Doom Debates State of the Show 2026

Welcome to the first annual Doom Debates State of the Show!

I started Doom Debates two years ago from a couch in an Airbnb to argue with random people from Twitter.

Now the show hosts Nobel Prize and Turing Award winners, White House policymakers, and has earned a reputation for challenging top luminaries to come expose their ideas for critical analysis.

In this episode, Producer Ori and I share a transparent update about where things stand: what we’ve achieved so far, what we need to achieve next… and why we could really use your generous donations to keep our considerable momentum snowballing into the second half of 2026.

00:00:00 — Cold Open

00:01:38 — The Mission & the Urgency Gap

00:04:41 — Year Two: From Couch to Platform

00:06:08 — Going Pro & the Numbers

00:08:50 — Why This Show Exists

00:12:14 — The Flywheel & Dwarkesh

00:15:14 — The Guest List

00:18:55 — What People Are Saying

00:21:57 — Tegmark vs. Ball: 90% vs. 0.01%

00:24:03 — Duvenaud’s 85% P(Doom)

00:26:19 — Holding the Powerful to Account

00:30:56 — Changing Minds, Including Destiny’s

00:31:56 — The Team

00:33:36 — Why Liron Draws Zero Salary

00:36:36 — Our Budget

00:45:11 — The Ask

00:48:25 — Why Doom Debates Is One of a Kind

00:54:59 — Wrap-Up

👉 DONATE (tax-deductible via Manifund) — https://manifund.org/projects/doom-debates---podcast--debate-show-to-help-ai-x-risk-discourse-go-mainstream

Become a Mission Partner (full writeup) — https://doomdebates.com/p/become-a-mission-partner

Discord — https://doomdebates.com/discord

Merch — https://shop.doomdebates.com

Doom Debates episode 1, with Ori —

Rob Miles on whether to work at Anthropic —

Tristan Harris & Ted Tremper — https://lironshapira.substack.com/p/could-this-movie-wake-up-humanity

Nathan Labenz on The Cognitive Revolution — https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/supintelligence-to-ban-or-not-to-ban-max-tegmark-dean-ball-join-liron-shapira-on-doom-debates/

Joe Allen & Steve Bannon’s War Room —

Max Tegmark vs. Dean Ball — 90% vs. 0.01% —

Prof. David Duvenaud’s 85% P(doom) —

Elon’s “curious AI” safety plan —

Ben Horowitz on nuclear proliferation —

Destiny raises his P(doom) —

Liron Shapira 00:00:03
Members of Congress, I have the distinct honor of presenting to you the President of the Doom Debates.

Hey, everybody. Welcome to the 2026 Doom Debates’ State of the Show presentation.

How far have we come? What is the progress toward the mission? What do we need to do next? Just a good old-fashioned state of the show. Think about it as the Doom Debates community board meeting. With myself, and you know him from all the livestreams, it’s Producer Ori Nagel.

Ori, I see you’re wearing appropriate board meeting attire.

Producer Ori 00:00:43
Once a year I get dressed up to talk about Doom Debates.

Liron 00:00:47
Yeah, exactly. Work from home life. My babysitter saw me. She’s like, “Oh, you going out?” I’m like, “Nope. No, I am not.”

Ori 00:00:53
No. You’re just here for a board meeting.

Liron 00:00:56
Exactly. Ori has actually been unofficially involved with the show since the very first episode two years ago, summer of 2024, when it was just me in an Airbnb on a couch. “Welcome, everybody. You are listening to Doom Debates. For our first episode, I’ve brought on my good friend Ori Nagel, who is actually not gonna debate me because he’s also become another Doomer.”

Ori 00:01:21
“So Liron, Doom Debates, this is your podcast, and what do you wanna talk about?”

Liron 00:01:21
With no setup whatsoever on my laptop, which honestly, very convenient back then. It was just a one-click to record. I kinda miss that. You remember that, Ori?

Ori 00:01:27
Yeah. It was scrappy, but it was interesting, and I think it was a testament to the message that you had. But yeah, I remember that, and we’ve come a long way. Look at you now. Look at us now.

Liron 00:01:38
I can tell Ori’s pumped. For those of you who could use a refresher on the Doom Debates mission, why does this show exist? Well, our mission is to help millions of people see that unaligned superintelligence is an imminent danger, and also raise the quality of discourse around this.

Those are really the two themes that we try to hammer. We think that society is missing the sense of imminent danger, almost to the point where I’d wanna fearmonger a little bit to raise that sense of imminent danger. And I think it’s extremely obvious that we’re missing a level of discourse quality. What the heck is going on with our discourse? Why can’t mature adults just settle down, sit down together, be productive, understand what everybody’s position is so that they can start to productively hash things out? Those are basically the missions of the show.

Ori 00:02:24
You may not realize it in every episode, but those objectives are coming across in every episode. Every episode you get the object-level arguments, sort of get to the crux of the disagreement. That’s the improving the discourse quality. And also our wonderful host’s laser focus on the existential risk — the looming threat, the sword of Damocles that our society faces.

Liron 00:02:51
Exactly. Now, what is the gap in the discourse without Doom Debates? Because interestingly enough, the average person, if you survey them, they’ll be like, “Yeah, I’m worried about AI extinction. That seems like a serious threat.” But then they go about their lives, and they don’t actually think about it day to day because they’ve got other things on their mind.

So the gap that we’re actually trying to fix is the urgency gap, being like, “Hey, you know, this issue that you’re kinda worried about but don’t really think about — we’re talking about a few years until potential no more existing. It really should be your main voting issue. It shouldn’t just be this back of your mind thing.” We’re just trying to bridge the urgency gap. That’s really one way to think about the mission.

Ori 00:03:25
Part of the challenge with this issue is that you look at life around us and it seems normal, but this threat is just around the corner, so making that more pressing. It’s something that you choose to act upon because the arguments are so compelling, so persuasive, that you realize we need to do something here.

Liron 00:03:44
The timing of the show is unusual because even when we started it in 2024, we felt like we needed this yesterday. To use Eliezer Yudkowsky’s words, “The game board had already been played into a horrible place.” He said something like that, where it’s like, man, we’re so far along. The AI companies are already racing. How are we ever gonna put the genie back in the bottle? I still don’t know, but we just figure, hey, let’s just make it happen now. The time was yesterday. Let’s just do it now.

Ori 00:04:07
Look at how close we are to tracking the AI 2027 trajectory. And on that timeline, we’re just a year away from a pivotal point where AI becomes uncontrollable, so it’s urgent. And I think now is also a critical period. We’re in an infancy. So much AI policy, so many AI choices are forming. We’re living in post-ChatGPT, and the temperature on AI and AI concerns is only rising.

Now is an important time to act, and the urgency is gonna increase as AI gets more and more powerful.

Liron 00:04:41
Very true. All right, so year two in a nutshell. It’s crazy to think it’s already been two years. Time really flies. I would describe year two as a scrappy one-person show, basically me in 2024, became a platform that is being taken seriously, us right now in 2026.

Ori 00:04:58
I think that’s totally fair. Look at the names that we’ve gotten. Gary Marcus, Mike Israetel, Audrey Tang, Michael Levitt, Destiny. It’s an impressive mix of people part of the AI discourse or the AI researchers.

Liron 00:05:15
Totally. Yeah. We kicked down the door. We became part of the discourse.

Ori 00:05:21
How about the Rob Miles episode?

Liron 00:05:22
Yeah.

Ori 00:05:22
The Rob Miles episode made people ask the question, is it the right moral choice to encourage people to work at a company like Anthropic?

Liron 00:05:33
“Do you really think that we should be encouraging people to go work at Anthropic and Google DeepMind?”

Rob Miles 00:05:39
“Do you think that everyone who understands and cares about these issues should not be in the room where they can affect what actually happens?”

Liron 00:05:48
“So I would dispute the premise that there has to be this room where you build the AI. How about we just don’t have that room, and we lobby for the room to not exist?”

Rob 00:06:01
“Sure, but you can’t put all your eggs in that basket.”

Liron 00:06:01
These are urgent questions. As I like to say, these are questions that must be resolved before the world ends. That’s what we specialize in.

Liron 00:06:08
Now, the main progress we made in year two is really we professionalized. We started putting out episodes twice a week, got a whole stream of high-profile guests that’s only growing more and more, and we got you. We got you as official full-time Producer Ori. Because you used to just be my friend who I would chat with. I would just ping you, I’d show you stuff, and you’d give me some feedback. But now you’ve really gone pro. How’s it been your first year of going pro?

Ori 00:06:32
Yeah, we have professionalized the operation. You were doing roughly one episode a week. But then since I joined, we’ve had a steady cadence of episodes and guests. Now we’re at a point where we’re pumping out three episodes a week. It varies by the week, but it’s a main episode on Tuesday, a secondary episode on Thursday, the livestreams on Friday.

Liron 00:07:07
Even a livestream, that’s right. And that’s how everybody’s getting to know the character and personality and insights of Producer Ori, because you’ve been on the livestream every week now for a few weeks.

Ori 00:07:07
Here I am. Yep. The two of us together, we can really work up a real operation. Hopefully an effective one.

Liron 00:07:14
All right, the numbers. You guys wanna know how the show’s doing numbers-wise. So roughly in a given month, we’ll have about 20,000-plus hours watching on YouTube. And also, there’s a high engagement rate, so these are not vanity metrics. This is just our honest assessment of how much you guys are really paying attention to the show.

This is a decent milestone after two years. I can tell you, Producer Ori and I are laser-focused on snowballing this number higher, and we think that our number-one lever to do it is more prominent guests which attract larger and larger audiences, which then attract more prominent guests. We actually think that’s the number-one lever we have to accelerate the show’s growth.

Ori 00:07:50
Yeah. That’s definitely our number-one lever. Prominent guests is the main way to go. We’ll go through some of the big guests that we got, but that’s the main way to grow. These numbers are the representation of the community that Doom Debates is building.

I think Doom Debates is building the strongest AI x-risk community of any group, any association, because people who watch the show are really internalizing, understanding the existential risk. They go out, they talk to their friends about it. They spread the word to their community. These are really the people who can get the word out and spread the message.

That was how you were able to get Mike Israetel the first time — Mike Israetel said he was open to talking to people who were concerned about AI risk, and then a lot of fans of the show all messaged him, and he responded to all of that. There’s a real community of people who support the show, people who can spread the word and take action.

Liron 00:08:50
When I first started the show, I was pretty honest with myself that if I just feel like I’m shouting into the void, I don’t have more than a few weeks of stamina to do that. But we were just really happy to see, oh, great, people somehow found us and started commenting and saying, “Hey, we need more of this.” So that’s what keeps us going.

What we’re gonna describe more about — “Hey, we have this mission. We’re trying to impact the discourse.” People see it, and they’re like, “Finally.” They know what gap we’re filling, and they agree that this needs to exist. We wouldn’t do the show if other people were already doing it. If there was some other Doom Debates type person in the world, then we’d be like, “Okay, great. Let them do it.” I don’t feel like I have to be yet another doom debater.

When I came in as a special guest advisor to this workshop of people who were workshopping their YouTube channel, I told them that if they want to get a passionate audience, they should answer the question of, “Why does your show have to exist? And if your show went away, what would be the problem?”

And in the case of Doom Debates, I can actually tell you, I personally experienced the problem. Here’s the problem. You listen to other podcasts, and then there’s people being wrong on them and not even acknowledging imminent existential risk. It’s incredibly frustrating.

Ori 00:09:58
Yeah, 100%. It’s frustrating. And also, I think that it’s challenging to talk about. I also spend time with you in person. And I think that you are willing to bring it up even though it’s a difficult subject. Whereas some other people may not be as willing to bring it up.

Liron 00:10:19
Not only am I willing to bring it up, I’m not willing to not bring it up.

Ori 00:10:23
Okay.

Liron 00:10:25
Because it’s always on my mind. No, I manage to sometimes not bring it up in polite company, but yeah, it comes out a lot.

But seriously, you listen to other tech podcasts. A whole year of a prominent tech podcast will barely ever mention it. They’ll just be like, “Oh yeah, it’s great. People are making all these apps. Which company’s gonna make the most money?” It’s like, guys, can we check in with this intelligence that’s becoming superhuman, that poses a threat, that many of the top scientists are trying to warn you that extinction risk is high? And they’re just doing their episodes without warning.

So one of the first type of episodes we would do is the reaction episodes, where it’s like, “Hey, if I don’t call this person out for having a horrible opinion, this prominent person for having a badly thought out opinion, nobody is going to do it.” Somebody is wrong on the internet, as they say. That’s why this podcast has to exist, and luckily enough people agree that they’ve been egging us on.

Ori 00:11:18
Yeah, I think you’re doing an important service. Even journalists — I think there are journalists who do take this issue seriously. The quintessential AI x-risk interview was with Geoffrey Hinton on 60 Minutes, and that was great. That was excellent. But how many times are you gonna have that same conversation with each expert?

Liron 00:11:36
Yeah, 60 Minutes is now not gonna hit the topic for another year.

Ori 00:11:40
They’re not gonna hit it for another year, that’s true. But also, is it newsworthy? Because what’s changed that much? It’s still just a set of logical arguments. But yes, someone has to do it. In my opinion, this is the new God debate, the new atheism wars... except there’s a lot more on the line.

Liron 00:12:03
Although technically, whether God exists and whether everybody should be Christian or Jewish or Buddhist or whatever, there’s also a lot on the line for that, but maybe it’s not as urgent.

Ori 00:12:12
Okay, yeah. True.

Liron 00:12:14
Let’s talk about the Doom Debates flywheel. So here it is depicted in a diagram. Basically, bigger audience leads to bigger guests, bigger guests lead to bigger audience, and so on and so forth. And we’ve been stoking the flywheel.

If you can compare the pipeline of guests now from a year ago, now we’re outreaching to people and they’re actually giving us the time of day. And the secret is because we just show them a list of other guests, like, “Hey, don’t you wanna be on the same show that all these other people were on that we’re gonna talk about?” And they’re like, “Yes, I belong on this list. These are my people.” So we’re using that social proof, and the flywheel is turning.

Ori 00:12:50
Definitely. Max Tegmark, Noah Smith—

Liron 00:12:50
Yeah. All right—

Ori 00:12:51
Vitalik Buterin.

Liron 00:12:51
Yeah. We’ll name drop soon. Here’s where realistically we can get to if we keep turning the flywheel. A good reference is Dwarkesh. You guys probably know Dwarkesh if you’re listening to this podcast. His podcast started a few years earlier. He’s been doing a great job getting top-notch interviews, being really thoughtful. He prepares a lot. He’s kind of a role model of growing a high-quality show, and he is roughly 25X ahead of us — 2,500% in terms of audience size.

Which to me says, okay, great, that’s a huge opportunity. That’s why we gotta keep investing time and effort in the show because there’s this huge prize. There’s millions of person hours of attention that people could be giving to this issue that, in my opinion, they’re giving to much less important issues for them and for the world. We need people to pay attention to AI doom. And to me, it is a good goalpost to be like, “Hey, can we get the level of prominence that Dwarkesh has gotten interviewing people on intellectual topics?” We interview people on intellectual topics, and this one is quite urgent.

Ori 00:13:54
Dwarkesh is only gonna grow also, so that opportunity is gonna get larger and larger.

Liron 00:13:54
Exactly. That’s the crazy thing — I don’t wanna treat Dwarkesh as a ceiling. I just don’t wanna tell people, “Hey, we’re gonna have a billion viewers.” I’m just trying to be realistic here.

Ori 00:14:04
Yeah.

Liron 00:14:04
But as you mentioned, we’ve got this rising tide of AI. We’re sitting here like, have you guys noticed AI is gonna be superintelligent soon? If they haven’t noticed today, you’d think they’d be more likely to notice tomorrow than today. We do think we’re riding a rising tide, and these things tend to have a way of blowing up exponentially, as people have witnessed if they’ve been following the stock market and tracking AI companies.

We think there’s going to be a similar effect for AI media. And we’re kind of positioned to capture the attention of the millions of people who are turning to this and saying, “Wait, AI is going to take my job, threaten me existentially, physically. It’s gonna start physically threatening us.” There’s gonna be military drone attack safety issues. There’s all these triggers that’ll get random people to finally search YouTube or Spotify podcasts and be like, “Okay, I need to get educated about the risks of AI.” And then here we are, waiting for the rising tide.

Ori 00:15:10
How many prominent voices are there talking about safety in the context of what’s happening? If you’re in tech, you’re really aware of what’s happening, but outside of tech you’re not quite as aware. The increasing power and capability and prominence of the tools means that AI media is also gonna be growing.

Liron 00:15:14
All right, look at these guests. Max Tegmark, Vitalik Buterin, Nobel Prize winner Michael Levitt, Turing Award winner Moshe Vardi, Dean Ball, Gary Marcus, Daniel Holz, the chair of the Doomsday Clock, Tristan Harris, Center for Humane Technology. These are pretty heavy hitters. I’m excited about 2027.

Ori 00:15:31
So many of them are professors. Professor Max Tegmark, Professor Michael Levitt, Moshe Vardi, also a professor. These are important conversations with some of the most credentialed people on these topics.

Liron 00:15:43
It’s kind of funny because we talk about the flywheel. The show’s been growing. I think most of these people at some point, very much in the old days, would give us the treatment, understandably, of just not being able to respond to our messages. So we’ve experienced it both ways. We know what it’s like to not get the time of day and then to have enough to offer in terms of audience size and show reputation to be like, “Oh, look. Hey, they did respond to our messages.”

And now, don’t get me wrong. There’s still a long list of other guests in the pipeline that we’ve been reaching out to that are still giving us the same treatment, but there’s not that many more tiers to go until it gains a reputation of, “Listen, this is the place to debate. You can’t avoid the Doom Debates invite. You gotta respond to their invitations,” or, “This is worth doing.”

And this is such a tiny fraction of where we wanna be. We wanna be the voice of people who are calling their representatives so they hear a huge groundswell. That’s what we think is needed right now — a groundswell of regular people talking amongst themselves, being like, “Hey, are we crazy? Why are other people not talking about this? This seems interesting to us. This seems relevant to us.” More chatter, more groundswell. That’s basically the lever we’re pushing on right now that we think is high leverage.

The rest of these guests here — Professor Robin Hanson, Scott Sumner, Noah Smith, Richard Hanania, Geoffrey Miller, Lee Cronin, Ken Stanley, Keith Dugger, Roman Yampolskiy, George Hotz, Carl Feynman, Imad Mostaque, Roone, Rob Miles. When you do an episode a week with a prominent guest, I guess they really add up. If you told me two years ago that these people all would be coming on the show, my reaction would’ve been, “Are you telling me this is gonna go farther than the random people I debate on Twitter to serious people?” I would’ve been shocked that we took it this far.

Ori 00:17:15
You’ve gone from guy with smart takes in the living room being like, “Guys, this is concerning,” to talking to the actual important people and exposing — oh yeah, it really is concerning because the prominent people don’t have very good counterarguments.

Liron 00:17:29
I think that’s a good summary of our progression, where we’re like, “Hey, instead of just exposing that these anonymous Twitter accounts are being dumb, what if we can expose inconsistencies in the opinions of influential people?” I do think that we really escalated our ambitions.

But also, this idea of getting what somebody’s position is, that’s what I think is missing from the discourse. Even somebody like Bernie Sanders, I think he’s making a lot of good moves getting this issue out there. I’m sure we can all nitpick some of the details of what he’s saying because there’s so many different positions. Even the exact proposal that he made now, okay, 50% profit sharing. Does that make sense? The exact details everybody can nitpick, but there should just be a forum where you’re productively discoursing, not like he says something and, “Oh, if you’re a Republican, you have to hate it.” We just need nuanced discourse.

Ori 00:18:12
Totally.

Liron 00:18:12
Also, if you look at other shows that have invited me on, we’ve now racked up Dr. Phil, Jubilee’s Middle Ground, Destiny, Steve Bannon’s War Room, Nathan Labenz’s show Cognitive Revolution, Robert Wright, and we’ve collaborated with Mike Israetel, Rob Miles, Fraser Cain, Universe Today.

So this is 2026. And if we’re playing our cards right, if we’re doing our mission of actually getting the message out there, I do think this is a message that even more prominent channels will wanna get a piece of the action. They’re gonna wanna get their bearings and understand because there is another shoe dropping here. This is not the peak of AI. I know some people think there’s a bubble. No. The other shoe dropping is the whole taking over the world because it’s superintelligence thing. That is actually still coming in the future.

Ori 00:18:57
Part of preventing that from happening.

Liron 00:18:57
Yeah. Okay, so one of the nice things that happened in 2026 is prominent people were nice to us, so we wanted to share some of these nice quotes. Liv Boeree said, “You’re having important conversations on a narrow topic in a way no one else is doing.” Tristan Harris says—

Tristan Harris 00:19:12
“Just deeply appreciate how you’ve been trying to deepen the discourse about AI risk in the public sector, and you’ve had a diversity of great minds on here, and honored for what you’re doing and appreciate what you’re doing, and hope you can continue to contribute to that.”

Liron 00:19:28
Nathan Labenz says—

Nathan Labenz 00:19:28
“I wanna give credit to Liron on Doom Debates. I generally don’t like debates as a format, but by getting such outstanding guests as Max and Dean to focus in on what is very plausibly the most important question of our time — that is how likely is it that advanced AI will in fact go catastrophically wrong — Liron is making the format work, and I definitely encourage everyone to subscribe.”

Liron 00:19:51
Zvi Mowshowitz has written, “Strong guests. I do love that he’s doing this.” My favorite—

Ori 00:19:56
There’s more? You’re kidding me.

Liron 00:19:58
My personal favorite comment—

Ori 00:19:59
Come on.

Liron 00:19:59
—is from Scott Aaronson, somebody I’ve been reading a very long time, and he says, “Great, including the many parts where Liron tears me a new asshole. Highly recommended.” That was in the context of me actually criticizing some of his statements in an episode, but he took it so well, and it was super gracious and disarming. Joe Allen from Bannon’s War Room says—

Joe Allen 00:20:18
“I cannot recommend enough the Doom Debates platform. What I really appreciate about your show is that you’re not just simply berating people. You’re not necessarily an evangelist. You are holding your ideas and other people’s ideas up to scrutiny, and I really, really appreciate that.”

Liron 00:20:35
Canadian Prepper, a popular YouTube channel, he invited me on and he says—

Canadian Prepper 00:20:38
“Doom Debates, quickly becoming one of my favorite sources for information with respect to the developments in artificial intelligence. You’re a great science communicator.”

Liron 00:20:49
And the cosmopolitan globalist, Claire Berlinski, she says, “All views represented and rigorously debated, doomer and accelerationist alike.”

All right, so we’re making waves, and this is really just the beginning. This is not, “Okay, let’s rest on our laurels. We’ve made it.” But it’s just evidence that we’re not just here in our basement drinking each other’s Kool-Aid. We’re actually starting to get the message out.

Ori 00:21:10
Yeah. And these were unprompted. They just said it. They had these great things to say about the show. Joe Allen, key figure deciding how the right is reacting to AI existential risk. That’s quite a compliment, and same from the other ones.

Liron 00:21:28
Oh, yeah. And then let’s also quote our actual viewers. “I enjoy watching your content much more than Netflix. Your message is the most important topic everyone should be talking about.” Different viewer saying, “You make the ideas clear and accessible.” A different viewer saying, “I really love your content. I can’t get enough of it.”

Obvious enough that people are liking the content just given the fact that they’re clicking the like button and subscribing. But here it is, their exact words, and these are actually taken from viewers who are putting money behind their words. These are from some of our mission partners. Thank you for saying these nice words and donating to the show.

Ori 00:21:57
Thank you.

Liron 00:21:57
Let’s talk about people actually changing their minds as a result of our content or seeing new information that they didn’t know before, which makes them think.

For example, in our debate with Max Tegmark and Dean Ball, I thought it was interesting that we surfaced that the crux of the debate, in my opinion, is that Max Tegmark has a 90%-plus P(Doom), and Dean Ball, I think maybe he didn’t like the concept of P(Doom) as much, but he did say in the episode that his was something like 0.01%. “My P(Doom) is very low. It’s sub 1%. It’s 0.01% or something like that. It’s very low.”

Max Tegmark 00:22:30
“Yeah, I would think it’s definitely over 90% that we lose control over this.”

Liron 00:22:35
Wow. 0.01% versus 90%. So we exposed a big gap between Max Tegmark and Dean Ball just on that front, and the rest of the policy debate that they had on our show, to me, just seemed downstream of the fact that they just have wildly different conceptions of what risk they’re making policy around.

Ori 00:22:52
Yeah. This very, very fraction of a percent risk that he was willing to put out — I think was important to put out there because there is a huge gap between the expert consensus and what the policy person’s assessment is. That’s hopefully something that Doom Debates can help correct. Part of what the show can do is bring that level of accountability by having the courage to ask that question.

Liron 00:23:17
That episode is really special because it does represent our ideal of what we wanna be doing regularly. Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to produce a Max Tegmark versus Dean Ball level debate every week. That’s a special every few months type of feature for us. Hopefully it’s gonna happen more in 2027.

But it’s not just about what we wanna do. It’s demonstrating what society needs. Society needs a Meet the Press type of thing every week. These kind of influential figures — David Sacks comes to mind as somebody who’s been highly influential whispering in Trump’s ear. These kind of figures really should be sitting down with a nuanced debate. Imagine David Sacks versus Bernie Sanders. Oh, my Lord. What kind of nuance would that surface?

Ori 00:23:57
That would be amazing. We need more of that. As we get bigger, then we’re able to get more prominent people.

Liron 00:24:03
Exactly. And another takeaway from that episode is this whole issue of, “Hey, so did the US government consider recursive self-improvement when they were drafting the policy?” And it turns out the answer is explicitly no. They just set out to not consider recursive self-improvement and just draft a policy around AGI before the point of recursive self-improvement. I’m like, “Oh, okay. Well, good to know.” I’m glad that we got clarity that that is what happened.

And it’s like, again, what happens without Doom Debates? Does the world ever get this kind of important information? I don’t know. I hope that we can provide more.

Another episode that stands out to me in terms of surfacing information that has the ability to change people’s minds or just seems important is when we had former researchers from AI companies. I’m thinking of David Duvenaud. He previously worked at Anthropic, and he was transparent with us. He’s like, “Yeah, I would say that I hold an 85%-plus P(Doom), and I do see my own work in AI safety,” kind of paraphrasing him, as something of a Hail Mary. It’s the best we can do. “Professor David Duvenaud, what is your P(Doom)?”

David Duvenaud 00:25:02
“So I’d say something around 85%.”

Ori 00:25:05
To me, that’s revelatory. It’s important to hear what the experts have to say as a non-technical person, not an AI researcher. And there’s the emperor’s new clothes aspect of it — when you hear someone like Roone, who is a pseudonymous OpenAI employee, you hear those arguments, and that’s an emperor’s new clothes moment to hear how shallow their safety arguments are. That’s one thing.

And then when you have the validation of the expert saying, “Yes, this is a real concern and a very alarmingly high probability,” that also, I think, is very revelatory.

Liron 00:25:42
Well put. And right now, to be honest, the limiting factor of these kinds of episodes that I would also describe as revelatory really is just getting guests to agree to do it. We’re trying our best. We have a systematic outreach going on. We send many dozens of these kind of invitations a week, and you see the ones who eventually say yes, and the rate is growing.

But the bottleneck is just the flywheel. Grow the audience, grow the guests, attract more audience. We will get to these other guests. It’s just a matter of can we just hurry up and get to the point where guests are like, “Okay, I got an invite to Doom Debates. I’m going to let them know what’s on my mind, what my position is”?

Liron 00:26:20
All right. I wanna mention one of my favorite parts of what we’re able to do with this platform, which is hold the powerful to account.

Imagine that there’s somebody like an Elon Musk — this was actually a recent example — where he publicly says that his plan for surviving AI is to make it as curious as possible.

Elon Musk 00:26:30
“If you’re curious, you’re trying to understand the universe. One of the things you’re trying to understand is where will humanity go. And so I think understand the universe actually means you care about propagating humanity into the future.”

Liron 00:26:40
And by virtue of being curious, it’s probably gonna wanna let us live because it’s so curious about us. So he publicly states that.

And of course, we’ve invited him to debate. I’ve multiple times hit him up on his platform X, and I’m like, “All right, Elon, come debate me.” But he’s a busy guy. He’s got 50 companies to run. So I understand if he’s not gonna respond to me.

But does that mean that the discussion has to end? No, because we do reaction episodes. We do our own critiques even if the guest declines our invitation. I think that’s one of the powerful things of this platform where we use the flywheel of getting other guests on the show and making ourselves part of the discourse, and then we can editorialize and actually be part of the discourse that way.

Ori 00:27:15
Seriously. He’s one of the five top people building AI, and his safety plan is — it is a WTF what his safety plan is. So I think it’s important for someone to call that out.

Liron 00:27:28
I went back through and made some of the examples that I’m proud of. We called out Marc Andreessen’s conduct in the x-risk discourse. He just kind of inserted himself and said, “Guys, it’s just math. What are you guys afraid of? It’s a category error to think that an artificial intelligence could ever get the goal to come and attack humanity. It’s not like that, guys.”

And I’m like, “Are you sure, Marc Andreessen? Are you confident about that, that an AI can’t have this kind of goal that it pursues as hard as a human would pursue it?” And I criticized his conduct. I have a whole big article about that.

There was a time I criticized the other half of Andreessen Horowitz, Ben Horowitz, because he came out there and publicly said, “It’s so good if we make open source AI. It’s kinda like giving everyone nukes, and giving everyone nukes is good.”

Ben Horowitz 00:28:10
“I often remind people, the last nuclear bomb that was launched was when only we had the nukes. That’s a dangerous world with one person having the nukes.”

Liron 00:28:19
Yeah.

Ben 00:28:19
“And now everyone has nukes, and a bunch of people have nukes, and we haven’t had any nuclear activity. And there’s a very, very specific reason for that, because everybody’s got nukes. Nobody wants to get nuked. And I think that AI is, to the extent that AI is a super weapon, that will also be true there.”

Liron 00:28:37
And we also criticized the famous argument popularized by Roger Penrose, this whole idea that Gödel’s theorem will protect us from superintelligent AI because only a human, a conscious human, can see the truth of Gödel’s theorem, and AI can’t. So AI can never really absorb the kind of insights that a human can. I have a whole episode reacting to that. And somebody needs to say it. Somebody who has enough attention to be part of the discourse needs to be properly responding to this, unfortunately, what I would call false hope.

Ori 00:29:04
Andreessen and Elon Musk being on your list — you’ve been focusing on them for a while. But it was before they had an ear to the president. I think some rumors I read were that Marc Andreessen was part of the influence campaign that was influencing directly the policy that the Trump administration is taking with AI.

Those critiques are important, and we gotta just raise more attention for it because what happens with policy is ultimately an argument. I think that at Doom Debates, you are surfacing some of the most cutting, incisive critiques of the problems with what people like Andreessen and Elon Musk are saying.

Liron 00:29:45
So Ori, we’ve talked about this. The ideal way that Doom Debates would operate is some public figure makes all these bold statements, like the ones we’ve mentioned have done, and then we invite them to come explain their position — either debate me about it, let me interview them about it, debate somebody else about it. Imagine David Sacks versus Bernie Sanders or Marc Andreessen versus Tristan Harris. Just any interesting matchup like that.

A lot of times they’ll be like, “No, thanks. I’d rather just talk to my echo chamber.” But then we do the critique, and people realize, “Look, why would I let myself just have a one-sided critique? It really is my responsibility to come and explain the nuance in this public forum because people are watching. People want to actually learn.”

And everybody wins when we have that reputation, where we have the reputation that we’re gonna be fair. We’re not going to maliciously edit your episode. You really should come and debate. You can even help choose your debate partner, so it can be a fair choice of who you’re debating.

But the point is that this discourse needs to happen. There’s actually something wrong with our society with the current way people are doing it, where Elon’s going around saying, “Curious AI, curious AI.” And so many people are like, “Oh, yeah, maybe curious AI is a good idea,” because they’re not seeing the forum that’s properly holding him to account or questioning the idea.

Ori 00:30:56
Yeah.

Liron 00:30:56
So we hold the powerful to account. Some evidence that people are actually waking up and shifting the urgency, which we said is one of the goals of the show. Somebody wrote, “I used to be on the other side. After watching, my P(Doom) has risen. Good job.” Thank you, anonymous.

Somebody wrote, “I tell everyone about Doom Debates.” Somebody wrote, “First time I’ve heard an AI doomer lay out realistically how this leads to the future he’s worried about.” So the idea is each of these little comments, each of these little episodes we do, it probably doesn’t convince the guests, but it moves the Overton window. It gets people saying that other people are saying that other people are saying that all of these people are talking about how high AI existential risk is as an urgent voting issue.

Ori 00:31:33
Yeah. And look at the person who’s on screen there. It’s a bit of a spoiler from the episode, but Destiny came on the show, said he wasn’t that concerned about AI, and afterwards he said his P(Doom) was higher.

Liron 00:31:42
“I guess I’ll ask one last time, based on our whole conversation, what is your P of AI doom in the next twenty years?”

Destiny 00:31:51
“You know what? I’ll up it to five percent.”

Liron 00:31:53
Woohoo, five percent.

Destiny 00:31:53
“Just because I haven’t seen an event yet, but yeah, there you go.”

Liron 00:31:56
All right, let’s talk about the state of the team here in 2026. So there’s myself, the host. Hopefully, you guys know me by now. And then there’s you, Producer Ori. You started becoming more and more prominent on the livestreams. You’ve been developing your own fan base of people who wanna get your takes on things. We hired you away from Control AI — you helped 10X their growth. You made a big impact there before I hired you away.

And I like to tell people that you are quite versatile in all the different things you can manage. You don’t host the show, but besides my hosting duties, everything else that I would otherwise be working on outside of the actual episode, you might as well work on it instead, and it’s like one Liron hour equals one Ori hour. So you’re almost getting two Lirons in everything else besides hosting. Is that fair to say?

Ori 00:32:40
Yeah, for sure. You gotta be a jack of all trades to work on this. You’ve taught me how you make the show, so I can do the whole thing, soup to nuts. We just need you, the host. We need your pretty face on screen in the studio to make the episodes. But yeah, my background is in growth marketing, and we’re trying to apply what works for tech companies to help them grow to Doom Debates.

Liron 00:33:05
Hell yeah, and we’ve also got two producer interns. Overall, that’s our entire team. It’s a pretty lean, high-output team. Remember, Stephen Colbert costs a hundred million dollars to run his show. Everybody likes to compare against that.

We’re a very lean team, and we’re still putting out three episodes a week, some of which are two or three hours long. So I think we’re doing pretty well. We live in San Francisco and Saratoga Springs, New York, so we don’t have the cheapest cost of living, but I think we’re doing pretty well for ourselves in terms of efficiency.

Ori 00:33:36
Yeah, I agree with that.

Liron 00:33:36
I do wanna let you guys know if you’re a viewer, if you’ve ever donated to the show, I personally have been drawing zero dollars. That’s my policy. The reason is simple. I’m fortunate enough that I don’t need the money right now. I still work for the company I started called Relationship Hero. So I have a day job. I’m still doing that, and that allows me to do Doom Debates and get your viewer donations and use them toward the show’s production budget without taking away anything from the budget we otherwise have.

