[Recording Start] Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, I wanted to do a little session or even a medium or long session, depending on how it goes about interacting and working and writing about you for nine years or almost a decade. It's been a long trip. When we first started collaborating, I reached out to you just …
Ask A Genius 866: Edward Witten’s Productivity
[Recording Start] Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I had another topic for today about Edwin. As you know, he’s a colleague of mine and is a professor in cosmology at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. Mir Faisal, he's a devout Muslim; really smart guy and much more liberal than even me and has very interesting takes …
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Ask A Genius 865: The Bullshit of Metaphysics, Sorta
[Recording Start] Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I wanted to talk about the bullshit of metaphysics. I think that metaphysics, in so far as we currently understand it and have historically taken it in its existence, is outmoded in many ways. In that sense, I would argue for it being bullshit. I take that as a shorthand …
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Ask A Genius 864: Big Dongs
[Recording Start] Rick Rosner: So, in the 70’s which seemed like a very white era in terms of sex symbols, you had Charlie's Angels and Farrah Fawcett and it was a very skinny era in America. People jogged and also did a lot of cocaine and so some of our biggest sex symbols were assless …
Ask A Genius 863: Updates on Rick’s Novel
[Recording Start] Rick Rosner: I'm working on this novel about a very smart individual. At some point you're going to have to read it. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Okay. Rosner: And this individual is, to some extent a version of me, and has a lot of exciting things going on in his life and has neglected …
Ask A Genius 862: Reverse Centaur
[Recording Start] Rick Rosner: There was a dot com bubble around the year 2000 when a lot of people including my writing partner and myself were doing the man show.com We were doing the content for that and everybody thought that web portals have the potential to make you a millionaire if you got enough …
Ask A Genius 861: Effective Altruism and AI, Computism
[Recording Start] Rick Rosner: I've noticed and I think we talked about it briefly a few months ago but accelerationism and there's this symbol or term e/acc, which I think is short for Effective Accelerationism which is a play on Sam Bankman-Fried’s effective altruism. Anyways, now you’ve got effective accelerationism and accelerationism is the feeling …
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Ask A Genius 860: Workspace Theory
[Recording Start] Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, there's an idea called workspace theory with regards to the operations of the mind and cognition. I sent the article or the link to you in a reference to it. What are some of your preliminary thoughts on it? Does it have any relevance to informational cosmology? Rick Rosner: …
Ask A Genius 859: Gaza and Ukraine
[Recording Start] Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You have a lot of thoughts on the current actions of the state of Israel, the Israeli Defense Forces in the Gaza strip and associated areas. What is it? Rick Rosner: Right before we started taping, you mentioned that we should touch on anti-Zionism isn't necessarily anti-Semitism because you can …
Ask A Genius 858: LA and Pricing
[Recording Start] Rick Rosner: All right. So, we were talking about transcribing because there's a whole process when we're talking and then to get it turned into a print for putting on online. I have a transcription story that infuriated my wife and myself. Carol got a driving ticket from the highway patrol for making …
Rick Rosner 