Luke Freeman on how to make giving count: the promise and challenges of Effective Altruism

Podcast version:

But it’s also true that people around the world still feel a powerful drive to help others, like they always have. Altruism appears to be innate, and is also a primary value of widely varying cultures, religions, and philosophies.

There are all kinds of reasons to despair of humanity these days. The most selfish, destructive, and outright cruel behavior sometimes seems like it’s become a ticket to success.

Odds are that you donate money or time to charity.

But how can you know your help is making a difference? As you’re about to hear, by some measures, well over half of charities do little or no good. When similar charities are compared, the most effective ones can be up to 100 times more effective than the least. And there’s often a big mismatch between where donors direct their support and where the need and potential benefits are greatest.

Since the 2000s, a movement has developed to try to make giving work better. You may very well have heard of it: effective altruism has drawn worldwide attention through books and appearances by some of its founders: philosophers Peter Singer, Toby Ord, and Will MacAskill. Among the best known examples are Singer’s book The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically and MacAskill’s Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference.

Advocates for effective altruism seek to match good intentions to impact. They do that by identifying the most effective charities in the world and encouraging donors to support them generously and strategically.

Effective altruism has drawn the support of some very influential people. Many of them are donors; others have decided to follow the practice of “earning to give:” pursuing highly paid careers so they’ll be able to donate a lot of money.

But lately, effective altruism has also drawn criticism of the ethical premises it’s based on as well as the behavior of some of the people who describe themselves as effective altruists — most notoriously, FTX crypto-exchange founder Sam Bankman-Fried.

I recently had the chance to explore both the promise of effective altruism and the critiques it’s faced, by talking with one of the movement’s leaders, Luke Freeman.

Luke is the Executive Director of Giving What We Can, which describes itself as “a global community on a mission to make giving effectively and significantly a cultural norm.”

As you’ll hear, the apparently simple idea of helping other people requires us not just to collect data, but to examine our own values and motivations.

I thought it was a fascinating and valuable conversation, and I hope you will too.

— Spencer

About Luke Freeman

Luke Freeman is the Executive Director of Giving What We Can, a global community on a mission to make giving effectively and significantly a cultural norm, with over 8,000 members from 100 countries who’ve pledged to give 10% of their lifetime income to effective charities. Prior to his work at Giving What We Can, Luke served in leadership and specialist roles for 15 years in marketing, communications, and technology roles in across both for-profit startups and the nonprofit sector.

Transcript

The time stamps below match the YouTube version.

00:00:30:10 – 00:00:31:23
Spencer Critchley
Luke, thanks so much for joining me.

00:00:31:26 – 00:00:33:15
Luke Freeman
Wonderful to be here. Thanks for having me.

00:00:34:00 – 00:00:37:11
Spencer Critchley
Can you tell me, first of all, what was it that got you involved in philanthropy?

00:00:37:13 – 00:00:58:14
Luke Freeman
Yeah. So for me, it started quite young. It was when I was a kid, probably about eight years old or so. I was just really shocked to find out that there were kids who were my age, living in other parts of the world, who didn’t have the same privileges that I had, that they were often going hungry or, you know, suffering from preventable diseases.

00:00:58:29 – 00:01:39:07
Luke Freeman
And that felt very unfair. And it felt like quite a tragedy. And I therefore got involved in things as a child, things like 40 hour famine with World Vision around the millennium and things like Make Poverty, History, campaigning and things like that. And then when I got to a point where I actually had some income of my own, more than just a paper on and stuff, which I was also giving from, and my parents were quite encouraging of that when I actually had some reasonable income and went from having a very kind of low income situation where I was supporting my now wife on on one income that was quite low.

00:01:39:07 – 00:01:58:27
Luke Freeman
And then suddenly she got a job and I got a promotion. I was aware that that’s a time when your spending might start to increase and we kind of being quite happy figuring out how to live on less than many of our peers. We didn’t want to just like suddenly let that expenditure rise. And so that’s when I started to give a meaningful portion of my income.

00:01:58:27 – 00:02:27:02
Luke Freeman
And when you start to give a pretty decent amount, you start to care a lot about where it goes and you go, Well, yeah, this is the difference between maybe going back to visit family in Canada more often. That’s not a small sacrifice sometimes. Or is it just the train owning a car or not? Yeah. And you go, Well, if this is something that means a lot to me and I am going to make some kind of material sacrifice myself, I really want to make sure that it’s actually helping.

00:02:27:02 – 00:02:38:21
Luke Freeman
And so that’s when I discovered the work of Giving What We Can, which I now work at, and another organization called GiveWell, a bit over a decade ago now. So, yeah, that was how I got into this.

00:02:39:11 – 00:02:47:24
Spencer Critchley
Now, as you got involved in philanthropy, I know you identified problems with the way it works. What were some of the things that really struck you as you got to learn more about it?

00:02:48:01 – 00:03:17:17
Luke Freeman
Yeah, one of the things that I think was most impactful for me to see quite early on was a few examples of it just not working as intended. And that also was when it was I looked into just how wide the distribution of impact could be. I think one of the biggest kind of aha moments for me was seeing data from the DCP3, which is a dataset that the World Bank gathered on global health interventions, not just charity, but like public health as well.

00:03:17:17 – 00:03:38:11
Luke Freeman
But just looking at if you look at a particular area, like helping people with health who are in the world’s poorest regions, you look at the data, you kind of order it up from at least impact per dollar to highest impact point per dollar. And at the first pass of the data, you see kind of the median to the most effective.

00:03:38:12 – 00:03:56:13
Luke Freeman
You’re getting at multiples of about 100 fold more cost effectiveness. And then on the other end, from the median to the least cost effective, you’re getting a similar 100 fold ratio. And then there are these cost effective, yeah, obviously things that didn’t work as well, things that actively did harm or in something.

00:03:56:19 – 00:04:00:29
Spencer Critchley
Some things actually — some things actually not only don’t work, but they’re counterproductive.

00:04:01:00 – 00:04:22:15
Luke Freeman
Yeah, and that was just really shocking. And then you kind of get this moment of like, I don’t want that to stop me being generous and trying to help people and especially knowing just how much further money can go to others. Once you get to a certain point in life, but you also don’t to waste it. And so trying to seek out those really high impact opportunities became pretty important to me.

00:04:22:16 – 00:04:27:11
Luke Freeman
And I also found that that was important to other people as well and so fortunate I could benefit from it.

00:04:27:18 – 00:04:38:22
Spencer Critchley
How common is it? I think people might be shocked based on, you know, what I know about this. How common is it from your point of view for charities to be not very effective or not effective at all?

00:04:39:15 – 00:05:01:08
Luke Freeman
Yeah, it’s hard to tell because there is kind of not great data on this because there are just myriad. There are literally, I think, close to 2 million charities in the U.S. alone. And so studying the impact of that is quite difficult. But in global development, some studies indicate that something like 60 to 70% of interventions fail to show a positive result.

00:05:02:06 – 00:05:32:11
Luke Freeman
So either that’s kind of negligible or it’s insignificant enough that it’s hard to actually tell if it is positive, and that when you look in particular areas, you find the distribution is quite wide. So it is just something you can’t be confident going into. Most things you give to that, it’s good to actually have the impact you’d like and even, you know, I think there is some reasonable argument to be willing for things to not always pay off, to kind of think a bit like a startup investor, that some things will work and some things won’t.

00:05:32:16 – 00:05:34:17
Luke Freeman
And so it’s been interesting.

00:05:35:11 – 00:05:46:00
Spencer Critchley
To just I’m sorry to I’m sorry to interject. First of all, just to highlight 60 to 70%, as you say, there’s not very good there’s not comprehensive data, but there’s an indication possibly 60 to 70%.

00:05:46:00 – 00:05:46:10
Luke Freeman
Yeah.

00:05:47:00 – 00:06:02:28
Spencer Critchley
Which could be very demoralizing. Yeah. Then on the other hand, but on the other hand, I think you see it as an opportunity, Right? An opportunity for improvement. And then on the other hand, in the Silicon Valley world, for example, it’s roughly, you know, one out of ten venture investments are expected to succeed, but they’re expected to succeed really big.

00:06:02:28 – 00:06:23:00
Luke Freeman
But then you’d least have reasonable metrics of success. Look, profit isn’t everything, but with a company, it’s pretty key to know that, like, is it generating profit as a profitable? Is it something that consumers are willing to pay for? And investors see a return on that in the charitable sector? There isn’t this feedback loop in a lot of cases.

00:06:23:00 – 00:06:53:23
Luke Freeman
So I think an example for me is if I go to the coffee shop and I spend $5 for a coffee and then I come back the next day and I spend $5 and they don’t give me a coffee or I spend $5 and they say, okay, you need to cough up another $4,995 because it’s gone up a thousand fold in price, or you pay them $5 for a coffee and they punch me in the face like I would I would not go back to that cafe.

00:06:54:13 – 00:07:17:20
Luke Freeman
You kind of had that feedback loop. There’s some kind of sensitivity to AI and benefiting from this, and I’m paying for this. But in the charitable sector, the person who is benefiting isn’t the person who is paying for it, and so the person is paying for it. Often the information that they have in most cases is marketing. And I’ve worked in marketing for a big chunk of my career.

00:07:17:20 – 00:07:38:06
Luke Freeman
And when you’re selling something that the person who’s benefiting from it is paying for it, you might play it up in value to some extent. You might try and focus. At the end of the day, if they’re not getting the value, you’ve lost a customer and that was a very bad thing to sell them, that in the charitable sector it is very easy for funding to keep coming in.

00:07:38:06 – 00:07:39:21
Luke Freeman
While the impact isn’t being had.

00:07:40:19 – 00:08:05:19
Spencer Critchley
Right. So this is the problem of incentives, Right? And I know I mean, based on my own experience, when I first got involved in nonprofit work and political work, I was really naive. I see myself as very naive in retrospect, like a lot of people, of a kind of a technocratic bent. You know, you tend to assume, especially if you’ve worked in Silicon Valley, as I have, for example, and as you know, a lot of people getting involved in charity now.

00:08:05:23 – 00:08:30:14
Spencer Critchley
Do you tend to assume that everybody agrees we should do the thing that works best? And so you find out what’s what’s the best idea, test it and do that without realizing that you’re dealing with a much simpler problem space, really. You know, as genius, as much of a genius as you might think of yourself to be as a Silicon Valley founder, for example, you might not realize how simple what you’re doing, as hard as it is, is compared to trying to do what you’re describing.

00:08:30:23 – 00:09:00:20
Spencer Critchley
And there’s this fiendish sometimes problem of incentives, right? Because as you say, the customer is not the person who’s paying for the service, the person who needs the service very often, of course, can’t pay for it. Somebody else is paying for it like a donor, a foundation, a government, whatever. And you immediately you have distorted incentives, because if somebody’s offering a charity, a ton of money, for example, at all, and distort their incentives to please the donor instead of do what would be most effective for the recipient of the service, which might involve putting the charity out of business.

00:09:00:20 – 00:09:05:24
Spencer Critchley
Right. If it succeeds very well. I’m like a company. The greatest measure of success would be going out.

00:09:05:25 – 00:09:06:09
Luke Freeman
I know.

00:09:06:17 – 00:09:28:02
Spencer Critchley
So I can relate to what you’re saying. So how did you so how do you solve that, that kind of problem? How does what the giving what we can approach and the Effective Ventures Foundation approach differ from what’s tended to happen, which seems to work sometimes, but not even maybe most of the time.

00:09:28:02 – 00:10:02:27
Luke Freeman
Yeah, so it is a really gnarly problem to just start off with recognizing that the what it really helps is actually having good information and at least starting to focus on the beneficiary groups where you are most likely to have a large impact because there’s just so many things you could possibly do. And so for us, a lot of that actually comes a lot of the power comes from things like really interrogating your values and going do I care about something, you know, for any particular reason?

00:10:02:27 – 00:10:24:29
Luke Freeman
And what is that actually that Khorasan I’ll use a personal example myself. So I lost my grandmother a few years ago to breast cancer. And that is something it was really, really tough to see her go through. It. And it was tough for the family to lose a loved one. And seeing someone you loved suffer is never, never a good time.

00:10:24:29 – 00:10:51:14
Luke Freeman
And it breaks your heart. And you often driven to do something. And there are a lot of things immediately in front of me, literally in the waiting rooms, I’d see posters on the, you know, for things like brightening someone’s day by, you know, bringing them some flowers and that being something that you could donate to do and things like that, let alone things like you conducting research to prevent future cases or improve treatments and things like that.

00:10:51:29 – 00:11:13:10
Luke Freeman
But when I interrogate my values, the first thing I realize is that what I care about is not specifically breast cancer or cancers in general, or things that affect people in rich countries like the country that I’m in, that I cared about preventing the suffering of, you know, someone who is suffering and someone who I care about, but also other people care about other people as well.

00:11:13:10 – 00:11:42:22
Luke Freeman
And we’re all capable of suffering and capable of having wonderful lives as well. So like having more of the good and less of the bad and preventing the loss of a loved one. I lost a loved one. I wouldn’t want to prevent that happening from others as much as possible. And so once you had this kind of impartial view where you’re not necessarily focused on just one particular intervention and you can find things that help with outcomes are a lot better in anywhere on earth or any given species.

