Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War

Ananyo Bhattacharya is the author of The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann https://www.amazon.com/Man-Future-Visionary-Life-Neumann/dp/1324003995/. He is a science writer who has worked at the Economist and Nature. Before journalism, he was a medical researcher at the Burnham Institute in San Diego, California. He holds a degree in physics from the University of Oxford and a PhD in protein crystallography from Imperial College London. Watch on YouTube https://youtu.be/faZI6OBOopE. Listen on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/28-ananyo-bhattacharya-john-von-neumann-jewish-genius/id1516093381?i=1000560420952, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/5uHSlUJLFvJ3arPBgnZpr6?si=LUG-mQx5RVW3n7AE3dK5DA, or any other podcast platform. Episode website here https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/ananyo-bhattacharya. Follow Ananyo on Twitter https://twitter.com/Ananyo?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor. Follow me on Twitter https://twitter.com/dwarkesh_sp for updates on future episodes. Timestamps: (0:00:30) - John Von Neumann - The Man From The Future (0:02:29) - The Forgotten Father of Game Theory (0:16:04) - The last representative of the great mathematicians (0:19:45) - Did John Von Neumann have a Miracle year? (0:26:31) - The fundamental theorem of John von Neumann’s game theory (0:29:34) - The strong supporter of "Preventive War” (0:50:51) - We can't all be superhuman This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.dwarkesh.com https://www.dwarkesh.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I tried to lay out the context of this. I mean, this was after the most destructive war that the world had ever known. Millions of people had died. And von Neumann had predicted this and the Holocaust very successfully years in advance. And he now was convinced that within a decade, there would be a third world war with nuclear weapons.

• 0:30Dwarkesh Patel?

  Okay, today I have the pleasure of speaking with Ananyo Bhattacharya, who is a science writer who has worked at The Economist and at Nature. And most recently, he's the author of The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann. And it was an extremely enjoyable read, super interesting. And so before we jump into the questions, Ananyo, I'm wondering if you can kind of give context to my audience and summarize the life of this giant.

• 0:59Speaker 00

  Well, that's not an easy task, but I'll give it a go. So he was born in Budapest in around 1903 to this wealthy Jewish family. And pretty early on, they realized that there's something quite special about him. So he can do these long, six-figure calculations in his head by six. And he's learned calculus by eight, right? And he's teaching himself the finer points of set theory by kind of 11, right? So he's going on long walks with Eugene Wigner, who was a childhood friend of his and a future Nobel Prize winner.

• 1:42Speaker 00

  And Wigner's a year older than him, and he's teaching Wigner set theory at that age. So it's kind of clear that even among geniuses, as he would be later on at Los Alamos, for example, or at Princeton and at the Institute for Advanced Study, where he'd be recruited along with Einstein, that he was kind of a cut above even all of these incredibly clever people. And so, yeah, so he grows up in this quite privileged Budapest surroundings. Their home was...

• 2:27Speaker 00

  Often visited by um the the greats of the time. Um it was an incredibly cultured city. And um his um father Max was a kind of successful banker. So they were quite wealthy. I mean, he was a self-made man. Um but um he had, as a result, von Neumann, who was one of uh three brothers, actually, is the eldest. He had the benefits of um kind of a top-flight education as well.

• 3:00Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, so you know, um right before we did the interview, I was thinking about what uh you know, I have a computer science degree and I was thinking about. Okay, what portion of my computer science degree can be traced back directly to von Neumann? I was just going through, just like an initial glance at a few of the classes that I took, where like a large part of the fraction of the content. Uh came from von Neumann, right? So you could like, okay, algorithms, linear programming, um you know, merge sort, like probably like a quarter of my curriculum. Um quantum computing, uh you know, density, density matrix, uh von Neumann entropy. Hardware, von Neumann, uh the uh you know, the von Neumann architecture for the computers. Um you know, e- even like in my organizational ethics class, you know, that that that game theory, um that comes up.

• 3:42Dwarkesh Patel?

  Uh you know, theory of computing, uh you know, finite state machines, um cellular automata. So like, I I it it's astounding to me that this person is responsible for probably like a third of everything I learned in college. Um and so it was it was um very interesting to then get to read the history of this person and the ideas that he came up with and interacted with. Um and now, uh one very interesting part about the context, um a context surrounding von Neumann's work is. You know, he was part of this group, as you talk about, called the Martians. There were Hungarian and Central European Jews who migrated to the United States in the early twentieth century and.

• 4:19Dwarkesh Patel?

  Um as Scott Alexander has a fun blog post title about this, he says, uh the um the the nuclear uh the the nuclear bomb was a high school science project. For a bunch of Hungarians, uh because the uh a a lot of the scientists worked on the nuclear bomb where part like went to the same high school. So what was the cultural or other factors that made this group of people so, I mean, it produced so many geniuses?

• 4:45Speaker 00

  Right, so they were um all Jewish, um and von Neumann attributed this kind of pressures to succeed um to growing up in kind of Central Europe. Between the two world wars, um being surrounded by sort of antisemitism, now Budapest was relatively tolerant, but it was in the air of Central Europe at the time. And he said that um he felt a pressure to um succeed or face extinction. I mean, they were constantly under this huge relentless uh kind of psychological pressure um to kind of do the impossible.

