The art of the celebrity interview, with Sam Fragoso

This is an audio transcript of the FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘The art of the celebrity interview, with Sam Fragoso’

Lilah Raptopoulos
There’s a podcast I listen to called Talk Easy. It’s hosted by Sam Fragoso. A few weeks ago, I was listening to Sam interview the actor Ke Huy Quan and things got pretty emotional. He just won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in Everything Everywhere All at Once. He was also in The Goonies and Indiana Jones as a kid. On Sam’s podcast, he was talking about how he first came to the US as a refugee from Vietnam.

Ke Huy Quan
And I got on a plane for the first time in my life. And when I landed, there was my mom. And my siblings were all waiting for us at the airport.

Sam Fragoso
At LAX.

Ke Huy Quan
Yeah. And it was one of the . . . it’s one of the greatest days in my life. And then I have to finally. And that was . . . that was in 1979. I haven’t talked about this for 38 years, so whatever feelings that I had, those emotions, I buried them for decades.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Moments like this aren’t uncommon on Sam’s podcast. Before he was a host, he was a culture journalist and the creative director of a movie theatre. And on the show he talks to these huge stars. Ethan Hawke, Cate Blanchett, Janelle Monáe, Lorde. The thing I think he’s really good at is that moment with Ke Huy Quan. It’s getting people who’ve given a million interviews to say something new.

Sam Fragoso
The challenge of that one is that it gets really emotional really quickly.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm.

Sam Fragoso
And then it gets increasingly emotional to the point where you don’t even know how you could keep talking. On a human level what you’d like to do is give the person a hug, leave the microphones behind and, like, go for a walk. But as someone who has to make 52 episodes a year, you have to figure out how to button this thing up.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I really like Sam’s style. So this week I invited him on for a relatively meta conversation about interviewing. Then remember when we asked you to send us boring topics and our challenge was to make them interesting? One of you called in about the Life in the UK test, which is the test you need to pass to become a British citizen. So we took it on. We sent our producer Lulu Smyth out to look into it. And what she found was kind of bonkers. One, the questions are so esoteric that most Brits don’t know the answers. and two, some of the test is actually entirely inaccurate.

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This is FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos.

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Sam, welcome to the show. It’s such a pleasure to have you.

Sam Fragoso
It is a pleasure to be here.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I am excited to have you on because you are a gifted interviewer and I really love your show Talk Easy. And first, I’m just curious about how you think of your show. Like if we were to meet at a party and I know nothing about you, and I find out you host a podcast and I ask you “Oh, what’s your podcast about?” (laughter)

Sam Fragoso
It seems . . .

Lilah Raptopoulos
How would you answer that question? 

Sam Fragoso
. . . my worst nightmare. It’s my worst nightmare. So once I get past my own anxiety around the question, I usually say, “You know, it’s an interview show where at the end of the interview you’ll actually be able to walk away from it saying, I learn something.”

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm.

Sam Fragoso
You’re not going to hear anyone probably as insanely researched as some would say obsessively researched. And also, I also will just say, “Just look at who’s come on and just start with someone that you like.”

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm.

Sam Fragoso
Also a lot of the people that have come on the show, you know, Margaret Atwood or Questlove or David Byrne or Natasha Lyonne most recently. They’ve done a lot of interviews. So it’s kind of hard for me to be like it’s an interview show with people that you’ve also heard on other interview shows. (laughter)

Lilah Raptopoulos
I keep thinking of this word life review. My godmother’s a therapist and she works exclusively with old people, like people in their nineties, and she does the style of therapy with them called Life Review. And I don’t think that interviewing and therapy are the same, but I really like that framing of Life Review, and I think you’re pretty good at that. Like, I think the through line to me is that, like, people sort of have a chance to step out of their day-to-day and be eased into this place where they, like, trust you to reflect on their lives.

Sam Fragoso
Uh-huh. Well, that’s pretty good. I think we’re gonna roll with that, I like it.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Sam is in his late twenties and he lives in LA and, as you can probably hear, he can be a little self-ironic about where he’s ended up. But what makes Sam unique is that he’s made this happen almost entirely on his own. Before Talk Easy got picked up by a production company, Pushkin, he made the show independently for years. He started it while he was still in college, and even then he was booking really big names.

