Thirty-four podcasts — and what they say about how I think

I published my podcast list.

Not to recommend podcasts, though you’re welcome to take recommendations from it. More because there’s something useful about making your information diet visible — to yourself as much as to anyone else.

It’s at podcasts.hortal.me. 34 shows. You can filter by category, subscribe to individual ones, or download them all as an OPML file to import into your favourite podcasts app in one go.

Here’s how I ended up building it.

The thing about listening habits

I consume a lot of audio. There’s a 30-minute commute each way, I cook most nights, I go to the gym, I listen as I wind down every evening. That’s somewhere between two and four hours of listening time per day. Over a year, that’s a meaningful chunk of intellectual input — and for a long time I didn’t think of looking back and reviewing.

I know that the podcasts I keep returning to share certain qualities. Not topics — I listen to true crime, history, politics, science, and F1 commentary. In fact, the only topic they have in common is that they’re almost never about what I do for work. The overlap was something else entirely: rigour. Every show I kept coming back to had either done proper research, or was honest about the limits of what it knew.

Casefile True Crime is meticulously documented. Knowledge Fight goes through InfoWars episode by episode with citations. Behind the Bastards sources everything. More or Less — the BBC statistics programme — exists specifically to interrogate the numbers politicians throw around. These aren’t podcasts that tell you what to think. They model what careful thinking looks like.

That mental model — show me the actual evidence, not just the conclusion — is more useful than any framework when you’re a CPTO trying to cut through vendor claims, product hype, and AI noise. I didn’t build the list consciously around that principle. I noticed it was already there.

What the categories look like

True crime is the biggest section, which surprises people who only know me through product and technology writing. But true crime at its best isn’t morbid entertainment — it’s investigative journalism with a narrative frame. It’s critical thinking. The best shows in the genre are doing the work that local news outlets used to do: patient, detailed, and adversarial to official narratives.

Two shows in that section — Behind the Bastards and Weird Little Guys — come from Cool Zone Media, Robert Evans’s network. The house style is immediately recognisable: exhaustive primary research, dark humour, and a refusal to let historical or contemporary villains be reduced to cartoons. Behind the Bastards profiles the worst people in history two episodes at a time; Weird Little Guys does the same for the American far-right, with Molly Conger documenting white supremacist organisations with the same meticulous patience. Different subjects, identical rigour.

The comedy category overlaps heavily with history and politics. The Rest Is Politics is the canonical example: two people who were inside the machinery of government giving you the actual context behind the headlines. The Kitchen Cabinet is Radio 4 at its finest, panel discussions about food history that are funnier and better-researched than most deliberately funny podcasts. And of course, the granddaddy of comedy podcasts: The Bugle, and one of the largest: No Such Thing as a Fish. All firmly grounded in my deep UK roots, still very much a defining characteristic of me.

Technology is the smallest category, and deliberately so. I spend all day in tech. I don’t need more podcasts about AI trends or product strategy frameworks when I have opinions of my own on those. Better Offline — Ed Zitron’s newsletter in audio form — is there precisely because it’s one of the few technology voices actively hostile to the industry’s self-promotional instincts. That contrarianism earns its place.

Science has a similar quality. Skeptics with a K has been running since 2009, applying methodological scepticism to claims ranging from homeopathy to UFOs. The Infinite Monkey Cage is Brian Cox and Robin Ince making physics accessible while remaining genuinely funny. More or Less sits between science and politics, which is exactly where it should be.

Three of the shows — God Awful Movies, The Scathing Atheist, and Citation Needed — come from the same production network, Puzzle in a Thunderstorm, and share a sensibility that doesn’t fit neatly into any single category. The premise of each is simple: a group of sharp, funny people apply rigorous scepticism and dark humour to things that deserve it — bad religious films, scripture, Wikipedia rabbit holes. What ties them together is a cheerful intellectual hostility to received authority. If you like one, you’ll like all three. Start with Citation Needed if you want an easy entry point; start with God Awful Movies if you want to understand why Fireproof is the worst film ever made.

Why publish it

The honest answer: accountability.

When I look at this list, it tells me things about what I actually value versus what I tell myself I value. I claim to be interested in AI and the future of work. My most-listened show by hours is Knowledge Fight — 79 hours documenting Alex Jones’s contradictions. That probably says something true about where my attention goes when left to itself.

Publishing the list means having to look at it honestly. It’s harder to perform as a relentlessly forward-thinking technology leader when your podcast consumption is 60% history and true crime.

There’s also something useful about sharing your information sources with people who read what you write. You can disagree with my conclusions more usefully if you know where my thinking comes from. I find it odd that people publish bibliographies for academic papers but not for their ongoing intellectual inputs. Your reading list is a claim about how you form your views — your listening list is the same thing, just less polished.

The list lives at podcasts.hortal.me. If you’re on AntennaPod, every show has a direct subscribe button, or you can download the full OPML file and import them all at once.

If you have a podcast you think should be on the list, I’m genuinely interested — the categories are all open for expansion.