The golden age of audio storytelling is very much alive, and with millions of shows competing for your earbuds, the challenge isn’t finding something to listen to,it’s knowing where to start. From true crime rabbit holes and laugh-out-loud comedy to mind-expanding interviews and edge-of-your-seat narratives, we’ve rounded up the most binge-worthy podcasts guaranteed to have you hitting “next episode” before the outro even finishes.
Breaking Down: Collapse
Something feels off in the world, and you’re not imagining it. Political chaos, economic instability, and crumbling supply chains are all signs of something bigger on the horizon. But what, exactly? “Breaking Down: Collapse” cuts through the noise, making the daunting topic of industrial society’s decline easy to understand. Join collapse-aware Kory as he walks his unsuspecting friend Kellan through the sobering reality of where we’re all headed. Think it sounds far-fetched? Don’t be so sure.
My Dad Wrote A Porno
When Jamie Morton discovered that his father had written a dirty book, he did what any reasonable person wouldn’t, he decided to read it out loud to the world. In this award-winning comedy podcast, Jamie is joined by his friends James Cooper and Alice Levine as they work through the book chapter by chapter, with Jamie uncovering far more about his father than he ever wanted to know.
Rabbit Hole
Times tech columnist Kevin Roose takes a deep dive into the digital world to explore how the internet is reshaping the way people live their lives.
Stuff You Missed in History Class
Holly and Tracy take listeners on a journey through history’s most fascinating and bizarre stories that never made it into the classroom, in this iHeartRadio podcast.
The Big Dig Presents: Catching The Codfather
A fishing mogul gets caught in an undercover sting, but insists he’s the true victim, a man standing up against an overreaching government. So what is Carlos “The Codfather” Rafael, really: folk hero, fraudster, rebel, or con artist?
Your Own Backyard
A documentary podcast series that follows investigators as they examine the 1996 disappearance of Cal Poly student Kristin Smart.
Nice White Parents
A five-part series from the creators of Serial and The New York Times examines the state of public education, and the role that white parents play as one of the most influential forces shaping it.
The Blindboy Podcast
Hosted by Blindboy Boatclub, an artist and author, the podcast blends short fiction, interviews, and comedy into an eclectic mix.
Endless Thread
Hosted by Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson, the podcast explores hidden histories, unsolved mysteries, and remarkable true stories from both online and the real world.
Bone Valley
Bone Valley is a podcast series covering wrongful conviction cases. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Gilbert King leads Season 1, following Leo Schofield’s fight to prove his innocence in the murder of his wife Michelle, and Season 2, in which the actual killer, Jeremy Scott, fights to prove his own guilt, neither convincing the State of Florida.
Darknet Diaries
Hosted by Jack Rhysider, the podcast explores real-life stories from the darker corners of the internet, guiding listeners through tales of hacking, data breaches, and cybercrime. Discover the best episodes of Darknet Diaries.
Sweet Bobby
Sweet Bobby is an award-winning podcast about Kirat, a woman whose decade-long online romance with Bobby unravels when she uncovers a disturbing truth — and the elaborate catfishing scheme behind it all.
Underunderstood
Some questions exist that the internet simply cannot resolve. But that doesn’t mean Underunderstood can’t track them down. On each episode, the team behind Underunderstood uncovers a question that has stumped the web, perhaps a Wikipedia page that goes nowhere, a Reddit thread left cold, or a Tweet nobody ever got around to answering, and they work to fill in what’s missing. The show is part chat show, part documentary, and almost always manages to catch its audience off guard.
Ear Hustle
Named after prison slang for eavesdropping, Ear Hustle offers an unfiltered, candid look at life behind bars. Co-created by Nigel Poor and Earlonne Woods, the latter of whom was incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison when the show launched in 2017, the podcast has grown since Earlonne’s release to cover stories from prisons across California and life after incarceration.
Bag Man
In Bag Man, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow revisits a largely forgotten political bribery scandal, one brazen enough to involve cash deliveries to the White House, that was overshadowed in its time. It’s a story worth knowing, particularly now.
The Dropout
In The Dropout, ABC News correspondent Rebecca Jarvis and producers Taylor Dunn and Victoria Thompson unravel the spectacular collapse of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos. from celebrated billionaire to criminal defendant. Drawing on years of investigation, exclusive interviews, and never-before-heard deposition testimony, the series follows the full arc of one of the most stunning falls from grace in American business history, right through to the verdict.
The Conspiracy Files
Hosted by Colin Browen, The Conspiracy Files takes a deep look at the world’s most unsettling conspiracy theories, from suspicious deaths to high-profile crimes. No topic is off limits.
S-Town
S-Town is a podcast from Serial Productions, a New York Times company, hosted by Brian Reed. The series centers on a man named John who harbors a deep contempt for his Alabama hometown and sets out to change things, enlisting Brian to look into a wealthy family’s son rumored to have gotten away with murder. When another death occurs, Brian’s investigation spirals into a bitter feud, a search for buried treasure, and an intimate excavation of one man’s extraordinary life.
Cement City
Two journalists find themselves in a fading town, one with a Smog Museum, a mayor named Piglet, and little else, driven by a single question: what does it mean to live somewhere that the world has left behind? They purchase a house and put down roots for three years, getting swept up in an election cycle and a tangle of local scandals. The result is democracy observed at its most intimate scale, and every bit of it is true.
Search Engine
Each episode, the team tackles one question, big or small, in search of a little more clarity about the world.
You Must Remember This
You Must Remember This is a storytelling podcast dedicated to unearthing the secret and forgotten histories of Hollywood’s first hundred years. Created, written, narrated, and edited entirely by Karina Longworth, founder of Cinematical.com and former film critic for LA Weekly, the show is a deeply researched work of creative nonfiction in which Karina sifts through conflicting accounts, myth, and studio-manufactured spin to get at the truth behind the films, stars, and scandals of the 20th century.
Midnight Burger
When Gloria takes a waitressing job at a diner outside Phoenix, she discovers that Midnight Burger is no ordinary workplace, it’s a time-traveling, dimension-hopping diner that materializes somewhere new across the cosmos each day, staffed by a galactic drifter, a rogue theoretical physicist, a sentient old-timey radio, and some guy named Caspar. Nobody knows how it works, but wherever it lands, someone always needs a cup of coffee.
Alien Theorists Theorizing
Alien Theorists Theorizing brings together The Theorists for a loose, comedic roundtable covering everything from UFOs and ancient astronauts to cryptids, the supernatural, and government conspiracies, open minds and open beers required.
Sold a Story
In Sold a Story, Emily Hanford investigates how millions of children have been failed by reading programs built on a debunked theory, and the authors and publisher who profited from it.
Sea of Lies
From CBC’s Uncover, award-winning podcaster Sam Mullins traces the globe-spanning trail of a relentless con man, a story involving murder, stolen identities, fine art, gold bars, and the Rolex watch that finally brought him down.
Fall of Civilizations
Each episode, the show examines the collapse of a different civilization throughout history, exploring what they shared, why they fell, and what it might have felt like to witness the end from the inside.
The Turning – Seasons 1,2 & 3
In The Turning: River Road, Lindsay Tornambe recounts how she was chosen at 13 to become one of the youngest Maidens of a rural Minnesota cult, enduring over a decade of abuse before escaping and becoming a whistleblower whose actions sparked an international manhunt and brought the entire organization down.
Beyond All Repair
The home of Beyond All Repair, a 10-part true crime investigative series from WBUR and ZSP Media, and Violation, a series from WBUR and The Marshall Project examining America’s opaque parole system.
The Dream
The show remains focused on the American Dream, and all the people who make it harder to reach, with a little more freedom in how that story gets told.
Scamanda
When investigative producer Nancy receives an anonymous tip about Amanda’s cancer blog, award-winning journalist Charlie Webster follows the trail into a shocking true story of deception that tore apart a family and left an entire community reeling. Scamanda is the story of a woman whose own words ultimately exposed her secret.
Do you know of another bingeable podcast that you think should be on this list? Let me know
You might also like these lists of podcasts to discover: