#612: Will MacAskill of Effective Altruism Fame — The Value of Longtermism, Tools for Beating Stress and Overwhelm, AI Scenarios, High-Impact Books, and How to Save the World and Be an Agent of Change

Will MacAskill of Effective Altruism Fame — The Value of Longtermism, Tools for Beating Stress and Overwhelm, AI Scenarios, High-Impact Books, and How to Save the World and Be an Agent of Change | Brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs https://linkedin.com/Tim recruitment platform with 800M+ users, Vuori http://vuoriclothing.com/Tim comfortable and durable performance apparel, and Theragun http://therabody.com/tim percussive muscle therapy devices. More on all three below. William MacAskill (@willmacaskill https://twitter.com/willmacaskill?lang=en) is an associate professor in philosophy at the University of Oxford. At the time of his appointment, he was the youngest associate professor of philosophy in the world. A Forbes 30 Under 30 social entrepreneur, he also cofounded the nonprofits Giving What We Can https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/, the Centre for Effective Altruism https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/, and Y Combinator-backed 80,000 Hours https://80000hours.org/tim, which together have moved over $200 million to effective charities. You can find my 2015 conversation with Will at tim.blog/will https://tim.blog/2015/11/22/will-macaskill/. His new book is What We Owe the Future https://www.amazon.com/What-Owe-Future-William-MacAskill/dp/1541618629/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20. It is blurbed by several guests of the podcast, including Sam Harris, who wrote, “No living philosopher has had a greater impact upon my ethics than Will MacAskill. . . . This is an altogether thrilling and necessary book.” Please enjoy! * This episode is brought to you by Vuori clothing http://vuoriclothing.com/Tim! Vuori http://vuoriclothing.com/Tim is a new and fresh perspective on performance apparel, perfect if you are sick and tired of traditional, old workout gear. Everything is designed for maximum comfort and versatility so that you look and feel as good in everyday life as you do working out. Get yourself some of the most comfortable and versatile clothing on the planet at VuoriClothing.com/Tim http://vuoriclothing.com/Tim. Not only will you receive 20% off your first purchase http://vuoriclothing.com/Tim, but you’ll also enjoy free shipping on any US orders over $75 and free returns. * This episode is also brought to you by Theragun http://therabody.com/tim! Theragun http://therabody.com/tim is my go-to solution for recovery and restoration. It’s a famous, handheld percussive therapy device that releases your deepest muscle tension. I own two Theraguns, and my girlfriend and I use them every day after workouts and before bed. The all-new Gen 4 Theragun http://therabody.com/tim is easy to use and has a proprietary brushless motor that’s surprisingly quiet—about as quiet as an electric toothbrush. Go to Therabody.com/Tim http://therabody.com/tim right now and get your Gen 4 Theragun today, starting at only $199. * This episode is also brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs https://linkedin.com/Tim. Whether you are looking to hire now for a critical role or thinking about needs that you may have in the future, LinkedIn Jobs https://linkedin.com/Tim can help. LinkedIn screens candidates for the hard and soft skills you’re looking for and puts your job in front of candidates looking for job opportunities that match what you have to offer. Using LinkedIn’s active community of more than 800 million professionals worldwide, LinkedIn Jobs https://linkedin.com/Tim can help you find and hire the right person faster. When your business is ready to make that next hire, find the right person with LinkedIn Jobs. And now, you can post a job for free. Just visit LinkedIn.com/Tim https://linkedin.com/Tim. * [07:20] Recommended reading. [13:26] How Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment changed Will’s life. [18:12] Maintaining optimism in the age of doomscrolling. [23:41] What is effective altruism? [26:04] Resources for maximizing the impact of your philanthropy. [27:45] How adopting a check-in system has most improved Will’s life. [32:32] Caffeine limits. [34:08] Effective back pain relief. [41:18] What is longtermism, and why did Will write What We Owe the Future? [43:44] Future generations matter. [46:42] Finding the line between apathy and fatalism that spurs action toward ensuring there’s a future. [52:23] What Will hopes readers take away from What We Owe the Future. [55:56] What is value lock-in? [1:01:38] Most concerning threats projected over the next 10 years. [1:09:28] Most promising developments happening now. [1:13:47] How Will refocuses during periods of overwhelm. [1:18:48] Perils of AI considered plausible by the people who create it. [1:30:42] Longtermist-minded resources and actions we can take now. [1:36:29] Parting thoughts. * For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsors http://tim.blog/podcast-sponsors Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts http://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books http://tim.blog/books. Follow Tim: Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss https://twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferriss https://instagram.com/timferriss/ YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss https://www.youtube.com/timferriss Facebook: facebook.com/timferriss https://www.facebook.com/TimFerriss/ LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferriss http://linkedin.com/in/timferriss Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast include Jerry Seinfeld https://tim.blog/2020/12/08/jerry-seinfeld/, Hugh Jackman https://tim.blog/2020/06/26/hugh-jackman/, Dr. Jane Goodall https://tim.blog/2020/04/16/jane-goodall/, LeBron James https://tim.blog/2018/11/27/lebron-james-mike-mancias/, Kevin Hart https://tim.blog/2020/05/20/kevin-hart/, Doris Kearns Goodwin https://tim.blog/2018/09/07/doris-kearns-goodwin-leadership/, Jamie Foxx https://tim.blog/2015/12/06/jamie-foxx/, Matthew McConaughey https://tim.blog/2020/10/19/matthew-mcconaughey/, Esther Perel https://tim.blog/2017/05/21/esther-perel/, Elizabeth Gilbert https://tim.blog/2020/05/08/elizabeth-gilbert/, Terry Crews https://tim.blog/2017/12/20/terry-crews-how-to-have-do-and-be-all-you-want/, Sia https://tim.blog/2020/08/12/sia/, Yuval Noah Harari https://tim.blog/2020/10/27/yuval-noah-harari/, Malcolm Gladwell https://tim.blog/2016/06/21/malcolm-gladwell/, Madeleine Albright https://tim.blog/2020/05/27/secretary-madeleine-albright/, Cheryl Strayed https://tim.blog/2017/03/30/cheryl-strayed/, Jim Collins https://tim.blog/2019/02/18/jim-collins/, Mary Karr, https://tim.blog/2020/11/11/mary-karr/ Maria Popova https://tim.blog/2014/10/21/brain-pickings/, Sam Harris https://tim.blog/2020/05/15/sam-harris-2/, Michael Phelps https://tim.blog/2021/01/21/michael-phelps-grant-hackett/, Bob Iger https://tim.blog/2020/01/16/bob-iger/, Edward Norton https://tim.blog/2019/10/31/edward-norton-motherless-brooklyn/, Arnold Schwarzenegger https://tim.blog/2015/02/02/arnold-schwarzenegger/, Neil Strauss https://tim.blog/2014/06/24/neil-strauss/, Ken Burns https://tim.blog/2019/09/12/ken-burns/, Maria Sharapova https://tim.blog/2017/08/26/maria-sharapova/, Marc Andreessen https://tim.blog/2016/05/29/marc-andreessen/, Neil Gaiman https://tim.blog/2019/03/28/neil-gaiman/, Neil de Grasse Tyson https://tim.blog/2019/10/03/neil-degrasse-tyson/, Jocko Willink https://tim.blog/2016/09/21/jocko-willink-on-discipline-leadership-and-overcoming-doubt/, Daniel Ek https://tim.blog/2020/12/03/daniel-ek/, Kelly Slater https://tim.blog/2020/09/08/kelly-slater/, Dr. Peter Attia https://tim.blog/2019/11/27/peter-attia-fasting-metformin-longevity/, Seth Godin https://tim.blog/2016/02/10/seth-godin/, Howard Marks https://tim.blog/2018/09/25/howard-marks/, Dr. Brené Brown https://tim.blog/2020/02/06/brene-brown-striving-self-acceptance-saving-marriages/, Eric Schmidt https://tim.blog/2019/04/09/eric-schmidt/, Michael Lewis https://tim.blog/2020/05/01/michael-lewis/, Joe Gebbia https://tim.blog/2018/03/08/joe-gebbia-co-founder-of-airbnb/, Michael Pollan https://tim.blog/2018/05/06/michael-pollan-how-to-change-your-mind/, Dr. Jordan Peterson https://tim.blog/2021/03/01/jordan-peterson/, Vince Vaughn https://tim.blog/2017/05/31/vince-vaughn/, Brian Koppelman https://tim.blog/2020/04/23/brian-koppelman/, Ramit Sethi https://tim.blog/2019/05/07/ramit-sethi/, Dax Shepard https://tim.blog/2020/11/18/dax-shepard/, Tony Robbins https://tim.blog/2014/10/15/money-master-the-game/, Jim Dethmer https://tim.blog/2020/05/18/jim-dethmer/, Dan Harris https://tim.blog/2020/11/19/dan-harris/, Ray Dalio https://tim.blog/2017/09/13/ray-dalio/, Naval Ravikant https://tim.blog/2015/08/18/the-evolutionary-angel-naval-ravikant/, Vitalik Buterin https://tim.blog/2021/03/08/vitalik-buterin-naval-ravikant/, Elizabeth Lesser https://tim.blog/2021/03/16/elizabeth-lesser/, Amanda Palmer https://tim.blog/2019/04/18/amanda-palmer-2/, Katie Haun https://tim.blog/2021/02/18/katie-haun/, Sir Richard Branson https://tim.blog/2017/10/09/richard-branson/, Chuck Palahniuk https://tim.blog/2020/09/02/chuck-palahniuk/, Arianna Huffington https://tim.blog/2017/10/18/arianna-huffington/, Reid Hoffman https://tim.blog/2015/08/31/the-oracle-of-silicon-valley-reid-hoffman-plus-michael-mccullough/, Bill Burr https://tim.blog/2017/09/17/bill-burr/, Whitney Cummings https://tim.blog/2015/06/26/whitney-cummings/, Rick Rubin https://tim.blog/2015/05/15/rick-rubin/, Dr. Vivek Murthy https://tim.blog/2020/03/26/vivek-murthy/, Darren Aronofsky https://tim.blog/2017/09/09/darren-aronofsky/, and many more. 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• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

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• 0:43Tim Ferriss?

  first for my partner, t-shirts that are super soft but somehow last as he's hard on stuff. And then I got into the super soft cotton yoga pants and jogger sweatpants. I live in them and they too have lasted. They're stylish enough, I can wear them out and about. The material is just super soft and durable. I just got their clementine running shorts for summer and loved them. The brand seems pretty popular, constantly sold out. In closing, and I'm abbreviating here, but in closing, with the exception of when I need technical outdoor gear, they're the only brand I've bought in the last year or so for yoga, running, loungewear that lasts and that I think look good also. I like the discreet logo." So that gives you some idea. That was not intended for the sponsor read. That was just

• 1:24Tim Ferriss?

  her response via text. Vuori, again spelled V U O R I, is designed for maximum comfort and versatility. You can wear it running, you can wear their stuff training, doing yoga, lounging, weekend errands, or in my case, again, going out to dinner. It really doesn't matter what you're doing. Their clothing is so comfortable and looks so good. And it's, it's non-offensive that you don't have a huge brand logo on your face. You'll just want to be in them all this time. And my girlfriend and I have been wearing them for the last few months. Their men's KORE short, K O R E, the most comfortable lined athletic short, is your one short for every sport. I've been using it for kettlebell swings, for runs, you name it. The Banks short, this is their go-to-land-to-sea short, is the

• 2:10Tim Ferriss?

