Ben Blatt is a former staff writer for Slate and the Harvard Lampoon. Ben is a numbers guy who has taken his fun approach to data journalism to topics such as Seinfeld, map-making, the Beatles, and Jeopardy. This conversation centers around Ben's book "Nabokov's Favorite Word is Mauve" (2017). It's a book about what we can learn about writing and authors based not on what they say, or what impressions we get from reading their books, but on something that results from applying rigorous data analysis to their actual texts. Specifically, KMO and Ben discuss: 00:25 – Moneyball and its influence on Ben 02:12 – The attraction of baseball for analytical people 04:25 – Ben's interest in numbers and writing 06:40 – Patterns, correlations, and writing advice 10:00 – -LY adverbs 12:00 – British vs American English 14:40 – Bloke, blimey and the Harry Potter Effect 16:00 – Loud vs quiet verbs 19:08 – Pronoun and characters stats 20:00 – Comparing authors' noise levels 23:00 – Gender differences in literature 27:50 – Professionals and amateurs: the statistical differences 30:25 – Reading fan fiction 32:50 – Restraining style choices to foster creativity 34:50 – Revising one's novels 36:00 – Fame and success affecting one's writing style 38:00 – Data tools 40:15 – Vonnegut 42:10 – The validity of "write what you know" 43:10 – Digital Humanities and Franco Moretti's "Atlas of the European Novel" 47:15 – Ben's advice for aspiring writers 50:15 – Creating writing and progress in AI 52:05 – Ben's next project Ben (The Guest): Twitter: @BenBlatt KMO (The Host): Twitter: @Kayemmo en.padverb.com/kmo Padverb: The Padverb Telegram Channel: t.me/padverbpodcast

George Zarkadakis is the author of both fiction and non-fiction books, who describes himself as a science communicator, an artificial intelligence engineer, a futurist, and a digital innovation professional. His most recent book is called "Cyber Republic: Reinventing Democracy in the Age of Intelligent Machines" (MIT Press, 2021). In this conversation, KMO and George discuss: 06:05 – Why democracy needs to be reinvented 06:50 – Incorporating technologies into democracies 18:10 – Animal labor's role in creating inequality and its implications 25:40 – The psychological dimension and transforming spectators into actors 32:40 – Financial time machine 37:30 – Running out of units of measurement 41:30 – Obviating the need for trust with the blockchain 46:00 – Precarious creative gigs and AI's progress with artistic tools 57:20 – Blockchain technology in search of problems to solve 65:05 – The current web's dysfunctional nature 01:07:50 – George's book George (The Guest): Twitter: @zarkadakis georgezarkadakis.com KMO (The Host): Twitter: @Kayemmo en.padverb.com/kmo Padverb: The Padverb Telegram Channel: t.me/padverbpodcast

Francis Nimmo is a professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research specialty is understanding the structure and evolution of rocky and icy planets. KMO and Francis discuss: 02:30 – The importance of the James Webb and other telescopes 03:40 – NASA probes, the AI connection, and technical challenges 08:30 – The possibility of finding life and the radiation factor 09:45 – Europa and Enceladus 10:42 – Breaking molecules at fly-by speeds 11:50 – Technology limitations and ambiguity in our search for life 14:40 – The question of independent emergence of life 16:05 – Subsurface oceans 18:40 – Moons 23:25 – Saturn's rings 26:05 – The Kuiper belt and beyond 28:00 – Autonomy and hibernation 29:25 – Gas giants vs ice giants 31:25 – Pluto 35:50 – Mission re-assignment 40:10 – Canned apes and getting to Mars 42:30 – Sci-Fi future we were promised 44:15 – Venus 49:40 – Mercury 53:45 – Comets 56:05 – The Earth 57:40 – Deep Time Francis (The Guest): websites.pmc.ucsc.edu/~fnimmo/ Francis Nimmo @ Wikipedia KMO (The Host): Twitter: @Kayemmo en.padverb.com/kmo Padverb: The Padverb Telegram Channel: t.me/padverbpodcast

Lauren Aguirre is an award-winning science journalist who has produced documentaries, short-form video series, podcasts, interactive games and blogs for the PBS series "Nova." She has covered everything from asteroids to human origins to art restoration, but is particularly fascinated by the brain. "The Memory Thief" is Lauren's first book. In this conversation, Lauren and KMO discuss: 02:03 – Lauren's memory incident 06:42 – Waking up and not knowing where you are 08:28 – Retrograde and anterograde amnesia 13:10 – The fentanyl connection 20:53 – Experimental brain surgery 24:18 – Amnesia sufferers' self-worth 29:13 – Faking anterograde amnesia 31:18 – Science communication 33:38 – Disappointment in science 34:53 – The Memory Thief's target audience 36:28 – Multilayer narratives 39:13 – Our shared experience of forgetting 43:08 – Remembering our remembering of events 44:38 – The trauma connection 47:35 – Optogenetics 49:08 – The scientific process and the pursuit of truth Lauren Aguirre (The Guest): laurenaguirre.com @lsaguirre KMO (The Host): Twitter: @Kayemmo en.padverb.com/kmo Padverb: The Padverb Telegram Channel: t.me/padverbpodcast

Carla Diana is a designer, author, and educator who explores the impact of future technologies through hands-on experiments in product design and tangible interaction. Her latest book, "My Robot Gets Me: How Social Design Can Make New Products More Human," published by Harvard Business Review Press, came out in March 2021. Carla and KMO discuss: 02:20 – Carla's book's title 02:30 – What 4D design is 04:40 – Robot friends 13:05 – What a robot is 21:10 – What "entities" are 28:55 – Robots' association with labor 33:28 – Robots interacting with the environment 37:15 – Robots, faces, and shared attention 44:45 – Whether humanoid robots a good idea at all 48:50 – Science fiction affecting robot design and key concepts from Carla Carla (The Guest): carladiana.com KMO (The Host): Twitter: @Kayemmo en.padverb.com/kmo Padverb: The Padverb Telegram Channel: t.me/padverbpodcast Featured quote “Humans were still not only the cheapest robots around, but also, for many tasks, the only robots that could do the job. They were self-reproducing robots too. They showed up and worked generation after generation; give them 3000 calories a day and a few amenities, a little time off, and a strong jolt of fear, and you could work them at almost anything. Give them some ameliorative drugs and you had a working class, reified and coglike.” ― Kim Stanley Robinson, 2312

Michael J. Spivey is a professor of cognitive science at the University of California Merced. He earned his BA in Psychology at the University of California Santa Cruz and his PhD in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester. After 12 years as a psychology professor at Cornell University, Michael moved to UC Merced to help build a department of cognitive and information sciences. He has published over 100 journal articles and book chapters on the embodiment of cognition and interactions between language, vision, memory, syntax, semantics, and motor movement. His most recent book, published in 2020, is "Who You Are: The Science of Connectedness." (MIT Press) In this conversation, KMO and Michael discuss: 03:20 – The book's title and table of contents; externalism and egregore 07:30 – The role of the prefrontal cortex in our conception of self 11:30 – Non-scientific view of interactions between brain parts 12:50 – Mental representations of the world and the tricks they can play on us 15:35 – Letting go of oneself 17:25 – The value of familiar environments 18:45 – The futility of widely used time-management tricks 19:40 – Extending our mind past our skin 25:20 – The skipped question of emergent group intentions and desires 26:15 – Connecting to other bodies and life forms; emergence, again 28:25 – Murmurations and being in charge of a flock 28:45 – Boundaries between objects 35:20 – Perceiving objects as extensions of ourselves 37:02 – Virtual reality and tracking the direction of gaze 43:15 – AI and dogs 44:55 – Computer-generated imagery; deep fakes and their antidotes 49:35 – Extending your sense of self to the planetary scale 53:55 – Apocalyptic predictions, prepping, and the future of civilization 55:47 – Going beyond our planet and contacting life elsewhere 58:20 – Anti-natalism, suffering, and feeling one with the universe 1:02:28 – Michael's closing points; practical advice in the book Michael (The Guest): Michael's page at ucmerced.edu Who You Are at MIT Press KMO (The Host): Twitter: @Kayemmo en.padverb.com/kmo Padverb: The Padverb Telegram Channel: t.me/padverbpodcast

James Fodor is a science podcaster, an essayist, and currently, a PhD candidate in computational neuroscience and computational linguistics at the University of Melbourne (Australia). His intellectual and research interests cover such diverse areas as cognitive science, computer science, philosophy, theology, and economics. In this conversation, KMO and James discuss: 02:07 – A brief history of "The Science of Everything" 10:08 – How neural networks learn vs how humans learn 12:52 – The uncomfortable question of back-propagation 16:00 – Acquiring language and concepts 19:52 – Why and when machines' way of learning is important 23:22 – Illogical language models and the Internet lurking behind 25:52 – Conversation starters and GPT's talking to one another 27:45 – Modeling the mind vs the "just a neural network" cop-out 33:08 – A space of possible minds and complementing human intelligence 36:50 – Idiot chat bots and fearing AI 38:15 – The near-term future of AI 41:38 – Predicting the prosperity of nations James Fodor: The Science of Everything Podcast : fods12.podbean.com The Godless Theist Blog: thegodlesstheist.com James on YouTube: youtube.com/c/JamesFodor/ KMO: Twitter: @Kayemmo en.padverb.com/kmo Padverb: The Padverb Telegram Channel: t.me/padverbpodcast

Dr Jean-Marie Volland is a scientist at the Laboratory for Research in Complex Systems and an affiliate scientist at the Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute. He is also the lead author on a recent research paper that announced the discovery of something that most people, including biologists, had scarcely thought possible: a gigantic bacterium which is thousands of times larger than its fellow microbes – so large, in fact, that it can be seen with the naked eye. In this conversation, KMO and Jean-Marie discuss: 01:50 – Thiomargarita Magnifica and its discovery 05:05 – Geography refresher 06:25 – JM's stumbling into biology 10:20 – Etymological remarks 10:55 – Sulfur-eating lifeforms and KMO's mammalian privilege 13:15 – Bug size competition 13:55 – The three-domain classification (Eukarya, Archaea, Bacteria) 16:45 – Taxonomy of the living forms 18:38 – Reproduction and evolution 22:13 – T. magnifica's unusual structure (with a brief mention of Anton Petrov's YouTube videos) 26:20 – Evolutionary advantages of being large 30:00 – Cooperation and competition in the natural world and beyond (way beyond, including the economy); ramifications of this dichotomy; symbiosis, parasitism, and commensalism; why is symbiosis so abiding when its game-theoretical disadvantages are also evident? 44:40 – JM's two closing take-home messages Host and Guests: KMO: @Kayemmo | en.padverb.com/kmo Jean-Marie Volland (LRC Systems) Links and Resources: Thiomargarita magnifica (Wikipedia)

Dr. Batja Mesquita is a social psychologist, an affective scientist, and a pioneer of cultural psychology. She is the author of "Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions." In this episode's first interview, KMO and Batja discuss: 03:10 – Batja's background and story 04:26 – What's WEIRD about Western countries 05:46 – US vs Netherlands: cultural differences 10:30 – Translating emotions between cultures 32:48 – Batja's take on the KMO's interview with Rich Firth-Godbehere 36:08 – The nature-culture dichotomy Our second guest, Simon Ager, is the founder, developer, and proprietor of Omniglot.com, an online encyclopedia of languages and writing systems. In this episode's second interview, KMO and Simon discuss: 47:40 - Learning Japanese writing 51:58 – Change in language learning methodologies 52:33 – Writing scripts on Omniglot 53:16 – Tolkien's invented languages 54:32 - Sonja Lang's Toki Pona 55:48 – Emojis 57:20 – Making random changes to the Klingon grammar official 58:18 – Languages, pidgins, creoles, and dialects 59:18 - Mastering accents as adult learners 1:01:37 – Watching foreign media and acquiring fake accents 1:06:23 – Omniglot's unusual pedigree as a one-man linguistic orchestra Host and Guests: KMO: @Kayemmo | en.padverb.com/kmo Dr. Batja Mesquita: @batjamesquita | www.batjamesquita.com | Wikipedia Simon Ager omniglot.com/aboutme.htm | @Omniglossia

Dr Paul Thagard is a Canadian cognitive scientist and philosopher of mind. He is the author of many interdisciplinary books, including, most recently, "Balance: How it Works and What it Means." In this conversation, KMO and Paul discuss: 03:32 – Balance, Paul's book of two parts 04:47 – The inner ear and its role in balance 06:50 – Comparing balance and scales 08:40 – Using metaphors, Scott Adams, and Sam Harris 15:52 – Toxic metaphors and AI monitoring live conversations 20:00 – How prevalent misinformation is 22:52 – Opinions on vaccination 23:28 – The notion of consensus reality 25:40 – The no-longer binary (strong/weak) nature of AI 30:48 – The vacuously eloquent linguistic models 34:32 – Panpsychism and its relation to neuroscience 37:38 – Neural representation of meaning 41:08 – Whether larger brains means more intelligence 45:22 – Cats vs Boston Dynamics robots and the generality of human skill 47:26 - AI ethics 50:20 - Our future moral duties to suffering-capable AI entities Host and guest: KMO: en.padverb.com/kmo | @Kayemmo Dr Paul Thagard: paulthagard.com Links and references: Overpopulation on Mars - quoteinvestigator.com/2020/10/04/mars/ Eliezer Yudkowsky – en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliezer_Yudkowsky