#117 – David Denkenberger on using paper mills and seaweed to feed everyone in a catastrophe, ft Sahil Shah
If there's a nuclear war followed by nuclear winter, and the sun is blocked out for years, most of us are going to starve, right? Well, currently, probably we would, because humanity hasn't done much ...
29 Marras 20213h 8min
#116 – Luisa Rodriguez on why global catastrophes seem unlikely to kill us all
If modern human civilisation collapsed — as a result of nuclear war, severe climate change, or a much worse pandemic than COVID-19 — billions of people might die.That's terrible enough to contemplate....
19 Marras 20213h 45min
#115 – David Wallace on the many-worlds theory of quantum mechanics and its implications
Quantum mechanics — our best theory of atoms, molecules, and the subatomic particles that make them up — underpins most of modern physics. But there are varying interpretations of what it means, all o...
12 Marras 20213h 9min
#114 – Maha Rehman on working with governments to rapidly deliver masks to millions of people
It’s hard to believe, but until recently there had never been a large field trial that addressed these simple and obvious questions:1. When ordinary people wear face masks, does it actually reduce the...
22 Loka 20211h 42min
We just put up a new compilation of ten core episodes of the show
We recently launched a new podcast feed that might be useful to you and people you know. It's called Effective Altruism: Ten Global Problems, and it's a collection of ten top episodes of this show, se...
20 Loka 20213min
#113 – Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India
Our failure to make sure all kids globally get all of their basic vaccinations leads to 1.5 million child deaths every year.According to today’s guest, Varsha Venugopal, for the great majority this ha...
18 Loka 20212h 5min
#112 – Carl Shulman on the common-sense case for existential risk work and its practical implications
Preventing the apocalypse may sound like an idiosyncratic activity, and it sometimes is justified on exotic grounds, such as the potential for humanity to become a galaxy-spanning civilisation.But the...
5 Loka 20213h 48min
#111 – Mushtaq Khan on using institutional economics to predict effective government reforms
If you’re living in the Niger Delta in Nigeria, your best bet at a high-paying career is probably ‘artisanal refining’ — or, in plain language, stealing oil from pipelines. The resulting oil spills da...
10 Syys 20213h 20min
