Favorite Podcasts

My wife got me into podcasts when we were dating, and thank goodness for that, because it was a 4-hour drive one-way to see her each weekend! It became an easy way to substitute listening to music while I was on-the-go, learning rather than vegging.
This blog post was initially inspired by my now outdated post on The List App, but I knew I wanted to say more than I could type on my phone. They’re each hyperlinked to iTunes so you can find them (boo Android).
This is the latest podcast I’ve stumbled across. It’s super helpful in answering college student related questions as it pertains to productivity and university life. It’s helpful in a very general sense, though, so don’t discredit the guy right away, just because you aren’t in school anymore.
This guy is the legitest of the legit. A self-proclaimed “human guniea pig”, Tim experiments on himself in building the best routines and habits for an efficient and creative life. Each episode revolves around a very well-conducted interview of some expert or master of anything from coding to business to the military. definitely worth listening to.
This is a fun podcast because NPR (the host program) goes through all the homework of researching TED talks, then picks 4 or 5 to be combined into a theme for a single podcast episode. They even bring the speakers onto the show, exploring a little bit more thoroughly whatever it was they were talking about on stage.
Song Exploder is not only totally fun, but it’s also rad. They take artists and break down how they create music. Each episode revolves around a single song from a specific artist, and they interview the musician, composer, etc. to see what was going through their mind or what inspired them.
I first bumped into this one by way of the Freakonomics podcast episode interviewing Tim Ferriss! While it does revolve around economics, it’s not as textbooky as a college class would be. Instead, it dives into how Uber is a huge data source for economists, the betting pools of soccer games, and even the presidential elections. Give it a go. It’s a fun one.
These episodes only last 10-15 minutes. It’s like sitting around a story with Dirty Jobs star, Mike Rowe, as he tells a story about someone relatively famous the way he heard it, leaving the big reveal until the end.
This one is tougher to listen to on a regular basis, but I love it. It’s all about love and sexual intimacy between you and your spouse in your marriage. This couple hosts a very open discussion on a lot of topics we all think about but might not know how to discuss. Several of their ideas have seriously opened doors for communication within my marriage. They’re rockstars.
Honorable Mentions
These are podcasts that I have loved or listen to still, but aren’t at the forefront of my priority list. Here it goes:
  • StarTalk Radio: hosted by famous astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson, plus a comedian co-host, and often features Bill Nye the Science Guy
  • The School of Greatness with Lewis Howes: a podcast interviewing guests on what it means to be great. There’s a little more of a business emphasis here than Tim Ferriss’s podcast. 
  • How to Start a Startup: a recorded series of lectures on getting a business started
  • National Defense Magazine: this one’s great to stay up-to-date on the latest military tech and regulations
  • Serial: super well-known, I didn’t like season one, which followed a murder, but season two on Bowe Bergdahl was great!
  • Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History: this might be biting off more than you can chew, but each episode is about three hours long and tackles a piece of history like how WWI started and progressed.
  • Slow German: a great podcast to refresh on my German, only…I don’t listen to it slowly
  • foundr: a great publication that started putting out a podcast as well, highlighting entrepreneurs
  • BrainStuff: a short, 3-or-so-minute podcast that answers everyday questions
  • Startup Grind: interviews with prominent industry figures, designed to help entrepreneurs succeed in starting a business
  • TechStuff: hosted by How Stuff Works, these guys dive into a ton of technology-related topics throughout history as well as in modern-days
  • EOFire: short for “entrepreneurs on fire”, John Lee Dumas (affectionately JLD) literally puts out a new interview every day of the week. It because too much for me to keep up with, and it hogged all my memory, but he does an incredible job of finding entrepreneurs and asking what their biggest failure was and how they overcame it.