


18 Jun 2026 · 34m · 7 chapters

UK under-16s social media ban introduced from next year, covering likely platforms (TikTok, Instagram, X, Facebook, Snapchat, Reddit), enforcement via age checks, and political/industry arguments; plus a separate US export ban on Anthropic AI models.
Mark Selman says the shift from “no blanket ban” came from political pressure and parliamentary mechanisms, with broad adult support via parent groups; enforcement will rely on age verification similar to Online Safety Act approaches, but age checks at 16 are harder.
“collusion” age-check workarounds (older siblings helping); Australia-style approach; and the White House citing guardrail circumvention (with Andy Jassy mentioned) to justify Anthropic model withdrawal.
Mark Selman (Times Tech Podcast host/colleague covering the ban) and Katie King, founder and CEO of BioOrbit (space pharma manufacturing; microgravity drug crystallization for self-injectable cancer treatments; launched a prototype manufacturing line to the ISS via SpaceX; raised ~£10m seed; working with MHRA/RIO and CAA for regulation).
Written by AI. May contain mistakes.
Discussion on the newly implemented social media ban for under-16s in the UK.
“So head to the Times business page if you feel like watching.”
Exploration of the political reasons and public support for the social media ban.
“It stops them perhaps being an outlier in groups where, you know, often if you feel like other people's kids or your kids are saying, my friends are all on social media, you've got to let them.”
Examination of the practical difficulties in enforcing age restrictions online.
“It is democratic governments saying two things.”
How tech regulations intersect with child safety and geopolitics.
“So I think this is a sort of, you know, moment for them.”
Discuss the implications of AI technology and control by the White House on the European tech landscape.
“And Anthropic said, well, we're just going to pull them.”
Interview with an entrepreneur about their space lab for drug manufacturing and cancer treatment advancements.
“Parloa's AI agents are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”
Explore the emergence of commercial space stations and their implications for the industry.
“I was going to say, because they're not building another international space station, right?”

Get the gist, explore an idea or ask about something said.
On Times Tech, what are the key points of this episode?
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.
0:00This episode of the Times Tech Podcast is sponsored by health and life insurer Vitality, your health's best friend. Most of us want to be healthier, yet life so often gets in the way. Vitality's health and life insurance is built around that reality. Get active, look after yourself, and you can unlock rewards from some of the UK's top brands and help keep your insurance premiums low. It's insurance that works for you. By using tech and insight to understand your health, they can incentivize you to live better. The healthier you get, the more you are rewarded. Find out more at vitality.co.uk. This episode of the Times Tech Podcast is sponsored by IBM.
0:40Wimbledon is one of those rare events that feels steeped in tradition, but behind the scenes, it's also a huge data operation. Millions of fans follow the tournament across time zones, devices, and platforms, and increasingly they want highlights, stats, and personalized updates in real time. IBM has worked with Wimbledon for more than 30 years. using data and AI to help create digital experiences for fans, including match chat, which can answer questions during play, and likelihood to win, which uses live match data to offer near real-time predictions. It's a useful example of AI being applied in a way people can actually see and understand.
1:18To learn more about how IBM helps create smarter business, visit ibm.com slash Wimbledon.
1:32Hello and welcome to the Times Tech Podcast, where each week we unpack how technology is reshaping business, culture and everyday life. I'm Katie Prescott, finally back in the City of London after a busy week of hobnobbing. And I know, I know we promised you that replacing Danny this week would be Norman, the AI chatbot. But we have gone one better. And I am joined by my brilliant colleague, Mark Selman. And I'm so pleased you're here, Mark. I can't tell you. Do you really mean that? I do. Because... Like, you gave Norman such a big kind of billing. I mean, it was all right. Danny's not here. I was just picking him up to kind of make Danny feel bad.
2:19But you are the person who's been most across the social media ban that was finally introduced on Monday. It feels like the will they, won't they has been going on for ages. Yeah. So we are going to unpick a lot of that today. And we'll be answering all your burning questions about it. Which platforms will be banned? How it will be enforced? And actually, will it work? Everyone has lots of questions. my 11 year old was peppering me with things that I don't know the answer to because it's not something that I've been as across as you have. So we'll get into all of that. And we're also going to be talking about another massive ban, which came in right at the end of last week, which was the White House putting an export ban on two AI models from Anthropic, which has been a massive wake up call, not only in the States, but also over here in Europe and the UK, where Everyone is wondering if he can ban that.
