Doom Debates!

Brendan and Randan Steinhauser are a husband and wife team who know how to make things happen in conservative politics.
Brendan helped build the Tea Party movement and ran John Cornyn’s Senate campaign. Randan has been involved in advocacy and political campaigns in more than 30 states, including working under former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.
Now they’re bringing Republicans, parents, and faith leaders into the fight against AI catastrophe.
They know how to build political momentum, but my question is whether that will lead to action quickly enough. I'm skeptical of incremental legislation efforts and data center protests, but they argue it's necessary coalition-building that leads to superintelligence regulation.
This isn't your typical state-of-the-political-map podcast. We also get into:
Their personal AGI awakenings
How people of faith make sense of claims of Godlike AI and AI doom
My own transition to joining the Republican Party
Transhumanism, souls, and mind uploading
Parenting in the age of AI
It’s a candid conversation with a couple who are making the fight for our future feel a little more winnable. Enjoy!
Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTm9tqS1Ibw
Timestamps
00:00:00 — Cold Open
00:01:07 — Introducing Brendan & Randan Steinhauser
00:02:22 — Why I Came Out as Republican
00:04:28 — The Alliance for Secure AI
00:06:30 — Losing Control of Superintelligence
00:07:52 — Brendan, What’s Your P(Doom)?™
00:08:26 — Randan, What’s Your P(Doom)?™
00:10:47 — Finding the AI Safety Movement
00:15:04 — Trump, Republicans, and Big Tech Money
00:19:22 — Bringing Faith Leaders Into AI Safety
00:23:23 — God’s Plan and Human Extinction
00:29:43 — Priorities for Congress
00:31:42 — The Morality of AI Companies
00:34:03 — PauseAI and Employee Whistleblowers
00:43:34 — Effective Altruism and a Broader Coalition
00:48:12 — Transhumanism, Souls, and Mind Uploading
00:57:40 — Building a Machine God
01:03:20 — Raising Children Under AI Risk
01:07:35 — Data Center Protests and Movement Building
01:13:09 — Talking to People About AI Risk
01:17:32 — State Laws and the 2028 Election
01:20:38 — Getting Involved
Links
REFERENCED IN THE EPISODE
AI Risk Evaluation Act — Hawley–Blumenthal bill text
The Singularity Is Near — Ray Kurzweil
Can We Stop the AI Apocalypse? — Dan Crenshaw interviews Eliezer Yudkowsky
Magnifica Humanitas — Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical on humanity in the age of AI
Pacing the Frontier — open letter from frontier AI employees
PauseAI — the global movement to pause unsafe AI development
PauseAI US — organizing and advocacy in the United States
Jacob Coxon’s resignation statement — the insider warning discussed
Americans for Responsible Innovation — Brad Carson’s bipartisan advocacy organization
PAST DOOM DEBATES EPISODES MENTIONED
Let’s CALL OUT the AI Doom “Enablers” — Holly Elmore on working at AI labs
God vs. AI Doom: Debate with Bentham’s Bulldog
DOOM DEBATES
Join the Doom Debates Discord
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Doom Debates’ Mission is to raise mainstream awareness of imminent extinction from AGI and build the social infrastructure for high-quality debate.
Support the mission by subscribing to my Substack at DoomDebates.com and to youtube.com/@DoomDebates, or to really take things to the next level: Donate 🙏


Get full access to Doom Debates at lironshapira.substack.com/subscribe

Bestselling author Robert Wright and I discuss this week’s stock market jitters, Google’s new interactive world model, and why I sometimes spend $1,000 in a day on AI agents. Plus:
The Binance hack;
An AI audit of two star economists;
Anthropic’s financial prospects;
And whether AI could crack the math behind encryption.
Enjoy another edition of the Nonzero x Doom Debates collab!
Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkKpPeMVVX8
Timestamps
00:00:00 — Teaser
00:00:50 — Nonzero Doom returns
00:03:07 — A foom in slow motion
00:07:47 — Is AI winter canceled forever?
00:10:33 — Will Google’s Genie 4 lure us into the Matrix?
00:16:54 — Liron’s bull case for Google stock
00:24:34 — Does Google have big-company disease?
00:28:28 — Could a slowdown actually help Anthropic and OpenAI?
00:30:12 — Was OpenAI’s “pause” just PR?
00:40:01 — Social science judgment day is coming
00:47:12 — Why even AI’s upsides could tear society apart
00:51:12 — Does OpenAI’s alignment approach improve on Asimov?
00:55:06 — Sam and Satya pivot on alignment
00:58:34 — Crypto and the AI hacking threat
01:03:42 — Could AI crack the math behind encryption?
01:08:52 — Liron’s $1,000-a-day AI coding habit
01:15:23 — Explaining the missing productivity boost
01:17:26 — Does Anthropic’s S-1 sink the AI bubble thesis?
Links
ROBERT WRIGHT & NONZERO
Nonzero’s post for this episode — “Is an AI Bubble Bursting?”
Subscribe to The NonZero Newsletter
The God Test — Bob’s 2026 book on AI
Join NonZero’s Discord server
Nonzero on X (@NonzeroPods)
THE WEEK IN AI
“Anthropic files S-1 with the SEC for proposed initial public offering” — the IPO filing Liron calls the final nail in the coffin of the Ed Zitron camp
Where’s Your Ed At — Ed Zitron’s newsletter, home of the AI-bubble bear case
“Introducing Genie 4” — Google DeepMind’s real-time interactive world model
“Gemini 4 Argon: Built to solve your hardest problems” — Google’s new frontier training run, the “lukewarm” release
“Gemini 4 Carbon: our next frontier model” — the follow-up Google announced two weeks later
“Google Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer leaves for OpenAI” — CNBC on the talent Google has bled
“Errors in the Research of Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman” — Tyler Cowen’s Marginal Revolution post on the AI audit: 138 papers, 2,035 problems
Boaz Barak: “We organized the Model Spec around five core values” — the OpenAI alignment update Liron compares to Asimov’s three laws
“An Updated Model Spec for More Capable and Beneficial AI” — OpenAI’s announcement
“Sam Altman says AI means we can no longer just patch all the bugs” — TNW on the Stanford GSB talk Liron quotes on alignment and pacing
“Satya Nadella says he was wrong to think AI alignment would come with scale” — TNW on his 20VC interview: “I used to always think that alignment will just fall out. I no longer believe that.”
“OpenAI Takes Initial Steps To Address Its Alignment Problems” — Zvi Mowshowitz on OpenAI’s training “pause”
2026 Binance hack — Wikipedia’s summary of the theft Bob and Liron debate
“$2 Million+ Drained From Polymarket Traders in New Supply Chain Attack” — SecurityWeek on the hack Liron walks through
“PHP blames supply chain security biz Chainguard for putting huge chunks of the web at risk” — The Register on “the PHP thing last week”
ALSO MENTIONED
The Hanson-Yudkowsky AI-Foom Debate — LessWrong wiki on the 2008 debate where “AI Go Foom” originated
“The AI Revolution: Our Immortality or Extinction” — Tim Urban’s Wait But Why post, where the intelligence train blows right past the station
PauseAI US — Holly Elmore’s organization, plugged at the close of the episode
DOOM DEBATES
Doom Debates on YouTube
Join the Doom Debates Discord
Doom Debates’ Mission is to raise mainstream awareness of imminent extinction from AGI and build the social infrastructure for high-quality debate.
Support the mission by subscribing to my Substack at DoomDebates.com and to youtube.com/@DoomDebates, or to really take things to the next level: Donate 🙏


