Brian Chau: The AI doomers always believed superintelligent AI would become a malevolent god and wipe us out. People used to think he was exaggerating. Now they say it in public.

This week Jacob Coxon’s Anthropic resignation thread went mega-viral, and Bernie Sanders is staging AI’s “extraordinary dangers” on the Hill.

Brian Chau is an AI engineer, publisher of Effort.News, and co-founder of Alliance for the Future, the pro-AI advocacy group that fought Biden-era AI controls and helped unwind the institutional machinery that survived repeal. On Counterweight he maps the AI doom thesis—Yudkowsky, the orthogonality claim, and why every step of the chain fails—then follows the money: Sam Bankman-Fried, Dustin Moskovitz’s Open Philanthropy (now Coefficient Giving), Jaan Tallinn, and the Future of Life Institute. He walks through a Guardian story where the publisher, the reporter, the subject, and the experts were paid by the same donors; the Coxon amplification machine; anti-data-center funding; hardware kill switches sold as a China tool; TIME’s AI 100 with a majority of profiles written by Open Phil–paid journalists while Jensen Huang was left off; and what Senate staffers should ask Geoffrey Hinton and Ajeya Cotra next week.

Listen / watch: https://www.counterweightpod.com

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@counterweightpod

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/counterweight-with-will-chamberlain/id6803321469

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/18jtv7U8cB0IW82qM9xoK8

Brian Chau: Effort.News · @brianchau57 Will Chamberlain: @willchamberlain Instagram / TikTok: @counterweightpod

CHAPTERS

0:00 Teaser — they want to ban AI because they think it causes the apocalypse

0:48 Host intro

2:16 Brian Chau

2:20 Background — from AI engineer to Alliance for the Future

4:58 Coxon goes viral — who the doomers are

5:37 Why Chau welcomed the panic — now we fight on honest ground

7:41 The orthogonality thesis — and why the apocalypse chain is wrong

8:52 Their claim — AI becomes God, God is malevolent

10:53 Why every step fails — S-curves, narrow intelligence, the cult’s dark triad

19:02 Funders — Bankman-Fried, Moskovitz, Tallinn, Future of Life

21:43 The distorted media ecosystem

23:17 True believers vs regulatory capture — Anthropic and Amodei

27:48 Coxon’s thread as the product of the nonprofit machine

30:14 Cloaking the thesis — deepfakes, China, and data centers

31:21 Anti-data-center money — Singham vs the larger doom ecosystem

34:09 Why now — political timing more than sudden AGI panic

37:05 Policy endgame — treating NVIDIA GPUs like controlled arms

38:00 Kill switches — destroy the industry, sell it as beating China

42:26 TIME 100 — 58% of profiles paid by Open Phil; Jensen Huang left off

43:46 What senators should ask

46:24 YouTube ad bidding that steers recommendations

48:14 Undisclosed AI-doom sponsorships of creators

49:12 Effort.News — mining legal and financial records for the money trail

Richard Goldberg: America is winning the Iran war. The Strait of Hormuz is moving on U.S. orders, and the escape hatches are closing.

The harder question is how you turn that pressure into an end state before Tehran finds a way to wait you out.

Richard Goldberg is a senior advisor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He ran Iran weapons-of-mass-destruction policy on the National Security Council in the first Trump term, helped stand up the National Energy Dominance Council, and was sanctioned by Iran in 2020 for the maximum-pressure campaign. He has been one of the public architects of the blockade-plus-sanctions strategy now running as Operation Economic Outcast.

On this episode of Counterweight, Goldberg walks through what “winning” means six months in: nuclear and missile setbacks, ships running dark through Hormuz, the cash crunch and gasoline rationing inside Iran, and why Treasury closing escape hatches still leaves a harder problem. How do you go from economic suffocation to victory without a ground war, and what should “maximum support” for the Iranian people actually look like before the midterms?

Listen / watch:

https://www.counterweightpod.com

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@counterweightpod

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/counterweight-with-will-chamberlain/id6803321469

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/18jtv7U8cB0IW82qM9xoK8

Richard Goldberg: Foundation for Defense of Democracies · fdd.org

Will Chamberlain: @willchamberlain

Instagram / TikTok: @counterweightpod

CHAPTERS

0:00 Teaser — Hormuz on U.S. orders, hatches closing

0:55 Host intro

2:38 Richard Goldberg

2:57 What winning looks like — nukes and missile breakout

11:24 Hormuz no longer Iran’s — blockade plus Outcast

13:01 Ships running dark through Hormuz

17:27 Trump’s vibe shift — no more MOUs

18:03 Why the MOU happened and why Project Freedom went underground

27:53 Demining and whether America was stringing Iran along

29:02 The MOU as Iran’s surrender of Hormuz

29:51 Gas lines and the cash crunch inside Iran

31:27 How real is the squeeze — subsidies and the house of cards

40:10 Can economic pressure alone topple the regime

42:00 Maximum support — arming Iranians and naming an alternative

52:41 October surprise risk before the midterms

Judge Glock: data-center construction is up about twenty times in three years. Of course the counties are panicking.

Loudoun County takes about 45 percent of its tax dollars from those buildings and cut the homeowner rate by about 40 percent. He called it a free government.

Judge Glock is an economic historian, the research director at the Manhattan Institute, and a contributing editor at City Journal. Judge is his name, not a title. He lives next door to Loudoun County, Virginia, the data-center capital of the world. This spring he wrote the Loudoun case in City Journal.

On this episode of Counterweight, Glock walks through what is actually inside those buildings, why Loudoun became ground zero, whether other counties can still copy that deal, and why a local zoning vote will not decide the future of AI. The frontier labs spent a year talking as if they were going to eat half of the white-collar jobs, and maybe the planet. A lot of people are treating a county board meeting as a vote on the apocalypse.

Listen / watch: https://www.counterweightpod.com

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@counterweightpod

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/counterweight-with-will-chamberlain/id6803321469

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/18jtv7U8cB0IW82qM9xoK8

Judge Glock: @judgeglock on X · manhattan.institute

Will Chamberlain: @willchamberlain

Instagram / TikTok: @counterweightpod

0:00 Teaser

1:07 Host intro

2:52 Judge Glock

2:56 What a data center does

4:11 Why AI needs them

5:14 Cooling and power

6:28 Construction jobs

8:41 Neighbors

12:56 The twenty-times boom

15:14 Loudoun

19:34 Loudoun pushback

21:54 Who pays for power

24:06 Can other counties copy

25:18 Where the backlash comes from

28:55 How counties should bargain

32:15 Federalism

35:47 AI doom talk