It’s that time again where I share a list of the podcasts that I spend some time on the weekends enjoying. This list seems to evolve slowly over time. At the moment, the list probably starts out with Hard Fork which still exists as a New York Times product, but is now a distinctly different show. We will see if it ends up staying on the list in the next couple of months or drops off. What was the quintessential Hard Fork podcast is now a new and different product called Machine Gods which seems to be based on Kevin Roose and Casey Newton forming a new media empire. Outside of that podcast, I’m going to group a collection of items as number 2 in this list. The Vergecast, Decoder, and Version History which are all extensions of the Nilay Patel empire. Without question some type of podcast from Nilay has been in my weekend rotation the longest of any other stream of content. Someday I hope that a reunion podcast with Joshua Topolsky springs to life, but my degree of hope related to that reunion has diminished over time. Beyond that group lands a tertiary collection of shows that appear on YouTube like Chasing Cardboard and Baseball Card Collector Investor Dealer which are not exactly podcasts, but are certainly adjacent to that category in terms of an ongoing narrative that includes a visual component.
My weekend routine generally involves working on some type of project and listening to these podcasts during the start of the day. During road trips I certainly download from a larger collection of content in YouTube music to power those all day driving adventures. During our last major road trip we listened to a block of the Version History adventures which was actually rather engaging and informative. At this point, I do not really listen to podcasts while walking around as much. That was something that was a part of my routine, but has been replaced by music at this point. Probably the most interesting part of modern content delivery is how distributed things have become. Nothing is really a studio or major outlet based project in that list. Even the Kevin Roose and Casey Newton projects which were New York Times and now NPR sponsored are really conversation based not heavily produced infographic driven efforts. None of the things that I end up consuming are really anything more than quality conversations.