This Week in Podcasts

Yet another week has come and gone, and here at the end we once again find ourselves with a collection of fantastic podcasts; some new and only just published, while others now have one more chance at enamoring a pair of fresh ears. Some new, some old, and all equally excellent.

The Talk Show Episode 87: “Free Alcoholic Beverages”, with Ben Thompson. John Gruber has Ben Thompson on once again, this time to talk browser autofill, Samsung’s predicament between Apple at the high end and increasing competition from Xiaomi at the low end, and the importance of software differentiation even in a world where all hardware players are equal. As always, insightful and enlightening both.

Unprofessional Episode 33: Jay Clifford  —  My Eyeballs Were Vibrating. Lex and Dave talk to Jay Clifford about his various encounters with religion over the years, and share some intriguing insights of their own. Very interesting.

Roderick on the Line 117: Put on the Carrot Hat. We all have these incredible tools and fantastic opportunities now, to do and create things that previously only a select few could, but yet everything is getting progressively worse; less and less gets done. The democratization of creativity has not become the boon many believed it would in a time when the process of creating something cost a great deal more, but rather cause for concern going forward. As usual, a very interesting episode of Roderick on the Line.

Tangential Episode 01: Travel Around In A Hoverchair. In the inaugural episode of Tangential, John Chidgey has Amit Jain and Vic Hudson on to talk Apple rumors and the morality of this business before touching on John’s nerd cred as a past iOS developer. Their discussion of iOS programming led to one wherein they came to the conclusion that the future of programming languages is in high-level implementations like Swift rather than C, and then derailed towards Family Guy, The Simpsons, and Star Trek. My favorite part of this podcast, however, was getting to hear John much more relaxed than he tends to be on Pragmatic: I love Pragmatic, and for that show his serious demeanor is appropriate, but getting to hear him loosen up was great; fantastic episode.

Back to Work Episode 179: 7 Most Important Breasts for Your Re-Fi. It’s hard to get noticed these days, and that has made some people resort to methods away from developing their presence as an individual in favor of methods more conducive to reaching greater audiences with less effort. Thus, we have seen the rise of platforms like Medium. Also, everyone was once there: it’s easy to think that the people who are not in your current position were always popular, but that’s not the case. Conversely, though, and this is something that’s a bit of a pet peeve of mine, many popular people seem to forget that they once were not.

After Dark Episode 466: After Back to Work 179. Back in the early days of Back to Work, Dan and Merlin recorded an episode of After Dark for almost every episode of the main show. Lately, however, that has not been the case. This episode is reminiscent of those days since past, and it’s great.