Popular movies sometimes feature leagues of superheroes who are ready to defend the Earth against catastrophe. In this episode, we’re going to be discussing some real-life superheroes, as chronicled in the new book by our guest, Tom Ough. The book is entitled “The Anti-Catastrophe League: The Pioneers And Visionaries On A Quest To Save The World”. Some of these heroes are already reasonably well known, but others were new to David, and, he suspects, to many of the book’s readers.

Tom is a London-based journalist. Earlier in his career he worked in newspapers, mostly for the Telegraph, where he was a staff feature-writer and commissioning editor. He is currently a senior editor at UnHerd, where he commissions essays and occasionally writes them. Perhaps one reason why he writes so well is that he has a BA in English Language and Literature from Oxford University, where he was a Casberd scholar.

Selected follow-ups:

About Tom Ough
The Anti-Catastrophe League - The book's webpage
On novel methods of pandemic prevention
What is effective altruism? (EA)
Sam Bankman-Fried - Wikipedia (also covers FTX)
Open Philanthropy
Conscium
Here Comes the Sun - book by Bill McKibben
The 10 Best Beatles Songs (Based on Streams)
Carrington Event - Wikipedia
Mirror life - Wikipedia
Future of Humanity Institute 2005-2024: final report - by Anders Sandberg
Oxford FHI Global Catastrophic Risks - FHI Conference, 2008
Forethought
Review of Nick Bostrom’s Deep Utopia - by Calum
DeepMind and OpenAI claim gold in International Mathematical Olympiad
What the Heck is Hubble Tension?
The Decade Ahead - by Leopold Aschenbrenner
AI 2027
Anglofuturism

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration

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Real-life superheroes and troubled institutions, with Tom Ough