How To Live An Ethical Life With Moral Philosopher

For me to live an ethical life, it's not enough just to say, I'm going to obey some simple moral rules, like don't steal, don't cheat, don't hurt other people. You have to think also about what can I do positively, given the advantages that I have, and the problems that we have in the world. It's often easier to see how you can relieve suffering than how you

can boost happiness. Some people say you should be a negative utilitarian and only focus on reducing pain and suffering. I don't think that's right, at least theoretically it's not right, because if you could greatly increase the happiness of large number of people and do that without causing any suffering or maybe cause mild headaches to a few people, clearly that would be the right thing to do.

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

we don't even really know how to do that. Hey everybody, welcome to the podcast. My guest today is just an absolute living legend. His name is Peter Singer and he is perhaps the world's most influential living philosopher. The grandfather of both the world's most influential living philosopher. Modern Animal Rights and Effective Altruism Movements. Peter is a professor of bioethics of Princeton and laureate professor at the

University of Melbourne. He's published several books on our moral responsibility to alleviate suffering, including the highly influential book Animal Liberation and a book called The Life You Can Save, both of which are books we cover in this conversation. I should say as an aside and as a gift to our listeners, Peter has very generously offered to provide everybody with a free copy of his book The

Life You Can Save to anyone who wants one. To get your copy, visit thelifeyoucansafe.org slash richroll or click the link in the description below. Free paperback copies are available for a US residence only, but all listeners regardless of location can download the ebook or audiobook for free. And the point that I'm really driving at is that donations to Peter's Save Lives Fund can also be made

via this link and all donations there will be matched $1 for $1 up to $25,000 thanks to a very generous anonymous donor. I love meeting Peter, I love talking to him. I really hope you enjoy this conversation. It's all coming up really quick, but first. We're brought to you today by Athletic Greens. my self definitely included, which is why it's wise to back pocket a nutritional

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

real honor to have you here today as somebody who's admired your work for a very long time. I'm thrilled with the prospect of being able to talk to you. And this conversation will have been proceeded by me giving an introduction to your work. You're kind of formal bio, but I'm curious how you articulate what it is that you do. Like how do you explain your kind

of focus and curiosity in the world? Right. So I've got interested in philosophy as an undergraduate, but I was always interested in the part of philosophy that connects to real life and that can make a difference to how we live. So some of the courses I did were discussing how we know anything about the world. How do we know that we're sitting at a table now

that I'm not dreaming that there's not an evil demon who's given me illusions? That does are interesting intellectual problems, but I certainly wouldn't have wanted to spend my life doing them. But once I realized that ethics, the part of philosophy that connects with life, really can make a difference to how you think about your life, your values, and how you act in the world makes a

difference to changing the world. And that seemed to me to be something important. And worthwhile as well as intellectually interesting. Yeah. I mean, what's interesting is that you have fulfilled that promise in an era and a time in which there does seem to be a disconnect between the kind of academic pursuit of philosophy and the true utility of it. This came up in your conversation with

Ryan Holiday where he was saying back in ancient Greece and ancient Rome, politics and philosophy were very commingled pursuits. Whereas now, they don't really seem to meet, but I look at you as somebody who's had a profound impact on culture and how we think about ethics and morality and a very utilitarian and real way. That's true. Although I think I've been fortunate in the period that

I've been living and working in philosophy. It has moved back more like that Greek ideal, if you like, that it does connect with how we live. And there are many of my students, for example, who are interested in taking philosophy causes precisely for that reason. They want to think about these issues. And that's different from when I was an undergraduate, when there was still this period

of what was known as ordinary language philosophy or linguistic analysis, where a lot of philosophers said philosophy doesn't teach you how to live. It simply helps us to understand the meanings of the moral terms. And then the student movement of the 1960s started to get things back on track. So with the Vietnam War, students wanted more relevant courses. And one of the things that philosophy could

do as well. There's this ancient tradition of when is it right to go to war, of just war theory. And they started talking about that. And then they started talking about civil disobedience. When are you justified in disobeying the law? And so I think then philosophy got back on track to those sorts of topics and moved away from the idea that somehow a neutral activity telling

you what it means to say something is good or bad. Yeah, I feel that that era was sort of supplanted by the greed is good. Sensibility of the 80s and perhaps the on-way of the cynicism of Gen X, which is my generation. But I too look at this newer generation, the population, the age range of the students, I'm sure you teach, who do seem very concerned

about ethics morality and impact. And so I think that's the fact in terms of where they're investing their academic curiosity and their career choices. Like they really want to be on a track that is going to have a net positive on the world, which is very different from the sensibility of my generation when we were in college. Yeah, I think there were always some, at least

you know, I've been teaching in Princeton now since 1999. And I think there were always some students who were interested in how they could have an impact on the world. But I agree that it's come back more strongly. And the last few years and then most students wanting to take courses for that reason. Which of course begs the question of how do we think about morality,

positive impact, ethics, etc. So when the question is positive to you, what does it mean to live an ethical life? How do you begin to unpack that and respond to it? In a meaningful way that can help direct somebody who's wanting to know the answer to that. Yeah. So I think that's the way I think about it. I asked them to think about the impact that

they can have about the consequences of their actions, what they can do to make the world a better place than it would have been if they hadn't lived in it. And clearly there are a lot of opportunities for that. I mean, especially if you're living in an affluent society like the United States or any of the other affluent countries. And you see that there are a

lot of people in extreme poverty in other countries. You see that we're damaging the climate of our planet. You see that we're in trouble. We're in a conflict of vast amounts of suffering on non-human animals in factory farms. There are all sorts of choices that you have to make about how you're going to live, what you're going to do as a career choice, which students are

thinking about. But also what are you doing with your spare cash? What do you eat? All of those things that we can now see as ethical questions. So for me to live an ethical life, it's not enough just to say I'm going to obey some simple moral rules. Don't steal, don't cheat, don't hurt other people. You have to think also about what can I do positively

given the advantages that I have and the problems that we have in the world. And your particular lens for that is the reduction of suffering. That seems to be kind of like the lever through which all of this calculus is made. Yes, that's right. It's primarily the reduction of suffering. I do think that producing happiness or pleasure is a value as well. But that's a harder

thing to get your hands around, right? Exactly. Yes, that's right. It's often easier to see how you can relieve suffering than how you can boost happiness. And so, you know, some people say you should be a negative utilitarian and only focus on reducing pain and suffering. I don't think that's right. At least theoretically it's not right because if you could greatly increase the happiness of large

number of people and do that without causing any suffering or maybe cause mild headaches to a few people, clearly that would be the right thing to do. So it's not that the positive doesn't count at all in the scales. It's just that given the way the world is, the negative, the pain and suffering is so much more apparent. And in a way, so much easier to

prevent in the sense that we know what we could do that would prevent it may be hard to bring that about. But sometimes in terms of making people happier, we don't even really know how to do that. Right. Right. And in the context of the reduction of suffering, this is kind of the landscape from which you're thinking on animal liberation emanates. And I want to get

to that. But I kind of want to put that aside for now. And focus on something that's a little bit more current, which is the, you know, you being this, this sort of godfather of the effect of altruism movement, a movement which is very much in the news at the moment as a result of you say Sam, Sam Bankman, Fried and FTX and all of that,

which is kind of put this idea about how to effectively give to, you know, have the greatest impact on the reduction of suffering under the microscope of people who are now critical of it. And I'm interested. I know you've written about this, but parsing the behavior of this human being from the philosophical underpinnings of this movement that you helped play an ear. Yeah. So I think

the effect of altruism movement in general is saying we should try to make a positive difference the world, as I've been saying. And we should use reason and evidence to find the best way of doing that. And one of the things that the movement has talked about is making a positive difference doesn't necessarily mean becoming a doctor and working in a low income country or working

for one of the charities that are helping people in poverty. It might mean actually trying to earn a lot of money and then using that to support organizations that are doing good. That can be a valuable thing to do. And I think Sam Bankman, Fried set out to do that. I know that he had a conversation with Will McCaskill early on. Will being one of the

founders of the effective altruism movement. And we'll suggested that because he was mathematically gifted, that might be an opportunity for him. And I know others, I've had, for instance, students who were in a similar situation, who've done that and have given a lot of money to effective causes. So it certainly can be a good thing to do. But Sam, I think it was obviously uniquely successful

in accumulating a huge amount of wealth doing that and became a kind of a poster child in that way for earning to give. But he was clearly also a huge risk taker. And somebody, who was prepared to break standard rules of how you do business and how you look after other people's money that's entrusted to you. And I think that's what brought about his downfall. The

fact that he took risks, they didn't all come off. He tried to patch it off with shifting his customers trust funds basically to his research investment sort of fund. And clearly he shouldn't have done that. And I don't think anybody in the effective altruism movement thought that the idea of earning money to give to good causes would lead to somebody so flagrantly, this is a lage,

I suppose, we should say. But if the charges are correct, I don't think anybody in the effective altruism movement thought that anybody would so flagrantly violate those basic rules of sound practice and ethical price. Right. Well, you know, his misdeeds and mouthies and will be, you know, adjudicated. But from the outside looking in, it doesn't look great. And I think, you know, just kind of back

up for a minute, effective altruism being this, this, this movement whereby we try to sort of reduce the amount of emotional attachment we have to fill in foropic ends and look at it from a purely objective point of view to understand the best use of every dollar given to have the maximum impact in terms of the reduction of suffering. And, and those outlets often aren't the

sexy ones or the ones that we feel emotionally attached to because we have a relative suffering from a certain disease. It happens to be things like malaria, intense and the like that can, that are cheap, easy solutions that end up saving a lot of lives. And in the case of Sam Bankman-Freed, I see a guy whose motives are in question. Like there is an argument that

perhaps he leveraged this movement because it looked good from a, from a sort of PR perspective to say that he wasn't effective altruist. And I'm not so sure like how much money he actually ended up giving. He gave money to lots of different places. And so this sort of critique of the movement is that it sets in place unhealthy incentives. Whereby the end justifies the means,

right? Like no matter what end, or what means you pursue to accumulate a certain amount of wealth. It's okay because those resources will be deployed in an altruistic manner. Yeah. As for his original motives, I'm prepared to believe that he did sit at on that career in order to be able to give. I think, you know, that's, that's the evidence early on. It wasn't, wasn't right

from the start. He thought, oh, I'll pretend to be an effective altruist because, that'll make me more successful personally. And figures that I've seen, you know, he certainly gave well over $100 million to effective charities. Now that's not very much when you're worth 20, 25 billion. That's true. But I think he was on track to do a lot more. He also gave political donations. And some

of those were directed towards making the world safer. For example, he supported a candidate who was an expert on pandemics because he believed that the US is not doing nearly enough pandemic preparation. And I think that's obviously true. So I don't think that it was always just a cover, but it may be that he got carried away with his success and didn't want to admit, for

example, that he'd taken a big hit because of a bad investment from Alameda. And so tried to cover that up. Whereas, you know, if he admitted that, maybe Alameda had gone bankrupt, he would have still been wealthy and wouldn't be facing jail. So I think that's probably what went wrong. But in terms of what you were asking about the idea that the end justifies the means,

I think people often very simplistically say, oh, well, you know, he thought that the end justify the means and they don't. But if you stop and think about it, I think everybody thinks that sometimes the end does justify the means. And the classic example of that is, you know, if you're, if you were hiding a Jewish family in your cellar in Nazi Germany and the Gestapo

came to your door and you might think normally, it's wrong to tell lies, including telling lies to the state authorities is clearly wrong. But, you know, if you can save the family, you're hiding by telling a lie to the Gestapo, obviously, you should do that. So, so the question isn't do the ends ever justify the means. The question is when do the ends justify the means

when are the means too bad or when is the risk too great or the means not sufficient. And you have to look at those on a case by case basis. So that would play out in terms of a young person pondering career choices, they could either, you know, go to the 80,000 hours website and look at certain types of impact oriented careers, or they could become

an investment banker and try to accumulate as much wealth as possible for the purposes of deploying that at a later time. And and from your perspective, both of those are meritorious and worthy of consideration. Yes, that's right. And in fact, if they go to 80,000 hours, there's a lot of other things that they could do as well. They could, one of the careers suggest is becoming

a research scientist working in areas that will make a difference to people in extreme poverty. Another is to go into politics. Politics needs more people who are really serious about helping people in poverty, doing something about climate change. So there's a lot of different options. That people can have. And in fact, the effect of altruism movement did make quite a thing about only to give in

the early days. I think partly because that was a novelty. And it was something that got media attention. And when the movement was small, it was important to get media attention for new ideas. So Wilma Cascillin in particular made quite a feature of this. But more recently, but before the FTX collapse and so on, and not specifically related to to San Bankman Fried, they have reduced

the emphasis that they put on that. Partly because of the idea that one of the problems with new organizations that have great ideas about changing the world in the right direction, is that it's hard for them to get enough talented people working for them. So smart people like Sam might now be more likely to be, you know, might be suggested that they go into helping one

of these startups. To really get organized and to scale up and really make a big difference, rather than to end gift, just because of the sense that it's not always lack of financial resources, it may be lack of talented people that are slowing things down. Yeah, it's interesting. In thinking about, you know, the pursuit of an ethical life. And as somebody who, you know, who is

a moral philosopher, why is this important? Is there a morality? That exists. That is, that is a certain kind of like, there's a universality to that truth that, I mean, you're an atheist, right? So from whence does, you know, this sense of right and wrong and pursuing an ethical life. From, from where does that derive? Yes, I am an atheist. So obviously I don't, I don't

think it derives from God. Any God given commands. But, and for quite a while, I, I didn't think there was an objective truth. That was perhaps part of the era in which I was educated in studying philosophy. A lot of philosophers didn't think there was. And there has been a shift through a number of philosophers. And I'm one of them towards the idea that, no, there

are some things that we can really see as self-evidently good or often more to the point self-evidently bad. So for example, when somebody experiences agony, if, if a child is going through agony, whether it's an illness or an injury or some malevolent person deliberately hurting them, that's just a bad thing. And the universe would be a better place if that child were not experiencing agony. So

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

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

that in our own case. We, you know, when we experience agony, we just can't avoid seeing that as a bad thing for us. And then when we take a broader point of view, the 19th century utilitarian Henry Sidduick spoke about taking the point of view of the universe. And he, he was an agnostic really rather than an agnostic. He was an atheist, but he wasn't saying,

you know, that the universe has a point of view. He was just saying, imagine that you're looking on the universe as a whole and all the sentient beings in it. Then you can see that your own interest, your own well-being is no more important from that perspective than that of any other being who can have similar kinds of experiences of pain or pleasure. And so we

should, as rational beings, we should try to reduce the pain and agony that is experienced and increase the pleasure and happiness. Because that's what we want for ourselves. And we see that we adjust one of many similar beings who have those experiences. So much of your work is, is focused on the responsibility of the individual. Like, should I give money to this versus that? Should I

not eat animals like all of these sort of choices that can guide us towards, you know, kind of a more ethical way of living. But we live in a culture in which incentives and kind of momentum is pushing us away from the kind of economy of making those choices. In other words, like those choices tend to kind of cut against the grain of, you know, what

everything else is pushing us towards. And so I can't help but think about incentive structures at large and how your work being so far focused on the individual, how you contemplate like system change, like governmental regimes or, you know, economic, tectonic plates that, you know, set up situations where we're often making the wrong choice versus creating a new system in which the choices that you're advocating

for become the easier kind of more accessible and more incentivized choice. Right. Well, I certainly want to see changes in the system. And then the incentives that the systems create. And one of the most obvious cases here would be climate change because individuals also make choices, of course, about the greenhouse gases that they emit or the, again, what they eat makes an impact on their greenhouse

gases that they're responsible for as does whether they drive a car and if they do what sort of car to drive. But it's really important and shouldn't be that difficult for governments to change the incentives there by, you know, carbon taxes, for example, on what produces emissions. So that's an area where going into politics can be a really important career because you can help to make

governments make those choices. And that's true of the other things that I talk about at an individual level as well. Governments do give significant amounts to foreign aid. They could give more. The United States actually gives very little in terms as a percentage of its gross national income compared to European countries generally. And could give more and could also give it more effectively. And of course,

some governments have better laws and regulations regarding the treatment of animals. Even within the United States, California has better regulations for farm animals than most other states in the United States, because it has citizen initiated referendum and its past propositions to give animals a bit more room than they have in other states. So there are definitely things that you can do at the policy level and

that it's important to do at the policy level. But some of these things are really difficult to bring about change. And for example, trying to increase the United States foreign aid has been a long struggle that so far has been quite unsuccessful, even presidents who are sympathetic like President Obama. I heard one stage talked about raising US foreign aid to half a percent of gross national

product, which would still be only, you know, about half of the top nations in the world, but completely failed to do that. So if that's so difficult to achieve, then there is something that we can do individually and that can make a difference. So let's do that. And similarly, in terms of what we eat, it's also very hard to get laws and regulations to, in the

United States, to give animals more space to move around. As I said, there are exceptions with those states with citizens initiated referendum, because it does seem that ordinary Americans, when given that choice, will choose better conditions. But because the agribusiness lobby is so powerful at the federal level, it's been impossible to get any laws passed at the federal level to give animals room to move. And

that's a contrast with Europe, where the entire European Union has much better laws than the United States has. So again, you know, let's try to do what we can at the individual level. If enough people do that, we'll weaken the power of the agribusiness lobby because they won't be selling so much. And we'll press in the lobby in a better position to produce that systemic change.

