I love podcasts it’s simply a great medium for story telling and building a relationship with your audience or visa versa. Furthermore they’re easy to consume while doing other tasks. Here’s the my favourite podcasts:
Story Telling
99% Invisible
My favorite show of all time. It’s used to be more focused on architecture, now more broadly about stories that include design in some way. I was introduced to it through this amazing episode about the Citigroup Center in NY and how it for years was in danger of collapse without anyone knowing until an architecture student thought to double check the structural calculations.
Surprisingly Awesome
The premise is to take a seemingly boring subject and present something “surprisingly interesting” about it. Anything from Gimlet is probably worth a listen. Best episode so far is Free Throws it among other things unravel the fact that some basket players choose to throw free throws eyes closed to hit the basket!
Reply All
A show about the internet at large. Some great stories among the many episodes already. DMV Nation, Hack the Police, The Man in the FBI Hat.
Tech
Exponent
Ben Thompson and James Allworth deconstruct the business forces at work in whatever is shaking up the tech sector this week. Some of the best business analysis you will find.
a16c
Interviews with various people in the tech sector around a new topic every week. Blockchain, AI, Politics Over Pragmatism — On China, Trump, and Smart Guns?, etc.
Accidental Tech Podcast
Podcast covering Apple.
Life
Tim Ferriss Podcast
Lot’s of people roll their eyes when you try and explain Tim Ferriss. But he quite uniquely manages to combine physical health, business, tech and story telling in to something I find amazing.
Some episodes that stick out to me: Walter O’Brien > Born in Ireland, Walter was diagnosed as a child prodigy with an IQ of 197. He became an Irish national coding champion and competed in the Olympics in informatics.
Fast forward to today, he and Scorpion get paid to fix every imaginable problem for billionaires, startups, governments, Fortune 500 companies, and people like you and me. On the large side, it ranges from mitigating risk on $1.9 trillion of investments to inventing artificial intelligence engines to protect United States war fighters in Afghanistan.
The World’s Most Famous Performance-Enhancement Chemist
Patrick Arnold, widely considered “the father of prohormones,” is an organic chemist known for introducing androstenedione (remember Mark McGwire?), 1-Androstenediol (marketed as “1-AD”), and methylhexanamine into the dietary supplement market.
Super interesting to hear about how chemists think about making drugs. It’s considerably more like coding than I would have imagined.
Sam Harris, PhD on Spirituality, Neuroscience, Meditation, and More
Sam Harris is a neuroscience Ph.D. and the author of the bestselling books, The End of Faith, The Moral Landscape, Free Will, Lying, and Waking Up.
In this episode, we explore the science of lying, uses and types of meditation, psychedelic drug uses and risks, spiritual experiences, and more. It’s really a discussion of the human experience, and how to optimize it without harming others.