No censorship, no clock: why Los Gordos Podcast is, to us, the best thing being recorded in Costa Rica

This is a review, and it is worth saying in the first line, before anyone works it out on their own: Los Gordos Podcast is one of the shows qCRew exists because of. This directory came out of a very specific frustration —that finding more Costa Rican content this good depended on luck and on the algorithm— and this is the show that was playing when that frustration turned into a project.

It is made by DjP, Toledo and Roper, it goes out on the Ruff & Tuff TV channel, and the way they work fits into a line they wrote themselves.

Los Gordos Podcast is a series by DjP, Toledo and Roper where they hold conversations with different people, uncensored.

The show's own description, written by the channel

Read on 6 September 2026, the channel has 217 thousand subscribers, over a thousand published videos and 62 million views and counting, since it opened in December 2011. That is not a podcast channel: it is a production house with fourteen years in the industry.

And watch this detail, because it explains everything else: the channel did not start from the podcast, it started from music. Costa Rican rap, music videos, and the Rap Tico Fest they ran several years running. The most watched video in the whole house is not an episode: it is «En El Bar», by Toledo with Kavvo and RVS, written and directed by DjP, which is past 5 million views — about five times the podcast's biggest episode. Los Gordos arrived in 2019, moving into a house that had been standing for years.

And they did not always look the way they look now. The photo above is from 2021: a warehouse, stacked equipment cases, a poker table and three chairs. The branded set they record on today came later. The distance between those two things is not money: it is years of continuing to upload.

One episode passed a million views, and it runs a little over two hours

The most watched is the Lil Quil episode from May 2020: over a million views, a little over two hours of conversation.

Five months later came the Edgar Silva one, which is just shy of a million and runs two and a half hours — and note the detail: it gathers more likes than the other one with fewer views.

That is worth pausing on. In 2020, from Costa Rica, nobody was betting that a two-and-a-half-hour format of two people talking would work at all. Local television was still measuring in twenty-minute blocks with ad breaks. Los Gordos published whole conversations, unedited to fit anywhere, and gathered more than a million views. Views, mind you, not people: YouTube does not say how many are behind that figure, or which countries they watched from.

Luisito Comunica sat down there, and they made Araya Vlogs the host

In November 2024 came the Luisito Comunica episode: over half a million views and a good hour and a half of conversation. The choice we liked most in that episode was not the guest, it was the host: they brought in Araya Vlogs, the Costa Rican creator we already wrote about when he won Premio Juventud 2026.

It was not Araya's first time in that studio. In June 2023 he was the guest, and that episode sits close to 300 thousand views.

In February 2026 Corney and Diego Garro sat down together, months before Garro released his World Cup song and travelled to cover the 2026 tournament as an independent creator.

That is the pattern that interests us: when a Costa Rican creator is about to make a jump, they have often already been at that table.

A former president, a member of congress and two national-team names

The guest list is what separates Los Gordos from a niche show. On the same channel, in the same format and without changing register, they have hosted:

• José María Figueres, former President of Costa Rica — some 346 thousand views, January 2022
• Hernán Medford, former national team manager — some 240 thousand, February 2021
• Celso Borges — some 86 thousand, March 2023
• Ariel Robles, member of congress, on cannabis legalisation — some 55 thousand, April 2024
• Rigoberto Hidalgo, activist — over 100 thousand, May 2026

A show a former president says yes to, and that is sitting with a rapper the following week, has earned something money does not buy.

What it does well, said plainly

Four things, and none of them is budget.

It does not cut. Episodes last as long as the conversation lasts: an hour and a quarter with Corney and Diego Garro, two and a half hours with Edgar Silva. Nobody is watching the clock, and you can tell in the stretch where the guest finally relaxes.

The hosts are not journalists, and that is the advantage. DjP and Toledo are musicians —Toledo Again has his own listing in this directory, with over 220 thousand followers— so when they sit down with an artist it does not sound like an interview, it sounds like colleagues. The uncomfortable question still comes, but it comes from somewhere else.

The guest does not have to be famous. Next to the former president there are episodes with an activist, with a freestyle battle host, with people nobody else was going to put on camera. That is where the show gets good.

It does not pretend to be neutral. It says «uncensored» in its own description and it means it, with everything good and awkward that brings. In a country where almost all large-scale content runs through two broadcasters, a space that owes nobody anything is worth more than it looks.

Why this review sits inside a creator directory

Here the writer stops being «the team» and speaks first-hand.

I started watching Los Gordos Podcast more than seven years ago. At first it was just another show; then it became a habit. And at some point, from watching them so much, I asked myself the question that eventually turned into this site: where do I find more content like this? How do I find them?

For a good while the answer was the guests themselves. Every episode introduced me to somebody I did not know, I would go looking for their channel, and that is how I built what I watched. The podcast ended up working as my search engine, because there was no other one.

And that really was the only way to come across Costa Rican content: word of mouth, a video that broke into trending, or something you found by pure chance after digging around YouTube for a long while.

Several times I arrived late. I found good things —genuinely good— when the creator had already thrown in the towel. No views, no followers, and one day they simply stopped uploading. It was not talent they lacked. It was reaching the viewer.

That is what qCRew is trying to fix, and it is not a nice idea on a slide: it is that specific person who stopped recording because nobody knew they were there.

Look at the contradiction. Los Gordos Podcast has been doing this for years and its channel has already passed 62 million views. And even so, the normal way to reach them is still that somebody sends it to you on WhatsApp, or that YouTube decides to show it to you. There is nowhere in Costa Rica where you can type «uncensored podcast» and find them.

If that happens to them, with 62 million, imagine what it is like for someone just starting.

That is nobody's failure among the people recording. It is a gap in the country, and it is the gap this directory exists to close.

If you got this far and did not know them, start with the Edgar Silva episode. And take our advice on one thing: do not put it on in the background. Sit down and watch it.

And if you are the one recording, and it feels like nobody is watching: do not quit yet.

The creator who stopped recording was not short on talent. They were short on somebody knowing they were there.