Celebrity podcasts have an expiration date

I was a day-one listener to Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend. This is probably not a surprise to many people. O’Brien is a comedic genius, with a massive, ever-growing resume that anyone making anything remotely funny should aspire to.

His podcast only grew during COVID, eventually evolving to include a video version. Even as celebrity guests returned, usually to promote something, I kept at it, devouring the podcast while on long lockdown walks with LNI co-founder, and avid LinkedIn user Lola.

Starting in 2023, some guests returned a second or even third time. The podcast titles reflected that in their naming convention:

If John Mulaney comes on the show a fifth time, I’m not sure how else the very talented crew at Team Coco could frame it (“John Mulaney Returns Once More Again?”). More importantly, the original premise of the show — will this person be Conan’s friend? — has completely gone out the window. Sure, it was a bit of a joke to begin with, but with the rise of other celebrity-on-celebrity podcasts, how much longer can they keep this going? I’ll talk about it later on in this newsletter.

Also this week I’m building on a previous segment in a newsletter, in which I gave a full-throated opinion on something that is of zero consequence. I spoke about Smarties being the best candy because they are universally liked (Butterfinger is my personal favorite, by the way). I’m calling it “Correct Opinion.” This week’s is a doozy.

As always, I love to hear from you. Send me your thoughts, opinions and innermost desires at [email protected].

“You watch Survivor? That’s still on?”

It’s the refrain every Survivor fan hears, and has heard, for the 26 years since the show premiered and just kept going. It stings a bit more recently as I’ve begun to feel that Jeff Probst continues to run the show into the ground, introducing twists and turns meant to keep younger children excited that completely water down the original premise of the game. If you’re a long-time reader of this newsletter, you’ve heard me complain about this before, so I’ll leave it there and get to the main point:

Even the people who ask if Survivor is still on the air will remember arguably the best all-time moment on the show, during the season one finale, when Sue Hawk gave the “snakes and rats” speech. A trucker from Wisconsin, Hawk had leaned into her redneck persona the whole game, gone toe-to-toe with the white-collar eventual winner Richard Hatch. Betrayed by her best friend in the game, Kelly Wigglesworth, she gave what she now calls a “sales pitch” on why Hatch should be the winner.

It was iconic.

I know that she now refers to it as a sales pitch because after 21 years being completely off the grid, she reemerged on an episode of Talking with T-Bird, an ongoing series of my favorite Survivor podcast.

Sue talks about getting married in Vegas, going bear hunting in Russia in the 90s, her experience both times on the show and everything in between. And I mean everything. Every answer is packed with five separate stories and completely unrelated anecdotes. It’s amazing. You can listen or watch it now.

Until Sunday, Parlor KC was a food and drink hall in downtown Kansas City. It hosted seven restaurants, everything from Laotian cuisine to a very popular local chicken chain, Mother Cluckers. Naturally, my wife and I didn’t find this place until Friday, two days before it closed, and one day after the closure was announced. Before you get your calculator out, yes, 75 employees and seven restaurants were only given three days’ notice that Parlor was closing.

When we ordered from Elephant Wings, an Indian fusion restaurant, on Friday, employees expressed their frustration and noted that they were scrambling to find a new location. I even spoke to the owner, who is a renowned chef in Kansas City. He seemed politely dumbfounded by the news. It was all pretty fresh (so was their butter chicken, by the way)! You could tell they were still shocked.

No local outlet has been given a good reason for the sudden closure. Downtown Kansas City is a puzzle. There’s ample parking, which is nice for someone coming from the nightmare parking experience of 14th Street in Washington, D.C. But it’s also to the detriment of local businesses. A very recently eliminated surface parking lot law had made it difficult for areas to grow, literally forcing parking lots where businesses could be instead. I had never even been to Parlor before last week, probably because it’s hidden away on a street I’ve never had a reason to walk down.

Hopefully, as the Royals move downtown and the city continues to bask in the glory of a successful World Cup, this will begin to change. For now, I’m going to be on the lookout for all the displaced Parlor restaurants.

There is a difference between a “hot take” and what I’m calling a “correct opinion.” The former is something you know may not be a popular take, and you likely aren’t trying to change anyone’s minds. With Correct Opinion, I’m aiming to talk about things I believe everyone should agree with.

A Correct Opinion is not something that you should practice on consequential subjects. It’s important to do the exact opposite, to keep an open mind, especially as it relates to the news. But every so often, I just want to say an opinion with authority, so this will be my outlet. Here goes…

Burger King burgers are better than McDonald’s burgers.

