When Craig Constantine asks Mary Chan for a book recommendation, she reaches behind her for a copy bristling with post-it notes—Samara Bay’s Permission to Speak. The book is about voice and power, but Chan’s explanation takes a personal turn:

Like me when I was a little kid, I was the third kid, the youngest daughter, and I was always told to just be like, look pretty, serve tea to my dad’s friends. And be quiet. And my anti-rebel in me was like, no, I’m going to radio school. I’m talking for a living.

Radio school as rebellion. Not loud rebellion—no doors slammed, no bridges burned. An “anti-rebel” act: quietly choosing a life built entirely around the thing she was told not to do.

This passing comment opens onto something larger. How many podcasters are doing exactly this? Not everyone who starts a show was explicitly silenced as a child, but the medium seems to attract people with complicated relationships to their own voice. People who were talked over at dinner tables. People who learned to edit themselves before speaking. People who got the message, through a thousand small moments, that what they had to say wasn’t quite worth the room’s attention.

And now they have microphones.

There’s something worth sitting with here. Podcasting is the only medium built entirely on voice. Not voice plus image, like video. Not voice transcribed into text, like writing. Just voice—the raw fact of someone speaking, captured and transmitted to strangers who choose to listen. For someone who was told to be quiet, hitting record is an act of reclamation every single time.

This might explain why so many podcasters struggle with the sound of their own voice in playback. The common advice is “you’ll get used to it”—and that’s true, you will. But maybe the discomfort runs deeper than unfamiliar frequencies. Maybe it’s the strangeness of hearing yourself take up space, unapologetically, for twenty or forty or sixty minutes. Of discovering that your voice, the one someone once dismissed, now has an audience of strangers who pressed play on purpose.

Chan calls her book recommendation “a little love story to myself as a little girl.” That’s what some podcasts are, whether their creators know it or not. Not ego projects or content marketing or audience-building strategies, but quiet messages sent backward through time: It’s okay to speak up. It is okay to share your thoughts.

The question this raises isn’t about production quality or download numbers. It’s about what it means to build a practice around something you were once denied. And whether the podcasters who were silenced bring something to the microphone that the naturally loud never could—a kind of intentionality, a refusal to waste the permission they finally gave themselves.

This field note references the PodTalk podcast episode “Presence with Mary Chan,” published March 24, 2025.