All episodes of the 80,000 Hours Podcast

CORONAVIRUS: See our COVID-19 page for analysis and resources.

The 80,000 Hours Podcast with Rob Wiblin

A show about the world's most pressing problems and how you can use your career to solve them.

All episodes

March 19, 2020

Emergency episode: Rob & Howie on the menace of COVID-19, and what both governments & individuals might do to help

March 17, 2020

#73 – Phil Trammell on patient philanthropy and waiting to do good

March 7, 2020

#72 – Toby Ord on the precipice and humanity's potential futures

March 2, 2020

#71 – Ben Todd on the key ideas of 80,000 Hours

February 25, 2020

Bonus episode: Arden & Rob on demandingness, work-life balance and injustice

February 13, 2020

#70 – Cassidy Nelson on the 12 best ways to stop the next pandemic (and limit nCoV)

February 6, 2020

#69 – Jeffrey Ding on China, its AI dream, and what we get wrong about both

February 3, 2020

Bonus episode: What we do and don’t know about the 2019-nCoV coronavirus

January 24, 2020

#68 – Will MacAskill on the paralysis argument, whether we're at the hinge of history, & his new priorities

December 16, 2019

#67 – David Chalmers on the nature and ethics of consciousness

December 5, 2019

#66 – Peter Singer on provocative advocacy, EA, how his ethical views have changed, and drowning children

November 19, 2019

#65 – Amb. Bonnie Jenkins on 8 years pursuing WMD arms control, & diversity in diplomacy

October 25, 2019

#64 – Bruce Schneier on the big risks in computer security, secrets, and surveillance without tyranny

September 25, 2019

Rob Wiblin on plastic straws, nicotine, doping, & whether changing the long term is really possible

September 3, 2019

#63 – Vitalik Buterin on better ways to fund public goods, blockchain's failures, & effective giving

August 5, 2019

#62 – Paul Christiano on messaging the future, increasing compute, & how CO2 impacts your brain

July 17, 2019

#61 – Helen Toner on emerging technology, national security, and China

June 28, 2019

#60 – Prof Tetlock on why accurate forecasting matters for everything, and how you can do it better

June 17, 2019

#59 – Cass Sunstein on how social change happens, and why it's so often abrupt & unpredictable

June 3, 2019

#58 – Pushmeet Kohli of DeepMind on designing robust & reliable AI systems and how to succeed in AI

April 23, 2019

#57 – Tom Kalil on how to do the most good in government

April 15, 2019

#56 – Persis Eskander on wild animal welfare and what, if anything, to do about it

March 31, 2019

#55 – Mark Lutter & Tamara Winter on founding charter cities with outstanding governance to end poverty

March 19, 2019

#54 – Askell, Brundage & Clark from OpenAI on publication norms, malicious uses of AI, and general-purpose learning algorithms

February 27, 2019

#53 – Kelsey Piper on the room for important advocacy within journalism

February 8, 2019

#52 – Glen Weyl on uprooting capitalism and democracy for a just society

January 28, 2019

#51 – Martin Gurri on the revolt of the public & crisis of authority in the information age

December 27, 2018

#50 – Dr David Denkenberger on how to feed all 8 billion people through an asteroid/nuclear winter

December 19, 2018

#49 – Dr Rachel Glennerster on a year's worth of education for under $1 and other development best buys

November 22, 2018

#48 – Brian Christian on better living through the wisdom of computer science

November 2, 2018

#47 – Catherine Olsson & Daniel Ziegler on the fast path into high-impact ML engineering roles

October 23, 2018

#46 – Prof Hilary Greaves on moral cluelessness, population ethics, & harnessing the brainpower of academia to tackle the most important research questions

October 17, 2018

#45 – Prof Tyler Cowen's stubborn attachments to maximising economic growth, making civilization more stable & respecting human rights

October 2, 2018

#44 – Dr Paul Christiano on how OpenAI is developing real solutions to the 'AI alignment problem', and his vision of how humanity will progressively hand over decision-making to AI systems

September 25, 2018

#43 – Daniel Ellsberg on the creation of nuclear doomsday machines, the institutional insanity that maintains them, & how they could be dismantled

September 11, 2018

#42 – Amanda Askell on moral empathy, the value of information & the ethics of infinity

August 28, 2018

#41 – David Roodman on incarceration, geomagnetic storms, & becoming a world-class researcher

August 21, 2018

#40 – Katja Grace on forecasting future technology & how much we should trust expert predictions.

