Alle afleveringen
52 afleveringen, van nieuw naar oud
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A portrait of eight billion people
3 november 2026 · 1 uur 10 min
Before Joon Sung Park and I had ever met, he simulated the conversation. What questions would Mario, or a person like Mario, ask him? What would I find most interesting to dig into? I do not know how closely I adhered to my facsimile, though I wish I did. Lees meer
Joon has an advantage in rehearsing these encounters, and thousands of others. He is the Co-founder and CEO of Simile, an applied AI company building a foundation model of human behavior. That involves creating digital twins of real people – like a writer or podcaster – and simulating how they might react to certain circumstances. As you might imagine, that’s an attractive proposition for many companies: CVS Health, for instance, can test a new pricing policy against thousands of simulated patients. A bank can model how customers will react before announcing a fee change. Joon’s ambitions stretch far beyond these cases, though, and Simile has raised more than $300 million, most recently at a $2 billion valuation, to pursue them.
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Every timestamp
00:00 Intro
02:11 What Simile is
03:14 Learning to predict human behavior
04:33 From Schelling’s agent-based models to AI simulations
07:40 What drew Joon to simulations and how the idea took shape
10:32 Joon’s sci-fi inspirations
14:20 The ethical questions raised by simulation
15:34 How Joon got into art
17:58 Art that reveals deeper meaning
22:48 The artist’s framing and its role in simulation
27:04 A Simile customer journey
30:46 How Simile gathers data
37:55 Gaining trust
42:59 Public vs. hidden data and how Simile collects it
45:55 Use cases for simulation, from legal strategy to finding a partner
48:29 SimReddit
51:06 Using simulation internally at Simile
52:43 Surprising results from an EV simulation
54:27 Simile’s “siblings”
56:00 Simulation for investing
58:13 Winning in a simulated world
1:00:58 Joon’s hiring philosophy and his own contradictory superpowers
1:06:22 Final meditations
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Resources
• Simile: https://www.simile.com
• Sc…
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Pete Florence: When Robots Improvise
20 oktober 2026 · 1 uur 6 min
Pete Florence and I began by agreeing that his company has an excellent name. Generalist builds AI for robots, including models that can begin learning a new task from a single demonstration. We talked about dexterity, the strange business of gathering physical experience for a machine, and what we might build if robots could do much more of the work. Lees meer
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Every timestamp
00:00 Intro
02:24 GEN-1.5 and one-shot learning
08:55 What makes a task difficult
10:53 Dexterity in robotics
14:53 Matt Mason’s definition of a hand
17:34 Giving robots a sense of touch
20:30 Growing up in a family of technologists and scientists
22:46 What drew Pete into robotics
27:38 Generalist’s founding thesis and what sets it apart
32:17 Protecting simplicity
35:01 How Generalist’s data collection has evolved
35:30 Generalist’s scaling philosophy
39:53 Generalist’s build-versus-buy philosophy
42:15 Balancing general intelligence with commercial deployment
44:24 Why Pete is betting on dexterity
47:33 The durability of the robotics application layer
49:09 Open-weight robotics models and data flywheels
50:52 Geopolitics, safety, and alignment
52:42 The parallels between teaching humans and robots
1:00:05 The timeline for robotics progress and adoption
1:03:37 Book recommendations
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Pete’s complete reading list
• The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership: https://www.amazon.com/Score-Takes-Care-Itself-Philosophy/dp/1591843472
• Wooden on Leadership: How to Create a Winning Organization: https://www.amazon.com/Wooden-Leadership-Create-Winning-Organization/dp/0071453393
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Other resources
• Generalist: https://generalistai.com
• GEN-1.5: https://generalistai.com/blog/gen-1.5
• Proprioception: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprioception
• Cutaneous receptor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutaneous_receptor
• Fukushima nuclear accident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident
• The bitter lesson: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~eunsol/co…
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Jaan Tallinn would like us to survive
8 oktober 2026 · 1 uur 7 min
Jaan Tallinn is a founding engineer of Skype and Kazaa, and a co-founder of the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk and Future of Life Institute. For more than fifteen years, he has been among the most consistent voices arguing that advanced AI poses an extinction-level risk to humanity. Lees meer
Jaan became interested in AI risk in 2008 after reading the work of Eliezer Yudkowsky, a founding researcher of the field of AI alignment. In 2009, after a four-hour meeting with Yudkowsky, he made his first donation to what became the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI). He went on to become an early investor in DeepMind and led the first round into Anthropic – despite believing that AI development, if unchecked, could kill us all. His reasoning: his money displaced VC money rather than bringing Anthropic into existence, and the influence and proceeds that come with it help fund safety work.
In this conversation, we explore what Jaan believes the OpenAI/Hugging Face attack revealed about AI motivation and why he was less surprised than most. We discuss his evolving risk estimate, his case for an immediate moratorium on frontier model training, the technical and geopolitical case for hardware-based verification as a foundation for global AI governance, and why he asked Dario Amodei to collect competing term sheets before accepting his own investment.
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Every timestamp
(00:00) Intro
(02:28) Growing up in Soviet-occupied Estonia
(05:54) How Jaan assesses AI risk and why he’s more optimistic now
(07:16) AI’s preferences and motivations
(12:44) The OpenAI Hugging Face incident
(16:12) Meeting with Eliezer Yudkowsky
(18:20) Everything as computation
(20:22) The Coxon moment
(23:05) Who dismisses AI alignment risks
(26:17) The AI race, the case for a pause, and safer alternatives
(32:47) AI 2027
(33:44) Investing in DeepMind and Anthropic
(40:03) The “big blob of compute” and competing approaches to AI
(44:42) What effective AI safeguards could…
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Periodic Labs: A chatbot walks into a laboratory
29 september 2026 · 1 uur
Liam Fedus and Dogus Cubuk are the co-founders and co-CEOs of Periodic Labs, a startup building “synthesis superintelligence.” In practice, that means an AI system that closes the loop between hypothesis, experiment, and learning. Lees meer
Liam previously led post-training at OpenAI, where he was one of the creators of ChatGPT. Dogus spent years at Google DeepMind leading a large team of chemists and materials scientists. Together, they’ve brought those two trajectories to bear on a problem that has stymied science for decades: not just discovering new materials, but making them reliably and at scale.
In this conversation, we explore the limits of language models, the commercialization bottleneck in materials science, why Periodic chose high-temperature superconductors as its first target, and what Liam learned from watching ChatGPT go from an internal product to one of the most successful products of all time.
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Every timestamp
(00:00) Intro
(02:05) Periodic’s mission
(03:14) What it takes to build a synthetic superintelligence
(04:48) Why “thinkism” falls short
(05:46) Why Periodic is pursuing high-temperature superconductors
(07:21) How Heike Kamerlingh Onnes discovered superconductivity
(09:36) Why synthesizing new materials is so difficult
(16:44) Dogus’s path to AI
(20:18) Liam’s path to AI
(23:28) Lessons from launching ChatGPT
(25:24) Why Dogus and Liam chose each other
(27:01) How Periodic attracts top talent
(29:50) Inside an experimental loop at Periodic
(35:10) What AI learns across experiments
(40:10) What Periodic builds versus buys
(44:37) Balancing diversity and depth across experiments
(49:23) The difference in LLM performance on math vs. science
(51:26) Why Periodic doesn’t depend on better models
(53:20) Periodic’s short-term goals
(54:09) The competitive landscape
(55:39) Final meditations
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Liam and Dogus’s complete reading list
• The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World (recommended by Liam): https://…
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An Ex-SpaceX Engineer on Elon Musk, Starship, and Building a $1B-Valued Startup (Scott Morton, Founder & CEO of Revel)
8 september 2026 · 57 min
Scott Morton is the founder and CEO of Revel, a software platform for testing and controlling complex hardware systems. Before founding the company in 2024, Scott spent nearly a decade at SpaceX building control software for Falcon 9 and Starship. That experience helped him recognize a broader problem: while rockets, nuclear systems, supersonic aircraft, and other advanced machines have grown increasingly sophisticated, the software used to test and control them is often fragmented and decades old. Revel was created to close that gap. The company has raised $180 million, was reportedly valued at just over $1 billion, and counts Impulse Space and Radiant Nuclear among its customers. Its platform scales from small benchtop tests to industrial systems with hundreds of thousands of telemetry channels. Revel has also created its own programming language, RevelCode, designed to combine performance and accessibility with the runtime safety required for high-stakes physical systems. Lees meer
In our conversation, we explore:
• How AI can accelerate high-consequence software teams without replacing rigorous testing and review
• Why hardware test and industrial-control software still relies on tools created in the 1980s and 1990s
• What Scott took from Elon Musk about betting on teams before you know the answers
• Why Revel created its own programming language
• The “runtime safe” philosophy: what it means and why it matters
• Revel’s one-to-many model and the hardware frontiers it’s touching
• The strategic case behind Revel’s $150 million Series B
• How Revel’s edge showed up in an industrial-control bake-off
• How Scott hopes to preserve Revel’s engineering culture as it scales toward 500 people
• Revel’s long-term mission – and what it means for the hardware renaissance
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Timestamps
(00:00) Intro
(02:04) Why no one will vibe-code a nuclear reactor
(04:15) Revel’s engineering edge
(05:27) What Revel actually does
(06:34) Why industrial software has stagnated
(07:…
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38x in Ten Months: Inside One of Fintech’s Fastest-Growing Infrastructure Companies (Farooq Malik, CEO of Rain)
18 augustus 2026 · 1 uur 15 min
Farooq Malik is the co-founder and CEO of Rain, a financial infrastructure company powered by stablecoins. Growing up in an immigrant family, Farooq saw firsthand the friction involved in moving money across borders. Alongside co-founder Charles Yoo-Naut, Farooq spent years building infrastructure before stablecoins became mainstream, betting that tokenized money would eventually become a foundational layer of the global financial system. Today, Rain powers card issuance, payments, and other financial products built on stablecoin rails, helping companies move money faster and operate across markets. Lees meer
In our conversation, we explore:
• How stablecoins combine the advantages of cash and electronic money
• The barriers that still make moving money across borders expensive and inefficient
• The parallels between being an immigrant and being an entrepreneur
• How Farooq and Charles met through On Deck and decided to build together
• What Rain gained by building before the market was ready
• How Rain earned the trust of early partners who later became customers
• What The Art of War taught Rain about patience
• The misconception that stablecoins are only for emerging markets
• Why the payments market is big enough for multiple winners
• Why Rain believes its infrastructure is well positioned for a future shaped by AI agents
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Thank you to the partners who make this possible
Brex: The intelligent finance platform.
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Timestamps
(00:00) Intro
(02:46) An overview of Rain and global-first financial infrastructure
(06:57) The barriers in moving money and how technology can reduce them
(15:34) How stablecoins behave like cash
(18:46) The economic opportunity of a more efficient monetary system
(22:06) How Farooq’s childhood as an immigrant shaped him
(26:00) Farooq’s first entrepreneurial venture
(29:11) Lessons from Farooq’s career before founding Rain
(36:09) Connecting with Charles at On Deck
(39:51) From Sign and Wire to Rain
(42:18) Why Rain bet o…
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AI Got Good at Language. Now It’s Learning the Language of Life. (Eric Nguyen, Co-Founder and CEO of Radical Numerics)
4 augustus 2026 · 1 uur 22 min
Eric Nguyen is the co-founder and CEO of Radical Numerics, an AI research lab that has raised $50 million to train models directly on biological data. Before starting the company, Eric helped develop Evo and Evo 2, large-scale genome language models trained on unlabeled DNA sequences. Radical Numerics is now building models that can connect information across DNA, RNA, proteins, epigenetics, and other parts of biology, rather than treating each as a separate problem. Researchers have already used Evo to generate viable bacteriophage genomes, and Eric says Radical Numerics’ newer model, Omnii, matched key findings from two years of Alzheimer’s wet-lab research in a matter of days. He also believes these tools could make it easier to create dangerous pathogens, which is why the company is working on both biological design and biodefense. Lees meer
In our conversation, we explore:
• What AI models can learn by treating DNA as a language
• Why reading scientific papers is not the same as learning directly from biological data
• How Eric’s unusually free-range childhood shaped the way he follows his curiosity
• Why biology may have more useful data than researchers know how to use
• How Radical Numerics plans to connect information across DNA, RNA, proteins, and other biological systems
• Where the company sees early opportunities in drug discovery, diagnostics, synthetic biology, and biodefense
• Why testing AI-generated biology in the lab is still slow and difficult
• How models that design biological systems could also help detect dangerous or manipulated pathogens
• How to make powerful biology models safer without eliminating the capabilities that make them valuable
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Thank you to the partners who make this possible
Ahrefs Brand Radar: Find your brand in AI results.
Brex: The intelligent finance platform.
Guru: The AI source of truth for work.
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Timestamps
(00:00) Intro
(03:35) An overview of Radical Numerics
(06:35) From protein models to modeling all of…
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The Token Budget Problem Nobody Is Talking About (Matan Grinberg, Co-Founder & CEO of Factory)
30 juni 2026 · 1 uur 17 min
Matan Grinberg is the co-founder and CEO of Factory, an AI company valued at $1.5 billion that helps enterprises like Nvidia, Morgan Stanley, and Adobe automate software development through “Droids,” intelligent agents designed to streamline software engineering. Before Factory, Matan spent more than a decade in theoretical physics, studying string theory at Princeton and UC Berkeley. His work now centers on a different kind of complex system: how software gets built in an era of increasingly capable AI agents, open models, and shifting compute economics. Lees meer
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In our conversation, we explore:
• How Emmy Noether’s theorem continues to shape Matan’s approach to technology, business, and AI
• Why Matan believes there will always be more problems to solve, even as AI becomes more capable
• The resource allocation problem facing CEOs as they balance headcount, compute, and token budgets
• Why Factory is betting on model independence and Matan’s take on the SpaceX-Cursor deal
• Why Matan pushes back on conflating open models with “Chinese models” and wants a stronger open-model ecosystem
• The identity crisis that followed Matan’s decision to leave physics
• Lessons from Factory’s first few years, including learning to push back and identify gaps in his own knowledge
• Factory’s culture, values, and Matan’s partnership with co-founder Eno Reyes
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Thank you to the partners who make this possible
.tech domains: An identity for builders at their core.
Brex: The intelligent finance platform.
Persona: Trusted identity verification for any use case.
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Transcript: https://www.generalist.com/p/the-token-budget-problem
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Timestamps
(00:00) Intro
(03:50) Noether’s theorem explained
(06:45) How the search for what’s conserved informs Matan’s work
(10:53) Why there will always be more problems to solve
(11:58) The resource allocation problem of the AI era
(15:54) Factory’s mission: bringing autonomy to software engineering
(18:28) How Factory decides what to b…
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Own or Be Owned: Why Every Company Needs Its Own AI Model (Yash Patil, Co-Founder & CEO of Applied Compute)
23 juni 2026 · 1 uur 8 min
Yash Patil is the 23-year-old founder and CEO of Applied Compute, a $1.3 billion company helping businesses train custom AI models on their own data: smaller, cheaper, and purpose-built for the work they actually do. Before founding the company, Yash dropped out of Stanford and spent two years at OpenAI working on post-training infrastructure and Codex. He left with one core conviction: every company that runs its critical workflows on someone else’s model is building on shifting sand. Applied Compute is his answer to that problem, already serving customers including DoorDash, Cognition, and Mercor. Lees meer
In our conversation, we explore:
• Why “own or be owned” is becoming existential for any company that relies on frontier AI models
• What it was like inside OpenAI the weekend the board fired, and then reinstated, its CEO
• Why post-training is where competitive advantage is now being built, and what reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards actually is
• Why evals have become the new production environment, and why companies will never share them with frontier providers
• How a specialized model built for DoorDash outperformed frontier models on a narrow, high-value task
• Why cost, not capability, is now the primary driver pushing companies toward custom models
• Why Yash believes AI’s transformation of the economy will unfold over decades, and why near-term fears about mass job displacement are misplaced
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Thank you to the partners who make this possible
Brex: The intelligent finance platform.
Guru: The AI source of truth for work.
Persona: Trusted identity verification for any use case.
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Transcript: https://www.generalist.com/p/own-or-be-owned-why-every-company
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Timestamps
(00:00) Introduction
(03:50) Fable 5 and the case for owning your own models
(09:22) Why Applied Compute is betting on custom AI models
(12:30) Yash's early influences and first projects
(17:42) His brief time building at Stanford
(19:29) Leaving Stanford for OpenAI
…
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What America Is Missing Between Sanctions and Nuclear War (Bryon Hargis, Co-Founder & CEO of Castelion)
2 juni 2026 · 1 uur 16 min
Bryon Hargis is the co-founder and CEO of Castelion, a defense startup building low-cost hypersonic missiles designed to be manufactured at scale. Before founding Castelion, Bryon spent more than a decade at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and nearly six years at SpaceX, where he worked on national security space programs and saw firsthand how iterative engineering and manufacturing speed could reshape aerospace. Castelion’s first missile, Blackbeard, is slated for integration on the Navy’s F/A-18 Super Hornet in roughly a year. Lees meer
In our conversation, we explore:
• Why Bryon believes building missiles is paradoxically essential to maintaining peace
• The game theory behind warfare and why tit-for-tat strategies require credible middle-ground responses
• How China’s 2021 hypersonic test revealed not just a capability gap but a manufacturing and cost advantage
• Why traditional aerospace processes—optimized for low risk and high cost—can’t compete with rapid iteration
• What Bryon learned in his first week at SpaceX (after 12 years in traditional aerospace)
• Why building a carrier-based, air-launched hypersonic missile as a first product was the hard but right choice
• How focusing on manufacturability and cost over maximum capability can produce more effective deterrence
• Why the person who adapts faster in warfare always wins, and how that shapes Castelion’s philosophy
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Thank you to the partners who make this possible
.tech domains: An identity for builders at their core.
Ahrefs Brand Radar: Find your brand in AI results.
Persona: Trusted identity verification for any use case.
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Timestamps
(00:00) Intro
(04:01) Why America needs hypersonic missiles
(07:13) China’s edge in hypersonics
(12:05) The missing middle ground in deterrence
(18:05) Preventing warhead ambiguity
(19:40) How hypersonics differ from ballistic missiles
(25:05) The economics of defensive vs. offensive systems
(28:21) How SpaceX differs from traditional aerospace
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“Our Goal Is to Build an Electrical Engineer.” (Davide Asnaghi, Co-Founder & CEO of Diode)
19 mei 2026 · 1 uur 12 min
Davide Asnaghi is the co-founder and CEO of Diode, a Brooklyn-based startup using AI to design and manufacture circuit boards in the United States. Lees meer
Before Diode, Davide worked on Apple’s Special Projects Group and spent time in Hong Kong and Shenzhen studying Asia’s electronics manufacturing ecosystem. That experience convinced him that PCB design, despite powering everything from smartphones and satellites to medical devices and autonomous systems, remained one of the most overlooked layers of the tech stack.
Since its founding just two years ago, Diode has landed Physical Intelligence and Saronic as customers and partnered with Anthropic to help Claude become a better electrical engineer. The company’s ultimate ambition: to make hardware as nimble as software.
In our conversation, we explore:
• Why the West outsourced PCB manufacturing to Asia in the 2000s and why bringing it back matters for American competitiveness
• What Shenzhen’s manufacturing culture does better than Silicon Valley (and what the U.S. can learn from it)
• How Diode’s models can one-shot much of schematic design and compress hardware timelines from months to weeks
• The three-week YC pivot that transformed Diode from a design validation tool into a full-stack manufacturer
• Why circuit boards are the “forgotten middle child” between silicon and software
• How Diode partners with Anthropic to make LLMs better electrical engineers
• What it takes to build a hardware company in 2025—and why the talent bar must stay incredibly high
• How Italian, American, and Chinese cultures shaped Davide’s approach to entrepreneurship and manufacturing
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Thank you to the partners who make this possible
.tech domains: An identity for builders at their core.
Guru: The AI source of truth for work.
Brex: The intelligent finance platform.
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Timestamps
(00:00) Intro
(04:15) Why Davide calls himself a copper merchant
(05:53) Diode’s mission to rebuild PCB manufacturing in the U.S.
(07:58) What s…
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Investing Like A Mystic: How Cyan Banister Finds Outliers (Co-Founder of Long Journey Ventures)
5 mei 2026 · 1 uur 13 min
Cyan Banister has built one of the most distinctive early-stage track records of the last fifteen years, with early bets on companies like Uber, SpaceX, DeepMind, Niantic, and Postmates. Today, she is co-founder and general partner at Long Journey Ventures, where she backs what she calls “magical weirdos.” Banister describes herself as a professional daydreamer, running constant thought experiments and paying close attention to signals others ignore. In this episode, she explains how that mindset translates into investing, and why many of her best opportunities have come from observation, curiosity, and a willingness to look in unlikely places. Lees meer
In our conversation, we explore:
• Cyan’s philosophy of treating life as a series of experiments
• The strange, profound experiences that led her to question and ultimately move beyond her atheism
• How scanning Wi-Fi networks in a Four Seasons café led her to Flock Safety, last valued at $8.4 billion
• Long Journey Ventures’ “Biz, Tizz, and Rizz” framework for identifying exceptional founders and why the trifecta is rare
• How AI will enable the age of the polymath
• Why she believes brain-computer interfaces are closer than most people think
• Why she says Pokémon Go was “the closest we ever came to world peace”
• Why she lives part-time in a retirement community and her vision for a more connected future
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Thank you to the partners who make this possible
.tech domains: An identity for builders at their core.
Brex: The intelligent finance platform.
