Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 491: A New Way to Think About Your Money | William MacAskill

Episode Date: August 29, 2022

Most of us worry about money sometimes, but what if we changed the way we thought about our relationship to finances? Today’s guest, William MacAskill, offers a framework in which to do just that. He calls it effective altruism. One of the core arguments of effective altruism is that we all ought to consider giving away a significant chunk of our income because we know, to a mathematical near certainty, that several thousand dollars could save a life.Today we’re going to talk about the whys and wherefores of effective altruism. This includes how to get started on a very manageable and doable level (which does not require you to give away most of your income), and the benefits this practice has on both the world and your own psyche.MacAskill is an associate professor of philosophy at Oxford University and one of the founders of the effective altruism movement. He has a new book out called, What We Owe the Future, where he makes a case for longtermism, a term used to describe developing the mental habit of thinking about the welfare of future generations. In this episode we talk about: Effective altruismWhether humans are really wired to consider future generationsPractical tips for thinking and acting on longtermismHis argument for having childrenAnd his somewhat surprising take on how good our future could be if we play our cards rightPodcast listeners can get 50% off What We Owe the Future using the code WWOTF50 at Bookshop.org.Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/william-macaskill-491See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey people, I think many, if not most, if not all of us, worry about money sometimes. I certainly do, and I'm a little sheepish to admit it, given how fortunate I've been in my life, and yet I still worry about finances quite a bit actually. My guest today has been one of the most provocative voices in my head when it comes to how I think about spending the money I'm lucky enough to earn and by extension what my obligations are as a human.

Will McCaskill is an associate professor of philosophy at Oxford University and one of the founders have something called the effective altruism movement. I'm going to let him define that, but as I understand it, one of their core arguments is that we all ought to consider giving away a significant chunk, maybe 10%, maybe way more of our income because we know to a mathematical near certainty that several thousand dollars can save somebody's life. The beauty and the genius of McCaskill's approach is that he's not at all strident or self-righteous or dogmatic about any of this, just as the Buddha does, McCaskill frames his message in terms of both collective well-being and personal self-interest.

As you're going to hear him describe, he practices what he preaches and he believes his life is way happier as a result. I should say I'm not the only one who'd been moved by McCaskill's message. You may remember a few months ago we had the meditation teacher Matthew Brenn silver on the show and he got quite emotional when talking about the influence McCaskill has had on him. For some reason I was in some kind of random lottery drawing, and I won a session with Will Macaskill, and I was on a Skype with him, and he's a serious philosopher,

but just in seeing his face, they're on Skype. I started crying because I could sense that this is somebody who is asking the question of what it is to be a bodhisattva. He would never put it in that language I don't think, but to me it is. This is like what is the modern bodhisattva. And I think that can take a lot of forms. But for me, the most important piece is that it lures the heart into deeper commitment, maybe a little bit more renunciation, a little bit more commitment to caring

for the welfare of others. So today, we're gonna talk about the wise and the wherefores of effective altruism, how to get started on a very manageable and doable level, which by the way does not require you giving away most of your income, and the benefits for both the world and your own psyche. But that's not all, because we'll also has a new book out that we're going to talk about.

The book is called What We O the Future, and it makes a case for what he calls long-termism. Again, I'll let him define that more accurately than I can do, but it's essentially developing the mental habit of thinking about the welfare of future generations, which will argue is not only good for the species, but also good for you right here and right now. We're going to talk about whether humans are really wired to consider future generations, practical tips for thinking and acting on long-termism, his argument for having kids, and his somewhat surprising take on how good our future could be if we play our cards right right now.

We'll get started with William McCaskill after this. Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over

on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist, Kelly McGonical, and the great meditation teacher, Alexis Santos, to access the course, just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10%.com. All one word spelled out. Okay. On with the show. come from. And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcast. Will McCaskill, welcome to the show.

Thanks so much for having me on. Finally, I can take a few people who I've talked about more, but never met. And here you are on a little box in front of me. I'm extremely complimented by that. Thank you. I first encountered your work through our mutual friend, Sam Harris, host of the making sense podcast and the waking up app. It was just so provocative to me personally. So I'd like to start there at what I think you're probably best known for and then we'll move on to your new book. Can we start with just a definition

of effective altruism? Sure. So effect of altruism is about plan to use your time and money as effectively as possible to make the world a better place. So it's about thinking hard, about considering all the problems that the world faces, what are the things I can do which will have the biggest positive impact? And then using at least some of your money, perhaps 10% of your income, or some of your time, so perhaps altering your career, so that you can really put that idea of doing the most good into practice. The first part of that is, I think important, we should discuss it, but it's the second

part of that that is, to me, at least, very challenging. And I'd like to get you to say more about all of it, but let's just start on the, at least what struck me most powerfully, which is that being an effective altruist isn't just about optimizing for the most effective charities, it's rearranging potentially your entire life and career around this idea. You talk about giving away 10% of your money, but I know you personally give way more than 10% of your money. And so let's just start on that in terms of what is the rationale for dialing down your personal consumption in this way. Sure. And I'll say that within the effect of else was in community. There's a big spectrum. So there's lots of people who give say

10% and that's what they do and they're very welcome in the community. There's lots of people who give more. And you're right that I'm one of those people, so depending on exactly how you count my income at somewhere between 25% or even 90% or more of my income, that I give away. And why do I do that? Well, I think it's two reasons. On one hand, I don't think it makes an enormous difference to my wellbeing.

Honestly, my best guess is that the net impact is positive that I'm actually a happier person as the result of the giving I do. Then I would be if I spent more of that money on kind of luxury goods. But then the second aspect is just the truly enormous amount of good that you can do by targeting donations to the most highly effective nonprofits. And that's across many cause areas. So within global health and development, it costs a few thousand dollars to save a life. And

that's not a made up number. That's on the basis of extremely rigorous research and evidence. And so that means that if you're born into a rich country, you can save dozens or even hundreds of lives over the course of your lifetime. That's this phenomenal fact about the world. And perhaps you can do even more good again. I think by focusing on particularly neglected issues that might impact our long-term future, you can make a real difference to the entire trajectory of human civilization. As it pertains to the rationale here, you kissed it there, but I want to go deeper because this is the stuff that's pretty electrifying, radicalizing, I think, for many people.

Can you talk a little bit about who Peter Singer is and his analogy of the drowning child? So Peter Singer is kind of the grandfather of effect of autism, and he's a moral philosopher that since the 1970s was making the following argument, which is imagine someone who's walking past a shallow pond, and they see in that shallow pond a child who appears to be drowning and they think, oh, I could just reach in. I could just wait into,000. I don't want to get this suit muddy. So I'm just going to leave the child. I'm just going to walk on by. Now how would we evaluate that person? Well, in moral philosophy, I think we would kind of all agree that letting a child down would be a douche-moof, another technical term in moral philosophy.

In fact, it's like perfectly obvious, perfectly common sense, moderately speaking, that the loss of a few thousand dollars does not justify letting a child drown in front of you. In fact, supposing that that job, you know, you miss out on a job that you could have had as an interview and it would have increased your salary by 10%. Again, doesn't compare to this loss of a child. Now, here's the kicker. If we think that you have this model obligation to lose several thousand dollars or more in order to save a child's life in front of you, where is the model irrelevant difference between that

and the child that is dying of malaria in sub-Saharan Africa, that statistically speaking, you can save with a few thousand dollars. And Peter Singer argues, and I think very convincingly, that there isn't a model of elephant difference. It's psychologically different because that child in sub-Saharan Africa is less salient to us. But, morally speaking, we all the time are doing the same thing as walking past that

child's bounding in the shellup pond. Okay. So now we've reached the rub because when I heard you say this, I started talking about it to everybody I knew. And I was, I don't want to say surprise, I guess it's not surprising, but certainly did not escape my notice how I was met with universal agreement and universal rejection. Yeah, presumably the agreement is on the theory and the rejection is on actually doing anything about it. Yes.

Am I right? Yes, you were right. And it's this pretty striking thing in just the history of ideas that Peter Singer was making these arguments since the early 1970s and the kind of atmosphere in moral philosophy among people who worked on this was a lot of people, most people just thought this was kind of right and almost no one did anything about it. And that was how it things felt for me as well. I discovered his arguments when I was 18, and I had many years, I found them convincing. Many years of just feeling very bad about myself,

not really doing much. And then it was when I met another philosopher, Toby Ord, who was putting these ideas into practice and planning to give away most of his income over his life, and had found a extremely effective non-profit that he felt we're going to do an enormous amount of good and was not beating himself up about it. Actually, he was thinking, look, this is a great thing that I could be doing. And that was very inspiring

to me. I mean, here's a different analogy, which is supposing that one day you'd kind of discover a burning building and you're kind of inspired. You run in, kick the door down, save a child from that burning building. That would be a pretty meaningful moment in your life. You know, my brother saved a woman from drowning when he was 17. And everyone talks about it. He wanted a ward at his school. My granddad was like bursting with pride. I'm sure if I asked him, he would say that that was one of the most meaningful moments in my life. But given the way the world is, it's like you can do that every few months. It's like, you know, in January, you rescue the child from burning building in May, you

save someone from drowning in October, then someone's, you know, choking and you're the Heimlich maneuver, and that just keeps happening over and over again. You would think, wow, life had this a particular marketable life, but actually that's just the situation we find ourselves in. That's the sort of life that one can have just by using your money in a different way. And so there's an obligation kind of flame on this, which is like we have a moral duty to help. And I think

that is correct. But there's also just a different flame, which is, look, just reflect on your own values. And what you would think of as a good life, say on your deathbed looking back. And you actually have the capacity to do an enormous amount of good. So that's a kind of uplifting, inspiring thing. But is it really like do you personally, you will get the dopamine hit if that's even the right neurotransmitter to be discussing in this context, but I'll stick with it anyway. Do you personally get that dopamine hit because it's not like you are actually dislodging a chunk of porterhouse steak from somebody's esophagus, you know, like that isn't

actually happening. You have the ambient awareness that your sacrifice financially is saving lives, but you don't see it play out in front of you. Sure. So I certainly don't get the same kind of psychological high that I imagine I would get if I saved the life of someone in front of me. Why do get, though, is a kind of deep reassurance? So, you know, on and off, I've had depression anxiety for most of my life, many, many years.

One thing that is very reassuring at lower moments is just like, well, at least I've done this. You know, the abstract awareness of like, look, it's just literally true that there are people who are alive, who would not be alive, were that not for the fact of my donations. That's pretty, you'll be a surely thing. And yeah, that leads to, I think, a like deeper, more holistic piece with life and kind of meaning in life, I would say. I buy that completely. And I wonder whether there isn't an extra infusion of meaning

around being part of a community of people doing this together. That's absolutely true. So it's almost like that's a substitute. So you don't get the kind of immediate feedback or the wards from being on the ground and giving out bed nets or giving out deworming tablets or other good things you could be doing. But there is this large community, like many thousands of people who are engaging in this sort of work, giving at least 10% of the income or more. And there you get social support, social rewards. And that just really is the assurling, because you know, we're social animals. And the fact that you're getting kind of encouraged to do good things and people think more highly of you, you know, that helps too.

Can you say a little bit about what the implications are practically for your life? Are you taking fewer vacations, going out to fewer restaurants? What is your lifestyle look like, given that you are giving away, I believe? You said before, something in the range of 25 to 90%. Yeah, so it depends exactly how you count it. So if you're just looking at my university income, then it's currently kind of 25, 30%. So it's everything I earn post tax above about 26,000 pounds now. I guess that's about $32,000, $33,000. But then book royalties, speaking fees, other on or earlier, all of that doesn't even enter

my bank account. It just goes to the non-profits. So if you count that, then the figure gets a lot higher too. All right, so there is an opportunity cost for you. In other words, you could be doing a bunch of stuff with that money for yourself. And I'm not somebody who uses selfishness and fully in the pejorative. I mean, I think there is an argument to take care of yourself. Do you never miss those opportunities? No, not really. I mean, one thing is I never really got used to a kind of high-flying lifestyle.

So, you asked about my lifestyle. So, I live in a relatively cozy house with two roommates who I love daily. I don't have a car, but I also don't need a car. I do take vacations, COVID made it a bit more awkward, but including vacations to interesting places. So, I have particular love, kind of India and Sri Lanka, but that's perfectly possible given my budget

I don't stay in super fancy places when I go, but I don't think I need to and then I don't really buy material possessions very often. The kind of big purchases I've made over the last let's say year and a half one was big word will speak her and another was kind of an electronic keyboard. I'm very into music But again, those aren't like large parts of my kind of an electronic keyboard. I'm very into music. But again, those aren't like large parts of my kind of personal expenditure. And I don't really think I miss out on kind of buying more material goods. One caveat I'll make about my life

is that I'm kind of trying my best to kind of live in accordance kind of with these principles. At the same time, I'm like traveling a lot for work and things and that makes my kind of life certainly somewhat different than I was expecting it to be. But when I'm not engaging in business travel and so on, then yeah, I'm living in Oxford with my two-lumits in this cozy house, and you know, I'm swimming in the nearby lake where like building fires and dancing around the fires, there's just like a lot of ways of having a very enjoyable life that don't involve large amounts

of material expenditure. Now, you are young. I don't think you've cracked 30 yet. I'm 35 actually. Oh, you were 35. Well, I'm old because the first time I heard you, you are young, I don't think you've cracked 30 yet. I'm 35 actually. Oh, you were 35. Well, I'm old because the first time I heard you, you hadn't cracked 30. So I apologize for, well, I don't apologize for assuming you're in the 20s, that's a complement. Anyway, you're 35. I don't think you were married or have children. A lot of people listening to this would be like, all right, dude, call me when you've got a toddler.

Yeah, completely understand that. And it is true that I would increase the amount I'm living on if I were to have kids. So the typical expenditure or average expenditure on a child in the United Kingdom over 18 years is about 180,000 pounds. So it's about 10,000 pounds per child. So if I were to have a kid,

then if there were two parents involved, I would increase the amount I'm living on by like about 5,000 pounds per year. But that's still not kind of radically changing things. I think again, for certainly many people in the audience, many people listening in, they could give kind of 10% or more. I think another thing I'd say is like, even after my giving, I'm still in the rich as 10%, maybe maybe the richest 5% of the world's population. I think we really don't appreciate

just how well off those of us in rich countries like the US or UK are. And so there is a bit of a thought of, well, with my giving, if I am still in the richest 5% of the world's population, it can be that much of a sacrifice because 95% of other people are living on less. Let's talk some practicality for people

who are interested in learning more, doing more here. I want to admit from the outset, even though I've been really taken with your ideas, I haven't done shit about it. And even though there's positive peer pressure coming at me from the aforementioned Sam Harris, who I know has really shit about it. And even though there's positive peer pressure coming at me from the aforementioned Sam Harris, so I know it was really acted on it. My wife and I and my larger family

give a non-trivial amount away to causes we support, but I don't track it. I don't know if it's 10% and I doubt it, if I'm honest. So I don't feel great about that. So let's talk about how people who are having a similar reaction to me, in other words, really energized, electrified by your message, might be able to take the first steps towards putting it into action.

Sure. So a big thing depends on kind of what stage in your life you are, because I think it's a lot easier to not go up in terms of amount of consumption than to go up and then go down. So if you're early on a new career, then saying like, okay, cool, well, I'm happier, you know, whatever level of income I have, that amount of income is going to increase over time, and so I'm going to kind of donate the excess. That's a natural thing to do. More gently, I think that what people could do is take a kind of either hop in on the giving what we can 10% pledge, if people feel that happy with that. But there's also a smaller pledge called

the try giving pledge, giving what we can, which is where you can pick just some percentage of your income that you plan to give over the following year. And then after that one year, you kind of check in and you think like, how was that? Do I think I could do more next year? And ideally, you kind of tentatively build up to something like 10% and then at that point,

if you want to go further, you can. So that's I think the most natural thing to do is to kind of take some time, take a weekend, the fleck on these ideas, think, okay, over the next year, what percentage do I think I could give? Perhaps you just set up a standing order, right there and then, because then that means

that you only have to make one decision. So, you know, if you're getting a thousand pounds per month in the bank into your bank account as a salvy, then you take 5% of that and just it immediately goes as a direct debit to a course of your choice. And then in a year's time, then you think, okay, how was that was that super painful? And then you can scale up. So just to put a fine point on this, there's a website called giving what we can. Giving what we can.org. And it's got about 7,000 people now who've pledged at least 10% of the income. Okay. That is significant or non-trivial. And there are, as you said, there

are gradations you can try something lower. So that's a place where people can go to learn more about how to actually start doing this giving. Alongside it, you've set up resources for people to learn about where to direct their funds in the most effective ways. Can you say a little bit about that? For sure. So giving what we can has recommendations for charities in a wide variety of course areas. Within global health and development, the top charity evaluator is GiveWell at GiveWell.org.

And it just does in human amounts of the search and investigation to identify what are the nonprofits that have both exceptionally high levels of, they go behind them, in terms of like exceptionally good evidence base behind the recommendations, and exceptionally high cost effectiveness. So you can both be really pretty confident that your money is making a difference and that the money will go as far as possible in terms of improving people's well-being. And so they have a list of recommended charities.

That's linked to one giving what we can, but you can also go just directly to that website givewell.org. Within Corsair viewers, things get a little harder because there's not necessarily like individual funding opportunities that could absorb many tens of millions of dollars. And so there we tend to instead have a kind of funds model where you kind of give to a fund that is then reallocated by leading experts to kind of top places. And again, you can find out about that on giving what we can. Doug.

There's a real focus on data in your world and finding out where can you give that will have the most impact. One of the concerns that has been raised by outsiders is, is there any tension when you have a group of people from the dominant culture, mostly white folks running the numbers on these nonprofits? Is it possible for bias to creep in there anywhere? I mean, for sure. I think this is an enormously important concern. And so I'll tell you about the way that Givwell is responsive to it. So firstly is just to use transfer and cash as the baseline. And yeah, this is just completely correct.

Thought is like, I have just a very poor understanding, or like people in the West and I've actually have a very poor understanding of the like people in the West and I've actually have a very poor understanding of the needs of people living in extreme poverty, because it's just an extremely different life. And so if you just kind of go in and think, oh, well, what would be really helpful is, oh, they're lacking in food, so I'm going to give them more food or something, and it interferes with the local economy, or it's not really what's needed. An alternative is you just simply transfer cash to the poorest people and they can then spend the money on whatever they think is best for them. And it turns out that's

very often tin roofs rather than thatch roofs because thatch roofs require constant upkeep. That is not something that a non-profit ever did. I never heard of a non-profit going around installing tin roofs, but yet that's what many, many people in the next-the-impoverty actually need the most. So that's one thing to have that as a kind of baseline. A second thing is that I think this worry kind of does favor global health over other sorts of interventions, because just, you know, people can have a wide variety of different preferences, but not wanting to be sick,

or at risk of death in malaria, is just, I think, as a human universal. But then a third thing is just going and just getting information from the people themselves who you're trying to benefit about what sort of things they care about, what sort of they'd offer the willing to make. And again, that's what Givwell does working with like survey firms, essentially, that go and say, look, how do you trade off quality of life against increased quantity of life rather than someone in a richer country saying, like, oh, I think saving life is really important

and quality of life is not really important or vice versa. So instead, as much as possible, it's time to deflect the preferences of the beneficiaries. Coming up, Will McCaskill on long-termism, the topic of his latest book, whether human beings are really wired to consider future generations, and the false distinction between acting for the good of others and acting to benefit yourself after this. Hey, I'm Arisha, and I'm Brooke. And where the hosts of Wundery's podcast, Even the Rich, where we bring you absolutely true and absolutely shocking stories about the most famous families and biggest celebrities the world has ever seen.

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and carved out a place for himself as one of the world's top entertainers, opening the doors for aspiring queens everywhere. Follow even the rich wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. In terms of ineffective altruism, there's quite a famous or infamous story that you often tell about a case study of non-profit work done poorly. I'm sure you know what I'm referring to. Can you tell that story?

Yeah, I'm sure you have a feeling to the infamous play pump. So this is a great case of not really thinking about what the people you're trying to help actually need. So yeah, in the look of late 90s and then early 2000s, there was this new development innovation that had a lot of attention and a lot of plays heaped on it, which was the play pump. So the idea was that in areas that had poor access to water, rather than a normal water pump, you could have a kind of children's merry go round, one of the things you kind of push and then like sit on and you spin the round. You could have that. So the idea is like you would harness the power of children's play. So it's kind of like a win-win. So children would push play on this merry-go-round and the force of the merry-go-round spinning would pump clean

water from the ground to a tank kind of above the play pump. And yeah, this got it like one-on-a-wards, the development marketplace award, Jay-Z and Beyoncé supported it and their water for life tour. It had like all of these articles written about it, like the magic roundabout and pumping water's child's play. It got a lot of plays and attention, but it was an absolute disaster of a development intervention. Sometimes it was the placing Zimbabwe hand pumps which were more practical and more efficient. The local communities whenever asked did they actually want this thing? And if you think about the practicalities of it, it's

like children don't want to play on a merry-go-round all hours of the day. So instead, it would be often left to the kind of elderly women of the village who were tasked with collecting water, to push this kind of brightly coloured merry-go-round round-and-round, which is a task they found just kind of embarrassing kind of demeaning. And what's more, it just pumped much less water for greater cost than the kind of much more boring but what's more, it just pumped much less water for greater costs than the kind of much more boring, but very effective Zimbabwe hand pump that could have been used in its place. And so this is a story I kind of lead my book to do in good better with about ineffective altruism, where someone was coming in, they had lots

of ideas about what they thought would be good. It was very flashy, but they weren't really thinking through, look, what do people actually need? How can we benefit people by as much as possible with the resources we have? Do you think since the advent of effective altruism that the non-profit world has become more effective, and if the answer is yes, do you think this movement that you're a part of is an important variable in that change. So I think the effect of altruism itself, movement itself has grown enormously, where, as I say, many thousands of people are now involved with this,

and many major philanthropists have kind of gotten involved with that movement too. So in that sense, the answer is yes. On the other hand, one of the things that we really thought, back 12 years ago, was that, okay, maybe this will elect some incentive mechanism, and you'll shift the charitable world in general in a direction that's closer to effective altruism, so other non-profits will really adapt. And that's happened a little bit, but honestly not very much. I actually think most of the non-profit world just kind of keeps going as before and

sees effect of autism as this weird curiosity. Given our really twisty, frated attitudes, and by our, I'm referring to those of us in the developed world who are upper middle or high income people, or even middle income people, just basically the global minority of people who are upper middle or high income people, or even middle income people, just basically the global minority of people who are relatively well off, given our really frated attitudes toward money and a overarching culture that really emphasizes consumption and keeping up with people you see on social media and a capitalist engine

that works in part by imbuing us with a sense of insufficiency. Given all of those structural forces working against convincing people to give away more of their money, how optimistic are you about the future of this movement that you've helped to galvanize? I'm feeling pretty optimistic where I think the underlying culture just doesn't actually make much sense, like the underlying consumerist culture, because you just look at the data on the psychology of well-being. And increases, especially given the level that people in rich countries are that. So, you know, certainly the level I'm at even after my giving. The covelation between increased income and personal happiness is very, very small.

It is positive, money does make you a little bit happier, but it's very small, little. And in contrast, things like what community you're part of, do you have a sense of greater meaning in life? These are things that have a much bigger impact on your personal well-being. So on the one hand, on theoretical grounds, it's like, why are people opting for consumerism so much? But then secondly, just on a taxical level. I mean, back in 2009, Toby or my colleague and I go founded, given what we can, we had 23 people who took the 10% pledge. Every couple of weeks, we get another person and that was huge. That was like this big accomplishment. Where there's

now, there's just like I say, many, many thousands of people who are doing this, many thousands more, who, I mean, the number of people who are donating via give well is now like 100,000 people. So many more who are like donating some amount or using a career and it's somewhat of a different way. And I think there's just like a very clear momentum and kind of upsurge here. Look, I mean, I'm not taking anything away from what you've

accomplished, I think it's gigantic. And, you know, tens of thousands of people as compared to many billions of people, you people, and making up the global population, or even the subset that has the means to do this, and given the structural issues, societally, and also just psychologically within the human animal on an individual level. I'm going to mangle this quote, but I believe somebody smarter than me once said, we're not rational animals, we're rationalizing animals. And we are wired to justify doing what we want to do

even before we started thinking about the wise. And so I just wanna push back on you again on your optimism, not to dampen it, but just to give you another chance to expound upon it. Sure. I mean, I think it's probably Jonathan Height, who made that rationalizing animal worth and less than animal, sounds really much like him. But yeah, I mean, we can also just look at like the amount of money we've moved as well. So, you know, a really successful non-profit campaign, maybe over $1,000 hundreds of thousands of dollars. Over the last 12 years, Effect Veltusms a whole, including Givewell, has moved well over the billion dollars now to the most effective non-profits, and at least in terms of in-expectation

kind of funds that are committed and set aside, then with like tens of billions of dollars. And you know, that's just pretty good. We've not been around very long. If you look at the history of model change, normally it takes many decades, or even hundreds of years, to really affect model change. And so, sure, 12 years, it's a long time in the course of a single life. 10,000 people are still small

compared to the kind of overall world population, but, model change takes time. And so maybe I'm not thinking that we'll have convinced everyone in the world in the next couple of years, but I'd note by the end of my lifetime or by the end of the century, it's just common sense that you don't rob, but you don't steal, you're not racist. Could it be that a modely good life by the end of the century, it's just common sense that that involves using some of your time and money to help other people impartially considered in an effective way as possible?

Yeah, I think we can. I think we've seen model change happen in the past that's just as significant as change as that and in fact quite a lot more significant. And so that I think should give us hope for the future too. I find that to be a powerful and moving argument, and I hope you're right. And it does bring us to your new book, because you're making a long-term argument right there.

And you have a new book called What We O the Future, which is an ode to what you call long-termism. What is long-termism? Long-termism is the view that positively impacting the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time. So it's about taking seriously just how big the future ahead of us might be and how high the stakes are than anything that could impact the long-term. And then it's about looking for what events could occur in our lifetimes that could be pivotal

for that entire trajectory of the future. And then thinking, okay, what can we actually do to positively navigate those challenges in order to make the world better, not just for the present generation, but for, you know, grandkids lives and their grandkids lives and so on. Are human beings wired for this kind of thinking?

I think it just depends on the human. I think it's a matter of values. So I don't really think there's much of a human wiring. We have certain biases, but I think humans are model animals. And so if you look at class cultures, yes, in the kind of modern era, you don't get that much in the way of kind of really long-term thought. You know, people are very short-term focused, and maybe that's getting even more extreme at the moment. But in other cultures, that's different. So if you look at kind of many indigenous philosophies, so the Iroquois oral constitution, for example, the Gaianesh Gawa,

constitution. For example, the gay and a shagawa, it recommends that people in their decisions, the laws of the Confederacy, consider not just the present generation, but the generations that to come in their decision making. Similarly, African indigenous philosophy seems to have a particular concern for the long term as well. And so, yes, perhaps kind of in Western consumerist cultures, we're really thinking about the next month, the long term perspective is like five years or something, but I don't think it has to be that way. I think instead we can have a moral attitude that is thinking much more seriously about the very long term, because I think many of these ideas are really common sense. The idea that future generations matter, that benefits matter the same way, whether

they occur in one year or ten years or a hundred years. I think people have really attuned to that, and it's just a more matter of what society like tend to focus on. Do you think the answer in terms of getting buy-in for long-termism on a wider level is structural or individual? I actually think the first thing we need is cultural change. And if by structural you mean changing political institutions, here's the issue, which is that with some other sorts of social movements, so take women's suffrage, for example, you have activists, they're like women, have equal rights to men, and what we can do to give women more political power is giving them the vote, and that was enormously effective.

Can't do the same for future generations. There are things you can do to try to tweak democracy to bacon concern for future generations, but that will always go via proxy of people in the short term, taking the responsibility to act on behalf of future generations. And that means that suppose you set up some panel that will consider the interests of future generations and try and take action. Unless there's genuine concern for the future among the electorate, then any such panel or any such implementation will be co-opted by special interests. So that's the kind of situation we face, and that's why I think in

the first instance, what we really need is cultural change. And then once we've got that, political changes can follow and be the bust. How do you change the culture? You can start by writing a book and then going on podcasts, like 10% of, yeah. And hopefully that has some effect. So yeah, I mean, I think one thing is just I want to change culture by making good arguments. And so obviously not just me, many of my colleagues like Toby Horde has also written a wonderful book of the precipice and there's you know many, many blogs as well, called Takes as a great blog by

another fan and colleague Holden Kronovsky. So one thing you can do is just start making the arguments for why we should care about future generations. And also just the things that will really matter in our lifetime for future generations that are also just enormously important for the present generation as well. Risks from pandemics, both natural and engineered, that's just a really serious risk. And taking action on that has benefits in both the present and for the long term. Similarly, the risks from developing artificial intelligence vary serious risks in the short term as well as the long term. So that's one thing you can do, and then beyond that, beyond just making the arguments, it's just then getting them out there.

So podcasts are the big deal. So is YouTube, movies, potentially. So is education, and these are all things that I'm working on on the side. In addition to just trying to get the arguments down and framed as well as possible. You know in terms of you keeping your head up while embarking on these massively ambitious projects trying to get real deep cultural change around generosity and long-termism

You know as listening to you talk in the course of this interview about it. The Dalai Lama came to mind because he's sometimes asked, you know, you're trying to boost on a species-wide level, the kindness quotient, not a small task, and he will often say, yeah, it doesn't need to happen in my lifetime. And no, he's helped by being a devout believer and rebirth, but I don't know that you have to believe and reincarnation in order to think about engaging in meaningful community oriented,

massively ambitious projects, and not being attached to having specific results within your lifetime. Does any of that resonate with you? That resonates fairly strongly. So in the course of the Ike and the Book, I did a really deep investigation and learned a lot about the history of the abolition of slavery in particular. And some of the most pivotal early abolitionists in the abolitionist movement,

they were the Quakers, we're talking about like early 18th century here. And a particular protagonist I focused on, Benjamin Lay, who's this amazing character, engages in all sorts of kind of gorilla theater and like stunts and demonstrations to convince the Quakers. He, in his lifetime, you know, gauges an entire lifetime of activism. One year before he dies, he gets one win,

which is that the Quakers, so this is just one small community, ban slave trading within the Quaker community, still not the owning of slaves, just slave trading. And so that's like the only real success he gets in his lifetime from an entire history of activism. However, he was one component of obviously a much larger movement, but one important component of one of the most important Marvel changes in all of human history. It's just that those changes happened. I mean, I guess they began happening about 60 years after his death. We're fully implemented more than like 200 years after his death.

