Making Sense - Sam Harris - #228

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast, this is Sam Harris.

00:00:24.040 Okay, so today I'm bringing you a conversation that I originally recorded for the Waking

00:00:32.140 Up app, and we released it there as a series of separate lessons a couple of weeks back,

00:00:38.520 but the response has been such that I wanted to share it here on the podcast and put it

00:00:43.160 outside the paywall.

00:00:45.000 This seems like a better holiday message than most.

00:00:48.540 As I think many of you know, Waking Up isn't just a meditation app at this point.

00:00:54.420 It's really the place where I do most of my thinking about what it means to live a good

00:00:58.820 life.

00:01:00.040 And this conversation is about generosity, and about how we should think about doing good

00:01:04.360 in the world.

00:01:06.320 Increasingly, I'm looking to use this podcast and the Waking Up app to do more than merely

00:01:12.540 spread what I consider to be good ideas.

00:01:15.340 That's their primary purpose, obviously, but I want to help solve some of the worst problems

00:01:21.600 we face more directly than just talking about them.

00:01:26.180 And I want to do this systematically, really thinking through what it takes to save the

00:01:32.020 most lives or reduce the worst suffering or mitigate the most catastrophic risks.

00:01:37.880 And to this end, I've taken the pledge over at Giving What We Can, which is the foundation

00:01:43.600 on effective altruism started by the philosophers Will McCaskill and Toby Ord, both of whom have

00:01:49.500 been on the podcast.

00:01:50.300 And this pledge is to give a minimum of 10% of one's pre-tax income to the most effective

00:01:57.000 charities.

00:01:58.620 I've also taken the Founders' Pledge, which amounts to the same thing.

00:02:02.280 And I've had Waking Up become one of the first corporations to pledge a minimum of 10% of its

00:02:07.380 profits to charity.

00:02:08.680 And the thinking behind all of this is the subject of today's podcast.

00:02:15.160 Of course, there is a bias against speaking about this sort of thing in public or even

00:02:21.240 in private, right?

00:02:22.580 It's often believed that it's better to practice one's generosity anonymously because then you

00:02:28.080 can be sure you're doing it for the right reasons.

00:02:30.260 You're not trying to just burnish your reputation.

00:02:32.700 As you'll hear in today's conversation, there are very good reasons to believe that this

00:02:37.800 is just not true and that the imagined moral virtue of anonymity is something we really need

00:02:43.460 to rethink.

00:02:45.080 In fact, I've just learned of the knock-on effects of the few times I have discussed my

00:02:50.520 giving to charity on this podcast.

00:02:53.300 And they're surprisingly substantial, just to give you a sense of it.

00:02:58.120 Last year, I released an episode titled Knowledge and Redemption, where we discussed the Barred

00:03:05.360 Prison Initiative, based on the PBS documentary that Lynn Novick and Ken Burns did.

00:03:11.840 And Lynn was on that podcast.

00:03:13.720 And at the end, I think I asked you all to consider supporting that work, too.

00:03:17.680 And together, we donated $150,000, based on that one episode alone.

00:03:24.040 I've also occasionally mentioned on the podcast that I donate each month to the Against

00:03:27.860 Malaria Foundation.

00:03:29.540 And it was actually my first podcast conversation with Will McCaskill that convinced me to do

00:03:34.060 that.

00:03:35.020 And I do it through the charity evaluator, GiveWell.org.

00:03:39.280 Well, the good people at GiveWell just told me that they've received over $500,000 in donations

00:03:45.680 from you guys.

00:03:47.720 And they expect another $500,000 over the next year from podcast listeners who have set up

00:03:52.760 their donations on a recurring basis.

00:03:54.660 So that's $1 million and many lives saved, just as a result of some passing comments I've

00:04:02.740 made on the podcast.

00:04:04.760 And then I've heard from Will McCaskill's people over at Giving What We Can, where I took their

00:04:11.140 10% pledge, which I haven't spoken about much, but it seems that hundreds of you have also

00:04:19.000 taken that pledge, again, unsolicited by me, but specifically attributing this podcast and

00:04:25.500 the Waking Up app as the reason.

00:04:28.020 That's hundreds of people, some of whom may be quite wealthy or will become wealthy, who

00:04:35.380 have now publicly pledged to give a minimum of 10% of their pre-tax income to the most

00:04:42.480 effective charities every year for the rest of their lives.

00:04:47.240 That is awesome.

00:04:49.340 So all of this inspired me to share this conversation from the Waking Up app.

00:04:53.920 Again, this is a fairly structured conversation with the philosopher Will McCaskill.

00:04:58.720 Well, some of you may remember the conversation I had with Will four years ago on the podcast.

00:05:04.280 That was episode number 44, and that's a great companion to today's episode, because it gets

00:05:11.700 into some of the fundamental issues of ethics here.

00:05:15.100 Today's conversation is much more focused on the actions we can all take to make the world

00:05:18.740 better and how we should think about doing that.

00:05:22.000 Will and I challenged some old ideas around giving, and we discussed why they're really

00:05:27.800 not very good ideas in the end.

00:05:30.560 You'll also hear that there's still a lot of moral philosophy to be done in this area.

00:05:35.420 I don't think these issues are fully worked out at all, and that's really exciting, right?

00:05:40.060 There's a lot to talk about here, and there's something for moral philosophers to actually

00:05:44.720 do that might really matter to the future of our species.

00:05:48.080 In particular, I think there's a lot of work to be done on the ethics of wealth inequality,

00:05:53.840 both globally and within the wealthiest societies themselves.

00:05:57.800 And I'm sure I will do many more podcasts on this topic.

00:06:01.260 I suspect that wealth inequality is producing much, if not most, of our political conflict

00:06:07.960 at this point, and it certainly determines what we do with our resources.

00:06:12.740 So I think it's one of the most important topics of our time.

00:06:15.660 Anyway, Will and I cover a lot here, including how to choose causes to support, and how best

00:06:22.380 to think about choosing a career so as to do the most good over the course of one's life.

00:06:26.860 The question that underlies all of this, really, is how can we live a morally beautiful life,

00:06:34.420 which is more and more what I care about, and which the young Will McCaskill is certainly

00:06:39.840 doing, as you will hear.

00:06:41.460 Finally, I want to again recognize all of you who have made these donations and

00:06:47.580 pledges, as well as the many of you who have been supporting my work these many years,

00:06:52.780 and also the many of you who have become subscribers to the podcast in the last year.

00:06:57.820 I couldn't be doing any of these things without you, and I certainly look forward to what we're

00:07:02.440 going to do next.

00:07:04.480 2021 should be an interesting year.

00:07:06.580 So, my deep thanks to all of you.

00:07:11.480 And now I bring you Will McCaskill.

00:07:19.420 I am here with Will McCaskill.

00:07:21.580 Will, thanks for joining me again.

00:07:23.720 Thanks so much for having me on.

00:07:25.580 So, I just posted a conversation that you and I had four years ago on my podcast onto Waking

00:07:33.520 up as well, because I thought it was such a useful introduction to many of the issues

00:07:38.320 we're going to talk about, and it was a different conversation because we got into very interesting

00:07:43.420 questions of moral philosophy that I think we probably won't focus on here.

00:07:48.240 So, it just seems like a great background for the series of lessons we're now going to sketch

00:07:54.220 out in a conversation.

00:07:56.340 But for those who have not taken the time to listen to that just yet, maybe we should summarize

00:08:01.200 your background here.

00:08:03.080 Who are you, Will, and how do you come to have any opinion about altruism, generosity, what

00:08:08.460 it means to live a good life?

00:08:10.260 Give us your potted bio.

00:08:12.340 So, yeah, my potted bio.

00:08:13.900 So, I grew up in Glasgow, and I was always interested in two things.

00:08:18.340 One was kind of ideas, and then in particular philosophy when I discovered that.

00:08:23.380 And second was interested in helping people.

00:08:25.820 So, as a teenager, I volunteered running summer camps for children who were impoverished and

00:08:33.300 had disabilities.

00:08:34.540 I worked at a kind of old folks home.

00:08:36.680 But then it was when I came across the arguments of Peter Singer, in particular his arguments

00:08:41.960 that we have the moral obligation to be giving away most of our income to help people in very

00:08:47.360 poor countries, simply because such a move would not be a great burden on us.

00:08:53.020 It would be a financial sacrifice, but not an enormous sacrifice in terms of our quality

00:08:56.540 of life, but could make an enormous difference for hundreds of people around the world.

00:09:01.020 That moved me very much.

00:09:02.800 But kind of being human, I didn't really do very much on the basis of those arguments for

00:09:08.340 many years until I came to Oxford, met another philosopher called Toby Ord, who had actually

00:09:14.160 very similar ideas and was planning to give away most of his income over the course of his

00:09:19.400 life.

00:09:19.700 And together we set up an organization called Giving What We Can, which encouraged people

00:09:24.060 to give at least 10% of their income to those organizations they think that can do the most

00:09:28.720 good.

00:09:29.520 Sam, I know that you have now taken that 10% pledge, and I'm delighted that that's the

00:09:33.480 case.

00:09:34.720 And since then, this kind of set of ideas that were really just two, you know, very impractical

00:09:42.240 philosophy grad students kind of setting this up and not think, you know, I certainly never

00:09:46.740 thought it was going to be that big a deal.

00:09:48.580 I was just doing it because I thought it was morally very important.

00:09:51.800 It turned out just a lot of people had had similar sets of ideas.

00:09:56.060 And Giving What We Can acted like a bit of a lightning rod for people all around the world

00:09:59.700 who were motivated to try to do good, but also to do it as effectively as possible.

00:10:05.680 Because at the time we had a set of recommended charities.

00:10:09.100 There was also the organization GiveWell, whose work we leaned extremely heavily on, making

00:10:13.920 recommendations about what charities that they thought would do the most good.

00:10:19.180 And effective altruism at the time focused on charity in particular, and in particular

00:10:24.280 focused on doing good for people in extreme poverty.

00:10:27.360 And since then it's broadened out a lot.

00:10:29.120 So now most people in the effective altruism community, when they're trying to do good,

00:10:34.020 are doing so via their career in particular, and there's a much broader range of cause areas.

00:10:40.240 So animal welfare is a big focus.

00:10:43.560 And in particular, and I think increasing, are issues that might potentially affect future

00:10:48.500 generations in a really big way.

00:10:50.100 And in particular, kind of risks to the future of civilization at all that Toby talked about

00:10:55.880 when he was on your podcast.

00:10:56.820 And I have a factoid in my memory, which I think I got from your original interview with

00:11:02.800 Tim Ferriss on his podcast.

00:11:04.720 Am I correct in thinking that you were the youngest philosophy professor at Oxford?

00:11:11.820 Yes.

00:11:12.280 So the precise fact is, when I joined the faculty at Oxford, which was age 28, I'm pretty confident

00:11:18.960 I was the youngest associate professor of philosophy in the world at the time.

00:11:22.640 Oh, nice.

00:11:24.160 Nice.

00:11:24.420 All right.

00:11:24.700 Well, no doubt you're quickly aging out of that distinction.

00:11:27.840 Have you lost your record yet?

00:11:30.160 Yeah.

00:11:30.480 Well, I'm an old man at 33 years old now.

00:11:32.940 And I definitely lost that a few years ago.

00:11:35.320 Well, so it's great to talk to you about these things because, as you know, you've been very

00:11:40.440 influential on my thinking.

00:11:42.400 You directly inspired me to start giving a minimum of 10% of my income to charity.

00:11:47.420 And also to commit waking up as a company to give a minimum of 10% of its profits to charity.

00:11:54.380 But I'm very eager to have this conversation because it still seems to me there's a lot

00:11:58.700 of thinking yet to do about how to approach doing good in the world.

00:12:03.240 There may be some principles that you and I either disagree about or maybe we'll agree

00:12:09.020 that we just don't have good enough intuitions to have a strong opinion one way or another.

00:12:13.520 But it really just seems to me to be territory that can benefit from new ideas and new intuition

00:12:21.160 pumps.

00:12:21.600 And there's just a lot to be sorted out here.

00:12:24.340 And I think, you know, as I said, we will have a structured conversation here, which

00:12:29.000 will break into a series of lessons.

00:12:31.640 And so this is really an introduction to the conversation that's coming.

00:12:36.020 And all of this relates specifically to this movement you started, Effective Altruism.

00:12:42.120 And we'll get very clear about what that means and what it may yet mean.

00:12:47.440 But this does connect to deeper and broader questions like, how should we think about doing

00:12:57.080 good in the world in general?

00:12:58.820 And what would it mean to do as much good as possible?

00:13:02.620 And how do those questions connect to questions like, what sort of person should I be?

00:13:09.020 Or what does it mean to live a truly good life?

00:13:12.220 These are questions that lie at the core of moral philosophy and at the core of any person

00:13:17.440 individual attempt to live an examined life and develop an ethical code and just form

00:13:25.400 a vision of what would be a good society.

00:13:30.440 I mean, we're all personally attempting to improve our lives, but we're also trying to

00:13:35.640 converge on a common picture of what it would mean for us to be building a world that is making

00:13:44.260 it more and more likely that humanity is moving in the right direction.

00:13:48.340 We have to have a concept of what the goal is here or what a range of suitable goals might

00:13:54.640 be.

00:13:55.020 And we have to have a concept of when we're wandering into moral error, you know, personally

00:13:59.620 and collectively.

00:14:00.620 So there's a lot to talk about here.

00:14:02.320 And talking about the specific act of trying to help people, trying to do good in the world

00:14:10.760 really sharpens up our sense of the stakes here and the opportunities.

00:14:15.860 So I'm really happy to be getting into this with you.

00:14:19.280 Before we get into what effective altruism is, I think we should address a basic skepticism

00:14:27.460 that people have and even very rich people have, perhaps especially rich people have

00:14:34.440 this, is a skepticism about altruism itself and in particular a skepticism about charity.

00:14:43.100 And I think there are some good reasons to be skeptical about charity, at least in a local

00:14:48.840 context.

00:14:49.780 And then there's some very bad reasons.

00:14:51.260 And I just want to lob you some of these reasons and we can talk about them.

00:14:56.300 Because I meet, I would imagine you've encountered this yourself, I meet some very fortunate people

00:15:02.680 who have immense resources and can do a lot of good in the world who are fundamentally skeptical

00:15:10.680 about giving to charity.

00:15:12.980 And the bad reason here that I always encounter is something we might call the myth of the self-made

00:15:19.200 man.

00:15:19.600 The idea that there's somehow an ethically impregnable position to notice all the ways

00:15:28.000 in which you are responsible for all of your good luck, no matter how distorted this appraisal

00:15:35.560 might be.

00:15:36.480 You weren't born into wealth and you made it all yourself and you don't owe anyone anything.

00:15:41.900 And in fact, giving people less fortunate than yourself any of the resources you've acquired

00:15:48.260 is not really helping them in the end.

00:15:51.280 I mean, you want to teach people to fish, but you don't want to give them fish.

00:15:54.720 There's some Ayn Randian ethic of radical selfishness combined with a vision of capitalism that, you

00:16:03.140 know, wherein free markets can account for, you know, every human problem simply by all of

00:16:09.320 us behaving like atomized selves, seeking our own happiness.

00:16:14.180 It will be no surprise to people who've listened to me that I think there's something deeply

00:16:18.240 flawed in this analysis.

00:16:19.880 But what do you do when someone hits you with this ethical argument that they're self-made

00:16:26.420 and everyone should aspire to also pull themselves up by their own bootstraps?

00:16:32.060 And we falsify something about the project of living a good life by even thinking in terms

00:16:38.720 of altruism and charity.

00:16:42.580 I think there's a few things to say here.

00:16:45.260 So in the first case, the fact that you're a self-made man, I mean, I do disagree with the

00:16:51.500 premise.

00:16:51.980 I can predict 80% of the information about your income just from your place of birth.

00:16:58.340 Whereas, you know, you could be the hardest working Bangladeshi in the world, but if you're

00:17:03.520 born into extreme poverty in Bangladesh, it's going to be very difficult indeed to become

00:17:07.500 a billionaire.

00:17:08.180 So I agree with you that that's a myth.

00:17:10.180 But even if we accepted that, the fact that you have rightly earned your money yourself doesn't

00:17:15.860 mean that you don't have any obligations to help other people.

00:17:20.360 So Peter Singer's now very famous thought experiment.

00:17:23.940 You walk past a pond.

00:17:26.120 And it's a very shallow pond.

00:17:27.820 You could easily kind of wade in as deep as you like.

00:17:32.420 And you can see that there's a child drowning there.

00:17:35.320 Now, perhaps it's the case that you're an entirely self-made man.

00:17:39.820 Perhaps it's the case that the suit that you wore, you justly bought yourself.

00:17:44.860 But that really seems neither here nor there with respect to whether you ought to try and

00:17:49.320 wade in and save this child who might be drowning.

00:17:52.180 And I think that's just quite an intuitive position.

00:17:54.600 In fact, this ideal of self-actualization, of kind of being the best version of yourself

00:18:00.580 that you can be, which is the kind of admirable version of this otherwise sometimes quite

00:18:06.220 dark perspective in the world.

00:18:08.340 I think that is like part of being a self-actualized, authentically living person is living up to

00:18:14.600 your ideals and principles.

00:18:15.580 And for most people in the world, you actually want to be a helpful, altruistic person.

00:18:20.640 Acting in that way is acting in accordance with your deepest values.

00:18:24.400 That is acting an authentic and a self-actualized life.

00:18:27.800 And then just on the second point is about whether, well, maybe charity gets in the way.

00:18:33.480 Maybe it's actually harmful because it makes people rely on bailouts.

00:18:37.300 Well, here we've got to just think about, you know, there is market failure where in the

00:18:45.040 case of public goods or externalities, markets don't do what they ought to do.

00:18:50.300 And perhaps you want government to step in, provide police or defense and streetlights

00:18:54.780 or taxes against climate change.

00:18:56.920 And even the most kind of hardcore libertarian free market proponent should accept that's

00:19:02.460 a good thing to do sometimes.

00:19:03.960 But then there's also cases of democratic failure too.

00:19:06.940 So what if the potential people are not protected by functioning democratic governments?

00:19:12.880 That's true for people in poor countries.

00:19:15.120 That's true for non-human animals.

00:19:17.360 That's true for people who are yet to be born.

00:19:20.280 People who don't have a vote.

00:19:21.480 They don't, you know, the future generations are disenfranchised.

00:19:24.140 So we shouldn't expect markets or government to be taking appropriate care of those individuals

00:19:30.140 who are disenfranchised by both the market and by even democratic institutions.

00:19:35.160 And so what else is there apart from philanthropy?

00:19:38.840 Yeah, yeah.

00:19:39.440 So I've spoken a lot about the myth of the self-made man whenever I criticize the notion of free

00:19:46.920 will.

00:19:47.700 It's just obvious that however self-made you are, you didn't create the tools.

00:19:54.140 By which you made yourself, right?

00:19:56.040 So if you are incredibly intelligent or have an immense capacity for effort, you didn't

00:20:01.380 create any of that about yourself.

00:20:03.180 Obviously, you didn't pick your parents.

00:20:04.660 You didn't pick your genes.

00:20:06.000 You didn't pick the environmental influences that determined every subsequent state of your

00:20:10.520 brain, right?

00:20:11.200 You didn't create yourself.

00:20:13.640 You won some sort of lottery there.

00:20:16.360 But as Will, you point out, where you were born also was a major variable in your success,

00:20:23.440 very likely.

00:20:24.000 You didn't create the good luck not to be born in the middle of a civil war in a place

00:20:28.880 like Congo or Syria or anywhere else, which would be hostile to, you know, many of the

00:20:35.640 things you now take for granted.

00:20:37.120 So there's something, frankly, obscene about not being sensitive to those disparities.

00:20:44.120 And as you point out, living a good life and being the sort of person you are right to

00:20:52.800 want to be has to entail some basic awareness of those facts and a compassionate impulse to

00:21:02.080 make life better for people who are much less fortunate than we are.

00:21:07.700 It's just, if your vision of who you want to be doesn't include being connected to the

00:21:15.720 rest of humanity and having compassion be part of the operating system that orients you

00:21:22.780 toward the shocking suffering of other people, you know, even when it becomes proximate, you

00:21:29.080 know, even when you're walking past Singer's shallow pond and you see someone drowning,

00:21:34.860 you know, we have a word for that orientation and it's sociopathy or psychopathy.

00:21:39.960 It's a false ethic to be so inured to the suffering of other people that you can just decide to

00:21:49.400 kind of close your accounts with even having to pay attention to it and, you know, all under

00:21:53.980 the rubric of being self-made. But, you know, none of this is to deny that in many cases things

00:22:02.140 are better accomplished by business than by charity, right, or by government than by charity,

00:22:07.180 right? So we're not denying any of that. I happen to think that building electric cars that people

00:22:12.460 actually want to drive, you know, may be the biggest contribution to fighting climate change or

00:22:18.400 certainly one of them and may be better than many environmental charities are managed to muster.

00:22:23.480 There are different levers to pull here to affect change in the world, but what also can't be

00:22:29.260 denied is that there are cases where giving some of our resources to people or to causes that need

00:22:37.220 them more than we do is the very essence of what it means to do good in the world. That can't be

00:22:43.240 disputed and Singer's shallow pond sharpens it up with a cartoon example, but it's really not such a

00:22:50.840 cartoon when you think about the world we're living in and how much information we now have and how

00:22:57.140 much agency we now have to affect the lives of other people. I mean, we're not isolated the way

00:23:03.340 people were 200 years ago and it is uncontroversial to say that anyone who would walk past a pond

00:23:09.580 and decline to save a drowning child out of concern for his new shoes or his new suit, that person is a

00:23:17.480 moral monster. And none of us want to be that sort of person. And what's more, we're right to not want

00:23:24.380 to be that sort of person. But given our interconnectedness and given how much information

00:23:29.500 we now have about the disparities in luck in this world, we have to recognize that though we're

00:23:36.980 conditioned to act as though people at a distance from us, both in space and in time,

00:23:43.540 matter less than people who are near at hand. If it was ever morally defensible, it's becoming less

00:23:50.160 defensible because the distance is shrinking. We simply have too much information. So that's,

00:23:56.460 there's just so many ponds that are in view right now. And a response to that is, I think, morally

00:24:03.120 important. But in our last conversation, Will, you made a distinction that I think is very significant

00:24:08.360 and it provides a much better framing for thinking about doing good. And it was a distinction between

00:24:14.620 obligation and opportunity. The obligation is Singer's shallow pond argument. You see a child

00:24:22.740 drowning, you really do have a moral obligation to save that child, or there's just no way to maintain

00:24:28.160 your sense that you're a good person if you don't. And then he forces us to recognize that really,

00:24:34.120 we stand in that same relation to many other causes, no matter how distant we imagine them to be.

00:24:41.100 But you favor the opportunity framing of, you know, racing in to save children from a burning house.

00:24:49.500 Imagine how good you would feel doing that successfully. So let's just put that into play

00:24:55.840 here because I think it's a better way to think about this whole project.

00:24:59.580 Yeah, exactly. So as I was suggesting earlier, just if, I mean, for most people around the world,

00:25:07.800 certainly in rich countries, if you look at your own values, well, one of those values is being a good

00:25:13.500 person. And you can see this if you think about examples like there's, you see a building on fire,

00:25:19.640 there's a, you know, a young girl kind of at the window, and you kick the door down and you run in

00:25:24.260 and you rescue that child. Like that moment would stay with you for the entire life. You would reflect

00:25:31.040 on that in your elderly years and think, ah, wow, I actually really did something that was like,

00:25:35.840 that was pretty cool.

00:25:37.260 It's just, it's worth lingering there because everyone listening to us knows down to their toes

00:25:44.460 that that would be, if not the defining moment in their life, you know, in the top five,

00:25:52.740 there's just no way that wouldn't be one of the most satisfying experiences. You could live to be

00:25:59.240 150 years old, and that would still be the, in the top five most satisfying experiences of your life.

00:26:06.660 Absolutely.

00:26:07.660 And given what you're about to say, it's amazing to consider that and how opaque this is to most of

00:26:15.300 us most of the time when we think about the opportunities to do good in the world.

00:26:19.660 Exactly. And yeah, I mean, continuing this, imagine if you did a similar thing kind of several times. So

00:26:25.960 one week, you saved someone from a burning building. The next week, you saved someone from drowning.

00:26:32.560 The month after that, you saw someone having a heart attack, and you performed CPR and saved

00:26:36.440 their life too. You'd think, wow, this is a really special life that I'm living. But the truth is

00:26:42.000 that we have that opportunity to be as much of a moral hero, in fact, much more of a moral hero,

00:26:48.140 every single year of our lives. And we can do that just by targeting our donations to the most

00:26:55.240 effective charities to help those people who are poorest in the world. We could do that too,

00:27:00.760 if you wanted to choose a career that's going to have a really big impact on the lives of others.

00:27:06.440 And so it seems very unintuitive, because we're in a very unusual place in the world.

00:27:12.880 You know, it's only over the last couple of hundred years, there's such a wild discrepancy

00:27:16.660 between rich countries and poor countries, where people in rich countries have 100 times

00:27:21.680 the income of the poorest people in the world. And where we have the technology to be able to change

00:27:26.880 the lives of people on other sides of the world, let alone the kind of technologies to,

00:27:33.000 you know, imperil the entire future of the human race, such as through nuclear weapons or climate

00:27:38.260 change. And so our moral instincts are just not attuned to that at all. They are just not sensitive

00:27:45.340 to the sheer scale of what an individual is able to achieve if he or she is trying to make a really

00:27:52.860 positive difference in the world. And so when we look at the, you know, history, you look at the

00:27:57.760 heroes, like, think about William Wilberforce or Frederick Douglass or the famous abolitionists,

00:28:05.120 people who kind of campaigned for the end of slavery and the amount of good they did,

00:28:08.940 or other of these kind of great moral leaders, and think, wow, these are like really special people

00:28:13.240 because of the amount they accomplished. I actually think that's just attainable for many,

00:28:17.700 many people around the world. Perhaps, you know, you're not quite going to be

00:28:20.900 someone who can do as much as contributing to the abolition of slavery, but you are someone who

00:28:26.360 can potentially save hundreds or thousands of lives or make a very significant difference to

00:28:32.300 the entire course of the future to come. Well, that's a great place to start. So now we will get

00:28:39.760 into the details. Okay, let's get into effective altruism per se. How do you define it at this point?

00:28:48.620 So the way I define effective altruism is that it's about using evidence and careful reasoning

00:28:55.640 to try to figure out how to do as much good as possible, and then taking action on that basis.

00:29:02.360 And the real focus is on the most good. And that's so important because people don't appreciate just

00:29:09.580 how great the difference and impact between different organizations are. When we've surveyed

00:29:14.560 people, they seem to think that the best organizations are maybe 50% better than typical

00:29:19.840 organizations like charities. But that's not really the way of things. Instead, it's that the best is

00:29:26.980 more like hundreds or thousands of times better than a typical organization. And we just see this

00:29:32.480 across the board when comparing charities, when comparing different sorts of actions.

00:29:36.220 So for global health, you will save hundreds of times as many lives by focusing on anti-malarial

00:29:43.660 bed nets and distributing them than focusing on cancer treatment. In the case of improving the

00:29:48.840 lives of animals and factory farms, you'll help thousands of times more animals by focusing on

00:29:52.820 factory farms than if you try to help animals by focusing on pet shelters.

00:29:57.060 If you look at risks to the future of civilization, man-made risks like novel pandemics are plausibly

00:30:04.260 just a thousand of times greater in magnitude than natural risks like asteroids that we might be

00:30:11.100 more familiar with. And that just means that focusing not just on doing some amount of good,

00:30:16.380 but doing the very best is just, it's so important. Because it's easy, yeah, it's easy just not to think

00:30:21.840 about how wild this fact is. So like, imagine if this was through with consumer goods. So at one

00:30:28.060 store, you want a beer. At one store, the beer costs $100. Another, it costs 10 cents. That would

00:30:34.360 just be completely mad. But that's the way things are in the world of trying to do good. It's like a

00:30:40.700 99.9% off sale or 100,000% extra fee. By focusing on these best organizations, it's just the best deal

00:30:47.840 you'll ever see in your life. And that's why it's so important for us to highlight this.

00:30:51.840 Okay, so I summarize effective altruism for myself now along these lines. So this is a working

00:31:00.620 definition, but it captures a few of the areas of focus and the difference between solving problems

00:31:09.100 with money and solving problems with your time or your choice of career. In your response to my

00:31:14.820 question, you illustrated a few different areas of focus. So you could be talking about the poorest

00:31:19.300 people in the world, but you could also be talking about long-term risk to all of humanity. So the

00:31:25.620 way I'm thinking about it now is that it's the question of using our time and or money to do one

00:31:32.380 or more of the following things. To save the most number of lives, to reduce the most suffering,

00:31:38.840 or to mitigate the worst risks of future death and suffering. So then the question of effectiveness

00:31:45.540 is, as you point out, there's so many different levels of competence and clarity around goals.

00:31:54.320 There may be very effective charities that are targeting the wrong goals, and there are ineffective

00:31:59.560 charities targeting the right ones. And this does lend some credence to the skepticism about charity

00:32:07.240 itself that I referenced earlier. And there's one example here which does a lot of work in illustrating

00:32:14.400 the problem. And this is something that you discuss in your book, Doing Good Better, which I recommend

00:32:18.980 that people read. But remind me about the ill-fated Play Pump. Yeah, so the now infamous Play Pump

00:32:28.880 was a program that got a lot of media coverage in the 2000s and even won a World Bank Development

00:32:38.440 marketplace award. And the idea was identifying a true problem that many villages in sub-Saharan

00:32:47.240 Africa do not have access to clean drinking water. And its idea was to install a kind of children's

00:32:55.480 merry-go-round. One of the roundabouts, the things you push and then jump on and spin around. And that

00:33:01.480 would harness the power of children's play in order to provide clean water for the world. So by pushing on

00:33:08.200 this merry-go-round, you would pump up water from the ground, and it would act like a hand pump,

00:33:13.640 providing clean water for the village. And so people loved this idea, the media loved it.

00:33:19.000 Said, you know, providing clean water is child's play, or it's the magic roundabout. They love to

00:33:23.320 put a pun on it. So it was, you know, it was a real hit. But the issue was that it was really a disaster,

00:33:30.200 this development intervention. So none of the local communities were consulted about whether they

00:33:35.400 wanted a pump. They liked the, you know, much cheaper, more productive, easier to use Zimbabwe hand

00:33:43.400 pumps that were sometimes in fact replaced by these play pumps. And moreover, in fact, the play pumps

00:33:51.320 were sufficiently inefficient that one journalist estimated that children would have to play on the pump

00:33:56.760 25 hours per day in order to provide enough water for the local community. But obviously children

00:34:04.040 don't want to play on this merry-go-round all the time. And so it would be left often to the elderly

00:34:09.080 women of the village to push this brightly colored play pump round and round. One of the problems was

00:34:14.440 that it didn't actually function like a merry-go-round where it would gather momentum and keep spinning.

00:34:21.000 It actually was just work to push, right? Well, exactly. You need the point of a

00:34:26.600 children's merry-go-round is you push it and then you spin. And if it's good, it's very well greased,

00:34:31.480 it spins freely. But you need to be providing energy into the system in order to pump water up

00:34:37.240 from the ground. And so it wouldn't spin freely in the same way. It was enormous amounts of work.

00:34:42.840 Children would find it very tiring. So it was just a fundamental misconception about engineering

00:34:47.720 to deliver this pump in the first place. Yeah, absolutely. And then there's just,

00:34:52.040 why would you think you can just go in and place something that has already been quite

00:34:56.360 well-optimized to the needs of the local people? It seems quite unlikely. If this was such a good

00:35:02.440 idea, you've got to ask the question, why wasn't it already invented? Why wasn't it already popular?

00:35:06.920 There's not a compelling story about, well, it's a public good or something. There's

00:35:10.600 a reason why it wouldn't have already been developed. And that's, let alone the fact that

00:35:17.720 the main issue in terms of water scarcity for people in the poorest countries is access to

00:35:22.840 clean water rather than access to water. And so instead, organizations like Dispensers for Safe

00:35:28.600 Water, which install chlorine at the point of source, so at these hand pumps, chlorine dispensers

00:35:36.280 that they can easily put into the jerry cans that they use to carry water that sanitizes the water.

00:35:41.160 These are much more effective because that's really the issue is dirty water rather than access to

00:35:46.200 water most of the time. Okay. So this just functions as a clear example of the kinds of

00:35:53.560 things that can happen when the story is better than the reality of a charity. And this, if I recall

00:36:01.240 correctly, there were celebrities that got behind this and they raised, it had to be tens of millions

00:36:07.000 of dollars for the play pump. Even after the fault in the very concept was revealed, they persisted.

00:36:15.720 I mean, they kind of got locked into this project and I can't imagine it persists to this day, but

00:36:22.360 they kept doubling down in the face of the obvious reasons to abandon this project. I mean,

00:36:28.680 this included, you know, kids getting injured on these things and, you know,

00:36:32.040 kids having to be paid to run them. And it was a disaster any way you look at it. So this is the

00:36:39.080 kind of thing that happens in various charitable enterprises. And this is the kind of thing that

00:36:45.560 if you're going to be effective as an altruist, you want to avoid. Yeah, absolutely. And just on the

00:36:52.040 whether they still continue. So I haven't checked in the last few years, but a few years ago when I did,

00:36:57.080 they were still going. And they were funded mainly by corporations like Colgate, Palmolive,

00:37:03.320 and obviously in a much diminished capacity because many of these failures were brought to light.

00:37:08.680 And that was, you know, a good part of the story. But what it does illustrate is a difference between

00:37:13.080 the world of nonprofits and the, you know, business world where in the business world,

00:37:18.120 if you make a really bad product, then, well, at least if the market's functioning well, then

00:37:23.480 the company will go out of business. You just won't be able to sell it because

00:37:27.000 the beneficiaries of the product are also the people paying for it. But in the case of nonprofits,

00:37:32.200 it's very different. The beneficiaries are different from the people paying for the goods.

00:37:35.720 And so there's a disconnect between how well can you fundraise and how good is the

00:37:39.640 program that you're implementing. And so the sad fact is that bad charities don't die, not nearly enough.

00:37:46.200 Yeah, actually, that brings me to a question of about perverse incentives here that I do think

00:37:52.520 animates sort of the more intelligent skepticism. And it is on precisely this point that, you know,

00:38:00.360 charities, good and bad, can be incentivized to merely keep going. I mean, just imagine a charity that

00:38:08.680 solves its problem. It should be that, you know, if you're trying to, let's say, you know,

00:38:14.200 eradicate malaria, you raise hundreds of millions of dollars to that end, what happens to your charity

00:38:21.800 when you actually eradicate malaria? We're not, we're obviously not in that position with respect

00:38:26.760 to malaria, unfortunately. But there are many problems where you can see that charities are

00:38:33.400 never incentivized to acknowledge that significant progress has been made and the progress is such that

00:38:40.600 it calls into question whether this charity should exist for much longer. And, you know, there may be

00:38:47.000 some, but I'm unaware of charities who are explicit about their aspiration to put themselves out of

00:38:53.560 business because they're so effective. Yeah, so I have a great example of this going wrong. So one charity

00:39:01.080 I know of is called Scotscare and it was set up in the 17th century after the personal union of England

00:39:10.440 and Scotland. And there were many Scots who migrated to London and we were the poor, we were the indigent

00:39:15.880 in London. And so it makes sense for there to be a non-profit helping make sure that poor Scots

00:39:21.640 are, you know, had a livelihood. Were they able to feed themselves and so on?

00:39:27.080 Is it the case that in the 21st century, poor Scots in London is the biggest global problem?

00:39:34.280 No, it's not. Nonetheless, Scotscare continues to this day over 300 years later.

00:39:41.240 Are there examples of charities that explicitly would want to put themselves out of business? I mean,

00:39:45.240 giving what we can, which you've joined, is one. Our ideal scenario is a situation where the idea that

00:39:52.600 you would join a community because you're donating 10% is just weird, wild. Like if you become

00:39:59.480 vegetarian, very rare that you join the kind of a vegetarian society. Or if you decide not to be a

00:40:05.160 racist or decide not to be a liar, that's not like you join the No Liars Society or the No Racist Society.

00:40:12.600 And so that is what we're aiming for, is a world where it's just so utterly common sense that if

00:40:19.400 you're born into a rich country, you should use a significant proportion of your resources to try

00:40:23.960 and help other people, impartially considered. That the idea of needing a community or needing to be

00:40:30.840 part of this kind of club or broader group of people, that just wouldn't even cross your mind.

00:40:35.800 So the day that giving what we can is not needed is a very happy day from my perspective.

00:40:42.680 So let's talk about any misconceptions that people might have about effective altruism,

00:40:48.040 because you know, the truth is I've had some myself, even having prepared to have conversations

00:40:53.480 with you and your colleague Toby Ord, he's also been on the podcast. My first notion of effective

00:41:01.000 altruism was that, very much inspired by Peter Singer's Shallow Pond, that it really was just

00:41:08.360 a matter of focusing on the poorest of the poor in the developing world, almost by definition,

00:41:15.640 and that's kind of the long and the short of it. And you're giving as much as you possibly can

00:41:20.600 sacrifice, but the minimum bar would be 10% of your income. What doesn't that capture about

00:41:27.960 effective altruism? Yeah, thanks for bringing that up, because it is a challenge we faced that

00:41:34.200 the ideas that spread are the most mimetic with respect to effective altruism are not necessarily

00:41:39.320 those that most accurately capture where the movement is, especially today. So as you say,

00:41:46.280 many people think that effective altruism is just about earning as much money as possible to give,

00:41:50.360 to give well-recommended global health and development charities. But I think there's at least

00:41:55.160 three ways in which that misconstrues things. One is the fact that there are just a wide variety of

00:42:01.480 causes that we focus on now. And in fact, among the kind of most engaged people in effect of altruism,

00:42:10.120 the biggest focus now is making sure is future generations and making sure that things go well for

00:42:16.360 the very many future generations to come, such as by focusing on kind of existential risks that Toby talks

00:42:22.360 about like man-made pandemics, like AI. Animal welfare is another cause area. It's not definitely

00:42:30.360 by no means the majority focus, but is a significant minority focus as well. And there's just lots of

00:42:36.040 people trying to get better evidence and understanding of these issues and a variety of other issues too.

00:42:43.800 So voting the forum is something that I have funded to an extent and championed to an extent. I'm really

00:42:50.200 interested in more people working on the risk of war over the coming century. And then secondly,

00:42:55.320 there are, as well as donating, which is a very accessible and important way of doing good.

00:43:01.640 There's just a lot of, in fact, the large majority of people within the effect of altruism community

00:43:06.920 are trying to make a difference, not primarily via their donations, though often they do donate too,

00:43:12.200 but primarily through their career choice by working in areas like research, policy, activism.

00:43:19.320 And then just as a kind of framing in general, we just really don't think of effective altruism as a

00:43:24.920 set of recommendations, but rather like a research project and methodology. So it's more like the

00:43:31.800 science, you know, aspiring towards the scientific revolution than any particular theory.

00:43:36.120 Mm-hmm.

00:43:36.840 And what we're really trying to do is to do for the pursuit of good what the scientific

00:43:41.640 revolution did for the pursuit of truth. It's an ambitious goal, but trying to make the pursuit

00:43:47.000 of good this more rigorous, more scientific enterprise. And for that reason, we don't see

00:43:52.440 ourselves as this kind of set of claims, but rather as a living, breathing, and evolving set of ideas.

00:43:59.160 Yeah, yeah. I think it's useful to distinguish at least two levels here. I mean, one is the specific

00:44:07.720 question of whether an individual cause or an individual charity is a good one. And, you know,

00:44:15.320 but by what metric would you even make that judgment? And how do we rank order our priorities? And like,

00:44:23.000 all of that is getting into the weeds of just what we should do with our resources. And obviously that

00:44:29.000 has to be done. And I think the jury is very much out on many of those questions. And I want to,

00:44:35.080 we'll get into those details going forward here. But the profound effect that your work has had on me

00:44:42.840 thus far arrives at this other level of just the stark recognition that I want to do good in the world

00:44:52.440 by default. And I want to engineer my life such that that happens whether I'm inspired or not.

00:45:02.440 The crucial distinction for me has been to see that there's the good feeling we get from philanthropy

00:45:09.240 and doing good. And then there's the actual results in the world. And those two things are only loosely

00:45:15.480 coupled. This is one of the worst things about us that we need to navigate around or at least be

00:45:21.960 aware of as we live our lives. We tend, you know, we, you know, human beings tend not to be the most

00:45:30.280 disturbed by the most harmful things we do. And we tend not to be the most gratified by the most

00:45:35.800 beneficial things we do. And we tend not to be the most frightened by the most dangerous risks we run,

00:45:42.760 right? And so it's just, we're very easily distracted by good stories and, and other bright,

00:45:49.640 shiny objects. And the framing of a problem radically changes our perception of it. So the

00:45:56.440 effect, you know, when, when you came on my podcast four years ago was for me to just realize, okay,

00:46:01.800 well, now we're talking about GiveWell's most effective charities and the Against Malaria Foundations

00:46:08.200 is at the top. I recognize in myself that I'm just not very excited about malaria or bed nets.

00:46:15.240 The problem isn't the sexiest for me. The remedy isn't the sexiest for me. And yet I rationally

00:46:22.040 understand that if I want to save human lives, this is the dollar for dollar, the cheapest way to save a

00:46:31.080 human life. So that the epiphany for me is I just want to automate this. And you just give,

00:46:38.040 you know, every month to this charity without having to think about it. And so, you know, that,

00:46:43.400 that is gratifying to me to some degree, but the truth is I almost never think about malaria or the

00:46:50.440 Against Malaria Foundation or anything related to this project. And I'm doing the good anyway,

00:46:57.080 because I just decided to not rely on my moral intuitions day to day and my desire to rid the

00:47:04.520 world of malaria. I just decided to automate it. The recognition that there's a difference between

00:47:11.880 committing in a way that really takes it offline so that you no longer have to keep being your better

00:47:17.320 self on that topic every day of the week is just wiser and more effective to decide in your,

00:47:23.160 in your clearest moment of deliberation, you know, what you want to do, and then just to build the

00:47:27.800 structure to actually do that thing. And that's just one of several distinctions that you have

00:47:33.640 brought into my understanding of how to do good. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it just, we've got to

00:47:39.240 recognize that we are these fallible, imperfect creatures. Donating is much like, you know, paying

00:47:46.120 your pension or something. It's something you might think, oh, I really ought to do, but it's just hard to

00:47:50.120 get motivated by. And so we need to exploit our own irrationality. And I think that comes in two

00:47:57.320 stages. First, like building up the initial motivation, you can sustain that for, you know,

00:48:03.960 perhaps feeling of moral outrage or just real kind of yearning to start to do something. You can get

00:48:10.600 that. So in my own case, when I was deciding how much should I try and commit to, to give away over the

00:48:16.120 course of my life, I just, I looked up images of children suffering from horrific topical diseases.

00:48:21.960 And that, you know, really stayed with me, kind of gave me that initial motivation. Or I still get

00:48:27.800 that if I read about the many close calls we had, where we almost had a nuclear holocaust for the

00:48:34.200 course of the 20th century. Or if I, you know, learn more history and think about what the world would

00:48:39.880 have been like if the Nazis had won the Second World War and created this global totalitarian state.

00:48:44.760 There's, you know, or fiction, like I was recently reading 1984. And again, this kind of

00:48:50.200 ways of just thinking just how bad and different the world could be, that can really create the

00:48:54.360 sense of like moral urgency. Or just, you know, on the news too, the kind of moral outrages we see

00:49:00.440 all the time. And then the second is how we direct that. And so in your own case, just saying,

00:49:06.440 yes, every time I have a podcast, I donate three and a half thousand dollars and it saves a life.

00:49:11.560 Very good way of doing that. Similarly, you can have a system where every time a paycheck comes

00:49:16.040 in, ten percent of it just, it doesn't even enter your bank account. It just goes to, or at least

00:49:21.800 immediately leaves to go to some effective charity that you've carefully thought about. And there's

00:49:27.320 other hacks too. So public commitments are a really big thing now. I think there's no way I'm backing

00:49:33.400 out of my altruism now. Too much of my identity is wrapped up in that now. So even if someone offered

00:49:40.600 me a million pounds and I could skip town, I wouldn't want to do it. It's part of who I am.

00:49:47.160 It's part of my social relationships. And that's, you know, yeah, that's very powerful too.

00:49:52.360 Actually, in a coming chapter here, I want to push back a little bit on how you are personally

00:50:00.120 approaching giving. Because I think I have some rival intuitions here that I want to see how they

00:50:05.880 survive contact with your sense of how you should live. There's actually a kind of related point here

00:50:11.800 where I'm wondering when we think of causes that meet the test of effective altruism, they still seem

00:50:20.200 to be weighted toward some obvious extremes, right? Like when you look at the value of a marginal

00:50:26.120 dollar in sub-Saharan Africa or Bangladesh, you get so much more of a lift in human well-being for

00:50:34.280 your money than you do or than you seem to in a place like the United States or the UK that, you know,

00:50:41.400 by default you generally have an argument for doing good elsewhere rather than locally. But I'm wondering

00:50:48.520 if this breaks down for a few reasons. So, I mean, just take an example like the problem of

00:50:55.880 homelessness in San Francisco, right? Now, leaving aside the fact that we don't seem to know what to

00:51:01.980 do about homelessness, it appears to be a very hard problem to solve. You can't just build shelters for

00:51:08.100 the mentally ill and substance abusers and call it a day, right? I mean, they quickly find that even

00:51:13.960 they don't want to be in those shelters and, you know, they're back out on the streets and so you

00:51:18.120 have to figure out what services you're going to provide and there's all kinds of bad incentives

00:51:23.000 and moral hazards here that, you know, when you're the one city that does it, well, then you're the

00:51:28.080 city that's attracting the world's homeless. But let's just assume for the sake of argument that we

00:51:33.140 knew how to spend money so that we could solve this problem. Would solving the problem of homelessness

00:51:38.840 in San Francisco stand a chance of rising to the near the top of our priorities, in your view?

00:51:46.700 Yeah. So, it would all just depend on how, like, the costs to save homelessness and how that compared

00:51:53.120 with our other opportunities. So, in general, it's going to be the case that the very best opportunities

00:51:58.780 are, in order to improve lives, are going to be in the poorest countries because the very best ways

00:52:06.000 of helping others have not yet been taken. So, malaria is still life. It was wiped out in the

00:52:10.600 U.S. and certainly by the early 20th century. It's an easy problem to solve. It's very cheap.

00:52:16.240 And when we look at rich countries, the problems that are still left are, you know, the comparatively

00:52:21.840 harder ones to solve for whatever reason. So, like in the case of homelessness, I'm not, you know,

00:52:28.380 sure about the original source of this fact, but I have been told that, so, yeah, for those who

00:52:33.860 haven't ever lived in the Bay Area, the problem of homelessness is horrific there. There's just

00:52:38.320 people with severe mental health issues, clear substance abuse, just, like, everywhere on the

00:52:45.400 streets. It's just, it's so prevalent. It just amazes me that one of the richest countries in the world

00:52:49.380 and one of the richest places within that country is unable to solve this problem. But I believe,

00:52:55.700 at least, that in terms of funding at the local level, there's about $50,000 spent per homeless

00:53:02.100 person in the Bay Area. And what this suggests is that the problem is not to do with a lack of

00:53:07.560 finances. And so if you were going to contribute more money there, it's unlikely to make an

00:53:11.820 additional reason. Perhaps it's some perverse intentives effect. Perhaps it's government

00:53:16.560 bureaucracy. Perhaps it's some sort of legislation. I don't know. It's not an issue I know enough

00:53:22.520 about. But precisely because the U.S. is so rich, the San Francisco Bay Area is so rich,

00:53:27.400 is that if this was something where we could turn money into a solution to the problem,

00:53:32.100 it would, more likely, more than likely, it probably would have happened already.

00:53:37.060 But that's not to say we'll never find issues in rich countries where you can do an enormous

00:53:40.820 amount of good. So open philanthropy, which is kind of a core effective altruist foundation,

00:53:48.680 one of its program areas is criminal justice reform. It started, I believe, about five years ago.

00:53:55.500 And it really did think that the benefits to Americans that it could provide by funding

00:54:03.540 changes to legislation to reduce the absurd rates of over-incarceration in the U.S.,

00:54:10.540 where, for context, the U.S. incarcerates five times as many people as the U.K. does on a per-person

00:54:16.760 basis. And there's a lot of evidence suggesting you could reduce that very significantly without

00:54:21.260 changing rates of crime. It seemed to be comparable to actually the best interventions in the poorest

00:54:28.060 countries. Of course, this has now become an even more well-focused issue. So I believe that

00:54:34.480 they're finding it harder to now, you know, make a difference by funding organizations that wouldn't

00:54:38.660 have otherwise be funded. But this is at least one example where you can get things that come up

00:54:43.640 that just for whatever reason have not yet been funded, kind of new opportunities, where you can do

00:54:48.300 as much good. It's just that I think they're going to be much competitively much harder to find.

00:54:53.440 Yeah, I think that this gets complicated for me when you look at just what we're going to

00:55:00.360 target as a reduction in suffering. I mean, it's very easy to count dead people, right? So if we're

00:55:07.540 just talking about saving lives, that's a pretty easy thing to calculate. If we can save more lives

00:55:13.900 in country X over country Y, well, then it seems like it's a net good to be spending our dollars

00:55:19.960 in country X. But when you think about human suffering, and when you think about how so much

00:55:26.320 of it is comparative, like the despair of being someone who has fallen through the cracks in a city

00:55:35.120 like San Francisco could well be much worse. I mean, I think there's certainly, I don't know what data we

00:55:41.340 have on this, but there's certainly a fair amount of anecdotal testimony that poor people in a country

00:55:47.240 like Bangladesh, while it's obviously terrible to be poor in Bangladesh, and there are many reasons to

00:55:53.840 want to solve that problem. And by comparison, when you look at, you know, homeless people on the streets

00:55:58.820 of San Francisco, they are not, they're not nearly as poor as the poorest people in Bangladesh, of course,

00:56:04.360 and nor are they politically oppressed in the same way. I mean, by global standards, they're barely

00:56:10.100 oppressed at all. But it wouldn't surprise me if we could do a complete psychological evaluation or,

00:56:17.220 you know, or just trade places with people in each condition, we would discover that the suffering of

00:56:23.900 a person who is living in one of the richest cities in the world and is homeless and drug addicted and

00:56:33.380 mentally ill or to, you know, pick off that menu of despair is actually the, you know, the worst

00:56:39.320 suffering on earth. And again, we just have to stipulate that we could solve this problem dollar

00:56:45.560 for dollar in a way that, you know, we admit that we don't know how to at the moment. It seems like

00:56:51.740 just tracking the, you know, the GDP in each place and in the amount of money it would take to

00:56:57.220 deliver a meal or get someone clothing or get someone shelter. And, you know, the power of the

00:57:02.720 marginal dollar calculation doesn't necessarily capture the deeper facts of the case, or at least

00:57:09.840 that's my concern. So I'd actually agree with you on the question of, you know, take someone who,

00:57:17.860 yeah, they're mentally unwell, they have drug addictions, they're homeless in the San Francisco

00:57:22.760 Bay Area, how bad is their day? And then take someone living in extreme poverty in India or

00:57:28.900 sub-Saharan Africa, how bad is their typical day? Yeah, I wouldn't want to make a claim that the,

00:57:36.020 that homeless person in the U.S. has a better life than the extreme poor. You know, I think it's,

00:57:43.040 it's not so hard to just hit rock bottom in terms of human suffering. And I do just think that the

00:57:50.380 homeless in the Bay Area just seem to have like really terrible lives. And so the question,

00:57:56.520 the question in terms of the difference of the, how promising it is as a cause is much to do,

00:58:01.980 much more to do with this question of whether the low hanging fruit has already been taken,

00:58:06.640 where, you know, just think about the most sick you've ever been and how horrible that was.

00:58:12.820 And imagine, you know, and now think about that for months, having malaria, for example,

00:58:19.580 and that that could, you could have avoided that for a few dollars. That's like, you know,

00:58:25.760 an incredible fact. And that's where the real difference is, I think, is in kind of the cost

00:58:31.040 to solve a problem, rather than necessarily like the kind of per person suffering. Because while

00:58:37.220 rich countries are in general happier than poorer countries, the worst off people, I mean,

00:58:42.960 especially in the US, which has such a high variance in life outcomes. Yeah, the worst,

00:58:48.400 the lives of the worst off people can easily be much the same.

00:58:51.600 Yeah, I guess there's some other concerns here that I have, which, and this, this, this speaks to

00:58:56.300 a deeper problem with consequentialism, which is, which is our orientation here, you know,

00:59:02.360 not exclusively, and people can mean many things by that term. But there's just a problem in how

00:59:08.480 you keep score, because, you know, obviously, there are bad things that can happen, which have

00:59:14.300 massive silver linings, right, which, you know, they have good consequences in the end. And there

00:59:19.080 are apparently good things that happen that, that actually have bad consequences elsewhere,

00:59:24.240 and or in the fullness of time. And it's hard to know when you can actually know

00:59:28.900 that you can assess what is what is true, the net, how you get to the bottom line of the

00:59:36.040 consequences of any actions. But like, when I think about the knock on effects of letting

00:59:41.100 a place like San Francisco become a slum, effectively, right, like, you just think of like,

00:59:46.920 the exodus in tech from California, at this moment, I don't know how deep or sustained it'll be. But

00:59:53.820 I've lost count of the number of people in Silicon Valley, who I've heard are leaving California at

01:00:01.500 this point. And the homelessness in San Francisco is very high on the list of reasons why that strikes

01:00:08.820 me as a bad outcome that has far reaching significance for society. And again, it's the kind of thing that's

01:00:16.960 not captured by just counting bodies or just looking at how cheap it is to buy bed nets.

01:00:25.440 You know, and I'm sort of struggling to find a way of framing this that is fundamentally different from

01:00:30.940 Singer's Shallow Pond that allows for some of the moral intuitions that I think many people have here,

01:00:36.640 which is that there's an intrinsic good in, in having a civilization that is producing the most

01:00:45.940 abundance possible. I mean, we want a highly technological, creative, beautiful civilization.

01:00:53.800 We want gleaming cities with beautiful architecture. We want institutions that are massively well-funded,

01:01:01.660 producing cures for diseases, rather than just things like bed nets, right? And we want beautiful art.

01:01:10.440 There are things we want, and I think there are things we're right to want that are only compatible

01:01:16.680 with the accumulation of wealth in certain respects. One framing, I mean, from Singer's framing,

01:01:26.140 those intuitions are just wrong, or at least they're premature, right? I mean, we have to save the

01:01:31.420 last child in the last pond before we can think about funding the Metropolitan Museum of Art,

01:01:38.620 right, on some level. And many people are allergic to that intuition for reasons that I understand,

01:01:47.000 and I'm not sure that I can defeat Singer's argument here, but I have this image that,

01:01:51.620 I mean, essentially we have a lifeboat problem, right? Like, you and I are in the boat, we're safe,

01:01:56.780 and then the question is, how many people can we pull in to the boat and save as well? And, you know,

01:02:02.380 as with any lifeboat, there's a problem of capacity. We can't save everyone all at once,

01:02:09.340 but we can save many more people than we've saved thus far. But the thing is, we have a

01:02:14.880 fancy lifeboat, right? I mean, civilization itself is a fancy lifeboat, and, you know,

01:02:20.240 there are people drowning, and they're obviously drowning, and we're saving some of them, and you

01:02:24.880 and I are now arguing that we can save many, many more, and we should save many, many more.

01:02:29.160 And anyone listening to us is lucky to be safely in this lifeboat with us. And the boat is not as

01:02:35.220 crowded as it might be, but we do have finite resources in any moment. And the truth is, we're,

01:02:42.700 because it's a fancy lifeboat, you know, we are spending some of those resources on things other

01:02:48.700 than reaching over the side and pulling in the next drowning person. So that, you know, there's a bar

01:02:53.540 that serves very good drinks, and, you know, we've got a good internet connection, so we can stream

01:02:58.580 movies. And, you know, while this may seem perverse, again, if you extrapolate from here,

01:03:04.340 you realize that I'm talking about civilization, which is a fancy lifeboat. And there's obviously

01:03:10.000 an argument for spending a lot of time and a lot of money saving people and pulling them in.

01:03:16.680 But I think there's also an argument for making the lifeboat better and better, so that we have

01:03:23.540 more smart, creative people incentivized to spend some time at the edge pulling people in

01:03:30.380 with better tools, tools that they only could have made had they spent time elsewhere in the boat

01:03:36.820 making those tools. And this moves to the larger topic of just how we envision building a good society,

01:03:45.720 even while there are moral emergencies right now somewhere, that we need to figure out how to

01:03:53.920 respond to.

01:03:55.420 Yeah, so this is a crucially important set of questions. So the focus on knock-on effects is

01:04:02.460 very important. So when you, again, let's just take the example of saving a life, you don't just save a

01:04:08.120 life because that person goes on and does stuff. As they make the country a richer, perhaps they go and

01:04:13.440 have kids. Perhaps, you know, they will emit CO2. That's a negative consequence. They'll innovate,

01:04:19.900 they'll invent things, maybe they'll create art. There's this huge stream, basically from now until

01:04:24.980 the end of time, of consequences of you doing this thing. And it's quite plausible that the knock-on

01:04:29.600 effects, though much harder to predict, are much bigger effects than the short-term effects,

01:04:34.440 the benefits of the person you've, whose, you know, life you saved or who you've benefited.

01:04:38.300 In the case of homelessness in the Bay Area versus extreme poverty in a poor country, I'd want to say

01:04:47.360 that if we're looking at knock-on effects of one, we want to do the same for both. So, you know,

01:04:51.600 one thing I worry about over the course of the coming, you know, decades, but also even years,

01:04:57.280 is a possibility of a war between India and Pakistan. But it's a fact that rich democratic

01:05:04.100 countries seem to not to go to war with each other. So one knock-on effect of, you know, saving

01:05:10.680 lives or helping development in India is perhaps we get to that point where India is rich enough

01:05:16.820 that it's not going to want to go to war because, you know, the cost benefit doesn't pay out in the

01:05:20.980 same way. That would be another kind of potential good knock-on effect. And that's not to say that

01:05:25.620 the knock-on effects favor the extreme poverty intervention compared to the homelessness. It's just

01:05:30.900 that there's so many of them. It's very, very hard to understand how these play out.

01:05:37.760 And I think actually you then mentioned, well, we want to achieve some of the great things. So

01:05:42.880 we want, you know, to achieve the kind of highest apogees of art, of development. I mean,

01:05:51.320 a personal thing I'm sad that I will never get to see is the point in time where we just truly

01:05:56.420 understand science, where we have actually figured out the fundamental laws, especially the fundamental

01:06:01.800 physical laws. But also just, you know, great experiences too. People having, you know, peaks

01:06:08.900 of happiness that, you know, put the very greatest achievements in, of the present day, just in the,

01:06:15.480 you know, very greatest peaks of joy and ecstasy of the present day, just as basically different,

01:06:21.560 almost, you know, insignificant in comparison. That's something that really,

01:06:24.880 I do think is important. But I think for all of those things, once you're then starting to take

01:06:31.120 that seriously and take knock-on effects seriously, that's the sort of reasoning that leads you to

01:06:36.200 start thinking about what I call long-termism, which is the idea that the most important aspect of our

01:06:41.980 actions is the impact we have over the very long run, and will make us want to prioritize things like

01:06:49.140 ensuring we don't have some truly massive catastrophe as a result of a nuclear war or a man-made pandemic

01:06:56.760 that could derail this process of continued economic and technological growth that we seem to be

01:07:03.020 undergoing, or could make us want to avoid certain kind of just very bad value states, like the lock-in

01:07:09.300 of a global totalitarian regime, another thing that I'm particularly worried about in terms of the

01:07:14.460 future of humanity. Or perhaps it is just that we're worried that technological and economic growth

01:07:20.080 will slow down, and what we want to do is spur, you know, continued innovation into the future.

01:07:28.700 And I think there actually are just really good arguments for that. But I think I would be surprised

01:07:33.420 if that is what your aim is, the best way of doing that goes via some route, such as focusing on

01:07:41.920 homelessness in the Bay Area, rather than trying to kind of aim at those ends more directly.

01:07:47.680 Okay, well, I think we're going to return to this concept of the fancy lifeboat at some point,

01:07:52.640 because I do want to talk about your personal implementation of effective altruism in a subsequent

01:07:58.600 lesson. But for the moment, let's get into the details of how we think about choosing a cause in the

01:08:06.360 next chapter. Okay, so how do we think about choosing specific causes? I've had my own adventures

01:08:14.360 and misadventures with this since I took your pledge. Before we get into the specifics, I just want to

01:08:19.460 point out a really wonderful effect on my psychology that is, I mean, you know, I've always been, I think,

01:08:28.280 by real-world standards, fairly charitable. So giving to organizations that inspire me or who I think

01:08:36.360 are doing good work is not a foreign experience for me. But since connecting with you and now since

01:08:44.480 taking the pledge, I'm now, you know, aggressively charitable. And what this has done to my brain is

01:08:51.180 that there is a pure pleasure in doing this. And there's a kind of virtuous greed to help that gets

01:09:00.920 kindled. And rather than seeing it as an obligation, it really feels like an opportunity. I mean, just you

01:09:07.820 want to run into that building and save the girl at the window. But across the street, there's a boy at

01:09:14.200 the window and you want to run in over there too. And so this is actually a basis for psychological

01:09:20.960 well-being. I mean, it makes me happy to put my attention in this direction. It's the antithesis of

01:09:26.700 feeling like an onerous obligation. So anyway, I'm increasingly sensitive to causes that catch my eye

01:09:33.900 and I want to support. But I'm aware that I am a malfunctioning robot with respect to my own, you

01:09:40.940 know, moral compass. As I said, you know, I know that I'm not as excited about bed nets to stave off

01:09:47.940 malaria as I should be. And I'm, you know, I'm giving to that cause nonetheless, because I just recognize

01:09:54.080 that the analysis is almost certainly sound there. But for me, what's interesting here is when I think

01:10:00.800 about giving to a cause that really doesn't quite meet the test, well, that then achieves the status

01:10:07.180 for me of a kind of guilty pleasure. Like I feel a little guilty that I, you know, I gave that much

01:10:12.880 money to the homeless charity because, you know, Will just told me that that's not going to meet the

01:10:17.560 test. So, okay, that's going to have to be above and beyond the 10% I pledged to the most effective

01:10:23.380 charities. And so just having to differentiate the charitable donations that meet the test and

01:10:29.040 those that don't is an interesting project psychologically. I don't know, it's just, it's

01:10:33.460 just a very different territory than I've ever been with respect to philanthropy. But so this raises the

01:10:39.240 issue. So one of these charities is newly formed, right? So it does not yet have a long track record.

01:10:45.200 I happen to know the people who, or some of the people who created it. How could you fund a new

01:10:50.360 organization with all these other established organizations that have track records that you

01:10:55.440 can assess competing for your attention? First thing I want to say is just, does this count towards

01:11:01.460 the pledge? And one thing I definitely want to disabuse people of the notion of is that we think

01:11:07.280 of ourselves as the authority of like what is effective. These are our best guesses. We've

01:11:11.660 GiveWell or other organizations have put enormous amounts of research into this, but there's still

01:11:16.880 estimates. There's plenty of things you can kind of disagree with. And it's actually quite exciting

01:11:21.480 often to have someone come in and start disagreeing with us. Because maybe we're wrong, and that's

01:11:25.380 great. We can change our mind and have better beliefs. And the second thing is that early stage

01:11:30.820 charities absolutely can compete with charities with a more established track record. In just the same

01:11:36.820 way as if you think about financial investment, you know, investing in bonds or the stock market

01:11:42.700 is a way of making a return, but so is investing in startups. And if you had the view that you should

01:11:47.740 never invest in startups, then that would definitely be a mistake. And actually quite a significant

01:11:52.280 proportion of GiveWell's expenditure each year is on early stage non-profits that have the potential

01:11:58.800 in the future to become top recommended charities. And so a set of questions I would ask for any

01:12:05.540 organization I'm looking at is what is the cause that it's focused on? What's the program that it's

01:12:09.800 implementing? And then who are the people who are kind of running that program? But the kind of

01:12:15.920 background is that there's just some things we know do enormous amounts of good and have this enormous

01:12:20.340 amount of evidence for them. And so I feel like we want to be focusing on things where either there's

01:12:26.580 like very promising evidence and we could potentially get more, or it's something where in the nature of

01:12:32.620 the beast we cannot get very high quality evidence, but we have good compelling arguments for thinking

01:12:38.180 that this might be super important. So, you know, funding clean energy innovation, funding, you know,

01:12:44.120 new developments in carbon capture and storage or nuclear power or something. It's not like you can

01:12:48.560 do a randomized controlled trial on that, but I think there's good kind of theoretical arguments for

01:12:52.940 thinking that might be an extremely good way of combating climate change. It's worth bearing in

01:12:57.700 mind that like saying something that is the very best thing you can do with your money is an extremely

01:13:01.760 high bar. So, you know, if there's tens of thousands of possible organizations, there can only be

01:13:07.440 one or two that are the, you know, have the, that have the biggest bang for the buck.

01:13:12.140 All right. Well, it sounds like I'm opening a guilty pleasures fund to run alongside the Waking Up

01:13:17.220 Foundation.

01:13:18.080 I'm very glad that they're pleasures. I'm glad that you are sufficiently motivated. You know, it's a very

01:13:22.200 good instinct that you find out about these problems in the world, which are really bad and are

01:13:29.260 motivated to want to help them. And so I'm really glad you think of them as pleasures. I don't think

01:13:34.220 you should be beating yourself up, even if it doesn't seem like the very most optimal thing.

01:13:40.320 Yeah, yeah. No, no, I'm not. And in fact, I have an even guiltier pleasure to report, which,

01:13:45.480 you know, at the time I did it, you know, this is, this is not through a charity. This is just a,

01:13:50.980 you know, personal gift, but, and this does connect back to just the kind of lives we want to live and

01:13:58.060 how that informs this whole conversation. I remember I was listening to the, the New York

01:14:03.180 Times Daily podcast, and this was when the COVID pandemic was really peaking in the U.S. and

01:14:10.860 everything seemed to be in free fall. They profiled a couple who had a restaurant in, I think it was in

01:14:19.280 New Orleans, and they have an autistic child. And they were, you know, everyone knows that restaurants

01:14:25.760 were among the first businesses crushed by the pandemic for obvious reasons. And it was just a

01:14:32.420 very affecting portrait of this family trying to figure out how they were going to survive and get

01:14:38.080 their child to help. She, I think it was a girl, needed. So it was exactly the little girl fell down

01:14:46.500 the well sort of story compared to the genocide that no one can pay attention to because genocides are

01:14:53.400 just boring. And so I was completely aware of the dynamics of this. Helping these people could not

01:15:01.140 survive comparison with just simply buying yet more bed nets. And yet the truth is I really wanted to

01:15:11.280 help these people, right? So, you know, just sent them money out of the blue. And it feels like an

01:15:17.960 orientation that, I mean, there are two things here that kind of rise to the defense of this kind of

01:15:24.280 behavior. It feels like an orientation that I want to support in myself because it does seem like a

01:15:34.040 truly virtuous source of mental pleasure. I mean, it's better than almost anything else I do,

01:15:40.700 spending money selfishly. And psychologically, but it's both born of a felt connection and it kind of

01:15:47.020 ramifies that connection. And there's something about just honoring that bug in my moral hardware

01:15:53.060 rather than merely avoiding it. That seems, it seems like it's leading to just finding greater

01:16:01.700 happiness in helping people in general, you know, in the most effective ways in, you know,

01:16:07.300 middling effective ways. Feeling what I felt doing that is part of why I'm talking to you now,

01:16:14.000 trying to truly get my philanthropic house in order, right? So it sort of seems all of a piece

01:16:19.840 here. And I do think we need to figure out how to leverage the salience of connection to other people

01:16:27.560 and the pleasure of doing good. And if we lose sight of that, if we just keep saying that you can spend

01:16:34.660 $2,000 here, which is better than spending $3,000 over there, completely disregarding the experience

01:16:42.180 people are having engaging with the suffering of others, I feel like something is lost. And I guess

01:16:48.680 there's another variable I would throw in here is, you know, this wasn't an example of this. This

01:16:52.440 wasn't a local problem I was helping to solve. But had it been a local problem, had I been offered the

01:16:58.420 opportunity to help my neighbor, you know, at greater than rational expense, that might have been

01:17:04.200 the right thing to do. I mean, again, it's falling into the guilty pleasure bin here compared to the

01:17:09.240 absolutely optimized, most effective way of relieving suffering. But I don't know, I just feel like

01:17:15.960 there's something lost. If we're not in a position to honor a variable like locality ever, we're not

01:17:23.820 only building the world or affecting the world here, we're building our own minds. We're building

01:17:29.880 the very basis by which we would continue to do good in the world in coming days and weeks and months

01:17:36.360 and years. Yeah. So, I mean, I essentially completely agree with you and think it's really

01:17:41.220 good that you supported that family. And yeah, it reminds me in my own case, something that stayed

01:17:48.060 with me. So I lived in Oakland, California, for a while, in a very poor, predominantly black

01:17:52.980 neighborhood. And I was just out on a run. And a woman kind of comes up to me as like, asks if I can

01:17:59.440 stop and help for a second. And I thought she was just going to want help like carrying groceries or

01:18:04.460 something and be fine. It turns out she wanted me to move her couch like all the way down the street

01:18:09.500 took like two hours. And I just don't. And so, and that was out of my working day as well, because

01:18:15.860 I don't have lunch. And I just don't regret the use of that time at all. And why is that? And even

01:18:23.040 from a rational perspective, I'm not saying that this is, oh, I shouldn't just merely shouldn't beat

01:18:28.040 myself up or something. And I think it's because most of the time, we're just not the bigger

01:18:34.460 question of like, what individual action do we do? Like in any particular case, which kind of model

01:18:42.100 philosophy has typically focused on kind of act consequentialism. That's not typically the decisions

01:18:47.900 we face. We face these much larger decisions, like what career to pursue or something. Sometimes those

01:18:52.740 are more like actions. But we also face the question of just what person to be, what kind of

01:18:58.040 motivations and dispositions do I want to have? And I think the idea of me becoming this like

01:19:04.320 utility maximizing robot that is like utterly cold and calculating out of time, all the time,

01:19:10.320 I think is certainly not possible for me, given just the fact that I'm an embodied human being.

01:19:16.520 But also probably not desirable either. I don't think, you know, I don't think that an effective

01:19:22.460 Svelteism movement would have started had we all been these cold utility maximizing robots.

01:19:27.840 And so I think cultivating a personality such that you do get joy and reward and motivation from

01:19:34.660 being able to help people and get that feedback. And that is like part of what you do in your life,

01:19:39.740 I actually think can be the best way of living a life when you consider your life as a whole.

01:19:45.080 And in particular, it's not necessarily, doing those things does not necessarily trade off

01:19:51.720 very much at all, can perhaps even help with the other things that you do. So in your case,

01:19:57.400 you get this reward from supporting this like poverty-sitting family with a disabled child,

01:20:03.480 or get reward from helping people in your local community, that I'm presuming you can channel

01:20:08.560 and like helps continue the motivation to do things that might seem much more alien or just

01:20:13.900 harder to empathize with. And I think that's okay. I think we should accept that. And that's,

01:20:17.940 in fact, should be encouraged. So yeah, I think like, it's very important once we take these ideas

01:20:23.720 outside of the philosophy seminar room and actually try to live them to appreciate the instrumental

01:20:29.240 benefits of doing these kind of everyday actions, as long as it ultimately helps you stand by this

01:20:36.000 commitment to at least in part, try and do just what we rationally, all things considered,

01:20:40.740 think is going to be best for the world.

01:20:42.020 Yeah. So you mentioned that the variable of time here, and this is another misconception about

01:20:48.020 effective altruism, that it's only a matter of giving money to the most effective causes.

01:20:54.080 You spent a lot of time thinking about how to prioritize one's time and think about doing good

01:21:00.100 over the course of one's life based on how one spends one's time. So in our next chapter,

01:21:06.840 let's talk about how a person could think about having a career that helps the world.

01:21:15.300 Okay, so we're going to speak more about the question of giving to various causes and how to

01:21:22.660 do good in the world in terms of sharing the specific resource of money. But we're now talking

01:21:27.440 about one's time. How do you think about time versus money here? And I know you've done a lot of work

01:21:34.720 on the topic of how people can think about having rewarding careers that are net positive. And you

01:21:42.660 have a website, 80,000 hours that you might want to point people to here. So just let's talk about

01:21:49.660 the variable of time and how people can spend it to the benefit of others.

01:21:55.260 Great. So the organization is called 80,000 hours, because that's the typical number of hours that

01:22:02.180 you work in the course of your life. If that's a, you know, approximately 40 year career, working 40

01:22:09.180 hours a week, 50 weeks a year. So we use that to illustrate the fact that your choice of career

01:22:15.800 is probably the, altruistically speaking, the biggest decision you ever make. It's absolutely

01:22:20.660 enormous. Yeah. People spend very little of their time really thinking through that question. I mean,

01:22:27.540 you might think if you go out for dinner, then you spend maybe 1% of the time that you would spend at

01:22:32.060 dinner thinking about where to eat, like a few minutes or something. But spending 1% of 80,000 hours

01:22:37.400 on, you know, your career decision on what you should do, that would be 800 hours, enormous amount of

01:22:43.640 time. But I mean, why did I do philosophy? Well, I, you know, I liked it at school. I could have done

01:22:51.640 maths, but my dad did maths. I wanted to differentiate myself from him. Like I didn't have a very good

01:22:56.520 reasoning process at all because we generally don't, you know, pay this nearly enough attention.

01:23:02.840 And certainly when it comes to doing good, you have an enormous opportunity to have a huge impact

01:23:08.140 through your career. And so what 80,000 hours does via its website, via podcast, and via a small

01:23:15.160 amount of one-on-one advising is try to help people figure out which careers are such that they can have

01:23:22.020 the biggest impact. And in contrast, you know, this is a much, you know, the question of what

01:23:26.940 charities do I need to is exceptionally hard. This is even harder again, because firstly, you'll be

01:23:33.960 working at many different organizations over the course of your life, probably, not just one. And

01:23:39.000 secondly, of course, there's a question of personal fit. Some people would be, some people are good at

01:23:43.120 some things and not others. That's truism. And so how should you think about this? Well, the most

01:23:50.040 important question, I think, is the question of what cause to focus on. And that involves big picture

01:23:55.340 worldview judgments and, you know, philosophical questions too. So we tend to think of the question of

01:24:03.540 cause selection by using the heuristics of what causes, and by a cause, I mean a big problem in

01:24:09.180 the world like climate change or gender inequality or poverty or factory farming or pandemics,

01:24:15.180 possibility of pandemics or AI lock-in of values. We look at those causes in terms of how important

01:24:22.240 they are, that is, how many individuals are affected by how much, how neglected they are, which is how many

01:24:28.900 resources are already going towards them. And then finally, how tractable they are, how much we can

01:24:33.120 make progress in this area. And in significant part, because of those heuristics, that's why

01:24:38.460 we've, Effective Altruism has chosen the focus areas it has, which includes pandemic preparedness,

01:24:44.580 artificial intelligence, climate change, poverty, farm animal welfare, and potentially some others

01:24:50.100 as well, like improving institutional decision-making and some areas in scientific research. And so that's

01:24:56.580 by far the biggest question, I think, because that really shapes the entire direction of your career.

01:25:01.080 And I think, you know, depending on the philosophical assumptions you put in,

01:25:06.320 can result in enormous, you know, differences in impact. Like, do you think animals count at all?

01:25:12.540 Or, like, a lot? I mean, would make enormous difference in terms of whether you ought to be

01:25:17.900 focusing on that. Similarly, like, what weight do you give to future generations versus present

01:25:21.820 generations? Potentially you can do hundreds of times as much good in one cause area as you can in

01:25:27.980 another. Yeah. And then within that, the question of where exactly to focus is going to just depend a

01:25:33.800 lot on the particular cause area where different causes just have different bottlenecks. We tend to

01:25:40.040 find that, you know, working at the best nonprofits is often great. Research is often great, especially

01:25:45.240 in kind of new, more nascent causes like safe development of artificial intelligence or pandemic

01:25:50.600 preparedness. Often you need the search. Policy is often a very good thing to focus on as well.

01:25:57.300 And in some areas, especially where, you know, money is the real bottleneck, then, you know,

01:26:04.060 trying to do good through your donations primarily and therefore trying to take a job that's more

01:26:08.620 lucrative can be the way to go too. Yeah, that's a wrinkle that is kind of counterintuitive to people.

01:26:14.900 The idea that the best way for you to contribute might in fact be to pursue the most lucrative career

01:26:22.640 that you might be especially well-placed to pursue. And it may have no obvious connection to doing good

01:26:31.680 in the world apart from the fact that you are now giving a lot of your resources to the most effective

01:26:38.000 charities. So if you're a rock star or a professional soccer player or just doing something that you love

01:26:44.380 to do and you have other reasons why you want to do it, but you're also making a lot of money that you

01:26:49.920 can then give to great organizations, well then it's hard to argue that your time would be better

01:26:55.520 spent, you know, working in the non-profit sector yourself or doing something where you wouldn't be

01:27:02.240 laying claim to those kinds of resources. Yeah, that's right. And so it can be, so within the

01:27:07.860 effective altruism community, this is now, I think, a minority of people are trying to

01:27:12.620 do good in their career via the path of what's called earning to give. And again,

01:27:17.520 it depends a lot on the cause area. So what's the, you know, how much money is there relative to

01:27:23.280 the kind of size of the cause already? And, you know, in the case of things like scientific research

01:27:29.640 or AI or pandemic preparedness, there's clearly just like a lot more demand for altruistically

01:27:35.940 minded, sensible, competent people working in these fields than there is money. Whereas in the current

01:27:41.240 case of global health and development, there's just, yeah, there are just these interventions and

01:27:45.980 programs that we could scale up with hundreds of millions, billions of dollars that we just know

01:27:51.160 work very well. And there that's kind of money is kind of more of the bottleneck. And so kind of

01:27:56.560 going back to these misconceptions about effective altruism, this idea of earning to give, it's

01:28:01.880 again, it's very mimetic. People love the, how counterintuitive it is. And, you know, it is,

01:28:07.980 it is one of the things we believe, but it's definitely kind of minority path, especially if you're

01:28:14.000 focused on some of these areas where there already is a lot of potential funding. If you can, it's

01:28:18.260 more about just how many people can we have working on these areas.

01:28:22.160 This raises another point where the whole culture around charity is not optimized for

01:28:29.740 attracting the greatest talent. We have a double standard here, which many people are aware of. I

01:28:35.700 think it's most clearly brought out by Dan Pallotta. I don't know if you know him. He gave a TED talk

01:28:41.400 on this topic and he organized some of the bike rides across America in support of various causes.

01:28:49.340 I think the main one was AIDS. He might've organized a cancer one as well, but, you know, these are

01:28:54.680 ventures that raised, I think, hundreds of millions of dollars. And I think he was criticized for spending

01:29:01.440 too much on overhead, but, you know, it's a choice where you can spend, you know, less than 5% on

01:29:06.520 overhead and raise $10 million, or you could spend 30% on overhead and raise, you know, $400 million.

01:29:13.300 Which should you do? And it's pretty obvious you should do the latter if you're going to use those

01:29:17.620 resources well. And yet there's a culture that prioritizes having the lowest possible overhead.

01:29:26.060 And also there's this sense that if you're going to make millions of dollars personally by starting a

01:29:32.940 software company or becoming an actor in Hollywood or whatever it is, there's nothing wrong with that.

01:29:40.420 But if you're making millions of dollars a year running a charity, well, then you're a greedy

01:29:46.060 bastard, right? And the idea that, you know, we wouldn't fault someone from pursuing a comparatively

01:29:53.300 frivolous and even narcissistic career for getting rich in the meantime, but we would fault someone who's

01:30:01.580 trying to cure cancer or save the most vulnerable people on earth for getting rich while doing that.

01:30:08.540 That seems like a bizarre double standard with respect to how we want to incentivize people.

01:30:15.380 I mean, because what we're really demanding is someone come out of the most competitive school,

01:30:22.680 and when faced with the choice of whether or not to work for a hedge fund or work for a charity

01:30:28.300 doing good in the world, they have to also be someone who doesn't care about earning much money.

01:30:36.160 So we need to, we're sort of filtering for sainthood or something like sainthood among the

01:30:40.860 most competent students at that stage. And that seems less than optimal. I don't know how you view that.

01:30:47.380 Yeah, I think it's, I think it's a real shame. So the, you know, newspapers every year publish rankings of

01:30:54.740 the top paid charity CEOs. And it's, you know, regarded as kind of scandal, the charity is therefore

01:31:00.920 ineffective. But what we should really care about, if we actually care about, you know, the potential

01:31:07.040 beneficiaries, the people we're trying to help, is just how much money are we giving this organization

01:31:12.800 and how much good comes out the other end. And if it's the case that they can achieve more,

01:31:17.680 because they can attract a more experienced and able person to lead the organization by paying more.

01:31:23.600 Now, sure, that's like, it's maybe a sad fact about the world. It would be nice if everyone were able

01:31:28.960 to be maximally motivated purely by altruism. But we know that's not the case. Then if they can achieve

01:31:36.040 more by doing that, then yeah, we should be encouraging them to do that. You know, there's some arguments

01:31:42.140 against like, oh, well, perhaps there's kind of race to the bottom dynamics where if one organization

01:31:48.360 starts paying more, then other organizations should need to pay more too. And it just, you

01:31:53.200 get bloat in the system. I think that's the strongest case for the idea of low overheads

01:31:59.440 when it comes to fundraising. Because if one organization is fundraising, well, perhaps in

01:32:05.540 part, they're increasing the total amount of charitable giving that happens. But they're also

01:32:09.900 probably taking money away from other organizations. And so it can be the case that a general norm of

01:32:15.980 lower overheads when it comes to fundraising is a good one. But when it comes to charity pay,

01:32:21.780 we're obviously just radically far away from that. And yeah, it shows that people are thinking about

01:32:27.480 charity in a kind of fundamentally wrong way, at least, you know, for the effect of altruist purposes

01:32:33.560 we're thinking of, which is not thinking about it in terms of outcomes, but in terms of the virtues

01:32:39.040 you damage the or how much are you sacrificing or something. And ultimately, when it comes to these

01:32:44.480 problems that we're facing, these terrible injustices, this horrific suffering, I don't really

01:32:48.900 care whether the person that helps is virtuous or not. I just want the thing. I just want the

01:32:53.000 suffering to stop. I just, I just want people to be helped. And as long as they're not doing harm

01:32:58.480 along the way, I don't think it really matters whether the people are paid a lot or a little.

01:33:04.100 I think we should say something about the other side of this equation, which tends to get

01:33:08.980 emphasized in most people's thinking about being good in the world. And this is the side of kind of

01:33:16.660 the consumer facing side of not contributing to the obvious harms in a way that is egregious or,

01:33:24.120 you know, dialing down one's complicity in this unacceptable status quo as much as possible.

01:33:30.680 And so this goes to things like becoming a vegetarian or a vegan or avoiding certain kinds

01:33:37.580 of consumerism based on concern about climate change. There's a long list of causes that people

01:33:43.280 get committed to more in the spirit of negating certain bad behavior or polluting behavior rather than

01:33:52.400 focusing on what they're in fact doing to solve problems or giving to specific organizations.

01:33:59.740 Is there any general lesson to be drawn from the results of these efforts on both fronts? I mean,

01:34:06.840 how much does harm avoidance as a consumer add to the scale of merit here? What's the longest lever

01:34:15.340 we can pull personally?

01:34:16.820 Yeah, so I think there's a few things to say. So right at the start, I mentioned one of the key insights

01:34:23.020 of effective altruism was this idea that different activities can vary by a factor of 100 or 1,000 in

01:34:29.960 terms of how much impact they have. And even within ethical consumerism, I think that happens. So if you

01:34:36.560 want to cut out most animal suffering from your diet, I think you should cut out eggs, chicken and pigs,

01:34:41.520 maybe fish, whereas beef and milk, I think are comparatively small factors. If you want to reduce

01:34:47.640 your carbon footprint, then giving up beef and lamb, reducing transatlantic fights, reducing how much

01:34:54.020 you drive makes significant differences, and dozens of times as much impact as things like recycling or

01:35:00.460 upgrading light bulbs or reusing plastic bags. From the purely consequentialist outcome-based

01:35:06.140 perspective, I think it is systematically the case that these ethical consumerism behaviors

01:35:12.100 are small in terms of their impact compared to the impact that you can do via your donations or via

01:35:18.540 your career. And the reason is just there's a very limited range of things that you can do by changing

01:35:23.960 your consumption behavior. There's just things you are buying anyway, and then you can stop.

01:35:28.620 Whereas if you're donating or you're choosing a career, then you can choose the very most effective

01:35:34.260 things to be doing. So take the case of being vegetarian. So I've been vegetarian for 15 years

01:35:40.900 now. I have no plans of stopping that. But if I think about how many animals I'm helping in the

01:35:47.540 course of a year as a result of being vegetarian, and how does that compare when I'm looking at

01:35:51.920 the effectiveness of the very most effective animal welfare charities, which are typically what

01:35:58.260 are called kind of corporate campaigns. So it turns out the most effective way of reducing the number of

01:36:04.260 that we know of, reducing the number of hens in factory farms, laying eggs in just the most

01:36:10.840 atrocious, terrible conditions of suffering, seems to be by campaigning large retailers to change

01:36:17.980 the eggs they purchase in the supply chain. You can actually get a lot of push there.

01:36:22.820 And the figures are just astonishing. It's something like 50 animals that you're preventing the

01:36:30.400 significant torture of for every dollar that you're spending on these campaigns.

01:36:34.920 And so if you just do the maths, like the amount of good you do by becoming vegetarian is equivalent

01:36:40.540 to the amount of good you do by donating a few dollars to these very most effective campaigns.

01:36:45.180 I think similar is true for reducing your carbon footprint. My current favorite climate change

01:36:51.060 charity, Clean Air Task Force, which lobbies the U.S. government to improve its regulations around

01:36:57.440 fossil fuels and promotes energy innovation as well. I think probably reduces a ton of CO2 for

01:37:03.440 about a dollar. And that means if you're in the U.S., an average U.S. citizen emits about 16 tons of

01:37:10.340 carbon dioxide equivalent. If you did all of these most effective things of cutting out meat and all

01:37:16.060 your transatlantic flights and getting rid of your car and so on, you might be able to reduce that six

01:37:21.400 tons or so. And that's, you know, the same as giving about six dollars to these most effective

01:37:27.280 charities. And so it just does seem that these are just much more powerful from the perspective of

01:37:32.100 outcomes. The next question philosophically is whether you have some non-consequentialist reason

01:37:37.460 to do these things. And there, I think it differs. So I think the case is much stronger for becoming

01:37:45.600 vegetarian than for climate change. Because if I buy a factory farmed chicken and then donate to a

01:37:54.780 corporate campaign, well, I've probably harmed different chickens. And it seems like that's,

01:38:01.460 you know, you can't offset the harm to one individual by a benefit to another individual.

01:38:05.720 Whereas if I have a lifetime of emissions, but at the same time donate a sufficient amount to

01:38:11.420 climate change charities, I've probably just reduced the total amount of CO2 going into the

01:38:17.400 atmosphere over the course of my lifetime. And there isn't anyone who's harmed, in expectation at

01:38:23.680 least, by the entire course of my life. And so it's not like I'm trading a harm to one person for the

01:38:29.520 benefit to another. But these are quite, these are quite subtle issues when we get onto these kind

01:38:34.480 of non-consequentialist reasons. Yeah, and there are also ways in which the business community and

01:38:40.200 innovation in general can come to the rescue here. So for instance, there's a company,

01:38:46.000 I believe the name is going to be changed, but it was called Memphis Meats, that is spearheading

01:38:52.960 this revolution in what's called cultured meat or clean meat, where they take a single cell from an

01:38:59.500 animal and amplify it. So, you know, no animals are killed in the process of making these steaks or

01:39:05.300 these meatballs or these chicken cutlets, and they're trying to bring this to scale. And I had

01:39:10.860 the CEO, Uma Valeti, on my podcast a couple of years ago and actually invested in the company,

01:39:17.600 along with many other people, and hopefully this will bear fruit. That's an example of something

01:39:22.940 where, though it was unthinkable some years ago, we might suddenly find ourselves living in a world where

01:39:29.380 you can buy steak and hamburger meat and pork and chicken without harming any animals. And it may

01:39:38.080 also have other significant benefits like cutting down on xenoviruses and, you know, that connects to

01:39:44.860 the pandemic risk issue. I mean, we're really where, you know, our factory farms are wet markets of

01:39:50.220 another sort, and so it is with climate change. On some level, we're waiting and expecting for technology

01:39:57.740 to come to the rescue here, where you're just bringing down the cost of renewable energy to

01:40:03.240 the point where there is literally no reason to be using fossil fuels or bringing us a new generation

01:40:10.640 of nuclear reactors that don't have any of the downsides of old ones. And again, this does connect

01:40:18.340 to the concern I had around the fancy lifeboat. We have to do the necessary things in our lifeboat

01:40:24.800 that allow for those kinds of breakthroughs, because, you know, those are the, in many cases,

01:40:31.720 the solutions that just fundamentally take away the problem rather than merely mitigate it.

01:40:38.760 Yeah. So I totally agree. And I think that, so in the case of, you know, if you're trying to

01:40:45.600 alleviate animal suffering by as much as possible, I think that, yeah, funding research into clean

01:40:51.380 meats, plausibly the best thing you can do. It's hard to make a comparison with the more direct

01:40:55.720 campaigns, but definitely plausibly the best. In the case of climate change, I've recently been

01:41:00.760 pretty convinced that the most effective thing we can be doing is promoting clean energy innovation.

