Things have come a long way since the 2004 Guardian article credited with coining the term “podcast”. That piece describes a new format that combines “the intimacy of voice, the interactivity of a weblog, and the convenience and portability of an MP3 download”, before speculating somewhat breathlessly that “one might soon be able to make a living doing this”.
Twenty years later, the hosts of the SmartLess podcast, actors Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes and Will Arnett, just signed a $100m dollar deal with American radio network Sirius XM to host the podcast on the network for three years. Joe Rogan just renewed a deal with Spotify for an estimated $250m to host his podcast on its platform. The biggest tech companies in the world – Amazon, Spotify, Apple – are desperate to have a library of hit podcasts and are willing to stump up for anything that seems like a proven winner.
But it is not just the fees that have transformed. When podcasting first began, most of the shows were either the endeavours of solo hobbyists or repackaged public radio shows. Quickly the format exploded as a way to deliver deeply reported news or investigations, and for comedians to riff off each other. But in 2024 podcasts are becoming increasingly dominated by one format: the celebrity-on-celebrity interview.
An entertaining, longform audio interview is hardly a new idea. Its origins can be traced back to 1942, when the first episode of Desert Island Discs was broadcast on the BBC Forces Programme, a service that had originally been aimed at keeping up the morale of British soldiers stationed in France, and which continued after the Dunkirk evacuation. In 1985 it found a US counterpart in Fresh Air, the arts interview programme still hosted by Terry Gross. Both shows are warm yet combative, relentlessly researched interview shows – public radio in excelsis.
And that was about it until 2008 when Marc Maron, an LA-based standup who had alienated much of the local comedy scene with his belligerent style, plugged in a couple of microphones in his garage and started interviewing his friends. “When we started, it was really kind of punk rock,” Maron tells me down the phone from his home studio. “We didn’t really know what the show was going to be. The first 100 episodes were having celebrities over to talk about my problems and me apologising to people.”
Maron’s confessional, unprofessional style engendered incredible openness from his guests. He talked to Louis CK about his jealousy and insecurities and how it affected their relationship, and to Anthony Bourdain about their shared struggle with addiction. Quickly, bigger celebrities started to show up, culminating in Barack Obama’s visit to Maron’s garage to talk about race relations and basketball while he was still president.
The lack of rules governing the format, and Maron’s masterful juggling of ego and empathy, created a different kind of interview, unlike the public radio shows that had come before. “I used to get offended when people would hold me to a journalistic definition of what an interview was,” says Maron. “I’m not a journalist, I don’t write down questions. So, you know, go fuck yourself, I’m having a conversation, following my own instincts about what’s interesting to me.”
Having a conversation? What could be easier? “Oh yeah, my joke about it was: ‘Well, if Maron could do it, I can do it,’” Maron says. It started with a trickle: Joe Rogan followed shortly afterwards in the US, Adam Buxton and David Tennant a few years later in the UK. With each passing year since, more authors, politicians, musicians, actors and influencers have started to get involved – and increasingly the host of the podcast is more famous than their guests. Trevor Noah, Michelle Obama, Tucker Carlson, Meghan Markle, Jordan Peterson and Bill Gates all now basically do the same job: podcast interviewer. Even Barack Obama, a decade after he legitimised the format by deigning to appear on Maron, hosted a series of conversations with Bruce Springsteen as part of his Spotify deal; he too now just another bloke with a podcast.
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If there is a foundational belief underpinning the format, it is that conversation conquers all; that two celebrities with a free hour and a premium Zoom subscription might be able to make the world a better place. Michelle Obama begins her podcast, The Light, by saying, “the conversations in this podcast are about the ways I’ve tried to regain my footing”, by exploring “the questions so many of us are wrestling with”.
In that way, the presence of the other kind of hour-long conversation that defines our era looms large: therapy. Interview podcasts’ long running times mean guests are often pushed beyond questions about their latest project, asked to share something deep and personal. Some of the most empathic interviewers, such as Gross and Buxton, have an innate sense of how to steer the jovial into something more profound. Others use format points to eke out stories of early adolescence (Kirsty Young’s Young Again), failure (Elizabeth Day’s How to Fail) or relationship problems (Anna Faris’s Unqualified), all implicitly staging themselves as a therapy session, often literally sponsored by online therapy platform BetterHelp.
Maron says the sheer length of interview podcasts drives them towards the confessional. “After an hour, even if someone starts off being cagey or defensive, it becomes difficult to hide,” he says. “You start to get a sense of who they are.” Actor Keke Palmer, one of the US’s brightest comedic actors, launched a podcast two years ago where celebrity guests lean into their specialism (Ryan Michelle Bathe and Sterling K Brown talked about how to stay in a happy long-term relationship, for example). “I want to have really deep, raw conversations,” Palmer tells me. “To discover the subtext that’s underneath what people are saying.” Everyone’s waiting for that Freudian slip.
But there’s one difficult question you don’t hear on these shows: who are all the endless hours of conversations actually for? Are they for the listeners – a chance to gain a rare moment of unguarded honesty from the figures of our time? Are they therapy sessions for the guests – with the added boon of being able to promote their project at the end? Or are they for their hosts, a way to feel connected to the zeitgeist and make a bunch of famous friends in the process?
“People who are Hollywood actors are real show-offs, and I speak as a show-off myself,” says Miranda Sawyer, who has listened to hundreds of these shows as the Observer’s radio and podcast reviewer for more than 15 years (as well as hosting her own daily podcast, Paper Cuts). “A lot of them started podcasts in lockdown because they just couldn’t cope. They weren’t doing it for money, they were doing it because they wanted people to acknowledge they were still there. ‘I’m clever, too. Remember me?’”
There remain more traditional interrogators, who invariably produce the most listenable shows. Annie Macmanus, Louis Theroux and Oprah Winfrey have moved into podcasting and provided probing, structured conversations that let their guests unfurl. But the majority of the shows out there are by performers giving podcasting a go, such as Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Rob Lowe, Dua Lipa, Emily Ratajkowski and Justin Long. Many of these just don’t know how to make a conversation interesting week in and week out, and it seems notable that – after making big splashes about the launch of their pods – Ratajkowski and Lipa haven’t put a new episode out in months.
Those shows are still largely preferable to our politicians’ efforts, whether rightwing figures in the US or washed-up UK cabinet ministers who have realised that a podcast is the next best thing to being on the news. From Rory Stewart to Steve Bannon, the podcast provides a second act to a faltering political career; a more chummy space for politicians to say “what they really think”, while keeping them in the conversation should they ever want to pivot back to power.
The proliferation of interview pods now means there are not enough guests to go around and all the hosts have started interviewing each other. After a while, trying to untangle the ratty knot has become almost like a game: six degrees of desperation. Podcaster Bill Clinton, for example, has been interviewed by podcaster Questlove who has been interviewed by Bill Gates, who has been interviewed by Trevor Noah who has been interviewed by Conan O’Brien who has also interviewed Questlove. This is a pain for the established hosts, who are finding it harder to book unique guests. Maron tells me he’s been desperate to book Larry David for more than a decade and it seemed as if it was finally going to happen, but ultimately, Maron claims, David chose to go on a friend’s podcast instead, so as not to offend them.
Another issue is that these cheap, easy-to-make podcasts are starting to crowd the more expensive formats; the top podcasts on Spotify in the UK and the US at the time of writing were either conversation or true-crime based. Shows with original reporting or high production values that aren’t recorded “as live” were completely missing from the top of the charts.
“The difficulty is that it takes a lot of charisma to host an hour-long chinwag. If it’s a proper interviewer then it’s easy because they do the research, it’s structured and they’re good,” says Sawyer. “But so many of the other ones go on for ages and they’re too closed off and smug. Interviewing is hard and I feel like it’s being a bit disrespected.”
Rogan’s podcast, with episodes running more than three hours long and conversation often descending into rambling, shows how far the format has drifted from its public radio beginnings. His guests have included vaccine sceptics, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and some of Elon Musk’s only media appearances. All of them receive mainly softball questions and, in Musk’s case, quite a lot of marijuana. But it is hard to argue with Rogan’s ratings: boasting an average 11 million listeners an episode, he has shown how a podcast can become a kind of cult: unmissable to its loyal fanbase, unlistenable to anyone passing through.
But when other major figures have tried to tap into that Rogan success, they have struggled to find an audience. Harry and Meghan signed a huge deal with Spotify and Hillary Clinton partnered with iHeartRadio, but they only reached a fraction of Rogan or even Maron’s reach and their deals have been wound down or cut short.
But maybe having the status symbol is just as important as ratings. Gates isn’t making Unconfuse Me With Bill Gates because he needs the sponsor dollars, and certainly not because he’s confused. He’s doing it because it feels nice to sit in a room with someone famous and have a chat, not just as a billionaire but as a “broadcaster”. It’s a way to be popular – and next time he’s at Davos maybe he won’t have to sit at the nerds’ table.
I put this to Palmer, whose podcast is a breath of fresh air, her enthusiasm and high energy a point of difference from the legion of slightly grumpy older men. She agrees that empire-building is a big part of the boom, and that there is also potential podcast inflation among celebrities – “There’s a pressure on everyone: ‘If so and so has this then you should have this’” – but she is less worried that not every podcast host is a natural interviewer: “Not everyone is trying to be a good interviewer. Some people just want to be entertaining, some just want to be thought-provoking. The only thing that can be criticised is when people don’t have any intention at all.”
She also has a less cynical take on what all this conversation is doing for the people involved. “I think people just want to talk more,” she says. “This is a generation that’s having a difficult time understanding how to be a real person outside social media and their phone. Actually podcasts are giving people a space to be themselves again. And anyone can be involved if they can plug in a microphone.”
It is true that, in an age where media training, the PR industry and an epidemic of social anxiety has stifled real conversation, people are strangely unguarded as soon as they get on a podcast. “Especially, when they’re just coming over to my house,” says Maron. “When Barack Obama is in my 1,000-square foot shack in Highland Park, you know, everything becomes very human.”
Freud found the couch was essential to opening people up, and if the podcast really is a therapy replacement, maybe its key tool is a big oversized microphone with a pop shield. Whether you press record or not is almost academic.
