Live A BETTER & More ETHICAL Life w/ Philosopher Peter Singer | Rich Roll Podcast

if you pursue the materialist dream it doesn't fulfill you whereas if you use that for the purposes of saying I can do something to help others you're going to benefit yourself as well as others 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 if you were hiding a Jewish Family in your Cellar in Nazi Germany and the Gestapo came to your door you know if you can save the family you're hiding by telling a lie to the Gestapo obviously you should do that the grandfather of both the modern animal rights and effective altruism movements Peter is a professor of bioethics a 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 the life you can save both of which are books we cover in this conversation to live in ethical life it's not enough just to say I'm going to obey some simple moral rules 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 Peter has very generously offered to provide everybody with a free copy of his book the life you can save to anyone who wants one to get your copy visit thelifeyoucansave.org Rich Roll or click the link in the description below and the point that I'm really driving at is that donations to Peter's save lives fund can also be made by this link and all donations there will be matched dollar for dollar up to twenty five thousand dollars thanks to a very generous Anonymous donor the a lot of people in extreme poverty we're damaging the climate of our planet we're inflicting vast amounts of suffering on non-human animals in factory farms there are all sorts of choices that you have to make about how you're going to live what do you eat all of those things that we can now see as ethical questions it was an absolute honor to host this discussion so without further Ado here's me and Peter Singer um well Peter it's a real honor to have you here uh 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 be have have been preceded by me giving an introduction to your work your kind of formal bio but I'm curious how you uh articulate what it is that you do like how do you explain uh your kind of uh focus and and curiosity in the world right uh 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 uh those are interesting intellectual problems but I certainly wouldn't have wanted to spend my life doing them um but once I realized that ethics the part of philosophy that connects with life really can make a difference to how you think about uh your life your values and how you act in the world makes a difference to changing the world uh 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 um the kind of academic pursuit of philosophy and the true utility of it this came up in your in your conversation with Ryan holiday where he was saying back in you know ancient Greece and ancient Rome politics and philosophy were were very uh commingled Pursuits uh whereas now they don't really seem to meet but I look at you as somebody who's had a profound impact on on culture and how we think about ethics and Morality In a very utilitarian and and real way that's true although I think I've been fortunate in that in the period that I've been living and working in philosophy it has moved back more like that Greek uh ideal if you like that um it does connect with how we live and there are many of my students for example who are interested in taking philosophy courses precisely for that reason they want to think about these issues and that's different from when I was an undergraduate when there was still this period of what was known as ordinary language philosophy or linguistic analysis where a lot of philosophers said philosophy doesn't teach you how to live it simply helps us to understand the meanings of the moral terms and then the student movement of the 1960s started to get things back on track um so with the Vietnam War students wanted more relevant courses and one of the things that philosophy could do was well there's this ancient tradition of when is it right to go to war of just War Theory and they started talking about that and then they started talking about Civil Disobedience when are you justified in disobeying the law and so I think then philosophy got back on track to those sorts of topics and 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 I feel that that that era was sort of supplanted by you know the greed is good uh sensibility of the 80s and and perhaps the unwee of of uh and the cynicism of of Gen X which is my generation but I too look at this newer generation uh the population the age range of of the students I'm sure you teach who do seem very concerned about um ethics morality and impact in terms of where they're investing their academic curiosity and and their career choices like they really want to um 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 there are always some at least you know I've been teaching at Princeton now since 1999 and I think there were always some students who were interested in how they could have an impact on the world but I agree that it's it's come back more strongly in the in the last few years and there are more 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 posited to you you know what does it mean to live an ethical life how do you begin to unpack that and respond to it in a meaningful way that that can help direct somebody who's you know wanting to know the answer to that yeah so I asked them to think about the impact that they can have about the consequences of their actions uh what they can do to make the world a better place than it would have been if they hadn't lived in it and clearly there are a lot of opportunities for that I mean especially if you're living in an affluent society like the United States or any of the other affluent countries and you see that there are a lot of people in extreme poverty in other countries you see that we're damaging the climate of our planet you see that we're inflicting vast amounts of suffering on non-human animals in factory farms there are all sorts of choices that you have to make about how you're going to live uh what you're going to do as a career choice which students are thinking about but also uh what are you doing with your spare cash um what do you eat all of those things are we can now see as ethical questions so for me to live in ethical life it's not enough just to say I'm going to obey some simple moral rules like don't still steal don't cheat don't don't hurt other people um 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 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 um it's it's primarily the reduction of suffering I do think that producing happiness a pleasure is is a value as well but that's a harder thing to get your hands around right exactly yes that's right it's it's often easier to see how you can relieve suffering than how you can boost happiness and so you know some people say you should be a negative utilitarian and only focus on reducing pain and suffering um 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 uh and do that without causing any suffering or maybe cause you know mild head thanks to a few people clearly that would be the right thing to do so it's not that it's not that the positive doesn't count at all in the scales it's just that given the way the world is uh 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 maybe 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 in the context of the reduction of suffering this is this is kind of the you know the 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 um and and and focus on something that's a little bit more current which is the 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 Sam bankman freed and FTX and all of that which has kind of put this uh you know 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 who are now critical of it and I'm interested I know you've written about this but parsing the behavior of this human being from the philosophical underpinnings of this movement that you helped pioneer yeah um 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 movement has talked about is uh 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 uh it might mean actually trying to earn a lot of money and then using that to support organizations that are doing good um that can be a a valuable thing to do and I think um sand bankman freed set out to do that I know that he had a conversation with Will mccaskill early on um will being one of the founders of the effective altruism movement and will suggested that because he was mathematically gifted that might be an opportunity for him and I know others I've had 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 um 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 um and somebody who was prepared to break standard rules of of how you do business and uh how you look after other people's money that's entrusted to you uh 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 uh investment sort of fund and uh 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 to give to