Mihret’s Podcast Picks: Human interest stories to finish off the year

By Mihret Yirgeta, May 6 2024—

As the winter semester and the academic year comes to a close, please enjoy these podcasts about our fellow humans to complete this chapter of our lives.

All there Is with Anderson Cooper

CNN’s Anderson Cooper hosts this deeply touching and poignant podcast about grief and all its complexities. To understand his own feelings of grief, Anderson Cooper interviews a myriad of people in honest and moving discussions to learn from other’s who have experienced life altering losses. The show is best summarised by its incredible tagline: “All There Is with Anderson Cooper is about the people we lose, the people left behind, and how we can live on – with loss and with love.”

Invisiblia

Invisiblia is a podcast about all the intangible and unseen things that can shape a persons life, things like thoughts, beliefs, and assumptions. This show uses a unique blend of science and story telling to explore these “invisiblia” and their effects on human behaviour. Invisiblia released its final episode in April of 2023, so the whole catalogue is available to binge.

WTF with Marc Maron

WTF with Marc Maron is a weekly interview style podcast where the host, comedian Marc Maron, talks to people about their lives. The show has been around since 2009 and boasts a very high calibre of guests such as Keith Richards, Nicole Kidman and Barack Obama. In 2022, his interview with the late Robin Williams was for preservation in the United States National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress, for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”. As of Apr. 1 this year, the show has 1526 episodes, so you will never run out of content.

Armchair Expert

This show is hosted by actors Dax Shepard and Monica Padman as they explore “the messiness of being human”. Every week the hosts interview celebrities, journalists, and academics about the nature of being human. Shepard claims his qualifications for hosting a podcast are “decade of sobriety, degree in Anthropology, and four years of improv training,” and it seems to work as the show appeared on Vulture’s list for the best comedy podcasts of 2018. In Shepard’s own words “I will attempt to discover human ‘truths’ without any laboratory work, clinical trials or data collection. I will be, in the great tradition of 16th-century scientists, an Armchair Expert.”

Unregistered

For some lighthearted silliness, our campus’s very own Unregistered is a great choice. Unregistered is a student-run podcast in collaboration with the popular Instagram page @uofconfessions, and is not affiliated with the University of Calgary. The hosts chat with random students on campus for some fun conversations and to hear all the campus gossip. Their newest season just began in March, and there is  all-new content coming out as we speak, so make sure to check them out.