Earlier this year I completed my first London Marathon and to prepare for the event I spent most of my team whizzing around Battersea Park drinking energy drinks and being chased by angry dogs who had, no doubt, already eaten their masters. To help break the monotony of running in circles for hours I downloaded lots of podcasts onto an MP3 player and got stuck in. Now I am the world’s most boring names dropper, rumour monger and scientific tittle-tattler – from the economic history of Africa to China’s technological future, if there’s any pointless fact or equally irrelevant sound bite, I am your man. I have even begun to sound a little like Podcast Uber-lord Stephen Fry – which is not altogether good.

However, during these months of bloody hard labour, I began to listen to the Philosophy Bites podcasts and have been their No.1 fan ever since. Created by Nigel Warburton (Open University’s Senior Lecturer in Philosophy) and writer David Edmonds, they’ve been able to serve up some of history’s most complex philosophical problems into neat, accessible chunks that you can easily squeeze into your ear without embarrassment or trace of existential doubt. Where once I may have felt awkward opening up a book on Nietzsche on a packed London tube, I merely insert one of these aforementioned audio devices and simply press ‘play’. The rest is history.

But what makes these podcasts actually work?

• The format is repeated: Simple 1:2:1 interviews with interviewer and subject expert
• The interviewer never lets the interviewee get away with complex language.
• Any point of reference outside of the immediate discussion is always explained by the interviewer or (I guess) deleted
• The subject expert is usually an author of a recently published book. Most of these books are trying to introduce lots of old ideas to a modern audience. So the books mirror what the podcasts are trying to do
• The interviewer tries not to speak much  – he allows the other guy to take the lead
• They always wrap up with ‘the relevance of this philosopher and his work today’ which is always a neat closure. 

What I really admire about these podcast discussions is how the creators have taken such an academic subject as philosophy and made it accessible to the masses. I always find it a shame when people, who have benefited from a good education, use their knowledge to make other people feel inferior by their use of language or by using references that exclude those not privy to their ‘inner circle of academia’. Years ago a mate of mine said that philosophy was just a mental game of marbles – playing with ideas that had no practical application. I think these excellent podcasts attempt to challenge that assumption in an interesting fashion, plus they’re a lot of fun to listen to. Which, for philosophy, is saying something.