Kara Swisher Wants To Live Forever

 

I have long LUVED me some Kara. I read her stuff devotedly when I was covering the Silicon Valley Digital Health IT startup conferences turf (nationwide, actually) as part of my HHS HIT "Meaningful Use" initiative gig based out of Las Vegas. Kara's tagline at the time was "The Grumpy Lady of Tech."

 

Major Fanboy here kept hoping (to no avail) that Kara would show up at one of the Health 2.0 / WinterTech events. That woulda been way cool. Sigh...

 

My Bay Area history goes back to 1967. Arriving from the eastern U.S., I took up residence in North Beach (bar band musician at the time). I quickly became one of those "Summer of Love" hippies. I still have great life-long friends there.

 

BTW: Also relevant to Kara's topic, "The Good Death." 

 

FAST FORWARD TO KARA SWISHER 2026

 

 

Rahm Emanuel. What a dynamite podcast segment this was.

 

Speaking of Emanuel, how about equally brilliant brother Dr. Zeke? Last night while awaiting Kara's documentary debut I watched Real Time with Bill Maher. One of his guests? Ezekiel J. Emanuel, MD.

 

 

Bought his book (of course):

 

Yeah. Yes indeed. Just getting started on this book.

Zeke Emanual was materially involved with the authoring of the PPACA—"Obamacare." I followed those developments closely, writing about them on another of my blogs. e.g., see "Public Optional." Prior to those days, I'd written my first grad school paper ("argument analysis & evaluation") on the PNHP "Single Payor" argument published in JAMA in 1994.

_____

 

I have a bit of tangential personal experience related to these topics. to wit, excerpt from my memoir about my late elder daughter Sissy.

The search for survival and healing 
Should you or a loved one be beset by advanced and life-threatening cancer, gird yourself for an overwhelming onslaught of information, much of it in conflict, all of it ostensibly requiring your immediate consideration and action lest you accede to fatal delay.

My empirical triage effort began within days of Sissy's admission to County. While we were still struggling to come to grips with everything coming fast and furious from the doctors and medical administration, well-meaning friends and acquaintances began peppering us with unsolicited advice and literature, some of it conveying a bizarre ignorance that would leave me floundering for the politic response that would not demean and offend. Pejorative retort suppression would become an ongoing emotional exercise (repeatedly aided by the quiet and gentle reproach of my saintly wife).

It commenced with a reprint of an"article" hawking a book wherein it would be recounted in further detail just why "all cancers" were caused by intestinal flatworms! (The author ended nearly every sentence with one or more exclamation marks!) The curative regimen would simply involve purging the gastrointestinal tract of these carcinogenic parasites through a regimen including colonics and herbal mixtures. The boyfriend delivering this wonderful news was utterly sold on its merit: Salvation was at hand!

Mercifully, Dr. Wren got me off the hook on this one with a diplomacy worthy of a Secretary of State.

Next would come the "Hoxsey" video, a slick production exuding first-class "documentary" production values-- sinister in tone-- detailing the history of the miraculous herbal anti-cancer "formula" purportedly discovered by one uneducated Harry Hoxsey decades ago while treating horse hide lesions on his father's farm. The video-- replete with ominous background music and newsreel headline cutaways-- recounts the foul banishment of this alleged "savior" to Mexico by the greedy and venal American Medical Association. The Hoxsey clinic in Tijuana today still attracts innumerable desperate cancer sufferers bereft of more conventional clinical options and ready with cash.

After close consideration, I had no choice but to count myself in the company of those regarding this stuff as the worst sort of quackery.

Essiac tea (brand name: Fluoressence). The story is told that a Canadian nurse-- one Rene Caisse-- was the recipient of a mysterious healing herbal recipe used by an Ojibwa tribal medicine man that caused all manner of malignancies to disappear in short order. It is predictably alleged that the Canadian counterpart to our A.M.A. in concert with Ottawa would see to the suppression of this wondrous substance.

Proponents of this beverage invariably mention that "Essiac" is "Caisse" spelled in reverse. In my case, no particular epiphany would be forthcoming in the wake of this "Sgt.-Pepper-Played-Backwards" intimation, and, after much digging concerning the ingredients and their asserted efficacy, I could find nothing clinically interesting in Essiac.

"Resonance" machines? What? Another phone number slipped to me at the hospital had me listening to a sales pitch extolling a $1,500"radionics therapy" device used to destroy tumors by resonating with the electro-biological "cancer frequency" of malignant tissues.

Right.

Not flatworms! No, it was "bacteria in the blood," the result of diet, specifically consumption of items such as chicken, that was the source of all cancer, another "doctor" explained to me over the phone from his Tijuana clinic. "We can't get the docs in the States to understand this," he intoned with weary resignation. His methodology: purge the blood through a revised diet that, among other things, eschewed chicken and mandated the consumption of lamb. Why? A devotee of this practitioner had a ready retort: "Y'ever watch chickens eat? They peck at the ground, picking up all kinds of bacteria." Oh.
 
Lamb, on the other hand, came from "root-eating" livestock that, while foraging through the subterrain, ingested the beneficent, supposedly cancer-curing below-ground nutrients central to this serum antiseptic "therapy." We could come down to the Tijuana clinic for an initial two-week stay for blood assessment and initiation of therapy. $2,500 per week. But, according to our locally referred contact-- 'he'll work it out with you if money is a problem; he's a very compassionate man. He really cares for his patients, he takes the time to listen to their concerns.'
 
In contrast to the "arrogant, narrow-minded, greedy, and indifferent" American clinicians who controlled medical practice in The States (the oft-repeated mantra of the more strident segment of the "alternative healing" movement) clearly implicit in this appeal.

The foregoing comprise a more or less representative sampling of our experience thus far with the quackery end of the alternative therapy spectrum, a distribution of propositions whose opposite terminus abuts the breadth of mainstream clinical research and practice, where methods as yet"unproven" but more logically reasonable and promising vie for acceptance by the medical establishment. In the middle lie tougher calls: does shark cartilage really shrink tumors, functioning as an angiogenesis inhibitor? (one skeptical journal article called it "the laetrile of the 90's") Hydrazine sulfate? (also reported on extensively in the mainstream clinical literature and generally-- though not uniformly-- dismissed as 'ineffective.') Nucleotide Reductase? Plant oils? Blue-green algae?

All of these unconventional therapeutic assertions-- many of which would prove to be merely unproductive, outlandish, maddening distractions-- would have to be checked out while also slogging through the vast archives of mainstream clinical literature, a quest that would take me through the most recent three years of month-by-month National Cancer Institute (NCI) hepatoma citations. Also, I began-- and continue to this day-- keyword-searching the Medline indices for anything related to Sissy's condition that might prove useful…

I used to joke to Sissy about us getting "some Healing Burgers."

 

Again, Kara Swisher Fanboy exhorts you. 

 

I set up my Xfinity box to record this 1st episode, but CNN went from Bill Maher to an hour-long "breaking news" special on the JD Vance talks on Iran that had just concluded (in failure) after 21 hours in a meeting in Pakistan. So, my Kara recording didn't take. Frustrated and irritated, I signed up for the CNN Premium Subscription ($69.99 annual) so I could watch the segment. CNN is gradually going tiered "Freemium" like a lot of network / cable / streaming news media these days.

 

I have to say, this first Kara Live Forever episode was well worth the entire annual fee. It is that good. There are reportedly to be five more, in what they now tout as "Season One."

 

UPDATE

Link here.

UPDATE: OK, I just finished listening. I feel measurably better, both physically and in terms of being better at connecting a number of important dots. Kara rocks.

 

ERRATUM

 

Is Kara "NSFW?" 

 

More shortly... 

Sam Altman follow-up:

New Yorker Radio Hour interview with Andrew Marantz and Ronan Farrow.

    

I cited this long-read article on Monday. Below, in-depth interview with the authors.

 

New Yorker print article here.

 

Relatedly, see my post about the Anthropic Claude Mythos dustup. 

 

More in a bit...

Artemis II safely back to earth.

5:07:47 PM Pacific Time, safe splashdown SW of San Diego!
Congratulations NASA.

Well, I can exhale now.

OK, BACK TO WORK

 

Two new books just reviewed in my latest Science Magazine.

 

   

Geobiology and speculations on future paths of animal species' evolution. I have a major Jones for exobiology and evolution.

 

Stay tuned...

THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!

An Important Message From the President of the United States. 

“I know why Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, and Alex Jones have all been fighting me for years, especially by the fact that they think it is wonderful for Iran, the Number One State Sponsor of Terror, to have a Nuclear Weapon — Because they have one thing in common, Low IQs. They’re stupid people, they know it, their families know it, and everyone else knows it, too! Look at their past, look at their record. They don’t have what it takes, and they never did! They’ve all been thrown off Television, lost their Shows, and aren’t even invited on TV because nobody cares about them, they’re NUT JOBS, TROUBLEMAKERS, and will say anything necessary for some “free” and cheap publicity. Now they think they get some “clicks” because they have Third Rate Podcasts, but nobody’s talking about them, and their views are the opposite of MAGA — Or I wouldn’t have won the Presidential Election in a LANDSLIDE. MAGA agrees with me, and just gave CNN a 100% Approval Rating of “TRUMP,” not Hand Flailing Fools like Tucker Carlson, who couldn’t even finish College, he was a broken man when he got fired from Fox, and he’s never been the same — Perhaps he should see a good psychiatrist! Or Megyn Kelly, who nastily asked me the now famous, “Only Rosie O’Donnell,” question, or “Crazy” Candace Owens, who accuses the Highly Respected First Lady of France of being a man, when she is not, and will hopefully win lots of money in the ongoing lawsuit. Actually, to me, the First Lady of France is a far more beautiful woman than Candace, in fact, it’s not even close! Or Bankrupt Alex Jones, who says some of the dumbest things, and lost his entire fortune, as he should have, for his horrendous attack on the families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims, ridiculously claiming it was a hoax. These so-called “pundits” are LOSERS, and they always will be! Now Fake News CNN, The Failing New York Times, and all of the other Radical Left “News” Organizations, are “hailing” them, and giving them “positive” press for the first time in their lives. They’re not “MAGA,” they’re losers, just trying to latch on to MAGA. As President, I could get them on my side anytime I want to, but when they call, I don’t return their calls because I’m too busy on World and Country Affairs and, after a few times, they go “nasty,” just like Marjorie “Traitor” Brown, but I no longer care about that stuff, I only care about doing right for our Country. MAGA is about WINNING and STRENGTH in not allowing Iran to have Nuclear Weapons. MAGA is about MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, and these people have no idea how to do that, BUT I DO, because THE UNITED STATES IS NOW THE “HOTTEST” COUNTRY ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

 May our Artemis II astronauts return safely to earth.

Anthropic's Claude AI "Mythos" freakout?

The digitech world is flipping out right now. Tom Friedman:

The artificial intelligence company Anthropic announced Tuesday that it was releasing the newest generation of its large language model, dubbed Claude Mythos Preview, but to only a limited consortium of roughly 40 technology companies, including Google, Broadcom, Nvidia, Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, Apple, JPMorganChase, Amazon and Microsoft. Some of its competitors are among these partners because this new A.I. model represents a “step change” in performance that has some critically important positive and negative implications for cybersecurity and America’s national security.

The good news is that Anthropic discovered in the process of developing Claude Mythos that the A.I. could not only write software code more easily and with greater complexity than any model currently available, but as a byproduct of that capability, it could also find vulnerabilities in virtually all of the world’s most popular software systems more easily than before.

