2025 Highlight-o-thon: Oops! All Bests

2025 Highlight-o-thon: Oops! All Bests

It’s that magical time of year once again — highlightapalooza! Stick around for one top bit from each episode we recorded this year, including:

  • Kyle Fish explaining how Anthropic’s AI Claude descends into spiritual woo when left to talk to itself
  • Ian Dunt on why the unelected House of Lords is by far the best part of the British government
  • Sam Bowman’s strategy to get NIMBYs to love it when things get built next to their houses
  • Buck Shlegeris on how to get an AI model that wants to seize control to accidentally help you foil its plans

…as well as 18 other top observations and arguments from the past year of the show.

Links to learn more, video, and full transcript: https://80k.info/best25

It's been another year of living through history, whether we asked for it or not. Luisa and Rob will be back in 2026 to help you make sense of whatever comes next — as Earth continues its indifferent journey through the cosmos, now accompanied by AI systems that can summarise our meetings and generate adequate birthday messages for colleagues we barely know.

Chapters:

  • Cold open (00:00:00)
  • Rob's intro (00:02:35)
  • Helen Toner on whether we're racing China to build AGI (00:03:43)
  • Hugh White on what he'd say to Americans (00:06:09)
  • Buck Shlegeris on convincing AI models they've already escaped (00:12:09)
  • Paul Scharre on a personal experience in Afghanistan that influenced his views on autonomous weapons (00:15:10)
  • Ian Dunt on how unelected septuagenarians are the heroes of UK governance (00:19:06)
  • Beth Barnes on AI companies being locally reasonable, but globally reckless (00:24:27)
  • Tyler Whitmer on one thing the California and Delaware attorneys general forced on the OpenAI for-profit as part of their restructure (00:28:02)
  • Toby Ord on whether rich people will get access to AGI first (00:30:13)
  • Andrew Snyder-Beattie on how the worst biorisks are defence dominant (00:34:24)
  • Eileen Yam on the most eye-watering gaps in opinions about AI between experts and the US public (00:39:41)
  • Will MacAskill on what a century of history crammed into a decade might feel like (00:44:07)
  • Kyle Fish on what happens when two instances of Claude are left to interact with each other (00:49:08)
  • Sam Bowman on where the Not In My Back Yard movement actually has a point (00:56:29)
  • Neel Nanda on how mechanistic interpretability is trying to be the biology of AI (01:03:12)
  • Tom Davidson on the potential to install secret AI loyalties at a very early stage (01:07:19)
  • Luisa and Rob discussing how medicine doesn't take the health burden of pregnancy seriously enough (01:10:53)
  • Marius Hobbhahn on why scheming is a very natural path for AI models — and people (01:16:23)
  • Holden Karnofsky on lessons for AI regulation drawn from successful farm animal welfare advocacy (01:21:29)
  • Allan Dafoe on how AGI is an inescapable idea but one we have to define well (01:26:19)
  • Ryan Greenblatt on the most likely ways for AI to take over (01:29:35)
  • Updates Daniel Kokotajlo has made to his forecasts since writing and publishing the AI 2027 scenario (01:32:47)
  • Dean Ball on why regulation invites path dependency, and that's a major problem (01:37:21)


Video and audio editing: Dominic Armstrong, Milo McGuire, Luke Monsour, and Simon Monsour
Music: CORBIT
Coordination, transcripts, and web: Katy Moore

Episoder(333)

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#106 – Cal Newport on an industrial revolution for office work

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#105 – Alexander Berger on improving global health and wellbeing in clear and direct ways

#105 – Alexander Berger on improving global health and wellbeing in clear and direct ways

The effective altruist research community tries to identify the highest impact things people can do to improve the world. Unsurprisingly, given the difficulty of such a massive and open-ended project,...

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#104 – Pardis Sabeti on the Sentinel system for detecting and stopping pandemics

#104 – Pardis Sabeti on the Sentinel system for detecting and stopping pandemics

When the first person with COVID-19 went to see a doctor in Wuhan, nobody could tell that it wasn’t a familiar disease like the flu — that we were dealing with something new. How much death and destru...

29 Jun 20212h 20min

#103 – Max Roser on building the world's best source of COVID-19 data at Our World in Data

#103 – Max Roser on building the world's best source of COVID-19 data at Our World in Data

History is filled with stories of great people stepping up in times of crisis. Presidents averting wars; soldiers leading troops away from certain death; data scientists sleeping on the office floor t...

21 Jun 20212h 22min

#102 – Tom Moynihan on why prior generations missed some of the biggest priorities of all

#102 – Tom Moynihan on why prior generations missed some of the biggest priorities of all

It can be tough to get people to truly care about reducing existential risks today. But spare a thought for the longtermist of the 17th century: they were surrounded by people who thought extinction w...

11 Jun 20213h 56min

#101 – Robert Wright on using cognitive empathy to save the world

#101 – Robert Wright on using cognitive empathy to save the world

In 2003, Saddam Hussein refused to let Iraqi weapons scientists leave the country to be interrogated. Given the overwhelming domestic support for an invasion at the time, most key figures in the U.S. ...

28 Mai 20211h 36min

#100 – Having a successful career with depression, anxiety and imposter syndrome

#100 – Having a successful career with depression, anxiety and imposter syndrome

Today's episode is one of the most remarkable and really, unique, pieces of content we’ve ever produced (and I can say that because I had almost nothing to do with making it!). The producer of this ...

19 Mai 20212h 51min

#99 – Leah Garcés on turning adversaries into allies to change the chicken industry

#99 – Leah Garcés on turning adversaries into allies to change the chicken industry

For a chance to prevent enormous amounts of suffering, would you be brave enough to drive five hours to a remote location to meet a man who seems likely to be your enemy, knowing that it might be an a...

13 Mai 20212h 26min

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