Matt Brandabur, Yuri Marder

World Brain: No Experts

Technology EN ↓ 6 episodes

Taking the HG Wells essay collection as a departure point, this podcast asks the following questions of a range of people: What has been awakened? Rough beast? Benevolent angel? Boring super-appliance? Could we be less wrong about AI than those considered to be experts? Why "No Experts"? Is it possible that there really are any experts on this subject? Could a few relatively smart outsiders be less wrong about AI - what it is, what changes it's going to make to our lives - than the glory-drunk founders and their whorish enablers, or the terrifying doomsayers? Could we be any less wrong, for th...

Author

Matt Brandabur, Yuri Marder

Episodes

Ep 6: AI - Fears, Dreams, Experts with Kemi Olugemo and Barbara Salami from KAINDLY.AI 07.03.2026 1:22:52

In what is easily our friendliest interview so far, Yuri and Matt engage with industry leaders Kemi Olugemo and Barbara Salami to consider how artificial intelligence is redefining the role of the expert, what it's like to try bridging socioeconomic and cultural divides, and how hopes and fears comingle when the pace and the scope of changes continues to become more violent every day. They also di...

Ep 5: Beyond the Book - AI and Technical Documentation with Tom Johnson and Floyd Jones 14.02.2026 1:37:37

Three tech writers and a photographer walk into a bar. The writers are mostly not writing for human readers directly anymore. How is this funny? Tom Johnson, a technical writer at Google and a publishes thoughts on trends in his work at idratherbewriting.com . Tom sat down with Yuri, Matt, and another tech writer, Floyd Jones, to talk about how AI has altered the work Tech Writers do. Notes and ep...

Ep 4: AI Will Write All the Code, Ready or Not (with Chris Fregly) 09.02.2026 1:49:27

In this episode of World Brain: No Experts, Matt and Yuri interview technologist and author Chris Fregly about the accelerating integration of AI into software development and large-scale computing systems. Drawing on experience at companies like Netflix, AWS, and Databricks, Fregly argues that AI-assisted coding is no longer optional but inevitable, asserting that teams should move toward fully A...

Ep 3: Can AI Understand Meaning? (with Jobst Landgrebe) 17.01.2026 1:53:38

Jobst Landgrebe, co-author (with Barry Smith) of Why Machines Will Never Rule the World: Artificial Intelligence Without Fear , joins Matt and Yuri for a wide-ranging argument about what AI can and cannot do. Landgrebe claims that minds and living systems are complex systems shaped by history and irreversibility, and that LLMs can imitate language without understanding meaning in open contexts. Yu...

Ep 1: Are There Any AI Experts? (Wells, Consciousness, and the End of Shared Truth) 17.12.2025 1:15:23

In the first episode of World Brain: No Experts , Matt Brandabur and Yuri Marder use H. G. Wells’ 1938 World Brain essays as a starting point for an argument about artificial intelligence, expertise, and human identity. Yuri sees AI as a transformative force on the scale of language itself—while Matt insists that machines cannot reproduce the lived quality of biological consciousness. The conversa...

Ep 2: AI as a Rorschach Test (Tool, Mirror, or Mass Delusion?) 08.12.2025 55:46

In this episode, Matt and Yuri treat AI less as a single “thing” and more as a cultural mirror—an unsettling Rorschach test that reveals what humans and institutions fear, desire, and project. Matt argues that the current frenzy resembles a mass hallucination driven by investor fantasies of automation, while Yuri counters with a grounded case: in his daily work, AI has become an indispensable coll...