I’m looking to refresh my podcast subscriptions with thoughtful, insightful, non politics stuff (enough of that already in my subscriptions). I’d love some recommendations for:
- Techie stuff for a luddite like me
- Long form explorations of a single topic
- Video gaming (loved the video game historian but he stopped)
- TTRPGs and game design
- Reading and Writing
- Absolutely no interest in art, finance, crypto, cars, sports, aliens, murder/horror/crime, or influencer style conversation casts (Rogan or Piker)
My current subscriptions are to:
- Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History
- Disasters Deconstructed (though I’m not liking the academic tone anymore since I left this career, so stopped listening as much)
- Ralph Nader Radio Hour
- CBC podcasts, a wide variety on politics
- Autocracy in America
- NPR Shortwave and Planet Money
- John Stewart
- Trevor Noah
Edit: Wow! So many great suggestions. Thanks!


I’ve since come to understand 80,000 Hours as basically MBA-lite (all the “what’s wrong with you,” less filling). Their “free consultations” require having first read all the literature and accepted your role as a cog (as such, I lost interest). I don’t find it inherently worthless – I was, after all, still running into people in their 30s and even 40s bereft of direction and purpose, and for some, it might have been useful.
But of course, only a cult claims to have a One True Way.
Interestingly, I took one of those personality tests from a career counselor late in high school, and it came back with three top results:
—[1]
I had zero interest, having been told not to write by high school teachers. How the hell would that be my destination? I didn’t run into that long-forgotten dot-matrix printout until I was cleaning out my apartment for a move in 2018. Why was I moving? Because I’d been dating another newspaper editor for a couple of years, and paying separate rent was starting to look stupid.
only inserted because Lemmy seems to disregard two CRLFs after a bullet list and sets the next bit within the same graf ↩︎