Deep Future

Chris Kantrowitz and I start with the strange advantage of operating before deal flow: the people who spot talent before anyone else, whether they are venture investors, music lawyers, or agents.

Then we head into Hollywood. I tell Chris about advising hacker stories from an abandoned WarGames remake to Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Here Comes the Flood, and we unpack how CAA built a machine that Andreessen Horowitz later adapted for founders.

Byron Reese and I get into the uncomfortable gap between what intelligent systems know and what they can explain. Machine learning can expose the biases buried in our data, but it can also leave us staring at an answer without a satisfying reason.

Then we turn to the stories that teach us what futures feel possible: Hollywood’s dystopian AI, Star Trek’s optimism, the real Tricorder XPRIZE, and Byron’s idea of Agora. If we want people to build a better future, we need better stories about technology worth building.

Byron Reese closes the loop from stories to dice to rocks that think. Probability gave us numbers for future events; computer chips gave us machines that can model thousands of possible futures.

We get into Agora, the superintelligence built from accumulated human knowledge, then connect SimCity, spreadsheets, Tesla fleet learning, and my daughter’s stuffed-animal classroom to the same idea: models help us test what-if scenarios and choose a better future.

Byron Reese asks one of those questions that sounds ridiculous until it rearranges your brain: where are the Bronze Age beavers? Why did no other animal build even a primitive civilization?

We follow that question from Homo erectus hand axes and the cave paintings at Chauvet to language, memory, and the moment humans became a superorganism. Byron calls that superorganism Agora: the collective intelligence that lets us imagine a future, coordinate around it, and build it.

Byron Reese wrote one of my favorite books so I wouldn’t have to. Infinite Progress makes an optimistic, accessible case for using technology to solve huge problems, and I give it to everybody.

We also get into The Fourth Age and Wasted, where a recycle bin can make people use more cups. That weird incentive exposes the real problem: feel-good rituals do not scale. Clean, cheap energy does.

Are you ready to get weird? The Telepathy Tapes makes an extraordinary claim: some nonspeaking autistic people appear able to receive information that nobody knows how they could get. Plenty of skeptics think the whole thing is bullshit. Plenty of believers skip straight past the experiment. Both reactions are boring.

Spiros and I ask the more useful question: if there is even a clean, testable anomaly here, what experiment would let us find out? That takes us through entanglement, shared consciousness, Aikido, empathy and communication channels physics may not know how to read yet. This is not a declaration that telepathy is real. It’s an argument for being brave enough to test interesting things.

Neal Stephenson’s Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer is an educational machine I’ve wanted to build for decades. It knows its reader, turns lessons into adventures, and meets a kid at the right level. Now we have tablets, game engines, and language models. What happens when we put them together?

Spiros pushes back on the idea that a better machine should simply teach us more. He wants people to find their own group of weirdos, go on adventures, and figure things out. We talk about storytelling, creativity, the physical world, and the building blocks each generation gets to take for granted.

Spiros starts with a magnetic field, an electric current, and a voltage appearing in an unexpected direction. Then he takes me from the quantum Hall effect to topology, entanglement, and the possibility that the universe works like a hologram.

I try to keep up with Mexican jumping beans, scratch holograms, and a light bulb. We explore why a messy experiment can produce astonishing precision, how a system’s global structure constrains what happens locally, and what it means to see the world from a particular point of view.

Spiros asks me to forget what I know about physics and imagine we are in ancient Greece. I’m holding a rock. If I let go, why does it fall? Can I make it stop? Can I make it fall up? Those simple questions lead into his thought experiment about gravity and our movement through time — without starting with calculus or Einstein.

We follow that thread through anesthesia, memory, entropy, and the difference between what is possible and what is likely. I bring in self-driving cars, aikido, a rock-climbing close call, and salsa dancing to explore how we build a picture of the world beyond our own point of view.

I’ve got a real soft spot for outsiders—the poorly socialized nerds, hackers, lateral thinkers and other weirdos who refuse to accept the map they were handed. Spiros Michalakis has spent years at Caltech trying to figure out how to give more people access to the ideas and institutions normally reserved for the best and brightest.

Spiros is a quantum physicist, researcher and outreach leader who can make an argument about assholes, Marie Antoinette, the Fellowship of the Ring and quantum gravity all land in the same place. In part one, we pick apart why shifting your point of view might be the highest form of intelligence.