Audio narrations of academic papers by Nick Bostrom.
We'll probably also share other audio e.g. interviews and talks.
There is no formal affiliation between Nick Bostrom and this project. Bostrom has granted us permission to record his papers, and we've heard that he and his team are enthusiastic about the project.
Feedback? Suggestions? Complaints? We'd love to hear from you. Write to team@radiobostrom.com.
Like the show? Please help out!
Some ideas for how to do this are listed below.
Team
Advisors
Support our work
If you like the show, we'd really appreciate your support. Three quick ways you can help:
- Leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- Tell at least 3 friends about the show.
- Tell us how we could improve the narrations, or what other episode formats you'd like in the future.
For more ideas, see the Effective Altruism Forum announcement.
Stats
You can see our live website analytics data, as collected by Plausible.io.
We'll start sharing download stats and other engagement and impact metrics soon...
Progress to date
2022
19 July: Peter Hartree wrote "Increase reads of Bostrom papers" brainstorm, shared for comment.
25 July: Peter met Matt van der Merwe (Bostrom's assistant) and confirmed that he and Bostrom were excited about project. Also that the podcast and audio will be linked from Bostrom's website.
26 July: Peter shared "Radio Bostrom" funding application for comment.
26 July: Funding secured.
26 July: Shaun Acker recruited to the narration team.
29 July: Chloé Calonec recruited to help with visual identity and design.
1 August: First episode recording completed.
1 August: First release of radiobostrom.com.
1 August: First draft of visual identity complete (thanks Chloé!). Podcast feed setup and submitted to major directories.
1 August: Perrin Walker recruited to the narration team, and as advisor.
1 August: Katy Moore recruited for audio proofing.
2 August: Conor Barnes recruited for help with web development.
5 August: Team is now 6 people, plus 2 advisors.
8 August: Three more episodes released to podcast feed. This makes 4 episodes in total for the soft-launch.
10 August: Soft-launch to the EA Forum.
12 August: 2-day review of soft launch:
- Metrics:
- EA Forum karma: 66
- LessWrong linkpost karma: 2 (!)
- All-time website visitors: ~500
- Downloads (Buzzsprout): 386
- Spotify followers: 24
- Spotify streams: 23
- Earned media:
- Unsolicited tweet from @StefanFSchubert, via Future Matters newsletter.
- The tweet got 58 likes, 15 retweets and a reply from Dwarkesh Patel. Several likes came from people with >5K followers (Matt Clifford, Ben Todd, Joseph Walker, Anders Sandberg).
- Other developments:
- ~10 expressions of enthuasism, no criticism, only one substantive suggestion for improvement.
- Ranking well on Google for Radio Bostrom.
- Comment:
- After 2 days, it looks like the podcast was received somewhat better than I expected (especially on Twitter).
- No one has raised major issues, which is probably a good sign.
- Main disappointment is a surprising flop for the LessWrong linkpost.
- We'll hard-launch when we have 10+ episodes, and the introduction series. I expect the hard-launch to get more than 10x the attention within 14 days, so it seems like we're on track to get >2K Buzzsprout downloads and several hundred Spotify followers within 14 days of hard-launch.
23 August: Buzzsprout reports 1000 episode downloads.
23 August: Episode #10 released.
29 August: Launch of the “Introduction to Nick Bostrom” series (tweet). Featured on Marginal Revolution.
29 August: Episode #15 released.
5 September: Buzzsprout reports 5000 episode downloads.
6 September: Radio Bostrom featured in Effective Ideas Blog Prize digest.
8 September: Launch tweet received 22K impressions, 93 likes, 32 retweets and 362 link clicks. Plausible.io website analytics reports 2.3K all time unique visitors with average visit duration 2.5 mins and average 2.5 pageviews per visit. EA Forum launch post for the intro series has 55 karma.
8 September: Episode #20 released. Including the introduction to the intro series, we‘ve released 21 episodes since Radio Bostrom was funded (44 days ago). That‘s an episode every ~2 days, on average.
1 October: People want more narrations. So: Peter, Perrin and Katy commit to a new, more ambitious narration project. Within 1 year, TYPE III AUDIO will release 500 hours of narration related to effective altruism and longtermism. Seed funding and first big sale secured ($300K USD). Let‘s go!
4 October: Narration for season 1 complete! We‘ve released 27 papers since Radio Bostrom was funded, 70 days ago. That‘s one paper every three days.
4 October: Buzzsprout reports 8.5K episode downloads.