Effective Altruism Australia is launching a new podcast—designed for a broad audience
More Than Good is a new podcast from Effective Altruism Australia, aimed at introducing the ideas and principles of effective altruism to a broader audience. The episodes are framed around moral questions and how people think about doing good, covering topics like global inequality, animal welfare, ethics, philosophy and more.
For a global movement, there is relatively little content that is accessible for people who are unfamiliar with EA’s ideas, or who want an easier introduction. There is also limited content from “Effective Altruism” branded organisations that is deliberately designed to be a first point of contact. We have deliberately designed More Than Good to fill this gap, including making it suitable for short form video to grow casual engagement on platforms like Instagram and LinkedIn.
Our theory of change is that the podcast will introduce people to key ideas in effective altruism and create a positive impression of the movement as one that thinks hard about how to do good. We hope this flows through to people wanting to learn more—whether that’s donating via our platform, signing up to an intro course, or joining another community program.
We expect to measure success via engagement and reach, as well as flow-through effects to our website, donations and community programmes. Transparently, these projects are hard to measure directly—a lot of the benefit is increased awareness and positive sentiment, which is difficult for a small organisation to track. But we think this matters. EA has, in our view, underinvested in brand building because it’s hard to measure, and we think that’s been a mistake. Building a more known and trusted brand will make future media and growth activities easier.
We’ve just released our first episode, featuring:
Peter Singer—Moral philosopher
Yip Fai Tse—AI and animal ethics researcher
Krystian Seibert—Executive Director, Policy and Sector Development at Philanthropy Australia
Grace Adams—CEO of Effective Altruism Australia
Amy Aela—Host
We’ve recorded six episodes for the initial season, released every 4–6 weeks throughout the year. If successful, we plan to record a second season around EAGxAustralasia. Episodes range from 45 minutes to 1 hour 20 minutes.
Our first episode just went live:
Follow us on YouTube. You can also follow EA Australia on Instagram and LinkedIn—and please do share the podcast with friends or family who might be curious about doing good but aren’t sure where to start. That’s exactly who we made it for.
Liking, commenting and sharing the podcast short form videos is a great way to help it surface to your networks (which will include a lot of the people we’re hoping to reach).
Here’s the trailer for episode one which you might like to share on Linkedin!
And a reel on Instagram from the episode.
We welcome feedback—though if you’re an engaged EA, keep in mind it’s not meant to be the 80,000 Hours podcast. 😉
Really excited for this! The show isn’t showing up on my podcast app (Podcast Addict). Is there a direct RSS feed link available?
Thanks Jacob! Give this a go: https://anchor.fm/s/11209b150/podcast/rss
Great stuff, congrats on launching! Curious how you funded it—EA Australia’s general budget or a specific grant? Asking because we explored something similar at EAN and would love to compare notes. Happy to take it to DM if easier :)
We’ve funded it from our general budget! Let’s catch up at EAG London (if you’re going) and we can chat more!
Nice! I’ll be there, see you then :)
From your experience, are there systematic or structural differences in the effective altruism and evidence-based development communities in Australia compared to other high-income Western countries? If so, what do you think drives those differences, and how has your approach to communications and engagement within Australia adapted as a result?
My hypothesis is that Australia’s relative geographic isolation, and perhaps certain historic patterns of broader insularity, may mean that global development and health topics require a different kind of conversation to build empathy for places that feel more distant. This is speculative, though, so I’d genuinely welcome your perspective.
I’m going to rattle off some loose thoughts (mostly just speculation and intuition) - but I think this deserves a deeper interrogation another time:
- I think Australia’s takes on EA and to some extent evidence-based development are influenced by Peter Singer. Many university educated people are aware of Peter and his work—this is an outlier globally! I think this has driven outsized early interest in effective altruism
- I think the fact that Australia has more economic/social equality than other comparative countries like US and UK probably means that Aussies perceive ourselves as “lucky” comparative to other countries—and I think are less likely to default to “charity begins at home”. (I don’t think this is sufficient to drive action, but maybe is a useful factor)
- A high proportion of Aussies are either first or second gen migrants—I wonder how that interacts with seeing/feeling the need—I think there’s lots to explore here—for example some of my Indian / Chinese friends think that development is likely best done through growing the economy as this is how their parents moved from poverty to wealth.
Love seeing this! Please do keep us updated on how it works. I had a similar idea, and I am interested in knowing how this progresses. Bringing EA to a larger audience is one of the most pressing things we need to work on right now. Congratulations to Grace and the rest of the team.
Thanks so much Paula!
So cool!
Fantastic, I think it’s an excellent idea to get more introductory content out there. I was wondering if it will also be released on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, the other two big podcasting platforms? Congratulations!
Thanks so much! Spotify linked above and we’re looking into broader distribution!
What a great idea! As someone still relatively new to EA, I can’t believe I never heard about it until last year. There is so much potential to bring EA to wider audiences. I’ll be sure to share the podcast 😊
Thanks so much, Leonie! I totally agree!