Our guest in this episode is Stephen Witt, an American journalist and author who writes about the people driving the technological revolutions. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, and is famous for deep-dive investigations.

Stephen's new book is "The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip", which has just won the 2025 Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award. It is a definitive account of the rise of Nvidia, from its foundation in a Denny's restaurant in 1993 as a video game component manufacturer, to becoming the world's most valuable company, and the hardware provider for the current AI boom.

Stephen's previous book, “How Music Got Free”, is a history of music piracy and the MP3, and was also a finalist for the FT Business Book of the Year.

Selected follow-ups:

• Stephen Witt - personal site
• Articles by Stephen Witt on The New Yorker
• The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip - book site
• Stephen Witt wins FT and Schroders Business Book of the Year - Financial Times
• Nvidia Executives
• Battle Royale (Japanese film) - IMDb
• The Economic Singularity - book by Calum Chace
• A Cubic Millimeter of a Human Brain Has Been Mapped in Spectacular Detail - Nature
• NotebookLM - by Google

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration

How Hacks Happen

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