Doing Good Better: William MacAskill on ‘Effective Altruism’ & How To Maximize Positive Global Impact

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 1:04Speaker 01

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

• 1:20Rich Roll?

  That is Professor William McCaskill, and this is the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 1:39Rich Roll?

  What are you guys doing? What's happening? How are you? What's going on? What is the news? My name is Rich Roll. I am your host. This is the podcast, the Rich Roll Podcast, the one that I host, the one that has me behind the mic, talking to you guys. The podcast where I sit down with the outliers, the big forward thinkers, across all categories of positive paradigm-breaking culture change. And I've got a simple goal, very simple, to simply help all of us, myself included, unlock and unleash our best, most authentic selves. So, thank you so much for tuning in. For subscribing on iTunes, for checking out my newsletter, for giving us a review on iTunes, and of course, for always making sure to use the Amazon banner at richroll.com for all your Amazon purchases. The Amazon banner ad is right there on the podcast page at richroll.com,

• 2:24Rich Roll?

  richroll.com/podcast. If you click on that and then buy something on Amazon, Amazon kicks us some loose commission change. It doesn't cost you guys anything extra. And it's really just a great, very simple, awesome way to support this show and the mission. And it's been instrumental in helping me take care of my team, particularly as we've stepped this thing up from one episode a week to two, which I can tell you is a disproportionate amount of work. So, thank you so much to everybody who has made a practice of this. It really does make a huge difference, and I greatly, greatly appreciate it. So, it's Saturday night. What are you guys doing? Well, I can tell you what I'm doing. I'm in my office. It's 8 o'clock Saturday night, recording these intros for the next show.

• 3:07Rich Roll?

  But I just came from a really cool, inspiring couple hours that I spent in Malibu. This weekend is the Nautica Malibu Triathlon. And it's one of my favorite weekends of the year out here, most notably because that's when the CNN Fit Nation crew shows up. And what that is, is a program started by CNN, particularly Ronnie Selig, who's executive producer of the health unit, and Sanjay Gupta, who's the chief medical correspondent at CNN. Every year, they pick a small group of people who send in videos and this sort of application process, petitioning CNN for why they should participate in this Fit Nation program to

• 3:51Rich Roll?

  train for and participate in their first triathlon. And usually, it's stories of people who are in poor health, or at some kind of crossroads in their life, or are in the process of attempting to overcome some hurdle. Everybody's different, of course, and every year, it's a new crop. And so, I just came from a house that they rented in Malibu, where I got to meet all of the six athletes who are preparing for their first sprint triathlon tomorrow morning, which was- Completely inspiring. I just think it's so cool to be able to connect up close and personal with people that are really getting out of their comfort zone, doing something for themselves that I think is inspiring to so many other people. It's really great.

• 4:36Rich Roll?

  And of course, I got to reconnect with all my friends at CNN, Matt Sloan, who's producing The Weekend, Ronnie Selig, who's been on the podcast in the past and is an amazing triathlete in her own right. She got fourth in her age group yesterday in the Olympic distance and she's going to be competing in Kona coming up soon, which is amazing. And of course, Sanjay, who has been just on a personal level, like an incredible support system and mentor to me personally. He wrote an incredibly touching foreword to The Plant Power Way. In case you guys didn't see it, it's really meant a lot to me. And he's always been phenomenal in kind of supporting and covering what I'm doing. And it was just really cool to see him. He's going to be racing tomorrow as well. So, anyway, I just

• 5:21Rich Roll?

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

• 6:05Rich Roll?

  shared his kind of struggles and journey through that. I think it's been inspiring to a lot of people. So, it was very cool to meet him in person for the first time. Anyway, enough of that. Before we get into the episode, let's take care of a little business first.

• 6:26Rich Roll?

  All right, so today's podcast, I want to open this up with a question. And the question is this, how can we make the best use of the resources available to us to create the maximum positive impact on the world? And the response to this is a little bit trickier than you might imagine, and at times somewhat counterintuitive. So let's unpack it. Look, most of us want to make a difference, right? We donate our time and our money to charities and causes we deem worthy, we choose careers we think are meaningful, we patronize businesses and byproducts we believe make the world a better place. But unfortunately, we often base these decisions on assumptions and emotions rather than facts.

• 7:08Rich Roll?

  And as a result, our best intentions can at times lead us astray to often ineffective and at times even downright harmful outcomes. So how can we approach this issue better? How can we do better? And this is the problem that today's guest really wanted to solve. While he was a young researcher at Oxford, he was trying to figure out which career would allow him, on a personal level, to have the greatest impact. And of course, he came up against this very problem. And he discovered that much of the potential for change, for betterment in the world, was being squandered by lack of information, by bad data, and by our own prejudice.

• 7:50Rich Roll?

  In other words, it was an imperfect market that needed disrupting and that needed, really, to be studied. And so as an antidote, he and his colleagues did just that. They looked into it. And they applied a very fact and logic and reason-based approach to giving, to try to understand how to do better, basically, right? And what came out of this is a modality of thought, a movement, you could call it, that is now called effective altruism. And that's what we're going to talk about today. So who is this guy, William MacAskill? Well, he's a very interesting, young, enterprising man. He is a Scottish-born sculptor.

• 8:33Rich Roll?

  And author who is currently at the ripe age of 28, an associate professor of philosophy at Lincoln College in Oxford, that Oxford. Before that, he was a research fellow in philosophy at Emanuel College in Cambridge, yes, that Cambridge. Before that, he was a Fulbright scholar at Princeton, that Princeton. And if that's not enough, he also co-founded two nonprofits in his twenties, because he is literally still in his twenties. The first one is 80000hours.org, and this is sort of an ethical careers advisory service, sort of like an online career mentor, which provides research and advice on how you can best make a difference through your career, which is very, very cool. The other one is called

• 9:18Rich Roll?

  Giving What We Can, and that organization encourages people to commit to give at least 10% of their income to the most effective charities. And that's very, very interesting, because William, on a personal level, has made the commitment to donate any income that he receives above $35,000 to an effective charity. That is quite a commitment, and that's something that we get into in the podcast today. Very, very interesting. Combine, the nonprofits that William has founded have raised over $400 million in lifetime pledge donations to charity, and really have helped spark the globalization of this effective altruism movement. William is a contributor to The Atlantic, and he and his organizations have

• 10:01Rich Roll?

  been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, and TED, among other media outlets. And although he lives in Oxford, I was able to sit down with him in Mountain View, California, the Silicon Valley Mountain View, as he was, I don't think he's there anymore, was in residence there, as part of this accelerator program put on by an organization called Y Combinator, which is a seed venture fund. It's a really prestigious program. It's a program that launched a couple startups you might have heard of, called Dropbox, Airbnb, Reddit, Stripe. In any event, Y Combinator invited his nonprofit 80,000 Hours to participate in this accelerator program, which is very

• 10:46Rich Roll?

  cool for him. And that's what made him available to me, which was really great. In addition, William has a book that just came out. It's called How to Do Good Better. And the theme of this book is basically self-evident.

• 11:01Rich Roll?

  And I really found this book to be very captivating. It tracks pretty much what we talk about in today's podcast, so I won't spoil it for you. But I would strongly encourage you to check out this book. It's quite, it had quite an impact on me and I think it will irrevocably change how you perceive charitable giving and how you donate your own personal time to the world. And it will make you more mindful of the impact of your decisions on the greater good. So this is a pretty intense and at times heady conversation on all of the foregoing, but it was a pleasure and an honor to spend some time with William. I can't wait to see where he goes in his career because this is a guy who is actually

• 11:47Rich Roll?

  doing a lot of amazing things and I just, I can't wait to see where it, where it leads and how it's going to continually unfold. So without further ado, I really hope you enjoy this conversation. Ladies and gentlemen, William MacAskill.

• 12:05Rich Roll?

  Before we get into it, I thought I would point out that I talked to Ryan Holiday. He says to say hello, but he's super pissed that he lost the Rebel Book Club, whatever it was.

• 12:16Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, I was pretty surprised we won that. We each voted for each other's books.

• 12:22Rich Roll?

  Oh, you did? Good. Well, at least there's that.

• 12:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:24Rich Roll?

  No, he did say to say hello. It was funny because I didn't know that you guys knew each other. And then I was going through your Twitter feed and I saw a little exchange. I was like, oh man, my world just got smaller and I emailed him. I was like, hey, I'm going to meet William. He was super psyched, so.

• 12:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, Ryan's, I think, the center of a lot of people's networks.

• 12:40Rich Roll?

  I think that's true. Yeah, very, very true. Definitely a connector. So anyway, so many things to talk about, but I think probably the best way to just, is to just jump in and get our feet wet. Why don't you kind of explain what effective altruism is and then we can kind of go from there.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, terrific. So effective altruism is about using your time and money as effectively as possible to make the world a better place. So if you want to give to charity, how can you make not just a difference, but how can you make the most difference you can? If you want to do good with your career, what's the very best career you can do in terms of having a social impact? And then we try to take. A scientific, evidence-based, data-driven approach to answering that question.

• 13:24Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  And that's turned into a bit of a philosophy and a bit of a social movement. And there's now an effective altruism community all around the world.

• 13:31Rich Roll?

  I know. How does it feel to be at the epicenter of like catalyzing this entire social movement?

• 13:38Speaker 01

  Uh, well.

• 13:38Rich Roll?

  As a spry 28-years-old?

• 13:41Speaker 01

  Well, I'm British, so mainly I just feel awkward about it.

• 13:43Rich Roll?

  Right. How embarrassing.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  Uh, how embarrassing exactly? But I mean, exciting at the same time. It's just, I really didn't expect these ideas to take off in the way they have done.

• 13:53Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 13:54Speaker 01

  And it's been so exhilarating seeing people, you know, really make very significant changes to their life, pledging to give most of the money they earn over the course of their life, making major career switch, founding nonprofits, founding companies, uh, all with the aim of just really trying to make the biggest difference they can.

• 14:13Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right. And we're gonna get into all of that, but while we kind of like plant our flag in this, uh, world of altruism, I mean, I think that it might make sense to even define altruism in itself, because I feel like it gets confused. Like when I spoke to Ryan about Stoicism, you know, it gets confused with asceticism, right? And I feel like, you know, altruism can kind of fall a little bit into that category as well in terms of how people perceive it. So like, what is altruism in and of itself?

• 14:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks a lot for asking that. So, because when biologists use the term altruism, they mean self-sacrifice.

• 14:49Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 14:50Speaker 01

  And I think a lot of people think that. They mean, you're being altruistic, that means you're just making yourself worse off for some other end. And that's not really how I want to use it at all. For me, altruism is just about making other people better off. And more precisely, I just want to measure that as just how many people are you affecting? And how significantly are you improving their lives?

• 15:08Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 15:09Speaker 01

  And if in the course of that, you improve your own life as well, as I think is actually quite often the case, that's a bonus. That's a reason in favor of doing that thing.

• 15:16Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 15:17Speaker 01

  Not a reason against.

• 15:18Rich Roll?

  Is it your feeling that we are naturally altruistic? That, that through some bizarre, you know, sort of natural selection process that we are, you know, we have arrived on the planet kind of inherently altruistic? Or we have that innate sort of characteristic as a precept of natural law?

• 15:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think we're, I think it's, we're to some extent altruistic. So maybe we're like 90% out for ourselves and 10% altruistic.

• 15:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I'm not so sure we live in the most altruistic culture.

• 15:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think. It varies depending on which particular subculture you're part of. Maybe whilst the not so altruistic, the bail a little bit more, at least in how they talk about things. But I think in terms of human nature, yeah, I think there's a strong altruistic component. I think, you know, we see suffering in other people, even in people we don't know, and we feel compelled to help anytime a natural disaster strikes. That's in clear abundance. And it's hard to make sense of that on purely evolution and self-interested grounds.

• 16:18Rich Roll?

  And so how did you get initially interested in this subject matter?

• 16:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I'd been interested in doing good. You know, I'd been socially conscious kind of growing up. I ran a scout troop for kids with disabilities for many years. I worked as a care assistant at an old folks home. And that was a really

• 16:37Rich Roll?

  What were your parents like?

• 16:39Speaker 01

  I mean, my parents were fairly regular, kind of upstanding members of the community. They never really pushed me in any direction in particular. They just wanted to see me flourish on my own. And so a lot of this stuff was kind of off my own back.

• 16:54Rich Roll?

  A self-generated thing.

• 16:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then I became vegetarian age 18 and

• 16:58Rich Roll?

  I didn't know that.

• 16:58Speaker 01

  That was definitely

• 16:59Rich Roll?

  That didn't come up in my research. Now we have lots of other stuff to talk about.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, for sure. So first of October 2005.

• 17:05Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 17:06Speaker 01

  That was the day I left home. I became vegetarian.

• 17:09Rich Roll?

  Interesting.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  And that definitely wasn't encouraged by my parents. They were quite shocked. And so, yeah, I'd always been interested in making difference. And certainly through studying philosophy, a lot of ethical ideas coming up and a lot of arguments I found quite powerful. In particular, Peter Singer's argument that we have this obligation to give most of our income to fight poverty because you wouldn't walk past a child drowning in a shallow pond just because it would cost a few thousand dollars for you to run in and save the child and muddy your suit. And if that's true, what's the difference between that child drowning in front of you and a child dying of an easily preventable disease in a poor country on the other side of the world? And I found the argument compelling that there isn't really a morally relevant difference.

• 17:53Rich Roll?

  Was that an argument that you that you came upon prior to him sort of entering your orbit and being kind of a mentor to you?

• 18:00Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, I came upon that argument age 18 or 19 and found it very compelling immediately, but didn't act on it, not for years.

• 18:08Rich Roll?

  Right, right.

• 18:09Speaker 01

  And it was actually only after I graduated Cambridge, which is where I did my undergraduate degree. And over the summer, I was working as a fundraiser for Care International. So one of those annoying people who stands in the street and accosts passes by, asking them to donate ten dollars a month. In the UK, we call them charity muggers or chuggers.

• 18:32Speaker 01

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

• 19:11Rich Roll?

  Not applied philosophy.

• 19:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And so that meant that when I arrived at Oxford, I thought, okay, I'm gonna have to start making changes to my life. And I started giving someone my graduate stipend, like a couple of percent, a few percent, which seemed like a very big deal at the time in my head. And I started looking around, talking to academics, asking, okay, well, you know, including practical ethicists, people who are really engaging with real world ethical issues and asking, well, what impact did you have? And the Chair of Practical Ethics at Oxford, who is must be, you know, within that field, one of the most influential people, asked him and he said that once someone said that they joined the donor organ registry.

• 19:55Rich Roll?

  You got one email.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  One email, yeah, one person in this like twenty year career who'd signed up to do.

• 20:01Rich Roll?

  That breaks my heart.

• 20:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, and he said that was the sum total of it. So I was pretty disenchanted. And so really wondering what I should do with my life. But then, by coincidence, I met another academic called Toby Ord, and that was in early two thousand and nine.

• 20:19Speaker 01

  And we met because of shared research interest. But I saw on his website, he had this comment that he says he was very concerned by global poverty and give to the acquired amount. And I saw that and I thought hogwash. He's just another one of these academics, not actually doing anything. But then he told me he was at the time living on nine thousand pounds, saving two thousand pounds and giving two thousand pounds. And he was planning to give everything he earned above twenty thousand pounds.

• 20:47Speaker 01

  And he described it as a high bar. He was planning to give more than that, in fact, but if he was going to pledge something publicly, he wanted to have a safe amount. But what was most striking about it all was how enthusiastic he was about this. He was not conveying this as this self flagellating.

• 21:04Rich Roll?

  Like a martyr or something.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. He was like, this is this amazing opportunity. This is like so exciting how much good we can do. And that really inspired me as well. And so together, we then co-founded this organization, Giving What We Can, which is about encouraging people to give at least ten percent of their income to whatever causes do the most good. And I ended up taking a similar pledge to him, everything above twenty thousand pounds per year.

• 21:32Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 21:32Speaker 01

  Inflation and the cost of living adjusted to Oxford.

• 21:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah, let's explore that a little bit. So that's about thirty five thousand dollars US, right? Something in that range.

• 21:43Rich Roll?

  So did you do that shortly after that conversation or how long have you been on this program?

• 21:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think a couple of months afterwards. I actually, you know, it was obviously a time of turmoil for me. And before making the decision, I went online and just started looking at

• 21:59Speaker 01

  photos of children suffering from horrific diseases. And because, you know, I wasn't cognizively, I thought I should do it, but I didn't quite have the emotional push. So I deliberately looked at photos like that. And I remember seeing one child who had a Lymphatic philorhyosis of the face. So it's quite a rare condition to get that. It meant the entire face was hugely swollen and sagging down, almost like Snoopy the dog or something. And I just thought, look, if my action here can stop like one person, just one child from not having to go through a condition like that, it's easily worth it. And in fact, if you look at the numbers, I can do that thousands of times over. And so that's when I made the decision.

• 22:41Rich Roll?

  Right. And, and did you, what did your friends think when you announced this to your peer group?

• 22:47Speaker 01

  Um, well, at the time I was proselytizing quite a bit. Yeah. So a lot of people were like, would say, is that legally binding? Yeah. Come back in a few years and we'll see whether you're still stuck with that.

• 22:58Rich Roll?

  Well, it's a valid question. I mean, it's one thing to make that pledge when you're an impoverished student. But you know, now you're sort of, you know, as you escalate the, you know, the world and your income increases. I mean, do you, do you have like caveats for, uh, you know, adjusting for not just inflation, but you know, as your life continues to expand, I mean, if you have children, if you're, you know what I mean? Like things enter into your life where, you know, $35,000 a year, if you're making, you know, a decent quantity, which I imagine you will with all the work that you're doing, um, you know, you're going to confront like some realities with that.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. So there are some caveats. So, uh, one is for children. So if I'm a parent with another, if I have a child and, uh, if I have a, I'm a parent with another, with a partner, then I would increase it by 5,000 pounds per child or 10,000 pounds if I'm a, if I'm a single parent.

• 23:54Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 23:55Speaker 01

  Um, and I also have put in the kind of emergency clause, which is just if it's the case that something unforeseen happens, that I think is, yeah, and it's going to significantly impede how much good I think I'll do over the course of my life. Um, then I'll just get permission from Toby and break the pledge. Like it's not like this kind of crazy, um,

• 24:18Speaker 01

  Thing that I want to stick to, like even if the consequences were going to be worse.

• 24:21Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 24:22Speaker 01

  It's more just making a clear commitment about this.

• 24:24Rich Roll?

  But I think it will, it will likely present some interesting philosophical like slide rule equations. Because for example, you know, what if an opportunity arises for you to travel to some place? But there isn't, you know, where you could potentially do some good. But there isn't money to get you there. And that would put you over your budget, you know? Is it more important for you to, as a sort of, you know, emblematic message to the world? To hold true to your pledge? Or would it be more positively beneficial for the world for you to break the pledge? And then go someplace that costs money to get to, to enact the good?

• 25:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, I mean, uh, yeah, like I say, I'm not doing this for the reasons of asceticism. I think, you know, the ultimate justification for doing all this is the outcomes you produce in the world. And so in a case like that, I'd, um, uh, yeah, think of it as a business expense. Not count it as.

• 25:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that would come out of the other side of the equation.

• 25:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 25:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I got you.

• 25:26Speaker 01

  And but I want to be kind of clear and transparent about that. So, uh, yeah, because it's just, if it means that I'm just handcuffing myself in certain cases when I could do more good. Then that's exactly against the spirit of why I'm doing this.

• 25:40Rich Roll?

  Okay, so you make this pledge, which then, you know, bifurcates your income. But then you're presented with this, uh, very practical, real world question, which is also a philosophical question, which is how to allocate this money. And when we kind of look at altruism, it seems to me that, that, that, you know, that's basically potential energy. Right? And that potential energy can be expended through finances, through or through time. Right? Is that essentially correct?

• 26:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:10Rich Roll?

  So, so now you have, uh, you know, you have a finite amount of time and you have this other kind of allocated. Cash reserve and then it becomes an issue of like, how is this going out into the world into the best way, which then you run that through your philosophical brain and perform that calculus and really your life's work is an expression of that. It's like an ongoing expression of how to apply a more scientific method to the allocation of this potential energy so that it enacts the most, you know, quote unquote, good, right? So if we're going to explore that, we should probably first talk about like, what is good? You know, like, how are you defining good?

• 26:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, terrific. So that's exactly like, it's early 2009 and Toby and I, even on a low estimate over the course of our lives, are going to give a million pounds, one and a half million dollars. And the question's just, okay, well, this is a big spending decision. How are we going to use that as well as possible? And so for defining good, obviously it's contested, but I think one thing that all kind of plausible moral views agree on as at least part of the truth is about what makes for the good outcome is the sum total of improvements to people's lives. So if I can extend your life if you're happy, that's, you know, improving the, that's improving your life. If I can increase the

• 27:35Speaker 01

  quality of your life while you're alive, that's improving your life as well. And that's why I take the core of altruism to be is just improving other people's lives. And if you can improve more people's lives, that's better. If you can improve people's lives by a greater amount, that's better too. And there might be other things that go into good outcomes, like art for its own sake and knowledge for its own sake, that preservation of the natural environment for its own sake, not just in terms of how those things translate into improvements in people's lives. But there's at least one thing that everyone can agree on, which is that just making people suffer less, making people happier is a good thing to do.

• 28:11Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  And that's why I tend to focus on.

• 28:13Rich Roll?

  Right, right. So you have this experience as a chugger.

• 28:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:16Rich Roll?

  And, you know, are getting, they're saying, talk to the hand and you're realizing. This is a broken system, like trying to get people to act, you know, in an altruistic way, whether logically or emotionally, is a hurdle. And then your focus sort of looks at, you know, kind of the corporate environment of giving in general, and also realizing that that is broken. Like, there's got to be a better way to give, to help, to be altruistic. So, you know, let's, let's look, let's look at that for a minute. Like, you know, what is the, what is the culture, what is the environment of charity and giving? And why is it broken?

• 29:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay, great. So, yeah, there were two differences. One is that a move from just thinking of charity as this thing you do a couple of pounds, a couple of dollars a month, and actually taking it seriously, making it part of, a significant part of your life. So that's one aspect. But then the second is thinking about outcomes with a specter to charity. Rather than having this donor-centric philanthropy where you give to the causes you personally feel connected with, or personally feel passionate about, instead thinking, well, what are the charities that are gonna have the best outcomes, that are gonna do the most good, measured in terms of improvements to people's lives? And I think most people would think, oh, well, that's just an impossible question, you can't answer that. But actually, there's a large body of research from health and development

• 29:44Speaker 01

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

• 30:26Speaker 01

  distribution, or distributing bed nets, or providing deworming, all sorts of things, and look at and assess them and compare them in terms of the impact they have in people's lives. And then you can pick the best, the one that has the biggest improvements.

• 30:42Rich Roll?

  Right, so essentially taking emotion out of it.

• 30:44Speaker 01

  To some extent.

• 30:46Rich Roll?

  In certain respects, right? And, you know, as I'm kind of grappling with that, I can't help but think that, you know, giving is inherently very, it's a very emotional act for a lot of people, right? It's, people gravitate towards the causes that they feel personally connected to. So in some respect, you're saying, that's fine, but that's not a great way of going about it.

• 31:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, so an analogy is maybe with being a doctor. So if you're a doctor, then, you know, you might want to say, oh, caring and caring for the sick is an inherently emotional aspect, you don't want to take the emotion out of that. But if you're a professional doctor and you're doing that all day, every day, and having to make hard decisions about who you're helping, who you're not, engaging in triage and so on, you simply have to have a certain level of detachment about that. Because otherwise, you're gonna make bad trade-offs. You're gonna be too taken by, you know, something you feel very sympathetic towards, or just whoever's right in front of you, rather than thinking, okay, what's actually the best decision I could be making? And so obviously, there's still an underlying emotion there, like the reason people become

• 31:54Speaker 01

  doctors is because they want to help other people.

• 31:56Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 31:56Speaker 01

  Similarly, the reason we want to give is, you know, is an emotional drive of saying we, you know, want to combat the big problems in the world. But then, that needs to be guided by our ability to reason, our ability to...

• 32:08Rich Roll?

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

• 32:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:49Rich Roll?

  Is that factored into how you?

• 32:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, so if that was true, that we were just destroying people's intentions to do good, that would definitely be a bad outcome.

• 32:57Rich Roll?

  That would not be effective altruism.

• 32:59Speaker 01

  That would not be effective altruism. But I think there's a couple of things to say. Firstly, in terms of whether we should be trying to get people to give more, to give more effectively, I think there's a couple of reasons to push and giving more effectively. One is this, that there's already so many people trying to get others to give more. There's a huge focus on it, whereas not very much on effectiveness. And second is that the difference you can make is much larger. So maybe you get someone to give 10 times as much if you were really successful at getting someone to give more. But if you get someone to give more effectively, you could easily get them to do 100 times as much good with their donations.

