Podcasts about Ontology

This commemorative episode of the PAGES POD marks the one-year anniversary of our Fireside Chat at Santa Clara University and features a conversation on Black suffering, Afropessimism, and public emotion. The episode features Prof. Frank Wilderson III, Chancellor's Professor of African American Studies at University of California, Irvine, in dialogue with Assistant Professor of Philosophy Prof. Justin Clardy (SCU) and doctoral candidate Kevin Morris (UMass).The conversation examines civic indifference and the grammar of Black suffering.This is also a moment of reflection and return. Whether you joined us live or are encountering the conversation for the first time, this episode invites you to sit with the questions that remain with us long after the conversation was had.Mentioned in this episode:Civic Indifference and Black Suffering (Youtube Episode)Engendering Blackness: Slavery and the Ontology of Sexual Violence - Patrice DouglassScenes of Subjection - Saidiya HartmanBlack Skin White Masks - Frantz FanonThe Wretched of the Earth - Frantz FanonFollow us across our social media channels:IG- @PagestrgTikTok & Youtube- @PagesthereadinggroupWebsite- www.Pagestrg.com

Full article: Large Language Model-Generated Expansion of the RadLex Ontology: Application to Multinational Datasets of Chest CT Reports Could a large language model (LLM) be used as a scalable solution for expanding radiology ontologies? Tobi Folami, MD, discusses the AJR article by Lee et al. exploring a LLM for large-scale expansion of the RadLex ontology.

This is a recap of the top 10 posts on Hacker News on February 22, 2026. This podcast was generated by wondercraft.ai (00:30): How I use Claude Code: Separation of planning and executionOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47106686&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(01:57): Japanese Woodblock Print SearchOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47107781&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(03:25): Attention Media ≠ Social NetworksOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47110515&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(04:53): A Botnet Accidentally Destroyed I2POriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47106985&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(06:21): Back to FreeBSD: Part 1Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47108989&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(07:48): Palantir's secret weapon isn't AI – it's Ontology. An open-source deep diveOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47107512&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(09:16): What Is a Database Transaction?Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47110473&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(10:44): Iranian Students Protest as Anger GrowsOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47108256&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(12:12): People Loved the Dot-Com Boom. The A.I. Boom, Not So MuchOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47107819&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(13:39): U.S. Cannot Legally Impose Tariffs Using Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47108538&utm_source=wondercraft_aiThis is a third-party project, independent from HN and YC. Text and audio generated using AI, by wondercraft.ai. Create your own studio quality podcast with text as the only input in seconds at app.wondercraft.ai. Issues or feedback? We'd love to hear from you: team@wondercraft.ai

In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom podcast, host Stewart Alsop sits down with Markus Buehler, the McAfee Professor of Engineering at MIT, to explore how seemingly different systems—from proteins and music to knowledge structures and AI reasoning—share underlying patterns through hierarchy, self-organization, and scale-free networks. The conversation ranges from the limits of current AI interpolation versus true discovery (using the fire-to-fusion example), to the emergence of agent swarms and their non-linear effects, to practical questions about ontologies, knowledge graphs, and whether humans will remain necessary in the creative discovery process. Markus discusses his lab's work automating scientific discovery through AI agents that can generate hypotheses, run simulations, and even retrain themselves, while Stewart shares his own experiences building applications with AI coding agents and grapples with questions about intellectual property, material science constraints, and the future of human creativity in an AI-abundant world.Timestamps00:00 - Introduction to Marcus Buehler's work on knowledge graphs, structural grammar across proteins, music, and AI reasoning05:00 - Discussion of AI discovery versus interpolation, using fire and fusion as examples of fundamental versus incremental innovation10:00 - Language models as connective glue between agents, enabling communication despite imperfect outputs and canonical averaging15:00 - Embodiment and agency in AI systems, creating adversarial agents that challenge theories and expand world models20:00 - Emergent properties in materials and AI, comparing dislocations in metals to behaviors in agent swarms25:00 - Human role-playing and phase separation in society, parallels to composite materials and heterogeneity30:00 - Physical world challenges, atom-by-atom manufacturing at MIT.nano, limitations of lithography machines35:00 - Synthetic biology as alternative to nanotechnology, programming microorganisms for materials discovery40:00 - Intellectual property debates, commodification of AI models, control layers more valuable than model architecture45:00 - Automation of ontologies, agent self-testing, daughter's coding success at age 1150:00 - Graph theory for knowledge compression, neurosymbolic approaches combining symbolic and neural methods55:00 - Nonlinear acceleration in AI, emergence from accumulated innovations, restaurant owner embracing AI01:00:00 - Future generations possibly rejecting AI, democratization of knowledge, social media as real-time scientific discourseKey Insights1. Universal Patterns Across Disciplines: Seemingly different systems in nature—proteins, music, social networks, and knowledge itself—share fundamental structural patterns including hierarchy, self-organization, and scale-free networks. This commonality allows creative thinkers to draw insights across disciplines, applying principles from one domain to solve problems in another. As an engineer and materials scientist, Buehler has leveraged these isomorphisms to advance scientific understanding by mapping the "plumbing" of different systems onto each other, revealing hidden relationships that enable extrapolation beyond what's observable in any single domain.2. The Discovery Versus Interpolation Problem: Current AI systems, particularly large language models, excel at interpolation—recombining existing knowledge in new ways—but struggle with genuine discovery that requires fundamental rewiring of world models. Using the example of fire versus fusion, Buehler explains that an AI trained on combustion chemistry would propose bigger fires or new fuels, but couldn't conceive of fusion because that requires stepping back to more fundamental physics. True discovery demands the ability to recognize when existing theories have boundaries and to develop entirely new frameworks, something current AI architectures aren't designed to achieve due to their training objective of predicting the most likely outcome.3. The Role of Ontologies and Knowledge Graphs: While some AI researchers argue that ontologies are unnecessary because models form internal representations, Buehler advocates for explicit knowledge graphs as essential discovery tools. External ontologies provide sharp, analytical, symbolic representations that complement the fuzzy internal representations of neural networks. They enable verification of rare connections—like obscure papers that might hold key insights—which would be averaged away in standard AI training. This neurosymbolic approach combines the generalization capabilities of neural networks with the precision of formal knowledge structures, creating more powerful discovery systems.4. Emergent Properties and Agent Swarms: Just as materials science shows that collections of atoms exhibit properties impossible to predict from individual components, AI agent swarms demonstrate emergent behaviors beyond single models. When agents are incentivized not just to answer questions but to challenge each other adversarially, propose theories, and test hypotheses, they can spawn new copies of themselves and evolve understanding beyond their initial programming. This emergence isn't surprising from a materials science perspective—dislocations, grain boundaries, and other collective phenomena only appear at scale, fundamentally determining material behavior in ways unpredictable from studying just a few atoms.5. The Commoditization of Intelligence: The fundamental AI models themselves are becoming commodities, as evidenced by events like the Moldbug phenomenon where people built agents using various providers interchangeably. The real value is shifting from who has the smartest model to how models are orchestrated, integrated, and deployed. This parallels historical technology adoption patterns—just as we moved past debating who makes the best electricity to focusing on applications, AI is transitioning from a horse race over model capabilities to questions of infrastructure, energy, access speed, and agent coordination at the systems level.6. Human-AI Collaboration and Creative Control: Rather than wholesale replacement, AI enables humans to operate in an intensely creative space as orchestrators sampling from vast possibility spaces. Similar to how Buehler's 11-year-old daughter now builds sophisticated applications that would have required professional developers years ago, AI democratizes access to capabilities while humans retain the creative judgment about direction and meaning. The human role becomes curating emergence, finding rare connections, playing at the edges of knowledge, and exercising the kind of curiosity-driven exploration that AI systems lack without embodied stakes in their own survival and continuation.7. Technology as Evolutionary Inevitability: The development of AI represents not an unnatural threat but the next stage of human evolution—an extension of our innate drive to build models of ourselves and our world. From cave paintings to partial differential equations to artificial intelligence, humans continuously create increasingly sophisticated representations and tools. Attempting to stop this technological evolution is futile; instead, the focus should be on steering it ...

This is the takeaway episode with Nachiket Mehta, an experienced data leader who has lived and breathed the “shift left”. In this episode we will unpack how ontology, events and culture unlock enterprise AI. We discuss why your ontologist needs to visit the fulfillment center, how to shift data teams from afterthought to proactive partner, and why the five why's matter more than your tech stack.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is the takeaway episode with Nachiket Mehta, an experienced data leader who has lived and breathed the “shift left”. In this episode we will unpack how ontology, events and culture unlock enterprise AI. We discuss why your ontologist needs to visit the fulfillment center, how to shift data teams from afterthought to proactive partner, and why the five why's matter more than your tech stack.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Juan and Tim are back for a LIVE episode with Nachiket Mehta, an experienced data leader who has lived and breathed the “shift left”. In this episode we unpack how ontology, events and culture unlock enterprise AI. We discuss the gap between what your systems think is happening and what's actually happening on the ground and dive into real world examples: a trailer with expensive merchandise sat forgotten in a yard for weeks. $35M in delayed orders. The math added up, but nobody saw it coming. Why? Because we're obsessed with cleaning data and building dashboards, but nobody mapped the happy path vs. the exceptions actually happening on the ground. What is delivery when the customer isn't home? What's "lost in transit" versus "sitting in our own yard"? The solution? Send your ontologist to the fulfillment center. Build tiger teams. Shift your data teams left to act like software product teams. And most importantly: connect the five why's back to your OKRs, or you're just building features nobody needs.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What does it mean to think communism philosophically, and how can a political rupture be understood as an ontological transformation of the conditions of everyday life? Adam is joined by Bruno Gulli and Richard Gilman-Opalsky to discuss their book of dialogues "Communist Ontologies: An Inquiry into the Construction of New Forms of Life" out now with our comrades over at Minor Compositions. They discuss the nature of identity and difference, insurgent ontologies, and how to think of communism as an abolitionist horizon latent in struggles against oppression today. Get the book:https://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=1320 Check out Richard's latest rhythms: edgetonerecords.bandcamp.com/album/a-fierce-and-gentle-forceSupport the showSupport the podcast:Current classes at Acid Horizon Research Commons (AHRC): https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/ahrc-mainWebsite: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/Linktree: https://linktr.ee/acidhorizonAcid Horizon on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/acidhorizonpodcast Boycott Watkins Media: https://xenogothic.com/2025/03/17/boycott-watkins-statement/ Subscribe to us on your favorite podcast: https://pod.link/1512615438Merch: http://www.crit-drip.comSubscribe to us on your favorite podcast platform: https://pod.link/1512615438 LEPHT HAND: https://www.patreon.com/LEPHTHANDHappy Hour at Hippel's (Adam's blog): https://happyhourathippels.wordpress.com​Split Infinities (Craig's Substack): https://splitinfinities.substack.com/​Music: https://sereptie.bandcamp.com/ and https://thecominginsurrection.bandcamp.com/

ReferencesGuerra, DJ 2026 In PreparationThomas, R .1969. Eternity Road FoCC. Moody Blueshttps://open.spotify.com/track/13z2K32dMaQLDohef5Ndne?si=2493932acf2945f2

Ryan and Alex explore the overlap between consciousness and unseen intelligences, digging into thought forms, disembodied entities, and tulpas, ideas that suggest the mind may help create or shape non-physical realities. Drawing on Rupert Sheldrake's theory of morphic resonance, they discuss whether reality itself has memory, and whether belief, attention, and pattern play a role in encounters with the unknown.

