This is a recording of our <a href='/ai-book-club'>AI Book Club</a> discussion of <a href='https://www.amazon.com/dp/0593654498'><i>The MANIAC</i></a> by Benjamin Labatut, held August 16, 2026. This was the club's first work of fiction, and much of the discussion is about what that mode makes possible: getting inside the madness of scientists like John von Neumann in a way a biography can't. We talk about the book's opening scene as a thesis in miniature, logic carried to irrational ends, the 'death of play' in the AlphaGo match against Lee Sedol, Move 78 as a case for human unpredictability, the garage door scene as a metaphor for the gap between AI labs and what people actually want, and von Neumann's deathbed claim that a machine would have to play like a child.