The bad news is that if this tool falls into the hands of bad actors, they could hack pretty much every major software system in the world, including all those made by the companies in the consortium... 

Don't yet know how to feel about this dustup. I'm probably in ample company.

 

 

In tangentially related news, OpenAI 

 

 

I've thus far made one full pass through this (pdf). Intial reaction? 13 pages of the panoply of gauzy, vague cliches interspersed with a number of the usual Blinding Glimpses of the Obvious. Yeah, "we're making the world a better place."

 

More in a bit... 

In space,

no one can hear Donald Trump compulsively lie and crassly insult everyone every day.

   

 

UPDATE

I will definitly watch.

The Apocaloptimist?

This morning I read an excellent lengthy New Yorker article (see below) prior to heading out to a noon dental appointment.

 

Interesting. Recall my prior post feauturing Laurie Segall interviewing Sam Altman. In the wake of her interview, I felt a little bit better about Altman. Then comes the NY'er piece.

 

Then, this afternoon after I got back home I ran across Kara Swisher's podcast featuring Tristan Harris. (I cited Tristan last year, BTW.)

 

Some preparatory reading: "The Intelligence Curse."

More tomorrow. I'm tired, my mouth hurts, and I'm just gonna sip some red, watch the NCAA Div I Men's Hoops Final and crash.

 

UPDATE

 

 

Watch / listen carefully.

 

AND, OF COURSE, TODAY WE AWAKE TO THIS SHIT

BACK ON TASK. THE SOCIAL DILEMMA

 

 

OK, turns out that this documentary is up on my NetFlix (run time ~91 min). I'm well into it. Excellent. I was already quite aware of many of the issues set forth, but this film is proving well worth my time.

 

And likely yours. 

 

More to come...

2026 Presidential Easter Address to the Nation

 

April 6 UPDATE: Trump held a 90 minute Pentagon Presser today. An incoherent ramble of obscene self-glorification I will not abet it with a YouTube link. Suffice to give you this 2x mp3 sudio excerpt.

PanDigicon update

Jacob Ward is killin' it of late.

    

From his Substack.

"A federal class-action lawsuit filed Tuesday in San Francisco accuses Perplexity AI of embedding tracking software that transmitted users’ private conversations to Meta and Google — even when users had specifically enabled the app’s Incognito mode, which explicitly promised not to track data. The complaint, Doe v. Perplexity AI Inc. (3:26-cv-02803), names all three companies as defendants and alleges violations of California privacy law.

 
The actions alleged are both ugly and, unfortunately, very common. According to the complaint, trackers download onto a user’s device the moment they log in, giving Meta and Google full access to everything typed into Perplexity’s search interface — before the query even reaches Perplexity’s own servers. This allegedly includes not only email addresses, Facebook IDs, IP addresses, and device information, which Meta and Google can theoretically pair with names and home addresses to specifically identify them. It also, according to the suit, includes the text of the exchanges between the users and the AI. The Incognito mode that Perplexity described as creating “anonymous threads” that “expire after 24 hours” offered, according to the suit, no actual protection at all.

 
It is industry practice to embed analytics code like what’s described in the suit to improve performance and offer a tailored experience. But the idea that the code could also be delivering the content of the conversations is new, and a clear violation of what people would reasonably expect..."

The "PanDigicon?" Bentham's "panopticon" for our time. Man, my privacy gumshoe stuff in now so dated. Started my privacy ranting in grad school 30 years ago. 4th Amendment scruples today? How quaint.

 

I still try to stay abreast. See expanded riff here as well.

 

  
Jacob Ward is hugely worth your time. Subscribe to his stack.

 

This just came to my attention. Too much goin' on right now. More in a bit... 

Declaration of Independence 2.0, 2026

April 2, 2026
 

Google Gemini: “Take the July 4, 1776 US Declaration of independence and rewrite it to declare U.S. independence today from Donald Trump.”

