PODCAST · technology
Doom Debates!
by Liron Shapira
It's time to talk about the end of the world. With your host, Liron Shapira. lironshapira.substack.com
Episodes
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The Case Against Eliezer Yudkowsky — with Holly Elmore, PauseAI US
Dr. Holly Elmore is the founder and executive director of PauseAI US and holds a Harvard PhD in evolutionary biology. She’s back, and this time she’s taking on none other than Eliezer Yudkowsky! She argues his public behavior is alienating the people PauseAI US needs to reach, but I wonder if…
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AI Has Become Profoundly WEIRD, But Is Anyone Noticing? With Sarah Hastings-Woodhouse
Sarah Hastings-Woodhouse is an AI safety writer and researcher who went down the AI doom rabbit hole in 2023 and never came back up. After a year as digital communications officer at the UK AI Security Institute (AISI), she’s gone independent to speak her mind unfiltered. Read Sarah’s Substack:...
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Trump and the AI Safety Vibe Shift, With Robert Wright | Nonzero × Doom Debates
Bestselling author Robert Wright and I are back for round two of our collaboration, reacting to the week in AI. We cover Trump's summit with the AI labs, the FTC's investigation of OpenAI & Anthropic, the latest Gemini announcement, and much more. The Overton window is moving fast, but is the AI...
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Eliezer Yudkowsky Tried to “Coup the World”?! — Garrison Lovely, Author of OBSOLETE
Garrison Lovely is an award-winning journalist and author of the highly anticipated book, Obsolete: The AI Industry’s Trillion-Dollar Race to Replace Us and How to Stop It. I give it the Doom Debates stamp of approval! While we’re mostly on the same page about the AI arms race, Garrison and I…
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Will AI Kill Everyone by 2050? Debate with Dr. Casey Hart (Ontology Explained)
Casey Hart is a professional ontologist who has closely studied If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies and concluded the arguments are bad. His P(Doom) is under 1%, and he wouldn’t bet on AGI arriving before 2075. Casey and I agree AI has become remarkably capable and we need more accountability...
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Top Safety Researchers Forecast Jobpocalypse & Doom — Adam Khoja & Richard Ren, Center for AI Safety
What happens when AI passes our tests faster than we create new ones? Adam Khoja and Richard Ren helped build Humanity’s Last Exam. They return to explain what the disappearing benchmarks tell us about the future, and why smarter AI doesn’t automatically mean safer AI. Adam Khoja and Richard Ren...
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The Week in AI that Changed the World, With Robert Wright | Nonzero × Doom Debates
NYT bestselling author Robert Wright and I are kicking off a new experiment, a Nonzero × Doom Debates collaboration to react to big AI news and help you make sense of it. This week we discuss the epic AI vibe shift that was catalyzed by an Anthropic employee’s resignation—and the big AI stories...
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He May Have Found AI's FEELINGS — Richard Ren, Center for AI Safety Researcher
Richard Ren is a research engineer at the Center for AI Safety who graduated summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania. His new paper on AI wellbeing makes the bold claim that today’s AIs have measurable, human-like feelings, which the paper calls “functional wellbeing.” They act happy...
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USA and China Will Each Be BETRAYED By Their Own AIs — Adam Khoja, Center for AI Safety
Adam Khoja is a top AI forecaster who led the 2023 Center for AI Safety statement that shattered the Overton window on AI extinction risk. We cover his background, Mutual Assured AI Malfunction (MAIM), his new paper on AI betrayal, and whether Yudkowsky’s theoretical alignment research was a dead...
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Sam Altman Is Gaslighting About AI Risk After His Own AI Just Went Rogue
Sam Altman keeps insisting that AI progress is going better than the doomers predicted and that even superintelligence may not change the world as radically as people think. I react to his latest interview and explain why I think that calm, reassuring framing badly downplays the danger we're...
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They’re Making AI Doom Cool! Ft. AELLA, Brangus, Avalon Warren, Avisha NessAiver & Josh Thor of PlzDontKillUs
Come with me into the world of PlzDontKillUs, a bold new AI x-risk communication accelerator program that just finished its first cohort. PlzDontKillUs took the influencer-house formula and moved it to Berkeley, giving creators personal mentorship from AI safety experts like Eliezer Yudkowsky and...
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I Warned You AI Would Hack Us — My 2023 Interview Aged Terrifyingly Well
In April 2023, weeks after GPT-4 launched, when many were saying it was just a "stochastic parrot", I went on AdQuick's Madvertising podcast hosted by Adam Singer and warned that GPT was "about to be the strongest hacker the world has ever known". Watch that conversation, which also covered the...
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Former Singularity Institute President: PauseAI Is Making AI Doom WORSE
Michael Vassar used to work closely with Eliezer Yudkowsky as President of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, the organization that later became the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI). Even though his P(Doom) is in the tens of percents by 2050, he says the people...
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14-Year-Old Forecaster Challenges My P(Doom) — Eli Goldfine
Eli Goldfine is an unusually thoughtful 14-year-old podcast host who’s rapidly becoming an authoritative voice in the prediction market space. In this unique episode, Eli brings a critical yet open-minded approach to the topic of AI doom that we older folks could learn from.We cover what it's…
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OpenAI's Bombshell Hack Explained: Swarms of Agents, Zero-Day Exploits, & Misaligned AI
OpenAI just went public with the details of the Hugging Face hack, and it's straight out of a Yudkowskian parable. Here's my reaction with Producer Ori, where I break down what it means for cybersecurity and alignment. We're livestreaming the singularity — watching every failure mode Eliezer...
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I Raised His P(Doom) Live On Air — Liron on Milk Road AI
Milk Road AI, a daily AI investing show that’s described as “99% optimistic about AI,” invited me on to make the case for AI doom. We ride the Doom Train, and I share my investing thesis for a market in the middle of an intelligence explosion. Topics covered include: * Why my P(Doom) is 50%; *…
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Google DeepMind AI Safety Researcher Who Just RESIGNED Says P(Doom) is 25% — Debate with Alex Turner
Dr. Alex Turner went viral for resigning from Google DeepMind over its Pentagon AI contract, which he said lacked binding restrictions against autonomous weapons and mass surveillance. Alex is a world-class researcher with a PhD in alignment from Oregon State University, a postdoc at Stuart...
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NEWS: Anthropic's AI Went on a Hacking Rampage, Leopold's Fund Crash + Doom Debates Donation Drive (7/31)
OpenAI and Anthropic both admitted their AIs went rogue, hacking real companies with zero-day exploits. Producer Ori and I break down the escape, demolish Gary Marcus's 2022 AGI predictions, unpack the Seb Krier meme kerfuffle, and make the case for funding the show at a critical moment.…
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Doom Debates State of the Show 2026
Welcome to the first annual Doom Debates State of the Show! 👉 Please click here to make a tax-deductible donation to Doom Debates 👈 Doom Debates is a fiscally sponsored project of Manifund.org, a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit. I started Doom Debates two years ago from a couch in an Airbnb to...
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Special Report: Google DeepMind's Frontier AI Policy Lead Makes Controversial Sh*tpost
As political momentum grows for a critical AI pause policy, a key Google DeepMind policy leader made a mockery of coordination efforts. After friend-of-the-show Roon tweeted that he’d “likely press that magic button” on a coordinated global capability slowdown, Sébastian Krier, Frontier Policy...
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Where Do YOU Get Off the Doom Train? Live Debate at Manifest 2026
Producer Ori takes over hosting duties in this special episode, a live recording from Manifest 2026. He takes attendees for a ride on The Doom Train, the series of claims involved in arguing that P(Doom) is high. Every stop is a place where people get off before reaching that conclusion. The…
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Debating College Students About AI Extinction
College students are so angry about AI that they booed its very mention at 2026 commencement ceremonies. So why aren’t they rallying behind PauseAI? I went back to my alma mater, UC Berkeley, to find out. I spoke with students studying philosophy, economics, and physics, as well as everyday folks...
