You're listening to a podcast from Meaning of Life TV.

Hi, this is Bob, and I just wanted to let you know that this is an unusual episode of the right show, because I am as much the guest as the host.

The conversation is with Rob Wiblin, host of the 80,000

hours podcast, which is part of the Effective Altruism Movement. And here's the way the conversation

worked. I asked Rob some questions about effective altruism, and he asked me some questions about

my own mission, the Apocalypse aversion project.

And we had a great chat, and we're running it on both of our podcasts.

And I'm happy to report that there's a fair amount of intersection and synergy even between

our respective missions. If you want to check those missions out, you can subscribe to my newsletter,

the non-zero newsletter on Substack, and then, by way of exploring Rob's mission, subscribe to his

podcast, the 80,000 hours podcast, which is great, and maybe Google the 80,000 hours website,

and explore some ways you can use your time for the

greater good. So I hope you enjoy the conversation. Today I'm speaking with Robert Wright. Bob is an

American journalist and author who writes about science, history, and politics. Among others, he's

the author of The Moral Animal, The New Science of Evolutionist Psychology, Non-Zero, The Logic of Human Destiny, The Evolution of God, and finally, why Buddhism is true. He was also into podcasting, long before it was called, having helped set up bloggingheads.tv in 2005, and since then, he has hosted the popular podcast, The Right Show. For that reason, today is a slightly unusual episode, and we plan to post it on both of our podcast feeds, which means

we'll aim to both ask and answer questions in roughly equal measure.

I guess so we'll see how that experiment goes.

Thanks to coming on the podcast and your own podcast, Bob.

Yeah, well, thanks for having me, and you can now thank me for having you, I guess.

Yeah, on my end, I hope we'll get to chat about your views on how to reduce the risk of global catastrophes and whether or not I should start meditating. But first off, I guess I'm curious to know. How would you define effective atchism in your mind? And what do you kind of currently like and like and dislike about what you've heard of it? Well, first of all, let me say. I'm really happy to have the chance to interrogate you about it,

partly because I want to kind of explore synergies between it and my own, my own current obsession,

which I call the Apocalypse aversion project, in which I write about in my newsletter on

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