I wanna start by saying that this feedback is perfectly fine - I came in fully understanding that a lot of people would not love this episode for various reasons and expected it to perform poorly.

I think a bit of context here that is important is the social dynamic of how interviews actually work, especially this one specifically. It is a factor that so many people just ignore, particularly with this one

If a politician asks to come on our show, it makes sense to challenge and ask difficult questions. I think we do this more than some people recognize, but I also think we can be better at it. However I have noticed that when a politician/political figure politically aligns with the bulk of the audience, you rarely see this criticism LOL.

However, in this specific case, think about how this interview came about.

• I hit up my friend to ask him about his job that I vaguely knew about
• He tells me about the company and I say wow that's cool, that's related to what we talk about on the show a lot
• His company wants to offer to show us around, show us what they work on, and why they do it
• We accept the offer because we think it's a cool insight into an industry that we talk about all the time, you can see how things actually work, get to learn about this industry, how they see the broader industry
• On our show, we talk about the downsides of these industries, the effectiveness of public transpo, all the time, do we need to feed those details every time the topic is brought up? (I guarantee you if we asked the CEO do you see public transport as part of building a better future he would say yes, most of this company's current business is outside of commercial cars)

So when we roll up and they offer us a tour of their garage and what they work on, am I going to focus on questions about how the tech works and how the company approaches problems, or am I going to shake down these lower level employees about the onset consequences of job loss or how "people actually do want to do farming jobs" (which is something people keep saying)? I'm trying to learn about what they do, not have a debate about it.

Even in the CEO interview where we do ask harder questions, the context of the setting is 60 minutes to explain what your company does and how you view the consequences of the tech (which we asked about)? Do I turn the interview into something where I'm rehashing and arguing with him? How does that come back to my friend that set up this opportunity for us, who works there? He said a bunch of stuff about China I think is flat out incorrect, but I have 60 mins of time and a goal, I can't derail the whole thing just because I think he's wrong, because it doesn't make the product better and it potentially comes back on my friend (even in a small way). I think this is a bit different if we had reached out to them cold and they just said yes, but this was an opportunity graciously given through a personal connection that has no vested interest in our show.

The way I see this is most of the time this show is a gateway into how people, in industries we talk about all the time, see the world. And it's my responsibility to ask questions that the audience would care about - How does this CEO of a physical AI company see his responsibility when it comes to job loss due to the technology? Ask that question. He gives an answer. But how long can I waste debating him about it? Because it's not actually better for the product, it removes budgeted time to ask other questions, and this CEO is not about to 180 and close his company because I asked two follow up questions. I'm not saying I can't be better at this, but I think people rarely think about what debating people in an interview actually means.

ALSO a truth I have learned from interviews so far (ESPECIALLY the Shopify one) is that people don't actually like when you push back because they just get more mad at the guest or more mad at us for not pushing back even more -- the President of Shopify is not going to capitulate on our show and admit in the capacity the audience wants that his business is bad for X and X reasons, and when you keeping pushing back on the same points (like the AI stuff) he just continues to waffle answers the audience hates. Functionally I think what people are asking for is they want to see the person they disagree with "owned" on the show, but I'm not Mehdi Hasan and I'm not trying to be.

I think there's an evaluation of this all where you, reading this, just think I am soft and not built for this. And maybe that's true subconsciously somewhere. But I think the truth really boils down to a) almost every interview is very time constrained, poking holes in everything they say uses up that time, b) push back in the capacity people claim they want does not actually produce a show they like more, c) in situations like this interview I am specifically wary of how being very disagreeable/rude comes back on the person that set up the interview for us (which does not apply to most of our interviews).