I was an early-ish listener of Jackson Dahl's Dialectic podcast, I listened to it after his second ever guest Michael Dempsey posted about it on Twitter. After a general podcast hiatus, I caught up with some more recent episodes, including the show's 50th installment, with Tyler Cowen and Nabeel Qureshi.
Afterwards I clicked through to the show notes, and discovered transcripts and notes were available for all fifty episodes. This felt like a pretty decent dataset, and I had some spare Fable credits.
tl;dr: check out dialectic.azfuller.com for a data-driven exploration of the Dialectic podcast - analysing 968,626 words across 50 episodes.
- Guests say 71% of the words (Chris Sacca was the most verbose at 89%)
- AI was mentioned 595 times across 48 episodes, New York comes up in 40 episodes and Steve Jobs features in 26
- Most episodes are warm (with Jared Weinstein the warmest), only Eugene Wei's skewed slightly darker (based on a Fable text assessment)
- When we cease to understand the world by Benjamín Labatut is the most commonly referenced book (referenced in 5 different episodes)
- Mackenzie Burnett and Alex Danco were the most wide-ranging conversations (according to a rudimentary embedding analysis)
- Jackson will often quote an interviewee's words back to them (over a third of his questions for Henrik Karlsson)
- Creativity and craft is the most common topic across the series so far
- Jackson's signature phrase is "I'm curious"
This was a fun exploration! And certainly an example of Jevons paradox. There are more visualisations, as well as episode-specific pages at dialectic.azfuller.com. Topics and tone were tagged by Claude Fable reading every chapter; everything else is counting and embeddings, methodology notes on each tab.