The Rich Roll Podcast - How To Live An Ethical Life With Moral Philosopher Peter Singer

Episode Date: January 30, 2023

Today’s guest has dedicated his life to answering these questions with actionable, sustainable solutions. Meet the world’s most influential living philosopher, Peter Singer. The grandfather of both the modern animal rights and effective altruism movements, Peter is a Professor of Bioethics at Princeton and a Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne, who has published several books on our moral responsibility to alleviate suffering. Since its original publication in 1975, his groundbreaking work "Animal Liberation" has awakened millions of people to the existence of speciesism—our systematic disregard of nonhuman animals—inspiring a worldwide movement to transform our attitudes to animals and eliminate the cruelty we inflict on them. His book "The Life You Can Save" and the nonprofit organization of the same name focus on how we should respond to extreme poverty and how doing good for others can bring fulfillment to your own life. Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: Athletic Greens: https://www.athleticgreens.com/richroll Squarespace: Squarespace.com/RichRoll  InsideTracker:  insidetracker.com/RichRoll Voicing Change II: richroll.com/voicingchangeII Peace + Plants, Rich

For me to live an ethical life it's not enough just to say I'm going to obey some simple moral rules like don't steal, don't cheat, don't hurt other people. You have to think also about what can I do positively given the advantages that I have and the problems that we have in the world. It's often easier to see how you can relieve suffering than how you can boost happiness. You know, some people say you should be a negative utilitarian and only focus on reducing pain and suffering. I don't think that's right, at least theoretically it's not right, because if you could greatly increase the happiness of a large number of people and do that without causing any suffering or maybe cause, you know, mild headaches to a few people,

clearly that would be the right thing to do. So it's not that the positive doesn't count at all in the scales. It's just that given the way the world is, the negative pain and suffering is so much more apparent and in a way so much easier to prevent in the sense that we know what we could do that would prevent it. It may be hard to bring that about, but sometimes in terms of making people happier, we don't even really know how to do that.

The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the podcast. My guest today is just an absolute living legend. His name is Peter Singer, and he is perhaps the world's most influential living philosopher. The grandfather of both the modern animal rights and effective altruism movements, the grandfather of both the modern animal rights and effective altruism movements. Peter is a professor of bioethics at Princeton and laureate professor at the University of Melbourne.

He's published several books on our moral responsibility to alleviate suffering, including the highly influential book, Animal Liberation, and a book called The Life You Can Save, both of which are books we cover in this conversation. I should say as an aside and as a gift to our listeners, Peter has very generously offered to provide everybody with a free copy of his book, The Life You Can Save,

to anyone who wants one. To get your copy, visit thelifeyoucansave.org slash richroll or click the link in the description below. Free paperback copies are available for US residents only, but all listeners, regardless of location, can download the ebook or audio book for free. And the point that I'm really driving at is that donations to Peter's Save Lives Fund

can also be made via this link and all donations there will be matched dollar for dollar up to $25,000 thanks to a very generous anonymous donor. I love meeting Peter. I love talking to him. I really hope you enjoy this conversation. It's all coming up really quick, but 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.

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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. Okay, Peter Singer. Peter's work has had just a profound influence on my life. So it was an absolute honor

to host this discussion, a discussion about the ethical obligations we have to others, to human and non-human lives alike, and how these ideas that Peter thinks so deeply about can shape our choices and actions in the real world. So without further ado, here's me and Peter Singer. Well, Peter, it's a real honor to have you here today as somebody who's admired your work for a very long time. I'm thrilled at the prospect of being able to talk to you. And this conversation will have been preceded by me giving an introduction to your work, your kind of formal bio, but I'm curious how you articulate what it is that you do. Like, how do you explain your kind of focus

and curiosity in the world? Right, so I've got interested in philosophy as an undergraduate, but I was always interested in the part of philosophy that connects to real life and that can make a difference to how we live. So some of the courses I did were discussing how we know anything about the world. How do we know that we're sitting at a table now, that I'm not dreaming, that there's not an evil demon who's given me illusions.

Those are interesting intellectual problems, but I certainly wouldn't have wanted to spend my life doing them. But once I realized that ethics, the part of philosophy that connects with life, really can make a difference to how you think about your life, your values, and how you act in the world, makes a difference to changing the world. And that seemed to me to be something important and worthwhile, as well as intellectually interesting. Yeah, I mean, what's interesting is that you have fulfilled that promise in an era and a time in which there does seem to be

a disconnect between the kind of academic pursuit of philosophy and the true utility of it. This came up in your conversation with Ryan Holiday, where he was saying back in ancient Greece and ancient Rome, politics and philosophy were very commingled pursuits. Whereas now they don't really seem to meet. But I look at you as somebody who's had a profound impact on culture and how we think about ethics and morality

in a very utilitarian and real way. That's true. Although I think I've been fortunate in the period that I've been living and working in philosophy, it has moved back more like that Greek ideal, if you like, that it does connect with how we live. And there are many of my students, for example,

who are interested in taking philosophy courses precisely for that reason they want to think about these issues and that's different from when I was an undergraduate when there was still this period of what was known as ordinary language philosophy or linguistic analysis where a lot of philosophers said

philosophy doesn't teach you how to live it simply helps us to understand the meanings of the moral terms. And then the student movement of the 1960s started to get things back on track. So with the Vietnam War, students wanted more relevant courses and one of the things that philosophy could do was, well, there's this ancient tradition of when is it right to go to war, just war theory.

And they started talking about that. And then they started talking about civil disobedience. When are you justified in disobeying the law? And so I think then philosophy got back on track to those sorts of topics and moved away from the idea that somehow a neutral activity telling you what it means to say something is good or bad. Yeah, I feel that that era was sort of supplanted by,

the greed is good, sensibility of the 80s and perhaps the ennui and the cynicism of Gen X, which is my generation. But I too look at this newer generation, the population, the age range of the students I'm sure you teach, who do seem very concerned about ethics, morality, and impact in terms of where they're investing

their academic curiosity and their career choices. Like they really wanna be on a track that is going to have a net positive on the world, which is very different from the sensibility of my generation when we were in college. Yeah, I think there were always some, at least, I've been teaching at Princeton now since 1999. And I think there were always some students

who were interested in how they could have an impact on the world, but I agree that it's come back more strongly in the last few years and there are more students wanting to take courses for that reason. Which of course begs the question of how do we think about morality, positive impact, ethics, et cetera. So when the question is posited to you, what does it mean to live an ethical life?

How do you begin to unpack that and respond to it in a meaningful way that can help direct somebody who's wanting to know the answer to that? Yeah, so I asked them to think about the impact that they can have about the consequences of their actions, what they can do to make the world a better place than it would have been if they hadn't lived in it. And clearly there are a lot of opportunities for that.

I mean, especially if you're living in an affluent society like the United States or any of the other affluent countries. And you see that there are a lot of people in extreme poverty in other countries. You see that we're damaging the climate of our planet. You see that we're inflicting vast amounts of suffering on non-human animals in factory farms.

There are all sorts of choices that you have to make about how you're going to live, what you're going to do as a career choice, which students are thinking about, but also what are you doing with your spare cash, what do you eat, All of those things that we can now see as ethical questions. So for me to live an ethical life, it's not enough just to say, I'm gonna obey some simple moral rules like don't steal, don't cheat, don't hurt other people. You have to think also about what can I do positively

given the advantages that I have and the problems that we have in the world. And your particular lens for that is the reduction of suffering. That seems to be kind of like the lever through which all of this calculus is made. Yes, that's right. It's primarily the reduction of suffering.

I do think that producing happiness or pleasure is a value as well. But that's a harder thing to get your hands around, right? Exactly. Yes, that's right. It's often easier to see how you can relieve suffering than how you can boost happiness. And so, some people say you should be a negative utilitarian and only focus on reducing pain and suffering. I don't think that's right. At least theoretically, it's not right

because if you could greatly increase the happiness of large number of people and do that without causing any suffering or maybe cause, you know, mild headaches to a few people, clearly that would be the right thing to do. So it's not that the positive doesn't count at all in the scales. It's just that given the way the world is, the negative, the pain and suffering is so much more apparent and

in a way, so much easier to prevent in the sense that we know what we could do that would prevent it. It may be hard to bring that about, but sometimes in terms of making people happier, we don't even really know how to do that. Right, right. And in the context of the reduction of suffering, this is kind of the landscape from which you're thinking on animal liberation emanates, and I wanna get to that, but I kinda wanna put that aside for now

and focus on something that's a little bit more current, which is the, you being this sort of godfather of the effective altruism movement, a movement which is very much in the news at the moment as a result of Sam Bankman Freed and FTX and all of that, which has kind of put this idea about how to effectively give to have the greatest impact on the reduction of suffering under the microscope of people who are now critical of it.

And I'm interested, I know you've written about this, but parsing the behavior of this human being from the philosophical underpinnings of this movement that you helped pioneer? Yeah, so I think the effective altruism movement in general is saying, we should try to make a positive difference to the world, as I've been saying,

and we should use reason and evidence to find the best way of doing that. And one of the things that the movement has talked about is making a positive difference doesn't necessarily mean becoming a doctor and working in a low-income country or working for one of the charities that are helping people in poverty. It might mean actually trying to earn a lot of money and then using that to support organizations that are doing good. and then using that to support organisations that are doing good. That can be a valuable thing to do.

And I think Sam Bankman-Fried set out to do that. I know that he had a conversation with Will McCaskill early on, Will being one of the founders of the effective altruism movement, and Will suggested that because he was mathematically gifted, that might be an opportunity for him. And I know others. I've had Princeton students who were in a similar situation who've done that and have given a lot of money to effective causes. So it certainly can be a good thing to do.

But Sam, I think, was obviously uniquely successful in accumulating a huge amount of wealth doing that and became a kind of a poster child in that way for earning to give. But he was clearly also a huge risk taker and somebody who was prepared to break standard rules of how you do business and how you look after other people's money that's entrusted to you. And I think that's what brought about his downfall, the fact that he took risks, they didn't all come off. He tried to patch it off with shifting his customers' trust funds, basically,

to his research investment sort of fund. And clearly, he shouldn't have done that. And I don't think anybody in the effective altruism movement thought that the idea of earning money to give to good causes would lead to somebody so flagrantly. This is alleged, I suppose we should say. But if the charges are correct, I don't think anybody in the effective altruism movement

thought that anybody would so flagrantly violate those basic rules of sound practice and ethical practice. Right, well, his misdeeds and malfeasance will be adjudicated, but from the outside looking in, it doesn't look great. And I think, just to kind of back up for a minute, effective altruism being this movement whereby we try to sort of reduce the amount of emotional

attachment we have to philanthropic ends and look at it from a purely objective point of view to understand the best use of every dollar given to have the maximum impact in terms of the reduction of suffering. And those outlets often aren't the sexy ones or the ones that we feel emotionally attached to because we have a relative who's suffering from a certain disease. It happens to be things like malaria tents and the like that are cheap, easy solutions that end up saving a lot of lives.

And in the case of Sam Bankman-Fried, I see a guy whose motives are in question. Like there is an argument that perhaps he leveraged this movement because it looked good from a sort of PR perspective to say that he was an effective altruist. And I'm not so sure like how much money he actually ended up giving. He gave money to lots of different places. like how much money he actually ended up giving. He gave money to lots of different places. And so this sort of critique of the movement is that it sets in place unhealthy incentives

whereby the end justifies the means, right? Like no matter what end or what means you pursue to accumulate a certain amount of wealth, it's okay because those resources will be deployed in an altruistic manner. Yeah, as for his original motives, I'm prepared to believe that he did set out on that career in order to be able to give.

I think that's the evidence early on that it wasn't right from the start. He thought, oh, I'll pretend to be an effective altruist because that'll make me more successful personally. And figures that I've seen, you know, he certainly gave well over $100 million to effective charities. Now, that's not very much when you're worth $20, $25 billion. That's true. But I think he was on track to do a lot more. He also gave political donations and some of those were directed towards making the world safer.

For example, he supported a candidate who was an expert on pandemics because he believed that the US is not doing nearly enough for pandemic preparation. And I think that's obviously true. So, I don't think that it was always just a cover, but it may be that he got carried away with his success and didn't want to admit, for example, that he'd taken a big hit because of a bad investment from Alameda and so tried to cover that up. Whereas if he'd admitted that and maybe Alameda had gone bankrupt,

he would have still been wealthy and wouldn't be facing jail. So I think that's probably what went wrong. But in terms of what you were asking about, the idea that the end justifies the means, I think people often very simplistically say, oh, well, you know, he thought that the ends justified the means and they don't.

But if you stop and think about it, I think everybody thinks that sometimes the end does justify the means. And the classic example of that is, you know, if you were hiding a Jewish family in your cellar in Nazi Germany and the Gestapo came to your door and you might think normally it's wrong to tell lies,

including telling lies to the state authorities is clearly wrong. But, you know, if you can save the family you're hiding by telling a lie to the Gestapo, obviously you should do that. So the question isn't do the ends ever justify the means? The question is, when do the ends justify the means? When are the means too bad or when is the risk too great or the means not sufficient? And you have to look

at those on a case-by-case basis. Right. So that would play out in terms of a young person pondering career choices, they could either go to the 80,000 Hours website and look at certain types of impact-oriented careers, or they could become a investment banker and try to accumulate as much wealth as possible for the purposes of deploying that at a later time. And from your perspective, both of those are meritorious and worthy of consideration.

Yes, that's right. And in fact, if they go to 80,000 hours, there's a lot of other things that they could do as well. They could, one of the careers suggested is becoming a research scientist, working in areas that will make a difference to people in extreme poverty. Another is to go into politics. Politics needs more people who are really serious about helping people in poverty, doing something about climate change. So there's a lot of different options that people can have. And in fact,

there's a lot of different options that people can have. And in fact, the effective altruism movement did make quite a thing about earning to give in the early days. I think partly because that was a novelty and it was something that got media attention. And when the movement was small, it was important to get media attention for new ideas. So Will McCaskill in particular made quite a feature of this. But more recently, but before the FTX collapse, and so not specifically related to Sam Bankman Freed,

they have reduced the emphasis that they put on that, partly because of the idea that one of the problems with new organizations that have great ideas about changing the world in the right direction is that it's hard for them to get enough talented people working for them. So smart people like Sam might now be more likely to be, you know, might be suggested that they go into helping one of these startups to really get organized and to scale up and really make a big difference rather than to earn a gift, just because of the sense that

it's not always lack of financial resources. It may be lack of talented people that are slowing things down. Yeah, it's interesting. In thinking about the pursuit of an ethical life and as somebody who is a moral philosopher, why is this important? Is there a morality that exists

that is a certain kind of like, there's a universality to that truth? I mean, you're an atheist, right? So from whence does this sense of right and wrong and pursuing an ethical life, from where does that derive? Yes, I am an atheist. So obviously I don't think it derives from God or any God-given commands.

But, and for quite a while, I didn't think there was an objective truth. That was part of the era in which I was educated and studying philosophy. A lot of philosophers didn't think there was an objective truth. That was part of the era in which I was educated and studying philosophy. A lot of philosophers didn't think there was. And there has been a shift for a number of philosophers, and I'm one of them, towards the idea that, no, there are some things that we can really see as self-evidently good or often more to the point self-evidently bad. So, for example, good or often more to the point self-evidently bad. So for example, when somebody experiences agony, if a child is going through agony, whether it's an illness or an injury or some

malevolent person deliberately hurting them, that's just a bad thing. And the universe would be a better place if that child were not experiencing agony. So I think from the self-evidence of that judgment and the self-evidence of the feeling we have ourselves when we experience severe pain, that that's a bad thing. We can generalize that to other sentient beings. Any being who can experience agony, it's better if they don't. And any being who can experience a enjoyable, happy, blissful, worthwhile kind of life, fulfilling life for them,

it's better if they can. And how are you making judgments, adjudicating better and good? You know what I mean? Like if this is not emanating from some kind of spiritual connection, you know, even in a non-dogmatic, non-religious way, it's curious to ponder, you know,

the origin point of why the world is better if we do this versus that. But I think we can see that in our own case. We, you know, when we experience agony, we just can't avoid seeing that as a bad thing for us. And then when we take a broader point of view, the 19th century utilitarian Henry Sidgwick spoke about taking the point of view of the universe.

And he was an agnostic really rather than an atheist, but he wasn't saying, you know, that the universe has a point of view. He was an agnostic really rather than atheist, but he wasn't saying that the universe has a point of view. He was just saying, imagine that you're looking on the universe as a whole and all the sentient beings in it. Then you can see that your own interests, your own wellbeing is no more important from that perspective

than that of any other being who can have similar kinds of experiences of pain or pleasure. And so we should, as rational beings, we should try to reduce the pain and agony that is experienced and increase the pleasure and happiness because that's what we want for ourselves. And we see that we are just one of many similar beings who have those experiences.

So much of your work is focused on the responsibility of the individual, like, should I give money to this versus that? Should I not eat animals? Like all of these sort of choices that can guide us towards, you know, kind of a more ethical way of living. But we live in a culture in which incentives and kind of momentum is pushing us away

from the kind of economy of making those choices. In other words, like those choices tend to kind of cut against the grain of what everything else is pushing us towards. And so I can't help but think about incentive structures at large and how your work being so focused on the individual, how you contemplate like system change,

like governmental regimes or economic tectonic plates that set up situations where we're often making the wrong choice versus creating a new system in which the choices that you're advocating for become the easier, kind of more accessible and more incentivized choice. Right, well, I certainly wanna see changes in the systems and in the incentives that the systems create.

And one of the most obvious cases here would be climate change because individuals also make choices, of course, about the greenhouse gases that they emit or, again, what they eat makes an impact on the greenhouse gases that they're responsible for, as does whether they drive a car and if they do, what sort of car to drive. But it's really important and shouldn't be that difficult for governments to change the incentives there

by carbon taxes, for example, on what produces emissions. So that's an area where going into politics can be a really important career because you can help to make governments make those choices. And that's true of the other things that I talk about at an individual level as well. Governments do give significant amounts to foreign aid. They could give more. The United States actually gives very little in terms as a percentage of its gross national income compared to European countries generally, and could give

more and could also give it more effectively. And of course, some governments have better laws and regulations regarding the treatment of animals. Even within the United States, California has better regulations for farm animals than most other states in the United States because it has citizen-initiated referenda and it's passed propositions to give animals a bit more room than they have in other states. So there are definitely things that you can do at the policy level and that it's important to do at the policy level. But some of these things are really difficult to bring about change.

And for example, trying to increase the United States foreign aid has been a long struggle that so far has been quite unsuccessful. Even presidents who are sympathetic, like President Obama, who at one stage talked about raising US foreign aid to half a percent of gross national product, which would still be only, you know, about half of the top nations in the world, but completely failed to do that.

So if that's so difficult to achieve, then there is something that we can do individually and that can make a difference. So let's do that. And similarly, in terms of what we eat, it's also very hard to get laws and regulations in the United States to give animals more space to move around. As I said, there are exceptions with those states

with citizens-initiated referenda because it does seem that ordinary Americans, when given that choice, will choose better conditions for animals. But because the agribusiness lobby is so powerful at the federal level, it's been impossible to get any laws passed at the federal level to give animals room to move.

And that's a contrast with Europe where the entire European Union has much better laws than the United States has. So again, let's try to do what we can at the individual level. If enough people do that, we'll weaken the power of the agribusiness lobby

because they won't be selling so much. And we'll be in a better position to produce that systemic change. Well, in the context of animal rights, this has been a movement built upon the shoulders of the individual. Like it really has been a grassroots movement. And I wanna get into how this all began with you.

You wrote Animal Liberation in 1975. I wanna hear how that came into being. But in looking back upon the many years since that book came out, it must be quite an awesome thing to see how much progress has been made, how much energy is in this movement, while also recognizing how little has changed

and how much work remains, right? Like, how are you thinking about the current status quo? Yeah, you've got that exactly right. There has been significant change. I mentioned those laws in the European Union, sort of 27 countries that have better laws than when I published Animal Liberation in 1975 and the United Kingdom, of course, which is no longer in the European Union. So that's a significant change for hundreds of millions of animals. They have definitely not idealized,

but they have lives that are somewhat better than they were in the 70s. But on the other hand, factory farming still continues here in the United States. A lot of it goes on just as bad as it was before, in some respects even worse, because for example, the breeding of chickens for meat has increased the speed at which they put on weight to such a point that their immature legs can't really bear the weight of their bodies. They're very young birds when they're sent to market. They're about six weeks old

and they're in pain just from trying to carry their body weight and sometimes their legs will collapse under them and they'll just be unable to move. And then because this is such a mass production industry with 20,000 birds in a single shed, they're probably going to starve to death or dehydrate to death because they can't walk to food and water. And basically nobody cares about individual chickens. Nobody will even see that there's a darn bird and pick it up and humanely kill it. So, you know, those things have actually got worse. Plus of course, in other countries in the world,

particularly in East Asia, where they've become more prosperous, which in itself would be a good thing, but that means they're producing a lot more meat, more demand for meat. And factory farming has hugely increased there. And again, it's pretty much unregulated. It's hugely increased there. And again, it's pretty much unregulated.

Yeah, we can celebrate the growth of the vegan movement in these kind of urban pockets across the developed Western world. But that's myopic in that when we canvas our glance internationally, we see the expansion of a middle-class or new wealth sectors who are going to increase their consumption of meat at a rate that the planet really can't sustain. Right. And we're

seeing the decimation of the rainforest and with China, you know, all of these areas that are where we're seeing an increase in meat consumption at an unprecedented level. Like this is a global problem from not just a mass suffering perspective, but from a climate change perspective as well. Yeah, that's basically true. It's interesting that some countries have actually started on a decline in meat consumption. Germany is one example and Sweden is another.

So, there's some hope that as we become more educated and more understanding about what meat does not only to animals but to the climate and to the environment more generally. We've just had this meeting of environmentalists concerned to protect species. And again, there's been a lot of writing about how meat consumption just can't continue to grow, that it is destroying the rainforest and causing extinctions.

So there's some hope that more people will realize that, but it's difficult. And to me, you mentioned the pockets of people being vegan. I mean, I think being vegan is a great diet and a healthy diet and the best diet for the planet and for animals. But I think we have to work towards reduction of meat consumption in mainstream

because it's gonna be a long time before we get a vegan mainstream in most countries. Yeah, I mean, there does feel like quite a bit of momentum behind that right now. It is mainstreaming in that so many restaurants, you can at least get vegan options and people don't balk and they're not confused when you wanna veganize an entree at a restaurant or what have you.

But yes, there is so much work to be done. And your question really brings up this notion of effective activism. Like how do you sort of convince the most number of people to change their habits to have the greatest impact, right? Is it like throwing a bucket of blood on a runway model, you know, at a fashion show who's wearing a mink coat? Or is it having a, you know,

realistic conversation with policy makers about a slight reduction in harm that could actually impact millions of people and benefit millions of animals? Like how do you think about carrying the message from a utilitarian perspective to leverage the greatest change? I think that as far as trying to get people

that change their diet is concerned, probably being cool and reasonable is better than throwing buckets of blood at people. That's true. But we don't fully know. And I would like to see, and this is part of what effective altruism wants to do. I would like to see more studies about,

what is the effect of people when there are protests that are more in your face than others? There's some suggestions that it puts people off, but I don't really know that we know. And for example, on issues like climate change, which seems to me to be a really urgent issue, I can fully understand those eco-activists who threw soup over Van Gogh's sunflowers.

And let me say, they knew it was behind glass, so they knew it wasn't going to damage the original painting. But that was a gesture to say, you know, this is really something urgent and we're still not doing what we need to be doing about it and we have to do better and we have to do it soon. So I fully sympathise with that but I do want to know what actually is going to work

and what is going to get governments to take the relatively simple steps that they need to take to shift us away from greenhouse gas emitting products, both fossil fuels and meat in particular. How have your views evolved since writing this book in 1975 on this subject matter? Well, perhaps I was a little naive

about how easy it might have been to change these deeply ingrained habits and to combat major industries, because I did think that the arguments seemed to me to be so clear. I thought that if I could just state them clearly and rationally, readers would decide that they were right. They would change what they were reading. They would talk to their friends about why it was important to change what I was eating.

And I hoped at least- And that's how it happened for you, right? So why shouldn't it happen for anybody who's reading your book? Exactly, that's right, yeah. I mean, so I didn't think about this issue at all until I was a graduate student at Oxford, 24 years old. And I hadn't thought about it. Now this was 1970, so it wasn't really discussed. You didn't

meet vegetarians or certainly not Western vegetarians. You might have met some Indian vegetarians, but you didn't meet people who were like you who were vegetarians. Until I, at Oxford, happened to have lunch with a Canadian graduate student called Richard Keshen who asked whether there was meat in the spaghetti sauce that was being served. And when he was told there was, he took a salad plate instead. And I was surprised and asked him

what his problem was with meat. And he told me that he didn't think it was right to treat animals the way we treat them in order to turn them into food. And I said, don't they have good lives out in the fields? And he said, no, increasingly they're crowded inside in big dark sheds. I knew nothing about that.

I made it my business to find out. And then I also, because I was a philosophy student, I decided to look at what philosophers had said about this. Why is it okay to treat animals in this way? Why do the bands of morality, as it seemed at the time, just stop with our species? And I decided both that he was right on the facts and that there wasn't an ethical justification

for disregarding the interests of non-human animals in the way we were doing it. So it seemed a pretty simple argument to me. And if I could be persuaded by that and I could show the facts to other people and look at the ethical arguments, that that would convince other people. And it convinced some other people. That's the good news. The bad news is that we are still living in societies where the majority of people are not only eating

meat, but even buying factory farm products, not particularly looking for more organic or free ranging or certified humane animal products. Yeah, I think that with greater education around this issue also comes concerted efforts to confuse consumers, right? There's a lot of greenwashing going on and there's a lot of energy around, you know, kind of the grass-fed free range animals that make people feel better about their animal consumption without fully understanding the equation.

