Cults #2, No Cause for Alarm but we are Starting a Cult

Have you heard the Good News? Ned and Meg are starting a cult! Which cult will it be? That is still up for debate. We haven't really settled into anything yet. Gravity, books, and white noise are all in the running for the focus of our hypothetical cult. What cult will you start and what are we gonna do with all the cash? As always, thanks for listening, wash your hands, don't be a dick.

Meg and Ned decide to design a cult, but first we need some background. You would think years of Catholic 'education' would prepare Meg for this but whatever they said in CCD classes never stuck and Ned was raised without religion, so we need to do some research. We also forgot to get into the shit with Janja Lalich but more on that in #2. For now, join us on our preliminary endeavor into designing a cult. Thanks for listening, wash your hands, don't be a dick.

Poison! Poi-poi-poison! In a serendipitous moment of uncertainty, a fascinating email arrived in Meg's inbox and graced us all with the topic of today's episode: intentional food poisonings. When we were little, this included urban legends around sabotaged Halloween candy meant to force children to behave (ok, boomers), but in real life there have been many, many intentional and very real food poisonings. We explore a selection here. Thanks for listening, wash your hands, fund the FDA, don't be a dick!

Ned and Meg chat about the Simming Problem, which is a concept from Iain Banks, a sci-fi writer, about the ethics of simulating entities or individuals or whatever. The *whatever* bit is because how we define all these things gets real dicey and yet makes all the difference. What is an agent, or an intelligence, or a substrate or authenticity and is consciousness an emergent property of sufficiently complex systems? Who fucking knows! Hard question! How do you get ChatGPT to say fuck fifteen times? Turns out that's easy. Thanks for listening, wash your hands, don't be a dick.

Ned and Meg admire the magnificent Dieter Rams, who pointed and shrugged his way into our hearts, and we discuss his legendary ten principles of good design.

Ned and Meg celebrate the near-anniversary of the Titan Sub Failure with a couple updates about the ongoing situation, lawsuits, obituaries, and so on. We also learn a couple things about the Gay Agenda, no relation to the Titan Sub Failure. Thanks for listening to our schadenfreude. Wash your hands, don’t be a dick!

Ned and Meg recorded this so long ago that they don't even remember what it's about! It's like looking for a pine needle in a haystack, or some other bad analogy. We are apt to surprise and delight (maybe) everyone, even us (probably). I mean delighting ourselves is basically the whole point of this thing. Thanks for listening, wash your hands, don't be a dick!

Meg and Ned talk about an awful book in the category of self-help writing that Meg had to read for school. It's about how our culture in America shames women and it totally sucks not because it's true, which it is, but because it fails in its aims, except for one tiny excerpt near the very end and that part is about a man. It's the only part of the book that is any good. That's an opinion. If this book saved your life, well, bully for you. We also discuss just what the hell is wrong with our parents' entire generation. In light of this we discuss shame, shaming, shame as a tool of control, and shamey shame-shame. Also poop. Lotta poop. Thanks for joining us, wash your hands, don't be a dick.

Ned and Meg explore examples of familial triangulation involving people who grew up before answering machines and modern smartphone technologies. This leads to a chat about doubling down. Thanks for listening, wash your hands, don't be a dick.

Meg forces Ned to explain Net Neutrality on the spot, and then after that we talk about how US courts just overturned it, which is bad. In addition to the bad idea of ending net neutrality, we also talk about flat earth. Thanks for listening, wash your hands, don't be a dick!