Bloggingheads.tv

Teaser ... Cameron’s work at AE studio ... Why consciousness is such a hard problem ... Why AI consciousness matters ... Does consciousness need carbon? ... The ethics of AI subjectivity ... Can we trust LLM self-reports? ... Cameron’s innovative AI consciousness experiments ... Heading to Overtime ...

Teaser ... Joel’s legendary Bloggingheads line ... NASA’s new chief: More than a Musk toady? ... Why we’re still not living in Star Trek ... The space alien question ... Can we make the moon program great again? ... Heading to Overtime ...

David Lynch, Jane Goodall, and other notable 2025 losses ... When Bob called James Watson a "mad scientist" ... Predicting 2050: Star Trek abundance vs. "Total Chaos Planet"? ... The age of algorithmically guided attention ... Global poverty reduction (and its flip side) ... Will anyone care if your newsletter is AI-written? ... Trump's USAID cuts killed a lot of people ... Elon Musk, Alex Karp, and the age of the "manifestly crazy" ... Can the Supreme Court stop Trump? ... JD Vance's identity crisis: Tech bro or populist? ... The "Black Swan": When AI starts killing people ... AI scientific breakthroughs to come ... Bob and Paul's 2025 Entertainment Awards ... Which jobs are truly...

Teaser ... What era are we living in? ... David Bowie: "The Internet is an alien life form." ... Bob: "It's like aliens are approaching, and we don't know their intentions" ... Nikita: "COVID was weird, and nothing has been normal since" ... The lab leak theory ... How COVID killed consensus reality ... Bob's case for international biotech monitoring ... Vaccine geopolitics ... Bob's candidate: We let machines guide our attention ... Trump's failed bargaining strategy ... Technological progress is like a cocaine high ... How common is the idea that AI will be a big deal? ... When music is high stakes. Russian street musicians get arrested ... Heading to Overtime ...

What's the long game in Venezuela? ... MAGA's Monroe Doctrine ... Trump as deep state puppet ... Will Trump oust Maduro? ... Connor: Trump's foreign policy is a "profoundly mixed bag" ... Has Israel lost the American electorate? ... Andrew: Trump's Ukraine peace plan isn’t pro-Russia ... Silicon Valley’s inept arms makers ... The administration's view(s) on China and Taiwan ... Europe learns to speak Trump ...

Elon’s reckless response to the Brown shooting ... Susie Wiles gone wild ... The weirdest thing about Trump’s weird Rob Reiner post ... The Piers Morgan/Nick Fuentes encounter ... Judging Oliver Sacks ... Heading to Overtime ...

The incoherence of Trump's foreign policy ... The paucity of debate around Chinese chip restrictions ... Danny: Is this the stupidest foreign policy establishment ever? ... Should AGI worry us? ... Bob’s Overtime bait ...

Teaser ... How AI helped shape cancer treatment for Nathan's son ... Should you tell your doctor about your AI medical adviser? ... Big leaps for Gemini 3 and Claude Opus 4.5 ... How to get the best medical advice from your AI ... The astonishing breadth of AI expertise ... AI can help on the margins ... Bob's AI cancer journey ... AI and “Right to try” ... "Turning every stone" vs falling into anxiety rabbit holes ... Gemini 3 vs Opus 4.5 ... Are scaling laws leveling off? ... AI deception ... Experiments in AI Consciousness ...

Teaser ... Trump's 28-point plan: First real negotiations? ... Why Zelensky sounded so grim ... Listing Russia's advantages ... The unknowable casualties numbers ... Ukraine's forced mobilization vs. Russia's volunteer army ... Why Russia won't run out of money ... Bob: "I want Putin to get the worst deal possible" ... What is the Blob's plan? ... Bob answers a question from Discord ... Trump's failed bargaining strategy ... Bob: Ukraine is "so much more complicated" than Gaza ... The corruption scandal threatening Zelensky ... Ukraine's corruption scandal and Zelensky's uncertain political future ... Zaluzhnyi's manifesto: The rival commander's challenge ... Why all decision-makers are ok with the war continuing ...

Teaser ... Sam’s epic new biography of William F. Buckley ... Was Buckley the original Tucker Carlson? ... Buckley's paradoxical upbringing ... How Yale turned Buckley into a “counter-intellectual” ... Was Buckley racist or tribalist or what? ... Buckley v. the Civil Rights Act ... Heading to Overtime ...

A brief message from Bob ... Bob and former Bloggingheads.tv staffer and contributor Aryeh Cohen-Wade reflect on the legacy of Bloggingheads.tv, the pioneering website Bob co-founded in 2005. Bob and Aryeh discuss how the site and the technology that powered it anticipated modern trends in online media. They also consider whether Twitter still has any use for journalists, the pros and cons of Substack, and whether Culturally Determined should pivot back to video. ...

Teaser ... A brief history of American China hawkery ... The 2008 financial crisis changed things ... Xi Jinping and the great man theory of history ... Can we get along with autocrats? ... How China hawkery became bipartisan ... Total eclipse of the hawks? ... Kaiser’s "Great Reckoning" thesis ...

Bob’s Doha trip takeaways ... The Epstein-Bannon-Trump connection ... Can MAGA survive the Epstein saga? ... Email hygiene 101 ... Paul defends Larry Summers ... Olivia Nuzzi hikes the Appalachian trail ... Overtime preview: Top podcasting secrets revealed! The punishment problem; Pluribus; the “great feminization” debate; AI “bubble” update; and more! ...

Teaser ... Alex's influential "Google PM Bible" ... What is a tech aggregator? ... AI is much more than chatbots ... The dangers of centralized AI ... What you want vs what you want to want ... How an LLM’s memory locks you in ... AGI vs ASI ... Alex's solution to the lock-in problem ... Alex's ode to “resonance” ...

Teaser ... What is Bob doing in Qatar? ... "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold." Why Yeats felt this way ... Peter Thiel's Antichrist theory ... Nikita: COVID was a weird time, and nothing has been the same since ... Why Bob feels things are falling apart ... Were things ever in order? ... "Inner emigration": tuning out the world as self-care ... A reaction to a drone strike: "Loud noises don't wake me up" ... Young people are turning away from social media ... When Spain lost all power and cellular coverage ... War as a "major inconvenience" ... Bob's prediction about Ukraine's future retaliation for Pokrovsk ... Nikita's impressions from...

Teaser ... Shadi’s path to his new book, The Case for American Power ... George W. Bush’s “Freedom Agenda” ... Does America’s role in Gaza undermine Shadi’s case? ... Shadi’s case for US moral supremacy ... What does China want? ... What justifies military intervention? ... Bob: International law is the answer ... Heading to Overtime ...

This week in underappreciated world history ... Were the elections all—or just mostly—bad news for Trump? ... Will Trump invade Venezuela? ... Epstein's creepy relationship with Trump ... What’s the shutdown fight really about? ... Mickey vs Ezra Klein (in absentia) on healthcare ... Back down the Epstein rabbit hole ... Was Tucker playing 4D chess with the Fuentes interview? ... What happened to the blogosphere? ... The case for (and against) Bari Weiss ... AI doom in fiction vs reality ... The AI bubble: Dot-com déjà vu? ... AOC in 2028? ... Mickey: Beware of gym girls! ...

The Carlson-Fuentes interview controversy ... Paul: Candidate Carlson is coming ... Is gatekeeping dead? ... Is Carlson’s show respectable? ... Carlson and Fuentes on the Israel lobby ... William F. Buckley as MAGA precursor ... Is antisemitism more organic on the right or left? ... Heading to Overtime ...

Bob tries to lower American Prestige’s self-esteem ... The Trump-Xi trade talks ... Making sense of Trump’s nuclear saber-rattling ... Signs of a US-China vibe shift ... Is AI accelerating science? ... Bill Gates’s climate change of heart ... This week’s Gaza ceasefire death toll ... Overtime preview: Bob vs Danny on international law ...

