The Rich Roll Podcast - Doing Good Better: William MacAskill on ‘Effective Altruism’ & How To Maximize Positive Global Impact

Episode Date: September 21, 2015

Most of us want to do good. We devote our precious time to causes we deem worthy. We donate our precious funds to charities that appear to make a difference. We pursue careers we consider meaningful, and patronize businesses and buy products we believe make the world a better place. Unfortunately, we often base these decisions on assumptions and emotions rather than facts. As a result, even our best intentions often lead to ineffective—and sometimes downright harmful—outcomes. So how can we do better? In an effort to determine a career personally optimized for maximum positive impact, Professor William MacAskill began to ask himself this very question. While a young researcher at Oxford, he discovered that much of the potential for change was being squandered by lack of information, bad data, and our own prejudice. As an antidote, he and his colleagues developed a modality of thought that would later birth the movement known today as effective altruism: a practical, data-driven approach to “doing good” that proffers the best options to make a tremendous positive difference. In other words, “doing good” (or a well-intentioned act aimed at doing good) is not enough. We must do good better. William is a 28-year old Scottish born scholar and author who is associate professor of Philosophy at Lincoln College Oxford. Previous to this chair, William was a research fellow in philosophy from Emanuel College at Cambridge and a Fullbright scholar at Princeton. If all of this still fails to impress, while still in his twenties (because after all he is still in his twenties), William co-founded 2 successful non-profits, which combined have raised over $400 million in lifetime pledged donations to charity and helped to spark the effective altruism movement: * 80000hours.org is an extremely cool and impressive ethical careers advisory service – sort of like an altruistic AI online career counselor — which provides research and advice on how you can best make a difference through your professional life. * Giving What We Can encourages people to commit to give at least 10% of their income to the most effective charities. Walking his talk, William has officially pledged to donate any and all earned income in excess of $35K USD to such effective charities. This makes for a very interesting line of questioning during today's conversation. William shares his ideas — some of which are controversial and at times iconoclastic — as a contributor to The Atlantic and in several prominent international publications (see below show notes) and he and his organizations have been featured in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, NPR, and TED, among other media outlets. Although William lives in Oxford, I was able to sit down with him in Silicon Valley a few weeks ago as his noon-profit 80000hours.org was one of the very first non-profits ever invited to participate in the highly prestigious accelerator program hosted by prominent seed venture fund Y Combinator. For context, this is the fund and program that launched companies like Dropbox, AirBnB, and Reddit among many others. William recently released his first book, Doing Good Better:...

For me, altruism is just about making other people better off. And more precisely, I just want to measure that as just how many people are you affecting and how significantly are you improving their lives. And if in the course of that you improve your own life as well, as I think is actually quite often the case, that's a bonus. That is Professor William McCaskill, and this is The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. What are you guys doing?

What's happening? How are you? What's going on? What is the news? My name is Rich Roll. I am your host. This is the podcast, the Rich Roll Podcast. The one that I host.

The one that has me behind the mic talking to you guys, the podcast where I sit down with the outliers, the big forward thinkers across all categories of positive paradigm breaking culture change. And I've got a simple goal, very simple, to simply help all of us, myself included, unlock and unleash our best, most authentic authentic selves so thank you so much for tuning into the show for subscribing on itunes for checking out my newsletter for giving us a review on itunes and of course for always making sure to use the amazon banner ad at richroll.com for all your amazon purchases the amazon banner ad is right there on the podcast page at richroll.com richroll.com forward slash podcast uh if you click on that and then buy something on Amazon, Amazon kicks off some loose commission change.

It doesn't cost you guys anything extra. And it's really just a great, very simple, awesome way to support this show and the mission. And it's been instrumental in helping me take care of my team, particularly as we've stepped this thing up from one episode a week to two, which I can tell you is a disproportionate amount of work.

So thank you so much to everybody who has made a practice of this. It really does make a huge difference, and I greatly, greatly appreciate it. So it's Saturday night. What are you guys doing? Well, I can tell you what I'm doing. I'm in my office. It's 8 o'clock Saturday night recording these intros for the next show. Saturday night recording these intros for the next show. But I just came from a really cool,

inspiring couple hours that I spent in Malibu. This weekend is the Nautica Malibu Triathlon. And it's one of my favorite weekends of the year out here, most notably because that's when the CNN Fit Nation crew shows up. And what that is, is a program started by CNN, particularly Ronnie Selig, who's executive producer of the health unit, and Sanjay Gupta, who's the chief medical correspondent at CNN. Every year, they pick a small group of people who send in videos and this sort of application process, petitioning CNN for why they should participate in this Fit Nation program to train for and participate in their first triathlon. And usually it's stories of people who are in poor health or at some kind of crossroads in their life or are in the process of attempting to overcome some hurdle.

Everybody's different, of course, and every year it's a new crop. And so I just came from a house that they rented in Malibu where I got to meet all of the six athletes who are preparing for their first sprint triathlon tomorrow morning, which was completely inspiring. I just think it's so cool to be able to connect up close and personal with people that are, you know, really getting out of their comfort zone, doing something for themselves that I think is inspiring to so many other people. It was really great. And of course, I got to reconnect with all my friends at CNN, Matt Sloan, who's producing The Weeknd, Ronnie Selig, who's been on the podcast in the

past and is an amazing triathlete in her own right. She got fourth in her age group yesterday in the Olympic distance, and she's going to be competing in Kona coming up soon, which is amazing. And of course, Sanjay, who has been just on a personal level, like an incredible support system and mentor to me personally. He wrote an incredibly touching foreword to the Plant Power Way, in case you guys didn't see it. It's really meant a lot to me personally. He wrote an incredibly touching forward to the Plant Power Way, in case you guys didn't see it. It's really meant a lot to me. And he's always been phenomenal in kind of supporting and covering what I'm doing. And it was just really cool to see him. He's going to be racing tomorrow as well. So anyway, I just came from that. So I'm kind of feeling fired up and positive and energetic. And the other person I met, I forgot to mention is

Miles O'Brien, who is a science correspondent at CNN. And if you're, if you watch CNN, then you know, he was the correspondent who lost his arm. It wasn't that long ago. I don't know exactly when it happened to go happen, you know, maybe in the last year, I think like a pallet fell on his arm and he had nerve damage. It had to be amputated. And he's going to be doing the race as well with prosthetic. It was pretty cool to meet him. I've been inspired by his story and how he's kind of navigated this sort of, you know, disability that he suddenly found himself with in midlife and how he shared his kind of struggles and journey through that.

I think it's been inspiring to a lot of people. So it was very cool to meet him in person for the first time. Anyway, enough of that. Before we get into the episode, let's take care of a little business first. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. A problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com

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treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. All right, so today's podcast, I want to open this up with a question. And the question is this, how can we make the best use of the resources available to us to create the maximum positive impact on the world? The response to this is a little bit trickier than you might imagine, and at times somewhat counterintuitive. So let's unpack it. Look, most of us want to make a difference, right? We donate our time and our

money to charities and causes we deem worthy. We choose careers we think are meaningful. We patronize businesses and buy products we believe make the world a better place. But unfortunately, we often base these decisions on assumptions and emotions rather than facts. result, our best intentions can at times lead us astray to often ineffective and at times even downright harmful outcomes. So how can we approach this issue better? How can we do better? And this is the problem that today's guest really wanted to solve. While he was a young researcher at Oxford, he was trying to figure out which career would allow him on a personal level to have the greatest impact. And, of course, he came up against this very problem.

And he discovered that much of the potential for change, for betterment in the world, was being squandered by lack of information, by bad data, and by our own prejudice. In other words, it was an imperfect market that needed disrupting and that needed really to be studied. And so as an antidote, he and his colleagues did just that. They looked into it and they applied a very fact and logic and reason-based approach to giving, to try to understand how to do better, basically, right? And what came out of this is a modality of thought, a movement, you could call it, that is now called effective altruism. And that's what we're going to talk about today. So who is this guy, William McCaskill? Well, he's a very interesting, young, enterprising man. He is a Scottish-born scholar and author who is currently at the ripe

age of 28, an associate professor of philosophy at Lincoln College in Oxford, that Oxford. Before that, he was a research fellow in philosophy at Emanuel College in Cambridge. Yes, that Cambridge. Before that, he was a Fulbright scholar at Princeton, that Princeton. And if that's not enough, he also co-founded two nonprofits in his 20s, because he is literally still in his 20s. The first one is 80,000hours.org. And this is sort of an ethical careers advisory service, sort of like an online career mentor, which provides research and advice on how you can best make a difference through your career, which is very, very cool. The other one is called Giving What We Can. And that organization encourages people to commit to give at least 10% of their income to the most effective charities. And that's very, very interesting because

William, on a personal level, has made the commitment to donate any income that he receives above $35,000 to an effective charity. That is quite a commitment, and that's something that we get into in the podcast today. Very, very interesting. Combined, the nonprofits that William has founded have raised over $400 million in lifetime pledge donations to charity and really have helped spark the globalization of this effective altruism movement. William is a contributor to The Atlantic, and he and his organizations have been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, and TED, among other media outlets. And although he lives in Oxford, I was able to sit down with him in Mountain View, California, I was able to sit down with him in Mountain View, California, the Silicon Valley Mountain View, as he was, I don't think he's there anymore, was in residence there as part of this sort of accelerator program put on by an organization called Y Combinator, which is a seed venture fund.

It's a really prestigious program. It's a program that launched a couple startups you might have heard of called Dropbox, Airbnb, Reddit, Stripe. In any event, Y Combinator invited his nonprofit 80,000 Hours to participate in this accelerator program, which is very cool for him. And that's what made him available to me, which was really great. In addition, William has a book that just came out. It's called How to Do Good Better. And the theme of this book is basically self-evident. And I really found this book to be very captivating. It tracks pretty much what we talk about in today's podcast, so I won't spoil it for you.

But I would strongly encourage you to check out this book. It's quite, it had quite an impact on me, and I think it will irrevocably change how you perceive charitable giving and how you donate your own personal time to the world. And it'll make you more mindful of the impact of your decisions on the greater good. So this is a pretty intense and at times heady conversation on all of the foregoing, but it was a pleasure and an honor to spend some time with William. I can't wait to see where he goes in his career because this is a guy who is actually doing a lot of amazing things. I can't wait to see where it leads and how it's going to continually unfold. So

without further ado, I really hope you enjoy this conversation, ladies and gentlemen, William McCaskill. Uh, before we get into it, I thought I would, uh, point out that I talked to Ryan Holiday. He says to say hello, but he's super pissed that he uh lost the rebel book club whatever it was oh yeah i was i was pretty surprised we won that um we each voted for each other's books oh you did good well at least there's that yeah no he did say to say hello it was funny because i didn't know that you guys knew each other and then i was going through your twitter feed and i saw a little exchange i was like oh man my world just I saw a little exchange. I was like, oh, man, my world just got smaller. And I emailed him.

I was like, hey, I'm going to meet William. He was super psyched. Yeah, well, Ryan's, I think, the center of a lot of people's networks. I think that's true. Yeah, very, very true. Definitely a connector. So anyway, so many things to talk about. But I think probably the best way is to just jump in and get our feet wet.

Why don't you kind of explain what effective altruism is and then we can kind of go from there yeah terrific uh so effective altruism is about using your time and money as effectively as possible to make the world a better place so if you want to give to charity how can you make not just a difference but how can you make the most difference you can if you want to do good with your career what's the very best career you can do in terms of having a social impact and then we try to take a scientific evidence-based data-driven approach to answering that question and that's turned into a bit of a philosophy and a bit of a social movement and there's now an effective altruism community all around the world. I know. How does it feel to be at the epicenter of like catalyzing this entire social movement?

Well, I'm a spry 28 years old. Well, I'm British. So mainly I just feel awkward about it. How embarrassing. How embarrassing, exactly. But I mean, exciting at the same time. It's just I really didn't expect these ideas to take off in the way they have done. And it's been so exhilarating seeing people, you know, really make very significant changes to their life,

pledging to give most of the money they earn over the course of their life, making major career switch, founding nonprofits, founding companies, all with the aim of just really trying to make the biggest difference they can. Right, right, right. And we're going to get into all of that but while we kind of like plant our flag in this uh world of altruism i mean i think that it might make sense to even define altruism in itself because i feel like it gets confused like when i spoke to ryan about uh stoicism you know it gets confused with asceticism, right? And I feel like, you know, altruism can kind of fall a little bit into that category as well in terms of how people perceive it. So like, what is altruism in and of itself? Yeah, thanks a lot for asking that. So

because when biologists use the term altruism, they mean self sacrifice. And I think a lot of people think that they mean you're being altruistic that means you're just making yourself worse off for some other end and that's not really how i want to use it at all for me altruism is just about making other people better off and more precisely i just want to measure that as just how many people are you affecting and how significantly are you improving their lives and if in the course of that you improve your own life as well as i think is actually quite often the case that's a bonus that's what he's in favor of doing that thing right no reason against is it you're feeling that we are naturally altruistic that that through some bizarre you know sort of natural selection process that we are you know we have arrived on the planet kind

of inherently altruistic or we have that innate sort of characteristic as a precept of natural law yeah i think we're i think it's we're sunk to some extent altruistic so maybe we're like 90 out for ourselves and 10 altruistic yeah i'm not so sure we live in the most altruistic culture yeah i think it it varies depending on which particular subculture you're part of maybe wall street not so altruistic the bay a little bit more at least um and how they talk about things uh but i think in terms of human nature yeah i think there's a strong altruistic component right i think you know we see suffering um and other people even in people we don't know and we feel compelled to help anytime a natural disaster strikes that That's in clear abundance.

And it's hard to make sense of that on purely evolution, on self-interested grounds. And so how did you get initially interested in this subject matter? Yeah, so I'd been interested in doing good. I'd been socially conscious growing up. I ran a scout troop for kids with disabilities for many years. I worked as a care assistant at an old folks home. And that was a really...

I mean, what were your parents like? I mean, my parents were fairly regular, kind of upstanding members of the community. They never really pushed me in any direction particularly. They just wanted to see me flourish on my own. And so a lot of this stuff was kind of off my own back the self-generated thing yeah and then i became vegetarian age 18 and i didn't know that that was definitely come up in my uh research so now we have lots of other stuff to talk about oh yeah for sure so first of october 2005 wow that was the day i left home i became vegetarian interesting and that definitely wasn't encouraged by my parents they were quite shocked and so yeah i'd always been interested in making difference and certainly through studying

philosophy a lot of ethical ideas coming up and a lot of arguments i found quite powerful in particular peter singer's argument that we have this obligation to give most of our income to fight poverty because you wouldn't walk past a child downing in a shallow pond just because it would cost a few thousand dollars for you to run in and save the child and muddy your suit and if that's true what's the difference between that child downing in front of you and the child dying of an easily preventable disease in a poor country on the other side of the world and i found the argument compelling that there isn't really a morally relevant difference. Was that an argument that you came upon prior to him sort of entering your orbit and being kind of a mentor to you? Oh, yeah. I came upon the argument age 18 or 19

and found it very compelling immediately, but didn't act on it, not for years. Right, right. And it was actually only after I graduated Cambridge, which is where I did my undergraduate degree. And over the summer, I I graduated Cambridge, which is where I did my undergraduate degree. And over the summer, I was working as a fundraiser for Care International. So one of those annoying people who stands in the street and the cost passes by asking them to donate $10 a month. In the UK, we call them charity muggers or chuggers. Sure. And so I was a chugger.

chuggers or chuggers. And so I was a chugga. And it meant that all day, every day, I was telling people about global poverty, and how much good you could do just by spending your money in a different way. And every day, I was getting these blank, apathetic stares back at me, people who just were taking making any excuse possible to dodge the arguments. And I thought these people just aren't living up to their own values. And I felt very angry about that. And then I thought, well, I'm not living up to my own values either. I'm, you know, my plans at the time was to go to grad school at Oxford, continuing to do philosophy, but doing very esoteric subjects, philosophy of language, philosophy of logic, things that I honestly thought were very intellectually interesting, but weren't going to really make

a difference to the world. Not applied philosophy. Yeah, exactly. And so that meant that when I arrived at Oxford, I thought, okay, I'm going to have to start making changes to my life. And I started giving some of my graduate stipend, like a couple of percent, a few percent, which seemed like a very big deal at the time in my head.

And I started looking around, talking to academics, asking, okay, well, including practical ethicists, in my head uh and i started looking around talking to academics asking okay well you know including practical ethicists people who are really engaging with real world ethical issues and asking well what impact did you have and the chair of practical ethics at oxford who is must be you know within that field one of the most influential people asked him and he said that once someone said that they joined the donor organ registry you got one email one email yeah one person in this like 20-year career uh-huh who'd signed up to dog that breaks my heart yeah and he said that was the sum total of it so i was pretty disenhanced

disenchanted and so really wondering what i should do with my life but then uh by coincidence i met wondering what i should do with my life but then uh by coincidence i met um another academic called toby ord and that was in early 2009 and we met because of uh shared research interest but i saw on his website they hit this comment that he says he was very concerned by global poverty and give to the acquired amount and i saw that and i thought hogwash he's just another one of these academics he's not actually doing anything but then he told me he was at the time living on nine thousand pounds saving two thousand pounds and giving two thousand pounds and he was planning to give everything he earned above twenty thousand pounds um and he described it as a high bar um he was planning to give more than that in fact but if he was going to pledge something publicly, he wanted to have a safe amount. But what was most striking about it all was how

enthusiastic he was about this. He was not conveying this as this self-flagellating. Like a martyr or something. Yeah, exactly. He was like, this is an amazing opportunity. This is so exciting how much good we can do uh and that really inspired me as well uh and so together we then co-founded this organization giving what we can which is about encouraging people to give at least 10 of their income to whatever causes do the most good and i ended up taking a similar pledge to him everything above uh two twenty thousand pounds per year right inflation and cost of living adjusted to let's explore that a little bit so that's about thirty five thousand

dollars u.s right in that range um so did you do that shortly after that conversation or how long have you been on this program yeah i think a couple of months afterwards uh-huh uh i actually you know it was obviously a time of turmoil for me and before making the decision i went online and just started looking at um photos of children um suffering from horrific diseases and because you know i wasn't cognitively i thought i should do it but i didn't quite have the emotional right push um so i deliberately looked at photos like that and i remember seeing one child who had a lymphatic filobiasis of the face so it's quite a rare condition to get that it meant the entire face was hugely swollen and like sagging down almost like snoopy the dog or something and i just thought look if my action here can stop like one person just one child from not having to go through a condition

like that it's easily worth it and in fact if you look at the numbers i can do that thousands of times over and so that's when i made the decision right and and did you what did your friends think when you announced this to your peer group um well at the time i was facilitating quite a bit yeah no so a lot of people would say, is that legally binding? Uh-huh, yeah. Come back in a few years and we'll see whether you're still stuck with that.

Well, it's a valid question. I mean, it's one thing to make that pledge when you're an impoverished student, but now you're sort of, as you escalate the world and your income increases, I mean, do you have like caveats for adjusting for

not just inflation but you know as your life continues to expand i mean if you have children if you you know what i mean like things enter into your life where you know 35 000 a year if you're making you know a decent quantity which i imagine you will with all the work that you're doing um you know you're gonna confront like some realities with that yeah so there are some caveats so uh one is for children so if i'm a parent with another if i have a child and uh if i have a i'm a parent with another with a partner then i would increase it by five thousand pounds per child or 10,000 pounds if I'm a single parent. And I also have put in kind of emergency clause, which is just if it's the case that something unforeseen happens,

I think is, yeah, and it's going to significantly impede how much good I think I'll do over the course of my life. Then I'll just get permission from Toby and break the pledge. Like, it's not like this kind of crazy thing that I want to stick to, like, even if the consequences were going to be worse. It's more just making a clear commitment about this is how I'm going to live my life. It will likely present some interesting philosophical, like, slide rule equations, because, for example, you know, what if an opportunity arises for you

to travel to some place, but there isn't, you know, where you could potentially do some good, but there isn't money to get you there and that would put you over your budget, you know, is it more important for you to, as a sort of, you know, emblematic message to the world to hold true to your pledge, or would it be more positively beneficial for the world for you to break the pledge and then go someplace that costs money to get to to enact the good yeah i think i mean uh yeah like i say i'm not doing this for reasons of asceticism uh i think you know the ultimate justification for doing all this is the outcomes you produce in the world. And so in a case like that, I'd think of it as a business expense, not count it as something I...

That would come out of the other side of the equation. Yeah, that's right. I got you. But I want to be kind of clear and transparent about that. Yeah, because it's just... If it means that I'm just handcuffing myself in certain cases when I could do more good, then that's exactly against the spirit of why I'm doing this. OK, so you make this pledge, which then, you know, bifurcates your income. But then you're presented with this very practical real world question, which is also a philosophical question, which is how to allocate this money. And when we kind of look at altruism, it seems to me that that that, you know, that's basically potential energy.

