Cal Newport on Mythos and Anthropomorphization
Better Offline
Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 687 Ratings
🗓️ 22 April 2026
⏱️ 62 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this week’s Better Offline, Ed is joined by computer science professor and writer Cal Newport to talk about the Claude Mythos marketing scam, the lies around AI job loss, and why LLMs shouldn’t talk like they’re people.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an IHeart podcast. |
| 0:02.5 | Guaranteed human. |
| 0:04.4 | No gloss, no filter. |
| 0:07.4 | Just stories. |
| 0:09.1 | Spoken without fear. |
| 0:10.9 | Person who is not generous can not be an artist. |
| 0:13.8 | The world will be at peace only when it is ruled by poets and philosophers. |
| 0:18.4 | Listen to my weekly podcast, the Pooja Abhaw show and the I Heart Radio app, |
| 0:22.9 | Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. |
| 0:27.6 | Come for the honesty. |
| 0:29.2 | Stay for the fire. |
| 0:35.6 | CallZo Media. |
| 0:42.1 | Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm of course your host at Zittron. |
| 1:03.4 | As ever, support your neighborhood Zitron by subscribing to the premium newsletter, discount link in the episode notes, of course, buy a t-shirt, download a blog where it, whatever it is you want to do, okay? |
| 1:09.9 | It's not up to me what you do, but today I'm joined by the incredible Compside Professor and commentator Cal Newport Cal. |
| 1:10.9 | Thank you for joining me. |
| 1:12.0 | Always a pleasure, Ed. |
| 1:17.6 | So I kind of wanted to start with, I asked you for a quote a few, like a week ago, maybe two weeks ago. I can't remember how time works anymore. But it was around the way the reporters |
| 1:22.6 | cover AI and how it seems that a lot of the reporting is kind of directionally true rather than |
| 1:28.8 | actually true. |
| 1:30.9 | Yes, and I want to add something to it since. |
| 1:33.7 | So I've been thinking about that quote. |
... |
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