Ryan welcomes John Dickerson, CEO of Mozilla.ai, to talk about the evolving landscape of AI agents, the role of open source in keeping the tech ecosystem healthy, the challenges OS communities have faced with the rise of AI, and the implications of data privacy and user choice in the age of multi-agent AI systems.
Episode notes:
Mozilla.ai is building the agent platform that helps organizations safely automate real work with AI agents.
Connect with John on Linkedin or email him at john@mozilla.ai.
Python in 2025 is different. Threads really are about to run in parallel, installs finish before your coffee cools, and containers are the default. In this episode, we count down 38 things to learn this year: free-threaded CPython, uv for packaging, Docker and Compose, Kubernetes with Tilt, DuckDB and Arrow, PyScript at the edge, plus MCP for sane AI workflows. Expect practical wins and migration paths. No buzzword bingo, just what pays off in real apps. Join me along with Peter Wang and Calvin Hendrix-Parker for a fun, fast-moving conversation.
Join us on YouTube at pythonbytes.fm/live to be part of the audience. Usually Monday at 10am PT. Older video versions available there too.
Finally, if you want an artisanal, hand-crafted digest of every week of the show notes in email form? Add your name and email to our friends of the show list, we'll never share it.
Brian #1: djrest2 - A small and simple REST library for Django based on class-based views.
Never forget to pull again: Automatically discover and update all your Git repositories with one command.
Built initially to solve this problem
Rebuilt and published last week as part of my upcoming Agentic AI Programming for Python course. Get notified this week at training.talkpython.fm/getnotified
Update everything in a folder tree with gittyup
Review changes, blockers, etc with gittyup --explain
Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover: 1) Sam Altman says ChatGPT will start to have erotic chats with interested adults 2) Also, more sycophancy? 3) Is sycophancy the lost love language 4) Is erotic ChatGPT good for OpenAI’s business? 5) Is erotic ChatGPT a sign that AGI is actually far away? 6) OpenAI’s latest business metrics revealed 7) Google’s AI contributes to cancer discovery 8) Anthropic’s Jack Clark on AI becoming self aware 9) Is Zuck poaching Apple AI engineers mostly to hurt Apple? 10) AI’s sameness problem 11) Ranjan rants against workslop
---
Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice.
Episode overview:
Prince Nwadeyi spent years providing market research that unlocked South Africa's R600 billion (~USD 34.4 billion) informal economy for blue-chip clients. The likes of Swiss Re, Liberty, NASPARS all wanted the insights. Few wanted the execution risk.
In conversation with Andile Masuku, Nwadeyi explains why his holding company SAG Ventures stopped selling insights and started building businesses. From Mustard Finance Group (formerly Setana Capital) providing working capital to township spaza shops (micro convenience stores), to Purchase Pal embedding funeral cover into everyday groceries, Nwadeyi's ventures share a common thread: aligning incentives across entire value chains whilst playing a longer game than quarterly-focused corporates can stomach.
His journey from UCT postgrad researcher to operator deploying millions in credit with a claimed 99.9% repayment rate offers a masterclass in strategic patience and the power of granular consumer understanding.
Key insights:
- On why insights alone don't create impact: "We realised that some of the executives were not willing to take the risk, not for any risk of their own, but really just how the incentive structure set up within corporate." Nwadeyi discovered that knowing differently doesn't translate to acting differently when bonuses hang in the balance. The solution? Stop asking permission and build the innovation yourself.
- On aligning incentives to unlock impossible markets: Working capital finance to informal retailers seemed impossible until Nwadeyi mapped the ecosystem. Wholesalers wanted more sales but couldn't offer credit. They did have transaction data. "Can we build a technology solution that interprets that data at scale to enable unique insight that traditional finance institutions don't have access to?" The result: finance the stock purchase to the wholesaler, the SME repays over 14 days, everyone wins. One of their spaza shop clients recently scaled from one store to three and bought her first house for R1 million (~USD 57,400) cash.
- On thinking in decades whilst executing in months: "You don't have to think in days. You have to think in decades." Purchase Pal (what Nwadeyi claims to be "the world's first FMCG-embedded funeral insurance") represents one piece of a five-year strategy spanning multiple financial services verticals. The long game enables patient execution whilst maintaining corporate relevance. "What's my exit point? What's my entry point? Am I wanting to build this alongside?"
- On why research beats assumptions every time: A tearful interview during his MPhil research - a woman describing the humiliation of borrowing money to bury her mother whilst neighbours gossiped about her poverty - sparked the Purchase Pal concept. "What if we could unlock quote unquote, what I call, no cost insurance?" Years of ethnographic research revealed the margin structure in FMCG goods, the cost burden of traditional insurance intermediation, and the customer stickiness problem facing consumer goods manufacturers. Research made the impossible obvious.
Notable moment:
The pivot from consultant to operator: Walking through a Cape Flats township, Nwadeyi's co-founder encountered a spaza shop owner struggling for financing. "All I ever wanted to do is to feed myself, feed my family or feed my business." That human story, repeated across thousands of township retailers, shifted SAG from insight provider to solution builder. Traditional finance wouldn't touch these operators. Nwadeyi's team reportedly deployed over R100 million (~USD 5.7 million) and achieved 99.9% repayment rates.
Image credit: SAG Ventures
Andrei Kvapil, founder of Ænix and core developer of Cozystack, joins Ryan to dive into what it takes to build a cloud from scratch, the intricacies of Kubernetes and virtualization, and how open-source has made digital sovereignty possible.
Episode notes:
Cozystack is a Kubernetes-based framework for building a private cloud environment.
Sam Partee started out his love for tech/engineering by working on cars. After many y ears of working on cars, and even starting his own car stereo installation business, he decided that cards were finite and moved onto computers. He fell in love with the space, and the rest is history, filled with super computers, AI, distributed training, Redis and the lot. Outside of tech, he loves to take long hikes with his snowy husky.
Sam and his team built a prior solution, an agent to solve bugs for you. They ran into a litany of problems, but eventually figured out that there was a dire need for an authorization for the activities that agents wanted to do on your behalf. Fast forward, and they are working with Anthropic to define these auth protocols.
CodeCrafters helps you become a better engineer by building real-world, production-grade projects. Learn hands-on by creating your own Git, Redis, HTTP server, SQLite, or DNS server from scratch. Sign up for free today using this link and enjoy 40% off.
Join us on YouTube at pythonbytes.fm/live to be part of the audience. Usually Monday at 10am PT. Older video versions available there too.
Finally, if you want an artisanal, hand-crafted digest of every week of the show notes in email form? Add your name and email to our friends of the show list, we'll never share it.
Minor but annoying bug: content-types ≠ content_types on PyPI+ but they are in Python itself. Minimum Python version seems to be interpreted as max Python version.
Brian #2: uv-ship - a CLI-tool for shipping with uv
“uv-ship is a lightweight companion to uv that removes the risky parts of cutting a release. It verifies the repo state, bumps your project metadata and optionally refreshes the changelog. It then commits, tags & pushes the result, while giving you the chance to review every step.”
Rick Heitzmann is the founder and managing director of FirstMark Capital. Heitzmann joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss whether AI startups can compete against the ChatGPTs of the world, or whether the big AI bots have ingested all the opportunity. Tune in to hear Heitzmann break down the economics of AI investing today and whether the application layer is investable. We'll also break down the big funding deals in AI today, looking at the potential for the frenzy to pay off. Tune in for a sensible discussion of the potential future of AI innovation.
---
Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice.
Julia Shaw is a criminal psychologist and author who in her books explores human nature, including psychopathy, violent crime, the psychology of evil, police interrogation, false memory manipulation, deception detection, and human sexuality.
Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep483-sc
See below for timestamps, transcript, and to give feedback, submit questions, contact Lex, etc.
