This Week’s Indie Star: Congratulations to Ayesha Khan of Every Single Sci-Fi Film Ever for her four-part miniseries about one of the greatest (if you’re not a fan, then one of the most intriguing) sci-fi films ever made: 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick. “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that” is ranked #78 on the AFI’s top 100 movie quotations. Her four-part series is a masterpiece.
Lies We Bought
What’s This Podcast About: Lies We Bought is an award-winning myth-busting podcast hosted by former advertising and marketing executive Emily Rask. It traces famous advertising slogans, corporate deceptions, cultural conditioning, and marketing myths back to their origins. Rask uses her background in building ad campaigns to “read the fine print out loud,” combining branding history with consumer psychology.
Who Will Enjoy This Podcast: It’s one of those “everyone” podcasts because marketing affects us all. The topics are far-ranging, from “Got Milk?” to the 10,000-steps-a-day goal, and from “Made in USA” labels to how infomercials evolved into TikTok Shop.
Creator/Host: Emily Rask’s LinkedIn profile says: “I’m an award-winning marketer turned podcaster with a decade under my belt, proving that great strategy and smart storytelling can sell just about anything, including the lies we bought along the way.”
Lies We Bought just won a Gold Signal Award in the 2026 Signal Awards for Creativity & Marketing.
What I love about the show: First, Emily Rask has already made it into my A-tier of podcast hosts, and I’ve only listened to four episodes so far! She reminds me of Cristen Conger from the Conspiracy, She Wrote podcast. She has a snarky sassiness to her. Second, the show exposes how advertising and marketing seduce us, even when we claim we skip TV commercials and never read ads online. Yeah, right.
Recommended Episode to start listening with: How did drinking water become a moral achievement? Rask asks, “How did drinking water become a moral achievement?” Rask tells us that “Hydration used to be a biological need. Somewhere along the way, it became a wellness routine, a personality trait, and a daily metric to prove you are doing life correctly.”
Talking Common With Josh Connolly
What’s This Podcast About: Talking Common with Josh Connolly offers an alternative to the crowded self-development landscape. It brings working-class voices and often overlooked experiences into conversations about the issues shaping modern Britain, encouraging listeners to look beyond division and discover what they have in common with others.
Who Will Enjoy This Podcast: People who enjoy self-help books and social media self-help tips.
Creator/Host: Josh Connolly is a bestselling author, breathwork facilitator, and resilience speaker. Other than being an author, I do not know what the other qualifications are, but they sound impressive.
What I love about the show: Josh Connolly explores a question at the heart of modern life: What if self-help has taught us to look inward for answers to problems we can only solve together?
Moving beyond traditional self-help, “Talking Common is about challenging the idea that the answer is always to work harder on ourselves. I believe we heal through connection, community, and recognizing our shared humanity,” says Josh Connolly, host of Talking Common.
I admire that the show will bring working-class voices and often overlooked experiences into conversations about the issues shaping modern Britain, encouraging listeners to look beyond division and discover what they have in common with others.
The show begins on YouTube on November 5th.
Lawyering Without Law
What’s This Podcast About: Lawyering Without Law is a legal and thought leadership podcast by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, and it just won both a Silver Signal Award and the Listener’s Choice Award in the Limited Series and Specials, Thought Leadership category.
Who Will Enjoy This Podcast: Anyone worried about the state of U.S. democracy. January Sixers, white supremacists, and fascists need not listen.
Creator/Host: Columbia Law Professor and Knight Institute Senior Fellow Madhav Khosla and Knight Institute Research Director Katy Glenn Bass host the series, which connects historical and international examples to the challenges facing American democracy today.
What I love about the show: Democracy is extremely fragile in any nation. History has taught us that when democratic principles give way to authoritarianism, the shift is so gradual that citizens don't recognize it until it's too late.
Recommended Episode to start listening with: From Torture to Trump — Former Navy General Counsel Alberto Mora recounts his efforts to challenge torture under the Bush administration and reflects on the lasting consequences of failures of accountability.
