floating questions

Wen Tong is an imaging engineer and (aspiring) colorist — his job is to make sure what you see on screen is exactly what the director intended. Turns out, that's almost impossible. 

Two people literally cannot see the same color.

I went into this conversation expecting to learn about color science, and I did — but we ended up somewhere I didn't expect. We talked about:

• Why working in total darkness actually ruins a colorist's perception — you'd think the opposite
• The moment his first film looked beautiful on his laptop and terrible in the theater, and how that one experience pulled him into a career very few people know of
• Giving up computer science for art — "in a traditional Chinese mindset, that's insane"
• "Fun is always the thing that will make you do things. If things are not fun, it's hard to do for long."

Wen lives in New York and is still building the skills to tell the story he hasn't written yet. He's in no rush.

wentongcolor.com

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In this episode of Floating Questions, we sit down with Mason Grimshaw, an MIT alum and mission-driven data scientist driving critical progress at the intersection of environmental conservation and indigenous empowerment in the age of AI. We explore how his work, life, and community view intertwine to thread a journey that spans from the Rosebud Sioux Reservation to the cutting edge of geospatial modeling.

• Parenthood and the Probabilistic Worldview: How Mason applied a "process over results" mindset to navigate the challenges of raising a family while completing his degrees at MIT.
• Language as Ancient Code: How the Lakota language uses redundant information—such as encoding kinship and physical direction—to ensure the integrity of oral histories, functioning much like modern error-correction technology.
• Building the "Pocket Botanist": How indigenous youth at the AI camp use computer vision and Docker to preserve traditional knowledge of medicinal plants in the Black Hills.
• Indigenous Data Sovereignty: The critical need for tribes to maintain sovereign control over their cultural resources to prevent models from training on sensitive data without community permission.
• Geospatial AI for the Earth: Using "Clay," a foundation model for the earth, to transform satellite imagery into semantic data for tracking whale migration and deforestation.

In our rush to build the future, how should we handle the delicacy of history, memory, and wisdom?

You might have heard of Amine Bennouna from a previous episode (here)  – from the Math Olympiad in Morocco to an MIT PhD and now a Professor at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management. Recently, he has been thinking deeply about a critical question: Do we actually need more data for AI? 

In this episode, Amine discusses the idea that data is the "fossil fuel" of AI , and we have largely burned through the easy reserves. He believes the next frontier isn't about scale, but about quality – knowing exactly which "soil samples" to collect before building the subway line, rather than just feeding the model the entire map.

We dive deep into his research on optimal decision-making under uncertainty in relation to data, but we don't stay in the theory. We also wade into the messy, human incentives that shape our world: 

• The Tenure Game: Why the academic pressure to publish volume is killing "moonshot" research – and why we need more people willing to be misunderstood (like Geoffrey Hinton) to make real breakthroughs. 
• The Data Marketplace: A future where we stop giving our data away for free and start treating it like the currency it is. 
• The Crisis of Busyness: Why our generation is wealthier but often less happy , and how "optimizing" your life is meaningless if you don't know the objective function.

This conversation is an invitation to pause and ask: Are we collecting the right information, or just more of it?

For the final episode of 2025, we are joined by a guest who embodies the spirit of exploration: Eric Wang. 

By day, Eric works in private equity in New York City, managing commercial real estate deals on Wall Street. On weekends, he trades his spreadsheets for a chef's knife, running 81 Eats – a supper club and pop-up series featuring "Chinese-inspired comfort food." 

From growing up in Shanghai and attending boarding school in the US at age 12, to training at Wharton and a top-tier French culinary school, Eric is turning the journey inward. 

We discuss how he balances a high-pressure finance career with the grounding nature of cooking, his solitude during the pandemic in Tokyo, and his personal philosophy rooted in nature ("touch grass" to feel alive) and gathering people together.

Today on Floating Questions, we sat down with Shaka Mitchell - Aspen Institute Civil Society Fellow, Senior Fellow at the American Federation for Children, constitutional law lecturer, long-distance runner, creator of the Come Together Music Project, and father of three. 

