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Jon Mooallem’s Walking Podcast: Like Receiving a Butt-Dial From a Nature-Loving Friend

As everyday life becomes increasingly enmeshed with technology, our attention spans fragmented by constant distractions of the attention economy, one podcast makes a case for unplugging and simply taking a hike. In his 

 podcast, journalist and author Jon Mooallem doesn’t interview guests, host any celebrities, or sound off on current affairs. Instead, with a recorder in hand, he simply takes us along for a walk.

There’s an odd and contemplative comfort in listening to the nearly hour-long episodes, each filled with the ASMR-like rustle of the wind and the crunch of branches, leaves, and gravel beneath footsteps, as Mooallem meanders about in the woodlands of the Pacific Northwest. (Occasionally, he’ll run into a friend, making small talk about “clearing his head” or cleaning out the chicken coop.) Part Calm session, part random core, it’s like receiving a transcendentalist butt-dial from a nature-loving friend, or the #oddlysatisfying audio equivalent of 

.

Mooallem has said that walking is an exercise in self-reflection, and he is in good company. Considering famous walkers in history and literature in 

, Rebecca Solnit muses that “walking articulates both physical and mental freedom.” Writers have long linked the mind with the feet, and 

, taking regular walks (especially in nature) not only stimulates the growth of new neurons, it actively sharpens our memory, attention, and thinking: “Because we don’t have to devote much conscious effort to the act of walking, our attention is free to wander—to overlay the world before us with a parade of images from the mind’s theatre.”

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