I spend a lot of time listening to podcasts or listening just to audio of YouTube videos.
Most of what I listen to is fully scripted and edited, often with just one person talking. A small amount of what I listen to have two people with unscripted conversations that are edited to keep the episode on topic.
I’ve tried listening to fully unedited live conversation podcasts with anywhere from 2 to 4 people talking, and every one of them has driven me absolutely crazy. I usually pick episodes based on the topic in the title, to always find that either nobody in the podcasts knows/cares about the topic, or only one person knows about it. It results in conversations turning into mindnumbing rambling about nothing or one person explaining a topic to another person who is uninterested or just stupid.
If there is a podcast with multiple hosts that actually share an interest in a topic and keep it reasonably on topic I would really like to try it out.
Nathan Fillion and Alan Tudyck recently started Once We Were Spaceman and is primarily the two just chatting. I’ve been enjoying it a lot so far!
Good Talk - It’s Canadian politics but they can make Canadian politics seem interesting which is a huge accomplishment in itself.
Most of the podcasts I listen to are this format. I think their enjoyment might come down to knowing (or being interested in getting to know) the speakers’ personalities.
Omnibus — Ken Jennings (of Jeopardy fame) and Jonn Roderick (of The Long Winters (or bean dad) fame) take turns on doing a deep dive on some weird but true topic.
Filmcast — Film nerds (David Chen, Devindra Hardawar, and Jeff Cannata) talk about new movies they’ve watched and TV Shows they’re watching
The Incomparable — Geeks talking about various pop culture topics. This is a whole network with various podcasts focusing on different aspects of pop culture. I linked to the “main” feed which is where you’ll usually find new movie releases, but they also go back and discuss movies they’ve watched missed and classic too. Or if you’d rather browse by topic
The Accidental Tech Podcast — Three friends from childhood and professional geeks discuss current technology topics with a heavy focus on Apple from a developer and consumer perspective.
The Rest is History — Two English historians discuss various history topics from around the world at length. They just wrapped up a four part series on Jack the Ripper.
…that should be a reasonable start I hope.
I’d recommend the Acquired podcast. I believe both hosts do their own independent research, and it shows. They know their stuff.
Lots of excellent episodes but the Costco, Trader Joe’s and Epic Systems (MyChart) episodes are particularly fascinating to me.
Let’s Learn Everything is great. The hosts each research a science related topic each week and they explain it and discuss it on the show. It’s really interesting, quite fun.
The conversations in the Waking Up app are high quality and the participants are either well informed or experts. It’s meditation focused but they talk about many adjacent topics such as neuroscience, time management and philosophy. Hundreds of hours of content.
Before I read the body of the post, I was going to recommend “gl;hf” (the only podcast I’ve really listened to in quite a while), but they don’t stay on topic. There is no topic, really. It’s just rambling about whatever comes to them as it comes up.
At the beginning of every episode, they start with “welcome to gl;hf, the world’s first podcast in gaming.” And the running joke is that they rarely talk about gaming at all.
Largely they talk about being prolific career YouTube content creators, but they may delve into random stuff like the U.S. National Cheese Reserve or the ethics of eating lab-grown human meat or Uncle Wiggily board games.
On the plus side, they’re always interested in what they’re talking about.
What languages do you speak?
The same ones I type.
Idk if you’re expecting me to background check your profile now but for English I have no recommendations
