It used to be that stories of tech companies breaking all the rules and fighting city hall were considered sexy. But right now we’re having conversations with more suspicion about things like unproven driverless technology, online advertising, unstoppable data collection and automation. Yet, here with a defense of tech’s disruptive mentality is Bradley Tusk. He’s a political operative turned tech consultant who has a new book called “The Fixer.” It’s full of pirate stories of him helping heroic startups like Uber work around innovation-killing politicians and their rules. Molly Wood talks with Tusk about the politics of tech. (09/24/18)  

This week, we’ve been covering how technology has changed investing and will continue to change it. That conversation leads us to artificial intelligence. A Wall Street industry poll earlier this year said a majority of hedge funds are now using artificial intelligence and machine learning to help them make trades. Huge quant funds are even fighting Google and Facebook for engineers to crunch tons of data and build algorithms to predict the next great stock buy. This has all made markets faster, more efficient and more accessible to online investors. On the other hand, there are some worrying aspects. We dig into that in Quality Assurance, our Friday segment where we take a deeper look at a big tech story. Host Molly Wood talks with Simone Foxman of Bloomberg. (09/21/18)  

A few decades ago, a company had to go public in order to attract enough investment to grow significantly. But times have changed. According to The Wall Street Journal, last year $2.4 trillion in private money was raised in the United States compared to $2.1 trillion in public markets. What’s that mean for ordinary investors? Molly Wood puts that question to Nizar Tarhuni, head analyst at research firm PitchBook, and Howard Marks, CEO of StartEngine, a company that allows everyday investors to put money into private companies. (09/20/18)

Marketplace Tech is exploring investment technology as part of the Divided Decade project on the financial crisis of 2008. This is the second half of host Molly Wood’s conversation with Brad Katsuyama, whose IEX stock exchange aims to address some of the negative impacts of high-frequency trading by slowing down the system — by a whole 350 millionths of a second. This speed bump caused what Katsuyama calls “one of the biggest controversies” in the stock market’s recent history as IEX sought approval. (09/19/18)  

Marketplace Tech is spending all week looking at the risks technology can introduce to investing. Today, part one of a look at high-frequency trading. Critics of too much high-frequency trading say it makes markets vulnerable to manipulation, and the algorithms that fuel it can cause abrupt dips and rises in stock prices. Brad Katsuyama is a former big bank trader who’s the subject of the 2014 Michael Lewis book “Flash Boys.” He started studying high-frequency trading before the 2008 financial crash and eventually decided to start his own stock exchange to remove the influence of trading technologies that he says rig the market. Molly Wood talks with Katsuyama and Jonathan Macey, professor of corporate law at Yale, about the implications of high-frequency trading. (09/18/18)    

Here at Marketplace, we’re doing a yearlong project on the 10-year anniversary of the financial crisis called Divided Decade. At the center of it, of course, were dodgy housing loans that were packaged and resold as seemingly solid investments. They were known as mortgage-backed securities. Here’s where the tech comes in: Back in the ’90s, a guy named Michael Osinski and his wife, Isabel, wrote software that made it super simple to bundle loans into a security. Osinski retired from Wall Street eight years before the recession to farm oysters on Long Island, where he rode out the financial collapse with few ill effects on his life. Marketplace producer Eliza Mills met Osinski at his oyster beds to hear his story of making a tool that bankers used to bundle bad loans. She shares what she learned with Molly Wood. (09/17/18)

New digital copyright laws pushed forward by the European Parliament this week would make platforms like Google, Facebook and YouTube share more of their profits with creators, news organizations, musicians and artists. The laws would make them be more aggressive about filtering copyrighted material. But critics, including YouTubers, say the law is so broad that it could lead to widespread censorship and even kill off internet memes. Host Molly Wood talks through the issues with Joanna Plucinska, a tech reporter for Politico Europe. (09/14/18)

We are still at least 15 years away from the first human mission to Mars — that’s at the earliest. But that hasn’t stopped Hollywood from skipping ahead to the future. Hulu, the online streaming service, is out with a new series Friday called “The First.” It’s set in the 2030s, and as the name implies, it imagines what that first mission might be like. In addition to getting the astrophysics right, the show producers had to get the future right. And for that they called a futurist. Amy Webb, founder of the Future Today Institute, usually helps businesses with strategy. But from time to time, she consults on films or shows set in the future. One of the questions she had to answer on “The First”: Will smartphones still be around in 15 years? She talks about it with Molly Wood. (09/13/18)

Most people are looking at the new iPhones and thinking about the camera performance, the size of the screen, the notch situation. But we nerds here at Marketplace Tech will be thinking about the semiconductor. Many people will probably ignore the part in Apple’s new gadgets announcement Wednesday about the A12 processor and what a big difference it’s going to make for speed, performance and battery life. But these guts are actually what set Apple apart — and ahead — of other smartphone makers, because Apple designs its own semiconductors for all its mobile devices. Anshel Sag is a semiconductor analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy. Molly Wood asks him what the benefits are of making your own chips. (09/12/18)