Looking for up-to-the-minute updates on where the fires are, LA residents have been turning to the app Watch Duty, rather than getting updates directly from the local or state government, or even local media.

Guests:

David Merritt, cofounder and CTO of Watch Duty

Alyssa Jeong Perry, LA-based producer for Slate.

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Podcast production by Evan Campbell, Patrick Fort, and Cheyna Roth.

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Misinformation, disinformation, politics—Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg is not going to shield users from those anymore. What’s behind the abrupt change in direction?

Guest: Sheera Frenkel, New York Times tech reporter

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Podcast production by Evan Campbell, Patrick Fort, and Cheyna Roth.

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How the FCC and its incoming head, Brenden Carr, could enact Trump’s top policy goal: punishing anyone who says mean stuff about Trump.

Guest: Drew FitzGerald, telecom reporter for the Wall Street Journal.

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Will a First Amendment defense keep TikTok running in America? 

Guest: Emily Baker White, tech reporter for Forbes. 

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Podcast production by Evan Campbell, Patrick Fort, and Cheyna Roth.

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Cryptocurrency spent generously on this last election cycle, and now they’ve got their top pick in the White House, and wins across Congress. Where is the industry looking to go with these favorable, regulatory winds? 

Guest: David Yaffe-Bellany, tech reporter covering the crypto industry for the New York Times.

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Podcast production by Evan Campbell, Patrick Fort, and Cheyna Roth.

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On Christmas Eve a fracas erupted on X, when Elon Musk posted in favor of H1-B visas for specialized and high-skill workers and was met with anger from the MAGA base who view the visas as a way for immigrants to take American jobs.

Guest: Ryan Mac, tech reporter for The New York Times and the coauthor of the book “Character Limit How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter.”

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

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Between a third and half of American schoolchildren have a form of “mental health monitoring” software on their school devices, which scans for and flags certain keywords. 

While intuitively appealing, is it worth the false positives, privacy issues, and compromised trust? 

Guest: Ellen Barry, mental health reporter for the New York Times.

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“Fecal microbial transplants” treat someone’s unhealthy gut with poop from someone else’s healthy gut, and proponents of FMT claim it can help treat everything from IBS to autism. But if your doctor isn’t ready to fill you up with someone else’s poop, the internet will happily oblige. 

Guest: 

Luke Winkie, Slate staff writer who published “The Poop Broker.”

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Disclosure in Podcast Description: A Bond Account is a self-directed brokerage account with Public Investing, member FINRA/SIPC. Deposits into this account are used to purchase 10 investment-grade and high-yield bonds. As of 9/26/24, the average, annualized yield to worst (YTW) across the Bond Account is greater than 6%. A bond’s yield is a function of its market price, which can fluctuate; therefore, a bond’s YTW is not “locked in” until the bond is purchased, and your yield at time of purchase may be different from the yield shown here. The “locked in” YTW is not guaranteed; you may receive less than the YTW of the bonds in the Bond Account if you sell any of the bonds before maturity or if the issuer defaults on the bond. Public Investing charges a markup on each bond trade. See our Fee Schedule. Bond Accounts are not recommendations of individual bonds or default allocations. The bonds in the Bond Account have not been selected based on your needs or risk profile. See https://public.com/disclosures/bond-account to learn more.

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One influencer working for Amazon sued another influencer who works for Amazon for creating content that looks too similar to theirs. But with how the algorithms work and reward, was this an inevitability? What does this mean for the economics of the influencer position?

Guest: Mia Sato, reporter covering platforms and communities for The Verge.

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Reports of flocks of drones, flying overhead nightly, are coming in from New Jersey down to Maryland. Are they UFOs? Nefarious foreign powers? Something even more pernicious? Something even more banal?

Guest: Jon Ostrower, editor-in-chief of The Air Current.

Ben Mathis-Lilly, Slate senior writer

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