Like this idea that we actually need the animals to regenerate the soil and you eating your animals from these farms is actually part of the climate solution and these animals live great lives. And certainly that's a better situation than the factory farmed animals, which is the big gaping problem that needs to be solved. But I think it allows people to kind of fall into

sort of an acceptance or a delusion that they're still not, their habits aren't really resulting in the harm that they're actually resulting in. I didn't say that very inelegantly, but I think you know what I'm getting at. I know what you're getting at, yes. And in fact, it is a delusion, I think. And I'm not sure, maybe people are aware of it,

but because if you ask people if they eat meat and when they say yes, you ask them, do they mostly buy organic or certified humane, grass-fed, something like that, the percentage that answers yes is just wildly more than the amount that is actually produced by a high multiple. So either people somehow believe that they're buying these better products when they're not or they're just lying in the answers that they're giving.

Because if you look, for example, at chicken meat production, the example I gave earlier, I think it's 99.8% is factory farmed in the US. It's a tiny, tiny percentage, far less than 1%. So, you know, if people say they're eating humanely produced certified, humane, sorry, if people say they're eating humanely produced chicken, humane, sorry. If people say they're eating humanely produced chicken, they're almost certainly not. If the reduction of suffering is the rubric,

there is an interesting philosophical exploration to be had when it comes to the kind of carnivore people who call what they eat like nose to tail. Like from a suffering perspective, if somebody is going to take one cow and they're gonna consume the entirety of that, is that a more ethical choice than the vegan who's eating plants that are sort of threshed

in a traditional way where lots of rodents and insects are being sacrificed as a result of the harvesting of these many plants or gophers having to be killed, et cetera, where in other words, like lots of different animals are sacrificed for the production of these plant foods versus the person who eats the cow who says, well, this is just one sentient being. Like from a philosophical, ethical perspective,

like how do you think about that or parse the difference? Yes, so there are a couple of things to be said about that. One is that from a climate point of view, cows and beef is really the worst of the animal products in terms of the quantity of greenhouse gases because they produce methane and methane is an extremely potent greenhouse gas. And they've had to consume a lot of resources

to get to the point before they're killed for food, right? Right, well, I mean, so if they're in feedlots or fattened the last few months in feedlots eating grain, then all of those problems about the rodents that get killed with the threshing are going to be there because they will have eaten far more grain than a vegan would eat because you only get back from feeding grain to cattle,

you get back somewhere between 5% and 10% of the food value of the grain that you're putting in. So if you're eating the grains directly, you eat far fewer grains. But if people are saying, well, I'm just eating fully grass-fed beef, which again is quite a small proportion of US-produced beef, then you're not killing the rodents when you harvest the grain because they're eating grass. But they actually produce more greenhouse gases than the feedlots. And that's because the reason cattle are put in feedlots is they fatten up faster on grain. So if they're on grass, they have to live longer to

reach the same weight to produce the same quantity of meat for people to eat. And all the time they're living and digesting the grass, they're producing the methane. So in terms of the impact on the climate, it's really bad. It may be better from an animal welfare point of view, much better than eating chicken, for example, both because they're outside and have better lives and also because you're talking about one animal

with a lot of meat, whereas chickens, people who eat chickens are eating a lot of chickens over their lifetime. But in terms of greenhouse gases, it's actually worse. Beyond that, there isn't enough land to support the production of cattle in that manner anyway, to meet global demand for meat. Well, that's right.

So it's not a scalable, sustainable solution. No, and some of it, and the demand for beef is causing rainforest to be cleared, causing the Amazon to be cleared for grazing land, for example, or even to grow more soybeans in Brazil, which also about 70% of the soybean crop gets fed to cattle. And I think something over 20% goes to biofuels. And people say, oh, I don't eat tofu

because soybeans are bad. But actually it's about 7% of the whole soybean crop is actually eaten directly by humans, either as beans or as tofu. And the great majority is getting funneled through cattle. And again, we lose most of the food value of the soybeans when we do that. Right, back to the earlier question

about how your ideas have evolved since 1975, are there other things? Like if you, so you're reprising this book, right? You're coming out with a new edition of it. So I suspect there are things that you wanna change or I don't know how much you can talk about that specifically, but maybe generally, how your thinking has changed and evolved

in the many interceding years. Yeah, that's right. I'm producing what's effectively a new book that's been called Animal Liberation Now, which maintains the key ethical ideas, completely updates the relevant facts and looks at progress that we've made and that we've not made from a more global perspective.

So it has a lot of new things in it that went in the original edition. My thinking has developed in various respects. I suppose some of the things that I'm more concerned with now are questions about wild animals, about should we be concerned about the suffering of wild animals and what might we do with that. I'm also interested in the development of alternatives to meat.

I see that as a positive sign, both plant-based meats and the development of cellular meats, meat that is actually produced from animal cells but does not require any living animal organism and therefore is, again, far lower on greenhouse gas emissions maybe has about three percent of the greenhouse gas emissions of meat from animals and doesn't involve the animal suffering of course because there's no conscious animal there so if we could do that and if we could produce it at a economically competitive price with the meat that is being sold from animals.

That might be another way of breaking this deadlock of trying to get people to move away from eating animal products that are so bad for animals and for the environment. Well, all indications is that we are headed in that direction. It may take a little bit more time because this is an expensive problem to solve, right?

Figuring out how to culture these cells and create these, you know, quote unquote meat products. They're able to do it. They've established that it can be done, but doing it economically. So it's on par with what it would cost to go to McDonald's or what have you.

There's still a lot of work to be done, right? Yes, that's right. And you can actually buy cellular chicken in Singapore now and it's licensed for sale there. But it's yes, it's expensive. And I think the problem is they need to scale up and there's some questions about building these huge bioreactors

in which the process occurs. Can that be done? Will there be problems with things going astray? We really don't know, but there's quite a lot of capital being invested in it. A lot of capital. But also the question of just consumer acclimation to it. There is the sort of getting over the icky factor of like, what is this and where does it come from?

And having consumers acclimate to the idea of this new food. That's true, although consumers seem to think that the meat that they're buying is somehow natural. And that's obviously transformed tremendously in the last 50 years. Yeah, the animals are bred differently, as I was saying. I mean, the chickens can't really live to maturity mostly

because they're bred to eat so fast and put on weight so fast that a lot of them will just collapse and die if they were kept to older birds. In fact, it's so bad that with the breeding birds, because the parents, of course, have to have the same genes as the one we eat, they have to be starved basically.

Because if you've fed them as much as they want to eat, they would not be able to survive to breed or they might not physically be able to breed because they would be too obese to actually do that. So they tend to be fed every second day, which means that they're desperately hungry all the time. And then of course the antibiotics are used because they're under stress.

So a lot of antibiotics that are losing their efficacy because we're feeding them routinely to farm animals. So yeah, this is not a natural product either, but somehow people have been persuaded to continue to eat it, think of it as good. So no doubt there will be some, let's say, need to show consumers that this cellular meat, when it happens, is essentially still meat

and is actually a safer and purer product than what they're getting from factory farms. Have you tried it? No, I've not had the opportunity to try it yet. I would certainly do so if I find myself in Singapore. Yeah. I will go and do that. Right. getting from factory farm. Have you tried it? No, I've not had the opportunity to try it yet. I would certainly do so if I find myself in Singapore, I will go and do that. Right.

How do you think about philanthropy in the animal welfare space? It seems like there's a lot of sort of improvement to be had in terms of like how to leverage the dollar for the most good. When we look at the big problems versus where people's kind of hearts and emotions are. Absolutely, yeah.

In fact, I show my students a slide of that, which has two boxes. One box shows where the greatest amount of animal suffering is and animals being killed. And it's overwhelmingly farmed animals. And so it's like a big square of one color for farmed animals. And then down in the bottom corner, there's a tiny little square that shows the other things

like laboratory animals, pretty small too, although it's probably around 100 million animals in the United States each year. There's things like furs. And then there's dogs and cats, which is just a tiny mark you can hardly see on my slide. And then the adjacent box shows where the dollars are going and there it's it's the dogs and cats the animal shelters that is the dominant thing and uh farmed animals are quite small and laboratory animals are quite small wild animals do rank larger there so uh yeah there's this

complete disconnect between where the dollars go and where they're needed. We're starting to get a little more money going through effective altruism actually mostly through foundations like Open Philanthropy which is funded by Dustin Moskovitz and Carrie Tuner which is directing more money to oppose factory farming. But what's coming from the general public is really not going to where

the big animal suffering problems are. It's going to where people's emotions are. And it's not that effective altruism doesn't want people to have emotions. It's just that they want people to feel the emotions and then think, yes, I care about dogs and cats, but I also care about animals in general. I don't want pigs or cows or chickens to suffer.

