I’ve been catching up on Revisionist History lessons and, in Malcolm Gladwell’s critique of Joe Rogan - which, even if you’re a Rogan fan, or even if you only loosely respect the guy’s listener-base, the entire episode is fantastic because he drops this gem:
The most natural form of human interaction is the conversation. Two people talking, unscripted, improvised. It ends when it ends. The roles of listener and talker are fluid… An interview is very different. It’s two people talking with a purpose. One person asks questions of another with the intention of revealing something of consequence. Conversation is easy and natural. interviewing is an acquired art.
But you know what’s even harder? Performance. The interview conducted for the benefit of someone else, an audience. This is what Oprah does better than anyone else.
I think in these terms too. Largely because, as he gets at in the full episode, the role of the podcaster isn’t necessarily to do journalism, or conduct an interview. That doesn’t remove some amount of responsibility of people giving platform to individuals like RFK (in the main point in question, which Gladwell is focused on here - that I very much agree with him on). But it does present some interesting questions.
When I think about podcasts, and the experience we have as listeners, Gladwell’s framing is pretty invaluable. The reality is they are very performance based. The high-wire act of having an audience adds an element.
Conversation-driven podcasts are all about host and guest personalities. They don’t require structure, but great conversationalists are truly rare. Listen to strangers at your local bar for 2 minutes and you can prove this point. The skill shows up in the combination of presence and real-time, targeted storytelling.
Interview-driven podcasts are all about the host extracting information from the guest. While there are more conversational style interview shows, aka the friendly, less journalistic type of interviews like what Rogan does, the premise is that you the listener will learn something from the additional pushing or thread-pulling the host does.
What responsibility does the host have? To themselves or their audience?
That’s where the premise becomes a promise. You can think of it as a brand promise, if you want the marketing-speak term.
In a performed conversation you want to be on a chair next to the conversation. The best hosts can deliver on making you feel like a mutual friend by the end, and learning about some new or at least varied perspectives depending on the topics discussed. Either way, the friend-status, even if parasocially granted, is powerful. “I feel like I know them and we could hang out,” is the gold standard.
In a performed interview you want to be in the audience of the guest in the hot seat. While the host has the question-asking power, the guest has the answer-giving authority, and the status boost of being asked to be there in the first place. Interviews have this slight status imbalance, which makes them slightly higher stakes feeling than a straight conversation. “I feel like I learned something from the questions, answers, or lack of quality answers” is the gold standard.
I already think about this when I listen to podcasts. I probably think of this too much with regards to my own.
Listening to Gladwell dissect this on a walk - I couldn’t help but wonder how many podcasters are actually obsessed with this nuance, too. There’s a self-aware consciousness about this performance, and maybe I’m being judgy, but I don’t think most people doing conversation-performance hybrids ever stop to ask if they’re extracting, enabling, or just occupying space together.
On Excess Returns and The Intentional Investor I’m always trying to walk the interview-performance line. I don’t want to let somebody get away with a heinous point (although, you do have to choose your battles carefully, and pre-show research helps a lot here). The brand promise is extracting interesting insights and connections from the guests that the audience can use, or at least will make them think.
On Just Press Record, however, it’s a far more conversational approach. As host, I can play a small interviewer role, but small is the key term. The brand promise is to enable a conversation between people who have never met, where I am in the background to help the conversation move along. The audience should feel like they could effortlessly be friends with these people too, and leave with a strong sense of what it’s like to actually talk to them (and not just hear them interviewed, which is different!).
What’s absent in my own self-reflection is that at most I do lite-journalism, and at most I staged conversations. I have no interest in talking to somebody like an RFK, or being in a status position to ask those follow-up questions, mostly because any pre-research would tell me I don’t want to platform them.
But maybe that’s part of why Rogan is Rogan. His brand promise is optimized around unfiltered access without pre-judgment even when a little sane pre-judgement probably wouldn’t hurt. That’s a choice I believe he’s aware of, and unsure if much of his audience has even considered. Especially when thinking about the field of choices available.
Writing this down - I’m convincing myself that performance-as-conversation requires you to be very aware of the parasocial contract with your audience. Knowing who your people are means knowing who they aren’t, and why. It’s just a specific type of cultural boundary that exists in every scene, and even if I had to listen to some RFK to get here, it was worth it.
In the post I wrote about Startup Vs. Scene I made this argument and it applies again here. Mostly because The Joe Rogan Show works like a startup, and that’s why it veers off-course too often in its brand promise for my taste. While the friendliness between Joe and his guests is on-course with the startup-framing, it risks taking audience members expecting any semblance of journalistic information gathering off-course unless they’re coming in aware of that boundary.
What I prefer is someone who scales on journalism for controversy, and is anti-scaling by letting us eaves drop on their scene in conversation, including conversation interviewing. Those are my preferences, and I see (and feel) them much more clearly now.
Leave it to Malcolm Gladwell to provoke so many thoughts. He may not be Oprah (or Stern, or Cavett), but damn he’s close.
