Serious People Podcast

When AI Answers Your Doctor's Phone

Noah Levin — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 05:00:00 -0400

For the office manager at your doctor’s office, it’s not about having an "AI strategy." It’s about answering the phone during the 8am rush, or patients hanging up before anyone picks up.

Alex Cohen used to run product at Carbon Health, where he first tried to solve that problem with call-center software. Now he's co-founder of Hello Patient, where AI agents answer the phone, book appointments, and handle insurance and billing calls for healthcare clinics.

On this episode, he lays out the three rules his team won't break when they put AI in front of a patient. He also explains why the hardest part of any AI rollout isn't the AI; it's the 20% of the work that every clinic does differently. And he gives a direct answer to the question every operator actually has: what do I need to check before AI can touch my own systems?

No strategy decks. No jargon. Just what it takes to run AI inside a business that can't afford to get it wrong.

Topics covered:

What Hello Patient's AI agents actually do inside a healthcare clinic
The three non-negotiable rules for deploying AI in a clinical setting
How to actually get AI-ready (EMR access, APIs, compliance)

Chapters:

(00:00) Introduction
(01:00) Alex Cohen: From Carbon Health to Hello Patient's Origin Story
(06:03) Finding the Pattern: Building the First Voice AI
(08:05) From Manual IVRs to Agentic AI
(12:14) What Hello Patient Actually Does
(14:15) Rule #1 — No Clinical AI Without a Human in the Loop
(20:49) Rule #2 — Never Let AI Pretend to Be Human
(27:01) Rule #3 — Don't Try to Automate 100% of Calls
(29:44) The Last-Mile Problem: Why the Final 20% Is 90% of the Work
(33:25) Why EMRs Aren't Commoditized Like Your CRM
(34:58) How to Actually Get AI-Ready
(37:08) Why Some Systems Won't Give You API Access
(38:33) HIPAA, Compliance, and Where AI Actually Helps
(40:57) Where to Find Alex & Hello Patient

Resources:

Valet — Episode Sponsor

Valet is the founding sponsor of the Serious People Podcast.

AI is getting very good at making useful things: dashboards, analyses, internal websites, and small tools. Making those things available to the rest of a team is a separate problem.

Valet lets you publish AI-created artifacts to a stable URL. New sites are private by default, and members of your organization can access them after signing in.

Try Valet at https://valet.dev

Connect with Alex on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexander-cohen/

Follow Hello Patient on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/hello-patient/

Connect with Noah on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noahlevin/

Noah’s Website: https://www.noahlevin.com/

Serious People Website: https://seriouspeople.ai/

Matt Van Horn: Never Read the Plan

Noah Levin — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 05:00:00 -0400

Matt Van Horn got rid of his IDE. Then he got rid of his text editor. Now he doesn't even read the plan his AI agent writes; he just asks for the TL;DR (Too long; didn’t read) and lets it run. He's the founder behind three open-source projects (Last 30 Days, Printing Press, and Agent Cookie), the former founder of June, the smart oven company that put an NVIDIA GPU on a countertop appliance years before anyone said "agentic," and he's now building a new company in what he calls the "after Claude" era.

In this conversation, Noah and Matt get into what it actually looks like to trust an AI agent with real work, where that trust should stop, and why the calculus changes completely once real customers, real revenue, or real hardware are on the line.

In this episode, you’ll hear:

Why Matt stopped reading the plan, and when that's actually a bad idea
How building a company after Claude 4.5 changes headcount and strategy
The simplest way to start learning AI coding by contributing to open source

Chapters:
(00:00) Introduction

(02:15) The case for “dangerously skip permissions”

(03:31) From “don’t read the code” to “don’t read the plan”

(07:45) Why vibe coding died last Thanksgiving

(09:11) Matching your risk tolerance to the stakes

(11:13) Building a company after Claude 4.5

(15:04) Personal productivity with Granola and Claude Code

(16:05) The missing agentic email product

(18:07) How the open source projects feed the business

(20:35) The best way to start contributing to open source

(25:06) There's more than one right way to build now

Resources:

Sponsor: Valet — https://valet.dev — the secure place to share what AI creates.
Follow Valet on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/valetdotdev/

Connect with Noah on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noahlevin/
Serious People Website: https://seriouspeople.ai/

