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.
