The scam du jour arrives via a text message, offering you a job. What happens when you accept?

Guest: Alex Sammon, Slate features writer. 

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Jensen Huang, cofounder of NVIDIA, finds himself president of a $4 trillion company, at the forefront of A.I. technology, and, consequently, something of an international diplomat, as he charms President Trump and negotiates to sell his powerful chips to China. 

Guest: Amrith Ramkumar, reporter for The Wall Street Journal in Washington covering tech and crypto policy.

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Podcast production by Evan Campbell, Ethan Oberman, Patrick Fort, and Elena Schwartz.

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It’s hard to make money in the music industry. But if you could flood every streamer with hundreds of “original” songs without having to, you know, write or produce it yourself, there’s money there—and less for everyone else. 

Guests: 

Chris Molanphy, host of Slate’s Hit Parade podcast.

Kate Knibbs, senior writer at Wired

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In January, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta was moving from employing professional fact-checkers to letting its users fact-check each other. If you’ve heard that it’s going perfectly, then you, too, have been exposed to misinformation.

Guest: Geoffrey Fowler, tech columnist with the Washington Post

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Podcast production by Evan Campbell, Ethan Oberman, and Patrick Fort.

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OpenAI’s Sam Altman, flanked by President Trump and Softbank’s Masayoshi Son, announced a hugely ambitious investment in data centers across America to support all the artificial intelligence we’re going to be using. Months in, the project has been scaled back to a single, power-hungry data center in Ohio.

Guest: Berber Jin, reporter covering A.I. for the Wall Street Journal

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A shadow app for the dating world had its data hacked and exposed, and it laid bare the perils of creating safe spaces for women online — and of relying on tech companies.

Guest: Kate Lindsay, host of Slate’s ICYMI

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There’s an entire economy devoted to seeing what products are trending—clothing, skin care, even Greek Islands—and delivering you a cheaper knock-off to buy. 

Guest: Mia Sato, reporter for The Verge

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Was the Late Show too unprofitable, or too political?

Guest: Eric Deggans, NPR TV critic and media analyst, Knight Chair, Journalism and Media Ethics, Washington & Lee University.

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Podcast production by Evan Campbell and Patrick Fort.

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It’s kind of strange that Grok, Elon Musk’s chatbot, went full Nazi a few weeks ago, and is just…still out there. But, then again, how are you supposed to hold an LLM accountable?

Guest: Drew Harwell, technology reporter for the Washington Post

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The MAGA world has been waiting for Jeffrey Epstein’s client list to be released since the first Trump administration. But with those like Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, who stoked interest in the list literally in power, the administration is now saying that no such list exists. For some MAGA fans, this is finally a bridge too far. 

Guest: Anna Merlan, senior reporter at Mother Jones.

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Podcast production by Evan Campbell and Patrick Fort.

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