good causes would lead to somebody so flagrantly this is alleged I suppose we should say um but uh if if the charges are correct I don't think anybody in effective altruism movement thought that anybody would so flagrantly uh violate those basic rules of of sound practice and ethical practice right well you know his misdeeds and malfeasance will be you know adjudicated but from the outside looking in it doesn't look great and I think uh 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 philanthropic ends and look at it from a purely objective point of view to to understand the best use of every dollar given to have the Maximum Impact in terms of the reduction of suffering and and and and those Outlets often aren't the sexy ones or the ones that we feel emotionally attached to because we have a relative who's suffering from a certain disease it happens to be things like malaria attention and the like that can that are cheap easy solutions that end up saving a lot of lives um and in the case of of of sand Bank Sam bankman freed uh I see a guy who whose motives are in question like it there is an argument that perhaps he leveraged this movement because it looked good from a from a sort of PR perspective to say that he was an effective altruist and I'm not sure 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 uh unhealthy incentives whereby The end justifies the means right like no matter what end uh or what means you pursue to accumulate a certain amount of wealth it's okay because this these that those resources will be deployed in an altruistic manner yeah um as for his original motives um I'm prepared to believe that he did sit at on that career in order to be able to give um I think you know that's that's the evidence early on that it wasn't wasn't right from the start he thought oh I'll pretend to be an effective altruist because that'll make me more successful personally um and figures that I've seen you know he certainly gave well over 100 million dollars 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 for pandemic preparation and I think that's obviously true so um uh I 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'd admitted that maybe Alameda had gone bankrupt he would have still been wealthy and wouldn't be facing jail so uh I think that's probably what went wrong but um in terms of what you were asking about uh the idea that The end justifies the means I think people are often very simplistically say oh well you know he thought that the ends Justified the means and they don't but if you stop and think about it I think everybody thinks that sometimes the end does justify the means and the classic example of that is you know if you're if you're hiding a Jewish Family in your Cellar in Nazi Germany and the Gestapo came to your door um and you might think normally it's wrong to tell lies including telling lies to the state authorities is clearly wrong but uh 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 end ends justify the means um when are the means too bad or when is the risk too great or the means not sufficient uh and you have to look at those on a on a case-by-case basis right so that would play out in terms of a young person pondering career choices they could either uh uh uh you know go to the 80 000 hours website and look at certain types of impacts oriented careers or they could become a investment banker and try to accumulate as much wealth as possible for the purposes of of deploying that at a later time and and and from your perspective both of those are meritorious and and worthy of consideration yes that's right um and in fact if they go to 80 000 hours there's a lot of other things that they could do as well um they could one of the careers suggested is becoming a research scientist working in areas that will make a difference to people in extreme poverty um another is to go into politics politics needs more people who are really serious about helping people in poverty doing something about climate change um so there's a lot of different options that people can have and uh in fact the effective 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 for new ideas so uh will mccaskill in particular you know made quite a feature of this but um more recently and but before uh the FTX collapse and so not specifically related to Sam bankman freed um but I 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 um 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 um to really get organized and to scale up and really make a big difference uh rather than to earn to give just because of the 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 um in thinking about you know the pursuit of an ethical life and as somebody who you know who's who is a you know a moral philosopher why is it like why is this important is there a morality that exists uh that is that is a certain kind of like you there's a universality to that truth that I mean you're an atheist right so so from whence does you know this sense of right and wrong um and and pursuing an ethical life from from where does that derive uh yes I I am an IPS so obviously I don't I don't think it derives from God or any god-given commands but uh and for quite a while I I didn't think there was an objective truth um that was postparted the era in which I was educated in studying philosophy a lot of philosophers didn't think there was um and there has been a a shift for a number of philosophers and I'm one of them towards the idea that no there are some things that we can really see as self-evidently uh good or often more to the points of evidently bad so for example um when somebody experiences Agony if if a child uh is going through Agony um whether it's an illness or an injury or some malevolent person deliberately hurting them um that's just a bad thing and uh the universe would be a better place if that child were not experiencing Agony so uh I think from the self-evidence of of that judgment and the self-evidence of the feeling we have ourselves when we experience severe pain that um that's a bad thing we can generalize that to other sentient beings any being who can experience Agony it's better if they don't um and only being who can experience a enjoyable happy Blissful worthwhile kind of Life fulfilling life for them uh 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 uh emanating from some kind of spiritual connection you know even in a non-dogmatic non-religious way uh 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 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 um the 19th century utilitarian Henry Sedgwick spoke about taking the point of view of the Universe um and he he was an agnostic really rather than atheist but he he wasn't saying you know that the Universe has a point of view he was just saying imagine that you're looking on the universe as a whole and all the sentient beings in it then you can see that your own interests your own well-being is no more important from that perspective than that of any other being who can have similar kinds of experiences of pain or pleasure and so uh we should as rational beings we should try to reduce the pain and Agony that is experienced and increase the pleasure and happiness because that's what we want for ourselves and we see that we are just one of many similar beings who have those experiences so much of your work is is focused on the the responsibility of the individual like should I give money to this versus that uh should I not eat animals like all of these sort of choices um that can guide us towards you know kind of a more ethical way of living um but we live in a culture in which incentives and kind of momentum is pushing us away from the kind of uh 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 focused on the individual um how you contemplate like system change like governmental regimes or uh 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 systems and in the incentives that the systems create and 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 um but it's really important and shouldn't be that difficult for governments to change the incentives there by carbon taxes for example on what produces emissions so that's a that's an area where going into politics can be a really important career because you can help to make governments make those choices um and and that's true of the other things that I talk about at an individual level as well governments do give significant amounts to foreign aid they could give more 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 uh citizen initiated referenda and it's passed uh propositions to give animals a bit more room than um 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 had one stage talked about raising U.S foreign aid to half a percent of gross national product which would still be only uh you know about half of the top nations in the world um but completely failed to do that um so if if that's so difficult to achieve um then there is something that we can do individually and that can make a difference so let's let's do that and similarly in terms of what we eat it's also very hard to get laws and regulations to in the United States to give animals more space to move around as I said there are exceptions with those states with citizens initiated referenda because it does seem that ordinary Americans when given that choice will choose better conditions for animals but because the agribusiness Lobby is so powerful at the federal level it's been impossible to get any laws passed at the federal level to give animals room to move and that's that's a contrast with with Europe where the entire European Union has much better laws than the United States has so again you know let's try to do what we can at the individual level if enough people do that we'll weaken the power of the agribusiness Lobby because they won't be selling so much and uh we'll press and be in a better position to produce that systemic change well in the context of of animal rights uh 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 in 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 um there has been significant change I mentioned those laws in the European Union sort of 27 countries that have better laws than when I publish animal Liberation in 1975 and the United Kingdom of course which is no longer in the European Union uh so that's a significant change for hundreds of millions of animals they have definitely not idealized but they have lives that are somewhat better than they were in the 70s um but on the other hand factory farming still continues uh here in the United States uh a lot of it goes on just as bad as it was before in some respects even worse because for example the breeding of chickens for meat has increase the speed at which they put on weight to such a point that their immature legs can't really bear the weight of their bodies they're they're very young birds when they're sent to Market they're about six weeks old um 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 um 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 Dan bird and pick it up and you mainly kill it um 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 they're more demand for meat uh and factory farming has hugely increased there and again it's pretty much unregulated yeah we 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 canvas our glance internationally we see the expansion of a middle class or you know New Wealth sectors who are going to increase their consumption of meat at a rate that um 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 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 um so you know there's some hope that as we become more educated more understanding about what meat does not only to animals but to the climate and to the environment more generally we've just had this meeting of environmentalists concern to protect species and again uh there's been a lot of writing about how uh meat consumption just can't continue to grow that it is destroying the rainforest and causing extinctions so there's some hope that more people will realize that but it's it's difficult and uh uh you know to me you mentioned the pockets of people being vegan I mean I think being vegan is a great diet and a healthy diet and the best diet for the for the planet and for animals but I think we have to work towards reduction of meat consumption in mainstream um because it's going to be a long time before we get a vegan mainstream in in most countries yeah I mean it's it there does feel like quite a bit of momentum behind that right now it is mainstreaming in that so many restaurants you can at least get vegan options and people don't bulk or and they're not confused when you want to veganize an entree at a restaurant or what have you um but yes there is 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 on a runway model you know at a fashion show who's wearing a uh a mink coat or is it having a you know realistic conversation with policy makers 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 to change their diet is concerned uh probably being cool and reasonable is better than throwing Buckets of Blood at people that's that's true but you know 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 um there are protests that are more in your face uh than others uh 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 uh those Eco activists who um through soup 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 um but you know that was a gesture to say you know this is really something urgent and we're still not doing what we need to be doing about it and we have to do better and we have to do it soon so I I fully sympathize with that but I do want to know what actually is going to work and what is going to get governments to take the relatively simple steps that they need to take to shift us away from uh greenhouse gas emitting uh products both fossil fuels and meat in particular I feel like most people want to eat better they want to improve their diets absolutely have you heard of it I've heard of it this trips up so many people we thought hey we know a couple things about how to do this a few so we created this thing called the plant power meal planner that is this beautiful offering whereby you gain access to literally thousands of plant-based recipes that you can totally customize based upon your preferences your allergies your peccadillos it integrates with grocery delivery so all the ingredients that you need get shipped right to your door so you can make the stuff that you've pre-selected and we all could use a little inspiration and support when preparing meals for our families in our busy lives so we hope you join us no matter what your eating style is we have our arms open wide and we've saved you a space at our family table to join us in eating more healthy a vibrant plant-based meals and if you're looking for the perfect holiday gift for a loved one right now for a limited time we're offering twenty dollars off meal planner gift cards through December 15th visit meals.rich roll.com to claim the offer again for twenty dollars off meal planner gift cards from now until December 15th visit meals dot richroll.com [Laughter] how have your views uh evolved since writing this book in 1975 on this subject matter well um perhaps I was uh a little naive about how easy it might have been to to change these deeply ingrained habits and to combat major industries because I did think that the arguments seem to me to be so clear I thought that if I could just State them clearly and rationally uh readers would decide that they were right they would change what they were eating they would talk to their friends about why it was important to change what I was eating and um I hoped at least that's how you that's how it happened for you right so why shouldn't that happen for anybody who's reading your book exactly that's right yeah I mean so I didn't think about this issue at all until I was a graduate student at Oxford 24 years old and I hadn't thought about it no 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 um until I uh at Oxford happened to have lunch with a Canadian graduate student called Richard Cashin who uh 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 um and I was surprised and asked him what his problem was with me and he told me that he didn't think it was right to treat animals the way we treat them in order to turn them into food and I said don't they have good lives out in the fields and he said no they're increasingly they're crowded inside in big dark sheds I knew nothing about that I made it my business to find out and then I also because I was a philosophy student I decided to look at what philosophers had said about this you know why is it okay that to treat animals in this way um why do the bands of morality as it seems at home just stop with our species and I decided both that he was right on the facts and that there wasn't an ethical justification for disregarding the interests of non-human animals in the way we were doing it so it seemed a pretty simple argument to me and if I could be persuaded by that and I could show the facts to other people and and look at the ethical arguments that that would convince other people and it convinced some other people that's that's the good news um 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 farm products not particularly looking for um more organic or free-ranging or certified Humane Animal products yeah I think that that with greater education around this issue also comes concerted efforts to confuse consumers right there's a lot of green washing going on and there's a lot of um energy around uh you know kind of 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 um 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 uh it allows people to kind of fall into uh sort of a an acceptance or uh you know a delusion that um they're still not their habits aren't are aren't really resulting in the harm that they're actually resulting in yeah I don't say they're very inelegantly but I think you know what I'm