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80,000 Hours Podcast
The most important conversations about artificial intelligence you won’t hear anywhere else. Subscribe by searching for '80000 Hours' wherever you get podcasts. Hosted by Rob Wiblin, Luisa Rodriguez, Zershaaneh Qureshi, and Tom Reed.
Episodes
80,000 Hours Podcast#145 – Christopher Brown on why slavery abolition wasn't inevitable
In many ways, humanity seems to have become more humane and inclusive over time. While there’s still a lot of progress to be made, campaigns to give people of…
80,000 Hours Podcast#144 – Athena Aktipis on why cancer is actually one of our universe's most fundamental phenomena
What’s the opposite of cancer? If you answered “cure,” “antidote,” or “antivenom” — you’ve obviously been reading the antonym section at…
80,000 Hours Podcast#79 Classic episode - A.J. Jacobs on radical honesty, following the whole Bible, and reframing global problems as puzzles
Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in June 2020. Today’s guest, New York Times bestselling author A.J. Jacobs, always hated Judge Judy. But…
80,000 Hours Podcast#81 Classic episode - Ben Garfinkel on scrutinising classic AI risk arguments
Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in July 2020. 80,000 Hours, along with many other members of the effective altruism movement, has argued that…
80,000 Hours Podcast#83 Classic episode - Jennifer Doleac on preventing crime without police and prisons
Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in July 2020. Today’s guest, Jennifer Doleac — Associate Professor of Economics at Texas A&M University, and…
80,000 Hours Podcast#143 – Jeffrey Lewis on the most common misconceptions about nuclear weapons
America aims to avoid nuclear war by relying on the principle of 'mutually assured destruction,' right? Wrong. Or at least... not officially. As today's guest…
80,000 Hours Podcast#142 – John McWhorter on key lessons from linguistics, the virtue of creoles, and language extinction
John McWhorter is a linguistics professor at Columbia University specialising in research on creole languages. He's also a content-producing machine, never…
80,000 Hours Podcast#141 – Richard Ngo on large language models, OpenAI, and striving to make the future go well
Large language models like GPT-3, and now ChatGPT, are neural networks trained on a large fraction of all text available on the internet to do one thing…
80,000 Hours PodcastMy experience with imposter syndrome — and how to (partly) overcome it (Article)
Today’s release is a reading of our article called My experience with imposter syndrome — and how to (partly) overcome it, written and narrated by Luisa…
80,000 Hours PodcastRob's thoughts on the FTX bankruptcy
In this episode, usual host of the show Rob Wiblin gives his thoughts on the recent collapse of FTX. Click here for an official 80,000 Hours statement. And…
80,000 Hours Podcast#140 – Bear Braumoeller on the case that war isn't in decline
Is war in long-term decline? Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature brought this previously obscure academic question to the centre of public debate…
80,000 Hours Podcast#139 – Alan Hájek on puzzles and paradoxes in probability and expected value
A casino offers you a game. A coin will be tossed. If it comes up heads on the first flip you win $2. If it comes up on the second flip you win $4. If it comes…
80,000 Hours PodcastPreventing an AI-related catastrophe (Article)
Today’s release is a professional reading of our new problem profile on preventing an AI-related catastrophe, written by Benjamin Hilton. We expect that there…
80,000 Hours Podcast#138 – Sharon Hewitt Rawlette on why pleasure and pain are the only things that intrinsically matter
What in the world is intrinsically good — good in itself even if it has no other effects? Over the millennia, people have offered many answers: joy, justice…
80,000 Hours Podcast#137 – Andreas Mogensen on whether effective altruism is just for consequentialists
Effective altruism, in a slogan, aims to 'do the most good.' Utilitarianism, in a slogan, says we should act to 'produce the greatest good for the greatest…
80,000 Hours Podcast#136 – Will MacAskill on what we owe the future
People who exist in the future deserve some degree of moral consideration. The future could be very big, very long, and/or very good. We can reasonably hope to…
80,000 Hours Podcast#135 – Samuel Charap on key lessons from five months of war in Ukraine
After a frenetic level of commentary during February and March, the war in Ukraine has faded into the background of our news coverage. But with the benefit of…
80,000 Hours Podcast#134 – Ian Morris on what big-picture history teaches us
Wind back 1,000 years and the moral landscape looks very different to today. Most farming societies thought slavery was natural and unobjectionable, premarital…
80,000 Hours Podcast#133 – Max Tegmark on how a 'put-up-or-shut-up' resolution led him to work on AI and algorithmic news selection
On January 1, 2015, physicist Max Tegmark gave up something most of us love to do: complain about things without ever trying to fix them. That “put up or shut…
80,000 Hours Podcast#132 – Nova DasSarma on why information security may be critical to the safe development of AI systems
