TechStuff
TechStuff
Behind every innovation is a new kind of power. TechStuff unpacks how technology reshapes influence, creativity, and control, from Silicon Valley’s rising moguls to the cultural forces they create. Because tech is the new religion, economy, and entertainment, all at once. Each week, Oz Woloshyn and the brightest minds covering tech dig into the weird, funny, and sometimes unsettling ways technolo…Social links:
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Shell Game: Minimum Viable Company
In Season 2 of Shell Game, journalist Evan Ratliff tells a story of entrepreneurship in the AI age; or, how he tried to build a real company, run by fake people. Meet Kyle Law and Megan Flores, Evan’s AI agent cofounders, as he puts to the test the claims about an emerging future in which AI emplo…
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Are You Ready For A ‘Hot Surveillance Summer’? - Week in Tech
Who’s afraid of China’s open-source AI models? Nitasha Tiku (The Washington Post) breaks down the secret battle between Silicon Valley and Chinese AI labs, why Anthropic was surveilling China-based users, and whether "adversarial distillation" is a national security threat or just a term American c…
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Skyline Drive: Organ Trail
Did you love TechStuff’s last episode, 'The Tech That Helps You Live Forever', and want to hear more from Mangesh Hattikudur? Check out Episode 5 of the podcast Skyline Drive: How to Live Forever. In this season of Skyline Drive, Mangesh Hattikudur (Part-Time Genius, Mental_Floss) dives into the …
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The Tech That Helps You Live Forever - The Story
What's it like to feel your body age in minutes? And will this tech actually affect how long we live? Oz sits down with Mangesh Hattikudur, host of Skyline Drive: How to Live Forever, to find out. This season, Mangesh dives into a world familiar to many Silicon Valley billionaires: longevity. He m…
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Why Animal Rights Advocates Are Investigating AI Consciousness - Week in Tech
Do chatbots have feelings? Anthropic, Google, and Meta are hiring computer scientists, neuroscientists, and philosophers to find out. Nitasha Tiku (The Washington Post) explains why the search for AI consciousness has gone from fringe theory to Silicon Valley mainstream, and why the answer matters …
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Big Tech’s Most Valuable Product Isn’t AI. It’s the Belief that AI is Inevitable - The Story
Do you work with machines, or for machines? Cory Doctorow, who coined the term “enshittification,” has a new book that asks exactly that. In The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before It's Too Late, he challenges the belief that AI is inevitable,…
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Shell Game: The Future Isn't Real
Evan pushes the experiment one step further, sending his AI voice agent to talk to his closest friends and family — his buddies, his daughters, his dad. With their alternately joyful, skeptical, and painful reactions to meeting an AI version of him, he tries to come to terms with what generative AI…
53:34
TechStuff Redux: How Google DeepMind Accidentally Started the AI Race
What drives a man to turn down half a million pounds at 18, test Mark Zuckerberg's sincerity over dinner, and wonder aloud if he can win a second Nobel Prize? For Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, the answer is a lifelong pursuit of artificial general intelligence — and an unsh…
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This Founder's Failed Social Networking Site Led to a Multi-Billion Dollar Idea - The Story
How do you build a billion-dollar startup? Ask Mark Pincus. The founder of Zynga and creator of FarmVille, Mark turned a $350,000 personal investment into one of the most successful gaming companies in history — eventually selling to Take-Two Interactive for over $12 billion. Along the way, he inv…
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The Quantum Shift in Biomedical Discovery
When Dr. Lara Jehi began treating epilepsy patients in the 2000s, critical surgical decisions were driven more by clinician intuition and expertise than data. Today, she is a leader of IBM and Cleveland Clinic’s Discovery Accelerator, using advanced AI and quantum computing to transform how researc…
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