Episode 305: DHH, Hinton & Jensen

0:10Conor:Welcome to AD SP The Podcast episode 305, recorded on September 24th, 2026. My name is Connor, and today I recommend a few podcasts to listen to while I'm on paternity leave. Welcome to a solo episode. Episode 305, I believe. I'm recording this on Thursday, September 24th at 5 28 p.m. The evening before this is going to drop. I had a backlog of a couple episodes from the Mark Seraphim interview. Definitely check those out if you haven't already. We recorded that, Bryce and I and Mark, back in July, in anticipation of my wife giving birth to my son.

1:02Conor:And I'm very happy to say that she gave birth, and both baby and my wife Shima are very healthy, and we are very excited as well as very tired right now. I'm on week two of my paternity leave. I'll be back at work next week and then be taking the rest of my paternity leave later on in the year or potentially earlier in 2027. But we're taking a bit of a I wouldn't call it vacation, but just a break from work and also podcasting. And therefore, we're just going to have a very brief episode today.

1:34Conor:So happy to share the news that both my wife and baby are healthy. And we will be resuming our regular schedule of ADSP episodes next week. And potentially we're going to have an interview. Maybe, maybe not. We'll see. Guest to be announced if we do have a guest. And for today, I will mention, as I usually do mention, I mean, the last time I looked it up, I did a solo episode was back on January 30th of 2026. So under a year ago, where I was talking about the algorithms that went into the board game Mastermind.

2:12Conor:But I think on previous instances of solo episodes when I wanted to put something out but didn't have that much time, I usually refer people to other podcasts that I have enjoyed as of late, as I do listen to a ton of podcasts. And for those that of you that are waiting for Pod God, the process of publishing it has begun. It's going to take a while, probably a couple weeks, maybe a few weeks. But Pod God is coming for those of you that are waiting for the Personality Meta podcasts.

2:45Conor:But until then, listen to the following podcasts on whatever app you're currently listening to ADSP on. And the main podcast that I want to put on people's radar is the I think it's like four hours or five hour interview that DHH uh gave on the Lex Friedman podcast, which is not a podcast that I listen to regularly, but I enjoy listening to DHH's thoughts and interviews that he does. And it might be the most inspiring podcast I've listened to in the last decade.

3:20Conor:He does not work for any of the Frontier AI labs or NVIDIA or any company that has a horse in this race, and he beautifully captures my enthusiasm for the AI, coding tools, LLMs, etc., that we now have access to. And I encourage you, even if you don't like DHH, even if you don't like Lex Friedman, to go and give that podcast a listen. Another one that came out recently was uh Jensen, CEO of NVIDIA, the company I work for, went on the Ezra Klein podcast, which is also not a podcast that I listen to regularly, although my wife is a big Ezra Klein fan.

4:02Conor:And the most recent interview was Ezra interviewing uh Jensen, which is worth listening to, but I was honestly a bit disappointed. There was a couple times when Jensen was asked questions, and I really thought he fumbled the ball. The main one being when he was asked about job displacement, and then Jensen said, you know, there's a lot of jobs that didn't exist a number of years or decades ago, and he mentioned a bunch of things, which I don't think were the most compelling examples.

4:35Conor:And I thought for sure there was an obvious job that was right in front of him that he didn't mention, which was podcasters, as Recline is a full-time podcaster slash journalist, and he didn't mention that. Anyways, I thought that was like a freebie, a layup, and he didn't mention it. Anyways, I'll leave a link in the description. It's an interesting conversation to listen to, even if I thought Jensen could have performed better. And he really harps on Jeff Hinton, who is actually in my top three people that I like listening to for AI takes.

5:09Conor:The top three, ooh, what's the order? Probably, well, in no particular order. Uh Boris Cherney, who is the creator of Claude Code, he works at Anthropic, Jeff Hinton, one of the fathers of AI, uh, is affiliated with the University of Toronto, although I think he recently retired, and DH since his most recent interview with Lex Friedman. And Jensen gives Jeff Hinton a really hard time for his predictions. He has famously made the radiology and radiologists are not going to have work and they're going to be displaced.