Points North: A Great Lakes Podcast
What’s This Podcast About: Points North is a window into life in the Great Lakes. Each episode tells a story rooted here that ends up being about all of us. A smooth-talking stone skipper. A woman forced to sell her family sawmill. A scientist who stumbles on a tree that shouldn’t exist. We take you into the woods, onto the water, down a back road, or into the life of someone who calls this place home.
Who Will Enjoy This Podcast: Anyone who loved A Prairie Home Companion by Garrison Keillor. The public radio variety show ran from 1974 to 2016.
Creator/Host: Points North is part of the NPR Network.
What I love about the show: It has received numerous accolades, including its second national Edward R. Murrow Award in three years. The show was also honored in the Excellence in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion category for the episode, “Big Abe’s Net,” a story about Ojibwe fisherman Abe LeBlanc and his fight for tribal fishing rights in the Great Lakes.
Recommended Episode to start listening with: Tossing and Turning: Every night in her dreams, a woman is forced to relive a deadly storm. A Curious Case of Goo: A boat captain discovers a strange black goo. It turns out to be a new lifeform.
Falling Tree
What’s This Podcast About: The Falling Tree podcast is an audio series featuring curated documentaries, radio features, and sound art drawn from the 30-year archive of Falling Tree Productions, a London-based independent radio production company. The show features short-form, eclectic audio documentaries and narrative soundscapes — often around 20 minutes long.
Who Will Enjoy This Podcast: Documentary lovers.
Creator/Host: Alan Hall and Eleanor McDowall created and produce it. Falling Tree Productions is well known for crafting distinctive audio work for broadcasters like BBC Radio 4 (including projects like Short Cuts hosted by Josie Long).
What I love about the show: I love its sonic aspect. Listen to what the creators say: “Sounds that can reconfigure the world around you, move you through inner landscapes, sink into your dreams.”
I also admire the responsibility Hall and McDowall feel to their audience, as they say: “We are an intentionally small company that considers carefully the creative, social and political aspects of the work we put out into the world.”
Recommended Episode to start listening with: The Sound of Sport. The creators ask: “What do you hear when you watch sport? Dennis Baxter, the sound designer of the 2012 London Olympics, guides you through the sonic worlds of sports broadcasting.” This episode is a sonic masterpiece!
Life After Band
What’s This Podcast About: Life After Band is a podcast about life after leaving a band you spent years—or even decades—with, or after a band breaks up. Creator/host Amedeo Berta asks critical questions about such a breakup: What does this event mean for our identity and everyday life? What do we miss about it — and what don’t we miss at all?
What is something precious we will always carry with us after this experience? Has our relationship with music changed? How healthy was the decision to leave — or to break up — the band?
Who Will Enjoy This Podcast: Music lovers. Anyone who was ever in a band and understands the trials and tribulations of being bandmates in a brutally competitive business.
Creator/Host: Amedeo Berta told me: “ I’m a podcast host and producer — and I’m also a musician. I’ve been in bands since I was 15. In January 2026, I left my most recent band after 14 years of weekly rehearsals, shows, miles and miles on the road, and brotherhood. That was huge for me. I’ve decided to deal with it the way podcasters do: making a podcast.”
Since 2019, Amedeo Berta has been writing, producing, and hosting Strano Podcast (Best Podcast in the “Indie–Entertainment” category at the 2023 Italian Podcast Awards), a format with over 115 episodes.
What I love about the show: I love the premise. A podcast about what happens to musicians after they are no longer in a band.
Recommended Episode to start listening with: Blazes’ life after Iron Maiden. From ’94 to ’99, Blaze Bayley was the singer of Iron Maiden, one of the most influential heavy metal bands of all time. He was already a huge fan of the band, and joining them felt like a dream. In this episode, Blaze opened up about this life-changing experience, his ongoing solo career, his love for music, mental health, hard times, and a few other things.
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This week’s Forbes article
Most Podcasts Can’t Make Money Selling Ads
Check out books by Frank Racioppi. Everything from novels and nonfiction to podcasting books and essays.
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