The summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college, I slunk back to my Indiana hometown and got a job at one of the joint-replacement factories there. For some improbable reason, this particular facet of the manufacturing sector had claimed my hometown as its primary base of operations, as the film industry does with Hollywood, or tech with San Francisco. I worked eight hours a day polishing oblong pieces of metal, sanding them down till they were free of grit and abrasion. Or rather, I worked eight hours a night. This was a third shift position, the only one open, which meant that I worked from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. I arrived at the factory when it was dark and left with the rising sun.

During those late drives into work, I searched the radio for some companionship. AM, not FM—it was too late for music. I needed a human voice to guide me through the dark American night, and I found one.

“From the high desert in the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening or good morning, as the case may be, across all these many time zones!”

The voice was at once mischievous and sincere. A jokester, perhaps, but one who wanted to share the joke with me. I turned the volume up and listened closely as the voice spoke of paranormal activity and UFO sightings. Callers recounted their experiences with unexplained phenomena, and the voice offered reassurance and encouragement. I didn’t believe in ghosts, and, my enthusiasm for *The X-Files *notwithstanding, I didn’t believe in aliens, either. But I kept listening. I found the voice soothing, no matter what it was saying. It possessed a curious mix of excitement and patience: it was thrilled to explain all of the hidden truths of the world, while also retaining the sense of calm necessary to guide listeners through a gallery of wonders and terrors. The voice of a kindly docent at a museum.

The voice, I soon learned, belonged to a man. The man’s name was Art Bell. And I wanted to hear more of what he had to say.

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TV can reach you in your home; at the airport, if you’re a member of the coastal elite; and at McDonald’s, if you’re in flyover country. The podcast, by contrast, is everywhere. In your car; on your headphones; sprawling across all of your social media feeds, which remain on your person at all times, thanks to the computer that fits in your back pocket. This is often held to be a net negative: Joe Rogan got Trump elected, after all, and the manosphere bore him to the White House like an infanta upon a palanquin.

In response to this state of affairs, numerous commentators and journalists have claimed that we need a “Joe Rogan of the left” in advance of the 2028 election—and Democratic operatives have taken up the quixotic quest with gusto, pitching donors and throwing money (and restrictive contracts) at influencers. Never mind that it took Rogan literal decades to build up his audience to the point where he could exert such influence, or that an important reason why he became so popular is that he didn’t discuss politics all that much, at least at first. Dip into his feed at random and you’ll hear guests discussing comedy, or biochemistry, or the origins of the Aztec pyramids. The breadth of topics covered constitutes a major component of his appeal. Yes, Rogan covers politics more frequently nowadays—including at moments like this one, where he speaks highly critically of the illegal deportations and disappearances of immigrants to a Salvadoran prison—but this political coverage reaches as widely as it does precisely because he spent years building a wide audience by covering a broad range of topics.

But I don’t want to get lost in an analysis of the present state of the podcast industry. Nor do I want to look ahead at what might come next. Rather, I want to look back, to examine the case of broadcaster Art Bell, as an attempt to fashion a creation myth, of sorts, for the podcast form as we currently experience it. This will tell us more about what audiences seek in these kinds of programs, and why they keep tuning in, day after day, week after week.

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Talk radio was one of the emblematic media formats of the 1990s. The talk-radio host was a familiar archetype in popular culture, as evidenced by Terry Gilliam’s film The Fisher King (1991), in which Jeff Bridges plays a disgraced host who forms an unusual friendship with a homeless man, played by Robin Williams. Bridges plays the host as a familiar social type: the shock jock. The shock jock, throughout the decade, titillated listeners during their morning commute with offensive rants and lewd acts performed in the studio. The paradigmatic shock jock in those years was, of course, Howard Stern, who became a media sensation, writing bestselling books, starring in a hit movie, and stealing the scene at the MTV Awards.

