Subscribe to my new podcast playlists!

Good times for a change

Hey friends, welcome back to Follow Friday! For reasons that will imminently become obvious, I want to start by thanking everyone who has been reading this newsletter since its return in September. You rock.

I told ChatGPT to imagine what you all would look like as ducks, with my vaguest prompt to date: They have to look cool, do cool stuff, wear fashionable clothes, and be having a great time.

🐈‍⬛ Déjà vu all over again

Usually in this part of the newsletter, there’s a section called “What I’m reading.” But in the weeks since the election, the answer to that has been a lot of political stuff that is generally quite depressing.

I’m sure you’re getting plenty of that in your media diet, too, and — notwithstanding my occasional rants about whatever tech company has pissed me off most recently — I don’t want Follow Friday to be a bummer.

On top of all that, my work at LightningPod is keeping me busy enough that I have less and less time these days to spend newslettering. I want to focus that time on the thing that brought most of you here in the first place: Podcasts.

That means this newsletter is going through a big change, again. For now, at least, I’m going to nix the reading/YouTube/TikTok/movie sections (although you can still follow me on Letterboxd for all my takes on cinema such as 13 Going on 30 and School of Rock).

I’m also going to make it a lot easier to listen to my podcast recommendations.

🚨 My new podcast playlists

Nobody wants to listen to a podcast in their email app. But I stand by all the episodes I recommend here, and I want you to listen to them, too! So, I have a couple new things you should try.

First, if you use Spotify, you can follow this playlist to get my new recommendations in the app. Clicking that link will open the Spotify app, and then you can click on the plus sign to follow the playlist.

No Spotify? No problem! I’m sharing the same episodes in a playlist on ListenNotes.com, which you can get in whatever podcast app you use.

Here’s the the playlist on Listen Notes, and here is the public RSS feed. You can copy that second link and paste it into almost any app — including Apple Podcasts, Overcast, and Pocket Casts — to get my playlist. If you’re not sure how to do that, find your app in Transistor’s guide and follow the instructions.

I’ll be adding to these lists continually, no more than one episode per day. I’ll remove episodes once they’re about a week old, to keep it fresh.

🎧 What I’m listening to

Here’s the Spotify version of the playlist:

This week’s picks so far... Stars for the ones I edited:

• Lock and Code, “An air fryer, a ring, and a vacuum get brought into a home. What they take out is your data” (27min) *

• Grit, “CEO and Co-Founder Codeium, Varun Mohan w/ Leigh Marie Braswell: Limitless” (1hr) *

• Acquired, “IKEA” (3hr22min - I promise, it’s worth it)

• Imaginary Worlds, “There’s No Place Like Oz” (38min)

Give one of the playlists a follow, and let me know what you think!

🙏 Hey, thanks!

Thank you for being a loyal subscriber. And if a friend forwarded this to you, please consider subscribing for more!

If you or your business/school/organization are looking for help starting a podcast or leveling up an existing show, please get in touch with me at LightningPod. All experience levels are welcome!