Well, in the context of animal rights, this has been a movement built upon the shoulders of the individual. Like it really has been a grassroots movement. And you know, I want to get into how this all began with you. You wrote animal liberation in 1975. I want to hear how that came into being. But in looking back upon, you know, the many years since that book

came out, it must be quite an awesome thing to see how much progress has been made, how much energy is in this movement, while also recognizing how little has changed and how much work remains. Right? Like how are you thinking about the current status quo? Yeah, you've got that exactly right. There has been significant change. I mentioned those laws in the European Union, sort of 27

countries that have better laws than when I published animal liberation in 1975 and the United Kingdom, of course, which is no longer in the European Union. So that's a significant change. So that's a change for hundreds of millions of animals. They have definitely not idealized, but they have lives that are somewhat better than they were in the 70s. But on the other hand, factory farming still

continues here in the United States. A lot of it goes on just as bad as it was before. And some respects even worse because, for example, the breeding of chickens for meat has increased the speed at which they put on weight to such a point that their immature legs can't really bear the weight of their bodies. They're very young birds when they're center market, they're about

six weeks old. And they're in pain just from trying to carry their body weight. And sometimes their legs will collapse under them. And they'll just be unable to move. And then because this is such a mass production industry with 20,000 birds in a single shed, they're probably going to starve to death or dehydrate to death because they can't walk to food and water. And basically nobody

cares about individual chickens. Nobody will even see that there's a lot of downbird and pick it up and you mainly kill it. So, you know, those things have actually got worse. Plus, of course, in other countries in the world, particularly in East Asia, where they become more prosperous, which in itself would be a good thing. But that means they're producing a lot more meat, there's more

demand for meat. And factory farming has hugely increased there. And again, it's pretty much unregulated. Yeah, we can celebrate the growth of the vegan movement in these kind of urban pockets across the developed Western world. But that's myopic in that when we canvass our glance internationally, we see the expansion of a middle class or, you know, new well sectors who are going to increase their consumption

of meat at a rate that the planet really can't sustain. Right. And we're seeing the decimation of the rainforest and with China, you know, all of these areas that are where we're seeing an increase in meat consumption at an unprecedented level, like this is a global problem from not just a mass suffering perspective, but from a climate change perspective as well. Yeah, that's basically true. It's

interesting that some countries have actually started on a decline in meat consumption. Germany is one example and Sweden is another. So, you know, there's some hope that as we become more educated and more understanding about what meat does not only do animals, but to the climate and to the environment more generally. We've just had this meeting of environmentalists concerned to protect species. And again, there's been

a lot of writing about how meat consumption just can't continue to grow that it is destroying a rainforest and causing extinctions. So there's some hope that more people will realize that. But it's difficult. And, you know, to me, you mentioned the pockets of people being vegan. I mean, I think being vegan is a great diet. Healthy diet and the best diet for the planet and for

animals. But I think we have to work towards reduction of meat consumption in mainstream. Because it's going to be a long time before we get a vegan mainstream in most countries. Yeah. I mean, it's, it does feel like quite a bit of momentum behind that right now. It is mainstreaming in that so many restaurants you can at least get vegan options and people don't bulk or

and they're not confused when you want to veganize an entree at a restaurant or what have you. But yes, there is so much work to be done. And your question really brings up this notion of effective activism. Like how do you sort of convince the most number of people to change their habits to have the greatest impact? Right. Is it, is it like throwing a bucket

of blood on a on a runway model? You know, at a fashion show who's wearing a a mint coat or is it having a realistic conversation with policymakers about a slight reduction in harm that could actually impact millions of people and benefit millions of animals? Like how do you think about carrying the message from a utilitarian perspective to leverage the greatest change? I think that as

far as trying to get people that change they diet is concerned, probably being cool and reasonable is better than throwing buckets of blood at people. That's, that's true. But you know, we're going to be able to do that. We don't fully know and I would like to see, and this is part of what effective altruism wants to do, I would like to see more studies about,

you know, what is the effect of people when there are protests that are more in your face than others. There's some suggestions that it puts people off, but I don't really know that we know. And for example, on issues like climate change, which seems to me to be a really urgent issue, I can fully understand those eco activists who through super over Van Gogh's sunflowers and

let me say they knew it was behind glass, so they knew it wasn't going to damage the original painting. But, you know, that was a gesture to say, you know, this is really something urgent, and we're still not doing what we need to be doing about it. And we have to do better and we have to do it soon. So I fully sympathize with that, but

I do want to know what actually is going to work. What is going to get governments to take the relatively simple steps that they need to take to shift us away from greenhouse gas emitting products, both fossil fuels and meat in particular? How have your views evolved since writing this book in 1975 on this subject matter? Well, perhaps I was a little naive about how easy

it might have been to change these deeply ingrained habits and to combat major industries, because I did think that the arguments seemed to me to be so clear. I thought that if I could just state them clearly and rationally, readers would decide that that they were right, they would change what they were reading, they would talk to their friends about what was important to change what

was eating, and I hoped. And that's how you, that's how it happened for you, right? Exactly. So I shouldn't have happened for anybody who's reading your book. Exactly, that's right. Yeah, I mean, so I didn't think about this issue at all until I was a graduate student at Oxford, 24 years old, and I hadn't thought about it. Now this was 1970, so it wasn't really discussed.

You didn't meet vegetarians or certainly not Western vegetarians, you might have met some Indian vegetarians, but you didn't meet people who were like you who were vegetarians until I, I'd also happened to have lunch with a Canadian graduate student called Richard Keshen who asked whether there was meat in the spaghetti sauce that was being served. And when he was told there was, he took a salad

plate instead. And I was surprised and asked him, what his problem was with meat. And he told me that he didn't think it was right to treat animals the way we treat them in order to turn them into food. And I said, I don't, they have good lives out in the fields. And he said, no, they're increasingly, they've crowded inside in big dark sheds. I knew

nothing about that. And I made my business to find out. And then I also, because I was a philosophy student, I decided to look at what philosophers had said about this. You know, why is it okay that to treat animals in this way? The bands and morality, as it seems, at the time just stopped with our species. And I decided both that he was right on

the facts. And that there wasn't an ethical justification for disregarding the interests of non-human animals in the way we were doing it. So I've seen a pretty simple argument to me. And if I could be persuaded by that, and I could show the facts to other people and look at the ethical arguments, that that would convince other people. And it convinced some other people. That's the

good news. The bad news is that we are still living in societies where the majority of people are not only eating meat, but even buying factory-found products, not particularly looking for more organic or free-ranging or certified human animal products. Yeah, I think that with greater education around this issue, also comes concerted efforts to confuse consumers. Right? There's a lot of greenwashing going on. And there's a

lot of energy around, you know, kind of the, the, the, the, the, grass-fed free-range animals that make people feel better about their animal consumption without fully understanding the equation, like this idea that we actually need the animals to regenerate the soil. And you eating your animals from these farms is actually part of the climate solution. And these animals live great lives. And certainly that's a better

situation than the factory-farmed animals, which is the big gaping problem that needs to be solved. But I think it allows people to kind of fall into sort of an acceptance or a delusion that they're still not, their habits aren't, aren't really resulting in the harm that they're actually resulting in. Yeah. I can say that very in, in elegantly. But I think you know what I'm getting

at. I know what you're getting at. Yes. Yeah. And in fact, it is a delusion, I think. And I'm not sure. Maybe people are aware of it, but because if you ask people, if they eat meat, and when they say yes, you ask them, do they mostly buy organic meat? Or certified, you may, grass-fed, something like that. The percentage that answers yes is just wildly more

than the amount that is actually produced. By a high multiple. So either people somehow believe that they're buying these better products when they're not, or they're just lying in the answers that they're giving. Because if you look for example at chicken meat production, the example I gave earlier, I think it's 99.8% is factory-farmed in the market. It's a tiny, tiny percentage, far less, less than 1%.

