The Prof G Pod

Therapy Culture Has Gone Too Far, Says a Stanford Psychiatrist

The paradox of control is that we have so many more ways to quote unquote optimize that we all feel we should be engineering perfection.

The a16z Show

Andrew Huberman’s Three Rules for Better Health and Focus

optimizing every health protocol can be counterproductive if it gets in the way of the rest of your life

Hidden Brain

Do You Have Trouble Sleeping?

a chronic lack of good sleep can also affect how we make decisions and even what we value

Hidden Brain

Do You Have Trouble Sleeping?

Sleep researchers have found that when we lie awake at night, ruminating about our problems, we're not actually solving them. We're just rehearsing them. The very effort we put into trying to sleep — or trying to solve our problems — can backfire, keeping us alert and awake.

Mixed Signals

Google’s Josh Spanier On The Unrealized CMO Armageddon, And Why AI Is At 'The End Of The Beginning'

We've never lacked for ideas in marketing we've been constrained by resources you only have so much budget so much time so many people with AI as sort of an accelerant every idea fear that you have suddenly becomes possible.

TED

I Thought I Was Lazy. Turns Out I Had a Sleep Disorder | Lindsay Scola | TED

We've been taught to push through exhaustion instead of asking about it. This isn't an epidemic of laziness. It's a failure of diagnosis.

The a16z Show

AI Can Write the Code. Can It Run the System? | Grepr CEO Jad Naous

AI has transformed engineering inside his 10-person team, cutting some projects from six months to just 10 days.

The Prof G Pod

Will the Real Winners of AI Be Us? Scott Galloway and Ethan Mollick

If you're an intern at company this last summer, you absolutely were using Claude or, you know, chat GPT and just turning it those answers into people, cuz it's better than you at your job. And middle managers were increasingly turning to using AI instead of interns, cuz it does the work and doesn't cry, right? And so, as a result, you saw this loop where nobody was learning the sort of entry skills before.

The Prof G Pod

"Nobody Knows What's Going On" — Ethan Mollick on Why CEOs Are Getting AI Wrong

About 50% of American workers use AI. They report, by the way, three times productivity gains on the tasks they use AI for. They're just not giving that to companies, right? Because why would you? Like you're worried you'll get fired if AI shows you that you're more efficient.

Daily Stoic

The Most Important Things You Need To Stop Doing

The magical thing when you do less, when you eliminate the inessential, when you stop saying yes to things that don't matter, when you stop getting caught up in busy work and nonsense, he says you get the double benefit of doing the essential things better.

The a16z Show

The Personal Agent Race Is Here | Anish Acharya & David Pawlan

the most useful agents may become increasingly invisible, proactively checking you into flights, finding refunds, filing reimbursements, or simply handling the small tasks that pile up across everyday life

Decoder with Nilay Patel

The SaaSpocalypse that wasn't, with Atlassian's CEO

I think the world will move from where do you work in an office, to which time zone you work in.

The Week

How Meta’s AI Agent Muse Beat ChatGPT to #1 | The Week

What I've said for a long time is you want to build a trillion dollar company, you have to do one thing. You have to build a time machine. And that is you have to give people time back.

TED Intersections

How to Escape Your Obsession with Productivity | TED Intersections

I do see fun as a respit from this obsession with productivity but I also see this conflict where people will start doing something for fun and then this need for productivity is so deeply ingrained they'll turn it into a side hustle.

The Week

Trump’s Canada Tariffs Are Backfiring in Red States | The Week

The danger isn't that AI makes us less intelligent. It's that it allows us to avoid the work through which intelligence develops.

Diet TBPN

OpenAI Cracks Navier-Stokes, Tech Trailers, AI Jobs Apocalypse on Hold | Diet TBPN

Same month that AI solved this incredibly difficult math problem, I saw someone use Chachi PT to book a haircut. So equivalent, no, I mean in terms of the actual economy, the actual impact of these things, uh like practically using these tools for something that people enjoy, that's not just spinning their wheels, that's not just optimizing endless things, that's actually uh generative and moving things forward.

