Changes to the 80k podcast

By Michelle_Hutchinson @ 2025-11-10T18:41 (+72)

This is a brief update about what’s been happening on the 80k podcast team over the last 6 months, because we’ve undergone quite a few changes. We’re also hiring (more details below).  

As background: The podcast has been running for 8(!) years, run and predominantly hosted by Rob Wiblin. Over that time the podcast has grown to ~127,000 subscribers across Spotify, YouTube and Apple Podcasts, the production value and knowledge of how to execute a great podcast have very much improved, and Luisa Rodriguez joined Rob as a host. But, given capacity constraints, 80k hasn’t invested significant resources into testing out ways to substantially scale the podcast’s impact. Rob hosted while also needing to manage the team and leading on strategy. Alongside this, he has led projects like selecting and appointing a new board for 80,000 Hours as we spun out of EV. Over the coming year, with me now focused on strategy for the podcast, 80k aims to invest notably more in experimenting with potential ways to grow the podcast team and scale its impact. 

There are a couple of reasons we think it’s worth investing significant resources into growing the podcast team. The first is that the podcast has had good impact returns: 

• In OpenPhil’s 2023 survey about what caused people to be interested in GCR work, 80k is mentioned as a leading influence, and 45% of the people who said they were significantly influenced by 80k cited the podcast as an important part of how 80k had influenced them/their trajectory. ^[1]
• The EA survey tells a similar story. For example, in the 2024 survey, the 80k podcast comes out similarly to things like EAG on influencing personal ability to have an impact.    

The second reason is timing. Along with the rest of 80k, the podcast team thinks that our largest vector for improving the longrun future right now is focusing on the transition to transformative AI. Right now, AI progress is coming more into the public consciousness and a greater number of societal decision makers are needing to make choices which impact and/or are impacted by AI developments, and are needing to do so without having a background in the technology. Having been learning about and working on this for a decade, we’re relatively well placed to inform people about how the technology might affect the world, and the risks associated with it. Our aim is that the discussions and issues we highlight on the podcast will help guide decisions people take in their current roles, as well as decisions about where they work. 

In order to capitalise on those, we’d like to increase the output of episodes and experiment with more formats. To achieve this, we need to hire additional capacity. I joined the team to push on these goals and allow Rob to focus on hosting. We started by running a hiring round for additional hosts, which we’re getting towards the end of, though it’s likely we will want to hire for further new hosts in 2026. A large part of what goes into these episodes isn't just having the conversation and finessing the audio -- there's researching topics, inputting on the episode flow, and publicising them. Right now, the hosts are mostly responsible for these but we don't think that's necessary. We’re looking to hire people with complementary skills to take on a large proportion of these responsibilities, to allow the team to really ramp up our output. To give a sense of the types of work: 

• Coming up with topics for episodes that are important for our audience to hear and finding potential guests to cover those topics 
• Suggesting and editing questions for an interview, and editing episodes post recording to streamline episodes and make them more engaging
• Figuring out titles and framings for episodes, and drafting copy to accompany them on other platforms (such as X) to help them reach the right people  

If you would like to join our small ambitious team to produce content to shape humanity’s longrun trajectory as it navigates transformative AI, please consider applying. You can read more about the roles we’re planning to add and what we’re looking for on our website.

To galvanise our team around a central mission, and help ourselves to remain ambitious and remember what we can achieve, I wrote a brief vision for the podcast over the coming years. I find these types of documents a bit tricky to engage with because making them truly aspirational is often in direct tension with realism, so they always feel like a work in progress to me. But I thought people might like to get a sense of what the podcast team is currently aiming at. Since it was written as an internal doc for people with a lot of context, I’ve made an abridged version with some tweaks and some explanation (denoted by square brackets) which hopefully makes it more intelligible and helps avoid confusions. I wanted to get this out fairly swiftly though, so I’m afraid it still reads like an internal doc.

What does all this mean for what you might expect to be able to listen to and watch over the coming months? 

• We’re hoping to put out decidedly more episodes this quarter than we did last quarter, including interviews with Ajeya Cotra, Rob Long, Max Harms, Marius Hobbhan and Dean Ball. 
• Rob will be experimenting more with voice essays, starting with one about how his AGI timelines have shifted given the developments over the year. 
• In the new year we hope to add a third host to the team and potentially try out other new formats such as debates. 
• We don’t expect all our episodes to focus on AI, though we do expect it to be around 80% for the foreseeable future.

1. ^{^}

   People could cite multiple programs, but this was the highest of any 80k program, and 80k overall is consistently a leading influence on people in the OpenPhil survey. (See their public 2020 results.)