The World's Smartest Mind: Exploring the Extremes of Thought with Benjamin Labatut

25 years ago, wandering in a bookstore, I picked up Brian Greene's book Elegant Universe on a whim. It was life-changing, opening the floodgates of curiosity to understand the nature of... well, Nature.

BG really showing his range here. Saw a lot of comments that were shady but this conversation is really what we need in the age of AI! We’re gonna have to get closer to what makes us human.

“The mind is alive when it is suffering, when it is unsure” - Wow. As a mystic on one side and an engineer on the other I find this kind of conversation to be deeply insightful.

“Either you accept truth that cannot be proven or you accept contradiction.” When I heard Labatut say that I shivered. I never thought of that idea being applied to the real world. As a mathematician I have often pondered that concept as being applied to a logical system. However, I never even considered it as a philosophic fact of living in the world. I found that idea to be profoundly deep and yet extremely self-evident.

I love writers and scientists and artists and skeptics and believers. Big thinkers and feelers. We are so beautifully loco and human broken and divine

This was so insightful. Another great video Brian. I have always thought that all humans are insecure from the time we are old enough to grasp reality.. I feel in short, Benjamin portrayed my thought in so many eloquent ways. He has a fascinating way to express the human experience. Thank you so much for having him as your guest.

Good evening Brian and Benjamin Seems we can be walking talking contradictions of reasonable madness, indeed. Loved this. Thank you kindly for this beautiful although short, shared conversation. 💜

"I have known a great many intelligent people in my life. I knew Planck, von Laue and Heisenberg. Paul Dirac was my brother in law; Leo Szilard and Edward Teller have been among my closest friends; and Albert Einstein was a good friend, too. But none of them had a mind as quick and acute as Jansci [John] von Neumann. I have often remarked this in the presence of those men and no one ever disputed me. But Einstein's understanding was deeper even than von Neumann's. His mind was both more penetrating and more original than von Neumann's. And that is a very remarkable statement. Einstein took an extraordinary pleasure in invention. Two of his greatest inventions are the Special and General Theories of Relativity; and for all of Jansci's brilliance, he never produced anything as original." Eugene Wigner

I love Labatut's novels. Looking forward to watching this later.

I am currently reading Labatut‘s book MANIAC and I very much enjoy it. Great book, very inspiring.