Mark Zuckerberg has a vision for the future -- that in a few years, we’ll be living our digital lives in a blend of augmented and virtual reality. The metaverse. To pursue that vision, Zuckerberg’s renamed his entire company and invested billions of dollars in a bid to make Meta the leader of the next tech platform. In our season finale: what are the chances his bet pays off, and why it would give Meta more power than ever.
The news to know for Wednesday, August 31st, 2022!
We'll tell you about the latest development in the legal battle over classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.
Also, an urgent and risky mission for inspectors in Ukraine trying to protect a nuclear power plant.
Plus, a potentially record-breaking heatwave building across the American west, how brain surgery could help prevent serious binge eating, and the film festival jam-packed with Oscar hopefuls that kicks off today.
From the time he was a child, Colin O’Brady knew he wanted to climb Mount Everest. It was a childhood dream that easily could have fallen by the wayside as a result of the demands of adulthood.
Today, at the age of 37, O’Brady has climbed Everest not once, but twice.
O’Brady’s passion to accomplish what others say is impossible led him to become the first man to walk across Antarctica solo and unaided. As a professional adventurer, O’Brady has crossed Drake Passage, a notoriously dangerous section of ocean between South America and Antarctica, in a rowboat; climbed the tallest peaks on all seven continents; and represented the United States in international triathlon competitions.
Adventure is a way to “unlock the human potential that I think that we all have inside of us,” O’Brady says.
But there was a day and time when he would not have dreamed he would be inspiring the world through his exploits.
When he was in his early 20s, O’Brady set out on a trip to see parts of the world he had never experienced. While in Thailand, he suffered an accident and was burned so badly on his legs that doctors were not sure he would ever walk normally again.
Sitting at his bedside in a hospital in Thailand, O’Brady’s mother challenged him to set a goal. He told her he wanted to run a triathlon.
“You should start training now," he remembers his mother telling him, even while he was bandaged from the waist down. But taking his mother's advice to pursue a dream, he started lifting weights in bed.
Eighteen months later, O’Brady won the Chicago Triathlon.
His stories of grit, courage, and advice on how to overcome the roadblocks in our lives to achieve our dreams are featured in his new book, “The 12-Hour Walk: Invest One Day, Conquer Your Mind, and Unlock Your Best Life.” His success as an athlete and adventurer has earned him sponsorships and speaking opportunities around the world.
O’Brady joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to share how he discovered one practical step that can move anyone closer to accomplishing his or her goals in life.
On Aug. 22, Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, or NIAID, and chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden, announced he would retire from the government in December.
“There will be meaningful investigations that will uncover meaningful information that especially has to answer the question, after the Obama administration ordered the ending, the ceasing, of gain-of-function research in 2014, by whose authority did it begin again? Where did it start again?” Deace told "The Daily Signal Podcast.”
Deace said the lasting lesson from Fauci’s tenure and “Faucism" is that "never again can this kind of singular power be placed in an unelected official or an agency that's unelected and not directly accountable to the people. Period, end of sentence.”
The host of "The Steve Deace Show" on BlazeTV anticipates Republicans will control at least one house of Congress in 2023, and that the origins of COVID-19 and how agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will be held accountable.
“They won't have a lot of meaningful fights, and so they need to, I think, feed the ecosystem something,” Deace said. “... They will do some meaningful investigating of NIH; NIAID, that's Fauci's department; and NIH under, I mean, Francis Collins, what went on in terms of CDC under both Robert Redfield and now Rochelle Walensky.”
He predicts Fauci and other public health officials who guided COVID-19 policies will have a legacy of being “authoritarians” for consistently doubling down on ineffective policies.
“It's not that they were just doing gain-of-function. They were doing it specifically to measure spillover potential,” Deace said of the federal funding that found its way to the Wuhan lab in China. “... They wanted to figure out what would cause one of these viruses to jump from an animal to a human. They were provoking that outcome in the lab. So, it's not just how dangerous gain-of-function is, but the functionality they were testing in and of itself was dangerous.”
Author Emma Donoghue "seem to enjoy the stimulus of going to an entirely new place." That's precisely what she does in her new book 'Haven'; it's about three Irish monks in the middle ages who choose to live a life of isolation on a rocky island. In an interview with Ari Shapiro, Donoghue explains why she has recurrent themes of isolation and faith in her stories.
Do worms feel pain? How do otters experience the world? What are those pink appendages on the face of the star-nosed mole? We answer all these questions and more in this quiz show episode of Short Wave. Scientist in Residence Regina G. Barber and producer Margaret Cirino go head-to-head answering questions based on science writer Ed Yong's new book, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us.
Are you reading a new fascinating science-themed book? Let us know which one at shortwave@npr.org.
On this episode of The Federalist Radio Hour, Federalist Culture Editor Emily Jashinsky and Federalist Managing Editor Madeline Osburn discuss what the 2022 MTV Video Music Awards mean for U.S. culture and politics.
Ravi and Rikki start by unpacking the internet’s hottest new buzzword: quiet quitting. Then they move on to Mark Zuckerberg’s long sitdown with Joe Rogan, a heated fight over equity in admissions at a prestigious Virginia high school, the unredacted revelations from the Mar-a-Lago affidavit, and Novak Djokovic sitting out the U.S. Open over his vaccination
David Cicilline is one half of Rhode Island’s two-member delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives, and while he may have been sent to D.C. by a small state, his contributions to the impeachments of Donald J. Trump were huge. Cicilline discusses his new book, House On Fire: Fighting for Democracy in the Age of Political Arson, and about growing up as the son of a criminal defense attorney who occasionally represented the mob, (and did so very well), and how his father’s work shaped his sense of justice. Also, why we don’t eat dogs, but we do eat pigs. And a guest Spiel from Dan Savage, host of the Savage Lovecast, about the word “women.”
Produced by Joel Patterson and Corey Wara
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Former Pakistani Prime Minister Imram Khan is touring the country assailing what he believes is U.S. intervention in domestic affairs as he seeks new political power. Sahar Khan explains why the U.S. shouldn't wave off Imram Khan's growing popularity in a nuclear-armed country.
