In this episode Jerry and Stably discussed Class: A Guide Through the American Status System by Paul Fussell. They go through Fussell’s nine-class system, from the “top out-of-sight” to the “bottom out-of-sight.” They also cover his argument that class depends on where your money comes from, your taste, how closely you’re supervised at work, and how anxious you are about status, more than on income. The hosts look at the middle class’s insecurity, the confidence the upper class and high proles share, and “prole drift.” They ask what has changed since the 1980s, including social media and political yard signs. They place themselves in the system as children of immigrants and debate Fussell’s bohemian “Category X.”

In this episode Jerry and Stably discussed More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity by Adam Becker. Jerry values its look at the rationalist, effective altruist, and longtermist network and its critique of singularity, nanotechnology, and space-colonization beliefs. Stably finds it uneven and closer to magazine polemic than history, citing guilt by association and an AI chapter that has aged poorly. They question Becker’s proposed cap on billionaire wealth and ask what tangible harm his targets have caused, weighing Bill Gates’s geoengineering as an example. Neither fully recommends it, though both want a balanced primer for general readers.

In this episode Jerry and Stably discussed Buddha's Little Finger by Victor Pelevin. The hosts explored this postmodern Russian novel that weaves together multiple narrative threads across different time periods and realities. The protagonist Pyotr Void exists simultaneously as a patient in a 1990s Russian mental hospital and as a commissar to Bolshevik commander Chapayev in 1919. Through encounters with fellow patients whose delusions form separate vignettes—including a man believing he is a Mexican telenovela actress romantically involved with Arnold Schwarzenegger, and a drunk Russian intellectual inducted into a Japanese samurai clan—Pelevin constructs sophisticated commentary on post-Soviet Russian identity. Jerry and Stably discussed the novel's Buddhist philosophy, particularly how it functions as a Zen teaching device through paradox and riddle-like dialogue, depicting Pyotr's journey toward enlightenment and the realization of non-self. The translation was praised for its quality, and the hosts noted how Pelevin uses the patient hallucinations as political metaphors representing Russia's conflicting fantasies of merger with the West and East.