High Variance with Danny Buerkli

Andrew Greenway — co-founder of Public Digital, one of the founders of the UK's Government Digital Service, and co-author of the new book Digital Sovereignty: The Power to Decide — joins Danny Buerkli to make the case that many government institutions cannot be reformed, only replaced. They discuss what DOGE got right, why a Thanos snap of the top civil servants might help, how the strangler fig p...

Eric Schwitzgebel — professor of philosophy at UC Riverside and author of The Weirdness of the World and the forthcoming Human-Like: A Defense of AI Rights — joins Danny Buerkli to ask what happens if we create AI systems whose consciousness we cannot determine. If they are conscious, treating them as disposable tools could amount to a horrible crime; if they are not, granting them human-like righ...

Bouke Klein Teeselink — associate professor of economics at King’s College London and chief economist at the AI Objectives Institute — joins Danny Buerkli to ask what actually makes a job automatable. Early evidence suggests that firms and occupations more exposed to AI are already seeing declines in hiring and employment — but Bouke argues that these first effects may be driven as much by uncerta...

Florence Gaub — political scientist, military strategist, and director of the Research Division at the NATO Defense College — joins Danny Buerkli to talk about the craft of foresight: what makes for a good warning (be concrete, offer options, manage the emotion), the mix of imagination, expert knowledge, and privileged access behind her 2013 call that Egypt was counting down to a coup, and why she...

Dan Davies — economist, FT contributor, former investment bank analyst, and author of The Unaccountability Machine and Lying for Money — joins Danny Buerkli to make the case that management cybernetics is the science economics should have turned into. Hayek and Coase settled the economics of information in the 1930s, before Shannon and Turing gave the field a rigorous concept of information to bui...

Simon Wardley — former CEO and creator of Wardley Mapping — joins Danny Buerkli to talk about how he went from feeling like a "fake CEO" to finding one of the most useful ways of thinking about strategy. Simon also explains how he "cheats" at prediction, calling cloud, serverless, vibe coding, and the rise of intelligent agents years — sometimes decades — before they arrived. They also talk about...

If you don't have a frontier AI lab within your borders, as a country, what exactly is your plan? Anton Leicht — visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of the "Threading the Needle" Substack — joins Danny Buerkli to talk through the strategic options available to middle powers. They discuss why the UK seems more situationally aware than others, what leverage...

Jeff Stern — reporter and author of The Warhead — joins Danny Buerkli to talk about the long quest to build the “perfect weapon.” They discuss how a company mostly known for calculators revolutionized warfare, the paradox of precision-guided munitions, what disappears behind the language of “surgical” force, and how covering conflict changed Jeff’s understanding of his own role as a reporter.

Ioana Marinescu — associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania, research associate at the NBER, and member of Anthropic's Economic Advisory Council — joins Danny Buerkli to discuss her "intelligence saturation" paper, which divides the economy into an intelligence sector and a physical sector to model what happens as AI automates cognitive work. They discuss why a recent scenario piece th...

Germany and France have historically formed the core of Europe and the European Union. Joseph de Weck - political analyst, historian, author, columnist, and Europe Director at Greenmantle - knows both exceptionally well and joins Danny Buerkli to unpack the state of Europe. They discuss the influence of Paul Ricœur on Emmanuel Macron, why French baguette bread is so standardized, what may happen a...

Every aspect of modernity was shaped by individuals with intellectual roots in Vienna, argues Richard Cockett, author of "Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World". Richard, historian and senior editor at The Economist, joins Danny Buerkli to discuss his latest book. They cover the story of the stunningly productive and creative Viennese emigrés, discuss implications for progress tod...

Which effects of AI are we already seeing in the labor market? And what might be coming down the line? Bharat Chandar, postdoc at Stanford and co-author of the "Canaries in the Coal Mine" paper, joins Danny Buerkli to discuss what we know about the impacts of AI on the labor market and where the jury is still out.

Patricia Ryan Madson, professor emerita at Stanford and author of "Improv Wisdom", joins Danny Buerkli to talk about how she got into improv, how she starts a class, how status works, Keith Johnstone's dark side, and the four A's of improv: attention, acceptance, appreciation, and action. 

Jamais Cascio, futurist, scenario expert, and author of Navigating the Age of Chaos , joins Danny Buerkli for a deep dive into scenario planning. They discuss how the discipline has evolved since the days of Herman Kahn at RAND and Pierre Wack at Shell, whether the military or the private sector do it better, why geoengineering might lead to predictable trouble (and why we might do it anyway), and...

Antoine Bosselut, Assistant Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne, joins Danny Buerkli to explain how he and his team built Apertus, the 'open' LLM. Antoine and Danny discuss why taxpayers should fund this work, which constraints bite hardest when creating an LLM outside one of the large labs, and which public investments may be needed now.

Vishal Jodhani, a master facilitator, joins Danny Buerkli to talk about what makes facilitation work. They discuss what makes for a good question, how to know the difference between productive chaos and unproductive confusion, and what is underappreciated about the Berlin club scene.

Don Kettl — prolific scholar of public administration — joins Danny Buerkli talk about state capacity and government reform. They discuss what DOGE got right (and what it didn't), whether gradual government is possible at all, why Operation Warp Speed was so unreasonably effective, and what lessons we should learn from Paul Volcker. 

We live in weird times. The world has become harder to read — more uncertain, more volatile, stranger.  High Variance is an interview podcast about how to navigate this reality. We talk to people who are making sense of what’s happening around us to ask: What’s going on? And how should we respond?