💎5 hidden gems in The Podcast Pantheon and some more random things
🍭 👂 And now for something a little bit different 🌈 🤸♀️
Bonjour.
Today is Monday November 10, 2025. I was at RESONATE last week listening to beautiful things on stage and beautiful people talking, not so much podcasts. WELCOME HI HELLO if you are reading this for the first time and I met you at RESONATE. You should know, most issues don’t look like this, they look more like this (last week’s):
Because I didn’t have the 30+ hours, which is absolutely how long I spend on each issue if you include listening time, to make an issue, I’ve handed the keyboard over to Sean Malin, author of The Podcast Pantheon: 101 Podcasts That Changed How We Listen--From WTF to Serial. When I held this book in my hands, the world stopped as I poured through it, looking for shows I’d never heard of or had forgotten about. I wrote about my favorite one here! Later, I asked Sean to share 5 of his favorite hidden gems in the book. I also interviewed him about the process and to get some behind-the-scenes stuff. Read on for a few notes from me, including one MUST-LISTEN recommendation about something I love so much I wrote about it twice. And I’ll see you next week. Thank you for your support!
xoxo
lauren
🚨the one thing🚨
Tink is working with RESONATE to co-produce a podcast called Pitch Party, which features a bunch of incredible podcast pilots from the best independent producers in the biz. We are doing this in hopes to get them in front of the right people who can offer these creators funding. If that’s you, give it a listen. But even if it’s not, listen anyway. You might hear one of the best things you’ll hear all year. The latest drop on the Pitch Party feed is…
I love Finding MF DOOM so much, I wrote about it the first time I heard it, months ago, when Tiny Human Things was on Pilot Season. It’s an audio drama that explores the world of Latveria, a fictional place from the Marvel universe home to Doctor Doom, who inspired the character of the mysterious rapper MF Doom. For this fun exercise we’re exploring Doom’s iconic album Mm..Food. Sumit Sharma and Chris Mitchell whisk us off to a bar, a diner, with real people (John Robinson, Sean Kantrowitz, MC Paul Barman, Dart Adams, Jason Jagel, Spanish Ran and Stahhr) to talk about different tracks, how they were made, and what piece they represent in the MF DOOM puzzle. I think everyone should listen to it to break their brains away from every single format of podcast you’ve ever listened to. I didn’t know an interview show could be an audio drama that is also an album review, did you?
notes
✨Last I checked there were only 5 spots left for Ask Us Anything! On November 14 Arielle Nissenblatt and I are hosting an Open Podcast Growth session for Radio Boot Camp. We’ll give you specific tips for your show, tell you who to partner with, who to pitch,
✨Yesterday, Arielle featured 5 fiction podcasts from around the world in EarBuds.
Hi Podcast the Newsletter readers! Sean Malin here.
On September 16, 2025, Chronicle Books published my debut book, The Podcast Pantheon: 101 Podcasts That Changed How We Listen--From WTF to Serial, in bookstores around the world. The book has been heralded as the first of its kind: A resource for discovering podcasts and learning more about how this multibillion-dollar industry came into being from the geniuses who created it.
Simply put, it offers the first comprehensive canon in podcast history along with never-before-heard behind-the-scenes stories, tons of original coffee table-ready episodic and show artwork, and a foreword by Jon Hamm (yes, that Jon Hamm). Publishers Weekly called it “an essential overview of a wildly popular medium,” the big sweeties.
While many of the podcasts considered critically in the book, including the two named in the subtitle, are among the most well-known and beloved on the planet, The Podcast Pantheon spans 37 genres and therefore covers shows at many different echelons of popularity. So for this week’s edition of the newsletter, Lauren asked me to highlight five of the lesser-known “hidden gems” in the book by sharing exclusive excerpts from their chapters with you, the podcasterati.
Given the love for audio shared by all of Lauren’s readers, I don’t expect all of these podcasts to be new to you. But should your fancy get tickled and you want to hear more of one, I’ve added the best places to listen to each podcast below along with my personal “Sean’s Pick” of the episodes that convinced me of that particular show’s historic essentiality.
