How to find good podcast episodes

The “New episodes” list is a trap! It favours novelty and serendipity over quality and relevance. Much of the time, the best thing to listen to is a high quality discussion of a topic that’s already on my mind. It usually doesn’t matter if the episode was released today or 10 years ago. ## Podcast search The website [listennotes.com](http://listennotes.com/) is the best podcast search engine I’ve found. You can: 1. Search all episodes of all podcasts for a topic or person of interest. 2. Save interesting results to your “Listen later” playlist. 3. Listen to episodes from the playlist using your favourite podcast app. _The “Listen later” playlists have an RSS feed that you can subscribe to in the usual way._ An alternative: the Podcast Addict mobile app lets you search across all episodes of all the podcasts you subscribe to. If you know a good mobile app with a ListenNotes-style search function, please send me a note. ## Create an RSS feed for podcast search results [MyPod](https://mypod.online/) lets you create an RSS feed based on a Listen Notes search query. When new matches are released, they'll show up on your feed. E.g. [search results for "Tyler Cowen"](https://mypod.online/?q=tyler+cowen). This is a good way to keep up with people you're interested in. It's also good for finding other good podcasts: if someone you like has appeared on a podcast, chances are that podcast will have other episodes of interest. You can also use the [Listen Notes Alerts](https://www.listennotes.com/alerts/). So far as I can tell, it does the same thing as [MyPod], but with some more advanced filtering options. Each Listen Notes alert feed costs $1 / month. ## Curated episode feeds A small number of people have started publishing curated feeds of their favourite episodes: * [The Valmy](https://thevalmy.com) — I run this one! * [The Podcast Browser](https://www.thepodcastbrowser.com/) * [The Syllabus](https://www.the-syllabus.com/) I don’t know why more people aren’t doing this. ## Other podcast apps of interest * [Shuffle](https://getshuffle.app/) seems promising, I’ll try it again in 2021. * [Breaker](https://www.breaker.audio/) is trying to do social podcasting and might be good one day. I found the app unusable because it auto-downloads the most recent episodes of all 250+ podcasts I subscribe to, and I couldn’t switch this function off. * [Listennotes.com](https://www.listennotes.com/api/apps/) publishes a list of apps that use its API. Presumably one of these will eventually implement the UI I’m looking for…