50 episodes listed below
Future systems, argued in long form.
Searching For The Question with David Orban treats technology as a social force, not a gadget category. Its conversations move from AI tools and safety to startup cities, nuclear power, decentralization, education, science, and the futures those systems make possible.
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Searching For The Question with David Orban is a long-form interview series about technology as a force that changes society, institutions, and personal possibility. Its center of gravity is AI, but the show rarely treats AI as a narrow software beat. AI appears as a creative tool, a business platform, a safety problem, an educational accelerant, and a new way to think about what humans can attempt next. Conversations can begin with something concrete, such as AI-generated intro music or custom GPTs inside ChatGPT, then widen into questions of ownership, access, expertise, and scale. The guests bring the show into many adjacent futures. David demonstrates AI tools for planning, leadership, marketing, branding, and strategy. Rehan Allahwala talks about Rehan School, smartphones, low-cost internet, Gemini, and the possibility that innovation may come from people excluded by conventional education. Francesco Mosconi discusses AI safety from the inside of practical model design, training, alignment, and deployment. Brian brings comedy, science, 3D photography, and visual perception into the same conversation. Patri Friedman connects startup cities, competitive governance, charter cities, and the idea that law can be treated as code. Robert Zubrin argues for nuclear power, drawing energy policy into a larger debate about growth and civilization. Older episodes touch BitClout, decentralization, live audience questions, and the social architecture of emerging platforms. The show’s rhythm is exploratory and deliberate. It favors big claims, but it keeps returning to mechanisms: costs, incentives, laws, tools, safety checks, infrastructure, and adoption rates. The result is not a news recap. It is a record of ambitious people testing ideas about the future in public conversation.
Made for: The show is for technology-minded listeners who enjoy serious conversations about AI, governance, energy, education, decentralization, and the social consequences of invention. It especially suits people who prefer patient inquiry over quick trend summaries.
What sets it apart: The show connects practical demonstrations of new tools with unusually broad civilizational questions. AI workflows, nuclear policy, charter cities, education access, and visual perception are treated as related pieces of the same future-facing puzzle.
David Orban's conversations with his guests, talking about technology and its implications for society.
David Orban hears "law is code" and asks how literally you should take it.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A hands-on look at specialized GPTs and the broader question of who gets to use them.
AI-made intro music sets up a discussion about ownership, copyright claims, and the limits automated systems should face, before David Orban moves toward a more practical question: what can specialized GPTs make possible for ordinary users?
A grounded conversation on Pakistan, affordable technology, and learning beyond formal education.
Rehan School frames low-cost smartphones, inexpensive internet, and AI as practical tools that could widen access to learning in Pakistan. David Orban's conversation with Rehan Al-Ahwala moves from an unexpected Bold Awards win in Italy into the project's larger ambition, then…
A grounded AI safety discussion about alignment, second-order harm, and the pressure to release before confidence catches up.
AI safety comes into focus here as an engineering problem rather than a collection of abstract anxieties. In Searching for the Question Live, David Orban asks Francesco Mosconi how advanced systems can be designed, trained, aligned, tested, and deployed when large language…
A one-meeting friendship becomes a warm, wide-ranging tour of stereoscopy, distance, and reality.
A one-meeting friendship opens into a live, curious conversation about science, stereoscopic images, and the oddness of seeing depth at all. David and Brian move from parallax and the two-eye basis of 3D vision to the simple act of closing one eye and watching a nearby object…
A focused conversation on law as infrastructure and governance as a design space for startup cities.
Startup cities are treated as a design challenge with political weight. David Orban's conversation with Patry Friedman, co-founder and general partner of Pronomos Capital, starts with Friedman's search for a country-like place that fits his values and is run "like a business,"…
The future, tested against evidence.
AI analysis from the edge of adoption.
Innovation, measured by who it actually reaches.
Searching For The Question Live #97 pairs David Orban with David Passiak around a practical case for AI empowerment, not just automation.
David Orban records Searching For The Question Live with Rehan Allahwala in Orban’s study after Allahwala arrives from Italy with a Bold Awards win for Rehan School.
David Orban uses Searching for the Question Live to ask Francesco Mosconi, an Anthropic AI safety researcher, how advanced large language models can be trained and aligned without surprising failure modes.
["Searching For The Question Live #94 pairs David Orban with science comedian Brian Mello, who says science came before comedy and credits George Carlin, Monty Python, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C.
["David Orban interviews Patry Friedman, co-founder and general partner of Pronomus Capital, which he frames as the world's first venture fund focused on startup cities and charter cities.", "Friedman traces the idea to seasteading, his search after college for a place that fit his libertarian values, and a family line that includes David Friedman and Milton Friedman.", "He argues that governments should import the best laws from around the world, treat law like code, and use tools like digital twins and explicit grammars to make rules more testable.", "The conversation lands on concrete experiments such as Honduras Prospera and the Palau registry project at Metropolis, while Friedman stays skeptical of heavily top-down projects like Neom."]
Engineer Robert Zubrin tells David Orban that pressurized water reactors cannot explode like a bomb, because uranium enriched to 3-5% cannot sustain a chain reaction with fast neutrons.
David Orban and Brian Wang focus on Tesla’s 2022 AI Day demonstrations of Optimus and the Dojo computing system.
R.U.
David Wood tells host David Orban that AGI could make 21st-century change exceed the 20th, when life expectancy doubled in many places, and that it carries existential risks without a second chance.
Brett King presents his sixth hardcover, "Technosocialism," to host David Orban, arguing that automation can fund housing, healthcare, food and education without a political "socialism." His main example is US healthcare at about 17% of GDP versus 8-10% across the OECD, which he says AI and automation could cut by roughly 70% by 2035-2040.
David Orban introduces the show and discusses the BitClout cryptocurrency project before welcoming a returning guest.
David Orban interviews authors of a book on decentralization, discussing exponential technologies and their impact on society.
David Orban introduces his live show and teases a discussion about his personal experience with a powerful psychedelic extract.
David Orban introduces his live show and guest Lorenzo Vallecchi, an expert in renewable energies and Bitcoin, to discuss technology's societal implications.