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

How well is the Biden administration coaxing semiconductor companies to build their chips in the United States? Compared to Taiwan, South Korea, Japan…or even mainland China, things are just okay.

Guest: Asa Fitch, reporter for the Wall Street Journal, covering the semiconductor industry.

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“Fecal microbial transplants” treat someone’s unhealthy gut with poop from someone else’s healthy gut, and proponents of FMT claim it can help treat everything from IBS to autism. But if your doctor isn’t ready to fill you up with someone else’s poop, the internet will happily oblige. 

Guest: 
Luke Winkie, Slate staff writer who published “The Poop Broker.”

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His law firm won a $73 million dollar settlement against Remington on behalf of nine Sandy Hook families. Now he’s filing a lawsuit against the gunmaker Daniel Defense, the video game company Activision, and Instagram’s parent company, Meta, on behalf of families in Uvalde.

Guest: Josh Koskoff, attorney

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Podcast production by Evan Campbell, Patrick Fort, and Anna Phillips.
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Last year saw a record number of healthcare hacks with more than 700 separate incidents. And with a subsidiary of United Healthcare forking over a $22 billion ransom this year, the problem isn’t going away. With so much sensitive personal information on file, why aren’t hospitals and their ilk better prepared?

Guest: 
Dina Carlisle, president of the local nurses union, OPEIU 40 in Michigan.
Justin Sherman, CEO of Global Cyber Strategies.

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When OpenAI showed a demo for the latest version of ChatGPT —the one that you can chat with, you know, with your voice—one of the voices sounded eerily familiar. And instead of a victory lap, it was a reminder of all of the implications for intellectual property and one’s own basic human likeness that this technology carries with it.

Guest: Sigal Samuel, senior reporter for Vox's Future Perfect and co-host of the Future Perfect podcast.

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In theory, crowdfunding sites offer an opportunity for anyone to give to any cause, including, say, strangers facing huge medical bills. In practice, crowdfunding suffers from many of the same inequities that led to someone needing to crowdfund to begin with.

Guest: Nora Kenworthy, author of Crowded Out: The True Costs of Crowdfunding Healthcare, associate professor at the University of Washington, Bothell.

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