Thinking On Paper

Mark Fielding and Jeremy Gilbertson
  • 5.0 (2)
  • Technology
  • Updated Weekly

The human story of technology. Every week, technology writer and parent Mark Fielding and musician turned data centre builder Jeremy Gilbertson speak with the founders, CEOs, scientists, engineers, writers and philosophers building our collective future. From AI and space tech to quantum computing, they get angry, passionate, defensive and deep. The question underlying it all? What's the impact of technology on you, me and the rest of humanity. All human. No hype. No BS.

  1. Sep 28

    AI Data Centers Are Moving From Air Cooling to Liquid Cooling

    Data centers use water to cool air, not chips. The water chills the air that gets blown across the racks, and that is where it evaporates. Remove the air and you remove most of the water. Simon Jesenko runs Iceotope, which builds cooling with no fans and no air at all. Fifteen to twenty litres of refined oil circulating inside a sealed chassis, touching every component. His point about the headlines: they describe air-cooled facilities, and the industry is moving off them. Once a site runs fully liquid-cooled, he says consumption drops immensely. He explains: - Why direct-to-chip cooling only solves 80 percent of the problem, and what stays hot - What the dielectric liquid actually is, where it comes from, and why Shell and Exxon make it - Why early liquid cooling installs leaked, and what that did to the industry's appetite for risk - Why the power supply unit, not the GPU, is where his technology wins - Why crypto miners proved immersion cooling years before data centers Please enjoy the show. -- Chapters (00:00) Introduction to data center cooling challenges (01:07) Water usage in data centers compared to agriculture and other industries (03:00) Basics of open loop and closed loop cooling systems (04:18) Guest introduction: Simon Jesenko of Isotope (05:02) Misconceptions about data center cooling technology (06:08) Evolution from air cooling to liquid cooling in data centers (07:31) Direct-to-chip cooling technology explained (08:40) Water consumption in traditional vs modern data centers (10:29) Market transition towards fully liquid cooled data centers (12:23) Airflow management and chip-level cooling techniques (13:34) Environmental factors influencing data center placement (15:50) Challenges of integrating liquid cooling into existing hardware (19:02) Future-proofing with system-level liquid cooling (22:02) Immersion cooling history and applications in crypto mining (23:25) What is dielectric liquid and its environmental impact (26:50) Adoption and market opportunities for Isotope’s technology (30:56) Optimizing power distribution with liquid cooling (34:15) Industry trends and next steps in liquid cooling technology (37:24) Capacities and limits of current cooling technologies (40:26) Guest question: How has AI replaced daily activities? -- Learn more about Iceotope: https://www.iceotope.com/ Thinking on Paper: ◼ Choose your own technology adventure: https://www.thinkingonpaper.xyz ◼ Running a tech conference? Book us to host: https://www.thinkingonpaper.xyz/tech-conference-host-moderators/ ◼ Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/00volKqMsQntToeho35W47 ◼ Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/thinking-on-paper-technology-considered/id1713227258 ◼ Follow Mark: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markfielding99/ ◼ Follow Jeremy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremygilbertson/

