What is Podcast Brain

There's a guy at my gym who has podcast brain. Podcast brain is when you listen to podcasts all day and then you go into the sauna and you think you're on a podcast.

When you listen to people talk, you anticipate the next word. This is called "predictive processing." After several hours listening to Joe Rogan, in predictive processing, one almost feels that one is helping Joe speak. You anticipate podcast speech at the level of words and also at the level of content chunks. You can feel another good chunk about Gobekli Tepe or some bullshit coming on. All language involves predictive processing, but podcast dialogue is modular and affordant in a way that exaggerates the effect.

One spends so much time in Joe Rogan's language, that one begins to close on the upcoming words as if one were playing a video game. In games like Guitar Hero, you see a sequence of notes approaching from the distance. You anticipate these notes through melody and repetition, and also you literally see them coming. In Guitar Hero, you perform these notes along with the game on a plastic guitar. One begins to to feel that he is generating the notes, rather than the game. Traditional written music has this feeling of generativity too, but the medium of Guitar Hero exaggerates it.

Listening to Joe Rogan is the linguistic version of Guitar Hero. You learn to complete his sentences. You learn to anticipate topics and modules, rhetorical moves. You practice conversation for three hours at a time in the style of Joe and his guests. And then you carry what you've learned back into the world and that becomes your personality.

However, Joe and his guests do not engage in normal conversation. They are constrained by format, medium, etc. Hence the pedantic monologues. Young men spend hundreds of hours learning to complete Joe's sentences. (As if they were a GPT model, training to predict upcoming words). But the young men train on an artificial dataset, constrained by an entertainment format. And when they learn to perform in this style, when they inevitably learn to speak like Joe and his guests, they apply this knowledge not in an appropriate medium but in the medium of their normal lives. They become pedantic little bitches, like tour guides to the world, always mid-monologue, never afraid of a joke. They live to perform this trick. Every conversation is an opportunity to drop in a module. Like an expert at Guitar Hero, trying to play with a band by performing sections of the game.

Real conversation involves listening and responding. Joe Rogan is a great listener, and that's why he has good conversations, even if they are stylized. The problem with learning conversation this way (again, like a GPT model, through observation) is that you miss the interactivity. You don't learn to enter into complex feedback loops with your interlocutor. The Guitar Hero expert is the ultimate hack, waiting around to play some module that he's perfectly practiced, with no regard for the living, breathing band beside him. Clearly this ruins the music. Likewise, the young man afflicted with podcast brain ruins conversation.