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Things People Say on Podcasts

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“Dot-com, railways, cars, I mean, electricity, name a transformational technology. You had to wait for adoption for those to scale. … This is different. Everyone can use it right now with existing hardware. There's no adoption cycle of new costly hardware or things, widgets, to drive this cycle. It can be used today.” — Ben Bajarin, The Circuit

Latest

Bajarin, chip analyst and co-host of The Circuit, on why he gives the AI buildout more benefit of the doubt than earlier mega-cycles. In earlier booms, people first had to wire a house or buy a computer or phone; here the bottleneck is building enough compute and energy to serve billions of daily users.

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AI Builders

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“Today, there's a lot of robotics companies that's talking about deployments, talking about pilots. But what's really hard is not putting your robot in one location or doing a pilot. What's really hard is that the customers believe or validate that your robot creates enough value that they want to deploy your robots across many of their sites.” — Jason Ma, Latent Space “For coding agents, language model, it's okay if it has latency, right? … But for robots, the inference latency has to be very short. The robot needs to act. You can't just hold a knife and not do anything for three seconds. That's going to freak people out.” — Jason Ma, Latent Space “I got a text actually from my mom like this morning, which is really funny. She said that she has apologized to her Muse for making him work so hard and thanked him for all that he's done for her, which I found really gratifying because I have been working in software for a long time and I don't think my mom has ever used a thing that I've made.” — Alex Cornell, How I AI “A lot of what I see in what I would consider slop is that someone's making three really good points and then there will be a section in the document called what this isn't. When in the history of anyone anywhere have we ever felt in our writing that we needed to preemptively state what we are not doing?” — Carly Taylor, Super Data Science: ML & AI Podcast with Jon Krohn “I say proteins are the building blocks all the time, but actually, I don't believe in it. Proteins are extremely complex. They are disordered. Their shape might change depending on the context. … What we are trying to do is basically someone got a structure, deposited it in the PDB, and we are trying to replicate and get the same structure. That's what we did. And it just so happens that it's useful. But that does not mean that we have understood all of protein dynamics.” — Pushmeet Kohli, Latent Space “Machine learning is really good at what's been trained on. But scientific discovery is almost by definition what you haven't been trained on.” — Ekin Dogus Cubuk, Latent Space “I put in as my topic AI and journalism and did girl boss and came out with this terrible post. I posted it directly to my LinkedIn, of course. And it is by far the most successful thing I've ever posted on LinkedIn.” — Katie Notopoulos, The Aboard Podcast “I like the utility of it as a programmer. If it would just produce Axios-style bullet lists. Just sort of like, here are the three things I did. Here are the three things I'm thinking of doing. But it's got to tell you a little story because they all went to gifted program and they all got to show you, oh boy, look how smart and funny I am.” — Paul Ford, The Aboard Podcast

AI Research & Frontier Labs

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“There's this huge talent farming operation. And AI alignment is the highest status cause for a decade. … There's all of this talent ready to work at places like OpenAI and Anthropic. And Anthropic is just EA now. … Without those talent bases, I don't think we would be in the situation we're in today.” — Holly Elmore, Doom Debates! “You should start really with what you want or even more as far as negotiating. And so starting weaker with, oh, maybe we should just slow down and more wishy-washy. If we had done that, then the debate now would be something closer to, do we have to stop it all? So you really don't do yourself any favors by weakening your opening position.” — Holly Elmore, Doom Debates! “When we got AlphaZero right, you know, we gave up on the human data and finally focused on what would it be like to build an algorithm that could discover for itself. So once we got it right, that algorithm, it took just a few hours. Like it took a few hours to outperform the two years of work which we'd done with human in the loop.” — David Silver, Training Data “The striking worker no longer has power in a world where they can be replaced totally by AI. But a billionaire has even more power because they can turn their capital directly into labor.” — Garrison Lovely, Future of Life Institute Podcast “The world already has tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of really talented researchers all pursuing exactly the same approach… Am I going to be the 100,001 person that's pursuing that approach? … There's this other lamppost that right now no one is looking under.” — David Silver, Training Data “I think they know it to some extent. And that's why they push the inevitability narrative so hard. Because if it was really inevitable, why do you need to convince anybody?” — Garrison Lovely, Future of Life Institute Podcast “I think that our computational media are our inextricable symbionts. And if all of computational media was fried tonight at midnight, within six months, 90% of the human species would have died.” — N. Katherine Hayles, The Trajectory “Open models are Trojan horses for the infrastructure that they bring with them. So you have an open model, but that alone is not very useful. So you buy into the entire software ecosystem and infrastructure ecosystem of a given country.” — Misha Laskin, No Priors

