Classic Episodes

Episodes

• #179 Classic episode – Randy Nesse on why evolution left us so vulnerable to depression and anxiety 2026-02-03
  Mental health problems like depression and anxiety affect enormous numbers of people and severely interfere with their lives. By contrast, we don’t…
• #145 Classic episode – Christopher Brown on why slavery abolition wasn't inevitable 2026-01-20
  In many ways, humanity seems to have become more humane and inclusive over time. While there’s still a lot of progress to be made, campaigns to give…
• #144 Classic episode – Athena Aktipis on why cancer is a fundamental universal phenomena 2026-01-09
  What’s the opposite of cancer? If you answered “cure,” “antidote,” or “antivenom” — you’ve obviously been reading the antonym section at…
• #142 Classic episode – John McWhorter on why the optimal number of languages might be one, and other provocative claims about language 2026-01-06
  John McWhorter is a linguistics professor at Columbia University specialising in research on creole languages. He's also a content-producing…
• #139 Classic episode – Alan Hájek on puzzles and paradoxes in probability and expected value 2025-02-25
  A casino offers you a game. A coin will be tossed. If it comes up heads on the first flip you win $2. If it comes up on the second flip you win $4.…
• #143 Classic episode – Jeffrey Lewis on the most common misconceptions about nuclear weapons 2025-02-19
  America aims to avoid nuclear war by relying on the principle of 'mutually assured destruction,' right? Wrong. Or at least... not officially. As…
• #124 Classic episode – Karen Levy on fads and misaligned incentives in global development, and scaling deworming to reach hundreds of millions 2025-02-07
  If someone said a global health and development programme was sustainable, participatory, and holistic, you'd have to guess that they were saying…
• #132 Classic episode – Nova DasSarma on why information security may be critical to the safe development of AI systems 2025-01-31
  If a business has spent $100 million developing a product, it’s a fair bet that they don’t want it stolen in two seconds and uploaded to the web…
• #138 Classic episode – Sharon Hewitt Rawlette on why pleasure and pain are the only things that intrinsically matter 2025-01-22
  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,…
• #134 Classic episode – Ian Morris on what big-picture history teaches us 2025-01-15
  Wind back 1,000 years and the moral landscape looks very different to today. Most farming societies thought slavery was natural and unobjectionable,…
• #140 Classic episode – Bear Braumoeller on the case that war isn’t in decline 2025-01-08
  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…
• #90 Classic episode – Ajeya Cotra on worldview diversification and how big the future could be 2024-01-12
  You wake up in a mysterious box, and hear the booming voice of God: “I just flipped a coin. If it came up heads, I made ten boxes, labeled 1 through…
• #112 Classic episode – Carl Shulman on the common-sense case for existential risk work and its practical implications 2024-01-08
  Preventing the apocalypse may sound like an idiosyncratic activity, and it sometimes is justified on exotic grounds, such as the potential for…
• #111 Classic episode – Mushtaq Khan on using institutional economics to predict effective government reforms 2024-01-04
  If you’re living in the Niger Delta in Nigeria, your best bet at a high-paying career is probably ‘artisanal refining’ — or, in plain language,…
• #100 Classic episode – Having a successful career with depression, anxiety, and imposter syndrome 2023-12-27
  Today’s episode is one of the most remarkable and really, unique, pieces of content we’ve ever produced (and I can say that because I had almost…
• #79 Classic episode - A.J. Jacobs on radical honesty, following the whole Bible, and reframing global problems as puzzles 2023-01-16
  Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in June 2020. Today’s guest, New York Times bestselling author A.J. Jacobs, always hated Judge…
• #81 Classic episode - Ben Garfinkel on scrutinising classic AI risk arguments 2023-01-09
  Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in July 2020. 80,000 Hours, along with many other members of the effective altruism movement, has…
• #83 Classic episode - Jennifer Doleac on preventing crime without police and prisons 2023-01-04
  Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in July 2020. Today’s guest, Jennifer Doleac — Associate Professor of Economics at Texas A&M…
• #43 Classic episode - Daniel Ellsberg on the institutional insanity that maintains nuclear doomsday machines 2022-01-18
  Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in September 2018. In Stanley Kubrick’s iconic film Dr. Strangelove, the American president is…
• #35 Classic episode - Tara Mac Aulay on the audacity to fix the world without asking permission 2022-01-10
  Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in June 2018. How broken is the world? How inefficient is a typical organisation? Looking at Tara…
• #67 Classic episode – David Chalmers on the nature and ethics of consciousness 2022-01-03
  Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in December 2019. What is it like to be you right now? You're seeing this text on the screen,…
• #59 Classic episode - Cass Sunstein on how change happens, and why it's so often abrupt & unpredictable 2021-12-27
  Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in June 2019. It can often feel hopeless to be an activist seeking social change on an obscure…