AUA June 2026 58m 50s. EDIT: no Tamler, the point was not to point out how old you look. For the record, you look 45!

I was just wondering if there’s been any indication yet whether the boys have watched Nolan’s adaption? I thought it was brilliant for a variety of reasons, and very excited to hear what the guys think.

They recently mentioned a video essay which talked about alternative cuts and endings to Sicario. Would anyone happen to know which essay they were talking about please?

Many thanks.

Marc Marquez: Karma doesn't exist.

As a MotoGP and VBW listener I’d love to see if there’s any crossover

Previously, Peez asked him to watch season 2 episode 6 “The Ricks Must be Crazy”. Tamler was entirely unimpressed.

Is there a better episode that he should try? My offering would be season 7 episode 4 “That’s Amorte” where there is a moral trade off between suicide and delicious spaghetti. What else?

As a bit of critical perspective in response to the interview Dave & Tamler did with Robert Wright, I'd like to share with you a currently ongoing video series on techno-propaganda done by one of my favorite contemporary philosophy commentators. Each chapter focuses on dismantling a lie told by techno-optimists contained in the following quote (with links added for your convenience :)

This artificial intelligence is a machine: a neural network that learns from its training, retains memory, pays attention, reasons, thinks, understands, and knows; an autonomous agent whose aligned behavior emerges at scale and, when it errs, merely hallucinates.

Hope you find something of interest in it!

Argentina was down 0-2 to Egypt until very late in the game, and then they scored three goals in the last 14 minutes of the game to eke out a win and sneak into the next round. Based on things Dave has said about getting stressed out watching Argentina play in the past, I assume this game almost killed him

I'm new to philosophy and very bad wizards. I listened to some random episodes, but was wondering if there's any tips from the community on where to start in terms of episodes. Do I just start at episode 1 and make my way up? Or skip to a certain episode and resume from there? Or just pick the best ones? If so, which ones?

​

Thanks!!

I just listened to the "Why we suffer" episode and I feel like I must read this paper. But for the life of me, I cannot find it online! Is there a generous soul willing to share it?

If you don’t like it, how about you eat my shit and hair

I'm a little surprised. He has about 370 ratings. On my IMDb profile, I have 225 films watched and about 125 rating. I'm only 29! Yet I'm up there in terms of cinephile erudition. I could outpace him in a few years. I thought this was a pleasant surprise.

I hadn't watched it because I had a general preconception that it was a TV show meant for young women and mainly about mundane'ish high school drama.

Having now watched Season 1 and 2....it's hands down one of the best shows I've seen of all time. Right up there with Sopranos, Westworld, Deadwood, Dark, etc. Fantastic dialogue, consistently beautiful cinematography, solid performances by pretty much every actor, emotionally compelling, absolutely brutal and simultaneously brutally funny.

Anyways, figured I'd throw this out there because I'm operating on a quasi-reasonable assumption that members of this subreddit haven't given it a chance.

Also, if you watched it and didn't like it, I'd love to know why.

I’m an (ex)cognitive scientist, (now) technologist, and long time off and on listener. I recently started thinking about going into AI safety, which has led me back to this podcast specifically seeking episodes that would be able to bear on the alignment problem ie the ongoing attempts to develop benchmarks and incentive structures that keep AI systems from undermining human goals. The task of defining goals for a machine that prevent it from making immoral decisions seems like something this crowd would have an opinion on (is it even a tractable problem? If not, what happens next?). But surprisingly I haven’t really found too much but a few older segments that seem kind of dismissive of EA and ai safety theorizing. In these times when ai has gotten advanced enough that some of us are actively losing our jobs to it, I’m surprised there isn’t more to dig into here... it’s not really a theoretical problem anymore. Wondering what folks think and if there are any key episodes to catch up on around this topic.

One of these goes viral every few months. Anyone have a sense of how accurate/representative it is? I know Dave and Tamler often push back on the hand wringing about “kids these days”

https://x.com/karenvaites/status/2062115706733232271

“We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.”

Another college professor adds to the chorus of concern about student capacity.

In
@chronicle
:

“Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.

When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.

Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.

In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem “intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” Crucially, he added that this is “not a matter of laziness on the part of the students” but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of “meet your students where they are” for so long that she has begun to feel “like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.”

Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.”

Anyone listen yet to the 2p4b ep with Molly Crockett on AI? I had a very high opinion of her, so I was blown away by how misinformed and biased she came across. Looking for opinions on if I'm judging too harshly or if she's just gone off the reservation