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. 1I'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…