Join renowned visionary Thomas Frey and Trent Fowler as they explore artificial intelligence, cryptocurrencies, space exploration, quantum computing, biotechnology, and a variety of other topics of interest to futurists.
How will capitalism evolve—or collapse—in the coming decades? Futurist, academic, and author Andy Hines joins us to discuss his latest book, "Imagining After Capitalism", the result of a decade of research into our shifting social and economic systems. He explores key drivers making capitalism less viable and presents three thought-provoking ‘guiding images' for the future: Tech-led Abundance, Circular Commons, and Post-Workers Paradise. Rather than predicting a single outcome, Hines challenges us to expand our imagination and explore alternative futures beyond the current system. Don't miss this fascinating conversation! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Roger Huang "Would Mao Hold Bitcoin?" is the authoritative resource exploring Bitcoin's disruptive intersection with Chinese history. Huang not only pulls back the curtain on the specifics of the history, characters, and story, but on the larger questions that arise from the clash between state-driven Chinese tech and the open-source development that is Bitcoin. As a longtime observer, Mandarin speaker, and regular contributor to Forbes and many other platforms on the subject of Bitcoin in China, Huang is uniquely positioned to evaluate the implications for the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
David Jilk joins us for round two! After finishing MIT, David founded eCortex, a company that wound up being a solid 20 years ahead of the curve on deep learning, and later worked on cognitive models for IARPA. He has founded or advised numerous other companies, including Harmonix Music Systems, creators of the wildly popular games Guitar Hero and Rock Band. He recently published Epoch: A Poetic Psy-Phi Saga, a science fiction epic poem that tells the story of the first fully human-level artificial intelligence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Andrew Rose is one of the founders of Fractal University, whose mission is to democratize enjoyable, lifelong education and public research culture by creating an easily replicable model for a community-driven university — and the economic, social, and creative opportunities that universities create. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Roko Mijic is a self-described radical centrist, transhumanist, and rationalist who is probably most famous for inventing "Roko's Basilisk," a thought experiment sometimes described as the world's greatest infohazard. He has written prolifically on AGI and AI Safety, and his writing can be found at his blog, "Transhuman Axiology." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Julian Togelius is an associate professor of computer science at New York University. His research lies at the intersection between computational intelligence and games, and he is currently focused on using evolutionary algorithms to generate levels, maps, or game rules. In addition, he has worked on a wide variety of problems related to evolutionary reinforcement learning, and he is the author of a forthcoming book on artificial general intelligence through MIT. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
After nearly a decade in TV news, Eli quit her job to become a full-time space journalist, creating content on YouTube and X. She spends most of her time covering rocket launches and documenting the story of SpaceX. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
All his life, James has been searching for the best ways to change himself and change the world. He started as an entrepreneur at age 6 and since has co-founded or helped build 9 businesses and 16 organizations, including the global conference series for the effective altruism movement, the world's first global lifehacking event series, Southeast Asia's first social innovation hackathon series, and a university for today's Leonardo da Vincis. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin as a triple major/quadruple minor. He's spent 20+ years unsystematically upgrading himself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Clifford Mapp is the global head of ecosystem development and information security at Dynex, the world's only accessible neuromorphic quantum computing cloud for solving real-world problems at scale. Dynex is already supporting thousands of projects in health/pharma, research, AI/ML, architecture, aerospace, EVs, and fintech. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Nathan Labenz is a technology entrepreneur, artificial intelligence analyst, and the founder and former CEO of Waymark. With a background in philosophy and a keen eye for innovation, Nathan led Waymark from its inception to its status as a trailblazer in generative AI-powered content creation. As host of 'The Cognitive Revolution' podcast, he explores the transformative impact of artificial intelligence on work, life, society, and culture from every possible angle. Through conversations with notable builders, researchers, and investors, as well as original deep-dive analysis on topics of particular interest, Nathan helps business, policy, and academic leaders stay up to date with AI developments and implications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Nat Eliason began as a successful marketer and the founder of Growth Machine before turning to writing full-time. He recently published "Crypto Confidential," an unfiltered, insider's account of the hyperactive, hyper-speculative, hyper-addictive, nearly unregulated, completely insane world being built on the blockchain. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Dr. Andrew M. Bailey Andrew is an interdisciplinary teacher and scholar whose work spans philosophy, politics, and economics. He is a Professor of Humanities at Yale-NUS College (Singapore), and he is the co-author of the upcoming book "Resistance Money: A Philosophical Case for Bitcoin." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Nick Frosst is a computer scientist and musician. He co-founded Cohere, which is a company focused on training large language models and making them available through a network-based API. He was also the first employee of Geoffrey Hinton Google Brain lab in Toronto, where he spent 3 years researching capsule networks, adversarial examples, and explainability. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
