Granted, there are good podcasts, but I've switched my listening time (mostly commute for in office once a week) to audiobooks. I find books to be much more consistently high quality content, regardless of the source. There are bad books, but the quality tends to be higher than podcasts. I mostly get audiobooks through my library, but I also sometimes listen through Spotify.
I find sort of escape in listening to non-technical podcast giving more of a insight into how broad, curios and overall marvelous and different the world is.
Maybe marginally related, I used to listen to a lot of podcasts, especially when I had a severe issue in my eye and I couldn't read. I used to listen to nonfiction, lifestyle, health, tech and history (I do not follow politics in podcasting).
At least after the pandemic (ca. 2023) one thing that I noticed is that a lot of podcasts now has some rotation of the same guests, they are more tied with the world events (e.g., a "stoic" podcast talking about the POTUS that has 0% influence in my life and interest) and prominent figures that are specialized in... podcasting, or podcasts that, without any pushback, bringing outlandish guests for clicks (e.g. any of the Weinstein brothers, moon landing, etc).
I used to listen 20+ hours of podcasting per day and my feed was great, but now I cannot even listen 1 hour or even 99% of the guests are the same figures or super polarizing.
Yeah, many podcasts are either: (1) an advertising platform for a guest's new book, (2) a platform for the guest to play their "greatest hits" without engaging critically or exploring new ideas, or (3) a platform for the host to tell you their half-baked opinion about $CURRENT_EVENT in order to keep the slop machine running.
Advisory Opinions
Legal analysis of Supreme Court that is really fun and talks about systems tradeoffs in how court systems make decisions.
Python Bytes
Just fun thing I can put on and listen to while coding or doing other work. I always learn something and the show runners are great.
Left Right and Center
Pretty good level headed political discussion where differing perspectives have real cordial conversation while disagreeing.
The Non Anxious Leader Podcast
Jack Shitama does a great job of explaining family systems theory and how our own emotional reactance can be managed effectively. If you want soft emotional intelligence skills listen to this.
The Russel More Show
Russel interviews a variety of people and talks about how to be a Christian in our weird political climate. It’s not Christian nationalist and I find it thoughtful and refreshing. He also interviews lots of people from different perspectives.
My podcast would be a good fit for this audience. Three engineer friends and a rotating guest each pitch a tech product or startup idea that we wished existed, but don't have time to build ourselves. Bicycle Lasertag, Cabinets that _are_ Dishwashers, Planetarium Swimming Pools, etc.
Good nerd stories, alas it was cancelled, so no new ones:
- Uncharted with Hannah Fry
Some great fiction:
- Achewillow - horror, but not excessively horrible.
- Desert Skies - humor, about folks who work in the first sphere of the afterlife, folks who are recently dead and arrive in Buick Skylarks are equipped with microwaveable burritos and information about the spheres to come.
Fantastic poetry:
- Poetry Unbound
Really fantastic interviews, alas, it's no longer updated:
https://thespaceabove.us/ extremely good listen with a lot of details in the early years of the space program. I found renewed interest in the area. Even started replicating some of the missions in KSP
Here's my usual playlist (tilted towards policy stuff):
The Realignment
AI Summer w/Dean Ball (he has a good substack too)
Dwarkesh Podcast
American Diplomat
Marginal Revolution (also has a good blog)
Statecraft with Santi Ruiz
The Dynamist
Derisky Business from Center for a New American Security
School of War
The Sunday Show by Tech Policy Press (also has a newsletter)
Econtalk
Natsec Tech by SCSP
Politico Tech (also a range of newsletters)
ChinaTalk
CQ Rollcall
Goodfellows by the Hoover Institution
Hudson Institute Events Podcast
Conversations With Tyler
.think atlantic
Building for the Future by CSIS
Into Africa by CSIS
War on the Rocks
Rational Security
The Vergecast
A16z podcast
I listen to an assortment of NPR podcasts, namely NPR's Book of the Day, Pop Culture Happy Hour, Wild Card with Rachel Martin, and the TED Radio Hour. I sometimes listen to Up First as well when I'm not in the mood to spend two hours listening to Morning Edition.
Got tired of npr and now get my news from monocle radio podcasts even though I'm not an "ultra-high-net-worth individual". I find it more international-focused and since I live in Europe more relevant to me.
Conversations With Tyler: he tends to ask some of the most creative and interesting questions. For a specific episode recommendation, I really enjoyed "Donald S. Lopez Jr. on Buddhism". He also has an older interview with Paul Graham (pg), but I don't think the questions were as deep or challenging.
Dwarkesh Patel: he gets extremely high quality guests and he doesn't just roll over completely when the guest makes a claim, at least he's willing to ask follow-up questions. His guest lectures with Sarah Paine are outstanding for helping to contextualize your understanding of the world order of the past 100 years from an American perspective.
Wookash Podcast: very technical and focused on more advanced programming topics. For specific episode suggestions I suggest the recent ones with Anton Mikhailov where they talk about ~~ECS~~ arrays of things.
Two's Complement: a podcast by the guy who made the Godbolt Compiler Explorer. It doesn't release very frequently but it provides interesting perspectives. Just
Ezra Klein Show: this is one of the guys that wrote the Abundance book, which I think was a much-needed message. Most recently he had an interview with Clark from Anthropic, but it's from a fairly normie / non-AI-obsessed perspective.
I have to rant about podcasts:
My biggest issue with most podcasts is that it often feels like there's very little effort put into preparing for the discussion and there's not many interesting follow-up questions. I think you can challenge people's claims in good faith to make for more interesting discussions. At least ask some reasonable follow-up questions when the guest makes outrageous claims! A lot of podcasts are just an advertising platform for people to talk about their new book; if you can listen to a guest give the same conversation with a different host then that's probably a sign that the questions are bad and shallow, so you shouldn't keep listening to that podcast.
One of the issues with asking deeper questions is that anything truly interesting or new will probably require having thought about the topic a lot ahead of time. Otherwise you just end up getting a very shallow answer because people can't usually think through complex topics on the fly so the best you can hope for is to get a pre-cached or partially computed answer. It would be great to have a podcast dedicated to exploring more challenging and underexplored questions which are shared with guests ahead of time so both parties can have time to think and explore. Most famous people just go on podcasts to play their "greatest hits" without saying anything substantially different or new.
Not particularly 'educational' at all, but "My dad wrote a Porno". Was recommended it by a friend and have been wetting myself laughing on the work commute.
Also "Stuff you should know" is a super popular one that always gets a listen.
Ethan Teaches You Music is one of my favorite music podcasts. It tends to focus on pop and jazz music as get the years with lots of music played during the podcast.
Revisionist History - The recent Alabama Murders story was a super interesting look into the death penalty.
The Colin & Samir show - interviews with Youtube creators. Recent John Johnson interview about doing stand up comedy for youtube was hilarious.
Lsat 12 months I listened to lots of Peter Attia, for health and aging information but not listening to him anymore because I found the Epstein emails problematic.
Latent Space gets a lot of play from me.
Darknet diaries is always great.
Corecursive, because I'm making it. Working on new episode about social media algorithms.
Colin and Samir have some really in-depth videos with MrBeast which help document and explain his rise in fame, influence, and prominence. He's one of the most dedicated optimizers of our time, and he's been responsible for shaping the YouTube meta for years at this point. At this point a significant portion of his brain is probably fully allocated towards optimizing for the most engaging YouTube videos possible. The "24 hours with MrBeast" video helped contextualize his fame to me, it's really rock-star level. It's a shame that not many people engage with him on a more technical level, I think he would have a lot of interesting insights over which to nerd out about.
Complex Systems by Patrick McKenzie (patio11). Casual interview format with guests from myriad industries, who try to distill human/technical bits of respective systems. Often it's about tech/finance/govt, or relates to them.
I found it independently of his other work (e.g Bits About Money, or VaccinateCA), which is fitting. The amount of stuff I've read from that guy (including on hn) but did not attribute to a single person seems anomalously high for me. https://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits/
That, and "The Optimal Amount of Fraud is Non-Zero", which is an idiom I paraphrase frequently by this point.
I’ve been rotating between a few distinct vibes lately:
Latent Space: Absolutely essential for keeping up with the breakneck speed of LLMs and the actual engineering behind them.
Hard Fork: Good for a high-level weekly pulse on tech policy and Silicon Valley shifts without being too dry.
The Changelog: Still the gold standard for open-source deep dives.
Also, if you’re into the 'local-first' movement we were discussing earlier, some of the older episodes of Software Engineering Daily regarding distributed systems are still incredibly relevant for today's edge-computing challenges.
The ones that feel the most like they "get me" are probably Weird Studies and Very Bad Wizards. I'm a fan of Sam Harris's Making Sense podcast too.
When I want to dip into political news, I trust the Fifth Column guys to have fairly measured and reasonable takes with a vaguely libertarian bent. I have a handful of other political shows too from various perspectives of the aisle that I'll sometimes tune into when something big seems to be happening, but I generally don't consume much politics.
Also, I'd be remiss not to mention the excellent Knifepoint Horror, whose creator has been delivering exemplary horror short fiction of a very particular style for over a decade now. I always listen to those basically immediately after they come out.
The Adventure Zone, Hardcore History, The Rest is History, Fall of Civilisations, The All in Pod, Planet Money, Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend, Noclip Crewcast, The Retro Hour, The WAN Show and a bunch of podcasts in Spanish and Norwegian that I doubt anymore would care about.
Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend, primarily for the segments with the staff that often descend into madness and then sometimes for the celebrity interviews. And a bunch of podcasts in French that I doubt anymore would care about.
Search Engine https://www.searchengine.show
99% invisible https://99percentinvisible.org
Oxide and friends: From oxide conputers, great tech interviews and various tech topics
Geopolitical cousins: weekly take on geopolitics that doesn't feel dreadful
The red line: If you want deep analysis of conflicts and militaries from experts
At least after the pandemic (ca. 2023) one thing that I noticed is that a lot of podcasts now has some rotation of the same guests, they are more tied with the world events (e.g., a "stoic" podcast talking about the POTUS that has 0% influence in my life and interest) and prominent figures that are specialized in... podcasting, or podcasts that, without any pushback, bringing outlandish guests for clicks (e.g. any of the Weinstein brothers, moon landing, etc).
I used to listen 20+ hours of podcasting per day and my feed was great, but now I cannot even listen 1 hour or even 99% of the guests are the same figures or super polarizing.
Someone have been in the same stage also?
Python Bytes Just fun thing I can put on and listen to while coding or doing other work. I always learn something and the show runners are great.
Left Right and Center Pretty good level headed political discussion where differing perspectives have real cordial conversation while disagreeing.
The Non Anxious Leader Podcast Jack Shitama does a great job of explaining family systems theory and how our own emotional reactance can be managed effectively. If you want soft emotional intelligence skills listen to this.
The Russel More Show Russel interviews a variety of people and talks about how to be a Christian in our weird political climate. It’s not Christian nationalist and I find it thoughtful and refreshing. He also interviews lots of people from different perspectives.
https://spitball.show
- Uncharted with Hannah Fry
Some great fiction:
- Achewillow - horror, but not excessively horrible.
- Desert Skies - humor, about folks who work in the first sphere of the afterlife, folks who are recently dead and arrive in Buick Skylarks are equipped with microwaveable burritos and information about the spheres to come.
Fantastic poetry:
- Poetry Unbound
Really fantastic interviews, alas, it's no longer updated:
- Partners by Hriskikesh Hirway
Linguistics and language:
- The Allusionist
Tabletop RPG:
- My First Dungeon
A few ones,
- .NET Rocks!
- Advent of Computing
- ADSP: Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs
- CppCast (just came back)
- CoRecursive: Coding Stories
- Developer Voices
- Foojay.io, the Friends Of OpenJDK!
- Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman
- Inside Java
- Game Dev Field Guide
- Oxide and Friends
- Signals and Threads
- Retro Asylum
- The Retro Hour
- The Fourth Curtain
- The AIAS Game Maker's Notebook
- The Haskell Interlude
Currently here is my pinned favorites ones:
Practical AI
Grit
Wenbin Fang's Podcast Playlist (Founder of https://www.listennotes.com/)
The Gradient: Perspectives on AI
Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast
The Empty Bow
Hacker News Recap
Dwarkesh Podcast
Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST)
Interconnects
Talk Python To Me
Training Data
---
My podcast collection (opml file format). Exported from Overcast.
Feel free to import to your podcast app of choice. https://github.com/vinhnx/podcasts
The Realignment AI Summer w/Dean Ball (he has a good substack too) Dwarkesh Podcast American Diplomat Marginal Revolution (also has a good blog) Statecraft with Santi Ruiz The Dynamist Derisky Business from Center for a New American Security School of War The Sunday Show by Tech Policy Press (also has a newsletter) Econtalk Natsec Tech by SCSP Politico Tech (also a range of newsletters) ChinaTalk CQ Rollcall Goodfellows by the Hoover Institution Hudson Institute Events Podcast Conversations With Tyler .think atlantic Building for the Future by CSIS Into Africa by CSIS War on the Rocks Rational Security The Vergecast A16z podcast
https://www.acquired.fm/
- How I write by David Perell
- Darknet diaries
- Syntax FM
- CoRecursive
- Under the radar
- Ladybug podcast (catching up on their old episodes. Glad to see they are back but haven't listened to their latest episodes.)
