EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

EA Forum Team
  • 0.0 (0)
  • Technology
  • Updated Daily

Audio narrations from the Effective Altruism Forum, including curated posts, posts with 30 karma, and other great writing. If you'd like fewer episodes, subscribe to the "EA Forum (Curated & Popular)" podcast instead.

  1. 22h ago

    “How (not) to fundraise from Anthropic staff” by Jack Lewars

    Adapted from my Substack, Funding Anthropalypse. Short version: if you want a share of the coming Anthropic and OpenAI windfall - the $37bn+ that could be in play next year - the way in is to become 'legibly excellent', so the evaluators and donors that frontier lab staff already trust point them to you. The way to blow it is to cold email them. Despite previous attempts to discourage it, this is still happening, and EA needs to do better on this as a community. Someone in a WhatsApp group recently asked for donation recommendations that they could pass to Anthropic employees. The subsequent exchanges reminded me of the episode in The Last of Us when the infected start pouring out of the ground. Every person in the chat started sending their own charity/fund/pet project (including me, in fairness) and the questioner was immediately overwhelmed. Disappointingly, many of the suggestions explicitly did not fit the brief from the person asking, and were fairly obvious attempts to crowbar pet projects into scope. As someone who has thought a lot about the Funding Anthropalypse (hat tip to @Pablo Melchor 🔸 for the name), I want to suggest a better way [...] --- Outline: (01:32) Should I cold email people at Anthropic and OpenAI? (02:37) How can I get noticed by frontier AI lab donors? (03:34) Demonstrate excellence through trusted evaluators (04:04) Have a credible plan for scaling (06:21) How much time do I have to build awareness? (07:11) What's so bad about emailing them anyway? (08:49) I'm an AI equity holder and I'm overwhelmed. Who can help me with my philanthropy? --- First published: July 16th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bHvamKxyBeWPFoJgn/how-not-to-fundraise-from-anthropic-staff --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

  2. 1d ago

    “My TED Talk on ending childhood lead poisoning is live” by Drew_McCartor

    This week is a big one for the lead poisoning community. The TED Talk I gave in April about lead poisoning just went live, and it's nearly at 100,000 views. Watch it here: In the talk, I describe a crisis affecting more than one billion children, the toll it takes on their health and futures, and the main sources of exposure. Most importantly, I share our path to solving it. This momentum did not evolve by itself. The EA community was among the first to recognize lead poisoning as both important and severely underfunded. That early support, through a GiveWell recommendation and initiatives like Coefficient Giving's LEAF, helped bring this cause to where it is today, and we are grateful. Now the goal is to make sure everyone else is aware of this crisis too. Lead poisoning has been overlooked for too long, and this TED Talk is the kind of visibility that will help change that. That's where I would love your help. If you find the talk compelling, please share it with your networks on LinkedIn, Instagram, or wherever you share content. --- First published: July 13th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8pHXGAbGHkJWQ8EwS/my-ted-talk-on-ending-childhood-lead-poisoning-is-live --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

  3. 1d ago

    “Apply to the Sentient Futures Fall 2026 Project Incubator” by Sentient Futures, Zoe L, Martyna Wielopolska, Jay Luong, Sam Chapman, Brody McManus, Constance Li

    Apply nowDeadline: August 9, 2026   Program dates: August 31 – November 9 The Sentient Futures Project Incubator is a 10-week long program for people who want to do high-quality work on some of the most important problems of our time - from AI's impact on animals to artificial sentience to post-AGI transition, and more. As a mentee, you can: Work with an experienced mentor on a concrete & impactful project (think: short-term research fellow) Push the frontier of nonhuman welfare through research, field-building, or real-world action Join a growing network of like-minded people motivated to improve the wellbeing of future sentient beings What to expect: 5-10 hrs/week of independent project work Weekly 30-60 min call with your mentor + light async support 10 weeks, fully remote Apply by August 9 or visit here to learn more. Feel free to share with anyone who'd be a good fit! ❓ Questions? Reply below or write to us. --- First published: July 14th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NrzNhmjRY3eisgLtd/apply-to-the-sentient-futures-fall-2026-project-incubator --- 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.