I’m hoping that Doom Debates becomes a prominent institution and such a fixture of society where just the natural revenue streams from the impact that we’re making and the 25X higher audience growth just starts to naturally — YouTube ad revenue, all this revenue just flows in naturally, in which case I can focus on it more, and I could potentially pay myself. But I’ve never done it before, and I’m also committing for the next twelve months because I think it’ll probably take us twelve-plus months to get to that point where we’re the Joe Rogan or the next Dwarkesh, whatever you wanna call it.

Because I do think we have a significant runway ahead of us, I’ve committed to continue not drawing any income from the show for at least another twelve months. And if you’ve ever donated to the show, I like to say you can feel comfortable that you’re getting a host who, if he were to work in the software industry, my market value would probably be 500K-plus per year because software salaries at the Googles of the world have become super high.

So that would be my market value. But I’m bringing all of that value to the show to augment on top of the money that you guys are donating. I’m donating my time, which you can go ahead and write in your accounting is worth $500,000 or more per year. It’s donated opportunity costs. It’s real skin in the game. I’m saying all this because I want you guys to feel comfortable if you’ve ever supported the show financially that we’re doing this in a way that’s very respectful to you and the sacrifice you’re making. So it’s going literally 100% to the show, zero overhead. Right, Ori?

Ori 00:35:28
That’s right. I think that’s a pretty clear message to all the people who say, “Oh, you’re grifting.” That’s really not the case. There’s a huge discourse about the AI propaganda machine, how there’s so much money in it, and it’s like, hey, you’re not doing this to make money at all.

Liron 00:35:43
That is actually true. Andreessen and friends have actually become big accusers of high P(Doom) types, doomers, being so well-funded, like there’s a well-funded campaign to attack us.

We are very much just funded by viewers, actually 100% funded by viewers. So we could not have a cleaner funding source in terms of it’s just people who think P(Doom) is high and want us to spread the message. I don’t know how else you can have a less shady funding source than that.

Ori 00:36:12
Yeah. And also the fact that you’re profiting zero dollars from it.

Liron 00:36:16
Correct. Yeah. I mean, to the extent that I have a selfish motivation, I do enjoy having these debates and sparring with people and having viewers comment. I enjoy the attention and fame of it all, okay? I’m not gonna lie. So if you put a price on that, that’s priceless. That’s worth a billion dollars of value to me, but financially, I’m not profiting.

Ori 00:36:36
Okay.

Liron 00:36:36
Now, we’ve committed to you guys, the viewers, because of the nature of the show — it’s viewer-funded. We wanna be completely transparent as to where the money goes. You guys have a right to know. So here’s a chart. It’s a pie chart.

We have been spending approximately $200,000 a year to run the show. That’s all-in total costs. Most of it is going to producer salary, some of it is going to producer interns, some of it is going to studio and equipment.

The studio was quite expensive, to be fully transparent with you guys. Full build of everything related to the studio and the high-end cameras we’re using and all that — we’re talking $28,000, contract work to build all this stuff. It wasn’t cheap. We made the investment. We think it’s gonna be worth it.

Conferences and travel is another slice of that pie chart. Marketing and software, although our marketing budget has been pretty minimal. The main marketing push has been we’re actually sponsoring conferences like Less Online and Manifest. That’s actually the majority of our marketing budget.

But yeah, I’m pretty proud of the pie chart to be like, look, this is what a lean operation looks like when you’re getting top talent like Producer Ori, one of a kind. It’s hard to find a producer like that, and he lives in San Francisco at the heart of the AI industry. Networking there, I think it’s worth a San Francisco-level producer salary. I think it’s worth a pretty high-end production setup. I don’t think we’re wasting money here. I think we’re being quite efficient, and we’re actually getting leaner in terms of the scale of the show, where the scale is going up, the guest quality is going up, and we’re actually getting more and more efficient because we’re streamlining the operation.

Ori 00:38:01
Yeah, I think people understand how much money it takes to make nice video productions, just the man-hours to make things. You just see one hour of a nicely produced thing, but there’s a lot that happens behind the scenes. It’s a lean operation for sure.

And also, yeah, it’s getting streamlined, so we’re using the competencies that we’ve gotten to build the V1, and now it’s scaling and getting more efficient. So yeah, I think we’ll be able to start doing a lot more. Now that we’re in a place where we could do three episodes a week.

Liron 00:38:33
Exactly. Now, in terms of cost efficiency, one thing I’ll come clean with is I think we might have splurged too much over here on camera three. Camera three is just a camera that’s pointed at me looking at my computer screen, and we don’t use this shot very much on the show, and the camera costs like $2,000. So I think that particular expense might have been too much of a splurge.

Ori 00:38:53
We’ve used it a few times, and honestly, we could use it more. It’s a work in progress, so it’s possible that sometimes we make a choice that maybe isn’t the best choice. But you talk about sponsoring the conference, and people might say, “What are you doing? You’re using money, you’re sponsoring an event.” But because of the sponsorship of Less Online last year, that led to a lot of the key guests, a real snowball effect in terms of guests.

Liron 00:39:19
Yeah, because one of the prominent guests — first, we met a prominent guest at the conference, and then another prominent guest liked a tweet when we posted the video with the other prominent guest. So you gotta work all the angles you can.

Ori 00:39:30
Yeah.

Liron 00:39:30
Just to reiterate, this show is 100% funded by you guys, the viewers, which is actually pretty crazy. It’s rare to find a show that’s viewer-funded because it just has to be much bigger. You really need millions of viewers in order to hope that your viewers are going to fund you.

We are in an unusual niche where we’ve gathered a set of early viewers. Those first 20,000 watch hours a month are extremely passionate viewers who understand the mission, understand why the mission is worth funding, and tend to work in industries where the disposable income is higher. So they’re like, “You know what? I will fund this.”

We’ve hit a — we’re not following any existing playbook. There’s no playbook online that says the way to fund your channel is to start relatively small but have a $200,000-a-year production budget funded by your viewers. We’re definitely breaking new ground here.

Ori 00:40:14
It’s nice to be supported. Appreciate it.

Liron 00:40:17
We actually have been making $5,000 a year from YouTube because enough people watch our show that a few hundred dollars trickle in every month. One day, that’ll be like $500K a year, and we won’t even need to ask for viewer donations.

But until then, we really appreciate it, and there’s zero dollars in institutional backing. So we are not a front for any organization whatsoever, which is why I can authentically promise you when you watch Doom Debates, you’re just getting my own unfiltered opinion. There’s no other plan I wanna do where I’m saying an opinion one way on the show because then I’m gonna turn around and do anything. I’m just a guy with an opinion, and I made a show to say the opinion. Simple as that.

Ori 00:40:53
There you go. Not bought off by any corporate sponsors.

Liron 00:40:57
Exactly. And let me give a shout-out to one of our mission partners, Leigh, pictured here in the Doom Debates shirt. This is really the epitome of high fashion. If you guys go to shop.doomdebates.com, you can check out some of the options that we have for you guys.