Persona: Trusted identity verification for any use case.
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Timestamps
(00:00) Intro
(03:51) Never playing the game you appear to be playing
(07:18) Practicing childlike wonder as a daily discipline
(10:08) Questioning belief after her stroke
(13:30) Cyan’s metaphysical experiments
(23:24) Non-local consciousness and creativity
(27:22) Investing with extreme openness to signals
(29:05) The importance of timing in investing
(32:26) Meeting Travis Kalanick
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The Future Of Drug Discovery Is 4 Billion Years Old (Viswa Colluru, Founder & CEO at Enveda)
21 april 2026 · 1 uur 23 min
For decades, drug discovery has shifted away from nature and toward biology-first approaches. Viswa Colluru believes that shift was a catastrophic mistake. His company, Enveda Biosciences, has raised over $500 million to build a “search engine for nature’s chemistry.” The mission is personal: he grew up around his father’s pharmacy in India and later lost his mother to a treatable cancer whose medicine his family couldn’t afford. Many life-changing medicines, including morphine, aspirin, and metformin, originated in nature, but there has never been a reliable, scalable way to systematically explore its chemistry. Colluru founded Enveda in 2019 with $55,000 of his own savings to change that. The company has since identified 18 drug candidates, with three now in clinical trials. Lees meer
In our conversation, we explore:
• Why the pharmaceutical industry abandoned nature (and why that was a massive mistake)
• How Enveda built a system to decode unknown molecules in nature
• The deeply personal story of his mother’s battle with leukemia and how it shaped his life’s work
• Why old ideas, from immunotherapy to natural products, often hold the most latent potential
• How Enveda developed 18 drug candidates for about $1 million each instead of $10-15 million
• Enveda’s three leading drug candidates targeting eczema, obesity, and ulcerative colitis
• Why first-in-class medicines capture the vast majority of returns in pharma
• What competitive table tennis taught him about building companies
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Thank you to the partners who make this possible
Brex: The intelligent finance platform.
Ahrefs Brand Radar: Find your brand in AI results.
Persona: Trusted identity verification for any use case.
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Transcript: https://www.generalist.com/p/the-future-of-drug-discovery
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Timestamps
(00:00) Introduction to Viswa Colluru
(03:57) His father’s pharmacy and early exposure to Western and Ayurvedic medicine
(07:06) Early pull toward technology
(09:29) His mother’s leukemia diagno…
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How a 20-Person Startup Won Gold at the Math Olympiad—Tying With OpenAI & DeepMind (Tudor Achim, CEO of Harmonic)
14 april 2026 · 1 uur 5 min
Tudor Achim is the co-founder and CEO of Harmonic, a startup working to solve one of AI’s hardest problems: mathematical reasoning. In July 2024, Harmonic achieved gold-medal-level performance on International Math Olympiad problems alongside systems from OpenAI and Google DeepMind—but with a key difference: every proof Harmonic submitted was formally verified. Tudor's path to Harmonic wound through competitive piano, computational biology, and autonomous driving. He studied at Carnegie Mellon's music preparatory school, worked on machine learning at Quora, briefly pursued a PhD before dropping out, and then co-founded an autonomous driving company, Helm.ai. Harmonic's core product, Aristotle, uses reinforcement learning and the programming language Lean 4 to solve problems and verify solutions. Lees meer
In our conversation, we explore:
• Why Tudor believes math is the fundamental toolkit to understand the world
• How Harmonic uses hallucinations as a feature, not a bug
• How Aristotle works and the applications beyond pure mathematics
• The reinforcement learning process that lets Harmonic generate synthetic training data and solve problems humans have never attempted
• Why Tudor believes AI could surpass human mathematicians on specific tasks within 2–3 years
• Why the future of mathematics looks more like GitHub than academic journals
• The alternating pattern between intellect leaps and data leaps throughout scientific history
• How studying piano under an extraordinary teacher taught Tudor discipline and the value of sticking with hard problems
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Thank you to the partners who make this possible
Brex: The intelligent finance platform.
Guru: The AI source of truth for work.
Rippling: Stop wasting time on admin tasks, build your startup faster.
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Transcript: https://www.generalist.com/p/how-a-20-person-startup-won-gold
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Timestamps
(00:00) Intro
(03:34) From competitive piano to computer science
(06:28) The mathematical foundations of music (and why T…
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30% Of Network Engineers Are Retiring. What Happens Next? (Anil Varanasi, Co-Founder & CEO of Meter)
7 april 2026 · 1 uur 11 min
Anil Varanasi, co-founder and CEO of Meter, is building a new kind of networking company for the AI era. Alongside his brother Sunil, he has helped raise more than $350 million to challenge incumbents like Cisco with a vertically integrated approach spanning hardware, software, deployment, and ongoing operations, all delivered through a utility-style model. His view is that networking has remained largely unchanged for decades, even as it has become foundational to everything from AI workloads to real-world infrastructure. Meter’s ambition is not just to improve existing networks, but to make them autonomous over time. Before starting the company, Anil and Sunil were deeply involved in filmmaking, a background that still shapes their philosophy of building with cathedral-level craft across every layer of the stack. Lees meer
Together we explore:
• The “burden of knowledge” and why progress is getting harder across fields
• Why most companies over-index on technology and ignore business model innovation
• The three ways companies create advantage: technology, delivery, and business model
• How Meter’s trade-in model borrows from the automotive industry
• Why networking should function like electricity or water—not hardware
• Lessons from Japanese vending machine logistics for infrastructure deployment
• The hidden coordination problem behind vertically integrated companies
• Why Anil believes “common knowledge” is often wrong
• How COVID forced Meter to abandon geographic constraints and scale nationally
• The case for fully autonomous networks in a world of exploding demand
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Thank you to the partners who make this possible
.tech domains: An identity for builders at their core.
Granola: The app that might actually make you love meetings.
Brex: The intelligent finance platform.
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Timestamps
(00:00) Introduction to Anil Varanasi and Meter
(03:52) The burden of knowledge and slowing innovation
(08:18) Losing creativity vs gaining expertise
(10:25) What Met…
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Why One Superintelligence Is More Dangerous Than a Thousand (Vincent Weisser, CEO & Co-Founder of Prime Intellect)
24 maart 2026 · 1 uur 19 min
Much of the fear around AI centers on misalignment – the idea that powerful systems might act against human interests. Vincent Weisser worries about something different: what happens if advanced AI systems are perfectly aligned with the interests of a small group of institutions? That concern led him to co-found Prime Intellect, a startup building open infrastructure for training and deploying advanced AI models. Before Prime Intellect, Weisser helped organize Vitalik Buterin’s Zuzalu experiment and worked in decentralized science, where he helped unlock roughly $40 million in funding for unconventional research. Today, he’s applying that same open ethos to AI, working to ensure the tools that shape superintelligence remain broadly accessible rather than concentrated in the hands of a few. Lees meer
In our conversation, we explore:
• Why Vincent believes multiple superintelligences are safer than one
• The intellectual influences that shaped Vincent’s thinking about intelligence and progress, including David Deutsch and Nick Bostrom
• Prime Intellect’s evolution from distributed compute infrastructure to frontier model training and reinforcement learning tooling
• Why Vincent believes open and decentralized science could accelerate discovery
• The Zuzalu experiment and what it suggests about the future of scientific communities
• The role of aesthetics and craft in building technology
• Why Europe might have a cultural advantage in a post-superintelligence world
• Vincent’s predictions for the next five years of AI
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Transcript: https://www.generalist.com/p/why-one-superintelligence-is-more
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Timestamps
(00:00) Introduction to Vincent Weisser
(03:28) The book behind Prime Intellect’s name
(07:35) The case for suffering
(09:35) An over…
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Why Robots Still Struggle With Simple Tasks (And What Might Finally Change That) | Karol Hausman, Co-Founder & CEO of Physical Intelligence
17 maart 2026 · 1 uur 14 min
Karol Hausman is the co-founder and CEO of Physical Intelligence, a robotics company building a general-purpose “AI brain for the physical world.” The company has raised more than $1 billion in funding to develop foundation models that allow robots to operate across many machines, environments, and tasks rather than being programmed for a single purpose. The core thesis: the same scaling dynamics that transformed language models may also unlock robotic intelligence. But only if you resist every commercial pressure pushing you toward specialization. The central challenge isn’t mechanical design. It’s intelligence: how robots learn, generalize, and interact with a physical world that is far harder to simulate than it is to describe. Before launching Physical Intelligence, Karol worked at Google Brain and Stanford University, studying robot learning alongside researchers Sergey Levine and Chelsea Finn, who later became his co-founders. Lees meer
In our conversation, we explore:
• How growing up in a small town in Poland and watching Star Wars sparked Karol’s fascination with robots
• The moment a lecture from Sergey Levine convinced him to abandon his PhD research direction and pivot fully to deep learning
• Why robotics has historically lagged behind breakthroughs in language models
• The case for building a general “AI brain” for the physical world rather than a single specialized robot
• The role of real-world data in training robots, the limits of simulation, and how deployment could create a powerful data flywheel
• The return of reinforcement learning and the parallels between human learning and robot training
• The unique challenges of physical intelligence and why robots must operate with far higher reliability than language models
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Transcript: https://www.generalist.com/p/karol-hausman-physical-intelligen…
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America’s Electric Power Grid Is Broken. This Startup Is Trying to Fix It. (Zach Dell, co-founder & CEO of Base)
10 maart 2026 · 1 uur 12 min
For decades, America’s electrical system has rewarded utilities for building more infrastructure, not for lowering costs. The result is a grid that expanded but rarely improved. Zach Dell, co-founder and CEO of Base, is building a different kind of power company. In under three years, Base has grown into a vertically integrated business valued in the billions. It combines home batteries and software to store electricity when it is cheap and deliver it when demand spikes. Dell’s interest in energy began long before Base. In college, he tried to lease a Hawaiian lava field for a solar project. He also experimented with anaerobic digestion systems in India and worked at Blackstone and Thrive Capital, where he met his co-founder. His bet is simple but ambitious: the next phase of the grid will come from increasing utilization rather than constantly building new infrastructure. Lees meer
In our conversation, we explore:
• How a failed college solar project and early energy experiments in India pulled Zach into the power industry
• The lessons he absorbed from his parents, including truth-seeking, reinvention, and competitive endurance
• How the U.S. grid’s regulatory structure discourages innovation and why Texas’s deregulated market creates space for new power companies
• Why batteries are best understood as a time-shifting technology that increases grid utilization and reduces total system costs, not simply as energy generators
• Base’s “make, move, store, sell” framework for thinking about the full power stack
• How Base aims to become the first beloved energy company
• How Zach identified Justin as a world-class operator and built the trust needed to go all-in together on a non-obvious idea
• How aggressive AI adoption is compressing cycle times and why slow adopters risk falling behind
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Transcript: https://www.…
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Everyone Is Betting on Bigger LLMs. She's Betting They're Fundamentally Wrong. (Eve Bodnia, Founder & CEO of Logical Intelligence)
