Podcasts · Suspicious Minds: AI and the Apocalypse

Moral Insurance (Part Two)

· 56 min · S2 E19

Episode Moral Insurance (Part Two)

0:00 56:28

The Secretary of War called it “defective altruism.” The New York Post called it a cult. The Economist put it on the cover and called it the most important social movement of the century. Hardly anyone in America has heard of it. So for this episode I did what I should have done before Part One: I sat down with an effective altruist.

Richard Yetter Chappell is a philosophy professor at the University of Miami and the author of the blog Good Thoughts. He’d heard what our critics said last week, and he came ready to answer them: the charge that these are pro-extinctionist movements, “suffering now, paradise later,” and whether caring about future people means caring less about the people in front of you. Then the math also takes us somewhere strange, with a writer who argues that the welfare of insects outweighs the welfare of humans.

We ask Richard the tough question: is effective altruism a cult? Then we follow the money. Émile Torres names the billionaires. Malo Bourgon of MIRI tells me who actually funds him. Ed Simon says the whole thing is a way of never changing anything. And I put the Bill Gates problem to Richard: taxed and spent democratically, or Gates decides?

Also: that time our ancestors nearly went extinct, Pulvermacher’s electric chain and the Singularity Summit I should have attended.

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Host and Creator: Sean King O'Grady

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Guests:

Richard Yetter Chappell — Professor of Philosophy, University of Miami / Author of the blog Good Thoughts — https://www.goodthoughts.blog/

Émile Torres — Philosopher and historian of science / Author, Human Extinction: A History of the Science and Ethics of Annihilation — https://www.realtimetechpocalypse.com/

Ed Simon — Writer, cultural critic, and professor at Carnegie Mellon / Author, The Dove and the Dragon: A Cultural History of the Apocalypse — https://amzn.to/4dVMYQb

Malo Bourgon — CEO, Machine Intelligence Research Institute — https://intelligence.org

Other works and things mentioned:

Pete Hegseth, the Pentagon and Anthropic (Feb 2026) — NPR/WBUR report: https://www.wbur.org/npr/nx-s1-5725327/pentagon-anthropic-hegseth-safety

The New York Post on effective altruism and newsrooms (Sept 2026), drawing on Semafor's Dec 2025 report on the Tarbell Center — https://nypost.com/2026/05/14/media/cult-like-effective-altruism-spreading-its-message-among-the-influential-with-80-journalists-embedded-at-top-news-orgs/

The Nation, David Futrelle on effective altruism (Sept 23, 2026) — https://www.thenation.com/article/society/effective-altruism-trump-ai/

The Economist cover story on effective altruism (early Oct 2026; syndicated as "Effective altruism conquered the world, and may yet end it") — https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/10/01/effective-altruism-is-this-centurys-biggest-idea

Rethink Priorities, how many Americans have heard of effective altruism (2022) — https://rethinkpriorities.org/research-area/how-many-people-have-heard-of-effective-altruism/

On the ideas:

Hu et al., "Genomic inference of a severe human bottleneck during the Early to Middle Pleistocene transition," Science (Aug 31, 2023) — https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq7487

Bentham's Bulldog, the insects post (Substack, Sept 2026) — newsletter:…

Links in the notes 20

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