So if people say they're eating, you mainly produce certified, you mean, sorry. If people say they're eating, you mainly produce chicken. They're almost certainly not. We're brought to you today by Inside Tracker. No two bodies are the same. Well, general principles can guide all of us on some level. I think it's fair to say we're all kind of n of one experiments. There is no one

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the rubric, there is an interesting philosophical exploration to be had when it comes to the kind of carnivore people who call, who call what they eat, like nose to tail, like from a suffering perspective, if somebody's going to take one cow, and they're going to consume the entirety of that, is that a more ethical choice than the vegan who's eating, plants that are sort of threshed

in a traditional way where lots of rodents and insects are being sacrificed as a result of the harvesting of these many plants or gofers having to be killed, etc. In other words, lots of different animals are sacrificed for the production of these plant foods versus the person who eats the cow who says, well, this is just one sentient being. From a philosophical ethical perspective, do you

think about that or parse the difference? Yes. So there are a couple of things to be said about that. One is that from a climate point of view, cows and beef is really the worst of the animal products, in terms of the quantity of green-eyes gases, because they produce methane, and methane is an extremely potent green-eyes gas. And they've had to consume a lot of resources

to get to the point before they're killed. For food, right? Right. Well, I mean, so if they're in feedlots or fattened the last few months in feedlots eating grain, then all of those problems about the rodents that get killed with the threshing are going to be there, because they will have eaten far more grain than a vegan would eat, because you only get back from feeding

grain to cattle, you get back somewhere between 5% and 10% of the food value of the grain that you're putting in. So if you're eating the grains directly, you eat far fewer grains. But if people are saying, well, I'm just eating fully grass-fed beef, which is, again, it's quite a small proportion of US-produced beef, then you're not killing the rodents when you harvest the grain because

they're eating grass. But they actually produce more greenhouse gases than the feedlots. And that's because the reason cattle are put in feedlots is they fatten up faster on grain. So if they're on grass, they have to live longer to reach the same weight to produce the grain. So they're the same quantity of meat for people to eat, and all the time they're living and digesting the

grass, they're producing the meat thing. So in terms of the impact on the climate, it's really bad. It may be better for an animal welfare point of view, much better than eating chicken, for example, both because they're outside and they're better lives, and also because you're talking about one animal with a lot of meat, whereas chickens, you eat people eat them, who eat chickens, eating a

lot of chickens over their lifetime. In terms of greenhouse gases, it's actually worse. Beyond that, there isn't enough land to support the production of cattle in that manner anyway to meet global demand for meat. Well, that's right. So it's not a scalable, sustainable solution. No, and some of it, and the demand for beef is causing rainforest to be cleared, causing the Amazon to be cleared for

grazing land, for example, or even to grow more soybeans in Brazil, which also, about 70% of the soybean crop gets fed to cattle. So, over 20% goes to biofuels, and people say, I don't eat tofu because soybeans are bad, but actually, about 7% of the whole soybean crop is actually eaten directly by humans, either as beans or as tofu. And the great majority is getting funneled

through cattle. And again, we lose most of the food value of the soybeans when we do that. Right. Back to the earlier question about how your ideas have evolved since 1975, or there are other... So you are reprising this book, right? You're coming out with a new addition of it. So I suspect there are things that you want to change, or I don't know how much

you can talk about that specifically, but maybe generally, how your thinking has changed and evolved in the many interceding years. Yeah, that's right. I'm producing... What's effectively a new book that's been called Animal Liberation Now, which has maintained the key ethical ideas. Completely updates the relevant facts and looks at progress that we've made, and that we've not made from a more global perspective. So it has

a lot of new things in it that went in the original addition. My thinking has developed in various respects. I suppose some of the things that I'm more concerned with now are questions about wild animals, but should we be concerned about the suffering of wild animals and what might we do with that? I'm also interested in the development of alternatives to meat. I see that as

a positive sign, both plant-based meats and the development of cellular meats, a meat that is actually produced from animal cells, but does not require any living animal organism. And therefore, again, phallar on greenhouse gas emissions, maybe has about 3% of the greenhouse gas emissions of meat from animals, and doesn't involve the animal suffering, of course, because there's no conscious animal there. So if we could do

that, and if we could produce it at an economically competitive price with the meat that is being sold from animals, that might be another way of breaking this deadlock of trying to get people to move away, eating animal products at a so bad for animals and for the environment. Well, all indications is that we are headed in that direction. It may take a little bit more

time because this is an expensive problem to solve, right? Figuring out how to culture these cells and create these, quote-unquote meat products. They're able to do it. They've established that it can be done, but doing it economically. So it's on par with what it would cost to go to McDonald's or what have you. There's still a lot of work to be done, right? Yes, that's right.

And you can actually buy cellular chicken in Singapore now. But it's expensive. And I think the problem is they need to scale up. And there's some questions about building these huge bio reactors in which the process occurs. Can that be done? Will there be problems with things going astray? We really don't know, but there's quite a lot of capital being invested in it. But also the

question of just consumer acclimation to it, there is that sort of getting over that icky factor of like, what is this and where does it come from? And having consumers acclimate to the idea of this new food. That's true. A lot of consumers seem to think that the meat that they're buying is somehow natural. And that's obviously transformed tremendously in the last 50 years. Yeah, you

know, the animals are bred differently, as I was saying. I mean, the chickens can't really live to maturity mostly because they're bred to eat so fast and put on weight so fast that a lot of them will just collapse and die if they were kept to older birds. In fact, it's so it's so bad that with the breeding birds, because the parents, of course, have to

have the same genes as the one we eat, they have to be starved basically because if you fed them as much as they want to eat, they would not have survived to breed or they might not physically be able to breed because they would be to obese to actually do that. So they tend to be fed every second day, which means that they're desperately hungry all

the time. And then, of course, the antibiotics are used because they're under stress. So a lot of antibiotics that are losing their efficacy because we're feeding them routinely to farm animals. So yeah, this is not a natural product either, but some of our people have been persuaded to continue to eat it. I think that I think of it as good. So no doubt there will be

some, let's say, need to show consumers that this cellular meat, when it happens, is essentially still meat and is actually a safer and pure product than what they're getting from factory farm. Have you tried it? No, I've not had the opportunity to try it yet. I would certainly do so if I find myself in Singapore. Yeah. I will go and do that. Right. How do you

think about philanthropy in the animal welfare space? It seems like there's a lot of sort of improvement to be had in terms of like how to leverage the dollar for the most good. When we look at the big problems versus where people's kind of hearts and emotions are. Absolutely. Yeah. In fact, I show my students a slide of that, which has two boxes. One box shows

where the greatest amount of animal suffering is and animals being killed. And it's overwhelmingly farmed animals. And so it's like a big square away. And then in the bottom corner, there's a tiny little square that shows the other things like laboratory animals. Pretty small too. Although it's probably around 100 million animals in the United States each year. There's things like first. And then there's dogs and

cats, which is just a tiny Mac you can hardly see on my slide. And then the adjacent box shows where the dollars are going. And there it's the dogs and cats, the animal shelters, that is the dominant thing. Farmed animals are quite small and laboratory animals are quite small. Wild animals do rank larger there. So yeah, there's this complete disconnect between where the dollars go and

where they're needed. We're starting to get a little more money going through effective altruism actually mostly through foundations like open full answer peer, which is funded by Dustin Moskiewicz and Carrie Tuna, which is directing more money to oppose factory farming. But. It's going coming from the general public is really not going to where the big animal suffering problems are. It's going to where people's emotions are.

And you know it's it's not that effective altruism doesn't want people to have emotions. It's just that they want people to feel the emotions and then think, you know, yes, I care about dogs and cats, but I also care about animals in general. I don't want pigs or cows or chickens to suffer. I don't want wild animals to suffer. I don't want even rats and mice

to suffer in laboratory experiments. And so. If I care about animals, I should be thinking about giving to where it will help the big problems and not the relatively small problems. That's what we need to get people to think about. Sure, but isn't there a place for that emotional impulse? Like if you think about. So for example, in the in the animal welfare space, like a

lot of people donate towards the shelters, right? Like they rescue farm animals. They create a beautiful place for them to live out their lives. And those places and people feel good about supporting those places for obvious reasons. But those places also serve as sort of museums for people to visit, which gets, you know, perhaps other people who have no connection to this movement or these ideas.

This is their inception point for even learning about this. An emotional connection to the reality of the problem that might in turn motivate them to give or get involved in the solution. And maybe that solution is an effective altruism solution. Something else, but I can't help but ask you like, where is the emotional piece? Like there has to be some importance and resonance for it on

some level. Yeah, definitely. I think that emotion is important. And with the animal sanctuaries that you mentioned, I think they do get people to see found animals as individuals. And that's important. They get them to see that some of them can actually grow old even, which of course found animals never do. It's the rescued ones that might. And those sanctuaries work and many of them do.

And I think they all should, as places of education that get people to see animals differently and encourage them to do more for found animals in general. So I think that's fine. And I think in terms of global poverty too, it's important emotion plays a role. And it's important to tell the stories of individuals of those children whose lives have been saved. By a treatment that

was made available through an organization that had community health workers going around and helping. Or, you know, restoring people's site is something where you can really see the emotion. And the life you can save the organization that I founded that recommends effective charities recommends a couple that do restore site in countries where otherwise people with quite simple conditions like cataracts would never be able to see

again. And you can see videos online. Of how somebody's, you know, when the bandages are removed after an operation was performed on the eyes of recovered. And you see a woman who sees her child for the first time that she's ever seen that to your old child and say, and that's a wonderful heartwarming experience. And I hope it will encourage people to think, yes, this is

really a good thing to be doing. This is such an important work to support. Right. Yeah. That's really beautiful. The counter side of that, like as a thought experiment as somebody who's primary driver is the redoubt of the production of suffering. If you think about the eradication of global poverty, if you're raising the kind of life experience and income of people who have grown up in

poverty, they then become, do they not then what happens if those people then end up increasing their meat consumption. And that drives, you know, cattle producers to clear more rainforest to produce that cattle. Like when you look at the macro benefit versus harm calculus from a philosophical point of view, like how do you make sense of that? Yeah. I'm grateful to be. That's a tough problem.

I've grappled with trying to think about that and trying to think about my any poverty work on how to connect with my concern for animals. But I suppose what I say. And you may think that this is a rationalization is that if we're ever to solve this problem, we're not going to solve it by keeping people in poverty because when people are in poverty, they will

do what ever they have to do to survive. And if that includes, for example, killing wild animals in the forest and including even chimpanzees in some places and perhaps leading to the extinction of species in the forest, they're going to do that. So I think we have to try to get people out of poverty and hope that when they have more choices, when they are out

of poverty, they will eventually come to see that eating more meat is not the right thing to do. And we will have alternatives for them that they can live good and healthy lives without eating more meat, or perhaps without eating any meat. And so that we'll get to the point where I'm hoping we all get to where we have expanded our concern for all animals, for

all sentient beings, and are not just thinking about human beings. So, you know, as you say, you may think that that's not even the only thing that I'm thinking about. No, it's just interesting to think about. Like I'm not wedded any answer or any, I think just grappling with that idea demonstrates how difficult problem solving is in the real world. If your goal really is like

how do we best eradicate suffering? It's complicated. It's nuanced and it's in the gray. I think there's another way of exploring that is the twist on your famous thought experiment of the girl in the pond, right? So first of all, for people who don't know, you know, maybe explain what that thought experiment is. Sure. Okay. So in an article I wrote a long time ago, I

asked my readers to imagine that they're walking past a pond, let's say an ornamental pond in a park and let's say they know well that the pond is quite shallow. And as they walk past it, they notice that there's something struggling in the water. And when they look more closely turns out it's a very small child, a child too small to stand up even in this

shallow pond. So, you know, the first thing you would think about is who's child is this? Who's looking after this child? But when you look around, you don't know why, but there's nobody else there. You're the only adult inside. So your second thought I hope is, gee, this child seems to be drowning. I better jump into the pond and save the child. But then maybe you

have a third and not so noble thought. And that is, I'm wearing my best clothes today because I was going somewhere special. And they're going to get ruined if I save the child by jumping into the pond. So what if I just forget that I ever saw the child and go on my way? Would that be the wrong thing to do? And I hope that all

your listeners are now saying, of course, that would be the wrong thing to do. How could you compare the value of a child's life with ruining your shoes or your clothes? So the point of the example is to say, yes, that is the right reaction that you should have and it would be the wrong thing to do. But it's not only in these unlikely circumstances where

you have to ruin your clothes to save a child in a pond, it's happening to us all the time that for the cost of replacing those clothes donated to an effective charity, we could save or certainly contribute towards saving the life of a child in a low income country, perhaps by donating to the against malaria foundation, which will distribute bed nets to protect children against malaria

or perhaps by distributing other medicines to prevent children dying of diarrhea, which is another significant cause. And the point being that the physical location of the suffering child should not have an impact on the decision to give or not give. That's right. I think if you reflect on it and you ask yourself, does the fact that the child is physically close to me, really make a

moral difference to how important it is to help that child to save that child's life? I think most of us would say, no, that's not the important thing. Sure. Proximity being a right thing. That's the most important thing to do. And then there's all kinds of other threads that can be pulled on this. Does temporality matter? Like, does the fact that this person is living at

the same time? Like, we can, we can predict that in the future, that there will be people in this circumstance, right? And the fact that they don't live yet, should that be a factor in our decision to think about how much of our income we're going to give over to increase the well being of the world? There are people who are going to be living in

the future and they are going to be either suffering or dying prematurely in ways we could prevent. The fact that it's in the future doesn't in itself matter. If we're uncertain as to whether we could do anything to prevent their suffering, that of course makes a difference. We have to discount the good of what we're trying to achieve by the odds against us actually managing to

achieve it. So yes, direct where good consequences are more certain. But it's just a future. The Oxford philosopher Derek Parford had an example about leaving broken glass somewhere in the forest and would say, it'll take a while. Nobody's going to tread on it in coming years. But at some point, a child may be not yet born. We'll walk along that path and cut their feet on

it. Does that mean that it didn't matter? Because they aren't born at the time that you left the broken glass in the path? No, it doesn't really matter. The pain of the child is the same. It's just a significant if you can predict that it is very likely to happen. And that opens the door to a whole discussion around long-termism, which is very related to it's

an extension of your work in many ways. Yes, that's true. There's one difference with the really long-termist predictions. If you're wanting to intervene not in a way that's going to make a difference to somebody living in 2050 or 100 years, but in many centuries or many millennia or even millions of years, then firstly, there is quite different uncertainty factor that comes in in terms of how

have to think about, well, if we did something that meant that we became extinct, these people wouldn't exist at all. So it wouldn't be like a child cutting their foot and getting hurt. It would be like, they just would be nobody alive on the planet. Maybe there would be no sendient beings in this part of the universe. And some philosophers think that that's different. We don't

have an obligation to ensure that future people exist. Rather, we have an obligation to say that if people exist in future, we don't do anything that will harm them. I want to get into life extension and the anti-aging stuff, because I feel like that's the next logical step from what you just shared. But to put a pin on that for now and circle back to the

girl drowning in the pond, the original question being coming out of this idea of suffering reduction, if you save the girl, which we all agree is the right thing to do if you're passing by, it can be presumed that that individual will go on to live some number of years and will consume. We'll consume many things, including probably animal products, which has its own downstream implications

in terms of harm. And, you know, resource allocation, et cetera. So it's back to that. I think there was actually an article in your journal about the out this, right? Like, the journal of controversial ideas, like, let's explore this idea. Like, if you're saving this individual altruistically, there's also harm that is incident to that, to that act, right? That's right. Yeah. It was an article written

by somebody with the name Michael Plant, which is his real name. Oh, it's his real name. Yeah. Because people can submit these articles with pseudonyms. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. And if anyone was to read it, by the way, as you mentioned, the journal of controversy, controversial ideas, it's open access, just Google, the journal of controversial ideas, you'll get to it. Yeah. It's a thoughtful article. And

it does raise that problem about the media, it is whose lives we're saving and ask whether we should be doing that. I'm somewhat unsure. I mean, I've actually talked to Michael Plant about this. And he's quite persuasive. But at the moment, I'm going to say, let's try and save those lives and hope that we can persuade people, move people towards a lifestyle in which we're not

