Speaker 1: Uh, it could happen. Here is the podcast that you're
Speaker 1: listening to. I'm Robert Evans, the person that you're listening to,
Speaker 1: and one of the people who does this podcast. Boy,
Speaker 1: what a what a glorious introduction that was. Let me
Speaker 1: also introduce some human beings who you might know. First,
Speaker 1: we have Chris and and we have James. Are are
Speaker 1: our correspondence in the field joining us today. Also is
Speaker 1: James's Spanish Civil War era mosen degauant Yep, that's right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm very happy it's joining us. It's going to make
Speaker 1: contribution throughout the episode, just gonna it's it's an antique
Speaker 1: bolt action rifle served in three World wars, the current one.
Speaker 1: That's right. Yeah, and it's about too. It's about to
Speaker 1: kick off this one now, which it might be. It
Speaker 1: might be two in the alcolumn for the most in
Speaker 1: the gun. Yeah, it's it's it's it's had a it's
Speaker 1: served a mixed bag. Um. Yeah. Anyway, we're recording this
Speaker 1: the day of the elections, so everybody's having a horrible one. Um,
Speaker 1: I'm having a firearm Yeah, yeah, I did. I'm still
Speaker 1: hoping my my Tech nine comes in before Oregon votes
Speaker 1: on its next ballot measure. Anyway, Um, today, I wanted
Speaker 1: to talk a little bit about something that I've been
Speaker 1: thinking about kind of constantly, which is, um, it's called
Speaker 1: effective altruism. And it's the short end of this is
Speaker 1: that like it is a style of thinking about charitable
Speaker 1: giving that Elon Musk in particular has recently highlighted as
Speaker 1: like how he thinks about things. It's very popular with
Speaker 1: the billionaire set, who are who are deeply invested in
Speaker 1: getting people to think that they're saving the world, right, Um,
Speaker 1: the folks who want to be seen as like looking
Speaker 1: ahead and and and set protecting the future of mankind
Speaker 1: and saving the world, um, but not doing it through
Speaker 1: things like paying you know, more taxes and supporting you
Speaker 1: know less money, being in politics and and all that
Speaker 1: kind of jazz. Like not not anything that would would
Speaker 1: actually harm their their personal ability to exercise power. So
Speaker 1: it's gotten kind of attacked recently because it's associated with
Speaker 1: guys like Muskin, because he is markedly less popular now
Speaker 1: than he was let's say, ten years ago. Um, but
Speaker 1: I want, Yeah, I wanted to talk because effective altruism,
Speaker 1: which is an actual movement. There's like organizations that espouse this.
Speaker 1: There's hundreds of millions of dollars in charitable giving that
Speaker 1: gets handed out under the addresses of effective altruism, and
Speaker 1: as it heads up, like most of it, it's fine,
Speaker 1: like most of its charities to like get let out
Speaker 1: of water and stuff like. It's not like effective altruism
Speaker 1: is not comprehensively some sort of like scam by the wealthy.
Speaker 1: It's more of a an honest theory about how charitable
Speaker 1: giving ought to work that has been adopted by the
Speaker 1: hyper wealthiest justification for fucked up ship and married to
Speaker 1: something called long term is um, which we will be
Speaker 1: talking about in a little bit. But I want to
Speaker 1: talk about where the concept of effective altruism comes from.
Speaker 1: If you read articles about this thing, most people who
Speaker 1: study it will say that it kind of This got
Speaker 1: started as a modern movement in nineteen seventy one with
Speaker 1: an Australian philosopher named Peter Singer, and Singer wrote an
Speaker 1: article titled Famine, Affluence and Morality UM. I think it
Speaker 1: was actually published in nineteen seventy two. I don't know
Speaker 1: one of the two seventy one or seventy two, and
Speaker 1: and the essay basically argued that there's no difference morally
Speaker 1: between your obligation to help a person dying on the
Speaker 1: street in front of your house. Like dude gets hit
Speaker 1: by a car in front of your house, you are
Speaker 1: not more morally obligated to help him than you are
Speaker 1: morally obligated to help people who are dying in Syria,
Speaker 1: you know, um, And obviously, like there's a a version
Speaker 1: of truth to that, which is that we're all responsible
Speaker 1: for each other and internationalism is the only actual path
Speaker 1: away from the nightmare. And when we do things like
Speaker 1: ignore authoritarians massacring their people, it inevitably comes back to
Speaker 1: affect us and like fuel the growth of an authoritarian
Speaker 1: nightmare domestically. That is very true, um, But also there's
Speaker 1: a fundamental silliness in it, because one reason why there
Speaker 1: is a moral difference between helping a person dying in
Speaker 1: the street in front of you and somebody who's in
Speaker 1: danger in I don't know, southern China is that, like,
Speaker 1: you can immediately help the person in front of your house, right,
Speaker 1: Like if somebody gets hit, but you have the ability
Speaker 1: to immediately render life saving eight, it's actually quite difficult
Speaker 1: to help somebody who is for example, getting shot at
Speaker 1: by the government uh in Tibet. Right, Like not that
Speaker 1: you don't don't have a moral responsibility to that person,
Speaker 1: but your moral responsibility to actually immediately take action when
Speaker 1: somebody is bleeding out is higher than your responsibility to
Speaker 1: try to figure out how to help people in distant
Speaker 1: parts of the globe. Um, this is more nuanced than
Speaker 1: I think a lot of especially like rich assholes like
Speaker 1: to It's more nuanced than like the the I shouldn't
Speaker 1: say rich assholes. What what's the problem with this is
Speaker 1: that it's the this is the kind of revelation like
Speaker 1: when you start talking this way that that feeds really
Speaker 1: well into a fucking ted talk it it's a perfect
Speaker 1: fix for that morality, whereas the reality is like a
Speaker 1: lot more nuanced where and number one, it's also like,
Speaker 1: well that the kind of help that you would render
Speaker 1: to somebody who's been hit by a car in front
Speaker 1: of your house is very different and requires really different
Speaker 1: resources than the kind of help you would give people
Speaker 1: in say, again like Syria, who are being murdered by
Speaker 1: their government. Right, if somebody gets hit by a car
Speaker 1: in front of your house, you run out with a
Speaker 1: fucking tourniquet and a kit and you call nine one
Speaker 1: one right, those are the resources that you can immediately
Speaker 1: use if butshar Al Assad is firing poison gas at
Speaker 1: protesters in you know, Aleppo, well your your stop the
Speaker 1: bleed kit is not going to help with that, one
Speaker 1: way or the other. Right, A very different set of
Speaker 1: resources are necessary. UM. So it's it's foolish to compare
Speaker 1: them anyway. Singer did UM and his essay was a
Speaker 1: big hit. It's often called like a sleeper hit for
Speaker 1: for young people who were kind of getting into the
Speaker 1: you know, the charity industrial complex UM, or at least
Speaker 1: we're considering it now. I found an interview with one
Speaker 1: named Julia Wise who currently works at the Center for
Speaker 1: Effective Altruism UM, and she was a started out as
Speaker 1: a social work, like to give you an idea of
Speaker 1: the kind of people who got into this. When she
Speaker 1: read Weiss's article UM, she was a social worker, she
Speaker 1: kind of fell in love with the concept and when
Speaker 1: it started becoming a thing, and like the monies and eighties,
Speaker 1: it was, as she described, quote, a bunch of philosophers
Speaker 1: and their friends and nobody had a bunch of money.
