Hi, this is Chris Hubs.

I don’t know why you’re listening to this, but since you are, let’s talk about podcasts.

I’m not going to get too meta here.

I mean, on a podcast talking about a podcast.

I don’t mean this one, but I thought I might review briefly the podcast listening that I do and maybe recommend a podcast or two.

I used to spend more time when I was commuting listening to podcasts.

I’d be in the car back and forth to work, out running errands, and I’d get through some podcast listening that way.

Since I started working from home this year, commute time goes down, which is great.

Means I need to find other times to listen to podcasts.

Largely now, it’s when I’m out running or doing outside chores, mowing the lawn, things like that is a good time for podcast listening, which means I’m getting a little bit of a backlog, which I do my best to sort of actively prune.

I’ve got two podcasts that I’ve listened to the most consistently and the longest, and here we’re talking about a decade or more.

One is Filmspotting, which is a film podcast hosted by two guys, one of whom is actually now in Iowa City at the University of Iowa.

The other one used to be Chicago-based.

I can’t keep track of where they’re located now, but a regular weekly film review and discussion podcast that I’ve learned a lot from, gotten a lot of good film recommendations from, and would recommend that one.

That podcast has been around close to 20 years now, which is long for a podcast, but they continue to crank out good work.

The other one is on the technical side, known as Accidental Tech Podcast, or ATP, hosted by two or three very nerdy software types who are usually talking about technology with an Apple product focus.

Again, I’ve listened to that one for at least a decade, and it’s a pretty regular listen.

More recent finds that I would definitely recommend.

There’s a podcast called The Sacred, hosted by a British woman named Elizabeth Oldfield, and I really, really enjoy that one.

She asks really good questions and has good conversation with different interesting people every week, really probing about what is sacred to them, what does it mean to be human and to live in this world in a fully human way.

I would recommend that one.

Another one I listen to on the science side is Sean Carroll’s Mindscape.

He’s a physicist by training, I think, but it’s not just about physics, but gets into some long, sort of deep, nerdy scientific kind of conversations about different areas of science, and I find that a lot of fun.

I’ve really enjoyed some episodes of a faith podcast coming out of the Yale Divinity School called For the Life of the World.

I think I first ran across it when they were featuring some talks by Miroslav Volf, but that’s a regular podcast talking theology and sort of engaging with life and spirituality, and that one has been a good one.

Then on the sort of nerd culture side of things, The Incomparable is a long-running sort of Really tech, pop culture, in that science fiction kind of vein.

I mean, they do movie reviews, they do book reviews.

I love their roundups every year of all of the Hugo and Nebula nominees.

I found lots of good books off of that.

Fun discussion there.

Jason Snell hosts that one and has been a great regular podcast.

I enjoy occasionally some episodes of 99% Invisible, which is a podcast about design, and that has had some fascinating stuff on it too.

And then one I would be remiss if I didn’t mention, which has slowed down a good bit in its release rate over the last couple years, but there’s a lot of backlog to keep up on, is the podcast A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs.

Now, the host is only up to song 187 right now, which is a David Bowie song.

But for me, who didn’t grow up with rock music, learning a lot of the background, the host, Andrew Hickey, pulls connections together just beautifully, and there’s lots of audio clips to illustrate the kinds of things he’s talking about.

Have learned a lot just about the history of rock and roll and its music, really the evolution of popular music over the 20th century.

So, fascinating podcast there.

As I scroll through, that’s the majority of where my big hitters are today.

If you’ve got something you’d recommend, I’d love to hear from you about that.

Otherwise, check out one of these.

You might find it interesting.

We’ll talk later.