1) Welcome to Night Vale Episode 13: A Story About You
Welcome to Night Vale is like if every episode of The Twilight Zone happened in the same town, and that town had a public radio station. A lot of the fun of Night Vale is the way the story builds and refers back to itself. This particular episode, however, stands alone very well. After all, it’s a story about you.
(Night Vale republishes their episodes on YouTube, which is where the link leads.)
2) Systematic: Episode 6 with Merlin Mann
This episode had a profound effect on my life. I first heard it as I was walking around exploring the new-to-me city of Champaign, Illinois. I was not long into a new job at the time. I wasn’t struggling with the work, but I was having an awful hard time with the transition itself. I was feeling chased by demons that had made things hard for me since grade school: feeling overwhelmed and disoriented, getting defensive and aggressive, experiencing destructive cycles of procrastination and panic. As Brett, the host, and Merlin, his guest, started talking about their experiences with ADHD, I had to stop and sit. I literally sat on the curb of a busy street, after sunset, and just listened. No one had ever so much as mentioned ADHD to me before and I’m embarrassed to admit that I had a very misinformed pop-culture perception of it. This episode started a process of learning about my own mind that is still ongoing to this today.
3) Roderick on the Line Episode 13: Then There Was Pump Chili
200+ episodes in and I’ve lost all perspective on how to explain Roderick on the Line to other people. This episode is one of the classics.
4) You Are Not So Smart Episode 67: The Fallacy Fallacy
I’ve really enjoyed learning about self-delusion, cognitive biases, and logical fallacies from David McCraney’s books and podcast. This episode was an important reminder to not get high on my own supply of knowledge.
5) Song Exploder: Tune Yards
Song Exploder breaks down a musician’s process in creating a particular song, and then also plays the song for you. Each episode is a little piece of genius. I particularly like this episode featuring Tune Yards, whom I first learned of through their Austin City Limits performance.
6) Imaginary Worlds Episode 25: Rolling the Twenty-Sided Dice
Of all the podcasts from which this list draws, Imaginary Worlds might be the easiest to get into if you need a new show to follow. The production is somewhere between This American Life and Radiolab, and all of the stories are about aspects of fiction and/or nerd culture. This particular episode does a good job of demonstrating host Eric Molinsky’s personal storytelling style, and also happens to be a nice introduction to the world of Dungeons & Dragons if you, like he, are mostly unfamiliar.
7) Lexicon Valley Episode 70: Seven Centuries of Fucks
A great show for word nerds, and who couldn’t love an episode about the F-word? (I also couldn’t resist an episode with seven in the title.) [Update: People keep fucking with podcast archives and this one seems lost to the ages, sorry.]
*** Originally published as List No. 05 of the 7x77 newsletter project.