Right. And that potential energy can be expended through finances through or through time. Right. Is that essentially correct? Yeah. So so now you have you know, you have a finite amount of time and you have this other kind of allocated cash reserve. And then it becomes an issue of like, how is this going out into the world into the best way? Which then you run that through your philosophical brain and perform that calculus. And really your life's work is an expression of that. calculus and really your life's work is an expression of that it's like an ongoing expression of how to apply a more scientific method to um to the allocation of this potential energy so that it enacts the most you know quote unquote good good right so if we're going to explore that we

should probably first talk about like what is good you know like how are you defining good yeah terrific so that's exactly like it's early 2009 and toby and i even on a low estimate over the course of our lives are going to give a million pounds one and a half million dollars and the question is just okay well this is a big spending decision how are we going to use that as well as possible and so for defining good, obviously it's contested. But I think one thing that all kind of plausible moral views agree on as at least part of the truth is about what makes for a good outcome is the sum total of improvements to people's lives. So if I can extend your life if you're happy, that's improving your life. If I can increase the quality of your life while you're alive, that's improving your life as well. And that's what I take the core of altruism to be, is just improving other people's lives. And if you can improve more people's lives,

that's better. If you can improve people's lives by a greater amount, that's better too. And there might be other things that go into good outcomes, like art for its own sake and knowledge for its own sake, that preservation of the natural environment for its own sake, not just in terms of how those things translate into improvements in people's lives. But there's at least one thing that everyone can agree on, which is that just making people suffer less, making people happier is a good thing to do right and that's why i tend to focus on right right so so you have this experience as a chugger yeah and and uh you know are getting you're they're saying talk to the hand and you're realizing uh this is a broken system like trying to get people to act uh you know in an altruistic way whether logically or emotionally is, is, is a hurdle. And then your focus sort of looks at, you know, kind of the corporate environment of giving in general, and also

realizing that that is broken. Like there's gotta be a better way, uh, to give, to help, to be altruistic. So, you know, let's, let's look, let's look at that for a minute. Like, you know, let's look at that for a minute. Like, you know, what is the culture? What is the environment of charity and giving? And why is it broken? Yeah. Okay, great. So, yeah, there were two differences. One is that a move from just thinking of charity is this thing you do a couple of pounds, a couple of dollars a month, and actually taking it seriously and making it a significant part of your life.

So that's one aspect. a month and actually taking it seriously making it part of a significant part of your life so that's one aspect but then the second is thinking about outcomes when it with respect to charity rather than having this donor-centric philanthropy where you give to the causes you personally feel connected with or personally feel passionate about instead thinking well what are the charities that are going to have the best outcomes that are going to do the most good, measured in terms of improvements to people's lives? And I think most people would think, oh, well, that's just an impossible question. You can't answer that. But actually, there's a large body of research from health and development economics

that can help you to answer that question. And that research was primarily designed to advise developing world governments on how they could best spend their scarce resources. But exactly the same research could be used to advise us on how we should spend our scarce resources when giving philanthropically. And they came up with a metric called a QALY, or quality adjusted life year, which is just a way of measuring these two ways of benefiting someone, extending their life or improving the quality of life that someone has while they are alive. And using that metric, you can look at all sorts of different health programs, treatment for HIV AIDS or condom distribution or distributing bed nets or providing deworming,

all sorts of things and look at and assess them and compare them in terms of the impact they have in people's lives. And then you can pick the best, the one that has the biggest improvements. Right, so essentially taking emotion out of it. To some extent. In certain respects, right? And as I'm kind of grappling with that,

I can't help but think that giving is inherently very, it's a very emotional act for a lot of people, right? It's people gravitate towards the causes that they feel personally connected to. So in some respect, you're saying that's fine, but that's not a great way of going about it. Yeah. So an analogy is maybe with being a doctor. of going about it yeah so an analogy is maybe with being a doctor so uh if you're a doctor then you you know you might want to say oh caring and caring for the sick is an inherently emotional enterprise you don't want to take the emotion out of that but if you're a professional doctor and you're um doing that all day every day and having to make hard decisions about who you're helping

who you're not engaging in triage and so on you simply have to have a certain level of detachment about that. Because otherwise, you're going to make bad trade-offs. You're going to be too taken by something you feel very sympathetic towards, or just whoever's right in front of you, rather than thinking, okay, what's actually the best decision I could be making? And so obviously, there's still an underlying emotion there. Like the reason people become doctors is because they want to help other people right similarly the reason we want to give is you know there's an emotional drive saying we uh you know want to combat the big problems in the world but then that needs to be guided by their ability to reason our ability but isn't the first hurdle getting people to actually get into that that place of willingness to give then it

becomes about how you allocate that right but if you're if you're pulling that emotional aspect out of it you know aren't you sort of isn't that going to have a deleterious impact on the total amount of giving you know what i mean like it's a psychological thing right if you're if you're saying like the guy who feels strongly about a certain cause, and then he's told, well, take emotion out of it. You know what I mean? Then he's like, well, I'm just not going to give. You know what I mean? As opposed to, all right, I'll channel this enthusiasm in a different direction about something that I don't necessarily care as much about.

Yeah. Is that factored into how you? Yeah. I mean, so if that was was true that we were just destroying people's intentions to do good that would definitely be a bad outcome that would not be effective altruism that would not be effective altruism uh but i think there's a couple of things to say firstly in terms of whether we should be trying to get people to give more to give more effectively um i think there's a couple of reasons to push and giving more effectively one is this

that there's already so many people trying to get others to give more. There's a huge focus on it, where there's not very much on effectiveness. And second is that the difference you can make is much larger. So maybe you get someone to give 10 times as much if you were really successful at getting someone to give more. But if you get someone to give more effectively, you could easily get them to do 100 times as much good with their donations. Right. So you have this kind of interesting example that I've heard you talk about before, which is the, is it Books for Africa versus the deworming program? So to kind of play that out, let's say you're passionate about literacy, right? And so your instinct is to give to this

organization that is providing books for impoverished african children and the idea there of course is that more books is better this will this will improve literacy and classroom attendance and the like right but what's the actuality of that yeah so you think obviously giving books is a good thing in terms of improving educational outcomes. But when tested, it's actually, I mean, the evidence is very mixed at best. Seems like distributing books, at least in the absence of teacher training, has no benefit in terms of educational outcomes, which is very surprising. But that's what the data says. Right.

surprising but that's what the data says right so so in the sort of counterintuitive example that you used was um that these they found out that a big reason that classroom attendance was falling off was because a lot of the kids had worms right so yeah so actually channeling that money towards deworming programs and getting these kids healthy improved attendance which in turn i would assume enhances literacy so if you're interested in supporting literacy, your money would have been better spent funding these deworming charitable organizations, right? Yeah, that's right. If you want to improve educational outcomes, if you want to improve life outcomes, deworming is one of the best things you can do.

Right, in this part of the world. In this part of the world, in sub-Saharan Africa, that's right, and in India. And that's not something you'd ever think of, of Saharan Africa, that's right, and in India. And that's not something you'd ever think of because no one's had these sorts of intestinal worms in the U.S. since the 50s. They were eradicated. So we don't even know about them,

whereas everyone can understand the idea of giving a book. It's easily understandable. And deworming is also, it's not a very sexy intervention. It's kind of gross. It's not the sort of thing you want to think about very much. So when do you found Giving What We Can, which was your first nonprofit? Yeah, that was 14th of November, 2009. Right.

So you were like 12 years old. Yeah, just out of the womb. I guess I was 22 at that time. And that initially, I mean mean it was a small affair there was 23 people who've taken the pledge at the time uh and the first party friends yeah many of them were my friends yeah um uh and i was aggressively going around talking to people uh and you know the launch event was like a fairly small gathering right um but there was an immense amount of attention and interest uh we were the most popular news story in the uk

and the bbc how did that happen did that just organically occur or was there like a tipping point moment that really foisted that on the public consciousness yeah i mean we talked to the university press office at oxford and they just submitted a press release and people found the story i mean this was especially around toby the co-founder uh of his pledge to give everything above 20 000 pounds intensely interesting and it was like the feel-good news story of the day and uh it got on the bbc and then after that point got a very large amount of media attention from other sources as well around the world in fact um and that meant that giving what we can became a bit of a light lightning rod for people who'd

had similar ideas but hadn't really acted on them all around the world and so did that predate kind of formalizing this school of thought called effective altruism or did these sort of coincide yeah it predated it um for sure uh we came up with the term effective altruism in late 2010 or maybe early 2011 simply because by that point we realized that there was this key idea combining doing more good and doing it more effectively. And we didn't really have a name. We used so many different things.

Smart giving, optimal philanthropy, strategic activism. You didn't think about calling giving what we can chugger.com? Chugger.com. Effective chugging. Yes. Thankfully we didn't. But we had been referring to you know people that we would now call effective altruists or members of the effective altruism community

we were calling them super hardcore do-gooders which is a tongue-in-cheek word but yeah we definitely needed to move beyond it um so you go from 23 and then what was that growth curve like um approximately doubling every year so we now have well over 1,000 members. Right. Including some people who've, you know, giving 50%, 90% of their incomes. Wow, 90%? Yeah, in some cases. Those must be rich dudes.

I mean, the person I'm thinking of, he's giving about $100 million. Wow. Which is about 90%. That's amazing. Yeah. So before we kind of explore that a little bit further i want to get it because i would imagine then with all these people giving pledges that's what gives birth to this idea of all right so how to best allocate this right it becomes the next sort of

thing that you're going to have to answer to and explore but before we get into that you know i kind of want to uh explore a little bit because you are philosophy is your background and that's what you've studied the the relationship between altruism and happiness or maybe more aptly put like self-satisfaction or or or you know a sense of purpose and contentedness right and you know we're in a you know we're in a culture where that's not particularly reinforced. It's more about accumulating the most material possessions and creating security and comfort around yourself. That's sort of dictated to us via Madison Avenue or whatever the television as being kind of the most well-trodden path to being a happy, contented person. And despite the fact that most people intellectually understand that not to be the case, we still propel ourselves forward down that road. Yeah, I mean, I think it's all lies.

I think marketing and advertising firms are just continually lying to people about how best to be happy. And now I think the reason for doing good isn't because it'll make yourself happier. I think the reason to try and help others is because it's the right thing to do. And certainly when I was doing all this. But if you can appeal to people's selfish natures, and get them to act and justify the means in that regard, like, look, do this.