David Shapiro. David is a former engineer who became famous through his dozens of well-received tutorials on Youtube, covering everything from fine-tuning ChatGPT to his proposed solution to the alignment problem. His work focuses on ensuring that advanced technologies are used safely, bringing about an abundant, post-scarcity, post-nihilistic future. Relevant episodes: “Ep. 156: Algorithms won't get us to AGI | Johannes Jaeger” “Ep. 153: AI, Alignment, and the Scaling Hypothesis | Dwarkesh Patel” “Ep. 147: Could heuristic imperatives solve the AI alignment problem? | David Shapiro” “Ep. 146: Will AI replace humans? | Peter St Onge” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
After a long career as a software engineer and data scientist, John became an independent researcher in artificial intelligence. Today he focuses on a diverse array of topics, such as the nature of abstraction and what the word "agency" even means. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Dr. Gregory Salmieri is a senior scholar of philosophy at the Salem Center, where he holds the Brigham Fellowship for the Study of Objectivism. He is the co-editor of the books "A Companion to Ayn Rand" and "Foundations of a Free Society" and the author of numerous articles on philosophy, with a particular focus on Aristotle and Ayn Rand. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Dr. Johannes Jaeger is a systems scientist, evolutionary biologist, educator, and natural philosopher with an extremely transdisciplinary track record. His investigations, first as the head of an empirical lab, later as the director of an institute for the philosophy of biology, and then as a freelance investigator, have always focused on organisms as complex adaptive systems. He is currently leading a research project at the Dept of Philosophy of the University of Vienna called “Pushing the Boundaries,” which concerns the differences between machines and organisms, and the importance of this difference for evolution. He is associate faculty at the Complexity Science Hub (CSH) Vienna, and a scholar at the Ronin Institute. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Dr. Anton Howes is a historian of invention. He is currently writing a book on the causes of the British Industrial Revolution, and is official historian for the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, as well as head of innovation research for The Entrepreneurs Network. He is a visiting fellow at King's College London, where he was previously lecturer in Economic History. He regularly shares his research on the history of invention at his online newsletter Age of Invention. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
After graduating with a degree in government from Harvard, Daniel Golliher founded a civics school called Maximum New York, anchored in New York City. The school's goal is to accelerate kind, smart, ambitious people into city and state politics; provide them with an atypical level of knowledge about how government works; and keep them networked together. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Dwarkesh Patel is a renowned podcaster who has hosted interviews with luminaries like Marc Andreesen, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Grant Sanderson. He's best known for the extraordinary effort he puts into researching the topics he speaks with his guests about, and for covering an exceptionally wide intellectual ground. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Taylor Black is a cross-functional team leader and seasoned entrepreneur passionate about driving innovation and growth. As a co-founder of Fizzy Ventures and a Principal Program Manager at Microsoft Incubation Studio, Taylor has been at the forefront of entrepreneurial ecosystems, venture studios, and technology and business model innovation. Thanks to this remarkable background, Taylor's expertise is sought after by founders, corporate innovators, venture accelerators, incubators, and studios alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Emery Gunselman is a former astrodynamics engineer and is currently a Satellite Operations Product Owner at Morpheus Space. Morpheus Space is disrupting the NewSpace industry by introducing Agile Constellations, a fusion between cutting-edge electric propulsion and Artificial Intelligence, which enables satellite service providers to operate entire constellations as one entity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
James Pethokoukis is a senior fellow and the DeWitt Wallace Chair at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he analyzes US economic policy, writes and edits the AEIdeas blog, and hosts AEI's Political Economy podcast. He is also a contributor to CNBC and writes the “Faster, Please!” newsletter on Substack. Mr. Pethokoukis is a 2002 “Jeopardy!” champion and author of The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised (Center Street, 2023). Check James out at AEI: https://www.aei.org/profile/james-pethokoukis/ Read James's substack: https://fasterplease.substack.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Nicholas Smart has 15 years' experience as a professional intelligence and security analyst working for government agencies and private companies, covering political, social, military, economic, information and infrastructure issues, and he has experience working as a compliance officer for a cryptoasset trading desk. At present, he is the director of blockchain intelligence and security at Crystal Blockchain Analytics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Augustus Doricko is a former Berkley Data Scientist who went on to co-found Terra Seco, a company that uses cutting-edge technology to help with water conservation efforts. Today, he is best known as the head of Rainmaker, a startup looking to end global water scarcity through advanced cloud seeding and weather modification technologies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
