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Episode: The Best Of Recommendations

Author: TED Audio Collective / Youngme Moon, Mihir Desai, & Felix Oberholzer-Gee
Duration: 00:32:49

Episode Shownotes

Revisit some of Felix and Mihir’s recommendations. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_00
How weird does it feel to be called someone's fiance? The first time you hear it, you do a double take. From there, let's enjoy this moment, turns into we're planning a fall wedding. That's where Zola comes in.

00:00:12 Speaker_00
From a venue and vendor discovery tool that matches you with your dream team to save the dates, websites, and an easy to use registry, Zola has everything you need to plan your wedding in one place. Start planning at zola.com. That's Z-O-L-A dot com.

00:00:32 Speaker_03
Hello everyone, this is Felix. After Hours is still on break, but we wanted to bring you a few past episodes that we hope you will enjoy. Let us know what you think, and, as always, thank you for listening.

00:00:56 Speaker_01
Okay, recommendations. Felix, what do you got?

00:00:58 Speaker_03
So I slip into your role for one episode and I have two recommendations. Oh, and then I get to chastise you for it.

00:01:06 Speaker_02
How could you?

00:01:06 Speaker_03
One is actually an old recommendation that I just wanted to re-emphasize. It's a podcast called The World, which is maybe a half dozen stories about what is happening in the world today. But the reason why I wanted to talk about it is

00:01:22 Speaker_03
It strikes me for completely obvious reasons that our attention swings so dramatically from one topic to another. In part because we have these big catastrophes that really deserve our attention.

00:01:37 Speaker_03
So we go from talking about Ukraine almost non-stop to now, yes, some things are happening in the Ukraine, but it's not really the center of attention anymore. Almost no one talks about just the incredibly terrible things that happen in Sudan.

00:01:52 Speaker_03
Khartoum, I think, is completely leveled at this point in time. We have all of these dramatic developments in Myanmar.

00:01:59 Speaker_03
If you wanted an interesting roundup of stories around the world, and in particular stories, I think that deserve more attention, but we don't naturally pay attention to these stories.

00:02:11 Speaker_03
The world is a really fabulous source, in particular because it's all reported by local journalists. So it's always a truly local angle, which is absolutely fantastic.

00:02:21 Speaker_01
Fantastic. That sounds great.

00:02:23 Speaker_03
And then, of course, after listening to the world, you need something that's a little more uplifting.

00:02:28 Speaker_01
Yeah. You might need a drink indeed.

00:02:30 Speaker_03
You need a drink or you need some Mexican music. And one recommendation that I have is Banda El Recuerdo. What is that? I don't know if it's the oldest or one of the older Mexican banda bands. It's basically a family enterprise.

00:02:47 Speaker_03
It was founded in the 1930s. And the person who leads the band is still from the original family. Of course, it has to have an amazing sousaphone player, which you get all the sousaphone you can possibly hope for.

00:03:01 Speaker_03
And no matter what the news of the day, no matter how terrible it is, you feel lighter right away. It's really a joy to listen to these guys. So Banda El Recuerdo and any album really that you can find will be a joy to listen to.

00:03:16 Speaker_01
Oh my god, that sounds like a great recommendation. I will take a look. So what do you have for us here? I too have something to maybe lift your spirits.

00:03:24 Speaker_01
Fortitude is something that I admire in many people including you Felix as a co-host for dealing with me. But Fortitude is also the name of, I think the best bakery I've ever been to.

00:03:37 Speaker_03
Oh my God. Okay.

00:03:38 Speaker_01
I love bakeries. I've previously recommended Olinstein and Rosetta, but this is a bakery in London, which I happened upon and it's just so good. So it's located in Bloomsbury.

00:03:50 Speaker_01
And I think when you're traveling, there is nothing better than finding a good bakery.

00:03:53 Speaker_02
Yeah.

00:03:54 Speaker_01
And this is just one outlet. It's in Bloomsbury and it's located on this lovely alley. There's no indoor seating. So part of it is also just the experience of waiting in line and then sitting outside in this little alley. And they emphasize sourdough.

00:04:10 Speaker_01
Okay. So they have just great breads, but they also have prepared foods. And so they have great sandwiches and great beignets. I went there four days in a row and everything was spectacular. I went there for breakfast and for lunch.

00:04:24 Speaker_01
And I got to tell you, it was spectacular every single time I went. And so I recommend it highly. And by the way, unlike some bakeries that I love, like for example, Flour in Cambridge, I love. But the coffee, not great.

00:04:37 Speaker_01
But at Fortitude, the coffee is also spectacular. So everything about Fortitude, the whole experience, the food, and when you're traveling, you need a good bakery. So if you're going to be in London, I'm going to recommend Fortitude.

00:04:49 Speaker_03
What a recommendation, as if I needed another reason to want to travel to London.

00:04:53 Speaker_01
Exactly right. There you go.

00:05:00 Speaker_03
I saw a show last week by a comedian. Her name is Atsuko Okatsuka. Very nice. She's out of LA and she is amazing. I can't really remember laughing so hard for so long. It was just an incredible show and many of our listeners will probably know her.

00:05:21 Speaker_03
She has an HBO special called The Intruder. where you sort of get to see her personality and get to see her comedy. And she's on tour now up until early 2024. So you might be able to catch her in one of the cities.

00:05:37 Speaker_03
But to me, she's really special for two reasons. One is she starts with these topics that sound quite serious. For instance, in this latest show, there's this issue around how do you actually make friends as an adult.

00:05:51 Speaker_03
So easy as a kid, and then as adults, we know. And so you think, okay, so this is like a really serious topic. And then these little twists and turns.

00:06:02 Speaker_03
when she thinks about when does it work well, when is it harder, what is it about the workplace that it somehow seems easier to make friends when we're at work as opposed to others, and so on and so on. So that alone is really fantastic.

00:06:17 Speaker_03
And I don't really remember having seen this the way other comedians build their shows. she has these little snippets that reoccur. So for instance, in this particular show, she talks about tandems and how she likes to ride a tandem with her husband.

00:06:34 Speaker_03
And the tandem becomes this little symbol, it's almost like a secret that she shares with her audience. And then at various points in the show, the tandem or a single bike shows up again,

00:06:46 Speaker_03
And because you experience the earlier part of the show, it's this secret language that you have with her that then makes you laugh and think about things.

00:06:55 Speaker_03
Other than having the most complicated name on the planet, she's just really fabulous if you have a chance to see her.

00:07:02 Speaker_01
And I love the idea of these themes that get woven through sometimes these comedic routines. Because it makes you realize that it's really very subtle, the storytelling they're doing.

00:07:11 Speaker_01
It's easy to kind of look at it as a set of jokes or a set, but often it's really very delicate what they're up to. Yeah. What do you have for us, Mihir? So given that it's Diwali, my recommendation is a little bit related.

00:07:22 Speaker_01
I just think these occasions are wonderful occasions to taste other cultures and embrace other cultures. So I just want to encourage everybody, especially at this time of year, since we have so many of them, to use these occasions

00:07:38 Speaker_01
to embrace and explore a different culture.

00:07:42 Speaker_01
And in particular, one can do that obviously by reaching out to people from those traditions, but also by visiting parts of your city that might be dominated by different people and different cultures, going there for a meal.

00:07:55 Speaker_01
These holidays are spectacular and they're wonderful invitations to engage with other cultures. So rather than think of them as times to let other people celebrate, perhaps try to understand them as opportunities for you to celebrate yourself.

00:08:11 Speaker_01
I think people who come from different traditions love nothing more than to share it. And so it is a good opportunity to engage with different cultures than your own.

00:08:20 Speaker_03
I love that. I have a book recommendation this week. It's a book by Bob Rubin, who used to be a senior partner at Goldman Sachs, who served as Treasury Secretary under President Clinton, so a very prominent figure.

00:08:40 Speaker_03
And he has a new book out called The Yellow Pad, and it's about decision-making and the way to think about complicated decisions where you're sort of at a loss even analytically how to think about these decisions. And it's actually quite fabulous.

00:08:55 Speaker_03
And I don't know if this is literally true or if it's just sort of a mechanism in the book.

00:09:00 Speaker_03
He describes how he would usually take one of these legal paths and he would describe all the outcomes that are possible and then he would attach probabilities to it.

00:09:10 Speaker_03
And when I first looked at it, I thought, yeah, so probabilistic thinking, isn't that what we're all doing all the time? Isn't that the most obvious way to make decisions?

00:09:21 Speaker_03
And what's fabulous about the book is then he looks at lots of decisions that he made as a private investor, when he was at Goldman, when he was the treasury secretary, and you see that the nuances

00:09:35 Speaker_03
are actually incredibly important and that in many of these cases, our intuition about decision making is not really close to what this yellow pad would suggest. So, I'll give you two examples.

00:09:49 Speaker_03
He talks about how you should always think about risk as a range. Risk is not a number. Risk is a range and you need to think about the probability distribution. And then of course everybody knows, right?

00:10:00 Speaker_03
When I just look at expected outcomes, that's not quite the right way to think about it. And then guess what? He talks about risk management in large financial institutions where they essentially look at one number and the whole distribution gets lost.

00:10:15 Speaker_03
So it's a real joy to read because it takes something that you take for granted and that you're familiar with, but it puts it in the context of a really remarkable career and a rich life.

00:10:28 Speaker_03
And you see many of the wrinkles of decision making that are super interesting to follow.

00:10:33 Speaker_01
That sounds fantastic. I'm just taking a look at it now. I hadn't seen that it had come out. It just came out like six months ago. That looks great. Yes, it's relatively recent. My only disagreement is mine is a quadrile graph paper pad.

00:10:43 Speaker_01
But aside from that, it sounds fantastic. Very good. What do you have for us Mir? So I have a weird quirky TV show on Amazon Prime.

00:10:53 Speaker_03
Oh, I love weird quirky.

00:10:55 Speaker_01
Yeah. And as you know, I'm a cop drama comedy kind of fan. And this is the ultimate weird intersection of cop show and comedy. And it's called Deadlock. And it takes place first off in a beautiful place, which is Tasmania, Australia.

00:11:09 Speaker_01
And then second, it is a portrait of this wonderful community in Tasmania, Australia. In particular, the woman who is the lead is in a lesbian relationship with this other woman. And then there is a whole community of people in Tasmania.

00:11:26 Speaker_01
And it is just such a wonderful pinpoint portrait of that geography and of a community. It's just both hilarious and actually has got a really good mystery underneath it all.

00:11:38 Speaker_01
It's actually like there's a good cop show and then it's just laugh out loud funny along the way.

00:11:44 Speaker_03
It's a miniseries?

00:11:46 Speaker_01
It's a miniseries. I think it's six or seven episodes long, which is my perfect arrangement and thoroughly enjoyable. So I had happened to have gone to Tasmania recently and I just found it to be fantastic.

00:12:03 Speaker_03
Have you seen Bodies, a miniseries that streams on Netflix right now? No. It's a detective story, of course, which is why I was thinking of you.

00:12:13 Speaker_03
It plays at four different points in time, and radically different points in time, as in the first one is in the 19th century, the last one is far out into the future. And I'm not going to say too much because I want you to watch it and enjoy it.

00:12:29 Speaker_03
But what happens is that there's some commonalities across the crime that you observe at these four points in time.

00:12:36 Speaker_03
But you also see the different responses given technology, given how police was organized, given the individuals who were involved in the tragedy that takes place.

00:12:47 Speaker_03
So it's a fabulous idea that has a little to do with time travel, but doesn't really have all the problems that usually time travel stories have.

00:12:57 Speaker_01
Wow, that sounds fantastic. Yeah, I'm all for cop shows and detective shows. That's great. Yeah, it's really fabulous.

00:13:02 Speaker_01
So by the way, Felix, this morning I did have a Felix and Mihir recommendation thing happen to me, which is as we were driving this morning, the song came on, which was the Brian Eno John Cale album.

00:13:15 Speaker_01
And you know what I couldn't remember is I couldn't remember if I had recommended it and you liked it or you had recommended it and then I liked it, which is just a testament to the fusion of our recommendation brains.

00:13:28 Speaker_03
And what's a little scary is I also don't remember.

00:13:31 Speaker_01
I know I love that music, but I can't quite… Exactly. I can't remember who said it. I don't know. So my recommendation is, I have a tradition of recommending silly British game shows.

00:13:42 Speaker_01
So they've taken the game show and they've perfected it and in part what they've done is they've had comedians who play a large role in the game show. So most game shows are rather vapid because they feature regular people.

00:13:56 Speaker_01
They have figured out that if you have a game show, but it's got comedians who are the contestants, it's hilarious.

