This Week in Podcasts
The conversations worth your time from the shows we cover, updated as the week unfolds. When a guest works the press circuit and turns up on more than one show, we line the appearances up here so you can see who is everywhere and what they actually said.
Aman Narang says Toast's revenue fell over 90 percent during COVID before it cut 55 percent of staff
The Toast CEO's survival story is a reminder that being essential software for restaurants is fantastic right up until restaurants are legally unable to be restaurants.
Jack Whitehall says Channel 4 pulled his show at 11 p.m. because Michael Jackson died after it had a pedophile sketch about him
On Club Random, Whitehall described the sort of pre-smartphone comedy near-disaster that now sounds less like showbiz lore than a deleted scene from Broadcast Standards Hell.
Erin Brockovich says the AI data center boom may really be a water grab
On This Past Weekend, Brockovich was skeptical of the sci-fi theories, but deadly serious about the water.
Elizabeth Stone says Netflix needs fewer narrow specialists and more systems thinkers in the AI era
Netflix’s CPTO argues that AI makes cross-functional judgment more valuable than one-lane expertise, though she’s not ready to throw engineering, design, or data science craft into the volcano.
The Twenty Minute VC hosts say Britain’s £300 million elite tennis pipeline has produced almost no champions
The episode’s best point is not that Jannik Sinner is ruthless, it’s that Italy’s club-heavy tennis system makes Britain’s expensive elite pipeline look weirdly barren.
Bill Maher says his high school talent show was canceled after he stole a risqué Johnny Carson joke
Maher’s first cancellation story is less a free-speech epic than a very on-brand origin myth: a teenage comic, a Carson bit, and a room full of parents who were not having it.
Tom Ellsworth says IBM has 135,000 employees in India and only 40,000 in the U.S.
The PBD panel treated IBM’s brutal earnings reaction less like a bad quarter and more like a warning light for a company that may have outsourced its identity.
Kenneth Cole says wholesale won't build your brand if you don't own the customer relationship
On How I Built This, Cole gave a very department-store-era warning to modern founders: revenue through retailers can look like momentum while quietly leaving the brand in someone else's hands.
Penn Jillette says Bob Dylan lied about hopping trains, then Penn lived Dylan’s hobo story himself
The magician’s best trick in this Club Random classic is turning Bob Dylan’s self-mythology into a story about teenage gullibility, showbiz hunger, and the glamour of being broke on purpose.
Dr. Jordan Metzl says sports medicine doctors will prescribe GLP-1s for arthritic knees within five years
The sports physician’s most striking claim wasn’t that exercise is medicine, it was that Ozempic-era drugs may become part of orthopedic care.
Carl Hayden Smith says DMT entities told him he was not scheduled to die in an fMRI scanner
The psychedelic researcher’s wildest claim is not that DMT produces entities, but that those entities appeared to treat his lab scan like a cosmic false alarm.
Dr. Alan Castel says feeling younger than your age predicts how long you'll live better than your actual age
The UCLA memory researcher gives the Huberman crowd a squishy variable with surprisingly hard stakes.
Kevin O'Leary says he never saw Steve Jobs happy or laughing, and that Jobs thought being nice was noise
The Shark Tank investor turns a money episode into a bleak little sermon on Steve Jobs, genius, cruelty, and the Apple ghost that still sits in the room.
Tom Rinks says he would have settled the Taco Bell Chihuahua lawsuit for $200,000 before a $30.1 million jury award
Before Sun Bum became a sunscreen juggernaut, Rinks says Taco Bell could have ended the Chihuahua fight for a fraction of what a jury later awarded.
Noam Segal says tech workers fear doing more for the same pay more than losing their jobs to AI
The AI job panic has been sold as a robot replacement story, but Segal's survey says the more immediate fear is much more office Slack: congratulations, your output just became your new quota.
The Circuit: the week the tidy story kept losing
Across nine conversations this week, some of the biggest names on the podcast circuit spent their time roughing up the clean version of events, the plague that supposedly ended Rome, the aliens in the government freezer, the trophy that counts as a World Cup. What kept surfacing was a preference for the smaller, stranger, less quotable truth.
Cristina Mariani says her parents have never come to see her perform comedy
On This Past Weekend, the Austin stand-up turned a family boundary into the episode's real punchline, and the punchline is sadder than it sounds.
Neil deGrasse Tyson says Kessler syndrome could wipe out 100 percent of satellites within a few orbits
The astrophysicist’s real apocalypse scenario isn’t aliens or black holes, it’s orbital shrapnel moving faster than a bullet.
Maureen Callahan says Sarah Jessica Parker called the paparazzi for her Amagansett reading photos
Callahan’s case is less forensic investigation than Hamptons social anthropology, but the claim is wonderfully specific: nobody just happens upon Sarah Jessica Parker reading on a bench out east.
Cristiano Ronaldo says Euro 2016 is like winning the World Cup
The PBD Podcast panel heard Ronaldo’s post-defeat answer as pure ego, but the real story is how perfectly it fits the Ronaldo brand.
David Epstein says General Magic failed because it had too much freedom
On Modern Wisdom, Epstein turns the most romantic Silicon Valley story into a warning label for anyone who thinks total freedom makes better work.
Mel Robbins says your life is an average Tuesday, not the big moments you keep waiting for
The self help star's best reminder is also the least glamorous one: stop treating ordinary days like filler.
Neil deGrasse Tyson says Obama was right that aliens probably exist, but UFO believers still need to show the alien
The astrophysicist’s alien position is less X-Files and more Costco math: too many planets, not enough proof.
Jeni Britton says seed oil panic is too fad-like to build a frozen-fry brand around
The Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams founder told a beef-tallow fries startup to sell taste first, not online wellness panic.
Anthony Kaldellis says the Plague of Justinian probably did not kill half the Roman Empire
The historian's case is brutally practical: if half the empire died, why did Justinian's wars, taxes, and courts keep running?
Patrick Bet-David says the Pepsi jet lawsuit guy finally got 7 million Frontier miles
Frontier turned John Leonard's impossible Harrier jet prize into a Super Bowl bit, and the PBD crew correctly clocks the real winner, the airline's marketing department.
Caleb Hammer says Gen Z is doom spending because algorithms make the future feel hopeless
The personal-finance YouTuber argues that young people are spending like the apocalypse is already on layaway, and he’s mostly right, with one big caveat.
Mike Rowe says China built 1,000 ships last year while America built three
The Dirty Jobs host turns a shipbuilding stat into a warning about welders, electricians, student debt, and America’s bad habit of treating trade work like a consolation prize.
Martin Picard says some gray hairs can turn dark again in about a week
The mitochondrial scientist’s gray-hair claim is real enough to be fascinating, but not a permission slip to cancel your colorist.
Patrick Bet-David says Iranian mourners held Kill Trump banners while the U.S. was negotiating with Iran
The PBD Podcast turns a funeral clip into an argument against negotiating with a regime whose street theater still knows exactly which American buttons to push.
Bo Derek says Marlon Brando called Ursula Andress because he couldn't remember if they'd had sex
On Club Random, Derek dropped a tiny Old Hollywood grenade, then spent the rest of the hour proving she may be one of the last people alive who can make that story sound casual.
Krishna Kaliannan says he first coated Catalina Crunch cereal in a washing machine
The Catalina Crunch founder's weirdest manufacturing hack is also the cleanest explanation of why making a modern keto cereal is much harder than making a pitch deck.