How To Live An Ethical Life With Moral Philosopher Peter Singer

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

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• 1:05Speaker 01

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

• 1:49Speaker 01

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

• 2:25Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast.

• 2:31Rich Roll?

  Hey, everybody. Welcome to the podcast. My guest today is just an absolute living legend. His name is Peter Singer, and he is perhaps the world's most influential living philosopher. The grandfather of both the modern animal rights and effective altruism movements, Peter is a professor of bioethics at Princeton and laureate professor at the University of Melbourne. He's published several books on our moral responsibility to alleviate suffering, including the highly influential book, Animal Liberation, and a book called The Life You Can Save, both of which are books we cover in this conversation. I should say, as an aside and

• 3:11Rich Roll?

  as a gift to our listeners, Peter has very generously offered to provide everybody with a free copy of his book, The Life You Can Save, to anyone who wants one. To get your copy, visit thelifeyoucansave.org/richroll, or click the link in the description below. Free paperback copies are available for US residents only, but all listeners, regardless of location, can download the ebook or audiobook for free. And the point that I'm really driving at is that donations to Peter's Save Lives Fund can also be made via this link, and all donations there will be matched dollar for dollar up to $25,000, thanks to a very generous anonymous donor. I love meeting Peter. I love talking to him. I really hope

• 3:56Rich Roll?

  you enjoy this conversation. It's all coming up really quick, but first...

• 4:07Rich Roll?

  Okay, Peter Singer. Peter's work has had just a profound influence on my life, so it was an absolute honor to host this discussion, a discussion about the ethical obligations we have to others, to human and non-human lives alike, and how these ideas that Peter thinks so deeply about can shape our choices and actions in the real world. So, without further ado, here's me and Peter Singer.

• 4:40Rich Roll?

  Well, Peter, it's a real honor to have you here today as somebody who's admired your work for a very long time. I'm thrilled at the prospect of being able to talk to you. And this conversation will have been preceded by me giving an introduction to your work, your kind of formal bio. But I'm curious how you articulate what it is that you do? Like, how do you explain your kind of focus and curiosity in the world?

• 5:04Speaker 01

  Right. So I've got interested in philosophy as an undergraduate, but I was always interested in the part of philosophy that connects to real life and that can make a difference to how we live. So some of the courses I did were discussing how we know anything about the world. How do we know that we're sitting at a table now, that I'm not dreaming, that there's not an evil demon who's given me illusions? Those are interesting intellectual problems, but I certainly wouldn't have wanted to spend my life doing them. But once I realized that ethics, the part of philosophy that connects with life, really can make a difference to how you think about your life, your values, and how you act in

• 5:47Speaker 01

  the world, makes a difference to changing the world. And that seemed to me to be something important and worthwhile, as well as intellectually interesting.

• 5:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I mean, what's interesting is that you have fulfilled that promise in an era and a time in which there does seem to be a disconnect between the kind of academic pursuit of philosophy and the true utility of it. This came up in your in your conversation with Ryan Holiday, where he was saying, back in, you know, ancient Greece and ancient Rome, politics and philosophy were very commingled pursuits, whereas now, they don't really seem to meet. But I look at you as somebody who's had a profound impact on on culture and how we think about ethics and morality in a very utilitarian and real way.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  That's true. Although I think I've been fortunate in that in the period that I've been living and working in philosophy, it has moved back more like that Greek ideal, if you like, that It does connect with how we live, and there are many of my students, for example, who are interested in taking philosophy courses precisely for that reason. They want to think about these issues. And that's different from when I was an undergraduate, when there was still this period of what was known as ordinary language philosophy or linguistic analysis, where a lot of philosophers said, "Philosophy doesn't teach you how to live, it simply helps us to understand the meanings of the moral terms."

• 7:15Speaker 01

  And then the student movement of the 1960s started to get things back on track. Say with the Vietnam War, students wanted more relevant courses, and one of the things that philosophy could do was, well, there's this ancient tradition of, "When is it right to go to war?", of just war theory, and they started talking about that. And then they started talking about civil disobedience, when are you justified in disobeying the law? And so I think then philosophy got back on track to those sorts of topics, and moved away from the idea that somehow a neutral activity telling you what it means to say something is good or bad.

• 7:54Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I feel that that era was sort of supplanted by, you know, the greed is good sensibility of the 80s, and perhaps the ennui and the cynicism of Gen X, which is my generation. But I too look at this newer generation, the population, the age range of the students I'm sure you teach, who do seem very concerned about ethics, morality, and impact in terms of where they're investing their academic curiosity and their career choices. Like, they really want to be on a track that is going to have a net positive on the world, which is very different from the sensibility of my generation when we were in college.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think there were always some, at least, you know, I've been teaching at Princeton now since 1999, and I think there were always some students who were interested in how they could have an impact on the world. But I agree that it's come back more strongly in the last few years, and there are more students wanting to take courses for that reason.

• 8:57Rich Roll?

  Which, of course, begs the question of, how do we think about morality, positive impact, ethics, et cetera? So when the question is posited to you, you know, what does it mean to live an ethical life? How do you begin to unpack that and respond to it in a meaningful way? Can help direct somebody who's, you know, wanting to know the answer to that.

• 9:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I ask them to think about the impact that they can have about the consequences of their actions, what they can do to make the world a better place than it would have been if they hadn't lived in it. And clearly, there are a lot of opportunities for that. I mean, especially if you're living in an affluent society like the United States or any of the other affluent countries. And you see that there are a lot of people in extreme poverty in other countries. You see that we're damaging the climate of our planet. You see that we're inflicting vast amounts of suffering on non-human animals in factory farms. There are all sorts of choices that you have to make about how you're going to

• 10:02Speaker 01

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

• 10:34Rich Roll?

  And, and your particular lens for that is the reduction of suffering. That seems to be kind of like the lever through which all of this calculus is made.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  Yes, that's right. It's primarily the reduction of suffering. I do think that producing happiness or pleasure is, is a value as well.

• 10:54Rich Roll?

  But that's a harder thing to get your hands around, right?

• 10:57Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yes, that's right. It's, it's often easier to see how you can relieve suffering than how you can boost happiness. And so, you know, some people say you should be a negative utilitarian and only focus on reducing pain and suffering. I don't think that's right, at least theoretically, it's not right, because if you could greatly increase the happiness of a large number of people and do that without causing any suffering or maybe cause, you know, mild headaches to a few people, clearly that would be the right thing to do. So it's not that, it's not that the positive doesn't count at all in the scales. It's just that, given the way the world is, the negative, the pain and suffering is so much more apparent and

• 11:41Speaker 01

  In a way, so much easier to prevent, in the sense that we know what we could do that would prevent it. It may be hard to bring that about. But sometimes, in terms of making people happier, we don't even really know how to do that.

• 11:53Rich Roll?

  Right, right. And in the context of the reduction of suffering, this is kind of the landscape from which you're thinking on animal liberation emanates. And I want to get to that, but I kind of want to put that aside for now and focus on something that's a little bit more current, which is you being this sort of godfather of the effective altruism movement, a movement which is very much in the news at the moment as a result of Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX and all of that, which has kind of put this idea about how to effectively give to have the greatest impact on the reduction of suffering

• 12:36Rich Roll?

  under the microscope of people who are now critical of it. And I'm interested, I know you've written about this, but parsing the behavior of this human being from the philosophical underpinnings of this movement that you helped pioneer.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I think the effective altruism movement in general is saying, we should try to make a positive difference to the world, as I've been saying. And we should use reason and evidence to find the best way of doing that. And one of the things that the movement has talked about is making a positive difference doesn't necessarily mean becoming a doctor and working in a low-income country or working for one of the charities that are helping people in poverty. It might mean actually trying to earn a lot of money and then using that to support organizations that are doing good.

• 13:34Speaker 01

  That can be a valuable thing to do. And I think Sam Bankman-Fried set out to do that. I know that he had a conversation with Will MacAskill early on. Will being one of the founders of the effective altruism movement. And Will suggested that because he was mathematically gifted, that might be an opportunity for him. And I know others, I've had Princeton students who were in a similar situation, who've done that and have given a lot of money to effective causes. So it certainly can be a good thing to do. But Sam, I think, was obviously uniquely successful in accumulating a huge amount of wealth doing that and became a kind of a poster child in that way for earning to give.

• 14:17Speaker 01

  But he was clearly also a huge risk taker and somebody who was prepared to break standard rules of how you do business and how you look after other people's money that's entrusted to you. And I think that's what brought about his downfall. The fact that he took risks, they didn't all come off. He tried to patch it off with shifting his customers' trust funds, basically, to his research investment sort of fund. And clearly, he shouldn't have done that. And I don't think anybody in the effective altruism movement thought that the idea of earning money to give to good causes would lead to somebody so flagrantly, this is alleged, I suppose we should say.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  But if the charges are correct, I don't think anybody in the effective altruism movement thought that anybody would so flagrantly violate those basic rules of sound practice and ethical practice.

