Whether you’re having a well-deserved lie in this Sunday morning, or a crazy productive one, here at N&C we are continuing on with the theme of providing you all with the upmost inspiration. I came across a fantastic podcast series which is appropriate for whatever mood you’re feeling today; it’s relaxed enough for you to playing in the background whilst vibing out and informative enough if you want to learn about a completely different industry to the one you are currently in now.
Enveloped in a 9-part series, Danny Fortson’s Tales of Silicon Valley takes us back to the beginnings of the iconic tech hub and tells us how the founding fathers’ origin story formed most of what we know of the industry today. Fortson has been the West Coast correspondent for The Sunday Times for 3 years now (since 2017), and has been the go-to expert for all of the new technological innovation that Silicon Valley has seen over the past couple of years.
With Danny’s impressive network, we get a first-hand insight into the start-up stories of the tech industry giants, with interviews from Atari’s very-own Nolan Bushnell, to the founders of Bebo, one of the first social networks.
That’s not all- Fortson also explores darker scientific realities such as a dystopian society where the entirety of humankind hold permanent settlements throughout the multiverse, as runners in the space-race aim to take things to the moon and beyond. He also probes into developments in med-tech where “brain-computer interfaces” have people questioning the morality of marrying AI and telepathy to allow technology to be powerful enough to control one’s thoughts.
Nolan Bushnell in his home workshop
With each episode averaging thirty minutes, combined with Spotify’s incredibly useful speed-up feature, the duration of each episode is comfortable enough for you to learn about technology’s revolutionary breakthroughs without taking up too much brain space. As someone who works in the tech industry without having any formal education in it, I found this podcast to be at just the right intellectual level for a more in-depth insight.
Furthermore, with each part of the series I felt as though I picked up on little pockets of information for me to do further research on when I felt my interest piquing, with my favourite episode being ‘The Brain: the final frontier’. Overall, I feel as though this podcast would be a huge hit for tech enthusiasts as well as those looking to see what all the fuss is about this mythical place that they’ve named after a variation of synthetic plastic.
If you have enjoyed listening about backstories of the Godfathers of tech, check out Danny’s weekly podcast: Danny in the Valley, to get regular updates on the revolutionaries changing the world as we know it today!
