The 15 Podcasts Every MBA Should Listen To

Nobody mentions this on the school website, but a fair amount of your MBA will be spent walking to campus, queueing for coffee, taking a ride back from a recruiting trek in the city, or running on a treadmill at an hour you would rather not discuss. Over two years that adds up to hundreds of hours of perfectly good thinking time, ready to be put to great use.

Podcasts are one of the best lessons for business students. The most interesting people in strategy, finance, marketing and entrepreneurship are all now talking into microphones, for free, at length, and often more candidly than they would in a lecture hall or an annual report. Chief executives explain the decision they got wrong. Professors say the thing they cannot put in a journal. Investors argue in public about where the money is going.

You still have to do the reading for tomorrow’s case. But the best podcasts do something a syllabus cannot, which is to show you how good business thinkers actually reason in real time, mid-argument, without the benefit of hindsight.

Here are the 15 podcasts BlueSky Thinking has chosen to enrich your business knowledge, with details of what each is good for, where to start, and episodes to start with.

We haven’t put this one at the top of the list for alphabetical reasons, but because business schools built their reputation on the case method, and then two venture capitalists started giving it away for free, at four hours a company. Acquired takes one business and follows it from founding to the present day: how it made money, what it got wrong, and why it survived when its rivals did not.

The Nvidia trilogy explains how a graphics card company ended up owning the infrastructure of artificial intelligence. The LVMH episode is the best available account of how luxury actually works as a business model. The Costco episode has converted more people into students of retail economics than any lecture. And the NFL episode treats a sports league as what it really is, a media rights machine. The strongest endorsement is not ours. Harvard Business School has written a case study about Acquired itself, “The Acquired Podcast: Scaling the Mic”. A show about case studies became one.

The hosts met at Madrona Venture Group in Seattle and started the podcast as a hobby in 2015, with an episode about Pixar. David Rosenthal has an MBA from Stanford, and spent more than a decade as a venture capitalist before going full time on the show. Ben Gilbert studied at Ohio State, worked at Microsoft on Office for iPad, and built and backed startups at Madrona and Pioneer Square Labs. Neither is a broadcaster by training, which is part of the appeal. They sound like two fun and well-prepared people arguing about a company they have read everything about.

The range is wider than the technology reputation suggests. Recent seasons cover Rolex, Formula 1, the NFL and a two-part study of Walt Disney, alongside Microsoft, Nike, IKEA and Standard Oil. Every episode ends the same way, with a playbook section and an analysis of the company against Hamilton Helmer’s 7 Powers framework, which is the closest thing podcasting has to a strategy seminar. 

Guests have included Jensen Huang, Dara Khosrowshahi, Charlie Munger and Mark Zuckerberg, the last of those recorded live in front of an arena crowd at San Francisco’s Chase Center. More than a million people listen to each episode, it ranks first among technology shows on Apple and Spotify, and roughly one in seven listeners is a sitting CEO.

Frequency: Episodes appear every three to four weeks and run between two and four hours, so this is a commitment rather than a commute. 

Start with Coca-Cola, which is somehow a story about sugar water, the Second World War, Warren Buffett, Santa Claus and one of the great scale economy businesses ever built..

The caveat: the hosts are investors, sometimes in the companies they cover, and the tone is admiring more often than it is critical. These are histories of winners told with affection.

Listen: Spotify · Apple Podcasts

Scott Galloway teaches brand strategy and digital marketing to second-year MBAs at NYU Stern, which makes this the closest thing on the list to a business school professor talking to you every weekday morning. Prof G Markets takes the week’s earnings, deals and market moves and asks what they mean, at a pace and length that fits an actual commute. Recent episodes have set out the bull and bear cases at record market highs, and examined how dependent the index has become on companies burning cash to build AI capacity. 

When Galloway wants the argument sharpened he brings in his NYU colleague Aswath Damodaran, the valuation scholar, who has used the show to argue that the market is not pricing in something potentially catastrophic. That combination, a marketer and a valuation professor arguing about the same set of numbers, is a reason to subscribe.

