Artificial Intelligence

Exosomes, Stem Cells, Ketamine & VR — Dr. Melissa Selinger

My friend, Dr. Melissa Selinger is a Doctor of Neuropsychopharmacology who has done actual research on using psychedelics and virtual reality for treating things like depression, anxiety, and PTSD. A huge frontier where there are all kinds of potential, and very little actual scientific research has been done here so far. It’s an exciting frontier to be able to help a lot of people who we don’t have any real idea how to help otherwise.

I’m super thrilled about that and the potential for it. It’s great to get to talk to somebody who knows what state of the art there is. Melissa knows a lot about all kinds of things that I don’t know anything about. As you guys know, part of what I love to be able to do is sit down with somebody who has a lot of knowledge and experience in something that I don’t know about, pick their brain, try and break it down, see if I can understand it and take you guys along for the ride so that we can all learn.

Carcinogens, teratogens, exosomes, stem cells, cytokines, CRISPR, gene editing, all these are things that we talk about in this conversation. A lot of it is me trying to get her to explain in layman’s terms what this stuff is and how it works. There is incredible potential here. If you were ever interested in what’s possible in stem cell therapy, you’re going to want to learn about exosomes and her experience with that. A couple of biotech startups had some ups and downs in that and learned a lot. I’m thrilled to be sharing our conversation with you. Enjoy this episode.

Deep Future

Exosomes, Stem Cells, Ketamine & VR — Dr. Melissa Selinger

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Building the Right Thing at the Right Time – Jeremy Bornstein

One of the things I really like to be able to do is go track down some of the friends that I’ve made over the years who have grown up with technology and grew up with computers as kids hackers, computer programmers, people who eventually became engineers and just pick apart their experience.

A lot of us had similar experiences and I think there’s a lot that can be learned from that. And sometimes it’s just learning that there are parallel experiences that led us into very technical careers. But but also I think it is important to look for the things that worked like what were the things in our backgrounds that got us good at something? And what is it that turned us into hackers and what is it that made us learn to think differently? And so anyway, today we have Jeremy Bornstein who is one of my all time favorite people. I had the good fortune of meeting Jeremy training Aikido back in the nineties.

We were training with with Frank Doran, who at the time, was one of the senior Aikido instructors in America. Jeremy had started a company with his brother and another friend of ours in San Francisco called Xigo. Xigo was trying to do in the year 2000, essentially artificial intelligence to trade on the stock market. And and I ended up going to work for Jeremy and though the company, unfortunately didn’t work out and got shut down in the.com bubble, we still had amazing actual technology and actual customers and actual revenue, and we were doing great.

We were a victim of a sock puppet attack ended up having to shut down the company. Jeremy and I became great friends there and have been friends ever since. There’s not a lot of people who are as friendly as he is and with his diverse interests. And so we got to spend a couple of hours talking, I’d say about the first half of this is about our backgrounds, his background growing up with computers, how he got into it, how he learned the things he did. Jeremy had a super interesting career back at Apple in the Advanced Technology Group back in the nineties when there was really interesting things going on there and he invented some cool technology.

In the last half we talk about artificial intelligence, where it came from and where it’s going. Also some of Jeremy’s other interests in addition to Aikido, archery, Japanese and Western style, languages like Japanese, French, Mandarin, Spanish, and Latin. He’s learned to play the shakuhachi and the didgeridoo.

He’s a guy who’s built massively multiplayer online games, automated trading systems, cryptographic systems and a wide variety of other things. I hope you have a good time listening to two friends have a long chat.

Katia Capprelli, the former Italian race car engineer also joined us for this conversation.

Deep Future

Building the Right Thing at the Right Time – Jeremy Bornstein

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Can Robots be Artists? — Hod Lipson

Today, I spent some time with Hod Lipson who is a professor at Columbia University. In fact, we recorded this episode right out in front of the university with crying babies going by and kids playing in the park. So it’s a little noisy, but I’ve been inspired by Hod for a long time, because he’s another inventor that worked on 3D printing early on. He is at the forefront of what we’ve been able to do with computers. That’s the kind of thing I’m always really interested in.

He was actually inventing 3D printing at the same time I was, a long time ago. We get to have a conversation about that…both of us were probably the two people who worked on inventing 3D printers for food. And Hod has since gone on to do a really cool side project trying to create a robot artist and it’s called Pix18. It’s not like any other creative robot that you’ve seen or heard about. Honestly, this is a difficult thing to get your head around: can a robot be creative? And that’s hard for humans to accept. And so of all the people on earth to have a conversation with about this topic, I probably couldn’t do any better than Hod Lipson. Towards the end of this episode, you’ll see. It’s pretty exciting because Hod manages to really blow my mind.

Deep Future

Can Robots be Artists? — Hod Lipson

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Hot Seat: Pablos Interviewed by Bill Scannell

This is an unusual episode where my old buddy Bill Scannell actually interviews me. Mostly this is a way for people who don’t know me very well to get a sense of who I am and how I think and where I come from. A lot of it’s really about my philosophy and what informs that. Bill does a lot to try and tie that back to how I grew up in Alaska, which may or may not be as relevant as it seems. We don’t really talk too much about projects I’ve worked on, this is just a conversation between friends about, you know, the background, behind a lot of a lot of what I’ve worked on and the things that matter to me, so I hope you really like it.

Bill Scannell is actually one of the most interesting people I know. I met him probably almost 20 years ago at at Cypherpunks meetings. Bill was a spook in the Cold War. He was stationed in Army Intelligence in Eastern Europe doing surveillance and then after that, ended up becoming a war zone journalist and has lived through like seven civil wars with bullets flying over his head. He has got a lot of interesting stories. Most of the interesting stories I know about a living human are about Bill. We don’t get into that too much here. These days Bill is a global strategist. A hacker with a Rolodex.

Want to launch a data haven? Spin-up an international press center in 3 weeks? Get a hacker out of jail? Get the Russian mob off your back? Stop a government surveillance program? How about negotiate with a foreign power over a seasteading misunderstanding? Bill’s your man. There’s a reason why he is on so many people’s speed dial.

It turns out he’s actually really good at interviewing people and I think you’re gonna like the way this came out. So hopefully you enjoy it.

Deep Future

Hot Seat: Pablos Interviewed by Bill Scannell

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Artificial Intelligence

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