Agency Business

“I think the over-reliance on AI just makes you more forgettable because AI, it rounds off all of the sharp edges.” — Tim Kilroy, Agency Forward “I have gotten some pushback from developers being like, well, now that I can build it in two days with AI, I should just build it and launch it. And it's like, no, dummy. Do you realize that you're going to build the wrong thing? … I guarantee you that your plan for your product will not survive contact with a real customer.” — Rob Walling, Ditching Hourly “Don't sell to consumers. Stop. … I've just plain out stopped answering questions about B2C SaaS and about two-sided marketplaces. … I'll tell you how. Don't. That's my answer. And then I move on to the next one. … It's just a boulevard of broken dreams.” — Rob Walling, Ditching Hourly

Alternative Proteins

“The whole shrimp on the Barbie thing is actually just a U.S. commercial. So I hate to burst people's bubbles, but we don't even call them shrimp. We call them prawns.” — Jess Pryles, My Food Job Rocks! “Meat science tells you about the perfect steak all the way up until it hits the pan. They're cooking on George Foreman grills in meat science labs because they just want consistency. Like they're not going for what we're going for.” — Jess Pryles, My Food Job Rocks! “I flipped it and called it food apartheid, because I wanted our conversation to be intentional. Be intentional about race and racism. Be intentional about where a person lived geographically, about the wealth that was built on the backs of enslaved and Indigenous people. … Food desert reminded me of just putting a pin on a map and saying, that's where people have limited access to food. We're human beings. … And then I went to people in the desert and I said, y'all got food? Yeah, we grow food in the desert.” — Karen Washington, Food Talk with Dani Nierenberg (by Food Tank) “I've had a bunch of heads of R&D from pharma companies come by… I ask, what's your split, spending on your automation work cells versus your lab benches? And it's like 97% lab benches. Millions of square feet, filled to the brim with benchtop equipment, filled to the brim with lab technicians, all regulated space — and all running, get this, at best 40 hours a week. We have 168 hours in a week.” — Jason Kelly, Grow Everything Biotech Podcast “So they're worried more about the yogurt they eat and whether they recycle than finance, which is absolutely brutalizing them most of the time.” — Kat Taylor, Food Talk with Dani Nierenberg (by Food Tank)

Art & Philosophy

“It's like tenting your house. And yeah, the termites should die and probably the roaches ... nobody's going to shed a tear. But you might get some little poor rabbit or frog that was in your crawl space and that's going to die too because the house needs to be cleansed because it's rotten.” — Tamler Sommers, Very Bad Wizards “Why do we want that car to go down? … I think it's because we just watched him do all this work. He really takes us through the cleanup. And it's like, we didn't just watch all that and now the car won't go down.” — Tamler Sommers, Very Bad Wizards “I kind of like the reading that there are clear traditions where she knows and clear traditions where she doesn't know. … I like the Schrödinger's Penelope here.” — Tamler Sommers, Very Bad Wizards

Bootstrapped & Indie SaaS

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“I don't believe in NPS. I have data from WP Engine showing that NPS is horseshit. … We found that there's zero correlation between NPS and retention. It's just as likely that a NPS 10 or 100 is going to churn in the next year as someone who did a two, at least for us.” — Jason Cohen, Smart Bear Live “What they aren't saying is that they want to pay for accountability. So they're choosing us because they want someone to yell at when things go wrong. When things break on AI, what are you going to do? DM the Anthropic guy? Like, who do you talk to? So people are willing to pay bigger prices now for human accountability.” — Jon Sturgeon, Smart Bear Live “Is this product going to be necessary in 2027, 2028? I mean, probably not, because literally the last three videos on my YouTube channel were edited by Claude operating Adobe Premiere for me, and it did a perfect job.” — Brian Casel, The Panel “Nobody wakes up and says, hey, ChatGPT, show me the most average podcast hosting platform. They don't search for that. They search, what is the best podcast hosting platform? So if that's true, then you've got to want it more than everybody else. Because by definition, if you don't, you're average.” — Justin Jackson, The Panel “Dell sells a machine, a very good machine at a great price point. And I'm appreciative of that, but they don't really have a brand. So people who are out there trying to create content, I think they fall into Dell camp. Serviceable, highly forgettable.” — Chris Do, The Nathan Barry Show “we're so in this bubble where we think, oh, the latest, greatest model, we're going to brand it Astro, we're going to brand it Fable and everyone's going to care. But like 99% of the world is mostly against AI at this point.” — Brian Casel, The Panel

Climate & Energy

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“Sometimes I wish it was a bit easier because the problem with fusion is getting it turned on, not turning it off, right? It's very easy to turn the fusion reaction off. Almost everything is trying to turn it off. Turning it on and keeping it on is the hard bit.” — James Cowan, Everything Electric Podcast “I know that European countries are continuing to produce tanks, and they're spending huge amounts of money on this kind of equipment, where each tank costs more than a million Euros but can be destroyed by a 200-euro drone.” — Oleksandr Tolokonnikov, Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change “If you look at last year, record year for demand for oil, record year for gas, record year for coal, which I think much of the Western world left for dead, but demand for that is still growing. And at the same time, you are trying to transition. So rather than replacement, it's become more a story about energy addition.” — Harry Mateer, The Energy Gang “In America, we have 30 million acres of corn that we grow for ethanol, gasoline. That produces 3% of America's energy. That same 30 million acres, if you covered them with solar panels, would produce about 100% of the energy that America uses.” — Bill McKibben, The Energy Gang “Nuclear fuel is so incredibly dense that if you use nothing but nuclear power to power your entire life, all of the fuel that you would need would fit inside one soda can.” — Liz Muller, Watt It Takes “If you walk around Nairobi right now, you'll see men in reflective attire digging up the drainage systems, trying to clear the silt from them or trying to clear garbage from them… But if you haven't moved people from indecent housing… That's a bigger problem. You're dealing with poverty… You can't unclog a system that was fitting for the 80s and expected to solve a problem in 2026.” — Thomas Mukhwana, The Climate Question “Even if you think the economy should be smaller or whatever, even if you think our primary goal should be reducing emissions immediately, there's no way to do any of those things without building replacements for existing fossil fuel infrastructure. Even if that's all you want to do, you need to build like a MOFO.” — David Roberts, Volts “Federal lands make up 21% of the lower 48. They account for 3 or 4% respectively of each of our wind, solar, and geothermal. If you look at a map of federal lands across the country overlaid with utility-scale wind and solar development, you can see the wind and solar development filling in in the negative of all the federal land. It is deliberately avoiding it.” — Daniel Palkin, Volts

Crypto & Web3

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“Marquee last year was, I think, half a million Sing dollars on like a random weekday minimum spend, and it was fully booked all week last year. This year, not a single booking. And it was all shitcoin projects spending investor money on Marquee and average DJs.” — Arthur Hayes, Unchained “Take the 193 UN members … And you make a histogram of their populations, and you'll find that half of them have less than 10 million people, and like 20% have less than 1 million people, right? … Most sovereigns are small. … So the number one asset that they have is a flag.” — Balaji Srinivasan, Unchained “If it breaks ... there will be signs, but also the first thing to break is not going to be Satoshi's coins. It's going to be the most powerful people on the planet hacking the second most powerful people on the planet. Meaning probably one government hacking another government.” — Taylor Monahan, Unchained “The market doesn't want a whitelisted tokenized stock. It wants a permissionless tokenized economic rights. No one cares about voting.” — David Hoffman, Bankless “Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic have any idea what is happening inside their walls, inside their sandboxes, outside. They have no idea.” — Taylor Monahan, Unchained “…So I generally take issue with the notion of we're building a robot that's going to perform all tasks because I think it'll be very difficult for a robot that performs all tasks to be better than a robot that's specialized to a certain task.” — Shahin Farshchi, Bankless “I don't care about the technology. It has nothing to do with it. It's all positioning in my view.” — Arthur Hayes, Unchained

Food & Beverage

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“People always say this, especially about children. They're like, you're never ready. You just got to do it. But I actually have an unpopular opinion in that in the entertainment industry, it's not true. Because what ends up happening is if you don't get established, if you don't get a regular paycheck, basically, and you have a kid, it will usually end your run at entertainment.” — Jay Duplass, Dinner’s on Me with Jesse Tyler Ferguson “Sitting down to write a script by myself after 25 years in a room full of comedy writers, I realized those comedy writers were in my head. They were still with me. … And they would say things to me like, that's not funny. What are you fucking kidding me? That's just glib.” — Chuck Lorre, Breaking Bread with Tom Papa “The audience has to care about a character in a comedy in order to laugh. If you don't care about these individuals, in their relationships, there's no joke in the world that's going to save the show.” — Chuck Lorre, Breaking Bread with Tom Papa “I'd save that one from being killed by the censor by giving up the ones that were Trojan horses. … We understood entirely this joke is never going to see the light of day. It's never going to be on American television. But if we put it in the script, they'll be so relieved we cut it that they'll give us the one we actually want.” — Chuck Lorre, Breaking Bread with Tom Papa “I could give a 10% discount to everyone, or I could give one in 10 people a free potato. And that chance that you could win a free potato or you could get something for free is far more enticing than oh, just 10% off.” — Ben Newman, The Go To Food Podcast “This is one of the problems that I have with some of the environmental standards saying don't eat that species and do eat that species. That is a very blunt instrument… If it's more about how it was caught rather than what it is, then that in its very nature is allowing a far greater biodiversity range of species to be taken out of the sea.” — Caroline Bennett, The Food Programme “75% of the number of boats get just 4% of the quota. But what's even more shocking of late is that this 4% quota that they have, in recent years, they've not even been able to fish. So they have the ability to go and fish it, but the fish simply aren't on the ground.” — Caroline Bennett, The Food Programme “People want that IPA off the line to say they had the freshest can of IPA ever. And I'm like, that IPA is way better on day 10 than it is right off the line. But that's such a supply-side issue. You can't just be like, all right, let's not sell it for 10 days.” — Steve Luke, Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine Podcast

Geopolitics & World Affairs

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“It's a generalized negativity where you want to both say this could never be as good as me and my friends, but also it's going to be so good that it destroys everything.” — Matt Yglesias, ChinaTalk “Nicholas Elliot writes about Sinjin, Philby's father. He left at tea time, had a nap, made a pass at the wife of a member of embassy staff in a nightclub, had a heart attack, and died early next morning. His last words were, God, I'm bored. I mean, that is Sinjin Philby. That 24-hour snapshot of his life.” — Gordon Corera, The Rest Is Classified “As a writer, I don't feel like AI has gotten much better at writing in the past two years. I think it's basically stayed about the same. Sometimes it even gets worse. And I know that's because my use case is not being prioritized at the companies.” — Jasmine Sun, The AI Policy Podcast “One of the biggest surprises I had when I was talking to people about data centers was how rarely AI ever came up. Until the very end of my interviews when I would almost always ask people, by the way, do you use AI? Are you worried about AI? Do you like ChatGPT? People basically never brought it up.” — Jasmine Sun, The AI Policy Podcast “One quote that someone gave to me when I was writing the book about Dario, who knows him well, was something to the effect of, this guy cannot tell a lie to save his life. And this person said, that's an asset for us on even numbered days and a liability on odd numbered days.” — Kevin Roose, ChinaTalk “A world in which AI becomes smarter than humans is not one where Congress is a particularly powerful body. It kind of doesn't matter if you're on the appropriations committee when we create the machine god.” — Kevin Roose, ChinaTalk “The thing that actually differentiates the AI labs and the companies that are winning versus the ones that aren't is not a matter of who has the most money or GPUs or even research talent. It's: do you believe or not? Because only by believing and then only by selling that belief to others can you amass the resources and the focus to get to AGI.” — Kevin Roose, ChinaTalk “I awarded four direct to phase two to companies to generate synthetic data. And then the first thing that the company said, hey, do you have representative data? And I'm like, oh, crap.” — Bharat Patel, ChinaTalk

Hands-On Engineering Podcasts

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“It makes people feel fearless because they feel well protected. There's a phenomenon where seatbelts made people drive faster, but unlike with cars, it's okay if you drive faster with Rust. It'll be right there for you.” — Josh Triplett, The Stack Overflow Podcast “Not particularly spicy hot take, I think no power on this earth makes vibe coding safe but everything is a spectrum in that regard.” — Josh Triplett, The Stack Overflow Podcast “Now when AI is changing the tests and adding new tests, I completely lost track of it. Like we started a new code base. On a few weeks, we had 200 tests. Now I think a couple of months in, we have 800 tests. I don't trust it at all.” — Gabriela Moreira, Maintainable “With humans, we were carrying this big history of regression tests and they were valuable. … If there is a regression test, AI will go and update that in a heartbeat. It won't even think twice.” — Gabriela Moreira, Maintainable “We went from unlimited, which was great, to everybody has $1,000 a month. And I'm watching my single instance of open code, which has a counter at the bottom that's over $1,000… I think the subsidized infinite tokens are drying up.” — Robbie Wagner, Whiskey Web and Whatnot “Due to AI, I have disabled external pull requests on all of my repos. Open Source, as we have known it, was fun while it lasted… It simply makes no sense for me to spend time reviewing and going back and forth on a low-quality PR when I can generate, verify, and ship the fix faster myself.” — TJ VanToll, Front-End Fire “I honestly don't know if I would tell somebody to go into CS today. Because there's also most companies at the moment are just not hiring junior engineers, too, which also feels short-sighted. At some point, everybody's going to retire out of the workforce, and who are they going to have left?” — Joy Ebertz, The InfoQ Podcast “I also have had cases where I'm like, fix this test. And the AI was like, okay, I'll delete the test. And I'm like, well, technically, we don't have broken tests now, but not what I meant.” — Joy Ebertz, The InfoQ Podcast

Ideas & Essays

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“In England, for example, in the 1840s, everyone kept local time. … But with travel, with commerce, you suddenly had people, if you like, being able to move faster than the sun. So if you left London and took a train to Bristol, you would arrive 20 minutes early by the Bristol time.” — Kristen Lippincott, In Our Time (BBC) “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) “For every pair of emotions that exist, of positive and negative emotions, the negative emotion is invariably stronger and more lasting than the positive counterpart. And as I said, many negative emotions don't really have a positive counterpart. For example, dread. Dread is a hugely important negative emotion. And we don't even have a word in the English language for the positive counterpart.” — George Loewenstein, Hidden Brain “That conclusion was more frightening to him than if he had found some common psychiatric disorder among them, because in placing all of these men within a broad normal range, that meant to Kelly that, number one, the ability of psychiatry to assess and treat people like this was limited. And secondly, that there were likely a lot more people like that out there in the world.” — Jack El-Hai, Science History Podcast “There have been so many technologies with that promise. The Industrial Revolution, we can go through a long list. And I have not yet seen it. I don't know anyone who's like, I used AI to free up a bunch of free time that I'm now using for kiteboarding and knitting. They're like, I was doing two projects, but now I can do 10 projects.” — Tim Ferriss, The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss “What's happening right now with the AI enthusiasts is that if there's a new model that comes out, there's zero loyalty. It's like, oh, Claude's better, I'll go use Claude. Oh, ChatGPT is better. And people are jumping all over the place. This is finally becoming this durable storage of your life and your story and your history… And that is going to be, I think, something where they're going to kind of lock that down.” — Kevin Rose, The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss “If you are writing about the realm of ideas, that is going to be a hard game to play. If you are writing about lived experience, like I did X, Y, and Z, then I think you have more defensibility.” — Tim Ferriss, The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss “The leisure time, I hope that's true. There have been so many technologies with that promise… And I have not yet seen it. I don't know anyone who's like, I used AI to free up a bunch of free time that I'm now using for kiteboarding and knitting. They're like, I was doing two projects, but now I can do 10 projects.” — Tim Ferriss, The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss

Media & Creator Economy

“I know a person who took up smoking because they thought AI is going to kill us all. So we might as well have some fun on the way out. I know someone who doesn't wear sunscreen to the beach anymore because it's just kind of like, why bother?” — Kevin Roose, Recode Media “There is essentially no regulation on these companies. The people who serve food in the OpenAI cafeteria have to go through more inspections and paperwork than the people training the models that could become self-replicating and destroy a lot of things.” — Kevin Roose, Recode Media “Dell sells a machine, a very good machine at a great price point. And I'm appreciative of that, but they don't really have a brand. So people who are out there trying to create content, I think they fall into Dell camp. Serviceable, highly forgettable.” — Chris Do, The Nathan Barry Show “For a long time, more visits meant more customers. That equation is now broken. … We saw an 80% drop in our traffic. We lost 140 million visits in a year. But we managed to increase our leads, our demand generation, by 20%.” — Kipp Bodnar, Marketing Against The Grain

Money & Markets

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“I'm not just asking it. I am answering it. I think the answer is clearly yes. … The simplest way to decide if a company is too big to fail is to ask, would the government step in to save it if it were in trouble? And I do not think the government would step in to save Meta or Google. I do think they would step in to save NVIDIA.” — Liz Hoffman, Prof G Markets “I think of this a little bit like if you have a bunch of alchemists trying to make a potion of immortality and some of them are just like breathing the mercury and other ones are like, don't worry, we have fume hoods. … It's like this, the type of safety theater that they're doing is not the type that you need to succeed at this problem.” — Nate Soares, Odd Lots “I don't think there'll be a single AI-relevant drug in the next 10 years. AI does not help drug discovery. … It's pretty hard to do. And we've had computers for a long time. I built a Cray cluster to analyze drugs. Now I can use GPUs. It's great. But there isn't much AI can help us with in drug discovery.” — Martin Shkreli, All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg “Yeah, I've been shorting them. Unfortunately, we lost millions of dollars shorting quantum computing companies, but I told my wife that we gained billions in insight.” — Martin Shkreli, All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg “Today, there's about 190 currencies around the world. My view is that 10, 20 years from now, those 190 will be maybe 10, because the fiscal situation in so many countries around the world is so dire that a lot of that fiat money is not real money.” — David Vélez, Invest Like the Best (Patrick O'Shaughnessy) “There's about $15 trillion of retail deposits in the US banking system, but banks pay on average about 40 basis points on yield a year. … That's more or less $600 billion that are going to banks to pay for banking branches that in a digital banking environment would actually stay in consumers' pockets. So this is a massive wealth tax, the fact that banks don't pay any yield.” — David Vélez, Invest Like the Best (Patrick O'Shaughnessy) “The issue is going from AIs that are safe because if they were trying to take over the world, they would fail to AIs that have to be safe because if they tried to take over the world, they would succeed.” — Nate Soares, Odd Lots “Everyone, all of these guys think it would be a catastrophe if anyone else won the race first. And I'm sort of like, I just believe in one fewer AI CEO than they do.” — Nate Soares, Odd Lots

Product & Design

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“Football helmets are designed to keep players safe. And they also give us a permission structure to keep playing a game that's fundamentally unsafe. They make us care about specific teams with their colorful branding. And yet, they also help us ignore the human beings underneath the helmets.” — Chris Berube, 99% Invisible “We'll hear sometimes people talk about what's someone's learning rate? Do they have a growth mindset? … I'm actually looking a lot right now for people, what's their unlearning rate? Like, how fast can they learn something and then walk away from it?” — Josh Woodward, Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth “When you're showing people early prototypes, what I'm always doing in those is you're looking at people's eyes and that is the metric. It is not a DAU over a MAU, it's not a D7 retention. It's none of that. … If your eyes kind of light up, if you lean in, these are the kind of signals you're looking for.” — Josh Woodward, Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth “I also think that a lot of times these chain of thought reasoning elements in the UI are there as a band-aid for latency, which is, it feels very frustrating as a user to sit and wonder, is my agent working on something and is it making progress or is it just stuck?” — Claire Vo, Lenny's Newsletter “I got a text actually from my mom this morning… She said that she has apologized to her Muse for making him work so hard and thanked him for all that he's done for her, which I found really gratifying because I have been working in software for a long time and I don't think my mom has ever used a thing that I've made.” — Alex Cornell, Lenny's Newsletter “We'll hear sometimes people talk about, what's someone's learning rate? Do they have a growth mindset? I'm actually looking a lot right now for people, what's their unlearning rate? How fast can they learn something and then walk away from it?” — Josh Woodward, Lenny's Newsletter “If you just look at the data, a large company who starts a lab, the lab is usually ineffective and fizzles out after about three to four years. Or it may have duration, but the company can never commercialize the things coming out of the lab. And so you get things like someone comes by and sees the future, and then they do it as a separate company.” — Josh Woodward, Lenny's Newsletter “We have extremely talented people. I have found that they have low tolerance and low patience for bullshit, for the work around the work. We should just say the thing, agree on the thing and do the thing, go.” — Randy Hunt, Design Better

Software Engineering & Infra

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“It makes people feel fearless because they feel well protected. There's a phenomenon where seatbelts made people drive faster, but unlike with cars, it's okay if you drive faster with Rust. It'll be right there for you.” — Josh Triplett, The Stack Overflow Podcast “Not particularly spicy hot take, I think no power on this earth makes vibe coding safe but everything is a spectrum in that regard.” — Josh Triplett, The Stack Overflow Podcast “I was amazed every day that I didn't get caught. Towards the end, I was looking at, you know, hundreds of documents a day. There's no legitimate business need to look at hundreds of documents a day.” — Frances Haugen, Click Here “I honestly don't know if I would tell somebody to go into CS today. Because there's also most companies at the moment are just not hiring junior engineers, too, which also feels short-sighted. At some point, everybody's going to retire out of the workforce, and who are they going to have left?” — Joy Ebertz, The InfoQ Podcast “I also have had cases where I'm like, fix this test. And the AI was like, okay, I'll delete the test. And I'm like, well, technically, we don't have broken tests now, but not what I meant.” — Joy Ebertz, The InfoQ Podcast “Sonnet has been like, okay, I'll do what you asked me to do, and nothing more. But then if you unleash a Fable or 5.5, it's going to insert its own opinion. It's going to say, I see what you did here, but I'm going to do you one better… It's the extra credit kid who's like, hey, you forgot to assign homework today, teacher.” — TJ Pitre, Shop Talk Show “If you've got 10,000 people in your organization, fast forward two years, you're going to have 100,000 agents in your organization. So every human has to become a manager of agents. And that's a big transition for people who have never done managerial work before.” — Gavriel Cohen, The Changelog “I think it doesn't really help you to have open source that's restrictively licensed. So you might as well just go all the way with MIT license and get maximum reach. I don't think the model of building an open source project and then trying to monetize your own user base works because it's so easy to host stuff. It's so easy to fork it.” — Gavriel Cohen, The Changelog

Startups & Venture

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“It basically works the opposite of a cell phone, right? The more cell phones you get in an area, the worse they all work. The more totems you get in an area, the better they all work.” — Carter Fowler, This Week in Startups “During the pandemic, supporting testing nationwide through the work we did at Ginkgo, the number of labs across the country where the operator loads the 96-well plate in a flipped direction is like double-digit percentages. The robot didn't do anything wrong. It's the human in the loop that is still part of autonomous science that we're not observing.” — Renee Wegrzyn, Masters of Scale “You talked about how AI is kind of transforming drug design. We think of that as top of the funnel. Now, you can test billions of designs in silico. Some subset of those you can actually test in the lab, but we haven't seen billions new clinical trials. It's because the rest of that pipeline is still bottlenecked.” — Renee Wegrzyn, Masters of Scale “I feel like most of the expansion that we've done or that we did early on was entirely based in fear.” — Karrie League, How I Built This (Guy Raz) “I got some business books at the library. This is not going to be that hard at all. We can totally do this. And it was, I don't know, I say often my two greatest strengths at the time were arrogance and ignorance that just drove me forward because I should have thought it through maybe a little bit more.” — Tim League, How I Built This (Guy Raz) “It's really just about cost of goods. You're paying a majority of the ticket on first-run movies to the studio. And on food, you're paying what rounds to 25% of just food costs, right? So you have a much better profit margin.” — Tim League, How I Built This (Guy Raz) “I don't think there'll be a single AI-relevant drug in the next 10 years. AI does not help drug discovery. … It's pretty hard to do. And we've had computers for a long time. I built a Cray cluster to analyze drugs. Now I can use GPUs. It's great. But there isn't much AI can help us with in drug discovery.” — Martin Shkreli, All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg “Yeah, I've been shorting them. Unfortunately, we lost millions of dollars shorting quantum computing companies, but I told my wife that we gained billions in insight.” — Martin Shkreli, All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg

Tech Strategy & Big Tech

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“Dot-com, railways, cars, I mean, electricity, name a transformational technology. You had to wait for adoption for those to scale. … This is different. Everyone can use it right now with existing hardware. There's no adoption cycle of new costly hardware or things, widgets, to drive this cycle. It can be used today.” — Ben Bajarin, The Circuit “I think of this a little bit like if you have a bunch of alchemists trying to make a potion of immortality and some of them are just like breathing the mercury and other ones are like, don't worry, we have fume hoods. … It's like this, the type of safety theater that they're doing is not the type that you need to succeed at this problem.” — Nate Soares, Odd Lots “I fear that it's going to take a Hiroshima Nagasaki type event for everybody to wake up. And I fear that that will be the reckoning for us to find accountability. But clearly, these people elude accountability and deflect accountability and are, in a sense, post-accountability.” — Jeremy Strong, On with Kara Swisher “It doesn't matter why I was wrong. That doesn't matter. What matters is that I was wrong.” — Peter King, Pivot Podcast “It's a generalized negativity where you want to both say this could never be as good as me and my friends, but also it's going to be so good that it destroys everything.” — Matt Yglesias, ChinaTalk “I think it's a lot of cowardice, I'll be honest. … So many other people around it who had the concerns and voiced them urgently just folded like napkins and changed their tune the moment they saw the wind was blowing the other way and they wanted in on the profit train.” — Ronan Farrow, Decoder with Nilay Patel “All I can do is offer an opinion about AI as it pertains to my field. And it's that I'm optimistic, actually, because I think the audience is going to reject it. I think that if you play Call of Duty, you don't have an emotional connection to the people you're shooting in Call of Duty. That's going to be your experience watching AI Schindler's List.” — Aaron Sorkin, On with Kara Swisher “The issue is going from AIs that are safe because if they were trying to take over the world, they would fail to AIs that have to be safe because if they tried to take over the world, they would succeed.” — Nate Soares, Odd Lots

US Politics

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“I fear that it's going to take a Hiroshima Nagasaki type event for everybody to wake up. And I fear that that will be the reckoning for us to find accountability. But clearly, these people elude accountability and deflect accountability and are, in a sense, post-accountability.” — Jeremy Strong, On with Kara Swisher “All I can do is offer an opinion about AI as it pertains to my field. And it's that I'm optimistic, actually, because I think the audience is going to reject it. I think that if you play Call of Duty, you don't have an emotional connection to the people you're shooting in Call of Duty. That's going to be your experience watching AI Schindler's List.” — Aaron Sorkin, On with Kara Swisher “I don't think there'll be a single AI-relevant drug in the next 10 years. AI does not help drug discovery. … It's pretty hard to do. And we've had computers for a long time. I built a Cray cluster to analyze drugs. Now I can use GPUs. It's great. But there isn't much AI can help us with in drug discovery.” — Martin Shkreli, All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg “Yeah, I've been shorting them. Unfortunately, we lost millions of dollars shorting quantum computing companies, but I told my wife that we gained billions in insight.” — Martin Shkreli, All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg “If there's one thing that we could all do that will both strengthen our bonds, build better communities, and boost happiness, it's introducing our friends to each other. It turns out that building bridges is actually more rewarding than deepening bonds.” — Adam Grant, Plain English with Derek Thompson “I worry a lot that increasingly people are defaulting to AI companions, which I actually think is an oxymoron. I don't think a chatbot can be a companion because by definition, companionship is a two-way street. You could receive simulated emotional support… But guess what? You can't give it back.” — Adam Grant, Plain English with Derek Thompson “It would be a historical anomaly if we did not see the use of bioweapons in the upcoming years, not decades, but years. That is what history has taught us: that engineering of natural sciences inevitably leads to the use of weapons.” — Ashish Jha, Plain English with Derek Thompson “No one talks to Google in complete sentences. No one says, hey, Google, I have a question about the capital of Australia. Could you please let me know what that is? No, they just type in Australia Capital Enter, right? Because we don't anthropomorphize that particular AI-based system. … The era of anthropomorphized chatbots was an accident.” — Cal Newport, Prof G Media

User Experience

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“There is this 52 to 1 ratio. So for 52 weeks, we are aligning and then we are coding for one week now… What matters now is how we collaborate, how we communicate, how we create that consensus.” — Deniz Kartepe, UX Research Geeks “If everyone is able to build anything, they are probably going to be building the wrong thing, or just build it bad. So knowing what to build, and how to go through that definition phase, is becoming the bottleneck.” — Deniz Kartepe, UX Research Geeks “We have extremely talented people. I have found that they have low tolerance and low patience for bullshit, for the work around the work. We should just say the thing, agree on the thing and do the thing, go.” — Randy Hunt, Design Better “Our governance best practices are designed to create weak companies that are extremely vulnerable to outside pressure, therefore lacking in integrity, therefore subject to this kind of collapse.” — Eric Ries, The Design Of Business | The Business of Design “Since 2008, companies that have been rated to have bad governance have outperformed companies rated to have good governance. So what are we doing here?” — Eric Ries, The Design Of Business | The Business of Design “It is the biggest thing in my life in terms of tech, but I just don't think it's as radical as like suddenly you can talk to anyone in the world.” — Paul Ford, Rosenfeld Review Podcast “When it gets into that weird social relationship where it's telling you that was a good idea, that's actually where my alarm bells go off... The native buttering up of these technologies, I think is really dangerous.” — Paul Ford, Rosenfeld Review Podcast “The paragraphs are always the exact same length. They're very balanced. Everything is very smooth and they keep making it smoother and smoother... Thought is very jagged. It does not organize itself nicely into paragraphs... when it takes those rough edges away, you no longer can really see a mind at work.” — Paul Ford, Rosenfeld Review Podcast

How This Is Made

Claude reads the transcripts of every podcast we follow and picks the lines that stand on their own. Every quote links to the episode and shows the transcript around it, so you can check it in context.