When Matt emailed me out of the blue to tell me he thought I was pessimistic and that he disagreed with several of the things I’ve said on the podcast, I knew we had to talk. We discuss:

• pessimism
• xrisk, including AI, his interest,
• risk at the scale of the personal life, and why Matt chose to introduce risk into his life,
• the lifeboat flotilla,
• dissensus,
• and more.

By the way, we mention but don’t discuss much in depth the concept of dissensus. I was introduced to the word by JMG’s writing, probably this post from 2008. I recommend it. The concept is central to much of my thinking.