In this episode, I answer a few questions from a reader. Enjoy the show notes, which are helpful when discussing particular works of art.

Welcome everyone who came from’s recommendation. He has a lot of good ideas, but I particularly like his articulation of Luxury Beliefs, such as when someone in a gated community says, “Defund the pol…

The above is what “Snake Cult of Consciousness” yields when run through an AI slop meme generator. Not entirely bad. But alas, I have been beaten to the punch:

I am in awe at how dense myths can be. The Fall of Adam and Eve occupies just a few pages in Genesis, and yet it richly captures what it would be like to wake up to one’s role as an agent—the Knowledg…

Brian Kulis is a professor of Machine Learning at Boston University (and my former adviser). He has also worked in industry on the crack team responsible for Amazon’s “wake” word. We discuss the histo…

Mungo Manic is a pseudo-anonymous researcher and commentator on X who fell down the rabbit hole of Australian prehistory. His posts have drawn attention to how identity politics and cultural sensitivi…

Within the decade, millions will solicit life advice from personal chatbots that know them better than they know themselves. Current technology is changing many parts of therapy, from onboarding asses…

A language model can learn a lot about language from the streets, so to speak. It is trained on terabytes of PubMed articles, YouTube transcripts, and reddit comments. But it doesn’t know how to behav…

Most of the feedback I got on the Snake Cult of Consciousness was on the pharmacology of venom. The first was from someone who ostensibly works with snake venom:

I’d like to add a third postulate to Galton’s Lexical Hypothesis: