The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Scott Phoenix, founder of artificial intelligence startup Vicarious, to talk about the dawn of the robot age (4:30), the “last invention” (6:05), replicating the human brain (8:55), putting robots in the wild (10:00), how he got into AI (11:15), why he’s not 500 years too early (12:20), why Elon Musk is wrong (13:15), having Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos as investors (16:55), not wanting to be an investment banker (18:05), launching a...
Apr 20, 2018•38 min•Season 2Ep. 15
The Sunday Times tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Bill Gates to talk about being the world’s biggest philanthropist (3:00) eradicating malaria (1:40), saving Africa’s children (6:10), wiping polio off the planet (7:40), applying big data to public health (9:30), why he cares (11:10), whether the new generation of billionaires care (14:20), launching the Giving Pledge with Warren Buffett (16:10), the economic dividend from saving kids (18:05), Africa’s exploding population (19:30), crea...
Apr 13, 2018•44 min•Season 2Ep. 14
The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Keller Rinaudo, founder of drone developer Zipline, to talk about air-dropping blood in Rwanda (5:35), whether this can be used in the developed world (8:45), how he came up with the idea (10:40), the rise of instant delivery (13:05), why smartphones are important (14:25), ramping up operations by ten-times this year (15:45), how a toy gave him credibility (16:15), why they went to Africa first (18:00), how regulations are catching up ...
Apr 06, 2018•28 min•Season 2Ep. 13
The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Benedict Evans, partner at Andreessen Horowitz, to answer five big questions about tech: One, How long will it be before self-driving cars take over (1:55), Two, Will cryptocurrencies replace the dollar, pound and other fiat currencies (8:40),Three, Is Big Tech too big (17:05), Four, How worried should we be about the march of the machines (28:15), Five, What is the next revolutionary technology (35:20). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/...
Mar 30, 2018•46 min•Season 2Ep. 12
The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Antonio Garcia Martinez, one of the architect’s of Facebook’s ad system, to talk about his days at the social media giant (2:15), what Cambridge Analytica did (4:55), the Wild West of online information (7:45), how Facebook has responded to the scandal (10:00), on how trust has been broken (12:40), why a subscription model would be hard to implement (14:30), whether Facebook is too big to govern (17:05), if it can recover (18:45), how ...
Mar 23, 2018•30 min•Season 2Ep. 11
The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent brings on billionaire entrepreneur Joe Lubin, co-founder of cryptocurrency ethereum, to talk about his pre-crypto career (4:05), producing reggae in Jamaica (5:00), meeting Vitalik Buterin (6:00), getting ethereum off the ground from an Airbnb in Miami (6:50), setting up HQ in Switzerland (8:55), the coming regulation on cryptocurrencies (11:10), why he’s a believer (13:25), spawning dozens of ethereum-based businesses (15:25), the dawn of the new Internet (1...
Mar 23, 2018•30 min•Season 2Ep. 10
The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Groupon founder Andrew Mason to talk about his new company Descript, launching his first startup in Chicago in the late 1990’s (4:30), turning it into Groupon (6:15), admitting he was fired (7:40), starting a guided-tour company (9:30), pivoting to podcasting (12:00), but keeping Detour alive (14:00), underestimating potential (16:00), the explosion of text-to-speech technology (17:00), raising venture capital from Andreessen Horowitz ...
Mar 16, 2018•39 min•Season 2Ep. 9
The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Sophia Mahfooz, entrepreneur and former operations chief at Girls in Tech, on sharing a house with other Silicon Valley hopefuls (3:00), winning her first pitch competition (4:05), building a product in China (6:20), trying (and failing) to sell to the NHS (7:55), launching another company (10:25), growing up in Afghanistan (12:15), learning entrepreneurship at home (14:30), getting in to Draper University (17:20), going through hell t...
Mar 09, 2018•50 min•Season 2Ep. 8
The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Patrick Collison, founder of $9bn payments startup Stripe to talk about building the financial plumbing of the Internet (2:45), why the web is just getting started (5:05), treating the big and small the same (8:45), the problem with ads (12:00), the origin of the name ‘Stripe’ (13:25), growing up in a village (14:45), trying to not be too “Silicon Valley” (18:35), going from 40 to 1000 people in four years (21:30), hiring adults (23:45...
Mar 02, 2018•42 min
The Sunday Times tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Brian Chesky, founder of Airbnb, to talk about the home-sharing giant’s tenth birthday (3:00) aiming for a billion guests (4:30), how he plans to grow without destroying communities (7:30), growing up in New York (13:30), convincing Y Combinator to invest $20,000 (16:00), doing 'an Amazon' (18:00), creating an airline (20:15), tech’s existential crisis (22:00), the limitations of algorithms (24:45), not floating on the stock market (26:...
Feb 23, 2018•45 min•Season 2Ep. 6
The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Aubrey de Grey, founder of the Sens Research Foundation, to talk the possibility of turning humans into a "multi-century species" (1:40), why rejuvenation is the key (4:40), aiming for “longevity escape velocity” (6:00), what’s wrong with the current approach to ageing, tackling the seven types of ageing damage (10:20), why the Google guys are wasting their money (11:30), getting funding from Peter Thiel and Vitalik Buterin (13:35), wh...
Feb 16, 2018•44 min
The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Prerna Gupta and Parag Chordia to talk about remaking reading for millennials (4:00), on reaching 40m people in a year (5:10) creating “chat fiction” (6:20), finding writers (8:10), how mobile reading is like film was at its outset (11:00), creating their first music-making apps (12:30), creating an antidote to social media addiction (19:30), trying to write a fantasy novel (22:00), translating the novel into mobile phone form (25:00),...
Feb 09, 2018•41 min•Season 2Ep. 4
The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Mike Selden, founder of Finless Foods, to talk about growing fish flesh without the fish (3:15) how it works (4:30), turning mush into fillets (7:00), why he started the company (8:50), the scourge of sea lice (10:40), blind tuna (12:05), how to avoid the public relations mistakes made by the GMO industry (13:35), leaving a medical career for a startup (16:10), why banana candy tastes terrible (17:10), being an environmental activist (...
Feb 02, 2018•40 min•Season 2Ep. 3
The Sunday Times tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Tim O’Reilly, oracle of the tech industry, to talk about why 2017 may go down as a watershed year (3:00), how Facebook is like Microsoft (4:25), what’s wrong with tech’s “master algorithm” (7:15), exploding the myth of the rise of the machines (9:50), the era of surveillance (12:25), the danger of bad laws (15:20), creating the world’s first website and formalising the open-source movement (17:40), coining the term “Web 2.0” (19:35), wh...
Jan 26, 2018•40 min
The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, to talk about his plan to save the news industry with his latest startup Wikitribune (3:15), what’s wrong with ad-driven media (4:35), crowdsourcing journalism (6:35), charity as a business model (11:20), why a pay wall won’t work (13:05), ‘disrupting’ the encyclopedia (14:50), growing up in an entrepreneurial family (16:30), why Wikipedia’s predecessor failed (19:30), not being a billionaire (24:40),...
Jan 19, 2018•35 min•Season 2Ep. 1
The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson takes a deep dive into the world of robots to chart the the beginnings of the machine age (2:30), the creation of the now-ubiquitous (ROS) robot operating system (5:00), the rise of artificial intelligence (7:45), machines leaving the factory floor into the real world (9:40), and into the fields (12:00), the end of work for humans (14:25), why Bill Gates called for a “robot tax” (17:20), how to flummox the machines (19:00), the importance of sel...
Dec 09, 2017•38 min•Season 1Ep. 28
The Sunday Times tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Pete Flint, founder of Trulia and partner at NFX, to talk about his plans to remake the venture capital industry (3:15), growing up in Essex (6:00), his brief investment banking experiment (8:00), helping lastminute.com get off the ground (9:45), surviving the dotcom bubble (11:00), decamping for California (12:45), starting Trulia (13:45), getting his first investors (16:05), being hit by the financial crisis (19:10), the famous ‘RIP G...
Dec 02, 2017•43 min•Season 1Ep. 27
The Sunday Times' tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on George Hotz, founder of Comma.ai to talk about how he plans to "win" the race to develop self-driving cars (2:45), improving autonomy (5:30), hacking the cars already on the road (7:10), developing the Android operating system of autmoobiles (9:00), why laser-based systems are "dumb" (10:35), why he doesn't plan to raise money (11:45), how self-driving will become a subscription service (13:00), trying to explain the unexplainable (15:...
Nov 25, 2017•26 min
The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Baroness Beeban Kidron talk about her crusade against Big Tech, “age appropriate” design (1:40), turning 50 pages of terms and conditions into a couple sentences (2:50), the industry’s “category error” (4:30), why kids are considered kids online at 13 (7:50), how the smartphone changed everything (9:50), making the digital world look more like the real world (11:50), why the tech ‘nation-states’ need to assume more responsibilities (14...
Nov 18, 2017•37 min•Ep. 25
The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent brings on Orion Hindawi, cyber-security billionaire and founder of Tanium, to talk about how the world is waking up to the security problem (1:50), how criminals make more from hacking than from drugs (3:50), rogue states like North Korea using hacking as an income generator (5:15), hacks becoming unavoidable events like earthquakes and fires (7:20), the origins of the Tanium name (8:15), starting his first company at age 17 (9:25), leaving and beginning agai...
Nov 11, 2017•32 min
The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Martha Lane Fox, dotcom pioneer and Twitter board member, to talk about the tech industry’s hubris (2:00), joining Twitter (5:45), explaining the Internet in 1995 (8:50), launching lastminute.com (11:50), creating a unicorn twenty years ago (13:35), which quickly became a pariah (16:15), almost dying in a car accident (17:45), rebuilding a career (19:30), the need for a Geneva Convention of the web (21:35), tech’s sexism problem (24:05...
Nov 04, 2017•42 min
The Sunday Times' tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Scott Galloway of NYU's Stern School of Business and author of The Four, to talk about how the big Internet companies Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google are like Darth Vader (2:10), Amazon's astoundingly low tax bill (5:45), its Jedi mind tricks (7:30), moving to a 'zero-click' model (9:30), the need to revisit antitrust laws (12:30), why Europe is going to lead the charge against Big Tech (14:30), how Google stockpiles geniuses (16:00...
Oct 28, 2017•39 min
The Sunday Times' tech correspondent Danny Fortson talks to cryptocurrency entrepreneurs and investors about the boom in initial coin offerings, or ICO’s, (1:45), why the underlying technology may be “bigger than the Internet” (2:45), living in an age of distrust (5:30), soaring digital currency values (6:30), how a former rapper is trying to get in on the craze (7:15), why most currencies are like Disney Dollars (9:50), the lack of regulation (12:25), the company trying to become the Goldmans S...
Oct 21, 2017•34 min
The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Trip Adler, founder of Scribd, to talk about creating the “Netflix of reading” (2:00), teaming up with newspapers (4:30), the evolving attitude to subscriptions (5:50), why less than 1% of users are paid subscribers (7:45), pivoting and pivoting again (9:05), taking on Amazon (11:20), the parallels to the music business (12:15), the generation gap (14:35), being classmates with Mark Zuckerberg (15:35), starting at Y Combinator (16:55),...
Oct 14, 2017•36 min
The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Venture Partners, the first investor in Snapchat, to talk about moving to America from Australia (2:10), working for Uber’s Dara Khosrowshahi (4:00), the AOL diaspora (5:00), becoming a venture capitalist (7:15), tracking down Snapchat in 2012 (8:00), how a picture with Barack Obama helped sealed the deal (10:00), young women as a lead indicator (12:25), the sexting issue (15:05), the Snap rocketship (17:00), ...
Oct 07, 2017•40 min
The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Ev Williams, chief executive of online publisher Medium and Twitter co-founder, to talk about upping Twitter’s character limit (2:20), the dark side of the Internet (3:40), the power of the web in politics (6:00), starting four companies (7:15), the idea behind Medium (9:35), the problem with the ad-based web (11:30), pivoting (13:15), putting up a paywall (14:55), cat videos vs investigative journalism (16:40), his new “pay-for-claps”...
Sep 30, 2017•37 min
The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Matt Barnard, co-founder of indoor-farming startup Plenty, to talk about building a ‘global agricultural utility’ (4:25), America’s outsized appetite (6:00), eating old apples (9:00), why tomatoes are terrible in Britain (11:20), building 500 city-centre farms around the world (14:30), luring Softbank as an investor (16:40), and Jeff Bezos (19:30), integrating with Amazon (20:20), why growing indoors works (22:50), using less than 1% t...
Sep 23, 2017•35 min
The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Saeed Amidi, founder of Plug and Play, one of the world’s largest startup accelerators, to talk about how he invests in 150 companies each year (2:50), chickening out of an Airbnb investment (4:10), arriving from Iran (7:50), starting a bottled water company (9:00), becoming an angel investor (11:40), investing in Google when it was just three people (12:45), his $100m payday from Dropbox (14:30), backing Peter Thiel at Paypal (16:05),...
Sep 16, 2017•40 min
The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Uber’s new head of leadership and renowned company doctor Frances Frei to talk about what she found when she walked into Uber (2:30), its army of first-time managers (5:30), taking Uber to school (6:30), the company's ‘toxic’ culture (7:40), the problem with startups (9:15), arriving as a woman (11:00), the importance of culture (12:20) overhauling Harvard Business School (13:00), making the right diagnosis (17:40), taking advantage of...
Sep 09, 2017•38 min
The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Steve Ballmer, former Microsoft CEO and one of the world’s richest men, to talk about retiring with a $33bn fortune (1:55), launching his new project USA Facts (3:00), losing his shirt investing in Twitter (3:55), starting as employee number 30 at Microsoft (5:20), what disruption looked like in 1980 (9:20), the most important negotiation of his life (11:25), being Microsoft’s biggest investor (13:00), why he started USA Facts (15:05),...
Sep 02, 2017•34 min
