The best podcasts for Understanding our world, not just the science or the politics, but everything!

Hosted by a team of researchers for the popular TV quiz show 'QI', each episode presents four facts which the panel then discuss. Which would be pretty dry if not for the fact that each of the hosts has an encyclopaedic knowledge of just about everything, and so the hour is a barrage of related details and stories. And also they are extremely funny people, which incredible chemistry. It's enormous fun, I laugh out loud most episodes, and I learn so much!

I've listened to Tim Harford in other shows - he's an economist with a number of newspaper columns and books to his name, and has a reputation for offering quietly thoughtful insights on a range of topics and current events - but I picked this one for it's focus on cautionary tales. Each episode tells a story or two about failure - an air crash, a botched product launch, a structural failure in a bridge - and then digs into why it happened. But rather than settling for the obvious answer ("The train crashed because the signal operators weren't paying attention"), he then unpacks how that cause itself could have happened ("There were too many distractions, and not enough operators, so they were always having to choose which signals to watch and which to ignore, and nobody though to warn them about the extra train that day" for example). It's a fantastic exercise in learning to see the bigger picture, to not settle for the simplest and most shallow explanation, and for understanding how things can be allowed to go so wrong in the first place.

Sean Carrol is a physicist who has written books and produced videos to try explain physics to the general public. But, like me, he is also fascinated by things outside his area of expertise. In his show, he invites people to discuss their work. Topics cover philosophy, psychology, urban planning, offshore wealth management, and of course physics! Unlike most of the other shows I listen to, I sometimes struggle to understand what the guests are talking about, but they're always interesting and I always learn something. Sean's conversational style feels like a genuine conversation, rather than a slickly produced show, which makes it much more inviting and comfortable. Definitely one of my favourites.

Hosted by Greg Jenner, a public historian and broadcaster, he picks a historical topic (person, event, period, anything!) in each episode and discusses it with his two guests. The guests are always a professional historian, who's specialised in the topic of the day, and a comedian who (probably) knows nothing at all. As the episode progresses, the historian tells a story about the topic, helped by Greg, while the comedian offers their own off-the-cuff reactions and insights (again, helped by Greg - he's a funny guy!). They also do a family-friendly version, where they edit out the swears and any particularly spicy historical details, which is published on the same feed.

The dark side of IT! This show interviews hackers, scammers, law enforcement, victims, and IT security professionals to talk about their daily experiences or big events that made the news. I love movies about this stuff - secret agents, heists, hackers, conmen, the criminals doing these things, the good guys catching them, and those shadowy people who work somewhere between the two. It makes for great cinema and great novels, but these sorts of people exist in real life, and you can hear their stories in this show. In my day job, I work with company's IT infrastructure, keeping it running reliably and helping the security team to keep it safe from attack. This show is especially interesting to me, because it's full of worse-case scenarios that I have to think about, and hearing all the players talk directly about how they do what they do is quite helpful. But since we all have vulnerable IT assets these days, from social media accounts to smartphones with our personal data, to our private and office laptops, this is stuff we all need to know about.