Nonzero | The Many Worlds of John von Neumann | Robert Wright & Ananyo Bhattacharya @Nonzero | Uploaded March 2023 | Updated October 2024, 1 hour ago.
Subscribe to The Nonzero Newsletter at nonzero.substack.com

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: bloggingheads.tv/videos/65817
Twitter: twitter.com/NonzeroPods
Facebook: facebook.com/bloggingheads
Podcasts: bloggingheads.tv/subscribe