 

The 2026 Unanimous Declaration of 
 the American People.

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for a people to dissolve the political bands which have bound them to a leader who has abandoned the principles of the Republic, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all people are created equal, endowed with unalienable Rights to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness, with government deriving its power only from the consent of the governed. When government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.

The actions of Donald Trump constitute a history of repeated injuries and usurpations aiming to establish tyranny over these States. Facts demonstrate that he has:

• Assumed excessive authority for military actions.
• Circumvented Congress to control election funding and state functions.
• Obstructed justice by dismissing officials upholding the law and challenging the Presidential Records Act.
• Attempted to challenge fundamental constitutional rights, such as birthright citizenship.
• Disregarded the will of the public.

Therefore, we, the People, declare that these United States are, and of Right ought to be, Free and Independent; that we are Absolved from all Allegiance to Donald Trump, and all political connection between us is dissolved.

CODA

 

The most powerful "man" on the planet, a person with the unilateral authority to violently end humanity, is obsessed with lame, crude juvie insults.

 

Where are things now in the AI market?

 Can we even know?

 

 

Hmmm...

 

 

AI Bubble-burst drawing nigh?

 

Trump's Iran debacle certainly is not helping matters. 

 

TWO NEW READS UNDERWAY

 

 

 

SEBASTIAN MALLABY

This book is about intelligence. On the one hand, it’s a portrait of a remarkable human, a chess prodigy, a Nobel laureate, a polymathic thinker. On the other hand, it tells the story of his quest to build remarkable machines: systems that are intuitive, creative, and even original. At some point in the not-so-distant future, artificial intelligence will beat human intelligence at almost every mental task, and to say this marks a watershed would be a parody of understatement. Artificial intelligence heralds a transformation more profound than anything since Homo sapiens acquired the capacity for abstract thought, some seventy thousand years ago. 

I first met Demis Hassabis, the remarkable human, in the mid-2010s: an elfin figure with dark hair falling forward toward angular eyebrows, his face framed by standard-issue spectacles. Already a star technologist and the possessor of a comfortable fortune, he seemed much younger than his thirty-eight years. Smooth-skinned, slight of build, he came across as a phenomenally articulate youth rather than a staid adult. He would appear onstage at conferences dressed in a boyish crewneck and loose slacks. “AI is the technology of making machines smart,” he began one typical performance in 2015, stating his premise in the plainest form possible. 

What he said next was what got your attention. Hassabis embarked on an explanation of his life’s purpose: the pursuit of machine superintelligence. Growing up in North London, he had decided that two fields of inquiry stood out: physics and neuroscience. Physics explains the external world, from the behavior of particles to the functioning of the universe. Neuroscience explains the internal world—the neurons and synapses and electrical pulses that constitute intelligence. Later, at some point in his twenties, Hassabis had concluded that neuroscience was the more important of the two: The internal trumped the external. Intelligence is fundamental; it is the root of all else. It is the mechanism through which humans perceive reality. 

Still speaking plainly, as though he were saying that he’d wash the dishes after lunch, Hassabis invoked the eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant. 

“The mind interprets the world,” Kant had declared. 

“It’s the mind that creates our reality around us,” Hassabis now said, by way of emphasis. 

The question was how to comprehend intelligence. Here Hassabis pivoted to a second intellectual giant, the Nobel laureate Richard Feynman. “What I cannot build, I do not understand,” Feynman famously remarked, and Hassabis clicked on a controller in his hand to display a slide of the great physicist. Following Feynman’s dictum, in order to grasp human intelligence, scientists would have to build an artificial analog: a machine that mimicked human thinking. AI’s practical or profit-making potential was a secondary concern. The youthful figure on the stage wanted “to understand our own minds better.”…

Mallaby, Sebastian. The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence (pp. xiii-xiv). (Function). Kindle Edition.