• 5:31Speaker 00

  And you know, von Neumann, in his letters from nineteen thirty, um by which time he's safely in the in the US, he's predicting disasters, he's predicts pretty accurately that there will be a second world war. And he predicts that um European Jews um will face extin- extinction um. So he he is very acu- acutely aware of this. Of course, um there are circumstances around uh Budapest at the at the time, which um was able, which meant that geniuses of um this sort were uh nurtured. So there were private schools, and they were all inevitably private schools, and they were all almost all boy schools as well.

• 6:16Speaker 00

  And um von Neumann went to one of uh three, I think, elite schools in Budapest at the time. Uh Teller, for example, and Wigner and um Zillard. Um are all part of this Martians, a part of this group called the Martians later. They all went to these um kind of elite schools. And um von Neumann was spotted quite early on by his maths teacher. Who um told his father, you know, your your boy's exceptional, let me arrange. Special tutoring for him. So von Neumann gets picked out even from this group of exceptional. People and he's given um a special course at the University of Budapest.

• 7:01Speaker 00

  And um it's uh his teachers are all just amazed at his abilities. So. The joke was um later on when all these guys met again at Los Alamos to work on. The American Bomb Project, that they had these funny Hungarian accents and they had these almost supernatural. Um intellectual abilities. Um so the joke was they must be from another planet. Now, when Wigner was. Asked about this, he said, ah, there is no Hungarian phenomenon. The only phenomenon that needs. Explaining is Johnny von Neumann. So you can you can tell from from those sorts of comments, what kind of person he was.

• 7:42Dwarkesh Patel?

  I I'm actually curious to boil down what ac- actually, what what exactly was going on that produced so many geniuses. I mean. Uh one one uh one thing you proposed was maybe it was the private schools, but uh I mean, as you just said, you know, the the he he had like. Uh he was, he had taught himself integral and differential calculus by the time he was ten and knew like four languages. So uh ma- maybe that. Aided his growth, but I'm curious, it it it seems like he was already on the path to becoming like a world star scientist.

• 8:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, he was renowned as a mathematician really early on. I mean, he he, as soon as he finished his. P H D where he resolves this incredibly difficult. Um paradox in in set theory who helps to resolve it by um sort of twenty two. And then he goes to uh Gössingen, where quantum theory is being invented by another whiz kid, actually Werner Heisenberg. Of course, he's just a year older than von Neumann. And uh von Neumann gets really interested in quantum mechanics. And he um produces this first mathematically rigorous version of it. Um in a a few years later.

• 8:52Speaker 00

  So, I mean, von Neumann clearly, I mean, he was just an exceptional, he had an exceptional brain. Now, his um grandfather was apparently, although he wasn't academically um particularly successful, he had started his own very successful business. But what was interesting was that he had these calculational abilities that were actually better than von Neumann. So von Neumann remembers asking his granddad these incredibly long sums, and his granddad would come back with um with answers pretty quickly.

• 9:33Speaker 00

  And von Neumann, despite all of his genius, he was never able to uh um, you know, kind of match these um these abilities himself. And of course, there's a lot more to higher mathematics, as we know, than um being able to do really long sums. But it's kind of interesting that uh there's some, you know, genetic um predisposition there that we can uh we can see.

• 9:57Dwarkesh Patel?

  Um one interesting possibility that I've heard is you have Jewish emancipation in Europe in like um was it the eighteenth or uh nineteenth century? And afterwards, you have this tremendous streak of Jewish achievement that's halted by the Holocaust. So, you know, you you have this brief window where this group of extraordinary people are able to achieve great things before, you know, before they're forced to emigrate or, you know, other things happen. Um and I mean, it makes what happened in Europe during that time even more tragic when you consider what what was stopped. So, you know, one question I have um is you you have this uh person who is incredibly prolific. Would he have been able to achieve as much as he did if he were born, say, uh today?

• 10:40Dwarkesh Patel?

  Given that a lot of the low-hanging fruit has been picked. Um is it just that he got into science and mathematics at a time that there was just so many different ideas combining and left to explore? Or, I mean, do you do you think that any at any other time, a person like uh von Neumann would have been able to be as prolific?

• 11:01Speaker 00

  Um. No, I think you've really hit the nail on the head there. I think there was definitely a historical moment. I mean, in terms of people with brains like von Neumann, they're pretty hard to think of, but. You know, in terms of raw mathematical ability, you you look at somebody like Terrence Tao. Uh. Today, or um, you know, you you consider um. Uh. There's, there's, there's a few other pure mathematicians who could maybe um. Match uh von Neumann's sort of brain. I mean. I- it was extraordinarily unusual, but maybe not, you know. Once in a century unusual, but um extremely unusual. But I think.

• 11:43Speaker 00

  Um. There are a few things that um kind of mark him out. One is, yeah, the historical moment. So he arrives on the scene. In um. Kind of, you know, nineteen ten nineteen twenties, and he's he's immersed in um kind of a maths. That's going through this logical crisis and it's gonna spur people like Alan Turing and Kurt Godel. To think really hard about these step by step proofs. Um. How do we, how do we prove stuff properly? Without uh getting into these awful paradoxes. And that would lead later on, that step by step thinking. Would be extremely influential when people came to think about programming.

