After Things Podcast

The episode begins with Andrew describing a memory-methods thread from the previous week and how it led him to build a face-and-name practice app. He explains that he prototyped the tool in JavaScript and then used GPT-4 to convert and expand it into a polished iOS app, with generated faces, tutorial copy, App Store text, and a webpage all created or assisted by the model. The discussion then widens into a long debate about how well ChatGPT understands context, why GPT-4 feels stronger for coding, and how priming prompts can improve style imitation and task performance. The back half of the episode shifts into hypnosis, with the hosts comparing stage hypnosis, hypnotherapy, Mesmerism, suggestibility, placebo effects, accountability, crowd dynamics, and whether hypnosis is best understood as an altered state, performance, or agreement. Key topics Memory techniques and face-name recall: Andrew opens by talking about memory methods, memory palaces, and his difficulty remembering faces and names, which motivates