100 Fun Facts About Podcast

Journalist Ben Hammersley coined the word 'podcast' in February 2004 while writing for which newspaper?

The Guardian. Hammersley floated the word in a single line, next to 'audioblogging' and 'GuerillaMedia', as one of three possible names for a new boom in amateur radio.

The word 'podcast' blends the name of Apple's iPod with which other word?

Broadcast. The word has outlived the gadget in its name: Apple discontinued the iPod line in May 2022.

Which former MTV VJ, nicknamed the 'Podfather', launched the early show Daily Source Code in 2004?

Adam Curry. The show began as a proof of concept for his own small program that fetched new audio automatically, under the tagline 'Where developers and users party together'.

Which web technology, adapted in the early 2000s to carry audio files, still delivers podcast episodes to listening apps?

RSS. Developer Dave Winer added an 'enclosure' tag that let a feed point to a media file, and showed it off in January 2001 by attaching a Grateful Dead song to his blog.

Apple mainstreamed the medium in June 2005 by building podcast support into which of its programs?

iTunes. Version 4.9 came with a directory of 3,000 free shows and made separate download software unnecessary; Steve Jobs called podcasting 'the next generation of radio'.

Which comedy podcast with Stephen Merchant and Karl Pilkington earned a Guinness record as most downloaded in 2006?

The Ricky Gervais Show. Named after Gervais, it came to revolve around Pilkington's life and odd ideas, and the recordings were turned into an HBO cartoon in 2010.

Who hosts Serial, the 2014 true-crime podcast spun off from This American Life?

Sarah Koenig. She told one murder case across a whole season, and the result became podcasting's first true smash and is credited with popularising true-crime shows.

Serial's first season re-examined Adnan Syed's conviction for a 1999 killing in which city's suburbs?

Baltimore. Syed's conviction was vacated in 2022 and later reinstated on appeal, but in March 2025 a judge cut his sentence to time served, so he stayed free.

The ABC News podcast The Dropout, later a Hulu drama, traces the rise and fall of which company founder?

Elizabeth Holmes. Reporter Rebecca Jarvis spent years on the Theranos story and aired Holmes's own deposition testimony, never heard in public before.

Who has hosted This American Life since it began on Chicago's WBEZ in 1995?

Ira Glass. He has fronted the show for three decades, and his co-workers went on to make its hit spin-offs Serial and S-Town.

Joe Rogan hosted which stunt game show before starting his podcast in 2009?

Fear Factor. His first podcast episode had long stretches of dead air while he and producer Brian Redban worked out the equipment, and he apologised to listeners that it was 'not very good'.

Which rewatch podcast do former sitcom co-stars Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey host?

Office Ladies. Fischer and Kinsey, Pam and Angela on The Office, worked through all nine seasons scene by scene and turned their real-life friendship into the book The Office BFFs.

Which guest's on-air cannabis use on Joe Rogan's show in September 2018 preceded a slide in his company's stock?

Elon Musk. Tesla shares closed about 6% down the next day, as news broke that the company's accounting chief and its HR chief were both leaving.

In June 2015 a sitting US president recorded an episode of WTF in which part of Marc Maron's home?

The garage. The visit came days after the Charleston church shooting, and the hour of frank talk about race and gun violence made headlines well beyond comedy fans.

Which NFL brothers host New Heights, a podcast named after their Ohio hometown of Cleveland Heights?

Travis and Jason Kelce. In August 2025 Taylor Swift, then Travis's girlfriend, chose the show to reveal her album The Life of a Showgirl.

Marc Maron's 2010 WTF episode with which guest joined the National Recording Registry?

Robin Williams. Maron re-released the 2010 conversation, with his own reflections added, on the day Williams died in 2014.

S-Town (2017) followed clock restorer John B. McLemore in a small town in which state?

Woodstock, Alabama; the title is McLemore's own rude nickname for the place. It hit 10 million downloads in four days.

Which newspaper launched The Daily, hosted by Michael Barbaro, on February 1, 2017?

The New York Times. It grew out of The Run-Up, a rough-and-ready politics podcast the paper made during the 2016 campaign with Barbaro as a host.

How do Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark sign off every episode of My Favorite Murder?

'Stay sexy and don't get murdered' caught on so well that the hosts made it the title of their joint memoir, published in 2019.

Alex Cooper's Call Her Daddy started in 2018 under which media company?

Barstool Sports. It acquired the show in 2018 and hired both hosts; after a contract dispute in 2020, co-creator Sofia Franklyn left and Cooper carried on alone.

Welcome to Night Vale, launched in 2012, is presented in the format of what?

A community radio show. Its deadpan bulletins from a desert town 'where every conspiracy theory is true' grew into books, spin-off podcasts and a touring live show.

Which series of Dan Carlin's Hardcore History covered the First World War?

Blueprint for Armageddon. Carlin, a former radio host, tells the story alone across six episodes that run about 23 hours in total and took a year and a half to release.

Stuff You Should Know began in 2008 as a way to reuse articles from which brand's website?

HowStuffWorks. Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant were staff writers there, and Clark admits he had never listened to a podcast before they started making one.

Which producer, later a MacArthur fellow, created Radiolab at WNYC in 2002?

Jad Abumrad. Trained as a composer, he scored episodes with layered voices, music and sound effects, and the show began partly to fill an empty Sunday-night slot.

Roman Mars's 99% Invisible is a podcast about what?

Design and architecture. Its makers describe it as a show about all the thought that goes into the things we don't think about, and it began as a project with San Francisco's architects' institute.

Which podcast company, founded in 2014 by Alex Blumberg, documented its own launch in the show StartUp?

Gimlet Media. Blumberg first named it the American Podcasting Corporation, and StartUp's opening episode aired his own practice pitch to investor Chris Sacca.

The podcast thriller Homecoming became a 2018 Amazon series starring which Oscar-winning actress?

Julia Roberts. She had never led a TV series before, and she agreed to this one on condition that Sam Esmail direct all ten episodes himself.

Which three actors host SmartLess, where one surprises the others with a mystery guest?

Bateman, Hayes and Arnett. Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes and Will Arnett began it as a passion project among friends during the pandemic, and it grew into a six-city live tour filmed as a documentary series.

In 2022 SiriusXM paid a reported $150 million for Team Coco, the company behind which host's 'Needs a Friend' podcast?

Conan O'Brien. The premise is the title: after 25 years and thousands of interviews he had never made a lasting friend among his celebrity guests, so he started a podcast to try.

Desert Island Discs castaways get the Bible and which writer's complete works?

William Shakespeare. Creator Roy Plomley had the idea at home one evening in 1941 and wrote to the BBC; castaways today also choose eight records, a book and a luxury.

The Rest Is History is hosted by Dominic Sandbrook and which historian, author of Rubicon and Dominion?

Tom Holland. In 2023 the British Academy gave the show its President's Medal, the first ever awarded to a podcast, for creating a new generation of history enthusiasts.

Which hit podcast do Ashley Flowers and Brit Prawat, friends since childhood, host from Indianapolis?

Crime Junkie. Flowers taught herself podcasting, the pair kept to a new episode every week, and their first four live shows in 2019 all sold out.

Which company bought Bill Simmons's The Ringer in 2020 for about $200 million?

Spotify. Simmons had built The Ringer in 2016 with editors from Grantland, the site he founded at ESPN, months after the network shut it down.

Dirty John, the 2017 podcast about con man John Meehan, was made with which newspaper?

The Los Angeles Times. Its reporter Christopher Goffard came across the story while looking into a killing in Newport Beach, and it later became a TV drama starring Connie Britton.

Ear Hustle, the first podcast created and produced inside a prison, is made in which one?

San Quentin. Two men incarcerated there, Earlonne Woods and Antwan Williams, started it with volunteer artist Nigel Poor, and their pitch beat more than 1,500 entries in a podcast contest.

Freakonomics Radio, launched in 2010, is hosted by which journalist, a co-author of the book Freakonomics?

