Info

Five Good Questions Podcast

Welcome to Five Good Questions. I’m your host, Jake Taylor. Fact: the average American watches 5 hours of television per day. What would the world be like if we dedicated one of those hours to reading books instead? I don’t know, but I’d like to find out. So to inspire others to read more, I ask five good questions of interesting authors and share the results with you every Friday. Let’s see if together, we can’t rescue some of those lost hours. In addition to author interviews, we also publish "The Hikecast." The Hikecast is a show where interesting people take me on their favorite hikes or walks and we talk about big ideas in an unconstrained format.  No planned agendas, just deep conversations, recorded out in nature. The idea is for you to put on The Hikecast and get outside to simulate taking a hike with us.  I want you to feel like you're there with us out in nature.
RSS Feed
Five Good Questions Podcast
2021
May


2020
September
August
April
March


2019
December
November
October
September
July
June
May
April
March
February
January


2018
October


2017
August
April
March
February
January


2016
December
November
April
March
February
January


2015
December
November
August


All Episodes
Archives
Now displaying: December, 2016
Dec 30, 2016

Adam Kucharski is an assistant professor in the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.  His research uses mathematical and statistical models to understand disease outbreaks.  In 2014, he was recruited to analyze the Ebola epidemic in West Africa.  Adam earned his PhD in applied maths at the University of Cambridge.

1.  What is it about gambling that seems to attract world-class mathematicians throughout history?

2.  What mathematical techniques have been best applied successfully to gambling?

3.  What was the genesis and evolution of Monte Carlo simulation?  What are its shortcoming?

4.  Why is poker such a good challenge for artificial intelligence?

5.  In free chess, computers-plus-human hybrids are still currently getting the best of computer-only opponents.  What are the implications for other domains like gambling and investing?

Dec 16, 2016

Julius Bailey is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Wittenberg University. He is a philosopher, cultural critic, social theorist, and diversity lecturer. Julius is the founder of Project Eight, a youth service organization that focuses on leadership and civic participation. He holds Masters Degrees from Howard (Philosophy) and Harvard Universities (Af Am Studies) and a Doctorate from University of Illinois (Philosophy and Education).

1. How would you define “hip-hop”? A lot of people confuse it with rap music, but it’s really so much more culturally, right?
2. How did gangsta rap impact hip-hop?
3. Warren Buffett has often espoused following your own personal inner-scorecard. How does that tie in with hip-hop and authenticity?
4. There appears to be a zero-sum-game mentality with many MCs where they build their reputation through bragging about their own success and dissing or diminishing others. I know my personal favorite artists have been the ones who are more vulnerable and less about describing money, cars, alcohol, and women. How have rapper’s philosophic outlooks evolved over time?
5. Who’s on your Hip-Hop Mount Rushmore?

Dec 9, 2016

John Burke serves as the President of Trek Bicycle Corporation.  John joined Trek Bicycle Corporation, which his father founded in 1984, and has been its CEO since 1997.  He served as chairman of President George W. Bush's President's Council on Physical Fitness & Sports.  John is an avid cyclist who has finished Ironman Wisconsin twice as well as completing the Boston and New York Marathons.

http://amzn.to/2fBYYGa

1.  You describe yourself as independent, and it’s clear you don’t care which side of the aisle an idea comes from if it makes sense to you.  How do we break the stranglehold the two parties seem to have right now?

2.  If you could make only three specific changes, what would they be?  What are the prime movers we might focus on to make the biggest differences?

3.  It seems like one party wants to “do more with more” and one leans toward “do less with less.”  With technology constantly increasing human capabilities, how come no one is saying “let’s do more with less”?  Is a low-performance government just a given?

4.  Is Social Security truly fixable?  Or will we just default slowly through printing and watering down our fixed liabilities?

5.  What can we do to fix a tax code that so clearly plays favorites and is overly complicated?

Dec 2, 2016

Benjamin Bergen is a professor of Cognitive Science at UC San Diego.  He teaches and does research on language and the brain.  Ben’s the author of two books; Louder than Words, which proposes a new theory of how people understand the meanings of words, and What The F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves.  He earned a PhD in Linguistics from UC Berkeley.

http://amzn.to/2fTisa9

1.  Is there truth to the myth that swear words come from a different part of our brains?  What’s aphasia?

2.  How do swear words operate with their own grammar?  It seems like fuck is a Swiss Army Knife of words.

3.  There appears to be a Gresham’s Law to swear words where once a word takes on a taboo meaning, it drives out all of it’s non-profane meanings.  How do swear words evolve?

4.  What’s the story behind Samoan children’s first word?

5.  Is the internet leading to a homogenization of swearing?  It seems like new swear words could bubble up more readily through the use of hashtags, but are we also losing some local color in the process?

1