You’re folding laundry or going for a run or prepping your kids’ lunchboxes, and you need something in your earbuds. Maybe you want to catch up on the latest news or hear the hottest take on last night’s game. Maybe you’re eager to hear a film critic tell you what’s worth streaming this weekend or listen to a celebrity interview that’ll make you laugh—or inspire a cathartic cry. Maybe you want to play detective in a true-crime mystery. If you’ve ever stared blankly at Spotify or YouTube wondering what to press play on, there is something for you in this list of the 100 best podcasts ever made.
Reviewing the nearly decade’s worth of “best of” lists I’ve compiled since I started on the podcast beat laid bare just how much the medium has changed. Once upon a time, you didn’t have to be an A-lister with a professional studio setup to find overnight fame. The likes of Roman Mars, Mike Duncan, Sarah Marshall and Michael Hobbes, Hrishikesh Hirway, and Phoebe Judge all became famous names in the podcast space without the boost of a Hollywood career. Between the mid-2000s and the mid-2010s, all you needed was a microphone and a dream of cutting an ad deal with MailChimp. That low barrier to entry eventually led to a podcasting boom in the late 2010s that accelerated when so many of us were stuck at home during COVID-19 lockdowns and desperate to consume as much content as possible to stave off boredom and loneliness.
No longer are podcast hosts just disembodied voices in a void. YouTube, the world’s largest video platform, now claims it’s also the world’s largest podcasting platform, with 1 billion monthly viewers of podcasting content worldwide. As Vulture recently noted, publications like the New York Times are pushing their writers and podcasters to put their faces on camera as the way we consume news and other content evolves on platforms like TikTok and Instagram.
So I included some shows that have ended their runs. I tried to pick podcasts that, if not entirely evergreen, have a hefty archive that can be revisited—series that cracked jokes that haven’t gotten old or covered books and movies you can still read and watch before tuning into a specific episode that will help you appreciate them more fully. With this list, I endeavored to find the best of the best, a database you can sort through by genre. Much ink has been spilled over the years about the parasocial relationships we form with podcast hosts, and, yes, while it’s wise not to get too attached to a stranger, I certainly think of my favorite hosts as imagined buddies I get to visit with each week. I hope you can find new friends too.