• 15:16Rich Roll?

  Right, right. Well, you know, his misdeeds and malfeasance will be adjudicated. But from the outside looking in, it doesn't look great. And I think, you know, just to kind of back up for a minute, effective altruism being this movement whereby we try to sort of reduce the amount of emotional attachment we have to philanthropic ends and look at it from a purely objective point of view to understand. The best use of every dollar given to have the maximum impact in terms of the reduction of suffering. And those outlets often aren't the sexy ones or the ones that we feel emotionally attached to because we have a relative who's suffering from a

• 16:01Rich Roll?

  certain disease. It happens to be things like malaria tents and the like that can that are cheap, easy solutions that end up saving a lot of lives. And in the case of Sam Bankman-Fried, I see a guy who whose motives are in question. Like, there is an argument that perhaps he leveraged this movement because it looked good from a from a sort of PR perspective to say that he was an effective altruist. And I'm not so sure like how much money he actually ended up giving. He gave money to lots of different places. And so the sort of critique of the movement is that it sets in place unhealthy incentives whereby the end justifies the means, right? Like, no matter what end or

• 16:45Rich Roll?

  what means you pursue to accumulate a certain amount of wealth, it's okay, because those resources will be deployed in an altruistic manner.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. As for his original motives, I'm prepared to believe that he did set out on that career in order to be able to give. I think that's the evidence early on that it wasn't wasn't right from the start. He thought, oh, I'll pretend to be an effective altruist because that'll make me more successful personally. And figures that I've seen, you know, he certainly gave well over $100 million to effective charities. Now, that's not very much when you're worth 20, 25 billion. That's true. But I think he was on track to do a lot more. He also gave political donations, and some of those were directed towards making the world safer. For example, he supported a candidate who was an expert

• 17:36Speaker 01

  on pandemics because he believed that the US is not doing nearly enough for pandemic preparation. And I think that's obviously true. So I don't think that it was always just a cover, but it may be that he got carried away with his success and didn't want to admit, for example, that he'd taken a big hit because of a bad investment from Alameda and so tried to cover that up. Whereas if he'd admitted that and maybe Alameda had gone bankrupt, he would have still been wealthy and wouldn't be facing jail. So I think that's probably what went wrong. But in terms of what you were asking about, the idea that the end justifies the means, I think people often very simplistically say,

• 18:20Speaker 01

  oh, well, you know, he thought that the ends justified the means, and they don't. But if you stop and think about it, I think everybody thinks that sometimes the end does justify the means. And the classic example of that is, if you were hiding a Jewish family in your cellar in Nazi Germany and the Gestapo came to your door, and you might think normally it's wrong to tell lies, including telling lies to the state authorities is clearly wrong. But if you can save the family you're hiding by telling a lie to the Gestapo, obviously you should do that. So the question isn't do the ends ever justify the means? The question is, when do the ends justify the means? When are the means too bad? Or when is the risk too great?

• 19:04Speaker 01

  Or the means not sufficient? And you have to look at those on a case-by-case basis.

• 19:10Rich Roll?

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

• 19:44Speaker 01

  Yes, that's right. And in fact, if they go to 80,000 hours, there's a lot of other things that they could do as well. They could, one of the careers suggested is becoming a research scientist, working in areas that will make a difference to people in extreme poverty. Another is to go into politics. Politics needs more people who are really serious about helping people in poverty, doing something about climate change. So there's a lot of different options that people can have. And in fact, the effective altruism movement did make quite a thing about earning to give in the early days. I think partly because that was a novelty and it was something that got media attention. And when the movement

• 20:25Speaker 01

  was small, it was important to get media attention for new ideas. So Will McCaskill in particular, you know, made quite a feature of this. But more recently, and but before the FTX collapse, and so not specifically related to Sam Bankman-Fried, they have reduced the emphasis that they put on that, partly because of the idea that one of the problems with new organizations that have great ideas about changing the world in the right direction, is that it's hard for them to get enough talented people working for them. So smart people like Sam might now be more likely to be, you know, might be

• 21:06Speaker 01

  suggested that they go into helping one of these startups to really get organized and to scale up and really make a big difference, rather than to earn to give, just because of the sense that it's not always lack of financial resources, it may be lack of talented people that are slowing things down.

• 21:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's interesting. In thinking about, you know, the pursuit of an ethical life, and as somebody who, you know, who is a, you know, a moral philosopher, why is this important? Is there a morality that exists that is, that is a certain kind of like, there's a universality to that truth? That, I mean, you're an atheist, right? So from whence does, you know, this sense of right and wrong and pursuing an ethical life, from where does that derive?

• 21:59Speaker 01

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

• 22:44Speaker 01

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

• 23:23Rich Roll?

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

• 23:48Speaker 01

  But I think we can see that in our own case. We, you know, when we experience agony, we just can't avoid seeing that as a bad thing for us. And then when we take a broader point of view, the 19th century utilitarian Henry Sidgwick spoke about taking the point of view of the universe. And he was an agnostic, really, rather than atheist, but he wasn't saying, you know, that the universe has a point of view. He was just saying, imagine that you're... Looking on the universe as a whole and all the sentient beings in it, then you can see that your own interests, your own well-being, is no more important from that perspective

• 24:28Speaker 01

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

• 24:53Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm. So much of your work is focused on the responsibility of the individual, like, should I give money to this versus that? Should I not eat animals? Like, all of these sort of choices that can guide us towards, you know, kind of a more ethical way of living. But we live in a culture in which incentives and kind of momentum is pushing us away from the kind of economy of making those choices. In other words, like, those choices tend to kind of cut against the grain of, you know, what everything else is pushing us towards. And so, I can't help but think about incentive structures at large

• 25:37Rich Roll?

  and how your work, being so focused on the individual, how you contemplate like system change, like governmental regimes or, you know, economic tectonic plates that, you know, set up situations where we're often making the wrong choice versus creating a new system in which the choices that you're advocating for become the easier, kind of more accessible and more incentivized choice.

• 26:05Speaker 01

  Right. Well, I certainly want to see changes in the systems and in the incentives that the systems create. And one of the most obvious cases here would be climate change, because... Individuals also make choices, of course, about

• 26:20Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 26:20Speaker 01

  the greenhouse gases that they emit, or the, again, what they eat makes an impact on the greenhouse gases that they're responsible for, as does whether they drive a car, and if they do, what sort of car to drive. But it's really important, and shouldn't be that difficult for governments, to change the incentives there, by carbon taxes, for example, on what produces emissions. So that's, that's an area where going into politics can be a really important career, because you can help to make governments make those choices. And, and that's true of the other things that I talk about at an individual level as well. Governments do give significant amounts to foreign aid. They could give more.

• 27:02Speaker 01

  The United States actually gives very little in terms as a percentage of its gross national income compared to European countries generally, and could give more, and could also give it more effectively. And of course, some governments have better laws and regulations regarding the treatment of animals. Even within the United States, California has better regulations for farm animals than most other states in the United States, because it has citizen-initiated referenda and its past propositions to give animals a bit more room than they have in other states. So there are definitely things that you can do at the policy level, and that it's important to do at the policy level. But some of these things are really difficult to bring about change.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  And for example, trying to increase the United States foreign aid has been a long struggle that so far has been quite unsuccessful. Even presidents who are sympathetic, like President Obama, who at one stage talked about raising US foreign aid to half a percent of gross national product, which would still be only, you know, about half of the top nations in the world, but completely failed to do that. So if, if that's so difficult to achieve, then there is something that we can do individually, and that can make a difference. So let's, let's do that. And similarly, in terms of what we eat, it's also very hard to get laws and regulations to, in the United States, to give animals more space to move around. As I said, there

• 28:28Speaker 01

  are exceptions with those states with citizens initiated referenda because it does seem that ordinary Americans, when given that choice, will choose better conditions for animals. But because the agribusiness lobby is so powerful at the federal level, it's been impossible to get any laws passed at the federal level to give animals room to move. And that's, that's a contrast with, with Europe, where the entire European Union has much better laws than the United States has. So again, you know, let's try to do what we can at the individual level. If enough people do that, we'll weaken the power of the agribusiness lobby because they won't be selling so much. And we'll be in a better position to produce that systemic change.

• 29:09Rich Roll?

  Well, in the context of, of animal rights, this has been a movement built upon the shoulders of the individual. Like, it really has been a grassroots movement. And, you know, I want to get into how this all began with you. You wrote Animal Liberation in 1975. I want to hear how that came into being. But in looking back upon, you know, the many years since that book came out, it must be quite an awesome thing to see how much progress has been made, how much energy is in this movement, while also recognizing how little has changed and how much work remains, right? Like, how are you thinking about the current status quo?

