Existential Risk

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Toby Ord about preserving the long term future of humanity. They discuss moral biases with respect to distance in space and time, the psychology of effective altruism, feeling good vs. doing good, possible blindspots in consequentialism, natural vs. human-caused risk, asteroid impacts, nuclear war, pandemics, the potentially cosmic significance of human survival, the difference between bad things and the absence of good things, population ethics, Derek Parfit, the asymmetry between happiness and suffering, climate change, and other topics.

Toby Ord is a philosopher at Oxford University, working on the big picture questions facing humanity. He is focused on the ethics of global poverty and is one of the co-founders of the Effective Altruism movement in which thousands of people are using reason and evidence to help the lives of others. Along with William MacAskill, Toby created the online society, Giving What We Can, for people to join this mission, and together its members have pledged over $1.5 billion to the most effective charities.

His current research is on the risks that threaten human extinction or the permanent collapse of civilization, otherwise known as existential risk. Toby has advised the World Health Organization, the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, the US National Intelligence Council, and the UK Prime Minister’s Office.

Toby’s new book The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity explores the cutting-edge science behind the risks we face. He puts risks in the context of the greater story of humanity, showing how ending these risks is among the most pressing moral issues of our time. Toby also points the way forward to the actions and strategies that can safeguard humanity.

Join neuroscientist, philosopher, and best-selling author Sam Harris as he explores important and controversial questions about the human mind, society, and current events.

Sam Harris is the author of five New York Times bestsellers. His books include The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, The Moral Landscape, Free Will, Lying, Waking Up, and Islam and the Future of Tolerance (with Maajid Nawaz). The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction. His writing and public lectures cover a wide range of topics—neuroscience, moral philosophy, religion, meditation practice, human violence, rationality—but generally focus on how a growing understanding of ourselves and the world is changing our sense of how we should live.

Harris's work has been published in more than 20 languages and has been discussed in The New York Times, Time, Scientific American, Nature, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, and many other journals. He has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Economist, The Times (London), The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, The Annals of Neurology, and elsewhere.

Sam Harris received a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA.