Having a podcast summer

Responsible travel, comedic climate denial, Stanley Tucci, moving to MySpace, women's sports bars, music economics, going blind.

How is it August already?! Have you been having a podcast summer? Long walks on the beach with your favourite hosts. Even longer drives spent on road trips where traffic is made better with the help of a full queue. I don’t know how I’d survive cottage weekend traffic without podcasts! Sometimes I’ll choose a series to catch up on and sometimes I like a selection of different conversations from shows I love popping into. Whatever helps the time fly by! What’s your favourite thing to listen to on a road trip?

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This week’s podstack

Alpaca My Bags - Can Responsible Tourism Be a Social Movement?

For the first episode of their new season, Alpaca My Bags dives into what it means to travel responsibly and how we can get people to think about it more. There’s absolutely nothing simple about it, but host Erin Hynes is joined by activist Nora Loreto (of the podcast Sandy and Nora Talk Politics) and therapist Zac Schraeder to talk about all the variables at play. Even though big changes require systemic changes, individual actions and awareness do still matter. How do you think about the impact your visit has on local people, no matter where you’re going? How do you have difficult conversations with friends who don’t want to know about responsible travel? All of this becomes both clearer and more complicated when you realize how to be a responsible traveler. These three are really great at having a relatable and informative discussion about what we can do. Plus, I loved the way Erin and producer Kattie introduced the episode and topic by referencing White Lotus, since it centres around tourism too!

The Climate Denier’s Playbook - You Owe Your Life to Oil & Gas

The Climate Denier’s Playbook is a lot of fun! Hosts Rollie Williams and Nicole Conlan have great chemistry as they work through a timeline of fossil fuel’s grip on our world. From old commercials to debates on news shows, they take the classic arguments you might hear someone say if you mention that fossil fuels are bad. It’s a walk through history, with fun and easy to follow analysis. This show is like Maintenance Phase but for climate change. I saw Lauren make the same comparison, that’s how well they’ve captured that fun style. The same way that show challenges toxic diet culture, The Climate Denier’s Playbook challenges those who don’t believe in climate change. You do not owe your life to fossil fuels, that’s toxic relationship tactics trying to make you stay. At the end they determine whether the claims used by the industry are misinformation or disinformation.

Desert Island Dishes - Stanley Tucci: Actor, Director, Writer & Producer

I could listen to Stanley Tucci talk about food all day. This interview even inspired me to make one of the pasta dishes that he listed as one of the seven dishes that are meaningful to him. I love the structure of this show. Just like when I listen to Films To Be Buried With and try to pick which movies I’d choose for each category, I can’t help playing along with every episode of Desert Island Dishes. Host Margie Nomura asks her guests about their favorite childhood meals, frequent plates, meaningful dishes, and their ultimate last meals before being cast off to a desert island. And just this past week, I saw someone on TikTok making a sandwich that Stanley mentioned in this episode because they heard about it on the show. This one will make you hungry… and excited, inspired, and entertained while feeling connected to people through stories of food.

Main Accounts: The Story of MySpace - Dialed Up

With the ongoing demise of Twitter and the constant battle for which platform will replace it, I found this episode particularly timely. The series is all about MySpace and the impact it had as the first big social media network. In this episode, you hear about the first early attempts at creating community-based places online, starting with Asian Avenue and BlackPlanet, and eventually escalating to Friendster and MySpace. The moments when people were on Friendster and then debating the move to MySpace feel very relatable to now. How many of my friends are going there? What experience does this space have that the other doesn’t? Is it glitchy? I was truly surprised at how similar the questions and preferences were back then to what they are now, because they had less to compare it to back then. It’s a good look at how our relationship with social media started.

The Economics of Everyday Things - Women’s Sports Bars

It’s safe to say that being a fan of men’s sports is firmly engrained in our culture. It’s just assumed that watching sports means watching men’s sports. But a bar in Portland is proving just how popular and profitable a place dedicated to women’s sports can be. Founder Jenny Nguyen speaks with host Zachary Crockett about why she was inspired to open the bar, the challenges she faced, and what she’s learned about sports fans since then. Jenny wanted to ensure that they could showcase all kinds of women’s sports, even though that’s difficult to do since it can be hard to find broadcasts that are playing them and it requires signing up to many different ones. One of my favourite insights was that she’s heard from men who have basically switched over to watching women’s sports because there’s less of the drama and it’s more about the team sport. This 16 minute episode ends with asking us to imagine what it could be like if a young girl saw women’s sports normalized the same way men’s are. What would that girl realize was possible that she might not have before? A show about economics has never felt so inspiring! (transcript)

Today, Explained - Music’s nostalgia-industrial complex

Speaking of economics, this episode is like Switched on Pop meets Planet Money. It’s the story of late stage capitalism and the music industry, where it’s easier to own a library of existing music and redistribute it in unique ways, than try to make something new. Like using Aerosmith’s song Dream On as part of a special lottery game where they would earn money off the song being played and being mentioned on the tickets. It’s an insightful look into one of the ways the music industry functions these days, but I’m not sure it’s entirely functional. (transcript)

Search Engine - What's it like to slowly go blind?

I try not to write about the same show too close together but I can’t not write about this episode of Search Engine. The topic and the structure result in such a beautiful piece of audio. PJ Vogt’s conversation with Andrew Leland, who started to lose his vision in his twenties, teaches us a lot about loss, fear, and how low vision and blind people navigate the world. Through PJ’s own anxiety, it puts things in perspective about how we worry about possibilities of the future. Beyond that, they talk about the technology and podcasts that are helping blind people learn about and enjoy visuals around them. Did you know there’s a podcast that describes different memes? That’s amazing! It’s like a lesson in accessibility and anxiety wrapped up in one. Then you learn about the thoughtful and detailed music used throughout the episode and I was left in awe of how it all came together. It’s both simple and expertly complex in production.

More sweet treats

• Share your podcast recommendations with Podcast Plunge.

• Check out this list of podcasts about The Changing Impact of Climate on Our Food.

• Hot Ones but it’s Earth.

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!