Let’s tune in.

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Nearly any time I have an idle moment—some period of time when what I’m doing doesn’t specifically involve listening to something or actively thinking—I listen to something on my iPhone. Sometimes it’s music, but most often, it’s one of the numerous podcasts I’ve downloaded to offset this particular brand of boredom. I just need something to fill my brain in the meantime, because quite frankly, I don’t do a whole lot of active thinking. It’s a fact I’ve recently come to accept about myself. When I’m working and not listening to sound bites, when I’m doing dishes or yard work, when I’m driving alone, I’ve always got a podcast on standby.

I mean, let’s face it—after the first year or so of driving, it really becomes more about muscle memory and cursory glances around your car than anything else. It’s not some fantasy of freedom like you dreamed as a teenager—it’s a means to an end, a way to get from point A to point B. It’s not magical. It can even be an outright chore. There’s no critical thinking involved anymore once your body gets into a routine. And I’m very much in a routine of sorts, whether I’m driving or working or just lazing around. But it’s still important to keep your brain engaged, so hey, podcasts.

When I first started listening to stuff in the car, it wasn’t mainly music, because my esoteric musical tastes and the tastes of the general radio audience aren’t exactly the same. Yes, it’s true—there was a time when we didn’t always have a portable means of entertainment, and the radio really was our best option. I know, children, it’s horrifying. Gather round and let me tell you of this thing called radio. It was a wasteland of insipid pop songs and auto dealership ads. And once every other month, the legends say the entire NPR staff threatened to very humanely smother a live free-range, grass-fed goat on the air unless they received enough listener donations. It was a different time.

Sorry for getting off-topic, although I did just realize again how weird it is going through this whole digital transition in my lifetime. There will be children born today who straight-up will not know for a fair portion of their lives what CDs are, let alone cassette tapes, and that is redonkulus to think about.

Anyway, as I was saying: having the musical tastes I did (electronica, techno, video game soundtracks), finding something I actively enjoyed listening to on the radio was damn near impossible in the small Florida city where I was raised. The 1993 Chevy S-10 I regularly drove didn’t have a CD player, but it did have a cassette player, on which my grandfather and I used to listen to some stand-up comedy tapes he owned. Eventually, I bought an adapter for the cassette deck so I could plug it into my portable CD player. CDs were great because, despite my parents’ refusal to upgrade our Internet service past dial-up, I could still find plenty of music online well within my listening threshold and burn it onto a mess of CDs, given enough patience. What wasn’t so great about the portable CD player was, of course, the fact that if you hit anything bigger than, say, a a stray sunflower seed in the road, the player would miss a spot and the disc would skip. Very annoying. So usually I didn’t bother with the CD player at all. But what’s a white kid in suburbia to do when he doesn’t like the music on the radio and his CD player gets road sick? If you guessed “listen to talk radio,” you guessed right.

Before we get into that, a tangent: basically all of the more mainstream music I keep in my playlist these days (Daft Punk, The Temper Trap, Boston, Radiohead, Explosions In the Sky, The xx) I get from Amazon MP3. With frequent sales and no built-in DRM, it’s a great example of a music service that feels fair. Also, if you like video game music, as I do, and you’d like to hear a ton of completely free, completely awesome tracks that pay homage to gaming tunes of yore, point your browser toward OverClocked ReMix and download away. I’ll wait.

Back? Perfect.

So here’s the thing about conservative talk radio: if you’re a white kid in the South, growing up with a card-carrying Republican dad and a politically-neutral mom as I did, it’s not outwardly offensive, or at least, you’re probably too sheltered to know the difference. The biggest talk radio hosts are known as the best in the business because they’re entertaining, and if you can see past their political arguments and very occasional off-color humor, they really are. Hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Michael Medved often seem like caricatures more so than people because their personalities are so clearly defined. Hell, they even have catch phrases. It was certainly more entertaining on a daily basis than the talk over at NPR, which seemed to deal with either world news and inside-baseball aspects of politics that had little to no bearing on my existence, or speaking with various cultural experts on the things they found when researching their latest non-fiction book. SUH-NORE. So I listened to a lot of talk radio during my high school and early college years, it’s true. I realize now that it’s like junk food for your brain—potentially dangerous in large quantities, and generally unwholesome—but at the time, I just needed something in my brain while driving around, and having a friendly voice occasionally crack a joke about a piece of relevant news was actually kind of comforting.

And certainly, there was a time when I found most of what these hosts said to be logically sound. But I started slipping off during my college years, and there were probably two big reasons for that: first, that me owning an iPod finally became a thing; and second, that I actually started to meet people who were different from me.

