Five Best Podcasts Of 2022 To Make You A Better Person

  Podcasts can impact our lives in many ways. Some listeners want to escape and be entertained with audio fiction such as Case 63. Some listeners want to laugh and forget their student loans, healthcare co-pays, and escalating rent with a comedy podcast such as How Did This Get Made. Still others, want to be learning things with a podcast like Stuff You Should Know. 

 Podcast listeners are an aspirational bunch. They view life as an ongoing, immersive inquiry in which they learn how to adjust the parameters of the experiment. In short, podcast listeners want to be better people, and they turn to their most familiar and useful resource -- podcasts.

Now, the five podcasts here are not happiness podcasts or self-help podcasts. Why, you say? Happiness is a highly personal endeavor, as is helping yourself. Being a better person has a social and interpersonal focus. In short, your human community is better of with you than without you.

 All The Wiser

In its four seasons, All The Wiser has talked with people who have experienced life's most challenging events and come out stronger for it. The podcast's episodes unleash that existential question we all ask ourselves when hearing or reading about someone's misfortune. How would I handle that?

Here is a brief list of some of the guests over four seasons on All The Wiser. An NFL player suffering from ALS, a man who jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge and survived, a woman who had a brain stem stroke and lost the ability to talk and hear, a woman who lost both her legs due to a bout of bacterial meningitis, an ESPN reporter who suffered locked-in syndrome for four years, and a man who was burned over 75 percent of his body. 

During the four seasons of the podcast, host Kimi Culp has talked to people about addiction, mental illness, transphobia, sex trafficking, school shootings, and suicide. You'd think these episodes would be downers. But the opposite is true. These episodes are life-affirming, inspirational, motivational, and uplifting. 

Listening to All The Wiser encourages you to be a better person. 

All The Wiser has an "if they can do it, so can I" vibe. In addition to the inspiring stories, credit for the show goes to host and creator Kimi Culp. Her experience includes work as a producer for NBC, ABC, and The Oprah Winfrey Show.

Culp began the podcast in April 2019 with a former NYC firefighter who survived 9/11 only to be struck by a 20-ton bus when running as a triathlete. Her fourth season just began with a fascinating interview with Amanda Knox, who spent four years in an Italian prison before being exonerated. 

While the structure of the podcast is relatively straightforward, it's obvious that Culp has put a lot of thought into what she wanted this podcast to be. To do.

Culp calls All The Wiser a "one-for-one charitable podcast." there is a $2,000 donation made to a non-profit based on the guest after every episode. For example, with the Amanda Knox episode, $2,000 was donated to The Frederick Douglass Project for Justice.

Talk about being a better person.  

There is so much to commend with this podcast. But listening is not an act of mercy. Instead, through empathetic interviewing and compelling storytelling, listeners can draw psychic energy from tales of people who have taken the worst life can throw at them, and still manage to adapt and overcome. 

Check out All The Wiser. It's one of those podcasts that can help you overcome the barriers that life builds in your path. 

All In The Mind

The ABC (Australian Broadcasting Company) podcast All In The Mind is one of the best such podcasts I’ve encountered.

The show’s host is Sana Qadar, who was apparently born to host a podcast. It has to be genetic. She’s just too good to have learned the skills intrinsic to podcast hosting — a resonant voice soaked with empathy and a desire to inform, and a cadence that sounds like each spoken word is carefully curated before being uttered.

Qadar is an award-winning podcaster and journalist whose work has featured on the ABC, BBC, SBS, Al Jazeera, and NPR to name a few. Most recently she was acting Deputy Editor, Multicultural at ABC Life, and co-hosts the SBS podcast Eyes on Gilead, which won a 2019 Australian Podcast Award for Best Fancast.

All In The Mind doesn’t have a novel structure or memorable narrative flow. But it’s so good at delivering fresh insights into each episode topic. In addition, Qadar acts as the narrative glue here, giving voice to well-chosen guests and then summarizing their conclusions. It also helps that the production quality and sound design on the podcast are exemplary. Kudos to the people behind the microphone.

