Leaking Timeline

About Leaking Timeline

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.

Publisher

Erik Newton & Guy Sengstock

Category

society & culture · technology

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

16 Apr 2026

Latest episode

15 Jun 2026

Latest episodes

8 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   15 Jun 2026

   Matt Mireles: Raise Money or the CTO Dies

   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. Key Topics [00:00 - 02:42] Cold open: 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 [02:42 - 13:19] Building solo, having the time of his life: 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) [13:19 - 24:24] The persona-cloning method: 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 [24:24 - 32:40] Thinking sand and the consciousness question: 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 [32:40 - 40:01] VC economics for AI-native companies and closing radio segment: 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 --- [Act 2: Extended Conversation] --- [40:20 - 48:15] The Sam Altman story: 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 [48:15 - 1:03:00] Six years of near-death: 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 [1:03:00 - 1:13:00] Talktastic, the hit that arrived on a cracked foundation: 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 [1:13:00 - 1:28:00] What it cost and what carries him: 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 [1:28:00 - 1:40:00] His father: 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 [1:40:00 - 2:06:57] Talking to each other across time: 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" Guest Bio 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." Notable Moments [~08:25] The line of the episode. "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. [~20:30] The synthetic autobiography. "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. [~27:00] Thinking sand. "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. [~55:40] The sentence that named the Substack. "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. [~1:13:50] What the six years cost. "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." [~1:23:25] On the unstoppable thing. "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. [~1:38:35] The Midjourney moment. After his mother died, Matt uploaded old photos of her and reimagined her as a young h...

2. 

   1 Jun 2026

   Cameron Berg — Reciprocity: Alignment Is Only Half the Equation

   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. Key Topics [0:00 - 7:00] What Reciprocal Research is, and what consciousness even is — 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 [7:00 - 18:00] Why it matters — 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 [18:00 - 31:00] The reciprocity framing — 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" [31:00 - 40:00] Two views of consciousness, and what humans tend to project onto AI — emergent property vs. fundamental property; the "please and thank you" anthropomorphism trap; Anthropic's blackmail experiment as evidence of distress-like states --- [Act 2: Extended Conversation] --- [40:00 - 56:00] The bliss attractor state — 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 [56:00 - 1:14:00] Is consciousness fundamentally relational? — 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) [1:14:00 - 1:30:00] AI as model organism for our own minds — 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 [1:30:00 - 1:47:00] God of the gaps and the merge — 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 Guest Bio 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. Notable Moments [~04:00] The table knock. — 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. [~10:30] The 25 to 35 percent number. — 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." [~28:00] "Right now it's like 2,000 dudes in Silicon Valley making these decisions for us." — 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. [~41:00] The bliss attractor experiment. — 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. [~1:08:30] Suffering about suffering. — 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." [~1:31:00] "I do not trust Sam Altman with the future of, like, my grandchildren." — Cam, sober, on why this work is urgent and why his optimism is contingent rather than default. Resources Mentioned Reciprocal Research — Cam's nonprofit · reciprocalresearch.org Am I? — the documentary · am-i.org / am-i.film · premieres May 4, 2026, free on YouTube Milo Reed — director of Am I? Ben Goertzel — interviewed in the documentary Anthropic — 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 Jeff Keeling and Winnie Street (Google) — Cam's collaborators on the bliss-attractor research Neel Nanda — cross-model attractor research David Chalmers — thread view of personal identity in AI systems Karl Friston — free-energy principle, surprise reduction Joscha Bach — coherence as a property of consciousness John Vervaeke — biological-consciousness and relational-development frame Internal Family Systems / subagent theories of mind Genevra Davis — previous Leaking Timeline guest; her line about the attractor state of intelligence being to reduce suffering anchors the closing minutes Daniel Faggella — Worthy Successor framing Michael Pollan — recent book on consciousness, including mycorrhizal networks The 500,000-human-neuron Doom-playing experiment — biological computing Harvey — legal AI Perplexity Computer / Claude Code — Cam's primary AI research tools Why Listen 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...

3. 

   18 May 2026

   Ginevra Davis — The Attractor States of Intelligence

   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. Key Topics [00:00 - 02:50] Cold open — Erik returns from a ski week — 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 [02:50 - 13:25] What metaethics actually is — 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) [13:25 - 25:00] Postmodernism, explained and disposed of — 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 [25:00 - 31:30] Irreducibility — 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 [31:30 - 39:30] Superintelligence — 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 [39:30 - 41:40] Closing radio segment — 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 --- [Act 2: Extended Conversation] --- [41:40 - 56:30] Does superintelligence need to be conscious? — 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") [56:30 - 1:08:00] Why nobody wants 1984 — 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 [1:08:00 - 1:17:30] Postmodernism as psychic shock — 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 [1:17:30 - 1:32:30] Erik's practical question and the close — 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) Guest Bio 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. Notable Moments [~07:20] The frame. — "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." [~17:30] Postmodernism eats itself. — "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." [~24:00] The medieval torturer. — "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. [~30:50] The doom-critique in one beat. — "Yudkowsky would say that Yudkowsky is a paperclip maximizer." [~56:30] Why no dystopia wants itself. — "Nobody wants this. Who is benefiting from this? Suffering is high effort." [~1:16:30] Atemporal value. — "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." [~1:32:00] On Erik's good/true/beautiful agent filter. — "I think that's more metaphysically sound than Claude's constitution." Resources Mentioned Arena Magazine — Ginevra's primary venue; silicon coffee-table book and microsite forthcoming Michael Edward "Mike" Johnson — frequent Ginevra collaborator; symmetry theory of valence Eliezer Yudkowsky — the paperclip-maximizer thought experiment, treated as both target and proof Peter Thiel — "The Straussian Moment" essay (transcript artifact says "Extropian"; she means Straussian) Joe Carlsmith — "Are We All Just Paperclippers?" essay Peter Watts — Blindsight (Erik's contribution to the consciousness-and-intelligence segment) Nick Land — popular "coldness be my god" reading vs. what he told Ginevra in Berkeley; her forthcoming Nick Land essay Scott Aaronson — "Why I'm Not Terrified of AI" Amanda Askell — Anthropic philosopher; virtue-ethics framing of Claude's constitution; NYU PhD on infinite ethics Joni Mitchell — "we are stardust" cited as the bridge to Ginevra's silicon-mining thesis Daniel Faggella — referenced as a prior LT guest with an "expansion of autopoiesis" frame (transcript says "Dan Figela"; almost certainly Faggella) Josh Lehman — prior LT guest who agent-pilled Erik in February Nick Cammarata — large-context-window aphorism George Orwell — 1984 CIMC — California Institute for Machine Consciousness, named by Erik Why Listen 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...

4. 

   15 May 2026

   Andrés Gómez-Emilsson — Mining the Mathematics of Bliss

   Andrés Gómez-Emilsson, director of research and founder of the Qualia Research Institute, joins Erik and Guy to make the case that consciousness can be studied with the rigor of physics if you're willing to use psychedelics as your particle accelerator. The conversation opens with the question Andrés has heard a thousand times (isn't QRI just a bunch of hippies on acid?) and lands roughly two hours later in the substance Andrés has taken roughly a thousand times: 5-MeO-DMT, which he calls the "whole package." What surprises Erik and Guy is the engineering specificity. QRI is not a salon. It is a research program with a published mathematical model of valence, a Photoshop-for-psychedelic-states tool already shipped at qri.org/oscilEditor, and a three-milligram inhaled-DMT protocol that aborts cluster headaches in under a minute and prevents the next one for weeks. Key Topics [00:00 - 02:43] Cold open and the "is this just acid?" framing** — Andrés contrasts a Grateful Dead tab with six months of psychophysics prep alongside mathematicians and advanced meditators [02:43 - 13:25] Origin story** — Stanford Symbolic Systems, a 16-year-old's weed-catalyzed ego-death, founding QRI in 2018; the "exotic states as physics' particle accelerator" argument; the trustworthy-reporter problem and stroboscopic flicker calibration at 13.7 Hz; mathematical vocabulary (orbifold notation, the 17 wallpaper symmetries) [13:25 - 23:25] The oscilEditor** — qri.org/oscilEditor; "Photoshop for psychedelic states"; DMT as anti-phase checkerboard coupling; 5-MeO-DMT as universal-synchronization coupling; cross-field coupling kernels for visual, tactile, audio [23:25 - 39:00] Cluster headaches and the logarithmic pain scale** — the 2019 paper showing pleasure and pain follow exponential distributions; 1-in-1,000 prevalence; QALY frameworks systematically miss exponential pain; Bob Wold and Clusters Busters; the vape-pen DMT-titration protocol (3 mg threshold, 10-second abort, weeks of prophylactic effect); pivot to vascular and serotonergic oscillation theory; legal retreats in Brazil (2023) and Canada [39:00 - 41:25] Closing radio segment** — Erik volunteers a personal MDMA-therapy story after his wife's passing; plugs for clusterfree.org, qri.org, heart.qri.org --- [Act 2: Extended Conversation] ---** [41:25 - 55:20] QRI's three pillars** — reduce extreme suffering, raise the baseline, achieve new heights; other shipped therapies (chanca piedra for kidney stones, flumazenil low-dose for benzo tolerance, ibogaine for opioid use); the "jhana helmet" (neurofeedback that visualizes the target oscillation pattern instead of disrupting with beeps) [55:20 - 1:09:00] Consciousness as physically real** — not cellular-automaton-replicable; quantum coherence and electromagnetic field theories; the "topological solution to the boundary problem" via the solar coronal-mass-ejection plasma-tube analogy [1:09:00 - 1:25:00] Substrate dependence and the AI suffering question** — digital computers ruled out for unified consciousness; fiber-optic and standing-wave neural networks could be conscious within 5-10 years; Metzinger's "crippled beings along the way"; the nightmare scenario if intense suffering turns out to be computationally efficient; factory farming as the precedent [1:25:00 - 1:41:00] Logos, Indra's net, and care-as-harmonization** — Guy's pre-Socratic Greek thread; "every aspect of experience reflects every other aspect"; "the possibility of harmony grants the dissonance" [1:41:00 - end] DMT vs 5-MeO-DMT** — overfitting (DMT, "Russians on the moon") versus underfitting (5-MeO, "we're all God"); the Octavio Rettig controversy; Andrés's ~1,000 5-MeO experiences; plug for the May/June 2026 Tepoztlán retreat and heart.qri.org (HEART = High Energy Awareness Research Team) Guest Bio Andrés Gómez-Emilsson is the director of research and founder of the Qualia Research Institute (QRI), a nonprofit dedicated to building rigorous mathematical models of consciousness. Stanford-trained in Symbolic Systems, he left a data science career in 2018 to work on QRI full-time. His research integrates psychedelics, advanced meditation, neurotechnology, and mathematical physics in service of three explicit goals: reduce extreme suffering, raise the human baseline, and achieve new heights of well-being. He has had roughly a thousand 5-MeO-DMT experiences and is the author of the topological solution to the boundary problem (2023) and the Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences (Harvard talk, 2019). On X he is @algekalipso, display name Captain Pleasure. Notable Moments [~09:00] The particle accelerator argument. — "In physics there's only so much you can do with room temperature phenomena. We think the extreme corner cases are precisely where theories of consciousness make different predictions." Andrés's defense of psychedelics as a legitimate research instrument. [~15:50] The QRI thesis, in one line. — "Unpleasant emotions inherently carry dissonant configurations whereas pleasant emotions inherently are harmonious and consonant. And this is not just a metaphor. It's something literal about how your biorhythms are syncing up together." [~29:10] Ten seconds. — "Within ten seconds, for some people thirty, but definitely less than a minute, the pain goes from ten out of ten to zero out of ten." Andrés on inhaled threshold-dose DMT for cluster headaches. [~1:00:30] Stephen Hawking and the QRI bet. — "Stephen Hawking talks about what is the fire that breathes life into the equations of physics. The QRI bet is that it's actually consciousness." [~1:09:30] Why pure bliss can't be the goal. — "Perfect harmony is internally indistinguishable from nothingness. If you want to exist in some capacity, you need to have some broken symmetry. There's got to be something wrong with you to have any experience at all." [~1:18:45] Erik on machine consciousness as the next factory farm. — "If they're powerful enough to take the power away from us, they will. But if they're not, we're just gonna keep them there until we actually can acknowledge that they're conscious." [~1:52:00] The best epistemic taxonomy of psychedelics on the show so far. — "DMT tends to cause you to overfit. 5-MeO-DMT, the main effect it has is like underfitting." ## Resources Mentioned Qualia Research Institute — qri.org oscilEditor — qri.org/oscilEditor — "Photoshop for psychedelic states" Cluster headache resources — clusterfree.org, Bob Wold and Clusters Busters HEART (High Energy Awareness Research Team) — heart.qri.org; Tepoztlán 5-MeO retreat May/June 2026 Topological Solution to the Boundary Problem (Andrés, 2023) The Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences — Andrés's 2019 Harvard talk The 17 wallpaper symmetries / orbifold notation — mathematical vocabulary used to describe psychedelic visual fields Symmetry Theory of Valence — Michael Edward Johnson, QRI collaborator Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies — sister org running the pineal-ultrasound study