• 33:32Rich Roll?

  Right. So you, you have this kind of interesting example that I've heard you talk about before, which is the, is it Books for Africa versus the, the deworming program?

• 33:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:44Rich Roll?

  So, so to kind of play that out, let's say you're, you're passionate about literacy, right? And so your instinct is to give to this organization that is providing books for impoverished African children. And the idea there, of course, is that more books is better. This will, this will improve literacy and classroom attendance and the like, right? But what's the actuality of that?

• 34:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. So you'd think, obviously, giving books is a good thing in terms of improving educational outcomes. But when tested, it's actually...

• 34:17Speaker 01

  I mean, the evidence is very mixed at best. Um, seems like distributing books, at least in the absence of teacher training, has no benefit.

• 34:25Rich Roll?

  Um.

• 34:25Speaker 01

  Um, in that terms of educational outcomes, which is very surprising, but that's what the data says.

• 34:31Rich Roll?

  Right, so, so, and the, the sort of counterintuitive example that you used was um, that these, they found out that a big reason that classroom attendance was falling off was because a lot of the kids had worms, right?

• 34:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:43Rich Roll?

  So actually channeling that money towards deworming programs and getting these kids healthy improved attendance, which in turn, I would assume enhances literacy. So if you're interested in supporting literacy, your money would have been better spent funding these deworming charitable organizations, right?

• 35:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. If you want to improve educational outcomes, if you want to improve life outcomes, deworming is one of the best.

• 35:06Rich Roll?

  Right, in this part of the world.

• 35:07Speaker 01

  In this part of, in Sub-Saharan Africa, that's right. And, and India. Uh, and that's not something you'd ever think of, because, um, you know, no one's had uh, these sorts of intestinal worms in the US since the 50s, they were eradicated. Uh, so we don't even know about them, whereas everyone can uh, understand the idea of giving a book, it's easily understandable.

• 35:29Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 35:29Speaker 01

  And deworming is also, it's not a very sexy intervention, it's, um, it's kind of gross, it's not the sort of thing you want to think about very much.

• 35:37Rich Roll?

  So, uh, so when do you found Giving What We Can, which was your first nonprofit?

• 35:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was 14th of November, 2009.

• 35:45Rich Roll?

  Right, so you were like 12 years old.

• 35:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, just out of the womb. Uh, I guess I was 22 at that time.

• 35:51Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 35:52Speaker 01

  Uh, and that initially, I mean, it was a small affair, there was 23 people who'd taken the pledge at the time.

• 36:00Speaker 01

  And the first party.

• 36:01Rich Roll?

  Friends?

• 36:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, many of them were my friends, yeah. Um, uh, and I was aggressively going around talking to people.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  And you know, the launch event was like a fairly small gathering.

• 36:14Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 36:15Speaker 01

  But there was an immense amount of attention and interest. We were the most popular news story in the UK and the BBC.

• 36:24Rich Roll?

  How did that happen? Did that just organically occur? Or was there like a tipping point moment that really foisted that on the public consciousness?

• 36:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, we talked to the university press office at Oxford and they just submitted a press release. And people found the story. I mean, this was especially around Toby, the co-founder of his pledge to give everything above £20,000 intensely interesting. And it was like the feel-good news story of the day. And it got on the BBC and then after that point, got a very large amount of media attention from other sources as well around the world, in fact.

• 37:02Speaker 01

  And that meant that Giving What We Can became a bit of a lightening of odds for people who'd had similar ideas but hadn't really acted on them all around the world. And so.

• 37:11Rich Roll?

  Did that predate kind of formalizing this school of thought called effective altruism? Or did these sort of coincide?

• 37:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, it predated it for sure. We came up with the term effective altruism in late 2010 or maybe early 2011, simply because by that point, we'd realized that there was this key idea, combining doing more good and doing it more effectively. And we didn't really have a name. We've used so many different things, smart giving, optimal philanthropy.

• 37:44Rich Roll?

  You didn't think about calling Giving What We Can chugger.com?

• 37:48Speaker 01

  Chugger.com, effective chugging.

• 37:50Rich Roll?

  Yes.

• 37:51Speaker 01

  Thankfully, we didn't. But we had been referring to, you know, people that we would now call effective altruists or members of the effective altruism community. We were calling them super hardcore do-gooders, which is a tongue-in-cheek word, but we definitely needed to move beyond it.

• 38:07Rich Roll?

  So you go from 23 and then what was that growth curve like?

• 38:11Speaker 01

  Approximately doubling every year. So we now have well over 1,000 members.

• 38:15Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  Including some people who've, you know, giving 50%, 90% of their incomes.

• 38:20Rich Roll?

  Wow, 90%.

• 38:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, in some cases.

• 38:23Rich Roll?

  Those must be rich dudes.

• 38:24Speaker 01

  I mean, the person I'm thinking of, he's giving about $100 million, which is about 90%.

• 38:30Rich Roll?

  That's amazing.

• 38:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:31Rich Roll?

  So before we kind of explore that a little bit further, I want to get it. Because I would imagine then with all these people giving pledges, that's what gives birth to this idea of. All right, so how to best allocate this, right? It becomes the next sort of thing that you're gonna have to answer to and explore. But before we get into that, you know, I kinda wanna explore a little bit because you are, philosophy is your background and that's what you've studied.

• 38:55Rich Roll?

  The, the relationship between altruism and happiness, or maybe more aptly put like self-satisfaction, or, or, or, you know, a sense of purpose and contentedness, right? And, you know, we're in a, you know, we're in a culture where that's not particularly reinforced. It's more about, you know, accumulating the most material possessions and creating security and comfort around yourself. That's sort of dictated to us, you know, via Madison Avenue or whatever the television, as being kind of the, the most well-trodden path to being a happy, contented person. And despite the fact that most people intellectually understand that not to be the case, we still propel ourselves forward down that, down that road.

• 39:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's all lies. I think, uh, you know, I think marketing and advertising firms are just continually lying to people about how, how best to be happy. Uh, and now I think the reason for doing good isn't because it'll make yourself happier. I think, uh, you know, the reason to try and help others is because it's the right thing to do. And certainly when I was doing all this-

• 40:02Rich Roll?

  But if you can appeal to people selfish, you know, nature-

• 40:06Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, then it's a benefit.

• 40:07Rich Roll?

  And, and get them to act like does the, and justify the means in that regard. Like, look, do this, you don't have to be altruistic, but this will make you a happier person if you do this. And you get people to buy into that idea, the impact of that is still the same.

• 40:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm perfectly happy with, I mean, I don't, yeah. If people enjoy helping others and they get a lot of satisfaction out of it, I think that's, yeah, they're a great person.

• 40:31Speaker 01

  The sort of person I wanna be around. If someone's doing it solely as a matter of duty, um, then okay, that's a different psychology. But again, the outcome, I'm in favor of that. And actually, it's more and more evidence is accumulating that helping others is a really good way to buy happiness and, um- Buying material goods is a very bad way of buying happiness. And so we looked into this quite a bit and we actually think that giving away even most of your income is probably going to have not very much impact at all on your happiness overall. Because obviously you've got the loss that you can't buy as much stuff for yourself, but the benefits of then being able to, you know, having the reward and satisfaction of helping others.

• 41:13Rich Roll?

  Right, but is that a first world problem? You know what I mean? Like I'm just imagining somebody's listening to this, who's struggling to pay the bills, they have kids and they can barely, you know, make their way, to hear that could be kind of jarring.

• 41:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, so it depends exactly what income you're already on. I mean, I think for, you know, people in the middle class who are in, living in a rich country, then I think pretty much anyone can give 10%. I mean, importantly, basically every member of the, of which countries like the US or UK are in the which is 10% of the world's population. If you earn about $50,000 after tax, you're in the which is 1% of the world's population.

• 41:58Rich Roll?

  Which makes it particularly acute if you're living in the developed Western world in terms of the impact that you can have, because the disparity, the wealth disparity is so severe in comparison to the developing world.

• 42:11Speaker 01

  That's like, that's what does the work is because

• 42:16Speaker 01

  you just have something like 20 times, 40 times as much in- income as the very poorest people in the world. That means a dollar is just worth so much more to them than it is to us. And it means that these very simple sorts of health programs, like distributing bed nets or deworming children just haven't been funded, they're still, you're still able to spend money in that way. And yeah, in my book, I talk about this is a hundredfold multiplier, where we have these good theoretical reasons. And then it's backed up by the data for thinking that you can benefit people in the poorest countries 100 times as much as you can benefit yourself by spending money on yourself.

• 43:01Speaker 01

  And the analogy I give is like, imagine if you could buy a beer for yourself was $5 or you could buy it for someone else for 5 cents, you know, you'd say next round's on me, like, we'd find ourselves being very generous and that's the situation within all the time.

• 43:16Rich Roll?

  The problem, though, is that it's not in our consciousness, right? It's just, you know, uh, you know, it's, we're not aware, we don't really think about it because it's so far away and we feel it doesn't impact our lives.

• 43:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:29Rich Roll?

  That's the hurdle, right?

• 43:31Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, that's definitely a big hurdle. And when it does, it feels alien, it feels other. I think often the presentation has been, um, very bad of just, you know, pot-bellied children starving with, you know, flies in their faces and, uh,

• 43:51Rich Roll?

  We just glaze over.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  And you, of course, you glaze over, you feel, um, put off, you feel like you're being emotionally manipulated. Far better to convey, you know, in Sub-Saharan Africa, there's incredibly rich vibrant cultures with people who are just actually, you know, they are pretty happy like a lot of the time, but then get sick in ways that could be, you know, they're people that you could be, would be very close friends with if you happen to know them.

• 44:14Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 44:14Speaker 01

  Um, if you happen to live there.

• 44:16Rich Roll?

  And illnesses that could be easily treated or averted through some pretty basic, simple actions.

• 44:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 44:22Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 44:22Speaker 01

  Um, and it's not like this, you need this deep emotional, um, uh, appeal. It's just almost common sense that.

• 44:31Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 44:31Speaker 01

  Should be funding something.

• 44:32Rich Roll?

  Well, I want to take a little bit of a left turn here.

• 44:34Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 44:34Rich Roll?

  Cause it just, you, you brought up something that I've been thinking a lot about, which is, uh, this advent of conscious capitalism.

• 44:43Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 44:43Rich Roll?

  It has sort of become a zeitgeist-y kind of thing in our culture. Right? Everything from like Tom Shoes to Warby Parker, like all of these companies are realizing that the best way of doing business is to allocate a portion of their revenue towards a charitable cause.

• 45:00Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 45:00Rich Roll?

  And, and in looking at that, like, I'm interested in parsing out, like, what aspect of that is truly effective in terms of outcomes, which is what you're interested in, versus marketing hype, right? Because it's good business to make people feel good about buying your product.

• 45:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:17Rich Roll?

  And I had, um, I interviewed Daniel Pinchback for the podcast last winter. I don't know if you know who he is, but he spends a lot of time thinking about these kinds of things. And he was like, I think it's BS. I think it's BS. It's marketing.

• 45:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:30Rich Roll?

  Spin. And that's not to say that, you know, if that money ends up in a good place and does some good for some people, that's fine. But what it does is it makes people feel good about buying this product, creates, creates brand loyalty.

• 45:43Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 45:44Rich Roll?

  Right? And I'm wondering whether you think that that then prevents people from exercising that altruism in a more effective way. Cause they say, well, I buy Tom's shoes.

• 45:53Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Yeah.

• 45:54Rich Roll?

  So I don't need to give to this charity because I'm see my shoes.

• 45:58Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 45:58Rich Roll?

  Like that, that I was able to donate shoes to somebody else. And, and, you know, what truly is the impact of that? Is that making a positive difference?

• 46:06Speaker 01

  Okay, terrific. Yeah. So I feel deeply.

• 46:08Rich Roll?

  And I'm not, I'm not bashing Tom's shoes. Like I, I like, you know, I like that company. I'm, I just, it was the first thing that came to mind.

• 46:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. Uh, although Tom's shoes is a good example. There have been studies of the program and,

• 46:20Speaker 01

  kids like the shoes, but it doesn't make much of a difference in terms of education outcomes or any other outcomes you can.

• 46:26Rich Roll?

  Thought it put shoes on their feet.

• 46:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:27Rich Roll?

  Is that, I mean, that's not a bad thing. I mean.

• 46:29Speaker 01

  It's not a bad thing, but you could do better things. I mean, in the initial story where the founders saw these children and oh, they didn't even have shoes. They just, they didn't like wearing shoes. That's why they weren't wearing shoes. Uh, so there's.

• 46:43Rich Roll?

  You're gonna get in trouble now.

• 46:44Speaker 01

  I might get into trouble. But, um, so I kind of feel ambivalent and one of the, I think that really could work, but then it seems to be often misimplemented. I think, I agree that very large swathes of this are BS, especially within corporate social responsibility. The reason behind it is marketing and PR, not an honest desire to do good. And then I'm really pleased you mentioned, so what psychologists call a model licensing effect, where you doing one good deed, especially if it's a very public good deed. So we're being able to wear a pair of shoes or something else that really shows off that you've done this good thing. Depending on the attitude with which you're going into this act, it can make you do fewer good deeds elsewhere.

• 47:29Rich Roll?

  That presupposes that you have a finite amount of altruism that you're willing to expend.

• 47:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you can imagine two different reasons why people might want to do an altruistic act. One is like this honest, deep commitment to wanting to do good. And some people have that attitude, I believe. Another, though, is just you want to not get criticized. You want to show yourself to be a good person, so no one's going to judge you. And if you're doing that, then if you can do something very salient, that very clearly demonstrates you're this good person, then you don't need to do other things as much.

• 48:01Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 48:03Speaker 01

  And so in that way, it could even be getting people to very publicly do a small good thing can in fact be harmful, risks being harmful. I talked about this a little bit with the ice bucket.

• 48:13Rich Roll?

  I would think psychologically, yeah, I want to ask you about that. But I think, but what about the idea that if you do something good, it makes you feel good, and then you want to do more good? Like, isn't that the counterpoint to that?

• 48:25Speaker 01

  So, yeah, that's the counterpoint, and that can happen as well. So in the literature, there's just mixed, you can get both effects. And I think depends on how is this being presented? And what's the attitude that someone is coming in? So are they thinking, oh, I'm doing my bit? Which I think is a very toxic phrase. If so, then you're going to get the model licensing effect. If instead it's conceived of like, okay, well, this is your first step in a path to making this thing really core part of your identity. And there's perhaps follow up.

• 48:54Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right. Interesting. I mean, extrapolating on this model licensing idea, there's a very interesting kind of analogous

• 49:04Rich Roll?

  idea in the kind of animal rights vegan world right now. There's a guy called Gary Francione, who's a professor of law at Rutgers. And he's always butting heads with Pete Singer. Because Pete Singer is somebody who kind of would say that incremental change is good, right? And Gary's taking a very kind of adamant, hardline approach. Like, you either are or you are not. Like, you're either an animal, right? You're either vegan or you're not. You can't like have it both ways. And he uses this interesting example that's kind of apropos to what we're talking about. In that we're in this period now where where it's suddenly very popular to eat grass fed meat, right? And like sustainably raised, quote unquote, ethically harvested.

• 49:47Rich Roll?

  And the impact of this, according to Gary, is negative in the sense that it's basically making people feel better about making, you know, in his mind, an inhumane choice. So it's reinforcing the meat eater's habit. As opposed, so like when you see these posters in Whole Foods where you see the farmers and everyone looks happy and the cows look happy, then when you go and buy your burger, you don't feel that guilt that maybe you would feel otherwise. So it's actually entrenching the behavior that, you know, he would like to see overcome. You know what I mean? Like, there's a sim- there's something similar about that, I think.

• 50:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I mean, again, on that issue in particular, it's something I feel ambivalent about. And I think ultimately, I'd, I'm happy on the, you know, I'd endorse the incremental view, at least if it's properly applied, because just because I think the vast majority of animal suffering occurs on, by, is suffered by chickens on factory farms. Just if you could run through the numbers and you look at the conditions of different animals. So maybe I think that like, uh...

• 50:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah, no, I hear, I hear what you're saying. We gotta get you off the dairy, though.

• 50:56Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 50:57Rich Roll?

  We'll talk about that later.

• 50:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm perfectly happy to have a discussion about that. But then, yeah, this is the same thing with giving to charity as well. You know, perhaps people should be taking the hardline approach. I think in our own experience, you know, so Peter Singer was making these arguments that were very hardline, saying, you know, if you're looking at the morality of the situation, you should give everything until you are...

• 51:29Speaker 01

  You know, you know, living the sa- living on the same level of income as the people you're trying to help. You should basically be giving away all of your income.

• 51:35Rich Roll?

  And does he walk that walk himself?

• 51:37Speaker 01

  Uh, he gives about thirty five, forty percent of his income. Um, which was very significant, given, uh, you know, he was the only person doing this. He was kind of lone ranger at the time. And now, you know, me and Toby and others like to see ourselves as kind of outdoing him. Uh, the next innovation.

• 51:55Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 51:55Speaker 01

  Um, but interestingly, not that many people seem to act on it. The uptick really came when people really acting in these arguments in two thousand and nine with me and Toby. And then everything, and then the others in giving what we can saying, presenting it in this different way.

• 52:09Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 52:10Speaker 01

  Saying, okay, well, and I honestly believe this, even if it weren't a moral obligation. It's still this amazing opportunity, like it's just part of your own values, like think about what it means to live a good life. You have these opportunities to, you know, be the person who like runs into a burning building and saves a child's life.

• 52:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah, truly aligning your actions with your value system.

• 52:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 52:30Rich Roll?

  Like having that co- co- you know, coherence is really kind of a beautiful thing.

• 52:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. And that's the kind of primary message we put forward because that's true whether or not you believe it's a moral obligation. And it's something that gets people a lot more excited.

• 52:46Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 52:47Speaker 01

  And I feel like actually the same thing happens with vegetarianism and veganism. You know, there's a very large uptake in people becoming vegetarian or vegan on health grounds. And within the animal welfare community, there's debate about that because, you know, they think maybe people are doing the right thing, but for the wrong reasons.

• 53:05Rich Roll?

  Right, yeah, how important is motivation?

• 53:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I ultimately think that normally people's beliefs follow their behavior. So I think if you can get people acting the right way, then they'll start to believe the right things as well.

• 53:17Rich Roll?

  Well, yeah, I mean, that's been my exam- that's been my experience. I mean, had you, you know, I've been hearing animal rights activists talk my whole life and it had zero impact on me. And then I had a, you know, a personal situation that compelled me to entertain it in a health context. I embrace that. It was positive in my life and then it's evolved. So now I'm much more interested in the environmental implications and the ethical implications of these choices that we make. And, you know, it's my version of what you're doing in the sense that I have aligned my, my choices in this regard with my value system. And that it's a, it's a good feeling, right? Um, but I think in terms of trying to.

• 53:58Rich Roll?

  You know, my responsibility as a spokesperson for this, in the same way that you're a spokesperson for your cause is how do you effectively communicate people in order to effectuate the change that you're looking for, right? And there's different strategies for that. You know, some people will hammer people over the head, or moralize, or judge. And you know, my approach has always been to create, you know, a very, you know, a welcome mat for people where they feel comfortable asking the right questions and, you know, allowing people to have that incremental change because for me, it didn't happen overnight. And I think for most people, it doesn't. And for the people that say they got hit with a lightning bolt and they changed overnight, I think for certainly, I'm sure

• 54:40Rich Roll?

  there's people out there that that happened to, but I think, you know, for by and large for most people, it's a gradual evolution and you have to give people space to grow into that.

• 54:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. And you can, yeah, and this is why I think, you know, people like you are great role models for this because a lot of the reasons why people might think, oh, I'm not going to become vegetarian or vegan is, oh, well, what will happen to my health or my fitness? Or, oh, I'm going to become, you know, have a negative stereotype of what that involves. And so if there are people who are like, yeah, I'm running ultra marathon, you know, at the peak performance and being vegan as well.

• 55:14Rich Roll?

  Right. And you're saying I'm giving away most of my money and I'm actually happy and I'm productive and I'm doing all these interesting things and I feel good about what I do and I'm impacting other people.

• 55:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, my life has gone far better after taking that pledge than it would have otherwise been. I'd have been, I'd still be, I'd be sitting in a library.

• 55:34Rich Roll?

  There has to have been some challenges though, like, I'd really like to get that thing. But like, what's been the hardest part?

• 55:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I think on the money side of things.

• 55:49Speaker 01

  Actually, very little. I mean, I just, there's, you know, I've never moved because I was a student, then a grad student, so I never had, I never moved downward. I've never got used to a higher level of earnings. Um, maybe the harder thing was like, like the amount of time, you know, because I'm trying to spend my time as well as possible. And that means just working very hard, um, uh, on my research on the nonprofits I co-founded as well. Um, and maybe I could have taken a few more weekends over the last five, six years, but.

• 56:20Rich Roll?

  All right. So let's get into the, the calculus that you've kind of developed to evaluate,

• 56:29Rich Roll?

  you know, the charitable options that are available. Like, what are the qualifications in your mind when you look at these organizations in terms of trying to come up with, you know, the best, most effective channel for your funds or for somebody's funds out there who's listening?

• 56:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I think the three key questions when thinking about charitable giving. Uh, the first is the program that the charity works on. The second is how well executed,

• 56:57Speaker 01

  uh, the charity implements the program. And then third is just whether it can actually usefully use more money. Um, and the first one is almost always neglected. Uh, people think, oh, you just can't compare across different programs, but that's not really true. Economists have been using tools to be able to do that, like the quality adjusted life year that I mentioned before, that's cashing out the different programs in terms of by how much they're improving people's lives. Um, and so there's a large body of, you know, of academic research that can help you answer that question. And because,

• 57:31Speaker 01

  and at least in terms of, you know, benefiting present day humans, uh, focusing your energy, like focusing your resources on especially areas in global health to benefit the very poorest people tend to be the best ways of doing that.

• 57:53Rich Roll?

  I think the conventional, you know, sort of average person looks at this and, and they say, well, you know, how much overhead is there? You know, like, oh, all this money's going to overhead. I don't want to support that. And you have kind of an interesting, very logical perspective on that.

• 58:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I think this is just a junk metric. I think it's just so, uh, like, it's very confused and I'm annoyed it's been so widely promoted because if you've got a lousy charity, it's going to stay a lousy charity, even if you've got 0% overhead. And so the US Golf Association is a charity, but is that going to do as much good as giving to bed nets? Clearly not, even if it had 0% overhead. And as an analogy, think about if you're buying a product for yourself, you're looking to buy a Mac or a Dell laptop. What, you know, would you look at how much the CEOs are paid? Would you look at how much money is spent on overhead and/or administration versus actual design and building of the products? No. You just look at how much does these two products cost?

• 58:53Speaker 01

  And how good is the product? And we should think in just the same way for charities. With a certain amount of money that you're giving to the charity, what's the outcome that this charity's producing? If it needs to spend more than overhead to produce a better outcome, then that's great. We should be praising it for doing that.

• 59:09Rich Roll?

  Right. Maybe, uh, you know, maybe, uh, paying a CEO quite a bit of money, like a really good CEO, can come in and effectuate the most good would be a prudent business decision.

• 59:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 59:21Rich Roll?

  It's almost, uh, it's kind of a selfish emotional thing because we want, as a giver, we want to feel connected to the money that we're donating, right? So when you, when it's going towards overhead or rent, we don't feel like our contribution is actually getting to the person who needs it, right? But on some level, that's sort of selfish. Like, we want to, we want to like see the, you know, the hand of the, that's eating the food. You know what I mean? Like, even if in the, in the meta sense, it's effectuating the most change, it's not giving us that, that warm fuzzy feeling, right?

• 59:56Speaker 01

  And I think there's a kind of pure, technical element as well, a little bit, which is that, you know, NGO workers should be not taking salaries or taking very low salaries, even if that's counterproductive.

• 1:00:08Rich Roll?

  Because they're in this world and it's all about

• 1:00:10Speaker 01

  It's all about, yeah.

• 1:00:11Rich Roll?

  giving back. So how dare you?

• 1:00:13Speaker 01

  That's right. But then if it's counterproductive, then why do we think this?

• 1:00:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah. But I think, you know, in contrast to that, we are in a time now where especially young people are demanding more and more transparency in the for-profit sector and in the nonprofit sector. And you see this in the nonprofit sector in the sense that, you know, these organizations are creating that transparency, like Track Your Dollar, and you could see exactly where it goes and duh, duh, duh, duh, duh. And I think that that's a, you know, that's a good thing. You know, that's better than not having that.

