6 podcasts to add to your rotation this summer, from Maintenance Phase to Uncanny Japan

Whether you’re looking for jaw-dropping facts about your mind and body or petrifying peeks into the afterlife, there is a podcast for you

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Our research found Hongkongers have a greater interest in informative podcasts than entertainment – here’ six summer podcast recommendations to diversify your diet. Image: Shutterstock

Suji Owen

Published: 3:15pm, 12 Jul 2024

On the basis that you are what you consume, I poked around the podcast charts to see what Hong Kong’s audio diet looks like these days. Using Chartable, a website that publishes daily Apple and Spotify charts (as well as its own global rankings) to sift through our collective listening habits, I wish I could say I was surprised by the results.

The top spot flits between Cantonese true crime show Waterblowing Mysteries and JPMorgan’s tech IPO explainer Acquired. Pleasingly, 34 of the overall Apple Top 50 are in Cantonese, but less satisfying is that the relatively few English-language podcasts to feature are densely informational. Week after week, business, news and English-learning shows dominate, occasionally seasoned with global phenomena such as Diary of a CEO or Huberman Labs.

Cover picture of Acquired hosted by Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal

Hongkongers have clearly embraced podcasts’ immense capacity to educate and inform, using them as tools like apps in a smartphone: there’s a podcast for that. Though nutritionally dense, what this diet lacks is spice. Where are the laughs? Where are the rabbit holes? And where on earth is the fiction? For me, the greatest strength of the podcast medium has always been the proliferation of stories you didn’t know you needed, and the sideways, serendipitous moments that stay with you, even years afterwards.

Here then are suggestions for injecting variety into the collective diet – delicious and satisfying podcast repasts old and new because, as everyone knows, man cannot live on edification alone. Sik faan.

1. Maintenance Phase

Cover picture of the podcast Maintenance Phase, hosted by Michael Hobbes and Aubrey Gordon

If we are talking nutrition, the wellness debunking Maintenance Phase podcast provides deeply researched and entertainingly presented reasons not to jump on the latest health fad and to take the concept of BMI with a big grain of dehydrating salt. Popular podcast host Michael Hobbes (You’re Wrong About, If Books Could Kill) and fat activist Aubrey Gordon mercilessly take down baseless weight-loss advice.