#235 – Ajeya Cotra on whether it’s crazy that every AI company’s safety plan is ‘use AI to make AI safe’
Every major AI company has the same safety plan: when AI gets crazy powerful and really dangerous, they’ll use the AI itself to figure out how to make AI safe and beneficial. It sounds circular, almos...
17 Feb 2h 54min
What the hell happened with AGI timelines in 2025?
In early 2025, after OpenAI put out the first-ever reasoning models — o1 and o3 — short timelines to transformative artificial general intelligence swept the AI world. But then, in the second half of ...
10 Feb 25min
#179 Classic episode – Randy Nesse on why evolution left us so vulnerable to depression and anxiety
Mental health problems like depression and anxiety affect enormous numbers of people and severely interfere with their lives. By contrast, we don’t see similar levels of physical ill health in young p...
3 Feb 2h 51min
#234 – David Duvenaud on why 'aligned AI' would still kill democracy
Democracy might be a brief historical blip. That’s the unsettling thesis of a recent paper, which argues AI that can do all the work a human can do inevitably leads to the “gradual disempowerment” of ...
27 Jan 2h 31min
#145 Classic episode – Christopher Brown on why slavery abolition wasn't inevitable
In many ways, humanity seems to have become more humane and inclusive over time. While there’s still a lot of progress to be made, campaigns to give people of different genders, races, sexualities, et...
20 Jan 2h 56min
#233 – James Smith on how to prevent a mirror life catastrophe
When James Smith first heard about mirror bacteria, he was sceptical. But within two weeks, he’d dropped everything to work on it full time, considering it the worst biothreat that he’d seen described...
13 Jan 2h 9min
#144 Classic episode – Athena Aktipis on why cancer is a fundamental universal phenomena
What’s the opposite of cancer? If you answered “cure,” “antidote,” or “antivenom” — you’ve obviously been reading the antonym section at www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/cancer.But today’s guest Athe...
9 Jan 3h 30min
#142 Classic episode – John McWhorter on why the optimal number of languages might be one, and other provocative claims about language
John McWhorter is a linguistics professor at Columbia University specialising in research on creole languages. He's also a content-producing machine, never afraid to give his frank opinion on anything...
6 Jan 1h 35min
