An AI Engineer Is Here, and It Might Redesign the Physical World - EP 20 Paul Eremenko

**Ashlee Vance** (0:00)
Is it Li, like L-E-E?

**Paul Eremenko** (0:02)
It's L-I.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:03)
L-I. Where does...

**Paul Eremenko** (0:05)
Long Island.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:06)
Long Island, because you're...

**Paul Eremenko** (0:07)
We got him, we adopted him in Long Island.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:09)
Okay.

**Paul Eremenko** (0:09)
That was the only reason. No other affiliation to Long Island.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:11)
And Li goes with you everywhere.

**Paul Eremenko** (0:13)
Li goes with me everywhere. He was a shelter dog, and he had separation anxiety.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:18)
There he is.

**Paul Eremenko** (0:19)
And we got started working on his separation anxiety. We adopted him like fall of 2020, and started working on his separation anxiety, and then the pandemic started. And then we gave up working on his separation anxiety, and by the end of the pandemic, I had separation anxiety.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:35)
Well, yeah, I was going to say the pandemic was probably good for his separation anxiety.

**Paul Eremenko** (0:38)
Well, in the sense that we were never separate, right? And so it was indulgent of his separation anxiety, but as a result, it never cured, and I developed it as well. So now we have mutual separation anxiety. When I go without him, I have like phantom dog syndrome.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:53)
Well, so if people see Li cruising around, it's hanging out with us, you, oh, we are like on your, well, okay, I got two questions. I mean, one is, and I am going to do an intro here in a second, but the, you fly, you flew in your own plane, right?

**Paul Eremenko** (1:10)
I did not.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:11)
No, no.

**Paul Eremenko** (1:12)
I flew JSX, which is almost as good.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:16)
I thought when we were emailing, it sounded like you were, I didn't know if you were just hopping in on your own plane.

**Paul Eremenko** (1:22)
Okay. No, but I do fly. I do fly. I enjoy it very much. And it's been a lifelong, lifelong thing.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:28)
Okay. We'll get into that. All right. I'm going to kick us off with a proper intro. We'll try to. Let's do it.
All right, Paul Eremenko. Thank you so much for being here. I guess in some ways, this is vaguely home turf for people who don't know we record this at the Playground Global Offices. They were kind enough to give me some space to build my podcast studio. I know they've invested in your, at least one of your companies in the past. Yeah, so you've spent time in here.

**Paul Eremenko** (2:13)
Some of my favorite people in Silicon Valley here.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:15)
Are here, okay. And real quick housekeeping item before I do the proper, proper intro. This is all made possible by E1 Ventures, kind enough to lend some support to the podcast. So here we go. This one's exciting. I've known you for a while now. You have this tremendous background, which I'm going to give to people so they know a little context of where you're coming from. I mean, it's hard to find. There's a lot of impressive stuff on here. You're born in Ukraine, moved to the United States when you were about 11

**Paul Eremenko** (2:50)
That's right.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:50)
You have this very impressive family. I learned this week, going back to some Russian generals who were-

**Paul Eremenko** (2:57)
Marshall of the Soviet Union.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:58)
Of the Soviet Union. Your father, I think, is a quite famous mathematician. That's right. You got astronautics degrees from MIT and Caltech, and then also a law degree from Georgetown, I think.

**Paul Eremenko** (3:13)
Yep, that is true.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:14)
Okay, so I'm doing all right so far. And then you were the CTO at Airbus. I think you became CTO when you were about 35 You're one of the youngest.

**Paul Eremenko** (3:25)
That might be true. I'm not sure. I've never claimed that, but if somebody did the math, then it's true.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:32)
The internet says this. You were also the CEO of Airbus' venture capital, like sort of Innovation Arm.

**Paul Eremenko** (3:40)
Yeah, sort of the Silicon Valley outpost, called A-Cubed.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:42)
A-Cubed.

**Paul Eremenko** (3:43)
That's how I got into Airbus.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:44)
You were also the CTO of United Technologies Corporation. You worked at Darpa. You worked at Google on a lot of this stuff is aerospace, but Google was really a lot of projects, but phones and trying to rethink hardware more broadly. I think. Is that fair to say?

**Paul Eremenko** (4:00)
That's right. Yeah. That was my only sort of major detour out of aerospace up until the current start.