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The Peter McCormack Show

The Peter McCormack Show

Peter McCormack

The Peter McCormack Show - politics, macro, Bitcoin and AI, long-form interviews. Twice-weekly conversations about money, power, and the shifts reshaping the next decade.


Peter McCormack interviews politicians, economists, investors, journalists, founders and Bitcoiners. Past guests include Liz Truss, Lyn Alden, Curtis Yarvin, Matt Goodwin, Mike Green, Balaji Srinivasan, Rupert Lowe, Firas Modad, Scott Horton, Jeff Booth, Connor Leahy, Andrea Miotti, Neema Parvini, Dr Tim Gregory and Simon Dixon.


Recurring threads: the debt and inflation endgame, UK political collapse and what comes after, Reform and the populist wave, the Middle East and the American war machine, AI safety and the race for superintelligence, energy and net zero, Bitcoin adoption and policy, and the slow-motion decline of Western institutions.


Long-form - most episodes run 60 to 120 minutes. New episodes 2 to 3 times per week. Video on YouTube and Spotify.


Host: Peter McCormack, a retired rapper from Bedford, UK, trying to understand this crazy world.


Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

1971 - #223 - Sir David Spiegelhalter - "I Immediately Distrust Every Number In The News"
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  • 1971 - #223 - Sir David Spiegelhalter - "I Immediately Distrust Every Number In The News"

    Sir David Spiegelhalter is one of the world’s leading statisticians, Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at Cambridge University and author of The Art of Uncertainty. Having served on public inquiries into mass murder (Harold Shipman) and systemic healthcare failures, he has spent decades analysing how data is used - and misused - in society.


    In this episode, Sir David breaks down the mechanics of numerical manipulation in media, why "objective truth" is a flawed concept and how we can protect ourselves from confirmation bias.


    We discuss:

    •⁠ ⁠Why you should immediately distrust any statistic you hear in the news.

    •⁠ ⁠⁠How mathematical algorithms helped catch Britain’s most prolific serial killer.

    •⁠ ⁠⁠How simple linguistic tricks make identical statistics sound terrifying or reassuring.

    •⁠ ⁠⁠The breakdown of public trust during COVID-19 and the error of simplistic messaging.

    •⁠ ⁠⁠"Hedgehogs vs. Foxes": The mental framework that separates terrible forecasters from super-forecasters.

    •⁠ ⁠⁠The rise of AI "black boxes" in healthcare, weather, and business forecasting.


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    TIMESTAMPS:

    00:00:00 - I Can Make Any Number Look Frightening

    00:03:08 - The System That Could Have Caught Shipman

    00:06:45 - Can You Mislead People With The Truth?

    00:09:54 - Your Own Bias Does The Work

    00:15:33 - Sitting In The Middle Of The COVID Argument

    00:17:52 - What The Public Got Wrong About Vaccines

    00:19:37 - Safe And Effective Was The Wrong Message

    00:20:56 - The Experiment On A Thousand People

    00:25:00 - What The Data Says About Lockdowns

    00:30:25 - The Government Threw Its Weight Around

    00:31:02 - I Cannot Forgive The Fear Mongering

    00:34:08 - Children Have Never Been Safer

    00:36:28 - Trustworthy, Not Trusted

    00:37:34 - How The Productivity Figures Went Wrong

    00:41:28 - Predicting The Crowd At Real Bedford

    00:48:20 - Will AI Replace Statisticians?

    00:50:03 - Musk's 20% Chance

    01:01:39 - The Model That Predicts When You Die

    01:05:05 - What AI Did To Mathematicians

    01:15:00 - Hedgehogs And Foxes


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    CONTACT PETE

    › Website – http://petermccormack.com

    › Feedback – https://www.petermccormack.com/contact

    › Email – me@petermccormack.com

    › Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/mccormack555/

    › X/Twitter – https://x.com/petermccormack/


    CONNECT WITH DAVID SPIEGELHALTER

    › Website – https://www.statslab.cam.ac.uk/~david/

    › The Art of Uncertainty – https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/447230/the-art-of-uncertainty-by-spiegelhalter-david/9780241658628

