In this episode of the podcast, I sit down with author and speaker Sam Harris to talk about the concept of "effective altruism" and why it's important to give back to society. We talk about what it means to be an effective altruist, the benefits of giving back, and why we should all try to do the same. Sam is a great guy and I really enjoyed our conversation, so I hope you do too. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE on Apple Podcasts or wherever else you get your stuff. I'll be picking one person at random who leave a review to win a FREE place on the next Shreddin8 program! Thanks again for listening and Good Luck Out There! -Jon Sorrentino Timestamps: 3:00 - Sam Harris 4:30 - The concept of effective altruism 5:15 - The benefits of charitable giving 6:00 7:30 8:20 - How much money do you need 9:40 - Why is it important to be generous? 10:00 | How can we all be kinder to each other 11:20 12:30 | What is the best thing we can do with our money? 13:40 14:00 // 15:40 | How to be a good human being 15:00 Is it possible to have a nice private jet 16:20 | Is there a better private jet? 17:00 / 16:30 / 17: What are you going to do with your money 18: Is it better than a nice thing? 19:00/16:00 +17: What do you really need to be better than that you can afford a nice plane 21:40 / 18:40/19:50 / 21:50 22:30/23:30 // 22:00 Can you have a nicer private jet ? 23:00 Do you want to have more money than you can you can have a jumbo jet? / 22:50/25:00 & 25:00 Are you better off than you need to buy a plane? 26:00 Does it really matter? 27:00 Should you have to be more than $100,000 or $200,000? , 26:30 & 27:10 Is it a problem?
00:00:24.000So, I'm interested to talk to you about a bunch of things, but one of the big ones is this idea of effective altruism.
00:00:31.000And this is something that you really promote to the point where, I don't know if this is true, but I read this about you, that everything that you make over $36,000 a year, you donate?
00:01:50.000I feel like in contemporary society, we just get bombarded with marketing stuff all the time, saying like, oh, you really need this thing if you're going to have a good life.
00:01:59.000And I think in almost every case, that's just not true.
00:02:02.000I think the psychological evidence just shows that once you're above a certain level of income, additional money just has a very small impact on your happiness.
00:02:22.000Being able to work on what I really am passionate about, and I already have that.
00:02:26.000So my life is just so good in so many ways, and I feel like there's so much of a focus on money and how money is the key to happiness, and I think it's just all bullshit, basically.
00:02:36.000Well, it's definitely some bullshit in it.
00:02:38.000And I see that a lot in my neighborhood because I live where white people go to breed.
00:02:44.000And they go to breed and they sit down and they just talk about things.
00:02:50.000They talk about Range Rovers and certain watches and certain purses and shoes.
00:03:45.000You hit this critical mass stage where you, you know, like these billionaire characters, where they start buying $100 million yachts and $400 million yachts.
00:08:33.000Yeah, I like move around a ton, so I normally, like I don't have a house, but it wouldn't be convenient to have a house because I'm traveling so much.
00:08:40.000So you rent an apartment or something?
00:08:45.000I spend quite a chunk of my time out in the Bay Area.
00:08:48.000Like, a significant part of our staff and the non-profits out there.
00:08:51.000I've got lots of contacts, sister organizations out there.
00:08:54.000So most of your time, it seems like you're spending working for charitable organizations or Yeah, so I have kind of three hats.
00:09:03.000So one is an academic, so I'm a professor at Oxford.
00:09:06.000Second is this kind of more public figure where I'm talking about these ideas through books or on this podcast and so on.
00:09:12.000And then third is I run a nonprofit called the Center for Effective Altruism, which is more about like finding the best charities, the ones that are doing the most good, going to help other people the most, and trying to promote them and try and get people to give more and to give more effectively.
00:09:26.000Yeah, we've gone over ineffective charities, or I shouldn't say ineffective, but charities that are, the way they're structured, when you look at how much money is actually going towards the charity itself, and how much is going towards the structure of the organization, it's kind of crazy.
00:12:17.000So the Make-A-Wish Foundation set up this amazing story where they've got to drive in a Batmobile and have this fantastic day where they're basically Batman for the day.
00:12:28.000Kids' wish network is doing basically the same thing.
00:12:30.000They find seriously sick kids, often terminally ill kids, and say, what one thing would you want?
00:12:38.000But there is a lot of focus on particularly bad charities.
00:12:43.000You know, the ones that are just really corrupt or completely dysfunctional.
00:12:45.000I think that's not actually the most important message.
00:12:48.000What's most important is just even among the charities that are kind of good, even the ones that are making a difference, there's still a vast difference in the impact that you have.
00:12:57.000Difference of hundreds or thousands of times between the charities that are merely good and the ones that are really the very best.
00:13:03.000And that's primarily dependent on what program are they focusing on.
00:13:36.000No, it does dolphin therapy for autistic children, which has no evidence of working, but does actually just have some, like, risk of the children drowning.
00:13:49.000Yeah, so you can, like, cherry-pick these examples, but the thing is that these are just, like, not really representative.
00:13:53.000In general, I think charity's doing good, but the question is just, like, in the same way as if you're buying a product for yourself, you don't just want to get, like...
00:14:03.000You know, a laptop, as long as it works.
00:14:05.000You want to find, like, what's the best laptop I can get with my money?
00:14:14.000So in that sense, I think, like, the number of charities that you think are just, yeah, this is really competing for being the most effective charity in the world, that's actually very small.
00:14:22.000So GiveWell, for example, is an evaluator.
00:14:25.000It looks at all sorts of different global health And global development charities.
00:14:30.000And its list of charities that's like, yeah, this is just super good.
00:14:33.000You should really be donating to them.
00:14:34.000It's only seven charities long at the moment.
00:15:31.000And he had this argument, which is that, you know, the way I tell the story is, imagine someone walks, is walking past a shallow pond, and they see a child drowning in that shallow pond.
00:15:45.000And they could run in, and they could save the child.
00:15:48.000But they're wearing a really nice suit, a suit that costs like $3,000.
00:15:52.000And so they say, no, I'm not going to save that child.
00:15:56.000I'm just going to walk by and let it drown, because I don't want to lose the cost of this suit.
00:16:00.000I normally say, look, in moral philosophy, we have a technical term for people like that.
00:16:07.000And this is how I convey it in my seminars.
00:16:13.000And obviously we all agree, like, yeah, come on, if it's just you could clearly save this child that's right in front of you, you ought to do that.
00:16:23.000But then what Peter Singer's insight is, he says, well, what's the difference between that child that's right there in front of you and that child that's in sub-Saharan Africa who you could save?
00:16:35.000But you could still save their life with just a few thousand dollars if you donate it to a really effective non-profit.
00:16:41.000And he considers all the different ways in which these cases might be disanalogous, but decides ultimately, like, no, there's actually just no morally relevant difference.
00:16:49.000And so, yeah, we do just have an obligation to give away at least a very significant proportion of our income.
00:16:56.000And I was really convinced by this kind of on an intellectual level for many years, but I never really did anything about it.
00:17:04.000And not until I went to Oxford to do a postgraduate degree in philosophy.
00:17:09.000And in the summer between then I needed some money, I worked as a fundraiser for Care International, a global development charity.
00:17:15.000So I was one of those annoying people in the street who would kind of get in your way and then ask you to donate $10 a month.
00:17:22.000And it meant that all day, every day, I was talking about, like, look, this is the conditions of people in extreme poverty.
00:17:27.000We can do so much to help people at such little cost to ourselves.
00:18:39.000But the thing, as well as actually taking these ideas and putting them into practice, what really blew me away was just how positive he was.
00:18:45.000And it was not that he was kind of wearing this hair shirt, flagellating.
00:18:49.000Instead, he was saying, look, this is an amazing way to live.
00:18:53.000We have this amazing opportunity to do a huge amount of good, to help so many other people, thousands of people, at what's actually a very low cost to ourselves.
00:19:02.000And me having that one person who also kind of shared my worldview, shared my ambitions, just meant kind of gave that little psychological block, was lifted.
00:19:14.000And it meant that I was like, okay, cool, I'm on board.
00:19:30.000You know, I want to make sure it has as big an impact as possible.
00:19:33.000And that meant I started digging into, well, how can we compare between different charities?
00:19:38.000I found there was a ton of work from health and development economics that could help us to answer this.
00:19:43.000And what began as this kind of side project between these two, you know, Ivory Tower academics, me and Toby, We found that loads of people just were really taken by this idea, both of giving more, but in particular of giving more effectively.
00:19:59.000And over time, this kind of global movement called effective altruism started to form around these ideas and started to broaden in a couple of ways.
00:20:07.000So, one is that I broadened away from just charitable donations to also thinking about, well, what should I think about with respect to my personal consumption?
00:20:16.000What should I think about with respect to my career?
00:20:18.000If I'm really aiming to do as much good as possible, what should I do?
00:20:22.000And then secondly, also starting to think about cause areas other than just global poverty as well.
00:20:45.000And then also preservation of the long-run future of humanity and worrying about risks of global catastrophe, things that may be fairly unlikely but would be very, very bad if they did happen, especially relating to new technology like novel pathogens,
00:21:03.000viruses you could design in a lab and so on.
00:21:05.000Well, you're also very concerned with AI as well, right?
00:21:10.000And that's, I think, in this category of If you look at the history of human progress, technological change just creates these huge step changes in just how humanity progresses.
00:21:22.000So it was only 12 years in 1933 to then 1945 between Leo Szilard first coming up with the idea of the nuclear chain reaction.
00:21:33.000And that was just a purely conceptual idea on a bit of paper.
00:21:36.00012 years from that to then the deployment of the first nuclear bomb.
00:21:41.000And think how radical a change that is, suddenly being in the nuclear age.
00:22:04.000That we're often very not prepared for.
00:22:06.000And I think artificial intelligence is in this category where we're really making radical progress in AI, especially over the last five years.
00:22:15.000It's really one of the fastest developing technologies, I think.
00:22:19.000And yet has huge potential in so many different ways.
00:22:22.000And as with any new technology, huge positive potential.
00:22:26.000Really, if you get AI right, you can solve almost any other problem.
00:22:57.000Are we now in a situation like the Neanderthals versus Homo sapiens where we've suddenly created this intelligence that is greater than our own?
00:23:10.000Are we able to ensure that transition is positive rather than negative?
00:23:15.000Have you ever considered the possibility when you look at all the impoverished people in the world, all the cruelty, all the people that are so just concerned with material possessions and shallow thinking and war and just the evil that men do?
00:23:30.000Is it possible that we're sort of an outdated concept that what we are as these biological organisms that are still slaves to the whole Darwinian evolutionary survival of the fittest natural selection sort of paradigm that we've operated under for all these many thousands and hundreds of thousands of years as humans Is it possible that we're giving birth to the next thing?
00:23:57.000That just like we don't long for the days when we used to be monkeys throwing shit at each other from the trees, one day we will be something different, whether it will be a combination of us and these machines, or whether we're going to augment our own intelligence with some sort of Artificial,
00:24:18.000whether it's some sort of an exo-brain or something that's going to take us to that.
00:24:23.000Or it's going to be simply that we create artificial intelligence.
00:24:28.000Artificial intelligence no longer has use for us because we're illogical.
00:24:31.000And then that becomes the new life form.
00:24:33.000And then we're hiding the cave somewhere, hoping the Terminators don't get us.
00:24:38.000Yeah, I mean, I think, like, over the long term, I mean, with all of these things, the question of kind of timelines is very hard.
00:24:44.000And sometimes people want to reject this sort of discussion because, oh, this is so far in the future.
00:24:50.000Whereas I think, like, if something's sufficiently important, we should be talking about it even if maybe it's, you know, decades or generations hence.
00:25:19.000You think we're not going to be around anymore?
00:25:21.000Yeah, I mean, I think if intelligent creatures are still around, it's going to be in a thousand years' time, it's going to be something that's not...
00:25:29.000Homo sapiens, like you said, there's kind of three...
00:25:32.000Or it's like not what we would consider kind of typical humans now.
00:26:10.000But when you get to large-scale humanity, it becomes very easy to...
00:26:15.000Disassociate or create this diffusion of responsibility where there's you know enough people So you don't really value them as much and you're allowed to get away with some pretty heinous stuff Especially when you consider drone warfare things that we're able to do with long distance where we're not seeing the person that we're having the effect on It's a very flawed thing the human species Wouldn't it be better if something better came along?
00:26:54.000So the question is just, will our kind of, you know, generations hence, will, you know, the question's not really about us, it's about our grandchildren.
00:27:20.000And how much of that is going to change if we're made out of something that people have created or maybe we're made out of something artificial intelligence has created because we've created something that's far superior to us.
00:27:33.000So yeah, I mean, I have a view on this, as you might expect.
00:27:36.000I mean, in my view, the thing that's valuable and the only thing that's valuable ultimately is conscious experience.
00:27:44.000So that's good conscious experiences, happiness, joy, and so on.
00:27:52.000Negative conscious experiences, suffering, pain, distress, those are bad for the world.
00:27:56.000And so that's why it's a good thing for me to do some service to you to benefit you, but I can't do anything good to benefit this bottle of water.
00:28:06.000And so then the key question in terms of what should we think about, supposing it is the case that, you know, a thousand years time, it's now synthetic life, it's artificial intelligence or something that's, like,
00:28:22.000that are in charge and there are no longer any humans, would this be good or bad?
00:28:25.000The question for me is, you know, are they having conscious experiences and are those conscious experiences good or bad?
00:28:44.000So it's called the experience machine.
00:28:46.000And the idea is, supposing that tomorrow you could plug into this machine.
00:28:53.000It's like the most amazing VR you could ever have.
00:28:56.000And in this machine, you will live, let's say you'll live 200 years, and you'll be in the most amazing bliss.
00:29:03.000You'll have the most amazing experiences of, you know, and your experiences will involve incredible relationships, incredible creative achievement and so on.
00:29:12.000And it'll just be like the perfect life that you could live experientially for the next 200 years.
00:29:22.000Insofar as you are self-interested, so put aside considerations you might have about wanting to make the world a better place, but just insofar as you care about yourself, would you plug into this thing?
00:29:32.000Bearing in mind that in a certain sense, all of these experiences are going to be fake.
00:29:36.000You're going to have experiences of having amazing friendships, writing great works of art and so on.
00:30:50.000When you talk to the leading minds when it comes to virtual reality or artificial reality or simulation theory, when they start talking about what will be possible one day, they're going to, without a doubt, within 100 years or 500 years or whatever the number is,
00:31:08.000They're going to be able to create an artificial reality that's indiscernible from this reality.
00:31:12.000You're going to be able to feel things.
00:31:14.000There's going to be emotions that come to you.
00:31:16.000They're going to be able to recreate every single aspect of an everyday life.
00:31:58.000And if you gave that to one of my kids, they'd spit on it.
00:32:00.000They'd be like, what kind of piece of shit video game is this?
00:32:03.000They would think it's just so ridiculous.
00:32:05.000But to me, at the time, it was amazing.
00:32:08.000You go from that to one of these HTC Vive games, which has all taken place within my lifetime, and you go, well, a lifetime from now, if you follow the exponential increase in the ability, the technological innovation, it's going to be spectacular.
00:32:34.000Yeah, I mean, there are actually some arguments for thinking, you know, this is Nick Boston, a colleague of mine, his simulation argument, for thinking we are in a simulation right now.
00:32:42.000In fact, it's very likely that we should be.
00:33:05.000Frame it, if you could, like his version of it.
00:33:07.000Yeah, so his argument is that in the future, supposing we believe that the human race doesn't go extinct, or post-humans don't go extinct over the next few thousand years...
00:33:19.000And secondly, that the people in the future have an interest in recreating their past, just for kind of historical interest or for learning, that they're going to be interested in running, because they're now going to have huge, amazing computer power.
00:33:31.000They're going to be able to create simulations of the past.
00:33:34.000That they're going to have some interest in running simulations of the past.
00:33:40.000Well, if that is true, then the number of simulations that these future people are going to be running will vastly outnumber the number of actual timelines, the kind of base universe, as it were.
00:33:54.000So for the one real universe where history kind of unfolds, there's also, let's call it, 10,000 simulations of that universe.
00:34:09.000It's the case that, well, given that I'm just, you know, these things really are indiscernible for the people who are inside them, it's overwhelmingly likely, just in the base rate, that I'm going to be in a simulation rather than in the real world.
00:34:24.000And what Nick Bostrom says actually is not that we definitely are in a simulation, but he just points out the conflict between these three kind of beliefs that we would seem to hold.
00:34:34.000One is that we're not going to go extinct in the near future.
00:34:38.000Two is that, you know, people in the future will have some interest in simulating the past.
00:34:43.000And thirdly, that we're not living in a simulation.
00:34:46.000And he himself gives, you know, a reasonable degree of belief.
00:34:49.000Maybe he thinks it's like 10% likely, 15% likely that we're in a simulation.
00:34:54.000Other people who understand the argument vary a bit more, but I think it's something you should at least be taking seriously.
00:35:03.000The reason I reject it is kind of even weirder, I think, or it's somewhat technical.
00:35:12.000But the basic thought is just that According to the best guesses from cosmologists, we're actually in an infinite universe.
00:35:24.000Now, we can't affect an infinitely big universe.
00:35:27.000We're restricted by the speed of light to what we can affect and to what we can see.
00:35:32.000But the best idea, according to the best theory we have, the universe just kind of keeps on going.
00:35:38.000But if so, then there's already like an infinite number of observers of people kind of in that bottom universe.
00:35:47.000And that means that you've now got kind of an infinite number of people kind of experiencing things, and then you've got the simulations, and you've got like 10,000 simulations.
00:35:57.000But you can't say there's 10,000 times as many simulated beings as there are real beings, because there's already an infinite number of real beings.
00:36:37.000It's kind of a case where, like, our best methods of assigning degrees of belief to things kind of run out.
00:36:43.000If you think it's, you know, there's an infinite number of...
00:36:47.000Simulated beings, an infinite number of real beings, then what's the chance of you being one or the other?
00:36:52.000I mean, like, we don't actually have the, like, tools to be able to answer that.
00:36:56.000Neil deGrasse Tyson was trying to explain this to me a couple of weeks ago, that there are infinities that are bigger than other infinities.
00:37:11.000So the number, but the key, we're all talking about the lowest, what's called cardinality, the smallest infinity, which is the size of the infinity of all the integers, one, two, three, four, counting numbers.
00:37:35.000And then what Neil was saying was, yeah, there are these even bigger levels of infinity.
00:37:39.000So if you look at not just all the counting numbers, but all of the numbers you can make fractions out of, a half, a quarter, an eighth, and so on, that's just more numbers than the infinity of the counting numbers.
00:37:51.000I've spent a lot of time trying to understand why human beings are so obsessed with innovation, why human beings are so obsessed with technological progress.
00:38:01.000And one of the things that I continue to come to is that we think of everything in this world as being natural, but the behavior of butterflies and wolves and the way rivers run down from the mountain.
00:38:13.000But we don't think of ourselves and our own behavior as natural.
00:38:17.000We don't think of our own thirst for conquest and innovation and even materialism.
00:38:23.000I think materialism is probably a very natural reaction to our need to somehow or another fuel innovation.
00:38:33.000And that one of the ways to ensure that innovation is constantly fueled is that people are constantly obsessed with buying new things, constantly obsessed with the latest and greatest, which fuels innovation.
00:38:45.000And when you look at the universe itself, and you look at all the various things that we know to be natural processes in the universe, like in order to make a human being, a star has to explode.
00:38:58.000When you literally are made out of stardust, which is...
00:39:01.000When you run that by people for the first time, they go, wait, what?
00:39:05.000In order for you to have carbon-based life form that has to be created inside a burning, dying star, and that's the only way you make this thing, what you are right now.
00:39:14.000And then that thing makes artificial reality, and then that thing makes...
00:39:22.000I mean, if you follow the ideas of technological progress, if something gets to a point where it's indiscernible from reality, how do you know it's not a new reality?
00:39:32.000How do you know it's not a new kind of reality?
00:39:58.000You're in these gigantic fake worlds where you're traveling from place to place, but right now we're looking at it in a very two-dimensional way.
00:40:06.000You're looking at it on a flat screen.
00:40:08.000One day it's not going to be two-dimensional.
00:40:10.000One day it's going to be something that you're interfacing with.
00:40:14.000Your consciousness is interfacing with it.
00:40:17.000Is it only real if we can take it and drop it on something?
00:40:30.000Or is it real if it follows every single check?
00:40:35.000Like if you check off every single item on the list of conscious reality and conscious experience?
00:40:41.000Yeah, I think that's a great question, because I think the dichotomy that a lot of people think in terms of natural, non-natural, I think it's just meaningless.
00:40:50.000I mean, people firstly think this is natural and this is not.
00:40:53.000I mean, in a sense, everything we're doing is natural because homo sapiens are part of a natural process.
00:41:01.000And maybe in another sense, everything we're doing is not natural.
00:41:06.000What's the model relevance of something being natural versus not natural?
00:41:10.000Lots of stuff that happens in the natural world is just really awful.
00:41:14.000Huge amounts of cannibalism, murder, suffering.
00:41:20.000So it's not clear why we would care about something being natural rather than non-natural.
00:41:26.000But then the second question is, yeah, let's consider this virtual reality again, this experience machine that you could plug yourself into.
00:41:36.000And as part of the description, I said, oh, none of this would be real.
00:41:40.000You'd have all of these interactions with people that you think are friends and so on, but that wouldn't be real.
00:41:45.000And I think you could very well push back on that and say, why should something be physically instantiated?
00:41:54.000In order for it to count as a real experience.
00:41:57.000Why is it not the case that in this virtual reality you're interacting with algorithms, but that's just as much...
00:42:04.000At least it's possible for that to be just as much friendship as if you're interacting with people who are, you know, flesh and blood.
00:42:12.000And I think it's hard to explain kind of what the difference would be.
00:42:16.000Because, you know, if you think about Star Trek...
00:42:19.000Jean-Luc Picard can be friends with data and android.
00:42:24.000He's not biological, but we think that you can still have moral worth and friendships and so on with creatures that are not made of human biology.
00:42:36.000In which case, why does the fact that something merely lives on silicon, why wouldn't that exist?
00:42:41.000Or as seemingly merely software, why does that mean you couldn't have a genuine friendship with that thing, if it acts in a sufficiently sophisticated way, perhaps?
00:42:53.000Isn't there also an issue with our incredibly limited ability to view reality itself?
00:42:57.000Because we're only viewing the dimensions that are relevant to us in this current state of carbon-based life form, this talking monkey clinging to the spaceship flying through the universe, right?
00:43:12.000But when you pay attention to those, the dudes who write on yellow legal pads and they get into quantum physics and they have all those crazy equations that nobody but them understands, Maybe you do.
