Within ten minutes of the experimental show/podcast/virtual hangout Friends Keep Secrets, Dave Burd, a.k.a. the world’s most neurotic rapper Lil Dicky, starts reading the fine print of an endorsement contract just to prove a point. “It will not fulfill the Domino’s obligation for you to do it this way,” he insists to his best friend and cohost, the musician and producer Benny Blanco, who just wants to enjoy a cold slice of pizza from the fridge. It’s around this point that it becomes clear just how much Burd loves to argue.

He says as much later on the show, which he also cohosts with his wife, the screenwriter and producer Kristin Batalucco. But this fact is obvious to anyone watching—or listening, or whichever way they choose to consume the product. Burd is the Allen Iverson of the crossover disagreement and on each episode of the show he elevates squabbling to an artform.

One topic he returns to: what exactly is Friends Keep Secrets. “It’s not a podcast!” he bemoans numerous times over the first season, as all-star guests like Lizzo, Paul Rudd, Wiz Khalifa, and Blanco’s wife Selena Gomez drop by the set, which is actually just Burd and Batalucco’s Barbara Bestor–designed West Los Angeles house rigged up with 18 cameras. (The most alarmingly voyeuristic of them is the fridge cam.)

You can listen to the show wherever podcasts are available, to be sure, but how many podcasts feature a video component that was inspired by both the sunny vibes of ’90s sitcoms and the fly-on-the-wall approach of Jonathan Glazer’s experimental 2023 Holocaust film The Zone of Interest?

“I wish it could be more like The Zone of Interest,” Burd says, scrunched up on a sectional couch in the basement lounge room of his home/set, flanked on either side by Blanco and Batalucco. “More abstract framing—just a totally different style. Completely achievable, but it wouldn’t serve the greater good of visibility.” It’s sometimes difficult to tell how serious Burd is being—and the more time you spend with him, the more it becomes apparent that his autobiographical show Dave, which ran for three seasons on FX, might have been less satirical than it appeared..

For starters, Burd and Blanco really are as close as they are in Dave, really do call each other Chuck, and really will come up with ways to goof around that require “Do Not Try This At Home” warnings. There’s “The Ten Pounds Episode” of Friends Keep Secrets, in which Burd insists that he can—and attempts to—gain ten pounds in two hours, or “The Fears Episode,” in which Blanco and Batalucco segue from discussing their worst nightmares (for Blanco, it’s getting on an airplane) to shoving as many marshmallows as they can in their mouths. This, they explain to me, is just what it’s like to hang out with them.

“The sauce argument is a great example,” Burd says, referencing an extended debate in the pilot episode in which he debates with Blanco and Batalucco about how many people make marinades from scratch when cooking. (The argument continued on Blanco and Burd’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! appearance, because Kimmel felt compelled to weigh in on this important matter himself.) “We would have gotten in that argument,” Burd notes, “and it would have gone exactly like that in reality.”

“I’m so happy there’s cameras here sometimes,” Blanco adds. “We can know who was wrong. It’s my favorite. It’s enhanced our friendship. I wish it was here at all times.”

It’s not like they all don’t have plenty to keep busy with on their own without creating an immersive, multimedia celebrity interview hangout experience. Burd is working on an animated movie, Batalucco is developing her own pilot that she sold to FX, and Blanco is one of the most successful music producers in existence (29 no. 1 hits and counting). But Friends Keep Secrets is a place to let loose from all that. Nothing too serious. The world is stressful enough as it is. It’s not a podcast.

Across an hour-long conversation, Burd, Blanco, and Batalucco joyfully bounce the interview all over the place, with digressions and jokes and digs and plenty of questions of their own. As Batalucco puts it, “Welcome to the ADHD house.”

So, you guys really live here?
Dave Burd: Yes, this is our house.

When I first started watching the show, I assumed it was not. My instinct was you rented a house to create a vibe.
Dave Burd: Did you think to yourself, “Wow, that was a good choice of location”?

I thought it was. It felt cozy.
Benny Blanco: We be cozy people.

It’s supposed to make people feel like they’re not with you in a podcast studio.
Kristin Batalucco: There’s a reason we’re doing it here: It’s a comfortable space. Walking into here I’ve always felt that there’s like a little bit of a childish play. That’s all Dave’s designing, before I came in.

Dave Burd: Oh, it’s a Barbara Bestor [architect]. So it’s kind of a piece as well.

Do you feel weird about creating a surveillance state in your own house? I thought about this with the fridge cam, especially. I feel like the fridge cam would be judging me.
Dave Burd: I’m sure [Benny] feels unaffected, because it’s not his home. And when we wrap and people leave, and it’s just me and Kristen here, and the cameras are still here, and we’ve been told that they’re off and not working for the night, I still feel like I would never just get naked in front of one of the cameras thinking that it’s not shooting. Should I not say that?

Kristin Batalucco: No, I think that’s true. There is an uncanniness to it. I was like, “Oh, it’s fine, I’ll know when the cameras are rolling and when they’re not.” But in the middle of the night when I walk downstairs to get a snack or something, I’ll be like…

Dave Burd: You think about The Truman Show.

Kristin Batalucco: At night when we go to bed and when we stop rolling, most of the cameras get turned around, so the lens isn’t facing us. But there are some that we don’t do that to.

Dave Burd: One of the unfortunate parts about our production realities: I believe the cameras actually don’t turn off because it takes so long to reboot them. I think they’re actually on, but they’re not recording. So if we went to the control room and looked—and we’ve done this—you can see kind of a stream of what’s out there.

See, this is not calming my anxieties about the situation.
Dave Burd: It doesn’t get to us.

Kristin Batalucco: It gets to me! I feel it, for sure. It’s a lot of stimulation to feel that you’re being watched.

This whole “it’s not a podcast” thing—I feel like it’s a joke, but it’s not a joke. I can tell how Dave feels. Do you all agree that it’s not a podcast, and if so, what would you call it?
Kristin Batalucco: If you get it where you get your podcasts, it’s a podcast. I think the meaning behind it is just that it’s more than just a podcast. It’s not just audio—you can watch it, and it’s interesting to watch.

Dave Burd: I think my core instinct to be like “it’s not a podcast” really comes from the origin of the word “podcast” to me, and how I intersected with it, which was like, it’s an audio medium—even though I know it’s been evolving over time. But I think you probably understand why I say the thing that I say. Maybe. Or not at all…

I do. Everything is evolving. People listen to music differently than they used to. Podcasts are changing, and so are the way we think about them. The last frontier is movies—like, if you go to a movie theater, that feels like one of the only things that’s the same as it used to be.
Dave Burd: I know, and I have younger cousins and I say to them, “What do you think of movie theaters,” and they’re like, “Oh, that place is so weird, like you just go to this dirty, dark place with other people and watch movies.” I can’t even believe it. That’s how it’s being interpreted.

Kristin Batalucco: I think what podcasts bring to the world are a lot of real people being themselves. So I think that’s more of the obsession with podcasts: just the authenticity of human beings behaving, which this is.

Benny Blanco: Everything is just kind of blurring at this point. I was reading this thing yesterday about how all these YouTubers, Instagrammers, TikTokers turned into directors of movies. Like, it’s like this new movie Obsession that’s supposedly crazy, Backrooms, Club Kid… I feel like everything is morphing into one media outlet. I understand where Dave’s coming from. It’s hard to quantify what it is, because it’s a little bit of a mixture of a lot of things. I don’t watch any podcasts, so I don’t know if I’m telling the truth at all, but in my head I feel like when I watch our podcast, I’m watching something that I haven’t totally seen yet.

It does feel like a fairly unique format. The hanging vibe is something that other people go for, but you guys have a pretty freeform mindset. Let me ask this: What’s the ideal way for someone to consume the show? Should they be sitting like Leo in The Aviator when he’s on the chair naked and he’s really locked in?
Benny Blanco: Someone, or Leo?

Both, ideally.
Kristin Batalucco: My personal answer would just be to consume it however—let it be their own. I think that’s what’s unique about having it be on audio, and having it be able to go with you as you experience your day—or if you want to watch it in front of the TV.

Dave Burd: I feel like I hear you say to me all the time—not to speak for you—about how you feel like it provides people the feeling of just being connected.

Kristin Batalucco: Yeah, I like that about it. Which I think it does, but maybe not for everyone. But you can’t be friends with everyone!

Benny Blanco: Do you know what I never knew until so recently? I was at a friend’s house, and they were playing YouTube on the TV, and they were watching a podcast on their big screen. Like, that’s how they consume it!

Dave Burd: How did you not know that? You didn’t know that people watch YouTube on their TV?

