"But China!": Robert Wright on the AI Race and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning

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This message is sponsored by IQ Bar.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:02)
Hey, I'm Will. I started IQ Bar because I couldn't find a protein bar that wasn't loaded with sugar and unpronounceable ingredients. So I decided to make my own. IQ Bars are ultra-low sugar, packed with protein, fiber and brain-boosting nutrients like magnesium and lion's mane, and they got zero weird ingredients. And if you've been meaning to try them, now is a great time because right now, you can get 20% off all IQ Bar products plus free shipping when you visit iqbar.com and enter promo code BAR20.
Whether you're at your desk, on the road or mid-workout, IQ Bar has functional, clean and delicious options for every occasion.

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**Kaiser Kuo** (2:09)
Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents and cultural trends that can help us better understand what's happening in China's politics, foreign relations, economics and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China. I'm Kaiser Guo, coming to you this week for the last time for my soon-to-be former home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. All packed up, the movers are coming soon, and it's official, we're putting the house on the market.
Sinica is supported this year by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a national resource center for the study of East Asia.
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This week on Sinica, a conversation I've been looking forward to for a long time, and one that takes us a little outside our usual beat, though as you'll hear, China sits much closer to the center of it than you might expect. My guest is Robert Wright, and if you don't know his work, you are in for a treat. Bob is one of the most original and consequential thinkers that we have on the big questions of today. Where our species came from, where it might be headed, and how the technologies we build are bound up with both. He's the author of a string of books that have shaped how a generation thinks about human nature and history, certainly me, The Moral Animal, Why We Are The Way We Are, The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology, which was his landmark 1994 book on evolutionary psychology. I will confess, I read it when it came out with enormous relish. I think I had just read either before or right afterward, Consilience by Edward O. Wilson. I was really on a kick, and this was one of those just landmark books for me. It stuck with me really ever since. There's also Nonzero, The Logic of Human Destiny, which argues that the long arc of biological and cultural evolution has a direction driven by the logic of nonzero-sum games, highly relevant to today's discussion, as you will see.
The Evolution of God, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and Why Buddhism is True, a bestseller on meditation and the modern mind. Bob writes the widely read Nonzero newsletter and hosts the Nonzero podcast. He's taught at Princeton, at the University of Pennsylvania, and he's been a New America fellow. But more than any of the titles, what comes through in his work is a rare combination of intellectual range, genuine humility and a stubborn insistence on cognitive empathy as the thing we most need and most lack.