Long arguments, read aloud with teeth.
Astral Codex Ten Podcast is an audio-first route into Scott Alexander’s long analytical posts, where essays become dense but navigable monologues. Recent episodes move from Mormon historical claims and parenting to AI forecasting, medical screening, congressional reform, and California ballot politics.
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Astral Codex Ten Podcast converts Scott Alexander’s Substack posts into long-form audio with very little padding. The center of gravity is analysis. Recent episodes show a consistent appetite for questions that sit between history, technology, medicine, politics, and decision theory. A book review finalist on the Book of Abraham becomes a tour through Mormon historical claims, papyri, seer stones, apologetics, and the awkward afterlife of documentary evidence. A parenting essay starts with old poetry and ends up tracing how children reveal language, judgment, bargaining, and family resemblance in miniature. The AI episodes are especially revealing. Prediction markets, finance competitions, and “superforecaster” prompting are treated as early signals of a world where bots may rival top human forecasters. The medical-screening pieces approach a proposed ultrasound scanner and whole-body MRI debates through false positives, patient anxiety, cost curves, doctor judgment, and the psychology of health optimization. Politics gets the same treatment. A guest post turns congressional dysfunction into an argument about representation, gerrymandering, the Electoral College, and the size of the House. Another episode examines California ballot initiatives as an incentive system that can reward destructive leverage. The show’s signature rhythm is quote, explain, qualify, compare, and then sharpen the claim. It does not sound built for casual background noise. It asks listeners to track assumptions, tolerate order-of-magnitude estimates, and notice when a tidy argument depends on a fragile premise. The tone can be dry and skeptical, with occasional sideways humor. It is also personal in controlled doses, especially when family life or ordinary cognitive habits become evidence. Astral Codex Ten Podcast works best for people who want an essay in their headphones: structured, argumentative, sometimes abrasive, and more interested in showing the reasoning than smoothing the surface.
Made for: For listeners who like analytical essays, rationalist-adjacent debates, institutional design, AI forecasting, medical decision-making, and history with footnotes. It rewards attention more than multitasking.
What sets it apart: Unlike conversational commentary shows, it keeps the essay form intact: long premises, quoted evidence, caveats, and conclusions that visibly depend on the reasoning before them. Its range is wide, but the method stays recognizable.
The official audio version of Astral Codex Ten, with an archive of posts from Slate Star Codex. It's just me reading Scott Alexander's blog posts.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Its history work follows contested claims back to documents, then tracks how institutions and later interpreters reshape the record.
Astral Codex Ten Podcast turns Scott Alexander's written arguments into measured audio essays, retaining their evidence trails, qualifications, and changes of direction.
Scott Alexander stress-tests AI superforecasters until your certainty starts asking for error bars.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A disputed scripture and a recovered court record frame a careful argument about evidence, belief, and Joseph Smith.
An anonymous book review opens with the Book of Abraham's stark claim to contain writings of Abraham, written by his own hand on Egyptian papyrus.
It turns prediction-market wins into a sharper question about access to expert judgment.
Prediction markets give this episode a useful testing ground for a bigger question: what happens when artificial intelligence begins to match, or even edge past, strong human forecasters?
A poem about fathers and sons opens into the odd, inherited grammar of family life.
Parenthood turns into a private history in "Chip Off The Old Block," reading the reunion between Huatha and Mojikius as a way to think about what children give back to their parents: youth, beauty, and the pressure of feelings thought to be past.
A skeptical, practical look at whether Midjourney's proposed scanner has medical value or mainly finds a market among wealthy self-screeners.
Midjourney's move from AI image generation toward a proposed medical scanner gives this PlayNext episode a useful central tension: what would a fast, radiation-free whole-body ultrasound actually add?
A case for enlarging Congress and reworking the incentives behind representation.
The episode takes Congress as its target and opens with the old fact that Americans trust it so little that even a cockroach poll still lands.
Anthropic's shock, a fast market rebound, and a grim turn through 2026 election risk.
It opens with the Pentagon's Friday move to label Anthropic a supply chain risk, an unprecedented step for an American company, and treats it as more than a routine rebuke. The framing is sharp: this reads as an effort to punish, and perhaps destroy, the company.
A February link roundup that moves from West Coast megacorps to AI anxiety, a suppression fight, and a fractured US map.
This February link roundup opens with a familiar caution: the host has not independently checked every link, and a few items may be off. Even so, the pace stays brisk and the focus stays on concrete material, from the claim that all nine of the world’s nine most valuable…
A brisk September roundup that moves from genomics to AI tells and back again.
Astral Codex Ten's September links roundup is at its best when it treats variety as the point rather than the problem. It moves from a Human Genome Project trivia answer to a Manifold market on San Francisco congestion pricing, then to words that may flag AI writing, before…
Phoebe Judge narrates true crime history and interviews the authors who uncovered it.
Dramatized deep dives into American history, from the Galveston hurricane to Harper Lee's Mockingbird.
Dana Schwartz narrates the violent lives of monarchs, warlords, and queens.
Tracy Wilson and Holly Frey narrate overlooked history, from Courbet's realism to IUD regulation.
Mike Duncan narrates Rome's full history solo, from Aeneas to Romulus Augustulus's exile in 476.
Scott Alexander reads his 'Links for September 2025' post, covering over 60 diverse topics.
This episode reviews the Quechua play Ollantay, discussing its historical context, unknown authorship, and its deadly impact after its first documented performance.
This episode explores the author's experiences dating men in the Bay Area, where dates often turn into therapy sessions revealing deep emotional trauma and societal neglect affecting men's mental health and relationships.
This episode analyzes Ajaya Khotra's 2020 Biological Anchors report, a landmark AI timelines forecast that predicted the scaling hypothesis and AI boom but centered AGI arrival in the 2050s.
Astral Codex Ten reviews an anonymous finalist's 2026 book-review-contest entry about Joseph Smith's Book of Abraham and its Egyptian papyri.
Scott Alexander's "Chip Off The Old Block" examines how his children reproduce family traits, from his son's train obsession and cabinet-closing ritual to his daughter's precise circles and inherited morning tea routine.
Scott Alexander examines AI superforecasters after hearing claims that one system turned $35 into $2 million on Kalshi in seven months and another beat the stock market by 25%.
Astral Codex Ten Podcast examines whether asymptomatic people should avoid whole-body MRI screening because false positives can trigger follow-up tests, anxiety, biopsies, and unnecessary treatment.
Scott Alexander examines Midjourney’s announced ultrasound tomography scanner, described as a water tank with ultrasound rings producing a 3D body image in 20 seconds without radiation.
This episode critiques the term 'hallucinations' for AI errors by comparing them to human guessing behaviors in educational contexts.
This episode analyzes the 2026 Billionaire Tax Act in California, discussing its potential impacts on billionaires, startups, and the economy, with critiques of its design and fairness.
Congress is the problem.
Scott Alexander starts with the Pentagon's decision to label Anthropic a supply chain risk.
Astral Codex Ten’s “All Lawful Use” dissects the March 1, 2026 Anthropic-OpenAI-Department of War dispute, starting with Pete Hegseth’s “supply chain risk” designation for Anthropic and OpenAI’s agreement in principle.
This episode explores the debate about whether AI models are fundamentally just Next Token Predictors, comparing their operation to human cognitive processes through a multi-level analysis.
The host opens with a warning.
This episode argues that concerns about AI safety regulations hindering America's technological race with China are overblown, analyzing the competition through compute, models, and applications.
A personal narrative reflecting on the Russo-Ukrainian War, blending the author's life experiences with political commentary on the conflict.
This episode explores the historical context and ideas behind Project Xanadu, an alternative vision for the internet, through a review of Vannevar Bush's work and his influential essay 'As We May Think'.