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.
Bill Maher says he made his early career harder by openly hating his audience
The late-night host tells Lisa Kudrow that his refusal to smile through a bad set made his rise in comedy much more difficult than it had to be.
A SEAL Team 6 operator says his only combat regret is hiding his Christian faith from a teammate who died days later.
The anonymous DEVGRU veteran survived a house-borne IED in 2008, but he is still haunted by a conversation he dodged.
Kathy Wakile says she deliberately stopped participating in RHONJ scenes before her exit
The former New Jersey housewife has no regrets about walking away from Bravo, largely because she stopped playing the game long before her contract ended.
Dr. Leanne Ten Brinke says you can spot a psychopath in exactly five seconds
Forensic psychologist Dr. Leanne Ten Brinke explains why we fall for dark personalities, and the specific physical 'douche smile' that gives them away.
Maureen Callahan says Sarah Jessica Parker will never get another acting job of consequence
On The Megyn Kelly Show, Callahan turned a commencement-speech critique into a full career indictment of the actress behind Carrie Bradshaw.
Sarah Jessica Parker says Northwestern graduates were 'a beautiful burden'
The line was meant to sound intimate and literary, but it gave The Megyn Kelly Show exactly the kind of celebrity commencement goo it was built to roast.
Martin Picard says Steve Jobs's reality distortion field was an energetic quality, not just charisma
The mitochondrial scientist turns Steve Jobs lore into a theory of human energy, and yes, the metaphor is doing push-ups.
Dr. Tommy Wood says six months of Norwegian 4x4 intervals protected older adults' hippocampus for five years
The Huberman Lab guest made the anti-cortisol crowd sound like people afraid of rain because floods exist.
Maureen Callahan says Taylor Swift asked Steven Spielberg to film her dancing with Travis Kelce
The host treats the Spielberg phone handoff as the perfect little fossil of modern celebrity, famous people making even other famous people part of the content machine.
Don Lincoln says we exist because the early universe had one extra matter particle per billion antimatter particles
The Fermilab physicist framed existence as the leftover scrap from a cosmic matter-antimatter wipeout, then admitted nobody knows what caused the imbalance.
Ryan Hawk says the Beatles were afraid to play their own music and started by copying others verbatim
On Young and Profiting, Hawk turns the Beatles into a permission slip for early-career imitation, with one giant warning label attached.
Matt Ehret says Majestic 12 is fake because its typewriter and Truman signatures give it away
The UFO disclosure debate gets a paperwork problem, then turns into a full CIA myth-management theory.
Chris Riccobono says tariffs pulled $9 million from UNTUCKit’s bank account
The UNTUCKit founder turned an advice episode into a grim little postcard from the new retail math.
Darren Candow says elevated kidney markers from creatine are false positives 99 out of 100 times
The creatine researcher says the supplement’s scariest reputation is mostly a lab-test misunderstanding, not kidney damage.
Maureen Callahan says Taylor Swift looked like Elaine Benes after asking Steven Spielberg to film her dancing
The burn is funny, but the sharper point is how completely Swift’s idea of spontaneity now comes pre-directed.
Arthur C. Brooks says 95% of diets fail because the reward is realizing you can never eat what you like again
The happiness scholar's best point is not that willpower is weak, it is that weight-loss goals are often designed to emotionally collapse the moment they succeed.
Carl Hayden Smith says 78% of IV DMT users see entities, and some meet the entities' children
The claim is wild, oddly domestic, and a useful reminder that psychedelic research keeps producing data that sounds like a Pixar sequel written in a hospital ward.
George Mack says Belgium’s driving theory test raised the death rate for new drivers by 32%
On Modern Wisdom, Mack turns Belgian road safety into a brutal little parable about false confidence, bad incentives, and the danger of thinking you know what you’re doing.
Megyn Kelly says Jennifer Lopez's True Romance sex list is J.Lo playing a game
Kelly bought Christian Slater as a believable celebrity crush, then bailed the second the list became a whole 1993 movie cast.
Sean Stone says a black program craft may have used lasers to spread the Palisades fire
The filmmaker and conspiracy media regular turns the LA fires into a secret aircraft theory, and the leap from eyewitness weirdness to smart city arson is doing Evel Knievel work.
Caitlin Bea says she nearly became a Sims creator instead of a BookTok creator
The BookTok personality's pandemic fork in the road explains why her reading taste feels less like literary canon and more like hobby monetization with better lighting.
Maureen Callahan says Sarah Jessica Parker's son James Wilkie Broderick does not have what it takes to be a model
The Megyn Kelly Show clip turns a People-style celebrity-kid photo item into a blunt nepo-baby verdict.
Rob Shuter says Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s Madison Square Garden wedding rumor is a decoy
The gossip veteran’s bet is that MSG is the meeting point, not the altar, and that the real wedding happens somewhere else while cameras camp out in Midtown.
Vincent Oshana says Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey has no Greek actors in major roles
The PBD Podcast liked Nolan's Homer epic, but Oshana couldn't get past the weirdest casting detail: a Greek story with almost no Greek presence.
Greg Carlwood says Neo’s Matrix passport expires on 9/11 because it was advanced sigil magic
The conspiracy podcaster rejects the usual karmic warning theory and offers something stranger: mass-media magic hiding in a single movie-prop frame.
Chuck Surack says Sweetwater sales engineers can make nearly $500,000 a year in Fort Wayne
The Sweetwater founder’s best argument against Amazon is not nostalgia for phone calls, it is a sales job that looks more like a paid residency for music gear obsessives.
Andy Stumpf says the Green Beret community has lost more people to suicide than combat since 2001
The retired Navy SEAL turned Huberman guest offered the bleakest metric in an episode stocked with discipline advice, then made the case that the real danger is often the quiet man who won’t say he’s in trouble.
Rob Shuter says Taylor Swift’s Madison Square Garden wedding rumor is probably a decoy
The celebrity journalist argues the Madison Square Garden chatter feels too Kardashian, too public, and too convenient to be the real Taylor Swift wedding plan.
Annie Jacobsen says a biological attack could push America from outbreak to anarchy in six days
The author of Nuclear War: A Scenario argues that the real bioweapon nightmare is not just death, but the speed at which fear of infection breaks a country.
Mark Milley says he’d probably call China before a U.S. attack to calm fears Trump was starting a war
The PBD Podcast turns Milley’s “I’ll probably give you a call” line into treason bait, but the quote itself is messier and less explosive than the outrage version.
Mel Robbins says writing your unfinished to-do list at night can work better than some sleep medication
The strongest idea in Robbins's bedtime script is also the most suspiciously useful one, put the unfinished mess on paper and stop letting your brain cosplay as a project manager at midnight.
A CERN physicist says CERN is not trying to create a black hole
On The Shawn Ryan Show, a theoretical physicist punctured the best CERN conspiracy by making the real thing sound both safer and, somehow, nerdier.
Marc Brackett says teachers can grade the same essay one to two full grades differently depending on their mood
The Yale emotional intelligence researcher makes a useful, slightly terrifying case that your feelings are already making decisions before you think you are.
Patrick Bet-David says Amy Coney Barrett should resign if threats made her vote less conservative
The PBD Podcast turned Barrett's bulletproof vest story into a much bigger accusation, that fear may be changing Supreme Court votes.
Alex Petkas says The Odyssey is about the collapse of the patriarchy and how violence restores it
The Cost of Glory host reads Homer less as a travel adventure than as a bloody manual for putting a household, and a civilization, back in order.