I don't want wild animals to suffer. I don't want even rats and mice to suffer in laboratory experiments. And so if I care about animals, I should be thinking about giving to where it will help the big problems and not the relatively small problems. That's what we need to get people to think about.

Sure, but isn't there a place for that emotional impulse? Like if you think about, so for example, in the animal welfare space, like a lot of people donate towards the shelters, right? Like they rescue farmed animals, they create a beautiful place for them to live out their lives. And those places, and people feel good

about supporting those places for obvious reasons, but those places also serve as sort of museums for people to visit, which gets perhaps other people who have no connection to this movement or these ideas, this is their inception point for even learning about this,

an emotional connection to the reality of the problem that might in turn motivate them to give or get involved in the solution. And maybe that solution is an effective altruism solution, or maybe it's something else, but I can't help but ask you, like where is the emotional piece? Like there has to be some importance

and resonance for it on some level. Yeah, definitely. I think that emotion is important. And with the animal sanctuaries that you mentioned, I think they do get people to see farmed animals as individuals and that's important. They get them to see that some of them can actually grow old even,

which of course farmed animals never do. It's the rescued ones that might. And those sanctuaries work and many of them do and i think they all should um as places of education that get people to see animals differently and encourage them to do more for farmed animals in general so i think that's fine um and i think in terms of global poverty too it's important emotion plays a role and it's important to tell the stories of individuals of those children whose lives have been saved by a treatment that was made available through an organization that had community health workers going around and helping um or you know restoring people's sight is something where you

can really see the emotion and um the life you can save the organization that i founded that recommends effective charities recommends a couple that do restore sight in countries where otherwise people with quite simple conditions like cataracts would never be able to see again and you can see videos online of how somebody's, when the bandages are removed after an operation was performed and the eyes are recovered. And you see a woman who sees her child

for the first time that she's ever seen that two-year-old child, let's say. And that's a wonderful heartwarming experience. And I hope it will encourage people to think, yes, this is really a good thing to be doing. This is such an important work to support. Right, yeah, that's really beautiful. The counter side of that, like as a thought experiment,

as somebody whose primary driver is the reduction of suffering, if you think about the eradication of global poverty, if you're raising the kind of life experience and income of people who have grown up in poverty, if you're raising the kind of life experience and income of people who have grown up in poverty, they then become, do they not then, what happens if those people then end up increasing their meat consumption

and that drives cattle producers to clear more rainforest to produce that cattle? Like when you look at the macro benefit versus harm calculus from a philosophical point of view, like how do you make sense of that? Yeah, I've grappled with, that's a tough problem. I've grappled with trying to think about that and trying to think about my anti-poverty work

and how does it connect with my concern for animals. But I suppose what i say and you may think that this is a rationalization is that if we're ever to solve this problem we're not going to solve it by keeping people in poverty because when people are in poverty they will do whatever they have to do sure to survive and if that includes for example killing wild animals in the forest and including even chimpanzees in some places and perhaps leading to the extinction of species in the forest, they're going to do that. So I think we have to try to get people out of poverty and hope that when they have more choices, when they are out

of poverty, they will eventually come to see that eating more meat is not the right thing to do. And we will have alternatives for them that they can live good and healthy lives without eating more meat or perhaps without eating any meat. And so that we'll get to the point where I'm hoping we all get to, where we have expanded our concern for all animals, for all sentient beings, and are not just thinking about human beings. So, as you say, you might think that that's- No, it's just interesting to think about. Like I'm not wed to any answer, I think just grappling with that idea

demonstrates how difficult problem solving is in the real world. If your goal really is like, how do we best eradicate suffering? It's complicated, it's nuanced, and it's in the real world. If your goal really is like, how do we best eradicate suffering? It's complicated, it's nuanced and it's in the gray. I think there's another way of exploring that is the twist on your famous thought experiment of the girl in the pond, right?

So first of all, for people who don't know, maybe explain what that thought experiment is. Sure, okay. So in an article I wrote a long time ago, I asked my readers to imagine that they're walking past a pond, let's say an ornamental pond in a park. And let's say they know well that the pond is quite shallow.

And as they walk past it, they notice that there's something struggling in the water. And when they look more closely, turns out that there's something struggling in the water. And when they look more closely, turns out it's a very small child, a child too small to stand up even in this shallow pond. So, you know, the first thing you would think about is, well, whose child is this? Who's looking after this child? But when you look around, you don't know why, but there's nobody else there. You're the only adult in sight. So your second thought, I hope, is, gee, this child seems to be drowning.

I better jump into the pond and save the child. But then maybe you have a third and not so noble thought, and that is, I'm wearing my best clothes today because I was going somewhere special, and they're going to get ruined if I save the child by jumping into the pond. So what if I just forget that I ever saw the child and go on my way?

Would that be the wrong thing to do? And I hope that all your listeners are now saying, of course that would be the wrong thing to do. How could you compare the value of a child's life with ruining your shoes or your clothes? So the point of the example is to say, yes, that is the right reaction that you should have and it would be the wrong thing to do.

But it's not only in these unlikely circumstances where you have to ruin your clothes to save a child in a pond. It's happening to us all the time that for the cost of replacing those clothes donated to an effective charity, we could save or certainly contribute towards saving the life of a child in a low-income country,

perhaps by donating to the Against Malaria Foundation, which will distribute bed nets to protect children against malaria, or perhaps by distributing other medicines to prevent children dying of diarrhea, which is another significant cause of deaths in low-income countries. And the point being that the physical location

of the suffering child should not have an impact on the decision to give or not give. That's right. I think if you reflect on it and you ask yourself, does the fact that the child is physically close to me really make a moral difference to how important it is to help that child, to save that child's life?

I think most of us would say, no, that's not the important thing. Sure, proximity being irrelevant. And then there's all kinds of other threads that can be pulled on this. Does temporality matter? Like does the fact that this person is living at the same time,

like we can predict that in the future there will be people in this circumstance, right? And the fact that they don't live yet, should that be a factor in our decision to think about how much of our income we're gonna give over to increase the wellbeing of the world? I think that if there are people

who are going to be living in the future and they're going to be either suffering or dying prematurely in ways we could prevent, the fact that it's in the future doesn't in itself matter. If we're uncertain as to whether we could do anything to prevent their suffering, that of course makes a difference. We have to discount the good of what we're trying to achieve by the odds against us actually managing to achieve it. So, yes, do act

where good consequences are more certain, but not just the future. The Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit had an example about leaving broken glass somewhere in the forest and would say, it'll take a while. Nobody's going to tread on it in coming years but at some point a child maybe not yet born will walk along that path and cut their feet on it does that mean that it didn't matter because they aren't born at the time that you left the broken glass in the path no it doesn't really matter um the pain of the child is the same and it's it's just the same it's just as it's just the same. It's just as significant if you can predict that it is very likely to happen.

And that opens the door to a whole discussion around long-termism, which is very related to, it's an extension of your work in many ways. Yes, that's true. There's one difference with the really long-termist predictions. If you're wanting to intervene not in a way that's going to make a difference to somebody living in 20, 50 or 100 years, but in many centuries or many millennia or even millions of years,

then firstly, there is a quite different uncertainty factor that comes in, in terms of how do we really know that what we're doing now will make a difference but there's also the fact that when long-termists try to prevent extinction and then they say there could be these vast numbers of human beings living rich and fulfilling lives as long as we don't do something that causes our species to become extinct let's say this century or the next couple of centuries then you do have to think about well if we do something that causes our species to become extinct, let's say this century or the next couple of centuries, then you do have to think about, well, if we did something that meant that we became extinct,

these people wouldn't exist at all. So it wouldn't be like a child cutting their foot and getting hurt. It would be like there just would be nobody alive on the planet. Maybe there would be no sentient beings in this part of the universe. And some philosophers think that that's different, that we don't have an obligation to ensure that future people exist. Rather, we have an obligation to say that if people exist in future,

we don't do anything that will harm them. I wanna get into life extension and the anti-aging stuff because I feel like that's the next logical step from what you just shared. But to put a pin on that for now and circle back to the girl drowning in the pond, the original question being, coming out of this idea of suffering reduction,

if you save that girl, which we all agree is the right thing to do if you're passing by, it can be presumed that that individual will go on to live some number of years and will consume. Will consume many things, including probably animal products,

which has its own downstream implications in terms of harm and resource allocation, et cetera. So it's back to that. I think there was actually an article in your journal about this, right? Like the Journal of Controversial Ideas, like let's explore this idea.

Like if you're saving this individual altruistically, there's also harm that is incident to that act, right? That's right. Yeah, it was an article written by somebody with the name Michael Plant, which is his real name. Oh, it's his real name, yeah, because people can submit these articles with pseudonyms. That's right, yeah.

Yeah, and if anyone wants to read it, by the way, as you mentioned, the Journal of Controversial Ideas, it's open access, just Google Journal of Controversial Ideas, you'll get to it. Yeah, it's a thoughtful article and it does raise that problem about the meat eaters whose lives we're saving and ask whether we should be doing that.

I'm somewhat unsure. I mean, I've actually talked to Michael Plant about this and he's quite persuasive, but at the moment I'm going to say, let's try and save those lives and hope that we can persuade people, move people towards a lifestyle in which we're not causing so much suffering to animals.

Right, I think in order to really flesh that out, you have to think about speciesism, this sense that we create a rank hierarchy amongst the animal kingdom based upon people's cognitive abilities and their level of sentience, right? Which is not necessarily correlated to their ability to suffer.

But to answer that question about harm reduction, do you not have to place a value, you know, a greater value on one life over another, right? From a species perspective. So I wouldn't do that on a species basis. That is, I wouldn't say that being a member of the species homo sapien automatically means that your life is more valuable

than a member of any other species. I would say that beings who have cognitive capacities that enable them to think about their lives and think about the lives of others whom they love and care for in ways that are different and perhaps more profound and more lasting than other beings, that it's a greater tragedy when they die prematurely than when those other beings die prematurely.

So I don't think of the lives of all sentient beings as being of equal value. I do think of their suffering as being equally important when we're talking about similar kinds and similar quantities of suffering, but not the preservation of their lives. The other uncomfortable idea as a parent, when I think about the pond and the girl

is this idea of like, we all sort of intuitively feel like we can prefer the wellbeing of our children over other children. And that is sort of accepted. Like, of course, I'm going to make sure that I'm providing for my children, even though they live in a much better circumstances

than most children in the world. But from a harm reduction perspective, would it not be better for me to allocate my resources more democratically so that my kids are sort of not getting any more than all these other children who need more? I think it would be better from a purely impartial perspective if we could do that.

But we are mammals who've evolved. But we're not gonna do that. No, we're not gonna, I agree, we're not gonna do it. You're a parent, you didn't do that, right? And you're the godfather of all of this. Okay, so what I wanna say about this is that it would be from this impartial perspective better if I were to do that. But I don't think we should blame ourselves

for not doing it because I think we should recognize that that's something that is basically imprinted in our genes that we are gonna care for our children more than the children of strangers. That's what our ancestors did for millions of years. And that's why we are going to care for our children more than the children of strangers. That's what our ancestors did for millions of years and that's why we are here because if they hadn't,

then they wouldn't have survived or their children wouldn't have survived. So I think we have to be somewhat indulgent to ourselves in that. Not as indulgent as many people are. I don't think we should be doing everything imaginable for our children. I think the automatic assumption that you leave all your wealth to your children is

not something that is justified, especially if they are already quite comfortably off and we are living in a world where there's so much extreme poverty and so much need. But we should try to do better. We should try to get to a more equitable distribution and we should try to encourage others to do that. But as I say, we're not saints. We haven't evolved to be saints with very, very rare exceptions and we shouldn't beat ourselves up because we're not. Right.

There's a lot of science and money and energy right now going into the extension of lifespan, like this anti-aging movement that's afoot. And there are plenty of people hard at work on solving the problem of aging as if it is a disease with prospects of really substantially extending lifespan to 150 years and maybe even beyond with certain scientific breakthroughs on the horizon. And like any technology that the human race pioneers, there is, from my perspective,

this sense of like inevitability, like we're not gonna stop or slow down and think about the implications of this. We're hell bent on just achieving it for the sake of achievement because it's a mountain yet to be climbed. And I feel like there's an important philosophical conversation that we need to have

about the implications of what the world might be like if suddenly people could live to 300 or beyond from a wealth distribution perspective, from a rights perspective, and from like a risk calculus perspective, like what would it mean if you could live 300 years? What is your imprint or your responsibility, like your carbon footprint and your responsibility to the planet, to future generations? How do you think about how many children you're gonna have if you're gonna live that long? Things like this.

Is this anything that you've spent any time thinking about? I have spent some time thinking about it. I actually published an article on lifespan extension back in the 1980s when we were not that close to making breakthroughs. But people did think even then that we might not be very far away. And although, as you say, I agree that it's going to come at some point, I'm not convinced it's going to come really soon. It may be harder than people think. But yes, it certainly raises some serious ethical issues. And there could be some good sides to it.

For example, you talked about views about risk. We might be less inclined to take risks if we have the prospect of living for hundreds of years. We might be less ready to fight in war, for example. We might not see wars of the kind we have now in Ukraine to the same extent because people think, you know, I want to live a long time. I don't want to die in my 20s

when I could live another 200 years. And also when you think about things like climate change, how would that affect our views? Now we're saying, well, we need to do this for our children and grandchildren, at least people of my generation are saying that. If we were going to be living 300 years, we would think, hey, we're going to be living in this world

with a vastly different and less stable climate. So we better stop what we're doing right now. So that could be a good consequence. But there's a real danger that if you simply expand lives for those who can afford it and you don't do anything to reduce population growth, of course, then the world will become even more populated than it is now.

And that's a serious problem. So would that slow down? Would that stop? You'd have to hope so, because otherwise we're definitely going to be over capacity even more than we are already perhaps now. It's hard to imagine that if and when those breakthroughs occur,

that they will be reserved for the wealthy. Like it's not gonna be a democratic thing, right? So it's just gonna drive a greater wedge in between the haves and the have nots. Yes, that's certainly gonna be what will happen initially. It might be one of those procedures that if you find, in fact, that you can find inexpensive ways of doing it, that it will spread.

But initially, yeah, we're going to get the wealthy people living longer. It's just the same thing with gene editing. I think we're going to get them being able to produce children who have enhanced capacities to earn well and to be useful in various ways. And so you will get wealthy people who are breeding children who are more significantly different genetically from low-income people than they are now. And you'll

actually get a sort of genetically fixed caste society occurring. So I think these are serious problems for technologies that are in the pipeline. Right, the other primary technology being the pioneering of new forms of consciousness through artificial intelligence, right? There's a lot of discussion around what constitutes sentience, what is consciousness, et cetera.

And we're seeing in real time, like these breakthroughs with, you know, chat GPT and things like this, where artificial intelligence is mimicking behavior in a way that is sort of helping us to realize like, oh, we're kind of on the precipice of something new here. And what does this mean for the future of humanity? And how should we think about the ethics

surrounding these developments? I think mimicking is the right word though at present. We do have these chat things that look as if you're having a conversation with a person who is conscious and thinking, but when you understand how it's actually working, I think you realize that that's not the case. But at what point, like if these things become self-learning, right?

The timeframe then becomes very compressed in terms of their evolution and development. And at some point when they become indistinguishable from human behavior, what is the tipping point or the kind of Rubicon where we can qualify it as sentient or conscious? Like for you, what does that line look like? Like what would have to happen?

I think the difficulty is in working out when one of these super intelligent artificial general intelligence actually becomes conscious. Because if in fact, it's very good at mimicking our behaviour and if it's also essentially a black box, that is we don't really understand how it's doing what it's doing and there is AI where we can't really say why it's making the judgements that it's making,

then it's going to be hard to know, hard to distinguish conscious processing from simply very rapid mechanical processing and learning. And it will take an effort to understand how it's working and why it's doing what it is. But I think that is the clue. We need to try to understand what's going on. And if we're simply saying, well,

we trained it on vast quantities of text and it absorbed that, and then we trained it as to how to give the right answers, and it's just doing that, then I think it's clear that it's not a conscious being. Right, but on some level already, we're in a situation where we don't quite know how it's coming up with the right answer. Like we know it's self-reinforcing on some level already, we're in a situation where we don't quite know how it's coming up with the right answer.

Like we know it's self-reinforcing on some level, but already the computer scientists, like this sort of process by which it's operating has already begun to elude the creators of the technology. Yes. So that's sort of frightening. It is frightening. It's frightening in a variety of ways, yes.

And at what point does it become unethical to flick the switch and turn it off, so to speak, because we have given birth to a new form of life and consciousness that deserves its own, you know, respect on some level, even as it's going about destroying us. Right. And if we simply ask it and say, you know, respect on some level, even as it's going about destroying us. Right. And if we simply ask it and say, you know,

is it okay for me to take the switch and turn you off? Right. And it probably, you know, will take this as, oh, does that mean you're killing me? And then, you know, I know what people say about being killed. So it comes out with the answer that a person would give if you said, I'm gonna kill you.

That's not gonna be persuasive. This is the dystopian world in which we're gonna kill you. That's not gonna be persuasive. This is the dystopian world in which we're headed, Peter. How are we gonna make sense of this? How are we gonna survive this impending apocalypse? So I'm not convinced that we're that close to this particular apocalypse yet, right? I think we have lots of problems.

