"The Cognitive Revolution"

A biweekly podcast where hosts Nathan Labenz and Erik Torenberg interview the builders on the edge of AI and explore the dramatic shift it will unlock in the coming years. The Cognitive Revolution is part of the Turpentine podcast network. To learn more: turpentine.co

100 episodes

AI:AM: Carbon in the Arena, Mistral's Le Chonk, the Agent-Run Economy, Ferroelectric RAM + New Hacks
31 October 2026 1h 27m
Freedom of Action: America's ASI Strategy, w/ RAND's Joel Predd, Ben Boudreaux & Matt Chessen
28 October 2026 1h 50m
AI:AM Highlights: Clean Neurons, Black October, the GPU Credit Crunch, and Buying the Supply Chain
24 October 2026 1h 29m
A World Model of Life: Biohub's Alex Rives on Virtual Cells, Measurement, & the $1.8B Data Push
20 October 2026 1h 5m
AI:AM: Where's the Steering Wheel? My Agent Set the Password, Hidden Valence, Proofs Find Linux Bugs
17 October 2026 1h 27m
Governing AI Agents: Alan Chan of GovAI on Monitoring, Agent IDs, Rogue Agents & Preparing for RSI
14 October 2026 2h 19m
How Agents Decide: Goodfire's Eric Bigelow on Critical Tokens, Phase Shifts, & In-Context Learning
10 October 2026 2h 2m
AI:AM: A Level We Shouldn't Pass? Notes from The Curve + Tokens vs. Salaries & Is SaaS Cooked?
8 October 2026 1h 28m
Software That Never Breaks: OutSystems CEO Woodson Martin on Building Enterprise-Grade Apps at ...
7 October 2026 1h 11m
One Brain, Any Body: Google DeepMind's Keerthana on Gemini Robotics 2, Cross-Embodiment & Humanoids
3 October 2026 1h 32m
AI:AM: Was Trump-Xi Anything? What Counts as Utopia? + AWS GPUs Cost 3X & AI Diagnoses Rare Diseases
1 October 2026 1h 29m
Obsolete or Irreplaceable? Garrison Lovely on Stopping the Race to Replace Human Labor
29 September 2026 2h 14m
AI:AM: What If It Works Too Well? Colluding Agents, $200M Safety Orgs, Virtual Cells Saturate at 2%
27 September 2026 1h 47m
What is Utopia? Presenting The Receipt Horizon, by Joel Borgen – Chapters 1–4
26 September 2026 2h 51m
Zero to One in AI Safety: Halcyon's Mike McCormick on Launching 30 New Orgs & the Founder Bottleneck
25 September 2026 1h 50m
AI:AM Highlights: Zvi on Pacing & Trump-Xi, Astra better behaved than Fable? + a new LLM Pain Axis??
19 September 2026 1h 41m
No Code Is Code: Zapier CEO Wade Foster on Headless Tools, Zapier MCP & Automation Bench
17 September 2026 1h 8m
The Balance of AI Power: Anton Leicht on Politics, Pacing Deals, and Muddling Through Well
15 September 2026 2h 10m
AI:AM Highlights: Astra as AGI, OpenAI's Pause, Mythos @ Mozilla & Human Agency vs Technocapitalism
12 September 2026 1h 42m
Nathan Goes to China #3: US-China Relations, the Art of the AI Deal & the Road to Pax Robotica
10 September 2026 3h 17m
AI:AM Highlights: Welcome to the AGI Era
5 September 2026 2h 20m
Write, Change, Recall, Forget: MongoDB's Pete Johnson on How Retrieval Drives Agent Performance
1 September 2026 1h 36m transcript summary
AI:AM Highlights: Recursive Self-Improvement, Rushed and Vibe-Coded?
28 August 2026 2h 11m
RL's a Hell of a Drug: Metagaming, Reward Seeking & Motivated CoT Reasoning – Bronson Schoen, Apollo
26 August 2026 2h 14m
AI in the AM — Weekly Highlights: Relaunch Week (Aug 17–20, 2026)
22 August 2026 2h 33m
Let There Be Germicidal Light: This $500 Fixture Could Stop the Next Pandemic, from Complex Systems
16 August 2026 1h 25m
Lindy Teammate: Flo Crivello on Multiplayer Agents, Memory & Why He'd Ban the Chinese Models He Uses
10 August 2026 2h 6m
Thinking in Silico: Goodfire CTO Dan Balsam on Concept Manifolds & a $1000/Month ML Research Agent
8 August 2026 1h 57m
Pick Your Poison: Zvi Mowshowitz on the Unipolar/Multipolar AGI Dilemma, OpenFace & Pacing the ...
