Welcome to 2026! We start out the year talking to an interesting person — Chris Mitsch — a Professor of Computer Science, whose focus has been on AI ethics. We discuss a variety of technologies known as AI, the limitations, costs, potential uses, who stands to benefit, and a litany of related issues. This leads to our MOGP segment, where we watched A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, of course! And we close the episode with a round-up of good energy news from 2025.

Show Notes:

Papers mentioned during the interview:

Does Liking Yellow Imply Driving a School Bus? By Gonen et. al.

https://aclanthology.org/2025.naacl-long.35/

The Reversal Curse: LLMs trained on "A is B" fail to learn "B is A" by Berglund et. al.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.12288

Seeing like a State by James C. Scott

https://files.libcom.org/files/Seeing%20Like%20a%20State%20-%20James%20C.%20Scott.pdf

The Mechanic and the Luddite by Jathan Sadowski

https://www.ucpress.edu/books/the-mechanic-and-the-luddite/paper

Empire of AI by Haren Hao

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/743569/empire-of-ai-by-karen-hao/

MOGP:

A.I. (Artificial Intelligence)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0212720/

Happy News:

https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy/clean-energy-renewables-charts-2025

Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything by Lydia Kang and Nate Pedersen

Other appearances: Chris Shelton interviewed us in the beginning of a series on Mormonism on his Speaking of Cults series. Our most recent discussion was on the Mountain Meadows Massacre: https://youtu.be/iJWirjCyWdk

He has had MANY different fascinating people on so go take a look! Here is the whole playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpGuS7GcsgA&list=PLGrPM1Pg2h72ADIuv8eYmzrJ-ppLOlw_g

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