🟧 Conversations are the new unit of culture

We crave interactivity and multi-sided discussions in the podcast era.

Kyle Chayka: What do hours-long podcasts, YouTubers, Twitch streamers, and TikTok talking heads — the hottest formats of our new media era — all have in common? They are driven by conversation, either with an on-screen participant or the implied partner of the consumer, staring at their screen. As plain text seems to grow less necessary and we move toward getting our news in these multimedia formats, conversation is becoming a dominant driver of culture. The format of a back-and-forth chat a unit of discourse. (Think of all those decontextualized TikTok clips of quipping podcasters.) You can put forth an argument in a podcast interview as easily as you can in an essay these days, and probably more people will get it.¹

This concept crystallized for me, fittingly, during a conversation with Friend of One Thing (FOOT) Tope Folarin. We often talk about where people get their ideas and opinions from, whether in culture or politics. Right now it’s not from a print magazine; it’s from listening in on two or more self-fashioned public intellectuals talking. (Are we going back to the 1968 televised debate of William Buckley vs. Gore Vidal?) Tope and I rehashed our conversation in text form here. I think it’s of interest for the media industry as well as for anyone trying to make a dent in the public consciousness.

Tope Folarin is a novelist and critic as well as the director of the Institute for Policy Studies. His debut novel is A Particular Kind of Black Man. He lives in Washington, DC, and recently published an essay in Places journal about building an identity as an artist in the city.

---

Kyle Chayka: Hey Tope, the other night at dinner you brought up this really interesting idea that conversation is the medium of our moment. There's Joe Rogan influencing the election, video podcasts going viral, even Google's NotebookLM turning any text into a two-way conversation. California governor Gavin Newsom recently launched a podcast to try to gain clout with audiences / voters. What made you realize this is going on and why do you think conversation is so compelling?

Tope Folarin: I've been thinking about this idea for a while, actually. Initially I was simply trying to understand why podcasts have become such an essential, ubiquitous medium. I think sometimes we lose track of how old-fashioned podcasts are; despite the tech that people use to record their conversations, and the tech they use to distribute them, podcasts are, more often than not, simply conversations between people. I love having conversations, and what strikes me about the conversation as a mode of interaction — as opposed to, say, playing a video game with someone, or competing in sports — is that it is a surprisingly effective and enjoyable way to imbibe a great deal of information incredibly quickly. A conversation provides a way for you and your interlocutor to co-create meaning, to achieve understanding (of a kind, anyway) of complex issues, and to impose order on chaos, simply by talking things through.

Set against this backdrop, it's no surprise that conversations have become so important — and commodified — in recent years. We all have to contend with so much information, from so many sources, and it's really comforting to sit with someone and work your way through various kinds of evidence and impressions (or vibes) toward some notion of the truth. This is also one reason why, I suspect, that book clubs have grown more popular in recent years. In this context, the book serves both as a prism and launching pad: we channel our experiences and understanding of various phenomena through the contents of the book, and the book also prompts us to engage with a much broader set of ideas and questions with other readers, many of which are only distantly related to what the book is about.

KC: That makes me think about how conversations are inherently social. They’re not just solo scrolling on your phone. With the book club example, we're having a communal experience of culture, at least as long as you read the book, and then coming together to break it down, and build more meaning out of sharing it. There's an authenticity (a tough word obvs but still relevant here) to conversation that doesn't exist in more linear forms of consumption, maybe because you're always seeing something from multiple perspectives, two or more sides of a conversation.

TF: I think the current obsession with conversation as a medium of engagement is also a response to our collective dissatisfaction with passivity, which is the primary way that many of us receive information now. We watch Netflix. We doom scroll. We enjoy the ambient noise of the televised concert as we do our chores. Having a conversation with someone is another way of asserting yourself, of imposing yourself on the world.

I should note, too, that we also passively listen to podcasts. Yet I’d argue that this is quite different from watching a T.V. show. As you listen to the podcast — as ideas whiz back and forth between the participants, as those participants contradict themselves and double back and occasionally struggle to express themselves (unlike on a T.V. show or movie, where the characters usually express themselves quite well, and one polished sentence follows another) you might feel implicated in the conversation, and you might feel a desire to contend with your own views.

KC: So even the consumer of the conversation — the podcast listener in this case — is kind of a virtual participant, because they are witnessing the dialogue happen. That's something I feel all the time as I listen to podcasts and subconsciously formulate my own (imagined) responses in real time, as if I'm also a guest. That effect is pretty potent. I interrogate my feelings and ideas possibly more through a conversation, even a performed one, than just reading a regular article or essay.

To go back to authenticity, there's a believability and a truthfulness, let's say, when you're hearing someone express themselves in a messy way as in a conversation. Because it's not perfect, you grab onto it more. The messier it is, the less performed or rehearsed it seems. That really worked for Trump in his podcast appearances, giving him a reality as a human being that more staged appearances would not have.

You and I both write essays and books, though, which are hyper-composed, linear forms. The writing is all designed in advance. Is a conversation more truthful than that? Or in the context that we're talking about, is the conversation as a medium just more entertaining, a better way to grab the audience's focus?

TF: I love how you describe essays and books — "the writing is all designed in advance." Yes, exactly. I don't think that a conversation is more "truthful," yet it can feel more authentic. I was actually just talking with my students at Georgetown about this a couple days ago. We were discussing dialogue in fiction and I mentioned how contrived — designed, you might say — the dialogue is on TV. Like the walk and talks on The West Wing, or the various bon mots that characters deliver on Succession. We know that no one actually talks like this, but we delight in watching these shows and hearing such dialogue because we pine for order and beauty. It's akin to walking into a well-designed, well-appointed room; when characters are effortlessly tossing beautifully curated sentences at each other, it feels like we've entered a realm where we can relax and experience pleasure because someone has done the work of ordering this world for us.

That said, we encounter truth in fiction all the time. That's the point. I think conversations can be entertaining, and they can certainly grab and maintain our attention, but I've recently become obsessed with figuring out why. Why is someone willing to sit through a two-plus hour podcast from Joe Rogan, Theo Von or Shannon Sharpe for example? I mention those three in particular — and not folks like Lex Fridman or Kara Swisher — because Joe and Theo are comedians and Shannon is a retired athlete; they don't have deep expertise in anything but their chosen fields. I think they're popular because they're entertaining, but also because they serve as stand-ins for us. When they bring on a guest who's an expert in some specialized topic — politics or computer science or UAPs or whatever — we learn as they do. They're like human search engines; they're helping people to sort through reams of information in an accessible way.

KC: In other words, we’re not going to Alex Cooper and her longform conversation show Call Her Daddy because she’s a professional journalist; we’re going because we can relate to her journey through the dialogue. Conversations can’t be too unrelatable, otherwise we can’t involve ourselves in them as easily.

Earlier you said that conversations have been "commodified," which I think is really true. The conversation has become a product that people pay for, and a product that attracts attention so that brands pay to be integrated with a conversation. (It brings to mind how Semafor is making a lot of its revenue on "live journalism" events and parties that are sponsored by companies.) What do you see for that going forward into the future? More intentionally productized conversations? A new Charlie Rose-style show?

TF: I definitely think that conversations will be more productized in the future. It's really interesting that you raise Charlie Rose — I watched his PBS show for decades, from my adolescence to the moment when his show was cancelled because a number of his former associates accused him of sexual harassment. Charlie Rose's show was like a podcast; unlike most other talk shows, his did not have a studio audience, so it felt far more intimate. His set featured a tiger oak table and a black background, and nothing else. So, as a member of the television audience, you were forced to focus on what Rose and his guest were saying to each other. At its best, the show could be quite thrilling because it felt like you were eavesdropping on two interesting, intelligent people as they figured things out together.

I think I first clocked the difference between an interview and a conversation while watching Charlie Rose. An interview is premised on the notion that one party is an expert and the other is not, or that one person has power and the other lacks it. A conversation is an encounter between two equals. Rose often interviewed his guests — he occasionally suffered from know-it-all-itis — but at his best he created a space where his guests could redirect the conversation, and even ask their own questions.

Charlie Rose was able to do this because he had range; I often thought of him as an enlightened generalist. I'm not sure if there's anyone like that now. There are certainly really bright folks who have podcasts — Swisher comes to mind, as well as Ezra Klein, Van Lathan and Rachel Lindsay. But they each have a beat: Swisher's is tech; Klein focuses on politics and policy; Lathan and Lindsay mostly talk about culture. Am I missing someone? Rose could discuss all these topics fairly fluently, and more besides. I certainly think the culture needs someone who can comfortably engage really bright folks on a range of issues, because there's so much we're dealing with now.

