This article is taken from the February 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
Old school fans of the Joe Rogan Experience will remember when the adverts for a male sex accessory was one of the more tasteful elements of the podcast. At some point, though, podcasting became a lot more serious. People began to think of recorded conversations as being a source of wisdom rather than as a source of dick jokes.
They can be, of course. Man cannot live by dick jokes alone. I’ve heard a lot of podcasts that have taught me new things and exposed me to interesting perspectives. But there are podcasters who aspire not to be interesting as much as to be enlightening — and who aim not just to share perspectives but to change the world. To change the world through the sheer power of conversation.
Well, conversations can be historical events. Another term for a Socratic dialogue could have been a Socratic conversation. I have little doubt that many of the podcasts that have bloomed across the internet, transcending the thematic and logistical constraints of traditional media platforms, have altered careers, and relationships, and belief systems.
Yet there is often a great deal of naïveté involved in these podcasting circles, if not outright hubris. Lex Fridman, for example, who hosts The Lex Fridman Podcast, appears to think that his show can be a platform for world peace. “I hope to interview both Zelenskyy and Putin,” Fridman announced last year, “My hope is to do my small part to understand their perspectives & to find the path to peace.”
I have no doubt that Vladimir Putin has an interesting perspective (which is not to say that it is a righteous one). But Fridman appears to think — in the face of all history — that the “path to peace” is a question of mutual understanding rather than a question of power.
Fridman’s lofty sense of self is quite adorable. Lexheads will recall when he unveiled his reading list for 2024, which allotted a week to The Brothers Karamazov (800+ pages long), or the time when he volunteered to run Twitter for free. He has a PhD in electrical and computer engineering. But what has equipped him to be such a multi-dimensional philosopher king? Well — he has a podcast.
Fridman does at least appear to be a nice man. The same can’t be said of Patrick Bet-David of the PBD Podcast. Bet-David — who owns, and presumably commissioned, a painting of himself in which he is hanging out with such men as Albert Einstein, Tupac and the Shah — assaults his guests with a barrage of ominous malapropisms.
He talks in lofty terms about entrepreneurship and culture, but he got rich from a multi-level marketing scheme, and his most famous episodes were sycophantic interviews with the online pornographer facing charges of human trafficking, Andrew Tate. To be fair, Bet-David is extremely entertaining. You’d struggle to devise such a bizarre personality.
One of the more likeable figures in this scene is Chris Williamson of the podcast Modern Wisdom. Williamson, an Englishman, appeared on the first series of Love Island, but has turned into something like a Joe Rogan for men who say “hey, man … ” instead of “hey, bro … ” He is thoughtful, and reflective, and he looks a bit like one of those Greek statues anonymous right-wingers like to put in their profile pictures on Twitter.
Importantly, Williamson appears to grasp the limits of his knowledge. A conversation is not a conversation if it reaches preordained conclusions. There must be an element of unpredictability. I enjoyed Williamson’s recent conversations with the delightfully strange fitness expert Dr Mike Israetel, and with the even stranger actor Matthew McConaughey.
Williamson might be a bit too nice, though. I think that he would be inclined to be generous towards Idi Amin or the board of Enron. If he could add a smidgen of Bet-David’s comical abrasiveness to his politeness and humility, he might have the full package.
A problem with all these conversations is that they can become little more than an excuse to have more conversations. Listen to enough of them, and one encounters the same people, talking about the same things, with slight variations depending on what happens to be in the news.
Tom goes on Dick’s podcast, and Dick goes on Tom’s podcast, and Tom and Dick go on Harry’s podcast until you wonder why you have allowed Tom, Dick and Harry to colonise so much of your consciousness. Fred Skulthorp, writing for The Critic, described these podcasts as “escapist twilight zones … a halfway space between ideas and reality”. For all their pleasurable and illuminating qualities, it sometimes takes silence to offer us real clarity of thought.
An amusing satirical take on the “important conversations” genre comes from The Adam Friedland Show, on which comedians Adam Friedland and Nick Mullen join forces to interrogate an increasingly bewildered series of guests. You can sometimes hear the teeth grinding as the interviewees mentally curse their booking agents.
Friedland and Mullen were two members of the trio of comedians that made up the cast of Cum Town — an insanely immature freewheeling comedic experience, full of jokes about bodily functions and ethnic stereotypes.
Yet a brief detour into Mullen’s self-disgust over wallowing in adolescent nostalgia had more of an impact on me than a three-hour conversation with Elon Musk. Sometimes, enlightenment can take you by surprise.
