After losing an MIT recruit to a Princeton doctoral program, the Moonshots panel argued that the next two or three years are the last window in which humans steering fleets of AI agents will be unusually valuable — and that a PhD spends that window badly. Then the objection arrived from their own side of the table: everyone there holds the degrees they are telling young people to skip.
On the Moonshots podcast, Salim Ismail, Alex and Emad Mostaque describe the same problem from different desks: agents now produce more work than a person can review. Their answers range from designing escalation thresholds inside companies to Mostaque's decision to read his research agents' output only once a week.
On The Diary of a CEO, writer Ed Zitron described catching an invented Microsoft share price in his Bloomberg terminal, then argued that his editor Matt Hughes — not a benchmark number — is what makes an answer trustworthy. The host pushed back: buyers pay for the output, not the process, and the honest comparison is AI against fallible people rather than perfection.
On The Diary of a CEO, critic Ed Zitron praises a chatbot for reading a troubleshooting log and for helping fix his son's Minecraft mod, then argues that neither is worth a trillion dollars. The host counters with his fiancée's one-woman business and his chief of staff's inbox. The argument turns on tokens, subscription rate limits and who is paying the real bill.