3:19What else can he ban? We'll also be hearing from the founder and CEO of Bioorbit, which is a space tech business, about her mission to build a lab in space and transform the way that we treat cancer. A little reminder as well, we are now also terrifyingly being filmed and this is on YouTube. So head to the Times business page if you feel like watching. so Mark let's dive straight into the social media ban because huge news this week and actually huge news on my parent groups who are all delighted about this that under 16s in Britain are going to be banned from using social media from next year huge numbers of questions though as you said about how it's actually going to work and what it means how will it work my 11 year old said to me quite fairly won't people just get their older brothers and sisters to log in for them and actually funnily enough this week the companies that have to deal with the the age checks they admit that yeah it's something collusion they call it what when you get your older brother to stop it collusion on in their technical speak it's hard to get round but they say that's the same with booze when your older sister or brother goes to get some yeah it's the same but this isn't always about the edge cases it's about the the middle but should we go back to the beginning and just try and kind of work out how we got here.
4:45It's been a journey. Almost exactly six months ago, Keir Starmer said, no blanket ban. I don't like them. So what's changed? Why now? Well, the politics of it changed, that's for sure. So his backbenchers made pretty clear in large numbers they wanted a ban. That was, you know, point one. And then obviously his position as leader came under pressure from two rivals who made it clear they wanted to go a bit further on this issue. One of them definitely backed a ban. And actually, parliamentary wise, you know, the opposition, the Tories and the Lib Dems played a pretty canny game in Parliament, using lots of mechanisms and lots of ways to force the government to essentially promise to do something but i think also they just realized it was really popular amongst amongst adults obviously and not amongst the teenagers who they want to give a vote i mean as i say like from what i've seen on parent groups and my kids are younger than yours everyone is delighted about it i think they feel that it gives them the right to say no to their kids sort of a sense that it It gives them more authority.
6:01It stops them perhaps being an outlier in groups where, you know, often if you feel like other people's kids or your kids are saying, my friends are all on social media, you've got to let them. Yeah. So it does feel universally popular. I mean, how has the reaction been? If you listen to the statement in Parliament, I mean, virtually everyone that stood up, whichever side of the House they were on, basically supported it. The only difference was the opposition liked to crow and say, what took you so long? and you're just following us. But essentially, there was massive support for this parliamentary wise.
6:35You know, the government was very reluctant, I think, given that these are American tech companies and they were trying to do business with them on the other side of the ledger. So they were always reluctant to wind up the Trump administration historically. But actually, when you look at the Trump administration, there's a lot of them in there who are pro child safety as well. So on this particular kind of regulation, I think, you know, you could probably come to a deal. And what have the child safety groups said about this? So I think broadly, everyone wanted something to be done. The argument really was about how you do it.
7:11And there are some groups, quite prominent groups, that said the blanket ban isn't the way to do it. Don't copy Australia. There are other ways to do it. But generally speaking, everyone wanted something to be done for a line to be drawn in the sand. and to move on from there. And, you know, we will see over the next year or two years or even three years whether this way of doing it is right. And they've essentially copied Australia and bolted on a couple of things. If you want to get into the weeds of it, essentially those who argue against this, people like Ian Russell who tragically lost his daughter Molly, they believe that you have to change the product.
7:52I see. And the way you do that is by essentially banning certain features like infinite scroll or notifications, and you say to the companies, this is banned, and either you are banned unless you get rid of this, or it is banned and we give you some time to get rid of it, and then you are banned. You know, this ban at the moment is going to say these platforms are banned. It doesn't really get into the knotty weeds of whether the bits on their platform should be got rid of. So it's just a you're not allowed to use. And what does it encompass? Facebook? We don't really know yet. We don't really know yet.
8:32But they've given an indication that the main ones will be covered, like Australia. So, yes, TikTok, Instagram, X, Facebook, Snapchat, all the ones you've heard of, Reddit, they will all probably be banned. We haven't got a definitive list. They are going to ban some features. We know that, but that'll come later. And how about the mechanics of it? How will the under-16s be stopped getting onto TikTok? So this is the heart of it. And any band like this has to have age checks at the heart of it. Now, we've sort of seen this before when the Online Safety Act came in. They said no porn for under 18s.
9:11And that seems to have gone pretty well in the sense that, you know, most porn sites or platforms that offer adult material check whether you're over 18 or under 18. And it's pretty hard to get around and it's pretty accurate. The difficulty of doing it at 16 is that you don't have the documents and the automated systems, like the most popular one is taking a picture of yourself and letting AI decide how old you are. That's pretty accurate at 18, not as good at 16. So there are practical problems with checking at 16. But the industry that does this says it is possible. You've followed this for a long time now.
9:55What do you think of it? The thing I sort of latch on to that I probably can understand is twofold. It's a sort of cultural moment. It is democratic governments saying two things. We hear you, public parents, and we hear your pain and we want to give you backing. And so us saying this, we think if the government says this is not safe, then parents will either think twice or have a way to combat their child's pester power. And it's actually about breaking networks. So this isn't about 15 and 14 year olds now, really, because essentially those networks are in place and those kids will probably try and stay on those networks and and find a way around it.
10:54or it's really about your children, actually, the younger children, about breaking the network that they are on and making sure their peers are not on that network so they don't have this FOMO, this feeling that they're being left out and this sort of drive to get back on that network. And this is what, you know, smartphone-free childhood was so effective at. It's a very successful grassroots movement that was, you know, essentially behind this, I would say, one of the big drivers behind this. And they got parents to sign pacts in whole school groups to say, at the age of four and five, we're not going to buy our kids' phones until 14.
11:38And that breaks the network at that age. And I think that's what the governments are trying to do here in Europe, Asia, etc. They're trying to do that. And they're doing one other thing, which is saying to the tech companies, no actually we're in charge and these are our rules and you have to follow it and they don't get the chance to do that very much no it's a really really interesting it's hard to do yeah and i think they're sort of emboldened by it i mean you can see in parliament the legislators and mps and peers saying we did it with grok in january we fought elon musk and we won and they're like and now we're doing it again and it sort of gives them either an illusion or the reality of being in power because a lot of the times they don't feel when they come up against these companies that they have very much power because they are huge, they're international and they're very powerful and they have an ally in the Trump administration.
12:33So I think this is a sort of, you know, moment for them. It's interesting. I remember covering this a few years ago and being heavily lobbied by the tech companies. I can't remember which particular stage. There was some white paper going through parliament, I think about it. And the company saying, well, Well, you know, it's going to be really difficult for young teenagers to go and get the information or talk to the people that they need to. For example, if you're a young gay man and you want to explore coming out of the closet, you know, social media is a really effective way. So it's all of this going on in the background as well.
13:06There will be those arguments. I mean, this is a dual use technology like all of them. There are bits to it that are positive. But ultimately, you know, the lawmakers decided, yeah, but in the balance of things, the negative outweighs the positive. Not this time, no. And it's a really fascinating point about how tech is so entwined with geopolitics, which brings us neatly on to our next story. We can jump into that, which is this extraordinary ban of two Anthropic models, which came late on Friday night, apparently. And, you know, there's a huge amount of he said and she said in this story about who's right and who's wrong between the White House and Anthropic.
13:46But apparently with only 90 minutes notice, this ban was issued. The White House denies that and says, actually, no, Anthropic was in discussion with us and we couldn't come to an agreement. But essentially these very, very powerful models that Anthropic released to a very select group of people initially and then with tight guardrails around them more broadly to the public. and the White House said, we've discovered, apparently with the help of the CEO of Amazon, Andy Jassy, which is another interesting twist to this tale, that these guardrails can be circumvented and so we don't want them being rolled out internationally.
14:24And Anthropic said, well, we're just going to pull them. But I've never seen the European tech ecosystem blow up in the way that it has, probably, I guess, since maybe the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. in the aftermath of that, because people are so worried here about what that means and the control, as you said, that the White House has over tech. Yeah. And I think, you know, as you've noted before, this conversation about sovereignty was going on literally in the week and two weeks beforehand. And this just gave it a little bit of a supercharge because this is what's on everyone's lips at the moment.
14:59And we've sort of been here before when, say, Amazon Web Services went down and everyone slightly freaked out at how much we You're all dependent on Amazon Web Services. And it just fuels this inferiority complex that Europe and the UK has with regards to not having a huge tech company to rely on. And all these fears about a kill switch, as people call it, that the White House has this button that it can go, right, you're not going to have cloud computing access anymore, so you're not going to be able to access your NHS data and just stop it. It's amazing. You know, we obviously talk about this technology moving really fast at the AI summit in Paris, which was only, you know, just last year in February.
15:46We have members of the Trump administration standing up and saying, we're not talking about AI safety. AI safety is not the right word. It shows that you're scared of this technology. We're not scared of this technology. We're enthused by it. And, you know, a week later, we changed the AI Safety Institute into the AI Security Institute to essentially come into line with that view. And now, funny enough, the Trump administration's full on with safety. And it shows you how far the models have come and how worried they are. And in some ways, I guess, if you think about it, it's good that they're deciding not to release a model into the wild that's unsafe.
16:29But obviously the mechanism and the speed and the way it was done and obviously the suspicion. And the understanding of why. Yeah. And the history to this dispute between the White House and Anthropoc, which has so many twists and turns into it, it's almost difficult to follow. Yeah. It's flipped and flopped. But I think those in the safety community, the people who were being told, you know, virtually a lot of what they said is coming true. You know, what they were saying a year ago or 18 months ago. You can tick the boxes, starting to tick the boxes. And that is worrying because if you keep going forward and ticking the boxes, it's really terrifying what could happen in 18 months time or two years time.
17:10This is one of those stories. It really depends where your centre of gravity is, doesn't it? Because if you're in the US, it becomes a story about anthropic versus the White House. Over here in Europe, it's the White House's control of our most important technologies. And as you say, in the safety community, everybody's watching the power of these models thinking, oh, maybe it's a good thing that they're not out in the world. Yeah. So it's got many different angles, like a lot of tech stores. I should say it's interesting that the G7 is meeting this week and that all the tech bros are there, too.
17:41We've just had the text of Sam Altman's speech, which talk about power. He's calling on the G7 essentially to put international standards in place. and he said which i thought was fascinating in light of especially the social media ban do not cede your responsibilities to ai labs like mine we've heard that before and then we've obviously seen the company lobby pretty hard against the ai act in europe so you know there's always a high level political statement but you know they've got lawyers and when it comes down to the nitty gritty of the wording, we see them lobby against it. So we'll see which way, you know, the wind blows when someone wants to put pen to paper with regulation, because ultimately that's when you see things, the mechanisms, the lobbyists, the lawyers, all that sort of stuff really kick into gear.
18:37Or maybe like social media in 25 years time or whenever, you know, whenever I think we are from when Facebook launched, we'll get there. It's certainly building ahead of steam and I'm sure it's going to be more talked about at the G7 and talking about different centres of gravity. We'll hear what Danny thinks about it from Silicon Valley next week. Coming up, we'll be hearing from a British entrepreneur who's building a pharmaceutical lab in space to try and transform cancer treatment. Stay with us.
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21:02hello and welcome back to the times tech podcast where it's time for our guest today who is a space entrepreneur which feels very apt given the recent spacex ipo and space i think becoming one of the hottest and most talked about areas in tech but let me set the scene for you about how i met her because last week i went to founders forum which have you been before mark i've not You always get me a ticket. Sorry. Maybe next year. Next year. It is extraordinary. I mean, it's one of Europe's top tech conferences. Certainly my favourite day of the year. And it's a really eclectic bunch of people. So you've got investors, all the tech entrepreneurs and CEOs that you would recognise.
21:47The boss of Lovable, the boss of Waves, the big European tech CEOs, plus a healthy contingent from the US as well. so this year the chief strategy officer of open ai was there and they take over soho farmhouse which is like a very fancy private members club in the oxfordshire countryside and they set up bell tents in a field with hay bales and comfy chairs and posh coffees and nice lunches and people sit around listening to talks from these people all right can i be a plus one next year and a few celebrities and it is very eclectic so davina mccall was there this year Will.I.Am. Al Gore. It was pouring with rain, so not maybe the best setting for a field.
22:33And I kept apologising to the Americans about, you know, June in Britain, because it was that really, really rainy day. But it did mean that everybody was huddled in the central barn for a lot of it. And it was quite fun watching that George Osborne was there, because obviously now he works for OpenAI. Nick Clegg, who's now at Hero Capital, but obviously was at Meta. You can't get away from Nick Clegg and George Osborne. They were. They were at every single tech event you go to. Bad Not was there doing a session with Harry Stebbings. I'm going to stop name dropping. Anyway, it was great. It was a great day despite the rain.
23:04But Founders Forum also has a cohort of people that they call their rising stars. So these are entrepreneurs who they think are going to go on to great things. And in the past, one Demis Hissabis was one of them. So they've got form in picking talent. And so as you can imagine, kind of lots of chat on the day about sovereignty, space, quantum, everything else. But these rising stars get a chance to speak on stage to the investors and people who are there. So it's a chance to show off their businesses. And one of those was Katie King. And she really stood out to me. She's the founder and CEO of something called BioOrbit.
23:43And essentially, they're building a pharmaceutical lab in space. The idea being to use microgravity to change how you manufacture drugs. And it's quite complicated to explain. So I'll leave it to her. So at BioWorbit, we are building a pharmaceuticals lab and factory in microgravity to change the way in which cancer treatments can be given to a patient. so ultimately in space you don't have gravity and you can form different structures of drugs that you cannot form here on earth namely making better crystals of drugs in space versus what you can make here on earth so gravity impacts the crystallization process for whatever it is but the more flexible that a drug is the more significant that impact is but what what that this all means in in real terms is that through forming crystals of cancer treatments, cancer antibody treatments, we can take them from something that needs to be injected in the vein and turn them into a self-injectable, like a shot.
24:49Which means for a patient, they don't have to go to hospital, they can do it themselves at home. Correct. Okay. Yes. So it's all about changing the accessibility, but the solution is a material science problem. It's how do we get all that drug from that IV bag into a tiny volume and if you were to just make it really concentrated just like concentrating up ribena effectively it becomes so thick and viscous like honey that it doesn't get through the needle but if you use tiny crystals of the drug you can fit more into that tiny volume and you don't get this viscosity spike so crystals can enable this switch from ib into a self-injectable pen and so So essentially what you're doing is putting molecules into a box and sending them into space in order for this process to happen.
25:38Correct. So we'll take drugs. For many people, it sounds completely sidebar and out there. So we have to make the drugs as you would normally on Earth, load them into our hardware, take them into space, and then induce the crystallization process. They will then form these beautiful crystals and come back down to Earth. And then we can then use those crystals in these new drug formulations. How did you come up with this idea as a concept? Well, I'd say space manufacturing is not a new idea as such. Sci-fi has been like, oh, we're making products here and there. And again, the research that this is based off is decades of work on the International Space Station, showing just how much better the space environment is for forming these crystals.
26:24But where BioWorbit came in and what I recognised was that now is the time that this can be financially viable to start mass producing and turn it from an R &D experiment into something real and commercialisable. And that's because of how space infrastructure has changed, costing has changed. And I recognised that a few years ago. I was like, right, we have to jump now because I can see the trends that are coming so that by the time infrastructure's all ready, we're also ready and we can just move quickly. And you're already doing this? Yes, we actually launched last month. Last month, we launched our first prototype manufacturing line to the space station.
27:04And it is looking wonderful in terms of the results coming through. And we are producing crystals in space. It's a world record breaking scale of production. and we'll wait to get it back in about a month's time and we can do full analysis of our system to see how we could improve it. But it's working beautifully from what we can see so far. And is it right? I was reading that you're putting your hardware into SpaceX rockets. Yes, so this launch was a SpaceX launch to the International Space Station. So it went up in a Dragon capsule. And then, again, that is one of the most trusted routes in space.
27:40SpaceX are brilliant. And again, the space station is safe. So that's just to de-risk a lot. But we won't be dependent on the space station. Again, it's being decommissioned soon. So we have to move over to the next bit of infrastructure, which will be the re-entry capsules and commercial space stations. I was going to say, because they're not building another international space station, right? They're going to, as you say, the commercial model. What does that mean for you? So it's actually very interesting. There are going to be several commercial space stations coming online, which is exciting.
28:14The interesting thing about it being commercial is that, you know, they will have to compete with each other for price points in terms of renting space on their space stations. so it's going to become a very interesting market in that sense because there is space but how do they how will they get the returning customers like us they'll have to give us a good deal to want to fly with them rather than with someone else so uh so yes it's it's it's just very interesting how much change is happening so quickly how much do you put down spacex's existence to what you were saying about you know space becoming more accessible i mean cheaper yeah SpaceX has changed the entire industry.
28:58Again, when they first started wanting to do reusable rockets, many people thought that was impossible and said it was dangerous or would laugh them out the room early days. But that reusability has meant that the cost has come all the way down, which has meant that so many more commercial applications are viable that never previously were. And as that cost continues to fall, there are going to be more commercial applications that become viable in time. So I imagine that in 10 years time, there will be many more businesses utilising the space environment that would just be wouldn't make sense right now.
29:38But SpaceX have, they are the single handedly, in my opinion, have completely changed the game. And they talk about medication I saw in their IPO document as well. Yes. So, again, data centers and AI took up a lot of the IPO documents and it would be very easy to miss what they said about manufacturing. But they did say they want to build facilities for production and for manufacturing in space and explicitly said about the benefits of microgravity for drug production. So I think it's great that they've named it explicitly and we want to have the facilities to provide, have that infrastructure.
30:19for these companies. It's great for me because then I'm just renting the space off them. Great. I don't need to build it myself. So I think that it's very easy to miss it, but it counted for a lot that it was in that document as well. And how much of the pharma companies jumped on this? In terms of... In terms of big pharma thinking, right, we're also going to, you know, aim for microgravity as part of our manufacturing processes. Yes. So I think for pharma, everything needs to be regulated. In terms of pharmaceutical production, there's very, very tight regulation. And currently there isn't regulation for using the space environment.
30:51However, we are spearheading work with the MHRA, Rio. So MHRA is like our version of the FDA, a Regulation Innovation Office and the CAA as well to make that pathway for farmer production in space, according to normal regulation. And we are spearheading it here in the UK. That's interesting. So you're seeing smaller businesses actually forging a path here rather than some of the bigger companies. Again, yes. So we've said this is a need. This is what it can open up. And then these big institutions, we can't obviously make that change. But then they've pledged like we are going to find a way to make this happen.
31:29So once the UK sought that across all these institutions, that will then become the blueprint for others to then copy. So it's very exciting because this barrier will be disappearing in the next however many years. And to be part of that process is a real honour, to be honest. How long do you think it will take? Have you got a sense of that? So in terms of regulated commercial production, I think that will be in the next five plus years. But before that, in terms of drug development, that can happen from next year. We have hardware that we can use. We can start working with pharma companies because there's still a lot to get to before you do your clinical batches and your commercial production.
32:13So there's still a lot that can happen within those five years. I mean, a lot of progress that we can make before the regulation becomes a real blocker. And you've just raised funding. Is that right? Tell us about that. Yeah, so we raised the world's largest seed round for in-space manufacturing. We raised about£10 million. It's not like an AI round, but for this sector, I mean, again, it's the world's largest seed. We've got some fantastic investors behind us backing us to make this possible. And again, to de-risk the technology and then build the next generation product. And we've already de-risked it last month.
32:51So there's a lot to do, but we are moving very, very quickly. And what does that allow you to do in terms of expansion? So we have opened up in the US already. So we've been able to expand it and bring on some world experts in this industry from public space companies, from pharma companies have joined us to then make Bioorbit and make this vision a reality. And I'd say where we are different compared to some other space companies is that we're really focusing on the engineering of the manufacturing part and also on the science, the biotech science of it as well. So we are more like a biotech that uses space rather than a space that does biotech, which is subtly different, but very important in terms of the services that you then offer.
