Rob Wiblin:
And then after a while, yeah, we managed to get this maybe worse spot. A real estate agent. We'll stick up some photos to what that was like for people. 

Benjamin Todd:
You'd have to walk past these real estate agents just to get into the office. 

Rob Wiblin:
We must have driven them insane because. 

Benjamin Todd:
There's a lot of people out the back. Yeah, yeah. 

Rob Wiblin:
All of these, like, young interns, people who've flown in from all around the world, just coming, constantly walking through this estate agent, because it's basically just like their back room that for some reason, they were renting out. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah. Like, one of our early donors came when we gave him a tour, and when he came into the office, his first reaction was, is this legal? 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah, I doubt it, because it was kind of... 

Benjamin Todd:
Like ten people or like eight people in this tiny room. 

Rob Wiblin:
Hey, listeners. Rob here, head of research at 80,000 Hours. Last year, our CEO, Benjamin Todd, stepped down after ten years straight leading 80,000 Hours, most of those years of which I was also around for. You might well be familiar with Benjamin's work, because he was the main author of our career guide, as well as the main author of many research pieces on our website. And he came on the 80,000 Hours podcast for episode 71, Benjamin Todd on the key ideas of 80,000 Hours, and again in 2020, for a conversation on the varieties of longtermism and things that we might be getting wrong. Among other topics, I thought that Benjamin passing the torch would be a nice moment to reminisce together about the history of our organisation, including how it got off the ground. 

You know, our scrappy early days, move to America and back, some of the highs that we've had and various mistakes we think that we've made along the way. I guess they call this an oral history, or at least it's the stuff we could still remember as of 2022. My memory of all those times keeps getting worse as the years go on. So the sooner we got down those memories, the less distorted I thought they'd be. Though the further things are away in time, the more nostalgia I seem to feel about them. So maybe I'll be telling my grandkids about our crazy office out the back of an estate agent when I'm 90. Fingers crossed. Note that this was recorded quite a long time ago, in June 2022, and a fair bit has happened since then. 

There's probably various different things that we might emphasise or talk about if we were recording now. I think this is actually by far the longest gap we've ever had from recording to releasing something. But given that this was all about getting down, you know, some long term history and it didn't feel super urgent, it kept getting bumped in favour of editing other interviews that did have more urgency to them. If you, listener, couldn't care less about 80,000 Hours as an organisation, this one probably isn't for you. But if you're considering starting a new nonprofit or a think tank, or otherwise promoting important ideas as a writer or community organiser, this might offer some useful insight into what it's like, or at least what it was like for us. 

Alternatively, if we've influenced your career or worldview, and you're just curious to know more about where this whole 80,000 Hours project and all of our ideas came from, how they've evolved over time, and what Ben and I are like as people, this also gives you some window into all of that. Separate from that, in a funny coincidence, 80,000 Hours is actually doing a hiring round to find a new CEO right now, because our previous CEO, Howie Lempel, is moving on to a role at Open Philanthropy. We're currently accepting expressions of interest in the role, and we're doing that until the 10th of December. So not that long in the future, and you want to get your expressions of interest in soon, if indeed you are interested. 

On top of that, there is a decent chance that we promote someone from within 80,000 Hours to become CEO, which would create a vacancy in another senior leadership position. So at the same time as we're soliciting expressions of interest in the CEO role, we're also asking people to let us know if they might be interested in becoming our director of internal systems, our website director, or our director of special projects, should one of those positions happen to open up. You can find the job ad for this on our website at 80,000hours.org/latest. Or if you google 80,000 Hours work with us, that should bring you to a page listing all of our vacancies, both now and anytime. 

I'll say a little about the role at the end of the episode, and there really is plenty to say, but if you really want to know about it, I suggest you just go and read that proper job description on our website. There really is plenty to say. All right, without further ado, I bring you Benjamin Todd. 


So I hope we'll get to talk about the 80,000 Hours organisational journey over the last 12 years or so, as well as some of the important lessons that we've learned through our various different successes and mistakes. But first, tell me a bit about what you were doing, I suppose, before you got involved with all of this. So suppose this, you were at Oxford in 2007, eight or so, yeah. 

Benjamin Todd:
So I'd wanted to kind of like do good in some type of vague way for a long time and going back to, I think, when I was a teenager. One of the earliest things I can remember was somehow I came across the IPCC report. So the summary of the expert consensus on climate change. I think maybe I was reading these blogs about the climate debate and I read all that and I was just like, whoa, climate change is totally an important thing. Why is no one doing anything about it? This makes so much sense. So I made a summary of the IPCC reports as a series of posters and got them put up on the wall in my school, trying to hopefully persuade some of the other students to care about climate change as well. Obviously convinced no one. 

Rob Wiblin:
Okay. 

Benjamin Todd:
But that was maybe like one of my first kind of proto EA things I did. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah. I remember going, just walking around the streets putting, I think, like negative flyers about huge cars on four wheel drives in Australia. I think that's one of my early memories of an extremely inefficient activity. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah. I mean, I could see that kind of working, though. Maybe it just hardens people against you. Like, fuck this guy kind of reaction. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah, I expect it probably doesn't cause people to sell their cars very often. Okay, so that was kind of high school. What kind of opinions do you develop at university? 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah, I mean, I remained pretty kind of climate change focused for a while. And just as I left high school, I did like an environmental audit of my school as well and was saying we could design the buildings to be sustainable, and here's how we could have air circulation that didn't require energy input and like, should we get solar panels? And yeah, the result of that was also like, my head, the deputy headmaster, writing back and saying like, we have started an organic garden. 

Rob Wiblin:
Were you happy about that? 

Benjamin Todd:
Well, no, I mean, the whole report was kind of like, I was quite influenced by David Mackay, I think by then already. So I was already being like, we need to focus on like, the big things. 

Rob Wiblin:
Right. This is a physicist who wrote this famous book about what is actually causing climate change by the numbers. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah, it's called Sustainability Without the Hot Air. And it's about like, how can we have a plan that actually adds up in reducing our CO2 emissions as much as we need? 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah. So the organic garden did not fully satisfy you. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah. And so I think when I then arrived at university, I was, like, kind of searching for something. So I would go to loads of talks, and I guess I got involved with, like, I would. I went to the Oxford Radical Forum, which was, like, super left wing politics stuff. And I kept on doing climate advocacy stuff a bit. So one day we arranged a thing where we tried to get as many professors to give a lecture relating their subject to climate change. So it was like, philosophy of climate change, physics of climate change, economics of climate change. And we got, like, a bunch of people to do these, just kind of, like, trying to spread awareness, not super strategically. But then one of these talks I went to was then Toby Ord. There was these, every Wednesday, I think, our chaplain at college would have a talk where we'd all sit on the floor and eat, like, free food. And. Yeah, one day I was, like, sitting on the floor watching Toby. And he gave his taking charity seriously talk, which is the one where he kind of, it's the founding talk of Giving What We Can. And he leads you through, like, well, this idea of a QALY. So, like, a year of quality, just a year of healthy life. Talks about how, like, the NHS will save QALYs for 20,000 pounds, $30,000, and gives you this really strong sense of, like, wow, this is, like, a really valuable thing. And then he kind of shows that, like, okay, there's things you could do that are ten times more cost effective than that. 

And then, like, ten times more cost effective than that again. And then if you focus on the very best things, it's, like, potentially, like, a thousand times more cost effective. And he kind of has this series of graphs that just really delivers this message. And then he's like, okay, and there's something you can actually do about this. There's the 10% Giving What We Can pledge. And I think I got convinced pretty much immediately. But I think about a week after, I signed the pledge and I was the first non founding member. So after the official launch, I was the first person who kind of signed on, who wasn't just one of Toby's friends who had joined beforehand. 

Rob Wiblin:
Very cool. So did this cause you to immediately kind of shift into effective altruism style work, or did you become kind of a close associate of Toby and friends at that point, or?

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah, no, I started kind of going to the Giving What We Can events, and I actually did. I guess this would have been quite a bit later, but I ended up doing my master's thesis with Toby as a supervisor. And I remember him early on telling me all about replaceability and I arranged a series of talks we had. At one point we experimented with the idea of positive ethics instead of effective altruism. So it was like the ethics of how to do good rather than not doing bad, which is what most. Kind of the analogy being positive psychology, because most ethics is about what you're prohibited from doing rather than what would. 

Rob Wiblin:
Be good to do. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah. In the same way that most of psychology is about avoiding mental illness rather than being more flourishing. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah. So this was in 2009. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah, that kind of would have then gone on for several years from 2009 onwards. So I think 2009 was the official launch of Giving What We Can. So I was like, at the launch party of that, and then there was kind of like groups and opportunities to volunteer. I should say, I did keep going with climate change stuff for a while through that. And then I think actually my first donation was to the 10 by 10 campaign, which wasn't an EA recommended charity, but it was like, it was a advocacy campaign to, I think it was to cut the UK's carbon emissions by 10% by 2010. 

Rob Wiblin:
Okay. We're getting quite late in the day to achieve that goal, I suppose. 

Benjamin Todd:
Well, I think the UK might well have succeeded in that goal because the UK has actually halved its carbon emissions per capita in the last 10, 20 years, which is pretty amazing. Yeah, yeah, I remember they got a whole like 747 plane and then they got it melted down and turned into dog tags which said 10 by 10 on them and they gave them out to their donors. So I got this, like, that's cool. And then, yeah, I was planning to then study like, the intersection of climate and economics. 

Rob Wiblin:
Okay. 

Benjamin Todd:
And so I did like a summer project in that intersection. I was really considering doing a PhD in that area and that was one of my career options. 

Rob Wiblin:
Okay. So the idea for 80,000 Hours itself kind of came together in 2011 at some point. This was all before I was involved, so I actually don't know the story here very well. I know there was some media campaign and some rush to set up the website, but, yeah, maybe you could talk us through that very early stage. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah, I think it would have been in 2010. So, like a year after the launch of Giving What We Can, and I was thinking about my career decisions and we just kind of. Yeah, I guess these ideas, there were all these ideas around, like earning to give and replaceability had both. I think they'd already been written up by Brian Tomasik on his blog already by then. And so these things were kind of being discussed in the proto effective altruism community. And then, you know, we just also knew that, like, it was pretty obvious implication from Giving What We Can, that if some charities are a thousand times more cost effective than others, then some career paths are presumably a thousand times more impactful than others. 

Just like, at the very least, by working at a more effective charity, rather than less effective charity, you could increase your impact by a thousand fold. And then also the idea of earning to give comes out very naturally. Another thing I was doing was finance, and I was involved with this investing competition around. I can't remember that. Maybe 2010, 2011. And I did two internships with Orbis, which was like a value investing company. So I was like, I could do earning to give, and I could do the climate economics PhD or maybe something else. 

Rob Wiblin:
These were different career paths. You were kind of weighing up and trying to figure out which one would be. Right, okay. Yeah, yeah. 

Benjamin Todd:
So that was that thinking. And then, so at one of these Giving What We Can, like, committee meetings, I was like, oh, I was thinking of giving a talk about which career is highest impact. And Will said, oh, I was thinking of giving the exact same talk. So we, like, wrote the talk together. 

Rob Wiblin:
Nice. Okay. 

Benjamin Todd:
That was. I think I remember us practicing it in my room in Balliol. Which is, like, also the college that Toby came from. So it's like, I think Balliol has, like, a special, like, EA claim, hasn't it? 

Rob Wiblin:
Also produced a ridiculous number of prime ministers. 

Benjamin Todd:
Oh, well, there's that, too. Including Boris. Yeah. The fourth one, for better or worse. 

Rob Wiblin:
How did the talk go, actually? What was in the talk? Yeah, you only would have had, like, a few days, I guess, to put this together? 

Benjamin Todd:
No, no, we probably put this together over, like, a month or something, just like, as a side project while we were studying. So I think that the original first ever talk is on YouTube, and the first section is basically an argument for why earning to give could be much higher impact than working directly in a non profit. And Will gave that section, and he also talked about how he'd decided to give away all of his money above... I think it's 20,000 post tax, inflation adjusted. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah. 

Benjamin Todd:
And then the second half of the talk, which no one remembered, was given by me. But that was where I talked about, like, could there be things even higher impact than earning to give? And I said, definitely. For instance, we talked about government and policy. We talked about how, by being a multiplier, you could do more and research as well. I think those were the four big parts: earning to give, research, government policy, advocacy. So that would have been February 2011. So, yeah, it was definitely never about earning to give, only just from the start. But there was just this very memorable first section where we say there's this new path, and it seems like maybe better than what people can conventionally think of his ethical careers. So that was like the really sticky bit. Yeah. 

Benjamin Todd:
And then I think Will then went on and gave this talk, at like a lot of different universities. 

Rob Wiblin:
I see. 

Benjamin Todd:
But, yeah, the very first talk was also the most important one because, yeah, I guess we've told this story before, but there was like, maybe like 20, 25 people in the audience, and depending on how you count it, maybe like six of them totally changed their careers. And now two of those people work at 80,000 Hours now, which is Roman and Habiba. And then a group of others, which was Richard Batty, Matt Gibb, Robbie Shade. I think it was Richard Batty who came up to Will after and was like, you should start an organisation about this. 

