This is the first Monday since the beginning of September where I did not spend some of my day promoting the latest episode of The Tape Recorder Trilogy Podcast. Season One wrapped up last week, and I am taking a break for the holidays before starting Season Two.
‘Taking a break’ somehow turned into writing a lengthy blog post recommending podcasts I like to people. So be it. I am a relative late-comer to podcasting as a medium. I only really gave them a chance during the COVID lockdowns. That said, what I lack in being an old hand, I’ve made up for in the breadth and depth of the extent to which I have incorporated podcasts into my daily entertainment and education consumption.
In 2025 through the Pocket Casts app alone —so not including things I have enjoyed through YouTube or embedded web players— I listened to 117 different podcasts and a total of 708 episodes, which worked out to 32,637 minutes. That’s almost 23 full days. It’s honestly a little shocking.
I also like to think my tastes are eclectic. Most of what I listen to I found on my own through either searching for something and then subscribing to the podcast when I liked what I heard, or through recommendations. If someone tells me they like something and why, I almost always will give it a shot.
For the last 15 years I have been producing a yearly ‘best of’ list for my output on first Twitter and now BlueSky. I wonder if I have it in me to also do an annual ‘best of’ for podcasts I have enjoyed? I don’t know, but the only way to find out is to do one now, and then see if I do another one in 2026, right?
So, without further ado, and with a little elevator sales pitch for each one, here are my Top 10 Podcasts of 2025 that I wholeheartedly recommend to anyone and everyone:
1 – The Obvious Super-Popular Movie-Based Podcast
What Went Wrong should be just one of hundreds of interchangeable shows where two or more people talk about movies. I would wager after ‘just hanging out’ and ‘sports,’ movies and television must be the third most popular thing friends brainstorm up as a podcast idea, and almost all of those shows end up being not very good.
What Went Wrong separates itself from that often disappointing herd by being just about perfect. It is one of only three shows I have set up to automatically download new episodes no matter what they are doing. The two hosts, Chris Winterbauer and Lizzie Bassett, are positive, sincere, qualified, respectful, earnest, and funny. Their research is impeccable and makes a point to draw upon many sources to craft something multifaceted. Their consistency of putting out solid content is frankly astounding.
As someone who has been regularly reading the imdb.com trivia sections of movies, then the wikipedia articles, then going to the reddit discussion threads for decades at this point, I am not a babe in the woods when it comes to this subject matter. This show consistently surprises and delights me. If you have any interest in the stories behind how hard it is to get a movie made, let alone a good one, pick any episode of this at random and enjoy.
2 – The Super-Popular Pop Culture Podcast You Don’t Need Me to Tell You About
The Lonely Island and Seth Myers Podcast is only on this list because it would feel dishonest of me not to include it. These guys don’t need my help promoting their show. With that said, this is only the second of three podcasts I have set up to automatically download onto my app, and of the three, it’s the only one that I always listen to the episode on the same day it comes out. It’s just… It’s very entertaining.
The quick pitch? Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer, and Jorma Taccone are and were The Lonely Island, a musical sketch comedy troupe that was on Saturday Night Live from 2005 to 2011. Seth Myers was also on SNL during that time, beginning as a pretty middling player who struggled for air time, and finishing as head writer and host of The Weekend Update. In every episode they are working their way chronologically forward from their time before, during, and after their shared time on SNL… Except when they don’t.
The real charm of the show is these four good friends are pop culture machines. They are constantly coming up with new slang, fun bits, inside jokes, charming anecdotes, surprise ‘pop-in’ guests, and even more surprising ‘so-and-so can’t join us today’ moments where they just muddle through the fact that coordinating all four of them to be able to do a weekly show together is impossible. Almost every episode they say something that ends up in entertainment news later that day. In the same way they drove viral videos at the dawn of that medium two decades ago, it feels like you are part of something unimportantly important happening when you are up to date on this show that pretty quickly morphed from its original premise into something that is looking forward and creating rather than looking backward and reminiscing.
That’s enough about this one. Again, they don’t need my help. I’ll add as near as I can tell, they haven’t even set up a website. I’m using the Spotify link here. Go ahead and just search for it wherever you find your podcasts. You should probably start at the beginning. The in-jokes build and build. They’re almost speaking in code at this point…
3 – The Two Guys Talking to Each Other But This One is Special to Me Podcast
Quick Question with Soren and Daniel is one of those shows that I love to pieces that I am not at all confident I am going to be able to persuade anyone to care about, but I have to try. I need to spread the good word about something that has brought me so much comfort and joy. When I said my podcast app is only set up to automatically download three shows? This is the third. It was also the first, and for a long time it was the only one.
