And a hundred thousand tons of crude oil.

I feel like my regular rotation is slight in comparison to what other folks are posting, but podcasts are an unwinding kind of activity for me, so I don’t really want to be inundated with current events or heavy topics. Accordingly, here’s a bunch of “Arts and Culture” type recommendations.

Bandsplain: Yasi Salek explores bands’ discographies, usually with a guest who is a self-described super fan of the band being discussed. I think it’s a Spotify exclusive, which is a bummer, but they leverage that to actually play relevant songs at certain points in the cast. A good way to remove blindspots in your catalog, or to achieve a greater understanding of artists’ holistic output, rather than just the hits.

Blank Check: A podcast about filmographies. Each “season” covers a different director, and the hosts examine their career chronologically. Fun, and it encourages me to finally tackle movie blindspots. They are doing the first half of Spielberg’s career at the moment, most recently discussing 1987’s Empire of the Sun.

Eye of the Duck: A podcast about movie genres / vibes. Each “season” is a different kind of film, and the hosts select emblematic examples to examine in chronological order, with a mind towards how the genre evolved over time. Examples of past topics include Alien Invasion, 80s Dark Fantasy, Space Movies, and so on. They are typically a little more “film school brain” than most amateur podcasts, which I appreciate, but may not be everyone’s cup of tea.

Three Moves Ahead: Weekly video game podcast, with a heavy emphasis on strategy games. I’m not a regular listener, but I will often check to see if they’ve done an episode on a particular game that I’m playing.

Every F’n FF: Three folks (who I think are involved in the speed running scene) on a quest to complete every Final Fantasy game. This coincided with a replay of FFX that I embarked upon. Sadly I think X-2 may have broke them, as they’ve not uploaded since last October, but it does look like they completed 1, 2, 4, 7, 10, 13, and Dirge of Cerberus.

This isn’t a direct answer to your question per se, but if this a topic that interests you, I can’t recommend The Right Stuff enough. I’ve not seen the film from the 80s, though by all accounts it’s pretty good, but the book is an excellent overview of the early days of space exploration, when the exact sort of questions that you ask here were being bandied about by the fledgling, pre-Apollo program NASA.

The focus of the book is on the first wave of astronauts who, as someone else mentioned, were pulled primarily from combat aviation backgrounds. I recall several passages which detailed their reactions to the sorts of psychological testing that they were undergoing, usually complete with humorous anecdotes.