In his landmark multi-volume biography of Stalin, Stephen Kotkin shows how totalitarian power worked not just through terror from above, but through millions of everyday decisions from below. Currently a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution after 33 years at Princeton, Kotkin brings both deep archival work and personal experience to his understanding of Soviet life, having lived in Magnitogorsk during the 1980s and seen firsthand how power operates in closed societies. Tyler sat down with Ste...
Mar 24, 2025•1 hr 26 min•Ep. 44
Beset by colonial controversy, difficult finances and the discovery of a thief on the inside, Britain’s No 1 museum is in deep trouble. Can it restore its reputation? By Charlotte Higgins
Mar 18, 2025•39 min•Ep. 43
Artificial general intelligence — an A.I. system that can beat humans at almost any cognitive task — is arriving in just a couple of years. That’s what people tell me — people who work in A.I. labs, researchers who follow their work, former White House officials. A lot of these people have been calling me over the last couple of months trying to convey the urgency. This is coming during President Trump’s term, they tell me. We’re not ready.One of the people who reached out to me was Ben Buchanan...
Mar 08, 2025•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 42
In the first episode of the Solid Podcast, we talked with Dennis Wingo, founder of Skycorp, in the former NASA McDonald’s where he’s been restoring the first images of the moon taken from space. After an hour of recounting his techno-archaeology exploits — reverse-engineering the arcane analog image-transmission systems that NASA’s engineers developed in the 1960s — Dennis paused and said, “and that’s just one of our history projects.” That teaser is where we begin today’s episode. Ready to appl...
Oct 08, 2024•39 min•Ep. 41
We’re kicking off our newest series, the O’Reilly Solid Podcast, with an episode recorded in the manager’s office of a McDonald’s at NASA’s Ames Research Center. David Cranor and I (Jon Bruner) visited McMoon’s, as it’s known, to talk with Dennis Wingo, founder of two audacious “techno archaeology” efforts. In the first episode, we discuss the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project, which has rescued NASA’s first high-resolution images from satellites orbiting the moon. Dennis’ team reverse-engine...
Oct 07, 2024•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 40
Narrated by David Duchovny, Searching for Hobey Baker re-contextualizes and brings to life the story of one of the greatest college athletes who has largely been lost to history. After Hobey Baker makes his triumphant Princeton hockey debut against Williams, we travel back to his early days attending St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire. He develops a reputation as both an athletic phenom and a kind, generous sportsman. After the economic crash of 1907, his father struggles to send him to college ...
Jun 12, 2024•42 min•Ep. 39
Dharmesh Shah is the co-founder and CTO of HubSpot (currently valued at $30 billion) and one of the most fascinating founders I’ve ever met. Dharmesh is the keeper of HubSpot’s Culture Code, built ChatSpot (an AI chatbot built on top of HubSpot CRM) and a game called WordPlay (which grew to 16 million users), and also founded and writes for OnStartups, a top-ranking startup blog and community with more than 1M members. He’s also invested in 100+ startups including OpenAI, AngelList, Coinbase, an...
Apr 19, 2024•1 hr 42 min•Ep. 38
From copyright violations to environmental concerns to the looming threat of the singularity, AI is a hot-button topic these days. Paul and Rich talk through many facets of this conversation, and discuss how they think about the AI components of Aboard. Plus: A little roleplay in which we learn that Paul thinks Aboard is an earnest mid-century cartoon character.
Apr 18, 2024•25 min•Ep. 37
To better understand how neural networks learn to simulate writing, researchers trained simpler versions on synthetic children’s stories.
Mar 06, 2024•21 min•Ep. 36
Demis Hassabis - Scaling, Superhuman AIs, AlphaZero atop LLMs, Rogue Nations Threat Wednesday 28 February 2024 https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/podcast Open in Pocket Casts Share Here is my episode with Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind We discuss: Why scaling is an artform Adding search, planning, AlphaZero type training atop LLMs Making sure rogue nations can't steal weights The right way to align superhuman AIs and do an intelligence explosion
Feb 28, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 35
When the great apes at Furuvik Zoo broke free from their enclosure last winter, the keepers faced a terrible choice. This is the story of the most dramatic 72 hours of their lives. By Imogen West-Knights.
Jan 31, 2024•53 min•Ep. 34
Ryan sits down with Bob Nardo, Founding Head of School and Executive Director at Libertas School of Memphis. They discuss why the principles of Montessori work, and how they can be applied to successful organizations of all kinds.
Dec 20, 2023•47 min•Ep. 33
Parmesan is a food—but it’s not just a food. Italy’s beloved cheese is often paired with a deep craving for tradition and identity. But its history also involves intrepid immigrants, lucrative businesses and an American version that’s probably available in your local grocery store. After a notorious debunker of Italian-cuisine myths claims this Wisconsin-made product is the real deal, we embark on a quest to answer the question: Has an Italian delicacy been right under our noses this whole time?