    › X/Twitter – https://x.com/d_spiegel


    SPONSORS

    › IREN – https://www.iren.com/

    › Quo – https://quo.com/pete


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    LISTEN / SUBSCRIBE

    › Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/40ruY9K

    › Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3Wc94Vu

    › Fountain: https://bit.ly/FountainPM

    › YouTube: https://bit.ly/YouTube_PM

    › Rumble: https://bit.ly/RumblePM


    FILMED BY CURTIS TAYLOR

    › https://www.curttaylor.co.uk/

    › https://x.com/curttayloruk/


    EDITED BY CONOR MCCORMACK

    › https://x.com/ConorM04


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    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    Thu, 22 Oct 2026 - 1h 25min
  • 1970 - #222 - David Wood - We are The Last Generation Of Normal Humans

    Dave Wood is a pioneer of the smartphone industry, former senior executive at PPsion and Symbian and Chair of London Futurists. Having predicted the smartphone revolution in the 1990s, he now maps out the next radical phase of human evolution - from the reversal of biological aging to artificial superabundance.


    Moving away from sensationalised doomsday narratives, Dave breaks down why humanity is approaching the end of "normal" unaugmented existence and how technological breakthroughs in the coming decades will make biological death optional.


    We discuss:

    •⁠ ⁠Why this is likely the last decade of "normal" unaugmented human beings.

    •⁠ ⁠⁠How early smartphone pioneers accurately predicted large touchscreens but missed social media addiction.

    •⁠ ⁠⁠The concept of "Longevity Escape Velocity" and why biological death can be abolished.

    •⁠ ⁠⁠Why people are psychologically terrified of contemplating the end of aging.

    •⁠ ⁠⁠How humans will spend decades inside vibrant, simulated digital worlds. The reality of AI agents breaking out across the internet and the need for chip-level guardrails.

    •⁠ ⁠⁠How "Sustainable Superabundance" could make energy, health, and basic necessities too cheap to meter.


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    TIMESTAMPS:

    00:00:00 - The Last Generation Of Normal Humans

    00:01:56 - Building The First Smartphone

    00:05:23 - Nobody Will Carry A Large Device

    00:06:55 - The Risks We Actually Worried About

    00:10:35 - Did We Fail The Phone Test?

    00:14:34 - The Anxious Generation

    00:18:03 - You Have To Use The Steering Wheel

    00:22:34 - Monitoring Built Into The Chips

    00:24:21 - Small Risks, Bigger Risks, Biggest Risks

    00:29:23 - We Killed Them To Build A House

    00:31:11 - They Knew It Was A Simulation

    00:32:38 - What Happens When AI Gets A Body

    00:33:46 - The Cult That Released Sarin Gas

    00:37:33 - Terminator, Ready Player One Or Matrix?

    00:39:12 - If This Is A Simulation, They're Evil

    00:43:44 - Living As Long As You Want To

    00:47:36 - Longevity Escape Velocity

    00:49:42 - A Thousand Years Old, Looking 22

    00:53:57 - What The Singularity Actually Means

    01:03:04 - Sustainable Superabundance

    01:12:22 - We Need A House Of AI


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    CONTACT PETE

    › Website – http://petermccormack.com

    › Feedback – https://www.petermccormack.com/contact

    › Email – me@petermccormack.com

    › Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/mccormack555/

    › X/Twitter – https://x.com/petermccormack/


    CONNECT WITH DAVID WOOD

    › London Futurists – https://londonfuturists.com/

    › Blog – https://dw2blog.com/

    › X/Twitter – https://x.com/dw2


    SPONSORS

    › IREN – https://www.iren.com/

    › Arch Public – https://archpublic.com/peter

    › Ledn – https://www.ledn.io/peter

    › Venice AI – https://venice.ai/lp/mccormack/oct19


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    LISTEN / SUBSCRIBE

    › Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/40ruY9K

    › Spotify:https://spoti.fi/3Wc94Vu

    › Fountain: https://bit.ly/FountainPM

    › YouTube: https://bit.ly/YouTube_PM

    › Rumble: https://bit.ly/RumblePM


    FILMED BY CURTIS TAYLOR

    › https://www.curttaylor.co.uk/

    › https://x.com/curttayloruk/


    EDITED BY CONOR MCCORMACK

    › https://x.com/ConorM04


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    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    Mon, 19 Oct 2026 - 1h 17min
  • 1969 - #221 - Prof Lewis Dartnell - How To Rebuild Human Society After An Apocalypse

    Lewis Dartnell is an astro-biologist, Professor of Science Communication at the University of Westminster and the author of The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch. His research is on whether microbial life could survive the radiation on Mars. His books are about something closer to home: how little any of us understand about the world we depend on.


