My favourites are:

NPR’s Planet Money remains an outstanding show, with stories, humour, very clear explanations and high production values. But – horrors! – they’ve poached the amazing Cardiff Garcia from the FT, and Cardiff is co-presenting (with Stacey Vanek Smith)… …NPR’s The Indicator which is basically a shorter, chattier version of the same thing. Available daily. Works very well. A new entry is Tyler Cowen’s Conversations with Tyler. This is so wide-ranging that it barely qualifies as an economics podcast, but it’s a joy to listen to. Tyler’s questioning style is unique and he has a remarkable range of people on the podcast – Martina Navratilova, Charles Mann, Garry Kasparov, Agnes Callard, Matt Levine… Freakonomics Radio remains a favourite. Stephen Dubner asks questions that others don’t think to ask, slips between serious and silly topics and generally gets a top-notch line-up of interviewees. Slate Money, presented by Felix Salmon, who is great but still interrupts his (changing crew of) co-hosts a little too too much. Always very smart and sometimes very well informed too. Behavioural economics enthusiasts should try The Hidden Brain with Shankar Vedantam. Guests have included Daniel Pink, Phil Tetlock, Alison Gopnik, Richard Thaler, Daniel Kahneman… even me. Try the Trade Talks podcast with Chad Bown and Soumaya Keynes for a nerdy (but witty) dive into the details of how trade negotiations and agreements work. Ordinarily I would suggest that this might be a little too geeky, but this is a fast-moving subject at the moment, and Bown and Keynes have a light touch, too. Russ Robert’s EconTalk offers long, searching conversations between Russ and a wide variety of guests, often with interesting books or essays to discuss. The sound quality can be patchy and the tone of the interviews varies a lot depending on whether the subject is the evidence for education, or the importance of meditation. But it’s a very good source of smart ideas.

Excellent not-quite-economics podcasts include:

Revisionist History with Malcolm Gladwell Start Up Reply All Radiolab TED Radio Hour 99% Invisible Akimbo WorkLife The Digital Human Stephen Fry’s Great Leap Years

My employers at the FT have some very fine podcasts at the moment. I particularly recommend:

FT Banking Weekly FT Money FT Brexit Unspun

Then there are MY PODCASTS:

More or Less, a weekly guide to the numbers that surround us. Pop Up Economics, mostly by me but also featuring guests including Gillian Tett and Malcolm Gladwell. 13 episodes, currently dormant but enjoy the archive. 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy – although there are actually 52 episodes. Series 1 is complete, but subscribe and watch this space.

That should be plenty to be going on with.

And if you want to make your own podcast, have a listen to some of the recommendations above and grab yourself a microphone (UK) (US). “Out On The Wire” (UK) (US) is a superb guide to how some of the top shows are made.

Previously: Best economics podcasts 2016, Best economics podcasts 2011.



My book “Messy: How To Be Creative and Resilient in a Tidy-Minded World” is now available in paperback both in the US and the UK – or through your local bookshop.