00:11:42:22 – 00:11:59:08
Luke Freeman
Or you can have time delays and things like that as well. For example, a lot of the most preventative and a lot of the most effective things are preventative things. It’s a lot easier to have a lot of impact if you are trying to stop bad things from happening than it is to come and try and fix things.

00:11:59:08 – 00:12:21:28
Luke Freeman
Once that happened. We’ve seen this with medicine, for example, Preventative medicine is time and time again shown to be much more effective than trying to come in later and solve something. And so you can look to good data sources once you have focused on this beneficiary group. They’re fantastic organizations out there doing this evaluation work, which didn’t exist, you know, a little over ten years ago when we started looking into this.

00:12:21:28 – 00:12:54:17
Luke Freeman
But it does exist now. Organizations like you’ve well, who do work in Global Health and development found this pledge work across a number of areas, including climate change, global health, global catastrophic risks. We work in another organization called Long View Philanthropy. They look at emerging risks that, you know, could affect all of civilization, things like nuclear war, pandemics and things like that that if we can prevent the bad things from happening, whether it’s giving someone a bed net to stop them from getting malaria, which can prevent them going to school, they could also die from it.

00:12:54:17 – 00:13:20:13
Luke Freeman
They can not go to work. They could lose a loved one. Similarly, if you can prevent something like COVID or even worse from happening by having good measures in place early on, that’s where you can get that impact, is thinking about what are the big problems that we can solve, what are the things that people are really ignoring and what is that things, you know, what are the things that there are some evidence for that you can actually have that really big impact in focusing on the outcomes.

00:13:20:13 – 00:13:21:03
Spencer Critchley
When I.

00:13:21:03 – 00:13:21:18
Luke Freeman
Think world.

00:13:21:23 – 00:13:44:10
Spencer Critchley
That’s I think a fascinating and important point you just made by starting with interrogating your own values and proceeding from there to data, because one of the knocks on what’s often called the effective altruism movement, you know, of which your organization is a founding part, is that it’s so data driven, you know, and it misses the human element potentially.

00:13:44:10 – 00:14:10:01
Spencer Critchley
And it’s a bunch of sort of smart technocrats coming in from the outside with a bunch of data and figuring that all that matters is data, or it’s business executives who only understand everything in terms of the business world view of effectiveness, which is always measurable pretty much. But what you started out with was starting with your values and, and from that, start moving to looking for what’s the data that would most effectively help you most effectively realize your values, Right?

00:14:11:14 – 00:14:36:22
Spencer Critchley
I think that’s part of what’s fascinating about this is without going too much into the weeds about it, is that this movement has roots in philosophy, you know, moral philosophy, through Peter Singer, for example, and Toby Ord. And these are issues that people, you know, who study philosophy will be familiar with and fascinated by. But the average person doesn’t have to.

00:14:37:15 – 00:15:02:05
Spencer Critchley
We’re certainly isn’t exposed to much about moral philosophy in the course of an ordinary school career. But what you’re describing is a key issue of moral philosophy, right? Is how do you what is virtue, for example, is virtue me trying to save my beloved grandmother or, you know, or trying to make essentially, you know, deal with the grief I feel over the loss of somebody I love a lot?

00:15:02:05 – 00:15:21:17
Spencer Critchley
Or is it from that feeling trying to find what could I do that would be truly effective, which might not as you say, necessarily be to address the problem that took your grandmother away from you. Can you say a little bit more about that, that perspective, wrestling with these issues of moral philosophy? Yeah.

00:15:22:28 – 00:15:46:06
Luke Freeman
Yeah. So there are things that I think many moral philosophers see that like we have some degree of special obligation to people around us. Like, you know, we’re expecting a little baby boy in March and I will have different obligations to, you know, my child as I would to the neighbor’s kids and as I would two kids living on the other side of the planet.

00:15:46:19 – 00:16:13:22
Luke Freeman
But how much you kind of speaking, Peter Singer, how wide your moral circle is, I think is a really important consideration because when I really consider, you know, a kid in Australia who lives on the other side of the country, well, they’re actually geographies. Part of it, the fact that they’re, you know, member of the same nationality as me is not necessarily that important to me.

00:16:14:17 – 00:16:34:18
Luke Freeman
Yeah, and it doesn’t really mean that they are of any higher moral value, that they’re suffering or flourishing as worth any more or less. Obviously, when it comes to having my child or my partner or your family, I have high levels of knowledge about their needs and they’re like, if I don’t help them, they’re like many cases where other people won’t.

00:16:34:18 – 00:17:18:10
Luke Freeman
So there is that kind of special relationship that you have. But once you are getting further than just, you know, something that you do have a lot of control or special obligations to, it does actually give you this opportunity to go, what is the thing that I truly care about? And that’s where things like thinking about, you know, not necessarily a specific disease or a specific population, but the types of things that you want to see in the world often are actually much more core things like suffering is bad and good lives are good and and also when you actually deal with some of these questions like time or location or species, you can really

00:17:18:10 – 00:17:47:04
Luke Freeman
push some of that intuitions a bit. And where people end up is very different. But I think it’s a good kind of healthy, responsible human thing to do is to actually challenge yourself on where you land. Like, are you doing things for good reasons or are you doing them just because you haven’t thought about it? And for me, that’s led to you being willing to like, open that up a bit and go, okay, well, who do I care about helping?

00:17:47:17 – 00:18:08:25
Luke Freeman
And that can actually be a lot bigger than I would have thought if I’d just kind of gone with my defaults. And, you know, for example, if you look at philanthropy in the U.S., 97 or so percent, I think it was the number is on helping people in the U.S. Yet the U.S. is one of the richest countries on earth.

00:18:09:07 – 00:18:30:19
Luke Freeman
And if you look at what money buys, you can buy a lot more in in life improvements, in life saving interventions in other countries than you can in the U.S. And if you’re willing to say, hey, do I value someone’s life more just because they’re in the same country? Well, or even if you do, how much more is it 100 times more?

00:18:31:28 – 00:18:51:06
Luke Freeman
You know, being willing to wrestle with that can give you a bit of an edge. If you’re thinking about an investor’s mindset, like if you’re trying to invest in good, you can get that edge by investing abroad. Similarly, if you look at philanthropy, that helps animals. Again, about only a couple of percent, I think between 1 to 3% actually goes to helping animals at all.

00:18:51:19 – 00:19:24:17
Luke Freeman
And all of that, the amount that goes towards helping farmed or wild animals is about, again, 1 to 3% as well. So you’re looking at a fraction of a fraction of percent going to help are the number of animals which far dominates the humans on this planet and who are being negatively affected due to our actions? And so if you’re willing to kind of wrestle with the core questions of who do I care about and what do I care about, and that can actually give you this opportunity to have outcomes you couldn’t really have imagined.

