My friend Sebastian, who went to Oxford, earned a blackbelt in karate, and at who’s casual request people fly in from all over the world to flâneur about Rome and discuss a five-volume work on the nature of uncertainty … recently interviewed Stephen Wolfram on the Fat Tony’s Podcast.

Stephen Wolfram is the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, the company behind Mathematica, Wolfram Alpha, and the Wolfram programming language. In 2002, he published A New Kind of Science on the nature of computation and has since moved on to tackling the nature of everything.

… so you know this is going to be good.

One of many things I took from this podcase is Stephan’s mentioning how being interviewed helps him expand his thinking. By explaining and arguing his ideas in different contexts, he is able to see them in new ways and make new connections.

That sounds amazing, but I’m still waiting on that invite from Lex Fridman, so iron to sharpen my iron hasn’t always been effortless to come by.

To address this, I’ve trained an AI on things you might know me for: my book, my blog articles, my coding projects, some Discord rants, … and a few things I haven’t shared online: art projects, short stories, and a book of poetry. I’ve asked this AI to challenge me on my ideas, and not just published ideas. The first few questions have been on safety, but there’s a random component. Occasionally, it will ask about creative projects or even something randomly sampled from the zeitgeist.

I will try to answer whatever it throws at me, as long as it doesn’t get offensive or offensively repetitive.