Jul 12, 2023•44 min•Ep. 32
The world is engaged in a multitrillion-dollar project to decarbonize the economy to slow or reverse climate change. But what exactly does that mean? How optimistic should we be that we can pull this off? And what new technology do we need to build to make it happen? This is a mega-pod with two guests. Ramez Naam is a writer, speaker, and one of the best technologists I know at explaining the progress we’re making toward building a clean-energy economy. And Vinod Khosla is one of the most famous...
Jun 22, 2023•1 hr 25 min•Ep. 31
Jun 16, 2023•2 hr 44 min•Ep. 30
Jun 12, 2023•35 min•Ep. 29
Jun 07, 2023•43 min•Ep. 28
Jun 05, 2023•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 27
Jun 04, 2023•43 min•Ep. 26
Nathan and Erik analyze the moats of the most powerful companies in AI. The paradigm-shifting technology has led to a flourishing open-source community with market share. Yet, the big players have key competitive advantages that can be examined from many different angles.
Jun 02, 2023•1 hr 27 min•Ep. 25
We chat about: -AIs trading crypto + the broader role of crypto/CBDCs -the impact of AI on real interest rates (Cowen’s Third Law) -the replenishing of low-hanging fruit Tyler Cowen is a professor of economics at George Mason University and Director of the Mercatus Center. He needs little introduction given his widespread online footprint. Tyler writes regularly on his blog Marginal Revolution , hosts his podcast Conversations with Tyler , and is the author of a column on Bloomberg . Tyler is an...
Jun 01, 2023•28 min•Ep. 24
Growing up in Georgia, Clarence Thomas wanted to make his mark. His goal was to become his hometown’s first Black Catholic priest. But in the 1960s, he abandoned that dream. Instead, he embraced campus activism and the teachings of Malcolm X. Season 8 of Slow Burn is produced by Joel Anderson, Sophie Summergrad, Sam Kim, and Sofie Kodner. Josh Levin is the editorial director of Slow Burn. Derek John is Slate’s executive producer of narrative podcasts. Susan Matthews is Slate’s executive editor. ...
May 31, 2023•55 min•Ep. 23
Happy National Train Day, everyone – for those of you who missed it: that was May 13th this year. A year ago, we started down this path with Train Set: Track One, which gave way to Track Two …and now, here we are for the final part of our train-fecta. Slip coaches, the worlds shortest trains, private cars, torpedoes, and of course, Thomas.
May 23, 2023•31 min•Ep. 22
When Kevin Kelly turned 68 years old, he began writing down notes and thoughts about all the lessons he’d learned in his life and the ones he wished he’d learned earlier. While those notes were originally intended for his young adult children, they eventually became the book Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier, which was released in May 2023. On this episode of the Knowledge Project, Kelly goes in-depth on some of the book’s most essential lessons, including learning, se...
May 16, 2023•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 21
Players, pundits and fans complain bitterly that referees are getting worse each season – but is that fair?
Apr 21, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 20
Kevin is the founding executive editor of Wired magazine, a writer and a photographer. When he was young he dropped out of college and travelled to Taiwan, which he describes as a live changing experience. Kevin is passionate about owning his time, the importance of goofing off and staying optimistic about the development of technology.
Apr 17, 2023•50 min•Ep. 19
Robin Hanson is an associate professor of economics at George Mason. He is known for a number of his works including Prediction Markets and Futarchy, writings on the possibility of alien life with both the Great Filter and Grabby Aliens, his book The Elephant In The Brain about our social programming, as well as extensive work and thought in the field of artificial intelligence including a very prescient series of debates and writings with Eliezer Yudkowsky 15 years ago.
Apr 10, 2023•1 hr 30 min•Ep. 18
(0:00) Preview (1:17) Sponsor (4:00) Anton breaks down the advantages of vector databases (4:45) How embeddings have created an AI-native way to represent data (11:50) Anton identifies the watershed moment and step changes in AI (12:55) Open AI’s pricing (18:50) How chroma works (33:04) Stable Attribution and systematic bias (36:48) How latent diffusion models work (51:26) How AI is like the early days of aviation (56:01) How Disney inspired the release of Stable Attribution (59:53):Why noise ca...
Mar 05, 2023•1 hr 26 min•Ep. 17
'Productivity is a trap. Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved work-life balance. The real problem isn’t our limited time. The real problem—or so I hope to convince you—is that we’ve unwittingly inherited, and feel pressured to live by, a troublesome set of ideas about how to use our limited time, all of which are pretty much guaranteed to make things worse.' That's how Oliver Burkeman, the author of 'Four Thousand Weeks,' explains our relationship to happiness and time. In this ep...
Feb 10, 2023•50 min•Ep. 16
We are raiding the Audio Long Read archives to bring you some classic pieces from years past, with new introductions from the authors. This week, from 2019: Three decades ago, Olof Palme was assassinated on Stockholm’s busiest street. The killer has never been found. Could the discovery of new evidence finally close the case?
Jan 25, 2023•37 min•Ep. 15
