This episode is nerd catnip unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. Ashlee sat down with Seamus Blackley, who you might know as the man who talked Microsoft into building the Xbox. Nowadays, you can find Blackley in a Pasadena laboratory making the world’s best chocolate. If you’re just here for the cacao, well, we did a video on it. Blackley grew up in rural New Mexico and studied electrical engineering, then physics, at Tufts University. He spent years working on titles you know and love, like Madden, and ones perhaps you don’t, like Jurassic Park: Trespasser, a flop notorious enough to earn him his first death threats. Also, Ashlee is away for a few weeks on a big video shoot in India, which means I, Kylie, will be filling in on all the writing stuff. Now that you know who the voice of God is here, let’s get into the most important thing — what I think about this episode! Blackley is totally captivating and eccentric, exactly the way you’d expect a physicist who builds holograms and runs a chocolate farm to be. He got deep in ways I didn’t expect, about his abusive childhood and what it was like working at Microsoft. I particularly loved this line from him: “The khaki pants wearing guys, the lifers, they show up and we had fought them to keep them away from [the Xbox]. The more we kept them away from it, the more consumers got excited because we were talking about things with the power of Microsoft and not the b******t of Microsoft. That was incredibly effective. But it was exhausting and it was a conscious effort of will to fight it. At some point it was going to destroy me and I had to stop.” Blackley seems to talk at 2x speed naturally, and I’m grateful for it, because he has no shortage of brain-exploding lore to fit into these 80 minutes. He describes his whole career as “one long tale of woe and rapid dancing in the face of failure,” which is a very modest way to describe inventing the Xbox, shepherding Guitar Hero into existence, and abducting Jimmy Fallon. You’ll have to listen for that last one. IN THIS EPISODE Core Memory on Seamus Blackley's chocolate experimentSmithsonian Magazine on Blackley's ancient Egyptian bread projectPacific Light & Hologram OUR SPONSORS BREX The Core Memory podcast is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster. We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here. SENDCUTSEND You know who else makes stuff for America? That would be SendCutSend. If you want to celebrate our great nation by building a metal part, then head on over to SendCutSend where you’ll get a 15 percent discount thanks to Core Memory on whatever you’re trying to build. We believe in you. TIMESTAMPS * 00:00:00 — Intro * 00:02:38 — Why Tech Hype Sucks * 00:07:37 — Why Talking About Your Work Kills It * 00:10:42 — Early Life, Physics, and Jazz * 00:21:57 — Fermilab & Academic Politics * 00:30:47 — Building the First 3D Video Game Engines * 00:34:18 — Early Game Development Culture * 00:38:37 — DreamWorks & Working for Steven Spielberg * 00:44:32 — Joining Microsoft & Pitching the Original Xbox * 00:54:04 — Fighting Corporate Bureaucracy to Save Xbox * 01:03:42 — Abducting Jimmy Fallon * 01:07:20 — Baking Bread with 4,500-Year-Old Egyptian Yeast * 01:10:40 — Growing Cacao Trees in a Lab * 01:17:09 — Accidentally Launching a Chocolate Empire This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.corememory.com/subscribe
