The Good Fight

Yascha is the kind of interviewer that more popular podcast hosts should aspire to be. He gently but clearly challenges assumptions and theories to tease apart causation and correlation, all while keeping the guest from feeling threatened. For the listener, we get to drill down deeper into the essence of a subject thanks to this approach. Thanks and keep em coming!

I love Yascha Mounk’s work as an interviewer. He is well versed in the background of each guest and manages to push them to dig deeper than a lot of other podcasts do. He has a mild manner that belies the sharpness of some of his questions; he can be challenging without ever seeming to be bullying. He lets his guests have room to breathe and respond fully. He also has great, often significantly knowledgable, guests from a wide variety of political and knowledge spectrums that are consistently worthwhile to explore. This has risen above the ranks to become my favorite interview style podcast. I can’t recommend it more highly.

intelligent, substantive long form discussions where differences of opinion are handled respectfully & with nuance

In a vast sea of podcasts that push one narrow point of view and one narrative The Good Fight stands out for being a true open discussion of ideas. 5 Stars.

The episode with Anshel Pfeffer in the immediate weeks after October 7 does not age well 6 months later. The complete inability of the guest — or even the host — to imagine or articulate Palestinian suffering or Israeli oppression and instead to cast the conflict as one purely of irrational, religious hatred and terrorism does a disservice to listeners (not a single mention of colonization, ethnic cleansing, mass dispossession or apartheid is had). The questions asked are so obviously biased in favor of a pro-Israeli sympathy, which the guest shares, that there is a complete lack of any understanding of the situation they are supposed to be illuminating. The latent racism against Arabs and Palestinians is palpable beneath throw away lines of mourning any innocent life lost and then focusing exclusively on Israeli suffering. Not worth your—or anyone’s— time.