24 februari 2026 · 1 uur 8 min
Eve Bodnia is the co-founder and CEO of Logical Intelligence, which is developing energy-based reasoning models (EBMs) as an alternative to large language models. She argues that LLMs, which operate by recognizing and recombining patterns within language space, are structurally incapable of genuine reasoning. Eve's alternative: Kona — an EBM that reasons in abstract latent space, learns rules about the world rather than surface patterns, and can interface with language models as one output channel among many. Eve traces the core ideas behind her architecture to decades of work in symmetry groups, condensed matter physics, and brain science — fields that share, as she explains, the same underlying mathematics. In a public demo, Kona solved a complex reasoning task for roughly $4 in compute, compared to an estimated $15,000 using frontier LLMs. With Yann LeCun serving as founding chair of its technical board, Logical Intelligence sits at the center of a small but growing effort to rethink AI beyond language-based models. Lees meer
In our conversation, we explore:
• Why Eve believes LLMs can’t truly extrapolate knowledge, even at larger scale
• What energy-based reasoning models are—and where the “energy” concept comes from
• The $4 vs. $15,000 benchmark, and what it tells us about the cost of guessing vs. knowing
• How Logical Intelligence showed spontaneous knowledge transfer at just 16M parameters
• Why systems like chip design, surgical robotics, and power grids need more than probabilistic AI
• What formally verified code generation means for the future of programming
• Why the math behind particle physics also explains how the brain filters signal from noise
• How meeting Grigori Perelman as a teenager shaped Eve’s views on ego and ownership in science
• Why Eve believes humans must remain the constraint-setters in advanced AI
• How meditation, piano, and Eastern philosophy support her creative process
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How Bolt Survived An 85% Revenue Crash And Became Europe's Ride-Hailing Champion (Markus Villig, Founder & CEO)
19 februari 2026 · 1 uur 20 min
In 2013, on an Estonian island of just 10,000 residents, a teenager borrowed €5,000 from his parents and decided to take on Uber. Twelve years later, Markus Villig leads Bolt, a company operating in 50+ countries, generating nearly €3 billion in revenue, and standing as one of the only European tech companies competing at true global scale. Rather than going head-to-head with incumbents in their strongest markets, Bolt expanded through underserved cities, emerging economies, and overlooked segments of urban transport. When COVID erased 85% of its revenue in weeks, the company didn’t retreat; it staged a kind of corporate “eucatastrophe,” pivoting into food delivery across nearly 20 countries in what became a company-wide sprint. That same bias toward action now shapes Markus’s broader agenda: investing in defense tech for Estonia and Ukraine, pushing for capital markets reform, and advancing a contrarian thesis on autonomous vehicles. Lees meer
In this conversation, we discuss:
• How growing up in Soviet-occupied Estonia shaped Markus’s ambition and moral clarity
• How Bolt’s European ethos and long-term focus on driver retention became a structural advantage
• The marketplace models and capital discipline that allowed Bolt to outmaneuver better-funded rivals
• Why Bolt found breakout success in African markets after failing in 12 Western countries
• The 85% revenue collapse during COVID and the rapid food delivery pivot that reshaped the company
• Bolt’s partnerships with Stellantis and Pony.ai and its long-term bet on autonomous vehicles
• Why Ukrainian and Eastern European startups are often outperforming their Western peers
• Markus’s blueprint for closing Europe’s tech deficit and building globally competitive companies
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Timestamps
(00:00) Intro
(…
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The Private Company Bringing Nuclear Enrichment Back to America (Scott Nolan, CEO of General Matter)
3 februari 2026 · 1 uur 16 min
Roughly 20% of the U.S. power grid runs on nuclear energy. A quarter of the fuel behind it is headed toward a hard stop. In this episode, I sit down with Scott Nolan, founder and CEO of General Matter, to unpack why uranium enrichment has quietly become one of the most consequential industrial bottlenecks of the 21st century. While at Founders Fund, Scott spent over a year searching for an American enrichment company to back. When he couldn’t find one, he decided to build it himself. Less than a year after emerging from stealth, General Matter secured a historic enrichment site in Paducah, Kentucky, and was awarded a $900 million Department of Energy contract—marking one of the first serious efforts to rebuild domestic enrichment capacity ahead of the 2028 ban on Russian supply. Lees meer
In this episode, we discuss:
• Why enrichment is the missing link in America’s nuclear supply chain
• How the U.S. went from controlling 86% of global enrichment capacity to effectively none at commercial scale
• The science behind uranium enrichment and why it matters for next-generation reactors
• Why Scott applied the SpaceX playbook to nuclear after more than a decade in venture capital
• How General Matter is revitalizing the historic Paducah, Kentucky enrichment site
• The significance of General Matter’s $900 million Department of Energy contract
• The bipartisan political support for expanding nuclear energy
• Why Scott believes nuclear energy could grow 3-4x by 2050
• The parallels between America’s space and nuclear industries
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Timestamps
(00:00) Introduction to Scott Nolan
(03:11) General Matter’s mission to rebuild U.S. enrichment
(05:06) How the U.S. lost its edge
(06:28) The nuclear fuel cycle explained—and where enrichment fits
(08:30) Scott’s background: From SpaceX and Founders Fund to General Matter
(13:54) Lessons from SpaceX
(17:32) How Scott’s focus evolved over 13…
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Programming Sunlight: How Reflect Orbital Is Building Satellites to Redirect Light From Space (Ben Nowack, Founder & CEO)
20 januari 2026 · 1 uur 19 min
Most energy conversations start with scarcity. This one starts with abundance. Sunlight powers nearly everything on Earth, directly or indirectly. And yet we have almost no control over when or where we get it. Ben Nowack thinks that’s a solvable problem. Ben is the founder and CEO of Reflect Orbital, a company building satellites designed to redirect sunlight from space—not as a thought experiment, but as a product. The company nearly died before it worked. Eight months in, Ben had $300 left and was living in a garage. He made a deliberate decision to go $50,000 into credit card debt to finish critical tests. At one point, he was down to $21 of available credit. A month later, Reflect raised its first round. Today, the company is preparing to launch its first revenue-generating satellites. This is a conversation about building conviction, finding the real market, and what changes when a fundamental resource becomes programmable. Lees meer
In our conversation, we explore:
• How Reflect’s satellites work
• The surprising pivot from energy to lighting applications that made the business immediately viable
• Ben’s remarkable journey from building RC planes and X-ray machines in high school to founding Reflect
• Why previous attempts at space mirrors failed and what’s changed to make this possible now
• The near-death moment when Ben went $50,000 into credit card debt to keep his vision alive
• How Reflect plans to scale from moonlight-level brightness to potentially powering solar farms
• The company’s first satellite launches planned for this year, and their path to a full constellation
• The wide range of applications, from emergency response to municipal lighting to agriculture
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Timestamps
(00:00) Introduction to Ben Nowack
(02:26) What Reflect Orbital is building
(05:07) How the satellite constellation works
(08:00) What Reflect is launching this year
(10:35) Finding early markets
(13:43) Ben’s childhood and early building experiences
(22:04) What Ben lea…
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Nothing’s Carl Pei on Building a $1B Smartphone Company, Why He Left OnePlus After 10 Days of Retirement, and Why He Thinks About Death Every Week
13 januari 2026 · 1 uur 19 min
Carl Pei is the founder of Nothing, the consumer electronics company known for its distinctive transparent design language across smartphones and audio products. Before launching Nothing in 2020, Carl co-founded OnePlus, where he spent seven years helping build it into a major smartphone brand. But Carl’s instincts as a builder showed up much earlier. As a teenager, he taught himself to code by building Pokémon fan sites, all while moving between China, the U.S., and Sweden. That combination of early creation and constant change shaped a founder comfortable with uncertainty—and deeply motivated by questions bigger than products. Carl thinks often about time and mortality, is skeptical of early retirement, and believes creativity is humanity’s real advantage. In an industry obsessed with optimization, he’s focused on making technology feel meaningful again. Lees meer
In our conversation, we explore:
• The origins of Nothing’s transparent design language and how it helps differentiate the brand in a mature, competitive market
• Carl’s childhood fascination with mortality and how it continues to drive his ambition today
• Nothing’s multiple near-death experiences, from 80% defect rates on first products to fundraising struggles
• Why India has become a crucial market for Nothing’s smartphone business
• How Nothing approaches community involvement, including letting users invest alongside VCs
• The company’s approach to integrating AI features without overhyping the technology
• Carl’s admiration for Genghis Khan’s management style and talent acquisition approach
• The future of consumer electronics beyond smartphones
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Transcript: https://www.generalist.com/p/nothings-carl-pei-on-building-a-1b-smartphone-company
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Timestamps
(00:00) Introduction to Carl Pei and Nothing
(02:44) Nothing’s long-term vision
(06:33) How existential thinking shapes Carl’s motivation
(10:12) Why Carl’s planned sabbat…
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Why Being a Generalist VC Is a Competitive Advantage (Aydin Senkut, Founder & Managing Partner at Felicis Ventures)
9 december 2025 · 1 uur 17 min
Two decades ago, Aydin Senkut was a first-time fund manager with a thin track record to show prospective backers. LPs didn’t believe a solo GP, especially one without experience at a legacy firm, could build a lasting franchise. They were wrong. Today, Felicis is a Silicon Valley mainstay on its 10th fund, a $900M vehicle. Across its history, Felicis has backed a slew of winners, including Shopify, Canva, Crusoe, and dozens of other billion-dollar outcomes. Rather than specialize over time, Aydin has remained a true generalist, investing across markets and cycles. In this conversation, we dig into the frameworks, stories, and philosophies that shaped Felicis into what it is — and where Aydin believes the next decade of technology is heading. Lees meer
We explore:
• How growing up in Turkey with entrepreneur parents shaped Aydin’s approach to risk and investing
• Lessons from working alongside Larry Page and Sergey Brin during Google’s early days
• Why Felicis deliberately chose a generalist strategy when most VCs were specializing
• How international experience became a competitive advantage in finding global winners
• The mathematical case for portfolio diversification (50-70 companies per fund)
• Why valuation concerns are often overblown when revenue growth is exponential
• Felicis’s aggressive AI investment strategy and what other investors are missing
• The future of robotics and physical AI through companies like Skild AI
• Why learning and adapting rapidly is Felicis’s constitutional principle
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Timestamps
(00:00) Introduction
(03:09) How Aydin made his way to Silicon Valley
(06:15) What he learned from his entrepreneurial parents
(08:55) Learnings from the early days at Google
(15:05) The childhood roots of his investing philosophy
(16:31) Why rejection became a catalyst for his venture career
(19:28) Strategy behind Felicis's first $41M fund
(25:44) How his international backgro…
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Joey Krug on Prediction Markets, Crypto Treasuries & the Next Era of On-Chain Finance (Partner at Founders Fund)
2 december 2025 · 1 uur 16 min
Prediction markets are no longer a fringe curiosity. They are becoming one of the most revealing instruments in modern finance. Platforms like Polymarket, once a niche corner of crypto, now regularly clear billions in monthly volume as traders speculate on everything from political outcomes to sports to cultural events. Few people saw this future as early, or as clearly, as Joey Krug. Lees meer
A decade before prediction markets went mainstream, Joey dropped out of college to co-found Augur, the first decentralized prediction market protocol. He later became one of the most influential investors in the category by backing Polymarket at Founders Fund. In this conversation, Joey shares why the moment for prediction markets has finally arrived, what has changed, and how these markets are reshaping information flows across society.
We explore:
• The experimental mindset that led Joey from horse-racing predictions to mining bitcoin in high school
• Why Augur was the right idea at the wrong moment, and what it taught Joey about timing and infrastructure
• The product, liquidity, and founder-market fit signals that persuaded Founders Fund to back Polymarket
• Why resolution is the hardest problem in prediction markets, and how Polymarket approaches it
• How crypto treasury companies are emerging as a major force and where ETFs fit in
• Why mimetic behavior drives entire sectors and how savvy investors read those waves
• The rise and fall of Operation Choke Point and its impact on crypto
• How Founders Fund reframed Joey’s approach to evaluating founders, markets, and structural shifts
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Transcript: https://www.generalist.com/p/joey-krug-on-prediction-markets
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Timestamps
(00:00) Intro
(04:10) How Joey began making predictions with horse racing
(08:00) Why Joey began coding with Applesoft BASIC
(09:32) How Joey first …
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How a Solo Founder is Reshaping Global Finance (Parth Garg, CEO of Aspora)
18 november 2025 · 1 uur 9 min
In the summer of 2022, Parth Garg woke up in Bangalore to discover that his co-founder had fled the country and emailed their investors to tell them their company was dead. Just over three years later, Aspora is one of fintech’s fastest-growing startups. The company, which makes it faster and cheaper for India’s diaspora to send money home and access banking services, now processes close to half a billion dollars in volume every month and has earned a $500 million valuation with backing from elite investors like Hummingbird Ventures, Sequoia, and Greylock. Lees meer
In this conversation, Parth shares his journey from physics prodigy to fintech founder, offering insights into what it really takes to build resilience as a founder and how to create a culture where feedback flows freely, even without a co-founder to provide checks and balances.
We explore:
• The moment when Parth discovered his co-founder had left the country and told investors the company was shutting down
• How Parth’s childhood moving between cities in India and later to the UAE shaped his adaptability and entrepreneurial mindset
• His journey from physics prodigy to startup founder, including early ventures before Aspora
• The process of discovering product-market fit through structured experimentation after the initial business model failed
• Why the Indian diaspora represents a massive, underserved financial opportunity (1% of the population contributing 30% of deposits)
• How stablecoins dramatically reduced Aspora’s working capital requirements and transformed their business model
• The regulatory landscape for fintech and crypto in India and the impact of the GENIUS Act in the US
• Aspora’s vision to become a comprehensive cross-border bank serving multiple diaspora communities globally
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Times…
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How Do You Build a New Singapore? Inside Próspera’s Bet on Private Governance (Erick Brimen, Founder & CEO)
11 november 2025 · 1 uur 24 min
What if you could redesign the rules of society? Not tweak the margins, but start over entirely. That’s the question driving Erick Brimen, founder and CEO of Próspera, a private charter city in Roatán, Honduras. Próspera is a radical experiment in governance: a platform that lets governments and entrepreneurs build cities with new legal systems, regulatory frameworks, and institutions from the ground up. Brimen believes that governance itself can be innovated upon. That cities, like software, can be upgraded. His goal isn’t just to build one new jurisdiction, but to create an operating system for hundreds of prosperous, self-governing communities around the world. In this conversation, Erick and I explore what it really takes to build a modern Singapore from scratch — and why better governance might be humanity’s most powerful lever for progress. Lees meer
Together we explore:
• How Brimen’s childhood in Venezuela shaped his understanding of governance and poverty
• The historical precedents for charter cities like Dubai, Singapore, and Hong Kong
• Why common law, trusted dispute resolution, and dynamic governance are essential foundations
• How Próspera’s Governance-as-a-Service model aligns incentives between governments, operators, and residents
• The current state of Próspera in Honduras, including its three hubs and economic impact
• The political challenges Próspera has faced and how international arbitration has protected the project
• Why regulatory innovation enables industries like biotech, crypto, and advanced manufacturing to flourish
• How the model could be applied to “catch-up growth,” industry diversification, and accelerating growth in developed nations
• The vision for a modern Hanseatic League of charter cities operating on shared governance principles
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Why Psychedelics Might Be the Breakthrough That PTSD Patients Need (Kevin Ryan, The Godfather of NYC Tech)
28 oktober 2025 · 1 uur 8 min
Often called the godfather of NYC tech, Kevin Ryan is one of America’s most influential entrepreneurs and investors. He co-founded MongoDB, Business Insider, Gilt Groupe, Zola, and Transcend Therapeutics, and continues to build and back new companies each year through AlleyCorp. Earlier in his career, he led DoubleClick from a 20-person startup to a global leader, taking it public before its acquisition by Google. Lees meer
In this episode, Kevin shares his insights on two surprising pockets of the future that he’s betting on: psychedelics for mental health and AI-powered materials science. He unpacks how psychedelics are showing remarkable success in treating depression and PTSD, and why AI may discover revolutionary new materials, from helicopter blades to smartphone glass, that humans never imagined possible.
We explore:
• The promising results of psychedelics in treating depression, PTSD, and addiction
• How AI is accelerating materials discovery by exploring combinations humans wouldn’t try
• The challenges of building successful incubators and why most attempts fail
• How MongoDB lost $1 billion before turning a profit (and why it was worth it)
• Why e-commerce businesses like Gilt Groupe often struggle against physical retail
• How AlleyCorp plans for the future when shaping its investment strategy
• What it really costs society to imprison someone for a year
• The hard truth about Europe’s tech ecosystem and why it struggles to compete with the US
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Timestamps
(00:00) Intro
(04:30) How Kevin collaborated with Scott Adams
(07:11) The origins of AlleyCorp
(08:33) The challenge of incubation
(10:00) Why intellectual flexibility matters
(10:54) What made MongoDB a breakout success
(13:49) How shifting market dyna…
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The Trillion-Dollar AI Hardware Opportunity (Navin Chaddha, Managing Partner at Mayfield)
21 oktober 2025 · 1 uur
Navin Chaddha has spent three decades at the forefront of innovation—first as a founder, and now as managing partner at Mayfield, one of Silicon Valley’s oldest venture firms. A 17-time member of Forbes’ Midas List, Navin has guided generations of entrepreneurs through waves of technological change, from the dot-com boom to the AI era. At Mayfield, he champions a philosophy rooted in the firm’s founding ethos: investing in people, not markets. That approach has shaped his perspective on what it takes to build enduring companies. In this conversation, Navin shares why $1 trillion in infrastructure spending is fueling a new hardware renaissance, how stealth startups are going from zero to billions in a year, and what it means for the future of innovation. Lees meer
We explore:
• How “vibe coding” is democratizing technology creation through conversational, collaborative, and cognitive interfaces
• Why Navin believes the “vibe economy” will transform how we work, live, and play
• How Mayfield’s 56-year focus on “backing the jockey, not the racetrack” shapes its investment approach
• The massive opportunity in AI hardware infrastructure
• How stealth AI hardware startups are going from zero to billions in under a year
• How India’s tech ecosystem has evolved and where the real opportunities are today
• How cricket taught Navin crucial lessons about company building
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Transcript: https://www.generalist.com/p/the-trillion-dollar-ai-hardware-opportunity
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Timestamps
(00:00) Intro
(04:52) Cricket and its parallels to venture capital
(08:13) Navin’s journey to Silicon Valley
(10:28) Growing up in an entrepreneurial family
(12:00) Early mentors and becoming an “accidental entrepreneur”
(13:46) Navin’s first company and unconventional fundraisi…
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Biological Time Travel: How Cryopreservation Could Transform Medicine (Laura Deming, CEO & co-founder of Until)
14 oktober 2025 · 1 uur 6 min
From a child prodigy in a genetics lab to building a company that can pause life itself, Laura Deming has made a career out of chasing time. At just eight years old she became obsessed with aging. At eleven, she joined Cynthia Kenyon’s pioneering longevity lab. At seventeen, she launched The Longevity Fund—one of the first venture firms dedicated to extending human healthspan. Now, she’s tackling her boldest challenge yet: building a “pause button” for biology. Lees meer
As the co-founder of Until, Laura is developing reversible cryopreservation: the ability to cool living tissue to ultra-low temperatures, hold it there, and then bring it back fully functional. By achieving vitrification (the process of turning tissue into glass instead of ice), Until aims to make organ preservation, and eventually medical hibernation, a reality.
We cover:
Why longevity was once stigmatized, and what changed to make it one of the most credible fields in biotech today
Why Until’s approach focuses on preserving the living, not the dead
The physics and biological challenges of scaling reversible cryopreservation from embryos to human-sized organs
How vitrification is making cryopreservation possible
How this breakthrough could transform organ transplantation by eliminating time constraints (and eventually enable medical hibernation)
The philosophical and social implications of being able to “pause” life and effectively time travel into the future
How growing up homeschooled in New Zealand shaped Laura’s unconventional way of thinking
The story of how legendary biologist Cynthia Kenyon invited 11-year-old Laura into her lab, sparking her lifelong obsession with aging
How she learned to embrace her weirdness and trust it as her creative superpower
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Timestamps
(00:00) Intro
(04:55) How Lau…
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"This feels like 1996": Why a16z's Martin Casado believes the AI boom still has years to run (General Partner)
7 oktober 2025 · 1 uur 25 min
Martin Casado has lived through multiple tech waves—first as a founder, now as a16z’s leading voice on AI and infrastructure. He helped pioneer software-defined networking, then moved from academia to entrepreneurship, and today backs founders building at the frontier of technology as a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. In this conversation, Martin shares his unique perspective on the AI boom, his market-first investment philosophy, and why he believes we’re still in the early days of AI’s impact. Lees meer
We explore:
* Martin’s path from game engines and simulations to investing at Andreessen Horowitz
* Why Martin believes we’re only in “1996” of the AI boom cycle with years to run before any bubble
* Why Martin approaches investing “from markets in” rather than “from companies out”
* Why the AI coding market represents a potential $3 trillion opportunity
* The transformation of Andreessen Horowitz from a small generalist partnership to a specialized 600-person organization
* The concerning dominance of Chinese companies in open source AI models
* Why Martin thinks AGI discussions encourage “lazy thinking” and obscure meaningful conversations
* How World Labs is solving the 3D representation problem that could unlock robotics, VR, and more
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Timestamps
(00:00) Intro
(04:50) Martin’s early career
(08:35) Martin’s shift from academia to founding his own company during an economic downturn
(11:25) The story behind Martin joining Andreessen Horowitz
(17:55) Ben Horowitz’s most impactful advice
(19:49) How Andreessen Horowitz has transformed since 2016
(22:20) Why product experience matters more than technical prowess for infrastructure investing
(26:26) Martin’s market-first investment philosophy
(28:39) Andreessen Horowitz’s framework for asses…
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How to be Agentic in the Age of AI (Cate Hall, CEO of Astera)
30 september 2025 · 1 uur 11 min
Cate Hall is the CEO of Astera, a private foundation focused on AI risk and frontier technology. Before leading Astera, Cate’s unconventional career path took her from practicing law (including work on Supreme Court briefs) to becoming the world’s top-ranked female poker player in 2016. After overcoming personal struggles with addiction, she co-founded Alvea, a biotech company developing shelf-stable vaccines for pandemic response, before joining Astera. In this conversation, Cate shares insights on human psychology, agency as a learnable skill, and why she believes AI’s biggest risk may be a “soft takeover” in which humans gradually lose independence and meaning. Lees meer
We explore:
• How Cate’s approach to poker focused on reading people rather than pure game theory, and why this contrarian strategy worked
• Why people who always try to “play” high status in conversations often have psychological issues
• The critical difference between ambition and agency, and why they’re often confused
• How LSD helped Cate break out of her career path and discover her own agency
• Why Cate believes we need a slowdown in AI development to develop the social technologies to manage it
• The challenge of maintaining meaning in human life as AI systems increasingly mediate our experiences
• How Astera is using investment as a philanthropic tool to help steer frontier technology development
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Timestamps
(00:00) Introduction to Cate Hall
(03:56) Cate’s role as CEO of Astera
(04:52) Cate’s poker career and focus on live reading
(07:02) The intuitive ‘people radar’ Cate has in identifying exceptional talent
(11:16) Status dynamics in conversations
(16:13) The parallel between poker and startup evolution
(19:18) The German wave in poker and game theory
(24:22) Cate’s legal career and Supreme Court experience
(27:05) The differ…
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Can Humans Stay Smart in the Age of AI? (David Krakauer, President of the Santa Fe Institute)
23 september 2025 · 1 uur 21 min
David Krakauer is a leading complex systems researcher and the president of the Santa Fe Institute, a unique institution dedicated to studying complex systems across disciplines. In this episode, David challenges conventional wisdom about AI, arguing that large language models pose a more immediate threat to humanity than commonly discussed existential risks—not by destroying us directly, but by eroding our cognitive capabilities through addictive, low-quality information. Lees meer
We explore:
• Why David believes LLMs aren't intelligent at all and how the AI community misunderstands emergence
• The three dimensions of intelligence: inference, representation, and strategy—and which one LLMs lack
• How AI acts as a "competitive" rather than "complementary" cognitive technology, atrophying our thinking abilities
• What makes great minds unique, from analogical reasoning to the cultivation of unconscious creativity
• How Cormac McCarthy's approach to knowledge and creativity offers lessons for the AI age
• Why David believes the greatest threat from AI isn't existential risk but cognitive atrophy
• How to protect your mind against AI's addictive pull and maintain cognitive autonomy
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Timestamps
(00:00) Intro
(04:39) The Santa Fe Institute’s approach to complex systems
(06:45) Murray Gell-Mann’s ‘Odysseus vs. Apollonian’
(10:35) How SFI was shaped by the legacy of Los Alamos
(12:45) Traits David looks for in great minds
(14:43) Cormac McCarthy on naivety and how thoughtful people treat knowledge
(19:24) A simple explanation of complexity science
(22:50) Why vantage point doesn’t matter when studying systems
(24:36) Aesthetic preferences among complexity scientists
(26:07) Films and directors with complexity science themes
(29:57) Why …
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Building Beautiful Homes with Robots: The Future of Construction (Salar al Khafaji, CEO & Founder of Monumental)
16 september 2025 · 1 uur 20 min
Salar al Khafaji is the CEO and founder of Monumental, a company building autonomous robots that assemble buildings, starting with its bricklaying system. After selling his previous software company to Palantir, Salar took time to explore big industries ripe for disruption before landing on construction—a sector that represents a significant portion of GDP yet has seen decades of productivity stagnation. Lees meer
We explore:
• Why construction represents a massive opportunity for technological innovation
• How Monumental's system of three robots works together to lay bricks autonomously
• Why Europe's severe bricklayer shortage has created wages as high as €80/hour
• The post-WWII shift away from beautiful architecture and how to bring it back
• Why operating as a subcontractor rather than selling robots makes business sense
• The challenges of building a hardware startup in Europe's tech ecosystem
• How Palantir's "cult-like" culture influenced Monumental's approach to company building
• The balance between structure and productive chaos in scaling a startup
• Why the best robotics companies solve specific problems rather than building general-purpose machines
• How to foster ambition in Europe's startup ecosystem
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Transcript: https://www.generalist.com/p/building-beautiful-homes-with-robots-salar-al-khafaji
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Timestamps
(00:00) Introduction to Salar
(04:44) Overview of Monumental’s work and mission
(06:25) Salar’s journey after selling his company to Palantir
(11:46) Stagnation in the construction industry
(14:21) The mental shift from software to hardware entrepreneurship
(16:10) Salar’s funding framework
(18:21) The post-WWII decline in constructing beautiful buildings
(20:23) Choosing bricklaying as the first construction trade to tack…
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What Makes Something Alive? Assembly Theory and the Origins of Life (Sara Walker, Theoretical Physicist)
9 september 2025 · 1 uur 17 min
Sara Walker is a theoretical physicist who studies the origins of life and the author of Life as No One Knows It. As AI prompts us to rethink what consciousness, intelligence, and life really mean, Sara’s work offers a provocative framework for understanding these questions. In this conversation, Sara shares how she developed assembly theory—a revolutionary approach suggesting that complex objects like DNA molecules (and even microphones) are evidence of life’s processes. Lees meer
We explore:
• Why Sara believes we need entirely new laws of physics to understand life
• How assembly theory quantifies the transition from non-life to life with a measurable threshold
• Why complex objects like DNA and microphones are evidence of evolutionary processes
• How our perception of objects as “physical” or “abstract” depends on their temporal scale
• Why traditional definitions of life fail as scientific frameworks
• How assembly theory could revolutionize our search for extraterrestrial life
• The surprising connection between urban atmospheres and biosignatures
• Why Sara sees fundamental differences between computation and physical construction
• How assembly theory views AI systems and large language models
• The creative parallels between theoretical physics and conceptual art
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Timestamps
(00:00) Intro
(03:32) Sara’s background and approach to studying the origins of life
(08:21) Sara’s journey to theoretical physics
(11:40) How the “origin of life” field has evolved since she began her research
(17:35) Introduction to assembly theory and its core principles
(23:11) How assembly theory differs from traditional definitions of life
(25:53) The historical parallels between assembly theory and Newtonian physics
(31:45) Life vs. alive
(34:33) How dabbling across disciplines led to Sara’s focus and partne…
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Reviving Forgotten Technologies: How Airships, Supersonic Flight, and Geothermal Energy Could Transform Our World (Eli Dourado, Head of Strategic Investments at Astera Institute)
19 augustus 2025 · 1 uur 11 min
Eli Dourado is Head of Strategic Investments at Astera Institute, a foundation funding transformative science and technology across energy, aerospace, AI, and other frontier sectors. Before joining Astera, he worked as a "regulatory hacker" at Boom Supersonic, where he helped navigate complex aviation regulations to make supersonic flight viable again. Lees meer
In our conversation, we explore:
• How Eli's refusal to be pigeonholed led to a career reviving forgotten technologies
• How lifting the 1973 ban on supersonic flight could reshape aviation, after decades of stagnation and regression
• Why airships need to be massive to be economical, and how they could transform global logistics
• The untapped potential of geothermal energy and why drilling economics are the key bottleneck
• Why titanium could be the next material to undergo a manufacturing revolution
• How reading regulatory fine print can unlock trillion-dollar industries
• Why AI might not automatically solve our productivity problems
• The relationship between technological stagnation and potential civilizational collapse
• The fascinating possibility of harvesting antimatter in space
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Timestamps
(00:00) Intro and Eli's background
(04:11) Eli’s work at Astera Institute
(07:53) The frontier sectors Astera is betting on
(08:57) Eli’s path from academia to tech investing
(13:06) How Eli became involved with supersonic flight
(15:42) Why the airline industry entered “the great regression”
(18:38) The origins of the overland supersonic flight ban
(20:37) Working as a "regulatory hacker" at Boom Supersonic
(27:30) The current state of supersonic flight technology
(30:40) Eli’s cargo airship research
(37:20) What sparked Eli’s interest in airships
(40:23) Why airships fell out of favor as a way to travel
(42:53) How Jim Coutre found a path to profitable airships
(47:00) The pros, cons, and profit …
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Inside General Catalyst’s $1B+ Bet on Fixing Healthcare (Hemant Taneja, CEO and Managing Partner)
12 augustus 2025 · 1 uur 16 min
Hemant Taneja is the CEO and Managing Partner of General Catalyst, a venture capital firm that has evolved into what he describes as a "strategic conglomerate with venture capital at its core." Under his leadership, GC has expanded beyond traditional investing to become an organization focused on transforming entire industries from healthcare to call centers to insurance. Lees meer
In this conversation, Hemant unpacks General Catalyst's unusual structure and ambitious mission. He shares why his firm acquired the hospital system Summa Health in Ohio, why AI roll-ups will create some of the most valuable IPOs in the coming decade, and how servant leadership principles have reshaped his approach to building organizations.
We explore:
• How General Catalyst evolved from a traditional VC firm into a multi-business "strategic conglomerate"
• Why Hemant believes the next decade requires completely rethinking what excellence means in company building
• How GC's healthcare transformation company (HATCo) is working to reinvent the American healthcare system
• Why GC made the unprecedented move to acquire Summa Health, a hospital system in Ohio
• How servant leadership principles learned from Ken Chenault transformed Hemant's approach to building organizations
• Why AI is accelerating transformation across industries faster than anyone predicted
• How General Catalyst built its global seed practice through unusual acquisitions of La Famiglia, Venture Highway, and Wayfinder
• Why Hemant believes AI roll-ups of labor arbitrage businesses will become some of the most valuable IPOs in the next decade
• The changing profile of successful founders in an era of rapid technological change
• How General Catalyst thinks about balancing profit and purpose across its portfolio
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Timestamps
(00:00) Intro
(02:16) General Catalyst’s ambition to help shape the future
(04:23) How General Catalyst challenges founders …
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The Future of Crypto: Stablecoins, AI Integration, and the Path to Mass Adoption (Jesse Walden, Founder and Managing Partner at Variant)
5 augustus 2025 · 1 uur 13 min
Jesse Walden is the founder and managing partner of Variant Fund, an early-stage crypto fund backing projects like Uniswap, Phantom, World, Morpho, Flashbots, Farcaster, Blockaid, Blackbird, and many more. Before launching Variant in 2020, he was an investor at a16z crypto, where he supported early-stage builders shaping the future of Web3. Lees meer
In this episode, Jesse offers a wide-ranging view of where crypto stands today and where it’s headed. He unpacks the rise of stablecoins, the role of meme coins in capturing attention, and why NFTs are evolving rather than disappearing. We explore the challenges of interoperability between blockchains, the shift from invention to productization, and the intersection of crypto and AI, two technologies that may supercharge one another’s progress.
