Shell Game

This week, we’re replaying the inaugural episode of More Perfect (first aired in 2016) we explore three little words embedded in the 8th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution: “cruel and unusual.” America has long wrestled with this concept in the context of our strongest punishment ...  Show more

In 1973, a massive manhunt in New York's Adirondack Mountains ended when police captured a man named Robert Garrow. And that’s when this story really gets started.In this episode, that we first released in 2016, we consider a string of barbaric crimes by a hated man, and the atto ...  Show more

What would happen if you created a digital copy of yourself, powered by AI, and set it loose in the world? Evan Ratliff, longtime tech journalist, decided to find out. He combined a clone of his voice, an AI chatbot, and a phone line—many phone lines, actually—into what are calle ...  Show more

Evan pushes the experiment one step further, sending his AI voice agent to talk to his closest friends and family — his buddies, his daughters, his dad. With their alternately joyful, skeptical, and painful reactions to meeting an AI version of him, he tries to come to terms with ...  Show more

Robert, Joe and Christian call in the mailbot for yet another dose of listener feedback. Join them as they read your thoughts on everything from the uncanny valley and the Black Stone of Mecca to hook suspension and the science of guessing.