All episodes of the 80,000 Hours Podcast

The 80,000 Hours Podcast with Rob Wiblin

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

All episodes

July 9, 2020

#81 – Ben Garfinkel on scrutinising classic AI risk arguments

June 22, 2020

#80 – Professor Stuart Russell on why our approach to AI is broken and how to fix it

June 1, 2020

#79 – A.J. Jacobs on radical honesty, following the whole Bible, and reframing global problems as puzzles

May 22, 2020

#78 – Danny Hernandez on forecasting and measuring some of the most important drivers of AI progress

May 18, 2020

#77 – Professor Marc Lipsitch on whether we're winning or losing against COVID-19

May 8, 2020

#76 – Tara Kirk Sell on COVID-19 misinformation, who's over and under-performed, and what we can reopen first

April 28, 2020

#75 – Michelle Hutchinson on what people most often ask 80,000 Hours

April 17, 2020

#74 – Dr Greg Lewis on COVID-19 & catastrophic biological risks

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 – Dr Cassidy Nelson on the twelve best ways to stop the next pandemic (and limit COVID-19)

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 EA 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