60: Patrick Hsu - Speedrunning the Infinite Game

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. --- Dialectic is presented by Notion. Notion is a collaborative workspace for your life's work, and it works with whatever AI you use. New models are typically available in Notion the day they launch, you can tag agents from inside Notion, and you can tag Notion from your other AI tools. As the tools around you change, Notion stays the one place that holds your context. Notion is also hiring across product, engineering, design, storytelling, and more. Learn more at notion.com/dialectic. --- 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 --- 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