And so those three and Will and possibly some others I was forgetting, but at least that group of four then started what was called High Impact Careers over that summer. So that was like February. And then over the next few months, 80,000 Hours were started or. Yeah, High Impact Careers were started. 

Rob Wiblin:
Okay, so at that stage, it was called High Impact Careers. Yeah, yeah. Why was it called that? I suppose this is very natural, descriptive. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah, I see. I mean, that's more of a traditional effective altruism org name, isn't it? Do the really bland, like, exact description. 

Rob Wiblin:
Of what it does. Yeah. The Shrimp Welfare Project. Yeah. Classic new example. 

Benjamin Todd:
You've been going along about shrimp welfare recently. This is some kind of...? 

Rob Wiblin:
Just a personal passion of mine. Okay, so I know there's at some point you guys did a publicity campaign where you're trying to get in the media, or maybe the media came to you. Talk about that. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah. So I guess the Oxford term, I kind of like was a bit checked out for a few months, but then towards the end of the summer, maybe August, September, I got back involved and then became the CEO, though. I mean, didn't really. I don't know if that was even my title. But anyway, it was kind of like I was, like, responsible for it. Yeah. And so we. Yeah, we tried to get lots of people signed up at the freshers fair at Oxford. And I think that was actually when we made our kind of, like, most aggressive promotional materials where we had, like, I think we had maybe a poster of, like, doctor and a banker being like, who has more impact? 

And we also made these little, like, postcards, so one which is like, loads of stick people on them in different bright colours. And I think one. I think the best one said, like, one life saved, you're a hero or something. A million lives saved as a statistic. Which was like the reverse of the Stalin quote, right? 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah, I think it is Stalin. What was it? Yeah. One life is a tragedy. A million lives is a statistic. Yeah, yeah. I'm just imagining those materials and how much they must have wound people up. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah. So we definitely did get people just coming up and being like, what? Like, just really aren't really negative about it. Yeah. I mean, we also got people who were really interested in, like, oh, this makes total sense. So there was, like, a lot of people still signing up, were giving talks and they were well attended, and people were, like, saying they were changing their careers. And. Yeah, I mean, around that time, I hated the name, so we started a process to figure out a new name and, yeah, that was, like, one thing I would say about every decision to name an.org I've been involved with has been super painful, so I recommend avoiding it at all costs. But, yeah, we did a bunch of brainstorming. Like, they all sucked. 

And then I think the actual suggestion, I think it was this guy called Tom, who was kind of helping out really early on, and he suggested 70,000 Hours, which was the opening of a paper Will had written, a philosophy paper where he lays out the arguments for earning to give. And it starts, the opening line is, you have about 70,000 hours in your career. So he was like, what about 70,000 Hours? And I guess I think we pretty much immediately liked that name. So we put it on the list, voted, it won, and then I think I asked a bunch of people, including a poetry professor friend, is 70,000 Hours or 80,000 Hours better? And he was like, no, definitely 80,000 Hours. Like, it's just. The rhythm is so much, like 70,000 Hours. It's much harder to say than 80,000. And, like, I don't know, it's just the kind of round number is nice. 

Rob Wiblin:
Totally. Yeah. 

Benjamin Todd:
So we, like, quick. And we realised that, like, I think the maths actually maybe does round up to 80,000 hours. It depends on exactly which country... 

Rob Wiblin:
At what age you retire. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah. So we did that, and Will then actually edited the philosophy paper to open with 80,000 hours, because it's gonna have. 

Rob Wiblin:
To retract it and resubmit. Nice. Okay. Yeah. This is why you've always got to keep a poet around or maintain a diverse friendship group for people with different skills. Okay, so this is, I guess, did you name it in early 2011 or?

Benjamin Todd:
So this would have been the autumn of 2011. 

Rob Wiblin:
Okay. 

Benjamin Todd:
Like October or something. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah. So are we getting up to the publicity campaign and the rush to create a website? 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah. So that was November. Yeah. I guess one thing that 80,000 Hours benefited a lot from Giving What We Can, kind of having been there and been a few steps ahead of us, so Giving What We Can got tonnes of press early by basically being like, Oxford academics giving away all their money. The Oxford University Press media person had helped them do a press release and helped them get all that coverage. So we were just like, okay, well, let's use the same playbook for 80,000 Hours. So Will had his philosophy paper about earning to give. We were like, this can be a news story. The Oxford University Press service might help us promote it. 

And, like, basically that worked. I mean, yeah, I think there might be a story that I don't know all the details of, but, like, Niel kind of, like, made sure he, like, bumped into the press officer guy, like, at the pub. And pitched it to him. 

Rob Wiblin:
This is Niel Bowerman, somebody got involved quite early. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah, no, I mean, yeah, Niel did a lot to get, like, CEA going in the early days. And had, like, a tonne of hustle. Like, he'd advise the president of the Maldives on climate change and, like, set up a think tank while he was a grad student. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah, yeah. He had a lot of things on the boil. Okay, so what did that. What was the story, though, for the press here? I guess it's clearer. 

Benjamin Todd:
It was like, the message of this, like, earning to give could be higher impact than traditional ethical careers. Just what this philosophy paper was about. It was like, Oxford academics as, like, bankers could do more good than charity workers or doctors if they donate the money. And, yeah, I mean, that just, like, really worked. 

Rob Wiblin:
And the press lapped it up. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah. Will got onto the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, which is, like, pretty much one of the biggest radio shows in the UK. A couple of million listeners at least. 

Rob Wiblin:
Wow. Okay. I guess that would have been terrifying at the time. Used to speak into rooms with dozens of people. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah, no, I mean, we were definitely, like, prepping Will a lot. And the way it happened is, you know, I think we got this opportunity and it was like, well, this is like, I think it was going to be a week out and then something happened. So it was just like two days out because it was kind of like, well, actually, no, we want to, like, shuffle it around. So it's going to be like Tuesday. 

Rob Wiblin:
Okay. 

Benjamin Todd:
And we didn't have a website or anything, so that's when we ended up basically just doing an all nighter to write and, like, put up the whole website from scratch. We'd, like, written a little bit before, but basically, like, we're a long way from being up. 

Rob Wiblin:
Didn’t you have an issue, I think that you registered the domain. So just before the interview going out that some people couldn't even get there because the address hadn't reached the DNS servers?

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah, I mean, or at least it was launched so last minute. Yeah, I mean, it takes a while to get ranked in Google. 

Rob Wiblin:
Right, right. 

Benjamin Todd:
So there was people literally searching 80,000 Hours and couldn't find us. 

Rob Wiblin:
Wasn't there yet. Okay, yeah. What stuff was on the website at that stage? 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah, I mean, you can probably see that in web archive. 

Rob Wiblin:
Oh, God. We shouldn't be encouraging people to go and look there. That's dangerous. 

Benjamin Todd:
I mean, the very first version, it was like very basic, but I mean, it would have, probably would have had some stuff about just like the arguments for earning to give. 

Rob Wiblin:
And the link to the paper, maybe. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah. And then I think it might have meant it probably had mini profiles on some of the other high impact careers and then I think it might have had a couple of examples of people, like mini user stories. Yeah, but, yeah, that was like a very basic page. 

Rob Wiblin:
Did this super wind people up? I'm imagining, I mean, that the whole message is just always divided people a lot. The idea that our bankers, especially then, this was right after the financial crisis, you're like, you're hitching your wagon to the most controversial and hated group in society. 

Benjamin Todd:
I mean, it definitely did wind people up a bit. And we had a bunch of other media coverage. So there was I think there was a Wall Street Journal article and will maybe we went on like, something like CNBC, a couple of like, pretty big shows. Pretty big shows just on the back of this. So that did, like, really get us out there. But, yeah, it meant that for years afterwards we were really earning to give. 

Rob Wiblin:
This is our original sin. Yeah. People. Yeah. I think sometimes people still, even to this day, think that, yeah, 80,000 Hours is about earning to give. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah. It has become much less the last few years. Yeah. But even. Well. Well, till like 2015, 2016, which I mean, was a big cost, I think. I mean, it's written up as a mistake on our mistakes page. I think the strongest case for it being a mistake is just that maybe we could have basically got all those benefits without the costs because we could have still had nothing to give as one of the options. And we could have still given the talk on university campuses, but we could have slightly toned down the controversy. I think maybe the bigger thing would have just been not doing the media. I think the media just really shapes people's impressions a lot, but doesn't actually generate that many interested people who are seriously going to do this. 

Benjamin Todd:
And we could have totally done all of those university talks without having the media coverage. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah. Did you suspect that you might regret this at the time? Did anyone realise, oh, my. In like eight years, people are gonna think we're just about earning to give and we'll have to. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah, well, I think it was more sticky than I expected. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah. Okay. 

Benjamin Todd:
And I think it's really under anticipated as well, just like because our actual message was always more nuanced. I think I just also was over optimistic about how much people would only remember the simplest possible version. And I think a lot of the things people were hating was like, they didn't even quite get the idea that we were saying that you had to donate like half your income. They're just thinking like, oh, like bank is generally higher impact. Like, some people would even misunderstand it on that level. 

Rob Wiblin:
Wow, okay. Yeah, I mean, I suppose that is understandable. The journalist garbles it and then the person kind of spends 30 seconds just scanning their eyes across an article and they're like, what the hell is this? Okay, so were you at that stage committed to turning the idea into an organisation and hiring people? 

Benjamin Todd:
And that was my fourth year at university. 

Rob Wiblin:
Okay. Yeah. 

Benjamin Todd:
And so then in this kind of after the media thing, the main thing that we were doing was more talks. And then we started a blog and started to build up a decent amount of views. I think we were getting thousands of views per post at that point. 

Rob Wiblin:
Okay. Yeah. This was just covering all kinds of different topics related to careers and impact and so on. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah. I mean, we actually talked about, for instance, a lot of the kind of heuristics and biases stuff and how that could apply to careers. And that was much more new back then. So that did pretty well. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah, yeah. That was very in vogue around that time. I think Kahneman was making a splash. 

Benjamin Todd:
Well, this would have even been like, decently before Thinking, Fast and Slow. I think so, like, these ideas were just really not well known. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah, 80,000 Hours at some point started, kind of a pledge to do good with your career? 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah, I mean, exactly. We were just copying Giving What We Can again. So we had, yeah, we had an online community where you could sign up and be like, I pledge to have a high impact career. I think for a while we had a 10% pledge, which is like 10% of time more money towards doing the most good. And then I think maybe we simplified it to just like I pledged to, like, try to lead a high impact career. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah. Did we ever keep a list of all the people who made that pledge? We got to go back and see who's been naughty and nice. 

Benjamin Todd:
I mean, yeah, it should be possible to get hold of that data somewhere. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah. Talk a bit about how things developed after the media came in. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah, so, yeah, so we were doing the blog and I was doing it, working on it part time, and I guess started to get gradually less motivated by academics and studying at that point, because just 80,000 Hours is more exciting. So I kind of scraped by my fourth year more, but just at the minimum, I needed to get the grades I wanted. And then, yeah, then I had this big career decision, like, should I continue with 80,000 Hours after I graduated or do one of the other two options, which we mentioned. So that would be investing and earning to give, or academia. Yeah, I think I remember we had, like, these CEA retreats where we'd go out to that weird, like, kind of castle slash school. 

Rob Wiblin:
The one in Wales. Yeah, Atlantic College. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah, Atlantic College. And I remember being back on the train, like, talking about it with Will and Niel, like, standing in the corridor, like, which one I should do. And I remember talking about it with my parents. Yeah, I think, I mean, I was. Definitely found a difficult decision, though. I think in the end it felt pretty clear that I should do 80,000 Hours. 

Rob Wiblin:
Okay. Yeah, that's kind of what everyone was recommending. Did your parents have any preference for you to maybe do something? I don't know whether there was any money around at the time. The organisation didn't exist. EA didn't have a name then. Or maybe it had only just the name had been coined. Did your parents have any reservations about it? 

Benjamin Todd:
The name was coined in 2011. And that was part of the process of setting up CEA. So I think CEA would have been existing by then. And then. Yeah, CEA was like, hiring its first five staff members. Who were going to start in, like, July 2012. And I ended up being one of those first five. So they were hiring a bunch of people as well. So it wouldn't have just been, like, just me doing everything. It was like, CEA exists, they're hiring people. There's like a charity. 

Rob Wiblin:
So did anyone recommend that you not do this? 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah, I don't think so. 

Rob Wiblin:
That's cool. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah. I mean, there wouldn't have been. I think there were people who would have been, like, unsure or just didn't want to take a stance. But I don't remember anyone being like, no, this seems like a mistake. 

Rob Wiblin:
Okay. Yeah. Well, it's great that you had people who are willing to encourage you to take a risk. I think very often we're encouraging people to be a bit more entrepreneurial and risk taking in their careers, and you get a lot of pushback from friends and family who are concerned about someone's wellbeing or concerned about their status and career prospects in the long term. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I think my mother has definitely been concerned about that, but the thing she's been most concerned about is actually the Giving What We Can pledge, because she's like, how will we be able to afford to live? And what happens if you have kids, if you're giving 10%? And I think, I don't remember the same thing coming up about the job. 

