What podcasts are you listening to? Looking for recommendations for anything well done and engaging. |
What podcasts are you listening to? Looking for recommendations for anything well done and engaging. |
Also "Stuff you should know" is a super popular one that always gets a listen.
- 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.)
Lifters (Ivan Llamarazares) - short weight lifting and training tips
Sozusagen - interesting stories and etymologies of words
The Reinsurance Podcast - name sums itself up pretty good
Dutch podcast: - De Technoloog - Space Cowboys - De Groene Nerds
- 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Darknet diaries
The Cine-Files
60 songs that explain the 90s: the 2000s
Freakonomics
Throughline
NY Times The Daily
The War on Cars
Gay Men Going Deeper
The Happiness Lab
You Might Be Right
What Could Go Right
Memory Palace
Soft skills engineering
Freakonomics Radio
This American Life
Radiolab
Hidden Brain
99% Invisible
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
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 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.
- 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
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?
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
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.
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
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
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
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My podcast collection (opml file format). Exported from Overcast.
Feel free to import to your podcast app of choice. https://github.com/vinhnx/podcasts
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
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.
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.
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.
- 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"
- The History of Rome
- Revolutions
- We're Not So Different
- The Fall of Civilizations