If a business has spent $100 million developing a product, it's a fair bet that they don't want it stolen in two seconds and uploaded to the web where anyone…
80,000 Hours Podcast#131 – Lewis Dartnell on getting humanity to bounce back faster in a post-apocalyptic world
“We’re leaving these 16 contestants on an island with nothing but what they can scavenge from an abandoned factory and apartment block. Over the next 365 days…
80,000 Hours Podcast#130 – Will MacAskill on balancing frugality with ambition, whether you need longtermism, & mental health under pressure
Imagine you lead a nonprofit that operates on a shoestring budget. Staff are paid minimum wage, lunch is bread and hummus, and you're all bunched up on a few…
80,000 Hours Podcast#129 – James Tibenderana on the state of the art in malaria control and elimination
The good news is deaths from malaria have been cut by a third since 2005. The bad news is it still causes 250 million cases and 600,000 deaths a year, mostly…
80,000 Hours Podcast#128 – Chris Blattman on the five reasons wars happen
In nature, animals roar and bare their teeth to intimidate adversaries — but one side usually backs down, and real fights are rare. The wisdom of evolution is…
80,000 Hours Podcast#127 – Sam Bankman-Fried on taking a high-risk approach to crypto and doing good
On this episode of the show, host Rob Wiblin interviews Sam Bankman-Fried. This interview was recorded in February 2022, and released in April 2022. But on…
80,000 Hours Podcast#126 – Bryan Caplan on whether lazy parenting is OK, what really helps workers, and betting on beliefs
Everybody knows that good parenting has a big impact on how kids turn out. Except that maybe they don't, because it doesn't. Incredible though it might seem…
80,000 Hours Podcast#125 – Joan Rohlfing on how to avoid catastrophic nuclear blunders
Since the Soviet Union split into different countries in 1991, the pervasive fear of catastrophe that people lived with for decades has gradually faded from…
80,000 Hours Podcast#124 – Karen Levy on fads and misaligned incentives in global development, and scaling deworming to reach hundreds of millions
If someone said a global health and development programme was sustainable, participatory, and holistic, you'd have to guess that they were saying something…
80,000 Hours Podcast#123 – Samuel Charap on why Putin invaded Ukraine, the risk of escalation, and how to prevent disaster
Russia's invasion of Ukraine is devastating the lives of Ukrainians, and so long as it continues there's a risk that the conflict could escalate to include…
80,000 Hours Podcast#122 – Michelle Hutchinson & Habiba Islam on balancing competing priorities and other themes from our 1-on-1 careers advising
One of 80,000 Hours' main services is our free one-on-one careers advising, which we provide to around 1,000 people a year. Today we speak to two of our…
80,000 Hours PodcastIntroducing 80k After Hours
Today we're launching a new podcast called 80k After Hours. Like this show it’ll mostly still explore the best ways to do good — and some episodes will be even…
80,000 Hours Podcast#121 – Matthew Yglesias on avoiding the pundit's fallacy and how much military intervention can be used for good
If you read polls saying that the public supports a carbon tax, should you believe them? According to today's guest — journalist and blogger Matthew Yglesias —…
80,000 Hours Podcast#120 – Audrey Tang on what we can learn from Taiwan’s experiments with how to do democracy
In 2014 Taiwan was rocked by mass protests against a proposed trade agreement with China that was about to be agreed without the usual Parliamentary hearings…
80,000 Hours Podcast#43 Classic episode - Daniel Ellsberg on the institutional insanity that maintains nuclear doomsday machines
Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in September 2018. In Stanley Kubrick’s iconic film Dr. Strangelove, the American president is informed that…
80,000 Hours Podcast#35 Classic episode - Tara Mac Aulay on the audacity to fix the world without asking permission
Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in June 2018. How broken is the world? How inefficient is a typical organisation? Looking at Tara Mac Aulay’s…
80,000 Hours Podcast#67 Classic episode – David Chalmers on the nature and ethics of consciousness
Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in December 2019. What is it like to be you right now? You're seeing this text on the screen, smelling the…
80,000 Hours Podcast#59 Classic episode - Cass Sunstein on how change happens, and why it's so often abrupt & unpredictable
Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in June 2019. It can often feel hopeless to be an activist seeking social change on an obscure issue where…
80,000 Hours Podcast#119 – Andrew Yang on our very long-term future, and other topics most politicians won’t touch
Andrew Yang — past presidential candidate, founder of the Forward Party, and leader of the 'Yang Gang' — is kind of a big deal, but is particularly popular…
80,000 Hours Podcast#118 – Jaime Yassif on safeguarding bioscience to prevent catastrophic lab accidents and bioweapons development
If a rich country were really committed to pursuing an active biological weapons program, there’s not much we could do to stop them. With enough money and…
