I have this idea to write about Podcasts on my Drive since MAY, but between no time and no inspiration, it stayed still. It changed today, though, because after almost two years listening to Podcasts, I decided to pay monthly to my favorites.
However, before we talk about this detail, the idea of this post is to talk with you reader that do not like this kind of media. In the end I intend to let you a little bit curious and interested.
To start, let’s talk about the WHYs you think you do not like Podcasts. The main reasons can be:
- I cannot pay attention;
- there is no relevant content for me;
- I rather listen to music;
- if I want to get information about something, I will read a newspaper.
About the first item: listen to Podcast is like eating sushi or drinking bear, you need to pass the weirdness’ phase and get used to the different content. After all, there is someone talking to you, in your ear, while you do a lot of different things.
There are a huge number of Podcasts shows in the world, maybe the problem is not the relevant content for you, but actually where did you search for it.
Listen to songs is really cool indeed, especially while you do other activities that need your concentration, but wouldn’t be way cooler to be able to wash your dishes or clean your house while learning something new? Or even listen to funny stories from random people and laughing your ass off?
I don’t want to take off the newspaper merit and, to be honest, I believe that one thing do not cancel the other. The advantage of a Podcast (the good ones) is that you will listen the two sides of the topic and in one hour you will have learned more than one week of reading the same newspaper. And I cannot finish this without saying that it is really hard to read a newspaper while you are driving in the traffic, however Podcasts..
Likewise there are a lot of Podcasts shows, we have a lot of ways to listen to it, even this app you are using right now while reading this post. That’s right: Spotify, Deezer, Google.. The best podcasts you can find on music streaming app. So, knowing that, app shouldn’t be a problem, right? Especially if we add here the fact that, in many cases, you can listen to it directly in the Podcast site.
However if you like to start it correctly, I can recommend you some apps, they are called Podcast players. Those apps have a lot of different features, like: create playlists, remove silence, increase and decrease the voice speed, download episodes automatically and subscribe.
My favorite app is Rocket Casts, but this is a paid app, so for you start enjoying podcasts without spending money here is a list of free apps almost as good as Pocket Casts:
- Google Podcast
- Podcast Player (super similar with Pocket Casts)
- Castbox
- Apple Podcast
After installing the app we go to the best part, and the funniest one, that is to find what to listen. Between the type of Podcasts we can separate it in the following categories: short (up to 30 minutes), long, news (daily) and specific content (that can be weekly or bi-weekly).
Within the sub-categories we can find from history podcasts, that are seasoned, to daily Podcasts with short episodes of ten minutes to get you up to date in some subject.
I follow and listen different categories, that’s why my ‘Up to Next’ have more than 237 episodes.
From the list of best podcasts that are in English I can recommend you User Defenders – https://userdefenders.com/ – and Serial – https://serialpodcast.org/.
Below an image of all the Podcasts I listen to*, in case you are looking for extra tips.
*A lot of the Podcasts are in Portuguese and that’s why they are not listed in the English version of the post.
I hope that this long post gave you enough reasons to start listen to podcasts. 🙂