Tech Overflow

Entrepreneurs get the glory, investors get the spreadsheets, and John Lilly says that’s exactly how it should be. John (former VC, now angel and board member, and newly involved with Gigascale Capital) joins us to demystify venture capital for curious builders: how funds are raised from limited partners, why returns follow a power law, and what investors actually do between writing a cheque and a company becoming real. Along the wa...

This week Hannah is joined by guest host Derrick Connell to discuss how Microsoft's Tay went wrong, how Satya Nadella reacted in the moment, and what Derrick learned about innovation. Derrick also shares stories from shifts in technology and discusses his new book Twenty One Summers.

Derrick shipped a chatbot that survived for 18 hours as it went horribly wrong. It sounds like a punchline until you realise it helped rewrite how...

Google Search feels like magic because it is solving an impossible problem on your behalf: you show up with a complex information need, type a couple of words, and expect a great answer almost instantly. We unpack what’s really happening in that split second, from the early days of cluttered 90s search engines to why Google’s clean interface, speed, and relevance changed everything.

We walk through the core machinery that ...

AI did not creep in quietly, it arrived like a tidal wave. We talk with Ramez Naam, computer scientist, science fiction author, futurist, and climate tech investor, to pin down what today’s large language models really are, why they’re the fastest adopted general technology in history, and why “impressive” is not the same thing as artificial general intelligence. Along the way, we challenge the idea that AGI is right around the cor...

Big tech isn’t a buzzword anymore, it’s the scaffolding holding up the modern economy and, increasingly, modern politics. We sit down and map the real shape of power behind the Magnificent Seven: Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, NVIDIA and Tesla. We talk through what they do, why they dominate the S&P 500, and the part most people miss, where the revenue comes from versus where the profit actually lands. If you’ve ever...

We compare how we actually use ChatGPT (and Claude) every day and why most people treat LLMs more like a personal helper than a work automation tool. We dig into what happens to your data after you hit Enter, from memories and human review to cross-border storage and training settings. 

We cover several topics:

• Our top real-world use cases for ChatGPT and why they are mostly non-work 
• How ChatGPT memory works and wh...

You pick up your phone to do one thing, and five minutes later you cannot even remember what that thing was. That is not just “bad discipline” or a modern character flaw. It is the result of deliberate product design, engagement metrics, and relentless experimentation that turns curiosity into habit. 
 
We walk through how big tech measures engagement in the real world, from daily active users (DAU) and monthly active users...

Ever watched an idea go from a sentence to a working app before your coffee cools? We put that thrill to the test. First, we vibe code a meeting cost tracker live—complete with per-person salaries and a live ticker—then we hand a broad travel brief to an AI agent and let it work unsupervised. By the time we circle back, it’s assembled sourced itineraries for Florence, aligned to festivals and budgets, and laid out the tradeoffs wit...

Ever had an ad land so perfectly it felt like your phone must be listening? We open season two by pulling back the curtain on why targeting feels psychic without constant eavesdropping. Smart speakers like Alexa and Siri rely on wake words and short cloud trips to respond, but the real signals come from everyday behaviour: where we go, what we search, how we scroll, who we share with, and even the Wi‑Fi we share at home.

W...

Season 2 of the Tech Overflow Podcast starts on March 3, 2026. 

Join Hannah Clayton-Langton and Hugh Williams as they explore and demystify tech for curious listeners. This season, there'll be even more episodes on AI, three incredible interviews, and deep dives into how tech is changing the industries we all care about.

Whether you're looking to learn more about how tech really works, hear great stories from insi...

A single field mismatch bricked fleets of Windows machines. A simple gesture turned dating into a swipe. A major grocer is hacked and down for 45 days. A driverless car pulled up with no one inside.

As we gear up for the launch of Season Two on March 3, Hannah shares her favourite stories from Season One. We went under the hood and explained tech in an accessible way for every curious listener. In this episode, we share what you&apo...

Three months ago we set out to make complex tech feel simple for smart people. Today, we close Season 1 with a bonus episode that’s a candid debrief on what worked, what didn’t, and the practical concepts you told us made a difference at work and in everyday life. We answer listener questions and Hugh fails to answer Hannah’s trivia questions (in a throwback to Episode 1).

We start with reflections on learning the craft of...

A taxi pulls up with no one in the front seat. Would you get in? We invited Waymo director Nick Pelly to take us from that first uncanny moment to the engineering that makes a driverless ride feel calm, confident and, by the data, far safer than most humans behind the wheel.

We walk through the full autonomy stack in plain English: how cameras, radar and LiDAR fuse into a single view of the world; how perception, predictio...

Ever joined a “Guest Wi‑Fi” that looked legit, rushed through an email on the way to the airport, or reused a password because it was easier? Those small shortcuts are exactly where hacks begin. We open the curtain on how attacks actually work and, more importantly, the simple habits that stop them.

We break down malware in clear terms: old‑school viruses that ride dodgy attachments, worms that replicate on their own, and ...

A fake contractor calls the help desk, a password gets reset, and suddenly a national retailer has hackers inside. We open the door on the human side of hacking—how believable stories and helpful habits become the first domino—then trace the technical steps that turn a small foothold into a system‑wide crisis.

We walk through the anatomy of the Marks & Spencer breach: social engineering as the entry point, slow‑burn pr...

Finally, a podcast that explains how AI, LLMs, and ChatGPT work without any hype, fluff, or hyperbole. This episode is aimed at smart people who aren’t in tech and just want to be able to understand the basics. Join host Hannah Clayton-Langton as she discusses the topic with former Google VP and OG AI expert, Hugh Williams.

We start by separating AI, machine learning, and LLMs, then explain why generative systems are not search. Ins...

What happens when a search engine is driven by a text file of hand-written rules? You get a Jaguar car ranking first for an iPod query on eBay, and you get the perfect setup for a practical tour of how AI actually creates value. We unpack the journey from brittle if-then logic to machine learning that learns relevance from real outcomes.

In this episode, we break down AI, machine learning, and large language models (LLMs) ...

Tinder's #swiperight gesture changed how millions decide and revolutionised dating. Tinder didn’t just explode into the public consciousness, it was also the most successful dating product in history and one of the fastest companies to $100m in revenue. 

Hannah and Hugh sit down with Tinder co‑founder Jonathan Badeen to trace the unexpected path from a flashcards epiphany to a cultural verb, and why #swiperight wasn’t meant to ...

Catastrophic software failures can seem like acts of chaos, but behind every major tech outage lies a story of human decisions, technical constraints, and cascading consequences. The July 2024 CrowdStrike incident—which Hannah describes as "the single biggest outage in the history of computing"—offers a perfect case study into what happens when critical systems fail.

Hannah and Hugh dive deep into how a seemingly...