80,000 Hours Podcast#117 – David Denkenberger on using paper mills and seaweed to feed everyone in a catastrophe, ft Sahil Shah
If there's a nuclear war followed by nuclear winter, and the sun is blocked out for years, most of us are going to starve, right? Well, currently, probably we…
80,000 Hours Podcast#116 – Luisa Rodriguez on why global catastrophes seem unlikely to kill us all
If modern human civilisation collapsed — as a result of nuclear war, severe climate change, or a much worse pandemic than COVID-19 — billions of people might…
80,000 Hours Podcast#115 – David Wallace on the many-worlds theory of quantum mechanics and its implications
Quantum mechanics — our best theory of atoms, molecules, and the subatomic particles that make them up — underpins most of modern physics. But there are…
80,000 Hours Podcast#114 – Maha Rehman on working with governments to rapidly deliver masks to millions of people
It’s hard to believe, but until recently there had never been a large field trial that addressed these simple and obvious questions: 1. When ordinary people…
80,000 Hours PodcastWe just put up a new compilation of ten core episodes of the show
We recently launched a new podcast feed that might be useful to you and people you know. It's called Effective Altruism: Ten Global Problems, and it's a…
80,000 Hours Podcast#113 – Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India
Our failure to make sure all kids globally get all of their basic vaccinations leads to 1.5 million child deaths every year. According to today’s guest, Varsha…
80,000 Hours Podcast#112 – Carl Shulman on the common-sense case for existential risk work and its practical implications
Preventing the apocalypse may sound like an idiosyncratic activity, and it sometimes is justified on exotic grounds, such as the potential for humanity to…
80,000 Hours Podcast#111 – Mushtaq Khan on using institutional economics to predict effective government reforms
If you’re living in the Niger Delta in Nigeria, your best bet at a high-paying career is probably ‘artisanal refining’ — or, in plain language, stealing oil…
80,000 Hours Podcast#110 – Holden Karnofsky on building aptitudes and kicking ass
Holden Karnofsky helped create two of the most influential organisations in the effective philanthropy world. So when he outlines a different perspective on…
80,000 Hours Podcast#109 – Holden Karnofsky on the most important century
Will the future of humanity be wild, or boring? It's natural to think that if we're trying to be sober and measured, and predict what will really happen rather…
80,000 Hours Podcast#108 – Chris Olah on working at top AI labs without an undergrad degree
Chris Olah has had a fascinating and unconventional career path. Most people who want to pursue a research career feel they need a degree to get taken…
80,000 Hours Podcast#107 – Chris Olah on what the hell is going on inside neural networks
Big machine learning models can identify plant species better than any human, write passable essays, beat you at a game of Starcraft 2, figure out how a photo…
80,000 Hours Podcast#106 – Cal Newport on an industrial revolution for office work
If you wanted to start a university department from scratch, and attract as many superstar researchers as possible, what’s the most attractive perk you could…
80,000 Hours Podcast#105 – Alexander Berger on improving global health and wellbeing in clear and direct ways
The effective altruist research community tries to identify the highest impact things people can do to improve the world. Unsurprisingly, given the difficulty…
80,000 Hours Podcast#104 – Pardis Sabeti on the Sentinel system for detecting and stopping pandemics
When the first person with COVID-19 went to see a doctor in Wuhan, nobody could tell that it wasn’t a familiar disease like the flu — that we were dealing with…
80,000 Hours Podcast#103 – Max Roser on building the world's best source of COVID-19 data at Our World in Data
History is filled with stories of great people stepping up in times of crisis. Presidents averting wars; soldiers leading troops away from certain death; data…
80,000 Hours Podcast#102 – Tom Moynihan on why prior generations missed some of the biggest priorities of all
It can be tough to get people to truly care about reducing existential risks today. But spare a thought for the longtermist of the 17th century: they were…
80,000 Hours Podcast#101 – Robert Wright on using cognitive empathy to save the world
In 2003, Saddam Hussein refused to let Iraqi weapons scientists leave the country to be interrogated. Given the overwhelming domestic support for an invasion…
80,000 Hours Podcast#100 – Having a successful career with depression, anxiety and imposter syndrome
Today's episode is one of the most remarkable and really, unique, pieces of content we’ve ever produced (and I can say that because I had almost nothing to do…
80,000 Hours Podcast#99 – Leah Garcés on turning adversaries into allies to change the chicken industry
For a chance to prevent enormous amounts of suffering, would you be brave enough to drive five hours to a remote location to meet a man who seems likely to be…
80,000 Hours Podcast#98 – Christian Tarsney on future bias and a possible solution to moral fanaticism
Imagine that you’re in the hospital for surgery. This kind of procedure is always safe, and always successful — but it can take anywhere from one to ten hours…