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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.

Overtime video:

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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.

Overtime video:

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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?

Overtime video:

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Note: With publication of my book on AI, The God Test, 2.5 weeks away, The Earthling will undergo a temporary change in character. Immersed as I will be in desperate self-promotion, there will be less time for the sustained focus I need to write the longish pieces that have traditionally appeared in this space. So this week I give you a handful of AI updates, followed by some highlights from the recent work of NonZero Network members. We’ll see what next week brings. As for podcasts: They’ll continue more or less as usual, with perhaps a bit more emphasis on AI. Though on balance the content flow won’t be much reduced, we’ll still do what we’ve done in years when we took June entirely off: give paid subscribers a bonus month.

Save the date: The discussion of AI on the NonZero Discord has been picking up lately, and, in support of that momentum, there will be a livestream discussion of AI this Monday, June 8, at 12 pm US Eastern Time (9 am PT), hosted by NonZero’s Nikita Petrov along with Jeremy Eliosoff, head of Pause AI Canada and an active member of the NonZero community. The conversation will range from policy and politics (e.g. Bernie Sanders’s recent proposal to give the public a 50 percent stake in AI companies) to philosophy and spirituality (e.g. the Pope’s recent encyclical on AI) to issues raised by some of the news items below. You can join the livestream discussion at this link (on the Streamyard platform; no need to install any software—it works in the browser). If you haven’t yet checked out the NonZero Discord, you can join here.

There was big news in the AI world this week. “Anthropic Urges Global Pause in AI Development,” read the headline on the Wall Street Journal’s homepage. It wasn’t exactly true news, but it was big.

What Anthropic had actually said was, “If it were possible to effectively slow the development of this technology to give ourselves more time to deal with its immense implications, we think that would likely be a good thing.” But, Anthropic continued, that’s not possible now, because there’s no “global coordination mechanism” to ensure compliance. So “The Anthropic Institute will conduct research—in collaboration with many others—and take actions to help build the systems that a credible slowdown or pause would require.”

So a headline more accurate than the Journal’s headline would have been: “Anthropic says world not ready for AI pause.” Nonetheless, the Journal’s spin was the most common spin on the story.

The company’s ruminations about a global pause came at the end of a long post about how rapidly the pace of Anthropic’s AI research is accelerating as each generation’s most advanced model plays a bigger role in developing the next generation of models—thus moving the process of innovation toward “recursive self-improvement.” Highlighting this theme probably won’t hurt the chances of Anthropic’s coming debut on the stock market being a big success.

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The Financial Times reported that “Anthropic is helping the US National Security Agency deploy its powerful Mythos AI model for offensive cyber operations, embedding engineers inside the agency despite an ongoing legal battle with the Pentagon.” Mythos is the not-yet-released model that is famously good at detecting and exploiting security vulnerabilities. FT quoted “a person close to Anthropic” saying that “the best way to build a good defense is to build a good attack…If [Mythos] is not used to build attack agents, adversaries will find a way to do it.”

Anthropic revised its “responsible scaling policy” (RSP) in a way that AI safety advocates said amounted to weakening its safeguards against such misuses of AI as building a bioweapon. This was not the first weakening of the RSP, and it led Dan Hendryks, head of the Center for AI Safety, to issue a kind of “RIP, RSP” post on X: “What a waste of a few years RSPs were.” If it’s any consolation: The heads of Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google’s Deep Mind joined others in the tech community in urging Congress to tighten restrictions on ordering synthetic DNA online.

Wired magazine reported that “Meta has quietly embedded face-recognition technology for its smart glasses into an app downloaded to millions of phones.” Apparently Meta had begun shipping “face-recognition code to users’ phones while publicly describing it as something the company was still ‘thinking through.’”

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NZNet Highlights

The NonZero Network is a group of Substack writers and podcasters who have a diversity of ideological perspectives but who all try to make sense of the world in a compelling and honest way. Paid NonZero subscribers can get a 50% discount on a subscription to any NonZero Network newsletter.

FOREIGN EXCHANGES

At Foreign Exchanges, Derek Davison looks at conflicting reports about negotiations between Iran and the United States and speculates about the thinking in Tehran:

With Trump seemingly unable to make a deal over the past few days there’s been less focus on the extent to which Iranian leaders are interested in an agreement, particularly if getting one would require them to make significant concessions like committing to the elimination of their highly enriched uranium. One of the problems that seems to recur in these deliberations is the fact that the US is demanding that Iran take steps that are not easily reversible while it’s only offering concessions that are easily reversible. That plus a massive trust deficit may be coloring internal Iranian deliberations. However, with Iranian inflation reportedly hitting 77 percent year-on-year last month, a rate not seen since World War II, Iranian officials have an economic incentive to conclude at least a preliminary agreement.

SINICA

On Kaiser Kuo’s Sinica podcast, retired Marine major Eddie Conger talks about why he has built the country’s largest K-12 Mandarin program in Texas, one of America’s least China-friendly states:

From the Marine’s perspective, before we ask our sons and daughters of this country to give their life in a conflict, we should do everything on Earth to make sure that we are communicating with whoever is sitting across the table from us. And we can’t hide from China. It’s 1.4 billion people. It’s the second largest economy in the world. They are going to move forward… What we are trying to do is make sure that we have competent… future leaders to be able to engage with each other. Because if we can do that, I don’t think there’s a problem on Earth that the United States and China, if we actually work together, couldn’t solve.

THE GLENN SHOW

Asked by conversation partner John McWhorter if he’s feeling the effects of age, Glenn Loury muses:

I might be a little bit slow on the mathematical proof of the theorem in the Econometrica paper, which requires a lot of concentration and short-term memory, in the sense that you have to keep the various derivations and whatnot in mind, and you have to follow the math…But my preferences change as well. I mean, I actually have lost interest in a lot of the technical stuff. Somebody sends me a paper. It’s 40 pages. I read the first three or four pages. I sort of get the idea. And then I encounter this forest of gibberish which has to be deciphered. And I used to dive in with relish to such a task. And now I say: Oh, my God, do I really need to do this? Do I care? And the answer often is I don’t really care, not enough to wade through this thing. So there are changes afoot, that’s for sure. But I’ll let others be the judge about whether or not I’m sharp enough.

GLOBAL DISPATCHES

On the Global Dispatches podcast, Alexandra Bell, president of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, tells host Mark Leon Goldberg why some of America’s longtime allies are considering getting their own nuclear weapons. The reason, she says, isn’t just that in the age of Trump they are less confident that America’s “nuclear umbrella” would be deployed on their behalf:

Poland, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Canada—multiple countries have talked about this…Partly this is happening because the U.S. is doing things as a government, as an administration right now, to make people doubt their commitment that the U.S. would actually follow through on its extended deterrence guarantees. But that’s not happening in a vacuum. There are countries like Russia, like China, that are expanding their nuclear arsenals, expanding their delivery system capabilities that are making countries feel insecure and like they may need to get their own deterrent because they can’t trust any of these larger nuclear-armed states.

THE BEINART NOTEBOOK

In a video essay, Peter Beinart argues that many Jewish Americans refuse to look at the reality of what’s happening on the ground in Gaza and as a result confuse outrage with antisemitism:

What they do is they look at the people who are enraged at Israel, or they look at Zohran Mamdani, or they look at people who are boycotting, and they don’t understand where this anger comes from. But if they would just pay attention to what Israel is actually doing, they would understand where this anger comes from. They could see it as something other than pathological and antisemitic, and they themselves might actually start to feel that kind of anger themselves.

SMALL POTATOES

Paul Bloom asks why publishers and Substack writers who want to boost their revenue aren’t following in the footsteps of baseball legend Billy Beane, who used sabermetrics to remake the Oakland Athletics:

Here’s what I think: People have looked, and there’s nothing interesting there. Book publishing and Substack just don’t work like baseball, and there’s nothing that HarperCollins Billy Beane could tell you that you don’t already know.

THE GLENN SHOW

On the Glenn Show, John McWhorter tells Glenn Loury why he feels good about a black woman playing Helen of Troy:

I think the idea of extending our imaginations and really getting past race by in some ways, in some contexts, like this one, where Helen of Troy is a fictional character, pretending that somebody with that appearance could have been in that place and time, in that story, as long as she is beautiful, the way Helen of Troy was supposed to be—I think that it’s a healthy thing. It gives black actors more work. I think a lot of people are of the opinion that: How come she can be Helen of Troy, but if you cast Sidney Sweeney in a film of “Raisin in the Sun,” there would be people who would go blow up a building? And as far as I’m concerned, that does need to happen at some point in the future. We have to get to a point where there could be a white “Porgy and Bess,” if we’re really going to get past race.

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0:00 Teaser
0:45 How Tianyu became a “China explainer”
3:15 American vs Chinese exceptionalism
8:09 What you can and can’t say in China
18:32 Is the government more accountable in the US or China?
27:03 How China sees America
36:32 The one-child policy and its consequences
42:53 Tianyu: The biggest misconception about China is…
46:20 Heading to Overtime

Robert Wright (Nonzero, The Evolution of God, Why Buddhism Is True) and Tianyu Fang (New America). Recorded June 02, 2026.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NonzeroPods

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

Overtime titles:

Chinese vs American surveillance.
What China has that America doesn’t.
How China sees AI.
Dario Amodei: China-hawk via God complex?
Is China all-in on open-weight AI?
How Silicon Valley went from hippie to hawkish.

Overtime video:

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Subscribe to Robert Wright’s podcasting empire NonZero on youtube and substack. And go buy one of his many books.

We discuss

• Whether Bob was the OG podcaster

• Is there a directionality to evolution?

• Where Bob is on the AI fear and awe spectrum

• Whether LLMs have decoded the meaning in language

• Is AI best viewed as a tool or as superintelligence?

• AI-as-slingshot analogy

References

• The God Test by Robert Wright

• Nonzero by Robert Wright

• William Paley and his pocket watch

• The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins

• Our conversation with Scott Aaronson

Recorded April 28th, 2026.

To me the most striking thing about the encyclical on AI issued by Pope Leo XIV this week is that it’s an encyclical on AI. It’s not every day that an emerging technology is deemed important enough to get this kind of treatment. In fact, it’s not even every century. Since the first papal encyclical was issued in 1740, there have been about 300 of them, and only one, aside from this week’s, was devoted to a single technology: In 1936 Pope Pius XI issued an encyclical on motion pictures. (I’m not counting Pope Pius XII’s 1957 encyclical on motion pictures, TV, and radio, since that was basically a sequel.)

In a few weeks, a book about AI that I’ve written will be published, and it will make some pretty dramatic claims about the significance of the AI revolution—so dramatic that some people will dismiss them as crazy. (Just to give you a sense, I say that AI will bring “the most abruptly dramatic transformation of human experience and human society in the history of our species”—and that’s not even the most dramatic claim I make!) But fewer people will react dismissively to such claims than would have reacted that way three years ago, when I first considered writing the book, or even three months ago, when I made final changes to it. More and more people are sensing that something very powerful is taking shape and that the technological future could bring strange and transformative things. I think this week, the week of the AI encyclical, marked an important phase in the formation of this sense, this vague but substantial anticipation of magnitude and perhaps meaning.

I don’t say that just because papal encyclicals devoted to a single technology are so rare. I also say it because of this encyclical’s contents—because of what the Pope says about AI.

If you’ve read much commentary on the encyclical, this may sound surprising. After all, a number of commentators have depicted the encyclical as modest in tone and compass. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat reads it as suggesting that the Pope sides with those who consider AI a “normal” technology—a hugely important and impactful technology, like electricity or the telephone, but not more than that. After all, Douthat notes, the pope doesn’t seem to think the sci-fi doomer scenario—a planetary takeover by an artificial superintelligence—is even worth mentioning. And Leo “emphatically closes the door on the imputation of personhood to any version of AI.”

That’s true. Pope Leo says that AIs “do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean.” On the other hand, what other pope has felt compelled to even address an issue like this? Pope Pius XI, I’m guessing, spent no time reassuring people that movies aren’t sentient. There have been lots of technologies whose impact and governance occasioned intense debate, but none that I’m aware of whose metaphysical status did.

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Moreover: Note how many analysts—Douthat to a limited extent, others to a greater extent—are suggesting the Pope should have gone further in conveying the magnitude of the AI revolution. That’s part of why I think this was an important week—not just because of the fact of the encyclical, and not just because of the contents of the encyclical, but because of what the encyclical illuminated about existing awareness of AI. Pope Leo comes along and makes a bigger deal of this technology than any pope has ever made of a technology, and still lots of people say he’s giving it short shrift!

That says something about where we are. There’s no single dominant view of AI, but there is, occupying a prominent place in the global landscape of opinion, an increasingly tangible sense of impending momentousness. The Pope provoked lots of thoughts this week, and a fair number of them align along this ripple of anticipation in the planetary mind—in the “noosphere.”

“Noosphere,” by the way, is a term coined by a Catholic priest and paleontologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, in 1923. Teilhard wrote a lot about the direction of technological evolution and its potential to transform human consciousness. He plays a significant role in my book, as does the notion of the noosphere. And FWIW, Teilhard (who died in 1955) would almost certainly have deemed AIs sentient; he viewed human consciousness as a particularly rich instantiation of a property that more or less pervades the universe, not just the biological part of it.

My own view on the AI sentience question is determined agnosticism; I take issue with anyone who confidently answers the question yes or no. I’ll close with an excerpt from my book that explains this view. The context of the excerpt is my critique of the philosopher John Searle’s famous “Chinese Room” thought experiment, which he employed to argue that AI can never be capable of true understanding. (Sorry about the paywall after the first paragraph, but I think I might get a wrist slap from my publisher if made a sizable excerpt freely available. If you’re not a paid subscriber and you don’t feel like becoming one, you can always pass the time by watching or listening to my podcast conversation about the AI consciousness question with Cameron Berg, who has done some interesting experiments designed to shed light on the question.)

OK, here’s the excerpt:

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[F]irst we might as well take this opportunity to do something we pretty much have to do if we’re going to get a handle on the question of whether AIs are capable of “understanding.” Namely: Say what we mean by understanding. And, in particular: Answer the question of whether subjective experience is a prerequisite for that capability, as Searle seemed to believe in 2010, or isn’t a prerequisite for that capability, as he seemed to believe in 1980. Does or doesn’t the question of AI understanding depend on the question of AI consciousness?

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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.

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0:00 Is NonZero or American Prestige the better podcast? AI weighs in
4:14 The state of the US-Iran war. Or is it peace?
17:52 Has Trump already lost the midterms? Does he care?
24:16 The Russia-Ukraine war (and Eric Schmidt)
29:23 What the latest Iran war strikes signal
31:04 Overtime preview: Nuland’s “monsters,” zombie blobsters, Barak Ravid, Bari Weiss, “killzones,” and the Pope vs AI

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 May 28, 2026.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NonzeroPods

Overtime titles:

Victoria Nuland’s "monster" theory of diplomacy.
Jake Sullivan and Antony Blinken: zombie blobsters?
The Barak Ravid controversy.
Did technology balkanize America? Or did capitalism?
What's Bari Weiss's CBS reign really about?
Danny’s vision of the multipolar(-ish) world-to-come.
The Pope vs AI.
“Killzones” and the future of war.

Overtime video:

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Recorded May 20, 2026.

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0:00 A Greek pilgrimage, a mystery guest, and a Discord revival
5:33 The first Papal encyclical devoted to AI
10:48 Pope Leo: just war theory is outdated, and AI lets humans dodge accountability
21:04 Anthropic tells the Pope about “mysterious, even unsettling” things inside AI
27:17 Inside the “Kill Zone”: How drones changed the Russia-Ukraine front
33:46 Who gets replaced first: the soldier or the commander?
38:23 Russia’s hypersonic missiles and nuclear signaling
48:01 Do drones favor the underdog? Plus a warning on Taiwan
50:20 The Iran ceasefire wobbles as Israel pushes back
51:59 Heading to Overtime: Greek mystery cults, Teilhard de Chardin, and Blade Runner
57:35 Enter the Mystery Guest: Jeremy Eliosoff, Pause AI Canada

Robert Wright (Nonzero, The Evolution of God, Why Buddhism Is True) and Nikita Petrov (https://psychopolitica.substack.com). Recorded May 26, 2026.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NonzeroPods

The voting on the day and time for the AI meetup is underway on the Nonzero Discord server: https://discord.gg/Zy4jAhTQMF

Nikita x Jeremy conversation on Psychopolitica:

Psychopolitica

Metaphysical Implications of Telepathic AI

This is a conversation I had with Jeremy Eliosoff, artist and Canada’s main Pause AI guy, sometime late last year. We talked about telepathic AI, DMT, lucid dreaming, art, and dogs watching TV (these are the topics I remember; dogs watching TV is a metaphor for our level of understanding reality). It was a lot of fun…

Listen now

21 days ago · 3 likes · Nikita Petrov

Overtime titles:

Pause AI.
Nikita’s Greek dream retreat: oracles, black rams, sacred snakes.
Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere: a planetary brain of brains.
Kin selection, cooperating cells, and the search for connection.
Philip K Dick’s vision of a holographic reality.
Waking Life.
Blade Runner 2049.

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On Thursday of this week President Trump was scheduled to sign an executive order outlining a process by which the government would review the most powerful new AI models before their release. This was less momentous than it sounds. Participation by the companies that make these models would be voluntary, and the executive order explicitly ruled out any actual government regulatory power: “Nothing in this section shall be construed to authorize the creation of a mandatory governmental licensing, preclearance, or permitting requirement for the development, publication, release, or distribution of new AI models.”

But apparently even this degree of oversight was too big a burden for Silicon Valley to bear stoically. David Sacks, who recently stepped down as White House AI Czar but now gets to play Rasputin, phoned Trump Thursday morning and lobbied against the order. By some accounts, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg chimed in as well. Hours before the signing ceremony, the White House announced its indefinite postponement. A new variant of TACO—a variant in which Trump is on the verge of defying billionaire AI accelerationists before he chickens out—had been born.

Explaining his decision, Trump flawlessly recited the central anti-regulation talking point of the accelerationists: “We’re leading China, we’re leading everybody, and I don’t want to do anything that’s going to get in the way of that lead.”

The reaction to Trump’s pivot fell along predictable lines. AI safety advocates lamented that even the most tentative step toward government monitoring of the AI industry had proved, for the time being at least, untenable. Voices of the AI industry replied that this tentative step could have been the camel’s nose under the tent. The Washington Post—owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos—lauded Trump’s decision as “prudent.” Granted, said the Post’s editorial board, the executive order “was limited to cybersecurity”—the government had apparently just wanted to use its sneak preview of powerful models “to ensure that any critical vulnerabilities adversaries could exploit in the nation’s critical infrastructure were promptly patched.” But “that scope could easily have broadened beyond cybersecurity to include more nebulous ‘safety’ concerns favored by advocacy groups.” All told, “The president is right to be wary of creating a bureaucratic review regime that erodes America’s edge.”

If forced to choose sides here, and align either with Silicon Valley accelerationists or the safety crowd, I wouldn’t hesitate. I don’t see how anyone who senses the emerging power of this technology—something you’d expect Silicon Valley billionaires to be capable of—could believe that faster is better, period. It seems to me that, in rejecting any and all government oversight, the accelerationists are being either deeply cynical or bafflingly naive. Either way, they must be stopped. If they keep sabotaging attempts to exert meaningful influence on our technological future, we’ll be in deep trouble. People in the AI safety community may have some mistaken ideas of their own—they disagree with one another enough that some of them must have mistaken ideas—but at least they evince a sense for the magnitude of what’s unfolding, an appreciation of the stakes.

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Still, to end the conversation there, with an endorsement of the tiny step toward oversight that Trump almost took, would be to give the issues raised by this week’s episode of TACO short shrift. This isn’t just another left-right debate about the virtues of deft regulation and the perils of ham-handed overregulation; AI has unique properties that make the issue much more complicated than that. To put it another way: If I just endorsed this modest executive order without elaboration or qualification, I’d be doing what I’m accusing the accelerationists of doing: failing to exhibit due appreciation of the stakes. The fact is that there really is something scary about giving Trump even modest oversight of AI—it’s just not the thing that Sacks and other prominent critics of the executive order are worried about.

Consider this thought experiment:

Let’s assume that, contrary to the Washington Post’s fears, the practical scope of this executive order remains confined to the realm of cybersecurity. In this scenario, the Trump administration could wind up with access to an unreleased model that has cyber capabilities far beyond those possessed by any AIs already on the market.

And actually, come to think of it, this isn’t just a thought experiment. The administration does now have access to the still-unreleased Mythos, Anthropic’s legendarily powerful tool for detecting—and in principle exploiting—cyber-vulnerabilities. Which raises a question:

What is the government doing with Mythos? Well, given what we know about this administration, there are unsettling possibilities that can’t be entirely ruled out. Is Pete Hegseth preparing to use Mythos to take down Cuba’s power grid, thus adding to the crimes against the Cuban people that the administration is already committing with its blockade of the island? Or maybe the Trump administration will use Mythos to penetrate China’s infrastructure in a way so unprecedentedly threatening that, if the Chinese government finds out about it, rash action might ensue? I very much doubt either of these things will happen—but given the wantonness with which this administration violated international law in attacking Venezuela and Iran, I don’t feel wholly confident that it’s not doing something lawless and/or reckless with Mythos.

And what about the domestic front? Imagine that, a year or two from now, the administration has access to a model so far ahead of the curve that, in the runup to an election, it could flood social media with undetectable and highly persuasive bots? Can we be sure that Donald Trump, the most blatantly unscrupulous person ever to occupy the oval office, would resist a temptation like that?

Again, these are pretty fanciful examples. My point is just that the regulation of AI is different from the regulation of, say, auto emissions or workplace safety or pretty much anything else. In those cases the government could, through regulatory overreach, stifle initiative or otherwise impede economic efficiency—but it couldn’t start World War III or a covert mass persuasion campaign that subverted the American republic.

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Here’s another distinction between AI and lots of other things that get regulated: If you refrain from regulation altogether, that could be not just bad (as it would be with, say, workplace safety) but catastrophic on a planetary scale. The most famous example, but not the only one, is that unregulated AIs could help someone create a bioweapon that started a pandemic.

In sum: Both ends of the regulation spectrum—powerful government control at one end and pure laissez faire at the other—pose much bigger dangers with AI than with most things that get regulated. So AI gives us a lot to think through!

That fact wouldn’t be so unsettling if we had lots of time to do the thinking. But one thing this week, like so many recent weeks, drives home is that we don’t. Consider, for example, some of the week’s news about Anthropic:

As of last summer, Anthropic was telling investors it didn’t expect to reach profitability before 2028. This week the company released revenue numbers that change that picture. As a Wall Street Journal headline put it, “Mind-Blowing Growth Is About to Propel Anthropic Into Its First Profitable Quarter.” Since the beginning of last year, Anthropic’s annual recurring revenue (monthly revenue times 12), has gone from around a billion dollars to around $40 billion. People who know about these things say revenue growth at this rate, and on this scale, is unprecedented—like, in the entire history of capitalism.

And note that, by virtue of Anthropic’s business model, the revenue comes mainly from companies, not consumers—which means that Anthropic AIs are doing a lot of work that human workers have traditionally gotten paid to do. So continued Anthropic revenue growth could mean real impact on the labor force, for better or worse.

And then there’s this: One company where work is being thus automated is Anthropic. So the kinds of AI tools that Anthropic is building accelerate the building of new kinds of AI tools. This kind of positive feedback cycle is what, in theory, could lead to the “singularity”—the point at which change starts happening so fast that God only knows what lies beyond it.

This week at an annual Google conference known as I/O, after the company had outlined plans to sprinkle AI onto pretty much every product it makes, Demis Hassabis, head of Google’s Deep Mind, turned heads by musing, “When we look back at this time, I think we will realize that we were standing in the foothills of the singularity.” On that same day, Anthropic said that Andrej Karpathy, a co-founder of OpenAI and the former head of AI at Tesla, would be joining Anthropic, leading a team that uses Anthropic’s large language model, Claude, to accelerate research on the training of LLMs. In other words: Karpathy’s mission is to accelerate Claude’s self-acceleration.

Well, at least for now there’s a human in that loop. Maybe we should make some progress on this AI regulation issue while that’s still the case.

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Note: Publication of my book on AI, The God Test, is a month away. Maybe you should pre-order a copy now in case the singularity disrupts the world’s electronic payment infrastructure before June 23!

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As noted in last week’s Earthling, my view is that the whole world benefited from the Trump-Xi summit. With that in mind, you might think I consider the framing of the survey below—“who benefited more”—unfortunately zero-sum. Well, strictly speaking, no; even in a non-zero-sum game that has a win-win outcome, it’s possible for one side to benefit more than the other. Still, the wording of this question does probably steer some people toward a zero-sum way of thinking about the summit’s outcome. Which I guess means people who replied that Trump and Xi benefited by an “equal amount” deserve credit for nonetheless giving an unambiguously non-zero-sum answer. And—credit where due—MAGA supporters were more likely to do that than any other group.

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0:00 Teaser
0:52 Bruce’s new book on ritual, A Time to Gather
3:12 The “Lifequake” that led Bruce to study ritual
8:10 The current “shadow ritual” renaissance
12:42 What is a ritual?
15:26 The origins of the shadow ritual renaissance
18:25 Forest bathing and the essence of ritual
26:11 Ritual as the original human algorithm
31:39 Honor walks: a quintessentially modern ritual
36:23 Rituals across Christianity
42:07 What rituals do
46:47 Heading to Overtime

Robert Wright (Nonzero, The Evolution of God, Why Buddhism Is True) and Bruce Feiler (Council of Dads, Walking the Bible, A Time to Gather). Recorded April 21, 2026.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NonzeroPods

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

Overtime titles:

Tribalism in the age of AI.
Lifequakes in the age of AI.
IRL rituals in the age of AI.
Pain, commitment, and dental rituals.
Ritual-forward families.

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0:00 Teaser
1:11 Hamidreza’s background
9:16 A brief history of US-Iran relations
15:44 Understanding Iranian antipathy toward Israel
21:43 Islam vs Islamism
30:50 The Iran-Iraq security dilemma
36:39 The Iran-Israel security dilemma
45:22 Palestinian objectives and patrons
48:21 Heading into Overtime

Robert Wright (Nonzero, The Evolution of God, Why Buddhism Is True) and Hamidreza Azizi (The Axis of Resistance, German Institute for International and Security Affairs). Recorded May 14, 2026.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NonzeroPods

Overtime titles:

Are Iran’s “proxies” really proxies?
What Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis share.
Iran’s (non)role in October 7.
Can Iran really “activate” the Houthis?
Are Iranians rallying around the flag?
The regime’s future viability.
Bob’s Strait of Hormuz plan.
Trump’s off-ramp problem.

Overtime video:

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On Thursday the White House issued a social media post that said simply, “American strength back on the world stage.” You might expect such a post to be accompanied by military imagery—maybe an impressive-looking array of soldiers. And this one was. But the soldiers weren’t American. Smartly clad People’s Liberation Army troops, part of the pageantry that had greeted Trump in Beijing, were featured in the opening montage of a video that then showed Trump shaking hands with President Xi Jinping and ended with the two leaders walking side by side on a red carpet.

Apparently the unipolar moment is over. Being one of the world’s two main poles is, these days, the highest geopolitical aspiration of America’s president. “It’s the two great countries,” Trump proudly told Sean Hannity in an interview that aired on Fox News after the US-China summit ended. “I call it the G-2. This is the G-2.”

The US foreign policy establishment was less effusive than Trump about G-2 membership. A Washington Post headline said: “China summit yields Xi’s goal—equal footing with U.S.,” and the subhead added that “the image of peer superpowers during President Trump’s visit displayed a dynamic that analysts say the Chinese have long sought and Americans had resisted.” The analyst quoted by the Post, a Biden administration national security staffer, said that Xi, using “the opulent optics of the visit,” had managed to do something “Chinese leaders have been working toward for decades”—he had made it “clear to the world that China and the United States are the two dominant, equally matched superpowers. There is no going back.”

New York Times reporter David Sanger, the dean of Blob scribes, also depicted the summit as a kind of comedown for America. Whereas Trump was “conciliatory,” Sanger wrote, Xi was “quietly more confrontational,” projecting a “new level of confidence and authority.” In particular: Xi had, according to a Chinese foreign ministry statement, privately warned Trump that “the US must handle the Taiwan issue with utmost caution” if it didn’t want to wind up in a conflict.

Meanwhile, as Xi was drawing red lines, Trump, Sanger noted in a subsequent co-authored piece, was spending his time calling Xi a “great leader” and saying that a garden where the two men strolled contained “the most beautiful roses anyone’s ever seen.” All of this showed, according to Sanger, “how far he has shifted the foundations of American policy toward China in the wake of his humbling retreat from last year’s trade war. He has thrown aside the adversarial approach of his first years in office, the Biden administration, and the beginning of his own second term.”

Works for me! Then again, I’ve always been a sucker for peaceful coexistence. Besides, the non-zero-sum problems that the US and China need to solve are increasingly urgent, and a pleasant stroll in the garden can be conducive to cooperation. In fact, this week the two nations agreed to start a dialogue on AI safety. For now they’re focusing mainly on ways to keep non-state actors from putting AI to malign uses. That agenda will likely grow as the magnitude of the AI issue becomes more evident and the inherently international nature of many AI threats does, too. But for now it’s enough that, as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent put it, “the two AI superpowers are going to start talking.”

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I think I’d go even further than Sanger in stressing the magnitude of this moment. Trump has “shifted the foundations” not just of “American policy toward China” but of American foreign policy globally. And at the moment, at least, this shift looks auspicious.

Before elaborating, I should emphasize that I’m not calling Trump a visionary. The new and improved foreign policy that I hope is unfolding will, if it unfolds, be one that Trump has more or less stumbled into—and will be different from the one he was pursuing when he started stumbling. Contingency plays a big role in history, and reckless leaders like Trump are particularly good at illustrating that.

Imagine, for example, that the Iran War had gone according to plan: Trump oversees a Venezuela-esque display of military mastery, installs a puppet regime, starts exercising remote control over Iran’s oil spigot, and waltzes into Beijing as king of the world. In that scenario, this summit might have had a different tenor, with Trump demanding more and demanding it loudly, creating the kind of friction he’s so good at creating. And it’s especially easy to imagine that kind of summit if—to add a second power-of-contingency thought experiment—some adviser had last year persuaded him to go easy on the tariffs and other forms of economic warfare, in which case Beijing wouldn’t have been pushed to the point of chastening Trump by playing its rare-earth minerals card.

But those are just thought experiments. In the real world, Trump came to Beijing a humbled man (OK, OK, a closer-to-humbled-than-usual man). What’s more—and what makes me so emphasize the magnitude of this moment—the things that humbled him have implications that go well beyond US-China relations. True, his Middle Eastern demonstration of the limits of American military power has, on the one hand, implications for Taiwan (a fact that has no doubt crossed Xi’s mind). But it also has implications—tectonic implications—for the Middle East itself. As the Beijing summit started, there were reports that Saudi Arabia has proposed a non-aggression pact between Iran and its Arab neighbors. That’s the kind of thing you propose when you realize that your guardian superpower can’t keep you safe—and it could turn out to be the kind of thing that foreshadows the eventual withdrawal of that superpower from the region.

The increasingly clear limits of American military power would exist with or without Trump. They’re a product of various forces, including technological changes that are rendering things like aircraft carriers and tanks less valuable as instruments of aggression. America’s waning ability to intimidate the world with economic weapons also has some deep drivers—such as America’s longstanding and profligate use of economic sanctions, which has hastened “de-dollarization.” (It was Marco Rubio who said three years ago, “We won’t have to talk about sanctions in five years because there will be so many countries transacting in currencies other than the dollar that we won’t have the ability to sanction them.”)

In short: Sooner or later, America was going to have to recognize the limits of its economic and military power and give up on the goal of dominating the world. And I think sooner is better than later. So I guess having a president whose obliviousness to those limits leads him to collide with them in such illuminating fashion is a blessing of sorts.

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Unfortunately, the personal qualities that led to those collisions persist. Don’t be surprised if Trump unrolls a regime change operation in Cuba next month—or next week, or in five minutes. And he may renew combat operations in Iran, being the slow learner that he is.

Still, whatever lies ahead, the Beijing summit offers real hope by virtue of its implicit recognition of long-denied structural realities. The age of American hegemony is over. Acknowledging that is a start.

Trump is in one respect well suited to build on that start. He won’t, like Biden and many previous presidents, spend a lot of time and political capital demanding that Xi reform his human rights policies. Trump’s indifference to such concerns may reflect poorly on his character, but it would be a more lamentable trait if the traditional American approach to human rights issues—sermons plus sanctions—weren’t so rarely productive and so often counterproductive, hurting the very people it’s supposed to help.

One thing standing in the way of my dream scenario—a world where the US and China and the world’s other nations cooperate to solve problems they collectively face—is Trump’s aversion to international governance. China under Xi plays a more active role in international institutions than the US under Trump, and Xi talks more about “win-win” outcomes than Trump, who is famously inclined to see life in zero-sum terms.

Still, he emitted fewer zero-sum vibes this week than he often does. Indeed, inherent in the idea of “G-2” is sustained cooperation between the two superpowers. So maybe Trump has more in the way of non-zero-sum impulses than is commonly recognized, and they just need to be nurtured. And maybe it would help if the New York Times and the Washington Post and much of the foreign policy establishment quit giving him negative feedback every time he expresses them.

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0:00 Teaser
0:34 Zhengyu’s tech background and new book, Rethinking China
3:00 What kind of threat is China, really?
10:06 How trading with China transformed America
16:51 The stakes of the chip war
22:02 Will tech war lead to real war?
30:33 The US-China escalation spiral and Taiwan
39:13 “Researching while Chinese”: the new Red Scare?
49:46 Heading to Overtime

Robert Wright (Nonzero, The Evolution of God, Why Buddhism Is True) and Zhengyu Huang (Rethinking China). Recorded May 13, 2026.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NonzeroPods

Overtime titles:

Rethinking the Chinese economic challenge.
The human rights question.
Who killed the WTO?
What’s happening with the Uyghurs?
Trump-Xi, Iran, and the future of American power.

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0:00 Teaser
1:00 Is AI a normal technology?
6:31 Mythos and the METR curve
16:24 The current state of coding agents
20:41 The total turbulence problem
23:42 Does Mythos favor offense or defense?
29:50 Mythos and hype
32:30 Regulating dangerous AI
38:48 The centralization problem
40:53 Heading to Overtime

Robert Wright (Nonzero, The Evolution of God, Why Buddhism Is True) and Timothy B. Lee (Full Stack Economics, Understanding AI, AI Summer). Recorded May 11, 2026.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NonzeroPods

Tim’s Understanding AI newsletter on Substack:

Understanding AI

Exploring how AI works and how it's changing our world.

By Timothy B. Lee

Overtime titles:

Tesla vs. Waymo.
Altman on trial.
Elon's new compute empire.
Will humans still have jobs?
The future of status, striving and service work.
Getting sentimental about AIs.
How Tim uses AI.
Tim's pricey robot dog.

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Welcome to another issue of NZNet Digest, a collection of highlights from NonZero Network member newsletters and other worthwhile media outlets. Paid subscribers to the NonZero Newsletter can get a 50 percent discount on an annual subscription to any NZNet member newsletter.

Note: There’s no Earthling this week, but I have a great excuse: I became a grandfather three days ago, and this turned out to be more time-consuming than I’d expected. For a picture of my cuter-than-average granddaughter, see below. (The photo is behind the paywall, but believe me: This kid is worth the money.) —Bob

SINICA

For years, China has played defense in the trans-Pacific tech war, adapting as best it could to a series of forceful American initiatives. The US kicked Chinese smartphone maker Huawei off the Android platform, constricted the eastward flow of microchips and chipmaking equipment, and strongarmed the Chinese owner of TikTok into placing the American version of the social media platform in American hands. And last year, acting under US pressure, the Dutch government tried to seize control of Dutch chipmaker Nexperia even though it was owned by a Chinese company—and relented only after the ensuing tug-of-war led to a global shortage of automotive chips.

But lately China has gotten more assertive. Last fall Beijing restricted rare-earth mineral and high-tech battery exports, last month it unveiled new tools for punishing foreign companies that participate in anti-China sanctions, and two weeks ago it struck again: After Meta bought AI agent maker Manus, which was founded by Chinese techies, Beijing got Meta to unwind the deal—even though Manus is based in Singapore, not China. On a recent episode of Sinica’s Trivium China podcast, tech consultant Kendra Schaefer explains the impetus behind Beijing’s decision to dust off a long-neglected foreign investment review mechanism for the occasion:

I actually totally understand why Chinese regulators are so mad… China spent the last two decades tweaking its innovation ecosystem, pouring subsidies into the innovation ecosystem, changing the way the entire sci-tech funding structure works, playing with the entire catalog of college majors to graduate more STEM students, right? I mean, this is a 20-year effort to generate companies like Manus that are globally competitive… So, they incubate these companies with all of this effort and all of the state funding. And then those companies take their toys and they go get acquired by a big foreign player. And so, I understand the state basically waking up to the fact that this is a major loophole. It’s kind of a national security issue.

Meanwhile, Beijing is having success in doing something Washington likes to do: export its “tech stack.” China is strengthening ties with frenemy Vietnam, which recently announced that it would let Chinese telecom companies Huawei and ZTE supply core equipment for its 5G network.

FOREIGN EXCHANGES

A common view holds that international institutions are weak and ineffectual, while the real influence is exercised by powerful nation-states and multinational corporations. But in the Sahel region of Africa, the International Monetary Fund remains powerful even as the influence of other outside powers wanes, writes Alex Thurston in Foreign Exchanges. Military juntas in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger have kicked out French troops, strong-armed multinational mining firms, and loudly declared their sovereignty—but the IMF’s grip on their budgets quietly survives these assertions of independence. And it’s not clear to Thurston that this influence will on balance be good:

The sweeping changes that the Sahelian countries have made in the military and political spheres—ending long-running Western security deployments, training programs, and more—have been paralleled by a large degree of continuity in their relations with the IMF. The juntas have asserted themselves vis-à-vis foreign energy and mining firms, but have been status quo actors when it comes to public spending. One wonders where the bulk of new royalties from gold, uranium, and oil will really flow, and whether ordinary Sahelians will end the decade any better than they began it… A reform program in Senegal faces the growing prospect of defeat at the IMF’s hands. There are major lessons here about where power ultimately lies.

DREZNER’S WORLD

International relations scholar Dan Drezner has been wrestling with the paradox posed by Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Marco Rubio. On the one hand, there are Rubio’s “mushrooming fortunes within the MAGAverse,” where he’s considered a leading contender for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination. On the other hand there’s… Rubio himself. “It’s not obvious at all that Rubio has provided any value-added over any other lapdog who would have occupied his position in his stead,” Drezner observes. “Like everyone else, he has functioned as a yes man for Trump.” And reflexively affirming Trump’s foreign policy impulses can have bad consequences. While Rubio is “not the architect of the Iran clusterfuck,” he has helped create “the conditions that make the clusterfuck possible.”

So why has someone as mediocre as Rubio gotten so many good reviews within the Republican party? Well, he looks pretty good compared to others who have been seen in Trump’s company—an effect Drezner calls the “Bad Boyfriend Benefit.”

It works something like this: A bad boyfriend dramatically lowers overall boyfriend expectations of whomever they are dating. This means that, after the inevitable breakup, the next boyfriend — even if he is perfectly average — looks great by comparison… No doubt, compared to Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, Howard Lutnick, Steve Witkoff, and the rest of Trump’s D-list crew, the fact that Rubio knows something about international relations and can speak with confidence about US foreign policy on camera is a plus.

Drezner assures us that “the Bad Boyfriend Benefit fades with time.” But “the honeymoon period can last for a spell…”

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GLOBAL DISPATCHES

This week’s MSM obituaries of CNN founder Ted Turner rightly noted his extensive philanthropic activity—his legacy includes the UN Foundation, the Goodwill Games, and the Nuclear Threat Initiative. But none of these testaments to his generosity were as personal as that of NZNet member Mark Leon Goldberg. In fact, if it weren’t for that generosity, Goldberg wouldn’t be an NZNet member. He writes:

In 1997, he famously pledged a billion dollars to support UN causes, leading to the creation of the United Nations Foundation. The UN Foundation, in turn, was one of my key backers early in my career when I launched the first blog about the UN, UN Dispatch. I would not be doing what I do today if not for his original act of philanthropy. [The] $1 billion pledge in 1997 was the single largest act of philanthropy at the time and inspired many of the other mega-donors in philanthropy today. What makes his commitment even more remarkable was that not long after his pledge, he lost a huge fortune in the AOL-Time Warner merger but still followed through on his pledge. He was fond of saying “You can’t take it with you,” when discussing why he’d given away so much of his wealth to causes that benefit humanity. Now that he’s gone, it’s worth taking a moment to remember what a difference he made.

THE BEINART NOTEBOOK

In a podcast monologue, Peter Beinart argues that right-wing critics of Israel like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Nick Fuentes are cherry-picking the Talmud to explain Israel’s crimes in much the way right-wing Islamophobes cherry-pick the Quran to explain Al-Qaeda’s crimes. Beinart argues that this framing is not just bigoted but strategically useful for the people pushing it, because it lets Western powers off the hook for the systems they sustain:

The danger in the way that Carlson and Fuentes and Owens talk is that it’s actually a way of trying to let white Christian Western countries off the hook: You know: Israel is this other terrible thing that’s the product of this peculiarly anti-Western alien civilization called Judaism or Jewishness, and we are not like that, right? This is what Carlson is getting at when he says things like, Israel hates Europeans, right? In fact, Israel could not do what it has done from the very beginning without the support of Europeans. To this day, it’s deeply entrenched and entangled in that system. And it’s important for people who want to change American policy towards Israel, and who want to oppose what Israel’s doing, to be clear about the terms in which they are making this criticism, and not to fall into this trap of suggesting a kind of civilizational divide between Jews on the one hand and white Western Christians on the other, or to suggest that Israel’s misdeeds are a result of a particular Jewish pathology. They’re not. They’re the one particular expression, a terrible expression in today’s moment, of the kinds of systems of oppression, of settler colonialism, of imperialism, of ethno-nationalism that we have seen across history and that we see all over the world.

THE GLENN SHOW

Glenn Loury thinks he may have just gotten a preview of America’s future foreign policy discourse. In fact, he may have just hosted that preview. On the Glenn Show, centrist Shadi Hamid, author of The Case for American Power, defended his relatively hawkish views against restrainers on the left and right—Daniel Bessner and Andrew Day, respectively. After watching Bessner and Day team up against Hamid, Loury observed:

This conversation may model the country’s political dynamic in the coming years, with the center-left and center-right advocating for the revival and reform of older models of U.S. military projection, while the right and left galvanize grassroots support by taking, for different reasons, anti-militaristic positions. Perhaps the days of blank-check budgets for the military are coming to an end. As someone who’s become far more skeptical of US military intervention than I once was, and who sees unaddressed domestic problems mounting at home, I can’t say that would be a bad thing.

TRANSFORMER

Silicon Valley defense contractor Palantir is commonly viewed as a tech powerhouse—a maker of products so sophisticated and valuable as to compensate for the controversy that accompanies the firm by virtue of its role in immigration enforcement and in AI-powered military targeting (and by virtue of the famously bizarre ideological intensity of CEO Alex Karp). But, suggests James Ball, writing in Transformer, maybe this view of Palantir has things backwards. Ball notes that “Palantir rarely seems upset at being credited with powerful and potentially nefarious capabilities” and writes:

Palantir’s controversy is not a tax on the business. It is the business. The brash narrative the company puts forward is a way to mystify what is ultimately a rather mundane product… A casual onlooker might be forgiven for thinking that Palantir is an AI company in the same vein as OpenAI or Anthropic, or an arms company like BAE Systems or Raytheon. In reality, it is neither. Palantir does not have a foundational AI model of its own, and has made no suggestion that it is trying to develop one. Similarly, it does not build surveillance devices, drones, or weapons hardware in any conventional sense. For all the company plays a role in surveillance networks, it does not build cameras…

SMALL POTATOES

Rather than direct your attention to one of Paul Bloom’s recent Small Potatoes posts, I will direct it instead to a couple of small potatoes. One is Paul’s daughter, born two months ago. The other is my granddaughter, born three days ago:

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0:00 Teaser
1:06 Annelle’s Middle East bona fides
2:55 The state of play in Iran
8:14 A deepening fissure between Gulf Arab states
22:05 Explaining the Trump-Biden continuity on Middle East policy
26:45 Will the Middle East realign away from America?
34:46 Turkey and the moral hazard of US aid to Israel
40:00 Can Iran mend ties with the Gulf states?
47:40 Heading to Overtime

Robert Wright (Nonzero, The Evolution of God, Why Buddhism Is True) and Annelle Sheline (The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft). Recorded May 07, 2026.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NonzeroPods

Overtime titles:

An Iran-Israel polarity: How different Gulf states could swing.
Has Israel’s strategy served its interests?
Annelle: Trump needs to take an L to make a deal.
Is a multi-polar world a more stable world?
A possible silver lining to the Iran war.
Saudi Arabia: the most pivotal player.

Overtime video:

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0:00 Teaser
0:42 Bob’s big personal news
3:50 The US counter-blockade backfires
10:34 Iran retains escalation dominance
16:43 Why the Iranian regime is built to absorb assassinations
22:53 “Donald, it’s too late for that.” Bob says Trump has to take the L
25:41 Putin’s Victory Day ceasefire (with a threat)
28:39 Russia’s vibe shift: drone attacks, airport shutdowns, Internet blackouts
32:19 Instagram influencer rants at the Tsar
39:14 Siloviki vs. civilian elites
48:26 Heading to Overtime: The Matrix, AI, DMT, interdimensional crocodiles

Robert Wright (Nonzero, The Evolution of God, Why Buddhism Is True) and Nikita Petrov (https://psychopolitica.substack.com). Recorded May 05, 2026.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NonzeroPods

Nikita’s newsletter:

Psychopolitica

Russian psychedelia in exile 🍄

By Nikita Petrov

Overtime titles:

Was The Matrix right about AI?
Was The Matrix right about reality?
The Alienism theory: AI, UFOs, and psychedelics point in the same direction.
DMT entities.
Gnosticism, war, and the "harvesting" of human energy.

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