Podcast

One of my favorite episodes of Past Present Future with Mary Beard where she compares the unaccountable power of emperors of the past with today’s tech oligarchs.

Through a recommendation on Bluesky I came across the Ronzheimer podcast hosted by Paul Ronzheimer, the main journalist out of the Axel-Springer media house. Listening to him talk to German notables, it becomes clear that he’s not the sharpest knife in the block. There is no spark or wit in either of the two episodes I listened to. His questions are superficial and unoriginal. I don’t understand why anybody would listen to this.

Just a quick review of 2025 as usual heavily inspired by the one that Hans puts out.

Listening to this episode on the trial of John Brown I gasped several times. It’s a wild story of deep moral conviction and powerful oratory.

I usually enjoy Cortex’s romps into productivity porn, but what struck me here is that they open with Grey discovering Asana and how he spent the week setting his business and life up in it.

I find limited run podcast series that dive deep into a specific topic are some of the best things the medium brings forth.

Trashfuture were really cooking when they taped “The Sulla of Suburbia” with Patrick Wyman.

For a relatively complete and concise rundown of how insane Germany is at the moment, this conversation with journalist James Jackson is highly recommended. Things are really spiralling into pure madness here and it seems likely that that will be the new normal.

In Good Company sounds like a good idea for a podcast, but after hearing the CEO of Deutsche Telekom deny how his company is responsible for Germany being in the dark ages when it comes to internet speed, I couldn’t listen to it anymore.

I would be the last to ever watch anything by Lex Fridman, but TikTok has been feeding me clips from his interview with Bassem Youssef and I can’t help but be impressed. Fridman does a decent job interviewing but of course the conversation is carried by Youssef, who is nothing short of a treasure.

I found a new German podcast crush in Hart Unfair which is my favorite format: three people (Anna Dushime, Yelda Türkmen and Ari Christmann) rambling through one another but in a way that’s funny, intelligent and diverse. It’s a shame that they publish so irregularly that I can’t tell if the podcast is dead or not.

The comments online around the Apple Vision Pro have been pretty deranged in a stupid kind of way. Lots of people jumped to the foregone conclusion that Apple released a failure or that it “wasn’t going to be a success”. Most of that seemed to have been motivated by clout chasing.

Listened to the latest episode of the German eGovernment podcast with the Minister for Digital for Bavaria. That is the state here that’s seemingly the farthest along when it comes to digitalisation and it now has the following ambitious plans:

Learned in this podcast episode about class justice in Germany something rather remarkable.

Spotify should be very heavily fined for funding and spreading misinformation like the stuff on the Joe Rogan podcast.

Simon Willison is one of the best engineering communicators out there and this podcast with him about LLMs and AI is one of the most insightful episodes I’ve heard on the topic.

Late to the party but I very much love this interview with Karri Saarinen, the co-founder of Linear. Their way of working, “The Linear Method”, will be waved away by companies (“we can’t do that because…”) but with leadership with the right mentality and experience I don’t think it’s that far off at all. Ask your leadership how you can work like this.

The last episode of Spaßbremse treats the history of German-Israeli relations and clarifies what the strategic foundations of the current complex are: white-washing and moral standing for one side and economic reparations and industrial capacity building for the other.

Suppose you’re a well-known journalists hosting a weekly rather left podcast around topics such as migration, the climate and criticism of right-wing frames in the media. And then suppose you let yourself get baited majorly by an American alt-right activist.

Listening to the Trash Future team describe CulturePulse.ai and the digital twin profile created for entire populations seems very very reminiscent of “The Red Men” by Matthew de Abaitua which didn’t get the attention it deserved but was quite prescient.

Given the current developments around the German debt brake, I think it’s good to refer to this bit about German financial politics and Adam Tooze’s initial prediction (FT, Zeit) that Christian Lindner as finance minister would not be good.

I don’t think about the Roman Empire that much, but when I do it’s great to have it be because of Mary Beard who in this podcast (from the 18:48) talks about Zuckerberg’s fascination with August and how leadership then and now has not changed that much.

Tooze picks apart Europe’s failure (mostly political in nature) to keep up with the United States on a bunch of areas.

Your browser does not support the audio element. Tooze talking for five minutes about the difference between European and American academic traditions. Excuse the low quality but my Wordpress has a 2MB file limit.

Once in a while they knock them out of the park in this podcast. In this episode Friedemann Karig goes out and asks for people to understand the necessity and reasons behind violent antifascism in the void left behind when the state fails to protect its citizens.

Een fragment uit Studio Tegengif “#87 Het nieuwe politieke pijnpunt: de Nederlandse vermogensongelijkheid” over vermogensongelijkheid en dat belastingen op vastgoed en grond veel te laag zijn.

I just threw away 2 Gigabytes worth of podcasts waiting to be listened to. Who knew podcasts were such a storage hog. This batch can wait some more. I also unsubscribed from five or six podcasts.

I don’t think there’s a decent dutch Linux podcast/magazine yet, is there?

Via Barbara de eerste podcast waar ik echt heel blij mee ben en die ik compleet ga luisteren. De stadsdichters van Antwerpen, Ramsey Nasr & Tom Lanoye, dragen hun gedichten voor.