The Last ArchiveToday on the show, Leon Neyfakh, co-creator of the hit podcasts Slow Burn and Fiasco, discusses his season on the aftermath of the 2000 election between Al Gore and George W. Bush.
You can listen to the full season of Fiasco now.
Pushkin a last archive listeners. In the year two thousand, Al Gore and George W. Bush faced off in a presidential election that was too close to call. Eventually it became a Supreme Court case which granted a victory to Bush. Today, I'm talking to Leon Nafok, co, creator of the hit podcasts Fiasco and Slowburn, about a series he did on the dramatic month long battle that ensued after Election Day two thousand. He made it a few years ago, but Pushkin is now re releasing that series. In it, you'll hear fly on the Wall, minute by minute accounts of one of the most gripping and consequential legal battles in American history, and on the eve of another US presidential election that is likely to be tight, it all feels eerily pression. You can listen to your ASCO's a whole series on Bush Vigor over on the Fiasco Feed. Here's our conversation. We're here to talk about your season on the two thousand election Bush Gore, and I'm curious to know how did the idea to do a season on that election come about?
So the honest answer is, we had produced these two shows at Slate one on Watergate and one on the Clinton impeachment, and so we sort of saw ourselves as in this lane that we thought of as being about political scandal. And so the two thousand elections struck us as a story that sort of has all the drama and all of the heightened emotions and twists and turns of a great scandal, but it's something else. It was this this this, this train barreling down a track that no one was really in control of. I suppose that is true about Watergate to some extent too, But I think the two thousand elections, especially as we dove into it, we started to see as a bunch of bureaucratic machines kind of rolling on their own power and rolling into each other and trying trying to run over each other. And it was almost like disembodied in that way. Obviously there were the two candidates UH facing off, and obviously there were all of their lawyers and all of their aids, but it really did seem like a system's story. And I think that's what attracted to us in the in the in the wake of Clinton.
I guess because in Watergate, someone still holds all the cards, like there is somebody who knows the truth of what happened in Watergate from the very beginning of that scandal, whereas in this case, sort of even in the final analysis, nobody really knows what happened in two thousand, Like who the true winner is there? You run through different studies at the end that suggests in a few cases gore one. But it's this It is so perfect for a system story because of that fundamental ambiguity that you tease out.
Yeah, and I think also like the one, I think one of the pleasures of those first two seasons of slowburn was kind of just forensically taking apart cause and effect and trying to retrace like how things ended up going the way they did. And with the two thousand election, what we found pretty quickly is that the margin was so narrow that any number of you know, sliding doors could have gone the other way. To mix metaphors, I think sliding doors really only go two ways. But but you know, like there were just so many contingencies and so many decisions that could have been made differently, so many mistakes that could have been avoided, or so many you know, potential arguments that could have been made that weren't. In the first episode, we talk about the election itself and like the campaign itself and everything that led up to the recount, and even there you just see how easily it could have gone differently. I think that was attractive to us as students have cause and effect.
Well, so could you could you walk me through the process of reporting this. You mentioned in one of your bonus episodes that there's a kind of ten day long reporting sprint in Florida, and I do love how sort of you know, it's this It has these national and global repercussions, but it is quite a provincial story and really set in Florida. Could you just tell me about those ten days and how you went about piecing this story together.
Yeah, So we got so much done in those ten days I sometimes dream of. I mean, it was really it was really grueling and hard because we were trying to do like two to three interviews a day. But you know, we usually take between you know, a months to a year to make these podcasts. But having like a two week period or a ten day period whatever it was where we just like crammed it all in. It was really amazing. Once it was done. You know, we planned it by just reaching out to everyone we could who we knew was in Miami or Palm Beach or Sarasota. And so there's a lot of driving, a lot of staying in pretty gnarly hotels, and a lot of cramming in the car. Like you know, we had preps for all our interviews, but there was a lot of like thinking on the fly because they were just coming too fast and furious for us to really to really plan everything meticulously as we like to do well.
