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A combination of natural disasters and cyber-attacks has shown how fragile our way of life is. Are we heading for chaos? Or will the better side of human nature prevail? Links: https://www.wired.com/story/puerto-rico-hurricane-maria-recovery/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/a-year-in-the-dark/ Episode Excerpt: Episode Transcript These shows are dictated to and transcribed by machines, and hurriedly edited by a human. Apologies for the minor typos and grammar flaws. Recent natural disasters have started to show how delicate the web of technology that holds the world together actually is, reckons Kulturpop’s Matt Armitage. But what if those natural disasters were followed up by cyberattacks from a hostile nation? On that happy note, it’s time to ask Matt to explain. Where are we starting, natural disasters or cyber-attacks? •This is one of those weeks where a bunch of stuff comes together. •Listened to a recent episode of the 99% invisible podcast earlier this week which focused on Puerto Rico’s

With Amy Winehouse set to tour the world in 2019, are we stumbling towards a future of zombie stars? Artists frozen in time and doomed by AI and CGI to repeat their hits for infinity. Links: Roy Orbison, Hologram Tour https://youtu.be/1Lem-iefSm0 Episode Excerpt: These shows are dictated to and transcribed by machines, and hurriedly edited by a human. Apologies for the minor typos and grammar flaws. Sometimes it feels more like an episode of the X-Files or one of Infowars’ crazier moments when you’re talking to Kulturpop’s Matt Armitage. Today, I believe we’re talking about technology and deceased pop stars. That’s right: it’s the singing dead. It’s time to Mattsplain. I can only assume we’re talking about Amy Winehouse, here? •Yes. In case any of you missed it, last week there was a story that Amy Winehouse, who died in 2011, will be embarking on her first world tour since her death. •And, in case you’re wondering how that works, it’s not a bunch of fans sitting around her casket while her albums are

The penalties for bullying and trolling should be obvious. But how should we be punished for pretending to be on holiday, or holding up everyone’s dinner for a food shot? Written on a tablet, these are Matt’s Social Commandments.

Who controls your mind? With mind-reading technology already showing incredible accuracy, is it time to ask who owns our thoughts? Produced by Jeff Sandhu for BFM Episode Excerpt: You’re already making us sound like machines… •We are machines. •But we’re thinking, feeling, sensing and self-determining machines. •We’re conscious. •You can press a button or issue a command that will wake Siri or Alexa, but the best those devices are is a one-dimensional representation of who and what we are. •We haven’t found a way to mimic or replicates that consciousness. •Yet. And now we can? This is another one of your killer AI shows? •There will be plenty of AI. •It’s weird, isn’t it? •I talk about 3-D printing twice in a year and I have an obsession. •We could literally rename this show Matt and Jeff talk about AI and nobody would bat an eyelid. Or pulse a chip? •Precisely. To answer your previous question, no we don’t have conscious AI. •But strangely, and I expect somewhat creepily to some of our listeners, we can

Technology companies, like people, don’t always make smart decisions. When they make truly disastrous ones, those are the mic drop moments. Today’s show takes a leap through the Portal. Produced by Jeff Sandhu for BFM Episode Transcript: What’s on your mind? •Facebook. They’ve done something silly, again. •And this time, it’s a genuine mic drop moment. The Portal? •Back in 2012 Mark Zuckerberg told the world that Facebook was not in the business of making hardware. •Jump to October 2018 and FB is making hardware. Specifically, a voice activated communication screen that works rather like Amazon’s Echo devices. To be fair, Facebook has been in the hardware game for a few years, since it bought over Oculus, the Virtual Reality specialist. •Yes, but that was as much about bringing FB up to speed with VR in general. •Not because the company wanted to become the world leader in moleman goggles. The Portal device has been on the cards for a long time. Reports suggest it was delayed for 6 months. •And the reas

Today Matt & Jeff go back to basics to look at CRISPR and the Blockchain and ask: What are they and how do they work? It’s time to Mattsplain. Episode Excerpt You’re looking very decomposed today. Why’s that? •I don't really spend much time in this temporal reality. Of course you don’t. You spend most of your time propping up a bar and practising your lies. Why don’t you tell us about black holes? •You are a little bit grumpy this morning, aren’t you? They aren't lies so much as alternative truths •As for the black holes, It’s really very straightforward. •You look at the velocity of the light coming from a dying star. •Then you account for the friction of gravity, and the density of the planet’s gasses •The you account for how they multiply as the star is pulled into the hole and the matter is compressed. Did you just make that up? •Yes. I’m very good at pretending to know what I’m talking about. •Usually, if I'm speaking it's a fairly good indication that I'm lying. Once ag

Technology and a little bit of positive thinking could vastly improve your mental and physical state. How? It’s time to Mattsplain. Show Excerpt: On last week’s show we talked about technologies that are meeting evolution head-on and trying to tip the balance in our favour. This week we’re in similarly choppy waters as we enter the world of the mind. In particular, the mind of Kulturpop’s Matt Armitage, an environment so hostile that it has been known to drive MRI scanners insane. It’s time to Mattsplain. You have another new word you want to introduce this week. •It’s not specifically about the direction of the show, but while we’re on mental health issues. •We’re all familiar with terms like sociopath and psychopath. •Many of us work with one or the other. I know you do Jeff… Are you talking about yourself? •I still maintain that that doctor is the real psychopath, and he has no business diagnosing anyone. •Would I be doing this show if you weren’t all my playthings? •Not everyone can have empathy. Noth

Science is building an impressive toolkit that is enabling us to fight back against Evolution’s darker urges. How? It’s time to Mattsplain. Episode Excerpt: You made up a word for today’s show… •Yes. We’re all about the clickbait on this show. •Hold tight for 7 reasons why evolution will kill you. Really? •No, of course not. •But we are talking about evolution. We're going to talk about the ways that Evolution targets us and some other ways in which we are starting to fight back. You’re not going to talk about the giant ants again are you? I keep telling you that Them! is a 1950s B-movie not a documentary… •You clearly don’t spend enough time on the Internet. •Look at the way that the local wildlife population has survived the Chernobyl disaster. •Is it really so far-fetched that radioactive tests after WW2 resulted in giant ants that roamed the New Mexico desert neighbouring towns? •You’ve got to start thinking more clearly Jeff. Forget your obsession with the lamestream media. •Take off the blinkers

In a world where money really does grow from trees, are we ready to throw it away and embrace a completely cashless society? Who controls the money if we do? It’s time to Mattsplain.

Wipe your feet and mind your head as we enter a universe where mindless code decides whether we live or die. A dystopia on your doorstep? It’s time to Mattsplain. Show Links: https://medium.com/iotforall/the-difference-between-artificial-intelligence-machine-learning-and-deep-learning-3aa67bff5991 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/aug/29/coding-algorithms-frankenalgos-program-danger Excerpt: About three months ago, Kulturpop’s Matt Armitage claimed that we will soon be living in the Age of Amazon. A world ruled by mega-companies who control every facet of global trade and our economic activity. Has he had a change of heart? Has the algorithm running his thought process short-circuited? To find out, we’ll have to let him Mattsplain. Now, we’re not actually in the studio together today. •No. Your new studios have this really amazing facial recognition software. •And they won’t let me in. I’ve had this problem for years, but for some reason facial recognition software identifies me as a basket of

It’s Silly Season. The time of the year when the news goes on holiday. Which means it’s time to catch up on some of the really cool tech and science stories we missed like fiery webcams and livestreamed fatbergs. Matt's Notes: This is the quiet time of the year for news and developments. It’s been such a crazy year that we’ve had a lot to catch up on. This week, I’m going back to some of the smaller stories, such as the discovery of a new shape, the scutoid, and its implications for building human organs. And why fatbergs, for all their colossal disgustingness, may be the cultural symbol of our times. On with the episode! Transcript Excerpt: Are we in the Mattsplained equivalent of a desert? •That is normally the case most years. •We get to a point where, sometime during July August and really isn’t anything to talk about. •This is been such a tumultuous and topsy-turvy year that the stories have kept on coming. •And as you said, this year I’ve had more to rant about than I’ve had time to rant. •The s

Are we heading for a one world order of powerful corporations? Will commercial brands dictate the popular culture of the future? It might not be what you expect. It’s time to Mattsplain. Episode Excerpt: As the world becomes increasingly wired, we often hear that culture is becoming more uniform and homogenised. Are we really heading for a one world order? Someone who’s not sure, but is pretty certain that it may not be the one world we imagine, is Kulturpop’s Matt Armitage. It’s time he Mattsplained. Is it true you’ve had Jeff locked up for the crime of sarcasm? •In a fake news world those of us with power can bend the judiciary to our will. •Last week, Jeff said some horrible things about me. They may have been true but I choose to call them untrue. •So, he’s way this week: I’ve had him locked up for a week to teach him to be more polite. I assume this has some link to the show? •You know what they say about assuming. •But yes, there is a link. •Nobody seems to know which way is up, right now. •True

Biotech conjures images of cloning, lab meat and mind control. But biotechnology has been fuelling humankind’s progress for thousands of years. Today we look past the fear and celebrate the promise. It’s time to Mattsplain. It’s time to Mattsplain.⠀ Excerpt: Biotech is one of those words that’s often thrown around – like blockchain – but that mean very little to most people. •That analogy with blockchain is a really good one. •People often imagine that topics like biotech and block chain are easily definable, like say artificial intelligence or the Internet. •Biotechnology especially is extremely broad. •That’s one of the reasons that we don’t talk about it here too often. •It tends to pop up more often on our geeks squawk show, because there will be a news item about a specific piece of biotech but that technology may not be big enough for us to consider on this show. Presumably that means that there is some enormous breakthrough in the Biotech sphere did you want to talk about today? •That would be the w

Today we’re going to speed through a bunch of the questions that Matt gets asked most often. What do the Facebook and Twitter share price falls mean? Should I invest in crypto currency? Where’s my ray gun? It’s time to Mattsplain. Excerpt from Transcript: Because he’s got a one track mind – a recent show on GPS being a good example – we usually tackle one topic at a time on Mattsplained. That generally means there are more things we can’t cover than we can talk about. Today we’re going speed read our way through some of the topics Kulturpop’s Matt gets asked on a daily basis. It sounds a little less depressing than what we do most weeks. It’s time to Mattsplain. Will today be less depressing than what we do most weeks? •No. Covering more topics means I can scare even more people than usual. •I’m hoping it’ll be like watching a Tony Robbins lecture backwards. •You’ll feel a lot more scared and insecure by the end. •I’m going to jump straight in and ask the first question myself, because I’ve been peppered

Bad ideas. Technology creates at least as many of them as it does good ideas. What happens when the bad ideas slip through and the good ones drift away? It’s time to Mattsplain. Excerpt from this episode: Problems. The things that science and technology are supposed to solve. That the solutions are themselves problems is not an original thought – which is good, because Kulturpop’s Matt Armitage isn’t very good at originality – but are we slipping into an era of bad ideas with great execution? I don’t know. I’m not sure I care. But someone does and he’s here to Mattsplain. You’ve been a bit under the weather this week? •That’s right. Nothing major – bit of a cold. •But it does mean there’s a couple of small changes to the show. •Instead of 20 mins of unrelenting misery punctuated by a couple of jokes, this week we just have the misery. •My SOH is the first thing to go when I’m feeling sick Play Clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0QWspt6PLE (0m06s to end) •Well, that’s all the production crew gone. •Jeff

It’s easy to jump on the new tech is better tech bandwagon. But what happens when that new tech is a little bit older and doesn’t perform as well as the technology it replaced? It’s time to Mattsplain. Excerpt from this episode: If there’s one thing that we can be sure of on this show, it’s that the future is always better. Every week, Kulturpop’s Matt Armitage pops by to tell us that while the sun may not come up tomorrow, it’ll be back eventually. Even if humankind is dead by then. So, why, you may wonder, is he suddenly declaring that the old is better than the new? It’s time to Mattsplain. Have you finally turned into that crabby old man obsessed with the good old days? •Yup. Things were good back then. •Back then, kids didn’t to go to school. •There was no point - most of them were dead from disease or stuck in chimneys or looms before they reached their teens. •You didn’t have to lock your doors because you couldn’t afford anything anyone would want to steal. Weren’t people more neighbourly then?

Science. It’s tricky stuff. Just as you think you’ve come to grips with nature’s mysteries, a quantum physicist fires you into another dimension. Should we stop worrying and let Schrödinger’s cat out of the bag? It’s time to Mattsplain.

Is Star Wars undermining the Internet? Has hate speech undermined the mainstream? Could a licence to surf could bring us back from the Dark Side? It’s time to Mattsplain. Excerpt: Masculine inferiority. It’s something that Kulturpop’s Matt Armitage has been accused of all his life. But until last week, he thought it was just him. Now, the massed ranks of Star Wars Ultras have broken cover to try and force their views, Empire-like, across the Internet. Confused? You will be. It’s time to Mattsplain. The fanboys should be happy today: we’re talking about Star Wars. •Less happy than you might imagine. •The fan boys very much in our crosshairs this week, as well as is everyone else who thinks the Internet is the sole preserve of their point of view. •Everyone knows that the Internet is reserved for my point of view. •And when that POV is interrupted, I have to conjure up these 20 minutes sermons to bring everyone to heel. You’re really full of yourself, aren’t you? •I’m happy to see that your holiday has im

Does society have the tech visionaries it deserves, or are we looking in all the wrong places? It’s time to Mattsplain.

Is technology already beyond our control? Is Skynet waiting for its opportunity to strike? Is humanity facing techno obsolescence? Only the machines know. It’s time to Mattsplain.