#187 – Zach Weinersmith on how researching his book turned him from a space optimist into a "space bastard"
"Earth economists, when they measure how bad the potential for exploitation is, they look at things like, how is labour mobility? How much possibility do labourers have otherwise to go somewhere else?...
14 Maj 20243h 6min
#186 – Dean Spears on why babies are born small in Uttar Pradesh, and how to save their lives
"I work in a place called Uttar Pradesh, which is a state in India with 240 million people. One in every 33 people in the whole world lives in Uttar Pradesh. It would be the fifth largest country if i...
1 Maj 20241h 18min
#185 – Lewis Bollard on the 7 most promising ways to end factory farming, and whether AI is going to be good or bad for animals
"The constraint right now on factory farming is how far can you push the biology of these animals? But AI could remove that constraint. It could say, 'Actually, we can push them further in these ways ...
18 Apr 20242h 33min
#184 – Zvi Mowshowitz on sleeping on sleeper agents, and the biggest AI updates since ChatGPT
Many of you will have heard of Zvi Mowshowitz as a superhuman information-absorbing-and-processing machine — which he definitely is. As the author of the Substack Don’t Worry About the Vase, Zvi has s...
11 Apr 20243h 31min
AI governance and policy (Article)
Today’s release is a reading of our career review of AI governance and policy, written and narrated by Cody Fenwick.Advanced AI systems could have massive impacts on humanity and potentially pose glob...
28 Mars 202451min
#183 – Spencer Greenberg on causation without correlation, money and happiness, lightgassing, hype vs value, and more
"When a friend comes to me with a decision, and they want my thoughts on it, very rarely am I trying to give them a really specific answer, like, 'I solved your problem.' What I’m trying to do often i...
14 Mars 20242h 36min
#182 – Bob Fischer on comparing the welfare of humans, chickens, pigs, octopuses, bees, and more
"[One] thing is just to spend time thinking about the kinds of things animals can do and what their lives are like. Just how hard a chicken will work to get to a nest box before she lays an egg, the a...
8 Mars 20242h 21min
#181 – Laura Deming on the science that could keep us healthy in our 80s and beyond
"The question I care about is: What do I want to do? Like, when I'm 80, how strong do I want to be? OK, and then if I want to be that strong, how well do my muscles have to work? OK, and then if that'...
1 Mars 20241h 37min
