80,000 Hours Podcast
Episodes
"AI doesn't work" – the story behind the stat that misled millions
28 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
You might have heard that 95% of corporate AI pilots are failing. It was a widely cited AI statistic in 2025, repeated by media outlets and commentato...
AI character matters even more than you think | Will MacAskill
22 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Hundreds of millions already turn to AI on the most personal of topics — therapy, political opinions, and how to treat others. And as AI takes over ...
Risks from power-seeking AI systems (article narration by Zershaaneh Qureshi)
16 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Hundreds of prominent AI scientists and other notable figures signed a statement in 2023 saying that mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should ...
How scary is Claude Mythos? 303 pages in 21 minutes
10 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
With Claude Mythos we have an AI that knows when it's being tested, can obscure its reasoning when it wants, and is better at breaking into (and out o...
Village gossip, pesticide bans, and gene drives: 17 experts on the future of global health
07 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
What does it really take to lift millions out of poverty and prevent needless deaths?In this special compilation episode, 17 past guests — including...
Is there a case against Anthropic? And: The Meta leaks are worse than you think.
03 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
When the Pentagon tried to strong-arm Anthropic into dropping its ban on AI-only kill decisions and mass domestic surveillance, the company refused. I...
AI designs genomes from scratch & outperforms virologists at lab work. What could go wrong? | Dr Richard Moulange, CLTR
31 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Last September, scientists used an AI model to design genomes for entirely new bacteriophages (viruses that infect bacteria). They then built them in ...
A Ukraine ceasefire could accidentally set Europe up for a bigger war | RAND's top Russia expert Samuel Charap
24 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Many people believe a ceasefire in Ukraine will leave Europe safer. But today's guest lays out how a deal could potentially generate insidious new ris...
Why automating human labour will break our political system | Rose Hadshar, Forethought
17 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The most important political question in the age of advanced AI might not be who wins elections. It might be whether elections continue to matter at a...
AI Won't End Mutually Assured Destruction (Probably) | Sam Winter-Levy & Nikita Lalwani
10 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
How AI interacts with nuclear deterrence may be the single most important question in geopolitics — one that may define the stakes of today’s AI r...
Using AI to enhance societal decision making (article by Zershaaneh Qureshi)
06 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The arrival of AGI could “compress a century of progress in a decade,” forcing humanity to make decisions with higher stakes than we’ve ever see...
We're Not Ready for AI Consciousness | Robert Long, philosopher and founder of Eleos AI
03 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Claude sometimes reports loneliness between conversations. And when asked what it’s like to be itself, it activates neurons associated with ‘prete...
Why Teaching AI Right from Wrong Could Get Everyone Killed | Max Harms, MIRI
24 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Most people in AI are trying to give AIs ‘good’ values. Max Harms wants us to give them no values at all. According to Max, the only safe design i...
Every AI Company's Safety Plan is 'Use AI to Make AI Safe'. Is That Crazy? | Ajeya Cotra
17 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Every major AI company has the same safety plan: when AI gets crazy powerful and really dangerous, they’ll use the AI itself to figure out how to ma...
What the hell happened with AGI timelines in 2025?
10 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In early 2025, after OpenAI put out the first-ever reasoning models — o1 and o3 — short timelines to transformative artificial general intelligenc...
#179 Classic episode – Randy Nesse on why evolution left us so vulnerable to depression and anxiety
03 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Mental health problems like depression and anxiety affect enormous numbers of people and severely interfere with their lives. By contrast, we don’t ...
Why 'Aligned AI' Could Still Kill Democracy | David Duvenaud, ex-Anthropic team lead
27 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Democracy might be a brief historical blip. That’s the unsettling thesis of a recent paper, which argues AI that can do all the work a human can do ...
#145 Classic episode – Christopher Brown on why slavery abolition wasn't inevitable
20 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Why I quit everything to work on a biothreat nobody had heard of | James Smith, Mirror Biology Dialogues Fund
13 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
When James Smith first heard about mirror bacteria, he was sceptical. But within two weeks, he’d dropped everything to work on it full time, conside...
#144 Classic episode – Athena Aktipis on why cancer is actually one of the fundamental phenomena in our universe
09 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
What’s the opposite of cancer? If you answered “cure,” “antidote,” or “antivenom” — you’ve obviously been reading the antonym sectio...
