Return of the Mic
How chat podcasts have taken over the medium and dominated the cultural discourse (again).
Less than a week into 2024, Katt Williams went on a podcast and laid waste to the world. Speaking on Club Shay Shay, the entertainment show hosted by pro-football Hall of Famer Shannon Sharpe, the comedian aired grievances and let loose on his long career while taking shots at an expansive list of targets, from Kevin Hart (“No one in Hollywood has a memory of a sold-out Kevin Hart show”) to Cedric the Entertainer (whom he accused of stealing jokes) to Harvey Weinstein (the disgraced producer “offered to suck my penis in front of all my people at my agency”).
Lasting almost three hours, the episode has been viewed more than 70 million times on YouTube; Saturday Night Live built a whole sketch around the appearance; and some of Williams’s strays are still rippling through the atmosphere, as his Diddy comments (“All lies will be exposed”) did when video evidence of the mogul physically assaulting his then-girlfriend, the singer Cassie, publicly emerged in May. The episode was such a cultural supernova that when Williams’s comedy special Woke Foke dropped on Netflix a few months later, it felt like an anticlimax. He left it all on Club Shay Shay.
If the public face of podcasting was once thinky narrative shows vying for high-art legitimacy, these days it’s chat and interview programs that hustle their way into your life. It’s podcasts like Call Her Daddy, where Alex Cooper hunts for notoriety and headlines with buzzy bookings. It’s Huberman Lab, where the pop scientist Andrew Huberman advises the masses to spend more time in the sun. It’s the SmartLess trio (Jason Bateman, Will Arnett, and Sean Hayes) palling around with three presidents (Clinton, Obama, Biden) in a bid to keep the dream of American neoliberalism alive.
The significance of these shows isn’t necessarily tied to audience size, though many are among the biggest podcasts in the world. Rather, their prominence lies in their ability to seize your attention by producing newsworthy moments or booking noteworthy guests — as well as the way they influence opinions in their respective communities. Last year’s grand reality-television drama that was “Scandoval,” for example, only partly took place on Vanderpump Rules; the rest of the action played out over, and was litigated within, the cottage industry of podcasts hosted by fellow reality-TV personalities: The Viall Files with Nick Viall, Scheananigans With Scheana Shay, Give Them Lala. If all you knew about Scandoval was through Bravo, you were missing out.
You might notice some commonalities among this elite class of chat-casts. Many are either unafraid of controversy or eager to court it. The currency of celebrity is a governing force, and these shows are basically exercises in brand extension. Many of these podcasts are hosted by people who are converting social cachet initially generated elsewhere; somewhat rarer is the podcaster who becomes famous through podcasting itself. Most work to leverage the celebrity of their guests in pursuit of celebrity for themselves; each episode is a kind of transaction driven by the podcaster’s intent to become the show’s main attraction. Being a good interviewer is a plus but not a strict requirement. Sometimes, they trade in the promise of expertise, whether it’s former athletes recapping games or aging comedians reminiscing about how SNL used to be, but that, too, isn’t a precondition. For the most part, a little fame, a knack for attention, and some predisposition toward building a cult of personality are enough to rise to the top. (At least temporarily, as in the case of Bobbi Althoff’s The Really Good Podcast.)
Podcasting’s contemporary chat-centrism marks a kind of full-circle moment. The medium emerged in the mid-aughts as an extension of blogging that allowed people to reach an audience without having to deal with the hurdles of traditional distribution channels like newspapers, television, and broadcast radio. Narrative shows, whether documentaries or audio fiction, arrived shortly after as public-radio organizations started redistributing their work on iTunes. In 2014, Serial catalyzed the narrative-podcast moment and helped draw huge sums of money into the space.
But chat-casts continued to be the bread and butter of the medium all through this period. Joe Rogan, Bill Simmons, and Marc Maron started podcasting around the time of the Great Recession; they’re still releasing episodes today. In hindsight, the narrative-podcast moment turned out to be a diversion for the medium. Culture flows downstream from economics and technology in that order: As falling ad revenue caused the podcast industry to rapidly contract, networks found themselves in need of more cost-efficient products. Chat-casts fit the mold perfectly. They can publish more episodes more regularly, which means more opportunities to make money; they can incrementally grow followings through sheer force of ubiquity and habit formation; and they can propel their way in front of even more audiences with big guest bookings that can result in viral moments. If the host is someone with a built-in following, you’re halfway to a solid business right there.
In many senses, this new universe of chat-casts reflects an expansion of old-school radio, which still reaches the majority of Americans and remains an influential cultural force. You can see this in how many existing radio subgenres (sports, hip-hop) and biases (the overabundance of male hosts) are robustly represented in the medium. Two traditional-radio giants, iHeartMedia and SiriusXM, are also two of the biggest podcast publishers. Once the domain of upstarts and narrative storytellers, podcasting is now similar to radio in how it has firmly become a star system. It’s only fitting, then, that one of the hottest podcasts right now is New Heights With Jason and Travis Kelce, led by two NFL brothers who are also Hollywood’s hottest free agents.
Podcasting seems to be on the verge of yet another full-circle moment. Some podcast hosts have uploaded episodes as videos on YouTube since the beginning of podcasting, but that practice didn’t really take off until Spotify added its own video support in 2020. That’s why you’ll find anything from The Diary of a CEO to Huberman Lab on YouTube as well as your podcast app; that’s also why your Spotify app is streaming the video version of The Joe Rogan Experience while your phone is in your pocket. Indeed, it’s probably safe to say that YouTube played a huge role in Club Shay Shay’s Katt Williams episode going as viral as it did — who knows if it would’ve made as big of an impact if it had just been audio.
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