My Podcast Recommendations #trypod

In the spirit of #trypod, the industry promotion to get more people to listen to podcasts, here are my recommendations.  I will group them into two loose categories, 1) news and information, 2) entertainment

News & Information

  • Planet Money (NPR) – I’ve been listening since the beginning. About the economy and business.
  • NPR Politics (NPR)
  • Freakonomic Radio (NPR/WNYC)

Entertainment

  • Think again from Big Think – thought leaders
  • James Altuscher Show – interesting guests and he is a good interviewer
  • Startup (Gimlet) – deep info-tainment reporting on startups  (not a “news” program, they go deep into a startupeach season while also chronicling their own startup experience)
  • Reply All (Gimlet) funny, a show “about the internet”
  • Hidden Brain (NPR) – you’ve probably heard segments on NPR, interesting stories about human nature and brain science
  • Pivot Podcast – the author of Pivot, Jenny Blake. Some good episodes, but sometimes they are a bit long winded
  • How I built this (NPR) feature length interviews with people who have created things (like companies, just listened to the episode about the founder of southwest)
  • Twice Removed (gimlet) a show by AJ Jacobs that delves into geneology
  • The Eater Upsell – about the food/restaurant industry
  • Invisibilia

 

The podcasts I listen to fall into two other categories: 1) those i listen to every episode of, and 2) those I listen to sporadically.

I listen to nearly every episode of Planet Money, Hidden Brain, Reply All, StartUp.  All the others, I pick and choose, or used to listen to each episode and am now more selective, or have just started listening to and am not sure that I will listen to each episode.

When deciding on episodes to listen to, I often use episode length as an important deciding factor. I want to be able to listen to the entire episode at once, and usually my listening time is on my commute home (~25 ~ 45 minutes) or while running errands alone on the weekend (45~60 minutes).