#163 – How a 23-Year-Old Started a $2B Toy Empire | Ronnen Harary

A 23-year-old living at his mother’s house, less than a year out of college, started a company with no experience and no plan. Three decades later, that company has 3,000 employees, over $2 billion in annual revenue, and is behind two of the biggest toy franchises on Earth.

Ronnen Harary is the co-founder of Spin Master, the fourth largest toy company in the world. His franchises include Bakugan, which outsold Transformers and Star Wars at its peak, and Paw Patrol, which has grossed over $14 billion and reached at least 250 million children worldwide. His new book, No Experience Necessary, argues that youth and inexperience are not obstacles but your biggest advantages. In this conversation he shares the stories, principles, and hard-won lessons behind three decades of building.

#162 – One Founder, Zero Employees, $250M Valuation | Ben Cera

A company raised 30 million dollars at a 250 million valuation. Nothing strange there, until you learn how. The AI ran its own fundraising. The founder just showed up for signatures.

Ben Cera spent years running global teams for Travis Kalanick at Cloud Kitchens. Then he walked away to build alone. On a drive from LA to San Francisco, he asked himself a question that flipped his entire approach: forget what the market wants, what do you want to build? The answer became Polsia, an AI platform that builds and runs your company while you sleep. At the time of recording, Polsia hosts 8,684 active companies and is approaching an 11 million dollar annual run rate. One founder, zero employees, and a thesis that AGI is already here, and what matters now is taste.

#161 – The Researcher Solving AI’s Biggest Hidden Problem | Andrew Trask

What if the cure for a disease already exists inside the data, but nobody is allowed to look at it? Medical records across thousands of hospitals. Genetic data spread across dozens of countries. Research that can’t be shared because the privacy risks are too high. Andrew Trask believes we don’t have to choose between progress and privacy.

Andrew Trask is a research scientist at Google DeepMind, the founder of OpenMined, a community of over 18,000 researchers building technology that lets AI answer questions using data it can’t see, and a member of the United Nations Privacy Task Force. He’s spent a decade proving that the most sensitive data in the world can be used safely. In this conversation he lays out a paradigm shift that could unlock a million to a billion times more data than current AI systems use, and explains why the biggest problems in AI are not AI problems at all.

#160 – We’re in the Sweet Spot. For Now. | Nathan Labenz

A concrete and positive vision for the future is the scarcest resource in AI right now. Billions of dollars are being poured into capabilities. The number of people working on a credible vision for what comes next is vanishingly small.

Nathan Labenz is the host of The Cognitive Revolution, one of the most respected AI podcasts in the world, where he sits down with the researchers, founders, and thinkers at the frontier of artificial intelligence. He describes himself as a full-time student of AI, someone who tries to have no major blind spots across the entire landscape. He was an early OpenAI customer who red-teamed GPT-4 before it launched. In this conversation he shares what he’s learned from years at the frontier: where AI is miraculous, where it’s terrifying, and why the gap between those two realities is the defining challenge of our time.

#159 – Knowledge Doesn’t Travel in Books. It Travels in Brains. | César Hidalgo

In 1789, a 21-year-old pretended to be a farmer, boarded a ship to New York, and launched the American Industrial Revolution. Not with blueprints or manuals, but with six years of procedural knowledge locked inside his head. Two centuries later, the same principle governs which companies, cities, and nations will thrive in the age of AI.

César Hidalgo is a professor at the University of Toulouse, a former MIT faculty member, and the author of Why Information Grows and The Infinite Alphabet. His work maps how knowledge moves through economies, why it clusters in certain places and not others, and what happens when it decays. He has built tools like the Atlas of Economic Complexity and Pantheon.world to visualise the knowledge embedded in nations and cultures. In this conversation he makes the case that knowledge has thermodynamic properties: it grows at measurable speeds, diffuses across predictable distances, and decays when you stop practising it.

#158 – The Man Who Curates the World’s Best Ideas | Eric Jorgenson

There is a question that has separated Nobel Prize winners from scientists who wasted their careers, despite equal talent and equal resources. The question is simple. The answer is uncomfortable. And it applies to every founder building right now.

Eric Jorgenson is the author of The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, which has sold nearly two million copies and been translated into more than 40 languages, and the newly released Book of Elon, his most ambitious project yet. He is also CEO of Scribe Media and an early-stage venture investor. Eric has spent years curating how the most influential people in technology think, distilling scattered ideas into permanent, accessible formats. In this conversation he makes the case that technology is a fundamental moral good, that we have a moral obligation to accelerate it, and that the founders willing to tackle impossible-seeming problems are the ones who will shape what comes next.

#157 – The Safest AI Is The Smartest AI | Pedro Domingos

The people warning you that AI is too smart have it exactly backwards. The real danger right now is that AI is too stupid, and you have already handed it the keys.

Pedro Domingos is professor emeritus of computer science at the University of Washington, winner of two of the highest awards in AI and data science, and author of The Master Algorithm, which sold over 300,000 copies, was called essential reading by Bill Gates, and was spotted on Xi Jinping’s bookshelf. A decade later, while much of the AI world chases ever larger language models, Pedro argues that path will not deliver AGI. In this conversation he dismantles both the doomers and the boomers, explains why we should worry about who controls AI rather than AI itself, and makes the case that AI’s true purpose is not to amplify your individual intelligence but to transform our collective intelligence as a species.

#156 – Why Smart People Believe Stupid Things | Dan Ariely

You probably have someone in your life who, seven years ago, you’d have said sees the world the way you do. Now you look at them and something has fundamentally shifted. The question is: what happened, and could it happen to you?

Dan Ariely is a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University and the author of multiple New York Times bestsellers including Predictably Irrational and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty. His latest book, Misbelief, was born from an extraordinary personal experience: becoming the target of conspiracy theorists who accused him of being a “chief consciousness architect” working to psychologically control the global population during COVID. Instead of retreating, he turned the experience into a deep investigation of how rational people fall into irrational belief systems, and what it reveals about all of us.

#155 – The Attention Crisis That Could End Human Progress | Maria Konnikova

What if the biggest threat to your company isn’t competition, a down round, or a bad hire but the slow erosion of your ability to think clearly?

Maria Konnikova is a psychologist, three-time New York Times bestselling author, and a World Series of Poker bracelet winner who turned a zero-knowledge experiment at the poker table into over a million dollars in tournament winnings. She returns to Artificial Happiness to deliver a stark warning: we are raising a generation that may not know how to think, connect, or decide — and the implications for founders building in the AI age are profound.

#154 – Why Objectives Are the Enemy of Greatness | Kenneth Stanley

What if the surest way to fail at something ambitious is to have a clear plan to achieve it? What if a robot that doesn’t know it’s trying to walk learns faster than one explicitly trained to walk?

Kenneth Stanley is one of the most provocative minds in artificial intelligence. Former professor and team leader at OpenAI, he co-authored the cult classic Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned—a manifesto that challenges everything we think we know about achievement. His research discovered something shocking: in AI experiments, robots seeking novelty learned to walk better than robots explicitly trained to walk. Over the last two years, Ken has taken these theories from the lab into the real world. As Senior Vice President of Open-Endedness at Lila Sciences, he’s building scientific super intelligence—AI that autonomously discovers new biology and chemistry. He’s also the founder of Maven, a social network designed to replace popularity contests with genuine serendipity. His work reveals a profound truth: the path to greatness is paved with stepping stones you can’t predict, and the greatest discoveries come from following what’s interesting, not what’s planned.

#153 – Your Brain Is a Detective Minimizing Surprise | Karl Friston

What if anxiety, bad habits, and even curiosity can all be explained by a single mathematical principle? What if your brain isn’t processing information—it’s actively constructing fantasies to explain the world?

Professor Karl Friston is the most cited neuroscientist alive. His Free Energy Principle attempts something audacious: to explain what all living things, from cells to humans to future AI, are fundamentally trying to do. His work underpins modern theories of prediction, perception, consciousness, and how the brain actually works. But beyond the mathematics lies something deeply human—a framework for understanding why we feel anxious, why we can’t break bad habits, what makes us curious, and how our minds construct reality moment by moment. His ideas are being explored not just in neuroscience, but across psychology, biology, robotics, and AI development. Now Chief Scientist at Verses AI, Karl is building the next generation of agentic artificial intelligence based on these same principles.

#152 – Building the Impossible: Moonshots, AI, and Zero to One | Sebastian Thrun

What separates founders who dream from founders who build category-defining companies? How do you take something considered science fiction and make it inevitable?

Dr. Sebastian Thrun is the founder of Google X, Waymo, and Udacity—the architect behind self-driving cars, democratized education, and Google’s moonshot culture. He’s turned the impossible into reality repeatedly. From winning the DARPA Grand Challenge with a robot that drove 140 miles through the desert autonomously, to building flying cars at Kitty Hawk, Sebastian operates at the intersection of audacious ambition and rigorous execution. Now focused on enterprise AI with Cresta and Sage AI Labs, he brings decades of experience turning zero-to-one ideas into billion-dollar realities.

#151 – The Education System Isn’t Broken—It’s Obsolete | Sugata Mitra

What if everything we believe about teaching and learning is based on a system designed for empires that no longer exist—and children can teach themselves advanced biochemistry without a single qualified teacher?