Teaser ... Trump on drug cartels: "We're gonna kill them. They're gonna be like, dead." ... Venezuela: Regime change disguised as drug war ... Marco Rubio holds all the foreign policy power ... Trump Doctrine candidate #1: "Jump at the chance to use force" ... Trump Doctrine candidate #2: Monroe 2.0 ... Roy Cohn's philosophy: "It is a nation of men, not laws" ... Bob: There's value in hypocrisy ... Trump is paving the way for a more competent tyrant ... Could Trump actually be good for the world? ... Trump the comedian ... Heading to Overtime: Bob's mysterious invitation-only conference ...

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What triggered Trump’s 100-percent tariff threat? ... How China is mirroring the US playbook ... The real escalation: America's "50% rule" ... Why has US media coverage been so bad? ... Why has US media coverage been so bad? ... US China policy as cognitive empathy failure ... Heading to Overtime ...

Teaser ... Why Liron became a Yudkowskian ... Eliezer Yudkowsky’s vision of AI apocalypse ... Does intelligence want power? ... Decoding Yudkowsky’s key Darwinian metaphor ... Is doomerism crowding out other AI worries? ... Liron: The silent majority is very AI anxious ... Heading to Overtime ...

Amazing Bob-Paul discount deal! ... The Bari Weiss trivia test ... Lasting peace in Gaza? ... Why did Trump finally get tough on Bibi? ... MAGA free speech debates ... Is the AI bubble about to burst? ... If anyone builds it, will everyone die? ... Heading into Overtime: Ian McEwan, George Harrison, OpenAI, One Battle After Another ...

Was Free Press bought “to control US media”? ... Why pay $150M for a Substack? ... Netanyahu on the TikTok deal and "giving direction" to the Jewish people ... Pro-Israel donors giving a $2M ultimatum to Charlie Kirk about his ties to Tucker Carlson ... How much influence does Israel have over US media? ... Why Tucker Carlson's appeal to Christians is a problem for Bibi ... Trump: "I would make TikTok 100% MAGA related if I could" ... Why Hamas would be crazy to trust Trump on his Gaza deal ... Prigozhin conspiracy theory: Why would the Russian government want people to think he's alive? ... Cognitive sovereignty ... Heading to O...

Teaser ... Steve’s book In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us ... Were school closures smart policy? ... The mask mandate question ... Did medical experts get too much say? ... The role of social class and political tribe ... How dissent was suppressed ... Bob takes a jab at Jay Bhattacharya ... Heading to OT: Why Steve wrote the book ...

The deal Hamas offered Bibi before October 7 ... How October 7 changed the landscape ... Why Clinton’s Camp David talks failed ... What Arafat was actually offered at Camp David ... The centrality of the right of return ... Beyond two states ... Heading into OT: Abandoning false optimism is not pessimism ...

How Eliezer Yudkowsky's new book envisions AI takeover ... Will we ever really know how AI works? ... The “paperclip maximizer" problem revisited ... Will advanced AIs be insatiable? ... David’s alternative takeover scenario: gradual disempowerment ... Can—and should—we keep humans in the loop? ... Heading into Overtime ...

Teaser ... Glenn’s latest book, Self-Censorship ... Why the Manhattan Institute dropped Glenn ... Glenn on Gaza: “I can’t bear it.” ... “Genocide” and other Israel speech code flashpoints ... Has Trump’s anti-antisemitism push chilled campus speech? ... The irony of the antisemitism crackdown ... A few kind and less kind words for Bari Weiss ... Are Israel’s defenders hurting their cause? ... Glenn’s next big project ...

Free speech after Charlie Kirk ... Tyler Robinson’s strange messages ... How influential was Kirk? ... Do violent video games encourage violence? ... What Gary Marcus gets right—and (very) wrong—about AI ... Overtime topics: Paul’s debate triumph, Redford’s legacy, etc. ... Heading into Overtime ...

How this conversation came to be ... What surprised Glenn most about the Kirk killing ... Who (or what) is driving our polarization? ... Cognitive empathy for MAGA ... Reacting to Charlie Kirk on affirmative action ... Are we re-running the 1960s? ... Coming up in part 2: Israel-Gaza ...

Has the pace of AI progress slowed? ... How the tech CEOs are learning to stop worrying ... Mark Zuckerberg ... Sam Altman ... OpenAI’s attempt to shed its non-profit status ... Dario Amodei ... Heading to Overtime ...

Teaser ... "Would Putin send a weird sexually suggestive birthday greeting to a famous affluent well-connected pedophile?" ... Decoding Trump's message in the greeting ... Conspiracy theories vs official silence ... Why is Ezra Klein content with "We'll never know"? ... Why no president wants to release the Epstein files ... Ghislaine names Clinton and Larry Summers ... Does Epstein kill faith in democracy? ... Trump vs. Putin: Authoritarian playbooks compared ... Will Trumpism outlive Trump? ... David Sacks embraces strongman tactics ... How war changes everything overnight ... Trump's Mexico invasion fantasy ... Heading to Overtime ...

The Bob-Paul secret sauce—spilled! ... Mickey Kaus's latest contribution to Epsteinology ... Paul fact-checks Mickey, gets fact-checked ... What’s better: AI or indoor plumbing? ... What Gary Marcus gets right—and (very) wrong—about AI ... Has TV made us smarter? ... The pros of the Google antitrust ruling ... Putin’s paleo-transhumanism ... Heading to Overtime ...

Teaser ... Seth’s new NYT bestseller, The Fort Bragg Cartel ... What is Delta Force? ... The growth of Delta Force's covert ops and unaccountability ... American "death squads" ... Why cops and prosecutors cover up crimes by elite soldiers ... The mysterious murder of Billy Lavigne ... How invading Afghanistan fueled America's drug crisis ... Heading to Overtime ...

Bob welcomes Nikita back to the Nonzero team ... WSJ's report on Trump's authoritarian drift ... Three levers: streets, media, education system ... Trump the businessman and Trump the politician ... Why Putin was compelling in 1999, when Russia was a young democracy ... Laws vs norms ... Trump and lawfare: how independent is the US judiciary? ... Partisanship among judges ... Trump's view of the world as a game ... Cynicism as a political brand ... Nikita: Putin and Trump share a geopolitical worldview ... The damage the US and Russia did to the international law ... The evolution of Putin's understanding of geopolitics ... Today's Overtime segment is open for everybody! ... The...

Joe’s notable background ... Is most of the MAGA coalition accelerationist? ... Transhumanism, big tech, Klaus Schwab, and the noosphere ... How the pandemic sparked a MAGA tech backlash ... Palantir as bipartisan bête noire ... The conservative case for AI regulation ... Should fear of China trump fear of AI? ... Heading to Overtime ...

Connor’s farewell ... What’s next at NonZero ... The looming invasion of Gaza City ... Israel's one-state solution ... Why did Trump give up on Gaza? ... The "blame-it-on-Bibi" farce ... A disappointing week for Ukraine ... How to make security guarantees work ... Ukraine's ticking time bomb ...

Bob defends the Unabomber (kind of) ... Paul nurses his Mickey-inflicted wounds ... Bob deflates the GPT-5 deflation ... How big a deal are LLM hallucinations? ... AI's coming social and economic disruptions ... How Bob and Paul use AI ... The ideas of Hanno Sauer ... Heading to Overtime ...

What’s at stake in Alaska ... George: Don’t try to do too much ... EU yes, NATO no ... Could Putin dupe Trump into a bad deal? ... Sanctions: painful, but not decisive ... What Russian media is saying about the talks ... Are Europe & Ukraine warming to a deal? ...

Nathan’s work at AI2—and his p(doom) ... What does “open source AI” mean? ... How Nathan taught a Llama new tricks ... Pros and cons of open sourcing AI ... Nathan's ATOM Project to boost American open models ... What's behind OpenAI's open source play? ... Geoffrey Hinton's case against open models ... Is the US-China open model rivalry really zero-sum? ... Heading to Overtime ...

Epstein's Israel connections ... Epstein's history of blackmail ... Was it suicide? ... Epstein's creepy relationship with Trump ... Why won’t Trump release the files? ... The Israel connection(s) ... Some Epstein-Wexner weirdness ... What’s the deal with Ghislaine? ... Was it suicide? (cont’d) ... Mickey plays pundit defender ... Influence operation or personal fetish operation? Or both? ... How Biden made war in Taiwan more likely ... Epstein's strangely light 2008 sentence ... The political cost for Trump ... How dangerous is Trump? ...