The Failure to Be Interesting

About halfway through Marc Maron’s recent interview with Barack Obama, the final episode in Maron’s extraordinary 16 year run as a podcaster, I realized I was zoning out. The goal of having Obama close things out, for Maron, was clearly to make the end of his podcasting journey feel profound and emotional, and I certainly got the logic. Obama had been on the show once before, toward the end of his presidency, and it had felt special. Maron wanted to evoke that feeling again, but this time Obama was speaking in platitudes, on topics where he either lacked deep expertise or hadn’t been meaningfully challenged in years. And he wasn’t giving himself to the encounter in the way that he had the previous time. It was a striking example of a fairly obvious but under-theorized truth: accomplished, influential, and highly respected people are often quite boring in public.