Vic Mensa is taking the conversations he has been having on Instagram and turning them into a proper show. The Vic Mensa Show, a 24-episode podcast, premiered on 26 August 2026 with fellow Chicago rapper Chance The Rapper as the first guest.
The series comes out of his Orange Tree Series, informal videos he started posting in late 2024 in which he works through current events. They went viral through last year and won a Webby Award, and the podcast is the format scaled up rather than replaced.
The guest list runs wider than rap. Rapsody, Durand Bernarr, Lena Waithe, Aja Monet and Van Lathan Jr are among those booked, with new episodes weekly on Wednesdays across YouTube, Spotify Video, Apple Video and podcast platforms.
Mensa framed the move around what the original format proved to him. The Orange Tree, he said, showed the transcendent possibilities of conversation, a space for radical ideas, humour, honesty and vulnerability. What began as a conversation with his community online is now expanding to include people he respects across other disciplines.
The show is produced with Mass Appeal, Blank Square Productions and Pickup Media, and lands alongside a company of his own. ORANJ, his new production outfit, will house the podcast along with his short film Halfrican, his Substack, the original Orange Tree Series and other projects in development.
That puts another rapper-run interview show into a lane artists have leaned on hard, since a podcast is direct access to an audience without a label or a magazine in between. We covered the podcast when it was first announced with Chance The Rapper attached, and more is on our hip-hop hub, including T.I.'s account of his own retirement plans.
The facts
- The Vic Mensa Show premiered on 26 August 2026
- It runs to 24 episodes, released weekly on Wednesdays
- Chance The Rapper is the first guest
- Rapsody, Lena Waithe, Aja Monet and Van Lathan Jr are also booked
- It grows out of his Webby Award-winning Orange Tree Series
- Mensa started the Orange Tree videos in late 2024
- Partners are Mass Appeal, Blank Square Productions and Pickup Media
- His new production company is called ORANJ
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