00:19:25:12 – 00:19:56:04
Spencer Critchley
And, you know, and in moral terms, very often I think one of the risks of giving or frankly any activity you take to be moral is that it can obscure the self-interest that’s at work, even though even with the best intentions, you know, you’re convinced you have the best intentions. But some of this self-examination and self-awareness you’re describing can reveal to you that you have unconsciously been moving in a direction that’s not necessarily as altruistic as you thought it was.

00:19:56:04 – 00:20:15:25
Spencer Critchley
So, for example, even in the United States, you look at a lot of the giving and it’s people who have done very well. And so they give a ton of money to their alma mater, you know, that they graduated from. And very often it’s a place like Harvard or Stanford or somewhere that really does not need the money, not to say, you know, nobody should ever donate to Stanford.

00:20:16:07 – 00:20:55:10
Spencer Critchley
You know, I have family connections to Stanford through people who have gone there. And it’s a it’s a wonderful place. Same with Harvard. But, you know, you get my point or, you know, it could be any pet concern, which it turns out really, you know, you have to ask yourself, just how altruistic am I being here? And so, again, when you when you pursue information as you’re describing, I think you can see it as not just turning everything into maximum efficiency and technocracy necessarily, but a path to awareness to actually do something that amounts to, you know, the the enactment of love, but in a way that is more effective and and more aware.

00:20:56:02 – 00:21:21:05
Luke Freeman
And I think it’s about putting yourself in the shoes of others. So if I lived in a much poorer country, what would I hope that someone who lived in a rich country like Australia would do? But I hope that they, you know, do things which are directly relevant to them that improve their lives by a marginal amount. But I hope that that person who could potentially impact an entire community somewhere else did that.

00:21:22:17 – 00:21:50:05
Luke Freeman
Similarly, like if the way that we treat animals here, we wouldn’t stand by and let humans treat each other that way. Suddenly no one that we would love. And I think that, you know, so another thing, looking at things like future generations, like I think about my kid and at some point hopefully they might have grandkids as well and I would care about their life just as much as I care about my own.

00:21:50:05 – 00:22:16:02
Luke Freeman
And more, in fact, and the lives of their friends and everyone around them. But we’re doing things today that can affect their lives, whether it’s, you know, the amount of nuclear warheads that are sitting there trigger ready or the, you know, what we’re doing in terms of the way we’re treating the planet and the ecosystem that they’re going to grow up in, the decisions we’re making now are going to affect them.

00:22:16:02 – 00:22:31:02
Luke Freeman
And if I could go back in time and change things, my grandparents generation did that have affected what we have today, I would. And so that kind of like putting yourself in the shoes of others and going, if I can push that out a bit further, what would I hope that someone would do if I was in that position?

00:22:31:23 – 00:23:04:07
Spencer Critchley
And that leads me to, you know, one of the other ethical challenges that’s been raised by critics of this kind of approach is, sure, it’s great that you’re measuring effectiveness, but doesn’t the very fact that individual donors or individual organizations get to decide based on that measurement of effectiveness where the money goes? Is that really right? The Gates Foundation, you know, is often cited as having a larger budget than many countries, and there’s relatively few people running the Gates Foundation ultimately.

00:23:05:17 – 00:23:15:06
Spencer Critchley
I mean, really, when it comes down to it, it’s two or three, right? So should they have that much influence, no matter how good their intentions are? How do you respond to that kind of challenge?

00:23:15:22 – 00:23:47:18
Luke Freeman
Yeah, I think it is really challenging, but I think that we have to be kind of pragmatic and think about, well, how does the world work right now and what are we what kind of the conditions that we’re playing in. And so and what would you otherwise do? So a few things that I’d like. One is would you rather that the Gates Foundation be focused on something that was so a lot of their work is helping, you know, people who have the least in the world.

00:23:47:26 – 00:24:23:14
Luke Freeman
And so, like that’s already they’re off to a good start. And they’ve also decided that they’re not going to hold that money and put it into unproductive assets like you’re owning a lot of land in the U.S. or something like that. They’re putting it into the giving it away to start with. So that’s that’s something I like endorse the giving away that wealth People may have different questions about how you distribute that, but from someone who, again, has a broader perspective of whose lives I consider of moral value, the philanthropic sector fits like it serves a need that other sectors do not serve.

00:24:23:15 – 00:24:45:00
Luke Freeman
So if you look at governments, governments are set up again back to incentives. They set up in such a way that they serve the powerful within their nation. So those who are voting at the very least, they distribute that power somewhat by having, you know, every person under the age of 18 maybe who aren’t in prison or things like that.

00:24:45:23 – 00:25:08:00
Luke Freeman
Having the right to vote. But that is already excluding people in other countries. And if they had if you just tax that money and then would distribute it democratically, the first question is who are the constituents and are the constituents just citizens of the US who show up to vote, which are going to be typically more people who already have more power in that country?

00:25:08:02 – 00:25:30:25
Luke Freeman
Certainly they’ll be of a certain age group. It’s not going to you people who are younger, who are the voting age, it’s not going include animals but include people elsewhere. So, yeah, it’s not going to necessarily go out and serve those who might need you need those resources the most. And so you’ve got already like you’re not serving the beneficiary groups of people in other countries.

00:25:30:25 – 00:25:46:10
Luke Freeman
You’re not serving animals, you’re not serving many disenfranchized people within that country, people who might not be able to vote because they’re too young or they’re in prison or they’ve got a job, which makes it hard to show up and vote. You’re not going to be serving future generations because they’re not a voting age. Well, they haven’t been born yet.

00:25:47:09 – 00:26:07:27
Luke Freeman
And similarly with companies, you have people who have who are shareholders that you’re incentivized to help with, to do things that make them happy customers to a reasonable extent, the team members, people who work at the organization. But if you don’t have buying power, if you don’t have really money, is what talks there, whether you’re a consumer or investor.

00:26:08:13 – 00:26:34:16
Luke Freeman
So the philanthropic sector is the only sector who set up to help those who aren’t already being helped by the other systems. And so whilst there are things you have to look at in the philanthropic sector about how they go about distributing funds and who has that control, I think that’s a really good question. You need to also realize that it is a sector that is currently filling a really important gap.

00:26:35:09 – 00:27:14:12
Luke Freeman
Now on that, yeah, once you get to the fact that you have this money which might be controlled by a smaller number of people, I really endorse a reasonable amount of the Gates Foundation I think is actually quite good. I know people who’ve worked there or are working in there and a lot of the day to day decision making power is actually delegated to professionals who care about the problem, who study these problems, and trying to work at it for the sake of the beneficiaries is is very different to a lot of large donor philanthropy, which is more focused on things that they might be, you know, personally affected by or accolades they might get

00:27:14:12 – 00:27:35:15
Luke Freeman
or their alma mater and things like that. So they’re already doing a lot better than most an organization that I think has done a very good job of this. And like all the cards on the table, they have provided us funding, but it’s also because they have the same approach as open philanthropy. So does the MOSKOVITZ, one of the co-founders of Facebook, runs a sauna.