getting at I know what you're getting it yes yeah um but 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 uh if they eat meat and when they say yes you ask them do they mostly buy organic or certified Humane grass-fed something like that um the percentages that answers yes is just wildly more than the amount that is actually produced you know 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 in the answers that they're giving because if you look for example at a chicken meat production the example I gave it earlier I think it's 99.8 is Factory farmed in in the US it's a tiny tiny percentage um far less less than one percent so um you know if people say they're eating humanely produced uh chicken they are almost certainly not yeah well if if the reduction of suffering is the is the rubric there is an interesting philosophical uh exploration to be had uh when it comes to the 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 you know sort of threshed in a traditional way where lots of rodents and insects are are being sacrificed as a result of the harvesting of these many plants or Gophers having to be killed Etc where in other words like 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 like from a philosophical ethical perspective like how do you think about that or parse the difference yes um so there are a couple of things to be said about that uh one is that from a climate point of view uh cows and and beef is really the worst of the animal products in terms of the quantity of greenhouse gases because they produce methane and methane is an extremely potent greenhouse gas 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 if they're in feedlots um or fat in the last few months in feedlots eating grain then all of those problems about uh 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 from feeding grain to to cattle you get back um somewhere between five and ten percent of the food value of the grain that you're putting in so if you're eating the grains directly uh you eat far fewer grains but if people are saying well I'm just eating fully grass fed beef which is again is quite a small proportion of U.S produced beef then you're not you're not killing the rodents when you harvest the grain because they're they're eating grass but they actually produce more greenhouse gases than the feedlots and that's because the reason cattle put in feedlots is they fatten up faster on grain so if they're on grass they have to live longer to reach the same weight to produce the same quantity of meat for people to eat and all the time they're living and digesting the grass they're producing the methane so in terms of the impact on the climate it's really bad it may be better from an animal welfare point of view much better than eating chicken for example both because they're outside and have better lives and also because you're talking about one animal with a lot of meat whereas chickens you people eat it who eat chickens are eating a lot of chickens over their lifetime but but in terms of greenhouse gases it's actually us beyond that there isn't enough land to support the production of of cattle in that manner anyway to meet Global demand for me well that's right so it's not a scalable sustainable solution no and and some of it and the demand for beef is causing rainforest to be cleared causing the Amazon to be cleared for for grazing land for example or even to grow more soybeans in Brazil which also uh about 70 of the soybean crop gets uh fed to cattle um and I think something over 20 goes to biofuels um and you know people say oh I don't eat tofu because soybeans are bad but actually it's you know about seven percent of the whole soybean crop is actually eaten directly by humans either as beans or as as tofu um 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 um back to the earlier question about how your your ideas have evolved since 1975 are there other other thing like if you so you are going you're you're reprising this book right you're coming out a new edition of it so I suspect there are uh you know things that you want to change or I don't know how much you can talk about that specifically but maybe generally uh you know how your thinking has changed and evolved in in the many interceding years yeah that's right I'm producing you know what's effectively a new book that's been called animal Liberation now um which has maintained the key ethical ideas um completely updates the relevant facts and looks at uh progress that we've made um and that we've not made from a more Global Perspective so it has a lot of new things in it that weren't in the original Edition um my thinking has developed in in various respects um I suppose some of the things that I'm more concerned with now are questions about wild animals about should we be concerned about uh the suffering of wild animals and my what might we do with that um I'm also interested in the development of alternatives to to meet um I see that as a positive sign both plant-based meats and um the development of cellular meat so you know meat that is actually produced from animal cells but does not require any uh living animal organism and therefore is again fallow on greenhouse gas emissions maybe has about three percent 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 um produce it in a economically competitive price with the meat that is being sold from animals uh that might be another way of breaking this uh deadlock of trying to get people to move away from uh eating animal products that are so bad for animals and for the environment well all indications is that we're we are headed in that direction it may take a little bit more time because this is an expensive um problem to solve right figuring out how to culture these cells and create these you know quote unquote meat products they're able to do it they've established that it can be done but doing it economically so it's um 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 uh cellular Chicken in Singapore now it's like it's for sale there but um it's yes it's expensive and uh I think the problem is they need to scale up and there's some questions about building these huge bioreactors in which the process occurs can that be done um will there be problems with things going astray we really don't know but but there's quite a lot of capital being invested in it a lot of capital yeah and but also the question of just you know consumer acclimation to it there is that the sort of getting over that icky factor of like what is this and where does it come from and you know having uh you know consumers uh acclimate to the idea of of this new food that's true although um consumers seem to think that the meat that they're buying is somehow natural and 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 the the chickens can't really live to maturity mostly because they're they're bred to eat so fast and put on weight so fast that a lot of them will just you know collapse and die um if they were kept to to older Birds um in fact it's so it's so bad that uh with the breeding birds because the parents of course have to have the same genes as the one we eat they have to be starved basically because if you've fed them as much as they want to eat they would not be able to to survive to breed or they might not physically be able to breed because they would be too obese to actually do that so um so they tend to be fed every second day which means that they're desperately hungry all the time uh and then of course the antibiotics are used because they're under under stress so a lot of antibiotics that are losing their efficacy because we're feeding them routinely to farm animals uh so yeah that this this is not a natural product either but somehow people have been persuaded to continue to eat it think that think of it as good uh so no doubt there will be some some let's say uh need to show consumers that this cellular meat when it happens is essentially still meat and is actually a safer and purer product than what they're getting from factory farms have you tried it no I've not had the opportunity to try it yet um I would certainly do so if I find myself in Singapore yeah I will go and do that right how do you think about uh philanthropy in in the Animal Welfare space uh it seems like there's a lot of um uh room 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 absolutely yeah in fact I show my students a slide uh of that which which has two boxes one box shows where the greatest amount of animal suffering is and and animals being killed and it's overwhelmingly farmed animals um and so it's like a big square of one color for farmed animals and then Dan in in the bottom corner there's a tiny little square that shows uh the other things like laboratory animals it's pretty small too although it's probably around 100 million animals in the United States each year um there's things like Furs and then there's dogs and cats which is just a tiny Mac you can hardly see on on my slide and then then the adjacent box shows where the dollars are going