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
August 10, 2025 • 30 mins
It’s hard to make money in the music industry. But if you could flood every streamer with hundreds of “original” songs without having to, you know, write or produce it yourself, there’s money there—and less for everyone else.
Guests:
Chris Molanphy, host of Slate’s Hit Parade podcast.
Kate Knibbs, senior writer at Wired
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August 8, 2025 • 28 mins
In January, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta was moving from employing professional fact-checkers to letting its users fact-check each other. If you’ve heard that it’s going perfectly, then you, too, have been exposed to misinformation.
Guest: Geoffrey Fowler, tech columnist with the Washington Post
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August 3, 2025 • 27 mins
OpenAI’s Sam Altman, flanked by President Trump and Softbank’s Masayoshi Son, announced a hugely ambitious investment in data centers across America to support all the artificial intelligence we’re going to be using. Months in, the project has been scaled back to a single, power-hungry data center in Ohio.
Guest: Berber Jin, reporter covering A.I. for the Wall Street Journal
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August 1, 2025 • 28 mins
A shadow app for the dating world had its data hacked and exposed, and it laid bare the perils of creating safe spaces for women online — and of relying on tech companies.
Guest: Kate Lindsay, host of Slate’s ICYMI
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July 27, 2025 • 33 mins
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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July 25, 2025 • 25 mins
Was the Late Show too unprofitable, or too political?
Guest: Eric Deggans, NPR TV critic and media analyst, Knight Chair, Journalism and Media Ethics, Washington & Lee University.
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July 20, 2025 • 28 mins
It’s kind of strange that Grok, Elon Musk’s chatbot, went full Nazi a few weeks ago, and is just…still out there. But, then again, how are you supposed to hold an LLM accountable?
Guest: Drew Harwell, technology reporter for the Washington Post
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July 18, 2025 • 29 mins
The MAGA world has been waiting for Jeffrey Epstein’s client list to be released since the first Trump administration. But with those like Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, who stoked interest in the list literally in power, the administration is now saying that no such list exists. For some MAGA fans, this is finally a bridge too far.
Guest: Anna Merlan, senior reporter at Mother Jones.
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July 13, 2025 • 22 mins
He started using ChatGPT to help with spreadsheets. But their relationship took a turn, and before long it was telling him he could leap off a 19-story building and fly.
Guest: Kashmir Hill, features writer at the New York Times.
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July 11, 2025 • 26 mins
It’s a record-breaking year for America: we’ve now had the most reported cases of measles since the disease was declared “eradicated” in 2000.
How did public health backslide so hard that it undid decades of progress—and is there any hope we can get back on track?
Guest: Dylan Scott, senior health correspondent at Vox.
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July 6, 2025 • 27 mins
As the One Big Beautiful Bill bounced around Congress, one provision—the 10-year moratorium on states making laws to regulate artificial intelligence—fell out. But AI-fans don’t need to worry, there’s still plenty of industry support in the bill.
Guest: Will Oremus, technology news analysis writer for the Washington Post.
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July 4, 2025 • 27 mins
This episode was originally published on April 27, 2025.
The Trump administration has already begun cutting the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which includes the U.S. National Weather Service. What’s the advantage to understanding the weather less?
Guest: Daniel Swain, weather and climate scientist with the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources.
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June 29, 2025 • 24 mins
Under a normal administration, a merger between two large advertising firms might attract the government’s interest for anti-monopoly reasons. Under this one, the Federal Trade Commission is creating conditions to…ensure that X still gets advertiser dollars?
Guest: Kate Conger, technology reporter for the New York Times.
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June 27, 2025 • 24 mins
In addition to the three-dimensional war of bombs and missiles, Iran and Israel—and the US—are squaring off in a cyber battle. With everything from water infrastructure to banking connected to the internet in some way, how much damage can cyberattacks do?
Guest: Maggie Miller, POLITICO cybersecurity reporter
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June 22, 2025 • 26 mins
ARC, the data broker owned by the country’s major airlines, has been selling domestic flight data in the US to Customs and Border Protection. But in the contract, they told CBP not to reveal where the data was from… why?
Guest: Joseph Cox, co-founder of 404 Media and the co-host of the 404 Media Podcast.
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June 20, 2025 • 30 mins
The Trump administration's anti-immigration campaign has become defined by distasteful memes that gleefully portray the mass deportations being carried out across the country. It’s impossible to ignore… which is exactly what the administration wants.
Guest: Drew Harwell, tech reporter at the Washington Post.
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June 15, 2025 • 27 mins
A guide to keeping your phone, and your digital life, safe when you’re crossing the border.
Guest: Lily Hay Newman, senior writer for WIRED covering information security.
Podcast production by Evan Campbell and Patrick Fort.
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June 13, 2025 • 27 mins
Elon Musk has ridden off into the sunset acrimoniously (maybe), but the Department of Government Efficiency is just getting started. Will DOGE continue wildly cutting or is something even more chaotic coming next?
Guest: Makena Kelly, senior writer at WIRED.
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June 8, 2025 • 28 mins
Assistant Attorney General Gail Slater inherited the government’s antitrust case against Google and is eager to follow it through—but likely not for the same reasons as her predecessors.
Guest: Nancy Scola, reporter and contributing writer at POLITICO.
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June 6, 2025 • 29 mins
One of the goals of DOGE was to get rid of the “silos” that keep government agencies from sharing freely amongst themselves efficiently and instead organize data using tools offered by companies like Palantir. The thing is, a lot of those silos are there by design, and removing them could be a nightmare for privacy advocates.
Guest: Sheera Frenkel, tech reporter for the New York Times.
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