Modern AI feels like weather, an unpredictable storm of new models and breakthroughs. It is not weather, it is architecture, and the man who drew most of the blueprints did so before 1970. This episode is a deep dive into John McCarthy, the Stanford-trained mathematician who coined the term "artificial intelligence" at the 1956 Dartmouth workshop and then quietly built the foundations the field still rests on.

We trace the long arc: the Dartmouth proposal that gave AI its name, the invention of the Lisp programming language and its idea of code as data, his early formalization of common-sense reasoning and circumscription, his pioneering 1960s vision of computer time-sharing that today we call cloud computing, and his founding of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. We also unpack his famous and provocative claim that a s ...