A guide to keeping your phone, and your digital life, safe when you’re crossing the border.

Guest: Lily Hay Newman, senior writer for WIRED covering information security.

Podcast production by Evan Campbell and Patrick Fort.

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Elon Musk has ridden off into the sunset acrimoniously (maybe), but the Department of Government Efficiency is just getting started. Will DOGE continue wildly cutting or is something even more chaotic coming next? 

Guest: Makena Kelly, senior writer at WIRED. 

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Podcast production by Evan Campbell and Patrick Fort.

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Assistant Attorney General Gail Slater inherited the government’s antitrust case against Google and is eager to follow it through—but likely not for the same reasons as her predecessors. 

Guest:  Nancy Scola, reporter and contributing writer at POLITICO. 

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One of the goals of DOGE was to get rid of the “silos” that keep government agencies from sharing freely amongst themselves efficiently and instead organize data using tools offered by companies like Palantir. The thing is, a lot of those silos are there by design, and removing them could be a nightmare for privacy advocates. 

Guest: Sheera Frenkel, tech reporter for the New York Times.

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His time in Washington was brief, but we’ll be picking up the pieces for a long time. What Elon’s exit signals for the future of DOGE, and Musk’s political career. 

Guest: Kate Conger, reporter for the New York Times covering X and other technology companies.

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The war between Ukraine and Russia is being fought increasingly via drone —and NATO and US military leadership is training troops for future conflicts that will pit man against machine.

Guest: Jake Epstein, senior defense reporter for Business Insider.

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Podcast production by Evan Campbell and Patrick Fort.

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The crypto industry poured tons of money into the last election cycle. Is the GENIUS Act, which has bipartisan support, their big payoff?

Guest: Hilary Allen, professor at American University’s Washington College of Law.

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OpenAI started as a non-profit dedicated to building safe A.I. Now, they’re obsessed with building artificial general intelligence by any means necessary - even if they don’t quite know what that is. 

Guest: Karen Hao, reporter and author of “Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI”

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What do you do when your likeness has been turned into A.I.-generated pornography?—it’s a problem people are already facing. But legislation moving through Congress may cause more problems than it would solve.

Guests:

Joanne Chew, actress and visual artist based in LA.

Samantha Cole, cofounder of 404 media and author of “How Sex Changed the Internet and How the Internet Changed Sex.”

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Podcast production by Evan Campbell and Patrick Fort.

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Aging equipment and chronically understaffed air traffic control have made flying in and out of Newark’s Liberty International Airport a delay-snarled mess. And the problems there aren’t entirely unique. Will Congress and the Trump administration be the ones to fix it? 

Guest: Will Guisbond, staff reporter covering air traffic control for The Air Current

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Podcast production by Evan Campbell and Patrick Fort.

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