As a reminder, if you fall in love with any of these shows, the best way to support them is to subscribe to their feeds, even if that means throwing a couple bucks their way, Patreon-style. And if you haven’t already, pick up your copy of The Podcast Pantheon anywhere.
Thank you, Lauren, and enjoy, y’all!
- SLM
There exist in every generation certain comedic personalities so defined that they become planets unto themselves. In the mid-1990s, Jonathan Katz emerged as one such celestial body, drawing protegees, acolytes, and imitators into his orbit primarily as guests on his Peabody-winning series Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist. So masterfully did Katz, a stand-up comedian and writer for films and television, deploy his signature deadpan on the sitcom that he has been dogged ever since by the false belief that he is, in real life, a doctor.
In actuality, Katz has spent the better part of two decades practicing a much more important vocation: podcast hosting. An avid audiophile since his childhood, he and producer Dana Friedman began broadcasting Hey, We’re Back on www.wkatz.com in October 2007, when podcasts were still in their infancy. “In the Early Days, it was just me and Dana. One of the things that distinguished [our show] from other podcasts was my desire to record anything that struck me as funny that day,” Katz says in a note after calling me to test my mettle first (Me: “I’m such a fan of Dr. Katz and House of Games!”; Katz: “Hm. And what about Daddy Day Care?”) That meant episodes could be short, between eight and ten minutes, and could publish at random intervals, sometimes week to week and sometimes with gaps of a year or more.
Katz and Friedman’s masterstroke was bringing back members of the Dr. Katz repertory company, like Tom Snyder, H. Jon Benjamin, Laura Silverman, and Wendy Liebman, to recapture the TV show’s era-defining chemistry. So bone-dry were their bits, however, that anyone stumbling on the podcast without knowing Katz’s previous work might be furious to discover that Bob Dylan, Barry White, and Aretha Franklin were not actual guests on his show, as once advertised on Blogspot. Friedman says they quickly decided to call it an “internet radio show” to help clarify that they were making satire. Here’s a telling exchange from an early sketch made to sound like a real talk radio interview between Katz and his old Hebrew school friend, “Al Schwarz,” voiced by Benjamin:
Katz: “It’s just such an unusual choice to make for a sport.”
Schwarz: “It was something that a lot of the other kids were not doing, basically.”
Katz: “I’m sure that was part of the appeal for you.”
Schwarz: “There wasn’t a lot of log-rolling where I grew up, in New York City.”
Katz: “Al, I’ve got to ask you: what inspired you to do this particular sport?”
Schwarz: “Trees.”
Eventually, Katz and Friedman retooled the podcast to its current, more familiar long-form format, and brought Silverman on full-time as co-host/foil. “At first it was all interviews,” Friedman notes, but recent episodes have also incorporated “sketches from earlier episodes that new fans might have missed.” Between this medley of materials and its hosts’ razor-sharp timing, the revitalized version has retained its position at the creative pinnacle of audio comedy, even for those who have trouble keeping up with its deadpan humor. If that includes you, don’t worry: You’re not alone, Katz says. “I don’t get it myself.”
Hosted by: Jonathan Katz
Genre: Comedy
First Episode: “Hey We’re Back (Premiere)” (August 3, 2007)
Influences: Lenny Bruce, Burns and Schreiber, Ronnie Shakes, Dom Irrera, H. Jon Benjamin, Rita Rudner, Woody Allen
Where to Listen: JonathanKatz.com
Sean’s Pick: “Telephone Support, with Jane Brucker” (September 27, 2007)
Can a podcast save Mother Earth?
This is the driving question at the heart of The Red Nation Podcast, the propulsive audio project of the Red Nation, “a coalition of Indigenous activists, educators, students, and community organizers advocating Native liberation and addressing the marginalization and invisibility of Native struggles within mainstream social justice by foregrounding the targeted destruction and violence toward Native life and land.” Launched by Red Media, the non-profit media arm of the Red Nation, on Indigenous Peoples’ Day 2019, the show is grounded by the twin concepts of decolonization and Land Back—not only with regard to the original peoples of the so-called United States but also on behalf of all peoples living under the conditions of settler colonialism across the planet.
As led by hosts Jen Marley, a scholar of queer Indigenous studies at the University of New Mexico, and Nick Estes, an assistant professor in American Indian studies at the University of Minnesota and the lead editor of Red Media, each episode of TRNP is vigorous, expansive, and staunchly revolutionary. Individual conversations with guests like Tohono/Akimel O’Odham campaigner Napoleon Marietta, Tlingit/Haida anti-war activist Phoenix Johnson, and Kānaka Maoli land defender Shelley Muneoka often touch on hundreds of years of history and politics in the span of about an hour. “We interviewed Quechua medical doctor Vivi Camacho at a café in La Paz, Bolivia,” Estes, whose recordings of events and teach-ins from within Indigenous movement spaces and communities served as the base materials for the podcast, offers by way of example. “She told us the story of how she lived and worked. Capitalism is killing in the global south of hunger and killing in the Global North of sadness.”
Estes and Marley joined forces soon after the latter’s 2017 arrest for the successful abolition of the Entrada, a reenactment of the Spanish conquistador Don Diego de Vargas’s racist and genocidal reconquest of what is today known as Santa Fe, New Mexico. Marley says that the Red Nation cadre, made up of mostly Native women, agreed that cohosting with Estes would help both to combat the “bro-dominated” reputation of podcasting and to better center the individuals and issues raised on the podcast, given Marley’s increasingly public profile. Once paired, the hosts vowed to adhere to the same “journalistic principles” that gird their off-mic scholarship. “In the early days when Nick and I started recording together, we spent a lot of time reading and researching before each episode,” Marley recalls. “We reviewed new books and interviewed authors, and we spent time learning about current events and trying to sharpen our analysis.”
Indeed, from their first full release—an exploration of the centrality of manoomin (wild rice) in Anishinaabeg culture and prophecy led by harvesters Courtney Calia and Kathy Smith—knowledge has been the soil from which the podcast attempts to cultivate an expanded public consciousness. Media, and its role in the continued genocide of First Nations peoples, are also key concerns: the podcast’s feed is shared by Red Power Hour, an ongoing dialogue between hosts Elena Ortiz and Melanie Yazzie on pop-cultural texts like Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon and Denis Villeneuve’s Dune. As a whole, the feed now serves as an archive for hundreds of hours of Native history, culture, and expression— all of which, notes East Is a Podcast host Sina Rahmani, serve to defy the campaign of terror waged on Indigenous people and their BIPOC comrades for generations. In an interview with theologist Cornel West, Estes says, “The larger project of decolonization begins with your mind, your spirit, your heart.” If you wish to join him, listening to The Red Nation Podcast is a good first step.
Hosted by: Nick Estes, Jen Marley, Elena Ortiz and Melanie Yazzie
Genre: Education
First Episode: “What Is Wild? Manoonim (Wild Rice) Harvesting w/ Courtney & Kathy” (October 28, 2019)
Influences: “Bad-ass Native women” (Yazzie)
Where to Listen: The Red Nation
Sean’s Pick: “Native Veterans against War w/ Phoenix Johnson” (March 9, 2020)
What the hell is gender? It’s a question that Tuck Woodstock—the creator, voice, and “resident gender detective” of Gender Reveal—has spent much of his career investigating. Through interviews with trans and nonbinary “activists, authors, artists, academics, and actors” like Meredith Talusan, Salimatu Amabebe, and Jane Schoenbrun, Woodstock and senior producer Ozzy Llinas Goodman have established a vast oral archive that engages gender and its infinite permutations head-on. The project also includes grant programs that have provided over $100,000 in snacks (particularly on Trans Day of Having a Nice Snack, a holiday Woodstock established in 2021) and general mutual aid to trans folks.
Woodstock appreciates knowing “that we are doing some kind of tangible good out in the world by organizing mutual aid efforts and grant programs, so I don’t have the existential question of ‘Is my work helping anyone???’ cloud every episode of the show.” Yet he also makes clear that such work is a pressure release for the production, not an extension of some weighted responsibility. “I also think that many people (cis and trans but especially cis) tend to add this extra gravitas to any story about trans people, as if to imbue every moment of trans life with Pain and Struggle and Bravery and whatever,” he says. “But trans life can also be silly and petty and fun and weird and playful and hot, and I think it’s important to capture those elements in the podcast as well.”
