The Joe Walker Podcast - 2023 Retrospective — A Listener Interviews Me

Episode Date: December 29, 2023

In this special episode, the tables are turned as I'm interviewed by a listener of the show, DJ Thornton from Sydney. We reflect on the progress of the show in 2023, what I learned from this year's guests, and what's in store for 2024. Full transcript available at: josephnoelwalker.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Thank you. episode, I sit down with one of you, that is one of my listeners, and we reflect on this year's episodes and the podcast more generally. In this episode, for the first time ever, I am the guest and my listener is the host. Let me briefly share how this situation came to pass. I thought 2023 was the show's best year. So I wanted to reflect on the specific episodes this year, as well as the broader lessons that I learned. I feel like there's a lot of knowledge I've gathered in my travels, but I haven't had a forum in which to share it. So it occurred to me that I should get someone to interview me, but I don't have a producer or a partner. This is a one-man show. So who should run the interview? Well, about a month ago, I invited listeners of the show

to apply to be my interviewer. And there were many excellent applications from around the world. I shortlisted the 10 best and did calls with all 10 of those listeners. Now, podcasting can be a very unidirectional thing. So finally getting to speak with members of this audience was really enjoyable. One of the highlights of the year for me. And happily, I was delighted to pick one of them to be my interviewer. You're about to meet DJ Thornton, who is an economics PhD student based in Sydney. Fortunately, as I am also in Sydney, that meant that we could record this in person, which we did on the 28th of December. I put this interview entirely in

DJ's hands. He wrote the questions. I didn't see them beforehand and he did an excellent job. So thank you, DJ, for making this an enjoyable and reflective experience. And thank you to all of you, my listeners, for joining me in 2023. Now, please enjoy this retrospective with DJ Thornton. Joe, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Pleasure. So let's begin by having you just like briefly mention who you are and maybe how you found the show. Sure, happy to. So my name is DJ Thornton. I am a PhD student in economics. I found the show in 2021. I was asked to lecture a course on economic perspectives and I was looking for a good podcast on Keynes and I came across your interview with Robert Skidowski. I've been a listener ever since.

That was a good chat, that one. Yeah, it was good. Well, it converted me to becoming a listener, so it was good. Yeah, so look, it's an honor to be sitting in the host chair today. There's lots of questions that I have for you, but before we get into that, I actually wanted to start by going back an entire year, since we're reflecting on the year, I thought we might go back an entire year to the end of last year. At the end of last year, your final interview was with Tyler Cowen, you talked about talent, you talked, among other things, about Emergent Ventures.

And then the podcast took a three and a half month hiatus. Of course, you weren't just resting in those three and a half months. There's a lot happening. And then you kicked off the year in the middle of April with your interview with Danny Kahneman. So I thought maybe you could just start by telling us a little bit about the lead up to that very first interview of the year. Yeah, wow. What a great question. So a few things happened in the lead up. Firstly, I won the Emergent Ventures Grant from Tyler and the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Secondly, I was actually recording podcasts that weren't published until I think April was when the first one was published. So I did a trip to the United States in February where I recorded the podcast with Kahneman, the podcast with Catelyn Carrico, and another one which hasn't been

published yet. And then I was just working my day job, which was very time consuming. So working at a tech startup. I figure it's always important to prioritize that obligation above anything else when you're, you know, working for someone. So the podcast took a backseat. Yeah. Yeah.

Fair enough. Fair enough. We should talk about the Emergent Ventures grant, but maybe we'll get there a little bit later. Sure. So you launched on April 14th with this interview with Danny Carmen. And in the preface to that very first episode, you said that you're going to be posting episodes every two weeks this year. Did I? So you did, you did. Yeah. Sorry,

I'm holding you accountable. So what, I mean, look, you had 12 interviews this year, if you count this one. And that's obviously impressive by any standards, but what were you a little over optimistic? Did you have the wrong reference class to use Carnivans terminology? Oh, wow. What a mean interview. Sorry. No, no, it's a good question. I'll say nice things to it. So I think I need to just like screw the frequency going forward.

Just like not publicly commit to anything and people will just get the episodes when they come. So that's my new commitment. No frequency. It's not much of a commitment. I thought two weeks was the right cadence, but again, the day job gets in the way and trying to do all the interviews in person means that you need to travel a lot for them as well. And so I can't produce them as readily as if I was just doing them all over Zoom or Skype. You'd like to plan these big trips, like Viking raids to America, get some interviews and come back.

For sure. Did the Emergent Ventures grant give you a little bit of slack in terms of your day job or not really? No, not really. You apply more for the network and the street cred not for the money it's not like a like it's generous it helps with the podcast helps with the operational costs but it's not like a life-changing amount of money and it's not money that i can like personally live off fair enough yeah but you you did uh stop your day job much later in the year yeah is that right so so you just focusing on the pod now? Yeah, so this might be news to many listeners, but as of mid-September, I've been just doing the podcast.

That will probably change at some point because ultimately I see it as part of a portfolio of different activities. I have too many interests and ambitions to just do that. But yeah, over the last few months and over the next few months going forward, it's kind of the main focus. Cool, that's great.

Well, I mean, I was going to ask you to kind of give a prediction of how many episodes you thought you might get out in 2024. So, I mean, given your lack of commitment. That's contrary to my new commitment. That is contrary. I mean, you want to give us a ballpark? I would imagine between like 10 and 20. Yeah. Okay. That's pretty reasonable. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, I do That's pretty reasonable. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, I do want to dive into kind of some of the episodes and the themes that were kind of woven throughout the year. Before we get there, I thought I might ask you a little bit about interviewing and guest

selection a little bit more generally. So first off, you have a lot of very high profile guests on the show, obviously. And I think- Including myself. Including, yeah, that's right. You're up with the greats. I was wondering first off how you choose which guests you're going to reach out to in the first place.

And then what's your actual kind of conversion rate on those cold emails? Right. The conversion rate's pretty good. Ballpark, maybe like 50%. Wow. I choose the guests first and foremost on a selfish criterion of just who am I interested in? Like, who am I reading? Who do I want to learn more from? Who do I want to have a conversation with? Who do I want to meet in person? Because that can obviously be quite fun. Secondly, there's just the constraint of who then actually agrees to do the podcast. But with a 50% conversion rate, that's pretty good.

And then I guess thirdly, there's also some, what would you call it, programming considerations. So thinking about the balance of topics usually. So not wanting to go too heavy on any one thing. I think in the past the show featured economics quite heavily and maybe i only had like one economist this year to raga ram rajan on of course shruti shruti well i mean ken henry as well if you oh yeah okay okay wow so i had three economists yeah yeah so but but that's probably a lower percentage than previous years. Interesting.

Yeah. I mean, it's funny because you say you should, you say you choose the guests that you kind of want to meet in person. Do you worry about kind of meeting your intellectual heroes? Have you been disappointed? No, not really. Not really. I mean, to be clear, I don't, that's not like the, the, the overwhelming kind of consideration to be like fanboying different people people getting selfies and autographs and stuff but no i've

been pretty universally impressed by everyone i've met that's nice well you you hit a personal best or maybe a podcast best for for the show this year you had a four and a half hour long episode, two four and a half hour long episodes, one with Ken Henry and then another with Stephen Wolfram. So the first thing I want to ask is how exactly do you, I mean, I imagine you're not getting your guests to agree to block out half the day for a podcast when you, when you ask them if they want to come on the show so do you think that that once they get in the room with you the reason that they're staying on is because they're just sort of enjoying the depth of the conversation with you or I mean are they finding it sort of beneficial to them or what do you think that the reason is that you get so much time from these people I think the conversation with both Ken and Stephen went well.

And so they were happy to, I mean, you actually hear that in, at least in the Wolfram one, he's like, no, no, keep going. Yeah. Crunching a carrot or something. Yeah. He's eating some chocolate. Some chocolate. Crunching in the background.

And that was recorded on a Saturday afternoon in Concord. Okay. And so I guess he didn't have any like hard stop or at least it didn't for a while. So we were recording on the right day. And then with Ken, I think that might've been a Wednesday, but it was kind of the end of the day. He actually had to move partway through the episode.

He had to move a call, which I felt kind of bad about, but he was like, no, it's fine. Like it's, I don't think it was a crucial call or anything. So yeah,

I guess I don't, I don't plan for it to go that long. I'll often try to calculate how many questions I need based on their average response length in previous interviews. So I'll take, I don't know, maybe their three most recent interviews or however many interviews they've done because sometimes they haven't done that many. Look at how many questions the interviewer asked and how long their answers were, calculate some kind of average,

work out how long I have with them and then just calculate how many questions I should be aiming for. But sometimes it just doesn't work out like that. I don't know why. So with Ken and Wolfram, about an hour into the interview, I realized like, oh shit, we've only got like one hour left

and I've only got through 20% of my questions. So you're asking them for two hours then? Yeah, I think it was roughly that in both those cases. And then I'll have to be like, hey, sorry, do you mind if we keep going a bit longer? And yeah, I feel like that's usually the right thing to do just because I'm pretty confident I've got some really good questions to ask them and we probably won't get this opportunity again, at least for a very long time. And because they'd enjoyed the question so far, it was, yeah, something we could do in those cases. Yeah. That's funny. Cause that's the method

that you describe of how many questions you ask is exactly how I worked out how many questions I was going to ask you today, or at least how many I was going to prep. But yeah, I think they also, those two particular cases, Wolfram and Ken Henry, they gave you long answers. I mean, Ken was telling lots of stories, which was fantastic. And Wolfram was, it seemed like he was kind of just thinking out loud. I mean, he's got excellent thoughts, so it was great for the listener, but yeah. Are there any guests that you really have wanted to have on the show, but have turned you down? I'm thinking in particular of an annual tradition that you have with a certain Australian politician. Yes, I have an annual tradition where I email Paul Keating's secretary and get rejected.

