Interviews:

George Church

Trey Gowdy 

Paul Haaga 

Michael Hüther

John Ikenberry 

Mitch Julis

Atif Mian 

Ethan Nadelmann

Mathias Risse

Sheldon Solomon

Toni Townes-Whitley

Jim VandeHei

Omar Wasow 

Dave Wasserman

Preface by Policy Punchline Founder Tiger gao

I am writing this preface after I have graduated from Princeton and handed off Policy Punchline to the next generation of podcasters. I feel incredibly proud of what we have achieved in the last three years, nervous about our leadership transition, grateful to the years of unwavering patronage from our Princetonian donors and support from our guests, and excited for the future our podcast holds. 

1. Overview of Our Progress In 2020-2022  

In the 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 school years, the third and fourth years of the podcast, respectively, we published 81 interviews and added 19 new members to our team. We have now published 165 interviews in total and had 6 new students host podcast episodes. 

We have realized our mission and passion more fully: 

• Seeking out guests who conduct frontier research and tackle urgent problems in our society

• Committing to long-form interviews and difficult conversations with a median interview time of longer than 1.5 hours; 

• Pursuing subtleties and nuances in an age where virality seems to have taken priority;  

• Working hard on guest research and asking deep questions that many legacy media institutions and student clubs may not want to ask. 

This model has worked out incredibly well. Our guests develop a wonderful connection with us during these long conversations and often say it’s the best interview they’ve received. Robert Langer (co-founder of Moderna and the most cited engineer in history) praised our question list as the most impressive he’d ever seen. Bill Dudley (former President of the New York Federal Reserve) said our first interview with him was one of the best he’d had and came back for a second time a year later. Sheldon Solomon (social psychologist and author of The Worm at the Core) said very few had engaged with his studies and questions as deeply as us, not even the famous podcaster Lex Fridman (even though through whom we found out about Prof. Solomon’s work in the first place).  

Having had more time to reflect on the pandemic, we continued our Covid-19 coverage while leveraging the two dozen interviews conducted during the last school year. The successful Covid-19 special coverage made us realize how we can center our attention around a theme, develop a holistic understanding for it, and connect dots between the major trends leveraging our generalist interview framework. 

Hence came our 2020 election coverage, which aimed at understanding American politics through a more ground-up, non-partisan approach. We hosted guests across the political spectrum, such as David Pakman, a famous progressive podcast host with more than a million YouTube followers, and Trey Gowdy, a prominent voice of the Republican Party and former Chairs of the Select Committee on Benghazi and the House Oversight Committee. 

Policy Punchline started as a podcast focusing on finance, economics, and policy. Then, we ventured into politics and media through our election coverage. In Spring 2021, we wanted to find our new frontier in the sciences and philosophy, so we kicked off an “Aspiring Intellectuals” special series that hosts conversations beyond policy and the social sciences. With renowned guests such as Robert Langer and George Church (founder of the Human Genome Project), we once again showed how far our collective intellectual mindshare could take us in exploring the unknown. 

2. Diversification of Ideas and Discarded Truths 

During my three years at Policy Punchline, we’ve interviewed more than 150 guests. Ideologically, they range from socialist economists like Branko Milanovic (who thinks Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders don’t tax enough) to conservative lawyer Robert Barnes (who defended Alex Jones and Kyle Rittenhouse and was invited by Trump to oversee the 2020 presidential elections lawsuit). Our show is interview-based, and we almost never express our own opinions, so we’ve always had to first engage with the guest’s ideas on a deep level in order to most fully represent their work.

We have genuine, open-minded dialogues with all our guests – Robert Barnes may be the best example in this case. We originally planned for a one-hour interview to discuss Alex Jones, but ended up chatting for 2.5 hours as Robert brought up how he was invited by President Trump to be a part of his legal team suing to contend the 2020 election results, and Robert became one of the key figures negotiating with Georgia’s Secretary of State. We might not agree with his interpretation of events, but it is not often that we get to learn about the political philosophy of someone in circles so dramatically distant from ours, while having the chance to discuss and debate in earnest about the nuances of a historical event. That in and of itself made it a meaningful learning experience. 

We’ve come to realize: all our guests can have valuable insights to contribute – across ideological, political, and academic backgrounds. Their points often get lost in today’s media discourse, but there is often a kernel of truth in everyone's argument, irrespective of their background, and it is important to highlight the nuances in their beliefs and hear out different perspectives generally. 

The overall American media landscape has been torn apart into fragmented tribes, and the tension is best exhibited between the mainstream outlets like CNN, The New York Times, and Fox News versus the “counter-mainstream mainstream” such as “The Intellectual Dark Web” represented by the likes of Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Eric and Bret Weinstein, Bari Weiss, Sam Harris, and others. Many media figures claim to be independent and truth-seeking, but I reckon that they likely also have their own set of narratives and mental biases. On an individual basis they have some merit, but relying on any particular network or public intellectual’s worldview in totality is probably dangerous for anyone’s intellectual sanity. So, I see it to be impossible to construct an ideologically comprehensive and domain-diverse knowledge base with just a single-digit number of sources. 