causing so much suffering to animals. Right. I think in order to really flesh that out, you have to think about species in this sense that, you know, we create a rank hierarchy amongst the world. The animal kingdom based upon people's cognitive abilities and their level of sentience, right, which is not necessarily correlated to their ability to suffer. But to answer that question about harm reduction, do

you not have to place a value, you know, a greater value on one life over another, right, from a species perspective. So I wouldn't do that on a species basis. That is, I wouldn't say that being a member of the species, how am I saying that? I would say that being a member of the species is more valuable than a member of any other species. I

would say that being who have cognitive capacities that enable them to think about their lives, and think about the lives of others whom they love and care for in ways that are different and perhaps more profound and more lasting than other beings. That it's a greater tragedy when they die prematurely than when those other beings die prematurely. So I don't think of the lives of all

sentient beings as being of equal value. I do think of their suffering as being equally important when we're talking about similar kinds and similar quantities of suffering, but not the preservation of their lives. The other uncomfortable idea, as a parent, when I think about the pond and the girl is this idea of, like we, we have a problem. We have a problem with the nature of

the human nature. We all intuitively feel like we can prefer the well-being of our children over other children, and that is accepted. Of course, I'm going to make sure that I'm providing for my children, even though they live in a much better circumstances than most children in the world. But from a harm reduction perspective, would it not be better for me to allocate my resources more

democratically so that, you know, my kids are sort of not getting any more than all these other children who need more? I think it would be better from a purely impartial perspective, if we could do that. But we are mammals who have evolved. But we're not going to do that. No, we're not going to agree. We're not going to do it. You're a parent. You didn't

do that, right? And you're the godfather of all of this. Okay. So what I want to say about this is that it would be from this impartial perspective better if I were to do that. But I don't think we should blame ourselves for not doing it because I think we should recognize that that's something that is basically imprinted in our genes that we are going to

care for our children more than the children of strangers. That's what our ancestors did for millions of years. And that's why we are here, because if they hadn't, then they wouldn't have survived or their children wouldn't have survived. So I think we have to be somewhat indulgent to ourselves in that. Not as indulgent as many people are. I don't think we should be doing everything imaginable

for our children. I think the automatic assumption that you leave all your wealth to your children is not something that is justified, especially if they are already quite comfortably off. And we are living in a world where there's so much extreme poverty and so much need. But we should try to do better. We should try to get to a more equitable distribution. And we should try

to encourage others to do that. But as I say, we're not saints. We haven't evolved to be saints with very, very rare exceptions. And we shouldn't beat ourselves up because we're not. Right. There's a lot of science and money and energy right now going into the extension of lifespan, like this anti-aging movement. That's a foot. And there are plenty of people hard at work. On solving

the problem of aging as if it is a disease with prospects of really substantially extending lifespan to 150 years and maybe even beyond with certain scientific breakthroughs on the horizon. And like any technology that the human race pioneers, there is from my perspective, this sense of like inevitability. Like we're not going to stop or slow down and think about the implications of this. We're helping out.

On just achieving it for the sake of achievement because it's a mountain yet to be climbed. And I feel like there's an important philosophical conversation that we need to have about the implications of what the world might be like. If suddenly people could live to 300 or beyond from a wealth distribution perspective, from a right perspective. And from like a risk calculus perspective, like what would

it mean if you could live 300 years? What is your imprint or your responsibility, like your carbon footprint and your responsibility to the planet, to future generations? How do you think about, you know, how many children you're going to have if you're going to live that long? Things like this. Is this anything that you've spent any time thinking about? I have spent some time thinking about

it. I actually published an article on lifespan extension back in the 1980s when we were not that close to making breakthroughs. But people did think even then that we might not be very far away. And although as you say, I agree that it's going to come at some point. I'm not convinced it's going to come really soon. It may be harder than people think. But yes,

it certainly raises some serious ethical issues. And there could be some good sides to it. For example, you talked about views about risk. We might be less inclined to take risks. If we have the prospect of living for hundreds of years, we might be less ready to fight in war. For example, we might not see wars of the kind we have now in Ukraine to the

same extent because people think, you know, I want to live a long time. I don't want to die in my 20s when I could live another 200 years. And also, when you think about things like climate change, how would that affect our views? Now we're saying, well, we need to do this for our children and grandchildren, at least people of my generation are saying that. If

we were going to be living 300 years, we would think, hey, we're going to be living in this world with a vastly different and less stable climate. So we're going to be living in this world with a vastly different and less stable climate. We better stop what we're doing right now. So that could be a good consequence. But there's a real danger. If you simply expand

lies for those who can afford it, and you don't do anything to reduce population growth, of course, then the world will become even more populated than it is now. And that's a serious problem. So would that slow down? Would that stop? You'd have to hope so. Because otherwise, we're definitely going to be over-capacitated. So that's a great capacity even more than we are already perhaps now.

It's hard to imagine that if and when those breakthroughs occur, that they will be reserved for the wealthy. It's not going to be a democratic thing, right? So it's just going to drive a greater wedge in between the halves and the halves knots. Yes, that's certainly going to be what will happen initially. It might be one of those procedures that if you find, in fact, that

you can find inexpensive ways of doing it, it will spread. But initially, we're going to get the wealthy people living longer. It's the same thing with gene editing. I think we're going to get them being able to produce children who have enhanced capacities to earn well and to be useful in various ways. And so you will get wealthy people who are breeding children who are more

significantly different genetically from low income people than they are. Now, and you'll actually get a sort of genetically fixed caste society occurring. So I think these are serious problems for technologies that are in the pipeline. Right. The other primary technology, being the pioneering of new forms of consciousness through artificial intelligence. There's a lot of discussion around what constitutes sentience, what is consciousness, et cetera. And we're

seeing in real time, like these breakthroughs with chat, GPT, and things like this where artificial intelligence is mimicking behavior in a way that is sort of helping us to realize, like, we're kind of on the precipice of something new here. And what does this mean for the future of humanity? And how should we think about the ethics surrounding these developments? I think mimicking is the right

word though at present. We do have these chat things that look as if you're having a conversation with a person who is conscious in thinking. But when you understand how it's actually working, I think you realize that that's not precise. But at what point, like if these things become self-learning, right, the time frame then becomes very compressed in terms of their evolution and development. And at

some point, when they become indistinguishable from human behavior, what is the tipping point or the kind of Rubicon where we can qualify it as sentience or conscious? Like for you, what does that line look like? Like what would have to happen? I think the difficulty is in working out when one of these super intelligent, artificial general intelligence actually becomes conscious. Because if in fact, it's very

good at mimicking our behavior. And if it's also essentially a black box, that is, we don't really understand how it's doing what it's doing. And there is AI where we can't really say why it's making the judgments that it's making. Then it's going to be hard to know, hard to distinguish conscious processing from simply very rapid mechanical processing and learning. And it will be, it will

take an effort to understand how it's working and why it's doing what it is. But I think that that is, that is the clue. We need to try to understand what's going on. And if we're simply saying, well, we trained it on vast quantities of text. And it absorbed that. And then we trained it as to how to give the right answers. And it's just doing

that. Then I think it's clear that it's, it's not a conscious being. Right. But on some level already, we're in a situation where we don't quite know how it's coming up with the right answer. Like we know it's self reinforcing on some level. But already the computer scientists, like this sort of process by which it's operating is already begun to elude the creators of the technology.