Rob Wiblin:
That's so interesting, because the job would have much bigger sacrifice. Much bigger sacrifice in terms of salary. It's like, probably reducing it more by, like, 80% rather than 10%. 

Benjamin Todd:
But I think that is a good thing about the Giving What We Can pledge, is it seems like a lot to people that people routinely take careers where they'll learn half as much as another career, and no one's like, oh, my God, how could you possibly consider doing that? 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah, that is really interesting to think about. 

Benjamin Todd:
Sometimes people just have these in, like, different reference classes somehow. It's like becoming a teacher is like a normal thing to do, or working for a charity is like a normal thing to do. 

Rob Wiblin:
But giving 10% is weird. 

Benjamin Todd:
Even though, like, the first is actually maybe, like, could easily be 75% salary. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah. Should have more respect for teachers than the salary sacrifice they make, maybe. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah, definitely. I think one thing now looking back, I could have easily made a mistake on was we didn't really have the idea of career capital at that point. So I was just literally thinking in terms of which one would be highest impact over the next five or ten years or something like that. And so I was just basically like, oh, 80,000 Hours seems higher impact because of the multiplier argument. Could get more than one person to give if I do this. Another kind of bit of reasoning was like, Matt was literally considering working at CEA to run the life you can save or going to Jane Street. And we kind of realised that Matt's earnings would be higher than mine. 


But it seemed like I was a better fit for entrepreneurial running the thing. So there was almost this trade where it was like Matt would go to Jane Street and would be one of the early donors to CEA, which he was, and basically pay for several staff members. 

Rob Wiblin:
It was a comparative advantage thing to some degree. One person could bring home the bacon and other people could then spend the money. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah. But then I think I was kind of lucky that I think I did end up getting better career capital from 80,000 Hours than I would have from the other two paths, even though I just wasn't really thinking about it, where the kind of heuristic is just like, if you can do something like, interesting and entrepreneurial, you often get a lot of career capital from that. 

Rob Wiblin:
Totally. It is so funny that the idea of career capital, this idea of, well, an important thing that you should do early in your career, is put yourself in a better position to do things later in your career. Make sure that your career keeps progressing, in a sense. How could that not be on our radar? But it's very easy for it not to be. I think. In fact, for most young people, they just don't really think about that in concrete terms until it's pointed out. I mean, I guess some do, but. 

Benjamin Todd:
I think almost also the idea of, like, having it as a quantity or something like, somehow makes it more possible to somehow reason about it, because, well, I could be, like, building career capital in this path, or I could be having impact, and then I want to do the thing that lets me get the best of both over the long term. Somehow that crystallises it more than just something very generic like, oh, you should get skills or something. Do you know what I mean? 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah, no, totally. I guess because people would have a sense that it's better to be in a job where you might get promoted more or something like that. But then it's hard to integrate that into the decision without making it more precise. Exactly. All the kinds of career capital and how they might trade off. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah, but then, I mean, the problem with career capital is that then people associate it with just the most obvious credentials. So I think if I'd known about the concept of career capital, then it might have made me more keen to do finance or PhD because I'm like, well, that's really clear career capital. But actually I think I got better career capital from 80,000 Hours. So I kind of like, was making a double mistake that cancelled out. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah, that's fortuitous. What was the plan for 80,000 Hours? I guess we know how things have turned out. But was the vision very different back then? 

Benjamin Todd:
Well, yeah, like a lot of entrepreneurs, we were just kind of doing like all types of different stuff. We didn't really. Yeah, we were super unfocused. 

Rob Wiblin:
Did you think of that as a deliberate decision or was that. That's just what happens when you don't make focus your main focus? 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah, I mean, it's so hard to stay focused. Even if you're constantly trying, you tend to end up unfocused. But, yeah, I think it's maybe. I mean, I think maybe very early on it can be good to just be basically trying a bunch of things and seeing what sticks. And so we were in that phase, but then I knew early on that. So I think that summer I was already like, we need to be more focused. 

And so one of the decisions we made very early was were kind of part conceiving ourselves almost as like an advocacy campaign or like a moral campaign or something, where we're like, we wanted to spread these ideas in society and just get them out there and convince people of them, which was maybe a bit more like the Giving What We Can kind of model where it's like giving 10%, it's kind of like this thing we want to normally want to promote. But then, like, another thing we were doing is kind of more like careers advice, which was like, I kind of saw that as giving people information to help them have more impact. And we decided to focus on that second paradigm. 

Rob Wiblin:
So it's more research heavy than advocacy heavy? 

Benjamin Todd:
Well, not necessarily research, but more the framing. Trying to be like, people already want to have impact, we're giving them information to help them have more impact. And being this kind of like supportive, useful resource. 

Rob Wiblin:
I see. 

Benjamin Todd:
Rather than like, we're out there trying to convince people to give 10% or to do high impact careers or to take earning to give seriously. 

Rob Wiblin:
So it's like people already want to reduce their carbon emissions. We just want to inform them more about how to do that best. It's more the model rather than beating people over the head to get them to worry more about climate change. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah. Which I think is a really good frame for EA as a whole. And that's the one I try to stay within. It's so easy to start thinking like, oh, we need to like convince people, like turn, make people into EAs, like recruit people. But I try to think of it more. It's like lots of people want to do good. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah. There's enormous undertapped potential. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah. And like, the existing advice and research is really bad and like people could just have like a hundred times more impact and they would want to do that. 

Rob Wiblin:
And then they'll like you for it rather than feel like they're being. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Okay. So the idea was to provide information. What was the initial plan for how to do that at the time, did you feel like the resources that you had or the advice you had was woefully insufficient? 

Benjamin Todd:
Well, you know, we had a lot of traction in terms of people actually seeming to say they've like made big changes to their career on the basis of these ideas. So I think we already knew at that point that we had some powerful ideas. 

And, yeah. With what we were actually doing about it, I think I remember being a big proponent of online content from the start and I, I think I kind of tried to convince Giving What We Can to start a blog and I was kind of, I had this intuition that it's more scalable to have online content and you can just build up a following and that would do more than just giving these in person talks. But I think, yeah, Giving What We Can kind of didn't quite bite on that at that time. So then 80,000 Hours kind of became more focused. So that's why I said like, one of the first things we did was a blog and starting to build up page rank and following. 

And so, yeah, I think there was an early emphasis on online content, but then we were probably still doing a bunch of talks and then we would also do ones with people, especially people who we met at the talks who seemed really interested, but also people who'd come in through the website. So I think maybe very early on it would have just been like, here's like some articles about our most important ideas and maybe a thing where you could get in touch with us for one on one advice. 

And then in practice we were doing a bunch of talks and stuff as well. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah, maybe is it worth scanning, like all of the things that might have been going on, because this will be, or this, like, very general issue of how much should you focus? I guess, especially early on in a project where you don't know what stuff is going to work. This is just a problem that almost every entrepreneur faces. You start getting your ideas out there, or people hear about you, and then they just start throwing opportunities to do stuff at you in a way that can just make you even less focused than you were before. Sometimes you do conversations with people about their career. There's writing the blog, there's doing media, and there's doing talks. 

Benjamin Todd:
And the website had a lot of different things because we'd write about heuristics and biases applied to careers, and we'd have career profiles. Yeah. 

Rob Wiblin:
I mean, and the membership programme. 

Benjamin Todd:
Oh, yeah, the membership programme, yeah. 

Rob Wiblin:
And I guess. Were you getting interns around that time? 

Benjamin Todd:
Well, I think that was actually the. When you say being unfocused, the biggest thing that comes to mind for me was, like, we just hired, like, loads of interns. Right. I think that summer we maybe had, like, three or four interns. And they wanted a lot of autonomy over what they were doing. So I think one person was writing this long report about why moral philosophy could be a really high impact career path. 

We actually ended up, like, never even publishing it, but we put, like, a lot of work into it. The basic argument being something like, you know, just. Peter Singer alone has saved so many lives that if you divide that by the number of moral philosophers. 

Rob Wiblin:
Oh, wow. They're good. 

Benjamin Todd:
On average. 

Rob Wiblin:
That's clever, even. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah. But even if you take, like, the whole rest of philosophy as being, like, zero value. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah. We gotta go away and find that on the drive. Or maybe that's on Dropbox. Maybe. That didn't even make it onto Google Drive. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah. It should be recoverable. Yeah. And then Ilan, who was then, like, really into animal advocacy, and he actually spent his internship basically setting up ACE. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah. Animal Charity Evaluators now. Yeah. 

Benjamin Todd:
Well, yeah. Was it called that at the time? 

Rob Wiblin:
I think it had a different name. I'm struggling to remember. 

Benjamin Todd:
It was kind of just like 80,000 Hours, but for effective animal advocacy. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah. Okay. 

Benjamin Todd:
And then turned into ACE later. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah. And I think there were some other interns as well, doing their own things. 

Benjamin Todd:
Well, Jess was doing lots of. Jess was an intern and did lots of great writing for the blog. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah. People could find her early articles. I think they hold up impressively well. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I guess of the three, she was the one who was kind of like actually delivering on a core programme and the others were kind of just doing like. Yeah, I mean, you know, the ACE thing. That's like a good example of being super unfocused. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah, I suppose at the time. Well, I suppose after six months or a year of that, it did become apparent that we were both mentally and physically as a group incredibly scattered. 

Benjamin Todd:
I think it maybe took even less time than that because I think the internships were mostly in the summer and I think already by the end, we basically started cutting down on the number of interns. A lot. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yes. But it is interesting how many amazing people came out of the woodwork and came to do internships at that point. So many people who were still involved in accomplishing great stuff today. I wonder whether it might actually have been a good programme because it was like a way of people who were already so excited about this idea that even though it was incredibly undeveloped, they were willing to travel from the US or travel from Canada or whatever, just to come and hang out with people for no money, their own accommodation. 

Benjamin Todd:
I think maybe we gave people small travel grants, something. 

Rob Wiblin:
Right. So it was kind of a summer camp for people who were already really stoked about these ideas, who were maybe also quite entrepreneurial potentially and were willing to go off and do really exciting stuff. And many of them did. But I suppose at some point you do also have to actually focus on the main project. 

Benjamin Todd:
I think there's a good argument to be made along those lines. But then I think what you want to do is optimise the thing around that benefit. 

Rob Wiblin:
So there could have been an internship org. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah. Or maybe just do a much shorter thing, which is like two weeks, and you just get everyone to come to Oxford at the same time. 

Rob Wiblin:
Right. Yeah, that makes sense. 

Benjamin Todd:
And you just really try to optimise for, like, meeting everyone, working together, hanging out, helping people with their career plans, like, whatever. Whatever they want with the idea of, like, getting people to do stuff later. Whereas instead of, you're kind of like, no, we're like trying to build this and then we're trying to kind of like, shoehorn people into it, but, you know, they have other stuff they're motivated by and then you end up kind of starting a bunch of random projects to, like, give them work. 

That's like really slowing you down on your main priority. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah. Let's talk for a little bit about just what was the general vibe in the EA community in the UK, and I guess specifically Oxford. Around that time, it was very different. I suppose people have talked about parts of this here and there over the years, but the accommodation, like the office setup, the salaries, just everything felt really duct taped together and I guess quite fragile and definitely not necessarily conducive to people being maximally productive, I guess. Should we talk about the housing situation first? 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah, I mean, I guess initially, I think, like, at least for 80,000 Hours, I think Will fundraised maybe like 50. I think that was mostly maybe from Jeff Kaufman and Julia Wise. I think they were some of the first donors to CEA. And then Matt also started donating early, but it wasn't much. So initially the salary was about 15,000 pounds. 

Rob Wiblin:
I think that was about the legal minimum that one could pay for a full time staff member. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah, close to minimum wage. I think after a year or two, we increased it to, like, the low twenties, but, like, that wasn't much. And, like, for that reason, you know, we put a lot of work, actually, into finding, like, cheap housing. And I got really lucky and I found this guy who, well, his business card was like, historian, art critic, priest, and he was just this guy who, like, had this house in Oxford, and he would rent it to grad students kind of as a non for profit basis. So it was 500 pounds a month for a two bedroom house. And by, like, living there, that really made a big difference to me. I had to live on such a low salary for quite a few years. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah. 

Benjamin Todd:
And, yeah, I mean, I actually mostly worked from home because our office was, like, so bad. That's how I got around it, but, yeah, like, the very first office we had was just like a balcony and an Oxford college dining hall. So kind of like, it was totally open to the dining hall. So every lunch it would be, and dinner time it would be super noisy because there'd be, like, loads of people. 

Rob Wiblin:
200 people all eating below us while you're trying to work. 

Benjamin Todd:
I think that was, like, mostly just for the summer. And then we. Then I think we just had a bit where we just didn't have an office, so we worked out of, like, the canteen, in a library for at least three months or something. And then it was only after that we moved into this tiny room at the back of an estate agent off in St. Clement's. In Oxford. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah, that's the progression that I remember. I think the day I showed up, some people were working in this room above a cafe that they'd managed to get them to let them hang out in for a while. And then it was. Yeah. On this row above a dining hall. And then I think soon after that, we didn't even have that. So then we were just in a general library area in some college somewhere, just sitting on tables that happened to be there. 

Benjamin Todd:
Well, I think that was the social sciences library. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah, the social sciences library. Right. And then after a while, yeah, we managed to get this maybe worse spot back. A real estate agent. We'll stick up some photos to what that was like for people. 

Benjamin Todd:
You'd have to walk past these real estate agents just to get into the office. 

Rob Wiblin:
We must have driven them insane because. 

Benjamin Todd:
There's a lot of people out there out the back. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah. All of these young interns, people who've flown in from all around the world just coming, just constantly walking through this estate agent. Because it was basically just like their back room that for some reason they were renting out. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah. Like, one of our early donors came when we gave him a tour. And when he came into the office, his first reaction was, is this legal? 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah, I doubt it was. 

Benjamin Todd:
Like ten people or like eight people in this tiny. And then we had like a meeting space, but that was where, like, the ceiling was so low that you couldn't stand up. Yeah. 

Rob Wiblin:
And it was incredibly poorly lit as well. I'm not sure that had an external. I'm not sure what the ventilation was. 

Benjamin Todd:
Just windows. 

Rob Wiblin:
Just had windows. Okay. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah, the main room had windows. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah. Okay. 

Benjamin Todd:
Like, just. You were saying you showed up and I remember. So that would have been September. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah. 

Benjamin Todd:
And I think. Yeah, Rob, like, I think when you showed up, you're saying you didn't know where you were staying. 

Rob Wiblin:
Exactly. 

Benjamin Todd:
You just came and you just had a single suitcase and a suit, which I guess you didn't wear because we didn't wear suits. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah, no, definitely not. Yeah. No, I think at the time that I was landing, there was still an email thread going on debating where I should live, where I should be allocated. 

Benjamin Todd:
And then you ended up in the famous Ken's house. 

Rob Wiblin:
Ended up in this, which I guess. 

Benjamin Todd:
Was another kind of landlord who almost like, helped EA get going because so many people lived in it. 

Rob Wiblin:
So many people lived in this house. Yeah, it was kind of the landing place, I guess, for many people who first arrived in Oxford. Ken's a lovely guy. The house did have some issues, though. I remember very early on when I got there, the ground floor toilet was completely unusable because the shower was just dripping through, and so the room had become incredibly wet and mouldy. And the shower, we couldn't really use the shower properly, so then people were going elsewhere in order to have showers. One of the rooms was not really a normal room. I think it was kind of a converted storage facility were cramming people in. Anyway, we were poor, but we legitimately did have a great time in the house, a bunch of us who had just gotten there, because it was just such an exciting new era. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah. And there was a lot of people passing through, not just the interns, but just kind of. We'd have these retreats and people would come from all over the world who were interested in these ideas. Yeah, I mean, I think another thing about the early days is I think it did just feel really clear that it's like, these ideas are really important. That was just super motivating. So there was this real sense of, like, almost just not questioning the situation, just being like, well, we have to do this. 

Rob Wiblin:
Exactly. Yeah. It's not like I ever considered leaving. I know what I was getting myself into. So, yeah, something that is interesting is there was such a diversity of opinion then. It was a much smaller group, but just people were all across the board on what kind of problems they thought were most important, what concepts they were particularly interested in. But everyone knew, and I think has been. It's been shown to be the case that there was just thinking in this way, thinking in expected value terms, trying to figure out, like, how you can do the most to help other people, was just a massively under explored area. And as soon as you started looking there, you just found all of these amazing. 

Rob Wiblin:
You had all of these great insights, and you didn't know exactly where it was going to lead or how it was going to congeal. But I think we were right to be really excited that we'd found just such a fertile area for intellectual exploration and advocacy. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah. Though, I mean, the bit of the story that people find interesting, slightly going in the opposite direction is like, 80,000 Hours, one of the reasons why we started was to have an org that would focus on existential risk and could have that prominently among what it did, whereas we thought early Giving What We Can should remain more focused on, maybe you could still give to x risk things as part of your pledge, but that wouldn't really be the first thing we talk about. And, yeah. So that means that even back in 2012, there was a group of us, like, I remember Niel as well, was very keen on, like, we should really be doing something about existential risk, right? Back then, yeah. 

Rob Wiblin:
I just remember people had very heated discussions about longtermism and existential risk and whether that stuff made sense. It was a very controversial topic among people who are interested in these ideas. And there were lots of people who would very strongly advocate for a more GiveWell focused view, just similar conversations to what we have now, although I think much less developed or the ideas were a lot more scattershot. Yeah. So there was a group of us who were very excited about existential risks, but at the time there were people who were extremely excited about animal stuff, people who were extremely excited about GiveWell, people were excited about other aspects of global health and development. 

There were people who thought it was radically important that we immediately try to grow the movement as much as possible because of this kind of multiplier argument. And admittedly it was growing at a very rapid percentage pace at that point. So people had very strong views about all kinds of different topics and yet somehow we did manage to get along and produce something useful out of it. 

Benjamin Todd:
One other example of a debate we had then was just, should we talk about effective altruism directly? Because early on we just conceived of it as an internal facing name, just to name CEA. And then it kind of started to catch on. But like, even then there was this proposal that we got into this like pretty heated debate about to start a group of just EA first local groups around the world. So it was called think so, the high impact network, I think. And like, I was like a big person on the side against that because I was like, well, firstly, the idea was that people who weren't in the community yet would be given a bunch of material so they could present the material themselves. So it was kind of like do it yourself local group materials. 

Benjamin Todd:
And I was like, this is going to produce like low quality events, which I think was kind of indicated it's like better to focus on high quality online content that you can make sure is really good rather than having like lots of like badly done groups. But then I was also like, EA is too abstract to promote directly, which I think, like, in some ways I think kind of is true. And I think a huge problem that EA has had over the last ten years is people just understand it as like particular list of like, you should do these actions, such as donate 10% to malaria charities, RCT backed charity or like crazy AI stuff. And like EA just gets identified as like the list of recommendations rather than the way of thinking that it actually is. 

And that's because, like, communicating a way of thinking is a super abstract thing and. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah, takes a lot longer. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah. So, you know, I think I was like kind of right about that being a big downside, but looking back, maybe actually should have. We kind of realised that EA was the thing taking off fairly early. And so I can't remember which year this was, but maybe 2013, 2014, CEA started effective altruism outreach, which is another new project whose aim was just to promote EA directly. But then, you know, we kept on with Giving What We Can, because we just thought, like, it's too abstract, Giving What We Can is a much more concrete thing. And again, like 80,000 Hours, it's like High Impact Careers. That's kind of an existing thing that we can hang everything on. But I think maybe a mistake I made was like, not updating even quicker to EA being the central thing. 

And now looking back, it's a bit odd that in a sense, CEA ended up without a kind of content team writing about effective altruism and all the kind of writery capacity ended up on 80,000 Hours writing about high impact careers. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah, yeah. It is really interesting that there never really was an attempt to create a research team that would work on EA specific or EA other than being through either the vehicle of careers or giving, I guess. So you had GiveWell working on a particular kind of giving. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah, that kind of became global priorities. 

Rob Wiblin:
I see. 

Benjamin Todd:
There was a global priorities project, which was another early CEA thing. And again, clearly CEA, we set up way too many charities. I think looking back, every good person we had would end up kind of running their own thing, whereas I think it's often a lot better to just have three amazing co founders do one thing and grow that as much as it can and then move on to the new thing rather than kind of spread out over lots of different projects. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah. 

Benjamin Todd:
But, yeah, we set up the Global Priorities Project, which did then eventually turn into the Global Priorities Institute, or was like an influence on that, which is now really successful. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah, which is now a big deal and is an actual institute at Oxford with lots of academics tackling these questions with a level of rigour that we never could have possibly brought to the table in 2020. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah. So interestingly, ended up so far has mainly focused on long termism rather than central EA stuff itself. So a lot of the most central EA things, like how much do interventions differ in effectiveness? Like how should we correct for aggression to the mean, even like how much to cause is different effectiveness, like very central EA questions or even just like how do we compare causes beyond int that actually hasn't really had any, still much rigorous research done on it. 

Rob Wiblin:
That's so true. I guess that slightly falls within our remit to a degree. And I guess Open Phil. 

Benjamin Todd:
We don’t have a research team either. 

Rob Wiblin:
No, right, exactly. Yeah. But I'm thinking if people were looking from the outside, who would they say should do this? Maybe they would have thought we maybe should be doing it. Perhaps they thought that Open Phil should be doing it. 

Benjamin Todd:
The GPI will end up with kind of EA foundations research stream as well as the longtermism stream, but I don't know what their current plans are on that. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah. Okay. So that's a bit about the vibe and the conditions that people were living with in Oxford back then. How did the plan for what 80,000 Hours would do and what were going to recommend kind of develop over time? 

Benjamin Todd:
One thing is now, looking back, quite striking is I think very early we kind of converged on this idea of like online content plus one on one. And I kind of still see that now as the core of 80,000 Hours today. And I remember, I think I saw this, I read this business strategy that I wrote in 2013 when we were doing fundraising and I actually thought it really holds up. It's pretty similar to our strategy now. In fact, in some ways it was more punchy than recent documents. I was like, oh, this is pretty compelling. 

Rob Wiblin:
Just copy and paste that into the 2022 plan. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah. So I guess I almost don't know what the lesson is from that, but in a sense, we did hit on the thing, but then we kind of had still quite a lot of self doubt. So in a way, we didn't actually double down on that. In fact, even until it's only really been 2020, when we just became really confident on doubling down on just fully scaling up the one on one advice. Yeah. 

Rob Wiblin:
What were we uncertain about and what were we having self doubt about back in that? 

Benjamin Todd:
Well, in the first few years, it was just like, is this going to be cost effective? Like, can we really change people's plans, not just through, like, Will talking to them one on one, but kind of like, as an org. And, yeah, we basically had this list of people who said they'd been influenced by us and seemed cool. Like, in reality, you know, we had pretty, like, those are super messy counterfactuals. So you could have really debated all those cases. And then there was a kind of just also, like, what actually is our advice going to be? And, you know, figuring out things like career capital. And like, when do we say that? And the kind of overall framework is pretty hard to figure out. 

Benjamin Todd:
And like, for instance, like, Holden just recently has criticised us for, like, he's kind of proposed an alternative framework which is like, okay, is your worldview the most important century? If so, then just figure out your aptitude from this list of ten aptitudes and frame it more in terms of, like, what could you be amazing at? Whereas 80,000 Hours tends to be a little bit more like, okay, what are the most important problems? What are the best things to do about them? And then how could you kind of target those in a career path over the long term? Yeah, I see things like, just how do you compare careers? What are the concepts that we use? Like, do we use career capital, neglectedness, problem selection, all these concepts? 

Benjamin Todd:
So there was kind of like that being solidified and then I guess just a bit of like, can we actually kind of deliver these programmes? But then, yeah, like, around 2015, we decided that we'd kind of done that stage. And that's when we started trying to get into Y Combinator. We applied to Y Combinator twice. So I think maybe the first application was in 2014 and we got turned down. But then we were kind of like, we had some discussions with YC partners, so that was super helpful. And actually, especially Kate, who was the nonprofit partner, kind of like, we stayed in touch with her and we figured out what would be needed to get into YC, what would we need to do. 

Benjamin Todd:
And then by summer 2015, we got in and so we kind of saw that symbolically as like, we now think we have a working model. People will actually change careers. We have some advice. That's the stuff we're going to say, and we're delivering this and now we can scale that up a bunch more. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah. How did you first get excited about Y Combinator and the tech scene and all that? 

Benjamin Todd:
Well, they started taking, I think the first ever nonprofit was in maybe it was 2013, 2014. So that was WOTC. And then they did a batch where they kind of had an official call for nonprofits. And I think that got passed to us by more than one person. Just being like, this might be a good fit for you. 

And then one thing I did was then watch a bunch of that, like, read Paul Graham's essays. They had this great, like, how to start a startup series of YouTube videos that I found super useful. And so I was kind of convinced that this would be really useful. And so then I was saying like it was almost like a year long project to get in after we like applied and then had to kind of like figure out what is the core of what we're doing. How can we show that it's really scalable? Yeah, how can we have like a founding team that's convincing enough? 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah. What was the hiring philosophy then? Because I guess 80,000 Hours has hired reasonably slowly. Did that begin at a particular time? 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah, I can't remember exactly when we, I mean, yeah, I knew that having a really high bar for hiring was important pretty early and so we were definitely hiring slowly from early, like especially once we stopped the internship programme. Then I think we hired Roman and then it would have just been like me and Roman as the only full time employees, just on 80,000 Hours, I think, for a while. Until Peter Hartree joined. So we were definitely going pretty slowly. But then that was one of the big things I learned from YC, was like they made me way less keen on hiring and that was one of the things that really surprised us about it, was just, they were like, basically their philosophy is like, before you have product market fit, just don't hire. 

