My podcast listening dropped off a cliff when suddenly I no longer had a commute a few years back. Recently I've been interested in finding new shows -- daunting task, better to ask!
What are y'all listening to on the tech and general interest side?
99% Invisible
Articles of Interest
Conversations with Tyler
Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History
Everything Everywhere Daily
Nice Try!
Radiolab
The Memory Palace
Quanta Science Podcast
Cortex
Good complete series:
The Anthropocene Reviewed
S-Town
On the Metal
Hello Internet
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EDIT: I can't update my website because cloudflare is down haha
I'll try to update later today.
A lot of my rankings have changed as podcasts often degrade in quality over time
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EDIT:
Series that I enjoyed at some point in the past:
Against the Rules with Michael Lewis
Akimbo: A Podcast from Seth Godin
American Innovations
Brains
Cautionary Tales
Chemistry for Your Life
Dear Hank & Jon
Deep Questions with Cal Newport
Endless Thread
Everything is Alive
Experimental History
Freakanomics
Harmontown
Hey Riddle Riddle
The Joy of Why
Land by Hand
Monday Morning Podcast with Bill Burr
More Perfect
Patented: History of Inventions
The Permaculture Podcast
The Peter Attia Drive
Planet Money
Reasonably Sound
Reconcilable Differences
Reply All
Revisionist History
The Strong Towns Podcast
Stuff You Should Know
The Tim Ferriss Show
Trailblazers with Walter Isaacson
Twenty Thousand Hertz
Support these cool tech podcasts produced by my friends:
devtools.fm
The Changelog
Elm Town
Future of Coding
Hest
Software Unscripted
TODEPOND PODCAST
Articles of Interest is _so_ good. It's a great take on the 99% Invisible "design of everyday things". I was definitely blind to clothing and textiles and Articles of Interest is really enlightening.
You may enjoy Search Engine by PJ Vogt[1], it's really well done. Its the quality of the original Gimlet Podcasts and a bit different than his previous show (Reply All).
> A lot of my rankings have changed as podcasts often degrade in quality over time
I totally agree, some podcasts start off so good but then they are in there to appeal the masses than to stick with their original theme/style.
And it becomes really difficult to tell others only listen to this, this and this episode but afterwards its alright.
So I am curious how do you rate them(collectively)? Is it just a arbitrary rating system or is there a science/logic behind it? I wish a podcast app could prompt me after each listen to rate the episode and then use that to update the rating of the podcast(as a whole) based on what I personally gave than the public rating system which is very flawed as a recommendation engine.
I think this should be fairly easy to incorporate on ones personal website too, a way to let your listening history be personal recommendation engine than we relying on our memory to recommend/suggest. And if you stop listening to it and as episodes pile on, it can clearly drop in rating for you(?) or just go down the list.
When I rate podcasts, I try to go based on the last ~1 year of episodes.
I updated the rankings on my website, but unfortunately, cloudflare is not letting me deploy :(
Feel free to email me at hello@taylor.town if you'd like more recs
>I think this should be fairly easy to incorporate on ones personal website too, a way to let your listening history be personal recommendation engine than we relying on our memory to recommend/suggest.
If you look at my past newsletters, I used to do something like this with individual episodes:
I'll be the weirdo and admit... I enjoy true crime podcasts.
But!!! But... I don't like the mindless exploitative stuff (which is unfortunately 95% of it). I like the hard-cutting journalism stuff.
My favorite 3 are Swindled, Court Junkie ('Court', not 'Crime'), and In the Dark.
Swindled is a dry recounting of white-collar crimes. Funny and informative and kinda scary.
Court Junkie focuses not on the crimes, but on the court cases, and is 75% real audio from the courtroom, with additional narration by the host.
And In the Dark is maybe the most gut-wrenching of them all, especially season 2. This podcast uncovered evidence in a wrongful conviction that ended up going all the way to the supreme court. This one is true door-to-door journalism - literally knocking on the doors of homes in a small rural Mississippi town to ask what people remember about a crime from decades ago, and ultimately taking down a corrupt district attorney. Just amazing.
For anyone interested in an intersection of True Crime and Tech/Hacking, you should definitely check out Darknet Diaries: "true stories from the dark side of the internet". The host, Jack Rhysider, has been at it for a couple of years+ now and continues to refine his story collection & fact-checking processes, all while steadily improving production value.
My anti-answer is that podcasts have been making me sad (cause they are usually just the news, for me), and I've been listening to my late 90's late-teenager playlists on my commute to unspool my day, and force myself to remember nostalgic times and try to cope with everything. Basically using nostalgic music as a cheap drug.
I keep track of Lex Fridman and Joe Rogan's podcast releases and listen to em when the guest seems interesting.
I've listened to some episodes of Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal when he has interesting guests on. For example he recently did two podcasts with Joscha Bach who is always a really creative guy to hear from. Also learned about Machine Learning Street Talk because Joscha Bach was a guest on there and he was promoting his appearance.
Godbolt, the guy that made Compiler Explorer, also had a few podcast episodes which I enjoyed.
Someone already mentioned it, but Conversations with Tyler can be really good as well. He did a podcast with Paul Graham which HN readers might enjoy.
Comedy: - L'apero du Captain (french, discussion about tech news and general news, and other less reputable things)
- Deux heures de perdues (french, movies spoils with critics)
- Las noches de Ortega (castellano, character impersonating and improbable stories)
- My Dad Wrote a Porno (english, porn book spoil and critics)
Science: - Podcast Science (french, everything is in the name)
- PlanetGeo (english, condensed lecture about geoscience topics)
- ScienceDiction (english, links an actual word with an often suprising scientific stories)
- Undiscovered (english, stories about scientific discoveries, how they happened and in which context. I think it is the best thing ever produced by human beings. But I may be partial)
History: - Culture 2000 (french, summary about a theme by four teachers who have tried to study it during the last two weeks)
- Beyond Huaxia (english, history and cultural development of far-east asia with a strong accent of the territory that is today China)
News: - El hilo (spanish, south-american news)
- Histoires du monde (french, locked-in on France Inter app, short summary of a world event)
Economy: - Planet Money/The Indicator (english, general economy podcasts covering the news or an economic concept. The second is shorter and more nerdy)
- Freakonomics (english, behavioral economy. The recent episodes are less interesting and consist more often in interviews of people linked with the political world. It is made by one of the author of the books of the same name)
- Seldon Crisis: I know the host Joel personally, and he's such a great guy. The embodiment of software professionals being creatives.
- Volts by David Roberts: Interesting by itself, but makes me less pessimistic about the climate crisis. He talks to a lot of fascinating entrepreneurs, usually working with "hardware", which as a software engineer always feels like magic to me.
- 13 Minutes to the Moon: Blew me away, and it's relatively quick listen. It's a detailed retelling of the moon landing with original audio.
- Dolly Parton's America: Also a limited series. Goes into why Dolly Parton is such a cultural icon. Learned a lot about the US.
I'm professionally interested in podcasts since my company provides transcription services. We're launching a free magazine of podcast transcripts. If you enjoy knowledge-dense podcasts, feel free to suggest your favorites for transcription: https://withfanfare.com/podread/
Been listening to Hardcore History recently - very very intriguing. Also, am a fan of a new video podcast by Amit Varma & Ajay Shah called [Everything is Everything](https://www.youtube.com/@amitvarma/featured). Note that latter can be a bit India-focussed at times.
It turns out too many of them are hosted on YouTube, so my listening habits will have to change.
Hello Internet
Cortex
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
The Amp Hour Podcast
Beau of the Fifth Column
Peter Zeihan
The Business of Machining
The Wee Scone Variety Show
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History
Artificial Intelligence with Lex Fridman
Dark Horse with Bret Weinstein
The Portal with Eric Weinstein
Joe Rogan (if he's got a good guest)
The Anthropocene Reviewed
Lost Terminal is wonderful as a story. The way things are revealed and the calm tones really elevate it. I don't want to spoil anything I'd just very strongly recommend it.
Seems there's text YouTube videos but it's also a regular podcast.
This Week in Google is my favourite podcast (they don't talk too much about Google though, a recurring theme they mention in the show).
They have a great panel: a reporter from Wired, a journalism professor and author, a photographer (who is also the network community manager), Leo (who hosts the show) and a rotating set of guests.
I am interested in every show they produce.
This Week in Tech is also great, but I prefer the TWiG panel :)
For curious hacker types interested in aerospace, infrastructure, and the history of computing, I HIGHLY recommend Omega Tau Podcast . For computing nerds, check out, for example, Episode 248. For flight nerds, Episode 91, for infrastructure nerds, Episode 146.
A few I haven't seen on the list, by looking at my recent listens. I'm not saying all of them are good, I'll often listen to podcasts as background noise, so don't take this as sanctioning or recommentations:
- Science Vs (science)
- Freakonomics Radio (curiosities)
- If Books Could Kill (politics I guess)
- The Atlas Obscura Podcast (curiosities)
- Robinson's Podcast (philosophy of science)
- Twenty Thousand Hertz (sound engineering)
- Tiny Matters (science)
- Unexplainable (curiosities)
- Talk Python to Me (programming)
- Decoder Ring (curiosities)
- Ologies with Alie Ward (science, most of the time)
- Sawbones (medical science)
- Skeptoid (curiosities)
- SciShow Tangents (science)
- In Defense of Plants (... plants?)
- You're Wrong About (curiosities)
- No Stupid Questions (psychology)
- Hidden Brain (Psychology)
- Radiolab (curiosities)
- Overthink (philosophy)
- Philosophize This! (Philosophy)
Plus a whole bunch of Brazilian Portuguese shows, too.
The best interviewer I've found is Peter Robinson for his Hoover Institution podcast "Uncommon Knowledge." He's got great guests and really elicits great answers. (He was a speechwriter for Reagan and the one that wrote his "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" speech.)
The best investing podcast I've found is "The Week Ahead" by Complete Intelligence. I look forward to it every weekend for its variety of guests and subjects.
Patrick O'Shaughnessy's "Invest Like the Best" podcast has a good variety of guests and he asks incisive and insightful questions.
National Review's "The McCarthy Report" has astute legal analysis from a former U.S. Attorney.
Institute for Justice's mutli-season exploration of the 14th Amendment "Bound by Oath" is well-produced, outrage-inducing, and fascinating.
"Breaking News" is a new podcast by Ben Hunt (of Epsilon Theory fame) that explores the news' nudges and narratives.
What works for me best is not only to subscribe to a particular podcast but use "search-based" RSS feeds to track particular guests.
On my Android phone "Podcast Addict" app can use search to create feeds based on keywords. So I put names of guests I found interesting and when they go to a new podcast it finds that episode.
For news, I like "Today Explained" by Vox Media. Episodes are about 25 minutes long. Each episode they dig into a single issue for the entire episode. Sometimes they will discuss some aspect of a hot button issue (there's a few recent episodes on the Israel/Palestine/Hamas conflict), but sometimes they'll talk about other interesting topics too. A couple of recent examples are the 50 year history of hip-hop, or how some healthcare services or moving into stores like Dollar General.
Another podcast I like a lot is Maintenance Phase. It's basically about debunking ideas on health and nutrition. Has US-centric angle, it's well-researched, the format is pretty loose and conversational, and the hosts are pretty fun. Probably a love it or hate it kind of podcast.
I listen to a few podcasts focused on US politics:
David Pakman (has a finance background, very level-headed in his viewpoints): https://davidpakman.com/
I like David Pakman but feel like this type of political content needs to be consumed in far greater moderation and not on a daily basis. People that cover politics tend to hijack your brain with a lot of inconsequential events and information.
A good metric for me is probably something like: is this going to be important or relevant in a few weeks?
David Pakman had a podcast episode with Lex Fridman and even he recommends that you treat him as a small part of your media diet.
Monster Man[0] - Medieval studies professor does a gentle deconstruction of all the monster entries in the classic D&D Monster Manuals. Short and delightful, if you are (or ever were) inclined toward RPGs.
Two well-known scriptwriters (John August, behind e.g. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Craig Mazin, behind Chernobyl and The Last of Us (HBO)) discuss screenwriting and the movie industry. They have great guests as well - most recently Neil Gaiman for example.
They are very interesting to listen to, and give great insight into the different aspects of screenwriting. At the same time, it is different enough from tech where it does not feel like work, while I still learn fascinating stuff.
Well, some of those are in french, other in spanish and some in english:
- L'apéro du Captain (french, comedy/news)
- 2 heures de perdues (french, comedy/movies)
- El hilo (spanish, latin american news)
- Las noches de Ortega (spanish, character comedy)
- Podcast Science (french, science)
- My Dad Wrote a Porno (english, comedy)
- Planet Money (english, economy)
- Histoire du Monde (french, locked-in on France Inter application, news)
- RadioLab (english, news/investigation)
- Freakonomics (english, news/economy)
- How I built This (english, company building)
- Gastropod (english, food)
- Threedom: Funny people Scott Aukerman, Lauren Lapkus, Paul F. Tompkins talk and play improv games
- Hey Riddle Riddle: Chicago improvisers Adal Rifai, Erin Keif, and JPC try to solve riddles and then do improv scenes tangentially related to them
- Doughboys: Funny people Nick Wiger and Mike Mitchell and usually a guest review chain restaurants in America
- Scott Hasn’t Seen: Comedan Shaun Diston and deranged human being Scott Aukerman and a guest watch and talk about one of the many movies Scott somehow has never seen.
I have found a new podcast to listen to - Paper Cuts. They summarise the UK newspapers each weekday at midday. I’ve listened for 2-3 weeks and love it.
C-SPAN's Bookshelf feed for long author interviews of new nonfiction books. I find this a good way to get the distilled essence of a book without the time commitment.
This might be a slightly more difficult question to answer, but instead of people listing the podcasts they like, I'd love to hear which podcast episodes in particular people would recommend?
Otherwise, as interesting as this thread is to read through, the amount of recommendations here is a bit overwhelming :P
I get enough tech here. These are for making me a more well-rounded individual. Note: I'd love to get an entire set of medschool lectures as a podcast - does this exist?
No longer active, but the archives of "The dice tower" gave me lots of joy back in the day (until they changed the format - around 2017, I guess - I liked the previous one better).
The Adventure Zone is my all time favorite podcast. 3 brothers and their dad playing DnD but they don’t take the rules as seriously as many other actual-play podcasts.
The absolute best for long format (2.5 hrs) breakdown of mystery, murder, history, comedy, and other amazing stories told by a wickedly intelligent host with a strong sense of comedic irony. Every episode gets me through my Saturday chores with laughter, amazement, and the occasional onset of 'sudden allergy syndrome' aka tears.
General interest - my favorite is Very Bad Wizards. The two hosts are university professors in psychology and philosophy. They cover all kinds of different things - usually some piece of media like a book or movie, where they will sort of analyze it deeply and just generally chat about it. They'll also often cover a silly or interesting philosophy or psychology paper as an opening segment.
They're just fun to listen to. They hardly ever touch anything political which is very refreshing. For their Patreon supporters they have also been going episode-by-episode through Deadwood, which I watched because of their coverage and think is one of the greatest TV shows ever made. Their analysis of each episode really enhanced my experience of the series. (They just finished covering the second season, so one more to go).
I also enjoy Sam Harris's podcast, been listening to him for years now. I don't listen to every single one, but he has some pretty interesting guests sometimes. I like his general "theme" of being interested in the mind, meditation, psychedelics, and also just what's going on in the world. Obviously gets much more political but not the exclusive focus of his pod.
Last, I like the Fifth Column a lot, which is an explicitly political podcast covering current events - they tend to lean a little more right than me but the overall bent of show is sorta centrist/libertarian and I think they do a pretty good job of lambasting both sides of the aisle.
I listen to a few others at varying frequencies. One other standout I'd mention is Knifepoint Horror, which releases a 20-60 minute horror story about once a month. The guy behind it has a pretty unique and interesting approach to horror fiction and I can't think of a single one I didn't enjoy.
I enjoy Sharp Tech (Stratechery’s podcast), though unfortunately it’s mostly paywalled but has free episodes. It’s good for the business side of big tech and the two people on it, Ben Thompson and Andrew Sharp keep it pretty light and fun, which is nice because business stuff can be dry as hell.
Joe Rogan Experience is the best podcast that I listen to. It has a wide variety of guests and topics, from regular politics to Neil deGrasse Tyson to Elon Musk to Bernie Sanders to aliens to psychedelic drugs to anti-mRNA vaccines. Joe Rogan is also an excellent interviewer because he asks questions without an agenda.
Funny how you get downvoted, not because you are wrong but because people don't like your opinion. Joe Rogan is the most successful podcast ever made. He is doing it all right.
I'm curious where you see that he asks questions without an agenda. Do you not feel that in several of his discussions (ie: Sanjay Gupta) he tends to ask questions indicating a very clear one? And regarding his choices of guests, do you think perhaps there's a bias towards more fringe beliefs?
He has stated clearly that he invites guests based on what he is interested in at that moment or that phase of his life.
So yes, sometimes some weeks the guests are very biased and towards a certain kind of beliefs, some(experts) are just his friends now at this point who like the platform he gives so millions(?) would listen.
I am not going argue he asks the best questions but you can often see that the way he is not an expert but a knowledge seeker, the guests are free to speak what they want and leads to interesting discussions. His personal knowledge is limited to his curiosity and interest but when the guest starts speaking of topics he isn't aware of he keeps asking good questions which are vague most of the time.
I do not listen to all episodes but only when the guests are interesting and/or the topics they cover are interesting or very new to me.
Do you consider the approach he takes to "seek knowledge" is perhaps tainted by bias? For example, the information he seeks out, he may seek out in a way that confirms his pre-existing biases rather than seeking to test them? For example, his reliance on VAERS reports when talking about vaccines.
He's a human being, not a robot. He's trying the best he can and he's being completely honest about it. I'm not sure what you're expecting from him, but he's not perfect nor does he claim to ever be. He's trying to be honest and open-minded more than anyone else in media so I appreciate that immensely.
Are you saying the VAERS reports are useless or biased?
Essentially yes, as laymen VARES is useless. VARES reports are useful for scientist to identify things to study. The useful data comes out of the peer reviewed studies that the VARES report spawn, not the reports themselves. They're simply datapoints that need to be taken in conjunction with the rest of the inputs to the study and you can not extract meaningful conclusions from them alone.
They're as useful as looking at only 1-star product reviews that don't even verify the submitter owns the product.
> Moreover, the CDC and FDA do not restrict what people can report, as long as it happened at some point following a vaccination. That means events that happen even years later and have no obvious connection to a vaccine, such as feelings of anger, end up reported in the system
Nobody would listen to a podcast that only had mainstream guests describing their non-fringe ideas. His primary choice of guests are MMA fighters and comedians which one might safely describe as a fringe professions.
I guess it depends on what the definition of "without an agenda" means. He has opinions, some of them very strong, but he doesn't bring someone on to push an agenda that he wants to publicize. He has people on that he wants to have a genuine discussion with. And he's not beholden to any particular ones and is willing to have an open-minded debate or discussion.
With Sanjay Gupta, he brought him on so that he could have a debate about the COVID vaccine, and Gupta conceded many points that Rogan made. He never has "gotcha" questions like many journalists, and I believe it's an entirely honest discussion with all of his guests. For example, he has had hard-core pro-Palestinian journalists like Abby Martin, and very pro-Israeli talk show hosts like Ben Shapiro. He's had politicians from all sides of the spectrum. He is more than willing to have people debate the COVID policies and vaccines but no one takes him up on his offer, like Peter Hotez. He has some independent journalists like Alex Berenson who is very much against the legalization of cannabis, something that Rogan uses often.
In terms of "fringe beliefs", what do you mean? I like the fact that he has a variety of topics, some of them absurd, like aliens. Not everything has to be serious.
[1] https://taylor.town/podcasts
Good complete series: ---EDIT: I can't update my website because cloudflare is down haha
I'll try to update later today.
A lot of my rankings have changed as podcasts often degrade in quality over time
---
EDIT:
Series that I enjoyed at some point in the past:
Support these cool tech podcasts produced by my friends: