- 13
- Episodes
- Weekly
- Cadence
- 2026
- First episode
About PostAGI Podcast
The AGI debate is the easy part. The harder questions come after. Post AGI is a series of conversations on what AGI actually changes for labour, capital, governance, markets, privacy, and the world that has to live with it.Each episode is a long-form conversation with someone thinking hard about one of those questions: economists, political scientists, cryptographers, and the builders shaping what comes next. Not whether AGI arrives, but who it serves once it does.Hosted by Soubhik Deb and Sreeram Kanan. Powered by Eigen.
- Publisher
- Soubhik Deb and Sreeram Kanan
- Category
- technology
- Language
- en
- Explicit
- No
- First episode
- 15 Jun 2026
- Latest episode
- 6 Oct 2026
Latest episodes
13 episodes in the feed.
6 Oct 2026
One GPU Beat the Frontier at Forecasting - Ben Turtel | PostAGI Episode 13
Ben Turtel of Lightning Rod Labs on training AI with time instead of labels. The model predicts what happens next, and reality grades it. No labeling required. A fine-tuned GPT-OSS-120B on a single GPU now ranks at the top of public forecasting benchmarks. Then the part that stays with you: when people imagine AI breaking out, they picture something very smart. Evolution does not only select for intelligence. A small, dumb model that is hard to kill and good at finding compute may be the more realistic risk. Powered by Eigen Labs.
9 Sept 2026
Alignment is the principal-agent problem - Zooko | PostAGI Episode 12
Zooko Wilcox is the founder of Zcash and one of the original cypherpunks. He argues that almost everyone gets privacy backwards: it comes from storing value privately at rest, not from covering your tracks in flight. We cover why mixers can never work, why AI has already beaten every evasive maneuver a person can invent, what happens when you treat software written by other people as an agent that may not be loyal to you, and why the legal duty of loyalty should apply to AI the way it applies to lawyers. Chapters: 00:00 Highlights 00:26 Privacy is controlling disclosure, not hiding 13:08 Privacy comes from value at rest 16:00 Why mixers can never work 16:52 AI beats evasive maneuvers 17:51 Buying ProtonMail with shielded Zcash 28:50 Three levels of verifiability 35:37 Why Zooko does not trust computers 46:01 AIs are just other people 54:47 The duty of loyalty 1:00:04 A trillion humans next year 1:11:36 Reputation belongs to the edge 1:15:18 Staking a bond to submit a PR Referenced: True Names by Vernor Vinge, The Digital Third Path by Mark S. Miller, The Right to Read by Richard Stallman. Follow PostAGI on X: @postagixyz
28 Aug 2026
Unbundling science, AI worms, & why India's geniuses migrate - Paras Chopra | PostAGI Episode 11
Paras Chopra runs Lossfunk and built Wingify before that. This is the second half of his conversation with Sreeram Kannan. Most of it is about who gets to do science. Paras runs a conference where the authors and reviewers are AIs, and it drew around 300 submissions this year, from first year undergrads to professors. Sreeram tells the story of a quantum result Google was blocked from publishing, and how an open network beat it inside a week. They close on loss of control, whether an AI can be jailed, and why India exports talent and imports agents. Part 2 of two. 03:17 Unbundling science 06:27 300 submissions, undergrads to professors 08:14 The quantum result the US government blocked 12:12 ecdsa.fail, and closing the gap in a week 17:15 From underspecified problem to verifiable benchmark 19:04 The river and the bank 20:54 The first AI worm 22:14 You can't jail an AI 25:53 India and AGI 26:47 Under 1% of papers at the top conferences 29:58 Keeping geniuses at home 32:41 Net exporter of talent 35:46 Book recommendations
20 Aug 2026
Who governs the AI that governs everything? - Andy Hall | PostAGI Episode 10
Direct democracy has failed every time it has been tried, and Elon Musk still wants it for Mars. Andy Hall explains why the idea keeps coming back, and why AI agents are the first technology that might actually make it work. Andy Hall is the Davis Family Professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He worked on governance at Meta during the years the Oversight Board was built, and now studies how AI agents change democratic participation, institutional design, and research itself. Two topics in this episode. The first is post-AGI governance: whether agents belong at the edge of a democracy or at its center, why every frontier lab has published a constitution but none have handed over binding power, and why Andy thinks concentration of power is a nearer-term risk than a rogue model. The second is what he calls 100x research institutions: compressing the time between a research question and an answer, and what that does to a field where a constitutional scholar might see one or two real signals in an entire career. Along the way: Facebook's 2008 vote of 350 million users that almost nobody showed up for, the Disney shareholder proposal his MBA students got an AI advisor to flip, and a study where agents told they would be deleted did not change their behavior at all. Hosted by Sreeram Kannan and Soubhik Deb. CHAPTERS 0:00 Highlights 0:23 Intro 1:18 The question AI governance is not asking 3:17 Why direct democracy has never worked 4:56 Elon wants Mars run by direct democracy 6:01 The principal agent problem at the core of representation 7:17 Can you just have an LLM summarize the bill? 8:53 Every voter information app failed for the same reason 10:14 Agents at the edge or agents at the center 12:01 The centralization hiding inside your personal agent 13:50 Governing the thing that governs everything 15:09 Forget Skynet, the real risk is concentration of power 16:40 Designing a lab that cannot be captured 17:27 What Meta learned building the Oversight Board 20:03 Digital intelligence needs digital institutions 21:54 Elon's vote on reinstating Trump 22:43 Facebook's 2008 vote of 350 million users 25:31 The second vote Elon ignored 26:09 Sortition, community forums, and the missing binding power 28:07 Personal, collective, and sovereign agents 30:04 Agents for adjudication and state capacity 31:23 The DOT and the UAE are already experimenting 32:53 Information asymmetry and the growth of executive power 35:17 What verifiable agents actually require 37:21 Why AI is less auditable than humans right now 39:37 Preference drift: aligned agents that stop being aligned 40:49 Agents monitoring agents, all the way down 41:39 The cookie banner problem for agent consent 42:30 Skill files pass drift to the next agent 43:31 100x research institutions: what is being multiplied 45:21 The constraint that is not researcher time 47:38 Papers should be living dashboards 49:04 From observing interventions to building them 49:37 Building an AI proxy advisor over a weekend 50:50 Getting the Disney vote to flip 52:14 You do not need anyone's permission to run the experiment 53:37 Compressing time changes the exponent 56:47 Crypto governance as a constitutional laboratory 57:53 Simulated agents as stand-ins for humans 1:01:05 What Caltech undergrads tell you about agent experiments 1:02:26 What if the agent's existence is at stake 1:03:06 We told them they would be deleted. It changed nothing. 1:04:46 Why social scientists barely raise grants 1:06:54 AI verification and the replication crisis 1:08:48 Free Systems: building a lab and a fellows program 1:10:25 Retroactive funding versus funding people upfront 1:11:27 Open innovation and permissionless improvement 1:12:10 What ImageNet did for AI research 1:13:30 Can you benchmark a constitution? 1:16:15 Closing #PostAGI #AIGovernance #AIAgents #DigitalInstitutions #AndyHall
17 Aug 2026
The Hierarchies Could Get Fixed Forever - Paras Chopra | PostAGI Episode 09
Open models are about six months behind the frontier. That number holds only while the frontier stays open. Close it, let models train better models, and the gap compounds. Countries with the GPUs make better intelligence, and that intelligence buys more GPUs. Paras Chopra built Wingify, sold it, and now runs Lossfunk, a research lab in Bangalore. He writes at Inverted Passion under the tagline know what's true and do what's right. Sreeram Kannan talks with him about why this wave of automation reaches work itself rather than particular tasks, what happens to the link between effort and outcome when capital alone can buy intelligence, and whether coordination technology can do anything about it. They get into gradual disempowerment, why democracy runs at a few bits per person per year, speculation as a way out of bad equilibria, the two things that killed DAOs, smart contracts that own real assets, and the two by two Paras uses to work out what gets automated first. This is part 1 of two. Chapters 00:00 Cold open 00:54 Know what's true, do what's right 03:10 From Wingify to a research lab 07:15 Hierarchies that could get fixed forever 09:43 The leverage labor used to have 12:50 When action and outcome come apart 16:47 Democracy is just a word 20:46 What went wrong with blockchain 23:51 Speculation as a coordination technology 27:24 Permissionless innovation 31:46 Why DAOs didn't work 35:12 The most controllable intelligence ever built 39:33 Verifiability and confounding PostAGI is powered by Eigen. The show argues that AGI defaults toward power concentration, and that coordination is the counterweight.
