Any Austin: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Someone who knows five things rather than one or two. The polymath. How does math fit into that? I don’t know. There must be a different definition of math that I don’t know. Anyway, that was totally separate. You talk to a lot of people, right? One of the things when I was looking up, I was scrolling through all these people you talked to. A lot of times, you want to watch interviews with people that you think did something that was really interesting. I’ve always been really surprised at how often, when you see a great film or play a great video game or listen to a great album, it’s not uncommon that, if you listen to that person talk and have a conversation with them, they don’t come across as that intelligent or that compelling. I was wondering if, in you talking to a lot of different people, you’ve seen any correlation between the capability for people to create great creative artistic works or whatever, intelligent works, is there a correlation between that and just being an interesting, smart person? Or is that totally just nothing? I think, in general, the people who are successful deserve the success, that the world is more meritocratic than I might have thought when I started doing this. Also, the best interviews tend to be with people who are not so much in the public eye. (A) they’re more willing to say what they think, but it’s also about selection. Just like in the NBA, the taller players are worse at free throws than the shorter players. The taller players can play in the NBA anyway, and someone who is not incredibly well-known in the, say, Mark Zuckerberg sense doesn’t get on the show, given that there’s selection, unless they have something going for them.…

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