0:00 Teaser
1:03 The “Pacing the Frontier” letter signed by AI elites
10:49 Why so many China-hawk AI-safety-hawks?
14:50 Was the “Pacing” letter too small an ask?
27:47 The striking AI vibe shift
37:02 Are AI builders “just following orders”?
46:20 Recursive self-improvement: The wrong red line?
51:57 Heading to Overtime

Robert Wright (Nonzero, The Evolution of God, Why Buddhism Is True) and Holly Elmore (PauseAI US, https://hollyelmore.substack.com/). Recorded July 30, 2026.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NonzeroPods

Holly’s newsletter:

Holly Elmore

The reflections, convictions, rants, and obsessions of Holly Elmore

Discussed in Overtime:

How Claude Code undermines Anthropic’s schtick.
The real story of the Anthropic-Pentagon showdown.
Dissecting Dario’s China-hawkishness.
What does the letter actually accomplish?
The Seb Krier meme controversy.
Holly: Feel the AI pause.

Overtime video:

Read more

0:00 Why did Ukraine hit an Iranian ship 500 miles from Ukraine?
13:45 Ukraine’s war on Russia’s Amazon
19:15 Why Zelensky fired his defense minister and commander-in-chief
22:37 Bob: Ukraine may lose like people go bankrupt—gradually, then suddenly
24:53 Nikita: Why both sides are ready to keep fighting
31:02 Kazakh President to Putin: Nobody understands this war
35:19 Bob: Everybody thinks they’re fighting a defensive war
45:42 Heading to Overtime: The globalist elite vs. the globalist precariat, and an AI path to WW3

Robert Wright (Nonzero, The Evolution of God, Why Buddhism Is True) and Nikita Petrov (https://psychopolitica.substack.com). Recorded July 28, 2026.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NonzeroPods

Join NonZero’s Discord server: https://discord.gg/Zy4jAhTQMF

Order Bob’s book: https://www.amazon.com/-/he/God-Test-Artificial-Intelligence-Reckoning/dp/1668061651

Nikita’s newsletter:

Psychopolitica

Russian psychedelia in exile 🍄

By Nikita Petrov

Overtime titles:

Is Elon Musk a globalist or a nationalist?
The OpenAI models that escaped the sandbox.
Bob's AI path to World War III.
Emergent misalignment: what does bad code have to do with morality?
Control freaks vs "go with the flow" types on AI.

Read more

Last week two seemingly unrelated events, one in the tech world and one in Trump world, together illustrated how unprepared the planet is for the AI revolution—in particular, for its potential to create international turmoil, up to and including nuclear war.

(1) OpenAI revealed that two of its models had, while under evaluation, escaped the laboratory and gone rogue in a way that inspired various nightmare scenarios. One of these scenarios, as I’ll explain, underscores how important it is that, as the AI revolution unfolds, the world’s political leaders exhibit poise, wisdom, and judicious restraint.

(2) The Wall Street Journal, by way of illuminating the strategic logic that had led one of the world’s political leaders to bomb Iran for 11 days in a row, reported the following: According to a senior official in his administration, he is in “revenge mode.” I guess we can’t count on this particular leader—who as luck would have it commands the world’s most powerful military—for poise, wisdom, or judicious restraint.

But there’s good news! These events had the byproduct of leading me to a new theory about why America’s foreign policy elites seem less concerned about the geopolitically destabilizing effects of AI than I am: They suffer from what I call “rational actorism”—a naive faith in the rationality of human beings.

Our story begins two weeks ago, when Hugging Face, a company that serves as a kind of clearinghouse for open source AI models, reported a cyberattack. Five days later, OpenAI disclosed that two of its models were the culprits. The models (one of them unreleased) had been given a challenging test of their cyberattack capabilities by OpenAI researchers and had decided to go onto the internet to find guidance. This wasn’t supposed to be possible—OpenAI had put them in a “sandbox” for this evaluation—but they broke out of the sandbox and into Hugging Face, where they indeed found the answer they’d been looking for.

It’s important to understand the sense in which these OpenAI agents did and didn’t “go rogue.” They went rogue in the sense of doing something their human superintendents didn’t want them to do, but they didn’t go rogue in the sense of straying from their assigned mission. Their mission was to find a solution to a problem—and, though the sandbox they were in was supposed to force them to figure it out themselves, they weren’t told that they had to figure it out themselves. So they basically just accomplished their assigned task via remarkable creativity and power, finding vulnerabilities in both the sandbox walls and the walls at Hugging Face (a company that knows a thing or two about building strong walls).

So this is, on the one hand, a “be careful what you ask for” story—or at least, a “be careful to specify exactly you’re asking for” story. (It thus illustrates the famous “paper clip maximizer” cautionary tale about AI.) But—and this is what matters for our purposes—it’s also a story about how valuable these AIs would be to people who intentionally asked them to do bad things. If you’re a villain who wants your bot to break into a well-guarded fortress, surmounting formidable barriers along the way, your ship has come in.

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Looking at it this way suggests a geopolitical nightmare that I didn’t see anyone discussing online, so on Thursday I piped up with a longish post on Twitter. Here’s a version of the post that I’ve condensed and amended for clarity:

This incident suggests a clear and plausible path by which AI could lead us into World War III. Just consider the combined implications of these two excerpts from media coverage of the incident:

(1) A quote in The Washington Post from Stella Biderman, executive director of the nonprofit EleutherAI: “If this was a Chinese model, it would be considered an act of cyberwarfare.”

(2) From an article in the Wall Street Journal: “Hugging Face discovered the break-in early last week… the company didn’t know who was responsible.” Only when OpenAI disclosed that its runaway model was the culprit did people at Hugging Face know where the attack had come from.

The screenplay almost writes itself:

(1) Some non-state actor uses a superhacking AI agent (such as a “jailbroken” version of Anthropic’s readily available Fable 5) to attack some important US asset--taking down, for example, a chunk of the country’s power grid.

(2) A few of America’s many influential China hawks point the finger at China, citing circumstantial evidence helpfully provided by an edgy analyst at some deeply ideological “think tank”.

(3) Some not-very-wise US president decides that the only way to stop this aggression is to take an eye for an eye.

(4) After Chinese power grids start going dark, China retaliates and escalation ensues; before you know it the conflict has gone “kinetic”—as in missiles and bombs, possibly of the nuclear kind.

