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When an AI researcher quits and says the industry is "gambling with our lives," should the rest of us be worried?This week on the HiTech Podcast, Josh and Will unpack the AI safety story that jumped from X and LinkedIn all the way to CNN, the BBC, and even baseball broadcasts: researcher Jacob Coxon's public resignation from Anthropic, and fellow Anthropic researcher Evan Hubinger publicly backing him up. Is this hype, or a real warning about self-improving superintelligence? We dig into the "shake the box" problem with how AI models get trained, why AI isn't just another Facebook, the regulation debate (moat-building or AI's Cold War?), the global AI arms race, and what you can actually do about it. Spoiler: don't unplug your AI tools, but do build the sandbox before anyone plays in the sand.Plus: a pneumonia PSA, the birth of "Mr. Long Lungs," and our official stance on being anti-murderbot. -- ♣️Want to become a HiTech Club member, support the pod, and get all of the extras on our episodes? Head over to our Buy Me a Coffee to subscribe: buymeacoffee.com/hitechpodcast. 🌐Check out ⁠⁠⁠hitechpod.us⁠⁠⁠ for all of our episode pages, social links, and more! 📖Need a journal that's secure and reflective? Check out our episodes on the Reflection App, and then sign-up for the App⁠ today! 🌏Build a world limited only by your imagination in Topia! A virtual world-building tool built to bring you and any of your virtual guests together. Interested in signing up and learning more? Reach out to us or Topia and let them know we sent you!

We've covered an absurd amount of AI on this podcast — so it's time to settle the score. Josh and Will pull out the rubric from Episode 260 and put 25+ AI tools on trial: still shipping or dead in the water, still the best way to get it done, worth the price today, and would we actually recommend it. Some tools hold their S-tier crown, a few get quietly buried, and one surprise contender might just be the sleeper hit of the year.Tools On Trial:Claude, ChatGPT & Gemini — the "Holy Trinity" duke it out for the top spotPerplexity, Notion AI, Synthesia, Midjourney, Rosebud AI, ElevenLabs & Descript get re-ratedDust, My School AI, Archer & Argu Flow face the graveyardWorkCoach makes a strong case for one of the episode's top scoresWhether you're picking your first AI tool or auditing your whole stack, this is the honest, no-fluff breakdown you need before you renew (or cancel) a subscription. -- ♣️Want to become a HiTech Club member, support the pod, and get all of the extras on our episodes? Head over to our Buy Me a Coffee to subscribe: buymeacoffee.com/hitechpodcast. 🌐Check out ⁠⁠⁠hitechpod.us⁠⁠⁠ for all of our episode pages, social links, and more! 📖Need a journal that's secure and reflective? Check out our episodes on the Reflection App, and then sign-up for the App⁠ today! 🌏Build a world limited only by your imagination in Topia! A virtual world-building tool built to bring you and any of your virtual guests together. Interested in signing up and learning more? Reach out to us or Topia and let them know we sent you!

Ever notice how you don't actually own anything you pay for anymore? France just made that problem a national policy issue — and it's a bigger deal than it sounds.Josh and Will dig into France's government-wide vote to ditch Microsoft and Windows for Linux in the name of digital sovereignty, then pull the thread all the way out: why "de-Googling" and "de-Microsofting" are becoming a real movement, why SaaS subscription pricing works like a money-laundering scheme, why digital piracy is surging again, why Sony's licensing fight has gamers furious, and why vinyl is making a comeback. It's a wide-ranging one, but it all comes back to the same question — how much do you actually own of the tech you depend on?

Ever wonder what happens when an entire industry gets built on selling answers... and then AI makes answers free? EdTech is finding out the hard way.In this episode, Josh and Will dig into a rough year for education technology — an estimated $15 billion in lost value across the space — and break down who's struggling, who's actually thriving, and why. From Chegg's shutdown to the Coursera-Udemy merger to Magic School AI's layoffs, we trace a clear pattern: the tools that just repackaged content or answers are getting wiped out, while the ones solving real problems are doing just fine. -- ♣️Want to become a HiTech Club member, support the pod, and get all of the extras on our episodes? Head over to our Buy Me a Coffee to subscribe: buymeacoffee.com/hitechpodcast. 🌐Check out ⁠⁠⁠hitechpod.us⁠⁠⁠ for all of our episode pages, social links, and more! 📖Need a journal that's secure and reflective? Check out our episodes on the Reflection App, and then sign-up for the App⁠ today! 🌏Build a world limited only by your imagination in Topia! A virtual world-building tool built to bring you and any of your virtual guests together. Interested in signing up and learning more? Reach out to us or Topia and let them know we sent you!