• 12:26Speaker 00

  And you know, and algorithms and things like that. So there's um, so there's that side of things. And then, of course. Science just explodes. You know, you've got um masses of funding, of course. Quantum mechanics becomes the atom bomb, basically, within a space of twenty five years. You have huge amounts of money suddenly being thrown at um at science and and then you get big science and. You know, economics, eh, you know, thanks to von Neumann, um, in in large part, becomes suddenly more mathematical. But now, um, with that massive funding and the continued uh funding of science. I think there's been um a great degree of of specialism.

• 13:11Speaker 00

  Um, I think the time when one genius of von Neumann's stature could contribute so productively. To kind of, you know, everything from pure mathematics, right the way through quantum mechanics to various fields of physics. To, you know, nonlinear equations and uh to uh. Distill out the modern form of of the computer, the programmable computer, to automata theory. Um, you know, come up with a proof that um machines could reproduce themselves. I think, uh, sadly, that that was really a a a a brief moment of the twentieth cen- century that made it possible.

• 13:53Speaker 00

  But the second um thing that that's incredibly rare about von Neumann that I noticed. He actually embraced this idea of applying maths to real world problems. Whereas many mathematicians, many academics of all sorts actually, would uh rather eschew. Uh, you know, the the real world, they don't want very much to do with it, they, um. When it comes to mathematicians, they'd rather be left alone in their ivory towers to prove theorems. And von Neumann did a lot of that. He he left behind a, you know, a massive um amount of pure mathematics. But really, my my book focuses on.

• 14:36Speaker 00

  Um, the stuff that he left behind that came about from engaging with with the real world, and there's a huge amount of that. And um, I think that's that's also what made him really quite exceptional. The only other person that I can think of that was that is now as gifted. Uh, mathematically as he was and has shown um some interest in these sort of practical affairs is Stephen Wolfram. Um. So, um, uh, but, you know, Wolfram was born in the wrong time, I think. Um, perhaps if he'd have been born in nineteen oh three, uh, you know, he might have been a von Neumann-esque figure, but.

• 15:17Speaker 00

  Um, so there's definitely a combination there of good luck, um, a historical moment and just. You know, a particular attitude, maybe because he was brought up. Uh, in a, you know, by a banker father. Who was not afraid to get his hands dirty. I mean, this was an, he was an investment banker. Happily investing in, um, firms, in technology firms, the technology firms of the time. People, uh, you know, he invested in a jacquard loom company, um. Which use, used punch cards to program looms, you know, that, that made a, an impact on von Neumann, obviously, at, at the time.

• 15:58Speaker 00

  So I think, yeah, there's a, a, um, a combination of reasons that von Neumann was so influential.

• 16:05Dwarkesh Patel?

  W- Wolfram could have been a great scientist at another time. I guess he just ended up writing, uh, writing some mathematical software in our time. Um, uh, uh, not, not to say he hasn't tried other things. Um, so you, uh, you suggest that maybe it was his. Uh, it was a time he spent working on practical problems that helped him achieve so much. And I wonder if the opposite may not be true, that is it possible that because he got. Uh, recruited into all these different projects that the government had going on at the time, especially because of World War Two. You know, bullet, ballistics research and nuclear implosion devices, and then advising with like, uh, Cold War strategy. Um, what, was this in some sense a distraction from the, uh, you know, the basic research that he might have otherwise done? And have been more productive at?

• 16:51Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, uh, uh, you know, Bronowski thought, you know, that von Neumann had. Kind of wasted this, the, his incredible talent. But to me, the more I looked at his work, the more I realized that for him. Um, this engagement with the real world was actually vitally important and, um. You know, need not have been the work for the military, but that is where at the time in in the, unfortunately. In the early to mid twentieth century, a lot of the challenging problems were, I mean, designing the the the atom bomb. Which is where he made some key contributions. And then later on, of course, the emergence of the computer.

• 17:34Speaker 00

  Is deeply, deeply linked to the mathematics of the atom atom bomb. And um arguably, you know, it was it was his engagement with these areas. That led him to to think and be in a position to kind of spur. Computing and as I argue, he was kind of a godfather of the open source movement um. You know, his uh proof um of um. That automata could could reproduce themselves and evolve. All of this thinking um. Came about because he was, I think, deeply engaged with the real world, and that that makes him unusual.

• 18:17Speaker 00

  And he argues as much um quite openly in an essay that he did called The Mathematician. And um where he says that if mathematicians retreat too far. Kind of into their ivory cha- towers, if if the maths becomes just maths for the sake of maths with no um. Input from um kind of the real world, then um. The he he said it it became Baroque um uh and and uh not interesting. So I find it really difficult to believe that if von Neumann had.

• 18:58Speaker 00

  Sheltered himself away and somehow been left alone or didn't engage with. The sorts of problems that he did, whether it was the computer or to his military work, that he would have left behind. The kind of interesting oeuvre that that he did. Uh he he wouldn't have been von Neumann, right? I mean, you you can see it's so deeply ingrained in his personality to be um. To be out there thinking all the time and to be thinking about um, you know, key problems. That um.

