Dialectic Analytics

Each transcript is split into chapters using the episode's own chapter headers (~870 chapters across the show). The 26-topic taxonomy was designed by reading all of those chapter titles; a language model (Claude Fable) then read a digest of every chapter and assigned it one to three topics, plus the tone scores used on the Tone tab.

Topic word counts weight each chapter by its length: all of a chapter's words count toward every topic it carries, so totals across topics exceed the corpus word count. Chapters that are sponsor reads, intros, or thanks are tagged "meta" and excluded from every number here.

Co-occurrence counts chapters tagged with both topics at once. Topic assignment is a model judgment of transcript text — treat boundaries between related topics (e.g. Creativity & Craft vs Design, Taste & Aesthetics) as soft.