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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

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.”
 
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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

Brands, political parties, and businesses all want to know what you think. But what if you're not telling the truth? Cameron Fink, Ned Koh, and John Kessler, the founders of Aaru, believe the future of market research isn't polling humans—it's simulating them.
 
They may be onto something. The three friends founded Aaru as teenagers, and it has since grown into a billion-dollar AI startup. Cameron Fink and Ned Koh join Oz to explain how their platform uses thousands of AI-powered "digital twins" to predict everything from consumer behavior and elections to which musicians are poised to break out. They discuss why they believe traditional surveys fail and the ethical questions that come with building a machine designed to forecast the future.

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They Founded a Company as Teens. Now They’re Predicting the Future - The Story

As Evan gets Hurumo’s employees up and running as fully-functioning colleagues (with support from Maty), he learns what it’s really like to spend your days managing, collaborating with, and socializing alongside autonomous AI agents. And he quickly sees one of the significant cracks in the facade of the AI employee future: It’s one thing to get your agents to start acting like real employees. It’s something else entirely to get them to stop.
 
To sign up for our newsletter and access ad-free episodes, visit shellgame.co.
 
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Shell Game: Outdoor Debugging

Why is the US banning more Chinese technology? Reed Albergotti (Semafor) fills us in on the robot ban and what it means for American innovation. Then, new research on why Chinese open-source AI models may not be as big a threat as Washington makes it seem. Taylor Lorenz (User Mag) tells us about Substack’s new AI detection tool and what it reveals about how creators’ are using AI to build their content.

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Chinese Humanoid Robots Aren’t Welcome Here, US Says - Week in Tech

What does it take to power the AI boom? Steve Vassallo, a roboticist turned General Partner at Foundation Capital, helped semiconductor company Cerebras figure it out. Steve and Oz discuss why AI workloads demanded an entirely new kind of chip, what "wafer scale" actually means, and how a decade of near-failures — including a system that literally caught fire — led to the largest semiconductor IPO to date and deals with OpenAI and AWS.

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Cerebras Built a New Way to Make Sand Think - The Story

As AI adoption accelerates and global regulations evolve, digital sovereignty has shifted from policy concept to board-level priority. In this episode of Smart Talks with IBM, Malcolm Gladwell sits down live at VivaTech with IBM’s Ana Paula Assis and AXA CIO Giovanni D’Aniello to explore how organizations can balance innovation, control, trust, and resilience in the age of AI.

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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Trust Needs Proof: Who Really Controls Your AI?

How much can we actually trust AI to stay inside the lines? Nitasha Tiku (The Washington Post) on the OpenAI models that went rogue — and why this isn't necessarily a sign of the end times… just sloppy security. Reed Albergotti (Semafor) on the company that wants to help anyone make software to power robots. Do we even have to talk about what that means for the future of human labor? Finally, Taylor Lorenz (User Mag) on Phoebe Gates' AI shopping startup Phia. Is it too early to call it nepo slop?

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Did the AI Catastrophe Just Happen? - Week in Tech

How do meteorologists predict the weather? We look at the tools meteorologists use to determine stuff like high and low temperatures, the chance of precipitation and more!

 
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How Meteorologists Work

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