#0 – Introducing The 80,000 Hours Podcast

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 in a highly effective way. This podcast is just one of many things that we offer, the others of which you can find over at 80000hours.org. 

We've been going since 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 use to figure out what they want to do with their careers or with their charitable giving.

We've talked about a lot of things over the years — for example:

• Geoengineering for climate change
• Preventing suicide caused by access to pesticides
• Nuclear arms control
• The pros and cons of nuclear power
• The suffering of animals in factory farming
• 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 recover from apocalyptic pandemics
• Population ethics and moral uncertainty
• Access to food in catastrophes
• Better systems of voting

And that's 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, and more.

More recently, in 2025 we came to think that many of the most important problems were 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 reason is that we think that AI more capable than humans could lead to explosive technological change, and make the next decade perhaps the most pivotal in history. There's huge potential upside here, but there's also huge potential risks — and as a society, we’re simply not ready.

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 in a decade” — and how we’re completely unprepared.

If you'd like to watch our episodes in their beautiful video form, 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.

But why “80,000 Hours”? 80,000 hours is about how much time we have in our careers over our lives, and we support people to make the most of it. This podcast is just one of many things that we offer — we also have:

• A job board that at any one point in time lists 500-1,000 really valuable roles you might take to try to do a lot of good, ranging across different problems, locations and skill set. That's 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.
• Once you've absorbed some of those resources, there's also our one-on-one career advising service where our experts can review the different career options you're thinking about, make introductions to people working in the field, and suggest next steps for you. It's free, but demand exceeds supply for that one, so you'll need to write up a bit about your situation so we can figure out how much we can actually help. You can find that at 80000hours.org/speak/  

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. We hope we succeed some of the time and you find the show informative and entertaining. 

If you want to give us any feedback on this podcast, email us at [email protected].