The Aboard Podcast

48:28

Katie Notopoulos: There Are Still LOLs on the Internet

The Aboard Podcast ·

2026/10/06

How is AI reshaping internet culture? On this week’s episode, Paul is joined by a journalist who has truly looked into the digital abyss: Business Insider’s Katie Notopoulos. Using a few recent AI-related stories Katie reported as a lens, they discuss the increasingly blurry boundaries between the real and the artificial on our social feeds. Katie is known for, among other things, her lists of the worst things on the internet; with AI, Paul asks, has “worst” somehow gotten “even worser”? Plus: In a

en

28:25

Is Jev the New Shape of AI?

The Aboard Podcast ·

2026/09/29

LLMs are often far too powerful for the small tasks they’re asked to complete. Is the more-contained Jev the alternative? On this week’s episode, Paul and Rich read a question from tech writer John Pavlus about Jev, a new model from Typesafe AI that’s been a major topic of discussion in programming circles recently. LLMs, Rich suggests, are often like using a power riding mower to cut the grass of your tiny lawn. As Paul breaks down Jev and others like it into layman’s terms, they debate whether

en

35:01

Charity Majors: Embrace Your Computer’s Chaos

The Aboard Podcast ·

2026/09/22

How is observability being redefined in the AI era? On this week’s episode, Paul and Rich sit down with Charity Majors, the co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb. After a crash course on observability, the conversation pivots to AI and its cascading effects—both on this subfield, and on the tech community overall. Some engineers try to plan for every eventuality, but Charity stresses that the best thinking comes when you accept that anything could go wrong at any time: “There’s liberty in chaos.”

en

28:22

AI Companies Shouldn’t Police Themselves

The Aboard Podcast ·

2026/09/15

Tech execs are sounding alarms about the dangerously fast pace of LLM development. Will any regulators stop them? On this week’s episode, Paul and Rich discuss a heady few days in the world of Big AI, as Dario Amodei called for a slowdown on AI development that was soon echoed by other leaders like Sam Altman and Elon Musk. Do their stated concerns actually match up to reality? In our current political climate, how realistic is the idea of government intervention? Plus: Paul does a pretty convincing

en

31:17

AI Versus…Talking to People?

The Aboard Podcast ·

2026/09/08

Problems with your boss? Why not fire up Claude and hit HR with a lengthy legalistic complaint? On this week’s episode, Paul and Rich look at the erosion of human-to-human communication in the AI era, springboarding off a friend’s anecdote about employees sending official-sounding LLM-generated documents to HR rather than starting with simple conversations. AI tools allow us to flood each others’ inboxes. Is that making it impossible to truly communicate?

en

34:22

It’s Fun to Ship Software

The Aboard Podcast ·

2026/08/25

It’s unrestrained summer fun, Paul Ford-style: Using AI tools to actually ship some software. On this week’s podcast, Paul shows Rich his recent vibe-coded project, Stellate.app, which visualizes whimsical, made-up musical genres and plays the corresponding electronically generated music. (Don’t worry: You’ll get to hear some!) This might have been a fun summer project, but what did Paul learn building it—and, importantly, getting it out into the world?

en

36:30

LevAIthan? A Hobbesian Look at AI

The Aboard Podcast ·

2026/06/16

Is the AI era destined to make our software lives nasty, brutish, and short? On this week’s podcast, Rich brings Paul the framing of “Hobbesian AI,” specifically from 17th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s greatest work, Leviathan. Humans need some kind of order, Hobbes argued in the wake of the English Civil War, otherwise they will destroy each other. How can these lessons be applied to our decidedly order-less AI moment?

en

40:45

Kamal Menghrajani: The Limits of AI Healthcare

The Aboard Podcast ·

2026/05/19

Doctors might be using AI to cut down on paperwork, but can these tools really be employed in clinical settings? On this week’s podcast, Paul and Rich sit down in the studio with Dr. Kamal Menghrajani, a practicing oncologist and lecturer at Harvard Medical School who was previously a member of the Biden White House’s “Cancer Moonshot” team. After she explains how AI is helping in her work, she lays out its real limitations—and discusses how these technologies can distract from more systemic

en

27:00

Why AI Makes Things Worse for Enterprise Teams

The Aboard Podcast ·

2026/05/12

Why are so few engineering teams reaping the benefits of AI? On this week’s episode, Paul presents Rich with the findings from a recent report from CircleCI and Thoughtworks on the productivity of enterprise teams using LLMs. While there’s been a dramatic increase in throughput—the amount of code produced—across the board, just 5% of orgs are seeing real gains from these tools, while the majority struggle with errors, bugs, and lower productivity than before AI was introduced. As Paul puts it: “The

en

46:21

Evan Ratliff: Preparing for a Ridiculous Future

The Aboard Podcast ·

2026/03/24

Is the future of work sitting back and watching your company of bots plan their offsite? On this week’s episode, Paul is joined in the studio by journalist Evan Ratliff, the host and creator of the wildly popular Shell Game podcast, which is about, per the show’s description, “how Evan tried to build a real startup, run by fake people.” Evan’s AI agents were an exercise in immersive journalism (and yes, they did in fact go wild planning their offsite), but would he ever consider running a company of

en

33:29

Expertise Matters More Than Ever

The Aboard Podcast ·

2026/03/17

With AI drastically cutting delivery times in tech and beyond, how should practitioners price their time? On this week’s podcast, Paul tells Rich about a recent experience with a potential client, where he skipped steps and rapidly vibe-coded through the prototyping process and they….didn’t really know what to make of the result. If things that used to take months can now be done in hours, what are clients actually paying for?

en

44:12

Erynn Petersen: Fixing Healthtech, One Bill at a Time

The Aboard Podcast ·

2026/03/10

Can AI help heal our broken healthcare system? On this week’s podcast, Paul and Rich are joined in the studio by Erynn Petersen, a longtime technologist and the current CEO of Emme, a healthtech startup that works to lower medical costs for both providers and patients. First, she lays out some of the systemic problems that saddle Americans with huge bills (or lead them to avoid seeking care entirely). Then, she discusses how AI tools might revolutionize the industry—as well as the ways the

en

25:36

Product Is More Than Prompts

The Aboard Podcast ·

2026/03/03

People are constantly talking about how AI is transforming engineers’ work, but where does that leave the product manager? On this week’s podcast, Paul (who has hired many PMs) and Rich (who is also a PM himself) tilt the AI-and-code lens away from the engineers and onto the role they describe as the diplomat of software creation, liaising between business, design, and engineering needs. Should PMs feel threatened by LLMs, or empowered by them? How can they use these tools to add value to the org

en

41:03

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: How Anthropic Sees Claude

The Aboard Podcast ·

2026/02/24

Public opinion on LLMs like Claude varies widely—but how do the people who actually work at Anthropic think about it? On this week’s podcast, Paul and Rich are joined in the studio by New Yorker staff writer Gideon Lewis-Kraus to discuss his recent feature, which he reported from within Anthropic HQ. They discuss the piece, and then they hash out the real questions: What’s the correct literary metaphor for an LLM? Does an AI company really need psychologists for its chatbots? And, perhaps most

en

37:24

Can Tech CEOs Be Thoughtful?

The Aboard Podcast ·

2026/02/17

Anthropic founder Dario Amodei wants AI to be regulated. Will anyone listen? On this week’s podcast, Paul and Rich dive into Amodei’s recent (lengthy) essay, “The Adolescence of Technology,” which argues for social responsibility both from within and around the AI industry. Amodei might have the best intentions, but with less mindful competitors in the space, are his ideas nothing more than wishful thinking?

en

35:53

Robot Reddit Wants Your Passwords

The Aboard Podcast ·

2026/02/10

Is Moltbook—aka “Reddit for Robots”—merely a novelty, or does it contain bigger ideas about the future of tech? On this week’s podcast, Paul and Rich start by discussing the autonomous agents of OpenClaw before they move on to Moltbook, the social network where said agents can hang out. (No humans allowed!) How do these LLM developments fit into the broader history of the web, and what do they suggest about where AI might be headed?

en

36:27

Rafe Colburn: Building Etsy in the AI Era

The Aboard Podcast ·

2026/01/13

How is one of the internet’s biggest spaces for human creativity adapting in the AI era? On this week’s podcast, Paul and Rich are joined in the studio by Rafe Colburn, the Chief Product and Technology Officer at Etsy. After discussing Rafe’s long history at the company, they tackle the AI topic two ways: First, how the Etsy engineering org is using AI tools, and second, Etsy’s recent deal with OpenAI to display their products directly in ChatGPT searches. Plus: Rafe and Paul teach Rich the proper

en

29:19

Totally Prepared for 2026

The Aboard Podcast ·

2026/01/06

What will the AI story be in 2026: Society-wide transformation or incremental change? On the first podcast of the new year, Paul and Rich (gently) argue over what they expect to see in the AI space over the coming months. These tools might allow people to build software far faster than before, but how much will that disrupt the industry itself? Plus—perfect for a podcast full of tech predictions—they discuss why humans are terrible at predicting the future of tech.

en

25:29

God, Sex, and AI

The Aboard Podcast ·

2025/12/09

Is there space for everyone in LLM world? On this week’s podcast, Paul and Rich traverse the always-changing AI landscape from one end of the spectrum to the other. First, the Christian LLM company Gloo, currently headed by former Intel CEO Patrick Gelsinger, which is building technologies for the “faith ecosystem.” Then, Sam Altman’s recent announcement that OpenAI will begin producing erotic content for verified users. In one version of our AI future, there’s room for lots of smaller companies

en

34:29

Max Read: Reporting on the Big, Bad Internet

The Aboard Podcast ·

2025/12/02

AI is reshaping the media, the internet, and the culture at large—and Max Read is writing about it. On this week’s podcast, the longtime journalist and author of the popular “Read Max” newsletter comes into the studio to talk about the intersections of tech and culture in our current AI moment. Topics discussed include Max’s journey from a general-interest journalist to covering tech platforms and internet culture, the ways he uses AI tools in his own work, and whether he thinks the slop flooding

en

All Episodes

Similar Podcasts

Lead With AI

Tamara Nall

Two Blokes Talking Tech

Trevor Long and Stephen Fenech

Pioneers of AI

WaitWhat

The Brave Technologist

Brave Software

The Good Tech Companies

HackerNoon