  2. Sep 16

    He Quit SpaceX to Make Houses from Grass | Nathan Silvernail, CEO of Plantd

    Nathan Silvernail quit SpaceX to make wood from grass. Building the first part of a rocket SpaceX ever reused - the nose cone - wasn’t enough. After a decade working for Elon Musk, he quit.  Took everything he had learnt. And started Plantd.  The plan? Make carbon-negative engineered lumber from fast-growing perennial grass. Climate tech meets space tech.  Wood, without trees.   Plantd's panels replace OSB, the oriented strand board that sheathes the floors, walls and roofs of almost every new American home.  In this hotly anticipated episode, Nathan joins Thinking On Paper to talk about his SpaceX journey, why he thinks Mars is a distraction from the work in front of us, how the lumber industry accounts for the wood it burns, and why building a material stronger than steel turned out to be wrong.  You’ll get insight into the nine-month harvest cycle, what it takes to change the culture of an industry without letting it notice, and why he believes the unit economics that let SpaceX displace ULA will do the same to timber. Please enjoy the show. Thinking on Paper connects the dots between technology and what it means to be human. New episodes every week. 🏠 ⁠Buy us a beer on Substack⁠ 🫵 C⁠hoose your own technology adventure ⁠ 📺  ⁠Watch our beautiful faces on YouTube ⁠ 🎧 R⁠emember Steve Jobs on APPLE⁠ 📺 ⁠Get clips and exclusive videos on Instagram ⁠ -- Chapters (00:00) Grass building panels that replace wood (04:10) SpaceX: what the job actually cost him (07:56) What a payload fairing is and how SpaceX recovers it (11:52) Lumber: why anger put him in this industry (24:02) OSB alternative: a drop-in structural panel (28:00) Carbon negative building materials explained (29:50) SpaceX and ULA: the same playbook for lumber (35:55) Why hemp, bamboo and mycelium fail as building materials (40:14) Harvest: nine months against fifteen years (46:00) Why the Space Shuttle was retired

  3. Sep 4

    New US Space Transportation Policy Demands 1000 Rocket Launches a Year

    We read the National Space Transportation Policy in full. Signed 20 August 2026, it shreds the 2013 directive and rewrites how the US gets into space, moves around up there, and comes back down. The War Department is all over it. Launch ranges, reentry infrastructure, a clause about accommodating launches within 48 hours of need. You don't build a 48-hour capability to do science. Somebody expects to lose a satellite and need a replacement up fast. Here's what we think stops it. Not rockets. Not pads. Demand. Most of what goes up is Starlink, everyone else crams onto rideshares, and a target of 1,000 assumes five times more reason to be up there than anyone currently has. The document is a sales pitch with the government as a customer. We also get into the Mars carve-out and what it says about who America needs, the ISS retiring the same year and China’s plans to land on the moon. -- Thinking on Paper is a technology podcast about AI, Space, quantum computing, science, and the systems shaping your life.  🏠 ⁠Buy us a beer on Substack⁠ 🫵 C⁠hoose your own technology adventure ⁠ 📺  ⁠Watch our beautiful faces on YouTube ⁠ 🎧 R⁠emember Steve Jobs on APPLE⁠ 📺 ⁠Get clips and exclusive videos on Instagram ⁠ -- Chapters (00:00) Introduction to the US Space Transportation Policy (03:20) US Launches in 2025 and 2026 (04:45) Private Industry and Market Demand (06:24) International Competition and Collaboration (07:55) Infrastructure Needs for Increased Launches (10:00) Government Coordination and Regulatory Frameworks (12:02) Market Opportunities and Ride-Sharing in Space (15:13) Future Missions to Mars and Lunar Surface (18:43) International Efforts and the Race to Mars (20:48) Implications of the 2030 Space Goals (23:22) Summary and Next Steps

  4. Aug 3

    Fear Is Holding Us Back From Asking Questions │ Pia Lauritzen

    Why do we stop asking questions as adults? Philosopher Pia Lauritzen has analysed 30,000 of them, and says nothing was ever lost. The ability stays. What changes is the price. Every question admits you don't know something, and nobody gets promoted for ignorance. Ask in the wrong room and curiosity starts to feel like an interrogation, which is why most of us learn to keep the question to ourselves. She proves it in keynotes. One minute, two rules, and every person in the audience writes one. They could do it the whole time. Full episode with Pia Lauritzen on questions, curiosity and whether AI can think at www.thinkingonpaper.xyz Be curious, stay disruptive. -- Thinking on Paper is a technology podcast about AI, Space, quantum computing, science, and the systems shaping your life.  🏠 ⁠Buy us a beer on Substack⁠ 🫵 C⁠hoose your own technology adventure ⁠ 📺  ⁠Watch our beautiful faces on YouTube ⁠ 🎧 R⁠emember Steve Jobs on APPLE⁠ 📺 ⁠Get clips and exclusive videos on Instagram ⁠

  5. Jul 28

    AI And The Hyper-personalization of Music

    Nicholas Ponari says AI music makes live performance more valuable, not less. Mark Fielding calls the same future a hellscape. Ponari's scenario: by 2045 his son types a script into a generator, gets a feature film in the style of Kubrick crossed with Tarantino, and hits publish.  Everyone becomes a creator in every medium. Nobody can consume a fraction of it, so AI becomes the largest curator in history. Mark's objection is that shared culture dies with it. No song anyone else has heard. No film anyone else has seen. Nothing left to talk about. Ponari's answer is scarcity. When everything is generated, the things that cannot be, a room, a crowd, live music, become more valuable than ever. Who's right? Full episode at thinkingonpaper.xyz. Be curious, stay disruptive. -- Thinking on Paper is a technology podcast about AI, Space, quantum computing, science, and the systems shaping your life. Thinking on Paper is a technology podcast about AI, Space, quantum computing, science, and the systems shaping your life.  🏠 ⁠Buy us a beer on Substack⁠ 🫵 C⁠hoose your own technology adventure ⁠ 📺  ⁠Watch our beautiful faces on YouTube ⁠ 🎧 R⁠emember Steve Jobs on APPLE⁠ 📺 ⁠Get clips and exclusive videos on Instagram ⁠

  6. Jul 22

    AI Governance: Where Does Recursive Self Improvement End?

    The US and China are racing to build AI systems that could lead to superintelligence before any enforceable global rules exist to inspect them, limit them or verify what they can do. Mark and Jeremy Think On Paper about The Hard Question of AI, an essay by Planet CEO Will Marshall. Marshall argues that AI governance now needs the same kind of verification, trust and global protection as nuclear weapons. That means more than voluntary safety tests and China and America laying down their AGI swords. And since that is unlikely, it could mean monitoring chips, tracking data-centre construction and energy use, inspecting frontier AI labs, protecting whistleblowers and agreeing international red lines around recursive self-improvement. But the nuclear comparison has many challenges. Weapons-grade material is scarce and difficult to hide. Just ask Iran. AI software can spread quickly and cross borders. Any Tom, Dick or Harry could end up being the first to create superintelligence.  At the centre of the episode is one question: what would AI’s Cuban Missile Crisis look like? What event would force the US and China to cooperate? Really cooperate. Lip service won’t calm existential risk.  We also discuss Sam Altman, Dario Amodei and Demis Hassabis, the incentives behind AI safety warnings, the limits of voluntary regulation, the RAND verification framework, recursive self-improvement, the Fermi paradox and whether governments can build the institutions required to manage AI superintelligence. Hint: they can’t. Please enjoy the show. And don’t have nightmares. -- Thinking on Paper is a technology podcast about AI, Space, quantum computing, science, and the systems shaping your life.  🏠 ⁠Buy us a beer on Substack⁠ 🫵 C⁠hoose your own technology adventure ⁠ 📺  ⁠Watch our beautiful faces on YouTube ⁠ 🎧 R⁠emember Steve Jobs on APPLE⁠ 📺 ⁠Get clips and exclusive videos on Instagram ⁠ -- Chapters 00:00 Trailer  01:38 AI And Existential Risk 02:40 OpenAI, Anthropic & Google 04:40 Nuclear meltdown or sharks? 05:50 Why is everyone speaking about the end of humanity 08:00 RSI - Closed loop recursive self improvement 10:00 A ghostbuster copyright interlude 19:39 Why America And China Are In An AI Race 23:51 The AI Cuban Missile Crisis 28:07 The AI Supply Chain 35:09 USA And China And The AI DeadEnd 40:36 The Nuclear Framework

  7. Jul 14

    Make GPUS 25% More Efficient | Moshe Tanach, CEO NeuReality

    AI companies are splashing billions on more GPUs before they use the ones they already have. Many sit idle, others use a fraction of their potential.  For the hyperscalers, cloud providers and AI companies, buying more GPUs does not solve much if the GPUs already in the rack spend too much time waiting for the rest of the system. The next battle in the AI infrastructure wars is efficiency: GPU utilization, NICs, memory movement, networking, CPUs and software that keeps expensive hardware doing useful work. Moshe Tanach runs NeuReality AI, a company building infrastructure for AI inference. In this conversation, he explains why the next wave of AI infrastructure depends on GPU utilization, NICs, memory movement, networking and software efficiency, not just buying more chips. This is a technical conversation about AI inference, infrastructure efficiency and the hardware layer beneath ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and the AI tools now being built into business software. Please enjoy the show. Thinking on Paper is a technology podcast about AI, Space, quantum computing, science, and the systems shaping your life.  🏠 ⁠Buy us a beer on Substack⁠ 🫵 C⁠hoose your own technology adventure ⁠ 📺  ⁠Watch our beautiful faces on YouTube ⁠ 🎧 R⁠emember Steve Jobs on APPLE⁠ 📺 ⁠Get clips and exclusive videos on Instagram ⁠ -- Chapters (00:00) The GPU challenge (01:27) Training Vs Inference (05:45) Memory & Keeping The GPU Busy (07:31) Deep Seek, Blackwell & Ruben (09:03) How Ripe Is CPU For Reinvention? (11:03) AI Agents Run On CPUs (12:51) Do We Need All The Computation? (14:35) GPU Utilization Rates (16:50) Tokens In A Context Window (20:59) Data, Knowledge & Wisdom (23:56) Why Are Your GPUs Busy? (A Truck Analogy) (29:07) Hyperscalers (31:59) The Decode Phase (36:47) What More Efficient GPUs Means For The User

  8. Jul 8

    Is Cultivated Meat The Death Knell For Industrial Animal Farming? - Bruce Friedrich

    Could cultivated meat replace industrial farming without asking billions of people to change what they eat? And save all the cows on the way? Bruce Friedrich, founder of the Good Food Institute and author of Meat, explains why the future of food may depend less on changing human behaviour and more on changing how meat is produced. For more than 12,000 years, humans have relied on animal agriculture to produce meat. Bruce argues that this system is reaching its limits. We explore how cultivated meat is made, why it is attracting support from governments and major food companies, and why some of the biggest meat eaters are also the most open to the technology. Along the way, we discuss the environmental cost of livestock, antibiotic resistance, food security, infrastructure, consumer psychology, regulation, and whether this technology could become as transformative as renewable energy or electric vehicles. We also examine what happens to farmers, why culture may be harder to change than technology, and whether cultivated meat can ever reach price parity with conventional meat. If the next agricultural revolution is already underway, it may not begin on a farm. Thinking on Paper is a technology podcast about AI, Space, quantum computing, science, and the systems shaping your life.  🏠 Buy us a beer on Substack 🫵 Choose your own technology adventure 📺  Watch our beautiful faces on YouTube 🎧 Remember Steve Jobs on APPLE 📺 Get clips and exclusive videos on Instagram -- Chapters (00:00) Who Eats Cultivated Meat? (02:37) Cultural Significance of Meat (06:09) What Is Cultivated Meat? (08:25) The Science Behind Cultivated Meat (10:48) How Much Does Cultivated Meat Cost? (14:46) What does cultivated meat taste like? (17:10) Emerging Companies in the Lab Meat Industry (19:08) Industry Support for Alternative Meats (21:06) Government Role in Innovation (24:40) The Future of Animal Agriculture (28:25) Agricultural Policies for Sustainability (31:41) What Are Fermented Meats? (35:48) Meat And Antibiotic Resistance (39:32) The Invisible Costs of Meat Production (42:26) The Future of Cultivated Meat

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Ratings & Reviews

5
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About

The human story of technology. Every week, technology writer and parent Mark Fielding and musician turned data centre builder Jeremy Gilbertson speak with the founders, CEOs, scientists, engineers, writers and philosophers building our collective future. From AI and space tech to quantum computing, they get angry, passionate, defensive and deep. The question underlying it all? What's the impact of technology on you, me and the rest of humanity. All human. No hype. No BS.

Information

  • Creator
    Mark Fielding and Jeremy Gilbertson
  • Years Active
    2023 - 2026
  • Episodes
    138
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Mark Fielding and Jeremy Gilbertson
  • Show Website
    Thinking On Paper

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