Bhtv: Science Faction (fast)

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” ...

Teaser ... What is Bob doing in Qatar? ... "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold." Why Yeats felt this way ... Peter Thiel's Antichrist theory ... Nikita: COVID was a weird time, and nothing has been the same since ... Why Bob feels things are falling apart ... Were things ever in order? ... "Inner emigration": tuning out the world as self-care ... A reaction to a drone strike: "Loud noises don't wake me up" ... Young people are turning away from social media ... When Spain lost all power and cellular coverage ... War as a "major inconvenience" ... Bob's prediction about Ukraine's future retaliation for Pokrovsk ... Nikita's impressions from Europe ... Nonzero Reading Club THIS SATURDAY: Norbert Wiener's God & Golem, Inc. ... Deepfakes and the future of news ... Russia's first humanoid robot falls down ...

Teaser ... Shadi’s path to his new book, The Case for American Power ... George W. Bush’s “Freedom Agenda” ... Does America’s role in Gaza undermine Shadi’s case? ... Shadi’s case for US moral supremacy ... What does China want? ... What justifies military intervention? ... Bob: International law is the answer ... Heading to Overtime ...

This week in underappreciated world history ... Were the elections all—or just mostly—bad news for Trump? ... Will Trump invade Venezuela? ... Epstein's creepy relationship with Trump ... What’s the shutdown fight really about? ... Mickey vs Ezra Klein (in absentia) on healthcare ... Back down the Epstein rabbit hole ... Was Tucker playing 4D chess with the Fuentes interview? ... What happened to the blogosphere? ... The case for (and against) Bari Weiss ... AI doom in fiction vs reality ... The AI bubble: Dot-com déjà vu? ... AOC in 2028? ... Mickey: Beware of gym girls! ...

The Carlson-Fuentes interview controversy ... Paul: Candidate Carlson is coming ... Is gatekeeping dead? ... Is Carlson’s show respectable? ... Carlson and Fuentes on the Israel lobby ... William F. Buckley as MAGA precursor ... Is antisemitism more organic on the right or left? ... Heading to Overtime ...

Bob tries to lower American Prestige’s self-esteem ... The Trump-Xi trade talks ... Making sense of Trump’s nuclear saber-rattling ... Signs of a US-China vibe shift ... Is AI accelerating science? ... Bill Gates’s climate change of heart ... This week’s Gaza ceasefire death toll ... Overtime preview: Bob vs Danny on international law ...

Teaser ... Trump on drug cartels: "We're gonna kill them. They're gonna be like, dead." ... Venezuela: Regime change disguised as drug war ... Marco Rubio holds all the foreign policy power ... Trump Doctrine candidate #1: "Jump at the chance to use force" ... Trump Doctrine candidate #2: Monroe 2.0 ... Roy Cohn's philosophy: "It is a nation of men, not laws" ... Bob: There's value in hypocrisy ... Trump is paving the way for a more competent tyrant ... Could Trump actually be good for the world? ... Trump the comedian ... Heading to Overtime: Bob's mysterious invitation-only conference ...

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What triggered Trump’s 100-percent tariff threat? ... How China is mirroring the US playbook ... The real escalation: America's "50% rule" ... Why has US media coverage been so bad? ... Why has US media coverage been so bad? ... US China policy as cognitive empathy failure ... Heading to Overtime ...

Teaser ... Why Liron became a Yudkowskian ... Eliezer Yudkowsky’s vision of AI apocalypse ... Does intelligence want power? ... Decoding Yudkowsky’s key Darwinian metaphor ... Is doomerism crowding out other AI worries? ... Liron: The silent majority is very AI anxious ... Heading to Overtime ...