why i think @DialecticPod has succeeded -- despite being yet another interview podcast, started by a not-well-known host: an interview podcast is basically a marketplace. you need to align the interests of two parties: 1) the guest, who has a personal brand or story they wanna reinforce 2) the audience, who wants to hear something actually interesting the hard part is that most guests have strong incentives to narrativize their lives. if you ask someone about their career for an hour, you often get at best a polished, abstracted spiel - and at worst, a story that's obviously engineered to be a sales pitch for whatever they’re currently building. Dialectic gets around this by: 1) picking guests whose personal brands are built around having interesting ideas; 2) digging deep into their ideas, instead of making them narrate their lives explicitly so the guest’s desire to reinforce their image aligns with the audience’s incentive -- and gives the guest a natural reason to distribute the episode to their existing audience