I was nervous to speak to Sam Fragoso, filmmaker and host of the award-winning interview podcast Talk Easy. He is generally regarded as one of the best in the industry and specializes in intimate, long-form interviews with writers, actors, and other notable artists.
When we spoke at the beginning of March, I remarked on his reputation as a master interviewer and apologized for my comparably substandard skillset. Fragoso laughed. Apparently everyone who interviews him starts the conversation this way.
Fragoso has been doing this a long time. It shows. At moments, I lost track of who was interviewing whom. The conversation veered into analysis of our childhoods; my recovery. When I threw in a quote from a New Journalist near the beginning, it proved to be less of a smart comparison than a premonition of my own self-indulgent approach.
Since 2016, Talk Easy has released over five hundred episodes with the likes of George Saunders, Jenny Slate, Patti Smith, and Gwyneth Paltrow. That is just a flavor of his extensive archive. On air and off, Fragoso is a generous conversation partner. His easy demeanor works carefully with his thoughtful way of speaking, every observation or memory delivered delicately and without cliché. I wanted to know more about his research process and how he navigates an interview when it goes wrong.
Spoiler: it’s all about preparation.
Alice Florence Orr: You often ask guests about the “back-half” of your guests’ lives. After a decade of doing this, what have you realized is the most common misconception people have about their own legacy?
Sam Fragoso: I have to go into the interviews being very well aware of the stories [the guest] has told both themselves and other journalists. The person goes “All right, well, I can’t just say that again. I just can’t just repeat what he said.” It’s a little bit like when you go to a therapist, or when you’re dating someone new for the first time, and you have to give them the backstory of your life. You want to do it quickly because you don’t want to labor over the details. I want to offer them the room to start to tell a different and more interesting story about themselves.
AFO: What you’re saying really reminds me of that famous Joan Didion quote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” It also sounds like certain psychotherapy techniques around deconstructing people’s self-narratives.
SF: Have you had much experience with psychotherapy?
AFO: Yes.
SF: And how did it take?
AFO: It helped. But I think that there comes a point where analyzing your life only gets you so far. You know, you can’t just do bad things and then reflect on those bad things infinitely.
SF: I was raised Catholic and it very quickly becomes like being in confession. I go back and forth and in terms of how useful [confession] is.
AFO: I’m not saying that Talk Easy is like the confession booth, but a worse interviewer could draw that comparison. [SF laughs.] You go back to find quotes your guests said 10, 20 years ago. How long does that process take?
SF: It depends on the person I think. If they’re older, there’s so much more written about them. So it’s about the scope of their work, how much they’ve done, and then how much of their life is written about on the internet. But I’d say for someone over 50, it takes between 20 and 30 hours. And then if [the guest is] under 45, it’s like 12 to 18. We’re in a routine of booking, taping, editing. There are definitely weeks where I wish I had more time.
AFO: Do you ever find something that you think is going to be the key access point for the interview, but then you say it to them and they look at you blankly?
SF: 100%. It’s a good lesson. In earlier interviews, a friend of mine who used to work on the show, Ian Chang, said to me: “Sometimes you go into the interviews and I can hear you basically have a ‘theory of the case.’ It sometimes feels as if you’re trying to stress-test it.”
He was right to point it out. People don’t really like that. They don’t want to go in and have someone say, “Hey, I have a grand unified theory about your life.” I had done that a few times. It worked occasionally and I was right about it, but other times it just wasn’t. I would have done nice research, I’d be well prepared, but I’d suggest X thing meant Y. And the guest would be like, “Very respectfully, that’s a really interesting, novel concept you’ve come up with, stranger, but it’s just not right.”
Then I would be like, “Yeah, but actually isn’t it kind of right?” and I realized — wait, what the f*** interview is this? “Hey, person who’s had to live in that body, what if I told you that the way you thought of yourself is actually not correct.” So I stopped doing that. I might still have things where I think it may be the skeleton key, but I’ve stopped thinking of research in that way.
My mother was a lawyer and my father is a middle school teacher; I think my approach is very much informed by those two. In terms of the lawyerly part, I take what I saw my mom do: be very well prepared, script in advance, deep dive into all the notes. But I’m doing what my mom did using the information to learn about someone, not to indict them. I make that very key distinction. You think you have the thing that’s going to unlock it, then you realize people are more complicated.
By the way, that’s a good thing in an interview. We don’t always keep it in if I get it wrong, but sometimes we do if it’s interesting. It’s good to go “not this, but that,” because people will often respond by saying, “exactly — not that, but this.” That’s what you want. You want to get to the truth anyway, even if it’s a clumsy way to get there.
AFO: It’s clear you don’t want to be incriminating in these interviews. You use silence as a tool better than almost anyone in podcasting. How do you distinguish between a “productive” silence where a guest is thinking, and a “dead” silence where you need to step in?
SF: I’ve gotten better at shutting up, for sure. If I didn’t learn how to not center myself after a decade, something would be wrong. But even if you go back to the beginning, I was never the host who talked about their dog — with all due respect to those who do. I was always about the guest.
The big difference is that in the beginning, I wasn’t as prepared. I wanted it to sound more friendly and convivial; I didn’t want to make anyone uncomfortable. I was really following the name of the show. But that was also a cover because I wasn’t doing the requisite amount of work needed to make these great.
[My style] a mix of Terry Gross and Anna Sale. Both of them have been so supportive of me and have taught me a whole lot.
AFO: You’re a filmmaker at heart. How does your background in directing and film criticism influence the way you “edit” a conversation in your head while it’s actually happening?
SF: There are so many layers. There’s the process of the brief, then an outline I’m writing — it’s like a three-act structure — and then the taping and the editing. I’m involved in all of it. I want the guest to feel proud to have participated, but that doesn’t necessarily mean every beat of the podcast is going to be an easy one. My aim is for them to feel like it was a conversation authentic to who they are, where they could show up as themselves. That’s pretty hard to do with a stranger.
AFO: It’s especially hard when guests are promoting something. You have to work around that commercial impulse. You’ve cited Studs Terkel as a hero — in an era of 15-second TikToks, how do you protect that “slow-burn” oral history format?
SF: What we’ve found is that the show is actually very conducive to video, and that hasn’t changed the way I do interviews. The main thing is that the guests don’t seem to care. It’s just us two in the room, no one is moving, we aren’t cutting to anything. We can get past the camera stuff.
In terms of releasing clips, I’m not precious about it. If there’s a good 45-second clip, we release it, provided it has the feeling of the show so we aren’t false-advertising. There’s a whole new group of people on YouTube who legitimately do not listen to podcasts otherwise.
AFO: Is there an interview where your prepared “map” completely failed, and you had to find a totally new way to connect with the person sitting across from you?
SF: It’d be so amazing if I was like “no” and then just ended the interview. [Laughs.] We’d get the most traction on this piece if I did that.
I don’t know. David Mamet walked out of an interview last summer, but that wasn’t because I wasn’t connecting — it was because I was hitting something close to the bone. We had one interview during the pandemic with Brian De Palma where I still wonder what happened. It’s human relationships. It wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t great — and I wanted it to be great.
AFO: You’re clearly a perfectionist. Doing 30 to 40 hours of research suggests you really value the product. It’s an artistic reflection of you.
SF: Of course I am. Why would I do all this if not to try for that? I want the guest to feel proud to have participated, but that doesn’t mean every beat is easy. It’s painstaking. I help with the editing, the three-act structure, the mixing. I want them to feel like it was an authentic conversation where they could show up as themselves. That’s the aim.
AFO: If you were sitting in the guest chair on Talk Easy, who would you want to interview you?
SF: Besides you, Alice? [Laughs.] Aren’t you thinking about what you’re making for dinner right now? This is around the time I’d start thinking about it.
AFO: My partner actually made dinner already. I think it’s a minestrone.
SF: Oh my god, that’s amazing. That’s such a relief when it’s already done. Let me help fast-track this [interview] for you. I don’t know who I’d want. Who would you want to interview you?
AFO: I’d love to have Ken Burns do a ten-minute film of my life. Just apply a deadpan monologue over terrible photographs of me as a child.
SF: He doesn’t make a movie shorter than four hours.
AFO: That’s true. But I managed to fit all my midlife crises into my early twenties. For you, is there one chapter of your story that you’re surprised no one has asked you to revisit yet?
SF: Terry Gross. I’d go with Terry Gross. It’s hard now because I’m contributing to Fresh Air and I talk to her and I love her, but that would still be a dream.
As for a chapter — the show is a thinly veiled autobiography. Take the recent episode with Ryan Coogler. He talked about the “embargo” of success — missing birthdays and funerals because he felt he couldn’t leave the set of Creed at the one-yard line. I’ve been doing this for ten years and I’ve missed a lot, too. My family would be the first to tell you. I feel a tremendous amount of guilt and regret about that, yet I’ve continued to make the same choice Ryan made. Hopefully not forever, but certainly for now. If the material works for me, hopefully it works for the listener.
AFO: Thank you for sharing that. I think that’s a natural place to end.
SF: I was trying to give you an ending, and that happens to be true. It’s a group effort. Go enjoy your minestrone.
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Thank you to Sam Fragoso for his time. If you’ve never listened to Talk Easy, he recommends you start with either Jesse Eisenberg or Zadie Smith.