August 7, 2018

#39 – Spencer Greenberg on the scientific approach to solving difficult everyday questions.

July 25, 2018

#38 – Prof Yew-Kwang Ng on anticipating effective altruism decades ago & how to make a much happier world

July 16, 2018

#37 – GiveWell picks top charities by estimating the unknowable. James Snowden on how they do it.

July 11, 2018

#36 – Tanya Singh on ending the operations management bottleneck in effective altruism

June 21, 2018

#35 – Tara Mac Aulay on the audacity to fix the world without asking permission

June 1, 2018

#34 – We use the worst voting system that exists. Here's how Aaron Hamlin is going to fix it.

May 29, 2018

#33 – Dr Anders Sandberg on what if we ended ageing, solar flares & the annual risk of nuclear war

May 22, 2018

#32 – Prof Bryan Caplan on whether the Case Against Education holds up, totalitarianism, & open borders

May 18, 2018

#31 – Prof Allan Dafoe on defusing the political and economic risks posed by existing AI capabilities

May 15, 2018

#30 – Dr Eva Vivalt on how little social science findings generalize from one study to another

May 8, 2018

#29 – Dr Anders Sandberg on three new resolutions for the Fermi Paradox and how to easily colonise the universe

April 27, 2018

#28 – Dr Owen Cotton-Barratt on why scientists should need insurance, PhD strategy & what if AI progresses fast

April 17, 2018

#27 – Tom Inglesby on how to prevent global catastrophic biological risks

April 10, 2018

#26 – Marie Gibbons on how exactly clean meat is created & the advances needed to get it in every supermarket

March 28, 2018

#25 – Prof Robin Hanson on why we have to lie to ourselves about why we do what we do

March 20, 2018

#24 – Stefan Schubert on why it’s a bad idea to break the rules, even if it’s for a good cause

March 16, 2018

#23 – How to actually become an AI alignment researcher, according to Dr Jan Leike

March 7, 2018

#22 – Dr Leah Utyasheva on the non-profit that figured out how to massively cut suicide rates

February 27, 2018

#21 – Holden Karnofsky on times philanthropy transformed the world & Open Phil's plan to do the same

February 19, 2018

#20 – Bruce Friedrich on inventing outstanding meat substitutes to end speciesism & factory farming

February 14, 2018

#19 – Samantha Pitts-Kiefer on working next to the White House trying to prevent nuclear war

January 31, 2018

#18 – Ofir Reich on using data science to end poverty & the spurious action-inaction distinction

January 19, 2018

#17 – Prof Will MacAskill on moral uncertainty, utilitarianism & how to avoid being a moral monster

December 22, 2017

#16 – Dr Hutchinson on global priorities research & shaping the ideas of intellectuals

November 20, 2017

#15 – Prof Tetlock on how chimps beat Berkeley undergrads and when it’s wise to defer to the wise

November 13, 2017

#14 – Sharon Nunez & Jose Valle on going undercover to expose animal abuse

October 31, 2017

#13 – Claire Walsh on testing which policies work & how to get governments to listen to the results

October 25, 2017

#12 – Dr Beth Cameron works to stop you dying in a pandemic. Here’s what keeps her up at night.

October 17, 2017

#11 – Dr Spencer Greenberg on speeding up social science 10-fold & why plenty of startups cause harm

October 11, 2017

#10 – Dr Nick Beckstead on how to spend billions of dollars preventing human extinction

October 4, 2017

#9 – Christine Peterson on how insecure computers could lead to global disaster, and how to fix it

September 27, 2017

#8 – Lewis Bollard on how to end factory farming in our lifetimes

September 13, 2017

#7 – Julia Galef on making humanity more rational, what EA does wrong, and why Twitter isn’t all bad

September 6, 2017

#6 – Dr Toby Ord on why the long-term future matters more than anything else & what to do about it

August 28, 2017

#5 – Alex Gordon-Brown on how to donate millions in your 20s working in quantitative trading

August 23, 2017

#4 – Howie Lempel on pandemics that kill hundreds of millions and how to stop them

July 21, 2017

#3 – Dr Dario Amodei on OpenAI and how AI will change the world for good and ill

June 21, 2017

#2 – Prof David Spiegelhalter on risk, stats and improving understanding of science

June 6, 2017

#1 – Miles Brundage on the world's desperate need for AI strategists and policy experts