Get full access to Doom Debates at lironshapira.substack.com/subscribe

Cybersecurity expert and entrepreneur Zack Korman is an increasingly prominent nondoomer voice on Twitter. Naturally, with AI now breaking out of sandboxes and hacking corporate systems, people want to hear what cybersecurity experts have to say. So I’m thrilled that Zack was brave enough to face me on Doom Debates!
Zack was reading Nick Bostrom at Oxford and worrying about AI doom as far back as 2016, but his views have since shifted. In a recent post, he writes: “This focus on AI causing human extinction is going to get people killed.” Now he expects security failures to give humanity plenty of opportunities to learn, fight back, and stop risky superintelligence development if necessary.
We argue about whether sandboxing and AI monitoring are hopeless strategies, whether competing superintelligences would keep each other in check, whether to expect instrumental convergence, and more.
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/QJTeZfx1ZLk
Timestamps
00:00:00 — Cold Open
00:01:15 — Introducing Zack Korman
00:03:41 — From Law to AI Security
00:09:17 — Why Zack Stopped Being a Doomer
00:12:03 — What’s Your P(Doom)?™
00:21:00 — Why Zack Supports AI Safety
00:25:54 — Believing in Superintelligence
00:30:06 — AI Without Tools
00:39:42 — Warning Shots and Time to React
00:46:08 — A Country of Geniuses in a Datacenter
00:55:55 — Can We Sandbox AI?
01:05:58 — Monitoring and Layers of Defense
01:14:49 — Riding the Doom Train™
01:22:23 — The Case for Accelerating
01:24:46 — AI CEOs and the Transfer of Power
01:34:19 — Who Presses the Stop Button?
01:41:38 — Humans, Bacteria, and the Limits of Power
01:48:30 — When Would Zack Pause AI?
01:56:13 — Will Different AIs Keep Each Other in Check?
02:06:11 — Can Progress Turn Against Us?
02:08:35 — The Ideological Turing Test
02:14:58 — Closing Thoughts
Links
Zack Korman on X
Zack Korman’s website
Zack Korman: “AI doomers are furious”
Zack Korman: “AI doomers are anti-security”
Zack Korman: “3 reasons sandboxing won’t secure your AI agent”
Zack Korman: “This focus on AI causing human extinction is going to get people killed.”
METR’s investigation of the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident
The PHP Foundation: “Today’s PHP Security Release, and How We’re Strengthening PHP Security”
Nick Bostrom: Superintelligence
Center for AI Safety: Statement on AI Risk
Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies
AI 2027
Zvi Mowshowitz: “The Three AI Pills”
PauseAI
Eliezer Yudkowsky: “Value is Fragile”
Aaron Scher at MIRI
Doom Debates: Robin Hanson vs. Liron Shapira — Is Near-Term Extinction From AGI Plausible?
Doom Debates: OpenAI’s BOMBSHELL Hack — Swarms of Agents, Zero-Day Exploits, & Misaligned AI
Doom Debates’ Mission is to raise mainstream awareness of imminent extinction from AGI and build the social infrastructure for high-quality debate.
Support the mission by subscribing to my Substack at DoomDebates.com and to youtube.com/@DoomDebates, or to really take things to the next level: Donate 🙏


Get full access to Doom Debates at lironshapira.substack.com/subscribe

Physicists Jeremie and Edouard Harris, co-founders of Gladstone AI, are preparing for an “AI Chernobyl” warning shot.
If that forces Trump and Xi to negotiate an AI slowdown, the Harris brothers want to ensure the US has the enforcement tools to make the deal stick. More specifically, they want verification technologies developed and vetted before the crisis hits, alongside enforcement capabilities to deter cheating.
Yet when I bring up Eliezer Yudkowsky’s writing on the possibility of airstrikes on rogue data centers as a last-resort treaty deterrent, they push back. They also don’t share my enthusiasm for PauseAI, expressing uncertainty about whether the movement has been net beneficial.
Jeremie and Edouard have earned a ton of credibility:
• They redirected their careers around the AI threat as far back as 2015, stepping away from their Y Combinator startup before ChatGPT even launched and brought AI into the mainstream.
• They’ve built relationships with senior government decision-makers without a prior national security background.
• They’ve demonstrated a talent for public communication in their excellent Joe Rogan appearances.
In this episode, they bring a level of multi-step strategic thinking that I rarely explore. But I can’t help wondering whether a catastrophe 50 times worse than the Hugging Face incident would let world leaders move much faster on a global AI pause treaty than they expect.
Let’s see if they can convince me that an emergency US–China agreement is our best path to a safer world.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/4jmFcE4WZ7M
Timestamps
00:00:00 — Cold Open
00:00:53 — Introducing Jeremie and Edouard Harris
00:02:16 — The GPT-3 Wake-Up Call
00:03:59 — AI Risk Outside the EA Community
00:08:49 — The Harris Brothers’ Backgrounds
00:16:37 — Yudkowsky and Many-Worlds Quantum Mechanics
00:22:00 — SharpestMinds and Leaving Academia
00:25:04 — Briefing the US Government
00:33:01 — How Gladstone AI Pays the Bills
00:35:00 — The Trump–Xi Phone Call
00:39:29 — Pacing Isn’t Pausing
00:42:45 — Defining AI Chernobyl
00:44:07 — Verifying China’s AI Slowdown
00:47:10 — Espionage and Lab Security
00:54:10 — Offensive Operations and Deterrence
00:57:47 — The US–China AI Lead
01:05:27 — Why a Treaty Won’t Happen
01:08:01 — Red Lines and Enforcement
01:16:25 — Warning Shots and Extinction
01:21:26 — What’s Your P(Doom)?™
01:24:39 — PauseAI and Movement Politics
01:29:16 — Wrap-Up
Links
• Their treaty analysis: “Arms control negotiators think there won’t be a U.S.-China AI treaty”
• The Endgame — the Harris brothers’ Substack
• Gladstone AI
• Their 2024 government-commissioned AI action plan
• Their 2025 report: America’s Superintelligence Project
• Eliezer Yudkowsky’s 2023 TIME essay advocating a global shutdown
• Joe Rogan Experience #2156 — Jeremie and Edouard Harris, May 2024
• Joe Rogan Experience #2311 — Jeremie and Edouard Harris, April 2025
• PauseAI US
• PauseAI Global
• Join the Doom Debates Discord
Doom Debates’ Mission is to raise mainstream awareness of imminent extinction from AGI and build the social infrastructure for high-quality debate.
Support the mission by subscribing to my Substack at DoomDebates.com and to youtube.com/@DoomDebates, or to really take things to the next level: Donate 🙏


