#Trypod: What Is Your Favorite Podcast? Or, Why You Should Start Listening to Podcasts

#Trypod: What Is Your Favorite Podcast? Or, Why You Should Start Listening to Podcasts March 22, 2017

This month, many podcast producers are partnering together to encourage new listeners to try podcasting for the first time: “Listeners will be asked to share stories of why they listen and their favorite podcasts using the hashtag #trypod. According to Edison Research, one in five Americans listened to podcasts every month as of early 2016 – a number that has grown by double-digits for five years.

I used to listen to NPR almost all the time. Now, I sometimes still listen to NPR, but almost exclusively through NPR podcasts. I love being able to start and stop whenever I want: no more “driveway moment” of being stuck in my car waiting for an NPR story to end. Instead, I unplug my iPhone from my car, plug in my earbuds, and keep listening as I walk.

What are your favorite podcasts? The following are some of my favorites:

1. 538 – Nate Silver and team offer data-driven perspectives on politics. They were unfairly maligned (I was guilty as well) FilmspottingSVUfor giving Trump a much greater chance of victory than almost everyone else — not that they wanted him to win, but that the polls indicated he had a chance. Sadly, they were on the right track, confirming that their perspective remains valuable.

2. Culture Gabfest – “Slate’s critics plus their guests, discuss what’s happening in movies, books, TV, and more.”

3. Filmspotting SVU (“Streaming Video Unit”) – “a bi-weekly podcast focusing on the world of online movies.”

4. Freakonomics – a counter-intuitive, left-brained, rational perspective of economics meets culture.

5. Pod Save America – “A no-bulls**t conversation about politics for people not yet ready to give up or go insane hosted by four former aides to President Obama .”

6. Political Gabfest: “Weekly discussion about three of the week’s high profile political developments with a trademarked banter that makes it look easy.”

7. SpeakingofJungSpeaking of Jung: “Interviews with Jungian analysts to discuss the writings of C.G. Jung.”

8. Trumpcast:

A quasi-daily podcast from Slate that sets out to understand the real Donald Trump. Jacob Weisberg, chairman and editor-in-chief of Slate, will be talking to historians, psychiatrists, and other experts to help explain who this man is, and why this is happening, right now, in the United States of America.”

Trumpcast9.Real Time with Bill Maher – Maher is tendentious on the topics of Western medicine and religion, but he has original opinions on almost every other subject. An entertaining way of keeping up with politics.

10. We the People – “The National Constitution Center is a nonprofit, nonpartisan institution devoted to the U.S. Constitution and its legacy of freedom. Join the conversation.”

The Rev. Dr. Carl Gregg is a certified spiritual director, a D.Min. graduate of San Francisco Theological Seminary, and the minister of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Frederick, Maryland. Follow him on Facebook (facebook.com/carlgregg) and Twitter (@carlgregg).

Learn more about Unitarian Universalism: http://www.uua.org/beliefs/principles


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