SHIFT

What would you say if someone offered you a taste of a salmon filet that doesn’t contain fish?

The protein content, carbs, and even the omega 3s are basically the same, but what it doesn’t contain are things like microplastics and mercury. 

Join us for a factory tour of a startup called New School Foods for a peek at the next-generation of plant-based protein.

We Meet:  

New School Foods CEO Chris Bryson

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This ep...

It’s not just AI software that’s rapidly shifting. One could argue that the very map of high performance computing is being redrawn, from OpenAI investing more than $10-billion in wafer-scale chips to breakthroughs in quantum research that are making that architecture much more useful. 

This episode was taped in front of a live audience in Davos, Switzerland, on stage at The Drawing Room: AI and Exploration Salon held along...

Figuring out what it takes to make agentic AI work in a high-stakes, real-world environment is front and center these days, because for the most part, we’re still figuring that out.

At this year’s annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, we get a first-hand look at the shift that’s taking place from agent demos to what a successful deployment looks like.

We Meet: 

Shibani Ahuja is the SVP of Enterprise IT Stra...

How do you feel about the use of artificial intelligence in the hiring process? Whether it sounds like a good way to remove human bias, a bad idea that could bake in machine bias, or something in between, you won't want to miss our deep dive  with author and journalist Hilke Schellmann at the P&T Knitwear Bookstore in Manhattan.

This episode was taped in collaboration with All Tech is Human in New York City. 

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This week, we bring you an episode of another podcast anchored by our host, Jennifer Strong, called The Next Innovation. In it, we sit down with other prominent tech journalists to discuss the biggest tech trends to watch in 2026 - including how the different iterations of AI, including agentic AI, will shape the future of cybersecurity, finance, healthcare, and defense. 

We Meet:

Freelance journalist Jeff Wilser has wri...

A live conversation about the state of the space industry with serial space entrepreneur Kam Ghaffarian, a co-founder of Axiom Space, Intuitive Machines, Quantum Space, and more, from the mainstage at Collision Conference in Toronto, Canada.

This episode first published on June 26th, 2024. 

We meet: 

Dr. Kamal "Kam" Ghaffarian

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This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens, and it was ...

We meet a founder questioning the wisdom of the Turing Test as he works to address the loneliness epidemic among the elderly, in the latest installment of our oral history project.

We Meet: 

Intuition Robotics Founder Dor Skuler, maker of the ElliQ digital companion

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SHIFT is produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens. It’s mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

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The application of artificial intelligence to help discover new medicines could become one of the more transformative ways we use this tech in the near term. A key player in this space is Recursion Pharmaceuticals. Its outgoing CEO Chris Gibson takes us on a tour of the world's largest phenomics lab in Salt Lake City, Utah.

We Meet: 

Recursion Co-Founder Chris Gibson

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This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jenni...

What if voting in a primary could be as simple as reaching for your phone? This week, Bradley Tusk's TED Talk about this topic was named one of the ten essential TED Talks of 2025, and we're revisiting the episode we taped with him about mobile voting for our oral history project.

We Meet: 

Bradley Tusk, Founder & CEO of Tusk Holdings 

Credits:

This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma ...

What happens when machines start telling us what we want to hear—and when users start depending on them for emotional connection? Join us for a live conversation about the psychology and liability of chatbots.

We Meet:  

Meg Marco is Harvard Berkman Klein Center’s Senior Director of the Applied Social Media Lab.

New York Times Tech Reporter Kashmir Hill is also the author of YOUR FACE BELONGS TO US.

Jordi Weinstock is a Se...

We join the MIT community in New York for an event focused on AI, innovation, and the evolving role of tech in society. 

SandboxAQ is a Google spinout that combines AI Large Quantitative Models and deep expertise in physics, biology, and chemistry in order to work on a wide range of hard problems, such as the prototyping of new materials and chemicals for manufacturing. Andrew McLaughlin is the company’s chief operating off...

How do we move quantum computing from scientific milestone to measurable business value? 

It’s not an easy question to answer. 

When I first started covering this tech even the physicists charged with building such machines doubted the feasibility of the whole idea. That's no longer the case today, but the bar for quantum, especially compared to AI, remains almost impossibly high. 

This episode was taped before a live audienc...

For as far as we’ve come with AI and robotics, there’s still a huge gap when it comes to combining the two. AI excels in the digital space, and in the physical world, robots are often pre-programmed. That’s where physical AI comes in. It’s critical for things that can’t tolerate the kinds of mistakes that are common in today’s statistics based AI, like self driving cars or managing the power grid. In the latest installment...

Astro Teller, Alphabet’s Captain of Moonshots, joins us for a conversation about the importance of failure, workplace culture in a moonshot factory, and not throwing away your shot.

We Meet: 

Astro Teller is the Captain of Moonshots at X, Alphabet's Moonshot Factory

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This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and...

AMD provides high-performance computing power that runs everything from your gaming console and personal laptop, to the giant supercomputers and AI systems that power the cloud. Its head of AI discusses the move from sequential to massively parallel processing, and the company's strategy to embed AI from big cloud machines to tiny client devices.

We Meet:  

AMD’s SVP for AI Vamsi Boppana

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This episode of SHIFT ...

We explore how one group is using AI to help people talk, listen and understand in large groups, in hopes of counteracting forces that have undermined our ability to communicate online, in the latest installment of our oral history project.

We Meet:  

Yasmin Green, CEO of Jigsaw, an incubator within Google 

Credits:

This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Gar...

What do you think it would be like to lead AI efforts and the overall digital transformation of the CIA? This week, we find out as we dive into a world of espionage and secrets in the latest installment of our oral history project. 

We Meet:  

Retired Deputy CIA Director for Digital Innovation Jennifer Ewbank 

Credits:

This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed...

How we build products, why we build them, and what we think they’re for have always changed, but these days developers and engineers who love things like product roadmaps might find the current AI scene a little disorienting. That’s because there often isn’t a roadmap. If there is? It’s constantly changing.

This week, we meet the CTO of IBM Research and she tells us about the current landscape and what she imagines for the ...