The School of Greatness - 253 How to Do Good Better with Will MacAskill

Episode Date: November 11, 2015

"So much of convincing people has nothing to do with the arguments you are giving." - Will MacAskill If you enjoyed this episode, check out show notes and more at http://lewishowes.com/253

This is episode number 253 with Will McCaskill. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. Now, Will McCaskill raised over $400 million in donations with both his charities.

So this is all about giving. He's got a new book out as well. For me, greatness is about making the maximum amount of impact in the world. And without further ado, let's go ahead and dive in this episode with Will McCaskill. book out as well. For me, greatness is about making the maximum amount of impact in the world. And without further ado, let's go ahead and dive in this episode with Will McCaskill. Welcome back, everyone, to the School of Greatness podcast. Very excited about our guest. His name is Will McCaskill. How's it going, Will? Yeah, it's going really well. Thanks so much for having me on. Yeah, thanks for being here, man. And you just had a book come out recently in the US called Doing Good Better. It's on effective altruism and how you can make a difference. And I'm all

about making a difference. I've got a book that's out right now that's all about leaving a legacy and living a bigger and better life. So I appreciate the work you're doing. And tell me, why did you decide to write this book? You're a professor over in the UK, correct? Yeah, that's right. I'm a professor of philosophy at Oxford. And I started to get interested in these ideas because I'd thought about the problem of global poverty for quite a while. And I kind of thought, yeah, I really should be doing something about this, but had never

really kind of acted on it until I started working as a fundraiser for this international charity. So I was one of those annoying people who would kind of accost you on the street. This is why I was a student. Accost you on the street and demand that you donate kind of $10 a month. And this meant that I was like thinking about global poverty all day, every day, and talking to these people who just all they wanted to do was get out of a conversation with me. And I felt kind of angry because I felt like, yeah, I was telling them like there's these big problems in the world.

We could do something. We can do so much to help. And yet I was just thinking, and they'd say no, and they'd move on, and they'd just think these people were not living up to their values. And then I thought, well, I'm not living up to my own values either. You know, at the time, I was planning to go into grad school in philosophy and do these very esoteric abstract subjects that clearly weren't going to have much of a benefit for the real world, that I was doing them because they were intellectually interesting. And so I thought, okay, I really need to start changing what I'm going to do with my life. And it was in Oxford that I met this slightly older academic called Toby. And we got coffee, actually in a

graveyard, which in Oxford doubles as like the gardens of this college. They have like parties and stuff. It's normal. It's normal if you're in Oxford. But I got coffee and he was telling me about this commitment he made to give away most of his income over the course of his life. And I'd already heard and thought about these arguments that just given how much good money can do for the very poorest people in the world, well, that just means you should just try and donate as much as you can because you're going to be saving hundreds of lives by doing so. This is an argument that's kind of popular among ethicists and moral philosophers. But I'd never met anyone who was acting on it. And yet here was this guy.

And it's not like he was doing it in this like really self-flagellating way. Like it was this big duty of his. He was like, no, this is this amazing opportunity I have to improve the lives of hundreds or thousands of other people. Like this is fantastic. And I was very convinced by this, so I ended up making a similar commitment to give away everything I earn above. I mean, it was £20,000 per year.

It's about $35,000. Adjusting for inflation, that's maybe about $40,000 now. Everything above that per year. So this year, that'll be about half my income. But then this question, like, okay, so I'm planning to give away quite a lot of money over the course of my life like of course my life probably a couple of million dollars at least if i stay as an academic and the question is then what do i do with that because lots of

charities you know there's a lot of bad stories about um attempts to help going really badly along and yeah surely there must be something better. And so I started, this was back in 2009, started to do the search into which charities are most effective. What are those that really are doing the most to help other people and improve their lives by as much as possible with the money that I donate to them. And from that research, this kind of movement started, Effective Alt altruism so we set up an organization called giving what we can that did research into this question and encouraged people to give at least 10 of our income to those most effective charities um then that started to expand out we

