In The Poetics of Space, philosopher Gaston Bachelard declares that the house is “a psychic state […] It is a body and a soul. It is the human being’s first world.” With that in mind, let’s zoom in on the bedroom. Let’s zoom in a little further. Uncover exactly what brand of plastic water bottle is sitting sad and half-empty on a nightstand, interrogate a Zendaya Lancôme Idôle poster decorating a wall. What a collection of objects — an exhibition, really — does or does not signal about a person’s identity. This is the psychic state of a digital community. This is Interior Motives.
By now, you’ve likely seen the clips: host Ben Mora invites celebrity guests and internet personalities like Courtney Love, Ivy Wolk, Gregg Araki, John Early and Kate Berlant to investigate images of bedrooms (as well as fridge and car innards) submitted by predominantly US-based, LGBTQIA+ viewers. The goal is to guess the age, gender, and location of the submitter via aesthetic clues only. It’s highly entertaining when one of the players guesses correctly, and even more so when they are wildly wrong.
If you grew up watching MTV in the 2000s, Room Raiders and Cribs likely come to mind as comparisons. However, Interior Motives collages together other more voyeuristic forms of entertainment, from the “what’s in my bag” trend and shelfie content to a 2020 New York Times quiz that invites readers to determine the difference between a Trump and Biden fridge. For Mora, it’s GeoGuessr — a geography game wherein players attempt to identify global locations based on randomised, nondescript Google Maps imagery — that is the show’s North Star.
“Interior Motives is GeoGuessr for gender, essentially,” Mora tells me over video call, where he is parked up in a booth at an Upper East Side coworking space (“Humiliating,” he says). He brings up Rainbolt, a superstar GeoGuessr player who became something of an internet celebrity for his confoundingly accurate guesses. “I think people, when they watch the show, imagine that I'll end up in a position in my life where I can see a chair and just say, ‘Gay guy.’ These things are way less fixed than gravel roads in the Sahara.”
Mora, despite having hosted nearly 75 episodes of his internet game show to date since its 2025 inception, says that he still finds himself baffled by room reveals. In fact, it’s what generated the idea for Interior Motives in the first place. “I was really hungover at my apartment and scrolling on my phone,” he explains. “Sometimes TikTok will just throw you a four-follower account from a completely schizophrenic person in Arkansas. It was [a video of] this person, probably on drugs or something, with the camera pointing away from them, scanning their house. It was really disheveled and kind of alarming. I got a glimpse of them, and they turned out to be a lesbian. I remember thinking it was so shocking that a lesbian would live like that.”
There's something thrilling about seeing a cis guy who's living in a room that looks like a Vietnamese handjob salon
This isn’t new territory for Mora. Having been a co-host of Seeking Derangements, a comedy podcast with a cult fanbase, for over six years, he is intimately familiar with both queer corners of the internet and the formats that resonate with audiences. It’s no easy feat to stand out amid a sea of Chicken Shop Dates and celebrity pseudo-therapy sessions, but Mora figured game shows were due for a comeback, and famous guests are simply the cherry on top. “These celebrities are calling chairs transgender,” he says. “Some horrible Australian isn’t dragging them out onto Bowery Street and asking them what their favorite micro neighborhood is… I think that that is the standard one-size-fits model for all vertical short-form content, but that’s not a concept. That's not a show.”
Conversely, in Interior Motives, audience members are the stars. Upon revealing a room’s inhabitant, their image and Instagram handle are displayed onscreen, allowing for further investigations from viewers at home. The process mirrors detective work that many of us have engaged in, whether to analyse a potential Hinge match or find out exactly which Diptyque candle Charli XCX burns. The difference here is that rather than strictly soliciting Architectural Digest Home Tour-worthy imagery, unpolished and at times bewildering rooms are also encouraged. Interior Motives challenges hyper-curated avatars, and in this way, a political undercurrent runs beneath its surface.
“[With] the housing crisis, people are living in rooms that are short-term sublets,” says Mora, who used to work as a staff member on Bernie Sanders’ campaign. “They’re living in their parents’ basements. They’re living with friends or friends of friends.” He points to one of the most shocking reveals of the series to date (let’s just say it is the opposite of wherever you think a 21-year-old straight man with a photo of himself holding a fish would live). “It all seems implausible until you realise the extent to which people have to go to find housing now.”
Currently, submissions sit around 5,000. While the more unnerving rooms make for great shock-value, Mora says he’s actually on the lookout for some traditional, pristine spaces to examine. “It can’t just be dirty. There were a couple times I was so fed up trying to find rooms that I was posting to the Instagram story, and I was like, ‘Are you a rich gay guy? Do you have a clean room?’ Those are the people I was most excited to roast because there is so much obvious staging and such an obvious attempt to communicate personality and taste. It brings me great joy to cut that down.”
Clean or dirty, it can be hard to believe that some of the visuals match up with the person who claims to submit them. Mora says that the team Google reverse searches the images they receive to ensure they are original and human-generated, but generally, he operates on a basis of trust, hoping that people who go to the trouble of submitting something as personal as a bedroom would be doing so from a somewhat pure place. Even if that place is strewn with pill bottles and clearly hasn’t been vacuumed… ever.
Interior Motives serves as an important reminder: you can dissect someone’s digital rendering as if it is a spectacular Renaissance painting, scraping over every pixel to discover a hidden truth about who they are. But there will always be a shadow of the unknown. “In some ways, it frees you of this really seamless narrativisation we all have about the world, where everyone is in these neatly categorised boxes,” Mora says. “There’s something thrilling about seeing a cis guy who's living in a room that looks like a Vietnamese handjob salon.”