MikeyOpp November 2026 Bonus Post

Mike Oppenheim and I have another recorded video conversation

Mike Oppenheim and I had another recorded video conversation.

The members-only post has the full conversation.

MikeyOpp November 2026 Bonus Post

We have been having many conversations in email and other mediums, with this being the 3rd recorded conversation on his podcast.

---

Themes from this conversation, in case anyone is interested in me expanding on these in text.

• My discomfort with the hierarchy called “favorites”

• Science Fiction as a tool to understanding humanity

• Discussing emotions and how I sometimes don’t know which one I’m having (I didn’t mention the term Alexithymia)

• Friendship/relationship changes as part of lifelong learning when close people diverge. This is huge for me as I have diverged from mainstream North American culture (Canada, USA). And yes, I started talking about the Overton Window

• I discussed how USA/Canadian loyalists like to talk about the Aztecs, Mayans, Incas as distant past (and elsewhere). For me I discuss the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe as contemporary relational leagues of nationalities in the region I live.

• Hunter-gatherer is seen as the past for Eurocentric thinkers, but other peoples went back and forth (and sometimes in parallel) with hunter-gathering and agriculture. That other peoples used natural cycles and cyclical time, rather than the notion of linear time and the notion of linear “progress”.

• AI training data, and how AIs only build networks (like a mycelial network?) of weighted links between words and is thus “thinking” only within the context of that training data.

• What is innovation vs what do specific social constructs reward – I question whether “individuals” that are claimed to be innovators under the current culture are innovators at all.

• I talk about my problem with the concept of individualism, and why the line was drawn at the arbitrary place it was.

• Discussion of verb-based languages, and how those peoples think more in terms of relations than objects – that feeding an LLM with that thinking will get very different results in conversations than what can happen with English.

• How humans are different from LLMs, and how my being programmed with Canadian loyalist training data didn’t guarantee I would be compatible with that training.

Here are two specific clips, the latter is where the quote Mike uses in promoting the video came from.

Okay, so individualism. So … the word comes from no longer being divisible. Here’s a question for you. If you’re either born with no legs or they get cut off for some reason. Are you still human?

If you cut off your arms, are you still a human?

So there is a certain ability human that is considered an individual. And then as they are divided further... Because the indivisible becomes divisible. They are then called disabled.

Who drew the line there though?

So to me as a person that has a certain neurotype, my neurotype works best when coupled with persons of other neurotypes.

But when I’m not coupled with groups that include other neurotypes, I am then disabled.

If you build a system that rewards certain ideologies, then the winners are going to be certain people. Do those people have a pathology as individuals, or does the society have a pathology?

---

The intro is on YouTube: