6 Entertaining Podcasts

For about 3 months before my husband and I bought our first house close to downtown, it took me around 30 minutes door to door to get to work and home each day. On these car rides, I got very familiar with podcasts and would come home with story after story of what interesting fact or thing I had learned that day. Sometimes even after I got home I would sit in the car just to hear the very end of each episode.

Podcasts are perfect for long or short car rides, getting ready for work, or doing chores. The episodes are meticulously edited so that they are woven together in a story-like rhythm (i.e. not just one person talking into a mic!). And the best part, these are all free in the Apple Podcasts app on your phone!

There are Podcasts for every genre (finance, science, love, entertainment, comedy, politics, health – I’m sure I have so many more to discover!), but so far the below 6* have been my favorite (descriptions taken from their sites)!

Dirty John – this is a true story and was the equivalent of a page-turner for me. I couldn’t.Stop.Listening! Shout out to my mother-in-law for recommending! Note: This one needs to be listened to in chronological order.
- Debra Newell is a successful interior designer. She meets John Meehan, a handsome man who seems to check all the boxes: attentive, available, just back from a year in Iraq with Doctors Without Borders. But her family doesn’t like John, and they get entangled in an increasingly complex web of love, deception, forgiveness, denial, and ultimately, survival.
Serial – This was the first Podcast I listened to and is very well-known in the Podcast world!
- Tells one story—a true story—over the course of a season. Each season, the narrator follow a plot and characters wherever they take us. The narrartor won’t know what happens at the end until we get there, not long before the listener gets there too. Each week they bring you the next chapter in the story, so it’s important to listen to the episodes in order.
How I Built This –
- Dives into the stories behind some of the world’s best known companies (think Wayfair, Stitch Fix, Spanxx, Kate Spade, etc) . How I Built This weaves a narrative journey about innovators, entrepreneurs and idealists—and the movements they built.
This American Life –
- A weekly public radio program and podcast. Each week they choose a theme and put together different kinds of stories on that theme. It gives listeners touching, humorous and often unexpected vignettes of life in America
Radio Lab –
- A radio show and podcast weaving stories and science into sound and music-rich documentaries.
Start- Up –
- A documentary series about entrepreneurial life. The show has been downloaded tens of millions of times since its launch in 2014. Its first season has been adapted into an ABC sitcom called Alex, Inc. starring Zach Braff. StartUp has won a Gracie Award and the Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism.