🤳 10 podcasts I texted my friends (a new genre?, Ponce de León, Bible: The Movie)
🍭 👂 I hope that snake comes back 🌈 🤸♀️
Bonjour. Today is Monday, February 9, 2026. Can I ask you to do something this week? Respond in the comments to the very last or most current podcast / episode you are listening to? I just wanna know. 🙏
xoxo
lauren
🚨the one thing🚨
In the early days of podcasting, Nick van der Kolk's Love + Radio was a show that used immersive, inviting sound to really push podcasting into bold places at a time when most people were used to listening to more traditional radio. Since then, there hasn’t really been anything quite like it and I think many shows are still chasing the high bar it set. This might not be news to you but if it is, listen to it even just for educational purposes. It’s an important show. I was shocked to hear that Nick was releasing something new and different on the feed, and true crime of all things. And a non-narrated true crime? This new thing, Blood Memory, follows the life of Michael Thompson, who joined the Aryan Brotherhood when he went to prison for probably murdering someone, then was freed after testifying against them in several high-profile criminal trials. Then he gets in trouble again. I don’t get to say this often but I think we have a new genre on our hands. I would describe it as “interactive investigative journalism.” We aren’t being told what happened or what is true in the traditional sense, we are uncovering truths, or what appear to be truths, with Nick. The entire time, Nick is struggling himself to pin down the truth through this interesting person and what he did and did not do and why it matters. But it’s like trying to hold onto sand. In fact, the word that kept popping into my mind was “shape shifter.” The story keeps moving underneath our feet. The truth keeps slipping through our fingers. Michael Thompson sways back and forth between intelligent, pure-hearted victim of rough circumstance and cold blooded evil murderer. There is no in between. Plus, Michael has actually claimed to be able to shape shift—one of his many lies is about his identity as a native American, a real Pretendian, Buffy St. Marie-style. Episode one of Blood Memory alone is a masterpiece, we are told almost nothing, we just hear from two women who have very different impressions of him. That signals to our brains that we are going to be figuring out this thing together. We get a lot of tape listening to Michael tell his story to Nick (he tells some of the craziest stories and he tells them well,) we also hear from people in his crime circle and his family and the people who were involved in his case, a lot of people he has hoodwinked, and we get a lot of updates from the show’s producers and fact checkers. It takes a village to tell this story. (The fact checker was put to WORK. Her name is Nicole Pasulka and I always smile when I hear her name in credits for various podcasts because we were friends like 15 years ago but haven’t talked since.) Michael is a fascinating person who is clearly smart, he was able to pull this whole thing off. But he’s not as smart as he claims to be. Would a smart person lie about things so easy to disprove? (He throws around some facts about bullfighting that are INSANE.) I think it says so much about the entirely separate universe Michael Thompson lives in. He’s shape shifting in the sky and we’re all trying to figure out what just happened. There is an especially chilling scene at the end, when Michael is living outside prison in a normal neighborhood that I don’t think spoils anything, but if you’re paranoid stop reading for now. It is when Nick is talking to Michael’s neighbor Annie that I was creeped out the most. To Annie, Michael is a harmless person. He fixed her fence and talked to her about gardening. He has learned how to manipulate her just like he has learned how to manipulate and take advantage of everyone else. This is where it starts to sound like the last scene of a horror film, where the villain has charmed another innocent, future crime victim, and the observer knows it but can’t do anything about it. This same neighbor goes on to complain that “the unfortunate part is that it seems like these days nothing is right or wrong it’s narrative. Keep the narrative going. Keep everyone happy up there…the government, media, you name it.” To the government, to media, to us, it matters that Michael is guilty. But to Annie, Michael’s neighbor who fixes her fence, does it really matter? Who knows. Shape shifting.
notes
✨Castbox is featuring shows that celebrate Black voices! Check it out on the Castbox app and here.
✨Sign up for my 2/12 (that’s Thursday!) Podcast Marketing 101 Radio Boot Camp class here.
✨My OTHER Radio Boot Camp class, Pitch Perfect: How to Get Booked on a Show (March 2,) is here.
✨I will be on stage at On Air Fest, see you there? (Full lineup and tickets here.)
✨Yesterday, Arielle featured podcasts for pet owners in EarBuds.