And it's a huge cast of characters, which is I think that's one of the things I love, not just about the season, but about all the seasons of the show. You wrangle's there's such a strong spine to the story, but then you have all of these people filling in different pieces of it, And I'm wondering how you choose your characters. If you interview I think you said sixty people, there aren't six. There aren't sixty people in the show, So I'm curious what your selection criteria is. And also if going into your interviews you kind of know I'm going to want this person. I know what structure our episode on the courts or the media is going to have I want this person to speak to this moment or is that something that evolves after the fact.
So obviously it depends a little bit. But the way we like to do it in an ideal world where we have a story that we have decided to take on, where there you know, we've almost never done a podcast about something that about which there's there is not already like a shelf or ten of books and documentaries that we can watch, and so a lot of our first steps are absorbing everything that's been produced already, and you know, taking leads from people that have been interviewed before, often looking at contemporaneous coverage, you know, individuals who happened to be quoted in a newspaper story who seem like they might be interesting to follow up with. And we try to outline episodes ahead of time, like before we've even done much reporting, because you know, that's the luxury of doing history right. You already know what happened, and you're trying to find witnesses for every corner of it that you're interested in. But I think you know, based on who says yes, your emphasis ends up shifting. But it definitely helps to know what we're interested in ahead of time, but also obviously be for us to feel open to pursuing avenues that we couldn't account for because we didn't know who was going to agree to talk to us, and we didn't know what they were going to say.
And your your second episode was one of my favorites of the series. It's your media episode functionally about about the early Call on Election Night two thousand, which is this is a subject that is very near and dear to the last archives heart, because we have ale episode about the UNIVAC computer predicting the nineteen fifty two election, and I'm curious, I had not really heard the story of Voter News Service. I'm curious if you've seen much reporting subsequently on how impactful the early call was in shaping the outcome of the election. There's sort of there's reference to voters in the Florida Panhandle possibly being discouraged from voting. I've seen there's kind of conflicting evidence around whether or not that actually made a difference. It seems on principle, it's clear that we shouldn't be calling things before we know an actual outcome. But I'm curious how you think about the impact of that early call.
Yeah. So I think in terms of setting the basic dynamic of those thirty six days during which the recount unfolded, the early call, well, I guess there's two early calls, right that both turned not to have to be wrong.
They get it wrong twice on an election.
Yeah, first Al is the winner in Florida, and then it's Bush and then it's nobody. I think the fact that it was Bush before it was nobody kind of positioned him. And the fact that he had more votes in so far as there was a vote count on election night or the day after, he had more and I think that just inherently created a dynamic where he was protecting his victory and Gore was trying to challenge it even though technically no one had won, and it should have been you know, in some abstract way it should have been even but I think, you know, narrative is important and the overwhelming feeling, you know, I think people probably remember, if they were around Sore, Luserman was the joke. And I think that just directly stems from the fact that Gore was in this unenviable position of having to try to overturn a non result. In terms of what you know, those folks that you mentioned who might have turned around on their way to the polls because they heard that Gore won. It's hard to say. I think people, I mean, this whole season was you know, a study and motivated reasoning. I think you just see the partisans on both sides make more of the facts that are advantageous to them than than than facts that are not. But certainly, as someone you know, I remember Catherine Harris, the Secretary of State who was overseeing the recount, a Bush supporter who had campaigned for him, a Republican, she was so certain that that all that all those people who might have voted for Bush but turned around because of the Gore call, you know, would have determined the outcome. And by the same token, people are certain that if the Palm Beach County ballot had been designed differently and people hadn't accidentally voted for Pat Buchanan when they meant to vote for or Al Gore, then there would have been no recount at all, because Gore would have been up by thousands of votes that seemed.
To go it was like a three thousand or something that he over performs by.
Which which is like such a small number. But actually I remember I think realizing like three thousand sounds like so many when you're dealing with.
These times the margin right, exactly.