and there it's it's the dogs and cats the animal shelters that is the dominant thing and uh farmed animal are quite small and laboratory animals are quite small wild animals do rank larger there so uh yeah there's this complete disconnect between where the dollars go and where they're needed we're starting to get a little more money going through effective altruism actually mostly um through foundations like um open philanthropy which is funded by Dustin Moskowitz and Carrie tuna which is directing more money to uh oppose factory farming but um but what's going coming from the general public is really not going to where the big animal suffering problems are it's going to where people's emotions are um and you know 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 you know 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 um 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 these shelters right like they they rescue farmed animals they create a beautiful place for them to live out their lives and those places and people feel good about supporting those places for obvious reasons but those places also serve as sort of museums for people to visit which gets you know perhaps other people who have no connection to this movement or these ideas this is their Inception point for even learning about this an emotional connection to the reality of the problem that might in turn motivate them to give or get involved in the solution and maybe that solution is an effective altruism solution or maybe it's something else but I can't help but ask you like where is the emotional piece like there has to be some importance and resonance for it on some level yeah definitely I think that uh 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 um they get them to see that some of them can actually grow old even which of course farmed animals never do it's the rescued ones that might um and those sanctuaries work and many of them do and I think they all should um as places of Education that get people to see animals differently and encourage them to do more for farmed animals in general so I think that's fine um 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 um or you know restoring people's sight is something where you can really see the emotion and um the life you can save the organization that I founded that recommends effective Charities recommends a couple that do restore sight in uh 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 and the eyes are recovered and you see a woman who sees her child for the first time that she's ever seen that two-year-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 uh the the counter side of that like as a thought experiment as somebody who's primary driver is a reduction of suffering if you think about the eradication of of global poverty if you're raising the kind of um uh life experience and and income of people who have grown up in poverty um they then become do they not then what what happens if those people then end up increasing their meat consumption and that drives uh 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 that's that's a tough problem I've grappled with uh trying to think about that and trying to think about my anti-poverty work on how does it connect with my concern for animals but I suppose what I say and you may think that this is a rationalization is that if we're ever to solve this problem we're not going to solve it by keeping people in poverty because when people are in poverty they will do whatever they have to do sure to survive and if that includes for example uh killing wild animals in the forest and I uh including even chimpanzees in some places and uh perhaps leading to the extinction of species in the forest uh 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 um eating more meat is is not the right thing to do and we will have alternatives for them that they can live good and healthy lives without eating more meat or perhaps without eating any meat and so that we'll get to the point where I'm hoping we all get to where we have expanded Our concern for all animals for all sentient beings and are not just thinking about human beings so you know as you say you may you may think that that's no it's just interesting to think about like I'm not wed to any answer or any I I think just grappling with that idea demonstrates how difficult problem solving is in the real world if you're if you're if your goal really is like how do we best eradicate suffering it's complicated it's nuanced and it's in the gray I think there's you know another way of of exploring that is is the Twist on your famous thought experiment of the girl in the in the pond right so first of all for people who don't know you know maybe explain what that thought experiment is sure okay so in an article I wrote a long time ago I asked my readers to imagine that they're walking past uh upon let's say an ornamental pond in a park and let's say they know well that the pond is quite shallow um 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 child too small to stand up even in this shallow pond so you know the first thing you would think about is whose Child is This who's looking after this child but when you look around you don't know why but there's nobody else there you're the only adult 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 um 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 uh you know 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 uh you know 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 a effective charity we could save or certainly contribute towards saving the life of a child in a low-income country perhaps by donating to the against malaria Foundation which will distribute bed nets to protect children against malaria or perhaps by Distributing other medicines to prevent children dying of diarrhea which is another significant cause of deaths in in low-income countries 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 irrelevant and then there's all kinds of other threads that can be pulled on this does temporality matter like does the fact that this person is living at the same time like we can we can predict that in the future that will there will be people in this circumstance right and the fact that they don't live yet uh should that be a 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 I think that if 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 uh the fact that it's in the future doesn't in itself matter uh if we're uncertain as to whether we could do anything to prevent their suffering that of course makes a difference we have to Discount the good of what we're trying to achieve by the odds against us actually managing to achieve it so yes do act where good consequences are more certain but not just the future um the Oxford philosopher Derek parfitt had an example uh about leaving Broken Glass somewhere in the forest and let's say it'll take a while nobody's going to tread on it in coming years but at some point a child maybe not yet born will walk along that path and cut their feet on it does that mean that it didn't matter because they aren't born at the time that you left a broken glass in the path no it doesn't really matter um the pain of the child is the same and it's you know it's just the same it's just as it's just as significant um 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 which is you know very related to it's an extension of of your work in many ways yes that's true um there's there's one difference with the really long-termest predictions if you're wanting to intervene not uh in a way that's going to make a difference to somebody living in 20 50 or 100 years but in many centuries or many Millennia or even millions of years then firstly there is a quite different uncertainty factor that comes in in terms of how do we really know that what we're doing now will make a difference but there's also the fact that um when long-termers try to prevent Extinction and then they say there could be these vast numbers of human beings Living Rich and fulfilling lives as long as we don't do something that causes our species to become extinct let's say this Century or the next couple of centuries um then you do have to think about well if we did something that meant that we became extinct these people wouldn't exist at all so it wouldn't be like a child cutting their foot and getting hurt it would be like there just would be nobody alive on the planet maybe there would be no sentient beings in this part of the Universe um and some philosophers think that that's different that we don't have an obligation to ensure that future people exist uh rather we have an obligation to say that if people exist in future we don't do anything that will harm them hmm I want to get into life extension uh 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 to the the girl drowning in the pond the original question being um you know coming out of this idea of of of of suffering reduction if you save that girl which we all agree is the right thing to