The FATcast

Your data is precious. So why are you just giving it away? The reason is that nobody is helping you control it. But all that may be about to change. This week I’m talking to Julian Ranger, the founder and executive chairman of Digi me. What Digi Me does is enables you to download all your social activity – all of it – which you can then search and manage, right there on your device. Better still, they’re working on a system for letting you control your data and decide what you share and which companies you share it with. You can also use Digi Me as a powerful lifelogging tool, and Julian and I get into that. This conversation will change the way you think about your own personal data, so get ready to have your mind blown. Here’s my conversation with Julian Ranger. Listen: https://ia801506.us.archive.org/3/items/fatcast15/fatcast15.mp3

Food sucks. Let’s change it. So much of our food is unhealthy. People feel like they don’t have time to cook, let alone learn to cook. And nearly 40 percent of the food produced in the United States is wasted. Solutions abound. And these include countertop food processors, such as the revOILution olive oil press to Amazon’s secret Kabinet project – a kind of food-centric Amazon Echo – to the creation of lab grown meat. One Silicon Valley company called Innit – as in “in it to win it” – is working on an extensible platform that enables the food you buy to provide the kitchen appliances you use with information that streamlines and optimizes the entire cooking process. I spoke to Innit’s founder and CEO, Eugenio Minvielle, about his product and about the future of food. Here’s my conversation with Eugenio Minvielle. Listen: https://ia601507.us.archive.org/34/items/FATcast14/FATcast14.mp3

The Internet Of Modular Things! Electronic LEGO? Maybe the future of consumer electronics and the internet of things is hinted at by everyone’s favorite plastic pastime. A company called Nascent Objects is building such a future, brick by brick. In this special FATcast interview, I talk to Nascent Objects founder & CEO Baback Elmieh about his company’s approach to rapid deployment and reducing rampant waste in the electronics industry. Listen: https://ia801505.us.archive.org/5/items/fatcast13/fatcast13.mp3 #fatcast #technology #nascentobjects

The revolution will be conversational! My guest Lucas Ives has an interesting job title. He’s a “Conversation Engineer” at a San Francisco company called ToyTalk, which specializes in custom conversational interfaces. The company is best known for bringing Barbie to life. Mattel’s Hello Barbie doll has a Siri-like interface for children developed mainly by Ives’ team at ToyTalk. I’m fascinated by Hello Barbie because I believe the spoken conversational UI will quickly become the primary interface for computers, phones and everyday objects. Where Barbie goes today, the rest of the world follows. Listen: https://ia601503.us.archive.org/8/items/FATcast12/FATcast12.mp3 #fatcast #technology #conversationalui #toytalk

Part personal trainer, part nutrition consultant, part holistic health counselor, the new Shae virtual assistant tells you exactly how and when and what to eat and exercise. I talked to the founder and CEO behind Shae, health entrepreneur Matt Riemann. Listen: https://ia601502.us.archive.org/18/items/FATcast11/FATcast11.mp3

I asked Gordon Bell about lifelogging, about the quantified self movement and about predicting the future of technology. Listen: https://ia801500.us.archive.org/19/items/fatcast10/fatcast10.mp3

Kevin Mitnick is known as a “superhacker.” But he’s also a behavioral psychologist, educator and showman – and that’s what makes him so effective as a hacker-for-hire for some of the world’s biggest corporations. Catch up with the world’s most famous hacker in this surprising interview. Listen: https://ia601504.us.archive.org/11/items/fatcast9/fatcast9.mp3

Don’t throw rocks at the Google bus. You’ll only be hurting yourself (and people like you). Writer Douglas Rushkoff has a new book called “Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity.” In the book, he lays out why we’re all on that bus together. The growth-centered digital economy seeks to extract value from people, instead of helping us all create and share value with each other in a trusted, mutually beneficial community. Rushkoff says there’s a better way, and tells us how to start getting there. Listen: https://ia601500.us.archive.org/3/items/fatcast8/fatcast8.mp3

Amy isn’t a real person. But if I didn’t tell you that, you’d never know. Amy is x.ai’s virtual assistant software that does only one thing – schedule meetings for you.  In this episode of the FATcast, I talk with x.ai CEO and founder Dennis Mortensen about how Amy came into the world – and why. Listen:  https://ia601502.us.archive.org/22/items/fatcast7/fatcast7.mp3

Why are you eating that? In this episode, journalist Mike Elgan talks with food writer Bee Wilson about her book: “First Bite: How We Learn to Eat.” Listen: https://ia601504.us.archive.org/13/items/FATcast6/FATcast6.mp3