#162 – Mustafa Suleyman on getting Washington and Silicon Valley to tame AI
01 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Mustafa Suleyman was part of the trio that founded DeepMind, and his new AI project is building one ...
#161 – Michael Webb on whether AI will soon cause job loss, lower incomes, and higher inequality — or the opposite
23 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
"Do you remember seeing these photographs of generally women sitting in front of these huge panels a...
#160 – Hannah Ritchie on why it makes sense to be optimistic about the environment
14 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
"There's no money to invest in education elsewhere, so they almost get trapped in the cycle where th...
#159 – Jan Leike on OpenAI's massive push to make superintelligence safe in 4 years or less
07 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In July, OpenAI announced a new team and project: Superalignment. The goal is to figure out how to m...
We now offer shorter 'interview highlights' episodes
05 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Over on our other feed, 80k After Hours, you can now find 20-30 minute highlights episodes of our 80...
#158 – Holden Karnofsky on how AIs might take over even if they're no smarter than humans, and his 4-part playbook for AI risk
31 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Back in 2007, Holden Karnofsky cofounded GiveWell, where he sought out the charities that most cost-...
#157 – Ezra Klein on existential risk from AI and what DC could do about it
24 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In Oppenheimer, scientists detonate a nuclear weapon despite thinking there's some 'near zero' chanc...
#156 – Markus Anderljung on how to regulate cutting-edge AI models
10 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
"At the front of the pack we have these frontier AI developers, and we want them to identify particu...
Bonus: The Worst Ideas in the History of the World
30 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Today’s bonus release is a pilot for a new podcast called ‘The Worst Ideas in the History of the...
#155 – Lennart Heim on the compute governance era and what has to come after
22 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
As AI advances ever more quickly, concerns about potential misuse of highly capable models are growi...
#154 - Rohin Shah on DeepMind and trying to fairly hear out both AI doomers and doubters
09 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Can there be a more exciting and strange place to work today than a leading AI lab? Your CEO has sai...
#153 – Elie Hassenfeld on 2 big picture critiques of GiveWell's approach, and 6 lessons from their recent work
02 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
GiveWell is one of the world's best-known charity evaluators, with the goal of "searching for the ch...
#152 – Joe Carlsmith on navigating serious philosophical confusion
19 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
What is the nature of the universe? How do we make decisions correctly? What differentiates right ac...
#151 – Ajeya Cotra on accidentally teaching AI models to deceive us
12 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Imagine you are an orphaned eight-year-old whose parents left you a $1 trillion company, and no trus...
#150 – Tom Davidson on how quickly AI could transform the world
05 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
It’s easy to dismiss alarming AI-related predictions when you don’t know where the numbers came ...
Andrés Jiménez Zorrilla on the Shrimp Welfare Project (80k After Hours)
22 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode from our second show, 80k After Hours, Rob Wiblin interviews Andrés Jiménez Zorril...
#149 – Tim LeBon on how altruistic perfectionism is self-defeating
12 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Being a good and successful person is core to your identity. You place great importance on meeting t...
#148 – Johannes Ackva on unfashionable climate interventions that work, and fashionable ones that don't
03 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
If you want to work to tackle climate change, you should try to reduce expected carbon emissions by ...
#147 – Spencer Greenberg on stopping valueless papers from getting into top journals
24 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Can you trust the things you read in published scientific research? Not really. About 40% of experim...
#146 – Robert Long on why large language models like GPT (probably) aren't conscious
14 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
By now, you’ve probably seen the extremely unsettling conversations Bing’s chatbot has been havi...
#145 – Christopher Brown on why slavery abolition wasn't inevitable
11 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In many ways, humanity seems to have become more humane and inclusive over time. While there’s sti...
#144 – Athena Aktipis on why cancer is actually one of our universe's most fundamental phenomena
26 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
What’s the opposite of cancer? If you answered “cure,” “antidote,” or “antivenom” —...
#79 Classic episode - A.J. Jacobs on radical honesty, following the whole Bible, and reframing global problems as puzzles
16 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in June 2020. Today’s guest, New York Times be...
#81 Classic episode - Ben Garfinkel on scrutinising classic AI risk arguments
09 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in July 2020. 80,000 Hours, along with many othe...