started to think about how can you use your time or your career as effectively as possible to make the world a better place and then yeah this community the effective altruism community really developed and became quite vibrant. And after kind of five years later, I thought, okay, it's time to take all these ideas and package them together so that a lot more people can really get familiar with them as well

and start implementing them into their own lives. I love that. So just so people know, what does effective altruism mean? And what are the core principles of it for you? Yeah, so effective altruism is about using your time and money as effectively as possible to make the world a better place. And taking the scientific approach. So using high-quality evidence and data and good, careful reasoning to ensure that you're not just making a difference but actually making the most difference you can i love that yeah thank you um so it's about you know maybe you've got

like really emotional like strong motivations there but using your ability to kind of reason to channel that so that you have the biggest impact so how do we yeah how do we know that you know i'm all about service giving back my time my money that's part That's one of the principles in my book is living a life of service. I feel like you can't live a great life without doing that as well. For sure. And so how do we maximize it? Because I'm all about maximizing every ounce of energy, time, treasure, talent that we have for our own service but also for the service of the world. So how do we quantify that and make the most of it?

Yeah, I'm really glad to hear you say that. And lots of people who get interested are those who take this kind of, you know, hacker-optimizing approach to life and realize you can do the same thing with doing good. Yeah, so there's a whole body of kind of research from economists, health economists, development economists, on what social programs work and what don't. And then within those that work, what, you know, measuring the kind of size of the impact that you have. And so because the scale of global inequality is so incredibly extreme, so if you're earning above about $55,000 after tax, you're in the kind of richest 1% of the world's population. Everyone earning above about $12,000 is in the richest kind of 15% of the world's population.

Whereas the poorest billion people in the world are living on less than $1.50 per day. Wow. So you can do this. That's like this good kind of general argument for thinking the way that you're going to be able to do the most good is by helping the very poorest people in the world. Because you're able to like, you know, by halving your income, even if you're on a fairly typical salary, you can double the income of like 100 people. It's just this amazing opportunity. because there's loads of aid programs that have not achieved very much. There are some, especially global health, where there are these absolutely outstanding impacts. And these have often been studied and shown to have this really big effect.

So one very simple one is just distributing bed nets to protect children against malaria. It costs about $5 to protect two children for two years by providing one bed net. And by digging into all the studies, of which there have been many, you can be pretty confident that by donating about $3,500, statistically speaking, you will save a life by doing this. There's some child out there who would have died of malaria who didn't because of your donation. would have died of malaria who didn't because of your donation. And charities often throw away grand figures like, it cost $5 to save a life, and normally that's hyperbole,

but this is actually our best guess about how many bed nets you have to provide to prevent one child dying of malaria. And that's the kind of baseline. So I'm all about people experimenting and thinking about other ways of doing good as well, but a lot of the time we focus on these very poor people and these kind of proven you know global health programs just because the case is so strong and maybe we can do even more good again but that's kind of what we should compare against i think what did you notice i'm curious before i learn more about all this, what did you learn about when you were asking for donations as one of those, you know, street, essentially like a street beggar,

you know, like a street beggar asking for money? Um, what did you learn about that process with yourself? And besides the fact that, you know, people are busy and are off to do something and they're, you know, the last thing you want to do is stop and donate money to a random stranger what did you learn about yourself and what did you learn about how to connect with strangers about something that's really important to you yeah it was an amazing learning experience for me actually um i kind of wouldn't encourage anyone to do it because yeah it's actually a pretty bad location to sell to people they're really not in the mood for um it's like door-to-door sales it's like door-to-door sales yeah yeah it's similar and it's actually a pretty bad location to sell to people. They're really not in the mood for... It's like door-to-door sales. It's like door-to-door sales, yeah.

Yeah, it's similar, and it really had a big impact on me. So one, for sure, is how much of convincing people has nothing to do with the arguments that you're giving. I mean, it's no coincidence at all that most of the people doing this, at least who last you know quite attractive um people and that just seems to make a really big difference in terms of how likely people are to sign up similarly for me like the people who i get and who convinced it was very rarely because i was like firing all the statistics at them but instead because you know i just i

smiled or i reminded them of their nephew or something or some sort of personal connection and that made me kind of that was a big learning experience for me just in terms of you know selling things or selling ideas in general there's really only so far especially in a short time frame that like logical rational robotic arguments can take you. It's going to be more about actually kind of breaking that down and having more like this kind of almost like friendship or connection with someone. So actually someone that you, um, that you trust. What type of connection did you say? Just almost like a friendship, like a mini friendship.

So I started to get people to stop and talk to me. I'd kind of go up to them and just kind of ask them a joke. And they were pretty corny jokes, but they'd often work. People would stop because they'd want to find out what the punchline was. And then they'd be kind of disappointed that it wasn't that funny. But then that would be funny itself. And so that would kind of at least start this connection. Break the ice, yeah.

Yeah, where as if you go and you're just like do you want to save a life then they immediately know it's gonna you know feeling like a back fit back foot and people would often say no and it would be kind of awkward you don't want to save a life okay yeah uh okay so what got you into that in the first place like why did you decide that hey i want to start raising money for charities and and start doing that in the first place yeah i mean that was a combination of you know i always kind of wanted to help i always had that kind of social conscience and it was always a bit um ad hoc though so i used to run these summer camps for children with disabilities i worked at an old folks home um i once went to ethiopia and taught in a school

did a bit of volunteerism um and then it was literally just i needed money in the summer after graduating from cambridge before i started postgrad so desperately needed a job and i just thought well i can maybe combine this with doing something worthwhile um so it wasn't these like pure altruistic intentions at all um i was you know, you know, I was doing it and, uh, to get a job, but then it ended up having this really big long-lang impact on me. Gotcha. Gotcha. So let's go back to the book. I'm curious, what are these, these core principles of, uh, effective altruism? There's five core, four or five core principles? effective altruism. There's five core principles? That's right.

So I lay out the kind of style of thinking that effective altruists take in terms of kind of five key questions that you can ask. And the first one is, for any action, think about how many people benefit from this action and by how much. And that's to encourage people to think about

like the outcomes that they're producing by an action so like an example of this gone awry is uh when people think about charitable efficiency they often look at overhead costs how much is the charity spending on administration um versus how much is it spending on the program or maybe they ask about how much is the ceo paid as well but this is just totally misguided because if you've got a really lousy charity that's working on some lousy program, it's like giving away donuts or something, let's say. Then it's just not – like no matter how low your overheads are, it's just still not going to be effective. And in contrast, maybe you need to have high overheads so that you can actually ensure that your program is being really well implemented or that you're choosing the most effective programs. Yeah, because I mean at the same point, if you want to have a great leader of a charity, you're going to have to pay them.

And you don't want to underpay them to have them be thinking about how can they survive themselves when they're making such a big impact in the world. They want to be paid for their time I'm assuming, right? Yeah, that's exactly right. So if you as a charity can pay your CEO, pay a higher salary to CEO so you can get better talent and therefore are doing more good for your charity. Yeah, you double the donations because of it, you know? That's right.

Then you just have a moral obligation to do that. And it's a bit of a shame that we have this often puritanical attitude to charity where the focus is on self sacrifice rather than just actually how much of an outcome of this because if you can do good and also improve your own life in the process as i think you often can like i often think that donating to charity is actually the great component of a meaningful life. You know, benefiting yourself as a bonus of doing good is not a cost. Yeah. I mean, for me personally, feel free to let me know based on your research. I don't feel like only serving the world and sacrificing everything that all of our wants and needs and dreams and desires is worth it to sacrifice

it all. I think it's only worth it if we're able to create a win-win, where we are filled up every single day, where our needs are met, we're striving to get what we want, that we're fulfilled, and we're also making an impact. But if it's just serving the world and we're doing a disservice to ourselves, then what's the point? Yeah. I mean, yeah, you don't want to be one of, you know, you don't want to be someone who's just doing this like self-sacrificial, self-flagellating thing, like, and focused on, you know, how

can I be the one as badly off as possible, love, and how can I do the most good? Yeah. And I just think, yeah, exactly. But I think like, you know, helping others can and should be just like a significant part of what makes for the meaningful life. Yeah. I mean, I talk about it as like this would be the way you're being 24-7. You should be in service.

When you're walking down the street, you should smile. You should open the door for people. You should, you know, I'll buy an extra juice for someone behind me in line just because I want to do something nice. It can be called random acts of kindness. It can be just being a good human being and saying hello. It doesn't have to be this let me donate everything in my life every single day. It can just be like this is who I am as a human being. I'm going to serve.

Yeah, and there's actually – so there's a bunch of evidence both on how additional money actually just makes you, does way less to improve your happiness than people expect. Yeah. Like people radically overestimate how much additional income will make them happier. And at the same time, they totally underestimate how much kind of giving will improve their lives. So in some studies, they gave people some money. Some they told to spend it on themselves, others they told to donate. And it was the people who donated who felt much happier about themselves afterwards. the proportion of people who are psychopaths or something and um uh and that actually just means that there's much less of a trade-off i think than you know i mean i think like if you do want to

like if you're happy to kind of live on less yourself in order to help loads of other people that's great that's like should be really applauded um but and a lot of the time it's just you know donating a proportion of your income even if that's a pretty significant proportion, like 10% or more, or choosing to have a career that you think is going to do more good. Very often this is much less of a sacrifice than you think, actually a kind of benefit. And at the same time, making this huge positive difference to the world because that's the opportunity we have. I love that. Yeah. What are some of the other principles you talk about?

Yeah. So the second is this idea of, you know, is this the most effective thing I can do? So am I not just making a difference, but making the most difference? And this is crucial because so most social programs actually don't have an impact at all. So when tested rigorously, they're just actually no impact or even harmful. But even among those that do have an impact, there's a huge difference in how much of an impact they can have. So among different education programs in sub-Saharan Africa, for example, even among those that are really great, even among those that are having a big impact, there's still a factor of 100 between those that are merely very good and those that are very best. Similarly, if you look at different health programs, where you can think about that in terms of cost to save a life

or cost to give an extra person an extra year of healthy life. Again, you get this discrepancy of like 100 times between programs that are merely very good and the very best ones, like, as we said, distributing bed nets. Right. Okay. And you said that's the second principle? So that's the second principle. So the third one is the idea of, is this area neglected?

So in terms of thinking about what causes to focus on or where your money or your time should go, one crucial thing is, is this something that people are already kind of piling into? So for example, you know, natural disasters get an awful lot of attention and obviously there should be disaster relief. The question is just how much

and how much can I as an individual contribute if it's already the case that huge amounts of funding are flowing into this. And so for example, in the Japanese earthquake, the Japanese Red Cross explicitly said, we're part of the fourth richest country in the world. We have the resources to deal with this problem. Obviously, it's great that there's such an outpouring of sympathy,

but we actually really don't need the money. Yet $5 billion you know in the aftermath of that um whereas there's these ongoing natural disasters all the time malaria tuberculosis hiv aids they get a lot they get a lot less attention um and for that reason you can have a bigger impact just because of diminishing returns the less money that's already flowing into something the more the bigger an impact an additional dollar will have. Okay.

I like that. Yeah. So that's the third principle. The fourth one is, uh, the fourth question is what would have happened otherwise? So the difference you make in life is the difference between the good you do and what would have happened otherwise. Um, and this plays out in a whole bunch of ways, But one way is in terms of the career that you pursue. So you might go and do something.

So you might become a doctor, let's say, and think, okay, yeah, well, I'm saving lives just absolutely all the time. I'm just doing these kind of life-saving operations. But if so, that's not quite the right way of thinking how much of an impact am I really making, how much of a difference am I making to the world? Because if you weren't in that job, then, you know, it's not the case that all those life-saving surgeries just wouldn't be performed. You know, someone else would be in that position.