But yeah, Leigh is a mission partner, meaning she’s donated $1,000-plus to the show, and she’s just been great in the comments. We do see the mission partners as a team who are all trying to achieve the same mission. Some of us do it by building a studio in their house and hosting the show, and others do it by working a normal job but then also donating to the show. It takes everybody.

Ori 00:41:28
They donate to the show, and I also think based on all the comments and interactions from Leigh, I think she’s going out telling people about these concerns and encouraging more people to have the conversations. I think it’s making a difference there.

Liron 00:41:41
We also — there is an asterisk here, like when in the $200K funding, how do we get to $200K last year, and can we just do the same thing again next year? We hope we can do the same thing again next year because it is working, but most of the $200K that we got actually came from a single person stepping up, and he’s volunteered for me to give him public praise here on the show.

So his name’s Daniel Brockman. He’s got a background in tech and crypto, and he was just watching the show being like, “Hey, this show needs to exist. I’m going to step up and fund it.” This was a year ago. This is actually what made us pull the trigger and have Producer Ori go full time, being like, “Hey, look, we’ve got a budget now. We’re a serious operation, and let’s also ask other people for donations. Let’s go pro because we can only go up from here.”

So he really jump-started a lot of what we’re doing, and he did it before there was much social proof. You need that first person to step up. That’s been really great for year two of the show, but it’s also a gap that we’re asking you to close if you also wanna support the show. It just leaves us in a position where the next year’s budget does have some room for new donors. In other words, we don’t just need one occasional hero to step up. We need a whole circle of mission partners.

We’re gonna be transparent with you guys about the metrics. There’s currently 18 mission partners, which is actually pretty amazing. A show that’s relatively new, up and coming, to already have 18 people who are donating at the mission partner level, which we’ll explain means a $1,000-plus donation. So that’s what it looks like with our $200K budget, and we’re hoping to get a circle of mission partners to just give us more stability heading into the singularity here, a little more financially secure. We’ll give you a little bit more details in a couple slides.

Liron 00:44:06
Right now in mid 2026 is actually a very unique moment. It’s why it makes sense to bring up the whole issue of state of the show and funding needs right now. We’re heading into a situation where philanthropic capital is probably going to become easier to access as all of these AI labs are going IPO — OpenAI, Anthropic. There’s a really interesting article by Nan Ransohoff that we’ve talked about on the show saying, “Hey, there’s going to be six Gates Foundations’ worth of philanthropic capital coming online in the next few years,” and hopefully that will be great for shows like ours.

But in this moment right now, there’s a lot of high-quality organizations that are funding-constrained, and this seems like a high-leverage moment where viewer dollars keep us as a growing part of the discourse. And this time next year, I think the landscape will be very changed both by superintelligent AI and by some very new interesting philanthropic organizations.

We’re having this conversation in mid 2026, which is a very interesting time. I’d refer you back to the AI 2027 timeline — superintelligence is probably coming online soon. I personally believe that. A lot of prediction market traders seem to believe that. But it’s not happened yet, and also there’s all these AI companies that are going IPO, and they’re gonna have all this philanthropic capital.

People assume, oh yeah, there will be six Gates Foundations getting set up to donate, and that’s all great. But if you listen to AI 2027, the actual singularity is coming on so fast that we don’t particularly have time to wait for that or assume that it’s coming. We are just trying to raise the alarm today — hey, can we maybe pause progress today? Can we not wait until ASI?

So here in 2026, it is very much a situation where the show’s growth really is funding-constrained. We would like to invest more in production right now, not a year from now. It’s kind of a funding-constrained environment. And that would be the “why now” if you’re considering becoming a mission partner and you’re wondering, when should I do it? I would urge you to consider now.

Ori 00:45:06
Now is an important time because, look, this is when the policies are getting set right now.

Liron 00:45:11
Here’s the specific Doom Debates ask for 2026 if you’re considering contributing. $50,000 is the total amount we need to get us through 2026, to kind of finish out our 2026 budget. So here’s our total ask for the rest of 2026. If you think we’re on a good path and you want to contribute to that path while we’re still funding constrained, you want to help out with something that I consider high marginal impact, which is funding production of our show.

Liron 00:45:35
50K is how much we need for 2026. 50K is how much we are planning for in donations to make up for the rest of 2026, assuming that some of you are willing to step up and help us out. We are coordinating production of the show, assuming that 50K will come through from some generous viewers. Maybe some of the same people who donated last year will donate again. We don’t put you guys on recurring donations. We just keep it real. We appreciate any one-time donation.

50K will help us continue at the same level of production till the end of the year, which we think is highly worthwhile. We think it’s harder to find a better use of 50K than six months of Doom Debates given that we’re doing three episodes a week, getting increasingly prominent guests, shaping the discourse, having great momentum. Going to be self-funding most likely, or have other philanthropy come online and benefit from this rising tide.

Funding Doom Debates in 2026 feels good to me. It feels high leverage. I would do it if I were you and I was in a position to direct some philanthropic capital. One or two of you could potentially just step up and do it. We’ve had that happen before. We’ve had large generous donors. It’s tax deductible via Manifund, our registered 501(c)(3). That’s our charitable sponsor. You’ll be going through there if you go to doomdebates.com/donate. This is what keeps the show alive to the end of the year, guys. No fluff, no buffer. I told you we run a lean operation, but the funding really does help, and you guys as the viewers really do make it happen.

Ori 00:46:57
That’s the plan, to keep the lights on.

Liron 00:46:59
So if you’ve made it this far, if you’ve been watching the show for a while, if you support what we’re doing, and you’re willing to donate some of your hard-earned money, these are kind of the tiers. For $10 a month, you could subscribe to our Substack. I’m not going to say that moves the needle for our budget, but it does juice our Substack numbers, which is definitely appreciated. And you can rock a Doom Debates T-shirt, and you get a paid Doom pin. You get leaderboard recognition. So definitely appreciate the supporters.

But now we come to the mission partners. This is really the tier we’ve been promoting over the last year. We define that as a $1,000-plus donation. This is the level where you move the show’s budget. We can actually be like, “Okay, great, this is a significant amount of editing work that we can pay for,” stuff like that.

You get to join our private Discord channel where only mission partners can talk about secret stuff that’s happening on the show. You can know months in advance when we have some really exciting guests, and the regular people who haven’t made a donation just have no idea about that stuff. It’s really exciting stuff that we share with you because we appreciate that you’re part of our inner circle. You’re supporting the show. You’re making it happen. Actually producing a show is not the only way to produce the show.

Ori 00:48:02
We just had some mission partners who were meeting up with each other. So, talking about building a groundswell — this is like being on the ground floor of the anti-AI extinction movement.

Liron 00:48:15
Exactly, yeah. You could meet your future husband or wife in the Doom Debates mission partner community.

Ori 00:48:20
And if you do that, report it back to us so we can put it in this slide deck next year.

Liron 00:48:25
Exactly. And then the last tier is major donor. I think you probably know who you are if this is you. We’re talking 25K or even 100K. Chances are that you’ve written a check like that before. You know the ropes, and you’re looking to make a high marginal impact, and you’re being somewhat systematic about your approach. You’re actually being like, “Hey, out of all these organizations, how do I quantify their marginal impact?”