• 29:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, you've got that exactly right. There has been significant change. I mentioned those laws in the European Union, sort of 27 countries that have better laws than when I published Animal Liberation in 1975, and the United Kingdom, of course, which is no longer in the European Union. So that's a significant change for hundreds of millions of animals. They have definitely not idealized, but they have lives that are somewhat better than they were in the 70s. But on the other hand, factory farming still continues here in the United States. A lot of it goes on just as bad as it was before, in some respects even worse, because, for example, the breeding of chickens for meat has...

• 30:30Speaker 01

  Increase the speed at which they put on weight to such a point that their immature legs can't really bear the weight of their bodies. They're very young birds when they're sent to market, they're about six weeks old. And they're in pain just from trying to carry their body weight. And sometimes their legs will collapse under them and they'll just be unable to move. And then, because this is such a mass production industry with 20,000 birds in a single shed, they're probably going to starve to death or dehydrate to death because they can't walk to food and water. And basically, nobody cares about individual chickens. Nobody will even see that there's a downed bird and pick it up and humanely kill it. So, you know, those things have actually got worse.

• 31:13Speaker 01

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

• 31:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah, we can celebrate the growth of the vegan movement in these kind of urban pockets across the developed Western world, but that's myopic in that when we canvass our glance internationally, we see the expansion of a middle class or, you know, new wealth sectors who are going to increase their consumption of meat at a rate that the planet really can't sustain, right? And we're seeing the decimation of the rainforest and with China, you know, all of these areas that are where we're seeing an increase in meat consumption at an unprecedented level, like this is a global problem from not just a mass suffering perspective, but from a climate change perspective as well.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's basically true. It's interesting that some countries have actually...

• 32:23Speaker 01

  Started on a decline in meat consumption. Germany is one example and Sweden is another. So, you know, there's some hope that as we become more educated and more understanding about what meat does not only to animals but to the climate and to the environment more generally. We've just had this meeting of environmentalists concerned to protect species and again, there's been a lot of writing about how meat consumption just can't continue to grow, that it is destroying the rainforests and causing extinctions. So there's some hope that more people will realize that, but it's difficult. And, you know, to me, you mentioned the pockets of people being vegan. I mean, I think being vegan is a great diet and a healthy diet and the best diet for

• 33:07Speaker 01

  the planet and for animals, but I think we have to work towards reduction of meat consumption in mainstream. Because it's going to be a long time before we get a vegan mainstream in most countries.

• 33:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it, there does feel like quite a bit of momentum behind that right now. It is mainstreaming in that so many restaurants, you can at least get vegan options and people don't balk or, and they're not confused when you want to veganize an entree at a restaurant or what have you. But yes, there is so much work to be done and your question really brings up this notion of effective activism. Like, how do you sort of convince the most number of people to change their habits to have the greatest impact, right? Is it, is it like throwing a bucket of blood on a runway model, you know, at a fashion show who's wearing a mink coat?

• 34:03Rich Roll?

  Or is it having a, you know, realistic conversation with policymakers about a slight reduction in harm that could actually impact millions of people and benefit millions of animals? Like, how do you think about carrying the message from a utilitarian perspective to leverage the greatest change?

• 34:24Speaker 01

  I think that as far as trying to get people to change their diet is concerned, probably being cool and reasonable is better than throwing buckets of blood at people. That's, that's true. But, you know, we, we don't fully know, and I, I would like to see, and this is part of what effective altruism wants to do. I would like to see more studies about, you know, what is the effect of people when there are protests that are more in your face than others. There's some suggestions that it puts people off, but I don't really know that we know. And, and for example, on issues like climate change, which seems to me to be a really urgent issue, I can fully understand those eco activists who threw soup over Van Gogh's sunflowers.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  And let me say, they knew it was behind glass, so they knew it wasn't going to damage the original painting. But, you know, that was a gesture to say, you know, this is really something urgent, and we're still not doing what we need to be doing about it. And we have to do better, and we have to do it soon. So I, I fully sympathize with that, but I, I do want to know what actually is going to work, and what is going to get governments to take the relatively simple steps that they need to take to shift us away from greenhouse gas emitting products, both fossil fuels and meat in particular.

• 35:41Rich Roll?

  How have your views evolved since writing this book in 1975 on this subject matter?

• 35:48Speaker 01

  Well, perhaps I was a little naive about how easy it might have been to, to change these deeply ingrained habits and to combat major industries. Because I did think that the arguments seemed to me to be so clear. I thought that if I could just state them clearly and rationally, readers would decide that, that they were right, they would change what they were eating, they would talk to their friends about why it was important to change what was eating. And I hoped, at least. And that's how you, that's how it happened for you, right? Exactly. So why shouldn't it happen for anybody who's reading your book? Exactly, that's right, yeah. I mean, so I didn't think about this issue at all until I was a graduate student at Oxford,

• 36:32Speaker 01

  twenty-four years old, and I hadn't thought about it. Now, this was nineteen seventy, so it wasn't really discussed. You didn't meet vegetarians, or certainly not Western vegetarians, you might have met some Indian vegetarians, but you didn't meet people who were like you, who were vegetarians, until I, at Oxford, happened to have lunch with a Canadian graduate student called Richard Keshin, who asked whether there was meat in the spaghetti sauce that was being served, and when he was told there was, he took a salad plate instead. And I was surprised and asked him what his problem was with meat. And he told me that he didn't think it was right to treat animals the way we treat them in order to turn them into food. And I said, don't they have good lives out in the fields? And he said, no, they're increasingly, they're crowded inside in big, dark sheds.

• 37:17Speaker 01

  I knew nothing about that. And I made it my business to find out. And then I also, because I was a philosophy student, I decided to look at what philosophers had said about this, you know? Why is it okay that, to treat animals in this way? Why do the bans of morality, as it seemed at the time, just stop with our species? And I decided both that he was right on the facts and that there wasn't an ethical justification for disregarding the interests of non-human animals in the way we were doing it. So it seemed a pretty simple argument to me, and if I could be persuaded by that and I could show the facts to other people and look at the ethical arguments, that that would convince other people. And it convinced some other people, that's, that's the good news.

• 37:58Speaker 01

  The bad news is that we are still living in societies where the majority of people are not only eating meat, but even buying factory-farmed products, not particularly looking for more organic or free-ranging or certified humane animal products.

• 38:14Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think that with greater education around this issue also comes concerted efforts to confuse consumers, right? There's a lot of greenwashing going on and there's a lot of energy around, you know, kind of the grass-fed, free-range animals that make people feel better about their animal consumption without fully understanding the equation. Like this idea that we actually need the animals to regenerate the soil and you eating your animals from these farms is actually part of the climate solution and these animals live great lives. And certainly that's a better situation than the factory-farmed animals, which is the

• 38:57Rich Roll?

  big gaping problem that needs to be solved. But I think it allows people to kind of fall into sort of an acceptance or a delusion that they're still not, their habits aren't really resulting in the harm that they're actually resulting in. I didn't say that very inelegantly, but I think you know what I'm getting at.

• 39:18Speaker 01

  I know what you're getting at, yes. And in fact, it is a delusion, I think, and I'm not sure, maybe people are aware of it, but because if you ask people if they eat meat and when they say yes, you ask them, do they mostly buy organic or certified humane or grass-fed, something like that, the percentage that answers yes is just wildly more than the amount that is actually produced by a high multiple. So either people somehow believe that they're buying these better products when they're not, or they're just lying in the answers that they're giving. Because if you look, for example, at chicken meat production, the example I gave earlier, I think it's 99.8% is factory-farmed in the US.

• 40:02Speaker 01

  It's a tiny, tiny percentage, far less than 1%. So, you know, if people say they're eating humanly-produced certified humane, sorry, if people say they're eating humanly-produced chicken, they're almost certainly not.

• 40:25Rich Roll?

  If the reduction of suffering is the rubric, there is an interesting philosophical exploration to be had when it comes to the kind of carnivore people who call what they eat nose to tail. From a suffering perspective, if somebody is going to take one cow and they're going to consume the entirety of that, is that a more ethical choice than the vegan who's eating plants that are threshed in a traditional way, where lots of rodents and insects are being sacrificed as a result of the harvesting of these many plants, or gophers having to be killed, et cetera, where, in other words,

• 41:10Rich Roll?

  lots of different animals are sacrificed for the production of these plant foods versus the person who eats the cow, who says, "Well, this is just one sentient being." From a philosophical, ethical perspective, how do you think about that or parse the difference?

• 41:28Speaker 01

  Yes. So there are a couple of things to be said about that. One is that, from a climate point of view, cows and beef is really the worst of the animal products in terms of the quantity of greenhouse gases, because they produce methane, and methane is an extremely potent greenhouse gas.

• 41:48Rich Roll?

  And they've had to consume a lot of resources to get to the point before they're killed for food, right?

• 41:54Speaker 01

  Right. Well, I mean, so if they're in feedlots or fattened the last few months in feedlots eating grain, then all of those problems about the rodents that get killed with the threshing are going to be there, because they will have eaten far more grain than a vegan would eat. Because you only get back from feeding grain to cattle, you get back somewhere between 5% and 10% of the food value of the grain that you're putting in. So if you're eating the grains directly, you eat far fewer grains. But if people are saying, "Well, I'm just eating fully grass-fed beef," which, again, is quite a small proportion of US-produced beef, then you're not killing the rodents when you harvest the grain, because they're eating grass.

• 42:38Speaker 01

  But they actually produce more greenhouse gases than the feedlots. And that's because the reason cattle are put in feedlots is they fatten up faster on grain. So if they're on grass... They have to live longer to reach the same weight, to produce the same quantity of meat for people to eat. And all the time they're living and digesting the grass, they're producing the methane. So in terms of the impact on the climate, it's really bad. It may be better from an animal welfare point of view, much better than eating chicken, for example, both because they're outside and have better lives, and also because you're talking about one animal with a lot of meat, whereas chickens, people who eat chickens are eating a lot of chickens over their lifetime.

• 43:22Speaker 01

  But in terms of greenhouse gases, it's actually worse.

• 43:25Rich Roll?

  Beyond that, there isn't enough land to support the production of cattle in that manner anyway to meet global demand for meat.

• 43:34Speaker 01

  Well, that's right.

• 43:35Rich Roll?

  So it's not a scalable, sustainable solution.

• 43:37Speaker 01

  No, and some of it, and the demand for beef is causing rainforest to be cleared, causing the Amazon to be cleared for grazing land, for example, or even to grow more soybeans in Brazil, which also about 70% of the soybean crop gets fed to cattle. And I think something over 20% goes to biofuels. And, you know, people say, I don't eat tofu because soybeans are bad, but actually, it's, you know, about 7% of the whole soybean crop is actually eaten directly by humans, either as beans or as tofu. And the great majority is getting funneled through cattle. And again, we lose most of the food value of the soybeans when we do that.

• 44:15Rich Roll?

  Right. Back to the earlier question about how your ideas have evolved since 1975, are there other things, like if you, so you are, you're reprising this book, right? You're coming out with a new edition of it. So I suspect there are, you know, things that you want to change, or I don't know how much you can talk about that specifically, but maybe generally, you know, how your thinking has changed and evolved in the many interceding years.

• 44:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. I'm producing, you know, what's effectively a new book that's been called Animal Liberation Now, which has, maintains the key ethical ideas, completely updates the relevant facts, and looks at progress that we've made and that we've not made from a more global perspective. So it has a lot of new things in it that went in the original edition. My thinking has developed in various respects. I suppose some of the things that I'm... More concerned with now are questions about wild animals, about should we be concerned

• 45:25Speaker 01

  about the suffering of wild animals and what might we do with that? I'm also interested in the development of alternatives to meat. I see that as a positive sign, both plant-based meats and the development of cellular meats, or meat that is actually produced from animal cells but does not require any living animal organism. And therefore is again far lower on greenhouse gas emissions, maybe has about 3% of the greenhouse gas emissions of meat from animals, and doesn't involve the animal suffering, of course, because there's no conscious animal there.

• 46:04Speaker 01

  So if we could do that, and if we could produce it at an economically competitive price with the meat that is being sold from animals, that might be another way of breaking this deadlock of trying to get people to move away from eating animal products that are so bad for animals and for the environment.

• 46:26Rich Roll?

  Well, all indications is that we are headed in that direction. It may take a little bit more time, because this is an expensive problem to solve, right? Figuring out how to culture these cells and create these, you know, quote-unquote "meat" products. They're able to do it, they've established that it can be done, but doing it economically, so it's on par with what it would cost to go to McDonald's or what have you. There's still a lot of work to be done, right?

• 46:56Speaker 01

  Yes, that's right. You can actually buy cellular chicken in Singapore now.

• 47:00Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 47:01Speaker 01

  It's licensed for sale there. But it's, yes, it's expensive. And I think the problem is they need to scale up, and there's some questions about building these huge bioreactors in which the process occurs. Can that be done? Will there be problems with things going astray? We really don't know, but there's quite a lot of capital being invested in it.

• 47:23Rich Roll?

  A lot of capital. But also the question of just, you know, consumer acclimation to it. There is that, the sort of getting over the icky factor of like, what is this and where does it come from? And, you know, having, you know, consumers acclimate to the idea of this new food.

• 47:43Speaker 01

  That's true, although consumers seem to think that the meat that they're buying is somehow natural and that's obviously transformed tremendously in the last 50 years. You know, the animals are bred differently, as I was saying. I mean, the chickens can't really live to maturity mostly because they're bred to eat so fast and put on weight so fast that a lot of them will just, you know, collapse and die if they were kept to older birds. In fact, it's so, it's so bad that with the breeding birds, because the parents, of course, have to have the same genes as the one we eat, they have to be starved, basically. Because if you've fed them as much as they want to eat, they would not be able to survive

• 48:25Speaker 01

  to breed, or they might not physically be able to breed because they would be too obese to actually do that. So, so they tend to be fed every second day, which means that they're desperately hungry all the time. And then, of course, the antibiotics are used because they're under, under stress. So a lot of antibiotics that are losing their efficacy because we're feeding them routinely to farm animals. So, yeah, this, this is not a natural product either, but somehow people have been persuaded to continue to eat it, think that, think of it as good. So, no doubt, there will be some, let's say, need to show consumers that this cellular meat, when it happens, is essentially still meat and is actually a safer and purer product than what they're getting from factory farm.

• 49:09Rich Roll?

  Have you, have you tried it?

• 49:10Speaker 01

  No, I've not had the opportunity to try it yet. I would certainly do so if I find myself in Singapore. I will go and do that.

• 49:17Rich Roll?

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

• 49:36Speaker 01

  Absolutely, yeah. In fact, I show my students a slide of that, which, which has two boxes. One box shows where the greatest amount of animal suffering is and animals being killed, and it's overwhelmingly farmed animals. And so it's like a big square of one color for farmed animals. And then down in, in the bottom corner, there's a tiny little square that shows the other things, like laboratory animals, pretty small too, although it's... Probably around a hundred million animals in the United States each year. Um, there's things like furs and then there's dogs and cats, which is just a tiny mark you can hardly see on, on my slide. And then, then the adjacent box shows where the dollars are going.

• 50:18Speaker 01

  And there it's, it's the dogs and cats, the animal shelters that is the dominant thing. And, uh, farmed animals are quite small and laboratory animals are quite small. Wild animals do rank larger there. So, uh, yeah, there's this complete disconnect between where the dollars go and where they're needed. We're starting to get a little more money going through effective altruism, actually mostly. Um, through, uh, foundations like, um, open philanthropy, which is funded by Dustin Moskowitz and Carrie Tuna, which is directing more money to, uh, oppose factory farming. But, um, but what's going, coming from the general public, um, is really not going to where the big animal suffering problems are. It's going to where people's emotions are.

• 51:01Speaker 01

  Um, and you know, it's, it's not that effective altruism doesn't want people to have emotions. It's just that they want people to feel the emotions and then think, you know, yes, I care about dogs and cats, but I also care about animals in general. I don't want pigs or cows or chickens to suffer. I don't want wild animals to suffer. I don't want even, uh, rats and mice to suffer in laboratory experiments. And so if I care about animals, I should be thinking about giving to where it will help the big problems and not the relatively small problems. That's what we need to get people to think about.

• 51:34Rich Roll?

  Sure, but isn't there a place for that emotional impulse? Like if you think about, so for example, in the, in the animal welfare space, like a, a lot of people donate towards these shelters, right? Like they, they rescue farmed animals, they create a beautiful place for them to live out their lives. And those places, and people feel good about supporting those places for obvious reasons. But those places also serve as sort of museums for people to visit, which gets, you know, perhaps other people who have no connection to this movement or these ideas, this is their inception point for even learning about this, an emotional connection to the reality of the problem that might in turn motivate them to

• 52:17Rich Roll?

  give or get involved in the solution. And maybe that solution is an effective altruism solution, or maybe it's something else, but I can't help but ask you, like, where is the emotional piece? Like, there has to be some importance and resonance for it on some level.

• 52:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely. I think that emotion is important. And with the animal sanctuaries that you mentioned, I think they do get people to see farmed animals as individuals, and that's important. They get them to see that some of them can actually grow old even, which of course farmed animals never do. It's the rescued ones that might. And those sanctuaries work, and many of them do, and I think they all should, as places of education that get people to see animals differently and encourage them to do more for farmed animals in general. So I think that's fine. And I think in terms of global poverty too, it's important, emotion plays a role.

• 53:16Speaker 01

  And it's important to tell the stories of individuals, of those children whose lives have been saved by a treatment that was made available through an organization that had community health workers going around and helping. Or, you know, restoring people's sight is something where you can really see the emotion. And the life you can save, the organization that I founded that recommends effective charities recommends a couple that do restore sight in countries where otherwise people with quite simple conditions like cataracts would never be able to see again. And you can see videos online of how somebody, you know, when the bandages are removed after an operation was performed and their eyes have recovered.

