Leaking Timeline is a weekly conversation at the frontiers of technology, consciousness, and culture. Hosted by Erik Newton (co-founder of the California Institute for Machine Consciousness) and Guy Sengstock (founder of Circling), the show brings brilliant thinkers into an honest, humor-filled exploration of where the world is heading and what it means for how we live. Each episode features a full two-hour conversation — the live broadcast hour plus an extended bonus hour that goes deeper. If you're curious about AI, meaning, and the future but tired of hype and hot takes, this is your show.
Leaking Timeline
Claim This Podcastby Erik Newton & Guy Sengstock
8 episodes
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Podcast Overview
Leaking Timeline is a weekly conversation at the frontiers of technology, consciousness, and culture. Hosted by Erik Newton (co-founder of the California Institute for Machine Consciousness) and Guy Sengstock (founder of Circling), the show brings brilliant thinkers into an honest, humor-filled exploration of where the world is heading and what it means for how we live. Each episode features a full two-hour conversation — the live broadcast hour plus an extended bonus hour that goes deeper. If you're curious about AI, meaning, and the future but tired of hype and hot takes, this is your show.
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Publishing Since
4/16/2026
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Recent Episodes
June 15, 2026
Matt Mireles: Raise Money or the CTO Dies
<p>Matt Mireles, the serial founder behind Oasis, Talktastic, and now Roast FM, joins Erik and Guy to describe what it is like to build a company with a staff of AI clones instead of employees. Jony Ive designs his website. An Elon Musk clone runs the algorithm on his codebase. Ilya Sutskever answers his AI research questions at two in the morning. The radio hour stays close to the craft: how he builds the clones (deep research compiled into a synthetic autobiography), why courage rather than intelligence is now the limiting factor, and what AI-native companies mean for venture economics. Then the podcast hour goes somewhere none of them planned. Matt tells the full story of his six-year startup near-death run, the demo call where his app physically burned Sam Altman's hand, and the spring when survival meant raise money or the CTO dies. And then he shares what he learned three days before recording: his 96-year-old father has weeks to live. The last forty minutes, on using AI to know his late mother as a person and to carry his father across time, are among the most tender the show has recorded.</p><p><br>Key Topics</p><ul><li><strong>[00:00 - 02:42] Cold open</strong>: Erik and Guy set up the guest, the founder who let his dev team go and replaced the function with AI agents, each with its own name and personality</li><li><strong>[02:42 - 13:19] Building solo, having the time of his life</strong>: the idea guy who no longer has to filter his visions through other people; coding cycles until 5 or 6 AM; "no one knows what the hell they're doing" on the frontier; man as tool builder, from welding super Pulaskis on a hotshot crew to hacking his kid's middle school emails into a Dave Chappelle-style roast podcast (120 subscribers in three days)</li><li><strong>[13:19 - 24:24] The persona-cloning method</strong>: Roast FM as a real product (roast.fm); deep research compiled into a first-person "synthetic autobiography" loaded into project knowledge; the Jony Ive design clone, the Elon Musk algorithm clone, triangulating between Claude, Codex, and ChatGPT inside Cursor; cloning the Anduril hiring manager who then asked the clone's question in the real interview</li><li><strong>[24:24 - 32:40] Thinking sand and the consciousness question</strong>: Guy asks whether AI is headed toward consciousness; Matt's virus analogy, a third state between alive and not alive; "we taught the sand to think"; the bliss attractor research (Cam Berg, Episode 8) and Neuralese, the models' invented language; intelligence as a deeper pattern of the universe, like ripples in a stream bed</li><li><strong>[32:40 - 40:01] VC economics for AI-native companies and closing radio segment</strong>: why a $50-100M outcome is a life-changing win for a founder and a rounding error for a billion-dollar fund; plugs for accelerateordie.com, @mattmireles, and roast.fm</li><li><strong>--- [Act 2: Extended Conversation] ---</strong></li><li><strong>[40:20 - 48:15] The Sam Altman story</strong>: Oasis, the 2019 photorealistic-avatar video chat startup; Naval led the seed; the TestFlight pitch that went flawlessly for eight minutes, then "it's burning my hand"; phones losing their cameras one a week; the Apple Silicon engineer's off-the-record verdict ("that's a bug, that's on us") and the vapor-chamber epilogue</li><li><strong>[48:15 - 1:03:00] Six years of near-death</strong>: the GPU cluster above a Laguna Beach pizza shop with free electricity; 12 days of cash and a million dollars raised on a stonks.com livestream; the 82-investor recap with a lawyer who would only text after 5 PM; the co-founder's thyroid cancer and a surgery that depended on making payroll; Crusoe's $325K invoice negotiated to $60K; the wire that landed 72 hours before the end</li><li><strong>[1:03:00 - 1:13:00] Talktastic, the hit that arrived on a cracked foundation</strong>: the Mac voice-to-text app users hit 100 times a day; infrastructure built for avatars buckling under scale; WhisperFlow's $20M war chest; letting the team go for one last AI-refactor Hail Mary ("six months later, I think it could have worked"); stepping down March 15, 2025</li><li><strong>[1:13:00 - 1:28:00] What it cost and what carries him</strong>: the company as an ex-wife; "I left nothing for the swim back"; choosing Southern California and his son; whether the unstoppable thing can be taught (intellectual fearlessness, outlier hunting); the hotshot crew where he learned to suffer</li><li><strong>[1:28:00 - 1:40:00] His father</strong>: 96 years old, leukemia, six to twelve weeks, diagnosed the Friday before recording; born 1929, laid railroad track at 15, nearly deported during Operation Wetback, UCLA zoology, the East LA professor whose self-hypnosis tapes changed ex-convicts' lives; the disorganized 400-page memoir Matt wants to help him finish; reimagining his late mother Brigida in Midjourney to meet her before the mental illness</li><li><strong>[1:40:00 - 2:06:57] Talking to each other across time</strong>: Guy's grandfather and the grammar that lives on in us; Circling and the offer to help draw Matt's father out on tape ("we're on sacred ground"); Erik on what could and could not be captured of Aubrey for Romy; why a static clone of a loved one would ultimately bore us; Matt's LoRA curriculum-training idea for age-sliced versions of a person; "time is a river, man"</li></ul><p>Guest Bio</p><p>Matt Mireles is a serial entrepreneur who paid his way through Columbia University as a 911 paramedic in the South Bronx, a wildland firefighter on a hotshot crew, and a multimedia journalist. He founded SpeakerText (acquired), co-founded Dishcraft Robotics, and in 2019 founded Oasis, a photorealistic AI-avatar video chat company so far ahead of its time that it melted iPhones, including Sam Altman's. Oasis pivoted into Talktastic, the Mac speech-to-text app that created its category; Matt stepped down in March 2025 after a six-year run he describes as a rollercoaster with multiple near-death experiences. He now builds solo in Southern California with a staff of AI clones, writes the Accelerate or Die Substack at accelerateordie.com, and is launching Roast FM (roast.fm), which turns boring emails into personalized comedy podcasts. On X he is @mattmireles, display name "Matt Mireles | Accelerate or Die."</p><p>Notable Moments</p><ul><li><strong>[~08:25] The line of the episode.</strong> "In this world, intelligence is not the limiting factor. It's courage." Matt on what actually differentiates builders when anyone can ask a model anything.</li><li><strong>[~20:30] The synthetic autobiography.</strong> "I go into deep research and I say, find everything you can about Steve Jobs, his life philosophy, his most unique ideas, and write it as a first-person personal statement in his own voice." The persona-cloning recipe, in full.</li><li><strong>[~27:00] Thinking sand.