Crisp conversations with critical thinkers at the leading edge of science, technology, politics, and social systems.
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EP 265 Aravind Srinivas on Perplexity AI
48:50
48:50
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48:50
Jim talks with Aravind Srinivas, co-founder and CEO of the AI-powered search engine Perplexity. They discuss Jim's use of Perplexity, its wide range of use cases, why Google search is limited by fear of mistakes, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), citations, coming up with the idea, leveraging existing tools vs inventing everything, the core pro…
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EP 264 Bret Weinstein and Jim Argue Politics
1:09:06
1:09:06
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1:09:06
Jim talks with Bret Weinstein in the second of four episodes featuring heterodox political thinkers on the 2024 presidential election. They discuss Bret's historical voting principles & why they don't apply this time, election interference, what actually happened with Biden's failed debate, current polling & apparent desperation of the Democrats, t…
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EP 263 Evan McMullen on Self-Driving Cars
1:17:09
1:17:09
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1:17:09
Jim talks with Evan McMullen about the state of self-driving car technology, with a special focus on simulators. They discuss the purpose of simulators, levels of simulation, how the world is modeled, gradually ramping up the complexity of the testing world, Tesla's approach, hardware-in-the-loop testing, Waymo's first-mover advantage, simulating t…
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EP 262 Cliff Maloney on a Libertarian’s Case for Trump
1:21:03
1:21:03
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1:21:03
Jim talks with Cliff Maloney about the November election and his get-out-the-vote campaign, The Pennsylvania Chase. They discuss Cliff's libertarian background, why Pennsylvania is a crucial state, a Republican return to grassroots, the structure of the operation, the effectiveness of door-knocking, choosing the highest-impact doors to knock on, wh…
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EP 261 Nikos Salingaros on What Went Wrong with Architecture
1:24:08
1:24:08
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1:24:08
Jim talks with Nikos Salingaros about architectural theory, urbanism, and urban planning. They discuss inherited knowledge, the capability to distinguish between ugly & beautiful buildings, John Vervaeke's 4 kinds of knowing, vertical vs horizontal design, how architecture went so wrong, backward evolution, a Messianic futurism cult, the destructio…
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EP 260 Ben Goertzel and Trent McConaghy on a Crypto Merger for AGI/ASI
1:36:20
1:36:20
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1:36:20
Jim talks with Trent McConaghy and Ben Goertzel about the merger of Ben's SingularityNET AGIX token, Trent's Ocean Protocol, and Fetch. They discuss the relative size of the merger, motivations for pulling together the three networks, distinguishing this from a standard corporate merger, how the communities of the projects reacted, leveraging the b…
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EP 259 Toufi Saliba on a Peer-to-Peer Network for AI Agents
1:17:06
1:17:06
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1:17:06
Jim talks with Toufi Saliba about the Toda/IP protocol and HyperCycle, a decentralized network for AI-to-AI communication. They discuss the high-level view of Toda/IP & HyperCycle, enabling communication of value, what Toda adds on top of UDP, time & cost constraints, cryptographic proof in the first handshake, how Toda transfers value in very smal…
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EP 258 Stephen Webb on Where Are the Aliens?
1:52:35
1:52:35
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1:52:35
Jim talks with Stephen Webb about his book If the Universe Is Teeming With Aliens... Where Is Everybody?: Seventy-Five Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life. They discuss Jim's obsession with the Fermi paradox, the meaning of the Fermi paradox, the Drake equation, discounting claims about UFOs, a question that ever…
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EP 257 Malcolm and Simone Collins on Fertility Rates and Pronatalism
1:34:12
1:34:12
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1:34:12
Jim talks with Malcolm and Simone Collins about declining worldwide fertility rates and pronatalism. They discuss when fertility started declining, the pre-World-War-I fertility catastrophe, the countries entering fertility freefall, a population-based pyramid scheme, different cultural frameworks' resistances to fertility collapse, the urban monoc…
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EP 256 Glenn Loury on Confessions of a Black Conservative
1:55:05
1:55:05
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1:55:05
Jim talks with Glenn Loury about his recent memoir, Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative. They discuss the problem of self-regard, Glenn's mentorship under Thomas Schelling, his upbringing in the South Side of Chicago, his matriarch aunt Eloise, his best friend Woody, the one-drop rule, the social construction of race, the influence…
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EP 255 Is God Real? (with Jordan Hall)
2:10:24
2:10:24
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2:10:24
Jordan Hall tries to convince Jim that the reality of the Christian God is logically necessary. They discuss points of agreement & resonance between their views, relational ontology vs substance ontology, belief as mental operation vs existential commitment, a hierarchical stack of concepts, the complexity lens, the conceptual level on which relati…
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EP 254 John Robb on What Went Wrong with America
46:19
46:19
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46:19
Jim talks with John Robb about the ideas in his recent Substack essay, "What Went Wrong With America?" They discuss why there's a need to address what went wrong, tribal conspiracy theories following the Trump assassination, a breakdown in collective sense-making, cohesion, coherence, legitimacy, OODA loops, the importance of orientation, reorienti…
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EP 253 Alexander Bard Part 3: Process and Event
1:50:58
1:50:58
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1:50:58
Jim talks with Alexander Bard in the last of three conversations about his and Jan Söderqvist’s recent book Process and Event. They discuss the barred absolute as that which is hidden to us in the world, the barred subject, the mamilla in Lacan, barred absolutes vs the Barred Absolute, dissolving nihilism, accepting death as absolute, trans-determi…
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EP 252 Alexander Bard Part 2: Process and Event
1:51:39
1:51:39
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1:51:39
Jim talks with Alexander Bard in the second of three conversations about his and Jan Söderqvist's recent book Process and Event. They discuss eventological monotheism vs nomadological iconology, dualism vs monism, substance dualism, Spinoza's monism, graded relationality, emergence vector theory, Syntheism & its concepts, God as the ultimate dream,…
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EP 251 Pamela Denise Long on Kamala Harris and Blackness in America
37:41
37:41
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37:41
Jim talks with Pamela Denise Long about the nomination of Kamala Harris and what it might mean for American Freedmen. They discuss the meaning & value of the term "Freedmen," what it means to be Black & why it matters, misallocated affirmative action, Barack Obama's ethnicity, the history of Bantu & Nilotic Africans, Kamala Harris as a metaphor, pa…
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EP 250 Alexander Bard Part 1: Process and Event
1:56:30
1:56:30
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1:56:30
Jim talks with Alexander Bard for the first in a series of conversations about his and Jan Söderqvist's recent book Process and Event. They discuss Jim's process for reading the book, metaphysics, narratology, the sociont, dividuals vs individuals, a biochemical definition of individuality, eventology, Alexander's conversion to Zoroastrianism, noma…
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EP 249 Seth Lloyd on Measuring Complexity
1:04:45
1:04:45
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1:04:45
Jim talks with Seth Lloyd about the many ways of measuring complexity. They discuss the difficulty of measuring complexity, the metabolism of bacteria, Kolmogorov complexity, Shannon entropy, Charles Bennett's logical depth, cellular automata, effective complexity & its discovery, the effective complexity of a bacterium, coarse graining, fractal di…
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