The Interview

I’ve listened to almost every episode. I really like this show, but the interviews that Lulu leads inevitably end up with this aggressive tone. Even when the guests seem to agree with her she sets them up for these gotcha questions that feel like cheap shots. I enjoy hearing push back and truly like that this show asks ‘hard hitting questions’, but the way she does it feels blind siding to the guest and frankly lacks tact. Getting people to open up publicly is an art and simply bulldozing them does not make for good journalism.

That interview with Nancy Pelosi is terrifying. It seems like her ego is preventing her from taking a good hard look in the mirror and making any attempt to understand why voters are rejecting the party. Her pollyannish take on the results suggests somebody who is either in denial, not in touch with reality, or trying (and failing) to put a spin on our utter defeat. I BEG you Pelosi and the democratic leaders to please look inward and first accept that you have lost real contact with the American people. People of all ages/races crossed party lines to vote for one of the most despicable men in history. Obviously, your message is not resonating. Just like republicans are the problem, so are we for not clearly communicating our policies and platforms and fixating too much on identity politics. For the love of god, put the identity politics aside.

This interview was excellently performed by Lulu Garcia-Navarro. Her questioning led to Pelosi’s opinion delineating the distinction primarily between the house races and states election results differing from the presidential election.

I have listened to this podcast twice — its debut and the most recent interview with Tilda Swinton. In both instances, the interviewer, David Marchese, seems to confuse solipsism with insight. As a result, the interviews are shallow, at times fawning, and manage to make otherwise fascinating people unforgivably boring. Like the pretentious videos that illustrate each episode, these are beneath the Times’s standards — a podcast without an apparent reason for being, other than leveraging the Times’s unparalleled access, which it then squanders.

I’ve listened to the interviews with Nancy Pelosi and Vince Vaughn. In both, the interviewer is insulting. In the case of Pelsosi, the tone of Garcia-Navarro is crass, smug, and she is disagreeable to the point of interrupting Pelosi several times. When she doesn’t agree with the answer Pelosi gives, she almost attacks her. In the case of Vaughn, Marchese insults him from the beginning- assuming Vaughn is as simple-minded as some of the characters he plays. When Vaughn wants to make the interview more of a meaningful conversation, Marchese pushes back, despite asking Vaughn very personal questions. Thankfully, Vaughn continues to share meaningful experiences that anyone could relate to, only to have Marchese wrap up the interview with “This is easily the weirdest celebrity interview of all time now”. (???) In general, the audience tends to listen to interviews because they like the person being interviewed- they don’t want to hear them being belittled, interrupted, and offended by the interviewer.