The Interface

This week on The Interface: the UK’s under-16s social media ban - is America next?
The UK is preparing to go further than almost any other country on children and social media: under-16s will be blocked from platforms including TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, Facebook and X, while messaging apps like WhatsApp and Signal are expected to be excluded. Ministers are also considering overnight curfews and limits on infinite scroll for under-18s, with implementation targeted for spring 2027.
Karen, Tom and Nicky ask the obvious question: will it work? Australia’s early results suggest enforcement is hard: the Molly Rose Foundation found 61% of 12–15-year-olds who had used restricted platforms still had access to at least one account, and 70% of those still using banned sites said it was easy to get around the rules. That raises a bigger issue too: if this all depends on age verification, does everyone end up having to prove their age just to use the internet? And with 64% of US voters already saying they support a ban for under-16s, is Britain about to start a trend?
Also this week: why are AI companies getting involved in fusion energy?
Fusion has been hyped for decades as near-limitless clean power - but it remains hugely difficult, expensive and years away from broad commercial use. So why are AI firms suddenly interested? Because data centres need vast amounts of electricity, and fast. Sam Altman-backed Helion has just raised another $465 million and is trying to build its first plant for Microsoft by 2028, while other fusion firms are pitching themselves as the answer to AI’s energy appetite. Karen and Nicky ask whether fusion is a realistic answer to the data-centre crunch — or just the latest shiny idea being pulled into the AI boom.
And finally: could Siri’s new AI update change how we use our phones forever?
At WWDC 2026, Apple unveiled a rebuilt Siri AI with deeper access to your messages, emails, photos and apps, plus broader “world knowledge” and more natural conversations. Apple is pitching it as a much more capable assistant — one that could make AI feel normal for people who’ve never really used it before.
But not everyone gets the same Siri. Some of the most advanced on-device features are limited to Apple’s newest hardware, including iPhone 17 Pro, and users have to join a waitlist even in beta. Tom asks the big question: if Siri finally works the way Apple has long promised, could that genuinely change how we use our phones — or is this still another catch-up move in the AI race?
The Interface is your weekly guide to the tech rewiring your week and your world. Hosted by journalists Karen Hao, Thomas Germain and Nicky Woolf, each episode unpacks, week by week, how technology is shaping all our futures. No guests. No jargon. Just three sharp voices debating the stories that matter — whether they shook a government, broke the internet, or quietly tipped the balance of power.
New episodes drop every Thursday on BBC Sounds in the UK. Outside the UK, find us on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts, or watch the video version on YouTube (search “The Interface podcast”).
To get in touch with the team: theinterface@bbc.com
The Interface is a BBC Studios production.
Producer: Natalia Rodriguez Ford
Executive Editor: Philip Sellars

This week on The Interface: is AI quietly sending your CV to the graveyard?
Karen starts with the growing role of AI in hiring and why it may be far more powerful, and more worrying, than most jobseekers realise. Automated hiring systems are now used across large parts of the labour market, and Stanford researchers say a handful of dominant models are creating an “algorithmic monoculture”, where the same software can shape outcomes across multiple employers. Their recent study of more than 4 million job applications found repeated racial disparities in AI‑based screening, raising the stakes for anyone applying into a market where software may judge you before a human ever does. We look at how these systems scan CVs, how candidates are trying to game them, and what happens when tools designed to “streamline” recruitment start quietly deciding who never even gets a chance.
Also this week: Thomas asks whether slow messaging might actually be better for us than instant messaging. After trying Roost — an app that sends messages at deliberately different speeds, from snail mail to carrier pigeon — he steps back to ask how we got so used to the pressure of instant replies in the first place. Messaging once felt novel; now it is the default form of contact, with Americans sending billions of texts a day and younger users often preferring texts to calls. But that speed comes with emotional costs: reply anxiety, relationship strain, and a culture in which silence itself can feel loaded. Tom asks whether slower communication might feel frustrating at first but ultimately more humane.
And Nicky looks at Silicon Valley’s latest genre experiment: tech CEOs turning themselves into entertainment. With Founders Fund launching MAFIA the GAME - a game show featuring Sam Altman, Palmer Luckey, Bryan Johnson and other tech luminaries - the people building the future increasingly seem to want control not just of products, but of the story around them. Nicky asks what this says about a culture where power depends not just on having the best technology, but on telling the best myth about yourself.
The Interface is your weekly guide to the tech rewiring your week and your world. Hosted by journalists Thomas Germain, Nicky Woolf, and Karen Hao, each episode unpacks, week by week, how technology is shaping all our futures. No jargon. Just three sharp voices debating the stories that matter — whether they shook a government, broke the internet, or quietly tipped the balance of power.
New episodes drop every Thursday on BBC Sounds in the UK. Outside the UK, find us on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts, or watch the video version on YouTube (search “The Interface podcast”).
To get in touch with the team: theinterface@bbc.com
The Interface is a BBC Studios production.
Producer: Natalia Rodriguez Ford
Executive Editor: Philip Sellars

