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Psychology
21 Psychology Podcasts Every Businessperson Should Listen To
The best podcasts about how people buy, create and negotiate.
Posted February 9, 2021 Reviewed by Kaja Perina
While many business legends have gotten away with the scantiest grip on accounting, finance, and tech, no one has ever made it big without understanding what drives the behavior of their customers, clients, employees, and partners. Yet, when asked about the discipline of psychology, many businesspeople respond with a blank stare.
It was with this discrepancy in mind that I decided to put together a list of the best psychology-oriented podcasts for businesspeople to listen to.
For the purposes of this piece, I have defined psychology quite broadly. If a podcast focuses on the mechanisms behind how human beings think, feel, or interact, it was eligible for consideration.
Whether you need to solve a difficult interpersonal challenge, figure out how to fatten your sales pipeline, or soothe your emotional state in the midst of stress, there’s probably a podcast on this list that’s right for you.
For many years, economists operated under the assumption that human beings made rational decisions. Then behavioral economics came along and changed everything. The field is all about the hidden biases driving our financial decisions. On The Brainy Business, host Melina Palmer boils down the complex academic concepts of behavioral economics to help listeners turn these groundbreaking insights into actionable steps.
Unmistakable Creative, hosted by Srinivas Rao, was one of the earliest interview-based podcasts. It rose to prominence by offering detailed explorations of the various kinds of creativity that lead to commercial success. Through deep questioning and even deeper listening, Rao regularly uncovers counterintuitive insights about the inner workings of innovation.
Co-hosts Joel Mark Witt and Antonia Dodge explore the nature and structure of human personality on each episode of their show. No matter what kind of business you’re in, the personalities of the people you manage, sell to, or work beside will significantly affect the results you achieve. The Personality Hacker Podcast helps you navigate the ins and outs of this multilayered subject.
On Opinion Science, psychologist and podcast host Andy Luttrell digs deep into the roots of what factors influence our most strongly held opinions. He covers the ways in which our attitudes affect the degree of influence others have over us, how much influence we have over others, and how we and the people we want to influence change over time.
You Are Not So Smart is an extension of the book of the same name, in which host Dave McRaney helps us become aware of our own self-delusions. McRaney is a natural storyteller who almost makes you feel okay about all the ways you’re fooling yourself on a daily basis.
Marketing at its best is all about persuasion, influence, motivation, and perception. Kenneth “Shark” Kinney, the host of A Shark’s Perspective, has a knack for identifying, connecting with, booking, and interviewing marketing experts who have an uncanny understanding of the discipline’s most psychological aspects.
As a professional salesperson trained in the traditional “always be closing" style, host Red Strafstrom came close to having a breakdown. Instead, he embarked on a quest to dissect the psychology of sales so he could reconfigure the process into something he felt good about. In the Broken Salespeople Podcast, Strafstrom relates his journey, along with the insights that followed.
On The Anthony Iannarino Show, the bestselling author, speaker, trainer, entrepreneur, eponymous host, and, above all, business-to-business sales expert engages in in-depth conversations with big-ticket sales wizards and many other professionals and thinkers. In doing so, he reveals the less-than-obvious psychological nuances that show up in everyday business scenarios.
Host Marcus Cauchi describes TheInquisitor Podcast as providing “sales advice for the ambitiously lazy.” What he really does is explore the unseen forces that motivate buying decisions. The podcast takes the form of a series of interviews where Cauchi draws out real-world, practical sales, management, and channel sales advice for sales professionals, CEOs, channel chiefs, sales leaders, and sales managers.
10. The Marketing Book Podcast
Douglas Burdett, the founder of an agency that specializes in promoting manufacturing firms, realized that he was reading tons of books about marketing and wanted to discuss what he was learning. The result was The Marketing Book Podcast. Burdett is constantly pitched to by publicists wanting to get their authors on his incredibly popular show. Fortunately for us, he is highly selective, featuring only books that provide the most valuable insights about market motivations and behaviors.
11. The Social-Engineer Podcast
Christopher Hadnagy specializes in understanding how malicious actors take advantage of the quirks in human nature to harm their fellow human beings. In the Social-Engineering Podcast, Hadnagy and his co-host Maxie Reynolds (a submarine piloting, ex-stunt woman, MIT-educated, fellow social engineering expert), explore all the unique and imperfect ways we humans communicate, interact, and relay information to one another.
Jenny Radcliffe spent her youth prowling the rough and tumble streets of Liverpool—helping her friend burglarize buildings by distracting guards and extracting valuable information from them in the process. She eventually abandoned the world of petty crime and turned herself into one of the world’s most coveted experts in corporate security. On her podcast, Human Factor Security, Radcliffe and her guests explore what makes human beings so easy to manipulate.
13. Changing Minds
Changing Minds is a podcast all about unlocking the real reasons behind why we do what we do, why we say what we say, and why we think the thoughts that we think. Host Owen Fitzpatrick facilitates a blend of discussions, interviews, book reviews, and monologues that gives listeners science-based strategies for thinking differently in all the most important areas of their professional and personal lives.
Gene Hammett started his Growth Think Tank podcast for the purpose of helping business leaders learn motivation, persuasion, and influence through discussions with other leaders. The podcast focuses on interviews with founders and CEOs of Inc. 500 companies who impart their insights about the behavioral aspects of business.
Kurt Mortensen’s podcast Maximize Your Influence is based on the premise that persuasion, influence, and negotiation skills are absolutely essential for gaining fulfillment not only in business but in every area of life. The podcast covers timeless persuasion research, the most up-to-date studies, and plenty of stories, anecdotes, and discussions to arm listeners with the ability to influence anyone they encounter.
16. Brain Science
The stated mission of Ginger Campbell’s Brain Science Podcast is to communicate the most recent discoveries from the world of neuroscience in a way that people of all backgrounds can enjoy. The podcast has had more than 10 million downloads and is one of the top-ranking podcasts in its category on iTunes.
In Unpopular Culture, host Michael Drane draws examples from crime, pop culture, and media to illustrate the delusions, illusions, and manipulations that characterize so much of human existence. Unpopular Culture is a valuable resource for anyone looking to understand and navigate the machinations, outbursts, and excessive emotionalism that so often passes as business leadership.
Behavioral Grooves, co-hosted by consultants Kurt Nelson and Tim Houlihan, features interviews with behavioral science theorists and practitioners, along with their musings, stories, and music playlists. In doing so, the hosts illuminate the oddities of human behavior to anyone who depends for their living on figuring out how their fellow humans operate.
As the producer of the famed Second City improv comedy theater in Chicago, Kelly Leonard discovered and hired such legendary figures as Tina Fey, Stephen Colbert, and Seth Meyers. As host of the Getting to Yes, And podcast, he explores the utility of improvisational thinking via conversations with writers, thinkers, and doers. Past guests have included Brene Brown, Daniel Pink, Scott Barry Kaufman, and Dan Carlin, to name a few.
20. Join Up Dots
Inspired by Steve Jobs’ famous maxim about life only making sense when you connect the dots looking backward, Join Up Dots helps entrepreneurs get to where they need to go by helping them change their mindsets and up their confidence. Whether through conversations with startup founders or his own energetic stories, host David Ralph is all about reframing listeners’ mental states.
21. On Wisdom
The business world is obsessed with being smart. And while smarts are certainly important. It’s also true that self-styled smart people gave us cigarette ads, credit default swaps, and Theranos. What if instead of focusing on getting smarter, more of us strove to become wiser? Cognitive scientist Igor Grossman and Evidence-Based Wisdom Project Director Charles Cassidy launched the On Wisdom podcast specifically to explore what true wisdom looks like.
