Episodes

May 5, 2020

#93 – Daphne Koller: Biomedicine and Machine Learning

Daphne Koller is a professor of computer science at Stanford University, a co-founder of Coursera with Andrew Ng and Founder and CEO of insitro, a company at the intersection of machine learning and biomedicine. -
April 29, 2020

#92 – Harry Cliff: Particle Physics and the Large Hadron Collider

Harry Cliff is a particle physicist at the University of Cambridge working on the Large Hadron Collider beauty experiment that specializes in searching for hints of new particles and forces by studying a type of particle called the "beauty quark",
April 24, 2020

#91 – Jack Dorsey: Square, Cryptocurrency, and Artificial Intelligence

Jack Dorsey is the co-founder and CEO of Twitter and the founder and CEO of Square. - Support this podcast by signing up with these sponsors: - MasterClass: https://masterclass.com/lex - EPISODE LINKS: Jack's Twitter: https://twitter.com/jack
April 22, 2020

#90 – Dmitry Korkin: Computational Biology of Coronavirus

Dmitry Korkin is a professor of bioinformatics and computational biology at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where he specializes in bioinformatics of complex disease, computational genomics, systems biology, and biomedical data analytics. I came across Dmitry’s work when in February his group used the viral genome of the COVID-19 to reconstruct the 3D structure of its major viral proteins and their interactions with human proteins, in effect creating a structural genomics map of the coronavirus...
April 18, 2020

#89 – Stephen Wolfram: Cellular Automata, Computation, and Physics

Stephen Wolfram is a computer scientist, mathematician, and theoretical physicist who is the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, a company behind Mathematica, Wolfram Alpha, Wolfram Language, and the new Wolfram Physics project. He is the author of several books including A New Kind of Science, which on a personal note was one of the most influential books in my journey in computer science and artificial intelligence. Support this podcast by signing up with these sponsors: – ExpressVPN at ht...
April 13, 2020

#88 – Eric Weinstein: Geometric Unity and the Call for New Ideas, Leaders & Institutions

Eric Weinstein is a mathematician with a bold and piercing intelligence, unafraid to explore the biggest questions in the universe and shine a light on the darkest corners of our society. He is the host of The Portal podcast, a part of which, he recently released his 2013 Oxford lecture on his theory of Geometric Unity that is at the center of his lifelong efforts in arriving at a theory of everything that unifies the fundamental laws of physics. Support this podcast by signing up with these sp...
April 9, 2020

#87 – Richard Dawkins: Evolution, Intelligence, Simulation, and Memes

Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist, and author of The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, The God Delusion, The Magic of Reality, The Greatest Show on Earth, and his latest Outgrowing God. He is the originator and popularizer of a lot of fasc...
April 3, 2020

#86 – David Silver: AlphaGo, AlphaZero, and Deep Reinforcement Learning

David Silver leads the reinforcement learning research group at DeepMind and was lead researcher on AlphaGo, AlphaZero and co-lead on AlphaStar, and MuZero and lot of important work in reinforcement learning. -
March 31, 2020

#85 – Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe

Roger Penrose is physicist, mathematician, and philosopher at University of Oxford. He has made fundamental contributions in many disciplines from the mathematical physics of general relativity and cosmology to the limitations of a computational view o...
March 25, 2020

#83 – Nick Bostrom: Simulation and Superintelligence

Nick Bostrom is a philosopher at University of Oxford and the director of the Future of Humanity Institute. He has worked on fascinating and important ideas in existential risks, simulation hypothesis, human enhancement ethics, and the risks of superintelligent AI systems, including in his book Superintelligence. I can see talking to Nick multiple times on this podcast, many hours each time, but we have to start somewhere. Support this podcast by signing up with these sponsors: – Cash App – us...
March 21, 2020

#82 – Simon Sinek: Leadership, Hard Work, Optimism and the Infinite Game

Simon Sinek is an author of several books including Start With Why, Leaders Eat Last, and his latest The Infinite Game. He is one of the best communicators of what it takes to be a good leader, to inspire, and to build businesses that solve big difficu...
March 19, 2020

#81 – Anca Dragan: Human-Robot Interaction and Reward Engineering

Anca Dragan is a professor at Berkeley, working on human-robot interaction -- algorithms that look beyond the robot's function in isolation, and generate robot behavior that accounts for interaction and coordination with human beings. -
March 16, 2020

#80 – Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum, Cryptocurrency, and the Future of Money

Vitalik Buterin is co-creator of Ethereum and ether, which is a cryptocurrency that is currently the second-largest digital currency after bitcoin. Ethereum has a lot of interesting technical ideas that are defining the future of blockchain technology,...
March 7, 2020

#79 – Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution

Lee Smolin is a theoretical physicist, co-inventor of loop quantum gravity, and a contributor of many interesting ideas to cosmology, quantum field theory, the foundations of quantum mechanics, theoretical biology, and the philosophy of science. He is the author of several books including one that critiques the state of physics and string theory called The Trouble with Physics, and his latest book, Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution: The Search for What Lies Beyond the Quantum. EPISODE LINKS: Bo...
March 5, 2020

#78 – Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science

Ann Druyan is the writer, producer, director, and one of the most important and impactful communicators of science in our time. She co-wrote the 1980 science documentary series Cosmos hosted by Carl Sagan, whom she married in 1981, and her love for whom, with the help of NASA, was recorded as brain waves on a golden record along with other things our civilization has to offer and launched into space on the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft that are now, 42 years later, still active, reaching ou...
March 3, 2020

#77 – Alex Garland: Ex Machina, Devs, Annihilation, and the Poetry of Science

Alex Garland is a writer and director of many imaginative and philosophical films from the dreamlike exploration of human self-destruction in the movie Annihilation to the deep questions of consciousness and intelligence raised in the movie Ex Machina,...
Feb. 29, 2020

#76 – John Hopfield: Physics View of the Mind and Neurobiology

John Hopfield is professor at Princeton, whose life's work weaved beautifully through biology, chemistry, neuroscience, and physics. Most crucially, he saw the messy world of biology through the piercing eyes of a physicist.
Feb. 26, 2020

#75 – Marcus Hutter: Universal Artificial Intelligence, AIXI, and AGI

Marcus Hutter is a senior research scientist at DeepMind and professor at Australian National University. Throughout his career of research, including with Jürgen Schmidhuber and Shane Legg, he has proposed a lot of interesting ideas in and around the ...
Feb. 24, 2020

#74 – Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI

Michael I. Jordan is a professor at Berkeley, and one of the most influential people in the history of machine learning, statistics, and artificial intelligence. He has been cited over 170,000 times and has mentored many of the world-class researchers ...
Feb. 20, 2020

#73 – Andrew Ng: Deep Learning, Education, and Real-World AI

Andrew Ng is one of the most impactful educators, researchers, innovators, and leaders in artificial intelligence and technology space in general. He co-founded Coursera and Google Brain, launched deeplearning.ai, Landing.ai, and the AI fund, and was the Chief Scientist at Baidu. As a Stanford professor, and with Coursera and deeplearning.ai, he has helped educate and inspire millions of students including me. EPISODE LINKS: Andrew Twitter: https://twitter.com/AndrewYNg Andrew Facebook: htt...
Feb. 17, 2020

#72 – Scott Aaronson: Quantum Computing

Scott Aaronson is a professor at UT Austin, director of its Quantum Information Center, and previously a professor at MIT. His research interests center around the capabilities and limits of quantum computers and computational complexity theory more ge...
Feb. 14, 2020

Vladimir Vapnik: Predicates, Invariants, and the Essence of Intelligence

Vladimir Vapnik is the co-inventor of support vector machines, support vector clustering, VC theory, and many foundational ideas in statistical learning. He was born in the Soviet Union, worked at the Institute of Control Sciences in Moscow, then in the US, worked at AT&T, NEC Labs, Facebook AI Research, and now is a professor at Columbia University. His work has been cited over 200,000 times. This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast. If you would like to get more infor...
Feb. 5, 2020

Jim Keller: Moore’s Law, Microprocessors, Abstractions, and First Principles

Jim Keller is a legendary microprocessor engineer, having worked at AMD, Apple, Tesla, and now Intel. He's known for his work on the AMD K7, K8, K12 and Zen microarchitectures, Apple A4, A5 processors, and co-author of the specifications for the x86-64...
Jan. 29, 2020

David Chalmers: The Hard Problem of Consciousness

David Chalmers is a philosopher and cognitive scientist specializing in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and consciousness. He is perhaps best known for formulating the hard problem of consciousness which could be stated as "why does the fee...