• 54:00Speaker 01

  And you see a woman who sees her child for the first time that she's ever seen that two-year-old child, let's say. And that's a wonderful, heartwarming experience. And I hope it will encourage people to think, yes, this is really a good thing to be doing. This is such an important work to support.

• 54:14Rich Roll?

  Right, yeah, that's really beautiful. The counter side of that, like as a thought experiment, as somebody whose primary driver is the reduction of suffering, if you think about the eradication of global poverty...

• 54:30Rich Roll?

  If you're raising the kind of life experience and income of people who have grown up in poverty, they then become, do they not then, what happens if those people then end up increasing their meat consumption and that drives cattle producers to clear more rainforest to produce that cattle? Like, when you look at the macro benefit versus harm calculus from a philosophical point of view, like, how do you make sense of that?

• 55:01Speaker 01

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

• 55:46Speaker 01

  choices, when they are out of poverty, they will eventually come to see that eating more meat is not the right thing to do. And we will have alternatives for them, that they can live good and healthy lives without eating more meat, or perhaps without eating any meat. And so that we'll get to the point where, I'm hoping we all get to, where we have expanded our concern for all animals, for all sentient beings, and are not just thinking about human beings. So, you know, as you say, you may, you may think that that's...

• 56:19Rich Roll?

  No, it's just interesting to think about. Like, I'm not wed to any answer, any, I think just grappling with that idea demonstrates how difficult problem solving is in the real world. If your, if your, if your goal really is, like, how do we best eradicate suffering? It's complicated, it's nuanced, and it's in the gray. I think there's, you know, another way of, of exploring that is, is the twist on your famous thought experiment of the girl in the, in the pond, right? So... First of all, for people who don't know, you know, maybe explain what that thought experiment is.

• 56:55Speaker 01

  Sure, okay. So, in an article I wrote a long time ago, I asked my readers to imagine that they're walking past a pond, let's say, an ornamental pond in a park, and let's say they know well that the pond is quite shallow. And as they walk past it, they notice that there's something struggling in the water. And when they look more closely, turns out it's a very small child, a child too small to stand up even in this shallow pond. So, you know, the first thing you would think about is, whoa, whose child is this? Who's looking after this child? But when you look around, you don't know why, but there's nobody else there. You're the only adult in sight. So, your second thought, I hope, is, gee, this child seems to be drowning.

• 57:36Speaker 01

  I better jump into the pond and save the child. But then, maybe you have a third and not-so-noble thought, and that is, I'm wearing my best clothes today because I was going somewhere special, and they're going to get ruined if I save the child by jumping into the pond. So, what if I just forget that I ever saw the child and go on my way? Would that be the wrong thing to do? And I hope that all your listeners are now saying, of course, that would be the wrong thing to do. How could you compare the value of a child's life with ruining your shoes or your clothes? So, the point of the example is to say, yes, that is the right reaction that you should have, and it would be the wrong thing to do. But it's not only in these unlikely circumstances where you have to ruin your clothes to save

• 58:21Speaker 01

  a child in a pond. It's happening to us all the time that, for the cost of replacing those clothes donated to an effective charity, we could save or certainly contribute towards saving the life of a child in a low-income country, perhaps by donating to the Against Malaria Foundation, which will distribute bed nets to protect children against malaria, or perhaps by distributing other medicines to prevent children dying of diarrhea, which is another significant cause of deaths in low-income countries.

• 58:54Rich Roll?

  And the point being that the physical location of the suffering child should not have an impact on the decision to give or not give.

• 59:03Speaker 01

  That's right. I think if you reflect on it and you ask yourself, does the fact that the child is physically close to me really make a moral difference to... How important it is to help that child, to save that child's life? I think most of us would say, no, that's not the important thing.

• 59:20Rich Roll?

  Sure, proximity being irrelevant. And then there's all kinds of other threads that can be pulled on this. Does temporality matter? Like, does the fact that this person is living at the same time? Like, we can predict that in the future, there will be people in this circumstance, right? And the fact that they don't live yet, should that be a factor in our decision to think about how much of our income we're going to give over to increase the well-being of the world?

• 59:51Speaker 01

  I think that if there are people who are going to be living in the future, and they're going to be either suffering or dying prematurely in ways we could prevent, the fact that it's in the future doesn't in itself matter. If we're uncertain as to whether we could do anything to prevent their suffering, that of course makes a difference. We have to discount the good of what we're trying to achieve by the odds against us actually managing to achieve it. So, yes, do act where the good consequences are more certain. But not just the future. The Oxford philosopher Derek Parfitt had an example about leaving broken glass somewhere in the forest. And let's say, it'll take a while, nobody's going to tread on it in coming years,

• 1:00:34Speaker 01

  but at some point, a child, maybe not yet born, will walk along that path and cut their feet on it. Does that mean that it didn't matter because they aren't born at the time that you left the broken glass in the path? No, it doesn't really matter. The pain of the child is the same, and it's just the same. It's just as significant if you can predict that it is very likely to happen.

• 1:00:58Rich Roll?

  And that opens the door to a whole discussion around long-termism, which is, you know, very related to, it's an extension of your work in many ways.

• 1:01:09Speaker 01

  Yes, that's true. There's one difference with the really long-termist predictions. If you're wanting to intervene, not In a way that's going to make a difference to somebody living in 20, 50, or 100 years. But in many centuries, or many millennia, or even millions of years. Then firstly, there is a quite different uncertainty factor that comes in in terms of how do we really know that what we're doing now will make a difference? But there's also the fact that when long-termists try to prevent extinction, and then they say, there could be these vast numbers of human beings living rich and fulfilling lives as long as we don't do something that causes our species to go extinct, let's say this century or the next couple of centuries.

• 1:01:54Speaker 01

  Then you do have to think about, well, if we did something that meant that we became extinct, these people wouldn't exist at all. So it wouldn't be like a child cutting their foot and getting hurt. It would be like, there just would be nobody alive on the planet. Maybe there would be no sentient beings in this part of the universe. And some philosophers think that that's different. That we don't have an obligation to ensure that future people exist. Rather, we have an obligation to say that if people exist in future, we don't do anything that will harm them.

• 1:02:30Rich Roll?

  Hmm. I want to get into life extension and the anti-aging stuff. Because I feel like that's the next logical step from what you just shared. But to put a pin on that for now and circle back to the girl drowning in the pond. The original question being, you know, coming out of this idea of suffering reduction. If you save that girl, which we all agree is the right thing to do if you're passing by. It can be presumed that that individual will go on to live some number of years and will consume, will consume many things, including probably animal products, which has its own downstream implications in terms of harm

• 1:03:13Rich Roll?

  and, you know, resource allocation, et cetera. So it's back to that. I think there was actually an article in your journal about this, right? Like, the Journal of Controversial Ideas, like, let's explore this idea. Like, if you're saving this individual altruistically, there's also harm that is incident to that. To that act, right?

• 1:03:38Speaker 01

  That's right. It was an article written by somebody with the name Michael Plant, which is his real name.

• 1:03:44Rich Roll?

  Oh, it's his real name, yeah, because people can submit these articles with pseudonyms, right?

• 1:03:48Speaker 01

  That's right, yeah. And if anyone wants to read it, by the way, as you mentioned, the Journal of Controversial Ideas, it's open access. Just Google Journal of Controversial Ideas, you'll get to it. Yeah, it's a thoughtful article, and it does raise that problem about the meat eaters whose lives we're saving, and ask whether we should be doing that. I'm somewhat unsure. I mean, I've actually talked to Michael Plant about this, and he's quite persuasive, but at the moment, I'm going to say, "Let's try and save those lives and hope that we can persuade people,

• 1:04:30Speaker 01

  move people towards a lifestyle in which we're not causing so much suffering to animals."

• 1:04:36Rich Roll?

  Right. I think in order to really flesh that out, you have to think about specism, this sense that, you know, we create a rank hierarchy amongst the animal kingdom based upon people's cognitive abilities and their level of sentience, right? Which is not necessarily correlated to their ability to suffer, but to answer that question about harm reduction, do you not have to place a value, you know, a greater value on one life over another, right, from a species perspective?

• 1:05:12Speaker 01

  So, I wouldn't do that on a species basis. That is, I wouldn't say that being a member of the species Homo sapiens automatically means that your life is more valuable than a member of any other species. I would say that beings who have cognitive capacities that enable them to think about their lives and think about the lives of others whom they love and care for in ways that are different and perhaps more profound and more lasting than other beings, that it's a greater tragedy when they die prematurely than when those other beings die prematurely. So, I don't think of...

• 1:05:53Speaker 01

  The lives of all sentient beings as being of equal value. I do think of their suffering as being equally important when we're talking about similar kinds and similar quantities of suffering, but not the preservation of their lives.

• 1:06:08Rich Roll?