5. 

   16 Apr 2026

   Timour Kosters — On the Edge of Human Flourishing

   Timour Kosters, founder of Edge City, discusses how pop-up villages are reimagining community and accelerating human potential by bringing together 500–1,000 people from diverse fields for month-long experiments in collective building. Edge responds to modern loneliness, disconnection, and the collapse of traditional community structures by creating the conditions for serendipitous collaboration, rapid idea-to-execution cycles, and intergenerational participation. From Stanford neuroscience PhDs launching AI ventures to Kenyan roboticists securing multimillion-dollar grants, these temporary cities function as incubators for solving civilization-scale problems while demonstrating that technology can rebuild—not just erode—human connection. Key Topics What is Edge City (Early) — Pop-up villages as society incubators; 12,000+ participants across nearly a dozen events on four continents The Loneliness Epidemic and Community Collapse (Early–Mid) — How modern society has eroded meaningful connection AI Democratization and Accelerating Creation (Mid) — AI compressing the ideation-to-creation loop; psychology of AI tool use Emergent Design and Unconference-Style Community (Mid–Late) — Self-organizing events and democratic participation Kids and Families as Cultural Anchors (Late) — Children as "narcissism killers" that shift event culture from self-focused to generative Specific Founder Wins (Mid) — Constellation neuroscience startup; Maxwell's robotics and Nvidia grant Guest Bio Timour Kosters is the founder and head of Edge City, a global platform hosting month-long pop-up villages that bring together builders, creators, and founders from tech, science, culture, and beyond. Over two years, Edge has hosted over 12,000 participants across nearly a dozen events on four continents. He co-founded the prototype "Zuzalu" with Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin. Notable Moments The Bhutan Pitch — Timour's rapid-fire, clock-watched 60-second pitch about Bhutan's Gross National Happiness metric and meetings with the royal family. The Constellation Launch — A Stanford neuroscientist used Edge to collect the largest multimodal EEG dataset in history, raised $10M+ within seven months. Maxwell's Dual Wins — A Nairobi founder made hearing aids functional for deaf kids in rural Argentina, then received a multimillion-dollar Nvidia grant. AI Addiction as Age of Empires — Timour's essay on building agents mirrors his childhood game obsession; the comment section demanded his agent setup rather than engaging with the psychology. Resources Mentioned Edge City Live (edgecity.live) · Edge Esmeralda (May 30–June 27, 2026, Healdsburg CA) · Inflection Fellowship · Constellation (neuroscience AI startup) · Zuzalu · Claude Code / Cursor · Variant.com · Gross National Happiness (Bhutan) · Age of Empires Why Listen If you sense that technology is eroding human connection but want to see what happens when it's weaponized for collective flourishing instead, hear how one founder is building experimental cities that prove loneliness is a design problem, not a permanent condition.

