Adam Marblestone – AI is missing something fundamental about the brain • The brain's secret sauce is its reward functions, not its architecture.

Capital in the 22nd Century • Piketty was wrong about the past. He’s probably right about the future.

An audio version of my blog post, Thoughts on AI progress (Dec 2025)

Sarah Paine – Why Russia Lost the Cold War • Oil crisis, Sino-Soviet split, ethnic rebellions, and arms build-up

Thoughts on AI progress (Dec 2025) • Why I'm moderately bearish in the short term, and explosively bullish in the long term

Podcast Strategy Doc (December 2025)

Ilya Sutskever – We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research • “These models somehow just generalize dramatically worse than people. It's a very fundamental thing.”

RL is even more information inefficient than you thought • And implications for RLVR progress

Satya Nadella — How Microsoft is preparing for AGI • Plus a tour of Fairwater 2, the most powerful AI datacenter in the world

Sarah Paine – How Russia sabotaged China's rise • Plus, where Russia and China go from here

Thoughts on the AI buildout • Fab CapEx overhang, 1 GW a week, China privileged in long timelines, and much else

Andrej Karpathy — AGI is still a decade away • "The problems are tractable, but they're still difficult”

Nick Lane – Life as we know it is chemically inevitable • Life is continuous with Earth’s geochemistry

Some thoughts on the Sutton interview • I have a much better understanding of Sutton’s vision now

On The Vital Question by Nick Lane • Life is continuous with Earth's geochemistry??

Fully autonomous robots are much closer than you think – Sergey Levine • Plus, how VLA models work, self-improvement from deployment, and China’s hardware advantage

How Hitler almost starved Britain – Sarah Paine • “The only thing that really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril” – Winston Churchill

Evolution designed us to die fast; we can change that — Jacob Kimmel • Is the answer already in our genome?

China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer • Plus, how solar fits into the next 10 years

Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard • “Chickens are unbeatable at converting grain into protein”

Sarah Paine — How Imperial Japan defeated Tsarist Russia & Qing China • Plus, the most lopsided naval battle in human history

Stephen Kotkin — How Stalin became the most powerful dictator in history • The most consequential figure of the 20th century

Why I don’t think AGI is right around the corner • An audio version of the original blog post

Sarah Paine 6 part July lecture series - free tickets for paid subscribers • 6 new lectures from my most popular guest, 4 times over.

A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church • The man behind the last few decades of biotech breakthroughs