They'd be doing those same sorts of operations. And so you really need to look at the difference between what you do and what whoever would have been in your shoes would have been doing like what would have happened otherwise and that means that yeah the impact for example doctors make is maybe less than people might intuitively think um and then the final um final key question is uh what the it's to address cases where the kind of potential benefits of your action are a lot more uncertain and uh that what they should ask what's the probability of success and just how good would success be if i were to pursue this thing because a lot of the book focuses on these more easy to quantify measurable concrete things like distributing bed nets or

i also talk about deworming school children, which is curing children of parasitic worms that live in their gut, costs only about 50 cents per child. Again, it's an extremely effective thing. But you might think, okay, well, what about kind of campaigning for political change or doing basic research, or something where it's a lot less clear whether you're actually going to have an impact at all. But if you did have a big win, then it would just be absolutely huge for the world. And you can take that. You can still try and at least make a comparison between that and these more easy to quantify things

by looking at what's the probability of this paying off. And if it did pay off, how good would that be? And then you can multiply that together and that's economists call that expected value and if the expected value is greater than the value that you're gonna generate by doing the more concrete thing yeah then you should go off to that lower lower probability chance of a big win right okay is there is there ever a wrong way to give in your mind um yeah i think so um i mean i think there's a wrong way to give in your mind? Yeah, I think so.

I mean, I think there's probably quite a few wrong ways to give. I think a lot of people give in order to get just to aggrandize themselves. So building a new wing of an opera so they get something named after themselves, I think. I think a lot of people just give unreflectively. And I think that's, you know, it's still admirable, it should be like, encouraged that people are willing to put their money to help others. But I'd really like people to just have a bit more thought. So like, actually, less than 10% of people when you ask them, say that they did any research at all, or any thinking before choosing where to donate. And I'd much rather people think, no, actually, this is like, you know, it's a pretty big decision. It is actually life and death for people on the other side of the world, like depending on where you're choosing to give. And so, you know, if I actually want to use my life to have this kind of,

like you say, legacy or lasting impact, I should really be putting thought into where I'm giving this money in the same way as if I was buying purchases for myself. I'd be reading Amazon reviews or I'd be on the wire cutter or other things in order to ensure that I was going to buy the product that was going to be best. I think we should think just the same way when it comes to charity. I'm curious. I've heard different sides of the story here for people that donate money to causes.

And, you know, usually when you donate online or something, you can have the option to put your name or not put your name and be anonymous, right? And I've heard a lot of people that will tell stories of, you know, some rich individual or rich family that donates millions of dollars a year, but they never put their name. They never want anyone to know. It's an anonymous donor. And then I hear stories from other people that say, I put my name on every donation I put not to brag about myself, not to get recognition, but to be a symbol of inspiration for other people to

say, hey, if he's doing it or she's doing it, then I should do it too. It's kind of like a confirmation that, wow, this person is doing that. They're not trying to get the recognition, but their name is on this. That's social proof saying that I should do it too. What do you think is the best approach to donating money? Yeah, so I'm kind of fairly strongly inclined towards the latter. So again, I kind of worry that we've got this kind of biblical inhabitants of give your money, but you don't want to show off at all.

Whereas again, I'm concerned by what's the outcome going to be. And so like with Giving What We Can, we've got kind of 1,300 members now. These are people who are committing to give at least 10 percent um and it's all public so basically everyone they kind of write their name on the website and so that means it's not just a donation it's also a statement kind of says yeah look we're kind of 1 300 people that's not that many people um compared to the world yet together we've been able to commit commit close to half a billion dollars in lifetime pledge deductions. So that's like, whoa, actually,

that's like a real statement and does make you think, well, maybe I should do this too. And, you know, if you can get one other person to make a similar commitment, then you've just doubled your life's impact. So that's really important. And I think ultimately it's worth kind of risking,

