Business podcasts typically tackle economic growth numbers, global economics, fiscal policy, international trade and even universally reviled cable companies.

Want to know about job burnout among millennials? Can’t understand why Harvard University is investing in California vineyards? Worried about Italy’s sovereign debt problem?

The Slate Money podcast — hosted by Felix Salmon – nerds out on these topics and more –  the economics of marriage, wine snobbery and even patent trolls. It’s truly a business podcast where no category escapes its peripheral and quirky vision. 

In one podcast episode, for example, author Manu Saadia actually discussed economics through the prism of Star Trek.  

The host, Felix Salmon, is a well-known blogger and business journalist who works at the media company Axios and has a strong history in podcasting and radio with regular stints on APM’s Marketplace Friday Roundup with Ky Ryssdal and On The Media.

Like his co-hosts, Salmon’s wide-ranging background accounts for his wide angle view of economics. Salmon, born in England, has a degree in Art from Glasgow University, as well as a degree in Mathematics. As a host, Salmon breeds infectious intellectual curiosity and seems to enjoy the interplay with his co-hosts and guests. Intellectually, he’s not afraid to flex his muscles but always with a sense of wonder about exploration and a commitment to data analysis instead of political posturing. 

Salmon manages to steer the podcast back on track when it threatens to go off the rails and is never afraid to douse the podcast with a splash of humor, even jokes targeting him, especially directed at his utter lack of American sports knowledge about baseball, basketball and football.

His co-hosts are Emily Peck, a senior reporter at the Huffington Post who covers everything from economics to gender inequality and worked at The Wall Street Journal and The American Lawyer magazine earlier in her career.

Peck brings a healthy dose of gender economics into discussions on the podcast and her reporter’s natural curiosity make her natural fit to investigate the hidden crevices of any topic.

By contrast, the other co-host, Anna Szymanski boasts experience in an entire different area, working as an Emerging Market (EM) debt expert so more than happy to nerd out with Salmon and Peck on Puerto Rico debt woes and Sears debt restructuring.

The podcast typically covers three topics and runs about 50 minutes and has a cutesy naming convention with each podcast being titled the “blah-blah-blah Edition, such as the last episode – the Spoiled Children Edition about the recent college bribery scandal.

At the end of each podcast, Salmon, Peck and Szymanski – as well as the guests — have a number they reveal and discuss briefly in the “Numbers Round.”  

For example, in a recent episode, Peck’s number was one billion dollars, which is the value of the startup Rent The Runaway, only the second “unicorn” owned by a woman.

In its fifth year now, Slate Money is just finding its stride as a business podcast with a tossed salad of topics that appeal to millennials, Gen Xers and baby boomers.

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