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The most important conversations about artificial intelligence you won’t hear anywhere else.
Subscribe by searching for '80000 Hours' wherever you get podcasts.
Hosted by Rob Wiblin, Luisa Rodriguez, Zershaaneh Qureshi, and Tom Reed.
Hi listeners. I’m Rob Wiblin, the creator and initial host of The 80,000 Hours Podcast.
I'm recording this 'episode zero' in late 2026, because if you're about to launch into the show for the first time, there's a few things you might want to know.
In particular, I can see that a lot of you are deciding to start listening to the show with episode one, which is a terrible idea.
But let's start at the beginning. 80,000 Hours is a nonprofit that provides research and other support to help people switch into careers that tackle the world's most pressing problems, hopefully in a highly effective way.
This podcast is just one of many different things that we offer, the others of which you can find over at 80000hours.org.
This show has been going since mid-2017, putting out regular interviews about the world's most pressing problems and how to solve them — which some people enjoy because they love to learn about important things, and others are using actually to figure out what they want to do with their careers or with their charitable giving.
Back in 2017, I was a researcher at 80,000 Hours, and I found myself thinking, “You know, writing detailed articles is a real pain in the ass. When I talk to experts, they say much of the stuff that I'm gonna write in those articles is just straight out to me on the call. So can't we just make this whole process a lot faster by getting the people I talk to to say what we want everyone to know into a microphone, and then just release that recording instead?”
And so from the virtue of laziness, The 80,000 Hours Podcast was born. And since then, we've gone on to have hundreds of conversations about threats humanity faces that could be reduced, horrible instances of suffering and wasted potential that could easily be averted, and opportunities to make the world radically better than it is.
We've talked about a lot of things over the years. There's geoengineering for climate change, preventing suicide caused by easy access to pesticides, nuclear arms control, the pros and cons of nuclear power, the suffering of animals on factory farms, lead poisoning in children, the massive global death toll from particulate pollution, alternatives to long prison sentences, solutions to the replication crisis in social science research, US hegemony and foreign policy, how humanity could hopefully recover from apocalyptic pandemics, population ethics, moral uncertainty, access to food in catastrophes, and better systems of voting.
And that in turn has involved interviewing a wide range of different experts. We've talked to people founding nonprofits and businesses, people working in the White House, economists, lawyers and other academics doing deep research, elected politicians, activists and authors trying to stimulate action on these problems, and plenty of other groups besides.
I try to press our guests rather than take what they say at face value, and also push them on what people actually ought to do if we want to make a difference.
We've also, if I'm honest with you, had some episodes on stuff that was just particularly fascinating to me, like what we could learn from big picture history, why Creoles are the best languages that are around, the strangest beliefs held by people in ancient Greece and Rome, and what evolution by natural selection might teach us about how to best treat mental health problems.
Now, listening back, the early episodes of the show, they weren't bad, given that I had little idea what I was doing. But we have gotten a lot better over the years at what we do, and the audio quality has certainly gotten way more consistent.
So, as I mentioned at the start, listening to all of our episodes chronologically from start to finish would be a pretty weird choice to make. I would rather look for episodes on topics that really excite you from 2019 onwards, or just go and listen to the classic episodes that we've been putting out on the feed every January since 2019.
Anyway, that describes the show pretty well from 2017 until 2024. More recently, in 2025, we came to think that many of the world's most important problems were heavily related to guiding humanity through the transition to a world with artificial general intelligence: machines that can do everything humans can do, but faster and cheaper.
The main reason being that we think that AI more capable than humans could lead to really explosive technological change, and make the next decade perhaps the most pivotal one in human history. There's huge potential upside here, to be sure, but there's also huge potential risks. And as a society, I think we're nowhere near ready, and I would guess that you agree with that.
So from 2025 onwards, you'll find that more than half of the episodes that we make are related to artificial intelligence one way or another. Probably the best first episode to listen to to understand the motivation for that shift is episode 213: Will MacAskill on AI causing a century and a decade and how we're completely unprepared for it.
2025 is also the year that we went from doing episodes in audio only to following industry trends and recording them in video as well. You can find the 80,000 Hours channel on YouTube or subscribe to the show on Spotify or Apple, where you can just turn on the video whenever you like.
Now, I started the show back in 2017, and was the only regular interviewer for a number of years. But now I'm just one of several. Luisa Rodriguez joined us in 2023, and this year Zershaaneh Qureshi and Tom Reed joined as well, giving us a wider variety of perspectives and allowing us to cover a lot more topics than I could ever hope to do by myself.
If you want to give us or the production team any feedback on this podcast, you can do that at podcast@80000hours.org. We always really enjoy hearing what you guys think about what we're doing.
Now, I mentioned a few minutes ago that 80,000 Hours is this nonprofit that helps people find fulfilling careers that hopefully have a big positive impact on the world — 80,000 hours being roughly the number of hours we work over the course of a full-time career.
And I said this podcast is just one of many different things that we offer — those other things are, if you're curious:
A job board that at any one point in time lists 500 to 1,000 really high-impact roles. You can find that at jobs.80000hours.org.
There's also a huge written guide covering career strategy, writeups of the world's most pressing problems and how to solve them, and lots of other really valuable topics. Just head to 80000hours.org to find that. That's also now a book published by Penguin in mid-2026, called 80,000 Hours: How to Have a Fulfilling Career That Does Good.
And once you've absorbed some of those resources, there's also our one-on-one career advising service, where our experts can review different career options you're thinking about, make introductions to people working in different fields, and suggest the best next steps for you. That one's free, but naturally demand exceeds supply, so you'll need to write up a bit about your situation so we can figure out just how much we think we can actually help in your specific case. You can find information about that at 80000hours.org/speak.
Anyway, to sum up: we're doing our best here to help you navigate this crazy, disorienting time in history and figure out how you can make the best contribution to setting the world onto a good path, or at least a better path. I hope we succeed some of the time, and you find this show and our other resources informative and entertaining.
Enjoy, and I'll talk to you soon.