He gave birth to the Xbox. Was a game making legend. Became an agent and then went full mad scientist making the world's best bread and chocolate. More than all that Seamus Blackley is a deep, eccentric thinker on tech and has lived a most unusual life. One of the best pods we've ever done. Mega thanks to @brexHQ and @sendcutsend for making the Core Memory podcast possible. Timestamps 00:00:00 Intro 00:03:37 Why Tech Hype Sucks 00:08:33 Why Talking About Your Work Kills It 00:11:36 Early Life, Physics, and Jazz 00:22:53 Fermilab & Academic Politics 00:31:43 Building the First 3D Video Game Engines 00:35:14 Early Game Development Culture 00:39:33 DreamWorks & Spielberg 00:45:28 Pitching the Xbox 00:55:04 Fighting to Save Xbox 01:04:44 Abducting Jimmy Fallon 01:08:16 Baking Bread with 4,500-Year-Old Yeast 01:11:36 Growing Cacao Trees in a Lab 01:18:05 Accidentally Launching a Chocolate Empire

Don't know if this is one of the best interviews I've ever done. You'll have to be the judge of that. But it's one of my favorite chats ever. Father of the Xbox Seamus Blackley on his most odd and adventurous life Grab the Core Memory podcast wherever you pod. And here

Core Memory went to a former cattle field in Rockwood, Texas, and found a data center for the night sky. Starfront Observatories. Roofs roll open. Hundreds of telescopes wake up under Bortle 1 dark. People ship their scopes from around the world. Bray Falls lives on site, duct tapes water bottles for counterweight, and still runs the coolest triple RASA in the shed. They walk the piers. PlaneWaves. Takahashi banana tubes. A 24 inch Italian Newtonian that barely clears the roof, built as a community scope. SeaStar bar for beginners who want in for a couple hundred bucks. Then it gets dark. Bray slews to a once in a lifetime comet, autofocuses three monochrome cameras, and the ion tail is already different from last night. Milky Way overhead. Andromeda as a smudge. Sophie the duck on patrol. They even jokingly name a nebula Bray discovered the Core Memory Nebula. A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what a ship is for. Same for a telescope rotting in a light polluted backyard. This place makes space accessible. Watch it. @ashleevance @astrofalls

Los Angeles is full of hardware startups these days - most of them doing defense, energy, manufacturing and aerospace. But this week we bring you the story of a company making a fish killing robot. It's from @ShinkeiSystems, and it's designed to kill fish in a more humane way using a method perfected in Japan and now automated with a robot. The fish are killed quickly instead of suffocating on a boat. And the result result for humans is better tasting, healthier fish. We went to El Segundo to see how the robot is made and operates and then hopped on a boat to see it in action on the sea. Full episode here made possible by the finance geniuses at @brexHQ.

I've been writing about @ScottWu46 since he was 18. Don't think I really started to understand him until this year. Here's my piece on the rise of a nerd king.

Had not used Devin from @cognition and @ScottWu46 in a long, long time. And, good lord, did it improve. I can't code anything and made this in about a half hour. Craziest thing was the video highlight reel it made by going over our YouTube channel and picking out the most kinetic clips with minimal guidance. I'm a dork and legit got a buzz.

Four frenchmen have gone to Starbase to build a 50-foot, bronze Prometheus in honor of @SpaceX. They've spent $1m on the project and encountered corndogs for the first time along the way. We went to Starbase to find out what @AtelierMissor_ is all about and to see them in action.

This might just be the peak of American statues. It's Robert Goddard across the street from a Wendy's in Roswell, New Mexico. It's the 1920s and this lunatic is telling people rockets can get to space and the moon and Mars. The NYT writes a piece saying he's the bad kind of lunatic and not the good kind because the physics will never check out on something flying in a vacuum. He starts making liquid fueled rockets anyway. First on the East Coast and then he heads to New Mexico in 1930 because America is grand and has grand lands where you can blow things up in peace. The Russians and the Germans will get there soon, but Goddard got there first. Look at the statue. Fingers ready to ignite. He's looking towards his test stand, sure, but he's also looking toward a future no one else can conceive of. Coat. Tie. Hat. Perfect.