Renaissance Circle

About Renaissance Circle

Steven M. Muskal, Ph.D. - AI Pioneer, Drug Discovery Expert, Innovator, and Musician - explores science, business, and the art of feeling good. Where innovators, scientists, and entrepreneurs discuss the future of health and performance

Publisher

Steven Muskal, Ph.D.

Category

health & fitness

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

30 May 2025

Latest episode

4 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

21 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   4 Oct 2026

   What Are We Going to Do With All This Intelligence?

   Tim Lewis hosts the stargazing at Cal-a-Vie's observatory, where Steven Muskal met him one night after hours of talk under the dome. He grew up in Michigan, the youngest of five, with the freedom to be home by dark. He got his first telescope at 11, a wobbly two-and-a-half-inch scope he rebuilt in the basement, then traded the stars for a guitar at 14 and came back to astronomy around 2000. Underneath all of it is an enthusiasm he cannot quell: the best part of understanding something is getting to tell somebody else. In this conversation on The Renaissance Circle, Tim and Steve talk about: - Why people are not insignificant next to the universe: in numbers of atoms and cells, we are more a universe than the universe is - Consciousness as a leading candidate for what lies beneath spacetime, and 30 years of approaching the mystical with the same rigor as everything else - The ego as an expert pursuer and a terrible keeper of things - Science as an all-hands-on-deck engine for a civilization, and AI as a leveler that lets anyone ask questions - Why some mathematicians are uneasy with AI-solved proofs, and the printing press's early detractors - Steve's rule for his own work: he does not want to write another line of code, only to say what should be built, evaluate it, and prove it - The AI investment boom, the dot-com parallel, and Max Tegmark's Life 3.0 - Incentives: if you don't like the way something is happening, look at what the incentive system rewards - Musicians predicting the beat by milliseconds, and the few seconds when a band locks in - Conscious evolution and the widening sphere of care - Giving time as well as money, and why giving is a gift to yourself - Wealth, islands, and why the ego is never satiated - Universal income, abundance, and who benefits from AI's productivity - Going back to old science: Steve's 1998 human intestinal absorption model, built on 86 compounds, rerun on about 780, and the discovery that the original test set was a favorable one. It still reproduces, and it was not as good as reported. - Moderna's personalized cancer vaccines - Consortium voting for toxicity prediction, releasing models as free websites before the paper, and why pharma should share basic toxicity and ADMET data (OpenADMET) - What a pharma incentive structure built around human wellbeing could look like, wearables, and GLP-1 drugs Companion article on Substack: drstevenmuskal.com

2. 

   23 Aug 2026

   From Displacement to Reconnection

   Irina Ankoudinova is a biologist who has been displaced by technology over and over. She learned crystallization in the Kim lab at Berkeley, built zinc finger archives at Sangamo Therapeutics, and then CRISPR arrived. Every time technology made her work obsolete, she moved on. Now she wants to bring Ukraine’s damaged farmland back. Her mother is Ukrainian, from Kharkiv. After the war, Irina speaks Russian; the young generation speaks Ukrainian and has made it their identity. They do not want to talk to her. “A lot of pain,” she says. With Steven Muskal on The Renaissance Circle: the career arc from crystallography to CRISPR to DNA-encoded libraries; the language divide inside Ukraine; the drone strategy and mobilization policy; soil contamination, soil microbiomes, and Israel as proof of concept; a photo exchange idea for displaced people; and AI as the next displacement she is not afraid of. Soil scientists, agronomists, and Ukrainian students: reach out.

3. 

   15 Jul 2026

   That Go There

   Why the memories worth keeping need a body that can move. Thirty years ago, my older daughter, two and a half at the time, sat on the floor with a wooden puzzle of the United States and placed every state exactly where it belonged. Nevada, there. Colorado, there. Ask her a capital and she would tell you, in that small serious voice kids use when they already know they are right. She could not do that today. Neither could I. But the tape remembers, and this episode is about that gap: between what a mind lets go of and what a piece of media holds onto, and what it takes to keep the second one alive. This is a story that runs from a family living room to a Berkeley computer lab in the late 1980s, where I learned, tape by tape, that the platform you are standing on will not be the platform you are standing on in five years. Moving my neural network research from DEC systems to Silicon Graphics workstations taught me to treat one question as a hard engineering requirement for anything I care about keeping: will I be able to read this in ten years? Most families learn that lesson too late. Betamax, lost. Video CDs, lost. MiniDV, lost. Blu-ray, which felt permanent for about a decade, lost. Every one of those formats held real memories: someone's wedding, someone's Christmas morning, someone's toddler doing a state puzzle. Nothing burned. The scrolls are all still in a drawer in someone's garage. What disappears is the machine that can read them, which for practical purposes is the same thing as gone. It is the Library of Alexandria on a budget, spread over decades instead of one bad afternoon in Egypt. In this episode: 0:00 The tape: a two and a half year old and the US state puzzle 1:21 Study with Hannah: 62,000 study cards and what we bother to record 1:57 Berkeley, DEC, and the machines that would not talk to each other 3:05 The Alexandria fire, on a budget: Betamax to Blu-ray 4:10 In silico memorialization: save the unremarkable footage, not just the highlight reel 5:10 Built to move, not to stay: why ToastOurFriend content belongs to the people in it 6:09 Where things go, and the one thing to do this weekend The ask is simple. Go find the tape, the disc, the drive you have not opened in a decade, and move what is on it somewhere that can survive the next format change. And if there is someone in your life worth celebrating while they can still see it, do not wait for the memorial version. Say it, film it, post it, now, while it can still land exactly where it is supposed to go. Read the essay: https://www.drstevenmuskal.com/p/that-go-there Celebrate someone while they can read it: https://toastourfriend.com Related listening: Father-Daughter Face-Off part one with Lili, part two with Hannah, and Homeownership, Healthcare, and AI with Lili, all at https://www.drstevenmuskal.com Steven Muskal, Ph.D. is the CEO of Eidogen-Sertanty and writes about AI, health, and the intersection of biology and technology at stevenmuskal.com.

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Spotify

5.0 / 5

1 ratings

Contact Renaissance Circle

Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.