7 Podcasts to Help You Think Like an Investor in 2026

Most investing podcasts will teach you what stocks to buy.

The seven below will teach you something more durable: how to think about businesses, capital, and risk in a way that compounds across decades. None of them tell you what to buy. All of them make you better at deciding for yourself.

I’m not an investor by profession, but I listen to investing-adjacent podcasts as the closest thing to a strategy-thinking education that’s freely available. Some of the most useful frameworks I’ve encountered for thinking about products, companies, and decision-making came from this list. They’re worth your time even if you never buy a public stock.

For each show I’ll tell you why it’s on the list, the episode to start with, and the single mental model I’ve stolen from it that I keep using.

1. Invest Like the Best, Patrick O’Shaughnessy

Why it’s #1: ILTB is the closest thing on this list to a perfect podcast. Patrick interviews legendary investors, founders, and thinkers about how they think. The conversations are dense, careful, and consistently change how you see things.

Start with: the Howard Marks episode on second-level thinking. (Marks’s The Most Important Thing is required reading for anyone serious about investing; the podcast is the audio version of Marks’s mind.)

One mental model I keep stealing: second-level thinking. The first answer to any market question is what everyone else has already concluded; the second-level answer is what they’re systematically missing. Apply this to everything, not just investing.

2. Acquired, Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal

Why it matters: Acquired teaches business history at a depth nobody else does. Each episode is one company, three to four hours, deeply researched. By the time you’ve listened to 20 episodes, you have an unusually rich library of business case studies that compounds when you read or listen to anything else.

For investors specifically: Acquired is the best free education in why companies actually become valuable. The strategic moves, the timing decisions, the moats that emerged from accident, you can’t learn this from quarterly reports.

Start with: the Microsoft series (4 parts). Then NVIDIA. Then TSMC.

One mental model I keep stealing: the concept of power (Hamilton Helmer’s framework, which Acquired uses constantly). The seven sources of durable competitive advantage. Once you can identify which power(s) a company has, you can value it more clearly.

3. Founders, David Senra

Why it matters: Founders is the biographies-as-podcast show. David reads founder biographies and reports back, episode by episode, with extraordinary intensity. The format is unique. You’re not getting interviews; you’re getting David’s distilled obsession with the lives of people like Walt Disney, John D. Rockefeller, Edwin Land, Estée Lauder, Steve Jobs.

For investors and operators, Founders is unmatched at one specific thing: pattern recognition across hundreds of years of great company-building. You start to see the recurring shapes — the early failures, the obsessive focus, the long stretches of being misunderstood — and you carry the patterns into your own thinking.

Start with: the Walt Disney episode. Then John D. Rockefeller. Then Edwin Land.

One mental model I keep stealing: the founder-obsession heuristic. David has read enough biographies to notice that the most enduring companies tend to be built by people who can’t stop thinking about their work. Whether that’s a useful filter for investing is a real question; David’s case for it is the most compelling I’ve heard.

4. The Knowledge Project, Shane Parrish

Why it matters: not technically an investing podcast, but the most useful general-purpose decision-making podcast on the list. Shane interviews thinkers across psychology, economics, performance, business, all in service of one question: how do you think better?

Investing is fundamentally a thinking discipline. The Knowledge Project upgrades the thinking.

Start with: the Daniel Kahneman episode. Then Naval Ravikant. Then Annie Duke on decision quality vs. outcome.

One mental model I keep stealing: resulting (from Annie Duke). The cognitive error of judging the quality of a decision by the quality of its outcome. Outcomes have noise; decisions should be judged on the process, not the result.

5. 20VC, Harry Stebbings

Why it matters: for venture-side thinking, 20VC is the highest-frequency show with the broadest guest list. Multiple episodes a week. You stay current on what investors are actually thinking and seeing.

For founders who deal with investors, or for people thinking about venture investing themselves, 20VC is the meta-layer.

Start with: the Bill Gurley episode on power laws. Then the Vinod Khosla on contrarian bets.

One mental model I keep stealing: power laws (Peter Thiel, but discussed often on 20VC). In venture, returns are dominated by a tiny number of huge winners. Most other domains are normally distributed. Recognizing which regime you’re in changes everything.

6. The Logan Bartlett Show

Why it matters: Logan (Redpoint) does a venture-style interview show with founders, operators, and other investors. The episodes are tight, the questions are sharp, and the guest list skews toward people who don’t do many other podcasts.

For investors thinking about company-building or fundraising specifically, this is one of the more underrated shows in the category. Logan asks the questions about the actual mechanics of company-building that other VCs are too polite to ask.

Start with: any of the late-stage founder episodes.

One mental model I keep stealing: the “earn the right to ask” frame. Several of Logan’s guests have made the point that as an investor or operator, you earn the right to ask hard questions by having done your homework. The work before the conversation is the leverage.

7. a16z Podcast

Why it matters: Andreessen Horowitz’s flagship show is a wide catalog covering venture, tech, and the broader market. Episodes range from short single-host explainers to deep founder interviews. The shorter, single-topic episodes are usually the most useful — pure framework or analysis with no padding.

For investors trying to stay current on what the largest VC firm is thinking about, a16z’s podcast is the most direct window.

Start with: any of the more recent “Big Ideas in Tech” annual rundowns. Then the deeper episodes on AI infrastructure or platform shifts.

One mental model I keep stealing: the “stack vs. service” frame the a16z partners often use. Whether a new technology will create infrastructure companies (stacks) vs. application companies (services) determines who actually captures the value. Useful for thinking about almost any new wave.

How to actually use this list

A few honest notes for people who want investing podcasts to actually make them better, not just entertain them:

Pick three, not seven. Nobody actually listens to seven shows weekly. I’d recommend ILTB + Acquired + Founders as the foundation. Add The Knowledge Project for the breadth on thinking. Add the others if time permits.

Listen during long walks or drives. Investing podcasts reward focused listening more than most. The episodes are long and dense; chopping them into 10-minute bites loses the through-line.

Capture the mental models, not the stock picks. The stock pick is local-in-time; the mental model is global. Six months from now, you’ll forget what stocks were discussed. You’ll remember “second-level thinking” forever, if you captured it.

Build a small list of frameworks. Over time, you’ll have a personal vocabulary of 20-30 mental models from these shows. That vocabulary is the real product of listening. Each one is a thinking lens you can apply to new situations.

Margin is the app I built for capturing exactly this. Press and hold while listening, speak the framework or quote, release. The note is anchored to the exact moment and episode. Six months later when you’re trying to remember where you heard the second-level-thinking thing, you can find it instantly.

What this list deliberately excludes

A few absences worth explaining:

• CNBC / Fast Money / daily market shows — too short-term-focused. The signal-to-noise is bad.
• Stock-picking podcasts — most of them are wealth-transfer mechanisms from listeners to hosts. Skip.
• Crypto-only podcasts — domain-specific; if you’re in crypto, you know which to listen to. If you’re not, the list above teaches you better general investing instincts.

The list above is a deliberately boring selection. The best investing thinking is boring. The exciting investing thinking usually loses you money.

One last thing

The single most useful sentence I’ve ever heard from an investor, paraphrased from one of the Howard Marks ILTB episodes:

Most investors fail not because they don’t know enough, but because they don’t act on what they know.

The same is true of podcast listening. You can listen to all seven shows on this list and still be a worse investor than someone who listens to one of them and actually applies what they hear.

The application is what matters. The listening is the input. The decisions you make differently are the output.

Pick one show. Listen to one episode this week. Capture three mental models. Then, and this is the part most people skip, use one of them in an actual decision this month.

That’s the loop. Everything else is podcast collection.

Selinay