do if you're passing by uh it can be presumed that that individual will go on to live some number of years and will consume will consume many things including probably animal products which has its own Downstream implications in terms of harm and uh you know it's a resource allocation Etc so it's back to that I think there was actually an article in your your Journal about this right like the Journal of controversial ideas like that's right 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 articles with pseudonyms that's right yeah yeah if anyone wants to read it by the way as you mentioned the Journal of controversial ideas it's uh Open Access just Google yeah Journal of controversial ideas uh you'll get to it yeah it's it's it's a it's a thoughtful article um and it does raise that problem um about the the meat eaters whose lives we're saving uh and ask whether we should be doing that um I'm I'm somewhat unsure I mean I've I've actually talked to Michael plant about this um and uh he's he's quite persuasive but uh at the moment I'm going to say let's try and save those lives and hope that we can persuade people and move people towards a 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 speciesism this sense that you know we we create a rank hierarchy uh amongst the animal kingdom based upon people's cognitive abilities and their level of sentience right which is not necessarily correlated to their ability to suffer But to answer that question about harm reduction do you not have to place a value you know a greater value on one life over another right from a species perspective so I wouldn't do that on a species basis that is I wouldn't say that being a member of the species Homo Sapien automatically means that your life is more valuable than a member of any other species I would say that beings who have cognitive capacities that enable them to think about their lives and think about the lives of others whom they love and care for in ways that are different and perhaps more profound and more lasting than other beings that it's a greater tragedy when they die prematurely than when those other beings die prematurely so I don't think of the lives of all sentient beings as being of equal value um I do think of their suffering as being equally important when we're talking about similar kinds and similar quantities of suffering but uh not the preservation of their lives yeah they're uncomfortable uh idea as a parent when I think about the the pond and the girl uh is is this idea of of like we we all sort of intuitively feel like we can prefer the well-being of our children over other children and that is sort of accepted like of course I'm going to make sure that I'm providing for my children uh even though they live in a you know much better circumstances than most children in the world um but from a harm reduction perspective would it not be better for me to allocate my resources more democratically so that uh 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 you know we are mammals we're not going to do that no we're not gonna I agree we're not going to do it you're a parent you didn't do that right and you're the you're the Godfather of all of this okay so uh what I want to say about this is that it would be from this impartial perspective better if I were to do that but um 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 um imprinted in a 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 they wouldn't have their children wouldn't have survived so I think we have to be somewhat indulgent to ourselves in that not as indulgent as many people are I don't think we should be doing you know everything imaginable for our children 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 uh extreme poverty and so much need but um we should we should try to try to do better we should try to get to more equitable distribution and we should try to encourage others to do that uh but as I say you know we're not Saints we we um 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 uh science and money and energy right now going into the uh extension of lifespan like this anti-aging movement that's a foot uh 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 held bent on just achieving it for the sake of achievement because it's a mountain yet to be climbed and I feel like there's an important philosophical conversation that we need to have about the implications of what the world might be like if suddenly people could live to 300 or Beyond from from a wealth distribution perspective from a rights perspective and from like a risk calculus perspective like what would it mean if you could live 300 years what is your imprint or your responsibility like your 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 but people did think even then that we might not be very far away and uh although as you say I I agree that it's going to come at some point I'm not convinced it's going to come really soon sure it may be harder than people think but uh yes it certainly raises some serious ethical issues uh and there could be some good sides to it for example you talked about uh 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 um what would 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 um if I we were going to be living 300 years we would think hey we're going to be living in this world with a vastly different and less stable climate so we better stop what we're doing right now so that could be a good consequence but there's a real danger there if you simply expand lives for those who can afford it um and you don't do anything to reduce population growth of course then then the world will become even more populated than it is now and that's a serious problem so uh would that slow down would that stop um you'd have to hope so because otherwise uh we're definitely going to be over capacity even more than we are already perhaps now it's hard to imagine that if and when those breakthroughs occur that uh they will be reserved for the wealthy like it's not going to be a democratic thing right so it's just going to drive of Greater wedge in between the halves and the haves-nots yes that's certainly going to be what will happen initially um it might be one of those procedures that if you find in fact that you can find inexpensive ways of doing it that it will spread but initially yeah we're going to get the wealthy people living longer it's just the same thing with 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 than they are now and you'll actually get a sort of genetically fixed caste Society uh occurring so I think these are these are serious problems for uh technologies that are that are in the pipeline right the other the other primary technology uh being the pioneering of new forms of Consciousness through artificial intelligence it's right there's a lot of discussion around what constitutes sentience what is consciousness Etc and we're seeing in real time like these breakthroughs with you know 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 uh chat things that that look as if you're having a conversation with a person who is conscious and thinking but uh when you understand how it's actually working I think you realize that that's not the case but at what point like if these things become self-learning right the 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 uh where we can qualify it as sentient or conscious like for you where what does that line look like like what would have to I think the difficulty is in working out when one of these uh uh super intelligent artificial general intelligence actually becomes conscious because um if in fact it's very good at mimicking our Behavior and if it's also uh 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 uh conscious processing from Simply very rapid mechanical processing and learning and it'll 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 train 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 the computer scientists like the this sort of process by which it's operating has already begun to elude the creators of the technology yes so that's sort of frightening it is right it's funny 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 as it's going about destroying us right and if we simply ask it and say you know is it okay for me to pick the switch and turn you off right um 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 so it comes out with the answer that a sure a person would give if you said I'm going to kill you um that's not going to be the dystopian World in which we're headed Peter how how are we gonna 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 yet right I think we have lots of problems I'd much rather focus on climate change extreme poverty getting rid of factory farming um I think the robot apocalypse is still some distance yeah 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 Bostrom and Toby ORD right have written written about this extensively and it's sexy and it's fun you know to it feels very you know Terminator world to like think