Peter van Hardenberg talks about Industrialists vs. Academics, Ink&Switch's evolution over time, the Hollywood Model, internal lab infrastructure, and more!

Peter is the lab director and CEO of Ink&Switch, a private, creator oriented, computing research lab. 

References

• Ink&Switch (and their many publications)
• The Hollywood Model in R&D
• Idea Machines Episode with Adam Wiggins
• Paul Erdós

Transcript

Peter Van Hardenbe...

A conversation with Tim Hwang about historical simulations, the interaction of policy and science, analogies between research ecosystems and the economy, and so much more. 

Topics

• Historical Simulations
• Macroscience
• Macro-metrics for science
• Long science
• The interaction between science and policy
• Creative destruction in research
• “Regulation” for scientific markets
• Indicators for the health of a field or science as a whole
• “Met...

Nadia Asparouhova talks about idea machines on idea machines! Idea machines, of course, being her framework around societal organisms that turn ideas into outcomes. We also talk about  the relationship between philanthropy and status, public goods and more. 

Nadia is a hard-to-categorize doer of many things: In the past, she spent many years exploring the funding, governance, and social dynamics of open source software, both writin...

Seemay Chou talks about the process of building a new research organization, ticks, hiring and managing entrepreneurial scientists, non-model organisms, institutional experiments and a lot more!

Seemay is the co-founder and CEO of Arcadia Science —  a research and development company focusing on underesearched areas in biology and specifically new organisms that haven't been traditionally studied in the lab.  She’s also the co-foun...

William Bonvillian does a deep dive about his decades of research on how DARPA works and his more recent work on advanced manufacturing. 

William is a Lecturer at MIT and the Senior Director of Special Projects,at MIT’s Office of Digital Learning. Before joining MIT he spent almost two decades as a senior policy advisor for the US senate. He’s also published many papers and a detailed book exploring the DARPA model. 

Links

William'...

In this conversation, Adam Falk and I talk about running research programs with impact over long timescales, creating new fields, philanthropic science funding, and so much more. 

Adam is the president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation,  which was started by the eponymous founder of General Motors and has been funding science and education efforts for almost nine decades. 

They’ve funded everything from iPython Notebooks to the Wik...

In this conversation, Semon Rezchikov and I talk about what other disciplines can learn from mathematics, creating and cultivating collaborations, working at different levels of abstraction, and a lot more!

Semon is currently a postdoc in mathematics at Harvard where he specializes in symplectic geometry. He has an amazing ability to go up and down the ladder of abstraction — doing extremely hardcore math while at the same time pay...

Professor Michael Strevens discusses the line between scientific knowledge and everything else, the contrast between what scientists as people do and the formalized process of science, why Kuhn and Popper are both right and both wrong, and more.

Michael is a professor of Philosophy at New York University where he studies the philosophy of science and the philosophical implications of cognitive science. He’s the author of the outsta...

A conversation with the VitaDAO core team. VitaDAO is a decentralized autonomous organization — or DAO — that focuses on enabling and funding longevity research.

The sketch of how a DAO works is that people buy voting tokens that live on top of the Etherium blockchain and then use those tokens to vote on various action proposals for VitaDAO to take. This voting-based system contrasts with the more traditional model of a company tha...

Dr. Brian Arthur and I talk about how technology can be modeled as a modular and evolving system, combinatorial evolution more broadly and dig into some fascinating technological case studies that informed his book The Nature of Technology.

Brian is a researcher and author who is perhaps best known for his work on complexity economics, but I wanted to talk to him because of the fascinating work he’s done building out theories of te...

In this Conversation, Jason Crawford and I talk about starting a nonprofit organization, changing conceptions of progress, why 26 years after WWII may have been what happened in 1971, and more.

Jason is the proprietor of Roots of Progress a blog and educational hub that has recently become a full-fledged nonprofit devoted to the philosophy of progress. Jason’s a returning guest to the podcast — we first spoke in 2019 relatively soo...

In this conversation, Dr. Stephen Dean talks about how he created the 1976 US fusion program plan, how it played out and the history of fusion power in the US, technology program planning and management more broadly, and more.

Stephen has been working on making fusion energy a reality for more than five decades. He did research on controlled fusion reactions in the 60s and in the 70s became a director at the Atomic energy commissio...

Eli Dourado on how the sausage of technology policy is made, the relationship between total factor productivity and technological progress, airships, and more.

Eli is an economist, regulatory hacker, and a senior research fellow at the Center for Growth and Opportunity at Utah State University. In the past, he was the head of global policy at Boom Supersonic where he navigated the thicket of regulations on supersonic flight. Before...

In this conversation I talk to the Amazing Arati Prabhakar about using Solutions R&D to tackle big societal problems, gaps in the innovation ecosystem, DARPA, and more.

Arati’s career has covered almost every corner of the innovation ecosystem - she’s done basically every role at - DARPA she was a program manager, started their Microelectronics Technology Office, and several years later returned to server as its Director. She was a...

In this conversation I talk to Ilan Gur about what it really means for technology to “escape the lab”, the power of context to shape the usefulness of research, the inadequacies of current institutional structures, how activate helps technology escape the lab *by* changing people’s context, and more.

Ilan is the CEO and founder of Activate, which is a nonprofit that runs a fellowship enabling scientists to spend two years embedded ...

In this conversation I talk to Luke Constable about the complicated tapestry of finance, funding projects, incentives, organizational and legal structures, social technologies, and more.

Luke is the founder of the hedge fund Lampa Capital and publishes a widely-read newsletter full of fascinating deep dives. He’s also trained as a lawyer and historian so he looks at the world with a fairly unique set of lenses.

Disclaimer: nothing ...

In this conversation I talk to Donald Braben about his venture research initiative, peer review, and enabling the 21st century equivalents of Max Planck.

Donald has been a staunch advocate of reforming how we fund and evaluate research for decades. From 1980 to 1990 he ran BP’s venture research program, where he had a chance to put his ideas into practice. Considering the fact that the program cost two million pounds per year and e...

A conversation with Adam Marblestone about his new project - Focused Research Organizations.

Focused Research Organizations (FROs) are a new initiative that Adam is working on to address gaps in current institutional structures. You can read more about them in this white paper that Adam released with Sam Rodriques.

Links

FRO Whitepaper

Adam on Twitter

Adam's Website

Transcript

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Michael Filler and Matthew Realff discuss Fundamental Manufacturing Process innovations. We explore what they are, dig into historical examples, and consider how we might enable more of them to happen. Michael and Matthew are both professors at Georgia Tech and Michael also hosts an excellent podcast about nanotechnology called Nanovation.

Our conversation centers around their paper Fundamental Manufacturing Process Innovation Chan...