01
September 27, 2026
#168: The Value of Deep Work in the Age of Distraction
The Art of Manliness · Cal Newport · 57 min
A clear, practical case for long, undistracted focus from the person who named it. Still true, maybe more so.
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Episodes about paying attention.
Handpicked podcast conversations about attention, focus, distraction and the quiet work of noticing. One episode at a time — no feed, no algorithm.
02
September 24, 2026
Montaigne
In Our Time · Melvyn Bragg and guests · 42 min
A calm, clear introduction to the man who invented the essay by writing honestly about himself.
03
September 17, 2026
Mary Oliver — “I got saved by the beauty of the world.”
On Being · Mary Oliver · 50 min
A rare, unhurried conversation with the poet who spent a lifetime paying attention. Quiet, funny, and completely without pretence.
04
September 16, 2026
Robert Sapolsky on Why We Behave the Way We Do
Sean Carroll's Mindscape · Robert Sapolsky · 1 hr 29 min
A neuroscientist walks backward from a single action, through seconds, years and millennia, to show how much stands behind every choice.
05
September 13, 2026
The vanishing pleasures of daily life
The Gray Area · Sean Illing · 48 min
A conversation about the small ordinary pleasures that quietly left, and whether we traded them or lost them. Calm, and slightly bruising.
06
September 12, 2026
21. Majapahit - Empire of the Islands
Fall of Civilizations · Paul Cooper · 4 hr 31 min
Paul Cooper tells the story of a maritime empire most of us were never taught, with the pace of a long novel and no hindsight cleverness.
07
September 11, 2026
Opendoor CEO: Excellence Is the Capacity to Take Pain
The Knowledge Project · Kaz Nejatian · 55 min
A short, unsentimental hour about the boring middle of getting good at something. No hacks, which is why it lands.
08
September 10, 2026
Adam Brown – A deep but accessible introduction to general relativity
Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown · 1 hr 38 min
The clearest introduction to general relativity you are likely to hear spoken aloud, from a physicist who refuses to hide behind the maths.
09
September 4, 2026
Valeria Luiselli : Beginning Middle End
Between the Covers · Valeria Luiselli · 2 hr 45 min
David Naimon gives a serious writer the time serious writers rarely get. Slow, generous, and about form as a moral choice.
10
August 24, 2026
Ursula K. Le Guin interview
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.
11
August 22, 2026
The Arrow of Time
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.
12
August 21, 2026
Bad Medicine, Part 1: The Story of 98.6
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.
13
August 17, 2026
What the internet is doing to our attention (with Nilay Patel)
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.
14
August 12, 2026
Plate Tectonics
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.
15
August 11, 2026
Memory and Forgetting
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.
16
August 9, 2026
Matthew Walker on sleep, Part I: the dangers of poor sleep
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.
17
August 6, 2026
Byzantium: Last of the Romans
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.
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