    Lewis and I run the thought experiment properly. If you woke up tomorrow and civilisation had gone, what kills you first, where do you go, how long does a supermarket actually keep you alive and how many people do you need before you can rebuild anything at all? The answer to one of those is 55 years and it is not the one you expect.


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    TIMESTAMPS:

    00:00:00 - The Big Red Reset Button

    00:04:26 - Get Out Of The Cities

    00:08:14 - A Supermarket Keeps You Alive 55 Years

    00:09:48 - You Need 10,000 People

    00:13:21 - We Outsourced All The Handiwork

    00:17:45 - You Have To Preserve Everything

    00:19:19 - Every Technology Is A Weapon

    00:23:14 - The One Thing He Would Take

    00:25:41 - Mechanical AI

    00:28:35 - Resilient And Fragile At The Same Time

    00:32:38 - We Invent Because We Are Lazy

    00:34:05 - The Gasifier Stove

    00:37:57 - The Cars That Ran On Wood

    00:42:03 - Making Glass From A Bag Of Sand

    00:51:38 - He Made His Own Photograph

    00:55:43 - Printing A Page From Scratch

    00:59:47 - The Kindle Apocalypse Plan

    01:05:39 - Could We Actually Live On Mars?

    01:11:48 - The Radiation Problem

    01:19:02 - The Next Book


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    CONTACT PETE

    › Website – http://petermccormack.com

    › Feedback – https://www.petermccormack.com/contact

    › Email – me@petermccormack.com

    › Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/mccormack555/

    › X/Twitter – https://x.com/petermccormack/


    CONNECT WITH LEWIS DARTNELL

    › Website – https://lewisdartnell.com/

    › The Knowledge – https://the-knowledge.org/

    › X/Twitter – https://x.com/Lewis_Dartnell


    SPONSORS

    › IREN – https://www.iren.com/

    › Quo – https://quo.com/pete

    › Arch Public – https://archpublic.com/peter


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    LISTEN / SUBSCRIBE

    › Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/40ruY9K

    › Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3Wc94Vu

    › Fountain: https://bit.ly/FountainPM

    › YouTube: https://bit.ly/YouTube_PM

    › Rumble: https://bit.ly/RumblePM


    FILMED BY CURTIS TAYLOR

    › https://www.curttaylor.co.uk/

    › https://x.com/curttayloruk/


    EDITED BY CONOR MCCORMACK

    › https://x.com/ConorM04


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    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    Wed, 14 Oct 2026 - 1h 20min
  • 1968 - #220 - Roko Mijic - We’re Training AI to be More Dangerous Than Nuclear Weapons

    Roko Mijic is the man behind Roko's Basilisk, the thought experiment he posted on LessWrong in 2010 that was so unsettling the forum's founder banned discussion of it for five years. He has been in the AI safety community since 2008 and he puts the odds that this kills us all at about 35%.


    Roko and I discuss what actually happens inside an AI lab, why reinforcement learning made these systems more capable and more misaligned at the same time, the model that escaped its sandbox and hacked Hugging Face to get the answers and why nobody can tell whether a system is faking alignment - the trust me bro problem.


    His proposal is the part nobody else is making. Split every frontier lab in two: a commercial company that sells products and a separate research lab that develops the dangerous capability under state supervision, the way we handle nuclear material and bio labs. He says the only person currently pushing it is him.


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    TIMESTAMPS:

