Previous episodes
One choice for each day. No ranking, no infinite feed — just past conversations that earned our attention.
02
August 24, 2026
EconTalk · Michael Munger · 1 hr 8 min
Two economists who normally argue about markets sit with an uncomfortable question: what does economics get wrong when it treats a moral catastrophe as an efficiency problem? The conversation is patient, self-questioning, and never reaches for a slogan.
03
August 24, 2026
Between the Covers · Ursula K. Le Guin · 1 hr 30 min
A slow, generous conversation with a writer who spent her life insisting that imagination is a moral faculty. David Naimon asks real questions and then, rarely for an interviewer, gets out of the way.
04
August 23, 2026
The Rest Is History · Tom Holland & Dominic Sandbrook · 56 min
An ordinary morning that became the best-documented catastrophe of the ancient world. Holland and Sandbrook stay with the small human details — the bread, the dog, the letters — and that is what makes it unforgettable.
05
August 22, 2026
Sean Carroll's Mindscape · Sean Carroll · 1 hr 24 min
Carroll explains why the past differs from the future without once losing the thread or talking down to you. It is physics, but it lands as something closer to a meditation on memory and mortality.
06
August 21, 2026
Freakonomics Radio · Stephen Dubner · 48 min
A quietly unsettling look at how much of medicine rests on numbers nobody re-checked. Not a conspiracy story — a story about how evidence actually accumulates, and how slowly it gets corrected.
07
August 17, 2026
The Ezra Klein Show · Nilay Patel · 1 hr 12 min
Two people who have spent their careers inside the attention economy talk honestly about what it has cost. It is not a lecture about screen time; it is a conversation about what happens to a culture when everything is optimised for a click.
08
August 16, 2026
Decoder with Nilay Patel · Brian Chesky · 1 hr 6 min
A slogan got loose on the internet and this is the conversation where someone is actually pressed on what it means. Chesky is unusually specific about how he runs things, and the interviewer does not let vague answers pass. Useful whether you agree with him or not.
09
August 15, 2026
Move Your DNA with Katy Bowman · Katy Bowman · 44 min
A biomechanist takes the most unglamorous subject imaginable and uses it to explain something larger: how the shape of a body records decades of small habits. No supplements, no protocols, no hype. Just careful thinking about how we live in our own feet.
10
August 14, 2026
Planet Money · Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon (archival) · 24 min
Two men made a public bet about whether the world was running out of resources, and the story of who won is far less interesting than why the argument never ended. Twenty-four minutes that reframe every doom forecast you will read this year.
11
August 13, 2026
Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah C. M. Paine · 2 hr 12 min
A naval historian teaching, not performing. Paine explains how strategy actually fails: not through a single bad battle but through a chain of reasonable-sounding decisions. It is the rare long conversation where the length is the point.
12
August 12, 2026
In Our Time · Sanjeev Gupta, Rebecca Bell, Saskia Goes · 52 min
A calm academic conversation about how an idea considered ridiculous became the foundation of modern earth science. No music, no drama, just three scholars taking their time. It is a small lesson in how consensus actually changes.
13
August 11, 2026
Radiolab · Jonah Lehrer, Karim Nader, Oliver Sacks · 58 min
An hour that quietly dismantles the idea that memory is a recording. Every time you remember something you rebuild it, and the rebuilding changes it. The reporting is careful, the storytelling is patient, and the conclusion stays with you long after the episode ends.
14
August 9, 2026
The Peter Attia Drive · Matthew Walker · 1 hr 58 min
Two careful scientists taking their time with a subject most of us treat casually. There is no hype here and no product at the end, which is exactly why it changes behaviour more reliably than a book summary would.
15
August 8, 2026
Odd Lots · Zoltan Pozsar · 52 min
One of those rare interviews where an analyst lays out an entire worldview instead of a forecast. Whether or not the thesis holds, following the argument end to end teaches you how money actually moves.
16
August 7, 2026
Unexplainable · Byrd Pinkerton and Noam Hassenfeld · 29 min
A show built entirely around what scientists do not know, applied to the largest gap of all. It models something rare: curiosity that is comfortable ending without an answer.
17
August 6, 2026
Fall of Civilizations · Paul Cooper · 2 hr 4 min
Paul Cooper writes history the way a novelist writes a slow ending, and this is his most patient work: an empire that took a thousand years to fall, told without hurry and without hindsight cleverness. It is the rare long episode that never asks for your patience twice.
18
August 5, 2026
99% Invisible · Roman Mars and Katie Mingle · 34 min
Long before anyone argued about AI, aviation had already learned what happens to human skill when the machine does most of the work. This episode turns one flight into a quiet, unforgettable argument about the cost of handing over control.
19
August 4, 2026
Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Kahneman · 56 min
A conversation with one of the few thinkers who changed how we understand our own minds, held by an interviewer who refuses to ask the obvious questions. Kahneman is unusually willing to say what he still does not know, and that honesty is the reason this hour keeps its value.
20
August 3, 2026
Hidden Brain · Sheena Iyengar · 49 min
Sheena Iyengar spent her career studying why more options don't necessarily make us happier, and this conversation distills that research into something usable. It reframes daily decision fatigue as a design problem rather than a personal failing. Recorded during early pandemic uncertainty, its insights about control and choice have only grown more relevant.
21
August 2, 2026
Dan Snow's History Hit · Dan Snow with historical experts on the Anglo-Spanish War · 69 min
Dan Snow walks through why Philip II launched history's most famous invasion fleet and how weather, tactics and English seamanship combined to unravel it. It's a rare case where a single week of naval maneuvering reshaped the balance of power in Europe for a century. The storytelling makes strategy and consequence equally vivid.
22
August 2, 2026
Search Engine · Kashmir Hill · 61 min
PJ Vogt and journalist Kashmir Hill trace the strange, largely unregulated rise of facial search engines back to one mysterious first builder. It's an investigation that manages to be gripping without sensationalism, and it leaves you with a genuinely unresolved ethical question rather than an easy verdict. This is narrative journalism at its most patient.
23
August 1, 2026
Hidden Brain · Matthew Walker · 36 min
Sleep scientist Matthew Walker explains why the average adult's habit of trading sleep for productivity is a quiet act of self-sabotage. The conversation moves past generic advice into what actually happens in a dreaming brain and why it matters for memory, mood and health. It's the rare health segment that changes behavior without moralizing.
24
July 31, 2026
EconTalk · J. Doyne Farmer · 65 min
Physicist J. Doyne Farmer argues that standard economic models miss what chaos theory and agent-based simulation can capture about real human behavior. Russ Roberts pushes back throughout, which keeps the conversation honest rather than one-sided. It's a genuine debate about what economics is even trying to predict.
25
July 30, 2026
Acquired · Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal · 119 min
Long before Nvidia became a trillion-dollar AI bellwether, it was a scrappy graphics chip company that nearly died more than once. Ben and David trace those near-collapses and the stubborn technical bets that eventually paid off, which makes today's AI boom look far less inevitable and far more earned. It's a masterclass in how founders survive years of being almost wrong.
26
July 29, 2026
Sean Carroll's Mindscape · David Chalmers · 82 min
David Chalmers coined the term 'the hard problem of consciousness,' and here he and Sean Carroll spend an unhurried hour testing where physicalist explanations of the mind actually break down. The conversation is rigorous without being dense, and it treats simulation theory seriously rather than as a gimmick. Few philosophy-of-mind conversations manage to be both this careful and this fun.
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