Latest Interviews
Showing 1291–1305 of 1,332 transcripts.
Clear all filters- 80,000 Hours2h 36m
#21 - Holden Karnofsky on times philanthropy transformed the world & Open Phil’s plan to do the same
Holden Karnofsky, Margaret Sanger, Gregory Pincus, Katherine McCormick, Keiran Harris, Rob Wiblin
The Open Philanthropy Project, funded primarily by Good Ventures, operates on a venture-capital model to deploy over $100 million annually toward high-risk, high-impact causes including U.S. criminal justice reform, farm animal welfare, and artificial intelligence safety. The organization employs a distinct "50-40-10" grant approval framework and prioritizes field building to create expert communities in neglected areas like AI alignment and pandemic preparedness. Through strategic board engagement at institutions like OpenAI and a rigorous, truth-seeking hiring culture, the project aims to mitigate global catastrophic risks while maximizing philanthropic returns on long-term societal transformation.
- 80,000 Hours1h 53m
#17 - Prof Will MacAskill on moral uncertainty, utilitarianism & how to avoid being a moral monster
Prof Will MacAskill, Will MacAskill, Rob Wiblin
Will McCaskill reflects on the transition of the Effective Altruism movement from its origins in GiveWell and Giving What We Can to its current status as a global network, while stepping down as CEO of the Center for Effective Altruism to pursue academic leadership in moral uncertainty research. He argues that decision-making should analogously apply expected value reasoning to moral theories, proposing a "Long Reflection" era where humanity resolves fundamental value questions before committing to irreversible actions. Despite these theoretical advances, McCaskill emphasizes the necessity of addressing critiques regarding justice, institutional bias, and the need for greater diversity to prevent the community from stagnating in groupthink.
- 80,000 Hours1h 46m
#12 - Dr Cameron works to stop you dying in a pandemic. Here’s what keeps her up at night.
Dr Cameron, Dr Beth Cameron, Keiran Harris, Rob Wiblin, Dr. Elizabeth Cameron
The Nuclear Threat Initiative, led by CEO Secretary Ernest Moniz, is launching the Next Generation Global Health Security Network to engage emerging leaders ahead of the Kampala Ministerial and advance its pilot Global Health Security Index. The organization addresses rising biological risks from dual-use technologies and funding gaps by advocating for integrated public health and national security strategies, including a proposed global preparedness fund and improved governance frameworks. Through these initiatives, NTI aims to dismantle the "cycle of panic and neglect" by fostering interdisciplinary collaboration and establishing permanent metrics for global pandemic prevention and response.
- 80,000 Hours1h 52m
#10 - Dr Nick Beckstead on how to spend billions of dollars preventing human extinction
Dr Nick Beckstead, Keiran Harris, Rob Wiblin
Nick Beckstead, a researcher at the Open Philanthropy Project, advocates for prioritizing far-future utility by directing substantial grants toward existential risks like artificial intelligence and biosecurity. His approach relies on a philosophical framework that rejects time discounting and population ethics constraints to justify focusing on narrow, high-impact interventions such as Target Malaria and AI alignment rather than broad economic growth. Beckstead further urges effective altruists to transition into specialized full-time roles within these priority sectors to maximize their leverage against global catastrophic threats.
- 80,000 Hours1h 45m
#9 - Christine Peterson on how insecure computers could lead to global disaster, and how to fix it
Christine Peterson, Keiran Harris, Robert Wiblin
Christine Peterson, co-founder of the Foresight Institute, draws parallels between the evolving effective altruism movement and 1980s space settlement communities to advocate for prioritizing long-term, high-leverage existential risks over immediate, easily measurable causes. She highlights accelerating artificial intelligence timelines and software security vulnerabilities as critical threats requiring a global shift toward defensive technologies and fundamentally secure system design within a decade. Peterson further outlines a strategic framework for the movement that combines repair-focused longevity research with personal sustainability practices, urging practitioners to pursue careers in computer and physical sciences while establishing nimble nonprofit organizations to maximize civilization-scale impact.
