#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.