There seems to be an endless supply of intellectual podcasts available now, and on paper, this should be amazing—so much new content with brilliant thinkers! But to be candid, most intellectual podcasts suck. It’s not because they have poor production values or bad guests. In my view, the problem is much more frustrating: the hosts often don’t really care about the quality of the conversation.
The hosts typically do minimal research, display little genuine enthusiasm, and ask predictable questions lacking in substance. The same guests rotate through the podcast circuit, while less popular but deeply fascinating new voices remain absent.
Each podcast seems to follow the same formula:
- A new intellectual guest shows up, promoting their latest book or popular research.
- They get asked the same shallow questions they’ve been countless other times
- The host repeatedly calls the guest’s answers “fascinating,” even though these could be found with 1 minute of Googling.
- Everyone pretends to have a deep conversation for 60 minutes or so, but no one’s learning anything new.
- Next week, repeat.
I’ve thought about this a lot, and here’s my theory:
Most intellectual podcasts, despite being intellectual podcasts, are hosted by relatively non-passionate social climbers.
Instead of smart, passionate nerds, we get these status-seeking people who figured out that:
- Hosting an intellectual podcast is an excellent way to build a personal brand, even if the conversations aren’t particularly deep. You can cosplay as a “thought leader” without actually generating any new thoughts.
- If you don’t have your own audience, you get to leverage and piggyback off your guests’. Every episode becomes a cross-promotional opportunity.
- Each episode doubles as a networking event, potentially gaining you a new high status friend.
I want podcast hosts who are infovores—the real nerds who stay up until 3 am reading obscure books on the Safavid Empire or long-form articles on theft in the Nigerian oil industry, or who comment on nerdy blogs. Of this group, few already have platforms or fame, and those who don’t are typically the kinds of people who feel uncomfortable putting themselves out there or facing rejection. In contrast, there is an abundance of highly ambitious people who know how to climb social ladders.
It seems the desire to climb social ladders is more crucial than genuine passion and curiosity is for building a popular intellectual podcast.
When I type this out and consider the numbers of each personality type, this intuitively makes sense, yet it took me until just now to understand.
I guess this also checks out because I’m a deeply curious nerd, and despite being told repeatedly by others that I would be a great podcast host, and it being something I’d love to do, I’m too scared to actually attempt it. (What if my dream guests say no to my request to interview them!?)
The Few Exceptions
There are exceptions, of course. I follow four podcasts closely—three interview-based and one narrative:
- Narrative: Jewish History Soundbites, which is a niche podcast examining Jewish history through a yeshiva perspective. This podcast is very important to me because it explores areas of history that are otherwise inaccessible to secular people reading academic books.
- Interview-Based: Conversations with Tyler, Dan Schulz – The Undertone, and The Dwarkesh Patel Podcast.
(I also check The Podcast Browser every few months to see if there are any specific episodes that catch my eye, as well as download episodes with authors explaining their new non-fiction books on podcasts rather than reading them.)
What makes these podcasts different? They’re hosted by incredibly smart and genuinely curious people who would be having these conversations even if they weren’t being recorded. The hosts put in the effort to ask fresh, substantive questions because they’re driven by personal passion, not obligation or desire for an audience. For them, learning is the point—not networking or status-building.
The key test for a good podcast for me is: would the host put in the same preparation if they could never release the episode? For these three, the answer is unequivocally yes.
What stands out to me is that I don’t find any of these podcasts particularly exceptional—this is simply the baseline quality I expect from intellectual podcasts—because this is how passionate, smart, curious people converse. When people praise Tyler, Dan and Dwarkesh, all of whom I respect greatly, I don’t think to myself, these are the only three people in the world capable of doing this, but rather, how can there only be three! There should be hundreds more podcast hosts like them.
Podcasts I’d Love to See More Of
I guess my biggest takeaway is that despite intellectual podcasts being a huge market, there are few podcasts hosted by passionate curious nerds. Based on this, I think there is much more room for passionate and curious people to start their own shows, and I sincerely hope more people do so—especially in niche, underexplored areas. Let 100s of future Dwarkesh Patels bloom.
Aside from this, I’d also love to see more of these kinds of intellectual podcasts
- Group Discussions: I think podcasts where a group of friends just talk and basically hang out can be very fun. This works well for sports-related podcasts or current event ones, because the guests can ostensibly react to a specific set of recurring events. For intellectual podcasts, there aren’t ongoing routine events to keep track of, so the individual episodes don’t have a purpose or something to inject novelty into them, causing them to lose steam.
- Personal Exploration: Podcasts where hosts ask guests, who are typically unusual people, about themselves as individuals (not just their thoughts on random issues they may not have considered). Most experts are highly unusual in some way, so asking about their childhood, or their thoughts on film or dating etc. can be interesting on a human level.
- Collaborative Learning: Podcasts where smart people are asked to read or think about a topic in advance, that isn’t their area of expertise, and then two people try to explore that topic together.
I generally agree. Tyler Cowen has himself called podcasts of this sort high-grade entertainment (during his first appearance on Dwarkesh’s podcast, if I recall correctly). Audiobooks (if you can retain them and get through them) are a reliably superior form of imparting knowledge occupy a similar niche.
It’s interesting that Conversations with Tyler is for you an example of a podcast that breaks the intellectual podcast mould. As I see, it is one of the worst examples of podcast-as-entertainment. While Cowen can be good at asking interesting questions, the range of topics covered is too broad and the depth of each particular sub-part of the conversation is too shallow, so that I rarely come out thinking I’ve learned a lot. Indeed, one of the best episodes of his podcast, for me, is the one where he breaks from his usual format and reads a few books and then talks about them with Jerusalem Demsas (this goes into the third kind of podcast you said you would want more of). Otherwise, Cowen’s podcast mostly functions as a kind of motivation and inspiration for me.
I do like Dwarkesh’s podcast and Dan Schultz’s podcast. There are a few other podcasts I genuinely enjoy and listen to frequently *as a source of information*:
1.) 80k Hours podcast, which has very long discussions that are generally quite good.
2.) The Rest Is History, which is narrative in style and, while sometimes too chatty, is generally nice.
3.) Rasheed Griffiths’ podcast, which for me has the same flavour as Undertone.
As for the kinds of podcasts you’d like to see more of, I personally grew up on The Partially Examined Life, which in my view falls into the first and third buckets you mentioned. With that said, I do have to agree that the absence of high quality podcasts that, for example, function as recorded book clubs (this is my interpretation of your third bucket) is deeply disappointing, though arguably it reflects the reality that most people don’t deeply engage with books unless they have to (which is why most IRL book clubs suck, too).
I’m curioius, what’s an example of a bad intellectual podcast? It’s not clear to me what falls in the category of intellectual vs. non-intellectual podcast.
To add to Jing’s recommendations, I sense you’d like the Joe Walker Podcast and the BBC’s In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg.
I’ve found this is also a good use of ChatGPT — describing the podcasts you like and why you like them and asking for more.
I love your succinct blog. Here are some podcasts you might like:
1. The Knowledge Project Podcast by Shane Parrish
https://fs.blog/knowledge-project-podcast/
By a well-prepared former intelligence officer, an infovore who gets right to the questions no one else has asked. Wide range of topics.
2. EconTalk by Russ Roberts
https://www.econlib.org/library/About.html#roberts
From a compassionate economist and college president in Israel, podcasting since 2006. Wide range of topics.
3. Infinite Loops by Jim O’Shaughnessy
https://www.infiniteloopspodcast.com/
By a curious, enthusiastic, joyful, do-it-yourself investor and independent thinker. Wide range of topics. Often also tells his own tales.
4. Complex Systems by Patrick McKenzie (patio11)
https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/
By an American software developer who moved to Japan and ran his own small business. On technology, finance, and systems thinking.
5. Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin
https://www.tetragrammaton.com/podcasts
By an American record producer. Mostly about artists, I guess. I have only listened to a few.