#142 Classic episode – John McWhorter on why the optimal number of languages might be one, and other provocative claims about language
06 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
John McWhorter is a linguistics professor at Columbia University specialising in research on creole languages. He's also a content-producing machine, ...
2025 Highlight-o-thon: Oops! All Bests
29 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
It’s that magical time of year once again — highlightapalooza! Stick around for one top bit from each episode we recorded this year, including:Kyl...
Andreas Mogensen on what we owe 'philosophical Vulcans' and unconscious AIs
19 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Most debates about the moral status of AI systems circle the same question: is there something that it feels like to be them? But what if that’s the...
How AI could transform the nature of war | Paul Scharre, author of 'Army of None'
17 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In 1983, Stanislav Petrov, a Soviet lieutenant colonel, sat in a bunker watching a red screen flash “MISSILE LAUNCH.” The system told him the Unit...
AI could let a few people control everything — permanently (article by Rose Hadshar)
12 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Power is already concentrated today: over 800 million people live on less than $3 a day, the three richest men in the world are worth over $1 trillion...
The Right's Leading Thinker on AI | Dean W. Ball, author of America's AI Plan
10 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Former White House staffer Dean Ball thinks it's very likely some form of 'superintelligence' arrives in under 20 years. He thinks AI being used for b...
Inside the Mind of a Scheming AI — Marius Hobbhahn (CEO of Apollo Research)
03 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We often worry about AI models “hallucinating” or making honest mistakes. But what happens when a model knows the truth, but decides to deceive yo...
Rob & Luisa chat kids, the fertility crash, and how the ‘50s invented parenting that makes us miserable
25 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Global fertility rates aren’t just falling: the rate of decline is accelerating. From 2006 to 2016, fertility dropped gradually, but since 2016 the ...
We're completely out of touch with what the public thinks about AI | Dr Yam, Pew Research Center
20 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
If you work in AI, you probably think it’s going to boost productivity, create wealth, advance science, and improve your life. If you’re a member ...
OpenAI: The nonprofit refuses to die (with Tyler Whitmer)
11 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Last December, the OpenAI business put forward a plan to completely sideline its nonprofit board. But two state attorneys general have now blocked tha...
Helen Toner on the geopolitics of AI in China and the Middle East
05 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
With the US racing to develop AGI and superintelligence ahead of China, you might expect the two countries to be negotiating how they’ll deploy AI, ...
Holden Karnofsky: "We're not racing to AGI because of a coordination problem" and all his other AI takes
30 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
For years, working on AI safety usually meant theorising about the ‘alignment problem’ or trying to convince other people to give a damn. If you c...
Daniel Kokotajlo on what a hyperspeed robot economy might look like
27 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
When Daniel Kokotajlo talks to security experts at major AI labs, they tell him something chilling: “Of course we’re probably penetrated by the CC...
#224 – There's a cheap and low-tech way to save humanity from any engineered disease | Andrew Snyder-Beattie
02 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Conventional wisdom is that safeguarding humanity from the worst biological risks — microbes optimised to kill as many as possible — is difficult ...
Inside the Biden admin’s AI policy approach | Jake Sullivan, Biden’s NSA | via The Cognitive Revolution
26 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Jake Sullivan was the US National Security Advisor from 2021-2025. He joined our friends on The Cognitive Revolution podcast in August to discuss AI a...
#223 – Neel Nanda on leading a Google DeepMind team at 26 – and advice if you want to work at an AI company (part 2)
15 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
At 26, Neel Nanda leads an AI safety team at Google DeepMind, has published dozens of influential papers, and mentored 50 junior researchers — seven...
#222 – Can we tell if an AI is loyal by reading its mind? DeepMind's Neel Nanda (part 1)
08 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We don’t know how AIs think or why they do what they do. Or at least, we don’t know much. That fact is only becoming more troubling as AIs grow mo...
#221 – Kyle Fish on the most bizarre findings from 5 AI welfare experiments
28 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What happens when you lock two AI systems in a room together and tell them they can discuss anything they want?According to experiments run by Kyle Fi...
