Ben Kissel

Ben Kissel co-created The Last Podcast on the Left in 2011 with Marcus Parks, and Henry Zebrowski was in by the third episode, the three of them performers from the Brooklyn comedy circuit who built a long-running show out of true crime and the paranormal. Born in Fargo, North Dakota in 1981 and raised in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, he took a political science degree at Wisconsin-Milwaukee and stood for Brooklyn borough president in 2017 on the Reform Party line, finishing with under two percent of the vote. The Last Book on the Left, written with Parks and Zebrowski and illustrated by Tom Neely, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2020 and entered the hardcover nonfiction bestseller list at number three; it revisits nine of the notorious criminal cases the show had covered, with two rounds of fact-checking behind them. Kissel stepped away in September 2023 to enter treatment and left the network that October, following allegations by a former partner that he denied.