Learning the art of the best taboo podcast interviews
One of the great revelations of the rise of podcasting is the format’s eagerness to lift the curtain on the journalistic process and mine the method for material. Consider the raw interview, a nonfiction podcast staple that reveals as much about the person asking the questions as the one answering them. The most interesting ones stretch the form beyond the journalist’s traditional limits. If the classic journalistic chat is objective and emotionally removed, the best podcast hosts leverage their personal investments and creative conversational tactics to tackle even the most taboo topics. Three podcasts — Terrible, Thanks for Asking, Conversations With People Who Hate Me and Where Should We Begin? — reveal new insights into how to talk about sex, death and hate.
Esther Perel is a kind of next-gen Dr. Ruth — a rising-star sex therapist, complete with fun accent. Her new podcast, Where should we Begin? takes the form of a one-time counseling session with a couple working through some issues. But during a session with Perel, you get to know an anonymous couple from so many angles that it feels more like an unraveling mystery story than a relationship advice show.
It’s all because Perel works so creatively as an interrogator. If the traditional journalist is after “the story” — to record the subjects’ perspectives and synthesize them — her prerogative is to create a new narrative.
Nora McInerny self-describes as a “notable widow.” In the three years since she was hit with three terrible life events within a few weeks — a miscarriage, her father’s death and then her husband’s death from brain cancer — McInerny has devoted herself to creative projects that cut through her trauma with insight and levity. She has written a memoir, created an online support group and now hosts a podcast, Terrible, Thanks for Asking, which began in November. McInerny’s personal experience with several genres of grief is central to the podcast’s charm.
In Conversations With People Who Hate Me, which began Monday, Dylan Marron calls up strangers who wrote nasty things about him on the internet and tries to talk it out. The podcast, produced by Night Vale Presents, is the latest entry in a digital subgenre, where anonymous meanies reveal the complicated dynamics behind their online misbehavior. What distinguishes this podcast is that Marron’s critics are not generalist haters. He’s best known for his brassy social justice videos on YouTube, and the detractors he features are mostly conservatives who become mad watching them.
Marron’s podcast throws two American impulses into conflict: We don’t want to be rude, and we don’t want to be wrong. The show usually ends with a tacit agreement between Marron and his critic to respectfully disagree.