I use podcasts to escape so I more lean towards comedy podcasts. My top is

Regulation Podcast (PREVIOUSLY F**kFace)

• 4 guys and Andrew (who didn’t know what the shift key did) shooting the shit, coming up with zany and dumb ideas and having way too much burger confidence

My Brother My Brother and Me

• 3 brothers doing different bits, talking about fast food news, making jokes about pop culture and bad movies

Clutch my Pearls

• 3 girls started their own smut podcast where one of them who only reads true crime is introduced into the very very weird world of smut novels. With very funny readings from the books

We’re Here to Help

• A comedy advice podcast with Jake Johnson from New Girl where they get questions like “my kids got a trampoline and my neighbor likes to walk around naked outside” and “my coworker likes to take their socks off at work” and “I brought muffins every week to work since I started and now they call me the muffin man and excpect muffin deliveries”. Quite fun.

Then more seriously

Swindled

• The stories of how the great (and often mainstream) scam artists get found out and topple from power

Nerdland Podcast

• (In Dutch) a podcast about new developments in science and technology. Sadly very often about AI or Musk now but they try to keep that to a minimum.

My time has come! I have a podcast for everything. What do you like?

I subscribe to over 250 podcasts. -_- I don’t listen to all of them every day, and many aren’t in production anymore.

I love to listen and learn.

Unexplainable - Explainers on scientific mysteries, each episode is less than 30 minutes

What Went Wrong - Behind the scenes movie podcast. It’s a miracle any movie gets made.

Song Exploder - Musicians take apart their songs, layer by layer and talk about how it was made

Hysteria - Politics and News focusing on how the issues affect women

Levar Burton Reads - Levar Burton reads short stories. Not in production anymore, but there are almost 200 episodes worth of stories to hear

Hello From the Magic Tavern - A guy falls to another dimension but still gets WiFi so he started a podcast interviewing fantasy characters in that universe

Welcome to Night Vale - A fictional story told through a bi-monthly community updates radio broadcast. All conspiracies in Night Vale are real.

Hacked - Stories about hacking and internet crime.

Ologies - Science show about ‘-ologies’ careers

I enjoy the following rotation:

EconTalk - Interviews about all kinds of stuff with a classical liberal econ professor.

The Greatest Generation & Greatest Trek: Star Trek reviews with dick jokes and production notes

Joy, a Podcast. Hosted by Craig Ferguson

Love Worth Finding: sermons from Baptist minister Adrian Rogers

Timothy Keller Sermons Podcast by Gospel in Life: Presbyterian sermons

History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps: Peter Adamson goes over All. The. Philosophy. Ever. See the sister cast for non-Western philosophical schools.

In no particular order, I listen to all of them regularly:

• Omnibus - general obscure history hosted by indie rocker John Roderick and Jeopardy’s golden boy Ken Jennings

• The Dollop - (mostly) American history with a leftist bent. One comedian reads a story the other hasn’t heard before.

• Not Another D&D Podcast - apologies for the first episode, but great world- and character-building. Really shows how great cooperative storytelling can be

• Last Podcast on the Left - comedy/horror. Conspiracies, cults, UFOs, and other weird shit. Their historical deep dives are awesome.

I listen to these regularly, but there’s a limited series podcast I like to recommend called S-Town. It’s excellent, especially if you’re from the southern US or grew up in a rural area. If you aren’t from the south or a rural area, it’ll probably be an extra-wild ride!

The Constant by Mark Chrisler. It covers examples of all the different way people have been wrong throughout history like thinking birds flew to the moon for winter or how homeopathy started. I always find it super interesting and pretty funny too.

It’s the only podcast I subscription to on patron.

I like fiction podcasts, and the main one I’m working through currently is The Magnus Archives. Each episode is a short first-person paranormal horror story, and they start out pretty standalone, eventually building more background and connections between the stories and adding more “frame story” about the people collecting these tales. I wouldn’t say it’s an SCP clone, but it’s kind of shaped similarly.

I see a bunch of other Cool Zone Media shows, but not Molly Conger’s Weird Little Guys.

Her calm cadence and thorough exploration of specific American wingnuts is fun. And as far as I’ve seen, most of the stories end with the guy dead or in prison, so happy endings.

Behind the Basards, History of Rome and Revolutions by Mike Duncan, Hardcore History.

Lions Led By Donkeys! Weird and usually stupid military history, featuring everything from Roman warfare up to Vietnam.

I’ll also toss in Well There’s Your Problem. It’s an engineering disasters podcast. With slides (if you’re watching on YouTube).

• Behind the Bastards
• The Dollop
• Live Like The World is Dying
• Some More News
• It Could Happen Here
• Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
• Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness
• The Film Reroll
• How Did This Get Made?
• Twenty Thousand Hertz
• The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

These are some of my favorites, I’m sure I’m missing some though.

Bigfeets.

It’s a watch along podcast for quite possibly the lowest depths of US reality TV, Mountain Monsters.

Their other podcast The Dogg Zzone 9000 is at least as funny, though it is dependent upon which cursed media artifact from the wrong dimension which they’re reviewing.

The Linux Experiment

Darknet diaries is one of my all time favorites.

If you like music analysis then Strong Songs is also interesting

And for a non serious listen I like to listen to Sherlock & Co, which is an amazing audioplay where Watson becomes a podcaster to deal with his PTSD. The adventures are self contained, so you can hop on any you like.

Srsly Wrong

• a leftist utopian podcast made in Canada

Reply All

• it’s done now and is really only good until PJ leaves, but it was excellent for a while

Dungeons and Daddies

• four dads get sent to the forgotten realms while bringing their kids to a soccer game

The What If? Podcast

Turned Out A Punk

Something Rotten

Behind The Bastards

Knowledge Fight. Dan listens to InfoWars so you don’t have to.

He has immersed himself in the world of Alex Jones, InfoWars, and other right-wing shit-headerry for almost 8 years now, and he brings a depth of research and continuity to the conversation that nobody else really does. He goes beyond the usual “wow, what a hypocrite” criticism and thoroughly eviscerates anything even remotely resembling a valid point that these dicks make. His co-host, Jordan, screeches along in an occasionally hilarious fashion.

They’re about to release their 1,000th episode, and virtually all of them are worth a listen (even going back to 2016-2017). It really shows how often people like Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, Trump, Laura Loomer, and so forth have been overlapping and collaborating for years.