I'd much rather focus on climate change, extreme poverty, getting rid of factory farming. I think the robot apocalypse is still some distance ahead of us. And I don't know that we yet have a good enough handle as to how it's gonna happen. So I would rather wait and see. Yeah, well, I mean,

I think it's good to be thinking about these things. And I know you like, there are other Oxford philosophers who are on this, Nick Bostrom and Toby Ord, right? Have written about this extensively. And it's sexy and it's fun, you know, it feels very, you know, terminator world to like think about these problems. And certainly at some point, perhaps this,

these are very real things that we need to grapple with. But what's interesting to me about it is the obsession with trying to understand the ethics around emergent robotic consciousness belies the fact that currently there are billions of animals that we're sacrificing constantly for our food system. And we don't really think about their,

like the ethics of their conscious awareness and suffering. Like this big problem is right underneath our foot. And we're worrying about this problem that's coming down the line and we should be, there's value in that of course. But we already have a very real circumstance right here that we kind of walk around with blinders on around. Yes, that's right.

I actually coauthored an article with a Hong Kong researcher called Tsai Yip Fai who looked and he looked at a whole lot of courses on AI ethics and a whole lot of AI ethics statements and lots of them take very seriously this still hypothetical question of what would be the moral status of conscious AI but pretty much none of them actually take seriously the effect of the present impact that AI is having on sentient beings, non-human sentient beings, on animals. They, of course, deal with impact of AI on humans. But we show in the article that AI is already having a major impact on non-human animals. For example, in some countries, it's being used to run factory farms,

not really in the United States, but that's happening in China. It's happening in Europe to some extent. Just automated, like sort of automated factory farms where algorithms are dictating feeding schedules and things like that, or what does that mean? Yes, that's right. And they are sensors that are observing animal behavior

and adjusting what is done to the animals by how they're behaving, possibly detecting diseases early, which could be a good thing. But they're also going to enable animals to be even more crowded because of the AI will actually be geared to where is it most profitable?

What's the point at which it's most profitable? It's a very rudimentary matrix where this living being is exists for the purpose of resource extraction, right? Yes. A battery. That's right, exactly. For resource extraction and not treated as a thing, as an end in itself, as a sentient being with a moral status that is different

from that of a thing of a product. Yeah, that's wild. I mean, do you, when you cast your gaze into the future, are you an optimistic person or, you know, how do you, how is all this gonna, how is all this playing out? I've always been optimistic. I wrote a book back in the 80s called the expanding circle

in which I talked about the way in which throughout human history we have pushed the boundaries of our moral sphere outwards from the tribe to larger groups to national groups to racial or ethnic groups. And finally in the 20th century to recognising with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that all human beings have certain basic rights. And I looked forward to pushing that beyond the boundaries of our species to non-human animals, and there are some signs of that happening.

But over the last 20 years, there have been backward steps as well, both in terms of human relations and the idea that we have a pretty naked war of aggression going on right now with Russia's invasion of Ukraine and people dying and being killed is something that makes it hard to be optimistic about our future. But also, in terms of the treatment of animals, we haven't continued to push outwards in the way that I'd hoped. And finally, climate change is still a huge problem that we have not done enough about. And if we don't solve that, then things are going to go backwards

and we will be in greater need. And no doubt we'll have climate wars because of huge numbers of refugees wanting to leave places where they can no longer live and grow their own food. So I'm more agnostic now about whether I think the future is gonna be positive. Yeah, the expanding circles concept was another thing that you talked about with Ryan Holiday.

He was analogizing it, I think it was Heracles that you talked about with Ryan Holiday. He was analogizing it. I think it was Heracles who had written about this. That's right, yes. A stoic. Yes, I didn't even really know that a stoic. Which is pretty cool how you tapped into the, you know, greater consciousness to explore that idea. But I think, you know, when you think about,

or sort of the erosion of your optimism, to me, it just feels like human beings are not very well wired for decision-making around long-term consequences, right? Like we're acting in our self-interest. It's very difficult for us to think about future generations. And when you see our inability to take appropriate action

with respect to climate change, there's a feeling of like, we're somehow neutered. Like whether there's not enough political capital or we can't marshal our incentive structure to create better decision-making around this. It's easy to not be optimistic about how we're gonna solve this problem because there's so much indicia

of us not taking action where we should. Yeah, and part of the problem I think is that we do not have strong global organizations and we really need that. I also wrote a book called One World, was published just after 9-11. And in that, I was looking towards the strengthening of global institutions because I argued that we need them

to deal with climate change. We just have one atmosphere. You can't govern climate change with sovereign nations because the greenhouse gases that we emit across the United States obviously spread everywhere. we emit across the United States, obviously spread everywhere. Also, I thought that we needed a world trading organisation that was more geared towards helping people in extreme poverty. We like that.

I wanted to have a stronger international legal system so that crimes against humanity would be punished everywhere. And I wanted us to do more about global poverty. And if you look at those areas, we certainly haven't got the strong institutions to govern climate change. The move towards international law that seemed reasonably promising then with the setting up of the International Criminal Court has had very limited success. And if you look at the war crimes being committed by Russia in Ukraine, it's hard to see how the people responsible are ever going to be brought to justice there. The World Trade Organization basically stalled around the time the book came

out and hasn't been able to make progress towards better trading regimes for countries that are low income and disadvantaged by present systems. So, you know, perhaps we've made some progress in terms of global poverty that has been reduced over the 20 year period quite dramatically. But that's really the one bright spot in this picture. And that's why it's hard to see that positive future. Global cooperation seems very elusive. It's that definitely we've gone back

with the conflict between Russia and the West now and China as well, not being part of a global trading order. The hope was that if they realized that they need to trade and the trade is helping their economy and helping to lift hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty, that then they would be a participant in this

and we would have a multipolar world. Well, I suppose it's multipolar, but there's more confrontation than there was 20 years ago. Yeah, and these sort of global gatherings are often about political expediency. There's a lot of words being said, but in terms of like real world action with the intended positive effect,

that doesn't seem to occur with any regularity. Certainly not in the way that it needs to occur to solve the problem. But to hearken that stoic tradition of the intersection of philosophy and politics, if there were, at least in national politics, a seat in the White House for like the philosopher in chief, I'm sure lots of people have called upon you

for your input and advice on various issues. But if that was actually like a cabinet position, like you're in a parallel universe and you're sitting there in the Situation Room or in the Oval Office, what have you, like what is the guidance or the counsel that you could give like the president or our government to help us start to make better decisions

about these problems? I would say that the United States has to lead and it has to be prepared to lead in ways that are clearly genuine and bona fide and saying, look, we will do these things. We will start doing them. We will do what is our fair share on things like climate change

and extreme poverty and that's doing a lot more than we're doing now on either of those issues and we want you to join in and let's let's be open and transparent about what we're all doing so that we can see who's doing their fair share. And I hope if we make that gesture, you'll match it and do the same and we'll start to build trust and cooperation in the things that need to be done and that can only be done if all the major global players participate.

Yeah. And from an economic perspective, so much of your work and your focus is on giving and how to effectively give, but how do you think about other economic modalities like the notion of conscious capitalism or venture capital that is kind of impact oriented? Like I'm thinking of Jacqueline Novogratz

and Acumen and the work that she's doing to eradicate poverty and kind of, you know, like there are other ways beyond just the traditional notion of giving to NGOs and nonprofits, like how do those operate in your thinking? Absolutely, I think we need to try them all and see what works. Social enterprises that do produce a return that are for-profit organizations,

but concerned to have a social impact are things worth doing. I've actually made a small investment in a organization that is building low-income housing in Kenya on a for-profit basis. But the people there, I know some of, genuine people who've worked in aid, see an opportunity here to fill the gap between the slums that exist in places like Nairobi

and the housing that the wealthy can afford. So I did this because I want to see that it works. I want to have an interest in it and be able to follow it. And I have no objection. In fact, I'm all in favor of people trying new ideas. I think it's relatively new to see what works and what is gonna spread and multiply. But I hope some of these things will

because they certainly have the potential to do good. Who else is leading the way here? Like when you think of people who are really doing the right thing, making a real positive change and doing it in innovative ways? Well, I think some of the foundations that have been set up to do good things,

like I already mentioned Dustin Moskovitz and Carrie Tuna, who's Good Ventures Foundation, set up open philanthropy and supporting GiveWell too. And those are both organizations that are trying to assess what's the best thing you can do to have a positive impact on the world. GiveWell, like The Life You Can Save, is concerned with global poverty

and with assessing which are the most effective charities in the field of global poverty. Whereas Open Philanthropy is much broader and is looking at a whole range of different areas and trying to assess where you can make that impact. So I think those are really important things to do because we need to have that knowledge and then we can follow through.