00:27:35:15 – 00:27:53:01
Luke Freeman
He’s basically gone and said, Hey, I have this money. I don’t think that I should be in this position where I have all of this kind of decision making power. I’m going to find professionals who really care about trying to do as much good as possible. They’re going to use tools to try and figure out how to do that.

00:27:53:17 – 00:28:11:10
Luke Freeman
Great data, good research, even moral philosophy to figure out who to help, in what way they even have to this internal trading that goes on between figuring out different beneficiary groups and how to focus on it. But if you look at all of their grants, almost all of them are helping people who are very different to just moskovitz.

00:28:11:10 – 00:28:33:29
Luke Freeman
They’re not going to help. Yeah, billionaires are not going to help you often even moderately wealthy Americans. And that is something I would like to see more of that stepping back and saying, look, I have this huge wealth. I know that, you know, putting it into the market or into my local government isn’t necessarily going to result in those who need it most getting helped.

00:28:34:05 – 00:28:56:22
Luke Freeman
But I also want to find experts who can really help with this. And then within that, using tools like open philanthropy has given a lot to give well and give while uses works a lot with a the organizations that give it to have a lot of people on the ground in the places that they’re giving to. And there is this kind of ability for that information to filter back up as to what’s working, what’s helping and how do people want to be helped.

00:28:57:03 – 00:29:10:27
Luke Freeman
But they also do things like conduct beneficiary surveys, ask them what would you rather would you rather have you clean, clean water at this price or this kind of availability of these ways? Or would you rather have these kind of educational outcomes and really involving people in the process of how they’re helped?

00:29:11:14 – 00:29:33:23
Spencer Critchley
And so I guess, you know, part of what you’re saying, an important part of what you’re saying, I think, is that an element of what you are contributing here? Is that discussion in that debate too, to raise awareness of? That’s actually a phrase that drives me crazy in the nonprofit sector, frankly, because I think it’s so often ineffective to simply raise awareness of a problem.

00:29:34:15 – 00:30:06:25
Spencer Critchley
But but in this case, too, in a very active sense, raised awareness of the issues involved here and to encourage discussion and debate and for people to challenge each other. That, too, can be, I think, a very beneficial effect perhaps of this kind of approach. And I suppose also if the argument is, you know, democratic governments should be more involved in this, perhaps then or, you know, private billionaires, part of what one can contribute to is democratic reform and, you know, make democratic governments more common and more effective.

00:30:06:25 – 00:30:48:03
Spencer Critchley
That’s I personally think would be a probably a valuable thing to to contribute to. Another thing that occurred to me while you were talking was that, you know, you can often flip these moral questions on their head. And we’re used to thinking about, you know, the potentially pernicious effects of lots of money. But if you think about the charities, for example, that are not effective, there’s a moral responsibility there because they’re diffusing the impact of well-meaning donors, including small donors, very often who very often don’t have access to a lot of great information and are probably quite susceptible to marketing appeals, which will, you know, tug on their emotional responses.

00:30:48:19 – 00:31:03:16
Spencer Critchley
And if you’re running an ad for an ineffective charity year after year and siphoning money away from donors, you’re diffusing the impact of of those potential dollars. And I think you should probably be looking at what, you know, perhaps a little more self-awareness about what your real values are.

00:31:04:06 – 00:31:37:19
Luke Freeman
There are some organizations that are just really excellent here. And so one that I like to highlight, it’s an organization called Evidence Action, and one program that they ran it was called No Lean Season, and they would help when there was like poor conditions for farming in your rural communities. They might provide the ability to travel to a city for someone to work there to earn a bit more, and to bring money home and send money home often during that time as well to stop their family from suffering just when there aren’t good growing conditions.

00:31:38:01 – 00:32:00:19
Luke Freeman
Now, it had really strong early evidence that it was working great. They’re collecting that evidence now as they scaled it up, they realized that the kind of initial stuff was overly optimistic. And you get this idea that kitchens were just like such that often you find this when things are first study that, like everyone’s working really hard to try and make sure it works.

00:32:00:19 – 00:32:33:21
Luke Freeman
But as you try and scale like not everyone has all of the same skills, that might be how to say incentives or even just like the data is noisy, says I scaled it up. It wasn’t nearly as cost competitive as they thought, and they had other programs that were more effective. And and so even though it was still helping and it’s really hard to shut something down, they shut it down and they’re like, Hey, you should find out the stuff or, you know, stuff that we don’t do because they have this attitude of we keep trying to find the best thing that we can do.

00:32:33:21 – 00:32:50:29
Luke Freeman
They’re still in the game as an organization because it wasn’t just resting on this one program. And I think that that’s a really good thing to see in the sector and to be celebrated for not like how terrible was it that this wasn’t as effective as other things or how terrible was it that it didn’t work but good on them for shutting it down?

00:32:51:06 – 00:32:53:08
Luke Freeman
And I think that needs to be celebrated more.

00:32:53:08 – 00:33:11:18
Spencer Critchley
Wow. That’s that’s fantastic. You know, it gets back to what I was suggesting earlier that really success for a nonprofit organization might mean putting yourself out of business. That can’t be true of some that are just required to provide ongoing care. You know, of people, for example, who will always need help. And, you know, it’s not a problem that can finally be solved.

00:33:11:18 – 00:33:20:17
Spencer Critchley
People with, you know, permanent health conditions, for example. But, yeah, how do we incentivize organizations to be rewarded essentially for going out of business?

00:33:20:23 – 00:33:24:05
Luke Freeman
I say we can wipe out certain diseases. That’s one example. Like.

00:33:24:17 – 00:33:41:28
Spencer Critchley
Yeah, and I believe actually the March of Dimes in the United States many decades ago, you know, unfortunately there’s a risk of it coming back. But I think it was polio they were founded to address and it was close to eradicated. And so, you know, they they had to redefine their mission.

00:33:41:28 – 00:33:43:18
Luke Freeman
Yeah. And that’s great.

00:33:43:26 – 00:34:09:15
Spencer Critchley
So that was a good problem to succeeding yourself. It’s a wonderful problem to have succeeding yourself out of business. Now, recently, you know, there’s been a lot of attention to this issue in connection with A.I. as it happens, because of controversy with Sam Bankman-Fried, you know, and how his whole operation ended up exploding. But he was coming into it as a prominent, effective altruist.

00:34:09:24 – 00:34:46:16
Spencer Critchley
And then have other people in Silicon Valley who, as I mentioned earlier, have been very much attracted to this, or people in the technology business generally. And all those folks tend to comment, not all of them. That’s too much of a generalization, but many of them come at it from a utilitarian perspective in terms of philosophy. You know, going back to Jeremy Bentham in the 19th century and the idea that you can measure, which is a lot of what you’re talking about here, you can measure positive and negative outcomes and morality amounts to trying to generate the most good, you know, and the least bad.

00:34:47:16 – 00:35:17:01
Spencer Critchley
By every action you take. But that’s not the only ethical system. You know, for example, again, not to get too far into the weeds, but there’s deontological ethics, which is more, you know, a code, a moral code, which you must stick by, even if sometimes the outcomes are not good, or virtue ethics, which focuses on the virtue of individual people, which is something that a lot of libertarian thinkers, for example, it is far better to be a heroically good person than to try to rescue everybody else.

00:35:17:20 – 00:35:32:28
Spencer Critchley
How how do you look at this, the specifically technocratic slash utilitarian angle here and the extent to which that determines how everything gets measured or even the idea that measuring is the way to go?

00:35:33:15 – 00:35:58:14
Luke Freeman
Yeah, I think it’s a kind of what is the tool for the job question. So I think that almost every ethical system that I’ve seen like tends to agree that it is good to do more things that are good. And so they may have different ideas as to like, where do you lean when it comes to some really like deep crises.

00:35:58:14 – 00:36:25:09
Luke Freeman
So yeah, at what point might it be okay to do harm for the sake of some good? But most of the time operating in a world where, you know, deontological, rule-based thinking works for things like laws and how you treat people around you and things like that, you lean into things like virtue, ethics, and what is the kind of person that I want to be, the kind of attributes that I want to have.

00:36:25:22 – 00:36:55:11
Luke Freeman
And a lot of the time these rules of virtues, all these other ways of thinking are often in service of things that we might more deeply care about, which is people living good lives. And they’re really good tools and rules of thumb. Like if you were to actually try to live purely as a, you know, calculating consequentialist, you wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning because you wouldn’t know the long term impacts over all of infinity of choosing one pair of socks over another.

00:36:55:11 – 00:37:13:26
Luke Freeman
What if you know which one might cause you to slip and then, yeah, help yourself and things like that. Oh, maybe one of them might be quite attractive and bring you a partner who leads a great fortune or whatever the kind of what if just get impossible. And so we need these rules of thumb that work really well.

00:37:14:04 – 00:37:34:06
Luke Freeman
And some people see these things as ultimate truth, and that’s okay. Like, I think it’s perfectly fine for someone to say, Look, you know, it’s never okay to murder someone by a particular definition. And I think that most people probably think that’s okay. You might find these really weird circumstances in some possible future that someone might be in.

00:37:34:06 – 00:37:59:22
Luke Freeman
And that’s what we have courts for that it’s like, oh, you know, this is manslaughter. But, you know, had this, you know, positive outcome and you’ve even seen people do things that are illegal and you like and willing to take the consequences. But the tools for the job, if you’re trying to think about things like how do we allocate resources, you know, that’s a really difficult question and trying to understand, well, how does that affect how good lives are?

00:38:00:07 – 00:38:18:28
Luke Freeman
And so, for example, our health systems do this all the time. They see quite a developed field of health economics of if we’re going to put one more dollar into the, you know, public health budget, where should we put it? And it’s always thinking about outcomes. You can debate a lot is like how to trade off these different outcomes.

00:38:18:28 – 00:38:43:08
Luke Freeman
Which ones are better or worse? But we’re already in the field of talking about outcomes. And so when it comes to philanthropy, there’s this big opportunity to play in the game of outcomes that most people tend to ignore. And if you do care about outcomes and there’s reasonably good data that you can have much better outcomes in others, investing in those things just seems like a really good deal for a lot of people to be doing, certainly more than currently are.

00:38:44:09 – 00:39:10:12
Spencer Critchley
Yeah, and I guess really, you know, in a way that introduces, you know, yet another philosophical approach, which is pragmatism. So you don’t necessarily have to solve some of these potentially insoluble moral philosophical questions if you start from a commitment to do good and try to do more good than harm, then, you know, there are, as you say, there could be a deep anthological code of values like never commit murder or never lie that might serve that.

00:39:10:12 – 00:39:30:28
Spencer Critchley
But on the other hand, you know, in the famous example, if the Nazis are at the door asking, where is Anne Frank, do you still want to stick with your deontological code of never lying? Or do you want to say, I don’t know who you’re talking about, which takes them to these pragmatic, difficult moral choices which we seem to be forced to wrestle with, no matter what clever philosophy we come up with?

00:39:31:11 – 00:39:59:13
Spencer Critchley
Yeah. And so that takes me to something you just you mentioned, which is the famous mosquito net solution to malaria, because this is one of the most effective uses of money there is. Right. It constantly tops the lists of the of this kind of intervention because for a few dollars, you know you you get people some mosquito nets and you save lives.

00:39:59:16 – 00:39:59:23
Luke Freeman
Yeah.

00:40:00:12 – 00:40:29:20
Spencer Critchley
And you saved many lives. And it’s hard to find other ways of spending money that are that cost effective. But on the other hand, some things are just naturally expensive for example, if you’re trying to rescue people from human trafficking, which is a terrible problem around the world right now, which I assume would be potentially far more expensive if it was a purely utilitarian consequentialist decision, you would only invest in malaria nets, but obviously that feels morally wrong.

00:40:29:27 – 00:40:33:06
Spencer Critchley
Do you have any insights about how balance that kind of choice.

00:40:34:01 – 00:40:59:20
Luke Freeman
If there’s a few things in that? So firstly, a classic misunderstanding of what we’re scribing is that there’s a small list of things such as buying bed nets that everyone should do, and that’s just not going to happen overnight. So there’s no world that I can imagine which to tomorrow everyone wakes up and goes, You know what? They’re right.

00:40:59:29 – 00:41:18:13
Luke Freeman
We’re just all going to go get some bed nets and we can put all of the current philanthropic dollars into bed nets. But even if that did happen, that would be solved within seconds. And so then you’d move onto the next thing and eventually you get to the point where, you know, you’ve probably solved a bunch of problems.

00:41:18:13 – 00:41:40:03
Luke Freeman
And something like human trafficking is probably less likely to happen because you’ve already solved a lot of things that maybe lead to it happening, things like, you know, terrible poverty, like it causes people to do, and then even then, like it is reasonable to prioritize. So like that, well, it isn’t going to happen. There are already people who are working on many different things.

00:41:40:12 – 00:42:14:01
Luke Freeman
So on the margin as a donor, given that there are many people funding all of these different interventions in the world, you as a donor might have more impact. If you’re willing to think differently. And the other thing is so that many donors can is have a portfolio of giving. If you still want to be like, Hey, I want to have a mix of these things for different reasons, I think it’s like for me, just like the the story of this or the emotional resonance or it’s something that happened to someone I care about, or I have this special obligation that can go into someone’s portfolio.

00:42:14:14 – 00:42:45:25
Luke Freeman
And I do that personally. Like some amount of our philanthropic dollars goes to support the cat shelter that we got our cats from. I see. That is that’s a kind of special obligation, but it’s not the vast majority of my giving. The vast majority of my giving is going. Most people in the world are ignoring these, you know, tragedies that exist, that are incredibly cheap, relatively, and that every day that they go unfunded, that is really, really a failure of our species.

00:42:45:25 – 00:43:05:15
Luke Freeman
And so I want to at least try and get in there and try and make that problem less bad. And so in a sense, it’s triage. It’s you know, I was about 15 years old and I was rushed into the emergency room going into anaphylaxis. If I didn’t get adrenaline shot and some other things within probably a couple of minutes, I would have been dead.

00:43:05:29 – 00:43:33:06
Luke Freeman
And boy, am I glad that the medical staff there that day didn’t say, Oh, yeah, yeah, there are 30 people in front of you just kind of sit down. We’ll get to you eventually. Or that they didn’t go. The first person in line is actually my brother. Yeah, he’s my brother. I should help him. Oh, like there are all of these things that, you know, kind of analog to what happens in philanthropy that they could be doing in the emergency room.

00:43:33:19 – 00:43:53:24
Luke Freeman
But they do a very responsible and compassionate thing of going, who can we help the most? But in what order? Like, what do we do? We do things to try and leave leave the office today and go that we saved more lives. And not that you ignore things, you go, Maybe there are people elsewhere doing other things as well.

00:43:53:24 – 00:44:15:01
Luke Freeman
So if you think back to the emergency room, you know what I’m not going there for my long term back issues that I have that I see a physio for and things like that, I go elsewhere and that’s kind of like what’s happening in philanthropy. But if you have at least some people who are focused on triage, I think you end up saving a lot more lives and making the world a lot better than if you didn’t have that.

00:44:15:11 – 00:44:45:18
Spencer Critchley
And this gets to part of the service you provide through giving what we can, right? That you actually advise people. Can you say a little bit more about that? You just use terms like portfolio and investment as if one were managing, you know, a stocks bonds portfolio. But can you say if somebody is inspired listening to what you’re saying and says, yeah, I want to abandon my ad hoc to giving approach to giving and be more effective and I could use some advice.

00:44:45:18 – 00:44:47:03
Spencer Critchley
What sort of advice is available?

00:44:47:18 – 00:45:11:27
Luke Freeman
Yeah, so the advice that we provide is a mix of we have a lot of information public on our website and we try to do as much as we can publicly and as to the evaluators and graphics that we work with, we don’t think that the Just trust US approach is good. We want to put the information out there and help people let people decide for themselves.

00:45:12:04 – 00:45:30:02
Luke Freeman
That being said, if you are impressed with what you see and you think that there is a lot of good work behind this, you can do things like put money into similar investments into a fund. So we have things like our Global Health and Wellbeing fund where we go, okay, what’s the best research being done at the moment?

00:45:30:17 – 00:45:49:10
Luke Freeman
Find this research partners and we work with them in doing grantmaking. Similarly, we have funds to helping future generations or animals. So if people want a relatively hands off approach, they can just like put money into a fund. And then we work really closely with grant makers during research and trying to make sure that that funding goes as far as possible.

00:45:49:25 – 00:46:18:03
Luke Freeman
Or they can look at a bunch of reports that we have on our website about individual organizations, stitch it together into a portfolio and make it a group donation that kind of is allocated between these different things. We also do one on one advice as well. If people want to talk through some of these things and often the conversations are more like the one that you and I are having is I care about so many things and I’m trying to actually make sense of these trade offs, and that’s conversations that are often really worthwhile having with us.

00:46:18:03 – 00:46:37:14
Luke Freeman
We’re also with that community. We often organize things like events or some online things that people can with each other as they’re wrestling with these questions about, you know, really tough questions, you know, problems in the world. But we do limit our advice to the things that we feel like we can actually really help with and that we see our time is valuable.

00:46:38:06 – 00:47:05:09
Luke Freeman
We have only so many resources as well and we really care about impact. So I’m not going to advise someone on a very customized portfolio that is focused on a lot of things that are outside of our remit, which is like helping the most vulnerable populations with the most effective measures. So if someone is thinking about, you know, maybe a donation to the alma mater or something affecting them personally, go for it if you want to add that to your portfolio.

00:47:05:09 – 00:47:14:27
Luke Freeman
But I’m not going to do a deep dive for them as to like how to squeeze the most out of that particular gift. We just don’t have the resources for that.

00:47:15:00 – 00:47:31:24
Spencer Critchley
And of course, there are there are organizations and consultants that do provide those customized services if people are seeking them. And it seems to me that the transparency you describe, which presumably everybody involved should be committed to, is a big part of the point.

00:47:32:01 – 00:47:56:03
Luke Freeman
Yeah. And another thing to add on that is that we provide a certain limited amount of advice ourselves, but that’s often the first point is getting to understand someone’s where they’re trying to head. And if people have above, yeah, a particular size of gift generally in the kind of hundreds of thousands of dollars, that’s when we are also in a position to introduce them to specialist grant makers.

00:47:56:03 – 00:48:13:07
Luke Freeman
So specialist grant makers like give well along with philanthropy or their startup founder down his pledge or other kind of small niche advisors that we know in our networks who can help people with particular high impact gifts in a very kind of more niche area that is a bit more hands on.

00:48:14:00 – 00:48:27:04
Spencer Critchley
So looking at where you’ve been and where you are now and where philanthropy in general is and where it was before. How do you feel about the prospects as you look ahead to the future?

00:48:27:23 – 00:48:59:12
Luke Freeman
I’m someone who is, I think in my nature is quite optimistic. I’m cautiously optimistic. I do see a lot of big problems in the world that we’re struggling to address and some things on the horizon that I could see going either way. But I kind of have this optimistic attitude that if you have more people who are inspired by people who care about doing good and people are working really hard, that’s how you solve it.

00:48:59:12 – 00:49:26:01
Luke Freeman
And being cynical or pessimistic is kind of guaranteeing a bad result. So even though I might be cautiously optimistic, I am pretty optimistic and that keeps me going and seeing things actually happen is very motivating. So seeing, you know, the last couple of years is a bit tough with COVID and a few other things like the Ukraine supply shortages.

