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Molly Wood

Host and senior editor

Molly Wood is the former host and senior editor of "Marketplace Tech," a daily broadcast focused on demystifying the digital economy, and former co-host of "Make Me Smart," where she and co-host Kai Ryssdal would try to make sense of big topics in business, tech and culture. What was your first job? Grocery store checker (but I also drove an ice cream truck once). Fill in the blank: Money can’t buy you happiness, but it can buy you ______. Time, the most precious thing of all. What is something that everyone should own, no matter how much it costs? A pet! What’s the favorite item in your workspace and why? My electric fireplace! It is both cute and cozy.  

Latest from Molly Wood

  • Square co-founder Jim McKelvey is at the helm of Invisibly.
    Dilip Vishwanat/Getty Images

    A new tech venture plans to let you, the reader, earn free articles by trading more data.

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  • Impossible Foods introduced the Impossible Burger 2.0 at CES 2019 in Las Vegas.
    Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images

    But will meatless meat remain a delicacy for the rich?

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  • Impossible Foods introduced the Impossible Burger 2.0 at CES 2019 in Las Vegas.
    Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images

    Today the Impossible Burger 2.0 arrives in restaurants around the country. The company Impossible Foods won all kinds of “best of CES” awards at the big tech show in Las Vegas last month for creating a plant-based meat replacement that smells, tastes and looks like real beef. There’s also all kinds of science going into growing meat from real meat cells. Molly Wood speaks with Larisa Rudenko, biotechnology expert and visiting scholar in emerging technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She says climate change, animal welfare and human health are all driving huge investment in meat-replacement technologies. Today’s show is sponsored by Kronos, Pitney Bowes and Mozilla Firefox.

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  • The Apple logo is seen onstage prior to an event at the Steve Jobs Theater on September 12, 2018 in Cupertino, California.
    Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

    If you re-read the first few chapters of The Innovator’s Dilemma and you insert "Apple" every time Clayton Christensen mentions "a company," a certain picture emerges.

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  • Facebook seems to be doing everything wrong, but it’s working for them…
    Loic Venance/AFP/Getty Images

    Do people just not care about privacy after all?

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  • Facebook seems to be doing everything wrong, but it’s working for them…
    LOIC VENANCE/AFP/Getty Images

    A busy week in Facebook news: One report said it was paying people to use a research app that sucked up basically all the activities on their phone. That got Facebook in huge trouble with Apple. Meanwhile, two senators were demanding answers about kids buying things on Facebook without their parents’ knowledge. Then, on Wednesday, the company reported its earnings and… they were fantastic. The number of users everywhere, including in the U.S., was up, along with increased ad revenue. A tech reporter for The New York Times, Mike Isaac covers all of these stories. Molly Wood asks him if it’s possible people just actually don’t care about their privacy after all. Today’s show is sponsored by Triple Byte_JD and Evident.

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  • "If cybersecurity is one of the principal challenges that will define the remainder of the 21st century, then let's have a Manhattan Project to make sure we've got that security," says former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler.
    Photo by David Ramos/Getty Images

    And what role should the Federal Communications Commission have?

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  • The United States and several other countries have made it clear that they don’t want hardware from Chinese telecom giant Huawei to be part of future fifth-generation wireless networks. They’re worried that Huawei could install back doors in a 5G network that could let the Chinese government, companies or hackers spy on information crossing that network. But no matter who is building a 5G network, there will be cybersecurity threats. So who’s in charge of making sure that protection against hacking, spying or other cyberthreats is built in from the ground up? Molly Wood talks with Tom Wheeler, former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission from 2013 to 2017. He’s now a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. He says the government should be in charge. Today’s show is sponsored by Pitney Bowes and Indeed.

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  • Apple released its earnings Tuesday afternoon, and although it met its lowered expectations, revenue from iPhones was down 15 percent over the same quarter last year, and the future trend is still down. For years, Apple’s smartphone strategy has been to make premium devices with a premium price tag. The starting price is basically $1,000 for a new flagship iPhone. But those prices are hard to swallow in China and India, markets Apple is depending on to grow its global market share. Even here in the United States, consumers aren’t upgrading their phones as much as they used to. Molly Wood talks with Julie Ask, principal analyst at Forrester Research, about whether Apple can keep commanding such high prices. Today’s show is sponsored by Kronos, the University of Florida Warrington College of Business and Lenovo for Small Business.

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  • iPhones at an Apple store in Milan.
    Piero Cruciatti/AFP/Getty Images

    And that's especially true in China and India.

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