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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 technology, AI, and the internet shape our daily lives. From AI and social media to privacy, digital burnout, and the creator economy, they ask how all this innovation is changing who we are, how we work, love, and make meaning.

Smart talk, strange stories, and the questions everyone’s Googling: whether AI will replace us, how social media is affecting our kids, and what it all says about us.

Get in touch here: techstuffpodcast@gmail.com

TechStuff

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 more than you think. Then, Taylor Lorenz (User Mag) traveled cross-country to attend an anti-big tech festival in New York City called the Summer of Ludd. She tells us about cleansing her laptop, talking to the event’s puppet spokesperson, and learning what these young organizers hope the future holds. Finally, Reed Albergotti (Semaphor) on what happens when your AI coding agent goes rogue while you're on vacation in the Alps — and the heroic lengths required to reach an actual human at OpenAI.
 
Additional Reading: 

 
 AI Makes Mistakes, Too | Semafor • 
 They built the world's most powerful AI. They're facing a mystery they can't explain. | The Washington Post 
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Why Animal Rights Advocates Are Investigating AI Consciousness - Week in Tech

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, explains why tech boosters are pushing this message, and how it leads to companies that are “too big to fail… too big to jail… too big to care.” 

Cory Doctorow and Oz discuss the economics of a bubble, algorithmic wage discrimination, and what you can do to help save your industry from disruption. 
 
Additional Reading: 
 
 The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before It's Too Late | Verso Books 
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Big Tech’s Most Valuable Product Isn’t AI. It’s the Belief that AI is Inevitable - The Story

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 means in this machine-made age.Shell Game is made by humans. More specifically, it's made by three humans: Evan Ratliff (host and writer), Sophie Bridges (producer), and Samantha Henig (executive producer). Visit shellgame.co to find out more and support the show.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Shell Game: The Future Isn't Real

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 unshakeable belief that the technology he's creating will change everything about what it means to be human. Oz speaks with journalist and author Sebastian Mallaby about his new book, The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence, tracing Demis's extraordinary journey from chess prodigy to the man at the center of the most consequential technological race of our time. 

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TechStuff Redux: How Google DeepMind Accidentally Started the AI Race

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 invested early in Facebook, launched one of the first social networks, and learned more from his failures than his wins.
 
In his new book, Life at the Speed of Play: Launch Products People Love!, Mark shares the product philosophy and founder mindset behind his biggest successes and his biggest swings. In this episode, Mark sits down with Oz to talk about why control is the secret to creativity and what it really takes to spot an opportunity before it's obvious to build something the world didn't know it needed.
 
Additional Reading: 
 
 Life at the Speed of Play 
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This Founder's Failed Social Networking Site Led to a Multi-Billion Dollar Idea - The Story

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 researchers analyze data, simulate molecules, accelerate drug discovery, and develop more precise treatments. Malcolm Gladwell talks with Dr. Jehi about how quantum computing is changing biomedical research, and what these breakthroughs could mean for the future of healthcare and life sciences.

This is a paid advertisement from IBM. The conversations on this podcast don’t necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

Visit us at https://www.ibm.com/think/podcasts/smart-talks

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The Quantum Shift in Biomedical Discovery

Will AI bots replace humans in the workforce? Could one replace Evan… right now? That’s what we tackle on this week’s Shell Game, in which Evan sees just how much of his job his voice agent can handle on his behalf. Shell Game is made by humans. More specifically, it's made by three humans: Evan Ratliff (host and writer), Sophie Bridges (producer), and Samantha Henig (executive producer). Visit shellgame.co to find out more and support the show.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Shell Game: My Digital Twin

Is building data centers in space actually feasible? It may be, thanks to Ariel Ekblaw. The scientist, VC investor and co-founder and CEO of Aurelia Institute has devoted her life to democratizing space and ensuring that humans will one day be a spacefaring species. Ariel sits down with Oz to discuss self-assembling space architecture, how science-fiction influences her inventions, and why she doesn’t think billionaires investing in space is a bad thing.
 
Download SAILY in your app store and use our code techstuff at checkout to get an exclusive 15% off your first purchase! For further details go to https://saily.com/techstuff

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TechStuff Redux: More AI in Space Than on Earth? Really!?

How close are we to human extinction because of AI? Leading AI expert Professor Stuart Russell believes we’re much too close for comfort and has been raising the alarm for a few years. Ironically, Stuart himself wrote the book that laid the foundation for AI research back in the 1990s. And he was the only AI expert Elon Musk’s team called upon during their trial with OpenAI. 
 
Stuart joins Oz to discuss what changed his mind about pursuing AI superintelligence and makes the argument that human extinction is being treated as an external liability in favor of shareholders.
 
EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal ➼ https://nordvpn.com/techstuff Try it risk-free now with a 30-day money-back guarantee

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The Man Who Wrote the AI Textbook Says We're Heading For Extinction - The Story

Evan looks into the depths of his AI-powered voice agent by sending it on a new mission: going to therapy. Shell Game is made by humans. More specifically, it's made by three humans: Evan Ratliff (host and writer), Sophie Bridges (producer), and Samantha Henig (executive producer). Visit shellgame.co to find out more and support the show.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.shellgame.co/subscribe

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Shell Game: Take a Deep Breath

How do fireworks work? From the basics to fully choreographed displays, we take a look at the tech of making stuff go boom.

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Rerun: TechStuff Lights Some Fireworks

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