I listen to a lot of podcasts. Right now I have roughly 600 hours queued up at any given moment. I listen to about five hours a day, and five new hours land in my feed by the time I am done. The list never really shrinks. That is my mentally ill approach to podcasts.
I never listen to one show straight through. I play program director and assemble an eclectic list of various shows. I will jump from an episode of Founders to a story about the Persian Empire to a song-by-song breakdown of a 1995 hit. History is the biggest category for me, with some business and current events mixed in.
Here are eight of the shows in heavy rotation right now.
Table of Contents
Founders by David Senra
A podcast I keep coming back to is Founders by David Senra. He deep dives into biographies of interesting founders and other people from history and business.
There is a story David Senra tells about John D. Rockefeller from the book Titan that has stuck with me. Rockefeller’s company sealed cans of oil with solder, roughly thirty drops to glue the lid down. He asked the obvious question nobody else asked. Why thirty? Why not twenty-nine? They tested twenty-nine drops. The cans held. They tested twenty-eight. Still fine. They tried twenty-seven and the cans started to leak. So they settled on twenty-eight. Two drops of solder, multiplied across the millions of cans of oil they were selling, was a huge savings of money.
My First Million
If you’re into business podcasts, My First Million is the first one I would recommend. It is a good entry point if you want business ideas thrown at you quickly.
My two favorite episodes are both about the same company. First, Buying A $50M Egg Carton Biz For $0 Down, where Shaan breaks down an amazing company and founder. Then How I Bought A Multi-Million Dollar Egg Carton Business For $0, where he interviews her directly.
These two highlight the two sides of the show. One side is conversations with founders about their process and philosophies. The other side is a fly on the wall as two friends talk about amazing things they’ve found or researched.
Sarah Moore was a student at Harvard when she researched and purchased a company that many would consider boring. Manufacturing and selling egg cartons. She did it with creative financing and almost no money down. This business is a cash cow and it was hiding in plain sight.
The Game by Alex Hormozi
The other business podcast I listen to is The Game by Alex Hormozi. His podcast gets into a lot of actionable advice and frameworks to apply to business.
When I first started my business, a friend recommended the $100M Offers book as a way to think about how to build the company. I read that, and that is what led me to the podcast.
The podcast is amazing. Tons of intelligent approaches and mindsets. And he has audiobook chapters for his three books available for free in the feed. The show has evolved a lot over the years. Lately there have been Q&A sessions with business owners. Extremely insightful.
I wrote a bit about Hormozi’s world in Scaling in Vegas, after attending one of the Acquisition.com workshops.
60 Songs That Explain the 90s
This podcast is hosted by a guy named Rob Harvilla who is really funny. When he talks about being a teenager in the nineties, it lights up a bunch of nostalgia stuff for me, which is why I highly recommend this show.
Each episode goes deep into the influences behind a particular song. He will start ten or twenty years before the song came out and build up through the earlier music that led to it. Because it is the nineties, there is often talk about the music video. He also goes into the band and where their career went. The end of each episode features a guest who brings their own background to the song, and sometimes they trash it a little, but mostly it is positive.
Another music history show I just started is called A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs. Much more serious, lots of clips of the songs. The histories are extensive, getting into the music and the history of the bands.
Hardcore History by Dan Carlin
If somebody asked me for one recommendation, it would be the Hardcore History podcast with Dan Carlin.
Dan Carlin is the best. He has been making podcasts since podcasts began. He does one or two episodes a year, and they are effectively the length of an audiobook, with an insanely colorful story driven approach on the topic. His business model is that the most recent episodes are free, and the older catalog episodes are paid (insane value btw).
There is a series he did on the war in the Pacific called Supernova in the East. To tell the story of the Asia-Pacific War from 1937 to 1945, he starts in the 1800s. Japan had been almost completely closed off, with the Dutch as a narrow exception. Then the United States showed up with a massive warship and forced the country open. Japan looked around, saw how far behind it had fallen, and modernized in a single generation. They sent students to Western schools, brought the techniques back home, and then applied their own principles and attention to detail to make them better.
Right now he is doing a series on Alexander the Great. It is a great follow up to a classic series he did called King of Kings, which is what the Persian emperors referred to themselves as. It goes through the succession of Persian kings and ends with the fall of that empire. The fact that a 3-part 13 hour podcast exists as a result of Dan trying to tell the story of The 300 spartans at Thermopylae encapsulates the madness that drives him.
It can be kind of daunting to sit down and listen to a four-hour podcast, but you do not have to listen to the whole thing in one sitting. When a new episode drops, it moves to the next spot in my queue automatically.
American Revolution
For straight history, and something similar to the above, I would recommend the American Revolution Podcast. That one gets into very, very granular detail about the American Revolution.
If you want the story told carefully and slowly, with all the side characters and side events, this is the show.
How Did This Get Made?
For pure entertainment, How Did This Get Made? is the one. The hosts are Jason Mantzoukas, Paul Scheer, and June Diane Raphael, and they basically watch bad movies and comment on them. Almost every episode has a catchphrase-worthy takeaway.
Notable episodes include Face/Off, and if you have never seen that movie, you should watch it because it is crazy. They also covered Con Air. The whole catalog is worth a scroll.
Conclusion
Here’s a summary of my podcast recommendations:
- Founders by David Senra: Breakdowns the biographies of interesting founders and historical business figures.
- My First Million: Rapid-fire business ideas and case studies. A good entry point if you want ideas thrown at you quickly.
- The Game by Alex Hormozi: Actionable advice and frameworks for building and scaling a business.
- 60 Songs That Explain the 90s: Rob Harvilla unpacks one nineties hit per episode, tracing the music and music videos that led up to it.
- A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs: Long-form background on the bands and the history behind each song.
- Hardcore History by Dan Carlin: Audiobook-length episodes on a single topic — the war in the Pacific, the Persian Empire — one or two a year.
- American Revolution: A slow, granular walk through the Revolution with all the side characters and side events.
- How Did This Get Made?: Three comedians watch bad movies and pick them apart. Pure entertainment.
Check back soon for the next installment, where I will get into some of the smaller, lesser-known podcasts in my rotation.