Azeem Azhar's Exponential View

This episode is a special preview of the new podcast, What’s Your Problem? from Pushkin Industries. What’s Your Problem? explains the problems really smart people are trying to solve right now, from creating a drone delivery service to building a car that can truly drive itself. Jacob Goldstein, former host of Planet Money, talks with entrepreneurs, executives, and engineers about the future they’re trying to build – and the problems they have to solve to get there...

Google, Facebook, Apple, and Uber are just some of the enormous companies that derive part of their value from network effects: the more users they have, the more value they provide. Serial entrepreneur and early-stage investor James Currier is one of the world’s foremost experts on networks, and on the companies that use them best. He joins Azeem Azhar to discuss how companies with network effects dominate markets, and why their influence will likely continue to grow.

Fighting the climate crisis requires investment, innovation, and on-the-ground know-how. Dawn Lippert works at the intersection of all three. She’s the founder and CEO of Elemental Excelerator, a non-profit incubator that helps climate-focused startups deploy and scale their technologies. She joins Azeem Azhar to discuss how innovative climate tech companies can make it to market, and why workers at Silicon Valley’s biggest companies are flocking to fight climate change.

Ford has been making cars for 118 years -- nearly all of them with internal combustion engines. It now faces the biggest challenge in its history. Hau Thai-Tang, Ford’s chief product platform and operations officer, joins Azeem Azhar to discuss electrification, mobility, and the future of one of the titans of the industrial age.

Governments and companies have committed to net-zero emissions by 2050, but it’s not clear how they plan to get there – or how much it will cost. Michele Della Vigna, who runs the Carbonomics research program at Goldman Sachs, has dug into the economics behind a transition to net-zero emissions...

Hopin is one of the fastest-growing startups in history. The virtual events company had six employees in February 2020, at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. A year and a half later, it employs more than eight hundred and is valued at almost $8 billion...

Renewable energy is the future of our power systems, but relying on solar, wind, etc. will require a more reliable and resilient grid. Energy storage will be essential, and Malta Inc.’s molten-salt system is one of the most innovative and promising technologies in the field...

Investors Nathan Benaich and Ian Hogarth co-author the influential, annual “State of AI” report. They join Azeem Azhar to discuss breakout developments in disparate fields, from defense to medical biology. And they offer their take on the flood of new investments into AI and how we can best keep the technology safe for humanity.

Former Greek Finance Minister, economist, and bestselling author Yanis Varoufakis joins Azeem Azhar to discuss his speculative novel Another Now. The book isn’t pure fiction; it’s an optimistic vision of what our society could yet become -- a world where mass organization, technological progress, and an overhaul of companies and markets have made society more equitable.

Murray Shanahan, professor of cognitive robotics at Imperial College London and a senior research scientist at DeepMind, joins Azeem Azhar to discuss AI: where developments have exceeded expectations, where they have fallen short, and what the next steps are towards an artificial general intelligence.