  Versatility. It's made from recycled plastic bottles. And what I'm wearing right now, which if I had to pick one to recommend to folks out there, or at least to men out there, is the Ponto Performance Pant. And you'll find these at the link I'm going to give you guys. You can check out what I'm talking about, but I'm wearing them right now. They're thin, performance sweatpants, but that doesn't do them justice. So you gotta check it out. P O N T O, Ponto Performance Pant. For you ladies, the women's performance jogger is the softest jogger you'll ever own. Vuori isn't just an investment in your clothing. It's an investment in your happiness. And for you, my dear listeners, they're offering 20% off your first purchase. So get yourself some of the most comfortable and versatile clothing on the planet. It's super popular. A lot of my friends have now noticed are wearing this.

• 2:55Tim Ferriss?

  And so am I. vuoriclothing.com/Tim. That's V U O R I clothing.com/Tim. Not only will you receive 20% off your first purchase, but you'll also enjoy free shipping on any US orders over $75 and free returns. So check it out. vuoriclothing.com/Tim. That's V U O R I clothing.com/Tim. And discover the versatility of Vuori Clothing.

• 3:28Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Theragun. I have two Theraguns and they're worth their weight in gold. I've been using them every single day. Whether you're an elite athlete or just a regular person trying to get through your day, muscle pain and muscle tension are real things. That's why I use the Theragun. I use it at night. I use it after workouts. It is a handheld percussive therapy device that releases your deepest muscle tension. So for instance, at night, I might use it on the bottom of my feet. It's helped with my plantar fasciitis. I will have my girlfriend use it up and down the middle of my back and I'll use it on her. It's an easy way for us to actually trade massages in effect. And you can think of it, in fact, as massages reinvented on some level.

• 4:11Tim Ferriss?

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• 4:52Tim Ferriss?

  That's organic light emitting diode screen, personalized Theragun app, and incredible combination of quiet and power. And the Gen 4 Theraguns start at just $199. I said I have two. I have the Prime and I also have the Pro, which is like the super Cadillac version. My girlfriend loves the soft attachments on that. So try Theragun for 30 days, starting at only $199. Go to therabody.com/tim right now and get your Gen 4 Theragun today. One more time, that's therabody.com/tim. T-H-E-R-A-B-O-D-Y.com/tim.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  Trigger action plan. That's what you need, pal.

• 5:32Tim Ferriss?

  Optimal minimal.

• 5:34Speaker 01

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start to shake. Can I ask you a personal question?

• 5:40Speaker 02

  Now would have seemed appropriate time.

• 5:43Speaker 03

  What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 5:48Speaker 02

  Me, too. Ferris. Show.

• 5:57Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. My guest today is William Macaskill. That's M-A-C-A-S-K-I-L-L. You can find him on Twitter @WillMacaskill. Will is an associate professor in philosophy at the University of Oxford. At the time of his appointment, he was the youngest associate professor of philosophy in the world. A Forbes 30 Under 30 social entrepreneur, he also co-founded the nonprofits Giving What We Can, The Center for Effective Altruism, and the Y Combinator-backed 80 ...hours, which together have moved over $200 million to effective charities. You can find my 2015 conversation with Will at tim.blog/Will.

• 6:40Tim Ferriss?

  Just a quick side note, we probably won't spend too much time on this, but in that 2015 conversation, we talked about existential risk and the number one highlight was pathogens, although we didn't use the word pandemic. Certainly, that was perhaps a prescient discussion based on the type of research, the many types of research that Will does. His new book is What We Owe the Future. It is blurbed by several guests of this podcast, including neuroscientist and author Sam Harris, who wrote, quote, "No living philosopher has had a greater impact upon my ethics than Will MacAskill..." This is an altogether thrilling and necessary book. End quote. You can find him online, williammacaskill.com. Will, nice to see you again. Thanks for making the time.

• 7:23Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me back on. It's a delight.

• 7:25Tim Ferriss?

  And I thought we would start with some, say, warm-up questions to get people right into some details of how you think, the information you consume, and so on and so forth. So we're going to begin with a few questions I often reserve for the end of conversations. We covered some of the other rapid-fire questions in the last conversation. For people who want a lot on your bio, how you ended up being the youngest associate professor of philosophy in the world at the time of your appointment, and so on, they can listen to our first conversation. But we spoke about a few books last time, and I'd be curious, what is the book or what are the books that you have given most as a gift and why?

• 8:09Tim Ferriss?

  Or what are some books that have had a great influence on you? I know we talked already about Practical Ethics by Peter Singer and then Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom last time, but do any other books come to mind when I ask that question?

• 8:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, so here are a couple. One is The Precipice by my colleague Toby Ord, who I co-founded Giving What We Can With back in 2009. And it's on the topic of existential risks. So I see it as a complement to my book, What We Are the Future. And it details in quite beautiful prose and also painstaking detail, some of the risks that we face as a civilization, from the familiar asteroids to the less familiar supervolcanoes, and to the truly terrifying, which I also discuss in the book, and discuss how we might try and handle, like artificial intelligence and engineered pathogens and engineered pandemics. And it also just talks about what

• 9:06Speaker 01

  we can do about them as well. And so I think it's just like absolutely necessary as a read. We'll talk, I guess, a bunch about some of those topics as we get into my work too. So I have like another kind of set of books, which are quite different, but they've had some of the biggest impact on just the background of my thinking over the last few years in very subtle ways. And that's Joe Heinrich's books, Seek the of Our Success and The Weirdest People in the World. And Joe Heinrich is a quantitative anthropologist at Harvard. And his first book is just, why are humans the most powerful and ecologically

• 9:49Speaker 01

  dominant species on the planet? And people often say like, oh, it's our big brains. And he's like, no, our brains are several times the size of a chimpanzee's brain. But that's not the distinctive thing. The distinctive thing is that we work together, essentially. We're capable of cumulative cultural evolution, where I can learn something and then my children will pick it up from me, even if they don't really understand why I'm doing it. And that means that the way humans function, it's not like a single brain that's three times the size of a chimpanzee. It's tens of thousands of brains all working in concert, and now millions of brains, over many generations. And that's why there's such a big gap between

• 10:30Speaker 01

  chimpanzee ability or intelligence and human intelligence, where it's not a scale up of three X, it's a scale up of three hundred thousand.

• 10:42Speaker 01

  Basically, that's exactly right. So on this perspective, humans are not just another species that are like weird and not hairy and particularly sweaty and good at long distance running. Aristotle commented that humans are the rational animal and that's what made them distinct from other animals. Whereas actually, we're just very sweaty and that's one of our most distinctive characteristics. And I like to think that I am therefore the most human of humans because I'm the sweatyest person I've met. So he has this book and that alone just, you know, really blew my mind. It really made a big difference to how I understand humans. And he has this other book, The Weirdest People in the World, which is about the psychology in particular of weird people, Western, educated,

• 11:26Speaker 01

  industrialized, rich and democratic, which are the subject of almost all psychology experiments, but they're not representative at all of most cultures. And in fact, they're very unusual among most cultures, much more individualistic, much more willing to challenge authority, even perceive the world in slightly different ways. And the overall picture you get from these two books is an understanding of kind of human behavior that's very different from the kind of economic understanding of human behavior. There's all these just like self-interested agents going around, then I kind of maximize profit for ourselves. Whereas on this vision, it's like, no, we're these cultural beings. We have like a vision for the world and we go and like try and put that vision into the world. And that's

• 12:11Speaker 01

  what the kind of big fights are about. And I think it has a much better explanation of of history.

• 12:16Tim Ferriss?

  When you said quantitative, I think you said quantitative anthropologist. Am I hearing that correctly?

• 12:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's

• 12:22Tim Ferriss?

  What is a quantitative anthropologist? I know those two words separately and I can, I can pretend like I understand what those mean together. But what does a quantitative anthropologist do?

• 12:32Speaker 01

  So you might know kind of evolutionary biology has these formal models of how genes evolve over time. It's hard to make predictions within this field, but at least you have these like precise formal methods that you like can start to kind of understand what's going on in terms of how organisms evolve. Now, it turns out you can do the same thing but applied to cultures. Dawkins made this word meme very famous. And that kind of gets across the right idea, although it's not quite right because it's not like there's a single divisible unit of culture. But nonetheless, you can think of different cultures, kind of like different species. And some are like more fit than others. So some are going to win out over time. And you can apply the same sort of like formal methods that evolutionary biologists use

• 13:17Speaker 01

  to study evolution of genetics to the evolution of cultures as well. And Joe Henning does that at least a little bit.

• 13:26Tim Ferriss?

  All right. Well, I'll have to I'll have to take a look now. We were talking, well, we using the royal we you. We're talking about, I suppose I mentioned in passing existential risks and threats. And I have a number of questions related to this, not surprisingly, but I want to touch upon first, perhaps an unexpected insertion. I have in my notes here, Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky as a book that was important to you. And I would like to know why that is the case.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  That book is actually what got me into philosophy originally. Back when I was about 15, I read it and I was at a time variance in literature. I wanted to be a poet and an author. And it was via that that I learned about this word philosophy. And I realized that like, oh, actually you can just tackle the big ideas directly. You don't need to go via fiction. But I was also particularly in the time in existentialist philosophy. And this is something that honestly likes I kind of still bear with me. I'm kind of a bit unusual in that I often think to myself, could I justify my life now to my 15 year old self? And if the answer is no, then I'm a bit like, oh, what are you doing?

• 14:44Speaker 01

  You're not living up to what earlier Will would have wanted for present Will. And the key thing, I think, for 15 year old Will, who was inspired by existentialism, was living an authentic life. And I still find that very.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  Liberating and empowering and inspiring. So some of the things I do, so for example, I've I give away most of my income, which is like a very unusual thing to do. And you might think, oh, that's like a sacrifice that's making my life worse. But actually, I find it kind of empowering because it's like, I am making an autonomous decision. I am not merely kind of following the dictates of what social convention is telling me to do, but I'm like reasoning about things from first principles and then making a decision that's genuinely authentically mine. And that was something, I hadn't particularly pegged it to kind of acting morally when I was 15, although to some extent, but that was something that really moved me then and honestly continues to move me today.

• 15:46Tim Ferriss?

  How would you just, I often say for the listeners out there who may not be familiar, but honestly, if I'm being honest with myself, I have not studied existentialism and I hear certain names associated with it, so I can kind of fake it until I make it and give it, create the illusion, I'll be like, ah, you know, Kierkegaard, I think maybe, uh, this person, that person, but what is existentialism as it is portrayed in Crime and Punishment or conveyed?

• 16:13Speaker 01

  One of the things I liked about Crime and Punishment and Dostoevsky's work in particular, at least as wrestling with existentialism, word can get used in various ways, but here, one way of thinking about it is just, the world as it is, has no intrinsic meaning. And yet we are like placed into it and have to make decisions. And that's this like absurd position to be in. And you can create your own meaning out of that through radically free acts, like authentic, genuine acts. And Dostoevsky, in his work, kind of wrestles between three positions, I think.

• 16:57Speaker 01

  One is this like existentialist position. A second is just pure nihilism, which is just like actually literally, if you take it seriously, like and there's no God, then everything is permitted, there's no reason to do anything, not even like reason created from yourself. And then third is this religious position, which I think he actually ultimately endorses. And it's almost like. Nihilism as like a proof of rejection of nihilism, like therefore guarantees that you should be like religious.

• 17:27Tim Ferriss?

  Q E D, God.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well, it's like, life is meaningless unless God exists. You know, I'm now describing it slightly Pascalian terms, but like you may as well act as if, as if there's a God that is giving meaning to life.

• 17:42Tim Ferriss?

  We're not going to spend a whole bunch of time on it now, but in our last conversation, we talked about Pascal's wager, but also Pascal's mugging, if I remember correctly.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:51Tim Ferriss?

  Something along those lines. So we won't take a side alley down into Pascal's mugging just now. But I said, I had two things I wanted to ask you about. The first was crime punishment, which I think we've covered. The second, before we jump into

• 18:06Tim Ferriss?

  our longer conversation, which will go all over the place. And I may ask still some of the shorter questions. When people hear existential threats, when they hear supervolcanoes, AI, manmade pathogens, et cetera, I think that there will likely be an apprehension, perhaps a little seizure of the breath for some people listening who might think to themselves, my God, this is just going to be audio doom scrolling. This is just going to come away from this conversation with higher blood pressure, more cortisol. And my impression of you in the time that we've spent together is that you are not nihilistic,

• 18:50Tim Ferriss?

  you're not apathetic, you are not pessimistic, you're quite the opposite of all of those things in some respects. How do you do that? Is that just will out of the box? And that's just how you came programmed? Is there more to it? And this is, I think, a crux question because I don't see in the people.

• 19:12Tim Ferriss?

  Say in my audience, including those who are very competent, effective action, if they don't have some degree of optimism or belief that they can exert change. So could you just speak to that? Because I know I also succumb to just getting waterboarded with bad news all day from around the world. I'm like, I can't do, I can't, I cannot put a salve onto all of this for all of these people. And it can be overwhelming. So how would you respond to that?

• 19:41Speaker 01

  I think there's two things that motivate this. One is just the desire to actually make the world better. And then second, I'll call low standards. So on the first side, you know, age 21, and I'm like, man, I'm about to really start my life. I'm trying to look for like, I want to act morally, I'm trying to look for different causes. I bounce into a lot of the sorts of classic causes that you'd find on a social, for someone socially motivated in a college campus, like vegetarian society, left wing politics, climate change stuff. I found there was very little in the way of action. There was an awful lot of like guilt and an awful lot of talking about the problems, but not that

• 20:24Speaker 01

  much in terms of like, hey, here are the solutions. This is how you can actually make the world better. And this is what we should do. But if you actually care about what making, wanting to make the world better, and that's the key motivation, the size of a problem and like really thinking about suffering, I mean, it can be important, especially if it's motivating you. But the ultimate thing is just what do you do? Something could be the worst problem in the world. But if there's nothing you can do, then it's just not relevant for the purpose of action. And that therefore really makes me think in the first instance, always about, okay, well, what's the difference we can make? Not like, how scary are things? Or how bad are things? But instead, like, how much of a difference can we make? And there it's like, very positive. So in the last podcast, we talked about, a lot about

• 21:07Speaker 01

  global health and development. And what's the difference you can make there? Well, if you're a middle class member of a rich country, it's on the order of saving dozens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of lives over the course of your life, if you put your mind to it. That's huge. Now we're talking about existential risks and the long-term future of humanity. What's the difference you can make? You can play a part in being pivotal in putting humanity onto a better trajectory for not just centuries, but for thousands, millions, or even billions of years. The amount of good that you can do is like truly enormous. You can have like cosmic significance. And that's kind of, that's pretty inspiring.

• 21:47Speaker 01

  And so, yeah, when you think about the difference you can make, rather than just like focusing on the magnitude of the problems, I think there's every reason for optimism. And then the second aspect I said was low standards, which is just, what's a world that you should be sad about? What's a world you should be happy with? Well, in my own case, I think, look, if I came into the world and when I leave it, the world is neither better nor worse. That's like zero. I should be indifferent about that. If I can make it a bit better in virtue of my existence, hey, that's pretty good. The more good I can do on top of that, the better. And I think I have made it much better. I'm not zero, I'm like positive.

• 22:30Speaker 01

  And so all of the additional good that I potentially do feels like a bonus. And so similarly with humanity, when I look to the future, what's the level at which I'm like, ah, it's indifferent? That's where just like the amount of happiness and suffering in the future kind of cancel out. And relative to that, I think the future is going to be amazing. Already, I think the world today is like much better than if it didn't exist. And I think it's going to be a lot better in the future, like even just the progress we've made over the last few hundred years. People today have like far, far better lives. If you extrapolate that out, just, you know, a few hundred years more, let alone thousands of years, then there's at least a good chance that we could have a future where everyone lives not just as well as the best people off alive today,

• 23:15Speaker 01

  but maybe tens, hundreds, thousands of times better.

• 23:19Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I mean, Kings a few hundred years ago didn't have running water, right?

• 23:24Speaker 01

  No.

• 23:25Tim Ferriss?

  Air conditioning.

• 23:26Speaker 01

  They didn't have it. They didn't have anesthetic.

• 23:29Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, no antibiotics. Oops.

• 23:31Speaker 01

  If they were gay, they had to keep it secret. They could barely travel. Yeah.

• 23:35Tim Ferriss?

  Lots of things we easily take for granted, which we can come back to because it may be related. But why don't we take 60 to 120 seconds just for you to explain effective altruism. Your name is often associated, just so we have a definition of terms and people have some idea of the scope and meaning of effective altruism, since you're considered one of the creators or co-creators of this entire movement. If you wouldn't mind just explaining that briefly and that way people will have at least that as a landmark as we go forward.

• 24:10Speaker 01

  Effective altruism is a philosophy and a community that's about trying to figure out how can we do as much good as possible with the time and money we have and then taking action on that basis. So putting those ideas into practice to actually try to make the world better as effectively as possible, whether that's through our donations, with our careers, with how we vote, with our consumption decisions, just with our entire lives.

• 24:36Tim Ferriss?

  What have been some of the outcomes of that?

• 24:40Speaker 01

  Over, you know, I've been promoting these ideas along with others for over 12 years now. We've raised well over or moved well over a billion dollars to the most effective causes. So that means if we take just one charity that we've raised money for against malaria foundation, we've protected over 400 million people, mainly children from malaria. And statistically, that means we've saved about 100,000 lives or maybe a little more, which is, you know, the size of a small town, about the size of Oxford. And that's just one charity. There's several more within global health and development. I think in terms of other cause areas that we focused on within animal health and welfare, hundreds of millions of hens are no longer in cages because of corporate cage free campaigns

• 25:25Speaker 01

  that we've helped to fund. And then within the field of existential risks, there are, it's not as easy to say, oh, we've done this concrete thing. This thing would have killed us all, but we avoided it. But we have helped make AI safety a much more mainstream field of research. People are taking the potential benefits, but also the risks from AI like much more seriously than they were. We are also like, have invested a lot in certain pandemic preparedness measures. Again, it's kind of still early stages, but some of the technology there or things I think have really promising potential to action, at least making sure that COVID-19 is the last pandemic we ever have.

• 26:04Tim Ferriss?

  One of the many things I appreciate about you and also broadly speaking, many people in the effective altruism community slash movement is the taking of a systematic approach to not just defining, but questioning assumptions and quantitatively looking at how you can do good, not just feel good, if that makes sense. And that seems obvious to anyone who's in the community, but the vast majority of philanthropy or charity, broadly speaking, is done without that type of approach, from what I can tell. And it's really worth taking

• 26:46Tim Ferriss?

  a closer look for those people listening. Are there just a few URLs you'd like to mention for people who'd like to dig into that? And then we can move into some of the more current questions.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  If you're interested in how to use your career to make the world better, then 80000hours.org is a terrific place to go. I'm a co-founder of that organization, gives in-depth career advice and one-on-one career coaching as well. If you're interested in donating some of your money, then givingwhatwecan.org encourages people to take a giving pledge, typically 10% of one's income or more. It's a great way to live. If you're interested in donating to effective charities, then givewell.org is the single best place for donating to global health and development charities. That's givewell.org. There's also the Effective Altruism Funds or EA Funds that allow you

• 27:37Speaker 01

  to donate within animal welfare and existential risks and promotion of these ideas as well.

• 27:45Tim Ferriss?

  All right. A few more calisthenics, then we're going to go into the heavy lifting, the max squats of long-termism. All right. In the last, say, five years, you can pick the timeframe, but recent history, what new belief, behavior, or habit has most improved your life?

• 28:01Speaker 01

  I think the biggest one of all, and this was really big during writing the book, which was this, you know, enormous challenge. It was like my main focus for two years over the course of the pandemic, was evening check-ins with an employee of mine who also functioned a bit like a productivity coach. So every evening I would set deadlines for the next day, both input and output. So input would be how many hours of tracked writing I would do, where going to the bathroom did not count. And a really big, a really big day would be six hours. Sometimes very occasionally I'd kind of get more than that. And also output goals as well. So I'd say, I will have drafted this section or these sections, or I will

• 28:42Speaker 01

  have done such and such. I would also normally make some other commitments as well, such as, how much time do I spend looking at Reddit on my phone? How much caffeine am I allowed to drink? Do I exercise? Things like this. And Laura Pemerius, who was doing it, is wonderful and the nicest person ever. And she just never beat me up about this. But I would beat myself up. But it would make me, it was incredibly effective at making sure I was just like actually doing things. Because I, like many others, find writing, it's like hard. It's like hard to get motivated. It's hard to keep going. And sometimes, I don't know, I'd have gotten drunk the night before, let's say, and it was a Sunday. And normally you just, it would be a write-off for the whole day.

• 29:27Speaker 01

  But I think like, oh no, I'd just be so embarrassing at 7pm to have to tell Laura like, yeah, I didn't do any work because I got smashed. And so instead I would feel hungover and I would just keep typing away. And that was just huge. I mean, I think it increased my productivity. I don't know, it feels like 20% or 25% or something, just from these like 10 minute check-ins every day.

• 29:50Tim Ferriss?

  So these were 10 minute check-ins, seven days a week? What was the cadence?

• 29:54Speaker 01

  I was working six days a week. So yeah, if she was doing something else at the weekend, we wouldn't check in.

• 29:59Tim Ferriss?

  Right. So the format would be, walk me through 10 minutes would be the first five minutes. Here's how I measured up to what I committed and here's what I'm doing next.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  Exactly. So you have a view of the day. Did I hit my input goal, my output goal? How much caffeine did I drink? Did I exercise? And then also like, was I getting any migraines or back pain, which are two kind of ongoing issues for my productivity? And then next would be a discussion of what I would try to do the following day. And interestingly, you might think of a productivity coach as someone who's like really putting your like nose to the grindstone. Whereas with Laura, it's kind of the opposite because my problem is that I beat myself up too much. And so we would have a conversation.

• 30:40Tim Ferriss?

  Luring ET out of the closet with the Reese's Pieces candy.

• 30:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I would be like, oh, I got so little done today. So I'm going to have to just have a 12 hour day tomorrow or something. Or like, I'll work through the night or something like that. And she's like, that doesn't make any sense. You know, we've tracked this before and when you try and do this, maybe you get like an hour of extra work where you feel horrible for days afterwards. So she would be very good at like countering bullshit that my brain would be saying, basically.

• 31:12Tim Ferriss?

  Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. It's summer 2022 and many small business owners are busier than ever. Finding the right candidate to join your business can be the leverage you need to be able to ignore the trivial, delegate some of the urgent stuff and focus on longer term strategic decisions. The big picture. LinkedIn Jobs makes it easier to grow your team by helping you find the people you want to interview faster and for free. Create a free job post in minutes on LinkedIn Jobs to reach your network and beyond to the world's largest professional network of more than 800 million people. Then add your job and the purple hashtag hiring frame to your LinkedIn profile to spread the word that you're hiring so your network can help you find the right people.

• 31:56Tim Ferriss?

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• 32:32Tim Ferriss?

  So a couple of things. Caffeine, what were your parameters on caffeine? Like what were the limitations or minimums? I don't know how you said it on caffeine. And then how did you choose this employee specifically for this and why?

• 32:48Speaker 01

  Caffeine, I think a big thing is just if I drink too much, I'm likely to get a migraine. So I set my limit at three espressos worth, so about 180 milligrams of caffeine. And I'm very sensitive, so it's like.

• 33:01Tim Ferriss?

  180 is legitimate for a sensitive person.

• 33:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. So that's like, that's kind of a max that I do. Whereas double espresso is fine, but then it's like shading in between. I'll be like very cautious about. And then how did I choose this person? I think it's like a very subtle thing. The kind of rapport or personal fit you have with someone who can be a good coach. Where she kind of knew me well enough that she knew the ways to like push me around. The combination of like, maybe I call it friendly pushiness or something was, is like perfect. And it's, you know, it could be very easy to go along on either side of that line.

• 33:39Tim Ferriss?

  Sounds like I need an evening check in. All right.

• 33:43Tim Ferriss?

  Who's my, who is my victim gonna be? All right.

• 33:48Speaker 01

  Maybe we can start it.

• 33:49Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, so I'll give you.

• 33:53Tim Ferriss?

  Will, I know, I know, I know it's, I know it's four in the morning, but I had to call you for my evening check in. We're in different time zones for people who may not have picked up on the, that is not a New Jersey accent that Will has.

• 34:07Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. Comment sidebar on low back pain. I know this came up in our last conversation. Have you not found anything to help? And I may have some suggestions if you would like suggestions, but have you found anything to help?

• 34:23Speaker 01

  Actually, I've almost completely fixed it. So it was just, I mean, I was working, you know, I was just sitting in a chair. Especially, you know, pandemic and writing a book for eight hours a day. But there was actually only one period that I started getting lower back pain. And remember in our conversation, you recommended me these boots that so they could hang upside down. And I did buy them and I confess I never used them, so I'm sorry Tim.

• 34:46Tim Ferriss?

  Adherence failure. No, that's a failure of my recommendation. If it's not going to be used, it doesn't make any sense for me to recommend it.

• 34:53Speaker 01

  But what I did do, in the end, I just developed my own workout routine where I got advice from physios and so on. I talked to like loads of doctors. In general, people just aren't really engaging with what your problems are. And like self experimentation, I think was just better. And it's also like, the other thing is just, all of this takes loads of time. And like, if you're a time pressed individual, firstly, the advice is often geared towards old people. So it's like very easy stretches or like movement that most people aren't doing. And then secondly, it's like, man, you want to do all this? It's like two hours or something. How can you do this more efficiently? So I developed my own routine, which involves standing on a bosi ball, so all on a bosi ball. I've got two free weights. I do a squat. I'm sitting in like squat position as the

• 35:36Speaker 01

  resting position. That's very good because it stretches your hip flexors.

• 35:40Tim Ferriss?

  And for those people who can't see, Willie's got his hands in front of his chest.

• 35:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, imagine.

• 35:45Tim Ferriss?

  Looks kind of like a prairie dog. But really, I think what that symbolizes is he has the dumbbells in front of his chest, like a goblet squat, if people know what that is.

• 35:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. With my like, yeah, legs wide, elbows in between your knees, so that your legs are kind of splayed out like that. And you'll feel a stretch on your hip flexors. So cultures that squat to sit actually experience lower rates of back pain. So that was the kind of inspiration there. And then from there, standing up, squat, do a bicep curl up into a shoulder press, go down, then deadlift going into an upright low. That's all in a bosi ball. And the thoughts here are strengthening your entire kind of anterior pelvic chain. So I think my hypothesis was like, why was I getting this? It's because I was one of an idiot young male who was like, why would you work anything out apart from your beach muscles? What would be the point of that? And that majorly distorted

• 36:37Speaker 01

  my posture. And then I would do that. So kind of one of them every 20 seconds in like two sets of 10 minutes. And then that combined in also with core work. So plank in particular, really just, I think, sorted things out because it's all about, you know, had just bad posture for 25 years, made worse by like, very poor focus at the gym. And so it's like this long process of reconfiguring your body. So it makes more sense. And in particular, as we talked about, I had anterior pelvic tilt. So my, my gut stuck out, my pelvis was too far forward. And so then it's like your glutes tearing that back and then stretching out your hip flexors. Oh, and I invented my own stretch as well.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  So for the listeners who don't know, actually, I was previously married and I took a different name, took my wife's grandmother's maiden name. So my name wasn't always MacAskill, it used to be Crouch. And so I named this stretch, the Will Crouch, in honor of my former self.

• 37:41Speaker 01

  Involves hooking your, you stand up, you hook your foot into your two hands and then press out, kind of extend your leg, but pushing against your two hands. And that stretches out this muscle that is, goes all the way from your kind of pelvis up your back. And I've not found any other stretch that stretches that particular muscle. And that was the one that was really causing all the pain. So the muscle is the longissimus thoracicus, yes.

• 38:09Tim Ferriss?

  You do this standing?

• 38:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's standing. That's right. Yeah.

• 38:12Tim Ferriss?

  It's like a kid and play dance move. Okay, so people may just, I'll put my liability hat on, I'll just say, maybe just start on the ground to try this one. So you don't get your foot stuck and topple over like a, you know, an army figure and onto your head. But yes, I can see how that would work.

• 38:30Speaker 01

  Anyone, anyone would say that I'm not a professional workout coach.

• 38:35Tim Ferriss?

  I can't, I can't wait for the Will Crouch YouTube instructional fitness series.

• 38:41Speaker 01

  So I did take on this role in the early stages of the pandemic. The house I was in, I would go outside every lunch at 1pm and put on my best Scottish accent. And I'd be like, right, you wee pricks. Get on the floor and give me 20. Very effective. Never made it to YouTube though.

• 39:04Tim Ferriss?

  Well, you know, it's never too late. So a couple of things real quick. The first is these exercises, did you do them every day in the morning? Did you do them midday? How many days a week and what time of day?

• 39:18Speaker 01

  So I almost always work out just after lunch. People always complain to me, it's like, oh, you'll get a sore stomach or something. I'm like, but I don't, never happens. But I deliberately time it because I have a real energy dip just after lunch. And so doing something that's just not work makes a ton of sense.

• 39:36Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah. Plus, after sitting for a few hours, you can break up the two

• 39:41Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 39:42Tim Ferriss?

  marathons of sitting. And I'll make one, one other recommendation for folks who may also suffer from occasional or chronic low back tightness, which has been an issue for me also, if I sit a lot. And it ends up affecting my sleep most significantly. And can cause that type of anterior pelvic tilt and lordosis. So if your gut is sticking out and you look like you're fat or pregnant, even though you are not, perhaps that means your pelvis is pouring forward. So if you think about your pelvis as a goblet or a cup full of water, if you're pouring that water out the front, you have anterior pelvic tilt.

• 40:23Tim Ferriss?

  And one of the causes of that or contributing factors can be a really tight iliopsoas or iliacus that then in some fashion connects to the lower back, the lumbar. And so you get this incredible tightness slash pain. For me, it can cause tossing and turning at night and really affect my sleep. And the device that was recommended to me a few times before I finally bit the bullet and got it was something called the So Right, P S O hyphen R I T E. It is the most expensive piece of plastic you'll ever buy. But worth it at something like $50 to $70 for self-release of the psoas, which is incredibly difficult to achieve. I find incredibly difficult to achieve by yourself otherwise.

• 41:07Tim Ferriss?

  And most, a lot of soft tissue therapists are not particularly good at helping with it. Nor is it practical really, didn't necessarily have that type of work done every day, even if you could. So the So Right is helpful. All right, so let's move from personal long-termism, making sure that you're able to function and not be decrepit when you're 45 into the broader sense and discussion of long-termism. What is long-termism? And why did you write this book?

• 41:38Speaker 01

  Well, long-termism is about three things. It's about taking seriously the sheer scale of the future that might be ahead of us and just how high the stakes are in anything that could shape that future. It's then about trying to assess what are the events that might occur in our lifetimes that really would have impacts, not just for the present generation, but that could potentially shape the entire course of humanity's future. And then third, then to figure out, like, okay, how do we ensure that we can take actions to put humanity onto the right path? And I think you're exactly right to talk about personal long-termism and the analogy there, because in the book, in What We Are the Future, I talk about the analogy between

• 42:22Speaker 01

  the present world and humanity and an impudent teenager, like a reckless teenager, where what are the really high-stakes decisions that a teenager makes? It's like, not what you do at a weekend. Instead, it's the decisions that would impact the entire course of your life. So in the book, I tell a story where I was quite a reckless teenager. I nearly killed myself climbing up a building. That was one of the biggest decisions, dumbest decisions like I ever made. Because if I had died, then it would have been 60, 70 years of life that I would have lost. In the same way, if humanity dies now, you know, if we cause our own extinction or the end of, unrecoverable end of civilization, such as by a worst-case pandemic, then we're losing, well, not just 70 years of life.

