Doom Debates — Serious AI X-Risk Debates as Mainstream Infotainment

We engage with top intellectuals on AI extinction risk publicly & substantively

Doom Debates hosts discussions & debates with prominent intellectuals and media personalities. These help move the Overton window to where everyone is expected to have a thoughtful position on AI extinction risk, and ideally one that doesn’t dismiss it as meaningless or <1% chance.

Since 2024, we’ve been building society-wide common knowledge that experts, leaders, and famous people of every kind are taking AI extinction risk seriously.

Doom Debates Team

Host: Liron Shapira

Producer: Ori Nagel

Producer Interns: Alfred Churchill and Ronak Saxena

Our guests have included:

• Max Tegmark

• Dean Ball

• Vitalik Buterin

• Emad Mostaque

• Gary Marcus

• Tristan Harris

• Michael Levitt (Nobel Prize)

• Moshe Vardi (Turing Award)

• Noah Smith

• Roman Yampolskiy

• Carl Feynman

• Emmett Shear

• Richard Hanania

• Holly Elmore

• Robin Hanson

• Scott Sumner

• Keith Duggar (Machine Learning Street Talk)

• Daniel Holz (Chair of the Doomsday Clock organization)

• Ken Stanley

• Audrey Tang

• George Hotz

• Bentham's Bulldog

• Roon

• Eliezer Yudkowsky (interview on separate channel)

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

• Nathan Labenz

  • “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.”

• Scott Aaronson

  • “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.”

• Tristan Harris

  • “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.”

• Bentham’s Bulldog

  • “I highly recommend Liron Shapira’s show!”

• Zvi Mowshowitz

  • “These are strong guests… I do love that he is doing this”

• Canadian Prepper

  • 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.”

• The Cosmopolitan Globalist

  • "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.” 

• Liv Boeree

  • “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.)

We spend $150k/year on production. $50k gets us to the end of 2026:

• Producer salary: $120k

• Producer interns and other outside production help: $30k

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.