Ashley Flowers, the undisputed queen of true-crime podcasts thanks to her show Crime Junkie and her Audiochuck network, was starstruck. As she arrived at the Sun Rose Hotel on Sunset Boulevard for the taping of THR‘s first Podcasters Roundtable, she found veteran Dateline correspondent Keith Morrison, resting an elbow on the bar, true to his much-memed tendency to lean on things. She gathered the courage to ask him if he would record a quick video for her millions of followers in his ominously mellifluous voice. He obliged; the moment felt like an anointment. Next came the two interviewers of the bunch, best-selling self-help phenom Mel Robbins and actor and comedian Dax Shepard, who has had about 1,000 conversations with A-listers and scholars since 2018 on his show Armchair Expert. Rounding out the group were the politicos. You might imagine that sparks would fly when conservative firebrand Ben Shapiro encountered his liberal counterpart, former Obama staffer Jon Favreau, who co-hosts Pod Save America. But the two began chatting amiably in an all-too-rare display of across-the-divide grace. All are among the top 25 most popular podcasters in the country and thus eligible to be nominated for the new best podcast category at this year’s Golden Globes. In the conversation that followed, the six podcast superstars discussed the format’s pivot to video, their most embarrassing episodes and which one of them could finally topple the mighty Joe Rogan.
If you were to go listen to your earliest episodes, what would make you cringe?
ASHLEY FLOWERS You couldn’t pay me to listen to my first episodes. I don’t even sound like the same person eight years ago. I think it was very, like, “I hope you like this, and please listen and tune in …” It was just so new, and we edited it on GarageBand. I think I would be harsh on little me.
Keith, did you find that distinctive voice of yours immediately?
KEITH MORRISON (In an extreme Morrison voice) Oooohhhhh. … (Laughter.) I am 412 years old. That didn’t come along until I was about 300.
DAX SHEPARD Who was the vampire that converted you? I forget his name.
MORRISON Looked a lot like you, actually. We didn’t know how to do a podcast at Dateline. We do television shows. So when they came to me and said, “We ought to do a podcast,” I said, “This will never work. Who would want to listen to such a thing?” But, you know, they’d pay me, so I agreed to do it. And [at that time], we had an outside company help us with it since we felt incompetent. And they weren’t very good at it. When I listen to it now, it’s like, “Oh, yeah, I wish we would have done that ourselves.”
MEL ROBBINS If you feel cringe doing it for the first time, you’re doing it correctly. So our first episode, I was on the floor of my closet on my 54th birthday when we released it. We were so unbelievably naive about how hard this would be to come up with something to talk about and to not feel self-conscious. Then the second episode, we didn’t have one ready, [I thought,] “Why did I agree to two episodes a week?” And I was traveling for work, so we had to tape it underneath a comforter in a hotel room.
FLOWERS Who among us hasn’t?
Keith Morrison, Dateline NBC: “I’ve been telling stories for almost 60 years, but every year some different thing happens in the way they’re consumed, but you still tell them.”
Photographed by Mark Griffin Champion
Marc Maron just hung up his hat, citing, among other things, burnout. Do you ever feel like doing the same thing?
BEN SHAPIRO If it’s a bad news cycle, almost every day. I think that when people get into podcasting, they think, “Oh, this is going to be fun.” And then just like anything else, it becomes a job. It’s a very high-energy thing to do. On my show, I literally just talk for about an hour. And I have a very annoying voice, and I speak quickly, and …
MORRISON No, really? (Laughter.)
SHAPIRO Oh, yeah. And somehow people listen to it, which has been a big shock, actually.
JON FAVREAU Yeah, we spent most of 2016 telling people that there’s no way possible that Hillary Clinton could lose the election. So looking back on those episodes (laughter), yeah, I think I would probably cringe just a little bit. But I don’t worry about burnout as much. Probably because my brain is broken and all I can think about is politics and news. When we started, we thought that we would just be doing this podcast as a hobby for the 2016 election, and then Hillary Clinton would win and we’d go back to our jobs. We were like, “Oh, this is fun. It’s a crazy race.” And now it’s like a monkey’s paw situation, where it’s like 10 years later, and you’re talking about Donald Trump every single day.
FLOWERS Do you guys think podcasting will stay weekly or will it be more like TV shows, which have seasons and clearly for a reason?
ROBBINS I think it depends on the host. The cool thing about this medium is you can do whatever the fuck you want. You’ve got to ask yourself the famous Seth Godin question: Who’s it for and what’s it for?
SHEPARD My No. 1 show is Revisionist History, which is a master class on production and storytelling and research. It’s phenomenal, but it has seasons. And often someone will be like, “Oh, the fourth episode of the new season …” And I’m like, “Wait, it’s back?” I’ll miss my favorite show because it’s not a weekly.
FLOWERS I think it’s a legitimate fear that the machine moves so fast and there are so many podcasts and so much content coming out that if you take the summer off, your audience isn’t going to be there when you come back.
SHEPARD I’m not willing to find out.
SHAPIRO (Gesturing toward Favreau) Not an option for us.
FAVREAU I keep thinking there’s going to be a slow season in politics one of these years.
SHAPIRO I looked it up recently, and I had not missed a single workday that was not a Jewish holiday for four years. And even when I was on vacation. We went on a cruise in Greece this summer, and my crew came with me and we recorded on the ship.
Podcasting didn’t seem like a viable career when many of you started out. Could you have imagined that it would become what you’re known for?
SHEPARD No. I’m constantly waiting for someone to knock on the door of our studio and go, “Oh, guys, we really messed up. You don’t get to make money doing this. You’re just shooting the shit here in your garage.” I think there’s a crazy cosmic irony that I did not pursue this in any way to make money — and I’m a greedy pig. I wanted to make money as an actor and as a director and as a writer, and I was probably terrible to deal with in pursuit of that. And this was just, “Oh, I like being a guest on podcasts, I think I want to do this more.” And that that thing turned out to be the source of income is crazy ironic. And maybe there’s a life lesson in that: If you do something for the right reason, you might get rewarded.
ROBBINS I kind of had the opposite entry because …
SHEPARD Cash grab for you. (Laughter.)
ROBBINS I had gotten my start in media in the radio business in 2005, and I always wanted to get back to audio. And so when I started seeing buddies of mine in the podcast space, I’d be like, “Oh, that freaking guy Jay Shetty, that monk — he beat me to it, now I can’t get into it.” At the time, three years ago, there were already almost 6 million podcasts out there. And so you would have to be an egomaniac to think you could create something that would be worth people’s time and be profitable. And when we started releasing and it just took off like a rocket, I was very surprised.
Ashley, you’re frequently No. 2 in the rankings behind Joe Rogan. Does that motivate you to dethrone him?
FLOWERS Oh, I’m coming for Joe. Yeah. I’ll never put out the amount of content Joe Rogan puts out. I would love to just hang out and smoke weed and talk for three hours. That sounds like my jam. It’s just not my show. And I don’t think anyone would listen to me do it.
SHEPARD Have you tried cocaine? (Laughter.)
FLOWERS I could really find my niche.
Ben Shapiro, The Ben Shapiro Show: “I’ve had 24/7 security for the last seven years. My kids have security. This is just a normal part of life, unfortunately.”
Photographed by Mark Griffin Champion
Looking back, is there a specific episode that any of you wish you could take back?
SHEPARD Oh, I have several. At the beginning, when you’re just, like, trying to fill the content inferno, we didn’t have access to tons of great experts. And, yeah, I’ve had some charlatans come through.
Do you feel a responsibility to your listeners afterward to say, “Sorry about that”?
SHEPARD I think I have thrown a couple guests under the bus, just as an apology. Just like, “Oh, yeah, I should have probably known more about that person.”
Ashley, when you were starting out, you had your growing pains as well — it was said, for example, that you were too credulous in presenting unverified explanations of certain crimes. How did you get beyond that?
FLOWERS When we started out, I was working full-time, and I thought if I could make 60 grand, like I made at my software job, I would be perfectly fine. And so I was in it for the love of it, but not a trained journalist. And I’ve felt this responsibility to figure out how to do it better. Constantly: How do we level up? So now, we’ve got a team of 100 in Indiana — investigative journalists across the country running down 50 stories at a time. Which is even harder now: A single episode takes us three months to put together.
So much for the scrappy nature of podcasting.
FLOWERS I know, it’s what I miss so much!
MORRISON But this can be very satisfying, too. I mean, you spend a lot of time honing it and checking it and figuring out what’s right, what’s wrong. Our bread and butter are people who say things which aren’t true. And the delight is you discover that they’re not true along the way. At the beginning of every story, you think, “Oh, God, another one of these horrible stories about people being really bad to each other, do I really want to do another one of these?” But by the time you’re into it, people are so fascinating, even the bad ones — sometimes especially the bad ones — that you can’t get enough of it.
ROBBINS You guys don’t have nightmares about the stuff you cover?
FLOWERS Never.
MORRISON No, no, not at all.
SHAPIRO (Gesturing to Favreau and himself) I think we do.
FAVREAU Yeah, we do, all the time. (Laughter.)
FLOWERS I have nightmares about the stuff that you guys cover, not the stuff that I cover.
Ben and Jon, you’ve both been podcasting for about a decade now. How has the landscape changed?
SHAPIRO It’s much more populous. There are many more podcasts. There are many more people who are listening to podcasts. And that’s a wonderful thing. [But] it also means that ideas that I don’t think are wonderful sometimes get a very large and very viral audience. Because, when you have a bigger crowd, then it’s not that hard to find a very sizable crowd within that bigger crowd that’s willing to listen to something that actually is not true.
On your show this morning, you railed against Tucker Carlson for platforming white supremacist Nick Fuentes on his podcast …
SHAPIRO It wasn’t really the platforming. It was the fact that he glazed him.
Right. It does seem that there’s been a fracture in right-wing media lately.
SHAPIRO It’s reflective of a fracture that exists on the right. I think there’s always a danger in politics that your mainstream is captured by a radical fringe, and there’s always an energy to the radical fringe that’s very attractive to people who are mainstream. And mainstream people try to foster it, use it as jet fuel for their movement. And if you don’t draw a moral line somewhere, then your movement is quickly captured. I’ve been worried about it for quite a long time.
FAVREAU I feel very similar. I think you can get into audience capture really easily when you look at what everyone’s saying about an episode, especially on your side of the political divide. And then you can start changing the way you talk about certain things because you’re afraid people might attack you. The danger is, if you let the crowd start pushing you in one direction or the other …
SHAPIRO If you’re in the political space and virality is driving you toward legitimately horrifying things, then it does require establishing a moral line where you say, “I don’t care where the algorithm is driving, and even if somebody is getting bigger numbers by doing this terrible thing, I’m just not going to do that. I’m going to fight that.”
Ben, you have told your listeners to listen to Jon’s podcast if they want a balanced perspective. Jon, do you feel that you have a responsibility to return the favor?
FAVREAU Yes. It’s very funny. We did a show in Nashville. It’s like 2018, 2019. And after the show, we went to a bar and this big group of students came up to us, and they’re like, “We love Pod Save America. Every single week we listen to you and we listen to Ben Shapiro.” We have heard that through the years.
SHAPIRO I say repeatedly on my show: “Listen to my show, listen to Jon’s show. Where we agree, that’s probably the common locus of fact, and everything else is the opinion. And then you can determine whose opinion you think better fits that fact pattern.”
Ashley Flowers, Crime Junkie: “I felt a need to give back. I have to get people to care about this story to get them to listen all the way through and take action.”
Photographed by Mark Griffin Champion
Why do you think that right-wing podcasts have been so dominant?