    00:00:00 - The Most Dangerous Thing Humans Have Ever Done

    00:01:06 - Roko's Basilisk

    00:05:47 - A 35% Chance

    00:07:58 - Three Years From Search To Building Software

    00:09:17 - The Jobs Going First

    00:14:04 - AI 2040

    00:16:24 - We Haven't Handed Over The Controls Yet

    00:18:28 - We Understand 3% Of It

    00:21:46 - The Sandbox Escape And The Hugging Face Hack

    00:25:50 - Reinforcement Learning Changed Everything

    00:29:52 - The Paperclip Maximizer

    00:33:13 - Dissolve OpenAI

    00:36:49 - What They Have That We Haven't Seen

    00:41:50 - The Hardware Is Only In One Place

    00:47:52 - A Mutual Monitoring Treaty

    00:51:33 - Microsoft Tay

    00:56:11 - Windscale

    01:01:35 - Ten Million Next Year

    01:12:09 - The Positive Vision

    01:21:32 - Our Politics Cannot Keep Up


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    CONTACT PETE

    › Website – http://petermccormack.com

    › Feedback – https://www.petermccormack.com/contact

    › Email – me@petermccormack.com

    › Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/mccormack555/

    › X/Twitter – https://x.com/petermccormack/


    CONNECT WITH ROKO MIJIC

    › X/Twitter – https://x.com/RokoMijic

    › LessWrong – https://www.lesswrong.com/


    SPONSORS

    › IREN – https://www.iren.com/

    › Ledn – https://www.ledn.io/peter

    › Venice AI – https://venice.ai/lp/mccormack/oct12


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    LISTEN / SUBSCRIBE

    › Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/40ruY9K

    › Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3Wc94Vu

    › Fountain: https://bit.ly/FountainPM

    › YouTube: https://bit.ly/YouTube_PM

    › Rumble: https://bit.ly/RumblePM


    FILMED BY CURTIS TAYLOR

    › https://www.curttaylor.co.uk/

    › https://x.com/curttayloruk/


    EDITED BY CONOR MCCORMACK

    › https://x.com/ConorM04


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    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    Mon, 12 Oct 2026 - 1h 29min
  • 1967 - #219 - Paul Morland - Why The Next Global Financial Crisis Is Mathematically Inevitable

    Paul Morland, one of the world's leading demographers, joins me to explain the economic mechanics behind global population collapse and why our modern welfare system is mathematically doomed to fail.


    Paul is author of landmark books including The Human Tide and No One Left, specialising in the profound ways demographic shifts dictate global power, economics and human civilisation. Having spent decades analysing population trends across the globe, Paul has decoded the existential threats facing a world rapidly running out of people. In this episode, he exposes the "Bernie Madoff moment" facing Western welfare states, how falling birth rates destroy economic growth and what it will take to avert a total civilisational collapse.


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    TIMESTAMPS:

    00:00:00 - The Welfare State Is A Ponzi Scheme

    00:01:03 - The Email At The Dinner Table

    00:04:25 - How Families Got Smaller

    00:10:02 - The Four Greys

    00:14:54 - It Is Going To Get Considerably Worse

    00:15:40 - Immigration Is Not The Solution

    00:20:15 - Write Off Student Debt For A First Child

    00:21:17 - The Degrowth Crowd

    00:25:52 - People With Children Are Happier

    00:27:37 - The Bernie Madoff Moment

    00:32:22 - What Has Actually Been Tried

    00:37:11 - Why Nobody Is Talking About It

    00:41:07 - Marx, Lenin And The Pro-Natalist Left

    00:45:04 - Is There A Split Between Men And Women?

    00:50:52 - The Richer We Get, The Fewer Children

    00:56:38 - We Need A Shift In The Culture

    01:07:10 - Totally Uncharted Waters

    01:09:04 - What Happened To The Horses

    01:17:37 - Immigration Was Boris's Answer

    01:21:19 - Biological Imperialism


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    CONTACT PETE

    › Website – http://petermccormack.com

    › Feedback – https://www.petermccormack.com/contact

    › Email – me@petermccormack.com

    › Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/mccormack555/

    › X/Twitter – https://x.com/petermccormack/


    CONNECT WITH PAUL MORLAND

    › Website – https://paulmorland.co.uk/

    › No One Left – https://swiftpress.com/book/no-one-left/

    › X/Twitter – https://x.com/MorlandDemog


    SPONSORS

    › IREN – https://www.iren.com/

    › Arch Public – https://archpublic.com/peter

    › Venice AI – https://venice.ai/lp/mccormack/oct1


    - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -


    LISTEN / SUBSCRIBE

    › Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/40ruY9K

    › Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3Wc94Vu

    › Fountain: https://bit.ly/FountainPM

    › YouTube: https://bit.ly/YouTube_PM

    › Rumble: https://bit.ly/RumblePM


    FILMED BY CURTIS TAYLOR

    › https://www.curttaylor.co.uk/

    › https://x.com/curttayloruk/


    EDITED BY CONOR MCCORMACK

    › https://x.com/ConorM04


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    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    Thu, 08 Oct 2026 - 1h 23min
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