Our guest in this episode is Stephen Witt, an American journalist and author who writes about the people driving the technological revolutions. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, and is famous for deep-dive investigations.

Stephen's new book is "The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip", which has just won the 2025 Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award. It is a definitive account of the rise of Nvidia, from its foundation in a Denny's restaurant in 1993 as a video game component manufacturer, to becoming the world's most valuable company, and the hardware provider for the current AI boom.

Stephen's previous book, “How Music Got Free”, is a history of music piracy and the MP3, and was also a finalist for the FT Business Book of the Year.

Selected follow-ups:

• Stephen Witt - personal site
• Articles by Stephen Witt on The New Yorker
• The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip - book site
• Stephen Witt wins FT and Schroders Business Book of the Year - Financial Times
• Nvidia Executives
• Battle Royale (Japanese film) - IMDb
• The Economic Singularity - book by Calum Chace
• A Cubic Millimeter of a Human Brain Has Been Mapped in Spectacular Detail - Nature
• NotebookLM - by Google

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration

Our guest in this episode is Holly Elmore, who is the Founder and Executive Director of PauseAI US. The website pauseai-us.org starts with this headline: “Our proposal is simple: Don’t build powerful AI systems until we know how to keep them safe. Pause AI.”

But PauseAI isn’t just a talking shop. They’re probably best known for organising public protests. The UK group has demonstrated in Parliament Square in London, with Big Ben in the background, and also outside the offices of Google DeepMind. A group of 30 PauseAI protesters gathered outside the OpenAI headquarters in San Francisco. Other protests have taken place in New York, Portland, Ottawa, Sao Paulo, Berlin, Paris, Rome, Oslo, Stockholm, and Sydney, among other cities.

Previously, Holly was a researcher at the think tank Rethink Priorities in the area of Wild Animal Welfare. And before that, she studied evolutionary biology in Harvard’s Organismic and Evolutionary Biology department.

Selected follow-ups:

• Holly Elmore - substack
• PauseAI US
• PauseAI - global site
• Wild Animal Suffering... and why it matters
• Hard problem of consciousness - Wikipedia
• The Unproven (And Unprovable) Case For Net Wild Animal Suffering. A Reply To Tomasik - by Michael Plant
• Leading Evolution Compassionately - Herbivorize Predators
• David Pearce (philosopher) - Wikipedia
• The AI industry is racing toward a precipice - Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI)
• Nick Bostrom's new views regarding AI/AI safety - reddit
• AI is poised to remake the world; Help us ensure it benefits all of us - Future of Life Institute
• On being wrong about AI - by Scott Aharonson, on his previous suggestion that it might take "a few thousand years" to reach superhuman AI
• California Institute of Machine Consciousness - organisation founded by Joscha Bach
• Pausing AI is the only safe approach to digital sentience - article by Holly Elmore
• Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers - book by Geoffrey Moore

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration

Popular movies sometimes feature leagues of superheroes who are ready to defend the Earth against catastrophe. In this episode, we’re going to be discussing some real-life superheroes, as chronicled in the new book by our guest, Tom Ough. The book is entitled “The Anti-Catastrophe League: The Pioneers And Visionaries On A Quest To Save The World”. Some of these heroes are already reasonably well known, but others were new to David, and, he suspects, to many of the book’s readers.

Tom is a London-based journalist. Earlier in his career he worked in newspapers, mostly for the Telegraph, where he was a staff feature-writer and commissioning editor. He is currently a senior editor at UnHerd, where he commissions essays and occasionally writes them. Perhaps one reason why he writes so well is that he has a BA in English Language and Literature from Oxford University, where he was a Casberd scholar.

Selected follow-ups:

• About Tom Ough
• The Anti-Catastrophe League - The book's webpage
• On novel methods of pandemic prevention
• What is effective altruism? (EA)
• Sam Bankman-Fried - Wikipedia (also covers FTX)
• Open Philanthropy
• Conscium
• Here Comes the Sun - book by Bill McKibben
• The 10 Best Beatles Songs (Based on Streams)
• Carrington Event - Wikipedia
• Mirror life - Wikipedia
• Future of Humanity Institute 2005-2024: final report - by Anders Sandberg
• Oxford FHI Global Catastrophic Risks - FHI Conference, 2008
• Forethought
• Review of Nick Bostrom’s Deep Utopia - by Calum
• DeepMind and OpenAI claim gold in International Mathematical Olympiad
• What the Heck is Hubble Tension?
• The Decade Ahead - by Leopold Aschenbrenner
• AI 2027
• Anglofuturism

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration