Podcast
Alex Kantrowitz's book list: the books mentioned on Big Technology Podcast
Books from the latest episodes
Most recommended on Big Technology Podcast
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Thinking, Fast and Slow
Discussed“the great late Danny Canaman had this book thinking fast and slow about how in our brain we have this way of taking decision that's very fast and this way that's low like slower more deliberate takes more time”
Where to get it
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Always Day One
Discussed“I mean it's all I mean I wrote a book with this title but it is always day one really really sort of felt that way beforehand but in this world you can't be tied to any legacy”
Where to get it
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I Am Not a Robot
Discussed“And I think the experience of interacting with AI on a phone right now kind of sucks in some situations. And that is something I talked about a lot in the book, right?”
Where to get it
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The Anxious Generation
Discussed“I think it is uh some of the science I guess has been partially debunked but I I I like the anxious generation and it resonated with me just the negative impact of smartphones and social media particular on young people”
Where to get it
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Magic Pill
Recommended“He's a New York Times best-selling author, and his new book, Magic Pill, The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight Loss Drugs, is out in any bookstore you could hope for, and I've read it. It's a terrific book.”
Where to get it
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The Innovator's Dilemma
Discussed“Klay Christensen used to be I think a Harvard business school professor and he wrote this book called the innovator's dilemma and the idea is that a lot of technology start at the lower end”
Where to get it
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Privacy is Power
Discussed“I mean, you have a perspective that you got to have used comedy in this era. And that's sort of a counterweight to some of these ills that you see. Talk a little bit more about that. Yeah, it's really funny because my first book, Privacy is Power, is kind of gloomy, in a way.”
Where to get it
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The Sirens' Call
Discussed“Yeah, although I think it actually is kind of different. Like, one of the things I would say, two things. One is that I think it's possible to do do good work in any medium.”
Where to get it
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The AGI Chronicles
Discussed“Um the the thing that struck me cuz I read the book, you can see. By the way, it's a video. looks read. I read it through and through, cover to cover. Um the theme in the book, of course, is the building of AI, but it's also the drama.”
Where to get it
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A World Appears
Discussed“He is the author of the book A World Appears, a journey into consciousness, that is out this week from Penguin Press.”
Where to get it
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Exit Interview
Recommended“She's a 12-year Amazon veteran and the author of Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career. It's out this week. Definitely encourage you to pick it up. I enjoyed reading it very much.”
Where to get it
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The Fund
Discussed“there's the version that Ray Delio would tell you and there's the version that my book uh I think breaks open let me tell you the ray doio version”
Where to get it
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HOW TO MAKE MONEY IN ANY MARKET.
Recommended“And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Jim Kramer, host of Mad Money and the author of this great book, How to Make Money in Any Market. Definitely recommend picking it up.”
Where to get it
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1929
Discussed“I write my own articles today. I uh wrote this book without AI. AI was AI was uh was too late for me. it this took eight years unfortunately”
Where to get it
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If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies
Discussed“We actually went over this in my book and you know, we we spent all of chapter 3 saying, "Hey, I know that the AIs don't seem that agentic right now. I know that they don't seem like they have their own goals right now, but like they're going to as they get smarter and here's all the reasons why."”
Where to get it
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Read Write Own
Critiqued“Let's briefly touch upon Chris Dixon's book read write own. So this is a book basically extoling the virtues of crypto and telling die hards that it ain't over yet, folks.”
Where to get it
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The Second Machine Age
Recommended“he is a professor and senior fellow at stanford university director of the digital economy lab there and author of co-author of a great book the second machine age which i recommend you pick up eric”
Where to get it
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How to Save the Internet
Recommended“And we're back here with Nick Kle. You should check out his new book, How to Save the Internet: The Threat to Global Connection in the Age of AI and Political Conflict. I've read it through as you can see if you're watching on video.”
Where to get it
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The Cost of Conflict
Recommended“And we're back here with Nick Kle. You should check out his new book, How to Save the Internet: The Threat to Global Connection in the Age of AI and Political Conflict. I've read it through as you can see if you're watching on video.”
Where to get it
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Superagency
Discussed“I want to speak more about your book which I think is sort of like a in some ways a Manifesto um to the world talking about the positive uses of AI and why that book uh needed to be written”
Where to get it
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Superintelligence
Discussed“Um, and some of the worries that you had brought up in the past in your book, Super Intelligence, um, the fears of like AI potentially wiping us out didn't seem like they were pressing.”
Where to get it
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Empire of Orgasm
Discussed“There's also this core I I I think I read about this in your book. Um this core ideology to it.”
Where to get it
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The Contrarian
Discussed“so why is he so important that you became you know obsessed in the way that got you to write a book and you know we're about to spend about an hour talking about him”
Where to get it
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Amazon Unbound
Recommended“join us next week we will have brad stone the author of the new book amazon unbound i'm halfway through the book quite enjoying it”
Where to get it
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Deep Utopia
Recommended“Uh folks, the book definitely check out the both books, but Deep Utopia and Super Intelligence are available um basically at all places that sell books.”
Where to get it
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Engines That Move Markets
Recommended“Like in some ways if you do the old school, you know, there's the Alistair Marn who I love and think very highly of and who wrote the book The Engines That Move Markets, which is like the great book on technology investing, who says it's easier to short the canal than it is to be like figure out which”
Where to get it
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More everything forever
Recommended“So, I just want to put in a shout out for um a new book by Adam Becker called More Everything Forever. Um which really goes deep into the connections between the sort of dumerous thought and these more palatable looking sides of what's called effective altruism.”
Where to get it
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No Trade Is Free
Recommended“We allowed free trade to flow into the United States unfettered by and large. And we accepted protectionism from other countries. You can read Robert Lighheiser's book, No Trade Is Free to understand the history of this.”
Where to get it
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Player Piano
Recommended“and if you haven't read player piano I highly recommend this book immediately after you read my book um Kurt wrote this 70 years ago and it's it's it's still relevant because it's about”
Where to get it
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Abundance
Discussed“And then also because American government is you has this thing that the authors of the book Abundance talk about where American government hobbles itself. It it self-regulates to the point where government stuff costs more costs too much.”
Where to get it
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After Steve
Discussed“but the thing is is that if you read uh that book I forget exactly what it's called it's after Steve the New York Times author who did that book about uh apple he did a fantastic job”
Where to get it
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All Gas, No Brakes
Discussed“all gas snow breaks began as a kind of memoir storybook that i wrote about my experiences hitchhiking across america”
Where to get it
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Alone Together
Discussed“they're really great books um by Sher turle on that uh one I think even from 2015 called alone together”
Where to get it
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An Ugly Truth
Discussed“there's a line in um there's a line in the um cecilia carrying cheryl frankel book of i think it's a quote from kara swisher about it basically is like something to the effect”
Where to get it
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Anna Karenina
Discussed“Leo tolto uh most famous I think book Ana starts with you know every family is I'm not going to quote it verbatim but it's something along the lines like every family is happy in a similar way but unhappy in so many different ways”
Where to get it
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Atomic Habits
Discussed“And it's like the James Clear atomic habits, just a little bit every day.”
Where to get it
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Bible
Discussed“I mean the Protestant Reformation one version of it is to blame it on the accessibility of literature and the printing press and the ability to read the Bible and go wait a minute I don't agree with this right”
Where to get it
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Brave New World
Discussed“Um so the question is are we going to get to a point where it's so good that it actually fulfill completely and then you get brain new world the soma kind of.”
Where to get it
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Cliffs Notes
Discussed“We've been down this path with is it valuable to get a summary rather than read the whole thing. This is like the cliffnotes story, right? The cliffnotes did not replace the book because there's something about the way our brains work that learn through story”
Where to get it
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Competing Against Luck
Discussed“There's a framework from Clayton Christensen. He wrote this book competing against luck called jobs to be done. What job does your customer hire the software to do?”
Where to get it
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Confessions of a Street Addict
Discussed“But sometimes the last line in Confessions of the Street Act, my first book is it's better to be lucky than good.”
Where to get it
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Empire of AI
Discussed“Karen How's Empires of AI does an excellent job of discussing how many of these people's fart in a glass and sniff it because they have jobs there where they just sit around going, "What if this happens? What if this happens?"”
Where to get it
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Filterworld
Discussed“I thought it was really interesting and he wrote a book called Filter World. The main argument, he's been on the show. I'll link it in the show notes.”
Where to get it
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Foundation
Discussed“since i was a kid i was a fan of science fiction and i always saw and imagined the way that technology could change the world and you know i read isaac asimov's foundation series where he made up this profession of psycho historians”
Where to get it
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Going Infinite
Discussed“and uh I bringing Mike Lewis into it cuz I'm reading his book and he actually explains it quite well talking about basically that if you can if you can earn a ton of money over your life even as like a banker or you set up an exchange and you spend that to help people out”
Where to get it
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Great Expectations
Discussed“And literature is filled with these, "Hey man, stop chasing ghosts. Stop looking Stop living a life of comparison and chasing ghosts and and you know, this phantom thing you're think you're supposed to have." Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, um Great Expectations of Dickens.”
Where to get it
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How to Change Your Mind
Discussed“I mean, one of the inspirations for the book was the experiments with psychedelics I did for How to Change Your Mind.”
Where to get it
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I Am a Strange Loop
Discussed“I think what I think I really like um there's a a book uh Hof's book I am a strange Loop um which has this idea of Consciousness as an emergent property of sufficiently self-referential systems um and it's a beautiful book”
Where to get it
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Nexus
Discussed“have you read the book Nexus no okay it's very similar like there's the borgan Star Trek Yeah so basically Nexus is about like a computer that runs in people's brains allows them to connect to each other”
Where to get it
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Principles
Discussed“he calls them principles for life and work and he wrote a best-selling book about it”
Where to get it
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Quran
Discussed“Like you can read the Quran, you can read the Torah, you can read the Gospels, you can read the Mahabharata. Like there's kind of one truth in the universe.”
Where to get it
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Rebooting AI
Discussed“but it it's astounding that it works well enough that everybody can now for example vividly see what semantic search would be like like in 2019 in rebooting AI Ernie Davis and I wrote about semantic search”
Where to get it
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Reclaiming Conversation
Discussed“another one reclaiming conversation really just focusing on how people are losing the art of conversation levels of empathy that are dropping across the board”
Where to get it
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Simulacron-3
Discussed“And I believe the first story, science fiction story of that kind was published in 1964 where someone was able to upload his mind in um in a in a computer um back then with rotating tapes and everything. Uh that was what was the name icon simulacron 3.”
Where to get it
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Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital
Discussed“There's this woman named Carlota Perez who wrote a book called Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital which in a sense is the Bible for many of the most um I don't know, bullish partisans pushing some of this stuff.”
Where to get it
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The Blind Spot
Discussed“And there people who argue with I I talked to philosophers um Evan Thompson is somebody in particular author of an amazing book called the blind spot.”
Where to get it
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The death of expertise
Discussed“There's a book I actually wrote something about this not too long ago cuz uh there's a book I'm blanking on the author's name right now, but The End of Expertise or that talked about how experts have have gotten it wrong repeatedly on important issues.”
Where to get it
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The Diversity Myth
Critiqued“and if you go back to teal's um you know to the newspaper or stanford review or the or the or the book he wrote diversity myth you will find some views on um uh you know sexuality that are are really you know pretty backwards”
Where to get it
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The Ethics of Privacy and Surveillance
Discussed“I read a great book called uh privacy and power I'm blanking slightly on the title by Carissa Viz um and she had examples in there like people were taking data from Grinder and extorting people”
Where to get it
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The Great Gatsby
Discussed“The great news about America, F. Scott Fitzgerald got something really wrong. Uh he was a brilliant writer. 100th anniversary of a Long Island novel, The Great Gatsby. Yes. Came out in April of 1925.”
Where to get it
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The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness
Discussed“And Solms wrote a really interesting book called uh The Hidden Spring. Uh and he makes the case that consciousness begins in the brainstem, not in the cortex as people had previously thought.”
Where to get it
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The Joke
Discussed“And for example, um Milan Kundera, the novelist, wrote a novel called The Joke making exactly this point um given his experience with communism.”
Where to get it
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The Mahabharata
Discussed“Like you can read the Quran, you can read the Torah, you can read the Gospels, you can read the Mahabharata. Like there's kind of one truth in the universe.”
Where to get it
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The making of the atomic bomb
Discussed“I interviewed um the guy who wrote The Making of the Manhattan Project uh Richard Rhodes uh sorry, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes and uh he was telling me”
Where to get it
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The man who knew
Discussed“Sebastian Maliby has this book about Demis Asabas, the head of Google DeepMind, coming out. And there was this excerpt published in the Wall Street Journal.”
Where to get it
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The Mind's I
Discussed“well pretty early honestly i mean i definitely by high school i was reading uh you know the mind's eye and douglas hofstetter and patrick winston had a book on artificial intelligence”
Where to get it
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The Odyssey
Discussed“Yeah, I mean, to my the the the the title of the book which is drawn from the Odyssey is and it starts with Odysseus is on the mast and the whole point of that is that the sirens that lure the man to his death by warbling him in his ears”
Where to get it
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The player of games
Discussed“And then the last metaphor I used in this post was Azod which is this fictional game in Ian Banks The Player of Games. He imagines a civilization where you literally play a strategy game and whoever wins becomes emperor.”
Where to get it
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The Torah
Discussed“Like you can read the Quran, you can read the Torah, you can read the Gospels, you can read the Mahabharata. Like there's kind of one truth in the universe.”
Where to get it
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Tim O'Reilly in a Nutshell
Discussed“The internet was built by people that had O'Reilly books on their shelf, right? And I was there in that era. And what I liked about the founder Tim O'Reilly is like, you know, essentially the business was selling the most in-depth information possible”
Where to get it
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To the Lighthouse
Discussed“And literature is filled with these, "Hey man, stop chasing ghosts. Stop looking Stop living a life of comparison and chasing ghosts and and you know, this phantom thing you're think you're supposed to have." Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse”
Where to get it
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Too Big to Fail
Discussed“so i though the only lesson i feel like i learned writing too big to fail and and you know reporting around that crisis and now really trying to understand financial crisis as a phenomenon is every financial crisis is really only a function of one thing”
Where to get it
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Zero to One
Discussed“i mean in that you know teal wrote whole book zero to one where the basic takeaway is you know businesses if they want to succeed they should they should strive for you know monopoly profits”
Where to get it
Guests who recommended books
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Latest mentions
Discussed The AGI Chronicles
“Um the the thing that struck me cuz I read the book, you can see. By the way, it's a video. looks read. I read it through and through, cover to cover. Um the theme in the book, of course, is the building of AI, but it's also the drama.”
Discussed If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies
“We actually went over this in my book and you know, we we spent all of chapter 3 saying, "Hey, I know that the AIs don't seem that agentic right now. I know that they don't seem like they have their own goals right now, but like they're going to as they get smarter and here's all the reasons why."”
Discussed The death of expertise
“There's a book I actually wrote something about this not too long ago cuz uh there's a book I'm blanking on the author's name right now, but The End of Expertise or that talked about how experts have have gotten it wrong repeatedly on important issues.”
Discussed Superintelligence
“Um, and some of the worries that you had brought up in the past in your book, Super Intelligence, um, the fears of like AI potentially wiping us out didn't seem like they were pressing.”
Recommended Deep Utopia
“Uh folks, the book definitely check out the both books, but Deep Utopia and Super Intelligence are available um basically at all places that sell books.”
Recommended Magic Pill
“He's a New York Times best-selling author, and his new book, Magic Pill, The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight Loss Drugs, is out in any bookstore you could hope for, and I've read it. It's a terrific book.”
“There's this woman named Carlota Perez who wrote a book called Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital which in a sense is the Bible for many of the most um I don't know, bullish partisans pushing some of this stuff.”
Discussed The player of games
“And then the last metaphor I used in this post was Azod which is this fictional game in Ian Banks The Player of Games. He imagines a civilization where you literally play a strategy game and whoever wins becomes emperor.”
Recommended Engines That Move Markets
“Like in some ways if you do the old school, you know, there's the Alistair Marn who I love and think very highly of and who wrote the book The Engines That Move Markets, which is like the great book on technology investing, who says it's easier to short the canal than it is to be like figure out which”
Discussed The Torah
“Like you can read the Quran, you can read the Torah, you can read the Gospels, you can read the Mahabharata. Like there's kind of one truth in the universe.”
Discussed Quran
“Like you can read the Quran, you can read the Torah, you can read the Gospels, you can read the Mahabharata. Like there's kind of one truth in the universe.”
Discussed The Mahabharata
“Like you can read the Quran, you can read the Torah, you can read the Gospels, you can read the Mahabharata. Like there's kind of one truth in the universe.”
Discussed Simulacron-3
“And I believe the first story, science fiction story of that kind was published in 1964 where someone was able to upload his mind in um in a in a computer um back then with rotating tapes and everything. Uh that was what was the name icon simulacron 3.”
Discussed Great Expectations
“And literature is filled with these, "Hey man, stop chasing ghosts. Stop looking Stop living a life of comparison and chasing ghosts and and you know, this phantom thing you're think you're supposed to have." Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, um Great Expectations of Dickens.”
Discussed To the Lighthouse
“And literature is filled with these, "Hey man, stop chasing ghosts. Stop looking Stop living a life of comparison and chasing ghosts and and you know, this phantom thing you're think you're supposed to have." Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse”
Discussed I Am Not a Robot
“And I think the experience of interacting with AI on a phone right now kind of sucks in some situations. And that is something I talked about a lot in the book, right?”
Discussed Always Day One
“I mean it's all I mean I wrote a book with this title but it is always day one really really sort of felt that way beforehand but in this world you can't be tied to any legacy”
Discussed Privacy is Power
“I mean, you have a perspective that you got to have used comedy in this era. And that's sort of a counterweight to some of these ills that you see. Talk a little bit more about that. Yeah, it's really funny because my first book, Privacy is Power, is kind of gloomy, in a way.”
Discussed The Joke
“And for example, um Milan Kundera, the novelist, wrote a novel called The Joke making exactly this point um given his experience with communism.”
Discussed The man who knew
“Sebastian Maliby has this book about Demis Asabas, the head of Google DeepMind, coming out. And there was this excerpt published in the Wall Street Journal.”
Episodes
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