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Good Talk - It's Canadian politics but they can make Canadian politics seem interesting which is a huge accomplishment in itself.

Apologies for pushing stuff I'm involved with but The Devil's Library fulfils that criteria - it's a book related podcast with myself and fellow atheistic Satanists talking about books (nothing to do with Satanism, just ordinary fiction). No ads, no sponsors. It is very lightly edited just to improve audio quality and eliminate the odd moment when we talk over each other but other than that, what you hear is what we've said.

It is mostly also available on PeerTube but the last couple are missing as the instance we're on has been struggling a bit, we're trying to get it sorted in the new year.

Dr. Mike's The Checkup is interesting. He is usually very empathic but critical of his guests views and as far as I know unedited. just an hour of conversation about (usually) medical topics. Sometimes more US specific

The conversations in the Waking Up app are high quality and the participants are either well informed or experts. It's meditation focused but they talk about many adjacent topics such as neuroscience, time management and philosophy. Hundreds of hours of content.

Let's Learn Everything is great. The hosts each research a science related topic each week and they explain it and discuss it on the show. It's really interesting, quite fun.

Why?

Why are you looking for this specific format if all other examples have been unpleasant for you?

The only thing I can think of is that you are promoting something using an alt account. I'm sure there are more reasons why someone might, but I'm just drawing a blank. Like, if you had an interest in something and were looking for a podcast on that topic then I would get it. I really don't get the motivation here though

Nathan Fillion and Alan Tudyck recently started Once We Were Spaceman and is primarily the two just chatting. I've been enjoying it a lot so far!

I don't know if it is recommendation material but it is the only one that comes to mind within my subscriptions.

How Bizarre, four friends rambling a bit about life before getting into whatever topic they have, usually creepy tales, paranormal stuff, true crime, weird news, whatever. The show feels like their excuse to keep in touch. No ads.

This Week in Tech hosted by Leo Laporte, with a panel of 2-4 guests every week, focused on technology news. Leo has been podcasting since before it was called podcasting. Some of you may remember him as the host of The Screen Savers from TechTV, or The Tech Guy radio show.

Decentered a podcast about the Fediverse with involved developers as guests!

The Delta Flyers Tom (Robert Duncan McNeill) and Harry (Garrett Wang) talk about working on Voyager, with other Star Trek cast & crew as guests. They've actually finished all of Voyager (nice backlog to listen to) and started covering DS9, adding Jadzia (Terry Farrell) and Quark (Armin Shimerman) as co-hosts.

risky.biz This one's more niche, a weekly global cybersecurity news review. Patrick Gray (the show runner) and Adam Boileau (regular co-host) are old experts in infosec with a lot of knowledge and a lot of industry contacts who they interview regularly. In the present there's a lot of overlap with international politics, so getting an understanding of current events from the cybersecurity perspective is pretty interesting. If you are a professional working in IT or a hobbyist with an interest in computer networking or information security you should be listening to this one regularly.

Most of the podcasts I listen to are this format. I think their enjoyment might come down to knowing (or being interested in getting to know) the speakers’ personalities.

Omnibus — Ken Jennings (of Jeopardy fame) and Jonn Roderick (of The Long Winters (or bean dad) fame) take turns on doing a deep dive on some weird but true topic.

Filmcast — Film nerds (David Chen, Devindra Hardawar, and Jeff Cannata) talk about new movies they’ve watched and TV Shows they’re watching

The Incomparable — Geeks talking about various pop culture topics. This is a whole network with various podcasts focusing on different aspects of pop culture. I linked to the “main” feed which is where you’ll usually find new movie releases, but they also go back and discuss movies they’ve watched missed and classic too. Or if you’d rather browse by topic

The Accidental Tech Podcast — Three friends from childhood and professional geeks discuss current technology topics with a heavy focus on Apple from a developer and consumer perspective.

The Rest is History — Two English historians discuss various history topics from around the world at length. They just wrapped up a four part series on Jack the Ripper.

…that should be a reasonable start I hope.

On Being with Krista Tippett has an unedited version.

Dark Horse is a fantastic one. The main episodes are Bret and Heather (married couple) and Bret also does interviews with guests

Not entirely un scripted or un edited, but Citations Needed have a well informed conversation format and every episode they interview someone new, where they go un scripted.

Majority Report

I’d recommend the Acquired podcast. I believe both hosts do their own independent research, and it shows. They know their stuff.

Lots of excellent episodes but the Costco, Trader Joe’s and Epic Systems (MyChart) episodes are particularly fascinating to me.

Before I read the body of the post, I was going to recommend "gl;hf" (the only podcast I've really listened to in quite a while), but they don't stay on topic. There is no topic, really. It's just rambling about whatever comes to them as it comes up.

At the beginning of every episode, they start with "welcome to gl;hf, the world's first podcast in gaming." And the running joke is that they rarely talk about gaming at all.

Largely they talk about being prolific career YouTube content creators, but they may delve into random stuff like the U.S. National Cheese Reserve or the ethics of eating lab-grown human meat or Uncle Wiggily board games.

On the plus side, they're always interested in what they're talking about.