Recommendation Engine: What’s the point in Gavin Newsom’s podcast?

plus How Do You Cope? and Luigi

10:00 AM GMT+1 on April 2, 2025

Welcome to this week's Recommendation Engine from Podcast Rex, rounding up the week in podcast reviews. Get this in an email each week by signing up to be a supporter of Podcast Rex from £3.99.

Platforms

Apple Podcasts: New & Noteworthy

Spotify: New & 🔥

Amazon Music: Best Podcasts of the Week

Pocket Casts: Featured

Miranda Sawyer in the Observer

Invisible Hands (BBC Radio 4) - “David Dimbleby’s new series unpicks a real establishment fundamental: capitalism and the free markets. Many people in Britain – me included, and I’m hardly a spring chicken – can barely remember a time when this country wasn’t in thrall to the idea that the best way to run an economy is by handing power to a market where everything – strappy sandals, war weapons, water supplies – is up for sale.”
White Hot Hate: Agent Pale Horse (CBC) - “Scott Payne’s look and demeanour have meant that he has been able to infiltrate neo-Nazi cabals, biker gangs, dodgy fringe groups – though always with the fear of being discovered. Payne is painted as a tattooed angel on the side of the righteous, but whether or not you enjoy this show will depend on how much you warm to his convivial but rather egotistical company.”
Luigi (Wondery) - “The circumstances – and, to be honest, Mangione’s looks – trump any banal insights offered by friends and neighbours.”

Fiona Sturges in the FT

Journey Through Time (Goalhanger) - “The hosts are fluent, authoritative and accessible, though they haven’t yet got the spark of other Goalhanger double acts such as Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook (The Rest Is History), or Marina Hyde and Richard Osman (The Rest Is Entertainment), who do a good line in convivial chit-chat. Here there’s a slight sense of listeners being talked at, which may or may not be due to an over-reliance on scripts, rather than two hosts being in conversation.”

Patricia Nicol in the Sunday Times

Good Hang (Spotify/The Ringer) - “The interview is better if you watch it. (In principle, I am hostile to visual podcasting, but there is teasing and nuance in the facial expressions here and a slapstick finale that you can only guess at via the audio.)”
Three People with Rebecca Front (Unlocked) - “Recently I heard Front promoting the podcast on BBC Radio 4’s Saturday Live. ‘I say to the guests, I don’t want to know in advance who you’re choosing,’ Front said. The journalist inside me groaned because surely she would ask better questions if fully prepared. That comment and the initial chaos of Poehler’s podcast set me wondering whether improv is the best grounding for an interview show.”
How Do You Cope? (Wondery) - “The production can be slick but the open-minded Robins is not. At times self-excoriating, he poses sensitive, well-researched questions and is rewarded with thoughtful and at times sad, surprising and revealing answers.”

James Marriott in the Times

What’s Up Docs? (BBC Radio 4) - “The first set, on ‘willpower’, might have been conceived as a shot across the bows of Andrew Huberman and his fellow self-improving self-optimising self-empowering obsessives. Xand complains that he feels ‘lazy and inadequate … this deficiency of willpower’. Chris says he doesn’t believe in any such thing. ‘Willpower does not exist as a concept,’ he insists. ‘It has no moral, scientific, political or economic validity at all.’ I almost cheered. This is one of my favourite hobbyhorses.

★★★★☆

David Hepworth in the Radio Times

This is Gavin Newsom (iHeart) - “This is why podcasts don’t do debate and most are devoted to people energetically agreeing with each other.”

Gwilym Mumford in the Guardian’s Guide newsletter

How Do You Cope? (Wondery) - “Robins is hosting solo this time, serving up empathetic but incisive interviews with the likes of Joe Wicks, Tuppence Middleton and Justin Hawkins from the Darkness.”

Freddie Hayward in the New Statesman

This is Gavin Newsom (iHeart) - “Don’t be taken in by the promise that this show will contain debate. Newsom melts into a free-loving chum once his guests get into their monologues… At some point he is going to have to answer the question: what’s the point in talking for three hours if you have nothing to say?”

Tim Stanley in the Daily Telegraph

The Lex Fridman Podcast (ind.) - “Admirers call him an open-minded listener; critics say he gets these names because they know he rarely interrupts, that he’s fundamentally naive.”

Chris Bennion in the Daily Telegraph

How Do You Cope? (Wondery) - “What unfurled was extraordinary – a rich and unsettling insight into a living nightmare, and the mental odyssey required to survive it… All the nonsense, navel-gazing questions celebs ask of themselves on countless soft-soap interview podcasts became unbearably profound in the case of Amanda Knox.”

Ben Sixsmith in the Critic

REAL: Bad Grandpa (ind.) - “Naomi Channell is a tireless true criminologist - digging her microphone into the mud of history. In the Children of God, she has found one of the fatter worms in the garden.”