My Top 5 Podcast Recommendations (With favourite episodes)

If you are reading this, there are high chances that you have listened to a podcast at least once in your lifetime and maybe you already have a few favourites of your own (DM me 😃) or even if you are new to podcasts altogether, this article has something for you.

My journey with podcasts began in 2013, thus I have been able to try out a lot of great podcasts along the way. And as the title suggests, in this article I will share my top five recommendations with one favourite episode from each podcast, making it easier for you to get started with the show(s) you pick.

1) How I Built This

This podcast is hosted by Guy Raz where he invites entrepreneurs who have founded some of the most well-known companies around the world.

Guests on the podcast include founders of some recent companies like LinkedIn, Slack, Instagram and more to founders of some legendary companies like Ben & Jerry's, Chiptole and others.

Guy is a very experienced host and knows the art of a good conversation which makes his guests open up like never before.

Below is one of my favourite episodes from the podcast. In this episode, Guy invited Joe Gebbia, one of the co-founders of Airbnb.

They have a very interesting conversation about how the company which now has more rooms than the biggest hotel chain in the world came to be.

Listen to the podcast on Google Podcasts | Apple Podcasts | Spotify

2) Naval

Naval Ravikant is a serial entrepreneur and an investor. He co-founded AngelList, a fundraising and hiring platform for startups. He has invested in 200+ companies including Uber, Twitter, Notion, and Clubhouse.

He clearly knows how to make money and more importantly how to stay wealthy in the long term.

Naval may be an entrepreneur and an investor by profession but I and many of his Twitter followers see him as a modern-day philosopher.

He has been sharing his wisdom on how to become wealthy and lead a better life in multiple form factors and got very popular on Twitter when his thread below blew up.

He started this podcast to expand on this Twitter thread.

Thus his initial episodes elaborated on each Tweet of this thread and were no longer than 5 minutes.

After he finished elaborating on the thread he continued to share wisdom on other topics in an easy to consume manner.

My favourite episode so far on his podcast has to be the compilation episode of all his smaller episodes on the tweet that blew up.

Listen to the podcast on Google Podcasts | Apple Podcasts | Spotify

3) TED Radio Hour‌

On this podcast, some of the most influential TED Talk speakers are invited to go deeper on the topic of their talk. They bring multiple TED speakers who talked about a similar topic on one episode giving you multiple perspectives on a topic.

Sounds pretty dope, right? Trust me it is.

The podcast is currently hosted by Manoush Zomorodi and was also hosted by Guy Raz (host of the earlier mentioned podcast How I Built This).

Below is my favourite episode, in this episode the speakers talk about spaces and how different spaces leave a mark in our mind.

Listen to the podcast on Google Podcasts | Apple Podcasts | Spotify

4) HBR IdeaCast

This podcast is from the house of Harvard Business Review (HBR), a popular business magazine by Harvard University.

The podcasts bring you ideas and insights on career, entrepreneurship, management and leadership.

They have been running this podcast since 2006!

So there is definitely something for everyone in the archive.

My favourite episode is their recent episode on negotiations in a remote setup aka Zoom era.

Listen to the podcast on Google Podcasts | Apple Podcasts | Spotify

5) The Joe Rogan Experience

Joe Rogan is an actor, comedian, UFC commentator, and a Podcast host.

His podcast was recently made Spotify exclusive in a $100 Million deal, likely the biggest ever deal in the podcasting industry.

Thus it would be criminal to talk about podcasts and not mention Joe Rogan.

On the JRE podcast you will find Joe have a totally casual and long conversation with the guests (upwards of 2 hours), sometimes so casual that they end up smoking weed together, yes the "Elon Musk smoked weed live" headline was from the Joe Rogan podcast.

And yes, the guests on his podcast include Elon Musk, Edward Snowden, Mike Tyson, Kanye West and others.

My favourite episode was Elon Musk's first visit to his podcast (yes, he has been on the podcast twice), not because he smoked up live but because Joe asked Elon some great questions like how does he manage time to do stuff like make flamethrowers and dig tunnels while also running companies like Tesla and SpaceX.

Listen to the podcast on Spotify (Remember? Spotify exclusive)

Also, a shameless plug, but I also have a podcast of mine where I talk about how to be a "better" version of ourselves. You can listen to it on Spotify, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts or any podcasting app of your choice.

I am hoping you found something new to listen to today, and if not, at least something to revisit.

It would be great if you could share this article with your network on LinkedIn, Twitter or anywhere else :)