Deep Future

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.

Mike Winter starts in an Alaska winter with little snow-going robots, opens Wired, and calls Mark Thorpe about Robot Wars — then builds the promo video, wins middleweight with a flipper, and finds a whole tribe of ILM and Silicon Valley people who just wanted to make dangerous fun machines.

We get into warehouse humanoids, googly eyes on combat robots, how people actually work with machines, and the Cannonball philosophy: never be bored, and always do stuff when you don’t know what you’re doing.

Mike Winter and I talk tools that run hot at home, Runway hands that finally get the fingernail polish right, and why he still collects dirty real artifacts — minidiscs, bad cameras, Phil Tippett garage-sale leftovers — instead of generating everything from scratch.

Then the origin story: boredom, Business Week, radio drama, a wire-wrap childhood computer, Super 8 stop-motion on public access, and his line that a lot of neurons live in your hands. You really do want to be working with them.

Mike Winter and I talk about the precision of Chinese manufacturing, the depth of its supply chains, and what it would take to bring production back to the U.S. Could we make things differently instead of rebuilding the same factories?

Mike proposes a design challenge: no screws allowed. We get into combat robots, 3D printing, rocket design, and the assumptions hidden in the way we build things. Then we ask a bigger question: what are we making all this stuff for, and what actually brings us happiness?

CFD — computational fluid dynamics. CFD is numerical simulation of how liquids and gases move — used to design rockets, cars, drones, and other hardware where airflow or flow fields matter.

Mike Winter tells me how a military-grade plotter at his tech school led to thousands of drawings and his first CAD startup. But the business he really wanted to be in was making monsters for movies.

We talk about monster movies, Halloween creatures, and a research contest with one constraint: find something that is not on the internet. Then we head to Dollar Tree for a different kind of creative tool kit. What story could you tell with a pile of cheap objects and a diorama?

IMU — inertial measurement unit. An IMU senses acceleration and rotation (typically with accelerometers and gyros) so a device can estimate motion and orientation without relying only on GPS or cameras.

Mike Winter built a full-AI combat robot, put it in the arena against his daughter — a BattleBots driver for decades — and watched it learn not to expose the corner that kept getting hit.

From there we talk factories and marketing that would be crazy not to use AI, the diorama work on his desk, and the idea that language models are only one kind of model. Mike says he doesn’t think in a language — and I push the case for non-language creative models alongside the LLM stack.