The Xbox Nearly Destroyed Him - EP 87 Seamus Blackley

Ashlee Vance (0:00)

Okay, on this week's episode, we asked the age-old question, can the father of the Xbox make the world's best chocolate? It turns out that maybe he can. We're interviewing Seamus Blackley. He is the man who convinced Bill Gates to go on the Xbox adventure some 20 plus years ago. Seamus is a physicist, an inventor, engineer, and an eccentric. He's in addition to working in the video game industry in Hollywood.

He got really into engineering food. He became famous during COVID for the things that he did to bread, bringing back ancient bread-making techniques. Then he's got a top-secret laboratory near Pasadena called Pacific Light and Hologram, which is working on something I'm not allowed to tell you about, but has also been the birthplace of his incredible chocolate that has Thomas Keller, Jose Andres, all the top chefs freaking out. We did a video episode about all this on our main YouTube channel and our substack, which you can already go see.

This is our big chat with Seamus on how he got to the chocolate, but also mostly about his life, which is crazy. He had a quite dramatic and tumultuous childhood, bizarre career and is one of the most fun people to listen to ever. This is one of my favorite interviews I've ever done. I was just enthralled the whole time and I think you will be too. So this interview took place inside of Pacific Light and Hologram, which is Seamus' top secret lab. We've got a mechanical dinosaur in the background, quite the dramatic backdrop if you're watching on YouTube or Spotify or wherever. I think you'll love this. Come learn about the chocolate, learn about Seamus. This is Core Memory. I'm Ashlee Vance. Here we go.

Where are we?

Seamus Blackley (2:17)

We are in our secret location, our secret laboratory location.

Ashlee Vance (2:21)

You're like a legit mad scientist with a secret lab.

Seamus Blackley (2:25)

Yeah.

Ashlee Vance (2:25)

I like it. Yeah. How long have you been in this spot?

Seamus Blackley (2:29)

This place, about two years. Okay. And before that, there was a previous secret lab.

Ashlee Vance (2:33)

Okay. And it's secret because you're working on a new project.

Seamus Blackley (2:38)

Secret just because.

Ashlee Vance (2:39)

Yeah.

Seamus Blackley (2:41)

Well, I think that there's- and you are really aware of this, but you're in it, so I don't know how much the fish sees the water, but there's a culture in technology, and what has become called technology, where people lead with a bunch of promises and then don't deliver.

Ashlee Vance (3:07)

I'm familiar with it.

Seamus Blackley (3:09)

Yeah. For me, being an older guy, remembering how exciting the things were when things would come out, you'd never heard of it before, they were amazing, and people really worked hard on them and finished them.

And I think it's important to get the work done up front.

Ashlee Vance (3:31)

Yeah.

Seamus Blackley (3:34)

And then announce what you've done.

Ashlee Vance (3:36)

So you think there was not this whole hype type approach back in the day? People used to-

Seamus Blackley (3:42)

Well, no, there's always been hype, and there were always been people who were showmen trying to take advantage of people and get money out of them. But I think that there was, and maybe this is true of all human endeavors, but in the early days, you think special effects, like Industrial Light and Magic, when those guys were working on that, nobody had done it that way with a computer before, and so they paid a huge amount of attention to every shot. The first ILM shot is the lifeboat leaving Princess Leia's ship.

That was the first one, and even George didn't believe it. You can watch the Disney documentary about this. It was just so beautifully done. There's a little talcum powder that they put so that when the thing fell down, like there was a little dust released, and then the claws that held it in retract after it goes, right? And everything, it sells it because they were living and breathing every part of it, because it was hard and they had to think about every part of it. And so there's a kind of honor about it that you wanted to be honest about it. You wanted everything to be real because you were not only proving yourself, but you were proving the discipline you were trying to invent. Proving the whole, you're announcing to the world that, hey, there's a new thing and it's real and we're doing it really seriously, even though it seems like kid stuff and it seems like we're doing it really seriously. And the same thing was true of computers, right? The computer fairs and all these things, these guys that took it really seriously and they built these systems to be super robust, they took it really, really seriously.