You don't have to be altruistic but this will make you a happier person if you do this and you get people to buy into that idea the impact of that is still the same yeah i'm perfectly happy with i mean i don't yeah if people enjoy helping others and they get a lot of satisfaction out of it i think that's yeah they're a great person um the sort of person i want to be around if someone's doing it solely as a matter of duty um then okay that's a different psychology but again great outcome i'm in favor of that and actually it's more and more evidence is accumulating that helping others is a really good way to buy happiness and um buying material goods is a very bad way of buying happiness and so

we looked into this quite a bit, and we actually think that giving away even most of your income is probably going to have not very much impact at all on your happiness overall, because obviously you've got the loss that you can't buy as much stuff for yourself, but the benefits of then being able to, you know, having the reward and satisfaction of helping others. Right, but is that a first world problem? You know what I mean? Like I'm just imagining somebody who's listening to this, who's struggling to pay the bills. They have kids and they can

barely, you know, make their way to hear that could be kind of jarring. Yeah. I mean, so it depends exactly what, um, income you're already on. I mean, for you know people in the middle class uh who are uh in living in a rich country then i think pretty much anyone can give 10 i mean importantly basically every member of the um of rich countries like the us or uk are in the richest 10 of the world's population um if you earn about fifty thousand dollars after tax you'll know that's just one percent of the world's population um which makes it particularly acute if you're living in the developed western world in terms of the impact that you can have because the disparity the wealth the wealth disparity is so severe in comparison to the developing world that's right that's what does the work is because

uh you just have something like 20 times 40 times as much um income as the very poorest people in the world that means a dollar is just worth so much more to them than it is to us and it means that these very simple um sorts of health programs like distributing bed nets or deworming children just haven't been funded. You're still able to spend money in that way. And in my book, I talk about this as a hundredfold multiplier, where we have these good theoretical reasons. And then it's backed up by the data for thinking that you can benefit people in the poorest countries a hundred times as much as you can benefit yourself um by spending money on yourself and the analogy i give is like imagine if you could buy a beer for yourself was five dollars

or you could buy it for someone else for five cents you know you'd say next lands on me like right we'd find ourselves being very generous and that's the situation within all the time the problem though is that it's not in our consciousness right it's just you know uh you know it's we're not aware we don't really think about it because it's so far away and we feel it doesn't impact our lives yeah that's the hurdle right uh yeah that's definitely a big hurdle and when it does it feels alien it feels other i think often the presentation has been um very bad of just you know pot-bellied children starving with you know flies in their faces and uh we just glaze over and you of course you glaze over you feel um put off you

feel like you're being emotionally manipulated far better to convey you know in sub-saharan africa the incredibly rich vibrant cultures with people who are just actually you know they are pretty happy like a lot of the time but then get sick in ways that could be you know they're people that you could be would be very close friends with if you happen to know them um if you happen to live there and illnesses that could be easily treated or averted through some pretty basic simple actions yeah that's right right um and it's not like this you need this deep emotional um uh appeal it's just almost common sense that right you should be funding something well i want to take a little bit of a left turn here because it just you you brought up something that i've been thinking a lot about which is uh this advent of conscious capitalism it has sort of become a

zeitgeisty kind of thing in our culture right everything from like tom shoes to warby parker like all of these companies are realizing that the best way of doing business is to allocate a portion of their revenue towards a charitable cause. And, and in looking at that, like I'm interested in parsing out like, what aspect of that is truly effective in terms of outcomes, which is what you're interested in, versus marketing hype, right? Because it's good business to make people feel good about buying your product. And I had, I interviewed Daniel Pinchbeck for the podcast last winter.

I don't know if you know who he is, but he spends a lot of time thinking about these kinds of things. And he was like, I think it's BS. I think it's BS. It's marketing spin. And that's not to say that, you know, if that money ends up in a good place and does some good for some people, that's fine. But what it does is it makes people feel good about buying this product. It creates brand loyalty, right? And I'm wondering whether you think that that then prevents people from exercising that altruism in a more effective way.

Because they say, well, I buy Tom's shoes. Oh, yeah. so i don't need to give to this charity because i'm see my shoes like that that i was able to donate shoes to somebody else and and you know what truly is the impact of that is that making a positive difference okay terrific yeah so i feel um and i'm not i'm not bashing tom shoes like i i like you know i like that company i'm company. It was the first thing that came to mind. Although Tom's Shoes is a good example. There have been studies of the program. Kids like the shoes, but it doesn't make much of a difference in terms of education outcomes or any other outcomes you can measure.

Better put shoes on their feet. That's not a bad thing. It's not a bad thing, but you could do better things. In the initial story where the founders saw these children these children and oh they didn't even have shoes they just they didn't like wearing shoes that's why they weren't wearing shoes um uh so there's gonna get in trouble now i might get into trouble but um so i kind of feel ambivalent and one is that i think that really could work but then it seems to be often misimplemented. I think I agree that very large swathes of this are BS, especially within corporate social responsibility. The reason behind it is marketing and PR, not an honest desire to do good.

And then I'm really pleased you mentioned what psychologists call a moral licensing effect, where you doing one good deed, especially if it's a very public good deed. So we're being able to wear a pair of shoes or something else really shows off that you've done this good thing. Depending on the attitude with which you're going into this act, it can make you do fewer good deeds elsewhere. That presupposes that you have a finite amount of altruism that you're willing to expend. Yeah. So you can imagine two different reasons why people might want to do an altruistic act. One is like this honest, deep commitment to wanting to do good. Um, and some people have that attitude, I believe. Uh, another though is just, you want to not get criticized.

You want to show yourself to be a good person. So no one's going to judge you. And if you're doing that, then if you can do something very salient that very clearly demonstrates you're this good person then you don't need to do other things as much right um and so in that way it could even be getting people to very publicly do small like a small good thing can in fact be harmful it risks being harmful i talked about this a little bit with the ice i think psychologically yeah i want to ask you about that but i think but what about the idea that if you do something good it makes you feel good and then you want to do more good yeah isn't that the counter point to that so yeah that's the kind of point and that can happen as well so in the literature there's just mixed you can get both effects and it i think depends on

how is this being presented and what's the attitude that someone is coming in so are they thinking oh i'm doing my bit which i think is a very toxic phase uh if so then you're going to get the model licensing effect if instead it's conceited like okay well this is your first step in a path to making this thing really core part of your identity extra And there's perhaps follow-up. Right, right, right. Interesting. I mean, extrapolating on this model licensing idea, there's a very interesting kind of analogous

idea in the kind of animal rights vegan world right now. There's a guy called Gary Francione, who's a professor of law at Rutgers, and he's always butting heads with Pete Singer. Because Pete Singer is somebody who kind of would say that incremental change is good, right? And Gary's taking a very kind of adamant hardline approach, like you either are or you are not. Like you're either an animal, right? You're either vegan or you're not. You can't like have it both ways.

can't like have it both ways and he uses this interesting example that's kind of apropos to what we're talking about um in that we're in this period now where where uh it's suddenly very popular to eat grass-fed meat right and like sustainably raised quote-unquote ethically harvested and the impact of this according to gary is negative in the sense that it's basically making people feel better about making in you know in his mind an inhumane choice so it's reinforcing the meat eaters habit as opposed so like when you see these posters in whole foods where you see the farmers and everyone looks happy and the cows look happy then when you go and buy your burger, you don't feel that guilt that maybe you would feel otherwise. So it's actually entrenching the behavior that, you know, he would like to see overcome. You know what I mean? Like there's a sim, there's something similar

about that, I think. Yeah. So, I mean, again, on that issue in particular, it's something I feel ambivalent about. And I think ultimately I'd, I'm happy on the you know i'd endorse the incremental view at least if it's properly applied because just because i think the vast majority of animal suffering occurs on by um is suffered by chickens on factory farms just if you could run through the numbers and you look at the conditions of different animals uh so maybe i think that like yeah uh yeah no i hear you i hear you saying we gotta get you off the dairy though oh yeah we'll talk about that later yeah i'm perfectly happy to have a discussion about that uh but then yeah this is the same thing with um giving to charity as well

um you know perhaps people should be taking the hard line approach uh i think in our own experience you know so peter singer was making these arguments that were very hard line saying you know if you're looking at the morality of the situation you should give everything until uh you are you know you know living the same living on the same level of income as the people you're trying to help. So you should basically be giving away all of your income. And does he walk that walk himself? He gives about 35%, 40% of his income, which was very significant given, you know,

he was the only person doing this. He was kind of a lone ranger at the time. And now, you know, me and Toby and others like to see ourselves as kind of outdoing him the next innovation um but interestingly not that many people seem to act on it the uptick really came and people really acting on these arguments in 2009 with me and toby and then everything and then the others and giving what we can saying presenting it in this different way right saying look okay well and i honestly believe this even if it weren't a moral obligation it's still this amazing opportunity like it's just part of your own values like think about what it means to live a good life you have these opportunities to you know

be the person who like runs into a burning building and saves a child's life truly aligning your actions with your value system yeah exactly like having. Like having that coherence is really kind of a beautiful thing. Yeah, that's right. And that's the kind of primary message we put forward, because that's true whether or not you believe it's a moral obligation. And it's something that gets people a lot more excited. And I feel like actually the same thing happens with vegetarianism and veganism. There's a very large uptake in people becoming

vegetarian or vegan on health grounds and within the animal welfare community there's debate about that because you know they think maybe people are doing the right thing but for the wrong reasons right yeah how important is motivation yeah and i ultimately think that normally people's beliefs follow their behavior so i think if you can get people acting the right way, then they'll start to believe the right things as well. Well, yeah. I mean, that's been my experience. I mean, had you, you know, I've been hearing animal rights activists talk my whole life and it had zero impact on me. And then I had a, you know, a personal situation that compelled me to entertain it in a health context.

I embraced that. It was positive in my life. And then it's evolved. So now I'm much more interested in the environmental implications and the ethical implications of these choices that we make. And it's my version of what you're doing in the sense that I have aligned my choices

in this regard with my value system. And it's a good feeling. Right. Um, but I think in terms of trying to, you know, my responsibility as a spokesperson for this in the same way that you're a spokesperson for your cause is how do you effectively communicate people in order to, um, effectuate the change that you're looking for. Right. And there's different strategies for that. You know, some people will hammer people over the head or moralize or judge. And, you know, my approach has always been

to create, you know, a very, you know, a welcome mat for people where they feel comfortable asking the right questions and, you know, allowing people to have that incremental change because for me, it didn't happen overnight. And I think for most people, it doesn't. and for the people that say they got hit with a lightning bolt and they changed overnight i think for certainly i'm sure there's people out there

that that happened to but i think you know for by and large for most people it's a gradual evolution and you have to give people space to grow into that yeah and you can yeah and this is why i think uh you know people like you are great role models for this because a lot of the reasons why people might think oh i'm not going to become vegetarian or vegan is oh well what will happen to my health or my fitness or oh i'm going to become you know have a negative stereotype of what that involves and so if there are people who like yeah i'm running ultra marathons umathons at the peak performance and being vegan as well. Right, and you're saying I'm

giving away most of my money and I'm actually happy and I'm productive and I'm doing all these interesting things and I feel good about what I do and I'm impacting other people. Yeah, I mean, my life has gone far better after taking that pledge than it would have otherwise been. I'd still be sitting in a

library. There has to have been some challenges, though, like i'd really like to get that thing but like what's been the hardest part yeah that's a good question um i mean i think on the money side of things uh actually very little i mean i just there's you know i've never moved because i was a student then a grad student so i never had i've never moved downward i've never got used to a higher level of earnings um maybe the harder thing was like like the amount of time you know because i'm trying to spend my time as well as possible and that means just working very hard um uh on my research on the non-profits i co-founded as well um and maybe i could have taken a few more weekends over the last five six years but all right so let's get into the

the calculus that you've kind of developed to evaluate um you know the charitable options that are available like what are the qualifications in your mind when you look at these organizations in terms of trying to come up with you know the best most effective channel for your funds or for somebody's funds out there who's listening yeah so i think there are three key questions when thinking about charitable giving uh the first is the program that the charity works on. The second is how well executed the charity implements the program. And then third is just whether it can actually usefully use more money. And the first one is almost always neglected. People think, oh, you just can't compare across different programs. But that's not really true. Economists

have been using tools to be able to do that like the quality adjusted life year that i mentioned before that's cashing out the different programs in terms of by how much they're improving people's lives um and so there's a large body of you know academic research that can help you answer that question and because uh and at least in terms of you know benefiting present-day humans, focusing your resources on especially areas in global health to benefit the very poorest people tend to be the best ways of doing that. I think the conventional, you know, sort of average person looks at this and they say, well, you know, how much overhead is there? You know, like, oh, all this money is going to overhead. I don't want to support that. And you have kind of an interesting, very logical perspective on that.

Yeah, so I think this is just a junk metric. I think it's just so, like, it's very confused and I'm annoyed it's been so widely promoted because if you've got a lousy charity, it's going to stay a lousy charity even if you've got 0% overhead. And so the US Golf Association is a charity, but is that going to do as much good as giving to bed nets?

Clearly not, even if it had 0% overhead. And as an analogy, think about if you're buying a product for yourself, you're looking to buy a Mac or a Dell laptop. Would you look at how much the CEOs are paid? Would you look at how much money is spent on overhead or administration versus actual design and building of the products? No. You just look at how much these two products cost

and how good is the product. And we should think in just the same way for charities. With a certain amount of money that you're giving to the charity, what's the outcome that this charity is producing? If it needs to spend more than overhead to produce a better outcome, then that's great. We should be praising it for doing that. Right. paying a ceo quite a bit of money like a really good ceo can come in and effectuate the most good would be a prudent business decision yeah that's right um it's almost uh it's kind of a selfish emotional thing because we want as a giver we want to feel connected to the money that we're donating right so when you

when it's going towards overhead or rent we don't feel like our contribution is actually getting to the person who needs it right but on some level that's sort of selfish like we want we want to like see the you know the hand of the that's eating the food you know what i mean like even if in the in the meta sense it's effectuating the most change it's not giving us that that warm fuzzy feeling yeah right and i think there's a kind of puritanical element as well a little bit which is that you know NGO workers should be not taking salaries or taking very low salaries even if that's counterproductive because they're in this world and it's all about it's all about yeah giving back so how dare you

that's right but then if it's counter about giving back. So how dare you? But then if it's counterproductive, then why do we think this? But I think in contrast to that, we are in a time now where especially young people are demanding more and more transparency in the for-profit sector and in the nonprofit sector. And you see this in the nonprofit sector in the sense that these organizations are creating that transparency, like track your dollar, and you could see exactly where it goes and da da da da da. And I think that that's a, you know, that's a good thing. Well, you know, that's better than not having that. Oh, yeah. So I think transparency is terrific. And that kind of relates to the second question is how well is the organization implementing one of these programs uh and in particular um is it being honest with respect to the mistakes it's making so one of the charities that i think does the most good is uh give directly and it's a very simple program just transfers transfers cash directly to some of the

poorest people in the world living in kenya and one of their most exceptionally transparent organization they even have update charts that update weekly on what proportion of households had to pay a bribe in order to receive the transfer oh my god and the answer is like kind of two or three percent um and almost no charity would ever do that because all charities always have to pretend that everything's perfect all the time. That's never true. It's zero times. And so a charity that's very honest about the obstacles it's facing, that's a very good sign, in fact.

When Oxfam published a whole bunch of studies they'd taken showing that many of their programs actually weren't having an impact. I thought more of Oxfam not less uh and so yeah this sort of very great transparency is a very good sign um also just whether is the uh organization you know being led by really good people um does it is it doing monitoring and evaluation or even kind of trials of its own programs? And how much does it need your money, right? Like I'm thinking about what happened with the Red Cross and Katrina, where there were massive amounts of cash getting poured out and it not getting allocated. It's probably the most famous example of low and misallocation.

Yeah, so that's the final question is about what I call room for more funding, which is even if a charity is doing terrific work and has done in the past, you don't know that additional, doesn't necessarily follow additional donations are going to be as well used. So an example of this is a polio immunization vaccination.

Incredibly effective program. Should definitely put money towards it, except that it's already fully funded by the Gates Foundation. Additional money going to that just isn't actually going to have much of a difference. And the same is often true with disaster relief. Because it's so well publicized, natural disasters get a huge amount more funding than what I'd call ongoing natural disasters like deaths from malaria, tuberculosis, where I think you can have a much larger impact.

So how do we make this decision? How do we find out? Is this the idea behind, you know, the nonprofit that you started? Like, if somebody's listening and like, I have X amount of dollars to give and I want to allocate it best, but I don't even know where to begin.

Yeah. Well, then I think the best thing to do is to go onto the website of an organization that I didn't found, but I support very strongly called GiveWell. So it's givewell.org. And, you know, they've done the hard work of doing extraordinarily in-depth research

to work out what are these charities that do the very most good. Right, and they kind of started, these guys started kind of with a similar premise as you, right? Like they were like, but they were like investment bankers trying to figure out like, all right, where they wanted to make this pledge, but they couldn't figure out where it should best go yeah that's right they were working for the hedge fund bridgewater and they were giving some of their

money and thinking well i want to take this like any other purchasing decision i want to get my biggest bang for buck and they started trying to talk to charities and just finding they can get even what they thought of as the very most basic information, just what will my money actually do? Do you have any evidence by this program? Why are you choosing this rather than anything else? In fact, one charity that the now CEO, Holden Kowalski, spoke with was so confused by this that they phoned Bridgewater to try to get him fired because they thought that he must be a spy

for a different charity. Oh, wow. And that could be the only motivation he'd have for asking questions like that. Do some of the charities try to lobby to get on these lists? I mean, I would imagine it's impactful to their bottom line, right? Yeah. I mean, we get, so Giving What We Can has recommended charities as well that often relies very heavily on GiveWells as such, but sometimes differs.

And yeah, we get a ton of people contacting us you know trying to make the case right um i mean it's never you know we just have our own independent research and aren't affected by that right um because yeah i mean it's a matter of millions of dollars going to these charities right and in in kind of running this calculus i mean you're you know there, I would imagine, so much scientific method. Like you're taking philosophical precepts. You're trying to apply logic and math to try to come up with the best options for people. But isn't it more complicated?

I mean, we have psychology that plays into this. And then there's certain intangibles right like what about uh investing in new technologies where you don't know what's going to happen with that and what about you know political forces that are intervening that you have no control over that could you know prevent certain things from happening like yeah yeah how do you approach that or wrap your head around that yeah so so far we've just talked about these more easily quantifiable programs that have short-term effects, like distributing bed nets for the Gansamaleri Foundation,

deworming children. That all kind of fall into this 100x idea that you have. But by no means do I think they're definitely the best uses of money, because you could do things that are really trying to make big systemic change. give well we're now looking into that in conjunction with a foundation called good ventures uh these much kind of more uncertain but potentially higher payoff uh sorts of activities like you know policy change immigration reform um potentially better today deals innovation as well biotech biotech yeah exactly

biomedical research and so even that first thing just deciding whether you should fund bed nets rather than direct cash transfers involves a lot of judgment calls right definitely not a hard science like right so if you're sitting on ten thousand dollars and you can say well i could donate this to an organization that has a one percent chance of of saving the lives of a million people or i could donate this money to an organization that has a 100 chance of of saving the lives of 10 people so philosophically this is a bit of a moral dilemma right yeah i mean philosoph so and they talk about this and doing it better um and use the idea of expected value. And so I'm pleased you put numbers out there, because then I can say, well, I think the way you should assess decisions like this is to look at the probability of success and how good success would be, and then you multiply it all together so you said one percent chance of a million lives that's an

expected 10 000 lives one percent times a million and then you said versus a guarantee of 10 lives well that's way less than than 10 000 right and so i think the way the best way to make decisions in light of uncertainty like this is to look at the probability multiply it by the value of the success and then go with what um decision scientists call the expected value right right and that would mean in this case we actually i think there would be a kind of better answer which is to go with that one percent chance of saving a million lives interesting and in the research that you've done i mean you've kind of come up with pretty concrete numbers of the actual dollar amount that it would take to save a life or support a life. Yeah.

So our best guess at the moment is a donation of three and a half thousand dollars to the Against Malaria Foundation will save a life. Statistically, when you say save a life like that, that's sort of an amorphous term, too. Right. Like, what are we talking about? So what we're talking about is $3,500 will put 600 bed nets over the heads of 1,200 children for two years. One of those children under five would have died of malaria had you not done that. So that's precisely what we're talking about. Right, right, right. And sometimes people hear that and they're like, oh, I thought it cost $5 to save a life. And that's precisely what we're talking right right right uh and sometimes people

hear that and they're like oh i thought it cost five dollars to save a life and that's a shame that's because charities often give these very optimistic numbers but i think deep down people often don't believe them whereas this is just actually our kind of best guess even taking into account all sorts of different uncertainty interesting right, so we've kind of explored the first metric of effective altruism, which is allocation of financial resources. But now we have time, right? So how do we approach this and figure out how to best allocate this resource

for the most good? Yeah. So this, in the story of how I was coming to these ideas, we're now moving from 2009 to 2011. And precisely, I'd been promoting this idea of cost effective giving to charity. I had all these students coming to me and saying, okay, well, that's all great. But I've got this really big decision coming up, which is what the hell should I do with my career? And they were asking me, should I just go and get rich and give it all away?

Should I work for a non-profit? What should I do? And I was having to face this decision as well. Should I stay as an academic? Should I go and do something completely different? This is applied philosophy. This is your opportunity to apply your philosophy. Yeah, exactly.

And in particular, one of these people who came to me and pressed quite forcefully was Ben Todd. He had the options of doing a PhD in climate physics, or he could go into asset management where he could donate a lot. And we gave what was intended to be a discussion group turned into a lecture, which turned into a series of lectures because in that first lecture i think a third of the audience changed their career plans as a result of the talk and then we thought okay this is a sufficiently important set of concepts that and completely lacking in the world like if a young person wants to make a difference in their lives using their time uh using their career they have nowhere to go for the advice. The career service will just give them some mediocre tips on how to make a nice resume. And then the few online sites like Ethical Careers will just say,

oh, work in the non-profits. They don't even think about other options. And so we've set up an organization called 80,000 Hours, which is the number of hours you typically work in the course of your life, where the idea is, you know know it's a big deal it's worth in general when you make a decision you might want to spend one percent of that time working out how to best spend the other 99 percent you think right yeah you'd think so but not that many people would spend you know 800 hours uh 20 working weeks you know just sitting down thinking okay what am i going to do with my life right um and yeah so we now so it's really hard to figure out what charities are

the best it's even harder to figure out what career paths are the best and obviously it's going to be a lot more relative to the person um but we think there's a lot of progress that can be made at least relative to the status quo. So the standard advice of if you want to do good work for the charity, we think is badly wrong in a few ways. So one is just that many charities have no impact when tested. Something like 75% of social programs just don't make a difference at all. Second is that obviously there's loads of good ways to do good outside of the non-profit sector, through policy, politics, research, entrepreneurship,

and just, you know, the activities of for-profit companies as well, at least depending on the company. So it's, again, a very narrow approach. But then the third thing we think is just, this is also neglecting what we think of as the best path to really making a big difference, which is early on in your career where you just don't have many skills. Maybe you've come out of a good university, but you studied philosophy. You don't have that much of the kind of real world application. You should really be thinking

about leveling up. You should be thinking about making yourself better as a person, being more skilled in order to have a big impact later on. And that might well mean working in a for-profit company or trying to work in some very elite environment. And before then, perhaps working for non-profits. And then the very final mistake, I think, is that only thinks about the impact you can have through your labor rather than through your ability to advocate. So like Martin Luther King didn't work for the charity right he was a minister who's then able to advocate for important this incredibly important cause um or your ability to donate as well so again bill gates didn't work for the non-profit it's done a huge amount of good i estimate he's saved more lives

than everyone in my home country of scotland, you know, that was through his ability to donate. And so there are several paths to doing good and where to work out, yeah, for each person, what's the one that's going to have the very biggest impact. Well, just the simple fact that you're drawing attention to it and mindfulness around these ideas at the outset of a young person's career is potent and powerful in its own right.

You know what I mean? Like, it's just the fact that it's part of the discussion, part of the, you know, the mental decision making process of entering your career. But I would imagine, you know, it gets further complicated. You know, we're living in more and more of a independent contractor world. It's not that it's not the, you know, the world of you get a career, and that's where you stay your whole life. Yeah, it's like people are having multiple careers and doing many, many different things. So, your whole life. It's like people are having multiple careers and doing many, many different things. So, you know, many careers along the way. And, and so I'm just thinking like, how do you, I mean, in terms of like providing a service through 80,000 hours, like you've got to come

up with some kind of algorithm, right. To provide these options for people to explore. I would imagine that's, that's the heavy lifting heavy lifting of what you're trying to do. Yeah, well, I think that's exactly right. And I think a big mistake a lot of people make is thinking of career choice as this all-or-nothing decision, something you make when you're 22 and then you have to stick with it

for the rest of your life. Whereas, really, we think you should have a kind of career model. So you should think of yourself like an experimental scientist or an investigative journalist or something. You have a hypothesis about what would make for a good, what is the right career for you.

And then you go and test it. And that's like a decision made over like a year or two. And then if it doesn't work, you can go and do something else. And so the careers we often recommend are those that give you a very large base of options from which to go on to other things. And again, that's often a reason for not working in nonprofits. It's hard to move from nonprofits to other fields. Whereas if you get like an economics PhD, that opens up a lot

of doors. If you're working in something like management consulting, or if you learn to code, again, you're just opening up a lot of doors doors and so we encourage people at least to begin with to work in these skill sets that could be applicable in unforeseen ways later exactly implicit in all of this is you know quite a bit of optimism right like you're very you must be a very optimistic guy to be even tackling this problem to begin with uh so how do you like sort you communicate with people who are coming from a different perspective? I feel like the massive culture feels very disenfranchised. They feel like their vote doesn't count.

What's the point? I'm just going to watch Dancing with the Stars and eat my bag of Cheetos and try to buy the best, biggest screen TV that I can and I'm going to go golfing on the weekend and call it a life. They don't feel like their actions can have an impact. Yeah. Well, I think there's a couple of things.

So in terms of pessimism, like with respect to the world and progress, I think that's just not unfounded, I think not founded at all. I think over the last 200 years we've just had the most amazing rise in the standards of living of a large proportion of people in the world and so you know efforts to then um fight extreme poverty is just how to continue winning in ways that we really haven't done in the whole of human history before but then secondly in terms of actually having an impact i just think it's not borne out by the fact that you can't i mean we've seen this over and over again uh you know if again coming back

just to charitable spending if you spend your money in the right way then just 10 can save hundreds of lives over the course of your life. That's absolutely huge. And people say, oh, it's just a drop in the bucket. But that's not really relevant. It's the size of the drop that matters, not the size of the bucket. If you actually pull 10 people out of the ocean who are drowning, that would change your life forever. Yeah, exactly.

It would stay with you. We don't feel emotionally connected to it, so it's not the same experience. But the outcome is the same. Yeah, exactly. connected to it so it's not the same experience but the but the outcome is the same yeah exactly um so i think in part of your in the way that you communicate or try to like you know sort of compel this change there has to be a way to psychologically like you know create that bridge right because the psychology is the big part right it's like catalyzing the act like intellectually you know it makes perfect sense it's logical the philosophical basis for it is sound the impact is

is measurable right but there is the psychological barrier to taking the action yeah and i think that's exactly right and that's why kind of one of the things we've done is built this community the effects of altruism community which is just um community of uh thousands of people around the world who are just really excited about doing good and doing it effectively as well and that allows you to get this kind of positive reinforcement um because if you do start making like you know changes in your life that are going to do more good for the world you've got a whole bunch of people around you going, yeah, that's amazing. And that's, you know, then suddenly your peers are just kind of awarding you, um, of being very positive about those sorts of actions. And that's not tying yourself to the, um, the beneficiaries of your actions.

Ultimately, um, you're not being connected with the children you're deworming but i've actually found psychology is psychologically it's just very powerful as well like uh i do find when i get up um you know when i get up in the morning and i'm you know feeling psyched about my work or when i'm feeling like most rewarded by the work i'm doing it's mainly through know, inspiring people to do more good and just how excited they get by that rather than, you know, the people on the other side of the world

that I'm, you know, not as connected to. Right, right, right. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, and I think that's, again, been, you know, part of the reason for the uptake of these ideas is that now there's, you know, it's a community. It's a group of people who are all together saying, look're gonna realize in a certain way well that's the advocacy aspect of what you're doing though right yeah it's not like your money is going to deworming that's one

aspect of it but the advocacy and actually catalyzing change in the people that you're impacting you know perhaps on a one-by-one basis or by virtue of the talks that you're giving there's a real sense of of accomplishment there like that's making a difference you know it's like you have some resources going to africa and the other resources are pushing out in the other direction in a different way through the kind of energy that you're putting out there yeah um yeah so i mean ultimately i'm hoping for that wide-scale societal shift where people think very differently about, you know, giving to charity is not just this nice thing to do. But, you know, altruism or attempting to help others just isn't, you know, I want people to think of that as an obvious part of, like, significant part of just what it means to have a good life.

Well, you have to make it cool. You have to make it cool. It's cool to be altruistic. I mean, that's the truth. You know what I mean? It's like you have to make, like, I feel an obligation to make it cool to be altruistic i mean that's the truth you know what i mean it's like you have to make like i have like i have an i feel an obligation to make being vegan cool because people you're not going to like off so well well yeah but it's like you're not going to get it's like you're not going to get people to eat this food if it doesn't taste good like it's

got to actually taste better than what they're eating you know what i mean that's how you catalyze change that's how you attract it it. So I feel like you're, you know, like you're this millennial, you know what I mean? Who has a very powerful message and it's attractive because you have great energy and you're optimistic and, and people want to, they want to be like you, you know, it's cool. It's cool to be altruistic. And the more that you can kind of infuse the message with, with that, you know, I feel like that's a really powerful route. Yeah, I think, and that's the kind of message we want to convey, again, emphasizing just, this is an awesome opportunity. It's actually a really amazing way to live your life.

It's a way where you're not going to find yourself in middle age just thinking, well, I've made a ton of money, but what does it all mean you know you wouldn't think oh well you know i saved 10 000 lives but like what was the point it doesn't doesn't really make sense yeah yeah what about i mean have do you account for uh personal development like you know the buddha would say that the best way to improve the world is to improve yourself. You know what I mean? You can't help others until you help yourself. So, for example, time spent on self-help or meditation or mindfulness practices or the time that I spend each day when I get up and I go running or I go to the pool would seemingly not

kind of be applicable to this calculus of giving back. But I feel like it's absolutely crucial to me in order to be the best version of who I am so that I am available for the rest of it. Yeah, no, I think that's totally right. I mean, if you're trying to do a lot of good, then improving your ability to do that is incredibly important. I mean, if you're trying to do a lot of good, then improving your ability to do that is incredibly important. I mean, at the extreme, if you're, you know, reckless and get hit by a car or something because you're not crossing the road or not wearing your seatbelt and killed in a car crash, all the good you do in the course of your life is gone.

It's not going to matter, right. And so I think, you know, the time I spend at the gym or any time I'm spending meditating, you know, that's the most effective use of the time in the day because that enhances everything else. Right. And, yeah, that's why there's often quite a bit of overlap or interest from the effective altruism community also in the kind of productivity, personal development, life hacking, rationality, communities as well. Because, you know, we've got this aim, just trying to help others as much as possible. Part of that means leveling yourself up, means being a better person. And actually, I found that, you know, one of the surprising ways I wouldn't have anticipated

that this has benefited myself is that now you've got this big reason to actually like get out of bed and go to the gym yeah yeah it's because you're not just benefit it's not just so that you can yourself have a better life but it's actually because um you have the lives of others you're infused with yeah you're infused with a sense of purpose that's right yeah yeah and there's nothing more powerful than that yeah really all right let's talk a little bit about some of the controversy swirling around some of your ideas sure not a fan of the ice bucket challenge so i got you into a little trouble it got me into trouble yeah um let's break that down i didn't uh so that was unexpected i wrote that article

quite quickly oh come on everybody loved the ice bucket challenge why be a hater and then i was i wrote this grumpy article about it so i wanted yeah i was making a couple of points so one as we've talked about was this ethical licensing uh the worry that the ice bucket challenge was the most extreme like this um where it's very public uh you know you're pouring a bucket of ice over your head um so very salient action going out to all of your facebook friends so you can really demonstrate how altruistic you are uh and then donating i think what ended up being on average relatively small amounts of money like tens of dollars or something i think it was meant to be a hundred dollars but people would often donate less right i. I mean, in the aggregate,

what did they raise? Like $3 million? No, in the aggregate, they raised $100 million. Oh, $100 million. Yeah. Now you're really a hater. Well, so that'll come to the second point. So that was the first thing. You've got to think of that $100 million, how much would have been

donated to other charities? What are the other effects? And all I wanted to say is just, well, we need to think, before we're kind of lavishing praise on this phenomenon, we need to have an assessment of that and an estimate. Right, let's dissect it and figure out exactly what happened. Yeah, that's right. Because it's just, it's not obvious that it's net positive.

I mean, we always say, oh, it's 100 million raised for charity, but it's 100 million raised and how much taken from other charities. So, I mean, the amount of funding that goes to charities or percentage that Americans spend on charitable giving is pretty constant over time, which suggests that additional fundraising efforts are maybe just eating away at others. All right, but hold on a second. I mean, I feel like this was, you know, because it was a viral internet moment, that it must have, you know, I don't know, but I would assume that it must have inspired people who ordinarily don't give to give in the moment because they were caught up in the excitement of this so you're you're you're adopting kind of a zero-sum game approach where this is taking money away from other charities but you could make that argument with respect to any giving right anytime you give that's money that didn't go somewhere else yeah or any big fundraising campaign and i think it just is true um that whenever you're raising money then to some extent i don't think 100 but to some extent that's taking money away from other.

But if you're watching Benedict Cumberbatch get his, you know, like get ice on his head, you know, I'm sure there were people who just spontaneously gave $10 who weren't previously, you know, thinking about giving money and just did it in the moment. Yeah, I'm sure there were some. And so you're assuming that that had an impact on their later giving, but I'm not so sure that that's valid, is it?

