Larry Temkin: transitivity, critiques of Effective Altruism, international aid, pluralism | Podcast

Larry Temkin is a moral philosopher. He has major works on inequality (book: Inequality); transitivity and social choices  (when A > B > C, A > C ?; book: Rethinking the Good) and recently on the philosophies of doing good (critiquing some aspects of Effective Altruism, long-termism, international aid, utilitarianism | book: Being Good in a World of Need). As of 2022, he was Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University. He was Derek Parfit’s first Phd student, and he supervised Nick Beckstead’s thesis*.

The podcast is in two parts. The second part focuses on Effective Altruism (EA) ideas. The first part looks at transitivity and other debates in philosophy through a pluralist lens. I am still reflecting greatly on the conversation where I judge I learned a lot. The whole conversation is 3 hours long, so please feel free to dip in and out of it, and if you are intrigued go and look at Larry’s original works* (and other critiques of Larry). I provide some links at the end, to his books and some commentary from others (Tyler Cowen, reviewers). There is a transcript at the end, which I have put into a shared google doc for ease of reading (approx 30,000 words).

In the podcast, I ask:

How should we value a human life?

What is transitivity? And we discuss the axioms that transitivity underpins for economic, social and moral choices.

I ask how Larry comes up with such unique ideas such as on inequality and transitivity, and the story of how he was rejected by three great philosophers when he first proposed his idea.

Larry explains consequentialist notions of personhood, especially with respect to a question I had on Singer’s view on disability, and even though our general views are more pluralist.

I pose a dilemma I have about the art of a friend who has done awful things, and Larry explains the messiness of morals.

(In part 2…) Larry recounts the dinner with Derek Parfit, and Angus Deaton, along with a billionaire and other brilliant philosophers. This dinner gave Larry bad dreams and lead to Larry thinking up many disanalogies to Peter Singer’s classic pond analogy.

We discuss the pond analogy and how it may or may not be a good analogy for doing good in foreign places especially the disaster that was Goma*. Larry discusses how he changed his mind on whether international aid may be doing more harm than good and both philosophical and practical reasons behind it. 

Larry also discusses some concern on the the possible over-focus on long-termism.

We barely touch on Larry’s work in inequality, but I will mention that it has been influential in how the World Health Organisation and potentially, ultimately, China has viewed access to healthcare. The work has also highlighted the complexity around equality, and that it may be more individualistic and more complicated than often assumed.

Throughout all of this is the strong sense of a pluralistic view of the world, where we may value many attributes such as fairness, justice, health and that a focus on only one value may lead us astray.

Larry ends with life advice:

“I've taught many students over the years. I'm coming to the end of my career. I'm retiring. I've had countless students in my office over the years who are struggling with the question of, "How should I lead my life? This is extremely controversial, but being the pluralist that I am, I believe in a balanced life. Now, you can find balance in a number of ways. But just as I'm a pluralist about my moral values, I'm a pluralist about what's involved in being a good person and what's involved in leading a worthwhile human life. I'm signed up in the camp of, "We only have one life to lead."

It would be great if there's reincarnation and we led multiple innumerable lives. It would be great if there was life after death, et cetera. I'm on board for all of that if it's there, but I'm not leading my life assuming any of that is true. I'm leading my life thinking I have one and only one life to lead. How am I going to lead it? I would like to lead a life. I would like it to have been true that I led a life that at the end of the day, I can look myself in the mirror and feel good about the life I live. This involves the life for me of things like personal integrity. How do you treat other human beings? Do you treat people with respect, et cetera? I believe that personal face to face confrontation matters. I believe the things in my life...

I'm wearing a shirt right now. I’m wearing this shirt on purpose today. It says, "I have been: Mr. Professor, and Doctor...” If you turn around to the back, it says, "But my favorite title is grandpa." I now have five grandchildren. I understand that having children is not for everybody, but for someone like me, or for my father, for my parents, the amount of joy and pleasure and pride that I get out of my children and grandchildren, there's nothing in my professional lives that compares to it. For all the accomplishments that I've had-- I've had a few. All the impact on the world that some people have say I've had which is major-- none of that. It all pales in comparison to the relationship I've had with my wife going back to when we met decades ago. .

I put a tremendous amount of weight on the value of human relations. Parent a child, love towards significant others. These are tremendous services of value in human life. I pity my peers who are at the absolute pinnacle of intellectual achievement, but whose lives are lacking in so many other ways. So Derek Parfit who I've mentioned before, he was my mentor. He was my closest friend in philosophy for 40 years. I still think about him almost every day. I love Derek, but I would never have wanted to be Derek. And I wouldn't want anybody I care about to be Derek. He accomplished unbelievable things as a world class philosopher. But his life was, to my mind, missing so much of what makes a life valuable. So I wouldn't recommend that life. He didn't regret the life he had. And I have other philosopher friends like Derek; single minded, focus on their philosophy, that comes first, second, and third, and they wouldn't have traded their lives for anything. I get that.

I don't see that as the most valuable human life. One of the ways of thinking about this is, I have a model which I use in my Rethinking the Good… It was called the Gymnastic Model for many years and now I've given it a new name. Often when we think about like, "Who's the greatest gymnast? The best all-around gymnast?"

The greatest all around gymnast is not the gymnast who excels at the parallel bars, but stinks at everything else. I don't care how good you are at the parallel bars or how good you are at the mats. If you are not good in anything else, you're not a great all round gymnast. Similarly, when you think about the virtues, I don't care how much Genghis Kahn might have the virtue of loving his mother-- pretend that's a virtue.

He might love his mother an unbelievable amount, but he's not a virtuous person if he rapes and pillages and kills and steals and does all these other things. It doesn't matter how accomplished he is along that one dimension, if he's abysmal along the other dimensions. If you want to be a virtuous person, a truly virtuous person, you have to score pretty highly along a whole bunch of dimensions. Similarly, I think for the human life, if you really want to have a great human life-- and this is why I try to urge my students, you can't be narrowly focused on any one of the aspects that make a human life valuable. That's my view. I have colleagues who don't share it, but you're interviewing me right now and you're asking my view. When I give my advice to the people I care about...

Nobody can do everything. You can't be everything. We live in an age of specialization. I don't do every academic field. I don't even do every academic field within philosophy. I don't even do every academic field within moral philosophy. I specialize. One of the reasons I'm as good or not as good as I am in moral philosophy is… I spent 15 years working on my first book and, 30 years working on my second book. That means a lot of hedgehogging rather than foxes. So I get the appeal to focusing on something and trying to do it well. But when it comes to living a good human life, it can't just be narrowly focused on one thing. There has to be space for these other things that allow a human being to flourish. That's what I believe and that's certainly how I've tried to live my life.

There's an old expression from the tradition I grew up with that says, "If you are not for you, then who will be? If you're only for you, then what are you?" Basically, that means we do have the right and the permission to look out after our own wellbeing and those of those we love. I believe that. But if we only look out after ourselves and those we love, and we don't take time to sense of the larger world of which we're apart, our lives are not good lives…”

Listen above and with video, or below on podcast wherever you get podcasts:

*Links to work:

I mention Derek Parfit. Derek was consider by many to be one of the great (if not at the end of his life in 2017, one of the greatest) moral philosophers. Larry was Derek’s first phd student, a long time friend, and his work on transitivity is deeply tied up with Parfit’s Reasons and Persons. Parfit was also an EA supporter.

I mention Nick Beckstead, as Beckstead is CEO at FTX Foundation and was an early leading figure for Open Philanthropy, and the Centre for Effective Altruism.

For Goma, see Linda Polman’s The Crisis Caravan and also Chapter 7.5 in Temkin’s Being Good in a World of Need.

This is the Amazon link to Inequality.  Here is Larry Temkin’s essay which draws together some central results of his work on inequality.  Inequality: A Complex, Individualistic, and Comparative Notion.

“...I discussed at some length a position I then called extended humanitarianism, and which I now call prioritarianism. On this view, one wants each person to fare as well as possible, but is especially concerned with—and hence gives extra weight or priority to—the worse-off….  “

This is the Amazon link to Rethinking the Good.  Here is a detailed review of the book (Richard Kraut, 2012). And this is Tyler Cowen with a blog post on the book (2012). Tyler writes:

 “While not an easy read, it is the most important work in choice theory and social choice in some time….The main contribution of this book is to show you that the transitivity postulate is far less intuitively appealing than it seems at first.  Twenty-two years ago I disagreed with Temkin but now I accept much of his critique.  Here is one very good Temkin piece from JSTOR.  These days, I see the good is more holistic than additive-aggregative.  This defuses Temkin’s arguments, though at a high cost.  (You will find Temkin’s criticisms of holism and related ideas at around p.355, though I find them unusually lacking in force.  One of his worries boils down to how a multiplicative view will handle negative numbers but I see the scale as sufficiently arbitrary that they need not pop up to begin with.)  We can make some gross comparisons of better and worse at the macro level, with partial rankings at best, but for many individualized normative comparisons there simply isn’t a right answer.  I view “ranking” as a luxury, occasionally available, rather than an axiomatic postulate which can be used to generate normative comparisons, and thus normative paradoxes, at will.  I see that response as different than allowing or embracing intransitivity across multiple alternatives and in that regard my final position differs from Temkin’s.  Furthermore, in a holistic approach, the “pure micro welfare numbers’ used to generate the paradoxical comparisons aren’t necessarily there in the first place but rather they have to be derived from our intuitions about the whole”

This is the Amazon link to Being Good in a World of Need. You can view the 2017 Uehiro lectures here (although his ideas are a little updated from this). This is a 2021 YT video/podcast with Friction purely on notions in the book. This is the TLS review of the book (Mark Hannam,  March 2022).  And this is Tyler Cowen’s blog post:

His new book is Being Good in a World of Need, and most of all I am delighted to see someone take Effective Altruism seriously enough to evaluate it at a very high intellectual level.  Larry is mostly pro-EA, though he stresses that he believes in pluralist, non-additive theories of value, rather than expected utility theory, and furthermore that can make a big difference (for instance I don’t think Larry would play 51-49 “double or nothing” with the world’s population, as SBF seems to want to).

So where does the red pill come in?  Well, after decades of his (self-described) intellectual complacency, Larry now wonders whether foreign aid is as good as it has been cracked up to be:

…In this chapter, I have presented some new disanalogies between Singer’s original Pond Example, and real-world instances of people in need.  I have noted that in some cases people in need may not be “innocent” or they may be responsible for their plight.  I have also noted that often people in need are the victims of social injustice or human atrocities.  Most importantly, I have shown that often efforts to aid the needy can, via various different paths, increase the wealth, status, and power of the very people who may be responsible for human suffering that the aid is intended to alleviate.  This can incentivize such people to continue their heinous practices against their original victims, or against other people in the region.  this can also incentivize other malevolent people in positions of power to perpetrate similar social injustices or atrocities. …

The book also presents some remarkable examples of how some leading philosophers, including Derek Parfit, simply refused to believe that such arguments might possibly be true, even when Nobel Laureate Angus Deaton endorsed one version of them (not exactly Larry’s claims, to be clear).

Another striking feature of this book is how readily Larry accepts the rising (but still dissident) view that the sexual abuse of children has been a grossly underrated social problem.

What is still missing is a much greater focus on innovation and economic growth.

I am very glad I bought this book, and I look forward to seeing which pill or half-pill Larry swallows next.  Here is my post on Larry’s previous book Rethinking the Good.  Everyone involved in EA should be thinking about Larry and his work, and not just this latest book either.

Transcript Below, also available on shared google doc here:

Larry Temkin and Ben Yeoh in Conversation Transcript (July 2022)

This is an unedited transcript of a podcast transcript between Larry Temkin and Ben Yeoh. (Expect typos, and grammar errors typical of a conversation). The transcript covers 3 hours of conversation held in July 2022. The podcast is in two parts and available on podcast platforms and YouTube. The second part focuses on Effective Altruism ideas. The first part looks at transitivity, and other debates in philosophy through a pluralist lens. There is more in this blog post. You can CRTL-F  the word “rhubarb” to quickly go to part 2.

Ben (00:03):

Hey, everyone. I'm super excited to be speaking to Larry Temkin. I told my friend I'm going to be podcasting with Larry and they replied, "He is a genius." This assertion, I think, rests on Larry's work on inequality and so called transitivity. In particular, the work on inequality might have been very impactful on thinking around the importance of access to healthcare. Reading Larry's work, for me, has made me think quite hard about how to live a good life, especially living in a rich nation, and questioning some of the assumptions behind certain aspects of effective altruism. Larry's books have also led me to question how much weight we can put on using expected value decision making tools, especially for moral questions. For those of you on video, this is a copy of one of his books, and this is a copy of another one of his books. I would suggest you get them; Being Good in a World of Need and Rethinking the Good. I just realized on Rethinking the Good, just today, that is the lollipop analogy on the front page there which I hadn't twigged until today. So I'm feeling-- I don't know whether slightly clever or not clever for only realizing that. So, Larry welcome.

Larry (01:21):

Well, thanks Ben. It's great to finally meet you. We've been talking about doing this for some months now, and it's great that this is finally happening. I have to say, as long as you were kind enough to hold that up, you cut off half of the picture. So I'm going to hold it up a little bit higher. The reason for that is the cover of this was actually drawn by my daughter. I love that she did that. She asked me, "Could I do the cover of your next book?" And I said, "Sure." But you're right, it is the lollipop example which is a seminal example in that book. Anyway, great pleasure to meet you and to be talking with you today. I hope it is enjoyable for your audience.

Ben (02:02):

Excellent. So I'm going to start with an easy one. How should we value a human life? Can we put a dollar figure amount on it? And when should we, or should we not? I have an example in mind. So here in the UK, we have a national health service and this health service has to make judgements. Broadly speaking, there is a set of people and policymakers who have decided that if a lifesaving treatment costs more than about 30,000 pounds for a life year, technically a good quality life year, they will pay for it. But if it costs more than 30,000 pounds for a life year, then they are minded not to pay for it because they can do other treatments which would be saving a life for under 30,000 pounds. So they decide this way for most treatment such as a diabetes treatment or a migraine treatment or something like that.

However, they also make some notable exceptions. Two of these exceptions which are quite notable for me, are for rare genetic diseases and also for premature babies. Here, treatments for that under most reasonable assumptions cost much more than 30,000 pounds per life year, particularly for premature babies where you can easily get into the hundreds of thousands of pounds. But one of the arguments given is that there is society preference-- not by everybody, but by quite a lot of people, and in the majority of people it seems when they've done this work to help premature babies, because there is no other treatment for them. So that's a kind of practical example thinking about this and how you go about valuing a human life and some of these problems or challenges which I can touch upon your work. So what do you make of that?

Larry (04:01):

Great question. In fact, I've never been asked that question before, and I don't have any pat answer to pull out for you. But I have a bunch of things to say about this kind of question. So the question of, "How much is a human life worth?" It's not the right question. It's not how I would frame the question though I realize that societies have to, in essence, answer that question every time, all the time. Not just in the healthcare system, but when you talk about, “Should you fix roads? Should you fix a curve in a road? How much is it going to cost? How many people are going to drive on it? How many people might die if you do or don't do it?" These are all sort of cost benefit analysis type questions of, "What's it worth for?"

The questions for me that we have to answer are not an absolute, “How much is a human life worth?” as if there's a single answer. But, what are the values that we care about as a society, as individuals, as members of the society when we think about these questions. So the reason I put it that way is that there are fundamental issues of fairness and justice that come into play here, which stand opposed to-- as my work and as you are well aware of, certain kinds of questions which the, "How much is life worth?” question push us towards, which is the kind of cost benefit analysis. How do we get the most pay for the buck? It seems it's inefficient to spend a lot of money to save an infant or to save someone at the end of their lives if it's going to cost millions of pounds to do so, when you could take those same millions of pounds, in theory, and spend it in lots of other ways and save far more people. Doesn't that seem better?

Well, the sum total of people who say it will be better, yes. But, questions about fairness aren't just the same as questions about efficiency. They’re unrelated-- there are certain ways in which they are related, but they're not related. The other question is, the reason why I want to bark at just answering the question the way it's framed is, we as a society are constantly being told that we have to make trade-offs between this costly procedure and this cheaper procedure which affects similar ends, et cetera. And I think perhaps we do. But the question really is-- when we're asking this question, "What is the actual trade-off? Why is the trade-off between this person's expensive care in order to save their lives and these people's less expensive cares to save their lives, rather than this person's expensive care to save their lives and this person's ability to buy a jet and fly down to an island that they own, which is a private island somewhere in the middle of nowhere, blah, blah, blah.”

When we as a society spend here in the United States a billion dollars on our pleasure palaces which is the State Arena where our football teams play, or a billion dollars on arenas, or half a billion dollars on arenas where our basketball teams play or our baseball teams play, and you think about all these kinds of issues, these are the trade-offs I really want us to think about. I want us to think about when we have these questions. We're constantly told, "We only have a budget. Budget is this amount. How should we make these trade-offs between this expensive health policy and this much less expensive health policy?” If those were literally the only trade-offs in play, I could be moved more to think, “Well, it's 12 lives with this cheaper efficient way, and it's one life with this way, blah, blah, blah.”

But if you tell me, but meanwhile, in the background there are these massive amounts of inequalities and accesses-- what some people regard as accesses, things that people spend enormous amounts of funds on that actually don't necessarily improve the quality of their life; maybe not even at all, but even if it does, maybe perhaps the bad image. They're not sure that we should be taking seriously this question of, "How do we choose between who lives and who dies in this area?" Rather than putting pressure elsewhere on it as it were, the economic systems that are fortunate to make these choices while we allow all these other kinds of things to go on in the system.

If I just say, "Well, I think a human life is worth this, and so we should make all our decisions that way,” I'm already buying into all the background assumptions, most of which I actually just reject. So I'm inclined to sort of not answer the question the way it was put and to want to shift our attention to these other larger questions. But I can enter a philosopher's room where I say all these other things are not there. We don't have vast inequalities and we don't have people spending hundreds of millions of dollars on giant yachts and they have 12 homes and so on. None of that is prevalent. Now we have to make some of these tough choices. Even then I would decline to say a human life is worth one amount rather than another. I would then still be trying to pay attention to questions of, "What would be fair, what would be just, how do we give everyone equal opportunities to live? How should we weigh those kinds of considerations?" These are more about comparisons and about values than about the absolute value of a human life.

Ben (10:09):

That makes sense. So I pull two things out of that, although there's quite a lot. One is, there's a higher level question as to-- Maybe I misused the word in terms of pluralism, but thinking about other aspects, both on the systems level, are there other things we should be judging? But also these other ideals of fairness or equality or things like that? I do think there is something though that the health authorities, for instance, do in the end have to try and make that decision. But in some ways, you're sort of saying that the philosophy question is perhaps a tier above that.

Larry (10:51):

Let me re-enter the question for a second with a concrete case that I discussed in my most recent book, “Being Good in a World of Need.” So there is a charity called Village Reach. It's a well-known charity and it operates throughout the world, but mostly in Africa. The aim of Village Reach is to reach so called last mile communities. And the idea is the Village Reach is a charity that recognizes that there are all sorts of very needy people; mostly in rural areas scattered throughout Africa and elsewhere, where there are infrastructure problems and there are medical personnel problems. There's a whole host of problems that are in play that make it difficult for people who are very ill in these distant rural communities; the so-called last mile communities, to get healthcare.

Strikingly oddly, certain effective altruist organizations such as GiveWell, for many years had ranked the Village Reach as one of their top rated charities. What that basically means is that they judged that the money that you spent in contributing-- if you made contribution to Village Reach, was money well spent, that was efficiently being used, and that this charity was doing what it said it was doing for the money that you were giving it. It turns out that for a variety of well-known reasons that Village Reach is actually intended to counteract. A charity of this kind is not efficient. It's not efficient if what you want to do is maximize the number of lives saved. This is what health organizations like the World Health Organization and many international aid organizations have recognized because by and large, you can do a lot more good if what you're merely interested in is saving the most lives.

If you focus on the large cities; you put a hospital in a large city, you put a hospital in a place like Kibera, which is the largest slum in Africa, and a single doctor can reach hundreds of thousands of people. Where similarly, if you go to villages that are in the middle of nowhere and there's a hundred people in the village or less, to send a doctor out there to address the needs of a dying child is just not efficient. It's not cost effective. But the point of a charity like Village Reach is to say that the child who's born in rural Africa, their life is just as valuable as the lives of the children that are born in the major cities in Nairobi or wherever else. And they should have an equal chance at life and having a normal life expectancy.

So this charity has risen up to meet a demand that most of the poor nations of the world healthcare systems just can't meet that demand. But the thing to note here is that this is a charity that at its root, has a certain conception of fairness in mind. It's not a, "How do we do the most good with the money?" It's a, "Does this child's life matter any less than these children's?" It's with that in mind-- And there are deep philosophical backgrounds to this kind of thinking. Kant famously claimed that each person's life was worth infinite value. That may be too strong. But the point about each person's life is worth infinite value, is in essence the view that you don't crate off between lives. You don't say, "Well, here's one life here and here's two lives here. I could save these two people if I'm just wanting to kill this person and distribute their organs. Are two lives more valuable than one?" Kant says, "Well, each of their lives is infinitely valuable. Each of their lives has value without bound, and you don't increase the total value in the world by killing one innocent person in order to save two others.” That's not how we should be guided in our thinking.

I'm not a strict counting by any means. I actually give a great deal of weight in my own thinking to so called consequences considerations, the kind of efficiency considerations that motivate organizations like effective altruism and such. I give great way to it, but that's kind of one important moral ideal and it has to be balanced against other ideals. That was the point of my initial response and the point of my talking about places like Village Reach. I think there's the place in our Pantheon of valuable charities that will rank something like Village Reach, which is highly inefficient in terms of most life saved for the dollar, but highly efficient in terms of giving weight to a value like equality or fairness.

Ben (16:04):

Sure. That makes sense and that feels like an analogy to the UK health service issue. I guess that has made me reflect a little bit on something to do -- And you've written about this a little bit as well. The nature of perhaps time and also distance. There's a little bit on the sense of fairness, I think particularly with babies, because we feel that they have a future and there is something about thinking about future selves. Then I think drawing in the example of the Village in Africa, there is something about distance, about perhaps it not being necessarily as morally relevant when we're thinking about weighing lives. And like you say, if you get to the Kant view of it being infinite, then actually things like time and distance fade away. Have you changed your view of thinking about time and distance over your thinking around this?

Larry (17:02):

Not over my thinking about this per se. Historically, people have thought questions about time and distance are philosophically simple, but practically complex. So, the thought would be historically that we should be neutral with respect to people; all people's lives are valuable, places; it doesn't matter where in space someone is suffering. What matters is that someone is suffering somewhere, and neutral with respect a time. So if I could save one person alive today, or 500 people who will be alive in a hundred years from now; 500 lives obviously is equal, more important than one life. This gets into the question we started with. Supposed we take that for a minute. And the fact that it's in the distant future, that doesn't matter. It's 500 versus one. So from a theoretical standpoint, most philosophers and economists and others have agreed that we should be neutral, theoretically with respect to people, places, and times. But practically speaking, it can make a big difference whether someone is right next to you or further away. It can make a difference whether you can help someone now or in the future. Because someone who might need your care now will assuredly die if you don't help them.

Someone in the future might die if you help them. They might not even come to exist if you do or don't make certain actions now. Or they might come to exist, but there might be technological developments that will enable you to save those 500 people. The technologies you would have saved, not use the resources here now, in order to say in the future, turn out to be obsolete and aren't even necessary as you let this person die for nothing. These are sort of practical considerations. They're not theoretical considerations. They're practical considerations. As a matter of fact, I've come to the view and published a bit that even the theoretical questions are not nearly as simple as most people have thought; that it's just a simple matter of being neutral with respect to people, places and times.

When I say that, there's always a kind of other things equal clause here. So when I say that you ought to be neutral with respect to people, I'm not suggesting that means that there can't be special relationships. So, between me and my wife, me and my children, me and my mother. But the point is, if there are special relationships that enable me to treat my mother differently than a stranger, then that's supposed to be true for everyone. That's the kind of neutrality I'm talking about here. So if another stranger has a mother, they get to treat their mother the same way I get to treat my mother. That's the sense in which neutrality could be compatible with different people having special obligations or agree towards those they're in close contact with. But anyway, the questions about space and time; neutrality with respect to people, places, and times, people have made a lot of assumptions about these over the years. That we are to treat these different possible locations of the good, the same. We are to treat time, or space, or people-- they're all the same from a moral standpoint. I've actually published that that's not right. I think that turns out to be extremely complicated. But that would take us down a philosophical rabbit hole probably which would try the patience of your readers.

But if your readers are interested in this, they might look at some of my articles where I argue about people, places, and times. And I show that the common assumption that they're all different locations of the good and we ought to treat them all the same. That's not only not plausible, it's not even possible in certain kinds of cases. They're actually incompatible with each other.

Ben (21:15):

That seems to be a thread when I follow your work, because it's similar on inequality that if I were to sum it up, you look at it and go, "Well, we thought it might have been theoretically simple, but it turns out that actually it's also theoretically complicated." I'm going to come back to this nearness of people because it's actually a small point in your book, perhaps, but it really struck me that you make a point about when someone is right in front of you, the immediacy of that moment-- I don't whether there is a certain phrase for it. That actually struck me as quite true, but that's from my work within theater and art. But we'll come to that because I think it will help understand the Singer's pond analogy when we get to some of the disanalogies on that.

So maybe before getting to that, I was maybe going to touch on your work on transitivity. But before touching on that, I was really interested in essentially how you've come about your ideas and how do philosophers think. I'm interested in how we as humans say progress. So we can progress technologically. We can progress socially. And I think we seem to progress morally. If you go a thousand years ago, the consensus was, “Slaves are fine.” Come to today, the consensus is, “Slaves are not fine.” I think most people also agree today that's actually some sort of moral or social progress. And some of that could have come from a moral or philosophical thinking. I was just rereading the front of your book and some of your thinking around this area you had quite earlier on. I think maybe you say 1977 or something like that.

You first propose it to a couple of some of the greatest living at the time; moral philosophers. They basically say, "Doesn't seem to make any sense." So you parked that idea for several years. But there's something about it which you haven't quite let go, and you have a couple of students who reignite it with you and you come to it again. It's interesting, and we'll come to this dinner that you have, which I think seems to be one of the greatest, perhaps moral philosophy dinners of the last 10 or 20 years. But again, you have these thoughts go around in your head. You can't sleep very easily. You run all of these scenarios. You seem to be almost dreaming about it to come to some sort of conclusion. It also now seems to be the case particularly if we think about transitivity, that people who didn't agree with you and people who thought this is completely crazy are kind of thinking, "Well, maybe this is truth. Maybe this is some discovery or at least something we need to take really seriously," which strikes me as some form of progress from something which is a very non-consensus idea, has sprung out of your brain somehow and come out into the world.

I'm not sure. Is there anything we can think about or learn about this? Maybe we can't because we don't have a good sense of it. But I was really struck how, if this is true about sensitivity and it seems to be certain true of inequality, and maybe some of these ideas that you've recently expressed, they've gone against a consensus grain but they've also then maybe allowed us to progress. There seems to be something quite important about that process upstream. I wondered whether you'd had any reflections on this, or whether you've come to think, "Well, that's interesting. This is an idea which in 1977 might have died and never come to light,” in which case actually, all of these other downstream effects may not have happened, but actually it did.

Larry (24:57):

Yeah. So this is a great question, Ben. Some of this is just luck. I couldn't write a prescription for how this happens. I can say several things which is that... I mean, part of it is just me. I remember when I was in ninth grade, I had a high school teacher and she said to me, "Oh Larry iconoclast you.” To be honest, I didn't know what that word meant, but I looked it up and I saw and said, "Yeah. I'm kind of happy with that." For those of you audience members who don't want to have to look it up, I'll just tell you. Iconoclast is just like a breaker of idols. So I've always had it in me that... My absolute favorite expression for the bumper sticker that I love is, question authority.

It's not necessarily disobey authority, but it's always question authority. So in some sense, this is the heart of what philosophies have always done. They question the given. Going back to Plato and Plato's cave, here's this world that we're surrounded in. Is it the real world? Are we just seeing shadows on a cave and we don't know the difference? Kant and Hume and all these great philosophers who have raised all these great skeptical questions they cart, "How do I know that I'm dreaming and I'm not awake?" These are all basically questioning even the most fundamental truths. The most fundamental truths is like there's a tree outside my window, or I exist and lots of other people exist and then people have the problem of other minds.

Well, how do I know anybody else exists? How do I know there's any center of consciousness anywhere, but here? So part of this is just as it were, a philosophical tradition that goes back to the pre-Socratics, to question, to question, to question. Some people have philosophical temperaments and some people don't. It turns out I'm one of those people who do. I have a philosophical temperament. I've always questioned things. My parents would tell me things and they tell my siblings things. I have three very bright siblings. They all have doctorate degrees, or lawyer degrees, or whatever. They're very bright. They're very smart. I would be questioning everything and my siblings would say, "Yeah, okay, that sounds right." So part of the thing is, “Is having a kind of temperament that allows you to question things and to be open to the possibility that even the things that everybody thinks must be true, might still not be true.” I am actually just always open to that possibility.

Then there's the element of, as it were, luck or being sparked. In my case, being sparked by a genius; a certifiable genius. My mentor was Derek Parfit. He was, in my judgment, a great living moral philosopher until the time of his death not that long ago. One of the great moral philosophers, I believe, since Kant. He was a towering figure, and I had the great fortune of working very closely with him. The thing about Derek is he was just brilliant. So you're in the presence of brilliance and he would create these arguments. He was this argument machine. He would generate all these arguments. He was so bright, and he was so clever, and he was so smart. People in the presence of Derek would often just listen to his arguments and they'd be blown away and think, "Wow, that's amazing. That must be right."

But I just always had this element of... I would read Derek's arguments and I would often think, "Well, I can see why he says that, but..." Then something in the back of my head would nag at me and would just make me want to think about it a little bit different way. Both of the things you're discussing here-- and maybe we'll get to the conversation of the dinner which was quite fun for my third book. But the spark of both of my first two books came from incredibly rich arguments that Derek made where he made claims, and most people read those claims and just accepted them. I read those claims and for whatever reason, I didn't just accept them. I thought, "Hmm. Maybe, but maybe not." The story about the transitivity, I'll just quickly relate it for your audience.

It was the case. Derek had created this incredibly clever argument which he called, the mere addition paradox. I won't go to the details of the mere addition paradox, but the form of the mere addition paradox is it was considering three different possible futures where the world would go. He asked us to judge how these different worlds compared, how these different possible outcomes compared. He considered three of them and they were called the A world, the A+ world, and the B world. He gave very powerful arguments for thinking that the A world was better than the B world, and they were very compelling arguments. Then he made very compelling arguments to the claim that the B world was better than the A+ world, and they were also very compelling arguments. Then he gave this incredibly compelling series of arguments for the view that A+ was not worse than A. But that was a contradiction, according to the standard assumptions of what's called the axiom of transitivity for better, which human beings have accepted more or less since we came down from the trees.

The thought is, if A is better than B and B is better than C, then A must be better than C. So if A was better than B and B was better than A+, then A must be better than A+. But Derek supposedly had these arguments to show A was better than B, and B was better than A+, but A wasn't better than A+. Derek took that to show that we had this paradox, and we had to figure out which of these various claims had to go. We didn't know which of them had to go, but we knew that one of them had to go because they were incompatible with the axiom of transitivity.

This axiom was just accepted without argument for centuries of human thought. I mean, everybody accepted them. Philosophers accept them, psychologists accept them, economists accept them, mathematicians accept them, physicists; everybody accepted them. But the thing is, when I read Derek's arguments, I thought, "Geez, A really is better than B and B really is better than A+. But it isn't clear that A is better than A+." Maybe the lesson to be learned from the mere addition paradox is not that we have to give up one of these very plausible claims, but rather that we have to give up the action of transitivity. That entered my head and the thing is I was open to that. Nobody else was. Everybody else read that they had an axiom. They just accepted, "Axiom of transitivity must be true." I took this and I went to, as you say, three of the greatest living philosophies at the time. I took this thought that's inside of mine, that maybe the lesson that we learned from the mere addition paradox was that, "All things considered better than wasn't a transitive relation.”

I ran this first by Tom Nagel, who was in my judgment along with Derek, one of the two great living bowl of philosophies of the 20th century. Tom just looked at me and he sort of shook his head very sadly with this kind of mixture of pity and contempt. And he said, "Oh, Larry, I wouldn't understand what someone meant if they said that all things considered A was better than B, and all things considered B was better than C, but all things considered A wasn't better than C." He was the great Tom Nagel and I was like a punk graduate student at the time that thought, "Oh man, I must be an idiot" and I wandered out of his office. But then I took this question to another teacher of mine. A guy named Tim Cannon who was at Princeton at the time and later at Harvard. He was a MacArthur award winner, so-called genius award. Brilliant philosopher. I ran the same thought by him. I said," Tim, it seems to me that maybe the lesson to be learned from Derek's mere addition paradox is that all things considered better than isn't a transitive relation."

He didn't look at me as if I was an idiot the way Tom had, but he basically said, "Larry, that can't be. All things considered better than is true by definition. If you know the meaning of the words, you know that must be true.” And then I ran them by Derek whose paradox it was. I thought if anyone will appreciate the possibility that there's this incredibly mind all three new way of thinking about the world that comes out of his work, it should be Derek. I ran by Derek and Derek gave me the same answer. He basically said, "Larry, that just couldn't be true." So they basically all told me that, "You're an idiot. Go home and do something else with your life." I did put it on hold for a while, but thanks to several students around, I did come back to it. I did explore it. Then eventually, I came to the view that maybe I was right and I could even explain what was going on. So I had an explanation, both for why people thought that "all things considered better than must be true," but for why it might not actually be true. And this had to do with an exploration about the very nature and structure of the good, which people assume to be one way, but on examination, in fact, it turns out perhaps to be another way. If it is another way, then there's no reason at all to expect all things considered better than to be a transitive relation.

And it is a striking feature that when I started this particular work as a graduate student in 1977, it was universally opposed. Now, when I travel to the best graduate programs in philosophy in the world, the next generation or two generations forward now, the graduate students are all perfectly prepared to accept that all things considered better than might not be a transitive relation. In a matter of basically 40 years, two generations among graduate students in philosophy, it's been a radical shift from this is conceptually impossible, or as the great philosopher, former vice chair of Moral Philosophy at Oxford, John Broome once told me, it's logically impossible that all things considered better than might be not a transitive relation. And now, many people, including some people in economics have agree with that, and yeah, maybe this is right.

Ben (36:26):

That strikes me as an amazing story on two or three levels. Let me pick out a couple of reflections and one addition. The addition is that when you came back to this work-- And maybe we wouldn't have all of your brilliant work on inequality had you only come to this conclusion. So maybe there was a silver lining for this. You sent the write up of your thoughts to Derek, who mythology goes was very busy, had just published, and then took it up halfway up a mountain in India, read it and went, "Wow, you might be right. I really paraphrase this kind of thing.” But actually, he had the openness of mind, which you suggest is perhaps a trait of philosophers. I also think Derek has a kind of interesting style of thinking which maybe I've called perhaps autistic cognitive, to some degree as well. But this pursuit of a certain thread of thought. But I thought that was very interesting.

I might just mention why I found it so troubling or at least thoughtful when I've only rarely recently came across your work around this. This is because if things aren't transitive particularly around this-- So like you say, it's very easy to see in numbers. The language of numbers; three is bigger than two. Two is bigger than one. So obviously three is bigger than one. And you can see this within the heights of people, right? So this seems to be quite obvious. But we use this as the background for economic utility theory and all of that decision making theory to actually where alluded to right at the beginning. And so if there is something potentially not always right, or not always situations where we can really hold that, it has really weakened some of my thinking about the moral choices of when you're using utility theory, which is still obviously a very useful decision framework.

But I think that relates to my first question, because actually, it seems to be the case that it isn't really all-encompassing as perhaps we would like it to be. It doesn't solve all of these problems for it. I remember listening to you. You had one very good example around pain as to why you could have a thought of experiment on that. But does that still hold for you then that this does probably slightly down weight the idea of how we can use utility theory because of your thinking around transitivity? Are those sort of examples still…? Has your thinking much evolved around that, or is it kind of evolved as how it was? Maybe you would want to give the quick example around pain or something else so that people can understand what it might be and why this seems so problematic. If you think that's a good example, or maybe anything else which is kind of easy to understand for this axiom of transitivity.

Larry (39:20):

Sure. Let me say several things. First, I'll give the general answer. I'll give a particular example. It's a striking thing because economists have always-- and I admire economists greatly. I think their contributions to the progress of humanity has been immense. I have many very good friends who are economists who I admire greatly and who have influenced me significantly: Angus Deaton, Nobel Laureate, John Broome who was trained under Nobel Laureate as an economist. These are all very brilliant people. There's much to be learned from them and from what economics has given us. Expected utility theory is an extremely powerful theory, but it does have a bunch of axioms. These are the premises on which this theory is built.

I have challenged in my book, Rethinking the Good, a good number of its most fundamental axioms, at least three. If the axioms of a theory aren't true-- and I think there's very powerful reason to think they're not true, then that theory isn't true. It's just not. That should give one great pause of putting too much weight on a theory whose fundamental axioms are questionable. So my thinking about that has not changed. There are still cases where we all implicitly rely on the axiom of transitivity in our everyday thinking. And there are lots of cases where we rely on standard economic expected utility theory reasoning in our everyday reasoning, but that doesn't mean it's right. It's deeply questionable. Let me give a concrete example and then I'll just mention one that's a little bit harder to grasp. But here's a concrete example for your audience.

So, I've been lecturing on the topic of transitivity now for 35 or 40 years; 30 years at least. I've traveled all around the world and I will often ask my audience the following question. Suppose that you or a loved one is going to have to have a certain intensity of pain. So I'm just going to measure that. I'm going to show you a visual diagram. The height of this when I raise this up is the intensity of the pain. So a certain intensity of pain for a certain duration of time. So if I go like that, that's how long it is. So certain intensity of pain for a certain duration of time. So you or a loved one is going to have to have a certain intensity of pain for a certain duration, or you or your loved one is going to have a slightly less intense pain-- so not quite as intense, slightly less, but it's going to last two, or three, or five times as long. And the question is, "What do you want for yourself or someone you love?" Do you want a certain intensity of pain for a given duration of time? Or do you want slightly less? I mean, just ever so slightly. They barely notice it, a little bit less, but it's going to last two or three or five times as long. That's my first question.

Now just to tell you, if your audience is... I should have said, "Think along with this question. When I ask it, think what you want for yourself or someone you really love. Your mom, your daughter, your significant other, whatever." Almost unanimously people say, "I want the slightly more intense pain that's much shorter in duration." It's not literally unanimous, but it's almost unanimous. I then ask my audiences the following question. There are two ways your life might go. In both lives there could be very, very long lives, as long as you might possibly want. And there's going to be 15 mosquito bites a month for the duration of your life. I came up with this example a long time ago when I lived in Houston, Texas. We have lots of mosquitoes in Houston, Texas so I was constantly scratching the mosquito bites. They're annoying. They're not the end of the world, but they are annoying. And I constantly have mosquito bites on me. So I was thinking, 15 bites a month for the rest of your life. Background, that's part of what goes with living in Houston.

But in addition, at one point in this very long life, you or your loved one; your son, your daughter, your significant other is going to have two years of the most excruciating pain humanly imaginable. So everything you've ever seen or heard or read in the worst be novels or movies about how torture might go-- And I don't want to make light of it because some people have actually gone through this. The bamboo shoots under the fingernails, the wax in the eyes, the electrodes hooked up to your genitals. It's everything that could possibly be bad. You're being tortured, and you're being tortured like 20 hours a day until finally you go unconscious. Then they wake you up, and the next day they do it again. The next day they do it again, and the next day they do it again. Every single day the pain is so intense that you really wish you could die. You just pray, "Please, Lord, let me die." But you don't. It goes for two straight years. But, at the end of that two years, because this is philosophy we're allowed to do that, they will give you a pill and you won't ever remember having gone through this pain. But for the two years of your life, it will be the most excruciating pain humanly imaginable. That's one way your life might go. Now, here's the other.

At this point, most of my audience members are thinking, "I don't care what the other is. I'm taking that. You don't have to tell me just what's behind door B. I'm taking door B. I don't want do A." But now I'm going to tell you what's behind door B because you really have to know. Instead of 15 mosquito bites a month and two years of the most excruciating torture humanly imaginable, you will have 16 mosquito bites a month. That's it. Now, which of those do you want for you or anyone you really care about? Here, again, it's virtually unanimous. Human beings say, "I want the life of 60 mosquito bites a month. I don't care how long I live. One extra mosquito bite a month, I'd rather have that than two years of the most excruciating torture humanly imaginable." So I ask those two questions in my audiences. I've asked them around the world. Hundreds of audiences, thousands of people. Virtually, everyone agrees with the answers they give to these two questions.

Turns out that the answers that almost everyone accepts-- And I'll just add, I believe rightly so. I'll say a tiny bit more about that, are incompatible with the axiom of transitivity. I'll just say why. Because you'll remember when I said at the beginning, you have a certain intensity of pain for a certain duration, or a little bit less intense for two or three or five times long. I didn't tell you how intense nor did I tell you the duration, and I didn't need to, because it turns out this is a generalizable truth. That is, whether it's a really intense pain for a month, or a really intense pain for 10 years, or a mild pain for a month, or a mild pain for 10 years, we'd all rather have that pain than one that's a little bit less tense for two or three or five times as long. So it's a general truth. No matter how intense or how long the original duration, we'll rather have that than a little bit-- just barely less, but it's less and much longer.

So now you just imagine a world in which everyone starts off with a long life and 15 mosquito bites. And one of those lives, first life, has two years of intense torture. The next one, just to simplify it, has four years of torture almost as bad. 15 mosquito bites and four years of torture; almost bad, not quite as bad, but almost as bad. Everybody says the two years and 15 mosquito bites is better than the four years of torture almost as bad, and 15 mosquito bites. Or make it eight years or 10 years. It doesn't matter. We're just going to simplify it. Two to four. We all agree. Two is better than four when it comes to torture. Then instead of four years of really bad pain, you have eight years of pain almost as bad. Everyone agrees four is better than eight. Then you have eight years of pretty bad pain or 16 years of really pretty bad pain, not quite as bad, but so close. We'd rather have eight years than 16 and you just continue. Eventually, the pain is getting a little bit less, a little bit less, a little bit less, until at the very end, the pain is equivalent to a mosquito bite.

What we've agreed about is we all agree the first outcome is better than the second. The second is better than the third. The third is better than fourth. The fourth is better than the fifth. That continues all the way down. If all things considered better than is a transitive relationship, then the first outcome is better than the last. But the first outcome is which involves two years of excruciating torture and 15 mosquito bites a month. The last outcome is just 16 mosquito bites a month, and nobody believes that's better. So here we have a conflict. People who are interested in this topic just need to read the book, Rethinking the Good. But the key is to understand what's going on. To understand what explains this. Because a lot of times people make intransitive judgment. We learned this from the work of Amos Tversky for which Khaneman won the Nobel Prize. Tversky would've won the Noble Prize had he not passed away yet. That psychologically, people often make intransitive judgment because they're making mistakes in their judgment.

But I don't think these are cases where we're making cognitive mistakes. I think something else is going on. I think what happens is that there are certain principles that seem relevant and significant for making certain comparisons. There are other principles that are relevant and significant for making other comparisons. It turns out that the principles that are relevant and significant for making the comparison between the first outcome and the second, and the second and the third, and the third and the fourth, and the fourth and the fifth, that's what you call an added of aggregation principle. It basically says, if you have two alternatives that differ only slightly, very slightly in terms of pain or pleasure, then quantity matters. So more pain is worse than less pain if the pains are similar in quality. You call that an added of aggregation account. For cases like that, we just add up the sum total of pain, weighted by the quality times duration. We take the area end of the curve, as it were, tells you which is worst.

But this is key. There are certain kind of cases where we expect what I call an anti-added of aggregation. The case I just gave is one, and my lollipop for life's case on the cover of my book is another. I'll mention that in a second. That's a case where we say, if the difference in quality of pain is sufficiently great, so that the one kind of pain makes a substantial impact on the quality of a person's life, and the other kind of pain makes basically no impact on the quality of their life, then no amount of the second kind of pain is worse than the first. So there we're rejecting the added of aggregation. We're rejecting the view that, "Well, if only there's enough mosquito bites, eventually they'll be worse than two years of intense torture." We say I don't care how many mosquito bites there are.

So basically what we're doing is we're using what's called an added of aggregations approach to compare the first alternative with the second, and the second with the third, and the third with the fourth, et cetera. But we're using anti-added of aggregations approach where we compare the first with the last, and both of those seem right. But then, it turns out that if the principles or the factors that are relevant for comparing alternatives vary, depending on the alternatives being compared, then there's no reason to expect transitivity to hold. Transitivity only holds if the very same factors are relevant for comparing every comparison, but it turns out they're not. It turns out there are lots of cases of this sort where actually the factors that are relevant for comparing A with B is one thing, B with C is another thing, and C with D is another thing. But the factors for preparing A and Z are different. And when that happens, no reason to expect transitivity to obtain. That's what I eventually saw. That's what can explain or account for what otherwise seemed logically impossible. We couldn't understand how that could even be the case until I got to the root of what explains how it could be the case, which has to do with the nature and structure of the good. I could say much more about that, but maybe…

Ben (53:51):

Definitely read the book for that. I think this is maybe the 18th time I've now read or heard your explanation for it and I'm still astonished listening to it, and it feels right. So I am troubled a little bit like you say that there's a theory that we use and it's probably not true because its axioms are not true. On the other hand, when I think about my creative and artwork, I am less troubled because actually there's a lot, I think, in the endeavor of human creativity which essentially kind of only holds in the moment in these certain circumstances and in these things. So the tools are kind of true even if they don't have a greater truth. There's another aspect which I've been thinking about. This idea of rationality or not rationality, that again, this human brain doesn't work necessarily on all of these prepared pathways, like the logic of maths might do. And actually, there might be even some neuroscience for why that might be. Do you want to do your other little example or shall we move on?

Larry (54:58):

Well, we could go on. I was going to give my lollipop for life example as another example of an anti-added of aggregations approach. But it is, as I say, the one that...

Ben (55:09):

Yeah, we've got the picture.

Larry (55:13):

It's a picture. These are little people, they're all licking a lollipop, and this is a big person in intense pain.

Ben (55:19):

You want to go and look it up on the web now. Have a look at the picture.

Larry (55:26):

So, the thing about the lollipop for life case is it's one of the many cases where most people accept what's called an anti-added of aggregation view. And what that means is the following. Suppose you had two ways the world might go. In one, everybody lives really an incredibly, wonderful, flourishing life. So whatever you think matters for a flourishing life, they all have it. They live a long time. They have deep loves. They're very creative. They appreciate music. There are all sorts of scientific achievements and accomplishments. There's justice; whatever you want, the lives are filled with them and everybody has them. So in terms of all the really weighty things that matter in life, billions of people all have them. And in addition, there's a bunch of not so weighty things in life, but that also make life a little bit better. One of them is that over the course of their lives-- these are long lives, everybody gets to lick a lot of lollipops many times. That's one way the world might go.

Here's another way the world might go. Everybody lives that same type of life almost exactly the same. All the things that matter; the high achievements, the good health, the terrific sex, the theater going, everything. Whatever you think is valuable in life, it's all there. They're all healthy and they're all happy. But, one person suffers the most agonizing life. Pain and misery and suffering every single day. Day after day after day and then they eventually die. But, everybody else who have this incredible great life gets one extra lick of a lollipop over the course of their life. Now, almost everybody you ask that question, "If you had to choose between those possible outcomes, which would be better?" They say the outcome in which everyone has an incredibly great life but one less lick of the lollipop. Rather than the life in which all these people, vast numbers of them, have great lives, one more lick of lollipop, but someone suffers unbelievable agony and dies. So I call that the lollipop for life case.

But if one had a simple added of aggregation approach for everything, well, one lick of lollipop might be only a teeny tiny bit of pleasure. But if you just add up to sum total of people, if only there's enough people, eventually the sum total of pleasure gained from all those individual licks of the lollipop would outweigh the suffering of any single person, no matter how bad. On a simple added of aggregation approach of the sort that's typically favored by standard utilitarians. But that just seems crazy. That just seems deeply wrong. There are many examples from literature that try to evidence this kind of a view. The ones who walked away from the omelas are the ones who walked away.

But it just doesn't seem right. Things don't add up in that way. And I have more to say about why they don't add up in that way. But I'll just say one more thing about that because it's important for people to get their head around what does or doesn't work. When I think about the pain of a mosquito bite spread out throughout our life, or the extra value of a lollipop spread out over time across many different lives, I claim that those kinds of pleasures and pains don't add up in the way they would need to, to outweigh the concentrated pains or pleasures that might occur in the same life with two years of torture. When I think about that, my analogy is roughly like this. I want to talk about the straw that broke the camel's back.

So you have a camel, you put a straw on the camel's back, and then you add a second piece, and then you add a third piece, and then you add a fourth piece, and a fifth piece, a six piece, It takes a very long time, but eventually you'll have tons of straw on the camel's back and the camel's back will break. That's the added of aggregation approach. If you add enough straw, the camel's back will eventually break assuming that straw is all there present at the same time. But suppose instead you have a camel and you put these straw on his back and then you blow it off. Then you put a second piece of straw and then you blow it off. And then you take the third, and the fourth, and fifth. But each time you blow it off. The camel's back will never break. It doesn't matter how much straw. It will never break.

Well, I think when we have a mosquito bite; one this month, and one next month, and one next month and one next month. Or a lickable lollipop; one person, and then a different person, and then a different person, then a different person. Those don't add up. That's like the straw on the back that's being blown off each time. Before the second piece of straw comes, the first one's gone. Before the second itch comes, the first one's gone. When the one person has a lick of a lollipop, the other person has one, but they never combine. So there are some kinds of cases where an anti-added of aggregation approach seems right for comparing outcomes. But importantly, there are other cases where an added of aggregation approach seems right for comparing cases.

Then it just turns out it's easily shown that if certain factors are relevant for comparing A and B, and B and C, but different factors are relevant for comparing A and C, then A could be better than B in terms of all the factors relevant and significant for making that comparison. And B could be better than C in terms of all of the factors relevant to C for making that comparison. But it does not follow that A is better than C in terms of all the factors relevant and significant for making that comparison because those factors are different.

Ben (1:02:15):

That still blows my mind. I hope everyone listening can ponder that, and re-listen to that, and go read the book. I’m going to move on to a couple of Peter Singer ideas before getting to the pond, or at least one, before his pond analogy. I have to confess. I found this Singer idea so awkward that I put a little bit less weight to his other ideas on animals and altruism when I first came across it. This idea has to do with disability and I think with some of his utilitarian roots. I hope I don't mangle this, but Singer has proposed that we should allow parents of disabled babies the choice of keeping or ending their lives. Now, Singer has quite a few nuances to his arguments. But I think, as a layperson, this seems to me both are wrong on consequentialist and non-consequentialist grounds. Consequentialist because actually you can see examples where this is probably going to have less welfare in the world, and non-consequentialist because it doesn't seem to be the right thing to do.

But I never really had a chance to ask a moral philosopher on this. So I wonder if this has been problematic in the world of philosophy as well. You can see people as brilliant as Stephen Hawking who lived a very fulfilled live. When you do that, disability rights people talk about the social model of disability, which doesn't also encompass things like focusing on systems change and making lives more fulfilled for people. Is it as problematic as we kind of think?

Larry (1:03:59):

This is not a topic that I address in any of my books, but I'm happy to address it here. So Peter's views about disability are complex and they are nuanced. I think they're often misinterpreted. I'm not saying you've misinterpreted them, but I do think they're often misinterpreted. The question whether they're controversial or not. The interesting thing you said is you think that they're controversial on both consequentialist and non-consequentialist ground. I think they're less controversial on consequentialist grounds than you. I think they're very controversial on non-consequentialist grounds. I think there are lots of reasons why one might or might not worry. But even then, I have to get in. Among philosophers, they're less controversial even on non-consequentialist grounds than many people would think. I say among philosophers-- There are philosophies and philosophers. They always say if you have 15 philosophies in the room, you have 15 opinions about any about any given issue. Do you mind a funny story and then I'll come back to this. Maybe I won't. Remind me if you feel like it. There's a character in The Good Place, Chidi who can never make up his mind about philosophy. That character was a pattern on my reading group, and I can tell you more about that. 

But let me talk about the more serious issue. So the issue for Singer, what makes this so complicated is it gets down to a variety of questions about under what conditions does a being of any kind have a serious right to life. For many people-- I know how Roe V Wade was just decided here in the United States. But for many philosophers, a being doesn't have a serious right to life until they have achieved a certain level of psychological development; a whole bunch of other kinds of things. For Kant, you didn't have a serious right to life until you were capable of following a moral law that you prescribed to yourself.

In other words, you had to be a rational being. You had to be a being that was capable of morality. For some people, you don't have a serious right to life unless you're capable of a kind of inner self consciousness. A life going on, on the inside where you're aware of who you are. Where you are of autonomy, where you have plans that are perhaps being frustrated by being treated one way rather than another. For some people, you don't have a serious right to life until you can envision your future going a certain way, and then have that vision that you have for how your future might go being interrupted by other people who are deciding how your future should go for you instead, et cetera. The point is, there's a whole bunch of candidates for under what condition would we say of a being that they have a serious right to life, and most of the candidates that most people take seriously-- This is one of the wonderful ironies about all of this. About how Peter is castigated on one side, but then not credited on another. But for most people, they don't think a cat, or a rat, or a rabbit has a serious right to life.

But in terms of the mental capacities that are currently held by a newborn baby; handicapped or not, and a cat or a rat… One of Peter's points early on is that an adult male cat, or a dog, or a cow, or a rat, or a mouse has those capacities to a greater degree than a newborn infant. Notice that has nothing to do with the disability per se. That's just true, he thinks and many philosophers think about… You first ask the question, “Under what condition is one a person?” Not a human being, but a person. Whereby person, you mean a being with a serious right to life. Peter tries to ask, "What do newborn babies have that newborn chimpanzees don't, or that cats don't, or that mice don't have? What do they have?" We can say more about, well, they have a potential that the others don't have. And then we could talk about that.

But that potential isn't there now. It's not realized. It might be there in the future. Is that enough? On that view then, these newborn babies, whether handicapped or not aren't persons. They don't have a serious right to life. I'm not saying I accept that view. I'm taking a stand on that one way or the other. But this is a very serious kind of view that's widely discussed and that one has to come to terms with. In virtue of what is it that any being has a serious right to life that would enable us to distinguish, for example, between a newborn infant and an adult cat-- if we really think adult cats don't have a serious right to life. Then his point would be, when he turns to the question about, what about handicap beings? Well, that can put a lot of strain on a family. That can put a strain on the other children in family. It can put a financial strain, emotional strain, all sorts of other strains.

Why not, if they don't have a serious right to life anyway, allow the parents to decide for themselves about something that's of such crucial importance to how their lives go, and how their family's lives goes, and their children's lives might go. Now, if you thought a newborn baby infant, whether a handicapped or not has a serious right to life, then the fact that it puts a lot of burden on the rest of the family might be irrelevant. Doesn't matter. “So I'm sorry, you won't be able to go to an expensive college because we spent all this money taking care of your younger sister. That's too bad. But she's a Persian, she has a serious right to life, and that's just the cost you're going to have to pay.”

But I think his position is more complicated in that really at its foundational roots, there's a question of whether any human being before the age of two, even has a serious right to life. And if the answer is no, even for a healthy newborn baby, then you could see why Peter or others might think when you're dealing with a seriously handicapped child, that might be a huge burden on other members of the family, and whose quality of life depending on how serious it is, may or may not be significantly high. Why not in that case give the parents the autonomy to choose what's best for them and their siblings? That's one element of the kind of view in question.

There's another element which is what utilitarians accept, which non utilitarians don't accept, which is the kind of replaceability argument. On this view, all human lives are replaceable. Let's go back to the very first question you asked me about, "I could save one person, but would cost a lot of money. For the same money, I could save 10 other people." Well, this person's life is replaceable as it were. One life versus 10. Kant thinks and non-consequentialist are over here saying, "No, you can't think about human lives that way. Human lives aren't replaceable that way." And that's my own view. 

But for Peter or for other committed utilitarians, we should be neutral between all beings; all essential beings, including all human beings, and one human being is replaceable by another. So if this human being would have a certain degree level of success and value in their life, and you could have two others or another person that the expected value would be just as high or higher, this person's replaceable by another. So you should allow a parent to not have to support this baby in order to bring another one into existence that would have an equally and better life. That's replaceability thesis. That's a distinctly utilitarian thesis. It's not in general. But I want to get back to one of the things you said which is very important.

You speak about the case of Stephen Hawking. Other people talked about the case of Beethoven. Though Beethoven wasn't in fact deaf at birth, he became deaf later on. So it's not the perfect analogy. But anyway, suppose he had been deaf at birth but still capable of creating his great work. Stephen Hawking and others. What you have to understand here is the form of the reasoning, that Peter and others I suppose, which is a kind of reasoning that I often object to in my work, as you know. But it's the form of the reasoning. In legal circles, people say hard cases make bad law. You can't decide the general principles to government society based on the exceptions, based on the fact that as a matter of fact... And again, Stephen Hawking, same case. Stephen Hawking wasn't born with the disabilities that developed later. They came much later.

Suppose he had been born with those disabilities, what would the expected value of his life have been? Well, the expected value of his life might have been very, very low. It turned out that he was genius and ended up doing great things, but the expected value of his life was quite low. When we any kind of decisions; moral decisions, practical decisions, you don't make your decision on the best possible outcome that could ever occur. You make the decision on your most reasonable guesses of what's likely to occur in general, in cases of this kind. So when you're choosing between-- This goes back to the value of expected utility theory. But you're choosing which profession you go into, and you're going into this profession, you're virtually guaranteed to have a great life. There's almost no downside to it.

You go into this profession and you're virtually guaranteed to have a miserable life, but there's a one in a billion chance or a one in a million chance that you'll have a stupendously great life, a better life than you would have while we're here. Which should you pursue? Almost every rational person forget about the morality of it will say, "Pursue the one where you're guaranteed you have a great life with no downside.” You don't choose the one that is almost certain to lead to terrible outcomes, just because there's some chance it might lead to a great outcome. So when people point to these great lives that have been lived by people who suffer from serious handicaps, that's not necessary. That might be the hard cases that make bad law. Do we really want to adopt general policies for society; moral or otherwise, based on the exceptions rather than what's predicted to be the case. 

Suppose you knew the following. You're going to have a thousand children born with a severe handicapped and 999 of them lives are going to go horribly. They'd be ridiculed at school. They're only capable of certain levels. But one out of a thousand, their life is going to be great. Should you bring the thousand people into the world? Do you bring a thousand people into the world knowing that 999 of them are going to suffer greatly because one of them might fare really well? That's really what Peter and others are trying to get us to grapple with. They're trying to get us to grapple with really, what is the expected value of these lives? And if the expected value of these lives is actually negative, though on rare occasions it’s positive, he says, what right do you have to do that?

But the key thing I want to get here is there are cases. There's a difference between a child that's born not normal, but perfectly capable of a happy, fulfilling life. I take it most down syndrome children have this kind of a life in front of them, and children that really have severe spina bifida. They're likely to be in pain and suffering and live a short life. It's never going to turn around, or highly unlikely. There are different kinds of cases. I'm not going to agree with Peter at any point where the argument turns in essence on the replaceability. "Well, we could get rid of this model for a newer improved model." I just don't buy that. But I do think there are other elements that are underlying his view that need to be taken pretty seriously.

Ben (1:17:10):

Okay. That's given me food for thought. I still find it somewhat troubling, but I understand now the link to his work on animals and sentience better. I have listened to him, but I actually have found your explanation better. Maybe it's easier to do it when you're doing it on someone else's work where you might not completely agree with all of their things because you can elucidate the things out from that. So one more then maybe before the pond analogy. Hopefully we'll have time. Again, this is a personal thing which isn't really in your books either. It was a little bit I hinted at because I somewhat was troubled by some of Peter's views because of a view that he had. This actually comes in the work of art. So I had, not a close friend, but a friend, who arguably was a great artist and made great work.

But it turns out that they also had other parts of their lives which was very troubled and probably horrific. It ends up that this friend then committed something awful and they had long running hidden problems and it didn't end well. Actually, I have their work still on my bookshelves and I'm a little bit troubled. This question is often raised with regards to Ezra Pound. It's a little bit more historic, so we can think because he had very troubling views. But poets would say his poetry is also very brilliant. Do why, or should I have to regard their work any differently in the face of other aspects of their lives when I'm thinking about their art or not?

I mean, I guess it's going to come to every individual and the waiting of the case and all of that which I'm considering. But does moral philosophy have anything to say about those sorts of problems? I guess they extend because people can do other horrific things and they have other parts of their lives. I've read a little bit around that, but I've never had anything which I kind of go, "Oh, I could really think about it in that way." I'm assuming that's because of your 50 philosophers and the light bulb type of thing, there's probably just a huge range of views in that. Is there any easy way of thinking of that or is the answer complicated?

Larry (1:19:32):

So we've hinted at this already. You've hinted at it in the very beginning and I’ve hinted at in my various responses. But I'm what other people call a pluralist about morality. So I think there are many ideals that matter. I think there are many ideals that matter practically and I think there are many ideals that matter morally. So justice matters, autonomy matters, freedom matters, equality matters, perfectionism matters; all these things matter. The truth matters, I believe. Beauty matters. Keith famously saw the connection between beauty and truth, right? “Truth is beauty. Beauty is truth. That's all you know, and all you need to know,” something like that. I probably butchered it. So a very important claim about the importance of truth. Truth itself has its own kind of beauty, and beauty itself has its own kind of truth…

So I believe there are different values and I believe that at the end of the day, a person who wants to be a good person has to give proper expression to all of these different kinds of values. So that is almost always going to make, from my way of thinking about the world, any question a complicated question because there's rarely a case where I'm going to say, "Ah, here's the answer." People who are what I call monolist as opposed to pluralist. They have a single value. It's the one they care about more than anything else, or the only one they care about. Milton Friedman famously claimed, "One can care about only one value and that value is freedom." But anyway, the point was there's one thing that matters; freedom. Everything else is pale. So you assess every single issue in terms of freedom.

Well, if you assess every single issue in terms of-- and now fill in your favorite value; utility, or freedom, or perfection, then most of the questions you're going to ask me or yourself aren’t going to have an easy answer. But as soon as you recognize that morality's not that simple, life isn't that simple… Art itself isn't that simple. It's fragmented. It's complicated. You look at many of Picasso's pieces, he's Kafka. I love Kafka. The truths that he's revealing are not simple straightforward. You don't get to them in a linear fashion, but they're revealing something really important about his inner psyche, but also about the world, and also our relationship. All these kinds of things that you can only see through a distorted lens. There is no clarity. There isn't clarity to be found. There isn't searching to be found.

So I believe that morality is extraordinarily complex and lots of different factors bear on almost every important question. There are some questions that are very nice. They're kind to us. Because those are the easy questions where all the values line up. Utility favors, and perfection favors, and equality favors. They're all favor. That makes it a simple answer. But there's so few real world questions, the kind that trouble us, the kind that keep us up at night that have that feature. There's all these complicating elements. That's the background. Now to the particular question. You asked a specific question. So how should I think about a great poet or a great philosopher? 

Heidegger or others who are affiliated with the Nazis. Nietzsche. What should we make of Nietzsche if in fact Nietzsche's views were used or misused by the Nazis? I think there are theoretical issues at stake. There are moral issues at stake. There are practical issues at stake. I think Insofar as a poet gives us an example of great art that can be inspiring and can teach us about beauty, or ourselves, or the world, or our relationship. It would be a terrible waste of resources to ignore that poem that does that for us. It would be inefficient if nothing else. On the other hand, do you want to hold this poet up as a paragon of virtue? Be like her, be like him when there's all this other baggage going on in your lives? The answer to that is no, you don't want do that.

So you may want to, as it were, there's always the old question of... I always want to say you don't want to throw out the baby with the bath water. For some people, the kind of case you describe, it's a very small baby and it's a very big bathwater that's filthy, and dirty, and drudgery, and so on. You want to get rid of the bath water, not the baby. And it's always a continuum, right? Some of these people are very big babies and only a little bit of water. You really don't want to throw out the big baby just because there was a little water there. We're facing this issue as you know, of course, as we try to come to terms with our past. In the west, but not only in the west, in the terrible atrocities that we have helped perpetrate or have perpetrated, or our ancestors did, do we celebrate or not celebrate here in America, Columbus?

He discovered America. He also committed genocide on all these various things. So now, how do we come to terms with that? In the United States we're trying to, how do we come to terms with these leaders of the Confederacy? There were all these statues to them, but they were trying to keep slavery as an institution. So we need to weigh off, what do we learn from them? What do we not learn from them? What are the costs of just saying, “We don't need them?” I could get this argument. Someone might say, "Yeah, Ezra Pound was a great writer." But there are plenty of other great writers. Draw on them for their inspiration. You just don't have to talk about him because it's not like he's irreplaceable.

So if you don't need to talk about someone who's this complicated and has all this baggage, why bother? But the philosopher in me is-- There's always one element in me that cares about the truth. It cares about the truth. If a poet or a writer or a philosopher has truths that they've expressed, I think we should hang onto those. But we have to be very clear that what we're hanging onto is the truth, and not the speaker of the truth. That would be my own way of thinking about it. I certainly can see there's the theoretical case to be made, and then there's the practical case because human beings aren't so good at compartmentalizing. Supposed if we say, "No, look. Here's what we want to do. We want to continue to teach these controversial figures, but we're going to do it with the sign at the beginning of class." And all it says is, "Look, they did a bunch of really nasty things. Ignore all that. Just pay attention to the poetry or the story" or whatever like that.

If you say that, are we going to do it, or is this other stuff going to infiltrate? Is it going to have an impact?" You say, “Don't pay attention to it.” But even when you say don't pay attention to it, you start paying attention to it. The old saying from the Bible, "People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones." This is my point about the big baby with a little bit of water, or the small baby with... If you go back in history, all of the people we teach are complicated because they all come out of a historical period where nasty views were held. And they're part of those nasty views.

