



The Secret Stanford Off-Campus Class for Tech’s Next Titans - The Story
Did your college have a secret society? Well, Stanford has a secret off-campus class training the next generation of Silicon Valley billionaires. And it's literally called "How to Rule the World." Theo Baker arrived at Stanford as an aspiring coder with dreams of building the future. Instead, he s…

Shell Game: Me and My Scammer
Evan turns his AI-powered voice agent loose on the people who are always at the forefront of technological adoption: the fraudsters and the rip-off artists. How will the scammers and spammers react when they face Evan’s voice agent in a battle of wits? And what happens when they deploy the same kin…

Blue Origin Rocket Explodes in Apocalyptic Mushroom Cloud - Week in Tech
Blue Origin's latest rocket test ended in what the company called "an anomaly" — and what everyone else would call an explosion. Reed Albergotti (Semafor) explains why blowing things up is just part of the process and why the US Space Program is probably going to be fine. Then, Kyle Chayka (The N…

The Man Building the Last AI Humans Will Need to Design - The Story
What if the fastest path to superintelligence is AI that builds itself? That's the bet Richard Socher is making — and he has the track record to back it up. A double unicorn founder and early investor in eight unicorn companies (including Perplexity and Hugging Face), Richard has spent 15 years bui…

Inside the Octagon: How AI Brings UFC’s Fastest Moments into Focus
Most of what happens inside the UFC Octagon is too fast for the human eye to follow. Enter Alon Cohen, Executive Vice President of Innovation for TKO, who has spent 15 years building the data and AI systems that expose the hidden moments that help decide a match. Malcolm Gladwell sits down with Alo…

Shell Game: Quality Assurance
This is the story of what happens when Evan Ratliff, a longtime tech journalist, makes a digital copy of himself, powered by AI, in order to understand how amazing and scary and utterly ridiculous the world is about to get. In Episode 1, Evan clones his voice, hooks it up to a chat bot and his phon…

The Pope vs. AI? It’s Complicated - Week in Tech
The Pope called for AI to be "disarmed" — then gave Anthropic a seat on the dais. Nitasha Tiku (The Washington Post) unpacks what the Vatican's landmark intervention means for Silicon Valley. Then, get off Nextdoor, Kyle Chayka (The New Yorker) says hyperlocal publications are in vogue and a respit…

How AI Almost Led To This Tech Reporter’s Divorce - The Story
What happens when you let technology take over your life? Joanna Stern (Fmr. Wall Street Journal / New Things) found out. She spent all of 2025 letting the robots in: Waymos, AI therapists, robot massagers, assistant researcher agents… During that yearlong experiment, Joanna Stern chronicled her f…

Google's AI chief: We're Living in the “Foothills of the Singularity” - Week In Tech
What does it mean to be at the “foothills of the singularity”? That’s how DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis ended his speech at Google I/O, prompting questions and scratched heads. Oz and Reed Albergotti (Semafor) attempt to dissect the meaning behind Hassabis’s confounding statement. They also discuss w…

The ‘Steroid Olympics’ Brought to You By Big Tech - The Story
What if Olympic athletes could use steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs, legally? They can now, at the Enhanced Games. The Enhanced Games take place on May 24th and it’s anyone’s guess what will happen. Unless you’re Chris Gayomali, host of the new podcast SuperHuman, which is an inside …