The Joe Walker Podcast (Jolly Swagman formerly)

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.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

At a time when the Enlightenment is under attack from without and within, I bring together two of the most thoughtful defenders of progress and reason, for their first ever public dialogue. Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. I think of him as providing the strongest empirical defence of the Enlightenment (as seen in his book Enlightenment Now). David Deutsch is a British physicist at the University of Oxford, and the father of quantum computing. I think of him as having produced the most compelling first principles defence of the Enlightenment (as seen in his book The Beginning of Infinity). Full transcript available at: https://josephnoelwalker.com/153-deutsch-pinker-dialogue. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Shruti Rajagopalan is an Indian-American economist. She leads the Indian political economy research program and Emergent Ventures India at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. She also hosts the Ideas of India podcast. Full transcript available at: jnwpod.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What were the deep causes of the global financial crisis and great recession? Has unconventional monetary policy in the wake of the crisis done more harm than good? And should monetary policy target financial stability? I discuss these questions and more with Indian economist and Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Raghuram Rajan. Raghuram Rajan was chief economist at the IMF from 2003 to 2006, and from 2013 to 2016 he was Governor of the Reserve Bank of India. As RBI Governor, he notably introduced India's inflation-targeting scheme, among many other achievements. Full transcript available at: josephnoelwalker.com/151-raghuram-rajan See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Peter Singer is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. He is widely regarded as the world's most influential living philosopher. Full transcript available at: jnwpod.com Episode recorded on 26 April 2023. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Peter Turchin is a complexity scientist and one of the founders of cliodynamics — a new, cross-disciplinary field that applies mathematics and big data to test historical theories. Full transcript available at: jnwpod.com. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Stephen Wolfram is a physicist, computer scientist and businessman. He is the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, the creator of Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha, and the author of A New Kind of Science. Full transcript available at: jnwpod.com. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Katalin Karikó is a Hungarian-American biochemist. She is one of the inventors of mRNA technology. Full transcript available at: thejspod.com. Episode recorded on 15 February 2023. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Richard Rhodes is an American historian and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Full transcript available at: thejspod.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Dr Ken Henry is an Australian economist who served as Secretary of Australia's Treasury from 2001 to 2011. He was instrumental in helping Australia avoid recession during the 2008 Global Financial Crisis — Australia was the only major advanced economy to do so. Full transcript available at: thejspod.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Palmer Luckey is an American tech entrepreneur and billionaire. He has founded two companies: Oculus VR (acquired by Facebook for $2 billion in 2014), and Anduril (recently valued at $8.5 billion). He has been described as the real-life Tony Stark. Full transcript available at: www.thejspod.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Daniel Kahneman is widely regarded as the most influential psychologist alive. He won the Nobel Prize in Economics (2002) for his work on judgment and decision-making under uncertainty, much of it done jointly with his late collaborator Amos Tversky. He is the author of the bestselling books Thinking, Fast and Slow and Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment (written with Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein). Full transcript available at: thejspod.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In the long run, talent allocation is almost everything. But as a society, we're not actually very good at it. The question of how to reliably match people with jobs they are well suited for is one of the big unsolved problems of our times. Joe catches up with return guest Tyler Cowen to discuss the art of identifying talent. Tyler is a professor of economics at George Mason University and host of the podcast Conversations with Tyler. He is also the co-author of a new book, Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World. Full transcript available at: thejspod.com Episode recorded: 18 May 2022. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

From language and writing to the Hindu-Arabic numeral system, computers and Adobe Photoshop, our species has a history of inventing tools for augmenting our own intelligence. But what comes next? Andy Matuschak is a developer and designer. He helped build iOS at Apple, founded and led Khan Academy's R&D lab, and now works as an independent researcher investigating 'tools for thought' — that is, technologies that can transform human cognition and creativity. Full episode transcript available at: thejspod.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

How rational are we? How can a species smart enough to set foot on the moon also be prone to conspiracy theories that the moon landing was fake? Joe speaks with Steven Pinker to discuss rationality — and its opposite. Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He is a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, an elected to the National Academy of Sciences and one of Time‘s 100 Most Influential People. Full episode transcript available at: thejspod.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Bayesianism, the doctrine that it's always rational to represent our beliefs in terms of probabilities, dominates the intellectual world, from decision theory to the philosophy of science. But does it make sense to quantify our beliefs about such ineffable things as scientific theories or the future? And what separates empty prophecy from legitimate prediction? David Deutsch is a British physicist at the University of Oxford, and is widely regarded as the father of quantum computing. He is the author of The Fabric of Reality (1997) and The Beginning of Infinity (2011). Full episode transcript available at: thejspod.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

William Dalrymple is an acclaimed historian and writer. Show notes available at: josephnoelwalker.com/138-afghanistan See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Richard Holden is Professor of Economics at UNSW. Steven Hamilton is an Assistant Professor of Economics at The George Washington University. Full transcript available at: josephnoelwalker.com/holden-hamilton See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ole Peters is a physicist and a Fellow at the London Mathematical Laboratory. Show notes available at: josephnoelwalker.com/136-ergodicity See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Michael Sandel teaches political philosophy at Harvard University, where he is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government Theory. His course “Justice” is the first Harvard course to be made freely available online and on television and has been viewed by tens of millions of people around the world. Full transcript available at: josephnoelwalker.com/michael-sandel See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.