The Trendaddy (formerly The McFuture)

Steve is a great guy to sit next to a wedding. Oh, and his show is pretty good too.

There are many stand up comics that do hilarious and biting current social commentary. And there are many serious commentators that insightfully discuss how the present is shaping our future. Steve Faktor is the only one I have found to combine the two. He sees the hilarious, scary, absurd ways the future is rushing towards us. very few have the lightness of touch to pull this off. If Futurama was a podcast it would be The Mcfuture.

I am a firm beleiver in flattery by analogy - so here are my top 3 comparisons of my new favorite podcast host. 1) Steve Faktor is like Fareed Zakaria after he's had 7 drinks -- still brilliant but enough sauce to be unfiltered but not incoherent 2) Steve Faktor is what Joe Rogan would be if he hadn't been kicked in the head so many times --- by that, I mean provocative but able to able to speak in complete sentences 3) Steve Faktor is like Dennis Miller eating a pastrami and rye sandwich -- you can take the boy out of New York but you can't take New York out of the boy

I just heard Steve's conversation with Professor Glenn Loury, who teaches economics at Brown University. Kudos to Steve Faktor for having the credibiity to attract a person of Prof. Loury's caliber to his podcast. Of course, Faktor is no slouch; he's a highly productive and thoughtful person in his own right. These two men conducted one of the most intelligent, coherent, candid and inspiring conversations about politics, race, and social justice that I've heard in a long time, maybe ever. What a change from today's favored conversational mode of partisan finger pointing, virtue signalling, jargon, guilt-tripping, and bizarre claims. I will now go back and look at the entire catalog of Steve's podcast episodes here. And I'm making a list of select friends to whom I'll be sending this conversation with Prof. Loury. These are the kinds of conversations the whole country needs to be having right now. Unfortunately, a dogmatic, authoritarian, metaphysical narrative is ascending at the moment. But as long as I can still access the ideas of people like Steve Faktor and Prof. Glenn Loury, there's hope.