When Craig Constantine asks Lindsay McMahon whether she ever freaks out knowing 200,000 people are listening to each episode of All Ears English, her response reveals something worth pausing on.

I don’t think about it too much because I come back. I think our vision of the human connection is still so strong inside me that I think about that—I think about that listener who might feel isolated right now because of language. Either they’re living in the US and they’re struggling to get connected in their community, or they’re on a call from Japan to New York and they’re cringing because they think they just said the wrong thing and they’re not building the business relationship.

Notice what McMahon doesn’t do. She doesn’t imagine herself broadcasting to a crowd. She doesn’t think about aggregate listener stats or download numbers. Instead, she pictures one person—someone specific, struggling in a particular way, in a concrete situation.

This runs counter to how we typically think about scale. Conventional wisdom suggests that reaching more people requires broadening your message, smoothing the edges, speaking to the lowest common denominator. McMahon’s instinct moves in the opposite direction: the bigger her audience grows, the more particular her mental image becomes. Not “English learners” as a demographic, but someone cringing after a stumbled phrase on a business call. Not “people who feel isolated,” but a specific person in a specific community struggling to connect.

Here’s what’s counterintuitive: connection doesn’t scale through abstraction. It scales through specificity.

When McMahon thinks about that one listener, she’s not limiting her reach—she’s sharpening it. The person on the Japan-to-New-York call isn’t a stand-in for All Ears English’s target demographic. That person is the demographic, made real enough to feel something toward. And paradoxically, making the listener concrete instead of abstract makes the connection more transferable, not less. Thousands of listeners in completely different situations can recognize themselves in that portrait of isolation and cringing self-doubt, precisely because it’s drawn with enough detail to feel true.

This matters beyond podcasting. Anyone who speaks to groups—facilitators, teachers, leaders—faces the same temptation to abstract their audience into a faceless mass. It feels safer. A crowd of 200 people is somehow less intimidating than imagining any one of them specifically. But that safety comes at a cost. Speaking to a crowd produces crowd-speak: generic, hedged, addressed to no one in particular.

McMahon’s approach suggests a different discipline. Instead of asking “what do my listeners need to hear?” she seems to ask “what does this listener need to hear?”—and trusts that the specificity will resonate more widely than any attempt to address everyone at once. Her show’s tagline, “connection, not perfection,” takes on a different weight in this context. Connection isn’t a feeling you generate by being generally warm toward a general audience. It’s something that happens when you’re specific enough to actually reach someone.

What remains unresolved is whether this instinct can be taught or whether it emerges from experience. McMahon mentions earlier in the conversation that she herself felt like an outsider—sitting at a campfire in South America, intermediate Spanish skills, unable to get the joke. She knows what isolation tastes like because she’s tasted it. That memory might be what allows her to conjure such a specific listener in the first place.

For those of us who haven’t had that particular experience, the question becomes: can we cultivate that imaginative specificity deliberately? Can we learn to think in concrete situations rather than abstract demographics? Or does genuine connection require having been the isolated listener yourself, at least once, before you can truly imagine speaking to one?

This field note references the Podtalk episode “Connection with Lindsay McMahon,” published June 17, 2025.