80,000 Hours Podcast

This podcast started talking about careers, then seemed to do a random walk through other topics, to end up in the land of AI speculation. They really need to define a mission and stick with it. Far too much content to actually be useful. Less quantity and more quality.

Who pays these people to sit and think about hypothetical/nonexistent nonsense?

You couldn’t pay me to listen to this techbro optimizing slop.

I’ve learned a lot listening to this podcast and the issues covered are extremely important. However, since this is the primary podcast focusing on these issues, it is crucial to make sure they are being broadcasted effectively. Here’s some improvements: 1. Hosts must push back against guests. Often the hosts will agree and not question the difficult and sometimes dubious steps of the guests. 2. Hosts should have more research into the guests’ topics. I’m sure there are folks in 80k that work in the same field as these guests. Have them host. 3. Balance unrelated content. Some unrelated content helps bring in new listeners, especially when they are big names. Though it’s important not to bury issue focused episodes. (I’ve enjoyed linguists, historians, and philosophers ; though politicians are too vague and uninformative). This was a problem for older 80k, now more unrelated content but especially more content around non-AI would help attract and maintain listeners. I highly recommend listening to this podcast. My improvements don’t dis-recommend, but point to making a frequently great podcast to a consistently great one.

Despite the occasional episode on topics of interest the somewhat recent near total fixation on AI is very unfortunate. The uncritical interview of Jacobsen on nuclear weapons was also a huge red flag.