Here’s some of the things I talk about:

• My upcoming longread on life in the near-AGI age. I have stated since early 2023 that my timelines are short and chance of some prolonged asymptote has since collapsed.

• Some observations on coming back to San Francisco (last here in 2016).

• How Trumpism: Can’t Get Fooled Again has been vindicated (both Hanania and Cofnas throwing in the towel), including some comments on how this has collapsed rightoid prospects abroad (e.g. Canada, Germany). Although I note that politics/culture war interests me very little these days that is where you get the clicks so I’ll write a longread about that as well this month.

• I am fascinated by Rwanda vs. Congo.

• FWIW I remain bullish on crypto. But I did not foresee that Trump would choose to wreck the world economy with tariffs. In this environment making long-term forecasts is a fool’s errand. He might order an SMO into Ottawa tomorrow for all we know.

Additionally, there’s some other administrative changes to this blog going forward.

I decided to start making the chapters of my upcoming book Nooceleration arguing the case for human intelligence enhancement progressively available here (excerpts for free subscribers; the full thing for paying ones). I am unhappy with the progress I have been making, so this doubles as an incentive for me to write regular updates as opposed to whenever I like it. The perfect being the enemy of the good applies is an even greater truism in the near-AGI age.

I continue taking AMAs with questions from paying subscribers being privileged.

I also decided to roll up Cryptograd. Running a crypto/network states-specific newsletter also feels like too much of a chore. I will obviously still comment on the decentralization movement and network states and the like, but I will do so within the context of the Open Threads.

The longread on RationalWiki. Discuss it, ignore it, whatever. I am glad to be finally done with it and don’t intend to comment further.

In the first half, and I debated the case for insulated icebergs in the context of a prospective scenario in which network states encroach on traditional nation-state prerogatives. These icesteads - or “iceburgs” - could exploit the 70% of the Earth’s surface that is covered by oceans at a 10x lower cost than traditional seasteading, not to even mention space colonization. We discussed the internal layout of these iceburgs and addressed some of the technical objections to iceberg colonization, such as structural integrity and the practicality of navigation. We then argued about whether they should be permanently anchored to specific locations, or whether they should be free to ply the high seas like the Raft Cities of Philip Reeve’s science fiction.

In the second half, we focused on the political and geopolitical implications of network societies such as Infinita or Viva City opting for iceberg colonization. Potentially, we could see a nexus of autonomous polities like these spread out across the world, offering exit to builders and innovators who feel held back by the ossified bureaucracies of the legacy states. We discussed the demographics of icestead pioneers (“what is stopping you from moving to an iceburg?”) and their competitiveness against alternatives such as charter cities and digital nomadism, and speculated about iceburg timelines.

At the end, we discussed the future of AI and crypto. In particular, I queried Roko about why he has become much more sanguine about AI risks since early 2023. We then rounded it off with a discussion of the crypto markets and why Roko leans bearish on Ethereum.

Further Reading

You can follow Roko at and on X.

Roko’s posts on icesteading:

• Ice: The Penultimate Frontier (Jul 13, 2024)

• Icesteading: Executive Summary (Sep 11, 2024)

• Lecture Notes (PDF): Real Seasteading Has Never Been Tried

• The Icesteading Living Whitepaper (WIP)

Subscribe to this blog for more interviews with transhumanists, network statists, and sundry oddballs.

I also intend to duplicate episodes at my YouTube channel.

These exits range the gamut from charter cities such as Próspera to individual group houses, with Zelar City being somewhere intermediate between them in scale and ambitions. Its medium to long-term plan is to acquire property in Berlin, and then in other major global cities in Europe and globally. These (perhaps NFT-gated) properties will host community centers and co-working spaces for those who share our mission, as well as serve as “embassies” of radical life extension to the world at large.

Towards the end of Zelar City, I took the opportunity to interview three of its main organizers - Laurence Ion, Victoria Forest, and Alexey Strygin. The camera work was very kindly provisioned by Elias Schlie, an up-and-coming podcaster who also participated in the discussion and co-posted this interview to YouTube (as well as doing a separate interview with yours truly).

Here are some timestamps:

0:00 - Introductions
6:02 - How to Get People into Anti-Aging?
16:28 - Where to Build Longevity Communities?
20:34 - Is it Neo-Colonialism?
21:41 - We Need Multiple Experiments
26:03 - Where to Expand Next?
27:04 - Why So Many Romanians in This Space?
29:35 - Europe: Degrowth vs. eu/acc
32:47 - People Need Need Inspirational Stories
36:47 - Bureaucrats Need Longevity Economics Institute
43:30 - Bottlenecks in Anti-Aging Research
53:05 - Role of Vita DAO in Zelar?
55:16 - Reflections and Future Projects

Links to some of the things mentioned in the podcast:

• VitaDAO, the decentralized community that wants to solve aging.

• Aging.FYI: Short summary of why aging is malleable and what you can do to help that. (See also my Immortality page).

• Strygin’s new Longevity Economics Institute think-tank.

I will also take the opportunity to shill Vitalist Bay, slated to become the biggest life extension conference to date. It’s going to take place in Berkeley in April-May 2025. Check it out if you live in the SF Bay Area!

On an administrative note, this interview also marks the formal beginning of the The Karlin Show. I envisage this podcast as a space where I will interview influential and interesting people in the worlds of transhumanism, intelligence research, libertarianism, and other topics that are as catnip to “Elite Human Capital”. The next podcast is going to be with Roko Mijic on icesteading and will be published next week. Don’t forget to subscribe!

I was recently at Zelar City, a pop-up village in Berlin that’s focused on making death option. One of the things I was happy and privileged to get to do there was to participate in a podcast with Elias Schlie, an up-and-coming YouTuber who is interviewing various people in the world of life extension and bio/acc. I think it turned out quite well, and is certainly the most comprehensive case for human intelligence enhancement that I have yet made in an audiovisual format.

Timestamps:

0:00 - Introduction: What if we are not smart enough to solve aging?
1:00 - My background: Education, digital nomadism.
3:08 - Pop up cities and why they are better than both big cities and villages; comparing Zuzalu, Vitalia, and Zelar and their prospects.
11:10 - I explain why intelligence is important (“what you need when you don’t know what to do”); why rich countries are rich and poor countries are poor; and how smarter people will help increase innovation across the board, including further accelerating intelligence and solving aging and other hard and important problems.
16:46 - Why not just work on AI? Importance of having a backup plan.
19:47 - How can we increase human intelligence? Embryo selection for IQ.
21:46 - Higher average IQ, better health, and beauty lifts all boats - but there are trade-offs when selecting for other aspects of personality. The risk of uniformity/psychological monocultures. Regulation through prediction markets? Optimize for economic success or “interestingness”?
32:38 - Embryo selection is slow. What about adults? Gene editing? Nootropics? Biomechatronics?
36:59 - Bandwidth problems.
38:54 - Why focus on embryo selection? (It’s already completely safe and feasible).
40:36 - Could it all just be education levels? Debating causality.
49.57 - What are my plans for Sophia DAO?
51:50 - Minor Errata: I inadvertently gave the impression that UK Biobank only has educational data - it does also have short cognitive function tests (13 questions in 2 minutes), but this falls well short of a proper IQ test.
54:15 - The importance of influencing media and culture: As with pro-deathist messaging, there’s a lot of pretty dumb anti-IQ enhancement propaganda (e.g. Gattaca, Brave New World). To the contrary, we need fantasy and other products with inspirational pro-Biosingularity heroes!
1:01:08 - What do we do with eternity?
1:05:22 - Current investment/manpower in AI research, biogerontology/life extension, and psychometrics/intelligence enhancement.
1:08:52 - Nootropics are to nooceleration as supplements are to life extension, and Neuralink as its equivalent of pacemakers.
1:10:32 - Possible benefits of holding the Sophia DAO token and tentative plans.
1:12:30 - Conclusion. (Note: Obviously I changed blog name from EHC Zone to the current Karlin’s Blog).
1:13:51 - More comments on Zelar’s prospects and Berlin’s surprising status as a major DeSci hub.

Please do have a listen and (if interested) subscribe to Schlie’s channel.

Apart from going into much greater detail on the philosophical connections and synergies between human intelligence enhancement and life extension, you can view it as essentially an audio version of my classic article The Biosingularity is Near.