Joseph Cornett

Author, Co-Host

Joe Cornett is a writer, essayist, and independent thinker whose work explores the complex intersections of psychology, philosophy, history, sociology, ethics, religion, technology, and human behavior. Guided by a lifelong fascination with the human condition, he has spent decades examining the beliefs, experiences, motivations, and hidden assumptions that shape both individual lives and entire societies.

His interests are especially focused on the deeper questions that often exist beneath public discourse: Why do people believe what they believe? How are identities formed? What creates empathy, and what erodes it? Why do some people become compassionate while others become cruel? How do trauma, culture, ideology, religion, economics, and personal experience interact to produce the individuals we ultimately become?

Drawing from years of introspection, historical study, philosophical inquiry, and personal experience, Joe approaches these questions not as a clinician or academic authority, but as a dedicated observer of patterns in human thought and behavior. His perspective is shaped by a broad range of influences, including psychology, neuroscience, moral philosophy, comparative religion, political theory, mythology, evolutionary thinking, and the study of social systems. He is particularly interested in the ways human beings construct meaning, create identities, form communities, justify actions, and navigate the often difficult relationship between belief and reality.

Much of his work centers on subjects that resist simple answers: empathy and sociopathy, tribalism and cooperation, faith and skepticism, free will and responsibility, suffering and resilience, power and corruption, technological change and human adaptation. Rather than seeking certainty, he is drawn to the tension between competing ideas and the process of examining them honestly, even when the conclusions are uncomfortable.

Joe's worldview is informed by secular humanism, methodological naturalism, transhumanism, and a deep reverence for the interconnected nature of reality. He is particularly interested in the ways emerging technologies, artificial intelligence, and future social systems may reshape human identity, relationships, creativity, morality, and consciousness itself. At the same time, he remains fascinated by the oldest questions humanity has ever asked: What are we? Why do we suffer? How should we live? What do we owe one another?

As co-host of Every Hidden Thing, Joe brings this lifelong curiosity to conversations about the hidden mechanisms that drive human behavior. Episodes frequently explore psychology, morality, social dynamics, historical patterns, political movements, religion, trauma, neurodiversity, consciousness, and the stories people tell themselves about who they are. His role is less that of a lecturer and more that of an investigator, following ideas wherever they lead and examining difficult questions from multiple perspectives.

Underlying all of his work is a conviction that people are often more complicated than their labels, that understanding requires both intellectual honesty and empathy, and that meaningful insight is most often found beneath the surface of things. Whether discussing history, ethics, politics, psychology, or personal experience, he seeks to uncover the patterns, motivations, and unseen influences that connect individual lives to the larger human story.

Because every hidden thing leaves a trace, and every trace tells a story.

Published Works

What follows are five books, four of which were written almost exclusively with the assistance of AI during a period of emotional healing, the fifth is a book of poetry written over the years for the Poetry Tag Group on AOL.

Click the picture to see the book on Amazon

In part this book is a love letter to my late father, despite one of my very first memories of him being scary, he also taught me how to play chess at a young age, and that changed my life by orders of magnitude I could not grasp until the middle of my life.
This is the kind of speculation I feel as though he would have enjoyed reading, I think all of my writing kind of aims to please my father. I used ChatGPT to synthesize all of the concepts in this book.

Fourteen short stories all written with the help of ChatGPT with the aim of writing genuinely moving and unsettling tales. The stories have a recurring theme running through them, and it has a lot to do with the nature of identity and consciousness.

An assortment of connected essays examining a hypothetical new political model, using speculation about future technology to imagine what could be accomplished in a more equitable and balanced world.

This book was written as I transitioned out of a lifetime of crippling depression and discovered a lot of unused rooms in my mind with things I wanted to say for years but never felt like I had the words. I found my voice with this and it was revealed in a continuing conversation with ChatGPT in which I examined many interesting concepts and theories and areas of interest.

This book is a collection of poetry I wrote for the Poetry Tag Group, a group of poets who prompt each other with a title for a poem, and the person then writes a poem along the lines suggested by the title extemporaneously. It's a fun game to play if you are a poet, a challenging way to improve your skill at weaving words. Many of these poems have deep emotional significance to me and this collection is the culmination of more than a decade of writing poetry.

Click the picture to visit my Suno profile and listen to the music I've created.

Suno is an AI assisted music making tool that allows one to generate fully realized music with nothing more than ideas. I have been experimenting on it for a while and have a sturdy catalogue of music already. I highly recommend trying it out, even if you are not musically inclined, you may find there was a calling to music deep within you that you didn't even know about.