I've been really into comedy DnD podcasts this year, and highly recommend "Dragon Friends" ( https://thedragonfriends.com/ ), a comedy DnD podcast by Australian comedians done live, with musical accompaniment, every month. I haven't actually caught up to current though, so it doesn't quite fit the brief.
Most (almost all) of Dan Carlin's podcasts are nothing short of excellent. Twilight of the Æsir Parts I and II are top quality. Apart from that I used to listen to Mike Duncan's Revolutions series, even though he finished up that project in 2022. Likewise the BBC produced an Apollo-era podcast called 13 Minute to the Moon, which was excellent, and technical enough to keep even a space nerd like me interested. Shout-o…
Second on all of Dan Carlin's podcasts. I absolutely loved his World War I series called "Blueprint for Armageddon". Even though I listened to quite a few of them while they were free, I recently bought the whole back catalog from his website and have been working through them. Absolute gem and worth every penny. For anyone not familiar, he makes the most recent episodes "free" (he does ask for a standard donation of $1 per episode, but they are not paywalled) through the standard RSS feed, and monetizes by selling the older episodes through his website. Probably the best podcast series I've ever listened to. Recommend listening to the newer free episodes, and if you like it then go through the back catalog.
(Carl thinks seriously about how to reason about AI scale-up)
Overall Dwarkesh seems like the most underrated podcast atm, with Conversations with Tyler being the best. I also enjoyed some Sean Carroll interviews.
Andrew Huberman’s “Goals Toolkit” is responsible for me finally losing some stubborn weight this year, and I plan to apply it to other things I want to achieve. https://www.hubermanlab.com/episode/goals-toolkit-how-to-set... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CrtR12PBKb0
It's Aug 2022 so a bit out of range for the OP, but his alcohol episode convinced me to really cut down on drinking, from about 2 beers (low variance/rarely drunk, just a homebrewer with a craft beer obsession) a day to a day to maximum 2 beers a week. I sleep better and lost 35 pounds in the last year.
2023 is the year I divorced podcasts. Don't feel like I missed much.
Why did you divorce podcasts?
I just realized the idle chatter filled up my head. Using LLMs to summarize them have also made me realize how repetitive and samey the insight-based interview podcasts are. It's not accurate that I divorced podcasts fully. I listen to one or two shows a week. One is a technology podcast and the other is a film podcast, both have a group of friends.
So long story short, chemistry is all that matters to me about most podcasts don't have it.
I was blown away by Shelved by Genre [1] this year. It’s a group of 3 reading and discussing Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun series in a sort of book club format.
They’re a pretty academic lot and I’ve found their perspective on the books very rewarding as I read along. Highly recommend!