David Rosenthal: preference

Transcript context

…Yeah. All right. I was going to do just one, but actually I'm trying to decide what to do. I think it's appropriate to do a potpourri, a suite of different types of media here, given that that's Amazon's DNA. They probably bought or consumed most of this through an Amazon service in one way, shape, or form. Books. I have been reading a few books by Ursula Le Guin, a very famous American author. Great, both sci-fi work and fantasy work, both of which I really enjoy. I read her, I think, probably best known sci-fi novel. It's called the Left Hand of Darkness. Excellent book, highly recommend. I feel like it was written in the 1960s, maybe 1950s or 1960s. I could be wrong on that, but that era of type of sci-fi. It's a character-driven sci-fi, so less about crazy technology and more about as a setting to explore characters. Great. I'm just starting her Earthsea fantasy series, which I had no idea. Now I'm like reading it and I'm like, oh, and some of the reviews on Amazon talk about probably part of the inspiration for Harry Potter. It's super cool to go get that little bit of history. Harry Potter, by the way, broke a lot of Amazon's algorithms. I was listening to a couple of interviews with early engineers who were saying, you may also like or people who like this also like, basically everyone liked Harry Potter. They would have to either special case it or tune some parameters to make it so it just wasn't always recommending Harry Potter with any other product because any other product had a similarity of buyers with Harry Potter.…

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