Future Around & Find Out

So, there are dire wolves living on Earth again. They were “de-extincted” by Colossal Biosciences. And today on the show their Chief Science Officer joins me to share her view on why the de-extinction matters — not as a science project, but because it will help solve problems that threaten every species on earth, including us.

 Beth Shapiro is the Chief Science Officer at Colossal Biosciences, and she helped to bring back the dire wolf or, as others call it, a gray wolf with 20 genetic edits. There is a fierce debate about what de-extinction even means, and we discuss that, but whatever you call them, there are now three big wolves living in an undisclosed location and they wouldn't be there if not for the DNA that Beth and her team edited. Colossal is also working to bring back the wooly mammoth, the Tasmanian tiger, the dodo and other animals that have long been extinct. Why? 

Listen to find out… 

Chapters:

(01:19) - The Most Oprah Question Beth's Ever Been Asked

(03:04) - Moonshots Require You to Create a Giant List of Problems

(04:19) - The Things We’ll Solve Along the Way, a la the Original Moonshot… to the Moon

(05:57) - Beth’s Journey: From Broadcast Journalism to Ancient DNA

(09:13) - How a Sediment Core Solved a Mammoth Mystery

(11:36) - Why Charismatic Animals Matter (a.k.a. Why Riz Is Everything)

(12:38) - What’s Up With Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi?

(14:19) - But Are They Really “Dire Wolves”? The Controversy Over 20 Genetic Edits

(21:45) - Should We Do This? Beth's Ethics Framework for Builders

(23:51) - Advice for Moonshot Builders

(25:10) - Why We Want Dodos, Mammoths, and Thylacines Back

Links & Resources:Colossal Biosciences
Beth Shapiro
PopTech -- a conference I love!  
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Music by Jonathan Zalben

Murderbots, mass layoffs, and media takeovers — all in one news cycle. Anthropic told the Pentagon "we will not accede." Block cut half its workforce overnight. And the Paramount-Warner Brothers deal raises real questions about who's running the media now.

Also, thanks to Nicolás Maduro's fashion sense, Dan's 13-year-old is being called Lil Tator at school and honestly? The kids are all right. 

Happy FAFO Friday!
Here's some of what Kwaku Aning and I get into:

(00:00) - Three Stories Broke Last Night

(03:16) - Anthropic Tells the Pentagon No

(06:24) - Murder Bots, But Human in the Loop

(07:00) - The Pentagon's Friday Deadline

(09:28) - Why This Is a Huge Win for Anthropic

(10:50) - The War for AI Talent

(12:57) - Is the Administration Losing Steam?

(15:05) - The Paramount-Warner Brothers Deal

(17:36) - Who Controls the Media Now?

(21:13) - CNN, Independent Media, and the Employee Perspective

(23:55) - Block Lays Off 4,000 People

(24:14) - The Citrini Research Fiction That Tanked Stocks

(27:49) - AI Washing and the Real Reason for Layoffs

(30:11) - Will Vibe Coding Replace Real Companies?

(33:27) - Mid-Roll Break

(34:41) - Past, Present, Future: State-Controlled AI

(35:18) - Past, Present, Future: Independent Media

(38:03) - — SLAPP Lawsuits and Creator Protections

(40:23) - — Past, Present, Future: Knicks Championship

(41:44) - — Come See Us at South by Southwest!

Of all the industries AI will transform, Kira Radinsky believes chemistry and biology will change the most. 

Kira is the co-founder and CTO of Diagnostic Robotics, which uses AI to automate the administrative work that's crushing healthcare teams — so clinicians can actually focus on patients. She's also the co-founder of Mana.bio, where they're accelerating drug discovery by orders of magnitude.

She'll tell you she's terrible in the lab. Not because she isn't brilliant, but because she can't pipette without killing the cells. So she’s thrilled that thanks to her skills in data and AI she was able to realize her childhood dream of being a scientist: 
“I'm not trying to automate everything… Like when, when you say automate drug discovery, I'm not gonna discover everything. I just want to accelerate it, which comes back to my childhood dream: I just didn't want to do it myself. I just want AI to replace me as a scientist. That's it.”But this episode is about more than healthcare. It's about how to build systems that get smarter over time — feedback loops, causal inference, incentivizing algorithms to take risks, and knowing when to optimize for ROI instead of accuracy. Lessons that apply whether you're building in biotech or not.

We cover:
How growing up Jewish in Soviet Ukraine — and fleeing to Israel just before the Gulf War — shaped Kira's obsession with predicting the future
How she built a system that successfully predicted real-world events, including Cuba's first cholera outbreak in Cuba in 130 years
How Mana.bio is using AI to build "rocketships" that deliver drugs to the right cells — and how they've done in three months what used to take 20 years
Why predictions are only valuable if there's something you can do about them — and why that makes healthcare an ideal field for AI 
How to incentivize algorithms to make bolder predictions (it's easy to predict there won't be an earthquake today; it's much harder to say there will be)
Why causal inference is the most underrated tool in machine learning right now
How healthcare AI can perpetuate racial bias — and what builders need to do differently
Note: this interview originally aired in October 2024.
Chapters:

(01:44) - Why predictions are so important to Kira: lessons from fleeing Soviet-era Kyiv

(05:10) - Building a prediction engine from 150 years of news

(08:35) - How Kira predicted the Cuba cholera outbreak

(09:50) - Returning to biology by way of data

(12:50) - Predicting healthcare outcomes by finding your patient's twin

(17:53) - The racial bias hiding in healthcare AI

(19:15) - Building Mana.bio and accelerating drug discovery

(24:33) - "In three months, what did what used to take 20 years"

(31:44) - Builder tips: ROI, causal inference, and teaching algorithms to explore

(35:07) - Planning: Where generative AI needs improve

Links & Resources:Kira Radinsky on LinkedIn
Diagnostic Robotics
Mana.bio
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Music by Jonathan Zalben

You probably know by now that AI is the definition of mediocre. As in: it’s the average of everything it’s been trained on. So how do you get beyond average? How do you build a moat? 

It certainly doesn’t seem to be via the models. While there are models of the month (hey, Opus 4.6, my new friend!), they seem to be pretty swappable. 

So, the model ain’t it. But proprietary data (e.g. an AI that knows you really well), yes! Or doing something really hard in the real world (think: Waymo self-driving cars). Maybe via trust and safety (Anthropic is certainly making a play here). Or... how about via amazing design and good taste. 

Remember when ChatGPT first came out and everyone derided “AI wrappers”… well, maybe a wrapper isn’t so bad, assuming you can differentiate on one or more of the above. 

Luke Des Cotes is the CEO of MetaLab, the agency famous for designing interfaces, including early versions of Slack and Coinbase, so don’t be shocked when you hear him say that great design can be your moat. 

MetaLab is working with a host of AI companies (another shocker), including Windsurf (AI + code), Suno (AI + music), Pika (AI + video), and more…, which is why Luke's take on AI surprised me. He's not rah rah. He's pretty judicious actually. Luke has questions about AI's costs and appropriateness for lots of use cases like those involving kids, but mostly he objects to its mediocrity.

On this episode we discuss what it takes to go beyond.

We also get into:
Why vibe-coded software isn't changing the world anytime soon
Why Shopify acquired a design agency right after telling employees to justify their existence against AI
How MetaLab designers are using AI to prototype in hours instead of weeks
The talent market for zero-to-one designers — and why they're harder to find than ever
Landlines, brick phones, and how parents are fighting back against always-on kids
Chapters

(01:10) - "It's a race to the mean"

(03:10) - "How do you create emotional resonance?"

(05:33) - AI companies are burning money

(08:44) - Speed to good enough

(13:51) - Is the chat here to stay or a temporary fad?

(17:43) - It’s hard to find great 0 to 1 design talent

(22:28) - Seemingly conscious AI

(25:05) - Kids, landlines, and fighting always-on culture

(27:21) - Sounds like science fiction, but is here now…

Links & Resources
Luke Des Cotes on LinkedIn
MetaLab
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Henrik Werdelin is one of my favorite entrepreneurs. He’s founded and incubated several unicorns, most notably BARK, the dog happiness company.
Henrik himself is a pretty happy guy — an optimistic guy who likes to ask what could go right? — and on the day we recorded (a few months ago as I was squirreling away interviews for the podcast relaunch), he helped me see through some future of tech gloom I was feeling. I honestly can’t even remember what Trump+tech hellscape we were living through that week, but I do remember that Henrik put me in a better mood. I think he’ll do the same for you, no matter how you’re feeling. 🤗

Henrik believes AI could be a massive force for good. That it could bring forth a whole new — a better! — form of capitalism. He writes about this is in his latest book, Me, My Customer, and AI. He points to those (like Henry Ford) who took advantage of electricity by making drastic, not incremental, changes to how the build things. Our conversation pairs nicely with my recent episode with Azeem Azhar, who said the AI winners will “come from odd places”, as they have in previous tech transformations. 
Here’s more of what Henrik and I cover:
His concept of "relationship capital"—the moat AI can't clone—and why the companies that win next will be defined by who they serve, not what they make
The three components of relationship capital: intensity, community, and durability
The "it sucks that" method for finding problems worth solving (he took it to a fifth grade class; the teacher was not thrilled)
His vision for the "headless", agentic web, where your startup's MVP is a group of agents, not an app
The wildly practical AI tools he's built just for himself: a custom CRM that searches by vibes not names, a newsletter bot tuned to his quarterly goals, and an agent that handled his visa paperwork while he was in a meeting
Why entrepreneurial skills—agency, narrative, resourcefulness—are the ultimate career insurance, whether you start a company or not
The absolutely ridiculous story of how a prank on a cruise ship led to him meeting his BARK co-founder in a heart-shaped bed
Chapters

(01:43) - Two Futures: AI Bad vs. AI Really, Really Good

(05:44) - Why Positivity Is Actually the Riskier Bet

(09:05) - Electricity, AI, and the Rise of Relationship Capital

(11:12) - The Three Components of Relationship Capital

(14:20) - "It Sucks That" — The Best Way to Find a Real Problem

(19:22) - The Headless Future and Minimum Viable Agents

(22:40) - N-of-One Software: Building Tools Just for Yourself

(26:48) - Henrik's Custom Newsletter Bot and AI-Powered CRM

(30:59) - Warp, Obsidian, and Letting Agents Loose on Your Computer

(34:45) - Entrepreneurial Skills as Career Insurance

(36:53) - The Heart-Shaped Bed: How Henrik Met His BARK Co-Founder

Links & Resources
Henrik Werdelin on LinkedIn
Audos, Henrik’s latest venture where he hopes AI agents trained in his methods can help thousands of entrepreneurs (donkeycorns!) a year
Beyond the Prompt podcast, from co-hosts Henrik Werdelin and Jeremy Utley

Support Future Around & Find Out
Get the free newsletter
And consider becoming a paid subscriber and help future proof this thing!
Sponsor the show? 
Are you looking to reach an audience of senior technologists and decision-makers? Email me: [email protected]
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Music by Jonathan Zalben