What does a score of 0.83 mean? It's not relevance—it's a predicted probability of an action you might take. In episode 381 of the recommender systems series, Joey explores ranking: how systems order…
In a feed with thousands of articles and videos, your phone has milliseconds to surface the few things worth your attention. Candidate generation is the invisible first filter that narrows chaos to…
Every recommender system that works at scale has the same shape: a funnel. Joey explores YouTube's 2016 paper on recommendations—the paper that switched YouTube from optimizing for clicks to watch…
When Glen Bell watched Mitla Cafe owners make tacos and then opened Taco Bell across the street, he didn't invent the recipe — he copied it. Today, Taco Bell makes $17.9 billion annually while Mitla…
When colonial powers target rites of passage, they don't just break one thing—they dismantle an entire culture's pathway to belonging. In this episode, we examine how colonialism deployed a systematic…
After exploring institutions that trap people in permanent liminality, this episode examines what genuine rites of passage look like when they actually work—and why incorporation, the phase after the…
Clown Cast unpacks the rite of passage architecture that institutions—from cults to MLMs to secret societies—weaponize to trap people in permanent liminal space. The episode traces how van Gennep's…
Joey assumed UniFi was another AI product—it's not. It's Ubiquiti's networking platform. But his dad, a project manager at a small university, is watching a structural risk repeat: the school just…
Indigenous communities are building their own AI systems—not waiting for Big Tech permission, but writing their own rules and encoding sovereignty directly into the architecture. This episode traces…
In 1995, the University of Mississippi patented using turmeric for wound healing—a practice documented in Ayurvedic texts for thousands of years. India challenged it with ancient Sanskrit texts and…
