TIMMTI: Feel Better, Live More

The Internet Made Me Try It Day 5: 5 Jan 2020

App: Podcasts

Ad: Be A Better You - Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee

Targeted: No

I'm an avid podcast listener, racking up a few hours each week soaking up my favourites.  At the moment I'm listening to Chart Music, Decoder Ring and Reply All.  Of those three, Chart Music has recently become "all adverty" as they put it, and the other two don't feature ads aside from Decoder Ring occasionally telling me that electric cars are "normal now".  Unfortunately, I'm up to date with Chart Music at the moment and have no unplayed podcast episodes in my library, so that won't be my source for today.

Like the iTunes Store, there's a tab on the Podcasts app for finding shows that Apple recommends, called the 'Featured' tab.  Today, the top banner was advertising a collection called "Be A Better You", aimed at those of us who are figuring out our New Years Resolutions and looking for some tips and inspiration.  

There are a few different categories of resolution in the collection to match popular Resolutions - things like 'be a better exerciser', 'be a better reader' and 'be a better cook'.  The first one on the page, 'be a better parent', was of no use to me since I'm not a parent, so I skipped ahead to the next category: 'be a better thinker'.

This category is all about mental health.  Like most of the categories, it featured podcasts I've heard of, like Fearne Cotton's 'Happy Place' which has been well-publicised, along with ones I hadn't, like 'Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee', which was first on the list and therefore the one I tried out.

The average episode of 'FB,LM' looks to be an hour or two long but the newest edition lasts 2 hours and 43 minutes.  Titled "If This Man Can Turn His Life Around, So Can You with John McAvoy", I dived in.  That might sound unfair since I didn't give The Irishman the same chance the other day, but with podcasts I can do other things while I listen so I think they're different.  Plus, the average Chart Music episode is 4 hours long so I'm used to podcasts that take up a whole evening!  I'd never heard of either Dr Chatterjee or John McAvoy, although the latter's story was so unusual and compelling that I'm surprised not to have come across him before.

What I expected from this podcast was that it was going to be one of those self-help shows that uses a lot of clichés and soft voices asking me to visualise things, but luckily it didn't end up like that. The opening wasn't too promising - it started with Dr Chatterjee trying to shill his new self-help book, advertising some expensive shoes and then taking me through a hotel-sponsored breathing exercise.  After I'd sat through that, the interview began.  

John McAvoy is an endurance sportsman who landed on this profession after growing up in an organised crime family who led him to armed robbery and, inevitably, a ten year stretch in prison.  From that point onwards, no matter how many times the Dr. dropped the word 'mindset' into the conversation, the podcast became like listening to a compelling episode of 'This American Life'.  McAvoy's story truly is fascinating and he's great at telling it; the 2.5 hours where he described everything he'd been through and how he got to where he is today flew by.  

The episode ended with another plea to purchase Dr Chatterjee's book, which claims to give 5 minute fixes to bad habits or something.  I found McAvoy compelling but would have enjoyed it a bit more if it wasn't being viewed through the prism of self-improvement and health; there were no gory details about the actual bank robberies which I suspect might appear in another type of podcast, and I'd rather have learned more about that than had the conversation continually steered to that key-word, 'mindset'.  I won't be subscribing to this podcast but if you like to hear stories told by interesting people that centre on health and wellbeing, I can't fault it as a production.  

The Podcasts app doesn't have any sort of personalisation or targeting - the 'Be A Better You' thing is for New Year, not for me specifically.  I'd like it if they did have a 'recommended for you' tab on there as I often wish it was easier to find other podcasts like the ones I love most, as all they have at the moment is a 'similar to...' which works like Amazon recommendations in that it shows what other people who listen to that podcast have downloaded.  As a result it always just shows the really popular shows, regardless of whether or not they truly are similar in genre or style.  The alternative is to listen to podcasts on Spotify which does offer recommendations, but there's no way to tell it if I listened to something and didn't like it, so it continues to tell me about new episodes of a podcast I listened to for 5 minutes and hated.  

If you're a podcast fan, please tell me what sort of shows you're into! 

R x