Project summary

Humanity's time to deal with AI x-risk is running out. The topic has been steadily gaining mindshare, but it hasn't been enough. Famous people are increasingly discussing AI on high-profile shows and podcasts, but they often do it without addressing the basic claim that the trajectory of our species is literally heading toward doom within one generation!

Doom Debates will be the premiere forum for doomers and non-doomers to engage in high-quality debates over this urgent topic, much like the popular debate between Max Tegmark / Yoshua Bengio / Yann LeCun / Melanie Mitchell that Munk Debates hosted last year.

Doom Debates will also be publicly analyzing and critiquing other media, particularly high-profile intellectuals and AI experts who are currently helping the public sleepwalk toward doom by not even acknowledging the basics of AI existential risk.

The show will never stoop to ad-hominem attacks or any kind of low-quality discourse. On the contrary, the project's mission is to model EA-caliber discourse for mainstream AI x-risk arguments.

See DoomDebates.com for representative examples of episode content.

What are this project's goals? How will you achieve them?

When millions of people are tuning into a high-quality source of analysis on AI x-risk each week, and it's no longer common to see other prominent AI discussions completely dismissing the AI x-risk issue, then we've succeeded in our mission.

Tracking our audience size is a good way to measure progress toward our mission of putting AI x-risk consistently in the mainstream public conversation. Just two months into the project, we're already getting 1k+ views and listens per episode. As a ballpark estimate of what audience size this can realistically grow to, Dwarkesh Patel's podcast gets 150k+ views and listens per episode, and still has much room to grow.

How will this funding be used?

Doom Debates has been organically growing and improving on a $0 budget by steadily releasing episodes that resonate with our audience. We're now at the point where we can convert money into faster audience growth using obvious low-hanging-fruit growth tactics.

I will hire my friend Ori Nagel on contract, whose professional specialty is marketing and PR. He'll take the content I produce and create optimized clips to syndicate to various social channels and triple each episode's reach.

The viewers-per-episode metric will soon hit tens of thousands, and we're heading into a virtuous cycle where the quality of the guests we attract grows with our audience size, and our audience grows when we have episodes with more well-known guests.

Who is on your team? What's your track record on similar projects?

The team is just me so far. See note above about contracting my friend.

The Doom Debates YouTube channel has come a long way in just its first 2 months as I've dialed in the production value and found a passionate initial audience.

Through my years on Twitter/X, growing my account to 38k followers, I've gotten a sense of how to distill ideas into a simple attention-grabbing form. For instance, this viral thread helped signal-boost Eliezer Yudkowsky's Bankless appearance last year, and this viral tweet raised awareness about Yann LeCun's overconfidence.

My track record of tweeting hundreds of video clips and analyses about AI x-risk issues nonstop over the last 2 years, plus feedback from my appearances on other podcasts like Robert Wright and Future of Life Institute, made me realize that I have an unusual level of motivation and stamina to produce a podcast on the subject. It's going well so far; I'm having fun and I'm motivated to build on the steady momentum.

What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails?

The most likely failure mode is if my content doesn't resonate with a large audience, making it hard to get beyond 25k+ views and listens per episode, such that I give up on the 250k+ views per episode which I currently think is a realistic long-term goal.

But I believe my communication style is relatively mainstream, e.g. I recently got invited to come on Dr. Phil's primetime show to talk about AI doom, and the early audience for Doom Debates has been very engaged. Plus, the topic of AI risk is growing increasingly mainstream. So I bet the potential audience who wants to consume my content about AI x-risk really is in the millions.

What other funding are you or your project getting?

This is the first grant I've applied to, because I wanted to get my momentum going on the project first. There's now enough content posted on the Doom Debates YouTube channel where you can get a sense of what you're supporting. Soon listeners who believe in the mission will also be able to help fund it via premium subscriptions on Substack or Patreon.