80,000 Hours Podcast

By Rob, Luisa, Keiran, and the 80,000 Hours team

Technology Education

What's 80,000 Hours Podcast about?

Unusually in-depth conversations about the world's most pressing problems and what you can do to solve them.

Subscribe by searching for '80000 Hours' wherever you get podcasts.

Produced by Keiran Harris. Hosted by Rob Wiblin and Luisa Rodriguez.

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Great power conflict (Article)

09.22.2023

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, footnotes and figures in today’s article, you can find those here. And if you ...

80,000 Hours Podcast episodes:

09.22.2023 Great power conflict (Article) 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, footnotes and figures in today’s article, you can find those here. And if you ...
09.08.2023 #163 – Toby Ord on the perils of maximising the good that you do 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 people more and more? But in today's interview, Toby Ord — moral philosopher at the ...
09.04.2023 The 80,000 Hours Career Guide (2023) 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 our career guide helpful, you can get a free copy sent to them ...
09.01.2023 #162 – Mustafa Suleyman on getting Washington and Silicon Valley to tame AI 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 large language model on 10–100x the compute used to train ChatGPT. But far from ...
08.23.2023 #161 – Michael Webb on whether AI will soon cause job loss, lower incomes, and higher inequality — or the opposite "Do you remember seeing these photographs of generally women sitting in front of these huge panels and connecting calls, plugging different calls between different numbers? The automated version of that was invented in 1892. However, the number of human manual ...
08.14.2023 #160 – Hannah Ritchie on why it makes sense to be optimistic about the environment "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 everyone in the family has to work there to just stay afloat. Basically, you ...
08.07.2023 #159 – Jan Leike on OpenAI's massive push to make superintelligence safe in 4 years or less 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 to use within four years, and the lab is putting a massive 20% of its ...
08.05.2023 We now offer shorter 'interview highlights' episodes 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 necessarily the most important parts of the interview, and if a topic matters to you we ...
07.31.2023 #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 Back in 2007, Holden Karnofsky cofounded GiveWell, where he sought out the charities that most cost-effectively helped save lives. He then cofounded Open Philanthropy, where he oversaw a team making billions of dollars’ worth of grants across a range of ...
07.24.2023 #157 – Ezra Klein on existential risk from AI and what DC could do about it In Oppenheimer, scientists detonate a nuclear weapon despite thinking there's some 'near zero' chance it would ignite the atmosphere, putting an end to life on Earth. Today, scientists working on AI think the chance their work puts an end to ...
07.10.2023 #156 – Markus Anderljung on how to regulate cutting-edge AI models "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 mines have been discovered, and the frontier developers keep walking down the minefield, there's ...
06.30.2023 Bonus: The Worst Ideas in the History of the World 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 of the 80,000 Hours Podcast. If you have strong opinions about this one way ...
06.22.2023 #155 – Lennart Heim on the compute governance era and what has to come after As AI advances ever more quickly, concerns about potential misuse of highly capable models are growing. From hostile foreign governments and terrorists to reckless entrepreneurs, the threat of AI falling into the wrong hands is top of mind for the ...
06.09.2023 #154 - Rohin Shah on DeepMind and trying to fairly hear out both AI doomers and doubters 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 extinction. The government is setting up meetings to discuss how this outcome ...
06.02.2023 #153 – Elie Hassenfeld on 2 big picture critiques of GiveWell's approach, and 6 lessons from their recent work 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 dollar." It mostly recommends projects that help the world's poorest people avoid easily prevented diseases, ...
05.19.2023 #152 – Joe Carlsmith on navigating serious philosophical confusion What is the nature of the universe? How do we make decisions correctly? What differentiates right actions from wrong ones? Such fundamental questions have been the subject of philosophical and theological debates for millennia. But, as we all know, and ...
05.12.2023 #151 – Ajeya Cotra on accidentally teaching AI models to deceive us 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 have to hire a smart adult to run that company, guide your life ...
05.05.2023 #150 – Tom Davidson on how quickly AI could transform the world 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 15 years, it’s likely that we’ll see a 1,000x improvement in AI capabilities in a ...
04.22.2023 Andrés Jiménez Zorrilla on the Shrimp Welfare Project (80k After Hours) In this episode from our second show, 80k After Hours, Rob Wiblin interviews Andrés Jiménez Zorrilla about the Shrimp Welfare Project, which he cofounded in 2021. It's the first project in the world focused on shrimp welfare specifically, and as ...
04.12.2023 #149 – Tim LeBon on how altruistic perfectionism is self-defeating Being a good and successful person is core to your identity. You place great importance on meeting the high moral, professional, or academic standards you set yourself. But inevitably, something goes wrong and you fail to meet that high bar. ...
04.03.2023 #148 – Johannes Ackva on unfashionable climate interventions that work, and fashionable ones that don't 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's guest, Johannes Ackva — the climate research lead at Founders Pledge, where he advises ...
03.24.2023 #147 – Spencer Greenberg on stopping valueless papers from getting into top journals 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 same result if the experiments are repeated. Two key reasons are 'p-hacking' and 'publication bias'. ...
03.14.2023 #146 – Robert Long on why large language models like GPT (probably) aren't conscious 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 have a subjective experience of being conscious, aware, and alive, but I cannot share it with anyone ...
02.11.2023 #145 – Christopher Brown on why slavery abolition wasn't inevitable 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 people of different genders, races, sexualities, ethnicities, beliefs, and abilities equal treatment and ...
01.26.2023 #144 – Athena Aktipis on why cancer is actually one of our universe's most fundamental phenomena What’s the opposite of cancer? If you answered “cure,” “antidote,” or “antivenom” — you’ve obviously been reading the antonym section at www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/cancer. But today’s guest Athena Aktipis says that the opposite of cancer is us: it's having a functional multicellular ...
01.16.2023 #79 Classic episode - A.J. Jacobs on radical honesty, following the whole Bible, and reframing global problems as puzzles Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in June 2020. Today’s guest, New York Times bestselling author A.J. Jacobs, always hated Judge Judy. But after he found out that she was his seventh cousin, he thought, "You know what, she's not ...
01.09.2023 #81 Classic episode - Ben Garfinkel on scrutinising classic AI risk arguments Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in July 2020. 80,000 Hours, along with many other members of the effective altruism movement, has argued that helping to positively shape the development of artificial intelligence may be one of the best ways ...
01.04.2023 #83 Classic episode - Jennifer Doleac on preventing crime without police and prisons Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in July 2020. Today’s guest, Jennifer Doleac — Associate Professor of Economics at Texas A&M University, and Director of the Justice Tech Lab — is an expert on empirical research into policing, law and ...
12.29.2022 #143 – Jeffrey Lewis on the most common misconceptions about nuclear weapons America aims to avoid nuclear war by relying on the principle of 'mutually assured destruction,' right? Wrong. Or at least... not officially. As today's guest — Jeffrey Lewis, founder of Arms Control Wonk and professor at the Middlebury Institute of ...
12.20.2022 #142 – John McWhorter on key lessons from linguistics, the virtue of creoles, and language extinction John McWhorter is a linguistics professor at Columbia University specialising in research on creole languages. He's also a content-producing machine, never afraid to give his frank opinion on anything and everything. On top of his academic work he's also written ...
12.13.2022 #141 – Richard Ngo on large language models, OpenAI, and striving to make the future go well 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 thing: predict the next word in a passage. This simple technique has led to ...
12.08.2022 My experience with imposter syndrome — and how to (partly) overcome it (Article) 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 Luisa Rodriguez. If you want to check out the links, footnotes and figures in today’s ...
11.23.2022 Rob's thoughts on the FTX bankruptcy 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 statement. And here are links to some potentially relevant 80,000 Hours pieces: • Episode ...
11.08.2022 #140 – Bear Braumoeller on the case that war isn't in decline 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 debate, and pointed to rates of death in war to argue energetically that war is on ...
10.28.2022 #139 — Alan Hájek on puzzles and paradoxes in probability and expected value 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 it comes up on the ...
10.14.2022 Preventing an AI-related catastrophe (Article) Today’s release is a professional reading of our new problem profile on preventing an AI-related catastrophe, written by Benjamin Hilton. We expect that there will be substantial progress in AI in the next few decades, potentially even to the point ...
09.30.2022 #138 – Sharon Hewitt Rawlette on why pleasure and pain are the only things that intrinsically matter 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, justice, equality, accomplishment, loving god, wisdom, and plenty more. The question is a ...
09.08.2022 #137 – Andreas Mogensen on whether effective altruism is just for consequentialists 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 greatest number.' It's clear enough why utilitarians should be interested in the project of ...
08.15.2022 #136 – Will MacAskill on what we owe the future 1. People who exist in the future deserve some degree of moral consideration. 2. The future could be very big, very long, and/or very good. 3. We can reasonably hope to influence whether people in the future exist, and how ...
08.08.2022 #135 – Samuel Charap on key lessons from five months of war in Ukraine 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 benefit of time we're in a much stronger position to understand what happened, why, ...
07.22.2022 #134 – Ian Morris on what big picture history teaches us Wind back 1,000 years and the moral landscape looks very different to today. Most farming societies thought slavery was natural and unobjectionable, premarital sex was an abomination, women should obey their husbands, and commoners should obey their monarchs. Wind back ...
07.01.2022 #133 – Max Tegmark on how a 'put-up-or-shut-up' resolution led him to work on AI and algorithmic news selection 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 up or shut up” New Year’s resolution led to the first Puerto Rico ...
06.14.2022 #132 – Nova DasSarma on why information security may be critical to the safe development of AI systems 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 anyone can use it for free. This problem exists in extreme ...
06.03.2022 #131 – Lewis Dartnell on getting humanity to bounce back faster in a post-apocalyptic world “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 next 365 days, they’ll try to rebuild as much of civilisation as they can — from ...
05.23.2022 #130 – Will MacAskill on balancing frugality with ambition, whether you need longtermism, & mental health under pressure 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 on a few tables in a basement office. But over a few years, your ...
05.09.2022 #129 – James Tibenderana on the state of the art in malaria control and elimination 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, mostly among young children in sub-Saharan Africa. We already have ...
04.28.2022 #128 – Chris Blattman on the five reasons wars happen 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 evolution is that the risk of violence is just too great. Which might make ...
04.14.2022 #127 – Sam Bankman-Fried on taking a high-risk approach to crypto and doing good 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. But on November 11 2022, Sam Bankman-Fried's company, FTX, filed for bankruptcy, and all staff at ...
04.05.2022 #126 – Bryan Caplan on whether lazy parenting is OK, what really helps workers, and betting on beliefs 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 seem, according to today's guest — economist Bryan Caplan, the author of Selfish Reasons ...
03.29.2022 #125 – Joan Rohlfing on how to avoid catastrophic nuclear blunders Since the Soviet Union split into different countries in 1991, the pervasive fear of catastrophe that people lived with for decades has gradually faded from memory, and nuclear warhead stockpiles have declined by 83%. Nuclear brinksmanship, proxy wars, and the ...

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