Show Notes
Tori Westerhoff joins Scott to explore the intersection of AI, human psychology, and personal growth. As people increasingly use LLMs for introspection and decision-making, Tori argues that we're missing the diversity of thought that comes from community, even particularly random encounters with strangers. She reveals her own practice: a daily noon reminder to talk to strangers. "If you sycophant yourself, you're never going to grow," she explains. The conversation delves into how LLMs can create echo chambers of thought, and why the randomness of human connection, even just someone on the same bus, helps us update our mental frames and break out of programmed decision-making paradigms.
More from Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman
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A young man who's a sophomore in high school emailed me to come on his podcast that he does with his friend, and I had so much fun. I decided to make it a crossover episode. Check out "Compile after Class" on this week's episode!
Maynard Holliday spent 30+ years at the intersection of robotics, nuclear security, and defense technology, most recently serving as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Critical Technologies. He's worked on everything from helping remediate Three Mile Island to securing tons of Soviet nuclear material in post-Cold War Ukraine to overseeing the Pentagon's critical technology portfolio including AI, hypersonics, and microelectronics. He shares what "trusted AI" really means, why he co-founded Black in Robotics, and how T'Challa and Tony Stark shaped his career more than you'd expect.
Felix Rieseberg came to computing through poetry, and that background gives him a unique lens for explaining language models. A longtime engineer, Felix now gets to watch AI evolve from the inside. In this episode, Scott and Felix explore why language models are surprisingly easy to understand despite feeling magical, what it's like to train a model from noise to coherence, and the bigger philosophical questions about intelligence that AI keeps surfacing. You can learn how AI really works by making your own in a weekend with his free https://languagemodelbuilder.com/