Podcasts I listen to Part 3 – ‘other’…Member Audio
(Audio: link)
[audio:http://www.RunRunLive.com/PodcastEpisodes/Membership/M13-Podcast-I-Listen-to-Part-3.mp3]
Link M13-Podcast-I-Listen-to-Part-3.mp3
This is the good one. This is the tranche of podcasts that I listen to for no intrinsic reason other than they are interesting.
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General interest
New Yorker Fiction – http://www.newyorker.com/series/fiction-podcast
This is an awesome podcast where every so often the short story editor of the New Yorker gets a writer to read a short story. Anyone who knows me knows my love of the short story as a powerful art form. Short stories are like brilliant bottle rockets of ideas that flash briefly but powerfully into your brain.
Many of the writers who read these stories are accomplished writers themselves so they have a love of the craft and that shows. They get to choose what story they are going to read and they choose some odd stuff.
Before and after the reading the editor and the writer talk about the featured author and try to tease out what they were getting at, what they were trying to accomplish. It’s a bit of an inside the actors studio for writers. As a student of the craft it is just wonderful.
My only knock on this podcast is that they publish very infrequently.
We’re alive! – https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/were-alive-zombie-story-survival/id313300476?mt=2
This is one of the few zombie stories out there in podcast land. It’s cheesy radio production style story that walks with the survivors as they try to outrun, outfight and outlive the undead. It’s not well acted, it’s cheesy and it stopped publishing a couple years ago but if you like zombie stories it’s one of the few out there.
I can’t really tell from the website but they might have switched to a paid feed and kept the storyline going. You can also get the whole story on audible.
Welcome to Night Vale – http://www.welcometonightvale.com/
This is a crazy hipster podcast that is sort of Garrison Keillor meets the twilight zone. It’s hard to describe. It’s the theatre of the absurd. I love what they do with the story telling as an art form and the way they play with words.
They employ a lot of classic absurdity humor in their timing – which is when you start a normal statement and end it with something off-kilter. Like “He always wanted to be a librarian, so he could eat children.”
They have spawned an entertainment empire around this theme. They’ve launched a second podcast and have a successful traveling show which is a live theatre performance of the show. There’s also a book.
Zombie Take out – http://zombietakeout.com/
What I love about podcasts as a form in general is that podcasts like zombie take out can exist. It’s two guys who review B-movies and riff on them. They cover a lot of horror and scifi genre and rate them on a 1-5 brains scale. It’s goofy and funny. If it wasn’t for this one I would have never found such gems as Sharknado and Dead Snow – a low budget Danish flick with zombie Nazis. How can you pass up zombie Nazis?
Film Spotting – http://filmspotting.net/
This is a serious movie review podcast. I like movie reviews because I really have no knowledge of the craft of moving making and enjoy the inside-baseball dissection of them. I don’t watch a lot of movies anymore and when I do I like them to be something interesting and worth my time. These guys give me a sense of where the dogs and the gems are.
I used to listen to a great movie review podcast out of Portland Oregon but they podfaded.
Car talk – http://www.npr.org/podcasts/510208/car-talk
I have stopped listening to car talk since Ray died, but I used to love their show before podcasts were invented. Funny guys from Massachusetts who could make a man sound like he knew what that noise coming from under the dash was. No man wants to be totally car illiterate.
“Sounds like the fan belt!”
Freakonomics – http://freakonomics.com/
Overproduced and full of ads Freakonomics is cut from the same cloth as most of the other NPR type shows but they have some great topics and some eye-opening analysis.
Science Fridays – http://www.sciencefriday.com/
Another old standby from when I used to listen to NPR that has made the leap to podcast. Ira does a good job. You can look at the topics and see which ones you want to listen to. Suffers from the same liberal agenda as all the NPR shows and wanders far away from hard science much of the time.
It’s super painful to listen to Ira trying to fake enthusiasm for Harry’s Razors.