Diet TBPN

Astra Reactions, Jobs Print, Cybercab Launch | Diet TBPN

Those are never really feel the AGI moments for me, but this, uh, but I I've actually spent hundreds, if not thousands of hours in 3D modeling software, uh, mostly in Cinema 4D and Houdini, and it was really fun. I really enjoy making uh, uh, 3D renders and motion graphics. Uh, and it was also useful when I was making YouTube videos. Uh, but every step in building a scene uh requires you got to watch a YouTube tutorial. Then you got to look up how all the different functions work. And then ultimately you're tweaking settings in literally four dimensions because it's a 3D scene.

Daily Stoic

The Lesson Jet Li Spent His Entire Life Learning

I said why I just do 700 better than thousand what what's the key words I always thinking always thinking

TED

How Doodling Unlocks Your Imagination | Joe Whale | TED

Imagination is like a muscle. The more you use it, the stronger it becomes. But if you don't use it, it gets weaker and your body will rely on something else to do it for you.

Daily Stoic

What’s Actually Stopping You From Doing Your Best Work

I find if I'm not at the desk working in the morning, the every hour I'm waiting to get started is substantially decreasing the quality of what I bring to the table.

TED Radio Hour

The price of creativity

right now we find ourselves more people than ever creating. More demand for content than ever, yet less support systems than ever. And there's this very acute pressure that every artist and creative person feels right now of like, I feel like I'm falling behind. I don't even know what to do, you know.

The a16z Show

Stripe’s AI Strategy: Build More, Not Less

Stripe sees AI productivity as an opportunity to build more rather than simply cut costs, including how its internal coding agents now generate thousands of pull requests each week.

TED Radio Hour

The price of creativity

right now we find ourselves more people than ever creating. More demand for content than ever. Yet less support systems than ever. And there's this very acute pressure that every artist and creative person feels right now. Of like, I feel like I'm falling behind. I don't even know what to do.

The Week

The Half-Trillion-Dollar AI Loop | The Week

If you were to go back and look at the average productivity of the US worker over the past 90 years, you will not see a single technological innovation. You won't see air conditioning. You won't see cell phones or computers or the internet or Microsoft Office. You don't see it because it takes a long time for productivity to be absorbed into the workplace and used by employers.

TED

How Play Boosts Your Creativity and Resilience | Katina Bajaj | TED

We've systematically removed everything that makes play what it is. The spontaneity, the freedom, the wonder, from all parts of adult life and replaced it with efficiency and achievement. And in doing so, we're losing the very survival skills that we need the most right now.

TED Radio Hour

The price of creativity

More people than ever creating. More demand for content than ever, yet less support systems than ever. And there's this very acute pressure that every artist and creative person feels right now of like, I feel like I'm falling behind.

Daily Stoic

You Don't Want Autonomy With David Epstein

You think your brain's made for thinking, but it's not. It's made for preventing you from having to think whenever possible because thinking is like energetically costly. And so left to your own devices, your brain goes for convenience, like doing things you've done before, not working too hard, all these things. So it's only if you block that proclivity for convenience that you can actually do hard things.

Semafor

The World of Work: The State of Global Workplace | Semafor Events

80% of all of the world's workers have quietly quit. And by the way, it's not their fault. The problem is not work. The problem that causes people to quietly quit is the work place.

The New York Times

Why This 91-Year-Old Is Hiking 2,190 Miles. Again.

If you want to keep going and living a good life, just keep setting yourself a new goal.

TED Radio Hour

Tracking what your body needs

When we compare brain activity after movement versus after sitting, the differences are so striking. The brain after movement looks like one certainly far more ready to learn and to work, and yet somewhere along the way, we decided that sitting and staring in front of a computer screen for eight hours straight is the best way to work.

TED Radio Hour

Tracking what your body needs

When we compare brain activity after movement versus after sitting, the differences are so striking. The brain after movement looks like one certainly far more ready to learn and to work, and yet somewhere along the way, we decide that sitting and staring in front of a computer screen for eight hours straight is the best way to work.

TBPN

XBOX RIF, "Manual" Ferrari, SPV Hustle Debate, EV Truck Fraud

Very notable that the first major layoff from a major company just admits that the business is not healthy and doesn't blame it on AI. We have not seen a layoff of this scale that wasn't at least partially credited to like the productivity increases that we're seeing from AI.

