Paris, 1987. Rob Angel, during the game’s launch in France Rob Angel is the inventor of Pictionary. You have played this game. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t. He Invented the game in 1985 and started manufacturing it in his studio apartment in Seattle, and then literally went out onto the streets, trying to sell it to people face to face. Since then, 38 million copies of Pictionary have been sold worldwide. It’s one of the biggest games of human history. Is just staggering how many people have e...
May 20, 2024•1 hr 22 min•Ep. 47
Two nerds bullshitting about a decentralized YouTube. Recorded on March 13, 2024 The post YouTube of Alexandria – ØF appeared first on .
May 13, 2024•9 min•Ep. 46
Two nerds bullshitting about adapting cybersecurity to LLMs. Pablos: I have a totally different angle here. The topic is cybersecurity for AI so right now people are definitely doing cybersecurity to keep their models proprietary and keep their weights to themselves and this kind of thing. That’s not what I’m talking about. Cybersecurity for AIs is: I need to be able to test a bunch of failure modes for a model that I’ve made. So if I’m a company, I’ve trained a model on my internal data, and I ...
May 06, 2024•6 min•Ep. 45
Garrett Lisi by Martin Schoeller I’ve got a real soft spot for heretics and people who carve their own path outside of the institutions and societal norms and things that everyone is so pressured into because it creates this echo chamber and there’s these cookie cutter outcomes, it’s not conducive to getting to new ideas, it’s not good for figuring out new things and to discover how the world works and invent new things. It’s always a real privilege to spend time with a true heretic and today we...
May 02, 2024•1 hr 40 min•Ep. 44
Two nerds bullshitting about E-ink T-Shirts. Recorded on March 13, 2024 The post E-ink Everywhere – ØF appeared first on .
Apr 29, 2024•7 min•Ep. 43
Rob Shepherd by Matthew Palumbo I’ve gotten to spend a little bit of time with Rob Shepherd over the years. He’s working on soft robotics and all the different kinds of materials advancements that could really help us make robots that are more naturally integrated into the world. Things like polymer colloidal suspensions as inks for 3d printers so they can fabricate microfluidic devices, synthesizing single micron to millimeter scale parts in glass and silicon and all kinds of other stuff, like ...
Apr 25, 2024•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 42
Two nerds bullshitting about augmented reality tattoos. Pablos: I don’t know if this exists, but AR tattoos should totally be a thing. and this is just I think there’s a couple different embodiments for this, but basically there should just be an app where you aim it at anybody and they can set their own tattoos on, right? So like if I hold up my phone and I aim it at you, I can see the tattoos that you put on your bod, right? On my phone or goggles or whatever you got. But it would just be a th...
Apr 22, 2024•5 min•Ep. 41
Lee Cronin by Business Wire Lee Cronin is a true mad scientist. He’s a professor of chemistry in Glasgow, where he also founded Chemify . This is a company that has invented a new type of approach to accomplish chemistry, very analogous to using the tool chain that we use in computers and then adapting that to chemistry. I think this analogy holds very tightly. He’s built this machine called a Chemputer, which is basically a 3D printer for chemistry. To make that work, he had to make a programmi...
Apr 18, 2024•1 hr 32 min•Ep. 40
Two nerds bullshitting about an augmented reality baseball cap. Pablos: With AR, I think we got it wrong. Everybody’s been trying to put dragons in the room or have a whale in the room or whatever. And they’re going for this super realistic, photorealistic, immersive experience. And I think the only thing that really matters is dashboards. And even if you get an Apple Vision Pro and it’s an extraordinary image quality, what you mainly find yourself using it for is dashboards. You just put stuff ...
Apr 15, 2024•7 min•Ep. 39
Two nerds bullshitting about being able to annotate everything. Recorded on March 13, 2024 The post Mother of all Annotators – ØF appeared first on .
Apr 09, 2024•7 min•Ep. 38
If you ever get the chance to hang out with David Eagleman , first of all do it. The first thing you’re going to notice is that he’s extremely nice, fun, outgoing and very friendly. He’s lit up in the brain and he’s prolific, he’s doing a zillion different things and he’s still somehow nice enough to hang out and listen and chat. Davis is a neuroscientist teaching at Stanford . He’s got an amazing TED talk you have to watch. He’s an author of – I don’t know how many books – fiction and nonfictio...
