Patricia Ryan Madson, professor emerita at Stanford and author of "Improv Wisdom", joins Danny Buerkli to talk about how she got into improv, how she starts a class, how status works, Keith Johnstone's dark side, and the four A's of improv: attention, acceptance, appreciation, and action.

Jamais Cascio, futurist, scenario expert, and author of Navigating the Age of Chaos, joins Danny Buerkli for a deep dive into scenario planning. They discuss how the discipline has evolved since the days of Herman Kahn at RAND and Pierre Wack at Shell, whether the military or the private sector do it better, why geoengineering might lead to predictable trouble (and why we might do it anyway), and whether today’s AI is more or less weird than Jamais once imagined. Jamais also reflects on his time working with Ken Waltz and shares the story behind his BANI framework, which captures how many now perceive the world: brittle, anxious, nonlinear, and incomprehensible.

Antoine Bosselut, Assistant Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne, joins Danny Buerkli to explain how he and his team built Apertus, the 'open' LLM. Antoine and Danny discuss why taxpayers should fund this work, which constraints bite hardest when creating an LLM outside one of the large labs, and which public investments may be needed now.