  4. 2d ago

    “Spiro: an update 2.5 years on and a fundraising ask for expansion” by Habiba Banu

    Summary Back in November 2023 I posted here to launch Spiro and raise our first 198 thousand dollars. Two and a half years later this is an update and a fundraiser for the next step. The short version: we've now reached over-5,900 people with TB preventive medicine, including over 3,000 children under five years old. Our early results have held up well and GiveWell made us a grant last year. Now there's an urgent opportunity in front of us: US funding for community TB contact tracing across half of Sindh province in Pakistan ends this month. The provincial government has invited us to expand our work - taking on those 15 districts and expanding to cover all 30 districts of Sindh, up from the 7 we serve today. To do that we're aiming to raise 512 thousand dollars by the end of July, the most urgent slice of a ~1.8 million dollars gap for 2026–2027. By our own modelling, our work is in the ballpark of something that would meet GiveWell's bar - around $5,000 per life saved. But if we want to avoid a gap in coverage on the ground after the US pulls out, we’ll need to [...] --- Outline: (00:13) Summary (01:55) What Spiro does (03:35) Progress since our launch (05:14) The next opportunity: all of Sindh (06:22) We're fundraising for an urgent $512k now (08:01) Risk and uncertainties (09:37) How to give (10:07) The future for Spiro (10:27) Appendix: More on what we've done since Spiro's launch --- First published: July 15th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hBoGLwKwMmizeRyZx/spiro-an-update-2-5-years-on-and-a-fundraising-ask-for --- 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.

  5. 2d ago

    “The “third wave” of philanthropy needs a new marketplace” by Sjir Hoeijmakers🔸

    Cross-posting from Substack. It's written for a broad audience not necessarily familiar with effective giving or altruism, so some of it may be a bit introductory for an EA audience. That said, I expect most of the points and examples will be new (and hopefully useful) to many. Can we do better than traditional philanthropy and impact investing? Nan Ransohoff argues that AI wealth is about to bring a “third wave” of tens of billions of dollars a year into philanthropy, and that we’ll need many more capital allocators and builders to make sure this money is deployed well. I agree, but not with her underlying claim that “The real question is whether there are 50 billion dollars worth of initiatives that are compelling to these funders. If not, the dollars won’t get spent.” The track records of both philanthropy and its sister impact investing show us that it won’t be hard to spend the extra 50 billion dollars: philanthropy in the US grew by $30 billion just last year and impact investing's self-reported assets grew by $100s of billions. What will be hard is to avoid the incentives that usually guide their expansion: catering to donors' individual [...] --- First published: July 10th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4AfjuHrKCs9MYC9jk/the-third-wave-of-philanthropy-needs-a-new-marketplace --- 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.

  6. 3d ago

    “The EA Opportunities Board now has full-time roles” by Agnes Hasselblad 🔸

    The Effective Altruism Opportunities board now lists full-time roles alongside internships, fellowships, and volunteering opportunities. We’re aiming for it to be a curated home for EA opportunities across all cause areas. If you’re actively looking for a role you might want to check out the board, and if you’re only passively looking you might want to sign up for the newsletter to get a weekly digest of impactful roles. History The Effective Altruism Opportunities Board was originally aimed at helping people find internships, volunteering opportunities, and part-time roles to build skills or contribute to impactful work. It was run by students and young professionals for a long time, and has had multiple iterations over the years. The Online team at CEA took over the board early 2025, and I started giving it focused attention beginning this year. In April we decided to start listing full-time roles. Why we added full-time roles After taking over the board I was exploring if the current niche was still what visitors expected and wanted, and whether it was filling a gap. The board's niche was defined back when 80,000 Hours covered full-time roles across cause areas equally (without focusing more strongly on [...] --- Outline: (00:45) History (01:18) Why we added full-time roles (02:26) Numbers (03:17) Other improvements (03:56) We're looking to hire someone to own the board (04:25) A visual timeline (05:27) Ways you can help The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: July 13th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2YdPfvQSRLcWwNXCc/the-ea-opportunities-board-now-has-full-time-roles --- 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.

