Top Documentary Podcasts

What I Survived is a true survival podcast featuring extraordinary first-hand stories from people who survived kidnapping, hostage situations, disasters, accidents and other extreme life-or-death ordeals.

Each story takes you back to who these people were before everything changed, then inside the moment their lives were pushed to the edge — shipwrecked at sea for weeks, held captive by terrorists, falling 15,000 feet from a plane after a parachute failure, and other extraordinary fights for survival.

Through intimate first-hand accounts, we follow the ordeal as it happened, the decisions made under unimaginable pressure, and the resilience and will it took to survive.

Then we explore what came after — the physical and psychological recovery, the impact of trauma, and the process of rebuilding a life forever altered.

What I Survived is hosted by Australian podcaster Jack Laurence, creator of the award-winning podcasts One Minute Remaining, Wanted and more.

Follow What I Survived for remarkable true stories of survival, resilience and the human instinct to stay alive.

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You know Roald Dahl as the writer who thought up Willy Wonka, Matilda, and the BFG. But did you know he was also a spy? "The Secret World of Roald Dahl" is a wild journey through the hidden chapters of his extraordinary, controversial life. How did this secret agent and struggling screenwriter wind up as the most successful children’s author ever? And what darkness from his covert past seeped into the stories we read as kids? A dark, twisty, fascinating true story from creator and host Aaron Tracy.

What if you could hypnotize yourself into a better you? Or…. secretly hypnotize others into giving you anything you want?

That’s the promise of NLP, which emerged in 1970s California and then took over self-help… in spite of its connection to a gruesome unsolved murder in the late 1980s . 

NLP is the secret sauce connecting life coach Tony Robbins, Wolf of Wall Street Jordan Belfort, pick-up artist Ross Jeffries, as well as NXIVM, the most infamous sex cult of the 21st century.

Journalists and best friends Zoë Lescaze and Alice Hines investigate the controversies behind NLP, put the techniques to the test on themselves, and ask the ultimate question: is mind control real?

Mind Games tells the story of NLP and its crazy cast of disciples, including the fake doctor who invented it at a New Age commune, took it to Fortune 500 boardrooms, and whose gruesome murder trial did little to stop its rise. The biggest mind game of all? NLP may actually work.

A Whole Other Country is a new podcast from the award-winning Marfa Public Radio Studios.

Back in the ‘90s, in an off-the-grid neighborhood in the mountains of Far West Texas, a wannabe vintner started his own Wild West nation. Reporter and host Zoe Kurland drives the long, bumpy roads of the Davis Mountains to talk to a cast of neighbors and onlookers who watched the story of the standoff unfold in real time -- the myths of the frontier crashing violently into reality. 

The Brothers Ortiz is the story of two brothers–both successful, but in very different ways. Gabe Ortiz becomes a third-highest ranking officer in all of Texas while his younger brother Larry climbs the ranks in Puro Tango Blast, a notorious Texas Prison gang. 

Gabe doesn’t know all the details of his brother’s nefarious dealings, and he’s made a point not to ask, to protect their relationship. But when Larry is murdered during a home invasion in a rented beach house, Gabe has no choice but to look into what happened that night. To solve Larry’s murder, Gabe, and the whole Ortiz family, must ask each other tough questions. 

It’s the early 1970s, and a young British family is attempting to sail around the world when catastrophe strikes.p>

The Robertsons have sold everything they own to embark on this trip. But their epic odyssey soon turns into a desperate fight for their lives in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. 

Dougal and Lyn, their teenage son Douglas, 12-year-old twins Sandy and Neil, and young hitchhiker Robin find themselves hundreds of miles from land, with few supplies, no radio contact, and surrounded by sharks. 

Drifting in the vast emptiness, they must rely on their instincts and harness the elements to survive. Yet even with deadly predators circling, they discover that sometimes their worst enemy is...themselves. 

Adrift is an Apple Original podcast, produced by Blanchard House. Follow and listen on Apple Podcasts.

apple.co/Adrift

When America’s Next Top Model premiered in the early 2000s, it looked like a golden ticket: a glamorous TV show that could catapult aspiring models into fame. But two decades later, many contestants describe its aftermath as a curse. Hosted by pop-culture journalist Bridget Armstrong, Curse of: America’s Next Top Model is a deep investigation into the hidden costs of reality television, and what the show’s legacy reveals about beauty, power, and the culture that cheered it on. 

Through conversations with dozens of former contestants, producers and crew members, Curse of: America’s Next Top Model explores what happened behind the scenes on one of the most iconic and problematic reality shows of our generation.  

The series starts off by exploring how ANTM almost didn’t get made. You’ll get the real story behind the show’s most infamous controversies. Then, the models and producers pull back the curtain and talk about how the most outrageous photoshoots and runaways came together. You’ll hear from contestants who say ANTM saved their lives and from those who say it ruined theirs. The contestants also talk about how the body shaming they experienced on the show caused lifelong scars. Finally, we try to answer the question, is Tyra Banks the ultimate reality television villain?  

