The World's Most Boring Podcast - Bore Me to Sleep

Episode sixty-one of The World's Most Boring Podcast, Bore Me to Sleep, is called The Pedantic Breakdown of Circadian Rhythms, and it is a long, slow, thoroughly unhurried look at the science of sleep, the body clock and the way light shapes our evenings. If you have trouble falling asleep, find it hard to switch off at bedtime, or are looking for a calm sleep podcast to help you drift off without any fuss, this episode was written with you in mind. It is also perfectly suited to people with no sleep problems at all who simply enjoy nodding off...

Episode sixty of The World's Most Boring Podcast - Bore Me to Sleep is called Comparing Different Shapes of Macaroni, and it is a very serious, very passionate, and very unhurried debate about whether tube macaroni is superior to spiral macaroni, judged purely on mouthfeel. There is no sauce required, although there is quite a lot of sauce discussed. If you are looking for a podcast to help you fall asleep, a calm voice for bedtime, or something gentle to listen to when you have trouble sleeping, this episode was made to be drifted away from. Nothing important happens, nothing...

Episode fifty-nine of The World's Most Boring Podcast, Bore Me to Sleep, is called Saying Words Until They Agree: A Guide to Negotiations. It is a long, slow, deliberately unexciting bedtime story for anyone who wants to fall asleep fast, stay asleep, or simply wind down with something soft and monotone in the background. If you have trouble sleeping, insomnia, a busy mind at night, or you just like drifting off to calm talking, this is a gentle, soothing sleep podcast made for you. It is also perfectly fine if you doze off in the first few minutes. There is...

Episode fifty-eight of The World's Most Boring Podcast, Bore Me to Sleep, is called The Aerodynamics of a Falling Leaf in Mild Wind, and it is a long, slow, wonderfully unimportant over-analysis of one lime leaf that takes one minute and fifty-two seconds to fall roughly six metres. In still air it would have taken about six. We've left the extra hundred-odd seconds entirely unhurried. If you're looking for a calming podcast to help you fall asleep, a sleep story with no plot, or simply something quiet to switch off to after a long day, this is a very gentle...

Episode fifty-seven of The World's Most Boring Podcast - Bore Me to Sleep is called The Bureaucracy of Time Management, and it is exactly as thrilling as that title suggests. Over the course of this episode, your host takes you on an unhurried, meandering tour through the history of calendar systems and productivity frameworks, presented in the style of an endlessly long dissertation that no one asked for and everyone who needs sleep will be deeply grateful for. If you have been searching for a sleep podcast, a podcast to fall asleep to, or simply something monotone and soothing to...

Episode fifty-six of The World's Most Boring Podcast - Bore Me to Sleep is a slow, unhurried dramatic reading of the warranty conditions and safety instructions for a nineteen dollar toaster. If you have ever wondered what happens when someone actually reads the small folded piece of paper inside a budget kitchen appliance, this is the episode for you. Spoiler: it takes a very long time, and that is entirely the point. This episode is ideal for anyone looking for sleep meditation content, boring bedtime stories for adults, or simply something deeply monotonous to listen to while drifting off. It...

Episode fifty-five of The World's Most Boring Podcast - Bore Me to Sleep is titled Sixteen Unexciting Truths About Fiber Digestion, and it is exactly as riveting as it sounds. If you are looking for a sleep podcast, a podcast to fall asleep to, or simply something so thoroughly monotone and unhurried that your brain gives up trying to follow along and drifts off on its own, this episode was made for you. It covers gut health, the gut microbiome, short-chain fatty acids, butyrate, soluble and insoluble fiber, resistant starch, prebiotics, the gut-brain axis, the vagus nerve, transit time, blood...

The World's Most Boring Podcast - Bore Me to Sleep, Episode fifty-four: An Exhaustive Biography of a Ceiling Fan. If you are looking for something to help you fall asleep, something monotone and unhurried and perfectly safe to miss if you drift off, you have found it. This episode follows the complete life story of a single ceiling fan, from the copper wire wound in a factory in Guangdong, China, to the gentle, eternal rotation above a living room sofa somewhere in the United States. We cover raw materials, factory assembly, motor winding, blade manufacturing, quality control, ocean shipping across...