Yeah, so the idea is that it impacted some people's later giving. And there is some evidence for thinking that's the case, like the fact that people's giving on average just doesn't seem to change. Kind of year on year, it just remains at about 2%. And so I don't think all of the $100 million would have been donated somewhere else. So giving what we can, for example, we've raised about $450 million of pledge donations. And we ask people, like, how much do you think you would have been giving otherwise? And we estimate it's about 50%.

But that's unreliable information coming back to you, though. Oh, yeah, that's right. It might be. Sort of anecdotally. Yeah, that's right. It might be too high, it might be too low. But it's also just what you'd expect, is that a certain percentage of money is going to be donated anyway whenever you're doing a fundraising campaign. And this takes us to the second issue,

is that we simply have to ask the question of how effective is the ALS Association compared to other charities, compared to the average charity? Because if the ALS Association is significantly less effective than charities on average, then if you're doing two things, one is that you're raising, say, 50 million from just out of nowhere would have been spent on ice cream or something, and 50 million that would have gone from other charities. If those other charities are much more effective than the ALS Foundation on average, then you

could be net harmful for that reason. And I think there's some arguments for thinking that so um using this metric of quality adjusted life year i think the estimates that costs about two hundred thousand dollars via als treatment um uh just to look after someone for the year who's suffering from ALS, you know, with that same money, you could save the lives of tens of thousands of people, I think, but not quite thousands of people. And so, yeah, so we just at least, and again, I didn't want to come down as a conclusion,

but we at least have to ask that question. And then in particular, you know, when a charity is getting $100 million, Again, I didn't want to come down as a conclusion, but we at least have to ask that question. And then in particular, when a charity is getting $100 million, is that final million dollars going to be spent as well as the first million dollars? It's very unlikely, especially when its income is increasing 50-fold. Yeah, explain that idea a little bit. Yeah, so this is the idea of thinking on the margin is what economists do it. But the idea that just things have diminishing returns. So you have your first coffee in the morning and that, you know, makes you feel really good, kind of perks you up.

But if you have to drink three or four, then you start to feel kind of sick, you know, seconds less good. And in general, just whenever everything has diminishing returns. So you spend your money in the best way that you can. Then when you have more money, you've already used up that opportunity. You can not spend it as well. And so for something like an organization that's getting a vast influx of funds,

it's going to not know. Firstly, it might just struggle to spend the money well at all because it's just unprecedented. It's never even thought about how it would spend money in this way. Then the second is that even if it does have a good plan, it's simply not going to be able to spend it as well as it spends the initial use of funds. Right. So in other words, let's say the final $10 million, ALS gets $90 million. The final $10 million goes somewhere else that is in much more dire need of that money, the sort of impact in a meta sense is much more profound.

Yeah, that's exactly right. And I think this relates to healthcare, philanthropic spending on healthcare in general. spending on healthcare in general uh something like um you're going to do a lot more good by funding malaria treatment um rather than or prevention rather than something to do with cancer prevention or treatment uh because you're giving to countries where people are so much poorer that additional money makes a much bigger difference and so much less money is already spent on malaria that the lowest hanging opportunity the ease the best opportunities have still not been taken whereas phenotypic cancer is just like this really hard problem but by taking this like very you know economic dispassionate approach to this you're draining

all the fun out of it right so the als challenge was fun and it goes back to what you're talking about about making it cool right so it was cool to do that yeah people were making fun videos and and and i think an intangible in your equation is the long-term impact of people being excited about campaigns that that you know, get them to reach for their wallets. Right? So maybe that campaign has created more people interested in altruism than would have existed otherwise. Yeah.

So that's the kind of alternative. So again, we were talking about ethical licensing versus what psychologists would call foot in the door, the kind of first step approach. And again, I'd be really in favor of that. If we can just kind of raise the altruism waterline of a whole society, that would be a fantastic thing to do. Right. That could potentially overcome, you know,

whatever downside occurred in your perspective as a result of the ice bucket challenge, right? Yeah, yeah yeah potentially um but it seems to me like it wasn't designed i mean it wasn't designed at all it's just this viral phenomenon um right just happened yeah just happened but i think somebody had a fun idea of doing something and it spread virally but it's not dissimilar from you know the skydiving example that you've you know cited in the past these i this you know creating fun activities around giving which inherently seems like a good idea to me you're

just you're tracking it to its conclusion though and seeing holes in that you know in the in that equation yeah so i think and pro it i'm very favorable of it as long as it's like the first step so you know maybe you get someone to like go skydiving for charity and uh it's on balance not doing that much good uh and they feel like they did their charitable act for the year yeah so that's the bad outcome because if there's no follower at all but if however they say oh wow that was terrific i had like loads of fun and then say okay, how about you do this additional thing? And then you do something more again. And then it actually starts to feel like, oh, yeah,

this was the first step that I was taking. And in the case of the Ice Bucket Challenge, there wasn't that. And again, that's no one's fault. It's because it's just this viral phenomenon. People pour water on their heads, and then they go back to their day-to-day lives. I'd be pretty surprised if actually people, like many people were, then, you know, significantly changing their life as a result of that.

All right. So a couple other controversial ideas that you have. One of them is around fair trade. Yeah. Yeah. So the general idea of ethical consumption in favor of, you know, good work in theory. But then fair trade in particular, I think, is just a very bad implementation of that idea. And that's for a few reasons. The first is just that the additional money you spend on fair trade goods relative to non-fair trade goods, of that, a very small percentage actually ends up in the hands of producers. And possibly none of it ends up trickling down to the wages of the poorest people who are the farmers working in, say, coffee plantations.

Right, so it's not a conceptual disagreement. It's an implementation problem. It's an implementation thing, yeah. So yeah, and it's just a few ways in which I think it's badly implemented. So that's one. Although that's going to be very hard to get around because supermarkets are going to use this as a way to do what's called price discrimination, which is that you're willing to pay more for an ethical product.

I'm going to just charge as much as I can, and I can say, oh, and this is an ethical product, even if a very small percentage of that's actually going to benefit people. Yeah, I mean, that's what's happening right now with organic labeling. It's become commodified, right? So it becomes a premium brand to have that certification and that label on a food product. And, you know, food producers know this, supermarkets know this, and the governing organization the usda knows this so then what happens is lobbying efforts are applied that uh begin to um devalue the the organic certification gets watered

down yeah right so it doesn't quite mean what it used to mean and you know organizations are charged a lot to get the certification and they're able to now produce foods that aren't quite as organic as they were maybe five years ago still meet the standard they can charge more and it just becomes a business so the under the underlying idea behind it is quite good it's just not quite what people think it is and i feel like it's similar with fair trade yeah although yeah no i think that's right although i think there are even additional problems with fair trade so one is because i mean that's an example of you know for profits co-opting it right and i i guess the kind of additional price being charged for fair trade um well starbucks starbucks can charge more yeah if they tell you this is fair trade yeah and we

don't really spend any time really analyzing what's actually going on yeah yeah and i don't know what what is so i'm not like pointing fingers again yeah but i think there's even additional problems beyond that so one is the fact that with fair trade production uh it's hard to get certification um in effect it kind of costs resources. And so most fair trade coffee production doesn't come from the poorest countries like Ethiopia and Kenya, it comes from places like Mexico, Colombia, Costa Rica, where again, you know, they're not rich countries, but they're 10 times richer than Ethiopia or Kenya. And so the additional learnings just aren't doing as much good. And then the final thing is just the way the fair trade model works is by giving two dollars or it gives a price premium

a certain amount of money in addition to the market price for the goods bought and that's great for the fair trade producers it means they can sell their goods at higher price but um through the laws of supply and demand it means that fair trade coffee is going to be oversupplied uh it means that non-fair trade farmers are going to be made worse off and that's why i'm like most deeply ambivalent about fair trade is but isn't that a market force that would compel other suppliers to become fair trade uh there's only a, I mean, if you could have everyone that was fair trade, then you wouldn't, I guess you wouldn't have people being harmed, um, made worse off, but you still would have coffee oversupply. So you'd have a lot of coffee going to waste, which would seem, uh, inefficient.

Um, but at the moment, uh, you know, the vast majority of coffee production is still not fair to fade. And so if you do have some people, some producers kind of supplying more than the market wants, that is just going to make fair to fade workers worse off as a result, because they won't be able to sell the goods. I mean, I feel like the biggest thing is just the trickle down of actually getting it to the farmers.

Yeah. Because I think that's what the consumer is operating under when they're making that choice they want to know that it was fairly produced which implicitly means that you know you're taking care of the actual not that not the boss of the you know like the actual farmers yeah i mean in particular compared to just firstly buying just the cheapest the coffee that's just produced in the cheapest countries sorry in the cheapest countries sorry in the poorest countries where um the money's going to go furthest and then secondly donating the difference so cutting out the middlemen cutting out starbucks and all the retailers that are

taking a cut each time yeah and just giving to yes what i mean it's a simple gonna do that simple direct just buy the cheapest goods that's. Set up a direct debit to give directly, which just transfers cash to the poorest people in Kenya, Tanzania. What could be simpler? How do you set up that direct? Can you do that through your organization? Yeah. I mean, if you want, you can give to,

so Giving What We Can has a trust. And if you're a Giving What We Can member, you can donate through the trust. If not, you can set up a direct debit through GiveWell, and they'll distribute it to their top organizations. Or in this case of GiveDirectly, you could just go straight onto the GiveDirectly website. Right. All right. All right. Final controversial subject.

Sweatshops. What is going on here? Yeah. subject sweatshops what is going on here yeah so again i think this is a case of kind of good intentions gone wrong with respect to uh the attempt to boycott sweatshop produced goods and yeah so you had ryan holiday on the show recently he was the chief marketing officer for american apparel which you know as a marketing campaign claims, okay, we are sweatshop free, we do not use sweatshop produced goods. We do not use sweatshops, we just only employ people in America, or other kind of, well, like much richer countries. And so people think, okay, I shouldn't

buy goods produced in sweatshops, I should buy from American Apparel. I think that's a very bad outcome for the poor. Because they're otherwise unemployed. You're saying there's either no employment or there's poor condition employment. That's right. Or worse jobs, prostitution, street hustling, scavenging from dumps. So sweatshops are pretty horrific places.

No one's disputing that at all. They're not nice places to work. But extreme poverty is just very extreme indeed. And they're actually the best jobs going around. They actually are the job. They are typically paying much more than other jobs available in the area. And, you know, the people working there, choosing to work there, in fact, um emigrating

across borders risking deportation so that they can work these sweatshop jobs and so if you're taking away those sweatshops then uh um then you're taking away the best working opportunities the people in the poorest countries have but isn't i mean to extrapolate on that argument i mean couldn't that be you know it almost sounds like an argument a slave owner would make, you know, it's like, well, I can either, you know, have this guy as my slave, or he'll just be wandering, you know, unemployable, and will perish, you know, in the wilderness. So I'm actually doing him a favor by providing him an option and putting a roof over his head. Yeah. To give the most extreme, right? So I think the cases are quite different because the people who work in sweatshops, you know, it's their voluntary choice to go and work there.