Benjamin Todd:
And then once you have product market fit, maybe then you hire as quickly as possible. But this is kind of like two regimes thing. And the argument was like, before you have product market fit, the most important thing is getting to product market fit. Hiring people will actually slow you down because it basically then means you're spending all your time on management rather than figuring out product market fits, which is usually something that only the founders are really good at. So you can easily grind to a halt while at the same time you've five x your expenses. So you've got now only 20% as much time to figure out product market fit before you're done. And that's a really big failure mode for a lot of startups. 

Rob Wiblin:
I guess you can also end up hiring people who are specialised in doing something that you're going to decide you don't want to do very quickly because you're trying to figure out what the product even is. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah, I think that's another big thing is just like in a startup, you just want a small, very generally competent, well coordinated team who can easily switch between things. In a sense that means you need to hold a very high bar on those dimensions. And I think that's also, I don't know, it's just so easy to, I think there's actually, like, a lot of mistakes in this area. And I see this with a lot of young entrepreneurs or, like, young people getting into the community. There's just this very, like, it almost seems so obvious that, like, if you hire more people, you will get more done. And also there's this very compelling illusion that, like, I should be able to get money, pay for services, and people will, like, do the things that I want and pay for. 

Benjamin Todd:
And there should be, like, experts in things like management and, like, marketing and running orgs and, like, the way to do a lot of stuff is to hire a bunch of these experts in these things and get them to do these things. And that just almost seems not how things work in the real world. It's a bit surprising even now when. 

Rob Wiblin:
You say, yeah, it isn't like that. So the idea that you're someone who thinks, I have good ideas about effective altruism and I want to write those up and share them, but I'll hire someone else to manage the project, or I'll hire someone who's an expert in operations. It's surprisingly shockingly hard to just delegate all of that stuff at an early stage. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah. And I'm kind of worried that I'm not really going to convince anyone because it's almost still, like, quite hard to say exactly what goes wrong. But I think one big thing that goes wrong, and this is gonna sound very arrogant, but just like there's a general level of professionals doing stuff, most things are just done badly in the world. 

Rob Wiblin:
People model through with a tolerable level of goodness. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah. So something like your bookkeeping is on the end of things that's relatively easy to outsource because that's a very well defined thing that there's people who are out there and they do bookkeeping, but we've had it, found it really hard to not have our books be, like, totally fucked up by people we've hired to do bookkeeping. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah, that is a really, I mean, I think probably we got to accept some of the blame there, but that speaks to the fact that you're part of the process of delegating the thing of defining the task and passing and, like, deciding who's going to do it. And if you don't know how to do that, then you're going to mess that up. 

Benjamin Todd:
I think that's a really big part of it, is like, it's very hard to hire someone to do something that you don't know how to do, and that's because you can't even judge how good the person is. And it's very hard for you to package things well in a form that's easy to delegate, if you like. It's just a mystery to you. So that's just early on. It's just really good to just do all the stuff yourself for a while until you at least learn basic, very rough outlines of how it works. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah, I think that might even be true of bookkeeping, potentially. You want to set up the basic structure of the bookkeeping so that it makes sense given what you're trying to do. 

Benjamin Todd:
I think that's what happened in the end is just people at CEA did a lot of the, like, setting up financial systems ourselves. And, like, now we have it kind of semi outsourced, but that, like, was a thing that took several years of figuring things out ourselves and then, like, finding good people, like, overseeing them. Well, yeah, I remember, like, you've definitely kind of like, unfucked 80k’ accounts on more than one occasion. Yeah. 

Rob Wiblin:
I mean, and imagining someone doing it. Well, that's a great example where. So it's. It's bizarre how involved I was in the finances of 80,000 Hours until very recently. It's because I was working on the operations for the broader organisation before I came to work at 80,000 Hours. 

Benjamin Todd:
Well, but you're also just very good at spreadsheets. You just spot more mistakes than most people. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah, yeah. It is true that it can be remarkably challenging to make a budget in a spreadsheet without introducing massive mathematical errors, that if you don't know how those can appear, then you can just end up with completely wrong numbers and report wrong numbers. And I've seen that happening all the time. You have to be remarkably careful. And another amazing thing is, whenever I would try to get someone else to handle it, if they weren't deeply embedded within 80,000 Hours, then they wouldn't notice that particular line items make no sense, because, like, how could we have spent this much money on that? Because that doesn't even exist. When you're inside a project, you understand the budget and the finances just intuitively. By scanning them, you spot the errors and you can see how should roughly be organised. But as soon as you delegate it to someone who's not in the office with you, chaos begins to. 

Benjamin Todd:
No, I think that's another really good example of why, like, having a small, super dedicated, super hardworking, generally competent team, like, four people, it's really possible to achieve, like, what would take, like, 20 or 30 people otherwise and it's for these types of factors. Like you're saying, like, if they're all deeply immersed in it, really care, they're going to just like spot way more mistakes. They're going to just intuitively know what's going on. It's going to be really easy for them to coordinate because they're all just kind of like living it every day and they can learn things really fast and pivot strategy really fast. And all these factors add up to just potentially making it way more productive. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah, you have so much more context and a lot more trust, potentially, and willingness to change. 

Benjamin Todd:
And so eventually you have to do the big route where you hire specialists and you have everything processified and there's more bureaucracy, and that's kind of necessary if you want to get to a certain level of scale often, but you kind of want to avoid that as long as possible. And yeah, the way to do that is to have like, a small, really talented team who are just doing everything themselves and then only gradually outsourcing things or hiring people to do things. Once it's super solidified, you know how it works, it's definitely going to be part of the business in the long term. You're not just going to pivot away from it. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah, yeah. Okay, let's talk a little bit about, I suppose, various different programmes or aspects of 80,000 Hours that had to be shut down over the years. And I guess some of them have subsequently been resurrected. But during that kind of 2012 to 2015, what were some of the things that got started that then had to also be closed? 

Benjamin Todd:
Well, yeah, we did kind of gradually become more focused over those few years. And one example of that was, I think we'd already mentioned we had this careers pledge that you could take, and that was actually attached to like a mini social network. So it had profiles of each person, like with bio information. So you could like, be part of this community of people doing high impact careers. And I think there was like a login to the sites for that and all that kind of stuff. And we hired Ozzie Gooen, who I think was working with 80,000 Hours for almost a year, maybe, but yeah, quite a while. 

And anyway, he basically convinced us that, like, you know, it would be almost most of his time just to keep this thing, like, working well and like, debugging it and fixing things and like making marginal improvements and kind of like, had this whole presentation about technical debt. And his proposal was like, this isn't the key focus, let's just shut it down and this will save a lot of time and enable you to just focus on the key thing, which was like the online content. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah. Were you sceptical of that at the time? 

Benjamin Todd:
I definitely took some convincing, but yeah, we did it and I think he was vindicated by that. 

Rob Wiblin:
It's very counterintuitive because you think all we're doing is keeping a list of names of people who've signed a pledge. How can this take one full time coder just to keep it working? 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah, I mean, and also the whole rest of the website. I mean, and it was a bit more than a list of names. Like I was saying, it was almost like a mini 80k internal social network, you know with profile functionality and. Right, like search and commenting and. 

Rob Wiblin:
Okay, okay. But that turned out to be somewhat technically complicated and I guess we didn't have that many great web devs at the time, so. Well, yeah, without chewing up. 

Benjamin Todd:
This is one of the hardest things to hire for the whole time has been engineers. 

Rob Wiblin:
So we just ended up axing the membership thing. Did we get pushback from people who didn't want us to get rid of that? 

Benjamin Todd:
Maybe a bit, but yeah. I don't remember there being a tonne. 

Rob Wiblin:
Not being a big issue. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah, I do think something like having a, like, “I pledge to have a high impact career” thing you can sign up for. I know, I think that is like a pretty good idea. And I remember like a few years later Kevin Hale at YC being like, oh, you should like totally have something like this. And there could have been a much more minimal version of it that's more just like a list of names. Yeah, or like when you sign up to the newsletter it's like do you want to take the pledge? Something like that. Which. Yeah, so maybe we should have recaptured that thing. But like I think having the kind of whole like, I mean another big thing we realised is just like if you want to have a social network of people, like just use a social network. 

You know, we set up the 80,000 Hours LinkedIn group and that's got over 20,000 members and that's kind of got all the functionality that we'd want and a bunch more like super detailed profiles that people actually keep up to date because if you try and do your own one, they never stay up to date. Of course you do it once and then like three years later it's all out of date. And LinkedIn have like slightly changed some of their features now, but you can if you have a premium account. You can search that group by lots of different fields. So you can do, like, much more than what you could have done with our stuff with it. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah. That's wildly more useful than a list of what? A list of kind of people's bios that are going to just year by year become like more and more out of date, such that you have to go look them up somewhere else anyway to figure out who they are and what they're doing. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah, exactly. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah. I remember there was another project that designed kind of its own internal forum, I think, maybe even coding it almost from scratch. And then, of course, it was really. I guess maybe it's hard to think back, but social media maybe was not as much, it wasn't quite as established exactly where people were going to end up on social media back in those early days. 

Benjamin Todd:
And forums were a much bigger thing. 

Rob Wiblin:
Forums were still quite a big thing. Yeah. So it felt somewhat natural to code up and produce a forum for people to discuss various topics, but it was surprisingly challenging to code up your own custom forum. 

Benjamin Todd:
Wasn't there a Giving What We Can forum? 

Rob Wiblin:
That's what I'm talking about. Yeah, yeah. And then I think as soon as the discussion moved on to a social media platform like Facebook, some Facebook group, I think the discussion went up substantially and it was obviously a lot more easy to maintain and moderate. So, yeah, I guess if you could hijack. 

Benjamin Todd:
Though, the early EA Facebook group was pretty terrible. So it wasn't like a panacea. 

Rob Wiblin:
No, I think the Giving What We Can one was properly moderated and only people were only allowed in if they'd signed the pledge. Okay. Yeah. What are some other stuff that had to get the ax? 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah. I mean, in terms of kind of like whole programmes, I think that was... And then like the internship kind of just doing like random projects. And that was probably the main thing. I mean, then just maybe there was a process of focusing the content down more, trying to have, like I say, a core career guide and a list of careers and a list of courses and just like figuring out that's the thing, the most important thing we're going to focus on. Whereas early on we had more of this model of just like, oh, we'll just write blogs about whatever's interesting, which I think is an interesting alternative model, which I kind of call that the magazine model. 

Benjamin Todd:
And looking back, that's actually much more scalable because you can kind of almost hire or you can have lots of freelancers or just let people write about a loose collection of topics and you just play the role of an editor. 

Rob Wiblin:
Works in Progress is doing this now, in a way. 

Benjamin Todd:
Exactly. And you can see they've put together a really good thing like very fast. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah. And they have such a broad remit because you can talk about kind of any aspect of social progress or technological progress, and like ways the world could better. 

Benjamin Todd:
Whereas I guess if you have to take this pretty different route, which is more like here's the key things we want to say about impactful careers and that's super hard to hire for because if you write anything, it has to be kind of talking for the whole fitting into one of the key things like that. Kind of key gaps in the overall advice. So you just need like way more context and be able to like speak in the org’s voice basically. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah. The downside of the blog post model is just that at the end of the day you end up with a whole lot of... 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah, there's no actual advice. Yeah, exactly. It's just like here's a bunch of ideas though. Yeah. Some people say that's better from a kind of epistemics point of view because it's getting people to think for themselves, because it's really like no one agrees, like here's just ideas. 

Rob Wiblin:
Realistically, it's all a mess. And the blog will reflect that. Yeah, it's a mess. 

Benjamin Todd:
Well, and the podcast more takes this model. Right. Like here's people's views on these topics. Listen to a bunch and make up your own mind. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah, yeah it is. Yeah. I guess it is kind of like a verbal blog in an odd way. I guess the problem with lots of blogs is that basically people end up reading none of the old posts, except for a handful that for some reason become incredibly popular. So like 95% of it is ghost town. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah, that's a big thing because our central content just gets a lot of views. We quickly realised that in order to get significant views, a thing either needs to get a huge spike on social media or to get search traffic or to be one of the ten most central pages that you link to and a lot of the other stuff just goes nowhere. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah, it is interesting that I feel more, it's more common for people to find a podcast like this and subscribe to it and then go back and listen to a substantial fraction of the old interviews than it is for someone to find a blog and then just go and read the blog from its beginning forward. 

Benjamin Todd:
I guess those are about similar. 

Rob Wiblin:
Oh, really? Okay. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah. Because I thought, doesn't half of, only half of the listening time each week come from, like, the old episodes? Like, I think on a blog the ratio would be higher. Like, more would be coming from the back catalogue, though it would depend on whether you're getting search traffic or not. 

Rob Wiblin:
I think it's more often search traffic to specific old blog posts. I don't know why, but not browsing back. I think it's hard to have the discipline to, like, let's go to the archives. I'm going to read, like, through, like, I'm reading a journal from start to end. Whereas I think that does happen for some reason. And I've done that with podcasts where I'm like, this is so great, I'm just going to listen from episode one forward. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah, that's interesting. 

