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 ForwardKeith Sonderling, Deputy Labor Secretary, U.S. Department of Labor Jessica Garner, Managing Director, Innovative Learning, ISTE+ASCDElisabeth Jacobs, Associate Vice President, Urban InstituteLet 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 :)

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 Introduction00:30 DGX One Origin Story01:42 The Great Parallel03:31 Robotics Endgame Setup03:39 Why VLA Falls Short04:32 Video World Models06:09 DreamZero World Action07:46 Scaling Data Collection11:06 EgoScale And Scaling Laws15:39 DreamDojo And The RoadmapLet 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 :)

00:00 - Introduction00:44 - Feeling Behind as a Coder02:28 - Software 3.0 Explained03:44 - Agents as the Installer04:49 - Menu Gen vs Raw Prompts07:37 - What’s Obvious by 202609:41 - Verifiability and Jagged Skills13:39 - Founder Advice and Automation15:46 - From Vibe Coding to Agent Engineering25:17 - Agents Everywhere and LearningLet 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.