Without Fail

I can’t imagine hearing my recorded voice and it sounding as listenable as Alex Blumberg (and Ira Glass and Sara Koenig). Part of that listenability is all the technical stuff: tone, volume and cadence but the other part is how well Alex...well, listens. 

No disrespect to the Mighty O (Oprah) as I love her podcast as well but what makes me prefer Blumberg’s style is that I feel like he is actually listening while Oprah can sometimes break the flow and project her thoughts and interpretation onto the subject and that can get a bit...for lack of a better word, annoying.

The wide variety that Alex covers in Without Fail also expands my lens of what people are experiencing and that’s invaluable. If you only listen to business podcasts or self-help or true crime, your worldview starts to become myopic and shows like Without Fail provides a portal to travel to entire new universes (like the latest episode about professional cycling) from the people who actually live there. Not every episode is a home run but it’s definitely a joy of mine to see a new episode appear in my library every week to see where I’ll travel to next! 8/10