Ben (1:27:37):

That is helpful thought to think about it in that way, and perhaps confirms my nudging towards a sort of pluralist type of view as well. So let's go to Peter Singer's pond. Hopefully we still have time. I probably spent a little bit too long on all these other interesting aspects. Who knew that there was so much philosophy?

Part Two Follows Here:

Second Part Starts Here (Rhubarb)

Ben (00:22):

So, I'm going to ask about Peter Singer's pond, and maybe you could reflect a little bit on this amazing dinner you had also with Angus Deaton and some moral philosophers. Maybe I'm going to mangle it a little bit, but I'll talk about the pond and then maybe you can call out some of your disanalogies and some of the perhaps more novel aspects of how you've thought about Singer's pond and what it means for effective altruism and how to think about doing good. But for his pond analogy, very roughly it goes, "You are passing a pond, no one else is about, you spotted drowning child. It would be safe for you to save her at the cost of wet clothes or wet shoes, what should you do?" And of course, everyone says, save the child. And then Singer goes on to say, "Well, this is an analogy for giving aid to those in need when at very little cost to yourself, you can help save a life somewhere else.

When I first heard the example, I wasn't exactly sure it was analogy because of these issues of inter mediation and distance. I'd been to some very poor places in the world and I thought, "Well, in the real life, it's a bit complicated.” But it did have a reasonable force of analogy to it. But on reading your work, I kind of realized there are quite a lot of disanalogies when you get into the real world and some various serious thinkers and economists like Angus Deaton have some quite serious concerns. I was quite moved by the fact that you've kind of changed your mind, or your mind has been nudged, and these are the elements of that which I found quite insightful. So I've only been grappling with the kind of these ideas for a while, and I think we agree that EA or trying to do good as this whole podcast has been about, is on the side of angels, in the sense of we're trying to do good better, or the most good. We can argue a little bit about what that is with the project for effective given and things. But maybe you'd like to recount where you've come to the disanalogies with Singer's pond and how this has come about.

Larry (02:35):

Good. So let me tell this story. I'll tell some stories about this and then you can interrupt at any point. So first, the audience has to understand if they have a chance to look at the book, I describe all these things. But I've been worried about the needy my whole life-- basically, as long as I can remember. I have very vivid memories at different periods of my life of just seeing people who are very poor and just my heart going out to them and thinking, “I'm so lucky, I've got so much. They have so little, and it's just not fair, and we have to do something about it.” From the earliest ages, I was contributing in my own small ways nickels and dimes out of my allowances to give to charities that would help the needy. I would go trick or treating for UNICEF and try to raise money to help hungry children. I happened to meet my wife when I was 16 years old on a hunger hike. We were walking 31 miles to raise money to feed people who were hungry. So this is a very deep and longstanding concern of mine. Both of my parents were very concerned about this. They were very different. One was very liberal. One was very conservative, but they both agreed that when it came to the issue of people in need, this was not a right left issue. This was a humanitarian issue. And this was something that was very important to me.

I got to college, I got to graduate school. When I was in college I was volunteering for all sorts of different kinds of local organizations. I would go door to door, try to raise money for them, et cetera. Eventually, I got to graduate school, started learning about Oxfam, and I eventually came around to the view that there were lots of organizations that I had given to and that I cared about, but they just weren't as important as the international development organizations, the international relief organizations; organizations like Oxfam. Didn't mean they weren't important, I thought. It's good to contribute to Literacy. It's good to contribute to the March of Dimes which tries to address handicaps of various sorts. It tries to address people who are disadvantaged. It's good to address cancer and so on. It's good to save the whales. You can start this large litany of things that it would be nice to do, but contribute to your local PBS station; Public Broadcasting.

Those are all worthwhile activities. Preserve the environment; a park so we can go sit in. It's endless. But people are dying. Children are dying every single day, and it just seemed to me that was more important. So there came a period-- and this was before I'd ever heard of an EA moment, where people would come to my door and they'd want to raise money for some worthy local cause. I would invite them in oftentimes to sit and talk about it. But in essence, I would tell them, "Look, I'm glad you're doing this. It's a good thing. It's a good cause that you want to support. But I'm not going to support this kind of cause because it's not as important as saving innocent children from dying." Once one begins to think about it that way, when beginning to think about which charities are or are not most important, and then among those charities, you begin to think-- And again, this is before I'd ever heard about EA or before I'd read anything by Peter Singer.

There was the thought of charities can do it more or less effectively. You really want to give to an effective charity. If you want to save lives, there can be expensive ways of saving lives or there can be very cheap ways of saving lives. Wouldn't you rather save more lives than fewer lives if we want to save innocent lives, et cetera? So from early on, I found myself in a kind of effective altruist mindset of, "I really am going to focus my giving-- We (me and my wife), who walked on this hunger hike, are going to focus more on really trying to do good and in particular, trying to help the neediest people in the world.” We thought that was what most people do. As you know, the poorest people at the time when I first started thinking about this, in China, in India, in Pakistan, and so on. But also throughout Africa; Sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere.

So that was the thinking. When I started out as a young professor, I started teaching obligations to the needy in a large introductory class where I did a bunch of moral issues. We would teach abortion, and infanticide, and capital punishment, and nuclear war and all sorts of different issues. Other sections came and go, but I always had a section on obligations to the needy. By now, I had started sponsoring. I had some students who sponsored an Oxfam club. We did an Oxfam meal skip program. This was at my first institution, Rice University. Students could swipe their meal cards once a week, and instead of receiving a meal, they go without a meal on that day. And the money that would've been spent on the meal went to Oxfam. We would do Oxford hunger banquets at Thanksgiving where different people were randomly assigned. Roughly 78% reading beings and some other percentage reading something more. Then a few people representing the wealthiest creatures in the world would have some wonderful dinner. We'd all be sitting around; some at the table would find linens, and some on the floor with straw. So people could get that feeling for a night of really the disparities here.

So this is something that's been near and dear to me for a very long time. Eventually, I started reading people like Peter Singer and then later people like Peter Unger who has a wonderful book, Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence, and teaching these topics in my classes and raising money along the way. At the end of the section on Obligations to the Needy, I would have anonymous collections. It wouldn't affect people's aids. I wouldn't be in the room. We'd have a half pass and we raised thousands and thousands of dollars; sometimes more than $10,000 in a given year. I would match penny for penny. Every dollar that they gave, dollar for dollar-- my wife and I, in addition to whatever else we would normally give. So this is something that's been a deep concern for me, more or less forever. 

I like many other people would often teach Peter Singer's famous article, Famine, Affluence and Morality, and it did have this very powerful effect on people. Because if you walked by and you see the kid drowning in the pond, it seems you have to save the kid even if it's going to cost you your new shoes and your new clothes, and that's just not important. Then Peter says, “But look, you can give the equivalent of new shoes and a new clothes by writing a hundred dollars check for an international relief organization, and they can be just as effective on the other side of the world and save some kid who's just as needy.” Goes back to one of your earlier questions. We are to be neutral with respect to people, places, and times. The mere fact that they were in Africa, rather than here, that's not morally relevant. If they can be just as effective, you ought to write that check. 

Then this eventually gave rise to be effective altruist movement. You want to write a check, but it's not just writing a check. It had all these various features to it. For years, I had found myself not lecturing on this topic in my classes, but then I was invited to lecture on this topic to help launch numerous chapters of effective healthcare organizations; Giving What we Can Chapters at Princeton, several chapters of a similar fund at Harvard, one at the University of Manchester. I was lecturing around the world, sometimes co-lecturing with people like Jeffrey Sachs from Columbia, of course, and also Peter Singer was co-lecturing with me on one of these locations.

So this is something I've been committed to personally and professionally for years. One of the key points about the kind of lecture I would always give is I would just talk about how incredibly well off we at the West are, and how badly off people are elsewhere, and how every one of us-- not just the richest, but every one of us by making teeny tiny alterations in our lifestyle could help those in need. I thought it was very clear that by making tiny alterations in our lifestyle, it wouldn't adversely affect us at all. In many ways we'd actually be better off if we ate out less, if we drank less, if we took fewer drugs. If we did some of these various other kinds of things, it would be better for us actually and better for them. I basically focused as Peter does in his example on how needy others are and how little it would cost us if we tried to help them. And that remains true.

Then one move that I made, which was important from early on in all my lectures that was different from Peter's kind of view or the views of the effect altruist is I would argue for this, not just on utilitarian grounds, not just on the grounds that this is the way of doing the most good. I was arguing that this is something that one had reason to do in virtual, the kind of pluralism I care about. So if you want to be virtuous, you should be compassionate, you should be generous, you should be merciful, and you should be all these other kinds of things. And that should lead you to want to help people. If you want to do your duty, there are duties to help people in need; positive duties. I argue those can be every bit as strong as negative duties, not to harm people in some cases or not to violate someone's rights. A lot of people say, "Well, there are negative duties and those are really strong. Then positive duties are weak." There's a negative duty not to steal my brother's candy bar, but there's a positive duty to save the child drowning in the pond. If I steal my brother's candy bar, well, that's wrong negatively, but it's not nearly as bad as letting the child drown. So I argued that positive duties can be extremely strong, even much stronger than many so-called negative duties which are supposed to be strict and you have to fulfill them. I think you have to fulfill some of these other duties.

So I had all these arguments that there are duty based reasons to help people, virtue based reasons to help people, and you are doing more good in the world if you make slight alterations in your lifestyle that significantly improve people's lives. So that was my view, and it dominated my thinking from the time I was a little kid until very recently into my fifties; mid-fifties, late fifties. Along the way though, I met Angus Deaton who was a 2015 Nobel Laureate in economics. Angus is a terrific guy and very smart. We met at various different places; Princeton and over in Geneva conferences for international health issues.

We would meet and we would talk and we'd go to lunch together. He had me over to his house. He'd be telling me about this book of his called, The Great Escape, in which he was basically arguing that the inequalities in the world are not as bad as we think. It's not that there aren't inequalities, but they're kind of a necessary byproduct of progress which takes place at uneven rates and uneven pace throughout the world. Since I was a person who spent most of my life thinking and arguing for equality, I wasn't very sympathetic to that. We were getting to these debates about whether we should or shouldn't worry about the extent of inequality in the world, et cetera. But along the way, he would slip in that he thought that people like Peter Singer were actually doing more harm than good.

And I remember thinking, "That can't be right." But I also was acutely aware that while Peter Singer was the god in this domain, I spent most of my life intellectually and otherwise giving to international relief organization and urging that my students do so, and raising money and lecturing to help launch these chapters of giving what we can. If Peter Singer was doing more harm than good, then I was too, and that was a very dismayed thought. I just didn't want to believe it and I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe we were doing more harm than good. I more or less dismissed him. Even though I like him a lot and I respect him, I just didn't really take it seriously. We had numerous conversations on this topic over the years, and every time he would raise it and I would just say, "That just can't be true."

So now we fast forward, and I've been invited meanwhile to give the rural lectures in Oxford. I was planning to give some lectures on justice and inequality and global health, but I had a dinner party at my home. This dinner party, small group of people, but an amazing collection of people. It included the world's greatest living active epistemologist; a guy by the name of Alvin Goldman. It included Derek Parfit who I've already said I thought was the greatest living moral philosopher. It included Jeff McMahan, a philosopher I admired greatly who was the vice chair of Moral philosophy at Oxford. It included Angus who was Nobel Laureate. And it included various other people including a billionaire named Patrick Burns. Anyway, we have this incredible conversation, free flowing conversation. Dinner is going great, if I may say so. It was the greatest dinner party I've ever been a part of by far, whether as host or guests. I've never heard anything like it. It was amazing.

But at some point, Angus who is a very large man pushed back from the table and started talking about his views about international aid and how people like Peter Singer are doing more harm than good. He was on one side of the table, literally, and on the other side of the table, literally, Derek and Jeff McMahan started pushing back. I was the host of the party so I was kind of observing and watching rather than actively participating. And when you put the observing and watching hat on, rather than the active participation hat, it's a very different hat. I found myself listening with fascination to the give and take because I heard Angus putting forward his ideas, and I heard Derek and Jeff pushing back against his ideas. What they were saying was almost word for word what I had told Angus all these years every time we had this conversation. Every time Angus would say something, I would say something, and Derek and Jeff were saying basically the exact same things. “They didn't believe it could be true. How could that possibly be true?”

Normally, if I find myself in agreement with Derek and Jeff that would make me confident that we were right, because they are just great philosophers. Jeff is a really, really good philosopher, I'm a pretty good philosopher, and if we're all on the same side of an issue-- I don't care who's lined up on the other side. For the most part, I'm going to be pretty confident we're right. But this time I found myself thinking, "What the hell is going on here?" Because they just was actually talking about empirical questions about whether Peter Singer and others, and on the ground aid agencies scattered throughout Africa were doing more good than harm. We were all saying-- comfortable, armchair philosophers that we are, arguing that can't be true.

This argument went on well after dessert, after the dishes were clear, eventually everyone went home. My wife and I are cleaning up the dishes. I can't get this out of my head. "What had just happened?" It seemed to me clear there was something wrong methodologically with Derek, Jeff and me all telling Angus he couldn't be right. Well, we were basically arguing about empirical issues. He had a whole lot of empirical background and we had basically none. Even if we're right, how can we be so sure we're right? I went to bed that night and I basically didn't sleep. I just could not sleep. I found myself thinking about Peter Singer's very famous pond example. Then I started generating various examples, versions of pond example. Just one after another, after another, because the basic pond example is you walk across, there's a child, you're the only one there, they're drowning in a pond, can you save them or not? Of course you have to save them.

But what if it's different? What if they're drowning in a pond and there's this person at the bridge and he's like a tyrant. And he says, "Yeah, you can go save them. But before you can save them, you have to shoot somebody." Well then would you save the child? Suppose he says, "No, you don't have to shoot them, but you have to give me an Uzi. Then you can go save the child." Would you save them then? What if you're pretty sure he is going to take that Uzi and he's going to shoot people? What if he says, "No, you don't have to give me an Uzi. I just want you to give me a bunch of ammunition.” But you're pretty sure he is going to shoot a bunch of people. Do you still save the child? What if he just says, "No, you just have to give me a bunch of money," but you know he's going to buy guns with that money and he's going to persecute people with one. Do you still save that child? And I followed through thinking about example after example of variations of a pond example, where what if someone had thrown the child in the pond, and then in order for you to save them they force you to pay them?

I couldn't sleep all night. I'm thinking about example after example. I drifted off at some point in the early morning. I wake up an hour and a half later and I realized, "This has got to be the topic of my rural lectures. I have to think about this more." Because when I thought about it, I had generated all these possible pond examples. In a few of them, you still had to save the child. But in a whole lot of them, you couldn't save the child. And in a bunch of them, it wasn't clear if you should save the child or not. Then the question was, "Is the real world more like the one set or the other set? Is it more like Peter's example or more like these others?"

Then I found out I actually have to do some reading. I normally don't read. I normally just sit in my office and I think. When I did my work inequality, I mostly thought. I didn't read other people. When I did my work on rethinking the good, I mostly thought. I didn't read other people. But now I was trying to figure out what's actually going on in the world and I found myself just reading a whole bunch of books and articles by developing economists and philosophers. But I read a lot of the philosophers stuff. Bottom line, I spent the next five years rethinking my views about this topic and it was very unsettling. I'd spent my entire life, not only living my life a certain way, but absolutely convinced that I was right in doing so. I'm no longer so convinced. I'm still convinced-- I remain convinced that those of us who are well to do in the West and elsewhere, have to do a lot more than most of us do to help the neediest people in the world. I remain convinced about that, but it's no longer clear to me what the best way of doing that is. 

There are so many disanalogies between Peter's original case and what goes on in the real world. It isn't funny. There are all these worries that arise in the real world that simply don't arise at all in Peter's case. Some of them people are acutely aware of, but many of them no one even thinks about. They're very deep and they're very important. I now think they're very serious questions about whether we are doing more harm than good, whether there are much better ways to aid the Navy, whether we should be focusing on the needy in the world's poorest country, or just focusing on the needy wherever they live, because many of the worries about helping people in the world's poorest countries don't arise in wealthier countries. That sounds counterintuitive, but there's reasons to think that's true. There's just so many different questions.

But ironically, when I thought about this as a pluralist, I just found myself thinking the effective altruist approach to this, which is dominated thinking among philosophers at least for years now, we have to do the most good. I just thought that's not the right approach anyway. It's not a question about just doing the most good. We want to do the most good, that's an important value, but we also want to be good. And sometimes these conflict. So I find myself raising all these questions. I find myself looking at a lot of literature. I find myself wondering and worrying about a view. I lost more sleep over this topic than I had in the previous 35 years of my life as a professional philosopher. I could think about inequality the way I did. There was never any, "How does this fit with my own personal convictions and commitments?" I could think about rethinking the good. There was never any deep tension between what I thought about that philosophy and how I'd live my life. For the last 5, 6, 7 years as I've thought about this topic, I've had to seriously reexamine, "Have I actually been acting rightly all these years in doing what I've done and urging others to do what I've done to aid the Navy in the way I have?" It's been very unsettling to think that maybe the answer to that question is no. So let me pause there and then give you a chance to ask about any more details, arguments, asymmetries that you want to hear about.

Ben (25:38):

Yeah. I've got lots I could pick out. Maybe I'd asked you to pick out the ones that you feel most strongly about. I perhaps have two or three reflections. So having come to this somewhat later and a little bit more haphazardly, I was struck by-- and I think you made this reflection-- That I'd known a tiny bit about the real life episode of Goma, but hadn't realized how much of a disaster it is. And obviously, Deaton holds this out as a sort of case for like, "Wow, look. Look what happens." That's one disanalogy or something which has happened in the real world. So that's what I reflected on. Then the small and the tiny other one, which is maybe aside from the whole of it, but I was really struck about where some things might have the force, which was your argument. I referred to this a lot earlier about the immediacy. There is something about the immediacy of when someone is in your face.

Actually, I think you see this in cities all the time when you actually meet face to face someone who is homeless. So it's not a theoretical issue, but it's a here and now issue. I do think from my own experience that there's no real theory guiding this. There is something qualitatively different from it which has been alluded to a little bit, but again, from this armchair philosophy versus where out is in the real world, that has really has really struck me. I probably now understand why I might put a little bit more weight to that liveness of where that is. Again, it's complicated. But there is something to that.

And just to your overall conclusion of that, it just seems uncertain because of that. And that maybe, for instance, you end up in a place where... Depending on how you define it in the UK or in the US, 10 to 15% of Americans or British are below the poverty line here. Direct giving to those poor people or poor wherever you are is definitely something good. Whether it's the most good, or doing good better you could argue about, but it is doing good, and you have less of these governance problems. You could maybe say it's more immediate. So that was one reflection that I had as well. But maybe you could just talk a little bit about the disanalogy which causes you to think that I'm no longer sure that some of this international aid or some of this is actually doing more good than harm.

Maybe the example of Goma is one, if you want to do that. Or there's a couple I could really struck with your disanalogies and you've alluded to some of them. "Do you give this person a lot of money?" Well, that seems sort of fine. But then if you know they're going to use this money for corrupt things-- And you can see in the real world, a lot of corruption has happened. Then this idea I think that Deaton has that countries develop in response to their own citizens. And if you essentially sidetrack that process somehow, you're essentially doing a whole disservice to that nation. That has now really struck me as being plausible. If that's plausible, that's kind of problematic for this international development thing. I think that's where you seem to have landed as well in your thinking.

Larry (28:55):

I think it is. So there's a number of elements you're touching on here, all of which are important. I'll just say a word about the face to face. I do talk about this in my book. As a pluralist, I think that there are many different ethical components that matter. There are certain people historically, who have said that the quintessential ethical moment arises when one human being encounters another human being and recognizes in that other human being a subject like themselves, with similar hopes, dreams, experiences, and so on and so forth. A similar frailty, similar mortality in that moment of direct confrontation. People like Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas have said that this is the heart of morality. Now, I don't think it's the heart of morality in the sense of-- It's certainly not the whole of morality. But I do think there's something extremely important about that face to face confrontation which is relevant to the strength of an obligation to help someone in a pond that's lacking when someone is also in danger of dying on the other side of the world.

I think that there's a kind of-- when you confront them... So I give an example in the book; a toy example. "You have a very expensive watch on, and because it's very expensive it has this latch and you need a significant to get the latch on and off. It's so complicated. You can't do it one hand. But it's worth $5,000. Your rich uncle left it to, you love him, et cetera." You're walking by a pond, there's a child drowning in the pond, and you see them. Your first thought is, "I have to save the child." Then suddenly you think, "But wait a minute. I have this expensive watch on. If I jump in, my watch will be ruined." Then your next thought is, "But that's insignificant. There's a child who's going to drown. It's a $5,000 watch, but it's just a thing. It's just not important. So it'll be ruined. So what?" Then you have a further thought and the further thought is, "Wait a minute. If I let the child drown, I could take this and I could sell it for $5,000. I could give it to an effective charity and they could supposedly save two children." Then you think, "Yeah. Well, I've read the effective altruism movement. I've read Peter Singer and so on. I ought to do the most good that I can. So, I'm really sorry about this. It's really too bad, but…." So you call 911. You say, "There's a child drowning in a pond here." There's nothing you can do about it and you go off to work. Then you sell the watch and you send it to an effective charity and they save two people.

Well, I claim there'd be something deeply wrong with you and something deeply wrong about what you did if you were able to do that. I think this is connected to issues having to do with virtue. I think if you're raised to be a virtuous person, those virtues will come to play and forcibly tell you, “You have to save this person there.” I also think there's something what we call a special kind of direct agent relative duty that you can acquire just by being in direct confrontation with another human being in need. Now, there are various analogies on this. 

Notice the following. Suppose I'm walking into a grocery store and there's someone following me and I let that door slam on their face. That's a direct disrespect of another human being. I mean, you're walking into the grocery store. You turn, you make eye contact, you've got the door right there and you let it slam in their face. There's something bad about that. There's something really bad about failing to respect another human being, even over something as trivial as that. It becomes even worse of course, if that person is a woman, if that person is handicapped, if that person is a black and you're directly disrespecting them perhaps for all sorts of biased reasons. That's a kind of thing that arises that direct face to face failure to show respect when you're in contact with another human being. That's just not in play. When somebody on the other side of the world is drowning, metaphorically, and you could help them, the fact that that is in play when it's in your community and when you're face to face with it, gives you, I believe, a further reason to help, which is disanalogous to the other case.

