Fresh Air Archive: 40 years of interviews with the voices that shape our world | Hacker News Reader

Fresh Air Archive: 40 years of interviews with the voices that shape our world

freshairarchive.org

134 pointssmacktoward35 comments

I look forward to checking this out. Gross is a very skilled interviewer, and this looks like a filter for the better stuff. Off the top of my head, the relatively recent interviews with Philip Glass and Tara Westover are fantastic.

There are also some interviews that did not go so well. The tension when Gene Simmons came on the show (https://freshairarchive.org/segments/gene-simmons) was brutal but I've heard her say before that it's been the most listened-to online episode since it originally aired in 2002.

The Howard Stern interview is great too.

Joe Rogan, while not the best interviewer, is getting better. When he prepares, he can ask good questions and gets the guest to come out of their shell. He's one of the only places to go for good long form interviews.

Rogan’s interviews are largely a thinly-veiled excuse to push right-wing BS to the impressionable young men that comprise his audience.

As someone who’s had to talk people out of racist and misogynistic ideology that they were pipelined into through Rogan/his guests, I really wish he didn’t have so much purchase. I know he has a very polished “chill” veneer, but his long-time friendship with Alex Jones should clue people in to what he’s actually after. He even appeared on Jones’ show a week after one of the Sandy Hook parents who had been targeted by Jones’ listeners killed himself.

https://slate.com/culture/2019/03/joe-rogans-podcast-is-an-e...

Rogan is not "right-wing," and people saying that have not listened to his views thoroughly. He is open-minded (sometimes to a flawed degree), and had Jones on and it was the funniest thing I've heard. Jones is a lunatic, and Rogan exposed that. The pseudo-architectural anthropologist was also pretty funny.

I’ve listened to many hours of his show, his interviews with far right types like Gavin McInnes and Stephen Molyneux. I had to in order to talk a friend down from some really dark thinking he was encouraged toward through Rogan’s show. But I’m sure that when I heard him denigrating Muslims or talking about how trans women are actually just confused gay men, I just needed to listen more “thoroughly.”

His interview with Russel Brand is hilarious and deeply insightful, which was really surprising. I don't listen that often but will put it on when someone like that is on. Bound to be some entertaining banter.

As a 25+ year NPR junkie, I can say Gross brought on the trend of hosts thanking their guests "so much" for being there. This started somewhere around 2011.

I used to believe Gross was the best interviewer until I heard some Stern interviews from 2014. While Stern talks a lot more, he is able to elicit more genuine responses from the guests and his interviews are real-time, not edited. Fresh Air suffers from having to break every 10 minutes.

I believe the parent was referring to Gross's recent two part interview with Stern. It's actually reveletory to hear them discuss interview technique (for example, interviewees are physically present with Stern and are not with Gross) although it's not a major part of the interview.

One observation: Stern was not always as effective an interviewer as he has been in recent years.

Sensationalism creates attention.

There was a sour Interview on the old show 'Q' with Billy Bob Thorton that ended worse. But brought a lot of attention to the show and the host. Been instructed to only talk about Music/The Band and not to bring up Acting etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJWS6qyy7bw

Terry Gross is the best regular interviewer in the US. She prepares well, is thoughtful and respectful, thinks on her feet, asks good follow-up questions, and focuses on getting the guest to talk.

I could not disagree more. She talks far too much. I think she lets her personality as a Personality get in the way.

I know this is subjective, and I don't need you to agree with my opinion. I'm only responding because I listened to her for almost two decades and have never been able to tell anyone these thoughts except for an undeserving ex-gf and a hapless hitchhiker.

>> She prepares well, is thoughtful and respectful, thinks on her feet, asks good follow-up questions, and focuses on getting the guest to talk.

> I could not disagree more.

Someone could talk too much and all of these things could still be true. Which part do you disagree with?

>Terry Gross is the best regular interviewer in the US.

This is the part i disagreed with. All of your other statements serve to qualify this assertion. I have great respect for her staff, but i find her interview style over-the-top and self aggrandizing.

But seriously, can you point to a good example of that? Your criticism is shocking to me as my perspective as a long-time listener is that she's NEVER "over-the-top and self aggrandizing".

> She talks far too much

I think we must be listening to different shows. Can you link to an example interview where you think she talked too much?

Many other interviewers regularly interrupt their guests, and impose their own (often idiotic) opinions / ideology instead of letting the expert explain. Gross does not do this.

Maybe point to a counter example?

> I listened to her for almost two decades

Normally that would be part of an endorsement...

One that may be of particular interest to HN readers: here's Gross interviewing Steve Jobs in 1996, right before his return to Apple and the long, remarkable run of successes that would come from that, on "the future of computer technology": https://freshairarchive.org/segments/steve-jobs-future-web

EDIT: And a few more blast-from-the-past interviews, for good measure...

