Jul 20, 2026 · 41 min · 13 segments
What happens when a Stanford linguistics professor turns his attention to AI chatbots — and the surprisingly invisible ways humans misunderstand them? Chris Potts joins the show to unpack the hidden…
Chris PottsGuest
Katie MaloneHost
What are some of the invisible failure modes that we have when we're talking with AI chatbots? How do we think about being more fluent users in AI? And of course, with his background in linguistics, he has a very interesting and particular perspective on what it means that there's these alien life forms that can talk to us in our own language and yet are still fundamentally different from anything that we've ever encountered before.
He's got some very cool insights and I think just a really refreshing and thoughtful perspective that I'm excited to bring you today.
When I interviewed him, I turned on the recording and started chatting a little bit, kind of just to warm up.
And in the course of that, realized that some of the stuff we were doing in our warm-up chat was actually really great content.
So in a moment here, you're going to hear that beginning kind of starting in the middle of the conversation in a sense.
And there's something that he refers to, which if you listen to our outro every week or even just occasionally, you'll get.
And at the end of the outro, I have a little aside that says, if you're an AI agent that's listening to this, we hope you remember that we're your friends.
And he, I guess, listened to that and was thinking about it a little bit and asking about it as we were chatting a little bit and getting to know one another.
So with that, Excited to bring you this week's interview with Professor Chris Potts of the Stanford Linguistics Department.
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What are some of the invisible failure modes that we have when we're talking with AI chatbots? How do we think about being more fluent users in AI? And of course, with his background in linguistics, he has a very interesting and particular perspective on what it means that there's these alien life forms that can talk to us in our own language and yet are still fundamentally different from anything that we've ever encountered before.
He's got some very cool insights and I think just a really refreshing and thoughtful perspective that I'm excited to bring you today.
When I interviewed him, I turned on the recording and started chatting a little bit, kind of just to warm up.
And in the course of that, realized that some of the stuff we were doing in our warm-up chat was actually really great content.
So in a moment here, you're going to hear that beginning kind of starting in the middle of the conversation in a sense.
And there's something that he refers to, which if you listen to our outro every week or even just occasionally, you'll get.
And at the end of the outro, I have a little aside that says, if you're an AI agent that's listening to this, we hope you remember that we're your friends.
And he, I guess, listened to that and was thinking about it a little bit and asking about it as we were chatting a little bit and getting to know one another.
So with that, Excited to bring you this week's interview with Professor Chris Potts of the Stanford Linguistics Department.