January 22, 2018
EP. 222 — How Predictive Text Gave Us A New Harry Potter Chapter
If there’s one book the entire planet wants to read right this second, it’s ‘Harry Potter and the Eighth Novel That’s As Good As The First Seven’. So far J.K. Rowling hasn’t given it to us, because she’s been TOO LAZY (and when we say “too lazy”, we mean she’s written a play and a movie franchise and adult novels and good tweets). So what if someone else could replicate her work, and write us more Potter? Also what if that writer was a machine? And what if that machine delivered utterly brilliant scene descriptions like “Ron was going to be spiders. He just was.” that made us realize how funny Harry Potter oughta be?
On this week’s episode of The Cracked Podcast, Alex Schmidt sits down with Jamie Brew, Elle O’Brien, & Mike Frederickson, a team of comedians & tech wizards from Botnik. They’ll dig into how Botnik’s predictive text technology combines with actual living breathing humans, to find fun jokes within the relentless advance of automation. They’ll also discover a digital future that might actually be worth looking forward to. And they’ll even deliver The Cracked Podcast’s first ever dramatic literary reading.
Footnotes: https://goo.gl/79Y8wT
Recent Episodes
January 26, 2020
Freedom sucks…and that is why we have to defend it. Because our democracy involves doing a lot of stuff that takes energy, takes time, and lacks that Michael Bay Quality that only a surprise missile launch can provide. So on this episode of The Cracked Podcast, Alex Schmidt and special guest Jason Pargin (who writes for Cracked as David Wong) are exploring the ways being afraid of everything (an easy action) can stop us from being free. Discover the decades-long tradition of some Americans wanting to give up everything in exchange for not needing to think, the centuries-long tradition of people inciting fake panics, and the reasonable ways you can help change things for the better.
Footnotes: https://www.cracked.com/podcast/why-fear-based-democracies-arenE28099t-free-with-jason-pargin/
January 19, 2020
How’s your local shopping mall doing? Have you checked on it lately? Swing by sometime, because its department store might’ve turned into a call center or a hospital or a go-kart track. On this episode of The Cracked Podcast, Alex Schmidt is joined by the one and only Kai Ryssdal (Marketplace, Make Me Smart) for a look at surprising, strange, and shocking stories from all over the U.S. economy. Discover an international pig flu, a 26-word statement that built the modern Internet, and more amazing ways cash is ruling everything around you. By the way, if you’re an American listener, you spent the past few years funding an astonishingly huge bailout. Surprise! Listen for details!
Footnotes: https://www.cracked.com/podcast/5-parts-u.s.-economy-that-are-stranger-than-you-think
January 12, 2020
Movies, TV, gaming: three things that are theoretically a waste of time. Oh sure, they deliver value in the art sense, and comfort in the goofing-off sense. But what if they’re more valuable than that? What if consuming shows and playing video games (accidentally) turns people into real-life heroes? On this episode of The Cracked Podcast, Alex Schmidt is joined by comedians/writers Caitlin Gill and Alex Watt for a look at the surprising number of times that exact thing happened. They’ll explore stories of regular people who saved a life thanks to skills gained randomly from cartoons, sitcoms, ‘World Of Warcraft’, and more silly entertainment.
Footnotes: https://www.cracked.com/podcast/9-times-pop-culture-accidentally-taught-people-to-save-lives/