Bloggingheads.tv

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

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

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

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

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

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

Teaser ... Cameron’s work at AE studio ... Why consciousness is such a hard problem ... Why AI consciousness matters ... Does consciousness need carbon? ... The ethics of AI subjectivity ... Can we trust LLM self-reports? ... Cameron’s innovative AI consciousness experiments ... Heading to Overtime ...

Teaser ... Joel’s legendary Bloggingheads line ... NASA’s new chief: More than a Musk toady? ... Why we’re still not living in Star Trek ... The space alien question ... Can we make the moon program great again? ... Heading to Overtime ...

David Lynch, Jane Goodall, and other notable 2025 losses ... When Bob called James Watson a "mad scientist" ... Predicting 2050: Star Trek abundance vs. "Total Chaos Planet"? ... The age of algorithmically guided attention ... Global poverty reduction (and its flip side) ... Will anyone care if your newsletter is AI-written? ... Trump's USAID cuts killed a lot of people ... Elon Musk, Alex Karp, and the age of the "manifestly crazy" ... Can the Supreme Court stop Trump? ... JD Vance's identity crisis: Tech bro or populist? ... The "Black Swan": When AI starts killing people ... AI scientific breakthroughs to come ... Bob and Paul's 2025 Entertainment Awards ... Which jobs are truly AI-proof? ... Bob's Epstein document deep-dive ... Bill Ackman's conspiracy-theory-brained year ... Are US arms sales pushing China to invade Taiwan? ... Barry Weiss’s journalistic scruples ...

Teaser ... What era are we living in? ... David Bowie: "The Internet is an alien life form." ... Bob: "It's like aliens are approaching, and we don't know their intentions" ... Nikita: "COVID was weird, and nothing has been normal since" ... The lab leak theory ... How COVID killed consensus reality ... Bob's case for international biotech monitoring ... Vaccine geopolitics ... Bob's candidate: We let machines guide our attention ... Trump's failed bargaining strategy ... Technological progress is like a cocaine high ... How common is the idea that AI will be a big deal? ... When music is high stakes. Russian street musicians get arrested ... Heading to Overtime ...

What's the long game in Venezuela? ... MAGA's Monroe Doctrine ... Trump as deep state puppet ... Will Trump oust Maduro? ... Connor: Trump's foreign policy is a "profoundly mixed bag" ... Has Israel lost the American electorate? ... Andrew: Trump's Ukraine peace plan isn’t pro-Russia ... Silicon Valley’s inept arms makers ... The administration's view(s) on China and Taiwan ... Europe learns to speak Trump ...

Elon’s reckless response to the Brown shooting ... Susie Wiles gone wild ... The weirdest thing about Trump’s weird Rob Reiner post ... The Piers Morgan/Nick Fuentes encounter ... Judging Oliver Sacks ... Heading to Overtime ...

The incoherence of Trump's foreign policy ... The paucity of debate around Chinese chip restrictions ... Danny: Is this the stupidest foreign policy establishment ever? ... Should AGI worry us? ... Bob’s Overtime bait ...

Teaser ... How AI helped shape cancer treatment for Nathan's son ... Should you tell your doctor about your AI medical adviser? ... Big leaps for Gemini 3 and Claude Opus 4.5 ... How to get the best medical advice from your AI ... The astonishing breadth of AI expertise ... AI can help on the margins ... Bob's AI cancer journey ... AI and “Right to try” ... "Turning every stone" vs falling into anxiety rabbit holes ... Gemini 3 vs Opus 4.5 ... Are scaling laws leveling off? ... AI deception ... Experiments in AI Consciousness ...

Teaser ... Trump's 28-point plan: First real negotiations? ... Why Zelensky sounded so grim ... Listing Russia's advantages ... The unknowable casualties numbers ... Ukraine's forced mobilization vs. Russia's volunteer army ... Why Russia won't run out of money ... Bob: "I want Putin to get the worst deal possible" ... What is the Blob's plan? ... Bob answers a question from Discord ... Trump's failed bargaining strategy ... Bob: Ukraine is "so much more complicated" than Gaza ... The corruption scandal threatening Zelensky ... Ukraine's corruption scandal and Zelensky's uncertain political future ... Zaluzhnyi's manifesto: The rival commander's challenge ... Why all decision-makers are ok with the war continuing ...

Teaser ... Sam’s epic new biography of William F. Buckley ... Was Buckley the original Tucker Carlson? ... Buckley's paradoxical upbringing ... How Yale turned Buckley into a “counter-intellectual” ... Was Buckley racist or tribalist or what? ... Buckley v. the Civil Rights Act ... Heading to Overtime ...

A brief message from Bob ... Bob and former Bloggingheads.tv staffer and contributor Aryeh Cohen-Wade reflect on the legacy of Bloggingheads.tv, the pioneering website Bob co-founded in 2005. Bob and Aryeh discuss how the site and the technology that powered it anticipated modern trends in online media. They also consider whether Twitter still has any use for journalists, the pros and cons of Substack, and whether Culturally Determined should pivot back to video. ...

Teaser ... A brief history of American China hawkery ... The 2008 financial crisis changed things ... Xi Jinping and the great man theory of history ... Can we get along with autocrats? ... How China hawkery became bipartisan ... Total eclipse of the hawks? ... Kaiser’s "Great Reckoning" thesis ...

Bob’s Doha trip takeaways ... The Epstein-Bannon-Trump connection ... Can MAGA survive the Epstein saga? ... Email hygiene 101 ... Paul defends Larry Summers ... Olivia Nuzzi hikes the Appalachian trail ... Overtime preview: Top podcasting secrets revealed! The punishment problem; Pluribus; the “great feminization” debate; AI “bubble” update; and more! ...

Teaser ... Alex's influential "Google PM Bible" ... What is a tech aggregator? ... AI is much more than chatbots ... The dangers of centralized AI ... What you want vs what you want to want ... How an LLM’s memory locks you in ... AGI vs ASI ... Alex's solution to the lock-in problem ... Alex's ode to “resonance” ...