I ride my bike to work most days. It’s usually a 50-60 minute ride each way. When I don’t ride a bike I take a bus and train that takes roughly the same amount of time. On the bus and train I used to read all the time, but you can’t do that on the bike. Years ago I started listing to podcasts through one earbud while I ride (keeping the other ear free to listen for traffic - I’m not totally crazy).

Over the last couple of days I’ve found myself talking about what podcasts I listen to most frequently. I tend to rotate through some NPR news and storytelling episodes, some Mormonism episodes, and some lefty political episodes. In the spirit of scaling my communication, I thought I would put a list of the general entertainment, news and religion podcasts I subscribe to here so I could just point people to this post. For the list of developer shows I subscribe to check out my AgileCoder blog.

So, here it is. My list of favorite podcasts:

News, Politics & Storytelling

• NPR’s This American Life: Weekly - The most popular podcast in America. 2-4 stories around a theme.
• The Left Show: Weekly - Not for kids, right wingers, or the sensitive; awful swearing; Utah and National news and politics.
• NPR’s Snap Judgement: Weekly - Excellent storytelling with a beat.
• NPR’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me: Weekly - NPR’s funny and entertaining news quiz show.

Religion & Mormon Culture

• Maxwell Institute Podcast: 2-3 times a month - Incredibly deep and wide ranging Mormon Studies topics.
• Leading LDS: Roughly Weekly - Former bishop interviews people in a diverse set of leadership role about common challenges and suggestions to become a better leader.
• Latter-Day Left: Roughly Weekly - Produced by the LDS Democratic Caucus, center-left politics discussed by active LDS members.
• Mormon Discussion Podcast: Roughly Weekly - Lots of “dealing with doctrinal, historical and cultural difficulties” episodes. Similar to the Maxwell Institute, but without the restrictions of being sponsored by BYU. So they will have guests and “faith transition” topics occasionally that many mainstream Mormons would consider questionable, or even apostate. That said, the N.T. Wright lectures on The Historical Jesus, episodes part 1, part 2, part 3, & part 4, are quite possibly the best 4 hours I have ever spent listening to a podcast.