The Best Podcasts of 2025 (So Far)

It’s widely established at this point in 2025 that YouTube has eaten podcasting, with study upon study indicating that the platform is now the distribution point of choice for audiences everywhere. As a result, YouTube has firmly redefined the ecosystem around video, a shift that largely benefits a certain kind of program — interview shows and chat-casts, usually live-to-tape — while deemphasizing the existence of others that are more audio-first: narrative shows, interview programs conducted without a camera, audio fiction, formalistically adventurous works, etc. Podcasting still means both things, though as more time passes, it’s likely we’ll end up with a media environment where the public primarily associates the word “podcasts” with its video incarnation, in which the audio-first stuff can probably be sorted back into the word “radio.” For what it’s worth, YouTube generally defines “podcasting” as “eyes-optional content that is episodic and organized within a playlist,” which, frankly, doesn’t really help.

But I don’t think we’re quite there yet. For our purposes, I’m still going to try and square the difference by considering the whole pot, and because I’m governed by my own tastes and historical experience with podcasts as primarily an audio-first medium, you’ll find that I will be fairly audio-oriented when I curate this list. (For now, anyway.) That being said, I’m attuned to podcasting’s shift to video and its growing impact on the broader culture; for better or worse, our society is  increasingly defined by The Joe Rogan Experience, Call Her Daddy, Club Shay Shay, and so on. (A podcaster is this country’s new deputy FBI chief, after all.)

Moving forward, you might see this list defined by a sort of dichotomy: a combination of what I believe to be great audio work and what I believe to be particularly interesting moments from video podcasts. As an example of the latter, I would’ve listed Timothée Chalamet’s appearance on This Past Weekend With Theo Von because of its impact on how we understand him as an increasingly prominent star, if only it debuted after the New Year. But alas, it dropped in mid-December.

Back from the dead and still devoted to a form of podcasting that’s drifted precariously out of the spotlight, Jonathan Goldstein and his team’s return to the role of a kind of time-traveling therapy unit, helping people untangle lifelong regrets by visiting the remnants of their past, is a welcome one. For the most part, this new batch of adventures shows Heavyweight to be as good as it’s ever been: a patient, empathetic exploration of ordinary lives, crafted with emotional precision and Goldstein’s sublimely droll sensibility. (“Stefano,” in particular, stands out.) And at a moment when it’s increasingly unclear where this level of narrative care and craft in audio storytelling will come from next, it’s comforting to know that Heavyweight is still here, at least for now.

The Adam Friedland Show (Independent)

One of the stranger interview shows running right now, The Adam Friedland Show is at once a parody of talk shows and an earnest attempt to reinvent them. Friedland, of Cum Town lineage and recently anointed as one of Vulture’s Comedians You Should Know, plays the host as a kind of destabilizing presence: mostly ironic, occasionally sincere, somewhere in the register of Between Two Ferns but with the genuine ambitions of an actual interview program. The irony is the gimmick, but it’s also a tool that disarms both guest and listener in the service of producing moments with genuine, unscripted feeling.

The show also benefits from some fascinating booking: A recent conversation with David Hogg, the young survivor of the 2018 Parkland High School shooting turned gun-control activist and Democratic political operator, teeters between candor and discomfort as Friedland’s persona interrupts Hogg’s well-honed rhetorical patterns, pulling something more raw and unpredictable to the surface. A recent sit-down with Representative Ritchie Torres, one of the Democratic Party’s staunchest defenders of Israel, produced an unusually fraught exchange: Torres robotically on-message while Friedland, briefly dropping the bit, pressed him for compassion on the human toll in Gaza. The result, which went viral, was not cleanly comedic or neatly journalistic but something far stranger and more compelling: an interview that pierced the machinery of political and cultural performance. In that way, The Adam Friedland Show feels archetypally new media. It is neither pure comedy nor conventional journalism but a hybrid form that thrives in the fractured media environment by making friction and unpredictability itself the point.

Taylor Swift’s appearance on New Heights With Travis & Jason Kelce (Wondery)

Look, I hear you — “best” might be a generous label in this context. But the very famous Taylor Swift dropping by her boyfriend’s football podcast to announce her new album was undeniably a major pop-cultural event, one that in hindsight doubled as a prelude to their engagement. Odds are you either listened to big chunks of the two-hour episode or skipped it entirely while still absorbing the highlights of what was discussed by osmosis (including the mop cart). And that’s precisely the point. For better or worse, Swift’s turn on New Heights is emblematic of podcasting today: an arena fully overtaken by celebrity and video-first economics, and one that’s become a cultural highway we all end up traveling whether we want to or not. And thanks to the engagement, it now belongs firmly in the Swiftie historical record, not to mention the annals of celebrity studies. After all, the relationship did arguably start because of the podcast.

The Retrievals, season two (Serial Productions)

At first, the follow-up to The Retrievals seems like a thematic reprise: Where season one explored the systematic dismissal of women’s pain through a fertility-clinic scandal, season two begins with the harrowing story of Clara Hochhauser, a nurse forced to endure a C-section with botched anesthesia administration. But host Susan Burton and her team center this story on what came after: a disparate and gradually coalescing push within the medical community to prevent such failures from happening again. The season traces the slow, challenging work of cultural change within the medical system, and what’s additionally interesting here is the way Burton and the team frame and stylize the narrative as if it were a medical procedural. The high-wire conceit carries a purpose, and while it might not necessarily work for everyone, the result is a vivid investigation into how culture, medicine, and motherhood collide — and how change might actually begin.

On the Media: The Divided Dial, season two (WNYC)

One of the cool things about radio waves is the imagery it evokes of a great big invisible space floating over our heads that all sorts of characters use to speak with each other — some with innocuous purpose, others more malevolent. The radio is reporter Katie Thornton’s muse: In the first season of The Divided Dial, an offshoot project produced beneath On the Media’s auspices, she traced the rise of conservative talk radio as a by-product of policy, technological shifts, cultural warfare, and decades of intentional capitalist-driven takeover. With her follow-up, she shifts focus to another layer within the airspace: the shortwave radio, which most people would traditionally associate with ham-radio hobbyists but in reality has long served as a space of messaging warfare. The American government used the technology to beam out anti-communist propaganda during the Cold War and, as the decades rolled by, steadily became a haven for cults and extremists seeking a “free-speech-friendly” space to cultivate their followings. Thornton uses the historical shortwave-radio experience as a key to read the modern shape of the internet, and while there are some presentational limits to this four-episode season — Thornton’s delivery as a narrator needs tightening — the ideas that it evokes about open publishing spaces, freedom, and the danger those things attract continue to be fine ones to mull over.

Final Thoughts: Jerry Springer (Audible)

Pointing to a piece of lowbrow pop culture and saying “This explains Trump’s America!” has become a boring parlor trick. Setting aside The Apprentice — which, no duh — the lens is as applicable to anything from COPS to Survivor to Jersey Shore as to ultimately not mean very much. But in the case of The Jerry Springer Show, the garish, syndicated daytime talk show infamous for its sensationalism and exploitative treatment of marginalized groups, the notion actually holds some weight. In his Audible series, Leon Neyfakh, best known for Fiasco and the early seasons of Slow Burn, makes a compelling case for Springer’s cultural significance, weaving it into a biographical portrait of the man himself, who died in 2023. Neyfakh is particularly interested in Springer’s contradictions: Despite his reputation as the godfather of “trash TV,” Springer was also intelligent, politically engaged, and deeply curious about what resonates with the public. There’s a lot to process in this meaty portrait of a complicated figure, but running beneath it all is a deeper tension that still defines our cultural moment: the clash of taste, class, and elitism.

What We Spend (Audacy)

The Suze Ormans and the Dave Ramseys of the world can frame money however they want, but everybody’s anxieties are different, even if the feelings are universal. What We Spend gets at this notion with acute sensitivity. Constructed as a combination of spot interviews and audio diaries, the show might initially resemble a polished equivalent of a personal-finance blog, but as shepherded by Courtney Harrell, it swiftly reveals itself to be a thoughtful, revealing, and illuminating series of windows into the inner lives of others as refracted through their expense sheets. It’s crucial that ordinary people make up the voices of this show, and you can imagine that the longer it goes, the more it will be able to tackle a greater variety of class, racial, and geographical differences around the country. But even at this early stage, What We Spend shows signs of greatness in the simplicity of its approach; an example of how asking the most basic of questions — what do you spend on in a week? — can hold the deepest punch of human experiences. You’ll leave each episode wondering how we ever make it out of modern society alive.

If you really want to absorb something, I’ve found it’s almost always better to immerse yourself in the wonkiest podcasts imaginable on the subject instead of hitting up material that simplifies things down. Don’t mind the gap; you’ll close it eventually. That pretty much explains my long-standing devotion to Odd Lots, Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal’s economics podcast for Bloomberg has long been staple listening for various finance, business, and other Tom Wolfean Masters of the Universe types, plus nosy rubberneckers like myself. Odd Lots is deliriously wonky, a true expression of hyperspecific professional curiosity that tackles both mainstream finance-news subjects and more esoteric concerns: the unlikely dominance of a Brazilian airplane manufacturer, the modern chicken supply chain, the back-end shenanigans of the Realtor profession. So, in early April, when the second Trump administration unleashed chaos on the global order as we know it, there was really only one place I wanted to go — and lo, Alloway and Weisenthal’s rapid flurry of episodes on the matter, attacking it from a myriad of angles, truly met the moment as essential means to navigate the rapidly shifting terrain of what’s happening, what’s changing, and how, exactly, we’re screwed.

