#120: Will MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Y Combinator, and Artificial Intelligence

Will MacAskill (@willmacaskill https://twitter.com/willmacaskill) is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at Lincoln College, Oxford. Just 28 years old, he is likely the youngest associate (i.e. tenured) professor of philosophy in the world. Will is the author of Doing Good Better http://amzn.to/1OSLV35 and a co-founder of the "effective altruism" movement. He has pledged to donate everything he earns over ~$36,000 per year to whatever charities he believes will be most effective. He has also cofounded two well-known non-profits: 80,000 Hours https://80000hours.org/, which provides research and advice on how you can best make a difference through your career, and Giving What We Can https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/, which encourages people to commit to give at least 10% of their income to the most effective charities. Between them, they have raised more than $450 million in lifetime pledged donations, and are in the top 1% of non-profits in terms of growth. He is one of the few non-profit founders who have gone through Y Combinator https://www.ycombinator.com/; for-profit companies get $120,000 for 7% of equity; as a non-profit, 80,000 Hours got $100,000 for 0% of equity. In this episode, we discuss his story and a ton of actionable tips, including: Why "following your passion" in a career is often a mistake. Thought experiments: Pascal's Wager versus Pascal's Mugging Why working for a non-profit straight out of college is also a mistake. How it's possible to "hack" doing good in the same way you would a business. Implications of artificial intelligence. The best ways to really evaluate if you (or charities) are going good in the world. The reasons donating to disaster relief typically isn't the best use of your money. Why ethical consumerism typically isn't a great way to do good. Running a non-profit in the Harvard/Navy SEALs of startup incubators: Y Combinator This podcast is brought to you by Wealthfront https://wealthfront.com/tim. Wealthfront is a massively disruptive (in a good way) set-it-and-forget-it investing service, led by technologists from places like Apple and world-famous investors. It has exploded in popularity in the last 2 years and now has more than $2.5B under management. In fact, some of my good investor friends in Silicon Valley have millions of their own money in Wealthfront. Why? Because you can get services previously limited to the ultra-wealthy and only pay pennies on the dollar for them, and it's all through smarter software instead of retail locations and bloated sales teams. Check out wealthfront.com/tim http://wealthfront.com/tim, take their risk assessment quiz, which only takes 2-5 minutes, and they'll show you—for free–exactly the portfolio they'd put you in. If you want to just take their advice and do it yourself, you can. Or, as I would, you can set it and forget it. Well worth a few minutes: wealthfront.com/tim http://wealthfront.com/tim. Mandatory disclaimer: Wealthfront Inc. is an SEC registered Investment Advisor. Investing in securities involves risks, and there is the possibility of losing money. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Please visit Wealthfront dot com to read their full disclosure. This podcast is also brought to you by Mizzen + Main http://mizzenandmain.com/collections/tim. These are the only "dress" shirts I now travel with -- fancy enough for important dinners but made from athletic, sweat-wicking material http://fourhourworkweek.com/shirts. No more ironing, no more steaming, no more hassle. Click here for the exact shirts I wear most often http://mizzenandmain.com/collections/tim. Don't forget to use the code "TIM" at checkout. Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast.

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• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:08Speaker 01

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• 0:23Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront, and this is a very unique sponsor. Wealthfront is a massively disruptive, in a good way, set-it-and-forget-it investing service, led by technologists from places like Apple and world-famous investors. It has exploded in popularity in the last two years, and they now have more than $2.5 billion under management. In fact, some of my very good friends, investors in Silicon Valley, have millions of their own money in Wealthfront. So the question is, why? Why is it so popular? Why is it unique? Because you can get services previously reserved for the ultra-wealthy, but only pay pennies on the dollar for them. And this is because they use smarter software instead of retail locations, bloated sales teams, etc. And I'll come back to that in a second. I suggest you check out wealthfront.com/tim.

• 1:08Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:50Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:32Tim Ferriss?

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• 3:17Tim Ferriss?

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• 3:34Tim Ferriss?

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• 4:20Tim Ferriss?

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• 4:44Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. I am looking out over a highway from a hotel next to JFK because I forgot my passport in California. I missed my flight. In any case, on this show, it is always my job to try to deconstruct world-class performers and identify the routines, the habits, the decisions that help them to become who they are. And in this episode, we have a really fun guest, Will McCaskill. Will McCaskill is an associate professor in philosophy at Lincoln College, which is at Oxford. He is 28 years old, which makes him likely the youngest associate. In other words, tenured professor of philosophy in the world. He is co-founder of the Effective Altruism Movement, which I'm a huge supporter of,

• 5:27Tim Ferriss?

  and author of Doing Good Better. He has pledged to donate everything he earns over 36K roughly per year to whatever charities he believes will be most effective. He has co-founded two well-known nonprofits, 80,000 Hours and Giving What We Can, and we'll get into both of those. But more important, we will talk about the lessons he's learned, how to evaluate doing good, how to hack doing good as you would in business. And he has been exposed to business. He's one of the few nonprofit founders who have gone through Y Combinator, which is effectively the Harvard Navy SEAL equivalent for startup incubators based in Silicon Valley. And his stories are just fascinating. We talk about many different things.

• 6:12Tim Ferriss?

  We cover a lot of ground. Everything from artificial intelligence to why following your passion in a career is often a mistake, how on earth he became a tenured professor at his young age, thought experiments like Pascal's wager versus Pascal's mugging. And even if you have no interest in nonprofits, charities, this will We'll help teach you how to think more effectively, how to evaluate things more effectively. We'll also talk about some specifics, why donating to disaster relief or purchasing things through ethical consumerism are generally not a great way to do good. But we talk about his story, his decisions, and there's a lot to be learned. So, say hello to him on the interwebs.

• 6:53Tim Ferriss?

  Will is @willmacaskill, at W I L L M A C A S K I L L on Twitter. And please enjoy our conversation. Thanks for listening. Will, welcome to the show.

• 7:07Speaker 03

  Thank you for having me on.

• 7:09Tim Ferriss?

  I really appreciate you making the time. And where do we find you on the planet Earth at this moment?

• 7:14Speaker 03

  I'm in Oxford in the United Kingdom at the moment.

• 7:18Tim Ferriss?

  And now, you are an associate professor in philosophy at Lincoln College, is that right?

• 7:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, Lincoln College, Oxford University.

• 7:26Tim Ferriss?

  And is Lincoln College, it's not a residential college. So, for instance, at Princeton, they have different residential colleges. What is the significance of the colleges within Oxford?

• 7:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a really big thing, actually. So, almost all your teaching goes on in college. You live there, you eat there, most of your friends are there while you're a student at the university. And actually, all the colleges predate the university. So, that's really the core of your life at Oxford. And then you get examined and go to lectures at the university itself.

• 7:57Tim Ferriss?

  And when you receive a degree, is it from a particular college? Do you have to attribute it to the college, or is it simply Oxford?

• 8:04Speaker 03

  No, the degree is just from the university.

• 8:06Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. So, let's then begin. You do quite a few things. When someone asks you, what do you do? How do you answer that question?

• 8:15Speaker 03

  That's right. So, depending on whether I want to be low-key or not, I'll tell them I'm Associate Professor of Philosophy at Oxford University. But I'm also one of the co-founders of the Effective Altruism Movement, where that's a community of people who are dedicated to using their time and money as effectively as possible to make the world a better place. And to that end, I co-founded a couple of nonprofits. Giving What We Can, which encourages people to give at least 10% of their income to the most effective charities. And 80,000 Hours, named after the number of hours you typically work in your life, which is about giving advice to people to ensure that if they want to pursue a career with a big impact, they can do as much good as they can.

• 8:58Tim Ferriss?

  And what is the, how do you answer the question, what makes your brand of altruism effective? And maybe we can back into that, where there was a tweet I saw at one point from Bill Gates, and it was a data nerd after my own heart, and he linked to an article about you. I think it was a profile on The Atlantic.

• 9:18Speaker 03

  That's exactly right.

• 9:20Tim Ferriss?

  So if you're talking to a skeptic and they say, okay, well, what makes it effective?

• 9:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, so the key is that we take a kind of scientific approach to doing good. So that's using high quality evidence, really good data, thinking about the outcomes that your actions do, rather than just what's a really sexy intervention, or what makes you feel good, but actually what's helping people the most. And, you know, drawing on years of research now, as well as using careful, reflective, self-critical reasoning, in order to work out what are those things that aren't just making a difference, but are making the most difference.

• 9:54Tim Ferriss?

  And what are some common mistakes? And just so people listening understand this, this isn't a disguised sell for nonprofit donations on my part. This is a conversation that I've wanted to have with you, because we have a mutual friend in Ryan Holiday, and who is himself a philosopher of sorts, huge fan of Stoic philosophy, as am I, and he's a fan of yours, and I was very interested to connect. So just for those people who are wondering if this is a dressed up sales pitch, it is not. The, what are common mistakes that people make when giving? And I've had many of my own struggles with providing time and money to various causes

• 10:36Tim Ferriss?

  and nonprofits, that maybe we'll dig into some of them specifically. But what are, what are common mistakes or misallocation of resources that you see very commonly?

• 10:49Speaker 03

  So yeah, I think the biggest mistake of all is just not really thinking or doing any of a search about where you're donating. So I mean, imagine if someone came up to you in the street and told you about this company that they'd set up, or that they were representing, and that you should really invest in this company, and they tell you about how great the company is, and then ask you right there on the street, well, are you going to make an investment?

• 11:09Tim Ferriss?

  Sounds like Silicon Valley right now.

• 11:12Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, maybe it's a little bit different in the day. Certainly here in Oxford, people would be...

• 11:19Tim Ferriss?

  Generally not a good idea.

• 11:21Speaker 03

  Generally not a good idea. But yet, we're happy to do that when it comes to charities. We're happy to spend our money to try and help others, but without ever actually doing the research to work out, you know, what's gonna actually have the biggest impact. And there are evaluators now, like givewell.org, that are doing this research for us, so that we can actually follow their recommendations, because it does take quite a bit of time.

• 11:45Tim Ferriss?

  How does givewell.org compare to, say, Charity Navigator or something like that?

• 11:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, there are really big differences. So Charity Navigator focuses just on the financials and just on the aspects of the charity itself, where one core part of it is, how much does the charity spend on overheads? What's the percentage spent on administration? But that's not a great metric, because imagine you've got some really lousy program. You're giving away donuts to hungry police officers or something, something that's not gonna do very much good. And instead, but you've got this amazingly low overhead. You're spending almost nothing on administration. Well, you're still gonna be a lousy charity. You can't make a lousy charity good by having a very low overhead.

• 12:30Tim Ferriss?

  Right, got it. So they're looking at the sort of the operational efficiencies, but whether something is efficient or not, it can still be very ineffective.

• 12:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's exactly right. So you've got to look at what program the charity's implementing as well. And there, there's absolutely huge differences. So three-quarters of social programs, when put to the test using trials, are found to have no effect at all. They just don't actually improve people's lives. Some are even actively harmful. But then, among the ones that are good, that do make a difference, there's still a vast discrepancy. The best ones are hundreds of times as good as merely ones that just do some amount of good.

• 13:09Tim Ferriss?

  And it seems like you are a skeptic of disaster relief. Is that a fair statement? Or how would you unpack that?

• 13:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I mean, I think funding disaster relief, you know, it should happen for sure. When there's a massive crisis like the Haitian earthquake, money should be going to it. And a lot of money, in fact. But then the question is, what should you as an individual donor do? And natural disasters, because they get so much press coverage and so much media attention, they're massively overfunded compared to what I'd call ongoing natural disasters like the 400,000 people who die of malaria every year, but that gets far less media coverage. And in fact, even in the case of the Japanese earthquake, the Japanese Red Cross issued a statement saying, we do not want any money. We do not need money with a fourth richest country in the world. We have resources to deal with this problem.

• 14:04Speaker 03

  But yet they still got $5 billion in donations, which was about the same as got allocated to Haiti, which is one of the poorest countries in the world.

• 14:12Tim Ferriss?

  Understood. And let's, let's take a step back for a minute, because I know we could, we could really dig into the sort of tactics and science and numbers behind what you do. But you are currently 28, is that right?

• 14:30Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 14:31Tim Ferriss?

  And you are a tenured professor of philosophy.

• 14:36Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 14:37Tim Ferriss?

  Where does that put you on the spectrum of tenured professors of philosophy worldwide? Age wise?

• 14:45Speaker 03

  Age wise, it's hard to verify, but I suspect I might be the youngest in the world.

• 14:50Tim Ferriss?

  And to what do you attribute that? Why you? Yeah. It's a competitive, it's a very competitive field. As I understand it, the philosophy, I want to ask a question about this, but you know, philosophy post grants, having the highest GRE scores out of any subject. So what are the, what are the?

• 15:15Tim Ferriss?

  What are the factors that contributed to you becoming tenured at such a young age?

• 15:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I definitely think it's not because I'm the smartest person. I'm very confident I'm not. I know lots of people who are like have exceptionally high IQs around these places. And also not, I think, because I put in the most number of hours because I do so much other stuff as well. But I think the two things are just, one is, yeah, one is like actually kind of understanding, kind of, you know, really thinking about what your goals are and understanding, how is it best to achieve those goals? Which seems like, you know, that's pretty common sense. You'd think like everyone would do that. But actually, most people don't. Most people spend, for example, years and years kind of slugging away just on their dissertation, their PhD,

• 16:04Speaker 03

  even though that's normally read by about four people in the world, rather than focusing, say, on publishing really good articles, which are read by much more people and much more important in terms of doing well in the career. And then the second aspect is just absolutely a ruthless application of the 80/20 rule,

• 16:21Speaker 03

  which obviously you talk about in your book. But just the idea that of the stuff that you do, most people do, almost all the value comes from a very small number of activities. And again, I think a lot of people in academia get, use a lot of the time used up with busy work. So they attend conferences, they go to like seminars, they do a lot of reading, that doesn't ultimately contribute to, you know, what they're really trying to do, which is come up with new ideas, new arguments, and really put that forward. And so I think I've been just a lot more proactive and kind of goal oriented in terms of the approach I take to my work.

• 16:54Tim Ferriss?

  So let's, let's get into detail with that because I know people love the details and not surprisingly, a lot of people listening love 80/20. The 80/20 principle are all applications of that. So if we rewind to your undergraduate, were you studying philosophy undergrad?

• 17:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right. I was at Cambridge University as an undergrad.

• 17:15Tim Ferriss?

  And what did the trajectory look like? What were the inflection points or key moments between that point and getting tenured?

• 17:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I think I was a lot less effective as an undergrad. I was still kind of trying to discover what

• 17:35Speaker 03

  You know, how to do things effectively. And I made some big mistakes. I remember trying to train myself to only sleep four hours a night. And that was a disaster. That was the worst year of my life. Then I realized like, no, actually, like, sleeping well and exercising well is really important in terms of having good performance.

• 17:53Speaker 03

  One thing I realized as an undergrad was just that you can just make so much progress just by finding someone smarter than you and learning from them. And that's exactly what I did. Someone who's now a close friend of mine just knew absolutely everything. And so I'd spend hours just talking to him. So he's Andreas Morgenstern. He also got a professorship at Oxford.

• 18:14Tim Ferriss?

  Uh huh, in the philosophy department.

• 18:15Speaker 03

  In the philosophy department, that's right. So we've ended up having a very similar career trajectory. And I've been a zombie and eaten his brains at every stage of the way.

• 18:27Speaker 03

  But then in terms of the big, the big inflection points, I think really came, I mean, both through, you know, it was only when I moved to Oxford to do my postgrad work that started to get a lot more serious about this. Also realizing, you know, getting funding to do philosophy postgrad is pretty hard. But then realizing a lot of scholarships out there that most people have never heard of and actually don't therefore get that many applicants. So if you apply for them, you can actually have a pretty good chance. And then managed to get funding for my PhD and extend it by a little bit more than other people do through a combination of, I think, eight different scholarships in the end.

• 19:07Speaker 03

  And so doing that, and then the big thing was just from the outset of starting a PhD thinking, okay, well, philosophy is incredibly competitive. If I do want to do this as a career, then I've really got to know what's actually expected of you, like, what, on what basis are you going to get hired as a professor? And the answer is weirdly disconnected from what you typically do as a grad student. At least in philosophy, people basically judge you on the quality of your best five or 10,000 words of work, whereas your dissertation is kind of 80,000 words or something. And so if you want to really do well, then it's just about making that highest quality

• 19:48Speaker 03

  stuff as good as possible and then trying to get it published in the very best journals. So it's really about optimizing for your kind of peak output, rather than just being this kind of big journalist.

• 19:59Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. What was your dissertation about? And what was your best five to 10,000 words about?

• 20:06Speaker 03

  Oh, so dissertation was about ethical uncertainty. So if you're unsure about

• 20:15Speaker 03

  what you ought to do, so maybe you think, okay, well, I think it's okay to eat meat, but I'm unsure about that. You know, there are these vegetarians around and they have these arguments and so on. And you're like, well, I don't quite know what to do. How should you act in light of that? How should you take uncertainty into account? And this was quite a strategic choice of topic as well, because almost it's like a very important topic, but almost nothing has been written about it. So I could read everything that had been written on it in about two weeks. Whereas many people choose to pursue PhDs on something that's already had a huge amount of work done.

• 20:51Speaker 03

  And so that was the

• 20:55Speaker 03

  that was what the PhD was on. And in particular, I argued that even if you're unsure about your values, you should treat that uncertainty in the same way as if you're unsure about matters of fact or what's going to happen. So in the same way as if you wouldn't speed around a blind corner if there was some risk of a child playing in the street. Even if you thought there's probably no one there, you still wouldn't want to risk it. In the same way, if you think, well, maybe something is wrong.

• 21:21Speaker 03

  I think it probably isn't, but it's a risk. And if it was, it would be very wrong. I think you should take that same

• 21:27Speaker 03

  same course of action. You should again kind of play safe, as it were.

• 21:31Tim Ferriss?

  The Pascal's wager for life.

• 21:34Speaker 03

  It's a little bit, yeah. It doesn't involve infinite amounts of value, though that's interesting too. But a little bit like Pascal's wager for life.

• 21:42Tim Ferriss?

  And then what about your your your peak? Or your your best five to 10,000 words? Was it the same subject or something completely different?

• 21:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it was the same subject as well. And this is all just quite distinct from my effective altruism stuff. But it was the same subject. And in particular, I saw there was this analogy between that sort of decision and a bunch of work that had been done in economics. So again, this is something where you can make a lot of progress by doing research, just by combining two different fields. Because the number of combinations of fields is far, far greater than

• 22:18Speaker 03

  the number of fields themselves. And so I argued that this problem was kind of like the problem of voting. So in just the same way as there's this problem of like, if you've got all these people with different preferences, how do you kind of aggregate that into one social preference or one will of the people, as it were? And there's just a ton of work done on that in economics that's really interesting and often quite technical. And I said that was kind of the same as the decision under ethical uncertainty. It's like you've got all these different ethical viewpoints and they're like different voters. And if you want to be able to make a decision between them in light of that kind of uncertainty, you can treat them as like voters and you can use that those same kind of all the same

• 23:02Speaker 03

  technical apparatus that had been developed in economics and apply it to that case of ethical uncertainty.

• 23:08Tim Ferriss?

  Which, so you mentioned Andreas Morgensen. What other philosophers are your idols is a strong word, but role models, people you really look up to? If you had to alive or dead, if you had to put sort of your top, your top five or fewer philosophers on a list, who would they be?

• 23:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, so there are two that really stand out. The first one on the more of a kind of academic is Derek Parfit.

• 23:38Tim Ferriss?

  How do you, Derek Parfit?

• 23:40Speaker 03

  Parfit, yeah, P A R F I T. And he spent his entire life at All Souls College in Oxford, which is elite even within Oxford.

• 23:48Tim Ferriss?

  What was the name of the college?

• 23:50Speaker 03

  All Souls College.

• 23:51Tim Ferriss?

  All Souls?

• 23:53Speaker 03

  All Souls, yeah.

• 23:54Tim Ferriss?

  That's intense.

• 23:55Speaker 03

  The way you get into All Souls College, and Andreas achieved this as well, is you have to sit 15 hours of exams and you have to answer questions that can be on any topic like, is China overrated? Why democracy? How many people should there be? And then the final three hour exam is just on a single word.

• 24:15Tim Ferriss?

  Sounds horrible. Sounds very uniquely philosophical, too. I mean, in terms of academia.

• 24:21Speaker 03

  It's crazy. It's known as the hardest exam in the world, but it gives you seven years of funding and you can do whatever you want in those seven years.

• 24:28Tim Ferriss?

  What's the name of the exam?

• 24:29Speaker 03

  It's called the All Souls Prize Fellowship, I think.

• 24:33Tim Ferriss?

  Ah, okay. So Derek is one.

• 24:36Speaker 03

  He is one, and he's now 70. And he wrote a book called Reasons and Persons, which I think is one of the most important books written in the 20th century.

• 24:45Tim Ferriss?

  Could you say that one more time?

• 24:47Speaker 03

  Reasons and Persons.

• 24:48Tim Ferriss?

  Reasons and Persons.

• 24:50Speaker 03

  Yeah. And it argues a whole number of things, but two of the big things are,

• 24:57Speaker 03

  one is the idea that there isn't really a continuing self over time. So the difference, there's nothing kind of fundamental,

• 25:09Speaker 03

  fundamentally distinct between, different between Will MacAskill, age 28, and Will MacAskill, age 70, versus Will MacAskill, age 28, and Tim Ferriss right now. There's only a kind of matter of degree between those things. And that has a whole number of implications. And actually, interestingly, it's been,

• 25:30Speaker 03

  it's actually quite similar to Big Srin and Buddhist thought. And apparently, his book has been used as a text in certain Buddhist temples. They chant to it. He didn't realize this for like 30 years or something.

• 25:45Tim Ferriss?

  And then he showed up and there was some effigy to Derek Parfit sitting on a throne in a cave in Tibet. That's...

• 25:53Tim Ferriss?

  And, well, I mean, it does resonate certainly with the

• 25:58Tim Ferriss?

  certain discussions of self, right? Whether it's a contemporary like

• 26:04Tim Ferriss?

  Sam Harris, who's a PhD in neuroscience, but also a very experienced meditator who wrote Waking Up, or texts that are thousands of years old. I mean, the the concept of a static self is something that's challenged a lot in Buddhist thought, among others. So you have Derek. Who's your number two?

• 26:23Speaker 03

  Number two then has to be Peter Singer, and unsurprisingly...

• 26:26Tim Ferriss?

  I was gonna ask you about him, yeah.

• 26:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, he's a big influence, both in terms of my thought and in terms of how I'm approaching my life, the decisions I'm making, in terms of my own career. And he... You know, has two really big important arguments. One is for the moral importance of non-human animals and treating them much better than we treat them as we do at the moment. And then also the importance of fighting global poverty, especially for us in rich countries using, you know, he really argued it should be most of your income donating that away to charities that will, you know, help improve lives or save lives among the poorest people

• 27:12Speaker 03

  in the world, where he argues that, you know, if you were walking past a shallow pond and a child was drowning in that pond and you could run in and save the child and it would ruin your expensive suit that you were wearing and it cost you a couple of thousand dollars as a result, you'd obviously go and do that. You'd be, in technical terms, an asshole if you didn't. He doesn't say that, that's my interpretation of the argument. But if so, then what's the difference between that and the life that you can save in Malawi right now by distributing insecticide to bed nets to save the child from malaria? And he argues there isn't a difference. And he was immensely influential, so sold millions of books and,

• 27:57Speaker 03

  you know, caused a large number of people to really change their lives, including myself.

• 28:03Tim Ferriss?

  Now, do you, so I am a Peter Singer fan, and I think that most people who are not, most people who protest against or picket against Peter Singer haven't read his work. And certainly he has controversial stances, but I remember when he came to Princeton to teach and there were people picketing and rolling out their disabled children and so on because they were, I think, sort of adopting bastardized versions of what he had said from media. As much as I like Peter, I would, I would...

• 28:42Tim Ferriss?

  Propose, "Well, you know, this isn't about me. Let me ask you, do you think it's really the same in so much it's walking, you know, walking in with a suit and rescuing a drowning child versus saving a potentially sort of faceless child across the world of which there are potentially millions, right? And the reason, the reason I bring it up is not to say that people shouldn't do it, but I had a conversation with, well, actually, I suppose it was a Q and A of sorts with Sam Harris about the, I think it's called the trolley scenario, and I'm not sure, do you know what I'm talking about, right? Whereas, so those people who are not familiar with this, the hypothetical thought exercise, which

• 29:24Tim Ferriss?

  is going to have a lot of real implications when we're using autonomous vehicles and programming AI and so on. So, you know, philosophy is suddenly a lot, lot more relevant, or some of these thought exercises more relevant than they, they maybe would have been imagined to become. That you have, and please correct me if I'm wrong, and I think I'm just paraphrasing this, but if you had a railroad track and you could flip a switch for it to go down one track that was split to the left and another that's split to the right, there's one kind of like fat man on the left, and then there are four people on the right, which, and you have to throw the switch. Do you throw the switch to the one person or the four? And people say, of course, that they would, they would switch it to the one. But

• 30:08Tim Ferriss?

  then the, the second scenario, I think, and there may be more, is if you had to push the fat man off of a bridge, so he landed in, you know, on the track, and it was an obstacle that then prevented four people from dying, would you do it? And all of a sudden, the percentages change very dramatically, right? And even though the, the utilitarian philosophical outcome is on paper the same, right? So, and this is, I know I'm, I'm kind of brain vomiting at you, but this, this is something I've really grappled with. So, Peter Singer had a cover story, I believe it was the New York Times Magazine, Sunday

• 30:49Tim Ferriss?

  Edition, huge piece on, you know, it's basically redistributing wealth for greater good. And yet, I couldn't necessarily point to a huge change in

• 31:05Tim Ferriss?

  Donation behavior after that article. So why don't more people donate, right? Because if I have, if I looked at my 10 friends, a given 10 friends who I would consider good human beings who have money, they would save the drowning child, but they're not going to send, if, for the same reason that I think that they're afraid of opening the floodgates. If they donate to one child, does it not then follow they should donate all of the money that they have to save not one child, but as many as they can afford to save?

• 31:45Tim Ferriss?

  And then they get themselves, they get themselves into a very hairy position where they feel like they can't enjoy the fruit of their labor because of the guilt that they feel. Does that make sense?

• 32:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:00Tim Ferriss?

  So how do you address that? I mean, this is something that I've grappled with, and I know friends of mine, I mean, I've, I have friends who've had to like, basically check out and, and, and, and basically do therapy who've been in nonprofits for a long time, because they get to a point where they'll like have dinner with a friend and they're like, for the amount you spent on that bottle of wine, like you could have saved a life in Malawi. And the friend's like, that's a real dickish thing to say.

• 32:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. I know a lot of people who've worked in nonprofits and gotten very disillusioned, very burnt out.

• 32:31Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. So how do you, how do you think of addressing that?

• 32:35Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so actually it is kind of indicative because Peter Singer was making these arguments since the early seventies, really. And there wasn't that much uptake of them until Toby and I, so Toby Ord, another academic at Oxford, and I set up Giving What We Can. And that was in 2009. And we were saying, okay, give 10%. And we, yeah, I think there were a number of changes. So like, one is just that, you know, we emphasize this concrete number, 10%. And some people go further than that. Some people give 50%. I may need to give away most of what I own over the course of my life. So that was one thing. Second was presenting it as just this amazing opportunity rather than this moral obligation. So

• 33:15Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, that's

• 33:16Speaker 03

  way Peter, yeah, that's right. Yeah. The way Peter presents this is just Yeah, you're this asshole if you don't do this. And then people are like, well, fuck you.

• 33:26Speaker 03

  And that's this kind of, I mean, it's a kind of natural human reaction. Whereas actually, most people really want to do good with their lives. You know, if you could be that person rescuing that drowning child, or if you could knock down the door to a burning building and save someone from inside, you'd feel like a hero. You'd feel great about yourself. And actually, that's the situation we're in. Within this situation, we can do huge amount of good at little cost to yourself, maybe even actually given the psychological evidence, benefiting yourself because giving has a whole host of benefits to the giver as well as to the receiver. So it's actually this amazing opportunity we have. And then secondly, I think the reason we don't give is just because a lot of psychological biases. So

• 34:09Speaker 03

  I remember when I was thinking about this, I just thought, well, I just don't want to be a sucker. You know, everyone else is, you know, getting ahead, being very ambitious. I was ambitious myself. I don't want to be holding myself back by spending all this time on nonprofit stuff and giving my money away and you know, going behind, falling behind my peers. Whereas we've built up this community, the Effective Altruism Community, where everyone's self, kind of self-reinforcing. You get really praised for doing more good or doing it more effectively. And it's this really warm welcoming. It's kind of new peer group, a new part of your identity. And I think that can really help overcome a lot of the reservations that people have. And then I think the final thing is just in terms of the impact people have. So obviously, there's a huge debate about

• 34:55Speaker 03

  how effective aid is. And I think it's reasonable for someone who's, you know, only vaguely heard about this stuff to think, oh, yeah, well, if you just donate, doesn't all the money get wasted? Because it's true that in very many cases, the money is squandered, the money is wasted, there's no impact. But then

• 35:14Speaker 03

  By us actually doing a research and saying, no, look, if you do this, if you pay, give money to Against Malaria Foundation, distribute long-lasting insecticide-free bed nets, for three and a half thousand dollars, statistically speaking, you will save a life. Huge number of trials have been conducted on this to show the efficacy of bed nets. We can answer all your questions. Then it's like, okay, this isn't just this kind of Pascal's mugging situation where maybe I'll save a life, but I don't really know what's going on. Actually, I know exactly what my money is going to go and do. And, you know, it's still, the child you save, you still will never know, but they become a little bit less faceless. It's a little bit more concrete what you're actually going to achieve.

• 35:54Tim Ferriss?

  Did you say Pascal's mugging?

• 35:57Speaker 03

  Um, I might have said Pascal's mugging, but, uh, do you know about that thought experiment?

• 36:02Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, no, I don't. I'd love to hear that, though, because that should be the title of your next book, I think.

• 36:07Speaker 03

  Okay. Oh, my God. I would love to learn about Pascal's mugging. Um, that scenario is where, uh, it's same as Pascal's wager, except, um, without, uh, infinite amounts of, uh, value at stake. It's not about heaven or hell.

• 36:21Tim Ferriss?

  And we should probably, could you just briefly explain Pascal's wager? So for people who are not familiar or would like to get reacquainted, we have that as a baseline before we get to Pascal's mugging?

• 36:32Speaker 03

  I love that we've got on to this. Um, so Pascal's wager is the idea that you should go to church because, uh, maybe you think it's incredibly unlikely that God exists. Let's say it's, you know, you think it's just almost no chance, one in a billion chance or something. But the payoff's just so great because it's an infinite amount of happiness. If you take a one in a billion chance multiplied by positive infinity of happiness, well, um, that's, you know, still a, you know, plus infinity, um, in expectation amount of happiness that you're going to get. Whereas the costs of going to church just not that great. And so, you know, if you're really kind of even just out for yourself, just looking to, um, maximize your own happiness, then you should try and believe in God and

• 37:16Speaker 03

  you should try and go to church, um, just because the potential payoff is so great. So that's kind of his idea, that's Pascal's idea from 17th century. Pascal's mugging is a slightly more updated version where

• 37:32Speaker 03

  Blaise Pascal is coming out of a pub and this kind of eerie figure approaches him and says, "Give me all the money in your wallet." And Pascal's like, "No." And the mugger says, "Well, okay, I know you're Blaise Pascal. I know that you think that the way to make decisions is to look at the probabilities of outcomes and their values and take that all together. And if you give me the money in your wallet, then I will come back tomorrow and give you any finite amount of happiness or money or anything you could possibly want." And Pascal's like, "No." And it's like, "Yeah, but like, look into my eyes. I'm like this kind of slightly creepy figure. You don't know that I'm this, not this alien or someone with superhuman powers.

• 38:17Speaker 03

  Like, you can't be absolutely certain of that. So you should still, you know, by your own logic, you should still give me this money." And it kind of, the thought experiment goes to show that Pascal, you know, would have to say, even in cases that aren't involving kind of infinities or heaven and hell, you should still do actions that seem pretty crazy to us, like giving this mugger money on this tiny, tiny-

• 38:43Tim Ferriss?

  Right. If there's a possibility of asymmetrical reward, then you should take the bet.

• 38:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's meant to be, yeah, that's meant to be the argument. But it seems ridiculous. So something's gone wrong and-

• 38:53Tim Ferriss?

  Right. Well, I mean, yeah, you, well, using that, right, every, yeah, everyone should invest in speculative startups, right?

• 39:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right.

• 39:03Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, Pascal's mugging, I love it. You know, I would, I would, I would love for like a drunk hipster to try to mug someone with that approach in the mission. I'd be curious to see how that turns out.

• 39:15Speaker 03

  Certainly. Well, if it's in the bay, it might work.

• 39:18Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it might, it might. Depends on, depends on who you catch, I guess, coming out of their, their juice bar or whatever. But, uh, so the, um-

• 39:30Tim Ferriss?

  I got us off track just a little bit, but in terms of, in terms of why people don't give more, right? I think that there, we could look at the negative examples, right? So the guilting approach doesn't work very well because like you said, it just provokes a go fuck yourself response. I think rightly so, quite frankly. I mean, I think it's a very naive and insulting way to kind of go about it, which doesn't have, for someone who's thought about things so rationally, it's surprising to me that Singer takes that approach because it flies in the face of like any type of negotiation research or behavioral modification research. That's kind of funny. But if I look at, for instance, the causes

• 40:10Tim Ferriss?

  that I've been involved with on some level, and I have not looked at them on givewell.org, but I've tried to do the amount of due diligence that I could with the bandwidth that I have, whether it's say donors choose, that does a lot of work with education, or Charity Water, for instance, they both do a very good job of concretizing the abstract. So they send you photographs, updates, letters, et cetera, to make you feel like you are rescuing that drowning child in your own suit. What, and just to come back for a second, the mosquito nets that you mentioned, is that the type of conclusion someone could

• 40:54Tim Ferriss?

  come to on givewell.org? Or are there other sites that they should check out? And we usually do this at the end of the show, but since we're on it, like what, what, what other resources can people use, given their busy lives? The people who have the most resources to allocate to something like this are usually also the busiest, right? I think that's another challenge. So, so what's, what's the, what's the, the most elegant way, time efficient way to figure these things out for oneself?

• 41:23Speaker 03

  Yeah. So if you're, yeah, if you're busy, by far, the best thing is just givewell.org, where they just have these four top recommended charities. So they just try and find out what are the charities that are doing the most good that we know of. And those charities are Against Malaria Foundation, which distributes bed nets, saving life about three and a half thousand dollars. The, so the best charities often have the worst names. And so a couple are DeWorm the World Initiative and the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative.

• 41:56Speaker 03

  Um, which when I first researched it five years ago, I could not pronounce. Um, and then which, and they deworm schoolchildren. So people don't really know about this, but over a billion people worldwide suffer from these parasitic worm infections in their guts. And they don't kill as many people as HIV, AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and so on. But they do just make huge numbers of people, especially kids, sick and therefore they don't go to school. Um, they earn less, they're less productive later on in life. And then incredibly cheap to treat, so when they cost about 50 cents per child. Um, and then the final charity I recommend is GiveDirectly, which simply transfers cash directly to the poorest people in the world, like, you know, the very poorest people in, uh, living in Kenya.

• 42:41Speaker 03

  And about 90% of the money that you give ends up in the mobile phone bank account of others extremely poor people, which they then can then spend in whatever way they believe is going to most benefit themselves. Um, so it's the ultimate charity if you're really worried about, you know, white knights coming over to try and help the problems of some other country they don't really understand. And, uh, the people who receive the money tend to spend it on assets like tin roofs and livestock. Uh, so yeah, that's the best place to donate, uh, look if you want just incredibly well researched, um, uh, like set of recommendations.

• 43:20Tim Ferriss?

  So I want to, because I, I think that, uh, there are people listening who will have some questions like those I'm going to ask. I'm going to, I'm going to challenge, um, I'm going to ask questions that I think might, might push on a couple of places. Uh, the first is, are there any organizations or resources like givewell.org that are less human centric, uh, and are, uh, and the reason I ask is that the, the ROI seems to be measured by the number of human lives saved.

• 44:02Tim Ferriss?

  Are there other organizations or people who have evaluated causes, cause-driven nonprofits, NGOs, whatever they might be, that are not focused on the number of human lives saved?

• 44:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, so there's one I actually helped to set up called Animal Chavity Evaluators, and that's applying the same sort of, you know, attempting to have the same sort of level of vigor and research, but if you just, if who you want to help are just animals, where should you donate? And they're a much smaller operation than GiveWell, but again, you can check them out for their sort of recommendations. In terms of if you're thinking about the environment, there I'm just less sure, actually. GiveWell are starting to broaden their research that they do, so they're working with a foundation called Good Ventures,

• 45:03Speaker 03

  which is set up by Kari Tuna and Dustin Moskowitz, who's one of the Facebook co-founders. And there they're looking into a much wider variety of causes beyond just global health and global development, including things like climate change, fundamental research, policy reform, especially immigration reform and criminal justice reform, and trying to look for, you know, comparing across all different causes you could be interested in, what are those that are particularly great in scale, so it's just a very big problem, particularly neglected, so there aren't very many other like philanthropists or actors trying to solve this problem, so it's not very crowded, or particularly tractable,

• 45:44Speaker 03

  so where there's just really great programs that haven't yet been funded, but that, you know, we know are going to make a really big difference. And some of the ones they're championing are, yeah, improving conditions of animals in factory farms, improving immigration policy.

• 46:08Speaker 03

  Including criminal justice policy to reduce the number of people who are incarcerated, while at the same time maintaining the same level of, better levels of public safety. And then also risks of global catastrophe from new technologies, or from climate change, or from developments in biology, and so on.

• 46:30Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. Thank you. Related question, or quandary, maybe, for, I think, a lot of people listening. So if you look at a given high-need population, let's just say we're looking at, you gave Kenya as an example, we're looking at Kenya. The reflex seems to be to help the poorest of the poor. Are there philosophers or philanthropists out there that you respect who disagree with that? In other words, people who say, "You could give $10 to the 10,000 poorest people in Kenya,

• 47:13Tim Ferriss?

  but I prefer to try to identify the, say, 200 most promising young students who could become the leaders of tomorrow, and break the cycle of poverty in this country through policy reform, and this, that, and the other thing, as engineers, blah, blah, blah." But it's a much more expensive per-person proposition, probably, right? Maybe they have to be sent to the US, or Cambridge, or Oxford for education, for instance. How are people thinking about that? And is there anyone who, it's politically safe to say, "We want to focus on the poorest of the poor."

• 47:56Tim Ferriss?

  No one's going to rake you over the coals publicly for that, right? But are there people who take the opposite approach, whose arguments you think have some validity, or that are interesting?

• 48:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I think there are a couple of good arguments here. So one is, yeah, so in terms of the argument for focusing on the poorest, it's just because of diminishing marginal returns for money and the fact that, so in rich countries, if you're, you know, earning above about ten thousand dollars per year, you're in the richest, you know, fifteen percent, ten percent of the world's population. Even taking account the fact that money is, goes further overseas. And if you're earning above about fifty thousand dollars per year, um, then you're in the richest one percent of the world's population. Um, and the poorest people in the world are only on about sixty cents per day, or the equivalent of what one dollar fifty could buy

• 48:49Speaker 03

  um, in the US. And for that reason, you just, additional resources to them just make such a much bigger impact um, than additional resources to people in richer countries. Uh, in my book, that just came out, Doing Good Better, uh, I talk, talk about this as the one hundredfold multiplier. A dollar, um, to me is gonna do less than a hundredth as much good as a dollar going to some of the poorest people in the world. But I think there are a couple of ways in which there can be things that, you know, focus on people that are already comparatively well off, that can do a huge amount of good. And that's, um, one is kind of through research and innovation, so if you're increasing that.

• 49:30Speaker 03

  So, a huge amount of good has been done in the past through developments in um, science and technology and, you know, medical research. So, mobile phones got developed by Motorola in the seventies, um, and now across Sub-Saharan Africa, you know, the majority of people own a mobile phone. Um, so you do get this kind of, over the long term, trickle-down effect as a result of research and innovation. And that tends to get underfunded by the market. Um, and then a second thing is if you can, um, uh, kind of harness, uh, these incredible resources, which are these very talented, um, or, you know, very ambitious, or...

• 50:12Speaker 03

  More well-off people and kind of direct them in a way that's going to do more social good. So that's, I mean, the approach 80,000 Hours takes my nonprofit advisers on career choice. You know, we explicitly, we're a small operation, we need to focus. And so we focus on, you know, those elite students, the kids coming out of Ivy League schools. Not because we think it's important, comparatively important to, you know, make Harvard grads a little bit better off, but rather because, you know, they're the people that are really going to be the leaders of tomorrow, or they could be shaping the world. You want them to be doing, you know, more to improve the world, both by having more kind of motivation

• 50:54Speaker 03

  to do good and using that motivation in as effective a way as possible. And so those are the couple of ways in which I think you can do a lot of good by, you know, focused on, you know, focusing on areas other than the very poorest of the poor at the moment.

• 51:12Tim Ferriss?

  And there's, there's a, there's an organization that I'm involved with called Quest Bridge that people can check out if they're interested, that I think is sort of along these lines. And it complements, in a way, the underserved students that I work with vis a vis donors choose. But Reid Hoffman and others are on the advisory board for Quest Bridge. So if people are interested, can check that out. Did an interview with Reid Hoffman for this podcast that discusses that on, on some level. The, if we wanted to convince people to help others, but to do it through pure self-interest, how would you, how would you

• 51:56Tim Ferriss?

  go about doing that? And what would the, what would the form of giving look like? So in other words, if you can prove to someone they will be happier if they give enough to save the lives of, life of one person per year, for instance, right? I think we're going to get into Andreas a bit. I think that would go a long way to, and I know this sounds maybe cynical and terrible, but I don't think that saving a life is enough to get millions of people to donate money. It sounds terrible, but I think that appealing to self-interest is the sort of the Trojan

• 52:37Tim Ferriss?

  horse necessary to open them to that experience. What would it look like? And I started thinking about this very specifically over the last year also because, you know, I'm involved with various cause-driven companies, both nonprofit and for-profit. And I took my family, took my parents and siblings on a trip to Iceland last year. It was the first time that we'd taken a family trip in 15 years or so. And the anticipation of that was so much fun and made it so much more valuable to the entire family, all of the brainstorming and the researching and the sharing of photos and so on.

• 53:22Tim Ferriss?

  Before it happened, that I started thinking of how that type of structure could be wrapped around something like cause-driven companies, whether nonprofit or for-profit, right? So if somebody really wanted to get just pure self-interest, I want to improve my quality of life, my optimism, my self-reported well-being, blah, blah, blah. How should they do it?

• 53:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I think, I mean, the psychology evidence itself does suggest actually that giving, I mean, it suggests a couple of things. One is just that money is actually way less important than we'd think to, you know, making ourselves better off. The relationship between higher levels of income and higher levels of happiness is really very low indeed, whereas other things like having a really good community around you is actually very important to, you know, having a group of friends that really like you is very important to being better off. And so one thing is just, yeah, if you wanna like start doing good, especially like the effective altruism community,

• 54:28Speaker 03

  suddenly you find you've got like thousands of, you know, new friends who really wanna support you and make you do better in life. And that's, I think, one reason why the people who have like in, you know, my peers who have started giving, actually feel, including myself, just actually feel really good about this decision. Another thing is just the direct effect of giving, you get a kind of warm glow. So people do tend to feel like, and they've done little psychology experiments on this as well, looking at people who donate rather than spending money on themselves. And people tend to feel happier after having donated, they feel better about themselves.

• 55:06Tim Ferriss?

  Is there any particular type of donation or type of cause that has the most significant impact in that respect? Does that make sense? Like, is it, for instance, you know, is the, and I know we don't wanna do this, but if we put efficacy aside, like is there, what are the characteristics of the donation that has the most persistent effect on happiness? You know, self-reported well-being, happiness, all that stuff. Is it the like flipping through the pamphlet to find, you know, choose between the goat or the chicken or the fill in the blank for the picture, you know, the kid who's pictured in the back?

• 55:49Tim Ferriss?

  Is it something else? What is, what are the characteristics of a sort of selfishly fulfilling charitable giving event?

• 55:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I don't know if there's any research done on this, but I suspect it would be, if I'm honest, not exactly the sort of things I tend to promote. It would be things where it's very, you know, your donation's quite public, but not in a way that comes across as sanctimonious, but that just that people know you're doing a lot of good and where you get the kind of positive feedback as a result, so. Probably donations within your own community or where you can see the kind of tangible benefits of what you're doing, that's going to be a really big factor. And then I guess if donations, if you're part of like a peer network where you've got a number

• 56:42Speaker 03

  of people kind of all doing the same thing, that's also going to be, and so, and those people who are kind of self reinforcing, so also saying like, yeah, that's really awesome what you're doing, you're this really good person as a result. I suspect that's also going to be one of the biggest ones in terms of, you know, increasing your level of happiness. Whereas purely, I suspect that donating to someone just on the street where you never hear from them again, that's going to be among the worst because that's, you know, that tends to sell you by making you feel guilty for a time and then you donate in order to alleviate the guilt, rather than this positive kind of ongoing thing where you get consistent feedback, whether if that's from the community or from the people you can actually see who you're benefiting.

• 57:27Tim Ferriss?

  Well, it's a negative reinforcer, right? As opposed to positive reinforcer. And if you, if you look at dog training or really any mammalian training, that doesn't produce a lot of enthusiasm.

• 57:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's exactly right. Carrots work and sticks don't, at least not in the long run. And the kind of worry I have about fundraising in general is that you get this competition between charities and you get this race to the bottom where they hold up bigger than bigger sticks and it means that people just end up getting annoyed or fatigued by these constant requests for donations.

• 57:58Tim Ferriss?

  Well, right. And we're going to talk about Y Combinator in a second, but I want to make sure we come back to this because I think many people, more people would be willing to get involved with charities or nonprofits if they felt they would stop getting annoyed.

• 58:20Tim Ferriss?

  And that's or that there wouldn't be incessant follow up with guilt, guilt, guilt, like every letter they receive.

• 58:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:28Tim Ferriss?

  I think a lot of, a lot of people don't want to open the door to that type of haranguing and kind of

• 58:36Tim Ferriss?

  incessant barking, so to speak, so they'd never take the first step. Does that make sense?

• 58:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, that's exactly right.

• 58:45Tim Ferriss?

  Well, you know what? Let's, let's just cover it now. Well, if you could make a plea or a suggestion to people involved with nonprofits out there and say, stop doing this, this and this, start doing this, this and this, what would be on those lists?

• 59:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, one thing, uh, for sure. So I used to work as a, in the UK, we call them chuggers or charity muggers. The people, yeah, people who are on the street who then harass you for kind of $10 a month. People seem to really hate that, um, as I know, having done it.

• 59:19Speaker 03

  And I think that's something that's like particularly, um, particularly damaging. Um, another is these pictures that you get of, you know, children in poverty with bloated stomachs and flies on their face. And it does a couple of bad things, just one is just that it makes people really not want to get involved because it's these kind of horrific images that very naturally you want to steer away from. And then also just paints this really bleak picture of, and kind of quite disrespectful picture of, uh, people in poor countries as those who are just helpless. Whereas I think if you were, like you say, doing positive enforcement, so instead you're like, hey, um, you know, this person donated, um, a thousand dollars and was able to deworm

• 1:00:04Speaker 03

  two whole schools. Isn't that amazing? That's like much more compelling. And if you could get charities to kind of band together, uh, to have that approach, then I think you'd do a lot more good. And then I think the second thing would be, um, in terms of the amounts that are asked for, I think there's also a race to the bottom in terms of different charities wanting to ask for less and less. Because, you know, if you've got a choice, oh, one advert's asking me to give $10 a month and others ask me to give $2 a month. I got the same feeling of guilt and I could resolve it either way, then I'm gonna donate for $2 a month. But I think that's just not an appropriate reaction if the images they're showing you are of these starving children. And so again, I kind of, I'd rather if we campaigned to say,

• 1:00:50Speaker 03

  The amount you should give is 2%, like everyone should give 2%. And then, you know, it's up to you where you give it, but that's what you should be aiming to do. And then it's just this one-off thing, it's just this one campaign. You don't get asked in all these, because I mean, this is part of a classic bit of social psychology is you want to disaggregate costs and I, and sorry, disaggregate benefits and aggregate costs. Where kind of getting asked to make a donation is a kind of cost, it's can be a bit unpleasant. But then you want the benefits, the kind of rewards you get to be as recurring as possible. And so having different charities saying, look, this is the standard, 2% of your income. Or, you know, maybe you could try for more, but that I think would be a decent amount to publicly say. Um, then I think people could, and you know, you can make a huge difference with this.

• 1:01:34Speaker 03

  I think people could be able to get behind that and would start to have a more positive view of charity and kind of help others.

• 1:01:42Tim Ferriss?

  Let's segue to Y Combinator. So Y Combinator, for those people who are unfamiliar, is it's like the Harvard All Souls Navy SEALs of startup accelerators. Uh, and they would dislike the term incubator, but a lot of people have a better familiarity with that. People apply, very few get accepted, and there's some huge companies that have come out of it, Dropbox, et cetera. Uh, you participated in Y Combinator as a nonprofit, uh, which I think is unexpected to many people, or seems like a mismatch. Uh, can you describe how you came to apply and get accepted to Y Combinator?

• 1:02:27Tim Ferriss?

  Tell me the story of how that happened.

• 1:02:29Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, so, uh, the charity was 80,000 Hours, um, that's the career advice one, uh, that went to Y Combinator. Uh, and we had been doing research into, you know, different career paths. And one we recommended really highly actually, uh, was tech entrepreneurship.

• 1:02:48Speaker 03

  And that's for the few reasons. One is because we think that early on in your careers, you should be really just trying to think about the long term. You should think about trying to build up yourself as a person, your skills, your network, your credentials, how much you're learning. And trying to run a startup is, you know, one of the best things you can possibly do for that. Or being in the early stages of a startup as an early employee. It also has potentially great payoffs in terms of the good you can do through entrepreneurship. I can tell you about some really amazing companies that are doing incredible things to improve the world. And then also, if you do get really big, if you have founded a Dropbox or an Airbnb or something, then you have huge financial resources that you can use

• 1:03:29Speaker 03

  to make an absolutely massive difference, like as Bill Gates has done. And so we were promoting that quite heavily. And that meant that when Y Combinator started to say, okay, we want to do nonprofits, we're going to open, open the doors to nonprofit applications where they'll just give a grant instead of an investment. A lot of people then contacted us. And we thought, yeah, this is just a perfect fit. We have the same sort of mentality. So the nonprofit space can be very stale, very unambitious, very unoriginal. Whereas we want to be really big. We want to, we think we can give the best advice in the world

• 1:04:14Speaker 03

  for people who want to make a difference with their careers. And we think like we can reach, we want to reach everyone who's graduating from university. We have big aims. We're focused on numbers. We actually are thinking in quite a similar way to a for-profit startup. Y Combinator does seem like a really pretty good home. So made the application. And it's a very funny process because there's the application form and a one-minute video. Everything is incredibly condensed in terms of what the partner is actually the view. Application form and a one-minute interview, one-minute video of yourself. And we just got drunk and filmed it.

• 1:04:52Tim Ferriss?

  What are you, what are you supposed to put in the one-minute interview, or the one-minute, excuse me, video, you incepted me. What do you, what is the content of that one-minute video supposed to be?

• 1:05:04Speaker 03

  Yes, in that one-minute video, you talk about, I mean, you can talk about anything. Sometimes it's just the conversation between the founders. But for us, we talked about

• 1:05:14Speaker 03

  Actually included the warm up that we were doing to get ourselves psyched up. For 20 seconds, it was just us singing.

• 1:05:21Speaker 03

  But then talking about what exactly 80,000 hours does, what's the problem? How are we going to grow? Why are we, why do we think we're a team that's good enough that we're actually going to be able to become an absolutely massive organization?

• 1:05:35Speaker 03

  That was kind of how we approached it. But the key thing is just, and this is amazing, how often founders fail to do this, is just actually conveying what you do. Because you get the curse of knowledge where you're so invested in this project that it's, you know, you've got so much detail and so much on your mind. But then when you actually try and convey it to someone who isn't as familiar, then you completely bastardize it. And people have no idea what you actually do.

• 1:06:04Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, you drown them in the minutias and they can't see the big picture.

• 1:06:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. And this is something that the Y Combinator partners were so good at. You know, every single week, we just had to give the one sentence description of what we do. And for us, it's 80,000 hours gives career advice for people who want to make a big social impact in their lives.

• 1:06:26Speaker 03

  So just actually explaining that and explaining exactly how you do it is just, was absolutely the key thing.

• 1:06:32Tim Ferriss?

  And when were you at Y Combinator then?

• 1:06:35Speaker 03

  So, yeah, we were the summer batch, so just the last three months of the summer, basically June, July, August.

• 1:06:40Tim Ferriss?

  June, July, August 2015.

• 1:06:44Speaker 03

  That's exactly right.

• 1:06:45Tim Ferriss?

  What, what were the most important things you learned or skills you developed at Y Combinator?

• 1:06:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, so the whole thing felt like this exhilarating learning experience, a whole new lens on how you build something to get very big. And once, so a lot of, a lot of great pieces of advice. One is just to focus on the product, basically exclusively. You will constantly be tempted to spend your time doing things that make yourself look cool to your friends and family, but that aren't actually making a better product and that aren't therefore helping with growth. So, you know, you tend to do press, you'll be tempted to do, to hire a lot of people because then you can say, oh, well, we've got 20 people on the team. Whereas hiring actually just takes a lot of time away from just trying to build a better product.

• 1:07:36Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:37Speaker 03

  The other thing is just focusing, picking your metric. So for us, that's the number of people. Ultimately, that's just the number of people whose plans we've changed in a very significant way and focus on growing that metric by 10% every week. So, you know, we'd been growing at something like, you know, kind of doubling in size every year and that makes us in the top 1% of charities, I think. That 10% every week, that's 142 times every year. It's just a totally different kind of level of ambition. And that really gives you focus. So you're insured on doing just what's gonna make your company, or in our case, charity,

• 1:08:20Speaker 03

  you know, bigger than better every single week and just doing whatever it takes to hit that 10% growth target.

• 1:08:28Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that focus on product in all of, I have about 40 angel investments now. And if you look at that sample set and pick out the biggest winners, and some of them are on paper still, but a lot of them have already had large liquidity events, all of them ruthlessly focused on product, to the extent that if I brought them an amazing press or business, you know, biz dev, business development opportunity, partnership of some type, they would say, that looks great, but we're heads down on product, just not the right time, but we'll be sure to reach out in five months, six months.

• 1:09:08Tim Ferriss?

  And it's that ability to say no to focus on product, which as you know, in this day and age, is the best approach to marketing and customer acquisition that you can take, since word travels organically if you take that approach. Easily the most common denominator when you, when you look at the, the home runs in my portfolio, the, I'm gonna come back to YC in a second, but you mentioned startups making a big difference. And one of the startups I'm involved with, for instance, is Duolingo. And Duolingo now... Has, I want to say, 100 million plus users who are learning languages for free on Duolingo.

• 1:09:52Tim Ferriss?

  And the founders include Luis Van An, who was the effectively creator of Captcha and Recaptcha, which was sold to Google. And it's a very brilliant model. I mean, they're pulling real content offline or from clients who are paying to have things translated and using the crowd to translate while simultaneously teaching them different languages. Right? So ostensibly, you end up in two very interesting positions. You have hundreds of millions of people learning languages more effectively than through paid programs for free indefinitely. And then you also have the ability to generate revenue through translation and certification and other things.

• 1:10:36Tim Ferriss?

  And then you also have the ability to rapidly translate. So you could crowdsource, say, putting, you know, turning Wikipedia into some lesser-known language in 50 hours of total time, which would be, of course, thousands or tens of thousands of hours of human time, but it would be simultaneous through this program. Right? So they are, I think, going to have and are having a huge impact. What are startups that come to mind for you, for-profit, that are having a huge impact?

• 1:11:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think that's a great example. And one of the things with for-profits is you can just get so big and get so big so quickly. So being able to reach 100 million people, you know, it's absolutely phenomenal and quite hard to do if you're functioning as a nonprofit because you're constantly having to fund base. My favorite example of a for-profit company making a really big impact, again, set by someone in the effective altruism community, is also Y Combinator alumnus is called Wave. And it makes remittances cheaper, basically. So...

• 1:11:41Speaker 03

  Globally, remittances, that are sending money from a country that you've immigrated to, back to your home country, which is typically poorer, but to your family there. It's an absolutely huge deal. So it's about half a trillion dollars, a cent in remittances every single year. And compare that to overseas development aid spending, it's actually, remittances are several times as great. But if you're a Kenyan in Maryland, and you want to send money back to Kenya, it's a real hassle. You have to go to a Western Union, the Western Union takes 10%. And what Wave are doing is enabling you to send money mobile to mobile, so it's much easier. And they'll also only take 3%. And they're growing

• 1:12:22Speaker 03

  phenomenally fast at the moment. They've already got thousands of users and tens of thousands of users and are moving millions of dollars, even though they only just set this up, only launched about six months ago. And the potential there, you know, if you just do the math, if they're able to really make a significant change to the amount of money that's being flown, that's flowing to poorer countries and remittances, it's just tens of billions of dollars every single year, going from richer countries to poorer countries, and kind of not getting taken by these middlemen companies. It's got absolutely astonishing kind of opportunity to have a really big impact.

• 1:13:06Tim Ferriss?

  So if you reflect back on your time at YC, as the kids call it, what were the most common debates you had with other participants in YC or with the partners?

• 1:13:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's a good question. Yeah, I mean, one thing that was very common was how much time to spend on things that are going to grow your user base rather than product. So they said, you know, I said the advice is always focus on the product. But then there's always going to be exceptions, and you always wonder, well, is this one of these exceptional cases? And that was just definitely a recurring issue, because it's kind of hard to be, to make the judgment call of, well, actually, we've already got this thing, and you're going to have to do some amount of distribution.

• 1:14:07Speaker 03

  So that was a really kind of ongoing thing. Actually, as well, all the, maybe a lot of the biggest debates were just, so Paul Graham is the founder of Y Combinator, and he has these essays, and Paul Graham is something of this kind of guru or god amongst the Y Combinator startup community, and he has these teachings through these essays. And then when do you deviate from the teachings of?

• 1:14:30Tim Ferriss?

  When do you violate the scripture?

• 1:14:33Speaker 03

  That's exactly right. That was the ongoing thing. So similarly, another piece of advice was, you know, don't take any investment during the period of Y Combinator. It's just a distraction, just focus on growing, and then do all that after demo day, which is the big presentation when you pitch to 450 investors and a big boom.

• 1:14:54Speaker 03

  But then, you know, people would get these, get approached by angel investors or VCs, and the question would be, well, should I actually be taking this? It looks pretty good. So again, there'd be ongoing debates about, you know, when should they violate these rules? And Paul Graham even acknowledges this. He says, every single year, he gives the same advice to startup companies. Every year, everyone ignores it. And then every year, they say later, oh, I really wish you'd listened to this advice. And so that was kind of played out in many different ways, actually. Similarly, for recruitment as well, that's something where they say, don't, you know, you want to have this exceptionally high bar for who you hire.

• 1:15:36Speaker 03

  And you either want to be spending all your time going to hire, because getting the best team, especially the early team, is just so vital. It's the most important thing, that if you're going to be doing it, it has to be absolutely full time. And the Airbnb founders, it was six months before they hired their first employee, just because they wanted them to be so good. But again, there'd always be these questions, well, we could do more if we hired someone now. Is this one of these exceptional cases where we should violate that rule? So that was the kind of theme in terms of the debates that, or things that were on people's minds.

• 1:16:08Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that's, that's another one where Pascal's mugging will kick you in the nuts, right? Because if you're like, well, there's a 1% chance that they could be the Michael Jordan of exactly what I need, so let me hire them, let me hire them. I mean, that's, that's a very, that's a, like a kamikaze run

• 1:16:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:16:28Tim Ferriss?

  at a ship, so you have to be very careful. Where does, where do? Uh, favorite, where do some of your favorite philosophical frameworks uh have trouble in the real world?

• 1:16:44Speaker 03

  Uh huh. Yeah, I think there's, I think all over the place, probably. So, um, uh, I mean, a big thing is just, there's so, like, the real world is just so messy. So if you've got this idea, okay, I just wanna do the most good, I wanna um help as many people as possible by as much as possible, then actually implementing that um is like much harder to do. So, you know, in the early stages, for example, of giving what we can, when we were doing research into charity effectiveness, uh, we made kind of certain assumptions about, say,

• 1:17:24Speaker 03

  the quality of academic evidence, where there's this body of kind of research from economists that we were really pretty happy just to trust, like, because we're like, look, look, these are the scientists, they really know what they're talking about, they're giving these numbers, we're happy to go with those numbers. Um, and uh, it turned out, um, actually, like, loads of the research was really kind of crappy, um, you really couldn't trust them in the exact, in the way that um it would have been hoped for. Uh, instead, you've just got to go a lot more with, you know, very in-depth, independent investigations of the evidence yourself. Um, and that was something where you've got this kind of philosoph, you know, philosophical motivation, and then you make an assumption, which is that the people doing the experimental

• 1:18:09Speaker 03

  work, the empirical work, that you can just kind of trust what they're doing. Um, turns out that's really sadly not the case. Science is a lot more broken than um you'd think um kind of coming into it. And so that was maybe like, uh, yeah, one case where you make certain assumptions about how best to do good, um, but actually, actually, when you have to start confronting the really messy, the real world, things get a lot more complicated.

• 1:18:35Tim Ferriss?

  Did you ever find, I don't know what accent that was that I just threw out, but that's okay. Uh, did you ever find, uh, when surrounded by startup founders at Y Combinator, that you felt?

• 1:18:52Tim Ferriss?

  Demotivated in any way because you've pledged to donate everything you earn over around $36,000 per year to whatever charities you believe will be most effective. Do you find that that is ever a demotivator, the lack of that financial incentive? And I only ask because the ambitious set, the smart and ambitious set who make it into Y Combinator, they're not one dimensional from a financial standpoint, but many of them want to build large companies to get exceptionally, exceptionally rich, among other things, right? And there are case studies of what, there are case studies of the incredible realities

• 1:19:34Tim Ferriss?

  you can create for yourself if you win one of those lottery tickets, or if you can execute well enough to become one of those lottery tickets. What was your experience like?

• 1:19:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I think in terms of my personal motivation, it's almost the opposite, I think. Since I decided, okay, I really want to use my life to make a big impact, including making this commitment to give away most of my income, that's made me way more motivated because now it's not just kind of me on the line, it's like all these people that I'm aiming to help. It's like, you know, not all the time because I'd burn out, but sometimes it's the feeling of urgency you get in like a war situation or something like, whoa, no, this is a crisis, it's an emergency, you've got to do something. And if I was just, you know, just out for doing myself, then I'd be, I think, much

• 1:20:27Speaker 03

  happier to have a somewhat more relaxed life. But I do feel, you know, definitely during Y Combinator, I'd feel envious of the for-profit companies because, in some ways, so the two ways, I think, just, yeah, three ways maybe. One is just how quickly you can grow because you can get investment. So the top, our company to companies were getting $3 million of investment two days after demo day. Whereas if you're a nonprofit, then you're just having to go around soliciting donations. It takes, you know, we have really great donors who are just very rational and...

• 1:21:09Speaker 03

  It's not as arduous, nearly as arduous for us as it is for many other nonprofits. But even still, it's just much slower as a process for growing. Second is in terms of the scale you can reach. Um, I think something like only fifty charities have grown to more than fifty million dollars of revenue in the last forty years, whereas, you know, Airbnb is just less than ten years goes to a twenty billion dollar company. Um, many other examples of this as well. And given the kind of scale of ambition, that's also something that makes me think, yeah, actually, that's a really pretty good model. And then, yeah, the final thing is, um, in terms of the sort of talent you can affect

• 1:21:51Speaker 03

  in as well, um, working as a nonprofit, uh, you have the kind of, you just not, it's much harder to be able to pay competitively to try and get in those people who are just super ambitious themselves. So then you've got a much smaller pool of people, those people who are just motivated, who are much more motivated by, uh, the kind of impact they're gonna have. And that's like, you know, an extra, extra difficulty as well. So it definitely made me appreciate, um, the benefits of kind of for-profit models if you're wanting to have a really big impact.

• 1:22:28Tim Ferriss?

  If, if you look at, this is, um, this is another question I think a lot of people wrestle with, give now or give later? And the reason I ask is that, uh, if people were to survey the philanthropists currently most famous for rationally giving and making an impact.

• 1:22:49Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:22:50Tim Ferriss?

  You would find people like Gates, for instance, right? But the reality of Gates is that, and, uh, no offense, Bill, but he was a predator who became an icon, who became a philanthropist.

• 1:23:05Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:23:06Tim Ferriss?

  He was not, uh...

• 1:23:09Tim Ferriss?

  You would not consider him an altruist for the first few decades of his career. And so there are people, I actually had someone say to me not too long ago, you know, Mother Teresa was a narcissist. Bill Gates with a strike of the pen can do, you know, a hundred times more than she ever did in her lifetime. And therefore, if you have a, even a small likelihood of developing the sort of dynastic wealth of someone like a Gates, you're better served rather than kind of shaving off speed by donating along the way to focus all of your efforts on building an empire that you can then use for the greater

• 1:23:52Tim Ferriss?

  good. And no doubt, this is not the first time that you've, you've heard this type of thinking. How do you respond to that? Or how do you, how do you, how do you contend with that type of thinking?

• 1:24:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I actually just, it's such an interesting question. Actually, I often judge, when I'm giving talks, I often kind of judge audiences by whether this question comes up. This is a good audience. But no, it's so, it's so interesting. So I think like, yeah, I mean firstly, I think you can do, as Gates did, just a huge amount of goods by what I call learning to give and have promoted that, where, you know, you aim to do good through your ability to donate, well, and through direct contribution of your labor. And I think, you know, it's not the right path for everybody, but I think a lot more people should consider that than currently do. In terms of then, when should you be donating? I think there's just a few reasons on either side. So if you've got these amazing

• 1:24:46Speaker 03

  investment opportunities that are just going to really pay off, then you should definitely take them. Where going to college is the clearest example. If you're age 18, coming out of high school, then, you know, you could just start earning money and donating it right away. But that would be a real mistake. You should definitely get a degree, especially if you can go to a good university, just because of the impact it has for the rest of your life. And actually, in general, when we give advice to eighty thousand hours, we think that people really under invest in the long term because with their careers. Because most of the, you know, most of your hours that you're going to be spending working is going to be after the age of thirty.

• 1:25:28Speaker 03

  And also, that's when you're more influential. It's when you're in, like, you're running an organization rather than interning for it. Whereas a lot of people who want to do good immediately go and work in a nonprofit, where they're not going to get as good training or skills, network credentials, money as they would in other places like the for-profit world or sometimes further education as well. So I think a lot of the time, actually, people should be investing more than they do. When it comes to the idea of just, okay, I'm already earning a lot, but I'm just going to invest it all again in building up my own organization. I'll donate it at the end of my life.

• 1:26:09Speaker 03

  You know, alarm bells ring for me a bit because a lot of people say that and they never actually follow through.

• 1:26:14Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I'm sure, yeah.

• 1:26:16Speaker 03

  And so I think, like, minimally, you should start donating a pretty significant percentage just to get yourself in the habit of it, just so you know you're not telling yourself this lie.

• 1:26:26Speaker 03

  I think there are other thoughts as well. So like, donating has its own sort of compounding. It's like a sort of investment. So

• 1:26:35Speaker 03

  when someone in Kenya buys a metal roof, they get this amazing return on that investment. It's like fourteen percent per year or something. So if you're giving to that poor household in Kenya who then buys the metal roof, that money that you've given compounds over time. You don't see it because the effects are kind of diffuse, but you've made the whole country that little bit richer in a way that compounds, just in the same way as if you put it in a bank. On the other hand, though, you also just might really not know, you know, what the best ways of doing good are. And so you might want to wait until you've just got better information or you have, like, better views or actually able to think about this. And I think that's maybe with a lot of entrepreneurs, kind of what's going on. Maybe you feel this yourself as well. You look, I've got so much going on.

• 1:27:20Speaker 03

  You know, if I want to do a really good job of philanthropy, that takes time. And so I'm just not able to think about this. I'm going to have to punt it to a later stage. And so I do think there's a reasonable argument to be made there, but maybe the things you could do is start kind of binding yourself to the mast a little bit. Maybe you can. Make some public commitments, make some like big declarations publicly such that you know that if you back out of them, it's going to be really embarrassing. Or you can take, you could take a pledge. So I'm an advisor of an organization called the Founder's Pledge, which encourages people, which is, provides you with a contract so you can legally bind yourself to give at least 2% of your income or 2% of the profits

• 1:28:05Speaker 03

  that you make when you exit your company. And I think that's, you know, again, one of these things where you can say, okay, to begin with, I'm just going to focus on, you know, building this thing as much as possible. But I know that I've like actually locked down my intentions, so that I'm going to follow through on this later on.

• 1:28:20Tim Ferriss?

  That's the Founder's Pledge.

• 1:28:22Speaker 03

  Founder's Pledge, that's right.

• 1:28:23Tim Ferriss?

  How many people have made that pledge to date? That's a contractual obligation?

• 1:28:27Speaker 03

  That's a contractual obligation.

• 1:28:29Tim Ferriss?

  Who is the counterparty? Who are you contractually obligated to?

• 1:28:32Speaker 03

  So the way that works is you can donate anywhere ultimately, but it has to have an entity in the contract just for legal purposes. So you donate to this organization, the Founder's Pledge itself, that would then redistribute the money wherever you wanted it to go.

• 1:28:50Tim Ferriss?

  I see.

• 1:28:51Speaker 03

  You don't have to make a decision about where the money goes until you've actually made the donation.

• 1:28:55Tim Ferriss?

  They act as a trustee of sorts.

• 1:28:57Speaker 03

  That's right, yeah, kind of intermediary.

• 1:28:59Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. I've read you write, following your passion can be a mistake.

• 1:29:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:29:11Tim Ferriss?

  Could you elaborate on that?

• 1:29:12Speaker 03

  Yeah. So when it comes to career advice, there's all these slogans that go around, the chief of which is follow your passion. And the idea is like, it's kind of like the idea of having a soulmate or something. So you just look inside yourself and you've got this calling and it's like, oh, I should be an artist. And then you see that calling inside yourself and that's what you should go and do and that's the way to be happy. And I just think this is terrible advice and. That's for a number of reasons. So, um, one is just that, actually, one is just that most people don't have work-related passions. So, there was one study that found that most people were really passionate, passionate study of students, but they were passionate

• 1:29:52Speaker 03

  about things like arts, music, um, sports, things that incredibly difficult to actually work in, uh, precisely because everyone's passionate about them and so everyone wants to pursue them. So it's not really taking the world or what the world needs into account. And, uh, it sets you up for kind of anxious soul searching or then trying to pursue this thing that just statistically speaking, you're probably not going to be successful at. But I think it also just misconstrues the nature of, you know, finding a satisfying career and satisfying job, where the biggest predictor of job satisfaction is mentally engaging work. So that's the nature of the job itself. It's not actually got that much to do with you, though obviously that is important to some extent. It's whether the job, you know,

• 1:30:36Speaker 03

  provides a lot of variety, gives you good feedback, allows you to exercise autonomy, um, contributes, uh, to the wider world, you know, does it actually, is it meaningful? Is it actually making the world better? Um, and also whether it allows you to exercise a skill that you've developed. And then that's the final thing where you might think following a passion, you turn to that as, or do something you're good at. But the thing is, if you're just starting out, um, on work, you're probably just not that good at many things that are work-related. You know, when I was graduating, I hadn't done any, really done any management or fundraising or marketing or any sort of, anything of the skills that, um, actually get used day to day in a work life. And so what you should be thinking when you're first

• 1:31:19Speaker 03

  coming out of university is, you should be thinking like an experimental scientist or investigative journalist or something. You should be thinking, well, what are my hypotheses about the things I could become good at? And then actually going into the world and then testing that, finding out, um, hey, like, maybe I could become good at coding and that's something that the world really needs at the moment. It's just huge demand for coders. Um, and then actually going out and trying that. Uh, because...

• 1:31:46Speaker 03

  People's preference, that's the final thing, it's just people's preferences and passions change massively in ways that people systematically underpredict. So if you think back 10 years, what were you like 10 years ago? What were the things you were really passionate about? Probably quite different from the things you're passionate about now. But yet, when we think in 10 years' time, we think, oh no, I'm just set, I'm the same person now. And so really, what you want to be doing to begin with is building up like a broad array of skills, figuring out what are the things I can become good at. And that's gonna, that's the much better way to lead to kind of a successful and effective life.

• 1:32:28Tim Ferriss?

  I agree on all those points. I think that there's, there's another, there's another bullet, which is, I wrote an article years ago, I think it's just called "The Myth, The Dangerous Myth of the Dream Job." And I think the other issue, well, there are two issues that I'll underscore. The first is, as you said, humans are very bad at predicting what will make them happy. Extremely famously statistically bad. There's a great book by Daniel Gilbert called "Stumbling Upon Happiness" that goes into some depth on this. Now, that's great, pretty depressing conclusion. How do you address it? I think the, the second

• 1:33:08Tim Ferriss?

  bullet is realizing that the, one of the best ways to extinguish your passions, sometimes, if you are using it to be synonymous with hobbies, let's say you surf on the weekends, you wake up on a Saturday and you surf every Saturday, you love surfing, therefore you think you should follow that as your passion. Very different, that experience and the purpose of that experience is very different from waking up at 6:00 every morning to take, you know, investment bankers out to surf every morning from Monday to Friday, right? And so the, I think people overestimate the persistence of their enthusiasm

• 1:33:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:33:48Tim Ferriss?

  in that, in that switch from optional activity, you know, electional to obligatory.

• 1:33:58Speaker 03

  Yeah. And being in philosophy, I'm very familiar with this. So I'm one of the, you know, I'm really lucky in terms of the position I got, there's You know, far more people wanting to do philosophy than as a career that actually make it. And you see so many people like this who go into it because they really love this subject. They just wanted to learn. They found it incredibly intensely satisfying. And then they then they find out that actually in the real world of work to do this, they've just got to jump through loads of hoops and do loads of networking and bureaucracy and admin, just as if they were in any other job. And it's can be really pretty dissatisfying. You can end up, you know, it can be really actually pretty tragic where you end up hating

• 1:34:41Speaker 03

  the thing that you that you used to love the most above everything else.

• 1:34:44Tim Ferriss?

  Which is very common, extremely common. So you are a very effective young man, I would say.

• 1:34:52Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 1:34:53Tim Ferriss?

  You're welcome. It's objectively, I think it's pretty easy to objectively assess. You've achieved, you've, you've, you've achieved many things that it would take people a lifetime to achieve, if they achieve it at all. So congratulations first and foremost. But the question I'd love to ask is what book or books do you give the most to other people as gifts?

• 1:35:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we talked a bit about moral philosophy. That was Peter Singer and Derek Parfit. So I definitely give them then, but for in terms of just improving your life and just being more effective, the two I'd mentioned, one is mindfulness by Mark Williams and Danny Pullman. And, you know, having had Sam Harris on the show, obviously your listeners will know about this, but mindfulness meditation is the most, I don't know, it's kind of like this magic

• 1:35:57Speaker 03

  bullet technique that kind of science has just recently conned on to, where in effect you train yourself to be more in control of your thoughts and emotions by realizing that The current thoughts and emotions are not you, they don't define you. They're like propaganda and it's up to you to choose how you react to them. And our instinctive way, which is to fight with them, is actually counterproductive. Instead, you want to accept them with warm and welcome, kind of curiosity almost. And then that means you have the ability to deal with them as you like.

• 1:36:42Speaker 03

  And that's got the most amazing evidence base in terms of, basically seems to improve everything, but in particular mood and self-control.

• 1:36:50Tim Ferriss?

  Who are the authors of this again?

• 1:36:52Speaker 03

  Mark Williams, a professor at Oxford in psychology, who is the real kind of champion of...

• 1:36:59Tim Ferriss?

  You're really part of the Oxford mafia.

• 1:37:00Speaker 03

  I know, I know, it's also, it's also nepotistic. That was a coincidence, though. He's actually one of the few authors I've written to, just to say, "Look, this book could just significantly improve my life. You should be very happy at what you've achieved."

• 1:37:16Tim Ferriss?

  Awesome.

• 1:37:17Speaker 03

  And then Danny Pearlman, I think his name is, who is kind of journalistic, but also promoter of these ideas. And it's just a really good course for it. I liked it because I'm, you know, a big science fan, so I hear something like meditation and I, you know, get a little bit freaked out, it sounds a bit hippy for me. Whereas this is just, it's almost comically dull. In fact, I mean, they give these kind of guided meditations and you're used to hearing this kind of female, high-pitched, dreamy voice, and instead you get this, you know,

• 1:37:57Speaker 03

  broad Midlands English accent saying, "Now, sit on a rug, or a chair, or on a bed, and close your, close your eyes." And it's really very kind of surprising when you first listen to it.

• 1:38:08Tim Ferriss?

  So it's just like the worst dad bedtime story ever, but effective nonetheless?

• 1:38:13Speaker 03

  But then, really good if you feel kind of intuitively a bit skeptical of that sort of thing, because it's a very friendly, very kind of accessible introduction to mindfulness meditation. And it provides you with a course over eight weeks. We do a series of guided meditations. And, you know, I did that course and it's one of the things I think has had a really significant impact on my life.

• 1:38:40Tim Ferriss?

  What is, do you have a daily meditation practice now?

• 1:38:43Speaker 03

  I actually...

• 1:38:46Speaker 03

  Don't, but I'm gonna start again. I mean, I think there's two things. Yeah, I think I'm gonna start again just after, probably just after the gym. Because I

• 1:38:59Speaker 03

  go to the gym first thing every morning. And then after that point, just do, you know, it can just be 20 minutes breathing.

• 1:39:09Speaker 03

  Where you first focus on your breath and then extend that feeling of awareness to your whole body.

• 1:39:18Speaker 03

  I still meditate if I'm feeling, you know, stressed or anxious about something. It's a really nice kind of go to

• 1:39:27Speaker 03

  you know, go to activity that you can do to kind of yourself, kind of reset yourself.

• 1:39:32Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:39:32Speaker 03

  But then also, the other thing is just, it starts to affect your entire approach to life. So, you know, you'll start to feel the rising panic and you're much more in tune with your bodily reactions that then turn into thoughts. And then again, you can kind of catch those bodily reactions to begin with. Again, kind of slow down your breathing, focus on the breath, and then realize that it's up to you how you want to respond. And that can be very powerful because it means you have much more choice about your emotional reactions to things.

• 1:40:08Tim Ferriss?

  What was the second book?

• 1:40:09Speaker 03

  So the second book is The Power of Persuasion by Robert Levine. So I'm really in favor of meta skills. Just these kind of general purpose skills that can improve you, you know, improve your effectiveness in all areas of life. And the just the ability to be convincing, to sell ideas and to persuade other people is one of the you know, most important of these skills, I think. I like to think of myself as, you know, taking laziness and making it into a virtue because

• 1:40:45Speaker 03

  you know, why do something when someone else could do it? If you can make that into a virtue, then suddenly you find you have all these volunteers helping you with this thing you're trying to create and they turn into employees and then Um. They're away doing the sort of stuff that you could have instead just been slogging away in yourself. Uh, for, you know, years.

• 1:41:04Tim Ferriss?

  So the power of persuasion.

• 1:41:06Speaker 03

  The power of persuasion, and it's not, I don't think it became that popular, but it's the best book on persuasion that I know of, actually.

• 1:41:12Tim Ferriss?

  Levine.

• 1:41:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, and it's um, it's quite a lot more in depth than uh, things like Caldini's Power of Persuasion. And some of the other books in that genre, um, but it's incredibly interesting, um, and really lays out different principles for, like the key ideas for um, persuading someone, so like norms of reciprocity or escalating commitment. Uh, also, and also just really shows how

• 1:41:45Speaker 03

  being persuasive, a lot is often just about being a really nice, authoritative, genuine, honest person. Um, so,

• 1:41:55Speaker 03

  you know, the key aspects of being persuasive are honesty, um, uh, honesty and authority. And ma- many people, they think, oh, well, I wanna become someone who can, you know, be persuasive. They then turn into these kind of sleazy secondhand car salesman types, and that's exactly the wrong thing to do. Um, instead, it's actually about being this uh, um, you know, transparent person who really knows their stuff. Um, and yeah, I found that kind of very useful, especially as someone who is trying to, you know, my life is about selling people on certain ideas, ideas of effective altruism.

• 1:42:37Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I, I think everyone's lives are about selling other people on their ideas.

• 1:42:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, basically. I mean, it's just, it comes up absolutely everywhere. Um, and it's just very thorough, very in-depth, and really goes uh, to, goes to the level of breaking down into like really concrete principles, like earlier I mentioned. Um, you wanna aggregate harms and disaggregate benefits, so, um, it's, you know, more enjoyable for you to win fifty dollars one day and twenty-five dollars the next than it is to win seventy-five dollars one day. Um, whereas if that was a cost, then it would be, you'd prefer to just lose seventy-five dollars at once, rather than have two distinct losses.

• 1:43:17Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:43:18Speaker 03

  So again, it goes to the level of very specific, um. Very specific recommendations and then also has amazing case studies of, you know, it does go to the best, uh, you know, stories of working with the very best, um, salespeople in all different areas of life. Um, so it's the best book that I read on that topic.

• 1:43:40Tim Ferriss?

  I'll have to check it out. Uh, your morning ritual, you mentioned working out first thing in the morning. What does the first sixty to ninety minutes of your ideal day look like?

• 1:43:51Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, um, in terms of morning routine, I think the biggest, I think maybe the single piece of productivity advice or, you know, productivity improvement I made was sleeping enough. Um, people's needs for sleep just varies massively from person to person. Some people can just sleep four hours a night and they're very lucky. I'm not one of those people. And coming to accept that was very important. So I aim to sleep nine hours a night. Um, and then, then when I wake up, it's really about getting up and going.

• 1:44:27Tim Ferriss?

  When do you wake up? What's your normal range?

• 1:44:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, I typically, typically about nine AM. So I'm not a super early riser either. Really not much of a morning person, actually. Um, so typically about nine AM. And then, yeah, it's just about getting up and going. So I eat things that I can hold in my hand. Um, I really hate cereal. I hate things where I had to like spend a lot of my time. Uh, you know, cause also the morning is my peak time in terms of, uh, you know, mental performance. And so, uh, I typically eat breakfast bars, which I'm sure you're going to chastise me for for being unhealthy. But, um, uh, uh, that's what I do in the morning. Go to the gym.

• 1:45:13Speaker 03

  Again, then that's probably the second most important, uh, piece of productivity advice is just regular exercise.

• 1:45:20Speaker 03

  Again, because, um, I feel like in terms of my life and what I've contributed, almost all of it is in terms of the highest quality work I'm producing, about how many hours I'm producing. So the thought of like, oh, I can sleep less and then produce more hours is just completely false economy. Instead, it's just how can I produce the highest quality work? And for that, again, just exercising in the morning is the most important thing.

• 1:45:47Tim Ferriss?

  What type of exercise? What does your routine look like?

• 1:45:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, so now, so I've suffered some fairly severe back pain over the last year and a half. So that's changed things quite a lot.

• 1:46:00Speaker 03

  And now, so my favorite exercise, which I was able to do when I was in Cambridge, not here, because I don't have the machine, is called a Jacob's ladder. Do you know it?

• 1:46:10Tim Ferriss?

  I do. Yeah, maybe you could describe it for folks.

• 1:46:12Speaker 03

  Describe it. So it's wooden bars forming a ladder that are on kind of conveyor belt. So they're constantly going down. You're constantly climbing up. So it's about forty five degrees. So it's not vertical. If you know, if you've ever just tried to climb up a ladder, you get pretty tired pretty quickly.

• 1:46:35Speaker 03

  And you're attached to the machine so that you're able to set the pace as well. So it's kind of like a treadmill, except you're just climbing up these bars. And it's great for me because it's low impact. I can't do high impact stuff at the moment.

• 1:46:48Speaker 03

  But it's incredibly tiring. I remember when I first did it, I could do about two minutes and then I would be completely conked out. And then I would build that up. I built that up over time.

• 1:47:00Speaker 03

  And it's the most, you feel like your entire body is just completely spent by the end of it. Yeah, so it's my favorite exercise.

• 1:47:10Tim Ferriss?

  And?

• 1:47:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:47:11Tim Ferriss?

  And then, so how long does that work out last?

• 1:47:14Speaker 03

  About an hour. I initially, if my back's bad, then I tend to focus it to more like an hour and a half. But that's, a lot of that time is spent doing physio exercises, so.

• 1:47:28Tim Ferriss?

  How did you hurt your back?

• 1:47:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't actually know. I think most cases of back pain actually don't have a clear, um, a clear problem, but I think it was bad posture. So, uh, my best guess as to what's going on is anterior pelvic tilt. So where your pelvis just tilts forward too much and you're gonna stick out your belly like kind of beer belly style.

• 1:47:52Tim Ferriss?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:47:53Speaker 03

  Um, and so for there, the key is to really strengthen your glutes and your abs, stretch out your hip flexors and your lower back so that you're strengthening the muscles that are pulling your pelvis back and stretching out those that are pulling it forward. And you get all these problems from sitting all day. Um, I would have terrible posture as well, so I've been through that a lot, using ergonomic kneeling chair, experimented with standing desk, um, and in general, learning a lot about posture because really, I think the kind of common conceptions of what good posture consists in are just completely wrong, actually. Um, uh, yeah, people think it's about sitting up very straight and very rigidly,

• 1:48:36Speaker 03

  whereas actually it's more about getting the curve of your spine right. So, um, having your hips tilted too far forward so that your lower spine, um, makes your belly stick out, that's a very common problem. And then also having your shoulders kind of hunched forward and then your, uh, neck and head up, kind of like a duck, another very common problem. Um, and so actually, if you want to test your posture, you can just stand against a wall and you should only have two inches, um, between, so just standing up straight against a wall. You should only have two inches between, uh, the spine, your spine and the wall and between your, uh, the kind of curve of your neck and the wall.

• 1:49:17Speaker 03

  And for almost everyone who does that, they'll find that, uh, especially at the neck, there's just much bigger gaps than there should be.

• 1:49:24Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's also, that's also hard if you have a horse ass like I do, like a Kim Kardashian ass. Uh, but the, so for the back, a couple of things that might be helpful. Where do you feel the pain in your back? And this could be- Referral pain and not the sensation of pain could, might not be the location of the pathology, but where do you feel the pain the most?

• 1:49:51Speaker 03

  Yes, it's very lower back.

• 1:49:53Tim Ferriss?

  Very lower back. So, a couple of things that you might find interesting to play with there, if it's the low back, would be number one, and you can check out Kelly Starrett, maybe you've seen his stuff, Mobility Wad, he's been on the podcast as well, but trying to get the head of your femur to seat at the back of your pelvis. So, by sitting constantly, it tends to get pushed to the front of the hip capsule, and it causes all sorts of issues and soft tissue changes and whatnot. So, if you look at exercises, they're pretty easy to do, just like on your hands and knees,

• 1:50:34Tim Ferriss?

  and you lift one leg up and move your weight around as you apply it to one leg. But if you were to look up sort of seating the femur in the pelvis, and Kelly Starrett, I think that could be very helpful. And then, secondly, have you considered using or used inversion tables or gravity boots? So that you can...

• 1:50:58Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:51:00Tim Ferriss?

  So, the, I've found this to just be tremendously valuable, where I'm decompressing my spine and putting myself into a state of traction. I try to do it at least once per day, and most frequently, I'll do that at night. So, I'll hang from my, try this out, because I've talked about this before on the podcast, and I've had literally dozens of men specifically, but my audiences, or the people who listen to the podcast are about 80% male, come back and say that they've eliminated years of back pain doing this. And I'm not a doctor, of course, this isn't medical advice, but if you hang from your hands in the morning, and then invert yourself at night for a short period of time, and

• 1:51:44Tim Ferriss?

  if you can't invert, there are other options, but you could look at teeter, teeter hangups, T-E-E-T-E-R. There are different models, but teeter hangups, I use the boots. There are risks involved with hanging upside down like Batman from a bar with boots on, obviously. You could use the inversion table. I just use the boots. And if you can't do either of those due to space constraints or travel or whatever, there's also a device called the Lynx, L I, L Y and X, which allows you to put your lower back into traction on the ground. And it's very small. I have one about 15 feet from me behind my couch.

• 1:52:22Tim Ferriss?

  And making it a habit, just as an experiment to hang twice a day, once from your hands and then again from your feet, if possible.

• 1:52:31Tim Ferriss?

  Particularly for that, like Iliapsoas pelvis, low back complex, I think you could find, that would be a worthwhile experiment.

• 1:52:43Speaker 03

  This is great. I thought I knew all of the back pain remedy tricks, but you've educated me.

• 1:52:51Tim Ferriss?

  You could also,

• 1:52:54Tim Ferriss?

  if you, if you want to enjoy some masochism, but potentially reverse some of the soft tissue issues that you have in, no doubt in your pelvis from the sitting and the sort of kyphosis lordosis, that upper back rounding and then the anterior pelvic tilt, that like sway back position is you could find an ART practitioner. I'm sure there are, I don't know if there's probably one at the very furthest from you. Or maybe it's farthest. I always screw those up. London. But ART is active release technique. And they'll basically take, they'll like form their hand into it, their fingers into like a ridge hand and, and dig it three or four inches into your pelvis and have you move your leg around. It's extremely uncomfortable.

• 1:53:40Tim Ferriss?

  You might need a safety word. But it's, that can have a tremendous effect on mobility and gliding of adjacent tissues and things like that. So those would be worth checking out. But I don't want to make this about me spouting off, but since I know a lot of people who've suffered from low back pain and I previously suffered from low back pain, which I do not suffer from anymore. That would be a suggestion. And the other thing is, what I've found is Standing at a standing desk all day long is very challenging, particularly if you're moving from location to location.

• 1:54:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:54:17Tim Ferriss?

  If I ensure that I walk an hour a day, which we're really evolved to do, we've made a lot of compromises from an evolutionary standpoint to be able to walk for long distances. That also helps to keep that hip complex functioning normally. And you're getting at that point, sort of a high volume of low intensity stretching.

• 1:54:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:54:45Tim Ferriss?

  Which is very valuable. So those would be my two cents.

• 1:54:49Speaker 03

  Well, it's a big deal. I mean, so many people, it's like a plague or something, number of people who suffer from back pain. And then it just can be completely debilitating. I've lost months of productivity as a result.

• 1:55:02Tim Ferriss?

  So what I would, I mean, you can speak to your PT about this, but I think that oftentimes the reason people have low back pain and then cannot squat is because they don't squat enough in the first place.

• 1:55:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:55:18Tim Ferriss?

  So the hanging, if you were to do that for a week, see how you feel, and then find a good Olympic weightlifting coach, not powerlifting coach, find a good Olympic weightlifting coach who can train you to do overhead squats. And it may take a long time for you to get to the point where you can do proper overhead squats where you're not losing lower back stability. But that can be a complete game changer. I mean, I'm 38 and my hips and knees have, are better than they've been in probably 15 years. And I directly attribute that to regular deloading and decompressing of the spine, as well as a regular squatting practice where I'm squatting every day, even if it's just

• 1:56:02Tim Ferriss?

  for five repetitions with 45 pounds on the back or in front of me or overhead. So that's a rather massive digression, but that's okay.

• 1:56:16Speaker 03

  Well, you may have, yeah.

• 1:56:18Tim Ferriss?

  Let me know how it goes. Yeah.

• 1:56:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, it may have given me months to fix the work, so. Take a bit of pain.

• 1:56:24Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I hope it helps. I know how debilitating it can be. Do you have any evening rituals, any evening routines for winding down?

• 1:56:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, I actually really don't have an evening routine. I mean, except insofar as

• 1:56:40Speaker 03

  I always take an hour or two off before, like, before going to bed because I used to, you know, work until I wanted to fall asleep, but that's just, again, this false economy because it means you just wake up much less energized. And again, it's just eating into peak productivity time.

• 1:57:01Speaker 03

  I travel a lot, so if I need to reset my sleep, then I take melatonin.

• 1:57:07Speaker 03

  And then I focus a lot on getting high-quality sleep if I can. So most important there, just being completely shutting out light.

• 1:57:15Speaker 03

  So that you're not waking up in the middle of the night at all.

• 1:57:19Speaker 03

  But in terms of something to decompress myself, normally just the regular things of seeing friends or eating, generally kind of avoid

• 1:57:30Speaker 03

  watching TV or anything that's kind of bright unnatural light.

• 1:57:34Tim Ferriss?

  Speaking of bright unnatural light, what are your, what are your favorite documentaries or movies?

• 1:57:41Speaker 03

  So I think by far, my favorite documentary maker is Louis Theroux. I don't know how popular he is in the US. He's a bit of a UK institution.

• 1:57:51Speaker 03

  Have you heard of him before?

• 1:57:52Tim Ferriss?

  I've heard of him, but I couldn't name any of his work.

• 1:57:55Speaker 03

  Okay, so he, I mean, the most, the most interesting is Louis Theroux's Wild Weekends. He tends to go to places in the US to these weird subcultures. And he does exceptionally well at

• 1:58:10Speaker 03

  becoming involved in those subcultures. So examples are neo-Nazis,

• 1:58:15Speaker 03

  survivalists, the West with the Baptist Church, swingers, off to prisons, yeah, porn, cosmetic surgeons, and the Black Power movement. And he comes across just so bumbling and naive that the people he's filming then completely reveal everything about their own crazy lives.

• 1:58:40Tim Ferriss?

  And that's Louis Theroux.

• 1:58:43Speaker 03

  Louis Theroux.

• 1:58:44Tim Ferriss?

  Go ahead.

• 1:58:45Speaker 03

  T H E R O U X, that's right. And it's incredibly powerful because you see him interacting with these neo-Nazis. And they're, you know, grilling him on whether he's Jewish and he just keeps telling them he doesn't want to answer. Um, and, uh, you know, and you see them, the parents are getting their children to dance around the swastika, um, as kind of morning playtime. And you think, wow, I'm so happy I'm not one of these people and, you know, so enlightened. Cause they're so mind-killed, they're so completely captured by this, their own ideology. But it makes you think, wow, well, what may be the things I believe just because of the people that I'm surrounded by? Um, all these kind of cultural things, because they're just completely convinced of this worldview.

• 1:59:30Speaker 03

  Or people who are looking for UFOs all day. Um, or people who are certain that the government is going to come and crack down. Um, or the West with the Baptist Church that thinks literally everyone is going to hell apart from them. Um, and it makes you think, yeah, well, maybe the things that I, I believe myself that, uh, are just, you know, in the future will be looked back upon as, uh, you know, and as crazy as I'm, you know, looking at these, these communities and thinking that they're crazy.

• 2:00:01Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I think it's no, it's no maybe at all. I think it's, it's a hundred percent certain. I mean, the, uh, I, I think everybody should take the approach of good doctors and the, uh, or I should say the sort of perspective of good doctors, which is 50% of what we know is wrong. We just don't know which 50%.

• 2:00:17Speaker 03

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

• 2:00:19Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, yeah.

• 2:00:20Speaker 03

  Yeah. Most people don't tend to act that way. They're much more too accepting of the status quo.

• 2:00:25Tim Ferriss?

  Oh yeah. It's just, uh, you know, like the quote that I always use and no doubt should implement more in my own life. Although I try quite hard is, uh, you know, when you find yourself on the side of the, the, the majority, it's time to pause and reflect. That's Mark Twain. But most people interpret that to mean the majority of, say, the US, whatever their nationality happens to be. And I would just say, no, no, no, even the majority of your friends, right? If you have a narrative that you're telling yourself. And it's within a peer group, even if it's 10 people, 20 people, you should really examine that.

• 2:00:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:00:59Tim Ferriss?

  You know, have a regular check in.

• 2:01:01Speaker 03

  And I think politics is the one that's the key, that's the biggest influence here, where, I don't know, people will identify very strongly as very left wing or very right wing, but it's like, all this likes me is a very strange thing to do, because there's this package of very different ideas associated with the left or associated with the right, that don't have any resemblance to each other. Like, why on earth should your views on abortion be related to your views on optimal taxation policy? There's completely distinct issues, yet they come in these packages. And I think it's because people, you know, we're all monkeys that walking around wearing

• 2:01:40Speaker 03

  suits, we, you know, we want to form tribes, and then we start forming tribes based around, say, political identities. But then that means you'll just start to buy a package of views rather than just looking at each one on their own merit.

• 2:01:58Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I think, yeah, that may be a whole separate conversation. I think humans can learn a lot about themselves and their biases by reading at least one book on chimpanzee behavior. There's one in particular that's popped up a lot in my reading about animal training and evolutionary biology and whatnot, because I have a new puppy, adopted or rescue puppy, and it's called Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes, written by France de Waal, W-A-A-L. And this book apparently was used by, and I think he's mentioned this publicly several times, Newt Gingrich, in amassing power and overcoming opponents in his political career.

• 2:02:43Tim Ferriss?

  So it's, I think the parallels are fascinating, and it's easy to convince ourselves that we are passionate about a particular position, because the position has merit, whereas in reality, I think a lot of it is just a hardwired desire to fight and dominate and be right and so on, which you can trace back to chimpanzee behavior, find parallels. And it's depressing, but I think also helpful at the same time.

• 2:03:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a really useful lens, I think.

• 2:03:23Tim Ferriss?

  If you could have one billboard anywhere with anything on it, what would it say?

• 2:03:29Speaker 03

  Good question. So I think it would be outside the Gates Foundation, or maybe outside Bill Gates's house, I don't know where that is, but in Seattle, where, you know, he's gonna, ultimately, he's gonna donate $100 billion. And it would say, "Bill, you have talked, like, yeah, you know, you've spoken about risks and potential upside from, in the long run, developments of artificial general intelligence,

• 2:04:11Speaker 03

  yet you're not doing anything about it yet. You haven't got involved. You have the power to make a massive difference here. You should, like, do something about it." I think that's what it would say.

• 2:04:22Tim Ferriss?

  So, artificial intelligence, generalized artificial intelligence?

• 2:04:25Speaker 03

  Human level and greater than human level artificial intelligence.

• 2:04:30Tim Ferriss?

  I did not see that coming at all.

• 2:04:33Speaker 03

  You did not see that coming. I was

• 2:04:34Tim Ferriss?

  No, this is

• 2:04:35Speaker 03

  Late on into the interview, it's a whole other

• 2:04:37Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah. This is act three.

• 2:04:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:04:41Tim Ferriss?

  That's

• 2:04:42Speaker 03

  Big debate in the media, but, yeah, I think just, this is, and like, another Oxford professor, Nick Bostrom, writing about this in a book called Superintelligence.

• 2:04:53Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah, very, very famous book.

• 2:04:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, very important book, where, you know, very, sometimes I think we just have, it's very hard to predict the future. Sometimes I think you have a bit of an inkling into, you're able to make really pretty educated guesses about what are going to be really big transformative technologies in the future, the sort of things like development efficient, that, you know, has huge potential to do For power and also huge potential for harm through um use of nuclear weapons. Uh I think the case of development of artificial intelligence, you know, it's not next, it's not gonna happen tomorrow. We're thinking about like thirty years or fifty years or by the

• 2:05:38Speaker 03

  end of the century. It's clearly, it's, you know, really pretty likely it's gonna be um one of the most or the most important development of the century when it does happen. Um like in the case, you know, if we could have known about nuclear weapons or developing fission um much earlier, we could have had policies in place such so we're really prepared for that and we wouldn't have maybe had a nuclear arms race. The world would have been a much better place. I think that's the situation we're potentially in with developments of artificial intelligence as well.

• 2:06:09Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, so I was planning on wrapping up after another two minutes, but I can't let this one go. So you're hanging out with, you mentioned Nick, super intelligence. You're surrounded by or you have access to some very smart people who have thought a lot about this. Seems like you have as well. What percentage of those who are most educated about the potential implications, ramifications of AI are strongly concerned that it's summoning the demon?

• 2:06:42Speaker 03

  Oh, summoning the demon. Um yeah, I mean, summoning the demon is quite an extreme way of putting it.

• 2:06:49Tim Ferriss?

  It is. Well, yeah, I mean.

• 2:06:50Speaker 03

  That's the reference to Elon Musk.

• 2:06:51Tim Ferriss?

  Right, that's Elon Musk, yeah.

• 2:06:53Speaker 03

  It might be. Uh so it depends exactly on who the reference class is, but um on some accounts, it's the large majority, actually, where then the media just completely distorts the debate because the media loves to distort debates.

• 2:07:10Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 2:07:11Speaker 03

  Where if you're framing it as this is a really important issue, it's not gonna, it's not something that's gonna happen tomorrow. It's something that's like a long-term speculative issue. Um but obviously, we need to have like a sensible, rational approach to this and like a proactive um approach such that we're like, you know, we're aware of what's coming and. Have taken precautions so that we use this new technology in a way that is gonna lead to the like good outcomes and avoid bad outcomes. Then the rate of agreement is just kind of very high indeed. If instead you were saying something narrower, which is like, well, AI is gonna happen in 20

• 2:07:55Speaker 03

  years and then it's gonna be Terminator scenario and we're all gone for sure. That's a much smaller percentage of people.

• 2:08:01Tim Ferriss?

  So let me rephrase my question, so which is a totally different question, so I'm kind of cheating, but.

• 2:08:08Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:08:09Tim Ferriss?

  Given your, so you are, you're in a somewhat, you're in a very interesting position because you've had the perspective and experience of watching people behave what could be considered very irrational, irrationally. In other words, they would rescue the drowning child, but they won't donate that amount of money for a similar guarantee, nearly guaranteed outcome, right? And then you have, you have, for instance, this is more from my experience, but I've had a lot of exposure to lawyers and attorneys in the legal world over the last decade or so. And you'll find people who are genuinely, I would say, good people, who started out

• 2:08:53Tim Ferriss?

  with very altruistic, world improving agendas. And yet now they, they are, say, defending child molesters in the Catholic Church, or, you know, and their job is to find holes in the depositions of these victims, or, I mean, it sounds fucking terrible, and it is, or their, their job is to help big oil companies avoid lawsuits and problematic legislation when there are violations of EPA regulations, right? I mean, like, from my perspective, just horrific, like, evil shit. And they're able to rationalize doing it, right? Like, everyone's, everyone is.

• 2:09:40Tim Ferriss?

  Entitled to due process, right? That's kind of the catch-all brush aside that you hear. And but it's like they go from that to a point where this is maybe a separate podcast, but I'm all fired up now. They go from being a hesitant participant in that to maybe now they're a senior partner and they're like, "Oh, there's an oil spill. Fantastic. Can you imagine how much work we're going to have now?" Right? And but these are people who, outside of that compartmentalization, act in very good ways. So I guess part of my concern, or not necessarily concern, Mike, my question for you is, given how you've observed these quirks of human nature, do you think people who are at the forefront of AI,

• 2:10:23Tim Ferriss?

  who have the possibility of changing the world in such a fundamental way, not only for other people, but to generate wealth that is almost beyond comprehension for themselves? Do you think that drive and greed and arms race, because there are competing teams, right, trying to get to this point in many countries, where you have a generalized artificial intelligence? Do you think that that competitive drive and desire to win and generate wealth, et cetera, will override the voice in the back of their head saying, "You need to figure out the safety precautions and the safety net

• 2:11:07Tim Ferriss?

  before we get anywhere close to this technology taking off?" In the same way that you talked about the nuclear arms race, right?

• 2:11:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:11:19Tim Ferriss?

  What's your perspective?

• 2:11:20Speaker 03

  So yeah, sadly, I mean, this is just, it's a classic tragedy of the commons where if you're going to have multiple people trying to build the same thing, and where whoever gets their first wins, basically, is just, you know, has much more power.

• 2:11:41Speaker 03

  And then some people think, "Oh, yeah, we should be doing this like more cautiously. That would, you know, slow progress, but we'd be having, you know, greater that chance of positive upside."

• 2:11:54Speaker 03

  Fewer risks, then they're just gonna kind of lose the race. And yeah, sadly, I think it's not. And maybe you can even have that, even if everyone's acting altruistically. Maybe they disagree slightly on how things should be done, and that's enough for them kind of not to trust each other in the absence of coordination. And there, again, it's just not even a matter of people getting corrupted, perhaps, as you talk about the people, you know, the lawyers being happy about an oil spill being. But just as a matter of economic incentives.

• 2:12:28Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 2:12:29Speaker 03

  Then you can get these, yeah, race dynamics. And, you know, that was the case, it was exactly the case between the US and Russia with nuclear weapons. And definitely not saying it's a perfect analogy at all, but there, there was the Barak Plan, which was a proposal after the Second World War for complete, kind of a complete abandonment of all nuclear weapons. And all fissile material would be kind of kept a check on by the United Nations. And basically, all parties were in favor of this because it's the best outcome for everyone.

• 2:13:14Speaker 03

  But it still wasn't able to happen because there wasn't sufficient trust between the two countries. And, yep, then we get this incentive, this kind of arms race. And that's, I think, why we kind of want, you know, and, you know, not just AI, other sorts of, you know, risky technologies as well, you know, the ability to develop pathogens, ability to do geoengineering. We're on the frontier of developing many different technologies that have very large potential upsides and very large potential costs. And in each case, we wanna have, you know, coordinated

• 2:13:52Speaker 03

  approach so that we can ensure that we don't get those sort of race dynamics, I think.

• 2:14:00Tim Ferriss?

  What existential threat to mankind worries you the most? Or is most underrated? Those are two different questions, but I'll, I'll make it two questions anyway.

• 2:14:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I guess.

• 2:14:17Speaker 03

  Until recently, I would have said, actually, yeah, okay, I have an answer for most underrated.

• 2:14:23Speaker 03

  You know, what is me the most? So, yeah, development of new pathogens. So, once we start being able to build viruses and bacteria,

• 2:14:32Speaker 03

  then it'll become very easy to potentially build pathogens that could kill billions of people or the entire world, or just almost everyone in the world. You know, that's very worrying, as is AI. Those are the kind of, those are the two big ones, I think. In terms of most underrated, I think are the ones we don't even know about.

• 2:14:56Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 2:14:57Speaker 03

  We, you know, predicting future technology is extremely difficult to do. Everyone basically agrees with this. And many of the developments that have happened over the last 50, 100 years would have been completely unpredictable 50 or 100 years before that.

• 2:15:17Speaker 03

  And we should expect, again, there's going to be developments that happen over the next 50 or 100 years that, you know, no one's even thought of at the moment. And so, I think that means, but you can still make some sorts of progress on mitigating those risks, because there's some things you can do, like greater political coordination across the world. It's just going to be really good across a very wide range of scenarios. You know, having research institutes working on really the frontiers of technological development, doing horizon scanning to try and identify sort of risks like this.

• 2:15:54Speaker 03

  Those are some of the things that we could be doing to try and mitigate these unknown unknowns. But that's exactly the sort of thing we're going to be biased against, because it's like, you're spending money doing something that you don't even know what it's going to help with. It's like quite an abstract kind of cell. So, I suspect the biggest risks are ones we haven't even thought of.

• 2:16:16Tim Ferriss?

  Right, yeah, the black swans.

• 2:16:20Tim Ferriss?

  Just a couple more questions. What advice would you give to your, you're only 28, so what advice would you give to your 20-year-old self?

• 2:16:26Speaker 03

  To my 20-year-old self? The biggest, I think there's, yeah, let's see, the two, I think. So, one is emphasizing, you have 80,000 working hours in the course of your life.

• 2:16:43Speaker 03

  It's incredibly important to work out how best to spend them. And what you're doing at the moment, 20-year-old Will, is just kind of drifting and thinking. And not spending very much time thinking about this kind of macro-optimization. You might be thinking about, you know, how can I do my coursework as well as possible? Kind of micro-optimization, but not really thinking about, okay, what are actually my ultimate goals in life and how can I optimize towards them? Analogy I use is, you know, if you're going out for dinner, it's going to take you a couple of hours. You might spend five minutes working out where to go for dinner. Seems reasonable to spend sort of 5% of your time on how to spend the remaining 95%. If you did that with your career, that would be 4,000 hours or two working years.

• 2:17:28Speaker 03

  And actually, I think that's pretty legitimate as a thing to do. Spending that length of time trying to work out, how should you be spending the rest of your life?

• 2:17:35Tim Ferriss?

  Now, do you spend that, do you spend, are those two contiguous years or are those four years of total time divided?

• 2:17:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think four years of total time weighted towards the front of your career, I think. But I think we should be spending a lot of time, and I do this, any sort of big decision I make, I spend a very large amount of time thinking about, you know, is this the best thing I could be doing? What other things could I be doing instead? Are there ways I can change my plans?

• 2:18:04Tim Ferriss?

  What's your process for thinking that through? Do you have, like, do you sit down with a particular pad of paper and go through a particular set of questions? How do you, how do you, what is the thinking process for important, big decisions?

• 2:18:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I'll create a Google Doc that I share with friends or people I particularly respect. They'll then provide comments and will often be several iterations of this. There's a framework. So the 80,000 hours, which, you know, is what 80,000 hours promotes as well, where Because I'm thinking about the impact I can ultimately make, you can break that down into kind of three components, impact you have, so this is for job decisions, but it actually applies quite widely. Um, uh, impact you'll have on the job, where you can think about, uh, impact you'll have through your direct labor, through, um, your ability to advocate for important causes,

• 2:18:58Speaker 03

  uh, through, uh, your donations as well, but then also impact later on in life, where that's, uh, skills, credentials, network. Um, then also, how does this keep my options open? Um, so academia is a great example of this. If you leave academia, it's very hard to come back, whereas if you go and do something before becoming, going into academia, doing a PhD, it's easy to transition back in. Similarly, if you go into a for-profit, then you can transition to nonprofits quite easily, much harder to do it, vice versa. And then also, how much do you learn about yourself in the course of this work? And then the third aspect's personal fit, so, um, you know, how uniquely good am I at doing this compared to other people?

• 2:19:42Speaker 03

  Um, and so that's the kind of framework, basically just like a big checklist, uh, that I'll use if I'm evaluating different sorts of, um, you know, large-scale pieces of work I could be doing.

• 2:19:54Tim Ferriss?

  Can people find this framework on the eighty thousand hours website?

• 2:19:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, so on the eighty thousand hours website, there's, you'll get it as kind of as soon as you go in, there's, um, uh-

• 2:20:06Tim Ferriss?

  What is the website?

• 2:20:07Speaker 03

  Career Guide, so just eightythousandhours.org, eighty thousand is the number, hours.org.

• 2:20:13Tim Ferriss?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:20:14Speaker 03

  And, uh, then there's a career guide, and actually, we've kind of built an interactive tool to help you apply this framework in your own career decisions. It takes about thirty minutes to do, um, how to choose that, and we'll also kind of recommend your ideas, uh, as you go through.

• 2:20:30Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:31Speaker 03

  Because I think, we don't often think about this in a very structured way at all.

• 2:20:34Tim Ferriss?

  No.

• 2:20:35Speaker 03

  Decision of our lives.

• 2:20:36Tim Ferriss?

  No, I should, uh, I think I'm going to do that in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours, because it's like, I have a habit of just-

• 2:20:42Speaker 03

  Terrific.

• 2:20:43Tim Ferriss?

  At random moments, you know, I'll have two glasses of wine and ask my girlfriend- What should I do with my life? What do you think? You know, it's kind of, it's, I mean, I'm playing a little bit. I mean, it's not the only way that I approach trying to make these decisions, but I haven't had a structured way of assessing impact of some of these larger options. And I think the, the-

• 2:21:03Speaker 03

  If you want any career advice as well, we do specialize in that. So happy to give you a one on one.

• 2:21:09Tim Ferriss?

  I appreciate it. Not sure if you could consider anything I've done a career, but-

• 2:21:14Speaker 03

  Well, that's the thing. Actually, we, that's one of the mistakes we think people make is thinking about careers. Really, you should just be thinking about stages in your life.

• 2:21:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:23Speaker 03

  Because very few people nowadays just do one thing and then stick at it for the rest of their life.

• 2:21:27Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, definitely.

• 2:21:28Speaker 03

  You want to be much more flexible than that.

• 2:21:30Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, and that, the keeping the options open is a really interesting point.

• 2:21:35Tim Ferriss?

  We, we're going to wrap up in a minute, so we won't get into it, this, this particular conversation. But spoke a lot with Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, about this and how he approaches his life. What, from what he calls a systems perspective as opposed to a goals perspective. And the systems is always, in effect, ensuring that even if a given project or stage fails, the skills and relationships and so on that he develops, in addition to the, the way in which he sequenced things, like you mentioned,

• 2:22:08Tim Ferriss?

  allows him to be as good off, as well off, or better off afterwards, even if, even if it's a strikeout on some, some other levels.

• 2:22:19Tim Ferriss?

  What is the last question? What ask or request do you have of people listening? I mean, I'm going to throw it out there just to, just to, to, to, because it addresses a pet peeve of mine. If you're a founder who claims to be building something to change the world, and if you're not able or not willing to contribute to any causes right now, then sign the founder's pledge. 2% is nothing. It's 2,000 out of a million dollars. It's nothing. It's trivial. So I would just say, if that's your line, to ensure you're not lying to yourself and other people, just sign the pledge. I don't see any downside to it that I can perceive.

• 2:23:02Tim Ferriss?

  So, so that would be one ask of mine. But what would, what would your ask or request be of the audience? And where can they learn more about what you're up to and find? Find your work online, and you for that matter.

• 2:23:17Speaker 03

  Great. So key ask is go onto effective altruism.com and you can sign up for the Effect of Altruism newsletter there. That's also, if you're interested, you can buy my book on that as well, Doing Good Better. That's all about the ideas we talked about, at least some of the ideas we talked about, about doing the most good. Beyond that, if you want to do good with charity, see give well.org for top recommended charities. Want to do good for your career choice, eighty thousand hours.org, again, sign up for the newsletter. And if you're really feeling inspired and you want to make an even bigger commitment than that founder's pledge, giving

• 2:24:01Speaker 03

  what we can is a pledge of 10% or more. And you can join the community and it's a really kind of worthwhile and worthwhile things to do that will make your life more meaningful and also have a huge impact at the same time. But key of those is effective altruism.com.

• 2:24:18Tim Ferriss?

  And Will, how do you pronounce your last name correctly?

• 2:24:21Speaker 03

  Macaskill.

• 2:24:22Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. And so for people who are going to misspell this, if you wanted to say hi to Will on Twitter, it's at Will Macaskill, M A C A S K I L L. So kind of like Macca skill, I guess, if you wanted to try to split those up. But Will Macaskill and then Facebook is facebook.com forward slash W D Crouch. That's a whole separate question that I want to get into. And then LinkedIn and so on. And for everybody listening, of course, the links that we discussed, the links that Will just mentioned, those will all be in the show notes, the books, the movies, the Wild Weekends with Louis Theroux, will all be found at fourhourworkweek.com,

• 2:25:05Tim Ferriss?

  spell it all out, fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. And Will, this has been great fun. I really appreciate you taking the time.

• 2:25:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, I've really enjoyed it. Thank you.

• 2:25:15Tim Ferriss?

  Thanks. And everybody listening, thank you for listening. And until next time, please experiment often, consider the impact of what you're doing. Don't misspend your 80,000 hours and check it out, eighty thousand hours.org and everything else that Will mentioned. Thanks so much.

• 2:25:38Tim Ferriss?

  Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric, as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short.

• 2:26:20Tim Ferriss?

  It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com, all spelled out, and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This podcast is brought to you by Mizzen & Maine. Don't worry about the spelling. All you need to know is this: I have organized my entire life around avoiding fancy shirts because you have to iron them, you sweat through them, they smell really easily, they're a pain in the ass. Mizzen & Maine has given me the only shirt that I need.

• 2:27:01Tim Ferriss?

  And what I mean by that, and Kelly Starrett loves these shirts as well, is that you can trick people. They look really fancy, so you can take them out to nice dinners, whatever, but they're made from athletic sweat-wicking material. So you can throw this thing into your luggage in a heap or on your kitchen table, like I did recently, and then pull it out, throw it on with no ironing, no steaming, no nothing, walk out, and you could probably wear this thing for a week straight, or make it your only dress shirt, and take it on trips for weeks at a time. Never wash it, it will not smell, you will not sweat through it. You gotta check these things out. So go to fourhourworkweek.com, all spelled out, fourhourworkweek.com/shirts.

• 2:27:41Tim Ferriss?

  Check it out, fourhourworkweek.com/shirts, and you'll see some of my favorite gear, including the one shirt that I've been traveling around.

• 2:27:52Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront, and this is a very unique sponsor. Wealthfront is a massively disruptive, in a good way, set it and forget it investing service led by technologists from places like Apple and world famous investors. It has exploded in popularity in the last two years, and they now have more than $2.5 billion under management. In fact, some of my very good friends, investors in Silicon Valley, have millions of their own money in Wealthfront. So the question is, why? Why is it so popular? Why is it unique? Because you can get services previously reserved for the ultra wealthy, but only pay pennies on the dollar for them. And this is because they use smarter software instead of retail locations, bloated sales teams, etc. And I'll come back to that in a second.

• 2:28:34Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:29:19Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:30:02Tim Ferriss?

  But I've been so impressed by Wealthfront that I've invested a significant amount of my own money, at least for me, in the team and the company itself. So I am an investor and hope to soon use it as a client. Now, back to the recommendation. As a Tim Ferriss Show listener, you'll get $15,000 managed for free if you decide to open an account. But just start with seeing the portfolio that they would suggest for you. Take two minutes, fill out their questionnaire at wealthfront.com/tim. It's fast, it's free. There's no downside that I can think of. Now, I do have to read a mandatory disclaimer. Wealthfront, Inc. is an SEC-registered investment advisor. Investing in securities involves risks, and there is the possibility of losing money. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Please visit wealthfront.com to read their full disclosure. So, check it out, guys.

• 2:30:47Tim Ferriss?

  This is one of the hottest, most innovative companies coming out of Silicon Valley, and they're killing it. They've become massively popular. Just take a look, see what portfolio they would create for you, and you can use that information however you want. Wealthfront.com/tim. And until next time, thank you for listening.