Podcast Episodes

How This Trippy Image Started A Massive Conspiracy Theory

This week, Jason explains the conspiracy theory circulating behind a trippy stock image that went viral after the White House Correspondents’ Dinner—…

2 months, 1 week ago

Government Hacking Tools Are Now in Criminals' Hands (with Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai)

This week Joseph talks to Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, a journalist at TechCrunch. Lorenzo has possibly the deepest understanding of one of the wil…

2 months, 2 weeks ago

How Algorithms Make Us Feel Bad and Weird

This week Sam unpacks how social media algorithms manipulate our emotions around everything from engagement rings to wedding dresses to babies, and w…

2 months, 2 weeks ago

Why Journalists Are Leaving Big Media (with Maddy Myers)

This week, Sam is joined by Maddy Myers, editor-in-chief of Mothership. She’s also a co-host of the video games podcast Triple Click. 

Maddy launche…

2 months, 3 weeks ago

How the FBI Extracted Deleted Signal Messages

We start this week with Joseph’s story on the inherent friction between secure chat apps like Signal and the phone they’re running on. Incoming messa…

2 months, 3 weeks ago

How the Internet Became Hell (with Whitney Phillips)

‘The Ambivalent Intent’ and ‘The Shadow Gospel’ author Whitney Phillips on how online got so bad

Why does the internet feel like it’s getting worse…

2 months, 4 weeks ago

Wildlife Cops Are Searching AI Cameras for ICE

This week we start with Jason’s story about how wildlife cops are doing Flock lookups for ICE. It shows that ICE is gaining access to this sort of in…

3 months ago

The Lawyer Fighting Government Surveillance for 30 Years (With EFF's Cindy Cohn)

This week Jason brings you an interview he did with The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s executive director Cindy Cohn, who recently announced she wo…

3 months ago

Inside the AI Slop Propaganda Wars

This week Matthew Gault joins us to discuss his article about Iran’s AI slop and LEGO-focused propaganda, and why the creators chose LEGO. After the …

3 months, 1 week ago

The Journalist Who Tracked Epstein Island Visitors’ Phones

This week Joseph talks to Dhruv Mehrotra, a journalist and technologist at Bloomberg. Before that, Dhruv was at WIRED, where you probably saw a ton o…

3 months, 1 week ago