Unusually in-depth conversations about the world's most pressing problems and how you can use your career to solve them. Subscribe by searching for '80,000 Hours' wherever you get podcasts. Produced by Keiran Harris. Hosted by Rob Wiblin, Director of Research at 80,000 Hours, and colleagues.
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80,000 Hours Podcast with Rob Wiblin


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#96 – Nina Schick on disinformation and the rise of synthetic media
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You might have heard fears like this in the last few years: What if Donald Trump was woken up in the middle of the night and shown a fake video — indistinguishable from a real one — in which Kim Jong Un announced an imminent nuclear strike on the U.S.? Today’s guest Nina Schick, author of Deepfakes: The Coming Infocalypse, thinks these concerns wer…
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80,000 Hours Podcast with Rob Wiblin


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#95 – Kelly Wanser on whether to deliberately intervene in the climate
1:24:07
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How long do you think it’ll be before we’re able to bend the weather to our will? A massive rainmaking program in China, efforts to seed new oases in the Arabian peninsula, or chemically induce snow for skiers in Colorado. 100 years? 50 years? 20? Those who know how to write a teaser hook for a podcast episode will have correctly guessed that all t…
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80,000 Hours Podcast with Rob Wiblin


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#94 – Ezra Klein on aligning journalism, politics, and what matters most
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How many words in U.S. newspapers have been spilled on tax policy in the past five years? And how many words on CRISPR? Or meat alternatives? Or how AI may soon automate the majority of jobs? When people look back on this era, is the interesting thing going to have been fights over whether or not the top marginal tax rate was 39.5% or 35.4%, or is …
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80,000 Hours Podcast with Rob Wiblin


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#93 – Andy Weber on rendering bioweapons obsolete & ending the new nuclear arms race
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COVID-19 has provided a vivid reminder of the power of biological threats. But the threat doesn't come from natural sources alone. Weaponized contagious diseases — which were abandoned by the United States, but developed in large numbers by the Soviet Union, right up until its collapse — have the potential to spread globally and kill just as many a…
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80,000 Hours Podcast with Rob Wiblin


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#92 – Brian Christian on the alignment problem
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Brian Christian is a bestselling author with a particular knack for accurately communicating difficult or technical ideas from both mathematics and computer science. Listeners loved our episode about his book Algorithms to Live By — so when the team read his new book, The Alignment Problem, and found it to be an insightful and comprehensive review …
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80,000 Hours Podcast with Rob Wiblin


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#91 – Lewis Bollard on big wins against factory farming and how they happened
2:33:16
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I suspect today's guest, Lewis Bollard, might be the single best person in the world to interview to get an overview of all the methods that might be effective for putting an end to factory farming and what broader lessons we can learn from the experiences of people working to end cruelty in animal agriculture. That's why I interviewed him back in …
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80,000 Hours Podcast with Rob Wiblin


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Rob Wiblin on how he ended up the way he is
1:57:56
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This is a crosspost of an episode of the Eureka Podcast. The interviewer is Misha Saul, a childhood friend of Rob's, who he has known for over 20 years. While it's not an episode of our own show, we decided to share it with subscribers because it's fun, and because it touches on personal topics that we don't usually cover on the show. Rob and Misha…
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80,000 Hours Podcast with Rob Wiblin


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#90 – Ajeya Cotra on worldview diversification and how big the future could be
2:59:04
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You wake up in a mysterious box, and hear the booming voice of God: “I just flipped a coin. If it came up heads, I made ten boxes, labeled 1 through 10 — each of which has a human in it. If it came up tails, I made ten billion boxes, labeled 1 through 10 billion — also with one human in each box. To get into heaven, you have to answer this correctl…
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80,000 Hours Podcast with Rob Wiblin


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Rob Wiblin on self-improvement and research ethics
2:30:36
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This is a crosspost of an episode of the Clearer Thinking Podcast: 022: Self-Improvement and Research Ethics with Rob Wiblin. Rob chats with Spencer Greenberg, who has been an audience favourite in episodes 11 and 39 of the 80,000 Hours Podcast, and has now created this show of his own. Among other things they cover: • Is trying to become a better …
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80,000 Hours Podcast with Rob Wiblin


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#73 - Phil Trammell on patient philanthropy and waiting to do good [re-release]
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Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in March 2020. To do good, most of us look to use our time and money to affect the world around us today. But perhaps that's all wrong. If you took $1,000 you were going to donate and instead put it in the stock market — where it grew on average 5% a year — in 100 years you'd have $125,000 to give a…
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80,000 Hours Podcast with Rob Wiblin


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#75 – Michelle Hutchinson on what people most often ask 80,000 Hours [re-release]
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Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in April 2020. Since it was founded, 80,000 Hours has done one-on-one calls to supplement our online content and offer more personalised advice. We try to help people get clear on their most plausible paths, the key uncertainties they face in choosing between them, and provide resources, pointers, a…
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80,000 Hours Podcast with Rob Wiblin


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#89 – Owen Cotton-Barratt on epistemic systems and layers of defense against potential global catastrophes
2:38:11
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From one point of view academia forms one big 'epistemic' system — a process which directs attention, generates ideas, and judges which are good. Traditional print media is another such system, and we can think of society as a whole as a huge epistemic system, made up of these and many other subsystems. How these systems absorb, process, combine an…
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80,000 Hours Podcast with Rob Wiblin


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#88 – Tristan Harris on the need to change the incentives of social media companies
2:35:38
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In its first 28 days on Netflix, the documentary The Social Dilemma — about the possible harms being caused by social media and other technology products — was seen by 38 million households in about 190 countries and in 30 languages. Over the last ten years, the idea that Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are degrading political discourse and grabbing…