- 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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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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FILMED BY CURTIS TAYLOR
› https://www.curttaylor.co.uk/
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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FILMED BY CURTIS TAYLOR
› https://www.curttaylor.co.uk/
EDITED BY CONOR MCCORMACK
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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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CONTACT PETE
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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
› https://www.curttaylor.co.uk/
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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
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FILMED AND EDITED BY CURTIS TAYLOR
› https://www.curttaylor.co.uk/
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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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› Website – https://www.morancerf.com/
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FILMED BY CURTIS TAYLOR
› https://www.curttaylor.co.uk/
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
› https://www.curttaylor.co.uk/
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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CONTACT PETE
› Website – http://petermccormack.com
› Feedback – https://www.petermccormack.com/contact
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› X/Twitter – https://x.com/petermccormack/
CONNECT WITH GREG ALLEN
› Decision Tree Research – https://decisiontreeresearch.com/
› The AI Power Podcast – https://decisiontreeresearch.com/podcast
› X/Twitter – https://x.com/Gregory_C_Allen
SPONSORS
› IREN – https://www.iren.com/
› Arch Public – https://archpublic.com/peter
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LISTEN / SUBSCRIBE
› Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/40ruY9K
› Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3Wc94Vu
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FILMED BY CURTIS TAYLOR
› https://www.curttaylor.co.uk/
EDITED BY CONOR MCCORMACK
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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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
› Website – http://petermccormack.com
› Feedback – https://www.petermccormack.com/contact
› Email – [email protected]
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› X/Twitter – https://x.com/petermccormack/
CONNECT WITH BARRY STRAUSS
› Website – https://barrystrauss.com/
› Hoover Institution – https://www.hoover.org/profiles/barry-strauss
› Antiquitas Podcast – https://barrystrauss.com/podcast
› X/Twitter – https://x.com/barrystrauss
SPONSORS
› IREN – https://www.iren.com/
› Ledn – https://www.ledn.io/peter
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LISTEN / SUBSCRIBE
› Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/40ruY9K
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FILMED BY CURTIS TAYLOR
› https://www.curttaylor.co.uk/
EDITED BY CONOR MCCORMACK
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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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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CONTACT PETE
› Website – http://petermccormack.com
› Feedback – https://www.petermccormack.com/contact
› Email – [email protected]
› Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/mccormack555/
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CONNECT WITH CONNOR LEAHY
› ControlAI – https://controlai.org/
› Connor’s Profile – https://controlai.org/connor-leahy
› MicroCommit – https://microcommit.io/
› X/Twitter – https://x.com/NPCollapse
› LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/connor-j-leahy/
SPONSORS
› IREN – https://www.iren.com/
› Expat Money – https://expatmoney.com/peter
› Arch Public – https://archpublic.com/peter
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LISTEN / SUBSCRIBE
› Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/40ruY9K
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› Fountain: https://bit.ly/FountainPM
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› Rumble: https://bit.ly/RumblePM
FILMED BY CURTIS TAYLOR
› https://www.curttaylor.co.uk/
EDITED BY CONOR MCCORMACK
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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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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CONTACT PETE
› Website – http://petermccormack.com
› Feedback – https://www.petermccormack.com/contact
› Email – [email protected]
› Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/mccormack555/
› X/Twitter – https://x.com/petermccormack/
CONNECT WITH SEBASTIAN THRUN
› Website – https://www.thrun.org/
› LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/sebastian-thrun-59a0b273
SPONSORS
› IREN – https://www.iren.com/
› Ledn – https://www.ledn.io/peter
› Arch Public – https://archpublic.com/peter
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LISTEN / SUBSCRIBE
› Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/40ruY9K
› Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3Wc94Vu
› Fountain: https://bit.ly/FountainPM
› YouTube: https://bit.ly/YouTube_PM
› Rumble: https://bit.ly/RumblePM
FILMED BY CURTIS TAYLOR
› https://www.curttaylor.co.uk/
EDITED BY CONOR MCCORMACK
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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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