All In The Mind does possess a wandering eye that focuses on a wide range of topics that loosely fit under the typical “psychology” umbrella.

For example, the episode ‘I’m going to cook my baby’ looked at dolls and how they can tell us a lot about how kids see the world — especially when it comes to race. In the episode, one American researcher spent months watching pre-schoolers play with dolls, and what she observed shocked her.

The episode also answers this question. Did you know the very first study of children and their thoughts about dolls actually changed the course of American history?

Can you change your personality? looks at a wish many people make. I wish I could change my personality? Many people do, according to studies cited in the episode, and we would like to — become more extroverted, more agreeable and more conscientious.

The episode poses two critical questions. What does the evidence say about whether people do change? And can you tweak your personality deliberately?

You’ve got the music in you is the most recent episode at the time of this review. In this episode, All In The Mind explores how music affects us from the womb through the rest of our lives — and what new research tells us about its measurable impact on our mental health.

Plus, the ‘plink’ test — how our musical memories can identify a track from just a sliver of song, and the power of music to shape our emotions.

Too often, we read an article or listen to a short podcast about “life hacks,” as if success in life can be distilled into “Marie Kondo-like” rules. The ABC All In The Mind podcast is not about giving us the right answers, but helping us to ask the right questions. 

It's asking those hard questions that can make us a better version of ourselves.

The Nutrition Diva

Today, there are three topics to avoid in polite conversation -- politics, religion and now nutrition. In our diet-obsessed culture, nutritional controversies abound. Is gluten bad for me? Should I eat like prehistoric society? Coconut milk? Almond milk? Fat-free or whole milk? 

Gliding through these tremors of nutritional controversy is Monica Reinagel, the host of the Nutrition Diva podcast. Since 2008, Reinagel has hosted this podcast, guiding us through the shifting sands of nutritional dogma. 

The Nutrition Diva is part of the Quick and Dirty Tips (QDT) network of podcasts, including 15 other short, action-oriented shows about topics that range from parenting to budgeting your money. To its credit, QDT has been one of the most successful organizations at monetizing digital content -- podcasts, videos, e-books, websites -- and The Nutrition Diva happens to rank consistently in the top ten of the iTunes health podcast ratings.

As of December of this year, Reinagel and the podcast are close to an eye-popping 700 episodes, which is an achievement for longevity in the podcast world.

Monica Reinagel is the perfect host for this podcast for several reasons. First, she's eminently qualified, being a licensed nutritionist. Second, she is a well-known author of such books as The Inflammation-Free Diet Plan and is a leading proponent of IF Ratings, which measure the inflammation capacity in each food. 

Third, she's been highly sought after by the media as a nutritional expert, appearing on the Dr. Oz Show, CBS News, The Today Show and in 2011 becoming a regular contributor to The Huffington Post.

Fourth, Reinagel is a classically trained singer and has performed at several opera houses, including the Baltimore Opera Company, as a soloist. How does her vocalist skill impact her podcast credentials? Simple, her voice is like expensive bourbon -- smooth, creamy, herbal and oaky. 

In fact, Reinagel can be just as compelling reading street addresses from a phone book as she is narrating her podcast.

Each podcast --about ten minutes in length -- deals with a specific topic that Reinagel often receives from her listeners. Moreover, she's at her best when sorting out nutrition fads from solid advice.

For example. Reinagel has tackled the gluten-free controversy with her usual aplomb, arguing that there is scant evidence that gluen is bad for most people who don't have celiac disease, while freely admitting that a gluten-free diet can help with sustained weight loss, simply because a lot of foods that have gluten --cookies, cakes, white breads, etc -- are also high in calories and saturated fat.

She's also taken on the unpasteurized milk craze and spent two episodes of the health halo surrounding bee pollen. Recently, Reinagel discussed resistant starch and how chilling rice properly cut reduce calories.

With her expertise in nutrition, Reinagel also links cooking with good nutritional habits. A recent episode, for example, discusses how to use a slow cooker and an episode last year talked about cooking vegan.