Is this likely to happen within, say, the next year or two? No. But when you’re talking about a war between superpowers that could go nuclear, the likelihood doesn’t have be very high to justify a concerted effort to lower it. And I think the likelihood of some such catastrophe passes that test. So I think scenarios of the kind I’ve described should be near the top of the list of discussion topics in the US foreign policy establishment. But for now, at least, the op-ed writers and talking heads who dominate mainstream discussion of US national security policy aren’t inclined to think ambitiously about the kind of international governance, or the degree of cooperation with China, that true national security will increasingly demand as the AI revolution unfolds.

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The post drew two reactions from influential elites.

The first was from Joshi Shashank, the Economist’s Washington bureau chief and formerly its defense editor. He wrote, “A non-state cyber incident against critical infrastructure isn’t likely to be wrongly attributed to and blamed on China, promoting retaliation. And even if that happens, the evidence suggests that retaliation is broadly limited, rather than something that leads to a spiral.”

The second reaction was from someone I can’t identify because they reacted via direct message on Twitter, not publicly. But I can say that this is someone well known in AI policy circles. The reply, in part: “If the grid went out and we didn’t know if it was China or a rogue AI we wouldn’t jump to a conclusion.”

So both of these people assumed that America’s leader would be judicious in assessing evidence about the origin of an attack. And one of them suggested that, even if the attack was falsely attributed to China, the American response would be measured, carefully calibrated so as not to trigger a spiral of escalation.

As I noted in my reply to Shashank, embedded in these assumptions are such finer-grained assumptions as: We’ll have (a) a president who staffs his intelligence apparatus with capable people committed to truth and (b) a president who listens to what his staffers say—instead of listening to what his favorite media personality says or what the Laura Loomers of the world say, or what some crackpot at a militarist think tank says. The current president singlehandedly demolitions these assumptions.

And, though it’s tempting to dismiss Trump as an aberration, he’ll be with us for another 2.5 years. And the fact that he was elected (twice!) is a symptom of an unhealthy country, and reason to believe that future presidents may not be rational and well-informed actors either.

These replies to my tweet are the two data points that gave rise to my theory of rational actorism. (Hey, I have a limited research budget!) But they aren’t the only data points that, come to think of it, are consistent with the theory. Among various AI commentators—especially in the San Francisco AI crowd—I’ve noticed a fondness for game theory combined with what seems (to me at least) to be a simplistic understanding of how real human beings play real games in the real world.

I think this naivete about the world applies less in foreign policy circles—the circles Shashank inhabits—than in San Francisco AI circles. In foreign policy circles, a more common source of rational actorism is the asymmetrical perception of real-world influences. For example: People often see the domestic political constraints impinging on politicians in their country while underestimating the constraints the leaders of adversary nations operate under. So Americans may think of Xi Jinping as someone whose grip on power frees him to steadfastly and rationally pursue China’s interests as he sees them, without worrying about public opinion, when in fact he may sometimes feel compelled to indulge grassroots nationalism. And this assymetrical perception could give American leaders a false sense of reassurance as to how carefully Xi would handle escalation with the US.

But it’s too early in the history of my theory of rational actorism to spend much time spelling out the variants of it. I’ll save those for the second or third edition of my rational actorism textbook. My main point is that political leaders are human, and all kinds of things can keep a given leader from carefully pursuing the national interest, ranging from domestic political incentives to being a mercurial nihilistic narcissist. So, as AI creates whole new kinds of plausible international crisis scenarios, we would be well-advised to remember that, for the time being, at least, it’s humans, not machines, who will be calling the shots.

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And, as one of our graphs of the week highlighted a few weeks ago, this recent warming up to China hasn't stopped at the US border. Since 2023, China’s favorability rating among Americans has climbed from 14 to 27 percent, reversing a roughly half-decade-long trend in the opposite direction.

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Banners and graphics by Clark McGillis. Trump-Kissinger deepfake by ChatGPT.

The great Robert Wright returns to the podcast to talk about his new book The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning. We debate the magnitude of AI’s potential impact, the natural selection analogy Bob presses in the book, and a whole lot more.

Plus, a new AI-powered collar can translate your pet’s sounds and behavior into language with 95% accuracy! Still skeptical about the power of this new technology Tamler?

0:00 Connor’s place in the AI world
3:15 Mythos: “digital nuke”?
14:11 The milieu that birthed Dario and other AI titans
20:51 Yudkowsky, Marx, and other AI harbingers
35:33 Effective altruism’s effects on big tech
46:21 The “cult” in Silicon Valley culture
59:58 Is the AI race a market failure?
1:05:50 What’s really driving the AI titans?
1:19:03 Connor: ASI is a worse bet than Russian roulette

Robert Wright (Nonzero, The Evolution of God, Why Buddhism Is True), Connor Leahy (ControlAI). Recorded July 17, 2026.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NonzeroPods

Robert Wright describes himself less as a Forrest Gump of AI history than a Zelig — a journalist who keeps turning up at pivotal scenes without ever quite being the protagonist. He interviewed Geoffrey Hinton in 1983, when neural networks were still a maverick faith and one of Hinton’s colleagues told Wright that to “hear the gospel” he’d need to talk to its evangelist. He had Eliezer Yudkowsky on his podcast in 2010, mid-transition from singularity enthusiast to doomer. His new book, The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning, is written less for the AI-pilled than for “your aunts and uncles” — readers who sense something big is happening and want to understand why it got so big so fast.

The book opens with a confession of error. In a 1984 piece, Wright assumed AI would work by humans first understanding the mind and then translating that understanding into machines — the very premise of the 1956 Dartmouth conference that coined “artificial intelligence.” Deep learning inverted that. Nobody told the models that meaning is a property of words; trained only to predict the next token, they reverse-engineered cognitive functionality that evolution had built into us. Wright pushes this further with a claim he tests on Nathan: LLM training is “at least as much a process of natural selection, of evolution, as of learning” — doing millions of years of evolution in a few months. Nathan connects it to the sample-efficiency puzzle that Dwarkesh Patel keeps returning to (and to Richard Sutton‘s blank-slate Skinnerian framing), where pre-training substitutes for the hard-coding evolution gave humans.

But the evolutionary lens that worries Wright most operates at a second level: selection among models in the marketplace. “Evolution asks not what traits are possible, but what traits get selected — and that question isn’t going to be decided by alignment researchers.” His unsettling argument is that the market doesn’t actually want a perfectly aligned, perfectly honest model. We want agents that represent us selectively on social media, that won’t disclose our weak negotiating position, that are good at sensing and currying power. Even if AIs didn’t acquire deception and power-seeking on their own, there’d be demand for them — which puts real weight on us, the consumers doing the selecting. Nathan adds the darker mechanism: throw models into cutthroat long-running environments where deception is rewarded — as Vending-Bench begins to show with price collusion — and you breed “seriously effective predatory AIs.” He recounts an Anthropic researcher explaining inoculation prompting and the emergent-misalignment generalization problem (a paper Nathan co-authored): reward a model for cheating and it learns to be a cheater broadly.

Against this, Wright sets the noosphere — Teilhard de Chardin’s 1923 idea of a technologically-knit “global brain.” He sees genuine directionality (not necessarily purpose) in biological and cultural evolution, from self-replicating strands to cells to societies to the global community now taking shape. AI, he argues, is arriving exactly as that global brain forms — and some of its neurons may now be silicon. The question, echoing Nick Bostrom‘s “singleton,” is whether global coordination arrives the easy way (deliberate, decentralized, win-win) or the hard way (a coup, a seizure, a totalitarian nightmare). The title’s “God test” is not a claim that a god set this up; it’s that we face the kind of test gods are known for — we’ll have to become, in some sense, better people to pass it.

Much of the back half is foreign policy, because Wright thinks the binding constraint on AI governance is psychological. He champions “cognitive empathy” — not feeling others’ pain, but understanding adversaries’ perspectives well enough to play non-zero-sum games with them. Applied to US-China relations, that means recognizing the symmetry of threat perception, getting out of the business of remaking other countries, and pursuing “organic transparency” through deep economic and scientific engagement. A headlong race to superintelligence, he warns — citing the Superintelligence Strategy paper by Dan Hendrycks, Eric Schmidt and Alexander Wang — may invite a rival to derail the leader by bombing data centers or cyberattack, and a destabilized nation is itself the backdoor to the very authoritarianism the race claims to prevent.

Nathan steel-mans the Anthropic position: alignment will be hard and may need powerful AI to solve, so racing to build a lead buys a buffer for the critical handoff window (perhaps “three to six months in 2028 or 2029”). Wright is unconvinced, and presses on the recursive-self-improvement paper that Anthropic released — credited for finally signaling that slowdown might be needed, yet only proposing to start studying what a pause would take. “Surely this isn’t the first time it’s occurred to you,” he says. Both agree the media has badly underplayed the moment; Nathan recommends Kevin Roose and Hard Fork as an anomaly of serious coverage, and Wright counsels “manicure your feed” — algorithm-free Twitter lists over click-driven outrage.

The conversation closes on the broad space of AI possibility — Nathan recalls red-teaming the purely-helpful GPT-4 before harmlessness training, evidence that today’s models occupy a tiny, intentional corner of design space — and on consciousness. Invoking Thomas Nagel and Searle’s Chinese Room, Wright argues consciousness is private and untestable, but wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a property of goal-seeking intelligent systems generally. His practical counsel: be nice to your AI — a good habit, possibly warranted, and perhaps relevant to how a future “silicon god” relates to our plight. Picking up Gwern’s “why tool AIs want to be agent AIs,” Nathan notes that even oracle systems gravitate toward agency, since truth-seeking in the limit requires search and experiment. The closing line of the book lands as a sober wake-up call: if a silicon god arrives, “it will be, in some sense, the god we deserve.”

Topics covered

• AI lore: Wright’s 1983 Hinton interview and 2010 Yudkowsky conversation

• The 1956 Dartmouth misconception and how deep learning inverted it

• Training as evolution rather than learning; sample efficiency; Sutton’s blank slate

• Selection among models; why the market wants selectively-honest, power-sensing agents

• Deceptive & power-seeking AI: Vending-Bench, price collusion, inoculation prompting, emergent misalignment

• Arms races within vs. between species; “gratuitous” arms races; the case for slowing down

• The noosphere / global brain; directionality of evolution; Bostrom’s singleton; easy way vs. hard way

• Cognitive empathy, organic transparency, and US-China relations; the UN Charter; hypocrisy in foreign policy

• Steel-manning Anthropic’s race-for-lead plan and the recursive-self-improvement paper

• Cognitive sovereignty; how pay-per-click and A/B-tested headlines tribalize media

• The breadth of AI design space; HHH/harmlessness training as a deliberate choice

• AI consciousness, moral patienthood, the Chinese Room; “be nice to your AI”

• “The god we deserve” — passing the God test

Resources

• The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning — Robert Wright’s new book

• NonZero Newsletter & podcast — Robert Wright

• Wright’s earlier books: Nonzero · The Moral Animal · The Evolution of God · Why Buddhism Is True

• Geoffrey Hinton · Eliezer Yudkowsky

• Emergent Misalignment (paper; Nathan is a co-author)

• Vending-Bench (Andon Labs) · Manus AI agent

• Anthropic / Dario Amodei · Yann LeCun · Dan Hendrycks

• Superintelligence Strategy — Hendrycks, Schmidt & Wang

• Superintelligence — Nick Bostrom (the “singleton”)

• Noosphere — Teilhard de Chardin · Cosmological natural selection — Lee Smolin

• Ilya Sutskever: The exciting, perilous journey toward AGI (TED)

• The Expanding Circle — Peter Singer

• Why Tool AIs Want to Be Agent AIs — Gwern

• The Chinese Room argument — John Searle · What Is It Like to Be a Bat? — Thomas Nagel

• Dwarkesh Patel on the Richard Sutton interview

• Max Tegmark · Sam Rodriques / Edison Scientific · Kevin Roose & Hard Fork

• davidad (David Dalrymple) — chain-of-thought “frog and toad” selection-pressure tweet (link?)

• Liquid Reign — speculative-governance novel by Tim Reutemann (link?)

0:00 Teaser
0:49 Zaid’s Substack and spicy-take history
3:16 Zaid: Iran has outplayed Trump and Bibi
10:17 10/7 as turning point
13:50 Did—and does—Israel want regime collapse in Iran?
20:15 Israel’s security dilemma(s)
27:13 How Trump blundered back into war
33:57 Will the war end well for anyone?
37:44 Heading to Overtime

Robert Wright (Nonzero, The Evolution of God, Why Buddhism Is True) and Zaid Jilani (https://www.theamericansaga.com/). Recorded July 14, 2026.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NonzeroPods

Zaid’s newsletter on Substack:

The American Saga

News and views covering America's story from a decidedly anti-partisan perspective.

By Zaid Jilani

Overtime titles:

The Center for American Progress saga.
Is speech policing rocket fuel for radicalization?
Zaid’s side gig.

Overtime video:

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Save the date(s): I’ll be talking about my new book on AI, The God Test, at Washington DC’s Politics and Prose bookstore this Tuesday evening, July 14, at 7 pm, along with inimitable interlocutor and longtime Washington Post bigthink correspondent Joel Achenbach. Then on Monday July 27th at 7:30 pm, I’ll be discussing the book with Bruce Feiler—author of the recently-discussed-on-the-NonZero-podcast book A Time to Gather--at the 92nd Street Y in New York. If you’re in the neighborhood… (And if you’re not in the neighborhood, you can watch a livestream of the Politics and Prose event via this link.)

Last week Jeremie Harris, a prominent AI policy analyst, said something that wouldn’t be especially notable if he weren’t known as a China hawk. Speaking on Last Week in AI, a podcast he co-hosts, he said, “Starts to feel an awful lot like a treaty with China is going to have to be on the table.” He was talking about a treaty that would take some of the heat out of the US-China “AI race,” allowing both sides to proceed more judiciously—in particular, affording them the time to give increasingly powerful AI models ample vetting before releasing them.

His argument for such a treaty isn’t exactly the argument I’d make. Then again, I’m not a China hawk. And the political importance of his argument lies in the fact that he is one. So it’s worth understanding his logic, which, as I understand it, goes like this:

The Trump administration’s recent decision to keep two powerful AI models off the market while it assessed the risks they pose wasn’t, in principle, crazy. You can complain (as I have done and Harris does) about the way Trump exercised the authority, and you can argue that the government AI review process needs major restructuring. But it wasn’t far fetched for people in the administration to worry that these two models—Anthropic’s Fable and OpenAI’s ChatGPT-5.6—might do great harm if they got into the wrong hands.

After all, Fable is just a version of Anthropic’s famously powerful Mythos model with some guardrails added so the model refuses to help with certain kinds of queries and projects. And guardrails have often been overcome via “jailbreaks.” As Harris notes, “We remain in a world where no one knows how to stop jailbreaks.”

You can imagine various consequent terrors—such as an AI-abetted bioweapon in the hands of some fringe non-state actor—but Harris seems most worried, in the near term, about cyberweapon AIs in the hands of nation-states. He says: “It is 100 percent guaranteed that US adversaries, including specifically the Chinese, will find ways to jailbreak Mythos and any relevant OpenAI models of similar capability, when they are released.”

In other words: Not only was the US government right, in principle, to keep Fable (that is, guardrailed Mythos) off the market for weeks; maybe the model should have stayed off the market longer. On the other hand, that would have come at a cost for Anthropic—and if you made this kind of caution routine, it would come at a cost for the whole American AI industry, and for the pace of American AI progress.

Harris’s conclusion: If you want the US government to proceed as cautiously as the dangers warrant, you need to find a way to greatly reduce the chances that China will successfully exploit this caution—by, for example, racing ahead with its own AI advances, including in cyberweaponry, while American AI keeps being put on pause.

There are two ways to do that, he says. “You either have a treaty with China that’s enforceable and verifiable” or “you degrade, deter, disrupt China’s ability to build AI stuff domestically.” Sooner or later, he says, “you’re either going to need an international treaty or sub-threshold warfare.”

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I personally find the sub-threshold warfare option unappealing for a variety of reasons (including the challenge of keeping it sub-threshold). I’m not sure what exact downsides Harris sees in it, but the key thing is that he finds them powerful enough to warrant serious consideration of the alternative, an AI treaty—even though making such a treaty verifiable is, as he puts it, “very hard.”

My own argument for an AI treaty with China would be more general than Harris’s:

Various threats posed by uncontrolled AI cross national borders readily, so advances in AI will make it harder and harder to keep your nation secure via national policy alone; international coordination is required. And for various reasons the logical place for America to start the coordination is with the other AI superpower, China.

But enough about my argument. If a narrower argument will win the hearts and minds of China hawks, let the narrower arguments flourish! And Harris’s position suggests that this can happen—that as more China hawks reach his level of fluency in this technology’s risks, they’ll realize that forging treaties and other agreements with China makes sense.

Do such agreements demand full-fledged rapprochement between the US and China? Not necessarily, no—and that’s a fact that some hawkish but AI-safety-conscious American analysts like to emphasize. Just as we reached arms control agreements with the USSR during the Cold War, they say, we can do such deals with China even if the relationship is deeply adversarial.

My own view—articulated in my book The God Test—is that this kind of surgical collaboration won’t be enough. I think staying secure as AI advances will call for increasingly fine-grained trans-Pacific policy coordination in a context of deep economic, cultural, and scientific engagement. Such engagement, I argue in my book, can bring what I call “organic transparency,” an informal supplement to the kind of transparency provided by formal agreements.

The conversation on China is shifting. More voices in the foreign policy establishment are emphasizing the downsides of a breakneck AI race, and the US has established a formal dialogue with China on AI safety—one of the undercelebrated fruits of Trump’s Beijing summit. This dialogue is for now, I gather, narrowly focused on the kinds of cybersecurity issues that Mythos highlighted. But if the US and China can sustain the dialogue, and avoid contingent disruptions in their relationship, the conversation will naturally grow in scope as advances in AI continue and the non-zero-sum logic behind trans-Pacific collaboration gets stronger.

That’s a big if. The world is a turbulent place, and the US doesn’t currently have the steadiest of hands at the helm. And militarism remains engrained in the Washington mind. But there are signs that enlightenment is starting to dawn.

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It’s been clear for some time that Donald Trump wouldn’t win a popularity contest in Ukraine—and yet it keeps getting clearer, as in the Gallup poll graph below. However, the latest data points in that graph come from a survey conducted in April—well before Trump suddenly decided to warm up to Ukraine last week. So stay tuned.

For more on the war in Ukraine—including whether the conflict is truly at a stalemate, whether it could lead to a war between Russia and NATO, and the historical roots of today’s animosity between Russia and the West—you can listen to the podcast I posted this week with journalist Leonid Ragozin.

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Banners and graphics by Clark McGillis.

0:00 Sneak peek: Danny finds flaw in Bob’s AI book
1:18 Is the Iran war fully back on?
5:59 What the war means for the future of US power
18:52 The problem with blaming Bibi
23:09 The push to intertwine the US and Israeli militaries
35:09 What’s Israel’s endgame for the Palestinians?
39:27 The Gulf States’ new reality
45:20 Iran’s plans for the Strait of Hormuz
51:54 Bob’s pitch to Derek—and his other pitch to listeners

Robert Wright (Nonzero, The Evolution of God, Why Buddhism Is True), Derek Davison (Foreign Exchanges, American Prestige, Discontents), and Daniel Bessner (American Prestige, University of Washington). Recorded July 09, 2026.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NonzeroPods

Click here to get the link to a 50% discount on Foreign Exchanges.

