NetHeads

NetHeads is a Smodcast production about technology, though the technology usually shows up halfway through a story. Will Wilkins is the lead voice, and he tends to back into a subject rather than announce it. In '421: Hack and Attacked', the story is a rough stretch in which he needed vital information from his mother's accounts. What unsettled him was how easily banking, investment, retirement and Social Security records came within reach once he had the right tools. The episode signs off with a plain 'keep your digital self protected'. AI runs through more than one recent episode, and not comfortably. '420: AI Outperformed Experts on This One Problem' starts from an uneasy admission: a problem more than a decade old, one that two very sharp people could not crack, was finally fixed by AI. '422: We're Already Living in Project Hail Mary' takes a film that plainly hit hard and reads it as an allegory for humanity working with a non-human entity, Rocky on screen and AI in real life. The conversation then argues that AI art and writing depend on the human work they draw from, using a hypothetical new episode of Friends as the test case, and borrows Dr. Malcolm's line about being so excited they could that nobody stopped to ask if they should. Will describes his own relationship with AI as awkward. '419: It's All Built on Sand' turns to creators, with the warning that nobody owns an audience living on someone else's platform. The news peg is TikTok passing to an American ownership group that includes Oracle, weighed against what became of ex-Twitter. Trent Hunsaker is the regular second voice. His short reactions, clarifying questions and jokes give the monologue something to push against, and he brings his own material too, like the mistakes he hears left in finished, published audiobooks. The chair rotates: on '417: Pegging My Wall' it is Tony Abdullah, and the talk wanders from filament choices to a 3D printer's extruder sprouting an ugly glob, with a detour through Punky Brewster. Gear is never far away, whether it is Adobe Podcast cleaning up raw audio or a pointed complaint about people holding clip-on lav mics like handheld microphones. Pop culture sits right beside the tech, and '418: Great TV, Bad Capes & Weird 3D Prints' includes a shared bafflement about the MCU, Wonder Man and Sam Rockwell's Hammer. The rituals give it texture: a 'System activate' intro, a 'transmission incoming from the big giant head' line, and a 'resume normal functions in three, two, one' sign-off that occasionally gets fumbled and retaken on tape. Expect strong language and blunt political asides alongside the practical advice. '421: Hack and Attacked' is the clearest place to start, since it has the whole method in one sitting: a personal crisis, a useful security warning and a long detour into microphones.