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

Key Takeaways

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 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 okay today i have the pleasure of speaking with anano 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 a extremely enjoyable read super interesting and so before we jump into the questions i don't know i'm wondering if you can kind of give context to my audience and summarize the life of this giant uh well that's not an easy task but i'll give it a go so he was um born in budapest in around 1903 to this wealthy jewish family and pretty early on um they realized that um 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 um [Music] by kind of eleven right so he's going on long walks with uh eugene wigner who was a childhood friend of his and a future nobel prize winner and uh wigner's a year older than him and he's he's teaching wigner set theory at that age so it's it's kind of clear that even among geniuses as he would be later on at uh los alamos for example or um at the uh princeton and at the institute for advanced study uh where he'd be recruited along with einstein that he was kind of a cut above even all of these uh incredibly clever people and uh and so yeah so he grows up in this uh quite privileged budapest surroundings their home was um often visited by the the greats of the time 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 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 one norman 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 and density matrix uh von neumann entropy hardware von neumann uh the uh you know the von neumann architecture from the computers um you know even like my organizational ethics class you know that that game theory um that comes up uh you know theory of computing uh you know finite state machines um cellular automotive so like 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 them get to read the history of this person and the ideas that he came up with and interacted with um now one very interesting part about the context um 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 the united states in the early 20th century and um scott alexander has a fun blog post title about this he says uh the um the the nuclear the nuclear bomb was a high school science project for a bunch of uh hungarians uh because 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 right so they were um all jewish um and von neumann attributed this kind of pressure to succeed um to growing up in kind of central europe between the two world wars um being surrounded by sort of anti-semitism 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 and you know von neumann in his letters from 1930 um by which time he's safely in the in the us he's predicting disaster he's pretty he's predicts pretty accurately that there will be a second world war and he predicts that um european jews um will face extinct extinction um so he he is very 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 almost all boys schools as well and um von neumann went to one of three i think elite schools in budapest at the time teller for example and wigner and zillard are all part of these martians are 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 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 and it's uh his teachers are all just amazed at his abilities so the joke was 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 so the joke was they must be from another planet now when wigner was asked about this he said 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 i'm actually curious to boil down what act 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 that he had like uh he was he had taught himself integral and differential calculus by the time he was 10 and knew like four languages so maybe that aided his growth but i'm curious it seems like he was already on the path to becoming like a world star scientist yeah i mean he was renowned as a mathematician really early on i mean he as soon as he finished his phd where he resolves this incredibly difficult um paradox in in set theory it helps to resolve it by um sort of 22 and then he goes to uh gertigan where quantum theory is being invented by another wizkid actually werner heisenberg of course who's just a year older than von neumann and 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 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 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 grandad these incredibly long sums and his grandad would come back with um with answers pretty quickly and von neumann despite all this genius he was never able to 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 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 um one interesting possibility that i've heard is you have jewish emancipation in europe and like um was it the 18th or uh 19th century and then afterwards you have this a tremendous streak of jewish achievement that's halted by the holocaust so you know 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 was stopped so you know what 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 you were born say uh today 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 think that any at any other time a person like uh von neumann would have been able to be as prolific 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 terence tao uh today or um you know you you consider um uh there's there's a few other pure mathematicians who can maybe um match uh von neumann's sort of brain i mean it was extraordinarily unusual but maybe not you know once in a century unusual but extremely unusual but i think 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 1910 1920s and he's immersed in um kind of a maths that's going through this logical crisis and it's going to spur people like alan turing and kurt godel to think really hard about these step-by-step proofs how do we how do we prove stuff properly without 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 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 25 years you have huge amounts of money suddenly being thrown at um at science and and then you get big signs and you know economics you know thanks to von neumann um in large part becomes suddenly more mathematical but now um with that massive funding and the continued funding of science i think there's been a great degree of specialism i think the time when one genius of von neumann statue 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 non-linear equations and to 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 uh a brief moment of the 20th century that made it possible 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 rather issue you know 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 tower to prove theorems and von neumann did a lot of that he left behind a you know a massive amount of pure mathematics but really my my book focuses on 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 but you know wolfram was born at the wrong time i think um perhaps if he'd have been born in 1903 you know he might have been a von neumannesque figure but 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 in a you know by a bank of father who was not afraid to get his hands dirty i mean this wasn't he was an investment banker happily investing in um firms in technology for the technology firms at the time people uh you know he invested in a jacquard loom company which uses used punch cards to program looms you know that that made a an impact on von neumann obviously at the time so i think yeah there's a a um a combination of reasons that uh von neumann was so influential wolfram could have been a great scientist and another time i guess he just ended up writing uh writing some mathematical software in our time um not to say he hasn't tried other things um so 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 recruited into all these different projects that the government had going on at the time especially because of world war ii you know bullet ballistics research nuclear implosion devices and then advising with like uh cold war strategy um 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 