The best podcasts for Interesting Pop Culture Stories

First off, Rob Lowe is a film and TV pop culture icon and has been for 40+ years. Second, he's a great interviewer and has worked with (or knows) a lot of people. And third, he's pretty funny and manages to tease that out of whoever he brings onto his show. The conversations have the intimate tone we strive for on our show...just two people talking about familiar stuff. While there are many great episodes, we suggest the one where he interviews Zach Galifianakis. He and Rob discuss, among many, many other things, profanity-laden celebrity melt-downs caught on tape, revealing the all-to-real human beings behind their public personas. If you don't laugh while listening to this, we're not sure we can still be friends with you.

Many have you are aware of this podcast. Roman Mars still helms what many consider to be the OG of design podcasts, and the wide variety of stories he's brought to listeners over the years has us applauding the world having greater design awareness in general. Now, we will be the first to admit this podcast has a certain NPR flavor to it, but given Roman's public radio roots this isn't a big surprise. As a result, the humor tends to be more subtle and on the highbrow side. One episode that does a good job of leveraging the popular and turning the story on its head is "Whomst Among Us Let The Dogs Out" talking about the backstory of—you guessed it—a certain earworm song from the Baha Men. You think you know this story. You don't.

These three hosts (Paul Scheer, Jason Mantzoukas and June Diane Raphael) have incredible chemistry and celebrate the pop culture staples that are b-movies. We love that this show leans into the guilty pleasure of these films, especially when they try to patch over plot holes and continuity errors with logic, which never quite works out. (But you knew that already.) The fact that all three hosts are comedians certainly helps, although they work as a team rather than stepping all over each other to see who's the funniest. We're bummed that some of our favorite episodes (ahem, Action Jackson) have been moved to Stitcher Premium, but them's the breaks, cheapskate! One of our favorite episodes is when they dissect "Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo." Pop, lock and listen.

Where do we begin with this title? Chock full of pop culture and stories of well-known musicians behaving badly. Often very, very badly. In host Jake Brennan's own words: "Disgraceland melds music history, true crime and transgressive fiction. Disgraceland is not journalism. Disgraceland is entertainment. Entertainment inspired by true events. However, certain scenes, characters and names are sometimes fictionalized for dramatic purposes." Yes, we know this is a popular podcast, but it's popular because the storytelling format works. It's also interesting that a structure depending on only a single narrator can be so compelling. Rather than pick an episode for you to start with, we suggest looking for your favorite musician in their list of episodes. Within one minute of starting your search you'll be jumping in and listening.

Just like with Disgraceland, this title gives you the backstory on the songs that are familiar to you, some because you heard them in your youth and others you just discovered in a social media stream. The beauty here is that host Hrishikesh Hirway gets the origin stories from the musicians themselves, asking them to articulate some of the specific decisions they made when making their work and how those decisions influenced the music that becomes the soundtrack to our lives. This show now has over 250 episodes. Because music is such a personal thing, we recommend finding a musician or band you love and going from there. In case you're wondering, the first band profiled was The Postal Service.