#109 – Holden Karnofsky on the most important century
Will the future of humanity be wild, or boring? It's natural to think that if we're trying to be sober and measured, and predict what will really happen rather than spin an exciting story, it's more l...
19 Aug 20212h 19min
#108 – Chris Olah on working at top AI labs without an undergrad degree
Chris Olah has had a fascinating and unconventional career path. Most people who want to pursue a research career feel they need a degree to get taken seriously. But Chris not only doesn't have a P...
11 Aug 20211h 33min
#107 – Chris Olah on what the hell is going on inside neural networks
Big machine learning models can identify plant species better than any human, write passable essays, beat you at a game of Starcraft 2, figure out how a photo of Tobey Maguire and the word 'spider' ar...
4 Aug 20213h 9min
#106 – Cal Newport on an industrial revolution for office work
If you wanted to start a university department from scratch, and attract as many superstar researchers as possible, what’s the most attractive perk you could offer?How about just not needing an email ...
28 Jul 20211h 53min
#105 – Alexander Berger on improving global health and wellbeing in clear and direct ways
The effective altruist research community tries to identify the highest impact things people can do to improve the world. Unsurprisingly, given the difficulty of such a massive and open-ended project,...
12 Jul 20212h 54min
#104 – Pardis Sabeti on the Sentinel system for detecting and stopping pandemics
When the first person with COVID-19 went to see a doctor in Wuhan, nobody could tell that it wasn’t a familiar disease like the flu — that we were dealing with something new. How much death and destru...
29 Jun 20212h 20min
#103 – Max Roser on building the world's best source of COVID-19 data at Our World in Data
History is filled with stories of great people stepping up in times of crisis. Presidents averting wars; soldiers leading troops away from certain death; data scientists sleeping on the office floor t...
21 Jun 20212h 22min
#102 – Tom Moynihan on why prior generations missed some of the biggest priorities of all
It can be tough to get people to truly care about reducing existential risks today. But spare a thought for the longtermist of the 17th century: they were surrounded by people who thought extinction w...
11 Jun 20213h 56min
