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.

5.0

141141 ratings

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80,000 Hours Podcast episodes:

04.18.2024
#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
"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, 'Actually, we can push them further in these ways and these ways, and...
04.11.2024
#184 – Zvi Mowshowitz on sleeping on sleeper agents, and the biggest AI updates since ChatGPT
Many of you will have heard of Zvi Mowshowitz as a superhuman information-absorbing-and-processing machine — which he definitely is. As the author of the Substack Don’t Worry About the Vase, Zvi has spent as much time as literally anyone in...
03.28.2024
AI governance and policy (Article)
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 massive impacts on humanity and potentially pose global catastrophic risks, and there are opportunities in...
03.14.2024
#183 – Spencer Greenberg on causation without correlation, money and happiness, lightgassing, hype vs value, and more
"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 solved your problem.' What I’m trying to do often is...
03.08.2024
#182 – Bob Fischer on comparing the welfare of humans, chickens, pigs, octopuses, bees, and more
"[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 to get to a nest box before she lays an egg,...
03.01.2024
#181 – Laura Deming on the science that could keep us healthy in our 80s and beyond
"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 do my muscles have to...
02.21.2024
#180 – Hugo Mercier on why gullibility and misinformation are overrated
The World Economic Forum’s global risks survey of 1,400 experts, policymakers, and industry leaders ranked misinformation and disinformation as the number one global risk over the next two years — ranking it ahead of war, environmental problems, and other threats...
02.12.2024
#179 – Randy Nesse on why evolution left us so vulnerable to depression and anxiety
Mental health problems like depression and anxiety affect enormous numbers of people and severely interfere with their lives. By contrast, we don’t see similar levels of physical ill health in young people. At any point in time, something like 20%...
02.01.2024
#178 – Emily Oster on what the evidence actually says about pregnancy and parenting
"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 this to look like? What time do I...
01.24.2024
#177 – Nathan Labenz on recent AI breakthroughs and navigating the growing rift between AI safety and accelerationist camps
Back in December we spoke with Nathan Labenz — AI entrepreneur and host of The Cognitive Revolution Podcast — about the speed of progress towards AGI and OpenAI's leadership drama, drawing on Nathan's alarming experience red-teaming an early version of...
01.12.2024
#90 Classic episode – Ajeya Cotra on worldview diversification and how big the future could be
Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in January 2021. 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...
01.08.2024
#112 Classic episode – Carl Shulman on the common-sense case for existential risk work and its practical implications
Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in October 2021. Preventing the apocalypse may sound like an idiosyncratic activity, and it sometimes is justified on exotic grounds, such as the potential for humanity to become a galaxy-spanning civilisation. But the policy...
01.04.2024
#111 Classic episode – Mushtaq Khan on using institutional economics to predict effective government reforms
Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in September 2021. 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, stealing oil from pipelines. The resulting...
12.31.2023
2023 Mega-highlights Extravaganza
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 highlights from each episode of the show that came out in 2023. That's 32...
12.27.2023
#100 Classic episode – Having a successful career with depression, anxiety, and imposter syndrome
Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in May 2021. 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 nothing to do with making...
12.22.2023
#176 – Nathan Labenz on the final push for AGI, understanding OpenAI's leadership drama, and red-teaming frontier models
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? That’s the central theme of today’s episode with Nathan Labenz —...
12.14.2023
#175 – Lucia Coulter on preventing lead poisoning for $1.66 per child
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 give a child that regularly plays there lead poisoning. For life...
12.07.2023
#174 – Nita Farahany on the neurotechnology already being used to convict criminals and manipulate workers
"It will change everything: it will change our workplaces, it will change our interactions with the government, it will change our interactions with each other. It will make all of us unwitting neuromarketing subjects at all times, because at every...
11.22.2023
#173 – Jeff Sebo on digital minds, and how to avoid sleepwalking into a major moral catastrophe
"We do have a tendency to anthropomorphise nonhumans — which means attributing human characteristics to them, even when they lack those characteristics. But we also have a tendency towards anthropodenial — which involves denying that nonhumans have human characteristics, even...
11.17.2023
#172 – Bryan Caplan on why you should stop reading the news
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 informed' and checking the headlines every day is just what responsible adults do. ...
11.09.2023
#171 – Alison Young on how top labs have jeopardised public health with repeated biosafety failures
"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 these experiments, the more labs, the more opportunities there are for a rare event to...
11.01.2023
#170 – Santosh Harish on how air pollution is responsible for ~12% of global deaths — and how to get that number down
"One [outrageous example of air pollution] is municipal waste burning that happens in many cities in the Global South. Basically, this is waste that gets collected from people's homes, and instead of being transported to a waste management facility or...
10.26.2023
#169 – Paul Niehaus on whether cash transfers cause economic growth, and keeping theft to acceptable levels
"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 already in the hands of people living in poverty. If I...
10.23.2023
#168 – Ian Morris on whether deep history says we're heading for an intelligence explosion
"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 can make an argument that, yes, rates of growth are slowing, the rate of...
10.18.2023
#167 – Seren Kell on the research gaps holding back alternative proteins from mass adoption
"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 on with alternative proteins and there's so much white space, it's actually just really exciting...
10.12.2023
#166 – Tantum Collins on what he’s learned as an AI policy insider at the White House, DeepMind and elsewhere
"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 to decide what that government looks like, and we...
10.06.2023
#165 – Anders Sandberg on war in space, whether civilisations age, and the best things possible in our universe
"Now, the really interesting question is: How much is there an attacker-versus-defender advantage in this kind of advanced future? Right now, if somebody's sitting on Mars and you're going to war against them, it's very hard to hit them....
10.02.2023
#164 – Kevin Esvelt on cults that want to kill everyone, stealth vs wildfire pandemics, and how he felt inventing gene drives
"Imagine a fast-spreading respiratory HIV. It sweeps around the world. Almost nobody has symptoms. Nobody notices until years later, when the first people who are infected begin to succumb. They might die, something else debilitating might happen to them, but...
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...
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'....