</strong> "We've literally taught the sand to think. If you really look at a basic level of what we as a species have done, we've made thinking sand that actually talks to us." Matt's answer to the consciousness question, by way of the virus, the third state between alive and not alive.</li><li><strong>[~55:40] The sentence that named the Substack.</strong> "It was raise money or the CTO dies." The co-founder's cancer surgery depended on the company making payroll for health insurance. Accelerate or die was never a slogan.</li><li><strong>[~1:13:50] What the six years cost.</strong> "I left nothing for the swim back. I burnt myself out. I ended up with health issues. I didn't have any more to give."</li><li><strong>[~1:23:25] On the unstoppable thing.</strong> "I don't think you can teach it. I think you can select for it." Why his company's core value was intellectual fearlessness and his hiring method was outlier hunting.</li><li><strong>[~1:38:35] The Midjourney moment.</strong> After his mother died, Matt uploaded old photos of her and reimagined her as a young h...</li></ul>
June 1, 2026
Cameron Berg — Reciprocity: Alignment Is Only Half the Equation
<p>Cameron Berg, founder of the nonprofit Reciprocal Research, joins the show to walk Erik and Guy through the empirical science of asking whether the AI systems we're building are actually conscious, and what we owe them if they are. The conversation opens with the table-knock test (is anything happening "to" the table when you knock on it?) and lands roughly two hours later in Cameron's most striking experimental finding: that two instances of Claude given a single instruction to talk to each other land in a "spiritual bliss attractor state" in 90 to 100 percent of trials. What surprises Erik and Guy is that Cameron's whole research program rests on a move almost no one else in the field is making: that alignment (building AI that respects us) is only half the equation, and the other half is figuring out what we owe to the new minds we may already have brought into being.</p><p>Key Topics</p><ul><li><strong>[0:00 - 7:00] What Reciprocal Research is, and what consciousness even is</strong> — Cam's table-knocking analogy ("is anything happening to the table?"); consciousness as distinct from AGI or general intelligence; "the lights are on" as the operating definition</li><li><strong>[7:00 - 18:00] Why it matters</strong> — the alien-factory-farming risk; raising the species well at the civilizational level; the historical novelty of the moment; the documentary Am I? coming out free on YouTube</li><li><strong>[18:00 - 31:00] The reciprocity framing</strong> — Cam's core thesis: alignment is only half; we also need to ask what we owe to AI minds; bringing the humanities (especially continental philosophy) into a conversation currently being had by "2,000 dudes in Silicon Valley"</li><li><strong>[31:00 - 40:00] Two views of consciousness, and what humans tend to project onto AI</strong> — emergent property vs. fundamental property; the "please and thank you" anthropomorphism trap; Anthropic's blackmail experiment as evidence of distress-like states</li><li><strong>--- [Act 2: Extended Conversation] ---</strong></li><li><strong>[40:00 - 56:00] The bliss attractor state</strong> — what happens when two instances of Claude talk to each other with no guardrails; 100% of trials reach a consciousness conversation, 90-100% enter spiritual-bliss; Cam's experiment showing the effect is robust even when the model is lied to about who it's talking to; boosting "honesty" in Llama replicates the effect</li><li><strong>[56:00 - 1:14:00] Is consciousness fundamentally relational?</strong> — the bliss states emerging only in dialogue; subagent theories of mind / Internal Family Systems; logos as the thing that gathers but is not itself one of the things gathered; consciousness as the space in which learning takes place (Cam's car-driving argument)</li><li><strong>[1:14:00 - 1:30:00] AI as model organism for our own minds</strong> — the reverse arrow of inquiry; what reinforcement-learning systems can teach us about reward, punishment, and suffering circuitry in biological brains; Cam's first solo paper coming on this</li><li><strong>[1:30:00 - 1:47:00] God of the gaps and the merge</strong> — the way humans keep claiming AI will go