If you’ve stumbled across a clip of an interview from Bobbi Althoff’s The Really Good Podcast on the internet and visited her YouTube channel, you might be surprised by the description which labels her “a social media star with over 80 followers,” considering she’s amassed a total of 936,000 subscribers on the platform and an additional 2.8 million followers and counting on Instagram. The next sentence, however, which describes Althoff, 26, as “a master interviewer with weeks of experience interviewing celebrities,” is an accurate summation of both her career and the controversy that has surrounded her deadpan internet persona since her viral interview with Offset. In their conversation a little over a month ago, the rapper turned the tables on the host whose brand has been built on nonchalance, telling her, “You need a little bit of seasoning,” when she reluctantly shook his hand during the episode. “You’re like a plain piece of chicken.” 

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“I would call her the queen of the fringe of cringe,” says Vinnie Potestivo, an Emmy Award–winning TV executive who has developed talent for series such as MTV’s Punk’d, The Osbournes and Boiling Points. “This idea of the media being on the fringe of cringe is not a new trend. This is true, tried and tested. The difference is most people see podcasting as bad social media content,” Potestivo adds. “And this is where Bobbi actually got it right. Bobbi’s like, you wanna see bad social media content? You wanna see a train wreck?”

Therein lies the irony of the title The Really Good Podcast, which gained notoriety when Althoff, who declined to speak with The Hollywood Reporter for this article, interviewed Drake in July of 2023. The details of how the former TikTok mommy influencer managed to land the superstar Toronto rapper as a guest are shrouded in mystery, much like the unexplained decision to remove the interview from her platform one month later, though Althoff told Cosmopolitan in August she simply DM’d Drake after he liked a previous interview of hers and started following her. Since then, her interviews with Mark Cuban, Shaq, Tyga and, most recently, Colombian rapper and singer Maluma have gained millions of views, with audiences seemingly finding themselves intrigued by her indifference to these public figures, turned off by her dismissive disposition or wondering whether it’s all an act. 

When asked why she started doing interviews as an alter ego versus herself on the May 10 episode of Tammin Sursok and Roxy Manning’s podcast Woman on Top earlier this year, Althoff replied, “Myself doesn’t get views, I had to [go] where the money was.”

“My issue is the quote-unquote humor in these interviews that Bobbi conducts,” says music journalist Naima Cochrane. “The optics of it with Black men, especially, are rooted in the fact that she is a pretty white woman who is clueless about Black culture and hip-hop culture and doesn’t care to be informed about Black culture and hip-hop culture. The entire humor of it is like, oh, this white girl doesn’t care to be here. Why is that funny to us?”

What underlies Cochrane’s frustration is the same concern that led sports journalist Jemele Hill to express her displeasure with Althoff’s rise to fame on X, formerly known as Twitter, when she wrote on Sept. 25, “I don’t find these types of interviews particularly enjoyable or interesting. Instead, it just sadly points out how real Hip-Hop journalism has been practically erased.”

“Having known from the inside what Black writers and Black journalists and Black media figures generally have to go through to land these types of high-profile interviews, the other part of it is that, largely speaking, Black media is frozen out of this access,” Hill tells THR. “A lot of these Black celebrities and entertainers have mostly white PR teams and those PR teams often willingly ignore Black media and Black journalists, or they just don’t see any value in speaking to Black people who represent a culture that made that Black artists famous and that they still remain very connected to. I’m not hating on Bobbi Althoff and the incredible success she’s had in such a short period of time in this format, but it does bring a lot of awareness to what is a bigger issue and that is how often Black culture being covered by Black people is minimized and erased.”

Althoff has been accused of copying the interview style of other popular Black hosts such as Ziwe and Funny Marco, who’s appeared on her show. Her podcast has also drawn comparisons to Zach Galifianakis’ Between Two Ferns and Amelia Dimoldenberg’s Chicken Shop Date, which similarly put guests in awkward positions. 

“Those satirical sit-downs would be a little gotcha-y, but there was some research, there were some notecards, an actual interview was conducted. With Althoff, it very much seems like there’s no prep,” says Cochrane. “As somebody who conducts interviews for a living, I find it highly disrespectful and a waste of time.”

Althoff confirmed as much when she told told Cosmo, “There’s no prep, and that’s the fun of it. I think that’s why celebrities are down to do it. They know it’s a character, and we just wing it. It’s not a real interview. I’m not trying to get hard-hitting information about you — I’m not trying to uncover anything. It’s just a conversation. It’s really a parody of a good interview.”

During Offset’s interview with Althoff, he asks why she wanted to get to know him, to which she responds, “I didn’t … Your team reached out to mine.” The Atlanta artists shouts out “Cap,” a slang term that means “lie,” suggesting it was Althoff’s team in fact that requested the sit-down. Either way, the question of what the payoff is for these A-listers who flock to her platform still begs answers.

“Podcasters are seen as strong word-of-mouth authorities,” says Potestivo, who’s also the host of I Have a Podcast. “She’s getting guests because podcasters are the most impactful media personalities when it comes to creating word of mouth. If you can get other people to share your content, and if visibility times shareability equals discoverability, then what Bobbi’s doing is kind of brilliant.”

As a former music label marketing executive, Cochrane disagrees with the value proposition for artists. “What’s interesting to me is that her stuff doesn’t live. She pulls episodes down,” she says, referring to Althoff’s removal of her interviews with Drake and Lil Yachty. “If my team brought this to me, my question would have been, ‘How is that going to drive our album sales?’ She doesn’t even know what her guests are there to promote.” 

In the wake of Althoff’s controversial chat with Offset, her subsequent interview with Scarlett Johansson raised eyebrows even higher for what some viewers perceived to be a different conversation style altogether — one in which Althoff actually appears interested in and knowledgeable about her subject. Johansson is also, notably, the first white woman Althoff appears to have spoken with for her podcast.

“Maybe it’s just the optics of it, and obviously as a Black woman in America, I’m much more sensitive to optics and to the type of message it is sending to people who are outside of the bubble of the community. But here you have this very young — or young-looking, because she’s not as young as people think she is, and I think that’s also very intentional — woman and her entire demeanor and attitude in these interviews when she’s with Black celebrities versus when she’s with white ones, is kind of obvious,” says Hill. 

“I’m not calling Bobbi Althoff some kind of racist,” adds Hill. “I don’t know this woman and I would never say that about her, but I do think that there is some level of understanding that how she interacts with Black celebrities plays and looks differently than it does when she’s with other people.”

Black audiences’ poor reception of Althoff may lead to hesitation from Black artists to appear on her show in the future, which is something Hill would like to see.

“I know Black entertainers who are very intentional about who they sit down with, who they allow to have access to them, and who they allow to tell their stories. I would like to see more Black entertainers be more intentional about that,” she says, noting “there’s enough responsibility to go around” when it comes to Althoff’s newfound fame and its potential to continue to rise.

At the end of the day, it will be viewers who have the final say about whether Althoff’s antics are worth consuming, says Potestivo.

“To be really blunt, it’s an indie podcast, meaning a network can’t be held responsible for canceling this,” he adds. “The old-school version of what we would do as an audience if we didn’t like something is make sure the platform that was supporting her wasn’t supporting her, right? In this case, it’s for us to figure out what happens next.”