2025: A Reckoning
Podcast with Robert Wright (and this one has no paywall)
Robert Wright and I meet every two weeks or so to discuss the issues of the day. This is a joint production of Small Potatoes and Bob’s Non-Zero Podcast. Here’s the most recent meeting.
0:00 David Lynch, Jane Goodall, and other notable 2025 losses
8:35 When Bob called James Watson a "mad scientist"
13:38 Predicting 2050: Star Trek abundance vs. "Total Chaos Planet"?
21:22 The age of algorithmically guided attention
25:54 Global poverty reduction (and its flip side)
30:30 Will anyone care if your newsletter is AI-written?
34:24 Trump's USAID cuts killed a lot of people
37:24 Elon Musk, Alex Karp, and the age of the "manifestly crazy"
40:40 Can the Supreme Court stop Trump?
44:54 JD Vance's identity crisis: Tech bro or populist?
48:51 The "Black Swan": When AI starts killing people
52:46 AI scientific breakthroughs to come
59:58 Bob and Paul's 2025 Entertainment Awards
1:04:28 Which jobs are truly AI-proof?
1:18:15 Bob's Epstein document deep-dive
1:27:15 Bill Ackman's conspiracy-theory-brained year
1:30:44 Are US arms sales pushing China to invade Taiwan?
1:36:49 Barry Weiss’s journalistic scruples
In your calculation about not having a paywall you forgot about all the paying subscribers, who get a lot of satisfaction from knowing that many others can’t see the overtime segment. Now they might not renew their subscription after having this feeling of superiority taken away from them.
I hope this decision won’t bring about your financial ruin in 2026. On a positive note, it might help you to tear down the face-eating mask of celebrity.
Happy New Year!
Paul, way to go adamantly expressing your disgust at the cancellation of US Aid. I think that you used the term evil, a term which is not common coming from an academic psychologist. But it certainly applies.