In that regard, Woodstock and Goodman are unequivocally effective. Since the podcast’s launch in January 2018, the conversations they’ve conducted have centered glee, compassion, and pleasure in counterpoint to the ceaselessly tragic and often violent slant of mainstream media reporting on transness. One aspect of this delightfulness is its elegance: Episodes are blessedly and (almost) uniformly simple sandwiches surrounded by Breakmaster Cylinder’s earwormy theme. In one representatively direct interview for the season five premiere, Woodstock and author Cyrus Grace Dunham speak with infectious enthusiasm about the role colonialism plays in top surgery, the delusion of cisness (“I tend not to trust people who don’t feel doubt,” Dunham says), and the “big Libra energy” inflecting the Aquarian memoirist’s A Year Without a Name. When it concludes, as each interview does, with Woodstock asking what Dunham considers to be the future of gender (Dunham’s answer: an end to racialized economic oppression and the police state), fifty-five exceedingly listenable minutes have flashed by.
The pod also features several recurring segments, including a “Theymail” section for listener inquiries and “This Week in Gender.” The latter, Woodstock says, originally “started as a news segment, but I’ve adopted a loose McElroy-style ‘No Bummers’ rule for that segment, because trans people don’t need to hear a five-minute spiel on the latest anti-trans laws. We know how bad it is out there!” In addition to lightening his personal workload, Woodstock notes, adjusting the segment allowed it to feature more collaborations with trans writers, such as “Niko Stratis writing about gender tracking apps, Dakota Hommes’s explanation of how her (former) union won trans-inclusive health-care coverage, and Krys Malcolm Belc’s review of Caitlyn Jenner’s memoir.”
This kaleidoscopic creativity makes for mighty entertainment, certainly. But it also offers a useful opportunity for anyone looking to deepen their engagement with, or support for, a community still subjected to expressions of ignorance or hate. “It’s not optional to know how to talk about trans and nonbinary folks with respect,” Woodstock reminds listeners in the episode “Gender 202.” “It is just a basic part of being a human being on this earth.”
Hosted by: Tuck Woodstock
Genre: Society and Culture
First Episode: “Gender 101” (January 8, 2018)
Influences: “Bitch magazine, early transition naivety” (Woodstock)
Where to Listen: Patreon
Sean’s Pick: “Cyrus Dunham” (January 27, 2020)
Holly Randall Unfiltered is an apt name for a podcast that challenges you to “forget everything you think you know about porn.” Indeed, as advertised, it presents an unvarnished, unromantic, and uncritical look at the most American business there is in hour-long chunks each week. At the same time, it also serves as an intimate audio diary of life in and around sex entertainment from one of the industry’s most enduring and popular artists.
Ironically, Randall only found time to launch the namesake venture because she was in between gigs. She began her producing career in 2000 for Suze.net, the website founded by her mother (renowned erotic photographer Suze Randall) and her father (filmmaker and author Humphry Knipe). By 2008, Randall had formed her own (again eponymous) production company, demonstrating lifelong affinities for self-governance and business development. She was quickly heralded as a next-generation auteur both by performers and glamour companies like Twistys, Club, and High Society for her authentically sensuous, cinematic aesthetics. In 2013, she was announced as host and director of Playboy TV’s Adult Film School, and that same year, AVN named her one of the industry’s most influential “Power Players.”
Still, when she felt new opportunities beginning to dry up towards the end of the decade, she already knew exactly how to pivot. “I always felt that the porn industry—and, more specifically, the people in it—were misunderstood,” Randall writes by email. “I thought, If only people knew these pornstars as I know them—funny, intelligent, creative, ambitious, free-spirited, independent—that they might think differently.” At the time, there were already a few podcasts claiming “to interview porn stars as ‘people’,” she remembers, but none from the perspective of a seasoned producer-director-photographer in the field. So working with producer Ernesto Hurtado, she conceived of a ten-episode test season for a show that was “about more than funny orgy stories and questioning if squirting is real.”
