Podcast idea: interview low-key people doing direct work
Listening to org leaders and top researchers is great, but I would love to listen to interviews with average people doing direct EA/EA-adjacent work.
Specifically, I’m a software engineer and I haven’t found any podcast interviewing a software engineer doing direct work.
If someone wants to work on this, I’m happy to donate some money to get it started.
@Aaron Bergman’s Pigeon Hour gets close to this https://www.aaronbergman.net/podcast
+1, love Pigeon Hour
Omg 😊😊😊😊
Second this. I think it could be potentially really fun to listen to by focusing on the hardships of doing ops work, development etc. like grunt work that is super important but not glorifying. So it can be a bit like listening to ultra marathon runners talk about their run, how hard it was, major pains they encountered and how they overcome it. Kind of like celebrating shlep in EA. This way, one can also get more people to be excited and feel rewarded for doing hard and boring stuff, which some senior EAs have seemed to indicate we need more of, and less of “galaxy brain fun and wild ideas”.
I’d be happy to listen to conversations with interesting and articulate people who are low-key. I suspect that a major challenge will be finding these people. My general/vague understanding is that most (not all) people who are on podcasts (or who have any type of public image) tend to do a certain amount of self-promotion, and I predict that tendency to self-promote is negatively correlated with being low-key.
I’ve met a handful of people who are doing good work that don’t appear to spend much effort on what I’ll label as “image,” but if you are searching for interesting and articulate people for a podcast it will be hard to find those people, exactly because they don’t promote themselves.
Finding them should be easy, no? Just checking the employees of interesting orgs on LinkedIn.
Maybe convincing them will be harder.