The Times Tech Podcast

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Krishna Rangasayee, founder and CEO of Sima.ai, to talk about why we need to remake the tech infrastructure for the AI age (5:10), what the “edge” is (8:30), why he started the company (11:00), the problem with the cloud (15:00), developing a new architecture (19:00), growing up in India (20:45), coming to Mississippi (25:20), starting t...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Alex Colville, co-founder of Age1, to talk about funding longevity science (3:15), studying the biology of ageing (5:10), the snake oil problem (11:05),  the rise of “geroscience” (15:15), healthspan (23:05), the ageing hypothesis (26:55), the potential of metformin (30:05), working on an anti-ageing treatment (34:15), and how long...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Pascal Lamy, chairman of the Climate Overshoot Commission to talk about climate migration (7:30), the huge cost of adaptation (12:40), solar geoengineering (14:40), the attraction of a sticking plaster solution (21:25), termination shock (26:40), carbon takeback obligations (32:30), pollution removal (37:00), and how Britain fights into...

The Sunday Times' tech correspondent Danny Fortson rings on Alex Blania, chief executive of Worldcoin developer Tools for Humanity, to talk about launching its iris-scanning orb around the world (5:00), testifying in Nairobi (9:40), signing people up (12:45), what problems it is trying to solve (16:10), proof of personhood in the age of fakery (19:20), the role of cryptocurrency (22:30), not offer...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Ranit Aharonov to talk about this moment for artificial intelligence (3:15), studying the brain (6:30), Project Debater (8:30), neural networks (11:30), language’s AlphaGo moment (14:50), the big idea at Pangea (19:20), getting it into the hands of doctors and drug communities (23:25), the role of AI in this tool (26:15), the regulatory...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Walter Isaacson, the biographer of Elon Musk, to talk about his new book (3:10), Musks’ “heartlessness” (6:15), his maniacal sense of mission (10:50), his approach to pro-creation and children (18:00), his fear of loneliness (21:55), and why he can’t smell the flowers (25:00), the reaction to the book (28:35), why Isaacson doesn’t make j...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Gregory Constantine, co-founder of Air Company, to talk about turning CO2 into fuel, booze and perfume (2:30), why they chose to do consumer products first (5:05), growing up in Australia (6:20), landing in New York (9:15), starting the company (12:00), its first product in 2019 (15:15), raising the first round of venture capital (20:40)...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Edo Liberty, founder of Pinecone, to talk about the state of artificial intelligence (4:00) the ‘hallucination’ problem (7:10), giving AI’s memory (10:30), starting out in Israel and in academia (17:15), starting pinecone in 2019 (20:30), raising money (24:05), creating a “handshake” between LLM’s and specialised knowledge (26:30), the A...