Apr 05, 2024•1 hr 38 min•Ep. 37
Two nerds bullshitting about a worldwide bug tracker. Recorded on March 13, 2024 The post Mother of all Bug Trackers – ØF appeared first on .
Apr 01, 2024•8 min•Ep. 36
Music producer & sound engineer John Vitale is creating music to help people optimize brain states. After co- founding Focus@Will , where he designed music and soundscape channels for flow state he moved on to found Brain Music Labs Where he’s crafting new ways to use entrainment based music and media for reducing stress, anxiety, and cravings with partners like Total Brain and Felix . John is a great guy and I’m thrilled to be able to share this conversation about the importance and potenti...
Mar 21, 2024•1 hr 31 min•Ep. 35
Two nerds bullshitting about robots getting some of mammals’ greatest hits. Recorded on February 4, 2024 The post Fingers for Robots – ØF appeared first on .
Mar 18, 2024•22 min•Ep. 34
A true polymath, Moran started out in the Israeli military, in one of their elite intelligence units. Then ended up working as a hacker in computer security. And to this day is still in demand for that, but he had a weird experience when Francis Crick told him to junk hacking and get into working on neuroscience, and he did. And so Moran’s had this amazing career some of the research that underpins things like Neuralink. These days, he’s a professor in the business school at Columbia, where we r...
Mar 14, 2024•2 hr 7 min•Ep. 33
Two nerds bullshitting about stunts on the internet. Another idea I had a long time ago. That, unfortunately never deployed widely. I prototyped in the late nineties, it was called the Internet Random Mail Reader. For people who don’t know the way networks work is like your computer is just broadcasting all the packets out on the network and all the other computers on the network just ignore the ones that aren’t addressed to them. This is how networks worked. And so you can just sit and listen t...
Mar 11, 2024•10 min•Ep. 33
Riley Knox is an entrepreneur that I met when I was hanging out in Austin, Texas, and I was just truly impressed with him, his energy, his outlook, his technical approach to building these companies that are hard. He had this company called Accelerate3D that he built to advance 3D printing for manufacturing, make it fast enough and cheap enough that it will be compelling, which has been one of the big challenges in 3D printing. Accelerate3D had some real trouble, unfortunately getting the suppor...
Mar 07, 2024•2 hr 11 min•Ep. 31
Two nerds bullshitting about possible robots. The Lashbot5000 is a concept for adapting a surgical robot to install lash extensions. Apparently this has now been accomplished by LUUM in Oakland. You can see their robot in action here: Then we eventually get around to describing the totally genius but as of yet unbuilt Miyagibot which can find flies and grab them with chopsticks! Recorded on February 2, 2024 The post Lashbot5000 ＆ Miyagibot – ØF appeared first on ....
Mar 04, 2024•23 min•Ep. 30
Years ago, I got to be an advisor for this company called data.world , and at the time, they were just getting started on helping figuring out how do you converge all the data sets that are in the world and help people work with them and combine them and share them. They built this thing that was kind of like GitHub for data. I was interested in it because I could see at the time where the world was going and we’re going to need these much more advanced tools for being able to manage data. I tri...
Feb 29, 2024•1 hr 30 min•Ep. 29
One of the things that’s on the verge of excitement and annoyance for me is the way that Artificial Intelligence work has all kind of converged around deep learning. Deep learning is amazing and super powerful, and we’ve gotten a lot out of it, but what it has done is, both attracted a lot of people to Artificial Intelligence, but also, steered all the research efforts away from other approaches into deep learning. And you could say that makes some sense, because for a long time, we weren’t maki...
Feb 16, 2024•1 hr 50 min•Ep. 28
Short episode where Ash & Pablos marvel at this ingenious invention called the GyroGlove that can ameliorate the jittery hands of folks with Parkinson’s disease. If anyone can introduce us to the inventor, Dr. Faii Ong, we want to get him on the podcast! Recorded on February 4, 2024 The post GyroGlove – ØF appeared first on .
