podcasts

[ian]

I confess the entire podcast thing has passed me by (I have even featured as the invited Tidy Haired™ Thought Leader* on several, the Tidy Hair being a bit of a waste, but I don't want to listen to myself waffle any more than you do).

Anyway, as I spend an hour a day spinning away on the exercise bike, I've opted to fill the time with podcasts.

But where to start? I'm open to recommendations. I've been listening to Very Bad Words but I'm getting to the end of that.

*a relatively modest claim to fame, my distant ex presented an entire episode of Horizon on BBC2, which is nerd-awesome to this day.

[LittleWheelsandBig]

Akimbo is a bit airy-fairy but mostly helps me understand different ways of looking at things.

Pessimists Archive looks at commonplace things that were originally decried as dangers to civilised behaviour.

Re-Cycle are short pieces on interesting historical bike races and incidents.

Strong Songs are detailed analyses of specific songs, popular and seminal.

[Tim Hall]

I asked my niece this question a few months ago.

She suggested "My Dad Wrote a Porno".

[LittleWheelsandBig]

Was that a suggestion?

[ian]

I asked my niece this question a few months ago.

She suggested "My Dad Wrote a Porno".

I *cough* actually did.

Only writing I ever got paid for. Then they invented moving pictures on the internet.

[pcolbeck]

Dan Carling - Hard Core History

Various eras

https://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-series/

The History Of English

The development of the English languages from Indo-European to the present day.
The website has maps and things to go with the podcast

https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/

[Basil]

Dan Carling - Hard Core History

Various eras

https://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-series/

The History Of English

The development of the English languages from Indo-European to the present day.
The website has maps and things to go with the podcast

https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/

I'm slowly working my way through The History of English.  Fascinating.

[Nuncio]

What sort of thing are you after? News, politics, true-crime, drama, comedy, satire, history, language, cycling, footy, other sport (apparently there are more), science (can't help with that), documentaries?

There's a massive range of comedians interviewing other comedians, and lots of instances of comedian B interviewing comedian A on Comedian B's podcast after Comedian A has interviewed Comedian B on Comedian A's. Some good, some bad.

The second series of 'Conflicted' is running at the moment:

The award-nominated podcast, hosted by Thomas Small, a Middle East expert, and Aimen Dean, a former jihadist turned British double agent inside Al Qaeda, is back for a second series. After exploring the War on Terror in series one, they’ll be turning their attention to the New World Order in new episodes

Fascinating stuff.

It finished a long time ago but the Onion did a piss-take of the Serial podcast called 'A Very Fatal Murder' which I found very funny. I don't think listening to Serial first is a pre-requisite.

And on the subject of Serial, the same people did one called S-Town - murder and seediness in small-town Alabama (though the S in the title is an abbreviation of 'shit' rather than 'small') featuring a larger-than-life horologist.

American politics. I'm sticking with The Rachel Maddow Show (cos I'm a bleeding heart pinko liberal), despite the creeping in of ads and trailers. I was getting a little jaded by the primaries but, hurrah!, coronavirus has come along and she's now shedding a bright light on American government incompetence (also helps take the mind away from UK government incompetence).

Comedy - Athletico Mince. With Bob Mortimer. Say no more.

The Bellingcat people have a podcast. Just one series so far, on the downing of the Malaysia Airlines plane over Ukraine. You'd think they'd be better with a visual medium but it didn't stop this being a good solid piece of investigation. Apparently the Russians did it.

Gossipmongers - simple premise. 3 people, including Joe Wilkinson, read out gossipy stories and rumours from contributors and vote on the best. I do laugh out loud sometimes, but not as much as the presenters, who have a whale of a time.

[quixoticgeek]

Podcasts... I consume a lot of these. I listen to them while doing audaxes and races, so easily consume 15+ hours on a Saturday. I can tell I've not been riding much if my podcast backlog builds up...

As such, I have found I really like:

- Zigzag podcast - Skip series 1, series 2 onwards is worth it, series 3 and 4 best yet

- 99 Percent invisible - A podcast about design in the world around us. I started with episode 296.

- Articles of Interest - A fork of 99% invisible by Avery Trufflman hidden stuff behind the design of our clothes. Really interesting.

- The Guilty Feminist - My favourite for cycling too, I started with episode 117 (Emily Chappells recommendation), warning I almost crashed my bike laughing at 119.

- Reply-all - From Gimlet media, Episode 120 is very good, start there and continue on

- 13 minutes to the moon - From BBC world service

- 50 things that made the modern economy - from the BBC

- BBC Inside Science - All the best science news in a form that the lay person can understand

- Bombshell - 4 National security experts drinking cocktails and explaining the world at the moment

- No Such thing as a fish - The QI elves very own podcast

- Passenger list - An audio play, great production values, addictive

- Queer Out Here - LGBT people and the great outdoors. Audiologs meet art.

- Serial - The podcast that made podcasts big.

- The Adventure Syndicate Podcasts - Jenny Grahams RTW record in podcast form.

- The Allusionist - Language, such beautiful language

- The indicator from planet money - Byte size economics

- The infinite monkey cage - Ignore the latest two episodes on UFOs, they are bollocks, everything else is absolute gold.

- The Truth - Audio plays, start with "The Off Season"

- The West Wing Weekly - If you're a west wing fan like me.

- Wheel suckers podcast - from Look mum no hands.

I've left out a few from my list that aren't as good as the above, or are more niche in their target, but hopefully the above should give everyone something to enjoy.

J

[ian]

Cool thanks. I like most things other than sports. Someone should do a metacritique of the oeuvre of Mr Daniel Brown. That would get me pedalling.

[Phil W]

Terra Incognito -  if your want adventure podcasts. Quite a variety of different stuff and sports / expeditions but all adventurous.

All in the mind - makes you think.

[SteveC]

Quite a few BBC programmes get podcasted as well, often with a few minutes extra tacked on the end. In Our Time, Radio 3 documentaries, The Kitchen Cabinet and so on.
And I've found odd things like Historic Royal Palaces (Tower of London, Hampton Court, Kensington Palace...) have released podcasts of their public lectures. The sound quality of the latter can sometimes be a bit off, but interesting if that's your sort of thing.

[haydenw]

A few great pods i listen to:

Price of Football - A great insight into the murky world of football finances
Undr The Cosh - Current and Ex Footballers sharing stories from their time in the game (Mark Crossley & his stories of Brian Clough are very funny) - Some crude stuff - but very funny!
Gossipmongers - People send in stories of local gossip - some very funny and daft stories - proper laugh out loud stuff!
The Horne Section Podcast - Alex Horne and his band making up songs with a 1 person guest audiance

Any of these are well worth a listen in my opinion.

[ian]

Started on Serial today, for some reason I had assumed it was something else entirely to what it actually is.

[perpetual dan]

- Wheel suckers podcast - from Look mum no hands.

This is probably my current favourite, the recent "Pop Cast" was rather good.

Also, The Bike Show (Jack Thurston of lost lanes) but it's is rather occasional these days.

I dip into the C86 podcast, which can be a bit rambling but appeals to a certain musical taste.

Beats In Space is good for when i need something danceable to code to.

Radio 3 and 4 both do some good ones, the building a library analysis of classical music I used to recommend to my PhD students as instructive on the art of critique and comparison.

Mrs Dan rates "my dad wrote a porno" but make sure your headphones are securely plugged in if you're in public.

[rr]

For the many, a mixture of politics and smut, partly because I went to school with Jacqui Smith and her soon to be ex-husband and she lives in Malvern which I still consider to be my home town.

Sent from my moto x4 using Tapatalk

[MikeFromLFE]

We go to sleep with The Archers, followed by a couple of episodes of American old time radio detective stories - Generally the 'Great Detectives of Old Time Radio' or 'Relic Radio Thrillers' which have episodes from the 1940s & 50s (Dragnet, Philip Marlow etc).
We also have 'Criminal', 'BBC Inside Health' and the BBC quiz shows on as well.
For when I can't sleep, I have 'Philosophy Bites' (a great 15 minute simple philosophy discussion podcast), 'Slow German' (for subliminal language learning) an for serious strangeness 'Numbers Station' (very odd, but guaranteed sleep induction)

[woollypigs]

Here's few

Ear Hustle (probably my favourite atm)
Far from home
Rough translation
Twenty thousand hertz
The infinite monkey case
Reply all
Never Strays far

[ian]

Started on Serial today, for some reason I had assumed it was something else entirely to what it actually is.

I did enjoy this – though I found season two about the army deserter a bit of a drag. Series 3 about the Cleveland courtroom was very good – and sadly apposite given the current focus on race and criminal justice in the US. It's worth digging up Courtroom 302: A Year Behind the Scenes in an American Criminal Courthouse. Believe me, nothing has changed in the intervening decade.

Currently In the Dark, another indictment of the US criminal justice system. The first series was about the desperate sad case of a child murder, but actually more about police incompetence in not catching the murderer (it turned out by chance they did just as it was about to air, so it puts a different complexion on proceedings). The second which I'm listening to now is about a man in Mississippi who's been tried six times for the same crime and is currently on death row. The legal shenanigans and all-out-lies and the dearth of evidence that has someone (black obviously) on death row is breathtaking. Basically every time he's been convicted, it's been overturned on appeal, so the prosecutor goes back and gets a retrial. Twenty-three years in prison. It's also a reminder that everything in Mississippi still splits along racial lines.

[offcumden]

Current grisly weather has had me back on the turbo, and I've been listening to French language podcasts to try and 'keep my ear in'.  It's a question of choosing the right level; anything too demanding and the cycling suffers, whereas trying to ride hard means I miss some of the sense of what is being said. Got the balance about right today with "Les Français sont-ils racistes?" from the 'Inner French' series, but then I wasn't busting a gut on the turbo

[Peat]

Mark Beaumont has joined seemingly everyone else and now has a podcast:

https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/endurance-mark-beaumont-wqcfA35e2r8/

[Cudzoziemiec]

Invisible infrastructure, purposeless art, bicycles, grand pianos, pirate radio...
https://rwm.macba.cat/en/sonia/sonia-317-reni-hofmuller

[quixoticgeek]

Help, i've caught up with my podcast back log, and the podcasts I listen to are not being produced as fast as I can consume them I need to increase the number of feeds I'm pulling in.

So.

Can you recommend me good podcasts? As linked above, I love 99 Percent invisible, Guilty Feminist, Passenger list, Serial, etc...

I'm on the look out especially for stuff with high production values and interesting content.

What do you suggest?

J

[woollypigs]

I refer you to what I posted above or you can pop in an audio book into your listening pleasure, to get the back log back up. I just did and I got 50 episodes I need to catch up with while walkies.

[quixoticgeek]

I refer you to what I posted above or you can pop in an audio book into your listening pleasure, to get the back log back up. I just did and I got 50 episodes I need to catch up with while walkies.

I have audio books as well, but that's typically about 120 hours a year, I need to sustain about 600 hours annually...

Aside from how good the podcast is, what I love about 99pi and guilty feminist is it comes out every week, and I know it'll be good, it forms a base for my listening. My training ride on a Wednesday always starts with "This is 99 percent invisible, and I'm roman mars"...

This is the first time in all my podcast listening that I've caught up the back log. It's a strange feeling...

Shall investigate your list, I already have reply-all and infinite monkey cage.

J