The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish

Shane Parrish built Farnam Street into one of the most respected blogs about thinking and decision-making, and The Knowledge Project is its audio counterpart. The show features long-form conversations with people who have mastered their craft: investors, scientists, authors, executives, and military leaders. But unlike most interview podcasts, Parrish is not interested in the highlight reel. He wants to know how people actually think. The conversations regularly stretch past an hour, sometimes hitting two hours or more. That might sound like a lot, but Parrish has a talent for extracting principles that apply far beyond the guest's specific domain. A conversation with a chess grandmaster becomes a lesson about patience. An interview with a hedge fund manager turns into a discussion about managing regret. The ideas transfer because Parrish keeps pushing past surface-level advice. With 268 episodes and a 4.7-star rating from over 2,500 reviews, the show attracts a devoted audience of people who take self-improvement seriously without the self-help fluff. Parrish asks follow-up questions that most interviewers miss entirely. He has clearly done the reading, and his guests respond by going deeper than they usually do on other shows. Recent episodes have featured conversations with Morgan Housel about the psychology of money, James Clear on habit formation, and Nicolai Tangen about managing a two-trillion-dollar fund. The guest list alone makes this worth subscribing to, but it is Parrish's preparation and genuine intellectual curiosity that sets it apart.