Athena Aktipis

speaker

1,334 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 9 Jan

Athena Aktipis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.

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80,000 Hours Podcast · #144 Classic episode – Athena Aktipis on why cancer is a fundamental universal phenomena · 9 Jan 2026 podcast

Thank you so much for having me here.

I am really excited to talk to you about all the things.

Oh, what am I working on at the moment?

I am like so deep right now in trying to finish my next book, which is called Everything is Fine, How to Thrive in the Apocalypse.

So yeah, it's like a playful take on existential risk and how we can deal with it as the social beings that we are.

Gosh, I ended up writing this book because I just could not stop thinking about and talking about these issues.

You know, when even before COVID, you know, I was sort of already like using the apocalypse as a as a as a.

like a way of thinking about and talking about existential risk that I thought was maybe like a little bit more playful and fun and appealing than just, you know, the sort of more straight approach to it.

And then the pandemic happened.

And then that kind of just like accelerated, like, you know, very quickly, like people were just talking about the apocalypse, like, yeah, we're in the apocalypse.

And I think like that actually provided some, you know,

you know, levity almost to, to just be like, yeah, it's the apocalypse.

Um, and so, so I just kind of like leaned into that and, uh, you know, started doing more like live streaming.

Um, we started channel Zed, which is, you know, television and the zombie apocalypse, which is basically like just an excuse to make a bunch of, um, TV shows that, uh, address issues like, you know, what are the risks that we're facing?

Um,

How can we work together in community to deal with it?

How can we prepare as individuals?

And how can we just understand our world using evolutionary biology, using a really interdisciplinary approach that includes both science and humanities and sort of considering policy and ethics, like bring all those things together, bring all those people together to start thinking and talking about those issues.

So that really kind of like got me going in that direction.

And then at some point I was just like, yeah, I want to I want to write a book to get these ideas across, like with a playful tone, with illustrations.

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