Newsletter
Stupid Questions and other things
January 11, 2026
Hello,
Here’s everything since my last little missive to you:
Happy new year. Long time since I sent one of these out, but that doesn’t mean I was idle. I’ll give you a pretty long update here, but if you like you can just scroll down to find links to the six articles and six podcast episodes(!?) I’ve produced in the interlude.
So, I have a podcast now. I’m calling it the btrmt. lectures. It’s got one major aim in mind. You see, I would often get feedback that my articles were a bit too academic and dense. I spent a year trying to pump out more accessible articles once a week, rather than the long, articles I used to write monthly. These ended up being a bit of a disaster. Not only were they often still a bit dense, they also weren’t doing the main things my articles are supposed to do—help me work something out, or straighten out my own thoughts. We’re just going to have to accept that my articles aren’t for everyone. So I paused the articles, and paused the newsletter.
To fill the gap, we now have the podcast. These aren’t for me, these are for you! This is me teaching you the stuff I’ve already got straight, and you can either listen, or read the edited transcript if you prefer that format. Stuff I teach as Associate Professor at Sandhurst, or taught at Cambridge, or when I’m consulting, or coaching, or speaking. To really fulfil that promise on my about page, that this stuff shouldn’t be just for people with the right degree.
So, I take one pattern of human thought or behaviour and turn it into a podcast in three or four hours after work. So far, I’m doing one every two weeks, and the articles have gone back to monthly. Have a listen and let me know. If you don’t understand, I’ve done something wrong. Keen to hear your feedback, and also tell me if there’s anything you want to hear about in particular. I’m still designing the content plan, so there’s every chance I’ll do it for you.
It’s hosted at Substack for now, because they’ll host it for free, but I’ll always link to the episodes from here and the main website. Feel free to go sign up to updates there if you prefer Substack though, or find it wherever you find podcasts.
Main idea: Nature is just nurture over time, and nurture is far more obviously in charge; nothing changes if free will isn’t real; and the same is true of consciousness. They’re just complicated debates with no real outcomes.
Main idea: Control the water, control the people. Today’s water is energy, social media, infrastructure. We’re coerced through convenience, not malice. There are many vectors for control—we don’t need to hand them over.
AI Hallucination is just Man-Guessing
Main idea: Human reasoning isn’t flawed, it’s a social tool we use in the wrong places. It’s about sharing and evaluating intuitive claims, not generating rational ones. AI is fundamentally this but crippled: without the grounded intuitions and social friction that makes it work.
Main idea: Vincent’s S-CALM model describes the situational and cognitive factors that undermine ethical behaviour. Mechanistic thinking helps explain how those factors might operate, and thus, where we might intervene on them.
Main idea: We can think of motivations in terms of three things. There is the content: what things motivate us. Then there is the process: how things motivate us. And lastly, we have those things that maintain our motivation.
Main idea: I describe five levels that help understand how good people do bad things—neural, cognitive, situational, social, and cultural. Inject some norms into the stack, and you can explain (and predict) moral behaviour.
Stupid Questions: Consciousness
Main idea: The hard problem of consciousness is just a complicated debate with no real outcomes. It’s the behaviour that matters, not whether there’s ineffable qualia behind the curtain.
Main idea: Nothing changes if free will isn’t real. The world is so intractably complex that it doesn’t matter, and we can shape behaviour either way. Why bother asking?
Stupid Questions: Nature/Nurture
Main idea: Nature is just nurture over time, and nurture is far more obviously in charge. The debate is Malcolm Gladwell shit—superficially sexy but practically useless.
Main idea: We’ve been taught that cults are dark and scary things. But we have been fooled. The cult is a prominent building block of modern community. If you’re not in one, you’re probably doing something wrong. The question is, is the cult you’re in a cult you chose?
Main idea: Men and women engage in identical behaviours—complaining, offering solutions, needing validation, resisting criticism. The difference isn’t biological, it’s interpretive. We cast the same behaviour as reasonable for one gender and unreasonable for the other. Gray’s book is a perfect case study: emotionally troubled men are normalised while women’s ordinary needs are pathologised.
Main idea: Stress isn’t poorly calibrated to modern life. It’s the energising force that allows us to perform. Optimal performance requires optimal stress. The difference between eustress and distress isn’t biological—it’s psychological. Controllability matters more than the stressor itself.
I hope you found something interesting.
You can find links to all my previous missives here.
Warm regards,