Future Around & Find Out

How do you build a system for turning wild ideas into world-changing innovations? Astro Teller, Captain of Moonshots at X, The Moonshot Factory, has spent over 15 years leading Google’s audacious innovation lab—the birthplace of Waymo, Google Brain, and other breakthrough projects. In this special episode, recorded live in Austin at last year's SXSW, Astro shares the playbook to create a moonshot...

Greetings from SXSW, where I'm learning, recording, and eating... You'll hear all about it soon... For now, enjoy this short, sweet, and geeky bonus episode. Have you seen that weird graph about all the jobs that AI is going to kill? It looks like an ink blot or a Rorschach test... It's from an Anthropic report and it's really making the rounds. If you follow tech stuff on social media you've prob...

So why is one of the world’s leading AI researchers teaching AI to understand pain and suffering? Well, Daniel Hulme says that if we build an empathetic AI, perhaps even a conscious one, then we’ll be safer. His hypothesis is that a "zombie" AI will eat our brains, but an empathetic AI would stay aligned with us. So he's building this "antivirus" (with AI, of course) and he's very aware that this...

So how do Kwaku's kids know that it's FAFO Friday? "They're like, 'oh, we know you're doing the podcast 'cause we just hear you cackling through the walls.'" So laugh along with Kwaku and me today as we work our way through a quick victory lap (stuff we said would happen last week happened!), why Sam is like that desperate guy at the bar who refuses to go home alone, quantum computing explained vi...

So, there are dire wolves living on Earth again. They were “de-extincted” by Colossal Biosciences. And today on the show their Chief Science Officer joins me to share her view on why the de-extinction matters — not as a science project, but because it will help solve problems that threaten every species on earth, including us.  Beth Shapiro is the Chief Science Officer at Colossal Biosciences, and...

Murderbots, mass layoffs, and media takeovers — all in one news cycle. Anthropic told the Pentagon "we will not accede." Block cut half its workforce overnight. And the Paramount-Warner Brothers deal raises real questions about who's running the media now. Also, thanks to Nicolás Maduro's fashion sense, Dan's 13-year-old is being called Lil Tator at school and honestly? The kids are all right.  Ha...

Of all the industries AI will transform, Kira Radinsky believes chemistry and biology will change the most.  Kira is the co-founder and CTO of Diagnostic Robotics, which uses AI to automate the administrative work that's crushing healthcare teams — so clinicians can actually focus on patients. She's also the co-founder of Mana.bio, where they're accelerating drug discovery by orders of magnitude....

You probably know by now that AI is the definition of mediocre. As in: it’s the average of everything it’s been trained on. So how do you get beyond average? How do you build a moat?  It certainly doesn’t seem to be via the models. While there are models of the month (hey, Opus 4.6, my new friend!), they seem to be pretty swappable.  So, the model ain’t it. But proprietary data (e.g. an AI that kn...

Henrik Werdelin is one of my favorite entrepreneurs. He’s founded and incubated several unicorns, most notably BARK, the dog happiness company. Henrik himself is a pretty happy guy — an optimistic guy who likes to ask what could go right? — and on the day we recorded (a few months ago as I was squirreling away interviews for the podcast relaunch), he helped me see through some future of tech gloom...

Is AI conscious? Will it be someday? And should we be nice to it now... just in case? This FAFO Friday, Kwaku and I dive into the mind-bending world of machine consciousness. We cover a lot of ground, weaving from the different ways that Luke (co-dependent with R2) and Han (barking commands at C-3PO) treat their droids to whether Pascal’s Wager informs whether we should believe in AI consciousness...

Everyone's feeling jumpy about AI right now—and for good reason. The hype has been massive. The investment has been astronomical. But where's the actual return? In this episode, Azeem Azhar, founder of Exponential View and advisor to tech leaders and governments, breaks down why the next 18 months are make-or-break for AI. Companies need to prove there's real ROI, not just prototypes launched and...

Welcome to the first FAFO Friday! This week Dan and Kwaku dig into: - The uncanny valley that is AI agents and Moltbook—the "Reddit" that agents built for themselves to complain about humans, create a religion, and behave in ways that freak humans out - Anthropic takes aim at OpenAI with a Super Bowl ad that's spicy (for cubs and cougars alike) - We read Claude's "Constitution" and ask: Should AI...

