Baba Brinkman

hello and welcome it's February 28 2023 it's active guest stream number 37.1 and we're here with Baba Brinkman this should be a great discussion an emergence Baba thank you so much for joining let's just jump right into it what brings you to this day how and who are you and welcome thanks thanks Daniel so much for having me here it's a real uh it's a real honor to join you and to uh you know dip into this community which I've been aware of for a while and uh you know like to try to follow the work as much as I can but I'm not a scientist myself uh I'm a rapper I have been uh exploring academic topics in hip-hop for quite a while I did my Master's thesis on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales I was a Renaissance and medieval scholar uh and I I rewrote the Canterbury Tales into rap and I used to tour around the UK wrapping My Wife of Bath's tail and Miller's tale Renditions which was a lot of fun and then at one point it was around 2007 or 2008 uh an evolutionary biologist a geneticist saw my Canterbury Tales show and he reached out to me and said I love what you're doing for medieval literature popularizing and popularizing it with rap but there's other topics that need rap popularization I think his exact words were would you be willing to do for Darwin what you did for Chaucer and this was a in the run-up to the uh the Darwin Bicentennial in 2009 it was the 200th anniversary of uh the birth of Charles Darwin also the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Origin of Species I was of course a big fan of Darwin and of evolutionary theory but not very expert so I said to this scientist yes I'll write some raps about Evolution but I could use some guidance uh he sent me a whole bunch of suggested reading sources books uh peer-reviewed papers everything so I took a sort of six month Deep dive on the state of evolutionary theory uh absorbed a whole bunch of books and uh and wrote These Rhymes but his uh his his criteria was your performances will be at academic seminars with experts in darwinian evolution across all kinds of social domains and psychology and everything so you need to make sure you represent the theory accurately which means you have to run your lyrics by me so I can check them for scientific veracity uh which I thought was a fair criteria for that kind of context so I sent him my lyrics he gave me some uh you know some revision suggestions and then when I got up when I was like set to perform the premiere of my Darwin show in February uh on Darwin day February 12 2009 uh the scientist his name is Mark Palin he was a bacterial geneticist he had this great intro typical British tongue-in-cheek style he was like I have fact check the lyrics and you're about to witness the first rap show in history that's peer reviewed now like peer-reviewed rap that's a great idea uh totally totally marks coinage uh but then right away the wheel started spinning like what other topics could you apply the peer-reviewed uh wrap lens to so I did my Evolution rap show for several years it was called the rap guide to Evolution it played Off Broadway won an award at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and then other scientists started tugging me on the sleeve like oh the Darwin wraps are cool but could you do um Wilderness conservation and threatened species ecology could you do climate change could you do Neuroscience uh and and various uh great collaborations came from that so I now have a whole series of rap albums rap guides to various topics and my encounter with the active inference uh community and research base was when I was working on one called the rap guide to Consciousness and uh Professor Anil Seth is one of the uh I think main proponent opponents and contributors to the Bayesian brain active inference research Paradigm today and he was one of the main science advisors on the project so he was giving me Bayesian stuff to read including Andy Clark's what's next highly technical uh review of all the literature which I slogged my way…