Episode fifty-three of The World's Most Boring Podcast - Bore Me to Sleep is titled A Monotone Explanation of Daily Routine Adjustments, which sounds exactly like the kind of internal company document you would receive on a Tuesday afternoon and immediately set aside until Thursday. Hidden behind this magnificently dull title, however, is a genuinely useful and deeply soothing exploration of atomic habits, habit formation, and the science of behaviour change - delivered in the most unhurried, low-stakes, and softly meandering way possible. If you are looking for a sleep podcast, a bedtime podcast, or simply something calm and monotone...

Episode fifty-two of The World's Most Boring Podcast - Bore Me to Sleep is called The Subtle Variations of Beige Paint, and it is exactly as thrilling as that sounds. Over the course of this deeply unhurried episode, we take a long, slow, thoroughly beige journey through the history, psychology, and naming conventions of one of the world's most underappreciated colours. If you have ever stood in a paint shop holding seventeen identical swatches and felt your grip on reality loosen slightly, this episode was made for you. We explore the difference between warm beige, cool beige, greige, and cream...

Episode fifty-one of The World's Most Boring Podcast - Bore Me to Sleep is titled The Monotonous Mechanics of Compound Interest, and it is exactly what it sounds like: a thorough, unhurried, deeply soporific guide to building wealth over time through compound interest, delivered in the style of a high school maths lecture by someone who finds the whole thing genuinely, quietly wonderful. If you are looking for a sleep podcast that actually teaches you something useful while putting you to sleep, this is a rare find. The interest compounds. So does the drowsiness. If you have been searching for...

Episode one hundred and sixteen of The World's Most Boring Podcast - Bore Me to Sleep is here, and it is exactly as uneventful as you were hoping. This week's topic was suggested by the wonderfully thoughtful Hilde, and it is about different types of snow - Forskjellige typer snø - along with a warm and thoroughly unhurried wish for a merry Christmas. If you are looking for a sleep podcast that will gently talk you into unconsciousness with slow, meandering, completely inconsequential information about meteorology, this is the episode for you. We cover stellar dendrites, graupel (yes, graupel), h...

Episode forty-nine of The World's Most Boring Podcast - Bore Me to Sleep is called The Secret World of Waiting Rooms, and it is exactly as uneventful as it sounds. Over the course of this thoroughly unhurried episode, we sit quietly in the world of waiting rooms - their chairs, their magazines, their humming lights, their clocks with second hands, their unspoken social contracts, and their particular quality of suspended time - and we find that there is really quite a lot to say about a place where, officially, nothing happens. If you have ever found yourself lying in bed...

Episode forty-eight of The World's Most Boring Podcast - Bore Me to Sleep is called Everything You Never Asked About Envelopes, and it is exactly as uneventful as it sounds. Over sixteen gently meandering segments, your host takes you on a thoroughly unhurried journey through the history, design, and quiet cultural life of the envelope - from the French origins of the word and the invention of the envelope-making machine in eighteen forty-five, through DL sizing standards, window envelopes, airmail envelopes with their red and blue stripes, padded envelopes and bubble wrap, gum arabic adhesives, self-seal flaps, square envelopes, and...

The World's Most Boring Podcast - Bore Me to Sleep, Episode forty-seven: The Science of Watching Grass Grow. If you are looking for something to help you fall asleep, something calm and slow and utterly without stakes, you have found it. This episode is about grass. Real grass. The kind that grows in your lawn, in parks, in fields, and in the longest-running ecological experiment in the world. We cover how grass actually grows (from the bottom, which is more interesting than it sounds, and also less interesting than almost anything else), the meristem, mycorrhizal fungi, photosynthesis, the Park Grass...

Welcome to episode forty-six of The World's Most Boring Podcast - Bore Me to Sleep: A Definitive Ranking of All the Days of the Week. If you are looking for a sleep podcast, a bedtime podcast, a podcast to fall asleep to, or simply something so relentlessly calm and uneventful that your brain has no choice but to give up and drift off, you have found the right place. This episode takes on one of the great questions of our time - which day of the week is actually the best - and answers it in the most thorough, meandering...