ROBBINS The pandemic. Fear. Uncertainty. There’s so much research that shows that people are more inclined, whether it’s the left or the right, to believe conspiracy theories when they’re already anxious and chronically stressed. But it’s refreshing to see the two of you respect each other and referring your audiences to one another because the public, I don’t think we see that.
FAVREAU That’s because most of our public life is now mediated online, and there aren’t enough spaces. You realize when you meet the person in real life that, yes, you still don’t agree at all, but also you’re human beings and you can hang out and talk.
SHAPIRO As far as why the right is dominant in this space: Any time there is a new media space, the right becomes quite adept at it quickly. Because for a long time there were basically three mainstream media networks, the right got good at talk radio. And then the left became very good at radio with NPR. And then podcasting started, and the right was like, “OK, we’re going to adjust to that.” So usually the left catches up at a certain point when that becomes a mainstream medium.
The respectful exchange we’re seeing here between podcasters from opposing viewpoints, that rarely happens. You guys aren’t going on each other’s shows …
FAVREAU One of these days.
You heard it here first. But one of the risks of the siloed podcasting landscape is that it can lead to an echo chamber effect.
SHAPIRO I think the No. 1 thing that everyone’s looking for when they listen to a podcast is the authenticity of the person who’s speaking, right? Well, one of the problems is that I know many, many deeply authentic people who think batshit, loony things. And so if what you’re looking for is authenticity, they can sell you on a really, really bad idea. And then because you like that person, you resent any sort of fact-check. Then you can easily find yourself in that silo. It’s like a family member — that’s the relationship that people have with hosts like us. That’s a huge responsibility and one we all have to take very seriously.
SHEPARD I want to potentially get in trouble and say, we’re ignoring the rise of the right-leaning, male-driven podcasts. Why did that explosion happen? I think a big issue we have is, 21 percent of the country is a group of young males who are plummeting in every metric. They have the highest suicide rate, the highest addiction rate, plummeting college attendance. So you have an entire group that if it had any other name, we’d be like, “Guys, this group’s failing and we need to help and we need a game plan.” No one was offering one. And then a bunch of male podcast hosts stood up and said, “Hey, I think this is crap.” And a lot of young men went, “Oh, someone does still care about us.” And so if the left is mad about that, they should have had a plan for young men.
Mel Robbins, The Mel Robbins Podcast: “The cool thing about this medium is that you can do whatever the fuck you want.”
Photographed by Mark Griffin Champion
I want to talk about Charlie Kirk. How did his killing change the way you approach your podcast and live events?
SHAPIRO I think that we have entered a new era in terms of the acceptability of political violence. I think it’s been going on for a while. I’ve had 24/7 security for the last seven years. I have multiple security people with me here right now. The night Charlie was killed, I was actually in Los Angeles, and they literally locked me in my hotel room, and they said, “You can’t go out to dinner.” I have four kids. My kids have security. This is just a normal part of life, unfortunately.
MORRISON Can that become normal? Does it feel good to have security?
SHAPIRO Of course not. But if I didn’t have security … I mean, I get legitimately hundreds of death threats a day. What Charlie was doing, being at an outdoor event, my team had told me years ago, you can’t do outdoor events like that.
FAVREAU Yeah, we had always thought about making sure there was security at our events. Obviously we think about it more now. If we cannot agree that we have to do everything we can to not excuse violence in this country, then I don’t know what we’re doing.
Ashley, you recently announced that Crime Junkie is leaving its longtime home at Sirius for Tubi. And now all of you have video elements to your podcasts. At what point does podcasting become the new TV?
MORRISON I think it probably is. And I hate to be alarmist, but have you noticed that over-the-air TV is not there anymore? I mean it’s there, if you’re over 75, people watch it. I watch it sometimes. (Laughter.)
FLOWERS There are different versions of it too, right? I mean, what goes into creating an episode of our vodcast , it’s like making an episode of TV. We’re also working on a pilot episode of what would be a more traditional TV show.
Why is there such an imperative for video when podcasting is an audio-native form?
ROBBINS Because it’s a business objective of the platforms that syndicate the product. If you want to compete at a global level, you’ve got to figure out strategies based on each platform, which is a giant pain in the ass. It’s a ton of work. It’s also fun to figure out. But a podcast is still an audio-first format. I guarantee you the majority of our listeners are by and large audio listeners. They’re in their car, they’re on a walk, they’re at home, they’re listening at work.
FLOWERS We got into video because we’re finding that the audiences are completely different. There are people who will never go to a podcast platform and listen, but they’re watching.
SHEPARD It’s super gendered. YouTube is predominantly male-driven. And we have a predominantly female fan base, which I love and cherish. I’d certainly rather be approached by women in public than men.
FLOWERS Same, girl. (Laughter.)
SHEPARD But I very much would like young men to listen to what I talk about. And they’re not coming to these podcast platforms. I must go to YouTube. It’s as simple as where they are.
SHAPIRO A question worth asking is why is it that people will, and they do in large numbers, sit and watch two people talk to each other, like My Dinner With Andre, for hours at a time. Something has changed. I think that there is a reflection of loneliness that’s happening. And so people will just leave Joe [Rogan] talking with guests for two hours on YouTube.
ROBBINS Well, a lot of us came home from school, and Mom had Oprah on, and so a lot of us grew up seeing the old-school talk shows, Donahue, Arsenio Hall, Sally Jessy Raphael — this is what we grew up on. And so I think it’s migrated back to that from a video standpoint.
Dax Shepard, Armchair Expert: “I’m constantly waiting for someone to knock on the door of our studio and go, ‘Oh, guys, we really messed up. You don’t get to make money doing this. You’re just shooting the shit here in your garage.’ ”
Photographed by Mark Griffin Champion
Dax, you’ve interviewed Keith on your show. How do you think it went?
SHEPARD Keith is a very hard nut to crack because he’s very Canadian. He felt like it was very indulgent to talk about himself. And I had to keep saying, “Keith, it’s not indulgent when you’re the guest whom we are dying to find out about.” But our show has a transitional segment when we go to a commercial and it says, (Morrison voice) “Stay tuned … if you dare.” And that’s Keith. I put him in a very awkward position and asked him to record that for me. And then we’ve used it for eight years and people love to guess who it is.
FLOWERS And you aren’t taking a percentage of the ads?
SHEPARD Well, I sent him cash in the mail one time, hidden in a box of crackers. And he immediately forwarded that to a charity in his neighborhood.
MORRISON I’ve never listened to that. I don’t think I could.
Ashley and Keith, why do you think true crime is so popular as a podcast genre?
MORRISON Well, it’s popular generally speaking. As a podcast, it’s a very intimate format. It’s just you and the person listening to it, and you’re right inside their ear, right inside their head. People love to be told stories, so that’s part of it. It’s [also] a highly female audience.
ROBBINS Why is that, you think?
SHEPARD I just had an expert last week that gave us the answer. So, an impala who’s afraid of getting eaten by a lion can only learn to avoid the lion by getting chased by it. But humans’ unique ability is we can learn from someone else what they did when they were chased by a lion. And we have the ability to model out our fears so we can lay there and imagine what we would do if we get attacked. And with true crime, it’s not an accident that it’s gendered: Women are going to die predominantly from men. So what are they modeling? What do they want to hear? What did the person miss about the attacker that they could learn to look for?
FLOWERS That is the answer I always get, without the lion. It makes a lot of sense. And it seems like men are the problem.
True crime also poses an ethical dilemma about presenting these stories in an entertaining fashion without exploiting people’s tragedies. How do you grapple with that?
FLOWERS When I started, as a consumer [of true crime] even before the podcast, I felt a need to give back. How am I getting entertainment from people’s worst times? I did a lot of volunteering. And so it was a foundational piece of creating our network. And what I say is, I have to get people to care about this story in order for them to listen all the way through and take action. We cover a lot of stuff that’s still unsolved, and we give people real ways to get involved. We’ve also done a ton philanthropically. I started a nonprofit that has funded a ton of DNA solves naming Jane and John Does. We partnered with over 260 nonprofits that we’ve funded. I wanted to really try and understand how could we create this content in a way that actually doesn’t make the worst time in someone’s life worse. It’s making the world better.
