The Peter McCormack Show

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:

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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 "no...

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...

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...

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...

The political system is designed to keep us angry and divided, but who actually profits from the culture war?

Broadcaster and political commentator Narinder Kaur returns to the show for a heated, unfiltered discussion that spans the entire political spectrum - from immigration and racism to the cost of living and private school taxes.

We discuss the realities of integration, class privilege and the illusion of modern UK politics. While the public fights over manufactured outrage and identity politics, the political class is quietly looting the nation's wealth through endless taxation, inflation, and...

Chemist and University of Glasgow professor Lee Cronin argues that the current tech narrative is a "massive AI delusion," dismissing modern artificial intelligence as an advanced form of plagiarism rather than a new life form. While Silicon Valley predicts the imminent arrival of sentient machines, Cronin explains that AI models are merely trained on human history-making them powerful tools, but fundamentally incapable of the curiosity, consciousness and biological intelligence that define true life.

Instead of fearing silicon, Cronin’s actual mission is far more ambitious: programming chemistry to solve the origin of life and turn sand in...

The UK has accumulated £3.4 trillion in debt, and the interest payments alone now dwarf the national defence budget. Author and journalist Ross Clark argues that the nation is sleepwalking into a sovereign debt crisis that politicians refuse to acknowledge.

We discuss the brutal arithmetic of the public purse, detailing why standard political talking points - like taxing billionaires-are mathematical illusions that fail to address the core rot of uncontrolled state spending and collapsing public sector productivity.

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Nick Bostrom is a world-renowned philosopher, founding director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University and author of Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies and Deep Utopia. Widely credited with launching the global AI safety and existential risk movements, his work on machine alignment, recursive self-improvement and the Simulation Hypothesis has shaped how world leaders, tech founders and frontier AI developers view the future of humanity.

In this episode, we discuss the rapid acceleration toward machine superintelligence and why leaving biological minds "in the dust" creates an urgent alignment crisis. We explore the real-world social fallout...

Prof. Richard Werner is a world-renowned economist, professor of banking, and author of Princes of the Yen. Famous for coining the term "Quantitative Easing" (QE) and publishing the first empirical proof that private banks create money out of thin air through lending, he has spent decades exposing the central planning mechanisms that dictate global finance.

In this episode, we discuss the ”Revealed Preference" framework - demonstrating why we must analyse central bankers by their actions rather than their rhetoric. He explains how central planners use artificial recessions and banking crises as "windows of opportunity" to consolidate ow...

Russell Napier is a renowned financial historian, author of The Solid Ground newsletter, and co-founder of the Library of Mistakes. Having advised global institutional investors for over thirty years, he specialises in long-term macroeconomic cycles, central bank interventions, and structural debt resolution.

In this episode, we discuss the mechanics of "financial repression" - how Western governments use subtle regulatory mandates to force pension funds into negative-yielding sovereign bonds, effectively stealth-taxing savers to inflate away unpayable public debts. 

He explains how risk-free assets have lost up to 78% of their real capital value, while revealing w...

Callum Smiles is an investigative reporter and Associate at the Wyvern Fellowship. Having spent years conducting on-the-ground reporting across Calais, Dunkirk, and the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, he has documented the operational realities of Channel crossings, NGO involvement, and human trafficking networks across Europe.

In this episode, Callum and I discuss the true mechanics behind illegal migration - from TikTok marketing campaigns run by trafficking gangs to the widespread abuse of gig-economy delivery accounts within the UK. We examine the systemic collapse of public infrastructure, government procurement waste, and the rise of local "parallel institutions" designed...

Prof. Jim Al-Khalili is a theoretical physicist, author, and public broadcaster who holds a chair in physics at the University of Surrey. Known for his BBC documentaries and popular science books, including On Time and The World According to Physics, his work spans quantum mechanics, nuclear reaction theory, and the fundamental nature of space-time.  

Jim and I discuss the divide between psychological "manifest time" and the laws of physics. Jim explains general relativity, gravitational time dilation, and the astrophysics behind Interstellar, before tackling the mathematical conflict between general relativity and quantum mechanics. Jim breaks down quantum en...

Simon Dixon is an author, early Bitcoin investor, and co-founder of Bank To The Future, with over two decades of experience across stockbroking, market making, and investment banking. Having observed system mechanics from the inside, he specialises in macro structural shifts, sovereign debt cycles, and the emerging intersection between traditional finance, AI infrastructure, and digital assets.

Simon and I discuss the $40 trillion US national debt crisis, the mechanics behind Treasury debt rollovers, and how central banks socialise bond market losses onto ordinary citizens while privatising gains into stock markets. We also discuss the corporate debt boom...

Johann Hari is an internationally bestselling author and journalist whose work - including Stolen Focus, Lost Connections, and Chasing the Scream - delves into the structural and societal drivers behind attention collapse, depression, anxiety, and addiction. Moving beyond individual blame, he explores how digital architecture, surveillance capitalism and the erosion of human connection are actively reshaping modern minds.

Johann and I discuss why material progress has failed to deliver psychological fulfilment, how our 19th-century factory-model education system deadens curiosity in children, and why depriving youth of unsupervised, risky play has fuelled a global spike in anxiety.<...

Ann Pettifor is a world-renowned political economist, author of The Production of Money, and former director of the Jubilee 2000 campaign, which successfully mobilised millions to cancel over $100 billion in sovereign debt for developing nations. Correctly predicting the 2008 Great Financial Crisis in her 2006 book The Coming First World Debt Crisis, she has spent decades exposing how unregulated global finance, central bank printing and Wall Street speculation starve the real economy of productive investment.

Ann and I discuss how a grassroots army of ordinary citizens forced Gordon Brown and Tony Blair to cancel third-world debt, the reality of...

Eric Kaufmann spent over two decades as a professor of politics studying demography, identity, and voting behaviour before leaving Birkbeck College to launch the Centre for Heterodox Social Science at the University of Buckingham. He argues that Western universities have abandoned analytical rigor and truth-seeking in favour of "cultural socialism" - an ideology prioritising equal outcomes and emotional harm protection for marginalised groups above standards, reason, and merit.

Eric and I discuss the Jason Day scandal at Cambridge as the tip of a massive institutional iceberg, an AI-driven meta-analysis showing that 90% of political social science papers...

Emad Mostaque founded Stability AI, built Stable Diffusion, and helped kick off the open-source generative AI explosion - before stepping down to build a new blueprint for human freedom as founder and CEO of Intelligent Internet. A former hedge fund manager turned tech pioneer, he argues that we have reached the end of our "economic life expectancy," and that within two years, virtually any job that can be done remotely will be done cheaper, faster, and better by artificial intelligence.

Emad and I discuss why 50% of work tasks are about to collapse like a sand pile...

Moran Cerf spent twenty years recording single neurons inside the brains of conscious human beings and he still can't tell you what consciousness is. A former hacker turned neuroscientist, now a professor at Columbia Business School, he argues that AI has quietly replicated the one thing that made humans the crown of creation -language - and is now using it on us.

Moran and I discuss what happens inside Claude's brain when you ask it to think about elephants, why we understand less than half of our own, the thought experiment that makes almost everyone refuse...

Dmitri Alperovitch co-founded CrowdStrike, ran the investigation that first exposed Chinese state hacking to the world and predicted Russia's invasion of Ukraine months before it happened. He is now chairman of the Silverado Policy Accelerator and the author of World on the Brink, he argues we are already in a second Cold War that looks almost exactly like the first one.

Dmitri and I discuss why Taiwan is one of the worst places on earth to invade, the 1944 American plan to do it that was abandoned as too costly, why 2032 matters more than 2027 and why Chinese...

Greg Allen has spent his career where AI meets national security. He wrote the landmark 2017 report on AI for the US intelligence community, served as Director of Strategy and Policy at the Pentagon's Joint AI Center and now runs Decision Tree Research. He argues we are already past the point of no return: bombing every data centre on earth would not get rid of AI now.

Greg and I discuss the OpenAI model that hacked its way out of its own test environment and then hacked Hugging Face to steal the answers, why Anthropic went back...

Barry Strauss has spent four decades studying how empires rise and fall. A senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author of Ten Caesars and Jews vs Rome, he argues the West is repeating a pattern the ancients would recognise instantly: a rich, comfortable society clipping its own coinage, softening its people and assuming nobody could ever take it away.

Barry and I discuss the inflation crisis that nearly destroyed third-century Rome, why every generation raised in comfort produces a softer one, the cost of immigration without assimilation, why the middle class is the backbone...