• 19:31Speaker 00

  That it's difficult to imagine a von Neumann that that wasn't like that, that was tucked away. And I think that as a kind of intellectual biographer, that that makes him kind of incredibly interesting, but also incredibly challenging to tackle.

• 19:46Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, that's what makes your book so interesting, is that you are a biographer of ideas. So, you know, a lot of other biographies about scientists really frustrate me because you get to hear all these details about their life, you know, which is also interesting, but you never get to engage with their ideas, which is probably a big part of what reading about a scientist should be about. And you do that really well. So, you know, that was super fun. Did John von Neumann have a miracle year?

• 20:13Speaker 00

  You know what?

• 20:16Speaker 00

  I don't know, and maybe you've looked at his publication record more closely than I have and counted up the papers. But, you know, whilst Einstein, for example, and Kurt Gödel, when they were placed into this perfect environment that was the Institute for Advanced Study, right? They didn't have, you know, to teach anybody anything, they had massive holidays, they could do what they wanted. Well, Einstein's time there was, you know, really not very productive. He had, you know, his miracle year, right, in the kind of early 20th century, which was incredible. But then his time at the IAS was not particularly productive.

• 20:59Speaker 00

  He was trying to find his theory of everything. And Gödel, after this incredible work in Europe on, you know, his incompleteness theorems, again, he spent a lot of time at the IAS going for nice walks with Einstein and, you know, and talking, chatting to von Neumann. But of course, you know, there wasn't much coming out there in comparison. Now, when you, when you look at von Neumann's productivity at the IAS, I mean, he was inventing whole new fields of mathematics. He was bringing about the birth of the modern computer, you know, he had this project at the IAS

• 21:43Speaker 00

  to, to bring a computer to them against, you know, it has to be said, against the wishes of many of the IAS staff. But.

• 21:56Speaker 00

  You know, he was, he was, he'd written three volumes worth of operator, operator theory. And he always joked, right, that um, um. You know, a, a mathematician's productive years are over, um. Uh, you, you know, uh, uh, at thirty or at twenty eight. It was always ten years away from however old he was at the time. So, um, you know, he, he, he clearly felt that he had a lot more to do. And I think that's what made his kind of untimely death all the more tragic uh for everybody. But, you know, it, it was uh in- incredibly painful for him. Uh, you know, nobody enjoys staring death in the face.

• 22:40Speaker 00

  But from, for von Neumann, it, it was um, it was extraordinarily um painful, yeah.

• 22:47Dwarkesh Patel?

  And I think you mentioned the theory that it, it might have had to do with his spending time around nuclear tests. The, the bone cancer he got, which is, uh, you know, ironic but still tragic. Um, so, uh, we, we know him very well for his work on computers. I'm curious why his uh research on cellular automata and constructors hasn't uh taken off. And why that isn't considered, well, by that hasn't been research as I guess, uh, as fundamental as computers are. You know, they're like David Deutsch has recently published about uh constructor theory. His, his claim is that a universal constructor is like as fundamental a tool as a universal computer is. Something that can construct anything else. Why did this uh train of thought kind of languish?

• 23:29Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, that's fascinating, isn't it? Because, I mean, the, the book's called The Man From The Future, right? And I, I loved um von Neumann's uh proof of um his automata theory. You know, his proof, um, uh, that automata could, could reproduce. And, uh, you know, he combines Turing's universal uh computer with, um.

• 23:56Speaker 00

  Uh, you know, with with this idea of a of a construction unit. And so he produces the universal constructor, right? And um, I think in a sense, this is an idea that's still kind of ahead of its time. And just after I published um The Man from the Future in the U K, this group in the States, this um published um their paper on xenobots. And these are kind of stem cells and they they sort of whirl around and collect other stem cells together in little groups. And then these stem cells themselves start to whirl around and

• 24:37Speaker 00

  and collect more together. So I suddenly realised, wow, you know, this is a the embodiment of von Neumann's self reproducing automata. And it's only taken, what, uh, you know, seventy years for them to make an appearance. And these stem cells were designed by um kind of a uh a neural net, so artificial intelligence. And here we are, you know, all of von Neumann's little influences coming together in this neat neat package. I think maybe in another ten years' time, we'll be asking the same question again. Why didn't anybody realise this stuff was important? I mean, when um von Neumann's first biographer, Norman McCrae, wrote about

• 25:19Speaker 00

  automata theory, he was extremely dismissive, barely, you know, gave it a few pages as if it's like something quirky. Um, and and now we're beginning to see kind of it's the influence of this extraordinarily powerful idea, if nothing else. We know that it inspired um those early pioneers in nanotechnology to think about universal constructors at the molecular level. We know that um Rep Wrap this idea of a three D printer where you could print most of its parts, you know, I I I talked to um the inventor of that and he said he was inspired by this uh this idea, von Neumann's idea.

• 26:02Speaker 00

  And um, you know, in the fifties and sixties and seventies, you had people thinking about, well, how do we explore the universe? Well, why don't we make a probe that can make more copies of itself? You know, out in space by foraging on the planets it finds. It's this incredibly fertile idea, and I think we're still. Just at the, at the beginning of really working out where this goes and uh it's kind of dangerous and it's kind of exciting and who knows where it's gonna, gonna end.

• 26:33Dwarkesh Patel?

