I know. I know. My homepage is filling up with podcast posts.
But here’s the thing: this podcast is the only standing commitment I have every week. It’s a 3-hour conversation with my best friend. It’s the only substantive interaction I get to have with anyone. And it takes 2-3 days out of my week to make it happen.
There’s the research, the prep, the show outlines. The books/articles/podcasts I have to ingest before going on air.
Then I have to clean up my little cave, because it doubles as my studio. It’s all on camera. Can’t have it looking like a dumpster fire.
Last night, I spent 40 minutes trying to get my camera to handle its stupid white balance and ISO issues, only to have it throw so much noise at the encoder that I look like a Minecraft character for half the episode because of all the big, blocky pixels.
Then we shoot. For three hours.
Then it’s post production for another 6-12 hours. Edits, audio, descriptions, thumbnails, titles, short clips, post everything to social media over the next week while responding to comments coming in.
And the truth is, I love it. It’s a lot of work, but it’s real, and it’s ours, and it’s finally growing. We had over 7,000 views on the last episode. It feels good to get some traction again.
My usual deal is to spend the first three days of the week writing (for the Substack), then prepping, shooting the show, processing. Thursday is normally a mix: podcast stuff in the morning, go deliver orders in the afternoon. Then Friday-Sunday it’s all Instacart, all the time.
Rinse, repeat.
But I just have to hope that if I keep putting in the hours, the real work — this Substack and the companion podcast — are going to become the job. Brick by brick. Inch by inch. I think what we’re doing matters. Not just for us, but for our audience.
Here’s the cold open for this week’s show. I probably spent 3 hours making it. I don’t even care. It helps grab attention from YouTube browsers, and it’s fun, and I’m proud of it:
I started making these little compilations at the beginning because YouTubers were getting stuck our our ineffably cool retro-futurist intro and bouncing before they got to the real conversation:
Anyway, enough of me showing you how the sausage is made. Here’s the description and link to the latest episode. And I’m not kidding, by the way. These Effective Altruists are bad news:
Silicon Valley has a religion. It has a creation story, a priesthood, an apocalypse, a promise of salvation, and a vision of beings that will succeed humanity. It's bougie and narcissistic and morally incoherent: in other words, pretty darn evil.
The scary part? Most people simply have no idea what it is, so they aren't aware of the danger.
Episode 24 begins with Diana Pasulka and Jonathan Pageau on UFOs, technological transcendence, and the end of secularism. Steve and Kale explore transfiguration versus transhumanism, the spiritual strangeness of digital life, the impotence of truth in an age of infinite information, and the urgent need to recover ordinary embodied life.
Then comes the dive into Effective Altruism: consequentialism, insect suffering, hypothetical future beings, longtermism, TESCREAL, AI extinction narratives, secrecy, and the power claimed by people who believe they are securing the future of intelligence itself. Peter Thiel's Antichrist argument supplies the mirror image: what if fear of apocalypse becomes the justification for control?
Are we building technology to serve human beings, or treating humanity as the bootloader for whatever comes next?
As always, you can grab the audio-only version right here or from your favorite podcast provider.
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I always look forward to new episodes!