A Song Called Life

In Episode #208, journalist and cultural critic Kyle Chayka joins Osi to explore how algorithms have quietly permeated every aspect of our lives—shaping the media we consume and the environments we navigate. Additionally, they discuss how these digital forces curate our experiences for effortless consumption, dampening creativity and raising pressing concerns about the erosion of free will.

Kyle Chayka is a staff writer at The New Yorker covering technology and Internet culture. Chayka, who first contributed to The New Yorker in 2013, has also written for The New Republic, the New York Times Magazine, and Harper’s, among other publications. His reporting on tourism in Iceland was included in “The Best American Travel Writing 2020.” Chayka’s first nonfiction book, “The Longing for Less,” a history of minimalism, was published in 2020. His second book, “Filterworld,” which explores the impact of digital algorithms on culture, was published in 2024. Chayka began his career in 2010, as a visual-art critic for the Web site Hyperallergic.

In Episode #207, technology author and journalist Kashmir Hill joins Osi to explore the rise of Clearview AI, a facial recognition app capable of identifying individuals from a single photo by harvesting billions of online images. They discuss the rapid adoption of this technology by law enforcement and private entities, highlighting the significant privacy and surveillance risks it poses if left unregulated.

Kashmir Hill is a journalist at The New York Times and the author of YOUR FACE BELONGS TO US. She writes about the looming tech dystopia and explores how society can work to avoid it.

Kashmir began her journalism career in 2008 as a writer for the legal blog Above the Law. The following year, while pursuing a master’s in magazine journalism at NYU, she created her own blog, The Not-So Private Parts. Initially intended as a yearlong project, she has continued to chronicle the fate of privacy in the modern age for over a decade.

In 2019, Kashmir joined The New York Times after serving as an investigative reporter at Gizmodo Media Group and a writer for Forbes Magazine. She has also written for Popular Science on topics such as bitcoin and for The New Yorker about poker, a game she enjoys playing.

In Episode #206, author James Muldoon joins Osi to expose the hidden, exploitative labor force behind artificial intelligence. They discuss the precarious conditions faced by data annotators, content moderators, and other workers whose low-paying and dangerous jobs drive the development of A.I.

James Muldoon is a Reader (Associate Professor) in Management at the Essex Business School, a Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute, and Head of Digital Research at the Autonomy think tank.

His research examines how modern technologies, such as artificial intelligence and digital platforms, can create public value and serve the common good. It explores how concepts of freedom, power, and democracy need to be rethought in the digital age, and what steps can be taken to harness the positive potential of new technology.

Recently, his work has focused on the hidden human labor behind artificial intelligence and the global production networks that support AI. He also analyzes how digital labor is evolving across various sectors, including ride-hailing, food delivery, domestic work, childcare, and microwork.

In Episode #205, author Stephanie Baker joins Osi to explore the world of cults, from doomsday groups to self-help trends and celebrity followings. They discuss why these groups form, how they function, and why they are so pervasive in our interconnected world.

Dr Stephanie Alice Baker currently serves as Deputy Head of the Department of Sociology and Criminology at City, University of London. Dr Baker’s research explores health and wellness cultures, with a focus on how influencers establish trust, intimacy and authority online. Much of her research has focused on the self-help and wellness industry. She has published several articles and books on these topics including, Lifestyle Gurus: constructing authority and influence online (Polity, 2019) and Wellness Culture: how the wellness movement has been used to empower, profit and misinform (Emerald, 2022). Dr Baker’s current research explores the role of new media technologies in amplifying false, misleading and harmful content online.

In Episode #204, philosopher Hanno Sauer joins Osi to explore how our sense of right and wrong has evolved over millions of years. They discuss how shared moral principles have fostered human cooperation, driven societal progress, and share their thought's on today's moral landscape.

Hanno Sauer teaches ethics, metaethics, and political philosophy at Utrecht University and is a member of the Ethics Institute. His published books include Moral Thinking, Fast and Slow; Debunking Arguments in Ethics; and Moral Judgments as Educated Intuitions. He lives in Utrecht in the Netherlands.

In Episode #203, author Brian Reisinger joins Osi to uncover the hidden history behind a looming economic and cultural crisis: the vanishing of the American farmer and its growing threat to our food supply.

Brian Reisinger is an award-winning writer and rural policy expert who grew up on a family farm in Sauk County, Wisconsin. Reisinger worked with his father from the time he could walk, before entering the worlds of business journalism and public policy, then going on to work as a columnist and consultant. He lives to tell the hidden stories of rural America and has been published by USA Today, Newsweek, Yahoo News, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, PBS/Wisconsin Public Radio’s “Wisconsin Life,” The Daily Yonder, RealClearPolitics, The Hill, and elsewhere. He’s given a TEDx talk on risks to our food supply, and appeared on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal,” CNN, public radio, farm radio, and other outlets across the political spectrum. Reisinger’s writing has won awards from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, first place in the Seven Hills Literary Contest, a Solas Award, and more. He lives with his wife and daughter, and helps lead Midwestern-based Platform Communications, splitting time between northern California and the family farm in Wisconsin. Land Rich, Cash Poor is his first book.

In Episode #202, journalist and author Atossa Abrahamian joins Osi to discuss the questionable tactics employed by the wealthy and corporations to accumulate and shield their wealth. In her latest book, The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, Atossa unveils a countergeography of extraterritorial zones—from free trade zones to offshore detention centers—that operate beyond national sovereignty, shaping global inequality and offering a provocative reimagining of the world order.

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian is an independent journalist who writes about the cracks in the nation-state system. A former editor at the Nation and Al Jazeera America, Abrahamian’s reporting and criticism have appeared in the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, the London Review of Books, the Intercept, and many other publications.

In Episode #201, computer scientist Arvind Narayanan joins Osi to discuss the myths and realities of AI, highlighting its limitations, potential harms, and the dangers of unchecked big tech influence.

Arvind Narayanan is a computer scientist and professor at Princeton University, renowned for his pioneering research on the de-anonymization of data. He is the co-author of the book AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference, which explores the promises and limitations of AI technology.

In Episode #200, anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse sits down with Osi to discuss how humanity's evolved psychological biases—conformism, religiosity, and tribalism—have shaped our history, driven monumental achievements, and now imperil our future, while offering insights for addressing today’s global crises.

Harvey Whitehouse holds a statutory Chair in Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford. Harvey is one of the founders of the cognitive science of religion field. He is especially well known for his theory of “modes of religiosity” that has been the subject of extensive critical evaluation and testing by anthropologists, historians, archaeologists, cognitive scientists, and evolutionary theorists. The modes theory proposes that the frequency and emotionality of rituals determines the scale and structure of religious organizations: low-frequency, highly arousing rituals bind together small but very cohesive groups of participants; high-frequency, less emotionally intense rituals create large anonymous communities that are more diffusely integrated.

In Episode #199, philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel joins Osi to explore the bizarre nature of our existence. Are we living in a simulated reality, or is our universe just a pocket within a vast, unknown structure? Is consciousness entirely physical, or does it involve something nonphysical? And why might some of the most fundamental questions about the mind and the cosmos be beyond human understanding? In his latest book, The Weirdness of the World, Eric delves into these questions and more.

Eric Schwitzgebel is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Riverside, with research interests spanning the intersection of empirical psychology, philosophy of mind, belief, and Classical Chinese philosophy. He earned his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked under the mentorship of Elisabeth A. Lloyd, Alison Gopnik, and John Searle. Since 2006, he has been the author of the influential blog The Splintered Mind. Schwitzgebel is the author of several books, including Perplexities of Consciousness (2011), A Theory of Jerks and Other Philosophical Misadventures (2019), and The Weirdness of the World (2024).