But you generally shouldn't go through the gatekeeper. It's just their job to say no. You should go through some kind of personal connection. So that annual tradition is just like a complete lazy sort of Hail Mary on my part. There's actually a better way to get to Paul Keating. Listeners, if you know. Who has, so I mean there've been some people where I think, oh, they'll probably say yes.

And then I've just been surprised when I've received no response or a negative response. Yeah. Some people I've wanted to get on, but haven't. One is George Lakoff. Okay. Wrote that book, Metaphorsors we live by about how a large part of our cognition is just like pattern matching. Right.

Who else? Bunch, bunch of people. It's probably like the academics who surprised me. Cause I'm like, surely that's me. Like was it Chad? Yeah.

So, so someone who I mentioned to you when we caught up last week that Chad Jones, the economist at Stanford who's done a lot on growth, he was a negative earlier this year. So that was kind of surprising. There are a bunch of more high-profile guests

that I'm chipping away at at the moment. Chipping away. So I guess they haven't said yes yet, but that's not necessarily a no. Right. I don't know. I probably shouldn't share any of their names. That's fine. No, no, that's not necessarily a no. Right. I don't know. I probably shouldn't share any of their names. That's fine.

No, no, that's fair enough. Jinx it. Don't want to jeopardize your chances. Yeah, that's funny. Well, one of your listeners has come up with a drinking game that they posted on an Apple podcast review, which is that every time one of your guests says something like, wow,

that's a really good question, or that's a very interesting question. They have a drink. And it's no surprise that they get sloshed by the end of the interview. You know, like the, the Danny Kahneman interview at the very end, as the,

as it's kind of fading out, you hear him say, you're a very good interviewer. Right. And then in the, in the Ken Henry interview, he, he pays you a very big compliment i

think around the 1 hour 30 mark where you're asking the question about him being colorblind and whether that was a problem he's like wow you're too well briefed joe um do you i mean do you think of yourself as a naturally good interviewer or is that something you've had to learn over the last couple of years i mean i guess there are all of these aspects to it which are innate, like the ability to speak well, to think well, so you're formulating good questions. I suppose I've honed the technique on top of that and what those people are gesturing at when they say,

like, you're a very good interviewer is I think the, but maybe, maybe two things actually. And this is quite Zen because these are, these are almost like opposing things or orthogonal things. One is doing really deep research so that you can ask questions that haven't been asked before. And then the other is actually being present in the interview so that you can

respond to what they actually say and follow up on it. Cause like the magic or a lot of the marginal value of an interview is in the interview so that you can respond to what they actually say and follow up on it. Cause like the magic or a lot of the marginal value of an interview is in the follow-up because that's where you can open up something that hasn't been discussed before. Yeah. How, what percentage of good interviewing then would you say is just good scholarship, good preparation? I think it's very high. For for me that's the main lever for the quality of an episode is just how much prep can i get done maybe i don't know like 80 yeah okay yeah and do you think your reputation now gives you a certain level of credibility to bring on new guests like you know like this year did you find that any of the guests you reached out to it kind of knew who you were or knew of you? Or maybe they look you up

and they go, Oh, he's, you know, interviewed people. I'm not sure how many of them already knew me, but certainly they, I expect them to look me up after I send the initial cold email. And we actually, the developer I worked with and I designed my website to optimize for guest conversion. So it's not actually so much for the listeners. The homepage of the website is actually designed to persuade a guest who's considering coming on the show to say yes. I never would have guessed that.

Yeah, wow. Do you, because you get into such depth on these topics and you're talking with world experts, how often do you find yourself, if ever, feeling out of your depth or a little bit like an imposter even, like this just got very technical very quickly or something like that? Like all the time. I'm acutely aware of the fact that...

This gives me more empathy for you, by the way. I'm acutely aware of the fact that this gives me more empathy for you by the way I'm acutely aware of the fact that even with the research and preparation I do which to be clear I'm never happy with I never feel like I've done enough but even with that, so putting in like tens of hours of reading and research and talking to other experts doing that as preparation for an episode I've still barely scratched the surface of their field. And a lot of that knowledge is just like very flimsy.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Which episode did you have to prepare most for this year? I have a conjecture, but so let me, okay, well tell me your conjecture first.

Well, I was well and truly out of my depth in the Cardi Carrico interview. Okay. I mean, that's just cause I don't know very much biology, but if it were me in your shoes, that would be the one i would have had to prepare the most for yeah i mean it's like with a lot of these things it's just learning the language of the field right but you already know the language of economics and and you know a good chunk of the

language of philosophy so yeah uh i mean you have had other biologists on um but you know like evolutionary biologists and this sort of thing, not so much immunology. Oh, yeah, Peter, Deodion actually. Yeah, but you tell me. So it wasn't cardio. I actually felt very underprepared for that episode. Okay.

And it probably seems to you or to other people who didn't do like the cursory research into microbiology that I did, that I was well prepared because I'm speaking the language, but it's very surface level kind of knowledge. I was actually embarrassed about how underprepared I was for that episode. And I sat on it for a few months because I was like, this was such an important person.

This was her first ever long form podcast. I just didn't do as good of a job as I should have. Okay. Which was probably too self-critical, but that's just a reflection of, so I don't know how much prep would I have done for that one. Maybe like 10 to 20 hours or something like that. Much of it on the flight on the way over.

So who did I, okay, let me reframe your question from like who did I have to do the most prep for to who did I do the most prep for this year? Um, God, I will say Wolfram. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. That was a very in-depth interview. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'll say Wolfram. Had you already read new kind of science before no i mean i'd like i was aware of it i i'd like dabbled in it in the past but i'd never

actually seriously tried to to read it it's an impressive book yeah it's an intellectual achievement whatever you think of his conclusions and whether or not you want to accept them just the idea of a new kind of science as an intellectual project is so ambitious and compelling. Yeah. So what, if you hadn't read that book, what made you bring, ask him to come on the show in the first place? What was it? Was it the physics project or?

Well, I mean, I knew, I knew all of his, I was vaguely familiar with all of his work okay i felt like there hadn't been a great kind of canonical wolfram episode to date yes but maybe there has been he's done a lot of media so i'm not sure about that but i felt like i could add some kind of marginal value there and uh he was relevant to the AI topic. I think that actually that was my original route in, is I wanted to get his thoughts on AI. Which we actually run out of time to cover in any depth.

I was going to say that, yeah. Which is kind of a shame. But we're planning around to, so we can talk about it for 2024. Yeah. Oh, that'd be great. Yeah.

Okay. So before we jump into some of the themes, which AI will be one of them, but before we get there, I think you wouldn't put a listener in my chair if you didn't value the contributions of your listeners. But there was one point this year where you did not care what your listeners had to say. Do you have any idea what I'm hinting at?

No. On August 7th, Joe, you posted a Twitter poll asking your followers whether you should change your name to, the name of the podcast to something less ridiculous than the Jolly Swagman podcast. Loaded question, by the way. 70%, almost 70% of the 431 people who responded said, no, leave it as is. 20% said you should change the name.

10% were not sure, but you changed the name. What's, what's going on there. So I'm trying to persuade the marginal listeners to subscribe to the show. And there's probably a massive selection effect where the people responding to that poll were existing listeners who had some kind of attachment to the name, some kind of status quo bias, but I don't care about them.

They're going to, well, I do care about them a lot, but I don't care what they think about the name because they'll keep listening to the show in all likelihood. I'm trying to convince the person listening from, I don't know, America who is finding the show for the first time and is like, the Jolly Swagman, what the fuck is this?

Who is rightly confused or was rightly confused about the old name. Fair enough. Do you think it was a good move? I mean, look, I'm an Australian. So I liked the Jolly Swagman. I think probably long-term it was a good move. I mean, are you familiar with, Friedrich Hayek makes this distinction

between the law and the legislation, right? And so the law is what everyone actually does and then the legislation is what's written in. I feel like for your existing listeners, you might have changed the legislation, but I don't know that you changed the law. If I'm telling someone about the podcast, I'll still say Jolly Swagman usually.

Oh no, it's called the Joe Walker podcast. I'm conscious of some acts of rebellion like that. Pure rebellion. Yeah, a subreddit as well, which is still Jolly Swagman. Probably stay that way. Another thing you did this year was what you called an experiment, which was to open up the show to listener contributions

and to see how much of the show you could support just via listener contributions. So how's that experiment gone? Yeah, so opening up to financial contributions. This started maybe one or two months ago, just after I quit my day job and started to give more time to the show. So to be clear, my hypothesis was never that it would be able to financially sustain the show. I suspected that it wouldn't

and in part that was because I'd seen other shows attempt the same experiment and just fail to sustain the model. So the most famous example there is the Tim Ferriss show. I think several years ago, he tried to switch to a subscriber model and remove all ads from his podcast. And it might've lasted like a month or two

when he switched back to the ad model. I'd procrastinated on doing it for years because I just felt, I didn't like the feeling of rattling the tin, so to speak. But I kind of become persuaded that maybe rattling the tin is better than publishing some sponsor that I don't have a close connection to. So I was correct. It's not enough to sustain the show,

but I was super moved and touched by the contributions I received. Regardless of the size, just from all sorts of people, it's actually really motivating and it's a big morale boost because people are um i guess like revealing their preferences yeah in a in a really clear way um so yeah i was like touched and grateful to all the people who contributed yeah you can kind of see your caution even when you you know made the announcement that you were opening up to listener contributions because you you said something like, please don't give if it's going to detract from you giving to charity or anything else. Yeah.

That's not me trying to do some virtue signaling thing. I just genuinely feel like there are probably better causes to give you money to. I'll be fine if you don't support the show. Yeah. We'll see how that goes in 2024. Yeah. Yeah. All right.

Let's talk about some of the best moments of the year, maybe the best episode and most underrated episode of the year before we dive into themes. So you actually have not told me what the listener best episode was. In terms of absolute downloads. Let's say in terms of absolute downloads. I'm going to guess. I'm actually going to guess top three.

Sure. Will you rank them? I'll rank them. I'm probably going to be way off. I'm facing a situation of radical uncertainty here. This is resolvable uncertainty. Yeah. Okay.

So I'm going to say top episode of the year was Ken Henry. Then, because you have a lot of Australian listeners. Then Stephen Wolfram. And I think I would have put Cardi Carrico in third, but I'm actually going to say it's been displaced by the Pinker Deutsch interview that you just did

a couple of weeks ago. So there's my top three. I'm not just making a wild guess here. That's based on, in part, on the different engagement on Twitter with the posts that you make when you're announcing the episodes. So those are the three posts that I think have gotten the most engagement out of any of the episodes.

But let's see whether that's a reasonable indicator of downloads. Pretty good. So I think you got two out of three, which is good. That's a credit. Thank you. So Ken Henry was the top. Daniel Kahneman was the second. And Pinker and Deutsch are likely to be the third.

Third place at the moment is Catelyn Carrico, but they'll probably outstrip that. Okay, that was pretty good. What do you think were the underrated episodes this year? So originally I would have said Catelyn Carrico, but she got all of these downloads after winning the Nobel Prize.

I was going to ask you about that. The episodes went semi-viral again. Let's see. I'm trying to remember the episodes I've done this year. I think maybe the Peter Singer one. Yeah, okay.

That really underperformed. Do you think it's just because he's a repeat guest? He's kind of saturated the podcast market. He's a repeat guest. But I think that was arguably the best of the three I'd done with him. So yeah, I might say Peter Singer. Okay.

Most underrated. Yeah. The data on I might say Peter Singer. Okay. Most underrated. Yeah. The data on retention was a little different. Yeah. Which I think surprised, this I do know, it surprised me and it surprised you. Yeah. So the episode that had the highest listener retention,

which correct me if I'm wrong, but that's just defined as listening to the end of the episode. Yeah, it's like the percentage of people who listen, are still listening by the end of the episode. Yeah, it's like the percentage of people who listen, are still listening by the end. So the highest retention was on the Palmer Lucky episode. Yeah. Followed by Peter Tertian.

Yeah. What do you make of that? I mean, I have a theory, but I want to hear yours. So Palmer still puzzles me. One possible explanation is, so this retention data is from Spotify. So I'm using it as a proxy for the retention for the episode overall.

There's a selection problem. There's a selection problem. Spotify is like five, people who use Spotify, five to 10% of my audience. I use Spotify. Yeah, I think that audience skews young as well. So to the extent that Palmer as a guest resonates with a younger audience, that might explain

why his retention was higher than all the other episodes. I don't know, maybe he's also just like a compelling speaker. Maybe it was a good interview. I felt kind of disappointed by it because I felt like sometimes he gave very vague or general answers to questions that were interesting. So yeah, I'm- He wouldn't share his list with you. Yeah, he shared like one or two things, which is cool.

So that you're referring to his list of like forgotten- Forgotten technologies. Forgotten technologies, yeah. So that's a puzzle. Turchin, again, I don't know. Maybe there's like some kind of drama in hearing about why the US is going to fail

as a society so people want to keep listening I guess also they were shorter episodes each was under two hours that might help as well what's your theory I'll come back to the Palmer Lucky episode but I think in the Turchin episode you

kind of hyped up Elite over production at the beginning but you didn't talk about it until quite a bit later on maybe by that point people were kind of like I was listening because I wanted to hear about Elite production was that true in your case? no I would have listened to the whole thing anyway obviously I listened to all of the episodes for the year I probably shouldn't be sitting here if I didn't listen to all the episodes

so you think there was a hook? there was a hook, I do think there was a hook I probably shouldn't be sitting here if I didn't listen to all the episodes. So you think there was a hook? There was a hook. I do think there was a hook. In the part of my lucky episode, that's a more interesting case to me. One thing is that I think if we were to divide your guests into two broad classes for the year, we could call them the kind of the politically influential class and then the kind of the politically influential class and then the kind of academic heavyweights. And I think all of your guests,

except for Parmalaki fit into those categories. He's not, you know, he wasn't sort of academically influential. He sort of made these engineering feats in a sense. So he was the odd one out in some sense. But also I think the conversation was just a lot lighter than the academic. When you're interviewing academic people,

the conversation can get dense very quickly. You talked about fiction and sci-fi and augmented reality. And there's a kind of fun to it. It's easy listening, right? So that would be my guess, but who knows? Yeah. Maybe your listeners will reach out to you and tell you. Okay.

Let's talk about some of the themes from the year. Okay. What, I mean, we've already mentioned AI and AGI should make its way in there too. What would be some of the other themes that you would say have run through the year? Some of the dominant themes. Firstly, I don't feel like AI was a massive theme. I'm not sure what you think. What would be some of the other themes that you would say have run through the year? Some of the dominant themes? Firstly, I don't feel like AI was a massive theme. I'm not sure what you think, but I feel like this was kind of a blind spot for me in the show in 2023 when relative to how hyped and important it was as a story in the world.

I don't think I gave it much coverage, which was a somewhat deliberate decision. Just like hedge against that. But some of the recurring themes include the importance of partnerships in doing creative work. So this question of are pairs the optimal creative unit, this came up with Kahneman because of his famous partnership with Amos Dversky, came up with Carrico because of her partnership with Drew Weissman. I think it came up with Wolfram in the negative sense of his very famously like a lone Wolfram,

pun intended. So it was like, could he have like done his work more quickly if he had the right partner? Yeah, we discussed Hardy and Ramanujan as well. Might've come up in- Came up in Rhodes, the Rhodes interview. He said to you that he had some research on that, or he'd found some research that kind of stable, the dyad was like a stable mathematical structure or something. And I think you were-

Oh, that's right. To use some Aussie slang, you were like frothing over that a little bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And he was talking about that in the geopolitical context, but I was hoping that there was some interesting game theory that might have sat behind that. You did link the article in the transcript.

Right, yeah. It wasn't that helpful in the end, that article. But I mean, it was interesting on its own terms. So that's one theme. Maybe another one is the UFO discussion. Came up twice. I tried to inject that where I could. So it just baffles me that people aren't talking about that more.

Yeah. And so the episodes I spoke about that in were Richard Rhodes and... Palmer Luckey. Palmer Luckey. He had some outrageous theories, which were a lot of fun. Can you remind me? I think he was saying that he thought that maybe it was much more likely to be some civilization

from a very long time ago who's kind of been living among us or something like that. Time traveling humans. Yeah, or something like that. One of the big hypotheses. Whereas Richard Rhodes I think was maybe a lot more reasonable. Not that a bit of speculation is fun. Any other ones you'd put on that list of things that came up in the year?

I mean, those are the two that come to mind in terms of object level topics. You could probably say that there were deeper, more philosophical themes. But yeah, I don't know. I'm curious to hear your thoughts. This is good. So firstly, I suppose it sort of depends on how we define what a theme is. AI or AGI came up in six of your episodes this year. Okay. So I was relevant. You were relevant, right?

So Kahneman, you asked whether AI systems will reduce bias. Yeah. And will they do it consistently or affect some biases more than others? Yep. And then in your Palmer Lucky interview, you asked him about VR in a post-AGI world and also the risks of a country like China getting AGI. And will AGI actually deliver a more final kind of means of experiencing and communicating to us than VR.

Yes. And then in the Richard Rhodes episode, you drew this parallel right between the development of AGI and the making of the atomic bomb. You didn't really talk about it, but it did come up. Yeah. Obviously you did talk about this with Stephen Wolfram in terms of the implications of computationally reducibility for AI, but it sounds like we've got another episode coming that will flesh that out a little bit more.

Then it also came up in the Peter Singer episode because you asked him about the ethics of super intelligent beings. And should we, should we just wish our, like if AI, wish them well, take over and cause human extinction, should we just kind of fade into history and wish them well?

Yeah. From a utilitarian standpoint. He said yes. And then of course in your last episode, you talked kind of at length, well, I mean, Steven Pinker and David Doge talked about this at length. So I think it was maybe more relevant than you think. Yeah, I think you're right.

Although I still feel as though I didn't give it the truly rigorous coverage that it deserves. Yeah. Including and especially in the Pinker and Doit episode. Fair enough. We'll get there. Yeah, we'll get to that episode. So another broad theme, I think that came up through the year, and maybe this is just something that's true about the podcast and less so about this year, but you talked a lot about progress of science and progress of technology. That's a good pickup. I should have added that as a theme. So, I mean, like to name a few, the entire Richard Rhodes episode is essentially about progressive science and

technology, right. The making of the atomic bomb and, uh, Catalin Carrico's episode, right. It was about the development of an mrna yeah um yeah i mean this came up as well in the steven pinker and david deutsch episode at the end of the episode uh you asked him i think three questions about progress and um and talk about this with with wolfram as well so this was, I mean, in a sense, you could even think of the Peter Turchin episode as progress of history or, you know, science of history, progress of science. It's a loose connection, but yeah. So I'd say that was definitely a big thing this year. What do you think? Yeah, I agree. I agree. And now that you're kind of reminding me of it, it's definitely something that I was like, it's similar to the UFO topic or the pairs topic, trying to consciously inject into the conversations

because when I do that, I'm doing it because I feel like the topic is underrated or underexplored or underdeveloped and I just want people thinking about it more. And obviously there's been a lot of talk about the great stagnation and problems in science and the over-bureaucratization of science, but trying to direct people to thinking more about what are the solutions out of this? How can we make science better? Was one of my little goals this year. That's cool.

I was actually going to do a little segment on things Joe thought was underrated this year, but you only use the word like three times to describe things that you thought were underrated. So I didn't think it was quite enough um yeah so let's um let's maybe talk a little bit about dyads and and pairs so you you have this running hypothesis that pairs can advance science in a way that uh or any creative field yeah yeah or any okay or any creative field uh in a way that individuals cannot and that groups of three or more also cannot because they can kind of bounce ideas off of each other.

Yeah. I know you like the book, The Powers of Two, but- I actually don't like that book, but that was kind of a, it's a good reference book and it was sort of an entry point into the topic. Okay. So, well, that's good because I want to ask you kind of where did this hypothesis come from for you and where does it sit now at the end of the year having talked with a couple of different people about it?

The conversation with Kahneman about it was pretty special and touching. The way he talked about Amos and the emotion that he spoke about him with. Originally my thinking on this came about through contemplating examples of pairs or noticing lots of examples of very fertile pairs. Maybe the first of those was Kahneman and Tversky. And that was actually long before I encountered Josh Schenck's book, Powers of Two. I think now my thinking on it is maybe a little more developed in that I've tried to think of, okay, how do you model

this or at what points are pairs the optimal creative unit? So that's where I'm at now. And I'm intending to write this up into some kind of blog post or essay that I'll publish on my website in the new year. Very good. So I think you said that you were jealous of Kahneman. And he said that you should be. I mean, are you looking for that pair? That kind of intellectual person to spar with, in a sense? Did you think you'd found that in Gus at the beginning of the podcast? I mean, that's going back a while now. But yeah, I mean, where do you sit on that personally?

Right. So yeah, Gus is my friend who I originally started the podcast with. He stepped back and moved to New York for work. And I was probably always like slightly more passionate about it than him. So he handed the reins over to me. I think we had a good dyad, but I don't think two-person interviewer podcasts work as a format. The reason for that is the big value add in a conversation podcast is in the follow-up question. Because that's where you start to explore nuance or go in directions that previous interviews haven't gone before with that guest. And if you have two interviewers, we're not telepathic. So I might have a great follow-up question, but if my co-interviewer

jumps in with the next question, that moment's lost forever. So I don't think that two-person interrogation works as a format. But I suppose it's plausible that I could have someone else who works with me on the show behind the scenes, who helps me prepare, or does the operational stuff, or admin, or helps with the guest selection and they are one part of a dyad. I do need help with the show on an ops front. I guess I'm not necessarily looking for an intellectual partner

for the show per se, but I think for other projects in life, I think that would be amazing. You just said that you were going to potentially be writing up something about dyads, an essay or something. So you're clearly wanting to pursue some other intellectual activities, right? So insofar as those things go, do you think that I suppose you'll be looking for someone to do that with, or you just sort of know what you want to do and you're going to get on with it? I think for the essays and blog posts and things with or you just sort of know what you want to do and you're going to get on with it? I think for the essays and blog posts and things I want to write, I know what I want to do

and I just want to get on with it. I think there are probably more ambitious projects where a partner would be a massive benefit. Starting a company, that kind of thing. You always need a co-founder. Have you got a company in mind already? I mean, I guess I have different ideas. Nothing that I'm seriously working on yet,

but probably things that I'll start doing next year. Yeah. Okay. Very cool. Well, maybe let's dive into some of the episodes a little bit. Hey guys, this is Joe. A quick word from this episode sponsor before we return to the conversation.

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All right, let's get back to the conversation. So, I mean, we can start at the beginning of the year with the Daniel Kahneman episode. One of the moments that surprised me in this episode was when you asked him about radical uncertainty and he sort of didn't know what you were talking about. Um, I kind of expected him to, to understand what you were saying immediately. Uh, this idea of, you know, not kind of not being able to play subjective

probabilities on, on events or something like this. Um, but you, you actually, I mean, you explained what you meant to him and, and correct me if I'm wrong, but you had John Kay and Mervyn King's book sitting on the table in that interview. I did. Yeah. Did he have a flick through it afterwards? I mean, I guess first off, were you surprised at that as well? Yeah, I think I remember being surprised

because it's kind of like one of the big foundational vectors of objection to their work. Yeah. And I'm sure he's contemplated it before. It might've just been the case that he didn't like hear me with my Australian accent, but yeah, I don't know. Because certainly on the way out of the interview, I had some, as I mentioned to you last week,

I had some books sitting on the side table because I travel with a pile of books, often ones that are relevant to the interviews I'll be doing. One of was Mervyn Kay and John King's Radical Uncertainty and he kind of pointed at it and commented on it as if he he had actually read it okay yeah okay that's interesting he said yeah he said that was a strange book and pointed at it doesn't seem like much of a compliment. So you used to, this is going to be a bit of an audible question, but you used to write a blog a long time ago. And this blog was your thoughts on books that you were reading. Yeah, I didn't even know this was still discoverable. So yeah, so this is still discoverable. So yeah. So this is, this is still

discoverable if you know the link and if you go to the, you know, josephnellwalker.com or whatever slash blog, or I can't remember exactly what it is. If you look it up on Google, you know, Joe Walker blog, you'll find it. Right. I took it down cause I was so embarrassed. So you click on this thing and then it's just got like Laura Mipsom text at the top and then it's got all of your old blogs. But this was up until, I don't know, two years ago. Something like that. Oh, so it's not discoverable at the moment. Well, you can find it if you search on Google for it,

but it's not discoverable from the website. But this is the thing, I only learned this recently actually. If you like create a page on Google Sites or something, but then you don't include a link to it on the navigation bar. People can still access it if they know the URL. So I thought, I wonder if it's still available. Lo and behold. When you read Thinking Fast and Slow for the first time, it took you about three months to read that book. Why didn't it take you so long? It's just really dense.

Okay. Yeah. I mean, there were lots of other dense books that you were reading at the time, kind of going back, and they were only taking you sort of one or two weeks. Was there anything special about this particular book? I think, so I mean, I was probably, I wasn't reading it continuously.

I was probably reading other things as well, and like context switching with other books. But I think from memory, so I must have finished it sometime in 2017. Yeah, I think it was 2017, January to April or something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think I remember wanting to actually internalize it. And so I spent a lot of time just rereading stuff, making sure I'd understood it. And it's a dense book. So that's probably why. Yeah.

I mean, to my credit, I dare say most people who own that book haven't read it or haven't finished it. Yeah. I actually made the effort of finishing it. Well done. Well done. Have you wanted to interview Kahneman since then?

Or has that been on your list for a long time? Yeah, I think I might have emailed him in the early days of the podcast and then maybe roughly every year since then. So the persistence pays off. Yeah, and in a way it's kind of good that he didn't agree initially because it would have been a radically different interview, a much worse interview if he'd come on the show in the early days. Yeah.

Okay. I have to ask you about one question that you didn't ask Daniel Kahneman. Okay. So you talked about his book Noise. Yeah. In May of 2021, I think, the economist Rachel Meager posted a tweet saying that the book contains a repeatedly incorrect claim about correlation and causation, which was basically that zero correlation implies no causation. Now you, I mean, for anyone wondering the kind of

classic example, which is the one that Rachel gives gives is like you're driving a car and you hit a hill and so you pump the gas but your speed going up the hill is constant and so the correlation between how hard you're pressing the gas and your speed is zero but obviously they're causally related. So you kind of went there with him on priming and I was expecting you to go there with him on this part of the noise book and you didn't. And I was just wondering why. Were you aware of this?

Yeah, absolutely. It's a great question. I was aware of this. I think I may have even shared it in my weekend newsletter at some point. Like I thought Rachel was right. I didn't feel like I was adding any value by asking him about it. I'm pretty sure the author, him and his co-authors responded, Cass and Oliver. I'm pretty sure they responded and so what am I just going to get

like another response from him? It doesn't seem like a great use of time and it felt a little, maybe it felt a little too gotcha as well. Yeah, it is a bit of a gotcha thing to ask. I mean, do you think I should have asked it? I don't, I just, I kind of expected that you might go there because you asked him about priming, right? Like, you know, there's been this big replication crisis and I think that's not the only

chapter of his book that's kind of come under question. And so I don't know, maybe I expected you to go there. I'm not sure, but I understand why you didn't. All right. Let's talk about Palmer Luckey. You, you asked him this question about one lesson that he'd learned from Peter Thiel that was not in the book Zero to One. Yeah. This is a book you read some seven years ago. Blog again. And his answer was kind of the main point of Zero to One.

And I know you said earlier when we've been talking that you felt like Palmer gave you kind of vague answers. Were you disappointed with that answer? Were you expecting more? I remember feeling immediately disappointed. I wanted him to give some kind of, I just imagine these situations where Peter's kind of put his arm around his shoulder

and said, listen here, son, like this is how you do layoffs properly or this is how you raise your series C and how it's different to your B or some kind of really specific tactical founder to founder advice. That's what I was hoping for. And instead he responded with basically what's the main message of zero to one, which is just like the idea of building a monopoly. What I maybe could have done different in that is just modeling for him what I was looking for

in a good answer in the preface to my question. So given him, but maybe I did that. I don't remember. I actually don't remember either. Yeah. Do you think that if you had have maybe given him more context or if he had had more time to think he might've been able to give you the answer you were looking for? Possibly, but it's not clear whether he would have wanted to do that anyway. Yeah. I wondered that. Yeah. Like, did you feel like he was withholding from you in the interview? Yes and no. Like there actually some great stuff that's never been shared before. The fact that he is writing his own sci-fi or some stuff from his forgotten technologies list. I don't think he'd spoken about steam engines before, though I could be wrong. So I was genuinely happy with that stuff

and I was kind of patting myself on the back. I knew what questions to ask. But then I felt like there were other times where he was kind of bloviating. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Did he send you his draft of the last hot rod, uh, sci-fi story that he's writing? No, no, we, we didn't really, we didn't speak again. And I actually didn't that, that was the one this year where I never corresponded with the guest to arrange the interview. Wow. He was in Sydney to speak at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. It's kind of like a hawkish think tank based in Canberra.

They had this conference where they brought in all these speakers. One of them was him and I got a cold email from one of the organizers, maybe a PR person saying, oh, we're holding these seminars and talks. This is the list of speakers. Is there anything you want to speak to? And I looked through and I said, yeah, Palmalaki.

So they arranged it. And actually the paradigm when I went in was very much like I'm a journalist and this is like a media interview because his handlers and a local Australian PR person were in the room when I went in and I had to ask them to leave. Cause I was like, this is like an intimate podcast conversation. I don't want like an audience. And they, they were quite concerned about that and asking him like, are you okay being doing the interview alone? And so they

like totally thought of me as some like journalist guy. Right. But they reached out to you to ask you who you wanted to interview. Yeah. I mean, these people who were in the room weren't the same as whoever had reached out. Okay. Yeah.

So it wasn't like he was needing some good publicity and you just happened to be around. No. No. No. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Cool. Let's move on to Ken Henry then. Yep. So I think the thing I enjoyed most about that episode was that Ken tells really good stories. He had a lot of really good stories. Um, and so I was wondering whether he shared any stories with you behind the scenes that weren't on camera or if there were any kind of moments uh or interactions you had with him that would have stood out that the listeners didn't get to hear i mean it was a very long episode obviously so you got through a lot but but yeah i don't think he shared any historical anecdotes that would have been of interest off the mic but it's only my interactions with him before and after the episode were really enjoyable and interesting.

So I have to say the MVP of this episode was my girlfriend who I, cause this is still when I was doing my day job. I didn't have too much time to prepare. So like I think a few days before I started preparing, I was reading a bunch of stuff, calling a bunch of people. I had my office at home just like covered in post-it notes, like the research I was doing. This is before I digitized my Zettelkasten system. And like just didn't have too much time for it. So I was like cramming the prep. I think

I had two hours sleep the night before and I'm in Sydney. We did it at his farm in country New South Wales, probably like a four and a half hour drive from our house. So my girlfriend did all the driving and I was in the car doing last minute prep on my laptop, like drinking coffee and chewing gum and trying to stay awake. And so we met at Wingham where we did a swap over. So then my girlfriend stayed in Wingham and I went with Ken in his ute to like his property, which is like quite a drive from Wingham.

You have to go like up a mountain basically. I think the temperature dropped like four degrees or something. I remember him pointing it out on the dashboard. And that drive, like where our families are kind of from similar parts of New South Wales. And so we had that bond over, but we were just chatting in the car on the way to his farm. So that was really nice.

I guess just like getting to know him. And also after, you know, we had his wife made us dinner and chatting after the episode. That was quite nice as well. I think my abiding impression was just like a really humble, decent, kind guy. Definitely got that sense as a listener. Yeah.

Well, thanks to your girlfriend for being the MVP. Yeah. How did you feel that interview compared with other interviews you've done with Australian politicians? I mean, you've done a number of interviews with Australian politicians. It was clearly the best interview I've done with any Australian politician or policymaker. It was better than the ones I've done with other politicians, maybe for like a systematic reason, which is just they're maybe more into like legacy building and manicuring their public image. Maybe policymakers would tend to be more honest. So yeah, I think it's definitely the best interview

I've done with an Australian. Yeah. Yeah. You said that you plastered your wall with post-it notes. Yeah. There's this picture of you, well, a picture that you posted to Twitter when you were prepping for your interview with Stephen Wolfram.

Yeah. You've like terraformed the room. It's my hotel room in Boston. Yeah, it looks like you're redecorating. I mean, I was going to ask you whether that's how you prepare for all your interviews. It sounds like at least for two of the interviews you prepared this way.

What's your method there? Yeah, not for all of them. So what I'd done was basically I try and... Should I talk about my interview process? Yeah, not for all of them. So what I'd done was basically I try and... Should I talk about my interview process? Yeah, sure. So I try and read as much as possible and talk to relevant people because often you need the tacit knowledge that exists in a field. You need someone to be like...

That's what Wolfram said. Yeah, yeah. You need someone to be like, okay, forget all this other stuff. These are the two papers you need to read. Or these really famous old papers are actually kind of obsolete now and the cutting edge stuff is like, here, you should read these three people. It's really helpful to have someone like that. So I'll often have a loop where I do a lot of research and then I reach out to and try and talk to people

whether they're friends or people I've just called him out in preparation for an episode. But you want to do a bit of research before you reach out to those experts with the tacit knowledge. Cause you don't want to waste their time and you need to know what are the right basic questions to ask. Yep. So yeah.

Interview process, sorry, preparation process. I'm doing all this reading, talking to people. And then I'll be kind of writing notes to myself on post-its, which I stick on the wall and they then tend to coalesce around certain themes. And then I'll have other post-it notes for the questions.

And as it gets closer to the interview, I'll rearrange the question post-it notes to form a sequence for the interview. So that's how I did Ken. That's how I did Wolfram. There's that photo of my hotel room that you mentioned where it's like covered in post-it notes. I've done a few like that, but my system now is like way more digital. So I'll have like software where I've got all my notes written out and the notes kind of connect, they can link to each other. And then I have that also links to flashcards so I can help to memorize the actual material better. And then I'll have a Kanban board where I like drag questions in

and change the order. Nice. Yeah. And do you retain much of that after the interview? Not much, but now I'm using flashcards Nice. Yeah. And do you retain much of that after the interview? Not, not much, but now I'm using flashcards. Like I'm retaining a lot more.

Yeah. Yeah. For people, people wondering what this like world of like, I've already mentioned the world, the word Zettelkasten talking about flashcards and notes, like what all this is, I guess actually have in mind a system of learning that many people have pioneered and written about.

But one of the foremost thinkers there would be Andy Matuszak, who I did a podcast with last year. Basically, you try and make memory a choice by writing really good notes and then helping yourself retain that information with spaced repetition memory prompts. writing really good notes and then helping yourself retain that information with like spaced repetition memory prompts. Spaced repetition memory prompts sounds like very fancy and formal, but it's, you can just think of flashcards when I say that. And there are all

sorts of like apps and software tools you can use. Flashcards you study with progressively longer intervals. Exactly. Yep. Yes. It's a great system by the way you use it too right? for some things flashcards are extremely helpful for memorizing things and use Anki for your flashcards it's open source so there are some things that it doesn't do as well and it's not as pretty as something like Moki

which I think is what you said you use but you can pretty much get anything you need online somebody's written it and if you really needed to, you could write something yourself. I also like Moki because I write my notes in Obsidian and there's a Moki Obsidian plugin. So I basically just push stuff through from the notes

into my flashcards in Moki. That's cool. One of the things you said before is that you i mean you you kind of don't want to reach out to people until you know enough of the uh the language of their field um or the language of the things that they do right so this is actually one of the things that came up in your interview with richard rose which he said uh I had to learn the language of physics before I interviewed any of these scientists. And also with Wolfram saying

that there's kind of different intuitions in different fields. Do you feel like you've developed those? I mean, the podcast kind of has a repertoire of a couple of different fields now, right? In a sense, do you feel like you've developed those intuitions and the language that you need now? I feel like I can speak with economists quite fluently.

Preparing for an economics episode is just like way easier. And that might indicate that I have retained a lot of economic concepts and language. So I guess there are a few areas where I feel fairly fluent economics being the main one. I think I've also developed a good general instinct for how to learn the jargon of a field. So reading a paper or a book or a blog article in a new field that you're trying to learn and having an instinct

for like what are the terms of art here because often terms of art can be very well disguised it just seems like a very commonplace word it's not capitalized but actually it means something very specific in the context of that field yeah i feel like i've built up a really good intuition for like is that likely to be a term of art and then switching to google or chat gpt where i'm like okay what does this mean in the context of this field and so you're constantly bootstrapping yourself by looking up the the basic words and flashcards can help with learning those as well but yeah i think learning the language of a field is um is a really good way to, to learn it. It makes everything a lot easier to understand. Yeah,

for sure. I don't want to hone on this point for kind of too long, but I know Tyler Cowen has said before that when he's learning about a new topic, he'll often read kind of multiple books on that topic and one after the other, and then maybe read one of them again. When you're learning or when you're kind of prepping for for an interview are you just sort of reading one thing at a time are you just like

reading multiple things at the same time are you rereading things what does it look like for you it looks like complete chaos like just like someone with adhd just like the picture of the post-it notes yeah yeah exactly okay so there's like two different approaches. One is you just focus on like the source books, the really high signal things. So it's what's like the most important paper or the most important book in this field or subfield that's going to give me as much knowledge as possible.

And the other way is like, okay, let's read a bunch of random stuff. And if I notice things being corroborated among a lot of different sources or things recurring then i can increase my credence in those things and that tends to be more my approach that that second way of doing it so i'll start by just reading a lot of random stuff that i found and kind of just building up an intuition for the basic concepts through osmosis or through like triangulating different sources. And then I'll start to get more refined as I go. Makes sense.

Yeah. Let's talk about your interview with Stephen Wolfram. I found that he, I mean, he's obviously a very individual guy, the lone wolfram, as you so eloquently put. I thought that some of his takes were even counter to some of the other guests that you had on this year.

So to give an example, you talked to him about working remotely, right? And how his company has kind of been able to cope with that and adapt to that over the last few years. His answer was very different to when you talked to Katalin Karikou about this, who said, well, there's really a lot of value in doing things in person. What do you make of that? What I make of it is there's not a blanket rule for every company or team. I think remote work makes more sense for some organizations than others.

Maybe in the case of Wolfram Research and Mathematica, there's something about that tool that means that remote work is more feasible. But generally, I think there's a lot of value to being physically proximate to whoever your coworkers are. Yeah. Not even from like a collaboration perspective, but also just drawing sucker and morale from being close to your colleagues. Do you think there's something different between the private sector and the

kind of academic area on that front, or not really? I don't know. I haven't thought about it. Do you have thoughts? I don't know. I just thought it was interesting that Wolfram obviously, you know,

he runs a company. Yeah. Katalin Karika was talking about this in the context of, you know, her work with Drew Weissman and others, you know, academic work. I guess, you know, Wolfram does academic work as well.

I suppose maybe he's just more bullish on adopting new technologies or maybe he's just found that to be more successful. I don't know. I don't know that there's one right answer necessarily. The more kind of base explanation is just that that's his personal preference and he's molded his company in his image. That's true. He's just justifying it.