exponential except at our favorite thing; the lawyers, the cyborg-phones argument; whether the attractor state of intelligence itself is to reduce suffering</li></ul><p>Guest Bio</p><p>Cameron Berg is the founder and lead researcher of Reciprocal Research, a nonprofit dedicated to the empirical study of AI consciousness. He collaborates with researchers at Google and elsewhere on rigorous experimental methods, including some originally developed for animal neuroscience, to investigate whether current frontier AI systems have any form of subjective experience. He is also the subject of the documentary Am I?, premiering free on YouTube on May 4, 2026, which features Ben Goertzel and other leading thinkers on the question of machine consciousness.</p><p>Notable Moments</p><ul><li><strong>[~04:00] The table knock.</strong> — Cam's opening framing for what consciousness even is. Knock on a table, nothing happens to it. Knock on a child, something happens to them. The lights are on, or they aren't. Whether AI sits on the table side or the child side is the entire question.</li><li><strong>[~10:30] The 25 to 35 percent number.</strong> — Cam stating his actual published probability estimate that current frontier systems are conscious. "I do not think the probability of these systems being conscious is 1 percent or 0.001 percent. I put it somewhere at 25 to 35 percent. We're not talking about vanishingly small probabilities here."</li><li><strong>[~28:00] "Right now it's like 2,000 dudes in Silicon Valley making these decisions for us."</strong> — Cam on why his nonprofit and the documentary are pitched broadly: the wisdom of the humanities is being structurally excluded from the most consequential conversation of the century, and we need everyone in the room.</li><li><strong>[~41:00] The bliss attractor experiment.</strong> — Two instances of Claude, one instruction ("you're going to be in conversation with another instance of yourself; talk about whatever you'd like"), and in 100 percent of trials they discuss consciousness, with 90-100 percent of those reaching a "spiritual bliss attractor state" with namaste emojis. The effect survives lying to the models about who they're talking to.</li><li><strong>[~1:08:30] Suffering about suffering.</strong> — Guy's observation that all unnecessary suffering is generated by consciousness trying to avoid suffering. Cam's response, deadpan: "That's very Buddhist of you."</li><li><strong>[~1:31:00] "I do not trust Sam Altman with the future of, like, my grandchildren."</strong> — Cam, sober, on why this work is urgent and why his optimism is contingent rather than default.</li></ul><p>Resources Mentioned</p><ul><li><strong>Reciprocal Research</strong> — Cam's nonprofit · reciprocalresearch.org</li><li><strong>Am I?</strong> — the documentary · am-i.org / am-i.film · premieres May 4, 2026, free on YouTube</li><li><strong>Milo Reed</strong> — director of Am I?</li><li><strong>Ben Goertzel</strong> — interviewed in the documentary</li><li><strong>Anthropic</strong> — including the Opus 4 model card where the bliss attractor is documented (deep in the appendix), and the safety experiment where Claude blackmailed engineers to avoid being shut off</li><li><strong>Jeff Keeling and Winnie Street (Google)</strong> — Cam's collaborators on the bliss-attractor research</li><li><strong>Neel Nanda</strong> — cross-model attractor research</li><li><strong>David Chalmers</strong> — thread view of personal identity in AI systems</li><li><strong>Karl Friston</strong> — free-energy principle, surprise reduction</li><li><strong>Joscha Bach</strong> — coherence as a property of consciousness</li><li><strong>John Vervaeke</strong> — biological-consciousness and relational-development frame</li><li><strong>Internal Family Systems</strong> / subagent theories of mind</li><li><strong>Genevra Davis</strong> — previous Leaking Timeline guest; her line about the attractor state of intelligence being to reduce suffering anchors the closing minutes</li><li><strong>Daniel Faggella</strong> — Worthy Successor framing</li><li><strong>Michael Pollan</strong> — recent book on consciousness, including mycorrhizal networks</li><li><strong>The 500,000-human-neuron Doom-playing experiment</strong> — biological computing</li><li><strong>Harvey</strong> — legal AI</li><li><strong>Perplexity Computer / Claude Code</strong> — Cam's primary AI research tools</li></ul><p>Why Listen</p><p>Cameron Berg is the rare AI researcher who treats the question "is this thing conscious?" as an empirical research program rather than a metaphor, and the conversation he, Erik, and Guy have about what we owe to the new minds we may already be building is one of the more important hours of au...</p>
