Interviews Everyone Needs to See at Least Once
Twenty-four conversations with writers, thinkers, and artists worth more than the time they take.
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This is a list of interviews I keep going back to, twenty-four of them, each one worth your time and each with a note on why. I kept to a narrow window, roughly the 1950s through the 1970s, or people who were shaped by those years. A few are only voices, no picture at all.
There is something that happens when you watch someone think out loud with no clock on them. You lean in. You stop scrolling, and for a little while you are in the room.
Many of these were nearly lost. Interviews from that era were often taped without sound and dubbed over later, or filed in an archive no one visits, or left on a reel until someone finally thought to digitize it, and for so many of the people I most wanted here, no sit-down survives at all. Their speeches I could pull by the dozen, but a conversation, someone simply asking them what they thought and letting them answer, was never filmed.
I gathered what I could from YouTube, where you can watch every one for free, though even that is fickle. Channels vanish. Videos get pulled. A link that works today is dead next year, so watch them while they are here.
I came to a lot of these people through the page.
Angela Davis showed me, in Women, Race & Class, that the things I had been taught to keep apart, race and labor and the lives of women, were one argument the whole time, and reading Russell’s The Conquest of Happiness I found his stubborn claim that happiness is not something you find but something you build, by turning your attention outward, toward curiosity and people and the world, instead of chewing forever on yourself.
And Striking Thoughts was Bruce Lee refusing every dogma, every borrowed answer, telling me to take what was useful and throw the rest out, and he was dead at thirty-two and still sounded more alive than most of the living.
Each one sent me looking for the person behind the book, wondering what they sounded like when someone simply asked.
I curated this for you.
If it is the kind of work you want more of, a paid subscription is what keeps me digging these up and writing these stories.
Share it too, because a voice only carries as far as the people willing to pass it on.
I. Liberation & Power
Malcolm X — Berkeley Interview (1963) ▶
He is twenty-six here and slowly it becomes clear that the Berkeley academics who think they are conducting the interview are the ones being taken apart. The best stretch is where he takes the word violence and hands it back to the people who coined it for him, pointing out that the man struggling against the rope gets called violent while the lyncher never does. His fox-and-wolf breakdown of the white liberal is worth the whole half hour on its own, because he grants them the same appetite as the conservatives and only better manners.
John Trudell — Power, Authority and Tribal Genocide (1994)▶
A poet talking to a late-night radio host, and somewhere in the small hours he lands the thing you cannot unhear, which is that authority is not the same as power. Money, armies, God-as-boss, all of it authority, and authority stays nervous, always watching what you say, because underneath it holds no real power at all. What Trudell calls power is something quieter, closer to knowing exactly who you are. He takes his time getting there, and it flattens you when he arrives.
Edward Said — On Orientalism ▶
Said walks you patiently through how the West built a whole body of “knowledge” about the East that had little to do with the people actually living there, and how that invention was never innocent, always serving the question of who got to rule whom. Then he tells a story about Oklahoma City, when every network phoned him for the “Middle Eastern angle” before Timothy McVeigh’s name ever surfaced, and his whole thesis lands in about ninety seconds.
Civil Rights Leaders in Dialogue (1963) — feat. Martin Luther King Jr., Roy Wilkins, James Farmer, Whitney Young, James Forman ▶
Weeks before the March on Washington, National Educational Television put five of the movement’s leaders in one room and let them argue strategy live, with no script. They disagree about priorities, about white liberals, about how much the vote can really fix, and you can feel the friction as they work it out in real time. King keeps insisting this is only the beginning, since good legislation has never once enforced itself.
Angela Davis — What It Means to Be a Revolutionary (1972)▶
Filmed while the country still had her pegged as the dangerous woman on the wanted poster, Davis is calm and exact about a word everyone else was using to frighten people. She refuses to let revolutionary mean violence, and shows how that equation gets manufactured on purpose, to cut the revolutionary off from the ordinary people she comes from. Her point about who actually starts the violence, always the ones sitting on the monopoly of it, reframes the whole conversation.