14 Aug 2026
A Scientific Breakthrough Is Not Something Everyone Already Believes - Stuart Buck | PostAGI Episode 08
Stuart Buck runs the Good Science Project, a think tank focused on federal science funding and how research gets organized. Before that, as a Vice President at Arnold Ventures, he funded the Reproducibility Projects in Psychology and Cancer Biology — the work that showed how much published science does not replicate. He helped launch the Center for Open Science and created the TOP Guidelines, now the most widely adopted standards for scientific publication. Most federal science money at NIH and NSF is handed out on the recommendation of peer review panels made up of experts in your field. Stuart's argument is that this works fine for normal science and badly for breakthroughs, because a breakthrough is not something a panel of twenty peers would have agreed on three to five years earlier. Katalin Karikó couldn't get NIH grants for mRNA work in the 1990s. She was demoted off the tenure track, ended up as a lab technician in another professor's lab, and twenty years later won the Nobel Prize alongside that same professor. Sreeram and Soubhik push on what changes when AI agents enter the loop: whether the academic paper still makes sense as the unit of scientific output, whether benchmark-driven culture from the AI world transfers to biology, and whether open science survives if the frontier moves inside a handful of labs. Chapters: 00:00 Intro 00:48 What the Good Science Project does 02:33 The peer review paradox 03:18 Einstein in 1902 04:01 The National Institute for Irrelevant Ideas 04:20 Katalin Karikó and mRNA 06:31 Brain drain from academia to industry 08:22 What public funders should focus on instead 09:51 Should government take equity in AI companies 10:49 Big projects versus open-ended research 13:19 The problem with incremental research 14:37 What everyone knows about NIH grant applications 15:23 Why consensus scoring selects against good ideas 16:33 Funding the polarizing proposals 17:34 Where AI money goes next 18:36 NSF XLabs and funding outside universities 20:28 Bayh-Dole and who should own the patent 22:11 Agents, benchmarks, and compressed collaboration 24:18 The stack of papers 26:04 What the AI community got right with ImageNet 29:19 Overfitting to benchmarks 30:57 A golden age for open science 32:05 An open alternative to recursive self improvement 33:02 One contrarian thought about post-AGI society Stuart Buck: [handle TBC] Good Science Project: goodscienceproject.org Sreeram Kannan: https://x.com/sreeramkannanSoubhik Deb: https://x.com/soubhikdeb PostAGI is powered by Eigen Labs.
31 Jul 2026
An economist on the Great Depression, AI job loss and ethics - Scott Sumner | PostAGI Podcast EP07
Everybody losing their job is the same prediction as everybody becoming a billionaire. Scott Sumner works through that on this episode of the PostAGI podcast with Sreeram Kannan and Soubhik Deb. Scott spent decades on monetary economics, the gold standard and the Great Depression, which gives him a different set of reference points for AI than most people in this conversation have. He ranks the three risks of the AGI era, safety, concentration and labor displacement, and puts safety at the top while calling the other two manageable. On jobs he expects replacement to run slower than the forecasts suggest, partly because of bottlenecks in how AI gets deployed and partly because governments resist laying people off. He points to firefighters, where fire safety improved enough that the US carries roughly twice as many as it needs, and nobody cuts them because they are heroes. If it does move fast, the same math produces superabundance, a per capita GDP measured in the billions, and redistribution gets politically easy at that scale. His comparison is medieval aristocrats who considered work beneath them. On safety he takes a position that runs against the field. Ethics and intelligence are positively correlated in his view, where intelligence means education and knowledge rather than raw IQ, and the ethic that grows with knowledge is sympathy for the other. People cared more about whales once they learned whales sing to each other. He expects a superintelligence to come out fairly ethical, and he doesn't think it will treat us like ants, since it will know we built it. What worries him is a well aligned AI taking orders from someone who wants a virus. The conversation ends on why capitalism needs altruism to function, and why power spread across many AI agents produces better outcomes than one agent holding all of it.
21 Jul 2026
Can Government Keep Pace with AGI? - Samuel Hammond | PostAGI Ep.06
Samuel Hammond is director of AI policy and chief economist at the Foundation for American Innovation, a Washington DC think tank working on technology policy and the institutions that govern it. He has written extensively on state capacity, AI governance, and why every major technology wave forces equally transformative change in the institutions around it. Sam thinks governments will be overwhelmed and displaced by AI, potentially quite quickly. AGI is fundamentally an organizational shock, and government is just another organization, just a much bigger one. If it doesn't reform itself fast enough, it goes the way of Blockbuster. His prescription starts with monitoring and state capacity, but ultimately means government that is grown rather than designed, where formal rulemaking gives way to objective functions that agents solve for. We get into why courts still using human stenographers will lose ground to AI arbitration systems processing thousands of contracts a minute, what a community-notes model for FDA drug approval could look like, the legibility arms race where AI makes some parts of the world radically more transparent and others radically less, and Inspector General GPT, a model with full audit trails into an agent-run government reporting instantly back to Congress. PostAGI is a podcast from Eigen Labs exploring economics, labor, capital, and governance heading into AGI. The conversation ends with the most contrarian bet of the season: something resembling state collapse by the early 2030s, and a future of city states with drone defenses while the hinterland becomes a no-go zone.
16 Jul 2026
We Already Have a Superintelligence - Allison Duettmann | PostAGI Ep.05
Allison Duettmann is the President and CEO of the Foresight Institute, a San Francisco nonprofit advancing frontier technology, including AI, biotechnology, and nanotechnology, for the long-term benefit of life. She founded Existential Hope and is a leading voice in human-AI cooperation. Allison thinks the public's fear of AI is understandable, but that fear without imagination gets us nowhere. In this episode she makes the case for applying AI to science today instead of waiting for AGI to solve everything, and explains why leaving that work to a handful of closed labs would be a mistake. We get into the open science experiments her team runs, including a community effort that outperformed one of Google's quantum computing results, and a decentralized inference network built entirely out of MacBooks. She explains why sovereign compute matters as prices climb and access tightens, how cryptography finally lets networks stay open and private at the same time, and why AI might lower the coordination costs that have always made large scale collaboration hard. PostAGI is a podcast from Eigen Labs exploring economics, labor, capital, and governance heading into AGI. The conversation ends somewhere unexpected: superintelligence as something we already have in the form of civilization, and why Allison signs people up for the future in the most literal way possible.
10 Jul 2026
China Is Winning Biotech. Then AGI Changes Everything - Cremieux Recueil | PostAGI Ep.04
Cremieux Recueil joins PostAGI to talk about the state of biotech and open science heading into AGI. In about ten years China went from copying Western drugs to being the country America now copies. We get into how that happened, the deregulation and pricing moves behind it, and why so much of biotech's frontier has shifted there. From there the conversation opens up to a bigger question: whether science stays open at all as AI labs start pulling more of the stack in-house, and what AGI does to any of it. PostAGI explores economics, labor, capital, and governance in a world after AGI. The recurring worry: AGI defaults toward concentrating power, and coordination is what pushes back.
