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.

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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.

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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.

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Richard Rhodes is an American historian and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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

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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.

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