About the show

Antiphasis is a conversation between technologist Douglas Locklin and philosopher James Wu. Its premise is that AI augmentation of thought is already happening — to the hosts themselves, in real time — and the honest way to examine that is from within.

Each episode puts contemporary questions about mind, technology, and cognition into dialogue with the philosophers who already thought hard about related problems — Hegel, Heidegger, Kant, Nietzsche, Marx, and others — treating those thinkers as active interlocutors rather than historical footnotes.

The show holds itself to the citational discipline it would ask of a philosophy seminar: claims are sourced, quotations are placed, and the line between documented fact and interpretation is never blurred — whether the source is a philosophical text, a historical record, or a song lyric. That rigor is part of the show’s stance: an argument that AI-assisted thought can still be careful, rather than something that necessarily degrades standards.

A second, structural goal is to demonstrate that discipline in practice. The hosts build and use their own tool — Extracosmic Commons, a semantic search engine over their own transcripts and sources — live, on air. The tool isn’t a sponsor segment; it’s the show’s method made visible.