Speaker 1: So it was also more when Singer put it out
Speaker 1: kind of a a wave, like a way of people
Speaker 1: kind of debating how to think about charity, which is
Speaker 1: is fine, people should always be like exploring stuff like that.
Speaker 1: So it's not I don't want to be like going
Speaker 1: after Singer too well, I do a little bit um
Speaker 1: because Singer after kind of his movement has a couple
Speaker 1: of decades to grow, winds up doing a Ted talk um,
Speaker 1: and the Ted talk winds up kind of electrifying a
Speaker 1: very specific chunk of the American techno set um. And
Speaker 1: you can see kind of in in some of the
Speaker 1: writing on this, like the way in which his talking
Speaker 1: about sort of the morality of charity has gotten flattened
Speaker 1: over the years. Quote which is the better thing to
Speaker 1: do to provide a guide dog to one blind American
Speaker 1: or cure two thousand people of blindness and developing countries? Um?
Speaker 1: Which is like, I don't know both. There's resources to
Speaker 1: do both. Um. We again, if you, for an example,
Speaker 1: in the United States, were to attacks the billionaire class
Speaker 1: and corporations a lot more, you could provide that blind
Speaker 1: person in the United States, uh with with free healthcare
Speaker 1: in a way that many countries do. Um. And we
Speaker 1: could also continue or even expand charitable giving, maybe if
Speaker 1: we were to do stuff like spend less money on
Speaker 1: our military. Again, it's like a false choice, like it's
Speaker 1: worth but but of course it's it's because the reason
Speaker 1: this choice is there is because they're thinking about they're
Speaker 1: thinking about helping people purely in the form of like
Speaker 1: nobless obliged charity, right, They're they're thinking about periods like
Speaker 1: rich like things that get improved when rich people put
Speaker 1: money into them. Um. Yeah, so obviously we should help
Speaker 1: you know, one of these groups before the other because
Speaker 1: it's more effective and yeada, YadA YadA. Yeah. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: and I think I think that was one of the
Speaker 1: things that like the there there's there's a second way
Speaker 1: you can look at the original sort of problem of
Speaker 1: we have this same methical responsibility. Someone who could sit
Speaker 1: by a car or somebody's on the other side of
Speaker 1: the world. Is that like the other way you can
Speaker 1: look at that is like I don't care about what's
Speaker 1: happening is some one of the other side of the world,
Speaker 1: so they don't have to care about this person. You
Speaker 1: get hit by a car, and that seems like people
Speaker 1: are doing it's like, well, I really have to care
Speaker 1: about this person here because there's someone over there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I did, Like I can see like how this lines
Speaker 1: up with some of these like like bigger like meta
Speaker 1: ethical kind of perspectives on what equality is and what
Speaker 1: like your ethical obligations are. But then yeah, it seems
Speaker 1: to just kind of be like a very clear, like
Speaker 1: very clear slippery slope to making kind of mouth usy
Speaker 1: and excuses for doing funk. All right, that's that's where
Speaker 1: the story is heading. So oh good. Early two thousands,
Speaker 1: he does like a Ted talk. You know, the momentum
Speaker 1: around this idea starts to build and it really gets
Speaker 1: a shot in the arm in two thousand thirteen with
Speaker 1: the work of an author named Eric Friedman. Friedman's new
Speaker 1: book or Friedland's book at the time that was new
Speaker 1: was called Reinventing Philanthropy A Framework for More Effective giving
Speaker 1: um and he kind of he kind of extends the
Speaker 1: arguments that Singers making. One of the things that he
Speaker 1: does is he he contrasts what St. Jude's Children's Reach
Speaker 1: their hospitals are doing to like research children's medical or
Speaker 1: like like illnesses that that kids supper and treatments for
Speaker 1: them um with the Malagi Provincial Hospital in Angola um
Speaker 1: and he kind of contrasts to patients who are being
Speaker 1: served at the different hospitals for life threatening conditions and concludes, quote,
Speaker 1: I'd probably also be very angry at the donors who
Speaker 1: are continually funding St. Jude and leaving Melangi Provincial woefully
Speaker 1: under resource. Why are the patients of St. Jude's so
Speaker 1: much more worthy of life? And like, yeah, what are
Speaker 1: the ridiculous way to think about it? Children's fucking asinine
Speaker 1: And the fact that many of the people who are
Speaker 1: doing these fucking TED talks and contributing to this like
Speaker 1: a global tech class at the same people who are
Speaker 1: making fucking millions of dollars off the pharmaceutical industry, which
Speaker 1: continues to neglect the diseases that people like in the
Speaker 1: colonial periphery suffer from because there's no profit in selling
Speaker 1: them drugs, and instead you're selling boldness cures to people
Speaker 1: in America, right, Like, yes, we can, I mean, like
Speaker 1: you you could if we just if if every single
Speaker 1: person who had a who's gotten a TED talk had
Speaker 1: all of their wealth appropriated tomorrow, we could fund both
Speaker 1: of these hospitals exactly yes, yeah, would will be better.
Speaker 1: It's fundamentally a kind of obscenity to look at pharmaceutical
Speaker 1: company CEO is making hundreds of millions and billions of
Speaker 1: dollars selling people often literal poison and jacking up the
Speaker 1: price of things like insulin. To look at these tech
Speaker 1: CEOs accumulating tens of billions of dollars, and to say,
Speaker 1: donations to this children's hospital are robbing an angolid hospital. Yes,
Speaker 1: so I won't be paying my tax? Yeah, why don't
Speaker 1: you go funk yourself? Yeah? And anyway, like but this
Speaker 1: is like you can see who this appeals to, right
Speaker 1: if you like the kind of people who love the
Speaker 1: freakonomics books, which are bullshit regressive statistics. Can economic story please? Yeah? Okay,
Speaker 1: So one of my professors at Chicago was a political
Speaker 1: science guy, um or I guess the public policy and
Speaker 1: there's there's a thing, there's a thing the freakonomics guy
Speaker 1: wrote where he was trying to prove that money doesn't
Speaker 1: actually influence, like doesn't actually influence left. Yeah, and you
Speaker 1: know what my my, my, my professor wrote wrote a
Speaker 1: paper about that, which is that you know and again
Speaker 1: this is this is a perfect example of how done
Speaker 1: this guy is that he doesn't This is how condis think, right,
Speaker 1: Like they when they when they go into a field,
Speaker 1: they go in thinking they already know everything and they
Speaker 1: can prove whatever they want because okay, but the thing
Speaker 1: this guy doesn't understand, right, is that, like and this
Speaker 1: is the thing most people in the US do not
Speaker 1: understand about how Congress works. Is that like all of
Speaker 1: the ship that's happening on the floor of Congress, all
Speaker 1: of those votes that is not that is not real congress, right,
Speaker 1: that that is fate congress. Nothing nothing important to actually
Speaker 1: happens there. All of the important stuff in Congress happens
Speaker 1: in committees. And so you can't figure out whether money
Speaker 1: is doing anything by measuring its effects on like votes
Speaker 1: on the floor, because floor votes are bullshit. All of
Speaker 1: the important stuff has already by the top, by the
Speaker 1: tip of floor vote happens, all the important policing stuff
Speaker 1: has already happened. And so he did this heard this
Speaker 1: whole thing where he was you know, he had this
Speaker 1: great I I. He had this great metric called like
Speaker 1: uh oh God, and it was it's called like the
Speaker 1: the dairy cow coefficients, which is like measuring like how
Speaker 1: how someone should vote versus like how the dairy cows running.
Speaker 1: It turns out, you know, if you look at what
Speaker 1: these people do in committee. No, yeah, hey, look, it
Speaker 1: turns out a lobby money is unbelievably effective. But because
Speaker 1: this fucking guy had like and this is something that
Speaker 1: like like this sort of distinction between between Congress like
Speaker 1: on the floor and Congress and committee. Like there's a
Speaker 1: press in it whose name of forgetting who has this
Speaker 1: famous line that like Congress and Committee is Congress at work,
Speaker 1: Congress on the floors, Corgress at play or something like that.
Speaker 1: Like it's it's like this is just like basic ship
Speaker 1: that if you know literally anything about how a field works,
Speaker 1: you cannot do if you wanna, if you wanna, if
Speaker 1: you want to a good breakdown of why the freakonomics
Speaker 1: guy is full of shit. Michael Hobbs and Peter sham
Speaker 1: Shary I think is his last name, have a new
Speaker 1: podcast called If Books Could Kill and they break down
Speaker 1: with like citations and everything like why everything in that
Speaker 1: book is horseship but like the reason why it's the
Speaker 1: only thing I'll disagree with you one, Chris is I
Speaker 1: don't think he's an idiot. I think he's very intelligent,
Speaker 1: and I think the thing that he's smart to do
Speaker 1: is he recognizes that there's a specific type of person
Speaker 1: and engineers and programmers are very likely to be this
Speaker 1: type of person who kind of fundamentally like their oppositional defiant.
Speaker 1: If somebody if something, if people say like well this
Speaker 1: is good or this is bad, um, they're going to
Speaker 1: take They want to take the opposite stance. And if
Speaker 1: you can provide them way to like feel like they're
Speaker 1: enlightened and smart and actually looking at the data by
Speaker 1: doing it, then they'll take the opposite stance on stuff
Speaker 1: like it's bad to let people by elections or it's
Speaker 1: good to fund children's hospitals just because somebody has made
Speaker 1: them feel smart for being an asshole. Um, that's what
Speaker 1: the freakonomics guy does. Malcolm Gladwell does a subtler version
Speaker 1: of it as a general rule. Um, and that's what
Speaker 1: that's what the fucking freedman is doing in this this book.
Speaker 1: In two thousand thirteen, I found a good review of
Speaker 1: it in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. Um. That is uh,
Speaker 1: pretty scathing, like surprisingly scathing considering it's it's written by
Speaker 1: a bunch of like Stanford nerds. This approach amounts to
Speaker 1: a little more than charitable imperialism, whereby my just causes
Speaker 1: just in yours to one degree or another, is a
Speaker 1: waste of precious resources. This approach is not informed giving
Speaker 1: UM and I think that that does a pretty good
Speaker 1: job of summarizing what I think is fucked up about it.
Speaker 1: There's another thing that's really messed up, which is that
Speaker 1: one of the conclusions that they gets come that they
Speaker 1: come to here is that um, they don't recommend or
Speaker 1: there's an organization called Guild well that kind of gets
Speaker 1: gets formed as a result of the book Freedman Rights,
Speaker 1: and they recommend not to deliver, like not to donate
Speaker 1: money to disaster assistance in the wake of the Japanese tsunami.
Speaker 1: Um And opposed disaster relief donations in general. Um because
Speaker 1: quote and this is from Freedman, most of those killed
Speaker 1: by disasters could not have been saved by donations, um,
Speaker 1: which is number one, Like, that's the donations are about
Speaker 1: like rebuilding communities generally, it's not like about the saving lives.
Speaker 1: Usually it's about like, well, all of the infrastructure was
Speaker 1: destroyed and it must be rebuilt. Um but okay, guy,
Speaker 1: Well it's annoying to you because it's like it's it's
Speaker 1: not like there's not good critiques of like pricipically always
Speaker 1: like the Red Cross. Oh, it's all fucked up. Every
Speaker 1: single yes, yeah, I critique is like the worst possible,
Speaker 1: like the critiques. Yeah, every single large charitable organization is
Speaker 1: fucked up. And if you go and talk to people
Speaker 1: on the ground, they will bitch, Like if you go
Speaker 1: to fucking war zones, people bitch more about NGOs than
Speaker 1: the folks shooting at them half the time. Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: they bitch about it being inefficient, about the stuff they're
Speaker 1: given being like bad quality or like um like nonsense
Speaker 1: like just being handed out to be handed out, which
Speaker 1: is a thing that happens sometimes, and a bitch about
Speaker 1: well paid aid workers staying in hotels and showing up
Speaker 1: for a couple of hours to like do a photo op. Um.
Speaker 1: There's also more incisive like you know, that's not to
Speaker 1: say none of it's useful, Like, for example, as many
Speaker 1: complaints as people have, everyone I've known who has been
Speaker 1: in a place where medicine sans frontier slash doctors without
Speaker 1: borders has operated while they have complaints about doctors without borders,
Speaker 1: are like, it's good that there's more doctors here. We
Speaker 1: fucking need them. Um. And you know, it's like you
Speaker 1: and h c R. Plenty of things to complain about
Speaker 1: you and h c R. Every refugee camp I go to, Also,
Speaker 1: people have fucking water filters, intins and ship because of
Speaker 1: U N h c R, which isn't nothing. It's a
Speaker 1: damn site more than nothing, and it's a damn site
Speaker 1: more than any of these long term motherfucker's are doing
Speaker 1: for people who are I don't know, displaced by war. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And it's like some of the things that they're doing
Speaker 1: is like, this is very strange kind of attempts to
Speaker 1: calculate and create markets for human life and human suffering, right,
Speaker 1: which you see a lot if you were like, I've
Speaker 1: worked in nonprofit, I've worked in in disaster response. I've
Speaker 1: seen some of these things on the ground and it
Speaker 1: it you see these bizarre fucking decisions being made by
Speaker 1: by someone in an office who is likely never been
Speaker 1: on the ground of these situations, and it inevitably results
Speaker 1: in it's within these big organizations at the Red Cross
Speaker 1: and MSF but also on a governmental level, right with
Speaker 1: people not having the autonomy to respond in a situation
Speaker 1: to reduce human suffering. And it's dead to be told
Speaker 1: to do something which is supposedly evidence based based on
Speaker 1: someone who's looked at the wrong criteria and come to
Speaker 1: the wrong conclusion hundreds of miles away. And it's us.
Speaker 1: It's bureaucrats, right, And it's like we we've we've, we've
Speaker 1: we've we've somehow managed to create like the absolute worst
Speaker 1: possible night mirror system of you have a bunch of
Speaker 1: government bureaucrats and then you also have a bunch of
Speaker 1: sort of privates that we have. We have like different
Speaker 1: we're watching a collision of different kinds of private sector
Speaker 1: bureaucrats like you have, you have your sort of engeo
Speaker 1: bureaucrats you have, and then you know, and then you
Speaker 1: have these billionaires who are also just fucking bureaucrats, and
Speaker 1: all of them are just doing box ticking, and we
Speaker 1: get like just the absolute worst nightmare fusion of horrible
Speaker 1: bureaucracy and capitalism, which is a great way to run
Speaker 1: programs to have people not die, And like so much
Speaker 1: of this comes from what that the whole like free economics.
Speaker 1: Thing to me strikes me as like we didn't, like
Speaker 1: you said, reading the Wikipedia active about subject and then
Speaker 1: applying trying to find out why you can apply a
Speaker 1: market to it, and then posting that as a solution.
Speaker 1: Stuff we have. The episodes were dropping on bastards well
Speaker 1: the week before this episode will air, are about like
Speaker 1: why the rent is so damn high? And one of
Speaker 1: the complaints I have is that there's a specific class
Speaker 1: of media people who the only answer they will accept
Speaker 1: is because, uh, there's not enough multi family zoning, which
Speaker 1: is just a part of why the rent is so
Speaker 1: damn high. And reducing it to just that ignores um,
Speaker 1: the price fixing software that tens of millions of Americans, Uh,
Speaker 1: like landlords use um. It ignores shit like Airbnb. It
Speaker 1: ignores like the fucking problems in the construction industry, the
Speaker 1: lingering effects of the two thousand eight crash. It's very frustrating,
Speaker 1: and it's the these kind of like freakonomics guys like
Speaker 1: to do the same thing, like the fucking freakonomics student.
Speaker 1: In particular, one of the things he got famous for
Speaker 1: is being like, uh, you know, the dropping crime in
Speaker 1: the nineties, this unprecedented fallen crime was due to abortion,
Speaker 1: which zero I will say again zero people who are
Speaker 1: experts on the topic of crime in America agree with.
Speaker 1: What they will say is actually there's a ship out
Speaker 1: of different things that contributed to the declining crime, and
Speaker 1: there's a good chance that abortion had an impact. A
Speaker 1: bigger impact was probably getting the lead out of like
Speaker 1: reducing environmental let although that gets overstated too. There's all
Speaker 1: sorts of different ship including like air conditioning, just the
Speaker 1: fact that like, yeah, now more people have air conditioning.
Speaker 1: And guess when violence is highest in the summer, when
Speaker 1: people are stuck around each other outside and like all
Speaker 1: sorts of computer games. People because something else to do.
Speaker 1: But it's it you want to if you're gonna be
Speaker 1: doing the kind of like if you're gonna be doing
Speaker 1: ted talk fucking uh public works philosophy, then it helps
Speaker 1: to just be able to like make one big Malcolm
Speaker 1: Gladwell style fucking reveal. Anyway, that's how all these people
Speaker 1: exist and how all of their morality is informed. After
Speaker 1: two thousand thirteen, Friedman is kind of like followed up
Speaker 1: by this guy named William mccaskell, who was currently the
Speaker 1: he's a Scottish philosopher um, which god, it's easy to
Speaker 1: get called a philosopher these days. Um. And he is
Speaker 1: he is a personal friend of Elon Musk. When must
Speaker 1: text messages got released as part of that court filing,
Speaker 1: some of them were with McCaskill um, who was considering
Speaker 1: like putting a bunch of money into buying Twitter. They
Speaker 1: ultimately decided not to, I think, because they just like
Speaker 1: it seems like McCaskill just didn't trust that Musk had
Speaker 1: any sort of planned So he is, I will say this,
Speaker 1: not an idiot, um, but he's wrong in ways that
Speaker 1: are are deeply fucked up. And he wrote a book
Speaker 1: that is currently a bestseller. It was published in August,
Speaker 1: called What We Owe the Future. And the gist of
Speaker 1: this is that like it's merging this kind of effective
Speaker 1: altruism with what's called long termism, which is this argument
Speaker 1: that morally we have to consider the impact of our
Speaker 1: actions as not just on people alive today but in
Speaker 1: future people, which is fine. There's actually a lot to
Speaker 1: that idea, but the way it always works out is
Speaker 1: we can't pay attention to problems that people are suffering now.
Speaker 1: We have to we have to work on giving the
Speaker 1: world from these bigger problems. Um. And again it's almost
Speaker 1: it's almost exclusively used as an argument for guys like
Speaker 1: Musk to like, well, we shouldn't tax billionaires out of
Speaker 1: existence because I you know, I see this that with
Speaker 1: clarity the problems that we face, and the long term
Speaker 1: solution is for me to be able to push for
Speaker 1: these specific things that I think are the only way
Speaker 1: to save humanity. Right. I'm getting ahead of myself a
Speaker 1: little bit here. Let's talk about mccaskell again. Um, when
Speaker 1: he was at Oxford. He's an Oxford boy, James h.
Speaker 1: Look at we've had in Banngus. Yeah. Uh. He started
Speaker 1: a group called Giving what we Can in two thousand nine. Uh,
Speaker 1: and members were supposed to give away ten percent of
Speaker 1: what they earned to the most cost effective charities possible,
Speaker 1: which is fine, there's nothing wrong with that idea basically,
Speaker 1: and it was like a supposed to be basically a
Speaker 1: lifelong promise that like, you know, we're all because you
Speaker 1: assume Oxford people, a lot of them are gonna wind
Speaker 1: up making very good money. You know, as we move
Speaker 1: into our careers, this will be a more and more
Speaker 1: influential kind of giving um, but yeah, dropped the board.
Speaker 1: If they'd had me there, Yeah, those meetings might have
Speaker 1: gone a little bit different. Yeah. Over time, though, he's
Speaker 1: kind of moved into he's merged this and and again
Speaker 1: the whole effective altruism movement. A lot of it does
Speaker 1: start reasonably with people being like, are these charities were
Speaker 1: donating to working? How can we make sure they're effective?
Speaker 1: Like what can we do to make giving um work better?
Speaker 1: Which is again perfectly fine, but very quickly gets married
Speaker 1: to this kind of long termist thinking um and they
Speaker 1: focus instead of stuff like, for example, funding hospitals, stuff
Speaker 1: like preventing an artificial intelligence from killing everybody, or like
Speaker 1: sending people to distant planets, which are like cool and
Speaker 1: sci fi and everything, but also deeply unrealistic. I'll say
Speaker 1: it right now. Our our threat is not that an
Speaker 1: AI kills us all. There's certainly a threat that different
Speaker 1: kind of artificial intelligences are used by authoritarians to make
Speaker 1: life worse for every But by the way, Peter Teal
Speaker 1: is a big back or of effective altruism. He's one
Speaker 1: of the people building that fucking AI. This is the
Speaker 1: guy who wrote that thing about earning to give right
Speaker 1: like that. He was like, this is the guy who
Speaker 1: did that. Yeah, okay, I'm familiar promise to never take
Speaker 1: more than thirty one dollars or something and then come
Speaker 1: over the course of a year in his life and
Speaker 1: give charity. He gives all his book profits to charity,
Speaker 1: but he also runs an organization that is spending more
Speaker 1: and more on keeping its people comfortable because I guess
Speaker 1: he doesn't have the money personally to spend anyway. I
Speaker 1: think there's some sketchy ship there. Yeah, this whole idea,
Speaker 1: and I'm sure we're gonna get today, right like, it
Speaker 1: completely overlooks our obligation morally to agitate for structural change,
Speaker 1: right like. It says like, if you can become a
Speaker 1: billionaire through whatever bullshit, evil, fucking exploitative grift you can
Speaker 1: and then give nine of that away, you're still perpetuating
Speaker 1: a system in which one grift gets rich and thousands
Speaker 1: of people die without fucking clean water. But that's okay
Speaker 1: because you also donated some water filters or whatever like,
Speaker 1: And it's not okay, And it makes me very angry. Actually, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it makes me angry too. And it's one of those
Speaker 1: things if you look at like, here's all the charities
Speaker 1: that mccaskell and his organization are putting hundreds of millions
Speaker 1: dollars of dollars into. They're not all bad. A lot
Speaker 1: of them are good, and I'm glad that money is
Speaker 1: going there, But there's always this strain of deeply unsettling
Speaker 1: logic running through it. Now, I want to quote from
Speaker 1: a Time article that I think kind of gets in
Speaker 1: a very subtle way, has this guy's number When I
Speaker 1: start thinking in practice, if you've got if you've got
Speaker 1: some things that look robustly good in both the short
Speaker 1: and the long term, that definitely makes you feel a
Speaker 1: lot better about something that is only good from a
Speaker 1: very long term perspective, he says. This year, for example,
Speaker 1: he personally donated to the Let Exposure Elimination Project, which
Speaker 1: aims to in childhood let exposure, and the Atlas Fellowship,
Speaker 1: which supports talented high school students around the world to
Speaker 1: work on pressing problems. Not all issues are equally tractable,
Speaker 1: but mccaskell still cares about a range. When we met
Speaker 1: An Oxford, he expressed concerned for the ongoing political crisis
Speaker 1: in Sri Lanka, though admitted he probably wouldn't tweet about it.
Speaker 1: The answer, he believes, is to be honest about it.
Speaker 1: In philanthropy, big donors typically choose causes based on their
Speaker 1: personal passions and ultra subjectivist approach. Mccaskell says, where everything
Speaker 1: is seemingly justifiable on the basis of doing some good,
Speaker 1: he doesn't think that's tenable. If you can save someone
Speaker 1: from drowning or ten people from dying in a burning building,
Speaker 1: what should you do, he proposes, it is not a
Speaker 1: morally appropriate response to say, well, I'm particularly passionate about drowning,
Speaker 1: so I'm going to save one person from drowning rather
Speaker 1: than the ten people from burning. And that's exactly the
Speaker 1: situation we find ourselves in. And like, no, it is not.
Speaker 1: That is nonsense because, among other things, if you're a
Speaker 1: random person, uh, and you have a choice between saving
Speaker 1: someone from drowning or ten people from dying in a
Speaker 1: burning building, well you actually probably don't because saving people
Speaker 1: from drowning is a really difficult technical skill, which is
Speaker 1: why people usually die when they try to rescue whether
Speaker 1: folks who were drowning. Yeah, the guy, the creator of
Speaker 1: Hugio die from drowning it's really hard and dangerous, and
Speaker 1: also so is rescuing people from a burning building, which
Speaker 1: is why we have firefighters. And guess what, a lot
Speaker 1: of firefighters may not be very good at saving people
Speaker 1: from drowning because they have not trained for that. There
Speaker 1: are different skills, and these are both problems, but they're
Speaker 1: different skills. But what have you instead spend that time
Speaker 1: buying some testlas dogs and then sold them and instead
Speaker 1: invested in h I don't know, I find something that
Speaker 1: stops water from from drowning people. Like none of the
Speaker 1: problems we have are are none of the problems I'm
Speaker 1: going to say right now, zero percent of the problems
Speaker 1: we have are the result of some sort of like
Speaker 1: lifeguard firefighter standing in between a burning building and like
Speaker 1: a yacht race gone wrong and going oh god, noah.
Speaker 1: It's like the trade he's doing the trolley problem, like
Speaker 1: he's he's just he's trying to do the Troy problem.
