The DemystifySci Podcast

Jeffrey Ladish is the director of Palisades research, and AI safety organization based in the San Francisco Bay. Our previous conversations about the dangers of AI left us insufficiently concerned. Ladish takes up the mantle of trying to convince us that there's something worth worrying about by detailing the various projects and experiments that Palisades has been undertaking with the goal of demonstrating that AI agents let loose on the world are capable of wreaking far more havoc than we expect. We leave the conversation more wary of the machines than ever - less because we think hyper-intelligent machines are just around the corner, and more because Ladish paints a visceral picture of the cage we're building ourself into.

Ben Landau Taylor is a writer, historian, and one of the minds behind the Bismark Brief, whose research is focused on understanding the life cycle of civilizations. Much of his work has been informed by the work of Caroll Quigley, who in the 1970s put together a seven part framework for how civilizations are born, mature, and eventually go extinct. His model was one of an economic instrument of expansion, where the tools of growth defined the success of the empire - a direct contradiction to contemporary Arnold Toynbee's perspective that it wasn't economics that drove civilization - it was some kind of spiritual commitment to a common cause. The economic model seemed more reasonable to Taylor, who then wanted to know - was it simply applicable to European history, or was this a more universal model? We talk about the ways that the rise and fall of civilizations generalizes across history, the place our own civilization is in the progression, and what the future might hold.

Today we're bouncing off our recent conversation with evolutionary biologist, Dr. Michael Lachmann from SFI, and unpacking why the modern definition of life sucks and why it matters. We attempt to construct a more scientific (i.e. less circular) definition of life and take it for a walk in the park. As a test case we examine an inadvertent hypothesis, which stems from Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker, a science fiction work that supposes stars themselves have an interior life and that when they move according to gravity they are simply doing the dance of a school of fishes or drivers on a freeway. We pull out cases where the stars satisfy a scientific definition of life and also problems with the theory. The notion forces us to reconsider the limits of life and its possible forms in the universe.

In today's episode we chart the debate surrounding Gunung Padang, an enigmatic site in Indonesia, and its implications for the possibility of ice age civilization. Our guide, Dr. Danny Hillman Natawidjaja, an Indonesian geologist specializing in earthquake geology and geotectonics at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) Research Center for Geotechnology, walks us through the difficulties of dating archaeological structures with tools like seismic imaging and LiDAR, particularly in a region shaped by natural upheavals. We unpack how environmental changes have influenced historical narratives and the survival of early sites. We also critique the institutional barriers and interpretative conflicts that shape modern archaeology, including the suspect retraction of Danny's seminal work on Gunung Padang - an interdiction not based on allegations of data manipulation, but rather on account of the conclusions drawn by its authors.

Helena Norberg-Hodge, from Local Futures, joins us to discuss a brighter future than that which is most commonly advertised. Her particular wisdom is drawn from her experiences in pre-globalized Ladakh, highlighting the corrosive effects of 'West envy' and the accelerating race toward techno-utopia. Together, we challenge inherited narratives about progress, exploring the complexities of global trade, urbanization, and modern education on our lives back home. Helena does a killer job of crushing conventional myths surrounding civilizational advancement, depression, sustainable agriculture, free trade, etc.. This mounts to a discussion of what it means to foster resilience, community connection, and a balanced relationship with the natural world, including our very bodies, in the maw of increasingly powerful global managers.

Today we're digging into the deep and often overlooked connections between neodarwinian evolution, life’s origins, and the evolution of non-living systems. We're guided by Dr. Michael Lachmann of the Santa Fe Institute, who investigates how life may have begun as a more generalized cosmic selection process, with planetary conditions shaping its emergence and survival. Through discussions of thermodynamics, functional information, and entropy, we examine whether life might be present in forms beyond Earth’s biology - and how'd know what to look for. In the end, this discussion swirls around what it means to be “alive” and how we can narrow boundaries of "life" to get closer to a true scientific definition of it.

Dr. Norman Fenton and Dr. Martin Neil are mathematicians from Queen Mary University of London who are experts in the unreasonable power of mathematics. For example - it is possible to produce an algorithm that will predict the likelihood that a piece of hardware or software will fail - and then to use that information to predict the stability of much larger systems - military vehicles, fly-by-wire software for aircraft, medical technologies. Along the way, they developed a rare intuition for statistics and probability, which allowed them to start to see places where statistical analysis was being done in such a slapdash way that it was leading people to believe things that… didn’t make a lot of sense. At first they attributed this simply to ignorance, but over the last few years underwent a dramatic transformation. They went from believing in the standard narrative, to questioning most of it. Their journey on this path is detailed in the book “Fighting Goliath,” and the full conversation is too hot for this platform - so can be heard wherever you listen to podcasts by looking for DemystifySci #295

Dr. Andreas Schlatter is a classically trained physicist (EPFL, Princeton) with a decidedly heretical approach to physics. Though deeply mathematical in his approach, he dispenses with the purely field-based approach to understanding the building blocks of nature, and asks far deeper question about what the mathematics is telling us about the hidden structures of nature. Rather than take the positivist approach, which suggests that anything that cannot be experimentally encountered is not worth considering, Schlatter follows in the tradition of Gödel and the other mid 20th century logicians, who believed that a layer of the universe beyond the visible is available to us if we can reason our way to it. By following this path, Schlatter has reached the conclusion that the only viable interpretation of quantum mechanics is the transactional one. Unlike the other transnational theorists we’ve had on the show, Schlatter has gone one step further to propose that there is a transactional interpretation of gravity just as is there is for quantum mechanics. He calls it entropic gravity, and in this episode we explore the convoluted path he took to physics, how he found the transactionalists, and how he and Ruth Kastner formulated an entropic explanation for spacetime.

Today we're back for round 2 of 3 with Jeff Snider from Eurodollar University. This round we're digging into the hidden meaning of the 2008 financial crisis, focusing on the often-overlooked Eurodollar system. Jeff Snider is an economic outsider who has subtle but unique perspectives on mainstream economics, modern monetary theory (MMT), and the role of central banking in global finance. We attempt to get to the bottom of how the collapse wasn’t just about subprime mortgages and how systemic issues within the global banking system led to widespread financial uncertainty, of which the GFC was just a mere symptom. This cues us up for round 3 where we'll discuss the future evolution of the monetary systems on our planet.

Today we are introduced to the world of Eurodollars and their critical role in shaping the global financial system. Our guide is Jeff Snider, of Eurodollar University - a street smart scholar and former investment manager. We begin by dispelling myths about the evolution of money from the gold standard to ledger-based systems, and discover how Eurodollars emerged as a dominant force in international trade and banking. We attempt to make sense of hazy ideas like global reserve currency, the impact of central banks, and orient ourselves toward the future of monetary systems. Stay tuned - this is the first of three planned conversations with Jeff. Next time, we will try to look at alternative explanations for the Global Financial Crisis and then we'll see what the future has in store in terms of monetary evolution.