Shaka has spent decades building bipartisan coalitions in education and civil discourse, guided by humility, principled thinking, and a deep commitment to humanizing others. In this conversation, we explore:

• Music as a bridge: why “every memory has a soundtrack” and how sharing a song helps people humanize each other before hard political conversations 
• Values, faith & principled living: “to give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift,” and why humility matters when advocating for what you believe 
• School choice & civic engagement: how diverse motivations still build coalitions, and the tension between plural school options and the demands placed on parents
• AI in the classroom: how AI can support learning and where it can’t replace teachers, plus emerging policy questions as AI enters education

Shaka shares stories from his coalition-building work, his family, and his faith - offering a grounded look at how people with very different backgrounds and beliefs can still learn from one another.

You can also follow his work and thoughts here https://shakamitchell.substack.com/

Timothy Chen’s story isn’t your typical Silicon Valley success arc. 

He didn’t start as a hotshot coder - Microsoft once slotted him into the IT track, nothing more. Yet he went on to become a member of the Apache Software Foundation, contribute to open-source projects like Kafka and Mesos (the one-time rival to Kubernetes), and now runs Essence VC, where he backs infrastructure founders with a hands-on approach. 

In this episode, we talk about: 

• The underdog mindset that turned rejection into reinvention. 
• How working in dysfunctional and even toxic environments taught him what builds a great startup.
• The messy reality of politics and consensus-building in open source - and why, contrary to myth, it’s the trust circle, not the crowd, that makes progress happen. 
• How he’s building the fund he wished existed when he was a founder. 
• A thrilling story of Mesos vs. Kubernetes - and how arrogance, not tech, killed the former. 

This conversation blends the human and the technical - a reflection on what it means to build trust, whether in code or in capital.

In this episode, we sit down with Julia Morton - a writer, art curator, fashion designer, early YouTuber, and author of a Substack chronicling how artists are experimenting with AI (https://aiplusart.substack.com). 

We chatted how Julia views art as a time capsule for a species going from analog to cyber, why AI-aided films can feel more personal (smaller crews, fewer gatekeepers), and how new tools surface new voices the way photography once did. 

We also wade into the thorny stuff: ownership and consent, documenting “transformative” use, and why we keep calling AI “them.” Julia shares a story about her husband’s implanted device - and how merging with machines can literally change how we feel. 

If you’re tired of doomscroll takes, this conversation sits in the nuance: fear and possibility, creativity and execution, and the old question beneath every new medium - what, exactly, makes art human?

In this episode, we are joined by Joshua Pulsifer - narrative designer and co-director at Zipit! Games, an indie studio in New York. Joshua and his partner Ben are building The Wide Open Sky is Running Out of Catfish, a story-driven photography game set on the back of a giant flying catfish. Beneath its playful exterior lies a meditation on memory, friendship, and the impermanence of life. 

We dive into a super fun journey exploring: whether video games are a good storytelling medium, what creates powerful emotional arcs, and why we need to take video games seriously as art. Along the way, we also confront death - both as a universal fear and as a source of connection and meaning. 

It’s an episode about creativity, mortality, and the stories we play that shape who we are.

Socials: @zipit_games

Data breaks. AI models go crazy. Downstream teams scramble to put out the fire.

In this episode, I talk with Chad Sanderson, CEO and co-founder of Gable - a startup rebuilding data quality and governance from the ground up. We dive into the “shift left” philosophy: why upstream engineers must own their data outputs, how data contracts create accountability in AI systems, and what it takes to drive real cultural change across an organization.

We also zoom out into Chad’s journey - from martial arts and journalism to leading data teams at Microsoft and Convoy. Along the way, we unpack why upstream ownership unlocks downstream speed, why the future of AI depends on mapping data flows end to end, and how a mission rooted in truth and transparency ties it all together!

A must-listen for anyone navigating the messy intersection of product velocity, data integrity, and organizational scale - the foundation needed to truly unlock AI’s potential.

https://www.gable.ai/

https://dataproducts.substack.com/

How do you measure whether an education policy is actually working?

In this episode, I talk with Stephanie Franklin, Deputy Associate Commissioner of Strategy and Analytics at one of the largest education agencies in the U.S.

We dive into the grounding yet complex role data plays in education - how student outcomes are tracked, how metrics are built to drive accountability, and the delicate balance between actionable insight and student privacy, in a world of emerging tech.

From evaluating classroom initiatives to exploring why education is inherently data-driven, this conversation unpacks the challenge of measuring what matters - and why great policy still hinges on effective execution.

If you’ve ever wondered how governments gauge success in education - or why it’s so difficult - this episode is for you!