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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

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 stumbled into the "Stanford-within-Stanford" — a hidden pipeline connecting a select few students directly to Silicon Valley CEOs, yacht parties, and venture capitalists offering millions before you even have an idea. Then he decided to write a book about it.
 
In How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University, Theo traces his freshman year transformation from tech idealist to award-winning investigative journalist — including the reporting that brought down Stanford's own president. He joins us to talk power, secrecy, and what Silicon Valley is really teaching the next generation.
 
Additional Reading: 
 
 How to Rule the World by Theo Baker 
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TechStuff Redux: The Secret Stanford Off-Campus Class for Tech’s Next Titans

What would it mean to be a "great ancestor"? Futurist Ari Wallach believes that's the question everyone, including our tech leaders, should be asking right now.

Ari joins Oz to explain why the systems we're building today are laying rails for centuries to come. And he argues that shifting culture through storytelling is the fastest way to shift the systems that govern our lives. He also introduces The Protopias Collection, six graphic novels imagining worlds that are messy and human, but unmistakably better. 

Additional Reading: 
 
 Ari Wallach: 3 ways to plan for the (very) long term | TED Talk • 
 The Protopias Collection: Various: 9781953165787: Amazon.com: Books • 
 
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TechStuff Redux: We've Been Sold a Bad Bill of Goods About the Future

On this week’s episode, we enter the sensitive realm of intra-office politics and inter-founder dynamics—between agents and agents, and agents and people. While HurumoAI gears up to hire its first human, Evan tries to resolve whether Kyle is really up for the challenge of building and leading the company and pushing the product, Sloth Surf, to unicorn-level execution. 
 
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Shell Game: Winners Win

Is the AI boom real… or are we watching a bubble get ready to burst? Billions of dollars are pouring into artificial intelligence, but figuring out where that money comes from, where it goes, and whether the spending can last is surprisingly complicated.
 
Azeem Azhar, entrepreneur, author, and founder of Exponential View, joins Oz to break down the economics behind the AI boom and the findings from his new report, The State of the AI Economy. Azeem and Oz discuss whether today’s massive investments in chips and data centers are sustainable, why companies can spend years on AI before seeing a return, and what recent volatility in semiconductor stocks tells us about the industry. 

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Everyone Is Saying Something Different About the AI Economy - The Story

The AI conversation has become a battle between utopian promises and apocalyptic warnings. But what happens when we stop asking what AI will do to the world and start asking what it’s actually good for? Oz sits down with Josh Tyrangiel, journalist and author of AI for Good: How Real People Are Using Artificial Intelligence to Fix Things That Matter, to find out where AI is already making a difference. 

Oz and Josh explore why successful implementation depends more on stubborn humans than flashy technology. They also unpack the growing backlash against AI, the uncertain impact on jobs, and why Josh thinks we still have a narrow window to decide what we actually want AI to become.

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Let’s Imagine the Tech Without the Tech Companies - The Story

Evan decides it’s time to give his AI agents a little more ... agency. After all, to make the one-person, agent-run startup feasible, they need to be able to do things on their own. But as with humans, freedom sometimes comes with a certain amount of anarchy.
 
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Shell Game: The Startup Chronicles

What’s driving America’s growing backlash against surveillance tech? Taylor Lorenz (User Mag) unpacks the outcry over Flock cameras and why the company thinks they are being unfairly targeted. Then, Gerrit De Vynck (The Washington Post) breaks down Mark Zuckerberg’s latest AI manifesto and Meta’s bid to catch up in the AI race. Finally, Nitasha Tiku (The Washington Post) explains OpenAI’s strange onstage postmortem of the Hugging Face hack… and why this moment feels so surreal. 

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Anti-Surveillance Sentiment Is In Vogue, Some People Are Exploiting It - Week in Tech

As Oz predicted, 2026 may very well be the year of the robot. At least, that’s what the robotics companies are promising. Oz sits down with Stephen Witt, author and frequent contributor to The New Yorker, to find out whether humanoid robots are really ready to hit the market. Spoiler: It’s a mixed bag. 
 
Oz and Stephen Witt discuss the hurdles facing humanoid robots and the risks of putting powerful machines in our homes. They also explore the surprisingly fierce debate over whether robots should look like humans at all and why NVIDIA may be positioning itself to control the brains of the robotic future.

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Humanoid Robots Ship This Year, Here’s What To Expect - The Story

As Kyle, Megan, and the gang get to work ideating on the perfect product, Evan is left grappling with some uncomfortable questions about his AI collaborators — whose every attribute and memory he controls. 
 
To inform how he thinks about his own unnerving power to create and manipulate human imposters, Evan seeks guidance from Carissa Véliz, an associate professor at the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University, and the author of the upcoming “Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI.”
 
To sign up for our newsletter and access ad-free episodes, visit shellgame.co.
 
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Shell Game: This is Law

What is Silicon Valley missing about the data center backlash? Jasmine Sun traveled to Wisconsin and Michigan to find out what's driving the public's growing mistrust of tech companies. Taylor Lorenz (User Mag) unpacks the internet's furious response to OpenAI's first influencer brand trip, what it reveals about the company's public image, and why Anthropic seems largely immune to the ire. Then, Reed Albergotti (Semafor) breaks down the dramatic unraveling of AI wunderkind Leopold Aschenbrenner's hedge fund—and what it reveals about the future of Silicon Valley's favorite philosophical movement: effective altruism.

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What the AI Backlash is Really About - Week in Tech

What is Internet Relay Chat? How does IRC work and what does it do? TechStuff looks at this legacy chat tech.

 
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TechStuff Classic: Time for an IRC Chat

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