Gather round, podcast listeners. I want to tell you a story. Many stories, the best stories, all assembled from the best storytelling shows available via a good wifi or cellular connection.
In many ways, all podcasts are trying to tell us a story. But these 12 shows are the heavy-hitters — not only focused specifically of presenting riveting, real world narratives, but doing so with impeccable sound quality and dynamic hosts. They’ll break your heart as they make you laugh, and terrify you as they make you cry. They’re all true, which means the stakes are high. Climb into the life of someone else for an episode (or three) to delight in a wonderful experience — or feel grateful that you have the option to climb back out.
Heavyweight
Those clinging to something from their past — an unresolved argument, a lost friend, a misunderstood interaction with a family member, or an unsolved mystery of any kind — can call Jonathan Goldstein, host of Heavyweight, and he’ll search far and wide (perhaps farther and wider than necessary) to get an answer. Goldstein takes it upon himself to help listeners with their problems by personally flying across the country, calling long-lost family members, schools, and businesses, and doing a ridiculous amount of research. He teams up with the guest, checking in with them on his progress, and diving into their story to understand what he is truly in search of.
Episodes can feel heavy because they are (“Heavyweight” refers to the weight of past trauma)…but it’s also hilarious. Jonathan is sharp and self-deprecating, and shares all of his awkward confrontations (there are many). The writing is poetic, peppered with tiny details about Jonathan’s investigation, what people are wearing, and every step of his unusually complicated process. (It wouldn’t be nearly as entertaining otherwise.) In the end, Jonathan’s aim is to bring people together, help them resolve struggles with their own identities, and be a friend.
Family Secrets
Dani Shapiro is like a family secrets whisperer. This podcast began with her own story of discovering the man she believed to be her biological father was not, a journey she wrote about in her bestselling memoir Inheritance. On Family Secrets, Dani collects stories of similar emotional tumult, from a daughter who learns about her mother’s past by reading a notebook after she’s died, to a woman who discovers something terrible about her husband when police break in to seize his computer, to an interview with the Unabomber’s brother. Most of her guests are writers with their own memoirs, so they are all expert storytellers already, but Dani has a lyrical way of gently pulling out all the emotion that comes with learning something shocking about yourself, perhaps because she’s been through it herself. She’s able to get people to share their secrets and help them discover the truths they’ve been hiding from themselves. These are intense stories, gently told.
Snap Judgment
On Snap Judgment, Glynn Washington is your emcee for a poetry slam of stories, starting out each episode with one of his own, told with such energy that you can feel it pulsing through your body. Then he hands the mic to his storyteller — you hear the again story from their POV, expertly assembled with killer beats. The result? Movies for your ears. These stories — a foreign negotiator attempts to free an American journalist being held captive, someone experiences a glitch in the universe, an underwater photographer is saved by harp seals — will stick with you. Listen to just one story (I recommend starting with “The Border Hacker”) and join the huge community of Snappers who sit at the altar of storytelling master Glynn Washington, waiting for him to drop new beats.
Rough Translation
The conversations we’re having in America about family, education, love, food, and everything under the sun feel unique to us, but with his podcast Rough Translation, host Gregory Warner is proving that we’re far from alone, and that stories that can unite us are everywhere. He takes us from Harlem, to Sweden, to Ukraine, and a McDonald’s in Marseille to introduce us to a world full of people more similar than they think. It’s a mixture of interview and narrative, woven into emotional, funny, and eye-opening stories. I often wonder how Gregory is able to find the most interesting people in the world, but then I remind myself they are everywhere, because he approaches everyone’s story with empathy and wonder. He listens.
Soul Music
Music lends itself perfectly to storytelling — songs evoke some of our strongest emotions and memories, after all. Soul Music features a different song each episode, as people from around the world describe their strong connection to it. It’s beautiful storytelling anchored to songs like Prince’s “Purple Rain,” Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime,” Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” and Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song.” From the song that was the soundtrack to our childhoods, to the one we were listening to when we found out a parent died, to the one played at our wedding. It doesn’t matter if the song is special to you or totally new, the stories are strong enough to pull you in. Because it’s not about the songs. It’s about us, and the way songs have a way of planting themselves into our lives.
Self Evident
Self Evident expands our ideas about what it means to be American by showcasing stories of Asian Americans who are often erased by our discourse. It’s a mixture of intimate investigations and personal histories, all by and about people in South Asian, South East Asian, East Asian, Central Asian, and multi-ethnic communities — but the stories are for everyone, asking difficult questions and exploring massive ideas. Who is the American Dream actually for? Whose story is really being told? Which side do we choose when there’s no middle path? What pieces of ourselves are we forever bound to lose? Where do we find joy during an identity crisis? How do we connect our past to our future? The show just started dropping episodes in a 5-part series called “Before Me” that lets us listen in as a mother tells her daughter a powerful story of one woman’s journey from Cambodia to America that will change everything she thinks about her mum, herself, her new baby daughter, and the generational trauma that’s been passed down through their lineage.
