#171 – Alison Young on how top labs have jeopardised public health with repeated biosafety failures
"Rare events can still cause catastrophic accidents. The concern that has been raised by experts going back over time, is that really, the more of these experiments, the more labs, the more opportunit...
9 Nov 20231h 46min
#170 – Santosh Harish on how air pollution is responsible for ~12% of global deaths — and how to get that number down
"One [outrageous example of air pollution] is municipal waste burning that happens in many cities in the Global South. Basically, this is waste that gets collected from people's homes, and instead of ...
1 Nov 20232h 57min
#169 – Paul Niehaus on whether cash transfers cause economic growth, and keeping theft to acceptable levels
"One of our earliest supporters and a dear friend of mine, Mark Lampert, once said to me, “The way I think about it is, imagine that this money were already in the hands of people living in poverty. I...
26 Okt 20231h 47min
#168 – Ian Morris on whether deep history says we're heading for an intelligence explosion
"If we carry on looking at these industrialised economies, not thinking about what it is they're actually doing and what the potential of this is, you can make an argument that, yes, rates of growth a...
23 Okt 20232h 43min
#167 – Seren Kell on the research gaps holding back alternative proteins from mass adoption
"There have been literally thousands of years of breeding and living with animals to optimise these kinds of problems. But because we're just so early on with alternative proteins and there's so much ...
18 Okt 20231h 54min
#166 – Tantum Collins on what he’s learned as an AI policy insider at the White House, DeepMind and elsewhere
"If you and I and 100 other people were on the first ship that was going to go settle Mars, and were going to build a human civilisation, and we have to decide what that government looks like, and we ...
12 Okt 20233h 8min
#165 – Anders Sandberg on war in space, whether civilisations age, and the best things possible in our universe
"Now, the really interesting question is: How much is there an attacker-versus-defender advantage in this kind of advanced future? Right now, if somebody's sitting on Mars and you're going to war agai...
6 Okt 20232h 48min
#164 – Kevin Esvelt on cults that want to kill everyone, stealth vs wildfire pandemics, and how he felt inventing gene drives
"Imagine a fast-spreading respiratory HIV. It sweeps around the world. Almost nobody has symptoms. Nobody notices until years later, when the first people who are infected begin to succumb. They might...
2 Okt 20233h 3min