Episode forty-five of The World's Most Boring Podcast - Bore Me to Sleep is called The Life of a Traffic Cone, and it is exactly as uneventful as it sounds. Over the course of this long, slow, gently wandering episode, we cover the full lifecycle of the humble traffic cone: its invention by Charles D. Scanlon in nineteen thirties California, its transition from concrete to rubber to polyvinyl chloride, the manufacturing process, the colour science behind safety orange, the art of stacking and deploying cones, the concept of the taper, the cone zone, and the quiet dignity of a cone's...

Episode forty-four of The World's Most Boring Podcast - Bore Me to Sleep is called An Exploration of Lukewarm Water, and it is every bit as uneventful as it sounds. Over the course of this episode, we take a long, slow, thoroughly unhurried look at lukewarm water - that gentle, tepid, thoroughly middling temperature that nobody ever gets excited about, which is precisely why it makes such ideal listening for anyone who wants to drift off to sleep to something calm, monotone, and completely safe to miss. If you fall asleep halfway through, you will not have missed anything that...

The World's Most Boring Podcast - Bore Me to Sleep, Episode forty-three: The Emotional Journey of a Dishwasher Cycle. If you are looking for something to help you fall asleep, something calm and monotone and thoroughly unimportant that you can drift off to without missing anything, you have found exactly the right place. This episode takes you through the complete emotional arc of a dishwasher cycle, from the moment you press the button to the moment the light quietly goes off, and it does so in the most detailed, meandering, and soothingly dull way imaginable. We cover the history of...

Episode forty-two of The World's Most Boring Podcast - Bore Me to Sleep is called seventeen facts about spoons that will not change your life. And it won't. That is a promise, not a disclaimer. This episode is a slow, warm, thoroughly unhurried journey through the history, language, design, and quiet cultural life of the spoon, and it has been carefully crafted to be as soothing and uneventful as possible, which makes it ideal for anyone who wants something calm and monotone to drift off to. Whether you listen to sleep podcasts every night, enjoy falling asleep to gentle talking...

Episode forty-one of The World's Most Boring Podcast - Bore Me to Sleep is called The Complete History of Dust, and it is exactly as riveting as it sounds. Over the course of sixteen unhurried segments, we take you on a slow, meandering journey through the entire history of dust - from the Big Bang and cosmic nebulae to household dust mites, the Dust Bowl, Saharan dust crossing the Atlantic to fertilise the Amazon, volcanic ash and the accidental creation of Frankenstein, the word origins of dust in Old English, loess deposits three hundred metres deep in China, feather dusters...

Episode forty of The World's Most Boring Podcast - Bore Me to Sleep is titled How to Sit in a Chair - A Masterclass, and it is exactly as riveting as it sounds. Over the course of this slow, meandering, deeply unhurried episode, host and producer Audun Kvitland Rostad takes you on a tour of five thousand years of chair history, posture advice, furniture philosophy, and the kind of gentle, rambling storytelling that is specifically designed to make your eyelids feel pleasantly heavy. If you are looking for a sleep podcast, a podcast to fall asleep to, or simply something...

Episode thirty-nine of The World's Most Boring Podcast - Bore Me to Sleep is here, and it is about shopping trolleys. Or shopping carts, if you prefer. Either way, it is exactly as uneventful as it sounds, and that is entirely the point. If you are looking for a sleep podcast to help you drift off, a monotone bedtime story for adults, or simply something so thoroughly uninteresting that your brain has no choice but to give up and go to sleep, you have found it. This episode takes you through the full, unhurried life of a shopping trolley...

Episode thirty-eight of The World's Most Boring Podcast - Bore Me to Sleep is a thorough, slow, and deeply unhurried review of every type of cloud. If you are looking for something to help you fall asleep, something calm and monotone to drift off to, something that will fill your head with gentle, meaningless information until your thoughts quietly dissolve, this is the episode for you. We cover all ten cloud genera recognised by the World Meteorological Organization: cirrus, cirrocumulus, cirrostratus, altocumulus, altostratus, nimbostratus, stratocumulus, stratus, cumulus, and cumulonimbus. We also wander into lenticular clouds, nacreous clouds, noctilucent clouds, virga...

Episode thirty-seven of The World's Most Boring Podcast - Bore Me to Sleep is called Why Bread Goes Stale and Other Urgent Matters, and we can assure you the matters are not urgent in the slightest. This episode is a long, slow, thoroughly unhurried exploration of the science and history of bread staling - perfect for anyone who needs help falling asleep, wants something calming to listen to at bedtime, or simply enjoys the gentle company of a voice talking about something completely inconsequential in a warm and slightly witty way. If you have insomnia, sleep difficulties, a restless mind...

The World's Most Boring Podcast - Bore Me to Sleep, Episode thirty-six: The Inner Life of a Parking Meter. If you are looking for something to help you fall asleep, something calm and unhurried and completely safe to miss if you drift off mid-sentence, you have found the right place. This episode is a long, slow, gently winding exploration of the parking meter - one of the most overlooked and magnificently uninteresting objects in modern urban life - and it will almost certainly put you to sleep before it reaches the end, which is entirely the point. We cover the...

Episode thirty-five of The World's Most Boring Podcast - Bore Me to Sleep is called An Unnecessarily Detailed Guide to Tying Your Shoes, and it is exactly as riveting as it sounds. Over the course of this episode, we explore the complete and thoroughly unnecessary history of shoelaces, aglets, lacing patterns, knot mechanics, the etymology of the word lace, a five-thousand-five-hundred-year-old shoe found in a cave in Armenia, the Ian knot as documented by Ian Fieggen on his legendary website Ian's Shoelace Site, the difference between a reef knot and a granny knot and why your shoes keep coming undone...

Episode thirty-four of The World's Most Boring Podcast - Bore Me to Sleep is a slow, unhurried journey through the history of saffron - the world's most expensive spice, and quite possibly the world's most soporific subject. Over sixteen gentle segments, we cover everything from the ancient origins of Crocus sativus in Persia and Greece, to Cleopatra's legendary saffron baths, to medieval European saffron guilds in Nuremberg, to the English town of Saffron Walden in Essex, to the saffron fields of Khorasan in Iran and La Mancha in Spain, to modern scientific research into saffron's potential antidepressant and cognitive effects...

Episode thirty-three of The World's Most Boring Podcast - Bore Me to Sleep is here, and this time we have clipped our way into one of the most thoroughly uneventful topics imaginable: the humble paperclip. If you are looking for a sleep podcast, a bedtime podcast, or simply something calm and monotone to drift off to, you have come to exactly the right place - and we are very proud of how little there is to stay awake for.

Episode thirty-two of The World's Most Boring Podcast - Bore Me to Sleep is called How to Fry an Egg, and it is exactly as uneventful as it sounds - which is precisely the point. Over the course of this slow, meandering, deeply unhurried episode, we explore the gentle art of frying an egg: the pan debate between cast iron loyalists and non-stick pragmatists, the soft sizzle of butter, the philosophy of yolk doneness, the Leidenfrost effect, the surprisingly rich history of salt and spoons, a peaceful breakfast memory from a guesthouse in Ireland, and the deeply calming experience of...

Episode thirty-one of The World's Most Boring Podcast - Bore Me to Sleep is here, and it is exactly as dull as you were hoping. This week's topic is A Complete List of the World's Most Boring New Year's Resolutions - a slow, meandering, thoroughly unhurried journey through the most forgettable ambitions humanity reaches for every January. If you are looking for a sleep podcast, a bedtime podcast, or simply something to listen to that will gently bore you into unconsciousness, you have found it. This episode is ideal for anyone dealing with insomnia, racing thoughts at night, difficulty falling...

Episode thirty of The World's Most Boring Podcast - Bore Me to Sleep is titled Social Media - A Study of Thumb Movements and Their Correlation with Sleep Quality, and it is exactly as uneventful as that title promises. Over sixteen unhurried segments, this episode explores the surprisingly soporific world of social media research, sleep science, and the humble human thumb, in a way that is specifically designed to be easy to miss if you happen to drift off halfway through, which is entirely the point. If you are looking for a sleep podcast, a podcast to fall asleep to...