MATT KAPLAN 

Just as Galileo endured because of the kindness of Ferdinando II de’ Medici, so too did Mary because of the kindness (and ferocity) of Jack, and Carl Woese because of the support of Ralph Wolfe. Just as Lister’s students helped him to survive, so too did David help Kati when times were tough. Just as Michaelis bravely tested Semmelweis’s ideas when he was being attacked, so too has Prasenjit Dey tested Betsy’s findings in his own lab and made remarkable discoveries. 

That might all sound very poetic and idealistic. To a certain extent, it is. There is no getting around the fact that the systems within science need to be altered in a manner that reduces competition and nurtures creativity. Reform must happen. With that said, we are creatures with a love of stories. Since the first tales were told around fires, we have loved our heroes and fondly dreamed of stepping into their shoes. Those instincts have not changed. This is something that we must take advantage of. 

Science journalists, myself included, have a long history of reporting the latest scientific discoveries. This is important, but it is no longer enough. If we want to change the way scientists behave, we need to talk more about heroes both in the pages of books like this one and within the science sections of newspapers like The Economist. We need to be shouting the stories of scientists who are doing the right thing from the rooftops. When they call out fraud, refuse to be manipulated by perverse incentives, and support those with unorthodox ideas in their communities, we need to celebrate their actions. We have done a good job with Kati, but there are so many more people out there whose heroics remain unknown. We need to find them. We need to prioritize telling their tales. We need to do this. Now.

Kaplan, Matt. I Told You So!: Scientists Who Were Ridiculed, Exiled, and Imprisoned for Being Right (pp. 232-233). (Function). Kindle Edition.

Sebastion came to me via an Atlantic article. Matt via a new book review in Science Magazine. The Infinity Machine goes to current digitech issue, as explored by Laurie Segal above with Sam Altman.I Told You So is predominantly a work of science history focused in particular on the overlapping socioeconomic / cultural-political ramifications of the science domain across millenia.

 

OFF-TOPIC ERRATUM

    

The Paddington Road Greycare Center is fully staffed and fully attended today. Meee-mo & Pop on duty. Baltimore city schools are closed today in observance of Passover, so Calvin has an off day. He’s assisting with little brother Arlo. 

apropos, 

 

"Pop, can I use your iPhone?"—Calvin

 

'eh?

 

See Science Magazine:

Digital child safety at the frontier: From evidence to action

The Oaf of Office, April 1st update

   
Oops. 

 

I listened to this live. The Solicitor General did not have a good day. While the SCOTUS decision properly should be a 9-0 slam dunk, I'd speculate a 7-2, with Thomas and Alito dissenting.

 

UPDATE: Jus' sayin'...

 

 

BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE!

 

Oaf of Office live TV Address to the Nation draws nigh. We're all thrilled...

   

2x audio mp3 feed.

"NSFW?" We're gonna need a new acronym.

How about "TSFAIU?"

    

Totally Suitable For the AI Unemployed.™

 

CBS is going all Sinclair / Fox Lite. CNN isn't far behind. MSNOW? ABC? Wouldn't surprise me. Print media? I've been a WaPo subscriber for decades. Not any more, in the wake of Bezos' gauche craven suckups to Trump. Still hanging with the NY Times for now, and my subscribed periodicals: The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harper's, Wired, Science (AAAS), and Scientific American.

 

A new independent entrepreurial public affairs news market is emerging. Mostly podcast-ish, and that gawdawful chaotic Substack platform (ugh).

 

Watch / listen intently to the above Kara Swisher-Scott Galloway Pivot episode. Wickedly funny (incl NSFW) and deadly serious & analytically cogent. Potential #1 for our nascent TSFAIU demographic. Think abut it. (Pull it up in native YouTube, and read the voluminous comments that people have left. Lots of thoughtful, topically astute viewers. By no means a FanBoy/Girl love fest.)

 

Other potential contenders? Jacob Ward? Laurie Segall? Numerous others.

 

Think about it. 

 

More shortly... 

