Mike Winter tells me how a 1994 Wired Robot Wars call pulled him out of an Alaska winter — flipper bots, a million fans, warehouse humanoids, and a Cannonball Run rule: never be bored.
Mike Winter and I go from local AI tools and gritty real props to childhood computers, Super 8 stop-motion, and why working with your hands still beats living only in your head.
Mike Winter and I argue fasteners, DJI-grade mechanics, and a no-screws design challenge — then widen out to what manufacturing is for and what still makes a person fulfilled.
Mike Winter walks me through his first CAD startup, the secret wish to make film monsters, offline research contests, and why Dollar Tree dioramas beat sitting around watching TV.
Mike Winter and I start with his AI or Die combat-robot fight against his BattleBots-veteran daughter — then dioramas as everyday model-making, and why creative thinking shouldn't live only in language.
Juan Enriquez and I confront the case for geoengineering—from runaway methane and ice-core climate shocks to cloud ships, reflective drones, and the politics of cooling Earth.
I closed with Marc on holding two futures at once — paperclip apocalypses, the stories in our heads, and why I still believe we have volition in the toolkit we are building.
I pressed Marc on cheap energy as a civilizational discontinuity — and whether AI is actually different in kind, or just another hockey-stick story we tell ourselves.
I asked Marc how a vision actually spreads inside a company — Alan Kay’s goal cloning, hiring people who already see it, and pulling from the future instead of pushing from the present.
I sat down with Marc Porat about personal technology as a north star — and how information as power runs from his family history through Stanford, Apple, and General Magic.
I talk with Kevin Slavin about building a transaction layer for genomic data: a Spotify-like system that rewards countries and scientists for nature's inventions while keeping research data usable.
I talk with Kevin Slavin about using wastewater, airplanes, sequencing, and genomic surveillance to detect outbreaks early, and why the missing pieces are political will, infrastructure, and business models rather than technology.
I talk with Kevin Slavin about Situationist psychogeography, location-aware games, bees, sewers, and the invisible microbial layers that make one city biologically different from another.
I talk with Kevin Slavin about raising curious children, the power of light-touch mentorship, childhood memory, wonder, and the distance between intention and lived experience.
Sarah Rose Siskind and I trace humanity’s dance with nature—from childbirth and AI filmmaking to universal basic salt, software abundance, and technological progress.
Sarah Rose Siskind and I talk about invisible progress, technology as connection, AI scribes, and why humanity needs a global pizza party for its biggest wins.
Sarah Rose Siskind and I talk data moats, the feature-vs-platform trap, why fire is technology, and accessibility wins from disability automated speech recognition to Be My Eyes.