Tim Ferris – http://fourhourworkweek.com/podcast/
I have a love-hate relationship with the Tim Ferris show. He crams it full of ads and sometimes it’s 3-hours long! Even at 1.5X speed it’s a weighty investment of time. I would never say that Tim impresses me as a misogynist, sophomoric, egomaniac because, hey one mention of any of my books on his show would be worth tens of thousands of dollars to me. So I would never say that.
The Four Hour Work Week was a seminal book. I would never say that the Four Hour Body was a load of pseudo-scientific crap because of the reason stated above.
But, after all is said and done – he has access to some of most interesting people on the planet. His recent interview of Mike Rowe was mind blowing. If you’ve got a long ride or some hours to kill, fast forward to the content and suck it up.
The Moth – https://themoth.org/
This is a great story telling podcast. It’s another re-purposed NPR program. I love to listen to the craft of the professional story tellers and understand the structure and the delivery of a good story performance.
The performers tend towards your common NPR left of the dial topics. I’m pretty sure there are run of the mill people with great stories, but they try really hard to focus on politics, race, and gender issues. Which is fine. Those stories need to be told too, but the shrillness of it is tiring. I’d rather enjoy the story telling than be lectured.
Ted Talks – http://blog.ted.com/audio_podcasts/
What could I say about TED talks that hasn’t already been said? The economic airing of very good ideas. There is an audio version of the talks that you can get. It suffers because most TED talks are very visual. But, you get the meat of the topics and you can always go watch the ones you think sound cool.
The Art of Charm – http://blog.ted.com/audio_podcasts/
I went through a phase last year where I researched the social sciences. I read the books and looked around for more. One of the podcasts I found was the Art of Charm. It started out as a podcast about how to pick up woman and progressed into a ‘skills humans need’ show (70% focused on men)
They drop 3 podcasts a week. Two of them are interview based and can be interesting but the one I love is ‘Fan Mail Friday’ where they read letters from fans, crazy people and the lovelorn. It’s my own sad bit of schadenfreude.
Savage Love – http://www.savagelovecast.com/
This is the podcast of the sex columnist from San Fransico Dan Savage. He’s a character. You will hear people with kinks you could never imagine existed. I had to stop listening to it because I was starting to lose faith in humanity.
Startup – https://gimletmedia.com/show/startup/
This is a commercial spin off from the NPR stable. It’s kinda interesting as the NPR take on startups. It’s also self-involved and over produced. Typical NPR stuff but one of the few podcasts that shine a light into the fascinating startup world.
Walker Stalkers – http://www.thewalkerstalkers.com/category/podcasts/
Yes I listen to a podcast that is a fan podcast for the Walking Dead. I’m not proud of it. But the cool story here is that these guys bootstrapped a startup that puts on Walking Dead themed conventions and have been very successful.
Intervals/phedip – http://steverunner.libsyn.com/
Steve has been with us for years and I love to listen to his continuing journey. He’s a smart guy, passionate, conflicted and produces a hell of a show.
Rich Roll – https://www.richroll.com/
Rich has this vegan save the world theme. He’s another one of the long-form podcasts that I hate/love. He has some super interesting fringe-y artist types on his show. The good news is that since Rich is from California you can speed the replay way up without losing any content – at 1.5 speed he just starts to sound like he’s from the east coast.
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That’s all I have for you for now. I was going to go into all the running podcasts but someone might feel slighted. I’ll just tell you to visit RunningPodcasts.org and sample them for yourself. I don’t particularly dig the ‘strap on a mic and go for a run’ genre. I find it a bit unfocused and rambling. The exception to this would be Dirt Dawg who is a good friend of mine and a super smart and caring soul.
Also any of the many podcasts produced by my friend Adam the Zen Runner are worth the time. He’s a brilliant and passionate guy.
I hope this was a useful survey course for you, my friends. Maybe it gave you some insight into the dark and wonky corners of my portfolio mind? We’ll see.
Like I said, if you have any podcasts you think I’d like, or preferably love, don’t’ hesitate to throw them over the wall!
Cheers,