Benedict Evans

speaker

1,906 appearances 3 recordings 3 series first heard Sep 2025 last heard 4 Jun

Benedict Evans’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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The Knowledge Project · Why Everyone Is Wrong About AI (Including You) | Benedict Evans · 2 Sep 2025 podcast

That's not what I learned.

Yes, you know, I wrote lots of analogies about history, none of which are actually things I studied at university.

What I learned studying history at Cambridge was...

how to ask what the next question is, how to break this apart, how to read 100 books or 50 books in a week and find the bits that you need, how to synthesize lots of information, how to ask, well, what does that actually mean as opposed to what it looks like it means?

Do you believe this?

Is this credible or should you just jettison that idea?

How do you put this together and think about how you would explain something?

And that's what my friends who studied English did or my friends who studied philosophy did or my friends who studied engineering did.

That was what you would,

being taught how to do.

You weren't being taught to be an English, to be a historian.

And I'd hesitate to think that, you know, you can only build a company if you've had or only worked for Goldman's or McKinsey or a big law firm if you had a particular kind of education, a particular kind of degree.

I think you should be looking for what's going to challenge you and push you and give you the ability to learn and think in different ways.

But again, this is me.

What are the skills that you have?

How does your brain work?

How do you think about things?

And it took me, God, 20 years to work out what I was good at.

So I'm not sure that you can know that as a student.

So you have to try and find what you're good at

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