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Things People Say on Podcasts About In-Depth Interviews

Long-form interview shows where one host talks at length with a single guest about their work, their ideas and how they got there.

Everything worth repeating from the In-Depth Interviews shows we follow. Updated every day — free to search and free to use, attribution included on every card.

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“We expect everybody to be equal to John Wooden, and that's impossible. So we fired coach after coach, although their winning records have been 60 or 70%, which any university other than UCLA would have been thrilled with, with the result that UCLA is now $150 million in debt in its athletic department because I'm having to buy out all these contracts. Again, my chancellor should have read my book.” — Jared Diamond, Conversations with Coleman “Of the major leaders of the world since World War II, interestingly, there were only two who stepped down voluntarily, Nelson Mandela and Lee Kuan Yew. All others were voted out of office or they died. Evidently, once you have succeeded in high office and have gotten a good opinion of yourself, you are not likely to change that opinion and step down.” — Jared Diamond, Conversations with Coleman “When people say, as you mentioned earlier, no one says on their deathbed that they would spend more time at the office. I don't know how much we weight the deathbed over the rest of one's life. Because if you gave that person 30 more years, my guess is they would end up spending a lot of time in the office again.” — David Wolpe, EconTalk “The problem for us is that our technology is exponential, but our wisdom is cyclical. You look back and you're like, oh, the Salem witches, we're so much smarter than them. It's like, well, we know more than them, but the way they're behaving is a lot of what I see on Twitter. … Wisdom does not go up exponentially. And that's a problem because more technology gives us exponentially more power. … I'm scared of that species having too much power.” — Tim Urban, Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps “One of the most important things to realize if you use language models or think about them is just this very bizarre fact that to make them is not to understand them. You make them by building this architecture, which is kind of like a scaffold. And then you pass a bunch of data through them and they sort of grow in inscrutable ways.” — Emmanuel Ameisen, Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth “It's great to help those that need help. … The problem is, is when you institutionalize it. … So my half a joke: the Salem witch hunts. I'm sure, you know, the first three witches they caught were actually fucking witches. But then you open up a witch office and now you got to start lying. Now you got to fucking make shit up because you got overhead.” — Chris Rock, The Interview “A self-destructive person is basically a person that makes six bad decisions a year. You know what I mean? … That's 359 days of being fine. But those six bad decisions a year will fuck up your whole life.” — Chris Rock, The Interview “The great thing about having a taboo is that you don't waste all of this mental energy constantly negotiating. … Whereas if you just have a hard rule, you can stop thinking about it and it frees up an enormous amount of space in the mind.” — Meghan O'Gieblyn, EconTalk “Why is Italy's soccer team so bad lately? Well, because there are just so much fewer Italians. So, if you are trying to select the best 22 soccer players when you have 300,000 Italians being born every year, you are going to have a much worse team than when you used to have 1 million Italians being born every year.” — Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde, EconTalk “If as a society your default is two, you are going to end up with 1.4. Why? Because you are going to have a percentage of women that, for whatever the reason, don't have children, maybe biological or maybe by choice. And you are going to have also a non-trivial percentage of women that are going to stay at one. And you are going to have next to nobody with three or more.” — Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde, EconTalk “I pay about a buck a month to my phone operator to screen out spoof phone calls that are essentially robocalls. And that's what's going to happen. And we're going to call that GDP. Those additional costs.” — Azeem Azhar, The Ezra Klein Show “In a weird way, societies require friction. And when you take away frictions, even frictions that you didn't realize existed, all of a sudden it has consequences. … blithely removing all of them is kind of creating in tech parlance almost a denial of service attack on modernity.” — Paul Kedrosky, The Ezra Klein Show “The Article of Faith, the West Coast ideology on this stuff is technology always creates more jobs than it destroys. And so it becomes just a thing that people repeat, like a mantra that they hope will become true. And the reality is we've never seen a general purpose technology that had such broad applicability, was adopted so quickly, and was repricing labor at the same time.” — Paul Kedrosky, The Ezra Klein Show “I think we're de-skilling ourselves from being able to deal with people. So two things happen. On the one hand, people start to see the chatbots more like people. But I think maybe more significantly, people start to be disappointed with people when they don't behave like chatbots.” — Sherry Turkle, The Ezra Klein Show “Social media came for our attention and chatbots come for our capacity for attachment.” — Sherry Turkle, The Ezra Klein Show “Like you can't just decide to believe. You can decide to belong though. Like if you decide that you want to go to church every Sunday and you want to take part in these rituals of religious life, maybe that does make you happier, even in the absence of belief.” — Megan Phelps Roper, Conversations with Coleman “When Britain invaded Egypt in the 1880s, Gladstone had put 40% of his net worth into Egyptian bonds… they were yielding probably 12 to 14%. And he thought this was a great buy. And it proved to be a fantastic investment because he invaded Egypt. Britain insisted that the Egyptian pay off their bonds at par.” — Liaquat Ahamed, Conversations with Tyler “It's because the church believes in predestination. So literally everything is predestinated by God… God doesn't hate you because you sin. You sin because God hates you.” — Megan Phelps Roper, Conversations with Coleman “The original sin of these objects is they speak in the first person and they say they care about you. And that's how they hook you.” — Sherry Turkle, The Ezra Klein Show “Big model smell and feeling of benchmaxing are kind of like inverses of one another.” — Alexandr Wang, Cheeky Pint “Is that Instacart account really for me, or is it for the Muse? Because I think, like, over time, I think that the question is, is the total addressable market for all of commerce just increasing dramatically?” — Mark Zuckerberg, Cheeky Pint “It's not like anyone planned for distillation to work super duper well, but it just turns out that you can get a lot of capabilities naturally through some form of distillation.” — Alexandr Wang, Cheeky Pint “This lane is open because everyone else seems to just be obsessed so much with just automating knowledge work, which, I mean, isn't even that charismatic version of the future, right? Because it's like, all right, like, a big part of our belief too is that the kind of highest use of superintelligence is invention and creation, not automation.” — Mark Zuckerberg, Cheeky Pint “The naming of some of the models is like so egregious... Some of the times the numbers go backwards and sometimes it's just like a totally different word and you have another set of words. And like, I just like, how is somebody who's not carefully reading API design specs supposed to know what they're supposed to pick?” — Alexandr Wang, Cheeky Pint “You don't want a moralizing lecture for why you're wrong for asking it to do the thing. Obviously, if you're trying to do something that's catastrophic, it needs to gracefully, without pissing you off, not do it. But in general, we view alignment as more of a question of instruction and values alignment with the person who it's intending to serve.” — Mark Zuckerberg, Cheeky Pint “It's like entrepreneurship on hard mode. It's like the opposite of Lean Startup. Like, Lean Startup is like, yeah, you like see if you get something working and then you double down and then you see if that works, then you double down. Like, you cannot do that in AI.” — Alexandr Wang, Cheeky Pint “One is if AI works overall, plenty of other people want all our compute... So I think that you, in order for it not to work out, it's not just that we have to fail, AI overall has to fail.” — Mark Zuckerberg, Cheeky Pint “If you really dig into the supply chain a little bit, it's some PhD student who made a benchmark as part of their... As the course of them doing their PhD. And so you're kind of outsourcing all of your product thinking to that PhD student who happened to make a viral benchmark.” — Alexandr Wang, Cheeky Pint “It's, I think, a good example of how stuff is going to go in the future where basically everyone is actually going to be writing tons of code. They're just not going to know that they're writing code.” — Mark Zuckerberg, Cheeky Pint “People are no longer afraid of failure because it just seems like that's part of the job, but they're 100,000% afraid of embarrassment. … If you're willing to embarrass yourself, you make more money every time.” — Ryan Serhant, The Knowledge Project (Shane Parrish)

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Dwarkesh Patel 31 Alexandr Wang 5 Mark Zuckerberg 5 Sherry Turkle 3 David Robinson 3 Paul Kedrosky 2 Arvind Narayanan 2 Josh Woodward 2