All my friends
Solving the listening time problem, lots of podcast recommendations, and lots of links.
Welcome to Hurt Your Brain #211, the place to get podcasts and links that will make you think, sent every so often.
It’s nice being back in your inbox. I have some great podcast recommendations for you.
But first, I’ve solved my ‘not having enough time to listen to podcasts’ problem.
The answer for me has been long walks at the park. Some might say long walks are best for connecting with nature or inviting along family and friends. Nonsense! Long walks are best as a solitary adventure designed to help you catch up on your ever growing podcast queue. At 1.8x speed of course, as all podcast producers intended.
Also, a new shirt design hot off the imaginary presses:
In that spirit, I hope you make some new friends below.
PODCAST RECOMMENDATIONS
First up is a little rapid fire set of recommendations:
Unexplainable has had some really great episodes: The four part Good Robot series, and Sorry, we left an implant in your brain are both excellent. Radiolab’s The Echo in the Machine tells a story about the history of closed captioning that is a little mind blowing and fun. The Dave and Buster’s Anomaly from Search Engine is super interesting, and as of this writing, the anomaly still hasn’t been fixed. If you are feeling romantic, Modern Love’s How to Fall (and Stay) in Love episode will hit the right spot. Case 63 is an often recommended to me fiction podcast starring Julianne Moore and Oscar Isaac that has a very breezy and intriguing first episode.
Now some classic recommendations:
Ologies: Araneology (SPIDERS) with Marshal Hedin
The Big Idea: Spiders are cool, and if you don’t believe me, maybe you just need to listen to this episode.
I don’t listen to every episode, but I am seriously never disappointed when I dip into the Ologies feed to see what catches my eye.
There are 50k described species of spiders (and probably 100k in reality), but only about 50 are potentially harmful to humans. That’s only one in a thousand species! I made a chart to prove it.
The Journal: Can Pepsi Make a Comeback?
The Big Idea: The big soda war is always Coke vs Pepsi right? WRONG! Did you know Dr Pepper has surpassed Pepsi as the number two soda? I mean, I love Diet Dr Pepper, but this was truly surprising to me.
The World As You’ll Know It: The Billion Dollar Bet — Will Humans Live to 150?
The Big Idea: A new season of The World As You’ll Know It is being hosted by science journalist Carl Zimmer. Sold. Downloaded. The man has been bringing S tier science content to podcasts like Radiolab and The Daily for years and years, and I’m very happy to see him here lead the narrative and the conversation.
And this first episode is indeed very well done. It fleshes out a topic I’ve heard about many times before (aging) and approaches it with depth and context that only someone like Zimmer could bring to the table.
The Big Idea: From the folks who brought you 13 Minutes to the Moon (about the Apollo space program), comes this natural follow up about the Space Shuttle program.
This first episode is extremely well done and I can’t wait to check out the rest.
Shoutout to Podcast Review for their article The 11 Best Science Podcasts, where I discovered this show.
There is a great episode 0 that sets up how this show came about that is worth listening to as well.
Terrestrials: The Snow Beast—A Mystery Animal with Latif Nasser
The Big Idea: I won’t spoil the mystery animal at the heart of the episode, but even though this is a kids science show (from the Radiolab team), I am quite confident all of you will enjoy this episode as much as I did. The reveal was honestly surprising to me.
PODCAST LINKS
What podcast do you listen to religiously? A Reddit thread with lots of recommendations.
FOR FUN
Because I focus on the important things in life, my next goal is to memorize Andrew Dismukes Jumanji rant.
Michael Jordan took it personally. And then a longer version just as good.
Glad Conan won the Mark Twain Prize, but just to be clear, it’s a prize, not an award.
That’s it for this week. Thank you as always for reading and responding!
Please like or comment (or reply) if you want to share any comments. See you next time.
p.s. Getting pumped for season finale of The Last of Us. It’s certainly not the feel good show of the year, but they are doing a great job adapting one of the greatest video game series of all time. Not pumped for the two years for season 3, particularly because I’m pretty sure I know how tonight will end.