Consistently Candid

Hosted by Sarah Hastings-Woodhouse

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Aug 2026

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AI safety, philosophy and other things.

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19 recent

August 21, 20261 hr 5 min

#21 Steven Adler on scruntising AI company safety practices & pacing the frontier

After a long hiatus, I am resurrecting my podcast! For this episode, I spoke with Steven Adler. Steven worked on policy and safety at OpenAI between 2020 and 2024. He has since left to pursue independent writing to raise public awareness about AI risks and co-founded Guidelight AI , an organisation focused on scrutinising and improving safety practices at major AI companies. Guidelight was one of two organisations instrumental in spearheading the Pacing the Frontier open letter , which has garnered 1300+ signatories from employees at frontier labs. It has also published a scorecard of AI control practices across OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, and xAI. Topics covered in the episode: Why Steven left OpenAI in 2024 — o1, NDAs, safety staff turnover Counterarguments to AI pessimism, and where Steven's cruxes lie The OpenAI–Hugging Face incident and OpenAI's response AI control: monitoring, prevention, and whether it scales to superintelligence Why incident reporting is inadequate, and communicating risk when nothing visibly bad has happened Where AI policy stands: SB 53, RAISE, Illinois, the EU AI Act, and how weak enforcement is Companies quietly diluting their own safety commitments The Pacing the Frontier letter, what "pacing" means and how it's landing Guidelight's control scorecard: method, findings, and theory of change Links: Follow Steven on Twitter and subscribe to his Substack The Pacing the Frontier open letter Read Guidelight's AI control scorecard

May 14, 202551 min

#20 Frances Lorenz on the emotional side of AI x-risk, being a woman in a male-dominated online space & more

In this episode, I chatted with Frances Lorenz, events associate at the Centre for Effective Altruism . We covered our respective paths into AI safety, the emotional impact of learning about x-risk, what it's like to be female in a male-dominated community and more! Follow Frances on Twitter Subscribe to her Substack Apply for EAG London!

April 13, 20251 hr 36 min

#19 Gabe Alfour on why AI alignment is hard, what it would mean to solve it & what ordinary people can do about existential risk

Gabe Alfour is a co-founder of Conjecture and an advisor to Control AI , both organisations working to reduce risks from advanced AI. We discussed why AI poses an existential risk to humanity, what makes this problem very hard to solve, why Gabe believes we need to prevent the development of superintelligence for at least the next two decades, and more. Follow Gabe on Twitter Read The Compendium and A Narrow Path

March 2, 20251 hr 46 min

#18 Nathan Labenz on reinforcement learning, reasoning models, emergent misalignment & more

A lot has happened in AI since the last time I spoke to Nathan Labenz of The Cognitive Revolution , so I invited him back on for a whistlestop tour of the most important developments we've seen over the last year! We covered reasoning models, DeepSeek, the many spooky alignment failures we've observed in the last few months & much more! Follow Nathan on Twitter Listen to The Cognitive Revolution My Twitter & Substack

November 8, 20241 hr 25 min

#17 Fun Theory with Noah Topper

The Fun Theory Sequence is one of Eliezer Yudkowsky's cheerier works, and considers questions such as 'how much fun is there in the universe?', 'are we having fun yet' and 'could we be having more fun?'. It tries to answer some of the philosophical quandries we might encounter when envisioning a post-AGI utopia. In this episode, I discussed Fun Theory with Noah Topper, who loyal listeners will remember from episode 7 , in which we tackled EY's equally interesting but less fun essay, A List of Lethalities . Follow Noah on Twitter and check out his Substack !

October 30, 202452 min

#16 John Sherman on the psychological experience of learning about x-risk and AI safety messaging strategies

John Sherman is the host of the For Humanity Podcast , which (much like this one!) aims to explain AI safety to a non-expert audience. In this episode, we compared our experiences of encountering AI safety arguments for the first time and the psychological experience of being aware of x-risk, as well as what messaging strategies the AI safety community should be using to engage more people. Listen & subscribe to the For Humanity Podcast on YouTube and follow John on Twitter !

October 16, 202449 min

#14 Buck Shlegeris on AI control

Buck Shlegeris is the CEO of Redwood Research , a non-profit working to reduce risks from powerful AI. We discussed Redwood's research into AI control, why we shouldn't feel confident that witnessing an AI escape attempt would persuade labs to undeploy dangerous models, lessons from the vetoing of SB1047, the importance of lab security and more. Posts discussed: The case for ensuring that powerful AIs are controlled Would catching your AIs trying to escape convince AI developers to slow down or undeploy? You can, in fact, bamboozle an unaligned AI into sparing your life Follow Buck on Twitter and subscribe to his Substack !

September 8, 20241 hr 53 min

#13 Aaron Bergman and Max Alexander debate the Very Repugnant Conclusion

In this episode, Aaron Bergman and Max Alexander are back to battle it out for the philosophy crown, while I (attempt to) moderate. They discuss the Very Repugnant Conclusion, which, in the words of Claude, "posits that a world with a vast population living lives barely worth living could be considered ethically inferior to a world with an even larger population, where most people have extremely high quality lives, but a significant minority endure extreme suffering." Listen to the end to hear my uninformed opinion on who's right. Read Aaron's blog post on suffering-focused utilitarianism Follow Aaron on Twitter Follow Max on Twitter My Twitter

August 21, 202454 min

#12 Deger Turan on all things forecasting

Deger Turan is the CEO of forecasting platform Metaculus and president of the AI Objectives Institute . In this episode, we discuss how forecasting can be used to help humanity coordinate around reducing existential risks, Deger's advice for aspiring forecasters, the future of using AI for forecasting and more! Enter Metaculus's Q3 AI Forecasting Benchmark Tournament Get in touch with Deger: deger@metaculus.com

June 20, 20241 hr 16 min

#11 Katja Grace on the AI Impacts survey, the case for slowing down AI & arguments for and against x-risk

Katja Grace is the co-founder of AI Impacts, a non-profit focused on answering key questions about the future trajectory of AI development, which is best known for conducting the world's largest survey of machine learning researchers . We talked about the most interesting results from the survey, Katja's views on whether we should slow down AI progress, the best arguments for and against existential risk from AI, parsing the online AI safety debate and more! Follow Katja on Twitter Katja's Substack My Twitter

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