My Appearance on the Foresight Institute Podcast

Where I discuss Bell Labs systems engineers, giving away $100 million like Warren Weaver, and more.

I made my first podcast appearance on the Foresight Institute’s podcast! The episode turned out to be a phenomenal one-hour summary of the most important ideas FreakTakes has covered. YouTube and Spotify embeddings are below.

In the episode, I discuss:

• FreakTakes as an applied research shop, and how I choose what to work on

• The role Bell Labs-style systems engineers can play at new science orgs

• How I might give away $100M, inspired by Warren Weaver and the Rockefeller Foundation

• BBNs at early ARPA, the upside of building more BBNs today, and why I joined RenPhil to work on this challenge

• The effect of events like Watergate and Vietnam on scientific bureaucracies

• What Gerald Holton and certain scientists’ oral histories have to say on the ‘burden of knowledge’ as a human systems problem

• Tons of R&D history anecdotes, including:

  • The complicated takeaways of Claude Shannon’s time at Bell Labs

  • Wilbur Wright’s taste

  • Irving Langmuir at GE Research

  • Praise for early MIT and the role of market signals in shaping their research agenda

As always, just email me (gilliam@renphil.org) to discuss any ideas discussed in the episode! I’m particularly eager to spend time with those who are curious about founding for funding BBNs.

Spotify

YouTube

Thanks for listening:)