As institutions fail to provide clarity in times of crisis, independent voices often emerge as more reliable sources. The Covid-19 crisis showed us that those who more accurately predicted the pandemic’s outcomes, advocated for forward-thinking policies, and preemptively wrote up in-depth research summaries for public digest were mostly independent voices (Zeynep Tufecki, Alex Tabarrok, Scott Alexander’s blog Astral Codex Ten, the Less Wrong / Rationalist Community, Ben Hunt’s blog Epsilon Theory, etc.).

It makes perfect sense – independent voices are more incentivized and pressured to deliver better information to the public because they’re judged more directly by their personal track record. The public listens to them not because they work for The Wall Street Journal or CNN, but because of their own thoughtfulness; there is much less institutional influence propping them up or holding them down.

Eric Weinstein made the point that the mainstream machines necessarily cannot hold on to every truth, so new movements are built on discarded truths. When insights are scattered, it becomes more important to “dig for gold” rather than focusing on getting a deep understanding of the “truths” presented by a few centralized institutions.

I put “ ” around “truth” in this preface because I see it as something we should always strive for but might rarely achieve. It’s hard to say what truth really is in today’s age – it isn’t just mere facts, and there should be a higher-order consequence when used to persuade people. I’m always wary of any major media organization telling people that they alone can tell you the truths and that the other side is either distorted reality at best or intentional misinformation at worst. 

People treat "truth" as objective, when often it is simply a best attempt at understanding a complex question, and such an understanding could easily be clouded by biases and misjudgments to be false. For centuries, the “truth” or “reality” told people that certain races are inferior to others, shown through both sociological and scientific “facts.” 

We are not saying that we cannot believe in anything and nothing can be objective, but at least in our formative college years, it may be best to practice intellectual prudence and keep an open mind, which is the whole point of having diverse guests on Policy Punchline. We will always strive to ask: What is the other side’s perspective? How can we pose better questions than everyone else to get more out of a guest? How can we keep refining our understanding of the “truth?” 

3. Leadership Transition at Policy Punchline

The last interview I did before graduation was with David McCormick – then CEO of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund with over $140 billion in assets under management. In the interview, David talked about the ten-year leadership transition that he and founder Ray Dalio had just completed. 

It’s always been extremely difficult for firms to transition from founders to sustainable institutions. Some had speculated that Bridgewater was running into this problem, as many in the firm might no longer truly believe in Ray Dalio’s Principles like the first-generation Bridgewater employees or the current senior leadership do, causing the fund’s returns to suffer.

This is what David said during our interview about their leadership transition: 

“It’s hard to transition from a founder – where you have this iconic founder and the organization really reflects that person – to an institution, which doesn't reflect any person, but rather lots of people in a common culture. The key is to really move from where it’s no longer about one person, but it’s about a team of people coming together for success.”

“The thing that's important is not so much the CEO role versus the Co-CEO role or whatever. It’s the evolution over time – the incremental transition from that one single person who’s responsible for so much to a team of people that hopefully can be successful; where we no longer depend on a single person, but become an institution where there is a lot of succession and capability.” 

What David said resonated a lot for me, as Policy Punchline was currently going through our own transition process. I started Policy Punchline as a sophomore and did more than one hundred fifty interviews in the subsequent three years. At first it felt nice to be able to do tons of interviews and be at the driver seat when creating this organization, but as time went on, my involvement seemed to grow into a liability and obstacle to the podcast’s sustainability. If I’m doing all the interviews and if all decisions have to flow through me, then the podcast would collapse the moment I leave. Ideally, we should reduce the number of “essential workers” so the organization can be antifragile to any single person’s departure. 

I remember at one of the first-ever team meetings in 2019, we talked about whether to have “one” or “many” hosts on the show, and everyone said it’d be nice to stick with Tiger, since we had just published around five interviews and people felt we should get listeners comfortable with one voice first. In hindsight, it was the right decision, and an organization at its early stage likely does require an authoritative leader to make centralized decisions in order to be effective.

The podcast ended up flourishing beyond anyone’s expectations. Everyone communicated directly with me, and the centralized management mechanism was able to bring out the tremendous talent and dedication of our team members. We were able to produce results much faster than typical bureaucracies that are often muddled with the slow speed of collective decision making and internal politics.

Starting around a year ago, we started a concerted push to “institutionalize” Policy Punchline. We have had many different attempts – setting up a collective leadership, decentralizing into different working groups, “forcing” younger team members to do interviews and source guests so they have more ownership over their work, etc. – but so long as I was at the helm, the podcast still felt more centralized around me than I wished. 

Now that I have graduated, the new generation of Policy Punchline members may finally operate without burden and explore new territories that they deem to be interesting and meaningful. It is sad and emotional to leave an organization that I’ve poured my heart and soul into, but it is time for me to move on and make room for the young generation. Judging by the fact that I’m writing the preface for a third Policy Punchline book that our new team put together, our new leadership is faring quite well. I am immensely grateful to all their support over the years, and I have faith that they will take this podcast to new heights. 

I hope you will like this book and will continue to follow us. Thank you again for supporting Policy Punchline. 

Tiger Gao

Originally Written in July 2021 and Updated in June 2023