Which Podcast Hosts Interrupt Most? We Ranked 20
You know the feeling. A guest is mid-sentence, building toward something interesting, and the host cuts in with a tangent about themselves. Some hosts do it constantly. Others barely speak at all.
We wanted to put numbers on it. So we took 97 episodes from 20 of the biggest interview podcasts and ran them through speaker diarization software to identify who's talking when, measure overlap, and classify each instance as an interruption or a backchannel (those little "yeah," "right," "mmhmm" sounds that signal you're listening without actually taking the floor).
The results ranged from zero interruptions per hour to over 16.
How we measured this
Every episode got transcribed with WhisperX for word-level timestamps, then run through pyannote for speaker diarization (who's talking when), and finally through our overlap classifier.
Overlaps under 1.5 seconds with backchannel-type words ("yeah," "right," "mmhmm") got classified as active listening. Anything longer than 2 seconds with substantive speech counted as an interruption. The gray zone in between got classified conservatively as backchannels.
We identified hosts using the first-speaker heuristic (the host almost always opens the show) and validated it across multiple episodes per podcast.
The full rankings
From most interruptive to most patient:
| Rank | Host | Interruptions/hr | Guest interruptions/hr | Host talk % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | N.O.R.E. & DJ EFN (Drink Champs) | 16.1 | 79.9 | 20% |
| 2 | Andrew Schulz (Flagrant) | 12.7 | 81.3 | 79% |
| 3 | Bateman, Arnett & Hayes (SmartLess) | 11.4 | 19.0 | 46% |
| 4 | Logan Paul (Impaulsive) | 9.0 | 39.8 | 58% |
| 5 | Shannon Sharpe (Club Shay Shay) | 8.0 | 2.0 | 3% |
| 6 | Dax Shepard (Armchair Expert) | 5.3 | 13.2 | 70% |
| 7 | Conan O'Brien (Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend) | 4.3 | 24.3 | 71% |
| 8 | Tim Ferriss (The Tim Ferriss Show) | 2.2 | 3.7 | 45% |
| 9 | Alex Cooper (Call Her Daddy) | 1.0 | 1.1 | 49% |
| 10 | Theo Von (This Past Weekend) | 0.8 | 2.9 | 62% |
| 11 | Andrew Huberman (Huberman Lab) | 0.7 | 0.4 | 49% |
| 12 | Joe Rogan (Joe Rogan Experience) | 0.7 | 9.7 | 62% |
| 13 | Charlamagne Tha God & co. (The Breakfast Club) | 0.5 | 44.7 | 90% |
| 14 | Guy Raz (How I Built This) | 0.4 | 3.1 | 30% |
| 15 | Jay Shetty (On Purpose) | 0.4 | 1.4 | 26% |
| 16 | Lex Fridman (Lex Fridman Podcast) | 0.2 | 0.5 | 23% |
| 17 | Ezra Klein (The Ezra Klein Show) | 0.1 | 1.4 | 54% |
| 18 | Steven Bartlett (Diary of a CEO) | 0.0 | 1.8 | 41% |
| 19 | Terry Gross (Fresh Air) | 0.0 | 0.0 | 53% |
The Interview (NYT) excluded from final rankings due to rotating hosts (only 2 episodes with "Various" as host).
What the numbers actually tell us
The comedy and panel shows dominate the top of the list, which isn't surprising. Drink Champs, Flagrant, SmartLess, and Impaulsive all thrive on crosstalk and guests firing back. Drink Champs had 79.9 guest interruptions per hour on top of the host's 16.1. The conversation is a free-for-all by design. Nobody's tuning in for measured silence.
High interruption rates don't always mean the host is dominating, though. Shannon Sharpe lands at #5 with 8 interruptions per hour, but he only talks 3% of the time. His show leans on panel discussions where he jumps in with quick reactions. The interruptions are short and pointed, not monologues.
The hosts who interrupt least tend to ask long questions and then get out of the way. Lex Fridman talks 23% of the time. Jay Shetty, 26%. Guy Raz, 30%. They set up questions and let their guests run for minutes at a stretch. Lex Fridman's guests had uninterrupted stretches exceeding 67 minutes. Joe Rogan's hit 80 minutes.
Terry Gross is in a class by herself. Zero host interruptions. Zero guest interruptions. Fresh Air is old-school radio discipline: the host asks a question, the guest answers, nobody steps on each other. She also had the lowest backchannel rate at 18.8 per hour, meaning she barely makes a sound while her guests are talking. After 50 years on the job, the restraint is total.
Joe Rogan is surprisingly patient. The internet's most discussed interviewer clocked just 0.7 host interruptions per hour. His guests interrupt him at 9.7, nearly 14 times his own rate. Say what you want about his guest selection, but the man lets people talk.
The backchannel divide
One metric that surprised us: the gap in backchannel rates. Impaulsive had 556 backchannels per hour. Flagrant, 493. SmartLess, 473. These are noisy listening environments where hosts are constantly reacting out loud.
Compare that to Fresh Air at 18.8, Lex Fridman at 42.8, and Ezra Klein at 47.3. These hosts listen in near-silence. They're just different interview styles, but if you prefer hosts who get completely out of the way, the bottom of the backchannel list is where to look.
The talk-time split
Host talk percentage tells you who's making the show about themselves.
The Breakfast Club hit 90% host talk, but the show has three hosts sharing a single mic, so that tracks. Flagrant came in at 79%, because Andrew Schulz runs commentary-driven episodes where the "interview" is really a platform for his takes. Conan O'Brien was at 71%. He's performing, not interrogating. Dax Shepard, 70%, because Armchair Expert leans heavily on Dax sharing his own experiences alongside guests.
At the other end: Lex Fridman at 23%, Jay Shetty at 26%, Guy Raz at 30%. These are the shows where the guest is the point.
How to use this
None of these numbers make a podcast good or bad. Drink Champs would be unwatchable if N.O.R.E. sat in silence, and Fresh Air would lose its identity if Terry Gross started riffing. The style has to match the show.
But if you're picking an interview podcast and you care about hearing the guest think out loud without getting cut off, look at the bottom half of this list. If you want energy and crosstalk, look at the top.
We'll update this analysis quarterly as new episodes drop. If there's a podcast you want added to the index, let us know.
Methodology notes
We analyzed 97 episodes from 20 podcasts, all published between December 2025 and February 2026. Transcription used WhisperX (small model). Speaker separation used pyannote speaker-diarization-3.1. Hosts were identified by the first-speaker heuristic, validated across multiple episodes with manual overrides where needed.
Interruption threshold: overlaps longer than 2 seconds with substantive speech. Overlaps under 1.5 seconds with backchannel words ("yeah," "right," etc.) were classified as active listening.
Speaker diarization isn't perfect. Episodes with 3+ speakers (panel shows) can misattribute some segments. We flagged cases where the host heuristic was weak (under 50% first-speaker consistency) but kept them in the dataset.