Can AI Actually Teach? Inside Oboe with Nir Zicherman
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6 speakers1Transcript42 turns · 48 min
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dot com. The pushback that people would say, well, people aren't comfortable talking into a phone and recording their voice well that's not true because billions of people every day are having phone calls with each other and communicating in exactly that way so how could you say that people are not comfortable with that so i think it's all about a shift in perspective if you shift your perspective to say let me look at the behavior that people are already exhibiting and figure out the inefficiencies that exist that to me is a market opportunity so with podcasting was people were already exhibiting the behavior of storytelling and communicating and talking into their phones they just weren't recording them and distributing them through a particular channel
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Welcome to EdTech Insiders. We have a really amazing and very, very interesting guest with us today. We're talking to Nir Zikkerman. He's the CEO of Oboe. That's oboe.com, like the instrument. Oboe's mission is to teach 1 billion people 1 trillion things. And Nir has an amazing background for EdTech, right? In 2015, Nir co-founded Anchor, which grew to become the world's largest podcasting platform. After Spotify acquired Anchor in 2019 and basically became Spotify for podcasters, he led Spotify's expansion into audiobooks as the VP of audiobooks. And now he's working with Oboe, which is an incredible platform. If you haven't yet experienced it, I recommend you do, and we'll talk about it a lot today. Nir Zickerman, welcome to EdTech Insiders. Thank
you so much for having me. I got to tell you, Alex, since I worked in podcasting and audiobooks for a long time, you have a fantastic podcast voice. I don't know if people have told you that. No,
I've never actually been told that, and that's great to hear. I appreciate it a lot. So thank you. Yeah, that comes from somebody with an enormous amount of podcasting experience. Let's start there, because I don't think we've ever talked to somebody who came into the edtech world from this incredible media podcasting sort of empire. So based on your experience building podcasts, Anchor, which has reached millions and millions and millions of users, and now moving into the
2Episode notes
Nir Zicherman is the CEO of Oboe. Oboe's mission is to teach one billion people one trillion things. In 2015, Nir co-founded Anchor, which grew to become the world's largest podcasting platform. After Spotify acquired Anchor in 2019, he led Spotify's expansion into audiobooks as VP of Audiobooks.
💡 5 Things You'll Learn in This Episode
- Why AI should teach—not just answer questions.
- How personalized learning paths can outperform traditional chatbots.
- Lessons from building consumer products that reach millions of users.
- Why curiosity and intrinsic motivation are the future of learning.
- How Oboe is reimagining education with AI-native learning experiences.
✨ Episode Highlights
[00:02:08] From Anchor to Oboe: why Nir made the leap from podcasting to AI-powered education.
[00:06:06] Why learning is the next great consumer technology opportunity.[00:10:00] How Oboe builds adaptive learning paths instead of AI chat conversations.
[00:17:12] The biggest flaw in large language models as teachers—and how Oboe addresses it.
[00:21:13] Bringing consumer product design principles to education.
[00:26:06] The vision to teach one billion people one trillion things.