TIMMTI: More Or Less

App: Podcasts

Ad: More Or Less

Targeted: No

As lockdown has gone on, I've spent less time lying around listening to podcasts so my library has been building up as more episodes have downloaded themselves onto my phone.  One that I do keep up with every weekend is BBC Radio 4's Friday Night Comedy podcast because it's topical, so if I fall behind the jokes are no longer up to date.  It was the most recently downloaded podcast when I came to write my blog, and because it's the BBC and I live in the UK, there are no ads on their podcasts for anything aside from other BBC shows.  This week's episode was preceded by a trailer for More Or Less, which is also a Radio 4 show, based around understanding numbers and statistics. 

More Or Less isn't the kind of show I would usually download, or even listen to if it was on the radio.  The ad is targeted in that if you're interested in one topical BBC Radio 4 show, you might like others, but it's definitely not aimed at me.  Still, I downloaded the 3rd June episode, and will be judging it on whether it was able to make the subject interesting to me, as a person who doesn't care too much about numbers.

This is one of those Radio 4 shows that is split up into a number of shorter stories; a sort of 'Front Row' for stats nerds.  The first story is about Coronavirus Track and Trace, a subject that's so unavoidable that I thought it would be impossible to say anything new or interesting about it.  I'm sure I'm not the only one sick of hearing about COVID now and a lot of the time I avoid the news about it.  This episode taught me something I didn't know - that the tests we're doing have a 30% chance of a false negative - and questioned the effectiveness of doing them at all if they're so inaccurate (apparently there's very little chance of a false positive, which is the upside).  I was also surprised by how much they went after the Cabinet in dissecting the figures that are produced about our testing capacity and the number of tests that are actually being taken every day.  And people say the BBC has a right-wing bias (or a left-wing bias, depending who you speak to)...

They followed this up with two shorter stories.  The first was about a claim that our soil only has enough nutrients left for 60 more harvests.  Turns out it's bullshit.  Next up, back to Coronavirus to fact-check a Piers Morgan tweet about the government lying about the daily death toll.  Again, turns out it was bullshit and Piers Morgan was wrong - who would have thought it?

The last story of the episode veered away from the news again, and was a response to a query about the mass of pheasants that exist in the UK at the start of the pheasant shooting season.  This story made me kind of sad because even though we perceive them as stupid birds, I don't like the idea of them being raised to be killed for sport.  I found out from this story that around 47 million pheasants get released into the wild every year and only a third of them get shot, so the rest end up out in the world with no survival instincts, which is why they don't get off the road when cars go past.  I thought this was a bit of a down note to end on - the story about the soil would have made a much better ending.  

More Or Less doesn't offer the escapism or humour I look for in a podcast but I would consider it to be a useful tool when it comes to understanding the truth about figures that are being publicised in the news.  I won't be subscribing to the show but I might turn to it in the future if there's a hot topic that I need some help understanding.  

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