What Next: TBD | Tech, power, and the future
Every Friday and Sunday, Slate’s popular daily news podcast What Next brings you TBD, a clear-eyed look into the future. From fake news to fake meat, algorithms to augmented reality, Lizzie O’Leary is your guide to the tech industry and the world it’s creating for us to live in.
Episodes
November 9, 2025 • 30 mins
Tesla shareholders just approved a trillion dollar (with a t!) pay package for Elon Musk. Is it enough incentive to keep him around the company and away from verbal spats with government officials? Because the whole Musk empire is still reeling from that dalliance.
Guest: Faiz Siddiqui, tech reporter at The Washington Post and author of Hubris Maximus: the Shattering of Elon Musk.
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November 7, 2025 • 25 mins
Nick Fuentes—an openly antisemitic, openly racist, openly sexist type who once was persona non grata in all but the unseemliest of online spaces—sat down with former Fox News star Tucker Carlson this week, setting off a debate between the “whoa whoa whoa, we’re not Nazis over here” branch of conservatives and the “well now, hold on a minute” wing.
Guest: Ali Breland, staff writer for The Atlantic and author of “The Firewall Agai...
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November 2, 2025 • 30 mins
President Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the former CEO of Binance who had been convicted for violating anti-money laundering laws, after months of Zhao boosting Trump’s own crypto company. The crypto industry has really nailed the path to Trump’s heart: it was something Joe Biden didn’t like, and it feeds directly to the president’s bottom line.
Guest: Alex Kirshner, contributing writer at Slate.
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October 31, 2025 • 29 mins
One legacy of the internet is the millions of subcultures that it helps flourish. Another is pornography—and lots of it. At a “gooner meet-up,” the two collide.
Guest: Daniel Kolitz, author of “The Goon Squad” for Harper’s Magazine.
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October 26, 2025 • 32 mins
For years, conservatives claimed that the Biden administration was pressuring tech companies to censor conservative speech with no solid evidence.
In Trump 2.0, the administration is explicitly bragging about doing the very same thing they accused democrats of. What gives?
Guest: Renée DiResta, Associate Research Professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown and author of “Invisible Rulers: The People Who T...
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October 24, 2025 • 31 mins
This week’s AWS outage illustrates just how fragile and vulnerable our interconnected world really is—and how far we’ve fallen from the vision of a decentralized internet.
Guest: Samanth Subramanian, author of “The Web Beneath the Waves: The Fragile Cables That Connect Our World.”
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October 19, 2025 • 21 mins
Paying a fraction of a penny per stream and diminishing the value of music were bad enough for Xiu Xiu, but when Spotify owner Daniel Ek announced an investment in a German defense contractor, they decided it was time to take the music back.
Guest: Jamie Stewart, musician in the band Xiu Xiu.
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October 17, 2025 • 27 mins
As Trump throws out journalists and outlets that report anything negative about him, he’s limiting access to a group of right-wing influencers who work to further his agenda.
Guest: Makena Kelly, tech and politics writer for WIRED.
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October 12, 2025 • 27 mins
At this very moment, police departments can gather more data than they have time to actually go through — audio and video from crime scenes, cell phone and search data, vast digital dragnets. This is where artificial intelligence comes in…as well as the civil rights questions.
Guest: Gerrit De Vynck, tech reporter for the Washington Post.
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October 10, 2025 • 25 mins
Though ICE, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services denied their Freedom of Information Act requests, these journalists aren’t giving up without a fight—not until they get their hands on a document that outlines how much information Medicaid is sharing with ICE.
Guest: Joseph Cox, cofounder of 404 Media.
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October 5, 2025 • 23 mins
How one of the largest video game companies was bought for $55 billion by a group that includes Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund and Jared Kushner.
Guest: Jason Schreier, Bloomberg reporter
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October 3, 2025 • 28 mins
TikTok exploded to popularity not by giving users what they asked for—but by figuring out what users really were interested in, and serving that.
What happens to this algorithm if Bytedance cedes control of it to the U.S.?
Guest: Emily Baker White, senior writer at Forbes and the author of Every Screen on the Planet: The War Over TikTok
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September 28, 2025 • 27 mins
When you’re getting out of an Uber, Tesla’s unintuitive door handle can embarrass you. In an emergency, getting out of the car quickly can be the difference between life and death.
Guest: Dana Hull, Bloomberg News reporter covering Tesla and Elon Musk
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September 26, 2025 • 32 mins
Why would Donald Trump rush to announce that Tylenol is a potential cause of autism, a claim unsupported by the research?
Guest: Dan Diamond, White House reporter for the Washington Post.
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September 21, 2025 • 31 mins
If you’re hunting for a job, the odds are increasingly likely you’ll have an interview with an artificial intelligence “recruiter.” And why not? It’s also increasingly likely you’ll be working with A.I. anyway.
Guest: Danielle Abril, technology-in-the-workplace reporter for the Washington Post.
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September 19, 2025 • 4 mins
TikTok—which was supposed to be banned again on Wednesday but, again, isn’t—may be legal once more. The Trump administration says it’s meeting with Xi Jinping Friday to finalize the agreement, which may involve—get this—a wealthy Trump-supporting tech mogul.
Guest: Nitish Pahwa, staff writer for business and tech at Slate.
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September 19, 2025 • 35 mins
As the Charlie Kirk murder demonstrated, law enforcement, the government, and media all need more internet fluency. But their reactions in the wake of the murder don’t seem to be moving towards a better understanding.
Guest: Ryan Broderick, reporter on online culture, author of the newsletter Garbage Day.
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September 14, 2025 • 34 mins
After their daughter committed suicide, they found her ChatGPT log—and where artificial intelligence helped her write her suicide note.
Guest: Laura Reiley, writer for the Cornell Chronicle.
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September 12, 2025 • 36 mins
Graphic, violent videos like the shooting of right-wing pundit Charlie Kirk circulate across social media moments after they happen, finding an audience even among people who have made no effort to seek them out.
Guest: Craig Silverman, journalist and cofounder of Indicator.
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September 7, 2025 • 23 mins
An Inflation Reduction Act subsidy for electric vehicles is being shut down by the Trump administration at the end of September, and automakers are preparing for sales of EVs to slow. Can this nascent industry survive?
Guest: Ryan Felton, reporter covering the automotive industry for the Wall Street Journal
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