Podcasters face a delicate tradeoff right at the outset: Too specific and the conversation won't generalize to other contexts, too abstract and it risks becoming unmoored from *all* applications. You need to anchor the discussion on something tangible to maintain an empirical feedback loop, but if your podcast is *just* about that thing it'll only be useful to those already laser-focused on the topic.
I don't know how *I'd* go about solving that problem, but I think I'd start by asking Will Jarvis, because Narratives does it. Each episode I've listened to has had useful insights with a wide range of applicability, and none of them have made me feel like they were hiding behind abstraction.
The target audience of the program, as far as I can tell, is people who want to understand things- to see the deeper patterns beneath the churning ephemera of modern life. There are key skills you need if you're gonna have any success at this- you need to be comfortable with uncertainty, able to mark unsolved mysteries as UNSOLVED rather than twisting them to fit the closest explanation. You need to be capable of reasoning under uncertainty, able to consider multiple possible explanations for any given phenomena. And- perhaps most difficult- you need to be capable of updating- of *actually* changing your mind when confronted with evidence that breaks your model. These are rare qualities, and Jarvis has them.
He's also a pretty skilled interviewer. I myself am not, so I have less insight into what exactly he's doing right here, but he's able to get guests to answer interesting questions, and I usually feel like I understand their perspectives.
I'd suggest sampling fifteen minutes of any episode; if I've written this review correctly, you probably already know if it's for you, but we should hedge against the possibility that I haven't.
If you're the target audience, I don't think you wanna miss it.
