Podcast Rec: 50 Things That Shaped the Modern Economy

For years, I worked on the theory that I was not built for podcast listening. I didn’t like the formats people used, and the signal-to-noise ratio didn’t add up when I looked at fitting them into my schedule. Then I discovered the genre of podcasts I really enjoyed: short, topic-focused essays and the interview series, as exemplified by Writing Excuses, the Allusionist, and Chris Jericho’s wrestling interviews.

Recently a whole host of the podcasts I listen to regularly went dormant, so I started searching for things to replace it. The one that’s really captured my attention: BBC World’s 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy.

The series is everything I want from the format: short, informative, and generally built around a seemingly innocuous topic that ultimately changes the way you see or understand the world around you.

Which isn’t a bad result for something which spends 8 minutes charting the history of things like barcodes and spreadsheets. The transition from “this is how someone built a program to handle complex accounting calculations” to “this is actually a meditation on what ‘the robots will take our jobs’ actually looks like’ is deftly handled, and always leaves me wanting to go and check out their source texts to find out more.

Strongly recommended.