In Brooklyn apartments, two friends with microphones dissect TikTok trends or recapitulate Twitter drama. There are the marathon sessions like The Joe Rogan Experience<\/em>, where conversations sprawl like suburban development: three hours of nothing punctuated by moments destined for Instagram Reels. There’s the parade of glossy celebrity sit-downs<\/a> with cinematic camera work that cost thousands to produce<\/a>, ostensibly have millions of listeners, and yet, you\u2019ve never heard of them<\/a>. Elsewhere, venture capitalists<\/a> pontificate about disruption. Influencers dissect relationships with other, slightly better-known influencers<\/a>. Politicians<\/a> “reach across the aisle” to controversial public figures<\/a>, to bond over their shared vocation of being famous<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In short, everyone hosts an interview show now.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n The format takes hold wherever a guest can be found and two voices can fill one to three hours. With a handful of exceptions (Dwarkesh Patel<\/a> and Ross Douthat<\/a> both immediately spring to mind, though there are certainly others), preparations for an interview seem to involve no more than sending a calendar invite. Editing means cutting where you accidentally named your situationship. Go deeper down the interview-show rabbit hole and you’ll find microphones are optional. There\u2019s zero barrier to entry, infinite upside. Maybe you’ll eventually sell out theaters for live recordings. Maybe you’ll coast on two hours of work weekly while banking six figures from your Patreon earnings. Maybe you’ll become the Joe Rogan of something incredibly specific, like being on your phone all day. Everyone believes they’re one viral clip from quitting their day job\u2014and sometimes they’re right.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Today’s carelessness would have horrified early broadcasters. Edward R. Murrow\u2019s See It Now<\/em> in the 1950s set the standard for adversarial television journalism and earned national attention when it challenged Sen. Joseph McCarthy<\/a>. Murrow\u2019s companion program Person to Person<\/em><\/a>, which aired into the early 1960s, by contrast, reached millions of viewers by bringing cameras into public figures\u2019 living rooms, avoiding controversy but establishing the template for the friendlier, intimate interview. Mike Wallace pushed in the other direction: His Night Beat<\/em> (1956) and The Mike Wallace Interview<\/em> (1957-58) were so confrontational they were taken off the air as quickly as they appeared. Each show was deliberate\u2014well thought-out\u2014and demanded the viewer\u2019s full attention. That sensibility culminated in 1968 with 60 Minutes<\/em>, where Wallace turned the interview into a civic ritual with questions framed as public demands for answers.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But that era is over; the contemporary interview show does something else entirely. Marathon programs, The<\/em> Joe Rogan Experience<\/em> being chief among them, are designed for audiences to drift in and out while they do something else, usually scrolling. Last year I tried to work against this current: With my creative partner, Taylor McMahon, I began an audio documentary<\/a> about Art Bell<\/a>, who mainstreamed conspiracy and paranormal talk radio. Every minute demanded dozens of small decisions. My narration had to be written, then read, then read again until I mastered the right cadence. What seems effortless when done well depends on time, money, and understanding of a craft that today’s shows have largely abandoned, for both good and bad reasons.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Most interview shows cost nothing to make and less to repeat. They can be monetized through Patreon and Substack, and of course through ads. Marketing is embedded in the format: A guest arrives with an audience and lends it to the host for an hour. Hosts accumulate listeners, downloads, and views parasitically, bouncing between audiences to build their own. Clips finish the job. A three-hour conversation becomes a month of 30-second social media reels, which travel further and faster than the original episode ever will.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Among creators, produced and edited shows are sometimes dismissed as “sterile,” a judgment that confuses careful shaping with absence of life. Listen to episodes of This American Life<\/em> or Radiolab<\/em>, or The Living Room<\/em>. This isn\u2019t sterility. They know when to withhold information, when to let silence work. There is a craft<\/em> to audio. But technique has become suspect\u2014and shows aim to be light and conversational, even ambient.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Having craft beyond whatever the algorithm rewards this week makes you seem pretentious, like a \u201ctryhard,\u201d or \u201cstriver.\u201d But to the DIY broadcaster\u2019s credit, the economics are also brutal: 40 hours of careful editing will likely generate the same number of downloads as two friends recording their hangout. Effort doesn’t always scale, unless you\u2019re lucky. The model that taught radio producers timing and pacing\u2014and made them invaluable\u2014is dead.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The absence of craft has all sorts of consequences. For example, the adversarial interview hasn’t vanished, but it grows scarcer yearly. Guests arrive with talking points, or even without them, knowing the host won’t push back on even the most absurd utterances. Most programs have settled into a therapeutic tempo, where guests say something outrageous and hosts just nod. The performance of conflict persists in some areas because conflict generates effective clips, though it more often manifests as humiliation<\/a>\u2014gotcha moments rather than genuine hard questioning.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In today’s media landscape, very few figures still practice real interviewing. Tucker Carlson, paradoxically, provides an interesting case study for both real interviews and the sort of galling credulity common to today\u2019s face-to-faces.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n When Carlson sat down with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Carlson actually challenged him, asking Altman<\/a> about Suchir Balaji, a former OpenAI employee who was found dead in an apparent suicide several weeks after accusing OpenAI of copyright violations. Carlson seems to genuinely believe Balaji was murdered\u2014and he pressed Altman on that when Altman said that he believed Balaji had committed suicide. It was a tense back-and-forth. Altman, at one point, tells Carlson he hasn\u2019t done too many interviews where he\u2019s accused of murder. Carlson clarifies\u2014he\u2019s not accusing him of murder, but the situation demands an explanation.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n By contrast, Carlson\u2019s interview with the writer and podcast Darryl Cooper was exceedingly deferential: When Cooper offered a revisionist picture of the Holocaust, Carlson didn\u2019t question his claims. He accepted them at face value.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Less controversially, Ross Douthat also doesn\u2019t sit in the passenger seat. On Interesting Times<\/em>, he asks guests to explain their positions<\/a> and actively engages with their arguments<\/a>. A surprising number of guests fumble when challenged, even lightly.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Virtually no one else, however, is conducting interviews with much confrontation. Nobody wants to piss anyone else off. Nobody wants to burn a bridge. The 2024 presidential election was widely considered \u201cthe podcast bro\u201d election, and what a missed opportunity it was! Joe Rogan<\/a> and Theo Von<\/a> hung out<\/em> with Trump, Alex Cooper hung out<\/em> with Kamala Harris on Call Her Daddy<\/em><\/a>. There were no stakes. With presidential nominees!\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But other podcasts exist less as actual conversations and more as collections of clippable moments. That is, it\u2019s less about the complete product as it is creating raw material for later harvesting, itself designed to help the podcast rack up followers and go viral. This is a culture-wide condition and not confined to podcasting, either. You see this most acutely in the film industry, where many movies seem to exist primarily as fragments for TikTok\u2019s For You page. Sydney Sweeney\u2019s Anyone But You<\/em> utterly failed the test of narrative craft\u2014really, it was worse than what you\u2019d read in a freshman screenwriting class\u2014but it succeeded brilliantly as a clip generator. There were<\/em> funny jokes\u2014there was just no plot. To return to podcasting: Call Her Daddy<\/em> offers a cornucopia of very consumable clips<\/a>\u2014but as a start-to-finish listening experience, it borders on unbearable<\/a>. Unless, of course, you\u2019re using it as background noise while you do other things.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n And it’s a pipeline that serves the influencer economy, whether you’re a walking lifestyle brand or a public intellectual. Every book demands a tour\u2014and you’ll discover, after you’ve written one, that most interviewers have barely cracked the spine. Or maybe it\u2019s not a book, it\u2019s a new project or a company. The actual content becomes secondary to the fact of its existence. Every tour demands appearances, a circuit of podcasts and shows where you’ll repeat the same anecdotes, refine the same talking points, until they calcify. These appearances build familiarity\u2014not with your ideas or your work, but with your face, your voice, your personal \u201cbrand.\u201d You become a regular presence in people’s feeds. Familiarity breeds recognition, recognition courts fame, and fame confers status and, with any luck, money.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n What matters is that you’re in circulation, generating clips, maintaining visibility. The work, whatever it is, was never the point; it was just your ticket to the circuit. It’s fame stripped down to its barest, most cynical mechanics: visibility for visibility’s sake. What’s the point of this endless circulation? It’s no wonder so many would-be internet personalities pivot to politics. At least there, the performance must pretend to be about something real. It\u2019s the last place where you can be famous in a durable way\u2014and not just durable, it means<\/em> something. You\u2019re less likely to be forgotten with the next news cycle.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n When television first visited the living room, Murrow’s Person to Person<\/em> gave audiences proximity in exchange for hard questions deferred. Later, 60 Minutes<\/em> demonstrated that interviews could provide a state for real accountability weekly. Mike Wallace made tobacco executives sweat<\/a>. Now we have something different: an entire media ecosystem built on circulating one’s own image.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n