Rob Wiblin:
Could be just that it's easier to avoid distraction when you're listening to audio because you don't have the whole of the Internet at your fingertips anyway. Yeah. 

Benjamin Todd:
I guess there was also some programmes that we considered starting but didn't. Where, like, one that sticks out is, I think when Peter Hartree first started, his proposal was that he would help us start a podcast and would like, do all the audio for it. I think that would have been back in 2013. 

And, you know, we didn't go for that idea, but I mean, that one could have been a mistake, because if we had got started like three years, well, more than three years early on the podcast, we would have just got a lot more subscribers because of sheer time passing by. And it would have helped with this big gap we had in the community, where there was always this big lag between things being written up and the actual state of the art knowledge. And the podcast has helped to close that a lot because it's so much easier just to interview someone for 2 hours than to kind of write up full considered articles about all of these positions. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah, I think that probably was a mistake because that would have been four years earlier, and it would have meant that we would have had probably a really good interview show at the point where podcasts were beginning to achieve mainstream success. We would have been more like, more at the econ talk level in terms of prominence and yes, so much better to communicate all of these ideas that were just kind of stuck in people's heads in private conversations for so many years, until finally they've seen the light of day through various different means. But there was another, I think maybe it was in 2014 or 15 that again, people got excited by the idea of starting a podcast and then it just kind of went away. I think there was a really active decision not to do it. It's just people were too busy with other stuff. 

Benjamin Todd:
Well, but because I do think on the other side, we've generally had too many programmes and been too unfocused and so just having even more, I'm not sure would have been the right call. But yeah, maybe there's a bigger picture, long term division between one vision of 80K is like an online content organisation that has articles, podcasts, maybe YouTube. And then there's the one-on-one advice which has headhunting and talking to people and maybe talks and local groups. So the more like in person stuff. And I think that those styles are actually pretty different. Like if you almost like on a very kind of basic level, like the cost structure, like one is a high marginal cost thing where it's like in order to have more impact, you need to hire more people and talk to more people. So kind of linear costs. Whereas the online content model is more of like a kind of hits based thing where if it does something really well, you get tonnes of views and without any increase in costs. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah. And I guess culturally it would probably be pretty different as well. The difference between running a literary magazine and some sort of sales operation. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah, well, I would say like consultancy. 

Rob Wiblin:
Consultancy? 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah, because the other one is kind of like hits-based, kind of creativity driven. You never quite know what your next big thing is going to be that will drive all your traffic and you're following all these metrics like kind of views and stuff like that. And I think that's a pretty different culture from like, okay, this year we're going to do a thousand calls and next year we're going to do 2000 calls. 

Rob Wiblin:
Just like you're really trying to hone your process on this thing that you're doing every day, trying to figure out how can you deliver a better service. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah, I mean, they do overlap in the sense that the advisors need to understand the cutting edge of the research as well. So that's the kind of the thing that unites them is just this underlying understanding of high impact careers. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah. Maybe a final discussion of when we tried to get more focus, is that the one-on-one advice that the kind of coaching, advising side of things was kind of suspended when you got into Y Combinator. Do you want to explain why that was? 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah, I mean, Y Combinator got us even more keen on focus and that like really just like startups just, they only have one programme and the idea is to grow that exponentially until you're a like multi billion dollar company and then maybe you start another programme after that. And so that was the paradigm and I think that makes a tonne of sense. It's really hard to get anything to succeed on a big scale. And so you don't want to like as a team of like four or five people, you don't want to split across like two or three things. You just need to like -- 

Rob Wiblin:
Find the best thing and hammer it. 

Benjamin Todd:
Hammer it as much as you can and if that's not working, switch to something else. And we decided at that point that the online content was the thing with the most upside, just almost for the kind of obvious reasons of just being super scalable, like a team of four people could in theory get millions of readers and change those careers, get lots of people involved. So yeah, I mean we don't... even advising maybe like 200 people a year. And I think there's a kind of argument for doing that just to be like speaking to your users. So you could have that as a kind of thing that you're not going to scale. 

Benjamin Todd:
But I think even then it would be better to just optimise around talking to users and then just be like, no, the online content is our programme, but we speak to users because it helps online content. And yeah, we focused like that in YC and I think that actually went really well. And like you can see in our metrics that from 2014 to about 2017, we grew most of our main metrics like tenfold. So the web traffic went from one hundred k a year to like 1.5 million ish per year. 

Rob Wiblin:
That was an era when the focus really was on the website and the web metrics and content, emailing people and so on. And yeah, they definitely paid dividends on that stream. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah, so we had things like the career quiz, which got a tonne of people to sign up, and then eventually this developed into the career guide, which was this kind of central twelve or so articles and many of those were very shareable articles, so they would each generate a hit. And then we promoted the career guide as a package and as a book and did a whole book promotion campaign around it. 

Benjamin Todd:
So we just had all these ideas and they were all paid off in terms of firstly getting a spike when they were first released, but then also building up a library of content that was getting a lot of search traffic because we knew that there was lots of people on the Internet searching terms like careers that make a difference, but world's biggest problems and what skills are valuable and stuff like this. And we end up having articles that rank near the top of Google in a lot of these questions. If you now search one of the world's biggest problems, 80,000 Hours is often in the top three results. And I think that's 10,000 views a month or something from that search terminal. 

And this is where most of our, we have this base of traffic that just still comes from, or new readers coming from that even today, all back from that investment. And I think that would be one of our biggest successes, was focusing on this kind of content that gets lots of search traffic. And I think that's kind of why 80,000 Hours has become the biggest pathway, the biggest single pathway into effective altruism, arguably, because just there is this really big general interest in high impact careers out there, and we're able to just put these things up that find people who have that interest and get them in. 

Rob Wiblin:
Okay, we need to leave that there for now, but we will be back to do another recording session and continue the story of 80k soon. We'll see you when we return to the recording studio. 


Okay, so we're back talking about the history of 80,000 Hours again. Last time we were talking about going through Y Combinator in 2015, and then the general success that we had working, I guess focusing on the web content and newsletter subscriptions in kind of late 2015, 2016, 2017. Were there any things you wanted to add about that era that we didn't already say? 

Benjamin Todd:
Well, I just think that was, looking back, a really successful era where we only had around five people on the team, and we managed to grow to a website with one and a half million views per year, and I think about 150,000 newsletter subscribers. And as a result, in the effective altruism surveys, often 80,000 Hours was the biggest single pathway by which new people were getting into finding out about effective altruism for the first time. Often, word of mouth was ahead of us. I think in one year, we were even a bigger source than word of mouth for finding people. And I think that was where a lot of our historical impact came from, was just telling people about effective altruism and telling them about the ideas for the first time and getting them involved with the community. 

Benjamin Todd:
And, yeah, for a really small team to be doing that, I think that was, looking back, were very productive at that point. 

Rob Wiblin:
That's the time when we had a lot of growth in newsletter subscriptions. A lot of growth in web traffic. It's when we wrote some of our most popular articles that were aimed at a reasonably broad audience. I suppose there was the career guide, which had 13 or so articles, including some on general themes, like what makes for a satisfying job, how to get jobs, how to do interviews, that kind of thing. But of course, all kind of with an effective altruist flavour and connection to it, but also hitting on things that are of interest to everyone. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah, totally. 

Rob Wiblin:
Might be worth mentioning an amazing thing is that a lot of that career guide was written by you when we were on a trip to Thailand. I think at one point there was only three of us full time staff members, at least only three of us locally, and we thought, well, why are we doing this in Oxford when we could be going somewhere with much nicer weather? And went to Chiang Mai for a while. 

Benjamin Todd:
I guess the team at that point was, we had Roman writing articles. You were writing articles. Peter Hartree was the lead engineer. And then there was me. And that was basically it. 

Rob Wiblin:
I think Maria. Maria Gutierrez was, I think, also doing some stuff for us at that point. 

Benjamin Todd:
But on a part time basis. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah, but Hartree was remote, so it was only you, me and Roman who were in person. So it was very easy to upsticks and just go to Thailand if we felt like it. And I think it allowed a lot of focus because we didn't have to, well, we weren't getting drawn into things happening with other organisations. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah. I mean, I think we did use those periods, didn't we, kind of partly say deliberately, this is just going to be a content focused period where we'll kind of clear out everything else. 

Rob Wiblin:
Definitely. 

Benjamin Todd:
And what was it? We spent five, six weeks in Chiang Mai? 

Rob Wiblin:
I think it might even be more than that because we got visas for there. So I think it could be two or three months, possibly, in Chiang Mai. And then we didn't feel like we wanted to go home quite yet. And you traveled in China before and spoke Chinese. So we decided to go to Chengdu. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah, to Chengdu, yeah. One of my favourite cities in China. And I remember, yeah, that was actually, like, quite a lot of work to find an Airbnb in Chinese in Chengdu. And I remember, actually, we finally found a place that seemed like it might be good, but it was one bedroom too short because one of the bedrooms was a mezzanine, so it was open to the living room. And I told this to the host, like, that's the problem. And she was like, don't worry, I'll install a wall. And then the next day she messaged me to be like, okay, there is now a wall. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah, it was incredible. Yeah, I guess just taking the space and making it completely private. I think we might even have seen the person who was still just putting the finishing work on the wall when we arrived. It's not so easy to visit China these days, so I'm really glad to have gotten in a trip to China for a month or five weeks. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah, I think China, I think were only there for about three weeks. And that was when Peter McIntyre started. So his first three weeks at 80,000 Hours were actually in China. So he just flew there straight to meet us. Which was like, yeah, quite a big introduction. 

Rob Wiblin:
The food there was incredible. And I think we were all just astonished by how well organised that the country was compared to Oxford or London. It felt like things worked much more smoothly, which I wasn't entirely. We had your help to get us around because almost nobody spoke English, so it was definitely challenging at times. But, yeah, I mean, those retreats, I think, were super productive times because we just put everything else aside and focused on writing and publishing and focusing on the web content. So that probably did contribute to that being a bit of a golden era for web traffic growth. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah. And I think more generally, just being really focused on just one product and one set of metrics and that's something that YC encouraged us to do, I think also just that you kind of get a critical mass where you're bouncing ideas off each other. So you are really good at thinking of things and Will was also a bit more involved with 80k at that point, and, yeah, just like the team as a whole, were. I don't know, it's just like we would think of things quickly and --

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah, okay, so I suppose at some point we kind of switched from that approach. I think it was in 2017 or 18, maybe. Yeah. Do you want to talk about why things changed? 

Benjamin Todd:
Well, yeah, I mean, it was a kind of gradual thing, but I think around 2017, things started to go less. Well, in a bunch of ways. And looking back, it wasn't clear at the time, but we hit a plateau of web traffic. So in 2017 it was 1.6 million, and then we didn't break that until 2020. And also when we looked like this, we only found out this a few years later. But 2017 was also a really outstanding year for plan changes and finding people changing their careers and. Yeah, I mean, actually it's still in our last evaluation, it was still the best year for planned changes. Historically though, we don't know what the last couple of years were like. I would hope that now 2022 will be ahead of 2017, but we won't know that for a few years. 

Rob Wiblin:
So yeah, at some point we started to feel uncomfortable perhaps with how broad the content was and were thinking, maybe this isn't actually focused enough on the topics that we think are the highest priority. 

Benjamin Todd:
Well, okay. No, so I think the bigger issue was that we basically started to set up a bunch of other programmes and came unfocused again. So the biggest thing was during YC we shut down the one-on-one programme. So 80k historically has been online content and that helps us find people and then we speak to them one on one. And it's this kind of complementary thing. Yeah. So we'd always had this idea that we would bring back the one-on-one advice or in-person advice in some form. And we came across Peter McIntyre, who we were really excited about hiring. So we thought, okay, he could start doing some type of in person programme again. He didn't actually do one-on-one advice to start with. He started him back doing the workshops. 

So the career guide was for a while I just did these in person workshops that would take four or 5 hours and we would basically lead someone through all the material in the career guide and get them to think about how it might apply to their own career over an afternoon. And people seem to really like those. And that was basically what then was turned into the career guide later. And you can actually see on YouTube there's a video version of me giving this as a lecture in Cambridge. Yeah, I mean, I think we should have actually then stopped there and then it's like, do the workshops and you make them online and you have them as videos and then you've kind of succeeded. But instead we were like, okay, let's go and have in person ones again. 


So Peter did that and this kind of insanely productive period where he did about, I think he did about 50 in person workshops in one year. 

Rob Wiblin:
Wow. 

Benjamin Todd:
He'd sometimes do like multiple in a couple of days. 

Rob Wiblin:
That guy has a lot of social energy. I think I did a handful of them and that was tiring enough. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah. Pretty exhausting just to do one. Yeah. But then Peter, I think, correctly realised that it would be better to be much more targeted instead. And so he said we should do one on one careers advice again with people coming through the website with an application form. And so we restarted the one on one programme with Peter running it. And I think, okay, if we'd just done that, I think that could have been a pretty reasonable place to be. It's just like, well, we have the online content and we have one on one, which is kind of our original model, but then we instead went on to set up three more programmes relatively soon after. So one being the podcast, which, looking back, that was clearly a great thing to have done. So I wouldn't call that a mistake, though I think if we just had the web content and the podcast, I think that would have also been a really natural place to because that's a kind of classic content playbook. Like, if you think about Vox or something, they have articles and they have their YouTube channel and they have their podcast, and it's kind of a natural package of stuff that's all quite. It's kind of a similar skill set to do these different things. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah, totally. 

Benjamin Todd:
So that would have also been a really good direction to go down. And then maybe the next step would have been to add a YouTube channel. But, yeah, so instead we did the podcast and we brought back the one on one team. And then after a year or so, Peter thought that headhunting might be more impactful than one on one. And I got convinced of that as well. And so then we basically split the one on one team into an advising team, headed by Brenton, I think, and then later joined by Michelle, and then a headhunting team, which was Niel and Peter. And then also were like, actually, it seems like having a job board would be really effective, probably more effective than advising. So Peter set up a job board page on the website. 

And then when Peter McIntyre, I think, moved to headhunting, then Peter Hartree ended up focusing on kind of making the job board his main thing for a while. 

Rob Wiblin:
Okay. Yeah. So what was going through our heads? Because we knew all of this stuff about focus, but we still slightly fell for this issue of coming up with so many products. 

Benjamin Todd:
Looking back, I'm like, I don't quite see how I managed to. It seems like such an obvious mistake. Looking back, was it driven by...? 

Rob Wiblin:
I suppose we would like to grow, would like to hire, but then the new people you want to hire, that they have a particular skill set that's a better fit for a different programme, or they have a passion for a particular different programme that they want to lead on. And so that is kind of an instigator for starting something new. 

Benjamin Todd:
I think that was a factor. And I think looking back, one lesson, one kind of rule of thumb now I would try to follow is if you're setting up a new programme in order to retain a particular staff member, you probably shouldn't. I think, within effective altruism thinking, it's just so seductive to be thinking at the margin. 

Rob Wiblin:
Do you want to explain what you mean by that? 

Benjamin Todd:
Well, you're kind of like, well, we're doing these two great things now. If we add a third thing, then that will be even better, because we'll just be doing more. Because the costs of loss of focus, they're kind of more nebulous than the just concrete extra impact. And so, yeah, we were kind of like, well, we're doing advising. Maybe headhunting is even better. Let's experiment with that, see how it goes. Maybe then we'll have both. And then that's kind of even better than just having one of them. But I think another rule of thumb, I would say, looking back, is don't start a new programme unless you think it's at least several folds better, maybe threefold or something. And we thought headhunting was like, maybe twofold better. We didn't really have strong reasons to think that. I think that was actually just below. That's below the threshold at which you should switch. We should have just carried on with advising until that was more scaled up and then added headhunting later. 

Rob Wiblin:
Right. Yeah. I'm sure listeners can understand if your intuition is that this other programme is going to be twice as good as the existing one, it's so seductive to start it. How do you say no to that? I suppose in this case maybe we could have said, well, the evidence isn't strong enough, so we should just stick with what we have. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah. And, I mean, I guess there is a kind of sense that if literally the expected value is twice as high, then you should. Yeah, but it's more like. What I more mean is like, you have a kind of rough back of the envelope, which is like, oh, maybe it's twice as good, but that's probably going to regress a lot when you actually do the thing. Probably your estimate is over optimistic. 

Rob Wiblin:
Well, I suppose it's also just not picking up all of these effects that you have on other programmes and lack of focus, lack of coordination across the organisation. 

Benjamin Todd:
But we then had to invest a lot in getting headhunting going, so it was below its potential for a while, whereas instead we could have been doubling down on having a much bigger advising team. So, yeah, it's this kind of. There's this kind of dynamic aspect as well. Yeah. I mean, I think even now it's a pretty controversial topic. How many programmes should 80,000 Hours have? And I've gone back and forth over the years. 


The other mistake I think we made around this period was moving to California. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah, yeah. Do you want to talk about that? 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah. So when we were in YC, we, you know, we kind of drank the Kool Aid a bit. We're like, you know, Silicon Valley is the centre of the world. This is, like, where all the most ambitious people are. And we did get a lot out of being in YC, and it was also. It probably was the key hub of effective altruism. It was definitely. I mean, it's basically going in that direction. So we were like, well, we want to be at the centre of things. We should move. And we did. Yeah, we did a process about it. We figured our hiring would be better there. It would be better to be part of the community there and Silicon Valley community. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah. I remember one factor that stood out, or the most salient factor in my mind, was that the labour market was massively larger, that suddenly you can hire from a labour pool of 330 million rather than. I suppose, at this point, the UK decided to leave the EU. So we were talking about just a labour market of 65 million. 

Benjamin Todd:
I mean, I don't know. I guess a lot of Europeans also don't want to move to Silicon Valley. But it's probably a slightly easier pitch than getting Americans to move to the UK. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah. 

Benjamin Todd:
Like, the American salaries are way higher. It's just one kind of bottleneck you have to get past. 

Rob Wiblin:
So those are some of the reasons we decided to move. I mean, do you think it was a mistake in retrospect? 

Benjamin Todd:
Well, yeah, so we did. It was a lot of work to get the visas and to move house and to figure out how to do American taxes and kind of move our whole lives. And then within two years, we moved back to London, which was also quite a lot of work. So, yeah, it was very costly and we did decide to move back. I think the key thing is that we did get a lot of benefits from being there. And I think, in particular, we got to know some of the people, the effective altruism people, living in the Bay a lot better. And that also, in particular, led to hiring, Howie. So maybe that alone was worth it. But I think we could have got a lot of the benefits by just spending one to three months there per year and pretty much without any of the costs. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah. Do you think we could have known ahead of time? So I guess we decided to move there in 2016, maybe in mid 2016, I think something like that. Should we have been able to predict at the time that this was a bad idea? I remember I was... I said that I was neutral on it. I think I, like, neither voted for it nor voted against it, but I remember declaring to a group of people a few weeks before we went that I was like, we're gonna not like this and we're gonna regret it. But by the time we realise, it's gonna be too late and we'll be too committed to the Bay to move back. Which was almost right, but not. Yeah, yeah. I was wrong about the last bit. 

Benjamin Todd:
Well, yeah. So it did turn out to be worse than we expected, because we thought it would be better for hiring, but actually, we didn't hire any Americans in that whole two years, except for Howie. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah. 

Benjamin Todd:
And in fact, we were strongly considering hiring, like, several British people. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah. Do you know what was going on with that? Is that just happenstance or...? I think it is the case that that concentration of people who are interested in effective altruism is greater in the London, Cambridge, Oxford area, certainly, than the US, as it was. I think our ideas are more popular in the UK per capita than they are in the United States per capita. And possibly there's even more people who have an 80,000 Hours style of thinking in London, Oxford, Cambridge than there is in the Bay Area, though it might be. 

Benjamin Todd:
I mean, we've definitely been overrepresented. The UK is overrepresented in our audience because of being from the UK. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah. Why do you think it is that we didn't end up hiring more Americans, given that that seemed like such a natural and salient benefit? 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah, I'm not sure. I mean, I think it was probably just partly bad luck, but then I think just partly, there isn't that big a difference in the number of really engaged EAs who are willing to move to London versus are willing to move to San Francisco. It's about 50. Maybe it's slightly tilted towards San Francisco. But then, actually, I think another factor was just our network was UK heavy, and that was maybe just about enough to kind of maybe Silicon Valley, maybe like the Bay Area. It's like the labour market there is. Maybe it's like 1.3 times bigger than the UK cluster, but then just our network thing was enough to tilt it towards being a wash, basically equal. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Do you want to talk about the decision to come back? 

Benjamin Todd:
I mean, this is another aspect of why it turned out to be a mistake is I think I remember in the document saying, this will be personally worse for me, but I think it's worth it for the greater impact for the org. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah, I mean, and that's why I said, we're going to regret this. I was like, this is just clearly going to be worse from my personal point of view. I know far fewer people there. I feel like I have a great cultural fit here in Oxford, so why. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah, so I think we did kind of realise it would be worse, but I think at least personally, I probably underestimated it. Yeah. And then I think I also maybe underestimated how much like, making the personal sacrifice would bug me. Well, I mean, moving country is a big deal, and I had friends from university who weren't involved with effective altruism, and I really valued that social scene. And then I moved to, well, we moved to Berkeley, where we didn't really know anyone who wasn't working in effective altruism. And so I kind of lost that social scene. That was really important to me. And then, in addition, it was at least the proximate trigger of ending almost a five year long term relationship. And so the combination of those two things happening at the same time was like, it's like losing the relationship and also not having a social scene to find a new partner. So that was pretty tough. 

Rob Wiblin:
It's something that I hadn't really thought about ahead of time, is that when you move to a new place for work, then almost everyone you meet for quite a while is people who you're connected to through work, and it really reduces the diversification in your friendship group. And that can take quite a long time to build back in. I was only starting to do that, I think, in the UK, after many years of living there, to start to meet more and more people who didn't have anything to do with effective altruism, which was really great. Yeah. 

Benjamin Todd:
And I think also San Francisco, it's hard to break out of tech people because just in general, the city is way more dominated by one industry. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah. It's a real hub for a particular set of interests. In this case, it was particularly rough because it was potentially forever changing your lifestyle in a way that was very hard to undo without, I guess, quitting your job. And so even if you're willing to make that sacrifice at that point, many years later, it could grate a whole lot more if you come to the point where you're thinking, my life just isn't what I actually wanted it to be structurally. It feels wrong. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah. I guess just in a way that's saying it's maybe a bigger sacrifice than it looks at first. I mean, I guess that was the impetus for moving back, was I was much less happy, and I realised I knew one of the factors was being based in the Bay, so that kind of made it a topic of discussion. And then I remember it was then, Howie, were eating vegetarian Chinese food at our favourite restaurant in Berkeley, and he was just like, well, actually, should we consider moving back? And then we started a kind of more formal process where we polled everyone on their preferences and we reanalyzed recent hiring and which people would have preferred to be based in which places, and tried to kind of estimate. And we realised that the hiring wasn't as good as we thought. And we also realised that. I think it was pretty clear that the team at that point's preferences was to be in London. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah. So I think the immediate instigator was that we were getting very close to signing a five year contract on an office in San Francisco. And then Howie raised the question, it doesn't seem like you really want to be living here, so why are we signing this contract to stay in a place that quite a few of you seem unhappy in? And. Yeah, so there was you and me, I think, who were pretty keen to go back, a few Australians who I think generally lean towards going back, though not as strong. And then quite a few people who missed home who were British. 

Benjamin Todd:
The other big benefit we didn't realise is we didn't actually end up being very involved with the Silicon Valley community at all. After YC ended, that kind of fell away a bit. So that didn't end up being a benefit like we hoped. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah, I don't know that that was necessarily a mistake, unfortunately. I think our ideas, perhaps they just don't tie into entrepreneurship exactly in that way. We're not necessarily trying to start lots of for profit companies or the cards have just fell in such a way that it doesn't seem like that's usually the best way to have an impact, or at least not the way that we've focused on. So the synergies weren't quite as strong as we might have expected. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah. But I did get really useful advice on how to run an org, and I did still keep getting some of that advice. I would still meet the YC partners every now and again, but I could have imagined being more involved and maybe just meeting when we first arrived in the valley. You know, we met, like, people from the PayPal mafia. We met Reid Hoffman. We met, like all the, like, the founder of Gmail was our mentor at YC, and we met Sam Altman and Paul Graham. And this was all really exciting, but then I was kind of like, maybe that's going to continue, and, you know, we'll meet like, Jeff Bezos as well. And that didn't happen. Yeah, right. Which, I mean, maybe could have happened if I'd carried on kind of pursuing that and socialising with those types of people. But I just. We didn't. 

Rob Wiblin:
We didn't do so. Yeah. Okay. We spent a lot of time talking about mistakes that we've made over the years, which I guess is natural because that's the kind of thing it's very easy to learn from. But we should also spend some time thinking about what we did right. What some of 80,000 Hours’ strengths were. What's one that stands out for you? 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah, I mean, the biggest one that comes to mind we already covered, which was focusing on the online content, focusing on content that would get search traffic and kind of building up the web traffic, especially the 2015 to 2017 period. But then, yeah, more just like with the. In general, one thing that comes to mind almost sounds kind of simple, but it's just trying quite hard to stick to basic processes like. Yeah, learning about the kind of basic things you should do as a line manager and doing them. So having quarterly feedback rounds and having weekly one on ones and actually writing down goals each week and checking whether you did them or not. And this stuff will. Yeah, it all sounds quite obvious, but it actually takes a lot of conscientiousness to just keep consistently doing that every week. 

