EAG Talks

Watch on YouTube For eighty years, nuclear weapons haven't been used. The reason? Deterrence, built on the assumption that leaders are rational, red lines are clear, and there's enough time to think before deciding. Now hypersonic missiles, cyber capabilities, and AI are eroding all three. Decision windows are shrinking from minutes to seconds, new pathways to miscalculation are opening...

Watch on YouTube How are emerging AI developments likely to impact animals in the coming years? The session highlights both opportunities and risks across areas such as precision livestock farming, alternative proteins, interspecies communication, wild-animal welfare, and long-term risks. It also introduces two strategies for influencing AI development to benefit animal well-being. The talk is ope...

Watch on YouTube What does it look like when effective altruism funding translates into measurable, large-scale policy impact? This talk shares how Charity Entrepreneurship (now Ambitious Impact (AIM)) incubator funding supported Movendi International and the Center for Alcohol Policy Solutions in developing the world's first investment case for alcohol policy, with Sri Lanka as the proving g...

Watch on YouTube Stefan once did daily argumentation analyses of articles on DN Debatt, Sweden's most widely read debate forum, grading them from 0 to 10. While he had expected to find errors, he was surprised by how basic they were. His critical thinking textbooks had focused on subtle fallacies, but on DN Debatt, the most common errors were bald assertions without any evidence and simply ig...

Watch on YouTube A fireside conversation with Bjørn Ihler on building a career in global security when there is no standard ladder to climb. Drawing on fifteen years between counter-terrorism, advisory work with world leaders and international organisations, founding and running The Khalifa Ihler Institute an international non-profit promoting peaceful and thriving communities, and founding Revont...

Watch on YouTube AI governance is a nascent field with no established playbook, and that's precisely why it needs people who can navigate ambiguity, map unfamiliar terrain, and move fast without a traditional mandate. This talk draws on a non-linear journey from historian to think-tank builder to show how adaptable expertise, the right conversations, and intellectual curiosity without the nee...

Watch on YouTube Biological risks represent some of the most consequential, pressing, and still underrepresented areas of existential risk work. This session offers an accessible entry point into the biosecurity field: why it matters, what makes certain threats globally catastrophic, and how the landscape is rapidly shifting. Starting with the foundations and history of general biosecurity and glo...

Watch on YouTube Frontier AI poses coordination challenges that no single government, institution, or research community can solve alone, yet the window for building durable international governance infrastructure is narrow and closing. This talk offers a ground-level account of what such coordination can look like in practice. Drawing on AI Safety Connect's work across the Paris and Delhi AI...

Watch on YouTube People get sick due to accidents, infections and around childbirth - and need urgent care to save their lives. Tragically, too many children and adults do not get such care. Most don't even need expensive care in an intensive care unit, they just need to receive the basics, the low-cost Essential Emergency and Critical Care (EECC), such as oxygen and essential treatments. If...

Watch on YouTube It's only in the last decade that it's become possible to measure happiness in a rigorous, scientific way, and to work out the best ways to improve it. Michael Plant and his team at the Happier Lives Institute have pioneered comparing charities by how much happiness they increase per euro spent, using WELLBYs. Focusing on wellbeing not only reveals that the best charitie...

Watch on YouTube A practical session on what makes a strong grant application, from how funders actually read proposals to the mistakes that sink otherwise promising projects. Come with questions, leave with a clearer sense of what it takes to get funded. Kiryl Shantyka serves as EAGx Coordinator at Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA). He manages grantmaking and strategic support for EAGx conferen...

Watch on YouTube For many people, deciding to give effectively could be the single most impactful decision they make, if they stick to it. In this session Sofie Sjöstrand goes over the why and how of effective giving, helping you avoid common pitfalls and create lasting impact. Sofie is the Executive Director of Ge Effektivt. With a background in fundraising, foreign aid and International Relation...

Watch on YouTube How do we do the most good? Most well-intentioned interventions have little measurable impact. A small number are vastly more effective than the rest. This session covers the core frameworks of effective altruism: identifying important, tractable and neglected problems; thinking about counterfactual and marginal impact; and weighing priorities across cause areas including global h...

Watch on YouTube The AI safety landscape can feel opaque from the outside: a dense network of organisations, research agendas, and entry points that isn't always easy to navigate. Drawing on his experience building Apart Research, Jaime maps the ecosystem: who the key players are, what they work on, and where people with different backgrounds can find a foothold. Whether you're a researc...

Watch on YouTube This session provides an overview of Ambitious Impact's (AIM) work to launch cost-effective organisations improving the world at scale. Over the last five years, AIM has launched more than 50 organisations improving the lives of upwards of 75 million people and 1 billion animals. This session explains how you can assess your fit as a potential founder, ways of developing skil...

Watch on YouTube In this session, we explores ten impactful career paths that go beyond traditional roles, focusing on leveraging skills, money, and networks for global impact. We covers options suited to different career stages. The second half will be an interactive session, where attendees brainstorm which of these options they might pursue, sparking ideas for meaningful change. Emil Wasteson W...

Watch on YouTube An introduction to alternative proteins and why they offer a high-impact, scalable solution to the challenges of factory farming. This session explores the case for alternative proteins, the state of the European industry, key policy opportunities and risks, and the role the Nordics can play in driving progress. Ellie works to accelerate the alternative protein ecosystem across th...

Watch on YouTube Attending your first EAGx Nordics can feel both exciting and overwhelming, hundreds of attendees, a packed schedule, and lots of opportunities to navigate. This session is designed to help you get oriented quickly and focus on what matters most. Max Onkenhout, Community Coordinator at EA Sweden, walks you through what EAGx Nordics is, why it exists, and how to approach it strategi...

Watch on YouTube Jeff Kaufman got into effective altruism before it even had a name. From 2009 to 2022, he and his wife, Julia Wise, donated 50% of their income, giving away over $2 million. Then, a conversation with someone from 80,000 Hours changed his trajectory. Jeff felt he could do more by applying his skills directly to help prevent catastrophic pandemics, rather than focusing on donations....

Watch on YouTube Michael Thatcher's career has been guided by a simple formula: "Follow your heart, use your head, and then go make a difference." This has taken him from professional musician and dancer, to oceanographic researcher, to tech executive. Today, Michael is the President and CEO of Charity Navigator. Michael sees Charity Navigator as the "top of the funnel" fo...

Watch on YouTube "We are much more powerful than we think." After finishing college in the Netherlands, Sjir Hoeijmakers knew he wanted to do something good with his career — but he didn't know what. At some point, he sat down and Googled "how can I make the world a happier place?" That search led him to Peter Singer's TED talk on effective altruism: his first exposur...

Watch on YouTube Kearney Capano always wanted to help others but nothing ever felt good enough. She would volunteer and work at nonprofits, but there were always more people to be helped, more suffering to address. In university, she joined a neuroscience lab studying people who donate one of their kidneys to a complete stranger — trying to understand what drives that kind of selflessness. That&#x...

Watch on YouTube "If you want to make the world a better place, just start by thinking about what the world needs and then figure out how your passion can meet that." In 2016, Arden Koehler was a philosophy PhD student at NYU, studying metaethics. She was considering a career as a “middling academic philosopher.” She might write something great someday, but even if she did, she didn&#x27...

Watch on YouTube “If you want to do good in the world and you don't know how, you're not alone.“ At 22, Will MacAskill had a problem: he had lots of pent-up moral energy, but didn’t know where to direct it. He was planning to become a philosophy professor but felt a duty to do more to help the world’s poorest people. Then he met Toby Ord. Toby had been working on an idea called Giving Wh...

Watch on YouTube Lincoln Quirk attended his first effective altruism conference in 2013, back when it was 50 people in a house in Oakland. He was already a startup founder, but the effective altruism movement helped him orient toward building something for the poorest people in the world. Labor migration — traveling from a poor country to a rich country, making more money, and sending it home — is...