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Givewell.org. Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

I'm your host, Julia Galeff, and today it's my pleasure

to speak with Toby Ord. He's a philosopher at Oxford University, and one of the founders of the

effective altruist movement, which focuses on using reason and evidence to figure out how to do the

most good. He's also the author last year of the book, Precipice, Existential Risk and the Future of

Humanity. Here's my conversation with Toby Ord. Toby, welcome to rationally speaking. It's so great to

finally have you on. It's wonderful to be here. So Toby, you've recently published a fascinating and

important book called The Precipice, Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity.

And that's going to be the main focus of our conversation today. So could you start by just laying out the basic idea in the book for my audience?

Yeah, it's fundamentally a book about humanity over deep time.

It's about the 200 or 300,000 years of humanity that's come before us over about 10,000

generations.

And about how the history of humanity even then might still be just beginning, because if we last as long

as a typical species on this planet, then we should last for about another million years.

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