Marketplace Tech With Molly Wood

It’s fair to say China dominates in electric vehicle sales. The country is the world’s biggest consumer of electric cars and has dozens of automakers competing in the space. Last year, Chinese companies sold about 9.5 million EVs and plug-in hybrid cars.But the industry faces mounting trade pressures. The Biden administration imposed a 100% tariff on Chinese EVs, which President-elect Donald Trump is expected to continue. Meanwhile the European Union recently raised tariffs up to 45%, citing concerns that Chinese government subsidies give its companies an unfair advantage.Subsidies certainly help, but there are other factors giving Chinese EVs an edge. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Marketplace’s China correspondent Jennifer Pak about how those factors could keep Chinese EV makers competitive, even in a more restrictive global market.The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. Jennifer Pak: There are multiple factors, and different people will emphasize different points to it.

As we close out the year and look ahead at 2025, we wanted to mark an anniversary of sorts: 20 years ago, the online review site Yelp was launched — the name reportedly a mashup of “help” and “Yellow Pages.”It started as an email service to send personal recommendations to your friends, then in 2005 morphed into the standalone review site we now know. Yelp wasn’t the first in the online review game, but it has been among the most popular and enduring.Andrea Rubin has been at the company almost from the beginning. She joined in 2006 as the first community manager in Chicago. She’s now the senior vice president for community nationally.“I absolutely loved my city and loved local businesses, and I just loved being able to share my thoughts on these local businesses through the Yelp platform,” Rubin said. “I was like, ‘Well, if I love this, I know there’s many other people who are going to love it as well.’”Yelp has now accrued almost 300 million reviews worldwide. And the site has helped usher in our current sta

This episode originally aired Sept. 23, 2024.You might say online gambling has been on a winning streak since a Supreme Court decision in 2018 cleared the way for states to allow sports betting.It’s now legal in 30 states and its influence is hard to miss: Online sportsbook companies like DraftKings and FanDuel are on billboards, commercials even college campuses, many of which have made deals with sports betting companies.Three out of four college students gambled last year according to the National Council on Problem Gambling, and online betting sites are increasingly targeting young people.Yanely Espinal, host of Marketplace’s “Financially Inclined” podcast, recently covered this topic on her show, and she explained to Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino how online betting companies are reeling in younger users.The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.Yanely Espinal: So that’s where I think it’s most interesting and a little bit scary, because the physical space where people are going to

This episode originally aired Sept. 11, 2024.Over the last couple of years, the tech industry has slashed hundreds of thousands of jobs, many of them in recruiting and other departments that work to improve diversity. Companies like Meta and Google, which earlier set ambitious hiring and investment goals, have pulled resources from those efforts.As a result, many nonprofit groups set up to train and recruit underrepresented workers are struggling to stay afloat. One prominent person in the field is Lisa Mae Brunson, founder of the nonprofit Wonder Women Tech. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino asked her how things have changed. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.Lisa Mae Brunson: We saw the writing on the wall where it seemed like companies were performative, despite the fact that, statistically, companies will perform better when they have diverse teams. Their bottom line will actually increase, they will make more profits. But that wasn’t really what they were looking at. I mean, I

Raise your hand if you kind of forgot where the word podcast comes from. The now-catchall term for digital audio shows goes back to the Apple iPod. And it’s been almost two decades now since Apple helped bring podcasts mainstream by adding them to iTunes.“We’re going to list thousands of podcasts and you’ll be able to click on them, download them for free, and subscribe to them right in iTunes,” said then-Apple CEO Steve Jobs at the 2005 Worldwide Developers Conference.So, what was the business of podcasting like at the beginning, and where might it go from here? Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty asked Nicholas Quah, podcast critic for Vulture and New York Magazine. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation:Nicholas Quah: My understanding is that there wasn’t really a business model. A lot of the early podcasts were just people making stuff and posting stuff around. And the analogy of the blog that rose with the rise of Google AdSense, these spam ads that you see on the internet, that was the ear

The House Task Force on Artificial Intelligence released a lengthy report this week that doesn’t recommend any specific policies or bills. We’ll also look ahead at what the new year could bring the robotaxi business. But first, the TikTok ban is heading to the Supreme Court. A federal appeals court last week upheld the law that would ban the short-form video app if its Chinese owners don’t sell it by Jan. 19. TikTok asked the court to weigh in, and this week SCOTUS agreed. Lily Jamali, tech correspondent at the BBC, joins Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino to discuss the news.

This story was produced by our colleagues at the BBC.Voice cloning is becoming easier, faster and more convincing. Artificial Intelligence makes it possible to change the age of an actor’s voice, translate words into any language, and replace a voice lost through illness. But it’s also increasingly being used by criminals to impersonate a loved one, extort money or compromise bank accounts. It’s changing how we communicate with each other and how we trust each other.Respeecher is a Ukrainian AI company at the forefront of cloning speech that’s indistinguishable from a human voice. They’ve worked on Disney’s Obi-Wan Kenobi, cloning James Earl Jones’ voice for Darth Vader. And along with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the company won an Emmy Award for turning an actor’s voice into President Nixon in the short film, “In Event of Moon Disaster.”Alex Serdiuk, Respeecher’s founder and CEO, said the process is much quicker.“We had to get several hours of Nixon’s voice from the Nixon library. Now we can d

About 170 million U.S. users could be TikTokless as soon as Jan. 19. Early this month, a federal appeals court upheld a law that could ban the very popular short-form video app unless its Chinese owners agree to sell it. They have a willing buyer, though, in billionaire Frank McCourt, who has assembled a consortium of investors ready to put down more than $20 billion. He’s the founder of the internet reform initiative Project Liberty. You may also know him as a real estate developer who once owned the Los Angeles Dodgers.

The artificial intelligence boom and its hunger for electricity has brought a surge of interest in nuclear power. Microsoft, for instance, made a deal to restart the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania, while Google and Amazon have invested in companies developing small, modular reactors.The Joe Biden administration’s Department of Energy aims to triple nuclear energy capacity by 2050, but the sector will need a lot more workers to make that happen.By some estimates there’s a gap of more than 200,000 jobs to fill over the next decade.Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Craig Piercy, CEO of the American Nuclear Society, to learn more about the hunt for talent and why many younger workers are fired up about joining the industry. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.Craig Piercy: What I like to say is there are the lab coats and there are the hard hats, and so it starts from nuclear engineers and very highly educated and trained scientific and technical professionals, which

As we approach President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration next month, questions are coming up about how his second administration will deal with tech.A lot has changed in the industry and its relationship to the former president since his first go-round.Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Reed Albergotti, tech editor at the news site Semafor, to help us decode some of the signals. They started with artificial intelligence and the man Trump has named as his AI czar, venture capitalist David Sacks.The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.Reed Albergotti: I actually don’t think we really know at this point what the AI czar’s responsibilities are. I thought it was really interesting, the announcement of David Sacks focused on freedom of speech and sort of bias in AI chatbots. That’s been an issue that I think people have brought up on the right. I don’t know if that’s the focus. I mean, I would be surprised if the Trump administration is really going after this, you know, Manhattan