33:39So as you'd expect from a tech conference, there are robots here today, Formula One car, Formula One simulator. There's also a massive rocket on the lawn. How much do you feel that space is having a moment that there is more interest in your area than there has been before, maybe driven by SpaceX? What does that feel like? I love it. I love that space has become more than just thinking about astronauts. It's like these are commercial businesses. And also this, the SpaceX in terms of launch. Yes, we need that. That's infrastructure. But the conversation has turned into how can we use space to serve Earth markets like data centers?
34:28That's not a space market. That's an Earth market. What we're doing is using space for the health market and the pharma market. So I think that it's I love how it's becoming part of public conversation because it sort of changes people's perception as to what space can be used for. And I hope will inspire the next generation into building the future companies as well. So I'm really excited about that. And what are the biggest challenges for someone working in space? to be honest the space industry needs all skill sets so you don't have to be an engineer or a scientist to work in space and i i hope that we will stop referring to these companies as space companies because we don't refer it feels a bit star trekky or it's just i hope it becomes like meaningless it's like we don't refer to all the companies here as earth companies it's like it's just an environment but it's like I hope that it is that we are just a pharma company and that this is just a data center company yeah and we don't need to mention the space bit because it all gets lumped together but they're so different just like you know all the different industries here on earth so I think that if people are interested in wanting to work in a space company then it's like there are so many opportunities no matter what your skill set because it's it's it's just an environment so last question like how do you feel about going to space i'd go yeah if someone offered me to go to space i would bite their hand off i'd love to i hope you get a chance but thanks so much taking the time and come back and tell us like how it's all going as well be really interesting to keep following with us ness thank you very much that's fascinating what did you make of it?
36:17I think what is becoming clearer and clearer is that space companies are not just about sending rockets to space, sending people to the International Space Station. Of course, that's going to be decommissioned soon. But it's actually about what you do in space and how it can affect things here on Earth. So I'm hearing more and more companies that are interested in this idea of microgravity that she talked about, but also businesses, for example, that are using satellite data to improve agriculture. And that seems to me to be the real trend at the moment. So it's not necessarily what we heard from the SpaceX IPO and colonising Mars.
36:53It's actually what we do up there and how it affects us down here. Well, so many people are enraptured with space. It's a story that really does capture the imagination. Obviously, I think that's what a lot of people who are buying into the IPO are also invested in. So, you know, it's great. Just got to see if that continues to rocket. Boom, boom. Well, that is it for this week's episode of the Times Tech Podcast. If you're enjoying the show, drop us a line and let us know at techpod at thetimes.co.uk. And we'd love to know your thoughts on the social media ban. Do let us know. Techpod at thetimes.co.uk.
37:36See you next week. Goodbye. Bye-bye. This episode of the Times Tech Podcast was sponsored by KPMG. One of the themes we keep coming back to is the gap between AI ambition and real world application. And that's where KPMG is focusing its work, helping organizations move beyond pilots and think about how AI can change the way the business operates and how it fits into wider processes and decision making. You can find all their insights and how they can help your organization make the difference through successful AI workforce adoption. Visit kpmg.co.uk slash AI. Today's episode of the Times Tech Podcast was sponsored by IBM.
38:21IBM's long running work with Wimbledon shows how AI and data can be used in a setting millions of people recognize. From instant match insights to digital tools like match chat and likelihood to win, the aim is to help fans follow the tournament in a more personalized way, whether they're on the grounds or watching from anywhere around the world. And beyond sport, it points to a bigger question for businesses. How do you turn data into something useful, timely and easy to act on? To learn more about how IBM helps create smarter business, visit ibm.com slash Wimbledon.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer has announced a ban on social media for under-16s, due to come into effect next year. But questions remain over how it will be enforced, and whether it will actually work. Mark Sellman joins Katie Prescott to answer the key questions.
In the US, the Trump administration has banned two of Anthropic’s most powerful AI models which include the controversial 'Mythos', intensifying calls for Europe to build sovereign AI systems of its own. If America can restrict access to critical AI technology at short notice, what does that mean for the rest of the world? Plus, Katie has been at Founders Forum, where she interviewed Katie King, the founder and CEO of BioOrbit, a company building a pharmaceutical lab in space to transform the way we treat cancer.
Do you agree with the social media ban? Get in touch: [email protected]
Producers: Marnie Duke & Ethan Sills
Executive Producer: Priyanka Deladia
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