CRAFTED.

CRAFTED.

Future around and find out as product leader Dan Blumberg speaks with founders, makers, and innovators about what comes next in tech, AI, and the craft of building great products. Honored three years in a row by The Webby Awards as a top tech podcast! Sign up for the CRAFTED. newsletter 👉 crafted.fm

Episodes

January 13, 2026 17 mins

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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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 ...

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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...

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“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 ...

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** 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...

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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 ...

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In this special live Web Summit edition from Lisbon, I sit down with Tom Haworth, founder of B13.ai, to talk about why “good enough” AI might actually be one of the most dangerous places we can get stuck.

And you’ll hear Tom say it’s time for the leaders of vibe coding platforms (e.g. Lovable, Replit, Cursor) to acknowledge that they’re great when you need to “demo not memo”, but not great (today and maybe ever) at deliveri...

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 Hey everyone. I've gotten so much interesting feedback on last week's Halloween episode featuring the anonymous CTO saying spooky things about AI and coding agents that I thought I'd share a quick solo voice memo style episode with you. The feedback ranges from people saying he's spot on about the insidious problems that AI coding agents create while others saying "he's holding it wrong." In other words, he's not using AI...

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AI coding assistants promise to write your code, speed up your sprint, and maybe even make engineers obsolete. But what if the people building with them every day see something very different?

In this special Halloween edition of CRAFTED. — which also marks the show’s third anniversary! — a masked CTO shares what he can’t say publicly: that these tools are powerful, but insidious. In his view, coding assistants are great fo...

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    Here’s a jaunty debrief from PopTech, a notoriously hard conference to describe, that always features obscenely talented entrepreneurs and changemakers.

    In this episode, Kwaku Aning, Sarah Rose Siskind, and I share some of the great stories and great vibes from this year's conference, including:

    • FetusGPT, Sarah’s madcap experiment to train an AI on everything her soon-to-be-born baby is hearing from inside the womb
    • Why Co...
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    A quick debrief from Climate Week / UN General Assembly week, including: 

    Joining me from New York are: 

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    What’s up with “the MIT study” that claims 95% of all AI pilots fail? Did anyone actually read it beyond the headline? (Dan did—and he has thoughts.)

    Also: the good, the bad, and the quietly dystopian side of putting AI in kids’ classrooms.

    And… are robots really the thing Melania should be worrying about?

    That’s just some of what Kwaku Aning, return guest and founder of Retrofuturism, and I get into on this very lively, ver...

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     Software is eating the world, right? We've all heard this phrase by now, but inventor and investor Pablos Holman has something important to add: “The world can't eat software.”


    That’s why Pablos focuses on “deep tech”, i.e. how to invent new solutions to real world problems like energy, water, waste, construction, and sanitation. Pablos says we’re still mostly using version 1.0 technology for these fundamental systems,...

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    As AI models grow larger and more powerful, they promise incredible capabilities — but at what cost?

    Karen Hao is an AI journalist and her new book, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI, is a New York Times bestseller.

    We discuss whether the largest AI models are worth their hefty footprint: They consume massive amounts of electricity and water and Karen argues that smaller models better balance cost ...

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    AI-generated voices aren’t just realistic — they’re changing how brands, creators, and agencies bring ideas to life. In this episode, Wondercraft co-founder Oskar Serrander demonstrates how their “Canva for audio” is unlocking rapid prototyping for high-quality audio ads, content, and storytelling.


    You’ll learn:

    • How Wondercraft enables you to go from concept to creative in seconds
    • Why when AI makes execution easy, ide...
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    Kevin Smith is building a totally new kind of podcast app. 

    Snipd is an AI-native podcast app and building it required a few mindset shifts. 

    First, what even is a podcast? The way Kevin sees it, podcasts are knowledge. So where most podcast players are, as Kevin calls them, "repurposed music players", Snipd is designed to help you learn. As people listen to episodes, they, or an AI, can save “snips” or interesting moments t...

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    What is a good money habit in 2025? And how do you actually help someone build one—without boring them, shaming them, or losing them in the first five seconds?

    Chief Product Officer Tim Hong shares how MoneyLion designs for emotion and creates content and products that inspire people to take action. 

    MoneyLion is a personal finance platform used by millions of mostly younger Americans who are just getting started with their ...

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