Dwarkesh Patel: he gets extremely high quality guests and he doesn't just roll over completely when the guest makes a claim, at least he's willing to ask follow-up questions. His guest lectures with Sarah Paine are outstanding for helping to contextualize your understanding of the world order of the past 100 years from an American perspective.
Wookash Podcast: very technical and focused on more advanced programming topics. For specific episode suggestions I suggest the recent ones with Anton Mikhailov where they talk about ~~ECS~~ arrays of things.
Two's Complement: a podcast by the guy who made the Godbolt Compiler Explorer. It doesn't release very frequently but it provides interesting perspectives. Just
Ezra Klein Show: this is one of the guys that wrote the Abundance book, which I think was a much-needed message. Most recently he had an interview with Clark from Anthropic, but it's from a fairly normie / non-AI-obsessed perspective.
I have to rant about podcasts:
My biggest issue with most podcasts is that it often feels like there's very little effort put into preparing for the discussion and there's not many interesting follow-up questions. I think you can challenge people's claims in good faith to make for more interesting discussions. At least ask some reasonable follow-up questions when the guest makes outrageous claims! A lot of podcasts are just an advertising platform for people to talk about their new book; if you can listen to a guest give the same conversation with a different host then that's probably a sign that the questions are bad and shallow, so you shouldn't keep listening to that podcast.
One of the issues with asking deeper questions is that anything truly interesting or new will probably require having thought about the topic a lot ahead of time. Otherwise you just end up getting a very shallow answer because people can't usually think through complex topics on the fly so the best you can hope for is to get a pre-cached or partially computed answer. It would be great to have a podcast dedicated to exploring more challenging and underexplored questions which are shared with guests ahead of time so both parties can have time to think and explore. Most famous people just go on podcasts to play their "greatest hits" without saying anything substantially different or new.
Dutch podcast: - De Technoloog - Space Cowboys - De Groene Nerds
Also "Stuff you should know" is a super popular one that always gets a listen.
The Colin & Samir show - interviews with Youtube creators. Recent John Johnson interview about doing stand up comedy for youtube was hilarious.
Lsat 12 months I listened to lots of Peter Attia, for health and aging information but not listening to him anymore because I found the Epstein emails problematic.
Latent Space gets a lot of play from me.
Darknet diaries is always great.
Corecursive, because I'm making it. Working on new episode about social media algorithms.
That's very cool.
> Working on new episode about social media algorithms.
Will it not just be mainly recommender algorithms? I.e., machine learning?
Or do you have other specific algorithms in mind?
But the big thing its about is how simple recommenders can lead to compelling and addictive consumption.
Also from the BBC, the 13 Minutes series (?): https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/w13xttx2
...and The Fall of Civilisations: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/fall-of-civilizations-...
...ocasionally a smattering of Dan Carlin's Hardcore History.
Really curious to see what other people are listening to.
I'm trying to be a bit more "intentional" with my podcasts, especially as its easy to amass a huge list of stuff and then not listen to 95% of them.
Edit: grammar
I found it independently of his other work (e.g Bits About Money, or VaccinateCA), which is fitting. The amount of stuff I've read from that guy (including on hn) but did not attribute to a single person seems anomalously high for me. https://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits/
That, and "The Optimal Amount of Fraud is Non-Zero", which is an idiom I paraphrase frequently by this point.
When I want to dip into political news, I trust the Fifth Column guys to have fairly measured and reasonable takes with a vaguely libertarian bent. I have a handful of other political shows too from various perspectives of the aisle that I'll sometimes tune into when something big seems to be happening, but I generally don't consume much politics.
Also, I'd be remiss not to mention the excellent Knifepoint Horror, whose creator has been delivering exemplary horror short fiction of a very particular style for over a decade now. I always listen to those basically immediately after they come out.
Darknet diaries
The Cine-Files
60 songs that explain the 90s: the 2000s
Freakonomics Radio
This American Life
Radiolab
Hidden Brain
99% Invisible
Hackaday Podcast
EconTalk w/Russ Roberts
The Jay Martin Show
Unherd with Freddie Sayers
The Winston Marshall Show
The Chris Hedges Report
And a couple of watch nerd shows on YouTube:
Teddy Baldassare
This Watch, That Watch