Bobbi Althoff
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For those who’ve stumbled throughout a clip of an interview from Bobbi Althoff’s The Actually Good Podcast on the web and visited her YouTube channel, you is perhaps shocked by the outline which labels her “a social media star with over 80 followers,” contemplating she’s amassed a complete of 936,000 subscribers on the platform and a further 2.8 million followers and relying on Instagram. The following sentence, nevertheless, which describes Althoff, 26, as “a grasp interviewer with weeks of expertise interviewing celebrities,” is an correct summation of each her profession and the controversy that has surrounded her deadpan web persona since her viral interview with Offset. In their dialog slightly over a month in the past, the rapper turned the tables on the host whose model has been constructed on nonchalance, telling her, “You want slightly little bit of seasoning,” when she reluctantly shook his hand through the episode. “You’re like a plain piece of rooster.”
“I might name her the queen of the perimeter of cringe,” says Vinnie Potestivo, an Emmy Award–profitable TV govt who has developed expertise for collection resembling MTV’s Punk’d, The Osbournes and Boiling Factors. “This concept of the media being on the perimeter of cringe just isn’t a brand new development. That is true, tried and examined. The distinction is most individuals see podcasting as unhealthy social media content material,” Potestivo provides. “And that is the place Bobbi truly received it proper. Bobbi’s like, you wanna see unhealthy social media content material? You wanna see a practice wreck?”
Therein lies the irony of the title The Actually Good Podcast, which gained notoriety when Althoff, who declined to talk with The Hollywood Reporter for this text, interviewed Drake in July of 2023. The main points of how the previous TikTok mommy influencer managed to land the famous person Toronto rapper as a visitor are shrouded in thriller, very similar to the unexplained choice to take away the interview from her platform one month later, although Althoff advised Cosmopolitan in August she merely DM’d Drake after he appreciated a earlier interview of hers and began following her. Since then, her interviews with Mark Cuban, Shaq, Tyga and, most lately, Colombian rapper and singer Maluma have gained thousands and thousands of views, with audiences seemingly discovering themselves intrigued by her indifference to those public figures, turned off by her dismissive disposition or questioning whether or not it’s all an act.
When requested why she began doing interviews as an alter ego versus herself on the Might 10 episode of Tammin Sursok and Roxy Manning’s podcast Lady on Prime earlier this yr, Althoff replied, “Myself doesn’t get views, I needed to [go] the place the cash was.”
“My subject is the quote-unquote humor in these interviews that Bobbi conducts,” says music journalist Naima Cochrane. “The optics of it with Black males, particularly, are rooted in the truth that she is a reasonably white girl who’s clueless about Black tradition and hip-hop tradition and doesn’t care to be told about Black tradition and hip-hop tradition. Your complete humor of it’s like, oh, this white woman doesn’t care to be right here. Why is that humorous to us?”
What underlies Cochrane’s frustration is identical concern that led sports activities journalist Jemele Hill to specific her displeasure with Althoff’s rise to fame on X, previously generally known as Twitter, when she wrote on Sept. 25, “I don’t discover a majority of these interviews significantly fulfilling or fascinating. As a substitute, it simply sadly factors out how actual Hip-Hop journalism has been virtually erased.”
“Having recognized from the within what Black writers and Black journalists and Black media figures usually should undergo to land a majority of these high-profile interviews, the opposite a part of it’s that, largely talking, Black media is frozen out of this entry,” Hill tells THR. “Quite a lot of these Black celebrities and entertainers have largely white PR groups and people PR groups usually willingly ignore Black media and Black journalists, or they simply don’t see any worth in chatting with Black individuals who signify a tradition that made that Black artists well-known and that they nonetheless stay very linked to. I’m not hating on Bobbi Althoff and the unbelievable success she’s had in such a brief time frame on this format, however it does deliver plenty of consciousness to what’s an even bigger subject and that’s how usually Black tradition being coated by Black folks is minimized and erased.”
