SHIFT

Engineers charged with maintaining secure and reliable sites and services need to be able to observe what’s going on inside their systems. That observability data helps them spot issues sooner,  fix problems faster, and learn from the whole experience.
A live conversation from the stage at the HumanX Conference in San Francisco.

We Meet: 
Christine Yen is the Co-founder and CEO of Honeycomb,
Jennifer Tejada is the CEO and chairperson of PagerDuty

Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

Best-known as the creator of ImageNet, we meet the Godmother of AI, Dr. Fei-Fei Li In the latest installment of our oral history project. She's a Chinese-American computer scientist and the creator of ImageNet - the dataset that made rapid advances possible in this field of AI that helps computers take meaningful information from things like photos and videos.

We Meet: 
Stanford University's Fei-Fei Li, author of "The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI" and the founder of World Labs

Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

Each day more than 11,000 people in the US turn 65 years old. It adds up to more than 4,000,000 people a year, and the labor force that serves them is struggling to keep up with that demand - a problem that’s unlikely to go away anytime soon. 
We explore this shift and how might technology be used to help people age in place in the latest installment of our oral history project.

We Meet: 
Chia-Lin Simmons is the CEO of Logic Mark

Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

Lately, it feels like you can’t go more than a few minutes without hearing someone talk about AI agents, and there’s a very good reason for that. Agents are doing more work, more quickly and in more places, and we’ve developed ways to help them retain knowledge from things they’ve done, and then build upon those experiences.
But what if the experience agents gain on a job changes the work product in ways we didn’t predict? How do you make sure that agent does what you want it to do? This episode, we explore the alignment problem in the age of AI agents.

We Meet: 
Andy Hall is a professor in the Political Economy Group at Stanford, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

Astro Teller, Alphabet’s Captain of Moonshots, joins us for a conversation about the importance of failure, workplace culture in a moonshot factory, and not throwing away your shot.

We Meet: 
Astro Teller is the Captain of Moonshots at X, Alphabet's Moonshot Factory

Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

This episode originally ran in April 2025.