Guy is an independent researcher, author, Emergent Ventures Fellow, and hands-down the most prolific/insightful shit-poster I know on twitter. If you’ve been around long enough, you’ll know him as “Rival Voices”.

Among many things, he’s an expert on Adversarial Epistemology: finding truth in an environment designed to deceive you. You can learn more from his book Alignment Gone Strange.

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Kati Devaney is a neuroscientist and meditation teacher with over 25 years of practice. She earned her PhD in 2018 using fMRI to study attention and prediction updating in experienced Vipassana meditators and completed a postdoc at Harvard Medical School. She’s now the Chief Scientific Officer at the Consciousness Foundation, co-founded the Berkeley Alembic and the SF Dharma Collective, advises Jhourney on the neuroscience of jhana, and has been quoted on the brain and meditation in The Atlantic, National Geographic, and TIME.

In this episode we talk about weird stuff like cessation, jhanas, and non-duality. We also explore how the brain quietly constructs your sense of reality moment-to-moment, and how to (re)start a meditation practice.

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Elena Lake is a bodyworker and former mathematician. After studying math, CS, and physics at MIT and two years doing ML at Meta, she left tech to study touch. When her early massage sessions started producing results she couldn't explain, she trained across Esalen, craniosacral, fascia, ScarWork, BoneWork, and visceral manipulation. In 2024 she developed her own modality: Regenerative Touch. Elena now sees billionaire clients, teaches tactile anatomy classes, and writes on Substack.

In this episode we talk about her path from MIT to massage school, how to take care of yourself, what it’s like to see fascia with your hands, and some of the weirder aspects at the frontier of bodywork.

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Alex Olshonsky is a coach, somatic therapist, and writer. After a polysubstance addiction nearly killed him during his Silicon Valley years at Twitter, Salesforce, and Slack, he found freedom in somatic psychology and contemplative practice. He now coaches founders and people in recovery, co-founded the psychedelic-assisted addiction nonprofit Natura Care, and writes the Substack Deep Fix.

In this highly practical episode, we talk about his life a “professional drug addict” and his beautiful article You’re probably addicted to thinking.

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Richard Ngo is one of a handful of people who've worked on AGI safety at both DeepMind and OpenAI. After three years as a futurist on OpenAI's Governance team, he left to pursue independent research on coalitions, virtue ethics, and the foundations of cooperation. He’s also a science fiction author (The Gentle Romance: Stories of AI and Humanity) and writes at Mind the Future.

We talk about virtue ethics, egregores, academic fraud, memeplexes, cooperation, parts-work, and what it was like to work with Sam Altman.

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"Nothing human makes it out of the near future." - Nick Land

Matt Southey is a leading expert on the philosophy of Nick Land with a PhD in Religion from Rice University. He is also the founding editor of The Latecomer, an online magazine which publishes essays on the long-term future.

Matt's excellent piece on "A Brief History of Accelerationism" can be found here.

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Michael “Valentine” Smith is a co-founder of CFAR (the Center for Applied Rationality) and the author of influential LessWrong essays including The Hostile Telepaths Problem, Kenshō, and The Intelligent Social Web.

He’s also been described as “one of the most powerful wizards in the Bay Area.”

In this conversation, he explains why your brain creates fog and self-deception to survive social situations, what it actually takes to find clarity, and why "working on yourself" might be the wrong frame entirely. We also do a live coaching demo debugging my own procrastination.

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Jake Orthwein is the creator of Frame Problems, a video essay channel on science, art, philosophy, politics, and culture.

In this episode, Jake talks about his upcoming film for Sam Harris‘s mindfulness app Waking Up. We explore the latest neuroscience on consciousness and how it might explain the psychedelic experience, religious phenomenology, meditation and what it all means for a good life.

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Alex Zhu is a math olympian and researcher exploring the convergence of analytical rationality and religion. He’s also the co-founder of AlphaSheets. He’s currently working on a rigorous framework for bridging AI alignment and mysticism.

Romeo Stevens is one of co-founders of the Qualia Research Institute and the founder of Mealsquares. He writes extensively about buddhism, pedagogy, skill development and psychotherapeutic modalities. You can find his work on his blog, Lesswrong and Twitter.

In this episode, Alex and Romeo explore their disagreement around perennialism. The idea that all the world’s major religions are pointing to the same thing.

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Pranab Sachi is the co-founder of Attention Copilot, a service that blends meditation and therapy techniques with real-time productivity support. He applies non-dual teachings, IFS, somatic awareness, and emotional processing to help people experience deep work on demand.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit themetagame.substack.com