Yeah, and as you're hearing about the you know, the day's long manual recounts that happen over the course of those thirty six days, and okay, like they found twelve Gore votes here, they found eight Bush votes here, and it's like, wow, three thousand, yea, and this thing would have been over before it started. So yeah, I think your question was about the early calls you asked also about new reporting. I will just take the opportunity to shout out Slow Burn season ten, if you can believe that there have been ten seasons now of the show that we that we were lucky enough to start steady It's right, hosted by Josh Levigne, who was our editor on those first two seasons. He talked a lot of the same folks that we did about the about Election Night two thousand, including Murray Adelman, who was at Voter News Service that you mentioned. Murray Aielman incredible character, such like probably one of my favorite people we've ever interviewed, because you know, especially in a story that's so full of motivated reasoning. You could really trust him, and he was so honest about the fact that his numbers had been off in ways that he was heartbroken by.
Yeah, he really lived with those consequences. You could tell he was still feeling it.
Yeah, totally. And Voter News Service, for those who don't know, like, it's a little bit hard to explain, and that's true of a lot of aspects of this story. I remember we were at some point We're like, damn, why did we do this? This was so complicated. Ultimately, it was a satisfying challenge to try to like wrestle down these like hyper bureaucratic storylines that you know, many of which take place in courtrooms or even you know, in judicial chambers, to try to kind of like smooth them out into a straight line and tell it like a story people actually want to listen to. Was was definitely a challenge in certain moments. But Voter News Service kind of hard to explain what it is, but basically it's a service that networks subscribe to and pay for. They own it, They co own it. All these network all these news networks, they co owned Voter News Service, and they relied on their early polling results their analysis rather to decide whether a state was ready to be called, and it was Voter News Services numbers, you know that initially indicated a core victory. We'll be right back.
You said that Murray Adelman from Voter News Service was one of your favorite interviews, and indeed one of the reasons that he sounds so trustworthy is because you can tell that he feels the gravity of his contributing to the early call. There is another interview in this series with Catherine Harris, the then Secretary of State in Florida, who ultimately certifies election results for Bush in the state and is sort of a figure about whom there is much debate. She seems in your interview with her, not to feel so heavily the consequences of her own actions in this and it seemed like in a series in which you have kind of empathetic interviews with many different people who are involved in the two thousand election, she seems to be one of the few in which there is actual misrepresentation, where there's actual conflict in your in your in your interview with her, I was wondering if you could talk a bit about the experience of interviewing Catherine Harris and what you think the factor is in her erroneously claiming that she had petitioned the Supreme Court of Florida to do a manual recount in Florida, misremembering other key details of what happened. What the factors in that are.
Yeah, so she was a good representative view that we heard a lot from people on both sides, which is that we were just trying to follow the law, Like this is nothing. This was not about winning or losing. This was not about trying to, you know, get one over on anyone. This was about following the law. The law is dispassionate, the law is black on white, and all all we were there to do was was make sure that the law was followed, which I think is a disingenuous argument. And I think and I get how people arrive there because you know, for example, the Florida Supreme Court, right like this is supposed to be in a political institution, just like the US Supreme Court is supposed to be an a political institution. But confronted with the most partisan question that one can imagine, which is did these people or these people win the election? It gets really hard to maintain that facade, and I think, you know, people's biases, people's desires for certain outcomes inevitably can be felt in their decision making and even in how they understand what's going on. I think with Catherine Harris, what was interesting in that interview, you know, and I should say, like, this interview took place almost twenty years after the fact, right, so I don't hold it against her that she didn't remember some details at all. We assume people will not always remember every twist and turn. But you know, the thing that really I remember kind of caused me to kind of go into a little bit more of an adversarial mode with her than I usually ever take with interview subjects was that there was a county, Palm Beach County, where they were doing a manual recount. They had a certain amount of time. They could have had more time if the Secretary of State's office decided to be open and the Secretary of State's office made the decision that gave them less time. Basically, they the secretary of State's office, had a choice like we could give them. We could interpret this ruling from the Florida Supreme Court as saying we can give them x amount of time, or we can interpret this ruling to mean that we if we stay open, we can give them a little more time. And they decided not to give them a little more time. And what was stunning to me was that Catherine Harris remembered as them having extent having granted them more time, when in fact, like they had made a very affirmative decision not to. And so that just struck me as like either her trying to spin facts in a dishonest way, or more likely like she has a version of this in her head that over twenty years has like warped her memory of her decision making in such a way that makes her the good guy, and that kind of erases a decision that I think, to my eyes, was like very obviously counter to the spirit of counting every vote you can, Like she had an opportunity to give Palm Beach a little more time when all they needed was a little more time to complete their recount, she decided not to. And so it was kind of amazing to hear her say no, no, no, no, we actually gave them more time, Like we gave them more time, and so I yeah, I think at that moment, I pushed back, and then she pushed back on me, and you know, you sort of hear her get defensive as I try to kind of like tell her what I know to be the facts and the reason we included it was not to like gotcha her or to like make her sound like she didn't know what she was talking about, because I do think motivated reasoning and motivated memory is just like this whole story here and so many different arenas, you had people who were supposed to be a political and neutral and without a dog in the race, so combing to their own biases in a totally natural way, but in a way that I think is real and and and powers a lot of history.
Yeah, well you also have there's this intentiveness across the season to how the media narrative that was emerging around the election is actually shaping these kind of a political non part or supposedly non partisan actors choices. And I think one place where you do see that where there is a lot of empathy and justifiably so for Catherine Harris, is you hear how wounded she is still by the very sexist and sort of cruel jokes that are made at her expense when she is elevated to fame through the election and then becomes a laughing stock at least in like the late night media s good and and it's it seems plausibly like part of what would lead to embattled or at least motivated decision making in that process.
Totally. Yeah, she knew who was who was making fun of her. She knew that people were dismissing her both as like an intellectual lightweight but also as a as a partisan hack. And you know that gets that that we'll get anyone's back up, right.
Yeah, I was. I was curious to sort of along similar lines in terms of how like a median narrative can shape what happened in the election. To what extent do you think al Gore's relative passivity or more He's very much an institutionalist, Like he he certifies his own defeat, He instructs his campaign not to criticize the Supreme Court in the United States after the ruling that that winds up giving the election to Bush, and he he calls off Jesse Jack And when he's campaigning very aggressively for him, there's this whole there's this sense that al Gore really wishes to appear presidential, and I was curious to what extent that version of Al Gore took the wheel because of the sense that he had been part of for eight years an administration that had been accused of of being unpresidential or disgracing the office of the presidency in some way, How do you account for his decision making and what role do you think that plays in it? If any so.
I remember ron Klain got really angry at me after he heard the show, or at least some of the show. I don't know if he listened to the whole thing. Ron Klain was was was Al Gore's top aid or I don't know if that's literally his title, but he was. He was one of the top advisors to Gore during this period. And his anger, as I recall, was was based on the on his sense that I had kind of swallowed uncritically the snare of Gore as a wishy, washy and kind of naively institutionalist actor who didn't really want to win enough, who wasn't willing to do what it took to win. And I wish that we have been able to talk about exactly what he thinks really happened and what he thinks the consequences were of Gore's I think undeniably restrained behavior during those thirty six days. I mean, you can argue about whether they fought hard enough, but I think no one would dispute, including I assume ron Klain, that Gore was not trying to stir emotion in his supporters. He was not trying to influenced news coverage in an aggressive kind of like mercenary way to try to shift the reality on the ground. You know, the thing that happened at the very end of the story where the Supreme Court halts the recount, you know, and Gore says to his team, like, just don't want anyone to trash the Supreme Court over this. I think it speaks volumes. I think both in a good way and that it's like, here was a guy who really took seriously the idea that the Supreme Court had a reputation that was important to the country as an a political institution, and that we shouldn't just because we think they've acted in a way that was you know, biased or even dishonest, Like we shouldn't say that because it would be bad for the country. I think that's like putting a positive spin on his on what you could also describe as a kind of unwillingness to fight like your life depended on it. People I think criticize the Democrats and have always criticized the Democrats for not wanting it enough or not being aggressive enough. And I think we have a line in the show maybe this was what ron Klain was mad about, that Gore was worried about not looking like a hypocrite, whereas the Bush folks were worried about winning. I think it mattered to Gore that the positions they took during those thirty six days were internally consistent, and so I think throughout the Gore campaign, I don't think it was limited to Gore. There was just like a perception that they were more invested in being good than being victorious.