Speaker 1: It's funny that you talked about Sri Lanka too, because
Speaker 1: it's like this is the perfect example. This is the
Speaker 1: perfect example of a political crisis that is like completely
Speaker 1: intractable to all of these like no, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: one of these people donating the charities can like do
Speaker 1: literally anything about that, because that's actually you know, like this,
Speaker 1: like the crisis of Sri Lanka is a is a
Speaker 1: is a both both is it like it is, but
Speaker 1: it is both a sort of short term crisis of
Speaker 1: this like you know, like utterly horrific genocidal political elites,
Speaker 1: and then also a sort of long term crisis about
Speaker 1: like the sort of structural position of like specimcific countries
Speaker 1: and sort of the global colonial system. This is not
Speaker 1: something any of these people can solve. The only the
Speaker 1: only thing, the only way any of these people could
Speaker 1: solve this is if people of Sri Lanka like just
Speaker 1: expropriated them. But you know, but he but because because
Speaker 1: because because these people like because Sri Lankas do not
Speaker 1: have access to this guy and like six guns, right,
Speaker 1: there's no there's no way, you know, he can just
Speaker 1: sort of sit there in his chair going, well, it's
Speaker 1: a crisis, us, I'm gonna tweet about it. I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna tweet about it. Yeah, I was. I was simply
Speaker 1: talked to newspapers about in tweeting. What what I would
Speaker 1: say is that like here's the actual solution to the
Speaker 1: stupid problem this guy came up with, Well, if we
Speaker 1: were to tax all of the billionaires to the point
Speaker 1: that they weren't billionaires and then put that into a
Speaker 1: massive new like works progress fund that, instead of like
Speaker 1: just building national parks, provided like rental assistance to millions
Speaker 1: of Americans in exchange for them learning how to fight
Speaker 1: fires and getting basic life gave it saving care and
Speaker 1: getting trained in things, um like that, so that they
Speaker 1: could deal with the consequences of climate change and be
Speaker 1: able to protect their communities effectively, and be incentivized to
Speaker 1: gain the actual technical skills that would allow them to
Speaker 1: protect people. Well, then you would have more people capable
Speaker 1: of saving someone from a burning building or from drowning.
Speaker 1: Um but anyway, whatever, that's that's that's my that's my
Speaker 1: pie in the sky. Leftist solution to that is use
Speaker 1: funds taken from rich in order to incentivize people to
Speaker 1: gain the skills that will allow them to protect their
Speaker 1: communities in the event of disasters. Um anyway, whatever. Uh So,
Speaker 1: Over the last decade, all of this thinking has increasingly
Speaker 1: given way from a wonky theory on charitable giving by bighearted,
Speaker 1: guilt ridden millennial kids and that's that's how this guy
Speaker 1: has always framed in articles, McCaskill as he's like, in fact,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna fucking I'm gonna scroll down here to my
Speaker 1: notes and I'm gonna find the section of the article
Speaker 1: to like show you the way he gets fucking talked
Speaker 1: about in all of these quote. Thirteen years ago, William
Speaker 1: McCaskill found himself standing in the aisle of a grocery store,
Speaker 1: agonizing over which breakfast cereal to buy. If he switched
Speaker 1: to a cheaper brand for a year, could he put
Speaker 1: aside enough money to save someone's life? Like that's the yeah,
Speaker 1: that's sort of like that you have where your engagement
Speaker 1: with global poverty is in the fucking cheerios aisle exactly exactly.
Speaker 1: And then yeah, of weight Rose in Oxford, I'm sure like, no, funk, sorry,
Speaker 1: I'm so fucking angry at this, and it's it's clearly,
Speaker 1: very clearly I can see that this is going towards
Speaker 1: an excuse for incredibly wealthy people paying funk all in
Speaker 1: taxes because they claim that it's not an efficient way
Speaker 1: to do things, and they completely ignore all these structural
Speaker 1: things which have to exist for their effective altruism to
Speaker 1: occur in the first place, right, Yeah, it's um. Anyway,
Speaker 1: this is effectively like over the years given away from
Speaker 1: this again kind of this wonky theory by guilty millennial
Speaker 1: kids to this pop philosophy for the fintech set, because
Speaker 1: that's how these guilt written millennial kids wound up making
Speaker 1: a bunch of money. Um. And yeah, that time article
Speaker 1: gives like, I just want to read another quote from
Speaker 1: it about one of the other guys who's involved in
Speaker 1: putting a lot of money into McCaskill's organization. Quote. Mr
Speaker 1: Mr Bankman Freed makes his donations through the ft X Foundation,
Speaker 1: which is given away a hundred and forty million, of
Speaker 1: which ninety million has gone through the group's future fund
Speaker 1: towards long term causes. Mr McCaskill and Mr Bankman Fried's
Speaker 1: relationship is an important piece and understanding the community's evolution
Speaker 1: in the reason years. The two men first met in
Speaker 1: two thousand and twelve when Mr Bankman Freed was a
Speaker 1: student at m I T with an interest in utilitarian philosophy.
Speaker 1: Over lunch, Mr Bankman Freed said that he was interested
Speaker 1: in working she related to animal welfare. Mr McCaskill suggested
Speaker 1: he might do more good by entering a high earning
Speaker 1: field and donating money to the cause and by working
Speaker 1: for it directly. Mr Bankman Freed contacted the Humane League
Speaker 1: and other charities, asking if they would prefer his time
Speaker 1: or donations based on his expected earnings if he went
Speaker 1: to work in tech our finance. They opted for the money,
Speaker 1: and he embarked on a remunerative career, eventually founding the
Speaker 1: cryptocurrency exchange. First off, that guy absolutely did not call
Speaker 1: any charities. Um. Sorry, this was a four. This was
Speaker 1: from the Forbes article I used, not the Time article. Um.
Speaker 1: First off, I don't believe that he but if he did,
Speaker 1: it was something like, Hey, I don't have any skills
Speaker 1: or training. Do you want money or do you want
Speaker 1: me to volunteer? And they were like who then is this? Kids? Like,
Speaker 1: we don't. We don't need another asshole wandering around here
Speaker 1: trying to touch the cats. Um, send us to a check. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And so instead of I don't know, getting trained as
Speaker 1: a vet tech or something where he would actually be
Speaker 1: able to help animals, he founded a cryptocurrency exchange and
Speaker 1: contributed to the burning of massive amounts of carbon that
Speaker 1: will contribute to mass deforestation and the deaths of animals
Speaker 1: around the world. That's good. I think that there's another
Speaker 1: aspect of this which I think is sort of under explored,
Speaker 1: which is that utilitarianism is genuinely one of the greatest
Speaker 1: evils humanity has ever created, every every bad decision anyone
Speaker 1: has ever made. If you look behind it, you can
Speaker 1: find your guilitarian is like, it's the basis of the
Speaker 1: basis of all economics. It's horrible everything in the world.
Speaker 1: It is an engine that allows rich people to feel
Speaker 1: good about hurting poor people. That's that's what it is.
Speaker 1: But and that's what I think this all makes clear.
