A good podcast: Twenty Thousand Hertz

2023-12-24T00:00:00Z

Everything you've ever wanted to know about sound, and things you didn't know you wanted to know but are glad you learned, such as:

why all film trailers sound the same with that deep "booj" noise
how NASA ran live audio from the Moon
how the language in The Sims came about, and the people who voice it
the history of Windows startup sounds
the Loudness Wars, aka the reason so much popular music from the last few decades is just badly mastered

An additional treat is the Mystery Sound competition they run every episode, where they play a snippet of an obscure (or sometimes very familiar) sound, and listeners can submit their guesses. Everything from the Gracie Films tag at the end of the Simpsons, to herring farts. Every year they do a Mystery Sound Game Show episode, and this year's is hilarious. There are some sounds in there that will no doubt trigger Pavlovian reactions for anyone listening.

A good podcast: If Books Could Kill

2023-07-16T00:00:00Z

Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri take us through some of the biggest "self-help"/pseudoscience books from the last few decades and deservedly tear them apart.

Some of the worst relationship books are here – Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, The 5 Love Languages, The Rules and The Game (yes, that dreadful pickup artist one) – alongside pop-economics and pop-psychology rubbish such as Freakonomics and Atomic Habits. One of the funniest podcasts I've listened to in a while, and honestly gobsmacking that these books were so well-received in the first place. I feel like this should be called "Citation Needed: The Podcast".

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A good podcast: Twenty Thousand Hertz

A good podcast: If Books Could Kill