about these problems and 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 with trying to understand the ethics around emergent like robotic Consciousness um beliees 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 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 sayiphai who um looked and he he looked at a whole lot of courses on AI ethics and a whole lot of AI ethics statements and lots of them take very seriously this still hypothetical question of what would be the moral status of conscious AI but pretty much none of them actually take seriously the effect of the the present impact that AI is having on sentient beings non-human sentient beings on on animals they of course deal with impact of AI on humans but um we show in the article that AI is already having a major impact on non-human 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 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 they are sensors that are observing animal behavior and adjusting the the what is done to the Animals by how they're behaving um possibly detecting diseases early which could be a good thing but they're also going to enable animals to be even more crowded um because of the AI will actually be geared to where is it most profitable what's the point at which it's a very it's a very rudimentary Matrix where this living being is exists for the purpose of resource extraction right yes a battery that's right exactly if a resource extraction and and not treated as a thing as as an end in itself as a sentient being with a moral status that is different from from that of a of a thing of a product yeah that's that's wild I mean do you when you cast your gaze into the future are you an optimistic person or you know how do you how do you how is all this gonna how is all this playing out I've always been optimistic um I wrote a book back in the 80s 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 outwards from from the tribe to larger groups to National groups um to racial or ethnic groups and finally in the 20th century to recognizing with the universal Declaration of Human Rights that all human beings have certain basic rights and I looked forward to pushing that beyond the boundaries of our species to non-human animals and there are some signs of that happening but over the last 20 years uh there have been backward steps as well uh in terms of um both in terms of human relations and the idea that we have a pretty naked war of aggression going on right now with Russia's invasion of Ukraine and people dying and being killed is something that makes it hard to be optimistic about our future but also in terms of the treatment of animals we haven't continued to push outwards in the way that I'd hoped and finally climate change is still you know the 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 uh huge numbers of refugees wanting to leave places where they can no longer live and grow their own food so um I'm more agnostic 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 it that's right yeah that's right yes I didn't even really know that uh which is pretty cool yeah you tapped into the you know greater Consciousness to explore that idea but I think you know when you think about or sort of the erosion of your optimism um to me it just feels like human beings are not very well wired for uh for decision making around long-term consequences right like we're acting in our self-interest it's very difficult for us to think about future generations and when you see our inability to take appropriate action with respect to climate change there's a feeling of of like like we're we're somehow Were Somehow neutered like whether there's not enough political capital or we can't Marshal our incentive structure to you know create better decision making around this it's easy to not be optimistic about how we're going to solve this problem because there's so much in disha 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 and we really need that um I also wrote a book uh called One World um was published just after 9 11. and uh in that I was looking towards the strengthening of global institutions because I argued that we need them to deal with climate change we we just have one atmosphere you can't you can't govern climate change with Sovereign Nations because the greenhouse gases that we emit uh across the United States obviously spread everywhere um also I thought that we needed uh a World Trading organization that was more geared towards helping people in extreme poverty we liked that I wanted to have stronger international legal system so that crimes against humanity would be punished everywhere um and I wanted us to do more about global poverty um and if you look at those areas we certainly haven't got the strong institutions to govern uh climate change uh the move towards international law that seemed reasonably promising then with the setting up of the international criminal court has had very limited success um and you know 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 uh you know perhaps we've made some progress in in terms of global poverty that has been reduced over that 20-year period quite dramatically but that's really the one right spot in in this picture uh and that's why it's hard to see uh that positive future Global cooperation seems very elusive it's that definitely we've gone back with uh with the conflict between Russia and the West now um and China as well uh not being part of global trading order the Hope was that if they realize that they need to trade and the trade is helping them helping their economy and helping to lift hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty that uh then they would be a participant um in this and we would have a multi-polar world uh well I suppose it's uh it's multi-polar but uh there's more confrontation than yeah there was 20 years ago yeah and these sort of global Gatherings are you know often about political expediency you know there's there's a lot of uh words being said but in terms of like real world action with the intended positive effect that doesn't seem to occur with anything certainly not in the way that it needs to occur to solve the problems but to hearken that that that stoic tradition of 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 whatever in the Oval Office what have you like what is the guidance or the counsel that you could give like the president or our government to help us start to make better decisions about these problems I would say that the United States has to lead and it has to be prepared to lead and ways that are clearly genuine and Bonafide 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 uh and that's doing a lot more than we're doing now on either of those issues um and we want you to join in and uh 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 uh you know I hope if if we make that gesture um you'll 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 major Global players participate yeah and from a from uh 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 uh other economic modalities like the notion of conscious capitalism or you know Venture Capital that is kind of um impact oriented like I'm thinking of do you know Jacqueline novograts 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 of giving to ngos and and non-profits like how do those operate in your thinking absolutely I think we need to try them all and see what works um social Enterprises that yeah do produce a return that are for-profit organizations but concerned to have a social impact um are things worth doing um I've actually made a small investment in a organization that is building low-income housing in Kenya on a for-profit basis but um the people there who I know some of who are genuine people who've worked in Aid see an opportunity here to fill the gap between the 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 you know I'm all in favor of people trying new ideas uh I think it's relatively new to see what 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 is leading the way here like when you think of people who are really uh um doing the right thing making a real positive change and doing it in innovative ways well I think some of the um some of the foundations that have been set up uh to do good things like um I already mentioned Dustin Moskowitz and and Carrie tuna who's good Ventures Foundation um set up open philanthropy and uh supporting givewell too and those are both organizations that are trying to assess what's the best thing you can do to have a positive impact on the world uh 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 um 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 um they're also uh doing a lot of good things uh saving a lot of lives improving the quality of many lives so I think uh you know they they deserve recognition and 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 the billionaire class uh so obviously if you have that much you ought to be giving a lot more right uh yes but is there so for example uh you