• 1:00:42Speaker 01

  Oh, yes. I think transparency is terrific. And that kind of relates to the second question is how well is the organization implementing one of these programs? And in particular,

• 1:00:55Speaker 01

  is it being honest with respect to the mistakes it's making? So one of the charities that I think does the most good is GiveDirectly. And it's a very simple program, just transfers cash directly to some of the poorest people in the world living in Kenya. And one, they're a most exceptionally transparent organization. They even have update charts that update weekly on what proportion of households had to pay a bribe in order to receive the transfer.

• 1:01:25Rich Roll?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  And the answer is like, kind of two or three percent. And almost no charity would ever do that, because all charities always have to pretend that everything's perfect all the time. That's never true. Zero times. And so a charity that's very honest about the obstacles it's facing, that's a very good sign, in fact. When Oxfam published a whole bunch of studies they'd taken, showing that many of their programs actually weren't having an impact, I thought more of Oxfam, not less.

• 1:01:57Speaker 01

  And so, yeah, this sort of very great transparency is a very good sign. Also, just whether is the organization, you know, being led by really good people. Does it, is it doing monitoring and evaluation or even kind of trials of its own, of its own programs?

• 1:02:15Rich Roll?

  And how much does it need your money, right? Like, like I'm thinking about what happened with the Red Cross and Katrina.

• 1:02:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:22Rich Roll?

  Where there were massive amounts of cash, you know, getting poured out and, and it not getting, you know, allocated. It's probably the most famous example of.

• 1:02:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yes, that's exactly.

• 1:02:30Rich Roll?

  Misallocation.

• 1:02:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that's the final question is about what I call room for more funding, which is even if a charity is doing terrific work and has done in the past, you don't know that addition, doesn't necessarily follow additional donations are going to be as well used. So an example of this is a polio immunization vaccination. An incredibly effective program should, you know, definitely put money towards it, except that it's already fully funded by the Gates Foundation. Additional money going to that just isn't actually going to have much of a difference. And the same is often to do with disaster relief. Because it's so well-publicized, disaster, natural disasters get a huge amount more funding

• 1:03:15Speaker 01

  than what I'd call ongoing natural disasters like deaths from malaria, tuberculosis, where I think you can have a much larger impact.

• 1:03:26Rich Roll?

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

• 1:03:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, then I think the best thing to do is to go on to the website of an organization that I didn't found, but I support very strongly called GiveWell. So it's givewell.org and, you know, they've done the hard work of doing extraordinarily in-depth research to work out what are these charities that do the very most good.

• 1:04:04Rich Roll?

  Right, and they kind of started, these guys started kind of with a similar premise as you, right? Like, they were like, but they were like investment bankers trying to figure out like, all right, where, they wanted to make this pledge, but they couldn't figure out where it should best go.

• 1:04:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. They were working for the hedge fund Bridgewater and they were giving some of their money and thinking, well, I want to take this like any other purchasing decision. I want to get my biggest bang for buck. And they started trying to talk to charities and just finding they can get even what they thought of as the very most basic information, just what will my money actually do? Do you have any evidence behind this program? Why are you choosing this and anything else? In fact, one charity that the now CEO Holden Konofsky spoke with was so confused by this that they phoned Bridgewater to try and get him fired because they thought that he must be a spy for a different charity.

• 1:04:54Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:04:54Speaker 01

  And that could be the only motivation he'd have asking questions.

• 1:04:57Rich Roll?

  Do some of the charities try to lobby to get on these lists? I mean, I would imagine it's impactful for their bottom line, right?

• 1:05:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, we get, so Giving What We Can has recommended charities as well that often relies very heavily on GiveWell's research, but sometimes differs. And yeah, we get a ton of people contacting us, you know, trying to make the case.

• 1:05:18Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:05:19Speaker 01

  I mean, it's never, you know, we just have our own independent research and aren't affected by that.

• 1:05:23Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:05:24Speaker 01

  Because, yeah, I mean, it's a matter of millions of dollars going to these charities.

• 1:05:28Rich Roll?

  Right. And in kind of running this calculus, I mean, you're, you know, there's only, I would imagine, so much scientific method. Like, you're taking philosophical precepts, you're trying to apply logic and math to try to come up with the best options for people. But isn't it more complicated? I mean, we have psychology that plays into this. And then there's certain intangibles, right? Like, what about investing in new technologies where you don't know what's going to happen with that? And what about, you know, political forces that are intervening that you have no control over that could, you know, prevent certain things from happening? Like,

• 1:06:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:07Rich Roll?

  You know, how do you approach that or wrap your head around that?

• 1:06:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. So so far, we've just talked about these kind of more easily quantifiable programs that have short-term effects, like distributing bed nets with the Gensmore Foundation, deworming children.

• 1:06:22Rich Roll?

  That are all kind of falling to this 100X.

• 1:06:24Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:06:25Rich Roll?

  Idea that you have.

• 1:06:27Speaker 01

  But by no means do I think they're definitely the best uses of money, because you could do things that are maybe trying to make big systemic change. And GiveWell are now looking into that in conjunction with a foundation called Good Ventures. These much kind of more Uncertain but potentially higher payoff sorts of activities like, you know, policy change, immigration reform, potentially better pay deals, innovation as well.

• 1:06:52Rich Roll?

  Biotech.

• 1:06:53Speaker 01

  Biotech, yeah, exactly, biomedical research. And so even that first thing, just deciding whether you should fund bed nets rather than direct cash transfers, involves a lot of judgment calls.

• 1:07:04Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:07:05Speaker 01

  It's definitely not a hard science like.

• 1:07:06Rich Roll?

  Right, so if you're sitting on $10,000 and you can say, "Well, I could donate this to an organization that has a 1% chance of saving the lives of a million people."

• 1:07:17Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:07:17Rich Roll?

  Or I could donate this money to an organization that has a 100% chance of saving the lives of 10 people.

• 1:07:24Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:07:25Rich Roll?

  So philosophically, this is a bit of a moral dilemma, right?

• 1:07:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, philosoph- so, and I talk about this in Doing Good Better, and it's the idea of expected value. And so I'm pleased you took, put numbers out there because then I can say, "Well, I think the way you should, you should assess decisions like this is to look at the probability of success and how good success would be, and then you multiply it all together." So you said 1% chance of a million lives. That's an expected 10,000 lives, 1% times a million. And then you said versus a guarantee of 10 lives. Well, that's way less than 10,000.

• 1:08:04Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:08:04Speaker 01

  And so I think the way, the best way to make decisions in light of uncertainty like this is to look at the probability, multiply it by the value of the success, and then go with what, you know, decision scientists call the expected value.

• 1:08:18Rich Roll?

  Right, right.

• 1:08:19Speaker 01

  And that would mean in this case, we actually, I think there would be a kind of better answer, which is to go with that 1% chance of saving a million lives.

• 1:08:27Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm, interesting. And in the research that you've done, I mean, you've kind of come up with pretty concrete numbers of the actual dollar amount that it would take to save a life or support a life.

• 1:08:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, so our best guess at the moment is...

• 1:08:42Speaker 01

  A donation of three and a half thousand dollars to the Against Malaria Foundation will save a life statistically.

• 1:08:48Rich Roll?

  And when you say save a life like that, that's sort of an amorphous term too, right? Like, what are we talking about?

• 1:08:53Speaker 01

  So what we're talking about is three and a half thousand dollars will put 600 bed nets over the heads of 1,200 children for two years. One of those children, under five, would have died of malaria had you not done that. So that's precisely what we're talking about.

• 1:09:12Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:09:13Speaker 01

  And sometimes people hear that and they're like, "Oh, I thought it cost five dollars to save a life." And that's a shame, that's because charities often give these very optimistic numbers. But I think, deep down, people often don't believe them. Whereas this is just actually our kind of best guess, even taking into account all sorts of different uncertainties.

• 1:09:29Rich Roll?

  Interesting. All right, so we've kind of explored the first metric of effective altruism, which is allocation of financial resources. But now we have time, right? So how do we approach this and figure out how to best allocate this resource?

• 1:09:46Speaker 01

  Great.

• 1:09:47Rich Roll?

  For the most good.

• 1:09:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. So this, in the story of how I was coming to these ideas, when I'm moving from 2009 to 2011, and precisely I'd been promoting this idea of cost-effective giving to charity. I had all these students coming to me and saying, "Okay, well, that's all great, but I've got this really big decision coming up, which is, what the hell should I do with my career?" And they would ask me, "Should I just go and get rich and give it all away? Should I work for a nonprofit? What should I do?" And I was having to face this decision as well. Should I stay as an academic? Should I, you know, go and do something completely different?

• 1:10:26Rich Roll?

  This is applied philosophy. This is your opportunity to apply your philosophy.

• 1:10:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And in particular, one of these people who came to me and pressed quite forcefully was Ben Todd. He had the options of doing a PhD in climate physics, or he could go into asset management, where he could donate a lot. And we gave what was intended to be a discussion group, turned into a lecture, which turned into a series of lectures, because in that first lecture, I think a third of the audience changed their career plans as a result of the talk. And then we thought, okay, this is a sufficiently important set of concepts that are completely lacking in the world. Like, if a young person wants to make a difference in their lives using their time... Using their career, they have nowhere to go for the advice. Their career service will

• 1:11:11Speaker 01

  just give them some mediocre tips on how to make a nice resume. And then other, the few online sites like Ethical Careers will just say, oh, work in the nonprofits. They don't even think about other options. And so we've set up an organization called eighty thousand hours, which is the number of hours you typically work in the course of your life, where the idea is, you know, it's a big deal. It's worth, in general, when you make a decision, you might want to spend one percent of that time working out how to best spend the other ninety-nine percent. You'd think, right? Yeah, you'd think so, but not that many people would spend, you know, eight hundred hours, twenty working weeks, you know, just sitting down thinking, okay, what am I going to do with my life? Right.

• 1:11:57Speaker 01

  And, yeah, so we know, so it's really hard to figure out what charities are the best. It's even harder to figure out what career paths are the best. And obviously, it's going to be a lot more relative to the person. But we think there's a lot of progress that can be made, at least relative to the status quo. So the standard advice of if you want to do good work for the charity, we think is badly wrong in a few ways. So one is just that many charities have no impact when tested. Something like seventy-five percent of social programs just don't make a difference at all. Second is that, obviously, there's loads of good ways to do good outside of the nonprofit sector, through policy, politics,

• 1:12:38Speaker 01

  research, entrepreneurship, and just, you know, the activities of for-profit companies as well, at least depending on the company. So it's, again, a very narrow approach. But then the third thing we think is just, this is also neglecting what we think of as the best path to really making a big difference, which is early on in your career, where you just don't have many skills. Maybe you've come out of a good university, but you studied philosophy. It doesn't have that much of the kind of real-world application. You should really be thinking about leveling up. You should be thinking about making yourself better as a person, being more skilled, in order to have a big impact later on. And that might well mean working in a for-profit company.

• 1:13:19Speaker 01

  Or trying to work in some very elite environment and before then perhaps working for nonprofits. And then the very final mistake, I think, is that only thinks about the impact you can have through your labor, rather than through your ability to advocate. So like Martin Luther King didn't work for the charity.

• 1:13:34Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:13:34Speaker 01

  He was a minister who's then able to advocate for important, this incredibly important cause. Or your ability to donate as well. So again, Bill Gates didn't work for the nonprofit, has done a huge amount of good. I estimate he saved more lives than everyone in my home country of Scotland.

• 1:13:52Speaker 01

  And, you know, that was through his ability to donate. And there's sort of several paths to doing good and where to kind of work out, yeah, for each person, what's the one that's going to have the very biggest impact.

• 1:14:01Rich Roll?

  Well, just the simple fact that you're drawing attention to it and mindfulness around these ideas at the outset of a young person's career is potent and powerful in its own right. You know what I mean? Like, it's just the fact that it's part of the discussion, part of the, you know, the mental decision-making process of entering your career. But I would imagine, you know, it gets further complicated. You know, we're living in more and more of an independent contractor world. It's not the, it's not the, you know, the world of you get a career and that's where you stay your whole life. It's like people are having multiple careers and doing many, many different things. So, you know, many careers along the way. And, and so I'm just thinking like, how do you, I mean, in terms of like providing a service through 80,000 hours,

• 1:14:43Rich Roll?

  like you've got to come up with some kind of algorithm, right, to, to provide these options for people to explore. I would imagine that's, that's the heavy lifting of, of what you're trying to do.

• 1:14:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I think that's exactly right. And I think a big mistake a lot of people make is thinking of career choice as this all one-ulting decision.

• 1:15:02Speaker 01

  Something you make when you're 22 and then you have to stick with the rest of your life. Whereas really, we think you should have. A kind of career model. So you should think of yourself like an experimental scientist or investigative journalist or something. You have a hypothesis about what would make for the good, what is the right career for you. Then you go and test it. And that's like a decision made over like a year or two. And then if it doesn't work, you can go and do something else. And so the careers we often recommend are those that give you a very large base of options from which to go on to other things. And again, that's often a reason for not working in nonprofits. It's hard to move nonprofits to other fields. Whereas if you get like an economics PhD, that opens up a lot of doors. If you're working

• 1:15:47Speaker 01

  in something like management consulting, or if you learn to code, again, you're just opening up a lot of doors. And so we encourage people at least to begin with to work in these things.

• 1:15:56Rich Roll?

  Base skill sets that could be applicable in unforeseen ways later.

• 1:15:59Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:16:00Rich Roll?

  Implicit in all of this is, you know, quite a bit of optimism, right? Like, you're very, you must be a very optimistic guy to be even tackling this problem to begin with. So how do you like sort of communicate with people who are coming from a different perspective? I mean, I feel like, you know, the mass of culture feels very disenfranchised. I feel like their vote doesn't count. What's the point? I'm just gonna watch Dancing with the Stars and eat my bag of Cheetos and try to buy the best, biggest screen TV that I can. And I'm gonna, you know, go golfing on the weekend and call it a life, right? Like, I don't, they don't feel like their actions can have an impact.

• 1:16:42Speaker 01

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

• 1:17:24Speaker 01

  again, coming back to charitable spending, if you spend your money in the right way, then just 10% can save hundreds of lives over the course of your life. That's absolutely huge. And people say, oh, it's just a drop in the bucket. But that's, you know, not really relevant. It's the size of the drop that matters, not the size of the bucket.

• 1:17:40Rich Roll?

  If you actually pull 10 people out, you know, out of the ocean who are drowning, that would change your life forever.

• 1:17:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. It would stay with you.

• 1:17:47Rich Roll?

  But we don't feel emotionally connected to it, so it's not the same experience, but the but the outcome is the same.

• 1:17:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:17:54Rich Roll?

  So I think in part of your, in the way that you communicate or try to like, you know, sort of compel this change, there has to be a way to psychologically like, you know, create that bridge, right? Because the psychology is the big part, right? It's like catalyzing the act. Like intellectually, you know, it makes perfect sense. It's logical. The philosophical basis for it is sound. The impact is measurable, right? But there is the psychological barrier to taking the action.

• 1:18:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think that's exactly right. And that's why kind of one of the things we've done is built this community, the Effects of Altruism community, which is just a community of thousands of people around the world who are just really excited about doing good and doing it effectively as well. And that allows you to get this kind of positive reinforcement. Because if you do start making like, you know, changes in your life that are going to do more good for the world, you've got a whole bunch of people around you going at, yeah, that's amazing. And that's, you know, then suddenly your peers are just kind of awarding you, being very positive about those sorts of actions. And that's not tying yourself to the

• 1:19:08Speaker 01

  The beneficiaries of your actions ultimately, you're not being connected with the children you're deworming. But I've actually found psychology is psychologically, it's just very powerful as well. Like, I do find when I get up, you know, when I get up in the morning and I'm feeling psyched about my work, or when I'm feeling like most awarded by the work I'm doing, it's mainly through, you know, inspiring people to do more good and just how excited they get by that. Rather than, you know, the people on the other side of the world that I'm, you know, not as connected to.

• 1:19:42Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right. Yeah, that's interesting.

• 1:19:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think that's again been the, you know, part of the reason for the uptake of these ideas is that now there's, you know, it's a community, it's a group of people who are all together saying, look, we're gonna realize in a certain way.

• 1:19:56Rich Roll?

  Well, that's the advocacy aspect of what you're doing though, right?

• 1:19:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:59Rich Roll?

  It's not like your money is going to deworming, that's one aspect of it, but the advocacy and actually catalyzing change in the people that you're impacting, you know, perhaps on a one by one basis, or by virtue of the talks that you're giving, there's a real sense of accomplishment there, like that's making a difference. You know, it's like you have some resources going to Africa and the other resources are pushing out in the other direction in a different way, through the kind of energy that you're putting out there.

• 1:20:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, ultimately, I'm hoping for that wide scale societal shift where people think very differently about, you know, giving to charities, not just this nice thing to do, but, you know, altruism or attempting to help others just isn't, you know, I want people to think of that as an obvious part of like, significant part of just what it means to live a good life.

• 1:20:47Rich Roll?

  Well, you have to make it cool.

• 1:20:49Speaker 01

  Have to make it cool.

• 1:20:50Rich Roll?

  Cool to be altruistic. I mean, that's the truth. You know what I mean? It's like, you have to make, like I have, like I have, I feel an obligation to make being vegan cool. Because people, you're not gonna like.

• 1:21:00Speaker 01

  Pulling it off so well.

• 1:21:01Rich Roll?

  Well, yeah, but it's like, you're not gonna get, it's like, you're not gonna get people to eat this food if it doesn't taste good. Like, it's gotta actually taste better than what they're eating. You know what I mean? That's how you catalyze change. That's how you attract it. So, I feel like you're, you know, like you're this millennial, you know what I mean, who has a very powerful message. And it's attractive because you have great energy and you're optimistic and, and people wanna, they wanna be like you, you know? It's cool. It's cool to be altruistic. And the more that you can kind of infuse the message with, with that, you know, I feel like that's a really powerful route.

• 1:21:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, you know, and that's the kind of message we want to convey again emphasizing just this is an awesome opportunity. It's actually a really amazing way to live your life. It's a way where you're not going to find yourself in middle age, just you're thinking, well, you know, yeah, but unless I've made a ton of money, but what does it all mean? You know, you wouldn't think, oh, well, you know, I saved 10,000 lives, but like, what was the point? It doesn't really make sense.

• 1:22:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah. What about, I mean, do you account for personal development? Like, you know, the Buddha would say that the best way to improve the world is to improve yourself. You know what I mean? Like, you can't help others until you help yourself. So, for example, you know, time spent on self-help, or meditation, or mindfulness practices, or the time that I spend each day when I get up and I go running, or I go to the pool, would seemingly not kind of be applicable to this calculus of giving back. But I feel like it's absolutely

• 1:22:41Rich Roll?

  crucial to me in order to be the best version of who I am, so that I am available for the rest of it.

• 1:22:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I think that's totally right. I mean, if you're trying to do a lot of good, then improving your ability to do that is incredibly important. I mean, at the extreme, if you're, you know, reckless and get hit by a car or something, because you're not crossing the road, and not wearing your seatbelt, and killed in a car crash, all the good you do in the course of your life is gone.

• 1:23:09Rich Roll?

  It's not going to matter, right.

• 1:23:10Speaker 01

  And so I think, you know, the time I spend at the gym, or any time I'm spending meditating, you know, that's the most effective use of the time in the day, because that enhances everything else. And, yeah, that's why there's often quite a bit of overlap or interest from the effective altruism community, also in the kind of productivity, personal development, life hacking, rationality, communities as well, because, you know, we've got this aim, just to help others as much as possible. Part of that means leveling yourself up, means being a better person. And actually, I found that

• 1:23:45Speaker 01

  You know, one of the surprising ways I wouldn't have anticipated that this has benefited myself is that now you've got this big reason to actually like get out of bed and go to the gym.

• 1:23:55Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:23:56Speaker 01

  It's because you're not just benefit, it's not just so that you can yourself have a better life, but it's actually because um.

• 1:24:01Rich Roll?

  You're infused with, yeah, you're infused with a sense of purpose.

• 1:24:05Speaker 01

  That's right, yeah.

• 1:24:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and there's nothing more powerful than that.

• 1:24:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:09Rich Roll?

  Really. All right, let's talk a little bit about some of the controversy swirling around some of your ideas.

• 1:24:14Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:24:15Rich Roll?

  Not a fan of the ice bucket challenge.

• 1:24:16Speaker 01

  So.

• 1:24:17Rich Roll?

  I got you into a little trouble.

• 1:24:19Speaker 01

  It got me into trouble, yeah.

• 1:24:21Rich Roll?

  Um, let's break that down.

• 1:24:22Speaker 01

  I didn't, uh, so that was unexpected. I wrote that article quite quickly.

• 1:24:26Rich Roll?

  Oh, come on. Everybody loved the ice bucket challenge. Why be a hater?

• 1:24:31Speaker 01

  And then I was, I wrote this grumpy article about it. So I wanted. Yeah, I was making a couple of points. So one, as we've talked about, was this ethical licensing. The worry that the ice bucket challenge was the most extreme like this, where it's very public, you know, you're pouring a bucket of ice over your head, so very salient action, going out to all of your Facebook friends, so you can really demonstrate how altruistic you are. And then donating, I think what ended up being on average relatively small amounts of money, like tens of dollars or something. I think it was meant to be a hundred dollars, but people would often donate less.

• 1:25:13Rich Roll?

  Right. I mean, in the aggregate, what did they raise, like three million?

• 1:25:16Speaker 01

  No, in the aggregate, they raised a hundred million.

• 1:25:18Rich Roll?

  Oh, a hundred million.

• 1:25:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:20Rich Roll?

  Now you're really a hater.

• 1:25:21Speaker 01

  Well, so that will come to the second point is then just, so that was the first thing, is you've got to, you've got to think of that hundred million, how much would have been donated to other charities? What are the other kind of effects? And all I wanted to say is just, well, we need to think before we're kind of lavishing praise on this. Phenomenon, we need to have an assessment of that and an estimate.

• 1:25:41Rich Roll?

  Right, let's dissect it and figure out exactly what happened.

• 1:25:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right, because it's just, it's not obvious that it's net positive. I mean, we always say, oh, it's 100 million raised for charity, but it's 100 million raised and how much taken from other charities. So, I mean, the amount of funding that goes to charities or percentage that Americans spend on charitable giving is pretty constant over time, which suggests that additional fundraising efforts are maybe just eating away at others.

• 1:26:09Rich Roll?

  All right, but hold on a second. I mean, I feel like this was, you know, because it was a viral internet moment, that it must have, you know, I don't know, but I would assume that it must have inspired people who ordinarily don't give to, to give in the moment because they were caught up in the excitement of this. So you're, you're, you're adopting kind of a zero-sum game approach where this is taking money away from other charities, but you could make that argument with respect to any giving, right? Anytime you give, that's money that didn't go somewhere else.

• 1:26:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, or any big fundraising campaign. And I think it just is true that whenever you're raising money, then to some extent, I don't think 100%, but to some extent, that's taking money away from other charities.

• 1:26:54Rich Roll?

  But if you're watching Benedict Cumberbatch get his, you know, like get ice on his head, you know, I'm sure there were people who just spontaneously gave $10 who weren't previously, you know, thinking about giving money and just did it in the moment.

• 1:27:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm sure there were some people like that.

• 1:27:08Rich Roll?

  And so you're assuming that that had an impact on their later giving, but I'm, I'm not so sure that that's valid, is it?

• 1:27:15Speaker 01

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

• 1:27:44Speaker 01

  And we ask people, like, how much do you think you would have been giving otherwise? And we estimate it's about 50%. Right. But that's unreliable information coming back to you, though. Oh, yeah, that's right. Yeah. Sort of anecdotally. Yeah, that's right. It might be too high, it might be too low. But it's also just what you'd expect is that a certain percentage of money is going to be donated anyway, whenever you're doing a fundraising campaign.

• 1:28:16Speaker 01

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

• 1:28:54Speaker 01

  And I think there's some arguments for thinking that. So using this metric of quality-adjusted life year, I think the estimates that costs about $200,000 via ALS treatment

• 1:29:09Speaker 01

  just to look after someone for a year who's suffering from ALS, you know, with that same money, you could save the lives of

• 1:29:19Speaker 01

  tens of thousands of people, I think, or not quite thousands of people.

• 1:29:24Speaker 01

  And so...

• 1:29:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we just at least, and again, I didn't want to come down as a conclusion, but we at least have to ask that question. And then in particular, you know, when a charity is getting a hundred million dollars, is that like final million dollars going to be spent as well as the first million dollars? It's very unlikely, especially when its income is increasing fifty fold.

• 1:29:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah, explain that idea a little bit.

• 1:29:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this is the idea of thinking on the margin is what economists do it, but the idea that just things have diminishing returns. So you have your first coffee in the morning and that, you know, makes you feel really good, kind of perks you up. But if you have to drink three or four, then you start to feel kind of sick, you know, the second one's less good. And in general, just whenever, everything has diminishing returns. So you spend your money in the best way that you can. Then when you have more money, you have to, you've already used up that opportunity, you can not spend it as well. And so for something like an organization that's getting a vast influx of funds, it's going to not know, firstly, it might just struggle to spend the money well at all because it's just unprecedented.