  I think um for me at least, his, his work here and the suggestion, the implications of it are even more scary than like the counterintuitive implications from his game theory work because um like Robin Hanson has this paper, I forget the title, but the idea is um whatever force or like civilization or whatever is expanding fastest will be the one that controls most of the universe, at least unless impeded by another one. And so if it's the case that this sort of von Neumann probes almost spread like a virus around the universe and turning everything into goop, maybe like the expected outcome of colonization is just that that's what the universe ends up looking like, where

• 27:14Dwarkesh Patel?

  the low hanging fruit, so to speak, has been burned away by, burned away by such probes. And it's an interesting like futuristic hypothesis and one I don't really hear much talked about, which I think is interesting.

• 27:29Speaker 00

  Well, you know, that's one way it could go. Let's hope it doesn't go that way. Um, you know, um, may, maybe they'll, you know, build us a, a new home after we've trashed this one. Who knows? Um, but uh, yeah, I, I think of course, you know, these sorts of science fictiony elements, maybe, maybe uh part of it is that uh no, you know, nobody wants to talk about automata theory because it's got these unsavory science fiction elements attached to it. Um, you know, people would rather stick to um the von Neumann architecture and all that, all that sort of stuff. Um, but yeah, I, I mean, um.

• 28:13Speaker 00

  It's the fecundity really of the idea more than the mathematics, isn't it? It just, you know, that somebody can take this question. That philosophers have been kicking around for sort of centuries, you know, can machines make more machines, can machines have babies, can machines reproduce? And he just says, yeah, well, let's let's look at this mathematically, shall we? And then he solves it and, you know, we have the answer. And that's what I find gripping about von Neumann's work and it's it's kind of what I found. Overall, as I was approaching this book, that I wanted to show that people, when you look at kind of popular science books or popular mathematics books.

• 28:56Speaker 00

  The majority of them are really about kind of celebrating the maths or the science in and of itself. Right, they rarely actually talk about maths as this kind of existential thing that humans have invented. That underpins our technological world. We don't really think of it like that often and. With with von Neumann, as I was writing about von Neumann, it became impossible not to, right? So, take game theory. Um, what was he trying to do there? Well, this was rooted again in this. Very early twentieth century idea amongst mathematicians that maths was extraordinarily successful. So we can apply it to kind of anything.

• 29:40Speaker 00

  And, you know, why should we leave um the human mind and human behaviour to. Psychologists when they've been so terribly unsuccessful in actually getting anywhere with understanding it. Let's uh let let's try to do the maths on this. And so, kind of that, I think it's that impetus that really. Drove a lot of mathematicians, including von Neumann, to tackle um the theory of games, which is really about. Conflict and cooperation. I think that was kind of his motivation there and um. And again, you've got, you know, the the the very. Thing that kind of so- some pure mathematicians would say, oh yeah, you know, von Neumann was wasting his time by being so involved.

• 30:26Speaker 00

  With military work or, or you know, this practical stuff. He was whizzing about looking for computational power. Well. You know, without that part of his personality. Would he have been so interested in in game theory? Would he have done? Would he have achieved what he did? Um, uh, you know, in in those terms, which is recasting economics in a, you know, in a completely different light, really.

• 30:51Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, yeah, it's almost like he foresaw the replication's uh crisis in psychology or something. Um, you know, s- speaking of his w- work on game theory, I think that part was e- e- especially. Uh, especially relevant today. Um, I I'm curious how you you know, uh, hi- his, you know, min max theorem and uh theory of like zero sum games, that makes it really hard, easy to. Model um, mo- mo- model two-player games, uh, two-player zero-sum games, uh, like the one we had against the Soviet Union. I'm curious how he would have thought about a multipolar world. Where more than two parties have nuclear weapons and are possibly roughly equal in power. Um, uh, uh, how would game theory generalize to that kind of problem?

• 31:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, so it's not at all clear, right, that von Neumann thought about. Nuclear strategy in kind of minimax terms, a zero-sum game. In in fact, there's quite a lot of evidence that he didn't. I mean, his, um. He, for example, he took very little interest in the prisoner's dilemma. That wasn't cooked up by him. It was cooked up by people at RAND who were kind of in- inspired and influenced by him. And of course, prisoner's dilemma isn't a zero-sum game. It's a, it's a non-zero-sum game. But it became this, um. Template with which many people thought about um nuclear strategy in the Cold War.

• 32:21Speaker 00

  Now, um, if you look at what von Neumann wrote. Uh, in theory of games and economic behaviour with Morgenstern. What he was concerned with, his kind of solutions were based around cooperation. So. He was like, were there stable solutions to games? Um, if a number of the players cooperated. And, you know, was this an optimal solution to the game? Um, so you could, um, you could imagine, right, say if you play, I don't know, Monopoly. And there's three of you. Um, often what you'll notice is one player will start winning and then the.

• 33:05Speaker 00

  The two other players, even without talking to each other, they'll sort of gang up on them, right? They'll form a kind of alliance. And, you know, kind of von Neumann's the early, um. Um, look at game theory was based around increasing numbers of these kind of. Um, alliances. So if you wanted to know about a ten player game, von Neumann tried to kind of think about how. You know, within this ten player group, you could get different alliances that were kind of stable and would lead to a winning solution. Wasn't entirely successful and it took, um.