well i mean you know bronowski thought you know that von neumann had kind of wasted his incredible talent but to me the more i looked at his work the more i realized that for him 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 20th century a lot of the challenging problems were i mean designing the the atom bomb which is where he made some key contributions and then later on of course the emergence of the computer is deeply deeply linked to the mathematics of the atom atom and um arguably it 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 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 and he argues as much um quite openly in an essay that he did call the mathematician and um where he says the if mathematicians retreat too far kind of into their ivory 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 that he he said it became baroque um and and uh not interesting so i find it really difficult to believe that if von neumann had sheltered himself away and somehow had 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 error 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 that it's difficult to imagine a von neumann that that wasn't like that that was tucked away uh and i think that as a kind of intellectual biographer that that makes him kind of incredibly interesting but also incredibly challenging to tackle yeah that's what makes your book so interesting um is that you are a biographer idea so you know i mean a lot of other biographies about scientists really frustrate me because you get to hear all these details about their life um you know which 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 that was super fun uh did jon von neumann have a miracle year you know what um 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 um einstein for example and kurt gerdell 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 he had you know his miracle year right in the kind of early 20th century which was incredible but then his time at uh term the ias was not particularly productive he was trying to find his theory of everything and girdle after this incredible work in europe on you know his incompleteness theorems again he he spent a lot of time at the ias going for nice walks with einstein and you know and talking chatting to von neumann um but of course you know there wasn't much coming out there in comparison now when you when you you look at von neumann's productivity at the ias i mean he was involved inventing whole new fields of mathematics he was um bringing about the birth of the modern computer you know he had this project at the ias um to to uh bring a computer uh to them against you know it has to be said against the wishes of many of the ias staff but um 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 you know at 30 or at uh 28. it was always 10 years away from however old he was at the time so um you know 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 was uh incred incredibly painful for him you know nobody enjoys staring death in the face but from for from neumann it was um it was extraordinarily um painful yeah and i think you mentioned the theory that it might have had to do with his spending time around nuclear tests the the bone cancer he got which is you know ironic but still tragic um so we know him very well for his work on computers i'm curious why his uh research on cellular automata and the constructors hasn't uh taken off and why that isn't considered well by that hasn't been researched as i guess as fundamental as computers are you know like david deutscher's recently published about uh constructor theory his claim is that a universal constructor is like as fundamental a tool as a universal computer as something that can construct anything else why did this uh train of thought kind of languish well i mean that's fascinating isn't it because i mean the book's called the man from the future right and 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 you know he combines turing's universal uh computer with um 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 uk 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 and collect more together so i suddenly realized wow you know this is a the embodiment of von neumann's self-reproducing automata and it's only taken what you know 70 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 10 years time we'll be asking the same question again why didn't anybody realize this stuff was important i mean when um von neumann's first biographer norman mcrae wrote about well thomas theory who 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 those early pioneers in nanotechnology to think about universal constructors at the molecular level we know that reprap this idea of a 3d printer where you could print most of its parts you know i i talked to um the inventor of that and he said he was inspired by this uh this idea von neumann's idea and um you know in the 50s and 60s and 70s 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 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 counter-intuitive implications from his game theory work because um like robin hansen 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 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 well you know that's one way it could go let's hope it doesn't go that way um you know um 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 autonomous theory because it's got these unsavory science fiction elements attached to it um you know people would rather uh stick to um the von neumann architecture and all that all that sort of stuff um but yeah i i mean um 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 the 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 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 we're 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 20th century idea amongst mathematicians that maths was extraordinarily successful so we can apply it to kind of anything and you know why should we leave um the human mind and human behavior to psychologists when they've been so terribly unsuccessful and actually getting anywhere with understanding it let's uh 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 some pure mathematicians would say oh yeah you know von neumann was wasting his time by being so involved with military work 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 you know in those terms which is recasting economics in know in a completely different light really yeah yeah it's almost like he foresaw the replications uh crisis in psychology or something um you know speaking of his work on game theory i think that part was especially um relevant today um i'm curious how you you know his you know mid-max theorem and theory of like zero-sum games that makes it really har easy to model um model two-player games uh the two players here some games 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 how would a game of theory generalize to that kind of problem yeah i mean so it's not at all clear right that von neumann thought about nuclear strategy in kind of mini max terms a zero-sum game 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 who ran who were kind of inspired and influenced by him and of course prisoners dilemma isn't a zero-sum game it's uh it's a non-zero sum game but it became this um template with which many people thought about nuclear strategy in the cold war now um if you look at what von neumann wrote in theory of games and economic behavior 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 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 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 theater early look at game theory was based around increasing numbers of these kind of um alliances so if you wanted to know about a 10-player game von neumann tried to kind of think about how you know within this 10 player group you could get different alliances that were kind of stable and would lead to a winning solution it wasn't entirely successful and it took john forbes nash later on to kind of develop this idea of non-cooperative game theory which was um hugely successful but 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 