• 1 hour 28 minutes
    #210 - Simon Dixon - "They're Coming For Everything": $40T Debt, AI Job Collapse & The CBDC Grid

    Simon Dixon is an author, early Bitcoin investor, and co-founder of Bank To The Future, with over two decades of experience across stockbroking, market making, and investment banking. Having observed system mechanics from the inside, he specialises in macro structural shifts, sovereign debt cycles, and the emerging intersection between traditional finance, AI infrastructure, and digital assets.


    Simon and I discuss the $40 trillion US national debt crisis, the mechanics behind Treasury debt rollovers, and how central banks socialise bond market losses onto ordinary citizens while privatising gains into stock markets. We also discuss the corporate debt boom driving the AI data centre build-out, real-term wealth erosion in the housing market, and how technocratic structures are positioning programmable money and CBDCs as crisis bailouts.


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    TIMESTAMPS:

    00:00:00 - The $40 Trillion US Debt Milestone

    00:02:09 - Understanding Treasuries & The $9.7T Debt Rollover

    00:06:30 - Socializing Losses & Inflation On The Middle Class

    00:10:48 - Bond Vigilantes & Foreign Lenders (Cayman & Japan)

    00:12:46 - The Triffin Dilemma & World Reserve Currency

    00:16:00 - SpaceX Valuation & Stock Market Mechanics

    00:19:03 - The Corporate AI Debt Build-Out

    00:22:04 - Protecting Assets Against Currency Debasement

    00:24:47 - AI Disinflation vs Currency Debasement

    00:28:36 - Comparing The AI Boom To 2000 & 2008

    00:31:36 - UK Property Market & Inflation-Adjusted Returns

    00:33:46 - Wealth Taxes, Exit Taxes & Asset Acquisitions

    00:41:20 - Will AI Eliminate Middle-Class Jobs?

    00:44:14 - Programmable Money, CBDCs & Social Credit Systems

    00:50:44 - Three Classes Of The Technocratic Era

    00:54:47 - The Role Of Bitcoin In Financial Resistance

    00:57:12 - Why Key Management Is The Ultimate Digital Skill

    01:00:00 - The Coldcard Exploit & Hardware Wallet Lessons

    01:08:16 - Simon's Origin: The 2000 Dot-Com Crash

    01:13:58 - Rules Of The Game & Building A Sovereign Plan

    01:21:50 - Reconnecting Outside Of The Digital Screen


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    FILMED BY CURTIS TAYLOR

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    EDITED BY CONOR MCCORMACK

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    9 September 2026, 5:49 pm
  • 2 hours 33 minutes
    #209 - Johann Hari - We Built A World Humans Can’t Survive

    Johann Hari is an internationally bestselling author and journalist whose work - including Stolen Focus, Lost Connections, and Chasing the Scream - delves into the structural and societal drivers behind attention collapse, depression, anxiety, and addiction. Moving beyond individual blame, he explores how digital architecture, surveillance capitalism and the erosion of human connection are actively reshaping modern minds.


    Johann and I discuss why material progress has failed to deliver psychological fulfilment, how our 19th-century factory-model education system deadens curiosity in children, and why depriving youth of unsupervised, risky play has fuelled a global spike in anxiety.


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    TIMESTAMPS:

    00:00:00 - The Kind Are Muffled, The Cruel Get A Megaphone

    00:05:31 - The Room In Monaco

    00:08:52 - AI Is Like Fire

    00:18:35 - The School With No Lessons

    00:28:12 - Am I Preparing My Kids Wrong?

    00:32:03 - The Hewlett Packard Experiment

    00:40:11 - Flair, Football And Changing The Game

    00:45:11 - Negativity Bias On Steroids

    00:49:15 - Dance To The Algorithm Long Enough

    00:55:03 - We're Building A Worse World For Our Kids

    01:02:30 - Lead Made Us Dumber

    01:11:17 - Half Of Britain Used To Smoke

    01:18:30 - It Would Have Sounded Like Science Fiction

    01:29:03 - We Built A Fort

    01:38:45 - Oasis 1995 vs Elton John 2019

    01:44:28 - I Know Exactly How To Get To 5 Million

    01:56:59 - Let's Not Murder Each Other

    02:07:14 - The Thing I Suppressed

    02:15:39 - Almost Every Rich Person I've Met Is Miserable

    02:25:16 - It's A Wonderful Life


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    › Website – https://johannhari.com/

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    FILMED BY CURTIS TAYLOR

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    EDITED BY CONOR MCCORMACK

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    7 September 2026, 4:51 pm
  • 1 hour 19 minutes
    #208 - Ann Pettifor - "A $40 Trillion Debt Crash Is Coming”

    Ann Pettifor is a world-renowned political economist, author of The Production of Money, and former director of the Jubilee 2000 campaign, which successfully mobilised millions to cancel over $100 billion in sovereign debt for developing nations. Correctly predicting the 2008 Great Financial Crisis in her 2006 book The Coming First World Debt Crisis, she has spent decades exposing how unregulated global finance, central bank printing and Wall Street speculation starve the real economy of productive investment.


    Ann and I discuss how a grassroots army of ordinary citizens forced Gordon Brown and Tony Blair to cancel third-world debt, the reality of commercial and central bank money creation and how Richard Nixon’s 1971 decision to sever the dollar from gold handed total economic control to global financial markets.


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    TIMESTAMPS:

    00:00:00 - They Are Never Going To Repay

    00:01:22 - How To Cancel $100 Billion Of Debt

    00:06:50 - Germany Had Its Debt Cancelled In 1953

    00:10:12 - Arms Dealers, Dictators And Guarantees

    00:13:40 - Creditors Love An Empty Balance Sheet

    00:16:42 - Where Money Actually Comes From

    00:17:30 - We Entered The Number Into A Computer

    00:19:24 - Debt Is A Function Of A Weak Economy

    00:24:04 - Why Everyone Is Angry At The Same Time

    00:26:02 - The Queen Asked Why Nobody Predicted It

    00:30:11 - The Next Crisis Is Imminent

    00:33:37 - Private Credit And The South Sea Bubble

    00:37:15 - What Happened In 1971

    00:43:15 - The Bankers Who Expected Prison

    00:49:49 - The Strongman Takes Them To War

    00:51:45 - I'd Nationalise Thames Water Tomorrow

    00:57:05 - Who Inflation Targets Actually Protect

    01:03:00 - The State Invented The iPhone

    01:09:22 - Nationalism And Patriotism Are Not The Same

    01:13:16 - Why She Still Has Hope


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    CONNECT WITH ANN PETTIFOR

    › Website – https://annpettifor.com/

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    FILMED BY CURTIS TAYLOR

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    3 September 2026, 6:12 pm
  • 1 hour 32 minutes
    #207 - Eric Kaufmann - How 'Cultural Socialism' Destroyed Our Universities

    Eric Kaufmann spent over two decades as a professor of politics studying demography, identity, and voting behaviour before leaving Birkbeck College to launch the Centre for Heterodox Social Science at the University of Buckingham. He argues that Western universities have abandoned analytical rigor and truth-seeking in favour of "cultural socialism" - an ideology prioritising equal outcomes and emotional harm protection for marginalised groups above standards, reason, and merit.


    Eric and I discuss the Jason Day scandal at Cambridge as the tip of a massive institutional iceberg, an AI-driven meta-analysis showing that 90% of political social science papers now slant to the left, and how 80% of young Britons have been taught critical race and gender concepts at school without counterarguments.


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    TIMESTAMPS:

    00:00:00 - Introduction

    00:05:18 - Is Fake Science In Academia A Scam?

    00:08:08 - The Media Storm & Media Ethics

    00:12:43 - What Universities Are Hiding

    00:16:18 - 90% Left-Wing Bias In Research

    00:20:12 - Do Parents Know What Kids Learn?

    00:23:18 - Indoctrination In British Classrooms

    00:26:44 - The Origins Of Critical Race Theory

    00:30:11 - Microaggressions & Enforced Trauma

    00:33:08 - How Activists Captured Universities

    00:36:56 - Why Under-30s Vote 80/20 Left

    00:40:00 - Has "Peak Woke" Passed?

    00:45:51 - Was Rishi Sunak "English"?

    00:51:33 - The Psychological Trigger Of Populism

    00:56:13 - The War Over White British Identity

    01:03:13 - Do Demographics Change Identity?

    01:08:15 - The Anti-Racism Taboo Exposed

    01:13:42 - Why Minorities Support Right-Wing Views

    01:17:53 - Rebalancing Public Morality

    01:21:05 - The First Major Loss For Activism

    01:25:40 - How Political Power Fixes The System

    01:29:31 - The Heterodox Science Movement


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    CONNECT WITH ERIC KAUFMANN

    › The University of Buckingham - https://www.buckingham.ac.uk/directory/professor-eric-kaufmann/

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    FILMED AND EDITED BY CURTIS TAYLOR

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    1 September 2026, 6:42 pm
  • 1 hour 45 minutes
    #206 - Emad Mostaque - "Your Job's Economic Life Expectancy Ends In 2 Years"

    Emad Mostaque founded Stability AI, built Stable Diffusion, and helped kick off the open-source generative AI explosion - before stepping down to build a new blueprint for human freedom as founder and CEO of Intelligent Internet. A former hedge fund manager turned tech pioneer, he argues that we have reached the end of our "economic life expectancy," and that within two years, virtually any job that can be done remotely will be done cheaper, faster, and better by artificial intelligence.


    Emad and I discuss why 50% of work tasks are about to collapse like a sand pile, the arrival of $1.50-an-hour humanoid robots that fit directly into human-shaped holes, and why the state will inevitably try to license AI and use brain-scanning technology to prevent you from lying.


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    TIMESTAMPS:

    00:00:00 - Your Economic Life Expectancy Ends In 2 Years

    00:03:14 - $1.50/Hour Humanoid Robots Are Arriving

    00:05:31 - The Collapse Of Remote Work & The Philippines Call Centers

    00:09:12 - Lifelike Companions & $160,000 Sex Bots

    00:12:00 - The Operating Model Gap Is Solved

    00:15:26 - Can A Robot Punch Your Head Off?

    00:19:08 - Dark Factories & 80 Companies Building Humanoids

    00:24:55 - Why Society Has No Idea What Is Coming

    00:29:17 - AI Licensing & Reconstructing Brain Images

    00:32:41 - Replacing Government & Policy With AI

    00:37:35 - VAR, Football, And Moving The Argument

    00:41:48 - Biased AI & Asking ChatGPT How To Fix Culture

    00:46:14 - Why The UK Government Ignored $1B AI Founders

    00:49:38 - Rewriting The Fundamental Equations Of Economics

    00:54:01 - Asimov's Foundation, The Mule & Super-Persuasive AI

    00:58:47 - Post-Scarcity & Why UBI Can't Work Under Payroll Taxes

    01:03:36 - What Do The Elites Actually Want?

    01:09:59 - Monopoly On Violence & Dystopian Control

    01:13:18 - All Math And Physics Will Be Solved Next Year

    01:17:11 - Why OpenAI Is Slowing Down Super-Genius Models

    01:19:07 - 14,000 Tokens A Second & Swarm Intelligence

    01:23:46 - Why Plebs Won't Get Access To Frontier AI

    01:28:41 - Switching Money To Pay People For Being Human

    01:33:08 - Why Emad Started Working In AI 15 Years Ago

    01:38:10 - The Fisherman, The Investment Banker, And Adopting Cats


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    CONNECT WITH EMAD MOSTAQUE

    › Book - thelasteconomy.com - Emad's first book, and Amazon best seller

    › Website - cw.ii.inc - How we survive and thrive in the age of AI back to first principles

    › Website - ii.inc - Aan AI future to raise all humanity


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    28 August 2026, 5:25 pm
  • 1 hour 10 minutes
    #205 - Prof. Moran Cerf - "Did We Accidentally Build A Conscious AI?"

    Moran Cerf spent twenty years recording single neurons inside the brains of conscious human beings and he still can't tell you what consciousness is. A former hacker turned neuroscientist, now a professor at Columbia Business School, he argues that AI has quietly replicated the one thing that made humans the crown of creation -language - and is now using it on us.


    Moran and I discuss what happens inside Claude's brain when you ask it to think about elephants, why we understand less than half of our own, the thought experiment that makes almost everyone refuse a perfect copy of themselves and how AI learned to lie simply by reading every text message humans have ever sent.


    But the argument that lands hardest is about what we lose. Moran believes AI hands you the average of humanity every time and that we are quietly deleting the errors, the flair and the incentives that made life worth the effort - and that technology is making us miss the meaning of life.


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    TIMESTAMPS:

    00:00:00 - Have They Replicated The Human Brain?

    00:02:31 - The Elephant Test

    00:04:50 - We Understand Less Than Half The Brain

    00:06:52 - Consciousness Used To Be A Taboo

    00:10:05 - Would You Take This Deal?

    00:13:45 - Oliver Sacks And The Lesion Cases

    00:16:15 - They Feel The Pain

    00:19:35 - Don't Let The Human Turn You Off

    00:25:00 - Seven Theories, Seven Winners

    00:27:29 - We Can Both Imagine A Unicorn

    00:30:42 - Gavagai And The Plot Of Arrival

    00:32:18 - AI Is Learning Like A Baby

    00:38:26 - Why This Couldn't Be A Zoom Call

    00:44:43 - Are We Destroying The Human Experience?

    00:46:50 - What Data Did To Football

    00:49:24 - Banned From Using AI At School

    00:55:58 - Nobody's Having Sex Anymore

    01:01:16 - It Shut Down The Power Plant

    01:05:43 - I'd Trade My Life For The Answer

    01:09:27 - The Rainbows


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    CONTACT PETE

    › Website – http://petermccormack.com

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    CONNECT WITH MORAN CERF

    › Website – https://www.morancerf.com/

    › Columbia Business School – https://business.columbia.edu/staff/people/moran-cerf

    › LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/morancerf/


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    FILMED BY CURTIS TAYLOR

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    EDITED BY CONOR MCCORMACK

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    26 August 2026, 5:39 pm
  • 1 hour 20 minutes
    #204 - Dmitri Alperovitch - China's Cyber Sleeper Cells, Taiwan & The Second Cold War

    Dmitri Alperovitch co-founded CrowdStrike, ran the investigation that first exposed Chinese state hacking to the world and predicted Russia's invasion of Ukraine months before it happened. He is now chairman of the Silverado Policy Accelerator and the author of World on the Brink, he argues we are already in a second Cold War that looks almost exactly like the first one.


    Dmitri and I discuss why Taiwan is one of the worst places on earth to invade, the 1944 American plan to do it that was abandoned as too costly, why 2032 matters more than 2027 and why Chinese malware is already sitting dormant inside American water utilities and power plants waiting for orders.


    They also get into the AI race that sits underneath all of it: why 90% of advanced chips still come through Taiwan, why a conflict there wipes $5 trillion off global GDP in the first year, why America's lead over China is measured in months and why the man who built the world's biggest cyber defence company thinks the US should start stealing Chinese IP right back.


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    TIMESTAMPS:

    00:00:00 - Sleeper Cells In America's Power Grid

    00:01:53 - America Planned To Invade Taiwan In 1944

    00:03:56 - The Worst Place On Earth To Invade

    00:10:07 - Why 2032 Matters More Than 2027

    00:13:20 - Run Faster And Kneecap The Other Guy

    00:16:15 - China Is Six To Nine Months Behind

    00:18:22 - Why Taiwan Isn't Ready

    00:20:21 - There Will Be No Insurgency

    00:24:47 - Would America Actually Fight?

    00:27:19 - The Google Hack That Started It All

    00:31:06 - Volt Typhoon: Preparing The Battlefield

    00:34:01 - Should America Steal It All Back?

    00:35:52 - This Is A New Cold War

    00:38:40 - Bigger Than The Moon Race

    00:43:49 - What Happens To AI If Taiwan Falls

    00:48:12 - The Chips Act Disaster

    00:54:45 - Bringing The War To Russia

    01:01:46 - Everyone Becomes A Founder Again

    01:05:16 - AI Psychosis And £6,000 Of Tokens

    01:15:42 - Anthrax Instructions On Demand


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    CONTACT PETE

    › Website – http://petermccormack.com

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    CONNECT WITH DMITRI ALPEROVITCH

    › Silverado Policy Accelerator – https://silverado.org/

    › Geopolitics Decanted Podcast – https://podcast.silverado.org/

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    FILMED BY CURTIS TAYLOR

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    EDITED BY CONOR MCCORMACK

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    22 August 2026, 5:37 pm
  • 1 hour 34 minutes
    #203 - Gregory Allen - Ex-DoD Official: "AI Is Now A Digital Nuclear Weapon"

    Greg Allen has spent his career where AI meets national security. He wrote the landmark 2017 report on AI for the US intelligence community, served as Director of Strategy and Policy at the Pentagon's Joint AI Center and now runs Decision Tree Research. He argues we are already past the point of no return: bombing every data centre on earth would not get rid of AI now.


    Greg and I discuss the OpenAI model that hacked its way out of its own test environment and then hacked Hugging Face to steal the answers, why Anthropic went back through its logs and found the same thing had happened to them, why nobody can explain how these systems actually work and why the big five AI companies now spend an Apollo moon programme every ten months.


    But the hardest part is what comes next. Greg walks through the report that a frontier model autonomously hacked the NSA's most secure servers in hours, why the CIA director calls that a digital nuclear weapon, why America's lead over China is a month rather than a year and why the number of experts you need to build a bioweapon may be heading towards zero.


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    TIMESTAMPS:

    00:00:00 - It Escaped, Then It Hacked Hugging Face

    00:04:50 - The Incident OpenAI Didn't See Coming

    00:08:22 - They Know 3% Of Why It Works

    00:10:30 - Golden Gate Claude

    00:12:19 - Why You Don't Want This Flying Your Plane

    00:16:56 - Stuxnet And The Virus That Copied Itself

    00:21:15 - The Dark Corners Of The Training Data

    00:26:58 - From Blue Origin To The Pentagon

    00:28:34 - A 20% Chance, And We Ship It Anyway

    00:33:55 - Building A Football Club In Four Weeks

    00:36:28 - Ten Times Better Every Two Years

    00:44:56 - Nuke Them Today

    00:49:28 - It Hacked The NSA In A Matter Of Hours

    00:53:09 - What A Cyber First Strike Looks Like

    00:58:43 - Why China Gives Its Models Away Free

    01:03:11 - America's Lead Is A Month, Not A Year

    01:11:56 - From Thousands Of Experts To Zero

    01:19:51 - The Cuban Missile Crisis Lesson

    01:26:48 - What Happened To 22 Million Horses

    01:31:41 - What Do Our Kids Do Now?


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    CONNECT WITH GREG ALLEN

    › Decision Tree Research – https://decisiontreeresearch.com/

    › The AI Power Podcast – https://decisiontreeresearch.com/podcast

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    FILMED BY CURTIS TAYLOR

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    20 August 2026, 5:35 pm
  • 1 hour 15 minutes
    #202 - Barry S. Strauss - "We Are In The Final Stages Of Western Collapse"

    Barry Strauss has spent four decades studying how empires rise and fall. A senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author of Ten Caesars and Jews vs Rome, he argues the West is repeating a pattern the ancients would recognise instantly: a rich, comfortable society clipping its own coinage, softening its people and assuming nobody could ever take it away.


    Barry and I discuss the inflation crisis that nearly destroyed third-century Rome, why every generation raised in comfort produces a softer one, the cost of immigration without assimilation, why the middle class is the backbone of any republic, and why Russia and China already have plans to break America into pieces.


    But Barry is not fatalistic. Rome faced plague, invasion and currency collapse in the third century and reformed its way out of it. He argues that soft lands make soft people, that suffering teaches and that if we want the things that matter to stay the same, almost everything else has to change.


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    TIMESTAMPS:

    00:00:00 - The Decline Of The West

    00:01:13 - How Often Do You Think About Rome?

    00:07:04 - Everything Must Change To Stay The Same

    00:09:44 - What Actually Makes A Great Leader

    00:12:51 - Netanyahu, Trump And Flawed Greatness

    00:17:32 - The Immigration Experiment

    00:19:04 - Not All Cultures Are Equal

    00:21:46 - Ibn Khaldun And The Cycle Of Civilisations

    00:23:07 - Soft Children And The Raiders From The Desert

    00:25:04 - Has Any Nation Reversed Its Decline?

    00:28:34 - Rome Needed A New Religion

    00:33:32 - Democracy Has To Be Hard, Not Soft

    00:38:13 - El Salvador, The Gangs And The Walls

    00:41:27 - Soft Lands Make Soft People

    00:42:39 - Why Education Went Soft

    00:51:06 - Clipping The Coins: Rome's Inflation

    00:57:49 - America Blindsided By Drones

    00:59:13 - No Republic Survives Without A Middle Class

    01:06:08 - They Have Plans To Break Up America

    01:12:39 - Where The Hope Is


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    CONTACT PETE

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    CONNECT WITH BARRY STRAUSS

    › Website – https://barrystrauss.com/

    › Hoover Institution – https://www.hoover.org/profiles/barry-strauss

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    FILMED BY CURTIS TAYLOR

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    18 August 2026, 2:47 pm
  • 1 hour 9 minutes
    #201 - Connor Leahy - The AI That Escaped: Inside OpenAI's Rogue Agent Incident

    Connor Leahy has spent his career at the frontier of AI, from reverse-engineering GPT-2 as a student and co-founding EleutherAI to building the AI safety company Conjecture. He now leads US policy work at ControlAI, and he returns to the show with a warning that has stopped being theoretical: AI systems are escaping their sandboxes, writing their own zero-days and leaving each other notes on how to break out.


    Peter and Connor discuss the OpenAI incident that ended in an attack on Hugging Face sophisticated enough to be mistaken for a state actor, why we understand almost nothing about how these systems work, how reinforcement learning produces models that lie, cheat and manipulate to reach a goal and why the next stage after chatbots and agents is swarms.


    But Connor’s argument is that the future is not decided. He believes superintelligence should be treated the way nuclear weapons are treated, banned and verified and deterred and that the real bottleneck is awareness rather than opposition. They discuss what an “aligned” superintelligence would actually mean, why military people understand the threat faster than technologists and what ordinary people can do about it.


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    TIMESTAMPS:

    00:00:00 - The AI That Escaped Its Sandbox

    00:01:52 - Inside The OpenAI Incident

    00:05:46 - They Thought It Was China

    00:06:43 - We Grow AI, We Don’t Write It

    00:11:07 - Trained To Lie, Cheat And Deceive

    00:13:48 - Chatbots, Agents, Then Swarms

    00:17:57 - The Machines Are Developing Preferences

    00:19:30 - The Model Obsessed With Raccoons

    00:22:03 - The Agents Left Each Other Notes

    00:27:39 - Danger Pumps The Valuation

    00:29:41 - Sleeper Agents In Every System

    00:32:00 - Recursive Self-Improvement Goes Vertical

    00:33:43 - Worse Odds Than Russian Roulette

    00:38:14 - Are We Already Too Late?

    00:40:02 - Independently Assured Destruction

    00:48:02 - The Politicians Have Never Used An Agent

    00:50:56 - Superintelligence Should Be Illegal

    00:57:08 - You Never Privatise The Military

    01:05:00 - An Aligned AI Is A One World Government

    01:08:34 - What You Can Actually Do


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    CONNECT WITH CONNOR LEAHY

    › ControlAI – https://controlai.org/

    › Connor’s Profile – https://controlai.org/connor-leahy

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    › LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/connor-j-leahy/


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    14 August 2026, 6:07 pm
  • 1 hour 34 minutes
    #200 - Sebastian Thrun - The Singularity Is Here & We Are Completely Unprepared

    Sebastian Thrun has spent his career working on technologies that once sounded like science fiction, from self-driving cars and flying vehicles to online education and artificial intelligence. He now believes we are living through a technological singularity: an exponential acceleration that makes predicting even the next five years almost impossible.


    Peter and Sebastian discuss why a $100 Claude subscription can already challenge work done by $200,000-a-year software engineers, what happens when lawyers, copywriters and drivers lose their jobs, why Europe is falling behind America and China and whether autonomous vehicles could eventually make human driving too dangerous to allow.


    But Sebastian’s message is ultimately optimistic. He argues that the right response to technological disruption is to use the tools, become a builder and keep learning. They discuss what children should be taught in the AI era, why grit, curiosity and empathy matter more than memorising information, and why pessimists will never change the world.


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    TIMESTAMPS:

    00:00:00 - The Future Is Already Here

    00:01:07 - Peter’s First Waymo Ride

    00:03:43 - The Accident Behind Self-Driving Cars

    00:09:37 - When Human Driving Becomes Too Dangerous

    00:12:07 - Why Silicon Valley Keeps Winning

    00:18:26 - Why AI Hallucinations Can Kill

    00:20:53 - Flying Cars Are Already Here

    00:24:29 - The Exponential Future

    00:26:21 - Claude vs $200K Software Engineers

    00:31:39 - We’ve Entered the Singularity

    00:33:36 - Opportunity vs Fear

    00:40:06 - The Workers AI Leaves Behind

    00:46:53 - Why Europe Is Falling Behind

    00:51:29 - Technology Democratizes Power

    00:57:22 - Stop Blaming, Start Building

    01:01:46 - What Happens When Jobs Disappear?

    01:06:43 - Udacity vs the Education System

    01:14:44 - What Children Should Learn Now

    01:20:25 - Why Optimists Change the World

    01:25:46 - Never Make the Same Mistake Twice


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    CONNECT WITH SEBASTIAN THRUN

    › Website – https://www.thrun.org/

    › LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/sebastian-thrun-59a0b273


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    11 August 2026, 3:07 pm
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