🟧 The banality of the video podcast

Everyone is talking into the same mics in the same studios

May 16, 2026

This week’s One Thing is a visual essay from Kyle about people talking into microphones, recorded on cameras. With thanks to Paddy Johnson’s erstwhile IMG MGMT series of image-based essays by contemporary artists. You might need to click a link if the email cuts off.

Today’s writers of text are are besieged by videos and screencaps thereof. Videos of themselves, talking about the texts they have written, speaking into microphones with thick pop shields positioned unavoidably close to their mouths. Ears occluded by cushioned headphones so as not to double up the sound of speaking. They sit around broad wooden tables, or on plush couches, or in Eames armchairs, slightly too far apart in a way that eliminates actual coziness. They are immersed in insulated, dim recording studios or comfortable libraries replete with probably fake books. There are wooden slats on every wall. Or else they are situated in unknowable voids, seamless white backdrops in warehouse studios somewhere, lit carefully and evenly as if by daylight.

These writers are recording podcasts, audio records of the discourse of the day, a way to propel their work to audiences who are no longer happy to read. But in the era of algorithmically recommended shortform video the writers are also captured and broadcast in moving images, with all of their pained facial expressions and undisciplined hand gestures, their middlingly fashionable outfits, their millennially fried vocals. The stage sets of these video podcasts are carefully designed and curated, each lamp and accessory considered, whether a grand piano or a fiddle-leaf fig. The atmosphere is “impeccable without having reference to any authority that could be perceived as inhibiting,” as George W.S. Trow described a fashionable restaurant in his 1978 New Yorker profile of Ahmet Ertegun, the chairman of Atlantic Records, a phrase that Trow repeats as a refrain. The sets, installed with plentiful mics awaiting speech, are authoritative and yet unintimidating, like a friend’s renovated suburban basement. They frame the speech of the interview subjects or conversers, legitimizing it in this time of slop, imbuing it with an authenticity reinforced by the presence of their actual bodies, faces, voices. The upholstered chairs and bokeh-fuzzed interiors extending in the background imply a sense of trust. We are really here with you.

Regardless of what is being discussed, the podcast videos that we now broadcast and that millions watch are the content, as Marshall McLuhan would argue, they are the texts. Thus we must examine them closely. What do they say?