- 80,000 Hours3h 17m
#8 - Lewis Bollard on how to end factory farming in our lifetimes
Lewis Bollard, Keiran Harris, Robert Wiblin
Open Philanthropy prioritizes farm animal welfare by targeting the massive scale of suffering among billions of chickens, land mammals, and fish through corporate campaigns, undercover investigations, and food technology grants. The organization deprioritized individual dietary advocacy and US legal battles due to low efficacy, instead focusing resources on neglected geographic regions like China and India and addressing the severe talent shortage in clean meat science. With global funding doubling to $50 million, the current strategic shift aims to resolve a talent gap while expanding into understudied areas such as fish, insect, and wild animal welfare.
- 80,000 Hours2h 14m
#6 - Dr Toby Ord on why the long-term future matters more than anything else & what to do about it
Dr Toby Ord, Keiran Harris, Rob Wiblin
The presentation argues that the 21st century represents a pivotal era where humanity faces a roughly one-in-six probability of extinction from anthropogenic threats like artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, and nuclear conflict. It posits that this existential risk is uniquely high because current technological power has outpaced civilizational wisdom, necessitating immediate global coordination and targeted interventions to preserve the potential value of a multi-million year future. By reframing long-term survival as a moral imperative, the argument advocates for specific career paths and institutional reforms that prioritize managing these catastrophic risks over short-term gains.
- 80,000 Hours1h 46m
#5 - Alex Gordon-Brown on how to donate millions in your 20s working in quantitative trading
Alex Gordon-Brown, Alexander Gordon-Brown, Robert Wiblin
Quantitative trading firms recruit STEM graduates through rigorous technical interviews to solve market inefficiencies, offering six-figure starting salaries that can escalate to millions for top performers within a decade. The industry operates with a partnership culture that emphasizes collaboration, risk management, and social responsibility, enabling successful employees to donate substantial portions of their high earnings to effective altruism causes. Beyond financial gain, these roles provide essential market liquidity while filtering candidates based on puzzle-solving aptitude and self-awareness rather than specific university credentials.
- 80,000 Hours2h 36m
#4 - Howie Lempel on pandemics that kill hundreds of millions and how to stop them
Identifying pandemics as the leading cause of future global catastrophic risk, the discussion highlights severe gaps in current disease surveillance and international coordination capabilities. It details specific philanthropic interventions, such as the Blue Ribbon Panel on Biodefense and educational grants for iGEM, aimed at bridging the divide between government inaction and the urgent need for proactive biodefense strategies. Furthermore, the analysis outlines critical policy recommendations for synthetic biology security, career pathways for interdisciplinary experts, and the necessity of shifting from reactive measures to developing rapid diagnostic platforms for unknown pathogens.
- 80,000 Hours1h 38m
#3 - Dr Dario Amodei on OpenAI and how AI will change the world for good and ill
Dr Dario Amodei, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Keiran Harris, Robert Wiblin
Founded by Elon Musk and Sam Altman, the nonprofit OpenAI employs approximately 55 researchers dedicated to ensuring Artificial General Intelligence benefits humanity through rigorous safety protocols and deep reinforcement learning. In the field's inaugural "Concrete Problems in AI Safety" paper, Amidey and colleagues identified actionable short-term risks such as reward hacking and adversarial examples, subsequently developing scalable supervision methods that allow agents to learn complex behaviors via human preferences rather than fixed reward functions. The organization advocates for high-impact technical careers focused on alignment and strategic coordination among major labs to prevent catastrophic outcomes while navigating geopolitical uncertainties in the race toward AGI.
