HIGHLIGHTS: Sir David Spiegelhalter

Hi everybody, tune in to this short version of the podcast, which we do every Friday. For the long version, tune in on Wednesdays. Hi everybody, I'm Nikolai Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund, and today I'm in really good company with Sir David Spiegelhalter. He is Well, I would say he's the world best statistician and for sure the best communicator of risk that I've ever seen.

Written lots of fantastic books and is particularly known for making statistics, which is uh difficult, uh, really accessible for most people. So big thanks for joining us. No, great, great pleasure to be here. Having worked with risks, what what's the main thing that you have learned about human psychology? Well, first of all, that I'm not a psychologist.

So, you know, I am a statistician, but I I have done my best to learn from psychologists that I have worked with. And I suppose just from observing how people react to risk and uncertainty, I tend to think of the broader idea of uncertainty rather than just risk. Everything to do with not knowing about what might happen in the future or even not knowing what's going on at the moment or what's happened in the past. And all these things we are uncertain about. Some of them, you know, usually things do have an upside and a downside, and so they could be considered risks depending on how they occur.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (10 minutes, 2,105 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 5 episodes for $3.49, and monthly plans are cheaper still.