Talk Easy
A running joke between me and a few friends is the inevitability of all podcasts — or really, all interview mediums — to curdle into anodyne pablum as they grow in scale and success.
The logic for this inevitability is simple. Interviews derive the vast majority of their value from their audience, and the single biggest influence on that audience is the subject of the interview. Interviewers are therefore incentivized to land subjects who are as popular as possible, and one way of doing so is to make the value proposition for those subjects as positive as possible — which generally means letting the subject completely drive the interview and use it to their own ends. Both parties get to leverage the audience and reach of their counterparty; it's a win-win relationship for everyone except the listener. I've been grumbling about this for a while: my The best podcasts list from 2017 is a receipt.
There is one small exception to this rule that I've noticed: a single podcast called Talk Easy, hosted by Sam Fragoso. Sam tends to interview people in the entertainment spheres — movies, television, and writing in particular.
His interviews are remarkable in three ways:
- Bless his heart, he has the voice of a caricature of an NPR interviewer.
- His depth of research for every interview is startling. He'll dig up — and quote at length — excerpts from a writer's first gig at their college paper, or from a blog they wrote under a pseudonym.
- He asks legitimately meaningful questions, and successfully elicits responses from his subjects that are unique and candid — a feat I have not seen replicated by any other interviewer who regularly talks to people of the same repute.
How does he do it?
Perhaps this is naive of me, but I think it's because he so clearly approaches every conversation with genuine candor and empathy. He builds a surprisingly intimate rapport with his subjects in a very short amount of time, which lends him the credence to ask them harder questions. Those harder questions are often telegraphed, but never inorganic or mean-spirited. He gets his subjects to discuss painful things — or their own hypocrisies — in a way that I find genuinely rewarding, unlike most other podcasts in this format.
Unlike every other podcast in this format, actually. The antidote to pablum, it turns out, is not hostility; it's homework and a little bit of tenderness.