00:14:01 Speaker_01
So I've historically recommended University Challenge and Only Connect, but the one I'd like to recommend now is Taskmaster, which is somewhat variable in quality given the season and who the comedians are. But my God, is it hilarious.

00:14:15 Speaker_01
They basically have comedians and then they make them do the most ridiculous and creative and wonderful things. And then they all compete. But it's all in the great spirit of fun.

00:14:26 Speaker_01
And it happens to be entirely on YouTube and you can watch all the seasons.

00:14:29 Speaker_03
Is it a little bit like whose line is it anyway? Do you remember that way back? Drew Carey and his friends.

00:14:36 Speaker_01
Absolutely. It's a little bit like that in that I love comedians generally, but they don't have to just do stand-up. They're just so wonderfully improvisational. Now, whose line is it anyway? It was really improv. It was really improv.

00:14:46 Speaker_01
This is like improv, but they're just put in these weird circumstances and they have to deal with the weird circumstances. And not really with each other, but just with these tasks. Anyway, so Taskmaster is my pick. There you go. Fabulous.

00:15:03 Speaker_00
How weird does it feel to be called someone's fiance? The first time you hear it, you do a double take. From there, let's enjoy this moment, turns into we're planning a fall wedding. That's where Zola comes in.

00:15:16 Speaker_00
From a venue and vendor discovery tool that matches you with your dream team to save the dates, websites, and an easy to use registry, Zola has everything you need to plan your wedding in one place. Start planning at zola.com. That's Z-O-L-A dot com.

00:15:41 Speaker_01
So now that teaching is over, I'm remembering some of the books that I've read in the summer that were really fantastic. So there is an nonfiction book called The Best Minds by Jonathan Rosen, which is a memoir, which I usually don't typically like.

00:15:58 Speaker_01
It is the story of a gentleman named Michael Lauder, who is Jonathan Rosen's friend, and who we grow up with.

00:16:03 Speaker_01
who has this remarkable career as a young person and is diagnosed with schizophrenia and then goes to Yale Law School, goes to work at Bain, and then comes undone by schizophrenia and ends up committing a horrible crime.

00:16:18 Speaker_01
And so it is just so well written and such a thoughtful, meditation on mental illness and the way we think about mental illness. Previously I've recommended Strangers to Ourselves by Rachel Aviv and The Mind Fixers, which is about psychopharmacology.

00:16:34 Speaker_01
And I think this one is kind of nice because it's a memoir and it has a different kind of tone to it and it's written just so beautifully. So The Best Minds by Jonathan Rosen.

00:16:45 Speaker_03
It sounds wonderful, really great.

00:16:48 Speaker_01
Is it science-based? It does have science in the background. It even has the healthcare system in the background, obviously. We see how he navigates the healthcare system.

00:16:58 Speaker_01
You don't want to read it to learn about schizophrenia, but you want to read it just as a story of mental illness and about that fine line. And we all know people who are on that line between genius and madness. And it's so compelling and so trenchant.

00:17:14 Speaker_01
You can't help but think, this could happen to any of us. And it's very complex when it does. Wow. Okay. What a recommendation. And what do you have, Felix?

00:17:21 Speaker_03
I'm on a roll. I recommended a cop show, mostly thinking of you, of course. And this week, again, another cop show. Oh, my dreamy outcome. Have you seen Three Pines? I think I've heard of it, I have not seen it. It's really remarkable.

00:17:39 Speaker_03
Maybe the most fascinating thing is it takes place in French-speaking Canada, and the context is Canada's treatment of indigenous people, indigenous women in particular.

00:17:55 Speaker_03
So the little town is close to a school, a home that mistreated indigenous children for a very long time. There are people living in the village who went to that school and have complicated memories about what happened.

00:18:14 Speaker_03
And it's just a spectacular way to show the historical significance of those relationships. You know how sometimes it can feel you're misusing that context to do something bigger? It never feels like that. It feels very genuine.

00:18:31 Speaker_03
And the filmmaker is someone who's a member of the Kainai First Nation tribe, a person called Tailfeather.

00:18:39 Speaker_03
Perhaps the involvement of someone who's really close to the phenomenon helped to make it real authentic and to make it feel like we're not just misusing the context, but the combination as a result is really powerful.

00:18:53 Speaker_03
So it's a miniseries, eight episodes. Crimes are typically solved across two episodes, which is also interesting. And then there's a bigger story in the back.

00:19:01 Speaker_01
That is fantastic.

00:19:02 Speaker_03
It's really super interesting to watch.

00:19:04 Speaker_01
And it stars one of my favorite actors, which is Alfred Molina. He's amazing.

00:19:08 Speaker_03
Oh, yes. He's really amazing.

00:19:09 Speaker_01
And I'm just looking at it here. By the way, I feel compelled because I feel like I'm losing my status as the cop show guy. I'm just going to mention Annika with Nicola Walker, which is also fantastic. Okay.

00:19:21 Speaker_01
Anyway, I just feel like I have to do that because I feel now some competition with you on the cop show. No, you've come through with two very strong ones, Felix.

00:19:29 Speaker_03
I'll retreat to my territory of making music suggestions next week.

00:19:34 Speaker_01
No, well, I was actually going to recommend a Turkish polka, but maybe next time.

00:19:45 Speaker_03
My recommendation is a documentary called American Symphony and it's about a project or an idea of a musician, John Batiste. I think he's probably best known for having been the band leader on The Late Show for a very long period of time.

00:20:04 Speaker_01
Yeah, Stephen Colbert's show. Exactly.

00:20:06 Speaker_03
He's fantastic. And then he has a super, super successful album that won many, many Grammys. And the American Symphony Project that the documentary starts out with is the idea, if someone were to invent the symphony today, What would it look like?

00:20:24 Speaker_03
And everything from who are the musicians? What are the instruments? What kind of music do they play? And so the documentary is about how he's working on this project and you get to see snippets of that symphony.

00:20:37 Speaker_03
But then the documentary is also about the relationship with his wife and what that relationship is like. I loved it because it was such a

00:20:49 Speaker_03
powerful reminder how life can be incredibly sweet and joyous and uplifting and just impossibly hard at one at the same time.

00:21:00 Speaker_03
And so we get to see their experience and we get to see how they live through these very happy and these very sad times at one at the same time. So American Symphony, it's a documentary that streams on Netflix.

00:21:15 Speaker_01
That sounds fantastic. I have to say, I'm just taking a look now. The song he composed for Colbert is just a great theme song, by the way.

00:21:22 Speaker_03
Yeah.

00:21:23 Speaker_01
It does strike me, Felix, that if the question is, if someone were to invent the symphony today, aren't you the right person to answer this question as a late bloomer?

00:21:32 Speaker_03
I wish.

00:21:33 Speaker_01
Yeah, very late bloomer. So ask me in 10 years. And you'll figure out the answer to that. That was a great suggestion. Yeah. What do you have for us here?

00:21:42 Speaker_01
Well, first, I just need to channel Peter Linane, our sound engineer, because I had the opportunity to spend some time with him on a separate project earlier this week.

00:21:50 Speaker_01
And he reminded me of a long time ago recommendation, I think from young me, but the new season is out of Slow Horses on Apple TV.

00:21:58 Speaker_03
Oh, I missed that.

00:22:00 Speaker_01
And thanks to Peter, I caught up. And let me tell you, I've only seen the first three episodes, but it's great. Season two, I thought was a bit of a miss. Season one was amazing, but season three is great. Certainly the first three episodes are.

00:22:11 Speaker_03
And can we stream the entire season? It's coming out every Wednesday, I think. Salami tactics. You know, I really dislike that. I think it's terrible. Don't give me this going back 20 years, every Tuesday, every Wednesday you serve a little bit.

00:22:29 Speaker_03
That is ridiculous to me. If I thought creatively about ways to cheapen and worsen the customer experience, that will be the top of my list.

00:22:40 Speaker_01
I don't know. I'm a little bit okay with it because binging is not super healthy for me. I can't control myself. Okay. And so you end up binging and it's like five episodes in a night. There is a little bit more enjoyment from the delay.

00:22:54 Speaker_01
So I'm going to take the other side of that.

00:22:56 Speaker_03
Let me counter, I was in a workshop once with one of the writers who wrote for The Office. And this was right at the time when binging became possible and when we all started doing it. And I asked him, what's the effect on how you write?

00:23:10 Speaker_03
And he says, oh, it's entirely different. If you see something once a week, the number of characters that you can introduce, the complexity of the stories, it's very limited because people don't remember what they had for lunch yesterday.

00:23:27 Speaker_03
How will they remember the fifth character in a particular show? And I feel we go back to an earlier time and we're here with a little more self-control maybe.

00:23:40 Speaker_01
That's the story of my life, Felix. Speaking of self-control, my real recommendation is The Upstairs Delicatessen, which is a new book by Dwight Garner, who's an author who I've recommended before.

00:23:52 Speaker_01
Garner's quotations is this lovely book of quotations that he put out. It's called A Common Book. But in Upstairs Delicatessen, he speaks about a life without self-control. And in particular, with respect to reading and eating.

00:24:07 Speaker_01
So he's a voracious reader, and he's a voracious eater, and he's got appetites. And those appetites are really just about those two things. It's a kind of memoir, but it's organized in this weird way.

00:24:22 Speaker_01
There's a section of the book called breakfast, and then lunch, and then dinner, and then sleeping, and then just kind of like these weird pieces, but he's knitting together his culinary appetites with his intellectual appetites.

00:24:33 Speaker_01
So he's talking about preparing a meal and eating a meal, but then he's talking about how Iris Murdoch describes eating and food and all this kind of stuff. And you'd think, how could this work? But he's such a likable companion.

00:24:45 Speaker_01
He's just the kind of guy, when you're reading him, you want to spend more time with the guy. And so not a lot of self-control there, but I'm a huge fan of Dwight Garner and The Upstairs Delicatessen. Wonderful.

00:25:03 Speaker_01
So I don't know how useful this will be in the short run, but maybe it'll be useful long run. So I do all my Christmas shopping late. And so I have just done some Christmas shopping.

00:25:12 Speaker_01
And I had two retail experiences that I think were just really wonderful and I encourage people to do. So the first is, you know, when you walk into a store and you're just shocked by how much stuff you really love. Okay.

00:25:26 Speaker_01
That's an infrequent feeling for me. Let me put it that way. And I had two recent experiences. The first is the MoMA design store is such a spectacular retail establishment.

00:25:37 Speaker_01
And maybe that's partly my aesthetic, but you go into that store, you find stuff at different price points. That's wonderful. And it's just so bankable. And then the second and related one I had is if you love bookstores,

00:25:51 Speaker_01
We've talked in the past about Barnes & Noble and its revitalization, but I gotta tell you, I went to the new flagship McNally Jackson store in Midtown Manhattan, and man, is that a beautiful bookstore. Oh, really? Yeah, I haven't been.

00:26:04 Speaker_01
The kinds of bookstores that exist, frankly, in the UK, in Japan, in India, there are some beautiful bookstores in those countries, at least that I know. I haven't walked into a US bookstore and felt that sense of wonder and awe

00:26:18 Speaker_01
The way there are books everywhere, but they're organized really well. The way that the employees are enthusiastic and people who you want to talk to. And it's operating at scale. It's not like some nichey little location. This is like a big footprint.

00:26:34 Speaker_01
It was just so wonderful to see someone do retail of books and to do this kind of design retail so well. So my recommendations are McNally Jackson and MoMA Design Stores for shopping.

00:26:46 Speaker_01
I know that's not that useful because you've probably already done with all your shopping, but maybe after Christmas sales, you should go and figure those two out. Wonderful. And what do you have, Felix?

00:26:55 Speaker_03
I wanted to recommend a YouTube video by Andrej Karpathy. He's at OpenAI. And he has this roughly one hour long lecture on large language models. I think it's called Intro to Large Language Models. And it's the best thing I've seen so far.

00:27:16 Speaker_03
In part, it's good not only because you can tell, oh, here is someone who has actually looked under the hood of large language models and understands how they're constructed and where they come from, but also it's just technical enough

00:27:31 Speaker_03
that you can get an intuitive sense of what's involved, what the issues are with some of these models, how they actually work. Like when we say, oh, people are working on large language models. What does this really mean?

00:27:46 Speaker_03
And interestingly, he uses one of Meta's models. And the reason is that Meta, unlike almost everyone else, has put theirs in the public domain.

00:27:58 Speaker_03
So we actually know the code, we know how it works, and we can talk a little bit about some of the things that are easy to understand, and then some of the puzzles also.

00:28:08 Speaker_03
So why is it that you type into a large language model the same query twice, and the answer is not the same? How can that be?

00:28:18 Speaker_03
And so if you're interested in a little more than just knowing roughly it spits out predictions about what world is likely going to follow another world, his lecture is really quite nice.

00:28:30 Speaker_01
It's such a great recommendation because we need explicators at this time. We need people who can explain things deeply and profoundly. My version of that is the substack by Timothy Lee, who also does, I think, a great job explaining AI.

00:28:44 Speaker_01
But it's the same principle. I look forward to this video. That sounds like a great pick.

00:28:53 Speaker_03
One of the trends I paid a little bit of attention to is the quality of data visualization. And it's been around as a topic for quite some time now. But I have to say, wherever you look, mainstream media, I follow a subreddit called Data is Beautiful.

00:29:15 Speaker_03
People have just become so good at telling sometimes complex stories with the help of beautiful and simple data visualization. I wanted to recommend one particular graph that I really loved. It appeared in The Economist.

00:29:32 Speaker_03
And it asks the question, how rich are countries really? If we had a ranking of the richest country, what would it look like? And what the graph does is it takes three steps. It starts just with GDP per capita.

00:29:46 Speaker_03
And then it asks, well, but actually prices of products and services are not the same. What if we adjust for Switzerland being super super expensive and other economies less so?

00:29:58 Speaker_03
And then the last step is an adjustment for how many hours do people actually work to produce that kind of income. And it's one of these things where just…

00:30:09 Speaker_03
seeing these very simple and obvious ideas, how big a difference they make, is just absolutely fabulous. So the US, for instance, starts out ranked seventh on the list of GDP per capita. It slips by a rank once you take prices into account.

00:30:28 Speaker_03
And then it ends up being 11th once you take into account that Americans work long hours. One of the most dramatic changes is if you look at Belgium, no one thinks of Belgium as a superstar economy, so they start out 18th.

00:30:46 Speaker_03
on GDP per capita, they're 15th once you take prices into account. And then once you take into account how much they work, they end up being the sixth richest economy.

00:30:59 Speaker_03
So it's all captured in this really simple, elegant graph that connects the different steps. People who do data visualization, if you have a chance to look at it on Visual Capitalist, on Reddit, on any of these forums, I think it's such a joy.

00:31:18 Speaker_03
You learn so much and it's often just incredibly beautiful to look at at the same time.

00:31:24 Speaker_01
That is a great recommendation. I agree. Data visualization is such a wonderful field. I remember like being obsessed with Tufti like way back when. Yes, exactly. The FT actually has gotten really good at this.

00:31:34 Speaker_01
And one of the things they've done, which I really love, is the regional differences within countries. So if you look within the US and you look at the poorest parts of those countries, they look a lot like developing countries all around the world.

00:31:49 Speaker_01
Looking under the hood is so powerful, just like what your example does, which is really fantastic. That sounds great. What do you have for us, Mihir? So I have just started this book, but I have just already fallen in love with it.

00:32:01 Speaker_01
It is a book by Carlo Rovelli, who is a physicist who writes books for the lay audience about physics. But his latest book

00:32:10 Speaker_01
is about Anaximander, which is a mouthful and somebody I had never heard of before, who is a Greek thinker and really Ravelli argues kind of the original scientific thinker.

00:32:23 Speaker_01
And so Anaximander turns out to be this incredible character who arguably is the father of the scientific method, is somebody who thought about evolution quite deeply early, who thought about laws,

00:32:38 Speaker_02
Wow.

00:32:38 Speaker_01
And I had never heard his name before. Yeah, I haven't either, yeah. And Rovelli writes so beautifully. And in a world that sometimes is lacking reason, it is wonderful to like read about somebody who thinks so seriously about the origins of science.

00:32:55 Speaker_01
So it's Carlo Rovelli, and the book is called Anoxymander and the Birth of Science. Yeah. And it's really fantastic.

00:33:02 Speaker_03
Fabulous.

00:33:03 Speaker_03
So this is it for tonight and we wanted to thank all our listeners for listening in, for thinking with us about the world and the changes in business, the changes in culture, and then of course a very, very big thank you to our audio engineer Peter Linnane, who's responsible for the wonderful sound that you get to hear on the After Hours podcast.

00:33:29 Speaker_03
This is it, After Hours from the TED Audio Collective.

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