Podcast Trivia
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100 free Podcast trivia questions with answers — pop culture quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Podcasts went from a 2004 Guardian column to a medium that reaches more than a fifth of Americans every week, and this podcast trivia quiz covers how it happened. It starts with Ben Hammersley coining the word, Adam Curry and Dave Winer wiring audio into RSS, iTunes 4.9 and the Ricky Gervais Show's Guinness record, then moves through the breakout years of Serial, S-Town, Welcome to Night Vale and Marc Maron interviewing a president in his garage. The modern era gets its due too: Joe Rogan's Spotify deal, Gimlet and The Ringer being bought, Call Her Daddy and SmartLess changing hands for nine figures, The Daily, Crime Junkie, My Favorite Murder, The Rest Is History, The Diary of a CEO and the first Golden Globe for a podcast. Whether you listen on your commute or make a show yourself, there are easy questions about hosts and hard ones about launch dates and download records. Every answer is checked against Wikipedia and the shows' own records, and each question reveals its source once you answer.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Journalist Ben Hammersley coined the word 'podcast' in February 2004 while writing for which newspaper?
The Guardian
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.
Q 02The word 'podcast' blends the name of Apple's iPod with which other word?
Broadcast
Broadcast. The word has outlived the gadget in its name: Apple discontinued the iPod line in May 2022.
Q 03Which former MTV VJ, nicknamed the 'Podfather', launched the early show Daily Source Code in 2004?
Adam Curry
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'.
Q 04Which web technology, adapted in the early 2000s to carry audio files, still delivers podcast episodes to listening apps?
RSS
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.
Q 05Apple mainstreamed the medium in June 2005 by building podcast support into which of its programs?
iTunes
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'.
Q 06Which comedy podcast with Stephen Merchant and Karl Pilkington earned a Guinness record as most downloaded in 2006?
The Ricky Gervais Show
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.
Q 07Who hosts Serial, the 2014 true-crime podcast spun off from This American Life?
Sarah Koenig
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.
Q 08Serial's first season re-examined Adnan Syed's conviction for a 1999 killing in which city's suburbs?
Baltimore
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.
Q 09The ABC News podcast The Dropout, later a Hulu drama, traces the rise and fall of which company founder?
Elizabeth Holmes
Elizabeth Holmes. Reporter Rebecca Jarvis spent years on the Theranos story and aired Holmes's own deposition testimony, never heard in public before.
Q 10Who has hosted This American Life since it began on Chicago's WBEZ in 1995?
Ira Glass
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.
Q 11Joe Rogan hosted which stunt game show before starting his podcast in 2009?
Fear Factor
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'.
Q 12Which rewatch podcast do former sitcom co-stars Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey host?
Office Ladies
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.
Q 13Which guest's on-air cannabis use on Joe Rogan's show in September 2018 preceded a slide in his company's stock?
Elon Musk
Q 21Welcome to Night Vale, launched in 2012, is presented in the format of what?
A community radio show
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.
Q 22Which series of Dan Carlin's Hardcore History covered the First World War?
Blueprint for Armageddon
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.
Q 23Stuff You Should Know began in 2008 as a way to reuse articles from which brand's website?
HowStuffWorks
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.
Q 14In June 2015 a sitting US president recorded an episode of WTF in which part of Marc Maron's home?
The garage
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.
Q 15Which NFL brothers host New Heights, a podcast named after their Ohio hometown of Cleveland Heights?
Travis and Jason Kelce
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.
Q 16Marc Maron's 2010 WTF episode with which guest joined the National Recording Registry?
Robin Williams
Robin Williams. Maron re-released the 2010 conversation, with his own reflections added, on the day Williams died in 2014.
Q 17S-Town (2017) followed clock restorer John B. McLemore in a small town in which state?
Alabama
Woodstock, Alabama; the title is McLemore's own rude nickname for the place. It hit 10 million downloads in four days.
Q 18Which newspaper launched The Daily, hosted by Michael Barbaro, on February 1, 2017?
The New York Times
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.
Q 19How do Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark sign off every episode of My Favorite Murder?
'Stay sexy and don't get murdered'
'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.
Q 20Alex Cooper's Call Her Daddy started in 2018 under which media company?
Barstool Sports
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.
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.
Q 24Which producer, later a MacArthur fellow, created Radiolab at WNYC in 2002?
Jad Abumrad
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.
Q 25Roman Mars's 99% Invisible is a podcast about what?
Design and architecture
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.
Q 26Which podcast company, founded in 2014 by Alex Blumberg, documented its own launch in the show StartUp?
Gimlet Media
Gimlet Media. Blumberg first named it the American Podcasting Corporation, and StartUp's opening episode aired his own practice pitch to investor Chris Sacca.
Q 27The podcast thriller Homecoming became a 2018 Amazon series starring which Oscar-winning actress?
Julia Roberts
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.
Q 28Which three actors host SmartLess, where one surprises the others with a mystery guest?
Bateman, Hayes and Arnett
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.
Q 29In 2022 SiriusXM paid a reported $150 million for Team Coco, the company behind which host's 'Needs a Friend' podcast?
Conan O'Brien
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.
Q 30Desert Island Discs castaways get the Bible and which writer's complete works?
William Shakespeare
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.