Dr. Evan Miyazono joins Jacob to talk about his path from quantum networking and Protocol Labs to founding Atlas Computing. They discuss why Atlas moved away from formal methods research and toward what Evan calls “field strategy”: identifying important problems, figuring out what interventions could actually address them, and finding the people best positioned to make them happen. The conversation also covers the resilience gap map, coordination failures, AI safety, "value alignment," and the question of how to decide what work is worth doing when there’s no obvious organization responsible for it.

Check out the video version of this podcast on the Kairos.fm YouTube channel, or the extended version on Patreon!

Chapters

• (00:00) - IAIS Evan
• (05:04) - From Quantum Internet to Blockchain
• (13:31) - Founding Atlas Computing
• (18:26) - Formal Methods Explained (ASIDE)
• (24:40) - Narrower AI & Domain-Specific Safety
• (35:55) - The Pivot to Field Strategy
• (52:29) - Value Alignment vs. Skill
• (01:09:17) - The Resilience Gap Map
• (01:26:33) - Guarding Against Funder Capture
• (01:49:10) - Rapid Fire Questions
• (01:58:02) - Outro

• Atlas Computing website
• The AI Resilience Gap Map
• Atlas Computing blogpost - Civilization's Maintenance Backlog
• Atlas Computing blogpost - Your Solution Doesn't Know Your Problem Exists
• Galois blogpost - What Are Formal Methods?
• Patrick Collison & Tyler Cowen essay discussion - We Need a New Science of Progress
• Federation of American Scientists article - Focused Research Organizations

What if the safest AI models weren't built by adding guardrails after training, but by shaping what gets learned in the first place? Ethan Roland, senior alignment researcher at AE Studio and first author on an ICML 2026 spotlight paper, joins Jacob to talk about gradient routing, a technique that routes dangerous capabilities into isolated parts of a model's architecture where they can be locked or removed entirely. They get into the absorption effect, KYC-style access control frameworks, and what it would actually take for frontier labs to adopt this kind of work before it's needed rather than after.

Chapters

• (00:00) - Introduction
• (06:39) - Inside AE Studio
• (15:26) - China & the Alignment vs. Controllability Framing
• (18:23) - Data Filtering & Gradient Routing (Aside)
• (30:39) - Mixture of Experts Explained (Aside)
• (36:25) - Why Pre-Training Interventions Are Rare
• (42:43) - Ethan's Theory of Change
• (56:17) - Access Control Governance and KYC (Aside)
• (01:04:47) - The Researcher's Role in Policy Advocacy
• (01:11:38) - Speed Round
• (01:27:55) - Outro

• Ethan's website
• The paper landing page
• Preprint - Gradient Routing: Masking Gradients to Localize Computation in Neural Networks
• ICLR paper and webpage - Deep Ignorance: Filtering Pretraining Data Builds Tamper-Resistant Safeguards into Open-Weight LLMs
• Wikipedia article - CBRN defense
• NTI tutorials on bioweapons and nuclear testing

Today's episode does double duty as an interview and an announcement. Joe Williams, host of the new Kairos.fm show "Beyond the Paycheck: Reclaiming the Case for UBI in the Age of AI," joins Jacob to talk about his background as a freelance translator and how AI quietly dismantled his livelihood in 2025. From there the conversation expands into whether this moment is really different from past waves of automation, who exactly makes up the tech billionaire class, and why you should probably raise an eyebrow when someone like Elon Musk says he supports UBI. Go check out Reclaiming UBI!

Chapters

• (00:00) - Intro
• (05:01) - Joe's Background
• (19:41) - What is UBI & Why Does It Matter Now?
• (27:25) - ASIDE: The Corporation Who Cried " My Technology Will End Work"
• (32:25) - Wealth Concetration & the Digital Economy
• (39:06) - The AI Gentry
• (48:13) - ASIDE: Sam Altman + OpenResearch + Worldcoin
• (53:38) - Powerful UBI Supporters Should Raise Red Flags
• (01:02:56) - How to Read AI Gentry Discourse Critically
• (01:10:00) - Who Is "Reclaiming UBI" For?
• (01:18:17) - Outro

• NEW KAIROS.FM PODCAST - Reclaiming UBI: Work and Values in the Age of AI
• Josh Steimle blog post - Will AI Destroy Jobs? 500 Years of Predictions Say No
• Smithsonian Magazine article - What the Luddites Really Fought Against
• ITIF report - Oops: The Predicted 47 Percent of Job Loss From AI Didn't Happen
• Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence journal article - AI, Universal Basic Income, and Power: Symbolic Violence in the Tech Elite's Narrative
• Time article - What to Know About Worldcoin and the Controversy Around It
• Wikipedia page - World (blockchain)