BhTV: The Wright Show (audio)

A brief message from Bob ... Shakeel’s newsletter, Transformer, and its mission ... The case(s) against Sam Altman ... OpenAI President Greg Brockman's political spending ... The founding doctrines of the leading AI labs ... The singleton and the singularity ... How market forces overwhelm good intentions ... Is the singularity near? ... Sam vs. Dario vs. Demis ... Heading to Overtime ...

Bob and Eli’s history of (civil) disagreement on Iran ... Is Trump's war on Iran legal? Does it matter? ... Who’s the real rogue state? ... Israel’s nukes and Iran’s nuclear program ... Is Israel more moral than Iran? ... How Hamas became Hamas ... “Proxy,” “theocracy,” and other fighting words ... Heading to Overtime ...

Would America benefit from Iran “winning”? ... Trump’s last exit ramp? ... What’s China’s angle on the war? ... Trump: psychoanalyzed ... Israel: psychoanalyzed ... Iran’s plans for the Strait of Hormuz ... Is this Trump’s biggest blunder? ... The intra-MAGA war over Iran (and Israel) ... Where are the Democrats? ... Antisemitism, alleged and real ... Heading to Overtime ...

Teaser ... Defining (and preventing) superintelligence ... Where the nuclear analogy holds (and where it breaks) ... Imagining an AI inspections regime ... The superintelligence precursors to watch for ... Nikita: "I find him weirdly persuasive on a hypnotist kind of level" ... Our dangerous lack of government oversight ... ControlAI's "bottom-up" approach to AI policy ... The mounting geopolitica...

Teaser ... Holy Week in Andalusia, and the Christian cross as branding ... Why Bob is skeptical of Trump's diplomacy ... Trump's hand got weaker and he doesn't even know it ... Killing Iran's navy chief won't reopen the Strait of Hormuz ... Nikita: "I find him weirdly persuasive on a hypnotist kind of level" ... The Iran war's secret winner: Vladimir Putin ... Bob checked back into AI podcasts and...

Teaser ... What (or who) is the Iran war for? ... Joe Kent and the MAGA rift over Israel ... Does antisemitism speech policing foment antisemitism? ... What Ron’s Substack has that others don’t ... Heading to Overtime ...

Teaser ... Overtime preview: a civil(-ish) debate on Israel-Palestine ... How vibe-coding changed Liron’s life ... Portents of the AI jobpocalypse ... What can humans do that AI agents can’t? ... The Darwinian case for AI doom ... OpenClaw vs SkyNet ... Liron: I love AI! We need to stop it. ... Amodei, Altman, and the Pentagon triangle ... Heading to Overtime ...

Teaser ... Is Iran inflicting much damage on Israel? ... Iran has a strategy. Does America? Does Israel? ... Where Trump and Bibi differ ... Why Daniel is no longer a Zionist ... Bibi vs the Israeli security establishment ... The Gulf States' dilemma ... Daniel on Bibi’s true endgame ... Heading to Overtime ...

Teaser ... How we got here ... Understanding Iran's strategy and goals ... Turkey, Europe, and the Gulf States ... Will the Iranian regime survive? ... The specious leadership of Reza Pahlavi ... The many missed opportunities for US-Iran entente ... Heading to Overtime ...

Teaser ... Will the Iran war supercharge antisemitism? ... Varieties of Israeli-Jewish conflation ... The Epstein effect ... Tucker v. Israel vs Fuentes v. Israel ... Does MSM have a pro-Israel bias? ... The ADL’s counterproductive speech policing ... Heading to Overtime ...

Teaser ... Marco Rubio's Israel faux pas ... What are Trump’s new goalposts? ... The regime after Khamenei ... Can a regime be changed by air strikes alone? ... Will Turkey be drawn in? ... The logic of Iran's response ... The pathetic European (and Canadian) response ... Heading into Overtime ...

Teaser ... Spain: the one country that got it right ... When US rhetoric starts sounding like the Kremlin ... Nukes, regime change, military threat—pick one ... Rubio's "ridiculous" explanation for attacking Iran ... Iran's restraint: from Soleimani to Khamenei ... Trump had leverage over Bibi. He didn't use it. ... Is this Israel's war or America's? ... Tommy Vietor goes after the ADL—a political...

Teaser ... Why is Trump threatening Iran, really? ... What’s the strategic logic behind striking? ... Trump vs Bibi on Gaza ... How would—and could—Iran respond? ... What a post-regime-collapse Iran could look like ... Josh: Trump has painted himself into a corner ... Is a new “axis of resistance” against Israel emerging? ... Heading to Overtime ...

Teaser ... Holly’s call-out campaign ... Holly: Don’t believe the Amanda Askell puff pieces ... Is Amanda a bad person? ... How Dario’s false dichotomies accelerate the AI race ... The only Anthropic through-line is "winning" ... Did Dario subvert Effective Altruism? ... The end of the AI safety fig leaf ... Heading into Overtime: The pros and cons of naming and shaming ...

Teaser ... A paywall bait masterclass ... Is Paul feeling the AI acceleration? ... The Freddie deBoer AI challenge ... What would a true AI revolution look like? ... Bob: We’re failing the AI test ... Has AI really made much of a difference? ... Heading to Overtime ...

Teaser ... Recap: how MAGA's domestic and foreign policy fit together as one project ... MAGA reframed as a response to a felt lack of agency ... AI is about to make that loss of agency universal ... The first technology we're actually transferring agency to ... What Claude Code is doing to Nikita's creative process ... Will people use their free time well — or sit on a couch and inject heroin? .....

Teaser ... The dueling Sam Altman biographies ... Who is the real Sam Altman? ... OpenAI’s origin—did Sam scam Elon? ... Why the OpenAI board coup failed ... Good and bad critiques of OpenAI ... Heading to Overtime ...

Army brats and media empires ... Is war with Iran imminent? ... Trump’s “red line” trap ... Are we underestimating Iran? ... Israel and the “clean break” memo ... Rubio as deep state puppet master ... Trump’s AI report card ... The race for superintelligence ... Is AI an existential threat? ... Will AI trigger mass unemployment? ... Chip restrictions as war starters ... Does Xi think his Taiwan wi...

Teaser ... How Bob’s and Paul’s names wound up in the Epstein Files ... Epstein’s double option play ... Understanding Moltbook ... Bob on the “big question” Moltbook raises ... Paul: What planet are Emily Bender and Alex Hanna on? ... Heading into Overtime: Friends in the Epstein Files, the strangest thing Bob’s ever done for money and more. ...

MAGA as a coherent global phenomenon ... Narrative vs. material forces behind MAGA ... Mark Carney and the hypocrisy of the "rule-based order" ... Burkeans vs. Silicon Valley libertarians ... Make Russia Great Again ... Heading to Overtime ...

Alex and Emily’s book, The AI Con ... Beyond the AI booster-doomer spectrum ... What—and who—is AI actually useful for? ... The AI productivity question(s) ... Emily: AI won’t take your job, it’ll just make it shi**ier ... Stochastic parrots, Chinese rooms, and semantics ... Are LLMs really black boxes? ... Do AIs “understand” things? ... Debating using AIs as experts ... How “neural” are neural n...

A recap of January’s Trump turbulence ... Is Trump a cause or symptom of world disorder? ... Is Trump increasingly unstable? ... Will we invade Cuba? ... American politics after Trump ... The crumbling bedrock of International Law ... Where are the Democrats? ... Heading into Overtime: Renee Good, Syria, Worthwhile Canadian Prime Minister ...

Teaser ... Defining AI succession ... How positive psychology led Dan to AI research ... Is Dan a "successionist"? ... Does it matter whether AI is sentient? ... Two traits of a worthy successor ... The varieties of succession scenarios ... Values and interests ... Will AI have any use for us? ... Succession scenarios to avoid ... Heading into Overtime ...

Are Bob and Mike the godfathers of podcasting? ... Slate and the origins of podcasting ... NotebookLM’s humanless podcasts ... From blogs to Substack ... Looking back at BloggingHeads ... The tribalizing influence of algorithms ... New news models ... What happened to the rules in professional sports? ... The consequences of paying college athletes ... Mike's comprehensive take on sports gambling...

Teaser ... Different readings of the Renee Good videos ... JD Vance vs Stephen Miller: compare and contrast ... Trump vs Hitler: compare and contrast ... ICE agents and stormtroopers: compare and contrast ... Has Elon totally lost it? ... Paul: Politicians are people too! ... Heading to Overtime ...