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Jensen Huang is CEO of the most valuable company in human history, NVIDIA. He is arguably the one person who could slow down the AI race. But he’s made a massive bet that AI is safe. 

Is that conviction, insulation, salesmanship, or something else? 

We find answers in his very unusual life story. 

The Thinking Machine by Stephen Witt

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An interview with a writer, Meghan O’Gieblyn, who started lying to herself about her relationship to alcohol and God. And afterwards wondered: when did it start? Why did it happen? How do you make peace with the part of yourself that wants something that could destroy you? 

Meghan O’Gieblyn, Will and Attention

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Nine months ago, three podcasters attempted to build a better internet. Today -- they confront foreign adversaries on a digital battlefield.

Watch the Machine Gods trailer.

Instructions for moving your Forkiverse account to a different server.

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Search Engine has some exciting news about the moving image to announce, and we’re sharing an interview we loved with an unusual architect.

Check out the video version on Freakonomics' YouTube page.

An email hits our inbox with the subject line: “My Dad is making a Bollywood Movie… is he being scammed?” We investigate. 

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A Japanese listener gets so many houseguests she starts a spreadsheet to try to figure out what's going on. Why has American tourism to Japan gotten so out of control? The story of a government plot.

Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the U.S. by Roland Kelts

Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style by W. David Marx

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Mahmud Almadhoun ran a soup kitchen in the north of the Gaza Strip. In November 2024, he was killed. A reporter tries to answer a big question. Was Mahmud intentionally targeted? And if so, what does that mean about the future of war?

Listen to The Gaza Chef.

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A listener asks: whose penis gets the top spot on the Wikipedia page for penis?

Our quest for an answer takes us on a surprisingly philosophical journey — where we learn about the cutthroat fight to be number one and the extremely overthink-y debate that precedes the coronation.

Wikipedia page for Lane Rasberry.

Wikipedia page for penis.

Wikipedia page for human penis.

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The midterms are approaching, and as the discourse heats up, one of the big new villains is: a kind of building. Data centers. Reporter Jasmine Sun took a road trip through two swing states to meet the people living at the center of these debates, and to understand where this all might be headed.  

no data centers in my backyard by Jasmine Sun

For the first time, an AI model has autonomously hacked a company. This week, an evolving story, a postcard from a strange, frightening moment in the story of our technology.

A big week for AI denialism by Casey Newton

Its AI agent spent days hacking a company, but sources say OpenAI did not notice for a week by Deepa Seetharaman, Raphael Satter, and Kenrick Cai

Cheating behaviour in frontier model evaluations by AI Security Institute

More On An Internal OpenAI Model Hacking Into HuggingFace by Zvi Mowshowitz