Our #InternationalPodcastDay Gift To You: 10 Favorite Tech Episodes of the Year

It’s #InternationalPodcastDay!

We all know everyone’s favorite part of International Podcast Day is the traditional sharing of podcasts. So we’ve rounded up some of our favorite recent podcast episodes about tech, exploring topics like computer-generated journalism, sexist robots, and computer dominatrixes (that’s a thing?!). Have a listen, and let’s try to keep the spirit of International Podcast Day in our hearts the whole year through.

Pod bless us, every one.

1. Future Tense — Activism That’s Less Aggressive and Far More Pervasive and Persistent

This episode looks at our slacktivist tendency to rage-tweet, make cheeky march posters, and then feel like we’ve done our part. It includes commentary from media/culture researchers and activists, including Occupy Wall Street co-founder Micah White, who asks, “in the 21st century, how do we make sure activism has real meaning?”

2. Reply All — Trust the Process

With a background in IT and library sciences, Mistress Harley knows her way around computers. She especially knows her way around the computers of strangers all over the world who solicit her services as a tech dominatrix, paying her to hack and control their devices. Armed with her slaves’ personal information (email, social logins, banking info, etc.) and remote access to their computers, she completely controls their online lives through blackmail. Mistress Harley talks with Reply All about her life as a techdomme and a fantasy that’s most people’s worst nightmare.

3. Today Explained — Mark Zuckerberg Explains Himself

The Facebook CEO rarely gives interviews, but he made an exception to attempt damage control in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Anyone who watched the congressional hearings back in April is familiar with Mark Zuckerberg’s stock-answer-driven narrative for shifting blame off Facebook (“you choose what to share,” “regulation is an important conversation”), and his interview with Vox isn’t too different. The real value in this episode is hearing this back-to-back against an interview with privacy advocate Marc Rotenberg, in which he expertly unspins Zuck’s spin.

4. Note to Self — Your Metadata Is Showing

This episode with Amazon Chief Scientist Andreas Wiegard will freak you right out. It goes through the results of an experiment in which he set out to learn as much information about people as possible from photos that didn’t seem very telling at all. What’s more, this episode discusses recognition software that goes way beyond your face, like one program that identifies you by your walk and another that uses your shoes.

5. Recode Decode — Psychologist Adam Grant

Companies who believe they have unique corporate cultures are often wrong, argues psychologist and author Adam Grant (who co-wrote “Option B” with Sheryl Sandberg). What’s more, tech companies’ obsession with hiring for culture fit may be hurting them in the long run. In conversation with Kara Swisher, Grant lays down what he’s learned on the topic from his experience advising a lot of companies on how they hire and organize.

6. Unladylike — How to Reboot Sexist Robots

If we’re going to welcome robots as our overlords, we should obviously make sure they’re not sexist. But we haven’t done a good job at this so far — AI is picking up society’s prejudices, and even NASA felt it necessary to give one of its humanoid robots breasts (we wish we were joking). On this episode, the ladies of Unladylike are joined by robotics experts to dive deep into this critical problem.

7. Decrypted — Inside a Local Newspaper’s Fight to Survive

In this episode, Bloomberg Technology’s Jeremy Kahn visits the newsroom of the U.K.’s Bournemouth Daily Echo to learn about the publication’s experimentation with computer-generated stories, which they’re producing with a project funded by Google.

8. Getting Curious With Jonathan Van Ness — How Are You Bridging Social Media & Lady-Entrepreneurship? with Reese Witherspoon

JVN is as captivating in his podcast as he is on “Queer Eye.” Throw in Reese Witherspoon, and it’s a combination that can’t be resisted. The two get real about social media usage, discuss female entrepreneurship, and Witherspoon shares the behind-the-scenes of her production company, Hello Sunshine.

9. Personal Best — The Doppelgänger

Texting is a vital skill these days, but what happens if you really, really suck at it? In this episode of Personal Best — a podcast described as “If ‘Nathan for You’ had a baby and left it in the Canadian woods to fend for itself” by Vulture — the hosts take some unconventional approaches to helping a young woman named Julia overcome her texting troubles. Let’s just say a canoe is involved.

10. Freakonomics Radio — How to Build a Smart City

Redesigning old cities is a difficult undertaking we’re still figuring out, but what does an urban area built for the 21st century from the ground up look like? In a new district of Toronto, Dan Doctoroff (the guy who revitalized NYC) is building a new kind of city as CEO of the Google-funded startup Sidewalk Labs.

Photo credit (in order of appearance): Pixabay, Vox, Unladylike, Personal Best