Ask HN: What is the best podcast you listened to in 2021?

There are significant contradictions within her recollection, as cataloged in the article https://thediplomat.com/2014/12/the-strange-tale-of-yeonmi-p... Some examples (from the article) -

  * Park’s account of the mother’s crime changes constantly, depending it seems on her audience
  * Park says her father was sentenced to 17 or 18 years in prison. Her mother told us he was initially sentenced to a year, but later it was increased to ten years.
  * Park’s mother told us prosecutors interrogated her on and off for about a year – sometimes at home in Hyesan and sometimes elsewhere [...] But, in a recent BBC radio interview, Park claimed her mother was imprisoned for six months
  * When she spoke with us, Park told of how her and her sister, at just nine and eleven, were left to fend for themselves after their parents were jailed. “We have shower and wash our clothes there and then we go to the mountain to get the grass to eat,” she said. But, in the BBC radio interview, Park claimed her sister went to live at her uncle’s house 
  * .... the host of the show says to Park’s mother, “When we talk about stories of people eating grass or people struggling to eat, Yeju (Park’s pseudonym) says, ‘Oh that never happened…’
  * The story of her escape has multiple versions with incompatible fundamentals (like who escaped, when, and how), and increasing in brutality over time.

The foundation of her story is a collection of self-contradicting childhood memories, making this case closer to the narration arc of Life of Pi (where the viewer is left guessing if the story was true or they were in the imagination of the protagonist). Even recent "vetted" "auto-biographical" stories like Lone Survivor can get so carried away in presenting the feeling of the situation that they sacrifice the facts, and we must be careful when trying to extract facts from the other side of the communication.

The Original Remote Developer episode was an absolute gem too. https://corecursive.com/remote-developer/

Definitely our home boy Lex Fridman

Dear Men - a relationships podcast by Melanie Curtin. It covers lots of relationship topics: communication, intimacy, sex, emotions, therapy, trauma, etc. The host/author runs a counseling group for men and does surveys on related topics to her “Big Sexy Dataset” (a few thousand opt-in volunteers to her surveys). She frequently does one episode with an interview guest on a given topic, then follows it up with a group of girls on the same topic then follows that with a group of guys on the same topic.

A close second is How to Save The World by Katie Patrick. It is primarily about how to find and utilize cross-functional skills to influence/persuade others into improving the world in lots of ways (sustainability, energy use, ethical eating, etc). She takes a really practical approach as opposed to heavy-handed and/or smug tactics frequently associated with these campaigns. A great resource for NGOs, software devs, academics, policy makers, and others.

Quite surprised that How I Built This has not been posted so far - https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510313/how-i-built-this?t=16405...

Very enjoyable to hear stories from founders of a selection of interesting companies and very well presented by Guy Raz.