Galloway has an MBA from Berkeley Haas, and has founded nine companies including the brand consultancy Prophet, the e-commerce business RedEnvelope, and L2, which he sold to Gartner. He has served on the boards of The New York Times Company, Urban Outfitters, Panera and Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, and was named one of the world’s 50 best business school professors by Poets & Quants in 2012. Ed Elson, his co-host, is an analyst and writer who also co-hosts First Time Founders, and whose job on the show is largely to slow Galloway down and make him show his working.

Expect markets, Big Tech, geopolitics, media economics and a recurring interest in how young men are faring in the modern economy. The wider Prof G universe includes The Prof G Pod for longer interviews and Pivot with Kara Swisher for technology and politics.

Frequency: Daily, at roughly 20 to 40 minutes. The live shows sell out theatres, including a run through the Wiltern in Los Angeles, the Fillmore Miami Beach and Town Hall in New York.

Start with the Jim Chanos episode, in which the short seller who made his name betting against Enron compares the AI investment boom to the dot-com era and explains what would change his mind.

The caveat: Galloway is a performer as much as an analyst. He makes confident calls, some of which are wrong, and the certainty is part of the entertainment. Listen for the framework rather than the prediction.

Listen: Spotify · Apple Podcasts

If Acquired is the case method on loan, this is the case method itself. Cold Call takes the opening question an HBS professor uses to start a class discussion and builds an episode around it, with the faculty member who wrote the case and, increasingly, the executive who lived it. The value for a student is obvious and specific: you hear what a good case discussion actually sounds like before you are cold called in one. 

The Commonwealth Bank of Australia episode asks whether a bank that warns customers honestly about the drawbacks of its credit cards will damage its own performance. Mark Roberge’s episode on InsightSquared works through the question every startup eventually faces, which is how to scale a sales operation without breaking it. A recent live taping on campus put School of Rock’s president and former chief executive in front of an audience to discuss why a well-designed internal app failed to win over franchisees. Neatly for this list, one 2026 episode covers the HBS case written about Acquired.

Brian Kenny is Harvard Business School’s Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, and ran global marketing for the consultancy Monitor Group and for Genuity before that. He is not a professor, which is the point. He asks the question the room is thinking rather than the question a specialist would ask, and he is very good at making faculty explain themselves in plain language.

Expect brands, startups, social enterprises, banks, museums and occasionally entire countries. A new video series focuses on how organisations are adapting to AI, covering The Atlantic’s partnership with OpenAI, Harvard Art Museums using generative AI to lift visitor engagement, and Mass General Brigham’s AI documentation programme.

Frequency: Every two weeks, around 25 to 30 minutes. The show has passed 12 million lifetime downloads since it launched in 2015 and sits consistently in the top 50 management podcasts on Apple.

Start with any case in the industry you are targeting, or otherwise James Sebenius on how Michael Jackson’s lawyer bought the Beatles catalogue in 1985 and spent three decades building it into the largest music publishing company in the world..

The caveat: the podcast is made by the school’s marketing department, and it is a shop window for HBS cases and faculty books. You get the discussion without the underlying case document, so you are hearing the answer without having done the reading.

Listen: Spotify · Apple Podcasts

Nobody needs to be told this show exists. It is the second most popular podcast in the world on Spotify’s 2025 ranking, and in 2024 it became the first UK-produced show to pass a billion views and listens across Apple, Spotify and YouTube. The question for a business school audience is not whether to listen but which episodes are worth the time, because this is a show that will happily sell you an interview about the financial architecture of the AI boom one week and cold plunges the next. The good business episodes are very good. Ed Zitron’s appearance in 2026 laid out the argument that the AI boom runs on circular financing between the large technology companies and the AI labs rather than on customer demand, with data centre investment vastly exceeding actual AI revenue. It is the clearest hour available on the bear case, and it will be more useful in a strategy seminar than anything you will read in a press release. Brené Brown, the most requested guest in the show’s history, is the counterweight on leadership and vulnerability.

Steven Bartlett was born in Botswana in 1992 and raised in Plymouth. He dropped out of university after a single lecture, started the social media agency Social Chain from his bedroom at 21, and became the youngest investor ever to join Dragons’ Den. He now runs Flight Story and the holding company Steven.com. The dropout backstory matters, because Bartlett interviews people from a position of open scepticism about credentials, which produces sharper questions than deference does.