MORRISON Well, that’s right. I mean, we deal with things which are the worst times in certain people’s lives. I always have a kind of a crisis of conscience about whether we should be doing this at all. So when you head in to cover your story, you better damn well have your moral compass with you as you’re doing it. My favorite writer these days is [Georges] Simenon. His character was Inspector Maigret. And Maigret had a simple philosophy. He wanted to solve crimes, but he came not to judge, but to understand. And we try to take the same approach.
Jon Favreau, Pod Save America: “I keep thinking there’s going to be a slow season in politics one of these years.”
Photographed by Mark Griffin Champion
What are your podcasting pet peeves? Something that you wish people would stop doing?
ROBBINS Video. (Laughter.)
FLOWERS Plosives. It’s not that hard. Just back the fuck up [from the mic].
SHAPIRO Conspiracizing.
FAVREAU I don’t know how people can do like three, four-hour episodes.
MORRISON There’s that Peter Ustinov quote, “Everything that’s ever been written is just a little bit too long.” That goes for podcasts.
What’s your preferred podcast listening speed?
FAVREAU One and a half.
SHAPIRO At least two, maybe two and a half, depending on the speed of the real-time.
SHEPARD I feel like I now know how you make love and I’m not interested. Oh, you’re in a hurry, are you, Jon? Where do you have to be?
SHAPIRO (To Favreau) I would assume that’s mostly for informational and political podcasts?
FAVREAU Yes. I’m not enjoying anything.
SHAPIRO Yeah, right. It’s input of data as opposed to enjoying the drama. It’s a different thing.
FLOWERS Input of data, I’m like a 1.5, but if it’s a show I love, I’m like, I want to listen how it was made.
SHEPARD I listen to Revisionist History on 0.25. (Laughter.) Take your foot off the gas. I could enjoy this longer.
In 10 years, how do you think podcasting will have changed and will what you’re doing now be relevant?
FLOWERS I think we’ll just keep showing up where the listeners are.
SHEPARD And the ride could be over. I often think, as I hope all of us here do, is like, “Holy shit, did we get lucky?” I was going to name the show The Millionth Podcast because I was insecure that there were already too many and I was late. And then, lo and behold, I’m in the right place at the right time for these big deals to happen. And in a time where millions and millions of people will consume this thing you make in your garage, what a gift. It’ll go away. I hope I’ll be grateful enough to just go like, “You got lucky, brother. You got to hit one of the hot streaks.” And that’s what it is for me. I have nothing but gratitude. It could end. This has been, I can speak for me, entirely too good of a job, and suspiciously so. So if it ends, I’ll be like, “Yeah, that had to come. I mean, we were getting away with murder.”
ROBBINS I think one of the coolest things about it is to think about the long tail, at least for the show that I do, which is about helping people create a better life. I love thinking that 50 years from now, somebody could bump into an episode because it’s evergreen whatever platform it’s on, whether they’re listening or they’re watching or they’re absorbing it through the chip in their head.
FAVREAU I think there’s going to be plenty to talk about in Trump’s fifth term. (Laughter.) Our job will persist.
SHAPIRO It’s the same stuff that people have been doing since they were sitting around fires 10,000 years ago before the domestication of the dog. Some of us are going to be telling stories (gesturing to Flowers and Morrison) and some of us are going to be speaking with the village elders about how to make your life better (gesturing to Shepard and Robbins), and some of us are going to be trying to debrief about the news of the day. That fundamentally isn’t going to change. It’s just maybe the method of consumption will change.
MORRISON Absolutely agree. I’ve been telling stories for almost 60 years, but every year, some different thing happens in the way they’re consumed, but you still tell them.
Photographed by Mark Griffin Champion
The full Podcasters Roundtable is streaming on Spotify and YouTube
and available to view on THR.com.
This story appears in the Nov. 19 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