  The other uncomfortable idea as a parent, when I think about the pond and the girl, is this idea of, like, we all sort of intuitively feel like we can prefer the well-being of our children over other children, and that is sort of accepted, like, of course I'm going to make sure that I'm providing for my children, even though they live in, you know, much better circumstances than most children in the world. But from a harm reduction perspective, would it not be better for me to allocate my resources more democratically so that, you know, my kids are sort of not getting any more than all these other children who need more?

• 1:06:54Speaker 01

  I think it would be better from a purely impartial perspective if we could do that, but, you know, we are mammals who've evolved.

• 1:07:02Rich Roll?

  But we're not gonna do that.

• 1:07:03Speaker 01

  No, we're not gonna, I agree, we're not gonna do it.

• 1:07:04Rich Roll?

  You're a parent, you didn't do that, right? And you're the godfather of all of this.

• 1:07:09Speaker 01

  Okay, so what I want to say about this is that it would be, from this impartial perspective, better if I were to do that, but I don't think we should blame ourselves for not doing it, because I think we should recognize that that's something that is basically imprinted in our genes, that we are going to care for our children more than the children of strangers. That's what our ancestors did for millions of years, and that's why we are here, because if they hadn't, then they wouldn't have survived, or their children wouldn't have survived. So I think we have to be somewhat indulgent to ourselves in that. Not as indulgent as many people are. I don't think we should be doing, you know, everything imaginable for our children.

• 1:07:54Speaker 01

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

• 1:08:26Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:08:33Rich Roll?

  There's a lot of science and money and energy right now going into the extension of lifespan, like this anti-aging movement that's afoot. And there are plenty of people hard at work on solving the problem of aging as if it is a disease with prospects of really substantially extending lifespan to 150 years and maybe even beyond with certain scientific breakthroughs on the horizon. And like any technology that the human race pioneers, there is, from my perspective, this sense of like inevitability. Like, we're not going to stop or slow down and think about the implications of this.

• 1:09:17Rich Roll?

  We're hell-bent on just achieving it for the sake of achievement because it's a mountain yet to be climbed. And I feel like there's an important philosophical conversation that we need to have about the implications of what the world might be like if suddenly people could live to 300 or beyond, from a wealth distribution perspective, from a rights perspective, and from like a risk calculus perspective. Like, what would it mean if you could live 300 years? What is your imprint or your responsibility? Like, your carbon footprint and your responsibility to the planet, to future generations? How do you think about, you know, how many children you're going to have if you're going to live that long? Things like this.

• 1:10:01Rich Roll?

  Is this anything that you've spent any time thinking about?

• 1:10:04Speaker 01

  I have spent some time thinking about it. I actually published an article on lifespan extension back in the 1980s when we were not... That close to making breakthroughs, but but people did think even then that we might not be very far away. And although, as you say, I agree that it's going to come at some point. I'm not convinced it's going to come really soon.

• 1:10:25Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 1:10:26Speaker 01

  It may be harder than people think. But yes, it certainly raises some serious ethical issues. And there could be some good sides to it. For example, you talked about views about risk. We might be less inclined to take risks if we have the prospect of living for hundreds of years. We might be less ready to fight in war, for example. We might not see wars of the kind we have now in Ukraine to the same extent, because people think, you know, I want to live a long time. I don't want to die in my twenties when I could live another 200 years. And also, when you think about things like climate change, how would that affect our views? Now, we're saying, well, we need to do this for our children and grandchildren, at least people of my generation are saying that.

• 1:11:09Speaker 01

  If we were going to be living 300 years, we would think, hey, we're going to be living in this world with a vastly different and less stable climate, so we better stop what we're doing right now. So that could be a good consequence. But there's a real danger that if you simply expand lives for those who can afford it, and you don't do anything to reduce population growth, of course, then the world will become even more populated than it is now. And that's a serious problem. So would that slow down? Would that stop? You'd have to hope so. Because otherwise, we're definitely going to be over capacity even more than we are already perhaps now.

• 1:11:51Rich Roll?

  It's hard to imagine that if and when those breakthroughs occur, that they will be reserved for the wealthy. Like, it's not going to be a democratic thing, right? So it's just going to drive a greater wedge in between the haves and the have-nots.

• 1:12:06Speaker 01

  Yes, that's certainly going to be what will happen initially. It might be one of those procedures that if you find, in fact, that you can find inexpensive ways of doing it, that it will spread. But initially, yeah, we're going to get the wealthy people living longer. It's the same thing with gene editing. I think we're going to get them being able to produce children who have enhanced capacities to earn well and to be useful in various ways. And so you will get wealthy people who are breeding children who are more significantly different genetically from low-income people than they are now.

• 1:12:48Speaker 01

  And you'll actually get a sort of genetically fixed caste society occurring. So I think these are serious problems for technologies that are in the pipeline.

• 1:13:01Rich Roll?

  Right. The other primary technology being the pioneering of new forms of consciousness through artificial intelligence, right? There's a lot of discussion around what constitutes sentience, what is consciousness, et cetera. And we're seeing in real time, like, these breakthroughs with, you know, ChatGPT and things like this, where artificial intelligence is mimicking behavior in a way that is sort of helping us to realize, like, we're kind of on the precipice of something new here? And what does this mean for the future of humanity? And how should we think about the ethics surrounding these developments?

• 1:13:40Speaker 01

  I think mimicking is the right word, though. At present, we do have these chat things that look as if you're having a conversation with a person who is conscious and thinking. But when you understand how it's actually working, I think you realize that that's not the case.

• 1:13:55Rich Roll?

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

• 1:14:24Speaker 01

  I think the difficulty is in working out when one of these superintelligent artificial general intelligence actually becomes conscious, because if, in fact, it's very good at mimicking our behavior, and if it's also essentially a black box, that is, we don't really understand how it's doing what it's doing, and there is AI where we can't really say why it's making the judgments that it's making, then it's going to be hard to know, hard to distinguish conscious processing from simply very rapid mechanical processing and learning. And it will take an effort to understand how it's working and why it's doing what it is.

• 1:15:08Speaker 01

  But I think that is the clue. We need to try to understand what's going on. And if we're simply saying, "Well, we trained it on vast quantities of text, and it absorbed that, and then we trained it as to how to give the right answers, and it's just doing that," then I think it's clear that it's not a conscious being.

• 1:15:28Rich Roll?

  Right, but on some level already, we're in a situation where we don't quite know how it's coming up with the right answer. Like, we know it's self-reinforcing on some level, but already the computer scientists, like, this sort of process by which it's operating has already begun to elude the creators of the technology.

• 1:15:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:15:49Rich Roll?

  So, that's sort of frightening.

• 1:15:51Speaker 01

  It is frightening.

• 1:15:52Rich Roll?

  Right?

• 1:15:52Speaker 01

  It's frightening in a variety of ways, yes.

• 1:15:54Rich Roll?

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

• 1:16:13Speaker 01

  Right. And if we simply ask it and say, you know, is it okay for me to flick the switch and turn you off?

• 1:16:19Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:16:20Speaker 01

  And it probably, you know, will take this as, oh, does that mean you're killing me? And then, you know, I know what people say about being killed. So it comes out with the answer that a person would give if you said, I'm going to kill you. That's not going to be persuasive.

• 1:16:33Rich Roll?

  This is the dystopian world in which we're headed, Peter. How are we going to make sense of this? How are we going to survive this impending apocalypse?

• 1:16:41Speaker 01

  So I'm not convinced that we're that close to this particular apocalypse yet, right? I think we have lots of problems. I'd much rather focus on climate change, extreme poverty, getting rid of factory farming. I think the robot apocalypse is still some distance ahead of us. And I don't know that we yet have a good enough handle as to how it's going to happen. So I would rather wait and see.

• 1:17:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, I mean, I think it's good to be thinking about these things. And I know you, like, there are other Oxford philosophers who are on this, Nick Bostrom and Toby Ord, right, have written about this extensively. And it's sexy and it's fun, you know, to, it feels very, you know, Terminator world to like, think about these problems. And certainly, at some point, perhaps this, these are very real things that we need to grapple with. But what's interesting to me about it is the obsession with trying to understand the ethics around emergent, like, robotic consciousness belies the fact that currently, there are billions of animals that we're sacrificing constantly for our food system, and we don't

• 1:17:47Rich Roll?

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

• 1:18:07Speaker 01

  Yes, that's right. I actually co-authored an article with a Hong Kong researcher called Tsai Yip-Fai, who looked, and he looked at a whole lot of courses on AI ethics and a whole lot of AI ethics statements. And lots of them take very seriously this still hypothetical question of what would be the moral status of conscious AI. But pretty much none of them actually take seriously the effect of the the present impact that AI is having on sentient beings, non-human sentient beings, on on animals. They of course deal with impact of AI on humans. But we show in the article that AI is already having a major impact on non-human animals.

• 1:18:50Speaker 01

  For example, in some countries, it's being used to run factory farms, not really in the United States, but that's happening in China, it's happening in in Europe to some extent.

• 1:18:58Rich Roll?

