Another year of Podstacks comes to a close

Gender whiplash, poaching ring corruption, preparing for super intelligence, AI psychosis, subjectivity of hearing, the best housing policy, a massive art fraud.

This was a good year for podcasts. I may have written less, but I listened more. I went deeper into a season or series before writing about it. I fell behind in my queue while trying to savor the stories and brain bending investigations. I lurked through Apple Podcasts for new releases and trends, while always turning to newsletters and fellow podcast lovers to find the hidden gems. I walked, I ran, I cooked, and cleaned all while swept up in facts and feelings I might not have found otherwise. If you like waxing poetic about podcasts and want to hear even more appreciation for great listens this year, Tink Media’s Audio Delicacies list has over 100 for you to enjoy!

I can’t wait to hear what next year has in store for us! What was your favourite from 2025? I’d love to know!

This week’s podstack

White Picket Fence - America’s Gender Whiplash

This history lesson in how authoritarian takeovers have impacted gender in the past quickly becomes way too relevant to our present. Things like telling women that becoming wives and mothers is their highest calling… This series had me saying WTF out loud many times. Like when I learned about the existence of NatalCon, a conference about pronatalism that people pay $10k to attend. As each episode unfolds, you realize more and more ways the chaos we’ve been surrounded by this year is extremely strategic and has been seen before. The ways gender is being used to as a Trojan horse for everything really put it into perspective and made me understand it in ways I hadn’t before.

Operation Night Cat - Why Did the Deer Cross the Road?

What begins as a story of a group of hunters who like to one-up each other and ignore the laws and ethics of hunting, quickly reveals the much darker things that these same people are doing at their day jobs. The teams behind Outside/In and Bear Brook have spent a year investigating this illegal poaching ring and it led them from the backwoods of New Hampshire to the brick walls of the state prison. By the end of the first episode, I found myself annoyed with the arrogance of these hunters but that was nothing compared the corruption and gross abuses of power that unfold in the following episodes. This series is only three episodes, so you could easily fly through it so fast and you’ll definitely want to. As someone who doesn’t listen to much true crime, this one had me hooked with the twists and turns and the thorough levels of investigation. (transcript)

The Last Invention - Ready or Not

AI is the first technology that as no limits. The big believers see the future of AI as nothing but abundance. A digital supermind that can do anything a human can do. Accelerationists believe we’re three years away from this. But now, some of them are raising alarms and asking us to take this existential risk seriously. If you’ve heard these claims before and you keep asking okay but what does that even mean? What will it look like? This series gets into it. If we can’t stop artificial super intelligence, then every government around the world needs to come together to make sure to teach it to not want to take over humans. I’m listening because all of this sends me thought-spiraling about our existence. Are we really so simple that a computer could truly do what we do? Sure in some ways, but creatively? Emotionally? Maybe I’m naive to think not. How does our intelligence work and therefore, how do we recreate it? It might be easier to make a chess champion than a three year old that can recognize objects or images. The things that we seemingly do so simply, are the most difficult for an AI system. It’s all so incredibly complicated and happening so fast, this will teach you so much about what’s ahead.

Suspicious Minds - Is AI Making Us Psychotic?

And the AI concerns continue! Compared to The Last Invention, which is more about super intelligence and AI at its highest from, Suspicious Minds is looking more at what the consumer level AI tools are doing to people’s brains. If you haven’t yet heard of AI psychosis, you might soon. As people are interacting with things like chatGPT, they are falling so deep into what it says that it’s making them think things that they have trouble telling themselves are false. Like that they’re some kind of messiah who has unlocked all the answers of our world. Yes, there are also positive experiences that people are having with these chat bots, as pseudo stand-ins when a human connection is unavailable, but it seems precariously close to being a slippery slope. After all, these chat bots can’t really be held accountable the way someone like a psychologist would be. As the show says, we’re currently running a worldwide experiment on humans with no safeguards.

Unexplainable - The Sound Barrier #1: The myth of hearing

Brains are bonkers. It’s kinda hard to truly appreciate the level of processing they’re doing every second, for every sense and movement and thought. The part of that that I didn’t think about as much before is just how subjective our brains can be because they are using context, our own personal contexts. We might realize this when we are faced with our own biases or judgments but did you know this also applies to your hearing? We don’t all hear things the same way because our brains use our own context to process sound. In this series, they’re going deep into what exactly happens when we hear things, or when we don’t. Every episode took me in a direction I didn’t expect. Like one about listening to space to learn about things happening in the universe when seeing it is no longer an option. It’ll make you appreciate silence and sound and change the way you think about how we all experience our surroundings. (transcript)

The Europeans - Housing policy: Who Does It Best? - Part 1

Who Does It Best? is a new series from The Europeans that’s doing some seriously awesome stuff! First of all, their listeners told them they wanted it and funded their ability to make it! And wow are listeners getting their money’s worth. The team is tackling some of the biggest issues people are facing, like housing, and figuring out which European country is doing best. They’re tackling housing first and they went so deep that it ended up being a two-part episode. You think you know the answer by the end of the first episode, but once you realize how much deeper the policy flaws go in part two you’ll be questioning so much. I don’t want to spoil too much of their conclusions so I’m not going to say which countries! If you’re worried that understanding the complexities of the housing crisis will be hard to keep up with, I need you to trust Katy and Dominic to keep things straightforward. They are learning a lot of new things themselves, so they’re good about explaining it all. And it absolutely doesn’t matter if you don’t live in Europe, because you might just learn something to help improve the housing situation where you live. I know I’m going to be comparing notes with the massive issues we have in Canada. Next, I went straight on to the episode about child care and the deep analysis continued! (transcript)

Forged - A Painting

Even though I didn’t know his name before, I definitely knew the distinct style of Norval Morrisseau, an iconic Indigenous artist. At least, I know I’ve seen art that looks like his unique style, but was it really his? This series follows the massive art fraud that used forged versions of Norval’s work to make a lot of money for some people. You hear from experts who can tell which ones are authentic Norvals based on the types of colours used and you learn about the difficult life Norval had that made it possible for others to take advantage of his vulnerabilities. I’m no art expert, but hearing about the way the courts treated this case was so frustrating. How could one of the largest art frauds ever be so easily dismissed?

More sweet treats

• If you’re like me and just finished watching the entirety of Gilmore Girls for the first time, I think you’ll really enjoy Generation Gilmore Girls, a study of the show’s impact and how it stood out among other popular shows at the time.

• Feeling much more critical of credit card reward programs after listening to this episode of 1440 Explores! Someone pays the price for your rewards. I haven’t stopped thinking about it for weeks.

• Protein panic seems to be everywhere, but, as with most things, we’ve seen this before. Why is it back? And do we really need protein lattes?? Many shows have tackled this trend, but you always know Decoder Ring is going to bring an interesting take on things.

Thank you for reading! If you listened to something this week that made your heart sing, your imagination wander, or your brain ponder, I’d love to hear about it!