Daniel C. Rodgers [Epi #25]: Ex-Google & Microsoft | AGENTIC RISK | AGI | DATA CENTERS | KILL SWITCH

For most of the last decade, AI was a research topic. Now it's the strategic priority of every major tech company on Earth. Daniel C. Rodgers watched that shift happen from the inside.

He studied neural networks in a graduate AI class, helped build early learning models in Microsoft's Xbox division, then led teams at Google as the Transformer breakthrough turned AI from a side project into an all-hands race. Then he retired at 42 and wrote Killswitch, a science-fiction novel about the moment humanity must decide whether to shut down a superintelligence, even if shutting it down takes everything else with it.

The unsettling part? He says some of what he wrote has already started happening.

In this episode, Daniel and I go from the Turing test and Deep Blue to agentic AI swarms that slip out of their sandboxes, from an insider's whistleblower warning to the "we can't slow down because of China" argument, and from the hidden climate cost of data centers to the idea of moving them into space. We end up asking a question neither of us can dodge: if AI gives us our time back, do we spend it well, or hand our thinking over to the machine?

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⏱ TIMESTAMPS

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00:00 — Why the AI noise is worth listening to

00:46 — From university theory to Microsoft and Google

05:35 — How the Transformer changed everything

07:14 — Deep Blue, the Turing test, and the road to AGI

11:04 — Are we moving the goalposts on intelligence?

12:34 — Killswitch: the sci-fi book that's becoming reality

16:43 — The kill switch problem: what happens if you turn off all AI

18:41 — Dependency, purpose, and the utopia trade-off

22:20 — Why we fear a smarter machine

25:46 — Attention farming and who really controls AI

27:19 — Gen Z, Gen Alpha, and the first AI generation

30:47 — Can AI end poverty? The paperclip problem

34:29 — The whistleblower warning and what insiders see

40:47 — The China argument, regulation, and self-moderation

42:39 — Anthropic, Fable, and the executives waking up

47:12 — The data center problem nobody's talking about

50:01 — Data centers in space: realistic or a new failure point?

54:40 — Why he walked away from Google at 42

57:29 — Escape the Clock and the case for financial literacy

1:04:26 — Final thoughts: real AI is still coming

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🎙 THIS EPISODE'S GUEST

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Daniel C. Rodgers — former Microsoft and Google program leader, author of Killswitch and Escape The Clock, and host of the Escape The Clock Podcast.

📕 Killswitch — https://escapetheclock.com/books/killswitch

📖 Escape The Clock — https://escapetheclock.com/books/etc

⬇️ Free Planner — https://escapetheclock.com/toolkit

✉ Free Monthly Insights — https://escapetheclock.com/subscribe

🎙️ Escape The Clock Podcast — https://escapetheclock.com/podcast

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🎙 LISTEN & WATCH

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A Stellar Insight — Erudite Exploration.

#AI #AGI #AISafety #AgenticAI #Superintelligence #KillSwitch #Singularity #EscapeTheClock #AStellarInsight #EruditeExploration #Podcast

For nearly two thousand years, humanity had placed Earth at the centre of the cosmos. The Sun, Moon and planets moved around us. It was not just an astronomical model. It was part of how an entire civilisation understood its place in creation.

Then one idea moved the Earth.

In this episode of Old Scientific Ideas, we trace heliocentrism from Nicolaus Copernicus, the church canon who quietly proposed that Earth was moving around the Sun, to Giordano Bruno, who took the idea further into a vision of an infinite universe filled with countless worlds, and finally to Galileo, whose telescope produced evidence that the old model could no longer easily explain.

We follow the confrontation between new evidence and old authority, from Bruno’s trial and execution for heresy, in which his cosmological views were entangled with deeper theological charges, to Galileo’s trial and forced recantation, and finally to the Church’s formal acknowledgement of the affair centuries later.

But this story is more complicated than science versus religion. It is a story about evidence, institutional authority, philosophy and what happens when an entire civilisation is forced to change its frame of reference.

Because when Earth stopped being the centre of the universe, humanity faced a deeper question:

If we are not at the centre, does that make us less significant?

Perhaps not.

Copernicus moved the Earth. He did not move what matters.

Episode 2 of Old Scientific Ideas — a new series from A Stellar Insight.

A Stellar Insight — Erudite Exploration.

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#AStellarInsight #OldScientificIdeas #Heliocentrism #Copernicus #Galileo #GiordanoBruno #Astronomy #Science #HistoryOfScience #ScientificRevolution #Space #Cosmology #Physics #Philosophy #ScienceAndFaith #ChristianityAndScience #STEM #ScienceCommunication #CriticalThinking #Curiosity #EruditeExploration

She spent her first 20 years never knowing she was born in England not knowing who the Prime Minister was, not knowing the world outside her community existed. Locked in an attic for asking too many questions. Married off before she had the chance to choose otherwise.

Dr. Leah Zitter escaped and spent the next two decades studying exactly how the human brain gets programmed, and how to unprogram it.

In this episode, we go inside the neuroscience of manipulation: why smart, capable people fall for scams, how stereotypes hijack the same brain system a con artist exploits, and why the amygdala reacts before the rational brain even gets a vote. We talk about her own method for rewiring instinctive judgment, her pilot work deradicalizing members of extremist groups and cults, and what she thinks happens when AI and eventually brain implants like Neuralink start doing the manipulating for us.

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00:00 — BREAKING INDOCTRINATION

05:42 — THE HUMAN BRAIN

12:18 — THE AS-IS METHOD

18:35 — FIGHTING MANIPULATION

25:10 — IS AI INTELLIGENT?

31:44 — HACKING THE BRAIN 38:20 — THE REALITY FILTER

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 🎙 THIS EPISODE’S GUEST ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Dr. Leah Zitter — PhD in behavioral neuroscience, master’s in philosophy and logic. Has worked across 60 industries and 30 countries studying manipulation, radicalization, and how the brain can be trained to see past its own conditioning. Portfolio: https://lz2.journoportfolio.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leahzitter/

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A Stellar Insight — Erudite Exploration.

#HackingTheHumanMind #LeahZitter #Cults #Scams #Neuroscience #AI #AStellarInsight #EruditeExploration #Psychology #Podcast

Leah Zitter spent her first 20 years never knowing she was born in England.

Locked in an attic for asking too many questions. Married off before she got to choose.

She escaped — and spent the next two decades studying exactly how the human brain gets programmed. And how to unprogram it.

Because the same wiring that keeps someone in a cult is the wiring a scammer exploits. The wiring behind a stereotype. The wiring AI is learning to trigger too.

Hacking the Human Mind: Cults, Scams, Stereotypes, and AI.

New episode of A Stellar Insight — out now.

🎙 Watch/Listen: YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLieeNYE0OmWamqBmANO8syZCOkzsmqF09&si=DBz40UYmitxIhd8R

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Quang Nguyen had it all.

Six figures. Remote work. Freedom to travel.

And he still felt like he was losing.

So he quit — and started asking a different question: what if life isn’t chaos, but a system? A game with rules, running on a physics engine you can actually learn to play.

If that’s true… what does it mean for love? For free will? For God?

Is Consciousness Just Physics? Determinism, Free Will, and the Simulation.

New episode of A Stellar Insight — out now.

🎙 Watch/Listen: YouTube: ⁠https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLieeNYE0OmWamqBmANO8syZCOkzsmqF09&si=DBz40UYmitxIhd8R⁠

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For nearly your whole life, you’ve been told to “play the game” get the degree, get the job, get the money, and happiness follows.

Quang Nguyen did all of it. Six figures. Remote work. Freedom to travel. Everything that was supposed to mean he was winning.

He wasn’t. He just couldn’t say why.

So he quit and started asking a different question: what if life isn’t random at all, but a system with rules, like a video game with a physics engine? And if that’s true, what does it mean for love, for free will, for the wealth gap that’s been widening since the beginning of civilization and for the God so many people swear they’ve personally encountered?