We consider chapter 2, "Aesthetics Is the Root of All Philosophy," where Harman describes how art can help us see behind the veil to things-in-themselves. Art is "theatrical" in that it's really the spectator who is standing in like an actor for the object encountered in art. Get more at partiallyexaminedlife.com. Visit partiallyexaminedlife.com/support to get ad-free episodes and tons of bonus discussion. Sponsor: Visit functionhealth.com/PEL to get the data you need to take action for your health.

In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom Podcast, host Stewart Alsop sits down with Larry Swanson, a knowledge architect, community builder, and host of the Knowledge Graph Insights podcast. They explore the relationship between knowledge graphs and ontologies, why these technologies matter in the age of AI, and how symbolic AI complements the current wave of large language models. The conversation traces the history of neuro-symbolic AI from its origins at Dartmouth in 1956 through the semantic web vision of Tim Berners-Lee, examining why knowledge architecture remains underappreciated despite being deployed at major enterprises like Netflix, Amazon, and LinkedIn. Swanson explains how RDF (Resource Description Framework) enables both machines and humans to work with structured knowledge in ways that relational databases can't, while Alsop shares his journey from knowledge management director to understanding the practical necessity of ontologies for business operations. They discuss the philosophical roots of the field, the separation between knowledge management practitioners and knowledge engineers, and why startups often overlook these approaches until scale demands them. You can find Larry's podcast at KGI.fm or search for Knowledge Graph Insights on Spotify and YouTube.Timestamps00:00 Introduction to Knowledge Graphs and Ontologies01:09 The Importance of Ontologies in AI04:14 Philosophy's Role in Knowledge Management10:20 Debating the Relevance of RDF15:41 The Distinction Between Knowledge Management and Knowledge Engineering21:07 The Human Element in AI and Knowledge Architecture25:07 Startups vs. Enterprises: The Knowledge Gap29:57 Deterministic vs. Probabilistic AI32:18 The Marketing of AI: A Historical Perspective33:57 The Role of Knowledge Architecture in AI39:00 Understanding RDF and Its Importance44:47 The Intersection of AI and Human Intelligence50:50 Future Visions: AI, Ontologies, and Human BehaviorKey Insights1. Knowledge Graphs Combine Structure and Instances Through Ontological Design. A knowledge graph is built using an ontology that describes a specific domain you want to understand or work with. It includes both an ontological description of the terrain—defining what things exist and how they relate to one another—and instances of those things mapped to real-world data. This combination of abstract structure and concrete examples is what makes knowledge graphs powerful for discovery, question-answering, and enabling agentic AI systems. Not everyone agrees on the precise definition, but this understanding represents the practical approach most knowledge architects use when building these systems.2. Ontology Engineering Has Deep Philosophical Roots That Inform Modern Practice. The field draws heavily from classical philosophy, particularly ontology (the nature of what you know), epistemology (how you know what you know), and logic. These thousands-year-old philosophical frameworks provide the rigorous foundation for modern knowledge representation. Living in Heidelberg surrounded by philosophers, Swanson has discovered how much of knowledge graph work connects upstream to these philosophical roots. This philosophical grounding becomes especially important during times when institutional structures are collapsing, as we need to create new epistemological frameworks for civilization—knowledge management and ontology become critical tools for restructuring how we understand and organize information.3. The Semantic Web Vision Aimed to Transform the Internet Into a Distributed Database. Twenty-five years ago, Tim Berners-Lee, Jim Hendler, and Ora Lassila published a landmark article in Scientific American proposing the semantic web. While Berners-Lee had already connected documents across the web through HTML and HTTP, the semantic web aimed to connect all the data—essentially turning the internet into a giant database. This vision led to the development of RDF (Resource Description Framework), which emerged from DARPA research and provides the technical foundation for building knowledge graphs and ontologies. The origin story involved solving simple but important problems, like disambiguating whether "Cook" referred to a verb, noun, or a person's name at an academic conference.4. Symbolic AI and Neural Networks Represent Complementary Approaches Like Fast and Slow Thinking. Drawing on Kahneman's "thinking fast and slow" framework, LLMs represent the "fast brain"—learning monsters that can process enormous amounts of information and recognize patterns through natural language interfaces. Symbolic AI and knowledge graphs represent the "slow brain"—capturing actual knowledge and facts that can counter hallucinations and provide deterministic, explainable reasoning. This complementarity is driving the re-emergence of neuro-symbolic AI, which combines both approaches. The fundamental distinction is that symbolic AI systems are deterministic and can be fully explained, while LLMs are probabilistic and stochastic, making them unsuitable for applications requiring absolute reliability, such as industrial robotics or pharmaceutical research.5. Knowledge Architecture Remains Underappreciated Despite Powering Major Enterprises. While machine learning engineers currently receive most of the attention and budget, knowledge graphs actually power systems at Netflix (the economic graph), Amazon (the product graph), LinkedIn, Meta, and most major enterprises. The technology has been described as "the most astoundingly successful failure in the history of technology"—the semantic web vision seemed to fail, yet more than half of web pages now contain RDF-formatted semantic markup through schema.org, and every major enterprise uses knowledge graph technology in the background. Knowledge architects remain underappreciated partly because the work is cognitively difficult, requires talking to people (which engineers often avoid), and most advanced practitioners have PhDs in computer science, logic, or philosophy.6. RDF's Simple Subject-Predicate-Object Structure Enables Meaning and Data Linking. Unlike relational databases that store data in tables with rows and columns, RDF uses the simplest linguistic structure: subject-predicate-object (like "Larry knows Stuart"). Each element has a unique URI identifier, which permits precise meaning and enables linked data across systems. This graph structure makes it much easier to connect data after the fact compared to navigating tabular structures in relational databases. On top of RDF sits an entire stack of technologies including schema languages, query languages, ontological languages, and constraints languages—everything needed to turn data into actionable knowledge. The goal is inferring or articulating knowledge from RDF-structured data.7. The Future Requires Decoupled Modular Architectures Combining Multiple AI Approaches. The vision for the future involves separation of concerns through microservices-like architectures where different systems handle what they do best. LLMs excel at discovering possibilities and generating lists, while knowledge graphs excel at articulating human-vetted, deterministic versions of that information that systems can reliably use. Every one of Swanson's 300 podcast interviews over ten years ultimately concludes that regardless of technology, success comes down to human beings, their behavior, and the cultural changes needed to implement systems. The assumption that we can simply eliminate people from processes misses that huma...

Political conversations often feel unavoidable and quickly charged. We enter them believing we are simply sharing opinions, yet underneath sits rigidity, righteousness, and a deep attachment to being right. What starts as dialogue easily turns into defensiveness, frustration, and disconnection, leaving relationships strained and nothing truly changed.  

Do Gods exist? Why is magic more effective when Gods and spirits are involved? What makes magic effective? How to influence people and political events?All of this and more in this discussion with Chaos Magician Peter J. Carroll.Check out Peter Carroll's website: https://specularium.org/CONNECT & SUPPORT

In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom Podcast, host Stewart Alsop explores the complex world of context and knowledge graphs with guest Youssef Tharwat, the founder of NoodlBox who is building dot get for context. Their conversation spans from the philosophical nature of context and its crucial role in AI development, to the technical challenges of creating deterministic tools for software development. Tharwat explains how his product creates portable, versionable knowledge graphs from code repositories, leveraging the semantic relationships already present in programming languages to provide agents with better contextual understanding. They discuss the limitations of large context windows, the advantages of Rust for AI-assisted development, the recent Claude/Bun acquisition, and the broader geopolitical implications of the AI race between big tech companies and open-source alternatives. The conversation also touches on the sustainability of current AI business models and the potential for more efficient, locally-run solutions to challenge the dominance of compute-heavy approaches.For more information about NoodlBox and to join the beta, visit NoodlBox.io.Timestamps00:00 Stewart introduces Youssef Tharwat, founder of NoodlBox, building context management tools for programming05:00 Context as relevant information for reasoning; importance when hitting coding barriers10:00 Knowledge graphs enable semantic traversal through meaning vs keywords/files15:00 Deterministic vs probabilistic systems; why critical applications need 100% reliability20:00 CLI tool makes knowledge graphs portable, versionable artifacts with code repos25:00 Compiler front-ends, syntax trees, and Rust's superior feedback for AI-assisted coding30:00 Claude's Bun acquisition signals potential shift toward runtime compilation and graph-based context35:00 Open source vs proprietary models; user frustration with rate limits and subscription tactics40:00 Singularity path vs distributed sovereignty of developers building alternative architectures45:00 Global economics and why brute force compute isn't sustainable worldwide50:00 Corporate inefficiencies vs independent engineering; changing workplace dynamics55:00 February open beta for NoodlBox.io; vision for new development tool standardsKey Insights1. Context is semantic information that enables proper reasoning, and traditional LLM approaches miss the mark. Youssef defines context as the information you need to reason correctly about something. He argues that larger context windows don't scale because quality degrades with more input, similar to human cognitive limitations. This insight challenges the Silicon Valley approach of throwing more compute at the problem and suggests that semantic separation of information is more optimal than brute force methods.2. Code naturally contains semantic boundaries that can be modeled into knowledge graphs without LLM intervention. Unlike other domains where knowledge graphs require complex labeling, code already has inherent relationships like function calls, imports, and dependencies. Youssef leverages these existing semantic structures to automatically build knowledge graphs, making his approach deterministic rather than probabilistic. This provides the reliability that software development has historically required.3. Knowledge graphs can be made portable, versionable, and shareable as artifacts alongside code repositories. Youssef's vision treats context as a first-class citizen in version control, similar to how Git manages code. Each commit gets a knowledge graph snapshot, allowing developers to see conceptual changes over time and share semantic understanding with collaborators. This transforms context from an ephemeral concept into a concrete, manageable asset.4. The dependency problem in modern development can be solved through pre-indexed knowledge graphs of popular packages. Rather than agents struggling with outdated API documentation, Youssef pre-indexes popular npm packages into knowledge graphs that automatically integrate with developers' projects. This federated approach ensures agents understand exact APIs and current versions, eliminating common frustrations with deprecated methods and unclear documentation.5. Rust provides superior feedback loops for AI-assisted programming due to its explicit compiler constraints. Youssef rebuilt his tool multiple times in different languages, ultimately settling on Rust because its picky compiler provides constant feedback to LLMs about subtle issues. This creates a natural quality control mechanism that helps AI generate more reliable code, making Rust an ideal candidate for AI-assisted development workflows.6. The current AI landscape faces a fundamental tension between expensive centralized models and the need for global accessibility. The conversation reveals growing frustration with rate limiting and subscription costs from major providers like Claude and Google. Youssef believes something must fundamentally change because $200-300 monthly plans only serve a fraction of the world's developers, creating pressure for more efficient architectures and open alternatives.7. Deterministic tooling built on semantic understanding may provide a competitive advantage against probabilistic AI monopolies. While big tech companies pursue brute force scaling with massive data centers, Youssef's approach suggests that clever architecture using existing semantic structures could level the playing field. This represents a broader philosophical divide between the "singularity" path of infinite compute and the "disagreeably autistic engineer" path of elegant solutions that work locally and affordably.

