For history:
Revolutions by Mike Duncan. You can start with the Haitian and the Mexican revolutions. Then just listen to whichever season you want.
Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History.
The History of Rome by Mike Duncan.
These are absolutely amazing.
Honorable mentions for Behind the Bastards and Lions Lead by Donkeys, if you like some banter along with the story telling.
Edit: someone in here reminded me about Your Undivided Attention. It is, literally and without irony, the most important podcast you could ever listen.
Behind the Bastards is my top recommendation. Just learning how truly awful the world has been for a few thousand years is soul crushingly entertaining.
I love how they combine it all with light banter. Without the banter, most of the episode would be unlistenable, as you would be too depressed and tie yourself on a train track.
I also love that Robert brings on repeat guests for certain topics. If an episode has lots of dead babies, it gets one person, Nazis often get Matt Lieb with his new sound board.
My favorite episode of all time is Action Park, with Garrison as host and Robert as the “guest”.
Carlin’s podcast (and a lot of popular history podcasts) are generally considered fairly poor by academic historians, in regard to accurately portraying modern historical research. I think those kinds of podcasts are good to engage and stimulate interest in history, as long as the listener understands that they are a kind of “pop” history and should be taken with a grain of salt.
Same goes for a lot of popular books, like Sapiens.
Cautionary tales: stories of how things went wrong
Darknet diaries: stories from the dark web
intelligence squared: thought provoking debates about anything and everything
The numberphile podcast: interviews with mathematicians by Brady Haran. If you like the kinds of videos Brady makes, you’ll probably like this too. You know, stuff like sixty symbols, numberphile, perioedic table of videos etc.
You are not so smart: podcast about psychology
your undivided attention: discussion and interviews about social media. What it’s like to work for a social media company. How social media influences your business, or how it affects your life. How different parts of it are intentional and some are unintentional.
With Tim Harford, by Pushkin.
Hope you like it. It’s one of my favorites even though I Found it only about a year ago.
Nobody recommended 99% Invisible yet?
That one is a must-listen about everyday (and not so everyday) design. Absolutely amazing!
As a testament tp their quality, several “interesting” videos made by Tom Scott and Veritasium were also 99pi episodes before they found out those things. For example, Veritasium did the Snake Antibody Facility video, where Snake venom is milked by hand last year. 99pi did it half a decade ago.
No Such Thing As A Fish is an informative and funny podcast, saw it recommended on a similar post a couple weeks ago and have been hooked since
Love recommending podcasts!
- Like others have said, Behind the Bastards is great to find out about some of the worst people in history.
- In relation to that Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is the opposite of Behind the Bastards. It’s about people who did cool stuff who became cool.
- Also in lieu of that, Bad Gays, it’s about bad gays in history. I think they’ve covered similar folks on BtB, but this is obviously from a queer perspective.
- Fad Camp and Maintenance Phase are great podcasts about dieting and wellness. Fad Camp is more about how damaging some of these diets can be, whereas Maintenance Phase is similar to You’re Wrong About (which I also recommend)
- The Weekly Planet are these two Australian guys who talk about movies, tv, comics and video games. They also have a YouTube channel called Me Sunday Movies where they’ll upload some of their podcasts. Like they have a running segment called “Caravan of Garbage” which is just sort of talking about a movie, tv show or game. Currently they’ve started going through the RoboCop movies.
- Also shameless plug, but Checkpoint is on the radio but they take their radio show and put it on a podcast. It’s a podcast about giving a 1up to diversity in video games. Most of us are from the LGBTQIA+ community and that’s where most of our perspectives come from, but it’s also just folks from any marginalised group. Lovely bunch of folks (if I do say so myself).
Uh yeah, I have some more, but like that’s politics or it’s writing related or spicyness in or out of the bedroom. But these are the ones I always recc.
