
Fresh Air Archive: 40 years of interviews with the voices that shape our world - smacktoward
https://freshairarchive.org/
======
ilamont
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](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.

~~~
batbomb
The Howard Stern interview is great too.

~~~
colordrops
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.

~~~
claudeganon
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...](https://slate.com/culture/2019/03/joe-rogans-podcast-is-an-essential-
platform-for-freethinkers-who-hate-the-left.html)

~~~
18pfsmt
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.

~~~
claudeganon
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.”

------
smacktoward
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](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...](https://freshairarchive.org/segments/computer-scientist-
bill-joy)

\- Stewart Brand on Silicon Valley, also in 1989:
[https://freshairarchive.org/segments/short-history-
silicon-v...](https://freshairarchive.org/segments/short-history-silicon-
valley)

\- Richard Stallman, 1991: [https://freshairarchive.org/segments/software-and-
copyright](https://freshairarchive.org/segments/software-and-copyright)

\- Mitch Kapor, 1993: [https://freshairarchive.org/segments/information-
highway](https://freshairarchive.org/segments/information-highway)

\- Bill Gates, 1995: [https://freshairarchive.org/segments/bill-gates-future-
infor...](https://freshairarchive.org/segments/bill-gates-future-information-
highway)

\- Tim Berners-Lee, 1996: [https://freshairarchive.org/segments/creator-world-
wide-web](https://freshairarchive.org/segments/creator-world-wide-web)

\- Andy Grove, 1996: [https://freshairarchive.org/segments/intel-president-
and-ceo...](https://freshairarchive.org/segments/intel-president-and-ceo-
andrew-grove-building-his-success)

\- Jerry Yang, 1997: [https://freshairarchive.org/segments/jerry-yang-
navigating-w...](https://freshairarchive.org/segments/jerry-yang-navigating-
world-wide-web)

\- Linus Torvalds, 2001: [https://freshairarchive.org/segments/computer-
programmer-lin...](https://freshairarchive.org/segments/computer-programmer-
linus-torvalds)

\- Larry Page and Sergey Brin, 2003:
[https://freshairarchive.org/segments/google-founders-
larry-p...](https://freshairarchive.org/segments/google-founders-larry-page-
and-sergey-brin)

\- Jimmy Wales, 2007: [https://freshairarchive.org/segments/jimmy-wales-user-
genera...](https://freshairarchive.org/segments/jimmy-wales-user-generated-
generation)

~~~
jawillis87
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](https://freshairarchive.org/playlist/53)

FYI anyone can create and share playlists like this:

[https://freshairarchive.org/playlist/create](https://freshairarchive.org/playlist/create)

------
sarcher
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](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.

~~~
drdeadringer
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.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
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...](https://gist.github.com/Wowfunhappy/e042b04a34b25bfe25d04b28914196d4)

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

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

~~~
Wistar
Her wordy elixir elicits excellent responses.

------
killjoywashere
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.

------
kja1123
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.

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

------
classicsnoot
~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.

~~~
unethical_ban
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.