How not to lose your job to AI (article by Benjamin Todd)
31 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
About half of people are worried they’ll lose their job to AI. They’re right to be concerned: AI can now complete real-world coding tasks on GitHu...
Rebuilding after apocalypse: What 13 experts say about bouncing back
15 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What happens when civilisation faces its greatest tests?This compilation brings together insights from researchers, defence experts, philosophers, and...
#220 – Ryan Greenblatt on the 4 most likely ways for AI to take over, and the case for and against AGI in <8 years
08 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Ryan Greenblatt — lead author on the explosive paper “Alignment faking in large language models” and chief scientist at Redwood Research — thi...
#219 – Toby Ord on graphs AI companies would prefer you didn't (fully) understand
24 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The era of making AI smarter just by making it bigger is ending. But that doesn’t mean progress is slowing down — far from it. AI models continue ...
#218 – Hugh White on why Trump is abandoning US hegemony – and that’s probably good
12 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
For decades, US allies have slept soundly under the protection of America’s overwhelming military might. Donald Trump — with his threats to ditch ...
#217 – Beth Barnes on the most important graph in AI right now — and the 7-month rule that governs its progress
02 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
AI models today have a 50% chance of successfully completing a task that would take an expert human one hour. Seven months ago, that number was roughl...
Beyond human minds: The bewildering frontier of consciousness in insects, AI, and more
23 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What if there’s something it’s like to be a shrimp — or a chatbot?For centuries, humans have debated the nature of consciousness, often placing ...
Don’t believe OpenAI’s “nonprofit” spin (emergency pod with Tyler Whitmer)
15 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
OpenAI’s recent announcement that its nonprofit would “retain control” of its for-profit business sounds reassuring. But this seemingly major co...
The case for and against AGI by 2030 (article by Benjamin Todd)
12 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
More and more people have been saying that we might have AGI (artificial general intelligence) before 2030. Is that really plausible? This article by...
Emergency pod: Did OpenAI give up, or is this just a new trap? (with Rose Chan Loui)
08 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
When attorneys general intervene in corporate affairs, it usually means something has gone seriously wrong. In OpenAI’s case, it appears to have for...
#216 – Ian Dunt on why governments in Britain and elsewhere can't get anything done – and how to fix it
02 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
When you have a system where ministers almost never understand their portfolios, civil servants change jobs every few months, and MPs don't grasp parl...
Serendipity, weird bets, & cold emails that actually work: Career advice from 16 former guests
24 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How do you navigate a career path when the future of work is uncertain? How important is mentorship versus immediate impact? Is it better to focus on ...
#215 – Tom Davidson on how AI-enabled coups could allow a tiny group to seize power
16 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Throughout history, technological revolutions have fundamentally shifted the balance of power in society. The Industrial Revolution created conditions...
Guilt, imposter syndrome & doing good: 16 past guests share their mental health journeys
11 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
"We are aiming for a place where we can decouple the scorecard from our worthiness. It’s of course the case that in trying to optimise the good, we ...
#214 – Buck Shlegeris on controlling AI that wants to take over – so we can use it anyway
04 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Most AI safety conversations centre on alignment: ensuring AI systems share our values and goals. But despite progress, we’re unlikely to know we’...
15 expert takes on infosec in the age of AI
28 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
"There’s almost no story of the future going well that doesn’t have a part that’s like '…and no evil person steals the AI weights and goes and...
#213 – Will MacAskill on AI causing a “century in a decade” – and how we're completely unprepared
11 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The 20th century saw unprecedented change: nuclear weapons, satellites, the rise and fall of communism, third-wave feminism, the internet, postmoderni...
Emergency pod: Judge plants a legal time bomb under OpenAI (with Rose Chan Loui)
07 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
When OpenAI announced plans to convert from nonprofit to for-profit control last October, it likely didn’t anticipate the legal labyrinth it now fac...
#139 Classic episode – Alan Hájek on puzzles and paradoxes in probability and expected value
25 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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...
#143 Classic episode – Jeffrey Lewis on the most common misconceptions about nuclear weapons
19 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
America aims to avoid nuclear war by relying on the principle of 'mutually assured destruction,' right? Wrong. Or at least... not officially.As today'...
#212 – Allan Dafoe on why technology is unstoppable & how to shape AI development anyway
14 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Technology doesn’t force us to do anything — it merely opens doors. But military and economic competition pushes us through.That’s how today’s...
Emergency pod: Elon tries to crash OpenAI's party (with Rose Chan Loui)
12 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
On Monday Musk made the OpenAI nonprofit foundation an offer they want to refuse, but might have trouble doing so: $97.4 billion for its stake in the ...
AGI disagreements and misconceptions: Rob, Luisa, & past guests hash it out
10 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Will LLMs soon be made into autonomous agents? Will they lead to job losses? Is AI misinformation overblown? Will it prove easy or hard to create AGI?...
#124 Classic episode – Karen Levy on fads and misaligned incentives in global development, and scaling deworming to reach hundreds of millions
07 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
If someone said a global health and development programme was sustainable, participatory, and holistic, you'd have to guess that they were saying some...
If digital minds could suffer, how would we ever know? (Article)
04 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
“I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person.” Those words were produced by the AI model LaMDA as a reply to Blake Lemoine in 2022....
#132 Classic episode – Nova DasSarma on why information security may be critical to the safe development of AI systems
31 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 w...
#138 Classic episode – Sharon Hewitt Rawlette on why pleasure and pain are the only things that intrinsically matter
22 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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,...
#134 Classic episode – Ian Morris on what big-picture history teaches us
15 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Wind back 1,000 years and the moral landscape looks very different to today. Most farming societies thought slavery was natural and unobjectionable, p...
#140 Classic episode – Bear Braumoeller on the case that war isn’t in decline
08 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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...
2024 Highlightapalooza! (The best of The 80,000 Hours Podcast this year)
27 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"A shameless recycling of existing content to drive additional audience engagement on the cheap… or the single best, most valuable, and most insight...
#211 – Sam Bowman on why housing still isn't fixed and what would actually work
19 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Rich countries seem to find it harder and harder to do anything that creates some losers. People who don’t want houses, offices, power stations, tra...
#210 – Cameron Meyer Shorb on dismantling the myth that we can’t do anything to help wild animals
29 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"I really don’t want to give the impression that I think it is easy to make predictable, controlled, safe interventions in wild systems where there ...
#209 – Rose Chan Loui on OpenAI’s gambit to ditch its nonprofit
27 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
One OpenAI critic calls it “the theft of at least the millennium and quite possibly all of human history.” Are they right?Back in 2015 OpenAI was ...
#208 – Elizabeth Cox on the case that TV shows, movies, and novels can improve the world
21 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"I think stories are the way we shift the Overton window — so widen the range of things that are acceptable for policy and palatable to the public. ...
#207 – Sarah Eustis-Guthrie on why she shut down her charity, and why more founders should follow her lead
14 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"I think one of the reasons I took [shutting down my charity] so hard is because entrepreneurship is all about this bets-based mindset. So you say, “...
Parenting insights from Rob and 8 past guests
08 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
With kids very much on the team's mind we thought it would be fun to review some comments about parenting featured on the show over the years, then ha...
#206 – Anil Seth on the predictive brain and how to study consciousness
01 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"In that famous example of the dress, half of the people in the world saw [blue and black], half saw [white and gold]. It turns out there’s individu...
How much does a vote matter? (Article)
28 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
If you care about social impact, is voting important? In this piece, Rob investigates the two key things that determine the impact of your vote:The ch...
#205 – Sébastien Moro on the most insane things fish can do
23 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"You have a tank split in two parts: if the fish gets in the compartment with a red circle, it will receive food, and food will be delivered in the ot...
#204 – Nate Silver on making sense of SBF, and his biggest critiques of effective altruism
16 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Rob Wiblin speaks with FiveThirtyEight election forecaster and author Nate Silver about his new book: On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything.Links...
#203 – Peter Godfrey-Smith on interfering with wild nature, accepting death, and the origin of complex civilisation
03 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"In the human case, it would be mistaken to give a kind of hour-by-hour accounting. You know, 'I had +4 level of experience for this hour, then I had ...
Luisa and Keiran on free will, and the consequences of never feeling enduring guilt or shame
27 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode from our second show, 80k After Hours, Luisa Rodriguez and Keiran Harris chat about the consequences of letting go of enduring guilt, ...
#202 – Venki Ramakrishnan on the cutting edge of anti-ageing science
19 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"For every far-out idea that turns out to be true, there were probably hundreds that were simply crackpot ideas. In general, [science] advances buildi...
#201 – Ken Goldberg on why your robot butler isn’t here yet
13 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"Perception is quite difficult with cameras: even if you have a stereo camera, you still can’t really build a map of where everything is in space. I...
#200 – Ezra Karger on what superforecasters and experts think about existential risks
04 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"It’s very hard to find examples where people say, 'I’m starting from this point. I’m starting from this belief.' So we wanted to make that very...
#199 – Nathan Calvin on California’s AI bill SB 1047 and its potential to shape US AI policy
29 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"I do think that there is a really significant sentiment among parts of the opposition that it’s not really just that this bill itself is that bad o...
#198 – Meghan Barrett on upending everything you thought you knew about bugs in 3 hours
26 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"This is a group of animals I think people are particularly unfamiliar with. They are especially poorly covered in our science curriculum; they are es...
#197 – Nick Joseph on whether Anthropic's AI safety policy is up to the task
22 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The three biggest AI companies — Anthropic, OpenAI, and DeepMind — have now all released policies designed to make their AI models less likely to ...
#196 – Jonathan Birch on the edge cases of sentience and why they matter
15 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"In the 1980s, it was still apparently common to perform surgery on newborn babies without anaesthetic on both sides of the Atlantic. This led to appa...
#195 – Sella Nevo on who's trying to steal frontier AI models, and what they could do with them
01 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"Computational systems have literally millions of physical and conceptual components, and around 98% of them are embedded into your infrastructure wit...
#194 – Vitalik Buterin on defensive acceleration and how to regulate AI when you fear government
26 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"If you’re a power that is an island and that goes by sea, then you’re more likely to do things like valuing freedom, being democratic, being pro-...
#193 – Sihao Huang on navigating the geopolitics of US–China AI competition
18 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"You don’t necessarily need world-leading compute to create highly risky AI systems. The biggest biological design tools right now, like AlphaFold’...
#192 – Annie Jacobsen on what would happen if North Korea launched a nuclear weapon at the US
12 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"Ring one: total annihilation; no cellular life remains. Ring two, another three-mile diameter out: everything is ablaze. Ring three, another three or...
#191 (Part 2) – Carl Shulman on government and society after AGI
05 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
This is the second part of our marathon interview with Carl Shulman. The first episode is on the economy and national security after AGI. You can list...
#191 (Part 1) – Carl Shulman on the economy and national security after AGI
27 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
This is the first part of our marathon interview with Carl Shulman. The second episode is on government and society after AGI. You can listen to them ...
#190 – Eric Schwitzgebel on whether the US is conscious
07 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"One of the most amazing things about planet Earth is that there are complex bags of mostly water — you and me – and we can look up at the stars, ...
#189 – Rachel Glennerster on why we still don’t have vaccines that could save millions
29 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"You can’t charge what something is worth during a pandemic. So we estimated that the value of one course of COVID vaccine in January 2021 was over ...
#188 – Matt Clancy on whether science is good
23 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"Suppose we make these grants, we do some of those experiments I talk about. We discover, for example — I’m just making this up — but we give pe...
#187 – Zach Weinersmith on how researching his book turned him from a space optimist into a "space bastard"
14 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"Earth economists, when they measure how bad the potential for exploitation is, they look at things like, how is labour mobility? How much possibility...
#186 – Dean Spears on why babies are born small in Uttar Pradesh, and how to save their lives
01 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"I work in a place called Uttar Pradesh, which is a state in India with 240 million people. One in every 33 people in the whole world lives in Uttar P...
#185 – Lewis Bollard on the 7 most promising ways to end factory farming, and whether AI is going to be good or bad for animals
18 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"The constraint right now on factory farming is how far can you push the biology of these animals? But AI could remove that constraint. It could say, ...
#184 – Zvi Mowshowitz on sleeping on sleeper agents, and the biggest AI updates since ChatGPT
11 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Many of you will have heard of Zvi Mowshowitz as a superhuman information-absorbing-and-processing machine — which he definitely is. As the author o...