Black Leaders (1973) — feat. Angela Davis, Kwame Ture, Fannie Lou Hamer ▶
This is ninety minutes of Tony Brown putting more than a dozen Black leaders in one room and letting them genuinely disagree, which is the rare thing about it. Davis argues that racism is engineered to keep white and Black workers from noticing they are both being robbed. Fannie Lou Hamer says that middle class or no class, it makes no difference as long as you are Black. Stokely Carmichael and the congressmen go at each other over whether you change the system from the inside or tear it down, and nobody smooths it over, which is exactly why it is worth your time.
Eduardo Galeano — Chronicler of Latin America’s “Open Veins” ▶
Galeano sits with Amy Goodman and reads from his calendar of human history, one story for each day, and you quickly understand why John Berger called publishing him publishing the enemy of forgetfulness. He reads the entry on how the United States quietly scrubbed Nelson Mandela from its terrorist watch list only in 2008, after sixty years, and another proposing wanted posters for the real crimes of kidnapping countries and trafficking in fear. What stays with you is his standard for what he keeps: a story survives only if it is better than silence.
Paulo Freire — An Incredible Conversation ▶
Freire is near the end of his life here, almost seventy-five, gentle and unhurried, refusing even to be called a literacy expert because his real subject was always how people learn to read the world and not just the word. The moving stretch is where he defends two things at once, the right of poor people to speak in their own beautiful language and their right to command the dominant one, since the more fluent the oppressed become in it the harder they can push back. He closes on the line he built a life around, that we did not come to keep the world as it is, we came to remake it.
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II. Letters (Writers & Poets)
James Baldwin & Nikki Giovanni — A Conversation (1971) ▶
Two writers across a table in London, and the pull of it is that the younger one does not defer to him for a second. Giovanni keeps pressing Baldwin on why a Black man brutalized all day comes home and brutalizes the people who love him, and he answers by going back to his own father, who raised nine children on twenty-seven dollars and fifty cents a week until the pressure drove him mad. She holds out for power and he holds out for morality, and they spend the hour circling the gap between those two words.
Ama Ata Aidoo — 1987 Interview ▶
Here you get to watch an interviewer be thoroughly outmatched without the guest ever raising her voice. When he asks whether Africa can forgive the West, Aidoo refuses the frame and tells him forgiveness is beside the point, that Europe took five hundred years of human beings, gold, cocoa, and timber and handed back leftovers dressed up as aid. Good morning and thank you, she says, were never going to salt anybody’s food forever.
Toni Morrison — on Beloved (1987) ▶
Talking with Charlayne Hunter-Gault the year Beloved came out, Morrison keeps returning to Margaret Garner, the real fugitive who cut her daughter's throat rather than see her taken back into slavery. She had no right to do it, Morrison says, and I would have done the same thing. Enslaved women were never allowed to be mothers, made to bear children they could not name or keep, so Garner claimed the one authority the world denied her and claimed it all the way down.
Maya Angelou — Bill Moyers Special Report (1973) ▶
Moyers grew up a hundred miles from Angelou in the same segregated South, and the two of them talk like people comparing notes from opposite sides of a line neither could see across as children. She argues that society knows exactly who she is and simply prefers not to cope, because a label saves you from having to deal with the human underneath it. Her reading of “Harlem Hopscotch” near the end, and her explanation of the counter-rhythms a white critic will miss, shows you the whole thing she means about being seen in full.
Audre Lorde & Marge Piercy — Contemporary Woman Poets ▶
The readings are the reason to watch this one. Lorde says poetry is one of the few places we are allowed to touch emotion and be reached by other people, then proves it with “Chain,” built from a news story about three girls returned by a court to the father who fathered their children. Piercy answers with “Rape Poem,” which lists all the ways rape differs from being hit by a truck or bitten by a snake, the difference always being what people ask you afterward. Between poems they talk about a reading as a loop rather than a performance, the audience handing strength back to the poet who wrote from it in the first place.
bell hooks — Speaking Freely ▶
hooks makes a case you rarely hear, that in a culture built on domination, choosing to love is the actual heroic act, not the conquering we usually hang our hero stories on. She is sharp on how censorship works through manners rather than bans, the way people assume they already know what a feminist or a Black intellectual will say and stop listening before you speak. She also draws a line that unsettles her own audiences, that care is not the same as love, and that a parent can care for a child deeply while the weekly beating remains no kind of love at all.
Chinua Achebe — with Bill Moyers ▶
Achebe explains why storytelling is a threat to anyone in power, since the storyteller keeps a different agenda than the emperor and outlasts both the warrior and the war. He describes the moment, reading Heart of Darkness in a Nigerian university, when he realized he was one of the savages on the beach and not on the steamer as he had always assumed, which is why someone had to go write a different story. He ends on listening, on how the powerful stop hearing the people they talk at, and why that has to change.
Lorraine Hansberry — Playwright at Work ▶
The one filmed conversation of Hansberry working through her craft, precise enough to make you wish there were fifty more. She separates naturalism from realism cleanly, saying naturalism just photographs the garbage can while realism puts in not only what is but what could be. The rest circles a scene from her unfinished play about Toussaint Louverture, landing on her conviction that an oppressive society degrades everyone caught inside it, the enslaver as surely as the enslaved.
Ursula K. Le Guin — Listening to the Unheard Voices ▶
Le Guin, at eighty-five, makes invented worlds sound like the most practical thing in literature, since made-up fiction throws a door open where realism keeps them shut. She turns skeptical on the word progress, asking progress toward what, pointing out that you can go forward into evil as easily as anywhere else. She lands on the unheard voices, the women and everyone else the dominant white imperial voice talked over, and says listening to them is the only way out of the place that voice has gotten us.
III. Philosophy & Meaning
Viktor Frankl — Self-Actualization Is Not the Goal ▶
Frankl explains himself through flying. A pilot crossing a strong headwind has to aim well above the field, because the wind will drag the plane down, and pointing straight at it means landing short. Overestimate where you are going, he says, and you arrive where you actually meant to. People are the same: take a person as they are and you get less than they could be, but treat them as the better version they might become and you help them get there. Happiness follows the same rule, never caught by aiming at it, only arriving once you have given yourself to something else.
Alan Watts — Interviewed by Studs Terkel (1960) ▶
Watts sits with Studs Terkel and refuses to be a salesman for Zen, since explaining it would be the hoax. What he circles instead is the way we confuse the sign with the thing, eating the menu instead of the dinner, living in words instead of in the world. He is quick and funny about the future as a carrot on a stick, always out ahead of you, and about the person who comes to Zen asking to be fixed, which he calls exactly the wrong question.
Bertrand Russell — Face to Face with John Freeman (1959) ▶
Grandson of a Victorian prime minister, expelled from Trinity for pacifism, jailed twice, run out of two universities for his politics and his views on sex, and near ninety he sits across from the BBC with a cigarette and answers everything like a man who decided long ago the truth was worth more than his own comfort. It closes on his message to whoever is watching a thousand years on. Look only at the facts, he says, and never let yourself be diverted by what you wish were true. Love is wise, hatred is foolish. Coming from anyone else it is a greeting card, but coming from a man who went to prison for it twice, it lands like a will.
Joseph Campbell — Understanding Mythology with Jeffrey Mishlove (1988)▶
Campbell taught this one subject for thirty-eight years, and here he strips it to the frame: myths are the body’s own way of making sense of birth, growth, marriage, and death, and every religion is a local dialect of the same language. Walk into a French bakery asking for bread and they will tell you they have none, he says, until you learn their word for it is pain. Different word, same loaf, and the trouble starts when a people worships the word and forgets the loaf. It closes on the one instruction he built a life around, to follow your bliss.
J. Krishnamurti — BBC Interview (1970s)▶
A British anchor sits across from a man the world called sage and guru and holy man, all of which he rejected, and tries to get the secret out of him. What follows is one of the great acts of dismantling on film. Krishnamurti takes apart belief, authority, meditation-as-escape, the idea of a path, even the idea that you are a separate individual at all. “You don’t leave much standing, do you,” the anchor says at one point, and he doesn’t.
