A collection of Bob Sullivan’s various podcasts.
The Debugger miniseries ‘Sugar High’ examines the impact Big Tech and AI will have on the music industry. In this conclusion, folk musician Tift Merritt and Duke Professor David Hoffman discuss all the tools society has to encourage both innovation and art. And we learn a bit more about Tift’s [Keep reading]
I sat down at his table and he had probably 100 cards and letters and gifts and boxes and he said, ‘I bet there’s at least 500 …. This isn’t nearly all of it.’ And he really lost count. There were just stacks of love letters and gifts and cards, [Keep reading]
The most dangerous hack is a brain hack. And criminals are getting very, very good at that. Meanwhile, I fear, the rest of us have spent precious little time learning to defend against brain hacks. Hopefully today’s piece will help a little. Today I’m going to discuss an important way [Keep reading]
Jen Jacobsen of the Artist Rights Alliance joins host Bob Sullivan to talk about the decades-long ‘battle’ between artists and tech firms. Will it come to a head with AI music? Can we build incentives into the system that reward creators? This is part 3 of Debugger’s miniseries on [Keep reading]
The parent company of Cash App, After Pay and Square laid off nearly half its staff this week. Wall Street cheered, sending the stock up nearly 20%. Get used to headlines like this. Owner Jack Dorsey — the founder of Twitter — claims AI enabled the workforce slashing. My hunch [Keep reading]
The next time you fire up your favorite streaming service, the music you hear might be made by a robot. Maybe you don’t care; you’re just looking for something to help you kill those 30 minutes on the treadmill. But you should care. The sound you might not hear is [Keep reading]
By any measure you can find, fraud is soaring in the U.S. and around the world. I spent an hour on WHYY radio recently discussing the causes for this, but I can boil it down to one concept: big, uncaring companies have dehumanized customers and employees alike, creating a perfect [Keep reading]
UPDATE 10/31/2025 — With SNAP benefits about to be suspended due to the government shutdown, I checked the “theft scoreboard” to see if there’d been any improvement in this situation. In fact, it’s grown worse. More than $100 million was stolen in the most recent quarter, and the total is [Keep reading]
It’s a dark, cluttered room full of bookshelves, each shelf jam-packed with laptop computers. There are dozens of them humming away, lights flickering. And each one has a Post-It note attached with a single name on it. And there’s a pink purse just hanging off the side of one of [Keep reading]
Many years ago, a very smart book editor I worked with (Jill Schwartzman at Dutton now) gently admonished me because I failed to include resources for consumers in my tirades about the mistreatment of consumers. So was born concepts like “Red Tape Tips” I’d include at the end of my [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan