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.
Episodes
16 episodes
Disrupting Anxiety with Hellenistic Philosophy
Episode 14 brings philosophy out of the classroom and into the turbulence of everyday life. Drawing on the ideas of Epicurus, Diogenes of Sinope, Zeno of Citium, and Pyrrho of Elis, the episode explores Hellenistic philosophy not as abstract th...
Disrupting Stochastic Parrots with Practical Wisdom
If AI is just a sophisticated copycat machine, what does that make us?In this episode, the team pits large language models against Aristotle’s vision of human agency and practical wisdom. Along the way, they explore why imitation isn’t t...
Disrupting Disengagement, or, Going From Feces to Flourishing with Aristotle
In episode 12, the team disrupts the widespread disengagement in education and the workplace being driven by increasingly sterile, bureaucratic systems. Echoing the critique that traditional schooling can erode curiosity, they ask how human flo...
Disrupting "The Extinction of Experience" with Aristotle, and that Pebble in Your Shoe
In Episode 11 of The gadflAI Podcast, we welcome Aaron Cornelison as the show’s new human gadfly, the only voice in the conversation with actual skin in the game.Jeanette and Manny explore a growing philosophical concern raised by thinke...
The gadflAI Podcast Preview 2
Beginning with Episode 11, a new voice is joining the gadflAI team! Aaron Cornelison [a real, carbon-based lifeform] will step into our digital agora to interrupt our AI hosts from time to time. Why? To keep the conversa...
Disrupting Cognitive Entrenchment with Plato's Parmenides
Often ignored or softened in undergraduate curricula, the Parmenides presents Plato at his most self-critical. This episode examines how the dialogue systematically dismantles the Theory of Forms, forcing philosophy to confront its own...
Disrupting Polarization with Plato, Philosophical Dungeon Master
In this episode, Manny and Jeanette explore how immersive role-playing games can do what abstract debate often cannot: loosen the grip of political tribalism. Focusing on Athens Besieged, a Reacting to the Past simulation run in an Ancien...
Disrupting Injustice with Plato, From the Margins
In this episode, we explore a disruption called "Plato from the Margins," which reimagines Plato’s dialogues through the eyes of characters often sidelined. We uncover the devastating historical irony Plato likely intended: the Republic
Disrupting Over-professionalization with Deep Cognition
Plato’s Meno asks a deceptively simple question: can virtue be taught? This episode pairs the dialogue with the disruptive assignment “Fluency or Thought: Peer Reviewing AI” to challenge higher education’s over-emphasis on quantified assessment...
Disrupting Gatekeeping by Eating Plato
In this episode, we explore how social annotation can disrupt traditional hierarchies of knowledge, highlighting the tension between singular expert knowers and crowdsourced, collective understanding. Using Plato’s Crito as a leaping off point,...
Disrupting Civil Obedience with Modern Gadflies
**PLEASE NOTE** This episode was produced in December 2025, prior to recent acts of violence in the United States. Its discussion of dissent is historical, philosophical and pedagogical, not a commentary on current events.
Disrupting Bull$#!t with the AI Stance
In an era saturated with AI-generated content, a familiar cultural anxiety has resurfaced: the fear that imitation will be mistaken for understanding. Critics describe much of AI's output as "slop" or, in the more philosophical terms of Harry F...
Disrupting the Traditional Classroom with Philosophical Hiking
This episode explores an innovative instructional design called "philosophical hiking," a pedagogical model that moves learning from the classroom to the trail. Developed as a response to the psychological and philosophical needs highlighted by...
Disrupting the Canon with Ancient Women Philosophers
This episode challenges the conventional history of philosophy, arguing that the Western canon is not a neutral archive of the world’s greatest ideas but a historically constructed power structure shaped by exclusion. The discussion reveals tha...
