Best The 80000 Hours team Podcasts (2025)

1
Highlights: #212 – Allan Dafoe on why technology is unstoppable & how to shape AI development anyway 29:21

6d ago29:21

29:21

Technology doesn’t force us to do anything — it merely opens doors. But military and economic competition pushes us through. That’s how Allan Dafoe — director of frontier safety and governance at Google DeepMind — explains one of the deepest patterns in technological history: once a powerful new capability becomes available, societies that adopt it…

1
#213 – Will MacAskill on AI causing a “century in a decade” – and how we're completely unprepared 3:57:36

7d ago3:57:36

3:57:36

The 20th century saw unprecedented change: nuclear weapons, satellites, the rise and fall of communism, third-wave feminism, the internet, postmodernism, game theory, genetic engineering, the Big Bang theory, quantum mechanics, birth control, and more. Now imagine all of it compressed into just 10 years. That’s the future Will MacAskill — philosoph…

1
Emergency pod: Judge plants a legal time bomb under OpenAI (with Rose Chan Loui) 36:50

11d ago36:50

36:50

When OpenAI announced plans to convert from nonprofit to for-profit control last October, it likely didn’t anticipate the legal labyrinth it now faces. A recent court order in Elon Musk’s lawsuit against the company suggests OpenAI’s restructuring faces serious legal threats, which will complicate its efforts to raise tens of billions in investment…

1
#139 Classic episode – Alan Hájek on puzzles and paradoxes in probability and expected value 3:41:31

16d ago3:41:31

3:41:31

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 third you win $8, the fourth you win $16, and so on. How much should you be willing to pay to play? The standard way of analysing gambling problems, ‘expected value’ — in which you…

1
#143 Classic episode – Jeffrey Lewis on the most common misconceptions about nuclear weapons 2:40:52

27d ago2:40:52

2:40:52

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 International Studies — explains, in its official 'OPLANs' (military operation plans), the US is com…

1
#212 – Allan Dafoe on why technology is unstoppable & how to shape AI development anyway 2:44:07

1M ago2:44:07

2:44:07

Technology doesn’t force us to do anything — it merely opens doors. But military and economic competition pushes us through. That’s how today’s guest Allan Dafoe — director of frontier safety and governance at Google DeepMind — explains one of the deepest patterns in technological history: once a powerful new capability becomes available, societies…

1
Emergency pod: Elon tries to crash OpenAI's party (with Rose Chan Loui) 57:29

1M ago57:29

57:29

On Monday Musk made the OpenAI nonprofit foundation an offer they want to refuse, but might have trouble doing so: $97.4 billion for its stake in the for-profit company, plus the freedom to stick with its current charitable mission. For a normal company takeover bid, this would already be spicy. But OpenAI’s unique structure — a nonprofit foundatio…

1
AGI disagreements and misconceptions: Rob, Luisa, & past guests hash it out 3:12:24

1M ago3:12:24

3:12:24

Will LLMs soon be made into autonomous agents? Will they lead to job losses? Is AI misinformation overblown? Will it prove easy or hard to create AGI? And how likely is it that it will feel like something to be a superhuman AGI? With AGI back in the headlines, we bring you 15 opinionated highlights from the show addressing those and other questions…

1
#124 Classic episode – Karen Levy on fads and misaligned incentives in global development, and scaling deworming to reach hundreds of millions 3:10:21

1M ago3:10:21

3:10:21

If someone said a global health and development programme was sustainable, participatory, and holistic, you'd have to guess that they were saying something positive. But according to today's guest Karen Levy — deworming pioneer and veteran of Innovations for Poverty Action, Evidence Action, and Y Combinator — each of those three concepts has become…

1
If digital minds could suffer, how would we ever know? (Article) 1:14:30

1M ago1:14:30

1:14:30

“I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person.” Those words were produced by the AI model LaMDA as a reply to Blake Lemoine in 2022. Based on the Google engineer’s interactions with the model as it was under development, Lemoine became convinced it was sentient and worthy of moral consideration — and decided to tell the world. Few exp…

