Talking Books

The future of work is being rewritten now. Hear how government, industry, labor, and civil society are supporting the workforce to successfully transition into AI-augmented roles that drive real impact. Angie Cooper, President, Heartland Forward Keith Sonderling, Deputy Labor Secretary, U.S. Department of Labor Jessica Garner, Managing Director, Innovative Learning, ISTE+ASCD Elisabeth Jacobs, Ass...

Jim Fan, who leads the embodied autonomous research group at Nvidia, walks through what he calls "the great parallel": robotics following the LLM path from pre-training to reasoning to auto research, but with world models replacing language models, egocentric video replacing teleoperation, and world action models replacing the VLA paradigm. Along the way: why he thinks we'll pass the...

00:00 - Introduction 00:44 - Feeling Behind as a Coder 02:28 - Software 3.0 Explained 03:44 - Agents as the Installer 04:49 - Menu Gen vs Raw Prompts 07:37 - What’s Obvious by 2026 09:41 - Verifiability and Jagged Skills 13:39 - Founder Advice and Automation 15:46 - From Vibe Coding to Agent Engineering 25:17 - Agents Everywhere and Learning Let me know what you want. DM or email me at https://tal...

Just an update on the uploading of new episodes. Let me know what you want. DM or email me at https://talkwithbooks.substack.com/ so I can send you the wisdom and resources you would like :)

For many years an atheist, C. S. Lewis vividly describes the spiritual quest that convinced him of the truth and reality of Christianity, in his famous autobiography. “In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God … perhaps the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.” Thus Lewis describes memorably the crisis of his conversion. ‘Surprised by Joy’ reveals both tha...

The "three rules of epidemics" (or the three "agents of change") in the tipping points of epidemics. The Law of the Few The Stickiness Factor The Power of Context

Models with Mark Manson

(0:00) Pre-show footage for the All-In Holiday Spectacular (3:00) Year in Review (10:45) Besties on stage and a drop-in from SantaCanis! (15:50) Besties introduce the format and the "Bestie" award (17:25) Biggest Winner - Business (18:35) Biggest Loser - Business (20:11) Biggest Surprise - Business (23:20) Biggest Winner - Politics (28:11) Biggest Loser - Politics (31:13) Biggest Surprise - Politi...

Something has gone really wrong in Britain. Our economy has tanked, our freedoms are shrinking, and social divisions are growing. Our politicians seem most interested in their own careers, and much of the media only make things worse. We are living in a country almost unrecognisable from the one that existed a decade ago. But whose fault is it really? Who broke Britain and how did they do it?

In  We Who Wrestle with God , Jordan Peterson guides us through the ancient, foundational stories of the Western world, analyzing the Biblical accounts of rebellion, sacrifice, suffering and triumph that stabilize, inspire and unite us, culturally and psychologically. Adam and Eve and the eternal fall of mankind; the resentful and ultimately murderous war of Cain and Abel; the cataclysmic flood of...

(1:56) Ingo lays out the case for Adyen over Stripe (6:37) Building and scaling a tech company in Europe (11:43) Thoughts on stablecoins, financial deplatforming, expanding into India (17:50) AI in fintech, open-source solutions (20:31) Offering services in authoritarian countries, data in economic forecasting, working as a Co-CEO

(0:20) Joby Aviation Intro (2:01) Archer Aviation Intro (4:43) Wisk Aero Intro (8:31) The biggest consumer issues facing eVTOLs, liquidity, scalability, pro-eVTOL areas (15:57) Autonomous flight, redundancy, pilot necessity, edge cases (24:35) Acoustic issues, creating a network through scale, go to market decisions, batteries (32:49) When eVTOLS will be commercially available, working with the FA...

Sundar Pichai also emphasized the need to build AI responsibly and make it accessible to everyone, regardless of access to information or digital skills. Google's approach to AI includes focusing on improving next-generation models, making them accessible, and addressing ethical considerations. The conversation touched on the importance of multimodal models, energy consumption, and the need for a...

(2:06) The obesity problem: a global chronic health epidemic (13:07) The history of discovering GLP-1s (20:38) Impact of GLP-1s on different human functions (27:09) Understanding the commercial aspect of drug discovery, pricing for GLP-1 drugs (33:11) Responding to criticism and research of GLP-1 dependency (40:04) Stock performance, dealing with political pressure related to successful drugs (47:...

Communication is a superpower and the best communicators understand that whenever we speak, we're actually participating in one of three conversations: practical ( What's this really about? ), emotional ( How do we feel? ), and social ( Who are we? ). If you don't know what  kind  of conversation you're having, you're unlikely to connect. Supercommunicators know the importance of recognizing--and...

Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte is a Spanish biochemist and developmental biologist. He is a professor in the Gene Expression Laboratories at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California since 1993. Izpisua Belmonte is a main catalyzer in one of today's most promising areas of biomedicine: regenerative medicine. His work may help to discover new molecules and specific gene/cell t...

(2:04) Jake breaks down the business of Gecko Robotics (20:42) Jake explains the sales cycle at Gecko (23:08) The crippling infrastructure of the old world (27:34) How Jake thinks about the coming wave of humanoid robots

Wynton Marsalis is an internationally acclaimed musician, composer, bandleader, educator and a leading advocate of American culture. He is the world’s first jazz artist to perform and compose across the full jazz spectrum from its New Orleans roots to bebop to modern jazz. Jon Batiste is a New Orleans-bred, New York-based musician, educator, and humanitarian, and the new band leader of “The Late S...

Why do some conversations succeed while others stumble? The neurology and psychology of communication offer surprising explanations for why human connection goes right or wrong. Join in a live experiment — and explore how the right conversation, at the right moment, can change everything.

(3:04) Thomas presents "The State of the Unicorn Economy" (21:34) Venture capital's relative underperformance over the past decade (30:45) Fixing what's broken in startups and VC

(10:26) Woody and Friedberg demonstrate how far the Moon is from Earth (13:51) Artemis timelines, going back to the Moon after decades, how astronaut assignments work (17:39) How NASA will use the Moon as a training ground to get to Mars

(0:54) Thoughts on JD Vance, the importance of bipartisanship, civil disagreements, and independent thinking (6:21) Political pressure and growing toxicity in DC, Senator Sinema's controversial filibuster vote (12:21) Money in politics, following "The Machine," the cost of a competitive Senate race (15:10) Behind the scenes of Build Back Better (21:43) Chances of a viable third party...

(2:56) How to build great businesses, lessons from his time at Google (6:30) Lessons from working with Masa at SoftBank, risk tolerance (11:51) Scaling Palo Alto Networks, handicapping cybersecurity, M&A strategy (20:02) State of cyber threats (24:23) Age of AI: How agents will change consumer apps, how AI is impacting cybersecurity

(2:22) How Ovitz got started in Hollywood (10:06) Closing Palantir's first enterprise deal (15:56) AI's impact on film and TV, how streaming killed Hollywood's business model (23:11) Free speech and censorship in Hollywood, protecting creatives (28:11) Can Hollywood be recaptured by the auteurs?

Aaron Sorkin and David Brooks discuss their approaches to creating compelling characters. Sorkin emphasizes the importance of understanding a character's desires and obstacles, using examples from his own work like "The Social Network." David Brooks shares anecdotes about encounters that inspired his writing and the empathy required to portray complex characters. Both writers stress...