The masses have flocked on Anaheim, California, for VidCon, where industry executives and fans get to interact with their favorite influencers. And, of course, take selfies with a giant rainbow slide and Barbie’s glittering Dream House. Marketplace’s Jed Kim also spoke with Taylor Lorenz, who covers internet culture for The Atlantic. She said Instagram and TikTok are gaining ground on YouTube among creators.

Marketplace’s Jed Kim continues his conversation with Margaret O’Mara, whose book “The Code” is out this week. Think of it as a biography of Silicon Valley — all the circumstances over more than half a century that made it what it is today.

We’re fascinated with tales of visionary entrepreneurs, trillion-dollar companies, the American tech success story. Foreign leaders are keen to understand and replicate the innovation juggernaut that is Silicon Valley. But little has been written about the entirety of it — the economic ecosystem of Silicon Valley and how it evolved. Margaret O’Mara’s new book, “The Code,” offers a more comprehensive look at the American tech industry dating back to the 1940s.

If you’ve got a design problem you need to fix, you could lock a bunch of engineers into a room to help brainstorm. Or you could look to the natural world, which is called biomimicry, the practice of replicating adaptations found in nature. Jed Kim talks to Janine Benyus, co-founder of the Biomimicry Institute.

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 crew landing on the moon. PBS is releasing a six-hour documentary series about it, “Chasing the Moon.” Marketplace’s Jed Kim watched the whole series and calls it thrilling, even though we all know how it ends, right? Kim spoke about this and more with the filmmaker Robert Stone.

Virtual reality company Oculus was going to revolutionize VR for gaming back in 2014. The Oculus Rift headset was for gamers by gamers, end of story. But then Facebook bought the company for about $2 billion because it had a much bigger vision for virtual reality as the future of engagement: people hanging out in VR like they did on the news feed, having a good time and watching ads for hours. This is an encore of part two of Molly Wood’s March 2019 interview with Blake Harris, author of “History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution that Swept Virtual Reality.”

Virtual reality is the technology that keeps on promising. For the past decade, the promise has seemed so much closer, especially when Oculus came along looking like such a game-changer that even Facebook invested $2 billion on it in 2014. Host Molly Wood spoke with Blake Harris in March, the author of “The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality.” This is a re-air of that conversation.

We couldn’t always predict the weather. It took huge strides in physics, atmospheric science, computer science and engineering to connect the dots between what’s going on in the sky at any given moment to whether we’ll have a rainstorm next week. And that effort has become bigger: more international and more expensive, involving supercomputers, the International Space Station, satellites and advanced models. Amy Choi talks to Andrew Blum, author of “The Weather Machine.”

Amazon turns 25 this week. Who would’ve thought back in 1994 that a tiny online retailer that just sold books might turn into a company that touches pretty much every aspect of our lives — what we buy, how we compute, how we watch movies? Molly Wood talks to futurist Amy Webb about the next 25 years of the giant tech firm.

A new California law goes into effect today, requiring any online chat bot that’s trying to sell you something or get you to vote a certain way to disclose that it’s a bot. No pretending to be a person trying to sell you an extended warranty in a customer service chat. Or no posing as a real person posting on Twitter about voting in an upcoming election.