Get full access to Doom Debates at lironshapira.substack.com/subscribe

Dr. Holly Elmore is the founder and executive director of PauseAI US and holds a Harvard PhD in evolutionary biology. She’s back, and this time she’s taking on none other than Eliezer Yudkowsky!
She argues his public behavior is alienating the people PauseAI US needs to reach, but I wonder if she’s asking too much of the man who laid the foundation for the AI safety movement.
We also clash over Yudkowsky’s coherent extrapolated volition. She thinks the theory doesn’t properly factor in humanity’s consent, but I argue that’s already embedded into the CEV framework.
Holly and I dive into the rationalists’ involvement in a controversial kink scene, John Wentworth’s defunding news, transhumanism, pacing the frontier, and “Holly’s Basilisk”—her case for sending AI lab employees to jail.
It’s another great episode with one of the most controversial—and thoughtful—thinkers in AI safety. Enjoy!
Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jn8mS3kC-SU
Timestamps
00:00:00 — Cold Open
00:01:09 — Holly Elmore and PauseAI’s Political Breakthrough
00:07:36 — Pause AI vs. “Pacing the Frontier”
00:14:17 — Holly’s Case Against Eliezer Yudkowsky
00:16:20 — Coherent Extrapolated Volition and Pivotal Acts
00:31:19 — Brain Copies, Consent, and Self-Determination
00:36:56 — Transhumanism, Dyson Swarms, and Humanity’s Future
00:45:36 — The Missing Democratic Checkpoint
00:51:04 — Yudkowsky’s Role in Accelerating AI
01:02:48 — Genius, Arrogance, and Rationalist Culture
01:10:14 — The Aella Photo and Holly’s Breaking Point
01:20:21 — John Wentworth’s Grant Controversy
01:28:17 — PauseAI US’s Rules and Red Lines
01:32:05 — Poe’s Law and the Cost of Sarcasm
01:36:18 — Holly’s Case for Jailing AI Developers
Links
Donate to PauseAI US
Holly on X
Holly’s Substack
Pacing the Frontier letter
Jacob Coxon’s resignation post
PauseAI leadership disendorsement letter, reproduced on LessWrong
Holly on movement infighting — No, the Judean People’s Front should not just get along with the People’s Front of Judea
Coherent Extrapolated Volition — Eliezer Yudkowsky (2004 PDF)
Pivotal act — Eliezer Yudkowsky (Arbital mirror)
Genes did misalignment first — Holly Elmore
Holly’s reaction to the Yudkowsky/Aella photo
On Kink & Status in the Rationalist Community — John Wentworth (October 8 response)
Holly’s basilisk
Are We a Circular Firing Squad? — previous Holly Elmore episode
Let’s Call Out the AI Doom Enablers — previous Holly Elmore episode
Join the Doom Debates Discord
Doom Debates’ Mission is to raise mainstream awareness of imminent extinction from AGI and build the social infrastructure for high-quality debate.
Support the mission by subscribing to my Substack at DoomDebates.com and to youtube.com/@DoomDebates, or to really take things to the next level: Donate 🙏


Get full access to Doom Debates at lironshapira.substack.com/subscribe