But still, I think if we could have Benjamin Lay here and just ask him, he would think, yes, like the thing I cared about is that these changes really happened, not that they happen in my lifetime. And, you know, I feel similarly, if all goes well, if I'm going to successful in my aims, then almost certainly most of the impact that I would have would not be occurring during my lifetime, what would occur afterwards. And that's okay. I'm in this because I want to make the world better. Getting to see the benefits of it is a happy bonus, but it's not the key thing. But I would imagine there's a kind of reinforcing double helix here

where, yes, you're okay. There's some self-sacrifice or something in that zone around working on big projects that you may not live to see the results of. But while you're alive, engaging in this meaningful work, probably makes the quality of your life on a moment-to-moment basis pretty high. Absolutely. Yeah, something I say is that compared to my well-being, before I started and all of this, I think I'm five to ten times happier now than I was back then. We prefer just 10% on the show.

So, yeah, so I've done kind of five hundred times that I'm not at all going to claim that's like entirely because of effective altruism. The many factors, meditation is one and incorporating not just meditation, but general kind of mindfulness practice into my life, having a better connection between my mind and my body It's hugely important. And then you know other things like therapy and medication and so on is also helpful But part of it certainly is being part of this community that is really taking seriously just the reality of the world all the good and all of the bad and trying to really figure out what the best things we can do to make this world better, and then taking action

to do so. That's like an inspiring thing to be part of. I mean, it's exciting. And if I have a flecked on ways that my life could have gone, I could have been a dusty philosophy professor in some ivory tower working on incredibly esoteric issues in logic I'm just so happy with the life that I've led and so this you know comes back to what we were saying to begin with I think people set up the distinction between Acting for the good of others and acting to benefit yourself is like much darker than it really is I think there's enormous ways which you can

Enormous extent to which you can do both. Coming up Will McCaskill on practical tips for getting better at thinking and acting on long-termism, his argument in favor of having children and his somewhat surprising take on how good our future could be if we play our cards right after this. I am really interested in that overlap between self-interest and other interests, and I think it's a very often put out into the world and very often in my own mind set up as a false binary. But you reference your community again, and in terms of promoting long-termism, thinking about the welfare of future generations

beyond your community, in other words, growing this community of long-term thinkers. Again, I think there are some headwinds here. We're living at a moment, at least in my 51 years of I've never seen levels of kind of fear and pessimism around some massive, you know, imprenitious global trends, declobalization, depopulation, climate change, artificial intelligence, bigotry, income inequality, really big, difficult, mega trends.

There's, I think, a temptation among many to look at the potentially grim future and go right into a mode of resignation, passivity, apathy. So what do you say to folks who might be resonating with what I'm just finished describing? Yeah, so I think the way I differ from other people on this is not so much in my appraisal of the world. There is just an enormous amount of suffering in the world. There are lots of trends that are very scary. I think I would not be a supplier at all if I saw World War in my lifetime. I would not be a supplier at all if I lived to see thousands of nuclear warheads launched. These are terrifying things. And I think the two things that give me this kind of at least vibe of optimism. I think a one is action orientation and the second is low standards. So action orientation is

just it's kind of like think about stoicism and in your own life no matter how bad things are you don't dwell on like how bad the situation is instead what you should do is just think what can I do to make it better and that's the same question you ask whether your life is amazing or whether it's terrible at the same time. And similarly in the world as it is today, the action relevant question is not how bad are things, how bad should we feel. Instead, it's, what can we do to make it better? And that means focusing a lot on solutions, thinking about the ways that we can prevent the next pandemic, the ways that we are and can take action to dramatically mitigate climate change, rather than just really focusing on the problem and beating ourselves up.

And then the second thing is, yeah, low standards, where I'm really just like, I don't know, with a bunch of monkeys, we've managed to build a society that's already kind of amazing. For almost all of human history, we were living an extreme poverty where there was no anesthetic against too thick or any sort of pain. Life expectancy was less than 30. Societies were incredibly paid to the arkel, almost always. Slave owning was almost universal until the 18th century. 1700s, 3 quarters of the world were in some form of forced labor.

Relative to that, I admit, it's a low standard. Okay, well, actually, we're doing okay. You know, people are a bit sure that they ever have been throughout history. There was not a third world war, that is like a very lucky fact. Probably the listeners of this country are living in like the egalitarian,

liberal, democratic countries. There are kind of many good things about the world too. And what we want to do is encourage those positive things and act against the kind of negative ones. And I don't think it's accurate or helpful to only ever be thinking about the negative. And I think it's a shame that a lot of kind of social activism tends to do that.

You know, as you sell, and I'm using that term not in the majority, but as you sell this idea of long-termism, I can imagine some people thinking, well, why do I want to think about all the threats facing the planet? That's just not a fun headspace. And I have immediate problems. I'm listening to this podcast, Harris,

because I want you to help me mitigate my stress now, not like be dwelling on, you know, future generations and whatever stress they might theoretically have. So how do you push back against that kind of conscious or subconscious objection? So I think there's two things. So here's a way in which a long-term perspective can actually make your life better. And these are kind of thinking tools that I have adopted. One is just the comparison with people in the past. So, you know, if I'm having a bad day, then sometimes I really reflect that,

well, at least I'm born today into a rich country. I'm not born into 1700. Like, I have painkillers if I have a headache, or I have anesthetic if I'm undergoing surgery. I'm able to into 1700. I have painkillers if I have a headache or I have an aesthetic if I'm undergoing surgery. I'm able to travel all around the world. That was not accessible to people until the 20th century. I don't have to spend my entire life engaging in kind of backbaking farming, which again was most of human history. Even on my bad days, I'm having like a very good day compared to I think most people in human history. So that can have long term perspective,

I think, computer-sharing. And then a second thought is what motivates me? I mean, the things that kind of motivate me most will form a long-term perspective. I mean, one is this thought of just model change that's happened in the past and seeing concern for future generations as continuous with model changes other activists to Fort Form in the past.

But then this second is just a thought of just how good the future could be if we play our cards. I talk a bit about this in chapter one of the book, but when I look to the book as a whole, I actually thought, it's funny that you talk about me as an optimist because I see the book that I wrote as kind of unduly focused on the negatives because it's talking all about risks and the threats.

And so I kind of put myself out there, and I was a bit nervous about it, but I wrote this little short story. It's kind of the last page of the book and the presented copy is just a QR code, and you can scan that, and you can access it. And it gives a depiction of just how good the future could be, where if you look back again to 1700, the sort of lives that we have now, where you can travel anywhere around the world, you can connect with anyone in the world at a moment's notice

you can make fire at the flick of a switch we work half as much as we used to just 200 years ago all of these things would have been unimaginable kind of 200 years ago so we can think like well how good things be in the future if we play our cards like and I think they could just be really wonderful a life consisting of your best days for all of those days, or maybe even better, maybe far better than again, hundreds of times better. And so I often kind of just reflect

on kind of my very best experiences, the feelings of like spending time with my partner or the falling in love for being a beautiful nature. And I just think, wow, we can create a world where just our grandkids, grandkids, this is how good life is for them in beautiful nature. And I just think, wow, we can create a world with just how grandkids, grandkids, this is how good life is for them all the time. And I personally find that motivating, kind of something to build towards.

And I guess, yeah, honestly, I find that more motivating day-to-day than worrying about nuclear war. May you be right about that. If I want to get better at long-termism, which I think for many of us, if not all of us, it may not come naturally. What can I do? The first thing to do is just to learn a lot more, where in some sense, long-termism is common sense. The idea that future generations matter and we should

care about that, just I think should come naturally to very many people. But what follows in that? What are the implications? In particular, what are the implications when we're trying to look for what sort of challenges and neglected are overlooked? So, you know, we're all very familiar with the challenge posed by climate change and the work being done on that. I mean, people are more familiar now with pandemics. They weren't as familiar when we were first kind of raising the alarm bell about this in the mid-2010s. And they're also not familiar with how the risks could be much greater than the future again,

in particular advances in biotechnology, enabling the possibility of engineered pandemics or engineered bio-weapons. People also just don't know just how fast and how rapid the development of artificial intelligences at the moment, too, nor are people aware of the risks involved, just how greatly the development of human level artificial intelligence could kind of upend the global distribution of power

could make for some very scary future scenarios. And so one thing is just learning a lot more. So I've really tried to lay this all out in what we are the future. I mentioned like it was over the decades worth of work because it's not just me, it was this entire team of people working on it. Every single claim got fact checked over two years spent on that because I just I just really want people to have a good understanding of the whole world for you. And then there are other great resources. So I mentioned the pithesipus, bytobiord, it's kind of a sister companion book, again just so filled with kind

of information. And then again for another kind of set of writing that is giving the kind of big picture, is this blog called Takes by Holden Konobsky. So all these are kind of different angles into the same set of issues. So that's the first thing is just like learning a bunch more. But let's say you've done that and you want to take action. I think the free most natural things are firstly using your money. So we discussed donations at length, taking the given what we can pledge, you can choose to focus your donations onto the things that most effectively impact the long-term future, and there is a long-term future fund that you can find at giving what we can.

Similarly, with your career. So, in this area, I think time is even more valuable than money, and we really need people who are willing to kind of make big career changes potentially to work on these most pressing issues. You can find out loads more about that at 80,000 hours. And then finally, you can get involved with the effective altruism community. If you really want to be doing good for the long term, but unsure, well, the effective altruism community is growing. There are very many conferences called Effect of Altruism Global or Effect of Altruism Global X if it's independently organized. That means you can get a lot of context, get up to speed very quickly, figure out

what's the best fit for me, how can I contribute the best? In your book, you list a few other action items. One is spreading good ideas in the other, and I was a little surprised to see this at first, was having children. Absolutely. So, spreading good ideas, I think the path to impact there is kind of obvious, just as with kind of moral changes that we've seen in the past, like abolition or women's suffrage. You just need buy-in from a lot of people, and good arguments can win out, and so people can be participating in that program, like making good model arguments. And then, yeah, having kids. So here, I just really want to push against this idea

that's very commonly raised, which is that it's immodeled to have children. And the argument is normally that the negative impact on climate change from having a child are just so bad that you should not have the child because children emit CO2 in the course of their life, especially when they become adults, and if they have kids too. I can tell you when their babies name it a lot of methane.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that doesn't change. Yeah, they keep doing that for the rest of their life. However, and this means that now people have fewer kids than they would like to have. I mean, that's not entirely due to climate change. Other factors are larger, but the average person in the US of UK has fewer children than they would like to have. But I think this is a really the wrong way of looking at things. And it relates to this question of like only looking at the negative side of the positives, because yes, it's absolutely true that as a result of having a child,

you will cause more CO2 to be emitted into the atmosphere, but there are two things to say in the response. The first is that you can offset that, and in fact you can offset that for a fraction of the cost of having the child. So they have the child cost about £10,000 per year, if you increase that by 10%. So you pay the cost of £10,000 for having a child, that was £11,000, but £1,000 of that goes to highly effective organisations to fight against climate change, like clean tech innovation. Then you will have offset that carbon impact

on my best guess, about a thousand times over. So this is again just testament to the power of one's donations. You can focus on the very most effective things to mitigate climate change. So that's going the first aspect. But then the second is just that if you're going to assess what's the overall impact of having a child, you need to look at both sides of the ledger.

So yes, there are negative effects of having a child, such as impacts on climate change. But there are many positive effects too. So children contribute, when they grow up, they contribute to that to lead to society. They innovate, helping move forwards like technological progress, kind of as a whole.

