Chicago tech interviews with a morning-show grin.
Bytes Over Bagels is a Chicago tech conversation show with a morning-radio streak: episodes tend to open with greetings to the city and jokes among the regulars, then settle into interviews. Guests include a Starter League co-founder and a technologist who explains insurance risk, and one season is built around empathy in leadership, branding and understanding customers.
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Bytes Over Bagels is a Chicago technology show built around interviews and sponsored by 8-Bit Studios, a studio that makes apps and websites. It does not start quietly. Cold opens greet the city directly, with lines like 'Good morning, Chicago' and, in one episode, 'Let's wake up this beast', before a sponsor read and some easy back-and-forth among the regulars. Mary Brown turns up across several episodes, sometimes in the studio and sometimes remote. The jokes are part of the package. Episode 22 has fill-in co-host Brett Meckie, Heather Brown and Dave Seidler, billed as everybody's favorite nemesis, roasting an absent John over a supposed Whole Foods habit. There are birthday asides and snowy mornings, and on one Monday the sponsor's office can be heard in the background. Beneath all that, the guests bring real material. Gary Hallgren, who calls himself a technology guy rather than an insurance guy, explains why insurers have to set a price before they know what a policy will cost, and he pictures drivers as colored marbles in a jar. Mike McGee, co-founder of Starter League, is booked to talk about Starter League's new entrepreneur school. In The Mission Economy, a guest explains how a community partnership onboards people. It asks about their skills, causes and campaigns so it can match them with projects, and the people range from those who have started nonprofits or worked on political campaigns to newcomers still looking for an outlet. A season centred on empathy gives the show a single through-line. The crew set out to learn why empathy sits so close to 8-Bit's mission, and they leaned on remote interviews to reach guests internationally. Maria Ross arrives as the guest they had hoped for: someone who has written on the subject. Asked about a company whose board did service work as a PR stunt, she argues that the motive matters less than the act, because performing empathy is still doing it. Another guest presents a diagram of four leadership styles plotted against cognitive and affective empathy, a model still being tested through questionnaires with company leaders around the world. Elsewhere, one voice points to Apple, Samsung and Tesla as companies that study their users closely, down to the packaging, and contrasts them with firms that rely on raw data alone. Even there the teasing comes back, with a jab about the crew's StrengthsFinder scores. Sign-offs point to subscriptions, and one crew member admits the analytics are part of the appeal. What a listener gets is a friendly look at people building things in Chicago, with earnest questions and running jokes side by side.
Made for: Suits a listener who follows Chicago's tech and startup community and likes interviews wrapped in loose, joking studio chatter. It also fits someone curious about how empathy shapes leadership, branding and the way companies understand their customers.
What sets it apart: It pairs Chicago tech interviews with a full season on empathy, framed by its sponsor 8-Bit Studios and that company's mission. Morning-radio banter, from roasting an absent crew member to office noise on a snowy Monday, keeps even the earnest episodes informal.
Interviews and news with Chicago's biggest players in technology, design, and venture capital. A Unicorn Road production.
A cable-company food-bank photo op leaves you asking when a good deed becomes more than a stunt.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A grounded look at matching professional skills with community work that needs them.
The episode frames mission-driven work as a matter of careful fit: learn what people care about, understand what they know how to do, and place them where that experience can be useful.
A grounded look at why deliberate understanding can serve leaders better than raw emotional reaction.
Empathy lands as a practical leadership skill here, with a clear distinction between recognizing what someone else is experiencing and being swept into an emotional response. Dr.
Maria Ross shows how a food-bank PR effort can become a practical case for empathy at work.
Maria Ross frames empathy as something that has to be felt in behavior, not just named in brand language. The episode turns on service work tied to a food-bank event for a major cable company, where the original brief seems partly about being seen as a good community citizen.
A candid, useful take on empathy as a design habit, sharpened by an unexpectedly revealing StrengthsFinder result.
Empathy comes through as both a design principle and an organizational habit, with 8-Bit's mission widening into a practical question: how well do teams understand the people they hope to serve?
A clear, practical look at how driving data can make insurance risk feel less like a category and more like a signal.
Transportation turns into a data question in this conversation with Gary Hallgren, who explains how driving behavior can change the way insurers judge risk.
Specialists walking through software's tradeoffs, one system at a time.
Founders and engineers on AI coding agents like Claude Code, and supply chain security.
["Bites Over Bagels talks with Caleb Gardner about 18 Coffees, the mission economy, and remote work.", "Mary Brown and John record from Chicago quarantine and joke that Gardner is speaking from a closet with a high-quality microphone.", "Gardner says 18 Coffees focuses on innovation through consulting, community, and content at the intersection of digital transformation and social change.", "He argues that nonprofit innovation is constrained more by structure, small teams, and decades-old operating models than by vision or technology."]
Bites Over Bagels talks with Dr.
Bites Over Bagels talks with Maria Ross, co-founder and CEO of Red Slice and author of The Empathy Edge, about what it means to build an empathetic brand without reducing empathy to marketing copy.
["Bites Over Bagels centers this episode on 8-Bit Studios' empathy focus, with John, Mary, Steve, and Don connecting it to client work, UX, and internal teamwork.", "John says 8-Bit started as a \"more human\" agency with work-life balance and friend-like client relationships, then realized its strongest work sat in a \"top right quadrant\" of collaboration and end-user empathy.", "The group breaks empathy into cognitive, affective, and doing forms, and John says the only documented measure he found is the Empathy Quotient.", "Mary, Steve, and Don keep it practical with StrengthsFinder, accessibility, organizational alignment, and a long bagel debate that ends with everything bagels, cream cheese, and New Jersey standards."]
Mary and Jessie talk with Gary Hallgren about Arity's driving-risk data and insurance pricing, and he says the company processes about a billion miles of driving data every two days.
Kaben Clausen says TruePublic grew from concerns about polling bias after the 2016 election and declining phone survey response.
Joe Pollock says Percent Pledge makes employee donations recurring through payroll deductions and shares personalized impact reports.
Bytes Over Bagels reports that Philo raised a $16 million seed round for compliant cannabis marketing.
A morning show covering Chicago tech news and featuring an interview with Mike McGee, co-founder of Starter League.
A morning show covering Chicago's tech scene with interviews and news, featuring a comedic panel.
A morning show covering Chicago's technology scene with interviews and news, featuring a segment on local startups.