/lit/ - Literature

So I was drinking and watching Bryan Magee videos on repeat last night, and I got to thinking "why doesn't this exist anymore." Then I went down a rabbit hole of looking into late night talk shows and game shows and podcasts and the different formats they use and what function that form conveys.

It's kind of interesting actually. Take the late night talk show, which has a desk stage right and a couch stage left, with the host always upstaging (literally) his guests in a kind of patriarchal power relationship. It's been a fairly consistent format since the fifties, which itself comes out of the American minstrel show: the opening is a monologue and theme song where the host, a viral white american socialite, does a little dance and hypes up the audience, then they have a series of guests who are always placed at a stage inferiority to the host, and finally they end the segment with negro music.

Bryan Magee on the other hand is more of a podcast type, with both host and guest being places equally on a couch and having a long in-depth discussion. There is an introductory monologue, but the negro music is dropped from the end.

Podcasts have somewhat revitalized the format, my favourite type being the co-host podcast where you've got two people with decent chemistry riffing off eachother on various topics. This is actually somewhat similar to a traditional comedy due, or japanese manzai, of which Abbott and Costello are probably the best example. However this kind of format doesn't lend itself as well to interviews, which is probably why its revitalization in podcasts hasn't led to a simultaneous revitalization of the public intellectual.

So anyways I was wondering why there isn't a bigger revitalization of "public intellectuals" in the media sphere. It seems like all the necessary infrastructure is there, through podcast and video hosting sites like YouTube and Spotify, yet the format seems to have reached its peak with Bryan Magee and been in terminal decline ever since. Podcasts as they currently are really seem to cater to the lowest demographic, with people like Sneako and Andrew Tate, and the closest our generation has gotten to producing a "public intellectual" is that zionist shill Jordan Peterson. So my question to you, /lit/, is how would you design a talk show with a focus on featuring/creating public intellectuals? Keep in mind McLuhan's famous quip "the medium is the message."

For the mods, pic related is a book for this feel.