This week on The Interface: the horrifying world of the TikTok Farlands.
Tom and Nicky head deep into the TikTok Farlands - the semi‑mythical place you supposedly reach if you scroll too far, too late, until your feed stops looking normal and starts serving up surreal, eerie and deeply unhinged videos. The name comes from Minecraft’s Far Lands, the glitched edge of the map where the world used to break apart, and TikTok users have borrowed it to describe the “end of the algorithm”: a strange zone of distorted edits, ominous warnings, weirdcore imagery and recurring figures like the now‑iconic fat bee playing the violin. TikTok’s Farlands have become a shorthand for what happens when doomscrolling tips into digital folklore.
But the Farlands aren’t just a joke. Tom and Nicky ask what this trend says about internet culture now. In a platform ecosystem dominated by polish, branding and optimisation, the Farlands feel like the return of an older internet: raw, surreal, handmade and proudly bizarre. At the same time, the meme also works as a critique of doomscrolling itself — turning algorithmic exhaustion into shared mythology, and making people newly conscious of how deep into the feed they’ve wandered.
So this week, we ask: is the TikTok Farlands a genuine return of weird, creative internet culture — or just another algorithmic genre?
Also this week: Karen looks at how AI detection tools may be changing the way we all write. As detectors spread through schools, publishing and professional life, students, teachers and writers are increasingly shaping their prose around what software might flag - dropping stylistic quirks, sanding off rhythm, and checking their own work in advance for fear of a false accusation. Researchers say the central problem is not just whether detectors catch AI, but how they balance false positives and false negatives in high‑stakes settings. And with a growing parallel market of “humanizer” tools promising to make AI text sound more human - and pass detection - the result may be an arms race that leaves everyone writing in a flatter, safer and more paranoid style.
The Interface is your weekly guide to the tech rewiring your week and your world. Hosted by journalists Thomas Germain, Nicky Woolf, and Karen Hao, each episode unpacks, week by week, how technology is shaping all our futures. No guests. No jargon. Just three sharp voices debating the stories that matter - whether they shook a government, broke the internet, or quietly tipped the balance of power.
New episodes drop every Thursday on BBC Sounds in the UK. Outside the UK, find us on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts, or watch the video version on YouTube (search “The Interface podcast”).
To get in touch with the team: theinterface@bbc.com
The Interface is a BBC Studios production.
Producer: Natalia Rodriguez Ford
Executive Editor: Philip Sellars

Google is changing up its search engine. At its recent developer conference, among a host of new AI tools, it announced the biggest changes to Google Search in its history. What will we see now? An intelligent search box. Longer text predictions. More answers to search queries instead of a list of websites. But if Google keeps us inside the answer box, with fewer clicks and fewer website visits, this could potentially break the economic model of the modern web. How will this change the Internet and our experience of it?
Also this week:
To the Vatican, where Pope Leo XIV issued a document this week, calling for the ‘disarming’ of AI. In ‘Magnifica Humanitas’ (Magnificent Humanity), the Pope warned that AI must be subject to rigorous ethical constraints. How is the Vatican attempting to influence tech companies? And with Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah in attendance, Karen asks why are AI companies equally interested in religion?
Nicky has been following the latest developments with Roblox. The online gaming platform has 150 million daily users, many of them under 13. With a number of child safety groups urging the FTC to investigate the online gaming platform, could it be having its ‘big tobacco’ moment? The FTC alleges that it “repeatedly exposes children to sexual content and harmful adults.” What’s the solution? Roblox says it’s improving child safety systems, but how effectively can platforms of this size be moderated?
The Interface is your weekly guide to the tech rewiring your week and our world. Hosted by journalists Thomas Germain, Karen Hao, and Nicky Woolf, each episode unpacks, week by week, how technology is shaping all our futures. No guests. No jargon. Just three sharp voices debating the stories that matter — whether they shook a government, broke the internet, or quietly tipped the balance of power.
New episodes every Thursday on BBC Sounds in the UK. Outside the UK, find us on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts, or watch the video version on YouTube (search “The Interface podcast”).
To get in touch with the team: theinterface@bbc.com
The Interface is a BBC Studios production.
Producer: Natalia Rodriguez Ford
Executive Editor: Philip Sellars
Follow Tom Germain on socials:
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thomasgermain
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com@tomgermain
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com@tomgermain
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/thomasgermain.bsky.social
X: https://x.com/@thomasgermain
Follow Nicky Woolf on socials:
BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/@nickywoolf.bsky.social
Follow Karen Hao on socials:
LinkedIn: /https://hk.linkedin.com/in/karendhao
X: https://x.com/_KarenHao
BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/@karenhao.bsky.social

Karen Hao’s away this week — but it’s a special episode: Thomas and Nicky welcome their first ever guest, senior reporter at MS NOW, Brandy Zadrozny, to decode the tech stories rewiring your week and your world.
First: are we heading for a world without screens? Bloomberg reports Apple is in late‑stage testing of AirPods with tiny cameras - not for selfies, but to give Siri “eyes” so it can understand what you’re looking at and respond in real time. We explore what that signals: less phone‑tapping, more ambient “AI companion” computing - and why earbuds (oddly) might be a more plausible bridge to screenless tech than headsets or smart glasses. If the interface moves from screens to always‑on assistants, what changes about attention, privacy - and who gets to shape the world you experience?
Next: the hidden clipping industry flooding your feed - now in politics. Brandy takes us inside the booming “clipping economy”: armies of freelancers paid to slice long content into viral short‑form clips and push them across TikTok, Reels and Shorts until something hits. The twist is that the tactics that built internet stars are increasingly being borrowed to build candidates - blurring what’s organic and what’s engineered. We ask who’s hiring clippers, what kinds of accounts they use, how political disclosure rules get sidestepped, and what happens when elections are fought in the attention economy.
Finally: if AI can simulate public opinion, what even counts as a poll? Pollsters and researchers are experimenting with “synthetic” respondents - AI‑generated “digital twin” voters trained on real datasets - to answer questions at speed and scale. But if headlines still say “the public thinks…”, when the truth is “the model predicts…”, are polls measuring opinion - or shaping it? In a polling era already bruised by credibility crises, we ask what trust looks like when the respondents might not be human.
We reached out to Gallup for comment and they responded: Gallup does not currently publish approval or favorability ratings for individual political figures, and we have no plans to incorporate simulated responses on that subject now or in the future. We are in the beginning phases of some exploratory research on simulated responses. Through this work, we are hoping to learn whether AI systems and emerging methods can help deepen our understanding of how humans think and behave. You can read more about our approach in our methodology blog.
We also contacted Apple for comment but did not hear from them before the release of this episode.
The Interface is your weekly guide to the tech rewiring your week and your world. Hosted by journalists Thomas Germain and Nicky Woolf (and this week, with special guest Brandy Zadrozny), each episode unpacks, week by week, how technology is shaping all our futures. No jargon. Just sharp voices debating the tech stories that matter.
New episodes drop every Thursday on BBC Sounds in the UK. Outside the UK, find us on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts — or watch the video version on YouTube (search “The Interface podcast”).
To get in touch: theinterface@bbc.com
The Interface is a BBC Studios production.
Producer: Natalia Rodriguez Ford
Executive Editor: Philip Sellars