Talking Books

The future of work is being rewritten now. Hear how government, industry, labor, and civil society are supporting the workforce to successfully transition into AI-augmented roles that drive real impact.Angie Cooper, President, Heartland Forward
Keith Sonderling, Deputy Labor Secretary, U.S. Department of Labor
Jessica Garner, Managing Director, Innovative Learning, ISTE+ASCD
Elisabeth Jacobs, Associate Vice President, Urban Institute

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Jim Fan, who leads the embodied autonomous research group at Nvidia, walks through what he calls "the great parallel": robotics following the LLM path from pre-training to reasoning to auto research, but with world models replacing language models, egocentric video replacing teleoperation, and world action models replacing the VLA paradigm. Along the way: why he thinks we'll pass the physical Turing test within 2–3 years, why "compute now equals environment equals data," and why this generation was born just in time to solve robotics.

00:00 Introduction
00:30 DGX One Origin Story
01:42 The Great Parallel
03:31 Robotics Endgame Setup
03:39 Why VLA Falls Short
04:32 Video World Models
06:09 DreamZero World Action
07:46 Scaling Data Collection
11:06 EgoScale And Scaling Laws
15:39 DreamDojo And The Roadmap

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00:00 - Introduction
00:44 - Feeling Behind as a Coder
02:28 - Software 3.0 Explained
03:44 - Agents as the Installer
04:49 - Menu Gen vs Raw Prompts
07:37 - What’s Obvious by 2026
09:41 - Verifiability and Jagged Skills
13:39 - Founder Advice and Automation
15:46 - From Vibe Coding to Agent Engineering
25:17 - Agents Everywhere and Learning

Let me know what you want. DM or email me at https://talkwithbooks.substack.com/ so I can send you the wisdom and resources you would like :)

Just an update on the uploading of new episodes. Let me know what you want. DM or email me at https://talkwithbooks.substack.com/ so I can send you the wisdom and resources you would like :)

For many years an atheist, C. S. Lewis vividly describes the spiritual quest that convinced him of the truth and reality of Christianity, in his famous autobiography.

“In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God … perhaps the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.” Thus Lewis describes memorably the crisis of his conversion.

‘Surprised by Joy’ reveals both that crisis and its momentous conclusion that would determine the shape of Lewis’s entire life.