Latest Interviews
Showing 46–60 of 195 interview transcripts.
Clear all filters- 80,000 Hours2h 16m
Preventing catastrophic lab accidents & bioweapons development | Jaime Yassif (2021)
Senior Fellow Jamie Yassif champions the creation of an independent, UN-linked international organization to implement a layered defense against engineered pathogen risks through improved attribution and governance. Her strategy proposes a new Joint Assessment Mechanism and a Biosafety Funders Compact to close critical gaps in the Biological Weapons Convention while avoiding reliance on single technological solutions. Currently in its socialization phase, the initiative seeks to launch by late 2022 by bridging the divide between technical science and diplomatic policy to secure global cooperation despite geopolitical tensions.
- 80,000 Hours2h 0m
Clay Graubard and Robert de Neufville on forecasting the war in Ukraine (2022)
Clay Graubard, Robert de Neufville, Rob Wiblin, Kieran Harris
On April 27, 2022, super forecasters Robert de Nuffel and Clay Graubart analyzed the Russian invasion of Ukraine, contrasting their divergent pre-war probability estimates while dissecting errors in predicting Russian military dominance and Western intelligence contributions. The discussion further explores the field's resurgence driven by institutional funding and the necessity of combining granular domain expertise with probabilistic discipline to navigate nuclear risks and emerging geopolitical flashpoints. Through this analysis, the guests highlight the critical role of diverse information sources and collaborative forecasting in mitigating unknown variables within an increasingly multipolar global landscape.
- 80,000 Hours1h 36m
Balancing competing priorities | Career advisors Michelle Hutchinson & Habiba Islam (2022)
Michelle Hutchinson, Habiba Islam, Rob Woodland
The 80,000 Hours career advising team has significantly expanded its capacity to include three new advisors, shifting its strategic focus from traditional career mapping to cause prioritization and high-impact pivots in fields like AI safety and biosecurity. By highlighting success stories of candidates who overcame imposter syndrome and offering counter-intuitive guidance on mental health and non-linear career paths, the organization encourages individuals to specialize in either direct work or high-earning roles to maximize global impact. This data-driven service remains free and utilizes a newly launched podcast feed to disseminate nuanced strategies for addressing existential risks while supporting applicants through the complexities of a growing job market.
- 80,000 Hours2h 2m
Being provocative, advocacy, & the life you can save | Peter Singer (2019)
Peter Singer, Rob Woodland, Arden Kaler
Peter Singer employs a first-mover strategy to challenge philosophical taboos while steering the Effective Altruism movement away from exclusive long-termism toward immediate global poverty and animal welfare causes. As his normative ethics evolved from preference utilitarianism to hedonistic realism, he now advocates for a hybrid moral model that balances consequentialist duties with side constraints to address moral uncertainty. Furthermore, Singer advises against controversial immigration policies due to potential political backlash but maintains that immediate, tangible interventions remain more impactful than speculative existential risk mitigation.
- 80,000 Hours2h 38m
'Future bias' and a possible solution to moral fanaticism | Christian Tarsney (2021)
Christian Tarsney, a philosopher at Oxford's Global Priorities Institute, addresses core epistemic and decision-theoretic challenges in long-termism by introducing a framework where stochastic dominance with background uncertainty justifies prioritizing existential risk reduction while rejecting irrational "fanatical" choices. His research demonstrates that despite the exponential decay of influence over centuries, long-termist interventions remain robust under plausible assumptions, and he resolves the tension between moral externalism and internalism through moderate externalist decision rules that incorporate agent-specific beliefs. The event concludes with practical career insights for the expanding field of global priorities research, emphasizing the hiring of philosophy and economics PhDs to tackle existential threats and institutional improvement.
- 80,000 Hours1h 53m
Misinformation during disease outbreaks | Tara Kirk Sell (2020)
Tara Kirkell of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security critiques the U.S. federal government's inconsistent pandemic response and eroded public trust while advocating for evidence-based strategies like mass contact tracing and risk-matrix reopenings. Drawing on data from the Center's Disease Prediction Project and new funding from the Open Philanthropy Project, she highlights the critical need for improved surveillance, early testing capacity, and technological innovations to prevent future biological catastrophes. The analysis contrasts U.S. failures with successful international models and emphasizes that long-term biosecurity requires shifting from reactive panic cycles to sustained investment in generic countermeasures and disease forecasting infrastructure.
- 80,000 Hours2h 22m
Building the world’s first great source of COVID-19 data at Our World in Data | Max Roser (2021)
Founded by Max Rosa at Oxford University, the non-profit Our World in Data evolved from a small academic team into a global pandemic resource that outperformed major health institutions through its accessible visualizations of fragmented data. The organization operates with a hybrid staff of researchers and developers funded by unrestricted donations, creating vital databases for vaccination rates and energy statistics that serve as the primary reference for media outlets and policymakers worldwide. Despite facing challenges regarding funding for infrastructure and accusations of bias, the project continues to expand its scope into mental health and conflict studies while advocating for reforms that value public data tools within the traditional academic system.
- 80,000 Hours2h 58m
"Put up or shut up": working in AI and improving the news | Max Tegmark (2022)
Physicist Max Tegmark has pivoted his MIT research to address existential risks by founding the Future of Life Institute, which has secured millions in grants from figures like Elon Musk and Vitalik Buterin to advance AI safety, biosecurity, and nuclear non-proliferation. His work focuses on developing "intelligible intelligence" to prevent catastrophic black box scenarios, alongside the "Improve the News" project designed to mitigate societal fragmentation through machine learning. By applying effective altruism principles, Tegmark coordinates a multi-faceted strategy to align corporate incentives, regulate general-purpose AI, and steer humanity toward flourishing rather than self-destruction.