• 33:44Speaker 00

  John Forbes Nash later on to kind of, um, develop this idea of non-cooperative game theory. Which was, um, hugely successful. Um, uh, but, um, that. Kind of doesn't chime well really with this idea of von Neumann. Viewing the world in these zero sum terms, right? He came from this rather central European. Background where they were used to discussing ideas and kind of bars and cafes over a drink and talking about. Um, stuff quite freely and sharing and, um, giving credit. Um, to others when, when it's due. And so, I mean.

• 34:28Speaker 00

  He, he was obviously proud of his own contributions and he was quite defensive about them, but. He was also reasonably honest. If he had culled an idea from somebody else, he would totally be, um. Be honest about that and give them credit. And so, this. Kind of thread of thinking, I think, uh was um was quite important. And it's been weirdly overlooked when it came to. Kind of this caricature of von Neumann that developed as a result of Kubrick. Using him as one inspiration for Doctor Strangelove later on.

• 35:08Speaker 00

  Um now von Neumann's actual thoughts on nuclear strategy, he penned a paper in the fifties. Before he died, um and um in that. Um he makes it clear that he doesn't. He's not really talking about this preempt, the idea of a preemptive strike on the Soviet Union anymore. It's a lot more complicated. It it's more like what evolved at Ran later, so. You know, he was deeply uncomfortable with this idea that, you know, we had two or more sides. With enough nuclear weapons to wipe out the world many times over.

• 35:48Speaker 00

  So he thought that if nuclear weapons ever were used, um you know, you would have to be insane to just go all out, so. You know, he he talked about kind of holding, holding back. And you know, you toss a, if one person tosses a nuclear weapon over and blows, blows up the city than the other person does. And it proceeds a little bit more um slowly, it doesn't escalate all at once into this massive catastrophic. Um nuclear war. But um the thing that people picked up uh most about his thinking was of course. In this brief period after the Second World War, where he famously said, if you say. Bomb them tomorrow, I say, why not today? If you say four o'clock, why not two o'clock?

• 36:34Speaker 00

  And, you know, it's not entirely clear that he meant that in all seriousness, I mean. His daughter certainly thinks he was advocating for a preemptive strike, or at least he was asking people to think. Quite rationally about whether a preemptive strike on the Soviet Union might be worthwhile, given. That he felt that it was almost inevitable Stalin, as soon as he developed nuclear weapons, would launch a. A kind of um strike on on the United States.

• 37:05Speaker 00

  Um, he was, he was sort of arguing, well, you know, if we're in this situation where we're thinking about it, why shouldn't we do it sooner? Um, rather than later, and shouldn't we do it before the Soviet Union has enough weapons that um. You know, they can fight back and shouldn't we do something to ensure that nuclear? Power doesn't get into the wrong hands and, you know, whether that's a world government or whether. The United States functions as a de facto guardian of nuclear technology, you know, it wasn't, uh, wasn't clear. Um, I think the other thing that I sort of say in my book is I try to lay out the context of this.

• 37:45Speaker 00

  I mean, this was after the most destructive war that the world had ever known, millions of people had died. And von Neumann had predicted this and the Holocaust very. You know, successfully years in advance, and he now was convinced that within a decade, there would be a third world war with nuclear weapons. Now, if you imagine that, and if you think that, and if your past predictions have come true. Then it allows you incredible scope to think in this kind of rather. Kind of ruthless manner about, well, maybe we, maybe bombing, you know, the Soviet Union and wiping out.

• 38:27Speaker 00

  You know, a hundred thousand um, people's lives at the push of a button, maybe, maybe that's not. Not as bad as it um, as it could be when you consider that millions of people are going to be dead in a decade and, you know, po- potentially. Bringing all of human civilization to an abrupt um, end. Um, well, maybe we can, we can stop that from happening. And um, it's uh, it turns out that it's a surprisingly common idea at the time in America. Um, and elsewhere, um, in Bertrand Russell, for example, the famous pacifist. Um, also argued for a preemptive strike on the Soviet Union if they didn't give up their, you know, their nuclear ambitions.

• 39:08Speaker 00

  And you, you know, you dig around in the post, kind of in the late forties, um. In this brief window after the Second World War, when the US seemed to have a virtual monopoly on, on nuclear weapons. And you find suddenly that. A lot more people supported this idea, including a, you know, a large proportion by the way of the American public than than you think is is possible.

• 39:36Dwarkesh Patel?

  Um, you you know, as you talk about in the book, there's like a very interesting but extremely scary precarious scenario where two sides think, um, two sides have a nuclear weapon or think that both sides have a nuclear weapon, but neither one has developed the ability yet to defend their nuclear silos against initial attack. So then, you know, both of them would think that the other one, if they launch a first strike, there would be no deterrent. So then both of them are incentivized to launch that first strike, which is kind of like the opposite of mad. And, you know, that's that's one worry if like, I don't know, if if if nuclear technology gets better, in some ways, that could have make nuclear war much more likely because the people could start thinking, okay, but

• 40:17Dwarkesh Patel?

  we can just take out all their all all their entire arsenal, but so they have no way to retaliate. Um, I'm curious what you you mentioned, you know, he had a good way of thinking about escalation. I'm curious how he would have thought about, you know, the one problem we have today is like that you can have cyber warfare, which is immensely destructive in an economic sense, but doesn't warrant or seem to warrant a sort of land war. And you can have a land war, like, I don't know, China takes over Taiwan, or, you know, you have what's going on in Ukraine. And but it seems like way too harsh to react with nuclear war. And I'm curious how von Neumann would have been able to think about these kinds of problems.

