Today we're joined by Joe Walker, host of The Joe Walker Podcast, where he conducts refreshingly in-depth conversations with the world's deepest thinkers. Joe has spoken with figures like Noam Chomsky, Daniel Kahneman, and Nassim Taleb, and is known for his extraordinary preparation process - sometimes investing over 200 hours of deep study for a single conversation.

We'll be exploring Joe's remarkable system for going from complete novice to discussing complex subjects with world experts in a matter of weeks – a process that includes textbooks, tutoring sessions, hundreds of flashcards, and in at least one case terraforming a hotel room with post-it notes. We'll also discuss how preparing for and having these conversations has shaped Joe's views on two topics: the risk posed by nuclear weapons, and the question of how people actually form and change their beliefs.

Want more Joe Walker? Check out his podcast. Here is the episode he recommended on evolutionary biology.

Things we mentioned:

• The Scout Mindset
• ⁠The Myth of the Framework⁠

About the hosts:

Thom and Aidan left boring, stable careers in law and tech to found ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠FarmKind⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, a donation platform that helps people be a part of the solution to factory farming — regardless of their diet. While the podcast isn’t about animal welfare, it’s inspired by their daily experience grappling with a fundamental question: Why do people so rarely change their minds, even when confronted with compelling evidence? This curiosity drives their exploration of intellectual humility and the complex factors that enable (or prevent) meaningful belief change.

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