Benny Blanco: I just never put two and two together that somebody would have—

Dave Burd: —so don’t even ask him about it. The fact that he hasn’t even conceived…

Benny Blanco: I’m a little tech challenged as far as those types of things go in general. Like, I’m late to the party. I don’t typically have my television on. My wife loves TV, my mom loves TV, but I don’t gravitate typically to it. And when I saw it, I was at my friend’s house, and everyone was cooking and hanging out, and they had a podcast on the thing, and it was hilarious. It’s why mukbang is so big, because people will eat at home and watch another person eating on TV, so it’s kind of like people are watching us chilling, and they’re chilling. I thought it was really interesting.

Kristin Batalucco: What I hope it does—I don’t know if this an arrogant thing to say—is it really just becomes this thing that exists in the real world to truly be a companion. Like, to just have on in the background to feel like you’re not alone.

Benny Blanco: I have friends who do this thing where every week they come together and they have all their favorite Instagram and TikTok [posts], and each person gets to control the TV and just show everyone their favorites of doomscroll.

Kristin Batalucco: I love that. It’s like being the DJ of content. You have to have one friend in your friend group that one night will be like, “I’m in control.” You could be that for us.

Benny Blanco: I just streamed my phone to the TV for the first time ever. I did it because there was a movie I was trying to watch that I couldn’t get anywhere else, and I could only find some foreign bootleg to stream.

It’s funny, though, because watching that part on Friends Keep Secrets when you’re making a song with Ed Sheeran, my jaw was on the floor watching how quickly you were moving. I guess I’ve never seen footage of someone building a song quite like that. But that’s technical wizardry, and then you’re the one in this room who’s just discovering that people watch YouTube on their TVs.
Benny Blanco: No, it’s different. I’m so good at knowing how to do the one program, but even if that program shuts down or something messes up, I’d have to, like, call in a person.

Dave Burd: He can’t update. He’s got the old AutoTune because he won’t get the new one.

Benny Blanco: I don’t know how to do anything past what I immediately know how to do. I’m an idiot savant or something.

Kristen, until now you’ve been a pretty private person. You’re on track to become more of a public figure with screenwriting, but did you have any hesitation to do this show and supercharge the process of becoming a public figure?
Kristin Batalucco: I definitely became hesitant and scared, but I would say in the beginning I was excited. Basically, I really underestimated what reading one comment would do to my psyche. So that was the learning curve. I’m private on Instagram, and I just think I was a tiny bit naive to just what any public person endures. Like, it’s not even that big of a deal. For me, it was knowing what everybody thinks, and I think that was where I became hesitant. But I trust Dave and Benny, and I feel like the pros outweigh the cons. And it was a good learning experience for me to let go of control and my sense of self.

Friends Keep Secrets creates the vibe of being a window into your real friendships with each other. How much is the show really what you guys are like? Are there any elements of the friendships that you try not to show?
Kristin Batalucco: I think it’s a slice of all of us.

Dave Burd: The more real it is, the happier I am with the final export.

Benny Blanco: We really are best friends in real life. I do feel like this show is, like, we’re not hiding anything. When we did Dave, it’s a much more heightened version of who we are as people.

Dave Burd: He’s watching thinking, “It’s the same guys. They’re doing the same thing.”

When I first watched Dave, I didn’t know you guys were close, so I wasn’t sure if that dynamic was just something that you wrote in the same way you wrote in ridiculous plots for other celebrities. I never really let myself believe it, like, “They don’t really pee in front of each other, do they?” And then watching Friends Keep Secrets, it’s like, “Oh, they really do.”
Kristin Batalucco: They have a very sweet, good friendship.

Benny Blanco: Do you have a friendship like us?

I don’t pee in front of anyone. I’m a shy pee-er.
Benny Blanco: When did we bring up peeing?

Dave Burd: It happened, yeah. In Selena’s episode, she was like, “I can’t believe our husbands go pee together.”

Kristin Batalucco: Girls go pee together a lot! When I started dating Dave, it said a lot about him to have such a close friendship with his best friend. It was good marriage material.

Dave Burd: Amen, sister.

Benny, Friends Keep Secrets carries on the name of your debut album and recording imprint. Why did that feel right?
Benny Blanco: I think we just couldn’t come up with a better name [laughs]. And the name is so good, and I was like, “Man, we should just use it here too.”

Kristin Batalucco: We tried.

