Our special guest for Episode 6 is one of Silicon Valley’s most influential and persuasive visionaries. Marc Porat’s Ph.D. thesis at Stanford created the very definition of what he called the Information Society, predicting with startling accuracy how data was to become the oil of the post-industrial economy.
Marc joined Apple from the Aspen Institute in 1989, tasked with charting the company’s path into the post-destktop computing future. He did far more than that. With Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld, co-creators of the Macintosh, he founded General Magic, which Apple spun out jn 1990 to create what became the first smartphone. But Magic was the incubator for far more than just a mobile communication device.
Marc’s farseeing vision embraced the entire ecosystem of social, mobile, anytime, anywhere communication, smart networks hosting software agents, app stores, digital currency and ecommerce that we now take for granted 35 years later as the infrastructure of our daily lives.
Hersh and I talk with Marc about what sort of future he now envisions as the age of AI dawns. In his usual dexterous fashion, Marc honors both AI’s potential dystopian impact as a destroyer of employment and human ingenuity and augmenter of authoritarianism and its promise of abundance as a cognitive amplifier and enabler of new forms of human creativity and democratized wealth creation.
The three of us worked together at Magic, and it’s a pleasure to reconnect to speculate on what the emergent AI revolution portends.
As always, the uncut episode is on YouTube (below) and the edited version, audio-only, is here on Substack, on Apple Podcasts, and on Spotify.
Marc Porat is the original smartphone visionary — he co-founded General Magic in 1990 and dreamed up the smartphone, the app store, and autonomous software agents nearly fifteen years before the iPhone existed. Today he’s one of the most sought-after voices on AI and superintelligence — advising governments, insurers, and institutional investors on what an abundant AI future could look like, and what could go catastrophically wrong along the way. In this conversation, Marc, Michael Stern, and Tom “Hersh” Hershenson dig into the AI safety debate that pits Eliezer Yudkowsky’s extinction-level doomerism against Peter Diamandis’s radical abundance, unpack Marc’s “digital twin” concept and his Alexandria Federation project to democratize AI for the non-English-speaking world, argue over who should fund and govern this transformation, and land on a remarkable story: a closed-door meeting with DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis and Vatican representatives about nothing less than “the mind of God.”
In This Episode
Honoring both sides of the AI safety debate — doomerism and abundance
The “digital twin” vision: a personalized AI
Alexandria Federation and the fight against AI’s English-language monopoly
Business models for democratizing AI access in the developing world
Government’s proper role in AI guardrails and the coming jobs disruption
Distributed micromodular fusion as the unlock for energy abundance
A dystopian role-reversal debate on cheap energy and cheap intelligence
Demis Hassabis, the Vatican, and science as “the mind of God”
Timestamps
(1:33) Chasing another “Aspen moment”: has Marc found his future again?
(4:16) Honoring both sides: Yudkowsky’s doom vs. Diamandis’s abundance
(9:22) Ten years to do what took industrialization a century: the velocity problem
(12:59) Market failure: AI wealth concentration and the new tech aristocracy
(19:22) Alexandria Federation: democratizing AI for 50+ countries
(23:59) Mia, Rosetta & Contienza: a blueprint for a global AI commons
(36:35) Funding models: venture capital vs. utility vs. single-payer AI
(42:29) Government’s role: guardrails, criminals, and the coming jobs bomb
(1:05:48) Demis Hassabis, the Vatican, and “the mind of God”
(1:09:09) Full circle: General Magic’s legacy and getting AI right this time
Marc Porat is the original smartphone visionary — co-founder and former CEO of General Magic, the 1990 Apple spinout whose Magic Link device and Telescript software anticipated the smartphone, the app store, and autonomous software agents more than a decade before the iPhone. After General Magic, he spent nearly two decades in cleantech, co-founding Serious Materials, CalStar Cement, and Zeta Communities to bring sustainability to windows, cement, and net-zero housing. Today he’s Chief AI Advisor at Access Holdings (appointed October 2025), Senior Advisor to SandboxAQ, and Senior Advisor to Pegasus Capital, and speaks and consults globally on AI and superintelligence — working on projects including the Alexandria Federation, an effort to democratize frontier AI for non-English-speaking countries, and distributed micromodular fusion energy. He engages actively across the AI safety spectrum, from Eliezer Yudkowsky’s extinction-risk warnings to Peter Diamandis’s abundance thesis.
- Marc’s Summit Detroit keynote, “A Techno-Visionary’s AI Forecast” (June 2025, 52 min.)— the fullest public statement of his current AI worldview, including Sovereign AI, superintelligence, and digital twins
- Access Holdings announces Marc Porat as Chief AI Advisor (October 2025)
- General Magic documentary (2018)
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