The Oaf of Office, March 31st Update

 

"Completely obliterating." Wafts of War Crlmes, anyone?

“To be honest with you, my favorite thing is to take the oil in Iran, but some stupid people back in the U.S. say: ‘Why are you doing that?’ But they’re stupid people.” —Donald Trump, to The Financial Times of London

39 years ago, during a 1987 televised ABC 20/20 interview with Barbara Walters, Donald Trump advocating invading Iran to "take the oil."

 

Today...

"The end of social media as we know it?"

Jacob Ward in discussion with Nita Farahany.

 

 

In the wake of the New Mexico and California civil liability verdicts.

 

 

"The end of social media?" I guess we'll see. 'Not anytime soon' would be my speculation. Good discussion. I've cited both Nita and Jacob before.

 

My Grandson Calvin at 13 months, LOL.
He is now six. "Hey, Pop, can I use your iPhone?"

  

Baby brother Arlo, last week, 5 months.

Couple Jake and Nita's discussion above with that of Laurie Segall and Becky Kennedy in the prior post. Lotta good stuff to ponder. 

apropos...

ON DECK, COMES OUT MARCH 31ST:

 

Even by the standard of a tech industry stacked with so-called geniuses, Demis Hassabis is a special case. Born poor in North London to immigrant parents, a chess prodigy by age five and wizard coder in his teens, he turned down a seven figure offer before turning 18 to feed his insatiable scientific curiosity at Cambridge. Later, he added a neuroscience PhD to his computer science skills to pursue the dream of artificial general intelligence, the ultimate goal being to unravel the mysteries of biology and theoretical physics and to usher in super-abundance. Alongside a small group of fellow travelers, that is the path he is still on, leading the AI research at Google, winning a Nobel Prize along the way, and imagining machines that will compound, or possibly supplant, the human understanding of the universe.

Hassabis has given Sebastian Mallaby a great deal of his time, sitting for over thirty hours of conversation. But Mallaby has also drawn from Hassabis's detractors, such as his estranged cofounder Mustafa Suleyman; from his rivals, such as OpenAI's leading scientist Ilya Sutskever; and from academic pioneers who now fear for human survival, such as Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton. The result is a revelatory account of a singular figure and his company and a profound reckoning with this protean field as it leaps from the periphery to the center of our consciousness.

No one questions Hassabis’s brilliance. There are those who, like Elon Musk, have at times regarded him as an "evil genius." He is in a game where the stakes are matched only by the exorbitant costs — for talent, and for compute. Celebrated scientists pursue the technology because they cannot resist the sweetness of discovery. Others pursue it for money or power. The inventors believe they control their technology, but often, the technology controls them.

Despite Hassabis’s pivotal role inside Google’s engine room, this is not a Silicon Valley story. Hassabis deals with the Valley and takes its money, but remains outside and furiously critical of it, lambasting its leaders in conversation with Mallaby. The end of this race cannot be known, but as this great book shows us, Hassabis's quest to will a new form of cognition into the world is a defining story for our era.

See "The man who thought he could keep AI safe." 

_______ 

 

CODA: GRATUITOUS MUCKING AROUND ON MY BLOG

 

Amid Donald Trump's recent nearly 2-hour long televised White House Cabinet Meeting, at 38:14 he launched into his trademark random mumbling grievance ramble. It lasted a little over 19 minutes. I had it up on my iPad via a YouTube feed. At one point I gripped the screen tightly with one hand while holding it at an angle. It went into 2x speed mode (without going into "Chipmunks"). It was funny, so I launched my voice memo app and re-rolled the video. After I got a decent audio take, I dropped the ensuing .mp4 file over to my Macbook, pulled it up in Garageband (I also have Logic Pro, but this was easier), clipped off the front and end loose matter, and exported it to an audio .mp3. I mounted it here, below. The dude is unreal.

Donald Trump, March 26, 2026 mid-cabinet meeting rant, 2x speed