OUR RATING:
What would it sound like if your most chaotic group chat gained sentience and decided to monetize itself? Now you know, it’s the Giggly Squad podcast. Hannah Berner and Paige DeSorbo make fun of everything, but most importantly themselves, which is fortunate because someone had to do it eventually. This weekly exercise in millennial stream-of-consciousness has managed to transform two friends catching up into a media empire complete with a new book “How to Giggle: A Guide to Taking Life Less Seriously” and a 28-city comedy tour, proving that in 2025, literally anything can become content if you’re loud enough about it.
The show operates on the premise that two women can sit in a room and talk about whatever pops into their heads, then call it a podcast. They discuss pop culture, fashion trends, television, horoscopes, mental health, dating, and expose their personal lives. It’s a smorgasbord of every topic your therapist wishes you’d stop bringing up in sessions. It’s like eavesdropping on a conversation at brunch, except the mimosas never run out and someone forgot to tell them that not every thought needs to be shared with the internet.
Hannah Berner, a comedian with a Netflix special, brings the manic energy through her comedic style which can best be described as “aggressively relatable”. Meanwhile, Paige DeSorbo, a television personality best known for Bravo’s Summer House and an entrepreneur with a new loungewear line, serves as the slightly more grounded half of this chaotic duo, though “grounded” is relative when your job involves being filmed while dramatically drunk on reality television.
The show’s format is, to put it lightly, unstructured. They can’t be managed, according to their own description, which tracks because management would probably require some semblance of organization or planning. Instead, listeners get to experience the raw, unfiltered essence of two friends who’ve convinced themselves that their inside jokes deserve a global audience.
What’s actually both fascinating and somewhat baffling is how they’ve managed to build what their fans call a “giggling cult” with 772K followers on Instagram alone. Listeners describe themselves as relying on “weekly episodes to stay sane” and being “Gigglers for life”, which suggests either profound loyalty or a concerning lack of other entertainment options. The devotion is real though. People attend their live shows, presumably to watch them do in person exactly what they do on the podcast, but with the added thrill of overpriced venue drinks.
The podcast fills that very specific niche of content that makes you feel like you’re hanging out with your funniest and slightly unhinged friends. All that said, their chemistry is undeniable, built on years of actual friendship rather than podcast-mandated forced camaraderie.
The show’s success says something profound about our current cultural moment, namely, that we’re so starved for authentic connection that we’ll gladly listen to strangers process their thoughts in real time. In these “troubled times” when “the world might seem dark,” the podcast provides “little laughs”, which is a surprisingly modest mission statement for something that’s become a multimedia empire. It’s comfort food for your ears, assuming your comfort food is a chaotic mix of questionable takes and genuine vulnerability.
Berner and DeSorbo have managed to turn their complete inability to take anything seriously into actual career success. They’ve made the 2025 TIME100 Creators List, proving that sometimes the best business plan is simply being yourself very loudly and hoping someone finds it entertaining. In a world full of overly produced, focus-grouped content, there’s something interesting about two people who just decided to record their friendship and see what happened. Whether that’s genius or madness probably depends on whether you’re the one cashing the checks.
The Giggly Squad podcast is ultimately the audio equivalent of that friend who texts you at 2 AM with random observations about life, sometimes profound, often ridiculous, but always unmistakably human. At this point, we should all know today’s society values attention above all else. It’s the ultimate currency. This podcast is not for everyone, but for those who get it, they really get it, and apparently, they’re willing to buy the merch to prove it.
Where to listen to Giggly Squad
Episodes.fm | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Overcast | Pocket Casts | Castro
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