The Aboard Podcast

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Episodes

226

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Oct 2026

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About the show

Talking about AI doesn’t have to feel like the end of the world. Join Rich Ziade, Paul Ford, and their guests as they discuss how AI is changing software development, business strategy—and everything else. New episodes every Tuesday.

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October 13, 202652 min

Jason Goldman: From VC Pitches to AI Kill Switches

How can we get politicians and Silicon Valley on the same AI page? On this week’s episode, Paul and Rich welcome on Jason Goldman, whose long career in tech has taken him from Blogger to Twitter to the Obama administration to his current endeavor, the Center for Shared AI Prosperity. “AI capabilities are advancing faster than the political system is responding,” CSAIP’s website reads; Jason explains the challenges around and different approaches to redressing this gap. Plus: as the host of the movie podcast Escape Hatch , Jason ranks his expectations for the fall tech industry films, and makes a big prediction about Dune: Part Three.

October 6, 202648 min

Katie Notopoulos: There Are Still LOLs on the Internet

How is AI reshaping internet culture? On this week’s episode, Paul is joined by a journalist who has truly looked into the digital abyss: Business Insider ’s Katie Notopoulos. Using a few recent AI-related stories Katie reported as a lens, they discuss the increasingly blurry boundaries between the real and the artificial on our social feeds. Katie is known for, among other things, her lists of the worst things on the internet; with AI, Paul asks, has “worst” somehow gotten “even worser”? Plus: In a classic reporter move, Katie flips the script and quizzes Paul about his 2014 essay on YouTube, “The American Room.”

September 29, 202628 min

Is Jev the New Shape of AI?

LLMs are often far too powerful for the small tasks they’re asked to complete. Is the more-contained Jev the alternative? On this week’s episode, Paul and Rich read a question from tech writer John Pavlus about Jev, a new model from Typesafe AI that’s been a major topic of discussion in programming circles recently. LLMs, Rich suggests, are often like using a power riding mower to cut the grass of your tiny lawn. As Paul breaks down Jev and others like it into layman’s terms, they debate whether this kind of technology is the future—or if it’ll just be one more thing absorbed by the AI giants?

September 22, 202635 min

Charity Majors: Embrace Your Computer’s Chaos

How is observability being redefined in the AI era? On this week’s episode, Paul and Rich sit down with Charity Majors, the co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb. After a crash course on observability, the conversation pivots to AI and its cascading effects—both on this subfield, and on the tech community overall. Some engineers try to plan for every eventuality, but Charity stresses that the best thinking comes when you accept that anything could go wrong at any time: “There’s liberty in chaos.”

September 15, 202628 min

AI Companies Shouldn’t Police Themselves

Tech execs are sounding alarms about the dangerously fast pace of LLM development. Will any regulators stop them? On this week’s episode, Paul and Rich discuss a heady few days in the world of Big AI, as Dario Amodei called for a slowdown on AI development that was soon echoed by other leaders like Sam Altman and Elon Musk. Do their stated concerns actually match up to reality? In our current political climate, how realistic is the idea of government intervention? Plus: Paul does a pretty convincing imitation of a data center.

September 8, 202631 min

AI Versus…Talking to People?

Problems with your boss? Why not fire up Claude and hit HR with a lengthy legalistic complaint? On this week’s episode, Paul and Rich look at the erosion of human-to-human communication in the AI era, springboarding off a friend’s anecdote about employees sending official-sounding LLM-generated documents to HR rather than starting with simple conversations. AI tools allow us to flood each others’ inboxes. Is that making it impossible to truly communicate?

September 1, 202653 min

Josh Tyrangiel: Media, Moats, and Middle School

All the investors are flocking to the Silicon Valley giants, but where is AI really making a difference on the ground? On this week’s episode, Paul and Rich welcome back writer and editor Josh Tyrangiel to talk about his new book, AI for Good: How Real People Are Using Artificial Intelligence to Fix Things That Matter . From hospitals to classrooms to the IRS, Josh has been chronicling the ways large and small that people are using AI to transform their fields. Plus: A discussion of the past, present, and future of the media industry, including that time Josh put airplanes having sex on a major magazine cover.

August 25, 202634 min

It’s Fun to Ship Software

It’s unrestrained summer fun, Paul Ford-style: Using AI tools to actually ship some software. On this week’s podcast, Paul shows Rich his recent vibe-coded project, Stellate.app, which visualizes whimsical, made-up musical genres and plays the corresponding electronically generated music. (Don’t worry: You’ll get to hear some!) This might have been a fun summer project, but what did Paul learn building it—and, importantly, getting it out into the world?

August 18, 202634 min

Kate Lee: Can AI Replace Editors Like Me?

What would you do if your boss said he wanted your help to automate away your job? On this week’s episode, Paul and Rich are joined by Kate Lee, the editor in chief of the AI-related publication Every . Kate’s boss, Dan Shipper, has proposed just that: For the past few years, they’ve been building software to try to reliably automate major parts of the editorial process. At Every , writers and editors alike regularly use AI tools. So what does it actually look like when AI is a fundamental part of an editorial workflow?

August 11, 202630 min

Why Is It So Hard To Ship With AI?

AI has radically changed the way software is built—so why aren’t we seeing a glut of cool new products as a result? On this week’s episode, Paul and Rich browse recent app-related headlines and product announcements, searching for anything that isn’t AI-infrastructure related: What are people actually building on top of LLMs these days? (Spoiler: Not much.) They then attempt to diagnose what’s going on here, invoking a variety of metaphors for building product with AI, from mirages in the desert to wearing a set of beer goggles.