PJ Vogt

When I started out in radio before the podcast boom, the big semi-recent invention everyone was still talking about was just editing audio on computers.

The veterans who I learned from loved to talk about how just a few years before,

interviews were still being recorded onto actual physical tape.

And they'd tell me how they used to edit that tape by cutting it with a razor blade and sticky taping it back together.

It had all been so different, so much less efficient, so recently.

They were still marveling at it.

For me, a few years later, the equivalent change was auto-transcriptions.

The weeks of my life spent typing up transcripts of other people's interviews or my own, just gone.

And now I was the one telling the young producers about how it used to be.

Every industry has these moments.

Although technological change, as we know, is not always that good.

Somebody recently told me one of these stories where a small tech breakthrough opened the door to innovations in the fields of professional violence and corruption.

You're going to get book tour fever.

This is Joseph Cox.

He just published a book called Dark Wire.

Joseph's a tech reporter, but he's not one of the normal ones.

His work won't tell you how many more camera lenses to expect on the next iPhone.

He does not dissect the latest outrageous tweet from Elon Musk.

His interests lie elsewhere.

And what's your relationship with the criminal underworld?