00:43:21.000I look at that shit and I go, what the fuck are they writing?
00:43:24.000But they believe, I mean, what is the current model?
00:43:27.000They believe there's at least 11 dimensions.
00:43:31.000What if there is a dimension that you can plug into that it's purely consciousness-driven, meaning there's no physical experience, there's no touching the ground, there's no gravity, but you exist in a conscious state and it's perpetual.
00:43:45.000Like, if you take A rocket ship, and it gets past our gravity and shoots off into distant space, and you have a clear shot of, you know, 14 billion years back to the beginning of the universe itself with nothing in the way, you're just gonna keep going for 14 billion light years.
00:44:48.000So Descartes thought there was this...
00:44:51.000Pineal gland, this little bit of your brain, and your conscious kind of soul was just kind of steering your monkey body through this pineal gland.
00:45:14.000It seems to be just fixed law of the universe that that just can't happen.
00:45:19.000Because in order for, you know, this conscious mind to, if it's not merely a physical process, if it's not just the brain, in order for it to be able to affect what this physical entity is doing, it would have to use energy to be able to do that.
00:45:34.000So the energy would have to be coming from somewhere, and if it's not coming from just the physical realm, then suddenly we've got this counter-example to all the rest of science.
00:45:43.000Sort of, but are you aware of the theories of human neurotransmitters being pathways to other dimensions like dimethyltryptamine?
00:45:53.000I mean, I know about DMT. Do you know it's produced in the pineal gland?
00:45:57.000Where Descartes thought that all that stuff was going on, the seed of the soul, what the Egyptians called the Eye of Horus, and the reason why the Catholics and so many ancient religions were so focused on pine cones and their...
00:46:07.000Their art and their imagery, that's the pineal gland.
00:46:13.000That's what it's supposed to represent.
00:46:15.000And for people who've had these intense transformative psychedelic experiences by consuming exogenous dimethyltryptamine, which is produced by the brain, that you have these insane transformative experiences where you feel like you are traveling to other dimensions.
00:46:56.000Yeah, but it's one of the most transient drugs ever observed in the body.
00:46:59.000Your body brings it back to baseline in like 15 minutes.
00:47:02.000Okay, because I mean, there's a lot of, I do think there's like tons of, people very often greatly overestimate the risks of non-legal drugs, like MDMA is like super safe and so on.
00:47:15.000Overestimate the risk, is that what you're saying?
00:47:49.000It's not like your consciousness dissolves into some bizarre quasi-living state and then you have to work your way back to being you again.
00:48:01.000You're Will McCaskill in the dimension, whatever the fuck it is.
00:48:05.000But what's crazy about it is that this is produced in the very area where Descartes was believing the seat of the soul is, and so many different Eastern religions, and all this psychological, like, all these different...
00:48:22.000Religions and all these different cultures, they were all convinced that that one gland had some massive significance in terms of the spirit and the soul, whatever that means, whatever the spirit means.
00:48:35.000So yeah, so then the question is just in these experiences, is it the case that you're like genuinely seeing into another dimension?
00:49:19.000Yeah, I think you're absolutely right.
00:49:22.000I mean, but there's also experiences, human experiences, that are available without drugs that some people have achieved through radical states of meditation and kundalini yoga, where they could achieve natural psychedelic states.
00:49:35.000Holotropic breathing, people that have done that have experienced, like, really radical psychological transformations and incredible psychedelic experiences from that as well.
00:49:47.000These sorts of experiences are very important, very interesting.
00:49:52.000I said that maybe we experience 0.01% of all possible conscious experiences, and that just allows you to see a little bit more of this potential vast landscape.
00:50:03.000Whereas I think there's nothing unmagical about saying ultimately that's all explained in terms of physics, in terms of different sorts of neurons firing and different sorts of transmitters and so on.
00:50:15.000We don't need to say, oh, and it's also this other thing which breaks all the known laws of physics that you're seeing into some other dimension in order for that to be an incredibly important thing.
00:50:27.000And nor is it unscientific to say we know almost nothing about consciousness.
00:50:32.000In terms of the areas of scientific inquiry, we have no understanding at all about the relationship between conscious experiences and, you know, what we would think of as physical processes.
00:50:46.000We really have no idea about, you know, if you give me any sufficiently complicated physical processes which are conscious and which are not, All we can go on is really this, well, I'm conscious, and so I know that things that are kind of like me are probably conscious too.
00:51:01.000And that's the best we've got, really.
00:51:04.000And this is known as a hard problem of consciousness.
00:51:07.000And philosophers often say that they've solved it with something, and I think it's always begging the question.
00:51:12.000I think we should be very open to the fact that Just as in, you know, 3000 BC, people had no idea about the laws of physics.
00:51:20.000This was just completely unexplored territory.
00:51:23.000We should think contemporary science, this is just a big, like, big black gap in our scientific understanding.
00:51:32.000And perhaps it's something maybe 21st century science, maybe 22nd century science can really get to grips with.
00:51:38.000It does seem like the ultimate question.
00:52:22.000They've only just now, within the last few years, the Cottonwood Research Foundation, which...
00:52:29.000Dr. Rick Strassman has a big part of it.
00:52:31.000He's the guy who wrote the book DMT, The Spirit Molecule.
00:52:35.000He did a bunch of the first FDA-approved drug trials with civilians where they took people and they gave them a Schedule I drug, dimethyltryptamine, which is so crazy that it's a Schedule I drug that your body produces.
00:53:01.000The different commonalities that these people had in their experiences.
00:53:05.000And he's working very closely with the Cottonwood Research Foundation.
00:53:08.000And one of the things that they found is that they've recently discovered, it was just anecdotal evidence that it was produced by the pineal gland.
00:53:15.000We knew that DMT was produced by the liver and the lungs, but now they know for sure because they've isolated it in rats.
00:53:22.000So in living rats, they know that they produce DMT with the pineal gland.
00:53:25.000So that explains a lot of ancient Eastern mysticism and all the symbology, all these symbols that people had to represent this gland.
00:53:36.000Now they know, okay, well this gland definitely does produce this incredibly potent psychedelic drug.
00:53:40.000But now the question is, at what levels, during what periods of stress, do you have to bring someone to the point of death before they experience this?
00:53:50.000And if that is the case, is it possible that consciousness itself is something that we, since we haven't really figured out what exactly it is, is it possible that consciousness can travel Through this chemical pathway that maybe these intense dimethyltryptamine experiences are in fact a gateway to what people have assumed exists from the beginning of time,
00:54:14.000like an afterlife, or a sea of souls, or something, some stage of existence other than this physical existence that we all experience right now.
00:54:24.000Yeah, so, I mean, I feel like I'd be...
00:54:30.000It's coming out of my mouth and I'm going, what the fuck are you talking about, dude?
00:54:34.000I think I'd just be surprised if consciousness was just this one chemical.
00:54:38.000I think it's much more likely that it's this emergent phenomenon from this incredibly complex system of billions of different neurons firing in a certain way.
00:54:48.000And when you have a certain process that's sufficiently complex in the right way, somehow, and this is just this big black box that we've got no idea about, somehow subjective experience comes out of that.
00:55:12.000If you're breathing air and the air keeps you alive, like you're breathing in and bringing out, you don't think that air carries the life with it to another place, right?
00:55:34.000But I am curious as to how consciousness varies.
00:55:37.000You know, consciousness and the actual feeling of being alive varies depending upon your health, depending upon stress levels.
00:55:46.000Depending upon love and happiness and all these different factors change the way you view the world, which is really interesting because in effect that changes consciousness and you can be more, you know, you can be more elevated like you can I guarantee you All this effective altruism that you're concentrating on is somehow or another elevating your consciousness because you're putting out so much love and so much happiness and you're helping so many people.
00:56:14.000There's so many positive benefits to your very existence.
00:56:17.000I've got to believe that somehow or another that manages to come back to you.
00:56:22.000I mean, it definitely comes back to me in kind of how I feel about my life.
00:56:27.000I mean, when we were talking about how money is just not the key to a happy life, the question is, well, what is?
00:56:34.000And the answers are having a great community, having a greater purpose in life, feeling like you're making a difference.
00:56:44.000So we've built up this kind of community around effective altruism.
00:56:47.000You know, people all around the world who are making a significant change.
00:56:51.000So for example, donating 10% of their income to the charities they think are most effective or pursuing a career that they think is really effective.
00:56:59.000And one thing I wasn't surprising from the outset, but I'm so happy happened, is that this strong community has formed.
00:57:05.000It's kind of like a little global village or something.
00:57:07.000And people have found that actually, far from being a sacrifice, as you might have expected, this is actually incredibly rewarding.
00:57:16.000Because you've now got this community of people who have shared aims to you, and you're all working towards this greater goal.
00:57:23.000And that's something that I think is very lacking in the world today.
00:57:29.000They work 9 to 5, and they have a nice time on the weekend, but they're like, where is all of this going?
00:57:35.000At the end of my life, I'm really going to think, yeah, I made the most of this.
00:57:40.000Whereas if you think at the end of your life, like, yep, I dedicated my life to helping others, and I had this transformative impact on thousands of people, you're not going to think at the end of your life, gee, I really wasted that.
00:57:52.000It's just something I don't think you can really look at.
00:57:54.000If you go deep, though, down the philosophical rabbit hole, You really consider that life is this temporary experience and even benefiting someone through this temporary experience is still a temporary experience It's like you are helping some you gave them a pillow for the ride and it's a temporary ride the ride comes to an end and then what and then what is the point of all this like what is the point of effective altruism if you're just helping people during this temporary ride and That doesn't seem to mean anything.
00:58:49.000The first is that the ride is the goal, ultimately.
00:58:54.000Again, if you think the purpose of life is to increase the amount of happiness and reduce the amount of suffering, the final goal is good experiences, and the kind of anti-goal is bad experiences.
00:59:04.000So when we're sitting here talking, having a great time, this is us kind of achieving.
00:59:08.000This is us getting points on the win counter.
00:59:43.000So you say, oh, we're just along for a ride.
00:59:45.000We're all going to get eaten up by the sun eventually, and so on.
00:59:47.000What's the kind of greater purpose of life?
00:59:50.000But I actually think there are some ways that our actions now can have much greater cosmic significance.
00:59:57.000And that's because, I think, if you think that the human race survives for the next few centuries, it seems kind of inevitable that we're going to spread to the stars.
01:00:11.000Again, from this perspective, we can go into more arguments if you want, of just saying what we want to do is promote happiness and reduce suffering.
01:00:20.000If that means we can live on other planets as well and have kind of thriving civilizations there, not only where the people are having great lives, but also making scientific, artistic contributions and so on, then that's a good thing to do as well.
01:00:34.000Well, there's no technological reason for thinking that we won't be able to do that in the future, given current rates of technological progress, unless something really bad happens along the way.
01:00:44.000And this kind of gets back to one of the things we talked about right at the start was one of the focus areas of the effect of altruism community is on trying to reduce Risks of human extinction, of global catastrophic risks.
01:00:59.000These are the sorts of things that could imperil the human journey, as it were.
01:01:07.000And I think that if you're working to mitigate some of these things, Then you're increasing the chance that we do get to the sort of level where humanity can have a thriving future, not just on this planet, but on other planets as well.
01:01:22.000And that actually means your actions really do have this huge cosmic significance.
01:01:27.000So the conscious effort to be a kind person, a generous person and effective altruism spreads and it impacts people.
01:01:37.000There's this ripple effect and your good deeds could perhaps Fuel enough people with this thought and with effective altruism and more people might act on that to the point where we reduce the amount of suffering, to the point where we extend the lifespan of human beings,
01:01:55.000we extend the areas where we have no war, we reduce the amount of violence to the point where we can successfully innovate to the point where we can get off this planet.
01:02:04.000And then start from scratch with a new dictator on Mars.
01:02:38.000Maybe they develop artificial realities.
01:02:40.000Like what Jamie was talking about to me with these artificial computer realities.
01:02:45.000If someone develops some sort of a matrix-like world where you can plug into it and experience an infinite number of things, an infinite number of artificially created dimensions that are indistinguishable from this, Why would you want to, like, risk a six-month trip in a metal tube to another planet?
01:03:16.000Which is, just given there's so much, so 100 billion stars in our galaxy, 8 billion galaxies in the affectable universe, 100 billion in the observable universe, The universe is also pretty old, 15 billion years old.
01:03:32.000So if it was the case that life is very common, that it's very easy for us to, life to then develop to a level of advanced technological ability, we should expect to see evidence of aliens all over the place.
01:03:49.000And that means that from somewhere from a habitable planet, somewhere along the path from a habitable planet to space-faring civilization, there must be some big filter.
01:04:01.000There must be some step that's just incredibly hard for that, or incredibly unlikely that civilization moves them, or life moves them that step to another.
01:04:11.000And one hypothesis is this, yeah, like, people just...
01:04:15.000Civilization gets to a sufficiently advanced level and they just chill out.
01:04:34.000Yeah, as in like, because there's just so many stars, so many Earth, so many seemingly habitable planets, it has to be the case that it's exceptionally unlikely at some stage or other.
01:04:46.000Like, not just really unlikely, as in like, you know, one in a trillion unlikely planets.
01:04:53.000On this path from habitable planet to spacefaring civilization.
01:04:58.000And so you'd have to think, of a trillion civilizations that get to this level of technological ability, they all choose to turn inward.
01:05:08.000It seems like, well, at least one would really try and spread out.
01:05:11.000And if so, then we'd see evidence of that.
01:05:16.000Because, cosmically speaking, the time from getting to the level of technological capability where you can spread to the stars and the level where we'd be able to kind of see real evidence of that is kind of small.
01:05:30.000So I actually think that the reason that we can't see aliens is because the very first stages of life are incredibly unlikely.
01:05:39.000The move from nothing to kind of basic replication, and then secondly, the move from single-celled organisms to multi-celled organisms.
01:05:48.000And the reason for thinking this is very unlikely is it took an incredibly long time on Earth, billions of years before this happened.
01:05:57.000And in particular, in the move from single-celled to multi-celled life, that's only ever happened once.
01:06:02.000And so, given that we don't see any aliens, we should think some part of this is really hard.
01:06:08.000Our best guess is that that move from single-celled to multi-celled, and perhaps from the creation of the first cells as well, that was incredibly difficult.
01:06:18.000And that means that we're just exceptionally lucky to be alive, as it were.
01:06:23.000But if the universe is infinite, that means that this has happened an infinite number of times.
01:06:31.000Though it might be very far away, like sufficiently far away that we are not connectable to each, like we can't contact each other or observe each other.
01:06:39.000But there's an infinite number of those infinitely far places.
01:06:45.000So there would be some clusters of the universe.
01:06:49.000And again, the idea of the universe is only a hypothesis.
01:06:52.000And I'm just deferring to other people who say it's the leading hypothesis.
01:06:55.000Well, the most puzzling hypothesis to me was the evidence of supermassive black holes being at the center of every galaxy.
01:07:04.000And that the hypothesis was that the supermassive black holes are exactly one half of one percent of the mass of the entire galaxy.
01:07:12.000And that if you go through those supermassive black holes, you may in fact go into a completely new universe, filled with hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with supermassive black holes at the center of those galaxies, which will take you to hundreds of billions of galaxies in another universe.
01:07:29.000It's never-ending, and that's what the real infinity is.
01:07:33.000It's not just the mass of all the things that we can observe in the 14 plus billion light years that we know of from the Big Bang to today.
01:07:41.000It's all of those things being portals to incredibly different, totally new universes.
01:07:49.000Okay, yes, it's turtles all the way down.
01:07:52.000So the real question to me, and I proposed this to Brian Cox and I didn't get a sufficient answer, it's why would we assume that there's someone more advanced than us?
01:08:06.000It is possible that someone, some species, something is the tip of the spear.
01:10:07.000Even a trillion years is a speck of dust.
01:10:09.000When you consider the possibility of the universe itself being infinite or the possibility that is a continuous cycle of big bangs to expansion to contraction back to an infinitely small point, back to another big bang, which is a plausible possibility.
01:10:24.000Yeah, I mean, I think, yeah, I'm also very worried, you know, I'm not Neil deGrasse Tyson, I'm sure I'm butchering tons of the science.
01:10:34.000I think my understanding at the moment is that we currently think that the universe is just expanding and it just keeps expanding further.
01:10:41.000I know it was definitely a leading theory that it was going to expand and slow and then kind of crunch.
01:11:28.000Somewhat easy, or if it was just not incredibly difficult for intelligent life to evolve, then it would have happened in the past already and we would see evidence of it.
01:11:37.000And the fact that we don't see any evidence at all of intelligent life and other solar systems at all suggests that it's incredibly difficult for that to happen.
01:11:47.000But isn't that like being in the woods and unzipping your tent and sticking your head out and saying, I don't see anything.
01:12:13.000If an alien civilization or us in the future goes to kind of start, yeah, spreading to the stars, in the course of, you know, just a few seconds, a million years, let's say, there will be really significant evidence.
01:12:29.000You'd see Dyson spheres being constructed around suns, you know, to harness the sun's energy.
01:12:35.000You'd see some evidence of, like, galactic engineering projects and so on.
01:12:41.000Do you think you'd see that with hundreds of thousands of light years between us and the observable objects?
01:12:47.000But again, 100,000 light years is just not very long compared to the kind of 15 billion.
01:12:54.000So it would just be this amazing coincidence if it's the case that...
01:12:59.000A life that's as advanced or more advanced than us has evolved at just the same time as us, where 100,000 years, give or take, is basically just the same time, but hasn't evolved more than a million years ago, where we would start to see kind of major impacts of that.
01:13:16.000So if something within the observable universe...
01:13:20.000We don't even have really adequate photographs of anything outside of our solar system.
01:13:24.000I mean, everything is just radio spectrum.
01:13:28.000You know, the analysis is that they're getting off of light waves of what the components of the atmosphere is.
01:13:35.000So using your analogy, what I'm suggesting is that if it was the case that intelligent life was not that hard to come by, you'd stick your head out the tent and you'd look like Tokyo rather than looking like the woods.
01:13:49.000But why does it have to look like Tokyo?
01:14:28.000Wouldn't that be the same thing that you could turn towards interstellar travel?
01:14:32.000Like, wouldn't it be more important for these communities to concentrate on taking care of their planet and figuring out a way to work in some sort of harmonious fashion with the very nature of the planet itself rather than travel to the stars?
01:14:50.000So on this alien planet, there's 10 billion aliens, and they're like, let's say they're a thousand years more advanced than humans are at the moment.
01:15:01.000In order for this argument to work, it'd have to be the case that every single one of them makes that decision to just turn inwards and focus on...
01:15:09.000Because not all those people would be the ones that would innovate in the first place.
01:15:12.000It wouldn't have to be everyone that makes a decision, but it would have to be everyone of a high enough consciousness to figure out how to make these interstellar machines decides not to harness this nuclear power and jet off into space.
01:15:23.000But I think over time that would just be everyone.
01:15:28.000Well, yeah, I mean, just technological progress just keeps going, and eventually, like, I mean, obviously we're doing this, like, weird thought experiment.
01:15:44.000I mean, just at some point, as a civilization progresses, then there's going to at least be many, many actors with sufficient power and capability to spread to the stars.
01:15:58.000And you need to say that every single one of them decides to turn inwards.
01:16:02.000So it's sort of like technology becomes very rare and then ultimately over time becomes very common, like the cell phone.
01:16:21.000And that this will happen with everything, including space travel.
01:16:24.000Yeah, I mean, but also it doesn't need to be the case that it gets out to 10 billion people, even if it's just like 1,000 people or something.
01:16:30.000Again, it would just seem unlikely that, you know, in every civilization and every one just has, you know, even just 1,000 people, everyone chooses not what a single person thinks exists.
01:16:40.000Hey, I just want there to be more spread out.
01:16:44.000Now, that obviously is dependent upon there being a more advanced civilization than human beings on planet Earth.
01:16:51.000Because if there weren't, if there were a few years behind us, like if they were stuck in the 1950s, or maybe they're stuck in ancient Greece, then obviously they don't have the capabilities yet.
01:17:06.000And I just think, yeah, because I think it would be unlikely that...
01:17:12.000Something more advanced happened just a little bit faster than us, but not, say, 100 million years ago, which is not very long ago in cosmic terms.
01:17:23.000I mean, it's still possible that something happened 100 years quicker than us, or that they haven't had the same setbacks that we've had in terms of, like, asteroidal impacts and natural catastrophe, supervolcanoes and the like.
01:17:37.000It's a real weird thought experiment, because you start thinking, and you start extrapolating, okay, well where are we gonna be?
01:17:46.000Like, that's one of the things that always gets me about this whole trip to Mars, and I have a joke about it in my Last comedy special, where people were, somebody actually said this to me, like, because it was before California had solved its drought, or Mother Nature solved our drought for us, rather, where people were like, hey man, we should really consider going to Mars,
01:18:02.000because, I mean, look at our environment, California's almost out of water, and my joke was like, we're right next to the fucking ocean.
01:18:09.000Like, there's so much water, you can't see the end of it.
01:18:11.000We have a salt problem, we don't have a water problem.
01:18:16.000Like, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard in my life.
01:18:18.000Yeah, there's this weird, when people start talking about Mars, I mean, I think, so there's the project of going to Mars, setting up a colony.
01:18:26.000Now, like, the aim of doing that, because it's awesome.
01:18:39.000But then this talk of like, oh, well, we need this in order to be able to survive as a species.
01:18:44.000I'm like, look, if you want to have this kind of refuge or colony in order to make the Earth more robust, Mars is just not a great place to pick.
01:18:54.000There's so many different ways that, I mean, Mars is like really inhospitable.
01:18:59.000And if you wanted to build a refuge, why not go under the sea?
01:19:03.000That's, like, going to be protected from, you know, viruses or asteroid impacts and so on.
01:19:39.000When you think about how big that thing was that killed the dinosaur 65 million years ago and that there's hundreds of thousands of those things floating around in space.
01:19:47.000So yeah, I was asking some people at NASA just two days ago actually on how many of them we've managed to identify.
01:19:56.000Because they're serious about kind of scanning the skies to find them all.
01:20:01.000And the answer, I thought we had it covered.
01:20:04.000I thought this was something that NASA was like, yeah, yeah, we know where all the Earth killers are.
01:20:09.000And their response was like, no, we've got no idea.
01:20:12.000We don't know how many of them are out there, and so we don't know how many we've managed to track.
01:20:17.000There's a guy named Randall Carlson that I've had him on podcast a few times, and he's obsessed with the idea that asteroidal impacts were probably what ended the Ice Age, you know, 10 to 12,000 years ago.
01:20:28.000And there's a significant amount of physical evidence that points to this.
01:20:34.000Both in evidence of impact in nuclear glass.
01:20:41.000But it appears all throughout Europe and Asia at around that same timeline, around 10,000 and 12,000 years ago, when they do core samples.
01:20:50.000And it points to this idea that there were significant...
01:20:55.000impacts from Asteroidal objects all over Europe and all over Asia around that time they think some of them Slammed into the ice caps that were you know North America was covered in a giant chunk of it was covered in as much as two miles high of ice just 10,000 years ago and And he points to an incredible amount of physical change in the environment that looks like it took place over a very short period of time.
01:21:21.000Like catastrophic change over an incredibly short amount of time that he believes points to these impacts, melting the ice caps, creating massive amount of flooding, killing off who knows how many people, resetting civilization in many different parts of the world.
01:21:39.000This evidence of the nuclear glass, of these micro-diamonds that also exist, they find them during nuclear test sites when they blow off bombs, and they also find them at asteroid impact sites.
01:21:53.000And when you know that we have been hit many times in the past, and they do have evidence of that, and then you see the moon and all the different impact craters on the moon, you know that this is just What he calls a cosmic shooting gallery, essentially.
01:22:06.000He's like, it's very likely that that was the cause of the end of the Ice Age.
01:22:11.000There's a lot of this climate data that sort of seems to point to that as well.
01:22:15.000So this is now, like, really outside my area of expertise.
01:22:20.000I'll send you some links to some of his stuff, because he's been obsessed with this for about 30 years.
01:22:26.000The two things that would really surprise me about that are, firstly, just that there were so many ice ages, and it just seemed to be this, it comes on, goes off.
01:22:37.000You know, fairly dynamic, predictable process, whereas asteroid impact, super random.
01:22:42.000So you wouldn't expect to have this kind of back and forth dynamic if it was asteroids that was doing it.
01:22:47.000And then secondly, my understanding would be that asteroids would cool the planet because asteroid hits, ash just spreads out all over the sky.
01:22:57.000So it would surprise me if it had this kind of warming effect.
01:23:01.000Well, I think the idea is that, first of all, when it hits, the impact is massive, and it melts off just the huge chunk of the amount of water that is covering North America, right?
01:23:13.000And that's one of the things that causes this massive flooding and this massive changing of the topography.
01:23:19.000And as far as, like, what causes the natural...
01:23:21.000I don't know if it interrupts it temporarily, and then it comes back and gets warmer.
01:23:53.000There's a lot of speculation back and forth about that.
01:23:55.000Because they think that humans did it, but then they found these mass dead sites where they're not consumed.
01:24:02.000What was the ones that he showed where these woolly mammoths, they found them Where their legs were broken, and it looked like just the impact of something had knocked them flat, and they had found like thousands of them in these mass death sites.
01:24:29.000That was like the best weapon they had at the time.
01:24:31.000They weren't even riding on horseback at the time.
01:24:34.000But then with respect to the death sites, I thought the mechanism for killing a woolly mammoth is you've got like 200 humans and you just chase the woolly mammoth off a cliff.
01:24:41.000That does work if you can get them near a cliff.
01:24:43.000But the idea of getting them all near cliffs and killing them all off by a bunch of people that hadn't figured out the wheel seems a little unlikely.
01:25:12.000And similarly, if you've got this grave site and it's got, wow, hundreds of woolly mammoths in this one place, that might be over thousands of years.
01:25:18.000I mean, again, this is just something I No, that's the thing.
01:25:20.000They're talking about carbon dating, that it's all within the same time period.
01:25:24.000You'd have to really go over his stuff with a fine-tooth comb and talk to him about it, because I'm not the right guy.
01:25:29.000I just listen to him and go, whoa, and then try to relay it as much as possible.
01:25:34.000There's a podcast that I actually retweeted today, because somebody brought it up on YouTube.
01:25:39.000It's available, so I'll send you to it afterwards and see what you think about it.
01:25:43.000But this is something, yeah, if you know the book Sapiens...
01:25:46.000No, you're like the fifth person to talk about it.
01:26:38.000There's a lot of different animals that within our lifetime have gone extinct.
01:26:41.000I mean, we're actually, like, in terms of extinctions, I'm not sure if we'll get the number right, but it would be pretty accurate to describe this as the fourth, and maybe it's not fourth, but mass extinction, because it's just huge, the number of species that have gone extinct as a result of human activity.
01:26:57.000And it's also one of those things where we don't think of it as being significant because it happens slowly over the course of many years, but if you look at it on a timeline, you're like, oh my god, look, everything's dying right now.
01:27:09.000Slow by human standards, but very quick by geological standards.
01:27:14.000It's a fascinating subject, the end of the Ice Age happening so quickly, the animals dying off so quickly, and so many large mammals dying off so quickly.
01:27:24.000When you think about what we know people have done, like when we almost killed off the bison, we know why they did that, we know how they did that, and they did it with extraordinary weapons.
01:27:35.000I mean, they did it with high-powered rifles.
01:27:37.000They could shoot things from a far distance.
01:27:41.000I mean, they did a lot of crazy shit back then.
01:27:43.000So we understand, I mean, and there's a lot of physical evidence.
01:27:46.000There's photographs of the actual piles of bones and all that crazy shit.
01:27:51.000When you take away those physical capabilities, the extraordinary physical capabilities, like even riding on horseback, there's a guy named Dan Flores, who's a fascinating guy, he's a scholar, who believes that even without The Europeans coming over here and market hunting and killing off all the bison,
01:28:10.000he thinks just the firearm and the horse with the Native Americans, it's entirely possible that they were going to eradicate the bison on their own.
01:28:19.000I mean, again, it just depends about timescales.
01:28:23.000So even if you're just killing like slightly more of the species, like killing just enough of the species that they're now below the, you know, two children for every two parents.
01:30:27.000Yeah, there's like some exfoliating thing that they're doing where they would consume so many trees and so many plants that it would actually lower the temperature of the earth.
01:30:53.000So is it the case that loss of a species, you can just cash that out in terms of impacts on individuals?
01:31:01.000Because obviously it's bad for the animals that die in the course of that, and we maybe have a loss of information that we can just not get back.
01:31:12.000But is there something intrinsically bad about just having fewer species?
01:31:21.000To act in a way that suggests they seem to believe yes, but it's hard.
01:31:27.000I think it's hard philosophically to cash that out.
01:31:30.000I think it's hard to explain like why would we care so much about losing species where we don't seem to care about having, you know, Deliberately randomizing breeding and so on, that we get more species.
01:31:44.000It seems like we're only just conservative about not losing them.
01:31:48.000But if it really is of value to have greater diversity of species, why do we not actively try and promote a greater amount of biodiversity rather than merely preventing loss of biodiversity?
01:31:58.000I think the reintroduction of species, if you have an environment that's stable, if you have some sort of an ecosystem that's stable, and then you reintroduce a predator or prey or some animal that's going to eat up all the foliage,
01:32:14.000you're running this big risk, and you're taking these big chances that you can sort of predict the future.
01:32:21.000You could look at A plus B, well, that's going to equal C. But it doesn't always work that way, and there's been disastrous results When they've introduced species to other environments where they're not native.
01:32:33.000You know what's going on with places like Australia?
01:32:36.000Australia is kind of hilarious in that regard.
01:32:38.000Yeah, so they introduced a type of frog to Australia.
01:32:46.000So they introduced rabbits to try and eat these frogs or something to eat the frogs.
01:32:51.000And then they took over and didn't kill the frogs.
01:32:54.000Well, then they introduced foxes to try to kill the rabbits, and they killed all the ground-nesting birds, and they introduced cats to kill the foxes, and cats to kill the rabbits.
01:33:49.000Oh my god, there's a video that some guy took somewhere in Australia and it is Thousands and thousands of kangaroos running across this field, and it looks like some apocalypse, some apocalyptic kangaroo invasion.
01:34:06.000See if you can find that, Jamie, in a video, because it's worth seeing to realize, oh, this is what can happen when there's no predators.
01:34:15.000Animals just get completely out of control.
01:34:17.000Yeah, so I'm vegetarian and have been for a long time now.
01:34:21.000But with some other vegetarian friends, we had the conversation of, yeah, what would be the most ethical meat to eat?
01:34:27.000And I think we concluded that kangaroo would be the most ethical because it's being killed anyway, because they just need to, like, you've got this population explosion.
01:34:36.000It's on land that wouldn't be otherwise used for anything.
01:36:01.000And the first evidence, because people wouldn't regularly visit this, was they would find these dead wallaby carcasses on the mainland.
01:36:07.000And that was during the winter, the loch, Scottish for lake, would freeze over and the wallabies would hop on the ice and then get hit by a car.
01:36:38.000Someone had told me that they were in some way in the deer family, or cousins of deer, or something like that.
01:36:43.000Early explorers said that they were just, that's what their descriptions were, that they were like deers without antlers, and they stood upright like men, but I saw some, I mean, it's a Q or a question, so I didn't find like an official scientist saying, here's the sighting on it, but yeah.
01:37:07.000Somebody put something up on Instagram today and it was a quote from the 1800s about an ancient philosopher or an ancient scholar rather would give his life for the information that's available to the common school boy today.
01:37:22.000And this is from a quote from 1888. Wow, okay.
01:37:27.000Which is nothing now compared to what we can do.
01:37:30.000Yeah, I think there's another statistic.
01:37:33.000And again, it's unclear how do you measure this, but in terms of written information at least, one newspaper has more written information in it than a typical person in the 1700s would be exposed to for their entire lifetime.
01:37:47.000I wonder what was the natural predator of kangaroos?
01:37:51.000Because kangaroos, they're a native animal to Australia, and if they didn't...
01:37:56.000Do you know, there was a giant predator in New Zealand, at least, at one point in time.
01:38:01.000It was called the host eagle, and it was an enormous eagle, the biggest eagle they think that ever lived.
01:38:06.000It had something like a 10-foot wingspan, and they believed they'd even hunted people.
01:39:12.000So maybe those things were eating kangaroos.
01:39:14.000A big part of kangaroos, I guess, would probably be catching them when they're not with their young, but they carry their young inside their body in that pouch, which makes them different from any other kind of animal that would be prey, because they can take care of their young and bounce away quickly.
01:39:30.000Well, this is why, so in terms of large mammals, humans killed every single type of large mammal other than kangaroos in Australia.
01:39:40.000I think there were kind of hundreds of different types originally.
01:39:42.000Oh, there's a bunch of different things other than kangaroos?
01:41:53.000But it was always the generalized, stereotypical knock was that the food in England was terrible.
01:41:59.000The first time I went there was pretty bad.
01:42:01.000But yeah, with respect to what's the most ethical meat, I think it is a really interesting question because I think...
01:42:07.000You know, the debate on vegetarianism and so on is normally phrased as this either-or thing, like not doing anything or just go vegetarian or vegan.
01:42:16.000But I was interested in this question of just, yeah, well, supposing you only want to go halfway or of the different foodstuffs, like what are the ones that are going to do the most in terms of animal welfare if you cut them out?
01:42:29.000Because most people, when they go halfway to being vegetarian, they might cut out red meat to cut beef and so on.
01:42:35.000And I actually think that's, if you care at least about the animal welfare side of things, I think that's just wrong.
01:42:40.000And I think there's two reasons for that.
01:42:42.000One is respect to the amount of suffering that the animal has in the course of its life, where...
01:42:51.000The way that chickens are currently treated, if you look at just average, and again, we're talking about most chickens, though.
01:42:58.000You're talking about factory farming conditions?
01:43:00.000Factory farming conditions, which is well over 90%, I think like 99% of chickens that are eaten are in these conditions.
01:43:07.000Their lives just, I think they're the worst off creatures in the planet, basically.
01:43:12.000And cows, I think, often don't have great lives, but it's just nothing really compared to chickens.
01:43:18.000And I think pork are similar, like pigs also have really terrible lives.
01:43:23.000Whereas larger animals, cows, sheep, just in general aren't being treated as badly.
01:43:30.000And then the second question is, how many animals are you affecting?
01:43:37.000Where if you consume a steak or something, that's like a thousandth of a cow on average.
01:43:44.000Whereas you can easily eat kind of half a chicken.
01:43:47.000And that's a factor that people normally don't consider as well.
01:43:50.000And obviously, maybe you value a cow's life greater than a chicken's life or something.
01:44:05.000Philosophical question I've thought about for ages and have eventually given up on is you've got an unhappy cow day, an unhappy chicken day, which is worse.
01:44:37.000And so over time, I've definitely become a lot more sympathetic to taking suffering of chickens and fish fairly seriously.
01:44:45.000But I think when you combine these two factors of, again, yeah, fish, I think, except that there's less good information on them, but I think this might be in the category.
01:44:55.000But certainly chickens and pigs compared to beef.
01:44:58.000I actually think if you just want to kill, like take out most of the suffering from your diet, removing chickens, caged eggs, I think in the US actually that's basically all eggs, unless you kill them yourself.
01:45:12.000And pork, I think you're removing, and maybe fish, I think you're removing most of the suffering from your diet.
01:45:18.000Vastly more than when it comes to beef or milk.
01:45:21.000Yeah, well in terms of like the amount of individuals that get impacted, you're right.
01:45:25.000And that one cow can feed much more people obviously than one chicken can.
01:45:29.000So if you're taking one life in that form.
01:45:32.000What disturbs me most about factory farming Well, for one thing disturbs me, it sort of existed and then I found out about it and it was already there.
01:45:43.000I remember sitting back, I'd watched some documentary on it, and I remember sitting back thinking, like, this happened because we weren't paying attention.
01:45:52.000Because I was a grown man when I found out about it.
01:46:24.000And there was a case where there was an animal welfare activist goes into a factory farm, is filming instances of animal cruelty for a kind of documentary film that gets presented.
01:46:36.000And she got tried and had to go to prison for not intervening in the animal cruelty.
01:46:44.000That was just happening all the time, and she was the person just actually...
01:46:47.000So she got tried for not intervening, not stopping the animal cruelty?
01:46:51.000Yeah, which is happening all of the time.
01:46:54.000I thought she would get tried for violating the ag-gag laws.
01:47:10.000But the thing you said earlier, when you were talking about the ways in which humans are broken, I think if you just look at, yeah, suffering...
01:47:36.000People would just think I'm this kind of despicable person.
01:47:39.000And that's the natural reaction, because I'm just caught inflicting unnecessary suffering on this creature.
01:47:45.000But then you can just modify the circumstances such that this natural emotional reaction of sympathy just fades away, where now it's this huge warehouse, and it's not just one chicken, it's hundreds of thousands of chickens, and it's all mechanized,
01:48:20.000And, you know, any death of a human will be tragedy.
01:48:24.000And when they get to large numbers, it's sort of...
01:48:28.000It's very difficult to calculate because it's hard for people to understand or grasp the concept of a million people dying in a war.
01:48:35.000What's bizarre about factory farming is that it's all kind of done behind these warehouse walls.
01:48:46.000It's all undercover and it's all incredibly common and it's all not discussed.
01:48:53.000Like if a war is happening, I was going to say if a war is happening and 100,000 people a month are dying, we're discussing, you know, how do we mitigate this?
01:49:10.000I mean, because we've looked into this, and one of the reasons it's such a priority area is just the amount of just philanthropic money going into this, when the focus is really on factory farming, not stray dogs and so on.
01:49:22.000It's in the low tens of millions of dollars.
01:49:29.000Like, other than going vegetarian, Have we reached this point, sort of like unmanageable point, where the population centers like Los Angeles, New York, whatever, that don't grow their own food have gotten so massive that in order to fuel these people with food, especially with animal protein,
01:49:48.000Yeah, I mean, I think if you've got the constraint of animal protein I mean, I think the answer is probably still no, but the other thing is you just don't need that constraint of animal protein.
01:50:00.000We eat radically more meat than we did, you know, 50 years ago, 100 years ago.
01:50:06.000Far more than we need to have a healthy diet.
01:50:08.000I mean, I've been vegetarian 11 years.
01:50:13.000That's a, for me, I don't understand why people don't.
01:50:16.000Like, when PETA had that whole campaign about eggs or chickens periods, I'm like, look...
01:50:21.000I can understand you not wanting to eat factory farm chickens' eggs because these animals are tortured and they're confined and it's horrific, but you can definitely find eggs.
01:51:23.000They try them and then they start shaking their head.
01:51:27.000They try to get the slime off their beak and they kind of freak out.
01:51:30.000So yeah, I mean, there's this big, within the animal welfare, kind of activists, this is actually quite big divide between, you could call them maybe the abolitionists on one side and the welfareists.
01:51:41.000And the abolitionists' view is just, you know, the way we treat animals is like how we treated slaves.
01:51:48.000This is just, this is kind of the equivalent of slavery of our time.
01:51:52.000And the only, and you know, imagine if we'd been in...
01:51:56.000Slave-owning Americans said, like, hey, well, why don't we just cut down the number of slaves we hold?
01:52:01.000It's just not doing enough moral seriousness.
01:52:04.000The welfarists, in contrast, are more like, look, almost all the suffering, if we're going to quantify the suffering of the way humans, the animals now, 99% of it comes from factory farms.
01:52:16.000If we could eliminate that factory farms, sure, there's still something left.
01:52:20.000It's not like, even if you agree we're not at the kind of final stage, but this is where the vast majority of Both the animals used and the worst conditions are.
01:52:28.000And so the welfareist would instead say, look, let's really just focus all of our attention on this.
01:52:32.000And things like the arranged eggs or circuses or fur are just, these are just really kind of not the main issue.
01:52:40.000And, you know, I'm naturally most sympathetic to the kind of welfareist perspective.
01:52:49.000I know lots of people who were in the welfarist camp and then moved to the abolitionist camp on welfarist grounds, where the kind of worry is just that if you're just trying to get people to do a little, then you're not actually going to move them at all.
01:53:02.000Whereas you need to have this hard moral line, and then people kind of see the integrity of that and follow it.
01:53:07.000Well, it seems to me that there's a slippery slope when agriculture and civilization were introduced that someone wasn't going to exploit it to the nth degree.
01:53:15.000And figure, well, there's just got to be a better way to squeeze money out of this situation.
01:53:18.000And then next thing you know, you've got these factory pig farms.
01:53:21.000I'm sure you've seen the horrific one where they fly the drone over the lakes of pig piss and pig shit.
01:53:29.000And that these animals are living just completely confined where they can't even turn around.
01:53:33.000And they're just pumping them up with whatever the fuck they need to keep them alive until they get to a certain point where they can kill them.
01:53:47.000In order to keep that money coming in, they have to keep people in the dark of these situations.
01:53:51.000And unless they go online and seek it out and watch these videos, and those videos are very polarizing too, because, you know, when you come to a lot of these animal rights organizations, a lot of them have roots in the Animal Liberation Organization, which doesn't even believe that you should have pets.
01:54:07.000They think that your pets are all, you know, prisoners.
01:54:11.000Yeah, it's so interesting, going back to Peter Singer, where he said Animal Liberation, which was the name of his book, which was kind of text, you know, a founding text for what became the animal rights movement.
01:54:22.000And what's interesting is that Singer doesn't believe in rights.
01:54:47.000Yeah, on the vast magnitudes of suffering that go on the factory farms.
01:54:51.000That's priority one, two, three, and four.
01:54:52.000Yeah, I have a hard time even entertaining the conversation that there's something wrong with a healthy pet dog.
01:54:58.000Like, that dog loves the owner, the people love the dog, and the dog has obviously gone through an incredible evolutionary process where it's gone from being a wolf to being a chihuahua.
01:55:09.000Like, if you think that thing should be out fending for itself in the forest, boy, you're dooming that little fucker to death.
01:55:15.000I mean, well, the question, the dog, in all of these cases, like, the animals wouldn't exist otherwise.
01:55:22.000I mean, if it wasn't for people breeding them and making them this bulldog, like this thing that can't even hardly breathe and walks with a waddle, like, we're weird that we've done that in the first place.
01:55:32.000Yeah, I mean, I find, especially the pets, like dogs that have difficulty breathing, genetic diseases, I find it kind of gross.
01:56:20.000But the poor little things, like if you look at an actual, like, legit English bulldog with their flat faces, like, they have massive respiratory problems.
01:56:30.000Yeah, so I find that, like, the fact that we, like, engage in this product in the process of bleeding them kind of weird.
01:56:36.000But then, like, yeah, if you're going to have a dog and look after it, well, like...
01:56:48.000Well, it also seems to me that this is just like everything else in life.
01:56:52.000Like, as you go down the rabbit hole and you look at it deeper and deeper and deeper, you go, God, this is a complicated issue.
01:56:58.000How do you get all these people to stop eating so much meat so that you don't need so much meat, so that you don't need factory farming and have to get people aware of what is the consequences of going and buying a chicken sandwich?
01:57:11.000Well, do you know where that chicken came from?
01:57:21.000I do think, though, like, so in the UK, at least, if you buy a pack of cigarettes, you get these pictures on them showing kind of what this is what your lungs will look like if you smoke 20 a day and there's warnings and things.
01:57:32.000Yeah, that doesn't stop people in some weird way.
01:57:34.000I mean, people are addicted to cigarettes.
01:57:56.000Like if you went to the butcher shop, went to the butcher section of the grocery store, and there was videos that were playing constantly above the packaged meat that showed these animals getting like a piston through the head and hanging by their ankles and getting bled out while they bucked and kicked.
01:58:13.000How many people that would be a fucking conveyor belt of baby male chicks falling into this?
01:58:20.000Yeah, that would be a fascinating Psychological examination to watch people walk up to that butcher shop and see those videos playing like if that became the law and I mean, there's an amazing...
01:58:34.000There's a comedy show, a sketch show, that did something kind of similar, which was, you know, they would go up to the butcher's counter and say, okay, I'd like some sausages.
01:58:44.000They'd go, okay, pick up a little baby pig and put it into this box.
01:59:39.000And, like, you do the math, it's like, not only am I behind that, I'm behind that, like, a thousand times.
01:59:44.000But again, the hunting is just, it's this very salient thing.
01:59:47.000You know, in the UK, Huge about fox hunting and so on that's a different thing because fox hunting you're not you're not eating it No, I mean it's supposed to be for yeah, it's kind of like vermin control Yeah, and there's some there's some logic to that that if you don't have natural predators you need to figure out some way to control certain populations that can be damaging like Fox or in some places black bear and there's a bunch of different animals that you do have to control because they don't have a they don't have a natural predator Yeah,
02:00:15.000yeah, but the thing that's like Incredible for me is just how people can have such long views on that and such long views on hunting and then just know the action to factory farming.
02:00:28.000It is just because we are very manipulable as humans in terms of our model reactions.
