#138 Classic episode – Sharon Hewitt Rawlette on why pleasure and pain are the only things that intrinsically matter
What in the world is intrinsically good — good in itself even if it has no other effects? Over the millennia, people have offered many answers: joy, justice, equality, accomplishment, loving god, wisd...
22 Jan 20252h 25min
#134 Classic episode – Ian Morris on what big-picture history teaches us
Wind back 1,000 years and the moral landscape looks very different to today. Most farming societies thought slavery was natural and unobjectionable, premarital sex was an abomination, women should obe...
15 Jan 20253h 40min
#140 Classic episode – Bear Braumoeller on the case that war isn’t in decline
Is war in long-term decline? Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature brought this previously obscure academic question to the centre of public debate, and pointed to rates of death in war to a...
8 Jan 20252h 48min
2024 Highlightapalooza! (The best of The 80,000 Hours Podcast this year)
"A shameless recycling of existing content to drive additional audience engagement on the cheap… or the single best, most valuable, and most insight-dense episode we put out in the entire year, depend...
27 Dec 20242h 50min
#211 – Sam Bowman on why housing still isn't fixed and what would actually work
Rich countries seem to find it harder and harder to do anything that creates some losers. People who don’t want houses, offices, power stations, trains, subway stations (or whatever) built in their ar...
19 Dec 20243h 25min
#210 – Cameron Meyer Shorb on dismantling the myth that we can’t do anything to help wild animals
"I really don’t want to give the impression that I think it is easy to make predictable, controlled, safe interventions in wild systems where there are many species interacting. I don’t think it’s eas...
29 Nov 20243h 21min
#209 – Rose Chan Loui on OpenAI’s gambit to ditch its nonprofit
One OpenAI critic calls it “the theft of at least the millennium and quite possibly all of human history.” Are they right?Back in 2015 OpenAI was but a humble nonprofit. That nonprofit started a for-p...
27 Nov 20241h 22min
#208 – Elizabeth Cox on the case that TV shows, movies, and novels can improve the world
"I think stories are the way we shift the Overton window — so widen the range of things that are acceptable for policy and palatable to the public. Almost by definition, a lot of things that are going...
21 Nov 20242h 22min
