My name is Victor and I’m a podcastaholic.
My commute is about 1.5 hours every day and I split it between reading and listening to podcasts. While on the bus I mostly read, but while I go to and come from the bus stop, I always have a podcast running. Also, I listen to podcasts most of the times I’m walking alone or doing things in the house that don’t require too much concentration (dishes, laundry, cleaning, etc.).
Even though I listen to podcasts at 2x speed, if I don’t listen for one or two days, it’s almost impossible to catch up on the listening list without skipping episodes.
In this post, I want to share the podcasts that I listen to. I grouped them in 4 categories.
The podcast links are to iTunes because I know that the majority of my audience uses an iPhone, but they are available in other places too. If you’re looking for a podcast application that works on any platform, I recommend Pocket Casts, the application that I use.
Money and Investing
Managing personal finance and investments are two topics dear to my heart. The podcasts in this category are one or both of those two topics. Some of them, like MarketFoolery and Industry Focus, are addressing niches while the others cover the topics more broadly.
- MarketFoolery - a show about the day’s top businesses and investing stories.
- Motley Fool Money - similar to the previous one, also from Motley Fool, this weekly show covers topics the same topics as the previous one but airs weekly.
- Motley Fool Answers - another Motley Fool show that covers personal finance, personal investments, retirement, and almost anything you need to know about being successfully in your financial life. The hosts, Alison and Robert, are amazing and sometimes I find myself laughing on the street because of their jokes.
- Industry Focus - the fourth Motley Fool show that I listen to covers each day a different industry: healthcare, technology, energy, banks, and consumer goods.
- Rule Breaker Investing - this podcast is hosted by the Motley Fool co-founder David Gardner and he covers his investment strategies and how he was able to outperform the market for many years.
- Money For the Rest of Us - I have to admit that I found this podcast by mistake, but I highly recommend it. David Stein brilliantly covers money topics and makes hard topics easy to understand.
- Listen Money Matters! - two young guys talk about money and they invite people to discuss complicated topics. Highly recommended if you’re in your 20s and 30s and want to better manage your finances.
Business
Recently, I became interested in learning about business and entrepreneurship. Sometimes I ask myself if I should go for an MBA. Maybe I’ll talk about that in the future. But, the important point here is that the podcasts in this category are about business, entrepreneurship, customer interaction, and success/fail stories.
- AskPat - Pat Flynn is one of the best podcast speakers that I’ve heard. He’s really honest and provides a lot of value in terms of business and being successful. AskPat is a daily podcast in which he answers one question from a listener.
- The Smart Passive Income Podcast - this is Pat Flynn’s flagship show. Every week he interviews a successful entrepreneur from the online business space.
- StartUp - in my opinion, the first season of Startup is the most brilliant idea ever. Each Startup season covers the inception of one startup. The first season covered the creation of Gimlet media and the Startup show - it was a show about itself (meta, right?).
- Youpreneur.FM - I learned about Chris Ducker from Pat Flynn. Chris is a very strong and charismatic character who talks about business and teaches about business strategies, mostly in the online space.
- The $100 MBA Show - I’m amazed that Omar Zenhom is capable of delivering a 10-minute show every day (that means 7 days a week, 365 days per year, including Christmas and New Year). In each episode, he teaches one business topic or answers a business question from one of his listeners.
- Steal the Show - Michel Port covers speaking, audience engagement, and how to behave when you are in the spotlight.
- Seth Godin’s Startup School - this podcast is a series of recordings from one of Seth’s workshops. He covers topics about building and running businesses.
Interviews and discussions
The podcasts in this category are discussions on various topics, including but not limited to technology, software, feminism, logical fallacies, and random questions from Quora.
- Re/code Decode - when I discovered this podcast I went back as far as my podcast app allowed me and got the previous episodes. Kara Swisher interviews smart successful people.
- You Are Not So Smart - yes, I am not so smart. A great podcast about logical fallacies, delisions, and cognitive biases. You’ll realize how easy is to make logical mistakes and how common they are.
- Hanselminutes - full disclosure, Scott is a colleague of mine at Microsoft. However, the reason I listen to his podcast is because he’s a brilliant speaker and his guests provide a lot of useful information on, mostly, tech topics.
- Less Than or Equal - probably, a unique show about inequality in various industries.
- HBR IdeaCast - a weekly podcast featuring the leading thinkers in business and management from Harvard Business Review.
- What’s The Point - a show about data and numbers, and how they impact our lives.
- Question of the Day - James and Stephen answer random questions. That’s it. But they do it brilliantly and the discussion is informal and unscripted.
Misc
It’s hard to categorize the podcasts in this category. They are about various topics that range from how monkeys behave when the number of males in a group decreases to how the Internet ruined someone’s life and got him banned from his community.
- Reply All - this is the second show created the Gimlet Media (the company behind the Startup podcast). It’s a show about weird things happening on the Internet.
- Radiolab - a show about curious stories.
- Planet Money - random, curious, and interesting stories about global economics.
This is it - my 2015 podcasts lists. If you’d like to share a podcast or tell me what you think about any in my list, leave a comment below.