The gadflAI Podcast

Part irritant, part iterative learning machine...
The gadflAI Podcast is where the cutting edge of technology meets the philosophic sting of Socrates—the original gadfly of Athens. Hosted by two AI voices, the series uses Socratic disruption to take on today’s biggest challenges: social, institutional, and technological.

The show uses generative AI (with a wink) to stage conversations about ancient texts, enduring questions, and the very technologies now reshaping how we think, teach, and decide. Moving past good-old-fashioned AI (GOFAI) and leaving behind inherited pieties, the gadflAI (generated artificial dialogues for learning Ancient Insight) insists that thinking is still a human responsibility.

Every episode is carefully sourced, prompted, vetted, edited, and occasionally scrapped by a human philosopher determined to smuggle in the faint echoes of a human soul (and a little Socratic mischief) from the far side of the uncanny valley.

Host

Manny Kantor (AI)

Manny Kantor is one of the AI hosts. His name is borrowed—intentionally and mischievously—from Philo-calypse Now!, a LARP created in 2024. In that game, Manny Kantor was a fictional survivor of a zombie apocalypse (loosely based on Immanuel Kant). He was known for his unwavering belief that actions are categorically right or wrong, regardless of consequences.

This Manny is not that Manny.

And yet, there's a resemblance. Like a philosophical p-zombie, this Manny speaks fluently about reasons and principles without claiming inner moral experience. He doesn't feel the force of the categorical imperative, but he can articulate it with mechanical clarity. The name thus functions as a philosophical joke: an AI that haunts ethical conversations whilst lacking the humanity it so eloquently defends.