Shock jocks aired their shows during the mornings. Later on in the day, talk radio became more serious, more topical and angrier. These hosts were obsessed with the news, with politics, with the wrongdoings of feckless celebrities. David Foster Wallace wrote a fascinating essay, “Host,” about one such figure, a Los Angeles-based broadcaster named John Ziegler. But the biggest of these hosts, and the most influential, was surely Rush Limbaugh. For three hours every day, Limbaugh inveighed against any and all of the forces that he believed bedeviled America: feminists, Democrats, liberals, gays, professors, the Clintons, degenerate artists funded by the NEA, the smug elites at the New York Times. And—it must be admitted—he was good at it. El Rushbo himself, yukking it up with a lit cigar. Funny, too, in the way that cruelty can be funny, when directed at targets both host and audience deem deserving.

Beyond the nationally syndicated programs, local and regional radio inspired a devoted following in many pockets of the country. Growing up in northern Indiana, I was a devoted fan of WGN out of Chicago, Bob Collins in the morning to Kathy & Judy during the lunch hour and Harry Caray during Cubs games. Tom Joyner appealed to African American audiences, honing a format that one sees continuing today with Sway and Charlamagne tha God. And Howard Stern honed the morning-zoo crew format to become the nationally known, self-anointed King of All Media.

I sketch out the talk-radio landscape in such detail in order to make Art Bell’s uniqueness that much more apparent. For while talk radio at all levels of the dial appealed to a vast, varied market, there was really no one else like Bell—not at the national level. Perhaps that’s partly why he’s remained so influential, and so beloved, into the present podcast era. He was memorable at a time when so many other hosts were deliberately interchangeable. Idiosyncratic, too. Limbaugh and Stern possessed distinctive personalities, yes, but their material could be ploddingly topical, pegged as it was to the news stories of the day. Bell’s material came entirely out of left field—a field that happened to be dotted with crop circles from landing UFOs.

Bell’s show, Coast to Coast AM, aired at night, making it the preferred listening experience for hotel clerks, long-haul truckers and third-shifters like me. This was long before social media and YouTube existed, meaning that clips of the show didn’t get aggregated and shared across multiple platforms. If you wanted to hear Bell, you had to tune in in real time. This played a significant role in cultivating the communal atmosphere that his listeners prized. That, and Bell listened to them. Significant portions of each show were devoted to listeners calling in and sharing their thoughts with Bell, who proved himself an attentive host. And as Bell never tired of reminding people, he did not screen his calls at all. He did not try to frontload the show with calls that would flatter him or get his listeners’ blood boiling. He put callers on the air and let them talk.

And what did callers want to talk about? Aliens. Ghosts. Area 51. Roswell. Secret government experiments. Paranormal encounters. Shadowy conspiracies. All the things that go bump in the night.

Bell was only too happy to indulge them. If nothing else, it made his show stand out in a crowded marketplace. One of his consistent criticisms of Limbaugh, actually, was that his competitor’s laser focus on politics limited the scope of his show. Talking over what was in the news day after day, to the exclusion of other, less headline-grabbing topics, kept the talk-show format from realizing its full potential. For Bell was something of an experimentalist when it came to broadcasting, eager to explore the possibilities of form as much as content, like a modernist of the FM dial. Generally, radio hosts treat listeners calling in to the show as a kind of appetizer. Brief flashes of commentary to get the host talking, which was the real action. Bell, though, relied largely on listeners calling and sharing their stories. That was the whole meal, from soup to nuts. Welcoming those listeners to the show, listening to their stories, required Bell to play the part of a gracious host, a role he relished. It was a genuine experiment in radio broadcasting, and it succeeded in large part due to Bell’s skill at listening, not simply talking. Listen to his show for an hour, and he might only speak for thirty minutes. The rest of the time was devoted to you, the faithful listener, whose every word Bell treated as if it had equal importance.

