Info

Radio Motherboard

Personal futures brought to you today by VICE's Motherboard.
RSS Feed Subscribe in Apple Podcasts
Radio Motherboard
2017
July
June
April
March
February
January


2016
December
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
February
January


2015
December
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March


2014
December
November


Categories

All Episodes
Archives
Categories
Now displaying: 2015
Jul 10, 2015

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.

Jul 3, 2015

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?

Jun 26, 2015

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 Singer about writing the book, and the staff discusses how climate-induced strife and constant cyberattacks and hacking incidents has already plunged much of the world into conflict.

 

Radio Motherboard is sponsored by Casper Mattresses. You can enter code VICE for $50 off any mattress.

Jun 19, 2015

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.

Jun 12, 2015

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.

Jun 4, 2015

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: casper.com/?utm_source=vice&ut…podcast.motherboard

May 28, 2015

 

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

May 22, 2015

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.

May 15, 2015

*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.

May 8, 2015

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: casper.com?utm_source=vice&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=motherboard&cvosrc=podcast.podcast.motherboard

Apr 30, 2015

 

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.

Apr 23, 2015

 

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.

Apr 16, 2015

Do we have to die? The world's first transhumanist candidate for president doesn't think so.

Mar 7, 2015

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 […]

Mar 7, 2015

​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 […]

« Previous 1 2