Radio Motherboard

It's almost Halloween, so Motherboard is exploring the very nature of fear. Why do we still get scared by things that no longer represent any threat to us? How has technology changed how we feel fear? And what happens in a culture that reveres death?This week, Kaleigh Rogers and Jason Koebler talk with Naomi Bishop, a freelance writer who recently spent time with the Tana Toraja people in Indonesia. In Tana Toraja culture, it's common for families to dress up and take care of the dead corpses of their loved ones, sometimes for many years at a time until a proper funeral can be held. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When you log into Facebook, you'll see a list of "suggested friends." They're full of people you went to high school with, random colleagues, and a bunch of people that you do sort of know ... but why does Facebook know that you know them?Motherboard contributor Kari Paul talks to us about her investigation into how Facebook and other social networks learn things about you that you've never purposefully given them access to. Short Circuit editor Nicholas Deleon talks to us about watching the Democratic presidential debate in virtual reality, and Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai discusses why Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Two major, solar system-shaking things happened this week. 'The Martian' came out, and we're all thankful that it ended up being a very good film. And Motherboard killed comments.These two things aren't even remotely related, but you're in luck if your interests include major sci fi motion pictures and the future of media. After announcing we were ending comments, there was a bit of a firestorm online and we just so happened to be recording the podcast as the hot takes came on Twitter. So, for the first 15 minutes or so, we discussed the move with our editor in chief, Derek Mead. Afterwards, we talk about whether it was even possible for Ridley Scott to screw up 'The Martian,' and Motherboard editor at large Alex Pasternack talks to Drew Goddard about his screenplay. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Radio Motherboard talks to Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the internet and Google's "internet evangelist," about the company's plans to fly internet-providing balloons over the developing world, encryption and security, and a horrifying scenario where our kitchen appliances start trying to hack our financial institutions.We also discuss Peeple, the "Yelp for People" app that's getting everyone riled up this week, a brand new scary Android vulnerability, and we end with a dramatic reading of a sci fi story written by one of our staffers when she was seven years old. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Scientists have just proven for the first time that it's possible to engineer yeast to make THC, arguably the most important chemical in marijuana. But do we want to get high using lab-made drugs when the real thing works so well?On this week's Radio Motherboard, we talk about the future of both synthetic drugs and lab-grown natural ones, Senior Editor Brian Merchant tries to make us care about fossil fuel divestment that could save the climate, producer Jaimie Sanchez tells us about cliff diving in Italy, and I talk about why DC's crypto wars have gotten so exhausting. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week is ALL FRONTS, Motherboard's deep dive into what a future of forever war looks like. On this episode of Radio Motherboard, we talk about what it means to always be at war and how technology and automation have made it possible to stay in a perpetual state of war. We also talk about why fast food restaurants are finally moving away from antibiotic-pumped meat, a weird Quebec phenomenon called "pizzaghetti," and sonogenetics, a newly discovered technique that allows researchers to control neurons using ultrasound. As always, thanks for listening—you can find us on iTunes and we always welcome feedback. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

If you've been listening to Radio Motherboard the last few months, thank you very much: It's been a bit of a roller coaster as we try to figure out a format and recording setup that works best for us, and it's been a blast experimenting. This week, we're experimenting again, as we try out a shorter, more segmented format that's hopefully a bit snappier than some of our more recent episodes. This week, we tackle the iPhone 6S release, talk about whether basic income will ever become a reality, and touch a bit on why reporting on the Hacking Team has been so much fun. We love hearing from our readers and listeners, so tell us if you're digging the new style or if it's got you down—we're available at [email protected] and on Twitter @motherboard. We're also available on iTunes here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

If you're American, it's easier than ever to go to Cuba, a country that's remained, mas o menos, off limits for the last 60 years or so. In fact, you can go to cheapair.com, buy a ticket, fill out a couple forms confirming you fit into one of several broad approved categories of person (you probably do), and hop on a flight direct to Havana. But should you?As we've explored in a series of stories over the last couple weeks, Cuba is still very much an island ruled by an authoritarian regime, with nearly all industry and services owned and operated by that regime. There's little starvation or homelessness on the island, but there's also very little free expression, internet access, or free flow of information. Overt propaganda is everywhere, and there are neighborhood watch groups specifically designed to inform on people who are "counterrevolutionary." And so, if you go to Cuba to sit on a beach, smoke cigars, and drink mojitos, you are ostensibly putting money directly into the pockets... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Who goes to the Pokemon World Championships in 2015? Well, we did, for one—mostly to find out who else was there. Well over a decade after its heyday, Pokemon is still going strong. There's now nearly 800 Pokemon, but there are still lots of kids, teens, and older nerds trying to catch 'em all. We caught up with some of the best players of both the card game and the video game at Boston's World Championships to see how the community has changed over the last few years. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Uber drivers set their own hours, file taxes independently, and often own their cars. They don’t get health insurance from Uber and they don’t wear uniforms. And yet, Uber controls much of what they do by setting prices, handling their tips, and micromanaging them through its driver rating system. Are these drivers independent contractors, working for a strict boss? Or are they employees, entitled to benefits and covered expenses?A law firm has filed a class action lawsuit against Uber in California on behalf of the state’s drivers, alleging that the company had misclassified them as independent contractors. Uber is going to the mat to defend the status quo, arguing that the class is too large, that drivers want to be independent contractors (which isn’t really material to their classification), and even trying to make itself seem more like Wal-Mart. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Brian Shiro really wants to go to space. He wants to go to space so badly, in fact, that he’s applied to NASA’s astronaut program. Twice. Both times he fell just short. He’s hoping the third time’s the charm.Until then, he’ll be heading up Astronauts4Hire, an appropriately-named astronaut contracting service. Wth A4H, Brian hopes to open doors for aspiring astronauts to the burgeoning commercial space industry, and also provide flight and simulation training to pad their resumés.I first learned about Brian’s story while editing a profile of him published a few weeks ago on Motherboard. The story was written by Sarah Scoles, an ace science writer (who, in a past life, did research on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We travel to the crater of the first atomic bomb with one of the youngest and last surviving Manhattan Project scientists. This is his story. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When did you get rid of your last computer or cell phone? It was probably pretty recently—we replace our technology all the time. But it's not this way for everyone: A contingent of diehard retro computing enthusiasts are still programming, hacking, tinkering with, and playing games on the Apple II, a 38-year-old computer originally released in 1977.And every July, about 70 of these diehards head to Rockhurst University in Kansas City for KansasFest, a conference dedicated exclusively to all things Apple II. More accurately, it's kind of like a sleepaway camp. For six days, the 70-or-so attendees will eat together, sleep in the same dorm, chug mountain dew to stay awake, and hack away at these things. I visited KFest, as it's affectionately known, to see why anyone would ever want to keep using a computer that's coming up on its 40th anniversary. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For the last six months or so, you've been listening to us talk at you about simulated universes and head transplants and transhumanism and all sorts of topics (and we thank you very much for that). But we haven't really told you all that much about ourselves.This week on Radio Motherboard, there is no guest, there is no topic, and there are no real rules. Instead, we bring through a whole bunch of Motherboard staffers (as in, whoever was available at the time) to learn what exactly it is they do around these parts. Along the way we talk about filming documentaries, corgis and professional wrestling, digital journalism, and, of course, encryption and security. I've also heard back from our Editor-in-Chief Derek Mead, who shamefully informed me that those Vultures over at New York Magazine pulled off a 9-8 victory over the Vice softball team in a heartbreaker. This will all make sense later, I promise. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It’s now been just over a year and a half of the biggest Ebola outbreak in history. We’ve dabbled in vaccines, but the best prevention method is still abstaining from contact with symptomatic patients, and the best treatment is still basically hydration. We’ve figured out that Ebola survivors seem at least temporarily immune, making them ideal health workers, but we still haven’t perfected treatment protocols and caretakers are still dying from the disease. This week on Radio Motherboard, we spoke to Kayla Ruble, who covered the outbreak in... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In October 2012, the gossip site Gawker published an edited video of Hulk Hogan having sex. In response, the former pro-wrestler sued the company. It's now going to court in a case that could have wide-ranging consequences for the First Amendment. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On this most American of holidays, it’s a good time to take a look at how we select the people who run this ol’ country many of you call home. Like everything else, social media and technology are playing a huge role in campaign strategy. Much was made of President Obama’s digital campaign, and for good reason: He lapped Mitt Romney in reaching people online with the help of his CTO, Harper Reed. Reed and Dylan Richard, the Director of Engineering for Obama’s campaign, joined us this week to talk about what they did on the campaign and about what has changed over the last four years. Are you going to be spammed on Snapchat by Marco Rubio? Hit up on WhatsApp by Hillary Clinton? Probably yes! And can Reddit turn its Bernie Sanders love into something resembling real political momentum? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We assume that the next world war will be a technological one, but the United States and its potential adversaries are increasingly developing tech designed to blast enemies into the past. In Ghost Fleet, real cybersecurity and war experts Peter W. Singer and August Cole explore what would actually happen in a war between the United States and China. There's drones and hacking, sure, but what happens when our space capabilities are taken offline? What happens if China hacks all the microchips we bought from them?In this version of the future, war is as gritty and as human as it's ever been. Singer footnotes the entire book with references to actual technology, speeches, military plots and documents to add a layer of realism not seen in most sci fi. Radio Motherboard talks to... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We're all living two lives. We've got whatever's going on in the physical world, and then we've got our online personas—our Facebook and Twitter profiles, our Gchat lives, our Reddit accounts, our OKCupid and Tinder profiles. How do you make sense of it all? And how are we supposed to find love when everyone lives in two separate worlds?Comedian Aziz Ansari calls our smartphones the "world's largest singles bar," and he's not wrong. At any moment, we can text whoever we want, check out of reality, or swipe through Tinder. The internet is connecting us to new people, but it's getting harder to make a lasting connection with someone when another option is simply a swipe away. This week, we talk about how technology has affected our dating lives, talk to Aziz about his new book, Modern Romance, and talk to his coauthor, sociologist Eric Klinenberg, about how to make sense of this new world we've found ourselves in. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What happens to our brains and our psyche when a huge portion of humanity spends their lives persistently jacked in to their computers, their tablets, their smartphones, their screens? We don't really know—in a sense, we're performing one massive uncontrolled experiment on most of the developed world. This week, we've been exploring everything mankind knows about the brain and technology's effect on it. Nathalie Nahai, the "web psychologist," has been doing this for her career. She's researchers how the web changes our expectations, our behavior, our attention spans, and our mood. Later this month, she'll be hosting the "Humanise the Web" conference in London, where she and other experts will be exploring our connection with the internet and how, maybe, we can make it a little more like the real world. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It's only June, and it's already been a very good summer for sci-fi. From the soaring optimism of Tomorrowland to the postapocalyptic dreariness of Mad Max to the outright unsettling nature of Ex Machina, there's already been plenty of speculative fiction to chew through. But we at Motherboard had been too busy making the site to enjoy any of the summer's biggest films. So we decided to change that with one back-to-back-to-back nine hour movie marathon. Before, during, and after the marathon, we discussed how these three looks at the future fit into the sci-fi canon, what they have to say about our future (and our present), whether they succeeded at creating a believable world, and whether they were actually any good.Radio Motherboard is sponsored by Casper Mattresses. You can enter code VICE for $50 off any mattress: Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We talk about Elon Musk and his companies, SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity all the time, but what is Musk's longterm plan? How do the companies fit together and, should Musk manage to create a reusable rocket or launch an array of internet-providing satellites, what happens then? Radio Motherboard talks to Ashlee Vance, author of a new biography about Musk, about how you write a book about one of the most fascinating (and busy) humans on Earth. We even try to give Musk a call.Radio Motherboard is sponsored by Casper Mattresses. You can enter code VICE for $50 off any mattress: https://casper.com/?utm_source=vice&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=motherboard&cvosrc=podcast.podcast.motherboard Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode of Radio Motherboard, we talked to New York Times reporter Nathaniel Popper about the process of researching his new book about Bitcoin. We also spoke to Courtney Marie Warner, who loves Bitcoin, even though it put her boyfriend in prison. And we spoke to some random people at a park to see just how far we have to go before Bitcoin is truly mainstream. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

*This podcast contains spoilers for the movie Good Kill*The military's drone pilots are physically removed from the battlefield, but, seven days a week, they spend 12-hour days staring at a screen, waiting for orders to kill from above. And then they go home, or to the bar, or to their daughter's dance recital. Good Kill and Grounded, a new movie and play starring Ethan Hawke and Ann Hatheway, respectively, take a look at the psychological toll being a drone pilot takes on a person. Motherboard talks with Hawke and director Andrew Niccol about the making of the film, its accuracy, and its importance as a first step toward showing Americans the brutal truth behind the targeted killing program. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The world seems real, but is it really? As humans get better at simulating artificial intelligence, it seems at least plausible that we could create life that is both conscious and has free will. And if we can create conscious life, who's to say that the universe, as we know it, wasn't created by superintelligent artificial intelligence who wanted to simulate their past?We talk to Nick Bostrom, the Oxford University philosopher who originally came up with this theory. Then we switch gears ever so slightly to talk with Craig Hogan, a Department of Energy researcher who is actively trying to prove that we're living not in a simulation, but in a hologram, which is a completely different thing. Finally, the Motherboard staff talks about glitches in the Matrix or moments that seem totally unreal.Radio Motherboard is sponsored by Casper Mattresses. You can enter code VICE for $50 off any mattress: Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Why would someone willingly spend years hanging out with people who make fun of recently dead teens? To write a book about the experience, of course. Motherboard meets Whitney Phillips, a Humboldt State University researcher and author of 'This is Why We Can't Have Nice Things,' an academic look at why internet trolls act the way they do. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In 2017, Valery Spiridonov hopes to become the first human to have his head transplanted onto a new body. We talk to Val, his would-be surgeon Sergio Canavero, and Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist about the process. Then, Motherboard's staff talks about Cookie Clicker, our new office obsession. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do we have to die? The world's first transhumanist candidate for president doesn't think so. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The ​Silk Road trial has only been going on for two weeks, and already it’s had its fair share of drama: There have ​been setups by the prosecution, ​accusations and alternative theories tossed out by the defense, and, ​yes, selfies. Motherboard’s Kari Paul has been at the trial every day of the week, and our reporters have been covering Silk […] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

​If you see the words “copyright” and “law” juxtaposed next to each other, and your eyes glaze over, we don’t necessarily blame you. But copyright law is insane, and a wonderful, constant source of nutty human interest cases that explore every part of art, culture, and greediness. This week on Radio Motherboard, we invited the Electronic Frontier […] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The ​first season of the ultra-popular podcast Serial is over, but lots of questions remain, in no small part due to the lack of evidence tying then-high school student Adnan Syed to the 1999 murder of his ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee. Huge swaths of Sarah Koenig’s longform storytelling (and reporting) experiment are dedicated to frustratingly minute details of what cell […] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In her filmmaking, the director Laura Poitras—my guest on this edition of Radio Motherboard—likes to document reality as it happens, those moments of uncertainty that often don’t appear on film. “There’s something about how we look at the past which has a kind of finality and closure to it, where life doesn’t usually happen that way,” she told me. […] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Interstellar may not be a great film—then again, it might be—but it does cut to the heart of quite a few of the themes we regularly hit on here at Motherboard: Space colonization, ecological collapse, near and far future dystopias, theoretical physics, the enduring power of love. Maybe not so much that last one, but […] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.