One, people tended to listen to podcasts while commuting, working out or doing errands. In other words, they chose to be a caaptive audience. When you watch a YouTube video, you can click on another tab, turn your head and talk to someone, pick up a book. But if you are out jogging, you will keep listening to whatever you chose to listen to.

But my third realisation was key. People crave depth. Everywhere else, the media is, in the words of my good friend Prem Panicker, a mile wide and an inch deep. This is understandable — the incentives are that way. Big media houses have to cater to the lowest common denominators, and go for numbers over engagement.

Podcasting is an intimate medium. The host’s voice is in your head. When two people talk in a podcast, you could be sitting on a couch besides them, listening in. And when podcasters are authentic to themselves, not contrived and projecting an artifical self, the listeners get drawn in. The podcaster becomes an old friend — and the podcast becomes a habit, even comfort food.The kind of engagement I got from my listeners blew me away. I will not go into details, but it has had a material impact on my life. And I am so grateful to have stumbled upon this. Stumbled upon not just this thing I do, but the person I am now.

When people who have just discovered the show ask for it to be shorter, they are making a category error. The Seen and the Unseen is not an explainer show, where gyan is given in crisp, digestible chunks. It is not an interview show, where a host asks questions about a subject to a domain expert. Instead, it is about long-form conversations — not interviews — which are meant to be discursive, to have thehrav, to explore the person as much as the subject or field. I love this, and I know listeners do — that’s why the show is what it is.To change the form would be to change the content. One-hour episodes would not be as deep, and would not have the freedom to take unexpected digressions, or to let serendipity happen. If I was to even break it up into half-hour chunks, it would change the show, as I would be calibrating during the conversation where the next breakpoint would come.