Dave Burd: We tried very hard to beat it. Whole lists of name options. It really does work, even though you could argue the last thing we’re doing is keeping secrets on this. We obviously didn’t come up with the name because of it representing this idea, but after the fact, now that we’re inheriting the name… Like, when Lizzo was on, she talked about when she lost her virginity for the first time, and she’s telling us, and that’s being told to a lot of people. It’s not really a secret being kept, but it’s almost like the people that are listening are the friends. It’s like, “Now you’re a part of this community—keep our secret,” which I think is the vibe we want to cultivate. We’re all in this together. Humanity, blah blah blah.

Kristin Batalucco: We are one.

Dave Burd: We are one. Put that in.

Benny Blanco: Also, we wanted this show just to be called Podcast, but our people said it was too generic of a title.

Dave Burd: I would have really regretted that once we started doing it and I realized that I didn’t think it even was a podcast.

Dave, you’ve said that making the show Dave was so intense that it wasn’t necessarily fun.
Dave Burd: That’s right. Parts of it were more fun than other parts.

Do you feel like this show was a conscious or unconscious effort to do something that was less stressful? Or am I naive, and this is just as stressful?
Dave Burd: Not just as stressful. I wasn’t necessarily thinking I needed to look for something that’s not stressful following Dave, but I also was able to appreciate the non-stressful components of it once I started doing it. Like, if all I know is Dave, coming into a production week of this compared to a production week of Dave, I’m able to appreciate this so much more. And then because I’m appreciative and living in the moment happy, I feel like I’m putting out my most fun version of myself. Then I’m tapped back into when I was a kid, and that’s kind of how I behave with my friends—like the most fun version of myself. What a joy it is to feel productive and just kind of have to be that person.

Benny, what percentage of being a good producer is being a good hang?
Benny Blanco: 100 percent. I don’t even know how to turn on the equipment [laughs]. Like, your number one goal is to make someone that maybe you don’t even know that well walk in, tell you their deepest, darkest secret, and then convince them to put it onto a page for the world to hear. I think so much of it is creating an easy experience to do that. When I was younger, and I had friends come over on the weekend, I didn’t have a fog machine, so I’d fill up humidifiers and it would be in the entrance when you walked in. I’ve always been a person who’s trying to really curate an experience for each one of my friends.

Kristin Batalucco: You’re a good host. You’ve always been a good host.

Benny Blanco: I do love to host.

I wonder sometimes watching—or listening—to the show, if the experience is like being in a session with you, except there’s no concrete goal to make music.
Benny Blanco: There’s no goal when I’m making music either [laughs]. [Dave] hates it so much. The process gets dragged out as long as possible, if it’s up to me. But the work always does get done.

Dave Burd: Let me tell you what it’s like working with him. He is a wizard at that software that’s required to make the music. And he’s so prolific at it, and has perfect taste, perfect instincts, and gives you these bursts of 15 minutes where it’s the best 15 minutes of your life. And you’re thinking, I can’t believe it’s only 5:15, we’re gonna be doing this for another three and a half hours—the things we’re gonna accomplish! And then he goes, “Ah, all right,” and he’ll go putter around for 45 minutes. And if you start to say, like, “Let’s get back to it,” he’ll be like, “Not yet,” and then you’ll start to feel bad, like you’re being a bad hang by even suggesting to get back to it. You’re actually kind of peer pressured into not pressuring him. But then when he comes back—and he always does—and gives you that next 15 minutes, it’s so good. What he’s able to do in the 15-minute burst is so good that it’s worth putting up with the 45 minutes of torture if you just want to work the whole time.

Benny Blanco: Most artists are in my boat, where they want to prolong the process. Like, most artists are big procrastinators, and they’re not so militant with it. It’s more of a free-flowing thing. But there are some, like him, that really want to just get down to it.

I’m more with Dave. I just want to do it while I’m doing it.
Dave Burd: While we have the opportunity! We’re all alive.

Kristin Batalucco: You have a high endurance.

Benny Blanco: The doctor says you’re not supposed to sit for more than like 30 minutes at a time. That’s why his back’s broken.

Dave Burd: That very chair that you sit on today, actually, combined with my militant work attitude really has done a number to my body. Because I was editing my TV show, sitting on that chair 16 hours a day, seven days a week, ten weeks straight.

Benny Blanco: Is the chair comfy?

Kristin Batalucco: It is very comfortable.

This is a historic chair.
Dave Burd: I have such bad emotions about that chair. I’m sorry that you’re sitting there. It’s very comfortable at first. I was so excited to sit in there every day until I realized what it was doing to me.