But there are so many other factors. When you jump in the pond, you're saving a life. When you give it to an international aid agency, you are effectively sending them a check that's going into their general fund, no matter what you say. And that's being spent on a whole bunch of things. Now, the net effect might be that on average, that amount of money is saving a life. But what you are actually doing is contributing to a general fund that's going to help pay for the salaries of the people who work there, help pay for the gas of the cars that are being driven by them, help pay for the supplies that you buy. It's going to help pay for the rent for the building in Boston. If it's giving, like I do to Oxfam America, you're going to be paying for all those things with your check.

There isn't the same moral compulsion to pay for all those kinds of things as there is to save an innocent human life. I know money's fungible. I know it works out on average, but they're not the same. There are other issues. When this child is drowning in the pond, it's just me and the child. I don't have to worry about corruption. When I give money to an international LEAF organization, there's an indefinitely large number of people that stand between me and the delivery of that aid. Any one of whom could, for any one of a number of reasons, divert that aid to his or her own purposes. I don't have to worry about that in the one case. I do have to worry about it in another case. There are other kinds of issues. When you have an on the ground, this is an issue that people are aware of in the global health realm, but they pay basically no attention to it in the realm of international aid.

When an agency moves into another country, they want to be effective. In order to be effective, they want to hire really talented people. They want to hire smart people, talented people, energetic people, and committed people. They want to hire people of good character. So they're going to go in and address what's often... Their particular thing they care about is AIDS. So they're going to have an office. They're going to have secretarial help. Maybe they have to do some infrastructure. Maybe they need some roads being built, whatever, et cetera. They're going to want to hire the very best people. Often, they're going to hire local people because those are the people who are going to be willing to work there. Here is a question nobody asks. What are those local people doing before? We often think about opportunity costs. "What else could I do with the money?"

But what we're not thinking about is, “What are the opportunity costs of the people who are going to come to work for you for the higher rate wages than international aid agencies can pay?” Where are they coming from? Because very often, if it's a doctor, or a nurse, or an engineer, or a lawyer, they might be coming from an absolutely fundamentally important social position in a community to address the one particular thing that you care so much about as an outside agency. What are the opportunity costs there when they move from here to there? So you can see the tosses, you can see the gains, but you don't see the losses. There are issues of cover-ups. These are serious issues that no one pays attention to. International aid organizations are not looking for the places where their aid goes awry. When they see the places where their aid goes awry, they often cover their eyes.

It's a see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil approach. This came to headlines with the Oxfam prostitution scandal just a few years back. But it's the tip of the iceberg. There are also cases of corruption in many of these countries. Unfortunately, people say, "Oh, this is like Africa." It's not just Africa. There's corruption everywhere. But in the world's poorest countries; the local, or state, or national level, often they're dominated by tyrants, by thugs, by dictators. These tyrants and thugs and dictators have a multitude of ways of getting their hands on international aid. There are so many ways that a person in power that you have to deal with if you're going to work on the ground to help people can get a piece of your pie. And then the question is what are they doing with that piece?

They can get money from you by forcing you to buy a permit in order to work in the country. They can force you to hire their followers. They can tax their followers. They can say basically for everybody who they get a job for, they're going to take 10%. They can get kickbacks from the people who receive foreign aid. They can insist... Here's a strategy that's used all the time. Countries, governments can set artificial exchange rates and insist that countries working in their area change the money first into the local currency at the official exchange rate, and then buy goods and services on the ground often from their people or through the aid. In Syria recently, there was an article in the Guardian just in last year. Syria has been doing this to the tune of at one point, taking 51 cents on every dollar of international aid spent in Syria off the top, by making the UN agencies that were working in Syria exchanged their money first into local currency before they could then buy goods and services.

What they would do is set the official exchange rate at 50% lower than the so-called black market rate, which is what the value was actually worth. And in this way, able to pocket hundreds of millions of dollars off the top just by manipulating the currency rates. Then those can be used to support the Syrian regime, which is a brutal regime and has gassed its own people. You help contribute to the human rights violations and so on. There are just so many ways. There's something called the resource curse. Economists have been talking about it for a while. People never talked about this when I was growing up, but now suddenly people are aware there's something called the resource curse. Basically, what that means is it's striking how in many countries, poor countries that are resource rich, the general population as a whole remains poor, while a group of elites become enormously wealthy.

The reason it's called the resource curse is because we have an international political system, economic system that allows whoever's in control of the resources, which means whoever's de facto in control of the government, can sell them to the international community at any terms they want. Typically they do so for the benefit of them themselves, their followers, and their political agenda. Well, that often leads to strife. It leads to civil wars. It leads to battles because people are fighting to come to power over the rich resources in their country. And this leaves many innocent people killed, wounded, dead, et cetera, as a result of these ongoing civil wars that lasts for decades in some of these countries like the Central Republic of Africa. All of this is fueled by the fact that whoever is in control of the resources could sell them to outside companies and countries for their own benefit.

There's a kind of resource curse that results in the world's poorest country when billions of dollars funnel in parade. Because people in power, if they're corrupt, if they're tyrants, if they're thugs, if they're warlords can get their hands on that money in a series of ways and use it to advance their political agenda. And when they do, often that political agenda is just terrible and we're complicit in that helping to make it happen. 

I'll pause there. I didn't yet to go. But Goma is the most striking, terrible, ethical disaster maybe in the history of international aid. Unbelievably bad. Your listeners, if they read nothing else in that book, should read the one small section of Goma. But what they really should read is Linda Polman's book on this topic-- I think it’s, The Crisis Caravan: What's Wrong with Humanitarian Aid? An extraordinarily powerful book that describes in great detail how the aid agencies are often complicit in these terrible events occurring. Often they know it, and they cover it up. It's a chilling story.

Ben (43:03):

Yeah. Let's ask people to look up Goma because I think we probably can't do it justice and the whole group of AIDS skeptics. So I think your work-- and we've highlighted quite a lot of challenges to that international aid. I guess I'm going to call it the kind of Peter Singer, perhaps utilitarian style of EA. I think there are a lot of those challenges where it's not exactly clear, and I think there are a lot of challenges which people haven't thought about. Maybe I'd add a couple of extra thoughts around it and try and loop some of the things that we talked about; issues with utility and some of this probabilistic thinking as well. And I guess this three...

Larry (43:48):

Can I interrupt for one second? I want to do that, but that might take us in the direction of which might be a good idea to bringing things together and some final thoughts a little bit. I'd like to add just one more sentence or two about this. So I want to say just a word about effective altruism, if I can, and then go on. And that is this book raises a lot of challenges. I'm not the only one who's done so. But among philosophers, EA is the dominant theme right now. People aren't really challenging EA. It's almost like a religion. You want to give, you want to do good, you need to be in EA.

So among philosophers this is a challenge. There are non-philosophers who have challenged EA, but there aren't a lot of philosophers challenging EA from within. I am challenging EA on a variety of levels; both empirical questions, but also theoretical questions. I do want to be fair in a way, but this gets to the kind of summing up question to EA. There are a lot of current EA leaders who are aware of many of these problems and they are not advocating that we give to on the ground international relief organizations. Many of the leaders of EA-- not Peter Singer, notably, but many of the other leaders of EA-- Here, I mean, people like Toby Ord, Will MacAskill, Nick Beckstead in our country, they have moved on. They think, "No, the most effective way of helping people in need isn't to help the neediest people in poor countries. It's to worry about things like existential risk.”

There's much more bang for the buck in preventing the extinction of humanity than there is in helping a billion people who are in the worst forms of poverty, or 2 billion people who are in poverty, but not extreme poverty. That's just not cost effective. That's not the way to spend our charitable contributions. And I want to say I bark at that too. I think many of the current EA leaders were in the same place I was. They were on the side of the angels, I thought, in wanting to do what they could to help the neediest people of the world. But many of them had now moved on because of expected utility calculations. How do I get the most expected value from charitable contributions? They think the way to do that is work on preventing nuclear war, work on preventing biological destructions, work on preventing chemical warfare, work on preventing an asteroid from hitting us, work on preventing the kind of thing that we have right now going on with COVID; these kinds of things. We should stop pandemics. That's where we should be spending the money. Not spending our money to help the neediest people in the poorest country.

I just want to hold back on that too because I'm not just an effective altruist. I still care about the neediest people in the poorest country. I want to find a way to help them. I believe that should be at the top of our priorities when we think about what we should do in terms of helping people. Not that these other things don't matter. What they care about matters too. We should pay attention to them. We should worry about climate change. We absolutely should. But not to the exclusion the way so many of them now do, because that's how the cost benefit analysis comes in to helping the neediest people in the poorest country. My heart still remains there.

My question is, how do we do that? I am inclined to think that if we end up doing it, the two things that will come into play is by finding ways to promote better governance, to promote democracy, to promote the rule of law, to change the terms of international trade, all those kinds of things. So we find ways to […]help people in Africa without spending money directly in Africa, which gives rise to all these other kind of issues. So that's one issue. But the other issue is we might have to sometimes in some cases step in to help people right now because they're in need now, even if we know there might be terrible downstream effects of our doing so. 

That's because of not just an effective altruism, other things matter too. Sometimes the urgency of the moment when people are in need that we could help now just might take priority over, "Yeah, but will that do the most good in the long run for everybody looking at future generations?" Maybe not. Maybe that's not what we should be doing if we want to be good in a world of need and not just doing the most good in a world of need. I want to just get that out because in fairness, the leaders of the effect altruism movement actually recognize many of the problems I've raised. Often did so even before I raised them. They say, "Yeah, right. That's not where we're spending our focus," but I'm not happy with that answer either.

Ben (49:20):

That's brilliant. I was hoping to wrap a lot of what you just said up in my next couple of questions. So I'm going to try and wrap it around a reflection and a question or two. So hopefully I can keep all of that in. Maybe I can say that because I'm even later to EA and I would view myself as an EA outsider, but I'm very in intrigued. So one core thing, I think, maybe some of the leaders or some people in EA people think as sort of higher level. EA is a project of doing good better, rather than doing the most good. So just thinking about how to do good better is aligned with a lot of this thinking. And I think one of my reasons for doing this is maybe they are open to thinking about... In fact, there has been some post written about, “Well, maybe how do we do better governance? How do we do better systems? Maybe this is doing good better.” This is why I think… I liked your phrase that a lot of the thinking is trying to be on the side of angels. We can disagree about how we might do that.

I think that's quite important particularly for a lot of younger people that I meet under 30, who want to do good or think about this. To think about, "Okay, maybe in a pluralistic view of the world, this is where you might want do something.” And maybe that is working on governance issues. Maybe that is working on some of these systems issues and things like that. Then my second reflection which goes back all the way, which is maybe where I spent so long in the beginning on some of your thoughts about utility, and transitivity, inequality and things like that. It comes down to your asteroid example. It is because there is this movement within EA to think about rogue AI, existential risk, and long termism. You can see from one of your things, if you have a lot of billions or trillions of people in the future and you multiply that by something, you get a really good blob. You really need to save this blob in the future. You can get that when you multiply these numbers under these kind of utility or expected value things. But to our very first point, if there are potentially issues with the axioms behind that, and we can see all of these other things, maybe we do need to be more pluralist, even if we've done that, and we haven't talked about kind of each we dilemmas and some of these dilemmas within long-termism or things like that.

So I may be interested in that final reflection of like, "Yes. So there's problem with international aid and maybe those problems are going away about being too reliant on unexpected value for very big things on long-termism.” We are in some ways pre arguing for actually Will MacAskill's next book which is going to be concentrating on this. I think, on future and future lives. I think you are just sort of holding your hand up and saying, "Well, yes, there are these concerns. Sure, in a pluralistic world, we must work on climate and pandemics." But in a pluralistic world we might think about inequality. In fact, there might be even trade-offs for that, that if we want to have economic growth after poverty might have to accept a certain amount of inequality in order to also think about justice and fairness and good governance and things like that.

And it's like morality, complex, which I think I've got from reading your work. So I don't know whether you might want to reflect on that long termism aspect and why you think some of those expected value calculations may not be doing good better, and that might be some other areas to work on. That I guess is my first question. Then my second, which is a little bit interrelated to that, which actually has come from… I think Tyler Cowen actually was, if you think you've had a little bit of a blind spot, at least previous to coming across Angus Deaton's work, or... This is what I find so interesting. In a way, back in 1977 those three great moral philosophers had a little bit of a blind spot because they couldn't conceive of transitivity to being different.

And actually in parts of EA or international aid development, they couldn't conceive that we were doing something wrong. Is there some other element that you're intrigued about that maybe your intuition or something is saying that, "Maybe we should really examine this because I just don't know, because it's been a little bit of a blind spot and actually two or three or four of the major things or discoveries that I've had have come from really interrogating some of these blind spots.” So two part question: One is when we're thinking about doing good or doing good better, why may we maybe want to rate or less rate long termism or some aspects of long termism and utility theory, and maybe more rate the ideas of health or poverty, but doing those better even if it's not international aid. And then second, is there anything else which you think might be a blind spot and why that is?

Larry (54:28):

So I'm going to start with the second one because I can deal with that more quickly by saying I'm sure there are other blind spots. But you don't always recognize them until they hit you between the eyes, as it were. I don't have anything as it were on my agenda. So percolating in the back of my head, everyone's got this wrong and we need to correct this. I do think we have blind spots. We have lots of blind spots socially that we're slowly-- people like Peter Singer and lots of other people are calling our attention to. I do think that our treatment of animals remains for most people in the world, a blind spot. We just can't take seriously that animals deserve more consideration than we currently give them, which is almost zero.

So I do think that's a blind spot, but I'm not unique in pointing that out. Lots of people have said that's a blind spot. So there are things of that kind that I think we as a species as it were, have not really taken on board seriously certain aspects that we should. So I think that. But a lot of these other things where I find myself suddenly rethinking for the first time something, it just kind of comes. I'm reading someone's work, I'm talking to someone, they're making these claims, and then it's just not fitting. And I suddenly realize something's not right here. It's just not right here. At least that's how it comes across phenomenologically. Then I suddenly realize I never saw this before. I mean, I couldn't. The point about angels, it was a total blind spot. I've been so committed to this.

We have all these psychological explanations for once people are committed to something. You have anchoring biases, you have confirmation biases, you have cognitive dissonance, you have all these psychological factors that make it very hard to move off of some ideological position that you're predisposed to accept. And that's true for all of us. I mean, just if you're a member of the human species, you have these problems. We all have blind spots individually.

Ben (56:48):

Nothing nagging you at the moment?

Larry (56:51):

No, nothing revolutionary. I think my thought about transitivity is kind of revolutionary. I think that we are way too... I express the sentiment that I have in my most recent book that I am cosmopolitan by nature. I'm capable of feeling moments of pride for the United States if we win more Olympic golds than someone else. But by and large, I never understand how a president can be elected by saying, "Put America first." And this is true on both sides. This is not just Donald Trump saying America first. But basically, Biden and others, they run on the thing, "It's all about the American worker." I'm thinking, "Yeah, well, if we shipped everything back to the American worker, we're taking away from people in the Philippines. We're taking away from poor people in India. We're taking away from people that are a whole lot worse off." I get the political appeal of it, but from a moral standpoint, I just don't get it. The kind of xenophobia that dominates the world, particularly the Western world right now, but the world about immigrants and so on.

I think these are all blind spots. I think they're moral blind spots. I think people are just not capable yet of really taking on board the attitude that they should towards people who are not one of their own; whether that's race, religion, gender, sexual orientation. We just have these terrible in and out; the other versus us. All of those lead to blind spots that I think are bad morally, socially, politically, et cetera. But I don't have anything revolutionary to say about those. I just think people have recognized that, and we're not there yet and we need to work more to get people there, I believe.

Ben (58:48)

So I'm just going to make a quick reflection before going to that first question. I see there's something with children or the art, or particularly talking to children. I was very struck speaking with my son where seeing people suffer in pictures, often particularly when younger. And the question is, “Why are they different?” Because they haven't been taught that they are different. It's interesting that through that lens they see something which becomes a blind spot later which they don't have earlier. I remember listening to school children and there were these forced economic migrants or whatever; refugees crossing over the sea, and real difficulty explaining why that had come to be because their questions of why had very unsatisfactory answers to them. So that's a small reflection. Maybe then coming to that first question on wrapping around how to think about doing good better, why long termism or some aspects of it maybe being over weighted by some within the EA community and some of that. How might we think about that?

Larry (01:00:03):

Good. Maybe we'll end with this discussion of where can you go beyond long termism? I will say this. This is actually quite important, I think. I think it was Derek Parfit at the very end of Reasons in Persons who really put on the philosophical agenda in the course of a single paragraph the issue of long-termism. And I do think that was a blind spot. I think for most of human history we could basically affect ourselves, our family members, and our local community, and the scope of morality extended that far and not much further. My obligations were to my wife, to my children, to the members, my neighbors. That's because I really couldn't do something about people on the other side of the world.

Then as information changed, as technologies changed, as we became in contact with a larger global community, we were suddenly able to recognize that there's a lot more going on in the world; more interaction, more people that we might be able to help or hurt than just the people in our local neighborhoods. And we began to have an expansion of our global awareness, our global reach. But for a long time it continued to be focused on what we call, those people who are alive today. Those who were kind of as it were, both the agents of moral thinking and also the patients; the people to whom we had obligations, with the people alive today. Those were the people you could hurt. So a lot of people in moral philosophy and Derek made this very clear had the view that, "No harm, no foul." So, you can't be violating someone's rights unless you somehow hurt them or leave them worse off than they otherwise would be.

When it came to future generations, there's nothing you do typically that's going to hurt them or leave them worse off than they would otherwise be. Especially once Derek taught us about the nonidentity problem, because if you could bring in future generations at level 200. But future generations are completely different people for reasons he talks about, given the nonidentity problem. At level 500-- well, the people at level 200 will be glad to be alive at level 200. That's an arbitrary number, meaning a decent life. The people at 500, that's also an arbitrary number, are leading much better lives but it's different people. It's not bad for the people at level 200 to be worse off. To be alive at level 200 with good lives than to not exist at all, which is the alternative.

So if the thought, which for most of human history is, "You don't ever act wrongly if you don't actually harm someone, that means leaving them worse off than they would otherwise be,” then we can do whatever we want to future generations as long as we make sure they have lives worth living. That was a blind spot. That was a hole in our moral thinking. It took the genius of Derek Parfit to wake us up to the fact that, "No, we can drastically affect the quality of life for generations to come. Indeed, we can affect whether or not there will even be people existing for generations to come and merely asking the question, "Do we harm anyone, leave anybody worse off, if we picked this alternative rather than that alternative?” That's leaving out a whole domain of moral philosophy.

So the first point to note is that there was a giant blind spot in our moral thinking when it came to the topic of future generations. How the world might go and whether there should even be future generations? Our standard intuitive way of thinking about these matters was poorly fit. It wasn't designed, because our evolution could be placed in an area where everybody who you could affect was someone you could reach out and touch; had nothing to do with future generations. So that was a big blind spot. But now the interesting thing is, philosophers post there-- this is all last 50 years or so, have rushed in to fill this void. One of the things that has resulted is long-termism driven by expected utility theory calculations. One of the leading books on this-- not published yet as a book, but was a thesis by a former student of mine, Nick Beckstead, who wrote a thesis on this topic that has been hugely influential in the effective altruism community, and it is a brilliant thesis.

But it takes expecting utility theory to be the fundamental principle of rationality; how we should make decisions, then it drives forward in that way. Now, three thoughts. There remains a kind of blind spot throughout all of these discussions which places human beings front and center of all these discussion about long termism. I see no reason to do that. If you're really just concerned about the expected utility of the world, the total amount of happiness that exist in the universe, it'd be a lot cheaper to genetically alter cockroaches so that they can experience pleasures. Maybe they already do, but genetically enhance them so they can experience pleasures a little bit more. Just ensure that there are billions of cockroaches all over the universe. Put cockroaches in spaceships and send them out rather than human beings. It’d be a lot cheaper.

There was a great book many years ago before your day probably, written by a guy named Jonathan Schell. It was called The Fate of the Earth and it was about nuclear disaster. I used to teach this in my class. Powerful book. He basically said after the great nuclear army get on when Russia and United States have launched all their nuclear things and they've destroyed the worst, the only thing that's going to be left are grasses and cockroaches. This was being slightly rhetorical flourish, but the question is, “If all you care about is the total amount of happiness in the world, if that's what's driving you, then this focus on humanity is the center of happiness” doesn't make sense. Because lots of beings, squirrels, rats, mice, maybe cockroaches may be genetically enhanced the MIBI; might be capable of having positive experiences, and it might be easy to duplicate them on vast numbers at a very cheap rate. Whereas humans are expensive to maintain, and to send through space, and to colonize.

So this kind of focus on humans from a long termism doesn't make any sense to me. I think that's a blind spot. It's an anthropogenic vestige. But it may reflect something very important. It may reflect that there are values that matter; certain kinds of perfectionist values, artistic values, the kind of things you do. If you're doing theater, or art, or poetry-- we've talked about in here that have a kind of value that can't be on the lollipops for life scale. How many licks of a lollipop are the equivalent of a burle brick play? Maybe no number. Maybe that's why we focus on humans rather than cockroaches. But again, that doesn't fit with the do the most good approach of the effective altruist and long termism if it's really just a matter of adding up how much good exist in the world. It's giving weight to certain things and saying no amount of this outweighs that. Lexical priorities…So that's one issue. And I do think there's maybe an undoing focus given their anteceding concerns on long termism on the human side.

The other thing that doesn't make a lot of sense to me is I believe we live in a vast universe. Set aside the multiverse question, which there's good reason to believe if you believe in Roger Penrose that we have multiverses all over the place. But set aside the multiverse, still the universe is huge. There might be all sorts of essential beings out there that have high quality lives, far more beings than we could even imagine. I suspect that's likely to be true. One of the main reasons people are so worried about long termism is they're worried about extinction. They're worried about the idea that we're going to go extinct and there might be nothing like this kind of high quality of life ever again, ever in the universe if we go extinct. I don't get that. Life will evolve. It will show up again. If not here on earth, it will show up on other planets. It probably already has.

So this kind of extreme angst about the future of humanity, that seems to have an overinflated sense of our own importance. I don't mind caring about our future, but I'm not willing to sacrifice the lives of people in need now. Here and now on this earth, right here, they need us. And we're going to say, "Eh...” We're too worried about future humans. Why future humans rather than future squirrels, rather than future cockroaches, rather than just... There are probably lots of beings scattered throughout the universe who already have high level existence. Our presence or absence in the universe is probably an insignificant contribution to the overall greater good. So why not focus on things like justice or equality, other values, than just more, more, and more. So I have three beefs basically with long termism. I think it’s something we should pay... There was a huge hole before. I want to make that clear. Derek told us there's a huge hole. We need to think about the future and we need to think about that from a moral perspective. That actually runs through all my work. I have arguments through tons of my work that basically say, "We have a moral obligation to pay attention to the future."

It's not just about doing the best we can for people who are alive now. It also matters who will be alive in the future. So I get that. I think that hole needs to be filled. But, I'm not going to drive all of our thinking about morality by this model that's dependent on a whole series of premises that are questionable at best, and most likely false. I'm going to want a more nuance. I'm going to want a more complex. I'm going to want a more pluralistic way of balancing off. I'm never going to want to give the overwhelming priority to human beings for a human's sake that this movement seems to have largely incorporated when they think about long-termism. And there's this incredible focus on us. It just reminds me-- I said we're kind of bringing it to a close so I'll give you the last word. Bur we still haven't gotten over the ….  conception of the universe. Notwithstanding the hundreds of years we are post Copernicus.

The whole thing about the …  conception of the universe is, "God created the world and He created us and we're at the center of everything. It's really all about God, but we're at the center of it all." Then it came as a huge shock to learn maybe we're not at the center of the all. Maybe there's a sun and it’s at the center of our solar system, and it's even not particularly important because there are all these other things out there. This caused untold damage to the human psyche to think, "Oh my God, we're not the center of the universe." But when you talk about holes in our thinking, we still think of ourselves as the center of the universe. We can't help it. It infuses our thinking everywhere and maybe that's unavoidable. Maybe that's an inevitable reflection of the human condition which leads to solipsism and subjectivity because each of us is the center of his or her own universe, right? When we die, our universe in a very real way goes out of existence. But we put so much weight on that, both as individuals and as a species. I think what we are supposed to learn from Copernicus is that it was a mistake to think we're the center of the universe. And it still is.

Ben (01:12:56):

Wow, that's fascinating. I'm going to ask you a couple of last questions to round that up as our sort of closing remarks. But I will offer a couple of reflections. One is, I'm really glad we did start with some work on expected value and transitivity because it comes full circle back to understand how you're thinking about long-termism and things like that. So that's really thought provoking. And that it was a blind spot thinking about the future and that Derek Parfit sort of mentioned it almost in passing, although there was more to it than in that, and that's important. But you don't necessarily want to rely on a theory which seems to have axioms which are not completely true or true in all circumstances. I do think then on EA though, if EA is more simply a project for trying to increase human welfare, maybe that is something which people can agree on, even if actually where the EA project might be going, that still has a lot of debate on.

So I'd be interested if that is a kind of simpler project to think about. If you do want to improve human welfare, how should you do it better? Then my last sub-question after that is if you'd like to offer any final remarks, perhaps advice about being good in the world or a life advice about the world, or even thinking about the life of a philosopher. Anything you'd like to do on final comments. Is that whether EA is a project for improving welfare and how maybe we should think about doing good in the world.

Larry (01:14:39):

Good. So let me start with the simple point. I said a long time ago and I still believe this. I do think that EA as a movement and the leaders of EA are on the side of the angels in one clear respect. They are concerned. They are moral beings who are concerned with acting morally in the world. They do have a larger global scope than what's just best for me, and you have to admire that. In fact, that's the thing that's often the most criticized for them. Is that they're going to require the greatest possible sacrifices that individuals should make for their greater good. Even if you think that's a mistake--and I'll say a word about that in a second, you have to admire people who take that approach to life seriously and put others before themselves.

You also have to admire the grain of truth in this. Suppose you want to do good in the world and you can spend at an earlier time when it costs this amount, something like $30,000 to address a single case of AIDS in Africa, or you could spend that $30,000 on oral rehydration tablets. In the one case you might save one life, and the other case you might save 20 lives. Well, if what you care about is saving innocent lives, it's hard not to think 20 lives has a certain pull on you that one life doesn't. That's important not to me to just become a being counter about doing the most good. Still, there's something valuable about that approach. More of the good is better than less of the good. It has a powerful appeal even if we can't let it drive the bus.

So I do think there's a lot to be said for effective altruist in that they tend to have a scope beyond just themselves, beyond just their country, beyond just people like them. They look towards the future. I'm a person who thinks we always should be looking towards the future. We shouldn't just be living in the past. There's so much to admire about effective altruism as a movement, and there's much to be said for other things equally we want to do more good rather than less. I still think that's an important component of being a good human being and of acting morally. So I can sign onto a lot of what they sign onto. Many of the critiques I make in my most recent book really are critiques that the effective altruism couldn’t fully accept. Yeah, you're right. This just shows that we have to do things differently, not because the goal was wrong, but because we weren't accomplishing our goal by doing the things we are doing now.

So there's a lot that I'm still in agreement with about effective altruism. But, at the end of the day, effective altruism have altruists. You mentioned the issue about might we limit the scope to human welfare. Insofar as we care about human welfare, we want to do the most good with respect to human welfare. Then we can leave it as an open question. “How much should we care about animal welfare? How much we care about alien welfare?” But at least what are the parts we're focusing on human welfare, and that seems to be a reasonable thing to focus on in some cases anyway. Can't we agree that we should do the most good at least there? I agree that we should pay attention to how much good we're doing always. There's always a relevant factor; pragmatically and also morally. But it's only one factor. That's going to be my claim again and again.

I've taught many students over the years. I'm coming to the end of my career. I'm retiring. I've had countless students in my office over the years who are struggling with the question of, "How should I lead my life? This is extremely controversial, but being the pluralist that I am, I believe in a balanced life. Now, you can find balance in a number of ways. But just as I'm a pluralist about my moral values, I'm a pluralist about what's involved in being a good person and what's involved in leading a worthwhile human life. I'm signed up in the camp of, "We only have one life to lead."

It would be great if there's reincarnation and we led multiple innumerable lives. It would be great if there was life after death, et cetera. I'm on board for all of that if it's there, but I'm not leading my life assuming any of that is true. I'm leading my life thinking I have one and only one life to lead. How am I going to lead it? I would like to lead a life. I would like it to have been true that I led a life that at the end of the day, I can look myself in the mirror and feel good about the life I live. This involves the life for me of things like personal integrity. How do you treat other human beings? Do you treat people with respect, et cetera? I believe that personal face to face confrontation matters. I believe the things in my life...

I'm wearing a shirt right now. I’m wearing this shirt on purpose today. It says, "I have been: Mr. Professor, and Doctor...” If you turn around to the back, it says, "But my favorite title is grandpa." I now have five grandchildren. I understand that having children is not for everybody, but for someone like me, or for my father, for my parents, the amount of joy and pleasure and pride that I get out of my children and grandchildren, there's nothing in my professional lives that compares to it. For all the accomplishments that I've had-- I've had a few. All the impact on the world that some people have say I've had which is major-- none of that. It all pales in comparison to the relationship I've had with my wife going back to when we met on the hunger hike decade ago.

I put a tremendous amount of weight on the value of human relations. Parent a child, love towards significant others. These are tremendous services of value in human life. I pity my peers who are at the absolute pinnacle of intellectual achievement, but whose lives are lacking in so many other ways. So Derek Parfit who I've mentioned before, he was my mentor. He was my closest friend in philosophy for 40 years. I still think about him almost every day. I love Derek, but I would never have wanted to be Derek. And I wouldn't want anybody I care about to be Derek. He accomplished unbelievable things as a world class philosopher. But his life was, to my mind, missing so much of what makes a life valuable. So I wouldn't recommend that life. He didn't regret the life he had. And I have other philosopher friends like Derek; single minded, focus on their philosophy, that comes first, second, and third, and they wouldn't have traded their lives for anything. I get that.

I don't see that as the most valuable human life. One of the ways of thinking about this is, I have a model which I use in my Rethinking the Good, which I... I'm blanking on the current name. It was called the Gymnastic Model for many years and now I've given it a new name. Often when we think about like, "Who's the greatest gymnast? The best all-around gymnast?" A cat model moral idealist, that's it. The greatest all around gymnast is not the gymnast who excels at the parallel bars, but stinks at everything else. I don't care how good you are at the parallel bars or how good you are at the mats. If you are not good in anything else, you're not a great all round gymnast. Similarly, when you think about the virtues, I don't care how much Genghis Kahn might have the virtue of loving his mother-- pretend that's a virtue.

He might love his mother an unbelievable amount, but he's not a virtuous person if he raves and pillages and kills and steals and does all these other things. It doesn't matter how accomplished he is along that one dimension, if he's abysmal along the other dimensions. If you want to be a virtuous person, a truly virtuous person, you have to score pretty highly along a whole bunch of dimensions. Similarly, I think for the human life, if you really want to have a great human life-- and this is why I try to urge my students, you can't be narrowly focused on any one of the aspects that make a human life valuable. That's my view. I have colleagues who don't share it, but you're interviewing me right now and you're asking my view. When I give my advice to the people I care about...

Nobody can do everything. You can't be everything. We live in an age of specialization. I don't do every academic field. I don't even do every academic field within philosophy. I don't even do every academic field within moral philosophy. I specialize. One of the reasons I'm as good or not as good as I am in moral philosophy is I spend 30 years-- 15 years working on my first book and, 30 years working on my second year book. That means a lot of hedge hogging rather than foxes. So I get the appeal to focusing on something and trying to do it well. But when it comes to living a good human life, it can't just be narrowly focused on one thing. There has to be space for these other things that allow a human being to flourish. That's what I believe and that's certainly how I've tried to live my life.

There's an old expression from the tradition I grew up with that says, "If you are not for you, then who will be? If you're only for you, then what are you?" Basically, that means we do have the right and the permission to look out after our own wellbeing and those of those we love. I believe that. But if we only look out after ourselves and those we love, and we don't take time to sense of the larger world of which we're apart, our lives are not good lives.

Ben (01:26:01):

That's amazing. I'd sum that out post. Be pluralistic, be balanced, be able to look at yourself in the mirror, and be happy with what you see. So on thinking about that, I think this has been one of the most amazing conversations in my life. So, Larry Temkin, I thank you very much.

Larry (01:26:26):

It's very kind of you to say. Thanks, Ben. I really appreciate it.

David Finnigan: Making theatre, improving creativity, learning from failure, art in a time of climate | Podcast

David Finnigan is an award winning theatre maker, writer and games creator from Ngunnawal country, Australia. David produces performances and writing that explores concepts from Game Theory, Complex Systems science, Network Theory and Resilience. He has also had the dubious honour of performing on stage with me, in our performance lecture collaboration, Thinking Bigly. He has a show coming up at The Barbican, London, 27 September: You’re Safe Til 2024: Deep History.

We discuss how all art might be considered climate art. Thus we should consider jobs as jobs, why put green there? or health is health. This can take some of the heat out of the language. 

Even in the great depression, we sort of look back now. There's a tradition of screwball comedies in the great depression. Now, we look back at them and they had nothing to do with the kind of political issues and economic issues at the time. But we look back at them now and say, "Oh, they were deliberately escapist from those conditions of the time." So whatever you kind of create now it's very hard to not find a way to read it. That is a climate reading. And when something becomes all encompassing like that, it's almost such a broad term that it ceases to be useful to use it. I'm thinking now of your comment the other day where you said, "When we talk about climate health or we talk about climate justice, that's just health and that's just justice." At what point is it relevant to use the word climate and at what point is it unnecessary? Because climate's everything. Climate's everywhere. So it becomes a bit too vague.

We chat about the process of creativity in particular in performing arts. The importance of David finding a community in his home town and the constant making of work at the start of his artistic journey. 

David discusses what he learned from scientists and his father. How this has integrated into his art. 

We debate on what is most misunderstood about Australia and London. 

I ask David what he learned from injured possums.  David talks about London foxes and Underground mosquitoes. 

How theatre is narrow but deep. How theatre is bad for being able to pay rent. What David learnt from theatre in the Philippines. 

What we learn from failure. How we practice creativity and how we improve. David’s work in music and spoken word. 

We end on David’s current projects including his one man climate show coming up at the Barbican.

David gives his advice to creatives. 

“Don't ask for career advice, don't ask for professional advice. Ask people their story.”

David’s website here.

Podcast available wherever you get podcasts, or below. Video with captions on YouTube, or above.

---

PODCAST INFO

• Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3gJTSuo

• Spotify: https://sptfy.com/benyeoh

• Anchor: https://anchor.fm/benjamin-yeoh

---

David Finnigan with Ben Yeoh (transcript, only lightly edited)

Hey everyone. I'm super excited to be speaking to David Finnigan. David is an award-wining theatre maker and games creator. He had the dubious honor of performing on stage with me in our performance lecture collaboration. He has a show coming up at the Barbican in London in September called "You’re Safe Til 2024." He's an all-around great person. Welcome.

David (00:56):

Hello, Ben. Thanks so much for having me.

Ben (00:58):

So you have written that all art is climate art. Is this an argument that all art simply reflects its times and we are obviously in climate times? Or do you want to unpack that thought for us a little bit more?

David (01:15):

I think you've actually just expressed it quite elegantly. I think for me, we've probably moved past the point sometime in the last 10, 20 years where climate could be described as an issue. It has just become too big to be an issue. It's too broad. It kind of touches everything. It has become the context or the background for every other issue. So in that sense, I think we could sort of say that we are now living in the climate era. I'm borrowing Alex Steffen's term there. We're in the early years now of the climate era and therefore whatever we make is going to be art of the climate era. People in 500 years I imagine will look back at us and say, "They were making work in the early years of the climate era." So whatever your work is about, it's going to be described as that. So I often say that trying to make work about the climate now is a bit like being a medieval artist trying to make work about medieval. We're trying to grasp something huge and complex and abstract while we're still in the middle of it. That's the kind of broad brushstrokes of that philosophy.

Ben (02:28):

I guess if you go back hundreds of years if you were in the middle of the plague your work would've been... Again, it's the same because the plague would've been all encompassing. You wouldn't say, "Oh, I'm making plague work" because you're just simply making work in the middle of that.

David (02:41):

Even in the great depression, we sort of look back now. There's a tradition of screwball comedies in the great depression. Now, we look back at them and they had nothing to do with the kind of political issues and economic issues at the time. But we look back at them now and say, "Oh, they were deliberately escapist from those conditions of the time." So whatever you kind of create now it's very hard to not find a way to read it. That is a climate reading. And when something becomes all encompassing like that, it's almost such a broad term that it ceases to be useful to use it. I'm thinking now of your comment the other day where you said, "When we talk about climate health or we talk about climate justice, that's just health and that's just justice." At what point is it relevant to use the word climate and at what point is it unnecessary? Because climate's everything. Climate's everywhere. So it becomes a bit too vague.

Ben (03:34):

Do you think there's something particular about its systemic nature or its wicked nature because there is...? Wicked in the sense of intractable problem as opposed to just evil, by the way. If you think about those things; health or justice, you could have made a call for that justice or health was a human ideal which could have been part of its times. But they've never really made it to the level that it is. But to your point, something like the great depression again, we now look back. I'm not sure at the time whether they would've thought of that. We see it back with that lens of history. Do you think there's something particular around about climate? Just kind of a reflection.

David (04:19):

I think the way we use the word climate kind of refers to this grab bag of transformation that the planet is undergoing. We use climate change kind of as the catchall term to refer to biodiversity loss, or land use change, or the transformations in the phosphorous nitrogen cycle, or colony collapse. Any number of these different sort of transitions that we're suddenly going through, climate change is kind of the catchall term for those even though climate change is probably only one small part. Certainly not the biggest part of these issues. Maybe not the part that's going to get us. So it's become a kind of a label that we stick on things. In that sense, I guess I know what it means loosely. I know what people mean when they say, "Oh, that works a piece of climate art."

I can guess some of the kind of genre beats that might exist within or some of the tropes that it might adopt. So it's useful perhaps in that sense, but also, it is kind of a vague label to slap on things. I'm not sure as an artist if you're making climate work-- Maybe you heard this too. But I do have every so often a young artist will come and say, "I want to make work about the climate. What should I do?" It's like, "What about the climate? It's too big. Keep zero in and keep narrowing down.”

So I make work about climate research. I work with climate scientists and I sometimes work with policy makers. I think you kind of exist at that intersection as well. But there are lots artists who make work that look at, for example, a specific community that might have been affected by dispossession or kind of indigenous conflicts. Like indigenous people being driven off land, migration, or gender issues which of course are exacerbated by climate and other planetary transformation issues. I think those are all legitimately equally climate work. .

Probably the work that you and I do is easier to label climate because it has the kind of... We use words like parts per million and greenhouse gases which kind of situated very much in what we understand climate change as being traditionally. Although I think in the last few years we have sort of stepped away from that a bit.

Ben (06:46):

Because it's possibly less useful. In fact, going to your point, the other way that actually is becoming a little bit of a hindrance having that label. I was thinking for instance when you were going through those things; plastic. With plastic you don't necessarily directly think of a climate thing. But obviously when you say climate and plastic it's like, "Yes that makes a lot of sense." But it's a different strand of that whole blob.

David (07:13):

I think like in a word cloud sort of mental association thing I think people do connect micro plastic pollution with climate change. Those two things sit next to each other. I think it's actually surprising for a lot of people to learn that plastic pollution doesn't really have much to do with climate change. They don't come from the same source. I mean, producing plastics, the plastics industry does have an emissions profile. But it's not on the scale of concrete or steel. The cycle of plastic is a kind of different issue. But I think for a lot of people-- well, for all of us, it sits in the same part of our brain.

Ben (07:56):

Sure. Definitely adjacent. So you're talking about your work with policy makers sometimes steeped in climate scientists or speaking to scientists and that in games. How would you view your own origin story starting work in Australia? Starting work with a kind of interactive games or performance. Also, spoken word, poetry. We might come up to your music making and sound creation as well. How do you view how your own creative journeys come about?

David (08:29):

I'll give you the kind of origin story as I think of it now. I'm from Ngunnawal country in Australia which is a region in the Southeast in between Lake George and the Murrumbidgee River. So I'm from the city of Canberra which is the capital but it's also a city of around 350,000 people. So it's not a huge population. There wasn't a huge theatre scene. I came up in my late teens and early twenties making theatre in this independent arts community in Canberra particularly with a collective called Bohemian. We later changed our name to Boho. I and my collaborators set out to make work that was interactive and looked at science. I think my friend Jack Lloyd who's a very close collaborator really was interested in gaming and how that could translate to theatre.

I was very interested in doing something around science. Just been reading some books, some pop science books on the shelves and thought that would be a kind of interesting thread to fold into our work. So our very first show as Boho was called a “Prisoner's Dilemma.” It looked at game theory; the classic prisoners dilemma game theory concept. Game theory for anyone who doesn't know is a branch of science that tries to analyze real world decision making using math. So it tries to break down real world conflicts or complex decisions into a sort of mathematical structure where you can actually calculate. It's essentially any situation where what the best thing to do depends on what other people do. 

One classic example is the game of chicken. You can imagine you have two cars driving towards each other. The first one to swerve is the loser. But of course, if neither car swerves, then you both hit each other and both drivers are dead. So chicken, it's also quite similar in a lot of ways to nuclear escalation and the mutually assured destruction. So you can kind of analyze this game and the scientists who developed game theory in the forties and fifties used it to try and think about how they might fight a nuclear war which they kind of expected to be doing. It's also just a great way to think about choices and decisions. We kind of built this show around a lot of these decisions that the audience might make and scenarios where we put them where they would have to cooperate or compete with each other and hacked gaming devices. So gave Wiimotes and joysticks to the audience and they could use them to kind of pilot the performers around on stage. That was where we began.

From there, we went from looking at game theory to looking at complex systems science and network theory. All of these I guess that you could broadly put under the heading of earth sciences or earth system sciences. They're all sciences that are interested in the kind of complex connections of how things work in the world. Probably it wasn't until 2010 that we really explicitly said out loud we were making a show about climate because wanted to avoid exactly what we were talking about earlier. We were really interested in the other things around climate that weren't being talked about. So biodiversity loss, land use transformation. These are the kind of global change phenomena that weren't being discussed. We kind of deliberately stepped around the topic. Then finally in 2010 we made a show called “True Logic of the Future” that looked right into climate shocks and the intersection between climate and politics and so on. So that work kind of took us into working with scientists. From then on, much of my theatre has been done in collaboration with researchers or in research institutions, in universities, in laboratories making work with scientists about science.

Ben (12:52):

Were you influenced by your family as well? Because your father was a scientist. I'm not sure how much professional science work he's still doing. Was it the kind of cultural looking and reading you were doing at the time or I'm imagining it was a bit of both, or did that come later?

David (13:14):

My dad was a big part of it. None of his children followed him into the sciences and he never really nudged us or pushed us one way or another. Certainly, when I began exploring theatre both my parents were very supportive. But I think it was really exciting for him when I began to sort of look around and be like, "Dad, can you point us in the direction of a resource? We want to talk with a scientist who knows about this issue or this topic." So he was like, "Well, yeah. I have a friend here who can chat with you and have a coffee with you about how complex systems intersect with Australian history or how network theory meets the Murray Darling basin; the kind of river system in Australia. So that was really great. That was really helpful. My dad was originally British. He moved to Australia in the 1970s and began working in what was then called environmental mechanics. So his area of expertise is wind flow over waving plant canopies. That's a thing that he has literally written the book on. A wind flow over low lying plant canopies. For the 10 people in the world who kind of study that, he's written a textbook that they often use.

Ben (14:40):

That has a special name?

