About ten minutes into the comedy podcast The Adam Friedland Show‘s episode featuring comedian Amelia Dimoldenberg, something enigmatic happens that demands of the viewer and/or listener to opine: Is this real or is it theater? It’s the kind of moment that perhaps only makes sense on a show that’s spent the last year becoming a hybrid of late-night TV (of the more shaggy and discursive Dick Cavett/Tom Snyder era), public-access dadaism, and the world’s most committed deadpan role-play.
If you don’t know Dimoldenberg, she’s the creator and host of Chicken Shop Date, a hugely successful YouTube show. At this point, she sits atop the throne of the wildly popular, visual-first, personality-driven, medium-form interview format. She makes awkwardness glamorous, flirtation uncomfortable, and cringe irresistible to millions of committed eavesdroppers to her poultry-based liaisons.
Indeed, she is a virtuoso of the glance, the micro-expression, the “did-you-really-just-say-that?” half-smile. Her medium is eye contact. Her currency is facial tension. Her empire is built on the visual. Which is why the moment in question on The Adam Friedland Show lands with such unexpected force.
They’re mid-interview – Dimoldenberg perched on her vintage Eames-style chair, apparently between amusement and befuddlement – when Friedland’s ‘girlfriend’ (who appears to be actor/humble bookseller Maia LaFortezza, although the line between character and personhood is so porous here both on screen and off that ontology becomes effectively a fool’s errand) suddenly interrupts the taping. She storms into view only long enough for the camera operator to snap reflexively into a shuddery Zoo TV-era handheld mode, tracking Friedland as he stands, flustered, and follows her off set.
Then, the camera stops. It holds on Dimoldenberg. She sits alone in the frame, blinking. She looks like someone awaiting a dentist who may or may not be experiencing a breakdown in the hallway.
Off-camera, we hear it: a quietly ferocious, deeply raw and personal exchange between Friedland and the girlfriend. It’s an argument about whether the interview with Dimoldenberg has become, either by guest-choice or in execution, too flirtatious, too sexually charged. Whether something has crossed a line. The microphone picks up murmurs, half-whispers, barbed fragments. Adam sounds panicked, conciliatory. Maia sounds betrayed, or perhaps just performing betrayal, albeit extremely effectively.
It’s genuinely hard to tell if the moment is real or staged. Whether this is part of the show or some unmediated spillover of real relationship tension. It’s also hilarious and impossible to break away from. The most notable aspect of this most clippable sequence from a podcast primarily targeted for video consumption is that it plays (in every sense of the word) as audio-only.
While the camera holds unflinchingly on Dimoldenberg (is she in on it? Who the fuck knows…), the drama unfolds sonically, like a hyper-modern, possibly (probably?) agitprop spin on an old-time radio play farce broadcast from the adjacent room. A modern screwball in muffled tones. A lovers’ quarrel as performance art. A kind of podcast-within-a-podcast, smuggled into the purposefully visual medium that Friedland has taken such pains to build.
For a minute or two, you’re transfixed by an audio drama; stripped of faces, stripped of visual cues, stripped of the carefully cultivated awkwardness that Dimoldenberg herself regularly weaponizes. You’re forced to imagine the gestures, the pacing, the hand movements, the eye rolls. You’re filling in the scene yourself, and it becomes funnier, richer, and more charged precisely because you aren’t seeing it. The moment works because it lives in the listener’s head.
The Great Audio Extinction Event
Friedland’s show, like so many podcasts, now exists in two completely different forms. There’s the video version on YouTube, and then that gets clipped into TikTok/Instagram nuggets.
While The Adam Friedland Show sits somewhat apart by virtue of its Merv Griffin-evoking set (whose recreation is wholly cribbed from Seinfeld S9, Ep6), most major comedy podcasts are characterized in their visual representations by one or two people in branded hoodies talking into $400 microphones in what look like overlit office cubicles with a neon sign and a fake plant.
The news-and-culture podcasts aren’t much different, just moodier. Their video versions tend to look like designer conference rooms posing as citadels of thought. A bookshelf in the background with the same five books arranged by someone who hasn’t read them. A succulently lit wall of neutral taupes announcing prestige: bright enough to smooth the pores, dim enough to imply thoughtfulness.
The aesthetic is TED Talk meets Airbnb staging: a set designed to reassure viewers that they are watching smart people engaged in smart conversations. “We are here to discuss the collapse of civilization, but also please notice our mid-century floor lamp.”
Then there are the audio-only versions; streamed via RSS feeds by people folding laundry, commuting, or half-listening while doomscrolling. It’s the same content, but two experiences. Two mediums. Two emotional architectures.
This friction – between what is seen and what is only heard – has become the defining tension of modern podcasting. Because everything is becoming a video podcast. Perhaps, though not everything was meant to be seen.Is the Friedland off-screen quarrel a blueprint for what might disappear?
Once upon a time – meaning at its cultural peak somewhere around 2019 – audio-only podcasting was the last refuge for people who didn’t want to put on real pants. Usually slouched on couches that smelled faintly of someone else’s youth, intellectuals, comedians, snowflake-baiters who transmogrified beyond the cosplay, dilettantes, washed-up radio hosts, and the occasional novelist were all united by the belief that the culture could be moved by humans talking into microphones.
Podcasting was not just a medium; it was a vibe. Anti-television. Anti-image. Anti-grooming.