Yes. So that's sort of frightening. It is frightening in a variety of ways. Yes. And at what point does it become unethical to flick the switch and turn it off? So to speak. Because we have given birth to a new form of life and consciousness that deserves its own, you know, respect on some level even as it's going about destroying us. Right. And if we simply

ask it and say, you know, is it okay for me to take this switch and turn it off? Right. And it probably, you know, we'll take this as, oh, does that mean you're killing me? And then, you know, I know what people say about being killed. So it comes out with the answer that a person would give if you said I'm going to kill you. And

that's not going to be. This is the dystopian world in which we're headed, Peter. How are we going to make sense of this? How are we going to survive this impending apocalypse? So I'm not convinced that we're that close to this particular apocalypse. Yeah. Right. I think we have lots of problems. I'd much rather focus on climate change, extreme poverty, getting rid of factory farming. I

think the robot apocalypse is still some distance ahead of us. And I don't know that we yet have a good enough handle as to how it's going to happen. So I would rather wait and see. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think it's good to be thinking about these things. And I know you like there are other Oxford philosophers who are on this. Yeah. And Bostrom and

Toby Ord, right, have written about this extensively. And it's sexy and it's fun. You know, it feels very, you know, terminator world to like think about these problems. And certainly at some point, perhaps this, these are very real things that we need to grapple with. But what's interesting to me about it is the obsession with trying to understand the ethics around emergent, like robotic consciousness, belies

the fact that currently there are billions of animals that were sacrificing constantly for our food system. And we don't really think about their, like the ethics of their conscious awareness and suffering. Yeah. Like this big problem is right underneath our foot. And we're worrying about this problem that's coming down the line. And we should be there's value in that, of course. Yeah. But we already have

a very real circumstance right here that we kind of walk around with blinders on around. Yes, that's right. I actually co-authored an article with a Hong Kong researcher called Sayip Fai who looked and he looked at a whole lot of courses on AI ethics and a whole lot of AI ethics statements. And lots of them take very seriously this still hypothetical question of what would be

the moral status of conscious AI. But pretty much none of them actually take seriously the fact of the present impact that AI is having on sentient beings, nonhuman sentient beings on animals. They of course deal with AI and humans. But we show in the article that AI is already having a major impact on nonhuman animals. For example, in some countries it's being used to run factory

farms, not really in the United States, but that's happening in China. That's happening in Europe to some extent. Just automated, like sort of automated factory farms where algorithms are dictating feeding schedules and things like that. That's right. Yes, they look, that's right. And they are senses that are observing animal behavior and adjusting what is done to the animals by how they're behaving, possibly detecting diseases early,

which could be a good thing. But they're also going to enable animals to be even more crowded. Because of the AI will actually be geared to where is it most profitable? What's the point? It's a very rudimentary matrix where this living being exists for the purpose of resource extraction, right? Yes. A battery. That's right. Exactly. For resource extraction and not treated as a thing, as an

end in itself, as a sentient being with a moral status that is different from that of a thing of a product. Yeah, that's wild. Do you, when you cast your gaze into the future, are you an optimistic person? How is all this playing out? I've always been optimistic. I write a book back in the 80s. It's called the expanding circle in which I talked about the

way in which throughout human history, we have pushed the boundaries of our moral sphere at words from the tribe to larger groups, to national groups, to racial or ethnic groups. And finally, in the 20th century, to recognizing with the universal declaration of human rights that all human beings have certain basic rights. And I looked forward to pushing that beyond the boundaries of our species to non-human

animals. There are some signs of that happening. But over the last 20 years, there have been backward steps as well, both in terms of human relations and the idea that we have a pretty naked war of aggression going on right now with Russia's invasion of Ukraine. And people dying and being killed is something that makes it hard to be optimistic about our future. But also, in

terms of the treatment of animal, we haven't continued to push outwards in the way that I had hoped. And finally, climate change is still a huge problem that we have not done enough about. And if we don't solve that, then things are going to go backwards. And we will be in greater need. And no doubt we'll have climate wars because of huge numbers of refugees wanting

to leave places where they can no longer live and throw their own food. So, I'm more accurate to be optimistic now about whether I think the future is going to be positive. Yeah. The expanding circles concept was another thing that you talked about with Ryan Holiday. He was analogizing it. I think it was Heracles who had written about this. That's right. Yes. That's right. So, this

is really the way that I was. Which is pretty cool how you tapped into the greater consciousness to explore that idea. But I think when you think about, or sort of the erosion of your optimism, to me, it just feels like human beings are not very well-wired for decision-making around long-term consequences. We're acting in our self-interest. It's very difficult for us to think about future generations.

And when you see our inability to take appropriate action with respect to climate change, there's a feeling of, we're somehow neutered. Whether there's not enough political capital, or we can't marshal our incentive structure to create better decision-making around this. It's easy to not be optimistic about how we're going to solve this problem. Because there's so much indisha of us not taking action where we should. Yeah.

And part of the problem, I think, is that we do not have strong global organizations. And we really need that. I also read a book called One World. It was published just after 9-11. And I think that's a great idea. In that, I was looking towards the strengthening of global institutions, because I argued that we need them to deal with climate change. We just have one

atmosphere. You can't govern climate change with sovereign nations, because the greenhouse gases that we emit across the United States obviously spread everywhere. Also, I thought that we needed a world trading organization that was more geared towards helping people in extreme poverty. And I wanted to have stronger international legal systems so that crimes against humanity would be punished everywhere. And I wanted just to do more about

global poverty. And if you look at those areas, we certainly haven't got the strong institutions to govern climate change. The move towards international law that seemed reasonably promising then with the setting up of the international criminal court, and the world's biggest threat. And if you look at the war crimes being committed by Russia in Ukraine, it's hard to see how the people responsible are ever going

to be brought to justice there. The World Trade Organization basically stalled around the time the book came out and hasn't been able to make progress towards better trading regimes for countries that are low income and disadvantaged by present systems. So perhaps we made some progress in terms of global poverty. That has been reduced over the 20-year period quite dramatically. But that's really the one bright spot

in this picture. And that's why it's hard to see that positive future. Global cooperation seems very elusive. Definitely we've gone back with the conflict between Russia and the West now, and China as well. Not being part of global poverty. Global trading order, the hope was that if they realized that they need to trade and the trade is helping their economy and helping to lift hundreds of

millions of Chinese out of poverty, that then they would be a participant in this. And we would have a multi-polar world. Well, I suppose it's multi-polar, but there's more confrontation than it was 20 years ago. Yeah. And these sort of global gatherings are often about political expeditions. And so, you know, there's a lot of words being said, but in terms of like real world action with

the intended positive effect, that doesn't seem to occur with any reality. Certainly not in the way that it needs to occur. But to harken that stoic tradition of the intersection of philosophy and politics, you know, if there were at least in national politics, a seat, you know, in the White House for like the philosopher in chief, I'm sure lots of people have called upon you for

your input and advice on various issues. But if that was actually like a cabinet position, like you're in a parallel universe and you're sitting there in the situation room or what in the Oval Office, what have you? Like what is the guidance or the council that you could give? Like the president or our government to help us start to make better decisions about these problems. I

would say that the United States has to lead and it has to be prepared to lead in ways that are clearly genuine and bona fide and saying, look, we will do these things. We will start doing them. We will do what is our fair share on things like climate change and extreme poverty. And that's doing a lot more than we're doing now on either of those

issues. And we want you to join in and let's let's be open and transparent about what we're all doing so that we can see who's doing their fair share. And I hope if we make that gesture, you will match it and do the same and we'll start to build trust and cooperation in the things that need to be done and that can only be done if

all the magic global players participate. Yeah. And from an economic perspective, you know, so much of your work and your focus is on giving and how to effectively give. But how do you think about other economic modalities like the notion of conscious capitalism or venture capital that is kind of impact oriented? Like I'm thinking of Jacqueline Novogratz and acumen and the work that she's doing to

eradicate poverty and kind of, you know, like there are other ways beyond just the traditional notion of giving to NGOs and nonprofits. Like how do those operate in your thinking? Absolutely. I think we need to try them all and see what works. Social enterprises that do producer return that are full profit organizations, but concerned to have a social impact are things worth doing. I've actually made

a small investment in an organization that is building low income housing in Kenya on a profit basis. But the people there, I know some of who are genuine people who've worked in aid see an opportunity here to do that. So I do feel the gap between the slums that exist in places like Nairobi and the housing that the wealthy can afford. So I did this because

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

potential to do good. Who else is leading the way here? Like when you think of people who are really doing the right thing, making a real positive change and doing it in innovative ways? Well, I think some of the foundations that have been set up to do good things like I already mentioned Dustin Moskovitz and Carrie Tuno who's good ventures foundation set up open philanthropy and

supporting give well too. And those are both organizations that are trying to assess what's the best thing you can do to have a positive impact on the world and give well like the life you can save is concerned with global poverty and with assessing which are the most effective charities in the field of global poverty. Whereas open philanthropy is much broader and is looking at a

whole range of different areas and trying to assess where you can make that impact. So I think I think those are really important things to do because we need to have that knowledge and then we can follow through. I think Bill Gates has been a pioneer too, I should say, in setting up the Gates Foundation Bill and Melinda Gates I should say and with support from

Warren Buffett. They're also doing a lot of good things, saving a lot of lives, improving equality of many lives. So I think they deserve recognition and applause for having made that contribution. And also, incidentally, for trying to persuade other billionaires to do the same through the giving pledge. Yeah, is there a different standard for that? For the billionaire class. So obviously if you have that much,

you ought to be giving a lot more. Yes. But is there, so for example, is it okay for the billionaire to be pursuing space travel when those resources could go towards eradicating poverty? Like how do you think about the switching, you know, like the focus of that resource allocation decision making? If you're thinking about the sort of boosting themselves into space for, should they be purchasing