Stephen Dubner. He met economist Steven Levitt when an editor sent him to write a magazine profile, and the pair went on to write the book together.

Who was the first guest on Dax Shepard's Armchair Expert in February 2018?

Kristen Bell, Shepard's wife. He started the show after enjoying long guest spots on other podcasts, and records it in the attic of a guest house on their property.

No Such Thing as a Fish is made by the researchers of which BBC panel show?

QI. The show's researchers, nicknamed the QI Elves, each bring the best fact they have unearthed in the past seven days, and the title itself is a fact first aired on the TV show.

Pod Save America is hosted by four former aides to which US president?

Barack Obama. Favreau, Lovett and Vietor walked away from their earlier hit, Keepin' It 1600, to found their own company, Crooked Media, with this show as its flagship.

Which podcast studio, founded in 2016 and bought by Amazon in 2020, made Dr. Death and Business Wars?

Wondery. Hernan Lopez founded it with backing from 20th Century Fox, and several of its hits, including Dirty John, were remade for television.

Which podcast, where musicians take apart their own songs, became a Netflix series in 2020?

Song Exploder. Creator Hrishikesh Hirway edits his own side of the conversation out, so listeners hear only the artist and the isolated tracks of the recording.

What is Aaron Mahnke's podcast of eerie tales from history, adapted by Amazon in 2017, called?

Lore. Mahnke started it in 2015 as a marketing experiment, because his self-published supernatural thrillers were not selling.

Which entrepreneur and Dragons' Den investor hosts the hit podcast The Diary of a CEO?

Steven Bartlett. The show began in 2017 as his own audio diary while he ran the marketing agency Social Chain, and only later turned into an interview show.

Reply All, hosted by PJ Vogt and Alex Goldman, was a show about what?

The internet. Its most praised episode hunted for a 1990s pop song that one listener could hum but nobody else on Earth seemed to remember.

Which show won the first-ever Golden Globe for Best Podcast in January 2026?

Good Hang with Amy Poehler. The show was only ten months old, having launched in March 2025, yet it beat long-running hits to the first award in a brand-new category.

In 2018 a book based on The Adventure Zone topped the NYT's paperback trade fiction list; what kind of book was it?

Graphic novel. Here There Be Gerblins retold the podcast's first quest, and the show's fans carried it to the highest spot a graphic novel had reached on the paper's fiction lists.

Which future late-night host co-founded the satirical news podcast The Bugle with Andy Zaltzman in 2007?

John Oliver. He co-hosted several hundred episodes, and in 2011 the pair gleefully mocked their own distributor, a Rupert Murdoch newspaper, over the phone-hacking scandal.

Which comedian crowdfunded his legal fight against a company that claimed its patent covered podcasting?

Adam Carolla. The company dropped its suit in 2014, saying podcasters made too little money to be worth pursuing, and the Patent Office then struck down the patent's key claims.

The Teacher's Pet, a 2018 podcast about a 1982 disappearance that ended in a murder conviction, came from which country?

Australia. Journalist Hedley Thomas dug into the case of Lynette Dawson, missing since 1982, and in 2022 her husband Chris was found guilty of her murder.

The 2020 podcast Das Coronavirus-Update made virologist Christian Drosten a household name in which country?

Germany. Drosten, a coronavirus expert at Berlin's Charité hospital, answered a radio journalist's questions at length, and the fame it brought him came with death threats.

On NPR's news quiz Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!, winners long received which prize from announcer Carl Kasell?

A voicemail greeting recorded by Kasell was the show's usual prize for nearly two decades. After he died in 2018, winners could choose any host or panelist to record theirs instead.

Which sponsor's advert on the podcast Serial became a 2014 meme after a teenager mispronounced the company's name?

Mailchimp leaned into the joke by buying the misspelled web address and pointing it at its own site. The slip came from a 14-year-old from Norway who was queuing for a new iPhone.

In Only Murders in the Building, three neighbors record a podcast about deaths in which fictional apartment house?

The Arconia exists only on screen, though its exterior shots show a real Manhattan apartment house, the Belnord. The trio's podcast carries the same title as the series itself.

Ted Danson and Woody Harrelson named their podcast Where Everybody Knows Your Name after which sitcom's theme song?

Cheers ran for eleven seasons with Danson behind the bar, and Harrelson joined in the fourth as Woody Boyd. Their podcast, launched in 2024, has the pair interviewing celebrities about their careers.

The podcast The Shrink Next Door became a 2021 Apple TV+ miniseries starring Paul Rudd and which Anchorman co-star?

Will Ferrell plays Marty Markowitz, a patient whose psychiatrist, played by Rudd, inserts himself into every part of his life. Journalist Joe Nocera first told the true story in audio.

Neil deGrasse Tyson has hosted which science-and-comedy podcast, later a National Geographic TV series, since 2009?

StarTalk pairs Tyson with comedian co-hosts such as Chuck Nice, and he often ends an episode with the sign-off of Jack Horkheimer, the astronomer who fronted Star Gazers on PBS.

Zach Braff and Donald Faison revisit which hospital comedy on their rewatch podcast Fake Doctors, Real Friends?

Scrubs starred Braff as J.D. from 2001, and the rewatch show he launched with Faison in March 2020 has welcomed co-stars including Sarah Chalke and Neil Flynn.

Marvel's first scripted podcast, launched in 2018 with Richard Armitage in the lead, starred which X-Men character?

Wolverine is seen through the eyes of two federal agents, who arrive in the fictional town of Burns, Alaska, to work a serial murder case and uncover Logan's double life.

Which author of The Tipping Point and Outliers hosts Revisionist History, a podcast that questions received wisdom?

Malcolm Gladwell opens each episode with a person, event or idea and then picks apart what everyone thinks they know about it. He also co-founded the podcast company Pushkin Industries.

The true-crime podcast Serial won which award in April 2015 for its long-form nonfiction storytelling?

A Peabody went to Serial months after its first season ended, and the judges credited the show with rocketing podcasting into the cultural mainstream.

Which playwright took over NPR's news quiz Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! in May 1998, months after its debut?

Peter Sagal replaced the original host, Dan Coffey, when producers revamped the four-month-old program. He moved to the Chicago area that year to take the job.

Which musician, who wrote Still Alive for the video game Portal, was house musician on NPR's quiz show Ask Me Another?

Jonathan Coulton stayed with the puzzle show from its 2012 start to its end in 2021, working alongside host Ophira Eisenberg. His other fan favorites include Code Monkey.

Good Job, Brain!, a pub-quiz podcast that later spawned a book, began in 2011 as a project on which crowdfunding site?

Kickstarter backers got the show going in December 2011, and it has kept one ritual ever since: every fifth episode is an All Quiz Bonanza with no theme at all.

The quiz podcast Good Job, Brain! opens with Pop Quiz, Hotshot, questions read from a card from which board game?

Trivial Pursuit supplies one randomly chosen card per episode, read out by host Karen Chu. The cast also play pub quizzes together as a team called Baby Dog Time, named for her dog.

Which record-setting Jeopardy! champion co-hosted the podcast Omnibus with musician John Roderick from 2017 to 2025?

Ken Jennings and Roderick gave each episode to one strange-but-true story or niche cultural trend. He left as a regular because of his commitments as the quiz show's host.

On the podcast Doug Loves Movies, comedian Doug Benson's signature guessing game is named after which film critic?

Leonard Maltin lends his name because Benson reads from one of his reviews, then guests bid on how few cast names, read from the bottom of the list up, they need to identify the film.

Which YouTuber, creator of the series Things You Might Not Know, hosts the lateral-thinking quiz podcast Lateral?

Tom Scott and three contestants take turns posing questions that need sideways logic to crack. The format grew out of a six-episode game show on his YouTube channel in 2018.

Which creator of the quiz show Pointless and author of The Thursday Murder Club co-hosts The Rest Is Entertainment?

Richard Osman began the podcast with journalist Marina Hyde in November 2023, the year after leaving the teatime quiz he had pitched to the BBC and co-presented for 1,300 episodes.

