Annie Jacobsen

But I'm amazed by the phenomena of podcasts, I must say, because I'm old enough to remember when they weren't around.

And I do have – I have one foot in publishing obviously, author of seven books, but I also write television.

And so I exist in these two different worlds of media that are, you could say, traditional media forms.

And when you consider how radically these different forms of communication are changing, that we did, I sell as many e-books and audio books as I do hardcovers.

And I have a feeling that if those markets didn't exist, I would sell half as many books, if that makes sense.

And so then when you throw the podcast into the mix, I cannot tell you how many people know about my work as a journalist, as a national security reporter, because of podcasts.

That is remarkable to me.

It makes things so much more accessible to so many more people.

Everybody's listening to a podcast driving around, listening, you know, when they're at the gym, when they're on a hike.

And if someone who cares about an alert and knowledgeable citizenry as a fundamental, first of all, because I think if people, people that are curious tend to be less furious, right?

If you can get your curiosity satiated, you don't become so angry.

And so I – and again, I have to be an eternal optimist, particularly writing the kind of books that I do or it would just be – it would be – my thinking would take a negative turn.

And so I am an eternal optimist and I do look to conversation and new media as a means to a better way or a means to a way out of this kind.

I think that – I believe the tide will turn.

But also what's remarkable is you hear people often say, like, people have lost their attention spans.

They watch TikTok.

Well, I mean, people listen to your podcast for three hours, right?

That is a very long attention span and I find that kind of like brain conditioning really valuable because I will listen to a podcast for three hours and also in a – it might be on an airplane and then, oh, my phone tells me I have this much time left on the podcast so I continue listening.

on a hike and I think that it is a very different kind of mental stimulus curiosity in a new way forward than the old days of reading a newspaper you know it takes you this amount of time to read and then you I mean newspapers barely exist anymore

Who's Alan Watts?