It just felt like a good time to make a move. You could tell Mike wasn’t really into it.” That wouldn’t be fair to Sarah. And I didn’t want to leave behind something where people would be like, “Yeah, that show was good until the last six months. I know myself well enough to know I will start slacking off once my brain starts getting excited about other things. Sarah and I talk about this a lot, but I just don’t think that works with the way we do the show. I wanted to find out what it was like in San Francisco at the time. I wanted to interview people who were there, people who lost loved ones, epidemiologists.
For example, I’m really interested in the HIV epidemic and had thought about doing a series around that for You’re Wrong About. And I started thinking about other stories I wanted to tell. So part of me feels like I was reaching the end of my attention span for the You’re Wrong About format. I worked in human rights for 11 years before I became a journalist, and I moved between jobs every few years for that entire career. I know myself well enough to know there’s always been a two-to-three-year fuse for me. There were these little pangs of procrastination: “Oh, I don’t know if I want to research this yet,” or I’d put off editing. Like the show had moved on from me, or I had moved on from it. And as we started to come out of that hard-core period - for me, that was February or March I hadn’t been vaccinated yet but was moving up the line - I just started getting this sense that the show was ending in this weird way. Why aren’t people talking about this all the time? You start reading up on something like, oh, I don’t know, Iran-Contra, and you’re like, Holy shit, this is a big deal. It started to feel like we were actually influencing what people believed about the world. For a long time, it felt like Sarah and I were broadcasting into nothingness, and suddenly our listenership blew up and people were talking about us. You’re Wrong About also became so much more popular during lockdown. If I wasn’t recording an episode, I was editing or researching an episode. You’ve briefly discussed this on the show already, but could you talk about why you decided to step away from You’re Wrong About?įor me, so much of the experience of You’re Wrong About was tied to lockdown.
We talked about his decision to leave the show, its significance, and what comes next. “Can I just comment on how weird it is that anybody would want to know my thoughts and my methods?” said Hobbes, who is currently in Berlin, when I reached out earlier this week. And as a longtime listener of the show, I felt compelled to memorialize the moment. This marked Hobbes’s third appearance on the program. (Hobbes also appeared on a recent midweek installment of WNYC’s On the Media, in which he walked Brooke Gladstone through the whole Bad Art Friend thing. Meanwhile, Hobbes can still be heard on Maintenance Phase, a podcast that applies a distinctly You’re About Wrong–esque critical lens to questionable health fads and cultural ideas, which he co-hosts with the writer Aubrey Gordon. Marshall will continue hosting the show, backed by a line-up of guest co-hosts, for the foreseeable future. You’re Wrong About devotees shouldn’t despair, however. It was a frankly refreshing explanation, one that feels true to the spirit of the show and its hosts. In the latest episode, Hobbes briefly mentions that the choice to step away was a personal one, a mixture of needing a creative reboot and the juice that can come only with new projects. Instead, we’re seeing a radical shake-up. After all, “ it was capitalism all along!”) Given the state of the podcast business these days, I started to half wonder if we were due to see Marshall and Hobbes announce a lucrative Spotify deal any day now. From the outside looking in, it seemed You’re Wrong About was on an ascent of sorts: an underground indie darling that was now on a trajectory toward something much larger. Since You’re Wrong About debuted, in 2018, its deeply researched, funny, and heartfelt reexaminations of the past have helped the show accrue a steady, solid fan base, one that positively exploded during the pandemic as more people sought out new podcasts to consume as well as a sense of companionship during lockdown there was even a glowing write-up in The New Yorker. The announcement came as a bit of a surprise, to me at least.
The most recent episode of You’re Wrong About, the beloved podcast by journalists Sarah Marshall and Michael Hobbes that reconsiders a person or event that has been miscast in the public imagination, brought with it a piece of big news: Hobbes is stepping back from the show.