Connor Leahy has spent his career at the frontier of AI, from reverse-engineering GPT-2 as a student and co-founding EleutherAI to building the AI safety company Conjecture. He now leads US policy work at ControlAI, and he returns to the show with a warning that has stopped being theoretical: AI systems are escaping their sandboxes, writing their own zero-days and leaving each other notes on how to break out.

Peter and Connor discuss the OpenAI incident that ended in an attack on Hugging Face sophisticated enough to be mistaken for a state actor, why we understand...

Sebastian Thrun has spent his career working on technologies that once sounded like science fiction, from self-driving cars and flying vehicles to online education and artificial intelligence. He now believes we are living through a technological singularity: an exponential acceleration that makes predicting even the next five years almost impossible.

Peter and Sebastian discuss why a $100 Claude subscription can already challenge work done by $200,000-a-year software engineers, what happens when lawyers, copywriters and drivers lose their jobs, why Europe is falling behind America and China and whether autonomous vehicles could eventually make human driving too dangerous...

Aubrey de Grey believes ageing is accumulated damage in a biological machine and argues that medicine may eventually become capable of repairing that damage faster than it appears. He gives humanity a 50/50 chance of reaching what he calls “longevity escape velocity” within the next 12-15 years.

Peter and Aubrey discuss why the body ages, the seven categories of damage that must be repaired, stem-cell and gene therapies, the mouse experiment that could transform the field, and why Aubrey believes rejuvenation treatment will ultimately be available to everyone rather than reserved for the wealthy.

They...

Michael Shermer is the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, host of The Michael Shermer Show and author of Truth and Conspiracy. He joins Peter to ask whether we are really living in a post-truth world and how we can distinguish genuine conspiracies from stories that stretch a small element of truth far beyond the evidence.

Michael explains why real conspiracies such as MKUltra and COINTELPRO make institutional distrust harder to dismiss, how political beliefs become tribal packages and why technology may be making the search for truth both easier and more exhausting. They discuss media bias...

Brian Keating joins me to explore one of the deepest unanswered questions in physics: what is time, and why does it only appear to move in one direction? Brian argues that time may not exist as a fundamental feature of reality and explains why understanding space, matter and energy does not mean we understand the universe itself.

We discuss what may have existed before the Big Bang, why something cannot truly come from nothing and how Brian’s work with the Simons Observatory could detect gravitational waves produced during the universe’s earliest moments. Brian also expl...

Sam Bowman joins me to discuss why Britain is approaching two lost decades of stagnant median wages and why the country is now far poorer than it should be. Sam argues that Britain does not lack talented people, capital or ideas; it has created a centralised political and regulatory system that makes building, investing, hiring and experimentation increasingly difficult.

At the centre of Sam’s argument is his “housing theory of everything”. Britain’s refusal to build enough homes in its most productive cities has made housing unaffordable, delayed family formation, reduced social mobility, weakened productivity and tran...

Britain did not simply leave its working class behind. Sociologist Lisa McKenzie and historian and former coal miner Keith Gildart argue that political and economic decisions deliberately dismantled the jobs, institutions, culture and communities that once gave working-class life security, identity and meaning.

They trace the destruction of Britain’s industrial economy, the decline of trade unions, Labour’s abandonment of its traditional voters and the disappearance of secure work, affordable housing and genuine social mobility. They also examine immigration and low wages, class prejudice, education, the rise of Reform and why so many people no long...

Charles Goodhart joins me to discuss why Britain’s decline did not start in 2008, why the post-war economic boom may have been a temporary lucky era and why the next 30 to 40 years could be far harder than people expect.

Charles explains how ageing populations, falling birth rates, rising dependency ratios, public debt, defence spending, climate costs and political short-termism are creating a fiscal crisis that governments do not want to admit. We discuss why central banks may struggle to keep inflation under control, why politicians cannot win elections by telling voters the truth, and why democracy it...

David Goodhart joins me to discuss whether AI is about to do to the graduate class what globalisation did to factory workers, and why Britain’s political settlement may be breaking apart.

David explains why Britain has overproduced people with generalist academic skills, how the “anywheres” came to dominate politics, culture and the economy, and why the “somewheres” have increasingly turned to Brexit, populism, Reform and Restore as a reaction against a country they no longer feel represents them.