Which humorist, the PC in Apple's Get a Mac adverts, rules on listeners' petty disputes in a courtroom-style podcast?

John Hodgman first played the judge as a recurring guest on another comedy podcast, and the bit became a stand-alone weekly show in 2010. Justin Long was the Mac in those adverts.

Which former England striker co-founded Goalhanger, the company behind The Rest Is Politics and The Rest Is Football?

Gary Lineker started the firm with a former ITV head of sport and a former BBC journalist. It moved into podcasts in 2018 with a football series he made with Danny Baker.

Which host of the podcast How I Built This co-created Wow in the World, NPR's first children's program, in 2017?

Guy Raz and children's host Mindy Thomas paid for the science show themselves and recorded it in her basement studio in Fairfax, Virginia.

Smash Boom Best, a kids' podcast from the Brains On! team, pits two rival subjects against each other in which format?

A debate decides every episode: comedians and writers argue their side with research and passion before a judge crowns the Smash Boom Best. The aim is to show kids how to defend an opinion.

On the science podcast Brains On!, who joins host Molly Bloom as a different co-host every single week?

A child shares the microphone each week to chase answers to questions sent in by listeners. The show's three creators set out in 2012 to make audio that never talks down to kids.

But Why, a podcast answering questions sent in by curious kids, is a project of which state's public media network?

Vermont Public says the show has answered several thousand questions from children all over the world, with no topic off limits. Kids take part by recording a question on a grown-up's phone.

Circle Round, a WBUR podcast for kids, turns which kind of story from around the world into music-rich radio plays?

Folktales chosen from many cultures are the raw material, and the station pitches the finished plays at listeners aged 3 to 103.

Million Bazillion, a podcast from public radio's Marketplace, answers real kids' awkward questions about which subject?

Money questions on the show have ranged from how inflation works to why the U.S. stopped making pennies. Hosts Ryan Perez and Bridget Bodnar turn each answer into an adventure.

Which former host of Reading Rainbow read short fiction aloud for adults on a podcast that ran from 2017 to 2024?

LeVar Burton closed the show in May 2024 by reading a Ray Bradbury story. Reviewers had described the podcast as Reading Rainbow for adults.

Which Flight of the Conchords actress helped found Story Pirates, whose podcast turns kids' stories into sketches?

Kristen Schaal was one of ten Northwestern graduates who started the troupe in 2003. Her childlike voice later made her Louise in Bob's Burgers and Mabel in Gravity Falls.

On No Such Thing as a Fish, each of the four presenters shares their favorite what from the past week?

Fact is the show's currency, and its title is one: biologist Stephen Jay Gould concluded that a salmon is closer kin to a camel than to a hagfish, so fish form no true group.

Comedy Bang! Bang!, which began in 2009 as Comedy Death-Ray Radio and became an IFC series, is hosted by which comedian?

Scott Aukerman renamed the show on its second anniversary in 2011. He was already known for his work on the HBO sketch program Mr. Show and for co-founding a weekly stage night in Hollywood.

My Brother, My Brother and Me, hosted by Justin, Travis and Griffin McElroy, is a comedy podcast built around what?

Giving advice is the frame, though the brothers answer listeners with a mix of silly and practical suggestions. A 2017 TV version was filmed in their hometown of Huntington, West Virginia.

Paul Scheer, June Diane Raphael and Jason Mantzoukas take apart what on the podcast How Did This Get Made?

Terrible films became the subject after Scheer and Raphael sat through a Wall Street sequel and joked about it with Mantzoukas. Scheer closes each discussion by reading five-star online reviews of the film.

On the food podcast Off Menu, James Acaster takes guests' dream-meal orders while playing which kind of magical waiter?

A genie was Acaster's own unilateral addition to the format. Guests who name the episode's secret ingredient are thrown out of the dream restaurant with no dinner at all.

Which future Saturday Night Live cast member launched the podcast Las Culturistas with his NYU friend Matt Rogers?

Bowen Yang was voted Most Likely to Be a Cast Member on Saturday Night Live at high school, then spent seven seasons there. The podcast's parody Culture Awards have aired on Bravo.

Which two Saturday Night Live alumni began co-hosting Fly on the Wall, a podcast revisiting the sketch show, in 2022?

Carvey and Spade overlapped at the sketch show in the early 1990s, and the podcast did well enough to spawn a video spinoff in 2024.

Which actress, who played Topanga on Boy Meets World, hosts the rewatch podcast Pod Meets World with two castmates?

Danielle Fishel was 12 when she took what was written as a small part. Co-host Rider Strong first had the idea for the podcast in 2018 and rewatches the episodes with his son.

Which star of the Scary Movie films created and hosted the call-in podcast Unqualified from 2015 to 2023?

Anna Faris followed celebrity interviews with phone calls to listeners who wanted help with their love lives, and she reused the show's title for her 2017 memoir.

Tom and Ray Magliozzi, whose Car Talk reruns live on as an NPR podcast, hosted the show under which nicknames?

Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers, got their start in 1977 when a radio station invited a panel of local mechanics on air and only Tom showed up.

Which stand-up, creator of the sitcom F Is for Family, began recording his Monday Morning Podcast in May 2007?

Bill Burr uses the weekly hour to talk through touring, sports and the news. His show was one of eleven on the roster when the All Things Comedy network launched in 2012.

Slate's history podcast Slow Burn, first hosted by Leon Neyfakh, devoted its opening season to which political scandal?

Watergate filled eight episodes built on interviews with people who lived the story, and Epix later turned that season into a six-part television series.

The podcast Dr. Death opens with Christopher Duntsch, a Texas doctor jailed for life, who practiced which specialty?

Neurosurgery was his field: 31 of his patients were left seriously injured and two died, and in 2017 he was convicted of maiming one of them.

Which Oscar winner played Pam Hupp in NBC's 2022 drama The Thing About Pam, titled after a Dateline podcast?

Renée Zellweger was also an executive producer on the six-episode series, while Dateline's Keith Morrison supplied the narration.

The 2020 podcast Wind of Change chases a rumor that the CIA wrote a hit song for which rock band?

Scorpions singer Klaus Meine denies that the agency had any hand in the song. Host Patrick Radden Keefe had heard the rumor a decade earlier from a friend in the intelligence world.

The BBC podcast The Missing Cryptoqueen searches for Ruja Ignatova, founder of which fraudulent cryptocurrency scheme?

OneCoin has been called one of the biggest scams in history. Ignatova vanished after boarding a flight from Sofia to Athens in October 2017, and the FBI put her on its Ten Most Wanted list in 2022.

The fiction podcast Limetown, about a vanished Tennessee research town, became a Facebook Watch series starring whom?

Jessica Biel played Lia Haddock, the journalist whose investigation frames the story of more than 300 missing people. Facebook Watch cancelled the show after a single season.

Terry Gross has presented the interview show Fresh Air since 1975 from public radio station WHYY in which city?

Philadelphia has been home since the show began as a local program in 1975. Gross took over that September, and a weekly edition distributed nationally by NPR followed a decade later.

StoryCorps, the oral-history project, opened its first recording booth in 2003 inside which New York landmark?

Grand Central Terminal hosted the booth from October 2003, with oral historian Studs Terkel cutting the ribbon. With permission, a copy of every interview goes to the Library of Congress.

Which company's SM7 microphone, used to record Michael Jackson's Thriller vocals, later became a favorite of podcasters?

Shure saw the SM7 stay largely unknown outside professional audio circles until podcasters took it up in the mid-2000s, sharing equipment tips with one another.

Which podcaster followed The History of Rome with Revolutions, a series that ran for ten seasons over nine years?

Mike Duncan began the Rome show in 2007 after failing to find a Roman history podcast to listen to. His second series covered the American, French and Russian uprisings, among others.

The Moth's StorySLAM nights pick ten volunteers at random to tell a true five-minute story under which restriction?

Without notes is the rule that keeps the tales conversational. Founder George Dawes Green named the group after the moths drawn to the porch light on storytelling evenings in his native Georgia.