I prefer YouTube as the platform but I’m also open to suggestions elsewhere.
Basically I’m looking for long-ish format episodes I can listen to while doing something else. Ideally the host isn’t just a voice reading a text, but someone relatable or that shows enthusiasm and/or has a personal take/ humor about the topic they’re talking about.
I sometimes listen to Simon Whistler’s videos on a variety of topics, in case you know him, I find he’s entertaining enough and his writers are usually good but I’m looking for some more variety.
I’ve tried Stuff You Should Know and the Oologies series and while the content seems well researched, I found them a bit boring for me.
Got any recommendations?
I think 99% Invisible might have some episodes up your alley.
Some of the episodes are about more modern-day topics, but a good majority of them involve historical events and figures.
I prefer YouTube as the platform but I’m also open to suggestions elsewhere.
Honestly, I think that most video on YouTube isn’t really designed for background use. Not a technical limitation of the platform, just that most users are going to be sitting and staring at the material, and so that’s what they target.
Podcasts, on the other hand, tend to be aimed at exactly that “background user” — they make a lot of design decisions, like not moving super-quickly through content, repeating themselves, stuff like that. It makes listening to a podcast really irritatingly slow if you’re doing nothing but that, but if you’re driving somewhere or whatever, it works well, I think.
You mention history — if you’re willing to spend money on commercial content, The Great Courses series has audio lecture series from professional lecturers; I think that the format works well for history, and they have variety of history lectures that I think are pretty solid. You won’t have to deal with ads. That’s probably more intensive than the typical podcast; I like them when doing long drives, but occasionally need to skip back a bit if I get distracted by something else in the actual drive.
I can list some non-commercial podcasts that I enjoy, but I think that that’s very much dependent on where your interests lie. Like, I tend to focus on military history and maybe some light law and economics stuff, and I don’t know if that’s really up your alley. Maybe NPR Planet Money. Basic introduction to lots of economic topics, keeping things pretty connected to the real world. Fits your “upbeat” ask, but each episode isn’t all that long. There are a lot of them, though…
Lions Led by Donkeys is a military history podcast. I enjoy the host’s sense of humor as much as the history.
The Rest is History. Good banter between the hosts. Huge backlog on a variety of topics.
Origin Story. This one might be a little outside your wheelhouse, or might not, depending on what you’re after. Specifically, it talks about the origins (and thus the history) mostly of political ideologies like neoliberalism and zionism, political figures like Thatcher, Churchill, and Jordan Peterson, and movements or terms like the Suffragettes and the term “woke”.
https://www.learnoutloud.com/Results/Author/Barbara-W.-Tuchman/14182
Listen to these books on audio.