#83 Classic episode - Jennifer Doleac on preventing crime without police and prisons
04 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in July 2020. Today’s guest, Jennifer Doleac —...
#143 – Jeffrey Lewis on the most common misconceptions about nuclear weapons
29 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
America aims to avoid nuclear war by relying on the principle of 'mutually assured destruction,' rig...
#142 – John McWhorter on key lessons from linguistics, the virtue of creoles, and language extinction
20 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
John McWhorter is a linguistics professor at Columbia University specialising in research on creole ...
#141 – Richard Ngo on large language models, OpenAI, and striving to make the future go well
13 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Large language models like GPT-3, and now ChatGPT, are neural networks trained on a large fraction o...
My experience with imposter syndrome — and how to (partly) overcome it (Article)
08 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Today’s release is a reading of our article called My experience with imposter syndrome — and ho...
Rob's thoughts on the FTX bankruptcy
23 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, usual host of the show Rob Wiblin gives his thoughts on the recent collapse of FTX....
#140 – Bear Braumoeller on the case that war isn't in decline
08 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Is war in long-term decline? Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature brought this previously...
#139 – Alan Hájek on puzzles and paradoxes in probability and expected value
28 Oct 2022
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...
Preventing an AI-related catastrophe (Article)
14 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Today’s release is a professional reading of our new problem profile on preventing an AI-related c...
#138 – Sharon Hewitt Rawlette on why pleasure and pain are the only things that intrinsically matter
30 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
What in the world is intrinsically good — good in itself even if it has no other effects? Over the...
#137 – Andreas Mogensen on whether effective altruism is just for consequentialists
08 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Effective altruism, in a slogan, aims to 'do the most good.' Utilitarianism, in a slogan, says we sh...
#136 – Will MacAskill on what we owe the future
15 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
People who exist in the future deserve some degree of moral consideration.The future could be very b...
#135 – Samuel Charap on key lessons from five months of war in Ukraine
08 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
After a frenetic level of commentary during February and March, the war in Ukraine has faded into th...
#134 – Ian Morris on what big-picture history teaches us
22 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Wind back 1,000 years and the moral landscape looks very different to today. Most farming societies ...
#133 – Max Tegmark on how a 'put-up-or-shut-up' resolution led him to work on AI and algorithmic news selection
01 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
On January 1, 2015, physicist Max Tegmark gave up something most of us love to do: complain about th...
#132 – Nova DasSarma on why information security may be critical to the safe development of AI systems
14 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
If a business has spent $100 million developing a product, it's a fair bet that they don't want it s...
#131 – Lewis Dartnell on getting humanity to bounce back faster in a post-apocalyptic world
03 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“We’re leaving these 16 contestants on an island with nothing but what they can scavenge from an...
#130 – Will MacAskill on balancing frugality with ambition, whether you need longtermism, & mental health under pressure
23 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Imagine you lead a nonprofit that operates on a shoestring budget. Staff are paid minimum wage, lunc...
#129 – James Tibenderana on the state of the art in malaria control and elimination
09 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The good news is deaths from malaria have been cut by a third since 2005. The bad news is it still c...
#128 – Chris Blattman on the five reasons wars happen
28 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In nature, animals roar and bare their teeth to intimidate adversaries — but one side usually back...
#127 – Sam Bankman-Fried on taking a high-risk approach to crypto and doing good
14 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
On this episode of the show, host Rob Wiblin interviews Sam Bankman-Fried. This interview was reco...
#126 – Bryan Caplan on whether lazy parenting is OK, what really helps workers, and betting on beliefs
05 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Everybody knows that good parenting has a big impact on how kids turn out. Except that maybe they do...
#125 – Joan Rohlfing on how to avoid catastrophic nuclear blunders
29 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Since the Soviet Union split into different countries in 1991, the pervasive fear of catastrophe tha...
#124 – Karen Levy on fads and misaligned incentives in global development, and scaling deworming to reach hundreds of millions
21 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
If someone said a global health and development programme was sustainable, participatory, and holist...
#123 – Samuel Charap on why Putin invaded Ukraine, the risk of escalation, and how to prevent disaster
14 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Russia's invasion of Ukraine is devastating the lives of Ukrainians, and so long as it continues the...
