Ignorance can be an asset to an interviewer. If you don’t know anything about a subject, you may ask curious, childlike questions that produce interesting answers. If you had to choose between hearing Neil deGrasse Tyson in conversation with a fellow astrophysicist about the faint-end slope of the rest-frame V-band luminosity function, with respect to galaxy spectral type, of field galaxies with redshift z < 0:5, or hearing him talk to a six-year-old, you’ll probably be more interested in hearing him talk to a six-year-old, unless you are yourself an astrophysicist. As an interviewer myself, I find that it’s actually unwise for me to do too much research on the subject I’m talking to someone about, because if I become a kind of quasi-expert in it, and they’re an expert, too, we’ll have a high-level technical conversation that leaves most listeners bored and lost. 

So interviewers don’t always need to be subject matter experts. But my God, if you’re talking to a politician who has been accused of serious crimes, you need to do some goddamned research beforehand. You need to come prepared. Otherwise you’re not really doing an interview. You’re functioning as part of the public relations operation of a powerful figure, and you have surrendered the right to call yourself independent.

A pair of pro-Trump Canadian prankster YouTubers called the “Nelk Boys” recently interviewed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu is responsible for the starvation of Gaza and a war on the population that kills hundreds of people per day. It is an unconscionable crime against humanity, which is why he is wanted by the International Criminal Court. 

The Nelk Boys, by their own admission, did not do a good job interviewing Netanyahu, asking questions like: “You [and Trump] are very tight, right? Would you call it a ‘bromance’?” They asked Netanyahu what his go-to McDonald’s order is. They raved about the nightlife in Tel Aviv. (“Tel Aviv is lit!”) The closest they came to asking a critical question was when Nelk Boy Kyle Forgeard said that “I’ll see or read stuff on X and people will say, like Israel is killing babies or they’re starving people,” to which Netanyahu just replied “That’s completely false.” (It is true.) Forgeard admitted during the episode that “I see so much stuff about what’s going on in Israel and Iran and Palestine, and to be honest, I just really don’t know what is going on there.” That certainly showed.

The Nelk Boys received an overwhelmingly negative response to their interview from their own followers. Haaretz reports that the “manosphere exploded with condemnation over their failure to critically question Netanyahu, as well as their decision to platform the prime minister.” The Nelk Boys seemed somewhat chastened, noting that one of their fans said “having Netanyahu on is like having a modern-day Hitler on.” He admitted that “honestly, it's a good point. We're here to fucking learn, to be honest.” “I really wish I, personally, went at him harder,” said Nelk Boy Aaron Steinberg. They admitted they had been given scripted questions by Netanyahu’s staff. Elsewhere the Nelks said “We are so not qualified to do this. That's what’s interesting about this, we should just not be doing this." But they also deployed the argument that the viewers should simply make up their own minds: 

“Sure, we’re probably not the best at asking questions. We’re not the best journalists, we never claimed to be, so we might not be the best at pressing them, but in my opinion, it’s up to the viewer to form their own educated opinion.” 

“We’re probably not the best at asking questions” is a good candidate for the Understatement of the Century award. But this Nelk’s view that audiences should “form their own opinion” reflects a common mistake about the role of an interviewer. The audience can only make up its opinion based on what they are exposed to. If they’re not exposed to counterarguments, they’re not going to be able to reach an informed conclusion. The interviewer’s job is to get the facts out on the table so that the audience is able to have an “educated” view on the subject. 

This is especially important when the person you are talking to is a head of state. Government officials lie and spin the facts, and they are very good at it, so an audience is not necessarily going to know when they’re being misled. The questioner must therefore cut through the evasions and half-truths and make the politician squarely face the truth. They will still evade, deflect, and mislead, but their evasions will at least be pointed out.

There are good interviewers working today. For example, look at how Mehdi Hasan has confronted figures like Erik Prince and Vivek Ramaswamy. One of the rules he lays out in his book Win Every Argument is that you must always “bring receipts”—do your research so that when someone says something false, you have the evidence showing that it’s false. Even Piers Morgan can be quite a good interviewer—witness how he grills Israel’s ambassador to the UK, and doesn’t let her get away with denying that Israel is killing children in Gaza. Morgan, importantly, will not let the ambassador change the subject, and is willing to ask a question over and over in an attempt to get a straight answer. (British journalists are famous for this. Witness Jeremy Paxman asking the same question 12 times in 90 seconds because a politician won’t answer it.) 

Unfortunately, the Nelk Boys are not unique in being completely unprepared to interview political leaders. A number of independent podcasters who have interviewed Donald Trump and JD Vance have been similarly unwilling to do the basic research necessary to carry out an interviewer’s job. These podcasters do not consider themselves right-wing, and in fact hold many left-leaning viewpoints, but because they have totally failed in the task of studying the issues they’re having conversations about, they end up spreading unchecked propaganda. 

