Nicolas Niarchos is a journalist whose work focuses on conflicts, migration and, most recently, the energy transition. Specifically, the hidden costs of extracting minerals like cobalt, which remains a critical element in the technology we use to run our lives. Niarchos sits down with Oz to discuss what he’s observed in mineral-rich Congo and Indonesia – and how the battle for geopolitical advantage over these natural resources are overturning the world order. See omnystudio.com/list...
May 07, 2025•31 min
Can AI help search-and-rescue dogs do their job? This week in the News Roundup, Oz and Karah explore the AI-powered technologies being used in war and why some Meta staffers worry about underage users interacting with their AI companions. On TechSupport, Olivia Carville, an investigative reporter at Bloomberg and the host of the podcast Levittown , discusses the Take It Down Act and what it means for the future of the internet. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
May 02, 2025•40 min
Evan Ratliff is an investigative journalist and podcast host. His Wired article, “The Delirious, Violent, Impossible True Story of the Zizians,” marked the culmination of a two-year deep-dive into a group of young tech radicals and their spiral into violence. Ratliff sits down with Oz to unpack how the group formed, what they believed – the parts we can decipher, at least – and how those beliefs led to alleged murder. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
Apr 30, 2025•29 min
Should you delete yourself from the internet? This week in the News Roundup, Oz and Karah dig into humanoid robots running a half-marathon, the AI-generated personas helping law enforcement interact with potential suspects and Google’s updated ‘Results About You’ tool. On TechSupport, Jeff Rosenthal, the co-founder of the venture capital firm CIV, discusses the role of private investment in building out energy infrastructure to meet the AI boom. See omnystudio.com/listener for ...
Apr 25, 2025•37 min
Lionel Barber is a journalist, author, and former editor of the Financial Times . He’s interviewed state leaders like former US President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. But in Gambling Man: The Wild Ride of Japan’s Masayoshi Son , Barber chronicles the life of SoftBank’s enigmatic CEO from his childhood as an ethnic Korean in Japan to becoming the richest man in the world – briefly. Barber sits down with Oz to discuss the impact SoftBank’s investm...
Apr 23, 2025•36 min
How would Salvador Dalí have used generative AI? This week in the News Roundup, Oz and Karah dig into this year’s most common uses for generative AI, the rise of code editor, Cursor, and how Google DeepMind’s Veo2 interprets a surrealist screenplay. On TechSupport, The Washington Post’s staff writer, Naomi Nix, discusses the first week of Meta’s antitrust trial. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
Apr 18, 2025•42 min
Jen Statsky is a comedian, writer, and producer who’s worked on some of TV’s biggest comedies like The Good Place , Parks & Recreation and Broad City . Most recently, she’s been behind the scenes as one of the co-creators of the hit show Hacks . Jen sits down with Karah to talk about how writing and producing for TV has changed in the face of accelerating AI, the “second-screening” phenomenon, and the optimization of streaming services. See omnystudio.com/listen...
Apr 16, 2025•39 min
What’s a ‘mega API’? This week in the News Roundup, Oz and Karah break down the ever-evolving landscape of tariffs and what it all means for tech companies, Tinder’s ChatGPT-powered dating game, and the rise of ‘Frankenstein’ laptops in India. On TechSupport, The Wall Street Journal’s Family & Tech Columnist Julie Jargon explains how imposter scams are becoming more believable thanks to generative AI. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy informati...
Apr 11, 2025•33 min
Reid Hoffman is a longtime entrepreneur, venture capitalist and author. Throughout his career, Hoffman has helped build or support some of the biggest tech companies we know today. He was one of PayPal’s first employees, a co-founder of LinkedIn and an early investor and board member for OpenAI. These days, Hoffman spends a lot of time thinking about the potential positive outcomes of AI development, which is the subject of his latest book — Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right ...
Apr 09, 2025•43 min
How do LLMs solve math problems? This week in the News Roundup, Oz and Karah explore what AI models could mean for the fashion industry, the humble-but-mighty device our modern world depends on, and what Anthropic’s researchers learned about the inner workings of their LLM. On TechSupport, The Washington Post’s technology reporter Gerrit De Vynck explains the state of the AI race and how some of tech’s biggest companies are vying for position. See omnystudio.com/listener for pr...
Apr 04, 2025•41 min
Zak Brown is the CEO of McLaren Racing, the second-oldest Formula 1 team. When he joined in 2016, McLaren was in a difficult spot — lagging behind in race wins, sponsorships, and morale. Brown set out to transform the team by elevating their in-house racing technology and fostering active collaboration. He led the team to win the F1 Constructors’ Championship last year, their first one after more than 25 years. In this episode, Oz visits McLaren's headquarters to speak with Brown abo...
Apr 02, 2025•33 min
What even is a crypto mixer? This week in the News Roundup, Oz and Karah dig into potential Slack-enabled corporate espionage, the recall of a Kim K-beloved product and the group chat that broke the internet. On TechSupport, The Washington Post’s technology columnist Geoffrey Fowler discusses 23andMe’s financial woes and what it means for the genetic data of the roughly 15 million people who bought DNA testing kits from the company. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information...
Mar 28, 2025•38 min
This is the first episode of a new podcast called Levittown. It’s a real-life horror story for the AI generation. In this six-part series from Bloomberg, Kaleidoscope and iHeartPodcasts, reporters Olivia Carville and Margi Murphy take listeners from the quiet suburbs of New York to as far as New Zealand and into the darkest corners of the internet. Where tech moves faster than the law, and it’s up to everyday people to hold back a rising tide of explicit deepfakes. See omnystudio.com...
Mar 26, 2025•31 min
How do you calm down a chatbot? This week in the News Roundup, Oz and producer Eliza Dennis dig into the book that Meta doesn’t want you to read, chatbot reactions to stressful stimuli, and the new home of Pokémon Go data . On TechSupport, 404 Media ’s Joseph Cox discusses a tool with surprising data scraping capabilities that is used by US agencies like ICE. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
Mar 21, 2025•28 min
Astro Teller is Alphabet’s Captain of Moonshots. He oversees projects at X – the moonshot factory behind innovations like Waymo and Google Brain. To celebrate X’s 15 years of pushing boundaries, Astro Teller decided to take listeners inside the factory. On The Moonshot Podcast , inventors and entrepreneurs behind breakthrough technologies reflect on their projects, both the highs and the lows. Teller sits down with Oz to discuss the process of experimentation, the importance of...
Mar 19, 2025•34 min
Could AI help you land an internship? This week in the News Roundup, Oz and producer Eliza Dennis explore the rise of vibecoding, what it means for the future of software development and how one college programmer hopes to reform the Big Tech hiring process. On TechSupport, Oz chats with the founder and researcher of the Exponential View newsletter, Azeem Azhar, about the latest AI innovation and its significance in the battle for technological supremacy. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy ...
Mar 14, 2025•32 min
David Eagleman is a neuroscientist, author, entrepreneur and host of the podcast Inner Cosmos . In his podcast, he explores how our brains interpret the world and construct reality. Eagleman sits down with Oz to discuss AI relationships, the human urge to anthropomorphize chatbots and the benefits of living on the exponential curve. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mar 12, 2025•30 min
What if AI could read your mind? This week in the News Roundup, Oz and producer Eliza Dennis explore the latest tech investment in the US, Meta’s brain-to-text breakthrough and the creation of the woolly mouse. On TechSupport, 404 Media ’s Jason Koebler takes us to an AI-generated film festival… spoiler: the tech isn’t there yet. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mar 07, 2025•30 min
Bradley Hope is a journalist, author and co-founder of Project Brazen, a narrative non-fiction production studio. His piece in Wired , ‘A Spymaster Sheikh Controls a $1.5 Trillion Fortune. He Wants to Use It to Dominate AI,’ outlines how one Gulf royal – Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed al Nahyan – came to control vast sums of sovereign wealth. Hope sits down with Oz to discuss Sheikh Tahnoun’s early obsession with AI, his path to becoming the UAE’s national security ...
Mar 05, 2025•32 min
This week, Oz is on the road, at the Web Summit Qatar, and he’s not alone. Joining him from the iHeart pop-up studio in Doha is a very familiar figure, Jonathan Strickland. Oz and Jonathan sit down to discuss some of the highlights of the Web Summit, including the future of the AI chip race, advances in augmented reality and how news organizations are grappling with AI. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Feb 28, 2025•39 min
Ben Taub is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and staff writer at The New Yorker . His piece, “Russia’s Espionage War in the Arctic,” covers tensions at the Russian border with Norway, an area Russia uses as a testing ground for future intelligence operations. Taub sits down with Oz to discuss the technology being used for survival and for espionage, as the war in Ukraine has escalated tensions with NATO. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
Feb 26, 2025•32 min
This week, TechStuff teams up with Part-Time Genius for a special crossover episode. Oz and Mangesh Hattikudur, host of Part-Time Genius , discuss a largely misunderstood group of machine destroyers. The Luddites. Joining them is tech journalist Brian Merchant, author of Blood in the Machine , to dig into the history of humans fighting against job automation, why we equate Luddites with technophobes and what we can learn from these 19th century rebels in the age of AI. See omnystudio.com/listene...
Feb 21, 2025•44 min
Hany Farid is a professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. He's been a leading voice on digital forensics for over two decades—pioneering ways to identify if an image, audio or video has been digitally altered. Since the rise of social media, Farid has kept busy helping news organizations, government agencies and law enforcement determine what is real and what is fake online. Farid sits down with Oz to talk about his initial interes...
Feb 19, 2025•29 min
What do the Brits want from Apple? This week in the News Roundup, Oz and producer Eliza Dennis explore how lithium-ion batteries and wildfires don’t mix, the UK government’s demand for a backdoor to iPhones and the James Webb Space Telescope–it rocks! On TechSupport with 404 Media ’s Emanuel Maiberg, a new study finds that AI might affect our critical thinking skills. And finally, Oz digs into Elon Musk’s government contracts. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy...
Feb 14, 2025•29 min
Geoffrey Hinton is a computer scientist, cognitive psychologist, and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics. His work on artificial neural networks earned him the title, ‘Godfather of AI,’ but in recent years, he’s warned that without adequate safeguards and regulation, there is an “existential threat that will arise when we create digital beings that are more intelligent than ourselves.” Hinton sits down with Oz to discuss his upbringing, research, time at Google and...
Feb 12, 2025•36 min
Do smart fridges help business? This week in the News Roundup, Oz and producer Eliza Dennis unpack Walgreens’ refrigeration woes, the future of supersonic planes, and what the Vatican has to say about AI. On TechSupport with 404 Media ’s Joseph Cox, the FBI’s unique relationship to one encrypted phone company. And finally, Oz tests out Google’s virtual office assistant in When Did This Become a Thing? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
Feb 07, 2025•35 min
Meredith Whittaker is the president of the Signal Foundation and serves on its board of directors. She is also the co-founder of NYU’s AI Now Institute. Whittaker got her start at Google, where she worked for 13 years until resigning in 2019 after she helped organize the Google Walkouts. She speaks with Oz about learning on the job, championing data privacy and being awarded the Helmut Schmidt Future Prize for “her commitment to the development of AI technology oriented towards the c...
Feb 05, 2025•43 min
Is China winning the AI race? This week in the News Roundup, the story that roiled US stock markets on Monday – DeepSeek. Oz and producer Eliza Dennis unpack the hype. On TechSupport with 404 Media’s Jason Koebler, how human ingenuity continues to subvert tech. We hear how one coder has decided to entrap AI web crawlers. And finally, Oz digs into our love affair with personal data in When Did This Become a Thing? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
Jan 31, 2025•34 min
Nathaniel Rich is a novelist, essayist and writer-at-large for The New York Times Magazine. Rich sits down with Oz to talk about his essay, “Can Humans Endure the Psychological Torment of Mars?” The piece explores NASA's CHAPEA (“Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog”) mission, a simulation meant to test a major challenge of Mars missions – isolation. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
Jan 29, 2025•48 min
In this episode of Smart Talks with IBM , Malcolm Gladwell speaks with Ric Lewis, IBM’s Senior Vice President of Infrastructure. They discuss how hardware capability has enabled the matrix math required to run large language models. Furthermore, they delve into some creative examples of how to put AI to work: from your bank to your local coffee shop. Ric underscores the importance of infrastructure in unlocking the potential of AI, helping businesses harness their data to...
Jan 28, 2025•56 min