Sam Fragoso
Well, I had done a lot of interviews for a whole bunch of publications like Vanity Fair and Vice, The Atlantic, and those are gone. Some of them went pretty well. But yeah, come 2016, I was leaving this job as a creative director at the Roxy in San Francisco, which is this great old California institution. And part of the job of being a creative director is I had to do all these on stage Q&A’s afterward.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm.

Sam Fragoso
And I thought, well, I’m not really good at the job of the creative director. Like, I wasn’t very good at it, but I was pretty good at doing the Q&A’s afterward. So from there, it seemed like the most natural evolution of both the onstage Q&A work and then the print interview work.

Lilah Raptopoulos
You do sort of, as you said, some would say obsessive level, deep research. A lot of deep research on people.

Sam Fragoso
Oh, yes, yes. Uh-huh.

Sam Fragoso
Often you read quotes they’ve said back to them and have them respond. (laughter) I’d kind of like to know what is the sort of experience you’re structuring in that room in that hour, like, what are you chasing? What are you building up to?

Sam Fragoso
Yeah, I think I go in with a pretty clear structure of how I think the hours should go.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm.

Sam Fragoso
Usually it's the first act, second act, third act. If we have time, a little epilogue. But basically by, like, the 20-minute mark, you should get to something that’s going to, like, turn the interview. So for instance, on a recent episode with Natasha Lyonne, the first 8 to 10 minutes is about Poker Face, her new show. And then around the 15-minute mark, there’s a turn or pivot into the past. And then from there, you’re telling some story that’s going to bring you back to the present. At least for me. So I like to have bookends. Then there has to be like a dismount, come down period. And that’s always the hardest part. And see how’d it figured out what ...

Lilah Raptopoulos
Landing the . . .

Sam Fragoso
Yeah, landing the plane. Yeah. How do you land the plane? And sometimes, you know, and sometimes that’s easy to do. And sometimes there’s, like, a lot of turbulence.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. (chuckles) I was curious to hear about an interview that Sam’s done recently that he felt really good about. And he chose one with Jonathan Majors, who starred in Lovecraft Country and The Last Black Man in San Francisco. He’s also in the new Creed movie.

Sam Fragoso
And I think that’s an episode where there’s we get into stuff about childhood and ambition and trauma around a whole host of issues and then in that last 5 minutes, there’s an element where he tells us about this dream he has, this recurring dream.

Jonathan Majors
It’s a mixture of the country where we grew up, in the city where we lived, and there’s a red balloon. It’s massive. It is both the horizon and the sun. And we’re looking at it. And the biggest thing about the dream, for anyone who has done dream analysis, they always ask you, “OK. Oh that’s great. All the symbolism is there. But how do you feel in the dream?”.

Sam Fragoso
And how do you?

Jonathan Majors
Sitting there next to my baby brother, seeing where we grew up and where we lived. And then now seeing the red balloon, which now in this moment I can say is probably my future life. There is a deep calm between us and a safety.

Sam Fragoso
And it’s so, so profoundly moving. That you can’t possibly ask anything else after that. (chuckles) You’d have to be an idiot to be like, “Well, so Jonathan, Creed III . . .” Like, no, like it’s over. It’s over.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. Yeah.

Sam Fragoso
I often leave this feeling it’s better than I expected. And what’s good about it are things I couldn’t have foreseen.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I find it . . . I find that different guests come to interviews in very different ways.

Sam Fragoso
How do you mean? 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Many are media-trained, so they’re used to telling their stories a lot. And with some you feel them telling the same story. You know, they’ve been told a million times. Sometimes you do research and have heard them tell the story a million times. Sometimes you need that.

Sam Fragoso
I know how you mean, yes. People, especially public figures, come in with a very well workshopped story of their life. And my job is to say I’ve heard the story because I’ve listened to everything you’ve done. I’ve read every interview you’ve been part of. And we’re going to try to tell a different story today. And I think by supplying the basic facts of their life, by offering a quote, like you mentioned that, by offering a quote in the face of that, they actually have to start saying something else.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. 