Pablo Torre Finds Out (Meadowlark)

It’s been quite the year for former ESPN personality turned muckraking podcaster Pablo Torre. Launched in 2023, Pablo Torre Finds Out came into its own this year by figuring out how to turn the chat-forward, high-volume, sports-talk-radio-style format into a model that can actually break news: not through cheap sensation but with hard reporting presented in a way that fits well with modern media consumption patterns. An early flash of this was detectable back in March, when the show published a substantial interview with documentarian Ezra Edelman, Oscar winner for his 2016 magnum opus, O.J. Simpson: Made in America, who spoke openly for the first time about his team’s nine-hour Prince documentary — considered a masterpiece by the few who’ve seen it — that was shelved after the Prince estate changed hands. By summer, the show was in full stride: first with its “funny, but wait, this is serious?” coverage of Bill Belichick’s relationship with his new, young bae, Jordon Hudson, then with a stunning multipart investigation into how Steve Ballmer, owner of the L.A. Clippers and one of the richest men in the world, may have skirted the NBA salary cap through a bizarre network of a fraudulent tree-planting company, a disgraced Democratic rising star, and an ad campaign that also involves Robert Downey Jr. Keep a close eye on the show, which is quietly modeling how impactful investigative journalism should look in the modern YouTube-centric social-video era: by drawing it out, making it a spectacle, and being willing to fight in the internet streets to rebut counterarguments and get the word out.

Embedded: “Alternate Realities” (NPR)

Sometime in 2024, the radio producer Zach Mack makes a bet with his father — an aging man who believe in conspiracy theories like terrorist immigrants, electromagnetic pulses, societal collapse, etc. — that if none of his big doomsday predictions take place by the end of the year, the guy has to fork over $10,000. The gambit is a playful put-up-or-shut-up proposal, but it’s also a quietly desperate piece of outreach from a son trying his best to see if his father can be retrieved from a kind of madness that’s all too familiar today. The resulting three-part series is as gorgeous as it is painful, as what emerges is both a gripping portrait of a family in crisis and a meditation on what it means to exist in a world where we truly aren’t able to live with each other.

“Coming Out” (Radio Atlas)

Last year, the Lithuanian radio producers Rūta Dambravaitė and Inga Janiulytė-Temporin created this 50-minute piece for LRT, their country’s national broadcaster, that recounts the story of Vitalius and Albinas, a same-sex couple who had to pass themselves off as father and son for decades. “Coming Out” is a personal history of a shared life forced to stay private under the shadow of state power. Long outlawed under Soviet rule, homosexuality has only been legal in the country since 1993, and the current democratic state still does not recognize sex-same unions to this day. The piece, which features the couple talking publicly about their union for the first time, drew a strong public response in the country, and it won the Prix Europa European Audio Documentary prize — a big deal in the region — in 2024. Earlier this year, Radio Atlas, the nearly decade-old English-language project surfacing radio stories from around the world, released a version on its site with translation by Vaida Pilibaitytė and Justinas Šuliokas.

Scam Inc. (The Economist)

A curious thing happened at the top of 2025: There was a sudden contemporaneous cluster of reporting from places like The Economist, the New York Times, Wired, The Conversation, and Wondery about “scam compounds” in Southeast Asia — giant prison-like complexes where people, often victims of human traffickers, are subjected to inhumane conditions as they are utilized as cogs in a giant operation to send out millions of texts and digital messages attempting to scam people around the world out of their money. Of these, Scam Inc., from The Economist, struck me as the most effective of the cohort, with its more sweeping scope and its ability to illustrate a network of depraved systems with greater accessibility.

Scratch & Win (WGBH)

I have a lot of time for Ian Coss and his team of collaborators at WGBH after 2023’s The Big Dig, where they took a major boondoggle, an uber-expensive highway project in Boston long-decried as the poster-child for government bloat that actually turned out to be highly successful, and used it to tell a bigger story about the politics of American infrastructure. With Scratch & Win, they tackle legal gambling in America, a phenomenon that exploded into cultural ubiquity only recently, and they do that in just the way you’d hope: by running it through the tale of what they call “the unlikely rise of America’s most successful lottery,” which, of course, took place in Massachusetts, where state officials faced off with organized crime in the ’70s in a bid to take over the market.

Some of the best cultural criticism happens in the classic conversational podcast format pegged to a specific line of deconstructive inquiry, so much so that it’s practically a veritable genre and a movement: Know Your Enemy, Maintenance Phase, If Books Could Kill, Sounds Like a Cult, System Crash, Better Offline, Culture Study, You’re Wrong About, and so on. Add another to the mix: Bad Therapist, hosted by the psychotherapist Ash Compton and the journalist Rachel Monroe, with producer Zoe Kurland. Operating as a kind of response to contemporary rise of therapy and therapy-speak as a cultural aesthetic as opposed to a scientifically driven discipline, each episode sees Compton and Monroe interrogate different expressions of therapy gone wrong: scammers, self-proclaimed gurus, and conversion therapy.