The Clearing

What’s it like for the particular slice of Gen Z who grew up on social media, but got AI in college? How do researchers approach the “mechanistic interpretability” of large language models that have no hard-coded logic or values? How can AI research help us understand our own and other minds, at individual and population level? Nicholas Budny is my little cousin. At 22, he’s the youngest guest I’v...

What is it about midlife that hits so many of us as unexpectedly liberating? Does the meaning of concepts inevitably become richer with experience? When it does, how is that philosophically relevant? And, does a middle aged spirit animate Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey? There isn’t much by way of terrain that the philosopher Markus Gabriel won’t touch. Best known for founding the philosophical moveme...

What is it to be “scientifically minded”? At the scale of Nature, how predictive are the mechanisms we can analyze experimentally? Is something more true when we can express it with elegant math? If science is about understanding what is , then the goal in science, as in philosophy, should be to “see clearly and to see whole.” But the scientific method, as well as the scientific temperament, deman...

Why are so many thoughtful people I know obsessed with the Enneagram? It’s easy to find deep-dive content, but really hard to find a reasonably compact overview that would help one decide whether to go for the deep dive. Having tried and failed (in a good way) in episode #23 to get an analysis from an enneatype 4 of how he would navigate the Enneagram framework in relation, I realised I needed to...

Every day I encounter (and perpetuate) the casual use of pop-psychological terms to describe personality types - we talk about left-brain-y vs. right-brain-y people, attachment styles, Enneagram types, drama triangles, introversion and extroversion… But how much do such frameworks help us to constructively understand ourselves better, versus simply justifying our foibles? How illuminating are they...

Why is there a different Chinese medicine paradigm that’s labelled “traditional”? Why do people in the West only tend to discover it when they’re confronting chronic illness? Does it ask us to adopt an alternative metaphysics? Allie Tao is a Chinese Medicine practitioner in Portland, Oregon. She didn’t set out to join the healing professions like the rest of her family, but her own journey of cult...

What is the connection between Turner’s ethereal paintings of the Rhine and today’s nativist stories, in Germany and across the pond? How is it that the Romantics venerated individual sensitivity and universalist ideals, and yet prominent Romantic thinkers were so often beguiled by authoritarians? Why did Fascists find it so easy to repurpose this soft, dreamy material for their own ends? Thomas M...

Dr. Bettina Wolfgarten is a third generation radiologist specialising in breast cancer. As we unpack what this means, it turns out the technology has changed so much that the job would be unrecognizable to her grandfather. But the throughline remains strong, in Bettina’s telling: a fundamental drive to look into the body as deeply and precisely as possible, embracing emerging technologies in an en...

My very dear friend Marie-Theres Strauss challenged me to trade seats for this one. I think I agreed to talking about the pod, but ended up answering questions about myself. Marie felt that anyone following these conversations is entiteld to know more about where I am coming from. So it’s a bit different and I’m not sure my bio is inherently interesting, but I’ll offer it. What is true though: I b...

Why do people enjoy conventional couple dances even when they eschew conventional gender roles in real life? Is there some broader virtue that is cultivated in this highly codified, chivalrous language? What’s satisfying about setting aside important aspects of identity for the duration of a dance, and instead, pracitcing a kind of whole-body-listening with a stranger? Soroa Lear is a professional...

What are the stories we tell about the boundaries of Self - and why should we interrogate them with science, contemplative practice, and psychedelics? Dr. James Cooke believes that any deep first-principles understanding of the human condition requires us to tackle the fundamental construct of separateness. He’s not denying that everyday narratives of reality are predictive, rather he’s interested...

Nobody isn’t going there, nobody’s parents aren’t going there—and yet so many of us show up at the threshold surprised and unprepared. Modernity seems at a loss when it comes to the dying process. Among the oldest evidence of human meaning making are artefacts to mark this passage, but today we often find ourselves without any conceptual frame that dying doesn’t break. It’s outside the event horiz...

We continue the conversation with the Odyssey myth. Marzia interprets the story of Odysseus (Ulysses) as Penelope’s dream of individuation. I enjoyed this archetypally Jungian move. Rather than the story be about the return of the hero protagonist after the Trojan war, the entire thing is dreamed up by his wife, Penelope, known as the faithful spouse who for twenty years awaits his return to Ithac...

Continuing with the theme of archetypes, Marzia suggested that we talk about the symbol of the snake, working through association and the real example of a snake dream of one of her clients (to which of course that client had consented). We talk about why Jungian Psychoanalysts pay such close attention to dreams, whether they contain messages from the unconscious mind, and how archetypal dreams ca...

When are we in contact with an archetype—and when are we merely stereotyping, denying ourselves the insight of a full human archetypal pattern? What if we’re stuck in one aspect of an archetype, with “success” thinkable only along one narrow trajectory, but many ways to fail? Is there such a thing as a flexible hero? In this episode, we look at these questions through concepts as different as thos...

Not being native to the Rheinland, Rhenish Karneval is a phenomenon that begs explanation. So I asked a local legal mind to summarise the rules for me. That turns out to be rather difficult: a loosely pro-social subversion of the usual social order is the whole point. Instead of rules, the region is seized by a passionate pre-Lent commitment to the themes of Love, Cologne, and Kölsch. I even did t...

What does it mean to innovate within a defined form? In what sense is it important to be true to the vision of the composer—when can we straddle the shoulders of artistic giants and go somewhere new, when does that end up some kind of insensitive appropriation? And what is our cultural responsibility to restore a musical lineage severed by genocide? Musicians must keep asking themselves these ques...

This is a foray into unfamiliar territory. But it’s almost Christmas, and the Christmas story is perhaps the only part of the Bible that even non-Christians know by heart: a miraculous pregnancy, a humble family’s journey to comply with government diktat. The search for shelter, finally bedding down in a stable, and the divine child born there in the cold. Hardly a story of domination, points out...

What makes a voice listenable? Are we looking to be soothed? How do the idioms of techno and jazz differently show up the nature of time? Does silence even exist? This is a pretty whimsical conversation about the nature of sound. Professionally, I’ve dealt a lot in writing and comparatively little in voice, but I’m interested in its different characteristics - in the extemporaneous nature of spoke...

Peer group circles are an extremely powerful format for reflection, supportive camaraderie, and building strength. It’s not like coaching, though similar insights can emerge. It’s not like friendship as we usually understand that, with its layers of intertwinement, loyalties and expectations, although a well-run circle can lead to mutual well-wishing that, as Toby says, borders on love. It is unde...

Caryl Emerson is Emerita Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton. She is also my dearly beloved, indefatigable octogenarian aunt. Caryl’s fascination with Russian culture dates back to when she was a teenager in the 1950s, a time when most people in the West were even more wary of all things Russian than they are today (or rather, the opposite political camps were). This young g...

“Only connect”, said E.M. Forster in Howard’s End, and that ends up being the essence of this conversation. Nathan designs social spaces with variations on this goal. We talk about the difference between rituals and games, what’s wrong with the New Stoics, and some things to try when small talk threatens to ruin an evening. We didn’t quite get to the bottom of games as “art in the medium of agency...

Sarah is one of the few people I know who can talk about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) without getting flustered. An endeavour that has inspired so much passion and such bitter resistance can be hard to even discuss, but she approaches it with thoughtfulness and empathy for everyone involved in the work of integrating DEI considerations into the challenging business of running an organizat...

People have always gathered to dance. It’s a peculiar feature of Western modernity that we don’t anymore; or rather, that we limit the opportunities for dance into such contained and private subcultures. In doing so, I think we deprive ourselves of some pretty brilliant social tech. Soroa Lear is a professional dancer and co-creator of Vibrant Body, a popular dance practice in Berlin Kreuzberg. We...

This is a conversation between three German-American siblings about the most German of Germans. Undeniably a Great, I’m not aware of Mann being particularly fashionable at the moment, though his writing is a creative benchmark for anyone who enjoys his language. I only just learned a little about his life in exile, and his journey from Germanic monarchist to passionate democrat. Which seems timely...