02:00:34.000That's really worrying because we can't go far with that.
02:00:37.000Yeah, but there's certain animals that you have to control the populations of, especially invasive species, like pigs.
02:00:43.000Like, wild pigs are a huge problem in America in getting bigger and bigger.
02:00:46.000I know you guys don't have them as much in the UK, but in America, particularly in Texas, and now in Northern California, there's just massive, massive populations of wild pigs.
02:00:57.000And they give birth two to three times a year.
02:01:00.000And they can give birth to as many as three to six piglets.
02:01:05.000And then six months later, those piglets are ready to give birth.
02:02:38.000And when you take a domestic pig and you let it go, within months, within months of being free, their hair starts to change, their snout starts to elongate, their tusks start to grow longer.
02:02:51.000Once they become feral, once they realize they have to fend for themselves, there's an actual physiological change in the structure of their body.
02:03:24.000This is so interesting as well, coming back to the question of what's natural and not and so on.
02:03:29.000And people often think this about meat they're eating as well, where if you look at the, you know, chickens can barely stand because they've been so engineered to have these huge breasts.
02:03:39.000Pigs that you're talking about are not meant to be pink, meant to be brown.
02:03:45.000Cows, can you really imagine a cow evolving in the wild?
02:03:51.000All of these things are incredibly unnatural through thousands of years of selective breeding.
02:03:57.000Well, cows don't live in the wild, but here's where it gets interesting.
02:04:01.000In Australia, when cows have gotten wild, they've gotten loose from these pens that people held them in, and then they become what they call scrub bulls, and they're out there in the wild, and people hunt them like they would hunt a wild animal, and they're very wary,
02:04:17.000and they run from people, they see people, they get the fuck out of there, and the bulls are incredibly violent.
02:04:23.000Like, the male cows, these scrub bulls, are some of the most dangerous things to hunt in the world.
02:04:29.000Because they'll actively chase you down.
02:05:25.000I mean, that looks like some crazy wild African animal.
02:05:28.000And it was originally, a long time ago, a regular domestic cow.
02:05:33.000But yeah, so it shows just how artificially they are.
02:05:37.000If that's the sort of changes you get over just the course of a few generations.
02:05:41.000Natural selection, as opposed to what we're doing with dogs, you know, when we create a bulldog.
02:05:46.000I mean, that is, those are the animals that have survived, and they've changed their coloration, their physical structure looks different, you know, over many, many generations.
02:06:11.000So we have to stay inside of our homes.
02:06:14.000We have to stay inside of our environments.
02:06:16.000And then we have to figure out, like, how much of an impact should we have on those things around us?
02:06:20.000Should we be like all the other animals, like the wolves and all these other animals, the coyotes that have this impact on the environment?
02:06:28.000Or should we try to lessen our footprint to the point where we have zero impact on any of the animals and we just live inside of these sustained areas that grow vegetation?
02:06:37.000It's an interesting question because those animals prey on each other.
02:06:47.000I definitely don't think we should factory farm.
02:06:49.000I definitely think that that was a huge mistake.
02:06:52.000And I also definitely think that that huge mistake is what led us to be able to have these gigantic cities.
02:06:57.000And I don't think necessarily cities are a huge mistake, but man, trying to figure out how to feed those people...
02:07:04.000In the way that they're accustomed to eating right now, that's a massive battle.
02:07:10.000Yeah, but I think the kind of question of large populations and how do you feed them, that massively tells in favor of lower meat consumption or vegetarians.
02:07:18.000Because you've got this 10 to 1 rule where to create a calorie of meat, you need 10 calories or more of grain or soy or whatever you're feeding them.
02:07:28.000Unless you're dealing with people just consuming wild pigs.
02:07:32.000Yeah, wild pigs or kangaroos or something.
02:08:01.000Well, in America, at least, the majority, the vast majority of the money that goes towards conservation, towards keeping wild animal populations high, is actually from hunting.
02:08:12.000It's a real strange contradiction that makes people really uncomfortable once they find it out, is that the vast majority of the money that goes to protect habitat, to preserve wild lands, it comes from hunting.
02:08:25.000In fact, hunters voluntarily agreed, I believe it was in the 1930s, to give up 10% I want to make sure that number's right, too.
02:08:34.000But the money, in terms of the percentage of sales of hunting equipment, goes directly towards conservation.
02:08:44.000There's all these different entities, like the Rocky Mountain Elk Federation, that have repopulated elk into all these areas, but done so specifically so that people can hunt them.
02:08:56.000It might be an uneasy alliance between...
02:08:59.000In many people's eyes, but they're the ones that are giving up the money.
02:09:02.000The money is not coming from altruistic organizations that just want to preserve these animals so that they can exist in the free, wild way that they did before people got here.
02:09:11.000But there's more white-tailed deer in America today than when Columbus landed.
02:09:16.000And that's all because of conservation, because of hunting.
02:09:20.000So it's another one of those weird things where when you look at the whole picture...
02:09:25.000Yeah, there's a solution that I've heard suggested for reducing species loss, which is to allow basically ownership of species.
02:10:10.000I mean, the science is kind of tricky, but...
02:10:12.000I'm positive about it in that it's not going to be any animal suffering.
02:10:15.000It's going to be fascinating in that regard.
02:10:17.000But what's going to happen if we find out that...
02:10:22.000Well, there's a bunch of different things, right?
02:10:23.000First of all, we have to make sure it's healthy.
02:10:25.000We have to make sure that it doesn't cause some sort of a weird disease because you're not eating something that's living and moving and when you eat sedentary creatures maybe there's some sort of an adverse impact on our biology because I think there's an adverse impact when you eat protein from an animal that is like weak and sick and they've actually shown There was a study that Dr. Rhonda Patrick sent me recently that showed that animals that eat older,
02:10:56.000They have a shorter lifespan and exhibit less health characteristics, I believe it was, than animals that ate younger animals.
02:11:06.000And there seems to be some sort of a direct correlation between eating younger healthy things and having a positive healthy impact on physical life itself, the animal that's consuming it.
02:11:18.000And that if you're eating something that never existed in the first place, like...
02:11:23.000Unless they're able to recreate the characteristics of a healthy animal, like a strong muscle tissue, like maybe they could do that with electrical impulses, like some sort of electrical muscular stimulation.
02:11:34.000Yeah, I don't see why that would be a problem.
02:11:36.000I mean, at least you'd think you'd be able to get past that, in fact, where, you know, the meat that we've currently got, stuffed full of antibiotics, you know, there's often viruses that...
02:12:19.000It seems like we should be able to get to the point where we have tastier, cheaper, more healthy meat that has far less carbon dioxide as a side effect, uses far less land area.
02:12:34.000It's going to be better than every single way.
02:12:37.000I think the science, it does seem hard, in particular, just to get the costs down low enough.
02:12:42.000Well, I think they've got it down pretty low.
02:12:44.000I mean, there was a recent article about it where they were talking about the original one was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and now they've got it down to like 20 bucks.
02:12:50.000Yeah, I think that was misleading, actually.
02:12:54.000Like, it seemed to me that there's been a little bit too much hype around in VÃctor de MÃ, where, yeah, there's some stories of, like, the costs are radically going down.
02:13:34.000Apparently part of what the difficulty is, there's a certain solution that you need to grow this meat in, and that solution is currently very expensive.
02:13:43.000And the key part of the cost, even once we get to the point of being able to develop this, getting the cost down low enough so it's competitive, You're going to need to take this fluid that currently costs, I don't know how much, but like a thousand dollars a litre, get it down to the cost of soda.
02:13:59.000And we don't currently, it seems, have like a clear kind of scientific path towards that.
02:14:06.000If they found out that the only way to make that fluid and to make it financially viable was to make it out of ground-up pets that get killed anyway, euthanized pets.
02:14:17.000Like, would people be upset if they took euthanized pets and they used it to make the fluid to grow the artificial meat in?
02:14:22.000Or would they prefer those euthanized pets just be cremated?
02:14:26.000So, at the moment, that fluid does have to come from animals.
02:14:30.000There's a certain part of it that is animal-based.
02:14:45.000I mean, I do think given the level of just moral cognitive dissonance that's currently going on between people's attitudes to animals, pets, any animal they can see, and consumption of meat, once you take self-interest out of the equation, once you've got meat that is cheaper and just as tasty,
02:15:03.000I think just everyone's going to switch.
02:15:04.000And then within a generation, people will look back at the current generation and just think, how did anyone ever engage in such...
02:15:12.000Abominable activity as factory farmed meat.
02:15:16.000Yeah, well, it's probably one of the darkest things that we as a civilized humanity do.
02:15:23.000When you think about, other than war, which is obviously the most horrific thing, or one of the most horrific things, I mean, it's arguable that in terms of suffering, it's the next thing.
02:15:35.000Because, I mean, it has to be, it is the next thing, right?
02:15:38.000Other than poisoning people for profit, you know, other than companies that have polluted environments that have wound up poisoning people.
02:15:45.000Yeah, so in terms of animals, so 50 billion animals are killed every year for human consumption.
02:16:56.000So back in the 50s, free market economics was just completely dead.
02:17:01.000It was just not a mainstream idea at all within academic economics.
02:17:06.000But it really rose to prominence across the end of the 60s, certainly the 70s, and then Thatcher and Reagan getting in power.
02:17:13.000Huge uptake in this intellectual movement.
02:17:16.000And so the question is kind of where did it come from?
02:17:20.000And it was actually very significantly driven by a small number of people in the 50s and early 60s, like very deliberately saying, okay, we want this ideology to become really dominant.
02:17:32.000And one of the most important first organizations was the Institute for Economic Affairs based in London, a think tank.
02:17:39.000And it was funded by the person who brought factory farmed chicken to Britain.
02:17:45.000So it's weird because I promote this idea of earning to give as something that young people should consider.
02:17:54.000Not as the only thing they should do, but as one of many things they should do, or should consider doing.
02:18:00.000If you want to do good, you could go and, like, directly have an impact.
02:18:03.000But there is also another option, which is doing something you're really passionate about that maybe has less of a direct impact, earn a lot, and donate what you're making, at least a significant part of that, to the things you think are most important.
02:18:17.000And then I think of this, I think it's Henry Fisher, sorry.
02:18:20.000This is like this most perverse instantiation of that, where the guy went and became a factory farming entrepreneur, basically on an indicative give grounds.
02:19:02.000Helping and putting out so much love to so many people and then being fucking evil to a bunch of people that he drugged It's like yeah that this this exists this Duality that this yeah think about Nazi Germany you think about the number of people who were involved in the Holocaust who loved their children and then children and if you talk to them You would have had it like a great conversation.
02:19:24.000They would have been very caring and so on this is I mean, yeah, it's a very powerful idea, the banality of evil, have a Rents phrase, where, yeah, the worst crimes committed are not because people are bad.
02:20:11.000And the same insight, actually, when we talk about AI as well, is...
02:20:15.000You know, sometimes in the media, people say, oh, the worry about AI is a Terminator that's going to want to kill humans.
02:20:20.000But that's not the worry at all, the idea.
02:20:22.000Or when you think about Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, again, it's just having some other entity that has goals on which you're just not very important.
02:21:02.000Like, I think a lot of the media attention around AI is, like, has been really unfortunate because it suggests, like, it's coming next year and it's going to control its...
02:21:11.000Like, the demon, I think, anthropomorphizes it more than is necessary and so on.
02:22:43.000And if we do give birth to artificial intelligence, if we are the caterpillar that gives birth to the butterfly that winds up taking over the world, some artificial butterfly.