 What makes this podcast especially helpful is wide-angle view of nutrition, tackling everything from bone broth to zinc lozenges and melatonin as a sleep aid to energy versus nutrient density. There's no topic out of Reinagel's field of vision and that keeps her podcast fresh week after week.

There are hundreds of excellent health and fitness podcasts in the audio universe. What makes The Nutrition Diva so special because host Reinagel refuses to allow her listeners to be seduced by social media nonsense, conveniently crafted theories, and conjecture disguised as fact. She's not selling a lifestyle, a diet, specially prepared food menus.

Instead, Reinagel helps her listeners use science to discover a healthier life and be a superior version of themselves.

 

Preconceived

  As a podcast, Preconceived exists to question the current state of affairs. Why are we groomed to accept norms as they are? Are we all destined to go to school, find a stable job, get married, have kids, then enjoy our retirement and older age? Do we hold certain beliefs because we value them, or because someone else told us to?

By challenging the paradigms that shape our world view, we discover what we want and why life is worth living. Yes, agency can be overwhelming. 

"But when we simply ask the question 'why', we are free to take control and live our most authentic lives," explains Zale Mednick, the podcast's host, who is a Canadian ophthalmologist with an eye and ear for insightful interviews.

In an interview wirrg Mednick earlier this year, he discusses how preconceived notions hurt us and damge our connection to others.

"Echo chambers and social media have made it easier than ever to not think differently, and to just follow the status quo. I’ve been discouraged at times by the response to certain episodes I’ve recorded. I posted the episode regarding Transgender Athletes with Joanna Harper on our YouTube channel. I thought Joanna spoke very articulately and presented a balanced viewpoint on what many consider to be a controversial topic. Some of the comments to the video were hateful and rude to Joanna, and it was clear that those writing the comments hadn’t even listened to the episode; they just saw the subject line and started typing away."

During the year, episodes of note included reimagining marriage, life extension, beauty myths, and the effect of birth order.

Mednick continues: "I think one of the biggest problems in society is that we don’t listen enough. People are often so set in expressing their opinions, that it feels like they aren’t hearing what is being said to them. When observing conversations, whether on the news or in our own lives, it can feel like people aren’t really listening, but just waiting for their turn to interject with what they think."

For all the stubbornness out there, there are people who do want to listen, have honest conversations, and just be better people.  

Profoundly Pointless

You know that you've succeeded in podcasting when you can record and then release an 85-minute episode when the subject matter is boredom. That's right. Profoundly Pointless founder and host Nick VinZant introduced boredom expert James Danckert to discuss all aspects of boredom.

Was the episode boring, you want to know?

Absolutely not.

VinZant, who's been doing this gig since 2018, is adept at turning water into wine. The episode fascinated me and other listeners, and I came away with a different perspective of boredom.

Danckert, the expert, explains in the episode: "...when you suggest that boredom serves a functional sort of purpose in our lives, you're also sort of hinting at the fact that it might indeed have an evolutionary history. If boredom is functional, then presumably it was selected for and if it was selected for evolution, then presumably, we can see it in other animals. And you can, so anyone that's owned a dog knows that dogs get bored, right? You come home, and you've got one of your shoes torn up while the dog was bored. And so we tore up your shoe, we didn't have any malice in it. But scientifically, we've also sort of demonstrated this"

That's why Profoundly Pointless is all about. Delivering answers to listeners about the dumbest questions possible. Want to know what a cigar blender does? VinZant has an episode for that. Cosmetic chemist? Swordsmith? Pizza acrobat? Intimacy coach? 

Profoundly Pointless has answers for its growing roster of listeners.

In this world today, we hide under our weighted blankets with our earbuds in, so we don't hear a discordant tone that ruptures our carefully sculpted worldview.

Profoundly Pointless isn't political at all, but it does sonically draw its listeners into a universe where what people do in life is different. It's exciting. Exhilarating. 

 

 

Photo by Darina Belonogova