Twitter or should they be, you know, winning? I wish Elon Musk had stayed with developing better batteries so that we can all be driving electric vehicles sooner. That seems to me to be his major contribution so far. I acknowledge that behind his idea of colonizing Mars is this idea of reducing poverty. By reducing the risk of extinction, right, that if we had a self-sustaining human colony

on Mars, and let's say there was a nuclear war on this planet that wiped everybody out here, well, you would still have our species and maybe in a few hundred years, they could come back to a less radioactive earth and reestablish things here or explore other planets elsewhere. So it's not that it's, you know, completely self-indulgent to try to develop colonies on Mars. But I do

think that there are more urgent issues that we could deal with here first. Right. Well, we can leave that with that on that subject and let it be known that that you do put your money where your mouth is. You recently were the recipient of this $1 million prize honoring you for your work in philosophy and humanities. And that prize was quickly dispatched to the life

you can save your organization. And then to I think 50% got spread out to charities that that organization has sort of vetted and supported, yes. And then the other half went to animal rights charities. Yeah, basically anti factory farming and pro-Vig and organizations, particularly those working in outside the Western countries to try to develop those ideas there. Right. And so I'm just I'm interested in the

kind of actual emotional experience of receiving a million dollars. And I mean, does it, what is that like? Does it hit your bank account? And then you have to like send it back out or can you, I mean, obviously it's sort of theoretical, right? Because you're not, you're just, okay, it's going to pass through you to these other things. But it is kind of a rare

experience to be like, wow, there's a million, like they're giving me a million dollars. Like is there, was there ever a moment where you're like, I need to give all of it. So I, you have kids, you have grandkids. Yeah, yeah. But you know, but this is who you are, right? So I'm just it is walk me through it. It is who I am. And all

so I've been a Princeton professor for more than 20 years on a comfortable salary. So I don't really feel that I need not well, I definitely didn't need it. And I don't even think that it would have made a big difference to my happiness. You know, I'm not the kind of person who wants to die and add it, you know, $300 restaurants and drink fine wines.

I don't need to when I travel, I don't want to live in luxury resorts. So actually they occasionally get put up in these places by conferences and so on. And they just make me feel a bit uncomfortable. Yeah. So I really have enough for the kinds of things that I want. And there is a fulfillment and satisfaction in saying, wow, I have the opportunity to help

all of these organizations to an extent that I didn't really have before. And to see what they're doing with the money that I'm giving and to know that it's helped a lot of people. And I hope has reduced animal suffering as well. It's been part of that movement helped people who are very dedicated working for these important causes. So I think I probably got more fulfillment

and satisfaction through giving it away than I would have got. I'm trying to think how to spend it on myself. Yeah, sure. I mean, I think that's a really important piece because we diluted ourselves into believing that this, that this, you know, wealth will be the thing that makes us happy. But all the evidence suggests and establishes that beyond a certain threshold point, it doesn't do

that at all. And in fact, it is in the giving that we, that we are kind of engendered with this sense of fulfillment, which is really what we're all kind of after. Right. So far be it from being this, you know, self-flagulating pursuit. It's actually self-serving in that regard. That's right. Yeah. While you're also alleviating suffering and doing all this good in the world. Yeah. So

Charlie Bressler, who's the person with whom I really co-founded the light you can save. He was before he read the book that I wrote the life you can save, president of a men's clothing retail chain in the United States. So he had earned quite a lot of money. But he says that by co-fading the life you can save the first life that he saved was his

own. Because he got so much more satisfaction and fulfillment together with his wife from helping to establish the organization. And he became the CEO of it on negative income. He didn't take any salary and he actually donated to it. So he found that really fulfilling. And I agree. You know, if you, if you pursue the materialist dream, dream in inverted commas, it doesn't fulfill you. You

give yourself a purpose. And then the purpose is to get more and more money. And for what? Whereas if you use that for purposes of saying, I can do something. To help others. And that's a really lasting and important value. You're going to benefit yourself as well as others. Right. That's really beautiful. And I think for people who are listening to this who are now curious

about what that might look like for their own lives. They can go to your website for the life you can save. And there they can sort of get a sense of some of these kind of vetted charity. And there are a lot of things that are doing good in the world. Right. Like you've done the work to say we know these ones are the best bang

for your buck in terms of suffering reduction. That's right. You can go to the life you can save.org. And you can look at the charities that we recommend and click on get more details on each one. You can also download the book. Absolutely free as in book. Or as an audio book. And I'm delighted that the audio book. Different chapters were read by different people. My

friend Paul Simon, the singer songwriter, Red One. Kristen Bell. Yes, he read one. Steven Fry. Steven Fry. That's a great voice. We have a series of voices. And different accents in English. We had Shabana Asmi who's an Indian actress reading it in her. And we have Winnie Alma who's an African. So we have a lot of different voices, which gives it a kind of global sense.

Of course, they're all reading in English, but it's global in that sense. And it is a book about the world. It's a global problem. And it wasn't always free, right? It's the re-release where you've kind of positioned it this way. So in fact, yeah, it was initially published by Random House. And at some point, Charlie said, let's try and get the rights back so that we

can make it free. So we had long negotiations with Random House. We had to pay for it. And I wasn't sure that that was the best investment of our funds given that we were trying to raise funds to help save lives. But Charlie persuaded me that in the long run it would save a lot more. And because we've now distributed far more copies of the book

than Random House would have if we'd left the rights with them. And a lot of people have read it and donated. And in fact, someone said this book was free, but it's actually the most expensive book over every... Because they donated significantly. So yeah, it has paid off getting the rights back. And the audiobook is that you could just get it on Spotify. Like listen to

it. Like you would listen to a podcast. Just in just... chapters, you know, at different episodes, which is pretty cool. So it's very easy to find. You don't have to go to Audible or anything like that. Yeah. Yeah. And if you prefer to read in paper, we are actually having, especially for listeners to your podcasts, we're asking them to donate. And we're having matching funds. And

they can... We'll even mail a paper by copy of the book to them if they prefer that. Right. I believe, and this is incredibly generous. So here's what everybody is watching or listening is going to do. You're going to go to thelifeyoucansave.org slash rich role. And you can learn more about the organization and where your funds will be allocated. If you donate there, the organization is

going to match you dollar for dollar up to $25,000 total. Right. And you can get the book there. So that's pretty good. And incredibly generous. So check it out. Yeah. Thanks for the opportunity to reach your listeners. I think it's... Your listeners are the kind of people who I imagine a lot of them will want to support this. Yeah. And we hope to hear from them.

Yeah. It's a very special thing. And, you know, I can't... First of all, I can't thank you enough for taking time out of your venture back to Australia to spend time with me today. And I just... I hold you in the highest regard. And I think you're the legacy of the work that you're doing is just... It's an extraordinary thing. And I can't tell you what

an impact you've had on my life and the life of millions and millions of people. It's such a worthy... It's a worthy life well-lived, sir, that you... That you... You've walked a certain path that I think is just extraordinarily laudable and rare. So... Well, thank you very much, Rich. I really do appreciate that. I know that we're both working for a lot of the same causes.

And we're both trying to leave the world a better place than it would have been if we hadn't been here. So I really appreciate your words and what you're doing. Yeah. Thank you. So... And the updated version of animal liberation is coming out in the spring, I think. That's in... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, maybe you can come back here and we can talk a little

bit more about that, which would be great. So, thank you. And I need the phone number of your surf instructor for when I go to Australia. Ah, yes. You're asking me all the time. Who do you think you're going to do that? We haven't talked about surfing now, but I know you're going to Byron Bay, which is one of the most beautiful places in Australia. And

I can put you in touch with a former US surfing champion. Who is a great surfing guy and a surfing guru. And either he or his daughter will be very happy to get you on a board in the waves there. Excellent. Well, I'm holding you to it. All right. Thank you, Peter. Cheers. Thanks for these lads. This episode was brought to you by Inside Tracker. Learn

how to live healthier, longer by visiting the world. Visit www.insytracker.com slash richroll and use code richroll a checkout to save 20% off the entire store. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast

archive as well as podcast merch, my books, finding ultra, voicing change in the plant power way, as well as the plant power meal planner at meals.ritroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube and leave a review and or comment. Supporting the sponsors who support

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