What Next: TBD | Tech, power, and the future - The Great Celebrity Spotify Playlist Hack
Slate Technology
Slate
4.6 • 636 Ratings
🗓️ 29 August 2025
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The playlists of dozens of high-level government officials and tech executives were suddenly broadcast to the world on a website called “the Panama Playlists.” But the information wasn’t taken by sophisticated hackers infiltrating any mainframes—it was all already publicly available.
Guest: Mike Isaac, New York Times Silicon Valley correspondent.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Ever wondered what power is. |
| 0:02.0 | Power is transforming the sun into your own energy source. |
| 0:06.0 | Power is getting energy companies to pay you. |
| 0:10.0 | Power is enjoying your morning coffee, knowing you created the energy to make it. |
| 0:15.0 | Well, you and the colossal ball of fire in the sky. |
| 0:19.0 | Because with solar panels from Hive, the sun works for you. |
| 0:23.0 | Hive, know your power. May not cover all electricity usage roof and weather dependent. Paid for |
| 0:27.9 | surplus requires eligible SEC tariff. |
| 0:35.2 | About a month ago, Mike Isaac, a tech reporter at the New York Times, received a strange message on his phone. |
| 0:42.8 | Yeah, it was actually, it was funny. It was like 10.30 at night. And it's basically just like this note out of nowhere, I'd do accept the request because I didn't know who it was. And it was like, hey, Mike, just FYI. |
| 0:54.8 | I've been scraping the, you know, open playlist data from a number of public figures for |
| 1:00.8 | about a year now and created a website just to kind of show off how much of people's listening |
| 1:07.9 | habits are public. |
| 1:09.3 | Oh, by the way, you're on it, too. |
| 1:11.1 | Take a look. |
| 1:12.5 | The website was called the Panama Playlists, |
| 1:15.1 | a riff on the infamous Panama Papers, |
| 1:18.0 | a massive leak that exposed millions of financial records |
| 1:21.4 | from big spenders using an offshore law firm. |
| 1:24.6 | Some big names were in the Panama playlist, |
| 1:27.3 | but it was much lower stakes. |
| 1:28.8 | It was like the type of music that J.D. Vance would listen to or someone supposedly with the name |
... |
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