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• [audio] Eerie Coincidences Aren't That Eerie — 17 Oct 2026
  Your phone probably isn’t listening. Your brain is just built to notice all the ads that surprise you, and forget the thousands that don’t. I reckon most eerie coincidences are like this.
• [audio] Why Stupid Leadership Retreats Work — 3 Oct 2026
  Leadership retreats don’t work because of what happens on them. They work because a change of scene forces new ways of thinking and acting. Win over the people everybody copies while you’re there, and the change will survive the trip home too.
• [audio] AI is kind of scary — 19 Sep 2026
  The AI panic mostly represents old problems: machines acting on a proxy of the world, to serve a proxy of our purpose. We’ve got a century of research solving those frictions. The new thing is that they’re running human social scripts without human stakes. Kind of scary.
• [audio] On Motivation — 5 Sep 2026
  Motivation seems simple until you notice that all of psychology describes what motivates us. I think three buckets make things easier: what motivates us, how it motivates us, and how motivation is sustained.
• [audio] AI Isn't That Scary — 22 Aug 2026
  AI is human-like, not human. Its output looks like ours but its purpose doesn’t, and purpose is what builds a mind. It isn’t heading towards us—it’s heading sideways, somewhere stranger and probably more benign.
• [audio] Purple Doesn't Exist — 8 Aug 2026
  Purple isn’t on the light spectrum. Your brain invents it to stand for a green that should be there and isn’t—and it does the same with your reasons. The brain is a storyteller all the way down to perception.
• [audio] The Value of Ritual — 25 Jul 2026
  You don’t get a choice about whether you ritualise. Only about whether you chose the ritual.
• [audio] The Neuroscience Con — 11 Jul 2026
  Brain-words are cosmetic filler. Strip the neuroscience out and the advice means exactly what it did before—so learn to strip it out.
• [marginalium] AI is shit at reasoning — 8 Jul 2026
• [audio] Successful Prophets — 27 Jun 2026
  The most successful prophet isn’t a person. It’s a shared abstraction the group charges up and pins to a convenient emblem. Charisma is conferred, not possessed—so the leader is optional, substitutable, and sometimes already gone.
• [article] AI-shaped stuff — 13 Jun 2026
  We keep waiting for AI to get good enough. That’s backwards. The bottleneck is human: work that isn’t AI-shaped, verification we’re bad at, and confidence we’ve offloaded to the machine itself.
• [audio] You Can Catch Madness — 13 Jun 2026
  <em>Folie à deux</em> isn’t a rare clinical curiosity. It’s one misleading face of social isolation—intimacy plus loneliness, the same machinery running in all of us. The spectacular cases are selection bias. You can catch it.
• [article] Successful Prophets — 5 Jun 2026
  We think of cults as the product of dangerously charismatic leaders but on examination this narrative falls apart. Really, the most successful prophets are not a person, but the followers, who use the leader as an emblem.
• [marginalium] AI and task fragmentation — 4 Jun 2026
• [marginalium] AI Dark Output — 4 Jun 2026