"It's company"

The voice in the ear is company. Alone in the house, the radio is people. On the walk, the podcast host is a friend who talks about interesting things and doesn't need anything back. A book that takes the fill away is a book that leaves you alone.

I'd take that seriously, because loneliness is real and the fill does cover it, and covering isn't nothing. But look at what kind of company a podcast is. It's a voice that can't hear you. It doesn't know you're there, doesn't ask about your day, doesn't notice when you go quiet. It's the experience of being with people without any of the things that being with people does, and a person who fills the house with voices can go a week without a conversation and not feel the absence, because the voices sound like the thing that's absent.

That's the cost. The fill covers the loneliness well enough that the loneliness doesn't get acted on. An earlier book in this series is about ringing people first, and its argument is that the quiet in a life is what tells you to ring someone, and a life with no quiet in it never gets the message. The podcast host is company in the way a photograph of a meal is dinner.

Compare the walk with a podcast to the walk with a friend. The second one is slower, and has pauses in it, and you hear about their week and they hear about yours, and you arrive knowing something about a person who knows something about you. The first arrives knowing something about the Byzantine Empire. Both are pleasant. Only one is company, and the podcast has been standing in for the other so smoothly that the other has stopped happening.

Keep the radio in the kitchen if you like it. But if the reason it's on is that the house is too quiet without people in it, the answer to that is people, and the quiet is the thing that would have sent you to find them. Chapter 18 puts this on the list of what goes missing.