Speaker 1: So the actual rhetoric from these people is always likes,
Speaker 1: especially if you're just kind of encountering it out in
Speaker 1: the wild. It's hard to argue with a lot of
Speaker 1: the time because they'll be like, well, look, we need
Speaker 1: to look at what's going to help the most people,
Speaker 1: and that's why we're you know, setting up None of
Speaker 1: this matters if we don't deal with this problem or
Speaker 1: that problem. And it's it's Taylor made to sound profound
Speaker 1: and again and like a Ted talk or the website
Speaker 1: for some charitable giving organization aimed at getting you to
Speaker 1: like put ten percent of your income to long term
Speaker 1: mist causes. But again, the funked up ship crusts kind
Speaker 1: of around the edges for the most part, in lines
Speaker 1: like these from a time profile on the Castle. The
Speaker 1: first public protest against African American slavery was the six
Speaker 1: eighty eight Germantown Quaker petition Slavery or was only Yeah,
Speaker 1: slavery was only abolished in the British Empire in eighteen thirty,
Speaker 1: three decades later in the US, and not until nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty two in Saudi Arabia. History encourages mccaskell to favor
Speaker 1: gradual progress, So for revolution abolition, he says, is maybe
Speaker 1: the single best moral change ever. It's certainly up there
Speaker 1: with feminism, and they're extremely incremental. They don't seem that
Speaker 1: way because we enormously shrink the past. But it's almost
Speaker 1: three hundred years we're talking about. Um. That wasn't the
Speaker 1: result of incremental change. It was the result against the
Speaker 1: people who owned slaves, fighting viciously against any attempts to slavery, Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it was a it was a battle. It was a
Speaker 1: series of in fact, a series of revolutions in a
Speaker 1: lot of cases, including like the Haitian Revolution and guys
Speaker 1: like John Brown. There were a ship bleeding Kansas. There
Speaker 1: were a shipload of people died fighting in order to
Speaker 1: end slavery. Like, yeah, it's a civil war, dude, what
Speaker 1: do you call that? That's not incremental? A million people
Speaker 1: shot each other to death, you know, and it's it's
Speaker 1: as far as we can talk about sort of income
Speaker 1: with the progress. It's stuff like Okay, So the like
Speaker 1: the slaves in Haiti freed themselves by means of revolution
Speaker 1: and then sent a bunch of guns and weapons to
Speaker 1: people in Latin America so that their armies could march
Speaker 1: through Latin America and slavery. Like many revolutions had to
Speaker 1: occur to end slavery because it was a powerful system
Speaker 1: at the center of global capital that a lot of
Speaker 1: entrenched and heavily arm interests were willing to die to maintain.
Speaker 1: Which also is fun because I I I bet, I
Speaker 1: bet if you look Throse, people supply chains, and this
Speaker 1: is almost certainly true of Elon must supply Jay, like
Speaker 1: I mean, Okay, must supply chains. In China. You can
Speaker 1: have some kind of debate as to whether the kinds
Speaker 1: of forced labor you're going to be encountering our slavery
Speaker 1: Like I I bet if you look to present the
Speaker 1: people who are affective alters, you can find slavery in
Speaker 1: their supply chains, and their arguments will be like, well,
Speaker 1: I can't end slavery and must supply chain because I
Speaker 1: guarantee it. They're in the tech industry and like, nobody
Speaker 1: has a laptop or a smartphone without the use of
Speaker 1: rare earth minerals that are like acquired via slavery. It's
Speaker 1: it's the same thing if you're wearing clothes, you have
Speaker 1: something that slavery was involved in. Because the garment industry,
Speaker 1: slavery is literally inextricable from it. Like the company that
Speaker 1: has tried the hardest to remove slavery from their from
Speaker 1: their production line, Patagonia, UM still continually finds like, oh, no,
Speaker 1: they're smart. Yeah they're pretty good. I'm going out, but yeah,
Speaker 1: they put a load of money into that ship and
Speaker 1: they still it is hard. Um. Anyway, um, I'm going
Speaker 1: to read another fun quote from the Forbes article. Mr
Speaker 1: Bankman Freed said he expected to give away the bulk
Speaker 1: of his fortune in the next tender twenty years. If
Speaker 1: you're worried about existential risks of a really bad pandemic,
Speaker 1: you sort of can't stall on that. Mr Bankman Freed
Speaker 1: said in an interview. That is how his text messages
Speaker 1: popped up among hundreds of others sent to Mr Musk.
Speaker 1: Mr Bankman Freed ultimately did not join Mr Musk's bid.
Speaker 1: I don't know exactly what Elon's goals are going to
Speaker 1: be with Twitter. Mr Bankman Freed said in an interview
Speaker 1: there was a little bit of ambiguity there. He had
Speaker 1: his hands full in the month that followed his cryptocurrency
Speaker 1: prices crashed. The Twitter deal has been volatile in its
Speaker 1: own way, with Mr Musk trying to back out before
Speaker 1: recently announcing his intention to follow through that after all.
Speaker 1: In August, Mr Musk retweeted Mr mccaskell's book announcement to
Speaker 1: his hundred and eight million followers with the observation worth
Speaker 1: reading this is a close match to my philosophy. So
Speaker 1: that's that's kind of the surface of where we are now.
Speaker 1: Um it is not. It doesn't quite get at all
Speaker 1: of the things that are deeply fucked up. And for
Speaker 1: that I wanted to quote from another article. UM, I
Speaker 1: found an a on a e O N. It's an
Speaker 1: essay by uh God, let make it the author here
Speaker 1: because it's it's quite good about long term ASM. It's
Speaker 1: an essay called against long termism by Emil P. Torres,
Speaker 1: a phb candidate at a university in Hanover in Germany
Speaker 1: uh Leibnitz Universitat. I don't know. I feel silly every
Speaker 1: time I tried to say Germans, so I'm not going
Speaker 1: to try that hard. But the article is very good
Speaker 1: UM and it kind of gets at how this effective
Speaker 1: altruism movement has merged with long term is um in
Speaker 1: a way that specifically exists to buoy the interests of
Speaker 1: wealthy authoritarians around the world. Quote. This has roots in
Speaker 1: the work of Nick Bostrom, who founded the grandiosely named
Speaker 1: Future of Humanity Institute f HI in two thousand five,
Speaker 1: and Nick Bestead, a research associated FHI and a program
Speaker 1: officer at Open Philanthropy. It has been defended most publicly
Speaker 1: by the FHI philosopher Toby or, the author of the
Speaker 1: precipice Existential Risk in the Future of Humanity. Long termism
Speaker 1: is the primary research focus of both the Global Priorities
Speaker 1: Institute and an f HI in linked organization directed by
Speaker 1: Hillary Greeves, and the Forethought Foundation run by William mccaskell,
Speaker 1: who also holds positions at f HI and g p I.
Speaker 1: Adding to the tangle of titles, names, institutes and acronyms.
