The Many Worlds of John von Neumann (Robert Wright & Ananyo Bhattacharya)

0:25 Ananyo’s book, The Man from the Future, about game theory inventor and polymath John von Neumann 6:38 Early life as a mathematical wunderkind 10:16 Von Neumann’s foundational contributions to quantum physics 24:39 Was entanglement as "spooky" to von Neumann as it was to Einstein? 33:46 Building—and reckoning with—the atomic bomb 47:22 Did von Neumann really want to nuke the USSR? 52:30 Why was early game theory so zero-sum–focused? 1:05:44 Influence on Turing, the open source movement, and modern computing 1:22:27 How brushes with totalitarianism shaped von Neumann’s views 1:28:56 Programming pioneer Klára Dán von Neumann 1:33:26 The duality of von Neumann’s social life 1:39:58 Did von Neumann grok incompleteness before Gödel? 1:42:45 Unfinished work comparing computers and the brain 1:50:23 Von Neumann’s deathbed conversion: Pascal's wager or something more?

Robert Wright (Bloggingheads.tv, The Evolution of God, Nonzero, Why Buddhism Is True) and Ananyo Bhattacharya (The Man from the Future). Recorded January 17, 2023.

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