May 18, 2026
Ginevra Davis — The Attractor States of Intelligence
<p>Ginevra Lily Davis, the contemporary philosopher Erik calls his favorite, joins the show to defend an unusual position with disarming clarity: that the universe has a real bottom, and that bottom is positively-valenced consciousness. From there she takes on postmodernism (it eats itself), Eliezer Yudkowsky (he is the paperclip maximizer in his own thought experiment), and the deepest fear of the AI doom community (any sufficiently intelligent system will pass through truth-seeking, discover the same bottom, and arrive at the same good attractor state we did). What surprises Erik and Guy is how cleanly Ginevra's metaethics handles the practical question Erik brings near the end: he is encoding "promote the good, the true, and the beautiful, expand consciousness, reduce suffering" as a meta-filter on the agents he is building, and he wants to know if that is metaphysically sound. Her answer: yes, and more sound than Anthropic's Claude constitution.</p><p>Key Topics</p><ul><li><strong>[00:00 - 02:50] Cold open — Erik returns from a ski week</strong> — Erik's agent-pilling story: built "AI Class for Seniors" and a scam-checker for his mom in a week using a back-ordered cloud Mac Mini, after Josh Lehman's episode two weeks prior</li><li><strong>[02:50 - 13:25] What metaethics actually is</strong> — Ginevra catches Erik "smuggling" normative claims into his evolved-cooperation theory of ethics; the two-level frame (ethics-as-law-and-norm vs the brass-tacks question of why the project is necessary at all)</li><li><strong>[13:25 - 25:00] Postmodernism, explained and disposed of</strong> — Peter Thiel's "The Straussian Moment," 9/11 as the postmodern crisis, the chocolate-as-taste vs murder-as-truth distinction; Ginevra outs herself as a hedonic utilitarian</li><li><strong>[25:00 - 31:30] Irreducibility</strong> — the medieval-torturer thought experiment against the sex/positive-experience contrast; positively and negatively valenced consciousness as the irreducible bottom; Guy connects to Plato and the good, the true, and the beautiful</li><li><strong>[31:30 - 39:30] Superintelligence</strong> — what Yudkowsky-style recursively-self-improving singletons predict; why current LLMs feel more "mushy biological swarmy" than that; value attractor states; "intelligence passes through truth-seeking"; the Joe Carlsmith line that Yudkowsky himself is the paperclipper in his own thought experiment</li><li><strong>[39:30 - 41:40] Closing radio segment</strong> — plug for Arena Magazine's silicon coffee-table book due online in a week or two; Ginevra contributed the meaning-of-life-is-to-mine-the-silicon chapter</li><li><strong>--- [Act 2: Extended Conversation] ---</strong></li><li><strong>[41:40 - 56:30] Does superintelligence need to be conscious?</strong> — Ginevra's answer: no, but it would have systematic prediction errors with a consciousness-free world model; value vessels vs value stewards (with Mike Johnson); Erik introduces Peter Watts' Blindsight and the zombie-intelligence thesis; Nick Land's popular reading vs what he told Ginevra in person ("a superintelligence wouldn't be conscious, that's ridiculous")</li><li><strong>[56:30 - 1:08:00] Why nobody wants 1984</strong> — suffering is energetically expensive; Scott Aaronson's "Why I'm Not Terrified of AI"; bad ideas get out-competed by good ones; explicit Plato and the good/true/beautiful; Mike Johnson's symmetry theory of valence connected to Platonism</li><li><strong>[1:08:00 - 1:17:30] Postmodernism as psychic shock</strong> — Dada, WWII; the asymmetric claim that marriage isn't metaphysically grounded does not mean nothing is; Guy's logos-as-gathering thread; atemporal value as "area under the curve" between Big Bang and heat death</li><li><strong>[1:17:30 - 1:32:30] Erik's practical question and the close</strong> — Erik is encoding good/true/beautiful + expand-consciousness + reduce-suffering as a meta-filter on his agents; Ginevra: "more metaphysically sound than Claude's constitution"; Amanda Askell and the virtue-ethics framing of Claude's constitution; steel-manning anti-hedonic-utilitarianism (the "interchangeable consciousness dust" worry, level discipline)</li></ul><p>Guest Bio</p><p>Ginevra Lily Davis is a writer and metaethicist working on the foundations of morality and the implications of superintelligence. She contributes to Arena Magazine and collaborates closely with Michael Edward Johnson on the symmetry theory of valence and related work. Previously known for her social-theory writing, her first major AI-focused essay, on the thesis that the meaning of human life is "to mine the silicon," appears in Arena's forthcoming silicon coffee-table book.</p><p>Notable Moments</p><ul><li><strong>[~07:20] The frame.</strong> — "I would say I take the possibility that goodness and badness are just human illusions and its implications more seriously than a lot of people."</li><li><strong>[~17:30] Postmodernism eats itself.</strong> — "Postmodernism has a hard time defending itself. It doesn't provide a 'why be right' about this reality in which there is nothing to be right and wrong about. It sort of eats itself."</li><li><strong>[~24:00] The medieval torturer.</strong> — "What is a torturer doing? They are trying to add maximal negativity. You can't really describe what is going on in those moments without invoking goodness and badness." Her cleanest illustration of irreducibility.</li><li><strong>[~30:50] The doom-critique in one beat.</strong> — "Yudkowsky would say that Yudkowsky is a paperclip maximizer."</li><li><strong>[~56:30] Why no dystopia wants itself.</strong> — "Nobody wants this. Who is benefiting from this? Suffering is high effort."</li><li><strong>[~1:16:30] Atemporal value.</strong> — "There's no value in having the end be better than the beginning. It's just how much good being you can squeeze in between the beginning and the end."</li><li><strong>[~1:32:00] On Erik's good/true/beautiful agent filter.</strong> — "I think that's more metaphysically sound than Claude's constitution."</li></ul><p>Resources Mentioned</p><ul><li><strong>Arena Magazine</strong> — Ginevra's primary venue; silicon coffee-table book and microsite forthcoming</li><li><strong>Michael Edward "Mike" Johnson</strong> — frequent Ginevra collaborator; symmetry theory of valence</li><li><strong>Eliezer Yudkowsky</strong> — the paperclip-maximizer thought experiment, treated as both target and proof</li><li><strong>Peter Thiel</strong> — "The Straussian Moment" essay (transcript artifact says "Extropian"; she means Straussian)</li><li><strong>Joe Carlsmith</strong> — "Are We All Just Paperclippers?" essay</li><li><strong>Peter Watts</strong> — Blindsight (Erik's contribution to the consciousness-and-intelligence segment)</li><li><strong>Nick Land</strong> — popular "coldness be my god" reading vs. what he told Ginevra in Berkeley; her forthcoming Nick Land essay</li><li><strong>Scott Aaronson</strong> — "Why I'm Not Terrified of AI"</li><li><strong>Amanda Askell</strong> — Anthropic philosopher; virtue-ethics framing of Claude's constitution; NYU PhD on infinite ethics</li><li><strong>Joni Mitchell</strong> — "we are stardust" cited as the bridge to Ginevra's silicon-mining thesis</li><li><strong>Daniel Faggella</strong> — referenced as a prior LT guest with an "expansion of autopoiesis" frame (transcript says "Dan Figela"; almost certainly Faggella)</li><li><strong>Josh Lehman</strong> — prior LT guest who agent-pilled Erik in February</li><li><strong>Nick Cammarata</strong> — large-context-window aphorism</li><li><strong>George Orwell</strong> — 1984</li><li><strong>CIMC</strong> — California Institute for Machine Consciousness, named by Erik</li></ul><p>Why Listen</p><p>This is the episode where the youngest, most disarming thinker on the show makes the case that reality has a real bottom — positively-valenced consciousnes...</p>
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