00:49:26:15 – 00:49:57:16
Luke Freeman
But seeing for most of the last decade consistent drops in poverty has been very motivating despite, you know, the increases in meat consumption and some of the conditions getting worse in some places. We have seen huge innovations in animal products, alternatives and better regulation, especially in places like the EU around how you treat animals. And climate change has been one that, yes, we haven’t solved a lot of things, but the progress in the last few years has just been incredible to see.

00:49:57:27 – 00:50:33:11
Luke Freeman
And so many things just being just a matter of time as your renewable costs dropped dramatically and things like that. So there are things that I am concerned about that I do think we like really have a long way to go. You know, COVID was an example of a test that I think we failed, you know, something that we’ve been worried about for a long time and at giving what we can in this community as pandemic risks and COVID, as terrible as it was, is nowhere near as bad as pandemics.

00:50:33:19 – 00:50:58:15
Luke Freeman
Pandemics can be if it’s much more lethal and has a long incubation period and is much more infectious, we could see significant, just incredible damage. And we failed in many ways with COVID to show that we could actually step up and and solve this problem and not sufficient amount of funding has actually run into, you know, come into this space since.

00:50:58:29 – 00:51:10:07
Luke Freeman
But there are a of opportunities. And if you are able to take those opportunities, I think that, you know, it’s a world that I’ll be really happy to try and figure out my kids. And so hoping to get there.

00:51:10:07 – 00:51:30:12
Spencer Critchley
And I think that, you know, as you folks say on your website, as part of your self-description, it’s helping to build a culture of being effective in giving And in these kinds of interventions will also hopefully play a big role in that. And it seems to me that that is part of what you’re describing.

00:51:30:27 – 00:51:31:08
Luke Freeman
You know.

00:51:31:17 – 00:51:36:25
Spencer Critchley
Whatever progress we’re making on climate change is because a lot of people care about making progress on climate change.

00:51:37:07 – 00:52:21:01
Luke Freeman
And I’ll tell you what the best part of my day, honestly, like often, like have a shivers down the spine or, you know, shed a small tear is reading motivations that people submit when they sign to giving what we can pledge. So we have a pledge for people to give 10% of lifetime income to high impact charities. We also have other versions at a more flexible than that as well that people come to that often quite morally serious and quite challenged by the problems they see in the world, but motivated to do something about that and people writing down why is just such a motivating thing.

00:52:22:25 – 00:52:48:14
Luke Freeman
And yeah, it’s often something that it definitely keeps me going. So if you don’t mind, I’m definitely just going to reach like literally today someone said, I recognize that I give that anything I give away. I can have a much greater effect on others welfare than it can have on mine. And it makes sense that this effect should be as large as possible for any amount given.

00:52:49:01 – 00:52:58:21
Luke Freeman
And that was just an hour ago. And that honestly, seeing that pop up on my screen definitely makes us all worthwhile.

00:52:59:01 – 00:53:30:12
Spencer Critchley
Oh, that’s that’s a wonderful story. Thank you so much for for telling it. And I think that, you know, as part of building a culture of giving, one of the things that is most persuasive, I think, is that it can actually be seen the activity of service can actually be seen as something that serves yourself, and it’s something that we lose sight of in the culture that most of us live in, in the developed world anyway.

00:53:31:25 – 00:53:47:14
Spencer Critchley
Yeah. Where we assume that, you know, pleasure is something you seek for yourself or, or those you. But the act of service is itself deeply pleasurable, which sounds can sound even Pollyannish, but actually turns out to be true when you just give it a try.

00:53:47:26 – 00:54:09:09
Luke Freeman
And the science is clear. Like this has been looked at many times and people get a lot more lasting joy from meaningful pursuits that improve the world for others than they do for consumption on themselves. That has like a really rapid decay in many cases. You’ve ordered the next thing on the.

00:54:09:10 – 00:54:24:23
Spencer Critchley
Hedonic treadmill, the hedonic treadmill, right, where you’re you’re constantly seeking your own sardonic pleasure. Yeah, but you’re on a treadmill. You know, you have to keep seeking pleasure. You will, as another saying goes, you can never get enough of what you don’t need.

00:54:24:28 – 00:54:43:02
Luke Freeman
That was that was actually one of the things that I read, when I tell you the story of when I first started giving significant amounts, it was reading about the hedonic treadmill and some of the behavioral science and stuff that and psychology around that as well. I was like, man, and I felt it. I felt it personally.

00:54:43:02 – 00:55:03:05
Luke Freeman
Like you get those moments. I’d be, you know, looking at social media or something like that, and you’re like, Oh, now if I got that, that you kind of had this, like, that’ll make me happy. And, and then two weeks later you’re looking around your messy house and going, I’ve got too much stuff. Now I feel really bad about trying to, like, throw it out or sell it or.

00:55:03:25 – 00:55:21:22
Spencer Critchley
Get, oh, you know, I, you know, I think all of us are prone to that. All of us in in any kind of consumer society. And you know what? What’s often been observed, too, is that it not only does it fail to bring lasting happiness, but it can actually make you irritable, you know, more likely to be unhappy.

00:55:21:22 – 00:55:42:26
Spencer Critchley
It seems that the more people get of these kinds of gratifications, the more likely they are to be dissatisfied. Yeah. Jose Ortega y Gasset, you know, identified this a long time ago, that people start to behave in a way like, you know, renaissance princes or something who can never be pleased.

00:55:42:26 – 00:56:08:10
Luke Freeman
Yeah. And I tell you what it does cause you to think about the things that do bring you value. So, for example, like we do a family conspiracy Santa, where we all have a WhatsApp thread where we talk about the person who’s one person’s going to buy a gift and that we all get to pitch in and talk about what might be valuable to them and then when they get it, yeah, you might be like, Oh yeah, we all talked about this and that kind of it adds that value.

00:56:08:23 – 00:56:25:03
Luke Freeman
And so when you do take them out and go a step away from some of the mindless spending that we do and when you do spend on things, you can get more value from it than if you just kind of didn’t stop and think. Plus you then often have a bit more to help others as well.

00:56:25:27 – 00:56:47:09
Spencer Critchley
Exactly. And you know, one way people might want to consider spending is by going to giving what we can talk and seriously considering taking the giving pledge and facing that choice from a point of view of what it might offer you as well as everybody else. Well, look, I want to thank you so much for your time today.

00:56:47:09 – 00:56:54:14
Spencer Critchley
This has been absolutely fascinating and important and it’s really been a true pleasure to speak with you.

00:56:55:19 – 00:57:01:06
Luke Freeman
Thank you so much that I really enjoyed our conversation and wishing you the best for the rest of the festive season.

00:57:01:09 – 00:57:01:25
Spencer Critchley
You, too.

00:57:02:15 – 00:57:03:21
Luke Freeman
Thank you. Thank you.

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