I mean, it strikes me that this election obviously listening to this season now after the twenty twenty election in you know, with one month less than a month ago before what is certain to be a very tight election, another tight US election presidential election, it's interesting to on two thousand as a moment where the machinery, the electoral machinery of this country was really and extremely granularly on display this question of postmarks on absentee ballots hanging Chad. I think one of my favorite details of the entire show is that the plural of Chad is Chad, which is really absurd. It's like, you, there is no other way you could add like an additional layer of absurdity to what is our very absurd situation. But I'm curious what the effect of all of this was in your view that I think now of twenty twenty as having elevated all of these small state level offices that people didn't think about, and the secretaries of state. How many people really would have known what a secretary of state did before twenty twenty in this country, And yet here in two thousand we have a national figure made out of Catherine Harris, the Florida Secretary of State. And I'm just curious to know, in your view, if it changed anything about either our faith in the electoral machinery or in how elections actually were run. Was it or was it all like the Supreme Court decision non presidential.
So so yeah, so So The short answer is, I don't know. Slightly longer answers, I think that it really changed how people saw the Supreme Court. I think like the prevailing conventional wisdom, or at least in certain certain circles now, is that the Supreme Court is a political institution, and it clearly is a body of political actors who are pursuing ideological ends in their reasoning. I think that starts with Bush v. Gore. I think the sort of disillusionment with the Court, I think it hasn't didn't reach a fever pitch to the extent that it has until you know, the past few years, I would say, but especially looking back, it's like this was this was the thing that shattered. I think a lot of people's illusions about the Court as far as like uh revealing the disproportionately consequential roles played by these tiny bureaucracies that that that that are different from state to state, that or even county to county, where you have individuals like Teresa Lapoor who uh was responsible.
For the butterfly ballot, right for.
The butterfly ballot, Yeah, thank you. The fact that these people can have such a can make such a huge difference, I think was probably pretty shocking, and I think it was shocking to them to be turned into national figures. One of my favorite lines that I heard on my as I was re listening recently was it wasn't, unfortunately a line that anyone said to me. It was Teresa Laport, who declined to be interviewed for our podcast, said to I believe it was the Saint Petersburg Times. She said, you know they were. They were writing about her role in the butterfly ballot fiasco intended and she said something like, you want my blood here, take it to me her. He heard her anguish in that moment is at least partly informed by like this should not be my fault, like this, this is this. We should not have a system where this this can be my fault.
When she was trying to accommodate a change in the law to how many third party candidates.
It's exactly yes. Uh so, I think did people on you know who work for political campaigns learn lessons from two thousand about the power of these local offices and the power of these elected positions that can be held by Republicans or Democrats. I'm sure yes. But the reason I said, the short answer to your question is I don't know, is we just didn't do a ton of reporting on how people like applied to the lessons of this uh of this fiasco in coming elections. I do think, you know, when we made the show, originally there was one part of it that seemed like total science fiction, but now looking back on twenty twenty, I see as anything but which had to do with the slates of electors that states send to officially throw a state's support behind one candidate or the other. So the Republicans in the Florida State Legislature on the stated basis that it seemed possible that with all this recounting going on, they would actually run out of time and the states electors wouldn't even get to cast their votes, that none of Florida's electoral votes would be counted in the final tally. They kind of came up with a backup plan the Florida State Legislature. The Republicans in the Florida State Legislature came up with this backup plan where they would change the law such that they had the unilateral power to decide who those electors would be, so they would be able to send Bush electors to the Electoral College to basically give Bush the state independent of what the vote count was, you know, seems obvious of course, like the state's electors have to you send the electors that represent the will of the people in the state. The Republicans and the Florida State Legislature were like, what if we decided which electors to send? And the Gore team saw this as like a potential end run around the will of the Florida voters, and they were worried that if you know, the recounts went their way and it turned out that Gore was ahead and the election could be certified for Gore, that these Republicans in the Florida State Legislature would be like, well, we don't care. We're like, we can just send the electors. We can just send Bush electors anyway, That's what they were worried about. The Republicans said, no, no, no, that's not why we're doing this, Like, we're just trying to prevent a situation where, uh, the recount doesn't end in time so that we can uh send electors and and and have Florida count I don't know, I don't know who was telling the truth. But the crazy thing was the Gore side came up with their own sort of Plan B where they would it.