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 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 dr strangelove later on um now von neumann's actual thoughts on nuclear strategy he penned a paper in the 50s before he died um and um in that 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's more like what evolved at ran later so you know he was deeply uncomfortable this idea that you know we had two or more sides with enough nuclear weapons to wipe out the world many times over so he thought that if nuclear weapons ever were used um you know you'd 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 it if one person tosses a nuclear weapon over and blows blows up the city then 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 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 kind of um strike on on the united states 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 wasn't that wasn't clear i think the other thing that i sort of say in my book is i try 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 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 may be bombing you know the soviet union and wiping out you know 100 000 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 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 mean 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 and you know you dig around in the post kind of in the late 40s 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 uh american public um then than you think is is possible um you know as you talk about the book there's like a very interesting but extremely scary precarious scenario where two sides think um suicides 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 um against uh initial attack so then you know both of them think that the other one if they launch the first strike there would be no deterrence 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 when worry if like i don't know if if um if nuclear technology gets better in some ways that could make a nuclear war much more likely because the people could start thinking okay well we can just take out all their uh all their entire arsenal but so they have no way to retaliate um um i'm curious what you mentioned you know he had a good way of thinking about escalation i'm curious how he would have thought about um 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 then 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 you know um von neumann i mean he was recruited by rand but the work that he did and and ran became this kind of hot house for nuclear strategic thinking right in in the cold war and it um influenced um american policy but von neumann apart from this paper on uh nuclear strategy he seems to have taken remarkable little interest in in the whole thing i mean when he was a rand he was um computing various solutions um to kind of duals so you know he'd worked out the minimax theorem and um so he was busy well you know if you have a plane and a um i don't know a tank or you know whatever submarine and a ship you know and they they can see each other coming at what point should they fire or 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 in the strategy you know 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 going to 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 one thing i find very interesting about von neumann's work for the government um and in aiding these kinds of 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 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 am i even characterizing the situation in the correct way yeah um no 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 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 liberal but you know at the time some you know a lot of people felt that it was quite hawkish um now the reason for that is that um there was a shortly after the first world war in hungary there were two things that happened one was there was a very short-lived communist uprising 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 military essentially a you know a military government uh just marched in uh led by general horvey and they took control and that turned out to be even worse i mean they there's public hangings and and rapes and um you know thousands of people ended up dead and um many jewish people um at that time were seen to have been collaborating with the earlier communist government so you know many jews were basically shot on the streets as well now the von neumanns were you know by a 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 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 spent in germany and he adored um kind of into war germany in the at least in the uh late 20s and for him it was this perfect intellectual climate and you have to remember that germany was you know scientifically and mathematically definitely kind of the center of the world then i mean america just was nothing at the time um it was only you know kind of during the second world war and post the second world war that um from the 30s late 30s onwards the america became this scientific and technological kind of powerhouse really and you know it 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 you know i i i got the feeling that you know he he he wasn't interested in making decisions on their behalf because you know 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 the us government the tools that it needed to overcome the nazis and to you know and to um you know main maintain their lead as kind of the preeminent um democracy in the world but um so he was kind of um i think more more allergic to authoritarianism where as i think um you know before the second world war happened 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 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 europe being turned upside down by the nazis 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 deep down it was you know superficially he was um kind of a good man and um he you know he he was nice to people and i think that's really where he started 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 want to learn more about maths but i'm in america basically building stuff where do i find out more about math 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 mandelbro who came over thanks to his reference and you know he was a princeton and the ias and years later when mandelbro 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 so you know mandelbro is doing really important work but you know he may struggle because what he's doing is so cutting edge so if he does and he 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 of course helps um scientists leave um kind of europe before the nazis make that impossible he gets he helps to get girdle out 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 and thoughtful human being and he's not easily characterized as you know dr strangelove or uh you know a um a bleeding heart liberal uh i i i understand what you meant but out of context um he was superficially a good man has got to be the best backhanded compliment ever um uh so the final question out of yourself for your time you know you're a researcher yourself you know you have a phd in protein crystallography you're a medical researcher and now you've analyzed uh john neumann's life you know 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 uh not at all but 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 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 20th century uh who works on abstract set theory you end up having to homeschool a recalcitrant 10 year old um so that's that's one you know if you want to be productive don't do that okay um but in other terms i think you know 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 yeah you know i he thought incessantly um 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 as as you know the 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 yeah yeah i know that's that that's definitely very fair uh you're not john moynihan almost certainly uh so um ananio thank you so much for your time i really appreciate you coming on the podcast thanks very much it was a it was a pleasure you