All of

• Fall Of Civilizations with Paul Cooper [https://open.spotify.com/show/44DE64rRpX1cFIQUlqQtvi?si=18c59f29bae248cb]
  • Incredibly well produced. If Christopher Nolan made podcasts about history. Voice actors that quote scripts in the native language, sound affects, compelling narration. Listening to this podcast I’ve played god sculpting civilizations. I’ve lived in different empires throughout history. I’ve brought civilizations to the tipping point. And nudged the domino.
  • You can’t go wrong. Start with Carthage (episode 17).
  • All episodes
  • 5/5
• How to Take Over The World [https://open.spotify.com/show/1gqvQ7h7BxNSVoQVTnwihr?si=cc14c2b884d4487b]
  • Learn from Lee Kuan Yew, Jesus, and Caesar. Ben siphons the leverage points, obsession, and architecture of power, of the most influential people in history from many different sources. Condenses it. And hands it to you on a silver platter. If the title intrigues you give it a listen.
  • The Lee Kuan Yew and Jesus episodes are great starting points.
  • 4.5/5
• Founders [https://open.spotify.com/show/7txiovdzPARhjm18NwMUYj?si=953e61c311b64d36]
  • David is obsessed with great people. He has consumed both the canonical and obscure literature on history’s most consequential founders. Once a week he adds a book to this corpus, adds in his encyclopedic knowledge, and translates into a narrative. Books have been translated specifically for his podcast. Focused on people in the business world aren’t currently active.
  • My favorite episodes were any of those with James Dyson, Sam Zemurray, Rockefeller, Paul Graham essays, and John Malone in roughly that order.
  • 80% of episodes
  • 4/5
• Cost Of Glory [https://open.spotify.com/show/4safRYjMIq51vEfNHRUCUz?si=960a30c0ac504908]
  • Alex Petkas has a PhD in the classics from Princeton. In this case it means something. He roughly follows Plutarch’s Parallel Lives[https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/e/roman/texts/plutarch/lives/home.html] which the likes of Napoleon and Churchill thoroughly annotated in their pursuits. Every narration driven episode on a historical driven figure is exceptional. The rating reflects only those episdoes.
  • Gallic Wars, Agesilaus, Marius
  • All person related episodes
  • 4.5/5
• Anthology of Heroes [https://open.spotify.com/show/1hDB7ZtZBfd06S2F7Z0CIM?si=e270feff2113414d]
  • Consistently high quality. Reminiscent of HHTOTW. But distinguished with an Aussie accent and minimal topical overlap from a focus on events rather than people.
  • The Sobibor episodes made me tear up. Skandabeg was epic. The recent Constantinople series is incredible.
  • All
  • 4.5/5
• The Explorers Podcast [https://open.spotify.com/show/6RC8NVlOzdfY8Rt4jDPNrU?si=cf473bd15d56451a]
  • Matt is a great narrator and good at condensing stories of exploration into enjoyable listens. Not quite as epic or high production quality as some of the earlier pods but if you have any latent interest in exploration, this is the best one.
  • Ernest Shackleton (please read the book), conquest of Mexico and the Incan empires.
  • 33%
  • 3.9/5
• History of Rome [https://open.spotify.com/show/6wiEd40oPbQ9UK1rSpIy8I?si=b39bc7ea76054ffb]
  • The definitive podcast on Rome. No other podcast covers Rome in as much detail chronologically. I never felt like it was a slog to get through the ~180 episodes.
  • All
  • 4/5
• Revolutions [https://open.spotify.com/show/05lvdf9T77KE6y4gyMGEsD?si=e91ecb79b8c8493f]
  • Turns out there’s been a lot of civil unrest in history for some reason. Skip the English revolution (1st series) and start from the American or French revolution. Roughly equivalent to History of Rome but for Revolutions.
  • English revolution of 1640s, American revolution, French revolution, Haiti.
  • ~100 episodes / 400?
  • 4/5
• The Ancient World [https://open.spotify.com/show/765nK6U4KXuceyVGNco4Xo?si=f9b8f703ff654c37]
  • Great but it’s really in the weeds and takes a while to get into. Especially the earlier episodes more closely resemble history as it was taught to me in school with a lot of date and name listing. Once I accepted that it wasn’t going to be the optimal narration style, I think this is the best podcast for diving into early antiquity and some out of distribution stories. Would only recommend to listen if you’re listened to all of the Fall of Civilizations.
  • Start with his series on the bronze age (C episodes)
  • All episodes
  • 3/5
• BG^2 [https://open.spotify.com/show/3dVqgYXN29DwwnqdY3YsCk?si=222f4fe7d30647dd]
  • I would say “5/5 hands down best podcast for macroeconomics bar none”. However, Bill Gurley (co-host) recently left the show. It remains to be seen if the podcast quality remains the same. So far it seems as though it will be biased towards interviews rather than bi weekly dives and opinions on the market.
  • All episodes
  • 4/5
• Dwarkesh Podcast [https://open.spotify.com/show/4JH4tybY1zX6e5hjCwU6gF?si=84e17640d89d432a]
  • By the nature of the format interview based podcasts are hit or miss. But this is about the best it gets. The podcast I have to slow down from 2x the most often.
  • I’ve quoted his Andrej Karpathy interview on the order of tens of times. Nick Lane was interesting.
  • 1/4 of all episodes
  • 4/5
• Latent Space [https://open.spotify.com/show/2p7zZVwVF6Yk0Zsb4QmT7t?si=d2ba9b78a4d341cd]
  • Shawn and Alessio are great interviewers.
  • Recent episodes on World models from Fei-Fei Li and Pim were great.
  • 1/8 of all episodes
  • 4/5

Guest/topic dependent (just list these at the bottom, no need to put them in as a record player)

• Lex Fridman
  • Michael Levin was one I listened to recently that was very interesting. Lex is a hit or miss interviewer in my opinion so I’ll only listen if I know the guest or off of a recommendation.
• Joe Rogan
  • An entertaining interviewer. Value is very much based on the guest.
• Acquired
  • The Nvidia and Amazon episodes are incredible.
• Legacy
  • A version of Cost of Glory / HTTOTW / Anthology of Heroes that focuses more on how we view these characters. I’d recommend those two first, though their Cleopatra episodes were great.
• Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman
  • In the search of a neuroscience podcast I’ve been listening to this more recently off of a recommendation. He’s a great speaker and almost all the topics are interesting and I learn about a new study that was conducted. Only two gripes a) there’s 3*3 minute ad chunks per 30 min episode b) I sometimes think the podcast could be more dense. 2x+ podcast for sure