Robin Hanson is a professor of economics at George Mason University, the author of The Age of Em and The Elephant in the Brain, the writer of the blog Overcoming Bias, and one of the most interesting polymaths alive today. 0:00 - Intro 1:24 - Mathematical models and grabby aliens 9:11 - Will we run out of value in the future?12:23 - Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns 14:29 - Posadism 17:53 - Moral progress and Whig history 20:29 - Will there be a trad resurgence? 23:00 - Will...

Nick Simmons is a founding partner at Octu Ventures, a member-driven venture DAO investing in teams building on Urbit. Urbit is a new computing paradigm that provides complete ownership of your digital world. 0:00 - Intro 1:19 - What actually is Urbit? 5:43 - Urbit ID and Schelling points 9:05 - Why Urbit? 10:23 - Roko Mijic on Urbit vs. TikTok and Crypto 17:32 - Urbit vs. Worldcoin 22:26 - Niche or growth model? 28:50 - Why haven’t Urbit star prices recovered since 2021? 33:13 -...

Paul Buchheit is a programmer and entrepreneur who joined Google as its 23rd employee. He created Gmail, developed the first prototype of Google AdSense, and suggested the company’s motto, “don’t be evil”. He later co-founded FriendFeed and served as a managing partner at Y Combinator. 0:00 - Intro 1:15 - Issues with Google 3:47 - AI risk 5:21 - AI centralization and decentralization 8:01 - Open-sourcing frontier AI 9:59 - Paul’s Predictions 14:28 - Centralization, free speech, and...

Bryan Caplan is a professor of economics at George Mason University, research fellow at the Mercatus Center, adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, writer at EconLib and Bet On It, and best-selling author of eight books, including You Will Not Stampede Me: Essays on Non-Conformism, the subject of this episode. 0:00 - Intro 2:04 - The Next Crusade 3:44 - Moderating X 6:11 - Inventing Slippery Slopes 8:04 - Right-Wing Antiwokes 10:20 - Nonconformism and Asperger’s 12:02 - Making...

Liron Shapira is an entrepreneur, angel investor, and CEO of counseling startup Relationship Hero. He’s also a rationalist, advisor for the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and Center for Applied Rationality, and a consistently candid AI doom pointer-outer. Liron’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/liron Liron’s Substack: https://lironshapira.substack.com/ Liron’s old blog, Bloated MVP: https://www.bloatedmvp.com TJP LINKS: TRANSCRIPT:...

Dwarkesh Patel is the host of the Dwarkesh Podcast, where he interviews intellectuals, scientists, historians, economists, and founders about their big ideas. He does deep research and asks great questions. Past podcast guests include billionaire entrepreneur and investor Marc Andreessen, economist and polymath Tyler Cowen, and OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever. Dwarkesh has been recommended by Jeff Bezos, Paul Graham, and me. Dwarkesh Podcast (and transcripts):...

Scott Aaronson is the Schlumberger Chair of Computer Science and Director of the Quantum Information Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Previously, he got his bachelor’s in CS from Cornell, his PhD in complexity theory at UC Berkeley, held postdocs at Princeton and Waterloo, and taught at MIT. Currently, he’s on leave to work on OpenAI’s Superalignment team. Scott’s blog, Shtetl-Optimized: https://www.scottaaronson.blog Scott’s website: https://www.scottaaronson.com PODCAST...

Nora Belrose is the Head of Interpretability at EleutherAI, and a noted AI optimist. Nora’s Twitter: https://x.com/norabelrose EleutherAI Website: https://www.eleuther.ai/ EleutherAI Discord: https://discord.gg/zBGx3azzUn PODCAST LINKS: Video Transcript: https://www.theojaffee.com/p/7-nora-belrose Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1IJRtB8FP4Cnq8lWuuCdvW?si=eba62a72e6234efb Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/theo-jaffee-podcast/id1699912677 ...

Razib Khan is a geneticist, the CXO and CSO of a biotech startup, and a writer and podcaster with interests in genetics, genomics, evolution, history, and politics. Razib’s Twitter: https://x.com/razibkhan Razib’s Website: https://www.razib.com Razib’s Substack (Unsupervised Learning): https://www.razibkhan.com PODCAST LINKS: Video Transcript: https://www.theojaffee.com/p/5-quintin-pope Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1IJRtB8FP4Cnq8lWuuCdvW?si=eba62a72e6234efb ...

Quintin Pope is a machine learning researcher focusing on natural language modeling and AI alignment. Among alignment researchers, Quintin stands out for his optimism. He believes that AI alignment is far more tractable than it seems, and that we appear to be on a good path to making the future great. On LessWrong, he's written one of the most popular posts of the last year, “My Objections To ‘We're All Gonna Die with Eliezer Yudkowsky’”, as well as many other highly upvoted posts on various...

Rohit Krishnan is a venture capitalist, economist, engineer, former hedge fund manager, and essayist. On Twitter @krishnanrohit, and on his Substack, Strange Loop Canon, at strangeloopcanon.com, he writes about AI, business, investing, complex systems, and more. CHAPTERS: Intro (0:00) Comparing Countries (0:33) Reading (6:50) Developing Genius (12:36) Investing (24:08) Contra AI Doom (34:27) The Future of AI (46:26) PODCAST LINKS: Video Transcript:...

Zvi Mowshowitz is a former professional Magic: The Gathering player who is a Pro Tour and Grand Prix winner, and member of the MTG Hall of Fame. He’s also been a professional trader and market maker, and a startup founder. He’s been involved in the rationalist movement for many years, and today, he writes about AI, rationality, game design and theory, philosophy, and more on his blog, Don’t Worry About the Vase. PODCAST LINKS: Video Transcript:...

Carlos de la Guardia is an independent AGI researcher inspired by the work of Karl Popper, David Deutsch, and Richard Dawkins. In his research, he seeks answers to some of humanity’s biggest questions: how humans create knowledge, how AIs can one day do the same, and how we can use knowledge to figure out how to speed up our minds and even end death. Carlos is currently working on a book about AGI, which will be published on his Substack, Making Minds and Making Progress. PODCAST...

Greg Fodor is a software engineer who’s been involved in augmented and virtual reality for over a decade. He co-founded Altspace VR, a virtual events company acquired by Microsoft, worked on Mozilla Hubs, a browser-based VR community platform; built Jel, a virtual environment video game for working, and is currently working on a new extended reality hardware stealth startup. On his Twitter account, @gfodor, he tweets about AI, VR and AR, unidentified aerial phenomena, aliens, and the...