Azeem Azhar's Exponential View

Anthropic's S-1, filed ahead of its IPO, addresses the question hanging over the whole AI boom: is any of this a real business? I walk you through its answers.

The AI economy is real and substantial. Forensic analysis of 1,000+ companies reveals where the revenue is flowing, and what it will take for the AI data center buildout to pay off.

More than three years after ChatGPT's release, only 27% of executives say AI has met their ROI expectations. The history of factory electrification explains why — most companies are at the light-bulb stage, adding Copilot licenses rather than reconceptualizing their businesses around AI. In this episode I map the three stages of AI adoption, and show what it actually takes to move from chatbots to the autonomous company — the only stage where the moat becomes real.

Published in early March 2026, Andrej Karpathy's autoresearch AI tool makes autonomous scientific experimentation cheap and easy — but it was designed to solve machine learning problems. I wanted to see if I could apply its loop architecture to my own work: refining my worldview, testing arguments, solving business problems.  In this video, I share how I adapted Karpathy’s autoresearch loops for problems that aren't easy to quantify, how to avoid the local minima trap, and the broader impact of these kinds of methods. I covered:

Last week Jensen Huang shared the numbers from NVIDIA’s order book: AI compute demand has grown a millionfold in two years. Much GCT coverage focussed on chips, robots, data centers in space, but I think Jensen revealed something far more important in his keynote: “the inference inflection has arrived,” and this is about to transform how all companies should manage their budgets. The inference era is already the operating assumption of the world’s most valuable company.

Apple may have stumbled into one of the most defensible positions in AI. This was not on my radar – just two months ago, I was describing a credibility crisis at the company; they appeared wrong-footed on the most important technology of our times and an acquisition was their only plausible way out. In this episode I work through what I and many other commentators missed – and what road lies ahead for Apple.

AI has become so embedded in how I work that I can no longer cleanly separate it from my thinking. That raises a question I find genuinely unsettling: is intensive AI use making me a sharper thinker, or quietly doing the opposite? In this episode I pull back the curtain on my full research and writing process — the custom tools, the friction points, and the places where I'm still not sure I've got it right. For Ezra Klein, having AI summarize material is a disaster for original thought. But my AI systems are designed to protect the cognitive work that has to stay human, while they handle everything else. Knowing where to draw that line turns out to be the hardest and most important question.

Meet R Mini Arnold - my OpenClaw chief of staff, which manages the equivalent of a ten-person team from a Mac mini in my garden studio. While I slept, that AI team debugged its own code at 3am, researched a trending Substack essay using five parallel investigators, and wrote a 4,600-word script for this very episode in 40 minutes. The gap between people who've started building this way and those who haven't is widening every week.

This is the first episode of AI Vistas, a new series where I bring together people I trust and respect to tackle a major question collectively. Today’s question: are we in charge of our AI tools, or are they in charge of us? Joining me are Nita Farahany, distinguished professor of law and philosophy at Duke University and a leading thinker on cognitive liberty and mental privacy; Eric Topol, founder of the Scripps Research Translational Institute and one of the world's most cited medical researchers; and Rohit Krishnan, engineer, former hedge fund manager, and AI builder. Moderating the conversation is Nick Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic.

In this episode, I sit down with my friend Rohit Krishnan - writer of the Substack newsletter Strange Loop Canon - for a hands-on conversation about what it actually looks like to build with AI agents today. Between us we're burning through tens of billions of tokens a month - I hit nearly 100 million in a single day this week - and we share what we're each running on our own machines. We dig into the quirks and surprising power of tools like OpenClaw, Claude Code, and Cowork, debate why AI remains stubbornly bad at good writing, and zoom out to ask what a world of trillions of agents might actually look like — and what economic infrastructure it will need.

In this episode, I'm joined by Jaime Sevilla, founder of Epoch AI; Hannah Petrovic from my team at Exponential View; and financial journalist Matt Robinson from AI Street. Together we investigate a fundamental question: do the economics of AI companies actually work? We analysed OpenAI's financials from public data to examine whether their revenues can sustain the staggering R&D costs of frontier models. The findings reveal a picture far more precarious than many assume; we also explore where the real infrastructure bottlenecks lie, why compute demand will dwarf energy constraints, and what the rise of long-running agentic workloads means for the entire industry.

A week before OpenClaw was released, I recorded a prescient conversation with Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI and co-founder of DeepMind. We talked about what happens when AI starts to seem conscious – even if it isn’t. Today, you get to hear our conversation. Mustafa has been sounding the alarm about what he calls “seemingly conscious AI” and the risk of collective AI psychosis for a long time. We discussed this idea of the “fourth class of being” – neither human, tool, nor nature – that AI is becoming and all it brings with itself.

At Davos 2026, the mood was unlike any previous World Economic Forum gathering. With Donald Trump arriving amid escalating geopolitical tensions and European leaders sounding alarms about sovereignty, I recorded live dispatches from the ground. In this special episode, I bring together observations from four days at the annual meeting, tracking the seismic shifts in global order alongside the practical realities of AI adoption in the enterprise.

In this episode, Peter McCrory, Head of Economics at Anthropic, unpacks the company's new Economic Index report. His team analyzed millions of real Claude conversations to map exactly where AI is augmenting human work today and where it isn't. We explore the striking divergence between API and chat usage, why businesses need to extract tacit knowledge to unlock AI's potential, the "hollow ladder" risk for junior workers, and Anthropic's estimate that AI could add 1.0-1.8% to annual productivity growth over the next decade.

In this episode, I share my outlook for 2026 and explain why AI tools now feel genuinely different. I explore how the act of making has been transformed, why authenticity and meaning will become the new scarcity, and whether the foundations of energy and capital can hold. I also address the question I was asked most in 2025: when will the AI bubble burst?

In this episode, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman and I discuss how a strong US economy, high asset valuations, and rapid AI adoption are sitting in uneasy tension. We explore what past technology cycles can teach us, why safety nets struggle to address disruption, and where genuine optimism still makes sense.

What made 2025 special? 🎊 We recorded this to publish after Christmas, but demand for year‑end reflections prompted an early release - so if you hear me say Christmas has passed, that’s why. 🎊 In this episode, I reflect on the past year and what it revealed: a K-shaped divide. On one track, AI models are now doing hours of high quality work, improving at exponential pace, and shifting how we work from doing to judging. On the other, organisations and the broader economy are struggling to keep up. Stay to the end for my seasonal film recommendation.

In this episode, I’ve distilled a year of extraordinary dialogue into one 20-minute briefing. I’ve spent 2025 in conversation with the architects of our future - the builders and thinkers redefining AI, energy, and the global economy. These are the "eureka" moments from my most exclusive interviews. From the future of "protopia" with Kevin Kelly to the hidden tech gaps with Dan Wang, this is your strategic roadmap for the exponential age.

In this episode, I look at the next 24 months of AI. The technology is improving rapidly – so what could hold back widespread transformation of how we work and live? I dig into the real constraints, from electricity shortages to institutional inertia, why mid-2026 matters for enterprise AI, and why so many people remain uneasy about a technology they use every day.

In this episode, I reflect on the third anniversary of ChatGPT's launch as a marker of where we are in the exponential age. As a product, ChatGPT captures the speed of technological progress, the new behaviours emerging around it and the widening gap between innovation and institutional change – all symptomatic of the era I called the exponential age in my 2021 book.

The AI industry is sending mixed signals, with markets turning red while teams report real productivity gains. In this session I explore why we are living in a split reality, where individuals move faster with these tools but the wider economy is ambivalent. We once assumed juniors would get the biggest lift from AI, yet the newer agentic tools seem to reward senior workers who know how to structure problems and judge output.

Junior roles in AI-exposed fields are disappearing fast. The obvious culprit is AI rapidly automating entry-level jobs. And yet, this isn't quite right. What is driving the drop is managers’ expectations about what AI will do, not the work that it's already replacing. I discussed this with Ben Zweig of Revelio Labs, which builds global workforce data from millions of individual profiles to track hiring, separations and job flows. Together, we explored the future of work and shared practical advice for new grads.

The AI boom isn’t just about chatbots. In this video, I explain why cloud companies and chipmakers are exploding in value: we’re moving into an economy where computation becomes a fundamental input – like steel, electricity or oil. If that’s true, our demand for compute could approach infinity.

In this episode, I speak with Jordan Schneider, creator of Chinatalk, to explore the new phase of US–China competition. Both countries are using trade policy, export controls and industrial strategy to shift the balance of global power. Yet, their economies remain tightly bound.

This conversation is a practical map of how AI “answer engines” upend the web’s traffic-funded model – and what could replace it. Matthew Prince (co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare) joins Azeem to discuss scarcity, pricing, and why unique, trustworthy content becomes the premium input to AI.

In this episode, I spoke with Dan Wang, author of “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future”. We unpacked a bold thesis: China is not merely a competitor in AI and tech, but is re-imagining its entire state apparatus as an engineering state - in contrast to the more “lawyerly” institutions of the US and UK.

Is AI in a bubble or a boom? I spent hundreds of hours figuring this out. Today I present a practical five-gauge framework to benchmark today’s AI frenzy against history’s bubbles, from railways to dot-coms. A clear, data-driven guide for investors and decision-makers.

GPT-5 was the most advanced AI when it was released, but most people were disappointed. Why? In this episode, I unpack the two key paradoxes that shape how we judge new technology: shifting goalposts and negative space.

Can AI stocks beat Big Tech? In this episode, I discuss OpenAI and its decision to expand a secondary share sale that lets insiders sell about $10.3 billion of stock at roughly a $500 billion valuation. Although skeptical at first, the calculations reveal there is a path for OpenAI to deliver outsized returns.

This is the single most important paper to come out in tech in recent weeks. Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar and Ruyu Chen investigated whether generative AI is leading to job losses in roles most exposed to AI – and how these effects differ by age and the way AI is used. In this episode, I break down these results and their implications.

Nick Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, led one of the first major content licensing deals with OpenAI in 2024. In this conversation, he joins Azeem to unpack how AI is transforming media – and what that means for every business navigating the shifting economics of attention, trust, and discovery.

At the start of the year, I made seven predictions about how 2025 would unfold. Six months in, it's time to mark my own work. From AI capability breakthroughs to autonomous vehicles, climate extremes to workforce transformation, I examine what I got right, what I missed, and why the 2027-2028 period will be when vertical AI hits the real economy in force.

In this episode, I reflect on a whirlwind three-day visit to China - my first in over 20 years. And what I saw was remarkable. The infrastructure puts most of the West to shame. The AI isn't just hype - it's working at serious scale. And the electric vehicles? They're about to steamroll the global auto industry. Here's what really struck me during my whirlwind trip to Beijing and beyond.

Broadcasting live from Paris, I tackle three massive technology stories that are reshaping our digital future. From Apple's stunning interface redesign to the collapse of traditional search advertising, and Sam Altman's vision of an AI singularity that's already begun - this episode captures the tectonic shifts happening in tech right now.

This week, I'm speaking with Kevin Weil, Chief Product Officer at OpenAI, who is steering product development at what might be the world's most important company right now.

Economist and polymath Tyler Cowen challenges Silicon Valley's optimistic projections about AI-driven economic growth. We explore what could slow down AI's economic impact, despite its remarkable capabilities – and where humans find the new normal amidst major shifts.

Thomas Dohmke, CEO of GitHub, joins Azeem to explore how AI is fundamentally transforming software development.

Aaron Levie, CEO & co-founder of Box, joins Azeem Azhar to explore how an “AI-first” mindset is reshaping every layer of Box – from product road-maps to pricing – and what that teaches the rest of us about building faster, smarter organisations.

Lennart Heim, a researcher and information scientist at RAND Corporation, joins Azeem Azhar to unpack a provocative claim: China is catching up with US AI capabilities, but it doesn't matter.

Greg Jackson, CEO of Octopus Energy, joins Azeem to discuss the Iberian blackout and how we can create a more stable, flexible, and resilient energy grid for the future.

Physicist and entrepreneur Steve Hsu, whose startup Superfocus tackles hallucination problems in large language models, joins Azeem to discuss AI agents, hallucination challenges and what happens when technology meets labor markets.

Sir Niall Ferguson, renowned historian and Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, joins Azeem Azhar to discuss the evolving relationship between the U.S. and China, Trump's foreign policy doctrine, and what the new global economic and security order might look like.

In this episode, Azeem Azhar speaks with Ryan Petersen, CEO and founder of logistics platform Flexport, about the current state of global trade amidst escalating tariffs, geopolitical tensions, and technological disruption. Ryan offers unique insights from the frontlines of the US-China trade war and explores how businesses are adapting to a rapidly changing landscape.

Azeem Azhar welcomes Packy McCormick, founder and investor at Not Boring, to discuss the current tech landscape – reflections on Web3, why bits and atoms are cool again and how AI and energy are reshaping the world as we know it.

Anthropic's co-founder and chief scientist Jared Kaplan discusses AI's rapid evolution, the shorter-than-expected timeline to human-level AI, and how Claude's "thinking time" feature represents a new frontier in AI reasoning capabilities.

Kevin Kelly is a co-founder of Wired Magazine and a renowned author and futurist. Decades ago, Kevin predicted much of today's technological and cultural landscape. In this discussion, he presents his new bold vision for what’s coming next: The Handoff to Bots.

Kai-Fu Lee joins me to discuss AI in 2025. Kai-Fu is a storied AI researcher, investor, inventor and entrepreneur based in Taiwan. As one of the leading AI experts based in Asia, I wanted to get his take on this particular market.

Nathan Benaich, Founder and General Partner of Air Street Capital, joins me to discuss AI in 2025. From runaway consumer adoption to evolving enterprise moats, from still-elusive AI-driven drug breakthroughs to the renewed vigour in robotics, several core themes stood out.

Dylan Patel, founder of SemiAnalysis and one of my go-to experts on semiconductors and data center infrastructure joins me to discuss AI in 2025. Several key themes emerged about where AI might be headed in 2025: (1) The hyperscalers are racing ahead in capital expenditure, (2) The expected explosion in AI workloads is drawing in a wave of new specialized GPU cloud providers, (3) By 2027, AI data centers alone could account for 10% or more of total US electricity consumption, straining America’s aging infrastructure, (4) Open-source variants like Llama 3.1 are driving commoditization at speed, slicing away the profit margins of plain-vanilla model-serving.

Azeem Azhar is joined by Richard Socher, CEO and founder of You.com, an AI chatbot search engine at the forefront of truthful and verifiable AI. They explore approaches to building AI systems that are both truthful and verifiable. The conversation sheds light on the critical breakthroughs in AI, the technical challenges of ensuring AI's reliability, and Socher's vision for the future of search.

As 2024 begins, leaders are facing increasing uncertainty and a host of difficult decisions. Azeem Azhar returns to bring clarity amid a complicated information landscape, with his analysis of 12 core themes that will shape the year ahead, including AI adoption, geopolitics, decentralization, the energy transition, and more.

Generative AI has a lot to offer health care professionals and medical scientists. This week, host Azeem Azhar speaks with renowned cardiologist, scientist, and author Eric Topol about the change he’s observed among his colleagues in the last two years, as generative AI developments have accelerated in medicine.

In this conversation, Azeem Azhar speaks with climate lead at Hugging Face, Sasha Luccioni, to shed light on the environmental footprint of AI, the pressing issues in AI deployment, and the potential paths to a more ethical and sustainable AI future.

AI is enabling new strides in autonomous driving. In this episode, Azeem Azhar joins the co-founder and CEO of Wayve, Alex Kendall, to explore how the AI revolution is opening new market opportunities for the auto industry. Wayve is a UK-based start-up that makes AI technology for self-driving vehicles.

Organizations across the world have been grappling with the opportunities and challenges of generative AI. In this episode, Azeem Azhar joins AI pioneer and entrepreneur Andrew Ng to debate whether we’re at an inflection point in the AI revolution.

Azeem Azhar speaks with Aravind Srinivas, the co-founder and CEO of Perplexity.ai, about the looming challenges in AI research and product development, such as user-centric design and the importance of open-source models.

The upheaval at OpenAI sent shockwaves through the tech world. Karen Hao, a contributing writer who covers AI at The Atlantic, joins Azeem Azhar to break down the ideologies and power struggles within OpenAI and their implications for the development of artificial intelligence. She also explains how these internal conflicts reflect broader challenges in AI development and governance.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is on every business leader’s agenda. How do you ensure the AI systems you deploy are harmless and trustworthy? This month, Azeem Azhar picks some of his favorite conversations with leading AI safety experts to help you break through the noise. Today’s pick is Azeem’s 2020 conversation with the pioneering AI scientist Fei-Fei Li, professor of computer science at Stanford University and the founding co-director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is on every business leader’s agenda. How do you ensure the AI systems you deploy are harmless and trustworthy? This month, Azeem picks some of his favorite conversations with leading AI safety experts to help you break through the noise. Today’s pick is Azeem’s 2021 conversation with veteran AI scientist Murray Shanahan, professor of cognitive robotics at Imperial College London and principal scientist at DeepMind.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is on every business leader’s agenda. How do you ensure the AI systems you deploy are harmless and trustworthy? This month, Azeem picks some of his favorite conversations with leading AI safety experts to help you break through the noise. Today’s pick is Azeem’s conversation with Joanna Bryson, a leading expert on the questions of AI governance and the impact of technology on human cooperation.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is on every business leader’s agenda. How do you ensure the AI systems you deploy are harmless and trustworthy? This month, Azeem picks some of his favorite conversations with leading AI safety experts to help you break through the noise. Today’s pick is Azeem’s conversation with Meredith Whittaker, president of the Signal Foundation. Meredith is a co-founder and chief advisor of the AI Now Institute, an independent research group looking at the social impact of artificial intelligence.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is on every business leader’s agenda. How do you ensure the AI systems you deploy are harmless and trustworthy? This month, Azeem picks some of his favorite conversations with leading AI safety experts to help you break through the noise. Today’s pick is Azeem’s conversation with Dr. Rumman Chowdhury, a pioneer in the field of applied algorithmic ethics. She runs Parity Consulting, the Parity Responsible Innovation Fund, and she’s a Responsible AI Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

As exponential technologies like artificial intelligence march on, the ability to make future-proof decisions is all the more important for leaders. Azeem Azhar’s new TV show and podcast, Exponentially with Azeem Azhar, goes beyond mainstream conversations about technology to explore new ways of thinking about our collective future. Guests include: Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Vinod Khosla.

In his brief commentary, Azeem Azhar discusses the increasing complexity and capabilities of large language models (LLMs) and the transformative potential they hold.

In his brief commentary, Azeem Azhar lays out why the future of the Web is underpinned by AI, and what this means for the traditional business model of the internet.

In his brief commentary, Azeem Azhar shares his outlook on how artificial intelligence will change the labor market, drawing on research published by Goldman Sachs.

Drawing on Carlota Perez's framework, Azeem Azhar considers whether large language models, such as OpenAI's GPT-4, will drive a paradigm shift across our economies.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is dominating the headlines, but it’s not a new topic here on Exponential View. This week and next, Azeem Azhar shares his favorite conversations with AI pioneers. Their work and insights are more relevant than ever. Jürgen Schmidhuber is a recognized pioneer in the field of deep neural networks. His techniques form the basis of the modern AI systems used by billions of people daily on services like Google, Facebook, and the Apple iPhone. In 2019, Jürgen joined Azeem to discuss the next thirty years of artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is dominating the headlines, but it’s not a new topic here on Exponential View. Azeem Azhar shares his favorite conversations with AI experts. Their work and insights are more relevant than ever. Gary Marcus has a reputation for being a contrarian in the AI community. A neuroscientist, founder, and the author of Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust, Marcus has been a vocal critic of deep learning as the best way forward for AI. in 2019, he joined Azeem Azhar to discuss the alternatives for building better machine intelligence.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is dominating the headlines, but it’s not a new topic here on Exponential View. This week and next, Azeem Azhar shares his favorite conversations with AI pioneers. Their work and insights are more relevant than ever. DeepMind’s co-founder and CEO, Demis Hassabis, joined Azeem in 2020 to explore his company's progression from gaming to accelerating scientific discovery. In 2023, DeepMind’s parent company Alphabet announced consolidation of its biggest research units, DeepMind and Google Brain, into a new division led by Demis.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is dominating the headlines, but it’s not a new topic here on Exponential View. This week and next, Azeem Azhar shares his favorite conversations with AI pioneers. Their work and insights are more relevant than ever. OpenAI has stunned the world with the release of its language-generating AI, ChatGPT-4. In 2020, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman joined Azeem Azhar to reflect on the huge attention generated by the precursor to GPT-4 and what that could mean for the future research and development toward the creation of artificial general intelligence (AGI).

After producing more than 160 episodes of Exponential View over the last six years, we’re taking a break to reflect on what we’ve learned and how the conversations we’ve hosted with leaders are changing our perspective on the future. While we percolate on the future of our podcast, we have a challenge for you: find all the phenomenal conversations we’ve hosted that you haven’t heard yet –and take alisten. (And please let us know which episodes helped you understand the world and your future!)

This episode is a special introduction to Cold Call, another podcast from Harvard Business Review. Host Brian Kenny explores Shield AI’s work with the U.S. government to develop autonomous combat robots. Harvard Business School professor Mitch Weiss and Brandon Tseng, Shield AI’s CGO and co-founder, join Brian to discuss the challenges start-ups face in working with the public sector, and how investing in new ideas can enable entrepreneurs and governments to join forces to solve big problems.

How do you talk about a product before anything like it exists? How do you guide the engineers building it and the marketing department who has to sell it? As co-creator of the iPod and iPhone, founder of the learning thermostat Nest, and with over 300 patents to his name, Tony Fadell is a serial entrepreneur who now focuses on investing. He tells Azeem Azhar how he uses opinion-based decision-making in his work, and why thinking like a product manager helps drive radical innovation.

Carbon recycling takes our polluting carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide and, with the help of bacteria, turns them into ethanol. This can replace oil as the basis for carbon-based chemicals industries (e.g., fertilizers, plastics, clothing, health and beauty products, etc.), as well as offering sustainable fuel and animal feed. Jennifer Holmgren, CEO of LanzaTech, joins Azeem Azhar to share her vision of the future where greenhouse gases provide a core contribution to our sustainable life.

Quantitative hedge funds, which rely on the work of employed mathematicians to develop complex trading strategies, are nothing new. But what if the mathematical work is outsourced to anyone, via a contest where the best predictions are rewarded with cryptocurrency? Richard Craib, founder of Numerai, explains to Azeem Azhar how his $70 million fund uses collective intelligence to perform well, despite the turmoil in the markets.

Hydrogen has long been hyped as a fuel of the future. It’s abundant and its waste product is water. But it’s only recently that the availability of cheap renewable energy has allowed hydrogen to be produced competitively without the use of fossil fuels. Azeem Azhar speaks with Raffi Garabedian, co-founder and CEO of Electric Hydrogen, to explore the market opportunity and roadmap to wide adoption of “green hydrogen.”

From The Jetsons to Back to the Future, flying cars are a staple of popular science fiction. German start-up Volocopter is working to turn that fiction into reality. Volocopter’s CEO Florian Reuter joins Azeem Azhar to explore how this radical new transport could transform our cities. They also break down the steps required to fulfill his vision of creating a door-to-door taxi service to rival Uber, via autonomous electric helicopters.

Web3’s ability to attach value and incentives to almost every part of human activity has radical implications not only for how businesses engage with their customers, but also for how people can self-organize to drive social change. Web3 investor and analyst Packy McCormick makes the case, in conversation with Azeem Azhar, that an optimistic outlook rooted in market dynamics can enable new sustainable businesses that operate for the public good.

What is the metaverse, how will we use it, and why might the financial innovations of Web3 and blockchain technology be crucial to its success? Citi’s Ronit Ghose, one of the world’s foremost analysts of technology’s influence on financial innovation, returns to the podcast to discuss how money will function in the metaverse.

Venture capitalists offer their investors outsized financial returns in exchange for taking on considerable risk. But what if that risk includes backing products where the economics of the end market aren’t clear? Moreover, what if the companies being supported have the non-financial goal of tackling climate change? As more money than ever pours into climate tech, Azeem Azhar speaks with Shayle Kann, a partner at Energy Impact Partners, about the challenges of investing in the net zero economy.

Today’s cancer therapies are difficult, expensive, and slow to create. But the combination of new computing and new biological technologies is leading to a better understanding of the human immune system, with the goal of offering a better class of cancer therapies. Azeem Azhar speaks with Immunai co-founder and chief technology officer Luis Voloch about how AI is unlocking the secrets of the immune system and opening new avenues for novel cancer treatments.

Danish start-up Seaborg Technologies has a blueprint for the future of power that uses a new type of nuclear reactor that is safe, can be manufactured quickly, and deployed on barges to any location worldwide. Seaborg CEO Troels Schönfeldt talks to Azeem Azhar about how the future of power stations could be sailing to your town soon.

We could soon be living more of our lives in immersive virtual worlds, but what will that look like and how will it affect us? New York University professor of philosophy and neural science David Chalmers discusses what the metaverse might offer us, the moral quandaries it could pose, and what our rights there might look like.

As war returns to Europe, General Sir Richard Barrons, former commander of the UK’s Joint Forces Command (whose remit included military intelligence, special forces, and cyber), joins Azeem Azhar to explore how technology is changing warfare and why we must take a more active role in stewarding peace. (This episode was originally broadcast on October 23, 2019.)

Many experts expected Russia’s war with Ukraine to be accompanied by a large-scale cyberattack, but that hasn’t yet materialized. Azeem Azhar speaks to Robert Hannigan, the former head of GCHQ (the UK’s equivalent to America’s NSA), to find out how the conflict is playing out in cyberspace and what might happen next.

Technology is making traditional agriculture more efficient, but farming still has its problems. It takes a huge amount of land and can be energy- and water-intensive. In addition, produce needs to be transported to customers, often over great distances. Daniele Modesto, CEO of ZERO Farms, explains the role building upward will play in the future of farming and why his technology could be used to produce more than just food.

Science is getting better at re-engineering micro-organisms for all kinds of uses, from better medical treatments to more durable materials. But there are still hurdles to overcome, including scaling. Boston-based Ginkgo Bioworks was one of the first billion-dollar companies in the synthetic biology space. The NYSE-listed company uses machine learning and automation to coax biology to work at industrial scale. COO Reshma Shetty talks to Azeem Azhar about the company’s technology, business model, and how big she thinks synthetic biology could become.

Eighty percent of urban trips are less than two miles long. So why do so many of us make them in big, inefficient, and expensive vehicles? Micromobility analyst Horace Dediu joins Azeem Azhar to discuss why many more of us will soon be getting around cities on electric scooters, bikes, and buggies and how that could change our lives for the better.

Seventy-five percent of the total value of US companies that have floated since 1995 has been created by venture-backed firms, including Alphabet, Facebook, and countless others. But how did an obscure investment strategy become the engine of modern innovation and where might it go next? Sebastian Mallaby, author of an excellent new book, The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future, joins Azeem Azhar to discuss the history (and future) of venture capital.

Nutritional science has long been one-size-fits-all. Advice on a healthier diet has long been generic, failing to consider the huge variance of our bodies. ZOE is trying to change that by combining new research on our microbiomes with AI and machine learning. The healthtech startup offers dietary advice tailored to an individual’s microbiome – the unique makeup of microorganisms present in our gut – to change the way we  eat for the better.

The workings of the brain have long puzzled scientists and philosophers, but the last twenty years have been a golden age for consciousness research. Neuroscientist Anil Seth explains his theories on consciousness and why unlocking the secrets of our mind will transform medicine, AI, and virtual reality.

Companies of all sizes and sectors have committed to net-zero emissions targets, but getting there is not straightforward. Measuring carbon dioxide output is tricky, carbon markets are fragmented, and the quality of offsets varies hugely. Michelle You, co-founder and CEO of Supercritical, is on a mission to help companies better measure, reduce, and remove carbon emissions – and her first target is the tech sector.

Azeem Azhar sets out his vision for 2022 and shares the trends that he thinks will change our world this year. Some changes are hurtling down the pike, like the growth of Web 3.0 and the metaverse, while others are rumbling along more slowly: the continued dominance of Big Tech and the tireless march of artificial intelligence.

As 2021 draws to a close and Covid cases spike, it’s easy to think not much has changed. But in between pandemic waves, we’ve made major progress in science and technology. And that progress gives us clues about how the future might play out. Azeem Azhar reflects on the tech trends we’ve seen this year and key shifts in industry and society that are changing cities, the labor market, and the superconductor business.

Andreessen Horowitz general partner Andrew Chen and host Azeem Azhar have something in common: they were both tech company insiders and early-stage investors before becoming authors. They explore why they decided to write their books, how writing intersects with their day jobs, and whether they’d do it all again.

Quantum computing won’t be an incremental improvement – it will represent a step-change in the power of the computing technology that underpins our modern economy. Exponentially faster computing won’t just help us solve problems more quickly – it will allow us to get the answers to questions that have been impossible to answer. Chad Rigetti, founder and CEO of Rigetti Computing, speaks to Azeem Azhar about just how revolutionary quantum computing will be.

Nuclear fusion seems to have been “twenty years away” forever, but recent advances could mean fusion is finally on its way to becoming part of our energy mix. Azeem Azhar speaks to Nick Hawker, co-founder and CEO of First Light Fusion, and explores how their “projectile fusion” approach might produce abundant, sustainable energy.