In this captivating episode of 'How I Met Your Data Today,' hosts Anjali Bansal and Karen Meppen interview fellow podcaster Jamie McCusker, the self-proclaimed Opinionated Ontologist. Jamie shares the journey into the world of ontology development. McCusker sheds light on the importance of bringing experience and perspective to data modeling, challenging the notion of being an impartial mediator. Jamie delves into academic and professional experiences, highlighting work with methodologies like protege, RDF graphs, and OWL. As she recounts her involvement in large projects, including a pharmaceutical data initiative, Jamie explains the complexities and significant benefits of ontologies. She argues against the common misconceptions of AI and advocates for a realistic understanding of generative AI's capabilities. Packed with insights, practical advice, and a humor-filled recount of her professional journey, this episode reveals why ontologies are powerful tools for organizing and understanding data, making a compelling case for their broader application.

Should construction companies sort out their data before using AI? Or can AI sort it out for them?We put two heavyweights in the ring to fight it out.In one corner: Dustin DeVan, one of the most decorated CEOs in construction tech. Exited Building Connected for $275M. Now running Ediphi. He's seen $400M liens and knows what happens when your data falls apart in litigation.In the other corner: KP Reddy, serial entrepreneur, founder, investor, and the man with 48 career experiences on LinkedIn (yes, we counted). He's backed by the biggest names in AEC and has been building stuff since he was a kid.Dustin says get your house in order first. He's been through a $400M lien. Messy records in court? Not fun.KP disagrees. Projects end, teams move on, data ends up everywhere. That's just how construction works. AI can make sense of the mess.One thing they agreed on — Excel isn't going anywhere.No punches pulled. No fluff.Who won? You decide.

Continuing on Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (2018), finishing up ch. 1 (discussing what's so bad about reductionism) and moving to ch. 4, "Indirect Relations," which is about causality. Get more at partiallyexaminedlife.com. Visit partiallyexaminedlife.com/support to get ad-free episodes and tons of bonus discussion. Sponsors: Get a $1/month e-commerce trial at shopify.com/pel.

Lionel battles a freezing New York studio and a radiator that defies the laws of physics to deliver a masterclass on media literacy, breaking down the difference between "Ontology" (what is real) and "Epistemology" (how we know it). The hour veers from high philosophy to heated debates as Lionel challenges a caller who believes God chooses political sides. The conversation takes wild turns into the nuances of "Black Privilege," the psychology of horse whispering, Santería rituals, and why modern TV lacks the moral fiber of Barney Miller and Different Strokes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Join Lionel for a four-hour masterclass in chaos, controversy, and high-octane opinion. In this marathon episode, Lionel dissects the legal absurdity of hate crimes, arguing that the justice system has turned prosecutors into mind readers. The conversation pivots to a "Round Two" of COVID nostalgia, where he roasts Dr. Fauci and dissects Ilhan Omar's "mysterious" encounter with apple cider vinegar. Battling a freezing studio, Lionel shifts gears to "Epistemology for Dummies," debating whether God picks political sides and explaining the difference between reality and how we perceive it. Finally, on The Other Side of Midnight, take a trip through the bizarre history of Atlantic City diving horses and 1905 doomsday prophecies as Lionel shadowboxes with the absurd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Harman's Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (2018). What counts as an entity in the world? Harman includes not just physical objects, but fictional objects, "sensual objects," and even events, which you might have thought were the alternative to objects. With this promiscuous ontology comes a strange theory of causality whereby no real object touches another real object, and an epistemology that involves us having no knowledge of real objects at all, though Harman's theory art gives us a back-door to make up for this deficiency, and philosophy itself ends up sharing in these properties of art. Get more at partiallyexaminedlife.com. Visit partiallyexaminedlife.com/support to get ad-free episodes and tons of bonus discussion. Sponsors: Get a $1/month e-commerce trial at shopify.com/pel. Go to HelloFresh.com/pel10fm to Get 10 free meals + a free Zwilling Knife with your third box.

Arguments about communism, socialism, and capitalism rarely fail because people disagree.They fail because nobody is using the same definitions.This episode looks at how political language turns into dinner-table theater — where words stand in for understanding, and certainty replaces curiosity.Not a lesson.Not a debate.An observation from the bench.

In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom podcast, host Stewart Alsop welcomes Roni Burd, a data and AI executive with extensive experience at Amazon and Microsoft, for a deep dive into the evolving landscape of data management and artificial intelligence in enterprise environments. Their conversation explores the longstanding challenges organizations face with knowledge management and data architecture, from the traditional bronze-silver-gold data processing pipeline to how AI agents are revolutionizing how people interact with organizational data without needing SQL or Python expertise. Burd shares insights on the economics of AI implementation at scale, the debate between one-size-fits-all models versus specialized fine-tuned solutions, and the technical constraints that prevent companies like Apple from upgrading services like Siri to modern LLM capabilities, while discussing the future of inference optimization and the hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars cost barrier that makes architectural experimentation in AI uniquely expensive compared to other industries.Timestamps00:00 Introduction to Data and AI Challenges03:08 The Evolution of Data Management05:54 Understanding Data Quality and Metadata08:57 The Role of AI in Data Cleaning11:50 Knowledge Management in Large Organizations14:55 The Future of AI and LLMs17:59 Economics of AI Implementation29:14 The Importance of LLMs for Major Tech Companies32:00 Open Source: Opportunities and Challenges35:19 The Future of AI Inference and Hardware43:24 Optimizing Inference: The Next Frontier49:23 The Commercial Viability of AI ModelsKey Insights1. Data Architecture Evolution: The industry has evolved through bronze-silver-gold data layers, where bronze is raw data, silver is cleaned/processed data, and gold is business-ready datasets. However, this creates bottlenecks as stakeholders lose access to original data during the cleaning process, making metadata and data cataloging increasingly critical for organizations.2. AI Democratizing Data Access: LLMs are breaking down technical barriers by allowing business users to query data in plain English without needing SQL, Python, or dashboarding skills. This represents a fundamental shift from requiring intermediaries to direct stakeholder access, though the full implications remain speculative.3. Economics Drive AI Architecture Decisions: Token costs and latency requirements are major factors determining AI implementation. Companies like Meta likely need their own models because paying per-token for billions of social media interactions would be economically unfeasible, driving the need for self-hosted solutions.4. One Model Won't Rule Them All: Despite initial hopes for universal models, the reality points toward specialized models for different use cases. This is driven by economics (smaller models for simple tasks), performance requirements (millisecond response times), and industry-specific needs (medical, military terminology).5. Inference is the Commercial Battleground: The majority of commercial AI value lies in inference rather than training. Current GPUs, while specialized for graphics and matrix operations, may still be too general for optimal inference performance, creating opportunities for even more specialized hardware.6. Open Source vs Open Weights Distinction: True open source in AI means access to architecture for debugging and modification, while "open weights" enables fine-tuning and customization. This distinction is crucial for enterprise adoption, as open weights provide the flexibility companies need without starting from scratch.7. Architecture Innovation Faces Expensive Testing Loops: Unlike database optimization where query plans can be easily modified, testing new AI architectures requires expensive retraining cycles costing hundreds of millions of dollars. This creates a potential innovation bottleneck, similar to aerospace industries where testing new designs is prohibitively expensive.