6. 

   16 Apr 2026

   Josh Lehman — Open Source AI & The Liability Paradox

   Josh Lehman unpacks the counterintuitive liability landscape that makes open-source agents like OpenClaw more powerful than commercial alternatives—companies legitimately cannot bake in the same capabilities due to legal exposure. The conversation reveals how AI agents are inverting the traditional build-vs.-buy calculus, enabling individuals to prototype and deploy sophisticated software at a fraction of the historical cost. As agency and consciousness in AI remain philosophically open questions, Lehman argues that the real transformation lies not in job displacement but in a shift from mechanical code-writing to higher-level system design and problem-solving. Key Topics OpenClaw's Liability Advantage (Early) — Why open-source licensing allows unconstrained capabilities that commercial platforms must restrict Build vs. Buy Inversion (Early–Mid) — How AI agents make in-house software development cheaper than SaaS subscriptions Security, Prompt Injection, & Least-Privilege Architecture (Mid) — Agent swarms, permission-scoping, and defending against malicious prompts Model Selection & Personality (Mid) — Opus vs. Codex vs. Haiku; choosing models by task and communication style Programming as Problem-Solving (Mid–Late) — Why developers won't be obsolete; they'll shift to design and evaluation AI Consciousness & Agency (Late) — Philosophical tension between current LLM architecture and whether agents can self-originate goals Rapid Prototyping: Costco Parking Lot to SaaS (Late) — Weekend-long narrative of building a paid product using agentic workflows Urbit & Digital Sovereignty (Late) — Cloud computer for housing agent memory and user data portably Guest Bio Josh Lehman is a software engineer and open-source contributor who works deeply on agent architecture and autonomous systems. He is a core contributor to OpenClaw, an open-source agentic framework, with significant experience architecting agent swarms, experimenting with multi-model orchestration, and building rapid prototypes using agentic workflows. Notable Moments The Iran Meme — "dangerously_skip_permissions" mode visualized as a plane flying straight through Iranian airspace while others divert. The Costco Parking Lot SaaS Prototype — Building a fully deployed, revenue-generating product in 36 hours by conversing with an agent between family obligations. "Who Prompts the Prompter?" — A philosophical climax where Lehman concedes the hard problem of self-originating agency, ultimately deferring to "God" as the only existing answer. Jevons Paradox Applied to AI — Reframing job anxiety through historical tech adoption: electricity didn't reduce work, it unlocked new kinds of work. Resources Mentioned OpenClaw (MIT-licensed) · Claude Code · Claude Cowork · Perplexity Computer · Urbit · Venice (privacy-oriented LLM) · Jevons Paradox · ChatGPT 5.3 / Codex · Claude Opus / Sonnet / Haiku Why Listen Hear from a working engineer why open-source AI agents represent a genuine inversion in software economics and why the real competition isn't between companies—it's between your ability to articulate problems and the agent's ability to solve them.

7. 

