You're listening to Robert Wright's Non-Zero Podcast.

Hi, Robin.

Hey, Bob.

How you doing?

Long time, no, C. It's been a while. It's been a while. It's been years since we recorded one of these. I don't know. My life is full of ideas, so I'm happy to talk to you about a wide range of ideas. As ever, we're going to talk about some of them. Let me introduce this. I'm Robert Wright, publisher of the Non-Zero Newsletter. you're Robin Hanson, economist and George Mason, well-known futurist,

uh, introduces. I'm Robert Wright, publisher of the non-zero newsletter. You're Robin Hansen,

economist and George Mason, well-known futurist, author of a couple of books. You also are putting out

the overcoming bias newsletter, which for people interested in the problem of racial prejudice,

is not about that. It's about more, I guess, cognitive bias, how to think rationally and so on.

Is that the idea?

That was an aspirational initial title, but it's just about like whatever I'm thinking about.

Yeah, originally.

It was a group blog for a while, actually.

It was actually helped to form the rationalist community in that I had a group blog with

Elias Uyoski, who then

split off to make less wrong and his current fame of AI risk. He and I debated those issues

in that blog many years ago. And so, you know, the blog has a history. That's actually relevant to what we're going to talk about because I want to talk about a few things.

First of all, you came up with this phrase, the great filter and some associated ideas that help us think about the question of whether planet Earth or how likely it is that planet Earth is doomed.

And in particular, think about the Fermi paradox, which we'll get into, which raises a question of whether it's good news or bad news for us that we haven't seen any space aliens.

At least I haven't seen any space aliens.

Have you seen any space aliens, Robin?

Nor water aliens, nor dirt aliens at all. Right.

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