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...
Jun 04, 2015•1 hr 18 min
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 ...
May 28, 2015•57 min
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.
May 22, 2015•41 min
*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...
May 15, 2015•54 min
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 ...
May 08, 2015•1 hr 4 min
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.
Apr 30, 2015•57 min
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.
Apr 23, 2015•1 hr 1 min
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.
Apr 16, 2015•1 hr 14 min
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.
Mar 07, 2015•30 min
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.
Mar 07, 2015•28 min
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.
Dec 24, 2014•29 min
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.
Dec 12, 2014•13 min
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.
Dec 07, 2014•42 min