And it makes a big difference. I think it's made a big difference in terms of one thing is it seems like there's often been an impression that 80,000 Hours is generally pretty well run, and I think that's reflected in our retention stats, which, yeah, they actually have the latest ones, but I would say over our history, it's probably over 90%. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah, I think so. Stuff that we did really consistently. Having line manager meetings regularly and following a particular kind of format for having those so that you don't miss stuff. Having all hands meetings. As the org has grown, all of these schedules have shifted, but there was a time when there was only a few of us. Every week we would meet and discuss what had happened the previous week and what we're going to do next week and looking at the metrics and so on. There's also kind of feedback rounds that you do regularly. Yeah. The open meetings where people can bring up issues with their line manager that might not fit into a normal weekly meeting. Reviewing metrics on a particular cycle so that you can then change. 

We did bouts for a while where you would set goals for say the next ten weeks or so and then you would try to finish particular things by the end of that bout. And then at the end of that you review that and come up with a new plan for the next bout. Which I think was like, it's very good to provide structure in something that otherwise doesn't naturally have cycles in it. Yeah. Are there any others? 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah, I mean, I guess a lot of this. Someone who's worked in tech before might just think this all sounds so obvious that it's like, why are we even mentioning this? But I mean, at least some of the organisations in the community didn't do these things, especially early on. I think we were one of the fastest to kind of implement that whole package. I think a lot of stuff when they join, they say one of the things that really attracted them was they feel like we have a very supportive culture, which maybe. Yeah, maybe it's. But maybe you could speak to this better than me. But for instance, I've always. I guess I. At least with the people I managed, I always tried to be very pragmatic about problems and that made people feel like they could bring things up. 

And this would also extend to things like mental health where I always just tried to be able to talk about them openly and just take a kind of pragmatic approach, like what's going to work type approach to it. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah, definitely. Yeah. We have a culture where I think by and large, people feel pretty safe to talk about mental health issues that they're facing and to share tips and tricks with one another about what things that they're trying, what's. What's working for them and feel fine telling their manager that they were pretty down this week so they didn't get so much done. I think by and large that's. I mean, for some people that's just incredibly valuable and almost essential in a place that they're. That they're going to work depending on what they're like as a person. Because, yeah, if you're feeling down and then you're struggling with work and then you kind of have to put on a front with your manager that you're getting things done that you're not, that is, can potentially start a very negative spiral for folks. And 80,000 Hours has always steered pretty clear of that dynamic. So, I mean, yeah, I value that personally as well. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah. And then I think people find the culture quite friendly. And then I think we also put a lot of effort into things like having a nice office and just generally trying to make it a nice place to work, having like good policies about like maternity leave and things like that and. Oh, yeah, I mean, also pushing to raise salaries, probably ahead of many orgs. Yeah, we've hired a bunch of people who got kind of burned out to other EA orgs and came to us. This is something that attracted them to 80k. And I think it's also contributed to just having less problems with lots of drama and burnout and things like that is often common. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah, I mean, we're also just hiring so many great people, it seems like. Yeah, the calibre of the people who are interested in working at 80,000 Hours is just really wonderful. In the past we've often felt a little bit. I mean, many years ago I think we felt quite limited by our ability to hire exactly the people with the skills that we wanted. But at this point where we're really able to grow through, we're really able to grow the inputs and grow the outputs pretty reliably. So I'm super excited about that. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah. And then, I mean, looking forward, I think, yeah, a big priority is just to actually get to the point where, say, the majority of students even heard of us, which I think, yeah, we're still now a lot closer with the marketing scale up, but there's still a bunch more to be done there. 

Rob Wiblin:
So one reason we've recorded this now is that after ten years of leading 80,000 Hours, more or less from its inception, you're handing over the reins and are going to be trying out some other projects. What are some of the reasons to be making that change? 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah, I mean, we touched on some of them before, but from around 2017, I started basically feeling less aligned with, gradually less aligned by the role and less motivated in it. And so, like, for instance, the thing I find most motivating is like spreading the ideas and writing and getting the ideas out there. And so when the organisation was more focused on content and I had time for writing, that felt like a better fit for me than now, where we have four programmes, I guess almost 30 staff now, and hiring rapidly. A lot of the programmes aren't doing content. So now what the org needs is more someone who just really wants to make management their main thing. 

Yeah, and throughout most of the history, I was kind of doing these two jobs where one was kind of head of product and author of a lot of our most central content, and then the other was being CEO. And that was pretty difficult to do both. And it just becomes harder and harder as the org grows. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah. The more staff you're line managing and the more people involved in general, the more that just ends up eating the role such that there's very little time left for creative work. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah. And 80,000 Hours, I would say, is almost harder to run than a typical org of this size because we have four programmes. It would be much simpler if we just had one programme. Then it would be easier to get your head around. And we kind of have four and each one's almost run by a mini CEO who has a lot of, like, they're developing them almost as separate products. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah. Are there any other ways that the role became a worse fit over the years? 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah, I think we've touched on the most important things. The ones we just said, though. Yeah, there was probably some other stuff. I mean, we also mentioned earlier, I think there was something where the move to California kind of used up a bit of sacrifice capital or something, which I think then turned into a factor. I think personally, the lack of growth in the web content was a kind of ongoing source of frustration for me or affected my morale. And then, I don't know, there's maybe also just a sheer variety thing where I'm like very kind of normally in most of my life, I really crave new experiences. And so just doing the same thing for ten years, a lot of stuff that was really interesting and fresh back in 2014. Okay, now it's like the 10th annual review. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah, yeah. We've both kind of been working on this stuff together for almost ten years. It's been a long while. 80,000 Hours has changed. We've both grown up a bunch. Nobody could say you haven't given a lot to 80,000 Hours over all this time. 

Benjamin Todd:
Yeah, there was a tension going back almost to the start where it was always just, I wanted to do more writing, but it was kind of hard to fit around running the rest of the org. Yeah, I just generally became more intense over time. 

Rob Wiblin:
Totally. 

Benjamin Todd:
All those factors were making me less motivated in the role and less of a good fit for it. 

Rob Wiblin:
Okay, well, we are almost out of time here, but did you have anything you wanted to say about the future of 80k before we go? 

Benjamin Todd:
So I think just for what might be in store in the next few years is it seems like compared to, say, 2020, 2021, we could triple our audience from there and really reach, you know, become a thing where it's a pretty well known. If you're really serious about social impact among students, that would just be like a typical thing to check out would be 80,000 Hours. And yeah, we could then at that point be doing calls with maybe 3,000, even 5,000 people a year, both new people coming in and doing calls with people who we already know that kind of like that community builds up bigger and bigger each year. But yeah, we could also imagine with one on one, there's adding headhunting back, which we've started doing. 

And just in general, as the readership gets bigger and bigger, 80,000 Hours is mostly in the past focused on getting new people into effective altruism for the first time, which I think is actually, this is a whole other topic, but I think there's a thing that confuses people about 80,000 Hours is they kind of think that what we're doing is providing the best possible careers advice for people in effective altruism. But actually, I think a lot of the impacts come from getting new people in rather than as we've reached more and more people, it becomes more and more important to focus on directing our existing and helping to coordinate our existing community of readers to actually solve all these problems that we're talking about. 


And there's a huge amount to be done. And you can imagine in ten or 20 years, if current trends continue, there'll be Nobel Prize winning scientists and they'll be top politicians and more tech CEOs who are people, and just also tens of thousands of people who've all been influenced by 80,000 Hours. And what that community might be able to do if it's able to coordinate and be able to start projects and get them staffed by the headhunting team. You can imagine really getting a lot done in the next couple of decades. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah, there's so much we still don't know. Although the range of problems that we could look into and develop a really deep understanding of, and especially potentially having specialists who really deeply know some particular problem area or some particular career path, that's something we haven't hit the scale at where we can do that very much yet. 

Benjamin Todd:
Well, that would be another big avenue for expansion would be just having a big research team who are actually able to cover all of the courses and different career options. 

Rob Wiblin:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I've been fully committed to the 80,000 Hours thing since I moved to the UK in 2012, and I have never doubted that we would continue to grow and continue to have more impact, and eventually our ideas would cut through and be able to help a lot of people do more good. Whether or not we'll reach a research team of hundreds of people and so on, I'm not sure, but I'm very optimistic about the next few years. So yeah, thanks so much for getting 80,000 Hours to this point and being such a pleasure to work with for a decade now. My guest today has been Benjamin Todd. Thanks so much for coming on 80k After Hours. 

Benjamin Todd:
Cool. Thanks, Rob. 

Rob Wiblin:
All right, as I mentioned in the intro, in a funny coincidence, 80,000 Hours is currently looking for a new CEO because our current CEO is heading off to work at Open Philanthropy. And if you're the kind of person who listened enthusiastically to that whole interview between me and Ben, even if you're not suitable for the role, you probably are among the 1% most suitable people in the entire world for that. For the CEO position, though, I would note 80,000 Hours is quite a bit bigger and quite a bit more formal than the era that Benjamin and I were talking about through most of that conversation. Anyway, we're currently accepting expressions of interest in the role, and they will be open until the 10 December. So do get on this fairly quickly if you are excited about the idea of the CEO vacancy. 

As I mentioned in the intro, there's a decent chance that we promote someone from within 80,000 Hours to become the CEO, which would then open up the position that they're currently in. So at the same time as we're asking people to let us know if they think they have what it takes to be CEO, we're also curious to know if they might be interested in applying to be director of internal systems, website director, or director of special projects. Should one of those positions just happen to open up, you can find the job ad for all of that on our website at 80000hours.org/latest. Or if you google 80,000 hours work with us, that should bring you to the page that lists all of our current job vacancies. If you're curious, you should really go read that. 

But a few things that I can say about the role: our CEO is, as you might expect, ultimately responsible for increasing the positive social impact that's generated by 80,000 Hours in practice. Currently, they line manage five people. Those are the directors of the website, podcast, one on one, advising, internal systems, and special projects. The CEO's main responsibilities include setting the strategy for 80,000 hours, including what audiences we should target with what kinds of recommendations and which impact metrics we should be keeping in mind. Inspiring the entire organisation to be ambitious and trying to have more impact. Hiring, retaining and firing senior staff ensuring we keep the positive aspects of our team culture, like curiosity, honesty and kindness ensuring we remain highly organised and functional as we are at the moment. 

Managing relationships with our key donors and other stakeholders and I guess just addressing any of the most important and thoughty issues that come up anywhere in the organisation. In terms of the other three roles that I mentioned, the director of internal systems currently has a team of around five and oversees our operations, legal, compliance, hiring and office. The website director manages a team of around eight and is focused on maintaining and building the website, producing written content, improving our career advice in our newsletter and marketing our services in order to reach a whole lot of new users and director of special projects is a kind of generalist role that involves leading or managing various ad hoc projects on behalf of the CEO, usually in the strategy or operations space. 

Those projects change from time to time, but they can include project managing, fundraising, the annual review, updating salaries and helping with strategy refreshes for individual teams and we think the sort of person that we're looking to hire for CEO has many or most of these traits, including being willing to live in or near London and work from the office that we have here. They have substantial experience managing people or projects. They're able to initiate difficult conversations, able to preserve good relationships among staff. We're looking for someone who's able to identify and focus on the most important uncertainties that we face, is able to set strategy for a big project with an appropriate amount of decisiveness. We're looking for someone who has a broad and deep understanding of current advanced thinking about how to make the world a better place in the way that 80,000 Hours understands it. Of course, we're looking for someone who can motivate and inspire people to follow their vision, someone who's resilient to the inevitable challenges and setbacks that comes with that. 

They come with leadership, someone with a track record of working hard, someone who's likely to work at 80,000 Hours for at least three years if they come on as CEO, and someone who likes the sound of our cultural values, which are aiming for ambitious long term impact having a modest scientific mindset, openness and honesty, focus, fun and friendliness, self care and personal growth. 


And finally, aiming for exceptionally well researched advice in terms of thinking about the scale of 80,000 Hours and the impact you might be able to have, I can give you some indications of how large 80,000 Hours is. So in terms of scale during 2023 we're going to spend about $6 million and have an average of 27 primary staff plus six full time equivalent contractors. 

We've grown around 30% per year over the last two years and aim to kind of maintain or increase that growth, ideally. And on top of that, we'll spend around $3 million on marketing in 2023, a figure that we also aim to increase in future years if we can find cost effective methods to do that marketing. And in terms of intermediate outputs, in 2023 we'll have about 750,000 click throughs to high impact jobs on our job board. Around 250,000 new subscribers to our weekly email newsletter about 300,000 hours of listening time on our podcast spread across about 100,000 subscribers. Over 3 million unique visitors to our website. 


Over 1500 one-on-one conversations with people who, in my view, are embarrassingly talented and looking to change their careers in order to have more impact, as well as tens of millions of ad impressions across sponsored videos and social media, and so on. Alright, that's plenty for me to read here. If your interest has been piqued, go find that job ad at 80000hours.org/latest or of course by googling 80,000 hours work with us again. Expressions of interest close on the 10 December.


All right, audio mastering and technical editing for this episode by Ben Cordell and Ryan Kessler. Full transcripts and extensive collection of links to learn more are available on our site and put together by Katy Moore. Keiran Harris produces the show. Thanks for listening.