Week 23 - June 5, 2026
The case for staying human in an increasingly agentic world
I spent the week in London (for work) and was pleasantly surprised by the growing number of bikers zipping throughout the city. Crossing the streets felt slightly more treacherous, but the city feels more communal when surrounded by those on foot and pedal.
Here are the episodes I thoroughly enjoyed as I trounced around London town.
FEATURE FLAG
The Case for Staying Human
Mo Gawdat brings two things to the AI conversation that most people don’t. He spent years inside Google X watching the technology accelerate faster than anyone was saying publicly, and he lost his son in 2014, which has given him an emotional grounding that most discussions of existential risk conspicuously lack.
The conversation starts with the assertion that AI is already here. The interesting part isn’t the claim itself, which Gawdat grounds carefully enough that it doesn’t feel like provocation. It’s what follows from it. If that’s true, the question is no longer how to slow the machine down — it’s how to remain meaningfully human alongside it. And Gawdat’s answer, which he previews from his upcoming book Alive, is warmer than you’d expect. The things AI can’t replicate are exactly the things we’ve been trained to treat devalue, such as presence, care, the willingness to sit with discomfort rather than optimize it away.
The conversation about his son, and why losing him reframed how he thinks about purpose and consciousness, is the part I’m still turning over days later.
The Diary of a CEO · Mo Gawdat · 2h 1m · Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube
THIS WEEK’S TAGS
HISTORY
How a Soccer Tournament Ate the World
You’re about to be inundated with World Cup chatter for the next month. Want to be one of the few who actually knows its history? Throughline traces the arc from a modest 1930 tournament in Uruguay to the multibillion-dollar geopolitical event it is today. This episode is sharp on the mechanics of how it got this big, from television rights to Cold War maneuvering to FIFA corruption. And it’s honest about what it means that the world’s biggest sporting event is now inseparable from Gulf state reputation laundering. Worth listening to now, before the first match kicks off and you have nothing to add when the topic inevitably comes up at a cookout.
Throughline · 52:17 · Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube
BUSINESS
Three Ideas That Actually Work
Sam Parr and Shaan Puri rate seven audience-submitted business ideas on feasibility, differentiation, and upside. And they end up genuinely excited about three of them. What makes this worth your time isn’t the ideas themselves but the evaluative framework they keep returning to: what separates a niche that’s under-served from one that’s just small? The episode is a good window into how they actually think about opportunity, which is worth more than any specific idea they surface.
My First Million · Sam Parr & Shaan Puri · 48:20 · Spotify · Apple Podcasts
CULTURE
The Rule That Made Joni Mitchell
Canada’s Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commision (CRTC) once mandated that a minimum percentage of radio airtime go to Canadian artists. It sounds like bureaucratic noodling until Roman Mars talks you through what it actually produced: Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Drake, and an entire music ecosystem that simply wouldn’t exist without this specific bureacratic intervention. The episode makes a careful, well-evidenced argument for when cultural market interference works, and what the conditions have to look like for it to succeed rather than calcify.
99% Invisible · Roman Mars · 40:27 · Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube
LIFE
More than a Sex Party
Imagine being at a local toddler class and learning that the mom next to you met her husband when he was one of 31 guys she fluffled at a sex party. The value of this episode is the conversation that would hopefully ensue with that mom. It’s intimate without being voyeuristic and surprising without manufacturing drama. The part I found most interesting is how this mom’s thoughts and feelings about sex have evolved as she experiences the most meaningful output of that act, becoming a mother.
Death Sex & Money · Anna Sale · 48:50 · Spotify · Apple Podcasts · Listen
QUICK SIPS
500 Million — Did you know that Pam and Angela from The Office have a podcast and that it has 500 million downloads? I didn’t! In this episode, actors Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey share the full origin story of their podcast for the first time and how a pandemic project with no real expectations turned into one of the biggest podcasts in the world.
1h 5m · Spotify · Apple Podcasts
Want to Optimize Your Happiness? — Laurie Santos makes the case, backed by a decade of research, that the things we spend our lives optimizing for (more money, more status, etc) consistently underperform. What actually optimizes happiness? The answers are counterintuitive and well evidenced.
47:30 · Spotify · Apple Podcasts
The American Roach — The bugs are out and my kids are irrationally freaked. So I’m ready to shine a warm flashlight on an insect that’s survived five mass extinctions. The result is a surprisingly affecting piece about what resilience actually looks like from the inside.
36:46 · Spotify · Apple Podcasts
VISUAL MARK
Naked Attraction > Naked & Afraid
My biggest cultural surprise from London: stumbling across the show Naked Attraction on basic cable. Unlike our approach to cover body parts with digital fig leafs, there’s not a body part blur in sight… and it’s surprising how they rather gracefully tap dance on and around a premise that seems so garishly superficial (i.e. selecting a date on appearance alone). I respect the body confidence of the participants, and suspect that heads would explode if this show ever turned up (unedited) on basic cable in the US.