Alison Coates lives in a coastal Scottish village with views of the Kyles of Bute and a beach a short drive away. She used to take podcasts with her on dog walks. Then one day she didn’t.

“It was such a different experience. I could hear the wind in the trees. It felt so much more engaged with nature. Because I didn’t have somebody else’s voice in my head.”

Coates is a podcaster. This isn’t an anti-podcast story. She didn’t quit listening, and she didn’t stop making her own work. She noticed something — something most podcasters know but don’t say out loud.

Every minute of audio in someone’s ear is a minute they’re not hearing something else. Wind in the trees. Their own thoughts. The conversation they didn’t have with the person they passed on the path. The idea that didn’t surface because the gap where it might have surfaced was already full.

This is uncomfortable for podcasters because the standard frame is competitive. Earn the listening time. Build the parasocial relationship. Be the show they reach for. Most podcasting advice circles the same problem: how do you make something good enough that someone presses play on it instead of the alternatives? The unspoken assumption is that someone is going to be listening to something — your job is to make sure it’s you.

Coates’s experience punctures that assumption. What she chose instead of another show was the wind in the trees. The neighbor passing her on the high street with eye contact and “How are you doing?” The silence in which something germinates that wouldn’t germinate with someone else’s voice running over it.

Coates didn’t have to leave podcasting to discover this. She discovered it because she makes them. Awareness of what audio does in someone’s head — the way it occupies the space between their ears, the way it crowds out other inputs — turned her into a more discerning consumer of the medium she also produces. The making sharpened the noticing.

What she heard that day on the beach wasn’t just the wind. It was her own profession as a filter on her perception. She’d been listening to podcasts the way podcasters listen to podcasts — for craft, for technique, for what they did and didn’t pull off — and she’d been doing that filtering instead of hearing what her ears were otherwise capable of hearing. The wind had been there every other day too. She just couldn’t hear it through her work.

What is the best version of the relationship between a creator and a listener’s ear? The standard answer is that the listener listens, regularly, with attention. They become a fan. They tell others. They form a parasocial bond. They reach for your show first. By every metric the industry tracks, that’s the goal.

But Coates’s experience suggests another version. The listener listens when listening serves them. They put the phone down when it doesn’t. They walk on the beach without you sometimes — and they’re better for it, and so is the work they bring back to the next episode they choose to play. The podcaster who wants this for their listeners isn’t a bad podcaster, even though it sounds like one. They’ve stopped competing for every minute and started thinking about which minutes they actually want.

The good podcaster wants you to listen. The really good podcaster might also want you to occasionally not. That’s an uncomfortable thing to say in a medium whose business model depends on listening. If your profession can filter what you hear when you’re a listener, it’s also filtering what you hear when you’re a maker. What’s getting through? What isn’t? And what would the work sound like if you took the headphones off long enough to find out?

This field note references the Podtalk episode “Vibrant with Alison Coates,” published September 29, 2023.

This work was produced using AI language models directed through an editorial system designed by Craig Constantine. The author selected all source material, designed the creative framework, directed the editorial process, and made all acceptance and revision decisions. The prose was generated by AI under sustained human editorial direction.