5 August 2026 2h 57m transcript summary
Nathan Goes to China – Part 2: AI Safety with Chinese Characteristics
2 August 2026 2h 17m
Is Offense or Defense Dominant? FAR.AI's Adam Gleave on the AI Security Leaderboard
30 July 2026 1h 44m transcript summary
Nathan Goes to China – Part 1: Tech & Agent Setup, Chinese AI UX, WAIC, and Attitudes on AI
27 July 2026 2h 24m transcript summary
Alignment with Awakening: Davidad on Moral Realism, AI Wisdom, & why His p(Doom) is Down to 5%
12 July 2026 2h 23m transcript summary
AI:AM Highlights: Exploring the J-Space, AI Superforecasters, SambaNova's Chips, & LTX Video Gen
9 July 2026 2h 7m
Intelligence on the Edge: Liquid AI's Ramin Hasani on the Search for Device-Native Foundation Models
4 July 2026 1h 47m transcript summary
1000 Designs a Day: Neural Concept's Thomas von Tschammer on AI-Native Engineering
1 July 2026 1h 29m transcript summary
AI:AM #4: Cameron on Model Consciousness, Duvenaud's Gradual Disempowerment, swyx's AI-Eng Alpha
27 June 2026 1h 56m
The God We Deserve: Nonzero's Robert Wright on AI as Humanity's Ultimate Test
23 June 2026 2h 29m
AI:AM #3: Zvi on Fable, the Cases For & Against the Ban, + AI for Math, Logistics & More
21 June 2026 2h 14m transcript summary
Dean Ball, on Joining OpenAI: New Power Centers, Frontier AI Policy, & Main Character Energy
20 June 2026 2h 39m
Radically Better Reasoning: Elicit's Andreas Stuhlmüller & Jungwon Byun on World Models for Research
17 June 2026 1h 46m
AI in the AM — Week 2 Highlights (June 2026)
13 June 2026 1h 44m
Babysitting the Machine: Glean's Rebecca Hinds on the Hidden Human Labor of AI at Work
10 June 2026 1h 46m transcript summary
AI in the AM — Week 1 Highlights (June 2026)
6 June 2026 1h 22m
Nested Learning: Ali Behrouz on the Quest for Continual Learning & Illusion of AI Architectures
3 June 2026 3h 0m
Inside Nathan's Second Brain: Daniel Miessler, Security Expert & Creator of PAI, Audits My AI Setup
30 May 2026 2h 32m
Your Biggest Lever: Designing your AI Career for Maximum Impact, with 80,000 Hours founder Ben Todd
26 May 2026 1h 42m
All Compute Is Food: Palisade's Jeffrey Ladish on AI Shutdown Resistance, Self-Replication & Ecology
24 May 2026 2h 13m
The Model Eats the Scaffolding: DeepMind's Logan Kilpatrick & Tulsee Doshi on 3.5 Flash, Omni & More
20 May 2026 59 min transcript summary
Three Kinds of Software Survive: Tasklet's Andrew Lee on Competing to be a Horizontal Platform
15 May 2026 1h 33m transcript summary
Milliseconds to Match: Criteo's AdTech AI & the Future of Commerce w/ Diarmuid Gill & Liva Ralaivola
9 May 2026 1h 27m
"Descript Isn't a Slop Machine": Laura Burkhauser on the AI Tools Creators Love and Hate
6 May 2026 1h 23m
The RL Fine-Tuning Playbook: CoreWeave's Kyle Corbitt on GRPO, Rubrics, Environments, Reward Hacking
1 May 2026 1h 46m transcript summary
AI in the AM: 99% off search, GPT-5.5 is "clean", model welfare analysis, & efficient analog compute
26 April 2026 2h 38m transcript summary
Does Learning Require Feeling? Cameron Berg on the latest AI Consciousness & Welfare Research
23 April 2026 3h 33m
Vibe-Coding an Attention Firewall, w/ Steve Newman, creator of The Curve
19 April 2026 2h 9m
Welcome to AI in the AM: RL for EE, Oversight w/out Nationalization, & the first AI-Run Retail Store
15 April 2026 2h 30m
It's Crunch Time: Ajeya Cotra on RSI & AI-Powered AI Safety Work, from the 80,000 Hours Podcast
11 April 2026 3h 10m
Calm AI for Crazy Days: Inside Granola's Design Philosophy, with co-founder Sam Stephenson
8 April 2026 1h 34m
Training the AIs' Eyes: How Roboflow is Making the Real World Programmable, with CEO Joseph Nelson
4 April 2026 1h 55m
Success without Dignity? Nathan finds Hope Amidst Chaos, from The Intelligence Horizon Podcast
1 April 2026 1h 44m transcript summary
Scaling Intelligence Out: Cisco's Vision for the Internet of Cognition, with Vijoy Pandey
25 March 2026 1h 35m transcript summary
Your Agent's Self-Improving Swiss Army Knife: Composio CTO Karan Vaidya on Building Smart Tools
22 March 2026 1h 38m
Zvi’s Mic Works! Recursive Self-Improvement, Live Player Analysis, Anthropic vs DoW + More!
19 March 2026 3h 26m transcript summary
AI Scouting Report: the Good, Bad, & Weird @ the Law & AI Certificate Program, by LexLab, UC Law SF
16 March 2026 1h 16m
Bioinfohazards: Jassi Pannu on Controlling Dangerous Data from which AI Models Learn
11 March 2026 1h 43m
Try this at Home: Jesse Genet on OpenClaw Agents for Homeschool & How to Live Your Best AI Life
8 March 2026 2h 6m
Don’t Fight Backprop: Goodfire’s Vision for Intentional Design, w/ Dan Balsam & Tom McGrath
5 March 2026 1h 47m transcript summary
Situational Awareness in Government, with UK AISI Chief Scientist Geoffrey Irving
1 March 2026 2h 18m
Universal Medical Intelligence: OpenAI's Plan to Elevate Human Health, with Karan Singhal
25 February 2026 2h 1m
Intelligence with Everyone: RL @ MiniMax, with Olive Song, from AIE NYC & Inference by Turing Post
22 February 2026 55 min transcript summary
Mathematical Superintelligence: Harmonic’s Vlad Tenev & Tudor Achim on IMO Gold & Theories of Everything
18 February 2026 1h 31m transcript summary
Approaching the AI Event Horizon? Part 2, w/ Abhi Mahajan, Helen Toner, Jeremie Harris, @8teAPi
14 February 2026 2h 22m transcript summary
Approaching the AI Event Horizon? Part 1, w/ James Zou, Sam Hammond, Shoshannah Tekofsky, @8teAPi
13 February 2026 1h 32m transcript summary
AGI-Pilled Cyber Defense: Automating Digital Forensics w/ Asymmetric Security Founder Alexis Carlier
8 February 2026 1h 16m
Infinite Code Context: AI Coding at Enterprise Scale w/ Blitzy CEO Brian Elliott & CTO Sid Pardeshi
5 February 2026 1h 56m transcript summary
The AI-Powered Biohub: Why Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan are Investing in Data, from Latent.Space
1 February 2026 1h 2m
AI & The Law: Changing Practice, Claude Constitution, & New Rights, w/ Kevin & Alan of Scaling Laws
29 January 2026 1h 36m
The Internet Computer: Caffeine.ai CEO Dominic Williams on Unstoppable, Self-Writing Software
25 January 2026 2h 11m
AMA Part 2: Is Fine-Tuning Dead? How Am I Preparing for AGI? Are We Headed for UBI? & More!
22 January 2026 2h 23m
Pioneering PAI: How Daniel Miessler’s Personal AI Infrastructure Activates Human Agency & Creativity
18 January 2026 2h 28m transcript summary
Snowflake VP of AI Baris Gultekin on Bringing AI to Data, Agent Design, Text-2-SQL, RAG & More
14 January 2026 1h 39m
AMA Part 1: Is Claude Code AGI? Are we in a bubble? Plus Live Player Analysis
9 January 2026 1h 54m transcript summary
Building & Scaling the AI Safety Research Community, with Ryan Kidd of MATS
4 January 2026 1h 54m
Confronting the Intelligence Curse, w/ Luke Drago of Workshop Labs, from the FLI Podcast
1 January 2026 1h 16m transcript summary
Controlling Tools or Aligning Creatures? Emmett Shear (Softmax) & Séb Krier (GDM), from a16z Show
27 December 2025 1h 15m
The Great Security Update: AI ∧ Formal Methods with Kathleen Fisher of RAND & Byron Cook of AWS
24 December 2025 1h 39m
AI 2025 → 2026 Live Show | Part 2
19 December 2025 1h 39m
AI 2025 → 2026 Live Show | Part 1
18 December 2025 1h 55m
AI's Energy & Water Demands: Sorting Fact from Fiction with Andy Masley
14 December 2025 2h 3m
Superintelligence: To Ban or Not to Ban? Max Tegmark & Dean Ball join Liron Shapira on Doom Debates
10 December 2025 2h 0m
Sovereign AI in Poland: Language Adaptation, Local Control & Cost Advantages with Marek Kozlowski
6 December 2025 1h 29m
China's AI Upstarts: How Z.ai Builds, Benchmarks & Ships in Hours, from ChinaTalk
3 December 2025 1h 23m
Underwriting Superintelligence: How AIUC is using Insurance, Standards, and Audits to Accelerate Adoption while Minimizing Risks
30 November 2025 1h 13m
AI-Led Sales: How 1Mind's Superhumans Drive Exponential Growth, from the Agents of Scale Podcast
27 November 2025 51 min
What AI Means for Students & Teachers: My Keynote from the Michigan Virtual AI Summit
25 November 2025 1h 4m
Escaping AI Slop: How Atlassian Gives AI Teammates Taste, Knowledge, & Workflows, w- Sherif Mansour
20 November 2025 1h 40m
AI in the Cancer Journey: How I'm Using AI to Help My Son
17 November 2025 2h 2m
My Positive Vision for the AI Future, from the Existential Hope Podcast
12 November 2025 1h 9m
What is Catholic AI? Technology Meets Theology, with Matthew Harvey Sanders, CEO of Longbeard
8 November 2025 1h 53m

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