Jamie and his AI companion Jimmy Botlett become increasingly difficult to tell apart as they bring you the final chapter of this story - featuring Geoffrey Hinton, the godfather of AI, who now wishes he'd thought harder about the consequences. Plus we hear claims that an engineer is building something rather frightening at one of the big AI companies. But what's true, what's fake, and what does any of it say about what's happening to all of us, right now? Presenter: Jamie Bartlett Series Produce...
Apr 15, 2026•28 min•Season 2Ep. 6
Jamie sits down with Dr Aseem Malhotra, the cardiologist who reaches millions through alternative media with his claims about Covid vaccines - and who is, he says, nervous about talking to the BBC. Jamie goes through his arguments carefully, with an open mind. But the harder question isn't whether Malhotra is right or wrong. It's what it means that so many people trust him more than they trust the institutions that are supposed to tell us the truth. Presenter: Jamie Bartlett Series Producer: Tom...
Apr 08, 2026•29 min•Season 2Ep. 5
In the early 2000s, a young man in New Jersey was writing thousands of fake university essays for paying students. Around the same time, financial analysts in New York were rating toxic debt as safe. And in Silicon Valley, a new business philosophy was taking hold: fake it till you make it. Jamie Bartlett asks how so many people, in so many different worlds, arrived at the same conclusion at the same time. The answer, he thinks, has a name - The Lance Armstrong Defence. A quiet, creeping logic t...
Apr 01, 2026•29 min•Season 2Ep. 4
In 1987, the same year Hulk Hogan body-slammed Andre the Giant, something else happened that would change America's relationship with the truth forever - a Washington regulator abolished the law that required broadcasters to present both sides of an argument. What followed was Morton Downey Jr, a furious chain-smoking provocateur who discovered that outrage was more compelling than accuracy. And Oprah Winfrey, who found that sincerity and emotional honesty could be just as powerful. Together, th...
Mar 25, 2026•29 min•Season 2Ep. 3
In episode two, Jamie ventures into the strange world of 1980s WWF wrestling - where performers and fans share an unspoken agreement to treat the whole spectacle as real. A shared illusion where everyone knows it's fake, but plays along because it feels true. It sounds like harmless fun. And for a while, it was. But Jamie soon wonders: what happens when an idea like that escapes the ring and changes the world? Credits: Presenter: Jamie Bartlett Series Producer: Tom Pooley Sound Design: Rob Speig...
Mar 18, 2026•29 min•Season 2Ep. 2
Jamie Bartlett is not Steven Bartlett. People mix them up more than you might think - but there is an important difference: Steven Bartlett is one of the most successful podcasters on the planet, and Jamie is not. So what does Steven have that Jamie doesn't? And what does the answer tell us about the world we now live in? In this first episode, Jamie digs into the origin stories of the UK's podcast kings - and discovers that in 2025, working out what's true, what's embellished, and what's just a...
Mar 11, 2026•29 min•Season 2Ep. 1
Have you noticed that more and more of the world feels, well, fake? Online there's a daily avalanche of dubious advice and information - about health, money, success, happiness - much of it delivered with total confidence and little regard for evidence. There's the fabricated reviews, inflated metrics and synthetic content. Influencers present themselves as authorities. The 'fake it till you make it' mantra has hardened into the business model. Everything is now content. Performed for likes, not...
Mar 04, 2026•2 min•Season 2Ep. 1
On 30th September 2022 a coroner in London finds that Molly Russell "...died from an act of self-harm while suffering from depression and the negative effects of online content." The finding is a global first. Social media is ruled to have contributed to the death of a child. In San Francisco, around the same time, a strange story is unfolding inside Twitter HQ. Ever since Donald Trump's account was suspended on twitter, tensions have been building around what is and isn't allowed on platforms. ...
Mar 25, 2024•32 min•Season 1Ep. 8
Jamie Bartlett travels to Minnesota to meet Abrham Meareg Amare. The young academic is seeking asylum in the States following the murder of his father in Ethiopia in 2021. In December 2022, Abrham became the lead complainant in a $2 billion lawsuit against Meta. Abrham believes that company is partly responsible for the death of his dad - a renowned chemistry professor - who was slandered and doxxed on Facebook, before being shot outside his home. Abrham says he reported the posts multiple times...
Mar 18, 2024•31 min•Season 1Ep. 7
In 2018, the CEOs of our most popular social media companies are standing at a crossroad. After political outcry over Russian interference in the 2016 election and fallout from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, tech leaders have a decision to make. They need to come up with ways of making their platforms safer. One route is a radical overhaul of the entire business model. The other is the biggest digital clean-up operation ever attempted, spanning hundreds of langauges and countries. Which path w...
Mar 11, 2024•31 min•Season 1Ep. 6
One of the strange things about our new media universe, is how innocuous decisions taken in Silicon Valley - turning a dial, or adding a few lines of code to increase engagement - can change your life. In 2016, Instagram introduced a new way of looking at content: the non-chronological feed. Now, instead of seeing what your friends were posting in the order they were posting it, an algorithm brought you stuff based on search history, likes, and interactions. That’s how tech engineers saw things ...
Mar 04, 2024•29 min•Season 1Ep. 5
2016 is a big election year. But something is going very wrong online. Journalists in America and the Philippines start to notice something strange going on online. In Manila, Maria Ressa - the editor of online news site, Rappler - discovers a sock puppet network of social media accounts, all pushing for the election of a strong leader. Someone like Rodrigo Duterte. Maria is suspicious. She makes an urgent call to Facebook. In Veles, in Macedonia, a young man called 'Marco' starts writing fake a...
Feb 26, 2024•31 min•Season 1Ep. 4
The tech pioneers were right: all this connectivity and sharing is creating a new age of freedom and democracy. A global consciousness. Arab Spring, Barack Obama – both fuelled by social media - make the possibilities feel limitless. But, just as the dream to connect everyone is being realised - at the height of technological optimism - everything starts to fall apart. Producer: Caitlin Smith Sound Designer: Eloise Whitmore Mix: Gav Murchie Composer: Jeremy Warmsley Story Consultant: Kirsty Will...
Feb 19, 2024•29 min•Season 1Ep. 3
From the rubble of the dot com crash, an ambitious young Harvard student with a passion for hacking and love of Roman emperors, sets up an exciting new website. Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook is an instant hit on college campuses. Soon it attracts the attention of Silicon Valley’s most successful - but controversial - venture capitalist, Peter Thiel. The company starts to scale up. But there’s one problem - how is it going to make money? Contributors: Roger McNamee, author of Zucked: Waking up to th...
Feb 12, 2024•29 min•Season 1Ep. 2
For years something strange has been happening online, but most of us have no idea what’s really going on. Ethnic conflict in Myanmar. A chemistry professor is killed in Ethiopia. A teenager dies in her bedroom in London. A mob storms the Capitol in Washington DC. And that’s the moment that catches Jamie Bartlett’s eye. A few days after the riot, on January 9th 2021, the outgoing leader of the United States is suspended on social media. First Twitter, (renamed X), and then Facebook. A President ...
Feb 05, 2024•29 min•Season 1Ep. 1
It all started with a crazy idea to realise a hippie dream of building a “global consciousness”. The plan was to build a connected world, where everyone could access everyone and everything all the time; to overthrow the old gatekeepers and set information free. But social media didn’t turn out that way. Instead of setting information free – a new digital elite conquered the world and turned themselves into the most powerful people on the planet. Now, they get to decide what billions of us see e...
Jan 29, 2024•3 min•Season 1Ep. 1
