There was big news last July, for the podcast world at least. Bobbi Althoff was signing off. In 2023, the then-25-year-old had started The Really Good Podcast. At the time, she had a large TikTok following (around 1.2 million) that she had built by posting parenting and pregnancy-related content, but she had no foot in the podcasting world. Which made it hard to believe that only months later, she would go on to interview Drake—an enormous get for a fledgling host that made her a source of fascination across the internet and fueled the runaway success of her show. By its end last summer, The Really Good Podcast had 8.2 million followers on TikTok and 3.9 million on Instagram, and had counted Scarlett Johansson, Offset, Jimmy Kimmel, and Michael Cera as guests.
She had said goodbye, but she wasn’t really gone. Even before Althoff, now 28, made the announcement that she was ending the podcast, she’d already started plotting her next show. Not This Again debuted in September, less than two months later. The new pod has given Althoff a chance to rebrand by returning to her sardonic roots with a bigger team, a higher production value, and the wisdom gleaned from her first show. The Really Good Podcast was started on a lark, but Althoff is building Not This Again more intentionally. The second season, which debuts on February 18, comes alongside a moment of transition in Althoff’s life: She’s performing at the Netflix Is A Joke Festival in May—a show called “Bobbi Althoff Tries Standup”—as part of a desire to pursue a career in comedy.
Working in entertainment wasn’t something Althoff anticipated for herself. She grew up in California, the second oldest of six children, in a family where financial security was elusive. Her father is a contractor, and her parents divorced when she was in high school. After graduation, Althoff worked as a nanny and completed a two-year degree in political science from Santa Monica College before marrying her now-ex-husband in early 2020 and having her first child soon after. She was planning to transfer to the University of California, Davis, but the pandemic and the birth of her daughter made her put that on hold. Instead, she joined TikTok and found success in 2021 by posting funny videos about motherhood. An early post, which captured her dancing with a banana, was a hit. But making a living as an influencer meant continually going viral, and that became exhausting over time. So she decided to try podcasting—she didn’t imagine it could be that hard.
Althoff still has a difficult time believing that the podcast she put together without much of a plan turned into such a smash hit. She began The Really Good Podcast by playing a character that was dry, sarcastic, blunt, and often downright hostile to her guests. It was strange, but it seemed to work. Comedians Rick Glassman and Funny Marco came on, with Marco’s video going viral, which thrilled Althoff.
Then, something even more amazing happened. “I get a call from Marco one day and he’s like, ‘Look, who just followed you?’ I go look, and it’s Champagnepapi”—that is, Drake. While Althoff was stunned he was following her, she was quick to seize the opportunity. As she tells it, the enduring online mystery of how she managed to book Drake wasn’t, as she tells it, really all that complicated. “I DM’d him and I asked him if he wanted to come on the podcast. He said yes, and that was it,” she says. “That’s really all it was.” Althoff got on a plane and flew to Memphis, meeting Drake during a stop on his tour.
The interview went viral and became a source of endless conversation. The two recorded it while sitting up in bed, unlike her previous episodes which were filmed in a studio. But it wasn’t actually a bedroom—it was a set created backstage at the arena before his show. (Althoff says she liked that interviewing Drake “in bed” gave the impression that she was so eager to interview him, she’d interrupted him in bed.)
The exchange was awkward from the jump. While Drake drank a cocktail, Althoff insulted his name, criticized his unmarried state, and questioned his talent. (This was a year before Kendrick Lamar went scorched earth on Drake in the diss track, “Not Like Us.”) It became wildly popular, garnering over 10 million views on YouTube—far surpassing the podcast’s other episodes. It also made Althoff, then the mom of two toddlers who was recently separated from her husband, a source of fascination, much of it dark. People called her an industry plant, suggested she was sleeping with Drake, and questioned her age and parenting choices.
To Althoff, the role she performed on The Really Good Podcast was a parody. But as viewership skyrocketed, it became harder and harder to maintain that persona. “I had a character that I was playing, and it really did well, but I abandoned that character as time went by,” she says. “The comments got to me. I had enough people call me a bitch that I was done. I was like I’m going to try to be nice and friendly and whatever….At some point my podcast just became the thing I was making fun of.” The new sanded-down, generic, less snarky approach might have made things less complicated, but it didn’t work. Maybe there was less online rage directed toward her, but without the bizarre moments the episodes weren’t as fun, or original.
When she ended The Really Good Podcast last summer, she needed a reset. “The name was not something that I had put a lot of thought into,” she says. “It blew up and then I was like, I’m really tied to this now. Last summer I thought, I’m just going to get rid of the name and I’m going to start a new podcast and it’s going to be more elevated, more professional.” Althoff thought about keeping the name the same, but Not This Again seemed like the perfect fit. “It was just a funny play on things because when I ended The Really Good Podcast, there’s so many people that were like, ‘Finally.’ Not This Again was just a great name because who wanted this? No one.”
With the new pod, Althoff is “going back into the character and having it be dry and witty; more humor-based, less me really getting to know the people,” she says. “It’s going to be putting on more of a show, which is what I was doing originally, and asking just super invasive questions and making people very uncomfortable.” She is also coming back to former guests. At least one of them, anyway. In the first season of Not This Again, Althoff and Drake got back in bed for another interview, this time in Switzerland, where he was on tour.
In the two years between Drake episodes 1 and 2, Althoff has been exposed to a lot. Her daily life has remained steady in many ways. If she’s not working, she’s usually at home with her two daughters and her boyfriend Tyler Hawkins, a basketball player in the NBA’s G League, and she’s remained close with the same friend group she had pre-TikTok. She’s found she loves interviewing people and has developed real connections with some of the celebrities that have been on her show. But Althoff has also learned that there’s a frightening side to fame. “TikTok really has opened up so many doors for so many people, and it’s really amazing to see what it’s done, but it can be scary,” she says. “Your life changes so fast. One month I was just a mom in Laguna Beach walking my kids everywhere, and then a month later I’m getting recognized everywhere I go.”
She has to be careful about what she says on her podcast. When a close friend of her family was detained by ICE this fall, Althoff told the story on TikTok, identifying the situation as a human rights issue. The hostile reactions she faced made her frightened for her family’s safety. “If I wasn’t afraid, I would be much more outspoken,” she says. “Anxiety rules my entire world, so it’s impossible.”
The risks are such that it’s just not worth it for a mother of two young kids, whose safety is paramount to her. She has largely kept her children’s lives private, keeping their faces off of social media and referring to them by nicknames. “There’s so many people that are so angry with politics. My main priority is keeping my kids safe,” she says. “The amount of evil, sinister messages I get, I’m like, ‘You guys are scary.’ I don’t want anyone trying to find me in real life because they’re so mad that I disagree with them.”
Althoff never really expected her thoughts to carry that much weight, but much of her career has unfolded in ways she couldn’t have anticipated. She makes decisions as they come, less deliberately than you might expect. “I’m really unorganized and I just do things. I like to just throw myself into things that I’m unprepared for and not equipped to handle,” Althoff says. When Netflix reached out to her team about doing a live version of her podcast at their comedy festival, she suggested she perform stand-up instead. They asked her if she’d done stand-up before. “I was like, no, but I’m going to do it, so we’ll see. And then I went to a couple of shows and was like, I’m not equipped for this whatsoever.”
But over and over her fears have lifted. She’s built her career on it. She hopes they will again. “It could be one of those things where I get up and I’m like, wait, I really like this. Interviewing people wasn’t something I ever thought I would do. I was so stressed out. I was panicked. I had so much anxiety,” she recalls. That feeling eventually dissolved and she knows that one day her fears about stand-up might, too. She’s trying something that no one asked her for once again, for reasons that don’t really make sense to anyone else but her. “I know the stress I feel right now could very well go away,” Althoff says. “I hope it does and I hope I get up there and I’m like, this is really fun and I want to keep doing this.”
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