Reading the Forbes article it would appear that some soul decided to interfere with what should be a sterile phase of the flight in that the monitoring pilot had a series of tasks which could and should have been carried out when the aircraft was stationary. Especially relevant as the copilot was new on type.
It isn’t the first time that I’ve seen ill thought procedure changes which left no one monitoring.
Since the tasks involved checking take off performance then Pm wouldn’t have been looking outside.
Perhaps it’s also about time that the 30 mins CVR rule is changed - after all it was introduced 50 years ago.
(I was on BALPA tech committee in the early 70s tasked with airfield lighting amongst other things - operated a heavy in 1978 into JFK and know how difficult RT and taxying can be without unnecessary distractions).