The Many Worlds of John von Neumann (Robert Wright & Ananyo Bhattacharya)
Robert Wright's Nonzero
Nonzero
4.7 • 618 Ratings
🗓️ 14 March 2023
⏱️ 118 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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.
Comments on BhTV: http://bloggingheads.tv/videos/65817 Twitter: https://twitter.com/NonzeroPods Facebook: https://facebook.com/bloggingheads/ Podcasts: https://bloggingheads.tv/subscribe
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.nonzero.org/subscribe
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Your Listen. |
| 0:03.0 | Your listening. You're listening to Robert Wright's Non-Zero Podcast. |
| 0:33.6 | Hi, I don't know. Hi, Bob. How you doing? |
| 0:54.6 | Good, good. Sort of slightly nervous about this, but also... You're nervous about this? You're nervous about this? Yeah, a little bit, a little bit. I hope you don't get any serious publicity. That would be traumatizing. Well, you know, the moral animal was one of my favorite books growing up. Oh, well. Is that? |
| 0:55.8 | You're too kind. |
| 0:58.3 | You've ensured yourself favorable treatment for the rest of this conversation. |
| 1:01.7 | Excellent. |
| 1:03.7 | Yeah, well, you know, I had to learn a bit about game theory myself. |
| 1:07.8 | Yeah, well, just the kind of thing, a clever game theorists. |
| 1:10.6 | We do. |
| 1:10.9 | We'll get to that because, well, let me introduce both of us. |
| 1:14.4 | I'm Robert Wright. |
| 1:15.7 | This is a non-zero podcast. |
| 1:17.2 | I published a non-zero newsletter. |
| 1:19.0 | You are on a lot of charia, a science writer. |
| 1:23.3 | And we're going to talk about your book on John von Neumann, who invented game theory, |
| 1:28.8 | among other things, who was arguably the most important thinker of the 20th century, |
| 1:34.0 | arguably the smartest person of the 20th century. |
| 1:36.1 | Now, Time Magazine selected Albert Einstein as person of the century. |
| 1:40.5 | I'm guessing that if you had been editor of Time Magazine 23 years ago, we might have seen a different person on the cover. |
| 1:46.1 | Is that true? |
| 1:47.6 | Have you ever thought about that? |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Nonzero, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Nonzero and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.