Sam Fragoso
They can’t just be like, “Oh, that’s a good quote. Let me just say it again.”

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. (laughter)

Sam Fragoso
Like they have to do something else.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Yeah. And yes, it’s interesting. Like, it puts you in a project together.

Sam Fragoso
Yeah, ideally.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Sam calls his show a car ride where he owns the car, but he isn’t driving. So occasionally, if a guest wants to take a different route, he has to be along for the ride. At times I find you to be — I mean this is a compliment — an insistent passenger. (laughter).

Sam Fragoso
Yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
And I’m thinking about a conversation of yours that I really liked with Kara Swisher, this sort of iconically confident (chuckles) tech journalist who the Silicon Valley CEOs they’re a little bit afraid of. And you two had exceptionally different energy, kind of opposite ends of the spectrum.

Sam Fragoso
Yes.

Lilah Raptopoulos
And she was moving so fast when she was talking that she was actually texting during the interview. And at one point you said, “Are you texting?” (laughter)

Sam Fragoso
Yeah. “You were writing back during the interview?”

Kara Swisher
To my children. Yes. I’m sorry. They rate higher than you do.

Sam Fragoso
I don’t want to rate above them.

Kara Swisher
No, that’s right. My son had a question about dinner. He’s 6’4 and he needs food, so I have to always feed him or else he’ll eat me.

Sam Fragoso
I don’t respond well to people doing a bad job. Period.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm.

Sam Fragoso
And so in that interview —  I respect Kara Swisher enormously —  but I found that if she’s going to text during an interview, then I’m going to let the listeners know that she is texting. And it wasn’t texting once. It was . . . I . . . by the time I called it out, she had written a little novel like it . . . It wasn’t like, oh, I’m not like that.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm.

Sam Fragoso
I’m not that pushy. I kind of think she was just being Kara Swisher.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, I thought it was a good representation of her. (chuckles)

Sam Fragoso
I didn’t take it personally. And I thought, this is actually going to be funny, I’m going to just kind of “Kara Swisher” Kara Swisher.

Lilah Raptopoulos
(Laughter) Yeah.

Sam Fragoso
And also, although Karen and I have very different styles, we’re actually after a lot of the same things. We want people to be honest. We want people to be vulnerable and forthright. We want people to not be full of shit. I just find that my way works for me. That setting a space that is safe and without judgment and honest and open-hearted is how I think people are more willing and open to share themselves.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I’m curious how you think what makes a good listener? How can we be better listeners?

Sam Fragoso
I don’t know if you can teach that. And I know there are couples therapists that will disagree with me. But I think you got to be invested in people to want to hear their stories. So I think it’s less about listening and more about finding ways and reasons to be invested in other people. When it comes to listening, you’ve got to find your entry point at. You have to find the reason they’ll make you care and show up and stay interested.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm. Sam, this is so interesting. It was such a pleasure. Thanks so much for being on the show.

Sam Fragoso
The pleasure was all mine.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
Sam’s show Talk Easy is produced by Pushkin. They also produce a sister show of ours at the FT, Hot Money. I’ve put links to a few episodes that I really like in the show notes.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
A few months ago, we asked our listeners to join us in a challenge. In the spirit of the show, you send us a topic that you think is boring, and we’re going to look into it and prove to you that it’s not. The submissions were great. They were things like, “Why are two wheels more fun than four wheels?” And “Who invented the paper plate?” We even did one on supermarket layouts. Today we bring you the next instalment. It’s a British topic. So we sent our London-based producer Lulu Smyth out to investigate.

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Lulu Smyth
A while ago we got this message from Kim Chebator in London.

Kim Chebator
When you have to get your citizenship in the UK, you’re required to take a written test. And the questions feel really random. So why to be a citizen of the UK, do you need to know the history of who won Olympics or the food of each of the nations?

Lulu Smyth
It’s a good question. And Kim actually isn’t the only person asking it.