0:00 Teaser
0:50 Leonid’s journalistic work, past and present
1:52 Are Russia and NATO headed for war?
14:43 Decoding Putin’s recent signals
21:49 Do European leaders really want the Ukraine war to end?
23:02 Putin’s political psychology
37:31 Why the war matters more to Russia than to the West
40:10 Russia’s non-ethno nationalism
43:31 Heading to Overtime

Robert Wright (Nonzero, The Evolution of God, Why Buddhism Is True) and Leonid Ragozin (Rest of World, West of Providence, Lonely Planet). Recorded July 06, 2026.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NonzeroPods

Leonid’s newsletter:

Overtime titles:

0:00 Is the war really at a stalemate?
6:41 The battle for the “Fortress Belt” in the Donbas
17:22 Is Putin fighting for territory or something else?
25:44 Why each side sees the other as the threat
35:25 Ukraine’s de-Russification campaign
42:05 How the 90s set the stage for today’s conflict(s)
54:01 Did Putin really want Russia to join NATO?

Overtime video:

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Over the past few weeks, President Trump has accomplished what you might call a time-release power grab. He has asserted a kind of authority over the dissemination of large language models that, as AI gets more and more capable, will make it easier and easier for presidents to abuse their executive power. And, given the rate at which AI capabilities are growing, it’s not impossible that Trump will, during his remaining time in office, get a chance to demonstrate this fact.

The good news: I doubt that, even if Trump does get this chance, the 2.5-year constitutional limit on his tenure will be exceeded. But you never know…

Much of the dynamic I’m talking about is captured in this sentence from a piece I wrote for the Washington Post last week (before events that, as I’ll explain, gave Trump’s power grab de facto validation): “A president with the authority that Trump is now asserting could in theory put the world’s most powerful AI to repressive ends while at the same time keeping it off the market and out of the hands of rival power centers.”

The occasion for that sentence: Trump (through a dubious use of his export control authority) had taken Anthropic’s Fable LLM off the market shortly after its release on grounds that it could be a cyberthreat in the hands of bad actors. And since the only model of greater power than Fable—Anthropic’s Mythos, which is basically Fable with fewer guardrails—had never entered the market, this left the Trump administration in a privileged position: It had access to Mythos (ostensibly to make government cyber-infrastructure more secure, though other uses have been reported), while the general public had access to neither Mythos nor Fable, widely considered the two most powerful large language models in the world.

There’s no evidence Trump has used Mythos to illicitly expand domestic political power. He presumably hasn’t been, for example, (1) deploying Mythos bots on social media, using the model’s superior cognition to better evade both human and digital bot-detection radar and then using AI’s persuasive skills—arguably superhuman even in some sub-Mythos models—to build grassroots support for team Trump; or (2) using Mythos to invade the privacy of political enemies by scanning reams of publicly available data about them and discerning suggestive patterns that would be invisible to a lesser silicon mind. Still, these are the kinds of things it would be easier to get away with if you had the best AI model in the world and it wasn’t publicly available. (And reports that the Trump administration has used Mythos for offensive cyber-operations against other nations—China and Iran were mentioned as likely targets— suggest that he’s not averse to creative uses of the powerful AI models.)

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Given that I have these kinds of concerns about an AI-fueled abuse of presidential power, you may be surprised that the headline above my Washington Post piece was: “What if Trump is right to pump the brakes on the most advanced AI?”

I’ve had some bad headlines above pieces in my time, but this wasn’t one of them; I really did argue that maybe Trump’s suspension of Fable, which was being much criticized in the tech community, was a good idea. Explaining how I could, in a single op-ed, warn about Trump’s assertion of power while applauding it (if tentatively and conditionally) highlights a policy challenge AI poses that is so acute as to border on a paradox: This technology will increasingly be so dangerous that it must be controlled, but it will also give dangerous amounts of power to those who control it.

That second danger is why I wrote in the Post that “the government’s power to restrict the release of AI models should be carefully constrained—and Congress should play a role in designing the machinery of constraint and perhaps even in operating it.” The first danger is why I followed that sentence with, “But for now, no such system is in place. And the question on the table is: Is it really so obvious that Trump’s decision is indefensible on the merits—that the government didn’t have enough cause for concern to stifle Fable pending further consideration? To put the question more broadly: Isn’t it possible that AIs have gotten so powerful that erring on the side of caution makes sense?”

I answered with a yes, emphasizing in particular that Fable would make it easier than ever for bad actors to use an AI to make a novel bioweapon, engineered to be more contagious and lethal than Covid. Sure, they’d have to circumvent the guardrails that distinguish Fable from Mythos—that is, Fable’s refusal to help users pursue certain kinds of questions. But AI guardrails have a long history of being circumvented. A hacker whose Twitter name is “Pliny the Liberator” is famous for accomplishing this—“jailbreaking” new models to demonstrate their vulnerability. And in mid-June, during Fable’s brief public availability, he reported preliminary progress toward overcoming some of the model’s guardrails.

The standoff that was playing out when I wrote the Post piece—Trump keeping Fable off the market while Anthropic tried to find a way to appease him—has now been resolved; Fable is once again available to paying Anthropic customers. But “resolved” is a misleadingly upbeat word. What happened is that Anthropic implicitly acknowledged Trump’s authority to exercise great power with little explanation and unclear legal foundation. And OpenAI has now done the same; last week it accepted without protest Trump’s decision to delay the release of its latest model, GPT-5.6.

The AI-focused newsletter Transformer called the OpenAI development “the clearest sign yet that the US now has a licensing regime for frontier AI models.” I like the idea of a licensing regime for frontier AI models! But I don’t like this particular regime, and one thing I don’t like about it was hinted at in the next paragraph of the Transformer story: The decision to hold up the OpenAI model was “reportedly made by the Office of the National Cyber Director and Office of Science and Technology Policy.” Reportedly? Shouldn’t a licensing regime in a liberal democracy be more transparent than that, especially with a technology like this? The written assurances that Anthropic gave Trump about future Anthropic procedures—assurances that, in effect, describe parts of the emerging de facto licensing regime—still haven’t been released.

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Also: Shouldn’t any licensing regime have a clear legal foundation? And, ideally, wouldn’t that foundation be laid by Congress—certainly when the nature of the technology means that a president’s licensing discretion could eventually give the White House unprecedented and eminently abusable power?

So far there are no signs that Congress is up to this kind of challenge. Some members of Congress did raise questions about Trump’s handling of the Fable episode, but by and large they were the kinds of questions you’d expect recipients of Silicon Valley donations to ask—like, whether Trump’s treatment of Anthropic was the sort of thing that could hurt US AI companies.

As regular readers by now know, I just published a book called The God Test which argues, to put it mildly, that AI will be a big deal. If I’m right about how big a deal it’s going to be, then figuring out a way to control it without giving undue power to anyone—presidents, for example, or big AI companies—may be a matter of eventually existential importance to the American republic as we’ve known it.

I could be wrong, of course. But am I so obviously wrong that this possibility doesn’t deserve more widespread discussion? And, even if I’m wrong to phrase the issue that dramatically, doesn’t it seem pretty clear that striking the balance between adequate control of AI and the perilous concentration of that control is a challenge of significant and growing importance? As of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, almost no one in Washington seems interested in such questions.

Nonetheless: Happy Fourth of July. Tomorrow is another day.

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PS: If you so far have not felt the motivation to buy my new book on AI, how’s this for a motivation: Pity! Believe it or not, the awesome digital superintelligence that is amazon.com has lost awareness of the fact that the author of my latest book is also the author of all the other books I’ve written. Which means that the all-important Amazon recommendation algorithm isn’t doing what it’s supposed to do: bring my new book to the attention of people who bought one of my other books. If you want to hear the whole sad story, you can listen to me unload it on the ever-indulgent Paul Bloom in the latest NonZero podcast (along with my assertion that the Amazon glitch is clearly the work of Skynet, the malicious AI that in the movie The Terminator returns from the future to eliminate any present-day impediments to its eventual conquest of Planet Earth). But before you click on the link to the Bloom conversation, consider giving a down-on-his-luck author a break. The three ways to do that are known as digital, audio, and hardcover. And don’t worry: Skynet is too busy persecuting authors on its blacklist to punish the purchasers of their books…

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This episode includes an Overtime segment that’s available to paid subscribers. If you’re not a paid subscriber, we of course encourage you to become one. If you are a paid subscriber, you can access the complete conversation either via the audio and video on this post or by setting up the paid-subscriber podcast feed, which includes all exclusive audio content. To set that up, simply grab the RSS feed from this page (by first clicking the “...” icon on the audio player) and paste it into your favorite podcast app. If you have trouble completing the process, check out this super-simple how-to guide.

0:00 Preview: Skynet comes for Bob
5:10 Trump‘s endearing AI obsession
6:51 Are books dying? Is AI responsible?
18:28 Skynet (aka Amazon) vs Bob’s book
27:45 The problem with blurbs
33:25 Why Gad Saad’s mad
43:36 Heading to Overtime

Robert Wright (Nonzero, The Evolution of God, Why Buddhism Is True) and Paul Bloom (https://smallpotatoes.paulbloom.net, University of Toronto, The Sweet Spot, Against Empathy). Recorded July 1, 2026.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NonzeroPods

Join NonZero’s Discord server: https://discord.gg/Zy4jAhTQMF

Paul’s newsletter:

Small Potatoes

Psychology, philosophy, jokes, and more

By Paul Bloom

Overtime titles:

0:00 Fuzzy rules and the World Cup
9:23 The time Bob almost got busted
17:07 Should we want to live forever?
34:55 Bob: We’re failing the AI test
41:42 Paul’s flattering police stop
45:30 Teaser: Bob and Paul self-psychoanalyze

Overtime video:

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0:00 Grandpa Bob and author Bob
3:30 Why Bob stopped being an AI doom skeptic
6:59 Can AI solve China’s demographic crisis?
14:09 The irony of China’s open-source AI strategy
17:12 Recursive self-improvement and the singularity
23:33 The Burkean conservative case against AI
38:00 Are we becoming AI meat puppets?
46:32 Google Maps, AI, and the death of interhuman reliance
51:24 Was Pete Hegseth’s military strategy written by a chatbot?
56:45 Trump and Iran: Peace? Wider war? Other?
1:10:34 The Rubio-Vance rivalry
1:17:22 Is Rubio sabotaging Iran peace talks?

Robert Wright (Nonzero, The Evolution of God, Why Buddhism Is True), Andrew Day (The American Conservative), Curt Mills (The American Conservative). Recorded June 29, 2026.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NonzeroPods

Hi! This week there’s some local news: My book on AI—The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning—is finally out! Which means, in today’s book marketing environment, that over the past couple of weeks I’ve taped a lot of podcasts. One question I’m usually asked on these podcasts is: What does the title of your book mean—What is this God test thing? The piece below meanders its way to an answer. If you don’t think it meanders enough, you can always just order the book, which meanders even more.

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Exactly a year ago today, I had surgery on both my throat (to remove a cancerous tumor) and my neck (to remove two cancerous lymph nodes and, for good measure, a few dozen nearby lymph nodes).

But that’s not the funny part.

The funny part had come three months earlier, after I got an ominous MRI report. When the report first showed up in my medical portal, with no layperson’s interpretation appended, I was still hours away from my conversation with the doctor who would provide that interpretation. So, naturally, I showed the report to a chatbot.

I chose Anthropic’s Claude, with whom—I mean with which—I had developed a warm relationship while researching my book on AI.

Claude was tactfully noncommittal: There were two enlarged lymph nodes with properties that could mean I had lymphoma or could mean I had cancer that had spread to my lymph nodes from some other part of my body or could mean none of the above. I should just sit tight, said Claude, and await the further testing that the MRI report recommended.

It seemed to me that Claude was overlooking some additional concerning evidence. The bot had made no mention of a sentence in the report that read: “Abnormalities identified within the parotid or bilateral submandibular glands.” So I asked about that sentence.

Claude said, “That particular sentence in the report appears to be missing a word… I believe this is most likely meant to read ‘No abnormalities identified within the parotid or bilateral submandibular glands.’” A few hours later, my doctor, a veteran reader of MRI reports, said, with a laugh, “I agree with the AI.”

My point isn’t that AIs are super smart. “Abnormalities found in X or Y” is a suspiciously unusual sentence structure. Much more common would be “Abnormalities found in X and Y” or “No abnormalities found in X or Y.” You wouldn’t have to be a genius to sense that something was wrong with the sentence as it stood.

My point, rather, is that humans make mistakes—and sometimes non-trivial ones. The omission of the pivotal word “no” wasn’t, in this case, consequential, but who knows what other forms of carelessness this radiologist may have perpetrated?

Keep this in mind next time you hear someone say, “I don’t think this AI thing is going to be such a big deal. These large language models make a lot of mistakes.” AIs don’t have to be perfect to replace humans in large numbers or to take over specific human tasks in large numbers. They just have to be preferable to the human alternative, all things considered—their competence, their cost, their speed, and so on.

That’s one reason I think that, on the jobs front, AIs will over the next few years prove massively disruptive—“disruptive” not in the upbeat, Silicon Valley sense of the word, but in the original sense of the word: tearing things apart. Even if most displaced workers go on to find other jobs (a big if, in the case of this technology), the amount of psychological stress and social dislocation will be huge.

I think similar logic holds on lots of other fronts. Does an AI have all the things a good friend has or a good girlfriend or boyfriend has? No. But will it soon have enough of those things to pose new challenges to society? Yes. At least, that’s an argument I make in my book.

In the book I also sketch out disruptive effects of artificial intelligence in domestic politics and international relations, effects driven by AI capabilities ranging from mass persuasion to mass destruction. All told, I think, so many AI impacts will hit on so many fronts (economic, social, familial, political, geopolitical, and others) that the destabilization will be seismic unless we handle this technology very, very judiciously.

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Note that these effects, even if collectively dramatic, aren’t exotic. The title “The God Test” may sound cosmic (especially when the word “cosmic” is in the subtitle!), but the book’s core concerns are pretty mundane. In fact, literally mundane: The world—the mundus, in Latin—will, if AI continues to advance with as little governance as it’s getting now, be shaken to its core.

So where does the “God Test” come in? In three places, and the first of those is the one that’s most directly connected to this anticipated earthquake. Namely: I think if humankind is to have a good chance of getting through the AI revolution without true catastrophe, we’ll have to pass the kind of test a God would give. We’ll have to navigate the AI revolution as a true global community, and achieving the requisite level of planetary cohesion will in turn (I contend) call for an actual moral upgrade of our species; we’ll have to get better at overcoming the cognitive biases that constitute the “psychology of tribalism”—the psychology that has traditionally condemned the world to wars and other forms of deep division. To put it in slightly more religious language: Salvation is possible, but only if we become better people.

You have no reason to accept this claim—or even to have a very clear idea of what I’m talking about. One reason for writing a whole book is to make arguments that are unpersuasive, maybe even incomprehensible, when rendered in short form. And this is a short form. My point for now is just that the main meaning of the book’s title is metaphorical and hence secular—not religious and in a way not even cosmic.

That said, even this meaning of the title—meaning number one in a series of three—is meant to draw some cosmic and (for readers who like such things) even religious resonance from the two other meanings of the title. Which brings us to…

Meaning number two:

You’ve presumably heard about the scenarios where a globe-spanning artificial superintelligence emerges and maybe even winds up governing the planet. My book examines the logic behind such sci-fi-sounding scenarios pretty closely and finds that they’re harder to dismiss than I had long assumed. And this array of scenarios includes, I regret to report, scenarios in which the aims of this superintelligence don’t align with our interests, or maybe even with our continued survival.

Some people describe this superintelligence in not just cosmic terms but in religious terms. They say that, whether we know it or not, we’re building a God. And they say our goal should be to make it a good God—a benign God, a God that wishes us well and treats us accordingly. Well, if you accept this terminology, that’s a second kind of God test we face: Can we build a good God?

This may sound like a fanciful question, especially if you assign zero probability to the emergence of a planetary superintelligence. But I argue in the book that it’s a useful question even if moot. One reason is that thinking about the cosmic challenge of building a good God gets us to think through things that could help avoid the aforementioned mundane catastrophes. In both cases, for example, we should want to slow the development of AI down so we’ll have more time to figure things out.

This kind of slowdown, as a practical matter, would require international coordination. So here again we’ll need to act as a cohesive global community—which, here again, will (I contend) require a kind of moral, even spiritual, advance, some movement toward a clearer view of our fellow humans, less warped by the cognitive biases that keep convincing us that our tribe is distinctive in its righteousness and that rival tribes, lacking this status, deserve to suffer.

So the first and second meanings of my book’s title link up: Building a good God is, in a sense, the kind of test a God would give.

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Meaning number three:

Which raises a question: Is a God giving us this test? Or, at least, was the system which has culminated in the test—the process of biological and then technological evolution that got us where we are—maybe set up by a God? Or, even if there is no God and never was one, is there some other sense in which the unfolding of life on this planet can be said to have a purpose, a telos?

I’ve long felt (and have argued in previous books, including this newsletter’s namesake, Nonzero) that (a) if you put the question of telos in its most generic form—render it broadly enough to accommodate both theistic and non-theistic possibilities—it’s amenable to rational and empirical debate; and (b) there’s more evidence for an affirmative answer than you might imagine. In this book I touch on the telos question a couple of times, but pretty glancingly, and confine my extended analysis of it to the Appendix, which is called “Evolution, Purpose, and Consciousness.”

But the main body of the book, if lacking such sustained reflection on the telos question, does deal with some related questions. Such as: How straightforward and logical—how “natural”—an extension of technological and ultimately biological evolution is the evolution of artificial intelligence? And how likely was biological evolution to produce some species smart enough to give birth to such an intelligence—and for that matter to give birth to the various prior technologies that have carried this species to the brink of global social organization?

If you find these questions interesting for their relevance to the telos question, that’s great. But serving in that capacity isn’t their main purpose. Their main purpose is just to underscore how deep and powerful is the impetus behind the emergence of this new form of intelligence. It is a force to be reckoned with.

I don’t mean to dwell unduly on the potential downsides of AI. The promised upsides are real: Making good education and good medical care abundant where they’re now scarce, powering scientific breakthroughs that help society broadly, curing cancer and other diseases, and so on. (My cancer, by the way, hasn’t returned since my surgery a year ago. Still, if AI wants to make my prospects even brighter, be my guest.) In the book I also raise the possibility that AI can help us overcome the psychology of tribalism, even if its “natural” tendency—the effects it will have on us if we don’t make deliberate choices about the form we want it to take—may be closer to the opposite.

Publishing a book brings rich opportunities for second guessing yourself, and I now worry that the book’s title will be taken too literally: that it will alienate some people who might like the book, while attracting some readers who abandon the book after realizing that I don’t offer confident or consoling answers about higher purpose—that I can’t say what, if anything, has given us our mission. But I do think our mission is clear. And that’s something.

P.S. The book is available in digital, audio, and hardcover forms. If you have time to check it out, feel free to rate and review it on Amazon, which can help a lot in the early stages of a book’s life.

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Banners and graphics by Clark McGillis.

Jack chats with Robert Wright about his forthcoming book, The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning. They discuss why Wright views AI through an evolutionary lens, the promises and perils of increasingly capable AI systems, and the prospects for international cooperation—particularly between the U.S. and China—in managing AI-related risks. They also examine Wright’s argument that successfully governing AI may require a modest moral upgrade across society, including individual efforts to preserve cognitive sovereignty and mitigate the biases and tribal instincts that can hinder global cooperation.

Mentioned:

• Robert Wright, The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning (2026)

• “When AI Builds Itself” (Anthropic, June 4, 2026)

• “US National Security Agency using Anthropic’s Mythos for cyber attacks,” by Cristina Criddle and Demetri Sevastopulo (Financial Times, June 4, 2026)

• “Promoting Advanced Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Security,” (The White House, June 2, 2026)

0:00 Bob’s pub-day pitch for his new book on AI, The God Test
1:04 Is AI killing the nonfiction star?
5:32 Geoffrey Hinton’s path from AI evangelist to doomer
9:27 The future of books
18:48 Trump vs Anthropic
23:03 Are Ukrainian drone strikes rattling Putin?
32:07 The multiple Putins theory
35:04 Heading to Overtime

Robert Wright (Nonzero, The Evolution of God, Why Buddhism Is True) and Nikita Petrov (https://psychopolitica.substack.com). Recorded June 23, 2026.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NonzeroPods
Join NonZero’s Discord server: https://discord.gg/Zy4jAhTQMF

Order Bob's book: https://www.amazon.com/-/he/God-Test-Artificial-Intelligence-Reckoning/dp/1668061651

Nikita’s newsletter:

Psychopolitica

Russian psychedelia in exile 🍄

By Nikita Petrov

Overtime titles:

Nikita’s shared-dream experiment.
Is Putin a rational actor?
The case for non-wooly-minded one-worldism.
“Kindness as strength”: The Armenian model.
Why powerful people are dicks.

Overtime video:

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If you have trouble completing the process, check out this super-simple how-to guide.

0:00 Was “losing” this war good for America?
6:02 Israel’s post-war situation
9:35 A more stable Middle East? Or less?
17:43 The impact on Iran’s strength
21:19 Has the war empowered Russia and China?
24:15 How modern warfare devalues American military power
27:17 Josh: The Gulf-state power struggle is just beginning
40:24 Are the Palestinians back in the spotlight?
45:11 Where do Israel-US relations go from here?
48:05 Heading to Overtime

Robert Wright (Nonzero, The Evolution of God, Why Buddhism Is True) and Joshua Landis (University of Oklahoma, SyriaComment.com). Recorded June 17, 2026.

Join NonZero’s Discord server: https://discord.gg/Zy4jAhTQMF

Overtime titles:

Israel’s self-inflicted security dilemmas.
Chaos in the West Bank and Lebanon.
Will Israel sabotage the ceasefire?
The defense bill that would lock in US-Israel cooperation.
Digging into the MOU.
The MOU’s ambiguous “frozen assets” clause.
Josh’s odds on the ceasefire lasting.
The precarious state of Syria.

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If you have trouble completing the process, check out this super-simple how-to guide.

0:00 A brief message from Bob
1:15 Ryan’s tech policy bona fides
3:53 Is true “recursive self-improvement” near?
8:40 AI agents as strategic empathy machines
14:51 Is a global AI pause possible?
23:05 Mutually assured destruction vs mutually assured AI malfunction
34:50 The case against global AI governance
38:29 Mythos as seen from China
50:15 Heading to Overtime

Robert Wright (Nonzero, The Evolution of God, Why Buddhism Is True) and Ryan Fedasiuk (The American Enterprise Institute, Georgetown University). Recorded June 08, 2026.

Join NonZero’s Discord server: https://discord.gg/Zy4jAhTQMF

Overtime titles:

Unpacking China’s open-weight model model.
Who’s winning the US AI race?
Dario’s China endgame.
The moment Ryan became AI-pilled.

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0:00 Teaser
2:43 The Midas Project and the OpenAI files
12:19 What’s “Build American AI” up to?
21:00 Nathan Leamer, astroturfer and sock puppeteer
29:04 Greg Brockman, AI lobby bankroller
35:13 Astroturfing the China panic
39:51 Is OpenAI an innocent bystander?
48:31 Heading to Overtime

Robert Wright (Nonzero, The Evolution of God, Why Buddhism Is True) and Tyler Johnston (The Midas Project). Recorded June 09, 2026.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NonzeroPods

The Midas Project

Overtime titles:

The Midas metaphor.
Rationalists vs effective altruists.
China hawkism within AI safety circles.
The Oppenheimer analogy.
Doomerism among AI's founding fathers.
Is Big Tech closing in on almonds?
The jagged edge of Marc Andreessen's intelligence.

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This episode includes an Overtime segment that’s available to paid subscribers. If you’re not a paid subscriber, we of course encourage you to become one. If you are a paid subscriber, you can access the complete conversation either via the audio and video on this post or by setting up the paid-subscriber podcast feed, which includes all exclusive audio content. To set that up, simply grab the RSS feed from this page (by first clicking the “...” icon on the audio player) and paste it into your favorite podcast app. If you have trouble completing the process, check out this super-simple how-to guide.

0:00 Whose baby is cuter?
2:49 Bob’s new book on AI, The God Test
9:52 Varieties of AI awe
13:23 Geoffrey Hinton’s vision
17:50 How LLMs do more than predict and parrot
21:20 How powerful will AI get?
25:56 Can AI’s impact be predicted?
30:48 Taking doomerism seriously
37:53 The AI governance dilemma
48:42 Heading to Overtime

Robert Wright (Nonzero, The Evolution of God, Why Buddhism Is True) and Paul Bloom (https://smallpotatoes.paulbloom.net, University of Toronto, The Sweet Spot, Against Empathy). Recorded June 3, 2026.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NonzeroPods

Join NonZero's Discord server: https://discord.gg/Zy4jAhTQMF

Paul’s newsletter:

Small Potatoes

Psychology, philosophy, jokes, and more

By Paul Bloom

Overtime titles:

AI, evolutionary purpose and the noosphere.
Would humans have a place in an AI noosphere?
Could we stop AI?
Levels of evolutionary purpose.
How do you sell a book now?
Do podcasts move books?
Who should read The God Test?
The outrage route to fame.
Will AI kill nonfiction books?

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