80,000 Hours Podcast
Episodes
#172 – Bryan Caplan on why you should stop reading the news
17 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Is following important political and international news a civic duty — or is it our civic duty to avoid it?It's common to think that 'staying inform...
#171 – Alison Young on how top labs have jeopardised public health with repeated biosafety failures
09 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
"Rare events can still cause catastrophic accidents. The concern that has been raised by experts going back over time, is that really, the more of the...
#170 – Santosh Harish on how air pollution is responsible for ~12% of global deaths — and how to get that number down
01 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
"One [outrageous example of air pollution] is municipal waste burning that happens in many cities in the Global South. Basically, this is waste that g...
#169 – Paul Niehaus on whether cash transfers cause economic growth, and keeping theft to acceptable levels
26 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
"One of our earliest supporters and a dear friend of mine, Mark Lampert, once said to me, “The way I think about it is, imagine that this money were...
#168 – Ian Morris on whether deep history says we're heading for an intelligence explosion
23 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
"If we carry on looking at these industrialised economies, not thinking about what it is they're actually doing and what the potential of this is, you...
#167 – Seren Kell on the research gaps holding back alternative proteins from mass adoption
18 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
"There have been literally thousands of years of breeding and living with animals to optimise these kinds of problems. But because we're just so early...
#166 – Tantum Collins on what he’s learned as an AI policy insider at the White House, DeepMind and elsewhere
12 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
"If you and I and 100 other people were on the first ship that was going to go settle Mars, and were going to build a human civilisation, and we have ...
#165 – Anders Sandberg on war in space, whether civilisations age, and the best things possible in our universe
06 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
"Now, the really interesting question is: How much is there an attacker-versus-defender advantage in this kind of advanced future? Right now, if someb...
#164 – Kevin Esvelt on cults that want to kill everyone, stealth vs wildfire pandemics, and how he felt inventing gene drives
02 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
"Imagine a fast-spreading respiratory HIV. It sweeps around the world. Almost nobody has symptoms. Nobody notices until years later, when the first pe...
Great power conflict (Article)
22 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Today’s release is a reading of our Great power conflict problem profile, written and narrated by Stephen Clare.If you want to check out the links, ...
#163 – Toby Ord on the perils of maximising the good that you do
08 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Effective altruism is associated with the slogan "do the most good." On one level, this has to be unobjectionable: What could be bad about helping peo...
The 80,000 Hours Career Guide (2023)
04 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
An audio version of the 2023 80,000 Hours career guide, also available on our website, on Amazon, and on Audible.If you know someone who might find ou...
#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 of the world's largest supercomputers to train a l...
#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 and connecting calls, plugging different calls betw...
#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 they don't get a lot from crop production, but every...
#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 make superintelligent AI systems aligned and safe t...
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 80,000 Hours Podcast interviews. These aren’t nece...
#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-effectively helped save lives. He then cofounded O...
#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' chance it would ignite the atmosphere, putting an end t...
#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 particularly dangerous models ahead of time. Once those m...
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 World’, created by Keiran Harris — producer o...
#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 growing. From hostile foreign governments and terrorist...
#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 said they're worried your research could cause human ...
#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 charities that save or improve lives the most per do...
#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 actions from wrong ones?Such fundamental questions h...
#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 trusted adult to serve as your guide to the world. You...
#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 from.For example: what if we told you that within ...
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 Zorrilla about the Shrimp Welfare Project, which he cofo...
#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 the high moral, professional, or academic standards...
#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 as much as possible, right? Strangely, no. Today'...
#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 experiments in top social science journals don't get the ...
#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 having. In one exchange, the chatbot told a user:"I ha...
#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 still a lot of progress to be made, campaigns to give...
#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” — you’ve obviously been reading the antonym sect...
#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 bestselling author A.J. Jacobs, always hated Judge J...
#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 other members of the effective altruism movement, has ...
#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 — Associate Professor of Economics at Texas A&...
#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,' right? Wrong. Or at least... not officially.As today'...
#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 languages. He's also a content-producing machine...
#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 of all text available on the internet to do one thi...
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 how to (partly) overcome it, written and narrated by...
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. Click here for an official 80,000 Hours stateme...
#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 obscure academic question to the centre of public...
#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. If it comes up on the second flip you win $4. If...
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 catastrophe, written by Benjamin Hilton. We expec...
#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 millennia, people have offered many answers: joy,...
#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 should act to 'produce the greatest good for the gre...
#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 big, very long, and/or very good.We can reasonably ...
#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 the background of our news coverage. But with the be...
#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 thought slavery was natural and unobjectionable, p...
#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 things without ever trying to fix them. That “put...
#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 stolen in two seconds and uploaded to the web where...
#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 abandoned factory and apartment block. Over the n...
#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, lunch is bread and hummus, and you're all bunched up o...
#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 causes 250 million cases and 600,000 deaths a year,...
#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 backs down, and real fights are rare. The wisdom of ev...
#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 recorded in February 2022, and released in April 2022....
#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 don't, because it doesn't.Incredible though it might...
#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 that people lived with for decades has gradually fade...
#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 holistic, you'd have to guess that they were saying some...
#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 there's a risk that the conflict could escalate to in...
#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 around 1,000 people a year. Today we speak to two of o...
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 explore the best ways to do good — and some episod...
#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 to today's guest — journalist and blogger Matthew...
#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 about to be agreed without the usual Parliamentary h...
#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 film Dr. Strangelove, the American president is info...
#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 inefficient is a typical organisation? Looking at Tara M...
#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 now? You're seeing this text on the screen, smell...
#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 activist seeking social change on an obscure issu...
#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 Gang' — is kind of a big deal, but is particularl...
#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 not much we could do to stop them. With enough mon...
#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 us are going to starve, right? Well, currently, pro...
#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 much worse pandemic than COVID-19 — billions of p...
#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 them up — underpins most of modern physics. But 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 these simple and obvious questions:1. When ordinary...
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 Effective Altruism: Ten Global Problems, and it'...
#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 child deaths every year.According to today’s gue...
#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 exotic grounds, such as the potential for humanit...
#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 ‘artisanal refining’ — or, in plain language...
#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 philanthropy world. So when he outlines a different perspect...
#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 sober and measured, and predict what will really happ...
#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 research career feel they need a degree to get ta...
#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, beat you at a game of Starcraft 2, figure out how...
#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 researchers as possible, what’s the most attractive perk ...
#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 to improve the world. Unsurprisingly, given the di...
#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’t a familiar disease like the flu — that we were...
#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 wars; soldiers leading troops away from certain dea...
#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 thought for the longtermist of the 17th century: they ...
#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. Given the overwhelming domestic support for an i...
#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 produced (and I can say that because I had almost not...
#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 to a remote location to meet a man who seems like...
#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 successful — but it can take anywhere from one ...
#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. There were those who went along with it — 147 memb...
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 called 'Effective Altruism: An Introduction', and it'...
#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 middle of the night and shown a fake video — in...
#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 rainmaking program in China, efforts to seed new oases...
#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 many words on CRISPR? Or meat alternatives? Or how A...
#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 come from natural sources alone. Weaponized contagio...
#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 difficult or technical ideas from both mathematics and co...
#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 get an overview of all the methods that might be ...