Podcast Episodes

Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end

Richard Sutton is the father of reinforcement learning, winner of the 2024 Turing Award, and author of The Bitter Lesson. And he thinks LLMs are a dead end.

After interviewing him, my steel man of Ric…

Published on 8 hours ago

Fully autonomous robots are much closer than you think – Sergey Levine

Sergey Levine, one of the world’s top robotics researchers and co-founder of Physical Intelligence, thinks we’re on the cusp of a “self-improvement flywheel” for general-purpose robots. His median es…

Published on 2 weeks ago

How Hitler almost starved Britain – Sarah Paine

In this lecture, military historian Sarah Paine explains how Britain used sea control, peripheral campaigns, and alliances to defeat Nazi Germany during WWII. She then applies this framework to today…

Published on 3 weeks ago

Evolution designed us to die fast; we can change that — Jacob Kimmel

Jacob Kimmel thinks he can find the transcription factors to reverse aging. We do a deep dive on why this might be plausible and why evolution hasn’t optimized for longevity. We also talk about why d…

Published on 1 month ago

China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer

How will we feed the 100s of GWs of extra energy demand that AI will create over the coming decade? On this episode, Casey Handmer (Caltech PhD, former NASA JPL, founder & CEO of Terraform Industries…

Published on 1 month, 1 week ago

Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard

A deep dive with Lewis Bollard, who leads Open Philanthropy’s strategy for Farmed Animal Welfare, on the surprising economics of the meat industry.

Why is factory farming so efficient? How can we make…

Published on 1 month, 2 weeks ago

Sarah Paine — How Imperial Japan defeated Tsarist Russia & Qing China

After my last lecture series with Sarah Paine ended, I still had so many questions. I knew we’d only scratched the surface of Sarah’s scholarship, so I immediately invited her back for another series…

Published on 2 months ago

Stephen Kotkin — How Stalin became the most powerful dictator in history

The Stephen Kotkin episode. Kotkin is arguably the world’s foremost expert on Joseph Stalin and has written a massive 2-volume biography on him (with a 3rd volume in the works).

No other individual ha…

Published on 2 months, 2 weeks ago

Why I don’t think AGI is right around the corner

I’ve had a lot of discussions on my podcast where we haggle out timelines to AGI. Some guests think it’s 20 years away - others 2 years.

Here’s an audio version of where my thoughts stand as of June …

Published on 2 months, 3 weeks ago

A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church

George Church is the godfather of modern synthetic biology and has been involved with basically every major biotech breakthrough in the last few decades.

Professor Church thinks that these improvement…

Published on 3 months ago