Podcast

Jan 26 2024

The Deutsch Files II

Brett Hall and I interview David Deutsch, physicist and author of The Beginning of Infinity. Also see The Deutsch Files I. The universality of computation and explanation So let’s go through The Fabric of Reality—the four theories. More

Jan 11 2024

Brett Hall and I interview David Deutsch, physicist and author of The Beginning of Infinity. New: Discuss this episode on Airchat. We don’t really have an agenda. There is no goal to the conversation. The closest we can come up with is just to have a spontaneous free flowing talk about anything you want to talk about. More

Aug 11 2023

David Deutsch: Knowledge Creation and The Human Race, Part 2

Brett Hall and I interview David Deutsch, physicist and author of The Beginning of Infinity. Also see Part 1. Popper’s Impact One of the other things that is counterintuitive—and one of the misconceptions that I see crop up out there in academia, intellectual circles, education—is that people think that there’s a final theory. More

Feb 11 2023

David Deutsch: Knowledge Creation and The Human Race, Part 1

I interview David Deutsch, physicist and author of The Beginning of Infinity. Also see Part 2. Background My goal isn’t to do yet another podcast with David Deutsch. There are plenty of those. I would love to tease out some of the very counterintuitive learnings, put them down canonically in such a way that future generations can benefit from them, and make sure that none of this is lost. Your work has been incredibly influential for me. More

Apr 14 2022

Vitalik: Ethereum, Part 2

Haseeb and I interview Vitalik Buterin about Ethereum and blockchains. Also see Part 1. Protocol Politics The elder statesman of smart contract blockchains Vitalik, I want to ask you a little bit about how your role has evolved since it began at Ethereum. More

Apr 8 2022

Vitalik: Ethereum, Part 1

Haseeb and I interview Vitalik Buterin about Ethereum and blockchains. Also see Part 2. Transcript Welcome back to the podcast. We have with us Haseeb Qureshi, who is a partner at Dragonfly and someone I used to work with back when I was more active in crypto-land. More

Dec 22 2021

The Beginning of Infinity, Part 2

Part 2 of my interview with Brett Hall about The Beginning of Infinity. Also see Part 1. With a Good Theory of Knowledge, You Can Decide What Else Is True David Deutsch’s theory is centered around good explanations David Deutsch has this great view of the world where he believes that everything important is understandable by a single human. More

Dec 13 2021

To a Caveman Very Few Things Are Resources

There was a time when coal wasn’t a resource

There was a story on ITV in the U.K. talking about how much supposed waste Amazon produces, that Amazon was routinely destroying a whole bunch of products. I thought, “Why are these people inserting their opinion into a business that they know absolutely nothing about?” Would they prefer Amazon to have the perfect knowledge of precisely how many products need to be made? In other words, an epistemologically impossible situation to be in. More

Dec 10 2021

Knowledge Makes the Existence of Resources Infinite

We’re going to keep creating new knowledge and new resources

Knowledge is the thing that makes the existence of resources infinite. The creation of knowledge is unbounded. We’re going to keep on creating more knowledge and, thereby, learning about more and different resources. There’s this wonderful parable of europium in The Beginning of Infinity where David talks about when the first color television started to be manufactured about 60 years ago. More

Dec 8 2021

Groups Never Admit Failure

You get a schism instead

Groups never admit failure. A group would rather keep living in the mythology of “we were repressed” than ever admit failure. Individuals are the only ones who admit failure. Even individuals don’t like to admit failure, but eventually, they can be forced to. A group will never admit they were wrong. More