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Jason Crawford writes about the history of technology and the need to understand what drives progress at his blog The Roots of Progress: https://rootsofprogress.org/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs) have been featured prominently in the news recently. Trent and Thomas do a solo episode exploring how SPACs are structured and what impact they might have on business.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Steven Kolter has become famous for his work on making the impossible possible through creativity, innovation, and a unique state of consciousness called 'flow'. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Moynihan is an intellectual historian who studies how humans came to discover the idea of existential risk, and what this means for our maturity as a species. Find more of his work at: https://thomasmoynihan.xyz/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Frederick Turner has spent a lifetime studying complex systems, evolution, the nature of time, epic poetry, facts, values, and aesthetics. We thoroughly enjoyed getting his perspective in this freewheeling discussion. Check out his blog at: http://frederickturnerpoet.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Woody Wade is a recognized expert in scenario planning who uses his unique method to help businesses and leaders chart the future. Check him out at: https://www.woodywade.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jungwon Byun and Andreas Stuhlmüller are co-founders of Ought, a company which leverages advanced language models to automate open-ended reasoning, data gathering, analysis, and scholarship. The result is a fascinating attempt to make knowledge workers 250 times more efficient (and change the world while they're doing it). Check them out at: https://ought.org/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Logan Thrasher Collins is a synthetic biologist, futurist, and author, the lead scientist at Conduit Computing, and a graduate student in biomedical engineering at Washington University in St. Louis.Check out his work at: https://logancollinsblog.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Peter's personal website: https://www.peterleyden.com/Our episode with David Brin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orfagXnjFgYRenowned futurist Peter Leyden is a former editor at Wired magazine, the founder of Reinvent, and a sought-after consultant and keynote speaker. He joins us to talk about his methodology for building forecasts and what he thinks the future holds.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Luca Dellanna joins us to talk about how his research into adaptive systems applies across management, psychology, investing, and economics. Check out more of his work here:https://www.luca-dellanna.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Karl Dakin is an expert in fundraising, with a long career in helping businesses raise capital in innovative ways. In this conversation we talk about how businesses are faring with the lockdowns, promising new technologies for ridding the air of pathogens, professional rugby, and lots of other interesting things.

Erik has a PhD in mathematics specializing in non-classical foundations of mathematics and naive set theory. His work centers around attempting to circumvent classical limitative results and reviving naive set theory as a viable theory.We spend a lot of this conversation discussing how his work will impact AI Safety and its implications for metaphysics.

Kai Faust is the CEO and Founder of Infopop, where he builds products that increase access to spatial information. Their first product helps retail customers find products using their mobile phones. He and his team are also building indoor maps which they are using as the bedrock for a future spatial computing platform.

Dr. Roman V. Yampolskiy is a Tenured Associate Professor in the department ofComputer Science and Engineering at the University of Louisville. He is the foundingand current director of the Cyber Security Lab and an author of many books including"Artificial Superintelligence: a Futuristic Approach". Dr. Yampolskiy’s main areas ofinterest are Artificial Intelligence Safety and Cybersecurity.

Kristin is a multi-disciplinary geek and fifteen year startup veteran. She is particularly interested in the intersection of epistemology, neuroscience, and nonviolence, and for the last five years has been working on her startup Rationally--what began as “Quora but with evidence-based answers” but ended up as an evidence synthesis platform for clinical research.

Dr. Kristinn R. Thórisson is Full Research Professor of Computer Science at Reykjavik University and Managing Director of the Icelandic Institute for Intelligent Machines. His work in applied AI for the past 30 years has included diverse projects at LEGO, NASA and Honda, as well as numerous startups in Europe and the U.S. such as Radar Networks which was funded by Paul Allen’s Vulcan Ventures. For the past 15 years his theoretical work has focused on human-level AI, constructivist learning, cumulative understanding, and cognitive control architectures.

Steve is the founder of Main Street Pedicabs, one of the most successful pedicab ventures in the world. In this conversation he joins Thomas and Trent to discuss his journey in business, urban planning, and the way communities evolve in response to changes in infrastructure and transportation. 

Michał is a Polish software engineer working on Zapata's quantum computing platform. His main interest is in so-called “variational quantum algorithms” – hybrid classical-quantum algorithms that will potentially be useful for near-term quantum computers. Apart from his day job at Zapata Computing he manages a mentorship program at the Quantum Open Source Foundation, creates educational content for his blog, and is involved in the Q4Climate initiative, an organization devoted to exploring ways in which quantum computers can help with climate change.He is also interested in topics such as effective altruism, design, and how the mind works.

Olu Amusan is an Artificial Intelligence Evangelist, an UNLEASH Alumnus, HIVE Global Leader, the Author of "A-Z of AI Consulting", and a global shaper of the World Economic Forum. He is the CEO of Coven Works, an AI Education and Consulting firm based in Dallas Texas with offices in Lagos Nigeria. He has been recognized multiple times for his work by top technology organizations like Microsoft and was recently pronounced one of JCI Top Ten Outstanding young persons in October, 2020.

Eleanor ‘Nell’ Watson is a researcher in emerging technologies who helped to pioneer Machine Vision techniques through her company QuantaCorp, which enables fast and accurate body measurement from just two photos.Nell serves as Chair & Vice-Chair respectively of the IEEE’s ECPAIS Transparency Experts Focus Group, and P7001 Transparency of Autonomous Systems committee on AI Ethics & Safety, engineering credit score-like mechanisms to safeguard algorithmic trust. She also chairs EthicsNet.org, a community teaching prosocial behaviors to machines, CulturalPeace.org, crafting Geneva Conventions-style rules for cultural conflict, EDCsymbol.org, informing consumers of endocrine disruptors, and Pacha.org, connecting a network of service providers to help enable the automated accounting of externalities (shifted costs) such as pollution.