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The Best New Podcasts I Heard in 2017

Posted by Matt Birchler
— 3 min read

Below are 7 podcasts that have shot to the top of my podcast priorities in 2017. Not all of them are new shows this year, but in all cases they are shows that I never heard before 2017. Shows like ATP, Cortex, and The Talk Show remained excellent this year, but these are the newcomers that I hope will become old reliable shows in the coming years.

Bring Your Own Device

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Greg Morris and Nathan Shocat team up to talk tech. I had the pleasure of being a guest on their show last month and it was a blast. Also, this show has the most Qualcomm talk you’ll get on any the podcast you’ve ever heard (if you’re into that sort of thing).

Dissect

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I just discovered this show a week ago, but it’s already one of my favorites of the year. This is a serialized podcast that discusses one album, track by track each season. The first season was in 2016 and talked about Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, and this year was season 2 which talked about my favorite album of all time: Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.

Easy Allies Podcast

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The best gaming podcast I listen to these days, The Easy Allies Podcast is full of positive, smart people talking about games. The games media is terrible more often than not, and EZA is a nice reprieve from the “gamer” culture that puts me off so much from a medium I otherwise love.

Vector

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I don’t think this is the best show on the list, but I have to give host Rene Ritchie a special achievement award for sheer mass of content produced. This is a daily show (even on Christmas!) and it’s not just a few minutes each day, it’s a full length show of 45 minutes or more. The show has guests and quality production and it comes…out…every…day.

As of writing this, there have been 46 episodes and the show started on November 14. For comparison, The BirchTree Podcast has 46 episodes and it launched on January 4!

Pod Save America

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Pod Save America is the exact podcast I (and apparently America) needed this year. Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, Dan Pfeiffer and Tommy Vietor break down the news of the day in entertaining, insightful ways. They’re partisan, sure, but they’re not blowhards by any means.

Lovett or Leave It

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Hosted by Jon Lovett, this live, comedy-politics show has become a Saturday morning staple for me and my wife. The show regularly has fun guests and provides the comedic relief we need at the end of most weeks these days.

Whims That Work

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Drew Coffman and Joe Buhlig have put together one of the more surprising podcasts of the year for me. They talk mostly about productivity and their workflows on iOS and macOS. If you’re reading this blog, there’s a good chance this show is right up your alley.