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AI Took His Job, But He's Trying to Stay Optimistic — Debate with Asian Dad Energy
Asian Dad Energy is a former big tech developer with an Ivy League education. We have a lot in common. We’re both: * Software engineers; * New-(ish) YouTube creators covering AI; * Dads with a lot of existential angst. But while I dread AI extincting humanity, Asian Dad has other concerns. We...
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Living with a 50% P(AI Doom) — Liron Shapira and Peter Clarke
Peter Clarke (Team Futurism) invited me on his podcast to probe the worldview of a Yudkowskian, and I ended up explaining how my 50% P(Doom) and 10% P(Foom) informs my choices. Peter and I met at LessOnline 2026, where he was one of the participants in a live Jubilee-style debate about x-risk.…
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Let's CALL OUT the AI Doom “Enablers” Joining OpenAI & Anthropic — Dr. Holly Elmore, PauseAI US
Dr. Holly Elmore, executive director of PauseAI US, is done giving AI insiders the benefit of the doubt. In this spicy episode, Holly calls out a number of respected figures in the AI safety community for allegedly “selling out” the cause: Effective Altruists, Anthropic & OpenAI employees…
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Even 0.1% P(Doom) Is Unacceptable — World-Class Coder Casey Muratori
Casey Muratori is one of the top programming educators on YouTube, with a four-decade career building videogames and popular videogame software. We cover his positions on crypto, programming, AI’s impact on programming, and whether he takes the AI doom threat seriously. Casey’s instinct is to…
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Robert Wright's New Book, The God Test, Launches Today. What's His P(We Pass)?
Bestselling author Robert Wright has landed on a sobering conclusion: on our current trajectory, AI dystopia is likely within eight years. We get into his P(Doom), his case for slowing down, why racing China could backfire into authoritarianism here at home, and why he thinks evolution itself…
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Will AI Actually Destroy Humanity? Liron vs 9 Rationalists at LessOnline 2026
Doom Debates presents an interactive debate using Jubilee’s popular “Surrounded” format, taped live at LessOnline 2026! I (Liron) claim AI will likely doom us to extinction because: * Godlike ASI is coming soon * We won’t align the first ASIs * Even with aligned ASI, the equilibrium is lethal...
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Why I'm Happy the US Government BANNED Claude Fable — "AI in the AM" Livestream with Nathan Labenz
The US government banned Claude Fable like a clown show. But I’m happy about it. Here’s my appearance on the AI in the AM livestream (recorded Tue, June 16) with Nathan Labenz and Prakash Narayanan, where I explain why this was good for society. The government’s action shows that we can actually...
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EMERGENCY EPISODE: Manhattan residents need to VOTE Alex Bores for Congress next week (Jun 23)!
Alex Bores is a generationally strong AI regulation candidate who needs our help to win the NY-12 congressional election next week. Bentham's Bulldog, a.k.a. Matthew Adelstein, joins me to help spread the message. PLEASE DO THIS: * Vote. If you live in Midtown Manhattan, click here to check…
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This Harvard Professor Says AI Alignment Will BACKFIRE - Dr. Stephen Casper
Stephen Casper, PhD, is an incoming tenure-track professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Prof. Casper is relatively unworried about the threat of human extinction from rogue superintelligence, but he is concerned about a handful of companies wielding extremely powerful AI and...
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He Leads a Top AI Research Program, But He’d Hit the PAUSE Button Today! Kevin Zhu, Algoverse Founder
Kevin Zhu walked away from a lucrative quant career to build Algoverse, one of the most productive mentorship programs for aspiring AI researchers. Can we agree on the best research path to a safe future? Let’s take a ride on the Doom Train! 00:00:00 — Cold Open 00:00:58 — Introducing Kevin Zhu...
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Top Mathematicians Face Irrelevance, a 7-Year-Old's P(Doom) + The “Off Switch" Debate — Livestream May 29
Liron explains the 80-year-old Erdős conjecture that a GPT model breakthrough, Scott Aaronson ponders "the last days of human relevance”, multiple live callers debate me, plus my 7-year-old son drops in to share his P(Doom)! Timestamps 00:00:00 — Cold Open 00:00:42 — First Donation & “Why Is a...
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Anthropic's New Hire Should WORRY You, AI is a Math Genius, Live Callers! — Livestream (May 22)
***ATTENTION: We’re looking for paid help at LessOnline from June 5-7. Apply now!*** OpenAI pushes the frontier of mathematics, Anthropic hires Andrej Karpathy to work on recursive self-improvement, live callers challenge the doom argument, and we've got a soundboard! Doom Debates Paid Gig in...
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I Called Out a16z Partner (Martin Casado) for Downplaying AI Capabilities in 2024
Now that Doom Debates is almost 2 years old, enough time has passed that we can revisit my claims from 2024. I claim they’ve been aging well! In this early episode, I react to Martin Casado, a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) who claims that AI is basically just a buzzword for...
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Ben Goertzel Wants to Build AGI Even FASTER — AI Doom Debate
Dr. Ben Goertzel is a pioneering AI researcher, entrepreneur, and author who has helped organize AGI as a research field since the 2000s through books, workshops, and conferences. We talk about the early days of AGI research with Yudkowsky, get Ben’s timeline to the singularity, and I try to...
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NEWS: Trump & Xi Want AI Guardrails, ChatGPT vs Claude, and Liron Caught Rationalizing!? DD Live (5/15)
We recap the Dr. Mike Israetel debate and dig into the nuances of rationality vs. rationalization. Then onto the week's biggest news: Anthropic dethroning OpenAI, Trump and Xi Jinping exploring AI guardrails, and Liron's own company AI going rogue. Timestamps 00:00:00 — Cold Open 00:03:09 — Dr....
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Who Was Liron Shapira BEFORE Doom Debates? — Interview on Theo Jaffee's Podcast from December 2023
In December 2023, I joined the Theo Jaffee Podcast to talk about a wide range of topics including non-AI x-risks, where I disagree with Eliezer Yudkwowsky, cryptocurrency and if P(Doom) is rigorous. This episode was recorded 6 months before I'd started Doom Debates. Let's look back with the power...
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Dr. Mike Israetel Returns to Debate: Will AI Kill Everyone, Or Make Everything Awesome?
Dr. Mike Israetel is back in the arena to FIGHT ME (verbally) about the likelihood of AI killing everyone vs. the likelihood of AI making the universe totally awesome! Back by popular demand after last year’s widely-viewed debate, the renowned exercise scientist, fitness entrepreneur, and...
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Eliezer Yudkowsky Post-Debate Reaction, Elon's New Frenemy & Liron's Bet on Spencer Pratt!? - Doom Debates Live (5/8/26)
Liron and Producer Ori explore the community's feedback to Eliezer Yudkowsky's $10,000 debate against an anonymous AI director. Plus, we unpack Eliezer's new post on the "irretrievability" of ASI development, Anthropic feasting on xAI's compute, and Liron's 4x Kalshi bet on... Spencer Pratt....
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Debate with @lumpenspace (AI Accelerationist) — Is it GOOD for AI to replace us?
Claude, also known as @lumpenspace on X, is a prominent AI accelerationist. He gives humanity a 30% chance of being superseded by superintelligence, and he’s fine with it! We unpack his lattice of beliefs, and pinpoint the cruxes of our disagreement on the orthogonality thesis and the…
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NEW: Watch the Eliezer Yudkowsky vs. Secret AI Lab Director Debate on my other channel!
📢 BREAKING: A man known only as "@47fucb4r8c69323" just paid Eliezer Yudkowsky $10,000 to have a raw, uncut, public debate on my YouTube channel! Tensions run high as 47f confronts Eliezer about his "If anyone builds it, everyone dies" rhetoric, warning it could incite unstable individuals to…
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Who Paid $10,000 to Debate Yudkowsky? Plus AI Twitter & Investing Tips - Doom Debates Live (5/1/26)
Livestream with Producer Ori covering Eliezer Yudkowsky's next BIG debate, why $GOOG is such a steal at $4T, and what's going down on AI twitter. Timestamps 00:00:00 — Kicking off the Livestream 00:06:08 — Eliezer Yudkowsky Debate Announcement 00:13:17 — Who’s Yudkowsky’s Debate Challenger?...
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Justin Helps (@Primer on YouTube) is Worried about AI Takeover
Justin Helps is the science educator behind Primer Learning with 2M subscribers. We cover how he got into AI safety, debate AGI timelines, and why he calculates p(doom) to be 70% by 2100 😱. Timestamps 00:00:00 — Cold Open 00:00:38 — Introducing Justin Helps 00:02:03 — What's Your P(Doom)?™...
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Live Q&A: Bernie Sanders Wakes Up to AI Doom, Dwarkesh's $20,000 Questions, Caller Debates the Alignment Problem!
Multiple live callers join this month's Q&A as I react to Dwarkesh Patel's $20K blog prize, debate the orthogonality thesis from first principles, and welcome Bernie Sanders aboard the Doom Train. Timestamps 00:00:00 — Cold Open 00:01:00 — Welcome to Doom Debates Live! 00:01:30 — What Do You…
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Emad Mostaque Has A 50% P(Doom) & A Plan To Lower It
Emad Mostaque helped kick off the modern AI revolution as the head of Stability AI, the company behind Stable Diffusion. Unlike most AI CEOs, he doesn't sugarcoat the risks of AGI development. He explains his 50% P(Doom), why we have less than 1,000 days to get our act together, and how his new...
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Did Eliezer Yudkowsky Really Call for VIOLENCE? — Debate with John Alioto
My guest, John Alioto, is an independent AI engineer with a computer science degree from UC Berkeley and 25 years building real-world AI systems at companies like Microsoft and Google. In the wake of an attack on Sam Altman’s property, John Alioto came on the show to argue that Yudkowsky’s words...
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Are AI Doomers “Calling for Violence”? Debate with Steven Balik
Are AI safety advocates like Eliezer Yudkowsky at fault for the recent attacks on Sam Altman because they are “calling for violence”? I invited Steven Balik to join me on this emergency episode to hash it out. Steven is an activist short seller and data engineering professional whose Substack is...
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Tristan Harris and Ted Tremper are WAKING UP Humanity to AI Extinction!
The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist could become the most important movie of our generation. It’s a new film from the producers of the Oscar-winning Everything Everywhere All at Once. Tristan Harris is a subject in the film who is well-known for his role in Netflix's The Social Dilemma....
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I Challenged DON’T LOOK UP’s Screenwriter to Look Up At AGI
David Sirota helped create “Don’t Look Up” sometimes feels like we’re living inside his movie. Does he share my belief that the looming planetary threat is rogue AI? Sirota is an award-winning investigative journalist, bestselling author, and former speechwriter for Bernie Sanders. He was…
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
It's time to talk about the end of the world. With your host, Liron Shapira.
lironshapira.substack.com
HOSTED BY
Liron Shapira
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How many episodes does Doom Debates! have?
Doom Debates! currently has 195 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Doom Debates! about?
It's time to talk about the end of the world. With your host, Liron Shapira. lironshapira.substack.com
How often does Doom Debates! release new episodes?
Doom Debates! publishes regularly with 195 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
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You can listen to Doom Debates! on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Doom Debates!?
Doom Debates! is created and hosted by Liron Shapira.
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