TED

A Simple Solution to Fix Workplace Miscommunication | Melissa M. Mikus | TED

Employees and executives, 86 percent of them, blame workplace failure on ineffective communication. And US businesses alone lose $1.2 trillion -- trillion dollars -- a year as a result of miscommunication. So this isn't just about being nice and diplomatic. Miscommunication is expensive.

The Business of Tech

Heidi: the AI scribe shaking up NZ healthcare

if you give every clinician an AI partner that handles the documentation, form filling, evidence search, and routine follow up communication, you effectively add another pair of hands to every consult without hiring another doctor.

TBPN

Etched Founder Joins, AI Creates Jobs, It's OVER for Peptides, Tristan Thompson in the Ultradome

Firms that adopt AI are hiring. They're going on the offensive. I've always said that this is the correct stance for a CEO to take is say, "Yeah, we're getting so much productivity. We're going to crush our competitors. We're staffing up."

TED

What Sitting All Day Does to Your Brain and Body | Keith Diaz | TED

Over the course of sitting all day with no movement, people's mood plummets while their fatigue builds and builds. And that's because our muscles have a symbiotic relationship with our brains. They're in constant communication. Our biological need to contract muscle is more than just about physical health and metabolism. It's also foundational to mental and brain health.

TED

Can Play Change the World? | Play@TED Full Event | TED, the LEGO Group and the LEGO Foundation

We are living through a play deprivation crisis. We've systematically removed everything that makes play what it is — the spontaneity, the freedom, the wonder — from all parts of adult life and replaced it with efficiency and achievement. And in doing so, we're losing the very survival skills that we need the most right now.

The a16z Show

Tyler Cowen & Alex Tabarrok on AI, Jobs, and Economic Growth

Throughout history, productivity-enhancing technologies have transformed work, created new industries, and expanded living standards, even as they disrupted existing jobs and institutions.

Hidden Brain

Unleashing Your Creativity

Most people assume that creativity is a fixed trait — you either have it or you don't. But research suggests that creativity is less like a gift and more like a muscle: it can be developed, strengthened, and yes, sometimes exhausted.

Hidden Brain

Unleashing Your Creativity

Most people think about creativity as a gift — something you either have or you don't. But research suggests that creativity is less like a trait and more like a muscle: it can atrophy if you don't use it, and it can grow stronger with practice.

Hidden Brain

Unleashing Your Creativity

Psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis explores the hidden mental processes that lead to these moments of inspiration, and why breakthroughs often emerge when the mind is at rest.

Hidden Brain

Unleashing Your Creativity

Most people assume that creativity is a trait — you either have it or you don't. But research suggests that creativity is less like a fixed ability and more like a muscle: it can be strengthened with practice, and it can also atrophy when it goes unused.

EconTalk

Making Your 80,000 Hours Count (with Benjamin Todd)

Most people end up in their jobs through a combination of accident and inertia. They don't really think carefully about what they could do with their career. And yet your career is probably the biggest opportunity you have to do good in the world, if that's what you care about.

Hidden Brain

The Cowboy Philosopher

Will Rogers once said, 'Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there.' He understood that good intentions and correct positioning aren't enough — you have to keep moving.

Hidden Brain

The Cowboy Philosopher

Will Durant spent his whole life worrying that he was a failure. He wrote 13 volumes of The Story of Civilization over 50 years, a project so vast it seems almost incomprehensible. And he was worried he was a failure.

EconTalk

Thinking Inside the Box (with David Epstein)

What do the inventor of the periodic table, the novelist Isabel Allende, and the almost-creators of the iPhone have in common? Join author David Epstein and EconTalk's Russ Roberts to explore a counterintuitive idea: that boundaries, and not unlimited freedom, often make us more creative, productive, and fulfilled.

EconTalk

Thinking Inside the Box (with David Epstein)

that boundaries, and not unlimited freedom, often make us more creative, productive, and fulfilled

EconTalk

Thinking Inside the Box (with David Epstein)

boundaries, and not unlimited freedom, often make us more creative, productive, and fulfilled

The Business of Tech

The Business of Tech: AI is eating market research

what if you could get the same quality of insight that used to take six weeks and tens of thousands of dollars overnight for a fraction of the cost.