Thom Brooks
I often call the test “the test for British citizenship that few British citizens can pass”.

Lulu Smyth
That’s Dr Thom Brooks. He’s a law professor who’s been pushing for reform of the citizenship test. As I was researching this story, I found lots of voices in favour of reform from all walks of life. Here’s comedian Sikisa, performing on the BBC comedy show Live at the Apollo.

Sikisa
In case anyone wants to get a British passport, I’m going to tell you how you get one. You’ve got to do this thing called Life at the UK test. Anyone heard of it? (applause) Well, if you’ve never heard of it, please look online. It is a very bad pub quiz. (laughter) I know this because I attempted to do it four times. I’ve been originally from Barbados and I failed it four times. And that was interesting for me because I’m an immigration lawyer. (laughter)

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Lulu Smyth
This is to say that the Life in the UK test has literally become a joke on national television. But I wanted to know what had prompted Kim to send it as a suggestion for a boring topic. So I called her up. She said that she took the test with her husband a few years ago.

Kim Chebator
As we began to study for the test, the questions ranged from, like, history questions, you know, about the former kings and queens, to what time are pubs open on Sundays. (chuckles)

Lulu Smyth
That is an important one.

Kim Chebator
If it is actually quite important. And as I was studying, I’d often walk out of my office and ask my British colleagues the questions and I’d say 50-50 whether they could actually know the answers.

Lulu Smyth
Kim sort of had fun studying for the test. She’s a US citizen and the stakes didn’t feel too high.

Kim Chebator
Probably didn’t hit me on that. You know, it was more than an administrative task. It was actually like becoming a citizen of a different country until the ceremony. But I would say for those people that really would do anything to come to the UK, I think about for them, it doesn’t feel like an administrative tasks. It feels like it’s like a life-saving, life-altering action.

Lulu Smyth
The thing about this test is that it can change the course of somebody’s life. But it feels obscure and outdated. To figure out what’s going on with it, I called up Thom, whom you heard earlier. Not only is he a law professor, he’s actually taken the test himself. So first I wanted to know what exactly is the test?

Thom Brooks
It’s 24 multiple-choice questions answered over 45 minutes. And you have to get 18 or more of these right. You need to get 70 per cent right. And it costs £50 a pop. So that’s effectively what it is. And you show up at a basically a test centre, you get logged on to a computer and start clicking away with your mouse and best of luck.

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Lulu Smyth
When the test was first introduced back in 2002, it was meant to help immigrants integrate into British society. And so you might expect certain things to be in it. When are the bank holidays? How do you file your taxes? A bit of that in there, but a lot of it isn’t. Instead, there are loads of random questions like “How tall is the London Eye in feet?” “What was the UK population in 1901?” And “What should you do if you spilled beer on someone in a pub?” The answer to that one, by the way, isn’t “Buy them a drink.” It’s just “Apologise.”

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Lulu Smyth
I would be interested to kind of hear what some of the questions that you encountered are. And obviously, I’m especially interested in the most absurd ones because I, yeah, I think it’s (chuckles) it can be quite baffling to read and hear of reports of people who’ve taken the test.

Thom Brooks
Oh, there’s lots of baffling things. I mean, like a lot of people, I went online, found a some version that claimed to be a version of the of the test. Failed it, like many of the British citizens I’ve come to know. You know, you want it quirky. If I may give you a couple of quirky quick things.

Lulu Smyth
Please.

Thom Brooks
One thing that’s odd is, you know, how many people out there know the name of the person who started the first curry house?

Lulu Smyth
The name of the person who started the first curry house is Sake Dean Mahomed. But you need to know way more than just that.

Thom Brooks
You need to know that he set up the first curry house. You need to know that its name was the Hindoostane Coffee House. You need to know it was on George Street, London. He was the only non-royal who has a spouse’s name you need to know. (chuckles) You need to know that they eloped and that she was, quote, an Irish girl. When they eloped in Ireland, and then he came back to Britain. It’s all hugely important to know to be a British citizen.