#122 – Michelle Hutchinson & Habiba Islam on balancing competing priorities and other themes from our 1-on-1 careers advising
09 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
One of 80,000 Hours' main services is our free one-on-one careers advising, which we provide to arou...
Introducing 80k After Hours
01 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Today we're launching a new podcast called 80k After Hours. Like this show it’ll mostly still ex...
#121 – Matthew Yglesias on avoiding the pundit's fallacy and how much military intervention can be used for good
16 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
If you read polls saying that the public supports a carbon tax, should you believe them? According t...
#120 – Audrey Tang on what we can learn from Taiwan’s experiments with how to do democracy
02 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In 2014 Taiwan was rocked by mass protests against a proposed trade agreement with China that was ab...
#43 Classic episode - Daniel Ellsberg on the institutional insanity that maintains nuclear doomsday machines
18 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in September 2018.In Stanley Kubrick’s iconic fi...
#35 Classic episode - Tara Mac Aulay on the audacity to fix the world without asking permission
10 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in June 2018. How broken is the world? How ineffi...
#67 Classic episode – David Chalmers on the nature and ethics of consciousness
03 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in December 2019. What is it like to be you right...
#59 Classic episode - Cass Sunstein on how change happens, and why it's so often abrupt & unpredictable
27 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in June 2019. It can often feel hopeless to be an...
#119 – Andrew Yang on our very long-term future, and other topics most politicians won’t touch
20 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Andrew Yang — past presidential candidate, founder of the Forward Party, and leader of the 'Yang G...
#118 – Jaime Yassif on safeguarding bioscience to prevent catastrophic lab accidents and bioweapons development
13 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
If a rich country were really committed to pursuing an active biological weapons program, there’s ...
#117 – David Denkenberger on using paper mills and seaweed to feed everyone in a catastrophe, ft Sahil Shah
29 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
If there's a nuclear war followed by nuclear winter, and the sun is blocked out for years, most of u...
#116 – Luisa Rodriguez on why global catastrophes seem unlikely to kill us all
19 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
If modern human civilisation collapsed — as a result of nuclear war, severe climate change, or a m...
#115 – David Wallace on the many-worlds theory of quantum mechanics and its implications
12 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Quantum mechanics — our best theory of atoms, molecules, and the subatomic particles that make the...
#114 – Maha Rehman on working with governments to rapidly deliver masks to millions of people
22 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
It’s hard to believe, but until recently there had never been a large field trial that addressed t...
We just put up a new compilation of ten core episodes of the show
20 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
We recently launched a new podcast feed that might be useful to you and people you know. It's called...
#113 – Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India
18 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Our failure to make sure all kids globally get all of their basic vaccinations leads to 1.5 million ...
#112 – Carl Shulman on the common-sense case for existential risk work and its practical implications
05 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Preventing the apocalypse may sound like an idiosyncratic activity, and it sometimes is justified on...
#111 – Mushtaq Khan on using institutional economics to predict effective government reforms
10 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
If you’re living in the Niger Delta in Nigeria, your best bet at a high-paying career is probably ...
#110 – Holden Karnofsky on building aptitudes and kicking ass
26 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Holden Karnofsky helped create two of the most influential organisations in the effective philanthro...
#109 – Holden Karnofsky on the most important century
19 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Will the future of humanity be wild, or boring? It's natural to think that if we're trying to be sob...
#108 – Chris Olah on working at top AI labs without an undergrad degree
11 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Chris Olah has had a fascinating and unconventional career path. Most people who want to pursue a...
#107 – Chris Olah on what the hell is going on inside neural networks
04 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Big machine learning models can identify plant species better than any human, write passable essays,...
#106 – Cal Newport on an industrial revolution for office work
28 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
If you wanted to start a university department from scratch, and attract as many superstar researche...
#105 – Alexander Berger on improving global health and wellbeing in clear and direct ways
12 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The effective altruist research community tries to identify the highest impact things people can do ...
#104 – Pardis Sabeti on the Sentinel system for detecting and stopping pandemics
29 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
When the first person with COVID-19 went to see a doctor in Wuhan, nobody could tell that it wasn’...