The Sunday times' tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Shaun Kingsbury to talk about the Green Investment Bank (3:40), whether he is optimistic (9:15), taking on harder-to-clean industries at Just Climate (13:30), teaming up with Al Gore (16:30), why he is not focussed on climate change adaptation (24:00), trying to create the Tesla of green finance (29:30), what he wants...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Frederic Lalonde, founder of Deep Sky, to talk about why it is already too late to address climate change (3:10), terraforming earth (14:00), the terrifying math of exponential systems (19:45), the breakdown in insurance models (23:05), what Deep Sky is doing (27:00), starting companies before Deep Sky (33:35), draught and famine (37:50)...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Philip Rosedale, founder of Second Life and IRL415, to talk about the Apple’s Vision Pro augmented reality goggles (3:30), digital eyes (6:40), the weight challenge (7:50), on whether there is a key breakthrough that will lead to adoption (11:50), how artificial intelligence and goggles come together, or not (16:10), starting a community...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Matt Gialich, founder of AstroForge, to talk about what he did before attempting asteroid mining (3:40), working at Virgin Orbit (6:00), what he learned at Bird, the struggling scooter company (8:05), jumping to asteroid mining (10:30), the problem with platinum (13:40), targeting metal-rich asteroids (15:40), the first launch (20:45), t...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent brings on Joshua March, co-founder and chief executive of SciFi Foods, to talk about the first approvals for lab-grown meat in America (4:45), building their pilot plant (6:45), using Crispr to engineer cells (7:50), the industry's dominant technology approach (12:30), why most of the 150 cultivated meat startups will fail (16:10), why clean meat will ultimatel...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Devon Wright to talk about moving from a boat to the country (4:00), starting agricultural and water tech startup Lumo (7:15), inventing a smart valve (11:40), quitting his old job (15:50), his previous companies (17:50), being in a band (20:30), coming to Silicon Valley (25:20), how farmers view drought and extreme weather (28:00), maki...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent brings on Trevor Neilson, founder of startup Wastefuel and the Climate Emergency Fund, to talk about how he helped launch and finance Extinction Rebellion (XR) (4:50), how the Malibu wildfires inspired him to act (8:20), meeting Roger Hallam, founder of XR and Just Stop Oil (16:00), bankrolling protestors (18:00), why he thinks the movement has gone off the rai...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Rehan Jalil, founder of Securiti, to talk about trying to grab control of data (3:00), the generative AI boom (7:35), growing up in Karachi, Pakistan (10:05), getting one of 200 slots in a top engineering school (14:35), going to America (18:15), the dotcom boom (18:45), his first two companies (21:00), taking advantage of market chaos (...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent brings on Hany Farid, of UC Berkeley’s School of Information, to talk about the new age of AI (artificial intelligence) misinformation (4:00), the proliferation of new tools (6:40), AI doomerism (9:50), regulation (13:10), history repeating itself (15:40), the AI election (18:20), simple ways to regulate AI (22:45), why imposing rules is easier than the industr...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Tamir Berliner and Tomer Kahan, founders of Sightful, to talk about inventing the world’s first “augmented reality” laptop (4:30), the end of the screen (8:10), what they learned from Magic Leap (10:30), making technology disappear (12:00), raising money (18:30), the advantages of starting the company in Israel (21:45), Apple’s big annou...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Manny Medina, chief executive of Outreach, to talk about how artificial intelligence is invading the sales business (2:30), why it will enhance humans (6:10), growing up farming shrimp in Ecuador (7:45), communism (9:30), coming to America (11:45), his original startup idea, and abandoning it (14:50), why his capitalist life does not con...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Cristobal Valenzuela, founder of Runway, to talk about using AI to edit and create videos (3:00), starting out at art school (6:50), quitting his job and starting the company in 2018 (8:30), his art career (9:30), rushing to raise money before his visa ran out (14:10), the critical breakthroughs (16:45), what “diffusion” is (18:30), the...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Stability.ai's founder Emad Mostaque, to talk about whether artificial intelligence (AI) is going to kill us all (3:30), why AI is the most important invention since the internal combustion engine (8:00), the next leap (12:40), the explosion of large language models and chatbots (17:00), why he is being sued (21:40), how AI can improve h...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Loyal founder Celine Halioua, to talk about extending the life of dogs (3:00), pushing to get first product on market in 2025 (6:10), the regulatory path (10:40), growing up in Texas (15:40), how health anxiety seeded her passion for longevity science (21:00), leaving Oxford after being sexually harassed (25:10), coming to San Francisco...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Vijay Pande, head of Andreessen Horowitz’s $1.5bn bio fund, to talk about how artificial intelligence is impacting healthcare (3:30), tools that “understand” biology (8:50), trying to eliminate cancer (12:50), trying to get techie founders to get into healthcare (14:25), America’s plunging life expectancy (18:00), the (potential) end of...

The Sunday Times' tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Stephen Hsu, founder of SuperFocus.ai, to talk about genetic testing of children (5:15), his new startup SuperFocus (9:15), the hallucination problem for artificial intelligence (11:40), how the Ai revolution could go very badly (17:55), creating an army of AI workers (24:00), how companies are reacting (27:30), starting a company amid t...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Ben Rapoport to talk about his plan it implant his first brain-computer interface in a human this year (5:00), his background in neurosurgery and electrical engineering (10:30), why BCI’s are ready now (13:30), Precision’s approach (16:45), preventing the device being rejected by the body (23:15), what this device will allow (24:45), res...