I’m glad I didn’t inadvertently take your seat, and then have you end up here, and then you’d be in a really bad emotional state for this interview.
Benny Blanco: I don’t think he’d even sit there.

Maybe you don’t think of it this way, but I think of Friends Keep Secrets as being an interview show. And I wonder if the experience of actively interviewing people the way that you have has given you any appreciation or new perspective on the act of interviewing. Like, “This Terry Gross shit is easy,” or the opposite, where you’re like, “Damn, this is harder than I thought it would be.”
Dave Burd: I don’t think of it as interviewing, personally. And the less interview-y they are, the happier I am with the final product. Especially people that we don’t even know—we’re going to be asking them questions. I’m always wondering, “Is it even cooler to just have a guest come over and be a part of whatever’s happening with us on that day?” But it’s asking a lot of someone socially who you’re not that comfortable with to be a part of your crew. It’s a hard social dynamic to fit.

Kristin Batalucco: We’re not doing that.

Dave Burd: No, we’re not, but I thought, “Should we do that?” And I think “No, of course not, that’d be a bad outcome.” I think the three of us have always been the type of people that love meeting people and connecting with them, and bonding with them. What this does is it gives us opportunity, week after week, to bond and connect with people. Not that I’m good at it—but I’m more conscious of quote-unquote “The Art of Conversation” than I would be otherwise. But I think the coolest way this thing can be is if everyone’s being their authentic self. I want to just be how I am.

Kristin Batalucco: I think you’re naturally inquisitive. I think we’re all curious about people. Obviously, there’s people like Terry Gross that do this for a profession that are very good at interviewing and getting certain things from people. But we’re never trying to get anything. I think most of the conversations really come from a general curiosity of people. Socially, I used to be like, “Don’t ask too many questions, don’t make somebody feel like you’re too curious.” But I think people, for the most part, do like to converse, and I feel like it’s shown me, at least, that it’s good to be curious about other people, and to try to understand other people, and that people are very forthcoming. I used to think famous people wouldn’t want to answer any in-depth questions because they’re in a different stratosphere. But I find that that’s not the case, and they’re really willing to talk openly about their lives and themselves, which is cool. I think we should do that more outside of interviewing situations.

Do you guys do research before the guests come on? Read their Wikipedia or whatever?
Kristin Batalucco: A little.

Benny Blanco: Dave doesn’t want to do anything. They make a one sheet for us, and I look at it. I mean, very rarely is it someone we don’t know.

Dave Burd: That’s not true.

Benny Blanco: I think so.

Kristin Batalucco: I think audiences nowadays really can pick up on the natural progression of a conversation, and human behavior is really interesting to watch. If we prepare too much, you take away from this natural human interaction. I like to watch human beings being totally themselves, getting to know one another. But we have to figure out there’s a fine line of completely missing everything that this person can bring to the table, while also trying to get to know them in real time and trying to allow them to get to know us in real time.

Dave Burd: And I think there’s a lot of positive tension. I’m uplifted by the human spirit of this whole thing. I never thought when we started making it that we would end every episode with this heartwarming musical thing, and the fact that every episode now ends with that “we are all one” type of thing, without necessarily saying it—like, I’m surprised by that. But it is the beautiful byproduct.

Benny Blanco: What happens at the end?

Dave Burd: The music… He doesn’t even know.

Kristin Batalucco: But you feel the human connection. I just think there’s a lot of podcasts that do prepare, and that can ask the interview-y questions, and then this is more about the journey of vulnerability. Or also not! Even us, we have to engage with whatever energy the person’s bringing, and I think it’s just a nice display of human interaction.

Dave Burd: Yeah, we just had a UFC fighter on, and I didn’t look him up, and I was shocked to learn that he had never been in a fight outside of the [sport]. Like, he’d never been in a fight in his life.

Benny Blanco: He punched me in the gut.

Dave Burd: He wore pads.

That killed Houdini.
Kristin Batalucco: It did?

Dave Burd: A punch to the gut killed Houdini?

Some strong guy punched him in the gut.
Dave Burd: Not enough people know this.

Benny Blanco: It’s very known.

Kristin Batalucco: I’m glad I didn’t know, because I would have been like, “You can’t do it.”

Benny Blanco: I wore three layers of padding. He still almost punched me through a wall. Literally, I went flying six feet. I was shell-shocked by it for a while. We have another guy coming on next week. I’m gonna have him punch me too.