I'm Justin, grew up in Modesto California, current home base is Sacramento. Previous homes include Pittsburgh, Melbourne Australia, and Boulder Colorado.

From 2017-2025 I worked as a scriptwriter for Matpat's Game Theory, Film Theory, and Food Theory channels. Wrote ~200 videos that got around ~1 billion views. 2018-2020 I experimented with being a video essayist on my own channel. I was also a video game designer and scriptwriter (Necrobarista 2021, Idol Manager 2021). In 2025 I started working as a scriptwriter and content strategist with Drew's channel AI Species (Drew is a PDKU mentor). In 2025 I also attended the Inkhaven fellowship at Lighthaven and started blogging on Substack. In 2026 I got over my aversion to the camera and started a new channel, "Proof Positive" (progress studies).

I'm very much an "idea guy" who generally stays behind the scenes doing research and writing scripts, but this year I'm getting in front of the camera more.

Talk to me about: Movies; Board games; Pokemon Go; Video game scriptwriting (I'm hiring!); my experience working for Game Theory/Film Theory; Running an Astral Codex Ten meetup group in Pittsburgh for 5 years; The theology of VeggieTales.

AI topics I find interesting: Why AI-generated text, pictures, and voices all took off in the same ~2 year period; Why eminent AI scientists like Hinton and Bengio worry about extinction risk; How LLMs treat words as vectors ("King - Queen = Man - Woman") and can translate between languages they were never explicitly taught. Work I'm most proud of lives on Substack: justinkuiper.substack.com.