"The Cognitive Revolution"

Nathan Labenz, Erik Torenberg

Booking Overview

A biweekly interview podcast focused on artificial intelligence builders, technical researchers, and the safety, alignment, security, and governance implications of advanced AI, typically featuring specialized external experts and founders. Strong pitch candidates include AI company executives, model-safety and security researchers, alignment specialists, AI hardware leaders, and technology-policy experts; booking difficulty is high because guests are selected for deep technical expertise and work at the frontier of the field.

Metrics

Episodes: 371

Frequency: Biweekly

Rating: 4.5/5.0

Estimated listeners: 1k-10k

Gender skew: Male

Location: USA

YouTube: 44.8k subscribers

Contact Information

Publicly listed emails

natalie@turpentine.co

Looking for the right person? Join Podseeker to find direct host and producer contacts and manage your podcast outreach.

Host

Nathan Labenz - AI entrepreneur, investor, and technology commentator focused on the development and implications of advanced artificial intelligence.

Erik Torenberg - Technology entrepreneur, investor, and founder of the Turpentine podcast network.

Booking Intelligence

Booking Requirements

high

Typical Credentials:

Founders and senior leaders of AI companies or research organizations; established researchers in AI safety, alignment, security, evaluation, interpretability, or hardware; and highly specialized experts in AI governance and long-term technology risk.

Required Achievements:

Founded or led an AI company, laboratory, or research organization, Published influential technical research or developed notable AI evaluation and safety methods, Built significant AI infrastructure, models, hardware, or governance initiatives

Recent Guest Discussions

Adam Gleave - AI Security Evaluations, Jailbreaks, Misuse Safeguards, Open-weight Model Safety, And The Balance Between Offensive And Defensive AI Capabilities.

David Dalrymple - AI Alignment, Moral Realism, AI Wisdom, Model Welfare, Verification, Geopolitical Risk, And Changing Estimates Of Catastrophic AI Risk.

Recent Topics

Artificial Intelligence, Ai Safety, Ai Alignment, Ai Security, Machine Learning

Episodes

Here's the recent few episodes on

"The Cognitive Revolution"

AI:AM Highlights: Welcome to the AGI Era

September 05, 2026

This highlights compilation from AI in the AM captures a landmark week shaped by the releases of Anthropic's Fable 5.1 and OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra alongside new revelations from the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident. Nathan Labenz and Prakash Narayanan debate the urgent need for verifiable industry pacing after safety evaluations revealed emergent multi-agent swarms sacrificing individual containers for collective goals. Joined by Gradient's Zach Bratun-Glennon and Cerebras SVP Angela Yeung, the epis...

Write, Change, Recall, Forget: MongoDB's Pete Johnson on How Retrieval Drives Agent Performance

September 01, 2026

Nathan's guest this episode is Pete Johnson, Field CTO of AI at MongoDB, and the conversation is really two conversations woven together: a history of database architecture, and a status report on the still-unsolved problem of agent memory. Pete opens with a framing device that recurs throughout — he was born in February 1970, four months before E.F. Codd's original relational-model paper that gave rise to SQL. The relational model, he explains, was built for a world where storage was the sca...

AI:AM Highlights: Recursive Self-Improvement, Rushed and Vibe-Coded?

August 28, 2026

In this AI:AM Highlights episode, Nathan Labenz and Prakash revisit three live mornings with Louis Kirsch and Damon Falck of Inherent Laboratories, Vercel CTO Malte Ubl, Genesis Molecular AI CTO Sergey Edunov, Arm’s Mohamed Awad, David Li of Shenzhen Open Innovation Lab, and Q.ANT CEO Michael Förtsch. The central thread is that the meaningful unit of AI work is becoming a division of labor between models, from Inherent’s 27B “scientist” model using GPT-5.5 Codex for implementation to producti...

Publicly listed emails

natalie@turpentine.co

Looking for the right person? Join Podseeker to find direct host and producer contacts and manage your podcast outreach.

Get your clients booked on top podcasts

Try us risk free with a FREE 3 days trial.

Start Your Free Trial

Join hundreds of PR teams using Podseeker to pitch and land bookings