Liron 00:49:03
Okay, well, we are kind of one of a kind, and that’s actually worth pointing out. Where else can you find somebody who’s just committed to going out there and having the debate, representing the position? It’s kind of weird, because when you go to other media hosts, I would claim other media hosts are so focused on being the host. Being, “Okay, I’m the host. You’re my guest. Just talk to me.” And they have to be so nice.

They don’t have this advantage that we’re bringing at Doom Debates, saying, “Hey, I’m Liron Shapira. I’m a guy with an opinion. I have a high P(Doom), and even if you are my guest and I am interviewing you, I’m still going to compare your opinion with my opinion. And if your opinion doesn’t make sense, I’m just going to be very honest about why, and then let the chips fall and let viewers judge.”

The one person that I know does this a lot in the space of television is Bill Maher. And I’m not saying I agree with all of Bill Maher’s perspective, but I just respect that he’s working the same combination of, “Yep, you’re my guest. I’m hosting you on the show. There’s a variety of perspective on the show, but here’s my perspective. You have to deal with my perspective.” And I don’t feel like there’s anybody else who’s playing that Bill Maher card of, “Hey, world, deal with my perspective as somebody with a high P(Doom).”

Ori 00:49:51
We gotta make you the Bill Maher of AI doom.

Liron 00:49:54
Right. It’s an N-of-1 situation. I guess I was trying to connect it to, if you’re trying to look for a unique impact, high marginal impact, it’s hard to quantify my own replacement value. If Doom Debates didn’t exist, what’s the ecosystem here of people who are trying to represent the high P(Doom) position on a media platform? I’m just not seeing it. It’s weird.

Ori 00:50:17
Yeah, I agree with that. The doom train thesis is basically you look at all the safety arguments, and then you’re exposing the unexposed assumptions, maybe why some of those concepts are flimsy. And when I’m looking at the AI ecosystem, I think that those claims, those assertions are just not being challenged in a direct way on a consistent basis.

One thing maybe that’s interesting is why I joined Doom Debates, actually, because I could have kept working at Control AI. I sort of gravitate towards impact. I’m concerned about the impact AI is going to have on everyone. I volunteered a little bit with Pause AI. I did this contract. I was doing communications in another area.

And I think us together — Doom Debates — I think has the chance for the most impact. The impact comes in different ways. There’s the times where we reach a larger public, like you appearing on Dr. Phil or debating with Destiny. That’s reaching a more public audience. But then there’s also speaking to the people in the AI safety community or people who are AI researchers, and that’s like Rob Miles and Rune. And I think that’s super influential also. That’s really impactful.

And so I just think that of all the different ways to make an impact, I do think that amplifying your voice — there’s a real promise to it as far as changing minds. You look at some people who go on Doom Debates and afterwards they’re like, “Yeah, okay. I come out the other end and I didn’t realize P(Doom) was high.” There are other figures who are out there, but who in a very consistent way is knocking down the flimsy “everything will be fine” arguments? That’s the role that Doom Debates is playing.

Liron 00:52:05
The character aspect — I brought it up myself in the context of Bill Maher, like who’s hosting a show and also being a doom pundit. Me. I don’t like the word pundit because it sounds not rational, but just somebody with a high P(Doom). I like to think I’m giving people permission to express high P(Doom).

There are so many people who are privately wondering, “Hey, where is this all going? Might it actually be bad?” And I’m saying, “Hey, guys, I’ve thought about it rationally, and I’ve concluded it is bad, and I’m not afraid to just repeat it.” Yeah, it’s bad to the point where it’s probably more likely bad than good. Or at least, let’s say fifty percent P(Doom) — there’s literally a fifty percent chance that twenty years from now we’re not even going to be standing. That’s how bad it is. And I literally say it on every episode. The “what’s your P(Doom)” is a mandatory part of every episode.

Ori 00:52:45
And I think the message is also very clear. Because there are other people who bring up some of the risks — I mean, we’ve had them on the show. They’re like, “Well, there’s a spectrum of harms, and this could be the worst harm, this could be the smallest harm,” but the discrepancy between those — the timelines are short. We’re talking about harm to everything that you care about and hold dear.

How many people are laser focused on that topic and bringing it up and then addressing the counterarguments to it? The amount that it’s coming up is just criminally under-discussed. It’s a real travesty to our society to not have it be discussed more. That is something that I think you bring to the discourse.

Liron 00:53:24
We’re bringing a new type of vibe that I think is important to combine with doom predictions. Our vibe is very different than the median Less Wrong user. No disrespect — I think Less Wrong is a national treasure, and I get a lot of my ideas from there. But I also think that there is a huge gap in the media landscape for somebody who’s communicating a lot of that same content but coming at it from a vibe of a somewhat normal person.

I try to dress like a normal person. I try to have a media studio that looks like a normal media studio. I’m not trying to introduce unnecessary weirdness into the equation. I’m trying to be somebody who’s empathizable, to make it seem like, “Oh yeah, this person is living a normal life, kind of like me, and they’ve realized that P(Doom) is high, and they have a normal reaction to it.” I’m trying to model what that combination of factors could look like.

Ori 00:54:17
Yeah. And allowing the guests also to say that. A lot of people believe it, but they don’t go out and they don’t talk about it with other people.

Liron 00:54:25
Well, it’s this concept of common knowledge. When people come on the show, I’ll say something and then the guest will be like, “Yeah, that makes sense.” And I’ll be like, “Great. Yeah, tell me again that it makes sense.” “Oh yeah, this makes sense.” It’s like, okay, well, here’s a person who seems to have respectable credentials, and that person is saying that these ideas make sense. Are you guys getting it yet?

And then we just repeat it. Volume matters. The volume of people normalizing this creates common knowledge in the technical sense of, okay, I know that they know that he knows that she knows that everybody knows, and we all know that this is now an important topic of shared discourse.

Ori 00:54:58
Yeah, totally.

Liron 00:54:59
So that was a great whirlwind tour through all the different things we’re trying to achieve here at Doom Debates. If you followed us along this far, here’s a link you can follow: doomdebates.com/donate. You are somebody who sees the risk. You have the ability to act now to actually meaningfully help, and you can join the mission. You can join the community of mission partners.

So if you’ve enjoyed learning about the state of the show and you want to get involved in a mission that you feel good about, a team of people working on the mission that you feel good about — talking about me, Ori, the production team, and the other mission partners in the Discord — if you want to join us, it’s a really great crowd to be in. I hope some of you guys join us. Please follow the link. Help us out. Do something impactful in 2026.

Ori 00:55:43
Yes. Please do that. Please support the show. Become a mission partner or contribute what you can if you want to help the cause. I really believe in the mission that we’re doing here at Doom Debates, and thank you for all the support you’ve given. Let’s amp it up. Let’s go bigger next year.

Liron 00:55:59
Hell yeah. I’ll also reiterate, thank you for your support in terms of watching the show, sharing the show, commenting on the show, supporting the show financially. It’s all been incredible compared to where we started and what our initial expectations were, and it’s now the fuel that set our sights higher and can potentially help us 10X this again, take the next exponential leap in the limited time we have.

I feel like a lot of us are on the same page. There are a lot of shared feelings here about what we’re doing. Thank you so much for your support, and we look forward to continuing to update you on the state of the show and hitting new milestones.

Ori 00:56:34
Cheers to that. Thanks, everybody.

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 🙏