The Giant Pool Of Money Response

The podcast was very interesting in the way they used people as sources. Talking TO the veteran who got screwed over in the mortgage crisis made it so much more personal. On the opposite hand, listening to the mortgage broker who did the screwing over talk on and on about how he hung out with B list celebrities and spent all this money as though he himself were the wolf of wall street really sold the idea that these people suck. The podcast put it in much better words but the general theme was that these wall street adjacent brokers were either embodiments of corporate evil, or just poor simple douchebags who got sucked in and then spit right back out. While another podcast we recently listened to about fast fashion outlined research in a fun, casual conversational way, this one felt a lot more like interviews. This mat have simply been done to add valid points from real life experiences, but I think it was done much more strategically. Personally, I couldn’t possibly care less about the mortgage market. I do however, care about Frank who’s about to lose his house and want to know what happened. Had I not been pulled in by real people affected by this crisis, I probably would’ve retained much less information. By presenting the facts in such a hands on way and getting the listener invested, this podcast had every reason to be dry and boring. It was very intelligent to lean into the personable aspects of the crisis and then pull out the numbers, I can’t think of a better way to make such a complex issue understandable and even palatable to the masses. There were certain parts that read as a lot more conversational than others, but the intermittent interviews made it feel a lot more clinical. Specifically the framing around the man who sold these bogus loans. During the interview portion they simply let him dig his own grave talking about how much money he had and bragging about his newfound status. It was only after the microphone was off and he could no longer defend himself that the podcast switched angles and ripped him to pieces. This was also the point where he got his poetic justice and they talked about how now HE was the one who had to move back in with his parents after screwing all those lower income people over.