Podcasts that Valerie Likes

For several years, I was stuck spending a ton of time shuttling kids around in the car and standing at the schoolbus stop waiting for a kid's schoolbus, and that time felt really badly wasted to me. One year I calculated that it was about eight hours a week that I spent on these things! To me, podcasts are an amazing solution to all that dead time. Since I discovered podcasts I've learned so much, and been entertained -- it makes that eight hours into a time that I look forward to instead of a nasty chore that is eating up my life. It's definitely worth finding podcasts that work for you -- there are plenty that do feel to me like just a waste of time. But some of the good ones are (in my opinion) very much worth listening to. Especially compared to just standing around waiting for the schoolbus with nothing to do.

Some podcasts that I like are:

Gastropod - a super well-researched food podcast
Flash Forward - starts by enacting a scene from the future if some current trend continues, such as "What if all the honeybees were gone?", and then talks to experts about what that would be like if that really happened. Also its spinoff podcast Advice From The Future is excellent too!
Imaginary Worlds - talks about how fantasy and sci fi work
Stuff Mom Never Told You - feminist topics
Stuff You Should Know - two guys research a topic and then tell you what they learned; covers a wide variety of topics
The Longest Shortest Time - weird parenting stories (now off the air, but hopefully there are archives -- look for the series called "The Accidental Gay Parents," or the episode where the podcaster was curious about whether those fake babies that are given to high school students to carry around as an example of parenting, to prevent pregnancy, really work)
two TED Talks podcasts
Hidden Brain - non-obvious stuff that we think about
Invisibilia - ditto
Planet Money and its spinoff The Indicator - really interesting variety of topics, even if you're not into finance
The Axe Files - David Axelrod interviews an awesome variety of people -- political figures and others, and gets them to talk about their area of expertise; starts with biographical stuff and then usually revs up into a really interesting topic
Undiscovered - really interesting science topics
Only Human - ditto
99% Invisible - theoretically is about design, but in reality it's an interesting take on a wide variety of topics.
On The Media - a public radio show that I like too much to miss an episode
Savor - a food podcast, formerly called FoodStuff
How I Built This
I can't decide if I like Reply All. They come up with some really fascinating episodes, but the podcasters cross boundaries that I'm not always comfortable with.
I can't decide if I like Malcolm Gladwell's podcast Revisionist History. He has some neat insights, but seems to think that the only people in the world are male, which drives me crazy. I once decided to send him an e-mail to point that out to him, but there were noooo ways available to contact him, which I thought was interesting.
Radiolab
The Ezra Klein Show - Ezra Klein is brilliant, and he gets a variety of really interesting guests to talk about interesting things. The episode on Modern Monetary Theory was really dense to work through, but the idea that the government actually can just create money to pay for certain things, without breaking anything, blew my mind!
The Daily - a news podcast from the New York Times. They have a knack for finding a topic that I needed to know more about and delving into it in just the right way to make it really informative and interesting.

Yes, this is only my favorites among the podcasts that I listen to! I spend far too much time listening to podcasts.

You can increase the speed that you listen/watch at, and it makes a HUGE difference to the frustration of speech being so much slower than reading. I switched my podcast player to 1.3 speed playback, and then when I got used to that I went up to 1.7 speed, and then from there to 2.0 speed, and now often to 2.5 speed. For material that is dense or speakers with a difficult-to-understand accent I need to slow it down, or if I'm multitasking with something else. But podcasts and video at speeded-up speed are amazing!!!

Last updated January, 2021

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