Baratunde Thurston wants us to live well with machines — not for us live under them, nor to be their almighty overlords. Baratunde is a technologist, a comedian, and an Emmy-nominated storyteller who explores interdependence. He gets spicy in this episode. The host of Life With Machines explores how he uses AI — without succumbing to its literal mediocrity — and why he feels he must use AI because...

You know what would be awesome? If we could build the future we want — before we muck it up. Future Around & Find Out helps builders think clearly about AI and emerging technologies, grapple with the implications, and decide what to build next. Independent technologist and former NPR journalist Dan Blumberg speaks with founders, makers, and you to celebrate breakthroughs, call BS on the hype,...

Here's the full text of this short episode: Hey everyone, Dan here with a quick, exciting update on this show... the name is about to change!  In a few days -- on January 20th --  you'll see that this podcast will have new cover art, a new name, a new trailer, and more... I'm not going to reveal that name today, but I do want to share a bit of why I'm changing the name of a show that's been honore...

Travel is one of the most demo-friendly use cases for AI — and one of the hardest industries to actually disrupt. Every AI launch seems to promise the same thing: “Tell me where you want to go, and I’ll plan everything.” But behind the slick demos sits a deeply consolidated industry dominated by platforms, hotel chains, and airlines that optimize for upsell and extraction. Rafat Ali is the founder...

This week I’m turning the mic over to podcast friends Mike Masnick and Ben Whitelaw, hosts of Ctrl-Alt-Speech, a show about what happens when we talk on the internet, the messy world of content moderation, trust & safety, and the laws trying (and often failing) to keep up. In their first episode of the new year, they build a 2026 bingo card of things that might happen across AI, regulation, an...

Happy New Year! This is the time of year when people make big changes. So, I'm bringing back my conversation with the co-author of Tomorrowmind . It's a fascinating book and especially relevant at this time of the year.  Dr. Gabriella Rosen Kellerman writes that that career trajectories used to be like steamships (full steam ahead), and then they became more like sailboats (lots of tacking), but n...

A guest episode from Famous & Gravy. On each episode, host Michael Osborne and guests look at the life of a famous dead celebrity and ask themselves if it's a life they would've wanted. The show gets into all sorts of things you will not in that person's official obituary or biography. I'm a fan. Here's how they describe today's episode: This person died 2011, age of 56. He dropped out of Reed...

This week I'm the guest and my friends at Whiskey Web and Whatnot are the hosts. And they're great hosts, because they send their guests a bottle of whiskey before talking web and whatnot... As we head into the holidays I hope you'll raise a glass with us and enjoy this very laid back episode...  Chuck and Robbie hosted me a year ago and I love that they got me on tape when they did, because it wa...

Looking to fund your startup? If you're new to the process, fundraising can be difficult to navigate. Not only are there a myriad of ways to go about it, but it can be hard to tell whether the tips, tricks, and advice floating around are based on any evidence at all. [This week, I'm turning the mic over to my friends at The Startup Podcast . featuring Carta's head of insights on what you need to k...

“So if you take any great startup and look backwards, you'll see that 90 percent of their growth came from like 10 percent of the stuff that they tried. So how do you find that 10 percent as quickly as possible?” Matt Lerner has advised hundreds of startups on how to grow. Now, the CEO of SYSTM has written a book called Growth Levers and How to Find Them where he shares his approach. This episode...

** I'd be so grateful if you'd take five minutes and answer our annual survey . It'll help me make the show better for you!  ** Hey folks, it's Thanksgiving weekend here in the US and it's the time of year when we think about what we're grateful for, so today I'm re-sharing some words from perhaps the most grateful person I've ever had on the show. Kelsey Hightower is a legendary developer. And he...

In this special live Web Summit edition from Lisbon, roboticist, investor, and founder Chris Coomes shares how and why he built X1 Pipeline, an AI platform that evaluates startups the way he would — only much, much faster. It's something he wishes he had when looking for early stage robotics startups while at Google and Amazon.  We also talk about the strange humanoid robots wandering the conventi...

In this special live Web Summit edition from Lisbon, I sit down with Tom Haworth, founder of B13.ai, to talk about why “good enough” AI might actually be one of the most dangerous places we can get stuck. And you’ll hear Tom say it’s time for the leaders of vibe coding platforms (e.g. Lovable, Replit, Cursor) to acknowledge that they’re great when you need to “demo not memo”, but not great (today...