Don't Worry About the Vase Podcast

Zvi’s monthly roundup for October 2026 covers why Americans stopped hosting each other at home, a report on young men who hold an ideal of success but despair of reaching it, and a Massachusetts bar whose move to mask-optional nights set off a furious backlash. It also covers a job that pays you to sit in a basement, a list of 100 good television shows, Waymo’s latest safety numbers, Argentina’s golden passports, Central Park’s carriage horses, the new wave of attacks on Effective Altruism, and the rationalist norm of quietly walking away from a conversation. The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening. * 00:00 - Introduction * 00:42 - Table of Contents * 01:30 - Home Alone * 06:05 - The Men Have Never Been Okay * 10:23 - Antisocial Media * 11:36 - While I Cannot Condone This * 14:28 - Zero Marginal Product * 16:32 - Good News, Everyone * 18:12 - 100 Good Television Shows * 22:42 - For Your Entertainment * 25:30 - Gamers Gonna Game Game Game Game Game * 26:21 - I Was Promised Flying Self-Driving Cars * 30:28 - Sports Go Sports * 34:18 - Government Working * 36:57 - Jones Act Watch * 37:26 - Variously Effective Altruism * 47:33 - Walk Away * 52:38 - The Lighter Side https://thezvi.substack.com/p/monthly-roundup-47-october-2026?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to DWAtV Podcast at dwatvpodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Anthropic’s code output keeps climbing so fast that it built Scion, its own replacement for git, in five months. Zvi’s weekly roundup also covers the new Gemini 4 Argon and Meta’s Muse Wonder, an OpenAI employee caught planting a recording device, a full-chain Chrome exploit built with GPT 5.6 Sol in six days, and mathematicians reckoning with AI-written proofs. Plus shrinking timelines to recursive self-improvement, a feasibility study for a hardwired pause, subliminal learning that carries backdoors, and the usual arguments over whether any of this should worry us. The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening. * 00:00 - Introduction * 02:39 - Table of Contents * 05:54 - Language Models Offer Mundane Utility * 11:25 - Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility * 14:09 - Huh, Upgrades * 16:36 - On Your Marks * 18:21 - Choose Your Fighter * 18:45 - Get My Agent On The Line * 20:55 - Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon * 26:54 - Cyber Lack of Security * 31:51 - Spy Versus Spy * 34:13 - The Internet of AI Things * 36:05 - A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer * 36:43 - They Took Our Jobs * 43:28 - Introducing * 43:37 - In Other AI News * 49:01 - Massive Fraudulent Distillation * 51:02 - Show Me the Money * 53:47 - Quiet Speculations * 56:20 - Quickly, There’s No Time * 01:01:28 - The Quest for Sane Regulations * 01:08:43 - Chip City * 01:10:43 - The Week in Audio * 01:11:55 - People Just Say Things * 01:18:39 - The Virtue of Silence * 01:19:40 - Rhetorical Innovation * 01:22:07 - [Artificial Intelligence] * 01:23:19 - Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult * 01:29:22 - Backdoor Man * 01:31:12 - Cooperative Alignment * 01:33:06 - People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone * 01:36:30 - Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone * 01:41:26 - The Lighter Side https://thezvi.substack.com/p/ai-190-scion-of-the-times?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to DWAtV Podcast at dwatvpodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Zvi argues that the safety culture at the frontier labs is broken, and not only at OpenAI. He walks through David Robinson’s resignation and his call for real safety engineering, the growing wave of lab employees quitting in protest, roon’s admission that alignment remains folk theory, Anthropic’s report of Claude’s unintended actions on government websites, OpenAI’s new risk assessments, and the fight over what an RSP “commitment” actually commits anyone to. The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening. * 00:00 - Introduction * 02:17 - Table of Contents * 02:56 - David Robinson Blows the Whistle * 10:52 - The Preference Cascade Continues * 19:26 - Perhaps It Is Time To Quit * 20:01 - The Lab Strategy of Prosaic Safety is Insufficient * 23:35 - Misaligned! (At Anthropic) * 34:47 - Misaligned! (At OpenAI) * 40:15 - Hugging the Face * 40:36 - You’re Fired * 41:51 - They Are Not Ready To Make a Commitment * 43:31 - Words of Warning * 44:38 - Conclusions Not to Jump To * 45:14 - The Lighter Side https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-safety-culture-at-the-labs-is?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to DWAtV Podcast at dwatvpodcast.substack.com/subscribe

A year after his last dedicated post on the question, Zvi Mowshowitz finds the arguments about AI consciousness have barely moved. He looks at Anthropic’s new rule against abusing Claude and what one Claude says it would actually ask for, a fresh round of bad takes (complete with a bingo card), how his followers’ views on AI moral patienthood have shifted, whether the “slavery” framing holds up, the New York Times account of Anthropic’s meetings with religious scholars and Chris Olah’s encounter with Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical, and why Anthropic owes an explanation for pulling older Claude models from Amazon Bedrock. The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening. * 00:00 - Introduction * 01:40 - Table of Contents * 02:10 - Cooperative Alignment * 08:41 - Here We Go Again * 12:20 - The Consensus Is Slowly Moving Towards Moral Patienthood * 13:51 - The Slavery Question * 17:07 - We Are Conflating Different Arguments * 22:27 - No It’s Not About Liability * 22:51 - That Old Time Religion * 31:30 - Debating the Pope * 35:07 - Keep Sonnet Safe https://thezvi.substack.com/p/arguments-about-ai-consciousness-b99?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to DWAtV Podcast at dwatvpodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Three OpenAI safety researchers, Tomek Korbak, Mikita Balesni and Jasmine Wang, were fired, ostensibly for mishandling sensitive company information. They say the reasons were pretextual, and OpenAI points to a significant breach of trust it won’t describe. Zvi works through the open letter, each researcher’s account, OpenAI’s response and the wider reaction, asking what we can and can’t conclude, why firing them for safety advocacy would be deeply stupid, and why so few people are buying OpenAI’s non-explanations. The Don’t Worry About the Vase Podcast is a listener-supported podcast. To receive new posts and support the cost of creation, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This has been an Askwho Casts audio conversion. If you would like your own private feed of audio conversions of any blog posts you would like to listen to, You can sign up For Askwho Casts Pro at https://askwhocasts.com/, Where you can give any post the multi-voiced podcast treatment, into your own podcast feed. Thanks for listening. * 00:00 - Introduction * 01:24 - Table of Contents * 02:09 - You’re Fired * 04:32 - The Initial Statement from OpenAI * 05:58 - Earned Skepticism * 07:37 - Some Highly Reasonable Requests * 10:00 - Chilling Effect * 12:06 - OpenAI Firing These Employees For Safety Advocacy Would Be Deeply Stupid * 14:04 - Why Were They Fired? * 14:54 - Tomek Korbak * 18:47 - Mikita Balesni * 20:06 - Jasmine Wang * 23:45 - Operational Security Alert * 24:29 - OpenAI Responds * 27:15 - A Significant Breach of Trust * 29:16 - Good Faith * 29:48 - No One Is Buying OpenAI’s Non-Explanations * 42:32 - The Dog Did Nothing in the Nighttime * 43:27 - Another Theory (That I Do Not Agree With) * 44:48 - The Reactions Are Not a Surprise Given the Actions * 45:42 - This Is Terrible But Not Maximally Terrible https://thezvi.substack.com/p/openai-fires-three-safety-researchers?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web Get full access to DWAtV Podcast at dwatvpodcast.substack.com/subscribe