While it’s true I wasn’t and never have exactly been a social butterfly, occasionally I’m put in situations where I’m forced to deal with people, and many of them are very nice, I’m happy to say. Many of them are also very different from me, from their choice of music to their race or ethnicity, from their favorite foods to their political views, from their sexual identity to their moral and religious viewpoints. Again, I’m not going to claim I “got out” a lot just because I went to college and that’s what you’re supposed to do, because I didn’t. But I was around these people enough to understand that the opinions I had were not necessarily shared by as many folks as talk radio big shots led you to believe. It seemed logical that if other people had such glaringly different opinions from, say, Sean Hannity, that they could create a presentable radio show that came from that viewpoint and find airtime somewhere, as a sort of indirect counter-argument. Thing is, whenever I tuned in, I never heard any opinions that were left-of-center, at least not from the hosts themselves. Callers were always a different story, of course. I’m sure we could have a long discussion about why there aren’t really any big-name liberal radio commentators, and it would probably be very boring and might not even make that much sense to me, as I admittedly know very little about politics. My point is, before I went to college and met someone who didn’t agree with me on everything, I assumed a majority of people held beliefs very similar to me, because a series of loud and very public voices were stating them on a daily basis, and were often cheered on by positive callers.

So I don’t listen to talk radio anymore. Like, at all. Barely any radio at all anymore, in fact. Sometimes when my iPhone isn’t handy, I’ll tune in the local classic rock station, or if I get really lucky, one of the NPR stations will play some jazz, but that’s pretty much it. Otherwise it’s silence, which is very rare, or it’s my iPhone, playing some mix of Adam-approved music or one of several podcasts I find entertaining.

And as you should know by now, I never miss an opportunity to link readers to things I find interesting, so here’s a quick list of the podcasts that always have a home in my earbuds:

My Brother, My Brother and Me, known colloquially as MBMBaM (or phonetically, “muh-BIM-bam”), is probably favorite of all time. Brothers Justin, Travis, and Griffin McElroy host this “advice show for the modern era,” doling out farcical nonsense like a trio of Bizarro Emily Posts, occasionally hitting upon genuinely useful guidance. Most of the “real” questions come from emailers, but some of the best material emerges when the bros take potshots at weird questions from the Yahoo! Answers service. It’s usually great for a few laughs—in fact, this is the very same show that caused me to laugh so hard after I threw out my back that I had to turn it off. MBMBaM usually updates on Mondays around noon.

Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine stars MBMBaM’s oldest brother Justin and his wife Dr. Sydnee McElroy as they discuss one of the many missteps in medical history. It’s quite a charming, cozy show, and fittingly, the husband-and-wife hosting team have a lot of chemistry. Justin typically plays the buffoon to allow Sydnee the perfect opportunity to correct him as though he were a child, and while it seems like that might get annoying after a while, it really doesn’t, which I think is a testament to Justin’s keen sense of comedy. In addition to actually being educational, this is one of the few clean podcasts I regularly listen to. Sawbones updates every Tuesday.

RISK!, which I also mentioned in my previous entry, is a storytelling show. Very simply, people telling true tales from their lives that they never thought they’d share in public. Often touching, obscene, funny, and almost always a little uncomfortable. Simple premise, great listening material. RISK! updates every Tuesday.

The Flop House is a show about box office “flops,” in which the trio of hosts give a general overview of a recent movie and tear it down along the way. Two of the regular hosts work as writers on The Daily Show, so you know there’s going to be some degree of quality to their comedic efforts—it’s like listening to three of your friends chat about a movie, but those three friends are also funny for a living. Even if the movie they’re talking about is an absolute stinker, one or more of the folks involved will always find a silly voice, an off-the-cuff song, or some other strange tangent to milk for comedy in the absence of good source material. Elliott Kalan, my favorite of the hosts (or the “Original Peaches,” as they’re sometimes known), has a particular gift for knowing when a segment is dragging or not working, and aside from his funny side, he is a genuine film buff, often recommending less-known older films and reminding listeners about classic screenings he organizes. The only great failing of The Flop House is that episodes are released biweekly, but it’s generally worth the wait. The Flop House updates every other Saturday.

We Hate Movies is basically the antithesis of The Flop House—while it’s still a show where three hosts dissect why a movie does or doesn’t work, the hosts here are generally less polished and a bit less accessible than the Floppers. Outside of special “listener request” or “worst of the year” shows, their movie selections also skew a bit older—they have a standing rule where any film made in the last ten years gets a pass. On the whole, listening to WHM for me is like watching a chef prepare and cook a beautiful cedar-planked salmon—I know there’s skill going into the product, but it’s just not quite my cup of tea. I keep WHM around mostly because they fill in the gap left every other week by The Flop House, but occasionally they’ll take on a movie I’ve actually seen and I can have a pretty good laugh. We Hate Movies updates promptly every Tuesday morning at 12:01 a.m.