Expect a very wide net: founders, chief executives, athletes, psychologists, scientists and politicians, at one to two hours each. The business interviews cover company building, marketing, capital and failure. The rest ranges across health, relationships and personal performance, which is why Apple files the show under business and health at the same time.

Frequency: Two episodes a week, and more than 780 in the archive since 2017.

Start with the Ed Zitron interview on AI economics, followed by any founder episode in your target sector.

The caveat: a BBC World Service investigation in December 2024 found that many of the show’s health episodes contained claims contradicting scientific consensus, and the Guardian and others have since reported similar concerns about specific guests. The production company defends the show on freedom of expression grounds. None of that touches the business interviews, but it should shape how much authority you grant anything said on this show outside a guest’s actual field.

Listen: Spotify · Apple Podcasts

Nicolai Tangen runs the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund, which is valued at around $2.34 trillion, invests in more than 7,000 companies across 50 countries, and holds roughly 1.5 per cent of every listed share on earth. He is, in a literal sense, a part owner of most of the companies whose chief executives he interviews. That is the show’s premise and its peculiar advantage. 

When Tangen asks a chief executive about capital allocation, the answer is being given to a shareholder, and the register of the conversation changes accordingly. Susan Cain’s episode on why introverts often make effective leaders is the one to send to anyone who thinks charisma is the job. The interview with the head of CPP Investments on managing $800 billion for 22 million Canadians is a rare look at how institutional money actually gets deployed.

Tangen has been chief executive of Norges Bank Investment Management since 2020. Before that he founded and ran the London hedge fund AKO Capital, and he was an analyst at Egerton Capital and Cazenove before that. His degrees are unusual for a fund manager: finance at Wharton, then master’s degrees in art history at the Courtauld and social psychology at the LSE, plus Russian at the Norwegian Armed Forces’ school of intelligence. He also gives away a large part of his wealth through the AKO Foundation.

Expect chief executives of very large companies talking about strategy, capital, succession and their own habits. Tangen ends almost every interview by asking what advice the guest would give a young person, which turns the archive into an unusually direct careers resource.

Frequcny: Full episodes weekly on Wednesdays, with shorter highlight editions on Fridays. Around 280 episodes since 2022, at 30 to 45 minutes each.

Start with Stan Druckenmiller, recorded in New York, on how one of the great investors actually reaches a decision.

The caveat: these are not adversarial interviews. Tangen is charming, curious and an owner, and the incentives all point towards a pleasant conversation. You will learn how leaders think, not what they are getting wrong.

Listen: Spotify · Apple Podcasts

Most business podcasts explain what happened. Odd Lots explains the machinery underneath, which is the more durable skill. Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway have spent ten years finding the person who genuinely understands one specific mechanism, whether that is container shipping rates, the repo market or the price of eggs, and letting them talk. 

For an MBA this is the antidote to the case study habit of treating the operating environment as a given. Recent episodes have covered Nigeria’s Dangote Refinery and what became Africa’s largest IPO, constraints in the freight market, and what central bankers were signalling at Jackson Hole. It is the show that will teach you to ask where a number comes from.

Weisenthal is an executive editor for news at Bloomberg’s digital brands and has been at the centre of financial Twitter for as long as that has been a thing. Alloway spent 2008 to 2015 at the Financial Times covering capital markets and was deputy editor of FT Alphaville, which is the best possible training for taking a complicated market and making it readable. Together they have the useful habit of asking the stupid question on the listener’s behalf.

Expect macroeconomics, commodities, market structure, supply chains, energy, credit and the occasional genuinely strange corner of finance. Guests are analysts, traders, academics and operators rather than chief executives on a book tour.

Frequcny: Three episodes a week, on Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays, at 40 to 60 minutes.

Start with any commodities or supply chain episode, which is where the show’s method is most visible.

The caveat: it assumes a level of financial literacy. In your first month you will be lost occasionally. Stay anyway, because being lost and curious is how the vocabulary sticks.

