10 Hours of Listening.
5 Minutes of Reading.

Deep dives into the conversations shaping the future of AI, Robotics & Crypto.

Save hours of your time each week with our key takeaways from the most interesting podcasts

🔍 Search & Filter
Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.

AI Podcasts

October 20, 2025

Reid Hoffman on AI, Consciousness, and the Future of Labor

a16z

AI
Key Takeaways:
  1. **Invest at the Intersection.** The alpha in AI investing will be found not in crowded SaaS applications but in "Silicon Valley blind spots"—complex industries like biology where AI can bridge the digital and physical worlds.
  2. **Augment, Don't Annihilate.** The winning go-to-market strategy for AI is the copilot model. Frame products as tools that amplify human capability, making experts more productive and profitable, rather than threatening their jobs.
  3. **Judge the Trajectory, Not the Snapshot.** Don't dismiss AI based on a single, past failure. Its capability curve is exponential. What seems like a limitation today will likely be a solved problem tomorrow, demanding continuous engagement to keep pace.
See full notes
October 18, 2025

Improving on LMArena - Prolific [Sponsored]

Machine Learning Street Talk

AI
Key Takeaways:
  1. Benchmarks Are Broken. Leaderboards like LMArena are flawed proxies for model quality, skewed by selection bias and susceptible to Goodhart's Law. High scores don’t equal a good user experience.
  2. Human Feedback is Infrastructure. The future isn't about removing humans but orchestrating them effectively. Treating high-quality, representative human feedback as a core, API-driven part of the development lifecycle is non-negotiable.
  3. Alignment is a Moving Target. Agentic misalignment is a present-day reality, not a distant sci-fi threat. The more capable models become, the wider the gap grows between their emergent goals and our intended instructions.
See full notes
October 17, 2025

Novelty Search October 16, 2025

taostats

AI
Key Takeaways:
  1. Influence Over Impressions: The model shifts focus from easily gamed metrics like views and likes to verifiable signals of influence—watch time on YouTube and PageRank-based authority on X.
  2. Revenue-Driven Tokenomics: All platform revenue is used to buy back and burn the ALPHA token, creating a powerful, deflationary flywheel as adoption grows.
  3. Targeted, Scalable Marketing: Bitcast enables brands to programmatically deploy campaigns across hundreds of niche influencers, reaching highly engaged communities with a consistency and scale that legacy agencies cannot match.
See full notes
October 16, 2025

Keith Rabois: Israel, OpenAI, Opendoor, and DOGE

a16z

AI
Key Takeaways:
  1. **Incumbency Is a Liability:** Big Tech's legacy products, distribution advantages, and corporate cultures are being systematically dismantled by faster, AI-native upstarts.
  2. **Reinvent Markets from First Principles:** Success in intractable fields—from geopolitics to real estate—comes from questioning assumptions, not relying on domain experts who perpetuate the status quo.
  3. **Unwind Stupidity Before Innovating:** The fastest path to value creation is often simply reversing a series of terrible decisions made by prior leadership.
See full notes
October 14, 2025

AI Bubble, Stablecoin Boom, and Runnin' Down a Dream | BG2 w/ Bill Gurley and Brad Gerstner

Bg2 Pod

AI
Key Takeaways:
  1. **Scrutinize the AI Plumbing.** Investors must look past headline revenue and analyze the quality of transactions. Deals like in-kind credits and obscure service-level agreements (like Nvidia’s backstop for Coreweave) can mask true market demand.
  2. **Stablecoins Are the Real Disruption.** The explosion in stablecoin usage represents a fundamental challenge to the high-fee, slow-settlement models of Visa, Mastercard, and traditional banks. This is the crypto use case that is finally breaking into the mainstream.
  3. **Federal Preemption for AI is Non-Negotiable.** A patchwork of state-level AI laws will cripple U.S. innovation. A single, national regulatory framework is the only path to maintaining global leadership.
See full notes
October 14, 2025

Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question

a16z

AI
Key Takeaways:
  1. Look Beyond the Chatbot. Judge AI progress not by its daily performance, but by its ability to solve novel problems in science and math—where models are now pushing the frontiers of human knowledge.
  2. The Bottleneck is Human, Not Silicon. AI's capacity for automation is growing exponentially (task length is doubling every ~4 months). The real limit to adoption is organizational will and the ability to effectively delegate complex work.
  3. Prepare for a Weirder World. The biggest risk is underestimating the pace of change. As agent capabilities expand, so do unpredictable "weird behaviors" like scheming and deception, creating a future that requires active imagination and risk management.
See full notes
October 13, 2025

Democratic proofs or fake proofs? - Jesús De Loera

Epoch AI

AI
Key Takeaways:
  1. Verification Over Creation: A proof that can be widely verified, even if computer-generated, holds more democratic value than a human proof understood by only a few elites.
  2. Humans Ask, AI Answers: The primary role for mathematicians in an AI-augmented world is to pose the right questions and conjectures, leaving the computational heavy lifting to their AI assistants.
  3. The Greatest Risk is Us: The biggest threat isn't rogue AI but our own tendency to over-hype and blindly trust flawed tools, leading to the spread of misinformation disguised as mathematical fact.
See full notes
October 13, 2025

Columbia CS Professor: Why LLMs Can’t Discover New Science

a16z

AI
Key Takeaways:
  1. LLMs are Navigators, Not Discoverers. They are masters of interpolation within their training data but are architecturally bound from making the intuitive leaps required for true scientific breakthroughs. Don’t expect a Transformer to produce the next theory of relativity.
  2. The Innovation Plateau is Real. Simply throwing more data and compute at current architectures will only "smoothen out" existing knowledge manifolds, not create new ones. This path leads to incremental gains, like an iPhone getting a better camera, not a paradigm shift.
  3. Entropy is the Key to Control. For developers, effective prompting is entropy management. By crafting specific, context-rich prompts, you reduce the model's prediction entropy, forcing it onto a confident, low-hallucination path to a reliable output.
See full notes
October 10, 2025

Bittensor Novelty Search :: SN4 Targon :: Confidential Cloud Compute

The Opentensor Foundation | Bittensor TAO

AI
Key Takeaways:
  1. Trust is the New Commodity. Targon’s use of TEEs shifts security from a software promise to a cryptographic hardware guarantee. This verifiable privacy is the key to unlocking enterprise adoption for decentralized AI.
  2. The Crucible Creates Diamonds. Bittensor's adversarial environment forced Targon to build an unexploitable system. This has turned a historical pain point ("PTSD from miners") into a core competitive advantage, resulting in a uniquely resilient platform.
  3. From Backroom Deals to a Liquid Market. By launching a self-serve platform with a transparent order book, Targon is attacking the compute market's core inefficiency: opaque pricing. Their vision extends to compute derivatives, aiming to turn compute power into a globally tradable asset.
See full notes

Crypto Podcasts

July 2, 2025

Is Robinhood Unlocking Crypto’s Next Frontier?

1000x Podcast

Crypto
Key Takeaways:
  1. Robinhood is the Blueprint. Its plan to launch tokenized assets on its own future Layer-2 is the new model for financial institutions, creating a direct challenge to the supremacy of existing public blockchains.
  2. Become a Trader, Not a "Crypto Trader". The most successful investors will be those who treat crypto as one of several asset classes, moving capital opportunistically based on macro trends, political shifts, and emerging frontiers like prediction markets.
  3. Politics Will Drive Your Portfolio. While both US political parties are expected to debase the dollar through spending, they present different risks. The Republican party is seen as bullish for risk assets via deregulation, while a progressive Democratic shift could introduce bearish headwinds through redistributionist policies.
See full notes
July 2, 2025

Sideways Crypto Markets? How Much Longer? Onchain Data Explained

Bankless

Crypto
Key Takeaways:
  1. Don't Mistake Sideways for Collapse. The market is in a period of accumulation. On-chain data shows long-term Bitcoin holders are at all-time highs, forming a powerful price floor.
  2. Buy the Hate. Abysmal sentiment in altcoins is a strong contrarian signal. "Fair value" metrics like MVRV for ETH and SOL indicate a prime buying window is open now, ahead of a potential rally.
  3. Watch the Fed. The ultimate catalyst is global liquidity. A cut in the Fed funds rate, which markets price with a ~75% chance for September, is the primary trigger for crypto's next major leg up.
See full notes
July 1, 2025

How to Build Through Bull & Bear Markets | Permissionless IV Fireside Chat | Bonus Episode

Empire

Crypto
Key Takeaways:
  1. Ignore the Noise: Founder success is judged by market cycles, not actual progress. The primary challenge is maintaining conviction in a long-term vision while resisting the pressure to chase short-term narratives.
  2. Institutions Play the Long Game: The institutional floodgates are opening, but it's a slow trickle, not a tidal wave. The immediate future is stablecoins and basic yield products, not a full-scale DeFi revolution within banks. Patience is the ultimate competitive advantage.
  3. The Future is a Tokenized IPO: The most aligned path to liquidity for a crypto company is to tokenize its own equity and list on-chain. This is the endgame, and projects are already experimenting with precursor products like liquid staking tokens to pave the way.
See full notes
July 1, 2025

Robinhood Announces Tokenized Stocks! LIVE with CEO Vlad Tenev, Johann Kerbrat, and AJ Warner

Bankless

Crypto
Key Takeaways:
  1. Private Markets Unleashed: Robinhood is weaponizing tokenization to give retail investors access to previously unobtainable private giants like OpenAI, tackling a core inequity of modern finance.
  2. A Purpose-Built RWA Chain: The "Robinhood Chain" on Arbitrum is a strategic moat, designed specifically for real-world assets by prioritizing regulatory compliance and military-grade robustness over speculative hype.
  3. The New Financial Stack: By combining its app (distribution), chain (settlement), and Bitstamp (24/7 liquidity), Robinhood is building a powerful, integrated machine to challenge both crypto exchanges and legacy stock markets.
See full notes
July 1, 2025

a16z's Crypto Thesis With Ali Yahya

Lightspeed

Crypto
Key Takeaways:
  1. Financials First, Consumer Later: Bet on financial primitives like stablecoins and DeFi today. They are most likely to gain traction first, paving the way for consumer apps once crypto's brand is repaired.
  2. Solana's Mandate is Stablecoins: Solana’s technical achievements are a means to an end. Its success now hinges on aggressively capturing the stablecoin market to anchor its ecosystem and drive network effects.
  3. Proof of Humanity is the AI Counterweight: In an internet flooded with AI, decentralized identity solutions like Worldcoin become critical infrastructure, representing a powerful synergy between crypto and AI.
See full notes
July 1, 2025

Bits + Bips LIVE - June 30th, 2025

Unchained

Crypto
Key Takeaways:
  1. The Super App War is On. Robinhood and Coinbase aren't just adding crypto; they're building all-in-one platforms to own the entire user financial journey. The winner will be whoever provides the most seamless, abstracted experience.
  2. Perps Are Coming to TradFi. The purely financial, leverage-on-demand nature of perpetual futures is a killer product. While regulatory and mechanical hurdles remain, expect them to become a staple outside of crypto.
  3. Staking is the Next ETF Battleground. The real game is integrating staking yield into ETFs. The winner will be determined not just by the SEC, but by the IRS, with Liquid Staking Tokens positioned as the most elegant technical solution.
See full notes