Never in my life have I thought a McDonald’s cheeseburger was delicious. On a road trip with no other options, I’ll get a Quarter Pounder and it will do the trick. But I’m never satisfied with that “burger.” The breakfast? You bet. When McDonald’s breakfast shifted to a 24/7 option, I would choose a Sausage McMuffin over a burger at 7 p.m. at a rest stop in the middle of Indiana. With the coffee to keep me going, I was unstoppable. More on their coffee in a minute.

I don’t know if it’s just good advertising, but I can tell the difference between a “flame-grilled” Whopper and a reheated frozen patty Big Mac. It’s bigger, it’s better. It tastes like an actual burger. It’s like McDonald’s is doing a copy of a copy of a burger. Even Burger King’s Impossible no-meat Whopper tastes better than something from McDonald’s.

Let’s be clear: there are many burger options better than those offered at both of these fast-food restaurants. Wendy’s, for example, leaves them both in the dust. Especially if you are able to eat it in one of the remaining sunrooms (check out this video from my friend Phil Edwards on the invention of those sunrooms).

I just never understood why, when given the binary choice between Burger King and McDonald’s, someone would willfully choose a Big Mac. Unless you’re going for the coffee, which is better than pretty much any to-go coffee out there, including Starbucks.

In fact, all beverages at McDonald’s are quite good. Their Coke and Sprite really do taste better. You’re not imagining it. In addition to better filtered water, they use a higher syrup-to-water ratio.

Do you have a Correct Opinion of your own on fast-food burgers? Or, heaven forbid, a wrong opinion that McDonald’s is better? Let me know at [email protected].

An unintentionally misleading headline and photo combo on Instagram gave me pause earlier this week. It said “Inside the Fake Celebrity Podcast Scam Fooling Hollywood.” To my horror, Amy Poehler’s face was plastered over it, in a still from her podcast, Good Hang:

It’s not a secret that Good Hang is one of my favorite podcasts. Poehler delivers every week, charming the guests with very specific questions. It’s become a bit of a running joke at LNI that I basically compare everything good to Good Hang. Especially as we’ve begun to prepare for our own long-form series (launching next month on YouTube!), I continuously mention the creative decisions of Good Hang, and why they work so well.

Now, to be clear, this headline was not saying that celebrity podcasts like Good Hang are a scam. It was about an actual scam that tricks celebrities into coming onto podcasts like Poehler’s, just to get access to their social media accounts.

Even as I read the caption explaining the real scam and my heartbeat slowed, I couldn’t ignore the thought that came to mind — it’s happening. What I believed to be “happening” was the kind of inevitable slow decline of interest which has long plagued Conan O’Brien’s podcast, the SmartLess podcast, Armchair Expert and many, many more.

Despite what some extremely passionate Redditors might say, I don’t believe any of those celebrity podcasts got worse; I think the shine just wore off. What makes them so addictive from the jump is learning what these people are like outside of a talk-show setting. I had no idea what Jason Bateman, Will Arnett and Sean Hayes were like before SmartLess debuted. It was a delight to see these actors I already loved showcase their friendship and quick wit on a regular basis. Similarly, discovering that Amy Poehler was exactly who I hoped she was only strengthened our parasocial relationship.

But … where do we go from there?

Very quickly, PR teams everywhere realized that the podcast circuit was fertile ground for actors to promote their projects. No longer were people going on Conan Needs a Friend to find out if they could be friends. They were going to discuss their latest project for at least 15 minutes of the 60-minute podcast — far more time than they would on any late-night show. Even as Poehler arrived on the scene, acknowledging she was quite late to the trend, her fresh approach still ultimately ends with the promotion of a project.

It’s delightful to listen to someone you like talk to someone else you like for an hour. But when that latter person is going around doing the same thing on five other podcasts that week, it loses its shine. With celebrity interview podcasts, we’re speed-running the rise and fall of late-night talk shows in the space of a decade.

In my view, these shows need to evolve or quit while they’re ahead. If they are going to stick around, the end goal can’t be promotion but something else. The celebrity-hosted podcasts that predated this trend like How Did This Get Made? could go on forever. In that podcast, three comedians answer the central question, “how did this insane film get made?” They still have their running gags. Like Conan’s podcast, so much of it is about the rapport between the hosts. The end goal isn’t promotion, it’s to discuss hilarious realities, like how the Jack Frost snowman puppet was designed to look like George Clooney, and they just didn’t bother changing it when they cast Michael Keaton in the titular role instead.

If it’s impossible to evolve or change the show, I hope these podcasts find a graceful exit. And I could be wrong! Maybe Poehler has the secret sauce and people will love it forever. But my parasocial appreciation for Poehler makes me worried that the show, and its host by extension, will fall out of favor first.

I performed a letter from President Trump’s aide, Natalie Harp, word for word. It was a LOT with a capital “L.”

… enjoy!