I hadn't really thought about it. Yeah. Yeah. There was also another thing I thought was amusing is that they both talked about like kind of the role of ego in promoting like scientific progress. And it's funny to me that both of them seem to indicate that the work they do themselves, they don't do kind of in pursuit

of their own egoistic desires, but, you know, Katalin Karikou in particular seemed to see this as something that was kind of important for newer scholars coming into the field to be able to feed their ego. Do you think at the top that the people who make it to the top tend to be the people who aren't doing the sort of egoistic work or rather they're doing the things that are important?

Or, I mean, even if that's a correlation, do you think there's a causation there? I mean, I think it depends what you mean by ego. Like ultimately this can collapse into that philosophical conversation around is altruism truly altruistic? And the answer is like, no, that these things are kind of like nested within each other. I think the people who make it to the top of like any field,

including science, have to be incredibly driven, incredibly motivated, and often I think that will be for egotistical reasons, which isn't a bad thing. Yeah. One of the other things that came up in that interview was the sort of pseudo- pseudo randomness of technological innovation. I thought it was funny because your three pronged attack on Peter Turchin's field. The first prong was essentially what Stephen Wolfram said, which is that technology development is extremely random. And how can you, like, I think his exact words were something like knowing that something is going to happen is very different to knowing when something will happen.

Yeah. I mean, he gives this example of like flat screen televisions and, and the, you know, extraordinarily slow progressive science. Did you kind of take that objection from your interview with, with Wolfram or,

or you just had that? No, it's something I've been thinking about for years. And you can probably find it in early interviews like with Mervyn King a few years ago. It's kind of like an obvious objection. It is. Where do you sit with that now? I mean, you only really raised two of the points of the objection that you had. I think the third one was something about computationally reducibility, but you sort of answered it. This is Peter Turchin that we're talking about now, obviously.

Where do you, did it change your mind? Did his response change your mind on that? Or do you feel like the objection still stands? I think the objection still stands. But with Turchin, I wanted to be incredibly careful about, and I wanted to be careful about this and I wanted listeners to be careful about it the reflex objection to turchin's work is just the paparian kind of how can you purport to know anything about the future like that's crazy like growth of knowledge yada yada yada this is dumb like this is a this project is just like a wild goose chase but he's he's actually his project is more sophisticated and nuanced than that. He's applying complexity science to look for patterns

that we can use as explanations, which might give us the ability to make what Popper would call conditional predictions. So Popper doesn't reject all predictions outright. I think in The Poverty of Hist of historicism he uses some examples from economics maybe maybe it's like basic stuff around the laws of supply and demand where you can say like yeah under certain conditions it's reasonable to think that this would follow so yeah i i kind of i was approaching tertian very cautiously in that light and trying to be as charitable as possible. But I still think that the criticisms I raised stand.

I certainly felt more amicable towards his field by the end of the interview. Okay. I don't know if you felt the same. I mean, I had already gone through that process in the preparation, but I know what you mean. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

All right. Let's talk about Catelyn Carrico a little bit. Yeah. This should be fun. I think a lot of your guests have a kind of intellectual honesty and humility about them. For me, though, Carty was the absolute standout this year in terms of humility.

Yeah. I mean, like, he is someone who has every reason to hate the system. She's been through a whole lot of strife, you know, been rejected for grants, her work hasn't been recognized the way that it perhaps should have been, at least in the past.

And yet, you know, she's got this attitude that she, or this, you know, aphorism she kind of attributes to Selye of what can I do? Do you think that her success and the success of her family as well, right? Her daughter's an Olympic rower. I mean, I guess how much of that do you think is attributable to this attitude of like, what can I do? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, you can never rerun the experiment and see but I feel like it is foundational to her resilience yeah and but for that resilience she wouldn't have kept pushing ahead in the 90s and the 2000s when she'd suffered all these setbacks do you think it's a useful

attitude to have I think so I think the counter argument would be something like, you know, you, you look around you and you realize that you're kind of doing everything. And actually it's the society around you that needs to be changed and not you. Right. Right. So there's a distinction between like what you should do at the policy level and what you should do at the individual level. Right. Like obviously at the policy level, you want to target your interventions at a higher level of abstraction. But all else being equal, if you were just giving an individual a piece of advice that you think would make their life go better,

it would be to have those mindsets and those beliefs. Yeah, fair enough. Now, I think Cardi is obviously not the first Nobel prize winner that you've interviewed. I mean, you had Daniel Kahneman on the show earlier this year, but you have a whole slew of Nobel prize winners. Correct me if I'm wrong. I do believe she's the first person to win a Nobel after being interviewed on the podcast. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So, so I mean, I have a couple of questions on this. My first one is, I mean, you answered one of them already, which is that the episode kind of went viral again. Um, but what was your reaction when you found out she won the Nobel?

And I mean, I'll pair that with this question, which is like, at the very beginning of the episode, you say something in the preface, like, if and when a Nobel Prize should be awarded for MRNA, Catalina Carrico is among the top of the list for candidates as a laureate or something like that. Do you think that the Nobel Committee were just big fans of the show? I was happy when she won it. I was unsurprised, but I didn't realize it would happen so soon. I thought it would take several years to play out.

Because as you know, like the prize is awarded for, there needs to be some kind of like real world impact of the work. So that's why, for example, with physicists, like theoretical physicists, it will often be like years or decades until they get the prize because you're still waiting for that empirical validation. And like all the COVID stuff has happened really recently. So yeah, I was kind of, I guess,

expecting it to take several more years. So the timing somewhat surprised me, but that she won it, that was unsurprising and yeah, entirely deserved. Predicting that things will happen versus when they will happen. Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah. And how much of a boost did that episode get after she won the Nobel? It was not as much as it had already had. Okay. But pretty good for an episode that's already been out for like three months. Yeah. Because you said it was her first long form podcast.

But then I think when you posted the episode, you clarified and said it was her first English long form podcast. Yeah. Why think when you posted the episode, you clarified and said it was her first English long form podcast. Why did you have to do that? So I recorded it with her back in February. And then at that point, I mean, she'd done podcasts, but they're like highly produced kind of 20 minute NPR style ones where they get a few quotes from it. I didn't think she'd done, at least to my knowledge, she'd never done. And in my research, I hadn't seen that she'd ever done one of the like long sit down, extended, unedited conversations. So I was the first at the time we recorded it. But then by the time I published it, I saw,

I just happened to go into her Twitter profile and she'd retweeted some like German podcast she'd done, but she did it in German. So I changed it from her first long form podcast to her first long form podcast in English. Nice. So you, I mean, you've got claims on the first recorded podcast. True. Yeah. Nice. Okay. You, you, you recorded that at her house. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. What was that like? It was really cool. It was just me and her. Obviously her daughter's like grown up now and yeah, very successful. I think her husband was like out,

I don't know, working on something. And so we just sat down, we had the conversation. And then the dining table or something in the video, right? Yeah. At her dining table.

And then I think we, we took a break like halfway through to get like a drink of water. And during that break and then after the conversation as well, she kind of like toured me around her house and she had all of these orchids growing in like bulbs growing in in glasses of water because it was winter when we were recording um in you know northern hemisphere us and so she had all these plants she'd brought inside so the house looked like an arboretum just like full of plants she was like showing them to me and explaining them. And then after the conversation, she took me up to her trophy cabinet, which her husband had built for her, which-

You posted a photo of that? Yeah, I shared a photo of that on Twitter with her permission. And this was before she won the Nobel, but it was just like full of all the most prestigious awards in science and humanitarianism. It's a bit surreal. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, very cool. In your episode with Richard Rhodes, I mean, most prestigious awards in science and humanitarianism it's surreal yeah yeah yeah yeah very cool in in your episode with richard rhodes i mean i figure i hadn't necessarily planned to go through them in order but we're kind of going through them in order so let's just sort of keep going through

all right um in your episode with richard rhodes i think you i mean we're in the kind of same generation i'm only a couple of years younger than you. And so when you, when you said that, you know, we really didn't grow up with any kind of fear of nuclear weapons, like at all. It just wasn't even on our radar. Right. I mean, no pun intended. Nice.

Yeah. Do you feel like that's, that's changed for you now? Like, have you, I mean, have you thought about that a lot since then as being a real risk? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Definitely. What do you,? Have you thought about that a lot since then as being a real risk? Yeah. Okay. Definitely. What do you do with that?

I mean, I think it can shift your priorities as to what a good career move is for you, like how you can improve the world. Yeah, okay. I mean, all it's really done for me is is like maybe i want to have more guests on about that topic to try and raise awareness about it i think that's a good idea yeah yeah you had a couple of kind of wow moments in that interview like literally you you were saying wow yeah uh what what was it kind of stood out most for you

um or what you know what was the thing that really blew your mind there? I think, again, no pun intended. Yeah, that was a bad choice of words, sorry. I think I mightn't have actually learned this in the interview because I probably already picked it up in the research preparing for the interview. But I think just about the the firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945 where about 100,000 people died in one night and about a million more were wounded the Americans just dropped like incendiaries over Tokyo and created effectively a firestorm yeah

that was shocking because that was, I think, the single most destructive act of the Second World War. Worse than the bombing of Dresden, worse than the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And it was interesting as well because it raises this question of like, so nuclear weapons are essentially fire weapons yeah they work by creating like a chimney of fire above a city and that that's what wreaks the most destruction you know to what extent are they qualitatively or categorically different from

the weapons that were already being used or just sort of on like an escalating gradient. And also it raises a second question, which is has the so-called long pace that we've enjoyed since World War II really been a nuclear piece? Because if things like firebombing could already be so destructive, is like the marginal deterrence between that and nuclear weapons so great that we can attribute this long piece to nuclear weapons? I don't know, but it raises a question. It's an important question.

Yeah, for sure. I have to think about that. Was there another moment where I was wowed? There were three wow moments. I actually don't remember what they are. I did a bit of textual analysis on your transcripts. Control F wow. There were three wow moments, but off the top of my head,

I don't remember what the other two were. Okay. Yeah. But that definitely, that was one of them. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Richard Rhodes also said this thing about, it was kind of an offhanded comment, but he said something like if you're a specialist, you shouldn't write science, like kind of general science, because you don't know what people don't know. You're not a specialist, but you're clearly very well read, and you interview people on a wide range of topics, which evidently you have a fairly decent knowledge of. Do you feel like you're,

or that maybe you might be soon in a position where you could write on some of these topics in a way that a general audience will be able to understand better than maybe the specialists? Yeah, I think so. Is that something you want to do? At some point, yeah, but it's got to be the right topic

and I've got to feel like I'm burning to write about it and I have to write about it and no one else will do as good a job as me. So I guess it's just about waiting for that topic. Like the dyads thing? Yeah, that's probably better as just an essay or I can use the essay to test. Yeah, okay.

I never thought about writing a book about that. But you could. with the right partner yeah the right the right co-author yeah that's right how much indian classical music have you listened to since your interview with shruti and not a whole lot to be honest um a little bit of ravi shankar me too yeah oh really yeah after the interview yeah yeah did you like it uh it depends how long you want me to talk about music i enjoyed it um it develops melody and rhythm a lot more than it develops harmony but i think that's just true of indian music is that there's a much bigger focus on melody that there's some sort of interesting scales and modes that they're using uh and they can sort of improvise over and tweak a little bit.

My favorite music is music that's harmonically complex. Okay. So, you know, someone like Jacob Collier, I don't know if you've heard of him, but he really pushes the boundaries on harmony. That's the music I love.

So it's not like for personal taste, it wasn't my favorite, but I could appreciate it. Why do you like the harmonically complex stuff more? It makes you, I shouldn't say you, I mean, it's for me, it makes me feel a lot more. It's like, wow, that is not the chord I was expecting to go there. But that like really invokes some emotion or something like that

or pulls you a certain way. But again, I mean, that's just me. What did you think? I feel that too. Yeah. It's very Western, right? That harmony is the focus. Yeah. Someone actually messaged me, DMed me on Twitter yesterday saying, did Trudy give you her list of Indian musicians? I actually need to get that from her. Yeah. I'll get a Spotify playlist. I'll share it on Yeah. Nice. You should, you should send it in your weekly email last. Yeah. Yeah. That'd be good. I'd listen to it. Coming around to your interview that you said

was perhaps the most underrated for the year. You, at the very beginning of your interview with Peter Singer, you said, you said basically to the listener, stick it out for like 30 minutes. We're going to talk about metaethics. We're going to talk about like the thorniest, possibly the thorniest subfield of ethics. Just stick it out. I thought that was the most interesting part

of the interview, by the way, was the first kind of 30 minutes. This idea of whether there can be kind of objective morals and esoteric morality, which got a little bit of publicity on on twitter and yeah i thought that was a lot of fun but do you know if listeners really did listen to the end or if a lot of people kind of dropped off after the first part i think i had like normal retention okay yeah so it didn't really make a difference the well maybe but but maybe it did because maybe

yeah you don't know what the counterfactual is that's true exactly yeah yeah but not everyone is like you yeah okay there might be people who who don't go for that kind of more sure philosophical stuff because then i think you talked later on about animal liberation because the 50 year or something like that. Yeah. Now you first, again, I'm going to go back to your blog because when you're, look, let me go on a slight tangent here. When you're prepping for an interview with someone,

you get to read everything they've put out. And these people have put out heaps and heaps of stuff. When I was prepping for this interview, I don't have any of Joe's writings to read through. I only have the podcast to listen to and the few things that you've put up on your- Yeah, well, I don't have any of Joe's writings to read through. I only have the podcast to listen to and the few things that you've put up on you. Yeah, well, I mean, you've found the few writings. I did, I did.

So you read Animal Liberation back, I think it's January 9th of 2017 is when you started this book. Yeah. I'm going to quote you now on what you said in your blog. Oh God. Which was, I'm suffering from cognitive dissonance as I write

this. Few omnivores could read Animal Liberation from pages one to 248 and refuse to change their diet. Yeah. Have you resolved that cognitive uncertainty now? What are you feeling? I haven't. And this is just evidence that I'm a selfish and imperfect person. No, actually, so I have, but in modest ways. Okay. So I guess the point I was making is like his logic is just like watertight. Yeah, it is watertight. It just like drags you to his conclusion, kicking and screaming.

So, I mean, there are a few changes I've made after that. These are probably laughable to true like animal rights activists or vegans. I don't know. So I never eat veal because the way veal calves are raised is really inherently cruel. I never buy caged eggs. Yeah. I mean, there are certain like small things I did where it was like i just don't derive enough pleasure from this and i know that it causes so much suffering like i'm just not gonna eat that kind of stuff but am i still a meat eater yes and yeah it's it's like one of my you just lost like 20 of your living yeah i mean it's like one of my big, I guess, failings where I'm just like, I know that I ought not to do this. And I still do.

So you're operating on some kind of utilitarian calculus then? Internally, at least. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but I don't think you need to be utilitarian to necessarily come to that conclusion. Okay, How so? Couldn't you justify not eating meat on like virtue ethics or deontological grounds?

I suppose. Like if you had a, yeah, I mean definitely on deontological grounds. Yeah. I don't know about virtue ethics. Then it would be like you were there. It would be more like gradations of how moral it was for you not to eat the meat. Like for somebody who really struggles not to eat meat,

to choose not to eat meat. Right. That would be like more ethical than someone who just goes, ah, it's not really so hard for me to not eat meat. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Fair enough. Do you eat meat? I do. Yeah. But then again, I'm not a utilitarian.

Yeah. still. Before we get to Steven Pinker and David Deutsch, we should touch on Raghuram Rajan, that interview. I actually, I mean, I think this is because I'm an economist. I actually didn't have any questions for you on the interview. I thought you did a stellar job. And it was, I mean, I think it was probably one of the most comfortable topics for you as an interviewer and something that has been talked about on the podcast a lot, right?

I mean, housing, right? You've done a lot on housing, a lot on the GFC. I guess you didn't talk about housing in particular, but the GFC, which is obviously related to housing. And even central banking and monetary policy and these sorts of things. But I guess I just wanted to ask, were there any sort of behind the scenes things that happened that you want to share from that interview? Nothing in particular. I mean, I could go on a riff

about the importance of the pre-interview, like getting good answers from the guests. Yeah, do it. Go on a riff. We're only going to do this once. No, I won't, because it's kind of mean to someone. Okay. Do you have to name them in order to do the riff? I guess not. So I guess like. So I like the, the,

I guess like assistant or whoever who I was like corresponding with around like organizing the room at the booth school of business left me waiting for like 40 minutes cause she just didn't check her email or something. And so then I was like 15 minutes late because of that, even though I was like half an hour early in reality. And that would have seemed rude to him. Yeah. And so like it's super important to have the guest like respecting you

and feeling really good and relaxed before the interview even begins. And just like how you convey yourself, how you carry yourself before you start recording. Yeah. And I didn't actually correct that. I didn't like properly apologize and explain the situation until after the interview should have done that before. So I feel like every little thing you do is necessary,

but not sufficient to making the interview go well. There's always noise. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean,

what else can I say that's maybe more interesting to people than that? But that was interesting. I meant to draw that out of you. That's, that's my job. Oh, okay. Yeah. I mean, what else can I say that's maybe more interesting to people than that? That was interesting. I meant to draw that out of you. That's my job. Oh, okay. Could you feel the tension at the beginning of the interview? Did you feel like he was going to be like, oh, who is this guy who's wasting 15 minutes of my time? He's such a good guy that if he felt that, he kind of pushed through it.

I also asked him a question at the start that maybe to try and offset that. Yeah, okay. I don't ask this every time, but this is a little trick. Sometimes at the beginning I ask people, what would make this a great use of your time? Nice. At the end of the interview, if you're really happy with this, what does that look like?

So I asked him that. So that probably offset the lateness by showing him that like you know like i care about him i'm not just like some guy taking him for granted what did he say uh if you remember i don't really i don't think it was anything like super surprising i think it was just like at the end though he did say he enjoyed he really enjoyed he was doing some like public dialogue the following week on similar topics. Okay. And he really enjoyed being challenged.

Like it helped him prepare. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. So the, the, the final interview for the year, I think certainly had a different flavor than any of your other interviews. And that's because in a sense it was less of an interview and more of a moderation.

Yeah. and that's because in a sense it was less of an interview and more of a moderation now you said that you were feeling a little bit disappointed about this so I mean you kind of don't, I mean this is an exaggeration but you kind of don't talk for the first 40 minutes tell me a little bit about what happened there and maybe why you were feeling disappointed yeah so obviously this was the dialogue between Steven Pinker and David Deutsch. Their first ever public dialogue. Both the previous guests of the podcast. It was actually a listener of the show who gave me this idea.

Someone emailed me back in August or September and said, you should do this. There's an opportunity here. And I was like, that's a pretty good idea. So I organized it. And maybe I'll just take a quick digression to point out how much actually goes into that. I'm not just talking about scheduling and getting two people together at three different time zones. I had to get up at very early in my time to do it.

