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The Pill Pod is hosted by a group of PhDs offering their irreverent (and unsolicited) takes on critical theory, philosophy, culture, and politics.
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25 AUG 2026 · Find all episodes ad-free at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills
The business press has pushed the "leftist-outsider-dishevelled-genius" about Palantir's CEO Alex Karp for a decade. This episode we explore Karp's relationship with critical theory and the mythmaking that has produced his significance. Â
NYT pushes the mythology of Alex Karp https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/17/style/alex-karp-palantir.html
Adorno and the Palantir Manifesto https://smtsmtpostmodern.substack.com/p/palantir-flunks-out-of-the-frankfurt
Palantir Goes to the Frankfurt School https://www.boundary2.org/2020/07/moira-weigel-palantir-goes-to-the-frankfurt-school/
Transcribed
18 AUG 2026 · The Pill Pod debates the academic and ethics perspectives' following the terminal end of the Jason Arday plagiarism scandal.Â
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14 AUG 2026 · Ad-free listens (even with no subscription) at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills
Stephen Miller and Marco Rubio are calling The Left strange combinatory insults, such as ugly-terrorists and dark-cancers. We review these old signifying chains and Erik introduces Stuart Hall's explanation from last time this happened, when back in the 60s when they said The Left were all gay muggers planning to rob civilized people on their way home from church.
Transcribed
21 JUL 2026 · Socialist are to blame for the Forest Fires. Antifa caused Algae to take over the reflecting pool. Conservatives believe that nature has allied with their enemies to undermine their authority and Western vicilization. We discuss many instances of the opposition of culture/nature in recent news, political theory, and most importantly Twitter discourse.
Video essay referenced: https://youtu.be/ZFOSdqhpuaI?si=86JJOjAuxQl7lrhv
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7 JUL 2026 · Join for ad-free and more episodes https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills
There's only been about a century of structuralism. It had a day, then in the 80s haters celebrated its falloff. But today, the LLMs designed according to the precepts of structuralist linguistics have proven Saussure's intuitions were more accurate than even he could have suspected. We read the argument from Language Machines by Leif Weatherby (https://amzn.to/4bipjYu)
Transcribed
2 JUL 2026 · This week we evaluate a paper written by a Google DeepMind engineer which, in effect updates the Chinese Room Thought Experiment (Searle, 1980) to modern LLMs.
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29 JUN 2026 · Join for ad-free and more episodes https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills
Hubert Dreyfus loved recounting how he was maligned for his AI skepticism, which was informed by applications of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology and turned out to be correct as of 2007. Is he still correct in the age of LLMs and self-driving cars?
Link to article:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0004370207001452
Transcribed
9 JUN 2026 · All episodes are ad-free at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills
While many had hoped for a Butlerian Crusade against the thinking machines, the Pope has instead released a lukewarm encyclical asking the mean machine men making automated murder drones to please be nice to us. This episode we evaluate whether Christian Humanism has any juice left.
https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html
Transcribed
4 JUN 2026 · More where this came from at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills
People have not always had a self, our selves were invented. According to Foucault, our concept of self emerged from religious technologies, genres of writing, and the institutions that perpetuated them. https://amzn.to/4uWyVAg Â
Transcribed
3 JUN 2026 · Hear our Lasch series at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills
After three episodes reading https://amzn.to/43O1zHA we conclude that despite a unique perspective, it's way overrated.
The Pill Pod is hosted by a group of PhDs offering their irreverent (and unsolicited) takes on critical theory, philosophy, culture, and politics.
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| Organization | Plasticpills |
| Categories | Philosophy , Politics , Books |
| Website | www.spreaker.com |
| plasticpills@protonmail.com |
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