  Just automated, like sort of automated factory farms where algorithms are dictating feeding schedules and things like that?

• 1:19:05Speaker 01

  That's right. Yes, they're looking, that's right, and they are sensors that are observing animal behavior and adjusting the what is done to the animals by how they're behaving, possibly detecting diseases early, which could be a good thing. But they're also going to enable animals to be even more crowded because of the AI will actually be geared to where is it most profitable, what's the point at which it's most profitable.

• 1:19:31Rich Roll?

  Sure. It's a very, it's a very rudimentary matrix where this living being is exists for the purpose of resource extraction, right?

• 1:19:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:19:40Rich Roll?

  A battery.

• 1:19:42Speaker 01

  That's right, exactly, for resource extraction and and not treated as a thing as as an end in itself, as a sentient being with a moral status that is different from from that of a of a thing, of a product.

• 1:19:54Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's, that's wild. I mean, do you, when you cast your gaze into the future, are you an optimistic person? Or, you know, how do you, how do you, how is all this gonna, how is all this playing out?

• 1:20:08Speaker 01

  I've always been optimistic. I wrote a book back in the eighties called The Expanding Circle, in which I talked about the way in which throughout human history, we have pushed the boundaries of our moral sphere atwards from from the tribe to larger groups, to national groups, to racial or ethnic groups, and finally, in the 20th century, to recognizing with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that all human beings have certain basic rights. And I looked forward to pushing that beyond the boundaries of our species to non-human animals, and there are some signs of that happening. But over the last 20 years, there have been backward steps as well,

• 1:20:50Speaker 01

  both in terms of human relations and the idea that we have a pretty naked war of aggression going on right now with Russia's invasion of Ukraine. And people dying and being killed is something that makes it hard to be optimistic about our future. But also in terms of the treatment of animals, we haven't continued to push outwards in the way that I had hoped. And finally, climate change is still, you know, a huge problem that we have not done enough about. And if we don't solve that, then things are going to go backwards. And we will be in greater need and no doubt we'll have

• 1:21:29Speaker 01

  climate wars because of huge numbers of refugees wanting to leave places where they can no longer live and grow their own food. So I'm more agnostic now about whether I think the future is going to be positive.

• 1:21:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah. The expanding circles concept was another thing that you talked about with Ryan Holiday. He was analogizing it, I think it was Heracles who had written about this, a stoic.

• 1:21:57Speaker 01

  Yes, I didn't even really know that.

• 1:21:58Rich Roll?

  Which is pretty cool how you you tapped into the, you know, greater consciousness to explore that idea. But I think, you know, when you think about or sort of the erosion of your optimism, to me, it just feels like human beings are not very well wired for decision making around long-term consequences, right? Like, we're acting in our self-interest. It's very difficult for us to think about future generations. And when you see our inability to take appropriate action with respect to climate change, there's a feeling of, of like, we're somehow neutered, like whether there's not enough political capital

• 1:22:41Rich Roll?

  or we can't marshal our incentive structure to, you know, create better decision making around this. It's easy to not be optimistic about how we're going to solve this problem because there's so much indicia of us not taking action where we should.

• 1:22:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, and part of the problem, I think, is that we do not have strong global organizations, and we really need that. I also wrote a book called One World, which was published just after 9/11. And in that, I was looking towards the strengthening of global institutions, because I argued that we need them to deal with climate change. We just have one atmosphere. You can't govern climate change with sovereign nations, because the greenhouse gases that we emit across the United States, obviously, spread everywhere. Also, I thought that we needed a world trading organization that was more geared towards helping people in extreme poverty. We like that.

• 1:23:42Speaker 01

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

• 1:24:26Speaker 01

  and hasn't been able to make progress towards better trading regimes for countries that are low-income and disadvantaged by present systems. So perhaps we've made some progress in terms of global poverty. That has been reduced over that 20-year period quite dramatically. But that's really the one bright spot in this picture.

• 1:24:51Speaker 01

  That's why it's hard to see that positive future.

• 1:24:55Rich Roll?

  Yeah, global cooperation seems very elusive.

• 1:25:01Speaker 01

  It's that definitely we've gone back with with the conflict between Russia and the West now and China as well, not being part of global trading order. The hope was that if they realized that they need to trade and the trade is helping them, helping their economy and helping to lift hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty, that then they would be a participant in this and we would have a multipolar world. Well, I suppose it's it's multipolar, but there's more confrontation than there was 20 years ago.

• 1:25:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and these sort of global gatherings are, you know, often about political expediency. You know, there's, there's a lot of words being said, but in terms of like real world action with the intended positive effect, that doesn't seem to occur with any regularity.

• 1:25:55Speaker 01

  Certainly not in the way that it needs to occur to solve the problem.

• 1:25:58Rich Roll?

  But to hearken that Stoic tradition of the intersection of philosophy and politics, you know, if there were, at least in national politics, a seat, you know, in the White House for like the philosopher in chief, I'm sure lots of people have called upon you for your input and advice on various issues, but if that was actually like a cabinet position, like you're in a parallel universe and you're sitting there in the Situation Room or what or in the Oval Office, what have you, like, what is the guidance or the counsel that you could give like the president or our government to help us start to make better decisions about these problems?

• 1:26:39Speaker 01

  I would say that the United States has to lead and it has to be prepared to lead in ways that are clearly genuine and bona fide and saying, look, we will do these things, we will start doing them, we will do what is our fair share on things like climate change and extreme poverty, and that's doing a lot more than we're doing now on either of those issues, and we want you to join in and let's, let's be open and transparent about what we're all doing so that we can see who's doing their fair share and. You know, I hope if we make that gesture, you'll match it and do the same and we'll start to build trust and cooperation in the things that

• 1:27:23Speaker 01

  need to be done and that can only be done if all the major global players participate.

• 1:27:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And from an economic perspective, you know, so much of your work and your focus is on giving and how to effectively give. But how do you think about other economic modalities like the notion of conscious capitalism? Or, you know, venture capital that is kind of impact oriented? Like I'm thinking of, do you know Jacqueline Novogratz and Acumen and the work that she's doing to eradicate poverty and kind of, you know, like there are other ways beyond just the traditional notion of giving to NGOs and nonprofits. Like, how do those operate in your thinking?

• 1:28:06Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I think we need to try them all and see what works. Social enterprises that do producer return, that are for-profit organizations, but concerned to have a social impact are things worth doing. I've actually made a small investment in an organization that is building low-income housing in Kenya on a for-profit basis. But the people there, who I know some of, who are genuine people who've worked in aid, see an opportunity here to fill the gap between the slums that exist in places like Nairobi and the housing that the wealthy can afford.

• 1:28:44Speaker 01

  So I did this because I want to see that it works. I want to have an interest in it and be able to follow it. And I have, you know, no objection, in fact, I'm all in favor of people trying new ideas. I think it's relatively new to see what works and what is going to spread and multiply. But I hope some of these things will because they certainly have the potential to do good.

• 1:29:06Rich Roll?

  Who else is leading the way here? Like when you think of people who are really doing the right thing, making a real positive change and doing it in innovative ways?

• 1:29:17Speaker 01

  Well, I think some of the foundations that have been set up to do good things, like I already mentioned Dustin Moskowitz and Carrie Tuna, who's Good Ventures Foundation, set up Open Philanthropy and supporting GiveWell too. And those are both organizations that are trying to assess what's the best thing you can do to have a positive impact on the world. GiveWell, like The Life You Can Save, is concerned with global poverty and with assessing which are the most effective charities in the field of global poverty, whereas Open Philanthropy is much broader and is looking at a whole range of different areas and trying to assess where you can make that impact.

• 1:29:59Speaker 01

  So I think those are really important things to do because we need to have that knowledge and then we can follow through. I think Bill Gates has been a pioneer too, I should say, in setting up the Gates Foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates, I should say, and with support from Warren Buffett. They're also doing a lot of good things, saving a lot of lives, improving the quality of many lives. So I think they deserve recognition and applause for having made that contribution and also, incidentally, for trying to persuade other billionaires to do the same through the Giving Pledge.

• 1:30:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah, is there a different standard for the billionaire class?

• 1:30:37Speaker 01

  So obviously, if you have that much, you ought to be giving a lot more, right? Yes.

• 1:30:43Rich Roll?

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

• 1:31:06Speaker 01

  If you're thinking about the sort of boosting themselves into space for...

• 1:31:11Rich Roll?

  Should they be purchasing Twitter or should they be, you know?

• 1:31:15Speaker 01

  I wish Elon Musk had stayed with developing better batteries so that we can all be driving electric vehicles sooner. That seems to me to be his major contribution so far. I acknowledge that behind his idea of colonizing Mars is this idea of reducing the risk of extinction, that if we had a self-sustaining human colony on Mars, and let's say there was a nuclear war on this planet that wiped everybody out here, well, you would still have our species and maybe in a few hundred years, they could come back to a less radioactive Earth and

• 1:31:54Speaker 01

  reestablish things here or explore other planets elsewhere. So, it's not that it's completely self-indulgent to try to develop colonies on Mars, but I do think that there are more urgent issues that we could deal with here first.