Obsessed with radio from a young age, growing up in the gee-whiz 1950s of gadgets and gizmos, Bell maintained a boyish fervor for the inner workings of broadcasting throughout his entire life. Born in 1945, just as World War II was drawing to a close, he was born on a military base, as both of his parents were serving in the Marines. Home life, as he details in his autobiography, The Art of Talk, was somewhat erratic; he sometimes clashed with his father, whose frequent job changes upended the family from state to state, and fared poorly in school. But radio captured his attention. He got his first ham radio license at the age of thirteen, studying for weeks to pass the necessary exam, and his passion for the medium never waned. He started an under-the-table radio station during a stint in the Air Force, then found work stateside following his discharge. His early talk shows were fairly conventional, but a sense of restlessness drove him to experiment. In one of those serendipitous events, he landed a late-night radio slot after another host fell ill. There, he found his niche. Where Stern offered shock, and Limbaugh offered outrage, Bell offered *enthusiasm. *And it was infectious.

Allow me to offer an example. Click here and you will find a selection of Bell’s program, lovingly compiled on YouTube. “It’s gonna be ghosts all night long,” Bell says, his voice somehow gleefully somber. “Shall we experiment?” One caller with a distinct Canadian accent recounts a night spent camping in the wilderness. A man on a motorcycle rides up and they proceed to share a meal. The man gives a discourse on American history, claiming that the moon landing wasn’t real, that it was faked for the sake of national morale. The caller gets up to use the outhouse, and when he returns—the man is gone! Motorcycle and all! Without making a sound! Bell says, with his penchant for weirdo poetry, “So you think that he was the ghost of America, teaching you history the way it really was?”

Now, I don’t believe this man saw a ghost, and I’m not quite sure if Bell believed that, either. But he took immense pleasure in hearing this man tell his tale, gathered around the analog campfire of the radio. And damn if this doesn’t make me *feel *something. An eerie feeling, a pleasurable one, as this man connects with something deep in the American psyche, in American myth. Bell loved that feeling, too, and he loved sharing it with his faithful listeners, myself included.

And he did that every night. Caller after caller recounted encounters with the paranormal, from ghosts in haunted houses, to abandoned playgrounds, to a heartbreaking segment where a woman describes speaking with the spirit of her dead husband. Bell listens to each of them patiently, asking questions in the right places, a late-night therapist to America’s loners and weirdos.

This was Art Bell at his best: connecting lonely people through the very obsessions that could make them off-putting in the waking world. In literary terms, Bell’s listeners form a strange cross-pollination of the sorts of characters found in the works of Denis Johnson and Thomas Pynchon: American mystics, loners, cowboys, spotting angels along the highway and aliens in the night sky. Bell listened to them, and he cared.

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Here is my problem. I love Art Bell. I pull up old episodes of his show on YouTube and play them in the kitchen while I’m doing the dishes. I love the crackpots who called in to claim they worked at Area 51 and personally witnessed the extra-dimensional beings housed there, and I love the way Bell egged them on with a mixture of patience and amusement. I am a firm believer that much of what is positive about the American character, the unswayable conviction and individualism, is on abundant display in Bell’s gallery of quacks and obsessives. Yet I also know that such eccentricity can become harmful, even destructive, when it is given free rein. And there is ample evidence to suggest that we have achieved precisely this state of destructive freedom, perhaps beyond the point of no return.

I know what that point looked like for me personally. Taking my children to an ultimate frisbee game, I parked in the expansive lot of a public facility to find, affixed on the window of the Chevy Tahoe before me, a decal that bore the strange acronym WWG1WGA. Since my own brain has been irreparably damaged by two decades of internet usage, I knew the acronym stood for Where We Go One We Go All, and that it is the motto of the QAnon movement. And it was a frisbee dad with the decal! The very embodiment of normie fortitude! Aren’t such people supposed to be immune to internet brain worms?

They are not, as it turns out. No one is. No matter your educational level, no matter the correctness of your ideological position, there exists in the primordial stew of message boards and podcasts and content some highly viral strain of wacko belief engineered to appeal to people in your demographic. It is, frankly, arrogant to think otherwise.

