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Lee Smolin is a theoretical physicist who has been since 2001 a founding and senior faculty member at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. His main contributions have been so far to the quantum theory of gravity, to which he has been a co-inventor and major contributor to two major directions, loop quantum gravity and deformed special relativity.

Lee also contributes to cosmology, through his proposal of cosmological natural selection — a falsifiable mechanism to explain the choice of the laws of physics. He has also contributed to quantum field theory, the foundations of quantum mechanics, theoretical biology, and the philosophy of science and economics. He is the author of more than 150 scientific papers and numerous essays and writings on science.

Lee also has written four books which explore philosophical issues raised by contemporary physics and cosmology. These are: Life of the Cosmos (1997), Three Roads to Quantum Gravity (2001), The Trouble with Physics (2006), and Time Reborn (2013). Most recently, he coauthored The Singular Universe and The Reality of Time with Roberto Mangabeira Unger.

1. Introduction to Lee Smolin and The Perimeter Institute 4 minutes
   
2. Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution 20 minutes
   
3. The Pilot Wave Theory 8 minutes
   
4. Quantum Physics after Bohm 10 minutes
   
5. The Multiverse and the Many-Worlds of Murray Gell-Mann 12 minutes
   
6. Quantum Foundations 6 minutes
   
7. The Life of the Cosmos and the Fermi Paradox 10 minutes
   
8. Entanglements, Noise and The Completion 10 minutes
   

Transcript of The Jim Rutt Show featuring Lee Smolin

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Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist, journalist, blogger, and co-editor of Boing Boing. He is the author of Radicalized and Walkaway, science fiction for adults; a young adult graphic novel called In Real Life; the nonfiction business book Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free, and more.

Cory works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and is a MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate, a Visiting Professor of Computer Science at Open University, a Visiting Professor of Practice at the University of South Carolina’s School of Library and Information Science, and the co-founder of the U.K. Open Rights Group. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in Los Angeles.

1. Introduction to Cory Doctorow and “Radicalized”  8 minutes
2. “Unauthorized Bread,” Techo-Utopians vs. Techno-Cassandras  20 minutes
3. Adversarial Interoperability + Walled Gardens  15 minutes
4. “Model Minority,” Racial Violence + Responsibility  7 minutes
5. “Radicalized,” Healthcare, Guns, InCel + AntiVax  17 minutes
6. “Masque of the Red Death,” Survivalism + Resilience  23 minutes

Transcript of The Jim Rutt Show featuring Cory Doctorow

Image: JonathanWorth.com/Creative Commons Attribution 3.0

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Robin Hanson is an Associate Professor of Economics, and received his Ph.D in 1997 in social sciences from Caltech. He joined George Mason’s economics faculty in 1999 after completing a two-year post-doc at U.C Berkely. His major fields of interest include health policy, regulation, and formal political theory.

Index to The Jim Rutt Show featuring Robin Hanson

1. Introduction and “The Age of Em” (00:00:00 – 00:36:00) = 36 minutes
2. Rates of Change (00:36:00 – 00:39:00) = 3 minutes
3. The Fermi Paradox (00:39:00 – 00:59:00) = 20 minutes
4. “The Elephant in the Brain” (00:59:00 – 01:14:00) = 15 minutes
5. Political Decision Making Section (01:14:00 – 01:26:00) = 12 minutes
6. Should We Publish Tax Returns? (01:26:00 – 01:37:00) = 11 minutes

Transcript of The Jim Rutt Show featuring Robin Hanson

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Simon DeDeo is an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences, and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He is also affiliated with the Cognitive Science program at Indiana University, where he runs the Laboratory for Social Minds. For three years, from 2010 to 2013, he was an Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute.

He and his collaborators study how people use words and signals, and the ideas they represent, to create a world. They have studied a diverse set of systems that includes the French Revolution, the courtrooms of Victorian London, the research strategies of Charles Darwin, the insurgency of modern-day Afghanistan, the emergent bureaucracy of Wikipedia, the creation of power hierarchies among the social animals, and the collusions and conspiracies of petrol stations in the American Midwest. They combine data from the contemporary world, archives from the deep past, statistical tools from cosmology, and models of human cognition from Bayesian reasoning and information theory to understand how cultures grow, flourish, innovate, and evolve.

Index to The Jim Rutt Show featuring Simon DeDeo

1. Introduction to Simon DeDeo (00:00:00 to 00:11:00) = 11 minutes
2. Noise vs. Signal: The Fermi Paradox (00:11:00 to 00:23:00) = 12 minutes
3. Social Media and Blocklists (00:23:00 to 00:48:00) = 25 minutes
4. Remembrances of Murray Gell-Mann (00:48:00 to 00:56:00) = 18 minutes
5. Cultural Evolution (00:56:00 to 01:13:00) = 17 minutes
6. Consciousness (01:13:00 to 01:30:00) = 17 minutes
7. Science Fiction (01:30:00 to 01:38:00) = 8 minutes

Transcript of The Jim Rutt Show featuring Simon DeDeo