Ask HN: Best Podcasts of 2026 [So Far]
Trying to diversify what I listen to and interested to hear what everyone else is enjoying this year! Shameless plug: a friend and I started Superlinear today, a short-form podcast about emerging practices for building with coding agents. Ep 1 is a 13-minute conversation about spatial feedback loops. We talk about how this pattern is showing up in Agentation, Claude Desktop, Codex, and the recent hot launches of Roughdraft, and heyclicky. Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/033IyYgdSJATUcZVwEmWYN
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8O4KFCCCV8 Would love to hear what you think and accept any feedback, if you check it out. Oxide and Friends has a good mix of light banter and interesting technical talk across the stack, leaning lower. They have a lot of great commentary on a range of things. Their LLM discussions are particularly interesting to me because they're very reasonable. The telepathy tapes. Don't want to give away too much but it has to do with non verbal autistic people with... Special abilities. Non fiction, and they try to conduct tests to be as scientific as possible. I think this one might be super interesting for its entertainment value, but there has been some strong criticism as to its credibility. For example, here's a pretty comprehensive debunking from The Skeptical Inquirer: https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/the-telepathy-tapes-... And a statement from Association for Science in Autism Treatment: https://asatonline.org/media_watch/asat-responds-to-the-skep... The tests are in no way scientific. Do a little research and you will find some horrifying truths about what is presented. https://medium.com/@randomuser_11627/the-telepathy-tapes-is-... https://jonogden.substack.com/p/lets-talk-about-the-telepath... https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-telepathy-tapes-more-fc... I've repeatedly bounced on and off 20VC by Harry Stebbings, but this year I'm finally hooked. The main draw is the episode released towards the end of the week with Jason Lemkin (SaaStr) and Rory O'Driscoll (Scale Venture Partners). With the pace of AI announcements, it's been a good place to recap and analyse the week's events. In particular, Rory's insights are usually spot-on. Latent Space (AI), old Conversations with Tyler (econ-ish?), Odd Lots (financy?), Unpacking Japan (autological?)... Social media algorithms, newsletters and guest slots expanded my podcast selection too quickly. The 'go direct' movement from tech + indie creators has created too much content.. But the smaller hangout podcasts get a little too off topic.. I haven't really seen anyone do something new with the format this year.. +1 Latent Space (and AI Engineering ). I hope it stays like it is. Minimal fluff, great guest list and very relevant. “The Real Dad Podcast” is by far my favorite podcast! It feels like hanging out with friends. I smile, I laugh, and I get some decent parenting stories to learn from.
I highly recommend it to anyone with kids or about to have kids (perhaps give it a shot if you don’t have kids?) Signals and Threads, The Pragmatic Engineer, Maintainable, Book Overflow, Happy Path Programming Triggernometry A couple of immigrants to Britain discuss politics, culture, and world events. Some topics are pertinent to life in the US, others are just interesting discussions. The hosts' previous work as comedians can make their discussions more entertaining. If those guys are "comedians" then I'm Elvis Presley. Had a listen, these are some pretty right wing populist views, the fact they are immigrants feels like something to take that edge off. The people they interview are mostly awful, David Starkey, Tommy Robinson (Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon), eww... Two elite comedy, dare I say, assassins Every year it’s The Rest is History. Every time I feel daring and try something new, I regret it. Nothing comes close. There seem to be different opinions on the host, but I enjoy the variety of guests on the Modern Wisdom podcast. I enjoy: The Pragmatic Engineer, Peterman Podcast, Rate Limited, State of Agentic Coding and linkarzu. How about ranveer allahbadia? lol, can't write that with a straight face. The Elephant Graveyard Radio Show Vertassium There is this Joe Rogan guy. I've heard that he has a nice podcast. Probably give him a try. Andrew Huberman is still one of my favorite. Even if you do not agree with every recommendation, the long-form discussions on neuroscience, sleep, exercise are worth listening as well as interesting too