If you bring them up well, then they can be the kind of model changemakers that the world needs to. I don't think it's a great then, if environmentalists are systematically having fewer children and the selfish people are systematically having more. And then finally, which I argue in the book as well, if you bring up the child well and that child has like a flourishing life, then that's good from the child's perspective too. That's a sort of benefit that you're conveying and that actually makes the world better. And so, you know, I'm definitely not saying like we should all have as many kids as possible. We should

become these kind of baby producing factories. But certainly people should remove the kind of angst, I think, that they have about having children on climate change grounds. I think that's really not warranted. And I think overall it's actually a good thing to have kids and bring them up well. My angst around having a brought a child into the world, well, my wife did the work, but having been involved in bringing a child into the world, I'm pretty bullish that this kid given the life we're giving him, can have a positive impact, I'm bearish though, on the quality potentially of his life

as he gets older, given the aforementioned pernicious mega trends in the world. Yeah, I think I would just disagree there, where look, there are some ways in which the future could be a lot worse than today. That's just undoubtedly to do. There could be like Third World War, there could be civilizational collapse, you know, there could be just some new pandemic every year because of developments in biotech. That's just totally on the table for me.

And maybe I think that's 10%, 20% likely or something. I don't think it's the most likely outcome though, where if you look at the last hundred years, or even the last few hundred years, I think four human beings at least, just average quality of life has gotten significantly better. So in 1800, something like 80% of the world lived in X-Lean poverty, now less than 10% do. If you look back kind of 100 years, I mean, we didn't have evidence-based medicine 100 years ago.

But that's going to continue going into the future. I think people are going to keep getting richer. We're going to keep having better technology that makes our lives better. We're also just going to have better model progress as well. I mean, like what old comedy shows and like, you'll see how much model progress we've had, you know, it was forget the year now. I think only 2011 that gay marriage was legalized in the United States. So I expect those things to continue overall. And sure, there's going to be ups and downs.

And absolutely, there's a very significant risk that things get worse and we should try and mitigate that as much as possible. But at least my best guess is that things could be very good in the future, indeed. Last question from me, in looking through the notes that were provided to me for this interview, I see that you make an argument about the world we're living in now, you say, and this is a quote, we're now living through the global equivalent of the hundred schools of thought. You then go on to say different moral world views are competing and no single world view has yet won out. Are you arguing that we should have a unified global moral outlook?

I'm actually in a sense, I'm arguing the opposite. So the risk that I'm pointing to here is what I call value-locking. So I reference the hundreds of schools of thought. That's a period in ancient China when they were these competing moral welds you. So Confucianism is what is most familiar to us now. You know, Plyze's family, order, stability. There was also legalism, which is sort of Machiavellianism,

a bit kind of amoral, Taoism, which valued like spontaneity, the kind of the mystical, and then Mohism, which is in some ways similar to effective altruism, actually, but very concerned with promoting the impartial goods, living on less. And at that point in time, these philosophers would wonder from state to state,

make their arguments about how best to live. But then over the following few hundred years, this competition kind of died away and Confucianism became the kind of, kind of like the state ideology, the official ideology, and it was just taught on mass to people to kind of everyone in China. And we see much more generally like ideology

trying to take over and entrench itself. So the Nazis, thankfully, did not win World War II, if we go to a kind of factual, possible world where they did. And then perhaps got even more powerful, were they able to take over the world as they wanted to do. They would have entrenched that fascist ideology for, you know, they said a thousand years and a thousand year empire, but perhaps even longer. And that would be very bad, because I think we're still far away from the end of model progress. And one of the things that's crucial to do if we care about the

very long term is ensure that we keep going with model progress. And I think we can only have that if we still maintain an openness to different kind of model perspectives and a large diversity of world views. So what I actually am emphasizing most is like certain things that could lock in bad values, where I think AI is one of them, a world government could be another, the first space settlement could be another. We actually wanna hold off on some of those things

until we've had enough time to really think about what the good life consists in. And only when we're like, okay, yeah, we're really sure on what the light distribution or what the light model values are to we then start kind of spreading that more widely. It's fascinating. And as I've said earlier, electrifying ideas that you're putting out into the world before I let you go, you've

referenced a bunch of websites that you've been a part of creating or promoting. And you also referenced your books. Can you re reference them all in one place here so that anybody who wants to go deeper has this as a resource? More than happy to. So the book that is just out is What We Are The Future, which makes the case for long-termism

and what follows from it. My previous book before that was Doing Good Better, which lays out some of the principles of effective altruism. I also mentioned a book called The Plessopist by Toby Ord, which is a discussion of existential risk in particular, Vesks of these really big scale catastrophes, and the blog Cult Takes by Holden Konoffsky, which focuses on AI in particular. There are also websites I mentioned, so giving what we can.org if you want to donate at least 10% of your income to the most effective non-profit,

and 80,000 hours to org if you want career advice. So how can you use your time on this planet to do as much good as you can? Thank you for coming on and thanks for the work you're doing on planet earth. I really appreciate both. Thanks so much for having me on. It's been a wonderful conversation. Thank you again to William McCaskill, a quick note, and I'm very excited to deliver this

little message, a quick note before I let you go. One of the amazing producers on this show, you probably heard me invoke his name, DJ Cashmere, has been hard at work on a side project that I want to tell you about. First just a little bit about DJ, you've heard me referencing before. He finds and vets many of our guests and then preps me for these interviews. And they will be hard to imagine doing the show, frankly, without him, he's a dedicated meditation practitioner, a dedicated husband and father and a dedicated producer on this show. And he somehow found the time to produce an hour long episode of a podcast that is truly,

truly excellent. It's a wrenching and revealing look back at his days as an inner city education reformer and it's just been released out into the world. It's called No Excuses and I cannot recommend it strongly enough. You can find it over on the Educate Podcast feed from APM Reports or you can just click the link which we have conveniently put for you in the show notes of this episode. Go check it out. It's really quite a brave piece of audio and it's a great story. You'll enjoy it. Worth an hour of your time. Congratulations to DJ on an amazing piece of work.

Of course, DJ is just one of many outstanding human beings who work on this show and I want to thank them before we let you go. 10% of happiness produced by Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ of course, Justine Davy and Lauren Smith. Our senior producer is Marissa Schneidermann, Kimmy Regler, is our managing producer, and our executive producer is Jen Poient, scoring and mixing by Peter Bonaventure of Ultraviolet audio. We'll see you all on Wednesday for a brand new episode. We'll see you all on Wednesday for a brand new episode. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today.

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