China Decode

Why Microsoft Is Quietly Abandoning China | China Decode

I think there's a third category, and this is the category that I would put Microsoft into. This is the category of companies, big western companies that dared to dream the dream but never managed to realize it.

The Week

The Half-Trillion-Dollar AI Loop | The Week

If you were to go back and look at the average productivity of the US worker over the past 90 years, you will not see a single technological innovation. You won't see air conditioning. You won't see cell phones or computers or the internet or Microsoft Office. You don't see it because it takes a long time for productivity to be absorbed into the workplace and used by employers.

The Prof G Pod

"It Scared Me How Realistic It Is" — AI Porn's Danger

I think the greatest innovation in history isn't vaccines or the iPhone. I think it's the American middle class. And only 40% of men throughout history, I understand, have reproduced and 80% of women.

The a16z Show

Garry Tan on Taste, Agents and Founder Ambition

why the best ideas tend to begin with people pursuing strange, earnest obsessions outside the mainstream

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Eric Vishria - A Decade of Lessons Investing in Software & Hardware - [Invest Like the Best, EP.486]

The companies that really win are not just solving a problem that exists today, but they're creating a new category or they're redefining a category. And the ones that try to do it incrementally — 'I'm going to be 10% better or 20% better' — almost never work. It has to be a fundamentally different approach.

TED

Inside Dubai’s Mission to Build the City of the Future | His Excellency Khalfan Belhoul | TED

Usually governments are a hurdle or they take time or they're bureaucratic. We are hearing from our leaders that we can actually do this. This is music to our ears.

Freakonomics Radio

683. In the New Space Race, Who Makes the Rules?

Governments started the space age. Now, billionaires and private firms are reinventing it.

The Business of Tech

FTN Motion's electric ride

It's hard to imagine this, but back then there was no like e bikes within a thing lit alone electric motorcycles. So we put that thing together and started riding and around Pocacoli. It just turned a lot of hits like it was something new.

The a16z Show

Steven Sinofsky: AI Doesn't Need New Rules Yet

governments are rushing to regulate AI before they fully understand the technology, risking innovation in the process

Throughline

The architect of modern China | Throughline

If I wanted to propose a grand synthesis for Americans to understand Shenzhen, it would be uh Detroit in its heyday of about 100 years ago to Silicon Valley today.

The Business of Tech

FTN Motion's electric ride

It's hard to imagine this, but back then there was no like e bikes within a thing lit alone electric motorcycles. So we put that thing together and started riding around Pocacoli. It just turned a lot of hits like it was something new.

Freakonomics Radio

How a Great Architect Thinks, with Bjarke Ingels | Better in Person

Is the oxymoron really "the secret sauce to everything"? That's the case Ingels makes in this debut episode of our new video show Better in Person, filmed in Stephen Dubner's living room.

EconTalk

From Sawdust to Paw Patrol: The Spin Master Story (with Ronnen Harary)

A nylon stocking filled with sawdust that grows grass for hair launched one of the most successful toy companies in the world.

TED

Why I’m Obsessed with Health Wearables (and You Should Be Too) | Michael Snyder | TED

We practice sick care rather than health care. And even when we practice health care, if you think about it, it's a pretty archaic process. You will travel to a physician's office that really hasn't changed much in the last 40 years.

TED

Origami, the Ancient Art Form Solving Modern Problems | Miles Wu | TED

It's amazing that something can be so strong and yet so lightweight at the same time. And it's exciting to think about what potential applications a fold like this could have -- maybe even helping to imagine a better emergency shelter one day.

EconTalk

Can a Phone Be a Cow? (with Philip Auerswald)

How much of human progress is inevitable, and how much depends on the determination of remarkable individuals?

The Business of Tech

China’s AI and robot revolution

China may not be the leader in AI development yet, but it certainly is a leader in the adoption of AI.

TED

Why the Best Ideas Come from Play | Maxwell Pearce | TED

Play is the most important ingredient in every person and every industry's evolution.

Diet TBPN

Bezos' Prometheus Raises $12B, America Inc. Moves to Texas, Trucking Rebounds | Diet TBPN

Bezos argued that if AI makes it cheaper, faster, and easier to invent things, employment will ultimately rise because even though you're shrinking the number of people needed by 10x, the technology will create more than 10x as many opportunities.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Alex Sacerdote - How to Invest Through Technology Cycles - [Invest Like the Best, EP.477]

The exciting part of being in technology investing is that you have these waves of innovation that create extraordinary opportunities for value creation and also value destruction. And the companies that are able to ride multiple waves are extraordinary compounders over time, but it's actually quite rare.

The a16z Show

Tyler Cowen & Alex Tabarrok on AI, Jobs, and Economic Growth

Throughout history, productivity-enhancing technologies have transformed work, created new industries, and expanded living standards, even as they disrupted existing jobs and institutions.

The Business of Tech

From Uber to Exaba: AJ Tills takes on Big Tech storage

if I reverse engineering my career, it's really been about normalizing disruptive technologies to make them more understood and to drive that mass adoption.

Hidden Brain

Unleashing Your Creativity

Most people think of creativity as the production of something new. But Ogas and Rose argue that creative breakthroughs almost always involve making unusual connections between existing ideas. They say that highly creative people are essentially librarians of their own knowledge and experience — constantly cross-referencing and combining things in ways that others don't think to do.

EconTalk

Thinking Inside the Box (with David Epstein)

The problem is that we're often led to believe that we need to think outside the box, but actually the most creative solutions often come from people who have gone so deep into a box that they understand the nuances and the constraints so well that they can find new pathways within it that others couldn't see.

