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PODCAST

80,000 Hours Podcast

Rob, Luisa, and the 80000 Hours team

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. Hosted by Rob Wiblin and Luisa Rodriguez.

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All Episodes

155:54

15 expert takes on infosec in the age of AI

80,000 Hours Podcast ·

2025/03/28

"There’s almost no story of the future going well that doesn’t have a part that’s like '…and no evil person steals the AI weights and goes and does evil stuff.' So it has highlighted the importance of information security: 'You’re training a powerful AI system; you should make it hard for someone to steal' has popped out to me as a thing that just keeps coming up in these stories, keeps being present. It’s hard to tell a story where it’s not a factor. It’s easy to tell a story where it is a

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237:36

#213 – Will MacAskill on AI causing a “century in a...

80,000 Hours Podcast ·

2025/03/11

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 — philosopher, founding figure of effective altruism, and now researcher at the Forethought Centre for AI Strategy — argues we need to prepare for in his new

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36:50

Emergency pod: Judge plants a legal time bomb under...

80,000 Hours Podcast ·

2025/03/07

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.As nonprofit legal expert Rose Chan Loui explains, the court order set up multiple pathways for OpenAI’s conversion to be challenged. Though

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221:31

#139 Classic episode – Alan Hájek on puzzles and...

80,000 Hours Podcast ·

2025/02/25

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 multiply probabilities by the value of each outcome and then sum them up — says your expected earnings are infinite. You have a 50% chance of

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160:52

#143 Classic episode – Jeffrey Lewis on the most...

80,000 Hours Podcast ·

2025/02/19

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 committed to 'dominating' in a nuclear war with Russia. How would they do that? "That is redacted."Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released

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164:07

#212 – Allan Dafoe on why technology is unstoppable &...

80,000 Hours Podcast ·

2025/02/14

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 that adopt it tend to outcompete those that don’t. Those who resist too much can find themselves taken over or rendered irrelevant.Links to learn

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57:29

Emergency pod: Elon tries to crash OpenAI's party...

80,000 Hours Podcast ·

2025/02/12

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 foundation controlling a for-profit corporation — turns the gambit into an audacious attack on the plan OpenAI announced in December to free itself from

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192:24

AGI disagreements and misconceptions: Rob, Luisa, &...

80,000 Hours Podcast ·

2025/02/10

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, intermixed with opinions from hosts Luisa Rodriguez and Rob Wiblin recorded back in 2023.Check out the full transcript on the 80,000 Hours

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190:21

#124 Classic episode – Karen Levy on fads and...

80,000 Hours Podcast ·

2025/02/07

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 so fashionable that they're at risk of being seriously overrated and applied where they don't belong.Rebroadcast: this episode was originally

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74:30

If digital minds could suffer, how would we ever...

80,000 Hours Podcast ·

2025/02/04

“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 experts in machine learning, philosophy of mind, or other relevant fields have agreed. And for our part at 80,000 Hours, we don’t think it’s very

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161:11

#132 Classic episode – Nova DasSarma on why...

80,000 Hours Podcast ·

2025/01/31

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 uncanny human text and images can cost tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. But once trained, such models may be only a few gigabytes in size and

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145:43

#138 Classic episode – Sharon Hewitt Rawlette on why...

80,000 Hours Podcast ·

2025/01/22

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 issue of what (if anything) is intrinsically valuable bears on every action we take, whether we’re looking to improve our own lives, or to help

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220:53

#134 Classic episode – Ian Morris on what big-picture...

80,000 Hours Podcast ·

2025/01/15

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 thought men who got too big for their britches needed to be put in their place rather than obeyed, and lifelong monogamy could hardly be expected

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168:03

#140 Classic episode – Bear Braumoeller on the case...

80,000 Hours Podcast ·

2025/01/08

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 debate, with datasets and statistical analyses exchanged back and forth year after year. The lack of consensus has left a somewhat bewildered public

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170:02

2024 Highlightapalooza! (The best of the 80,000 Hours...

80,000 Hours Podcast ·

2024/12/27

"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 WiblinIt’s that magical time of year once again — highlightapalooza! Stick around for one top bit from each episode, including:How to use the microphone on someone’s mobile phone to figure out what password they’re typing into their laptopWhy

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205:46

#211 – Sam Bowman on why housing still isn't fixed...

80,000 Hours Podcast ·

2024/12/19

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’ has been skyrocketing rent in major cities — not to mention exacerbating homelessness, energy poverty, and a host of other social maladies. This has

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201:03

#210 – Cameron Meyer Shorb on dismantling the myth...

80,000 Hours Podcast ·

2024/11/29

"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 we continue doing research, both at the theoretical level — How do ecosystems work? What sorts of things are likely to have what sorts of indirect

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82:08

#209 – Rose Chan Loui on OpenAI’s gambit to ditch its...

80,000 Hours Podcast ·

2024/11/27

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, has grown tired of its shackles and wants to change the deal.Facing off against it stand eight out-gunned and out-numbered part-time volunteers

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142:03

#208 – Elizabeth Cox on the case that TV shows,...

80,000 Hours Podcast ·

2024/11/21

"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 stories are the best way to bring them in." — Elizabeth CoxIn today’s episode, Keiran Harris speaks with Elizabeth Cox — founder of the

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178:39

#207 – Sarah Eustis-Guthrie on why she shut down her...

80,000 Hours Podcast ·

2024/11/14

"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 the fact of the matter is that I believe that intellectually, but l do not believe that emotionally. And I have now met a bunch of people who are

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