AI Alignment
329 episodes · Page 5 of 14
#4404: How a Government Admin Became a Kosher Food Icon
The jacket-and-tie reviewer who built 200K followers without free meals or hashtag strategies.
#4338: The Hidden Skill Most AI Models Still Fail At
Why do even top AI models still accidentally paste your questions into the output? A deep dive into a missing benchmark.
#4301: How to Channel Trump's Rhetorical Style (Without the Baggage)
Reverse-engineering the linguistic mechanisms behind commanding attention — extracted for everyday use.
#4248: How Libertarianism Found Its Label and Its Fault Lines
The surprising leftist origins of "libertarian" and the Hayek-Rothbard split that still defines the movement.
#4208: The Awkward Honesty of AI Attribution
Why admitting AI helped feels like a confession — and what emerging norms actually work.
#4170: Obfuscation as Risk Management with AI
How AI can protect whistleblowers and trauma survivors by intelligently obscuring identities while preserving story integrity.
#4058: Can AI Agents Ever Be Truly Social?
Text-based AI simulations look social, but do they understand anything? We explore the gap between pattern-matching and real social intelligence.
#4046: Why People Type in All Caps (It's Not Always Anger)
Three very different groups use all caps — and misreading their intent costs us real trust.
#4044: How to Sound Like a Bot on Purpose
When AI detectors flag clean human writing as machine-made, sounding like a bot becomes a survival skill.
#3954: The Surprising Chemistry of Road Paint
Road markings are optical devices engineered to survive 10,000 trucks a day. Here's how they actually work.
#3900: Why Zero-Side-Effect Drugs Are Impossible
Side effects aren’t design flaws—they’re physics. Here’s why no drug can ever be perfectly safe for everyone.
#3852: The Hidden Workforce Behind AI's Intelligence
Behind every "intelligent" AI system are millions of workers in Kenya, India, and the Philippines doing repetitive tasks for poverty wages.
#3751: Source-Restricted vs. Open Retrieval: How to Lock Down Your LLM
When should an LLM be locked to specific documents, and when should it search the web? A practical framework for grounding decisions.
#3724: How the Pope's Letter on AI Actually Works
Unpacking the Pope’s new encyclical on AI: what it is, how Catholics interpret it, and why it matters beyond the Church.
#3718: AI Babysitters Already Exist—What We Learned
Tens of thousands of Chinese families already use robot babysitters. What actually happened, and what's next?
#3717: What Even Is Luxury?
Is luxury in the object or in your head? A deep dive into the meaning of high-end goods.
#3658: How Reddit Built Guardrails for Anonymity
Reddit didn't solve harassment by killing anonymity. It built friction, reputation systems, and distributed governance.
#3595: How DeepSeek Feels More Open Than Western AI
Why Chinese AI models sometimes feel less censored on American political topics than American models do.
#3557: Does Your DNA Change Over a Lifetime?
DNA isn't a fixed blueprint. It mutates with age, and fathers pass those edits to their children.
#3422: How Rival Labs Reverse-Engineer a New AI Model in Hours
Inside the organized frenzy when a closed-source model drops — and how competitors map its every weakness.
#3392: Inside the AI Targeting Pipeline: Who Really Picks the Targets?
How AI finds, fixes, and nominates military targets — and why "human oversight" may be more ceremonial than real.
#3361: What Three Kids' Shows Reveal About AI's Impact on Childhood
Three iconic shows, three theories of childhood — and what happens when AI replaces human creators.
#3322: Desk Pets: Local AI on Your Desktop
Are desk pets useful tools or expensive Tamagotchis? We break down the local AI, privacy tradeoffs, and psychology behind these devices.
#3304: Rumble's Cloud Business: Video Site or Hosting Giant?
Rumble's $2.1B valuation is driven by cloud infrastructure, not conspiracy videos. Here's what it actually is.