TL;DR: I listen to podcasts. A lot of them. Perhaps too many. There is a list below of my favorites. You can look at the list rather than reading my rambling introduction, I guess.

So it was 1993, the internet was a blossoming place. The world wide web was rapidly gaining over a variety of other services. I think it was an O’Rielly newsletter which pointed out the first episode of Internet Talk Radio. One of my friends had the task of downloading the audio file, which took hours, and we sat around his computer listening to it. Being that cumbersome I don’t think I ever listened to any other subsequent shows.

At one point in my life I started noticing my habbit of turning on the TV as soon as I got home from work, and it was on until I went to bed. When I was moving in the year 2000, I decided to drop that habit and since my TV was missing its antenna all I had to do was drop cable to break that habit. I replaced that habit with turning on the radio (NPR) as soon as I got home. But that was an improvement, since audio does not hinder me from doing other things around the house.

Some radio stations were starting to stream onto the internet, so I was able to follow some shows, notably Go Vegan Radio. I think it was 2003 when I heard about Cristopher Lydon’s show The Whole Wide World. Apparently this show was was the reason RSS added the ability to include audio files, which was the birth of podcasting. Though, as is often the case with me, I failed to notice the significance for several years

Sometime around 2006, after a concert of the band “Fruit”, I went to get a CD and one of the band members saw my vegan tshirt and suggested I read Peter Singer. That triggered a memory and when I got home I looked for interviews with Gary Francione. I knew that my wife had listened to an NPR interview with him which inspired her to become vegan, and I suspect I remembered him critiquing Singer. I found the Veganfreak podcast’s interview with him, and I listened to that podcast regularily as long as it ran. I think this marks the start of me actively seeking out and regularly listening to podcasts, but with several different software packages, but after I got an Android phone I settled on AntennaPod.

So, what follows are the podcasts you must listen to (this list is going to grow over time, stay tuned):