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Close All Tabs: Daily Summaries Delivered
by KQED
Ever wonder where the internet stops and IRL begins? Close All Tabs breaks down how digital culture shapes our world through thoughtful insights and irreverent humor. From internet trends to AI slop to the politics of memes, Close All Tabs covers it all. How will AI change our jobs and lives? Is the government watching what I post? Is there life beyond TikTok? Host Morgan Sung pulls from experts, the audience, and history to add context to the trends and depth to the memes. And she’ll wrestle with as many browser tabs as it takes to explain the cultural moment we’re all collectively living. Morgan Sung is a tech journalist whose work covers the range of absurdity and brilliance that is the internet. Her beat has evolved into an exploration of social platforms and how they shape real-world culture. She has written for TechCrunch, NBC News, Mashable, BuzzFeed News and more.
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- 4 days ago42 min
Save or Scroll: Fake NFL Players, Girly Coding, AI Music Scams and Community Garden Drama
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 Read the Transcript here Email us at CloseAllTabs@KQED.org Follow us on Instagram and TikTok 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
- 1 weeks ago43 min
Close All Tabs Presents Snap Judgment: Runaway Car
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 Email us at CloseAllTabs@KQED.org Follow us on Instagram and TikTok 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
- 2 weeks ago33 min
Silicon Valley's Earliest Self Trackers
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 Read the Transcript here Email us at CloseAllTabs@KQED.org Follow us on Instagram and TikTok 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
- 2 weeks ago30 min
Going Down the AI Music Slop Chute with Camilo Landau | Dream Machines
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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
- 3 weeks ago43 min
AI Agents Are Turning Marxist Under Stress
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 Read the Transcript here Email us at CloseAllTabs@KQED.org Follow us on Instagram and TikTok 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
- 3 weeks ago35 min
Could AI Transform How Science Gets Done? with Jungwon Byun | Dream Machines
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
- Aug 19, 202636 min
The Emily Hart Saga, Part 2: The AI Thirst Trap Grift
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 Read the Transcript here Email us at CloseAllTabs@KQED.org Follow us on Instagram and TikTok 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
- Aug 17, 202639 min
AI Will Create Enormous Wealth — But Who Benefits? with Erik Brynjolfsson | Dream Machines
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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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About Close All Tabs
Ever wonder where the internet stops and IRL begins? Close All Tabs breaks down how digital culture shapes our world through thoughtful insights and irreverent humor. From internet trends to AI slop to the politics of memes, Close All Tabs covers it all. How will AI change our jobs and lives? Is the government watching what I post? Is there life beyond TikTok? Host Morgan Sung pulls from experts, the audience, and history to add context to the trends and depth to the memes. And she’ll wrestle with as many browser tabs as it takes to explain the cultural moment we’re all collectively living. Morgan Sung is a tech journalist whose work covers the range of absurdity and brilliance that is the internet. Her beat has evolved into an exploration of social platforms and how they shape real-world culture. She has written for TechCrunch, NBC News, Mashable, BuzzFeed News and more.
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