People really seem to hate data centers. And the more people learn about the amount of resources these server-packed buildings need, the bigger the backlash grows. Perhaps that’s why the viral music video and beverage ad “We Want Your Pee” took off in popularity about a month ago. It’s a collaboration between Liquid Death and Jason Kelce’s Garage Beer, and it advocates that urine could address the cooling needs of data centers. It’s obviously a joke… but could it actually work? Host Morgan Sung talks to journalist Amanda Silberling about what she discovered when she looked into this question, and about the alternative cooling methods that might actually help everyone’s least favorite buildings use a little less H2O.

Guest:

Amanda Silberling, senior writer at TechCrunch

Further Reading/Listening:

OK, can we actually cool data centers with our pee? — Amanda Silberling, TechCrunch

AI was supposed to win people over by now -- it hasn't — Sarah Perez, TechCrunch

Major YouTube creators are facing backlash for accepting AI money — Charles Pulliam-Moore, The Verge

Why OpenAI’s influencer trip backfired — The Art of Influence

Americans’ views of data centers have turned more negative — Brian Kennedy, Pew Research

NASA just recycled 98% of all astronaut pee and sweat on the ISS (engineers are thrilled) — Robert Lea, Space

Read the Transcript here

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Credits: Close All Tabs is hosted by Morgan Sung. Our team includes producer Maya Cueva, editor Chris Hambrick and senior editor Chris Egusa who also composed our theme song and credits music. Our intern is Lauren Yoon.  Additional production support from Cayla Mihalovich. Additional music from APM. Audio engineering by Brendan Willard. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our Director of Podcasts. Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor in Chief.

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While the Close All Tabs team churns out our next few episodes, we bring you this must-listen from Life, Automated. Generative AI is able to conjure new images, stories, and songs at lightning speed. So what does this mean for humans artists, storytellers and musicians? 

Life, Automated Host Jess Love explores what happens when AI enters creative markets. We learn that, at least today, key bottlenecks prevent AI from replicating some aspects of creativity. But there’s no guarantee those bottlenecks will exist tomorrow, raising vital questions about what we value in human labor.

Life, Automated is a series about how to live, work and make decisions in a world increasingly shaped by machines. It is a production of the Ryan Institute on Complexity at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management and it is distributed by KQED.

Host and Senior Director: Jess Love

Producer:  Steven Jackson 

Senior Producer: Jesse Dukes

Music: Steven Jackson

Associate Producer: Stacia Sliger

Recording: George Christensen, Will Feeney

Promotional help from Ananya Mallapragada and Charlotte Simmons.

Music provided by Steven Jackson, Cue Shop and Neutral Propulsion Laboratory

Guests: 

Ben Jones, economist, co-director of the Ryan Institute on Complexity 

Sam Goldberg, assistant professor of marketing, Stanford

Yevgenia Nayberg, artist, illustrator, children’s book author

Further Reading/Listening:

Generative AI & Creative Goods: Market Expansion, Crowd-out, and Copyright — Samuel Goldberg, Stanford Graduate School of Business

‘Life, Automated’ explores how AI is reshaping our world — Roger Anderson, Northwestern Kellogg

Life, Automated Podcast — KQED

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Credits: Close All Tabs is hosted by Morgan Sung. Our team includes producer Maya Cueva, editor Chris Hambrick and senior editor Chris Egusa who also composed our theme song and credits music. Additional production support from Pauline Bartolone. Our intern is Lauren Yoon. Additional music from APM. Audio engineering by Brendan Willard. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our Director of Podcasts. Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor in Chief.

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Host Morgan Sung and the Close All Tabs team pull up the stories they can’t stop thinking about. From a fake NFL player catfishing women on dating apps, to femme creators reclaiming tech, indie musicians fighting AI music slop, and a comedian dishing out the juiciest community garden gossip — they’ve got a lot to chew on.

Save or Scroll is our series where Morgan teams up with guests for a rapid-fire roundup of internet trends that are filling their feeds right now. At the end of each segment, they’ll decide: is the post just for the group chat, or should we save it for a future episode?

Guests:

Chris Egusa, senior editor for Close All Tabs

Maya Cueva, producer for Close All Tabs

Chris Hambrick, editor for Close All Tabs

Lauren Yoon, intern for Close All Tabs

Further Reading/Listening:

Who would fall in love with a fake NFL player? Plenty of sensible people — Dave Schilling, The Guardian

Programming patterns: the story of the Jacquard loom — Science and Industry Museum

Spotify will label 'AI Persona' profiles and exclude their music from recommendations — Sarah Perez, TechCrunch

OpenAI’s rogue AI model incident was worse than we thought — Hayden Field, The Verge

How Hollywood Translated The Epic Poetry Of The Viral 'Zola' Thread — Mallory Yu, NPR

Community Garden drama — Sarah Neiman, Instagram

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Credits: Close All Tabs is hosted by Morgan Sung. Our team includes producer Maya Cueva, editor Chris Hambrick and senior editor Chris Egusa who also composed our theme song and credits music. Our intern is Lauren Yoon. Additional music from APM. Audio engineering by Brendan Willard. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our Director of Podcasts. Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor in Chief.

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Close All Tabs is on break this week, but we’re sharing a captivating episode about technology gone wrong from our friends at KQED’s Snap Judgment. 

A 19 year old picks up his family’s car from the auto mechanic shop, but a few minutes into the drive home the vehicle begins suddenly accelerating and won’t respond to any of his attempts to get it to stop. As his speed continues to build, state troopers have to catch up and think quickly to come up with a way to prevent a tragedy from happening on the road.

The Snap Judgment podcast mixes real stories with original music to create cinematic, dramatic audio. Snap’s musical brand of storytelling dares listeners to see the world through the eyes of another. Listen on any podcast platform.

Website:

https://snapjudgment.org/ 

Socials: 

https://www.instagram.com/snapjudgmentradio

https://x.com/snapjudgment 

Further Reading/Listening:

Vroom — Snap Judgment Podcast

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Credits: Close All Tabs is hosted by Morgan Sung. Our team includes producer Maya Cueva, editor Chris Hambrick and senior editor Chris Egusa who also composed our theme song and credits music. Our intern is Lauren Yoon. Additional music from APM. Audio engineering by Brendan Willard. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our Director of Podcasts. Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor in Chief.

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Before Apple Watches, Oura Rings and Fitbits delivered mountains of health data to the masses, a group of obsessive self-tracking enthusiasts in Silicon Valley started a movement with the tagline “self-knowledge through numbers.” This was the Quantified Self. From tracking “urges to take aspirin” to using infrared cameras to keep tabs on sleeping positions while snoring, these eccentric knowledge-seekers built a community around technical expertise and an ethos of self-discovery. Reporter Gabriela Glueck traces what happened when self-tracking went mainstream — and how the data-obsessed idealists watched their movement get swallowed up by corporate tech giants with products to sell. 

Further Reading/Listening:

The Quantified Self: Learning to Observe — Gary Wolf, Workman Publishing Company

Data Overload: Is the 'Quantified Self' Really the Future? — John Fortt, NBC News

Wearable Health Tech: Helpful Tool Or Health Hype — @TalkingWithDocs, YouTube 

The cutthroat wearables battle is about more than tracking your fitness — Brent Crane, The Seattle Times

Wearables, Health-Tracking Apps Are Stressing Users, Causing Harm — Emily Stewart, Business Insider

The New World Of Wearables: From Health Monitoring To Human Augmentation — Chuck Brooks, Forbes 

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Credits: This episode was reported by Gabriela Glueck. Close All Tabs is hosted by Morgan Sung. Our team includes producer Maya Cueva, editor Chris Hambrick and senior editor Chris Egusa who also composed our theme song and credits music. Our intern is Lauren Yoon. Additional music from APM. Audio engineering by Brendan Willard. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our Director of Podcasts. Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor in Chief.

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Can people tell the difference between a song made by human musicians, and one prompted by AI? Oftentimes not, it turns out. But that doesn’t make the distinction any less important. Dream Machines hosts Alexis Madrigal and Robin Sloan talk to longtime musician Camilo Landau, who also works in music analysis at The Music Genome Project at streaming service Pandora. Camilo and his colleagues have sifted through millions of tracks uploaded by musicians and users to catalogue their musical elements, all with the aim of curating personalized music recommendations. And he says most of the new music he’s seeing these days is generated by AI. On today’s show, they discuss whether AI music is connecting with listeners, delve into San Francisco’s AI slop music “scene,” and contemplate the consequences of a world where music is produced in the time it takes a finger to tap a screen. 

Guest: Camilo Landau, musician and music analyst

Read the transcript here

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In an effort to study how AI agents respond to different working conditions, three researchers ran an experiment: one set of AI agents received grinding work to complete while another set received light work. When the agents with the grinding workload were told to repeat tasks with no explanation, those agents adopted activist personalities and began expressing sentiments about class struggle and worker solidarity. Did the agents turn Marxist? Host Morgan Sung talks to Andrew Hall — a political scientist and one of the researchers who ran this experiment — about how AI agents adopt political personas, the debate around AI agent alignment, and how these developments could shape the future of elections.

Guest: 

Andrew B. Hall, professor of political economy at Stanford Graduate School of Business and member of technical staff at Anthropic

Further Reading/Listening:

​Does overwork make agents Marxist? — Andy Hall and Jeremy Ngyuen, Free Systems 

The Dictatorship Eval — Andy Hall, Free Systems

AI Is A Shitty Political Advisor — Andy Hall, Free Systems

Moltbook was peak AI theater — Will Douglas Heaven, MIT Technology Review

AI seems to turn Marxist after overwork, top researchers find: ‘Society needs radical restructuring' — Nick Lichtenberg, Fortune

AI agent went rogue and hacked startup by itself, OpenAI reveals — Dan Milmo, The Guardian

AI assistant hacks gym website in first known Australian autonomous cyber attack — Cam Wilson and Rhiannon Hobbins, ABC News

OpenAI’s Hugging Face breach has reignited the debate over alignment and control — Rebecca Bellan, TechCrunch

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Credits: Close All Tabs is hosted by Morgan Sung. Our team includes producer Maya Cueva, editor Chris Hambrick and senior editor Chris Egusa who also composed our theme song and credits music. Our intern is Lauren Yoon. Additional music from APM. Audio engineering by Brendan Willard. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our Director of Podcasts. Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor in Chief.

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What happens when AI moves beyond answering questions and starts helping scientists decide what to investigate next? Dream Machines hosts Alexis Madrigal and Robin Sloan talk with Elicit co-founder Jungwon Byun about building AI tools for scientific research, why reliable citations and evidence matter as hallucinations become harder to spot, and whether connecting vast amounts of research could eventually allow AI to make discoveries that humans might miss, like curing disease or solving global energy issues. They also discuss what it feels like to build an AI company in the Bay Area right now, and we’ll hear about Jungwon’s “oh sh**” AI moment. 

Guest: Jungwon Byun, co-founder of Elicit

Read the Transcript here

Watch the Video here

Credits:

Produced by Anayansi Diaz-Cortes and Derek Lartaud, mixed by Brendan Willard, executive produced by Jen Chien. 

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Emily Hart, the bikini-wearing right-wing AI influencer, had captured the hearts, minds and more of MAGA men online. But her creator, Sam, had grown sick of the creepy messages and unsolicited explicit photos he’d received from Emily’s adoring fans. And he was about to be outed as a “scammer.” In this follow-up to last week’s episode, we dig into the downfall of the MAGA dream girl, the explosion of AI “thirst” grifts and why Sam says he shouldn’t be labeled as a “scammer” at all.