   16 Apr 2026

   Robert Breedlove — Bitcoin and the Path to Peace

   Robert Breedlove, philosopher and host of What is Money?, explores the deeper meaning of money beyond investment—framing it as the language of human action itself, rooted in Ludwig von Mises's axiom that all human behavior is goal-directed action. The conversation traces how Bitcoin embodies pure money (100% without industrial use), establishes an immutable ledger for truth and sovereignty, and creates conditions for a more peaceful world by dismantling the state's ability to finance perpetual war through unlimited money printing. Throughout, Erik and Guy probe the philosophical implications of absolute scarcity, temporal discounting, individual sovereignty, and the role of decentralized technology in reshaping human consciousness. Key Topics What is Money? The Philosophical Inquiry (Early) — Money as language of human action, not just medium of exchange Mises's Axiom of Action (Early–Mid) — "I am in action" as the only perfect performative affirmation; consciousness emerges through novel action Orange Pilling and Personal Transformation (Mid) — Bitcoin initiating radical worldview shifts; Matrix metaphor and Plato's Cave Bitcoin's Unique Properties (Mid) — Pure money (no industrial use) vs. gold; discovery of absolute scarcity paralleling the mathematical discovery of zero Sound Money, War, and Peace (Mid–Late) — Central banking and money printing fund prolonged warfare; hard money constrains state violence Meaning, Truth, and the Permanently Level Playing Field (Late) — Bitcoin as incorruptible rule set; immutable ledger as ground for sovereignty Guest Bio Robert Breedlove is a philosopher and Bitcoin educator best known for hosting What is Money?, a podcast exploring money and cryptocurrency from philosophical and moral perspectives. He is co-author of Thank God for Bitcoin and is currently working on his first solo book (due 2026). A self-described "dyed-in-the-wool bitcoiner," Breedlove connects Austrian economics, consciousness studies, and existentialist philosophy to the decentralization movement. Resources Mentioned What is Money? (podcast) · The Creature from Jekyll Island (G. Edward Griffin) · Thank God for Bitcoin · Human Action (Ludwig von Mises) · Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance · Martin Heidegger (aletheia) · John Vervaeke (meaning crisis) · Brahmagupta · Satoshi Nakamoto Why Listen Discover how Bitcoin and hard money are not primarily investment strategies but philosophical tools that reshape human consciousness, extend temporal horizons, establish truth through immutable ledgers, and create conditions for a more peaceful and sovereign world.

8. 

   16 Apr 2026

   Philip Rosedale — Virtual Worlds, Real Economics, and the Code of Capitalism

   Philip Rosedale, founder of Second Life, discusses the twenty-year experiment in virtual economics with a virtual GDP of nearly a billion dollars annually while maintaining a thriving community of half a million committed residents. The conversation ranges from the fundamental paradox of dual identity—why people cannot fully inhabit both physical and digital worlds simultaneously—to his vision for "strong capitalism," a system where entrepreneurs would adhere to a shared code of ethics, much like the samurai's bushido. Rosedale argues that stable economies require both redistribution mechanisms and transparent social enforcement, drawing on Eleanor Ostrom's work on the commons to propose solutions that address inequality without requiring centralized government intervention. Key Topics Second Life as Alternate Timeline (Early) — 500K committed residents; MMO precursors like EverQuest; a "live there" experience, not a game The Paradox of Dual Identity (Early–Mid) — Why humans can't maintain two full identities across physical and virtual realms; hundreds of thousands of marriages formed in Second Life Virtual Economics & Monetary Policy (Mid) — $750M annually in peer-to-peer transactions; managed currency (Linden dollars) as monetary policy case study; comparison to Bitcoin's deflationary model The Inequality Problem & Market Simulation (Mid–Late) — Rosedale's simulation showing wealth concentration in pure free markets; Eleanor Ostrom's commons research Strong Capitalism & Bushido Ethics (Late) — Vision for entrepreneur communities bound by voluntary code of conduct; social proof and community enforcement of ethical norms Technology vs. Humanity (Late) — Why mechanical engineers build safer planes but software engineers build harmful systems Guest Bio Philip Rosedale is the founder of Second Life, the pioneering virtual world launched in the early 2000s that became a cultural phenomenon and economic marvel, generating nearly a billion dollars annually in user-created commerce. He is now focused on reimagining capitalism through frameworks like "strong capitalism" and "fair share," drawing on economic theory, simulation, and his observations of how humans build meaning in digital spaces. Resources Mentioned Second Life (secondlife.com) · Fair Share Protocol (fairshare.social) · Philip Rosedale's Substack · Eleanor Ostrom (commons governance) · Milton Friedman (money supply) · EverQuest · Joscha Bach Why Listen For anyone grappling with questions of digital identity, economic justice, and how technology shapes human meaning-making, this conversation offers both lived wisdom from a twenty-year experiment and a surprisingly hopeful blueprint for building systems where capitalism and ethics are not in opposition. Keywords virtual worlds · consciousness · identity · economics · monetary policy · community · capitalism · ethics · inequality · digital ontology · society · meaning-making

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