David (14:42):

It's micro meteorology. f you see wind through a kind of grass field, the Japanese word for that is honami which means rice heart wave which is quite lovely. So obviously, that micro meteorology in the 1980s began to be folded into these bigger conversations about what was then called the greenhouse effect; what was starting to be called global warming. So my dad and a lot of his colleagues were sort of brought into these bigger discussions about can the climate change? What would it look like if the climate change? How would we know if the climate was changing? How could we model that? When people started making bold assertions saying, "Yeah, we could be facing five degrees of warming in the next century," people like my dad were kind of brought in to sort of go, "Is this realistic or is this not?"

Then in the 2000s, he became really interested in complexity theory. I think after chaos theory in the 1980s complexity was the next hot topic emerging out of places like the Santa Fe Institute. So my dad was kind of really interested in bringing complex system science to Australia and helped built up one of the first labs that looked at complexity theory in Australia. Built a kind of unit and hosted a whole series of conversations with scientists that tried to look at what complex systems could tell us about different sorts of issues that we were facing; climate being one of them. So all of that effectively meant that he was always there with some really interesting conversations around the dinner table and there were always books on the shelf. If we needed some inspiration I could go poking around and be like, "Well, I don't even understand the title of this one but I can skim it through and find some interesting anecdotes within these books."

Ben (16:46):

So we have science if you're interested in game theory. Was there any cultural icon or play movie TV element for teenager David which was really influential, or did you just sift through into that via performing and making?

David (17:07):

This is kind of a funny thing. I feel like the world I come from is very DIY. I actually suspect this is a real difference between you and me because you began making theater in London. So in Canberra in Australia particularly in the early 2000s, one of the things that I think was actually great was there was no weight of influence because there wasn't a kind of scene of theatre makers above us. I wasn't going to see the theatre. When I was in year 12, my friends and I found out that you could hire a theatre. You could pay $400 a week and you could rent this little tiny black box space the size of this room. They would just give you the keys and you could put on a show.

So we just did and it was awful. No one came, but it was the most fun that I had ever had and the most meaningful, fulfilling thing that I could possibly imagine. So I just did that and that was all I did. I spent the next 10 years really just making theatre nonstop with my friends. That's how we hung out. That's how we basically lived. Every cent that we earned went on theatre art and every minute that we weren't working or if we were studying at school, we were in the theatre making these shows that no one saw except each other. I didn't have the money to drive to Sydney to go and see a proper theatre show and when those occasional touring shows came to Canberra I couldn't afford to see them either.

So the only theatre I was seeing was the theatre of my friends and collaborators. Maybe there were 250 people in the scene making music, art, and dance and I would see everything that they did. So for me, the kind of big influences that I had were playwrights like Adam Hadley, Jack Lloyd, Nick McHariston, or Chris Lloyd. People who were my friends, also rivals, also inspirations which meant weirdly-- I think this is probably something I'm really both proud of but also I recognize as a big failing. By the time I came to take a workout out of Canberra and see the bigger world and come to places like London to put things on, I really didn't have a sense of what was going on in the bigger theatre conversation. A lot of the basic skills or basic discussions that had been going on here I had no clue about. 

So in a way I'm really pleased about that kind of upbringing because it meant I got to make a lot of stuff. I got to get all this bad stuff out of the way. I was never intimidated by being like, "Well, I can't put something on because I've seen all this amazing work by all these top end professionals I could never compete with." On the flip side, my standards were really all over the place. I feel like this would be very different for you coming up in London. My impression is as a young artist in London you're bombarded by seeing this work that you're told, "This is the best work in the world." How can you compare yourself to that?

Ben (20:35):

I'm interested in your comment that you could probably tell when your work was good or not good even without a reference to outside theatre. I do think you are definitely in a conversation in London or New York. I remember in my twenties there was an ongoing discussion between the kind of playwriting or theatre making where the playwright was very center and it was their vision and the director and actors would fill out that vision. But it was still a writer centric vision versus the form of theatre influenced by other things where it was much more collaborative; whether that was devised, or a vision or an idea of theatre making that way. Obviously, actually the splintering of all of those and being part of that live debate where actually for someone who has always been a little bit of outside even to theatre, I could see that they probably had more in common than they had apart. But it was very interesting. I've always been an outsider for that, because as most people listening to this will know I have a very different day job in sustainable investing. I'm interested in all of these other things.

But I think there is an element of being an outsider which can be really useful for creating more unique art or perhaps just art which wouldn't happen otherwise, either because you have a commercial imperative and the commercial market tends to be influenced by a certain amount of things. I was listening to MrBeast who's one of the largest YouTubers ever. He started this way but within YouTube. Obviously, he had a lot of feedback and was very obsessed by that and has gone on to have a multimillion franchise which hasn't happened and I don't think would happen in theatre. So there was something about its medium and its time.

David (22:29):

Yeah. The low ceiling is an interesting thing. I was talking about this the other day. The fact that to get into theatre is quite a high floor. You can't just sit down at the desk and write. You need a group of other people, you need a space, and you probably need an audience. Depending on what you're making you might need lights and sound and a set. So it's quite a high floor to kind of get started in. Then there's quite a low ceiling in that unless you're a smash hit first play west end, you are probably only performing to tens or hundreds of people on a good night. You're not on YouTube where it takes absolutely no challenge to make your first video and there's really no limit to how many people you could reach.

Ben (23:13):

I think about that because this series of podcasts has now reached more people than my in person plays probably ever will or ever will have. Maybe my radio play one which went on World Service potentially stole more.

David (23:30):

There's something in this though that I feel like one thing that is nice about theatre. Maybe I tell myself this because I'm a theatre maker. I'm too deep into theatre to shift art forms. So whenever I can think of something that I like about theatre I have to clutch to it. But I do feel like theatre is a very narrow but deep form. You have a very narrow group of people that you can reach. It's as many people that fit in the room really. Those are probably a very specific type of person. But when you have them, you can take them deep. You turn off the lights and they're with you for an hour and they're completely there.

I can't think of many other mediums where you can actually take someone's full attention for 60 minutes of their life. That's quite a generous thing that people give you. Whereas with the podcast or with the YouTube, I think you are getting a huge number. It's a shallow but broad medium. You're hitting a huge number of people but probably you're getting their distracted attention while they're doing something else, or they're watching you but they have five other tabs that they could flip to at any moment.

Ben (24:37):

I think there's a lot of truth to that. There's something to do with the liveness of it as well where a brilliant piece of art or even art that other people don't think is brilliant but transforms you, you can leave that room different than how you entered. Most other art forms do not do that to the same extent. I think all art has that capability but theatre has a higher percentage conversion. Maybe not that high even, but for a narrower number. I was also going back to your Canberra observation. What do you think is most misunderstood then, or perhaps that people would be surprised to know about Canberra or Australia having grown up there and now seen so much of the outside world? Do people really misunderstand Australia or don't get something about it, or even in particular Canberra? Is there something you would give back or forth or the observations? Maybe you could do the same like London. This is as an outside of what London doesn't understand about itself. I'm interested in Canberra or Australia.

David (25:45):

Canberra's a great choice because people within Australia hate Canberra. Canberra is broadly despised because Canberra is the seat of parliament and it's a sort of purpose built capital city. The origin of Canberra is that both Melbourne and Sydney were debating over which would be the capital, and to compromise they built this new city in between the two. So it's this sort of deliberately built town that has a big public service space and all of the politicians in the country come there to be there for six months a year perhaps to work and to be in session.

So whenever you watch a news broadcast in Australia it'll say, "Canberra has decided" some awful thing or "Canberra says," and it'll be some grim thing. If you come to Canberra as an outsider, you'll go to maybe a few kind of Washington DC esque landmarks. There are some museums, there are some nice architecture in the city center part but it's deliberately quite low. There's not much there for outsiders to get into. The perception of Canberra is that it's boring, it's evil because of the politicians that live and work there. Because it's a public service town it's also quite progressive. For years it has had more progressive policies around pornography and marijuana. So you'll often hear people be like, "Oh, Canberra. It's porn, pot, and polys" which is what we're known for.

The truth is it's actually an extraordinary city. It’s an extraordinary community. There's the kind of parliamentary triangle which is where all the politicians are, it's where all the museums are, and it's where you get these ambitious young staffers who come from Melbourne and Sydney when they're very young and they work in the triangle for two, three years and move back to the big city. Outside of that you have this weird little community that exists off the outside of any light. Because it's completely hated on, essentially you never get jerks come. You never get anyone come there who wants to be seen because they'll never be seen. So you have this very self-contained, very self-supporting community. It's the community I grew up in and the community that made me as an artist. The kind of art scene there is flourishing and weird and deeply off the radar. But all that said, I actually have no particular. Because of all that I have no real interest in trying to counter that myth. So when people are like, "I hate Canberra" I'm like, "Yeah. Good. Continue to hate it." I don't particularly want to change anyone's mind because it's also my secret.

Ben (28:45):

So if you are a weirdo in Canberra you can find your tribe quite easily as it were. I mean, sort of semi hidden, but you probably don't have to sniff around very much to find it and then probably find quite a happy home.

David (29:00):

I would say yeah. But for London, what do you think is most misunderstood about London? Because you're a proper born and bred London native. You're one of the rare breed.

Ben (29:09):

You've thrown the question straight back at me. I think some people when they first come to London find it somewhat unfriendly because unlike where you go to maybe even Australia or America there's a kind of surfaced, "Hi, how are you?" And you kind of get that surface feel that you're part of their community, which I don't think is the case for a lot of Americans. Although again, that generalization has a lot of exceptions. Whereas I think in London you don't get that surface feel very often. In fact, not at all. But if you scratch below the surface, I still think it's one of the most multicultural deep places because it's still a pivot point for many things. It has a very long, deep culture itself. It's taking a melting pot still despite everything of all of these other cultures and perhaps a little bit like what you were reflecting on Canberra that you can find your weirdness. You can find something in London as well.

Actually, you find a lot of people whether from UK or even elsewhere that are drawn to London to find that. So I think that's true. Our food is pretty good as well. So people think that London food isn't that great. But actually from the low end to high end and probably even better at the so-called low and mid-end, it's extremely varied. Partly maybe if you go back you had the spice trade or whatever through that but because of all of those cultures and things coming through. What's your reflection on London?

David (30:56):

I think you're right. Those are all my favorite things about it. A friend observed before I came here. They were like, "The thing you'll notice about London if you spend some time there is that whatever weird thing you're into you'll find a community.” But you can keep digging. In Melbourne, if you're into historical reenactment maybe there'll be a group that meets that does historical reenactment. But in London you'll be like, "There's a group that does historical reenactment for the Victorian era." When you get there they'll be like, "Do you want the one that does 1890, 1895, or 95 to 1900?" So it's like you can just keep digging and you'll keep finding the weirdness goes deeper.

Ben (31:35):

Yeah. I think there's a lot of truth there. Like you say, I've lived here for over 40 years. I just did the calculation. I have lived and worked-- apart from my time at university, within about a 12 to 14 mile radius of where I was born. Pretty much every week, definitely every month, I'm still learning things about the city which astounds me.

David (32:00):

There's one thing I do find very strange here. I'm speaking as an Australian white settler. My parents are British and they moved out to Australia in the 1970, I think. They're what's called 10 pound palms because you could get a boat ticket for 10 pounds at the time. So growing up in Australia you always have this sense, and it's very hard to put into words but you're very aware of it from quite a young age that you are not on your own land; the land you live on is not yours. At a point, you learn that the land you're on was stolen. Gradually bit by bit you kind of learn the depths of what that entailed. 

Some people never really engage with that and some people really do. But I think no matter who you are, if you spend any time in Australia as a settler you are aware that there is this legacy, there's this guilt, and you're responsible for something that you personally didn't do. By the time you're aware of it, you're already culpable. That's a strange thing and people metabolize that in different ways. Some people metabolize it by trying to address it and some people metabolize it by very actively ignoring it. It's a very kind of sore and contentious thing in the country. Not even speaking about the indigenous people who have born the worst of it in every sort of angle. So it was really weird getting to London and getting to the UK and meeting white people, British people who felt like the land that they were on belonged to them. I realized I'd never felt that. It's a strange sort of sensation. I don't know what your experience has been.

Ben (33:48):

So there is increasing awareness of that. Obviously, you feel it more in Australia. I think it's interesting comparing it to other lands which were colonized in that way; America and Canada. So they feel it less in America, but growing probably more in Canada. I put Canada between Australia and America but with similar reactions into it or sort of against it because of where it's come from. Here in the UK or in England, there is something where you go back to this land owner mentality or not. So when you dig down there is something around-- You have this in these great landed estates. Particularly in London, Marylebone is owned by certain estate around Sloan Square. It's the Catagens around Westminster. It's the Grosvenor or the Duke of Westminster. Going back probably to around the 1066 mark and then onwards, there is a sense that they own it. But actually it's a sense of owned still amongst the kind of landed elite.

Perhaps this is getting a little political, but they probably have gone a little bit into the shadows because they don't want to raise the fact that actually a lot of that wealth-- You see it probably mostly with the queen and things like that. They still own a lot of it. I think the vast majority of UK’s capital wealth is still tied up in the land. That generational wealth has really held for hundreds and hundreds of years. I think there's a kind of myth that we tell ourselves here about how it is, and therefore this quest particularly in the UK about owning your property and your land and things come from that. I think then the offshoots about how when the UK was colonizing everything, there was an offshoot of that mentality. It’s actually if you didn't have the land then-- and most people didn't, they wanted to own pieces of other land because of that. So I do think there is that, but it expresses itself in a slightly quaint way to put it.

Thinking back on the journey as an artist that you have, I'm really intrigued that a lot of your recent work has been in the style of theatre where you are essentially a playwright and a writer. So your voice as a player has come out and other people have put it on and it has been more collaborative from that. Whereas for instance your roots as you were saying were in the kind of collaborative art form. You've kind of gone that way in your journey whereas a lot of other people kind of go maybe the other way. I don't whether they go the other way but it's a mix. You still do both sets of work and I was intrigued. Is this a kind of form versus function, voice aspect, or is it just you've ended up doing more of that because you had done less of it before and you're more interested in it? Is there any kind of purpose to it or is it one of those just falling into it via luck and what opens out to you?

David (36:59):

It's a great question. Maybe now on a good year I'm able to kind of pick and choose a little bit what I'll work on, if I'm lucky. I still struggle to pay rent much of the time. I'm not by any means at the point where I can sit back and say, "I'm just going to do this for the next six months." But the work that I do that earns me money tends to be games. It tends to be interactive scenarios that I develop for research institutions or for organizations that want to communicate an idea. I'll get commissioned to make a game or an interactive activity that illustrates that idea.

That does have the field much more of those collective cooperative works devised theatre. My practicing game making comes from my work in devised theatre and that skillset that I've built up through working with Boho and with Coney and those other organizations over the years. The other stuff that I do that's more sort of playwright centric comes from this playwriting practice which just I don't think will ever earn me as much money. I don't think it'll ever kind of pay a living wage. It's great now that I no longer have to try and pay my bills through that sort of traditional theatre because I think for most people that's not viable, and certainly it's not viable for me. 

If I get a show up, that's a miracle and I'm very grateful for it. But it's not going to pay my bills. It does really scratch a deep, important itch in me. I probably am drawn more towards the playwriting end of the spectrum where I get to write a script and other people perform it or I'll perform it. I'm drawn more towards that. But I think that might be, as you say, because I was doing more of the other stuff for so long and it's still so rare that I get a theatre company say, "Yeah, we want to produce one of your works.” I don't get enough of that. But if someone said, "You'd have to give up the game making," I wouldn't want to do that. So I'm grateful for having both, but the ratio is never quite what you'd like.

Ben (39:15):

Yeah. You always go for the rarity or the thing that you can't have. Do you have a view on how digital or hybrid will work out? There's a phrase within theatre particularly here in the UK with building back better, building back different. Actually, to be absolutely honest I see very limited things about building back any differently than it really was pre pandemic. Really just small things around the edges is my kind of outside of you. But digital and perhaps hybrid which has been talked about for a long time, you might have thought that the pandemic might have finally been a catalyst and trigger for doing more work like that. And actually, I think you have done some successful work on this sort of line but it's been its own thing. What do you think of the future? Does hybrid digital, performing arts have a space? How's it going to go?

David (40:08):

I certainly don't think that what we were doing in the pandemic either has a real organic audience hungry for it or even a huge cohort of artists that are excited about it. I think there's a small group of artists who are really nudging at what that form could be. And there's a small group of audience who are really interested in that sort of experimental work. But I think a lot of it was just theatre artists being forced online. Certainly, that's where I sort of landed. I think you're right completely about the question of building back better. That intention hasn't really carried through. I think it's worse than actually reading your latest newsletter. Was it yesterday, it came out? Was this your prediction or was this a stat? That in fact, a lot of the artists that kind of held on for dear life through the pandemic to the art form might now be knocked out by the oncoming economic downturn. Was that a stat or was that a prediction?

Ben (41:16):

Some of it is stat and some of it is prediction. Some of the stat is if you look at for instance the proportion of people who are in the lowest fifth, and for instance if you're not really making rent you're definitely in the lowest two quartiles. I don't know exactly where you go. But if you look at the lowest fifth, they spend about 10 to 20% of their budget on food. Food is up 10% plus and actually lower cost food is up more. So all of that is now absorbed. And to your point, there are moderate to heavy headwinds still. So COVID is still a cost and it's going to be an ongoing cost essentially forever. This disease is with us forever and it's going to cost us more in everything: in health, in money, how we cope with it. Some of that cost is definitely going to be for some time in live event cost. The cost of managing it, the cost of cancellations; all of this. That hasn't been put in any calculations. So you've had this bounce back because people had no choice of a pandemic. The kind of new normal of what it is certainly for the next year or two is not looking great now.

When you go out five or seven years hopefully as we have done before, humans do quite well in the face of adversity and the coming up of new things. But I think we forget that it's very painful for the people who are inventing this type of stuff. So I think it's completely true. Actually, you see this with artists. The sort of poor artists in adversity kind of trope. There is some truth to it and they do create more and there is really interesting stuff which comes out. But if you also look at it, it's at a huge personal and other cost. Sometimes I speak to some of them and they're not exactly sure whether it was worth it, or at least worth it for them. It's probably worth it for the value they bring to society. So I think that there is some of that.

David (43:24):

I think that's absolutely right. It reminds me of that other Alex Steffen line where he says, “We're not heading towards an apocalypse, like society wide apocalypse. But we are heading towards a situation where there are many more personal apocalypses while society trudges on.” I think what you described is exactly that. People are kind of suddenly seeing years of their life go up in smoke and all of their money has to go towards just survival costs. Within that, how can you make work? How can you innovate or celebrate the work that you're making or the community around you?

Ben (44:00):

Exactly. And if the end part of thinking of human progress is that sense of, "We are wealthy so we can spend our time doing the things which make us human; call that art, or reading, or chatting with friends, or dancing, or music making and all of that," well, that whole blob is squeezed by all of this coming; whether it is climate related, or pandemic related, or inflation related. That blob of humanity seems to me to be squeezed. That's not doom in the sense that we are still about, but we are lesser for it and that does worry me certainly over the next two or three years because the catalyst, particularly in performing arts of pandemic hasn't really changed that trajectory it seems to me

David (44:53):

I think that's right. The personal experience I have of this is not my experience but it's something I've seen. I work a lot in the Philippines and have been doing for about 15 years. Being there since 2006, one thing that's been really extraordinary to see is this surge of-- Philippines is a country of 98 million people. It's the 12th most populous country in the world. In recent decades it has this sort of burgeoning middle class. There are these huge numbers of people who their parents lived in quite severe poverty. They have come to a better standard of living where they can start to experience a better life and as part of that consume art. What they are hungry for is art by Filipinos about Filipino experiences made for them by their peers.

So being around Filipino theatre makers was like nothing I've ever seen here or in New York or Australia. When work was made it was seized on, debated, discussed, engaged with, and grappled with. The audience is growing every year. Now, you can really imagine that trajectory in the coming decades as we hit these various crunches and shocks that growth might just stall. There's going to be millions and maybe billions of people who, as well as all the other sort of suffering and deprivation that they'll have to go through, won't get to see their worlds represented back to them the way they could have done. I don't know where that ranks on the scale of sadness but that does make me sad.

Ben (46:39):

I really would love to hear more about your work in the Philippines. Maybe the other reflection I have is the way you came into creative arts was a lot of doing and arguably a lot of 'failure' or a lot of stuff which wasn't that great and iterating. In some ways I think we talk about this in creative arts. That stays with us whether we had admitted or not that this is an act of failing, and rehearsals are one way. I was thinking about that. Science presents these conclusions to the Anza showings. That's one output. 

But actually, a lot of our interesting other output is the rehearsals. The creative is the messy failure process. Sometimes even the output of that is also a failure. I think a lot of science is actually the messy input before that and they have the hard equation at the end but there's a lot you don't see beforehand. So I was interested in your reflection on that process and what you learnt from failure or not. I think there's a kind of collective failure maybe in and around pandemic. I'm not exactly sure. It's interesting to see how Philippines respond or your own personal practice. So you can go with that wherever you like.

David (47:57):

Sure. The thing that immediately jumps to mind is this idea which I was writing about a little while ago. The pandemic as a kind of rehearsal. This metaphor came up a lot I think in the early days of the pandemic. That dealing with COVID would be a rehearsal for the bigger shocks that would've come. I loved Adam Tooze's kind of in media res history, “Shutdown” which is a book that came out last year that looked at the first 14 months of the pandemic. He kind of grabbed on two examples of where the response went right. The first one being China's initial massive scale lockdown of Wuhan in those first 70 days that managed to at extreme cost get the virus under control and limit the outbreak. Sure enough, people in Wuhan were out in nightclubs while you and I spent most of 2020 in lockdown. Where they're at now is a very different story, obviously.

For two, he sort of points out that came from the fact that a lot of the leading Chinese government officials now came of age in the SARS crisis in 2003. There was this big reckoning post SARS where a lot of officials were kicked out and this whole new generation took over. That was the generation that's now in charge and kind of running the show. The other one he talks about was the sort of financial response, and this is getting very much out of my wheelhouse. But he sort of says, "We came perilously close to some serious collapse in those days of February, March, 2020. That we didn't was because of some lessons learned by financial regulators during the GFC.” 