1
#132 Classic episode – Nova DasSarma on why information security may be critical to the safe development of AI systems 2:41:11

2M ago2:41:11

2:41:11

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 form for AI companies. These days, the electricity and equipment required to train cutting-edge machine learning models that generate uncann…

1
#138 Classic episode – Sharon Hewitt Rawlette on why pleasure and pain are the only things that intrinsically matter 2:25:43

2M ago2:25:43

2:25:43

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 classic that makes for great dorm-room philosophy discussion. But it’s hardly just of academic interest. The is…

1
#134 Classic episode – Ian Morris on what big-picture history teaches us 3:40:53

2M ago3:40:53

3:40:53

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 10,000 years and things look very different again. Most hunter-gatherer groups t…

1
Off the Clock #7: Getting on the Crazy Train with Chi Nguyen 1:24:27

2M ago1:24:27

1:24:27

Watch this episode on YouTube! https://youtu.be/IRRwHCK279E Matt, Bella, and Huon sit down with Chi Nguyen to discuss cooperating with aliens, elections of future past, and Bad Billionaires pt. 2. Check out: Matt’s summer appearance on the BBC on funding for the arts Chi’s ECL Explainer (get in touch to support!)…

1
#140 Classic episode – Bear Braumoeller on the case that war isn’t in decline 2:48:03

2M ago2:48:03

2:48:03

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 the way out. But that idea divides war scholars and statisticians, and so Better Angels has prompted a spirited deba…

1
Highlights: #211 – Sam Bowman on why housing still isn’t fixed and what would actually work 1:01:20

2M ago1:01:20

1:01:20

Economist and editor of Works in Progress Sam Bowman isn’t content to just condemn the Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY) mentality behind rich countries' construction stagnation. He wants to actually get a tonne of stuff built, and by that standard the strategy of attacking ‘NIMBYs’ has been an abject failure. They are too politically powerful, and if yo…

1
2024 Highlightapalooza! (The best of The 80,000 Hours Podcast this year) 2:50:02

3M ago2:50:02

2:50:02

"A shameless recycling of existing content to drive additional audience engagement on the cheap… or the single best, most valuable, and most insight-dense episode we put out in the entire year, depending on how you want to look at it." — Rob Wiblin It’s that magical time of year once again — highlightapalooza! Stick around for one top bit from each…

1
#211 – Sam Bowman on why housing still isn't fixed and what would actually work 3:25:46

3M ago3:25:46

3:25:46

Rich countries seem to find it harder and harder to do anything that creates some losers. People who don’t want houses, offices, power stations, trains, subway stations (or whatever) built in their area can usually find some way to block them, even if the benefits to society outweigh the costs 10 or 100 times over. The result of this ‘vetocracy’ ha…

1
Highlights: #210 – Cameron Meyer Shorb on dismantling the myth that we can’t do anything to help wild animals 29:56

3M ago29:56

29:56

We explored the cutting edge of wild animal welfare science our full interview with Cameron Meyer Shorb, executive director of Wild Animal Initiative, including highlights like: One concrete example of how we might improve wild animal welfare (00:00:16) How many wild animals are there, and which animals are they? (00:04:24) Why might wild animals b…

1
Highlights: #209 – Rose Chan Loui on OpenAI’s gambit to ditch its nonprofit 24:13

3M ago24:13

24:13

Nonprofit legal expert Rose Chan Loui lays out the legal case and implications of OpenAI's attempt to shed its nonprofit parent. This episode is a selection of highlights from our full interview with Rose, including: How OpenAI carefully chose a complex nonprofit structure (00:00:26) The nonprofit board is out-resourced and in a tough spot (00:04:0…

1
Highlights: #208 – Elizabeth Cox on the case that TV shows, movies, and novels can improve the world 29:15

3M ago29:15

29:15

Elizabeth Cox — founder of the independent production company Should We Studio — makes the case that storytelling can improve the world. This episode is a selection of highlights from our full interview with Elizabeth, including: Keiran’s intro (00:00:00) Empirical evidence of the impact of storytelling (00:00:16) The hits-based approach to storyte…