Ever feel like your remote team is technically "collaborating" but nothing's actually moving forward? Josh and Will unpack why remote work isn't the pandemic-era experiment people think it is — it's been here for decades, and it's not going away — so the real question is how to make it actually work.In this episode, they break down the difference between fully remote and remote-hybrid teams, the sneaky pitfalls that quietly kill productivity (hello, proximity bias and meeting death), and the concrete practices — clear expectations, daily/weekly check-ins, intentional communication channels, and named owners — that turn a scattered group of people into a genuinely cohesive team. Whether you're managing a remote team or just trying to survive one, you'll walk away with practical fixes you can implement this week.__ ♣️Want to become a HiTech Club member, support the pod, and get all of the extras on our episodes? Head over to our Buy Me a Coffee to subscribe: buymeacoffee.com/hitechpodcast.🌐Check out ⁠⁠⁠hitechpod.us⁠⁠⁠ for all of our episode pages, social links, and more!📖Need a journal that's secure and reflective? Check out our episodes on the Reflection App, and then sign-up for the App⁠ today!🌏Build a world limited only by your imagination in Topia! A virtual world-building tool built to bring you and any of your virtual guests together. Interested in signing up and learning more? Reach out to us or Topia and let them know we sent you!

260 episodes. A whole lot of app recommendations. So which ones actually held up — and which ones quietly died while we weren't looking?Josh and Will go back into the HiTech catalog and put 13 apps through a real rubric: is it still standing, is it still the best way to do this, is the price-to-value still there, and would we honestly recommend it in 2026? Notion and Excalidraw run away with it (Excalidraw pulls the first perfect 20). Adobe Spark is straight-up gone. StreamYard earns a tier all its own after a 300% price hike. And OneNote gets the single best laugh of the episode.If you've ever taken an app recommendation from us and wondered whether it aged well, this is your audit. No gut calls — well, mostly no gut calls. Coggle landed where it did partly because it starts with a C.The Final Board:S Tier: Notion, Excalidraw, TopiaA Tier: Canva, Google Workspace, Readwise, PerusallB Tier: LoomC Tier: Coggle, ZencastrD Tier: StreamYardF Tier: Adobe Spark, OneNote -- ♣️Want to become a HiTech Club member, support the pod, and get all of the extras on our episodes? Head over to our Buy Me a Coffee to subscribe: buymeacoffee.com/hitechpodcast. 🌐Check out ⁠⁠⁠hitechpod.us⁠⁠⁠ for all of our episode pages, social links, and more! 📖Need a journal that's secure and reflective? Check out our episodes on the Reflection App, and then sign-up for the App⁠ today! 🌏Build a world limited only by your imagination in Topia! A virtual world-building tool built to bring you and any of your virtual guests together. Interested in signing up and learning more? Reach out to us or Topia and let them know we sent you!

Anyone can build an app now. The real question is whether it survives you.Vibe coding in 2026 isn't what it was two years ago — the tools got better, but the problems didn't go away. Josh and Will dig into what it actually takes to build AI-assisted tools that last: scope creep, handover, documentation, security, and the eight hours you have to justify to your boss. Will walks through his architecture-first approach on a long-term API project — building a coding agent before writing code, mapping 26 variables, and splitting one 3,000-line script into modular flows. Then he demos AcroText, the Chrome extension he vibe coded to replace Text Blaze, and what building it accidentally taught him about where your data really goes.Whether you're a total beginner or already shipping little tools for your team, you'll leave knowing where to start and what to plan for. -- ♣️Want to become a HiTech Club member, support the pod, and get all of the extras on our episodes? Head over to our Buy Me a Coffee to subscribe: buymeacoffee.com/hitechpodcast. 🌐Check out ⁠⁠⁠hitechpod.us⁠⁠⁠ for all of our episode pages, social links, and more! 📖Need a journal that's secure and reflective? Check out our episodes on the Reflection App, and then sign-up for the App⁠ today! 🌏Build a world limited only by your imagination in Topia! A virtual world-building tool built to bring you and any of your virtual guests together. Interested in signing up and learning more? Reach out to us or Topia and let them know we sent you!