Listen: Spotify · Apple Podcasts

This is the founder origin story done properly, and the reason it has lasted ten years is that Guy Raz asks the uncomfortable questions that most founder interviews skip. The Bobbie episode is the template: a company that spent years fighting a dispute with the FDA and hunting for a manufacturer, with the constant fear of running out of money, before reaching more than $100 million in annual revenue and close to 4 per cent of the US infant formula market. 

Tobias Lütke on building Shopify is the one for anyone interested in how a snowboard shop became infrastructure. The show is at its most useful when a founder describes the eighteen months when nothing worked, because that is the part of entrepreneurship no case study captures well.

Guy Raz has interviewed more than 20,000 people. He joined NPR as an intern in 1997, worked as assistant to the legendary correspondent Daniel Schorr, and was made NPR’s Berlin bureau chief at 25, later serving in London and reporting from more than 40 countries including Iraq and Afghanistan. He hosted the weekend edition of All Things Considered, co-created the TED Radio Hour, and in 2017 became the first person in podcasting to hold three shows in the Apple top 20 at the same time. He is a reporter by training rather than an investor, which is why the questions are better than the average founder interview.

Expect consumer brands most of all, plus technology, food, retail and media. The Advice Line format is the underrated part: founders call in with a live problem, and Raz works through it with a former guest, which is closer to a coaching session than an interview.

Frequency: Two episodes a week, Mondays and Thursdays, at around an hour.

Start with Joe Gebbia on the founding of Airbnb, the 2017 episode that made the show’s name.

The caveat: every guest is a success story. You never hear from the founders who made the same decisions and went under, so treat the lessons as things that worked once rather than things that work.

Listen: Spotify · Apple Podcasts

If you are heading into technology rather than consulting or banking, this is the most immediately useful show on the list. Lenny Rachitsky interviews the people who actually do the job, product leaders, growth practitioners and founders, at a level of specificity that borders on the operational. 

Guests have included OpenAI’s head of design, Cursor’s head of talent, and the chief product officer of Whatnot. What separates it from the genre is that Rachitsky asks for the mechanism rather than the philosophy. How was that decision made, who made it, what did the meeting look like, what would you do differently. The career episodes are as valuable as the product ones, particularly for anyone trying to work out what a product role in a fast-growing company involves before they take one.

Rachitsky sold his company Localmind to Airbnb and then spent seven years there leading supply growth, conversion, trip quality and community. He left, gave himself six months to tinker, and turned a Substack into the largest business newsletter on the platform with 1.2 million subscribers. His approach to preparation is well documented and slightly absurd, which is why the interviews rarely waste time.

Expect product management, growth, pricing, hiring, AI tooling and startup operations. The spin-off series How I AI, hosted by Claire Vo, deals specifically with hands-on uses of AI tools, and Rachitsky auditioned people to host it rather than fronting it himself.

Frequency: Weekly, at 60 to 90 minutes. More than 350 episodes since 2022, with over 500,000 YouTube subscribers and 100,000 to 200,000 downloads per episode.

Start with any episode with a founder in a sector you want to enter, or a hiring episode if you are about to recruit.

The caveat: the vocabulary is Silicon Valley’s. If you are going into industrials, healthcare or banking, a good half of the specifics will not transfer, though the interviewing method still repays study.

Listen: Spotify · Apple Podcasts

If Acquired is the four-hour case study, this is the twenty-five minute seminar you can fit between lectures. Harvard Business Review has been publishing the ideas that shape what business schools teach since 1922, and since May 2006 the IdeaCast has been putting the people behind those ideas in front of a microphone. That matters for a student, because the research you are assigned in your second year usually appeared here first, in the words of the person who did the work. 

Angela Duckworth used a 2026 episode to argue that her research on grit has become more relevant in the age of generative AI, not less, because the people who thrive treat the technology as something to learn from rather than something that does the work. London Business School’s Lynda Gratton used another to point out that we are all living longer while our assumptions about executive careers, the ladder and the retirement date at 65, have not caught up. Neither of those is an abstraction if you are about to spend two years and a large amount of money on a qualification meant to last forty.

Alison Beard, HBR’s executive editor, hosts alongside senior editor Curt Nickisch. Beard came to Harvard from the Financial Times, and she edits the section of the magazine aimed at individual managers navigating their own careers. Nickisch has an MBA from Boston University and reported for NPR, Marketplace and Fast Company before joining HBR. They have recently been joined by Adi Ignatius, who ran the magazine as editor in chief for 16 years and is now editor at large, a change that has pushed the show towards more interviews with sitting C-suite executives.

The catalogue is the real argument. More than 1,100 episodes cover strategy, innovation, leadership, entrepreneurship, economics, finance, communication and teams, which is close to a core curriculum. Michael Porter on competitive strategy sits in the archive alongside Christina Maslach on burnout and IMD’s Goutam Challagalla on whether customers will actually pay a premium for sustainability. A recent special series, Tech at Work, deals with the practical question of making new technology useful to a team rather than merely present in it. The interviews are with one expert at a time, usually someone who has written for HBR or done the research at a major business school, which keeps the show closer to evidence than to opinion.

Frequency: New episodes land every Tuesday and run 25 to 30 minutes, so a term’s worth of listening costs you about six hours in total. 

Start with the compilation the hosts assembled for the thousandth episode, which is the fastest tour of the archive available, then work backwards into whichever discipline you are weakest in.

The caveat: many episodes are timed to a guest’s new book, so the show can feel like a publishing carousel, and 25 minutes gets you the headline finding rather than the method behind it. Treat it as a way to decide what to read properly, not as a substitute for reading it.

Listen: Spotify · Apple Podcasts

Every other show on this list assumes capitalism works and asks how to do it well. This one asks whether it is working at all, and it does so from inside a business school with a long attachment to free markets. Chicago Booth’s Stigler Center produces it, and the episodes have real teeth. 

The legal scholar Ray Madoff walks through why the familiar statistic that the top 1 per cent pay 40 per cent of all taxes obscures the fact that the very rich often have little taxable income at all, living instead on borrowed money. UCLA’s Adam Winkler traces the 200-year campaign that won corporations the constitutional rights of people, and gets pressed on whether AI systems could be next. Luigi Zingales argues that what we call free trade is better described as captured trade. If you are going to spend a career inside these institutions, the strongest arguments against them are worth hearing early, and hearing them made competently.

Zingales is the Robert C. McCormack Distinguished Service Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance at Chicago Booth, and one of the more prominent economists writing about the relationship between markets and political power. Bethany McLean is the investigative journalist and Vanity Fair contributing editor who has spent a career taking apart corporate stories that everyone else accepted. The pairing works because they disagree from different directions, an economist and a reporter, and neither defers.

Expect tax policy, antitrust, private equity, trade, corporate governance and the politics of finance. Live recordings at Booth have featured Nobel laureate Richard Thaler on behavioural economics and the historian Niall Ferguson on the global order.

Frequency: Weekly, at 40 to 50 minutes. Around 240 episodes since 2018, when it launched with Zingales and Georgetown’s Kate Waldock.

Start with Chicago Booth’s own Steve Kaplan, asked on a Chicago Booth podcast whether American capitalism is actually delivering, and pushed on income, mobility and who pays for the failures.

The caveat: the show argues from a position. Zingales has a thesis about capitalism being captured by incumbents, and the guest list reflects it. Take it as a deliberate corrective rather than a neutral survey.

Listen: Spotify · Apple Podcasts

Marketing is the discipline where MBAs are most likely to arrive with confident opinions and no evidence, and this is the best available cure. Jon Evans interviews chief marketing officers, agency founders and researchers about what actually moves a business, with data rather than anecdote. 

The Cannes Lions episode is the one that made the show’s reputation, bringing together Mark Ritson and Byron Sharp for the first time in more than a decade to argue about How Brands Grow, distinctiveness, the 95:5 rule and where AI fits. Elsewhere, the chief marketing officer of Chili’s explains one of the more impressive brand turnarounds of recent years, and Klaviyo’s CMO makes the case for customer experience as a growth engine. The recurring theme, backed by System1’s analysis of 100,000 campaigns, is that roughly half of a campaign’s business outcome depends on the creative work itself rather than the media plan, which is the argument most marketers struggle to make to a finance director.

Evans has been on both sides. He was marketing director at Suntory, where he ran Lucozade through a reformulation crisis, sat on the board of a private equity backed soft drinks business, and lasted three months as chief marketing officer of BrewDog. He now runs customer work at System1, the advertising and innovation effectiveness platform, which gives him access to thousands of test results. He has been fired twice in one year, talks about it openly, and that willingness to describe failure is what gets his guests to do the same.

Expect brand building, creative effectiveness, measurement, the long and short of marketing investment, and a steady stream of practitioners explaining what they got wrong.

Frequency: Weekly, at 45 to 75 minutes, since 2019. More than 2 million downloads across 150 countries.

Start with Richard Shotton on why we buy what we buy, the very first episode, and still the best hour the show has done on behavioural science in advertising.

The caveat: the host works for a company that sells creative testing, and the show’s central argument, that creative matters more than media allocation, is also his employer’s commercial proposition. The evidence is strong, so know whose evidence it is.

Listen: Spotify · Apple Podcasts

Four investors, an hour and a half, no editing to speak of, and a weekly argument about where capital is going. Whatever you think of the hosts, this is the closest thing to being in the room when serious money is being allocated, and MBAs heading for venture, growth equity or a startup should know how that room talks. 

The Best Ideas format is the standout, in which fund managers pitch a single position, from a casino operator to a power company to an oncology business, and the hosts pick it apart. Recent episodes have covered Nvidia’s $500 billion financing plans and how an AI market correction might actually unfold, the open source AI fight, and four robotics chief executives on humanoids and the economics of a one dollar an hour worker.

Chamath Palihapitiya founded Social Capital after a senior role at Facebook. Jason Calacanis created the show and produces it, alongside his own This Week in Startups. David Sacks was chief operating officer of PayPal and founded Yammer, is a general partner at Craft Ventures, and now chairs the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. David Friedberg founded The Climate Corporation, sold it to Monsanto for $1.1 billion in 2013 in the first unicorn exit in agricultural technology, and now runs Ohalo Genetics and The Production Board.

Expect markets, artificial intelligence, venture capital, science, and a large helping of American politics. Guests have included Elon Musk, Ray Dalio, Bill Gurley, Sam Altman and sitting politicians, and the annual All-In Summit has become a fixture.

Frequency: Weekly, at 60 to 100 minutes, since 2020, with more than a million YouTube subscribers.

Start with the interview with the chief executive of Flock, the number plate surveillance company: a real operator in the chair, being asked the hard questions by four people with money at stake..

The caveat: this is not neutral analysis and does not pretend to be. The hosts hold positions in what they discuss, one of them holds a White House advisory role, and the political content is partisan. Listen for how investment arguments are constructed, and keep a hand on your wallet.

Listen: Spotify · Apple Podcasts

13. Think Fast Talk Smart

Of everything on this list, this is the show most likely to change how you perform next week. Matt Abrahams teaches strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and the podcast is essentially his course delivered in short instalments: how to answer a question you were not expecting, how to structure a high-stakes presentation, how to give difficult feedback, how to be concise. 

Business school runs on spontaneous speaking. Cold calls, case discussions, interviews, pitches and networking are all forms of being put on the spot, and almost nobody is taught how to do them. Abrahams has built a career on exactly that gap, coaching presenters for IPO roadshows, TED, the World Economic Forum and Nobel Prize presentations.

Abrahams is a lecturer in organizational behaviour at Stanford GSB and has won the school’s Alumni Teaching Award. He wrote Speaking Up Without Freaking Out and Think Faster, Talk Smarter, and teaches the school’s Essentials of Strategic Communication course alongside Shawon Jackson. His manner is the opposite of the confidence-guru genre. Everything is a technique with a name, a structure and a way to practise it.

Expect concrete tools rather than inspiration: frameworks for improvised answers, advice on managing speaking anxiety, guidance on virtual presenting, and interviews with colleagues and experts across the university. He closes every episode by asking guests to name the three ingredients in a successful communication recipe, and the accumulated answers are a short course in themselves.

