Benjamin Todd
speaker
4,140 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2023
last heard 28 May
Benjamin Todd’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
But valuable as these careers are, we felt like there might be even higher impact options out there.
For instance, we recognised that some of the highest impact people in history came from different fields.
Martin Luther King Jr.
was a pastor who shaped the US civil rights movement.
Marie Curie was a scientist who pioneered life-saving medical technologies through her research into radioactivity.
Since founding 80,000 Hours, our team has spoken to hundreds of experts, spent hundreds of hours reading the relevant literature, and conducted our own analyses of the many job options available.
We still have a lot to learn, these questions are difficult to settle, and we've made some mistakes, but we don't think anyone else has spent as long researching these topics as we have.
Among the things we've learned, if you want a satisfying career, follow your passion can be misleading advice.
You might be able to do more good as a bureaucrat than a charity worker, and many conventional approaches to making the world a better place don't actually work.
We've also come up with more research-backed and hopefully better ways to approach age-old questions like how to figure out what you're good at and how to be more successful.
One of the most important things we've learned is that if lots of people already work on an issue, the best opportunities to help are more likely to have already been taken.
But that means the most common and popular issues to work on, like health and education in rich countries, are precisely not the ones where you can have the biggest impact.
Instead, you need to find something more unconventional.
At the same time, we found real ways to help with important neglected problems.
For instance, by focusing on the world's poorest people, it's really possible to save hundreds of lives while doing work you enjoy too.
We've even found that our generation faces issues that could affect the entire future of civilization, and that relatively few people focus on them.
This includes issues such as pandemics even worse than COVID-19, and the creation of smarter-than-human AI, which we've been recommending people work on since 2014.
As of today, thousands of people have significantly changed their career plans based on our advice.
Some of them are researching ways to prevent the next pandemic.
Some are working on neglected areas of government policy.
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