A narrative show that explores the complex industries that will play an important role in creating an abundant future for humanity. 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: unlocking 10x more clean and reliable energy by splitting ...
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The Flywheel Podcast is the audio companion to the popular newsletter The Flywheel: https://go.theflywheel.io/welcomelistener. In the podcast we feature interviews with top entrepreneurs, creators, and leaders to discuss what makes their flywheel spin. theflywheel.substack.com
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Bonus: Mass Manufacturing Micro-sized Nuclear Reactors with Jordan Bramble and Julia DeWahl of Antares
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Here's our full-length interview with Jordan Bramble and our own Julia DeWahl, co-founders of Antares, where we dive deep into how Antares plans on manufacturing in mass micro-sized nuclear reactors to provide abundant energy for all. 🔥 Apply to join over 400 founders and Execs in the Turpentine Network: https://hmplogxqz0y.typeform.com/to/JCkphVqj…
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Bonus: A World with Abundant Fusion Energy with David Kirtley of Helion Energy
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Here's our full-length interview with David Kirtley, founder of Helion Energy, where we dive deep into the need for fusion as a replacement for fossil fuels. 🔥 Apply to join over 400 founders and Execs in the Turpentine Network: https://hmplogxqz0y.typeform.com/to/JCkphVqj SPONSORS: RIPPLING SPEND | WEIGHTS AND BIASES | GIVEWELL | ANROK Imagine tot…
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Bonus: Unlocking Nuclear Power at Scale with Bret Kugelmass of Last Energy
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Here's our full-length interview with Bret Kugelmass, founder of Last Energy, where we dive deep into nuclear manufacturing and the importance of manufacturing efficiency. 🔥 Apply to join over 400 founders and Execs in the Turpentine Network: https://hmplogxqz0y.typeform.com/to/JCkphVqj SPONSORS: RIPPLING SPEND | WEIGHTS AND BIASES | GIVEWELL | ANR…
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Bonus: Building Nuclear for the Moon with Tyler Bernstein of Zeno Power
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We're kicking off the first of our bonus episodes with Tyler Bernstein, founder and CEO of Zeno Power, where he shares in-depth how they're creating radioisotope power systems for lunar applications. 🔥 Apply to join over 400 founders and Execs in the Turpentine Network: https://hmplogxqz0y.typeform.com/to/JCkphVqj SPONSORS: RIPPLING SPEND | WEIGHTS…
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We can live in an Age of Miracles, but it’s going to take a lot of work. Energy abundance is the most important thing we can work towards as a species. More than simply surviving climate change, we have the opportunity to unlock a new level of human thriving if we can successfully navigate this transition. That’s why we chose to do the first season…
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In the bizarro relay marathon that is the fusion race, the baton is firmly in the hands of the startups. The outcome, to be sure, is still uncertain, but the question isn’t whether humanity will achieve commercial fusion, but which companies will, with which approaches, when? Fusion, many believe, will be one of humanity’s greatest triumphs: we wil…
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There’s this joke that fusion is always 30 years away. 50 years ago, it was 30 years away. 20 years ago, it was still thirty years away. Today, though… we might be within a decade. We spent the first half of the season on nuclear fission, and the last episode on many of the other energy sources that will play a role in meeting humanity’s growing en…
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E7: The Case For All the Other Energy Sources
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Packy and Julia have spent the first five episodes of Age of Miracles diving into the past and present of nuclear fission—before jumping from the yin to the yang and covering nuclear fusion in the second half of this season, today we wanted to take a step back and talk about all the non-nuclear energy sources out there. We ask this icebreaker quest…
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This week, Packy and Julia take a break from our regularly scheduled narrative programming to look back on the past five episodes we've published focused on nuclear fission—and address news stories, feedback, and listener questions collected through this season so far. We cover: Illinois pushing back on the nuclear moratorium, Nuscale's cancelled c…
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E5: Fission Founders, Part 2: Designing Advanced Nuclear Reactor Startups
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Let's dive into the world of advanced nuclear startups—where founders are playing entrepreneurship on hard-mode, and navigating how to build new reactor designs, sell to new markets, and forge new regulatory pathways. This episode is the second focused on nuclear fission startup founders—while last week Packy and Julia spoke with entrepreneurs who …
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E4: Fission Founders, Part 1: Manufacturing Nuclear
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What if we treated building nuclear more like a manufacturing challenge than a construction challenge? How could nuclear benefit from the tried-and-true methodologies of other large industrial industries like ship-building and oil and gas to make nuclear as cheap as solar and wind to produce? In this episode – the first of two with leading nuclear …
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If we just tried to implement and scale the technology we have today for large scale nuclear reactors, with no innovation on reactor designs or business models, could we do it? How hard (or expensive) could it really be? In this episode, Packy and Julia dig into the nitty gritty of these issues and look at what it actually takes to build a plant in…
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E2: The Untold History of Nuclear Energy
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“Nuclear fission is a miracle technology, and we've had it for 80 years. But we don't live in an energy abundant world. Because progress takes more than miracles.” Almost exactly 50 years ago, nuclear fission and large scale reactors were on track to deliver abundant, cheap energy to the globe. But instead, nuclear power declined even faster than i…
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Welcome to the first episode of the first season of “Age of Miracles”. This new show from Packy McCormick, investor and writer of the Not Boring newsletter, asks the question: how do we create a future of abundance? This season, we’re exploring the future of energy – specifically, diving deep into nuclear energy, both fission and fusion. The world …
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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 possibilit…
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Not Boring Founders: Crusoe Energy (Chase Lochmiller and Cully Cavness)
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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 …
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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…
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Not Boring Founders: Dylan Beynon, Mindbloom
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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, Mi…
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Not Boring Founders: Brandon Arvanaghi, Meow (pt. 3)
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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. ---…
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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-ter…
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The Unbearable Heaviness of Being Positioned
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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 mode…
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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…
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Not Boring Founders: Trevor Bacon, Kellan Grenier, Jason Lewris (Parcl)
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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…
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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 wil…
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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…
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Anton Teaches Packy AI | E6 | Stable Attribution
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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 a…
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Not Boring Founders: Sam Levin, Melonfrost
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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, …
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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, contrib…
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Not Boring Founders: Michael Kelly, Open Forest Protocol.
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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…
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Not Boring Founders: Nicholas Chadwick, Mission Zero Technologies
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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 com…
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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…
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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…
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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 tech…
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Anton Teaches Packy AI | E3 | The First AI Winter
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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.…
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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 Manufactu…
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Anton Teaches Packy AI | Ep 2 | Chinchilla
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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 bil…
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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. …
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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 …
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Capital & Taste audio essay. Capital is banking built for founders. If that sounds like you, sign up for a Capital account today, whether you’re just raising your first million or doing millions in ARR. Capital expands Party Round’s offering from fundraising to a full suite of financial services focused on startups. Today, that’s banking – so you c…
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Formic delivers Robots by the Hour to manufacturers. It’s making small and medium American businesses stronger, fighting inflation, and creating abundance Link to full essay here. -------------------------- The goal is abundance. We want more and better things, more cheaply. We want those things to be made closer to home. We want less fragile suppl…
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Not Boring Founders: John Andrew Entwistle
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John Andrew Entwistle is the founder and CEO of Wander. Wander is a fully-integrated platform for experiencing magnificent short-term rental homes. Wander owns the customer experience end-to-end: the homes, the booking platform, and the value-added services. Over 100,000 people have joined the Wander waitlist. In this episode, John Andrew announces…
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Social vs. Science Experiments: We talk a lot about progress here in Not Boring. Progress can be difficult and messy and winding, and importantly, progress moves at different speeds and follows different paths for different kinds of products. Today’s essay is my thinking on two types: science experiments and social experiments. Successful science e…
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In "How Do I Teach These Kids?!" Packy confronts the challenge of how to properly educate his two young children in a rapidly evolving world. "Dev and Maya get a blank educational slate to start with. Puja and I are responsible for figuring out how to give them the best education possible, one that helps them love learning, have fun, and get prepar…
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Tegus is building the modern investment research platform for fundamental private and public market investors, starting with a novel twist on the classic expert call model, and expanding into adjacent opportunities by listening intently to customers. This audio essay covers: The Course to Tegus Modernizing Investment Research The Tegus Business Mod…
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Not Boring Founders: Peter Johnston, Polywork
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Peter Johnston is the founder of Polywork. Polywork is a place to discover opportunities to collaborate with other professionals. Existing networks like LinkedIn focus on connecting us to 9-5 opportunities — but where do you go to find opportunities to speak on podcasts? Or discover partners for your side project? Check out who at Google or Netflix…
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The Enchanted Notebook: on the real and growing power of writing down the future you want to see exist. In the context of a recent Lex Fridman and Ray Kurzweil podcast conversation, Packy explores where we are with AI today and what the future may hold. This essay and audio essay were sponsored by Secureframe. If you're starting a software company …
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Monday Audio Essay: "Indistinguishable from Magic" Packy explores "magic" in tech and how it impacts the startup lifecycle: "It’s the Magical Startup Circle of Life. A startup, if it’s lucky, creates magic, turns that magic into dollars, and transitions to life as a successful Big Muggle Company, capable of enormous profits and power but no longer …
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Not Boring Founders: Mike Saunders, Captain
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Mike Saunders is the co-founder and CEO of Captain. Captain powers restaurants and their communities through a mix of web2 and web3 technologies. Mike is an experienced food delivery entrepreneur, having previously started campusfood.com, which subsequently sold to Grub Hub where Mike served as an exec for a number of years. Captain, in many ways, …
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Not Boring Founders: Eli Wachs & Alex Grinman, Footprint
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Eli Wachs & Alex Grinman are the co-founders of Footprint. Footprint's mission is to bring back trust on the internet. The company wants to put people in control of their identity while solving KYC, IDV, and PII storage problems for enterprises. Footprint just announced a $6M Seed Round led by Index Ventures. --- Send in a voice message: https://po…
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Not Boring Founders: Brandon Arvanaghi, Meow
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Brandon Arvanaghi is the co-founder and CEO of Meow. Meow is a startup that opens corporate treasurers up to crypto markets. This is Brandon's second time on the podcast -- and he's on to discuss raising Meow's Series A & navigating challenging times in the crypto markets. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmi…
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