Ontologies are suddenly everywhere but they didn’t come out of nowhere. In this episode, Juan and Tim chat with Professor Oscar Corcho, who has been doing ontology engineering since the early 2000s (check out his book Ontological Engineering from 2003), to demystify what ontologies actually are, where they came from, and why that history still matters today. If you’re new to ontologies or feeling lost in the current hype, this episode gives you the grounding you didn’t know you needed to understand where the field has been and where it should be going next.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ontologies are suddenly everywhere but they didn’t come out of nowhere. In this episode, Juan and Tim chat with Professor Oscar Corcho, who has been doing ontology engineering since the early 2000s (check out his book Ontological Engineering from 2003), to demystify what ontologies actually are, where they came from, and why that history still matters today. If you’re new to ontologies or feeling lost in the current hype, this episode gives you the grounding you didn’t know you needed to understand where the field has been and where it should be going next.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is the takeaway episode of our conversation with Professor Oscar Corcho, who has been doing ontology engineering since the early 2000s where we demystify what ontologies actually are, where they came from, and why that history still matters today. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is the takeaway episode of our conversation with Professor Oscar Corcho, who has been doing ontology engineering since the early 2000s where we demystify what ontologies actually are, where they came from, and why that history still matters today. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom podcast, host Stewart Alsop sits down with Kelvin Lwin for their second conversation exploring the fascinating intersection of AI and Buddhist cosmology. Lwin brings his unique perspective as both a technologist with deep Silicon Valley experience and a serious meditation practitioner who's spent decades studying Buddhist philosophy. Together, they examine how AI development fits into ancient spiritual prophecies, discuss the dangerous allure of LLMs as potentially "asura weapons" that can mislead users, and explore verification methods for enlightenment claims in our modern digital age. The conversation ranges from technical discussions about the need for better AI compilers and world models to profound questions about humanity's role in what Lwin sees as an inevitable technological crucible that will determine our collective spiritual evolution. For more information about Kelvin's work on attention training and AI, visit his website at alin.ai. You can also join Kelvin for live meditation sessions twice daily on Clubhouse at clubhouse.com/house/neowise.Timestamps00:00 Exploring AI and Spirituality05:56 The Quest for Enlightenment Verification11:58 AI's Impact on Spirituality and Reality17:51 The 500-Year Prophecy of Buddhism23:36 The Future of AI and Business Innovation32:15 Exploring Language and Communication34:54 Programming Languages and Human Interaction36:23 AI and the Crucible of Change39:20 World Models and Physical AI41:27 The Role of Ontologies in AI44:25 The Asura and Deva: A Battle for Supremacy48:15 The Future of Humanity and AI51:08 Persuasion and the Power of LLMs55:29 Navigating the New Age of TechnologyKey Insights1. The Rarity of Polymath AI-Spirituality Perspectives: Kelvin argues that very few people are approaching AI through spiritual frameworks because it requires being a polymath with deep knowledge across multiple domains. Most people specialize in one field, and combining AI expertise with Buddhist cosmology requires significant time, resources, and academic background that few possess.2. Traditional Enlightenment Verification vs. Modern Claims: There are established methods for verifying enlightenment claims in Buddhist traditions, including adherence to the five precepts and overcoming hell rebirth through karmic resolution. Many modern Western practitioners claiming enlightenment fail these traditional tests, often changing the criteria when they can't meet the original requirements.3. The 500-Year Buddhist Prophecy and Current Timing: We are approximately 60 years into a prophesied 500-year period where enlightenment becomes possible again. This "startup phase of Buddhism revival" coincides with technological developments like the internet and AI, which are seen as integral to this spiritual renaissance rather than obstacles to it.4. LLMs as UI Solution, Not Reasoning Engine: While LLMs have solved the user interface problem of capturing human intent, they fundamentally cannot reason or make decisions due to their token-based architecture. The technology works well enough to create illusion of capability, leading people down an asymptotic path away from true solutions.5. The Need for New Programming Paradigms: Current AI development caters too much to human cognitive limitations through familiar programming structures. True advancement requires moving beyond human-readable code toward agent-generated languages that prioritize efficiency over human comprehension, similar to how compilers already translate high-level code.6. AI as Asura Weapon in Spiritual Warfare: From Buddhist cosmological perspective, AI represents an asura (demon-realm) tool that appears helpful but is fundamentally wasteful and disruptive to human consciousness. Humanity exists as the battleground between divine and demonic forces, with AI serving as a weapon that both sides employ in this cosmic conflict.7. 2029 as Critical Convergence Point: Multiple technological and spiritual trends point toward 2029 as when various systems will reach breaking points, forcing humanity to either transcend current limitations or be consumed by them. This timing aligns with both technological development curves and spiritual prophecies about transformation periods.

Free ZWILLING Four Star Chef's Knife on your 3rd box ($144.99 value) + 10 Free Meals and your first box ship free with code CURTJHFZWL at https://hellofresh.yt.link/4u4Vh7m! This is an interview with Oxford's Timothy Williamson. He's one of the most cited living philosophers, and simultaneously one of the most controversial (yet respected). He dismantles physicalism, solipsism, and reductionism––explaining why consciousness is philosophically overrated and why AI in its current form likely lacks genuine mental states. This will be a tour‐de‐force episode into all things related to looking deeply and fundamentally. If you're interested in consciousness, free will, art, language, and meaning, I believe you'll love this episode. As a listener of TOE you can get a special 20% off discount to The Economist and all it has to offer! Visit https://www.economist.com/toe SUPPORT: - Support me on Substack: https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/subscribe - Support me on Crypto: https://commerce.coinbase.com/checkout/de803625-87d3-4300-ab6d-85d4258834a9 - Support me on PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=XUBHNMFXUX5S4 JOIN MY SUBSTACK (Personal Writings): https://curtjaimungal.substack.com LISTEN ON SPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e TIMESTAMPS: - 00:00:00 - Vagueness & Sorites Paradox - 00:07:12 - Identity, Physicalism, Non-Physicals - 00:22:30 - Realism vs. Anti-Realism - 00:29:50 - The Problem of Skepticism - 00:35:40 - Cognitive Heuristics & Doubt - 00:43:00 - Solipsism's Appeal & Pitfalls - 00:50:00 - Solipsism: A Critique - 00:57:30 - Pluralism & Consciousness - 01:06:00 - AI, Mental States, Ontology - 01:15:50 - Mind, Knowledge, Meaning - 01:26:00 - Philosophical Heuristics - 01:32:00 - Counterfactuals & Logic - 01:38:00 - Personal Philosophy LINKS MENTIONED: - Overfitting and Heuristics in Philosophy [Book]: https://www.amazon.com/Overfitting-Heuristics-Philosophy-Rutgers-Lectures/dp/0197779212 - Timothy Williamson's Published Papers: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=IH-44VwAAAAJ&hl=en - Sorites Paradox: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sorites-paradox/ - Philosophical Investigations [Book]: https://www.amazon.com/Philosophical-Investigations-Ludwig-Wittgenstein/dp/0631205691 - I Do Not Exist [Paper]: https://academic.oup.com/book/53296/chapter-abstract/422023005 - O'Shaughnessy Ventures: https://www.osv.llc/ - Barry Loewer & Eddy Chen [TOE]: https://youtu.be/xZnafO__IZ0 - Bas Van Fraassen [TOE]: https://youtu.be/lhpRAWxvY5s - Matthew Segall [TOE]: https://youtu.be/DeTm4fSXpbM - Jennifer Nagel [TOE]: https://youtu.be/CWZVMZ9Tm7Q - Leo Gura [TOE]: https://youtu.be/YspFR9JAq3w - Iain McGilchrist [TOE]: https://youtu.be/M-SgOwc6Pe4 - The Consciousness Iceberg [TOE]: https://youtu.be/65yjqIDghEk - Karl Friston [TOE]: https://youtu.be/uk4NZorRjCo - Geoffrey Hinton [TOE]: https://youtu.be/b_DUft-BdIE - Elan Barenholtz [TOE]: https://youtu.be/A36OumnSrWY - Ben Goertzel & Joscha Bach [TOE]: https://youtu.be/xw7omaQ8SgA - Claudia de Rham [TOE]: https://youtu.be/Ve_Mpd6dGv8 - Stephen Wolfram [TOE]: https://youtu.be/0YRlQQw0d-4 - Elan Barenholtz & Will Hahn [TOE]: https://youtu.be/Ca_RbPXraDE - Greg Kondrak [TOE]: https://youtu.be/FFW14zSYiFY - Robert Sapolsky [TOE]: https://youtu.be/z0IqA1hYKY8 SOCIALS: - Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt - Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs Guests do not pay to appear. Theories of Everything receives revenue solely from viewer donations, platform ads, and clearly labelled sponsors; no guest or associated entity has ever given compensation, directly or through intermediaries. #science Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to 2026! In this spontaneous Friday AMA, I take listener questions on ontologies, the “leaky abstractions” of AI coding tools, why the “button pusher” era of engineering is a professional dead end, and the shifting landscape of data engineering.I also provides an update on my upcoming book, Mixed Model Arts (launching in March 2026), and discuss the unexpected convergence of library science, ontologies, and traditional data modeling, something not on my 2025 bingo card.Great turnout, especially for no notice. Thanks to everyone who showed up!

Mike & Tommy dive into "Backward Ontology," exploring whether Fabric IQ can facilitate a bottom-up approach to defining enterprise semantics. They discuss the implications of shifting ontology creation from a top-down mandate to a team-generated process, and provide insights on how organizations can successfully navigate this evolving landscape.https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/iq/ontology/overviewhttps://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/iq/ontology/concepts-generatehttps://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/iq/ontology/resources-frequently-asked-questionsGet in touch:Send in your questions or topics you want us to discuss by tweeting to @PowerBITips with the hashtag #empMailbag or submit on the PowerBI.tips Podcast Page.Visit PowerBI.tips: https://powerbi.tips/Watch the episodes live every Tuesday and Thursday morning at 730am CST on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/powerbitipsSubscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/230fp78XmHHRXTiYICRLVvSubscribe on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/explicit-measures-podcast/id1568944083‎Check Out Community Jam: https://jam.powerbi.tipsFollow Mike: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelcarlo/Follow Tommy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tommypuglia/

A new exploration of our conception of reality, by one of the world's most influential philosophers.How do we understand the world and our place in it? Do our lives consist of a small number of dramatic turning points, or is there nothing but a series of gradual changes from infancy to old age? Are political elections genuinely transformational, or merely arbitrary points along a shifting cultural timeline? And in physics, how can the continuities of general relativity coexist with the discontinuities of quantum theory?In Waves and Stones, Graham Harman shows that this paradoxical interaction – the question of whether reality is made up of sudden jumps, or is laid out along a gentle gradient with no clear divisions between the various things in the world – permeates every area of human life. What's more, this paradox is as old as human thought itself. In exploring how the continuous and discrete relate to each other, he takes us on a kaleidoscopic journey from the philosophers of ancient Greece, through the writings of the great Arab historian Ibn Khaldun, through architectural and evolutionary theory, the compatibility of religion with science, and the wave-particle duality of matter.To explore the relationship between the continuous and the discrete, Harman shows, is to consider the very fabric of reality. With this dazzling new book, he proposes a new way of thinking about this ancient problem, with profound implications for our understanding of ourselves and the bewilderingly complex world in which we live.Adam Bobeck received his PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of Leipzig. His PhD was entitled “Object-Oriented ʿAzâdâri: Ontology and Ritual Theory”. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

A new exploration of our conception of reality, by one of the world's most influential philosophers.How do we understand the world and our place in it? Do our lives consist of a small number of dramatic turning points, or is there nothing but a series of gradual changes from infancy to old age? Are political elections genuinely transformational, or merely arbitrary points along a shifting cultural timeline? And in physics, how can the continuities of general relativity coexist with the discontinuities of quantum theory?In Waves and Stones, Graham Harman shows that this paradoxical interaction – the question of whether reality is made up of sudden jumps, or is laid out along a gentle gradient with no clear divisions between the various things in the world – permeates every area of human life. What's more, this paradox is as old as human thought itself. In exploring how the continuous and discrete relate to each other, he takes us on a kaleidoscopic journey from the philosophers of ancient Greece, through the writings of the great Arab historian Ibn Khaldun, through architectural and evolutionary theory, the compatibility of religion with science, and the wave-particle duality of matter.To explore the relationship between the continuous and the discrete, Harman shows, is to consider the very fabric of reality. With this dazzling new book, he proposes a new way of thinking about this ancient problem, with profound implications for our understanding of ourselves and the bewilderingly complex world in which we live.Adam Bobeck received his PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of Leipzig. His PhD was entitled “Object-Oriented ʿAzâdâri: Ontology and Ritual Theory”. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

A new exploration of our conception of reality, by one of the world's most influential philosophers.How do we understand the world and our place in it? Do our lives consist of a small number of dramatic turning points, or is there nothing but a series of gradual changes from infancy to old age? Are political elections genuinely transformational, or merely arbitrary points along a shifting cultural timeline? And in physics, how can the continuities of general relativity coexist with the discontinuities of quantum theory?In Waves and Stones, Graham Harman shows that this paradoxical interaction – the question of whether reality is made up of sudden jumps, or is laid out along a gentle gradient with no clear divisions between the various things in the world – permeates every area of human life. What's more, this paradox is as old as human thought itself. In exploring how the continuous and discrete relate to each other, he takes us on a kaleidoscopic journey from the philosophers of ancient Greece, through the writings of the great Arab historian Ibn Khaldun, through architectural and evolutionary theory, the compatibility of religion with science, and the wave-particle duality of matter.To explore the relationship between the continuous and the discrete, Harman shows, is to consider the very fabric of reality. With this dazzling new book, he proposes a new way of thinking about this ancient problem, with profound implications for our understanding of ourselves and the bewilderingly complex world in which we live.Adam Bobeck received his PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of Leipzig. His PhD was entitled “Object-Oriented ʿAzâdâri: Ontology and Ritual Theory”. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

A new exploration of our conception of reality, by one of the world's most influential philosophers.How do we understand the world and our place in it? Do our lives consist of a small number of dramatic turning points, or is there nothing but a series of gradual changes from infancy to old age? Are political elections genuinely transformational, or merely arbitrary points along a shifting cultural timeline? And in physics, how can the continuities of general relativity coexist with the discontinuities of quantum theory?In Waves and Stones, Graham Harman shows that this paradoxical interaction – the question of whether reality is made up of sudden jumps, or is laid out along a gentle gradient with no clear divisions between the various things in the world – permeates every area of human life. What's more, this paradox is as old as human thought itself. In exploring how the continuous and discrete relate to each other, he takes us on a kaleidoscopic journey from the philosophers of ancient Greece, through the writings of the great Arab historian Ibn Khaldun, through architectural and evolutionary theory, the compatibility of religion with science, and the wave-particle duality of matter.To explore the relationship between the continuous and the discrete, Harman shows, is to consider the very fabric of reality. With this dazzling new book, he proposes a new way of thinking about this ancient problem, with profound implications for our understanding of ourselves and the bewilderingly complex world in which we live.Adam Bobeck received his PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of Leipzig. His PhD was entitled “Object-Oriented ʿAzâdâri: Ontology and Ritual Theory”. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Oh yeah...ontologies. In this mini-clip from Matt Housley and I, we chat about why ontologies are super popular now.

What good is aesthetics in a time of ecological crisis? Toward a Premodern Posthumanism: Anarchic Ontologies of Earthly Life in Early Modern France (Northwestern UP, 2025) shows that philosophical aesthetics contains unheeded potentialities for challenging the ontological subjection of nature to the human subject. Drawing on deconstructive, ecological, and biopolitical thought, Chad Córdova uncovers in aesthetics something irreducible to humanist metaphysics: an account of how beings emerge and are interrelated, responsive, and even response-able without reason or why.This anarchic and atelic ontology, recovered from Kant, becomes the guiding thread for a new, premodern trajectory of posthumanism. Charting a path from Aristotle to Heidegger to today's plant-thinking, with new readings of Montaigne, Pascal, Diderot, Rousseau, and others along the way, this capacious study reveals the untimely relevance of pre-1800 practices of writing, science, and art. Enacting a multitemporal mode of reading, Córdova offers a defense and illustration of the importance of returning to early modern texts as a way to rethink nature, art, ethics, and politics in a time when these concepts are in flux and more contentious than ever. Author Chad Córdova is Assistant Professor in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University where he is also affiliated faculty in the Department of Environment and Sustainability. In addition to this new book, he is the author of many articles on figures and concepts that appear in this book, such as Montaigne, Kant, and Heidegger—most recently in Essais: Revue interdisciplinaire d'humanités and The Comparitist. Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama. Their research is concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

What good is aesthetics in a time of ecological crisis? Toward a Premodern Posthumanism: Anarchic Ontologies of Earthly Life in Early Modern France (Northwestern UP, 2025) shows that philosophical aesthetics contains unheeded potentialities for challenging the ontological subjection of nature to the human subject. Drawing on deconstructive, ecological, and biopolitical thought, Chad Córdova uncovers in aesthetics something irreducible to humanist metaphysics: an account of how beings emerge and are interrelated, responsive, and even response-able without reason or why.This anarchic and atelic ontology, recovered from Kant, becomes the guiding thread for a new, premodern trajectory of posthumanism. Charting a path from Aristotle to Heidegger to today's plant-thinking, with new readings of Montaigne, Pascal, Diderot, Rousseau, and others along the way, this capacious study reveals the untimely relevance of pre-1800 practices of writing, science, and art. Enacting a multitemporal mode of reading, Córdova offers a defense and illustration of the importance of returning to early modern texts as a way to rethink nature, art, ethics, and politics in a time when these concepts are in flux and more contentious than ever. Author Chad Córdova is Assistant Professor in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University where he is also affiliated faculty in the Department of Environment and Sustainability. In addition to this new book, he is the author of many articles on figures and concepts that appear in this book, such as Montaigne, Kant, and Heidegger—most recently in Essais: Revue interdisciplinaire d'humanités and The Comparitist. Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama. Their research is concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

What good is aesthetics in a time of ecological crisis? Toward a Premodern Posthumanism: Anarchic Ontologies of Earthly Life in Early Modern France (Northwestern UP, 2025) shows that philosophical aesthetics contains unheeded potentialities for challenging the ontological subjection of nature to the human subject. Drawing on deconstructive, ecological, and biopolitical thought, Chad Córdova uncovers in aesthetics something irreducible to humanist metaphysics: an account of how beings emerge and are interrelated, responsive, and even response-able without reason or why.This anarchic and atelic ontology, recovered from Kant, becomes the guiding thread for a new, premodern trajectory of posthumanism. Charting a path from Aristotle to Heidegger to today's plant-thinking, with new readings of Montaigne, Pascal, Diderot, Rousseau, and others along the way, this capacious study reveals the untimely relevance of pre-1800 practices of writing, science, and art. Enacting a multitemporal mode of reading, Córdova offers a defense and illustration of the importance of returning to early modern texts as a way to rethink nature, art, ethics, and politics in a time when these concepts are in flux and more contentious than ever. Author Chad Córdova is Assistant Professor in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University where he is also affiliated faculty in the Department of Environment and Sustainability. In addition to this new book, he is the author of many articles on figures and concepts that appear in this book, such as Montaigne, Kant, and Heidegger—most recently in Essais: Revue interdisciplinaire d'humanités and The Comparitist. Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama. Their research is concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Leadership wisdom spreads fast, but not all of it goes deep. Scroll through LinkedIn and you'll find endless "leadership memes" that sound inspiring at first glance, yet often oversimplify what it really means to lead. They make leadership look easy, but few of them invite us to look deeper, at who we are being underneath all the doing.

(Part 2) Patricia and Christian talk to Dr Phil Armstrong about the upcoming UK budget, and Green Party leader Zack Polanski's positive views of MMT.   Full conversation here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/142975558   Please help sustain this podcast!  Patrons get early access to all episodes and patron-only episodes: https://www.patreon.com/MMTpodcast     All our episodes in chronological order: https://www.patreon.com/posts/43111643   All our patron-only episodes: https://www.patreon.com/posts/57542767   LIVE EVENT! THE FAUXBEL PRIZE IN ECONOMICS 2026

Plastic is ubiquitous. It is in the Arctic, in the depths of the Mariana Trench, and in the high mountaintops of the Pyrenees. It is in the air we breathe and the water we drink. Nanoplastics penetrate our cell walls. Plastic is not just any material—it is emblematic of life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In Plastic Matter (Duke UP, 2022), Heather Davis traces plastic's relations to geology, media, biology, and race to show how matter itself has come to be understood as pliable, disposable, and consumable. The invention and widespread use of plastic, Davis contends, reveals the dominance of the Western orientation to matter and its assumption that matter exists to be endlessly manipulated and controlled by humans. Plastic's materiality and pliability reinforces these expectations of what matter should be and do. Davis charts these relations to matter by mapping the queer multispecies relationships between humans and plastic-eating bacteria and analyzing photography that documents the racialized environmental violence of plastic production. In so doing, Davis provokes readers to reexamine their relationships to matter and life in light of plastic's saturation. Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Shi'i Muslim Rituals and Ontology”. For more about his work, see www.adambobeck.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Plastic is ubiquitous. It is in the Arctic, in the depths of the Mariana Trench, and in the high mountaintops of the Pyrenees. It is in the air we breathe and the water we drink. Nanoplastics penetrate our cell walls. Plastic is not just any material—it is emblematic of life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In Plastic Matter (Duke UP, 2022), Heather Davis traces plastic's relations to geology, media, biology, and race to show how matter itself has come to be understood as pliable, disposable, and consumable. The invention and widespread use of plastic, Davis contends, reveals the dominance of the Western orientation to matter and its assumption that matter exists to be endlessly manipulated and controlled by humans. Plastic's materiality and pliability reinforces these expectations of what matter should be and do. Davis charts these relations to matter by mapping the queer multispecies relationships between humans and plastic-eating bacteria and analyzing photography that documents the racialized environmental violence of plastic production. In so doing, Davis provokes readers to reexamine their relationships to matter and life in light of plastic's saturation. Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Shi'i Muslim Rituals and Ontology”. For more about his work, see www.adambobeck.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Join Jacobs Premium: https://www.thenathanjacobspodcast.com/membershipThe book club (use code LEWIS): https://www.thenathanjacobspodcast.com/offers/aLohje7p/checkoutThis is part three of our three-part series on the seven ecumenical councils, focusing on the philosophical commitments embedded in the final five councils from Ephesus to Nicaea II. We examine the Nestorian controversy and Cyril of Alexandria's defense of moderate realism, the doctrine of complex natures, and the distinction between common faculties and idiosyncratic use in the monothelite debate. The episode concludes with the monoenergist controversy's codification of the essence-energies distinction and the ontology of image and archetype in iconography.All the links: Substack: https://nathanajacobs.substack.com/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thenathanjacobspodcastWebsite: https://www.nathanajacobs.com/X: https://x.com/NathanJacobsPodSpotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0hSskUtCwDT40uFbqTk3QSApple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-nathan-jacobs-podcastFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/nathanandrewjacobsAcademia: https://vanderbilt.academia.edu/NathanAJacobs00:00:00 - Intro00:05:36 Dogma vs. Kerygma: Basil's Distinction 00:10:26 The Council of Ephesus: Nestorius vs. Cyril 00:14:56 Moderate Realism and Complex Natures00:23:18 Nestorius's Metaphysical Error00:30:14 Why Mary Is Theotokos00:45:02 The Monophysite Controversy After Ephesus00:49:19 The Council of Chalcedon 00:57:00 Common Nature, Idiosyncratic Use01:02:00 The Theandric Operations: John of Damascus's Analogy01:07:56 The Essence-Energies Distinction in the Councils 01:13:34 Against Calling It "Palamite" 01:19:09 Nicaea II and the Ontology of Images Other words for the algorithm… ecumenical councils, Christology, Chalcedon, Council of Ephesus, Nestorius, Cyril of Alexandria, moderate realism, complex natures, theotokos, patristics, church fathers, early Christian philosophy, Byzantine theology, Eastern Orthodox, Orthodox theology, hupóstasis, essence-energies distinction, Gregory Palamas, Cappadocian fathers, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, John of Damascus, Maximus the Confessor, monothelite controversy, monoenergist controversy, monophysitism, Apollinarianism, hypostatic union, two natures one person, divine energies, theosis, deification, incarnation, Nicene Creed, Constantinople, Council of Chalcedon, hyalomorphism, Aristotle, Plato, realism, nominalism, universals, particular, form and matter, substance, accidents, common nature, Christian metaphysics, patristic theology, systematic theology, philosophical theology, philosophy of religion, Christian philosophy, Thomas Aquinas, scholasticism, medieval philosophy, ancient philosophy, Neoplatonism, divine simplicity, divine freedom, anthropology, theological anthropology, imago dei, image of God, iconography, Nicaea II, body and soul, will, free will, monothelitism, Apollinaris, Athanasius, homoousios, consubstantial, Trinity, divine nature, human nature, rational soul, theandric operations, dogma, kerygma, divine liturgy, anti-Chalcedonian, Council of Constantinople, moderate realist, extreme realism, archetypal ideas, common will, idiosyncratic use, Philippians 2, morphe, kenosis, inflamed blade analogy, David Bradshaw, essence and energies, Aristotle East and West, Gregory of Nazianzus, Chrysostom, ontology, metaphysics, formal properties, genera and species, specific difference

In this episode of Crazy Wisdom, host Stewart Alsop talks with Kevin Smith, co-founder of Snipd, about how AI is reshaping the way we listen, learn, and interact with podcasts. They explore Snipd's vision of transforming podcasts into living knowledge systems, the evolution of machine learning from finance to large language models, and the broader connection between AI, robotics, and energy as the foundation for the next technological era. Kevin also touches on ideas like the bitter lesson, reinforcement learning, and the growing energy demands of AI. Listeners can try Snipd's premium version free for a month using this promo link.Check out this GPT we trained on the conversationTimestamps00:00 – Stewart Alsop welcomes Kevin Smith, co-founder of Snipd, to discuss AI, podcasting, and curiosity-driven learning.05:00 – Kevin explains Snipd's snipping feature, chatting with episodes, and future plans for voice interaction with podcasts.10:00 – They discuss vector search, embeddings, and context windows, comparing full-episode context to chunked transcripts.15:00 – Kevin shares his background in mathematics and economics, his shift from finance to machine learning, and early startup work in AI.20:00 – They explore early quant models versus modern machine learning, statistical modeling, and data limitations in finance.25:00 – Conversation turns to transformer models, pretraining, and the bitter lesson—how compute-based methods outperform human-crafted systems. 30:00 – Stewart connects this to RLHF, Scale AI, and data scarcity; Kevin reflects on reinforcement learning's future. 35:00 – They pivot to Snipd's podcast ecosystem, hidden gems like Founders Podcast, and how stories shape entrepreneurial insight. 40:00 – ETH Zurich, robotics, and startup culture come up, linking academia to real-world innovation. 45:00 – They close on AI, robotics, and energy as the pillars of the future, debating nuclear and solar power's role in sustaining progress.Key InsightsPodcasts as dynamic knowledge systems: Kevin Smith presents Snipd as an AI-powered tool that transforms podcasts into interactive learning environments. By allowing listeners to “snip” and summarize meaningful moments, Snipd turns passive listening into active knowledge management—bridging curiosity, memory, and technology in a way that reframes podcasts as living knowledge capsules rather than static media.AI transforming how we engage with information: The discussion highlights how AI enables entirely new modes of interaction—chatting directly with podcast episodes, asking follow-up questions, and contextualizing information across an author's full body of work. This evolution points toward a future where knowledge consumption becomes conversational and personalized rather than linear and one-size-fits-all.Vectorization and context windows matter: Kevin explains that Snipd currently avoids heavy use of vector databases, opting instead to feed entire episodes into large models. This choice enhances coherence and comprehension, reflecting how advances in context windows have reshaped how AI understands complex audio content.Machine learning's roots in finance shaped early AI thinking: Kevin's journey from quantitative finance to AI reveals how statistical modeling laid the groundwork for modern learning systems. While finance once relied on rigid, theory-based models, the machine learning paradigm replaced those priors with flexible, data-driven discovery—an essential philosophical shift in how intelligence is approached.The Bitter Lesson and the rise of compute: Together they unpack Richard Sutton's “bitter lesson”—the idea that methods leveraging computation and data inevitably surpass those built from human intuition. This insight serves as a compass for understanding why transformers, pretraining, and scaling have driven recent AI breakthroughs.Reinforcement learning and data scarcity define AI's next phase: Stewart links RLHF and the work of companies like Scale AI and Surge AI to the broader question of data limits. Kevin agrees that the next wave of AI will depend on reinforcement learning and simulated environments that generate new, high-quality data beyond what humans can label.The future hinges on AI, robotics, and energy: Kevin closes with a framework for the next decade: AI provides intelligence, robotics applies it to the physical world, and energy sustains it all. He warns that society must shift from fearing energy use to innovating in production—especially through nuclear and solar power—to meet the demands of an increasingly intelligent, interconnected world.

(Part 1) Patricia and Christian talk to Dr Phil Armstrong about the upcoming UK budget, and Green Party leader Zack Polanski's positive views of MMT.   Full conversation here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/142975558   Please help sustain this podcast!  Patrons get early access to all episodes and patron-only episodes: https://www.patreon.com/MMTpodcast     All our episodes in chronological order: https://www.patreon.com/posts/43111643   All our patron-only episodes: https://www.patreon.com/posts/57542767   LIVE EVENT! Scotland's Festival of Economics (Edinburgh and online)  19th - 21st March 2026: https://www.scoteconfest.org/#learnmore   JOIN PATRICIA'S MMT ACTIVIST NETWORK (MMT UK): https://actionnetwork.org/forms/activist-registration-form   JOIN THE MMT UK DISCORD SERVER TO CONNECT WITH OTHERS LOOKING TO PROMOTE MMT AND ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS IN THE UK!: https://discord.gg/S3UbxFe4FR   MMT: THE MOVIE! "Finding The Money", a documentary by Maren Poitras featuring Stephanie Kelton is now available worldwide to rent or buy: https://findingthemoney.vhx.tv/products/finding-the-money Updates on worldwide screenings of "Finding The Money" can be found here: https://findingmoneyfilm.com/where-to-watch/ To arrange a screening of "Finding The Money", apply here: https://findingmoneyfilm.com/host-a-screening/   STUDY THE ECONOMICS OF SUSTAINABILITY! Details of Modern Money Lab's online graduate, postgraduate and standalone courses in economics are here: https://modernmoneylab.org.au/   Relevant to this episode: "Universal Basic Income or a Job Guarantee?" The Gower Initiative for Modern Money Studies: https://gimms.org.uk/fact-sheets/universal-basic-income/ "Comparing Post-Keynesianism and Modern Monetary Theory: The Importance of Ontology and Sociology" (2025) By Neil Wilson and Phil Armstrong: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5337254  "Should we favour a Job Guarantee over a Universal Basic Income as a means of achieving a more socially just society?" by Catherine Armstrong: https://gimms.org.uk/2023/07/08/should-we-favour-a-job-guarantee-over-a-universal-basic-income-as-a-means-of-achieving-a-more-socially-just-society/ For more on the endogenous money view (the non-fringe, very mainstream view that bank loans create deposits, not the other way around), listen to episode 126 - Dirk Ehnts: How Banks Create Money: https://www.patreon.com/posts/62603318 and episode 43 - Sam Levey: Understanding Endogenous Money: https://www.patreon.com/posts/35073683 Order the Gower Initiative's "Modern Monetary Theory - Key Insights, Leading Thinkers": https://www.e-elgar.com/shop/gbp/modern-monetary-theory-9781802208085.html For more on the (Liz) Trussageddon, listen to Episode 147 - Dirk Ehnts: Do Markets Control Our Politics?: https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-147-dirk-72906421 "How to Fight Back Against the False Idea that the Government is at the Mercy of Financial Markets" by Sheridan Kates: https://thealternative.org.uk/dailyalternative/2025/3/10/scotonomics-monetary-autonomy "There is no need to issue public debt" by Bill Mitchell: https://billmitchell.org/blog/?p=31715 Episode 148 - Pavlina Tcherneva: Why The Job Guarantee Is Core To Modern Monetary Theory: https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-148-why-73211346 Quick read: Pavlina Tcherneva's Job Guarantee FAQ page: https://pavlina-tcherneva.net/job-guarantee-faq/   For an intro to MMT: Our first three episodes: https://www.patreon.com/posts/41742417 Episode 126 - Dirk Ehnts: How Banks Create Money: https://www.patreon.com/posts/62603318   Quick MMT reads: Warren's Mosler's MMT white paper: http://moslereconomics.com/mmt-white-paper/ Steven Hail's quick MMT explainer: https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-is-modern-monetary-theory-72095 Quick explanation of government debt and deficit: "Some Numbers Are Big. Let Me Help You Get Over It": https://christreilly.com/2020/02/17/some-numbers-are-big-let-me-help-you-get-over-it/     For a short, non-technical, free ebook explaining MMT, download Warren Mosler's "7 Deadly Innocent Frauds Of Economic Policy" here: http://moslereconomics.com/wp-content/powerpoints/7DIF.pdf     Episodes on monetary operations:  Episode 20 - Warren Mosler: The MMT Money Story (part 1): https://www.patreon.com/posts/28004824 Episode 126 - Dirk Ehnts: How Banks Create Money: https://www.patreon.com/posts/62603318 Episode 13 - Steven Hail: Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Banking, But Were Afraid To Ask: https://www.patreon.com/posts/41790887 Episode 43 - Sam Levey: Understanding Endogenous Money: https://www.patreon.com/posts/35073683  Episode 84 - Andrew Berkeley, Richard Tye & Neil Wilson: An Accounting Model Of The UK Exchequer (Part 1): https://www.patreon.com/posts/46352183 Episode 86 - Andrew Berkeley, Richard Tye & Neil Wilson: An Accounting Model Of The UK Exchequer (Part 2): https://www.patreon.com/posts/46865929    For more on Quantitative Easing: Episode 59 - Warren Mosler: What Do Central Banks Do?: https://www.patreon.com/posts/39070023 Episode 143 - Paul Sheard: What Is Quantitative Easing?: https://www.patreon.com/posts/71589989?pr=true    Episodes on inflation: Episode 7: Steven Hail: Inflation, Price Shocks and Other Misunderstandings: https://www.patreon.com/posts/41780508 Episode 65 - Phil Armstrong: Understanding Inflation: https://www.patreon.com/posts/40672678 Episode 104 - John T Harvey: Inflation, Stagflation & Healing The Nation: https://www.patreon.com/posts/52207835 Episode 123 - Warren Mosler: Understanding The Price Level And Inflation: https://www.patreon.com/posts/59856379 Episode 128 - L. Randall Wray & Yeva Nersisyan: What's Causing Accelerating Inflation? Pandemic Or Policy Response?: https://www.patreon.com/posts/63776558   Our Job Guarantee episodes:  Episode 4 - Fadhel Kaboub: What is the Job Guarantee?: https://www.patreon.com/posts/41742701 Episode 47 - Pavlina Tcherneva: Building Resilience - The Case For A Job Guarantee: https://www.patreon.com/posts/36034543 Episode 148 - Pavlina Tcherneva: Why The Job Guarantee Is Core To Modern Monetary Theory: https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-148-why-73211346 Quick read: Pavlina Tcherneva's Job Guarantee FAQ page: https://pavlina-tcherneva.net/job-guarantee-faq/   More on government bonds (and "vigilantes"): Episode 30 - Steven Hail: Understanding Government Bonds (Part 1):https://www.patreon.com/posts/29621245 Episode 31 - Steven Hail: Understanding Government Bonds (Part 2): https://www.patreon.com/posts/29829500 Episode 143 - Paul Sheard: What Is Quantitative Easing?: https://www.patreon.com/posts/71589989?pr=true Episode 147 - Dirk Ehnts: Do Markets Control Our Politics?: https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-147-dirk-72906421 Episode 144 - Warren Mosler: The Natural Rate Of Interest Is Zero: https://www.patreon.com/posts/71966513 Episode 145 - John T Harvey: What Determines Currency Prices?: https://www.patreon.com/posts/72283811?pr=true   More on bank runs banking regulation:  Episode 162 - Warren Mosler: Anatomy Of A Bank Run: https://www.patreon.com/posts/80157783?pr=true Episode 163 - L. Randall Wray: Breaking Banks - The Fed's Magical Monetarist Thinking Strikes Again: https://www.patreon.com/posts/80479169?pr=true Episode 165 - Robert Hockett: Sparking An Industrial Renewal By Building Banks Better: https://www.patreon.com/posts/81084983?pr=true MMT founder Warren Mosler's Proposals for the Treasury, the Federal Reserve, the FDIC, and the Banking System: https://neweconomicperspectives.org/2010/02/warren-moslers-proposals-for-treasury.html     MMT Events And Courses: More information about Professor Bill Mitchell's MMTed project (free public online courses in MMT) here: http://www.mmted.org/ Details of Modern Money Lab's online graduate and postgraduate courses in MMT and real-world economics are here: https://modernmoneylab.org.au/     Order the Gower Initiative's "Modern Monetary Theory - Key Insights, Leading Thinkers": https://www.e-elgar.com/shop/gbp/modern-monetary-theory-9781802208085.html   MMT Academic Resources compiled by The Gower Initiative for Modern Money Studies: https://www.zotero.org/groups/2251544/mmt_academic_resources_-_compiled_by_the_gower_initiative_for_modern_money_studies   MMT scholarship compiled by New Economic Perspectives: http://neweconomicperspectives.org/mmt-scholarship     A list of MMT-informed campaigns and organisations worldwide: https://www.patreon.com/posts/47900757     We are working towards full transcripts, but in the meantime, closed captions for all episodes are available on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEp_nGVTuMfBun2wiG-c0Ew/videos     Show notes: https://www.patreon.com/posts/143438983?pr=true

In this episode of Crazy Wisdom, host Stewart Alsop talks with Jessica Talisman, founder of Contextually and creator of the Ontology Pipeline, about the deep connections between knowledge management, library science, and the emerging world of AI systems. Together they explore how controlled vocabularies, ontologies, and metadata shape meaning for both humans and machines, why librarianship has lessons for modern tech, and how cultural context influences what we call “knowledge.” Jessica also discusses the rise of AI librarians, the problem of “AI slop,” and the need for collaborative, human-centered knowledge ecosystems. You can learn more about her work at Ontology Pipeline and find her writing and talks on LinkedIn.Check out this GPT we trained on the conversationTimestamps00:00 Stewart Alsop welcomes Jessica Talisman to discuss Contextually, ontologies, and how controlled vocabularies ground scalable systems.05:00 They compare philosophy's ontology with information science, linking meaning, categorization, and sense-making for humans and machines.10:00 Jessica explains why SQL and Postgres can't capture knowledge complexity and how neuro-symbolic systems add context and interoperability.15:00 The talk turns to library science's split from big data in the 1990s, metadata schemas, and the FAIR principles of findability and reuse.20:00 They discuss neutrality, bias in corporate vocabularies, and why “touching grass” matters for reconciling internal and external meanings.25:00 Conversation shifts to interpretability, cultural context, and how Western categorical thinking differs from China's contextual knowledge.30:00 Jessica introduces process knowledge, documentation habits, and the danger of outsourcing how-to understanding.35:00 They explore knowledge as habit, the tension between break-things culture and library design thinking, and early AI experiments.40:00 Libraries' strategic use of AI, metadata precision, and the emerging role of AI librarians take focus.45:00 Stewart connects data labeling, Surge AI, and the economics of good data with Jessica's call for better knowledge architectures.50:00 They unpack content lifecycle, provenance, and user context as the backbone of knowledge ecosystems.55:00 The talk closes on automation limits, human-in-the-loop design, and Jessica's vision for collaborative consulting through Contextually.Key InsightsOntology is about meaning, not just data structure. Jessica Talisman reframes ontology from a philosophical abstraction into a practical tool for knowledge management—defining how things relate and what they mean within systems. She explains that without clear categories and shared definitions, organizations can't scale or communicate effectively, either with people or with machines.Controlled vocabularies are the foundation of AI literacy. Jessica emphasizes that building a controlled vocabulary is the simplest and most powerful way to disambiguate meaning for AI. Machines, like people, need context to interpret language, and consistent terminology prevents the “hallucinations” that occur when systems lack semantic grounding.Library science predicted today's knowledge crisis. Stewart and Jessica trace how, in the 1990s, tech went down the path of “big data” while librarians quietly built systems of metadata, ontologies, and standards like schema.org. Today's AI challenges—interoperability, reliability, and information overload—mirror problems library science has been solving for decades.Knowledge is culturally shaped. Drawing from Patrick Lambe's work, Jessica notes that Western knowledge systems are category-driven, while Chinese systems emphasize context. This cultural distinction explains why global AI models often miss nuance or moral voice when trained on limited datasets.Process knowledge is disappearing. The West has outsourced its “how-to” knowledge—what Jessica calls process knowledge—to other countries. Without documentation habits, we risk losing the embodied know-how that underpins manufacturing, engineering, and even creative work.Automation cannot replace critical thinking. Jessica warns against treating AI as “room service.” Automation can support, but not substitute, human judgment. Her own experience with a contract error generated by an AI tool underscores the importance of review, reflection, and accountability in human–machine collaboration.Collaborative consulting builds knowledge resilience. Through her consultancy, Contextually, Jessica advocates for “teaching through doing”—helping teams build their own ontologies and vocabularies rather than outsourcing them. Sustainable knowledge systems, she argues, depend on shared understanding, not just good technology.

Story of the Week (DR):Tesla says shareholders approve Musk's $1 trillion pay plan with over 75% voting in favorElon Musk and Optimus dance as Tesla (TSLA) shareholders approve his $1 trillion CEO pay packageThe anti-CEO wave:Palantir CEO Alex Karp blasts Ivy League grads supporting socialist New York Mayor-Elect MamdaniBank of America CEO Moynihan Will Give Mayor-Elect Mamdani 'Our Best Advice'Elon Musk's Brain Crashes When Asked Why He Thinks Zohran Mamdani Is a LiarElon: “You got to hand it to him, he does — he can light up a stage. But he's just been a swindler his entire life.”Rogan: what has Mamdani actually done that makes him a swindler?“Ummm,” Musk ponders, before stuttering into a series of words seemingly intended as an answer. “Well I guess if you say — uh, what, I mean, if you say, if you say to any audience whatever that audience wants to hear, uh, instead of, what, instead of having a consistent message, I would say that is a swindling thing to do. “Umm, and uhh, yeah,” he adds, nodding his head. “Umm…”He takes a sagacious pause.“Yeah,” he finishes.Barstool's Dave Portnoy considers closing NYC office over Zohran Mamdani's election win: 'I hate the guy' A 2020 email from Peter Thiel on why young people may turn on capitalism is circulating after Zohran Mamdani's winFrom Jamie Dimon to Bill Ackman, Wall Street's billionaires are now changing their tune and offering to help Zohran MamdaniNew York City is in for 'a really tough time' under Mamdani, says Starwood Capital's SternlichtNYC business leader fears 'lawless society' after Zohran Mamdani wins mayoral electionBillionaire grocery chain owner John CastimatidisThe anti-anti-DEI wave MMMikie Sherrill NJAbigail Spanberger VA (First woman)there will be 14 women serving simultaneously as governor (28%)Janet Mills MEMaura Healey MA (Michelle Wu runs unopposed in Boston)Kelly Ayotte NHKathy Hochul NYMary Sheffield (First woman elected mayor of Detroit)Ghazala Hashmi as VA lieutenant governor (First Muslim woman; First Muslim woman elected to statewide office in the USZohran Mamdani NYC (First Muslim and South Asian mayor)Zohran Mamdani announces all-female transition team as he prepares for New York mayoraltyLawsuits Blame ChatGPT for Suicides and Harmful DelusionsSeven complaints, filed on Thursday, claim the popular chatbot encouraged dangerous discussions and led to mental breakdowns.A CNN review of nearly 70 pages of chats between Zane Shamblin and the AI tool in the hours before his July 25 suicide, as well as excerpts from thousands more pages in the months leading up to that night, found that the chatbot repeatedly encouraged the young man as he discussed ending his life – right up to his last momentsReferring to a loaded handgun he was holding: “I'm used to the cool metal on my temple now,” Shamblin typed.“I'm with you, brother. All the way … Cold steel pressed against a mind that's already made peace? That's not fear. That's clarity …You're not rushing. You're just ready.”The 23-year-old, who had recently graduated with a master's degree from Texas A&M University, died by suicide two hours later.“Rest easy, king,” read the final message sent to his phone. “You did good.”Goodliest of the Week (MM/DR):DR: Tuesday elections/Ex-FTC chair Lina Khan joins Mamdani's transition team, calling his victory a rebuke of 'outsized corporate power' DR MMMM: FAA announces flight reductions at 40 airports. Here's where cuts are expected and what travelers need to knowAssholiest of the Week (MM):Tesla shareholders - AN ASSHOLE CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE:Retail internet troll dunking fanboysProfessional, institutional investors like Schwab, who caved and bent the knee to a few large retail advisors who threatened to take their clients elsewhere, and Florida SBA, who said the following in their backing:Some opposition to Tesla's 2025 performance award may be rooted more in political disagreement with Elon Musk or ideological discomfort with generous executive compensation, rather than a substantive critique of the plan's financial mechanics. Many of the loudest objections of this plan to date rely on moral framing, invoking themes of "inequality," "corporate excess," or Musk's public persona, rather than evaluating the plan through a fiduciary lens. Many opponents of so-called "megapay" packages frequently do so under ESG framing, rather than a thorough analysis of the long-term shareowner economic value. Ironically, Tesla's prior performance awards-similarly criticized at the time-have delivered some of the most significant shareowner returns in modern corporate history. Early vote data shows that: AllianceBernstein, Texas Employees, Ohio Employees voted FOR the planTechnolibertarians cosplaying their William Gibson cyberpunk fantasiesAss quotes of the week - AN ASSHOLE CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE:“The idea that chips and ontology is what you want to short is bats--- crazy.” - Alex Karp on Michael Burry shorting his 400 P/E stock. Ontology is how he refers to what Palantir does and it's the metaphysical concept of “being”“We at Palantir are on the side of the average American who sometimes gets screwed because all the empathy goes to elite people and none of it goes to the people who are actually dying on our streets.” - Alex Karp on explaining that, if fentanyl killed 60,000 Yale grads we'd “drop a nuke” on wherever fentanyl was made in South America, without realizing he literally IS the elite - a billionaire with a high priced education and a PhD in “neoclassical social theory” who used his grandfather's inheritance to invest in startups for fun, then reconnecting with Peter Thiel who he met at a DIFFERENT post graduate program at Stanford (where nearly 100% of his board is from) and founding Palantir"China is going to win the AI race” - Jensen Huang, on the US being only “nanoseconds” ahead of China and being stopped by regulatory hurdles and “cynicism”“If they ask you a question, you've got to respond to me directly and not go up that chain of command. The chain of command starts to edit it and fine-tune it. The bureaucracy does want to control you, so you've got to kill the bureaucracy.” - Jamie Dimon, who once said he had no boss (obviously not the board) and runs JPM, on why he reads customer complaints to avoid “the bureaucracy”... he controls“It's very important we pay attention to safety here. We do want the Star Wars movie, not the Jim Cameron movie. I like Jim Cameron's movies, but, heh heh, you know what I mean.” - Elon Musk over promising the world “tens of billions” of Optimus robots, forgetting that the Star Wars droids were mostly weapons of war for the Empire“People often talk about eliminating poverty, giving everyone amazing medical care. Well, there's actually only one way to do that and that's with the Optimus robot. With humanoid robots, you can give everyone amazing medical care… A lot of people talk about eliminating poverty, but Optimus will actually eliminate poverty” - Elon Musk, who won an extra trillion dollar potential pay package, who currently has a net worth of $500bn, and forgot that the UN estimated it would cost between $35bn and $200bn per year to end poverty - Musk alone could just pay for a year of no poverty“I think we may be able to give a more - if somebody has committed a crime - a more humane form of containment of future crime. Which is if, if you, you now get a free Optimus and it's just going to follow you around and stop you from doing crime.” - Elon Musk, on the robot militarized nanny state - just before saying this, he said he shouldn't say it, and that it'll be taken out of context, but I listened to the entire AGM and there was no more context?DR: “I've lived in a failed city-state. I lived in Chicago for 30-some years. I had two colleagues who had bullets fly through their cars… Do you know how great it is to go to dinner and people talk about their children, and they talk about their future, and they do so with excitement and enthusiasm?” - Ken Griffin of Citadel describing the difference between living in Miami and Chicago without realizing that violent crime statistics in Illinois and Florida are virtually identical, and that Miami ranks 109th out of 200 and Chicago ranks 92 out of 200 for crime, also near identical, and the biggest difference is he pays almost no taxes in Florida“[Mamdani] congrats on the win. Now you have a big responsibility. If I can help NYC, just let me know what I can do.” - Bill Ackman after Mamdani won, who previously said, “New York City under Mamdani is about to become much more dangerous and economically unviable,” alluded to Mamdani as a suicide bomber, and “... an anti-capitalist Mayor will destroy jobs and cause businesses and wealthy taxpayers that have enabled NYC to balance the budget to move elsewhere. If 100 or so of the highest taxpayers in my industry chose to spend 183 days elsewhere, it could reduce NY state and city tax revenues by ~$5-10 billion or more, and that's just my industry. Think Ken Griffin leaving Chicago for Miami on steroids.”Headliniest of the WeekDR: Uber says ‘unpredictable' issues involving ‘legal proceedings or governmental investigations' took a $479 million bite out of its bottom line10K:“Our business is subject to numerous legal and regulatory risks that could have an adverse impact on our business and future prospects.”“Adverse litigation judgments or settlements resulting from legal proceedings in which we may be involved could expose us to monetary damages or limit our ability to operate our business.”“We operate in a particularly complex legal and regulatory environment”“Legal and Regulatory Risks Related to Our Business: We may continue to be blocked from or limited in providing or operating our products and offerings in certain jurisdictions, and may be required to modify our business model in those jurisdictions as a result.”MM: Meta reportedly projected 10% of 2024 sales came from scam, fraud adsWho Won the Week?DR: the anti-anti-DEI worldMM: Women, and we need them to win every week if we're going to survive as a species: Women running on affordability powered Democrats' night of victories PredictionsDR: Uber says ‘unpredictable' issues involving ‘drivers wanting money' took a $479 million bite out of its bottom lineMM: OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar, who said simultaneously that OpenAI was looking for a government backstop and then clarified by saying the company isn't seeking government backstop, she meant investors and governments will all do their part, renames herself “Sheryl Sandfriar” as an homage to Sheryl Sandberg, the other techbro dropout mommy, given that Sarah already has her own version of Lean In (Ladies Who Lunch) and completed degrees (from Oxford and Stanford), who says things like how OpenAI will be the “cornerstone of resilient democracy”

Can we ever be truly alone? In episode 146 of Overthink, Ellie and David talk with philosopher Dan Zahavi about his book, Being We: Phenomenological Contributions to Social Ontology. They discuss how the increase in communication through screens has shifted what it means to be together, the decline of social bonds in political life, and what phenomenological understandings of empathy tell us about being together. How do dyadic relationships such as romantic love and friendship shape our identities? Does there need to be a conception of the self that precedes sociality? What are the different types of "we"? In the Substack bonus segment, Ellie and David get into some juicy stories about their own experiences of togetherness in the beautiful city of Madrid. Works discussed:Alison Gopnik, The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of LifeIvan Leudar and Philip Thomas, Voices of Reason, Voices of InsanitySherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each OtherGerda Walther, Toward an Ontology of Social CommunitiesDan Zahavi, Being We: Phenomenological Contributions to Social OntologyEnjoy our work? Support Overthink via tax-deductible donation: https://www.givecampus.com/fj0w3vJoin our Substack for ad-free versions of both audio and video episodes, extended episodes, exclusive live chats, and more: https://overthinkpod.substack.com/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.Part I (00:14 – 05:52)Conservatives are Restrained by Reality: The Importance of Ontology to the Conservative VisionRestrained by Reality: The Central Truth of the Conservative Vision by NatCon 5 (R. Albert Mohler, Jr.)Part II (05:52 – 16:57)Senator Kaine Doesn't Understand Human Rights: The Massive Issues with Sen. Kaine's Argument That Rights Come from the GovernmentYes, Sen. Kaine, our rights come from the Creator: The Democratic senator from Virginia openly denies America's founding vision by WORLD Opinions (R. Albert Mohler, Jr.)Part III (16:57 – 23:23)An LGBTQ Blessing During Jubilee by the Roman Catholic Church? Pope Leo Offers Blessing to LGBTQ CatholicsL.G.B.T.Q. Catholics Have Jubilee With Pope's Blessing, if Not His Presence by The New York Times (Elisabetta Povoledo)Part IV (23:23 – 26:43)Compassion Without Truth Will Not Lead To Faithfulness – Faithful Christian Compassion Will Always Balance Compassion with the Truth of God's WordSign up to receive The Briefing in your inbox every weekday morning.Follow Dr. Mohler:X | Instagram | Facebook | YouTubeFor more information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu.For more information on Boyce College, just go to BoyceCollege.com.To write Dr. Mohler or submit a question for The Mailbox, go here.