02:22:53.000Yeah, I mean, I think the thing that worries me is that You know, it's...
02:23:43.000I mean, so my colleague, Toby, actually wrote a paper on the Large Hadron Collider because there was all this, you know, talk about, oh, we could create black holes and so on.
02:23:55.000And so he wrote an academic paper where he just talked about the risk analysis that they did.
02:24:01.000And they said, oh, the chance of the Large Hadron Collider creating a black hole or something else that was, like, really dangerous is 10 to the power negative 63. Yeah.
02:24:20.000But the second thing also is that you shouldn't think that anything's 10 to the negative 63, really, unless you have very, very strong models behind it.
02:24:29.000Because what's the chance that you just made some mistake in your calculation?
02:24:33.000It's like, you know, maybe it's as low as one in a million.
02:24:35.000But that mistake completely swamps the probability.
02:24:38.000And so that was the point that he was making.
02:24:40.000Just statistical point saying, look, I'm not commenting on whether this is dangerous or not.
02:24:46.000It's just that you've made a mistake in your methodology.
02:24:51.000And so it was really funny because then he was there, this very calm, sensible, you know, philosopher from Oxford in a press meeting with the Large Island Collider surrounded by all the, you know, aluminum, like tinfoil.
02:26:19.000She just kind of rocks her hand back and forth.
02:26:21.000Some sort of weird semi-Vulcan stance.
02:26:25.000It's kind of funny, yeah, talking to especially some of the kind of progressive friends I have in America, and they're like, you've got a monarchy, isn't this?
02:26:33.000Like, isn't everyone talking about it?
02:27:24.000It's a really funny part of British culture.
02:27:29.000It's so funny because I spend a lot of time in California, but every time I come back, it seems to be on some major event to do with royalty.
02:27:37.000So one was the queen's birthday, one was the event of the queen being the longest ever running monarch, one was her jubilee.
02:28:04.000Well, for me, as a Scot, Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister, so like the leader of Scotland, I kind of think of Scotland to the UK as like state to federal, but it's a little bit different.
02:28:18.000Announce there's going to be a second, she's planning a second Scottish referendum.
02:28:22.000So because Britain is taking itself out of the European Union, where they expect, is that announcement going to be made Tuesday, end of month, but very shortly.
02:28:36.000Scotland did not want to leave the EU, voted overwhelmingly in favour of remaining.
02:28:43.000So Scotland in general tends to lean a lot further left than the rest of the UK. And previously had an independence referendum, it was very close actually.
02:28:52.00052% were in favour of staying part of the union, so they stayed part of the union.
02:28:59.000There's now going to be a second referendum, at least this is what Nicola Sturgeon is saying.
02:29:06.000And because of the Brexit vote, I think it's much more likely that Scotland will say, yes, we're going to leave, and then they remain part of the European Union, whereas the rest of Britain will leave.
02:29:18.000And it's interesting for me, because I was very kind of pro the Union against independence in the previous election.
02:29:41.000I think that now the case for Scotland being part of the EU but not part of Britain, the economic case makes a bit more sense now than it did in the past.
02:29:50.000But then secondly, I would worry that Britain leaves the EU, does that trigger spark a much larger movement where just the EU as a project breaks down?
02:30:06.000And if it's the case, like, well, UK leaves the EU, but as a result, the country just falls apart.
02:30:25.000I mean, then if I was convinced that the Brexit was the right decision, it was actually best for the world, then I would change my mind.
02:30:34.000I don't know enough about it, but I do have a friend who's very knowledgeable, and he's from England, and his take on it was the real issue with the EU is that you're dealing with a bunch of people that aren't even elected.
02:30:47.000They're just sort of running the European Union.
02:30:50.000And he's like, we don't have to tell you when you just look at history what happens when people have a great amount of power and aren't even elected to their position.
02:30:59.000And you're allowed to just go to any part of the European Union and move into it.
02:31:07.000He's like, that was very detrimental and very bad in terms of the way England's Financial structure was set up.
02:31:15.000They were like, this would be detrimental to England, but beneficial to other places.
02:31:18.000And the idea was that we were supposed to accept the fact that it would be detrimental to England and beneficial to other countries.
02:31:24.000And many people in England did not want to do that.
02:31:27.000And in making that decision, they were thought to be xenophobic, they were thought to be nationalistic, and that it was racist.
02:32:23.000And then, like, is this good or bad for Britain?
02:32:26.000I think, like, the economic case is just incredibly strong for Europe being kind of good for Britain.
02:32:34.000The reason being just, like, free trade in general benefits both parties.
02:32:37.000You want to really maximize the amount of free trade.
02:32:40.000But then the bigger thing for me is just like with respect to unity between countries is like the tail risk, risk of war, which we don't really think about because we haven't had a world war since, you know,
02:33:00.000But Europe had had, like, a long period of comparative peacefulness, like before the First World War, people thought, no, it's unthinkable, given the level of interconnectedness between the countries that a world war could break out, and then two did.
02:33:35.000What he said makes sense to me as well, though, when he was saying essentially it was like, think of the United States, but now think of each state being a country.
02:33:44.000You're allowed to elect a leader of that country, but you can't elect a leader for the United States.
02:33:49.000And so that's essentially how he was looking at the European Union.
02:33:52.000He was saying the European Union is, they're not elected, and yet they're controlling all these other elected officials and elected states, all grouped together.
02:34:02.000Instead of thinking them as like Germany and thinking it was England, think of them as states.
02:34:06.000And think of the European Union and the officials, the people that are in control of the European Union aren't even elected.
02:34:13.000So, I mean, you do elect the parliament.
02:34:15.000And then it's also the case that the analogy, like the amount of power that Europe has over the remaining, the other countries is like, you know, nothing like the amount of power the federal government has over the states.
02:34:34.000You know, the UK sets, so the powers the EU has, one of the things that got made lots of attention was bendy bananas.
02:34:43.000This got like a real focus area for people's ire.
02:35:21.000Why do they even try to regulate it then?
02:35:23.000Well, it's because if you want to have like a free, like single market, you need to have common standards across.
02:35:30.000But doesn't the market dictate those standards where like the bendy bananas don't sell and then the straighter ones do?
02:35:37.000Yeah, I mean, I don't know more of the detail about the bananas.
02:35:40.000It seems to me like any time the government steps in on something as fucking ridiculous as the bend in the shape of a banana, they'll be like, hey, fuckface, why don't you go take care of poverty?
02:35:50.000Why don't you handle something real instead of dealing with bendy bananas?
02:35:53.000Look, so on the bendy bananas case, yeah, I can't, off the top of my head, think of why you'd want to not allow the sale of other bendy bananas.
02:36:00.000But that's what people worry about when they worry about bureaucracy, when they worry about too much control.
02:36:17.000It's not the bananas that caused it, right?
02:36:20.000But the thing is, the UK, as part of the European Union, has sovereignty over its income taxes, all of its laws, as long as they don't conflict with the UN Declaration of Human Rights, which was first invented by the UK, has control over all of its internal legislation.
02:36:38.000It can go to war if it wants, and it did.
02:36:42.000So the loss of sovereignty seems pretty mild from my perspective, and I feel like I feel like they focus on these examples, which is like, okay, maybe, like, let's say, yeah, it's okay, it's a cost.
02:36:55.000We would like to be able, like, maybe it would be better if Britain could make decision of bananas.
02:37:15.000I mean, the thing that I find fascinating is that we would make, and I think this in general, I think this with elections as well, because I studied a bunch of voting theory while doing my PhD, and we make these momentous decisions as a country where we get everyone in the population to try and go to a specific place and then get the smallest possible information out of them that you can,
02:37:39.000which is just a single tick, like yes or no.
02:37:42.000Whereas there's so much more you could be doing.
02:37:44.000In one case with a referendum, rather than just at a particular date, where the turnout is affected by things like the weather, it's affected by what happened in the week before, instead you just have three referenda.
02:37:59.000And given the momentousness of the decision, spending more money on actually getting the accurate views of the people, Is super important.
02:38:09.000So instead, yeah, you have three over the period of six months and choose the best, you know, best out of three, basically.
02:38:17.000That would be like a more accurate representation of what people think over time.
02:38:22.000Sure, but isn't there also a gigantic issue with people not being informed about what they're voting on?
02:39:13.000Is it just that democracy gives us this way to boot out dictators and the risk of a single person taking power is just really, really bad and so we just need some mechanism to get rid of that?
02:39:25.000Is it that it's intrinsically valuable?
02:39:27.000Is it that people just have a right to have equal representation and that's just this fundamental thing?
02:39:34.000Or is it justified just in terms of the consequences?
02:39:37.000Is it because if everybody's able to contribute, then people will make better decisions?
02:39:42.000I don't necessarily think it's an either-or.
02:39:44.000I think there's also that people like to feel like they play a part.
02:39:48.000Like they don't want to feel like they're being ruled over by some monarch.
02:39:51.000They want to feel like they have some sort of a play in their decision-making.
02:39:54.000It's also one of the gross things about Trump winning in this country is how many people gloated You know, how many people gloat upon victory that their side won, and then you're dealing with this whole team mentality that people adopt when it comes to any sort of an issue.
02:40:28.000Like, people say, well, of course, it's Comey, etc.
02:40:31.000But, like, the vast majority of Trump's votes were, and similarly for Hillary's votes, were from people who just always vote Republican or always vote Democrat.
02:40:39.000Well, not necessarily, because Trump won by so many votes that a good percentage of them had to have voted for Obama, just statistically.
02:40:47.000Oh, but I'm still thinking, of Trump's votes, what proportion of people have only ever voted Republican?
02:41:04.000I mean, if you look at the polls, like, it's always that, in terms of expected number of votes, like, oh, it's only 46% in favor of Trump.
02:41:13.000Well, there's also the issue that the independents in the swing states, whether it's Gary Johnson or whether it's Jill Stein, those independents, the amount of votes they got would have swung the other way towards Hillary.
02:41:25.000Yeah, I remember looking into this for Jill Stein in particular, and actually it was the case, she would have won the popular vote by even more, but in none of the swing states did she get enough of a percentage.
02:41:36.000Not just Jill Stein, but Gary Johnson as well.
02:41:38.000Yeah, though Gary Johnson, it seemed to me, was split almost evenly between Thump and Hill.
02:41:45.000But this is an interesting case, so...
02:41:47.000The thing that people don't think about so much is I think the process, we call this a democracy, but one single checkbox every four years is the smallest amount of information you can be getting from people.
02:42:03.000And it's susceptible to all sorts of different things.
02:43:13.000But that's the least interesting thing we talked about today.
02:43:16.000But the AI and all the other stuff is just fascinating stuff.
02:43:21.000If people want to know more about your effective altruism movement and more about you, where should they go?
02:43:28.000They should go to effectivealtruism.org.
02:43:30.000That's got tons of information about effective altruism.
02:43:32.000If there's one takeaway that you really want to do, you think, wow, actually, this was kind of cool.
02:43:37.000I do want to make more of a difference.
02:43:39.000We've just launched a set of funds, so it just means you can donate within one of these core areas of global development, animal welfare, or preservation of the long-run future against global catastrophic risks.
02:43:50.000You can just donate and have it ensure that it will go to the very most effective non-profits.
02:43:55.0000% overhead, depending on how you donate.
02:43:59.000And we don't take any money along the way.
02:44:01.000And just means that, yeah, super easy to donate as effectively as possible.