In the first episode of Talking Machines we meet our hosts, Katherine Gorman (nerd, journalist) and Ryan Adams (nerd, Harvard computer science professor), and explore some of the interviews you'll be able to hear this season. Today we hear some short clips on big issues, we'll get technical, but today is all about introductions.We start with Kevin Murphy of Google talking about his textbook that has become a standard in the field. Then we turn to Hanna Wallach of Microsoft Research NYC and UMass Amherst and hear about the founding of WiML (Women in Machine Learning). Next we discuss academia's relationship with business with Max Welling from the University of Amsterdam, program co-chair of  the 2013 NIPS conference (Neural Information Processing Systems). Finally, we sit down with three pillars of the field Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, and Geoff Hinton to hear about where the field has been and where it might be headed.