During COVID, I really missed college speaker events, which had for the first time made a whole class of people (giants of industry and creativity) approachable as conversational peers in content and style. Podcasts and YouTube lectures can be rich sources that curate 1) achieving people sharing true insights and detail (inspiring) and 2) articulate and status-holding people giving credence to non-popular ideas (necessary). It’s incredible and still underappreciated that we can freely access these conversations when the price for a subsection of these speakers as a ticketed conference would be thousands, or completely inaccessible.
As the medium scales, we’ll see more of the best podcasters (superb listeners + directors of guest streams of consciousness) replace entire media organizations as supernodes in our collective consciousness. They’ve already decided the world’s most important election and become pivotal distribution points within verticals (many of the below guests and hosts have cult followings of top decisionmakers in each subsector). Below are some of my favorites:
Index
Mixed (no series) | The Tim Ferriss Show | Joe Rogan Experience | Invest Like the Best | Dwarkesh Podcast | The Knowledge Project | BG^2 | Tetragrammaton |
Mixed
- Osho – A Story About Enlightenment
- Osho – Buddha Aur Meera Ka Sangam (breaking down a beautiful piece of poetry from the mystic Kabir)
Tim Ferriss
- McConaughey – Oct 2020
- Richard Koch – Sep 2020 – Pareto in everything
- Michael Lewis – May 2020
- Jerry Seinfeld – Dec 2020
- Balaji Srinivasan – Jul 2022 and Mar 2021 – Crypto, technoculture, geopolitics
- David Rubenstein – Jan 2021 – Founding Carlyle
- Naval Ravikant – Jan 2016
- Seth Godin – Oct 2020
- Dan Harris – Nov 2020
- Henry Shukman – Sep 2021 – Koans
- Michael Dell – Sep 2021
- Noah Feldman – Oct 2021
- Roelof Botha – Aug 2022
JRE
- Sadhguru
- Wim Hof First and Second
- Couldn’t find a good transcript to pull quotes from, but, consider this: a 50+ year old Dutch man, who lost his wife in the prime of his relationship to mental health while she was his only family, who is now known for spreading near-holotropic breathing / meditation / positivity that has testimonially saved hundreds of lives, and climbed to Everest base camp in barefeet and shorts. Must-listen.
- Kevin Hart First and Second
- Kanye West
- Naval Ravikant
- Tulsi Gabbard & Jocko Willink
- Andrew Yang
Invest Like the Best
- Cyan Lanister – Motivationally Differentiated Investing
- Brad Jacobs – Platform M&A
- Josh Wolfe – Lux Capital
- Micky Malka – Ribbit, Fintech
- Bret Taylor – AI Agents
- Ken Langone – American Dream
- Erik Serrano – Investing in Investors
- Trae Stephens – GovTech
- Bill Gurley
- Jared Kushner
- Robert Smith – Vista Equity
- Ravi Gupta – KKR / Sequoia
- Antonio Gracias – Valor Equity
- Gavin Baker – Atreides
- Orlando Bravo – Thoma Bravo
- Kat Cole – Focus Brands
- Ricky Sandler – Eminence Capital
- John Harris – (public equities)
- Chamath – Social Capital
- Ram Parameswaran – Octahedron
- Rory Sutherland – Ogilvy Advertising
- Michael Seibel – Y Combinator
- Charlie Songhurst – Microsoft / VC
- Ben Thompson – Stratechery
- John Collison – Stripe
- Tobi Lutke – Shopify
- Jeff Lawson – Twilio
- Jeff Ma
- George Rzepecki – Raba, Africa
Dwarkesh Podcast
- Jung Chang (on the reality of Communist China and its psychological consequences)
- David Deutsch – AI
The Knowledge Project
- Kunal Shah – Core Human Motivations
- Tyler Cowen – Thinking
- Balaji – Network State
- Naval – Angel Philosopher
- Gary Taubes – Sugar
BG^2