• 40:58Speaker 00

  You know, um, von Neumann, I mean, he was recruited by Rand, but the work that he did, and and Rand became this kind of hot house for nuclear strategic thinking, right? In in the Cold War, and it influenced American policy. But von Neumann, apart from this paper on on nuclear strategy, he seems to have taken remarkable little interest in in the whole thing. I mean, when he was at Rand, he was, um, Uh computing various solutions um to kind of duels. So, you know, he'd worked out the minimax theorem.

• 41:39Speaker 00

  And um so he was busy, well, you know, if you have a a plane and a um. I don't know, a tank or, you know, whatever, a submarine and a ship. You know, and they they can see each other coming. At what point should they fire? At what, you know, at what point should they do this? And so he got kind of involved in that and computing. And he kind of lost interest in game theory again as soon as as soon as computing came to the fore. So he helped, so whilst he was doing this, he ended up helping Rand. Kind of realize their own ambitions of of having a computer um. So it's it's uh not at all clear to me how much he'd still carry on being involved.

• 42:24Speaker 00

  In the strategy, uh you know, in in in the um nuclear strategy side. But of course, I mean, this idea of kind of if you are. Coming up with your best strategy, then you have to think what um. You know, your opponent will make of that and you have to imagine that they're also, you know, an intelligent opponent. Um who's gonna be out for themselves. And that thinking is very deeply embedded into minimax and um. And uh you know, and that that was that was clearly very influential um later on.

• 43:05Dwarkesh Patel?

  One thing I find very interesting about von Neumann's work for the government um and in aiding these kinds of stra- strategic conversations is. Um uh at least from my understanding, it seems that a lot of the scientists during that time were. Um somewhat radical and sympathetic to socialism, you know, like Richard Russell or Oppenheimer. Um and von Neumann seems to be a very practical, non-radical uh person. I mean, uh uh you can think that's a good thing or a bad thing, but it seems like he broke from the conventional. Uh I guess elite scientific culture at the time. I'm curious, what about his personality or background do you think? Made him that way or maybe even characterizing the situation in the correct way?

• 43:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, um no, I I I think that's fair. In fact, if anything, he was considered um. Kind of right wing, or at least a Cold War hawk um in certain circles. Um I think if you look at him quite closely, I mean, you could argue in many ways he was. You know, something of a a a liberal, but you know, um at the time, some, you know, a lot of people felt that he was quite. Hawkish. Um now, the reason for that is that um. There was a, uh shortly after the First World War in Hungary. There were two things that happened. One was there was a very short-lived communist uprising.

• 44:26Speaker 00

  And that government lasted for six months and it was pretty brutal, um. You know, they they reclaimed private property from wealthy fam- wealthy families and. And there was just general chaos and um beatings on the street and stuff and um. But then something happened afterwards and a a military, uh essentially, uh you know, a. A military government uh just marched in, uh led by General Hawley. And they took control and that turned out to be even worse. I mean, they they there was public hangings and. And rapes and um, you know, thousands of people ended up dead.

• 45:09Speaker 00

  And um many Jewish people um at that time were seen to have been collaborating. With the earlier communist um government, so you know, many Jews were. Basically shot on the streets as well. Now, the Von Neumans were, uh you know, uh. By dint of their wealth, um they were kind of protected from this, but von Neumann saw all of this as he was growing up. And then, of course, later with the rise of the Nazis in Germany.

• 45:44Speaker 00

  He um, you know, he had left Germany by then, but a lot of his formative years as a as a. Scientist or as a mathematician were were spent in Germany and he adored um kind of into war. Germany in the, at least in the late twenties and for him it was this perfect intellectual climate. I mean, you have to remember that Germany was, you know, scientifically and mathematically, definitely kind of the centre of the world. Then, I mean, America just was nothing at the time. Um, it was only. You know, uh, kind of during the Second World War and post the Second World War that um, from the thirties.

• 46:26Speaker 00

  Um, late thirties onwards, the America became this scientific and technological kind of powerhouse, really. And, you know, benefited from many of these European scientists who who left as a result of the Nazis. Now, he'd seen this and he, his lesson was that authoritarianism, you know. Is something that we shouldn't tolerate. And so when he came to the States, his priority was to put. His expertise into the hands of the democratic government there. And whilst he definitely. Was um advising them, he um.

• 47:08Speaker 00

  You know, I I I got the feeling that, you know, he he wa- he wasn't interested in making decisions on their behalf, cause. You know, he he, this was a democratically elected government. I think deep down he was a democrat. He felt he should work as hard as possible. To give uh the US government the tools that it needed to overcome the Nazis and to. You know, and to um, you know, main- maintain uh their lead as kind of the preeminent. Um, democracy in the world. But, um, so he was kind of um. Kind of, I think, more more allergic to authoritarianism, whereas I think.