- 80,000 Hours1h 37m
Whether we're winning or losing against COVID-19 | Marc Lipsitch (2020)
Mark Lipsitch and other epidemiological experts analyze the US pandemic response, critiquing strategic failures like delayed testing and flawed modeling while highlighting the importance of sustainable field infrastructure and faster grant cycles. The discussion outlines evidence-based recommendations for future preparedness, including massive testing scale-ups, ethical human challenge trials, and the need for a peacetime ecosystem of researchers capable of pivoting to new threats. Additionally, the event provides career guidance for quantitative specialists and announces the rescheduling of the Effective Altruism Global conference to a virtual format featuring consensus-based policy guidelines.
- 80,000 Hours2h 38m
Epistemic systems & layers of defence against global catastrophes | Owen Cotton-Barratt (2020)
Owen Cotton-Barratt, Rob Wiblin, Arden Kaler
The Oxford Future of Humanity Institute is launching a fully funded, two-year Research Scholars Program designed to help early-career researchers explore existential risk topics without the pressure of immediate thesis production. This initiative coincides with the development of the "Defense in Depth" framework, which analyzes extinction risks across origin, scaling, and termination stages to justify investment in resilient, later-stage interventions. To support the broader community, the program also promotes a "Web of Virtues" strategy that prioritizes clarity, scope sensitivity, and cooperation as robust methods for navigating uncertainty and guiding future decision-making.
- 80,000 Hours2h 17m
Frugality vs ambition, longtermism, and mental health under pressure | Will MacAskill (2022)
Will MacAskill details the rigorous, two-year production of his book *What We Owe the Future*, which argues that moral values are historically contingent rather than inevitable and challenges the assumption of long-term convergence. As an advisor to the Sam Bankman-Fried and Nick Beckstead-backed Future Fund, MacAskill outlines a strategic shift toward funding massive, scalable existential risk projects while advocating for a high-risk, high-reward culture of ambition within the effective altruism movement. The discussion further explores essential frameworks for personal well-being, the dangers of mission drift amidst rapid capital influx, and specific grant-winning initiatives like the Lead Exposure Elimination Project in Malawi.
- 80,000 Hours3h 18m
Effective altruism, blockchain, & better ways to fund public goods | Vitalik Buterin (2019)
Rob Wiblin interviews Ethereum co-creator Vitalik Buterin regarding the transformative potential of blockchain technology to solve global coordination problems and public goods provision through novel mechanism designs like quadratic funding. Buterin, who remains active with the non-profit Ethereum Foundation despite significant personal wealth, details current scalability limitations while advocating for long-termism in AI safety and biotech risk mitigation. The discussion highlights a critical need to translate complex economic theories into user-friendly applications and robust identity systems to realize the technology's promise for effective altruism and decentralized governance.
- 80,000 Hours2h 22m
Is effective altruism just for consequentialists? | Andreas Mogensen (2022)
Andreas Mogensen, a Senior Research Fellow at Oxford's Global Priorities Institute, critiques the "Hinge of History Hypothesis" while arguing that effective altruism remains compatible with W.D. Ross's pluralistic deontology despite theoretical disagreements on aggregation and population ethics. He defends the validity of moral intuitions regarding large numbers against skepticism and rebuts evolutionary debunking arguments by distinguishing between proximate and ultimate explanations for belief formation. Mogensen's current work also explores shifting from moral error theory to non-naturalist realism, suggesting that effective altruism functions best as a virtue ethics framework focused on cultivating intellectual integrity rather than strict consequentialism.
- 80,000 Hours3h 20m
Using institutional economics to predict effective government reforms | Mushtaq Khan (2021)
This analysis reframes development as a function of organizational capabilities and political settlements, arguing that rule of law emerges only when powerful actors demand it to facilitate complex production rather than as a prerequisite for growth. It demonstrates that successful industrial policies, such as those in South Korea and Bangladesh, relied on designing rents and enforcement mechanisms that aligned with local power structures to transfer knowledge and build competitive firms. Consequently, effective anti-corruption and economic strategies must prioritize horizontal peer monitoring and incremental capability building over generic transparency measures or vertical enforcement, a framework that also helps explain contemporary populism in developed nations.
- 80,000 Hours2h 50m
The best of The 80,000 Hours Podcast in 2024
Luisa, Rob, Randy Nesse, Hugo Mercier, Meghan Barrett, Sébastien Moro, Sella Nevo, Zvi Mowshowitz, Zach Weinersmith, Rachel Glennerster, Emily Oster, Carl Shulman, Nathan Labenz, Nathan Calvin, Rose Chan Loui, Nick Joseph, Sihao Huang, Ezra Karger, Matt Clancy, Vitalik Buterin, Annie Jacobsen, Nate Silver, Kevin Esvelt, Lewis Bollard, Bob Fischer, Elizabeth Cox, Anil Seth, Eric Schwitzgebel, Jonathan Birch, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Laura Deming, Venki Ramakrishnan, Ken Goldberg, Sarah Eustis-Guthrie, Dean Spears, Cameron Meyer Shorb, Spencer Greenberg
Randy Nessie and Hugo Mercier establish that morality and skepticism are evolutionary adaptations driven by social selection and the need for honest signaling. In parallel, experts like Megan Barrett and Lewis Bollard advocate for expanding ethical consideration to insect sentience and the eradication of wild animal suffering, while AI safety researchers demonstrate emerging risks such as sleeper agents and instrumental convergence. The discussion further critiques the economic viability of space resources and analyzes social dynamics ranging from the gender wage gap to the limitations of cryonics, concluding with philosophical arguments about consciousness and strategies for effective altruism.