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

June 23, 2025

Is Tether The World's Most Valuable Company?

Bankless

Crypto
Key Takeaways:
  1. Profit Powerhouse: Tether's profitability ($13.7B+ annually) fuels its independence and aggressive investment strategy, making it a financial force comparable to nations in Treasury markets.
  2. Global First, US Second (Strategically): While pursuing US compliance for USDT, Tether’s core focus remains on emerging markets where its impact (and profitability) is higher. A new US-specific stablecoin will target different, value-added use cases.
  3. Beyond Stablecoins: Tether is diversifying heavily, aiming to become a top Bitcoin miner, expanding its tokenized gold offering (with physical redemption), and investing in AI and other tech, always with an eye on distribution.
See full notes
June 23, 2025

How To Fix Crypto's Token Problem

Lightspeed

Crypto
Key Takeaways:
  1. **Brace for "Junk":** Expect a deluge of low-quality tokens funded over the past two years to hit markets in the next 12-18 months. Extreme diligence is crucial.
  2. **Equity Rises:** The growth of crypto M&A, potential IPOs, and institutional interest will increasingly value revenue-generating companies and "real things" over purely speculative tokens.
  3. **Utility Is King (Eventually):** Projects delivering genuine products, strong user adoption, and productive tokenomics will ultimately define a more robust and trustworthy crypto ecosystem.
See full notes
June 22, 2025

Yano On What The New Token Transparency Framework Looks Like

Empire

Crypto
Key Takeaways:
  1. **Standardized Scrutiny Arrives:** The Token Transparency Framework introduces a systematic, 18-criteria evaluation, offering a clear benchmark for assessing token projects beyond hype.
  2. **Rewards & Repercussions:** By first celebrating transparent projects (like Jito and Jupiter) and then planning to rate less forthcoming ones, the framework aims to incentivize industry-wide improvements in disclosure.
  3. **Investor Toolkit Boost:** This framework provides investors with a concrete tool for due diligence, moving towards a more informed and transparent crypto investment landscape.
See full notes
June 21, 2025

0xResearch | June 20th, 2025

0xResearch

Crypto
Key Takeaways:
  1. CEXs Go Lean: Exchanges are increasingly opting for lighter on-chain footprints, prioritizing app development on existing chains over building new L1s/L2s, signaling a focus shift to direct user value.
  2. Transparency is Non-Negotiable: The 0xResearch Token Transparency Framework highlights a critical industry need for standardized disclosures, aiming to build trust and attract serious capital by demystifying token projects.
  3. Utility Drives Valuation: Projects like Kamino, despite strong fundamentals and growth, underscore that clear token utility and value accrual mechanisms are essential for market recognition and valuation.
See full notes
June 20, 2025

Macro Uncertainty, Circle’s Surge, and Prediction Market Utility | Roundup

Bell Curve

Crypto
Key Takeaways:
  1. Selective Bets Over Broad Sprees: Forget throwing darts; the crypto market now rewards surgical precision. Focus on projects with strong fundamentals and demonstrable traction, as "hyper dispersion" is the new norm.
  2. Public Equities as a Crypto Proxy: With limited direct, high-quality crypto IPOs, existing listed entities like Circle and Coinbase are soaking up institutional and retail interest, mimicking "alt season" dynamics in traditional markets.
  3. Pragmatism Pays: The industry is shedding ideological baggage. Successful projects will meet existing market needs, provide clear disclosures, and avoid outdated tokenomic "tricks." Prediction markets are an emerging utility to watch.
See full notes
June 20, 2025

Token Transparency and The Hot Ball of Money (Hyperliquid/Circle) | Weekly Roundup

Empire

Crypto
Key Takeaways:
  1. **Transparency is Now Table Stakes:** Projects neglecting robust disclosure standards, like those promoted by the new Token Transparency Framework, will face escalating investor scrutiny and skepticism.
  2. **Public Markets: Crypto's Current Darling (But For How Long?):** Expect continued capital inflow and outperformance from regulated, publicly traded crypto entities before a potential, broader token market resurgence.
  3. **Real Value is Built on Fundamentals & Community:** Platforms like Hyperliquid, showcasing operational efficiency, potent tokenomics, and community wealth creation, are forging lasting value that transcends fleeting market trends.
See full notes