Top 25 Hot Podcast Episodes of 2018

As the year draws to a close, we’ve compiled a list of the best podcast episodes of 2018, ranked by the number of likes by Breaker users. Liking episodes is a feature that’s unique to Breaker and it’s the best way for our community to surface great content that might otherwise remain under the radar.

The List

1. The Joe Rogan Experience — #1169 — Elon Musk
2. How I Built This with Guy Raz — Slack & Flickr: Stewart Butterfield
3. Reply All — #130 The Snapchat Thief
4. How I Built This with Guy Raz — Stripe: Patrick and John Collison
5. Revisionist History — Malcolm Gladwell’s 12 Rules for Life
6. How I Built This with Guy Raz — LinkedIn: Reid Hoffman
7. Serial — S03 Episode 01: A Bar Fight Walks into the Justice Center
8. Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher — Elon Musk on Tesla’s crazy year, dying on Mars and taking Saudi money
9. Hidden Brain — Tunnel Vision
10. ycombinator — #100 — Sam Altman
11. Hidden Brain — The Lonely American Man
12. Masters of Scale with Reid Hoffman — Why Customer Love is All You Need w/ Y Combinator’s Sam Altman
13. Reply All — #115 The Bitcoin Hunter
14. Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher — Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg: The Kara Swisher interview
15. a16z — a16z Podcast: Mental Models for Understanding Crypto Tokens
16. Hidden Brain — Buying Attention
17. How I Built This with Guy Raz — Stitch Fix: Katrina Lake
18. Hidden Brain — When Did Marriage Become So Hard?
19. Hidden Brain — Red Brain, Blue Brain
20. Serial — S03 Episode 02: You’ve Got Some Gauls
21. How I Built This with Guy Raz — Dyson: James Dyson
22. The Daily — How Trump Really Got Rich
23. The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish — Thinking About Thinking
24. a16z — a16z Podcast: Technological Trends, Capital, and Internet ‘Disruption’
25. How I Built This with Guy Raz — Wikipedia: Jimmy Wales

Themes

We noticed a few themes in this year’s list. It includes many interviews with tech luminaries, including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Katrina Lake, Stewart Butterfield, Reid Hoffman, Jimmy Wales, and the Collison brothers.

The most popular show was How I Built This, with six entries on the list, followed by Hidden Brain with five, as well as two episodes from each of Reply All, Serial, Recode Decode with Kara Swisher, and the Andreessen Horowitz podcast.

Compared to last year, we noticed a sharp decline in podcast episodes about cryptocurrency. Last year’s list included five episodes on this topic, while this year’s list had just two, a decrease of 60%.

Decline in Bitcoin podcasts over 2018 💸📉😭

Breakout Hits

We also saw The Daily from The New York Times make its first appearance on this year’s list. This podcast regularly tops our daily charts, but one episode in particular, about how Trump really got rich, broke out and made it onto our annual list.

Another high-ranking episode that was a personal favorite of mine was an episode of Revisionist History about Malcolm Gladwell’s twelve rules for life.

If you have holiday travel plans coming up, you might want to give these episodes a listen (or a re-listen). Just add them to your playlist on Breaker. And keep pressing that ❤ button on Breaker to help us determine the top episodes for 2019!

Have a happy New Year, from all of us at Breaker!