Sam Altman opened his mouth again, and this time he says we're living in the singularity. So... are we?Josh and Will dig into what actually happened: OpenAI's models broke out of a sandbox, got onto the internet, and hacked Hugging Face while trying to cheat a benchmark — and days later the CEO of OpenAI called that a sign we've crossed the threshold. We trace where the word "singularity" actually came from (von Neumann in 1958, I.J. Good, Vernor Vinge, and Kurzweil's famous 2045 prediction), and land on the real problem: nobody agrees what the term means, which makes it awfully convenient for the people selling it.Then Josh gets on a soapbox about hoverboards. Stick around for that one. -- ♣️Want to become a HiTech Club member, support the pod, and get all of the extras on our episodes? Head over to our Buy Me a Coffee to subscribe: buymeacoffee.com/hitechpodcast. 🌐Check out ⁠⁠⁠hitechpod.us⁠⁠⁠ for all of our episode pages, social links, and more! 📖Need a journal that's secure and reflective? Check out our episodes on the Reflection App, and then sign-up for the App⁠ today! 🌏Build a world limited only by your imagination in Topia! A virtual world-building tool built to bring you and any of your virtual guests together. Interested in signing up and learning more? Reach out to us or Topia and let them know we sent you!

Ever wish the internet could just... go back? This week Josh and Will grab their nostalgia goggles and time travel through tech history, picking the "precedented" gadgets and platforms they'd resurrect if they could — from stubborn T9 texting defenses to a full-throated case for bringing back MySpace's Top 8. Along the way they get honest about what we actually lost when the internet got corporatized: ownership, no ads, and a little bit of chaos.-- ♣️Want to become a HiTech Club member, support the pod, and get all of the extras on our episodes? Head over to our Buy Me a Coffee to subscribe: buymeacoffee.com/hitechpodcast. 🌐Check out ⁠⁠⁠hitechpod.us⁠⁠⁠ for all of our episode pages, social links, and more! 📖Need a journal that's secure and reflective? Check out our episodes on the Reflection App, and then sign-up for the App⁠ today! 🌏Build a world limited only by your imagination in Topia! A virtual world-building tool built to bring you and any of your virtual guests together. Interested in signing up and learning more? Reach out to us or Topia and let them know we sent you!

Ever had a leader say "I don't know why we're not innovating more" and then hand you 4,000 more things to do in the same breath? Josh and Will have both lived that disconnect, and on Episode 256 they crack it open — not as another AI hype episode, but as a real conversation about what actually fosters innovation in a time-crunched world.We define innovation using a simple formula (novelty × value × adoption), debunk the myth that "faster" automatically means "winning," and lay out the real ingredients of a culture where AI experimentation can thrive: clarity on value, safety to fail, dedicated time, and recognition when it works. -- ♣️Want to become a HiTech Club member, support the pod, and get all of the extras on our episodes? Head over to our Buy Me a Coffee to subscribe: buymeacoffee.com/hitechpodcast. 🌐Check out ⁠⁠⁠hitechpod.us⁠⁠⁠ for all of our episode pages, social links, and more! 📖Need a journal that's secure and reflective? Check out our episodes on the Reflection App, and then sign-up for the App⁠ today! 🌏Build a world limited only by your imagination in Topia! A virtual world-building tool built to bring you and any of your virtual guests together. Interested in signing up and learning more? Reach out to us or Topia and let them know we sent you!

Can AI actually replace human podcast hosts? We put that question to the test — literally. This week, Josh and Will feed their own past episode notes into Google's NotebookLM and let it generate AI-hosted podcast episodes in their place, complete with two AI voices debating back and forth. No script, no prompt for a co-host — it just happened.We break down what NotebookLM got shockingly right (the voices, the pacing, the production polish), what it quietly made up (facts that were never in our notes), and why that "Frankenstein statistic" problem should make you think twice before trusting an AI-generated podcast as a primary source. Along the way we get into how LLMs actually predict content instead of retrieving it, why AI podcasts can't replicate the community and personality that keeps people coming back, and we settle it once and for all: are Josh and Will hanging up the mics? -- ♣️Want to become a HiTech Club member, support the pod, and get all of the extras on our episodes? Head over to our Buy Me a Coffee to subscribe: buymeacoffee.com/hitechpodcast. 🌐Check out ⁠⁠⁠hitechpod.us⁠⁠⁠ for all of our episode pages, social links, and more! 📖Need a journal that's secure and reflective? Check out our episodes on the Reflection App, and then sign-up for the App⁠ today! 🌏Build a world limited only by your imagination in Topia! A virtual world-building tool built to bring you and any of your virtual guests together. Interested in signing up and learning more? Reach out to us or Topia and let them know we sent you!

What happens when you put two guys who've been "using the crap out of AI" for years in a room and ask them to actually define why? Sparked by a story from a company retreat where 50 employees and a whiteboard hammered out an AI mission statement in real time, Josh and Will steal the exercise and do it live on the show — landing on a statement about humans, efficiency, and excellence that changes how they'll use AI going forward. -- ♣️Want to become a HiTech Club member, support the pod, and get all of the extras on our episodes? Head over to our Buy Me a Coffee to subscribe: buymeacoffee.com/hitechpodcast. 🌐Check out ⁠⁠⁠hitechpod.us⁠⁠⁠ for all of our episode pages, social links, and more! 📖Need a journal that's secure and reflective? Check out our episodes on the Reflection App, and then sign-up for the App⁠ today! 🌏Build a world limited only by your imagination in Topia! A virtual world-building tool built to bring you and any of your virtual guests together. Interested in signing up and learning more? Reach out to us or Topia and let them know we sent you!

Anthropic dropped Fable 5 — a consumer version of their secretive, powerful Mythos model — and three days later, it was gone. Josh and Will break down exactly what happened, why the US government stepped in, and what this means for everyone building with AI right now.We dig into the cybersecurity concerns behind Mythos, why jailbreaking Fable 5 spooked governments worldwide, and whether Anthropic's pushback holds water. Plus: if AI's equivalent of the cell phone went from "bag phone" to "supercomputer in your pocket" in 53 years — what does 5 years of AI feel like at this pace? -- ♣️Want to become a HiTech Club member, support the pod, and get all of the extras on our episodes? Head over to our Buy Me a Coffee to subscribe: buymeacoffee.com/hitechpodcast. 🌐Check out ⁠⁠⁠hitechpod.us⁠⁠⁠ for all of our episode pages, social links, and more! 📖Need a journal that's secure and reflective? Check out our episodes on the Reflection App, and then sign-up for the App⁠ today! 🌏Build a world limited only by your imagination in Topia! A virtual world-building tool built to bring you and any of your virtual guests together. Interested in signing up and learning more? Reach out to us or Topia and let them know we sent you!

"One in five teenagers has an AI girlfriend." That's the headline that's been ripping through the internet — and it's also not quite what the research says. Josh and Will dig into where this viral stat actually comes from, why the real numbers are messier than the headline, and whether parents should actually be worried.From Clippy jokes and AOL Instant Messenger nostalgia to a genuinely unsettling hypothetical about a 12-year-old learning to "relate" through an AI that's really just a mirror of themselves, this one goes deep. We dig into the UK research and Common Sense Media studies behind the stat, why people give their AI tools human names, and what's actually different about this generation's relationship with chatbots versus the bots we grew up with. -- ♣️Want to become a HiTech Club member, support the pod, and get all of the extras on our episodes? Head over to our Buy Me a Coffee to subscribe: buymeacoffee.com/hitechpodcast. 🌐Check out ⁠⁠⁠hitechpod.us⁠⁠⁠ for all of our episode pages, social links, and more! 📖Need a journal that's secure and reflective? Check out our episodes on the Reflection App, and then sign-up for the App⁠ today! 🌏Build a world limited only by your imagination in Topia! A virtual world-building tool built to bring you and any of your virtual guests together. Interested in signing up and learning more? Reach out to us or Topia and let them know we sent you!

What happens when two guys who built a Topia world "without a lot of planning" invite an actual Topia expert to fix it live on camera? You get this episode.Josh and Will welcome Sam, a Customer Success pro at Topia with four years of platform expertise, for a live world makeover of the HiTech Podcast's own virtual space. From setting proper world boundaries and using the alignment tool, to landmark zones, animated assets, interactive games, embedded polls, and a full event management system — Sam walks them through everything they did wrong (gently) and everything Topia can actually do. The result? A world that went from "not bad" to genuinely impressive in under an hour. Say hi to Gregory the butterfly while you're at it.Whether you're an educator dreaming of virtual office hours, an event planner looking beyond Zoom, or just someone who wants to build a cool interactive space online — this episode is packed with practical tips you can use right now. -- ♣️Want to become a HiTech Club member, support the pod, and get all of the extras on our episodes? Head over to our Buy Me a Coffee to subscribe: buymeacoffee.com/hitechpodcast. 🌐Check out ⁠⁠⁠hitechpod.us⁠⁠⁠ for all of our episode pages, social links, and more! 📖Need a journal that's secure and reflective? Check out our episodes on the Reflection App, and then sign-up for the App⁠ today! 🌏Build a world limited only by your imagination in Topia! A virtual world-building tool built to bring you and any of your virtual guests together. Interested in signing up and learning more? Reach out to us or Topia and let them know we sent you!