Called plan It was called Plan X, thank you. It was not planned BAT plan was their plan which X yes exactly.
Uh. Plan X involved sending a slate of Gore electors to the state House in Florida. Uh. And the funny part was that they basically realized that there were two state houses in Florida that they could send electors to. There was the new one and then there's the old one and which.
Is now like a museum or like like a library.
And so their their hope was like, okay, like, if they're going to do this end run where they send Bush electors to the Electoral College regardless of the vote totals among you know, among the people who actually voted in the election in Florida, well we're going to send our own Gore electors and then there will be two slates of electors. Anyway, none of this ever came to pass, obviously, and we included this storyline almost as like a g whiz, look at how crazy it got, or look how crazy it could have gotten. I guess was sort of the spirit in which we included these these what ifs. Then, of course, in twenty twenty, you know this question of which electors to send becomes very real, and suddenly you realize that all these all these assumptions we have about like how an individual person's vote will turn into consequences, is all quite flimsy, and the rules can just be changed. And if if someone like but Donald Trump can convince the parties and elected officials in the state to send electors to the Electoral College who don't represent the winner of that state's election, then you know he can do that, you know. And that didn't happen either, obviously, But I don't know. Did the people who were involved in that scheme, like take their cues from two thousand? I don't know, But I think it's certainly true that among people who paid attention, and certainly people who work in politics, like the two thousand election I can safely say at least should have been a wake up call regarding the power of entities and individuals who you wouldn't think had that much of it.
Yeah, there is the sense that on some level a kind of blind faith in elections does depend on blindness that the closer you look, the more you know about the intricacies of the system, the harder it is to have absolute confidence in the system, but totally there is a moment I'm going to get this wrong, but you I think Florida has sixty something counties and you're talking about I think that's right, and you're talking about a select few of them, and you sort of caveat it by saying, this is our journalistic bias towards I think the dramatic and the dysfunctional. So I suppose is a kind of wrap up question. I'm curious about having spent the last however long Slowburn's been abound eight years Slowburn Fiasco.
Not quite eight, I think six. We started in twenty eighteen.
Okay, but so you've you've spent the better part of a decade, over over half a decade, looking very closely and intricately at crises in our democracy. And yet there is a kind of genuine warmth and empathy I think in the series, even as it takes the consequences and issues very seriously, you're you have of this. It feels as if there is an underlying faith in the project, or at least a hope in the potential for improving this democracy. And I'm wondering, first if that's true, and second if it is true what you think it is that sustains that in your own tone, I don't know.
That it's true. I have to say, I think I'll never forget. Like when we made season one of Slowburn about the Nixon administration, we thought it was obvious that, like the way we described, you know, the sort of final beats of that story, we thought it was obvious that it could have gone the other way and that Nixon could have gotten away with it. And then I think we were surprised, my colleagues and I that at least some subset of our listeners were like, the system works. Like Trump was, you know, in Mueller's cross hairs at the time, and there was a real burning desire to believe that he would be stopped one way or another. And I think people took from the story of Nixon's downfall that like, look, you know, the end of the day, we have these systems and they work, Whereas my takeaway from the Nixon story was like, could have easily not worked, and the only reason it did was because of individuals who, like really at great personal expense in many cases, like stuck their necks out and insisted on doing things they thought were right. So maybe if there if if there is an underlying optimism in our in our work, maybe that's where it comes from, is that there are there is no shortage of people who do want to do the right thing. I think we try to approach everyone we interview and and and talk about in our history shows with the presumption of good faith. We we we we often say like we're interested in how people made decisions, how they made mistakes, like how they processed the situations they found themselves in when they did not have the luxury of hindsight, when they only had incomplete information to work off of. I think maybe that presupposes that if everyone did have perfect information, they would all make perfect choices. But really, I don't know. I think I think that I think this season, in particular of Fiasco, as I said before, really does I think put on display the power of conscious or unconscious bias, like you just want your guy to win, and that just warps how you understand what's going on. And I do think like Catherine Harris was being honest with me when she told me that she just wanted to follow law and that she did everything she could to count as many votes as as as humanly possible. I believe that she believes that, and I think we kind of take it as part of our project to like document the ways in which sometimes people make decisions based on delusions, right, people make decisions based on not only in perfect information, but also emotion and circumstance and errors in judgment. And I think, I think the other thing that I've concluded, I suppose over the course of these six years, is that you know, the expression of the bunch of guys in a room theory of history, where like you want to believe that there's some logic and somecity know there's a plan or at least a structure, a basic logic to like how history unfolds, and that at least maybe things aren't inevitable, but the things that happen had good reasons to happen. And I think, and I think what I've learned over the course of making all these shows is that oftentimes things happen because individuals made them happen, and people make things happen for all kinds of reasons, not all of them honorable or based in reality.
Yeah, what is your sense of why people speak to you for this season in particular, or for for the shows well, and there's a few moments where people are sort of like, you know, I was hesitating, and then what is it that people are like, Wait, the show is called Fiasco? What what do you think the FSCA Catherine Harris. I think, specifically, if I'm remembering correctly, objects to the title of the show.
Yeah, well, I'll never forget that. We you know, when we were brainstorming what we should call our new show, we had a bunch of ideas and Madeline Kaplan, who had been an intern on Slowburn and came with us to start what turned into Fiasca, came up with the name Fiasco, and we were like immediately as soon as she said it, we were like, that's it perfect, Like so flexible, so catchy. And then we sat down to write the first email to someone asking them for an interview about the two thousand election, we were like, oh shit, we're gonna have to every season we make, we're gonna have to account for what it is we think the Fiasco was exactly that's right, that's right. No, I think, Look, I think people, why why people talk to us? Do you think we're fair? I think, you know, even when it's not like we we have like a you know, capital O objective lens where we just say what happened, and we don't editorialize, like we have a point of view. We have analysis that that that people can agree or disagree with. But I think in the end of the day, like we do, we we do go into all of our interviews trying to figure out like what the person was thinking, like how they made their choices. And I think even if some people that we've featured in fiasco, you know, will there's a season on the Iran Contra scandal where there's a bunch of people who made choices people are will readily disagree with, I think you can still feel that we did our best to try to capture their motivations, and so, you know, I suppose some of the people we approach for interviews do their homework and listen to to to to a season or an episode or two, and they maybe can hear that that's what I'd like to think. I suppose the less flattering to us explanation for why people talk is that people like to talk, period, and they like to be asked their opinion, and they like to be they like to be involved. If someone's telling their story, and it's hard to say no when someone's giving you the opportunity to have some influence over how the story is told.
Yeah, that makes sense. Well, thank you for sabbi my to talk about this. Thank you for your great work. It was really a pleasure to listen to. Thank you so much. I'm very grateful for your questions. This episode of the Last Archive was produced by Lucy Sullivan and Amy Gaines McQuaid, mastering by Sarah Briguaire. You can listen to the full Bush Vigor season of Fiasco over on the Fiasco Feed. I'm Ben Outa Haaffrey. Thanks for listening.