Frequency: Weekly on Tuesdays, at around 20 to 30 minutes. Launched in January 2020 and now reaching listeners in more than 200 countries.

Start with the earliest episodes on spontaneous speaking with the Stanford improvisation lecturers, which set out the core method.

The caveat: this only works if you practise. Listening to communication advice while doing nothing about it is one of the more comfortable forms of procrastination available to a student.

Listen: Spotify · Apple Podcasts

Value investing was invented at Columbia Business School in the 1920s by Benjamin Graham and David Dodd, whose Security Analysis gave investment decisions their first rational basis. This is the podcast made by the department that still teaches it, and it is the most demanding show on this list. 

Episodes are long conversations with practitioners about how they actually decide what a business is worth. Django Davidson of Hosking Partners explains the capital cycle approach, which is to say why industries destroy their own returns by investing at exactly the wrong moment. Jim Flynn of Deerfield Management describes probabilistic thinking across roughly $16 billion of healthcare investments. Matthew Fine of Third Avenue works through why balance sheet strength matters more than growth when a crisis arrives. Columbia’s Kent Daniel goes after the Fama-French model. If you are heading into asset management, private equity or equity research, this is your reading list in audio form.

Tano Santos is the Robert Heilbrunn Professor of Asset Management and Finance at Columbia and faculty director of the Heilbrunn Center for Graham and Dodd Investing. Michael Mauboussin is an adjunct professor at Columbia and a Heilbrunn Center faculty member, and one of the most widely read writers on decision-making and valuation working today. They record between teaching, and it shows in the best way. The questions are the ones they have just been asked by students.

Expect valuation, market structure, behavioural finance, portfolio construction, and long conversations about what a career in investing actually looks like from the inside.

Frequency: Seasonal rather than weekly, following the Columbia academic calendar, at 50 to 70 minutes.

Start with Eddie Perkin, formerly chief investment officer at Eaton Vance and at Goldman Sachs Asset Management, on what actually makes an investment decision a good one.

The caveat: it assumes you can read a balance sheet and are comfortable with academic finance. It also goes quiet between semesters, so do not expect a steady feed.

Listen: Spotify · Apple Podcasts

Every other show here is about business. This one is about the decision you are making right now. Poets & Quants has covered business schools for seventeen years, and its weekly podcast works through the questions applicants and students are actually asking, with the people who used to sit on the other side of the admissions desk. 

Recent episodes cover whether to use AI in an application essay and how admissions teams detect it, which schools are genuinely ahead on AI in the curriculum rather than merely announcing it, and the scholarship discounting now going on as application volumes fall. One episode asks the question of how much rankings actually matter to MBB recruiters. Another works through Round 3 strategy in a year of falling applications. For anyone weighing a one or two-year commitment against one or two hundred thousand dollars and a career pivot, this is the most directly useful listening available.

The show is now fronted by Pola Lem, executive editor at Poets & Quants. Its long-running format pairs the site’s editorial team with two admissions specialists: Caroline Diarte Edwards, an INSEAD graduate and former director of MBA admissions there, now co-director of Fortuna Admissions, and Maria Wich-Vila, a Harvard MBA and founder of ApplicantLab. Between them they have read a great many applications and are refreshingly blunt about what works and what falls short. 

Expect admissions strategy, essays and interviews, rankings analysis, employment reports, scholarships, dual degrees, and the shifting economics of the MBA itself, including the impact of AI on hiring, and what visa and OPT changes mean for international candidates.

Frequency: Weekly, at 20 to 30 minutes, now in its seventh season with more than 300 episodes in the feed.

Start with whichever episode covers the stage of the application cycle or MBA experience that applies to you.

The caveat: this is a show about getting in to business school, the MBA job market and the state of the sector, not about management ideas. Once you are admitted you’ll get questions from family, friends and former collegues, so this is agreat way to stay up to date.

Listen: Spotify · Apple Podcasts

Interested in this topic? You might also like…

Ten Strategies To Make The Most of Your MBA Or Masters

See more

Favorite