Speaker 1: Long termism is one of the main cause areas of
Speaker 1: the so called effective altruism movement, which was introduced by
Speaker 1: ord In around two thousand even eleven and now boast
Speaker 1: of having a mind boggling forty six billion dollars in
Speaker 1: committed funding. It is difficult to overstate how influential long
Speaker 1: termism has become. Karl Marx in eighteen forty five decluded
Speaker 1: that the point of philosophy isn't merely to interpret the world,
Speaker 1: but change it, and this is exactly what long termists
Speaker 1: have been doing with extraordinary success. Consider that Elon Musk,
Speaker 1: who is cited and endorsed Bostrom's work, has donated one
Speaker 1: point five million dollars to FHI through its sister organization,
Speaker 1: even more grandiosely named Future of Life Institute. This was
Speaker 1: co founded by the multimillionaire tech entrepreneur Jean Tallinn, who
Speaker 1: has i recently noted doesn't believe that climate change poses
Speaker 1: an existential threat to humanity because of his adherence to
Speaker 1: the long termist ideology. Meanwhile, the billionaire libertarian and Donald
Speaker 1: Trump supporter Peter Teal, who once gave the keynote address
Speaker 1: at an Effective Altruism conference, has donated large sums of
Speaker 1: money to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, whose mission is
Speaker 1: to save in humanity from super intelligent machines and is
Speaker 1: deeply intertwined with long termist values. Other organizations, such as
Speaker 1: g p I and the Foe Thought Foundation are funding
Speaker 1: essay contests and scholarships and an effort to draw young
Speaker 1: people into the community. Well, it's an open secret of
Speaker 1: the Washington d C Base Center for Security and Emergence
Speaker 1: and Emerging Technologies c SET aims to place long term
Speaker 1: mists within high level US government positions to shape national apology.
Speaker 1: In fact, c SET was established by Jason Mathani, a
Speaker 1: former research assistant and f HI who is now the
Speaker 1: Deputy Assistant to US President Joe Biden for Technology and
Speaker 1: National Security. Or himself has, astonishingly for a philosopher, advised
Speaker 1: the World Health Organization, the World Bank, the World Economic Forum,
Speaker 1: the U s National Intelligence Council, the UK Prime Minister's Office,
Speaker 1: Cabinet Office, and Government Office for Science, and he recently
Speaker 1: contributed to report from the Secretary General of the United
Speaker 1: Nations that specifically mentions long term is um. The short
Speaker 1: answer is that elevating the fulfillment of humanities supposed potential
Speaker 1: above all else could not trivially increase the probability that
Speaker 1: actual people those alive today in the near future suffer
Speaker 1: extreme harms even death. Consider As I noted elsewhere, the
Speaker 1: long termist ideology inclines its adherence to take an insusian
Speaker 1: attitude towards climate change. Why because even if climate change
Speaker 1: causes island nations to disappear, triggers mass migrations, and kills
Speaker 1: millions of people, it probably isn't going to compromise our
Speaker 1: long term potential over the coming trillions of years. If
Speaker 1: one takes a cosmic view of the situation, even a
Speaker 1: climate catastrophe that cuts the human population by se for
Speaker 1: the next two millennia will, in the grand scheme of things,
Speaker 1: be nothing more than a small blip, the equivalent of
Speaker 1: a nine year old man having stubbed his toe when
Speaker 1: he was two. So this is evil, right, Like this
Speaker 1: is like this is vicious and vile and cruel, and
Speaker 1: it's one of those things. There's a book that I've
Speaker 1: talked about on the show a couple of times UM
Speaker 1: that is quite popular called Ministry of the Future UM
Speaker 1: and I. It's a very good book, and one of
Speaker 1: the attitude, like the basic premise of it is that
Speaker 1: climate change is addressed finally and the worst aspects of
Speaker 1: it are are dealt with and like begin to be
Speaker 1: repaired because of the establishment of an organization called the
Speaker 1: Ministry of the Futures. It's international organization that exists to
Speaker 1: like look out for the interests of unborn people and
Speaker 1: animals and plant species. And part of how they do
Speaker 1: this is by murdering billionaires in their beds uh and
Speaker 1: blowing up planes to in international air travel, which is
Speaker 1: so there's a verse. Like again, the idea that like
Speaker 1: we should be thinking about people and and living creatures
Speaker 1: who have not yet been born is reasonable and the
Speaker 1: reasonable conclusion of that is and so we should deal
Speaker 1: with things like climate change and stop like thoughtlessly degrading
Speaker 1: our environment so that people in the future will be
Speaker 1: able to live a quality life. UM. The argument that
Speaker 1: these long terms are making is No, that's foolish because
Speaker 1: in a trillion years, none of it will matter. And
Speaker 1: I intend to be alive and trillion years because I
Speaker 1: will be an immortal machine man billionaire forever. You know,
Speaker 1: It's about these people, These people like you think about this.
Speaker 1: If you believe this, the only, literally the only thing
Speaker 1: that you should spend your time doing is trying to
Speaker 1: dismantle every single nuclear weapon on the planet. Like you,
Speaker 1: you you should be forming your own private armies to
Speaker 1: like storm military basis to destroy nukes. And none of
Speaker 1: them will ever fucking do this. All these people will
Speaker 1: back candidates who like want to have one nuclear weapons.
Speaker 1: All these people who will back candidates who like like
Speaker 1: you know, I wonder how many these people personally supported
Speaker 1: dropping a nuke in the middle of a rock in
Speaker 1: two thousand four, Like god, Yeah, anyway, this is probably
Speaker 1: that's probably enough. I wanted to At some point, I
Speaker 1: think we will be doing a more detailed look into
Speaker 1: some of these people, and a more detailed look into
Speaker 1: some Maybe maybe it's a Bastards episode, but this is
Speaker 1: just getting more relevant. And I wanted to give people
Speaker 1: I wanted to connect them with some like some some
Speaker 1: resources per particularly that article on a on about the
Speaker 1: dangers of long termism and uh yeah, anyway, be be advised.
Speaker 1: This is what the fucking assholes who have spent like
Speaker 1: think about how many cool things the tech industry is
Speaker 1: actually made in the last decade. It's it's not many, right, Like,
Speaker 1: it's mostly been vaporware. Like most of the different big
Speaker 1: apps and stuff have all are in the process of
Speaker 1: collapsing right now. That's why the industry is falling apart
Speaker 1: as we record this in the metaverse. Yeah, that's right,
Speaker 1: that's right. The legs. It's like you're sitting right next
Speaker 1: to me, James, except for you have no laying legs in.
Speaker 1: Your mouth is open in an endless wordless scream. Um. Finally, anyway,
Speaker 1: that's what these assholes want to do, what they've done
Speaker 1: to the Internet, sucking the vibrancy and the life and
Speaker 1: like the freedom out of this this incredible creation, and
Speaker 1: turning it into uh an engine for sucking your personal
Speaker 1: data out and marketing things to you and making you
Speaker 1: angry all the time as much as possible, and convincing
Speaker 1: your parents and grandparents that fucking Joe Biden has been
Speaker 1: replaced by a lizard man. Um like the people who
Speaker 1: did that, uh now think that we can't take care
Speaker 1: of people today because that would distract from our mission
Speaker 1: to take care of people who have never been born
Speaker 1: a trillion years from now. Um anyway, fuck them. It
Speaker 1: could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1: Well more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
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Speaker 1: slash sources. Thanks for listening.