Unfiltered released its premiere episode, a conversation between the host and her parents, on July 19, 2017. That hour remains an object of quiet beauty—frank and funny and warm, without a hint of the hacky, tacky exposé stylings Randall so strenuously wished to avoid. Though intensely personal, it is also far from a trauma dump: at the end of the episode, Knipe and the Randalls cry with joy about getting to share life together.
While it didn’t receive the same attention as the series’ viral ninth episode, which features late starlet August Ames in one of her final interviews before her death (some of which can be read about in another entry in the Pantheon, The Last Days of August), the podcast once and for all affirmed Randall’s bonafides as a revolutionary creative and one of adult entertainment’s most vocal mascots. It also continues to reshape ideas about what constitutes mainstream podcasting today. In 2024, the show crossed 270,000 weekly subscribers on YouTube, with tens of millions of listens and views across its now-vast back catalog, putting it in very rarefied air. Randall was also inducted into the AVN Hall of Fame that year, with her advocacy on behalf of sex workers cited among her achievements.
Through all the accolades, Randall’s goal remains simply to deepen listeners’ understandings of the human experience. “The fact that adult performers trust me with these stories is really precious to me, because this is not the way most people see them,” she says. “That is part of the entire reason I started this show.”
Hosted by: Holly Randall
Genre: Business and Finance
First Episode: “Meet My Parents” (July 19, 2017)
Influences: You’re Wrong About, This American Life
Where to Listen: Pleasure Podcasts
Sean’s Pick: “August Ames” (September 13, 2017)
According to the United States Census Bureau, as of July 1, 2022, Branchburg township in Somerset County, New Jersey has a total population of 14,835. Incorporated in 1845, Branchburg is known as the home of Olympic equestrian Frank Chapot and as the site of a historic one-room schoolhouse off Route 22. It is also where the comedians Brendan O’Hare and Cory Snearowski met playing Little League, not knowing that in the next decade, they would form the comedy team Brendan and Cory and create one of the funniest and strangest audio programs known to humankind.
O’Hare and Snearowski broke out on Twitter, delivering slow-motion one-liners with pops of surrealist imagery (O’Hare, in 2012: “DATE TIP: Hold doors. Pull the chair out for your date. Burp your date. Change your date oh god you are on a date with a baby ok stay cool”). That soon gave way to a flurry of viral videos, including the Difficulty Man series and the modern YouTube classic “I Just Got a New Computer, Real Nice One Too,” in which Snearowski’s kooky alter ego devolves into a tech-induced panic attack.
In 2019, after stints writing for Clickhole and The New Yorker, the duo partnered to create their magnum opus, This Is Branchburg. Produced by Adult Swim and Abso Lutely Productions, the sketch podcast features O’Hare and Snearowski as a bevy of left-of-center characters of the kind they encountered in childhood: A milkman defiant in his journey to deliver milk on foot, a grape farmer forcing his crop down ShopRite shoppers’ throats, a power-mad school principal with a vainglorious motorcade. Part Alan Partridge, part A Prairie Home Companion, it is indescribably and ineffably itself.
In O’Hare’s opinion, that idiosyncratic tone is a direct reflection of his and Snearowski’s rigorous production process. During the show’s development, they drafted scripts for entire episodes that went unproduced because they were not yet up to par. “We would rewrite and reshape things endlessly; there are Google Docs full of bits hundreds of pages long that we scrapped because they didn’t meet our standard,” he tells me. Both seasons were also recorded in the bedroom of sound engineer Alex Gilson, a fellow Branchburg native whom Snearowski met in Boy Scouts, to fully capture the township’s local flavor. “The Gilson family was so kind to let us cause a ruckus in their house for almost two years,” Snearowski shares gratefully. “Each time a sketch involved screaming, we had to walk into the kitchen to warn his parents about how loud it was going to be.”
For those aware of the show’s sui generis genius, the possibility of hearing a potential Season Three is painfully low, as both founders are in high demand as comedy writer-performers (“We had a blast making This is Branchburg from start to finish,” is all Snearowski will offer on the matter). But should the opportunity someday arise, the duo clearly has more hometown stories to tell. O’Hare highlights one untold story about the Branchburg Town Fair, in which a low-achieving fifth grader is to be dropped into a Dunk Tank and a man will learn that there is no heaviest pig contest in which to enroll his 500-pound pig. It sounds hilarious, but for now, that particular piece still remains a work-in-progress, O’Hare says wistfully. “Maybe one day we’ll figure it out.”
Hosted by: Brendan O’Hare and Cory Snearowski
Genre: Comedy
First Episode: “Welcome to Branchburg” (May 8, 2019)
Influences: “The Chris Morris radio show Blue Jam was our biggest inspiration, along with the two-person comedy of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore” (O’Hare/Snearowski)
Where to Listen: Adult Swim
Sean’s Pick: “The Branchburg Goblin (feat. Gary Richardson)” (October 29, 2020)
The above is reprinted from The Podcast Pantheon: 101 Podcasts That Changed How We Listen–From WTF to Serial (Chronicle Books, 2025) with permission from the author and Chronicle Books.
Interview with Sean Malin
Tell us about The Podcast Pantheon in 10 words or less.
The world’s first-ever comprehensive master canon for podcasts.
What do all the shows included have in common?
The podcasts in the book represent a diverse array of approaches, formats, and backgrounds, but share the following:
Each can be downloaded as an MP3 or streamed on an audio-streaming service.
Each is produced and hosted in English. I don’t have a deep enough fluency in any language to grasp the nuances of shows made for non-English-speaking audiences, unfortunately, so I had to rely on what I can understand.
Each podcast features people speaking. None are just composed of music or sounds. That may sound obvious, but there are many podcasts out there that don’t feature human voices.
How do you discover shows to listen to?
I read about them and the podcast world constantly in Vulture, Business, Paste, AV Club, New Yorker, NY Times, and other culture publications. I listen to the advertisements and credits in episodes of shows I like as often as possible. I search under different genres on Apple Podcasts, Amazon, Spotify, and Patreon. And I follow my favorite podcasters on social media to hear what they’re working on next.
How did you pick the “Sean Pick” in the book, or the one episode you think people should listen to?
“Sean’s Picks” are secretly the most personal, least journalistic aspects of the book. I intentionally don’t explain exactly what they are so that readers can decide for themselves why I chose certain episodes, especially in cases like this where it’s confusing or random or even annoying. There’s a bit of a game to it.
What’s the best show that didn’t make the list?
I can only speak to this for the podcasts in my book. There are many equally exceptional shows that never made it into the book for a variety of reasons, but the most painful was probably Erica Heilman’s Rumble Strip. I didn’t know the show when my work started on The Podcast Pantheon, and by the time it was recommended to me by Vanessa Lowe, the creator and host of Nocturne, the book was already in the design stages and the podcasts in it set. Then I had a chance to listen and realized I’d been ignorant to the existence of a truly important work of art. I’m sure there are many more out there, but if I get the chance to write a second edition of the book, Rumble Strip is a must.
When you’re done listening for work, which shows do you listen to?
I have very few stable routines when it comes to my listening habits because I prefer exploring, but I rarely miss an episode of Comedy Bang! Bang!, WTF with Marc Maron, Hollywood Handbook, The Best Show with Tom Scharpling, or Bullseye! with Jesse Thorn.
If you were going to make a podcast, don’t worry about whether or not people would like it or ANY logistics (time and space don’t have to exist!) what would it be? Your budget is $1M.
Two ideas here.
I’d love to make a treasure-hunting podcast which can only be accessed and disseminated for download by USB drives hidden around the planet, like Geocaches. Each episode offers the next clue to the next clue to the next, culminating in the discovery of a treasure after 10 episodes. Once it’s discovered, the podcast and an after show about how the person who discovered it can be made public in season-long installments.
The other idea - and this is truly following the “time and space don’t exist” model - would be a film podcast in the vein of The Flop House or Black Men Can’t Jump [in Hollywood] centered exclusively on experimental, underground, and avant-garde film. Every episode would include an interview with a filmmaker followed by a discussion on that filmmaker’s work or one particular film, perhaps, with a fellow critic or guest. It pains me how little people understand about this world despite how often experimental film bleeds back into and informs mainstream cinema, and the goal of this podcast would attempt to draw a general public to that work.