Open Transcripts

The Education of Mark Zuckerberg: Lessons Learned from the People of Newark

presented by Dale Russakoff

You might have heard that this week Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan announced that they’re going to give away 99% of their Facebook stock in hopes of making the world a much better place for their newborn daughter and her generation. Now, I just want to be right up front with you. I have no inside information about this fascinating development. But what I do have is inside information, the inside story, on a gift that this couple made five years ago in their first act as philanthropists.

The Conversation #5 — Andrew Keen

presented by Aengus Anderson, Andrew Keen, Micah Saul

We’ve got two paradoxical trends happening at the same time. The first is what I call in my book “the cult of the social,” the idea that on the network, everything has to be social and that the more you reveal about yourself the better off you are. So if your friends could know what your musical taste is, where you live, what you’re wearing, what you’re thinking, that’s a good thing, this cult of sharing. So that’s one thing that’s going on. And the other thing is an increasingly radicalized individualism of contemporary, particularly digital, life. And these things seem to sort of coexist, which is paradoxical and it’s something that I try to make sense of in my book.

Hacking Space Exploration and Science

presented by Ariel Waldman

Hacking science and space exploration isn’t just about getting excited and making things. But it’s about getting excited and making disruptively accessible things. Things that really disrupt the current state of science and a lot of the elitism around it, and truly make it accessible for everyone.

The Conversation #4 — Colin Camerer

presented by Aengus Anderson, Colin Camerer, Micah Saul

We know very little about complex financial systems and how systemic risk, as it’s called, is computed and how you would manage policies. And if you look back at the financial crisis, you can either say, as many economists do, “It all had to do with badly-designed rules,” which may be part of the story; it’s certainly part of the story. Or it may have to do with the interaction of those rules and human nature, like mortgage broker greed, optimism… And you see it not just in individuals who now have houses and foreclosure, but at the highest levels.

The Conversation #3 — Peter Warren

presented by Aengus Anderson, Micah Saul, Peter Warren

Although our ultimate goal is protecting biological diversity on the land and protecting the integrity of these natural communities, the strategic way to get there is to prevent these ranches from being sub-divided. And it turns out the issue that these ranches are having, you know, they get together and talk and say, “Wow our neighbor over here sold out and that ranch got sub-divided…” every time that happens, it puts pressure on the remaining ranchers who want to stay in ranching.

Challenging the Audience to Work in Anti-Disciplinary Spaces

presented by James Patten

I came into doing work in an antidisciplinary space more or less by accident. Back when I was applying to university, the schools would send out these books talking about the different programs they offered and what each program was like. And for some reason I never read any of those books. I just applied to engineering school because I thought, “Oh, you know I like to make things, and engineering school’s where you make things.”

The Art of Discovery, As Seen by a Physicist

presented by Subodh Patil

The scientific method was perfected in the crucible of natural science, and physics in particular. And an old professor of mine once told me that a good theoretical physicist is intrinsically a lazy person. And so these heuristics of ignoring superfluous detail, simplifying the problem to its barest essentials, maybe even making a caricature out of it, solving that simpler problem. If you can’t solve that simpler problem, solve an even simpler problem. This actually works in physics. Because the universe is intrinsically a lazy place.

Making/Meaning in the Realm of Anti-Disciplinarity

presented by Sarah Brin

What does it mean to be antidisciplinary? To me, it means struggle. Sometimes, working in interdisciplinary fields, I felt like I’ve maybe tried really hard working and working and working on a project, and I wasn’t seeing any difference. Sometimes people would look at me and be like, “What are you even doing?” So, to me antidisciplinarity means not only not working in one specific field, but rather instead drawing from elsewhere to imagine something new.

The Conversation #2 — Max More

presented by Aengus Anderson, Max More, Micah Saul

My main goal is not to die in the first place. I hope to keep living, hopefully long enough that science will have solved the aging problem and I won’t have to die. But since I don’t know how long that’s going to take, cryonics is the real backup policy for me.

Towards a Quantum Computer

presented by Jeremy O'Brien

From vast data centers to mobile phones, the power of computers continues to transform our lives. But there are some problems across artificial intelligence, in the design of new materials, pharmaceuticals, and clean energy devices that they will simply never solve. So even if we turned our entire planet into a giant supercomputer we wouldn’t be able to solve these and many other important problems. The good news is that if we could build a computing device based on fundamental quantum principles, we could.