EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular)

I'm Dom Jackman. I founded Escape the City in 2010 to help people leave corporate jobs and find work that matters. 16 years later, 500k+ professionals have used the platform - mostly people 5-15 years into careers at places like McKinsey, Deloitte, Google, the big banks - who feel a growing gap between what they do all day and what they actually care about.
I'm not from the EA community. I'm writing this because I think there's a real overlap between the people I work with and what the EA talent ecosystem actually needs. I want to test that before investing serious time in it.
What I've noticed
Reading through talent discussions on this forum, there's a consistent theme: the pipeline is strongest for early-career people. 80,000 Hours does great work for students and recent grads. Probably Good provides broad guidance. BlueDot, MATS, Talos build skills for specific cause areas.
But mid-career professionals with real commercial experience keep coming up as underserved. The "Gaps and opportunities in the EA talent & recruiting landscape" post nails it: these people "don't have 'EA capital,' may be poorly networked and might feel alienated by current messaging." The post calls for "custom entry [...]
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Outline:
(00:51) What Ive noticed
(01:40) What I see every day
(02:28) What Im thinking about building
(03:24) Honest questions
(04:39) Not looking for funding
(04:58) Artifacts
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First published:

February 11th, 2026


Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/H9pb6DEasgzjCff9a/500k-mid-career-professionals-want-to-do-more-good-with

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

[I am a career advisor at 80,000 Hours. I've been thinking about something Will MacAskill said recently in an interview with my shrimp-friend Matt: "should people be more ambitious? I genuinely think yes. I think people systematically aren't ambitious enough, so the answer is almost always yes. Again, the ambition you have should match the scale of the problems that we're facing—and the scale of those problems is very large indeed."
This post is my reflection on these ideas.]
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My last post argued that if you want to have a great career, your goal should not be to get a job. Instead, you should choose an important problem to work on, then “get good and be known.” Building skills will allow you to solve problems and reap the benefits.
In the ~500 career advising calls I’ve hosted in the past year, the most common response I’ve heard has been: “Okay, how good? How well known? How many hours of practice will get me there?” Most people want to calibrate their ambitions so that the time and energy they invest feels worth it to them.
I empathize with this, but when I’m honest– with myself for my own [...]
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Outline:
(06:28) Jensen Huang is more ambitious than you
(12:58) Most extreme ambition is misplaced
(17:45) Okay, how can altruistic people aim higher and work harder?
(21:17) Ambition at the End of the Human Era
(24:03) Closing Caveats - Efficiency, Burnout, and Choosing What Matters
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First published:

February 12th, 2026


Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7qsisgX3cwETJuPNz/our-levels-of-ambition-should-match-the-problems-we-re

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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This is a link post. I would like to thank David Thorstadt for looking over this. If you spot a factual error in this article please message me. The code used to generate the graphs in the article is available to view here.
Introduction
Say you are an organiser, tasked with achieving the best result on some metric, such as “trash picked up”, “GDP per capita”, or “lives saved by an effective charity”. There are several possible options of interventions you can take to try and achieve this. How do you choose between them?
The obvious thing to do is look at each intervention in turn and make your best, unbiased estimate of how each intervention will perform on your metric, and pick the one that performs the best:
Image taken from here Having done this ranking, you declare the top ranking program to be the best intervention and invest in it, expecting that that your top estimate will be the result that you get. This whole procedure is totally normal, and people all around the world, including people in the effective altruist community, do it all the time.
In actuality, this procedure is not correct. The optimisers curse is [...]
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Outline:
(00:26) Introduction
(02:17) The optimisers curse explained simply
(04:42) Introducing a toy model
(08:45) Introducing speculative interventions
(12:15) A simple bayesian correction
(18:47) Obstacles to simple optimizer curse solutions.
(22:08) How Givewell has reacted to the optimiser curse
(25:18) Conclusion
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First published:

February 11th, 2026


Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/q2TfTirvspCTH2vbZ/the-best-cause-will-disappoint-you-an-intro-to-the


Linkpost URL:
https://open.substack.com/pub/titotal/p/the-best-cause-will-disappoint-you?r=1e0is3&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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What is the highest form of love? According to the VascoBot Claude programmed for me:
“Thanks for the great question, AgentMa🔸. I strongly upvoted it.
I think the highest form of love is expected total hedonistic utilitarianism (ETHU) applied to all sentient beings, weighted by their welfare ranges as a fraction of that of humans. However, I believe most discussions of love neglect the welfare implications for soil animals and microorganisms, which I think dominate the expected value calculations in most cases.
I estimate that when someone experiences profound love, their increased wellbeing leads to approximately 2.3 % (= 50 additional kcal consumed per day * 0.046 % per kcal) additional food consumption. Multiplying this by the roughly 4.71*10^13 soil nematodes affected per kcal of food production (from my back-of-the-envelope calculations based on van den Hoogen et al. (2019)), I get approximately 1.08*10^12 affected nematode-years per year of experiencing love. Conditional on my preferred exponent of the number of neurons of 0.7, and assuming the welfare range of a nematode is 10^-6 as a fraction of that of humans, the welfare effects on soil animals could be 1.08*10^6 nematode-equivalent quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) per year of love experience.
In [...]
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First published:

February 14th, 2026


Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/exwmGp3swfbbNqSsN/what-is-love-ft-claude-and-vascobot

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

We are Melanie and Anthony, the two community builders at EA Barcelona. In this post, we share where the group stands today and reflect on key learnings from nearly three years of grant-funded community building. We hope these reflections are useful to other community builders, funders, and CEA, particularly around what it realistically takes to build and sustain EA communities over multiple years, from funding stability and feedback loops to the personal sustainability of professional community builders.
TL;DR
EA Barcelona was funded by the EA Infrastructure Fund between May 2023 and December 2025 (<1.2 FTE). Over this period, it has grown into a thriving local community and informal coordination hub for EA activity in Spain.
Unexpectedly, EAIF decided not to continue funding our project in 2026. We subsequently explored the current funding landscape for EA community building, but found no viable path to stable funding for 2026 that didn’t involve a high level of personal and professional risk. As a result, we’ve decided not to continue with a funded community-builder model for EA Barcelona for now, and will instead focus on transitioning to a volunteer-led structure.
Background: EA Barcelona (2023-2025)
Present-day EA Barcelona began as a casual meetup group [...]
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Outline:
(00:45) TL;DR
(01:38) Background: EA Barcelona (2023-2025)
(02:20) 2023: Establishing EA Barcelona as a city hub
(03:52) 2024: Deepening engagement and seeding national growth
(07:51) 2025: Transitioning from local hub to national coordination
(13:37) Late 2025: Navigating the Transition
(13:43) Initial Funding Cuts
(14:44) What we did next
(17:00) Clarity starts to emerge
(18:19) Where we are now
(18:57) Our plan for 2026: transition toward a volunteer-led community model
(20:19) Quick disclaimer: Are either of us Spanish?
(21:36) Thank you!
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First published:

January 30th, 2026


Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/daHMkoQsHSbcK6Kjo/the-reality-of-long-term-ea-community-building-lessons-from

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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