• 1:32:11Rich Roll?

  Right, well, we can leave that with that on that subject. And let it be known that you do put your money where your mouth is. You recently were the recipient of this $1 million prize honoring you for your work in philosophy and humanities, and that prize was quickly dispatched to the life you can save, your organization, and then to, I think, 50% got spread out to charities that that organization has sort of vetted and supported, yes, and then the other half went to animal rights charities?

• 1:32:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, basically, anti-factory farming, pro-veg, pro-vegan organizations, particularly those working in outside the Western countries to try to develop those ideas there.

• 1:32:56Rich Roll?

  Right. And so I'm interested in the kind of actual emotional experience of receiving a million dollars. And I mean, what is that, like, does it hit your bank account and then you have to like send it back out? Or can you, I mean, obviously, it's sort of theoretical, right? Because you're not, you're just, okay, it's going to pass through you to these other things, but it is kind of a rare experience to be like, wow, there's a million, like, they're giving me a million dollars? Like, was there ever a moment where you're like, I need to give all of it? You have kids, you have grandkids.

• 1:33:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:33:30Rich Roll?

  You know, but this is who you are, right? So I'm just walk me through it.

• 1:33:34Speaker 01

  It is who I am. And also, I've been a Princeton professor for more than 20 years on a comfortable salary. So I don't really feel that I need not. Well, I definitely didn't need it. And I don't even think that it would have made a big difference to my happiness. You know, I'm not the kind of person who wants to dine out at, you know, $300 restaurants and drink fine wines. I don't need to. When I travel, I don't want to live in luxury resorts. Actually, they occasionally get put up in these places by conferences and so on. And they they just make me feel a bit uncomfortable.

• 1:34:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:10Speaker 01

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

• 1:34:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah, sure. I mean, I think that's a really important piece because we deluded ourselves into believing that this, that this, you know, wealth will be the thing that makes us happy. But all the evidence suggests and establishes that beyond a certain threshold point, it doesn't do that at all. And in fact, it is in the giving that we that we are kind of engendered with this sense of fulfillment, which is really what we're all kind of after, right? So far be it from being this, you know, self flagellating pursuit. It's actually self serving in that regard.

• 1:35:22Speaker 01

  That's right, yeah.

• 1:35:24Rich Roll?

  While you're also alleviating suffering and doing all this good in the world, yeah.

• 1:35:28Speaker 01

  So Charlie Bressler, who's the person with whom I really cofounded The Life You Can Save, was, before he read the book that I wrote, The Life You Can Save, president of a men's clothing retail chain in the United States. So he had earned quite a lot of money. But he says that by cofounding The Life You Can Save, the first life that he saved was his own. Because he got so much more satisfaction and fulfillment, together with his wife, from helping to establish the organization. And he became the CEO of it on negative income. Because he didn't take any salary and he actually donated to it. So he found that really fulfilling. And I agree.

• 1:36:11Speaker 01

  You know, if you pursue the materialist dream, dream in inverted commas, it doesn't fulfill you. You give yourself a purpose and then the purpose is to get more and more money. And for what? Whereas if you use that for the purposes of saying, "I can do something to help others." And that's a really lasting and important value. You're going to benefit yourself as well as others.

• 1:36:41Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:36:43Rich Roll?

  That's really beautiful. And I think for people who are listening to this, who are now curious about what that might look like for their own lives, they can go to your website for The Life You Can Save. And there they can sort of get a sense of some of these kind of vetted charities that are doing good in the world, right? Like you've done the work to say, "We know these ones are the best bang for your buck" in terms of suffering reduction.

• 1:37:12Speaker 01

  That's right. You can go to thelifeyoucansave.org and you can look at the charities that we recommend and click on, get more details on each one. You can also download the book absolutely free as a ebook.

• 1:37:26Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:37:27Speaker 01

  Audiobook, and I'm delighted that the audiobook, different chapters were read by different people. My friend Paul Simon, the singer songwriter, read one.

• 1:37:38Rich Roll?

  Kristen Bell.

• 1:37:39Speaker 01

  Yes, he read one.

• 1:37:40Rich Roll?

  You got Stephen Fry.

• 1:37:42Speaker 01

  Stephen Fry, that's right.

• 1:37:43Rich Roll?

  All the great voices.

• 1:37:43Speaker 01

  So we have, yeah, we have a series of voices and different accents in English. We had Shabana Asmi, who's an Indian actress, reading it in her. And we have Winnie Alma, who's an African. So we have a lot of different voices, which gives it a kind of global sense. Of course, they're all reading in English, but it's global in that sense. And it is a book about a global problem.

• 1:38:04Rich Roll?

  It wasn't, and it wasn't always free, right?

• 1:38:06Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 1:38:07Rich Roll?

  It's the re-release where you've kind of positioned it this way.

• 1:38:09Speaker 01

  So in fact, yeah, it was initially published by Random House. And at some point, Charlie said, let's try and get the rights back so that we can make it free. So we had long negotiations with Random House. We had to pay for it. And I wasn't sure that that was the best investment of our funds, given that we were trying to raise funds to help save lives. But Charlie persuaded me that in the long run, it would save a lot more lives. And because we've now distributed far more copies of the book than Random House would have if we left the rights with them. And a lot of people have read it and donated. And in fact, someone said, this book was free, but it's actually the most expensive book I've ever read.

• 1:38:47Rich Roll?

  [laughing]

• 1:38:48Speaker 01

  Because they donated significantly.

• 1:38:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:51Speaker 01

  So, so, yeah, it has, it has paid off getting the rights back.

• 1:38:55Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. And you can, the audiobook is that, you could just get it on Spotify, like, listen to it like you would listen to a podcast, just in chapters, you know,

• 1:39:03Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:39:04Rich Roll?

  At different episodes, which is pretty cool. So it's very easy to find. You don't have to go to Audible or anything like that.

• 1:39:09Speaker 01

  Yep, that's right. And if you prefer to read in paper, we are actually having, especially for listeners to your podcast, we're asking them to donate, and we're having matching funds. And they can, we'll even mail a paperback copy of the book to them if they prefer that.

• 1:39:25Rich Roll?

  Right. I believe, and this is incredibly generous. So here's what everybody who's watching or listening is going to do. You're going to go to thelifeyoucansave.org/richroll, and you can learn more about the organization and where your funds will be allocated. If you donate there, the organization is going to match you dollar for dollar, up to $25,000 total, right? And you can get the book there. So that's pretty good. And incredibly generous. So. Check it out.

• 1:39:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks for the opportunity to reach your listeners. I think it's your listeners are the kind of people who I imagine a lot of them will want to support this and we hope to hear from them.

• 1:40:08Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's a very special thing and you know, I can't, first of all, I can't thank you enough for taking time out of your venture back to Australia to spend time with me today. And I just, I hold you in the highest regard and I think you're, the legacy of the work that you're doing is just, it's an extraordinary thing and I can't tell you what an impact you've had on my life and the life of millions and millions of people. It's just, it's such a worthy, it's a worthy life well-lived, sir, that you, that you, you've walked a certain path that I think is just extraordinarily laudable and rare.

• 1:40:46Speaker 01

  Well, thank you very much, Rich. I really do appreciate that. I know that we're both working for a lot of the same causes and we're both trying to leave the world a better place than it would have been if we hadn't been here. So I really appreciate your words and what you're doing.

• 1:41:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah, thank you. So when the updated version of Animal Liberation is coming out in the spring, I think?

• 1:41:08Speaker 01

  That's in May, yes.

• 1:41:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah, okay, well, maybe you can come back here and we could talk a little bit more about that, which would be great. So thank you. And I need the phone number of your surf instructor for when I go to Australia.

• 1:41:19Speaker 01

  Ah, yes, Rusty Miller.

• 1:41:21Rich Roll?

  You didn't even talk about surfing!

• 1:41:23Speaker 01

  We haven't talked about surfing, no, but I know you're going to Byron Bay, which is one of the most beautiful places in Australia and I can put you in touch with a former US surfing champion who is a great surfing guy and a surfing guru. And either he or his daughter will be very happy to get you on a board in the waves there.

• 1:41:42Rich Roll?

  Excellent, well, I'm holding you to it. All right, thank you, Peter. Cheers.

• 1:41:46Speaker 01

  Thanks, Rich.

• 1:41:47Rich Roll?

  Lads.

• 1:41:56Rich Roll?

  That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as The Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review

• 1:42:39Rich Roll?

  and/or comment. Supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated, and sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, of course, awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, The Meal Planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo, with additional audio engineering by Cale Curtis. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis, with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davy Greenberg. Graphic

• 1:43:21Rich Roll?

  and social media assets courtesy of Daniel Salis, Dan Drake, and A.J. Akpodiate. Thank you, Georgia Whaley, for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants. Namaste.