A few more podcasts I keep returning to better ways to sleep. Or OpenSnore, or or variants of agents who work while you sleep.
Back to the shows.
The podcast I listen to most these days is probably not about business, politics, technology, or even history.
It’s about daughters.
Recently I listened to an episode of Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend where Conan and Matt Gourley spent the first fifteen minutes talking about their daughters.
Then an actress showed up and they did an interview.
The interview was fine.
The daughters were the story.
The older I get, the more I notice that the most interesting people eventually end up talking about the same things. Family. Friendship. Regret. Gratitude. The weird terror of loving someone so much that they become a permanent vulnerability.
Conan is a delight because he spent decades becoming one of the funniest men in America and now often sounds like somebody’s slightly bewildered dad.
Which brings me to the greatest podcast ever made.
The BBC’s In Our Time.
For years, especially during Covid, it was my church.
Every episode is the same. Melvyn Bragg gathers three academics in a room and asks them about some obscure topic that normal people are supposedly not interested in.
The Hanseatic League.
The Abbasids.
Entropy.
The Bronze Age Collapse.
The history of zero.
Nobody interrupts. Nobody is building a personal brand. Nobody says “actually.”
It is a place without morons.
Covid was strange because I was simultaneously spending my days with two small daughters and my evenings listening to medievalists explain fourteenth-century trade routes. Looking back, both activities had roughly the same psychological effect. They reminded me there was a world larger than whatever panic happened to be on television.
If In Our Time is my church, then Dylan, Album by Album is my monastery.
There are people who know every Bob Dylan record.
Then there are people who know every Bob Dylan bootleg.
Then there are the people who make Bob Dylan podcasts.
These people have crossed beyond fandom into something approaching religious vocation.
I admire them enormously.
On the Media occupies a different place.
Every week it reminds me that the story is often not the story.
The thing that happened is interesting.
The way people talk about the thing that happened is usually more interesting.
The machinery behind public understanding is one of the most important subjects in the world, and one of the least discussed.
Then there is The Rest Is History.
Of course.
History is one of humanity’s great inventions. It allows us to discover that everything happening today happened before, but with worse dentistry.
The hosts somehow manage to combine scholarship, enthusiasm, and the energy of two men trapped at a dinner party who have just discovered nobody is making them leave.
Acquired is the business equivalent.
Most business journalism is about quarters.
Acquired is about decades.
Most people underestimate how much more interesting a company becomes once you tell its story as a civilization rather than a stock ticker.
I have learned more from Acquired’s deep dives than from many business books.
Song Exploder remains one of the most elegant ideas in podcasting.
Take a song.
Ask the people who made it how they made it.
That’s the whole show.
The lesson is larger than music. Almost everything interesting becomes more interesting when you learn how it was built.
The same is true for comedy.
Good One is a podcast where comedians explain jokes.
The Zach Galifianakis episode is particularly wonderful because he reveals something many people miss: comedy is often less about wit than about architecture.
A joke is a machine.
The comedian is an engineer.
Unclear and Present Danger is another favorite.
The premise is simple: revisit the paranoid political thrillers of the late twentieth century and ask what they were afraid of.
The answer is often that America keeps inventing new anxieties while preserving the old ones in amber.
Finally, Jacobin.
I don’t always agree.
That is partly the point.
A healthy intellectual diet requires exposure to people who think differently from you, provided they are intelligent, serious, and arguing in good faith.
The internet has convinced us that disagreement is dangerous.
In reality, disagreement is often how thinking happens.
Looking at this list, I notice that almost none of these podcasts are really about their stated subjects.
History podcasts are about human nature.
Business podcasts are about ambition.
Music podcasts are about creativity.
Media podcasts are about reality.
Comedy podcasts are about structure.
And podcasts about daughters are about love.
Which, in the end, turns out to be what most things are about.