Episodes
#103 · Mon, Jun 22, 2020 · Loading viewsBen Goertzel is one of the most interesting minds in the artificial intelligence community. He is the founder of SingularityNET, designer of OpenCog AI framework, formerly a director of research at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, Chief Scientist of Hanson Robotics, the company that created the Sophia Robot. He has been a central figure in the AGI community for many years, including in the Conference on Artificial General Intelligence.
#102 · Sat, Jun 20, 2020 · Loading viewsSteven Pressfield is a historian and author of War of Art, a book that had a big impact on my life and the life of millions of whose passion is to create in art, science, business, sport, and everywhere else. I highly recommend it and others of his books on this topic, including Turning Pro, Do the Work, Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit, and the Warrior Ethos. Also his books Gates of Fire about the Spartans and the battle at Thermopylae, The Lion's Gate, Tides of War, and others are some of the best historical fiction novels ever written.
#101 · Sat, Jun 13, 2020 · Loading viewsJoscha Bach is the VP of Research at the AI Foundation, previously doing research at MIT and Harvard. Joscha work explores the workings of the human mind, intelligence, consciousness, life on Earth, and the possibly-simulated fabric of our universe.
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#100 · Wed, Jun 3, 2020 · Loading viewsAlexander Fridman is a professor at Drexel University and the director of the Nyheim Plasma Institute. He is one of the top plasma physicists and plasma chemists in the world. And most importantly to me, he is my dad.
#99 · Thu, May 28, 2020 · Loading viewsKarl Friston is one of the greatest neuroscientists in history, cited over 245,000 times, known for many influential ideas in brain imaging, neuroscience, and theoretical neurobiology, including the fascinating idea of the free-energy principle for action and perception.
#98 · Sat, May 23, 2020 · Loading viewsKate Darling is a researcher at MIT, interested in social robotics, robot ethics, and generally how technology intersects with society. She explores the emotional connection between human beings and life-like machines, which for me, is one of the most exciting topics in all of artificial intelligence.
#97 · Wed, May 20, 2020 · Loading viewsSertac Karaman is a professor at MIT, co-founder of the autonomous vehicle company Optimus Ride, and is one of top roboticists in the world, including robots that drive and robots that fly.
#96 · Fri, May 15, 2020 · Loading viewsStephen Schwarzman is the CEO and Co-Founder of Blackstone, one of the world's leading investment firms with over 530 billion dollars of assets under management. He is one of the most successful business leaders in history.
#95 · Tue, May 12, 2020 · Loading viewsDawn Song is a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley with research interests in security, most recently with a focus on the intersection between computer security and machine learning.
#94 · Fri, May 8, 2020 · Loading viewsIlya Sutskever is the co-founder of OpenAI, is one of the most cited computer scientist in history with over 165,000 citations, and to me, is one of the most brilliant and insightful minds ever in the field of deep learning. There are very few people in this world who I would rather talk to and brainstorm with about deep learning, intelligence, and life than Ilya, on and off the mic.
#93 · Tue, May 5, 2020 · Loading viewsDaphne Koller is a professor of computer science at Stanford University, a co-founder of Coursera with Andrew Ng and Founder and CEO of insitro, a company at the intersection of machine learning and biomedicine.
#92 · Wed, Apr 29, 2020 · Loading viewsHarry Cliff is a particle physicist at the University of Cambridge working on the Large Hadron Collider beauty experiment that specializes in searching for hints of new particles and forces by studying a type of particle called the "beauty quark", or "b quark". In this way, he is part of the group of physicists who are searching answers to some of the biggest questions in modern physics. He is also an exceptional communicator of science with some of the clearest and most captivating explanations of basic concepts in particle physics I've ever heard.
#91 · Fri, Apr 24, 2020 · Loading viewsJack Dorsey is the co-founder and CEO of Twitter and the founder and CEO of Square.
#90 · Wed, Apr 22, 2020 · Loading viewsDmitry Korkin is a professor of bioinformatics and computational biology at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where he specializes in bioinformatics of complex disease, computational genomics, systems biology, and biomedical data analytics. I came across Dmitry's work when in February his group used the viral genome of the COVID-19 to reconstruct the 3D structure of its major viral proteins and their interactions with human proteins, in effect creating a structural genomics map of the coronavirus and making this data open and available to researchers everywhere. We talked about the biology of COVID-19, SARS, and viruses in general, and how computational methods can help us understand their structure and function in order to develop antiviral drugs and vaccines.