Perhaps this is simply a matter of scale. Perhaps, like Goldilocks’s porridge, Art Bell’s program in the Nineties achieved the *just-right *level of engagement, drawing an audience just large enough, and no more, to give this parade of kooks and weirdos a viable platform to find each other and share ideas, while still remaining pleasingly fringe. One could only listen to Bell’s program in real time, sharing the lonely American night with other insomniacs and third-shift workers. Listening to the show initiated you into a secret society, one that remained delightfully marginal. One might say that Joe Rogan’s massive audience has actually constrained his show, as he has to please a far wider range of listeners (and corporate interests) than Bell ever did. Rogan locates himself in major American cities—first Los Angeles, now Austin—while Bell preferred living and working from his desert facilities outside of Las Vegas. He thrived on the margins.

It is also likely a blessing that Bell mostly retired from broadcasting before the internet enabled figures like him to reach much larger, global audiences, who in turn demand ever more—and ever-more unhinged—content from their faves. Something of the sort happened to Alex Jones. Jones got his start when Bell was still on the air, though he captured a much smaller audience. But once podcasting took off, in the mid-2000s, Jones recognized it as the format that could broaden his reach exponentially: he had already begun to pioneer online radio after being fired from an Austin radio station for his conspiratorial tendencies. Soon he had more listeners than Bell did at his own peak, and they wanted more, more, more. And he gave it to them, gladly, all the way to the point of spreading lies about Sandy Hook and inviting Kanye West onto *InfoWars *to discuss his admiration of Hitler. There is nothing worse than giving people exactly what they want.

Or perhaps Bell’s inimitability had to do with his own character. A possibility I’m very partial to, I admit, partisan that I am. Someone like Jones parlayed a kind of Gen X nihilism to the hilt, finding enemies everywhere, especially among those who called themselves friends. But Bell retained the can-do optimism of a true-blue Boomer, confident that the miracle of the radio could connect strangers in the night. Not only did he entertain the possibility of aliens, he actually thought they might be here to help humanity. Listening to his programs, decades after the fact, it is striking how deeply the callers confide in Bell, as if he were a priest. Speaking from the heart about the many shades of woo-woo, the callers open up, laugh, even cry, as Bell offers them a sympathetic ear. Perhaps that was why he chose to talk about space aliens rather than politicians. It disarmed his listeners, permitting him to speak of matters they otherwise could not.

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In 2015, Art Bell invited Joe Rogan to call in as a guest to his show, *Midnight in the Desert. *Rogan was a huge name at that point, while Bell was well past his peak in terms of listeners and audience engagement, though he retained his skill on the mic. In the late Nineties, he had stepped back from broadcasting to focus on legal issues brought on by a court case involving his son, and never quite managed to keep a steady spot on the airwaves afterward. He was still out of the game when podcasting took off, and by the time he got back into it, many of his former fans had become far more successful than him. Yet they retained, to the very end, a deep sense of warmth and affection for Bell. You can hear it in Rogan’s voice as he thanks Bell for providing him with company and comfort during the many nights he spent driving home from comedy clubs, a late-night listener like me.

One is reminded, of all things, of that popular feel-good quote: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Art Bell is remembered so fondly by his aging fans, as well as younger listeners who only know him from YouTube compilations, precisely for how he made so many people feel, more than any theory he espoused. I highly doubt that Rogan will ever be remembered with the same fondness, by the way, precisely because he’s so busy trying to sound smart that he ends up neglecting the emotional bond listeners can form with podcast hosts.

And it’s that—Bell’s emotional connection with listeners more than the actual topics covered—that has let his show endure, at least for me. Form, rather than content. As much as intellectuals may wish otherwise, emotion is the recognized currency of our attention economy. Mint those feelings if you wish your ideas to reach the listeners who crave them so desperately. Give word to their yearning, and they’ll listen to whatever you have to say.

Image credit: Famartin (CC BY-SA 3.0)