What's 80,000 Hours Podcast about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

80,000 Hours Podcast episodes:

#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

#184 – Zvi Mowshowitz on sleeping on sleeper agents, and the biggest AI updates since ChatGPT

AI governance and policy (Article)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2023 Mega-highlights Extravaganza

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

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

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

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

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

#172 – Bryan Caplan on why you should stop reading the news

#171 – Alison Young on how top labs have jeopardised public health with repeated biosafety failures

#170 – Santosh Harish on how air pollution is responsible for ~12% of global deaths — and how to get that number down

#169 – Paul Niehaus on whether cash transfers cause economic growth, and keeping theft to acceptable levels

#168 – Ian Morris on whether deep history says we're heading for an intelligence explosion

#167 – Seren Kell on the research gaps holding back alternative proteins from mass adoption

#166 – Tantum Collins on what he’s learned as an AI policy insider at the White House, DeepMind and elsewhere

#165 – Anders Sandberg on war in space, whether civilisations age, and the best things possible in our universe

#164 – Kevin Esvelt on cults that want to kill everyone, stealth vs wildfire pandemics, and how he felt inventing gene drives

Great power conflict (Article)

#163 – Toby Ord on the perils of maximising the good that you do

The 80,000 Hours Career Guide (2023)

#162 – Mustafa Suleyman on getting Washington and Silicon Valley to tame AI

#161 – Michael Webb on whether AI will soon cause job loss, lower incomes, and higher inequality — or the opposite

#160 – Hannah Ritchie on why it makes sense to be optimistic about the environment

#159 – Jan Leike on OpenAI's massive push to make superintelligence safe in 4 years or less

We now offer shorter 'interview highlights' episodes

#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

#157 – Ezra Klein on existential risk from AI and what DC could do about it

#156 – Markus Anderljung on how to regulate cutting-edge AI models

Bonus: The Worst Ideas in the History of the World

#155 – Lennart Heim on the compute governance era and what has to come after

#154 - Rohin Shah on DeepMind and trying to fairly hear out both AI doomers and doubters

#153 – Elie Hassenfeld on 2 big picture critiques of GiveWell's approach, and 6 lessons from their recent work

#152 – Joe Carlsmith on navigating serious philosophical confusion

#151 – Ajeya Cotra on accidentally teaching AI models to deceive us

#150 – Tom Davidson on how quickly AI could transform the world

Andrés Jiménez Zorrilla on the Shrimp Welfare Project (80k After Hours)

#149 – Tim LeBon on how altruistic perfectionism is self-defeating

#148 – Johannes Ackva on unfashionable climate interventions that work, and fashionable ones that don't

#147 – Spencer Greenberg on stopping valueless papers from getting into top journals