Those days are over. The push hasn’t been subtle. It’s been dramatic vs. the leisurely pace of historical change in broadcast technology. For some (but certainly not all) creators, it’s been involuntary, a kind of cultural conscription into video, whether they want to be seen or not.
Must We Hang Up the Headphones?
Watershed moments can be helpful cultural markers. Indeed, we’ve just had a doozy this past October, when Netflix and sportswriter Bill Simmons announced that the sovereign streamer would begin carrying video versions of Simmons’ The Ringer/Spotify podcasts, notionally transforming them seamlessly into streaming-era talk shows.
What makes the news feel almost poetic is that Simmons already tried something like this a decade earlier, when he attempted to turn his conversational style into a full-blown television format in 2016 with HBO’s Any Given Wednesday with Bill Simmons. That show looked and felt like a podcast in a suit.
Back then, the culture wasn’t ready. The show was stranded between mediums; too loose for prestige television, too produced for podcast energy, too early for the idea that long-form conversation in American entertainment could look like something. Simmons wasn’t wrong; he was simply ahead of the infrastructure, ahead of the audience, maybe even ahead of himself.
Cut to now: Netflix is not only ready, it’s hungry for exactly the thing that didn’t work on HBO. The world finally caught up to the format Simmons wanted to build; not so much traditional TV, but more an endlessly watchable hybrid space where podcasts become talk shows simply by virtue of the camera being on. His HBO show died on the operating table, but the organ transplant took a decade later. He didn’t change. The ecosystem did.
Now? Consumers apparently at least expect to be able to watch a podcast. Even the ones that don’t necessarily merit watching. So one might usefully ask, why has the video presentation of the previously audio-only podcast become de rigueur?
One answer is brutally mercenary: video scales, audio plateaus. YouTube pushes clips. TikTok pushes faces. Sponsors push visibility. Platforms reward whatever keeps eyes on the page longest. Audio-only still exists, but it no longer grows. It idles. It sustains. In a world governed by algorithms, invisibility is treated like a moral failing.
For a certain kind of legacy podcaster – the ones who built their empires before studio lighting became a line item – that pressure has become existential. You can feel it in Marc Maron’s recent decision to hang up the WTF mic: not a collapse in relevance, but a sense that the culture had shifted beneath him. His trademark sighs and emotional MRIs once set the gold standard for audio intimacy. Now they barely register on platforms built to privilege thumbnails and micro-expressions. The medium didn’t betray him so much as mutate into something his style was never built to chase.
Beyond this maelstrom of economics and fatigue lurks something older and more human: once a camera enters the room, an instinctive hunger awakens the urge to be seen. Or rather, the fear of not being seen in a culture where visibility itself reads as proof of life. A face confirms presence. A face confirms authenticity. A face sells. It’s not that audio creators always wanted this; it’s that refusing the camera now feels like refusing currency (both cultural and fiscal).
There are a few holdouts, but they appear almost monastic. Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan’s Red Scare remains perhaps the most notable example: defiantly audio-first, cultivating a deliberate anti-visual aura, their refusal less nostalgic than strategic. Nekrasova and Khachiyan are preserving a kind of mystique, an unlit zone where the voice is still the primary instrument. Yet even they orbit a gravitational pull they’re resisting; audio-only is now a position, not a default.
For all his personal and circumstantial connection to Nekrasova and Khachiyan, Friedland perhaps represents the other end of that evolution. The DIY YouTube auteur transforming a podcast into a late-night simulacrum, a satire of broadcast aesthetics that somehow, accidentally, becomes better television than actual television. A show that thrives because it merges forms: the intimate, voice-first energy of a podcast with the absurdist, uncomfortable, stylized visual grammar of YouTube. Then, in the Dimoldenberg/ LaFortezza incident, transcending both by reverting to audio when it matters most.
Podcasting Must Mutate
If Simmons represents the institutionalization of video podcasts, then perhaps Friedland represents the art. That dynamic – institution vs. art, visibility vs. intimacy – is exactly why it matters to look closely at what happens when a medium becomes visual-first.
We’ve seen this movie before. Whenever a medium evolves, something older evaporates. The talkies killed the silent era’s visual poetry; radio’s narrative intimacy dissolved the instant television arrived; the baroque sprawl of early blogging collapsed as video steadily became the lingua franca of the internet. Progress gives, but it also takes. It widens the sensory palette while shrinking the imaginative one. Each time, the cost is the same: a little less room for the audience to dream inside the frame.
Podcasting is undergoing the same mutation. The camera adds, but it also subtracts. Because audio, at its core, is collaborative. The host provides the voice; the listener supplies the room, the posture, the expression, the emotional palette. The space between words becomes a canvas. The listener becomes the co-author.
Which is why Friedland’s off-screen lovers’ quarrel feels so revelatory while rendering its veracity or otherwise somewhat moot. It reminds you what the medium once protected: the generative power of the unseen. The comedy, drama, and emotion that intensify precisely because you can’t see the faces involved. The mind does what cameras cannot: it builds the richest version of the moment.
This week, MTV announced that it’s shuttering its dedicated music-video channels for good. The very first video played on MTV at 12:01 AM on August 1, 1981, was Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star”. It was a declaration of conquest. It announced that video was the future. Now, decades later, the future it proclaimed has been inexorably eaten by the algorithm.
Within its own parochial evolution cycle, video is now killing the podcast star. Audio, however – slippery, intimate, invisible – endures as a creative territory where the imagination is still invited to play.
If imagination were the first medium, it might also be the last one worth protecting.