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80,000 Hours Podcast

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

Episodes

Total: 267

2023 Mega-highlights Extravaganza
2023/12/31

Happy new year! We've got a different kind of holiday release for you today. Rather than a 'classic

#100 Classic episode – Having a successful career with depression, anxiety, and imposter syndrome
2023/12/27

Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in May 2021.Today’s episode is one of the most rem

#176 – Nathan Labenz on the final push for AGI, understanding OpenAI's leadership drama, and red-teaming frontier models
2023/12/22

OpenAI says its mission is to build AGI — an AI system that is better than human beings at everythin

#175 – Lucia Coulter on preventing lead poisoning for $1.66 per child
2023/12/14

Lead is one of the most poisonous things going. A single sugar sachet of lead, spread over a park th

#174 – Nita Farahany on the neurotechnology already being used to convict criminals and manipulate workers
2023/12/7

"It will change everything: it will change our workplaces, it will change our interactions with the

#173 – Jeff Sebo on digital minds, and how to avoid sleepwalking into a major moral catastrophe
2023/11/22

"We do have a tendency to anthropomorphise nonhumans — which means attributing human characteristics

#172 – Bryan Caplan on why you should stop reading the news
2023/11/17

Is following important political and international news a civic duty — or is it our civic duty to av

#171 – Alison Young on how top labs have jeopardised public health with repeated biosafety failures
2023/11/9

"Rare events can still cause catastrophic accidents. The concern that has been raised by experts goi

#170 – Santosh Harish on how air pollution is responsible for ~12% of global deaths — and how to get that number down
2023/11/1

"One [outrageous example of air pollution] is municipal waste burning that happens in many cities in

#169 – Paul Niehaus on whether cash transfers cause economic growth, and keeping theft to acceptable levels
2023/10/26

"One of our earliest supporters and a dear friend of mine, Mark Lampert, once said to me, “The way I

#168 – Ian Morris on whether deep history says we're heading for an intelligence explosion
2023/10/23

"If we carry on looking at these industrialised economies, not thinking about what it is they're act

#167 – Seren Kell on the research gaps holding back alternative proteins from mass adoption
2023/10/18

"There have been literally thousands of years of breeding and living with animals to optimise these

#166 – Tantum Collins on what he’s learned as an AI policy insider at the White House, DeepMind and elsewhere
2023/10/12

"If you and I and 100 other people were on the first ship that was going to go settle Mars, and were

#165 – Anders Sandberg on war in space, whether civilisations age, and the best things possible in our universe
2023/10/6

"Now, the really interesting question is: How much is there an attacker-versus-defender advantage in

#164 – Kevin Esvelt on cults that want to kill everyone, stealth vs wildfire pandemics, and how he felt inventing gene drives
2023/10/2

"Imagine a fast-spreading respiratory HIV. It sweeps around the world. Almost nobody has symptoms. N

Great power conflict (Article)
2023/9/22

Today’s release is a reading of our Great power conflict problem profile, written and narrated by St

#163 – Toby Ord on the perils of maximising the good that you do
2023/9/8

Effective altruism is associated with the slogan "do the most good." On one level, this has to be un

The 80,000 Hours Career Guide (2023)
2023/9/4

An audio version of the 2023 80,000 Hours career guide, also available on our website, on Amazon and

#162 – Mustafa Suleyman on getting Washington and Silicon Valley to tame AI
2023/9/1

Mustafa Suleyman was part of the trio that founded DeepMind, and his new AI project is building one

#161 – Michael Webb on whether AI will soon cause job loss, lower incomes, and higher inequality — or the opposite
2023/8/23

"Do you remember seeing these photographs of generally women sitting in front of these huge panels a