2024 in Podcasts

Unlike most of what I write here, this is something people actually ask for, so here it is, the 2024 EOY edition of what podcasts are worth listening to.

With each show I include an estimated of the percentage of episodes I actually listen (no podcast is so good that all episodes are worth a listen and with time being so damn finite one has to filter ruthlessly). I tried to categorise - it’s not always easy. For some shows I also linked to sample episodes I liked.

I also include a few that are actually YouTube channels but since I consume them primarily as audio I file them under podcasts.

1. Dwarkesh [ 90% ] #everything #ai #economics #science
   John Schulman Leopold Aschenbrenner

2. Lexicon Valley [ 80% ] #language
   When Is Code-Switching Inappropriate? The World's Largest Family

3. Clearer Thinking [ 80% ] #rationality #psychology #science
   Is psychology the same across cultures? Two things shape the course of your life: luck and your decisions

4. Joe Walker [ 80% ] #everything #economics #science #philosophy #psychology
   Larry Summers — AGI and the Next Industrial Revolution Nassim Taleb — Meditations on Extremistan David Deutsch & Steven Pinker

5. Ones & Tooze [ 70% ] #economics #politics
   Why Are Poor Americans Voting for the Party of the Rich? The Success of Russia’s War Economy

6. Conversations with Tyler [ 70% ] #everything
   Michael Nielsen Philip Ball Paul Bloom

7. Hardcore History [ 70% ] #history
   Mania for Subjugation

8. No Priors [ 70% ] #ai #tech
   Bret Taylor Andrej Karpathy Eric Steinberger

9. Tides of History [ 70% ] #history
   Alice Evans Greg Anderson

10. Acquired [ 70% ] #business
    Microsoft 1, Microsoft 2, IKEA

11. Psych [ 70% ] #psychology (this is actually from 2023 but I only got around to listening to it recently and it’s great)
    Rationality Emotion and Motivation Individual Differences

12. Hamel Husain [ 70% ] #ai
    Instrumenting & Evaluating LLMs Fine Tuning OpenAI Models Back to Basics for RAG

13. Reason is Fun [ 70% ] #epistemology #rationality
    What is 'fun'? What is suffering? Creativity in decision making

14. Naval [ 70% ] #everything #rationality
    The Deutsch Files

15. 80,000 Hours (and 80K After Hours) [ 60% ] #rationality #ai #science #philantropy
    Anil Seth Hugo Mercier

16. The Austin School [ 60% ] #history #geopolitics
    Brief Overview of the US Presidency Apartheid South Africa Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

17. The Marginal Revolution [ 60% ] #economics
    The Economics of Insurance Oil Shocks, Price Controls, and War

18. The Album Years [ 60% ] #music

19. Kyla Scanlon [ 50% ] #economics

20. Anders Puck Nielsen [ 50% ] #war

21. EconTalk [ 40% ] #everything #economics

22. Latent Space [ 40% ] #ai

23. Guy Spier [ 40% ] #wisdom #investing

24. Brett Hall [ 40% ] #epistemology #science #optimism

25. Think & Drink Different [ 40% ] #hebrew #everything #science #philosophy

26. Google DeepMind [ 40% ] #ai

27. Jason Liu [ 30% ] #ai

28. Lex [ 30% ] #everything

29. Cognitive Revolution [ 30% ] #ai

30. The Rest is Politics [ 30% ] #politics

31. Tetragrammaton [ 30% ] #everything

32. Live Players [ 30% ] #geopolitics

33. The Future of Life Institute [ 30% ] #ai

34. 10% Happier [ 30% ] #mindfulness

35. Econ 102 [ 30% ] #economics #politics

36. Machine Learning Street Talk [ 30% ] #ai #ml

37. Alex Tseitlin [ 30% ] #hebrew #history #archeology #bible #historiography #everything

38. Vanishing Gradients [ 30% ] #ai #ml

39. Arjun Khemani [ 30% ] #epistemology #science #rationality #everything

40. Training Data [ 20% ] #ai

41. The Ancients [ 20% ] #history

42. Deconstructing Yourself [ 20% ] #mindfulness

43. Mindscape [ 20% ] #science

44. What Could Go Right [ 20% ] #tech #science #progress #optimism

45. Joseph Goldstein [ 10% ] #mindfulness

46. Money Stuff [ 10% ] #money

P.S. If you have your own recommendations please do share, I’d love to find some new interesting stuff.