Hey Matt, obviously there’s a tonne one could say here, just to offer some quick thoughts:
In playing down the chances that people here will enjoy it as much as they used to, I wasn’t particularly responding to you or about impact, just not wanting to set readers up to be disappointed.
The optimal strategy may well involve the show being less interesting in general. I’d say for instance that the AI Policy Podcast is much less interesting than the 80k podcast used to be, while nevertheless being very influential (and probably beneficial). It depends on whether the primary mechanism is to persuade people who aren’t bought in, or provide resources that are useful to people and enable them to have impact as they become persuaded by whatever means. (Or simply improve understanding of difficult issues within the AI ecosystem itself.) Different interviewers might reasonably adopt different strategies.
The behaviour of the people on audio apps vs YouTube is very different, in some ways totally opposite. An interview repeating points about AI/AGI/intelligence explosion that would be familiar and tedious to you, but doing it very well, could nevertheless reach and indeed persuade people by being fed to them by the YouTube algorithm (while adding little value to regular subscribers).
I have to leave it there just due to time constraints but my current bottom line is that I need to aim to have more unexpected guests / POVs, and a wider range of topics. So basically I’m agreeing with you that we’ve swung too far away from what people like about the show before this year and general interest is indeed important for the reason you give.
Hey Matt, obviously there’s a tonne one could say here, just to offer some quick thoughts:
In playing down the chances that people here will enjoy it as much as they used to, I wasn’t particularly responding to you or about impact, just not wanting to set readers up to be disappointed.
The optimal strategy may well involve the show being less interesting in general. I’d say for instance that the AI Policy Podcast is much less interesting than the 80k podcast used to be, while nevertheless being very influential (and probably beneficial). It depends on whether the primary mechanism is to persuade people who aren’t bought in, or provide resources that are useful to people and enable them to have impact as they become persuaded by whatever means. (Or simply improve understanding of difficult issues within the AI ecosystem itself.) Different interviewers might reasonably adopt different strategies.
The behaviour of the people on audio apps vs YouTube is very different, in some ways totally opposite. An interview repeating points about AI/AGI/intelligence explosion that would be familiar and tedious to you, but doing it very well, could nevertheless reach and indeed persuade people by being fed to them by the YouTube algorithm (while adding little value to regular subscribers).
I have to leave it there just due to time constraints but my current bottom line is that I need to aim to have more unexpected guests / POVs, and a wider range of topics. So basically I’m agreeing with you that we’ve swung too far away from what people like about the show before this year and general interest is indeed important for the reason you give.
Thanks! This is very helpful/informative — particularly the thing about YouTube!