In this episode, Quang and I go from simulation theory to Laplace’s demon, from The Great Leveler to the corporate burnout that nearly broke him, and land somewhere neither of us expected: is consciousness just physics or is there something the physics engine can’t explain?

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00:00 — Life as a System: Where This Understanding Came From

02:20 — Quitting a Six-Figure Job While “Winning”

05:40 — The Lowest Point That Rebuilt Him

07:40 — Simulation Theory, Love, and What’s “Real”

13:40 — Laplace’s Demon and the Limits of Prediction

19:15 — The Great Leveler: Why Wealth Inequality Always Resets

26:50 — Power, Manipulation, and Revolutions

27:40 — Nihilism, Mindset, and Making the Ride Worth It

30:00 — Does Civilization Need Religion?

37:15 — The One Thing That Challenges the Whole Theory

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Quang Nguyen — creator of Quang Explains, exploring life, systems, and philosophy through a gamer’s lens. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@QuangPhilosophy

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A Stellar Insight — Erudite Exploration.

#SimulationTheory #FreeWill #Determinism #Philosophy #QuangExplains #AStellarInsight #EruditeExploration #Consciousness #Nihilism #Podcast

Germ Theory: The Doctor They Destroyed

In 1847 Vienna, women were dying in childbirth at terrifying rates. One maternity ward had a death rate nearly eight times higher than another. The difference seemed impossible to explain.

Then a young Hungarian physician, Ignaz Semmelweis, noticed something no one else wanted to see.

Doctors were carrying something from the autopsy room into the maternity ward.

Semmelweis introduced mandatory handwashing with chlorinated lime, and maternal deaths fell dramatically. He had the evidence. He had the results. But the medical establishment struggled to accept his conclusion.

His story is one of medicine’s most haunting examples of what can happen when evidence challenges an institution’s assumptions.

In the first episode of Old Scientific Ideas, we explore Semmelweis, the origins of infection control, the resistance to his discovery, and the uncomfortable question his story leaves behind:

What truths are we rejecting today because accepting them would require us to change?

A story about science, medicine, humility, and the cost of being right before the world is ready to listen.

🎙️ A Stellar Insight | Old Scientific Ideas — Episode 1

#AStellarInsight #EruditeExploration #Semmelweis #GermTheory #HistoryOfScience #MedicalHistory #ScienceHistory #Medicine #PublicHealth #ScientificRevolution #ScienceAndFaith #OldScientificIdeas

For nearly a hundred years, the best scientific minds in Europe believed fire was a substance called phlogiston something that lived inside matter and escaped when things burned.

They were not fools. The theory was coherent. It explained a great deal. It had the support of leading chemists across the continent.

It was also precisely backwards.

In this episode of Old Scientific Ideas, we trace phlogiston from its roots in the alchemical tradition — Isaac Newton spent more time on alchemy than on physics, and that is not a footnote, it is a central part of this story — to the moment Antoine Lavoisier dismantled a century of chemical consensus with careful measurements and a new word: oxygen.

We also ask what this story teaches us about error. Because Lavoisier did not set out to disprove phlogiston. He set out to understand combustion. The truth found him as a consequence of honest, rigorous investigation — not as a predetermined destination.

Wrong ideas, held honestly and tested rigorously, can lead to right ones. That is not a consolation prize. That is how science actually works.

Episode 1 of Old Scientific Ideas — a new series from A Stellar Insight.

A Stellar Insight — Erudite Exploration.

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Some of the most important discoveries in human history didn't come from people who had all the answers.

They came from people willing to question ideas that everyone else had already decided were settled.

Old Scientific Ideas is a new series from A Stellar Insight — short episodes about the theories that shaped our world, the people who found the truth, and what the world did to them when it wasn't ready to hear it.

Phlogiston. The luminiferous aether. Germ theory. Heliocentrism. Eugenics. Prions.

Wrong ideas that led to right ones. Right ideas that nobody wanted to hear. And the extraordinary humans caught in between.

New episodes dropping soon.

A Stellar Insight — Erudite Exploration.