Curse of: America’s Next Top Model takes you on an investigative journey to figure out if the so-called curse is real? And if so, what was the toll on the models, and us, the audience?  

This is the official audio feed of Andrew Callaghan's weekly broadcast '5CAST' featuring a wide cast of illustrious guests.

Alan Berg was starting over as a divorcee, disbarred lawyer and recovering alcoholic when he found his true calling on the radio. His brash and bold on-air persona made him one of the true renegades in a “shock jock” revolution that took over broadcast media in the 1980s. Despite the numerous enemies the brash Berg made through his radio show, the world was stunned when he was assassinated outside his Denver home. The case would languish for months before uncovering the shocking truth about the white-supremacist militia that marked Alan Berg for death.

Thought provoking narratives. Unforgettable characters. Life changing journeys. From 'Cocaine Air' to ';The Quarterback and The Con Artist' to 'The Handyman of West Texas' Johnathan Walton unearths astounding, untold stories and weaves them into incredible tales of love, loss and the ultimate triumph of the human spirit.

In February 2022, a group of professional divers were sucked hundreds of feet into an oil pipe, deep beneath the Caribbean sea off the coast of Trinidad and Tobago. They could have been saved. But they weren’t. They were left to die.

This is their story… a tale of how their ordinary day at work turned into an unimaginable horror. Following their story has led us to lucrative contracts, failing safety standards and secretive political relationships… And to a question: why were those divers left to die?

This is Pipeline.

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Away Days Podcast is an episodic documentary series focused on unreported stories from the fringes of society.  We’re compassionately documenting the underground without watering it down or editorially obscuring it. This is independent journalism with no filter. Real, raw, and ugly. Journalist Jake Hanrahan, the host and creator of Away Days has spent the last 10 years embedded in places he’s not meant to be. With unique access and a straightforward style of on-the-ground reporting, the listener will be taken deep into the places they didn’t know existed.

Watch Away Days documentaries at youtube.com/@awaydaystv

Scams are no longer run by individuals. Instead, the bulk of scams now come from a network of high-security compounds in SE Asia, where an estimated 400,000 people live in slavery and are forced to run scams 24/7. In this multi-part video podcast, we'll dive into the terrifying world of 'scammer farms'. We'll meet people who've been trapped and escaped — and others who are desperately trying to rein in this exploding new business model.

Produced by Superreal

Hosted by Julian Morgans

Find us on TikTok, and YouTube

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Concrete Mama is not just a podcast - it’s a raw and powerful journey recorded in the heart of the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla. Featuring Demar, Anthony, Red, Vik, Gates, Nate, and Rachel, this groundbreaking show rewrites the narrative of life behind bars. The hosts delve into the prison’s notorious past — the infamous “Concrete Mama” era, when a failed experiment turned it into one of the most feared facilities in America. Get ready to rethink everything you know about the prison industrial complex. Concrete Mama is more than a podcast — it’s a movement.

American companies are being infiltrated—not by hackers breaking in, but by workers. 

Thousands of North Korean operatives are applying to jobs across the U.S.—and getting them. They are embedding themselves at Fortune 500 companies. Government agencies. Critical infrastructure. Even the firms tasked with stopping this threat.

To Catch a Thief: North Korea On Our Payroll is a first-of-its-kind audio documentary exposing this global labor pipeline—one that is quietly funneling hundreds of millions of dollars a year back to the regime, and its nuclear weapons program. 

Host Nicole Perlroth, bestselling author and former lead cybersecurity and digital espionage reporter for The New York Times, takes listeners inside this hidden network—from a rare, inside look at a North Korean IT worker on the job, to interviews with defectors who escaped it, to knocking on the doors of Americans hosting “laptop farms” on North Korea's behalf.

Along the way, the series reveals how this playbook is creating a hiring freeze for American workers, in a challenging job market. And how it has metastasized—adopted by cybercriminal groups and fraud networks around the world—blurring the line between nation-state espionage and organized crime.

To Catch a Thief is co-produced by Nicole Perlroth and Rubrik in partnership with Pod People. 

To Catch a Thief was written and produced by Nicole Perlroth, along with Khrista Rypl, T. J. Raphael, Rebecca Chaisson and Sam Gebauer. Additional thanks to Allie Pinel, Fendall Fulton, Krissy Clark, Cai Lee, Eunice Park and Aimee Machado. Editing and Sound Design by Erica Huang. Art direction and design by Ben Long, Gareth Strange and Sarah Burley at the John & Jane Agency, and support from John Leestma. 

Uncovering Roots is not just a podcast; it's a journey into the lesser-known narratives that deserve to be heard. Each episode is crafted to immerse listeners in a creative and personal storytelling experience, fostering a connection between the audience and the featured stories. 

Uncovering Roots will feature a number of stories which will concentrate on the SWANA (South West Asia and North Africa) region and indigenous people across the globe. The podcast aims to appeal to a broad audience by covering a wide range of themes.