Ask Lemmy

Uhh Yeah Dude. 2 guys choppin it up since 2006.

This History of Rome -- Pretty much exactly what the title says. This is an old podcast. It started in 2007 and finished in 2013. It pioneered the history podcast genre. It was made by Mike Duncan, who went on to create...

Revolutions -- Mike Duncan's follow up to The History of Rome. It's a similar format, but rather than a single on-going historical narrative, each season focuses on a different historical revolution. The original run of the show covered the English Revolution, American, French, Haitian, Spanish-American, 1830 French Revolution, 1848 European Revolutions, Mexican, and Russian Revolutions. He then concluded the podcast in 2022, but started it back up again late last year. This season is a fictionalized podcast about the Martian Revolution of the 24th century (told as a history from someone living well in the future of it). He's said that once he's done this season he's going back to doing historical revolutions picking back up after the Russian Revolution.

If you're at all techy or in to self-hosting or home automation, the Self-Hosted podcast is excellent listening.

Shout out to Linux Unplugged, from the same network, Juipeter Broadcasting

Plenty of audience participation, current and active.

They also have meetups, community stuff and are very fediverse involved!

LeVar Burton Reads

It's exactly what you see on the label. Curated collection of short stories read by Mr. Buron. There are very few "to be continued" episodes, so you can pretty much jump in wherever and have a listen.

General interest

• Hardcore History (the best!)
• A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs
• Myths and Legends

Game history

• Retronauts
• Video Game History Hour (Video Game History Foundation)
• New Books in Game Studies (I haven't listened yet, but the description sounds interesting anyway)

Talking about current video games

• Kit and Krysta
• Vic's Basement (Electric Playground)
• Easy Allies (Haven't tuned in since a lot their personalities left, but they've still got a solid crew)

A few not yet mentioned:

• Well There's Your Problem - a podcast about engineering disasters
• Hard Fork - a weekly tech news show, with banter similar to what you could find on Reply All before that was ended
• The War on Cars - an urbanism-podcast
• The Urbanist Agenda - another urbanism-podcast, by the creator behind Not Just Bikes
• The Climate Denier's Playbook - a climate-podcast
• Hyperfixed - by one of the hosts of Reply All

And a vote for previously mentioned podcasts:

• 99% Invisible - a podcast about design, arguably my favourite
• Darknet Diaries - a podcast about cybersecurity

The Fall of Civilizations is hauntingly beautiful

Darknet diaries. It's about anything security, spy, hacking, some networking bots, etc. do NOT need to be a nerd to love it, recent episode was a guy who started tracking stolen bikes and found a crazy web of criminals though patterns.

Very well spoken, very well edited, very easy to listen to, even if you're technically challenged.

Here are some I really enjoy, which I also use to fall asleep to.

• Fall of civilizations - great history show
• Sweet Bobby - Weird and fascinating story
• The Spy Who - Awesome storytelling about different spystories from around the world
• It could happen here - Podcast that tells how a second american civil war could happen
• Decoding the gurus - decoding weirdos like musk, jordan peterson and other scammers

The only one I listen to anymore is the WAN show. I just never have time to listen to them anymore so it usually takes 3-4 days to finish it.

Everything from Cool Zone Media

Knowledge Fight including spinoffs

Triple J The Hookup

Rude Tales of Magic

Many good ones on channel zero

Darknet Diaries, it’s about hacking and each episode is a different story and has interviews with people that were involved in information security incidents, either the ones doing the hacking and/or those defending from and responding to attacks

Trueanon, if I ever make a manifesto I'm mentioning them in it

DOS GAME CLUB

The materialism podcast has stopped, but is absolutely worth listening to the backlog. It's a material science podcast.

• Morbid (True Crime/Mysteries)
• Behind the Bastards (History/Biography with some humor)
• No Sleep (Fictional Horror Audiodrama)--

What's Left of Philosophy? - Good for elevating your philosophy game.

• welcome to nightvale - if you like kooky off the wall sci-fi stories
• We’re alive - Long form zombie survival podcast. I recommend starting from the beginning before moving to the newest stuff
• Alice isn’t Dead - mystery sci-fi trucker podcast
• Fictional - classical novels read with a bit of snark - new season coming soon
• That time that Planet Money read all of The Great Gatsby
• 99% Invisible’s book club synopsis of The Power Broker by Robert Caro
• The Truth
• What’s Ray Saying

Lateral - guests try to solve weird puzzles that require lateral thinking

Regular Features - regulars take turns telling a funny story each. They can be all kinds of different things. Songs, plays where everyone needs to get involved, or even true stories backed up with covert voice recordings.

That's Absurd Please Elaborate - regulars either explain something weird and interesting or listeners will prompt then with a question that they will go and research and explain in the podcast.

Horne Section Podcast - Little Alex Horne (of Taskmaster fame) interviews a guest alongside his band that will keep playing improv music of all kinds of different genres throughout. Regularly playing songs that end up being relevant to the guest, for example could be a funny retelling of their life or some fun word play on their name etc. the banter between Alex and band makes this one. They probably didn't even need guests to be honest.

A Problem Squared - 2 regulars each try to solve a question posed by listeners. Is often very intellectual but the two hosts are very witty and can find an interesting and funny way to explain someone's complicated concepts that anyone could understand and learn from.

James Acasters Perfect Sounds - each episode James shares an album specifically from the year 2016 to try and convince a guest that 2016 was the best year in music in an attempt to justify his obsession of trying to physically collect every album released in 2016. The reasons for it being 2016 specifically are very personal to him and uses each album to explain why. (This is like a companion piece/extension to a book he wrote prior on the same subject, except this time with other people involved and their opinions as well as the audible medium allowing him to share snippets of the sins they are talking about).

Some other ones I regularly listen to:

Cox n Crendor

Geekenders

Bill Burr's Monday Morning Podcast

C.R.E.A.M. (Cars Rule Everything Around Me - The TDC Podcast)

SmartLess

Windbreaker

Better Offline (A good one for Tech Sceptics that hate the big tech monopolies)

Better Offline: explains a lot of things that are wrong with today's tech. Mostly Ed ranting about enshittification/AI in everything

Oologies. A charming interviewer talks to experts in various disciplines.

The Dollop is one of my all time favourites.

Beautiful Stories From Anonymous People, basically someone calls in to talk about anything they want with the host (comedian Chris Gethard). The caller can hang up any time, the host must hang up after exactly one hour.

People call in to talk about so many different things, and Gethard is really good at getting people to open up in a very genuine yet casual manner.

Unmade Podcast - 2 dudes talking podcast.

Not Another D&D Podcast is the only one I reliably listen to.

Similar vein - 8 Bit Book Club.

I'm a fan of Lingthusiasm. It's two linguist friends chatting about interesting things in their field. They keep it pretty approachable for non-linguists (like me)

The Magnus Archives is still the best podcast of all time, if you're into audio dramas.

I also love The Deep 3, Thinking Basketball, and the No Dunks podcast for the NBA.

This Podcast will Kill You. It's about illness causing pathogens and poisons. It's super cool they break it down so nicely. AND they cite their sources!!!

Lots of great suggestions. If you want one that will make you mad, Swindled is a great one about white collar crime. Podcaster is left leaning (outwardly so) and it's (sometimes) therapeutic to hear him talk about some of the topics.