Why Every Brain Metaphor in History Has Been Wrong [SPECIAL EDITION]

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1. 

   16 Feb 2026 · 56 min

   Evolution "Doesn't Need" Mutation - Blaise Agüera y Arcas

   What if life itself is just a really sophisticated computer program that wrote itself into existence? Blaise Agüera y Arcas presenting at ALife 2025 — the most technically detailed public walkthrough of the ideas in his *What is Life?* and *What is Intelligence?* books that we've come across.He covers the BFF experiments (self-replicating programs emerging spontaneously from random noise), the mathematical framework connecting Lotka-Volterra population dynamics with Smoluchowski coagulation, eigenvalue analysis of cooperation matrices, and his central claim that symbiogenesis — not mutation…

2. 

   25 Jan 2026 · 47 min

   VAEs Are Energy-Based Models? [Dr. Jeff Beck]

   What makes something truly *intelligent?* Is a rock an agent? Could a perfect simulation of your brain actually *be* you? In this fascinating conversation, Dr. Jeff Beck takes us on a journey through the philosophical and technical foundations of agency, intelligence, and the future of AI. Jeff doesn't hold back on the big questions. He argues that from a purely mathematical perspective, there's no structural difference between an agent and a rock – both execute policies that map inputs to outputs. The real distinction lies in *sophistication* – how complex are the internal computations?…

3. 

   23 Jan 2026 · 54 min

   Abstraction & Idealization: AI's Plato Problem [Mazviita Chirimuuta]

   Professor Mazviita Chirimuuta joins us for a fascinating deep dive into the philosophy of neuroscience and what it really means to understand the mind.*What can neuroscience actually tell us about how the mind works?* In this thought-provoking conversation, we explore the hidden assumptions behind computational theories of the brain, the limits of scientific abstraction, and why the question of machine consciousness might be more complicated than AI researchers assume.Mazviita, author of *The Brain Abstracted,* brings a unique perspective shaped by her background in both neuroscience…

4. 

   31 Dec 2025 · 1 hr 17 min

   Bayesian Brain, Scientific Method, and Models [Dr. Jeff Beck]

   Dr. Jeff Beck, mathematician turned computational neuroscientist, joins us for a fascinating deep dive into why the future of AI might look less like ChatGPT and more like your own brain. **SPONSOR MESSAGES START** — Prolific - Quality data. From real people. For faster breakthroughs. https://www.prolific.com/?utm_source=mlst — **END** *What if the key to building truly intelligent machines isn't bigger models, but smarter ones?* In this conversation, Jeff makes a compelling case that we've been building AI backwards. While the tech industry races to scale up transformers and language…

5. 

   30 Dec 2025 · 3 hr 17 min

   Your Brain is Running a Simulation Right Now [Max Bennett]

   Tim sits down with Max Bennett to explore how our brains evolved over 600 million years—and what that means for understanding both human intelligence and AI. Max isn't a neuroscientist by training. He's a tech entrepreneur who got curious, started reading, and ended up weaving together three fields that rarely talk to each other: comparative psychology (what different animals can actually do), evolutionary neuroscience (how brains changed over time), and AI (what actually works in practice). *Your Brain Is a Guessing Machine* You don't actually "see" the world. Your brain builds a simulation…

6. 

   27 Dec 2025 · 1 hr 37 min

   The 3 Laws of Knowledge [César Hidalgo]

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7. 

   1 Oct 2026 · 1 hr 10 min

   How a Voice Agent Learns the Rhythm of Conversation — Shawn Wen

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8. 

   30 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 14 min

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9. 

   26 Sep 2026 · 44 min

   When AI Research Starts Moving Faster Than Human Research - Zhengyao Jiang

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10. 

    23 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 53 min

    How Deep Learning Finally Cracked Messy Tables - Frank Hutter

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