#20 - Bruce Friedrich on inventing outstanding meat substitutes to end speciesism & factory farming
Before the US Civil War, it was easier for the North to morally oppose slavery. Why? Because unlike the South they weren’t profiting much from its existence. The fight for abolition was partly won bec...
19 Feb 20181h 18min
#19 - Samantha Pitts-Kiefer on working next to the White House trying to prevent nuclear war
Rogue elements within a state’s security forces enrich dozens of kilograms of uranium. It’s then assembled into a crude nuclear bomb. The bomb is transported on a civilian aircraft to Washington D.C, ...
14 Feb 20181h 4min
#18 - Ofir Reich on using data science to end poverty & the spurious action-inaction distinction
Ofir Reich started out doing math in the military, before spending 8 years in tech startups - but then made a sharp turn to become a data scientist focussed on helping the global poor. At UC Berkeley...
31 Jan 20181h 18min
#17 - Will MacAskill on moral uncertainty, utilitarianism & how to avoid being a moral monster
Immanuel Kant is a profoundly influential figure in modern philosophy, and was one of the earliest proponents for universal democracy and international cooperation. He also thought that women have no ...
19 Jan 20181h 52min
#16 - Michelle Hutchinson on global priorities research & shaping the ideas of intellectuals
In the 40s and 50s neoliberalism was a fringe movement within economics. But by the 80s it had become a dominant school of thought in public policy, and achieved major policy changes across the Englis...
22 Des 201755min
#15 - Phil Tetlock on how chimps beat Berkeley undergrads and when it’s wise to defer to the wise
Prof Philip Tetlock is a social science legend. Over forty years he has researched whose predictions we can trust, whose we can’t and why - and developed methods that allow all of us to be better at p...
20 Nov 20171h 24min
#14 - Sharon Nunez & Jose Valle on going undercover to expose animal abuse
What if you knew that ducks were being killed with pitchforks? Rabbits dumped alive into containers? Or pigs being strangled with forklifts? Would you be willing to go undercover to expose the crime? ...
13 Nov 20171h 25min
#13 - Claire Walsh on testing which policies work & how to get governments to listen to the results
In both rich and poor countries, government policy is often based on no evidence at all and many programs don’t work. This has particularly harsh effects on the global poor - in some countries governm...
31 Okt 201752min
