I’m curious what people here listen to, and I’m also looking for new ones to check out. I’m personally a big fan of Linux Unplugged, MBMBaM, Lateral, and Twenty Thousand Hertz!
I also cannot get Lemmy’s search to work, so apologies if this was already a recent topic.
EDIT: I have so many new podcasts to listen to now.
A lot of people already know the absolutely excellent history of Rome podcast by Mike Duncan. However there are a lot of other history podcasts out there which also do “the start to finish format”, inspired by Mike Duncan. Some good ones I have listened to include:
Pax Britannica: A great podcast with good story telling ability about British history, with a focus on the British empire. It begins with the Henry VII and ends with Queen Elisabeth.
Russians rulers podcast: A great podcast that starts with the very first tsar of Russia and follows through the history of the whole country by focusing on the ruler of the time. It begins with Rurik and ends in Putin. However he already finished the leaders years ago so now he does slapshot episodes about various other Russian history topics which is also very interesting.
Fall of civilisations podcast: this is a great one with some of the best story telling in podcast form available. For each episode he chooses a civilization which collapsed in some form or another. He then tells their history from start to finish and but focuses on the decline and how it was to live in those last years. It’s really dramatic sometimes but it’s really informative, well researched and I highly recommend it.
Okay and now this is not a history podcast but it’s still a dear one to me: Sunday school dropouts. It’s a podcast by a wholesome married couple composed of a former presbyterian Christian (now atheist) and a “non beliving sort of Jew” (his words) that read through the whole bible for the first time. They begin with a episode on the book of genesis and continue to the book of revelation. Best way to follow along is to read the bible at the same time and after every bible book (most can be read in under an hour) you listen to the episode afterwards. But you can also listen to it blindly because they do summarize everything. Okay so why do I like this one? The bible is a truly interesting book but the discussion in our media about it is horrible. It’s either the most anti religion people or the “capital A atheists” discussing it or it’s religious people themselves, both of course approach it with very preconceived notions. But this is just a calm podcast where two non Christians seriously read it through, do their research and they discover that some is total garbage and some of the stories are so beautiful they couldn’t stop from crying during the show. Also the hosts are very entertaining and easy to like. I believe everyone should read the bible at least once to simply know what’s it about. It’s the most important book published in world history after all. They finished already and then did two seasons of just random pieces of interesting bible lore which was also fun to listen to.
After listening to the 4h one on the Aztecs, I can now say with confidence that Cortés was a special kind of bastard whose grave deserves to be pissed on by all.
+1 from me too. Paul Cooper rules. He has so much wonder and such a delightful sense of scale. It’s been a few months since the last one, so surely we’re due for another one soon.
Cashing In with TJ Miller. The first 200 episodes or so have some of the funniest conversations I’ve ever heard; it’s just two friends who are genuinely hilarious hanging out. After the first 200 episodes, the show is still good, but before that is what I would call the Golden age of the show.
They left probably 12-18 months ago. There are new hosts (which will be familiar if you’re a long-time listener) and the quality of NEW episodes is probably just as good as the old ones, albeit with some format changes. However, I think they only release new episodes once every two or three weeks, but they rerun an old show every week. Kinda sucks. It used to be my favorite podcast
Political Gabfest, The Intelligence (Economist), the Briefing Room (BBC), Battleground Ukraine, The Rest is History, any of the History Hit stable, Ezra Klein Show, Club Random, The Poetry of Reality, History of English
Lingthusiasm! It's basically just two linguist friends chatting about the weird and interesting oddities in their field. It's delivered at a level easily understandable to me that has never studied linguistics
I want to love Darknet Diaries, but the host has such an unexamined, lawful alignment. He tells such good stories so well, but his default interpretation is often that criminals stole from these poor, innocent companies, with no further interrogation into the human and economic systems that make this so common, or the larger ecosystem in which these companies exist and are complicit.
This is something that, in my experience, the entire cybersecurity industry struggles with. I used to do a lot of that kind of work until a few years ago, and I always found my peers uninterested in, or even incapable of, having these larger, interpretative conversations about what we’re doing, what our roles are in the world, and how we can make a safer, better internet.
Honorable mention for another CBB Presents, Full Throttle! With Bob Ducca - extraordinarily brilliant, probably the hardest I’ve ever laughed at a podcast in my life. Limited run, so it’s concluded. He tells a story about posing as a monkey in a traveling circus that is somehow both tragically beautiful, and snot running down your face funny.
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