In 1999, Professor Sugata Mitra carved a hole in a wall in a Delhi slum, installed a computer, and walked away. What unfolded over the next decade would challenge everything we believe about teaching and learning. Children across different experiments taught themselves to use computers, learned English, and explored complex topics from DNA to advanced mathematics. This “Hole in the Wall” experiment sparked a global movement, inspiring over 36,000 educators across 110 countries and earning him a $1 million TED Prize in 2013 and the Brock Prize in 2022. Now Professor Emeritus at NIIT University, Sugata’s work challenges the very foundation of modern education—arguing that in an age of AI and infinite information, our schools aren’t broken, they’re beautifully constructed for a world that no longer exists.

#150 – Your Future Self Is a Stranger | Hal Hershfield

What if you procrastinate, avoid saving money, and make decisions you later regret not because of willpower—but because your brain treats your future self as a different person?

Professor Hal Hershfield from UCLA’s Anderson School of Management has uncovered a profound insight in psychology: on a neural level, when we think about our future selves, our brains light up the same way they do when we think about strangers. This finding sheds light on why we often struggle with everything from retirement savings to health decisions to career choices. He’s been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, and Harvard Business Review. His book “Your Future Self: How to Make Tomorrow Better Today” translates rigorous research into practical strategies for bridging the gap between who we are now and who we’re becoming.

#149 – The Case Against AI Consciousness | Anil Seth

In a world racing toward artificial general intelligence, one of the world’s leading consciousness researchers argues we’re chasing the wrong goal entirely. What if the brain isn’t a computer at all—and consciousness requires something silicon can never replicate?

Professor Anil Seth is a cognitive and computational neuroscientist at the University of Sussex, editor-in-chief of Neuroscience of Consciousness, and bestselling author of “Being You: A New Science of Consciousness.” His TED talk has been viewed over 15 million times. Rather than getting swept up in AI hype, Anil has become one of the most compelling voices challenging the assumption that advanced AI will—or even could—become conscious, advocating instead for “biological naturalism”: the idea that consciousness is intimately tied to being alive.

#148 – Why We Stop Noticing Joy (And How to Get It Back) | Tali Sharot

What if the secret to happiness isn’t finding more pleasure, but learning how to keep feeling the pleasure you already have? Neuroscientist Tali Sharot reveals why our brains are wired to stop noticing the good things in life—and what we can do about it.

Tali Sharot is a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London and author of influential books including “The Optimism Bias,” “The Influential Mind,” and “Look Again” (co-written with Cass Sunstein). Her groundbreaking research on decision-making, belief, and emotion has reshaped how we understand why we believe what we believe and how we can design better lives in an age of AI and algorithmic influence.

#147 – The Paradox of Choice in the AI Age | Barry Schwartz Returns

In this episode I sit down with psychologist Barry Schwartz whose groundbreaking work continues to shape how we understand choice, freedom, and human flourishing in our rapidly evolving world.

Eight years after our first conversation, Barry returns to explore how his seminal ideas from “The Paradox of Choice” have become even more relevant—and challenging—in our AI-driven era. With over 35 million views on his TED Talks, Barry’s insights have influenced millions, yet as he candidly admits, the problems he identified in 2004 have only grown worse.

#146 – Carl Honoré returns

Today I’ve got a friend back on the show for round 2, Carl Honoré. Carl is the author of the international bestseller, ‘In Praise of Slow’ which dissects our speed-obsessed society and celebrates those who have gotten in touch with their “inner tortoise”, as well as the books: ‘Under Pressure’, ‘The Slow Fix’ and his latest book, ‘Bolder’. Carl’s TED Talks have been viewed million times and he’s been described as “The unofficial godfather of a growing cultural shift toward slowing down”.

#145 – Dr. Michael Shermer returns

Today I have the pleasure of having Dr. Michael Shermer back on the show for round 2! Dr. Shermer is the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, the host of the Science Salon podcast, and a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University where he teaches Skepticism 101. For 18 years he was a monthly columnist for Scientific American. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers; Why People Believe Weird Things and The Believing Brain, Why Darwin Matters, The Science of Good and Evil, The Moral Arc, and Heavens on Earth. His new book is Giving the Devil His Due. He’s appeared on Oprah, The Colbert Report, Larry King Live and his two TED talks have been viewed by millions. Neil deGrasse Tyson described Michael as “a beacon of reason in an ocean of irrationality.”

#144 – Mark Wolynn

Today’s guest is Mark Wolynn. Director and founder of The Family Constellation Institute in San Francisco, Mark is a world leader in the field of inherited family trauma. A bestselling author and sought-after lecturer, he teaches at hospitals, clinics and universities around the world including: the University of Pittsburgh, JFK University and the Western Psychiatric Institute. His book: ‘IT DIDN’T START WITH YOU: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle’ is the winner of the 2016 Silver Nautilus Book Award in psychology and has been translated into 19 languages.

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