EconTalk

Thinking Inside the Box (with David Epstein)

What do the inventor of the periodic table, the novelist Isabel Allende, and the almost-creators of the iPhone have in common? Join author David Epstein and EconTalk's Russ Roberts to explore a counterintuitive idea: that boundaries, and not unlimited freedom, often make us more creative, productive, and fulfilled.

The a16z Show

Crypto Fund 5: We Raised $2.2B. Here’s Why.

founders are shifting toward building products that work within existing systems, rather than attempting to replace them

The a16z Show

Crypto Fund 5: We Raised $2.2B. Here’s Why.

crypto has evolved from an ideological movement into a more pragmatic, product-focused ecosystem, shaped by real-world use cases and increasing regulatory clarity

Office Hours

Can AI Actually Help You Start a Company? | Office Hours

I would describe AI is all chip no salsa and that is real insight like what is it you're going to do differently with your business what is it that's unique about your business most new businesses make no sense at the outset otherwise they would already exist.

TBPN

Tech Earnings Quadkill, Red Button vs Blue Button | Diet TBPN

We're going into an entirely different era, but it is very exciting and we're getting a lot of data today.

The Business of Tech

Factories in retreat: inside NZ’s deindustrialisation crisis

Without a coherent industrial strategy covering energy, skills, investment, and R and D, we're effectively putting headwinds in front of our most productive exporters rather than giving them a competitive advantage.

The Business of Tech

Why big companies kill good ideas – and how to save them

really cool ideas can just naturally make the world better and be commercially successful.

The Business of Tech

Why big companies kill good ideas – and how to save them

for innovation to work in a corporate but has to look and feel like a real startup. It needs its own budget, a clear, finite time span, specific deliverables, and tough stage gates where ideas are reviewed and must earn the right to keep going exactly as they would if a founding team was pitching for the next funding round.

Fresh Air

Best Of: Arsenio Hall / Jeff Ross

I wanted to do this show that didn't exist when I was a kid, and I knew the talent was out there. You know, I found Bruno Mars and put him on the show when he was two feet tall. I wanted those things that Johnny didn't do.

TBPN

SpaceX Financials, Does AI Increase Unemployment or Leisure, Chimp Civil War | Diet TBPN

Elon has uh always had multiple irons in the fire, one project that's working and producing cash flow and and growing uh to finance the next uh piece of innovation.

The Business of Tech

From Leaf to lunch: the Canterbury startup rethinking protein

How could we develop a system that produced far more protein per hectare of land at a much lower environmental impact, and can we weave those things together into a business, which is what we have done.

Acquired

The physics of F1 cars are awesome.

What if you did the opposite? That is what the Lotus team did. They shaped a car like an upside down airplane wing.

TED

The Story You’re Not Hearing About AI Data Centers | Ayșe Coskun | TED

The very technology driving this unforeseen demand is also probably the only thing smart enough to tame it.

Acquired

The Evolution of Speed in Formula 1

What if we can turn the whole car into a wing? I mean, rather than our traditional shaped car with a wing slapped on top, what if we made it actually part of the body style itself?

Book of the Day

Apple is turning 50. David Pogue’s new book tells its history. | NPR's Book of the Day

What I find super interesting is that that mission of taking advanced technologies and trying to put it in everybody's hands hasn't changed in 50 years.

TBPN

The Great Peptide Debate with Martin Shkreli & Max Marchione

I think the genie's out of the bottle and we cannot ignore peptides as a tool in the toolkit.

The a16z Show

Why Every Satellite Needs Earth | Northwood CEO on a16z

Northwood is building the systems that connect satellites back to Earth, enabling faster, more scalable space missions.

The Business of Tech

Too small is a tech myth – Mehran Gul on NZ’s real advantage

if one or two places can change their relative importance in technology within such a short time span, you know, five to seven years, and it's not just China, you know Canada, for instance, the outsize role that it has played in AI research. You know, much of the AI boom that we see today comes from just a couple of major advancements in AI that happened, for instance, alexnet, which was this seismic event in neural networks.

TBPN

Inside Bezos’ Plan to Rebuild U.S. Manufacturing With AI

As manufacturing gets cheaper like the tools that you use, the cars that you drive, the washing machine in your home, uh the tires on your cars, uh all these different things get better, not just cheaper, but actually unlock new capabilities and new things that people people enjoy.

The a16z Show

Inside Palantir: Building Software That Matters with Shyam Sankar

the most important thing America can do right now is inspire its latent heretics to step forward

TBPN

FULL INTERVIEW: Uber Founder Travis Kalanick is Back with a New AI Startup

If you do, you do to the kitchen what Uber did to the car. So I've been doing that since 2018.

TED

The Tiny Organisms Transforming Farming | Karsten Temme | TED

Well microbes in response shut down that nitrogen-fixing function, putting those genes into hibernation. What if we could wake them back up?

The a16z Show

Palantir CEO Alex Karp on the Zero-Sum AI Race

America's single greatest competitive advantage is its ability to cultivate and protect unconventional talent.

The Business of Tech

AI’s Kiwi gatekeeper inside Microsoft

if this can transform how architects are imagining buildings, imagine how we can transform every industry.

The Origins Podcast

(New Science News Feb 2026) Fusion Dark Matter, String Theory in Biology, and Rapid Evolution

if we ever have a nuclear fusion reactor why not give it a try you know it's uh it makes a lot of sense to me