I spend a lot of time listening to podcasts or listening just to audio of YouTube videos.
Most of what I listen to is fully scripted and edited, often with just one person talking. A small amount of what I listen to have two people with unscripted conversations that are edited to keep the episode on topic.
I’ve tried listening to fully unedited live conversation podcasts with anywhere from 2 to 4 people talking, and every one of them has driven me absolutely crazy. I usually pick episodes based on the topic in the title, to always find that either nobody in the podcasts knows/cares about the topic, or only one person knows about it. It results in conversations turning into mindnumbing rambling about nothing or one person explaining a topic to another person who is uninterested or just stupid.
If there is a podcast with multiple hosts that actually share an interest in a topic and keep it reasonably on topic I would really like to try it out.
Nathan Fillion and Alan Tudyck recently started Once We Were Spaceman and is primarily the two just chatting. I’ve been enjoying it a lot so far!
Apologies for pushing stuff I’m involved with but The Devil’s Library fulfils that criteria - it’s a book related podcast with myself and fellow atheistic Satanists talking about books (nothing to do with Satanism, just ordinary fiction). No ads, no sponsors. It is very lightly edited just to improve audio quality and eliminate the odd moment when we talk over each other but other than that, what you hear is what we’ve said.
It is mostly also available on PeerTube but the last couple are missing as the instance we’re on has been struggling a bit, we’re trying to get it sorted in the new year.
Most of the podcasts I listen to are this format. I think their enjoyment might come down to knowing (or being interested in getting to know) the speakers’ personalities.
Omnibus — Ken Jennings (of Jeopardy fame) and Jonn Roderick (of The Long Winters (or bean dad) fame) take turns on doing a deep dive on some weird but true topic.
Filmcast — Film nerds (David Chen, Devindra Hardawar, and Jeff Cannata) talk about new movies they’ve watched and TV Shows they’re watching
The Incomparable — Geeks talking about various pop culture topics. This is a whole network with various podcasts focusing on different aspects of pop culture. I linked to the “main” feed which is where you’ll usually find new movie releases, but they also go back and discuss movies they’ve watched missed and classic too. Or if you’d rather browse by topic
The Accidental Tech Podcast — Three friends from childhood and professional geeks discuss current technology topics with a heavy focus on Apple from a developer and consumer perspective.
The Rest is History — Two English historians discuss various history topics from around the world at length. They just wrapped up a four part series on Jack the Ripper.
…that should be a reasonable start I hope.
Good Talk - It’s Canadian politics but they can make Canadian politics seem interesting which is a huge accomplishment in itself.
Why?
Why are you looking for this specific format if all other examples have been unpleasant for you?
The only thing I can think of is that you are promoting something using an alt account. I’m sure there are more reasons why someone might, but I’m just drawing a blank. Like, if you had an interest in something and were looking for a podcast on that topic then I would get it. I really don’t get the motivation here though
They don’t dislike the genre overall. They just came across many podcasts they didn’t enjoy and are asking for recommendations based on their specified criteria.
That’s believable, but it’s just not what I see in the words even after a quick reread. To me it reads like they skipped that bit. A few examples probably would have gone a long way to changing that and helping with suggestions
This Week in Tech hosted by Leo Laporte, with a panel of 2-4 guests every week, focused on technology news. Leo has been podcasting since before it was called podcasting. Some of you may remember him as the host of The Screen Savers from TechTV, or The Tech Guy radio show.
Decentered a podcast about the Fediverse with involved developers as guests!
The Delta Flyers Tom (Robert Duncan McNeill) and Harry (Garrett Wang) talk about working on Voyager, with other Star Trek cast & crew as guests. They’ve actually finished all of Voyager (nice backlog to listen to) and started covering DS9, adding Jadzia (Terry Farrell) and Quark (Armin Shimerman) as co-hosts.
risky.biz This one’s more niche, a weekly global cybersecurity news review. Patrick Gray (the show runner) and Adam Boileau (regular co-host) are old experts in infosec with a lot of knowledge and a lot of industry contacts who they interview regularly. In the present there’s a lot of overlap with international politics, so getting an understanding of current events from the cybersecurity perspective is pretty interesting. If you are a professional working in IT or a hobbyist with an interest in computer networking or information security you should be listening to this one regularly.
Dr. Mike’s The Checkup is interesting. He is usually very empathic but critical of his guests views and as far as I know unedited. just an hour of conversation about (usually) medical topics. Sometimes more US specific
The conversations in the Waking Up app are high quality and the participants are either well informed or experts. It’s meditation focused but they talk about many adjacent topics such as neuroscience, time management and philosophy. Hundreds of hours of content.
What languages do you speak?
The same ones I type.
Idk if you’re expecting me to background check your profile now but for English I have no recommendations
Let’s Learn Everything is great. The hosts each research a science related topic each week and they explain it and discuss it on the show. It’s really interesting, quite fun.
I don’t know if it is recommendation material but it is the only one that comes to mind within my subscriptions.
How Bizarre, four friends rambling a bit about life before getting into whatever topic they have, usually creepy tales, paranormal stuff, true crime, weird news, whatever. The show feels like their excuse to keep in touch. No ads.
On Being with Krista Tippett has an unedited version.
Dark Horse is a fantastic one. The main episodes are Bret and Heather (married couple) and Bret also does interviews with guests
I’d recommend the Acquired podcast. I believe both hosts do their own independent research, and it shows. They know their stuff.
Lots of excellent episodes but the Costco, Trader Joe’s and Epic Systems (MyChart) episodes are particularly fascinating to me.