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#89 · Sat, Apr 18, 2020 · Loading viewsStephen Wolfram is a computer scientist, mathematician, and theoretical physicist who is the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, a company behind Mathematica, Wolfram Alpha, Wolfram Language, and the new Wolfram Physics project. He is the author of several books including A New Kind of Science, which on a personal note was one of the most influential books in my journey in computer science and artificial intelligence.
#88 · Mon, Apr 13, 2020 · Loading viewsEric Weinstein is a mathematician with a bold and piercing intelligence, unafraid to explore the biggest questions in the universe and shine a light on the darkest corners of our society. He is the host of The Portal podcast, a part of which, he recently released his 2013 Oxford lecture on his theory of Geometric Unity that is at the center of his lifelong efforts in arriving at a theory of everything that unifies the fundamental laws of physics.
#87 · Thu, Apr 9, 2020 · Loading viewsRichard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist, and author of The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, The God Delusion, The Magic of Reality, The Greatest Show on Earth, and his latest Outgrowing God. He is the originator and popularizer of a lot of fascinating ideas in evolutionary biology and science in general, including funny enough the introduction of the word meme in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which in the context of a gene-centered view of evolution is an exceptionally powerful idea. He is outspoken, bold, and often fearless in his defense of science and reason, and in this way, is one of the most influential thinkers of our time.
#86 · Fri, Apr 3, 2020 · Loading viewsDavid Silver leads the reinforcement learning research group at DeepMind and was lead researcher on AlphaGo, AlphaZero and co-lead on AlphaStar, and MuZero and lot of important work in reinforcement learning.
#85 · Tue, Mar 31, 2020 · Loading viewsRoger Penrose is physicist, mathematician, and philosopher at University of Oxford. He has made fundamental contributions in many disciplines from the mathematical physics of general relativity and cosmology to the limitations of a computational view of consciousness.
#84 · Sun, Mar 29, 2020 · Loading viewsWilliam MacAskill is a philosopher, ethicist, and one of the originators of the effective altruism movement. His research focuses on the fundamentals of effective altruism - the use of evidence and reason to help others by as much as possible with our time and money, with a particular concentration on how to act given moral uncertainty. He is the author of Doing Good Better - Effective Altruism and a Radical New Way to Make a Difference. He is a co-founder and the President of the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) that encourages people to commit to donate at least 10% of their income to the most effective charities. He co-founded 80,000 Hours, a non-profit that provides research and advice on how you can best make a difference through your career.
#83 · Thu, Mar 26, 2020 · Loading viewsNick Bostrom is a philosopher at University of Oxford and the director of the Future of Humanity Institute. He has worked on fascinating and important ideas in existential risks, simulation hypothesis, human enhancement ethics, and the risks of superintelligent AI systems, including in his book Superintelligence. I can see talking to Nick multiple times on this podcast, many hours each time, but we have to start somewhere.
#82 · Sat, Mar 21, 2020 · Loading viewsSimon Sinek is an author of several books including Start With Why, Leaders Eat Last, and his latest The Infinite Game. He is one of the best communicators of what it takes to be a good leader, to inspire, and to build businesses that solve big difficult challenges.
#81 · Thu, Mar 19, 2020 · Loading viewsAnca Dragan is a professor at Berkeley, working on human-robot interaction -- algorithms that look beyond the robot's function in isolation, and generate robot behavior that accounts for interaction and coordination with human beings.
#80 · Mon, Mar 16, 2020 · Loading viewsVitalik Buterin is co-creator of Ethereum and ether, which is a cryptocurrency that is currently the second-largest digital currency after bitcoin. Ethereum has a lot of interesting technical ideas that are defining the future of blockchain technology, and Vitalik is one of the most brilliant people innovating this space today.
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#79 · Sat, Mar 7, 2020 · Loading viewsLee Smolin is a theoretical physicist, co-inventor of loop quantum gravity, and a contributor of many interesting ideas to cosmology, quantum field theory, the foundations of quantum mechanics, theoretical biology, and the philosophy of science. He is the author of several books including one that critiques the state of physics and string theory called The Trouble with Physics, and his latest book, Einstein's Unfinished Revolution: The Search for What Lies Beyond the Quantum.