Look at the kinds of questions that Lex Fridman asked Donald Trump, for instance: 

• What drives you more, the love of winning or the hate of losing?
• You’ve been close with a lot of the greats in sport. You think about Tiger Woods, Muhammad Ali, you have people like Michael Jordan, who I think hate losing more than anybody. So what do you learn from those guys?
• You’ve said that politics is a dirty game… So if it is a game, how do you win at that game?
• You’ve been successful in business, you’ve been successful in politics. What do you think is the difference between gaining success between the two different disparate worlds?
• How do you think you’ll do in the debate coming up, that’s in a few days?

You will not be surprised to learn that Trump thinks he will do well in the debate! From these ludicrous softballs, we learn nothing whatsoever of value about how Trump will govern the country. But even when Fridman approaches the realm of a substantive question, he allows Trump to get away with unbelievable bullshit. For instance, when Fridman says “Let me ask you about Project 2025. So you’ve publicly said that you don’t have any direct connection to—” Trump cuts him off, says he has nothing to do with Project 2025, and Fridman moves on. (After being elected, Trump appointed several of the project’s architects to key positions, and it is now estimated that nearly half of Project 2025 has already been implemented.) A good interviewer would have gone through Project 2025 item by item, demanding more clarity on whether Trump actually disagreed with the goals of Project 2025, and asking which parts of it Trump would specifically pledge not to implement.

Similarly, when Fridman asked another question that could have led to a substantive discussion (“how do we avoid war with China in the 21st century?”), Trump replied with one of the most worthless loads of vacuous verbiage I’ve ever heard:  

Well, there are ways. Now here’s the problem. If I tell you how and I’d love to do it, but if I give you a plan, I have a very exacting plan how to stop Ukraine and Russia. And I have a certain idea, maybe not a plan, but an idea for China. Because we do, we’re in a lot of trouble. They’ll be in a lot of trouble too, but we’re in a lot of trouble. But I can’t give you those plans because if I give you those plans, I’m not going to be able to use them, they’ll be very unsuccessful. Part of it is surprise, right?

Oh, how compelling! As with Ukraine, a special secret plan! Just trust him! A real interviewer might have asked some follow-up questions like: What specific steps would you implement to reduce the risk of an arms race between the U.S. and China? Is China right to believe the U.S. wants to curtail its economic power in Asia? How can the U.S. maintain a commitment to Taiwanese democracy without taking steps that make China more likely to move to retake the island? Of course, Trump would have met these with more empty, muddled nonsense, but a good interviewer would not simply let go. Fridman simply replied: “Right.” 

Joe Rogan was no better at interviewing Trump. In fact, he was much worse, because he ended up agreeing with a lot of Trump’s most egregious nonsense. Fridman at least tried to imply he was skeptical of Trump’s allegations of widespread election fraud in 2020, even if he hadn’t done the research necessary to refute Trump’s wild claims. Rogan and Trump, on the other hand, appeared to be playing a game of “bullshit tennis” in which turns are taken tossing ill-informed opinions back and forth. Here they are talking about wind power: 

ROGAN:

I went to a ranch in south Texas. We had to drive past this enormous windmill farm, and it's gross. It's dystopian. You're looking in the left and the right and all you see is these big spinning machines that aren't even that effective at generating electricity.

TRUMP:

Correct. Most expensive form of electricity is a windmill, and then they start to rust and rot.

ROGAN:

And you have to replace them.

TRUMP:

And then they get abandoned by the people that built them because—

ROGAN:

Well, you have to get rid of all that material too. When you replace those blades, now you have a problem because you have to dispose.

TRUMP:

You can't bury them.

ROGAN:

Right. You have to dispose [of] these enormous windmills. And how do you dispose of them?

TRUMP:

By the way, they say you can't bury them. So, I even questioned that, but I'm not gonna get into it. But they say you can't bury them. So you have the blades and you can't bury the blades. You can bury the blades. It's not gonna matter…You'll find areas you can bury. But they come up, this is what I mean, they come up with this, but the environmentalist dream is windmills everywhere. You know what happens to them? After five years, they start to rot. After 10 years, you have to replace them. Did you ever look at certain parts of California where they have heavy windmills and they've been abandoned and they're all different manufacturers and all different companies and they all—

How about in New Jersey? Off the coast of New Jersey, they wanna build, the people are going crazy not to build them. But where you have them, the whales are washing up on shore. So in 50 years they had one whale come ashore. Now they had like 18 come in the last year.

ROGAN:

What is happening with the whales? I've read about this.

TRUMP:

Well, they say that the wind drives them crazy. It's a vibration because you have those—those things are 50 story buildings, some of them. Fifty!

ROGAN:

Right. And they're super sensitive to vibrations and sounds.

TRUMP:

The wind is rushing, the things are blowing. It's a vibration and it makes noise. You know what it is? I want to be a whale psychiatrist. It drives the whales frickin' crazy and something happens with them. But for whatever reason, they're getting washed up on shore. And yet the environmentalists—

ROGAN:

Conveniently ignored by the environmental people.

Yeah, it’s “conveniently ignored by the environmental people” because it’s bogus! Here’s Trump’s own NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) saying that “there is no scientific evidence that noise resulting from offshore wind site characterization surveys could potentially cause whale deaths. There are no known links between large whale deaths and ongoing offshore wind activities.” And it’s totally false that wind power is “the most expensive form of electricity.” In fact, wind and solar are the cheapest sources of new power. It’s true that used turbine blades create waste, but that’s a problem that’s being addressed through innovating new ways to recycle blades, and the waste of used turbine blades has to be weighed against the severe damage done by burning fossil fuels. You can’t just look at used turbine blades and say “well, guess wind power is more harmful.” Does Rogan take a moment to challenge Trump on any of this? No, they just sit there talking about how stupid environmentalists are, when Rogan and Trump are the ones who don’t know what they’re talking about. 

These interviewers are not just bad because of how they deal with the subjects they’re asking about. They’re also bad because they pick bad subjects. Fridman asked Trump about UFOs and psychedelics, for instance, but did not bring up the single most important issue that the president has decision-making power over: the climate crisis. Now, Trump is doing everything he can to escalate global warming. He made no secret of this on the campaign trail. He wanted to rip up all regulation on fossil fuel use. This is imperiling humanity’s future! You have a climate change denialist running for office, sitting in front of you, and you’re not going to ask him about the fact that he’s in complete denial about the most important problem facing the entire planet?! What’s wrong with you? What kind of worm has eaten your brain?

We know that Rogan knows full well about climate change. He once challenged Candace Owens in an interview about it, and was skilled at exposing her limited knowledge of the scientific evidence. So why isn’t he asking Trump why he’s actively committed to worsening the most serious problem facing humankind? Isn’t that something an interviewer probably ought to want an answer on? But I’ve come to expect very little from a man who thinks Atlantis was real. 

The same problem of ill-preparation was evident when Theo Von spoke to JD Vance. Now, Von seems like a guy with a good heart. He’s been moved by the suffering of people in Gaza and has even called Israel’s actions there a genocide. To his credit, he brought the subject up with Vance, saying: 

It feels like a massacre and it feels like, you know, I’ve called it a genocide, other people have different thoughts about it, and that’s fine. Right? And I don’t need anybody to share the same thoughts or you to… But I think where it gets scary is that we give, you know, we’re complicit in it because we help fund, like, military stuff…Sometimes it feels like we look out for the interest of Israel before we look out for the interest of America.

Now, this isn’t that elegantly stated (“like, military stuff”) but it’s a heck of a lot better than Fridman did with Trump. Vance, predictably, replied with some bullshit, saying that “If you have a soul, your heart should break when you see a little kid who’s suffering,” but saying that he rejects the claim of genocide because Israel isn’t “purposely trying to go in and murder every Palestinian.” 

A prepared interviewer would follow up, and point out a few things. First, you don’t have to be trying to murder “every” member of a group in order to commit genocide. According to international law, genocide can involve the attempt to eliminate a group “in part.” Frequently, Israel’s defenders make the claim that the death toll would be higher if Israel was trying to commit genocide in Gaza, which amounts to saying that so long as you leave most members of a group alive, you cannot be committing genocide. But that’s not true, and we can immediately see why it’s not true by thinking about the Holocaust. If Hitler had only tried to reduce the Jewish population by 40 percent, would he still have been genocidal? Of course. If he had tried to eliminate ten percent of Jews, would he have been genocidal? Absolutely. A good interviewer would have gone through the evidence that shows Israel has gone beyond targeting Hamas and has intentionally made Gaza uninhabitable as part of a project of collective punishment and ethnic cleansing, whose ultimate goal is to drive the surviving Palestinians out and repopulate the Strip. This is a goal that many Israeli politicians announce openly and the government no longer bothers to deny. 

Theo Von is better than Rogan, Fridman, and the Nelks, in that he seems to have a decent amount of common sense and empathy. (He’s a Bernie fan!) But it’s very clear he’s out of his depth talking to someone like JD Vance, a brilliant politician who has mastered the art of talking eloquently while saying very little. It takes a good interrogator, armed with facts, stats, and research, to deal with such a person. 

Look, I wouldn’t want to interview JD Vance myself without a lot of prep-work. You have to go into these things understanding that politicians are trying to spin you, and they’re good at it. Unfortunately, these “independent” podcasters speak to odious right-wing figures and are terrible at challenging them. Sometimes that’s because, as with Rogan and Trump, they actually share the prejudices and misconceptions of the right-wing political figure. Other times, as with Von, they disagree with the right-wing figure, but haven’t read enough books or practiced the art of critical questioning. The result is a catastrophe for public understanding of the issues. I have no objection to these men podcasting. But I would beg them to stick to the issues they’re competent on. Drugs and exercise for Rogan, machine learning for Fridman, comedy for Von, and idiotic pranks for the Nelk Boys.