Jeff McMillan on knowledge before agents—canonical data, custom evals, process mapping, and accountability at agent scale. Episode transcript, companion essay, S2E22 and S3E13 archive summaries, and an arc essay across three visits.

Jonathan Frankle on fusion-grade intelligence without grid infrastructure—specification, testing, prompts as parameters, and knowledge written for machines. Episode transcript plus UXM companion essay and a summary of his 2023 mixology visit.

Fed Cohen Freue on a thousand AI requests a year, agents overtaking chatbots, demos that hide bad engineering, Mastercard’s commerce framework, agentic payments, trust as currency, and knowledge before action. Episode on YouTube with transcript plus UXM essay Trust Is the Currency, Knowledge Is the Engine.

Most AI “strategy” is a buying plan: literacy workshop, vendor shortlist, adoption scoreboard. Brian Evergreen makes the case for vision-first future-solving—name the new value in vivid language, map what would have to be true, then argue about agents and roadmaps. Episode on YouTube with transcript, UXM essay Real AI Strategy Isn’t a Vendor Bake-Off, and Josh Tyson’s members republication The “Do a Kickflip” Era of Agentic AI.

Economist Avi Goldfarb on why AI is cheap prediction, why complements from compute to judgment spike in value, and why point solutions steal budget while system solutions steal power. Episode on YouTube with full transcript plus UXM companion essay on organizational winners and losers.

Economist Joshua Gans on AI as cheaper computational statistics, the uncertainty tax in hospitals and airports, the politics of who selects automation, and why banning tools pushes adoption underground. Episode on YouTube with full transcript plus UXM companion essay expanding the social-post touchpoints.

Jennifer Pahlka on why fixing government is rarely a technology problem alone: friction accumulates in the seams between agencies, incentives, and unmaintained coordination. Episode on YouTube, UXM companion The Government Already Knows the Fax Machines Don’t Work, paired with The Map Is Not the System on sensemaking and crisis windows.

What if modern AI is less an invention story and more a coincidence story: ordinary human text, accumulated for other reasons, became the fuel for scaling laws? Episode on YouTube, UXM companion The Data Wasn’t Meant for This, and a free excerpt from The Infinity Machine on Hassabis, grounding, and language models.

Most organizations tell themselves coherent stories about how their systems work—stories that hold until stress arrives. Marina Nitze treats crisis as a narrow window when sensemaking fails and new institutional stories become possible in hours, not years. Episode on YouTube, UXM companion The Map Is Not the System, and a free excerpt from Crisis Engineering.

According to Evan Ratliff, investigative journalist and creator of the Shell Game podcast, we've built the most successful confabulation machine ever invented—a system that will make up absolutely anything to maintain the role it's been given. In season two of Shell Game, he created an entire startup run by AI agents and turned it loose in the world. As AI rapidly becomes more integrated into our professional and personal lives, are we quietly forgetting just how genuinely strange it all is? The normalization is the story—not the hallucination—and we're exploring what that means from multiple angles.

Ben Goertzel on MCP versus deeper agent stacks, Hyperon and Metta, the ASI chain, AGI versus broad AI, and why decentralized cooperation hedges model hegemony. Episode on YouTube with full transcript, UXM companion essay, and two rebuilt archive essays on orchestration and open versus closed architecture.

Joe DosSantos on why agentic AI needs a governed source of truth before it scales: implicit versus explicit workloads, semantic layers as contracts between language and ledgers, and why enterprises must agree on facts before interpretation becomes leverage. Episode on YouTube plus UXM companion essay.

Erika Flowers on why flashy AI use cases collapse without readiness inside NASA-scale estates; consumer-grade models hitting legacy data gravity; organizational gaps that kill pilots; moving work from demo to production; and how agent runtime scaffolding relates to a post-software operating model. Episode on YouTube with trimmed transcript plus Erika’s UXM essay Zero Stage to Orbit.