Monthly Archives: June 2025

EP 306 Anders Indset on The Singularity Paradox

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Jim talks with Anders Indset about his book The Singularity Paradox: Bridging the Gap Between Humanity and AI, co-authored with Florian Neutkart. They discuss the “final narcissistic injury of humankind,” Freud’s three historical narcissistic injuries, machine consciousness vs human consciousness, the “undead” state, human cognitive limitations, game theory dynamics & multipolar traps, Artificial Human Intelligence vs AGI/ASI approaches, consciousness preservation, chess AI & human cognition, coevolutionary dynamics between AHI & AGI/ASI, “playing to win” vs “playing to become,” organizational design for anticipatory leadership, trust & friction as progress drivers, the three pillars of forging & investment & efficiency, reactive vs reflective societies, technical hygiene, “zombie apocalypse” scenarios, the role of agency, questions of identity & authenticity in an AI world, and much more.

Anders Indset is a business philosopher and author of four Spiegel bestsellers, with works translated into over ten languages. He has been recognized by Thinkers50 as one of the most influential thinkers in technology, economy, and leadership. In addition to writing books including The Quantum Economy, Ex Machina, and his newest title, The Singularity Paradox, the Norwegian-born polymath is also Chairman of the Njordis Group, a driving force behind initiatives like the Quantum Economy, and a deep-tech investor. He is a sought-after speaker at conferences such as the World Economic Forum, the Global HR Summit, and the Mobile World Congress.

EP 305 J. Doyne Farmer on Complexity Economics

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Jim talks with J. Doyne Farmer about his book Making Sense of Chaos: A Better Economics for a Better World. They discuss deterministic chaos & strange attractors, how chaos makes time possible, bounded rationality, economic equilibrium & Nash equilibrium, traditional economics’ failures, standard economic theory basics, “as if” vs “as is” approaches, heterogeneity in economic systems, agent-based modeling & its critiques, the “metabolism of civilization” analogy, financial markets as an ecology of strategies, the Prediction Company experience, climate economics, weather forecasting as an analogy for economic forecasting, energy investment modeling, technology cost curves & climate change solutions, the vision of a “conscious civilization,” and much more.

J. Doyne Farmer is Director of the Complexity Economics programme at the Institute for New Economic Thinking and Baillie Gifford Professor of Complex Systems Science at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford. He is also External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute and CEO and Chief Scientist at Macrocosm. His current research is in economics, including agent-based modeling, financial instability and technological progress. He was a founder of Prediction Company, a quantitative automated trading firm that was sold to UBS in 2006. His past research includes complex systems, dynamical systems theory, time series analysis and theoretical biology. His book, Making Sense of Chaos: A Better Economics for a Better World, was published in 2024.

EP 304 Samuel Arbesman on The Magic of Code

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Jim talks with Samuel Arbesman about the ideas in his book The Magic of Code: How Digital Language Created and Connects Our World—and Shapes Our Future. They discuss Sam’s motivation for writing the book, the wondering vs. utilitarian stances toward computing, early personal computing experiences, scale in programming, AI as a “hinge of history” moment, the democratization of code through AI tools, the dual nature of code as text & action, analogies between code & magic/mysticism, HyperCard as an early programming tool, the evolution of web development & protocols, layers of abstraction in computing, code golf, imperative vs. functional languages, recursion in programming, tools for thought & note-taking software, numeric modeling & world simulation, agent-based modeling & artificial life, the simulation hypothesis, research into “glitches in the matrix,” and much more.

Samuel Arbesman is Scientist in Residence at Lux Capital. In addition, he is an xLab senior fellow at Case Western Reserve University’s Weatherhead School of Management and a research fellow at the Long Now Foundation. He is the author of The Magic of Code, Overcomplicated, and The Half-Life of Facts, and his writing has appeared in such places as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and Wired, where he was previously a contributing writer. He lives in Cleveland with his family. The first computer he used was a Commodore VIC-20.

EP 303 Mark Stahlman on Pope Leo XIV and the Catholic Church’s Missionary Turn

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Jim talks with Mark Stahlman about the new Pope Leo XIV and the Catholic Church’s evolving role in a digital age. They discuss Trump as an avatar of the digital paradigm shift, the significance of Leo XIV’s name choice, Francis as a thug, Francis’s background as chemical engineer and bouncer, Synodality & Church decentralization, the exterior vs interior personas of Pope Francis, Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, the three pillars of Catholic social teaching, financial system reforms and new settlement currencies, the role of Dubai in blockchain/crypto development, multipolar traps & solidarity, generational changes & media consumption, the growth of Catholicism in France despite overall European decline, the Catholic Church’s diplomatic efforts and interfaith outreach, the future of global systems, and much more.

Mark Stahlman is a biologist, computer architect and ex-Wall Street technology strategist. He is the President of the not-for-profit Center for the Study of Digital Life (CSDL, 501(c)3,  digitallife.center) and its educational project Trivium University (Triv U, trivium.university). He is also CEO of Exogenous, Inc. (EXO, exogenousinc.com), a strategic risk analysis group and on the editorial staff of its publication, the Three Spheres Newsletter (TSN). He studied for but did not complete advanced degrees in Theology (UofChicago) and Molecular Biology (UW-Mad). He has been widely interviewed and published, including teaching online courses (available on YouTube via 52 Living Ideas).