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?
At the risk of being super obvious… Give Hardcore History a try. It’s long, highly subjective, and the subject matter tends toward intense subjects.
Blueprint for Armageddon, King of Kings, and Destroyer of Worlds are absolutely fantastic episodes.
Let’s be real, they’re audiobooks
This is my pick too.
Also, if you’re into the history of Rome, give “The History of Rome” by Mike Duncan a listen. It’s old, so the first few episodes are of a questionable audio quality. But he gets a new microphone pretty early on, and it gets easier to listen to. He talks about the entire history of Rome, starting with Romulus and Remus and going pasthrough the republic, then the empire and up to the 5th century. The episodes are nice and short, and mistakes are always rectified if need be one or two episodes later.
- Fall of Civilizations
- Dan Carlin
- The Rest is History
- Cautionary Tales
- The Delicious Legacy
A real classic: BBC Radio 4’s History of the world in 100 objects
Hardcore history is one of my favorites.
The Blow back Podcast is a great one that goes into detail of the US doing fucked up evil shit around the world. Each season is a different country and they have Afghanistan, Cuba, North Korea, and Iraq.
https://blowback.show/ also provides all the sources used, can be found on any podcast service. It’s done by two great journalists and they also interview people who have direct experience with the conflict, such as independent journalists who were on-the-ground
The fall of civilization is really cool
By far my favorite, though I suppose OP may not like it, as it is just the (monotonous, but nice sounding) voice of the narrator, without enthusiasm, jokes or personal takes
I’m also not sure if it’s what OP is looking for, but I also think Fall of Civilisations is not quite as dry as other history podcasts.
He does a great job of painting a picture through the narration, making you imagine what it would be like to have lived in those times. And he sometimes does add his personal takes (always clearly pointed out as personal takes).
It might still be too narrative for OP, but it might also be colourful enough.
Well I’m not going to discard it outright, maybe if it’s really well written in a way I like, it’s still engaging enough. I’d rather err on the side of too many options than too few. Thanks for the suggestions
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”.
I am personally a big fan of Voices of the Past and Fall of Civilisations.
Voices is very specific in what it does. It doesn’t actually give you a historian’s perspective, it’s strictly primary sources translated into English and then read out as-is. Since it makes absolutely no attempt to account for material evidence or the biases of the authors it is much more about the perspective of individuals from the time than recounting accurate history, but I think that’s very interesting
As its name suggests, Fall focusses on the end of civilisations, ranging from the Greenland Norse and Rapa Nui to Han China and Byzantium.
It doesn’t hurt that the speakers in both have very pleasant voices
The Dollop comes to mind.
The dollop is fantastic.
Fall of Civilizations podcast has a YT channel. It’s excellent.
English only? Asking because the Barbero podcast (in Italian) is great. As a person who hated studying history in school I can spend hours listening this.
English and Spanish, unfortunately I don’t speak Italian. I should learn to perhaps, I like the way it sounds.
While the podcast is great, maybe not great enough to learn a new language for it! Although Spanish is very close!
Second for The Rest is History. Its on all major podcast platforms and on YouTube. It has two hosts who take it in turns to talk about a topic while the other asks questions. Its full of gentle banter, and light humour but deleves in depth into topics. Some topics are covered in a single episode, others in depth in multi part series.
Its got a huge backlog of episodes, clearly labeled by topic and covers the full breadth of history. The two hosts are British but it covers global history, and it doesnt have biases. It does a “warts and all” approach to any topic.
Strongly recommend it.
Well There’s Your Problem has a lot of personality while discussing historic disasters.
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…
https://www.learnoutloud.com/Results/Author/Barbara-W.-Tuchman/14182
Listen to these books on audio.
