Age of Miracles is a narrative show that explores the complex industries that will play an important role in creating an abundant future for humanity. Episodes 1 and 2 drop October 27th. Every season, host Packy McCormick – a venture investor and writer of the popular Not Boring newsletter – brings in an expert cohost to go deep into the possibilities and challenges of making “sci-fi” dreams our reality in our lifetimes. The first season starts at the root of all progress and prosperity:...

Crusoe is on a mission to align the future of computing with the future of the climate. It has pioneered infrastructure that taps into stranded energy — methane being flared or excess production from clean and renewable sources — to power the compute resources we need to drive our shared progress and reduce its environmental impact. The company is building an AI-native cloud infrastructure from scratch, and doing so by colocating and powering its data centers with stranded energy from some...

Emi Gal is the founder and CEO of Ezra. Ezra is on a mission to detect cancer early for everyone in the world. The company offers full-body MRI scans in order to catch cancer earlier to increase the odds of beating it.  I recently did an Ezra scan myself, and while it was nerve-wracking to face cancer, confirming that I’m cancer-free was a priceless relief. My scan took 60 minutes, but Ezra just received FDA clearance for the world’s first 30-minute full body MRI to screen for cancer. It’s...

Dylan Beynon is the founder and CEO of Mindbloom. Minbloom's mission is to transform lives today, to transform the world tomorrow through psychedelic medicine. It's starting with Ketamine therapy serving patients with depression and anxiety. 89% of Mindbloom clients report improvements in anxiety and depression symptoms. Beyond Ketamine therapy, Mindbloom is riding a wave of new research and regulation that's mainstreaming psychedelics for clinical use and shaping how approach physical,...

Brandon Arvanaghi⁠⁠ is the co-founder and CEO of ⁠⁠Meow⁠⁠. Meow is Costco meets financial services. It offers low-cost, high-value cash and treasury management products for high-growth businesses. This is Brandon's third time on the podcast, and this time he discusses Meow's navigation of the recent banking crisis and why Meow is built to last. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/notboring/message

Zach Marks is the co-founder and CEO of Jia. Jia connects capital to small businesses in every corner of the world. Here's how Jia works: When business owners repay a loan, they drive value to lenders and the economy. They deserve to be compensated as owners of that economy. That’s why Jia rewards borrowers with an ownership stake in Jia’s long-term growth. Ownership leads to better borrower behavior, which benefits the entire ecosystem. Packy and Zach discuss how blockchain can help align...

LINK TO ESSAY: Google isn’t facing the Innovator’s Dilemma; it’s just so deeply Positioned in search that it’s been a sitting duck for the first superior technology or business model strong enough to take it on.  Positioning is the flip side of one of Hamilton Helmer’s 7 Powers, counter-positioning: “​​A newcomer adopts a new, superior business model which the incumbent does not mimic due to anticipated damage to their existing business.” As Helmer points out in the book,...

LINK TO ESSAY Will AI steal our jobs, let us work less, or force us to do more, better?  Induced demand, Jevons Paradox, the Marchetti constant, and consumer psychology 101 suggest that the increased supply of intelligence will create more demand for tasks that require intelligence, that we’ll turn gains in intelligence efficiency into ways of doing new things that weren’t previously feasible.  Instead of a zero sum competition with the bots, we might be on the cusp of intelligence...

Trevor Bacon, Kellan Grenier and Jason Lewris are the founders of Parcl. Parcl bridges traditional real estate investments with cutting-edge blockchain technology to provide data-driven solutions for modern investors. Parcl was built to revolutionize how users approach real estate as an investment towards generational-wealth. By giving everyone the tools they need to access one of the world's most desired investment classes, Parcl aims to deliver real estate to everyone. Parcl is a Not...

Andrew Herr is the founder and CEO of Fount. Fount is crafting the operating system for the human body.  To start, it provides extremely high-touch personal health services to clients: blood tests, fitness plans, meal prep, supplements, and much more to meet its clients personalized health needs. But Fount is running a series of experiments that will allow it to develop software that scales its luxury health services to millions of customers.   Andrew Herr knows more about health &...

Ryan Glasgow is the founder and CEO of Sprig. Sprig is the easiest way to collect product feedback, inform product decisions, and increase your speed of innovation. The world’s best product teams including the teams at Notion, Loom, and Robinhood use Sprig’s in-app surveys and concept and usability tests to capture insights from their customers and build better products. Every week, at the bottom of this newsletter, I use a Sprig survey to get your feedback -- you click a button to tell me...

Packy an Anton discuss Chroma's (Anton's company) launch of Stable Attribution.  Stable Attribution is a tool that let's anyone find the humans behind AI generated images. Given any image generated by Stable Diffusion, Stable Attribution is able to identify the images in the model's training set which most contributed to the generated image.   Packy and Anton discuss the development of Stable Attribution, how to understand the data underlying these sophisticated AI models, and the...

Sam Levin is the co-founder and CEO of Melonfrost. Melonfrost is using the power of evolution and machine learning to launch the next generation of microbes that will revolutionize the fields of therapeutics, biomaterials, food, and agriculture. You'll learn more about what exactly that means in this conversation between Packy and Sam.   Melonfrost, a Not Boring Capital portfolio company, recently announced its latest round of fundraising -- a $7M seed round led by  Refactor Capital and...

Andy Chatham is the CEO and co-founder of Dimo. Dimo's mission is to be the driving force behind the future of mobility: a future where data shapes infrastructure, emissions are lower, roads are safer, and life behind the wheel is—well, better.  DIMO helps you get more from driving. Save money. Learn how to better take care of your car. And, contribute to a future where driving apps work for vehicle owners, not the companies that build them—just by sharing your data.  DIMO is the...

Michael Kelly is the co-founder of Open Forest Protocol.    Open Forest Protocol (OFP) is a scalable open platform that allows forest projects of any size, from around world, to Measure, Report, and Verify (MRV) their forestation data.  Through OFP, individuals, communities, NGOs, entrepreneurs, and governments are able to create transparent, immutable, proof-of-impact data that is comprehensively verified by a network of independent experts.  OFP is creating the foundation for more...

Nicholas Chadwick is the founder and CEO of Mission Zero Technologies. MZT is developing direct air capture (DAC) technology that will recover high-purity CO2 from the air while incurring only a fraction of the costs and energy it takes to do so today.  Frontier is a recipient of an advanced market commitment grant from Frontier, the effort from companies like Stripe, Shopify, Meta, and Microsoft to ensure there is a market for carbon removal credits. This podcast is sponsored by...

Exponential makes it easy to discover, assess and invest in liquidity pools across chains. It wants to be the Coinbase of DeFi. We were joined by the companies three founders: Driss Benamour, Mehdi Lebbar, and Greg Jizmagian to discuss the current crypto market, Exponential's risk-first approach, and how to asses a digital risk-asset. You can learn more at exponential.fi. You can also watch the full video version of this conversation on our Youtube channel @notboringmedia. --- Send in a...

LINK to essay Every new year is a blank page, a chance to start fresh with new ideas and new sources and new energy. Of course, January 1st isn’t actually any more different from December 31st than December 31st was from December 30th. But the collective time we all spend away from the daily routine during the holidays feels like a reset. And we’ve all tacitly agreed that the new year is a different thing than the old year. So it’s close enough to actually different. This particular...

Audio Essay: Four Seasons Total Tech Link to full essay: https://www.notboring.co/p/four-seasons-total-tech Packy analogizes the Gartner Hype Cycle to the four seasons, to explain why some technology winters feel so long and cold while all summers feel pretty much the same. We're coming out of a many decades long winter for a bunch of frontier technology spaces (AI, Space, Nuclear, etc) seemingly all at once -- it's still spring, but Packy predicts that the we're about to enter a long,...

Packy and Anton breakdown one of the early, foundational artifical intelligence papers, "A logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity," which was first published in 1943. The researchers, Warren S. McCulloch and Walter Pitts, were trying to understand how the brain could produce such complex patterns by using basic, connected cells. Their work was foundational in understanding neurons, and l introduced the concept of the neural network which has since become a key concept in...

The idea is this: the world oscillates between centralization and decentralization, with progress sloping upward through the turns. We’re approaching an era of decentralization.  This shift from centralization to decentralization is popping up everywhere I look:  Energy: Fossil Fuels vs. Renewables Manufacturing: Globalization vs. Reshoring Manufacturing: Making vs. Growing Science: Government Funded vs. Decentralized Hard Tech: Government Agencies & Incumbents vs. Startups ...

We're back! In Episode 2, Anton Teaches Packy about Deepmind's March 2022 paper, Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models, or as it's more commonly known, Chinchilla.  Prior to Chinchilla, the best way to improve the performance of LLMs was thought to be by scaling up the size of the model. As a result, the largest models now have over 500 billion parameters. But there are only so many GPUs in the world, and throwing compute at the problem is expensive and energy intensive. In this...

Anton Teaches Packy AI is Not Boring's attempt at making AI more accessible to our audience. It's become increasingly obvious that we're in the Golden Age of AI, so we think it's important to demystify what's going on and how it all actually works.   Anton Troynikov is the founder of Chroma, former Meta Reality Labs Research Engineer and Roboticist.   Packy McCormick is the author of the popular tech and buinsess strategy newsletter, Not Boring.   Anton Teaches Packy AI is exactly what it...

Odyssey (formerly Agora) fully believes in the power of technology to provide families with opportunity to choose the educational environment and services that help them best meet their unique learning needs.  In order to help parents do that, we have partnered with the best K-12 providers and vendors in order to create a robust marketplace for our families. Joe Connor is the founder and CEO of Odyssey, and brings with him years of experience in education & law. Packy and Joe have been...