Is This Anything? 18
I've never met a human being – even (especially?) people who I've known deeply and for a long time – and thought to myself, "yeah, I'm confident I can explain why this person does what s/he does."
And yet, some big subset of biographies and magazine profiles seem premised on the idea that if you know a person's history you can meaningfully explain their major life choices. When you think about it, this is really weird.
A defining fact about a lot of modern interview podcasts is the status difference between the host and the guest.
For most of the interview podcasts I listen to, the host is much lower status than the guest – just an eager kid who invited a minor celebrity to come talk their book. As a result, the interviewer is deferential or obsequious, and the podcast is worse: it is just not fun to listen to someone suck up to somebody else, and without being pushed the interviewees say fewer interesting things.
Some interviews are the other way round: most of the guests on Joe Rogan are much lower status than he is, and it shows. I think Sasha Chapin wrote somewhere that Joe Rogan's big trick as an interviewer is feeling comfortable and status-equal to anyone, so when he has super high-profile guests it works pretty well – he'll talk to any president or nobelist as a conversation of equals. But for most of his guests, being on Rogan is just a massive opportunity, and they feel it, so you get the same over-deference problem but the other way around.
I suspect that in the legacy-media days, a big part of The Trick with interviews was that an institution could lend part of its credibility to an interviewer: maybe the guest was a bigger deal than the host as a person, but the station the interviewer worked for brought some institutional status as well.
I think the best conversations happen when both parties are at a similar status level, and (most importantly) have some fluidity in their status throughout the conversation: it's much more fun when you don't know from segment to segment who's going to play the upper hand.