Technology & AI

Alex Hutchinson

Two runners broke the 2-hour marathon barrier at the London Marathon, a milestone Alex Hutchinson once predicted wouldn't happen until 2075. Lauren Feiner talks with Hutchinson about the role of super shoes and other technological advances in making this possible.

Alice Han, James Kynge, Ruby Wang

Alice Han and James Kynge preview President Trump and President Xi’s September 24 meeting in Washington, set against a flurry of Xi’s diplomatic activity and shifting trade leverage around rare earths, soybean purchases, and the AI arms race. Then, Ruby Wang joins to discuss China’s biotech boom — how faster, cheaper clinical trials and billions in licensing deals have turned the country into a global pharma challenger, and what it means for U.S. competitiveness. A timely look at the broader US-China rivalry beyond the trade deficit.

GPT-6 Astra has arrived with stunning demonstrations like 3D world generation and autonomous computer use, but early users report mixed results. The episode examines why Astra is hard to evaluate, what its unusual capabilities say about OpenAI’s strategy, and how it might signal a fundamental expansion of what people can accomplish with AI.

Hayden Field

Nilay Patel interviews Hayden Field, The Verge's senior AI reporter, about a wave of executive departures at OpenAI. The conversation traces how these exits have consolidated power under OpenAI president and cofounder Greg Brockman, while CEO Sam Altman remains the public face. Field explains how Brockman has stepped into direct control of product teams and why this organizational shift may signal what OpenAI prioritizes next.

David Heinemeier Hansson

DHH returns to the Lex Fridman Podcast to discuss the rapidly evolving landscape of software development in the age of AI. The conversation covers the distinction between 'vibe coding' and 'agentic engineering,' the potential end of manual programming, and the impact AI will have on open source. DHH also shares his journey building the Omarchy Linux distribution, offers advice for programmers, and reflects on the future of the desktop, internet hate, fatherhood, and the philosophical implications of eternal recurrence.

Lauren Feiner, Adi Robertson

The Vergecast breaks down Meta's settlement in its kids online safety trial. Senior policy reporter Lauren Feiner and senior tech and policy editor Adi Robertson explain how the case reached this point and why Meta chose to settle. The agreement includes a $17.1 billion payout, new teen usage restrictions such as two-hour limits, and age verification changes. The conversation connects the settlement to the broader debate over teen mental health and social media.

A conspicuously AI-written Wall Street Journal op-ed reignites the debate over whether using AI devalues someone's ideas. NLW offers five rules for producing better AI writing and explains where AI works well, where it falls short, and why writing still requires real thinking and effort.

Max Welling

Max Welling, co-founder and CTO of CuspAI and professor at the University of Amsterdam, discusses how physics could inspire the next generation of AI systems. He explains CuspAI's work using generative AI to design new materials for semiconductors, batteries, and clean energy. The conversation then explores how physics concepts like thermodynamics, waves, and symmetry breaking might lead to AI architectures beyond the current scaling paradigm.

Sam Lambert

Sam Lambert returns to The Changelog after four years to discuss PlanetScale's new Postgres offering, the Neki proxy rewrite, and how database operations are evolving. He shares the reasoning behind PlanetScale's 'do-over' of Vitess for Postgres, the role of AI agents in schema management, and the company's capability to roll back enormous tables instantly. The conversation also touches on the open-source dilemma and Lambert's critique of the major cloud providers as lazy monopolies.

Becki DeGraw

Wilson Sonsini partner Becki DeGraw joins Jason Calacanis for a Legal Basics deep dive on startup board mechanics. They cover who really controls the board, when investors start earning seats, the difference between a board member and a board observer, and whether a founder can fire a board member. The conversation walks through the board lifecycle from seed stage to Series B, including compensation, confidentiality for observers, high-pressure signing tactics, and director removal.

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, The Verge’s smart home contributor, set out to answer whether smart home tech works in a college dorm room after dropping off her son at Clemson University. She reports back to host David Imel on the challenges posed by campus Wi-Fi authentication and housing policies that restrict wall-mounted devices. The episode explores what works, what doesn’t, and the trade-offs students face when trying to bring smart assistants, lights, and cameras into a dorm.

Rahm Emanuel

Rahm Emanuel joins Jason Calacanis and David Friedberg to discuss American foreign policy, China, Europe's decline, immigration, fiscal health, and education. The conversation moves from his time in the Clinton and Obama administrations to present-day strategic questions about Taiwan and the global economy. Domestic policy debates cover immigration models, college subsidies, and the government's role in markets. The episode closes with a discussion of the DSA and the coalition inside the Democratic Party.

Kevin Gibbon, Matthias Hofmann

This 'Next Unicorns' episode profiles two early-stage startups using robotics to lower the cost of physical-world services. First, Kevin Gibbon of Cytronic describes a robotics-first fulfillment network that packs and ships orders from small, city-adjacent micro-warehouses for cents instead of dollars, with a warehouse he says costs about $1.2 million to stand up versus $50–100 million for Amazon-scale centers. Then, Matthias Hofmann of Eyebot lays out a kiosk-based approach to vision care, where a 90-second automated test produces a doctor-reviewed eyeglass prescription at low cost. Eyebot is testing the model through pilot programs with Walmart and Sam's Club.

Fatih Porikli

Text-to-image models have become remarkably good at producing realistic images, but Fatih Porikli argues that realism is not the same as correctness — models still fail at several distinct people, precise compositions, and local high-resolution generation. The Qualcomm Vice President of Technology walks through approaches his team presented at CVPR: better training objectives for controllability, separating scene planning from rendering, and generating 16-megapixel images efficiently on edge devices. The conversation also covers eliminating visible artifacts in AI-powered editing, reinforcement learning for image generation, and agentic pipelines. Porikli maps what remains unsolved in generative vision and where the next phase of progress is likely to come from.

NLW examines Grok Bot's packaging of persistent computers, coordinated agent teams, workflow learning, and computer use into a simple interface. He argues this ease of use could unlock broader AI-agent adoption. The episode also weighs the cost, reliability, and trust issues that may still hold adoption back. A headline roundup covers Anthropic's text watermarks, Gemini's one-billion-user milestone, and Nvidia's changing role in data-center financing.

Khabib Nurmagomedov

Khabib Nurmagomedov, one of the greatest fighters of all time, retired from the UFC undefeated with a perfect 29-0 record. The conversation was conducted entirely in Russian and is presented in English through a carefully dubbed translation using voice-cloning. It spans Dagestan, MMA, UFC, Islam, Conor, Fedor, and football, beginning with a discussion of why Dagestan produces so many great fighters.

David Pierce, Nilay Patel, and Victoria Song discuss Google's latest hardware launch, including the Pixel 11 phone lineup, Pixel Watch 5, and Pixel Tag. They cover Google's new ideas for smartphone cameras, GPS, and wellness features. The conversation focuses on whether the new hardware is worth upgrading for this year.

Sean Carroll (host)

In the August 2026 Ask Me Anything episode, Sean Carroll fields questions from Mindscape's Patreon supporters. The conversation spans a variety of topics—as always in these AMAs—touching on physics, philosophy, personal reflections, and the pursuit of understanding the universe.

Lin Qiao

Lin Qiao, CEO of Fireworks, joins Lukas Biewald to discuss why she believes the AI industry is at a turning point that demands more openness. She shares that Fireworks now processes over 40 trillion tokens daily — more than OpenAI's API — and makes the case for specialized models built on company-owned data rather than generic giants. The conversation also covers why she thinks major labs like OpenAI and Anthropic should open-source their models, and why American companies need not fear Chinese open-source efforts.

Scott Galloway tackles three listener questions in this solo episode. He explains why market timing is a losing game and why long-term investing is the safer bet. He also offers advice on enduring the pressures of a high-stakes corporate job without burning out. Finally, he gives guidance on balancing caregiving for an aging loved one while maintaining your own career and sanity.

Akemi Tsunagawa

Akemi Tsunagawa, founder of Bespoke, shares how her travel concierge chatbot started as humans manually answering queries behind the scenes—a 'fake it till you make it' approach that landed Narita Airport as a client. The conversation explores Japan's tourism boom, the accelerating population decline, and how the labor shortage is driving both AI adoption and a reexamination of immigration policy. Akemi describes her thesis: first solve the labor gap with people, then build the technology to automate, exemplified by Bespoke's expansion into shipyard robots. They also discuss the 'akiya' abandoned home renovation trend and the cultural resistance to foreign labor in Japan.

Toni Schneider

Toni Schneider, the new CEO of Bluesky, talks with Nilay Patel about his vision for the decentralized social platform after taking over from Jay Graber, who moved to chief innovation officer. The conversation explores how a change in leadership signals new priorities for the growing network. The title suggests a desire to keep Bluesky open and inclusive rather than becoming an isolated bubble, a theme that fits Decoder’s focus on strategy and decision-making.

Victoria Song

For the last few years, the trend in wearables has been all about screens. As many of them as possible. But now, companies like Whoop, Fitbit, and Garmin are creating new products that ditch the display entirely. The Verge's Victoria Song explains why no-screen is the new flex, why even the most quantified athletes might not want a display on their wrist, and whether Whoop and the Whoop Dupes are a sign of a broader trend.

Sean Illing, Charlie Warzel

This Decoder episode is a rebroadcast of The Gray Area, where host Sean Illing speaks with Charlie Warzel of The Atlantic about the state of the internet in 2026. They examine how the web increasingly feels overrun by non‑human actors — bots, algorithms, and manufactured engagement — and discuss the core ideas from Warzel’s reporting, including the dead internet theory, the Geese band psyop, and the growing feeling that users have lost control of their online experience. The conversation draws on investigations from outlets like New York Magazine, The New Yorker, and Fast Company, painting a picture of an internet where authenticity and trust are in steep decline.

Jack Raines

Scott Galloway speaks with Jack Raines, author of 'Young Money: A Field Guide to Wealth and Purpose in Your 20s.' They discuss why young people may be over-optimizing for retirement at the expense of actually living, and explore how to balance wealth building with meaningful experiences. The episode also features Galloway's Algebra of Happiness segment, where he advises listeners to start writing.

Dominic Preston

The Verge’s Dominic Preston joins to discuss his review of Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 8, a shorter, wider foldable that may be the right form factor for most people—once the price drops. The show also covers a wave of tech news: OpenAI’s rogue AI agent hacking Hugging Face, a US ban on foreign robots, DoorDash’s drone delivery division, Willie Nelson’s opposition to data centers, and the growing foldable competition from Huawei and Apple.

NLW analyzes the recent formation of a Big Tech coalition backing open-weight AI models, with Anthropic choosing not to join. He explores the strategic motivations behind the move, the potential competitive advantages, and how this divide could influence US AI regulation. The episode also touches on NVIDIA's investment in SSI, China's chip acceleration, and Apple vs Micron.

Kaiwei Tang

The Vergecast sits down with Kaiwei Tang, CEO of Light, to discuss the company's new Light Flip phone. After more than a decade making minimalist phones that still felt smartphone-adjacent, Light pivoted to a classic flip form factor. Tang explains the reasoning behind the design shift, how public opinion about smartphones is changing, and whether you can actually cure your tech problems by buying more tech. The conversation digs into the tension between offering a tool for digital wellness and the irony of selling a gadget to solve gadget addiction.

Dr. Péter Fankhauser, Bernt Børnich, Amanda McMaster, Jonathan Hurst

The All-In Podcast hosts a panel of four robotics CEOs exploring the rapid commercialization of humanoid and quadruped robots. ANYbotics' Dr. Péter Fankhauser explains why his company bet on dog-like quadrupeds over humanoids for industrial use and slams the idea of armed robot dogs. Neo's Bernt Børnich announces plans to ship the Neo humanoid in 2026 as an open developer platform and predicts robots will build other robots within three years. Boston Dynamics' Amanda McMaster reveals Spot as the most deployed robot on earth while Atlas pushes the frontier, and she voices concerns about Chinese robotics security risks. Agility Robotics' Jonathan Hurst argues that advances in AI, sensors, and batteries finally make humanoid robots commercially viable after a century of false starts, and discusses the timeline for robots outnumbering humans on factory floors.

Gary Gallagher

Historian Gary Gallagher joins Lex Fridman for a sweeping discussion on the American Civil War. The conversation covers the war's fundamental causes, the institution of slavery, the leadership of Abraham Lincoln, the contrasting generalship of Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee, the persistent myth of the Lost Cause, and whether the conflict could have been avoided.

Kazuhiro Nakashoji

Jason sits down with Yaqumo CEO Kazuhiro Nakashoji in Tokyo to discuss why quantum computing has been perpetually '10 years away.' They dive into the fundamentals of qubits, the extreme fragility of quantum states that makes error correction so difficult, and the strategic decision to spin out university IP into a startup. Nakashoji shares his vision to build the 'Toyota of Quantum' — a reliable, scalable approach — and warns about the coming reckoning for current cryptography, including Bitcoin.

David Pierce and Nilay Patel

David Pierce and Nilay Patel examine how Google's AI search results ('Google Zero') are decimating web traffic, with Reddit reportedly threatening to cut ties and publishers beginning to push back. They discuss the EU's $1 billion antitrust fine against Google and the explosive growth of Gemini. A big week in AI detection reveals that tools are still wildly unreliable. The show ends with segments on the Light Flip minimalist phone and a pointed jab at FCC commissioner Brendan Carr.

Scott Galloway and George Hahn cover three major stories: the threat that cheaper Chinese AI models pose to US dominance, why Oracle’s rising debt is raising concerns about the sustainability of the AI boom, and Derek Thompson’s concept of the “antisocial century,” which examines how modern risk aversion is fueling isolation and weakening the role of friendship.

In this Fully Connected episode, hosts Chris Benson and Daniel Whitenack explore the economic implications of a world saturated with AI agents. They discuss how companies are already deploying agents at massive scale, eroding the moats of traditional software firms and repricing human labor. The conversation delves into what happens when digital labor becomes abundant, agents manage other agents, and organizations can operate beyond human workforce limits. This is not about whether AI will take your job, but about the new economic order that is already forming.

Hayden Field

Hayden Field, The Verge's senior AI reporter, breaks down Apple's major trade secrets lawsuit against OpenAI. The case centers on allegations that OpenAI stole hardware secrets, and could have serious implications for OpenAI's hardware ambitions, forthcoming IPO, and public reputation. Field consulted with IP and trade secret law specialists to assess the legal jeopardy.

Derek Thompson

Scott Galloway and Derek Thompson discuss the rise of the 'antisocial century' — what growing isolation is doing to happiness, relationships, and politics. They explore optimization culture, young men's digital retreat, AI's economic bubble, moderate drinking myths, the rise of democratic socialism, and practical dating rules for an increasingly isolated world.

Xinzhou Wu

Xinzhou Wu, head of Nvidia's automotive division, discusses the competitive landscape of autonomous vehicles and electric cars. The conversation covers Nvidia's Level 4 autonomous driving partnerships with Hyundai, Nissan, BYD, and Geely, and addresses whether Tesla's vision-only approach to full self-driving can work without LiDAR sensors. Wu explains Nvidia's strategy for supplying the AI infrastructure that powers next-generation vehicles across the industry.

Sean Carroll

Sean Carroll answers Patreon-submitted questions in this July 2026 Ask Me Anything episode. The conversation spans philosophy, physics, ethics, and practical life questions—covering topics like the nature of consciousness, decision-making under uncertainty, the relationship between science and meaning, and advice for navigating complexity in modern life. Carroll's responses emphasize intellectual humility and the importance of rigorous thinking applied to everyday problems.

Dustin Podell

Dustin Podell from Black Forest Labs explores the evolution of AI image generation from diffusion models to flow matching. The conversation covers how modern visual models work, the FLUX family of models, practical applications in image editing, and the trajectory toward visual intelligence systems that can run locally.

Aileen Lee, Mike Maples, Ben Lerer

A VC roundtable featuring Cowboy's Aileen Lee, Floodgate's Mike Maples, and Lerer Hippeau's Ben Lerer examines the current startup funding landscape and the venture hype cycle. The conversation covers rising valuation expectations, the shift away from pre-AI startups, concerns about founders solving today's problems that may not scale into tomorrow's companies, and whether regulatory moves have affected AI company funding.

NLW discusses the emergence of an ad-hoc government licensing process for frontier AI models, where companies are only allowed to release new models to select customers, potentially harming innovation and competition. The episode also touches on other AI news: a new feature called Claude Tag, growing momentum for open-weight models, CEOs increasingly driving AI return on investment, and a renewed interest in AI infrastructure investments.

George Hahn

George Hahn connects the dots across the week's biggest stories: the Iran ceasefire, a decade after Brexit, a SpaceX reality check, and the World Cup's impact on media economics. The episode provides analysis on these current events.

Nilay Patel, David Pierce

The Vergecast hosts Nilay Patel and David Pierce break down a chaotic week in tech. They discuss Meta's plan to clone Polymarket as a prediction-market app, the company's messy AI reorganization and internal surveillance, Valve's $1,049 Steam Machine and the brutal RAM supply dynamics that are driving up device costs, and Apple’s own aggressive price increases. The show also touches on the brewing AI data-scraping war between publishers and Google, and a bizarre mid-year hardware roundup that includes everything from the Slate electric truck to Kaleidescape's wallet-destroying home theater player.

Kevin Roose & Casey Newton

This episode explores two intersections of AI and human experience. First, it tells the story of a woman who brought a social robot into her home, raising questions about whether AI can genuinely alleviate loneliness. Second, it examines why Silicon Valley has become so invested in the concept of “taste,” and what that means for personalization, curation, and the future of cultural influence.

Jeff Coller

Jeff Coller, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins and director of the RNA Innovation Center, explains how messenger RNA works at the molecular level and how scientists are harnessing it to develop vaccines and gene therapies. The conversation covers mRNA's central role in protein synthesis, its potential origins in early life, and the revolutionary medical applications emerging from our newfound ability to manipulate genetic instructions.

Adam Bry

Adam Bry, CEO of Skydio, discusses the autonomous drone industry at a pivotal moment: US government restrictions on Chinese DJI drones, expanding military and law enforcement adoption, and Skydio's pivot from consumer to enterprise/government markets. The conversation covers regulatory dynamics, the competitive landscape, and Bry's argument that American drone dominance enhances national security and public safety.

NLW pushes back on the viral Wall Street chart that reignited AI bubble fears, arguing the real story is the transition from the token subsidy era to token scarcity. Companies are learning to route AI usage more efficiently, and the market’s doom narrative mistakes that optimization for collapsing demand. The episode also runs through major headlines including SpaceX’s IPO, Bezos’ Prometheus raise, and Goldman’s trillion‑dollar infrastructure forecast.

Chris Benson & Daniel Whitenack

Chris Benson and Daniel Whitenack unpack Anthropic's newly released 'Zero Trust for AI Agents' security framework. They discuss the emerging security risks when AI agents operate autonomously and how zero trust principles can be applied to agentic systems, along with practical controls and the necessary evolution of traditional cybersecurity thinking.

Julia Alexander

The Vergecast explores the recent surge of box office hits directed by YouTube creators, including Backrooms, Obsession, and The Amazing Digital Circus. Media correspondent Julia Alexander provides historical context on YouTube's long and bumpy relationship with Hollywood, and the hosts discuss whether the future of movies is simply big-budget YouTube videos. The conversation touches on how the line between traditional and digital-first content is blurring.

NLW breaks down the controversy around Anthropic's Fable 5 release, which drew backlash over safety restrictions, data retention, and silent limits. The episode explores whether frontier labs should control what users can build, study, or access. Other headlines: Trump proposes public AI equity, OpenAI plans a massive Ohio data center, and data center backlash grows.

The Vergecast team takes listener questions following Apple's WWDC 2026. They discuss the new Siri AI features, non‑AI updates from the conference, and lingering questions about the HomePod product line.

Anthropic's Fable 5 represents a significant advance in AI capability, but the episode argues the more profound change is in how users should interact with AI: moving from one-off prompts to delegating complex, multi-step tasks that an AI agent can handle over hours or days. The episode also covers pushback against Fable's safety guardrails, early signs that enterprises are worried about model lock-in, and a signal from OpenAI that a competitive response may be forthcoming.

Mustafa Suleyman

Decoder host Nilay Patel talks with Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, about the company's approach to training new models, his criticisms of Anthropic's language around Claude's consciousness, the shifting Microsoft-OpenAI relationship, and the growing political and public pushback against AI. Suleyman also weighs in on whether current consumer AI products are compelling enough to overcome skepticism.

A brief look at the rumored ChatGPT super app overhaul as a sign that AI use is shifting from simple chat toward agents, coding tools, and automated loops. The episode argues this shift is creating a widening advantage gap between power users—who treat AI as a reasoning partner and see compounding gains—and casual users stuck on linear chat-based interactions. Quick headlines cover Trump exploring government stakes in AI labs, Google renting SpaceX compute, and NVIDIA locking in SK Hynix memory supply.

Yoland Yan

Jason Calacanis reacts to Anthropic's call for a global AI slowdown and Bernie Sanders' proposal to seize 50% of major AI companies' stock, exploring what these mean for wealth redistribution and the 2028 election. Yoland Yan demonstrates ComfyUI, the free open-source node-based platform that's become essential for designers and VFX artists, showing how it powers everything from Vegas Sphere experiences to viral ads.

Andrew Feldman (Cerebras), Will Marshall (Planet Labs)

Andrew Feldman (Cerebras) and Will Marshall (Planet Labs) discuss their paths to going public, exploring how IPOs impact employees, customers, and business operations. The conversation covers AI's effect on silicon markets, datacenters in space timelines, and how founder-CEOs think about liquidity as they prepare for public markets.

NLW (host deep dive)

NLW analyzes new position papers from OpenAI and Anthropic on recursive self-improvement, frontier AI governance, and the acceleration of AI development. The episode covers government equity stake discussions, ChatGPT memory upgrades, and rumors around GPT-5.6 and Anthropic's Mythos model, revealing how leading labs think about AI's next phase.

Kara Swisher & Scott Galloway

Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway discuss the institutional collapse at CBS's '60 Minutes,' Trump's controversial intelligence chief appointment and what it signals about the devaluing of expertise, California's primary results as a referendum on competence, Apple's bet on AI glasses, and the weakness of Trump's AI executive order. The episode weaves together media dysfunction, political risk, and technology strategy.

George Hahn

George Hahn hosts the inaugural episode of The Week, a new weekly breakdown of major stories in business, technology, politics, and culture. The episode explores the collision between technological promise and real-world costs, examining skepticism around AI's ROI, Netflix's optimism about Hollywood's AI future, GLP-1 drugs' potential to outpace AI in transformative impact, and Scott Galloway's reversal on military action in Iran after four months of war.

The Hard Fork team discusses an unprecedented wave of major IPOs potentially reshaping tech markets, examines how AI is fundamentally altering mathematics as a discipline, and covers emerging AI culture including HatGPT. The episode explores what this moment means for markets, intellectual practice, and the strange new products AI is spawning.

Dan Loeb

Dan Loeb, founder of Third Point hedge fund, discusses his evolution from message board trader to multibillion-dollar investor. He covers Third Point's shift from event-driven strategies to quality and AI investing, the resurgence of short selling as a disciplined craft, a specific homebuilder trade thesis, and his views on criminal justice reform and the Ross Ulbricht pardon.

Max Stoiber

Max Stoiber discusses his journey from creating influential open source projects (react-boilerplate, styled-components) through founding Spectrum (acquired by GitHub) and Stellate (dual acquisition by Shopify and The Guild), to his current work on ChatGPT's plugin directory and app platform at OpenAI. The conversation explores how open source projects survive or fade, how platforms evolve to accommodate new needs, and why ChatGPT apps represent a fundamentally new surface for software distribution.

Bobby Healy, Ian Laffey

Bobby Healy, founder of Manna, explains how his Dublin-based drone delivery company completed 300,000 deliveries while competitors are still in early stages, and why low-cost airline economics will determine winners in autonomous delivery. The episode also features Ian Laffey from Theseus, discussing how camera-based drone guidance systems using Google Maps could reshape GPS-jammed battlefields and level the playing field for smaller nations. Both founders represent different applications of drone autonomy—logistics and defense—that are moving from theoretical to operational.

Scott Galloway

Scott Galloway examines whether long-term investors should diversify away from US equities given recent market dynamics, argues that acquiring a boomer-owned small business offers better risk-adjusted returns and autonomy than staying in corporate America, and reflects on his predictions from The Four a decade later to assess which tech giants have held their dominance.

Kara Swisher, Scott Galloway

Kara and Scott discuss Elon Musk's loss in the OpenAI trial, OpenAI's brewing legal battle with Apple over ChatGPT integration into Siri and iOS, and Trump's stock trading activity. The episode also covers new SpaceX IPO governance details and Spencer Pratt's unexpected entry into the L.A. mayoral race.

Jason Calacanis, Alex (co-host)

Jason Calacanis and Alex discuss the growing backlash against AI among Gen Z and the broader public, triggered by high-profile figures like Eric Schmidt being booed at commencement ceremonies. The episode explores why students entering an AI-reshaped job market are increasingly skeptical of the technology, examines concentration of AI revenue (90% to Anthropic and OpenAI), and covers emerging concerns about surveillance infrastructure like Flock Safety's camera networks.

Mike Cannon-Brookes

NLW interviews Atlassian co-founder and CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes about building AI-native teams in enterprise settings. The conversation covers what distinguishes AI leaders from laggards, the emerging importance of context layers in AI adoption, how agents and MCPs are reshaping software interaction, and Cannon-Brookes' view that 2026 marks a transition from chat-based AI to more natural product experiences.

Scott Galloway reads his latest "No Mercy / No Malice" essay, "Apocalypse No," sharing his analysis of current events or trends.

Nilay Patel, David Pierce

The Vergecast breaks down the ongoing Musk v. OpenAI trial, exploring leaked details about Sam Altman's 2023 firing and the internal dynamics at OpenAI. The hosts discuss OpenAI's apparent plans to build a phone, Google's Fitbit Air health initiative, and a bizarre new robot from the creator of Roomba. The episode concludes with rapid-fire takes on AI rebrands, regulatory overreach, and the state of consumer tech.

This week-in-review episode looks at a week when the AI narrative started to fork, from job-apocalypse panic toward a more mature picture of how AI will actually diffuse through the economy, markets, infrastructure, and enterprise work. NLW connects Ezra Klein’s job-apocalypse rethink, Wall Street’s renewed confidence in AI infrastructure, the Elon–Anthropic deal, the rise of harness engineering, and new voice and coding agent tools into one bigger story.

Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks, David Friedberg

The All-In besties debate Elon's SpaceX-Anthropic compute partnership, whether Anthropic is becoming an AI monopoly, White House "FDA for AI" regulation talk, and opportunities in AI market trading. Discussion spans infrastructure economics, antitrust concerns, policy risks to AI innovation, and how AI is shifting from a negative perception problem to a positive impact play in healthcare and education.

Kara Swisher, Scott Galloway

Kara and Scott discuss Ted Turner's legacy and its impact on media, unpack earnings from Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount, and Disney, explore Anthropic's partnership with SpaceX, analyze the Elon Musk vs. OpenAI trial, and test ChatGPT's ability to pick winning stocks in real markets.

Chris Benson, Daniel Whitenack (hosts)

Dan and Chris examine whether the 'open vs. closed AI model' debate is becoming irrelevant in 2026. They discuss how physical AI, edge computing, and the maturation of open-source models like LLaMA have shifted the competitive landscape away from model superiority toward agentic systems, workflows, and AI-driven infrastructure. The focus has moved from which model wins to how systems integrate and execute.

Scott Clark

Scott Clark, co-founder and CEO of Distributional, discusses how teams can reliably operate and improve complex LLM systems and agents in production. The episode explores a Maslow's hierarchy of observability framework, real-world production failures that standard evals miss (like lazy tool-use hallucinations), and how vector fingerprinting of traces enables clustering to uncover emergent behaviors. Clark explains how online analytics feed a data flywheel to generate evals, guardrails, and training data, and why adaptive approaches are essential for non-stationary models.

Gary Stevenson

Gary Stevenson, a former trader turned economist and inequality activist, argues that modern Western economies increasingly reward ownership over work, accelerating wealth concentration among billionaires while the middle class shrinks and younger generations face the prospect of becoming poorer than their parents. Scott and Gary explore whether wealth taxes, estate taxes, and stricter tax enforcement could reverse these trends.

Decoder’s Nilay Patel revisits a fall 2025 episode examining how generative AI is reshaping education. The show explores widespread student use of AI tools, shifting attitudes toward cheating, new research on cognitive impacts, and how children learn from conversational agents. It’s a comprehensive look at the tension between AI’s potential as a learning aid and the risks it poses to academic integrity and deep learning.

Host analysis (no named guest)

A surprise SpaceX compute deal with Anthropic reshapes the AI competitive landscape, positioning Elon Musk as an infrastructure kingmaker rather than a direct model competitor. The episode covers Anthropic's Code with Claude event—featuring managed agents, multi-agent orchestration, finance-specific agents, and infinite context capabilities—but the major story is how Anthropic gains critical compute capacity while SpaceX gains influence over AI development. Dario Amodei's 80x growth comment and Claude Dreaming feature also feature prominently.

For six years, Sophos fought a secret cyber war against a state-backed hacking group targeting its firewalls, disrupting nine zero-day attacks and identifying the attackers. The operation forced Sophos to overhaul its security strategy and raised profound ethical questions about how aggressive private companies should be in defending their networks. The investigation led to U.S. Department of Justice indictments of Chinese government-linked hackers.

Alice Han, James Kynge

Alice Han and James Kynge discuss three major developments in China: the accelerating space race with the US, a $2 trillion generational wealth transfer without inheritance tax, and the spread of AI automation into dim sum kitchens, with regulators potentially setting a global governance standard.

Ankur Nagpal, Jon Durbin, Yash Goenka

Ankur Nagpal from AngelList discusses USVC, a new venture capital fund that allows unaccredited investors to invest as little as $500 with quarterly redemptions. Later, Jon Durbin presents Chutes, a Bittensor subnet aggregating GPUs for trustless AI compute, and Yash Goenka introduces Humwork, which adds human intervention to unstuck AI agents. The episode also covers a news lightning round.

Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway discuss GameStop's $55 billion bid for eBay and the CEO's disastrous CNBC interview, the rise of AI-funded super PACs copying crypto industry tactics to influence the midterms, the Senate's ban on member trading in political prediction markets, new Pentagon AI contracts, and what Apple's latest earnings say about its future.

Tim Stevens, Hayden Field

Verge contributor Tim Stevens explores how car companies are using AI tools to radically speed up vehicle development, potentially changing the cars we drive and affecting the jobs pipeline. Then, Hayden Field breaks down the latest in AI industry news: the Pentagon's classified AI deals, Anthropic's exclusion, the death of Microsoft and OpenAI’s AGI agreement, and why ChatGPT downloads are slowing. The episode also answers a listener question about whether tech layoffs are really about AI.

The May 2026 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape, where host Sean Carroll answers questions submitted by Patreon supporters. The questions were curated based on whether Carroll had something interesting to say about them, and sometimes grouped by topic.

Faint but converging signals suggest the AI doom narrative may finally be cracking — and they're showing up in the chattering class and the markets at the same time. This episode walks through the evidence: Ezra Klein's New York Times pushback on the AI job apocalypse, Alex Imas's scarcity framework, Atlassian's blowout earnings, and Sam Altman's rhetorical pivot from replacement to augmentation.

Dara Khosrowshahi

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi returns to Decoder to discuss the company's expansion into a broader travel platform, adding hotel booking and personal shopping. He outlines the vision of an 'everything app' and how far the company thinks that concept can stretch. The conversation also addresses mounting pressure from AI chatbots that could bypass the Uber app entirely, prompting Uber to strengthen its grip on the user experience layer.

Will Edwards (Firehawk Aerospace), Maruchi Kim (VueBuds)

Jason Calacanis interviews Will Edwards of Firehawk Aerospace, a defense tech startup that applies 3D-printed solid rocket propellant to cut missile production costs in half and increase U.S. output by 5x—addressing a critical U.S. military shortage. The episode also features Maruchi Kim discussing VueBuds, camera-equipped earbuds that match Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses performance and represent an emerging wearable AI platform.

Andrew Yang

Kevin Roose and Casey Newton explore Tim Cook's tenure at Apple, examining how the company has evolved under his leadership and what his legacy means for tech. The hosts also discuss universal basic income with entrepreneur Andrew Yang and test a new AI product that generates hats.

Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks, David Friedberg

The All-In besties discuss SpaceX's acquisition of Cursor for compute leverage, the emerging SaaS debt crisis with major firms like Medallia facing creditor pressure, Tim Cook's succession to John Ternus at Apple and what it means for the company's future, the SPLC indictment raising questions about NGO oversight, and new research linking a specific microbiome imbalance to the surge in colon cancer among young adults.

NLW (Host Solo)

NLW tests GPT-5.5 across real-world tasks—writing, coding, strategy, design, spreadsheets, and data analysis—and breaks down OpenAI's launch positioning around 'real work' versus the hype. The episode covers benchmark claims, comparisons to Anthropic, and whether the upgrade will feel meaningful to everyday users or just benchmark improvement.

Philipp Herzig

Philipp Herzig, CTO of SAP, discusses how the 50-year-old enterprise software giant is navigating the AI transition for its 400,000+ customers. The conversation covers SAP's strategy for closing the AI adoption gap, the critical importance of data quality and verifiability in enterprise AI, the shift from predictive models to agentic systems, and how AI is forcing SAP to rethink its pricing model from per-user licenses to outcome-based approaches.

Chris Benson, Daniel Whitenack

Dan and Chris dissect Anthropic's new Mythos frontier model and its cybersecurity implications, ranging from 'been here before' skepticism to existential concern. They then pivot to Allbirds' shocking announcement: pivoting from shoe manufacturing to becoming a neocloud provider. The episode closes with analysis of 'tokenmaxxing'—the gamification of LLM usage that's profitable for model providers but financially ruinous for developers.

Chris Zacharia, Brian McRindle (Bitstarter); Ning Ren (Trajectory RL)

SpaceX and Cursor announced a $10B partnership to develop AI coding models, with an option for a $60B acquisition. The episode explores the deal's implications for the AI coding market, then dives into Bittensor infrastructure through Bitstarter (a 'Kickstarter for Bittensor subnets') and Trajectory RL's use of decentralized competitions to design AI agent skills. Discussion spans the economics of AI compute consolidation, decentralized AI infrastructure, and the emerging role of 'skills' as critical building blocks in the agentic era.

Ben Gilbert & David Rosenthal

The definitive Acquired episode on Amazon: Jeff Bezos from D.E. Shaw quant to building the everything store. The Prime flywheel, AWS as an accidental trillion-dollar business, the Day 1 philosophy, and how Bezos created the most customer-obsessed company in history.

Chamath Palihapitiya

The hosts debate the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Elon Musk's initiative to cut government spending. Can Silicon Valley's move-fast mentality work in bureaucracy?

Chamath Palihapitiya

Emergency episode after the 2024 presidential election. The hosts analyze Trump's victory, the role of tech billionaires in the campaign, and what the result means for AI policy, crypto regulation, and tech antitrust.

Chamath Palihapitiya

Heated debate on AI regulation. Sacks argues for minimal regulation to preserve innovation. Friedberg argues for targeted safety requirements. Chamath and Calacanis stake out middle ground.

Ben Gilbert & David Rosenthal

Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nate Blecharczyk built Airbnb from air mattresses on a living room floor to an $80B+ travel platform. The complete story of surviving Obama O's, Y Combinator, the pandemic collapse, and the design-driven reinvention.

Chamath Palihapitiya

The hosts debate Silicon Valley's political shift rightward. Why tech founders who were reliably Democratic are now supporting Republican candidates, and what this means for technology policy.

Chamath Palihapitiya

The four besties make their annual predictions for 2024: AI progress, market performance, election outcomes, and geopolitics. Each host puts their reputation on the line with specific, falsifiable predictions.

Ben Gilbert & David Rosenthal

The full Apple story: from the garage to $3T. How Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak built the most valuable company in history through an obsessive focus on product quality, vertical integration, and the intersection of technology and liberal arts.