WORKING: September 2025 podcast playlist

What can we learn from someone else’s job? Work takes up most of our waking hours, yet we rarely get to hear what other people’s jobs are really like. This podcast playlist explores work from the perspective of the people doing it. We hear from brain surgeons and New York City movers, garment workers and podcast hosts, switchboard telephone operators and press agents. Each story reveals the hidden complexities, surprises, and human moments that make every job unique.

This playlist was curated by Matt, a member of the Baltimore chapter.

Podcast Playlist on WORKING

Get the full playlist on your podcast player of choice using these platforms:

 
What It’s Like To Be…: “A Brain Surgeon” (March 2025, 40 min)
Zapping parts of the brain to know where to cut, operating a mouth-controlled microscope that’s worth more than a house, and carrying the weight of life-or-death decisions with Dr. Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa, a brain surgeon at the Mayo Clinic. How do you preserve a mathematician’s expertise when removing tumors? And how did he go from picking tomatoes to performing brain surgery?
Planet Money: “Made in America” (July 2025, 32 min)
In today’s episode: We buy a garment made by factory workers in the U.S. – a basic purple sports bra – and learn how many people it took to make it, how much workers got paid to work on it … and whether garment manufacturing is a job Americans want, or even know how, to do.
The Economics of Everyday Things: “100. Podcasts” (July 2025, 33 min)
What goes into creating an episode of The Economics of Everyday Things? And how do shows like this one make money? Zachary Crockett turns the mic on himself.
Radio Diaries: “The Working Tapes – Part 1” (September 2016, 17 min)
In the early 1970’s, author Studs Terkel went around the country with a reel-to-reel tape recorder interviewing people about their jobs for his book, “Working.” It was a surprise bestseller. But until now, few of these interviews have ever been heard before. For decades, the reel-to-reel tapes were packed away in Terkel’s home office. Over the past year, Radio Diaries, along with Project&, combed through them to produce a new NPR series. This is the first of a three-part podcast series on The Working Tapes.
Death Sex & Money: “A New York City Mover Who Carries More Than Your Boxes” (October 2023, 33 min)
Over the past 20 years, Adonis Williams has moved thousands of people in and out of New York City. With each move, he catches a glimpse of a life in transition.
Bonus podcast episodes:

• Throughline: “How U.S. Unions Took Flight” (November 2023, )
  Hot Labor Summer has continued into fall as workers in industries from retail and carmaking to healthcare and Hollywood have organized and gone on strike. Public support for the U.S. labor movement is close to the highest it’s been in 60 years. And that’s no surprise to people who work in one particular industry: the airlines. Airline workers — pilots, flight attendants, mechanics, baggage handlers, and more — represent a huge cross-section of the country. And for decades, they’ve used their unions to fight not just for better working conditions, but for civil rights, charting a course that leads right up to today. In this episode, we turn an eye to the sky to see how American unions took flight.
• What It’s Like To Be…: “A Veterinarian” (May 2025, )
  Calming scared cats with pheromone sprays, advising families how to balance their pet’s well-being with budget realities, and diagnosing mysterious animal maladies with Dr. Hindatu Mohammed, a veterinarian in Austin, TX. What breed of dog, when having its nails clipped, responds as though it’s being murdered? And how did an injured ant shape her career choice?
• Weird Work: “I’m a dream analyst.” (October 2019, )
  Jane Teresa Anderson knows how to get inside someone’s head. And her work as a dream analyst has helped countless people better understand their waking lives. That way, the subconscious becomes reality. She even reaches into Sam’s psyche to break down a dream he’s long struggled to understand.
• Criminal: “Pen & Paper” (January 2016, )
  As a young woman in the 60s, Andy Austin talked her way into a job as a courtroom sketch artist in Chicago. She spent 43 years sketching everyone from disgraced governors to John Wayne Gacy, and says she only made someone look bad on purpose once.

Conversation Starter Questions:

1. What’s something about your job that people outside of your field would never guess or understand?
2. What’s the most surprising thing you learned about someone else’s work from these episodes?
3. If you could interview someone from any profession, which one would you pick and why?
4. Several of the jobs featured in The Working Tapes episode no longer exist or are radically different today. What jobs do you think will no longer exist in 20 years?