You can see it as an example of ‘alpha’ vs ‘beta’. When someone asks me about the value of someone as a guest, I tend to ask: “do they have anything new to say? didn’t they just do a big interview last year?” and if they don’t but they’re big, “can you ask them good questions that get them out of their ‘book’?” Big guests are not necessarily as valuable as they may seem because they are highly-exposed, which means both that (1) they have probably said everything they will said before and there is no ‘news’ or novelty, and (2) they are message-disciplined and careful to “talk their book”. (In this analogy, “alpha” represents undiscovered or neglected interview topics which can be extracted mostly just by finding it and then asking the obvious question, usually by interviewing new people; “beta” represents doing standard interview topics/people, but much more so—harder, faster, better—and getting new stuff that way.)
Lex Fridman podcasts are an example of this: he often hosts very big guests like Mark Zuckerberg, but nevertheless, I will sit down and skim through the transcript of 2-4 hours of content, and find nothing even worth excerpting for my notes. Fridman notoriously does no research and asks softball questions, and invites the biggest names he can get regardless of overexposure, and so if you do that, you will get nothing new. He has found no alpha, and he doesn’t interview hard enough to extract beta. So he’s sort of the high-expense ratio index fund of podcast interviews.
Sarah Paine, on the other hand, seems to have been completely unknown and full of juicy nuggets, and is like winning the lottery: you can make a career off a really good trade like Paine before it gets crowded. However, if another successful podcaster has her on, they will probably not discover Paine is their most popular or growth-productive guest ever. The well is dry. Paine may have more to say someday, but that day is probably closer to “5 years from today” than “tomorrow”.
(So a good interviewer adopts an optimal foraging mindset: once you have harvested a patch of its delicious food, you have to move on to another patch, which hasn’t been exhausted yet, and let the original patch slowly recover.)
So a great guest for Dwarkesh’s blog would be, say Hans Moravec or Paul J. Werbos: Moravec hasn’t done anything publicly in at least a decade, and is fallow; while Werbos has been more active and in the public eye, but still not much and is such a weird guy that just about any questions will be interesting. Reich was also a good guest because while Reich is very ‘public’ in some senses (he’s written popularizing books, even), he is still obscure, almost none of what he has published is well-known, and he is involved in so much fast-paced research that even the book is now substantially obsolete and he has a lot of new stuff to say. (And Reich will have more stuff to say if revisited in, say, 2 years for an update, so a harvester will be making a note to revisit him if the current crop of interview candidates in the pipeline is looking marginal.) A difficult or mediocre guest would be Tony Blair: he can surely say many interesting things about the current geopolitical context and his work since being PM… but he is a super-experienced career politician who has survived countless Question Times, and may eat you for breakfast and exploit you for ulterior purposes (rather than vice-versa). Similarly, Mark Zuckerberg and Satya Nadella are tough nuts: there’s meat there, but are you willing enough to bring down the hammer or will you settle for a mediocre result that mostly just fills space and is not a must-watch? A bad guest might be someone controlling and extremely PR-savvy like MrBeast; this is the sort of guy who will give you a bad interview pushing his ‘book’ shamelessly, and then might wind up spiking the interview anyway if he felt he wasn’t getting enough out of it, and just drops it as a sunk cost (though it was weeks of work on your part and blows a hole in your schedule—that’s not his problem).
I like the optimal forager take, seems intuitively correct. I’d add that Dwarkesh struck gold by getting you on his podcast too. (Tangentially: this grand theory of intelligence video snippet reminds me of a page-ish-long writeup on that I stumbled upon deep in the bowels of https://gwern.net/ which I’ve annoyingly never been able to find again.)
Also thanks for the pointer to Werbos, his website Welcome to the Werbos World! funnily enough struck me as crackpot-y and I wouldn’t have guessed just from the landing page that he’s the discoverer of backprop, respected former program director at the NSF, etc.
I wouldn’t have guessed just from the landing page that he’s the discoverer of backprop, respected former program director at the NSF, etc.
That’s what makes it alpha! If he was as legible as, say, Hinton, he would be mined out by now, and nothing but beta. (Similar situation to Schmidhuber - ‘obvious crackpot’ - although he’s such a self-promoter that he overcomes it, and so at this point there’s no alpha talking to him; the stuff that would be interesting, like his relationship to certain wealthy Italians, or to King Bonesaws, or how he’s managed to torpedo his career so spectacularly, he will not talk about. Also, I understand he likes to charge people for the privilege of talking to him.) You have to have both domain knowledge and intellectual courage to know about Werbos and eg. read his old interviews and be willing to go out on a limb and interview him.
This seems to underrate the value of distribution. I suspect another factor to take into account is the degree of audience overlap. Like there’s a lot of value in booking a guest who has been on a bunch of podcasts, so long as your particular audience isn’t likely to have been exposed to them.
You can see it as an example of ‘alpha’ vs ‘beta’. When someone asks me about the value of someone as a guest, I tend to ask: “do they have anything new to say? didn’t they just do a big interview last year?” and if they don’t but they’re big, “can you ask them good questions that get them out of their ‘book’?” Big guests are not necessarily as valuable as they may seem because they are highly-exposed, which means both that (1) they have probably said everything they will said before and there is no ‘news’ or novelty, and (2) they are message-disciplined and careful to “talk their book”. (In this analogy, “alpha” represents undiscovered or neglected interview topics which can be extracted mostly just by finding it and then asking the obvious question, usually by interviewing new people; “beta” represents doing standard interview topics/people, but much more so—harder, faster, better—and getting new stuff that way.)
Lex Fridman podcasts are an example of this: he often hosts very big guests like Mark Zuckerberg, but nevertheless, I will sit down and skim through the transcript of 2-4 hours of content, and find nothing even worth excerpting for my notes. Fridman notoriously does no research and asks softball questions, and invites the biggest names he can get regardless of overexposure, and so if you do that, you will get nothing new. He has found no alpha, and he doesn’t interview hard enough to extract beta. So he’s sort of the high-expense ratio index fund of podcast interviews.
Sarah Paine, on the other hand, seems to have been completely unknown and full of juicy nuggets, and is like winning the lottery: you can make a career off a really good trade like Paine before it gets crowded. However, if another successful podcaster has her on, they will probably not discover Paine is their most popular or growth-productive guest ever. The well is dry. Paine may have more to say someday, but that day is probably closer to “5 years from today” than “tomorrow”.
(So a good interviewer adopts an optimal foraging mindset: once you have harvested a patch of its delicious food, you have to move on to another patch, which hasn’t been exhausted yet, and let the original patch slowly recover.)
So a great guest for Dwarkesh’s blog would be, say Hans Moravec or Paul J. Werbos: Moravec hasn’t done anything publicly in at least a decade, and is fallow; while Werbos has been more active and in the public eye, but still not much and is such a weird guy that just about any questions will be interesting. Reich was also a good guest because while Reich is very ‘public’ in some senses (he’s written popularizing books, even), he is still obscure, almost none of what he has published is well-known, and he is involved in so much fast-paced research that even the book is now substantially obsolete and he has a lot of new stuff to say. (And Reich will have more stuff to say if revisited in, say, 2 years for an update, so a harvester will be making a note to revisit him if the current crop of interview candidates in the pipeline is looking marginal.) A difficult or mediocre guest would be Tony Blair: he can surely say many interesting things about the current geopolitical context and his work since being PM… but he is a super-experienced career politician who has survived countless Question Times, and may eat you for breakfast and exploit you for ulterior purposes (rather than vice-versa). Similarly, Mark Zuckerberg and Satya Nadella are tough nuts: there’s meat there, but are you willing enough to bring down the hammer or will you settle for a mediocre result that mostly just fills space and is not a must-watch? A bad guest might be someone controlling and extremely PR-savvy like MrBeast; this is the sort of guy who will give you a bad interview pushing his ‘book’ shamelessly, and then might wind up spiking the interview anyway if he felt he wasn’t getting enough out of it, and just drops it as a sunk cost (though it was weeks of work on your part and blows a hole in your schedule—that’s not his problem).
I like the optimal forager take, seems intuitively correct. I’d add that Dwarkesh struck gold by getting you on his podcast too. (Tangentially: this grand theory of intelligence video snippet reminds me of a page-ish-long writeup on that I stumbled upon deep in the bowels of https://gwern.net/ which I’ve annoyingly never been able to find again.)
Also thanks for the pointer to Werbos, his website Welcome to the Werbos World! funnily enough struck me as crackpot-y and I wouldn’t have guessed just from the landing page that he’s the discoverer of backprop, respected former program director at the NSF, etc.
Probably https://gwern.net/newsletter/2021/05#master-synthesis
That’s what makes it alpha! If he was as legible as, say, Hinton, he would be mined out by now, and nothing but beta. (Similar situation to Schmidhuber - ‘obvious crackpot’ - although he’s such a self-promoter that he overcomes it, and so at this point there’s no alpha talking to him; the stuff that would be interesting, like his relationship to certain wealthy Italians, or to King Bonesaws, or how he’s managed to torpedo his career so spectacularly, he will not talk about. Also, I understand he likes to charge people for the privilege of talking to him.) You have to have both domain knowledge and intellectual courage to know about Werbos and eg. read his old interviews and be willing to go out on a limb and interview him.
This seems to underrate the value of distribution. I suspect another factor to take into account is the degree of audience overlap. Like there’s a lot of value in booking a guest who has been on a bunch of podcasts, so long as your particular audience isn’t likely to have been exposed to them.