#550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats artwork

#550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats

The Tim Ferriss Show

November 30, 2021

Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats | Brought to you by 80,000 Hours free career advice for high impact and doing good in the world, Wealthfront automated investing, and Helix Sleep premium mattresses. More on all three below.
Speakers: Tim Ferriss, Andrew Chen
**Tim Ferriss** (0:00)
This episode is brought to you by 80,000 Hours. You have roughly 80,000 hours in your career. That's 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year for 40 years. They add up and are one of your biggest opportunities, if not the biggest opportunity, to make a positive impact on the world. In other words, if you want to make the best use of your 80,000 hours until we wrap up this show called Life, Where Should You Start?
Where should you focus?
It can be really hard and quite frankly, pretty stressful to try and figure out.
Some of the best strategies, best research and best tactical advice I've seen and heard come from 80,000 Hours, a nonprofit co-founded by Will MacAskill, an Oxford philosopher and a popular past guest on this podcast. Will is perhaps best known as being the co-founder of the Effective Altruism Movement, which has gained a lot of steam and a lot of popular coverage in the last handful of years. 80,000 Hours provides free research and support to help you find a career or path for tackling one of the world's most pressing problems. If you're looking to make a big change to your direction, mid-career, say, address pressing global problems for your current job, or if you're just starting out, or maybe starting a new chapter and not sure which path to pursue, 80,000 Hours can help. Join their free newsletter, and they'll send you an in-depth guide that will help you identify which global problems are most pressing, where you can have the biggest impact personally, and it will also help you get new ideas for high-impact careers or directions that help tackle these issues. They also have a job board with 800-plus opportunities to work on these problems and offer one-on-one advice to help you switch paths, if that's what you choose to do. And you can check out their excellent 80,000 Hours podcast, which has in-depth conversations with experts about how to best tackle pressing global problems, and really try to find that needle in the haystack. There's so many things to choose from. How do you pick the right high-leverage problem for you to focus on helping solve?
My team has raved, for instance, about the interview with Ezra Klein. That's number 94 And you can subscribe wherever you find your podcasts. That's the 80,000 Hours podcast. If you join the newsletter now as an extra bonus, they'll mail you, yes, physically mail you, a free book about impactful careers, such as Will MacAskill Doing Good Better. You can sign up at 80000hours.org/tim. That's 80000hours, H-O-U-R-S dot org slash Tim. Check it out. I really encourage you to check out this site. Even if you have no plans to change your career, if you're just curious about picking high leverage targets in life to improve the world. So I will also say it one more time because it's noteworthy. They're a nonprofit and everything they provide is free. That takes a hell of a lot of work. And a hell of a lot of dedication and a lot of people, a lot of hours on their part, the podcast, the newsletter, even their one-on-one advice, all free. So check it out, 80,000hours.org/tim, 80,000hours.org/tim.
Take a look.
This podcast episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep.
Sleep is super important to me. In the last few years I've come to conclude it is the end-all be-all that all good things, good mood, good performance, good everything seem to stem from good sleep. So I've tried a lot to optimize it. I've tried pills and potions, all sorts of different mattresses, you name it. And for the last few years, I've been sleeping on a Helix Midnight Lux mattress.
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