- Bill Joy, in 1989: https://freshairarchive.org/segments/computer-scientist-bill...

- Stewart Brand on Silicon Valley, also in 1989: https://freshairarchive.org/segments/short-history-silicon-v...

- Richard Stallman, 1991: https://freshairarchive.org/segments/software-and-copyright

- Mitch Kapor, 1993: https://freshairarchive.org/segments/information-highway

- Bill Gates, 1995: https://freshairarchive.org/segments/bill-gates-future-infor...

- Tim Berners-Lee, 1996: https://freshairarchive.org/segments/creator-world-wide-web

- Andy Grove, 1996: https://freshairarchive.org/segments/intel-president-and-ceo...

- Jerry Yang, 1997: https://freshairarchive.org/segments/jerry-yang-navigating-w...

- Linus Torvalds, 2001: https://freshairarchive.org/segments/computer-programmer-lin...

- Larry Page and Sergey Brin, 2003: https://freshairarchive.org/segments/google-founders-larry-p...

- Jimmy Wales, 2007: https://freshairarchive.org/segments/jimmy-wales-user-genera...

Thanks for linking to these specifically. Wouldn’t have spent the time to find it otherwise but am loving the Richard Stallman interview.

Oh my goodness, thank you. I simply had no idea that she'd interviewed any of these folks!

- Buckminster Fuller, 1981: https://freshairarchive.org/segments/bucky-fuller-humanitys-...

Great list! I actually created this as a playlist for anyone who wants all of these segments queued up in one place:

https://freshairarchive.org/playlist/53

FYI anyone can create and share playlists like this:

https://freshairarchive.org/playlist/create

Can anyone find a good way to browse? Closest thing I could find to an index is a alphabetical list of guests - but the formatting is made for mobile or something and you have to keep clicking 'load more' every couple of names.

https://freshairarchive.org/search/guests

In creating avenues for discovery ('collections' and 'topics') the simplest one seems to have been ignored - just listing all the segments with relevant metadata. Hopefully I'm just missing something obvious.

I really wish podcasts, radio shows, &c would include archive- or collection-based torrents for those of us who want to mass-download episodes to local for offline on-demand.

RSS is wonderful for upkeep but having to perform a manual click-and-save across hundreds or thousands of episodes is a questionable use of time and it's not always easy to web-scrape the .mp3 files via a script.

Maybe I should just go get a smartphone with a monthly data plan just for podcasts, but I really shouldn't have to.

If all old episodes are actually kept in the RSS feed, there are scripts for this.

Here's one: https://gist.github.com/Wowfunhappy/e042b04a34b25bfe25d04b28...

You could also run the script automatically every week to download and backup new episodes—no need for a dedicated podcast phone.

i get around the almost ubiquitous usage of the "more" page design by: 1) going to end of page (END button) 2) clicking 3) repeat until there is no more mores

i only have to move mouse once, as the END button scrolls to the next more at the same spot. Thus it is a rote typing on two alternate keys repeatedly.

It would be nice if there were a JS button doing all automatically.

I don't get the Gross love. She's so very wordy. Likes to use 40 words to ask a 5 word question.

Her wordy elixir elicits excellent responses.

A small smattering of people to search for that hackers might not think as much about:

Present:

* Richard C. Holbrooke

* Zbigniew Brzezinski

* Madeleine Albright

* Lord David Owen

* Larry Page & Sergey Brin

* Norman Schwarzkopf

Absent:

* Sandy Berger

* Tony Lake

* Henry Kissinger

* Cyrus Vance

* Anthony Zinni

Some other things to search for:

* Booker Prize

* Nobel Prize

* MacArthur Fellows

And I'll stop here for fear of wandering off and forgetting to add the comment.

Somebody should write an article on how to do this Monaco, the editor framework that powers VScode, so you can build your own flavor of vscode for fun.

Misread this then realized it's missing "Prince of Bel-" and it's not what I had hoped.

~50% of this archive is just Terri Gross telling people about themselves to them. I was always so perplexed at how she could secure interviews with so many interesting people, then just talk through the whole thing, literally talking over interviewees to tell interviewees what they said or what happened to them. I miss pre-Trump NPR so much, but Fresh Air has always been an immensely frustrating program.

As interesting as a lot of these interviews might seem based on subject, I think many people would get a lot more out of a Big Broadcast with Ed Walker archive.

I miss pre-Trump America, too. On topic, though, a good interview is engaging to the listeners, and not every interviewee is interesting on their own. It is her job to set the stage, to guide the conversation to find the most unique and intriguing things about a person or a story.

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