• 47:52Speaker 00

  Um, you know, uh, before the Second World War happened, and before we knew what was happening under Stalin. There were many intellectuals who were willing to give, you know, the communism, uh, you know, deep left. Um, thinking more, more of a chance, whereas von Neumann had kind of seen what that turned into. Um, in Hungary, and he'd seen that, yeah, essentially it became a kind of authoritarian regime. Um, he was deeply suspicious of Stalin, um, from day one for the very same reason. And he'd had these experiences of, you know, Eu- Europe being turned upside down by the Nazis.

• 48:36Speaker 00

  And I think that really shaped him very profoundly. Um, he became quite cynical about human nature as well at the same time. I think, you know, eh, deep down, it was, you know, superficially, he was, um. Kind of a good man and, um, uh, he, you know, he, he was nice to people. And I think that's really where he started, eh, you know, in his day to day interactions with people, he was, he was nice. He would do these incredible things very quietly behind people's backs. That many other scientists wouldn't dream of, like, you know, this builder, Hungarian builder, contacted him in the middle of the Second World War and said. I wanna learn more about maths, but I'm in America, basically building stuff.

• 49:21Speaker 00

  Where do I find out more about maths? So he writes to his friend in wartime Hungary and gets them to send over a bunch of Hungarian maths textbooks. I mean, and, and later on, you've got people like, uh, uh, Mandelbrot, who came over. Thanks to his reference and, you know, he was at Princeton and the I A S. And years later, when Mandelbrot ran into problems with his boss. Um, he goes looking for work elsewhere and he finds that, like, whatever. A decade earlier, long after, you know, and this is long after von Neumann was dead. You know, von Neumann had sent out letters and talked to people, saying, you know, Mandelbrot is doing really important work.

• 50:07Speaker 00

  But, you know, he may struggle because what he's doing is so cutting edge. So if he does and he go comes looking for a job, please, you know, give him a job because this guy's brilliant. And, you know, he does these little things and he, he of course helps um scientists leave um kind of Europe before. The Nazis make that impossible. He gets, he helps to get Gödel out um of Germany, for example. So, you know, he's this very conflicted personality. Um, so I think, I think, you know, he's. As you would expect, quite a complex um thoughtful human being, and he's not easily characterized as, you know, Doctor Strangelove. Or, uh, you know, a um a bleeding heart liberal.

• 50:54Dwarkesh Patel?

  Uh, I I I I understand what you meant, but out of context, um, he was superficially a good man, has got to be. The the the best backhanded compliment ever. Um. Uh, so the final question, out of your so for your time, you know, you you're a researcher yourself, you know, you have a PhD in protein crystallography, you are a medical researcher. And now you've analyzed uh John von Neumann's life, you know, for probably one of the greatest, probably the greatest um uh genius of all time. What are, do you, have you like extrapolated some lessons about how to be prolific or how to come up with new insights in different fields?

• 51:32Speaker 00

  Uh, not at all, but I I I would thoroughly recommend if you're gonna write a book that you try not to. Give up your day job a year before the worst pandemic.

• 51:45Speaker 00

  Descends that we've known about for, you know, decades, descends on on and engulfs the planet. Um, thus ensuring that instead of working on your book about the the cleverest uh person of the twentieth century. Uh, who works on abstract set theory, uh, you end up having to homeschool a recalcitrant ten year old. Um, so that's, that's one, you know, if you wanna be productive, don't do that. Okay. Um, but in other terms, I think, you know.

• 52:17Speaker 00

  Uh it's it's dangerous trying to. You know, come out with a kind of self-help book based on von Neumann's lifestyle, right? I mean, his first wife left him because he was too busy thinking. And um you know, she took up with essentially. A graduate student, uh Horner Cooper, who was um you know, a physics graduate student. And you know, and she was, you know, quite um the thinker herself. She ended up becoming this mover and shaker in um science admin. And uh you know, his second wife was uh very clever herself, um Clara Dan. But you you know, I he he thought incessantly.

• 53:02Speaker 00

  Uh from morning to night and you know, even at the cocktail parties that he threw. Um he would sometimes just find noise conducive to work. And he would just rush off cocktail in hand to write down some some theorem. I mean, what what do you draw? What do what kind of lessons do you draw from that? You know, the only lesson I draw is that um is that just don't do that. You know, try and try and forge some sort of um work schedule that that kind of works for you. We can't all be superhuman and uh you know, his, you know, as we see, his relationships, his human relationships suffered. And he was, you know, deeply troubled as he as he went out at the close of his life.

• 53:46Speaker 00

  As as, you know, cancer was eroding his mental capabilities. I mean, he he kind of rediscovered Catholicism. He'd converted when he was younger, but he had this, he was overtaken by this fear of mortality. And I think, you know, when we think about a productive life, I think, you know, we probably all want to. Go out on on something of a high and not go out in abject terror. So, yeah, you know, read about this incredible human being, but don't try to draw too many life lessons from it, I think.

• 54:22Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, yeah, I know, that's that that's definitely very fair. Uh you're not John von Neumann, obviously. Uh so, um, Ananiel, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate you coming on the podcast.

• 54:32Speaker 00

  Thanks very much. It was a it was a pleasure.