Feb 12, 2024•5 min•Ep. 27
Well, if you ever got tired of listening to me, talk. Today’s the day when you just get to hear from my buddy, Chris Young , because I wound him up and clicked go, and he just talks, and it’s great. He has so much, interesting experience and amazing insights. So Chris Young, if you don’t know, I met him back when we started the Intellectual Ventures Lab, because he was the guy that Nathan Myhrvold hired to start the cooking projects. We built an experimental kitchen there. Chris ran the project ...
Feb 08, 2024•2 hr 17 min•Ep. 26
Pablos: People are pissed off about social media all the time. They think that Facebook is making people vote for the wrong person. It’s still very difficult to find somebody who thinks they voted for the wrong person because of Facebook, but they think everyone else did. Never mind that, there’s this kind of, uh, very popular sensibility, which is to blame Facebook for all the problems in the world. They’re doing fake news, they’re doing, disinformation they’re doing , every possible thing that...
Feb 05, 2024•40 min•Ep. 24
This is a conversation with Bob Mumgaard and Steve Renter, founders of Commonwealth Fusion Systems in Cambridge, Massachusetts. So these guys spun out of MIT. An incredible, ambitious, company to figure out how to commercialize fusion, and it’s really the first fusion company in the world that has been able to show publicly that they have no new science needed in order to make it work, which is a major milestone. They also published a series of seven papers a couple of years ago now, showing exa...
Feb 01, 2024•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 23
Pablos: So what happens right now in scientific research is, if you’re going to do a research study on something, like “are M&Ms is bad for you?” It’s impossible to do that study. You have to be very specific and ask a much more fine grained questions like ” how many M&Ms does it take to, Kill a mouse?” or to cause a mouse to vomit. You just have to be very specific cause that’s something testable. You could test that, you can get multiple mice, you can feed them enough M&M’s that th...
Jan 29, 2024•13 min•Ep. 22
Part of what I love about getting to create a podcast like this is sharing conversations I’ve had with some of these extraordinary people that you just never hear about otherwise or never get to meet. They’re working behind the scenes, inventing new technologies that become part of our lives. And they’re out of the spotlight. I’ve been lucky enough to get to know Richard Chuang, who’s with us today, because we both served as board members at the University of Silicon Valley, where he is still a ...
Jan 25, 2024•1 hr 23 min•Ep. 21
Pablos: Here’s one of the things I think is a critical area of invention that remains unsolved, but it’s definitely a part of the future. So if you’re using an iPhone anywhere in the world, cultures vary. I’ve been working with this guy in Venezuela on a project. I text him on WhatsApp and then he replies with a voice memo like every time and so his, culture and worldview is just like talking to the phone and probably because I know Venezuelans do a lot more talking or something. Whereas I never...
Jan 21, 2024•17 min•Ep. 20
Pablos: There’s this idea that was just published that you could produce concrete and make it stronger by adding charred coffee grounds to the mix. And this is some research out of Australia. So concrete, if it’s not obvious, is like the most used material on the entire planet, aside from oil, which we burn. Cement, is in everything, and it’s this like staggering scale problem. Partly because of its contribution to greenhouse gases, right? So when you make cement, you’re burning some shit to mak...
Jan 16, 2024•34 min•Ep. 19
I got to know George Dyson 23 years ago. When we started Blue Origin, one of the really cool and unusual things that happened is we hired a historian. We hired George to be there at the beginning and kind of see where this all began. We thought – not just because of hubris – we thought it was such a unique moment in history, to be able to try and make a go at going to space. George had us print shit out and stick it in a box. He said one of the big problems for historians is these days everythin...
Jan 11, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 18
Here’s the dumbest thing in the world. You pull up to an intersection, the light is red, there’s no one else in sight and you have to sit there and wait for it to turn green. Traffic lights are the dumbest thing in the world. And this is insufferable because right now, if you, if you’re in a Tesla, the Tesla knows, Oh, no one’s coming from any other direction. It would totally be safe to go, but you can’t because the light is red. I think what somebody needs to do is rip the guts out of a Tesla,...
Jan 08, 2024•15 min•Ep. 17
