HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

Sorry transcribing from video is a little harder than from an essay. You try to tow the line between the speaker's rhythm and correct syntax to form the natural voice of the person speaking. Here is the video for the actual quote. http://www.bloomberg.com/video/breaking-down-billion-dollar-... skip to 4:47.

⬐ wyclif

Whenever I hear pg speak, I always forget he's from Great Britain. There isn't a discernible trace of an English accent in his voice, at least to my ear. That suggests to me he must have moved to the US at a young age.

I also give big thumbs up to Bloomberg West. The pace of the discussion is usually just about perfect.

⬐ joonix

Bloomberg, both TV and web, is pretty great in general. Shame CNBC is considered "the" business network.

⬐ kami8845

He moved to the US at age 2.

⬐ pg

3. But tis true I got rid of that funny sounding accent pretty fast.

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⬐ supervillain

Seeing Paul speaks in video for the first time gives the impression that he is an interesting character, someone like interviewing Nikolai Tesla or Albert Einstein.

⬐ guiomie

Omg, her voice and the way she asks questions is so intrusive and annoying.

⬐ rdl

Yes, intrusive -- that's the point. Asking questions like she did be annoying if that were an organic conversation among 3 people, but the point of a TV news host/interviewer is to frame the conversation for the audience, including basic questions, and keep everything in context. And to keep things moving, make sure the right points are covered, etc. (You absolutely wouldn't want an extended digression about the origins of index funds or details about one specific investment, or excessive self-promotion by a guest.)

She's actually quite informed about the tech industry and startups, vs. some other news anchors who just read from a script and have no idea about the content.

IMO it's harder to run a good panel or interviewer than it is to be a guest; converting a talk to an interview/panel is something a competent conference organizer does when he knows his guests are unprepared or not good at speaking.

⬐ kami8845

It was actually very good. She was engaging and it seemed like she not only knew what she was talking about but also really wanted to know the answers to the questions she was asking. She was leading the conversation even with 2 such heavy weights at her desk. Good job.

⬐ douglasisshiny

I agree. She got out of the way and let Paul Graham and David Hornik have a discussion.

⬐ rdl

Bloomberg West is surprisingly good for a financial news program; the contrast with CNBC is striking. (although CNBC Asia was pretty good, as I recall, at least a few years ago)

⬐ rz2k

I wish I could find a quote to pull out right now, but one of the other people on Bloomberg West has explained the distinction between business reporting and investment shows.

Much of the financial journalism on CNBC, or PBS's terrible NBR, purport to give you information sufficient to draw conclusions and make stock picking decisions.

One, you cannot do sufficient analysis to beat other investors from information provided in a two-minute report, and if it were reliably and predictably valuable analysis then by being reported to a large audience it will already be priced into the market before viewers can take advantage. Furthermore, the interviews with CEOs and investment managers who have fiduciary responsibilities to people that do not include the audience are counterproductive if they are ever assumed to be the final word.

However, insight and analysis are different things, and the narratives behind different businesses or the narratives that are guiding analyst's thoughts on a particular industry are a good starting point (and more interesting than arbitrary stock picks). Where Bloomberg West gets it right is leaving few viewers with the mistaken impression that wouldn't need to do their own research if they want to make investment decisions.

From this interview alone, they, or at least Paul Graham, talked about how most investors should probably avoid choosing stocks and stick to index funds. I doubt that would be a very popular thing to say on CNBC.

⬐ graycat

Shorter version: TV is light entertainment, even when it pretends to be something more.

Why? Claim: There is in effect a rule not to be violated: Whenever content passes through a video camera, the work must be under the control of a producer, director, writer, set designer, camera operator, and, if not 'live', editor all with the techniques and values of entertainment TV and Hollywood. Proof: Look at the video clips done for high school math and science. Done. I know of only one exception, the 30 minutes or so on plane geometry done by A. Gleason with some help from T. Apostol.

In one step more detail, the main technique of TV is from formula fiction. The interview in question? Sure: Notice that the interviewer kept returning to the issue of what she sensed was the 'drama' and 'evil' of the situation of hundreds of young entrepreneurs who enter accelerators but end up with businesses worth $0.00.

Why the drama? A central pillar of formula fiction is drama from the threat of evil. E.g., just now in my computer's DVD burner is a CD of the Puccini opera 'Tosca' with the two lovers, sung by di Stefano and Callas, and then too soon facing the evil Scarpia. Sure: I can like light entertainment when it has singing of Puccini by di Stefano and Callas! What is on TV shows on finance is closer to 'Tosca' than to Black-Scholes, the Sharpe capital asset pricing model (CAPM), how portfolio rebalancing in an index fund works, tests for Brownian motion, or how James Simons made so much money.

Am I the only one saying that TV is so bad? No: Recall the N. Minow statement that TV is a "vast wasteland". And recall the explanation from M. McLuhan "the medium is the message", that is, the narrow bandwidth of the then few TV channels ensured that the best ROI on that bandwidth was essentially one size fits all light entertainment.

Of course, Graham and Hornik kept talking about the challenge of seeing the future. Well, with the above, let's now do some of that: One size fits all doesn't fit. It never did fit very well. It doesn't fit in shoes, shirts, restaurants, home furnishings, cars, or personal interests. Instead, with more variety, can get on average better fits. So, there is value in more variety.

Can we have that variety? Well, with the Internet McLuhan's limited bandwidth of the TV "medium" essentially no longer applies. Instead we are free to have highly specialized content for particular personal interests. So, we can have specialized blogs, fora (not that I can think of any just now), long tail Web sites, etc. And maybe eventually I will be able to get some good lectures in quantum mechanics, that emphasizes both the physics and the mathematics, the actual, 100% genuine, died in the wool mathematics, hopefully from a guy who actually knows what a Hilbert space is. It would also be good for him to know what a random variable is, if that's not too much to ask.

⬐ SkyMarshal

Bloomberg in general is amazing. It's shocking in this day and age that a financial news network would sue the Federal Reserve to force it to release sensitive data on its bailout operations, but that's exactly what Bloomberg did, and won [1].

By way of comparison I could never see CNBC, the cheereader propaganda network, doing the same.

Real investigative journalism, not dead yet.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomberg_L.P._v._Board_of_Gove...

⬐ thedudemabry

Totally. This is my first view of Bloomberg West, but I was impressed by the tone of the interview. Very unlike any financial TV-news I've seen before.

⬐ pathy

Agreed, interesting, researched and well paced. I hadn't heard pg speak before but this was 15 minutes well spent.