Jesse Thorn has been interviewing comedians and hip-hop artists and other creative people for over twenty-five years. He started with a college radio show and he just kept going. His show, The Sound of Young America, got picked up by public radio stations, and he eventually changed the name to Bullseye, probably because he was no longer quite so young. Maybe you’ve heard of Bullseye. Maybe, as a WFIU listener, you’ve heard it on the radio. It runs on WFIU2 at 7:00 on Saturday evenings. We started carrying it in October 2025, which is when he and Nice Work host Alex Chambers spoke.
One of the effects of having started a radio show in college and turning it into a career is that Jesse Thorn never went to journalism school. Because of that, in 2017 he decided to do a series of interviews with interviewers about interviewing. That’s his description. It’s called The Turnaround, and he talked with a lot of legends, including public radio favorites Terry Gross and Ira Glass.
In this conversation, Jesse and Alex discuss what he’s learned about interviewing—from those interviews and from doing it for a quarter century.