know 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 that that the focus of that resource allocation decision making process if you think if you're thinking about about the sort of boosting themselves into space for uh should they be purchasing Twitter or should they be you know I I wish uh Elon Musk had stayed with um developing better batteries so that we can all be driving electric vehicles sooner um that seems to me to be his major contribution so far um I I acknowledge that you know behind his idea of colonizing Mars is this idea of 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 um you would still have our species and maybe in a few hundred years they could come back to a less radioactive Earth and re-establish things here or explore other planets elsewhere so it's not that it's not that it's you know completely self-indulgent to try to develop colonies on Mars but uh I do think that there are more urgent issues that we could deal with here first right well we can leave that with that okay on that subject um and and let it be known that that you do put your money where your mouth is you recently were the recipient of this one million dollar prize honoring you for your work and philosophy and Humanities and that that prize was quickly dispatched to uh the life you can save your organization and then to all 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 and yeah basically and anti-factory farming uh privilege pro-vegan um organizations particularly those working in uh 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 you know look but this is who you are right so I'm just it is walk me through it it is who I am and also I've been a Princeton Professor for more than 20 years on a comfortable salary so I'm good I don't really feel that I need not well I definitely didn't need it and I don't even think that it would have made a big difference to my happiness you know I'm not the kind of person who wants to dine out at uh you know 300 restaurants and drink Fine Wines I don't need to when I travel I don't want to live in luxury resorts actually they occasionally get put up in these places by conferences and so on and they they just make me feel a bit uncomfortable yeah um so I really have uh enough for the kinds of things that I want um and there is a fulfillment and satisfaction in saying wow I have the opportunity to help all of these organizations to an extent that I didn't really have before and to see what they're doing with the money that I'm giving and to know that it's helped a lot of people and I hope has reduced animal suffering as well it's been part of that movement helped people who are very dedicated working for these important causes so I think I probably got more fulfillment and satisfaction through giving it away than I would have got on trying to think how to spend it on myself yeah sure I mean I think that's a really important piece because we've deluded ourselves into believing that this that this you know wealth uh will be the thing that makes us happy but all that 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 um engendered with this sense of fulfillment which is really what we're all kind of after right so far far be it from being this you know self-flagellating Pursuit it's actually self-serving in that regard that's right yeah um while you're also alleviating suffering and doing all this good in the world yeah so Charlie Bressler who's the person who with whom I really co-founded the life you can save um was before he read the book that I wrote the life you can save um president of uh uh men's clothing retail chain in the United States so he had earned quite a lot of money um but he says that uh by co-founding 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 UM helping to establish the organization and and he became the CEO of it on negative income because it didn't take any salary and he actually donated to it so um he found that really fulfilling and uh and I agree um you know if you if if you pursue the materialist dream dreaming in inverted commas um it it doesn't fulfill you um you give yourself a purpose and then the purpose is to get more and more money um and for what uh whereas if you use that for the purposes of saying I can do something to help others and that's a really lasting and important value uh you're going to benefit yourself as well as others right um that's really beautiful and uh and I think for people who who are listening to this who are now curious about what that might look like for their own lives um they can go to uh your website for the life you can save and there they can sort of get a sense of some of these uh kind of vetted uh Charities that are doing good in the world right like you've done the work to say we 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 dot 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 uh absolutely free as in right book uh or as an audio book and I'm delighted that the audiobook different chapters were read by different people um my friend Paul Simon the singer-songwriter uh read one uh um yes you read one yeah Stephen Fry I Stephen Fry that's right so we have a yeah we have a series of voices and and different accents in English we had Shabana azmi who's an Indian actress reading it in her and we have uh Winnie Alma who's an African uh 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 it's Global in that sense and it is a book about a global problem it wasn't and it wasn't always free right it's not a re-release where you've kind of positioned it this way so in fact yeah it was initially published by random house um and at some point uh 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 um and I wasn't sure that that was the best investment of our funds given that we were trying to raise funds to help save lives but Charlie persuaded me that in the long run it would save a lot more lives and because we've now distributed far more copies of the book than random has would have if we left the rights for them and a lot of people have read it um and donated and in fact someone said this book was free but it's actually the most expensive book I've ever ever because they donated significantly yeah so um so yeah it has it has paid off getting the rights back uh-huh and you can the audiobook is that you could just get it on Spotify like listen to it like you would listen to a podcast just in chapters you know that's right 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 yep that's right and if you prefer to read in paper we are actually having uh specially for for listeners to your podcast we're um uh asking them to donate and we're having matching funds and uh uh they can we'll even uh mail a paperback copy of the book to them if they prefer that right uh I believe and this is incredibly generous so here's what everybody's watching or listening is going to do you're going to go to the life you can save dot org uh Slash richroll and you can learn more about the organization and where your funds will be allocated uh if you donate there uh the organization is going to match you dollar for dollar up to twenty five thousand dollars 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 to reach your listeners I think it's uh 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 uh uh it's it's a very special thing and you know I can't first of all I can't thank you enough for for taking time out of your Venture back to Australia to spend time with me today um and I just uh I 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 um what an impact you've had on my life and the life of millions and millions of people it's just it's such a Worthy um 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 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 when uh the updated version of animal Liberation is coming out in the spring I think that's in in May yes yeah okay well maybe you can come back here and we can talk oh that would be one of that would you rate itself thank you and uh and I need the the phone number of your surf instructor when I go to Australia ah yes yes I'm talking about surfing we haven't talked about surfing no but I know you're going to Byron Bay which is one of the most beautiful places in Australia and uh I can put you in touch with a former U.S surfing champion who is a 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 way it's there excellent well I'm holding you to it all right thank you Peter cheers thanks for these Lance [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: Rich Roll

Views: 44,293

Keywords: rich roll, rich roll podcast, self-improvement podcasts, education podcasts, health podcasts, wellness podcasts, spirituality podcasts, mindfulness podcasts, mindset podcast, vegan podcasts, plant-based nutrition, Moral philosophy, Effective altruism, Sam bankman fried, Animal rights, Peter singer, Animal liberation, William macaskill, Vegan podcasts, Rich roll vegan, Rich roll peter singer

Id: arQbGbytO2w

Length: 105min 12sec (6312 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 30 2023