• 43:06Speaker 01

  It's thousands, millions, even billions of years of future civilization. And so similarly, if I made decisions as a teenager that affected the kind of whole course of my life, like whether to become a poet or a philosopher or, you know, I could have become a doctor. And similarly, I think in the coming century, in our lifetime, humanity potentially makes decisions about how is future society structured? What are the values we live by? Is society a liberal democracy around the world? Or is it a totalitarian state? And how do we handle technologies like AI that I think could impact the very, very long run?

• 43:44Tim Ferriss?

  So I want to read just a paragraph that you sent me, which I found thought provoking because it's a framing that I had not heard before. And here it goes. Imagine the entire human story from the first Homo sapiens of East Africa to our eventual end, represented as a single life. Where in that life do we stand? We can't know for sure, but suppose humanity lasted only a tenth as long as the typical mammalian species. Even then, more than 99% of this life would lie ahead. On the scale of a typical life, humanity today would just be six months old. But we might well survive even longer for hundreds of millions of years until the Earth is no longer habitable or far beyond. In that case, humanity is experiencing its first blinking

• 44:28Tim Ferriss?

  moments out of the womb. And I appreciated this framing because my feeling, at least with my audience of listeners, is that there's a small percentage who are rushing headlong into battle with some vision of long-termism and feel committed to fighting the good fight. And a non-trivial percentage have decided it's too late, right? They've decided that the end is nigh. We are the frog in the water, slowly heating, that will be boiling before we know it. And I find this, at least, whether we put aside for the second, how people might find

• 45:12Tim Ferriss?

  fault with it or pick at it, a useful counter frame, right? Just to even sit with for a few minutes. Why do you think it's important to at least consider that something like this is plausible? Maybe it's not 90% likely, but let's just say it's even 10%, 20% likely.

• 45:33Speaker 01

  Well, it's so important just because... Future generations matter, future people matter. And whatever you value, whether that's, you know, well being or happiness, or maybe it's accomplishment, maybe it's great works of art, maybe it's scientific discovery. Almost all of whatever you value would be in the future rather than now. Because the future just could be vast indeed. Where if you look at like what has been accomplished since the dawn of humanity. Well, dawn of humanity was the end of thousand years ago. Agriculture was 12,000 years ago. Industrial evolution was 250 years ago. And yet, even on the scale of a typical mammal species, we have 700,000 years to go. Now, we're not a typical mammal species. We could last only a few centuries.

• 46:18Speaker 01

  We could last 10 years if we really do ourselves in, in the short term. But we could last much longer. And that just means that all of what we might achieve, all of the good things that humanity could produce, they're basically in the future. And that's really worth thinking about taking seriously and trying to protect and promote.

• 46:43Tim Ferriss?

  You know, one thing that you and I were chatting a bit about, I brought it up before we started talking is the question of if it is possible to make, let's just call it altruism, or in this case, long-termism, investing in a future we will not necessarily, most likely, see ourselves. Can you make that self-interested? Or how do you position it such that it appeals to the greatest number of people possible? Since our collective destiny depends on some critical mass of people taking it seriously, right? It can't, probably isn't one person. We're not going to get, say, nine billion people.

• 47:22Tim Ferriss?

  So how many do we hope to embrace this philosophy? And is it possible to position it as self-interested? And this is going to be a bit of a ramble, so I apologize in advance. But when you were talking about Dostoevsky and nihilism almost as a proof, and him ultimately landing on God, like, yeah, you kind of need to, something resembling God to sort of make sense of this sea of uncertainties so that you can maybe stabilize oneself and feel a sense of meaning. It brought to mind something I read very recently. And I apologize, this is again, going to be a bit of meander, but.

• 48:04Tim Ferriss?

  This is something that Russ Roberts included, so famous for Econ Talk podcast, in an article he wrote called "My 12 Rules for Life." Now, he is, I'm not sure this is the best descriptor, but culturally, and I would think religiously Jewish. So he has that as a sort of latticework of sorts. But number two in his 12 Rules for Life was find something healthy to worship. And I'm just going to take a second to read this. He quoted David Foster Wallace, and I'm going to tie this into what I just said in a second. Because here's something else that's weird but true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there's actually no such thing as atheism. There's no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.

• 48:48Tim Ferriss?

  And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual type of thing to worship, be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH, not sure what that is, or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles that is that pretty much everything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you'll never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure, and you'll always feel ugly. And when time and age starts showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, cliches, epigrams, parables, the skeleton of every great story.

• 49:29Tim Ferriss?

  The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness. Okay, and then dot, dot, dot. But the most important thing to remember is not to worship yourself, not as easy as it sounds. So I'm wondering if long-termism, in a sense, doesn't need to be spun to envelop self-interest if it is basically something to worship that gives you purpose when there is so much uncertainty and chaos and entropy around us? Anyway, long TED Talk, thank you for coming. But what are your thoughts on, on any of that?

• 50:09Tim Ferriss?

  And the overarching question is, how do we make long-termism catch? To have some critical mass of people who, who really embrace it?

• 50:20Speaker 01

  I think there's a really important insight there, actually one made by John Stuart Mill in a speech to Parliament at the end of the 19th century. And he asked this question like, what should we do for posterity? After all, what has posterity ever done for us? And then actually, he makes the argument like, posterity's done a lot of things for us because the projects we have only have meaning in so far as we think that they might contribute to this kind of relay race among the generations. So here's a thought experiment. There's this film Children of Men, and in it, people are just unable to reproduce. And so it's not that anyone dies, there's no catastrophe that kills everybody, but there's no future of human civilization. You know, how would that change your life?

• 51:04Speaker 01

  And I think for many, many people and many, many projects, it would just rob those projects of meaning. I certainly wouldn't be as nearly as interested in intellectual pursuits or like trying to do good things and so on. Maybe I would to some extent, but for a lot of things, it seems like, oh, they have meaning because, take scientific inquiry, is this same eye-built cathedral of knowledge that I have inherited from all of my ancestors that has then been passed to us? And it is incomplete. So we've got gender relativity and we've got quantum theory and they're amazing, but we also know they're incomplete and like, maybe we can work harder and see farther and build the cathedral a little higher.

• 51:47Speaker 01

  But if it's like, no, actually it'll just get torn up. It's kind of like, oh, you're painting an artwork and you can add to the painting a bit and like, it's going to just go in the schwere the day afterwards. You're not going to be very motivated to do it. And so one thing I think that a lot of people find motivating is this thought that you're part of this grand project, much, much grander than yourself, of trying to build a good and flourishing society over the course of not just centuries, but thousands of years. And that's one way in which our lives have meaning.

• 52:22Tim Ferriss?

  What do you hope the effect will be on people who read what we have in the future? What are you hoping some of the things will be that they take from that?

• 52:32Speaker 01

  The number one thing is just a worldview that's what my colleague Nick Bostrom calls getting the big picture roughly right. So there are just so many problems that the world faces today, so many things you could be focusing on and paying attention to. But there's this question, just, well, what's most important, what should be taking most of our attention? And the ideas in the book, I hope, give a partial answer, which is, well, the things that are most important are those that really shape the long-term future of the human project. And that really narrows things down, I think. So that's kind of broad kind of worldview. More specifically, though, I would like it to be something that guides

• 53:15Speaker 01

  the decisions people make over the course of their lives. So I think the biggest decision people make are what career they pursue. So do you go and become a management consultant or a financier and make money and live in the suburbs? Or do you instead pursue a life that's really trying to make the world better? And if so, then what problems are you focusing on? Where it seems to me, some of the biggest problems are the development of very advanced, or the biggest issues or events that will occur in our lifetime are the development of advanced artificial intelligence, in particular, artificial intelligence that's as smart as humans, or maybe considerably smarter. I think that has a good claim to being one

• 53:56Speaker 01

  of the most important technological discoveries of all time, once we get to that point. And that point, very good chances in the coming decades. A second is the risk of very catastrophic pandemics, things that are far worse than COVID-19, which, again, I think are just on the horizon because of developments in our ability to create new viruses. And a third is a third world war, which, again, if you look at history and look at leading scholars and the lying models of war, I think it's like a really pretty good chance we see a third world war in our lifetime, something like one in three. And I think that could quite plausibly have just unparalleled destruction and misery on the world, in the limit just

• 54:40Speaker 01

  being the end of civilization, whether that's because of nuclear warheads scaling up a hundredfold and being used in all that nuclear war, or because of the use of bioweapons. So These are all things that like, smart people who read this book could go and work on. I'm aware that that again, kind of sounds bleak, but perhaps the final thing is like, there is this positive vision in the book too, which is that if we avoid these threats or like manage these technological transitions well, we really can just create a future that's truly amazing. And this is present kind of throughout the book. I did feel like I hadn't fully given it its due. So there's a little Easter egg in the book as well, right in the

• 55:25Speaker 01

  final page QR code that sketches a little vision of a positive future in, yeah, short story form. But maybe that's the final thing of all in terms of this worldview is appreciating. There's so much at stake. There are enormous risks that we face or threats that we face that we need to manage. But if we do, then we can create a world that is flourishing and vibrant and wonderful for our grandkids, for their grandkids, for their grandkids.

• 55:57Tim Ferriss?

  What is value lock-in? And could you give some historical examples?

• 56:01Speaker 01

  So value lock-in is when a single ideology or value system, or kind of set of ideologies, takes control of an area or in the limit of the whole world, and then persists for an extremely long time. And this is one thing that I think can have very, very long lasting effects. And we've already seen it throughout history. And so in the, in what we are the future, I give a story of ancient China. So during this period that's known as the Hundred Schools of Thought, the Zhou Dynasty had fallen and there was a lot of kind of fragmentation, ideological fragmentation in China. And wandering philosophers would go from state to state with a package of kind of philosophical ideas and moral views and

• 56:46Speaker 01

  political, policy recommendations and try and convince political elites of their ideas. And there were four main schools. There were the Confucians that we're kind of most familiar with, the legalists, which are kind of like Machiavellian political realists. Just, you know, how do you get power was the main focus of them. Taoists, who are these kind of more, somewhat more spiritual, like acting in accordance with the way, with nature, like advocating spontaneity, honesty.

• 57:16Speaker 01

  And then finally, the Moists, which I read and I'm like, wow, they were kind of similar to the effective altruists, except in ancient China, where they were about promoting good outcomes and good outcomes impartially considered. They forewent much like fancy spending on luxury or ritual. So their funeral rites were very modest. They wore very modest clothes. And they were just really concerned about trying to make the world better. And so they created a paramilitary group in order to defend cities that were under siege. The reasoning being that if defensive technology and defensive strategy was so good, then no one could ever wage a war because no one could ever win. And so there was this great diversity of thought. But what happened? One state within China, the Qin, influenced

• 58:00Speaker 01

  by legalism, took over and tried to essentially make legalism state orthodoxy. And the Emperor Qin declared himself the 10,000 year emperor, wanted this ideology to persist indefinitely. It actually only lasted 14 years because there was a kind of counter rebellion. And that was the start of the Han Dynasty, which then successfully did, basically, over the course of a while, quell kind of other ideological competition, and instead implemented Confucianisms like this is the official state ideology. And that persisted for 2,000 years. And that's kind of just one example among many. Over and over again, you see what's the kind of ideology or belief set of a ruling power, whether that's Catholics or Protestants,

• 58:44Speaker 01

  or is it the communism of the Khmer Rouge of Stalin, or National Socialism of Hitler? Once that ideology gets into power, people with those ideologies get into power, they quickly try and stomp out the competition. And the worry is that that could happen with the entire world. So again, I spoke of a risk of Third World War. Well, what might happen as a result? One ideology could take power globally after winning such a war, implement a world government, a world state, or at least dominant world ideology.

• 59:16Speaker 01

  Then we're in this situation where there's much less ideological competition. And at least one reason why we've gotten model change and model progress over time, which is in virtue of having a diversity of model views that were able to like, kind of fight it out. And in ideal circumstances, the best argument wins. We would no longer have that. And so if there was a single kind of dominant ideology in the world, that could persist for an extremely long time, I think. And if it was wrong, which is quite likely to be wrong, because I think most of our model views are probably wrong, that would be like very bad indeed.

• 59:49Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, just to give you an idea, I mean, this is not exactly ideological, but you mentioned the Han Dynasty and Mandarin Chinese. One way to say Mandarin Chinese is Han Yu, which is the language of the Han people. Like Ha Yu Ping Yin is the romanization system used, which most people have seen with the diacritical marks for tones for Mandarin Chinese. So these things can last a very long time indeed. Do you have any other examples of value lock-in that could be past tense, historical examples, or attempts that are being made currently that you think are worth making mention of? Could be either.

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  I mean, historically, one particularly salient example or slight example was when the Khmer Rouge took power in Cambodia, Pol Pot, just very systematically, like anyone who disagreed with the party ideology generally would just be executed. So 25% of the population were killed in Cambodia. And again, it's like very transparent what's happening. He has this quote, "Purify the party, purify the army, purify the cadres." So it's just very clear that what's going on is almost like a species or virus kind of taking over and other competitors get wiped out. This one ideology takes over, competitors are wiped out.

• 1:01:12Speaker 01

  Similarly, if we look at like British history with at different times, Catholics and Protestants taking power, there was one act passed called the Act of Uniformity, which with Protestants saying like, okay, Catholicism is now banned in this country. And again, it's like very boldly named. And in general, just if you have a particular model view, then you are going to want everyone else in the world to have that particular model view as well.

• 1:01:38Tim Ferriss?

  So of AI.

• 1:01:41Tim Ferriss?

  Pathogens, let's just say bioweapons we can include in that. World War III, how would you rank those for you personally in terms of

• 1:01:53Tim Ferriss?

  concern over the next, let's call it, let's call it 10 years?

• 1:02:00Speaker 01

  Over the next 10 years, I'd be most concerned about AI. Over the next 50 years, let's say my lifetime, I'd be both most concerned about AI and war. Developments in AI, the reason I say that is wars are most likely when two countries are very similar kind of militarily power and

• 1:02:22Speaker 01

  the kind of historical rate of one major power in the world, like one of the big economies of the world going to war with another, when it kind of gets overtaken economically or militarily, it's pretty high. Some ways of modeling puts it to the size like 50% for AI. But I think that's more likely to happen not kind of within the next 10 years, though it's definitely possible that there will be some kind of outbreak of war, such as between the US and China. Even though the risk of war between the US and Russia is definitely higher than it has been in the last, I guess, 30 years potentially. I still think the odds are like quite low, thankfully. With AI, on the other hand, I think

• 1:03:04Speaker 01

  the chance of very rapid and surprisingly rapid developments in AI within the next 10 years are higher than any 10-year point after that.

• 1:03:16Speaker 01

  So as in 2020s, it's more likely there'll be some truly transformative development than 2030s, 2040s is my kind of view. And that's for a couple of reasons. One is that if you look at like how much computing power different brains use.

• 1:03:35Speaker 01

  And you compare that with how much computing power the kind of current language models use, or the biggest kind of AI systems use. The biggest AI systems use computing power of approximately the brain of a honeybee. It's kind of hard to estimate exactly, but that's kind of where we are. Which is a lot smaller than you might think. It's much smaller than I thought. And you might think like, okay, it's the point in time where you've got AI systems that are about as powerful as human brains. That's like a really crucial moment in time. Because that's, you know, potentially the point in time at which AI systems just become more powerful than us. Or at least approximately then, when we start to get overtaken. And that, again, it's like very uncertain, but there's a decent, pretty

• 1:04:17Speaker 01

  good chance that happens in something like 10 years' time. And now, it's very hard to do technological prediction. I am not making any confident predictions about how things go down. But it's at least something we should be paying attention to. Just from a kind of outside perspective, if you think, oh yeah, and then we're at a point where we're like, training these AI systems that are like, doing as much computing as the brain is. That's like, okay, well, at least maybe they're going to be just of a similar level of power and ability as human brains. And then that's really big. And that's kind of big for a few reasons, I think. One is because it could speed up rates of technological discovery. So historically, we've had like fairly steady, technologically driven economic growth. That's actually over the couple of hundred years. But that's because of two

• 1:05:01Speaker 01

  things happening. One is ideas get progressively harder to find. But we throw more and more researchers. So we have like a bigger population, we throw a larger percentage of the population at them. If instead, we can just create engineers and research scientists that are AI systems, then we could rapidly increase the amount of R and D that's happening. And what's more, perhaps they'd be much, much better at doing research than we are. Human brains are definitely not designed for doing science. But we could create machines that really are. And in the same way that- Go, the best AI systems are far, far better than even the very best human systems now. The same could happen within science.

• 1:05:45Speaker 01

  And if you plug that into like pretty standard economic models, you get the conclusion that, okay, suddenly things start really moving like really very fast. And you might get many centuries worth of technological progress happening over the course of a few years or a decade. And that could be terrific. That's what a lot of the, you know, in a sense, I think both the kind of the optimists and the doomsayers are correct, where that could be amazing. If it gets handled very well, then it could be radical abundance for everyone. We could solve all the other problems in the world. If it gets handled badly, well, the course of that tech development could be dangerous pathogens, or it could enable us to lose control to AI systems, or it could be involved

• 1:06:28Speaker 01

  like misuse by humans themselves. There's a lot of things going on that could be extremely important from the long-term perspective.

• 1:06:35Tim Ferriss?

  Well, let's go into it more. I mean, I, as a simpleton, assume that pretty much any new technology is going to be applied to porn and warfare first. And that those two would also sort of reciprocally drive forward a lot of new technology. I'm actually only 10% joking.

• 1:06:53Speaker 01

  Well, you know, DALL-E 2?

• 1:06:55Tim Ferriss?

  I do, actually. Yes, I'm going to be using it a bunch this week.

• 1:06:59Speaker 01

  Oh, fantastic. Well, for listeners who don't know, it's a fairly recent AI system. And you can tell it to produce a certain image using text. So maybe that image is an astronaut riding a unicorn in space in the style of Andy Warhol. And it will create a near-perfect rendition of that. And you can really say a lot of things. You can say, oh, I want a hybrid of a dolphin and a horse riding on a unicycle. And it will just create a picture of that. It's really like, in a way that really makes it seem like it understands the words you're telling it. And at the moment, it does faces, well, it can create like faces of.

• 1:07:41Speaker 01

  Imaginary people, almost picture perfect. Again, if you pay close attention, you can see like weird details.

• 1:07:47Tim Ferriss?

  When you say imaginary people, what do you mean?

• 1:07:50Speaker 01

  As in non, so if you type in like a picture of Boris Johnson, then it will not give you a picture of Boris Johnson. And I don't know this for sure, but my strong guess is that's because it's been deliberately restrained so that it does not do that.

• 1:08:05Tim Ferriss?

  So it doesn't deep fake everything?

• 1:08:08Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah, because you were mentioning porn. With that technology, you could, well, fill in the blanks. I'll let you think of your own text plumps that you could put in involving, you know, Joe Biden or Tim Ferriss or whoever you want.

• 1:08:23Tim Ferriss?

  Joe Biden and Tim Ferriss, uh-oh.

• 1:08:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Boris Johnson 2, you're all in the flame. Who knew you were such good friends?

• 1:08:32Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, God, the horror, the horror.

• 1:08:36Speaker 01

  So to my knowledge, that's not been used for porn yet, but I think the technology would make it completely possible. And then is it going to be used for warfare? Like, absolutely. I mean, there'll be a point in time when we can automate weaponically. So at the moment, part of the cost of going to war is that your people, part of your population will die. That's also a check on dictatorial leaders as well. You need to at least keep the army on your side, otherwise there'll be a military coup. Now imagine if there's a world where the army is entirely automated. Well, dictators can be much more reassured because their army can be entirely loyal to them. It's just coded in.

• 1:09:16Speaker 01

  Also, the costs of going to war much lower as well because, yeah, you're no longer sustaining casualties on your own side. And so that's just one way in which technological advances could be hugely disruptive via AI. And it's far from the biggest way.

• 1:09:29Tim Ferriss?

  Let's take a, just a short intermission from Skynet and World War III, just for a second, and we're going to come back to exploring some of those. But what are?

• 1:09:44Tim Ferriss?

  Some actual long-termist projects today that you are excited about.

• 1:09:52Speaker 01

  So one that I'm extremely excited about is investment in and development of a technology called far UVC lighting. So far UVC is just a very specific and quite narrow spectrum of light. And with sufficient intensity, just put into light bulbs, it seems like that just sterilizes a room. We're not confident in this yet. We need more research on its efficacy and safety. But if this was just installed in all lighting in every house around the world, basically in the same way that we do for fire regulation, every house, at least in a relatively well-off country, has to meet certain standards for fire safety, could also have to meet certain standards for disease safety, like having light bulbs

• 1:10:36Speaker 01

  with UVC light as part of them. Then we could would make a very substantial progress to never having a pandemic again, as well as as a bonus, eradicating all the spiracly disease. And so this is like some extremely exciting technology. There's a foundation that I've been spending a lot of time helping to set up over the last six months, it's called Future Fund. This is something that like, yeah, we're donating to and investing in because yeah, it just could make an absolute transformative difference. So that's one. Other things that are very concrete within the biotech space include early detection of new pathogens. So just constantly sampling wastewater or constantly testing healthcare workers and doing like full spectrum diagnostics of like, just all the DNA in the sample excluding

• 1:11:21Speaker 01

  human DNA. Is there anything there that we just looks like a pathogen and what we don't understand? So that we can kind of react to new pandemics very quickly. Also more boringly, just like better PPE, where you could just have, you know, you put on your super PPE hood and you're now just completely protected from any sorts of pathogens that could enable society to continue, even if there was an outbreak of a really bad pandemic. So that's very exciting within biotech. Within AI, there's a lot of work on technical AI safety, where the idea is just using methods to

• 1:11:56Speaker 01

  Ensure that AI systems do what we want them to do. That means even if they're very powerful, not trying to seek power and disempower the people who created them, not being deceptive, not causing harm. And there are various things you can do there, including with these kind of, you know, not as sophisticated models that we're currently using, like tests to see if they are acting deceptively, what structures you can use to make them not act deceptively. Can we have better interpretability so that we actually understand what the hell is going on with these AI models? Because at the moment, they're very non-transparent. We really don't know like what's, how do they get to a particular answer?

• 1:12:37Speaker 01

  It's just this huge computational process that, where we've like trained it via learning over, in computer time is like extremely long time. So maybe it's like tens of thousands or even millions of games of Go that's played. And now it's like very good at Go, but like, what's the reasoning that's going on? We don't really know. And then, yeah, we could keep going as well. It's just like many, many things within technical AI safety. And then there's the governance side of things, both for AI, for other technologies, for reducing the risk of World War III. Here, I kind of admit it gets tough. It's like very hard to measure and be confident that we're doing stuff that's actively good. And we have to hope a little bit more that just having smart, thoughtful, competent

• 1:13:21Speaker 01

  people in positions of political influence, where they're able to understand the arguments on both sides and put in policies and regulation in place such that like we more carefully navigate these big technological advances, or such that we don't go to war, or face some sort of race dynamic between different countries. That is also just like extremely important to me, in my view.

• 1:13:47Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, let me take a pause to jump back to number of the questions I have next to me. When you feel overwhelmed or unfocused, or if you feel you've lost your focus temporarily, what do you do? You know, the questions you ask yourself, activities, because I think it is easy, maybe I'll speak for myself, to feel like there's so much potentially coming down the pike that is an existential threat. It's easiest just to curl up into the fetal position and just scroll through TikTok or Instagram and pretend like it isn't coming. So not saying that is where you end up,

• 1:14:32Tim Ferriss?

  but when you feel overwhelmed or unfocused or under focused, what do you do?

• 1:14:37Speaker 01

  For me, it's most often driven by dropping my mood.

• 1:14:40Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:41Speaker 01

  So I've had issues with depression since forever, basically, although now it's just far, far better. Like I think, I normally say I'm something like five to 10 times happier than I was a decade ago. It's pretty good.

• 1:14:53Tim Ferriss?

  That is good.

• 1:14:54Speaker 01

  Happy about that. And so I have a bit of, have you heard of the term of a trigger action plan?

• 1:15:01Tim Ferriss?

  Say that one more time. I'm not sure if this is the word or the Scottish accent.

• 1:15:06Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:15:06Tim Ferriss?

  Trigger, trigger.

• 1:15:08Speaker 01

  Trigger action plan.

• 1:15:12Tim Ferriss?

  Oh my God, I have Shrek on the podcast. This is amazing. All right. Yeah. Trigger action plan. Go ahead. No, I don't know what that is.

• 1:15:20Speaker 01

  The idea is there's a trigger, like some event that you hit that happens. And it's just like, when that event happens, you immediately just put into place some action. So a fire alarm goes off. Then it's like, everyone knows what to do. There's the fire drill. You follow the fire drill. You like stand up, you walk outside, you leave your belongings. And it's like, it's so that you don't have to think in complex situations. I do that, but for when I have like low mood, where the thing that has been very bad in the past is when it's like, oh, I've got low mood. So I'm not being as effective and productive. So I'm going to have to work even harder. And therefore I beat myself up and it makes it even worse. So instead, what I do is I'm just like, if I notice my mood is really slumping and therefore it's harder to work, I just bump like fix my mood

• 1:16:04Speaker 01

  to like top of my to do list becomes like the most important priority. Where the crucial thing is not to let it spiral. The number one thing I do is just I go to the gym or go for a run. Cause there I'm like, look, I wanted to do this a certain amount of time per week anyway. It's something I enjoy, a friend like recreation. So worst case, I'm just moving time around. Similarly, I'll probably meditate as well. Then at the same time, in terms of thing, how I think. I have again, certain kind of cash thoughts that I found very helpful. So one is just thinking about how it's like, yep, this happens before and it's not the end of the world. It's been okay. If I've gone through this before, it's just, I'll be able to get through it again, probably.

• 1:16:46Speaker 01

  Second is just thinking about. No longer assessing like the individual day that I'm having, but instead some like larger chunk of time. Where it's easy to beat yourself up if you're like, look, I've had just the shittest day and I've done nothing. What a loser. Whereas if you're like, okay, well, how have I done over the last three years? Or 10 years or like my whole life. And at least assuming you feel kind of okay about that. Which I do, then that's very reassuring. It's like, okay. I've had a shit day, but like, if someone were to write a history of my last few years, they probably wouldn't talk about this day. They talk about the other things. And so it's kind of like, I've got a little bit in the bank there.

• 1:17:27Speaker 01

  So even if I just take the whole day off, in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't really matter. That combined with like taking a bit of time away from whatever's making me plunge. And then like exercise, I just find has a mood boost as well. But then also gives time for these thoughts to really percolate and sink in. Generally means that I can just then like come back a couple of hours later and be pretty refreshed. But the key thing is just like, once this happens, you just, you just do the thing and you stop thinking. It's like, look, this is what my plan is.

• 1:17:56Tim Ferriss?

  Can you say trigger action plan one more time in a heavy Scottish accent?

• 1:18:00Speaker 01

  Trigger action plan. That's what you need, pal.

• 1:18:04Tim Ferriss?

  I'm gonna put that right at the beginning of the podcast. Oh, so good, so good. Uh, thank you, thank you.

• 1:18:12Speaker 01

  Name, name, name, name, name, name, name, name.

• 1:18:14Tim Ferriss?

  You know, if this long-termism, effective altruism, philosophy thing doesn't work out for you, I think you have a future in voice acting. So you always have that.

• 1:18:22Speaker 01

  Effective altruism is about doing the most you can. Not being a wee girl's blouse.

• 1:18:29Speaker 01

  I don't know what if you speak in Scott, yeah, speak of this proper Scottish accent, suddenly you've got to be somewhat aggressive and like insulting someone. Otherwise, it just doesn't quite work, doesn't quite work.

• 1:18:39Tim Ferriss?

  You can't whisper an aggressive Scottish accent. It's very hard, very, very challenging. I'm not even going to try that. It would be embarrassing, but let's hop back into AI for a moment. So you hang out with a lot of the smart, cool kids and very technical people who really understand this stuff. When they talk about robots gone bad or just the plausible scenarios that would be very bad, what are they? Like, what are the two or three things that they would see as a, an event or a development that would sort of be the equivalent of the trigger action plan, right?

• 1:19:24Tim Ferriss?

  Where it's like, oh, this is like life before and life after. What are the, say, two or three or one to three scenarios that they've honed in on?

• 1:19:36Speaker 01

  I think there are two, from my perspective, two extremely worrying scenarios. One is that AI systems get just much more powerful than human systems and they have goals that are misaligned with human goals. And they realize that human beings are standing away of them achieving their goals and so they take control. And perhaps that means they just wipe everyone out. Perhaps they don't even need to. So an analogy is often given between like the lives of Homo sapiens from the perspective of the chimpanzees, where Homo sapiens were just smarter, they were able to work together, they just had these advantages.

• 1:20:20Speaker 01

  And that just means the chimpanzees just have very little say in how things go over the long term, basically no say. It's not that we made them extinct, although in a sense, they're kind of lucky. We made many, in fact, I think we made most of large animals extinct due to the lives of Homo sapiens. But that could happen with AI as well. We could be to the AI systems what chimpanzees are to humans. Or perhaps it's actually more extreme, because once you've got AI systems that are smarter than you, and they're building AI systems that are smarter again, maybe it's more like we're like ants looking at humans when we're looking at advanced AI systems.

• 1:20:55Tim Ferriss?

  Give me the second one, and then I'm going to come back to the first one with just a sci fi thought experiment.

• 1:21:00Speaker 01

  And then the second one is like, okay, even assume that we do manage to align AI systems with human goals. So we can really get them to do whatever they want. Nonetheless, this could be a very scary thing, where if you do think that AI systems could lead to much faster rates of technological progress, in particular by automating technological discovery, including the creation of better AI systems. So like, we've got AI writing the code that builds the next generation of AI, that then writes even better code to build the next generation of AI. Things could happen like very quickly. Well, even if you manage to have AI systems do exactly what you want them to do, well, that could concentrate

• 1:21:41Speaker 01

  power in a very small number of hands. Could be a single country, could be a company, could be like an individual within a single country who wants to instill a dictatorship. And then once you've got that power, it's kind of similar to what happened during the Industrial Revolution and earlier. So Europe got more and more powerful technology over that period. And what it did do, it used it to colonize and subjugate a very large fraction of the world. In the same way, it could happen, but even faster, that a small group gets such power and use it to essentially take over the world. And then, once it's in power, well,

• 1:22:20Speaker 01

  once you've got AI systems, I think you're able to have indefinite social control in a way that's like very worrying. And this is value lock-in again, where at the limit, imagine you're kind of the dictator of a totalitarian state, like 1984, The Handmaid's Tale or something. And that's a global totalitarian state. And you really want your ideology To persist forever. Well, you can pass that ideology on to this AI successor. It just says like, yep, you got all the world now and the AI does not need to, has no need to die. It's like software can replicate itself indefinitely. So unlike dictators, which will die off eventually,

• 1:23:02Speaker 01

  causing a certain amount of change to occur. Well, this is not true for the AI could replicate itself indefinitely. And it could be like in every area of society. And so then when you've got that, it's like, why would we expect model change after that point? And it's like, kind of hard to see. So in general, I think there can be these states where you get into a particular state of the world and you just kind of can't get out of it again. And this kind of Orwellian perpetual, like totalitarianism is actually one of the things I really worry about.

• 1:23:33Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 1:23:36Speaker 01

  Again, this is a happy book.

• 1:23:38Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:44Tim Ferriss?

  So within the context of our discussion of the happy book, you talked about, I think it was the Moists. I can't remember the term you used, but you mentioned they were similar to effective altruism and they formed a paramilitary group. When are you forming the effective altruism, paramilitary group, counter AI insurgency squad? Is that in the works?

• 1:24:06Speaker 01

  Well, there is an analogy between, we haven't yet, we haven't yet got our own army. Probably, probably that won't happen. I think things are going pretty weird if they have, and I might need to, might need to intervene at that point. But there is an analogy where they built very powerful and created very good defensive technology. So you got trebuchets, very powerful for attacking.

• 1:24:28Tim Ferriss?

  You say trebuchet, trebuchets?

• 1:24:31Speaker 01

  Oh, trebuchet. Yeah. It's like a catapult.

• 1:24:33Tim Ferriss?

  What is that? It's like, it's got a, it's got a sling on it. Is that what it is? It's like a catapult with a sling. So you get the, it's like an addle, addle, but for throwing much bigger things. Anyway, the physics involved are, I think the same. Yeah.