In our conversation, we explore:
• The fundamental difference between AI (technology of abundance) and crypto (technology of scarcity), and why the two technologies are complementary
• How the GENIUS Act is transforming the regulatory landscape for stablecoins and creating unprecedented bipartisan support
• How DAOs 2.0 will return to their original vision: automation at the center with humans at the edges
• How meme coins generate hype and the value of attention
• Why user experience still holds Web3 back and what needs to change
• What still needs to be solved to scale crypto, including true cross-chain interoperability
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Timestamps
(00:00) Intro
(02:19) An overview of Variant’s work
(03:03) Jesse’s vision of a tokenized future and why it makes sense
(06:19) The state of crypto since 2022
(10:46) The GENIUS Act: what it is and how it could reshape stablecoins
(14:28) How stablecoins are both a payment tool and a communication layer
(17:07) Why stablecoins are not yet convenient in the US
(19:06) Variant’s investment in stablecoins and blockchains
(21:33) The policy and regulation crypto still needs …
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AI Agents Are Here: What They Can Already Do—and What’s Next (Stanislas Polu and Harrison Chase)
29 juli 2025 · 1 uur 18 min
What’s next for AI agents, and how will they change the way we work? In this conversation, Stanislas Polu (CEO of Dust, formerly research at OpenAI) and Harrison Chase (CEO of LangChain, one of the most influential open-source AI frameworks) unpack the current state and future of AI agents. They reflect on their early conversations in the pre-ChatGPT days, how the landscape has evolved, and where it's headed next. Lees meer
Stan and Harrison share lessons from building today’s agent infrastructure—from chat interfaces to the future of ambient, autonomous systems—and discuss the challenges of operating in the chaotic "fog of AI." We dig into the open questions, early insights, and messy realities of building in today’s fast-moving AI landscape.
In this conversation, we explore:
• What sparked Stan and Harrison’s early interest in LLMs
• The pre-ChatGPT era and how the AI landscape has evolved since late 2022
• High-leverage use cases for agents inside Dust and LangChain today
• The critical differences between AI workflows and true agents—and why agents may unlock more powerful, long-term solutions
• Why reliability is the main blocker to ambient agents
• Real-world enterprise use cases for AI agents across customer support, sales, and engineering
• How to build in the “fog of AI” and the challenge of maintaining product vision when foundations shift every six months
• Strategies for creating defensibility in a world where tech giants can quickly replicate features
• The future of multi-agent systems and how they could transform enterprise productivity
• The current state of the AI talent market
• And much more
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Timestamps
(00:00) Intro
(02:33) Brief overviews of Dust and LangChain
(03:30) The early days of LLM product development
(11:02) Harrison's journey to founding LangChain
(14:35) Dust's evolution and focus on enterprise productivity
(17:15) Tobi’s AI memo
(18:42) An overview of…
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The Decade of Data (Tomasz Tunguz)
22 juli 2025 · 1 uur 4 min
Tomasz Tunguz has spent almost two decades turning data into investment insights. After an impressive run at Redpoint Ventures, where he backed Looker, Expensify, Monte Carlo, and more, Tomasz launched Theory Ventures in 2022. His debut fund, which closed at $238 million, was followed 19 months later by a $450 million second fund. Lees meer
Theory’s goal is simple but striking: to build an “investing corporation” where researchers, engineers, and operators sit alongside investors, arming the partnership with real‐time market maps, in‑house AI tooling, and domain expertise. Centered on data, AI, and crypto infrastructure, the firm operates at the very heart of many of today’s most consequential technological shifts.
In our conversation, we explore:
• How Theory’s “investing corporation” model works
• Why crypto exchanges could create a viable path to public markets for small-cap software companies
• The looming power crunch—why data centers could consume 15% of U.S. electricity within five years
• Stablecoins’ rapid ascent as major banks route 5‑10% of U.S. dollars through them
• Why Ethereum faces an existential challenge similar to AWS losing ground to Azure in the AI era
• Why Tomasz believes today’s handful of agents will become 100+ digital co‑workers by year‑end
• Why Meta is betting billions on AR glasses to change how we interact with machines
• How Theory Ventures uses AI to accelerate market research, deal analysis, and investment decisions
• Much more
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Transcript: https://www.generalist.com/p/the-decade-of-data-with-tomasz-tunguz
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Timestamps
(00:00) Intro
(03:37) Tomasz's background and journey to founding Theory Ventures
(04:57) Theory's data-driven approach to venture
(09:25) The importance of functional experts on investment teams
(11:45) Theory's focus on data systems an…
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Why the Real Computer Revolution Never Happened (Alan Kay & Anjan Katta)
15 juli 2025 · 1 uur 29 min
I'm thrilled to share this very special episode of The Generalist—one I've been looking forward to for a long time. Today, we tackle one of the most urgent questions of our time: What should computing look like in the age of AI? Lees meer
I'm joined by two extraordinary guests: Alan Kay, a pioneer of modern computing whose vision helped shape the personal computer revolution, and Anjan Katta, founder of Daylight, who's building a radically reimagined personal computer designed for deep thinking in our AI-saturated world. This conversation has been months in the making, and I couldn't be more excited to bring these two brilliant minds together.
We explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping our relationship with computers, whether current computing paradigms serve us well as AI becomes ubiquitous, and what new models of human-computer interaction we might need to thrive alongside intelligent machines.
This is a conversation about reclaiming agency in an age of algorithms—and imagining computing tools that amplify human intelligence rather than replace it. I think you're going to love it.
We explore:
• Why Alan believes the "computer revolution" commercialized in the wrong direction, missing the deeper humanistic vision of early computing pioneers
• How the structure of information, from pagination to platforms, shapes the way we think
• How Daylight is creating a reading and writing-focused device that helps access our "prefrontal cortex" rather than our "lizard brain"
• The concept of a magical medium, and how computing might help us become our best selves
• Why Marshall McLuhan's media theories predicted our current technological predicament decades before it happened
• The critical difference between intelligence and wisdom in computing systems, and why wisdom should be our focus
• How thoughtful constraints in computing design can lead to better thinking and more meaningful interaction
• The urgency of developing systems thinking in a world facing complex…
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No Rivals: The Founders Fund Story (Audio Edition)
8 juli 2025 · 49 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.generalist.com Lees meer
Today’s podcast is a little different.
Instead of a new interview, you’ll hear Part I of “No Rivals,” The Generalist’s definitive four-part deep dive into Founders Fund — Silicon Valley’s most controversial (and consistently top-performing) venture firm.
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What’s inside Part I
• How Peter Thiel and team set out to rewrite VC’s playbook
• The contrarian philosophy behind their earliest bets
• The people, power dynamics, and inflection points that shaped the firm
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Want the full story?
Parts II–IV (a 3h 15m extended cut packed with performance data and insider interviews) are available to Generalist Premium members. Join here → generalist.com/subscribe
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As a Premium member, you’ll also unlock:
• Case studies on Kleiner Perkins, USV, Tiger Global, and more
• Exclusive interviews
• Private startup databases
• Tactical operator guides
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All designed to give you an investing and operating edge.
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Skip ahead
(00:00) Intro
(01:30) PART I: THE PROPHET
(05:42) Pals
(11:16) Spite Store
(18:21) Clarium Calls
(21:57) Gate-Crasher
(28:55) Parker
(40:22) Moonshots
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Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity: Lessons from AI, Pandemics, and Nuclear Threats (Toby Ord, Author of "The Precipice")
24 juni 2025 · 1 uur 19 min
A quick note before today's podcast: Last Thursday, we launched Part 2 of our four-part series on Founders Fund. If you haven’t read it yet, you can catch up on Part 1 here and Part 2 here. For everyone following along, Part 3 drops this Thursday, June 26th. Lees meer
In the meantime, we hope you enjoy today's podcast episode below.
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How close are we to the end of humanity? Toby Ord, Senior Researcher at Oxford University’s AI Governance Initiative and author of The Precipice, argues that the odds of a civilization-ending catastrophe this century are roughly one in six. In this wide-ranging conversation, we unpack the risks that could end humanity’s story and explore why protecting future generations may be our greatest moral duty.
We explore:
• Why existential risk matters and what we owe the 10,000-plus generations who came before us
• Why Toby believes we face a one-in-six chance of civilizational collapse this century
• The four key types of AI risk: alignment failures, gradual disempowerment, AI-fueled coups, and AI-enabled weapons of mass destruction
• Why racing dynamics between companies and nations amplify those risks, and how an AI treaty might help
• How short-term incentives in democracies blind us to century-scale dangers, along with policy ideas to fix it
• The lessons COVID should have taught us (but didn’t)
• The hidden ways the nuclear threat has intensified as treaties lapse and geopolitical tensions rise
• Concrete steps each of us can take today to steer humanity away from the brink
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Timestamps
(00:00) Intro
(02:20) An explanation of existential risk, and the study of it
(06:20) How Toby’s interest in global poverty sparked his founding of Giving What We Can
(11:18) Why Toby chose to study under Derek Parfit at Oxford
(14:40) Population ethics, and how Parfit’s philosophy looked ahead to future generations
(19:05) An introduction to existential risk
(22:4…
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Are We Alone In The Universe? Sara Seager on Exoplanets, Venus, and the Hunt for Alien Life (Astrophysicist and Planetary Scientist at MIT)
17 juni 2025 · 1 uur 7 min
Why search for life beyond Earth? For MIT astrophysicist and MacArthur Genius Fellow Sara Seager, it’s not just a scientific question—it’s a deeply human one. Like creating art or studying philosophy, the search taps into our primal curiosity about who we are and whether we’re alone. Sara is a pioneer in the field of exoplanets: planets that orbit stars other than our Sun. Her early work was met with skepticism. Today, she’s one of the most respected voices in the field, with discoveries that have redefined our understanding of the universe. From detecting alien atmospheres to reimagining where life might exist, she shares how entrepreneurial thinking and intuition are fueling groundbreaking discoveries. Lees meer
In our conversation, we explore:
• An explanation of exoplanets and the importance of their discovery
• The key technologies that enabled exoplanet detection
• Sara’s controversial discovery of phosphine gas in Venus's atmosphere and why it could be a sign of life
• An overview of Project Starshade, why NASA has currently shelved it, and why Sara continues to work on it anyway
• How scientific innovation often requires challenging authority and conventional wisdom
• How Sara approaches her research portfolio like an investment strategy, but with an inverse risk profile
• Why AI may someday explore planets we’ll never reach—and what that means for humanity
• Much more!
—
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Timestamps
(00:00) Intro
(04:07) What is an exoplanet?
(04:33) The diverse types of exoplanets, including the common Sub-Neptune type
(06:40) Why the search for habitable planets matters
(08:57) The timeline for finding life outside of Earth
(10:15) Parallels between professors and entrepreneurs
(11:37) Sara’s background and inspirations
(15:48) Why the study of exoplanets was initially viewed with skepticism
(18:38) Te…
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Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading (Nadia Asparouhova, Writer and Researcher)
10 juni 2025 · 1 uur 19 min
Some ideas spread like wildfire. Others vanish before they take root—too strange, too threatening, too forgettable. In this episode of The Generalist, I sit down with Nadia Asparouhova, author of Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading, to explore the category of “antimemes”: ideas that actively resist being remembered or shared. Drawing from science fiction, epidemiology, and her own unusual cognitive wiring, Nadia maps the shadowy terrain of information that doesn’t want to be shared. We talk about taboos, group chat dynamics, and the hidden incentives shaping what spreads and what doesn’t. Lees meer
In our conversation, we explore:
• What antimemes are and why some ideas actively resist being remembered or shared
• How taboos, cognitive biases, and uncomfortable truths function as self-censoring ideas
• The 2x2 matrix of ideas: memes, antimemes, supermemes, and forgettable non-memes
• How group chats are changing idea evolution by acting as high-trust, high-density incubators
• How internet slang terms like “vibes” and “cringe” reflect deeper shifts in how we share information
• Why great innovation often comes from people willing to look foolish
• The critical roles of "truth tellers" and "champions" in preserving important ideas
• How memory, aphantasia, and synesthesia shaped Nadia’s sensitivity to forgotten ideas
• How local knowledge (wisdom) differs from global knowledge (facts), and why it’s harder to pass down
• How Nadia’s experience as a parent shifted her thinking from nurture to nature
• How to protect your mental space in an age of information overload
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Timestamps
(00:00) Intro
(04:45) A brief overview of Nadia’s writing
(06:24) Richard Dawkins’s definition of a meme
(08:02) Antimemes and a brief overview of the bo…
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Creating Stars in a Bottle: The Race to Commercialize Fusion Energy (Vinod Khosla & Bob Mumgaard)
3 juni 2025 · 55 min
While the world fights over chips, one company is building the power supply to run them all. In this episode of The Generalist, I'm joined by Bob Mumgaard, CEO and co-founder of Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), and Vinod Khosla, legendary venture capitalist and founder of Khosla Ventures. With over 800 employees and $2 billion in funding, CFS has accelerated the timeline for commercial fusion from being perpetually "30 years away" to potentially just a few years out. If CFS succeeds, it will unlock limitless clean energy for humanity, powering everything from AI to water desalination. Lees meer
In our conversation, we explore:
• How fusion could transform everything from AI to water desalination and agriculture
• The fundamental science behind fusion energy and how it differs from traditional nuclear fission
• The breakthrough in magnet technology that changed the timeline for fusion
• The strategic approach of partnering with existing power plant operators to rapidly scale fusion deployment
• Why fusion is essential for powering AI and other energy-intensive innovations
• CFS’s method for creating fusion using magnetic fields
• The final hurdles to completing SPARC, the company’s demonstration reactor
• The six-stage roadmap for fusion development, where CFS currently stands, and when they expect to begin delivering power to the grid
• What clean energy could make possible for future technologies and industries
• The geopolitical implications of a world with abundant clean energy
• Much more
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Thank you to the partners who make this possible
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Timestamps
(00:00) Intro
(04:13) An overview of fusion energy, and why it’s so important
(08:23) The connection between AI and fusion energy
(10:20) How Bob became interested in fusion
(13:06) The importance of entrepreneurs in bringing crazy ideas to life
(14:55) The advancement in magnets tha…
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The Semiconductor Century with Chris Miller (Author of “Chip War”)
27 mei 2025 · 1 uur 4 min
What really determines success in the age of AI? Is it better models or broader reach? Chris Miller, author of the bestselling book Chip War, explains how semiconductors have become the strategic center of gravity for global power, economics, and innovation. As a professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, Chris has spent nearly a decade studying how chips are reshaping geopolitics and why they're essential to understanding everything from military capabilities to artificial intelligence. Lees meer
In our conversation, we explore:
• Why diffusion and adoption of technology are more important markers of impact than actual capabilities
• What most people got wrong about DeepSeek's breakthrough, but why China's AI talent still matters
• Huawei's surprising transformation from telecom giant to potential AI powerhouse
• The critical role India and Southeast Asia may play in chip manufacturing
• How the Trump administration's policies will impact the technological battle
• Why China will likely achieve semiconductor self-sufficiency in mainstream chips within five years
• Barriers to rebuilding a domestic chip industry in the US
• The massive infrastructure investments being made in AI computing power
• The implications of Stargate
• And much more!
—
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Timestamps
(00:00) Intro
(04:06) A brief overview of Chip War
(06:10) Why Chris believes we are on the cusp of a new technological era
(08:03) Why the diffusion of technology is the true marker of impact
(09:29) Chris’s thoughts on enterprise adoption of AI
(11:03) Chris's personal use of AI tools
(12:24) The significance of DeepSeek and China's AI capabilities
(17:05) The main players in the Chinese AI space
(18:34) A case for Huawei as a full-stack player
(20:33) LLM price trends, and why DeepSeek isn't assured to win eme…
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How Anduril Is Reimagining the Defense Industry: Faster Tech, Ethical AI, and a New Kind of Deterrence (Trae Stephens, Co-Founder & Executive Chairman at Anduril)
20 mei 2025 · 1 uur 27 min
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Vanta: Automate compliance and simplify security.
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What happens when you apply Silicon Valley’s speed and innovation to reinvent defense technology? Trae Stephens, co-founder of Anduril, is running that experiment in real-time. His company creates software-driven, hardware-enabled autonomous systems designed to transform national security capabilities amid growing global tensions.
In today's episode, Trae and I dive deep into the ethics of warfare, technology's evolving role in national defense, the complexities of Great Power conflict with China, and how Trae’s personal faith shapes his vision for responsible innovation.
We explore:
* An overview of Anduril's mission and platform
* A look at the "Four Americas" and why we need a strong military
* How Trae uncovered gaps in intelligence that led to Anduril’s founding
* The “don’t work at Anduril” campaign and how transparency filters talent
* A glimpse at Anduril’s reading list and the case for organizational reading lists
* An overview of Lattice, the software behind every platform Anduril builds
* Why too much innovation can be a problem
* How Anduril took over the IVAX project from Microsoft
* Why single domain defense companies won’t win
* An overview of Just War Theory, and how it guides Anduril’s mission
* How the U.S. is stacking up against China’s intelligence and military
* How Anduril’s mission is compatible with Trae’s faith
* Lessons from Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, and Palmer Luckey
* And much more!
Timestamps
(00:00) Intro
(04:33) An overview of Anduril
(05:31) The surprising way Trae got into Georgetown
(11:58) Trae’s work with computational linguistics
(13:37) “The four Americas” and why we need a strong military
(16:05) How Trae uncovered gaps in intelligence and military that prompted Anduril’s founding
(20:49) Why …
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Inside Substack’s $650M Playbook for the Future of Media (Chris Best & Hamish McKenzie, Co-Founders)
6 mei 2025 · 1 uur 26 min
In a world where attention is fragmented and algorithms rule the content landscape, Chris Best and Hamish McKenzie are taking a radically different approach with Substack. Rather than chasing clicks, Substack focuses on a simple yet powerful idea: creators should own their work and make money directly from their audience through paid subscriptions. With over 5 million paid subscriptions and tens of millions of active readers, Substack has turned this model into a transformative force in media. Lees meer
In this episode, Chris and Hamish unpack how they’re reshaping creator economics, navigating AI’s role in creativity, and enabling a new era for writers, from serialized fiction to short-form video. Their bet? That if content adds real value—whether it educates, entertains, or helps people earn—audiences will pay for it.
In our conversation, we explore:
* How Substack grew from a simple newsletter tool to a multi-format media platform with 5 million+ paid subscriptions
* Why the "soul connection" between creators and audiences is becoming more valuable in an AI-dominated world
* The inside story of Substack's clash with Elon Musk and how it ultimately strengthened their platform
* Why the ceiling for great writing and culture might be much higher than we're currently imagining
* How Substack's subscription model creates dramatically better economics for creators than ad-supported platforms
* Chris's "grand unified theory" for how AI will influence content creation and consumption
* Why their short-form content isn't just a "sticky trick" but a pathway to deeper engagement and discovery
* The future of traditional prestige media brands
* Much more
Thank you to the partners who make this possible
Vanta: Automate compliance and simplify security.Brex: The banking solution for startups.WorkOS: The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS.
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Timestamps
(00:00) Intro
(05:27) An overview of Substack and its current scale
(06:53) The origin story of S…
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Lessons from 20 Years of Venture Capital (Roelof Botha, Managing Partner and Steward at Sequoia Capital)
29 april 2025 · 1 uur 21 min
Sequoia Capital is synonymous with outstanding performance, backing companies like Apple, Google, Airbnb, and Stripe. In today’s episode, I chat with Roelof Botha, Sequoia’s Managing Partner, about what it takes to see the future first, capitalize on it intelligently once it arrives, and help founders build enduring companies. Lees meer
Roelof is especially well-placed to discuss such matters. Not only has Sequoia navigated more than 50 years of market cycles, Roelof has personally spent more than 20 years helping shape the firm’s unique approach. From honing a philosophy rooted in clear thinking and long-term vision to asking the tough question of "What would you do with only 12 months of runway?" Roelof breaks down the mindset that’s helped Sequoia and its founders thrive, and what others can learn from it.
In our conversation, we explore:
* The psychological biases that most frequently derail investors
* Why the first-mover advantage is often a disadvantage in technology
* Why excess funding often undermines innovation
* The story of PayPal's near-death experience and how it sparked its most critical innovations
* How Roelof’s training as an actuary shaped his long-term thinking
* How Sequoia maintains investment discipline through market cycles
* Why they don’t use the word “deal” at Sequoia
* How the US can maintain the lead in the AI race
* The thinking behind the Sequoia Capital Fund and the firm’s organizational structure
* And much more
Thank you to the partners who make this possible
Brex: The banking solution for startups.WorkOS: The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS.Explo: Customer-facing analytics for any platform.
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Timestamps
(00:00) Intro
(04:50) Roelof on the AI bubble
(07:26) Sequoia’s Monday tracker and investment tools
(09:25) AI's role in business growth
(11:55) The challenge of spotting unicorns in a climate of rapid growth
(14:48) Roelof’s critique of capital-heavy AI startups
(19:30) A glimpse at how partne…