Santa Claus’s Christmas interview
A wonderful surprise on December 24: despite his busiest time of the year, Santa Claus agreed to be our guest on the last podcast of 2022. In the 10 minutes of his interview I asked him:
About Santa and Sustainability
I’m a huge proponent of clean energy. I have to be, look at where we live, right up at the North Pole and having magical reindeer, that helps to be able to fly everywhere with reindeer power. But, you know, that does only work on Christmas Eve. The rest of the year I take conventional transportation and I do try to make ecologically sound choices for sure.
About All the Cookies he gets from
I do love the outpouring that people give, the gifts that they leave for me, that’s a wonderful, wonderful thing. And I’ll tell you what I’ve done for the last seven weeks, getting ready for the big season, I’ve been doing intermittent fasting. I don’t know if anybody’s heard about that, but I’m eating 8 hours and then I’m taking 16 hours and I’m not eating at all.
About how Santa builds trust
Being reliable definitely helps build trust, and I’ve been reliable for a lot of years, but I do think there’s a bit more to it than that. Over the years, people have also learned that I have good judgment. I don’t always deliver people exactly what they ask for. Sometimes I read between the lines, I look a little deeper and they usually find out that, hey, this isn’t exactly what I asked for, but I even like it better than what I asked for. So I think part of it is being reliable. Part of it is having good judgment. But it’s allowed me to build a lot of trust over the years, I think.
About children who are not as lucky
I’ll tell you, that is a real concern. Fortunately, people are so amazing. All over the world, we have not-for-profit organizations or organizations that are dedicated to helping people. The biggest one in the world is United Way Worldwide. They bring in over $5 billion to help needy families and deserving families worldwide. And there are so many other St Jude Children’s Research Hospital in the United States and many others. They bring in billions of dollars. So I do what I can. But fortunately we have a lot of Santa’s helpers around the world, making the world a little bit of a better place, for sure.
Read the transcript of the interview with Santa Claus
Transcript-interview-Santa-ClausListen to what Santa Claus wishes us all for 2023
The TrustTalk podcast covers all aspects of trust. Trust is more relevant than ever. Trust is everywhere. Trust has many faces. We will dive in all aspects of trust in the lives of people: trust in technology, social networks, trust in politicians, trust in facts, communications and journalism, the judiciary, your partner, employer, or employee. Trust is not something that comes for free, most of the time it requires a lot of effort to gain and once gained, to keep it. Without Trust, nothing works.
We are exploring trust by interviewing experts from all over the world to talk about their research, experience or thoughts about trust.
Today’s guest, Robert Lepenies, the youngest university President in Europe, believes that there are major economic and political interests that fuel the denial of science. We should focus not only on the symptoms but also on the deeper underlying structures that allow denialism to thrive.
To maintain trust in science. scientists should actively address issues like science publications that become more focused on ranking and commercialization rather than the content of the research or industry-sponsored research.
He is a frequent user of social media platforms such as TikTok, Twitter (he is called “The TikTok Scientist”), and LinkedIn to disseminate scientific insights.
When talking about ChatGPT he advocates soul searching about what is the purpose of the texts we produce in science, asking ourselves, why do we produce it in the way that we produce it? Why is it valuable to write, understand, read, to critically reflect? And what is it that the machine can do and what is it that it can’t do?
As to AI-generated output, he believes that traditional methods of evaluating research are not enough to establish trust, suggesting the need for an “extended peer community” involving a broader range of people and stakeholders in the evaluation process.