• 1:24:45Speaker 01

  Yep, for sure. But you know, also walls are defensive technology. If you had just really good walls, really good defenses.

• 1:24:52Tim Ferriss?

  I thought you said wolves for a second. I was like, wow, I did not, did not see that coming. We're gonna have to resurrect the wolf if we want to have any hope of defensive wolf technology. All right, walls. Yeah.

• 1:25:03Speaker 01

  They are training eagles to attack drones. So it's not like, it's not so insane.

• 1:25:10Speaker 01

  We have wolves to attack the robot overlords. I don't back the wolves, I've got to say.

• 1:25:18Speaker 01

  But we can think in the same terms of, look, there's certain technology that has kind of offensive advantage. So the ability to design new pathogens, there's certain technology that's like, has a defensive advantage, like this far UVC radiation. And so one of the things we're doing is really trying to develop and speed up kind of defensive technology. And so similarly, when you look at AI, there's some things that just pure capabilities, it's just AI getting more and more powerful. And then there are some things that are helpful in making sure that AI is safe, like understanding what's under the hood of these models, just means that like, okay, we know what's going on a bit better. We can like use it better. We can predict what sort of behavior that will have.

• 1:26:01Tim Ferriss?

  Let's talk about defensive capabilities. I'll just give another example of an asymmetric

• 1:26:06Tim Ferriss?

  offense-defense situation, which would be drone warfare. The the ability to create weaponized, potentially lethal drones and swarms and so on, is much lower than the cost to defend against them, generally speaking, right? I mean, certainly that becomes true if you start to combine targeted bioweapons with drones, things get really expensive to, at best, to defend against. But let's let's talk about my sci fi scenario. So when you use the analogies of humans and chimps,

• 1:26:46Tim Ferriss?

  or the analogy of the industrial revolution and the technological gains in Western Europe predominantly, which then allowed the physical, and that's the word I'll underscore, sort of subjugation and colonization and dominance of a significant percentage of the world's population. I suppose there's part of me that on a simplistic level feels like, even though this would not be easy to do, because it would be sort of like a homicide-suicide for a lot of folks, the more interdependent we become. But it's like, all right, if AI is constrained to A physical infrastructure that is dependent upon power would not part of the defensive

• 1:27:27Tim Ferriss?

  planning or preemptive planning go into trying to restrict AI to something that can be unplugged, to put it really simply. But how are people playing out this hypothetical scenario, right? So with the AI, presumably if it's as smart or smarter than we are, foresee this and then develop sort of solar powered extensions of itself. So it can do A, B, and C. And how are people, I'm sure this is part of the conversation. I've just never had it. So what are smarter people exploring with respect to this type of stuff?

• 1:28:00Speaker 01

  I think actually your nose is pointed in a good direction on this one. And it's this sort of thing that makes me, among my peers on the more optimistic end of thinking that advanced AI would not kill everybody. Where, yeah, you could have like air gapped computers. So they're not, you can't access the internet now. They don't have other ways of kind of controlling the world apart from kind of text output. And they've been trained to act as kind of oracles. So you just ask them a question and they give you ideally like very justified kind of true answer. And perhaps you have many of these as well. You've got like a dozen of them. And they don't know that the others exist. And then you just start asking them for help. So you're

• 1:28:43Speaker 01

  like, okay, we're going to start building these like incredibly powerful AI systems that much, much smarter than, more generally able than we are. Like, what should we do? What should our plan be? And so that's a pathway where it's like, you're using AI to help solve the problems that we will face with even more powerful AI. And what's the response? I mean, some people would say, oh, well, if the AI systems are really that powerful, they're like far better than humans, they will then trick you. So, and they will be able to do that just by outputting text and telling you like, oh, do this thing or do this thing. And that will all be this like long deceptive play. And I just think that's unlikely. That seems to be. Spective for me, I don't have like strong reasons to think that we would have that.

• 1:29:25Speaker 01

  The current AI systems we have are more like, you know, they just output text. It's not like they're an agent that's like trying to do things in the world. You just put in the text input, it gives you a text output, at least for language models. And potentially we can scale that up to the point where they're like these kind of sages and boxes. I think that's a significant pathway by which we make even more powerful AI systems that are kind of agentic, are kind of acting, you know, have a model of the world and it's trying to do things in the world, that we make them safe. But that's exactly a good example of, yeah, again, kind of differential technological progress where an AI system that's just like this article in a box, separated from the rest of the world.

• 1:30:08Speaker 01

  That seems very good from a defensive perspective. Whereas an AI system that's been trained on like war games and then it's just like released into the open, seems like potentially very bad.

• 1:30:23Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, indeed. Robots gone wild.

• 1:30:28Speaker 01

  Are you gonna create a new subreddit?

• 1:30:30Tim Ferriss?

  I don't know if I'll create a subreddit. I mean, I'm, I'm tempted to start digging spider holes in my backyard and learning how to, you know, hunt with bow and arrow, but you know, all things in due time.

• 1:30:42Tim Ferriss?

  What are the most important actions people can take now? What are some actions for people who are like, I want to be an agent of change. I want to feel some locus of, if not control, at least free will. I don't want to just lay on my back and wait for the cyborg raptors to descend upon me or to become a house pet for some dictator in a foreign land who overtakes the US as a superpower, whatever it is, right? I want to actually do something. What, what are some of the most important or maybe impactful actions that, that people can take?

• 1:31:22Speaker 01

  So I think there's kind of two pathways for such a person. One, you might be motivated to help, but you don't really want to rejig your whole life. Ideally, perhaps you just don't really want to have to think about this again, but you do want to be doing good. Then I think the option of donations is just particularly good. So you could take the giving what we can pledge. You make a 10% donation every year of your income. And then you can give to somewhere like the Long Term Future Fund as part of EA Funds, and it'll get redistributed to what some kind of domain experts think are the highest impact things to do in this space. That's the kind of like baseline response or something. And I think it's important to emphasize you can do an enormous amount of good there. You know, there's a lot of ways we could spend money to do good things in the world, including from this long-term perspective.

• 1:32:07Speaker 01

  The second is if you're like, no, actually, I want to be more actively a kind of agent of change. Then I think the first thing to do is to learn more. You know, I've tried to pack as much as I can into a book, but I think there's a lot to engage with. I mean, the book is what we are the future. You know, it's talking about some big philosophical ideas. It's also just covering a lot of broad ground of different disciplines, different issues. Like, you know, we talked about AI and bioresc and World War III. There's plenty of other issues I didn't talk about. We haven't talked about nukes. We haven't talked about technological stagnation, which I think is particularly important as well. We also haven't talked even just about promoting better values as well, kind of all more broad ways of making the long-term better.

• 1:32:50Speaker 01

  So all of these things are things that I think we can learn. Therefore, I'd encourage reading The Precipice by Toby Ord, which I mentioned in my recommended books. Also, 80000hours.org as well has enormous amounts of content. Openflanthby.org also has just a lot of really interesting content. They're a foundation, but they've done some really deep research into some of these topics, such as this issue, which we didn't get to touch of, when we should expect human-level intelligence to arise, with some arguments that we should really put a lot of probability mass, like maybe more than 50% on it coming in the next few decades. And then, following that, I think the most important single decision is how can you either use or leverage your career or switch career in order to work on some of these, you know,

• 1:33:35Speaker 01

  most important issues. And again, we've really tried to make this as easy as possible by providing like endless online advice and also like one-on-one coaching, such that people can get advice.

• 1:33:47Speaker 01

  And then the final thing would be getting involved with the effective altruism community, where this stuff is hard, it can be intimidating. One of the big things that just is a fact when we start thinking about these more kind of civilizational scale issues compared to the kind of original seed of EA, which is funding these very well evidenced programs that demonstrably improve health, is like, it can be very overwhelming and it can be hard to know exactly how to fit in. But we now have a community of thousands or tens of thousands of people who are working together and really keen to help each other. And there are many conferences, like EA Global Conferences at places like London, DC, San Francisco, all kind of independently organized conferences, EA Global X's.

• 1:34:32Speaker 01

  In many places, there'll be one in India, for example, in early January, as well as like hundreds of local groups around the world where people get together and can often like provide support and help each other to try and figure out like, okay, what is the most impactful thing you can do? So yeah, that would be my kind of laundry list of advice.

• 1:34:49Tim Ferriss?

  And with respect to, say, ditching the news, or at least going on a lower information diet with the most manufactured urgency that we get flooded with, and instead spending time looking at big picture trends, or trying to get that big picture roughly right, as you put it, both from a historical perspective and a current perspective, would you still recommend for podcasts in our time hosted by Melvin Bragg, I believe discusses history, philosophy, science with leading academics, and the 80,000 Hours podcast? Would those be two you would still recommend?

• 1:35:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would still strongly recommend them. There's also another podcast here, This Idea, by Finn Morehouse and Luca Ragatti. I also particularly like, Rationally Speaking, by Julia Gayleth as well. It's like very good.

• 1:35:46Speaker 01

  And then in terms of websites, if you want like big picture, like beyond the websites I've already said, to just have like the best big picture understanding of the world, I don't know of a single better source than our world and data, which is just, I mean, it was very influential during the COVID pandemic, but it has, you know, if you want to learn about nuclear war or long line economic growth or world population, it's articles that are presenting both data and like the best understanding of the data in just this like timeless evergreen way with exceptional rigor and exceptional depth. It's just amazing. I use it very heavily to like orient myself for the book.

• 1:36:29Tim Ferriss?

  So Will Macaskill, people can find you on Twitter at Will Macaskill, M A C A S K I L L. On the web, William Macaskill dot com. The new book is What We Owe the Future. I recommend people check it out. Is there anything else you would like to add? Any requests to the audience? Anything you'd like to point people to? Any complaints or grievances with this podcast process that you would like to air publicly? Anything at all that you'd like to add before we wrap this conversation up?

• 1:37:00Speaker 01

  The main thing to say is just, as we've said over and over again, I think we face truly enormous challenges in our life. Many of these challenges are very scary. They can be overwhelming. They can be intimidating. But I really believe that each of us individually can make an enormous difference to these problems. We really can significantly help as part of a wider community to putting humanity onto a better path. And if we do, then the future really could be long and absolutely flourishing. And your great great grandkids will thank you.

• 1:37:33Tim Ferriss?

  Well, thank you very much, Will. I always enjoy our conversations and I appreciate the time.

• 1:37:37Speaker 01

  Ditto. Thanks so much, Tim.

• 1:37:39Tim Ferriss?

  Absolutely. And to everybody listening, I will link to all the resources and the books and websites and so on in the show notes as per usual at tim.blog/podcast. And until next time, be just a little bit kinder than necessary. And thanks for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half-page that I send out every Friday to share the

• 1:38:20Tim Ferriss?

  coolest things I've found or discovered, or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So, if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday, drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.

• 1:39:05Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:41:13Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:41:55Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:42:39Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:43:19Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:44:04Tim Ferriss?

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