Dress smart, hear the echo, and ask great questions

Favour time! I would love to be able to include some testimonials on the Podcasts for Nerds homepage. If you're enjoying these emails, it'd be great if you could tweet one thing you like about them; "I like this newsletter because it summarises podcasts I'm too lazy to listen to" - that sort of thing. Include the hashtag #podcastsForNerds, and I'll embed them on the PFN site.

Three great episodes to listen to this week:

Suits, Articles of Interest (33mins, 2020-05-26)

Podcasting heavy-weight 99 Percent Invisible will no doubt feature a lot in this newsletter; their deep-dives into niche topics are prime fodder for us nerds. For now, treat yourself to an episode from their clothing-focused mini-series, Articles of Interest. Avery Trufelman covers the history of the suit, from Beau Brummell through to the modern day. Find it here.

Sound Break: Hagia Sophia, The World According to Sound (4mins, 2020-04-09)

This one sent shivers down my spine. In this remarkable four-minute show you get to hear some normal-sounding chanting, but then you get to hear it again as it would have sounded in the Hagia Sophia - a building with an 11 second (!) reverb. Find it here.

How to make millions by writing online (Sam Parr of the Hustle), Indie Hackers (60mins 2020-05-08)

People who have the self confidence to drag a profitable business out of literally nothing (like, the absolute tiniest shred of an idea) tend to not be the kind of people I'd want to hang out with, and I'm pretty sure Sam Parr is one of those guys. All of this interview is interesting on an academic level, but I find Parr himself quite annoying. However (and here's the real value-proposition of this newsletter) I've trawled through the whole thing to be able to tell you about the great section in the middle of this podcast where Parr outlines one of his key superpowers: asking questions. The kicker is that he then demonstrates it perfectly by grilling the host, Courtland Allen. Find it here.

Not a podcast, but...

Tom Scott's "Things you might not know" series has been running for years, and all of them are great (if fact, his whole channel is consistently awesome in the most nerdy way possible). His latest, Why You Can Spot Bad Green Screen is particularly relevant to those of us who've been messing about with Zoom's "virtual backgrounds" lately (as well as simply highlighting why some bad TV looks so bad). Watch it here.

As always, feel free to forward this email to someone you think might like it. And if you've been forwarded this email (by someone awesome, no doubt), you can sign up for yourself at podcastsfornerds.com to be sent all future issues. And I'm serious about the Twitter thing; it'd really help me out.

Thanks again, Tom.