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.
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.
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.
I'm Biased since I'm a cohost, but ADI Pod (Artificial Developer Intelligence) at https://www.adipod.ai/
My cohosts Dan, Rahul and I do weekly coverage of AI news for developers, our pet projects, work wins and new technique / tools.
What I think sets us apart from the usual AI podcast space, other than our decade long friendship, 'good vibes', and crippling HN addiction, is the fact that it's a passion project by developers and for developers. You'll hear us break down a paper on diffusion-autoregression hybrid architectures and then immediately talk about wasting 40 minutes having Claude fix test coverage when the real fix was a one-line change.
Recent episodes covered cognitive debt from AI-generated code, my experience convincing AI that the Earth is flat, and the Thoughtworks retreat and its 'agentic manifesto'. Episodes are weekly and about an hour each. The idea came to me when I wanted to listen to a more casual AI podcast during weekend long runs (so no heavy math and no startup pitches), hope it serves that purpose well.
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:
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
I'm big into DnD podcasts, so Dragon Friends (Australian comedians doing DnD), The Adventure Zone (McElroy boys & dad doing DnD), Not Another DnD Podcast, etc.
Matt Levine's Money Stuff has a podcast with his friend and reporter Katie Greifeld, which is a lot of fun chatting about Money Stuff in an informative way.
I go through cycles of being obsessed with Blank Check (which goes through director's filmographies), and often more specifically, The Phantom Podcast (and sequels) where they watched The Phantom Menace over and over again under the guise of it being the only Star Wars movie.
I'm an appellate attorney. I listen to the Oyez project's "podcast" of the SCOTUS oral arguments. (It's just a feed of the original audio of the OAs.) I don't stress listening to every one; I'll catch the major cases and any other that might be relevant to cases I'm working on. It keeps me apprised of the way the Court is thinking; apprised of doctrinal developments; and gives me an opportunity both to critique generally high-quality advocacy and to pick up patterns and tricks to up my own game.
Security Now with Steve Gibson. Great podcast about the latest goings on in the tech world and often diverts into neat deep dives into technical topics.
https://twit.tv/shows/security-now
Side note: Check out this ultra secure offline paper password generator he came up with based off of Latin squares
https://www.grc.com/offthegrid.htm
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.
I agree, even more generally, in that if you think about any medium from a creator perspective there is so much more depth to it.
Pop music is not my thing, but I read a book about it, and the max martins and production function of these giant hits, and its endlessly fascinating optimization problems.
- The Slate Culture Gabfest
- probably the most consistently fun podcast on my list. It's like sitting down at a table with your smartest friends from grad school to talk about movies, books, and music. The endorsements at the end are always good
- Switched on Pop
- If Books Could Kill
News/Current Events:
- Slate Political Gabfest
- Slate Money
- CBC World Report
- NPR Up First
History:
- Well, There's Your Problem - "a podcast about engineering disasters... with slides"
Just a note to people that like podcasts without insane amounts of ads (iHeartRadio, I'm looking at you): often they're on Youtube as well. Using Pinchflat with Sponsorblock, you can make yourself an RSS feed of just the audio as long as someone has uploaded intervals to Sponsorblock for that video.
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.
To piggyback on this question, I've been looking for a replacement for - The Dinner Party Download - there's not been a podcast like it since they've moved on. Any suggestions?
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.
Some of these are political so take that into account but these are the ones i listen to:
- Joe Rogan Experience ( a bit of everything)
- Matt & Shane's Secret Podcast (Comedy)
- Called to Communion (Catholic)
- Tucker Carlson (Political)
- Part of the Problem (Political)
- Tom Wood's Show (Political/Cultural)
- Your Welcome with Michael Malice (Political/Cultural)
- The Game with Alex Hormozi (Business)
- History Hyenas (Comedy)
If I am going on a long drive, I will also listen to Hardcore History or Martyr Made. The long episodes help me lose track of time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Search Engine https://www.searchengine.show
99% invisible https://99percentinvisible.org