This was the second podcast ever that I got into in a serious way. That was something like six years ago now.
When I was in my early and mid-20s, cracked.com was the funniest thing on the internet. They had daily essays and frequent videos, and I adored it. In 2017, the website basically imploded. I will not get into the whole drawn out thing of who left peaceably, who quit dramatically, and who was fired, but the business model behind internet comedy was not actually built on making money, and the investors decided to start calling some shots about what did and didn’t get done, and some of the best creative talent of my generation was scattered to the wind.
Soren Bowie and Daniel O’Brien were two of my favourite writers and actors on cracked.com. They moved on in their working lives, but they remained very close friends. By the start of their podcast, Soren was writing for American Dad and Daniel O’Brien was writing for Last Week Tonight with Jon Oliver. They are on opposite coasts, but they keep in touch by phone and Zoom calls. Eventually they decided to turn those conversations into a little side hustle with the flimsy pretense —more honoured in the breach than the observance— of asking each other a quick question and giving each other a quick answer.
In the depths of COVID when I was climbing the walls looking for something to distract me from lockdowns, I listened to two men my age who I had known at least a little bit for a decade and more navigate what was going on in their lives. It was… It was so soothing.
In the first episode, they somehow got down the rabbit hole of their preferred translations of Beowulf, and I remember thinking, “Huh. That’s how I feel about Robert Fagles’ translation of Homer.”
No sooner do I have that thought, then one one of them says, “That reminds me of a guy, what was his name? Fagles?” And I started bouncing around my apartment doing fist pumps in the air, just trying to get my spontaneous joy out. I was hooked.
In the months and years since, I’ve heard them get married, buy and maintain their houses, have and raise kids, deal with the highs and lows of family, work, and just being a human being. They get into new hobbies. They share joys. They commiserate with one another and offer heartfelt, judgment-free advice. You know that joke women have that men don’t have real conversations? These two have real conversations. They very rarely talk about cracked or American Dad or Last Week Tonight with Jon Oliver, which makes those episodes all the more special when they do them. They very rarely bring guests on, and that makes those episodes special too.
I appreciate it’s just two guys hanging out on a podcast. That thing everyone makes fun of in the medium? They are 100% doing that. And I love it. I feel like I have two very close male friends I will never meet. I hope they do this show forever.
Anyway, that turned into a long and rambling thing that will persuade no one, but I had to say it. On to the next show.
4 – The Relatively Obscure but Dedicated History Podcast I Must Champion
The History of Byzantium is a podcast I have to mention, even though I won’t swear I even listened to an episode in 2025. It wrapped up sometime in the summer after a 10-year run. It was the first deep-dive history podcast I ever came across, and I have listened to something like 90% of it. It stopped because it fulfilled its mandate. If you are interested in the history of Byzantium —the eastern half of the Roman Empire that began centuries before the fall of the West and continued on in one way or another until almost the Renaissance— this is it. This covers everything in beautiful, stunning, insightful detail.
The showrunner, Robin Pierson, was a big fan of Mike Duncan’s History of Rome podcast, and he resolved to carry on that work to cover ‘the rest of the story.’ I will do a brief aside here to say while Mike Duncan’s History of Rome is often held up as a gold standard of the ‘History of’ subgenre of podcasts, to me it was a little too geared towards entry-level listeners. If you already know about Roman history, you are not going to learn anything from Duncan’s show. In that respect I would argue Robin Pierson exceeded his inspiration by leaps and bounds. The History of Byzantium is accessible to someone who knows little or nothing about the later centuries of Roman history, but it also does incredible deep dives into things you would need to do an enormous amount of deep research about to learn on your own.
This thing is a triumph. If you are at all interested in the subject matter, or just want to see what the shiny brass ring of ‘History of’ podcasts looks like, this is as good as it gets to convey this kind of information in an audio format.
5 – The Slightly Less Obscure, Broader, but Still Excellent History Podcast for History Nerds
I flatter myself that the Tides of History Podcast is the kind of history podcast I would like to do if I were to create one myself. It is hosted by Patrick Whyman, PhD, and most episodes are him working through something that interests him, beginning with a short ‘in the world’ piece of fiction to set the scene, then expanding that out for a deep dive into something about history that even if you know a lot already, you are guaranteed to learn something new. Each season also includes several interviews with historians and archeologists who are doing exciting new work that is changing how we talk about the past.
For a history nerd who likes a lot more history podcasts than can be made to fit into a Top 10 list, I am carving out a place for Tides of History because I think it has the perfect sweet spot of a knowledgeable host with a flexible format committed to sharing detailed and complex ideas and information that educate and entertain in equal measure.
I will add that there are a lot of people on reddit who ask for recommendations about history podcasts. This one somehow never gets mentioned as a ‘first thought,’ but when I suggest it, people come out of the woodwork to agree with me. On that basis, I would argue this is the history nerd’s history podcast. It might be just a little more than the average listener thinks they want, but it’s something everyone who gets into the really obscure deepcuts out there can agree is a solid choice.
6 – The Much Less Obscure Gold Standard of ‘Academic’ Excellent History Podcasts
The Ancients is probably pound for pound the best ‘academic’ history podcast out there. Every episode involves an interview with a published subject matter expert on any topic from the beginnings of life on Earth up until the Middle Ages, and they have even had episodes debating how far into the Middle Ages they can go before they need to draw a line.
The one caveat I have before recommending this show to people? You have to already love history. There is not a lot of hand-holding here. Where a show like The Rest is History makes a point of being entertaining and accessible to anyone and everyone, the closest thing The Ancients does to make their show understandable to everyone is asking some very basic ‘setting the scene’ questions at the top, and occasionally asking the archaeologist or historian or what-have-you to expand upon something they may have said too quickly, assuming everyone was on the same level of base knowledge. In many cases the experts being interviewed are THE current leading expert in the world on whatever it is they are talking about, and almost every episode can be considered a guided lecture prepared for an open university format.
There are other great academic history podcasts, but I would call this one the gold standard. If this is your cup of tea, they will consistently brew it just the way you like it.
7 – The Music Podcast I Have Been Listening to on the Radio Since Long Before Podcasts Were a Thing
Thirty-two years ago, at sort of the tipping point where hair metal and 80s pop-rock was definitely on its way out but indie rock and grunge had not yet quite completely taken over the zeitgeist, a man named Alan Cross working at a Toronto radio station was tasked with creating a weekly documentary show that would put alt-rock into context for listeners. “What exactly is going on here?” was the starting point, and from that humble beginning a music journalist and historian with a fantastic voice for radio created a one-of-a-kind show that was syndicated across many radio stations and eventually made the very short hop over into podcasting.
The show is called The Ongoing History of New Music. There are well over a thousand episodes. There is an episode about just about anything you can think of to do with popular music in the 20th and 21st centuries, although with an obvious focus on the rock music that has been popular within Alan Cross’s lifetime.
When I was a young man, I used to plan my long car drives around when new episodes of this show aired. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize there must be a podcast version of it now too, which gives me the luxury of being able to pick what I want to listen to, rather than just take in whatever episode is airing that week. All of it is new to me. While my history nerd credentials are rock solid, my understanding of music is pretty surface level. I like what I like. When I hear something I like, I wish I knew more about it. Alan Cross’s The Ongoing History of New Music scratches me where I itch, telling me the stories behind the songs and bands and artists I love, as well as ones I’ve never heard of who have never the less shaped the way music works.
Scroll through his back catalog. Pick anything that catches your eye. Listen to just one episode. He will win you over. This show is a jewel to be discovered and shared with everyone and anyone who has any interest in true stories well-told about things that make people happy (and sometimes very sad).
8 – The Comedian Who Has a Podcast Where He Just Hangs Out with Other Funny People, But This One is Better Because…
The Downside with Gianmarco Soresi and his co-host Russell Daniels is probably not all that different from whatever your current favourite ‘a comedian with a podcast’ show might be. He’s not Marc Maron. He’s not Bill Burr. He’s not Conan O’Brien. He’s not Amy Poehler. Those are four giants, each with their own immensely popular podcast, and I haven’t even gotten into all the different comedians in the Joe Rogan constellation of comedians with podcasts.
I find Gianmarco Soresi really funny. He is very clearly a standup comedian on the rise. He is friends with a wide range of other standup comedians on the rise, many of which I am only discovering through him having them on his show. Why am I recommending his show, instead of one of their shows?
I guess the answer is he treats his guests like he’s doing high-level standup crowd work, while also treating them like consummate professionals and artists who have shared experiences and things in common. Everything he says is an open question that wants a genuine answer, but at any point someone can turn things into a punch line, and that’s going to be okay. He gets upset about things he believes in. He apologizes when he doesn’t know something. He is a genuine person who wears his heart (and his hurts) on his sleeve.
There are probably a thousand standup comedians with long-running podcasts built around having guests. This is the only one I listen to even when I’ve never heard of the guest. If Gianmarco Soresi has them on, I’m going to have a fun time with them, and I will probably discover a new standup comedian to follow and enjoy moving forward.
9 – The Super-Obscure Single-Season Audio Drama that Charmed Me
I have spent a good chunk of my free time over the last year adapting three of my novels into a free weekly audio drama podcast. It occurred to me only slowly that I was making art that I did not also consume. I listen to a lot of podcasts (clearly), but I do not listen to a lot of audio dramas. I still don’t. The ongoing popular series in this space have not really hooked me yet, although I’m making progress on one or two that might make next year’s list, if there is a list next year.
For 2025, I have listened to some limited series that have impressed me deeply. The first one I want to pitch to you is almost certainly going to be news to you. The Second Star to the Left is an independently produced 11-episode show made a couple of years ago. Here’s the premise:
Scout-explorer Gwen Hartley has five years to explore and prepare her planet for settlement. With no aid but her robots and the anxious voice of her long-distance scout-minder Bell Summers in her ear, she’s hoping to be ready for anything.
I have said a number of times I’m a history nerd? I also love science fiction. This thing is utterly charming. A highly trained, competent, motivated woman lands on a strange new world. She has some adventures. You care about her. It’s a lovely way to spend a few hours of your time, and I find it inspiring just how good this show is despite it obviously being put together by just a few friends with an idea. This makes me want to make more audio dramas when my current project is done. Give it a try. It’s a humble little show punching above its weight that you will love that deserves more love.
Edit: After a few days reflection, I think I may have undersold this a little. It’s not just one character exploring a strange new world. She has a constellation of friends in other places she remains in touch with in ways big and small, and the story goes to some strange and wonderful places. I would not want to pitch it as a science fiction Cast Away. There’s some real emotional depth to this thing.
10 – The Super-Popular Single Season Audio Drama that Was as Good as Advertised
Star Trek: Khan is a little like The Lonely Island and Seth Myers Podcast in that you don’t need me to tell you this exists. If you’re into Star Trek, you almost certainly have heard of this, and if you’re not into Star Trek but are into audio dramas, you probably heard that it was happening even if you did not want to give it a try.
I won’t do the whole song and dance, but I will say this launched the same week as my podcast, so the whole time I was publishing and promoting my audio drama, I was also hearing about this show. It was like playing with homemade fireworks next to a military artillery range.
Naveen Andrews (Sayid from Lost) does a pitch-perfect rendition of the character Khan Noonien Singh made famous by Ricardo Montalban in Star Trek: The Original Series’ episode Space Seed and the 1982 film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. The plot fills in time between those two top-tier pieces of Trek lore and includes small parts for a currently 88-year-old George Takei reprising his role as Hikaru Sulu, as well as Tim Russ, who played Tuvok in Star Trek: Voyager and who in canon we know served with Sulu about the Excelsior in the years that make up the framing device of this show.
Again, without saying more than I have to, I will confess to being one of those hardcore Trekkies who feels like Star Trek has lost its way in recent years. This nine-episode audio drama felt like an episode of the Star Trek I grew up with and love to this day. It’s not among the best of the best of everything Star Trek has to offer, but it beautifully fits into some cherished stories thoughtfully, respectfully, meaningfully, and with obvious love and affection and attention to what has gone before. As someone who has watched a lot of the recent additions to the franchise make the conscious decision to not do that, having a new piece of star Trek fit into the old like a hand sliding into a glove is deeply satisfying.
If you are a Star Trek fan, you will dig this. If you are into audio dramas, maybe the nuances of how this connects to other things will go over your head, but it’s still a pretty decent piece of podcasting content. At the very least, it’s worthy of including in my Top 10 list for 2025.
Honourable Mention
And if you’ve read this far, I really should do a plug for my own project, The Tape Recorder Trilogy Podcast. The first season just wrapped up, as I mentioned at the top. Here’s the premise:
In 2015, a man who has been alive since the last Ice Age bought a tape recorder, and over the course of three days he dictated his life story as fast as he could while waiting for a woman to visit who he believes will finally be the death of him.
Based on the novels Beginning, Middle, and End written by Geoff Micks, this podcast is a work of historical fiction spanning from the very beginning of humanity’s story right up to almost the present day as told by a narrator who lived through it all and now is now free at last to tell you his experiences with whatever time he has left.
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And there we have it! This turned out to be surprisingly hard to whittle down to just 10 recommendations. There are definitely some runners-up and also-rans that if I’m still listening to them in 2026 will be given a chance to shine. Until then, happy listening!
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