#59 Classic episode - Cass Sunstein on how change happens, and why it's so often abrupt & unpredictable
Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in June 2019. It can often feel hopeless to be an activist seeking social change on an obscure issue where most people seem opposed or at best indiff...
27 Dec 20211h 43min
#119 – Andrew Yang on our very long-term future, and other topics most politicians won’t touch
Andrew Yang — past presidential candidate, founder of the Forward Party, and leader of the 'Yang Gang' — is kind of a big deal, but is particularly popular among listeners to The 80,000 Hours Podcast....
20 Dec 20211h 25min
#118 – Jaime Yassif on safeguarding bioscience to prevent catastrophic lab accidents and bioweapons development
If a rich country were really committed to pursuing an active biological weapons program, there’s not much we could do to stop them. With enough money and persistence, they’d be able to buy equipment,...
13 Dec 20212h 15min
#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 Nov 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 Nov 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 Nov 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 Okt 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 Okt 20213min
