The inimitable Fogus was on my list of desired guests from the moment I started thinking about having a podcast. He is a rare combination of humble, smart, and nice, and I have always greatly enjoyed talking to him. And he’s always working on something interesting, whether that’s making a game, writing some bit of software, or reading books on a million topics.

I thought that maybe we would shake things up a bit and this time start with the question, “What are you learning?” I am so, so glad I did, because what he’s learning kind of blew my mind. I could describe it as, “Philosophy, through the lens of heavy metal,” but that only captures some of what we talked about, which included ancient Egypt, Douglas Hofstadter, and his wondrous goal of making “an influential nothing.”

It was truly my enormous pleasure to talk to Fogus, and I’m sure you’ll find it as interesting and fascinating as I did.

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Links and Notes

• Fogus can be found on:
  • Twitter @fogus
  • GitHub
  • His homepage
• Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America by Tricia Rose
• Fogus’s tweet about Metal Studies
• The International Society for Metal Music Studies
• Commentary on the relationship between punk and heavy metal
• Podcast interview with David Burke, professor at Bath Spa University
• In the Dust of this Planet: Horror of Philosophy vol. 1 by Eugene Thacker
• Awakening from the Meaning Crisis video series
• The Upper Paleolithic Transition
• Existentialism
• Nihilism
• The metal band Nile
• The Sound of Everything, a Spotify playlist with one track from every genre
• Lisp languages
• Alan Turing
• Bletchly Park
• Turing’s Paper: Computing Machinery and Intelligence
• On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem
• The Turing Machine
• The Imitation Game
• Jodorowsky’s Dune
• Philip K Dick’s The Owl In Daylight
• Bush’s Memex
• Alan Kay’s Dynabook

This episode is also available on YouTube. View it there for a transcript and subtitles.