you know, maybe like having some people put out or calling you sanctimonious or something for that potential impact. I look at it like what if everyone was anonymous, right? What if no one put their name on a donation and just like, oh, we collected a million dollars this year in donations from we don't know who. Or everyone said not to put their name on it. It's like, how is that inspiring? And then everyone who shows up to like the gala or whatever is all anonymous. Right. But, uh, you don't know who donated. I just think it's kind of silly. I mean, I think there's like a, a dance and an art and how to do it. And you really need to come from a loving, humble, grateful place of service. But I think it's important.

The more I'm talking about it, I'm just convincing myself that it's good to put your name on it, I guess. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think for sure there are some people out there who, you know, these multi-billionaires or very rich people who are literally only doing charity

in order to build a new network or get kind of prestige and so on. And I think it's right that we should be calling out those people. Sure, sure. But that doesn't mean none of us, you know, it doesn't mean that you shouldn't take like pride in doing good. It doesn't mean we shouldn't be trying to like encourage others to do the same. Yeah, yeah.

I think it's, I think people are going to know if you do it for the right reasons or not. But I think either way, if you're supporting and giving back, that's still a great deed, even if you're benefiting. And it's okay if you're benefiting from the network or from the prestige, I guess. It's okay as long as you're wanting to serve first. If it's an extra benefit, then it shouldn't be bad, right? Yeah, exactly. That's exactly the right way of thinking about it.

What do you think is the right way of thinking about it. for how much time you should give. Let's say you're already being in service on a daily basis. You're a very loving human being. You're giving back to your community just by being in the world when you walk around town. But how much time should people give specifically to giving back? How much money do you think they should give back? And is there any other kind of criteria for time, money, their talent? Should they be giving back their resources?

What do you think is like a good amount or number? Kind of like on average, if people are doing that, I feel like that they're also pursuing their dreams and doing what they need to have a great life and take care of themselves, have a good family life, have fun in life. But also they're giving back in a maximum amount of way. Yeah, great. So a couple of things. So one is that I think it's actually just a lot harder to have a really big impact through kind of volunteering your time just on the kind of, you know, the spare hours you've got. And that's for a couple of reasons. So one is just that I think the biggest ways to have an impact are benefiting the poorest people in the world.

And for them, like, you know, additional volunteer hours, you know, it's easier to kind of volunteer in the local community. Also, though, just being a volunteer, like, costs charities as well as benefits them because it requires management and so on and overheads. And actually, anecdotally, I know of some charities that they only take volunteers, they think of volunteers as a kind of short-term cost, but a potential long-term benefit because those volunteers tend to donate to them. And so it's actually because they're more likely to donate, they take those volunteers. So I think there are some good opportunities, but I think it's hard to directly volunteer for the charity to have a really big impact.

to like directly volunteer for the charity to have a really big impact. With your donations, I mean, the standard that I promote is 10%. And that often seems like quite a lot to people. But I think there's a couple of ways of kind of mitigating that. So one is, especially if you're going to make a kind of commitment like this earlier on in life, then you never need to go backwards in terms of your income. You can just say, okay, well, as my income rises, I'll give a kind of larger percentage until I hit this 10%. And that means that, you know, I never feel like I've, you know, lost out or taken a step back. And then the other thing is just, I think people do underestimate or overestimate the benefits

of income and underestimate the benefits of giving. And so, I have the Dominican gives about 2%, but I'd love to see 10% becoming this kind of social standard. And then the final thing is I'd love to see, you know, people thinking about their whole careers as well as kind of more like an ethical choice,

because at the moment I think people think, you know, thinking about their whole careers as well as kind of more like an ethical choice. Because at the moment, I think people think, you know, people don't even think about it as just something that's important for the world in terms of what career they pursue. I mean, sometimes people do, but often they don't. And I'd love to think of, to see a kind of social norm change where people start thinking of making a difference as one of these obvious things that go into a career decision in the same way that your salary or your location is when you're choosing a career. And I think partly that doesn't happen just because people don't really know what that

involves, the different ways you can have an impact. And so I set up this other charity, 80,000 Hours, that provides advice from this. Its aim is just to help people make those decisions so that they can pursue whatever career will enable them to have a much bigger social impact. I'm curious now,

you know, it sounds like making the maximum amount of impact we can possibly is essentially working with third world countries. What do you say to people that say, well, there's a lot of bad things happening? You know, I live in Los Angeles.

