Show Notes
Patrick Hsu (X, Website, Arc lab) is co-founder and core investigator of Arc Institute, assistant professor of pathology at Stanford, and venture partner at Thrive Capital.
Patrick has always been precocious: he began college as a young teenager and contributed to early CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing breakthroughs as part of Feng Zhang’s lab at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Today, the Hsu Lab at Arc works where genome engineering meets AI, from bridge recombinases that can rearrange up to a million bases of DNA at once to Arc's Evo biological foundation models.
We discuss Patrick’s pace and ambition, infinite games, and why he was drawn to biology. Then, we traverse power laws in biotech and the reach of GLP-1s, research taste and success, Arc’s multidisciplinary model, data limits in AI-enabled bio, and cell and bio foundation models. We also discuss how AI and new science will help us solve diseases, design life, and push the boundaries of sci-fi when it comes to human health. I hope you are inspired to raise your bar, commit to reinvention, and hold a lightness that makes the long and challenging journey fun.
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This episode is supported by Google. Gemini 4 Argon recently launched and is built for long-horizon work. I used it inside Antigravity and gave it all 60 Dialectic transcripts: more than a million words. Instead of summarizing episodes one by one, Argon synthesized across them, tracing how ideas from early conversations connect to later ones. Together we made The Dialectic Compendium, an interactive book of the themes that run across the show, with a dossier on every episode and a 3D version you can page through on the web. Gemini 4 Argon is available in the Gemini app, Antigravity, Google AI Studio, and the Gemini API.
Compendium: https://jacksondahl.com/dialectic/compendium
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Timestamps
(0:00) Opening Highlights
(1:39) Intro: Patrick Hsu
(4:29) Start: Boldness, Infinite Games, & Ambition
(12:54) GLP-1s and Power Laws in Biotechnology
(20:17) Expelled at 13 and Falling for Biology
(25:51) What Makes a Good Biologist, Research Taste, and Biology’s Data Challenges
(37:58) The Arc Model: Full-Stack Science
(52:01) Betting on People, Style, & Learning to Simplify
(57:22) Perturbation, World Models, and Evo
(1:03:27) Virtual Cell Models
(1:09:56) Designing Life: From Stem Cells to Genome Writing
(1:18:39) Testing, Bro Science, and Human Data
(1:24:26) Can It Exist vs. Will It Exist: Science Meets Markets
(1:29:59) Biofuturism: Interoception, Peptides, Muscle Modulation, Sleep, and New Forms of Life
(1:43:47) Fun, Obsolescence, Going Slow, and the Future
(1:54:27) Outro
More from Dialectic
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Joe Gebbia (Website, X, LinkedIn, Wikipedia) is the first U.S. Chief Design Officer, leading the National Design Studio. He is also the co-founder of Airbnb and Samara.
Adam Mastroianni (Website, X) is an experimental psychologist and the writer of Experimental History. He earned his PhD in psychology at Harvard before leaving academia to pursue research and writing independently.
Immad Akhund (X, LinkedIn) is the co-founder and CEO of Mercury. He is also a prolific angel investor and co-hosts the Founders in Arms podcast.
Independent Study is a series of bonus episodes to accompany the interviews on Dialectic. I read essays and other writing that has influenced me.