01:41:07.420 In this case, this is another example of importance versus neglectedness, where you mentioned

01:41:11.860 renewables, and they are really key part of the solution. But other areas are really notably

01:41:19.160 more neglected. So carbon capture and storage, where you're capturing CO2 as it emerges from

01:41:25.920 fossil fuel power plants, and nuclear power get quite a small amount of funding compared to

01:41:31.260 solar and wind, even though the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change thinks that they're also a

01:41:37.300 very large part of the solution. But here, I think the distinction is focusing on issues in rich

01:41:44.120 countries in order to benefit people in those rich countries, or kind of as a means to some other

01:41:49.740 sort of benefit. And so I think it's very often the case that you should focus on, like, you might be

01:41:55.560 sending money towards things happening in a rich country like the US, but not because you're trying

01:42:00.840 to benefit people in the US, because you're trying to benefit the world. So maybe you're funding,

01:42:04.760 yeah, this clean meat startup, or you're funding research into low carbon forms of energy. And sure,

01:42:12.140 like that might happen at the US, which is still the world's research leader. That's fairly justified.

01:42:18.020 But that's kind of partly the beneficiaries in the US of these things. But it's also, it's,

01:42:23.460 you know, it's global, it's future generations, too. You're kind of influencing, as it were, the

01:42:28.840 people who are in the positions of power who have the most influence over how things are going to go

01:42:33.920 into the future. Okay, so in our next chapter, let's talk about how we build effective altruism

01:42:41.540 into our lives, and just make this as personally actionable for people as we can. Okay, so we've

01:42:50.220 sketched the basic framework of effective altruism, and just how we think about systematically evaluating

01:42:58.180 various causes, how we think about, you know, what would be prioritized, you know, with respect to

01:43:06.080 things like actual outcomes versus a good story. And we've referenced a few things that are sort of

01:43:14.200 now in the effective altruist canon, like giving a minimum of 10% of one's income a year. And that's

01:43:22.520 really, if I'm not mistaken, you just took that as a nice round number that people had some

01:43:29.080 traditional associations with, you know, in religious communities, there's a notion of tithing

01:43:33.740 that amount. And it seemed like not so large as to be impossible to contemplate, but not so small as

01:43:41.320 to be ineffectual. Maybe let's start there. How do you, so am I right in thinking that the 10%

01:43:48.360 number just, it was kind of pulled out of a hat, but seemed like a good starting point, but there's

01:43:53.760 nothing about it that's carved in stone from your point of view? Exactly. It's not, it's not a magic

01:43:58.560 number, but it's just, it's in this Goldilocks zone where Toby originally had had the thought that

01:44:05.600 he would be promoting what he calls the further pledge, which is where you just set a cap on your

01:44:10.720 income and give everything above that. But the issue, I think, seems pretty clear that if he'd been

01:44:15.540 promoting that, well, very few people would have joined him. We do have a number of people who've

01:44:20.440 taken the further pledge, but it's a very small minority of the 5,000 members we have. On the other

01:44:26.620 hand, if we were promoting a 1% pledge, let's say, well, we're probably just not changing people's

01:44:31.540 behavior compared to how much they donate anyway. So in the UK, people donate on average 0.7% of their

01:44:37.640 income. In the US, if you include educational donations and church donations, people donate about

01:44:43.140 2% of their income. So if I was saying, oh, we should donate 1%, probably those people would have

01:44:48.320 been giving 1% anyway. And so we thought 10% is in this Goldilocks zone. And like you say, it has this

01:44:54.440 long history where for generally religious reasons, people much poorer than us in earlier historical epochs

01:45:02.080 have, you know, been able to donate 10%. We also have 10 fingers. It's an Iceland number. But, you know,

01:45:09.560 many people who are part of the community donate much more than that. Many people who, you know,

01:45:14.580 affirm core people part of the effective autism community don't donate that much. They do good

01:45:19.700 via other ways instead. It's interesting to consider the psychology of this because I can imagine many

01:45:27.980 people entertaining the prospect of giving 10% of their money away and feeling, well, I could easily do

01:45:36.100 that if I were rich, but I can't do that now. And I can imagine many rich people thinking, well,

01:45:43.580 that's a lot of money, right? It's like every year after, you know, I'm making a lot of money and you're

01:45:48.940 telling me year after year after year, I'm going to give 10% away. You know, that's millions of dollars

01:45:53.740 a year. So it could be the fact that there's no point on the continuum of earning where if you're of

01:46:01.640 a certain frame of mind, it's going to seem like a Goldilocks value. You either feel too poor or too

01:46:10.200 rich and there's no sweet spot. Or, you know, to flip that around, you can recognize that however

01:46:17.700 much money you're making, you can always give 10% to the most effective ways of alleviating suffering

01:46:25.520 once you have this epiphany. You can always find those 10% at every point. And if you're not making

01:46:30.640 much money, obviously 10% will be a small amount of money. And if you're making a lot of money,

01:46:36.340 it'll be a large amount. But it's almost always the case that there's 10% of fat there to be found.

01:46:43.800 So yeah, did you have thoughts about just the psychology of someone who feels not immediately

01:46:49.500 comfortable with the idea of making such a commitment? Yeah, I think there's two things

01:46:55.340 I'd like to say to that person. One is the kind of somewhat direct argument, and second is more

01:47:00.520 pragmatic. The direct one is just that even if you feel like, oh, I could donate that amount if I

01:47:07.280 were rich. Probably you are rich if you're listening to this. So if you're single and you earn $66,000,

01:47:14.900 then you're in the global 1% of the world in terms of income distribution. And what's more,

01:47:22.760 even after donating 10% of your income, you would still be in the richest 1% of the world's population.

01:47:28.500 If you earn $35,000, which we would not think of as being a rich person, even after donating 10%,

01:47:35.300 you'd still be in the richest 5% of the world's population. And learning those facts was very

01:47:39.820 motivating for me when I first started thinking about my giving. So that's kind of direct argument.

01:47:47.100 But the more pragmatic one is to think, well, if you're at most stages in your life, you'll be

01:47:55.080 earning more in the future than you are now. You know, people's incomes tend to increase over time.

01:48:00.280 And you might just reflect, well, how do I feel about money at the moment? And if you feel kind of

01:48:06.680 all right about it, you know, perhaps you're in a situation where you're like, oh no, I'm actually

01:48:10.080 just fairly worried. There's like serious health issues or something. And then it's like, okay,

01:48:13.760 we'll take care of that first. But if you're like, well, actually, you know, life's pretty all right.

01:48:18.080 Don't think additional money will make that much of a difference. Then what you can do is just think,

01:48:22.580 okay, maybe I'm not going to give up to 10% now, but I'll give a very significant proportion of

01:48:29.220 the additional money I make any future raises. So maybe I give 50% of that amount.

01:48:33.340 Yeah. And probably after, that means that you're still increasing the amount you're earning over

01:48:37.780 time. But at the same time, you're, you know, if you do that, then over a few years, you'll probably

01:48:43.860 quite soon end up giving 10% of your overall income. So at no point in this plan do you ever

01:48:49.440 have to go backwards, as it were, living on less. In fact, you're always earning more, but yet you're

01:48:54.420 giving more at the same time. And I've certainly found that in my own life where, you know, I started

01:48:59.660 thinking about giving as a graduate student. So, you know, I now earn, you know, I now live on like

01:49:06.160 twice as much, more than twice as much as I did when I first started giving, but I'm also able to

01:49:12.400 give, you know, a significant amount of, of my income. Remind me, how have you approached this

01:49:16.960 personally? Because you haven't taken a minimum 10% pledge, you think of it differently. So what have

01:49:22.620 you done over the years? Yeah. So, you know, so I have taken the giving what we can pledge, which is

01:49:28.140 10% kind of at any point. And then I also have intention and plan to donate everything above

01:49:35.080 what is the equivalent of 20,000 pounds per year in Oxford 2009, which is now about 27,000 pounds

01:49:42.520 per year. I've never written this down as like a formal pledge. The reason being that there were just

01:49:48.960 too many possible kind of exceptions. So if I had kids, I'd want to increase that. If there were

01:49:55.020 situations where I thought my ability to do good in the world would be like fairly severely hindered,

01:49:59.420 I'd want to kind of avoid that. But that is the amount that I'm giving at the moment. And it's the

01:50:03.820 amount I plan to give for the rest of my life. Just so I understand it. So you, so you're giving

01:50:08.380 anything you make above 27,000 pounds a year to charity? That's right. Yeah, that's right. Post,

01:50:15.840 post tax. And so my income is a little bit complicated in terms of how you evaluate it

01:50:23.360 because it's my university income, but then also book sales and so on. I think on the most natural,

01:50:28.400 and there's things like speaking engagements I don't take that I could, but I think on the

01:50:32.440 most natural way of doing it, I give a little over 50% of my income. So I want to explore that

01:50:38.080 with you a little bit, because again, I'm returning to our fancy lifeboat and wondering just how fancy it

01:50:43.960 can be in a way that's compatible with the project of doing the most good in the world. And what I

01:50:51.660 detect in myself and in most of the people I meet, and I'm sure in this is an intuition that is shared

01:50:58.000 by many of our listeners, many people will be reluctant to give up on the aspiration to be wealthy

01:51:08.580 with everything that that implies. You know, obviously they want to work hard and make their

01:51:15.840 money in a way that is good for the world or at least benign. They can follow all of the ethical

01:51:22.060 arguments that would say, you know, right livelihood in some sense is important. But if people really

01:51:30.000 start to succeed in life, I think there's something that will strike many people, if not most, as

01:51:38.780 too abstemious and monkish about the lifestyle you're advertising in choosing to live on that

01:51:48.240 amount of money and give away everything above it, or even just, you know, giving away 50% of

01:51:54.480 one's income. And again, I think this does actually connect with the question of effectiveness. I

01:52:01.300 mean, so like, it's at least possible that you would be more effective if you were wealthy and

01:52:08.240 living with all that, all that that entails, living as a wealthy person. And I mean, just to take by

01:52:13.700 example, someone like Bill Gates, you know, he's obviously the most extreme example I could find

01:52:18.680 because he's, you know, he's one of the wealthiest people on earth. Still, I think he's number two,

01:52:25.380 perhaps. And he's also the probably well-established now, he's the biggest benefactor of charity in human

01:52:35.460 history, perhaps. The Gates Foundation has been funded to the tune of tens of billions of dollars by him

01:52:42.500 at this point. And so I'm sure he's spent a ton of money on himself and his family, right? I mean,

01:52:48.140 his life is probably filled to the brim with luxury, but his indulgence in luxury is still just a rounding

01:52:55.420 error on the amount of money he's giving away, right? So it's actually hard to run a counterfactual

01:53:00.640 here, but I'd be willing to bet that Gates would be less effective and less wealthy and have less

01:53:08.940 money to give away if he were living like a monk in any sense. And I think maybe more importantly,

01:53:16.560 his life would be less inspiring, less inspiring example to many other wealthy people. If Bill Gates

01:53:23.200 came out of the closet and said, listen, I'm living on $50,000 a year and giving all my money away to

01:53:30.880 charity, that wouldn't have the same kind of kindling effect I think his life at this point is in fact

01:53:37.700 having, which is you can really have your cake and eat it too. You can be a billionaire who lives in a

01:53:42.860 massive smart house with all the sexy technology, even fly around on a private jet, and be the most

01:53:51.500 charitable person in human history. And if you just think of the value of his time, right? Like if he

01:53:56.480 were living a more abstemious life, and I mean, just imagine the sight of Bill Gates spending an hour

01:54:04.600 trying to save $50 on a new toaster oven, right? You know, bargain hunting, it would be such a colossal waste of

01:54:12.060 his time, given the value of his time. Again, I don't have any specifics really about how to think about this

01:54:20.320 counterfactual. But I do have a general sense that, and actually, this is actually a point you made in our first

01:54:26.520 conversation, I believe, which is, you don't want to be an antihero in any sense, right? You want to, like, if you can

01:54:32.820 inspire only one other person to give at the level that you are giving, you have doubled the good you

01:54:39.620 can do in the world. So on some level, you want your life to be the most compelling advertisement for this

01:54:47.640 whole project. And I'm just wondering if, I mean, for instance, I'm just wondering what changes we would

01:54:53.760 want to make to, you know, Bill Gates' life at this point to make him an even more inspiring advertisement

01:55:03.200 for effective altruism to other very, very wealthy people, right? And I mean, it might be dialing down

01:55:10.240 certain things, but given how much good he's able to do, him buying a fancy car is just, it doesn't even

01:55:18.060 register in terms of actual allocation of resources. So anyway, I pitched that to you.

01:55:24.140 Yeah, terrific. I think, so there's three different strands I think I'd like to pick apart.

01:55:29.000 So the first is whether everyone should be like me. And I really don't want to make the claim. I

01:55:35.500 certainly don't want to say, well, I can do this thing so everyone else can. Because I really just

01:55:39.460 think I am in a position of such utter privilege. So being, you know, born into, you know, a middle

01:55:49.480 class family in a bitch country, being privately educated, going to Cambridge, then Oxford, then

01:55:54.920 Cambridge, then Oxford, being like, like tall and male and white and broadly straight. Like, and then

01:56:03.060 also just having kind of inexpensive tastes, like my ideal day involves sitting on a couch and drinking

01:56:09.400 tea and reading some interesting new research, and perhaps like doing, going wild swimming. It's also,

01:56:17.800 yeah. And then secondly, also, I have just these amazing benefits in virtue of the work that I do. I have

01:56:25.520 this incredibly, like I meet these incredibly varied, interesting kind of array of people. And so I just don't

01:56:32.160 really think I could stand here and say, well, everyone should do the same as me, because I

01:56:36.640 think I've just had it kind of so easy that it doesn't really feel like, you know, if I think

01:56:41.700 about the sacrifices I have made, or the things I found hard over the course of 10 years, that's much

01:56:48.860 more like doing scary things, like being on the Sam Harvest podcast, or doing a TED talk, or, you know,

01:56:55.820 meeting, you know, very wealthy or very important people, things that might kind of cause anxiety,

01:57:00.800 much more than the kind of financial side of things. But I recognize there are other people for

01:57:05.300 whom, like money just really matters to them. And I think you just, in part, you're kind of born with

01:57:12.240 a set of preferences and these things, or perhaps they're molded early on in childhood, and you don't

01:57:16.540 necessarily have control over them. So that's kind of me as an, yeah, what I'm trying to convey to this.

01:57:23.160 Second is the time value of money. And this is something I've really wrestled with, because it

01:57:30.680 just is the case that in terms of my personal impact, my donations are just a very small part

01:57:38.800 of that. Because, you know, we have been successful. We are, you know, giving what we can has now moved

01:57:44.660 $200 million. There's over one and a half billion dollars of pledge donations. The EA movement as a whole

01:57:50.880 certainly has over $10 billion of assets that kind of will be going out. And then, you know, I'm donating

01:57:56.600 my, you know, thousands of pounds per year, and it does not, well, make tens of thousands of pounds

01:58:02.680 per year. And it's all, it's just very clearly kind of small on the scale. And so that's definitely

01:58:07.660 something I've wrestled with. I don't think I lose enormous amounts of time. My guess is that it's maybe

01:58:13.000 a couple of days of time a year. I have done some things. So like, you know, via my work, I have an

01:58:20.240 assistant. If I'm doing business trips, like, that counts as expenses rather than my personal money.

01:58:26.080 So that I'm trying to keep it separate. There's some things you can't do. So like,

01:58:30.260 if you live close to your office, you know, I can't count that as a business expense, but it would

01:58:34.240 shorten your commute. So it's not like, perfect as a way of doing that. And so I do think there's an

01:58:39.660 argument, an argument against that. And I think that is definitely a reason of caution for making

01:58:44.460 kind of a very large commitment. And then the final aspect is, yeah, what sort of message you

01:58:50.820 want to send? And probably my guess is that you just want a bit of market segmentation here, where

01:58:57.020 some people should, you know, some people should perhaps show what can be done. Others should show,

01:59:03.620 well, no, actually, you can have this amazing life while, you know, not having to wear the hair

01:59:08.640 shirt and so on. You know, I think perhaps you could actually convince me that maybe I'm,

01:59:13.520 you know, sending a long message and would do more good if I had some other sort of pledge. And

01:59:18.840 maybe you would be right about that. I definitely, when I made these plans, I wasn't thinking through

01:59:24.300 these things quite as carefully as I was now. But I did want to, I did want to just kind of show a

01:59:29.080 proof of concept. Yeah, I guess I'm, I'm wondering if there's a path through this wilderness that

01:59:35.500 doesn't stigmatize wealth at all. I mean, the end game for me, in the presence of absolute

01:59:42.920 abundance is, you know, everyone gets to live like Bill Gates on some level. If we make it,

01:59:49.760 if we get to the 22nd century, and we've, you know, solved the AI alignment problem, and now we're

01:59:56.300 just pulling wealth out of the ether, I mean, essentially just, we've got Deutsche's universal

02:00:02.120 constructors, you know, building every machine atom by atom, and we can do more or less anything

02:00:07.920 we want. Well, then this can't be based on an ethic where wealth is at all stigmatized. What should

02:00:16.320 have a probrium attached to it is a total disconnection from the suffering of other people and comfort with

02:00:24.360 the more shocking disparities in wealth that we see all around us? Once a reasonably successful person

02:00:33.200 signs on to the effective altruist ethic, and begins thinking about his or her life in terms of

02:00:42.740 earning to give on some level, there's a flywheel effect here where one's desire to be wealthy

02:00:50.720 actually amplifies one's commitment to giving, so that, like, in part, the reason why you would

02:00:58.720 continue working is because you have an opportunity to give so much money away and do so much good,

02:01:04.960 and it kind of purifies one's earning in the first place. I mean, like, I can imagine, you know,

02:01:11.640 most wealthy people get to a point where they're making enough money so that they don't have to

02:01:16.920 worry about money anymore. And then there's this question, well, why am I making all this money?

02:01:23.000 Why am I still working? And the moment they decide to give a certain amount of money away a year,

02:01:30.140 just algorithmically, then they feel like, well, okay, if this number keeps going up,

02:01:35.820 that is a good thing, right? So, like, I can get out of bed in the morning and know that today,

02:01:40.280 you know, if it's 10%, you know, one day in 10 is given over wholly to solving the worst suffering

02:01:47.400 or saving the most lives or mitigating the worst long-term risk. And if it's 20%, it's, you know,

02:01:53.320 two days out of 10. And if it's 30%, it's three days out of 10. And they could even dial it up. I'm

02:01:58.260 just imagining, let's say somebody is making $10 million a year, and he thinks, okay, I can sign on

02:02:04.980 and give 10% of my income away to charity. That sounds like the right thing to do. And he's

02:02:09.540 persuaded that this should be the minimum, but he then aspires to scale this up as he earns more

02:02:15.060 money. You know, maybe this would be the algorithm, you know, for each million he makes more a year,

02:02:21.340 he just adds the percentage. So if he's making, you know, $14 million one year, he'll give 14% of

02:02:26.860 his income away. And if it's $50 million, he'll give 50% away, right? And obviously, I mean,

02:02:31.780 if let's say the minimum he wants to make is $9 million a year, well, then he can get to up to,

02:02:37.820 you know, 91% of $100 million a year, he can give that away. But I can imagine being a very wealthy

02:02:45.960 person who, you know, as you're scaling one of these outlier careers, it would be, you know,

02:02:52.820 fairly thrilling to be the person who's making $100 million that year, knowing that you're going to

02:02:59.400 give 91% of that away to the most effective charities. And you might not be the person

02:03:05.100 who would have seen any other logic in driving to that kind of wealth, you know, when you were the

02:03:11.740 person who was making $10 million a year, because $10 million a year is, was good enough. I mean,

02:03:16.380 obviously, you can live on that, you know, there's nothing materially is going to change for you as

02:03:20.740 you make more money. But because he or she plugged into this, this earning to give logic, and in some

02:03:28.680 ways, the greater commitment to earning was, was leveraged by a desire to maintain a wealthy

02:03:36.720 lifestyle, right? It's like, this person does want $9 million a year, right? Every year. But now they're

02:03:44.620 much wealthier than that, and giving much more money away. I'm just trying to figure out how we can

02:03:50.940 capture the imagination of people who would see the example of Bill Gates and say, okay, that's, that's

02:03:58.060 the sweet spot, as opposed to any kind of example that however subtly stigmatizes being wealthy in the

02:04:05.140 first place.

02:04:06.560 Yeah, I think these are good points. And it's true, I think the stigma on wealth per se, is not a good

02:04:13.680 thing, where, you know, if you build a company that's doing good stuff, and people like the

02:04:19.540 product, and they get value from it. And so there's enormous, like, surplus, so there's a lot of gains

02:04:24.580 from trade, and you get wealthy as a result of that. That's a good thing. Obviously, there's some

02:04:29.540 people who, like, make enormous amounts of money doing bad things, selling opioids, or building factory

02:04:35.060 farms. But I don't think that's the majority. And I do think it's the case that, you know, it's kind of

02:04:40.020 like optimal taxation theory. But you're, the weird thing is that you're imposing the tax on yourself,

02:04:45.640 where, depending on your psychology, if you, you know, say, I'm going to give 100% as the highest

02:04:52.440 tax rate, well, you're not incentivized to earn anymore. And so the precise amount that you want

02:04:57.400 to give is just quite sensitive to this question of just how unmotivated you're going to be in order

02:05:04.580 to earn more. So in my own case, you know, I'm not, it's very clear that I'm, the way I'm going

02:05:10.180 to do good is not primarily via my donations. So perhaps this disincentive effect is, you know,

02:05:15.700 not very important. But if my aim were to get as rich as possible, then, well, I'd need to really

02:05:23.020 look inside my own psychology, figure out how much, especially over the entire course of my life,

02:05:28.440 can I be motivated by pure altruism versus self-interest? And I strongly doubt that the

02:05:34.800 kind of optimal tax rate would be, you know, via my donations would be 100%. It would be something

02:05:40.740 in between.

02:05:41.640 That's what I'm kind of fishing for here. And, you know, I, by no means am convinced that I'm right,

02:05:47.320 but I'm just wondering if, in addition to all the other things you want, you know, as revealed in

02:05:53.380 this conversation, you know, for yourself and the world and, you know, acknowledging that you're,

02:05:59.000 you know, your primary contribution to doing good in the world might in fact be your ideas and your

02:06:04.100 ability to get them out there. I mean, like you've had the effect you've had on me and, you know,

02:06:08.200 I'm going to have my effect on, on my audience and, you know, conversations like this have the effect

02:06:13.560 that they have. And so there's no question you are inspiring people to marshal their resources in

02:06:19.420 these directions and think more clearly about these issues. But what if it were also the case

02:06:25.300 that if you secretly really wanted to own a Ferrari, you would actually make different decisions

02:06:34.240 such that in addition to all the messaging, you would also become a very wealthy person

02:06:40.380 giving away a lot of money?

02:06:41.860 Yeah. I mean, if it was the case, you know, if it was the case that I was planning to earn to give

02:06:49.100 and so I think a very common kind of figure for people who are going to earn to give via

02:06:55.180 entrepreneurship or other high, high earning careers is a 50% figure where they plan to give

02:07:01.660 half of what they earn, at least once they start earning a significant amount. And that has seemed

02:07:06.600 to work pretty well from the people I know. It's also notably the figure that Bill Gates uses for

02:07:11.560 his giving pledge where billionaires can join the giving pledge if they give at least 50%

02:07:17.480 of their income, of their wealth.

02:07:20.020 Most take that pledge, if I'm not mistaken, is pushed off to the end of their life, right?

02:07:26.020 They're just imagining they're going to give it upon their death to charity, right?

02:07:29.360 So you are allowed to do that. I know, I don't know exactly the proportions. It varies. Like

02:07:35.100 the tech, tech founders tend to give earlier than other sorts of people. I'm also not just

02:07:41.560 a little bit confused about what pledging 50% of your wealth means. So if I'm a billionaire one

02:07:48.760 year and then lose half my money and I've got $500 million the next year, do I have to give half of

02:07:55.880 that? Or do I have to give half of the amount when I pledge, which would have been all my money?

02:08:01.020 Anyway, confuses me a little bit, the details of it. But it is the case that, yeah, you can

02:08:05.740 fulfill your pledge completely in the giving pledge by donating entirely after your death.

02:08:10.840 And there are questions about how much people actually fulfill these pledges too.

02:08:15.980 But then, yeah, and I think, and I really do want to say like, that's also just quite

02:08:20.680 reasonable. Different people have different attitudes to money. I think it's a very rare

02:08:24.760 person indeed that can be entirely motivated. You know, and because we're talking about motivation

02:08:31.160 over decades and we're talking about every single day, motivation can be motivated at all

02:08:36.000 times by pure altruism. I think that's very hard. And so if someone instead wants to pick,

02:08:42.460 you know, percentage number and aim to that, that seems like a sensible way to go. And in particular,

02:08:48.260 you want to be sustainable, where if it's the case that moving from, I don't know, 50% to 60%

02:08:54.660 means that actually you like, your desire to do all of this kind of burns out and you go and do

02:09:00.820 something else. That's fairly bad indeed. And you want to be someone who's like, you know,

02:09:06.420 I think the right attitude you want to have towards giving is not to be someone where it's like,

02:09:11.800 oh yeah, I'm giving this amount, but it's just so hard. And I like, I really don't like my life

02:09:16.000 unpleasant. That is, you know, not an inspiring message. Julia Wise has this wonderful member of

02:09:23.000 the effects of altruism community, has this wonderful post called Cheerfully, where she talks

02:09:27.100 about having kids and thinking about that as a question and says that, no, what you want to be

02:09:32.460 is this model, this ideal where you're doing what you're doing and you're saying, yeah, my life is

02:09:37.640 great. I'm able to do this and I'm still having a really wonderful life. That's certainly how I feel

02:09:42.600 about my life. And I think for many people who are going into these higher earning careers saying,

02:09:48.040 yeah, I'm donating 50% and my life is still like absolutely awesome. In fact, it's better

02:09:52.000 as a result of the amount I'm donating. That's the sweet spot, I think, that you want to hit.

02:09:56.900 Hmm. There's another issue here around how public to be around one's giving. And so, you know,

02:10:03.320 you and I are having a public conversation about all of this. And this is just by its very nature

02:10:10.940 violating a norm that we've all inherited or a norm or a pseudo norm around generosity and altruism,

02:10:19.680 which suggests that the highest form of generosity is to give anonymously. There's a Bible verse

02:10:28.160 around this. You don't want to wear your virtue on your sleeve. You don't want to advertise your

02:10:34.140 generosity because that conveys this message that you're doing it for reasons of self-aggrandizement.

02:10:41.760 You're doing it to enhance your reputation. You want your name on the side of the building.

02:10:46.080 Whereas if you were really just connected to the cause of doing good, you would do all of this

02:10:52.320 silently and people would find out after your death, or maybe they would never find out that

02:10:56.620 you were the one who had secretly donated millions of dollars to cure some terrible disease or to buy

02:11:03.820 bed nets. And yet, you know, you and I by association here have flipped that ethic on its head

02:11:13.900 because it seems to be important to change people's thinking around all of the issues we've been

02:11:21.660 discussing. And the only way to do that is to really discuss them. And what's more, we're leveraging

02:11:27.700 a concern about reputation kind of from the opposite side in recognizing that taking a pledge has

02:11:35.660 psychological consequences, right? I mean, when you publicly commit to do something that not only

02:11:41.220 advertises to people that this is the sort of project a human being can become enamored of,

02:11:46.340 you then have a reputational cost to worry about if you decide that you're going to renege on your

02:11:51.860 offer. So talk for a few minutes about the significance of talking about any of this in the first place.

02:12:01.280 Yeah. So I think the public aspect is very important. And it's for the reason you mentioned earlier

02:12:06.100 that take the amount of good that you're going to do in your life via donations, and then just think,

02:12:12.020 can I convince one other person to do the same? If so, you've doubled your impact. You've done your

02:12:17.660 life's work over again. And I think possibly people can do that many times over, at least in the world

02:12:23.040 today, by being this kind of inspirational role model for others. And so I think this religious

02:12:28.960 tradition where, no, you shouldn't show the generosity you're doing. You should keep that secret.

02:12:35.040 I think that looks pretty bad from an outcome-oriented perspective. And I think you need

02:12:40.540 to be careful about how you're doing it. You want to be effective in your communication as well as

02:12:44.840 your giving. Where, you know, it was very notable that Peter Singer had these arguments around giving

02:12:50.020 for almost four decades with comparatively little uptake, certainly compared to the last 10 years

02:12:57.360 of the effect of altruism movement. And, you know, my best hypothesis is that move from a framing that

02:13:04.560 appeals primarily to guilt, which is, you know, it's a low arousal motivation. You don't often get up and

02:13:10.760 start really doing things on the basis of guilt, to inspiration instead, saying like, no, this is an

02:13:15.740 amazing opportunity we have. And so this is a norm that I just really want to change. You know, in the

02:13:21.580 long run, I would like it to be a part of common sense morality that you use a significant part of

02:13:26.760 your resources to help other people. And we will only get there. We will only have that sort of

02:13:31.800 cultural change if people are public about what they're doing and able to say, yeah, this is

02:13:36.100 something I'm doing. I'm proud of it. I think you should consider doing it too. This is the world I

02:13:40.960 want to see.

02:13:41.360 Hmm. Well, Will, you have certainly gotten the ball rolling in my life. And it's something I'm

02:13:48.580 immensely grateful for. And I think this is a good place to leave it. I know there will be questions

02:13:54.560 and perhaps we can build out further lessons just based on frequently asked questions that come in

02:14:02.120 in response to what we've said here. But I think that'll be the right way to proceed. So for the

02:14:07.840 meantime, thank you for doing this because I think you're aware of how many people you're affecting,

02:14:13.680 but it's still early days. And, you know, I think it'll be very interesting to see where all this goes

02:14:19.820 because I know what it's like to experience a tipping point around these issues personally. And I have

02:14:27.920 to think that many people listening to us will have a similar experience one day or another, and you

02:14:34.240 will have occasioned it. So thank you for what you're doing.

02:14:36.760 Well, thank you for taking the pledge and getting involved. And yeah, I'm excited to see how

02:14:40.840 these ideas develop over the coming years.

02:14:43.720 You

02:14:49.220 I know.

02:14:52.400 I know.

02:14:53.380 I know.

02:14:55.180 I know.

02:14:55.620 But the

Making Sense - Sam Harris - December 14, 2020

#228 — Doing Good

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