floating questions

Wen Tong: The Color You See Isn't the Color That's There

Wen Tong is an imaging engineer and (aspiring) colorist — his job is to make sure what you see on screen is exactly what the director intended. Turns out, that's almost impossible.  Two people literally cannot see the same color. I went into this conversation expecting to learn about color science, and I did — but we ended up somewhere I didn't expect. We talked about: * Why working in total darkness actually ruins a colorist's perception — you'd think the opposite * The moment his first film looked beautiful on his laptop and terrible in the theater, and how that one experience pulled him into a career very few people know of * Giving up computer science for art — "in a traditional Chinese mindset, that's insane" * "Fun is always the thing that will make you do things. If things are not fun, it's hard to do for long." Wen lives in New York and is still building the skills to tell the story he hasn't written yet. He's in no rush. wentongcolor.com 0V30R3WDkgCwovbCFXHs

Mason Grimshaw: Probabilistic Living, Indigenous Data Sovereignty, and Foundation Models for the Earth

In this episode of Floating Questions, we sit down with Mason Grimshaw, an MIT alum and mission-driven data scientist driving critical progress at the intersection of environmental conservation and indigenous empowerment in the age of AI. We explore how his work, life, and community view intertwine to thread a journey that spans from the Rosebud Sioux Reservation to the cutting edge of geospatial modeling. * Parenthood and the Probabilistic Worldview: How Mason applied a "process over results" mindset to navigate the challenges of raising a family while completing his degrees at MIT. * Language as Ancient Code: How the Lakota language uses redundant information—such as encoding kinship and physical direction—to ensure the integrity of oral histories, functioning much like modern error-correction technology. * Building the "Pocket Botanist": How indigenous youth at the AI camp use computer vision and Docker to preserve traditional knowledge of medicinal plants in the Black Hills. * Indigenous Data Sovereignty: The critical need for tribes to maintain sovereign control over their cultural resources to prevent models from training on sensitive data without community permission. * Geospatial AI for the Earth: Using "Clay," a foundation model for the earth, to transform satellite imagery into semantic data for tracking whale migration and deforestation. In our rush to build the future, how should we handle the delicacy of history, memory, and wisdom?

Amine Bennouna: The "Fossil Fuel" of AI, Decisioning Under Uncertainty, and the Tenure Trap

You might have heard of Amine Bennouna from a previous episode (here [https://youtu.be/aFR1pdVy_HI?si=hIydrDO2P7h5x5e4])  – from the Math Olympiad in Morocco to an MIT PhD and now a Professor at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management. Recently, he has been thinking deeply about a critical question: Do we actually need more data for AI?  In this episode, Amine discusses the idea that data is the "fossil fuel" of AI , and we have largely burned through the easy reserves. He believes the next frontier isn't about scale, but about quality – knowing exactly which "soil samples" to collect before building the subway line, rather than just feeding the model the entire map. We dive deep into his research on optimal decision-making under uncertainty in relation to data, but we don't stay in the theory. We also wade into the messy, human incentives that shape our world:  * The Tenure Game: Why the academic pressure to publish volume is killing "moonshot" research – and why we need more people willing to be misunderstood (like Geoffrey Hinton) to make real breakthroughs.  * The Data Marketplace: A future where we stop giving our data away for free and start treating it like the currency it is.  * The Crisis of Busyness: Why our generation is wealthier but often less happy , and how "optimizing" your life is meaningless if you don't know the objective function. This conversation is an invitation to pause and ask: Are we collecting the right information, or just more of it?

Eric Wang: Cooking on Wall Street – From Private Equity to Culinary Craft

For the final episode of 2025, we are joined by a guest who embodies the spirit of exploration: Eric Wang.  By day, Eric works in private equity in New York City, managing commercial real estate deals on Wall Street. On weekends, he trades his spreadsheets for a chef's knife, running 81 Eats – a supper club and pop-up series featuring "Chinese-inspired comfort food."  From growing up in Shanghai and attending boarding school in the US at age 12, to training at Wharton and a top-tier French culinary school, Eric is turning the journey inward.  We discuss how he balances a high-pressure finance career with the grounding nature of cooking, his solitude during the pandemic in Tokyo, and his personal philosophy rooted in nature ("touch grass" to feel alive) and gathering people together.

Shaka Mitchell: Civil Discourse Through Music, School Choice & the Rise of AI in Learning

Today on Floating Questions, we sat down with Shaka Mitchell - Aspen Institute Civil Society Fellow, Senior Fellow at the American Federation for Children, constitutional law lecturer, long-distance runner, creator of the Come Together Music Project, and father of three.  Shaka has spent decades building bipartisan coalitions in education and civil discourse, guided by humility, principled thinking, and a deep commitment to humanizing others. In this conversation, we explore: * Music as a bridge: why “every memory has a soundtrack” and how sharing a song helps people humanize each other before hard political conversations  * Values, faith & principled living: “to give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift,” and why humility matters when advocating for what you believe  * School choice & civic engagement: how diverse motivations still build coalitions, and the tension between plural school options and the demands placed on parents * AI in the classroom: how AI can support learning and where it can’t replace teachers, plus emerging policy questions as AI enters education Shaka shares stories from his coalition-building work, his family, and his faith - offering a grounded look at how people with very different backgrounds and beliefs can still learn from one another. You can also follow his work and thoughts here https://shakamitchell.substack.com/