Episode twenty-nine of The World's Most Boring Podcast - Bore Me to Sleep is called When Carrots Receive Compliments, and it is exactly as uneventful as it sounds. Over the course of this deeply unhurried episode, we explore the surprisingly long and thoroughly unexciting history of the carrot, from its purple and white wild ancestors in ancient Afghanistan, through the Arab world and Persia, all the way to the Netherlands where it turned orange, possibly as a tribute to William of Orange, possibly just because that is what carrots do when left to their own devices. We cover beta-carotene, vitamin...

Episode twenty-eight of The World's Most Boring Podcast - Bore Me to Sleep is titled The Transition from Awake to Asleep, and it is exactly as uneventful as it sounds. If you are looking for a sleep podcast, a podcast to help you fall asleep, something to listen to when your mind needs to slow down, or simply a long, calm, meandering voice to drift off to, this episode was made with you in mind. Or rather, it was made for the version of you that is already horizontal and would very much like to stay that way.

Episode twenty-seven of The World's Most Boring Podcast - Bore Me to Sleep is here, and it is called Boring Finds at Airport Security. If you have ever found yourself wide awake and in need of something deeply, profoundly, almost aggressively uneventful to listen to, this is the episode for you. We spend a long, unhurried, and thoroughly unspectacular amount of time exploring the world of airport security - the trays, the one hundred millilitre liquid rule, the X-ray machines, the body scanners, the yellow footprints, and the quietly poignant fate of confiscated jam. Nothing dramatic happens. That is the...

The World's Most Boring Podcast - Bore Me to Sleep, Episode twenty-six: The Alphabet's Order - A Deep Exploration of Why B Comes After A. If you are looking for something to help you fall asleep, something slow and meandering and completely safe to miss if you drift off mid-sentence, you have found exactly the right place. In this episode, we spend a deeply unhurried amount of time exploring one of the most overlooked questions in human history: why does B come after A in the alphabet, and not after, say, Q? We trace the alphabet from the ancient Phoenician...

Episode twenty-five of The World's Most Boring Podcast - Bore Me to Sleep is entirely about mathematics, and it is every bit as soporific as that sounds. If you are looking for a sleep podcast, a bedtime podcast, or simply something deeply monotone to drift off to, this episode will do the job with the quiet efficiency of a very reliable calculator. We cover the history of mathematics from the Lebombo bone - a forty-three-thousand-year-old baboon fibula with notches in it - all the way through to Gödel's incompleteness theorems, and we do it in the most unhurried, meandering, a...

Episode twenty-four of The World's Most Boring Podcast - Bore Me to Sleep is titled Everything You Don't Need to Know About Drying Paint, and it delivers exactly what it promises: a slow, warm, thoroughly unhurried journey through the world of paint, drying, and everything loosely connected to it. If you are looking for a sleep podcast, a bedtime podcast, or something to listen to when you want your brain to gently stop doing whatever it has been doing all day, this episode was made for you. It is also, technically, the most comprehensive and least necessary guide to paint...

Episode twenty-three of The World's Most Boring Podcast - Bore Me to Sleep is called If the World Were Made of Candy, and it is exactly as uneventful as it sounds. Over the course of this episode, we explore in painstaking and thoroughly unhurried detail what a world made of candy might actually look like - the geology, the weather, the architecture, the oceans, the fauna, and the quiet daily life of people who live in houses made of shortbread and walk on peppermint roads. We cover the history of gummy bears and Hans Riegel's Haribo, the invention of cotton...

Episode twenty-two of The World's Most Boring Podcast - Bore Me to Sleep is here, and it is everything you hoped it would be, which is to say, very nearly nothing at all. This week's topic is how broccoli grows, and we cover it in the most thorough, unhurried, and deeply soporific way imaginable. If you are looking for a sleep podcast, a bedtime podcast, a podcast to fall asleep to, or simply something calm and monotone to listen to while you drift off, this episode has been carefully crafted to be of almost no consequence whatsoever, and we are...