I have a general complaint about a lot of interviews of charismatic and successful tech entrepreneurs, which is a bucket that my guest on this episode, Anna Gát, fits into (though she also fits in plenty of other buckets).
It’s that the interviewers, whether they’re coming from the business world, the tech world, or the journalistic world, tend to ask their guests for their thoughts on everything but the actual thing they succeeded in doing, which is building their specific business.
The hosts want to know what, say, Marc Andreesen has to say about the future of technology, or the philosophical implications of AI, or the politics and culture around Silicon Valley, but there’s no reason to believe that these entrepreneurs have any special wisdom, insight, or expertise in these realms. Even someone like Peter Thiel, who clearly has some kind of gut instinct about what’s coming around the corner, tends to say either banal or quite dumb things when he’s asked for his thoughts on the big picture.
What these entrepreneurs do know deeply is how they built their specific business, and succeeded within their specific industry. But they’re not asked much about that, because the interviewers assume that their listeners aren’t interested in the minutiae of those things, which may be accurate but doesn’t change the fact that asking them about topics they don’t understand with any particular depth is a bad strategy for an interview.
I did not make that mistake with Anna. She’s a political intellectual, so we do talk some politics, but the focus is on the areas she knows best and most personally, including how things have changed for the worse in her native country of Hungary, why she thinks that a certain nerdy subset of American conservatives seems to have a raging hard-on for the country and its leader Viktor Orban, and what lessons it all holds for the potential of authoritarianism in the US.
Mostly, though, we talk about InterIntellect, which is the company she created that hosts intellectual salons, both in person and online, and about what she’s learned from starting and running the company about the art of facilitating good conversation. This is how Anna makes her bread, and so she has a deep investment, and deep expertise, in making her salons enjoyable and satisfying to people. She’s thought a lot about it. She’s iterated a lot. She has wisdom and insight that most other people don’t have. And I found it fascinating.
Hope you do too.
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