When my gym closed last year because of Covid, I started walking every morning. At first, I used that time to plan my day and mentally schedule my week., but that didn’t take the entirety of my walk, so my son suggested I listen to podcasts, and I have been doing that five or six days a week for the past twenty months or so.
The first one he introduced me to was Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History. If you’re a fan of history, you will probably enjoy this podcast. Most of the episodes are behind a paywall, but the most recent dozen or so are free. All of the ones I have listened to are excellent, but his five-episode treatise on WWII’s Pacific theater is notably exceptional.
One of the longer running podcasts is The Joe Rogan Experience, having over 1,700 episodes archived. It is not my favorite podcast as a significant number of his guests are comedians and MMA fighters, neither of which interest me, but some of his other guests are fascinating. One of them was Courtney Dauwalter, who won the Moab 240 (a 240 mile race through canyons and mountains in Utah) by 10 hours over the second place finisher.
Tim Ferriss, author of The Four Hour Work Week, also has a podcast that has been around for a while, and has some very interesting guests, including Peter Attia, Matthew Walker, General Stanley McChrystal, and Andrew Huberman.
Attis is an MD specializing in longevity who also has his own podcast which is very good although I must admit, is sometimes (oftentimes?) over my head. Walker wrote the 2017 bestseller, Why We Sleep. General McChrystal was the Commander of US forces in Afghanistan and one of the military’s best generals of the 21st century.
Huberman is a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine and host of the Huberman Lab podcast, where he discusses science and science-based tools for everyday life, easily my favorite podcast. My one minor criticism of this fabulous podcast is, as brilliant as Huberman is and as generous as he is for sharing his knowledge, he isn’t a very good interviewer and so those (relatively few) episodes where he interviews a guest are a notch below his other ones.
So if you’ve never listened to podcasts or if you’re looking for some new ones, perhaps one or more of these will strike your fancy.
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