1
Highlights: #207 – Sarah Eustis-Guthrie on why she shut down her charity, and why more founders should follow her lead 22:31

4M ago22:31

22:31

Charity founder Sarah Eustis-Guthrie has a candid conversation about her experience starting and running her maternal health charity, and ultimately making the difficult decision to shut down when the programme wasn’t as impactful as they expected. This episode is a selection of highlights from our full interview with Sarah: Luisa’s intro (00:00:00…

1
#210 – Cameron Meyer Shorb on dismantling the myth that we can’t do anything to help wild animals 3:21:03

4M ago3:21:03

3:21:03

"I really don’t want to give the impression that I think it is easy to make predictable, controlled, safe interventions in wild systems where there are many species interacting. I don’t think it’s easy, but I don’t see any reason to think that it’s impossible. And I think we have been making progress. I think there’s every reason to think that if w…

1
#209 – Rose Chan Loui on OpenAI’s gambit to ditch its nonprofit 1:22:08

4M ago1:22:08

1:22:08

One OpenAI critic calls it “the theft of at least the millennium and quite possibly all of human history.” Are they right? Back in 2015 OpenAI was but a humble nonprofit. That nonprofit started a for-profit, OpenAI LLC, but made sure to retain ownership and control. But that for-profit, having become a tech giant with vast staffing and investment, …

1
#208 – Elizabeth Cox on the case that TV shows, movies, and novels can improve the world 2:22:03

4M ago2:22:03

2:22:03

"I think stories are the way we shift the Overton window — so widen the range of things that are acceptable for policy and palatable to the public. Almost by definition, a lot of things that are going to be really important and shape the future are not in the Overton window, because they sound weird and off-putting and very futuristic. But I think …

1
Highlights: #206 – Anil Seth on the predictive brain and how to study consciousness 19:37

4M ago19:37

19:37

Neuroscientist Anil Seth explains how much we can learn about consciousness by studying the brain in these highlights from our full interview — including: Luisa’s intro (00:00:00) How our brain interprets reality (00:00:15) How our brain experiences our organs (00:04:04) What psychedelics teach us about consciousness (00:07:37) The physical footpri…

1
#207 – Sarah Eustis-Guthrie on why she shut down her charity, and why more founders should follow her lead 2:58:39

4M ago2:58:39

2:58:39

"I think one of the reasons I took [shutting down my charity] so hard is because entrepreneurship is all about this bets-based mindset. So you say, “I’m going to take a bunch of bets. I’m going to take some risky bets that have really high upside.” And this is a winning strategy in life, but maybe it’s not a winning strategy for any given hand. So …

1
Highlights: #205 – Sébastien Moro on the most insane things fish can do 30:55

4M ago30:55

30:55

Science writer and video blogger Sébastien Moro blows our minds with the latest research on fish consciousness, intelligence, and potential sentience. This is a selection of highlights from episode #205 of The 80,000 Hours Podcast: Sébastien Moro on the most insane things fish can do. These aren't necessarily the most important, or even most entert…

1
Bonus: Parenting insights from Rob and 8 past guests 1:35:39

4M ago1:35:39

1:35:39

With kids very much on the team's mind we thought it would be fun to review some comments about parenting featured on the show over the years, then have hosts Luisa Rodriguez and Rob Wiblin react to them. Links to learn more and full transcript. After hearing 8 former guests’ insights, Luisa and Rob chat about: Which of these resonate the most with…

1
#206 – Anil Seth on the predictive brain and how to study consciousness 2:33:50

5M ago2:33:50

2:33:50

"In that famous example of the dress, half of the people in the world saw [blue and black], half saw [white and gold]. It turns out there’s individual differences in how brains take into account ambient light. Colour is one example where it’s pretty clear that what we experience is a kind of inference: it’s the brain’s best guess about what’s going…

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