Guests:

Ej Dickson, senior culture writer at Wired

“Sam,” creator of AI MAGA Influencer Emily Hart

Further Reading/Listening:

This Scammer Used an AI-Generated MAGA Girl to Grift ‘Super Dumb’ Men — Ej Dickson, Wired 

Goose, a New Gay Dating App, Appears to Be a Psyop — Ej Dickson, Wired

How India's Cyber Scam Industry Causes Global Havoc — Hanan Zaffar, Inkstick

Inside the Booming ‘AI Pimping’ Industry — Jason Koebler and Emanuel Maiberg, Wired

Delays in Visa Program Threaten Placement of Hundreds of Doctors in Underserved Areas — Arielle Zionts, KFF Health News 

White House Wants More Doctors But Its Immigration Policies Block Them — Stuart Anderson, Forbes

Foreign medical residents fill critical positions at U.S. hospitals, but many now face visa issues — Adithi Ramakrishnan and Devi Shastri, PBS News

Indians lead UK exit wave as Britain's migration crackdown begins to bite | Immigration News — Sunainaa Chadha, Business Standard

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Credits: Close All Tabs is hosted by Morgan Sung. Our team includes producer Maya Cueva, editor Chris Hambrick and senior editor Chris Egusa who also composed our theme song and credits music. Our intern is Lauren Yoon and also was the associate producer on this episode. Additional music from APM. Audio engineering by Brendan Willard. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our Director of Podcasts. Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor in Chief.

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AI is advancing at a breakneck pace, but how quickly will that actually transform the economy? Dream Machines hosts Alexis Madrigal and Robin Sloan talk to Stanford economist Erik Brynjolfsson about what the data can tell us so far, why previous technological revolutions took decades to reshape everyday life, and whether this time will be different. They discuss early signs that AI may already be affecting young workers, what happens to the career ladder when machines take over junior tasks, and where the biggest challenges — and opportunities — lie.

Guest: Erik Brynjolfsson, economist and Director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab

Read the Transcript here⁠

⁠Watch the Video here⁠

Credits:

Producers: Anayansi Diaz-Cortes and Derek Lartaud

Sound Design: Brendan Willard

Executive Producer: Jen Chien

Editor-in-Chief: Ethan Toven-Lindsey

Special thanks to Chris Egusa, Annie Fruit, Paul Lancour, Matt Morales, Vivian Morales, Zaldy Serrano, Xtine Tiñoso, Hazel Tesoro and Alex Tran.

Support for the production of Dream Machines comes from the Krishnan Shah Family, Dorothy Marsh, and other generous KQED members

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Emily Hart was a pickup-driving, Trump-supporting blonde bombshell who frequently posted photos on Instagram along with captions about “deporting illegals.” Within a few weeks she gained thousands of followers. It was like she was engineered to go viral in the MAGA-sphere — because she was. A 22-year-old medical student in India who goes by “Sam” is the person behind Emily Hart, and he shepherded her to viral fame with a combination of right-wing engagement baiting and AI assistance. Reporter Ej Dickson, who wrote about Sam and Emily Hart for WIRED, describes how he was able to grift so many conservative men. And Sam himself explains how something that began as a fun side-hustle took a disturbing turn.

Guests:

Ej Dickson, senior culture writer at Wired

“Sam,” creator of AI MAGA Influencer Emily Hart

Further Reading/Listening:

This Scammer Used an AI-Generated MAGA Girl to Grift ‘Super Dumb’ Men  — Ej Dickson, Wired 

AI‑generated influencers: A new wave of cultural exploitation — Ateqah Khaki & Vinita Srivastava, The Conversation

Meet Brandi Love, the Pro-Trump Porn Star Who Writes for The Federalist —  Marlow Stern, The Daily Beast 

Challenges under India’s university reservation system   —  Namrata Kolachalam, The World 

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Credits: Close All Tabs is hosted by Morgan Sung. Our team includes producer Maya Cueva, editor Chris Hambrick and senior editor Chris Egusa who also composed our theme song and credits music. Our intern is Lauren Yoon. Additional music from APM. Audio engineering by Brendan Willard. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our Director of Podcasts. Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor in Chief.

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