Advertise on podcast: SHIFT

AI is helping turn the dairy supply chain from push to pull, but milk still shows up whether anyone ordered it. Land O’Lakes’ CTO on AI in a business run by animals and weather We Meet:   Teddy Bekele is the chief technology officer at Land O'Lakes   Credits: This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

What would you say if someone offered you a taste of a salmon filet that doesn’t contain fish? The protein content, carbs, and even the omega 3s are basically the same, but what it doesn’t contain are things like microplastics and mercury.  Join us for a factory tour of a startup called New School Foods for a peek at the next-generation of plant-based protein. This episode originally aired in August 2025. We Meet:   New School Foods CEO Chris Bryson Credits: This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

As AI blurs the line between creator and machine, the rules around ownership, value, and originality are all being rewritten. This week, we explore what it means for the music industry. This episode was taped before a live audience in Amsterdam at the tech conference HumanX. We Meet:   Ghazi Shami is the Founder and CEO of Empire Andrea Czapary Martin is the CEO of PRS for Music Credits: This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

As AI moves beyond the screen and into the physical world, the next generation of intelligent products will be defined less by bigger models than by context, trust, and the ability to act. We caught up with renowned industrial designer Robert Brunner at HumanX Amsterdam. Brunner designed a number of products that have gone on to define the way we live with technology, including Apple’s original PowerBook laptop and Beats by Dre.  We Meet:   Robert Brunner, Founder & Creative Director of Ammunition Credits: This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

Nasrin Mostafazadeh, co-founder and CEO of Verneek, traces her path from a teenage robotics champion to founding an AI company with a boy at that same robotics competition, who later became her husband. She explains why 2026's wave of generic LLM shopping integrations largely failed, and how Verneek's domain-specific AI cut Nordstrom's product-tagging time by 20x while beating human accuracy by 20%. We meet:  Co-founder & CEO of Verneek Nasrin Mostafazadeh Credits: This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

Neo4j CTO Philip Rathle on why the AI systems reaching production aren't monolithic LLMs,  and why "attackers think in graphs" even when defenders don't. Credits: This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

From deciding where to build a new business, airport or fire station, to understanding the potential impact of decisions regarding conservation or governance, people make billions of maps everyday using GIS. We explore the history and evolution of this tech with one of its pioneers, in the latest installment of our oral history project. This episode originally aired in November 2024.  We Meet: Esri Founder & President Jack Dangermond Credits: This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens, and it was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

We know that kids spending time on social media are more likely to experience depression and anxiety. Less clear, and far more contentious, is the role we expect of schools, governments, and tech companies, and some parents are organizing. We Meet:  Mothers Against Media Addiction (MAMA) Founder Julie Scelfo This episode of our oral history project originally aired in March 2025. Since then, MAMA has grown to nearly 50 chapters nationwide, and a California court found Meta and YouTube liable for designing addictive products that harm kids - a case Scelfo has called a major win for the movement. Credits: This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

Planet co-founder Robbie Schingler argues AI's next leap requires teaching it about the physical world, not just text. Join us as he traces the company's path from university dorm-room satellites to a daily record of the planet, in the latest installment of our oral history project.  We Meet:   Planet Labs co-founder Robbie Schingler  Credits: This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

Water shows up at every stage of the AI supply chain: to manufacture chips, to generate the power that runs them, and then more water to cool the chips in data centers. It's believed that AI's water needs by 2030 could roughly match the drinking needs of the entire United States, and less than 5% of this water is currently recycled.  Ecolab CEO Christophe Beck joins us with a look at how he thinks the industry can grow without draining communities dry. We Meet:   Ecolab CEO Christophe Beck Credits: This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

From Las Vegas, where AI and security conferences are putting agentic risk front and center, we explore the identity crisis inside enterprise AI, and what it means to have machines managing machines.   We Meet:  SailPoint President Matt Mills  Credits: This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

What if you could build solutions that unlock entirely new realities for millions of people? Aiming for something so big and so audacious that it seems almost impossible to imagine is often referred to as a moonshot. And what might it mean if a big part of what’s standing in the way of your moonshot… is your mindset?  We Meet:   Salima Bhimani, author of Invent Now: The Next Leap in Moonshots Credits: This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

What’s an astronaut’s time worth? Answering that question is not a perfect science, but at more than $100,000 an hour (not counting salary - that's just to keep one alive) on the International Space Station, it’s safe to say it’s more than you want to pay for bagging up trash.  This week, we take a field trip in New York City to see some space robots that could help with this problem.  We Meet:   Icarus Robotics CEO Ethan Barajas  Icarus Robotics CTO Jamie Palmer   Credits: This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

For as far as we’ve come with AI and robotics, there’s still a huge gap when it comes to combining the two. AI excels in the digital space, and in the physical world, robots are often pre-programmed. That’s where physical AI comes in. It’s critical for things that can’t tolerate the kinds of mistakes that are common in today’s statistics based AI, like self driving cars or managing the power grid. In the latest installment of our oral history project, we meet a central figure in these efforts, MIT's Daniela Rus. We Meet:   Daniela Rus is the Director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Credits: This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

Clio serves as the "operating system" for more than 400,000 legal professionals worldwide. Its founder and CEO Jack Newton has a lot to say about the field's agentic future, the company's vLex acquisition, and what other professional services can learn from the shifts he’s seen.  We Meet:   Clio CEO and Founder Jack Newton Credits: This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.