Interviewers and monologuists
Question ratios, turn counts and the longest uninterrupted monologues we have measured.
Talk share tells you how much of an episode a host occupied. It does not tell you what they were doing with it. A host at 45% who spends that time asking questions is running a very different show from one at 45% who is trading stories.
Three measurements separate them: the share of all questions that came from the host, how often the conversation changed hands, and the longest anyone spoke without being interrupted.
| Podcast | Host's share of questions | Median turn changes | Longest monologue |
|---|---|---|---|
| SmartLess | 77% | 407 | 8m 48s |
| How I Built This with Guy Raz | 75% | 264 | 5m 22s |
| All-In | 72% | 171 | 32m 31s |
| Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard | 69% | 1,011 | 8m 39s |
| Masters in Business | 67% | 166 | 5m 35s |
| My First Million | 65% | 158 | 14m 20s |
| The Joe Rogan Experience | 60% | 825 | 16m 13s |
| Invest Like the Best | 58% | 78 | 10m 17s |
| The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett | 56% | 313 | 11m 1s |
| The Tim Ferriss Show | 53% | 134 | 36m 12s |
| Huberman Lab | 52% | 249 | 20m 9s |
| Lex Fridman Podcast | 50% | 365 | 15m 53s |
| Lenny's Podcast | 49% | 151 | 7m 15s |
| The Knowledge Project | 38% | 121 | 23m 16s |
Interviewers
At the top of the table sits SmartLess, where 77% of the questions in a typical episode come from the host. That is the signature of a proper interview: the host is there to extract something, and the guest is there to answer.
Conversations
Lower down, the ratio evens out. When both sides are asking questions at similar rates, as on The Knowledge Project, the format has stopped being an interview and become a conversation. Neither party is running it. These episodes also tend to show far more turn changes, because nobody is waiting for their turn to finish a prepared answer.
And then there are monologues
The right-hand column is the longest single stretch we have measured of one person speaking without the other saying anything. The record is 36m 12s, on The Tim Ferriss Show. Neither a pre-roll nor an ad read, both of which are stripped before anything is measured.
Read that column together with the show's format rather than on its own. On a narrated programme a long monologue is simply the narration doing its job, and the figure says nothing about anyone being talked over. It is on the conversational shows, where a long uninterrupted run is not the format, that the number is actually telling you something.
A caveat we would rather state than bury. Question counts come from counting question marks in the transcript, and storytellers produce plenty of those without asking anything: "and I was like, what?" is punctuated as a question. On comedy and storytelling shows the rhetorical rate runs between 60% and 80%, so these are reviewed by hand and the rhetorical ones removed before publication. It is the softest measurement on the site, and the methodology page says so at more length.