My friends know I am addicted to podcast listening on my iPod, and they sometimes ask what are my favorite ones to listen to. I recently saw a great blog post from someone who listed his top 10 podcasts for helping him learn. I have misplaced who this person is so I can’t link to him here, but I’ll still follow his lead and post my favorite podcasts here. Enjoy! And if you have some great ones to add to the list, I’d love to hear them, so please add them to the comments.
Friends sometimes wonder where they can get the most recent conference talks. Wonder no more.
2. LDS Voices
If you are LDS, this podcast is wonderful. It pulls new and old talks from the BYUBroadcasting.org database, so one day you might hear our modern prophet and the next day you might hear a talk from a prophet living 50 years ago. Nothing like hearing Matthew Cowley’s famous “Miracles” devotional in his own voice.
3. TED Talks
This is one cool conference that I’ll never be cool enough to attend, but I’m glad to have the presentations on my iPod. Great social, political, scientific, and educational commentary by some of the most interesting thinkers in our country.
The New Yorker has a couple of podcasts I enjoy. One is the Comment podcast, which is an interview with a writer of one of their weekly feature articles. Always in-depth and interesting. Second, I love the speeches from their annual conference, which is in a separate feed.
My style is not to buy every song an artist every recorded, but the “Best Hits” album only. I want to just get the best from many different voices. Similarly, I don’t want to listen to all of NPR’s reports, but only their best, which is why I love this podcast.
A must, I think, for people in the Instructional Design profession, although the quality has dropped off of late. Still, there are great presentations and interviews with technology leaders. If you are not into the technology part of it so much, Moira Gunn’s episodes are pretty interesting.
This one is hit and miss for me. Some episodes are really interesting, and some get deleted after about 10 minutes. Worth a try, though, every week.
8. Grammar Girl
GG makes grammar interesting and easy to learn about with pop culture references and fun metaphors and anecdotes.
Gotta love a quick bit of scientific trivia and learning in only 60 seconds from Scientific American!
This one is hit and miss too. It gets a little tedious listening sometimes, and I wish they would chit-chat less and stay on topic more, but they pick darn interesting topics. Who doesn’t want to know whether the CIA really experimented on humans with heroin? Or who Delta Force is? Or how body armor works? Or whatever happened to Einstein’s brain?
A great gospel teacher shares a story that all Christians can relate to and learn from, followed by music. Very uplifting.
12. All in the Mind
Creepy intro music and sometimes disturbing topics. But sometimes it’s pretty interesting.
13. Best of YouTube.
Just subscribe and thank me later. You’re welcome. And by the way, not all of the ones shown on the website are funny or interesting, but the ones that get voted into the podcast feed usually are.
Well, those are some of my favorites. What are yours? Particularly I’m looking for a good history one, because I enjoy learning about history. Or one that did biographies about famous historical people?
thanks Rick!