✨While interviewing New Yorkers about their podcast listening habits with Arielle and Amanda (read below) we were accidentally interviewed by CNN about what we know about football and it turns out, nothing. 👇👇👇👇👇
💎podcasts i texted to friends💎
👂There is some good stuff coming out of Minneapolis covering the ICE protests, I have liked a lot of it. The best I’ve heard, so far (and send me what you find!) is what Jonathan Goldstein posted to the Heavyweight feed. Jonathan lives in Minneapolis, and speaks with his wife Emily, who dropped their son off at school right before Renée Good dropped off hers, which is right before she was murdered. But what really got me was hearing them discuss how this is impacting Jonathan and Emily’s son Auggie. A tiny, surprising moment of Auggie and his friends hugging shows us how even a little boy who lives in Minneapolis and is safer than almost anyone there is scared and sad and feeling lost. There is also an interview with the family of Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, who was shot in the leg by ICE during an enforcement action. Julio’s family shares their frightening migration story to the US and talks about the life they have now, which they never would have imagined, which none of us would ever imagine. They are terrified and in hiding. This was an unsettling piece of audio, it made me feel so many things but one of those things is an even deeper sense of despair for and disappointment in the United States. This audio reached a place in my heart I didn’t know existed yet, and then broke it. Listen to “Minneapolis” here.
How I discovered it: Longtime subscriber and I had planned to listen, but I also got a nice email about it, which reminded me that it was in my queue. Otherwise I might have forgotten. I also saw it mentioned twice in Reddit threads where people were asking “what’s the best podcast episode you’ve ever heard?” And the episode isn’t even a week old yet.
👂Glory to god in the highest and peace to his flame throwers on earth: Burn It All Down (“the feminist sports podcast you need”) is back in the feed. (They’ve basically been dormant since 2022, this is why you should never unsubscribe from your favorite podcasts.) I mean, they MIGHT come back. They need support and hopefully by the end of reading this you will realize how important this show is, how important independent feminist journalism is, and throw their Kickstarter a few dollars, like even just 5. It is pretty rare for feminism to be truly intersectional, but Burn It All Down is. You don’t have to like sports at all to be moved by their reporting and how they are able to tie sports to everything. Every episode each one of the hosts (Shireen Ahmed, Lindsay Gibbs, Brenda Elsey, Amira Rose Davis, and Jessica Luther ) says something that they want to burn down and then the whole crew together chants “burrrrrrrn” and it just feels so good and I usually join in. I want to draw your attention to their two part Winter Olympics Preview—the first of which is basically a collection of things to burn—fucked up shady shit happening over in Italy you may have missed. (Why we should take no comfort in the fact that Kirsty Coventry, famously a woman, is head of the IOC; how NBC is shutting down a former Olympian speaking out against sexual assault…) Part two is an answer to the question: “If the Olympics are fucked up, then why are we watching them anyway?” It’s all the good stuff, the cool stuff. The Olympics contains multitudes. Burn It All Down contains multitudes. Start with “Ep. 271: Winter Olympics Preview, Part 1” here.
How I discovered it: Longtime listener
👂I always recommend Radio Atlas to people who are bored with audio, people who are true artists or poets, people who are multi-lingual, people who reaaaaalky fucking love sound, journalists, people who love slow things or need to be slowed down, visual-minded people, or people who want to introduce something new to their brains. Audio often offers a portal into another world, but Radio Atlas gives me this spine-tingling level of excitement and wonder that I get when I’m going somewhere new, it’s almost childlike. The piece “Old Lika Pathetic Symphony,” (Čedo Prica, Zvonimir Bajsić and Maksim Jurjević) brings us to the Plitvice Lakes National Park during the winter of 1974/75, and we get to eavesdrop on the comings and goings of a farm and experience all the textures of it. The mundaneness and the brutality. (Hearing a woman screaming ‘mother fucker!!’ at a tiny hog while they try to castrate it made me uncomfortable, but that’s why I’m not a farmer.) The sound is crisp and clear, actually kind of juicy and delicious and normal and real. This whole experience made me feel like I was wading through a haunted house discovering things with my ears, except instead of ghosts we get cows. It is beautiful to be served something with permission to simply observe. On the site Zvonimir Bajsić is quoted as saying, “What I do is writing with a microphone. Our lexicon is the sound material we shape. We use speech, not language. All these terms: documentary radio drama, radio feature, acoustic film—are not quite appropriate. It is, in fact, radio itself… Documentary radio drama uses the means of the medium itself.” Which, wow. Happy World Radio Day (it was Friday) and happy TEN YEARS to Radio Atlas. To many mooOOooooore! Listen to “Old Lika Pathetic Symphony” here.
How I discovered it: Longtime listener but I got an email from Eleanor McDowall about this episode in particular
👂The Daily Zeitgeist, one of my favorite podcasts, just celebrated 2000 episodes and I can say with confidence I have listened to at least 98% of them, maybe more. It publishes every day, sometimes twice, I do not miss. I have a hard time converting people to this show because there is such strong lore and community and insiderness that first-time listeners can feel, well, left out. Jack even says on this episode that he received a comment from a listener that he keeps trying to get his wife to listen but every time he turns an episode on Jack starts telling this story about not pissing his pants on a scary ride with his nephews, blaming a urine-looking stain on spilled water ice. That’s an inside joke that makes me laugh, but this person’s wife didn’t get. Arielle Nissenblatt and I always say that you have to listen for a year straight before you get the hang of it, and it’s worth it. (Half of our text messages are about The Daily Zeitgeist. I don't know who else I can talk to about this stuff.) You can tell if you listen to this 2000th episode (which, we find out is actually the 1999th episode.) The team asked the community to send in their favorite memories and were overwhelmed with responses about the best stories the hosts have told, the best jokes that came back again and again, the best guests. I laughed out loud listening, remembering Miles obsessing for weeks straight over a press release for Halloween costumes that was clearly written by AI and made no sense, and a clip of Trump saying “the kids are going home and saying Mom I wanna vape” has been on repeat over the years. My big thing this year is that all podcasters need to identify their “hook” episode, the one episode that will hook a new listener. I’m not sure if this is a good episode to start with or not. You’ll either be confused and feel alienated or you’ll laugh and feel intrigued. Maybe there’s a new kind of podcast episode I need to write about, the Litmus Test episode. If you like this one, consider yourself in the Zeitgang. (How Arielle and I proudly identify.) If not, there are other shows for you to listen to. Listen to “The 2000th Episode 02.03.26” here.
How I discovered it: Zeitgang 4 life
👂La Brega is a gorgeous collection of stories that paint pictures of Puerto Rican life, on the island and in the diaspora, through deeply reported stories that don’t just explain history (although it does that) but the feelings that result from the history. (Everything is available in Spanish and English, and I so so so so wish more podcasts did this.) Season three, “Campeones,” will try to explain what we learn about Puerto Ricanness by spending time with their champions. Starting with: Juan Ponce de León, the guy we know for the Fountain of Youth but should know for being an evil conquistador who murdered and enslaved innocent people, crushed rebellions, and helped kick off a system that led to massive Indigenous death from violence, exploitation, and disease. (Why on earth did Camp Christopher, the camp I attended in 1994, to call my cabin Ponce de León EWW!) Anyway in 2022, right before a visit from the king of Spain, someone toppled over a Ponce de León statue, and as the mayor sets out to bring Ponce de León back in time, everyone starts to wonder if he’s a champion in the first place. Before the statue is slapped and sent swinging through the air like a zipliner, it’s put back on the pedestal, crooked, and it still stands, or slants, that way. Which tells a different story, perhaps more accurate. This is a good history story, it asks big questions and ends up being a metaphor for Puerto Rico’s place in the world and how Puerto Ricans see themselves. But also, I was loling. Listen to “Who represents us?” here.
How I discovered it: Longtime listener
👂On Wrath of Pod, Marcus and Deanna are reading the Bible, but as if it were a big-budget streaming television show being released in the year of our lord 2026. I think I got into writing and podcasting because I originally loved Bible stories, although I never believed them. (And I believed in Santa Claus until I was 9!) This is the greatest story ever told so I love looking at it kind of scene by scene, as Marcus and Deanna do, in a twisty fun way but also with respect, too. I love religious content but if the creators are making easy jokes or just bashing it I start rolling my eyes. This is not that. It’s funny (what a “shrewd move by the studio” to include an incest storyline, “they’re teaching us not to get too attached to these characters” “real sparks flying between Eve and the snake,”) but there’s also real conversation about God as a character, actual plot holes in this story that people actually believe, and what a Cain spinoff series would be like. Listen to Wrath of Pod here.
How I discovered it: Email from Kara Swisher
👂After listening to like two and a half hours of Caro and Katie disembowel Scott Galloway on Diabolical Lies, I thought I’d try another two-part episode covering Scott and his philosophies on Decoding the Gurus, a show hosted by Christopher Kavanagh and Matthew Browne, who are famously men. It’s interesting and a good listen because Chris and Matt play lots of audio from interviews Scott has done on Modern Wisdom and Diary of a CEO, which really is yikes-inducing. (“I know women say they want a sensitive man, but they really want a strong man” WHAT?) This one was not as biting as Caro and Katie’s. Chris and Matt do bring up things that Scott gets right, mostly harmless things like “women want a man to be kind, not nice,” which seems to really confuse Chris Williamson. Chris and Matt give Scott credit where credit is due. Most of his colleagues in the manosphere are not admitting their privilege and Scott does. In my journey to discover Scott Galloway, this mini series made me slightly less angry (truly a zillionth of a millimeter,) and gave me a better understanding of how the Galloway machine works. (Scott gives anecdote/makes random observation then backs with cherry-picked/not-real facts then says with confidence, creating problem that does not exist for his listeners, then tries to solve the problem he created for them that isn’t real.) Start with “Scott Galloway, Part 1: On Men” here.
How I discovered it: It was recommended to me via some algorithm years ago
👂Comedian Jordan Carlos’ book Choreplay: The Marriage-Saving Magic of Getting Your Head Out of Your Ass (about how he was doing zero housework or offering any support to his wife, who almost divorced him) is coming out and he went on Modern Love to talk about it. On paper Jordan Carlos seems to be a perfect idea for a guest. Comedians are entertaining! Men don’t do enough chores and women are mad! Let’s discuss! But I thought it was kind of a mess. First of all, I think comedians hugely exaggerate stuff or straight up make stuff up to make it funny, so I’m not even sure how much to believe, here. Did he really only walk the dog ONCE? (“and that was fun,” he says with an eye-roll.) But I don’t think Jordan Carlos was all that funny. And this isn’t a comedy podcast, anyway. So I felt confused. I’m not laughing, should I be? It’s not funny enough to be pure comedy so I guess I have to take this guy seriously. And if we are taking this guy seriously he is a DICK and I can’t even figure out why his wife was putting up with him for so long. It’s just annoying. I’m not saying I don’t like Modern Love, I love Modern Love and have written about it before. I LOVE how much I hated this episode! Sometimes that’s fun, too. Can we talk about that?!!??! I mean I don’t think Jordan Carlos is for me. (I’m not alone, the comments on Spotify for this episode are popping off and I got into a text thread rant session with two of my friends about it.) Anna asks pretty softball questions, “how did you learn when you needed to order toilet paper?” which makes it seem like he deserves tons of credit for the smallest gestures. The only person missing from this conversation was Scott Galloway. There is a story about paper towels that is supposed to be touching but almost made me barf. DM me if you listen. Listen to “I Was the Fun Dad. It Almost Destroyed My Marriage.” here.
How I discovered it: Longtime listener but my friend Shira texted it to me and Arielle (I love it when she does this)
👂Ronald Young Jr kicked off the season three premier of Weight For It with a Facebook fight with his cousin about ICE, which led to his own self-reflection on anger, anger and violence on a treadmill, which he was using not to lose weight but because he really just wanted to kick his cousin’s ass. But it turns into something more—about the institutional violence Ronald can feel coming. He’s ready with his mind, his words. But his body? Could he lay his body on the line if he needed to? He’s scared he’s too fat to be useful. What if he gets in a fight and it ends up being embarrassing? ICE agents are not typically known to be super fit or sharp, but could Ronald out run them? It’s vulnerable and heartbreaking and real. We all have to ask ourselves this. What do we need to do to get ready if we are called to help? This is a short episode, it’s a string of reflections that are perfectly harmonized. A really good example of why Ronald Young Jr is a master of his craft. I can see myself sending this episode to podcasters to show them what you can do in a short amount of time. You can punch guts in like 15 minutes. Listen to “Treadmill” here.
How I discovered it: Longtime listener
Episode Two of The Secret World of Roald Dahl
Somm TV podcast- European wine region show down. You want to know who wins? 😉