Althoff has been accused of copying the interview type of different fashionable Black hosts resembling Ziwe and Humorous Marco, who’s appeared on her present. Her podcast has additionally drawn comparisons to Zach Galifianakis’ Between Two Ferns and Amelia Dimoldenberg’s Hen Store Date, which equally put company in awkward positions.
“These satirical sit-downs can be slightly gotcha-y, however there was some analysis, there have been some notecards, an precise interview was performed. With Althoff, it very a lot looks like there’s no prep,” says Cochrane. “As any individual who conducts interviews for a dwelling, I discover it extremely disrespectful and a waste of time.”
Althoff confirmed as a lot when she advised advised Cosmo, “There’s no prep, and that’s the enjoyable of it. I feel that’s why celebrities are right down to do it. They understand it’s a personality, and we simply wing it. It’s not an actual interview. I’m not making an attempt to get hard-hitting details about you — I’m not making an attempt to uncover something. It’s only a dialog. It’s actually a parody of an excellent interview.”
Throughout Offset’s interview with Althoff, he asks why she wished to get to know him, to which she responds, “I didn’t … Your workforce reached out to mine.” The Atlanta artists shouts out “Cap,” a slang time period meaning “lie,” suggesting it was Althoff’s workforce actually that requested the sit-down. Both approach, the query of what the payoff is for these A-listers who flock to her platform nonetheless begs solutions.
“Podcasters are seen as robust word-of-mouth authorities,” says Potestivo, who’s additionally the host of I Have a Podcast. “She’s getting company as a result of podcasters are essentially the most impactful media personalities in terms of creating phrase of mouth. If you may get different folks to share your content material, and if visibility occasions shareability equals discoverability, then what Bobbi’s doing is type of sensible.”
As a former music label advertising govt, Cochrane disagrees with the worth proposition for artists. “What’s fascinating to me is that her stuff doesn’t dwell. She pulls episodes down,” she says, referring to Althoff’s removing of her interviews with Drake and Lil Yachty. “If my workforce introduced this to me, my query would have been, ‘How is that going to drive our album gross sales?’ She doesn’t even know what her company are there to advertise.”
Within the wake of Althoff’s controversial chat with Offset, her subsequent interview with Scarlett Johansson raised eyebrows even increased for what some viewers perceived to be a unique dialog type altogether — one during which Althoff truly seems inquisitive about and educated about her topic. Johansson can be, notably, the primary white girl Althoff seems to have spoken with for her podcast.
“Perhaps it’s simply the optics of it, and clearly as a Black girl in America, I’m far more delicate to optics and to the kind of message it’s sending to people who find themselves outdoors of the bubble of the neighborhood. However right here you will have this very younger — or young-looking, as a result of she’s not as younger as folks suppose she is, and I feel that’s additionally very intentional — girl and her whole demeanor and perspective in these interviews when she’s with Black celebrities versus when she’s with white ones, is type of apparent,” says Hill.
“I’m not calling Bobbi Althoff some type of racist,” provides Hill. “I don’t know this girl and I might by no means say that about her, however I do suppose that there’s some stage of understanding that how she interacts with Black celebrities performs and appears in another way than it does when she’s with different folks.”
Black audiences’ poor reception of Althoff could result in hesitation from Black artists to seem on her present sooner or later, which is one thing Hill wish to see.
“I do know Black entertainers who’re very intentional about who they sit down with, who they permit to have entry to them, and who they permit to inform their tales. I wish to see extra Black entertainers be extra intentional about that,” she says, noting “there’s sufficient accountability to go round” in terms of Althoff’s newfound fame and its potential to proceed to rise.
On the finish of the day, will probably be viewers who’ve the ultimate say about whether or not Althoff’s antics are price consuming, says Potestivo.
“To be actually blunt, it’s an indie podcast, that means a community can’t be held accountable for canceling this,” he provides. “The old-school model of what we might do as an viewers if we didn’t like one thing is ensure the platform that was supporting her wasn’t supporting her, proper? On this case, it’s for us to determine what occurs subsequent.”