And in fact, it's, you know, they're enthusiastic about working there relative to all the options. And I agree, we want to end the underlying poverty that makes sweatshops desirable place to work um and that's why you know campaign for people to donate more like far more or to you know try and make systemic change uh so that we eradicate sweatshops by actually just eradicating poverty um but yeah it's a voluntary choice that people make to work there and it's so banning it is just like taking away um uh yeah banning it is taking away the best option that they have whereas in you know the slavery case um it's well firstly the person would have many options to benefit you know benefit the slave and many other ways and

secondly um if it's an option if they're like well you can do as do as you wish if you want to keep yeah you can be my slave as long as you want to and if you want to leave you can leave and not be my slave i mean then that's no longer slavery but uh right right right all right so by but by virtue of your your logic like i should feel less guilty about the iPhone in my pocket. Oh, yeah, for sure. Because there's this weird dissonance. It's like, okay, I'm trying to align my actions with my values, but I still have an iPhone,

and I know intellectually that this was produced under circumstances that are less than ideal that I'm disconnected with from you know like i don't i don't really know what goes on in that factory in china where my i hear rumors you know and it's the same it's the same dissonance that occurs with somebody who doesn't like the idea of killing animals but will buy ground ground beef at the supermarket it really is no different you know what i mean but by your argument like i should say it's okay that i have my iphone because these people are employed well i think

it should go the other way actually so uh i think you should think take that feeling of kind of moral uncomfort that you have when buying an iphone and thinking of those horrific conditions and then channel that to try and end the underlying poverty. So you wouldn't have had that discomfort if you hadn't been doing anything. But now you feel somewhat involved. But you've benefited people in the course of doing that, just a little bit, by providing better job opportunities.

But that act has made salient actually how bad the lives of some people on the other side of the world are. And so I think that's good that we have that moral discomfort, but reacting to it by just saying, okay, I'm going to keep my hands clean and then I don't have to think about this at all is the wrong way. Doing nothing is the worst option. don't have to think about this at all right that's the long way doing nothing is is the worst option yeah and then it's a distinction between um a symptomatic or an underlying causal approach right like by not buying the iphone you're kind of dealing with the symptom buying it or not buying

it like you're in this the the factory and the people that are employed there is symptomatic of an underlying cause which is poverty right so so actually channeling your resources and your energy towards addressing the underlying poverty would be a better option in the same way that you would treat a disease by getting at the underlying cause as opposed to the pharmaceutical that masks whatever symptom is a result of that yeah i think that's exactly right. That condition, right? Yeah. I like that. Oh, good.

Maybe I've got a concept. All right, cool. So we've been going on an hour and a half. We'll wrap it up here soon. So one of the things that's in your book, Doing Good Better, is you kind of have these five questions that are basically like the decision tree to entertain when you're looking at you know how to allocate your resources so why don't we just run through those really quickly so that would be a good way to kind of like cap it off yeah so the first question um which we talked about earlier is uh how many people benefit and by how much um so that's the key is just thinking about your impact in terms of improvements to people's lives.

The more people you can benefit by a greater amount, the better. The second question is, is this the most effective thing I can do? And that's the idea of making the most difference, not just making a difference. Because even among very good ways of doing good, the best are hundreds of times better than just merely good sorts of activities. So you need to always think not just is this making some impact, but is this making the most impact I can? Third question is, is this area neglected? So because things in general have diminishing returns, it's vital to focus on the poorest

people in the world or those core areas that don't get as much attention u.s education's you know important cause but so much philanthropic funding already going to it it's hard to make a big difference fourth question is what would have happened otherwise and that question says the difference you make is the difference between how much good you do and how much good would have been done even if you hadn't acted um i talk about the impact a doctor has where you know as a doctor you're saving lives every single day but for most of those lives they would have been saved anyway even if you hadn't taken that job and so the actual impact you have the difference you've made to the world i think is much less than you might intuitively think by becoming a doctor. And then the final question is, what are the chances of success and how good would success be? And that's a crucial question when you're thinking about uncertain ways of doing

good, you know, things that maybe won't pay off, but might have a really big impact like systemic change or something other than these concrete, measurable ways of doing good. And that's this concept called expected value, multiplying the chance of success by the value of the success if you do it. And that provides us a way of thinking about systemic change. And then those are the kind of five underlying questions. If you're thinking like that, you're thinking like an effective altruist.

It's the kind of power tools for doing good. And then the second half of the book applies that to doing good through charity, doing good through career, doing good through your consumption, and thinking about what are the most important causes. What are the biggest problems in the world, the ones we should be really trying to tackle? Yeah, I love it. I mean, the book is really great. It definitely changed the way that I think about all of this. Certainly changes how I perceive, you know, the world of charitable giving. And I would recommend everybody check it out.

It's very cool, man. You've done a great service by putting this out there. Well, thank you. Yeah, it's cool and if if you're inspired um by professor mccaskill and interested in learning more about uh about giving i mean you can go to giving what we can and learn more um about what that organization does and if you're interested in trying to figure out how to allocate your next gift givewell.org that's a good place to go too right yeah that's right and if you want to do good for your career then 80,000 hours.org that's a good place to go too right yeah that's right and if you want to do

good for your career then 80000hours.org is right is the place so i took the test i did it said i should be a politician or a startup entrepreneur i think both of those things are pretty good for you i don't know i need the big idea for the startup entrepreneur though so i can come back and do what you're doing which is participating in ya combinator so why don't we cap it off with with that so you're here we're in mountain view right now just down the street from stanford and you're participating in a very prestigious sort of venture capital uh how would you describe it compendium it's not a conference but it's sort of like all these startups you've been invited. It's like an accelerator for new startups or an incubator. So it's a way of taking early stage startups

and really getting them off the ground. And it's produced companies like Dropbox, Reddit, Airbnb. And so it's the kind of premier accelerator in the world. And recently they started taking nonprofits and we're one of them. Yeah, how many nonprofits have gone through there how many yeah less than 10 i think um i think out of 100 companies in this batch for non-profits right uh and so you know i think y combinator they're definitely still trying to figure out exactly i mean you're still finding their feet with non-profits

because obviously it's a you know very different set of standards than the for-profits but there's similar things that apply to both and this has been one of the most valuable learning experiences of my life i think it's pretty cool so they kind of they mentor you but there's also a little bit of a competitive dog and pony show right where you have to get up there and you got a pitch yeah it's like front of a pretty intimidating audience of potential investors, etc. Yeah, so it all culminates in demo day, where all the companies stand up, they pitch for two and a half minutes to 450 investors. And then afterwards, there's this crazy meat market

where everyone tries to meet everyone else. And the startups are looking for investment, we're looking for donations. And there's a little app so that investors can like different companies. And then you'll get an email sent and you can be in touch afterwards. So how'd it go? You already did that part, right? Yeah, we've done that part.

It went really well. So it was Ben Todd, the CEO of 80,000 Hours, that was presenting. And I thought he nailed it, which I was happy with. And then, yeah, I had a bunch of people really interested in what we were doing in particularly as a donation opportunity. You know, we did set up 80,000 hours with the intention of being the most cost-effective charity in the world because, you know, we're encouraging people to work on the most important causes or donate to the most cost-effective charities. Yeah, you better walk that walk, right? If you're saying like, you you know make sure you understand where your money's

going and that it's actually having an impact and then you're saying please donate to us oh yeah so we're very yeah we're very aware of that especially given you know they could be donating to these amazing first order charities but we're like a meta charity we're like right kind of like we're raising resources for the most um causes and most effective charities. And you're fertilizing future effective altruists. Yeah, that's partly what we're doing. And making people who are already trying to do good more effective because they have better knowledge about what to do with their life and so uh yeah we think that um you know money coming in through us is like a tenfold or maybe hundredfold multiplier or something so uh it's like an investment it's

like a way of getting leverage in your donation right and from here you're almost done here and then you're heading off to oxford so yeah i'll very shortly be going back to oxford where i'm starting um an associate professorship uh What are you going to teach? I'm teaching ethics, political philosophy, as you'd expect. Yeah. I won't merely push effective altruism. I'll be much more impartial

than that. But yeah, I'm very lucky to be starting at Lincoln College, Oxford University. So it's an undergraduate? Yeah, undergraduate and graduates. And the Oxford systems. You're going to be teaching people that might be older than you yeah that's that's probably true um uh yeah which um i mean even with the undergraduates i don't feel so different than when i walked into came with jj 18 so uh i'll need to be yeah well i don't either but you know that's how it goes

well that's an interesting dynamic though to be to be i Yeah. Well, I don't either, but you know, that's how it goes. Well, that's an interesting dynamic though, to be, to be, I mean, you're essentially a peer. Uh, yeah. I mean,

obviously I'm going to have to try and create this, uh, create a dynamic where, you know, I am the tutor and costuming. Yeah. A little bit. Right.

So I won't be wearing this t-shirt. I'll be wearing a nice shirt and so on. No, no Chuck Taylors. Yeah. Right. Um, uh, but I think, you know, I nice shirt and so on no no chuck taylor's yeah right um uh but i think you know i think there's also advantage real advantages there like i actually know like nearly the member it's fairly salient what it's like being you know turning up at

cambridge so scared um suddenly surrounded by all these people are so high performing and you know it's very easy to beat yourself up very easy to feel like an imposter and so i think that the kind of empathy still being quite young will give me is going to be an asset in terms of teaching well good luck man yeah thanks uh your work is inspiring uh i can't wait to see you know where this all leads for you and uh i appreciate your time man yeah thank you so much yeah it's cool so all right all right, if you're digging on Professor McCaskill, I'm going to create a little formality here. You can go to his website, williammccaskill.com, or you can go to 8000hours.com. You can go to givingwhatwecan.org. And also, maybe most importantly, effectivealtruism.com, if you want to get involved and figure out how to create community around these

ideas where you live is that fair to say yeah that's right cool is there anything else you're at will mccaskill on twitter at will mccaskill on twitter and the book uh doing good better doing good better of course guide to effective altruism it's out now yeah definitely pick it up where all books are sold use the amazon banner at ritual.com doncom. Don't forget that. All right, cool, man. Thanks. Thank you. Peace. Plants. We did it. How'd you guys like that? He's pretty impressive, right? I think so. A pleasure and an honor to sit down with him. Thank you, William, for taking the time. And again, I can't wait to see where this guy's career is headed. If you want to learn more about effective altruism, go to centerforeffectivealtruism.org,

center, C-E-N-T-R-E. I would definitely check out William's book, How to Do Good Better. Again, I can't say enough good things about that. And please check out his nonprofits, 80,000hours.org, and also Giving What We Can. I will have links and show notes up on the episode page at richroll.com. Please check that out. I put quite a bit of time, as does my team, into creating a robust source of resources

so you guys can take your learning and your edification on the subject matters presented in each episode to the next level. So yeah, check that out. It's there for you guys. Thanks so much, you guys, for all your Plant Power needs. Go to richroll.com.

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