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Introducing The Generalist Podcast
Your weekly window into the ideas and innovations that will reshape our world.
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Don’t miss our first episode
Subscribe to make sure you don’t miss our first episode, launching tomorrow:
Friends,
Today marks the start of something I’ve wanted to create for a long time: The Generalist Podcast.
There’s a saying – usually attributed to science fiction writer William Gibson – that I think about with inordinate frequency: “The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed.” Our goal with The Generalist Podcast is to help distribute the future more evenly through conversations with the people who see it first.
Look around, and you can see this dynamic everywhere. We have robots that fold clothes, dance, do kung fu, and build houses. We have AIs that write, paint, make films, fold proteins, and demolish us at chess. We have humans living in space and people on Earth walking around with genetically modified animal organs or brain-computer interfaces that allow them to navigate the web. We have money that travels instantly from one corner of the world to another and satellites that bathe entire landscapes with high-speed internet.
These technologies aren’t impacting everyone yet but exist in pockets that might one day grow to span our civilization.
All of which is to say that the best way to predict the future isn’t to prognosticate blindly but to find the pocket in which it already exists and extrapolate outward.
The oldest living person today is the nun Inah Canabarro Lucas, age 116. When Lucas was born in 1908 in rural Brazil, today’s innovations would have been unimaginable. Awaiting her were the television, the printer, commercial aviation, space travel, microwaves, refrigeration, barcodes, GPS, PCs, video games, the internet, the browser, the mobile phone, social media, and artificial intelligence. The world leaped from spotty mechanization to near-total connectedness in a single lifetime.
As technological progress accelerates, we may experience the scale of change Sister Lucas did within a decade or two. In our lifetimes, we should expect to know someone who emigrated to Mars, fell hopelessly in love with a digital companion, radically extended their lifespan through biohacking, and works alongside affable automatons. In some fashion, all of these are already happening – they are simply waiting for wider distribution.
These possibilities, and others like them, are much closer than many of us believe. I want more people to understand what the future might look like so they can choose how to participate in shaping it.
With The Generalist Podcast, I’m bringing you thoughtful, differentiated interviews with visionary founders, far-seeing investors, and provocative thinkers who live in these pockets of the future that we can already see today.
What does that look like, tangibly? Here’s a teaser of our upcoming slate:
Reid Hoffman on the cognitive industrial revolution, AI agency, mystical atheism, and gene editing
Josh Wolfe on xenotransplantation, digitizing smell, searching for genetic mutants, and learning from science-fiction
Roelof Botha on cultivating the mindset to weather bubbles, how Sequoia navigates investment cycles, and why AI may favor incumbents
Chris Best and Hamish McKenzie on creator economics, what AI means for the art of writing and a volatile media landscape
Trae Stephens on innovating in defense, arming super soldiers, and Great Power conflicts
Chris Miller on semiconductor strategy, Chinese AI companies, and Southeast Asia’s growing importance in the chip war
Bob Mumgaard and Vinod Khosla on nuclear fusion’s potential, why it’s been a “holy grail,” and how close we are to limitless clean energy
…and many more!
In just 60 minutes each week, I hope you’ll be introduced to ideas, technologies, and people before you might have discovered them otherwise—and that this will make you a little bit more prepared for tomorrow’s world.
This is very much an experiment and a work in progress. I’ve loved recording the first few episodes and have personally learned so much. Though I was optimistic about what we’re building with this podcast, the process has made me increasingly convinced that we’re onto something special. That said, there’s still lots for us to learn and improve (I’m still getting my sea legs as a host, for example). I hope we can do that together, using your feedback, to steadily design the highest-value, signal-dense hour of your week.
To that end, I hope you’ll join us by subscribing to the show, listening to our upcoming episodes, and sharing your feedback. The journey officially begins tomorrow, when we’ll release our first episode with Reid Hoffman. I hope you enjoy it, and I can’t wait to hear what you think.
To the future,
Mario
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Production and marketing by penname.co, artwork by Ibrahim Rayintakath.
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