Sabrina Halper Show

Jack Dent, co-founder of Chai Discovery, gives us a look at how AI could change the way we discover drugs, understand biology, and treat disease. Jack went from cold-emailing Stripe and joining as a teenager to co-founding Chai Discovery, the AI drug design company Sam Altman asked him and Josh to start years before they did. Chai has since raised $225M from investors including OpenAI and Thrive Capital, and built a model that hit a drug-design breakthrough far faster than expected, with roughly 200x better antibody success rates.We talk about whether people could one day help cure their own diseases with AI, whether each of us might have a personalized biology model, and whether medicine shifts from treating sickness to preventing it before it starts. Jack also gets into whether frontier AI labs will build these biology models themselves, what AI can and can’t fix in our current healthcare system, why clinical trials are still such a bottleneck, and how much of science may become less random when AI can generate and test better hypotheses.

TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 Intro
02:28 Inside Stripe When It Was Only 100 People
08:45 How Sam Altman Sparked Chai’s Origin Story
10:52 Why Chai Discovery Exists
16:20 The Chai-2 Antibody Breakthrough
19:24 Approaching Biology as Engineering
24:45 Using AI to treat ourselves26:52 Robotics in labs
27:22 Why Pharma Is Finally Moving on AI
29:49 Can AI Fix Clinical Trials?
32:53 Personalized biology models
36:24 Longevity, Peptides, and Trillion-Dollar Drugs
39:02 Does it matter that the government cuts exploratory science grants?
41:00 What Next-Gen Chai Models Will Do
42:08 Will Frontier AI Labs Build Biology Models?
43:26 Biology is hard

Keri Findley, founder of Thiel-Backed fund Tacora Capital, shares a rare glimpse into her life and career: her path to Wall Street, eventually becoming one of the youngest partners at hedge fund Third Point while building its structured credit business from scratch, founding Tacora Capital with Peter Thiel anchoring the first fund as his biggest check ever.
Along with wild success comes a target on your back and Keri reflects on difficult moments of litigation, divorce, and betrayal that ultimately informed her outlook on life. She pulls back the curtain on Wall Street: big wins, pressure, risk, and competition. We discuss venture credit, what contrarian investing actually looks like, the AI boom, today's tumultuous private credit markets, and what it means to be a high-ethics person in business.

TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 – From Columbia grad to Third Point partner: building a trading desk at 25
03:30 – Discovering Wall Street by accident and landing at Morgan Stanley
06:00 – The 2008 financial crisis and making her first high-stakes trades
10:00 – Hedge fund life: massive trades, pressure, and doubling money in mortgage bonds
14:00 – Wall Street rivalries and the fallout with Morgan Stanley 18:00 – The Bloomberg article
22:00 – Calling Alex Spiro and discovering the investigation might not exist
24:00 – Peter Thiel offering to fund the entire first fund and founding Tacora Capital
36:00 – Silicon Valley venture capital, AI hype, and herd mentality in investing
46:00 – The dark side of startups: unethical founder behavior and financial fraud
55:00 – Carrie’s advice to her 21-year-old self: resilience, integrity, and ignoring titles

Edward Saatchi (Saatchi & Saatchi family, former Head of Oculus Story Studio, Founder of Fable Studios) joins us to make the case that Hollywood is sleepwalking into the most radical disruption in the history of storytelling."Creativity is at a deep blue and Kasparov moment"
"AI isn't just a tool in the toolbox for filmmakers. It's a competitor"
We talk about:
★ Whether AI can be truly creative - Edward says yes
★ Silicon Valley's quiet takeover of Hollywood
★ Tech companies becoming media companies
★ The rise of the one-person film
★ Why AI will bring an aesthetic shift to cinema
Then we go deeper into what this actually means for authorship, storytelling, and who gets to have a creative voice, when the cost of making a film collapses to near zero.

TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 Finding the New Medium of AI Art
00:57 From Obama Campaign Tech to VR Storytelling at Oculus
03:02 Why VR Didn’t Pan Out
04:03 Fable Studios’ Vision
04:20 Why “Cheaper VFX” Misses the Point of AI in Hollywood
07:09 The Playable Star Wars Thought Experiment (and Studio Pushback)
09:08 AI Media: Interactive, Remixable, Personal
12:48 Simulation-First Story Worlds
14:51 AI Will Be Creative
16:43 World-Building vs. Prompt Engineering
20:03 Hollywood’s Shifting Attitude
24:37 One-Person Films, YouTube Discovery, and AI-Generated Feeds
29:21 Can AI Art Have a Point of View?
31:10 From Creativity to Consciousness: Why Simulations Matter
32:13 ‘Exit Valley’: Using AI Satire Against Tech Power
36:50 Silicon Valley vs. Hollywood
40:52 Video Models, Robotics, and the ‘War on Cliché’
44:45 Generated Media’s Role in Globalizing Content
50:51 ‘AI Aesthetic’ in Film
56:06 Saatchi & Saatchi: Edward’s Family Roots

Moxie Marlinspike founded Signal, the nonprofit privacy messenger used by millions. He’s now building Confer, a fully private, end-to-end encrypted AI chat. This conversation covers everything.TIMESTAMPS:00:00 Intro 01:09 Building Physical World Projects Centered on Experiences07:43 Tales from Hitchhiking15:04 The Birth of Signal22:23 Privacy in the Digital Age31:21 Introducing Confer: Private AI Chat37:17 Generative AI and Developer Responsibility38:21 Encryption and Cryptography: A Historical Perspective39:15 Skepticism Towards Crypto41:24 The Impact of Self-Publishing and Cancel Culture44:01 Imagining MoxieLand49:41 Why Do Conspiracy Theories Exist58:00 Signal Gate1:02:30 Limits of Solo Ambitions1:05:09 Solving Aging1:09:00 Moxie’s Next Physical World Project FOLLOW:Follow MoxieSign up for ConferFollow SabrinaPlease support this show by subscribing!

Ken Liu: Renowned sci-fi author of The Paper Menagerie, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories, and his new book All That We See or Seem; producer of Pantheon; futurist who works with world governments to prepare for what’s ahead.

TIMESTAMPS:
(0:00) Introduction
(1:41) Mechanism vs meaning: what science explains vs what stories explain
(5:47) What is consciousness, really?
(6:42) Psychedelics and the mystery of the mind
(7:55) Can intelligence exist without consciousness?
(12:10) How mind-uploading might actually work (and the Singularity)
(19:15 — Falling in love with AI - why “imaginary companions” aren’t new
(23:40) Modern day myths around romantic love
(27:15) Preservation vs. transformation of humanity
(32:37) When technical skill disappears: what is craft?
(40:00) When using AI actually makes us feel more human
(41:05) Writing, imagination, and “All That We See or Seem”
(47:35) Dreams, reality, and how we know what’s real
(54:45) Privacy in an age of digital selves
(58:03) Data, the commons, and how knowledge should be shared

Follow Ken: https://x.com/kyliu99
Buy his new book All That We See or Seem : https://www.amazon.com/All-That-Seem-Julia-Novel/dp/1668083175

When will AI become conscious and how would we even know if it did? We talk about the decoupling of intelligence and consciousness in today's LLMs, and the ethical questions in regulating models.
Ken walks me through a thought experiment to understand the singularity: what uploading our minds might actually look like, a theme explored in his Netflix series Pantheon. If we replace our minds piece by piece with silicon, at what point do “we” disappear?
In the age of AI, when many technical skills are made obsolete, who are the experts of craft?
We explore why falling in love with AI may be grounded in our religious history, and is an act of falling in love with our own reflection.
We discuss how phones have killed daydreaming and access to the collective unconscious, and the mysteries of psychedelics, natural intelligence, and the universe at large.
“We are willing to die for the sake of a story. In fact, it’s the only thing humans have ever willingly died for.” Most of human life, Ken argues, has two levels of explanation: 1.Evolution & 2.Stories — the way we make sense of the world and find meaning in it.