TechStuff

Ever wonder why Gen Z is so obsessed with Millennial culture? Casey Lewis can tell you. She’s a trend researcher and author of “After School,” a Substack newsletter about youth and internet culture. Casey joins Karah to discuss why Gen Z is doubling down on nostalgia and buying up analog products. She runs through the latest trends you may have seen, but didn’t understand… And she unpacks why Gen Alph...

What would you do if AI took your clothes off? Elon Musk’s AI model, Grok, will strip women of their clothes when prompted and the results are all over X.com. “Nudify” apps and communities have been doing this for years, but now it’s trending on one of the biggest social media platforms out there. And no one is protected—even children. Karah sits down with Samantha Cole from 404 Media to discuss how X ...

Hey entrepreneurs! Your favorite hosts Jannese Torres (Yo Quiero Dinero & Financially Lit!) and Austin Hankwitz (Rate of Return & Rich Habits) are back for Season 4 of “Mind the Business: Small Business Success Stories", brought to you by iHeartMedia’s Ruby Studio in partnership with Intuit QuickBooks. 

This time around, we're diving deep with more exciting small business owners at the cutting edge of their...

Eliot Peper gets paid to dream about the future. He’s a science fiction writer who has stumbled into an unusual position: writing speculative fiction for Fortune 500 companies. He is also the Head of Story at Portola, which is an AI-companion company. Eliot is responsible for developing a whole new alien culture and forming the personalities of your new favorite AI creature. Karah and Eliot discuss the overlap between art and...

NASA and IBM have developed advanced AI foundation models that analyze satellite data to reveal patterns across Earth and beyond. These tools are already driving real‑world impact, from helping Kenya plan the planting of 15 billion trees to enabling the UK to track harmful algae blooms. This collaboration provides strategic insights for climate action, environmental monitoring, and emergency response.

This...

Would you live in a zero labor home – with a robot? This week, the latest trends and gadgets coming out of CES in Las Vegas and what Karah learned about consenting to biometric surveillance at a Wegmans. Then, Oz takes us to a peptide rave and Karah unveils how influencers and OnlyFans models are getting US visas — they can thank John Lennon.  

If you’ve used a chatbot in an unusual or surprising way, se...

What was your tech takeaway in 2025? And what is going to be the big story in 2026? Oz sits down with the author of The Running Ground and The Atlantic’s CEO, Nicholas Thompson, to discuss the odd intersection between tech and religion, the tech to compensate media companies for AI training data, who OpenAI’s real rival is, why we don’t understand how AI works, and much, much more.

See omnystudio.com/listener ...

Could you resist falling for an AI companion? We’re revisiting one of our favorite episodes of 2025: author and journalist Sam Apple takes us on romantic getaway for people who are in love with their AI companions He wrote a piece for Wired about what he observed that weekend, whether the love between humans and AI is real, and what the future of dating could look like in a world with AI companions.

See omnystudio.com/listener...

One of the companies you couldn’t ignore this year was NVIDIA, so we’re re-airing a conversation Oz had with Stephen Witt, a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and author of The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, NVIDIA, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip. They discuss what’s made NVIDIA the most valuable chip company in the world, how a single piece of hardware changed the world forever, and why data c...

What was your internet obsession this year? Karah is joined by writer and podcast host, Aminatou Sow, to talk about what they watched — and what rotted their brains — in 2025. They talk about niche internet obsessions, vertical shorts, AI depicting the oldest generation, and the never-ending Wicked press tour. 

Additional Reading/Watching: 

• Exploring My Mustard Collection | Tiktok

Are you a gift go-getter, or a holiday procrastinator? This week, Karah spoke with Kyle Chayka, tech writer for The New Yorker and author of the book “Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture”. They talk about his gadget gift guide, how analog products are back in style, and why books are his preferred gift of choice. Oz also shares the hottest toy of the year: a console that helps the whole family stay active.&nbs...

Is nuclear fusion the clean energy we need? Oz speaks with Commonwealth Fusion Systems' scientist and engineer Alex Creely and fashion designer Gabriela Hearst about why the public should get excited about nuclear fusion. Together, they discuss what it will take to commercialize fusion, how Gabriela’s 2022 fashion show changed the public conversation, and whether we’ll have nuclear fusion by 2030.

See omnystudio.com/list...

Should LLMs monitor crime? This week, Oz tells us why the US pharmaceutical industry may have competition… and why we’ve yet to see a flood of new products from AI drug discovery companies. Then, Karah explains how a telecommunications company is feeding recordings of inmate phone calls into LLMs that can then monitor future calls for planned crimes. Also, the UK government wants to cross-reference CCTV footage with th...

What does the death of restaurants look like? Ellen Cushing, staff writer for The Atlantic, joins Karah to talk about the rise of delivery apps and the fall of the in-person dining experience. They discuss how delivery apps became part of the millennial lifestyle subsidy, how they reshaped what’s on the menu, and why this feels all too similar to what’s happening to movie theaters. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for p...

Is unplugging from your phone the ultimate luxury? This week, Oz introduces us to the businesses that specialize in “dimming the sun” and Karah introduces us to “LinkedIn Face.” Polymarket’s bets lead to disinformation about Russia’s war with Ukraine. 23andMe reveals secret families — and secret inheritances. And Oz and Karah almost cry over the latest invention from Japan: a human washing ...

Can you run a billion dollar company with only one human employee? Journalist Evan Ratliff, along with technical advisor Maty Bohacek, join Oz to answer this question. Evan is host of the hit podcast Shell Game. In Season 1, he used AI agents to imitate his voice, which he sent out into the world to interact with customer service agents, scammers, and his own family and friends. This season, Evan co-founds a company… and emp...

This is the first episode of the second season of Shell Game. Journalist Evan Ratliff tells a story of entrepreneurship in the AI age; or, how he tried to build a real company, run by fake people.

Meet Kyle Law and Megan Flores, Evan’s AI agent cofounders, as he puts to the test the claims about an emerging future in which AI employees work alongside — or instead of — humans.

Over the course of the season, the thr...

This week, what does defense technology look like in 2025? Oz talks to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Dexter Filkins about his recent piece in The New Yorker titled “Is the US ready for the next war?” They discuss how the Ukraine and Israel are reimagining what warfare looks like in the 21st century, Silicon Valley’s race toward fully autonomous killer robots, and how it all might affect the potential conf...