I think Bill Gates has been a pioneer too, I should say, in setting up the Gates Foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates, I should say, and with support from Warren Buffett. They're also doing a lot of good things, saving a lot of lives, improving the quality of many lives. So I think they deserve recognition

and applause for having made that contribution and also incidentally for trying to persuade other billionaires to do the same through the giving pledge. Yeah, is there a different standard for the billionaire class? So obviously if you have that much, you ought to be giving a lot more, right?

Yes. But is there, so for example, is it okay for the billionaire to be pursuing space travel when those resources could go towards eradicating poverty? Like, how do you think about the switching, you know, like the focus of that resource allocation, decision-making process? If you're thinking about the sort of boosting themselves

into space for space tourism- Should they be purchasing Twitter or should they be, you know? I wish Elon Musk had stayed with developing better batteries so that we can all be driving electric vehicles sooner. That seems to me to be his major contribution so far. I acknowledge that, you know, behind his idea of colonizing Mars is this idea of reducing the

risk of extinction, right? That if we had a self-sustaining human colony on Mars, and let's say there was a nuclear war on this planet that wiped everybody out here, well, you would still have our species and maybe in a few hundred years, they could come back to a less radioactive earth and reestablish things here or explore other planets elsewhere. So it's not that it's completely self-indulgent to try to develop colonies on Mars, but I do think that there are more urgent issues

that we could deal with here first. Right, well, we can leave that with that on that subject. And let it be known that you do put your money where your mouth is. You recently were the recipient of this $1 million prize honoring you for your work in philosophy and humanities. And that prize was quickly dispatched to the Life You Can Save, your organization.

And then to, I think 50% got spread out to charities that that organization has sort of vetted and supported, yes? And then the other half went to animal rights charities? Yeah, basically anti-factory farming, pro-veg, pro-vegan organizations, particularly those working in, outside the Western countries to try to develop those ideas there. Right, and so I'm just, I'm interested in

the kind of actual emotional experience of receiving a million dollars. And I mean, does it, what is that like, does it hit your bank account and then you have to like send it back out or can you, I mean, obviously it's sort of theoretical, right? Cause you're not, you're just, okay, it's gonna pass through you to these other things,

but it is kind of a rare experience to be like, wow, there's a million, like they're giving me a million dollars. Like, is there, was there ever a moment where you're like, I need to give all of it. So I- You have kids, you have grandkids. Yeah, yeah.

There's, you know, but this is who you are, right? So I'm just, walk me through it. It is who I am. And also I've been a Princeton professor for more than 20 years on a comfortable salary. So I don't really feel that I need, well, I definitely didn't need it. And I don't even think that it would have made

a big difference to my happiness. I'm not the kind of person who wants to dine out at $300 restaurants and drink fine wines. I don't need to, when I travel, I don't wanna live in luxury resorts. Actually they occasionally get put up in these places by conferences and so on. And they just make me feel a bit uncomfortable.

So I really have enough for the kinds of things that i want and there is a fulfillment and satisfaction in saying wow i have the opportunity to help all of these organizations to an extent that i didn't really have before and to see what they're doing with the money that i'm giving and to know that it's helped a lot of people and i hope has reduced animal suffering as well as being part of that movement, helped people who are very dedicated working for these important causes. So I think I probably got more fulfillment and satisfaction

through giving it away than I would have got on trying to think how to spend it on myself. Yeah, sure. I mean, I think that's a really important piece because we diluted ourselves into believing that this wealth will be the thing that makes us happy, but all the evidence suggests and establishes that beyond a certain threshold point,

it doesn't do that at all. And in fact, it is in the giving that we are kind of engendered with this sense of fulfillment, which is really what we're all kind of after, right? So far be it from being this, you know, self-flagellating pursuit, it's actually self-serving in that regard.

That's right, yeah. While you're also alleviating suffering and doing all this good in the world, yeah. So Charlie Bressler, who's the person with whom I really co-founded The Life You Can Save, was before he read the book that I-founded The Life You Can Save, was before he read the book that I wrote, The Life You Can Save, president of a men's clothing retail chain in the United States. So he had earned quite a lot of money. But he says that by co-founding The Life

You Can Save, the first life that he saved was his own because he got so much more satisfaction and fulfillment together with his wife from helping to establish the organization and and he became the ceo of it um on negative income because he didn't take any salary and he actually donated to it so um he found that really fulfilling and uh and i agree um you know if you if if you pursue the materialist dream, dream in inverted commas, it doesn't fulfill you. You give yourself a purpose and then the purpose is to get more and more money.

And for what? Whereas if you use that for the purposes of saying, I can do something to help others. And that's a really lasting and important value. You're gonna benefit yourself as well as others. Right, that's really beautiful. And I think for people who are listening to this, who are now curious about what that might look like

for their own lives, they can go to your website for the life you can save. And there they can sort of get a sense of some of these kind of vetted charities that are doing good in the world, right? Like you've done the work to say, we know these ones are the best bang for your buck in terms of suffering reduction.

That's right. You can go to the lifeyoucansave.org and you can look at the charities that we recommend and click on, get more details on each one. You can also download the book absolutely free as an ebook or as an audio book. And I'm delighted that the audio book, different chapters were read by different people.

My friend, Paul Simon, the singer songwriter read one. Kristen Bell. Yes, he read one. You got Stephen Fry. Stephen Fry, that's right. All the great voices. So we have a series of voices and different accents in English.

We had Shabana Azmi, who's an Indian actress reading it in her. We have Winnie Alma, who's an African. So we have a lot of different voices, which gives it a kind of global sense. Of course, they're all reading in English, but it's global in that sense. And it is a book about a global problem. And it wasn't always free, right?

It's the re-release where you've kind of positioned it this way. So in fact, yeah, it was initially published by Random House. And at some point, Charlie said, let's try and get the rights back so that we can make it free. So we had long negotiations with Random House, we had to pay for it. And I wasn't sure that that was the best investment of our funds, given that we were trying to raise funds to help save lives. But Charlie persuaded me that in the long run, it would save a lot more lives. And because we've now distributed far more copies of the book than Random House would have

if we'd left the rights with them. And a lot of people have read it and donated. And in fact, someone said this book was free, but it's actually the most expensive book I've ever read. Because they donated significantly. So yeah, it has paid off getting the rights back. And you can, the audio book is that, you could just get it on Spotify,

like listen to it like you would listen to a podcast just in chapters, you know, at different episodes, which is pretty cool. So it's very easy to find. You don't have to go to Audible or anything like that. Yep, that's right. And if you prefer to read in paper, we are actually having,

especially for listeners to your podcast, we're asking them to donate and we're having matching funds and they can, we'll even mail a paperback copy of the book to them if they prefer that. Right, I believe, and this is incredibly generous. So here's what everybody who's watching or listening is gonna do. You're gonna go to thelifeyoucansave.org

slash Rich Roll, and you can learn more about the organization and where your funds will be allocated. If you donate there, the organization is going to match you dollar for dollar up to $25,000 total, right? And you can get the book there. So that's pretty good and incredibly generous.

So check it out. Yeah, thanks for the opportunity to reach your listeners. I think it's, your listeners are the kind of people who, I imagine a lot of them will wanna support this and we hope to hear from them. Yeah, it's a very special thing. And I can't, first of all, I can't thank you enough for taking time

out of your venture back to Australia to spend time with me today. And I just, I hold you in the highest regard. And I think the legacy of the work that you're doing is just, it's an extraordinary thing. And I can't tell you what an impact you've had on my life and the life of millions and millions of people. It's just, it's such a worthy,

it's a worthy life well-lived, sir, that you've walked a certain path that I think is just extraordinarily laudable and rare. So. Well, thank you very much, Rich. I really do appreciate that. I know that we're both working for a lot of the same causes and we're both trying to leave the world a better place

than it would have been if we hadn't been here. So I really appreciate your words and what you're doing. Yeah, thank you. So when the updated version of Animal Liberation is coming out in the spring, I think? That's in May, yes. Okay, well, maybe you can come back here and we can talk a little bit more about that,

which would be great. Yeah, okay. Well, maybe you can come back here and we can talk a little bit more about that, which would be great. So thank you. And I need the phone number of your surf instructor when I go to Australia. Ah, yes. You didn't even talk about surfing. We haven't talked about surfing, no, but I know you're going to Byron Bay,

which is one of the most beautiful places in Australia. And I can put you in touch with a former US surfing champion who is a great surfing guy and a surfing guru. And either he or his daughter will be very happy to get you on a board in the waves there. Excellent. Well, I'm holding you to it.

All right. Thank you, Peter. Cheers. Thanks, Rhys. Lance. That's it for today thank you for listening I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation to learn more about today's guest

including links and resources related to everything discussed today visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change in the Plant Power Way as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com.

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Namaste. Thank you.