You're listening to serious inquiries only. Oh, Hello and welcome to Serious and Queer's Only This is episode 179. I'm your host Thomas Smith, and joining me today will be Phil Torres. You may remember him if you've been listening to the show, I think back during the atheistically speaking days. Toward the end of that was when I had Phil on.

Phil has written a couple books.

He studies global catastrophic risks.

So he's all about which ways humans are going to end up dead basically or maybe which ways the

planet will be fundamentally altered or just anything catastrophic anything

extreme anything existential any of those sort of problems.

So, you know, AI, global warming, super volcanoes, all kinds of fun stuff, disease, you know,

the classics. of fun topics.

topics.

We talked mainly about that last time.

So feel free to check that out.

But this time, it's been long enough.

We may rehash some of that territory but also he's

recently been involved in a little bit of a back and forth because he did some

proof reading of a chapter of Stephen Pinker's latest book that dealt with existential risk, AI threat, some other stuff like that, and he found what he views, what Phil views as some poor scholarship wrote an article about it wrote a long

long article and then wrote like a shorter version that got picked up by

salon and went somewhat viral. So that'll be the second half of the show. If you're just

looking for that part, go about halfway through we get to that topic. But first we

have plenty to talk about, I mean after the the guy studies global catastrophic risks and we

elected one president since then so there's a lot to talk about all right with that

said let's get on over to the interview.

Joining me back on the show after what has been too much time. Phil Torres, how you doing sir?

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