  7. 4d ago

    “Thresholds for funding existential risk interventions” by NunoSempere

    This is some very old work I never published in the EA forum; publishing it now because I want to add it to my Estimating value series, mark the end of an era & reference it elsewhere. I don't think I could produce this work today since I've lost the youthful innocence to think it'd be worth the effort given the idosyncrasies of funding institutions. Thanks to SoGive for commissioning this piece a few years ago; you can see the original here. 1. Review of estimation strategies The following are strategies we might consider using to determine a reasonable cost-effectiveness threshold for philanthropy to reduce existential risk. 1.1. Summary table StrategyFeasible?Recommended?1. Randomized trialsImpossibleNo2. Shapley valuesEven more impossibleNo3. Natural experimentsUnlikelyNo4. Direct reduction in x-riskWith effortMaybe5. Relative value comparisonYesMaybe6. Estimate intermediate outputsYesYes7. Sanity checks or thresholdsYesYes8. Other funders as a benchmarkYesNot really9. Expert intuitionYesIn moderation10. Impact rubricYesNo 1.2. Discussion of strategies 1.2.1. Ideal yet impracticable Randomized trials are the gold standard in medicine and global health and development. However, they do have the problem of double-counting or triple-counting impact. Shapley values address that limitation. However, randomized trials are impossible1 for the case of existential risk2; we can't boot up different possible worlds [...] --- Outline: (00:36) 1. Review of estimation strategies (00:49) 1.1. Summary table (01:06) 1.2. Discussion of strategies (01:11) 1.2.1. Ideal yet impracticable (03:10) 1.2.2. Methods at the sweet spot of feasibility, informativeness, ambitiousness (06:19) 1.2.3. More common status quo methods (07:51) 2. Review of past thresholds (07:56) 2.1. List of past thresholds (10:23) 2.2. Meaning of these thresholds (13:24) 3. A few tentative thresholds (13:42) 3.1. From first principles (17:46) 3.2. Thresholds based on better specific interventions (18:35) 3.2.1. Why not the LTFF (20:28) 3.2.2. Comparison against robust AI safety technical research (25:07) 3.2.3. Other interesting targets for comparison (25:37) 3.3. Summary table and links to the models (25:43) 3.3.1. Summary of meanings (26:01) 3.3.2. Summary of values (26:36) 3.4. A note on replicability of estimates (28:16) Footnotes The original text contained 11 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: July 11th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/aBAkov3iJNWDWu8qS/thresholds-for-funding-existential-risk-interventions --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

  8. 4d ago

    “Counting animals: Stable population size is not equivalent to priority level” by abrahamrowe, mal_graham🔸

    AI Use Note: Main body text entirely human written. Claude (Opus 4.8) helped develop models of animal life histories in the appendix. Cross-posted from Good Structures. Executive Summary Animal advocates sometimes make claims like “there are X of this animal, and Y>X of this animal, so Y might be a better target to focus on.” For example, you could imagine someone making a claim like “there are 20 quadrillion ants, so they are a higher priority to work on than Pacific salmon (wild population size: ~500M), even accounting for moral weight and welfare range.” Some arguments for working on farmed over companion, or wild over farmed animals, take this shape – where population size serves as a rough heuristic for prioritization. These claims frequently rely on abundance estimates produced by conservation- and evolution-focused scientists, who primarily focus on estimating the“stable adult population,” since reproductively active individuals are what's relevant to evolution and species continuity. We show that: Using stable adult populations systematically underestimates the number of animals who will live over a specific period. Using stable adult populations systematically underestimates morally relevant experiences of some small and heavily r-selected animals. Given this, we argue that: [...] --- Outline: (00:27) Executive Summary (03:09) Introduction (07:22) What do abundance estimates actually count? (09:11) Callaghan et al. 2021 -- Global Bird Abundance (12:52) Comparing five example groups of animals (16:44) Implications for impact estimates (19:11) Takeaways (21:48) Appendix A: Methodology for animal throughput estimates (22:37) Common framework (23:43) Wild pacific salmon (24:15) Passeriform birds (24:41) Grasshoppers (25:08) Ants (25:37) Aphids (asexual summer phase) --- First published: July 12th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/YRfcKzTfW34FunjYy/counting-animals-stable-population-size-is-not-equivalent-to --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

See All (250)

About

Audio narrations from the Effective Altruism Forum, including curated posts, posts with 30 karma, and other great writing. If you'd like fewer episodes, subscribe to the "EA Forum (Curated & Popular)" podcast instead.

Information

  • Creator
    EA Forum Team
  • Years Active
    2023 - 2026
  • Episodes
    250
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 All rights reserved
  • Show Website
    EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

You Might Also Like