Episode Details

250 episodes. One destroyed yogi. Zero mastery of the eagle pose.

Raff’s Brain reaches Episode 250, and Rob marks the occasion in the most appropriate way possible: stumbling out of an absurdly difficult hot yoga class and immediately complaining about it into a microphone.

The trouble begins with bird dog, a pose Rob thought he had conquered. But this particular class introduces a horrifying upgrade involving a plank, one extended arm, and an opposite lifted leg—a maneuver that quickly reminds him that no matter how competent you feel, yoga is always prepared to expose you.

From there, Rob riffs on standing splits, figure fours, eagle pose, Nintendo’s Duck Hunt, the desperately needed invention of “bar stool pose,” and the strange satisfaction of voluntarily returning to a room designed to destroy him.

Then things get philosophical.

Rob reflects on what it means to have recorded 250 episodes, his enthusiasm for AI despite the robot-apocalypse discourse, and the roughly 44,000-word piece of fiction he’s been co-creating with ChatGPT. Could it become a serialized Raff’s Brain narration? Would anyone actually listen? And if creating it is enjoyable, does the audience size really matter?

A fitting Episode 250: ridiculous, reflective, grateful, mildly terrified of artificial intelligence, and still hitting record.

Topics include:

• The Raff’s Brain 250th-episode milestone
• An aggressively difficult hot yoga class
• Bird dog betrayal
• The proposed invention of bar stool pose
• Learning to enjoy being terrible at something
• ChatGPT, AI optimism, and robot-apocalypse survival odds
• Co-creating fiction with artificial intelligence
• A possible serialized novel on Raff’s Brain
• Making things for the sake of making them
• Gratitude for ordinary life

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