- Y Combinator1h 57m
Work at a Startup Expo 2018
Justin Kahn and Sam Altman provided contrasting yet complementary frameworks for evaluating startup careers, with Kahn highlighting the risks of financial instability alongside the unique benefits of rapid skill acquisition, while Altman outlined specific investment criteria such as product love and founder quality to identify high-potential ventures. A diverse cohort of companies from the hardware, AI, and Sectors presented concrete opportunities, ranging from late-stage giants like Instacart seeking 200 new engineers to seed-stage firms like Astranis raising capital for telecommunications satellites. Collectively, these presentations emphasized that while talent acquisition remains a critical bottleneck across the market, early employees face a trade-off between the accelerated learning curves of startups and the necessity of negotiating equitable equity stakes.
- Y Combinator3h 39m
Female Founders Conference - New York
Jessica Livingston, Kathryn Minshew, Alex Cavoulacos, Mariya Nurislamova, Reshma Shetty, Shan-Lyn Ma, Reham Fagiri, Tiffani Ashley Bell, Alana Branston, Katherine Minshew, Kirsty Nathoo, Adora, Stephanie, Holly Liu, Sharon Pope, Kat Mignolet, Matthew, Carolyn
Y Combinator and a diverse panel of founders, including Jessica Livingston and representatives from Zola and Scentbird, convened to discuss scalable startup strategies that prioritize values alignment, efficient hiring, and rapid product-market fit validation. The discussion highlighted critical insights such as the dangers of bias in "culture fit" evaluations, the necessity of avoiding "crappy yeses" during fundraising, and the importance of maintaining founder-led scrappiness even after significant capital deployment. By contrasting successful pivots in sectors ranging from wedding registries to virtual data science, the event underscored that sustainable growth relies on unique founder traits and disciplined metric management rather than traditional VC heuristics or rapid scaling alone.
- Y Combinator1h 33m
John Preskill on Quantum Computing
John Preskill, Steven Hawking, Kip Thorne, Craig Cannon
Established by Richard Feynman's early theoretical work, the field of quantum computing has evolved from theoretical challenges in the 1970s to a practical reality enabled by mid-1990s error correction and recent hardware advancements in superconducting and trapped-ion systems. As current devices approach 100 qubits, they are poised to disrupt public-key cryptography through Shor's algorithm while simultaneously offering transformative capabilities in quantum chemistry simulation and materials science. The industry now focuses on bridging these applications through hybrid classical-quantum systems and developing post-quantum security measures to address the imminent threat to existing encryption standards.
- 80,000 Hours2h 17m
#27 - Dr Tom Inglesby on careers and policies that reduce global catastrophic biological risks
Dr Tom Inglesby, Keiran Harris, Rob Wiblin
Dr. Thomas Inglesby of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security advocates for integrating catastrophic biological risk planning into existing public health and biosecurity frameworks rather than treating them as separate, siloed endeavors. He emphasizes that while natural pandemics currently pose the highest probability of threat, the rising accessibility of biotechnology necessitates a unified US Biodefense Strategy and sustained funding for initiatives like the Global Health Security Agenda to address both accidental and deliberate misuse. By promoting interdisciplinary training through programs like the Emerging Leaders Fellowship and urging legislative support for dedicated emergency response funds, Inglesby seeks to shift the system from reactive crisis management to proactive, resilient infrastructure.
- 80,000 Hours1h 45m
#26 - Marie Gibbons on how exactly clean meat is made & the advances needed to get it in every store
Marie Gibbons, Natalie Cargill, Keiran Harris, Rob Wiblin
In this 80,000 Hours episode, host Natalie Cargill interviews Marie Gibbons, a GFI research fellow and physiologist who transitioned from veterinary medicine to champion cellular agriculture as the most viable path for global animal protection. Gibbons details the technical progression from harvesting satellite cells to scaling production using suspension bioreactors and plant-based scaffolds, while noting that cost reductions will likely drive market entry within the current year. Although the field faces logistical hurdles regarding media costs and regulatory approval, the discussion emphasizes a strategic industry shift toward specialization and collaboration to achieve cost parity with conventional meat within a decade.