This week we’re bringing you our favorite episodes of the year. Think about all the apps you use in a day: Amazon, Facebook, Gmail, maybe Lyft or Uber. In China, some of those apps are banned. But it’s possible to use one app — WeChat — to do lots of things, like sending messages and ordering taxis. Facebook Messenger is trying to take on the same role in the U.S. Jennifer Pak, Marketplace’s China correspondent, gives us the lowdown on WeChat and talks about why there’s no equivalent in the U.S. … yet. 

This week we’re bringing you our favorite episodes of the year. As we get closer to sending humans to Mars, there’s been more talk about the technology and money it will take to colonize the planet. But science fiction writers have been pondering this for some time. Andy Weir is author of “The Martian,” which showed us how to survive on Mars. His new book, called “Artemis,” is about a colony on the moon. Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood talked with Weir about the real research that went into his science fiction.

This week we’re bringing you our favorite episodes of the year. From data breaches to global cyberwarfare, it’s clear cybersecurity isn’t really working. And not even a newly minted MacArthur fellow can tell us why. What he can tell us: advice like creating long, complicated passwords might not make a big difference in the end. Marketplace Tech’s Molly Wood talks with Stefan Savage about what we can do to make cybersecurity better.  

This week we’re bringing you our favorite episodes of the year. Amazon, Facebook, Google and Apple are four of tech’s most powerful brands. But have they become too powerful? And is regulation the only way to stop them? Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood talks with Scott Galloway, a marketing professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, about how these companies grew to global dominance and our love-hate relationship with them.

This week we’re bringing you our favorite episodes of the year. There’s a group of venture capital firms that want to change the world for the better and make money. This is called impact investing. One of the firms working in this space is Impact America Fund, which invests in companies with diverse missions — for instance, a startup that helps African-American stylists sell their own hair extensions. Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood talks with Impact America Fund founder Kesha Cash about the sometimes complex collision of money and mission in venture capital.

This week we’re bringing you our favorite episodes of the year. Americans spend 293 hours driving each year, according to AAA. That’s more than 12 days worth of data on where we go, what we listen to, and where we stop for lunch. Make no mistake, our cars are “watching” us. John Ellis, a former global technologist with Ford and author of a new book called “The Zero Dollar Car,” imagines that we’ll be able to trade in that data for cars one day. Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood talked with Ellis about the value of car data.

The holidays are a time of year where lots of things are the same as they always have been. The turkey. The songs. Maybe even the jokes people make. But as technology advances, the way we create those things changes. Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood thinks ahead to the holidays in the year 2030. She looks at the food — will we have smart ovens … and even smart toilets that calculate whether we’re making healthy choices? And using artificial intelligence, could we create holograms of deceased relatives to join us around the dinner table?  (And even if we could, should we?) This special episode of Marketplace Tech helps us walk the line between the ease that technology offers and the pleasures of holiday work … and encourages us to dream about the tech that’s yet to come. 

Apple announced this week that it intentionally slows down the speed of older phones in order to preserve their batteries. It’s something people had suspected for years, and it made us wonder: Why doesn’t Apple just make it easier to replace the battery in your phone? As part of a new segment called Quality Assurance, Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood talks about it with Ina Fried, chief technology correspondent at the digital news site Axios.

Andrew Ng was the founder of the artificial intelligence research project Google Brain., and his latest company is called Landing.AI. The startup has partnered with the electronics manufacturing giant Foxconn, as well as other companies in Japan, Taiwan and mainland China to bring more AI to the factory floor. He spoke about the future of AI in manufacturing with Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood.