The Bank Is Open

I listen to a lot of podcasts. I have a couple favorites, a few reliable ones, and a few that I’ll drop into here and there. A lot of them are about basketball, a few are about crime, or pop culture, or books, or just miscellaneous curiosities.

My reliance on podcasts might be considered an addiction, but I choose to look at it differently, because there’s nothing unhealthy about it. After all, while listening, I am almost always doing something productive: driving around to run errands, doing the dishes, folding laundry, cooking dinner, exercising, etc. I am rarely clearing out time to “enjoy a podcast.” On the contrary, they help me find some enjoyment in chores and activities that would otherwise be tedious.

(Also, to be clear: I literally can’t clear out time and just listen to a podcast. I’ve tried exactly once. After a long drive home from a day trip, I found I had about twenty minutes left of an episode of Shittown, so I decided to sit down with some tea and finish it. Somehow, those twenty minutes felt like two hours. It wasn’t that I was bored; I was physically uncomfortable. And again, this was listening to Shittown, a very good show!)

As stated above, the topics of these podcasts vary, but on an even broader level, they can be split into two categories: the chatty ones and the scripted/reported ones. Basically, some of them are just some people talking, whereas others follow an arc. Occasionally, on a podcast in this first category, someone will say something like, “If you’re just listening, hop over to YouTube (or Netflix or whatever) to see so-and-so’s expression as I said that!”

And whenever I hear this, my reaction is the same: There’s no way people actually watch these things… right?

Like, I get it if you have some sort of job that requires limited focus, so you load a livestream video to have on in the background. But are people getting a beer and some popcorn and hunkering down to give their full attention to what often amounts to an hour-and-a-half-long zoom call?

I just don’t get it. Not only does it seem incredibly boring, but it ruins a fun, secondary aspect of podcasts, which is listening to several episodes, and then Googling the hosts to see what they look like, only to be shocked at how different they were in your head.

But maybe I’m just an out-of-touch old person, and all the cool kids watch their radio shows these days. If so, let me know in the comments.

But whether you listen to podcasts on your phone or watch them on your phone, there’s one thing everyone can agree on: that phone needs to be charged. Which is something these power banks can do for you.