The Giant Bombcast is the main podcast of popular video gaming website Giant Bomb, started by former Gamespot editor Jeff Gerstmann. The Bombcast has its regular cast of characters and is honestly more about them and their bullshitting than video games. Having a working knowledge of and love for games certainly helps when you sign on for a podcast that runs two and a half hours or more every single week (!!!), but it’s not required. Just tune in and let the voices of Jeff, Vinny, Brad, and Drew take you away on marvelous sidebars about junk food, run-ins with cops, conspiracy theories, the seedy underbelly of the gaming industry, and growing up in the suburbs. The Giant Bombcast updates every Tuesday, at some point. Posting times are wildly erratic.

The NPR Sunday Puzzle is, as I understand it, a segment of NPR’s “Weekend Edition” show, which they kindly snip out and present as its own separate podcast. The puzzle editor for The New York Times, Will Shortz, concocts a new word-based puzzle every week, presents it live to a qualified listener, and the listener receives a modest prize package just for getting on the air. Shortz then closes each episode by putting forth a more difficult puzzle and asks for responses through NPR’s website; a randomly selected correct answer from this puzzle nets a listener a chance to be on the air for the live segment. With a tidy running time never exceeding seven minutes, the Sunday Puzzle is a fine distraction on a lazy Sunday afternoon. The NPR Sunday Puzzle updates every Sunday around noon.

A Life Well Wasted is probably the finest video game-related podcast I’ve ever heard, and although it occasionally deals with subcultures of gaming aficionados, editor and host Robert Ashley does a wonderful job of making his subjects easily understood to non-gamers as well. I’ve heard that it’s reminiscent of NPR’s “Radiolab.” A theme dictates the contents of most episodes, with conversations flowing into dreamlike musical compositions made just for the podcast by Ashley and his bandmate. The crime of ALWW is that it’s so very good, but its demanding production means episodes are scarce, with only 7 proper installments available as of this writing. Updates for A Life Well Wasted are sporadic; promises of new episodes are basically the only reason I follow Ashley on Twitter.

There are also a few others, the shows I revisit every now and again but don’t keep in my podcatcher on a permanent basis:

Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! is one of NPR’s flagship weekend shows, where a panel of comedians participate in a quiz about the week’s news. It’s occasionally good, but often focuses too much attention on its celebrity guests, who aren’t always as entertaining as you might assume. They also seem to take a lot of weeks off, instead filling in the feed with highlight reels, and to me, that sort of defeats the purpose of a news quiz show. Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! updates every Saturday.

Car Talk is another NPR classic, where two incredibly witty mechanic brothers take callers’ questions about trouble with their automobiles, as well as infrequent queries dealing with relationship advice or etiquette that’s vaguely car-related. The brothers have a great rapport, and while they sometimes seem to tell many of the same jokes over and over, they just have so much fun doing it that it’s hard to complain. My chief problem with the show is that, despite the comedy, it primarily deals with automotive shop talk—a subject in which I have little to no interest. So I’ll pop in every now and then for the Puzzler, where younger brother Ray drops a brain teaser on co-host Tommy and the listeners; likewise, the made-up, pun-tastic credits segment at each show’s end is not to be missed. But the actual car talk I do without. Like Wait Wait, Car Talk updates every Saturday.

Good Job, Brain! is a show where four friends, members of a pub quiz team, get together each week and present bits of trivia and obscure knowledge about everyday subjects like animals, food, and word origins. It sounds dull, and it certainly can be, if you listen to too many episodes in a short span of time. That was why I eventually kicked it from my dedicated list. While I really do like learning about potentially-interesting-but-trivial things like the history of cat litter, the hosts deal in a certain degree of corniness that irks me if I listen to too much at once. Every fifth episode, the gang has an “all-quiz bonanza,” where instead of presenting their prepared Wikipedia-esque segments on their chosen subjects, each member instead crafts a short themed quiz, and the other hosts take guesses as to the answers. These episodes are really the highlights for me, as it’s more like a game show, which is what I honestly want from a podcast—one really great, full-length, audio-based game show. Is that so much to ask, Internet? Good Job, Brain! updates every Wednesday.

That’s just about it, I guess. This entry was less about stunning self-realizations and more about personal history. And also, you know, just sharing some cool stuff with you, my readers. My homies. Word up, and such. More tales of self-discovery and rambly navel-gazing next time, I promise.