Connect with Matt on X: https://x.com/mvanhorn

Find Matt on GitHub: https://github.com/mvanhorn

June’s Website: https://juneoven.com/

Lyft’s Website: https://www.lyft.com/

Matt's projects

Last 30 Days: https://github.com/mvanhorn/last30days-skill

CLI Printing Press: https://github.com/mvanhorn/cli-printing-press

Printing Press Library: https://github.com/mvanhorn/printing-press-library

Agent Cookie: https://github.com/mvanhorn/agentcookie

Agentic engineering

Compound Engineering: https://github.com/EveryInc/compound-engineering-plugin

CE plan: https://github.com/EveryInc/compound-engineering-plugin/blob/main/docs/skills/ce-plan.md

Claude Code: https://claude.com/product/claude-code

OpenAI Codex: https://openai.com/codex/

Products and tools mentioned

Howie: https://howie.com/

Granola: https://www.granola.ai/

Superhuman: https://superhuman.com/

Clicky: https://github.com/farzaa/clicky

Wispr Flow: https://wisprflow.ai/

Digg: https://digg.com/

OpenClaw: https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw

Hermes Agent: https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent

cmux: https://github.com/manaflow-ai/cmux

Ghostty: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty

Podcast reference

Lenny's Podcast with Cat Wu: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7wTqD5zwl8ZitUeplapvBG

Cat Wu: https://www.linkedin.com/in/catwu/

Michael Ducker: What Actually Makes You an Agent Builder

Noah Levin — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 05:00:00 -0400

Michael Ducker and Noah Levin get into the practical mechanics of bringing AI into a real business. Michael shares the story behind his work building open source emoji at Twitter, then digs into why AI is creating real disillusionment even as it transforms how work gets done.

They walk through what it actually takes to get IT and a skeptical team on board, and the step-by-step process for turning a single AI session into a reusable skill through a technique called hill climbing.

The conversation lands on the real shift underway: agents moving from single-player tools into something teams build and share together, changing what it means to be a worker at all.

You’ll hear:

Three reasons AI adoption is creating disillusionment right now
How to get IT comfortable with AI tools through proxies and access controls
What a skill really is, and how to build one using the hill climbing technique
Moving from single player AI use to building agents with a team
Where to start automating real business processes, from knowledge bases to full agent workflows

Chapters:

(00:00) Introduction
(01:06) Michael's role in bringing open source emoji to the web
(04:10) Sponsor: Valet
(05:39) Three reasons AI is causing disillusionment
(09:33) The trust question: giving AI access to email and bank accounts
(12:07) The founding story of Valet
(15:43) What actually sells AI adoption to a team
(20:31) Building a shared folder as the foundation for team AI adoption
(22:45) What a skill is and how to build one through hill climbing
(32:34) Single-player vs. multiplayer mode
(33:39) What an agent is, and graduating to agent builder
(36:54) Where to start: high-value agent use cases
(42:37) Startup and model risk: playing the long game
(43:48) Where to find Michael, and wrap-up

Resources:
Valet — Episode Sponsor

Valet turns repeatable business processes into agents that work where your team already does—across Slack, email, calendars, and the tools you use every day. Try the Calendar Research agent, which researches who you’re meeting and sends the context you need directly to Slack before the conversation.

Set up Calendar Research with Valet

https://dashboard.valet.dev/deploy/calendar-research

Valet — own the business, not the busy-ness.

Follow Valet on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/valetdotdev/

Valet Website: https://valet.dev/

Connect with Michael on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/miradu/

Connect with Michael in person at Agent Builders Breakfast: https://agentbuildersbreakfast.com/

Connect with Noah on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noahlevin/

Serious People Website: https://seriouspeople.ai/

Serious People: Real AI for Real Businesses

Noah Levin — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 15:19:32 -0400

Most AI content is tech people talking to tech people. Serious People is different.

This is for the operators actually running things — selling supplements, managing caregivers, coordinating field crews. Real businesses with bad data, compliance headaches, and employees who've heard it all before.

Host Noah Levin spent almost twenty years inside complex operations at Amazon, Whole Foods, and healthcare tech. Now he sits down with operators who've done the work: what broke, what they tried, what it cost, and whether it actually paid off.

No hype. No magic prompts. No pretending the hard part is picking a model. Just AI, inside a real business, from people who run one.

New episodes start this month. Subscribe now.

Resources:

Connect with Noah on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noahlevin/

Noah’s Website: https://www.noahlevin.com/

Serious People Website: https://seriouspeople.ai/