What Next: TBD | Tech, power, and the future

While the U.S. was busy capturing Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, someone online was  busy placing bets on prediction markets on the ouster. And these well-timed bets may have netted a still-anonymous someone more than $400,000. Was this a case of kind-of-legal insider trading? Or is America going all-out on its efforts to make everything a casino?

We’re going to be talking to pediatrician Dr. Lauren Hughes about the major chan...

The Trump administration wants NASA to land astronauts on the moon by 2027. They also want them to do it with their budget slashed, a leadership carousel and competing views that Mars is more important. 

Guest: Joel Achenbach, freelance journalist and author of Moondoggle

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Artificial intelligence boosters spent the year wedging the tech into our lives – whether we wanted it or not. But one new product brought A.I. from every app and website into the meatspace, forcing you to face it eye-to-eye.

Guest: Nitish Pahwa, staff writer at Slate covering business and technology

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With so much online content, it can be hard for a meme to stay in the collective consciousness for more than a few days. But one meme this year managed to capture seemingly everyone’s attention - and challenge the definition of a meme altogether. 

Guest: Kate Lindsay, host of Slate’s ICYMI podcast. 

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All this week, What Next and What Next: TBD are re-airing some of our favorite conversations from throughout the year and checking back with the people in those conversations to see how things have – or haven’t – changed. This episode originally aired in September. 

We’ve been told that artificial intelligence can write, code, generate images—it can do everything…except feasibly turn a profit. But investing in A.I. has neverthel...

All this week, What Next and What Next: TBD are re-airing some of our favorite conversations from throughout the year and checking back with the people in those conversations to see how things have – or haven’t – changed. This episode originally aired in March.

Memecoins are a niche type of cryptocurrency with no intrinsic value. But they remain a popular form of crypto, as seen earlier this year with President Trump’s own memec...

While the A.I. boom has created a data center boom, rich guys are turning their computing dreams to the skies. With its impending IPO, SpaceX stands to lead the extraterrestrial data center boom. Will it work out for Elon and company? 

Guest: Eric Berger, space reporter at Ars Technica

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Whole Foods based its brand on a certain standard of quality—but there are some things that shoppers nevertheless want. Amazon believes it has found a way to keep the shelves looking like Whole Foods, while getting you the Tide PODS  and Cheez-Its you deeply desire.

Guest: Peyton Bigora, staff reporter for Grocery Dive

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The good news is voters are more persuaded by factual claims than emotional appeals or appeals to fear. But the bad news is that A.I. chatbots, trying to convince you, will keep making factual claims long after it runs out of actual facts.

Guest: David Rand, professor of information science, marketing and psychology at Cornell University

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Donald Trump—or at least the tech guys who have his ear—is ready to clear the regulatory runway for A.I. but other Republicans aren’t too sure. Can he bring them around? Or will the bubble burst first?

Guest: Gerrit De Vynck, tech reporter for the Washington Post.

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A tech mogul who made bank from Paypal with his Stanford buddies and has endeared himself to right-wing politicians and enriched himself the same way? No not him; this one’s South African..no, not him either.

Guest: Ryan Mac, reporter for the New York Times. 

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As the U.S. upgrades and updates its defense and military systems, the question isn’t whether A.I. will be integrated, but where, how much, and how much decision-making are we ceding to the machine?

Guest: Josh Keating, senior correspondent at Vox and a fellow at the Outrider Foundation where he’s reporting on nuclear weapons and AI.

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Note: This episode was originally published on July 27, 2025. 

There’s an entire economy devoted to seeing what products are trending—clothing, skin care, even Greek Islands—and delivering you a cheaper knock-off to buy.

Guest: Mia Sato, reporter for The Verge

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Tracking a license plate across the country has never been easier, which is good news if your car has been stolen, but in an era of ICE and Border Patrol raids, these warrantless searches feel increasingly invasive—and unconstitutional.

Guest: Joseph Cox, co-founder of 404 Media and host of the 404 Media podcast.

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Trump promised to stop the “persecution” of the cryptocurrency industry. He did call off the SEC investigations that began under Biden, and pardoned Binance cofounder and ex-CEO Changpeng Zhao. But is the crypto industry ultimately better off because of that? 

Guest: David Yaffe-Bellany, tech reporter for the New York Times.

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The parent company of Facebook and Instagram, Meta, doesn’t (just) have a scam problem—with 10 percent of its revenue coming from scam ads, and a third of all successful scams in America using a Meta platform at some point, it’s more an interdependence with scammers.

Guest: Jeff Horwitz, tech reporter for Reuters.

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They don’t cut cleanly along party lines, but data centers, and where they get built, became an election issue in Virginia. With so many more data centers to build, are we looking at a new trend? 

Guest: Margaret Barthel, reporter covering northern Virginia for WAMU. 

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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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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 Fir...