David Simon, creator of ‘The Wire’, being interviewed by Ari Shapiro (NPR)
SHAPIRO: Ok, so you’ve spent your career television without AI, and I could imagine today you thinking, boy, I wish I had that tool to solve those thorny problems…
SIMON: What?
SHAPIRO: … Or saying…
SIMON: You imagine that?
SHAPIRO: … Boy, if that had existed, it would have screwed me over.
SIMON: I don’t think AI can challenge what writers do at a fundamentally creative level.
SHAPIRO: But if you’re trying to transition from scene five to scene six, and you’re stuck with that transition, you could imagine plugging that portion of the script into an AI and say, give me 10 ideas for how to transition this.
SIMON: I’d rather put a gun in my mouth.
Radiolab has some good stories, but the editing is so grating. I wish there was something with energy between them and Science Friday or podcasts where it’s just two people talking back and forth. I appreciate Radiolab’s effort to keep me engaged and science exciting, but… it feels insulting to my attention span to do it as much as they do.
…which is a fair thing to insult, but not that much.
This American Life and The Moth may not be quite the format you’re describing but if you’re not familiar, they are old (big backlog), and quality and tend to feature viewpoints from the ordinary and even marginalized, both in their own ways.
Actually when I think about it, unless I’m misremembering, This American Life did a piece on body dysmorphia long before that concept reached more mainstream awareness. I don’t know how I’d feel about it now (I’ve just learned a lot since and it’s been like 10 years or something), but at the time I remember finding it compassionate and insightful, really opened my eyes on something I was previously only dimly aware of and curious about, before.