RISK!
RISK! is a live show and weekly podcast where some of the world’s best storytellers (Sarah Silverman, Kevin Nealon, Marc Maron, Lisa Lampanelli, and Samantha Bee, to name a few) share true stories that are so vulnerable and open, you often can’t believe what you’re hearing. Stories are embarrassing, sad, and often hysterical (one of my favourites is “For the Love of Nubbins,” told by Elna Barker.) Drug addiction, growing up in Catholic school, getting fired and robbed; whatever the subject, you’ll be entertained, but you’ll also feel a weight lifted off your shoulders. Hearing other people’s stories that are probably the same as yours — different details, similar emotions — is a gift.
Host Kevin Allison is a wizard of story, sharing pieces of himself as he invites people on stage to share theirs. There’s something about live recordings that make what you hear feel almost improvised — storytellers bravely step up without props or the security of distance to bleed from their hearts and souls.
The Mortified Podcast
Maybe you could get on stage and relay your most embarrassing story, but could you read from your childhood diaries? That’s what storytellers are doing for The Mortified Podcast. Episodes are grouped into themes — cliques, loneliness, musical theatre hookups — and for each, you get a collection of diary entries once scribbled by awkward, earnest, smart, sarcastic, and surprising kids who had no idea that one day their words would be fodder for adult entertainment. Or maybe they did — often the diary letters seem aware that someone might be reading their words. Confessions of outrageous crushes, lists of ambitious dreams, insecurities, fears, obsessions, and all the intense feelings of being young, read by the people who experienced them decades ago: This podcast is like a time capsule of ourselves, because even if we aren’t hearing our own diary entries, the emotions (and even some of the details) are universal. My suggestion? Start with “Jessica’s Diary.”
All the Wiser
On All the Wiser, Kimi Culp sits down with people who have had extraordinary experiences to talk about what they learned and how their lives were changed. She’s interviewed someone who spent time in a Mexican Cartel, an NBA player addicted to Oxy, and a quadruple amputee who faced death, proving that there’s a lot we can learn from others’ stories, and that listening can impact how we evaluate our own lives. There’s a lingering effect to every episode, as you’ll be left wondering how Kimi’s guests are doing and drawing parallels to the things in your own life. Kimi provides a safe space for people to let it all out, and they share stuff that’s tough to tell, but important to say — for them, and for the people listening. This is a one for one podcast — for each episode, Kimi donates $US2,000 ($2,776) to charities like the Crisis Text Line, the ASPCA, and the Heroic Hearts Project, changing lives around the world. All Kimi asks is that you sit back, let the stories wash over you, and maybe experience a change yourself.
This Is Actually Happening
What if you grew up in a cult? What if you found out your daughter’s boyfriend was her murderer? What if you were tortured in an Iranian prison? What would you do? This is Actually Happening presents some of the most incredible, you-never-think-it’s-gonna-happen-to-you stories, told by the people who experienced them. Whit Missildine is host, but he’s not interviewing his guests — he edits interviews to make a seamless narrative, as the speakers explain moment-by-moment, everything they heard, felt, and saw. It’s almost as if a stranger who is whispering in your ear one of the most unbelievable stories you’ve ever heard. Episode titles are cryptic, so you often go in not knowing where you’re headed, which makes the experience all the more anxiety-inducing.
Radio Diaries
Since 1996, the Radio Diaries team has been giving people tape recorders, asking them to report on their own lives, and helping weave the audio together into remarkable, memorable audio entries with little interference getting in the way of whatever is at the heart of the story. People of all ages and backgrounds — from prison guards, to bra saleswomen, to a little girl working in her father’s pizza parlor during Covid — invite us into their experiences in an almost tactile way. Radio Diaries offers a meaningful way to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes, as the ordinary becomes extraordinary.
Story of the Week
This is a bit of a cheat: Story of the Week isn’t traditional storytelling podcasts like the others we’ve discussed. Instead, each week host Joel Stein picks up a culture story that went viral or really struck a chord with readers, reads it, and invites the journalist who wrote it to come on and flesh things out for us. It’s an introduction to some of the world’s buzziest stories you might have missed — the one about LARP-ing (live action role-playing) at a fake gay conversion camp, or the one about billionaires prepping for the apocalypse, or the one about a hallucinogenic toad doctor — and a deeper dive than you’d get if you just read the story. It’s the story behind the story, and sometimes the best part of a story is what happens after it’s been published.
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