Okay, so I like listening to history podcasts, and I recently discovered what I think is a pretty good one, in Lynn Perkins's History of the Ottoman Empire. However, it has set off a few red flags for me. His bibliography (http://www.thehistoryoftheottomanempire.com/bibliography/) while it does contain several modern books, also includes a few that are so old the Ottoman Empire still existed when they were written. Given the recent changes in Ottoman scholarship, esp. with respect to the decline theory, this leaves me somewhat worried as to how accurate the podcast might be.
On top of that, he talks about the apocryphal story of Osman's Dream as though it were accepted fact, instead of something made up by Osman's descendants to justify their power. This also has me worried.
Anyway, I figured I should ask some people who probably know more about history than me, just how accurate is this podcast? Are things like Osman's Dream just momentary blips in what is otherwise a historically accurate podcast, or does it fall into the same "The Ottoman Empire was on the rise until Suleman the Magnificent died, and then they went into a decline up until the Brits put them out of their misery in the 1900s," that almost every other popular history of the Ottoman Empire seems to fall into.
I haven't listened to much of the podcast, so I can't comment on its quality as a whole (except to say that the narrator would really benefit from learning how to pronounce Ottoman names correctly). I can, however, talk about the bibliography. Having only listened to a small part of the podcast, I can't say how much he draws on any of these works or if this bibliography is even complete. He might even have bad works in there for the purpose of critiquing them.
As you noted, there are several works in there which are not reliable. Among general surveys, two books date back to the nineteenth century, and one is Lord Kinross' popular but highly flawed The Ottoman Centuries. Two others, İnalcık's The Classical Age and Itzkowitz' The Ottoman Empire and Islamic Tradition are good works that can still be used in some limited respects, but are in many ways highly outdated, both being published in the 70s. Finkel's Osman's Dream is, on the other hand, excellent. Both the Encyclopedia of the Ottoman Empire and the New Cambridge History of Islam are great resources.
What's most striking to me is the totally random assemblage of modern studies. For a podcast covering early Ottoman history, I'd hope to find Cemal Kafadar's Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State, which is an absolutely foundational work for our current understanding of the period. 100% must read for anyone trying to understand the Ottomans in the fourteenth century. This is missing along with Lowry's The Nature of the Early Ottoman State and Lindner's Nomads and Ottomans in Medieval Anatolia, whereas I would expect to see at least one of these books. The result is, in the first episode, he presents Ottoman origin myths as fact, repeating the story of Ertuğrul leading an army of followers to Anatolia, coming across a battle, and joining on the side of the Seljuk Sultan, after which he was rewarded with rulership over the town of Söğüt in western Anatolia. These stories were first recorded a couple hundred years later and exist in many conflicting varieties, the reality is we know absolutely nothing about Osman's father Ertuğrul aside from the simple fact that he existed. We also know essentially nothing about the relationship between the early Ottomans and the Seljuk Sultans, if there even was a relationship of any significance. In general this podcast presents our knowledge of early Ottoman history as way, way more rooted in fact than it actually is, on top of getting even the legends wrong: he claims that "Osman was born in 1232 in Söğüt," which somehow places him there before his father ever arrived in Anatolia, though that may be an isolated mistake and not representative of the podcast as a whole. We do not actually know where or when Osman was born. As you note, presenting Ottoman traditions as true extends to repeating the story of Osman's Dream as a factual event rather than a symbolically-charged story first recorded by Ottoman writers much later. I don't think he ever mentions the nature of our source base, though I could have just missed that. I don't want to be too harsh on something I haven't investigated in detail.
Lastly, and most disappointingly, he ends episode one by talking about gazis. Just as the later centuries of Ottoman history have undergone a radical revision through questioning the 'decline thesis,' so has early Ottoman history come to question the so-called 'gazi thesis' (or 'Wittek thesis,' after its originator Paul Wittek) that is the idea that Ottoman expansion was driven above all by an ideology of holy war that attracted Muslim warriors to fight for the Ottomans against the unbelievers. The books I mentioned at the beginning of the last paragraph all concern themselves with complicating this picture, noting the flexible nature of the concept of holy war, and emphasizing as well the early Ottomans' nomadic and tribal affiliations, material motivations in propelling conquest, and their capacity to incorporate Christians into their enterprise on a large scale, all of which significantly alters our image of the early Ottoman state away from viewing it as an overwhelmingly Muslim-dominated holy war-oriented enterprise. This podcast just repeats the gazi thesis in its traditional formation, with no sense of familiarity with the historiography of the past thirty years.
So, that's just the first episode. I can't judge the podcast as a whole, and it's totally plausible that the quality increases as time goes on and the creator becomes more experienced, but the beginning doesn't give me a lot of faith.