Theo Jaffee Podcast

Luke Drago is the co-author of The Intelligence Curse and previously researched AI governance and economics at BlueDot Impact, served on the leadership team at Encode, and studied history and politics at Oxford. 0:00 - Intro 0:54 - Overview of the intelligence curse 2:10 - Why are the doomers wrong? 4:37 - Why are the optimists wrong? 7:00 - Do people really have power now? 13:33 - Why would power...

Alok Singh researches provable AI safety via formal verification using Lean at Max Tegmark’s Beneficial AI Foundation, and writes about mathematics at alok.github.io. 0:00 - Intro 1:12 - Typing 8:45 - Elon’s demo day 22:42 - Animation, discrete vs continuous 29:04 - Number systems 35:26 - Nonstandard analysis 43:04 - Reasoning models and o3 50:45 - Fiction 55:48 - o1 and Linguistics 58:50 - Hyperf...

Samo Burja is a writer, historian, and political scientist, the founder of civilizational consulting firm Bismarck Analysis, and the editor-in-chief of governance futurism magazine Palladium. Chapters 0:00 - Intro 1:06 - Implications of OpenAI o1 10:21 - Implications of superintelligence on history 35:06 - Palladium, Chinese technocracy, ideology, and media 1:00:44 - Best ideas, philosophers, and...

Alec Stapp is the co-founder and co-CEO of the Institute for Progress, a non-profit think tank dedicated to accelerating scientific, technological, and industrial progress. Chapters 0:00 - Intro 1:13 - Why can’t smart people fix the Bay Area? 3:38 - How to get normal people on board with IFP 10:23 - How to get smart people into governance 15:55 - How IFP chose its priorities 21:56 - How will IFP a...

Casey Handmer is the founder and CEO of Terraform Industries and a physicist, immigrant, pilot, dad, solar enthusiast, Caltech physics PhD and former Hyperloop One levitation engineer and NASA JPL software system architect. 0:00 - Intro 1:40 - Why don’t other people do what Terraform does? 2:51 - Why is solar better than nuclear fusion? 5:27 - Could carbon emissions actually be good? 8:38 - Why is...

Stephen Grugett and Austin Chen are co-founders of Manifold Markets, an online play-money prediction market and competitive forecasting platform. Stephen currently serves on the company’s management, while Austin recently stepped down to start Manifund, a unique, open-source grant program. This video is not sponsored in any way by Manifold, Manifund, or Manifest - I just think they’re cool. Chapte...

Perry Metzger is an entrepreneur, technology manager, consultant, computer scientist, early proponent of extropianism and futurism, and co-founder and chairman of the Alliance for the Future. 0:00 - Intro 0:47 - How Perry got into extropianism 7:04 - Is extropianism the same as e/acc? 9:38 - Why extropianism died out 12:59 - Eliezer Yudkowsky 17:19 - Perry and Eliezer’s Twitter beef 19:46 - TESCRE...

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 -...

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...

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-s...

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 Slop...

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:...

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 b...

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-Optimize...

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: htt...

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: h...

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...

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 F...

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...

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...

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...