EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular)

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Audio narrations from the Effective Altruism Forum, including curated posts and posts with 125 karma. If you'd like more episodes, subscribe to the "EA Forum (All audio)" podcast instead.

  1. 2D AGO

    “How to actually give money away” by NickAllardice

    This was originally posted here. It's written for an audience that's not deep in the weeds of EA giving theory/culture, but a few people suggested I post here as there's much that's additive to or divergent from some common EA practices. Feedback / disagreements welcome! Also my first time posting here. Hi! -- Most people who intend to give large amounts of money away never actually do. The money sits. In donor-advised funds, in "someday" plans, in good intentions. This is the default pathway - not an edge case - and if you don't design against it, it will happen to you too. I've watched this from every angle. As CEO of Change.org we processed 5M+ donations. I now run GiveDirectly; 160 thousand people have donated, dozens regularly give 1 million dollars+, and some give 50 million dollars-100 million dollars+ at a time. I've advised two of the biggest philanthropic institutions in the world (Coefficient Giving and GiveWell) on donor engagement and growth, and sat on half a dozen nonprofit boards. I've also been giving away 10-20% of my annual income for 17 years; I grew up low-income, so this started as a very modest amount but has added [...] --- Outline: (01:59) 1. The default pathway is to delay. Fight this. (04:51) 2. Pick a few causes and write them down. (07:33) 3. Build a portfolio across causes and risk/return. (09:48) 4. Use the index funds of giving. (11:55) 5. For the love of god, dont over-staff. (13:58) 6. Make giving a recurring event, not a to-do. (15:36) A few final hot takes --- First published: April 30th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fRLt59FNXxmCaAkYF/how-to-actually-give-money-away --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

    20 min

  2. 3D AGO

    “If You Do One Thing for Animals This Year, Do This” by Becca Rogers

    There is a short window to prevent a US bill that would overturn decades of animal welfare progress. This is arguably the most consequential piece of farm animal legislation in U.S. history. Summary  The Farm Bill currently being considered by the U.S. Congress includes the “Save Our Bacon Act”, which would eliminate states' abilities to set standards on how farmed animals are raised and treated¹, and void existing state animal welfare laws. If passed into law, it would undo decades of animal welfare progress, and greatly reduce opportunities for future animal welfare wins. The Farm Bill has passed the House with the Save Our Bacon Act (SOB) included, and it will soon be considered by the Senate. This is the biggest legislative threat to farmed animal welfare in U.S. history, and preventing the Save Our Bacon Act from passing Congress is the highest impact opportunity to help animals that there has been in years. If you do anything to help animals this year, it should be helping with this. Call script, email templates, and more here. What to do Easiest, highest priority action (5 min): Call and email both your senators, and ask them to publicly [...] --- Outline: (00:21) Summary (01:15) What to do (04:55) Higher-effort actions (07:22) Context on the Save Our Bacon (SOB) Act (07:28) What is the Save Our Bacon (SOB) Act? (08:23) What would be this laws effect on animal welfare? (10:08) What is SOBs status in Congress? (10:57) Strategy (11:00) What are the goals? (11:44) Which Senators would be the highest impact to persuade to oppose SOB? (13:04) How to talk about this with different audiences (17:00) Footnotes (17:07) Appendix (17:10) More details on the goals (18:32) Which Senators would be the highest impact to persuade to oppose SOB? --- First published: May 4th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/vsYphZaBcXpmtNizp/if-you-do-one-thing-for-animals-this-year-do-this-1 --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

    22 min

  3. MAY 1

    [Linkpost] “Starfish” by Aaron Gertler 🔸

    This is a link post. By Alexander Wales Thousands of starfish had washed up on the beach, and a little girl was diligently throwing them back into the water, one at a time. A man came up to the girl and said, "You'll never save all of them. What you're doing is pointless. It doesn't matter." The girl threw another starfish into the water. "It mattered to that one." The man snorted and walked away. The girl kept throwing starfish, one after another. To throw one starfish back into the ocean takes a trivial amount of effort, but to throw ten, or fifty, is much less so. The girl had not learned much of biomechanics, but she began to feel the strain in her back. Her skin had softened from the seawater, and the starfish themselves were abrasive. Her fingers had pruned. Her shoulder hurt. She was cut, twice, on her fingers, as the same storm that had stranded the starfish had also brought up broken shells and crab carapaces. The skin of a starfish was like sandpaper. She tried switching hands, and could throw the starfish less well, and it wasn't long before she had mirrored all her injuries. [...] --- First published: April 28th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/BHHcPbirBdoBetNiu/starfish Linkpost URL:https://archiveofourown.org/works/52206136/chapters/220900811#workskin --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

    5 min

  4. APR 29

    “Time Sensitive Urgent Animal Welfare Action” by Bentham’s Bulldog

    The EATS act—now called the save our bacon act—would make it illegal for states to pass animal welfare laws that apply to products produced out of state. This would gut most state level animal protection. It would be the worst law for animal welfare ever passed, and would consign hundreds of millions of animals to a life in a cage. Terrifyingly, it has been added to the recent farm bill (though fortunately, even if it passes, egg laying hens will be spared). It will be voted on in the next few days, so this is EXTREMELY TIME SENSITIVE! There is an amendment to the farm bill that representatives could vote for called the Luna amendment which would remove the EATS act from the farm bill. This would save countless animals from extreme suffering and prevent the dissolution of most animal protection laws. It would be a catastrophe for animal welfare of historic proportions. Fortunately, there is something you can do about it. See this document for a lot more detail, including fairly easy steps like emailing your representative. Please, please, do some of these things. This is truly a pivotal moment for animals, and how we act today might [...] --- First published: April 28th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/GLixYBHyaLHsnAoDG/time-sensitive-urgent-animal-welfare-action --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

    2 min

  5. APR 26

    “Forecasting is Way Overrated, and We Should Stop Funding It” by Marcus Abramovitch 🔸

    Summary EA and rationalists got enamoured with forecasting and prediction markets and made them part of the culture, but this hasn’t proven very useful, yet it continues to receive substantial EA funding. We should cut it off. My Experience with Forecasting For a while, I was the number one forecaster on Manifold. This lasted for about a year until I stopped just over 2 years ago. To this day, despite quitting, I’m still #8 on the platform. Additionally, I have done well on real-money prediction markets (Polymarket), earning mid-5 figures and winning a few AI bets. I say this to suggest that I would gain status from forecasting being seen as useful, but I think, to the contrary, that the EA community should stop funding it. I’ve written a few comments throughout the years that I didn’t think forecasting was worth funding. You can see some of these here and here. Finally, I have gotten around to making this full post. Solution Seeking a Problem When talking about forecasting, people often ask questions like “How can we leverage forecasting into better decisions?” This is the wrong way to go about solving problems. You solve problems by starting with [...] --- First published: April 25th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zmbfZjK54xF4oGjSB/forecasting-is-way-overrated-and-we-should-stop-funding-it --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

    9 min

  6. APR 26

    “My lover, effective altruism” by Natalie_Cargill

    Crossposted from Substack. This post is part of a 30-posts-in-30-days ordeal at Inkhaven. All suboptimalities are the result of that. This is part 2, here is part 1 in my EA mini series! On my way to my tenth EAG in a decade, my brother-in-law explained effective altruism to me. At first, he couldn’t quite remember if he’d heard the phrase before. But he searched the corners of his mind until the definition made itself known: “yeah, it's just a bunch of wankers who pretend to have social impact, but all they do is go to conferences and raise money and they’ve never had any impact at all.” I have never had any chill. I did not develop it in that moment. If anyone is going to say EA is just a bunch of wankers, it's going to be me, newbie. “That's interesting, Ben, but I think it's a serious misconception — you might not be aware that EA has literally raised billions of dollars for global health charities, which very likely saved hundreds of thousands of children's lives (do you hate children, Ben?) They have literally stopped millions of hens being tortured in cages too small for them [...] --- First published: April 17th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/sA5iFynuMJQAuJ6ku/my-lover-effective-altruism --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

    9 min

  7. APR 24

    “A Database of Near-Term Interventions for Wild Animals” by Bob Fischer

    The Animal Welfare Department (AWD) at Rethink Priorities supports high-impact strategies to help animals, especially where suffering is vast and largely neglected. Therefore, one of our focus areas is wild animal welfare (WAW), where uncertainty about tractability makes identifying cost-effective interventions particularly challenging. While much of the current WAW work rightly focuses on academic field-building (see Elmore & McAuliffe, 2024), it is worth determining whether there are viable, near-term interventions that are already available or close to implementation. With this goal in mind, we have developed the Wild Animal Welfare Intervention Database (WAWID). This project evaluates an array of interventions that may be promising for improving WAW in the (relatively) near term, evaluating them relative to criteria of interest to funders, advocates, researchers, and potential implementers across the WAW space. The WAWID is available here: Wild Animal Welfare Intervention Database The landing page includes a full list of the interventions and evaluation criteria. This report explains how we developed the WAWID, what we think you can learn from it, and suggest some future directions for this work (conditional on funding). A future report will provide some descriptive statistics. How we developed the WAWID We launched this project in [...] --- Outline: (01:34) How we developed the WAWID (08:14) Initial observations (13:13) Limitations (15:20) Future Directions (16:48) Acknowledgements --- First published: March 25th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pEbiEmeu2agEHJgyu/a-database-of-near-term-interventions-for-wild-animals --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

    18 min

  8. APR 20

    “The AI people have been right a lot” by Dylan Matthews

    This post was crossposted from Dylan Matthew's blog by the EA Forum team. The author may not see or reply to comments. Subtitle: Try to keep an open mind as the world gets increasingly wild. The crowd at EAG 2015 (Center for Effective Altruism) In 2015, I went to my first EA (Effective Altruism) Global. It was then on-the-record for journalists, which is a rule that got changed for all subsequent events due to my actions. My exposure to EA at that time was mostly through people who took high-paying careers in order to “earn to give” to global health charities, which I had written about in the Washington Post. I also knew the movement cared a lot about animal welfare. I was aware that there were people worried about catastrophic risks, and specifically about AI; this had come up in a profile I wrote of Open Philanthropy (my now-employer, albeit under a new name these days). But I still broadly thought of EA as the bednets and cage-free commitments people. I was really taken aback by how dominant discussions of AI risk were at the event. The marquee panel featured Superintelligence author Nick Bostrom, future If Anyone Builds It [...] --- Outline: (03:31) What should I learn from bungling this? (06:43) Listen to the people saying stuff will get weird --- First published: April 16th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9FPxMET3W4wewwSyf/the-ai-people-have-been-right-a-lot --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

    11 min
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Audio narrations from the Effective Altruism Forum, including curated posts and posts with 125 karma. If you'd like more episodes, subscribe to the "EA Forum (All audio)" podcast instead.

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