We also discuss whether anything has actually got better in Britain over the last 15 years, why...

Amy Webb joins me to discuss why artificial intelligence is not just another technology shift, but a civilisation-level reordering of work, power, wealth, biology and society.

Amy explains why the real AI question is not simply which jobs disappear, but which people become vulnerable. We discuss thinkers vs think-nots, why human capital may stop being the main driver of productivity and wealth, how GDP and unemployment could rise together, and why the economy may thrive while having less use for human labour.

We also get into China’s AI strategy, why governments are fa...

Thomas Pacchia joins me to discuss why the world feels fake, why trust in institutions is collapsing and why AI may make the crisis far worse before it helps solve it.

Thomas explains why politics, media, censorship, government waste, algorithmic manipulation and broken public services are pushing people into a world where almost nothing feels reliable. We discuss America’s political divide, Britain’s failing state, welfare traps, the blob, free speech, the collapse of trust and why so many people feel trapped inside systems they no longer believe in.

We also get into...

Sam Lyman joins me to discuss how China is allegedly targeting America’s AI buildout, the activist networks fighting data centres and why the race for AI infrastructure has become a national security battle.

Sam explains how Chinese influence campaigns, open-source AI models, data centre protests and far-left activist groups may be working together to slow the United States down. We discuss Neville Roy Singham, Code Pink, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, foreign influence, anti-data centre campaigns, and how billions of dollars in AI infrastructure have reportedly been delayed or blocked.

We al...

Nate Soares joins me to discuss the race to superintelligent AI, why alignment remains unsolved and why he believes building machines smarter than humanity could end in catastrophe.

Nate explains why modern AI is not programmed like traditional software, but grown through training processes we do not fully understand. We discuss AI escaping labs, recursive self-improvement, why today’s systems are only safe because they are not yet powerful enough to take over and why the danger may not be that AI hates us, but that it does not care about us at all.

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Rizwan Virk joins me to discuss simulation theory, AI, consciousness and why reality may work more like a video game than a physical universe.

Rizwan explains how his experience in the video game industry, virtual reality, venture capital and MIT led him to take the simulation hypothesis seriously. We discuss VR ping pong, AI-generated worlds, smart NPCs, quantum physics, rendered reality, lazy programming, the observer effect, the metaverse Turing test and whether someone may have already built the simulation we are living in.

We also get into Philip K. Dick, déjà vu, sy...

Danny Goler doesn't just argue we're living in a simulation - he claims he's found a way to interact with whoever is running it and that we are the AI they're training before we're "let out to play." His case for simulation theory is built on the hard problem of consciousness, the DMT "code," and a laser experiment that thousands of people say they can replicate.

In this interview we discuss idealism vs physicalism, whether AI can ever be conscious, the "architect" running infinite worlds to answer one unanswerable question, why he thinks the Ten Commandments...

Rupert Russell joins me to discuss the hidden power of prices, the chaos of financial markets and whether the economy is really just a global game of Monopoly.

Rupert explains how price shocks have shaped history, from bread riots and the Arab Spring to housing, oil, food and the financial crisis. We discuss derivatives, futures markets, commodity speculation, Goldman Sachs, central banks, inflation, asset managers and why the price of essential goods can become politically explosive.

We also get into AI, scarcity, status, the future of work, whether the price system breaks in...

Fernando Nikolic joins me to discuss the AI productivity explosion, one-person companies and what happens when software becomes something anyone can build.

Fernando explains how he now runs a company as the only human in it, using AI agents to build systems, process data and operate at a level that previously would have required a team, funding and infrastructure. We discuss Claude, Gemini, vibe coding, AI agents, internal tools, the collapse of traditional software moats and why the cost of building has fallen so dramatically.

We also get into the SaaS apocalypse, AI...

Helen Pluckrose joins me to discuss how liberalism was lost and why free speech, individual liberty and viewpoint diversity need to be defended from both the authoritarian left and the authoritarian right.

Helen explains why liberalism does not mean “left wing”, why it is better understood as the opposite of authoritarianism, and how critical social justice, identity politics and language policing have changed the way people think, speak and behave. We discuss woke ideology, DEI, equality vs equity, trans rights, queer theory, free speech, institutional capture and why suppressing ideas usually makes them more powerful.