Nathan Bick

  I first encountered Stephen Kotkin and his work in passing with his first appearance on the Lex Fridman podcast. At the time, I didn’t pay much mind, although I do think the video was presented to me in my YouTube subscriptions feed. Later on, I did listen to the conversation which I found very compelling both due to the content and the delivery style of Kotkin. That is the first thing I’ll mention, is that Kotkin has a very distinct New York sarcastic, deadpan, comedic, incisive style in his speaking. He takes meaningful pauses and uses powerful metaphors as a speaker, and at times in his writing his literary voice comes through more strongly than any other author (especially nonfiction) that I can think of.  The first podcast ( Stephen Kotkin: Stalin, Putin, and the Nature of Power | Lex Fridman Podcast #63 ) focused on Stalin, but also on Russian geopolitics now and in the past. Kotkin discussed Stalin, but also Putin and the challenges that face modern Russia, such as br...

  Lex has had a very large number of Jewish guests during the run of his podcast, and he of course is also Jewish. I think this is one of the things that has kept me interested in the podcast - it sometimes felt like all these various conversations amounted to an investigation into humanity less in general and more in particular, and that happened to overlap with my own identity and amount to an investigation into myself. The very divergent guests that nonetheless shared some key features helps to reveal more of the truth, like a prism whose facets refract light into all of its colors. This included one rabbi that Lex interviewed, which I think opened up a new subseries in the podcast series, one directly investigating religion, that continued with a representative of Catholicism in Bishop Robert Barron.  The dominant impression I had from the bishop was his fluency with Thomas Aquinas and Church philosophy/theology. When I was younger, I read (or at least tried to read) The H...

  Demis is the founder and executive of DeepMind, one of the most incredible gatherings of minds in recent history, focused on research and development in the field of artificial intelligence. It is very reminiscent of Bell Labs which created fundamental technologies such as C, Unix, transistors, solar panels, etc, or possibly DARPA which created GPS, the internet, etc. For now, the potential of DeepMind is that it joins the ranks of these incredible shops with a contribution of generalized AI tools that influence sectors across society and the economy, but it remains to be seen if DeepMind realizes this opportunity. That potential is as lofty as the realization of superintelligence that propels us into the kind of society seen in Ian M Banks’s novels, a post-scarcity world. Superintelligence is wholly alien to us, so there’s no knowing what it would really be like, but the hope is that the superintelligent agent would solve problems like stopping aging, engineer climate solutions,...

  White Teeth was the debut novel by Zadie Smith, and it is a very strong debut. In my reading, Smith’s greatest strength is her character creation. I felt that the personal plots of each character, insofar as they reveal more about them, were excellent. The family history of Clara Bowden in particular.  While I’m sure it is not the only way to categorize it, White Teeth represents one important example of a subgenre including books such as Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. These are very intelligent books, considered “serious literary” novels but imbued with a lot of humor. This humor couples with a touch of added absurdism to create head-scratching plot points that range from unique to ridiculous. In White Teeth some examples include the fact that story of Samad’s son, Millad, joining a militant Islamist group called Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation or KEVIN; the plot role played by a genetically engineered mouse called FutureMouse One of the majo...