The Best Knowledge Project Episodes: A Listener’s Guide (2026)

Before Shane Parrish was a podcaster, he was a cybersecurity expert at Canada’s signals-intelligence agency who started a blog under a pseudonym to get smarter after 9/11 changed his job overnight. The blog became Farnam Street, named for the Omaha street where Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway sits, and the blog’s obsession, mental models and clear thinking, became The Knowledge Project: one of the longest-running interview shows about how smart people think, with a back catalog that Wall Street and Silicon Valley both quietly treat as a syllabus.

Because the show has run for a decade, its best episodes are scattered across more than 200 entries. The download charts, though, are remarkably stable: the same handful of conversations keep winning years later. Here they are, and why. (The show appears in my own weekly rotation and across most of my recommendation lists.)

The all-time top downloads

1. #18: Naval Ravikant, “The Angel Philosopher”

The episode that put the show on the map, and still its most legendary. Naval on wealth without status games, reading what you love until you love to read, and judgment as the scarcest skill. Large parts of Naval’s now-famous “How to Get Rich” canon were rehearsed here first. If you’ve only ever seen the tweetstorm, the long version is better.

2. #133: Andrew Huberman, “The Science of Small Changes”

The most-downloaded episode, full stop. Recorded as Huberman was becoming Huberman, it’s the compressed version of everything people go to him for: light and sleep, which supplements survive scrutiny, and how small behaviors compound. If you find Huberman’s own show too long, this is the 90-minute distillation.

3. #53: Howard Marks, “Luck, Risk and Avoiding Losers”

The Oaktree co-founder on second-level thinking and why avoiding losers matters more than picking winners. The rare investing conversation that’s really a philosophy conversation; it pairs beautifully with his Invest Like the Best appearance.

The rest of the essential list

#31: Barbara Oakley, “Learning How to Learn.” The engineering professor who failed math until her late twenties, on focused versus diffuse thinking. The single most practical episode in the catalog for anyone trying to learn anything, podcasts included.

#88: Derek Sivers, “Innovation Versus Imitation.” The CD Baby founder in aphorism mode. Half the episode is quotable; the “if it’s not a hell yeah, it’s a no” worldview gets its best airing here.

#96: Randall Stutman, “The Essence of Leadership.” The executive coach who has studied thousands of leaders, on the small behaviors that actually constitute leadership. The least famous name in the top ten and the episode leaders quote most.

#105: Seth Godin, “Failing On Our Way To Mastery.” Godin does podcasts constantly; this one is unusually good because Parrish asks about process, not marketing.

#72: Neil Pasricha, “Happy Habits.” The happiness-research episode that sneaks up on you. Comfort food with citations.

Facts for the superfans

• Parrish kept his identity secret for years because of his intelligence-agency day job; Farnam Street grew to millions of readers while its author was officially anonymous.
• The show’s name is the mission statement: it began as a project to master the best of what other people have already figured out, which is also the most concise description of note-taking I know.
• Naval’s episode was #18. Like Lenny’s early Shreyas episode, the show landed an all-timer before almost anyone was listening. The lesson generalizes: back catalogs hide the best material.

The meta-episode: use the show’s own method on the show

The Knowledge Project is literally a podcast about retaining and applying other people’s wisdom, which makes listening to it passively a small irony. Parrish’s whole thesis is that insight uncaptured is insight rented, not owned.

So own it: when Naval defines judgment or Oakley explains diffuse thinking, press and hold in Margin, say it back in your own words, and the note pins to that second of the episode. Your own words matter; that’s the generation effect doing the retention work for you. A few months of this and you’ve built your own knowledge project, timestamps included, out of everyone else’s.

Selinay