Podcast Episodes

#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 issu…

4 years, 3 months ago

#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 p…

4 years, 3 months ago

#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 mone…

4 years, 3 months ago

#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, pr…

4 years, 4 months ago

#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 peop…

4 years, 4 months ago

#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 …

4 years, 4 months ago

#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 …

4 years, 5 months ago

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'…

4 years, 5 months ago

#113 – Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India

Our failure to make sure all kids globally get all of their basic vaccinations leads to 1.5 million child deaths every year.

According to today’s gues…

4 years, 5 months ago

#112 – Carl Shulman on the common-sense case for existential risk work and its practical implications

Preventing the apocalypse may sound like an idiosyncratic activity, and it sometimes is justified on exotic grounds, such as the potential for humani…

4 years, 5 months ago