Future Around & Find Out

Murderbots, mass layoffs, and media takeovers — all in one news cycle. Anthropic told the Pentagon "we will not accede." Block cut half its workforce overnight. And the Paramount-Warner Brothers deal raises real questions about who's running the media now.

Also, thanks to Nicolás Maduro's fashion sense, Dan's 13-year-old is being called Lil Tator at school and honestly? The kids are all right. 

Happy FAFO Friday!

Here...

Of all the industries AI will transform, Kira Radinsky believes chemistry and biology will change the most. 

Kira is the co-founder and CTO of Diagnostic Robotics, which uses AI to automate the administrative work that's crushing healthcare teams — so clinicians can actually focus on patients. She's also the co-founder of Mana.bio, where they're accelerating drug discovery by orders of magnitude.

She'll tell you she'...

You probably know by now that AI is the definition of mediocre. As in: it’s the average of everything it’s been trained on. So how do you get beyond average? How do you build a moat? 

It certainly doesn’t seem to be via the models. While there are models of the month (hey, Opus 4.6, my new friend!), they seem to be pretty swappable. 

So, the model ain’t it. But proprietary data (e.g. an AI that knows you really well)...

Henrik Werdelin is one of my favorite entrepreneurs. He’s founded and incubated several unicorns, most notably BARK, the dog happiness company.

Henrik himself is a pretty happy guy — an optimistic guy who likes to ask what could go right? — and on the day we recorded (a few months ago as I was squirreling away interviews for the podcast relaunch), he helped me see through some future of tech gloom I was feeling. I honestly ...

Is AI conscious? Will it be someday? And should we be nice to it now... just in case?

This FAFO Friday, Kwaku and I dive into the mind-bending world of machine consciousness.

We cover a lot of ground, weaving from the different ways that Luke (co-dependent with R2) and Han (barking commands at C-3PO) treat their droids to whether Pascal’s Wager informs whether we should believe in AI consciousness just in case they do come a...

Everyone's feeling jumpy about AI right now—and for good reason.

The hype has been massive. The investment has been astronomical. But where's the actual return?

In this episode, Azeem Azhar, founder of Exponential View and advisor to tech leaders and governments, breaks down why the next 18 months are make-or-break for AI. Companies need to prove there's real ROI, not just prototypes launched and tokens spent.

We cover:

• Wh...

Welcome to the first FAFO Friday!

This week Dan and Kwaku dig into:
- The uncanny valley that is AI agents and Moltbook—the "Reddit" that agents built for themselves to complain about humans, create a religion, and behave in ways that freak humans out
- Anthropic takes aim at OpenAI with a Super Bowl ad that's spicy (for cubs and cougars alike)
- We read Claude's "Constitution" and ask: Should AI do what you ask it...

Baratunde Thurston wants us to live well with machines — not for us live under them, nor to be their almighty overlords.

Baratunde is a technologist, a comedian, and an Emmy-nominated storyteller who explores interdependence. He gets spicy in this episode. The host of Life With Machines explores how he uses AI — without succumbing to its literal mediocrity — and why he feels he must use AI because otherwise he’s ceding the...

You know what would be awesome? If we could build the future we want — before we muck it up.

Future Around & Find Out helps builders think clearly about AI and emerging technologies, grapple with the implications, and decide what to build next.

Independent technologist and former NPR journalist Dan Blumberg speaks with founders, makers, and you to celebrate breakthroughs, call BS on the hype, explore how things might go ...

Here's the full text of this short episode:

Hey everyone, Dan here with a quick, exciting update on this show... the name is about to change! 

In a few days -- on January 20th --  you'll see that this podcast will have new cover art, a new name, a new trailer, and more...

I'm not going to reveal that name today, but I do want to share a bit of why I'm changing the name of a show that's been honored 3 years straight by the Web...

Travel is one of the most demo-friendly use cases for AI — and one of the hardest industries to actually disrupt.

Every AI launch seems to promise the same thing: “Tell me where you want to go, and I’ll plan everything.” But behind the slick demos sits a deeply consolidated industry dominated by platforms, hotel chains, and airlines that optimize for upsell and extraction.

Rafat Ali is the founder and CEO of Skift, which bil...

This week I’m turning the mic over to podcast friends Mike Masnick and Ben Whitelaw, hosts of Ctrl-Alt-Speech, a show about what happens when we talk on the internet, the messy world of content moderation, trust & safety, and the laws trying (and often failing) to keep up.

In their first episode of the new year, they build a 2026 bingo card of things that might happen across AI, regulation, and online speech. Not predic...

Happy New Year! This is the time of year when people make big changes. So, I'm bringing back my conversation with the co-author of Tomorrowmind. It's a fascinating book and especially relevant at this time of the year. 

Dr. Gabriella Rosen Kellerman writes that that career trajectories used to be like steamships (full steam ahead), and then they became more like sailboats (lots of tacking), but now we're swirling in whitewa...

A guest episode from Famous & Gravy. On each episode, host Michael Osborne and guests look at the life of a famous dead celebrity and ask themselves if it's a life they would've wanted. The show gets into all sorts of things you will not in that person's official obituary or biography. I'm a fan. Here's how they describe today's episode:

This person died 2011, age of 56. He dropped out of Reed College in 1972 and once s...

This week I'm the guest and my friends at Whiskey Web and Whatnot are the hosts. And they're great hosts, because they send their guests a bottle of whiskey before talking web and whatnot...

As we head into the holidays I hope you'll raise a glass with us and enjoy this very laid back episode... 

Chuck and Robbie hosted me a year ago and I love that they got me on tape when they did, because it was just as I was starting to ...

Looking to fund your startup? If you're new to the process, fundraising can be difficult to navigate. Not only are there a myriad of ways to go about it, but it can be hard to tell whether the tips, tricks, and advice floating around are based on any evidence at all.

[This week, I'm turning the mic over to my friends at The Startup Podcast. featuring Carta's head of insights on what you need to know about today's fundraisin...

“So if you take any great startup and look backwards, you'll see that 90 percent of their growth came from like 10 percent of the stuff that they tried. So how do you find that 10 percent as quickly as possible?”

Matt Lerner has advised hundreds of startups on how to grow. Now, the CEO of SYSTM has written a book called Growth Levers and How to Find Them where he shares his approach. This episode of CRAFTED. is full of ...

** I'd be so grateful if you'd take five minutes and answer our annual survey. It'll help me make the show better for you!  **

Hey folks, it's Thanksgiving weekend here in the US and it's the time of year when we think about what we're grateful for, so today I'm re-sharing some words from perhaps the most grateful person I've ever had on the show.

Kelsey Hightower is a legendary developer. And he has an incredible story. He...

In this special live Web Summit edition from Lisbon, roboticist, investor, and founder Chris Coomes shares how and why he built X1 Pipeline, an AI platform that evaluates startups the way he would — only much, much faster. It's something he wishes he had when looking for early stage robotics startups while at Google and Amazon. 

We also talk about the strange humanoid robots wandering the convention hall at Web Summit, why ...