Still Human

10 episodes

AI & Technology

How artificial intelligence is reshaping industries, creativity, and what we build.

Episode 12 — Makarove Hong: Losing Money Is Normal in SaaS: Makarove Hong on 40+ Products, Two-Week MVPs, and Why Decomposition Beats ExecutionEP 12

Makarove Hong

Losing Money Is Normal in SaaS: Makarove Hong on 40+ Products, Two-Week MVPs, and Why Decomposition Beats Execution

Makarove Hong is the founder and CEO of FlyiDEA, a Taiwanese company that ships an MVP in two weeks with no-code and AI, acts as an outsourced CTO for small and mid-sized businesses, and takes a share of the product instead of a maintenance fee. He has built more than forty products. Over half of them lost money, and he calls that the normal ecology of SaaS. A Still Human conversation about running AI inside a working day, why the bottleneck in the AI era is decomposition rather than execution, and the two weeks of night shifts at Taipei 101 that ended with him falling down the stairs.

59 minSpotify
Episode 11 — Evelyn Chang: Your Lung Map Is a Week Old: Evelyn Chang on AI in Medical Robotics, Robotic Bronchoscopy, and Clinical EngineeringEP 11

Evelyn Chang

Your Lung Map Is a Week Old: Evelyn Chang on AI in Medical Robotics, Robotic Bronchoscopy, and Clinical Engineering

Evelyn Chang is a senior clinical engineer at Noah Medical, working on the Galaxy system — a robotic platform built to navigate the outermost edges of the human lung and biopsy nodules early. A Still Human conversation about what manual bronchoscopy loses, how a live fluoroscopy sweep gets reconstructed into 3D mid-procedure, where a clinician still has to confirm what the model sees, and why patient trust before and after may matter more than the procedure itself.

40 minSpotify
Episode 10 — Ewen Shengyao Huang: Will AI Replace Doctors? Ewen Huang on Causal AI, CRISPR, and What Medicine Can't AutomateEP 10

Ewen Shengyao Huang

Will AI Replace Doctors? Ewen Huang on Causal AI, CRISPR, and What Medicine Can't Automate

Ewen Shengyao Huang is an M.D. candidate at National Taiwan University who has analyzed autoimmune data from 97 million COVID patients and worked on CRISPR gene delivery for inherited blindness at Columbia. A Still Human conversation about using AI as a memory palace rather than a shortcut, what causal AI means for medical research, and the bedside moment no model could have taught him.

36 minSpotify
Episode 09 — Neil Gawande: Building AI for Human Connection: Neil Gawande on Belonging, Perception, and Five Companies by 20EP 09

Neil Gawande

Building AI for Human Connection: Neil Gawande on Belonging, Perception, and Five Companies by 20

Neil Gawande started five companies by 20 — from a GPS tracker for seniors to The Block, a personal AI assistant he calls 'ClaudeBot for regular people.' A Still Human conversation about building AI for human connection, belonging as a computational problem, being a third culture kid who belongs nowhere, and what we quietly lose by building too fast.

67 minSpotify
Episode 08 — William Norden: William Norden: Building Neural Networks from Scratch in C and What Most AI Engineers SkipEP 08

William Norden

William Norden: Building Neural Networks from Scratch in C and What Most AI Engineers Skip

A Still Human conversation with William Norden — Research Engineer at Santa Clara University, neuromorphic computing researcher, and the rare builder who writes neural networks in C from scratch. We get into the intelligence augmentation argument, the high-dimensional tapestry of global problems, and why Russian piano pedagogy and USTA tennis show up in his backpropagation.

52 minSpotify
Episode 07 — Toby Corey: Toby Corey: Zentrepreneurship, Tesla’s Fake Solar Roof, and Building Trust in AIEP 07

Toby Corey

Toby Corey: Zentrepreneurship, Tesla’s Fake Solar Roof, and Building Trust in AI

Toby Corey has been at the center of three tech waves — the dot-com boom (USWeb, $3B valuation), the clean energy transition (SolarCity, Tesla Energy), and now AI. He testified under oath that Tesla’s Solar Roof tiles were never connected to the grid, laid off 4,000+ people, and created Zentrepreneurship — a 21-principle framework for building companies with consciousness, taught at Stanford for 11 years. Now he’s building BrandCapsule: verifying identity in an AI world where hallucinations are the default.

60 minSpotify
Episode 06 — Lilian Krengel: Building Traffic Lights for Space: Lilian Krengel on AI, Orbital Congestion, and Student FoundingEP 06

Lilian Krengel

Building Traffic Lights for Space: Lilian Krengel on AI, Orbital Congestion, and Student Founding

A Santa Clara sophomore on building AI traffic lights for space, the Kessler Effect, and what it means when someone copies your startup in a weekend.

55 minSpotify
Episode 03 — Krish Jajoo: We Are the Product: Krish Jajoo on Social Media, Silicon Valley Pressure, and Why Human Connection Still WinsEP 03

Krish Jajoo

We Are the Product: Krish Jajoo on Social Media, Silicon Valley Pressure, and Why Human Connection Still Wins

A Santa Clara sophomore on growing up in Silicon Valley, why social media made us the product, and where being human still beats every algorithm.

25 minSpotify
Episode 02 — Michael Iwashima: Why AI Can’t Reason Over Time: Michael Iwashima on Brain-Computer Interfaces, Biosensors, and Building From NothingEP 02

Michael Iwashima

Why AI Can’t Reason Over Time: Michael Iwashima on Brain-Computer Interfaces, Biosensors, and Building From Nothing

A bioengineer on why AI still can’t reason over time, what a soccer injury taught him about building from nothing, and where humans still matter most — brain-computer interfaces, biosensors, and accessibility tech.

31 minSpotify
Episode 01 — Sean Wu: Execution Culture: How a Student Founder Raised $2M and Built Robotics for the Real WorldEP 01

Sean Wu

Execution Culture: How a Student Founder Raised $2M and Built Robotics for the Real World

Sean Wu raised over $2M for Synphony — a robotics startup tackling the sim-to-real gap — while finishing his junior year at Santa Clara. On execution culture, the wrestling lesson behind founder loneliness, and why most students never ship.

46 minSpotify