I haven't listened to that many episodes - in fact, of those you listed I've only listened to the one with Howie Lempel (which also resonated with me). But I think the episode I found most interesting is the one with Mushtaq Khan about effectively fighting corruption in developing countries.
I'm curating this act of curation- I agree with @Tym 🔸 that this is a great service to the community, and especially to those who became involved with EA recently and didn't catch these episodes as they came out.
In my opinion, the 80k podcast is a pretty load-bearing part of EA culture, and I loved revisiting and remembering some of the best episodes while reading this piece. Thanks for writing it JWS!
First: Thank you so much for sharing your curated list. As someone who has curated and shared my favourite essays by Holden Karnofsky, Tyler Cowen, Scott Sumner, and Joseph Heath, I find it to be something incredibly underappreciated, and it’s been wonderful to see my own list drive significantly more attention to some of my favourite articles and ideas — I hope your list does the same.
Second: this is serendipitous timing for me as I recently unsubscribed from the 80,000 Hours podcast and was reflecting on how both the podcast and the broader intellectual environment have evolved over time. (For the record, I didn't unsubscribe because I think the podcast has declined in quality — I simply don't have enough time to keep up with more than four active podcast subscriptions.)
When the podcast first launched, the ideas it introduced and the discussions around each episode felt so fresh and exciting. I specifically remember Spencer Greenberg’s 2017 and 2018 episodes leaving me feeling energized, and there being so many people in my online circle eager to talk about them (even though neither episode was really about Effective Altruism). Spencer's 2024 episode isn't worse, but the context is entirely different. We've now been exposed to ideas like this for a long time and there are now way more venues for people to explore and discuss these kinds of ideas. The podcast was a trailblazer that helped shape this broader discourse, and if people now turn to something like the Dwarkesh podcast to find new ideas, that’s a testament to the path the 80,000 Hours podcast helped pave.
I still remember back in 2018 when Bryan Caplan wrote a post titled "Hear Rob Wiblin" (https://staging.econlib.net/archives/2018/05/hear_rob_wiblin.html), urging his readers to listen to the 80,000 Hours podcast. His recommendation wasn’t because his audience was particularly drawn to EA, but because the ideas being discussed were so engaging and the interview quality so high. To give you a sense of how remarkable that was, Bryan has, to my knowledge, only written similarly glowing praise for Scott Alexander. Rob Wiblin and the 80,000 Hours podcast, and Scott Alexander — that’s it!
As someone who has curated and shared my favourite essays by Holden Karnofsky, Tyler Cowen, Scott Sumner, and Joseph Heath
Hi there, would you be willing to share a link to these collections? I'd be interested in checking them out. :)
With pleasure :)
I highly recommend the Heath essays, as the ideas are less likely to have permeated into this zeitgeist.
https://danfrank.ca/my-favourite-joseph-heath-articles-canadas-most-important-canadian-thinker/
https://danfrank.ca/my-favourite-tyler-cowen-posts-and-ideas/
https://danfrank.ca/my-favourite-holden-karnofsky-essays-pre-cold-takes/
https://danfrank.ca/the-wisdom-of-scott-sumner-my-favourite-non-econ-scott-sumner-blog-posts/
Thanks for this post, it warmed our hearts! Glad we've been able to help you understand the world better over the years and maybe even have more impact too. ❤️
I threaded the top ten list here: https://x.com/robertwiblin/status/1834613676034113817
(By the way the next episode we plan to release, one of Luisa's, actually has more pushback on AI and robotics, have a listen and see what you think.)
I think the 80,000 Hours Podcast is a great show. Despite the world of podcasts overflowing with content to choose from, it's reliably been a high-quality production that's been a regular part of my listening habits ever since I discovered it. It was also probably one of the first routes I become more aware of the EA community, which I suspect I might not be alone by.[1]
So, as the podcast numbers ticked up, the vague idea to write up a post shouting out some of my favourite episodes took root. I didn't get far with it from there, and now the unreasonable effectiveness of the 80k podcast production team has forced my hand! So in the post I'm going to link to my 10 favourite episodes, along with some final thoughts at the end.
I hope to share with you some of my favourite episodes, but I want to be clear that this is my list and not any sort of official ranking. If there's a really good episode that your surprised isn't on there, it may well because I haven't listened to that one yet! So, without any further ado, here's the Top 10 List:
While the podcast's title is nominally about cancer, I think the ideas in the podcast actually hint towards Autopoiesis, something I think connects a bunch of different causes I care about. I wasn't really aware of many of the things that Athena and Rob discuss in the episode so I found the discussing incredibly interesting, especially about how the concepts of growth, maintenance, and co-operation appear at many different levels in the universe.
LEEP is probably one of the key EA success stories in recent years but hearing it through Lucia's own words and her own story, from CE incubation to actually bringing the results of lead concentration to the Malawi Ministry of Health, was really inspiring to hear. There's also some good discussion about the 10% Pledge and the age-old Randomista v Growth debate in the episode too.
This was another excellent episode where Rob and an incredbily smart, engaging guest got to do a deep dive into an idea and see where it went. I think Professor Hájek did a fantastic job sharing his knowledge in an enlightening way, and he really showcased a number of limits of expect value calculations (not least the realisation the probability(0) events can and do happen all the time) which left my mind blown in a good way.
GiveWell looms large in the world of EA, so to get the CEO to come on the podcast and talk in this detail was great to see. I found Elie both an engaging guest and a persuasive interlocutor when he and Rob get into debates, and this definitely didn't seem like a softball interview to me. The Randomista v Growth section (at 02:20:00) is really good on this, and I wish Rob had actually put himself on the line a bit more since he clearly has a lot of sympathy with the 'Growth' side of the debate.
This podcast comes in at over 3 hours, but still I found it flying by as a listener. The topics range from the specific work of Maleria Consortium, the overall landscape of the battle against Malaria, as well as James' own story, including fighting off the disease himself. There's some much rich discussion that it feels like any of these could have been an episode on its own, so to get all 3-in-1 firmly puts this as one of the best episodes I can remember.
Over recent years the issue of Animal Welfare, and especially the potential ongoing moral catastrophe of factory farming, has mattered more and more to me. So listening to this episode when it came out had a strong impact on me. I actually had to stop what I was doing while listening to just take in what Lewis was saying, about the scale and callousness with which we treat farmed animals, and why it's so important to gain knowledge of how to mitigate and hopefully one day eliminate it. (The episode would also make an extra rough double-bill with Episode #182 on Moral Weights).
As soon as I thought of the idea for this post, this episode popped into my head. The older I've got the more Chalmers-sympathetic I've got on the topic of consciousness, and he does skewer Rob particular on the Vulcan thought experiment in this episode, but throughout it he shows clarity of ideas. It's nearly five hours and throughout it all Chalmers is super smart and on-the-ball. It's just a fantastic, idea-dense episode. Plus, a few days after I first listened to the podcast, I had an experience of anattā, so maybe it'll do the same for you.
I think this is one of the earliest episodes I remember listening to (though I have relistened to it at least once), and it's always stuck with me. I think Nuclear War is one of the first ways many people grapple with the ideas of catastrophic and even existential risk. Ellsberg's testimony here is equal parts gripping, enlightening, and terrifying, and to my mind also argues for why Improving Institutional Decision-making should be a key piece of all x-risk efforts.
The discussion of the importance of ideas when societies were malleable, and the risks of 'lock-in', was one of my favourite parts of WWOTF. This episode tackles a historical case study, that of the abolition of slavery in the United States. Brown is simply terrific as a guest, and provides a clear and cogent that the ideas and moral debate on this issue actually mattered, and it wasn't just due to inevitable march of history. In the end, the strongest signal that I think this episode is great is that I've recommended it to friends and family who know nothing about 80k or EA at all, just because I think it's so high quality.
I'd guess that many of you might have suspected this episode would end up as the #1, but it's simply deserved. Howie's honesty and openness throughout the episode, but especially on recounting some dark times, hit pretty close to me as someone who has gone through related times (though never to the extent that Howie experienced), and I think such experiences are sadly not uncommon in the EA community. I think this episode's grace, honestly, bravery, and ability to make the listener reflect on important personal choices and directions makes it stand out even amongst 199 other episodes to choose from.
There are way more than 10 good episodes on the show, but I had to draw a line somewhere. Even so, I wanted to highlight 3 episodes which very nearly made the Top 10, but didn't quite in the end.
Ok, so, I'm not putting this on the honourable mentions not because it's actually because it's one of the best episodes, or my favourites, but because it contains perhaps the major thing I think episodes of the 80k podcast lack the most - an honest-to-goodness disagreement between the host (Rob in this case) and the guest, and a proper back-and-forth about it (specifically, the "Critiques of effective altruism" section). Sure, it didn't really resolve this time, but I don't think that having more discussions like this where strong disagreements are brought out in the open and not lightly touched on/brushed over.
This one very nearly made the Top 10 list. The whole discussion of global catastrophes is thorough, covers the issue from many interesting angles, and also provides great examples to boot (such as the ingenuity of Bosnians finding ways to generate electricty while being under siege). And even after all of that, you get a 2-for-the-price-of-1 as there's a whole separate discussion about Luisa's own journey to impact and how that led her to find her biological father, which I found very moving.
In a really funny turn of events, I actually read Professor Schwitzgebel's paper barely a week or so before I listened to this, so it was a pleasant surprise to see the topic pop up on the feed! I think Eric & Luisa have a great répartie in this episode as guest and host, Luisa is admirably open about which of Eric's thought experiments challenged her own intuitions, and 2 hours simply flew by as listener.
Ok so, having got here and seen 13 out of 200 episodes highlighted, there's an obvious question to ask. Where are all the AI episodes? Surely some of them should have made the list. The honest answer here is personal preference and perspective. I work in ML and AI, so the conversations on these topics are perhaps in areas I am more familiar with, and less likely to be 'mind blowing'. Even more than that though, over the last couple of years I have generally found myself swimming against the tide in EA regarding AI risk.[2]
So when I listen to these episodes, I often feel like the guest and the host (be it Rob or Luisa) implicitly agree on most of the cruxes of AI already, and don't really interrogate them. An example that's always struck with me is the episode with Tom Davidson, where at the very beginning he says "I think like 1,000x improvement in the AIs’ capabilities in a year is a natural, kind of conservative default." When I heard this, I immediately thought "excuse me wtf? this wildly implausible claim makes me doubt everything about your thesis please justify it" and I kept waiting for the whole episode for the pushback from Luisa on this point, but it never came.[3]
So recently I've found myself not finishing, or even skipping, some of the AI episodes. I see the guests, think I can guess the general perspectives they and Rob/Luisa will take on AI, and don't think it'll add too much to my knowledge of the topic. If there are particular episodes that you think this is particularly incorrect about, then please let me know! But I'd really like to see Rob interview someone like Melanie Mitchell or Jeremy Howard who have serious disagreements with the in-house 80k view on AI timelines, risks, and responses, and have proper hammer-and-tongs disagreement about it, Weyl-style. I think some directional examples of this sort of thing would be Francois Chollet on the Dwarkesh Podcast, or Ryan Greenblatt on Machine Learning Street Talk.
Despite my personal disinclination to the recent AI-themed episodes, the 80k podcast still remains one of the most thought-provoking podcasts I listen to. There are many more excellent discussions beyond the 13 listed here that made earlier versions of this post, and it's a credit to the team that they've kept up an engaging, long-form interview format for over 200 episodes and still find new and interesting topics to discuss on the show.
On reflection, it seems that the episodes which have stuck with me the most are those that combine a discussion of important ideas that are often novel to me, but also include a personal connection from the host as well. However, that may not be the same for you, so if you disagree, or want to shout out other episodes, please add them below.
So I'll sign off with a final thank you to the 80,000 Hours podcast team: Here's to another 200 episodes of unusually in-depth conversations about the world’s most pressing problems, and what you can do to solve them.
I remember listening to some of the early episodes with Phil Tetlock in 2018 when I was really into his work. I think I came back to the podcast in 2021 though, and hard rotation began around episode #96.
I won't go into it in this post, though I do want to write it up someday. The best places I can point to for my perspective at the moment is this quick take, and this post.
This is the most clear example in my mind, but not the only one. I remember listening to the episode about AI deception with Ajeya Cotra and coming away unconvinced about the assumption that default methods would lead to this form of deception.
I’d be very surprised (and very impressed) if the Carl Shulman episodes did not add much to your knowledge of the topic (relative to how much you learned from the listed episodes).
For the avoidance of doubt, not gaining knowledge from the Carl Shulman episodes is at least as much my fault as it is Rob and Carl's![1] I think similar to his appearance on the Dwarkesh Podcast, it was interesting and full of information, but I'm not sure my mind has found a good way to integrate it into my existing perspective yet. It feels unresolved to me, and something I personally want to explore more, so a version of the post written later in time might include those episodes high up. But writing this post from where I am now, I at least wanted to own my perspective/bias leaning against the AI episodes rather than leave it implicit in the episode selection. But yeah, it was very much my list, and therefore inherits all of my assumptions and flaws.
I do think working in AI/ML means that the relative gain of knowledge may still be lower in this case compared to learning about the abolition of slavery (Brown #145) or the details of fighting Malaria (Tibenderana #129), so I think that's a bit more arguable, but probably an unimportant distinction.
(I'm pretty sure I didn't listen to part 2, and can't remember how much I listened to of part 1 over reading some of the transcript on the 80k website, so these episodes may be a victim of the 'not listened to fully yet' criteria)