Four hours up the motorway at the weekend, the sort of drive where the scenery is essentially the same grey ribbon repeated until you doubt you've moved. The kind of journey that lives or dies on what's coming out of the speakers, and I'd queued up an episode I'd been saving.
It was one of those long-form technical interviews where the host actually knows the subject and isn't just waiting for their turn to talk. Two hours on the history of a piece of infrastructure I'd used for years and never thought about properly. By the second services I'd stopped noticing the road, which is the highest compliment a podcast can earn on a drive like that.
What makes them good, I think, is the same thing that makes good documentation good. Somebody who understands the thing deeply, explaining it to somebody who understands it nearly as well, without performing for an imagined beginner. No throat-clearing, no "but first, let me explain what a database is". Just two people who've earned the right to skip the basics, talking at the right altitude.
I got where I was going slightly disappointed the episode had ended. Which, for four hours of the M6, is a result I'll take.