• 1:30:32Speaker 01

  It's never even thought about how to spend money in this way. Then the second is that even if it does have a good plan, it's simply not going to be able to spend it as well

• 1:30:43Speaker 01

  as it spends the initial use of funds.

• 1:30:45Rich Roll?

  Right, so in other words, let's say the final ten million dollars, ALS gets ninety, the final ten goes somewhere else that is in much more dire need of that money. The, the sort of impact in a meta sense is much more profound.

• 1:31:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, that, yeah, that's exactly right.

• 1:31:06Speaker 01

  And I think this relates to healthcare, you know, philanthropic spending on healthcare in general. Something like,

• 1:31:15Speaker 01

  you're going to do a lot more good by funding malaria treatment rather than, or prevention rather than something to do with cancer prevention or treatment because.

• 1:31:27Speaker 01

  You're giving to countries where people are so much poorer that additional money makes a much bigger difference and so much less money is already spent on malaria that the lowest hanging opportunity, the best opportunities have still not been taken. Whereas cancer is just like this really hard problem.

• 1:31:45Rich Roll?

  But by taking this like very, you know, economic dispassionate approach to this, you're draining all the fun out of it, right? So the ALS challenge was fun and it goes back to what we were talking about, about making it cool, right? So it was cool to do that. People were making fun videos and I think an intangible in your equation is the long term impact of people being excited about campaigns that, that, you know, get them to reach for their wallets. Right? So maybe, maybe that campaign has created more people interested in altruism than would have existed otherwise.

• 1:32:23Speaker 01

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

• 1:32:43Rich Roll?

  Right, that could potentially overcome, you know, whatever downside occurred in your perspective of as a result of the ice bucket challenge, right?

• 1:32:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, potentially. But it seems to me like it wasn't designed, I mean, it wasn't designed at all, it's just this viral phenomenon.

• 1:33:01Rich Roll?

  Right, it just happened.

• 1:33:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:03Rich Roll?

  It just happened. But I think somebody had a fun idea of doing something and it spread virally, but it's not dissimilar from, you know, the skydiving example that you've, you know, cited in the past, these, you know, creating fun activities around giving, which inherently seems like a good idea to me. You're just, you're tracking it to its conclusion though and seeing holes in that, you know, in that equation.

• 1:33:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think, and Chloe, I'm very in favor of it, as long as it's like the first step. So, you know, maybe you get someone to like go skydiving for charity and uh it's on balance not doing that much good.

• 1:33:42Rich Roll?

  And they feel like they did their charitable act for the year.

• 1:33:45Speaker 01

  Yes, that's the bad outcome, because if there's no follow up at all. But if however, they say, oh, wow, that was terrific. I had like loads of fun and then say, okay, well, how about you do this additional thing and they something more again. And then it actually starts to feel like, oh yeah, this was like the first step that I was taking. And in the case of the ice bucket challenge, there wasn't that. And again, that's no one's fault. It's because it's just this viral phenomenon. You know, people pour water in their heads and then they go back to um their day to day lives. I'd be pretty surprised if actually people, like many people were then, you know, significantly changing their life as a result of.

• 1:34:17Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:34:19Speaker 01

  As a result of that.

• 1:34:20Rich Roll?

  All right. So a couple of other controversial ideas that you have. One of them is around fair trade.

• 1:34:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. Uh, yeah. So the general idea of ethical consumption um in favor of, you know, could work in theory. Uh, but then fair trade in particular, I think, is just a very bad implementation of that idea. And that's for a few reasons. The first is just that the additional money you spend on fair trade goods relative to non fair trade goods. Of that, a very small percentage actually ends up in the hands of producers. And possibly none of it ends up trickling down to the wages of the poorest people who are the farmers working on, say, coffee.

• 1:35:00Rich Roll?

  Right. So it's not, it's not a conceptual disagreement. It's an implementation.

• 1:35:04Speaker 01

  It's an implementation thing, yeah. Um, uh, so yeah, because and it's just a few just ways in which I think it's badly implemented. So that's one. Um, although that's going to be very hard to get around because supermarkets are going to use this as a way to uh, do what's called price discrimination.

• 1:35:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:21Speaker 01

  Which is that uh you're willing to pay more for an ethical product. I'm gonna just charge as much as I can, even, and I can say, oh, and this is an ethical product, even if a very small percentage of that's actually going to benefit people.

• 1:35:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, that's what's happening right now with organic labeling. It's become commodified.

• 1:35:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:38Rich Roll?

  Right? So it becomes a premium brand to have that certification and that label on a food product. And, you know, food producers know this, supermarkets know this, and the governing organization, the USDA knows this. So then what happens is lobbying efforts are applied that begin to devalue the organic certification. It gets watered down.

• 1:36:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:03Rich Roll?

  Right? So it doesn't quite mean what it used to mean. And, you know, organizations are charged a lot to get the certification. And they're able to now produce foods that aren't quite as organic as they were maybe five years ago. Still meet the standard, they can charge more, and it just becomes a business. So the underlying idea behind it is quite good. It's just not quite what people think it is. And I feel like it's similar with fair trade.

• 1:36:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, although, yeah, no, I think that's right. Although I think there are even additional problems with fair trade. So one is, because, I mean, that's an example of, you know, for-profits co-opting it.

• 1:36:44Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:36:44Speaker 01

  And I guess the kind of additional price being charged for fair trade.

• 1:36:49Rich Roll?

  Well, Starbucks can charge more.

• 1:36:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:52Rich Roll?

  If they tell you this is fair trade.

• 1:36:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:54Rich Roll?

  And we don't really spend any time really analyzing what's actually going on.

• 1:36:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:36:59Rich Roll?

  And I don't know what is, so I'm not like pointing fingers again.

• 1:37:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I think there's even additional problems beyond that. So one is the fact that with fair trade production, it's hard to get a certification. In effect, it kind of costs resources. And so most fair trade, coffee production doesn't come from the poorest countries like Ethiopia and Kenya. It comes from places like Mexico, Colombia, Costa Rica, where again, you know, they're not rich countries, but they're 10 times richer than Ethiopia or Kenya. And so the additional earnings just aren't doing as much good. And then the final thing is just the way the fair trade model works is by giving $2 or it gives a price premium, a certain amount of money in addition to the market price for the goods bought. And that's great for the fair trade producers. It means they can sell

• 1:37:47Speaker 01

  their goods at a higher price. But through the laws of supply and demand, it means that fair trade coffee is going to be oversupplied. It means that non-fair trade farmers are going to be made worse off. And that's why I'm like most deeply ambivalent about fair trade is.

• 1:38:03Rich Roll?

  But isn't that a market force that would compel other suppliers to become fair trade?

• 1:38:08Speaker 01

  Uh, there's only a, I mean, if you could have everyone that was fair trade, then you wouldn't, I guess you wouldn't have people being harmed, made worse off, but you still would have coffee oversupply. So you'd have a lot of coffee going to waste, which would seem inefficient. But at the moment, you know, the vast majority of coffee production is still not fair trade. And so if you do have some people, some producers kind of supplying more than the market wants, that is just going to make fair trade workers worse off as a result. They won't be able to sell the goods.

• 1:38:47Rich Roll?

  I mean, I feel like the biggest thing is just the trickle down of actually getting it to the farmers.

• 1:38:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:52Rich Roll?

  Because I think that's what the consumer is operating under when they're making that choice. They want to know that it was fairly produced, which implicitly means that, you know, you're taking care of the actual, not the, not the boss of the, you know, like the actual farmers.

• 1:39:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, in particular, compared to just firstly, buying just the cheapest coffee, the coffee that's just produced in the cheapest countries, sorry, in the poorest countries where the money's going to go furthest. And then secondly, donating the difference. So cutting out the middlemen, cutting out Starbucks and all the retailers that are taking a cut each time.

• 1:39:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:27Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, it's a simple

• 1:39:28Rich Roll?

  Who's gonna do that?

• 1:39:29Speaker 01

  Simple, direct, just buy the cheapest goods, that's easy. Set up a direct debit to give directly, which just transfers cash to the poorest people in Kenya, Tanzania. What could be simpler?

• 1:39:43Rich Roll?

  How do you set up that direct, can you do that through your organization?

• 1:39:48Speaker 01

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

• 1:40:05Rich Roll?

  Right, alright. Alright, final controversial subject, sweatshops. What is going on here?

• 1:40:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, so again, I think this is a case of kind of good intentions going along with respect to the attempt to boycott sweatshop-produced goods. And yeah, so you had Lion Holiday on the show recently. He was the Chief Marketing Officer for American Apparel, which, you know, as a marketing campaign claims, okay, we are sweatshop-free. We do not use sweatshop-produced goods. We do not use sweatshops, we just only employ people in America. Or other kind of, well, like much richer countries. And so people think, okay, I shouldn't buy goods produced in sweatshops. I should buy from American Apparel. But I think that's a very bad outcome for the poor.

• 1:40:53Rich Roll?

  Because they're not, they're otherwise unemployed. You're saying it's either, there's either no employment or there's poor-conditioned employment?

• 1:41:02Speaker 01

  That's right, or they're in worse jobs, prostitution, street hustling, scavenging from dumps. So sweatshops are pretty horrific places, you know. No one's disputing that at all, they're not nice places to work. But extreme poverty is just very extreme indeed. And they're actually the best jobs going around. They actually are the job. They are typically paying much more than other jobs available in the area. And, you know, the people working there are choosing to work there. In fact, often immigrating across borders, risking deportation so that they can work these sweatshop jobs. And so if you're taking away those sweatshops, then

• 1:41:44Speaker 01

  Then you're taking away the best working opportunities that people in the poorest countries have.

• 1:41:48Rich Roll?

  But isn't, I mean, to extrapolate on that argument, I mean, couldn't that be, you know, it almost sounds like an argument a slave owner would make, you know, it's like, well, I can either, you know, have this guy as my slave, or he'll just be wandering, you know, unemployable. And will perish, you know, in the wilderness. So I'm actually doing him a favor by providing him an option and putting a, putting a roof over his head.

• 1:42:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:11Rich Roll?

  I mean, to, to, to give the most extreme, right?

• 1:42:16Speaker 01

  So I think the cases are quite different because the people who work in sweatshops, you know, it's their voluntary choice to go and work there. And in fact, it's, you know, they're enthusiastic about working there relative to all the other options. And I agree, we wanna, unlike, we wanna end the underlying poverty that makes sweatshops desirable place to work. And that's why, you know, campaign for people to donate more, like, far more, or to, you know, try and make systemic change, so that we eradicate sweatshops by actually just eradicating poverty.

• 1:42:49Speaker 01

  But yeah, it's a voluntary choice that people make to work there. And it's so banning it is just like taking away, um, uh, yeah, banning it is taking away the best option that they have. Whereas in, you know, the slavery case, um, it's, well, firstly, the person would have many options to benefit, you know, benefit the slave and many other ways. And secondly, um, if it's an option, if they're like, well, you can do as, do as you wish, if you wanna keep.

• 1:43:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you can be my slave as long as you want to. And if you wanna leave, you can leave and not be my slave anymore.

• 1:43:25Speaker 01

  Then that's no longer slavery, but.

• 1:43:27Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right. Alright, so by, but by virtue of your, your logic, like, I should feel less guilty about the iPhone in my pocket.

• 1:43:36Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:43:37Rich Roll?

  Because there's, there's this weird dissonance, like, okay, I'm trying to align my actions with my values, but, you know, I'll still, I still have an iPhone, you know, and I know intellectually that this was produced, uh, under circumstances that are less than ideal, um, that I'm disconnected with from, you know, like, I don't, I don't really know what goes on in that factory in China, where my, I hear rumors, you know, and it's the same, it's the same dissonance that occurs with somebody who doesn't like the idea of killing animals, but will buy ground, ground beef at the supermarket. It really is no different. You know what I mean?

• 1:44:13Rich Roll?

  But by your argument, like, I should say, it's okay that I have my iPhone because these people are employed.

• 1:44:19Speaker 01

  Well, I think you should go the other way, actually. So I think you should think,

• 1:44:25Speaker 01

  take that feeling of kind of moral uncomfort that you have when buying an iPhone and thinking of those horrific conditions, and then channel that to then end the underlying poverty. So you wouldn't have had that,

• 1:44:38Speaker 01

  you wouldn't have had that discomfort if you hadn't been doing anything. But now you feel somewhat involved. It can't be moral, but you've benefited people in the course of doing that, just a little bit, by providing better job opportunities. But that act has made salient, actually, how bad the lives of some people

• 1:44:58Speaker 01

  on the other side of the world are. And so I think that's like, good that we have that moral discomfort, but reacting to it by not, by just saying, okay, I'm going to keep my hands clean and just, you know, then I don't have to think about this at all.

• 1:45:09Rich Roll?

  Right. That's doing nothing is, is the worst option.

• 1:45:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:13Rich Roll?

  And then it's a distinction between

• 1:45:17Rich Roll?

  a symptomatic or an underlying causal approach, right? Like, by not buying the iPhone, you're kind of dealing with the symptom, buying it or not buying it. Like, you're in this, the, the factory and the people that are employed there is symptomatic of an underlying cause, which is poverty.

• 1:45:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:45:33Rich Roll?

  So, so actually channeling your resources and your energy towards addressing the underlying poverty would be a better option, in the same way that you would treat a disease by getting at the underlying cause as opposed to the pharmaceutical that masks whatever symptom is a result of that.

• 1:45:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's exactly right.

• 1:45:50Rich Roll?

  That condition, right?

• 1:45:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:54Rich Roll?

  I like that.

• 1:45:54Speaker 01

  Oh, good. Maybe, maybe I've got a concept.

• 1:45:58Rich Roll?

  All right, cool. So we gotta, let's see, how, how we've been going an hour and a half. Well, we'll wrap it up here soon. So.

• 1:46:05Rich Roll?

  One of the things that's in your, in your book, Doing Good Better, is you kind of have these five questions that are basically like the decision tree to entertain when you're looking at, you know, how to allocate your resources. So why don't we just run through those really quickly? So that would be a good way to kind of like cap it off.

• 1:46:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the first question, which we talked about earlier is, how many people benefit and by how much? So that's the key is just thinking about your impact in terms of improvements to people's lives. The more people you can benefit by, the greater amount, the better. The second question is, is this the most effective thing I can do? And that's the idea of making the most difference, not just making a difference. Because even among very good ways of doing good, the best are hundreds of times better than just merely good sorts of activities. So you need to always think, not just is this making some impact, but is this making the most impact I can? A third question is, is this area neglected? So because things in general have diminishing returns,

• 1:47:07Speaker 01

  it's vital to focus on, you know, the poorest people in the world, or those cause areas that don't get as much attention. US education's, you know, important cause, but so much philanthropic funding already going to it. It's hard to make a big difference. Fourth question is, what would have happened otherwise? And that question says, the difference you make is the difference between how much good you do and how much good would have been done even if you hadn't acted. And I talk about the impact a doctor has where, you know, as a doctor, you're saving lives every single day. But for most of those lives, they would have been saved anyway, even if you hadn't taken that job. And so the actual impact you have, the difference you've made to the world,

• 1:47:50Speaker 01

  I think is much less than you might intuitively think by becoming a doctor. And then the final question is, what are the chances of success and how good would success be? And that's a crucial question when you're thinking about Uncertain ways of doing good, you know, things that maybe won't pay off, but might have a really big impact, like systemic change, or something other than these concrete measurable ways of doing good. And that's this concept called expected value, multiplying the chance of success by the value of the success if you do it. And that provides this way of thinking about systemic change. And then those are the kind of five underlying questions. If you're thinking like that, you're thinking like an effective art twist.

• 1:48:33Speaker 01

  It's the kind of power tools for doing good. And then the second half of the book applies that to doing good through charity, doing good through career, doing good through your consumption, and thinking about what are the most important causes? What are the biggest problems in the world, the ones we should be really trying to tackle?

• 1:48:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I love it. I mean, the book is really great. It definitely changed the way that I think about all of this. Certainly changes how I perceive, you know, the world of charitable giving. And I would recommend everybody check it out. It's very cool, man. You've done a great service by putting this out there.

• 1:49:08Speaker 01

  Well, thank you.

• 1:49:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's cool. And if you're inspired by Professor MacAskill and interested in learning more about about giving, I mean, you can go to Giving What We Can and learn more about what that organization does. And if you're interested in trying to figure out how to allocate your next gift, givewell.org, that's a good place to go to, right?

• 1:49:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. And if you want to do good for your career, then eightythousandhours.org is the place to go.

• 1:49:37Rich Roll?

  So I took the test. I did. It said I should be a politician or a startup entrepreneur.

• 1:49:43Speaker 01

  I think both of those things are pretty good for you.

• 1:49:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I don't know. I need the big idea for the startup entrepreneur, though, so I can come back and do what you're doing, which is participating in YA Combinator. So why don't we cap it off with with that? So you're here. We're in Mountain View right now, just down the street from Stanford, and you're participating in a very prestigious sort of venture capital, uh, how would you describe it? Compendium, it's not a conference, but it's sort of like all these startups, you've been invited.

• 1:50:11Speaker 01

  It's like an accelerator for new startups, or an incubator, yeah. So it's a way of taking early-stage startups and really getting them off the ground. And it's produced companies like BlockBox, Reddit, Airbnb, uh, and so it's the kind of premier accelerator in the world. And recently, they started taking nonprofits and we're one of them, so.

• 1:50:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah, how many, I mean, how many nonprofits have gone through there? Not many.

• 1:50:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, less than 10, I think. I think out of a hundred companies in this batch, four nonprofits.

• 1:50:41Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:50:42Speaker 01

  And so, you know, I think Y Combinator, they're definitely still trying to figure out exactly, I mean, you're still finding their feet with nonprofits, because obviously it's, you know, a very different set of standards than for profits. But there's similar things that apply to both, and this has been one of the most valuable learning experiences of my life, I think.

• 1:51:01Rich Roll?

  It's pretty cool. So they kind of, they mentor you, but there's also a little bit of a competitive dog and pony show, right? Where you have to get up there and you got to pitch in front of like a, you know, pretty intimidating audience of potential investors, et cetera.

• 1:51:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it all culminates in Demo Day, where all the companies stand up, they pitch for two and a half minutes to 450 investors. And then afterwards, there's this crazy meat market where everyone tries to meet everyone else, and, uh, the startups are looking for investment, we're looking for donations. And there's a little app so that investors can like different companies, and then they, you'll get an email sent, and you can be in touch afterwards.

• 1:51:42Rich Roll?

  So how'd it go? You already did that part, right?

• 1:51:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, we've done that part, went really well. So it was Ben Todd, the CEO of 80,000 Hours, that was presenting, and I thought he nailed it, which I was happy with. And then, yeah, I had a bunch of people really interested in what we were doing, in particularly as a donation opportunity. You know, we did set up 80,000 Hours with the intention of being the most cost-effective charity in the world, because... You know, we're encouraging people to work on the most important causes or donate to the most cost-effective charities.

• 1:52:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you better, you better walk that walk, right? If you're saying like, you know, make sure you understand where your money's going and that it's actually having an impact, and then you're saying, please donate to us.

• 1:52:19Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, so we're very, yeah, we're very aware of that, especially given, you know, they could be donating to these amazing first-order charities, but we're like a meta charity, where like,

• 1:52:28Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:52:28Speaker 01

  Kind of like we're raising the resources for the most effective causes and most effective charities.

• 1:52:35Rich Roll?

  You're, and you're fertilizing future effective altruists.

• 1:52:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that's partly what we're doing. And, you know, making the people who are already trying to do good more effective because they have better knowledge about what to do with their life. And so, yeah, we think that, you know, money coming in through us is like a tenfold or maybe a hundred-fold multiplier or something. So it's like an investment, it's like a way of getting leverage in your donation.

• 1:53:02Rich Roll?

  Right. And from here, you're almost done here, and then you're heading off to Oxford.

• 1:53:07Speaker 01

  So, yeah, I'll very shortly be going back to Oxford where I'm starting an associate professorship.

• 1:53:12Rich Roll?

  What are you gonna teach?

• 1:53:14Speaker 01

  So I'm teaching ethics, political philosophy, as you'd expect.

• 1:53:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:18Speaker 01

  I'll be, I won't merely push effective altruism, I'll be much more impartial than that. But, yeah, I'm very lucky to be starting at Lincoln College, Oxford University.

• 1:53:28Rich Roll?

  So it's an undergraduate?

• 1:53:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, undergraduate and graduates, yeah. And the Oxford systems.

• 1:53:32Rich Roll?

  You're gonna be teaching people that are, might be older than you.

• 1:53:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's probably true. Yeah, which, I mean, even with the undergraduates, I don't feel so different than when I walked into Cambridge at eighteen, so I'll need to be...

• 1:53:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, I don't either. But, you know, that's how it goes.

• 1:53:52Speaker 01

  Well.

• 1:53:53Rich Roll?

  That's an interesting dynamic, though, to be, to be, I mean, you're essentially a peer.

• 1:53:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, obviously, I'm gonna have to try and create this, create a dynamic where, you know, I am the tutor and...

• 1:54:05Rich Roll?

  Costuming.

• 1:54:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, a little bit.

• 1:54:07Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:54:07Speaker 01

  So I won't be wearing this t-shirt, you know, wearing a nice shirt and so on.

• 1:54:11Rich Roll?

  No, no Chuck Taylors.

• 1:54:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. But I think, you know, I think there's also real advantages there. Like, I actually know, like, an early member that's very salient, what it's like being, you know, turning up at Cambridge so scared. Suddenly surrounded by all these people who are so high performing and, you know, it's very easy to beat yourself up, very easy to feel like an imposter. And so I think that the kind of empathy still being quite young will give me is gonna be an asset in terms of teaching.

• 1:54:40Rich Roll?

  Well, good luck, man.

• 1:54:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks.

• 1:54:42Rich Roll?

  Your work is inspiring. I can't wait to see, you know, where this all leads for you, and I appreciate your time, man.

• 1:54:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks so much for having me on.

• 1:54:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's cool. So, all right, if you're digging on Professor MacAskill, I'm gonna create a little formality here. You can go to his website, williammccaskill.com, or you can go to 80000hours.com, you can go to givingwhatwecan.org, and also, maybe most importantly, effectivealtruism.com, if you want to get involved and figure out how to create community around these ideas where you live. Is that fair to say?

• 1:55:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:55:17Rich Roll?

  Cool. Is there anything else? You're @willmccaskill on Twitter.

• 1:55:20Speaker 01

  @willmccaskill on Twitter, and the book, Doing Good Better.

• 1:55:23Rich Roll?

  Doing Good Better, of course.

• 1:55:24Speaker 01

  Guide to Effective Altruism, it's out now.

• 1:55:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah, definitely pick it up where all books are sold. Use the Amazon banner, add at ritual.com, don't forget that. All right, cool, man. Thanks.

• 1:55:34Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:55:34Rich Roll?

  Peace. Plants.

• 1:55:42Rich Roll?

  We did it. How'd you guys like that? He's pretty impressive, right? I think so. A pleasure and an honor to sit down with him. Thank you, William, for taking the time. And again, I can't wait to see where this guy's career is headed. If you want to learn more about effective altruism, go to centerforeffectivealtruism.org, center, C E N T R E. I would definitely check out William's book. How to Do Good Better. Again, I can't say enough good things about that. And please, check out his nonprofits, 80000hours.org, and also Giving What We Can. I will have links and show notes up on the episode page at ritual.com.

• 1:56:24Rich Roll?

  Please check that out. I put quite a bit of time, as does my team, into creating a robust source of resources, so you guys can take your learning and your edification on the subject matters presented in each episode to the next level. So, yeah, check that out. It's there for you guys. Thanks so much, you guys, for all your plant power needs. Go to ritual.com. We've got all kinds of cool products there. You can get signed copies of Finding Ultra, our new cookbook, The Plant Power Way. We've got Julie's meditation program. We've got nutrition products. We've got organic cotton garments. We've got Plant Power Techies. We've got sticker packs. All kinds of cool stuff to take your health and your life to the next level.

• 1:57:05Rich Roll?

  Keep sending in your questions for future Q and A podcasts to [email protected]. I've got two online courses at mindbodygreen.com, The Ultimate Guide to Plant-Based Nutrition and the Art of Living with Purpose. Go to mindbodygreen.com, click on video courses to learn more about those. And thanks for supporting the show, you guys. Thanks for telling your friends, for sharing it on social media. I really appreciate it. This has been an extraordinary journey for me, and I just appreciate you guys taking it with me. And I'm committed to continue to bring you amazing conversations each week. So, I'll see you guys in a couple days. Make it great. Peace. Plants. I'm out of here.