Operator conversations and long-form interviews on rebuilding the industrial base.
War on the Rocks
WOTR Staff
Welcome to The Adversarial. Every other week, we’ll provide you with expert analysis on America’s greatest challengers: China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and jihadists. Read more below.***IranThree weeks since a ceasefire took effect, the United States and Iran…
War on the Rocks
Sándor Ésik
Hungary has turned the page. After 16 years of rule by Viktor Orbán, opposition leader Péter Magyar has emerged as the winner by a landslide. Ryan is joined by Sándor Ésik, the lawyer and writer behind the Hungarian Muse, to understand how Orbán bui…
American Dynamism
content+a16zpodcast@a16z.com (Elena Burger, Joe Schmidt)
Elena Burger speaks with Joe Schmidt, partner on the enterprise team at a16z, about the future of enterprise software in the age of AI. Using Workday as a case study, they discuss why many of today’s most important enterprise systems feel broken, how platform shifts reshape enti…
War on the Rocks
Luke Collin
Last month, President Donald Trump hosted Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi for a visit that captured both the promise and the shortcomings of America’s Indo‑Pacific strategy.In some ways, the meeting was a success: It produced a few commercial deals, reaffirmed…
War on the Rocks
Gen. (ret.) Timothy Ray
Editor’s note: This article is the eighth in an 11-part series examining how the United States should organize, lead, and integrate economic statecraft into strategy, defense practice, and the broader national security ecosystem. This special series is brought to you by th…
War on the Rocks
Joshua Trevino
On Jan. 3, U.S. forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, and they are now imprisoned in the United States. That operation followed a buildup of U.S. military assets in the Caribbean and the launching of strikes against boats allegedly trafficking dr…
War on the Rocks
Judd Devermont
In 2024, Judd Devermont wrote, “Human Geography Is Mission-Critical,” where he argued that the United States should focus on behaviors and attitudes informed by human geography to craft better strategy. Two years later, we asked Judd to revisit his arguments. Im…
American Dynamism
content+a16zpodcast@a16z.com (Theo Jaffee, Gabriel Dickinson, Cremieux)
Theo Jaffee and Gabriel Dickinson speak with Cremieux about China’s rapid rise to the top of global clinical trial output. They discuss the regulatory reforms that accelerated China’s progress, the surge in novel drug development, and what the US would need to change to stay com…
American Dynamism
content+a16zpodcast@a16z.com (Patrick Collison, John Collison, Jordi Hays, John Coogan)
This interview with Stripe cofounders John and Patrick Collison originally aired on TBPN. They discuss Stripe's 34% growth and new employee tender offer, how agent commerce and stablecoins may require high-throughput blockchains built for millions of transactions per second, and…
American Dynamism
content+a16zpodcast@a16z.com (Ben Horowitz, Anjney Midha)
Anjney Midha, founder of AMP PBC, speaks with Ben Horowitz, cofounder of a16z, about how venture capital changed from a small, relationship-driven business into a scalable system for backing new technology companies. They discuss network effects, firm design, leadership, culture…
American Dynamism
content+a16zpodcast@a16z.com (Erik Torenberg, Martin Casado, Steven Sinofsky, Aaron Levie)
Steven Sinofsky, board partner at a16z, Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, and Martin Casado, general partner at a16z, discuss the reality of AI inside enterprises. They cover the gap between Silicon Valley and the rest of the world, why most AI initiatives fail in large organizations, an…
American Dynamism
content+a16zpodcast@a16z.com (Erik Torenberg, Martin Shkreli)
Erik Torenberg speaks with Martin Shkreli, American investor and businessman, about how he sees the AI landscape, from OpenAI to Anthropic, and what actually matters beyond the hype. They also talk through the future of computing, the limits of “vibe coding,” and why biotech and…
Dwarkesh Podcast
Dwarkesh Patel
I asked Jensen about TPU competition, Nvidia’s lock on the ever more bottlenecked supply chain needed to make advanced chips, whether we should be selling AI chips to China, why Nvidia doesn’t just become a hyperscaler, how it makes its investments, and much more. Enjoy! Watch o…
Acquired
Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal
Ferrari is the pinnacle of luxury scarcity — across its entire 79-year history, the company has sold just 330,000 cars at an average price today of $500,000. For context, Hermès sells that many Birkins and Kellys roughly every 2 years, and Rolex moves that many watches every 3 m…
Dwarkesh Podcast
Dwarkesh Patel
Dylan Patel , founder of SemiAnalysis , provides a deep dive into the 3 big bottlenecks to scaling AI compute: logic, memory, and power. And walks through the economics of labs, hyperscalers, foundries, and fab equipment manufacturers. Learned a ton about every single level of t…
Acquired
Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal
Formula 1 is three competitions in one: a 200mph battle of the world's best race car drivers, the world cup of engineering where thousand-person teams spend hundreds of millions designing cars from scratch, and — as one of our listeners perfectly put it — the “Real Housewives of…
Acquired
Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal
The NFL is nearly synonymous with America today. Practically nothing is more quintessentially and universally American than tuning in every Sunday (and Monday, and Thursday… and sometimes Saturdays and holidays too) to watch the world’s most beautiful ballet of violence. It gene…
Acquired
Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal
Rolex is a series of paradoxes. They sell obsolete and objectively inferior mechanical devices for 10-1000x the price of their superior digital successors… and demand is stronger than ever in history! Their products are comparable to a Hermès Birkin bag in price, luxury status a…
Acquired
Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal
Costco is not only Charlie Munger’s favorite company of all time (plus he’s on the board, natch), it’s an absolutely fascinating study in how seemingly opposite characteristics can combine to create incredible company value. For instance: Costco has the cheapest prices of any ma…
Acquired
Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal
Why has Acquired — seemingly against all odds — “worked”? It's a puzzling question: episodes are four hours long, they come out infrequently, and they usually don’t have guests or video. Hardly the standard-issue playbook for podcasting success! And yet well over a million smart…
Dwarkesh Podcast
Dwarkesh Patel
Sergey Levine , one of the world’s top robotics researchers and co-founder of Physical Intelligence , thinks we’re on the cusp of a “self-improvement flywheel” for general-purpose robots. His median estimate for when robots will be able to run households entirely autonomously? 2…
Dwarkesh Podcast
Dwarkesh Patel
Arthur Kroeber is a leading researcher on Chinese tech and macro, a founding partner at Gavekal Dragonomics , and author of "China's Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know." It's the most useful, detailed resource I've found of how China actually works. On this episode, we discuss…
Lex Fridman Podcast — Industrial
Lex Fridman
Dylan Patel is the founder of SemiAnalysis, a research & analysis company specializing in semiconductors, GPUs, CPUs, and AI hardware. Nathan Lambert is a research scientist at the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) and the author of a blog on AI called Interconnects. Thank you fo…
Dwarkesh Podcast
Dwarkesh Patel
A bonanza on the semiconductor industry and hardware scaling to AGI by the end of the decade. Dylan Patel runs Semianalysis , the leading publication and research firm on AI hardware. Jon Y runs Asianometry , the world’s best YouTube channel on semiconductors and business histor…
Lex Fridman Podcast — Industrial
Lex Fridman
Marc Raibert is founder and former long-time CEO of Boston Dynamics, and recently Executive Director of the newly-created Boston Dynamics AI Institute. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – HiddenLayer : https://hiddenlayer.com/lex – Babbel : ht…
Lex Fridman Podcast — Industrial
Lex Fridman
Neri Oxman is a designer, engineer, scientist, and artist working on computational design, synthetic biology and digital fabrication, previously at MIT, and now at OXMAN. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – Babbel : https://babbel.com/lexpod and use…
Lex Fridman Podcast — Industrial
Lex Fridman
Neil Gershenfeld is the director of the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – LMNT : https://drinkLMNT.com/lex to get free sample pack – NetSuite : http://netsuite.com/lex to get free product tour – BetterHel…
Lex Fridman Podcast — Industrial
Lex Fridman
Robert Playter is CEO of Boston Dynamics, a legendary robotics company that over 30 years has created some of the most elegant, dextrous, and simply amazing robots ever built, including the humanoid robot Atlas and the robot dog Spot. Please support this podcast by checking out…
Lex Fridman Podcast — Industrial
Lex Fridman
John Carmack is a legendary programmer, co-founder of id Software, and lead programmer of many revolutionary video games including Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, and the Commander Keen series. He is also the founder of Armadillo Aerospace, and for many years the CTO of Oculus VR.…
Dwarkesh Podcast
Dwarkesh Patel
David Deutsch is the founder of the field of quantum computing and the author The Beginning of Infinity and The Fabric of Reality . Read me contra David on AI . Watch on YouTube . Listen on Apple Podcasts , Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript with he…
Operator conversations and long-form interviews on rebuilding the industrial base. 12 sources / 11 live / 1 manual.
Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal
Deep histories of the companies that built the industrial and technological backbone of the modern economy — TSMC, Nvidia, Lockheed, Boeing.
Katherine Boyle and David Ulevitch
The a16z thesis on companies supporting the national interest — defense, aerospace, manufacturing, housing, logistics, and hard tech.
Joe Lonsdale
Founders, policymakers, and operators building the next American century — industrial tech, defense, energy, and national strategy.
Dwarkesh Patel
Long-form conversations with historians, economists, and builders — select episodes on semiconductors, state capacity, and industrial history.
Hoover Institution
Policy conversations on national security, industrial strategy, China competition, and American economic statecraft.
Lex Fridman
Select long-form conversations on manufacturing, rocketry, fusion, and the engineers rebuilding American hard-tech capability.
Taylor Owen
How machines and industrial systems reshape society — automation, infrastructure, and the new political economy of production.
Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway
The markets-plumbing show that consistently covers commodities, supply chains, shipyards, fabs, and the weird corners of the industrial economy.
Derek Thompson
An abundance-agenda lens on housing, energy, manufacturing, and the political economy of American building.
Chris Power
Inside the modern defense and aerospace precision-manufacturing floor — conversations from inside a next-generation American factory.
The Industrialist
Operators, founders, and policymakers working on the American industrial base — supply chains, fabs, energy, and defense production.
Ryan Evans
The national security publication of record — defense procurement, industrial mobilization, and the shape of modern warfare.