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Doom Debates — Serious AI X-Risk Debates & Analysis as Mainstream Infotainment
Doom Debates's mission is to be a popular mainstream-accessible forum for discourse about AI extinction risk.
Since 2024, we've been hosting discussions and debates with prominent intellectuals and media personalities (watch on Substack or YouTube).
We're steadily moving the Overton window to where everyone is expected to have a thoughtful position on AI extinction risk, ideally one that doesn’t dismiss it as meaningless or <1% chance.
We lower P(Doom) by building society-wide common knowledge that experts, leaders, and famous people of every kind are engaging with artificial superintelligence as an urgent societal-scale risk.
The Doom Debates Team
Host: Liron Shapira
Producer: Ori Nagel
Producer Interns: Alfred Churchill and Ronak Saxena
Our guests have included:
Michael Levitt (Nobel Prize)
Moshe Vardi (Turing Award)
Keith Duggar (Machine Learning Street Talk)
Daniel Holz (Chair of the Doomsday Clock organization)
Eliezer Yudkowsky (interview on separate channel)
Our "man on the street" episodes:
I’ve also been invited to appear on or collaborate with:
Dr. Phil, Jubilee "Middle Ground", Destiny, Mike Israetel, Rob Miles, Siliconversations, Wes Roth, Robert Wright, Steve Bannon's War Room, Prepper News, The Cognitive Revolution, The Bayesian Conspiracy, The Cosmopolatin Globalist, Universe Today, Primer
Praise for Doom Debates
“I generally don’t like debates as a format, but by getting such outstanding guests as Max [Tegmark] and Dean [Ball] 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 Shapira created a point-by-point video response to my podcast with Liv Boeree, focused on the parts about AI safety. I finally had a chance to watch it today. The response is great, including the many parts where Liron tears me a new asshole! Highly recommended.”
“Liron, deeply appreciate how you've been trying to deepen the discourse about AI risk in the public sector. You've had a diversity of great minds on here, and honored for what you're doing and appreciate what you're doing.”
“I highly recommend Liron Shapira’s show!”
“These are strong guests… I do love that he is doing this”
The YouTube channel 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.”
"I highly recommend this newsletter, and the author's YouTube channel, for vigorous debates about the risks of AI. You'll find all views represented and rigorously debated, doomer & accelerationist alike, by people in an excellent position to know what they're talking about. Whenever you're told that only ninnies worry about AI risk, check to see whether that argument has been discussed here and see what you make of the rebuttals."
Joe Allen, Host of Bannon’s War Room
“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.…I cannot recommend enough the Doom Debate platform.”
“You're having really important conversations on a very narrow topic in a way that no one else is really doing, so it's awesome.”
Audience Growth
The show gets over 20,000 YouTube watch-hours/month and over 10,000 podcast downloads/month.
Since we’re anticipating a rapid increase in mainstream interest in the topic of AI extinction risk, we believe Doom Debates is well positioned to grow these metrics by 10-100x in the next 1-3 years. (For comparison, Dwarkesh Podcast is currently about 25x ahead of Doom Debates in terms of watch & listen time.)
Theory Of Impact
We plan to help millions gain a deeper, more nuanced, more useful, and more actionable understanding of AI extinction risk.
To that end, we will continue to:
Produce a consistent stream of high-quality interviews and debates with thought leaders across a wide spectrum of AI x-risk positions
Document, probe and challenge the nuanced & evolving claims and arguments put forward
Provide consistent, timely, mainstream-accessible analysis from an informed and AI-extinction-risk-concerned viewpoint
These impacts scale with the show's audience and caliber of guests. Funding production operations (e.g. research, content prep, editing, guest outreach) accelerates the show's growth & impact snowball, wherein a larger audience attracts higher-caliber guests who attract a larger audience.
I believe funding Doom Debates has a high marginal impact because the show is taking a clear shot at filling a gap in mainstream AI x-risk discourse that could be highly influential and highly positive, and it doesn’t seem like other projects are directly competing with us to fill the same gap.
We Are Almost 100% Viewer Funded
Our viewers have donated over $200k to the show to date. (This plus ~$5k/yr of YouTube ad revenue has been our entire funding to date.) The breakdown of viewer donation amounts is:
1 viewer donated $150k
1 viewer donated $20k
1 viewer donated $15k
18 viewers donated $1k–$5k
49 viewers donated $10–$500
It's been extremely encouraging to see so many viewers putting such a high value on supporting our mission.
Some comments left by these donors:
"I really want to support you because I think that you are doing really great work to get the word out about this crisis. More people understanding it means more people to help try to solve it. Also, it means more people to reject wildly continuing down the path of AI capability development."
“Doom Debates tackles a pressing human existential risk with the best tools we have: clear thinking and honest discourse.”
"I've always been a fan of Eliezer Yudkowsky, a lot of what he's saying goes over my head sometimes, but at the same time a lot of what he's saying is almost too childish, and he's laughing at his own cleverness a little bit too often and it's hard to make other people take him seriously, I take him completely seriously, I think he's a brilliant genius, but you make his ideas clear and accessible."
"I really love your content Liron. I can't get enough of it."
"I enjoy watching your content much more than watching Netflix stuff and I pay for that. I know you try hard, you expose yourself out there and you don't care about all the hate you are probably receiving. You need to be supported and be heard, because your message is the most important topic everyone should be talking about on the media and at dinner-time (which is not yet the case)"
Someone needs to respond to the constant high-profile dubious claims
Because our civilization has thus far neglected to build a robust forum for high-quality debates on high-stakes issues, there are currently various prominent voices leveraging friendly media platforms to broadcast weak arguments for doubtful claims. We’re missing a platform where someone can challenge their claims and unpack their arguments with enough distribution to be a meaningful part of the same discourse as the original author.
Doom Debates is able to publish independent analysis of x-risk-related claims and arguments to an increasingly large audience, even if the author of the claims declines our invitation to come on the show. For instance, we’ve published articles and episodes critically analyzing:
Ben Horowitz’s backwards conclusion from comparing open source AI to nuclear proliferation
Roger Penrose’s claims about AIs lacking consciousness and Godel’s Theorem
Fresh new ideas need help reaching a mainstream audience
One of the show’s goals is to notice when smart people post important ideas in their corner of the internet and signal-boost them to a larger audience via an interview or debate, e.g.:
These are some of our most popular episodes, and demonstrate how we can speed up the diffusion of ideas from research organizations like MIRI into mainstream awareness.
Use of Funds
We spend $150k/year on production:
Producer salary: $120k
Producer interns and other outside production help: $30k
If we have additional funds, we will also spend them on marketing efforts such as our recent sponsorships of the LessOnline and Manifest conferences.
This doesn't include the value of my (Liron's) time. I have not been drawing any income from Doom Debates in 2024-2025, and commit to also not drawing income from Doom Debates in 2026-2027.
Right now, $50k gets us to the end of 2026.
We wouldn't be able to do this without viewer support. Thanks for partnering with us on the mission to lower P(Doom).
—Liron and Ori