How Many Podcasts Could You Possibly Listen To?

If every second of every waking hour was spent with earbuds in

Sometimes I can’t help but think of weird ways to understand how much of something there are. Like podcasts. There are so many of them!

There are millions of podcasts and even more episodes. Too many for one lifetime, right?

But what if you really tried? Like dedicated your entire life to listening to as many podcasts as humanly possible. What kind of dent could you put in the pile of podcasts?

All drawings by author

Here are the facts:

• According to Listen Notes, there are at least 3,351,967 podcasts and 196,609,368 podcast episodes right now.
• The average podcast episode is around 41 minutes and 31 seconds long. Dan Misener calculated this in 2019 after analyzing 19 million episodes, and I’ll take that number as close enough even though it has surely shifted a bit in the past five years.
• According to the World Health Organization’s most recent data available, the current average lifespan for a human is about 73.4 years.

What can we do with this information?

Let’s look at the average human life compared to the total minutes of podcasts out there.