5:43Conor:And the opposite happened. Jensen gives Jeff Hinton a really hard time for that. But Jeff Hinton actually went on another podcast that I listened to more recently called The Big Technology Podcast. And if you follow me on Twitter, you will have seen that I uh tweeted out a couple clips from that podcast, and he kind of walks back that prediction and acknowledges it was a bad prediction. And anyways, he just has, even if you disagree with Jeff Hinton and his takes that AI is sentient and your P Doom is nowhere close to his, you know, he famously, or not famously, he has gone on record saying that he keeps his money in three different bank accounts in Canada because he thinks like at a certain point in time, due to these like zero-day failures and exploits that LLMs are capable of doing, banks are gonna fail and people are gonna lose their money.

6:30Conor:I don't I don't think that's gonna happen. But it is interesting nonetheless to listen to Jeff Hinton. I have a lot of respect for Jeff. And anyway, so listening to the Ezra Klein podcast, where he interviews Jensen, he also cuts in a couple clips, one from an All-In Summit podcast, and then also one from uh Jeff Hinton. And I was thinking, like, oh, it's too bad they didn't splice another clip from Jeff Hinton on the Big Technology podcast, because that kind of is the more recent updated take from him.

7:04Conor:Anyways, so you've got the DHH podcast on Lex, you've got the Ezra Klein interview with Jensen Huang, you've got the Jeff Hinton podcast from the interview from the Big Technology Podcast, and anything with Boris Cherney. He was on the um platformer podcast, which I actually never heard of, but discovered it thanks to my personality meta podcast of Boris Cherney, and which is it's crazy that I I didn't know that that podcast existed because I believe it is Casey Newton, who is half of the Hard Fork podcast, uh, which is a very popular tech podcast, which actually I don't think Hard Fork wound down, but Casey News Casey Newton, I think is his last name, and Kevin Roos are stepping down from Hard Fork, leaving the New York Times, where I think technically only Kevin Roos worked for the New York Times, and Casey worked for his own company, Platformer, which is where he has the second podcast, which with which is crazy that I I didn't know that that existed.

8:03Conor:And they are going off on their own and starting a new podcast, which I think starts either in October or early 2027. They had conflicting statements on their last episode, and it's called Machine Gods. So if you haven't heard of Hard Fork, it's pretty it's pretty great. I mean, not my favorite podcast, but it's something that I look forward to listening to every week. And now that has wound down, at least with those two at the helm, and they're gonna be doing machine gods.

8:29Conor:And the reason I brought all that up is because Boris Cherney was and his uh personality meta podcast via PodGod is what led me to discover that Casey Newton had his own podcast called Platformer. Anyways, I have rambled on long enough. I will link all of these different podcasts in general and the specific episodes that I have alluded to. And if I had more energy right now, which I don't, I would splice in all the different clips. Instead, I'll just leave you with the I think three or four clips that I already have tweeted out, so it'll be easy enough for me to go and get the audio from that.

9:06Conor:And I'll put them here, and that will be the end of episode 305. Like I said, we'll be back to our regularly scheduled programming next week. Until then, have a good one.

9:18DHH (Clip):I'm in a state of delirium. That's what the state I'm in. Because I have been working with computers for 40 years, and I've never seen the things that I've seen in just the last two months. A whole career, a whole life dedicating to the love of computers as my main focus for the working hours and then some suddenly completely abandoned, suddenly completely rewritten. Of course I'm delirious. Who looking at this reality is not? If you are not delirious or at the very least, very excited, actually, I guess that's not even true.

10:02DHH (Clip):If you're not recognizing the gravity of the moment, that's the delusion. That is the psychosis. The psychosis is believing that the world is very different. That's also a point where I've stressed many times that when people accuse live coders of being slob generators, I go right back at them and say, have you looked at the average programmers' output? That is some other slob too. If you've looked at the behind the scenes of many great companies and what their code bases look like after there's been 3,000 humans through them, they're awful.

10:41DHH (Clip):Absolutely awful.

10:44Geoffrey Hinton (Clip):Um, I believe they're already conscious, yes, but I don't talk about that much because that puts people off from the other safety messages.

10:51Conor:Be sure to check these show notes either in your podcast app or at adspthepodcast.com for links to anything we mentioned in today's episode, as well as a link to a GitHub discussion where you can leave thoughts, comments, and questions. Thanks for listening. We hope you enjoyed and have a great day.

11:04DHH (Clip):Low quality, high quality, that is the tagline of our podcast.

11:10Conor:That's not the tagline. Our tagline is chaos with sprinkles of information.