The initial namespaces that Kubernetes starts with are default, kube-system, kube-public, and kube-node-lease. These namespaces are predefined and serve different purposes: 'default' is for user-created resources, 'kube-system' is for system components, 'kube-public' is a publically accessible namespace, and 'kube-node-lease' improves the performance of the node heartbeats as the nodes update their lease objects in this namespace.