Return of the Mic

How chat podcasts have taken over the medium and dominated the cultural discourse (again).

- NICHOLAS QUAH

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.