I do believe you can learn much about the basics of flipping houses from podcasts (like BP, Justin Williams, etc), but you learn far more once you pull the trigger and have to remodel the property as quickly as possible. The time value of money, coupled with the unknowns in the construction / rehab phase (contractor challenges, unanticipated repairs, etc), require problem solving skills you learn on the job, since they're specific to the project.
The other thing to bear in mind is that flipping houses is most profitable during the recovery phase of a local real estate cycle that leads into the expansionary (new construction) phase. High foreclosure rates especially create an ideal time to flip properties, just prior to recovery, when the market discounts are strong and plentiful. Otherwise, housing inventory is often too low and sellers' asking prices are too high in rebounding markets, creating thin (risky) margins for the investor.
California, Las Vegas and similar locations provided fertile ground for many profitable flips, due to the extreme price drops during the housing bubble. We saw a shorter window of opportunity to flip in Austin (2013-15) when housing prices started to climb and ugly houses at a discount were still around. Texas, however, didn't experience much of a crash in prices during the bubble, unlike much of the U.S. The Austin Business Journal published a good article on this reality >
http://www.bizjournals.com/austin/news/2017/01/27/austin-ranks-among-worst-u-s-city-for-flipping-a.html