Let's just use this as it's a sample. So what about people who would say, well, I live in Los Angeles and, you know, two miles away, there's a lot of crime and homelessness and this and that. Should I be neglecting my community to serve a community that I don't even know? Yeah. So I think, again, there's a couple of things to say. So one thing when I kind of recommend people giving to, you know, the very poorest people in the world, it's often not actually saying like, because these people have even worse

problems. Like, I actually think that for the people who are really the least privileged members of the US.S., like homeless or suffering from mental health and substance abuse, their lives are just actually really pretty bad. The question is just on, like, how tractable a problem is this and how neglected is it? So the U.S. spends about $2 trillion a year on kind of welfare payments

in order to try and help the poor in that own country. And that's, you know, say tens of millions of people. Total overseas development spending is only $250 billion. So a tenth as much. And that's to try and improve the lives of 2 billion people. And that's like a really big difference in terms of how many resources are already being allocated to help these different problems.

And so again, it's this question of not just who's the most in need, but how much of an impact am I actually going to make on the margin? Yeah, with respect to should we be helping in our own communities versus internationally, I feel like it's a double jeopardy thing if we think we should privilege the our home communities where these people have been unlucky to be born into this country with without like inhabited wealth without good institutions where they can be economically productive and then we're going to say oh and then also you don't get our help because we're going to benefit the people who are close to us who are comparatively going to much better off uh and so that is something i'd really like encourage people

to kind of think about and appreciate and um especially because you know if you happen to go to one of these places and get to know other people you know you'd find you'd feel exactly those same kind of bonds of loyalty right and it seems kind of arbitrary if it's the mere fact that you've kind of never been there doesn't you know means that you don't have you know like obligations or reasons to help them when someone is going to support a charity or non-profit uh you know i'm on the board of a organization called pencils of promise that builds schools for kids around the world and um i support charity water as well and a few other organizations here in the U.S. When someone is looking to donate or they find an attraction to an organization, what do you think are like the key things that you would want them to look for?

Maybe they don't have time to research too much, but like here are the two or three things that you should look out at. And if they meet these criteria, then cool. It's probably a good donation. Obviously obviously there's probably no perfect charity so what are those two or three things and then also what are the two or three organizations that you think are doing an incredible job and making the maximum impact yeah fantastic so um in terms of the questions i think divide into three so one is the program that the charity works on. So is it working within a cause that's very important, that's potentially tractable, you can make progress on it,

and at least comparatively neglected? Does the charity have evidence behind the program that it's implementing? You know, has it kind of looked at research? And then is it doing kind of self-evaluation as it's going along? Is it trying to conduct high-quality studies in order to ensure that it's actually having the impact that it's aiming to do? The second is then think about the operational ability

of the organization. Is it being led with people who have great experience and background? Is it led by leaders in the field? Is the organization very transparent about what it's doing, including the mistakes it's making? Because nonprofits can often get away with not having to be very transparent, but any organizations can be making mistakes.

And if it's being open about that, that's actually a really good sign. And then the third question, which is often overlooked, is just what's this charity actually going to do with additional money? So you might have gotten a sense of, okay, what it's done with money that it's spent in the past, but maybe it's just actually received an awful lot of donations recently, and additional money that you're going to give to it isn't going to have that same level of impact as been had in the past. So for example, it's hard to fund, you can't really fund polio eradication now, not because polio vaccination isn't incredibly effective, it is, but just because Gates is already in there, any additional attempts there is just not going to have a really big impact. And then in terms of the charities that I'd really recommend very highly.

So one is the Against Malaria Foundation, distributes bed nets, costs $5 per bed net, about $3,500 will save a life. Two, so sadly, the best charities often have the worst names. So I apologize in advance. But two deworming charities called Deworm the the world and then this is a really bad one schistosomiasis control initiative or sci schistosomiasis control initiative and they run programs that um en masse distribute deworming drugs to cure children of these parasitic worms that prevent them from going to school and then then in later life, you know, there have been long-run studies showing that this leads

to increased productivity, increased earnings later in life. And then the final charity is called GiveDirectly. And this is great if you think, if you're particularly skeptical of white knights thinking that they can do loads of good to help others in poorer countries. It just simply transfers cash to the poorest people in the world. white knights thinking that they can do loads of good to help others in poorer countries it just simply transfers cash to the poorest people in the world um typically transfers about one year's income to people who are not really living below that poverty line and you might worry well how's this money going to be spent and so on but this is actually one of the most evidence-based programs

there is uh and it turns out that what people tend people tend to spend money pretty well actually typically they invest it um in assets so that means buying livestock or um buying a tin roof rather than a thatch roof um because a thatch roof you have to replace every couple of years whereas a tin roof lasts for much longer and so it's actually they get these incredible returns on investment something like 14 14% return per year, much better than you could get investing in a bank in the US or the UK. Wow. And so,

yeah, that's this very simple program that's really been blowing up as well. So those are the four I recommend. I love it. Well, I want to, I want to ask you two final questions. Before I do, where can we go to learn more about this book and get access to this?

Great. So learn more and sign up to the newsletter as well at effectivealtruism.com. And there you can check out the book. If you sign up to the newsletter, you'll get a free chapter advising you on having a big impact through your career based on the research of 80,000 hours. But that's at effectiveautism.com. Love that. Question that I ask, there's two final questions I ask everyone at the end of my podcast. The first one is the three truths question. So if your book was gone and all the work you've done has been gone and you got to leave one final piece of paper behind

that was the three truths that you've learned from everything you've done in your life and this was your final message to the world. What would the three truths be for you that you've learned about life? That's a terrific question. So I think the first would be That's a terrific question. So I think the first would be, if you're earning above about $30,000 per year, then you're in the richest couple of percent of the world by GiveWell.org, you have the power to save a person's life every single year of your life.

third would be you have 80 000 hours of working life uh even just spend of 80 000 hours working in your life even just spending five percent of that time trying to work out how you should spend the rest is uh two working at years of life this is a huge decision and you should be spending a lot more time than you probably are um in order to work out how you can use your time as effectively as possible. I love that. Well, before I ask the final question, I want to acknowledge you for a moment, Will, for the service you're adding to the world and how you're constantly working and researching and diving in and creating this type of content and information so that people like myself and everyone listening can learn how they can make a maximum impact on the world. So I want to acknowledge you for all the hard work you're doing and I appreciate everything you're up to. Thanks so much. I mean, it's a pleasure.

Yeah. And the final question is, what's your definition of greatness? I feel like I'm obliged to give a definition, but I think this definition, but I'd define greatness as the difference you make to the world. So that's how many people, how many people's lives have you touched and by how much have you improved their lives both now and in the long run into the future? Will McCaskill. Thanks so much for coming on, my friend.

I appreciate it. Great. Thanks so much for having me. And there you have it, guys. I hope you guys enjoyed this. It's weartrim.com, W-E-A-R-T-R-I-M.com. And your clothing for men, I'm telling you, I feel like I just need to wear them all the time. So if you have a nice function, a nice event

that's also casual, check out the website. You'll see what I'm talking about when you go to weartrim.com. Greatness 20, so check it out at weartrim.com. Thank you guys again so much. We got the podcast in the top 30 in the world last week. So thank you guys for supporting, for listening, for subscribing, for leaving a review.

You guys know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great. Outro Music