80,000 Hours Podcast

#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...

AI governance and policy (Article)

28 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Today’s release is a reading of our career review of AI governance and policy, written and narrated by Cody Fenwick.Advanced AI systems could have m...

#183 – Spencer Greenberg on causation without correlation, money and happiness, lightgassing, hype vs value, and more

14 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

"When a friend comes to me with a decision, and they want my thoughts on it, very rarely am I trying to give them a really specific answer, like, 'I s...

#182 – Bob Fischer on comparing the welfare of humans, chickens, pigs, octopuses, bees, and more

08 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

"[One] thing is just to spend time thinking about the kinds of things animals can do and what their lives are like. Just how hard a chicken will work ...

#181 – Laura Deming on the science that could keep us healthy in our 80s and beyond

01 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

"The question I care about is: What do I want to do? Like, when I'm 80, how strong do I want to be? OK, and then if I want to be that strong, how well...

#180 – Hugo Mercier on why gullibility and misinformation are overrated

21 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The World Economic Forum’s global risks survey of 1,400 experts, policymakers, and industry leaders ranked misinformation and disinformation as the ...

#179 – Randy Nesse on why evolution left us so vulnerable to depression and anxiety

12 Feb 2024

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 ...

#178 – Emily Oster on what the evidence actually says about pregnancy and parenting

01 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

"I think at various times — before you have the kid, after you have the kid — it's useful to sit down and think about: What do I want the shape of...

#177 – Nathan Labenz on recent AI breakthroughs and navigating the growing rift between AI safety and accelerationist camps

24 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Back in December we spoke with Nathan Labenz — AI entrepreneur and host of The Cognitive Revolution Podcast — about the speed of progress towards ...

#90 Classic episode – Ajeya Cotra on worldview diversification and how big the future could be

12 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

You wake up in a mysterious box, and hear the booming voice of God: “I just flipped a coin. If it came up heads, I made ten boxes, labeled 1 through...

#112 Classic episode – Carl Shulman on the common-sense case for existential risk work and its practical implications

08 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Preventing the apocalypse may sound like an idiosyncratic activity, and it sometimes is justified on exotic grounds, such as the potential for humanit...

#111 Classic episode – Mushtaq Khan on using institutional economics to predict effective government reforms

04 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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...

2023 Mega-highlights Extravaganza

31 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Happy new year! We've got a different kind of holiday release for you today. Rather than a 'classic episode,' we've put together one of our favourite ...

#100 Classic episode – Having a successful career with depression, anxiety, and imposter syndrome

27 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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 n...

#176 – Nathan Labenz on the final push for AGI, understanding OpenAI's leadership drama, and red-teaming frontier models

22 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

OpenAI says its mission is to build AGI — an AI system that is better than human beings at everything. Should the world trust them to do that safely...

#175 – Lucia Coulter on preventing lead poisoning for $1.66 per child

14 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Lead is one of the most poisonous things going. A single sugar sachet of lead, spread over a park the size of an American football field, is enough to...

#174 – Nita Farahany on the neurotechnology already being used to convict criminals and manipulate workers

07 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

"It will change everything: it will change our workplaces, it will change our interactions with the government, it will change our interactions with e...

#173 – Jeff Sebo on digital minds, and how to avoid sleepwalking into a major moral catastrophe

22 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

"We do have a tendency to anthropomorphise nonhumans — which means attributing human characteristics to them, even when they lack those characterist...