David Shapiro is a former engineer who became famous through his dozens of well-received tutorials on Youtube, covering everything from fine-tuning ChatGPT to his proposed solution to the alignment problem. His work focuses on ensuring that advanced technologies are used safely, bringing about an abundant, post-scarcity, post-nihilistic future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Peter St Onge is a Ph.D. economist at the Heritage Foundation, a Mises Institute Fellow, and a former MBA professor in Taiwan. His approach to economic analysis is heavily informed by the “Austrian School”, which builds economics on more realistic foundations, and he is driven by a desire to understand the policies and technologies that make the world more prosperous. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Dr. Terence Kealey is a professor of clinical biochemistry at the University of Buckingham in the United Kingdom, where he served as vice chancellor until 2014. As a clinical biochemist, Dr. Kealey studied human experimental dermatology, and he discovered how distorting government money could be to the scientific enterprise. In 1996, he published his first book, “The Economic Laws of Scientific Research”, in which he argued that governments need not fund science. His second book, “Sex, Science and Profits” argues that science is not a public good but, rather, is organized in invisible colleges, thereby making government funding irrelevant. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Dr. Qichao Hu serves as the Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Board of SES. He is the recipient of MIT Technology Review's “Innovators Under 35” and was named one of the Forbes “30 Under 30” in 2013. Dr. Hu earned his BS in Physics from MIT and his PhD in Applied Physics from Harvard University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Quintin Pope is a computer science graduate student at Oregon State University, and an alignment researcher focusing on methods of instilling human-compatible values into deep learning-based AI systems, with a particular focus on language models. He co-developed shard theory, an attempt to explain the human value formation process as a consequence of simple reinforcement learning and self-supervised learning dynamics. His interests also include the optimization dynamics of neural networks, human brains, and evolution, as well as how they tie into AI takeoff scenarios and alignment concerns. His current research focuses on methods of scalably supervising self-improving AI systems. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Zenobia Godschalk is an entrepreneur and the senior vice president of Hedera, a fully open-source public distributed ledger that utilizes the fast, fair, and secure hashgraph consensus. Its network services include Solidity-based smart contracts, as well as native tokenization and consensus services used by a thriving community of developers to build decentralized applications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Scott Tibbits is a leader, inventor, and founder of both Starsys Research and The Center for Space Entrepreneurship. He was the recipient of the "Esprit Entrepreneur of Distinction" award in 1998 and is the holder of ten patents in technologies as diverse as medical devices, spacecraft products, and telecom. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Robert Hendershott is a finance professor, hedge fund CIO, and evangelist for a philosophy he calls "ingenuism". Ingenuism comes from the thesis that human progress stems, at its core, from ingenuity - the unique human amalgamation of curiosity and ambition. Nurturing ingenuity is the most important thing that a culture can do: there is no ceiling on what a society that promotes connection, exploration, discovery, and learning can accomplish. Check out his work at https://ingenuism.substack.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Dr. Mohit Jain is a physician-scientist with more than 20 years of expertise in physiology, biomedicine, engineering, computational biology, and mass spectrometry-based metabolomics. Prior to founding Sapient, he formed and was director of Jain Laboratory at the University of California San Diego (UCSD). There he led a multi-disciplinary research team to develop next-generation systems to probe the non-genetic landscape of disease, supported by over $30M in federal, foundation, and industry funding. Dr. Jain founded Sapient in 2021 as a spinout of Jain Laboratory to expand upon the mission of accelerating human discovery and drug development through the nexus of high throughput analytical mass spectrometry, computational biology, and population-level biomarker profiling. If you enjoy this interview please subscribe to the podcast and share it with your friends, and don't forget to check out our website, futuratipodcast.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Julian Rodriguez is a serial entrepreneur, product manager, and innovation-focused strategist with a passion for leading teams that build easy-to-use products and solve large problems. After founding a disruptive venture capital-backed tech startup in the B2B food service space he joined Bitcoin Magazine in 2013, where he worked directly with its co-founder Vitalik Buterin. He was a very early team member and advisor to several successful crypto and blockchain projects, including Ethereum, and he is a lifetime member of the Bitcoin Foundation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Check out Matt's other podcasts: https://planorama.design/podcast Use this link for early access to sinfonia: https://sinfonia.site Matt Genovese is the CEO of Planorama Design, a software user experience design professional services company based in Austin, Texas. With over 25 years of experience in high-tech spanning semiconductors to software, Matt has a long track record of launching successful products. He and his team at Planorama design simple and intuitive software from otherwise complex software or IoT systems, and simultaneously accelerate time to market while reducing internal costs for their clients. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Through a series of popular explainer videos, Rob has become one of the most prominent voices in the AI safety community, exploring topics like cryptography, recursive self-improvement, and meso-alignment with hundreds of thousands of fans. In this interview, we spend nearly two hours getting into the weeds on how powerful AI systems might be dangerous, and the technical solutions which can mitigate that threat. Check out Rob's work: https://www.youtube.com/@RobertMilesAI Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Elizabeth Varghese is well known as a futurist, humanist, and thinker on the topic of space exploration. She leads the People in Space business at Deloitte, she is on the Council of Advisors for The SETI Institute, and she has been called the “Space Philosopher” by leaders from DARPA because she integrates the technological aspects of our expansion into space with imperatives for economic, diplomatic, and ethical human behavior. She joins us on the Futurati Podcast to discuss her book "Stellar Singularity - Navigating the Spacefaring Economy." #spaceexploration #futurism #podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Noel Carroll took the helm of Biofriendly in March of 2018. As its Chief Executive Officer, he focuses on modernizing the company and pushing it toward a leadership role in the environmental community. Always passionate about the environment, Noel is doing this by widening the focus of the company from its flagship product (Green Plus) to a broader organization that educates, invests in and promotes a greener planet. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tigran Petrosyan is a physicist turned tech enthusiast and entrepreneur who is passionate about building comprehensive teams and making products people love. He is currently building "SuperAnnotate", an automated annotation tool that helps to speed up the computer vision lifecycle. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Suman Kanuganti is the co-founder and CEO at Personal.ai, a company that is reinventing human-to-human messaging by leveraging AI that helps people collaborate, exchange ideas, and deepen their relationships with others. As a creator and entrepreneur, Suman is passionate about solving problems for humans by leveraging the power of blockchain, robotics, AI, AR, wearable tech, video streaming, and fintech. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tim Kravchunovsky is an experienced network engineer who has decades of experience in consulting and entrepreneurship. Today, he's the CEO of Chirp, where he's using decentralized technologies like the blockchain to change the internet of things. #blockchain #crypto #internetofthings Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Zvi Mowshowitz is a former professional Magic: The Gathering player, a former trader and market maker in both traditional and non-traditional markets, and he was CEO of the personalized medical startup MetaMed. Recently, he wrote a very thoughtful analysis of the Future of Life's call to halt experiments with large language models, and that's the subject of our chat today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
effrey Ladish runs a security company called Gordian Research which provides operational security consulting services, and he spends his remaining time thinking about new and old ways of working together to build good communities, governance systems, and ultimately a thriving and robust civilization. #artificialintelligence #aisafety #existentialrisk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thomas and Trent talk about the recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, Balaji Srinivasan's bet on Bitcoin and hyperinflation, the CFTC's lawsuit against Binance, the importance of finance, the morality of price gouging, and the prospects of generative AI. #bitcoin #siliconvalleybank #generativeAI Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chris Mattmann is the IT Chief Technology and Innovation Officer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, as well as the Division Manager of the AI, Analytics, and Innovative Development Organization in the Information Technology and Solutions Directorate. He works on ensuring that cutting-edge technologies support NASA's science missions. If you enjoy this interview please subscribe to the podcast and share it with your friends, and don't forget to check out our website, futuratipodcast.com #spaceexploration #NASA #artificialintelligence Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Dr. Mahmoud Ghannoum is a tenured Professor and Director of the Center for Medical Mycology at Case Western Reserve University and University Hospitals Medical Center. He is also the co-founder of BIOHM, the first total microbiome company in the United States. He is the preeminent NIH-funded scientist on all things fungi and brings a captivating discussion to this largest life form on earth – which is genetically closer to humans than plants and at the core (or spore) of human wellness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Emiliano De Laurentiis is a trained cognitive psychologist with a lifelong interest in lifelong learning, and an impressive record of using technology to enhance educational outcomes. In the 80s, his "Arrakas Advantage" series was the first educational software to use chatbots. In the 90s, he launched a website that brought adaptive, student-specific learning to the internet. Today, his "Knowledge Avatars" platform is making it possible for experts in any domain to create robot tutors with the potential to educate millions of people. #chaptgpt #artificialintelligence # Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Alex Goryachev is the former managing director of Cisco's global Co-Innovation Center, where he spearheaded programs and initiatives to accelerate innovation. He is a Silicon Valley veteran who is a sought-after speaker on innovation and is often referred to as the ‘innovation therapist'. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tonight Thomas and Trent are bringing you a solo episode. In recent weeks, the internet has exploded with talk of the incredible tools released by OpenAI. With its remarkable ability to generate and explain code, write in multiple languages, create long, coherent essays, and even generate poetry, nursery rhymes, and fiction, ChatGPT in particular has drawn rapt attention. Tonight, they're going to spend some time playing around with this language model and discussing its broader implications for work, society, and the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jane Gatsby is a complexity theorist and political philosopher. Her digital series “Wonderland” explores philosophy and political theory from first principles, bringing listeners down the rabbit hole and into a world of exploration and curiosity. She is interested in how we can construct better cities of the future, rethinking traditional institutions and challenging our assumptions of how governments can and should function. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices