Why Doom Debates Exists

ATTENTION DOOM DEBATES LISTENERS:

We interrupt our usual programming to request that you consider supporting the show.

Do you want your family, children & friends to continue living life through these next 10-20 years and beyond? Want to experience the good future where we benefit from research advances that make us healthier, happier, wiser, and longer-lived? Want our descendants to continue flourishing for trillions of millennia?

I sure as hell do. I’m thrilled and inspired by the grand future within our reach… Sadly, I’m VERY worried that artificial intelligence may soon cause human extinction, leaving the future permanently devoid of the incredible potential value it once had.

I want to safeguard humanity’s chance at participating in the expansive future. I want to swerve away from a premature “GAME OVER” ending. That’s why I started Doom Debates.

The Mission

Doom Debates’s mission is twofold:

* Raise awareness of AI existential risk

* Raise the quality of discourse that people can engage with and trust

The mission is achieved when the average person realizes AI is life-threatening.

Until the average person on Earth sees unaligned, uncontrollable superintelligent AI as life-threatening — that is, an imminent threat to their life and to everything they hold dear — it won’t be feasible for leaders to drive major decisive action to protect us from extinction from superintelligent AI. That’s why raising mainstream awareness of AI x-risk is Doom Debates’s point of highest leverage.

Encouragingly, surveys already show that mainstream opinion is already on our side about the level and severity of AI x-risk. What’s missing is urgency. Moving the average person’s opinion from “worried, but in an abstract long-term way” to “alarmed, in an urgent way” creates grassroots demand for drastically better AI policy, and drastically better-informed policymakers.

We needed this shift to happen yesterday; it feels late to have to drive it now. But we have no choice.

By providing high-quality interviews and debates with mainstream appeal, we’ll make millions of people realize as soon as possible: “Hey, P(doom) is too damn high RIGHT NOW. And we need to do something about it URGENTLY!”

One Weird Trick You Can Do To Help

If you care about the show’s mission, the #1 way you can help right now is by donating some of your hard-earned cash money 🙏.

Spending on production & marketing accelerates the show’s growth, which achieves our mission faster (hopefully before it’s too late). Read on for more details.

Where Does The Money Go?

I don’t make money from Doom Debates. My “real job” is running an online relationship coaching service, and my passion project is making this show. Any income from Doom Debates, i.e. viewer donations and ad revenue, is fully reinvested into production and marketing.

* Producer Ori

Thanks to a generous viewer donation, I’ve hired a full-time producer: Ori Nagel.

Ori is a rockstar who I’ve known for many years, and he collaborated with me behind the scenes throughout the show’s first year (he’s also in the first episode) before officially joining Doom Debates as our Producer. I hired him away from the media & outreach team at ControlAI, where he 10x’d their growth on social media channels.

You may have noticed the show has already started getting better at editing & thumbnails, putting out more episodes and clips, and landing more prominent guests. We’re getting more done across the board because 1 hour of Ori’s time working on everything except hosting the show = same output as 1 hour of my time.

But it’s not all smooth sailing — now that Doom Debates is Ori’s full-time job, he apparently needs to “get paid every month” 🤷‍♂️, so I’m appealing to you to help Ori stay on the job. Help us keep delivering faster progress toward the mission.

* Paid Marketing

The key to the show’s growth isn’t marketing; it’s the content. To date, we’ve had robust organic growth with minimal marketing spend. Audience size has been doubling every 3 months, and we’re seeing a snowball effect where bigger audiences attract higher-quality guests and vice versa. We’re also happy to see that the show has unusually high engagement and long-term viewer retention.

That said, investing in marketing lets us pull forward the same viewership we’d eventually get from organic growth. We’ll soon invest in YouTube ads to go beyond the pace of organic growth. We also keep spending opportunistically on marketing initiatives like sponsoring the Manifest conference and giving away T-shirts.

Donation Tiers

SUBSTACK SUPPORTERS

You can donate as little as $10/month by subscribing to the DoomDebates.com Substack, which shows your support and raises our profile on their leaderboard. I’ll send you a free Doom Debates T-shirt and P(Doom) pin so you can represent the show. Early supporters say the T-shirt is great at starting AI x-risk conversations in a non-confrontational way. 😊

MISSION PARTNERS

If you’re serious about lowering P(Doom) and you have the money to spare, $1k+ is the level where you start to move the needle for the show’s budget. This is the level where you officially become a partner in achieving the show’s mission — a Mission Partner.

A donation in the $thousands meaningfully increases our ability to execute on all the moving parts of a top-tier show:

* Guest booking: Outreach to guests who are hard to get, and constant followup

* Pre-production: E.g. preparing elaborate notes about the guest’s positions

* Production: E.g. improving my studio

* Post-production: Basically editing

* Marketing: Making clips, TikTok shorts, YouTube ads, conference sponsorships, etc

If you think that’s worthwhile:

Please click here to Donate via PayPal

To donate crypto or if you have questions, email me.

Of course, some donation amounts are *extra* meaningful to accelerating the mission. If you’re able and willing to donate $25,000 or $100,000, that’s going to be, let’s see… 25x or 100x more impactful! For my well-off fans, I’d say funding us up to the next $million at the current margin is high positive impact per dollar.

Q: What if I’m not doing any AI x-risk activism? Is it good enough if all I do is donate money to other people who are working on it more directly?

A: YES! You’re putting your time & energy into making money to fund the show, just as I’m putting my time & energy into making it. Unlike the 99.9% of people who deny the crisis, ignore it, or passively/hopelessly worry about it, you’re stepping up to actively help the situation. You’ve identified “Making the average person see AI as life-threatening” as a leverage point. Now you’re taking a straight shot to lower P(Doom)!

Mission Partners are the show’s braintrust, collaborating in the private #mission-partners channel on our Discord server to steer the show’s direction. They can see non-public information and discussion about upcoming guests, as well as gossip like which AI company CEO surprisingly liked my spicy tweets.

We have a Mission Partners meeting once/month on Zoom to go over the latest updates, plans, and high-level strategy for those who are interested. Every Mission Partner is also credited on the show, unless you prefer to remain anonymous.

How Much Should YOU Donate?

The minimum donation for Mission Partners is a one-time $1,000, but if you can donate more than that and you believe in the mission, please consider scaling your donation according to your level of disposable income. The show’s expenses are over $100k/yr, so it’s extremely helpful if some of you can step up with a larger donation. Consider giving $10k, $100k, or whatever order of magnitude makes sense for you. Just stay within the maximum donation limit of $99 million.

A few months ago, a viewer stepped up and donated over $25,000, and it’s been a game changer. Ori came on board full time and we started moving twice as fast. We promoted the show at the Manifest conference, which led to recruiting a series of high-profile guests: Scott Sumner, Richard Hanania, Carl Feynman, culminating in an episode with Vitalik Buterin! And more unannounced guests in the pipeline.

If you’re ready to become a Mission Partner today:

Please click here to Donate via PayPal

To donate crypto or if you have questions, email me.

We’re seeing strong momentum after the first year of the show. The steady audience growth to date has been 100% organic:

Building a platform to raise the quality of mainstream x-risk discourse and inform the average person’s opinion is a realistically achievable mission. It’s just a matter of growing to the point where we can shape the conversation while there’s still time. To that end, building a team of Mission Partners who support the show financially and strategically is critical.

To everyone who believes in the Doom Debates mission, and believes in our ability to execute it, and acts on that belief by generously donating: THANK YOU! We won’t let you down.