#103 – Max Roser on building the world's best source of COVID-19 data at Our World in Data
21 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
History is filled with stories of great people stepping up in times of crisis. Presidents averting w...
#102 – Tom Moynihan on why prior generations missed some of the biggest priorities of all
11 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
It can be tough to get people to truly care about reducing existential risks today. But spare a thou...
#101 – Robert Wright on using cognitive empathy to save the world
28 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In 2003, Saddam Hussein refused to let Iraqi weapons scientists leave the country to be interrogated...
#100 – Having a successful career with depression, anxiety and imposter syndrome
19 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Today's episode is one of the most remarkable and really, unique, pieces of content we’ve ever pro...
#99 – Leah Garcés on turning adversaries into allies to change the chicken industry
13 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
For a chance to prevent enormous amounts of suffering, would you be brave enough to drive five hours...
#98 – Christian Tarsney on future bias and a possible solution to moral fanaticism
05 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Imagine that you’re in the hospital for surgery. This kind of procedure is always safe, and always...
#97 – Mike Berkowitz on keeping the US a liberal democratic country
20 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election split the Republican party. Th...
The ten episodes of this show you should listen to first
15 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Today we're launching a new podcast feed that might be useful to you and people you know. It's cal...
#96 – Nina Schick on disinformation and the rise of synthetic media
06 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
You might have heard fears like this in the last few years: What if Donald Trump was woken up in the...
#95 – Kelly Wanser on whether to deliberately intervene in the climate
26 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
How long do you think it’ll be before we’re able to bend the weather to our will? A massive rain...
#94 – Ezra Klein on aligning journalism, politics, and what matters most
20 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
How many words in U.S. newspapers have been spilled on tax policy in the past five years? And how ma...
#93 – Andy Weber on rendering bioweapons obsolete & ending the new nuclear arms race
12 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
COVID-19 has provided a vivid reminder of the power of biological threats. But the threat doesn't co...
#92 – Brian Christian on the alignment problem
05 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Brian Christian is a bestselling author with a particular knack for accurately communicating difficu...
#91 – Lewis Bollard on big wins against factory farming and how they happened
15 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
I suspect today's guest, Lewis Bollard, might be the single best person in the world to interview to...
Rob Wiblin on how he ended up the way he is
03 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
This is a crosspost of an episode of the Eureka Podcast. The interviewer is Misha Saul, a childhoo...
#90 – Ajeya Cotra on worldview diversification and how big the future could be
21 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
You wake up in a mysterious box, and hear the booming voice of God: “I just flipped a coin. If ...
Rob Wiblin on self-improvement and research ethics
13 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
This is a crosspost of an episode of the Clearer Thinking Podcast: 022: Self-Improvement and Researc...
#73 - Phil Trammell on patient philanthropy and waiting to do good [re-release]
07 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in March 2020. To do good, most of us look to us...
#75 – Michelle Hutchinson on what people most often ask 80,000 Hours [re-release]
30 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in April 2020. Since it was founded, 80,000 Hour...
#89 – Owen Cotton-Barratt on epistemic systems and layers of defense against potential global catastrophes
17 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
From one point of view academia forms one big 'epistemic' system — a process which directs attenti...
#88 – Tristan Harris on the need to change the incentives of social media companies
03 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In its first 28 days on Netflix, the documentary The Social Dilemma — about the possible harms bei...
Benjamin Todd on what the effective altruism community most needs (80k team chat #4)
12 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In the last '80k team chat' with Ben Todd and Arden Koehler, we discussed what effective altruism is...
#87 – Russ Roberts on whether it's more effective to help strangers, or people you know
03 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
If you want to make the world a better place, would it be better to help your niece with her SATs, o...
How much does a vote matter? (Article)
29 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Today’s release is the latest in our series of audio versions of our articles.In this one — How ...
#86 – Hilary Greaves on Pascal's mugging, strong longtermism, and whether existing can be good for us
21 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Had World War 1 never happened, you might never have existed. It’s very unlikely that the exact c...
Benjamin Todd on the core of effective altruism and how to argue for it (80k team chat #3)
22 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Today’s episode is the latest conversation between Arden Koehler, and our CEO, Ben Todd. Ben’s...