This Week in Podcasts

Another short week, unfortunately. Short, but no less excellent — of that, I can assure you. So sit back, relax on your day off tomorrow, and enjoy last week’s best podcasts:

The a16z Podcast: The Two Big Problems With Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”. Very interesting discussion on wealth inequality through the lens of Thomas Piketty’s hit new book. I ended up listening to this twice, but by the end, when I could finally follow Larry Summers and Balaji Srinivasan, I was very glad that I did.

The Weekly Briefly: Fear of the Blank Page. In this week’s Friday episode of Shawn Blanc’s daily members-only podcast Shawn Today, released publicly as part of The Weekly Briefly, he talked about the ever-present fear of failure particularly amongst creative individuals and offered some suggestions for overcoming it. I tend to shy away from this type of touchy-feely self-help, but — as usual — Shawn had don’t great insights and equally helpful advice. Yet another great example illustrating why everyone ought to support Shawn in subscribing to this show.

ATP Episode 65 The Year of Casey: I turned this this episode on as I left my girlfriend’s dance recital last weekend, only to find myself laughing aloud as walked through the parking lot at one of the show’s best openings in a while. After that, Marco, John, and Casey talked about the Overcast beta finally shipping, Casey’s huge news, the perpetually confirmed-unconfirmed rumor of Apple’s Beats acquisition, and the perils of JavaScript and relying on third-party code. Come for the opening, but stay for the main topic: as someone who, like Marco, prefers to write everything myself, this was a good look at both the upsides and the downsides to this approach.

Technical Difficulties Episode 34: Developing Workflow Software with Greg Pierce. Gabe Weatherhead and Erik Hess recorded a nice interview with the creator of my favorite note-taking app, Drafts, and go-to iOS dictionary, Terminology, where they talked about Greg Pierce’s career as an Apple developer and the life thus far of the apps that have, along with his significant work to further the x-callback-url scheme, made him famous. And if you want even more of Greg, Brett Terpstra had him on Systematic earlier this year as well.

Technical Difficulties Episode 35: Information Capture and Recall with Bradley Chambers. I used to use Evernote daily, but gradually lost interest as I moved towards plain text and Markdown. After this episode with Bradley Chambers though, I’m going to put a concerted effort into giving it another try.

Technical Difficulties Episode 36: Advocating for Science and Exploration with Emily Lakdawalla. Interesting discussion on space exploration and its importance not only to children, but the United States as well; however, this topic belied some fascinating thoughts on the current state of education in this country, for which I believe this episode ought to be lauded for even more so than the former.

Crush on Radio: The Wrens are the Ultimate Bar Joke. Terrific episode with Merlin Mann and Richard Anderson not necessarily because I have any interest in or appreciation of The Wrens, but rather because this episode was so well done: not only did it feature a great guest and a superb host, but also impressive production values across the board from audio quality to integrating music clips. Anyone looking to record a multi-media podcast ought to start here to first see it done extremely well.

Until next week, friends. I wish you, and especially any of you who served in the military, a very happy Memorial Day.