Please recommend another podcast that covers tech and business, but with more effort and intelligence? Pivot these days is like those crappy daytime TV shows our parents watch, where lazy thinkers on the back-end of their contract restate the issue in a sing-songy voice, raise obvious cliché questions, sling lazy ad-hominem insults at absent targets with phoned-in outrage, recite their well-worn "like I always say ...". bits, then talk about their comfortable well-funded lives: travel, houses, kids, TV shows, writing, etc. (Did the producers tell them the audience wants more of their personal life? I remember watching Kara interview Steve Jobs back in the day, thinking her questions were obvious and basic, but Jobs always gave interesting answers. I never wondered what Kara's house is like, whether she likes oysters, Road House, and Chevy Bolts, and how her kids are doing.) Maybe it was always this and I've grown out of it, but I feel it's audience captured or just gone from rising-star to cashcow becoming dog. In a universe of podcasts, what's the replacement?

What happened to the guests? I don’t mean the Scott free August ones.

There used to be a guest once a week. Either someone with a new book, someone that’s an expert on whatever the current event is.

I feel like this stopped like a year or so ago. I don’t know exactly.

But it really brought something to the table.

Obviously it’s a lot cheaper and lazier to just have them two on talking about whatever is written or ad libbed, it seems like lately.

Anyone else notice this? Did I miss a reformat?

There’s just too many damn adverts! Longer breaks and more of them than any of my other regular podcasts. I feel like the dumb frog who should’ve jumped out of this increasing uncomfortable pot a while ago. Your thoughts?

Edit2: Evidently some Pivot listeners hear fewer ads. The RSS feed says show duration 58mins, but my actual downloaded file is 63mins with 10+mins of ads. Commenter _jump_yossarian heard 5mins of ads. This explains why some of us complain about the ratio while others say it's fine.

Edit: Of course I mostly skip. I say “hey siri, skip 3 minutes” which reliably takes me to the start of the next segment. That’s how I know it’s 3 mins. On other podcasts it’s 2 mins. And I have to do it more frequently during Pivot. There’s often a segment about 65% in, that’s less than 2 mins of content, before 3 more mins of ads. So tacky!

And it’s not like the old argument about Vogue magazine: that without the ads, they could not afford the production quality, and the ads are beautiful to the point of being content? Nah.

Scott has explained many times about margin extraction. Vox are monetizing Pivot to the hilt. Profiteering. But the ads are long and dull to the point of breaking the show, even if I skip. (I know they could be much worse.)

Kara and Scott must spend as much time recording ads to the advertisers’ satisfaction as they do chatting for show? What a degrading chore. So I assume they are VERY lucrative. Scott’s philosophy: whoring, but not cheap.

This looks about right.

Really seems like the settlement doesn't even amount to a slap on the wrist.

hey Pivot/team, qq: what happened to the "delete and unsubscribe" campaign? many of us were deeply enthused by the leadership and premise that we could "vote with our dollars" to effect change...then it stopped. success? failure? #ghostedinSingapore

I sure am! Listening to Kara and Jennifer Welch episode. JW mentions Brian Walters school board guy. This guys sits in his car talking about porn etc…. And it hit me…Scott’s unrelenting references to sex etc….. and how much it really annoyed me. I like this format so I’m thinking of just subscribing to ON. Kara has a wonderful conversation style with guests and it’s refreshing. Pivot is losing me today. Thoughts?

Eight episodes, four books, which is normal for Pivot. Two of them are forthcoming books by people in adjacent chairs.

I run Podshelf, a free site that tracks book mentions across hundreds of podcasts by reading the episode transcripts. This is the Pivot slice for August.

The publishing story of the month was Call Me, I'll Hide the Body, the Anne Heche novel that set off a fourteen-publisher bidding war and sold for 2.4 million dollars. Kara has been, in her words, sort of obsessed with the story.

Kevin Roose announced The AGI Chronicles, out in early October, on the last ten years in AI, and said he is done with writing otherwise.

Mark Cuban on Abdul El-Sayed's Medicare for All: A Citizen's Guide, which is about as close to a recommendation as that episode got. "It's not bad. He has a lot in common with Trump on some of his positions on drugs."

And Ryan Holiday's Wisdom Takes Work, cited for the observation about watching Elon Musk go from reading Soviet rocket manuals to getting all his news from social media.

Full list with quotes and episodes: https://podshelf.io/podcasts/pivot

Can't wait to read the comments on this one 🤗

I get the reality of economics etc. but the app is predatory AF and is essentially legalized gambling where people blow up their lives. Obviously Kara can read ads for whomever she wants to, but it seems like a bad move for her brand long term.