KC: All these examples of professional conversation-havers reminds me of this thought I've been having a lot lately: We're in desperate need of "anchors" for culture and information right now. Not in the sense of centers of gravity, but in the sense of the news anchor, the person who calmly sits behind the desk on camera and explains what you need to know. Even though we know their content essentially comes via a committee of editorial staff, we trust the individual person. I think that's why people like Jamelle Bouie or Joe Rogan are so popular right now: They embrace telling people what or how to think about something by explaining how they think about something. The anchor then brings other people on to have conversations.

Parasociality is a big vector for authenticity and trust in media right now (not to mention politics). You want to feel like you know the person and that they are a well-rounded figure, with strengths as well as flaws. I don't think we've fully found that culture-wide anchor yet. Maybe if Netflix suddenly platformed some conversation-haver and put her on the top of all of our homepages at once? Late-night hosts seem less powerful than ever, but even weekly SNL hosts still grab some attention. Any thoughts on how that figure might emerge, or where we'll be consuming conversations in the next few years?

TF: I think your term "culture-wide" is really important. Because some might argue that we already have folks who explain what we need to know — John Oliver, for example, has received much acclaim (and many awards) for Last Week Tonight, a show that endeavors to explain a single, complex issue each week. John Oliver once worked for John Stewart, the once and current host of The Daily Show; though The Daily Show features a traditional structure (a monologue followed by an interview), Stewart spent his time away from the show hosting another show called The Problem on Apple T.V., where he also focused on a single, complex issue each week. Yet it strikes me that neither of these people, nor anyone else I can think of right now, is providing what we actually need during this age of polycrisis, which is an ongoing first draft history of our era that weaves wayward, disparate threads into a comprehensible narrative.

I think just about everyone senses that our lives are about to change in ways we cannot comprehend. How many folks actually understand AI? Crypto? The environmental crisis? The wars in Ukraine and Gaza? How many understand what's going on with afrobeats and K-pop, the fashion scene, trends in literature, NASCAR, outflows of migration from the global south to the global north, Real Housewives drama, Taiwan, the Luka Dončić trade, Tyla (and the racial politics of her rise), architecture, WWE, Cowboy Carter, the oncoming water crisis, and so on? Most importantly, how many folks understand how many or all of these things are connected? The answer is not many, perhaps no one, but if the latter is true, I do believe there are some folks who know a fair bit about many of these things, and are curious enough to learn more about what they don't know, and are capable of curating — and holding their own in — conversations with folks who are experts in these fields.

I believe this person (or these people) will likely emerge from the cultural side of the equation, because folks who work in, say, foreign policy and tech often (though not always!) dismiss culture, and cultural workers understand that culture is a revealing transcript of human anxieties and ambitions. We can't hope to understand what is happening in the world without understanding how human beings are processing and responding to those things.

It's no surprise, then, that the folks who've come closest to doing this recently — Stewart, Oliver, and of course Stephen A. Smith, who we haven't even discussed — have backgrounds in culture. I think Rogan and other folks in the 'manosphere' represent a 1.0 version of what's coming, hinting at someone who will work in a loose, irreverent way, just like them, but perhaps with a broader base of knowledge, someone who's more relatable to more people, someone who can speak with a measure of authority about a range of ostensibly unconnected issues and command respect from all kinds of folks.

And yes, it would behoove Netflix to find her and platform her at once.

---

Best of One Thing on media:

• The new rules of media: 20 guidelines for digital media during the video-podcast age, aka, why you need a personality cult.

• What makes a good newsletter?: An expert roundtable about newsletter strategy. Are there too many!? Does good writing matter!?

• Aggregation theory: More writers and publications are focusing on creating valuable aggregation because social media sucks so much.

• Voice, taste, trust, scarcity: The values that publications need to keep in mind while competing for readers in the new, messy ecosystem.

• The internet’s distribution problem: Why digital media companies should want consumers to intentionally seek them out, outside of feeds.

1. We have not begun to reckon with the consequences of this fact yet, as writers or thinkers. If you go on podcasts to promote your essay, why not just go straight to audio? One problem is that podcasts and videos are unscannable by nature and they aren’t thought of as inherently logical or intentionally designed as coherent arguments. You can change your mind in a conversation; it’s much harder in a written essay. I’m not saying we live in an aural culture now, just that what is changing people’s minds is an abstract, uncapturable bit of a random audio recording.