David Rosenthal: preference

Transcript context

…Indeed. Speaking of podcast clients, one that you can listen to on your podcast client, my carve out this week is the Pod Save America with Kara Swisher interviewing the gang from Pod Save America at South by Southwest. Pod Save America is the guys that used to do Keepin’ It 1600 on The Ringer podcast network. After this election, moved over to start their own media company called Crooked Media of “Pod Save America”, “Pod Save the World” and other left-leaning, highly cynical, very funny podcasts. If you’re in to keeping up on all the stuff that’s going on and you want some insights from the people that held those jobs in the Obama administration, it’s an awesome podcast. Pod Save America is incredibly entertaining. The Kara Swisher interview is phenomenal because she might be the best interviewer alive. She is so good. Thinking about like, “What do I want to know? What do I think my listeners want to know? I’m going to abuse you until I get those things out of you, and you’re going to like it because I do it in such a fun and entertaining way and let you tell your story, and give you the respect as the person being interviewed and starting from a place of like look, I think you’re really smart and I think you have a lot to share. Why don’t you share those things with us?” There’s this incredible mutual respect between the interviewer and the interviewees, and I highly recommend it. We look up to her on Acquired and a lot that we can learn and hope to keep learning as interviewers and podcast hosts and journalists in our own random internet way kind of sense ourselves. Mine, real quick for the week. Speaking of left-leaning liberal folks, great article in the New Yorker this week that really made me think, by Adam Gopnik who several years ago wrote this great book called Paris to the Moon which is just hilarious, being in Paris as I am right now for the next month or two. Great satire of the French and of Paris. But he wrote a piece asking the question “Are Liberals on the Wrong Side of History?” in the New Yorker and we’ll link to it. It’s really good. But one of my favorite elements of the piece of which there’s several, is sort of asking this question like what does the course of history have to say about what the themes are behind it, which reminds me of course of our podcast and what we do on Acquired. But Gopnik kind of makes the point that because events turned out a certain way, because Trump won the election, because Brexit happened, etc. or other things deeper in history, like the human mind is such a – this is Kahneman and Tversky classic stuff – is such like a storytelling machine that we seize on to that narrative that like oh well, that was inevitable and it reflects this deep truth. But the reality is, maybe it wasn’t inevitable. Maybe it was a probabilistic thing. Maybe it was even a low probability thing that just happened to happen. I love thinking about stuff like that. Interesting. Just because it happened, it doesn’t mean it was destined to.…

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