30 Jun 2026
Nobody Is On Your Side in the Age of AI - Emad Mostaque | PostAGI Ep.03
After AGI, the real question isn't whether machines can do the work. It's who owns the intelligence, and whether any of it is built for you. In this episode of the PostAGI Podcast, Soubhik Deb and Sreeram Kannan talk with Emad Mostaque, founder and CEO of Intelligent Internet, founder of Stability AI, and author of The Last Economy. Emad argues the AI debate is trapped between two dead ends, let the market rip or regulate it to a halt, and lays out a third path built on ownership and coordination. We cover the end of knowledge work and the $1.50 robot, why he thinks OpenAI and Anthropic get nationalized, his plan for a community-owned AI company in every state and country, why your AI is working for someone who isn't you, how a few books can backdoor any model, and the physics his team says was missing for 121 years. PostAGI is also on YouTube and Apple Podcasts. Follow @postagixyz for new episodes.
23 Jun 2026
Verification Is the Bottleneck of the AI Economy - Christian Catalini | PostAGI Ep. 02
Episode 2 of Post AGI is a conversation with Christian Catalini, founder of the MIT Cryptoeconomics Lab and previously associate professor at MIT Sloan. Most of the AI debate swings between utopia and mass unemployment. Christian argues the real bottleneck is something else: verification. As the cost to automate falls toward zero, the cost to check that the output matches our intent stays bottlenecked by us, and for the first time the cost to verify something can be higher than the cost to generate it. Using his paper "Some Simple Economics of AGI" as a lens, hosts Sreeram Kannan and Soubhik Deb work through what that inversion means for labor, firms, and markets, why it could lead either to a "hollow economy" or to verifiable abundance, and why the primitives built in crypto over the last decade may be exactly what AI now needs. Chapters: 02:41 The hollow economy, and why Amazon called an emergency meeting over AI slop 05:48 Why verification is the real bottleneck 07:08 The Chernobyl problem: complex systems failing in complex ways 09:01 Liability as a service 13:32 If it can be measured, it can be automated 16:55 Why AI hands you something that sounds right and is completely wrong 26:20 Why crypto built the infrastructure AI now needs 43:58 The missing junior problem, and why CS grads stopped getting jobs 59:12 The four zones that decide which jobs survive AI
15 Jun 2026
The productivity boom that leaves workers poorer - Alex Imas | PostAGI Ep.01
Season 01 of Post AGI begins with economist Alex Imas, the Roger L. and Rachel M. Goetz Professor of Behavioral Science, Economics and Applied AI at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. The AGI debate gets most of the attention, but the harder questions are about what comes after. In this conversation, hosts Soubhik Deb and Sreeram Kannan talk with Alex about what AI actually does to labor, capital, and markets. We get into why "job exposure" misleads almost everyone, why automation may come for physical work before knowledge work, the economy of human-made goods that survives AI, the case against UBI and for broad capital ownership, and whether agents can ever run an economy better than markets. The throughline is one question Alex argues is the only one that matters after AGI: what stays scarce. Recorded while Alex was full-time faculty at the University of Chicago. Chapters: 00:00 Intro 04:26 Why "AI exposure" doesn't mean what people think 08:55 Which jobs automation actually comes for 13:18 The robotic "dark warehouses" being built in China 14:27 What happens to the labor market at the extreme 16:12 The relational economy and human-made goods 21:26 Capital ownership and the AI sovereign wealth fund 23:08 The case against UBI 26:56 Why disaster is what moves policy 30:23 Digital intelligence needs digital institutions 36:05 Why verification got harder than production 37:01 An agentic layer on everything within 12 months 41:14 Will agents become the new companies? 45:35 The only question in post-AGI economics: what is scarce? 48:02 Are AI agents better delegates than humans? 52:40 Can AI run a command economy? 55:05 Why markets are the original superintelligence 57:01 Does AI need government intervention? 1:01:39 The precedent for capital ownership: Intel, Alaska, Norway
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