On Dec. 4, Amy Poehler hosted a live recording of her less-than-a-year-old podcast, “Good Hang,” at the Fonda Theatre in Hollywood. The crowd wasn’t just packed, it was fully engaged and cheered for pretty much anything (even Poehler’s admission that she’d forgotten the start time of the show).
This is important because, as one of her guests, comedian Ron Funches, pointed out, “Don’t they know podcasts are free? They are severely overpaying.”
In fact, I know he said it because, even though I live mere miles from the Fonda, I watched a video recording of the event on YouTube.
Podcast listening is, historically, a solo experience: Put in some earbuds or crank up the car stereo, sit back and let blossom a parasocial relationship with strangers who tell stories in such a way that they become our smartest, funniest or most talented friends. Because we can take them anywhere, they keep us connected to life outside of our small orbits. While promoting her new movie, “Die My Love,” actor Jennifer Lawrence said she parents her young child while an AirPod blasts murder podcasts into one of her ears.
However, going to a theater to see these podcast performers live can feel like the exact opposite: Strangers with the same niche interest crowding into one place in not just rapt, but maybe even a bit rabid, attention.
“These are people who don’t go out to shows,” says Joe Schwartz, a comedy touring and live events agent at United Talent Agency. “This might be the first show they’ve ever bought tickets to because podcasters are reaching different people than your average music fan or your average comedy fan.”
Hosts also don’t have to be beloved comedians like Poehler. Schwartz says that podcast fans may seem like passive listeners, but get them all in a room together and it might as well be the Eras tour.
“It’s just as loud whether there’s fire cannons or not,” he says. “When these podcasters walk on stage … it’s deafening. I have to put my hands over my ears. And I’ve done that many times.”
As they become bigger, productions also must find ways to make them more lucrative.
“We’re also increasingly in a media landscape that is paying more and more attention to these creators, and it’s bleeding into traditional media,” says Sarah Mathews, a digital talent agent at UTA. “They’re only going to get bigger and we’ll probably only get closer and closer to a more direct comparison of an Eras tour. Maybe the next podcaster who is doing a stadium tour can compete with Taylor Swift or Bad Bunny.”
Podcasting has been around for decades (some might even remember when it was simply called radio). And although some stars are turning off their mics, like comedian Marc Maron did when he ended his seminal “WTF” podcast in October, they are still industry moneymakers.
The 2026 Golden Globes will feature their first-ever podcast category, with “Good Hang” being one of the six nominees. This year, the British Podcast Awards were dubbed “the Oscars of the medium” by the country’s the Observer newspaper. In August, comedians Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang hosted the first-ever televised Las Culturistas Culture Awards, usually honored on their successful pop culture gabfest “Las Culturistas.”
The Interactive Advertising Bureau reported this year that podcasting “is on track to approach the $2.6 billion mark by 2026” with comedy and sports continuing to be the most attractive to listeners. Apple’s list of the most popular podcasts of the year, which was released in November, includes the less-serious or comedy-skewing (“The Joe Rogan Experience”; “Call Her Daddy”) but also motivational (“The Mel Robbins Podcast”) and news and features (“This American Life”; “The Daily”).
Not translating these successes to podcast tours is leaving money on the table. Some shows, like Jessica McKenna and Zach Reino’s “Off Book: The Improvised Musical” — where their whole shtick is to make a musical from scratch on the spot — were born for these moments. Similarly, Georgia Hardstark is an experienced TV presenter and actor, and Karen Kilgariff a trained comedian. Their recently completed “My Favorite Murder” live tour also made it interesting with surprise guests and their genuine delight in seeing audiences in hyper-specific cosplay.
“Many top podcast tours now rival live music and comedy tours in venue size, routing and ticket sales. We are also seeing incredibly strong merch numbers at these shows due to the strength of their fan bases,” says UTA agent Jackie Knobbe, who represents “My Favorite Murder’s” live business.
And, oh the fan bases.
Hardstark and Kilgariff remember the moment they realized that live shows for “My Favorite Murder” were never going to die.
In 2016, they were asked to perform at the Chicago Podcast Festival. They thought they’d be opening for someone else, but the demand was high enough that they quickly sold out the nearly 1,000-seat Athenaeum Center as headliners. At the end of the show, the performers told their audience they’d be in the lobby, expecting to meet a few fans. Three hours of photographs, hugs and signings later …
“That night, we realized we have to figure out what we’re going to be doing and the kind of show we’re going to give as opposed to what I’d always seen, which is people getting those Costco folding tables and four guys sitting and facing the audience,” Hardstark says.
But jazz hands and true crime aren’t the only titillations that will get fans to live shows. Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell’s popular British podcast “The Rest Is Politics” sold headlined London’s 20,000-seat O2 Arena.
The objective is to avoid the “live experience of ‘this could have been an email,’” says Tom Whiter, the general manager for British podcast production and distribution company Goalhanger, which produces the “Rest Is” series (see also: “The Rest Is History,” which Apple Podcasts recently named the best podcast of 2025, and espionage-focused “The Rest Is Classified”).
Whiter says that, for his company’s shows, “we won’t do an episode of the podcast on stage, and we don’t record it and put it out to the podcast audience.” They’ll also tailor show topics to the cities they’re in or make the dialogue cheekier than what you can say on air.
Most importantly, his company doesn’t want this to feel like school; these hosts should be less dry academics and more die-hard nerds about their subjects.
“This has got to be something that they want to do and want to do all the time and want to talk about to their wits’ end,” he says of his hosts. But also, “we will find the people who we find really engaging and who we think people want to spend lots of time with.”
They, like Poehler, need people who are good hangs.
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