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Lulu Smyth
As Thom was studying, he was curious as to whether his students, who were experts in many of the topics in this test could answer the questions as well. To his surprise, they got a lot wrong and that led him to find another problem.

Thom Brooks
But I would ask them the question about how many MPs there were in Parliament. I was struck that all these politics students I was coming across, you know, none seemed to know the answer. And I found out, it was because none of the options in the test book were correct.

Lulu Smyth
Right.

Thom Brooks
Probably they changed the number. And that made me think, “Hang in a second, how many other questions here have a correct answer that is factually untrue?” And I found that there was quite a few, not all because there was someone sat in the Home Office looking to make the lives of me and other people miserable. But often a lot of the errors are because things have gone out of date.

Lulu Smyth
Thom says that he ordered the most recent print version of the Life in the UK test stumped only a couple of months ago. And when it arrived, it had a large picture of the Queen labelled as head of state. As we all know, King Charles became the head of state after the Queen passed away last September. So it seems kind of like there are two problems. There’s a test that nobody is actually bothering to check or update. And then there’s also just the fact that the test in itself is a kind of trivia game, not a genuine set of questions about civic society or like practical things that can help.

Thom Brooks
Yeah, I think that’s right. So, I mean, I think one of the biggest problems isn’t just that the test book goes out of date and no one from the government seems to know or frankly care that it has. It’s also an impractical guide to living in the UK. You do not need to know how to call the police, how to report a crime, or how to register with a GP. So kind of fundamentals of kind of daily life that many people might have, especially those who say have families that is missing.

Lulu Smyth
How did the test get this way? Well, a few reasons. Thom says that the parts that are blatantly wrong are in there because it’s just not getting updated fast enough. It’s a question of resources. But the bigger issue may be that as a society, we Brits just haven’t decided what’s important about being British, because the test actually started out being more practical. But then the test makers made a survey and everyone had a different idea of what was British. So the easier thing was to go more obscure. And instead of being a bridge for new immigrants to their new identity, the test has become a pub quiz.

Lulu Smyth
Thom, is there an argument that we don’t need citizenship tests in the first place? I mean, is this a good idea gone wrong? or should we just be doing something else entirely? I mean, it seems to me like if you’ve lived somewhere for like ten years, then do you really need to prove that you belong there? Like, surely you know enough about the culture already to qualify as British.

Thom Brooks
Excellent point. An excellent point. I mean, I think, you know, so effectively where I’m going is right here that if you wanted to use the basis for keeping people out for some reason, you don’t need to go through the bother of writing a book that’s 180 pages, has three thou-, about 3,000 facts in it, including 278 dates, in order to do that. Having it like this seems inefficient. It seems a real waste of energy and time. It’s turned a lot of people off. If anything, it’s made a lot of folks feel farther.

Lulu Smyth
Mm-hmm.

Thom Brooks
And I think, you know, you are . . . you raise a good point. This is said to me a few times by people that, you know, isn’t the right test of citizenship, that someone’s eligibility to be a citizen, that they have paid their taxes, without breaching the law, and have been a good neighbour for a period of time. What more might we want from that? Isn’t that a sign that someone has some . . . kind of done all the things and integrated in the ways that we want to do? And I think there’s a strong argument for it.

Lulu Smyth
Yeah. Thanks so much for coming on the show. This is an absolute pleasure.

Thom Brooks
A great joy. Thank you.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s the show this week. Thank you for listening to FT Weekend, the Life and Arts podcast of the Financial Times. If this is your first time listening, it’s nice to meet you. You should come check us out. Just search FT Weekend wherever you listen to podcasts. There are links to everything we mentioned today in the show notes alongside a special discount for an FT subscription. And we love hearing from you. You can email us at ftweekendpodcast@ft.com. The show is on Twitter @FTWeekendPod and I am on Instagram and Twitter @LilahRap. I ask a lot of behind the scenes questions that feed into the show on my Instagram. I am Lilah Raptopoulos, and here’s my talented team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smyth is our producer. Molly Nugent is our contributing producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco, with original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer and our global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Have a lovely weekend and we’ll find each other again next week.