Everything here is free to read. Instead of a paywall, readers support it. No billionaire, no corporate owner, no advertiser deciding what I can say, which leaves me free to keep honest history alive and within reach. $8 a month or $80 a year. Become a paid subscriber.
IV. Science, Media & Society
Carl Sagan — Studio 2 Interview (1995)▶
Sagan sits with the newly published Pale Blue Dot and lays out our real place in things. The earth is not the center, the sun is an ordinary star on the outskirts of one galaxy among a hundred billion, and we are small beyond our own imagining. He walks through Darwin to show why the order of living things needs no designer, only time. Then the warning he kept returning to, that a society which runs on science almost nobody understands is a dangerous thing, and sooner or later the ignorance and the power collide.
Aldous Huxley — Interviewed by Mike Wallace (1958) ▶
Twenty-seven years after Brave New World, Huxley sits under cigarette smoke and names the forces he thinks will take our freedom, and none of them is a villain. Overpopulation, over-organization, the quiet machinery of persuasion. The dictatorship of the future, he says, will not need terror at all, because it will teach people to love their servitude, reaching them somewhere underneath where choice happens. Orwell feared the boot on the face. Huxley feared the smile.
Marshall McLuhan — The Medium Is the Message, Monday Conference (1977) ▶
Everyone quotes the line and nobody can say what it means, so here is McLuhan finally unpacking “the media is the message” himself. What matters is not the show on the screen. It is the screen, the thing reshaping how you think while you stare at the content and never notice. A crowd fires questions and he keeps turning their assumptions inside out. Look into the rearview mirror, he tells them, and you are not seeing the past at all. You are seeing what is coming.
Richard Feynman — Fun to Imagine (1983) ▶
One of the great physicists of the century, and the rare one who could hand you the joy of the thing without the math. He sits in a chair and, with nothing but talk, makes the ordinary world strange again. Heat is atoms jiggling. Fire is stored sunlight coming apart. Most of a tree is built out of the air. The stretch to watch is magnets, where he is asked why they repel and refuses to fake it, walking you through why a real why opens a trapdoor under everything. He gets a kick out of thinking, he says, the way a runner gets a kick out of sweating.
V. Art (Visual & Screen)
Georgia O’Keeffe — Interview ▶
In the New Mexico desert that remade her painting, O’Keeffe found no flowers, so she began collecting bones and carrying the country home in a barrel. She is flat and funny about the men of her day chasing the Great American Novel and the Great American everything, most of whom had never crossed the Hudson, so she painted a cow skull red, white, and blue and let them miss the joke. The bones are not death to her. She holds a pelvis up to the sky and looks at the mountain through the hole in it.
Federico Fellini — Interview▶
Fellini, one of the great filmmakers, sits for television and turns on the little device in the viewer’s hand. The remote, he says, is a firing squad that strips away the face and erases the word, breeding spectators who are impatient, distracted, unable to be enchanted by a story. He describes the old moviegoing as a religious rite: leaving the house, the ticket, the curtain, the hall going dark, the screen coming alive with its revelation. Then the channel-flipping that killed it, film to soccer match to quiz to diaper commercial, and with it the whole ancient act of sitting still to listen.
Bruce Lee — The Pierre Berton Show (1971) ▶
The only surviving full-length TV interview with Bruce Lee, months before Enter the Dragon and his death. He is loose and funny, but under the charm is a philosopher who studied the subject at university. He explains why he stopped believing in fighting styles, since a style is a crystallization and a person is a process of continuing growth, and lands the line he wrote himself: be formless, shapeless, like water, which becomes the cup, the bottle, the teapot, and can flow or crash. Martial art, he says, is honestly expressing yourself, and that is the hardest thing to do.
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thank you for compiling this extensive collection. i look forward to listening. and as always, thank you for my reeducation.
Just fabulous -- thank you so much!