But also getting the equipment to them, getting them to use the equipment, video, audio stuff, so that the equipment to them, getting them to use the equipment, video, audio stuff so that the quality is sufficient that the audience will actually listen. And you're trying to coordinate all of this over email and it's like the last thing either of them wants to do. You have to be super tactful and thread the needle very carefully. So there was a lot that went into that. And if people watch the interview and compare it with other interviews David Deutsch has done,

if they look at the video, you'll notice that it's like the best quality video that anyone has managed to squeeze out of David Deutsch. And it's good. The audio and video is really good for Pinker as well. So like none of that happens easily. And this is where like soon enough, i would just love to have a team where someone handles that for me because context switching between trying to read up on the

grammar explosion in kids so that i can like create some kind of clash between that and deutsch's idea of universal explains context switching with that kind of research and then like okay what are the gain level settings on the Shure MV7 mic that I've sent to Pinker? And like, should I ask him to sit here? Can you turn the knob a little bit to the left? And like, what time of day, like, how is the sun going to be hitting his face in Boston? So should I send him like a panel light? Like that's just stuff I ideally don't want to have to worry about. So there was a lot involved there

to get the quality that we got in the end. But I feel like I was, I mean, a lot of people enjoyed it. In terms of the actual dialogue, I was really disappointed with it relative to what I thought its potential could be. I think I needed to moderate way more heavily. What prevented that,

at least in the first part of the conversation, was my software freezing. So like I listened back to the recording. It was like so painful. Every 10 to 15 minutes, you hear Steve and Dave go like, Joe, is Joe still there? Like Joe, where have you gone? Because my- I never would have guessed that. The thing we were using was like crashing. So I couldn't even track the conversation intellectually, let alone interrupt. eventually i messaged my girlfriend

she brought her phone downstairs and i hot spotted to her phone so that's how i fix that yeah yeah and yeah i guess it was just like overloaded the internet connection everyone using their videos i should have foreseen that like i should have done a test the day before anyway but yeah i do feel like i do feel like it was under moderated i do feel like a lot of people who enjoyed it probably don't know what they were missing and like they'll be yeah there'll be a lot of comments on youtube which is like well done on like staying out of the conversation like that's the best thing you could have done i'm not trying to impress those kind of people the thing is you get trapped in like a local maxima where it's like super interesting to them to see David, David Doit, having like a

dialogue around some topic, but it's not a global maxima and I should be directing them to the global maxima around like what are the most interesting things we could be discussing. Okay. So what did you feel like you missed out from that global maxima? Like, were there things that you wanted to press them on that you didn't get to or yeah there were but but i'm not sure how i should have handled these because these are i think like one of the problems with my prep was like i was thinking a lot about okay what are different questions i can ask them either separately or together as if this was an interview where a dialogue has like a different dynamic. One thing in particular is missing from the discussion of AGI.

And then another thing was missing from the discussion of like differential technological development. So the thing missing from the discussion of AGI, which was more relevant to Pinker, was just like Bostrom's idea of instrumental convergence. Different agents who will, okay, firstly, draw a distinction between terminal goals, the thing you're ultimately trying to get, and then instrumental goals, things that will help you get there. There are a lot of instrumental goals

that we can reasonably expect different agents with completely different terminal goals to ultimately converge on. So things like self-preservation, resource acquisition, developing technology. And moreover, when we're training these models, we might inadvertently train sub-goals in them that are opaque to us. Sure.

And so I feel like that was kind of like a core issue missing from the discussion that I wanted to put to Pinker. The second thing was, one of the questions I asked them was just like, can you name any technologies for which we would want to halt or slow the development? Emphatically, yes. Yeah, yeah. Because where I was coming from with this is like,

David Deutsch has this, it's almost like the civilizational version of the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. It's kind of like, let a thousand flowers bloom. The people on the side of progress and reason, their asset is good ideas, the scientific method, speed, progress.

So ultimately we just have to cross our fingers and hope that we beat the enemies of the enlightenment. But what I wanted to put to them was just this idea that attack beats defense. So there's this like, and maybe you could ground it in some kind of like first principles explanation around entropy or something. But you can think of like destructive technologies that you can't easily explanation around entropy or something. But you can think of destructive technologies

that you can't easily undo or prevent or offset. So the ultimate example is a civilization that can create black holes and just launch them at you. There's no wall or anything you can build to defend against that. So yeah, there are just some technologies that are so destructive that you can't easily undo that damage or prevent them. And then that is just compounded by the fact that all you need is just one bad act

or one incompetent person and you're screwed. So for AGI policy, what do you want me to take away from that? Well, I guess that was in the context of a broader discussion, but I suppose it does apply to AGI. And I don't know, I don't have very formed thoughts on this yet. It's something I need to think a lot more about. Do you think that humans are really just Turing machines? I guess my default position is yes because I suppose I lean more towards

materialism than dualism. But I'm totally open to the possibility that there's something special about the biological substrate that gives us our abilities. Yeah. That was obviously a point of tension between Steven Pinker and David Deutsch, which is that Steven sort of saw this as being an undecidable thing.

And David Deutsch was saying, well, if you're a physicalist and this is it, right? This is just computation and more computation. If we keep going down, we just hit more computation, maybe at the quantum level or something else, but yeah. And people on Twitter and I think YouTube like bashed Pinker for that, kind of assuming that he was being somewhat naive.

But even if he didn't make it in these words, I think there's actually like a deeper point there around the emergent phenomena that lead to human brains and consciousness consciousness sentience do you think you'll do another moderation like that again i mean never say never like i guess i've learned a lot about how to do them well maybe in person next time absolutely in person like so difficult to moderate virtually because everyone is interrupting everyone else. When you're doing it in person,

you can respond to the subtle cues in body language and micro expressions of each other. And so it's much more easy to interrupt and to moderate. But yeah, I guess it just depends on what the opportunities are. I don't have any planned and I generally much prefer just a one on one interview For sure. Would you do a debate? Yeah. I mean that episode was in some ways it kind of turned into a bit of a debate at least in the first part Do you have any debates you'd like to see?

Yeah actually I do. I'd like to see Judea Pearl and Guido M. Benz or someone like that on causality. I posted something about this on Twitter a while ago. In economics, econometricians kind of think they have this good handle on how to identify causality. And we have methods for doing this, very good methods for doing this, like randomized controlled trials and these sorts of things. But there's this sort of theoretical computer science field of people

who really think that you need models of causality, which they model these as kind of Bayesian networks or directed acyclic graphs. I don't know if you know much about this, but there's been these like blog post wars between these two people where Pearl posts a blog up and then Inben's comments and then they have this back and forth where it seems like they're getting nowhere.

And I just love to see somebody have them on and sit them down and talk to them. I don't know if you're familiar with either of their work. I am. Yeah, okay. Well, there you go. Guido won the Nobel Prize last year. He did, yeah.

Yeah, with Angreast. Yeah. Okay. That's a great one. Yeah. I'll think about that. Take it under advisement. Wasn't expecting to give you my recommendations today,

but there you go. Very good. Well, why don't we wrap up by talking about 2024 and maybe the future of the podcast yep so um one of the nice things that you were able to do this year uh was record video you posted a lot of shorts online as well of like little clips of just kind of key moments um and then for the first time in the in in the Steven Pinker and David Deutsch episode, you had a full video recording,

right? Which you said, as you just said, was very difficult to organize. Can we expect full video coming in, in 2024 and onwards? Yes. Very good.

The reason being, I think it's, I think it's like a, we're probably like the biggest growth lever for the show. Just getting picked up by the YouTube and X algorithm. Yeah. And the ability to publish clips that go viral yeah did the video of the interview with with pinker and doge get a

lot of attention on youtube uh yeah a moderate amount maybe it's up to like 20 ish thousand views so far but then more than that on on twitter nice oh no about the same on twitter so not bad not. So not bad. Not crazy, but not bad. That's pretty good. We'll see what happens next year. Yeah. Can you tell us any guests that will be appearing in 2024?

Have you got anything locked in yet? I actually have zero locked in. Wow. Which is nice because I don't need to prepare for anything yet. I'm going to use the next few weeks just to write some of these essays and blog posts I've been talking about. I have people I know that I want to get on, but I don't like talking about it before it happens because if it doesn't happen... You don't want to jinx it. Yeah. And if it doesn't happen, people get disappointed.

Yeah. But it also might put more pressure on those people to come on. That's never a good way to get them to come on. Blackmail. Yeah, probably. Another exciting thing happening for you next year is that you and your girlfriend are moving to London. Yeah. Yeah. How did that come about and what effect is that going to have on the podcast? Yeah. So it's driven by the general intuition that we need to locate ourselves in a bigger network of potential collaborators, whether that's for the podcast or other projects. It will definitely help the podcast because I will be closer to guests in both the US and the UK.

It's a long journey doing those trips from Australia. We're going to get a whole year of Brits. Yeah, exactly. But what's the, what's the red eye flight from London to New York? It's seven hours or something like that. Yeah. I thought it was a bit longer,

but maybe you're right. It's longer, still way better than going. Yeah. Yeah. So, so that's, that's what we're doing.

And I think it's going to be a good move. Sydney is going to miss you. Yeah. I'll be back. Yeah. Okay. One day. When do you go?

we actually haven't locked in an exact date yet but it's like February next year sooner rather than later I wanted to ask you about your writings but we've already talked about that so I'm kind of happy to wrap things up there it's been fun reflecting with you maybe before I say let's end things

are there any kind of take homes from the year or behind the scenes things that you really wanted to share that you didn't get a chance to? Yeah, there's one. So I feel like this is the biggest thing I've, maybe not necessarily learned because I always knew it subconsciously or implicitly, but maybe this is the biggest lesson that's been reinforced to me as an interviewer but is to you have to morally deserve the guest's best material so you have to convey status to the guest whether that's in like how you come across in your emails or how you carry

yourself at the beginning of the interview, how you demonstrate the level of research you've done through your like questioning and the context and preface that you attach to your questions, like showing them that you've done a lot of work and you're like, you're the kind of person who deserves their best information is like a really important, but underappreciated way to make interviews go well. That was something I reflected on a lot this year. Yeah. It's funny. We talked about this when we talked about me doing this interview, which is that it kind of seems like a big signaling game, which is like, you have to prove to them that you're worthy of their time or something.

And well, I mean, you're saying not just worthy of their time, but worthy of good answers. Worthy of good answers. Exactly. Yeah. Podcasts, it, I mean, you're saying not just worthy of their time, but worthy of good answers. Worthy of good answers. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Podcasts. It's just all one big signaling game. Maybe life is just one.

Cool. Well, thank you, Joe. And, uh, from all the ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,

swag and swag, let's keep up the good work. Thanks so much. Great questions. Really enjoyed it. It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to read the episode transcript or support the show financially in 2024, head to my website, jnwpod.com. That's jnwpod.com. I hope you have a

happy and prosperous start to 2024. I will speak to you sometime early in the new year. Until then, ciao.