Issue No. 40Week ending Sunday, October 4, 2026507 episodes · 2183 articles
The Throughline ↓
The Podcast Summary.

10+ hours of podcasts, in 5 minutes.

Trend Steady

AI agents: how often the top podcasts talk about it.

AI agents came up in 22 of 89 episodes (25%) in the four weeks to Sep 27, about the same share as in the earlier weeks (20%).

22 of 89episodes, four weeks to Sep 27

Share of episodes, four weeks at a time

19%May 1010 of 5226%Jun 712 of 4617%Jul 512 of 6924%Aug 213 of 5515%Aug 308 of 5525%Sep 2722 of 89
Share of episodes from the tech, business and science shows we cover that said “AI agent” or “coding agent” at least twice, in blocks of four weeks. Each label is the block's last Sunday. The newest block is the orange bar on the right.
The 22 episodes behind the newest bar

Earliest mentions in our archive

The first episode from each show that said it, oldest first. The matched words are marked.

“…they're thinking more about their data strategy and often you want your AI agents for example to read a lot of data…”

Invest Like the Best · week ending Feb 8 · Watch at 32:30 ↗

Cloudflare: Leading Cybersecurity [Business Breakdownes Ep 241]Cloudflare Final

“…for mental health, LMNT, for electrolytes, Fin, for customer service AI agents, Shopify for selling stuff online, and Perplexity, for curiosity-driven knowledge exploration.”

Lex Fridman Podcast · week ending Apr 5 · Watch at 1:05:59 ↗

Vikings, Ragnar, Berserkers, Valhalla & the Warriors of the Viking Age | Lex Fridman Podc…

“Yes, a year ago, nobody was talking about AI agents. And now, if you are a large enterprise, you probably have AI…”

Acquired · week ending Apr 12 · Watch at 1:27:49 ↗

Ferrari: What happens when you staple a luxury brand to a sports team? (Audio)

“AI security and AI privacy and AI safety. There’s a whole ecosystem of AI startups that are trying to create this future for us, where you have one AI agent that's incredible, surrounded by thousands of AI agents, keeping it safe, keeping it secure.”

Dwarkesh Podcast · week ending Apr 12 · Watch at 1:01:35 ↗

Jensen Huang – Will Nvidia’s moat persist?

“…understand what people are saying. Once you have AI agents doing all this stuff, you're going to want to know what the AI…”

20VC with Harry Stebbings · week ending Apr 19 · Watch at 1:25:57 ↗

Cursor Acquired for $60BN | Anthropic Hits $1TRN in Secondary Markets & Figma, Adobe, Can…

“I will go ahead and try to address this with our coding agent. So, please remove the public preview badge from the…”

Cheeky Pint · week ending Apr 26 · Watch at 10:03 ↗

Stripe Sessions 2026 | Developer keynote

Most recent mentions

The newest episodes that count toward the chart, no more than two from one show.

“…and password resets. Um, let's let's see what's next. Uh, Meta, the AI agent company Muse, they're putting humans in…”

TBPN · week ending Sep 27 · Watch at 26:48 ↗

Andreessen Horowitz Launches Horowitz Andreessen, New Models, Human Powered Agents, McLar…

“…of environments for quite a while, right? Because there've been enterprises for for quite a while. Maybe just give us a sense of like leading up to AI agents, and we'll talk about agents here in a second, but leading up to AI agents... ...like what were some of the ways that you could, I guess,…”

Practical AI · week ending Sep 27 · Listen at 4:29 ↗

From AGENTS.md to Enterprise Deployment

“…extremely actionable. And so we did that. We built our own AI agent called Glass. And we gave it all the context it…”

Lenny's Podcast · week ending Sep 27 · Watch at 6:38 ↗

The limiting factor—how to design an AI software factory for speed | Geoff Charles (Ramp…

“…one thing one thing you also did with the coding agents was that you broke out which are the top coding agents and they…”

Latent Space · week ending Sep 27 · Watch at 1:07:54 ↗

The $10 Trillion Token Economy — Alex Atallah, OpenRouter & Anjney Midha, AMP

“…billion people start using, you know, personal AI agents as their digital assistant just to help make their lives…”

All-In Podcast · week ending Sep 27 · Watch at 1:11:46 ↗

Anthropic IPO at Risk, Meta’s Muse Pop, Token Prices Fall, Open Source Gains Share, Align…

Which shows say it

ShowLast four weeksAll weeks counted
TBPN922
Lenny's Podcast35
Latent Space216
20VC with Harry Stebbings29
Dwarkesh Podcast23
How I AI18
No Priors15
All-In Podcast14
Practical AI11
Cheeky Pint03
Invest Like the Best01
My First Million01

More trends

Episodes in the newest four weeks:

How we count. An episode counts when its transcript says “AI agent” or “coding agent” at least twice; plurals count too. We count a shortened re-upload of an episode we already have only once, and we skip the sponsor reads we can spot: the lines around phrases like “brought to you by”, and any passage a show reads word for word in three or more episodes. The share is the counted episodes divided by all episodes from the tech, business and science shows we cover in the same four weeks, so a busy month of releases does not raise it by itself. The mix of shows does change from month to month, and one daily show can move a number. Weeks run Monday to Sunday, and the week in progress is left out until it ends. The chart starts with the week of April 13, 2026, when our archive became steady. A few older episodes can still appear under the earliest mentions, and some weeks have gaps. Transcripts are automatic captions, so we also match the spellings they use. The counts cover only the shows we summarize. Download the counts (JSON) or CSV.

The Sunday Email

Get next Sunday's issue in your inbox.

10+ hours of podcasts, distilled into one 5-minute read. Free, every Sunday.

Newsletters

For now, every subscriber gets both newsletters. No spam. Unsubscribe with one click.