So if those two analogies hold-- and I like to think they do, then that suggest there's a sort of room where we can kind of rehearse a little bit our way through crises. One way or another we have learned from COVID. The next shock is going to be different and it's probably going to hit us very badly as well. But hopefully, we would have taken some kind of tips and tricks from this experience. In the absence of a sort of global overarching green new deal or kind of Paris agreement that we work to collectively as an international body, I think stumbling from crisis to crisis and picking up some tricks along the way is probably the best we can hope for, for the rest of our lives.

Ben (50:40):

So usually I'm the optimistic one and I think long term optimism is actually both correct and the correct strategy. But I have to say the pandemic or where we are now has tilted me slightly the other way because I don't think we are learning the obvious lessons. For instance, it seems fairly clear that give it a 30 or 50 year view, we are very likely to have another sort of viral pandemic. But we seem to put nothing in place from what we've learned this time around for the kind of things that you would need in order to make that pandemic manageable. So if that is a foreshadowing for some of the things around; either another pandemic or other joint coordination problems, or the first one we talked about right at the beginning which is obviously a major one that also makes me feel less hopeful because essentially the special interests or the interest groups for the smaller bodies-- I say small, whether that's nation state or however, just conflict in a way that we don't seem to be able to coordinate. But to your point, we do seem to learn a little bit every time. I just thought we'd learn maybe a little bit more but that's out of my sayings.

David (51:56):

It's true. I feel like even during the black plague governments didn't think that you could just announce that the virus was over. The fact that there is this sort of willingness from the top down to sort of say, "We are done now. Covid's not a problem anymore." It doesn't bode well for other kinds of shocks and crises that are coming down the pipeline very fast towards us.

Ben (52:21):

Maybe it's to do with the time scale though now because there is something which seems to be compressed. I think humans over history have tended to work more in generations. Actually, maybe in a generational aspect we're still okay. Like every 30 or 40 years we are trundling through. But just because of humans, some of these timelines have really moved up and that has caused perhaps a crunch that we have not kept up with the timelines that we have put on physical world; maybe even also in technological world with what we're doing with AI or nuclear technology and all of these advanced really quickly. Like suddenly, "Well, we're very good at usually killing one another. Now we have capabilities which could wipe out pretty much a lot of life on the planet." That's a kind of really big jump in where you would think in a kind of technological progress.

David (53:19):

I think you're absolutely right. The shocks that we're being hit with there's this pace at which they come. I think COVID probably ranks as a pretty good example of a mid-sized shock for the 21st century. The shocks are going to keep getting bigger on average and the gaps between them are going to get smaller and smaller. I was just sort of doing a kind of back of the envelope calculation for myself the other day and it struck me. I feel like I lost probably two years of my life to COVID. That being a theatre maker particularly, I lost two years where I couldn't practice my art, I couldn't practice my kind of profession. I also went from lockdowns in the UK to lockdowns in Australia.

So I spent probably a long time unable to connect with my community and be around the people that really matter to me. Financially, there was a big impact as well. So I'd say I lost two years and that's out of this decade. Assuming nothing else goes wrong in the 2020s which is a big thing to assume, but I could imagine… Losing two years out of this decade I was like, "Does that mean I could expect to lose four years out of the 2030s, six years out of the 2040s, and eight years out of the 2050s?" What do you think?

Ben (54:40):

I don't think it's linear. I think it's possible but you'd be unlucky. That would be my thought. I think there is a reasonable thesis which suggests is this the whole-- This is like an environmental curve. Things get worse before they get better. So you kind of have a cross between a techno optimist and a techno realist as in the technology will save us, but there will be a period where it could destroy you before it could save you. What you need to do through that period is progress humanity in all of its aspects which I think is both social, moral and everything in order to use the technology well and the technology. So you hit through the other side. But as you're doing that and you have not yet progressed enough and your technology has got more, you could well wipe out everything. So the risk becomes higher.

But you need to go through that because we're now at a point in time that if we don't go through the technology we end up there anyway. So you have to take that risk and hope you get through. You could see a landscape where if we have got through and maybe we'll come onto this… So for instance, I am worried-- I think one of my moral failings is that I eat animals and I can kind of reach a point through a sort of techno optimism or something where you go through that and you have the equivalent and you're not causing any harm to non-human sentient beings. But you probably get through there through technology rather than cultural change. You might get there through a bit of both. You could see this through everything. How we treat the seas, how we treat the land and all of that. But you definitely go through a period where that becomes a lot worse; potentially much worse before you get through to that other side. I don't know what to do with that except that it seems to be that's probably where we're heading.

David (56:37):

It has to be where we're heading. It's that thing where if we had gotten onto this 30 years ago, the transition would've been quite gentle. We wouldn't have had to disrupt our lives and our society very much at all to make the transition. But where we are now after 30, 40 years of inaction, the talk that's built up the energy by not making this move is like we've kind of press this spring down year after year. When it finally unleashes as it's beginning to do, there's no way through that doesn't cause huge damage. I think we are past the point for example, where without the kind of global agreements or something like the green new deal there will be a huge cost to transitioning from fossil fuels and cost in jobs for countless people who are going to lose their jobs, and a cost in energy security for a lot of the people who struggle the most because we haven't put in place the structures that would support those people during a transition. We're not going to at this rate. So I think you're right. We need to make that transition because we all... We will make that transition. But the cost is going to be-- We go through a dark place before we get to that other side.

Ben (58:02):

Perhaps bringing it back to something a little bit smaller and optimistic. I was very intrigued reading about your work with possums and injured possums. Maybe tell us what you've learnt helping injured possums and why this might give us hope.

David (58:21):

Okay. So during lockdown in Melbourne last year, my partner Rebecca Gigs and I were... Rebecca had this notion that we should volunteer. I think she'd been reading about a hedgehog hospital here in the UK. She was very excited and wanted us to go to see the hedgehogs here. We weren't able to because of lockdown. So when we got back to Australia she was like, "I really want to volunteer to do wildlife rescue." So we signed up to Wildlife Victoria and we got our animal rescue licenses. We did our training to rescue injured marsupials. The first thing they get you to do is to become a kind of animal transporter. This is before you feel ready to do proper rescuing of a snake that has run across the road and been hit, or pulling a bird that has run into power lines.

They get you to take an injured animal from the vet to where it's going to be fostered and looked after. We essentially signed onto this service where you get these texts saying, "There's a possum with three children. They're 31 grams, 35, and 37 grams. They're in a vet in Mona Vale and we need you to take them down to Richmond.” So we would drive to these vets and we'd take these animals. But because it was during lockdown we couldn't actually go into the vets. So we'd literally be pulling up to these vets and then a vet nurse would come out into the car park with just a sack that was wriggling and hand it to us at nine o'clock at night. Meanwhile, there'd be teenagers on the other side of the car park actually buying drugs like normal people.

We were trading weird animals. Then you'd have to drive with these possums. Essentially, because they're marsupials they need to be kept very warm. So they're in these sort of bundled up socks and blankets and wrapped around in these baskets. We take them to where they were being fostered and looked after. I think what was extraordinary was realizing that there is this whole network of people who rescue animals and foster animals in the city. Actually, the amount of wildlife going on in the city was extraordinary. We had no idea that there was this much native wildlife moving through these very dense urban areas. Unfortunately, you find out about it when they get injured, but it was still a really lovely thing to see that our own city was threaded through or is threaded through with wild animals.

Ben (01:01:00):

Cities and wildlife. There is a harmony and balance that we can get to.

David (01:01:09):

This is where I want to talk about the London underground mosquito.

Ben (01:01:11):

Go for it.

David (01:01:14):

London obviously has its extraordinary fox population. The quintessential London experience in my mind is coming out of a nightclub at three in the morning and there's a fox just roaming up and down the road with someone's kebab that they've stolen. But there's also this incredible ecology of mosquitoes in the underground. London mosquitoes are a very particular breed of mosquitoes. They drink bird blood. They don't drink human blood. They don't swarm and I think they are only active in summertime. So they're a very particular kind of mosquito. When they built the underground in the 1890s, 1880s, there were no mosquitoes down there. There were no insects down there.

The very first time that people reported encountering mosquitoes was actually during the blitz when people were sheltering down in the tunnels. That was the first time. So it took them 50, 60 years to get there. The mosquitoes that have moved to the London underground are not the same mosquitoes as the ones above. Somehow, they are a different species that's made its way here somehow hitching a ride on something. They drink human blood. They're active year round and they mate in big swarms. So they are their own species and they become over time their own sort of distinct species. But even better, they actually have evolved into distinct subspecies. So there is a Central line mosquito, there is a Bakerloo line mosquito, and there is a Victoria line mosquito. They are genetically distinct and they never interbreed. They are evolving into their own actual separate species. As this researcher said, the only way they would actually get to interbreed is if they all got out and changed trains at Oxford circus. That's the London equivalent. Australian wildlife story.

Ben (01:03:14):

That is incredible that nature will find a way. In fact, someone was commentating that if humanity wiped itself out, probably there will be a lot of other living stuff which will come and take its place. So it's a human problem. Some of these things is not necessarily an earth problem.

David (01:03:33):

It is definitely a problem. Kim Stanley Robinson makes this point. “The biodiversity loss and species extinction is the most final thing that we are responsible for.” What we lose will never come back. This has been on my mind today. I need you to fact check this for me. But tell me, the opera as an art form in my mind is a bit of a dwindling kind of heritage art form. It has been around for a long time but the audience base is sort of old and getting older and they are dwindling and there isn't a new audience for it. So I think it is sort of gradually on the way out. But I still feel like there will be opera performed after you and I are dead.

Ben (01:04:22):

I think that's true. I think that will be true.

David (01:04:25):

But rhinos-- The population is crashing and I think it's very likely that rhinos will be gone before you and I die. So what I've been chewing on. I woke up the other night and was like, "Oh my God. Is opera going to outlive us but rhinos won't?"

Ben (01:04:44):

I think that might be true. Although we can then talk about the woolly mammoth and whether it comes back or not. I actually particularly think of noh plays which are even more niche because I think noh plays will continue to survive in that niche.

David (01:05:06):

Are you going to have a world practitioner on the podcast at some point? I would love to hear that.

Ben (01:05:14):

I've been following a few people in Japan so hopefully we'll get them on. Yeah, I think that might be true.

David (01:05:23):

I think not even opera singers would want their art form to outlive rhinos.

Ben (01:05:27):

I did want to ask before we finish about your music making and actually maybe a little bit your spoken word. But your music and music collaboration, do you find that's in the same kind of blob as your performative work or even your playwright work, or does that exist in an adjacent world for you? It's interesting you're talking about Boho and your time there. You kind of put in a string of performance making, music making, and dancing all in one blob. It seems to me perhaps now that I listen to you, it is more connected than it seems when I've been looking at the outside saying actually it is maybe not a separate work as it seems. Do you find it all as kind of it's all the work of David Finnigan or in your mind is it a little bit more separate as well?

David (01:06:13):

No. I do put things in buckets but I think it's also very much all me. The work I do-- So I perform music with my brothers as Finnigan and brother. My brother Chris is a guitarist and makes music as fossil rabbit. He makes this beautiful kind of guitar and digital soundscapes and songs. He's an extraordinary musician. I'm not, I don't play anything. But I would do spoken word over the top of his beautiful compositions. One thing that I actually really love and appreciate about Chris and about that project is that many years ago when we started performing together I was like, "We are really enjoying this. We should actually kind of take it more seriously. We should try and get some funding to record an album. We should try and actually go and do proper tours." Chris was always like, "No, I don't want to professionalize it like that. I want to keep it as this thing that we do purely for fun and purely for our own satisfaction." Because of that, that collaboration with Chris and the kind of music making has become the loveliest and no strings attached to arts practice I have. I find it very restorative because it's not tied to-- It's not going to pay my rent. It's not going to be part of my professional practice in a big way.

Ben (01:07:40):

No public or commercial imperative with that. I guess riffing back on that failure question earlier then as well, what's been the most disastrous creative things that you've done and what have you learned from them?

David (01:07:57):

That's such a good question. My biggest failure is I think actually-- Perhaps it relates a little bit to what I said earlier about growing up in Canberra and coming up in this DIY community driven scene where it had a kind of punk ethos where we're like you want to make it fast, you want to make it dirty, you want to make it honest, and then you want to get onto the next thing. You set the fuck up, you rock the fuck out, and you get the fuck off stage. You don't kind of overthink and you don't try and make something too pretty. So my work is definitely not too pretty. My work always still now has these jagged edges and broken bits. It's me sort of fumbling around on stage and that's an aesthetic.

The problem with that aesthetic is that it can also just be the same as being sloppy and lazy. It's very hard to know when you're starting out which is which. So I got to a point in my practice probably about in my late twenties, early thirties where I had built up this practice. I was making lots of work and I was touring it and I was getting into venues, but I couldn't get a show of mine produced by a serious theatre company. I couldn't get a script of mine to be taken and picked up and produced. I had enough runs on the board that I could get to meet with literary managers and artistic directors. I could get into those rooms and have those conversations, but I just couldn't get them to actually pick up and take a work of mine.

In my head, it was because they just weren't connecting with this sort of voice that I had or this sort of style that I had which is very distinctive and it's still not for everyone. My stuff is not for everyone by any means. But it actually wasn't the style that was getting in the way. It was that I just wasn't good enough as a writer. I actually wasn't writing scripts that were really world class; had to be produced. I think what had happened is that I'd been so committed to this idea of just churning stuff out and whatever I churned out was honest, authentic, and true that I had stopped getting better. You get better when you start out at age 17 and you make six shows a year for five years. You get better and you do get better quite quickly. You get to a standard. 

But I hit that plateau and I hadn't moved for years. I won an award for Kill Climate Deniers which is a script of mine, which is very kind of scatter shot collage, Tumblr blog aesthetic. It's a really kind of all over the piece work. I'd won an award for it and I was very excited. I thought, "Great. Now it's really going to start happening. My work is going to be picked up. I'm going to have a future." What happened instead was I won the award and nothing happened. I went to meet with these theatres and I was like, "Hey, I just won this script award for this play." They were like, "Good on you." I would show them my other work and they were like, "No."

I had this real slump after the play award where I thought that things would get easier and I could kind of relax a bit and stop working so hard and take my foot off the accelerator a bit. Instead, I was in this sort of weird blank space. It took me-- I reckoned six months before it finally dawned on me very slowly that actually the problem was me and the problem was that I wasn't actually working on improving; whatever that means. That doesn't mean being dishonest or untrue to your voice, but it definitely means not just spitting out first drafts and trusting that that'll be enough which was my kind of classic era. I don't regret much in my career. Your journey is your journey. But I feel like I've lost probably at least six to eight years of my practice because I just didn't know that I had to be working all the time. Perhaps I would've known if I'd been in a city like London earlier and had a clear ladder to climb.

Ben (01:12:29):

Yeah. I reflect on that is maybe that might have helped. But partly, I think our art form or that performing art form is perhaps a little bit harder to know. That's why my earlier question is like, "How do you know your stuff is good?" And actually like you say, your first six years you are always just going to get better and then maybe you'll plateau. I think of it like a musician. If you're a piano player this is a little bit like well, you got to a certain level and you stopped practicing for three or four years. It's kind of really obvious for musicians and they need to practice and it's sort of honed into them that actually there is no other way around it. So it's a very obvious form. 

But you are right. In all of the creative arts I think if you are improving you're essentially practicing at something. Like you say, it is individual, it's your journey. It might be whatever it is. If you stop that practice journey or whatever it is that you do to make yourself get better, that actually slowly decays or it doesn't improve and you lose ground away. Actually in performing arts it is perhaps less obvious because it's sometimes only obvious when it's in front of an audience. Or in this case, you're not getting in front of an audience so you're not getting that. You're just getting a kind of producer script writer who for whatever reason; either they can see it a little bit in the work or maybe they have an intuition, it's not all adding out. Some of that can be just bad luck as well. So that makes it even harder. But as you say, some of it is at the core because actually you've not taken it up to that other level of where that practice would be.

David (01:13:59):

It's not like there's an obvious way to improve as a writer. Sure you have your own experience on this. I'd be curious to know what improving as a writer looks like for you. But you can't just sort of sit and write. If you just sit at the computer and write every day and churn out a thousand words a day, you will get better to begin with and then you'll plateau. To improve you need to focus on your weakest points as a writer, target them, and actually build up craft and muscles in specific parts of their practice that are not strong. They might not even be the parts that you are writing. You might not even care about that. For me, my issue is I've never been a strong writer of characters. I can write dialogue, I can write plot, I can write science ideas but I can't write a believable, realistic character. And that's fine. In my plays, the characters tend not to be fully 3D dimensional rounded characters.

But trying to learn to write a character I think is fed back into my actual... Even if I write something where the characters aren't important, you still need to be building up skills and muscles. I didn't realize that. I thought you could just keep writing and if you did a bunch of writing every day you'd kind of just keep improving. What's it for you? How do you improve as a writer?

Ben (01:15:24):

So there's an economist polymath, Tyler Cowan, who has articulated this question as, "What do you do every day that is like a musician practicing scales?" Particularly in what he would call the knowledge economy of which creative arts is definitely one. I think actually it's a key question when you reach our age or our practice where you've done a lot where you can kind of follow this groove and you'll get to a certain level. What do you do arguably for the next 40 years for where you could take it to this further level? So I don't think there's necessarily an easy question or answer there. I think it also depends on what it is. So within creative arts it is different to what you might do for investing or for other parts. But it does have some elements.

David (01:16:15):

You have brilliantly reframed the question while avoiding answering it.

Ben (01:16:21):

So it has certain parts. One element is the nuts and bolts of the core practice of what you're doing. So if it is writing, there is a certain amount which still has to be writing. That's for instance why I've increased the level of blogging a newsletter and less writing that I've done because there is a certain amount of that core bit of what you're doing. It might not be exactly like in a playwriting or dialogue or a character, but it is the foundational wordsmithing part of what you want to do.

The second element I think, is around reading or absorbing the type of work which you are interested in, in your domain. So novelists or memoirist or whatever should be reading around that. They're probably reading fiction and poetry and things, but around that. I think that performance makers need to be watching a certain amount of performance. I probably don't watch enough. If you can't get to that you can actually still read it in the written form; not as good, but there are certain elements of that. So particularly if you're saying you're very interested in character, then you can read very interesting writers around character.

I think I would go further to say if you've identified somewhere where you think you are weak or you just like to know more about-- so say this element of character, you don't just need to go to the ones who you think are really brilliant around character. You need to go to the ones who did something or are doing something interesting but may not be working out. And then you need to work out what it is you think may be interesting or not interesting. And then why do you think it failed or not failed? Maybe it's not failed. Maybe it's only half there and they haven't finished it and you will pick up that journey. Because I think at this level of where you're trying to take it into sort of an Olympic level sport as opposed to just a county player, you are dealing with all of the embodied knowledge of where the world has got to now, which is actually the same in science. You get all the way to where you are now. So you need to have an understanding of where all of that is. But then when you are there, we know that you can't just repeat what has just gone before because then that is no longer where the edge of the frontier is.

So you need to make these leaps and bounds. In order to do that you have to see where other people make leaps and either be like, "Oh yeah. Sorry, that was dead end. I can see that." Or you needed to stretch one further and you didn't realize there was an invisible stepping stone there had you dared to reach that further point. So at the level I think you are at where you're creating new work with potentially new form, new ways of thinking and seeing, you are combining the best of what you are seeing in the world with some of these leaps of faith as to what it is. Some of it is a recombination of ideas which are already on the edge. Maybe they're not even on the edge because they’re combination of things which have gone before but combined into something new or there's something on the edge. So they're mostly either a combination or something you can see, or I also think that you borrow-- Maybe this is why I was asking about some of your other art forms like music, spoken word, or your work with scientists, or even your work with possums and animals.

I have this thread through your work and Rebecca. The snail, the whale, the koala; all of this. You borrow from another domain. Fairly deeply into that domain as well. Maybe not all the way at the cutting edge of that domain, but quite deeply into that domain and you transfer or you transform the knowledge or skill in that domain into your own domain and you combine it into something new. If you're quite close to the edge of that domain, or even if you're not necessarily at the edge but you see some insight which isn't widely understood except within that domain, and you bring out of that domain and by bringing it out you transform it into something other, and you're transforming it through your voice, then I think you get creative arts innovation. That practicing of that which is that core and going in I think is what you do in creative arts knowledge to create frontier work once you pass the foundation.

David (01:21:09):

Yeah. I think that's right. One of the best things perhaps about working in the space we're working where we create theatre about planetary transformation and global change is that those two domains really don't connect. They don't interface easily. There's no comfortable overlap on the Venn diagram between the huge global abstract slow moving transformation of our planet and our society. On the other hand, the very kind of intimate, personal relationship. Two people having a conversation on stage that theatre’s very good at. The form does not meet the content. Trying to reach to connect things from one domain to the other and trying to find ways to map one in the form of the other is a continual struggle and mostly it's failure. But every so often when you get it right, you are previously on uncharted territory which is exciting. The great thing about this work is that it kind of calls on-- Because it's doomed to failure in a way, it can't really be a rethread of things that have gone before.

Ben (01:22:19):

Exactly. So we've given ourselves a part answer. Great. So maybe coming to the last couple of questions, what projects or work are you doing at the moment?

David (01:22:35):

My next sort of public outing is I'm performing a show called "You're Safe Til 2024." Deep history. I'm performing it at the Edinburgh Fringe festival in August and I'm performing it at the Barbican in London at the end of September. That's a solo show that talks about the deep arc of human history over the last 75,000 years. But really it's a story about the last three days of 2019 when the bushfires were impacting Australia and at that time hit Canberra. My best friend Jack who I mentioned who I made theatre with and my dad who I mentioned as a big influence were both caught on the front line of these fires in different ways. So it's a show about that three days and how that three days has become-- It is kind of an encapsulation of the climate shocks that are yet to come in the future. That's the next big piece. 

But beyond that, the thing that I've been writing that I'm very excited about is a piece called “Dance Dance Insurrection” which is a high school dance competition play. It's about a group of teens of misfits and losers who set out to form a team and compete in a big dance competition in order to save their parents from online radicalization by destroying the internet altogether. So they set out to win this dance competition that happens at a big internet infrastructure hub and destroyed that hub and get rid of the internet for good. So it's kind of a joyful trash dance piece that also unfolds a lot of stuff about the shape of the internet and how that kind of structure has affected our brains in the last 30 years.

Ben (01:24:25):

Wow. Amazing. I look forward to watching or reading that. Last question would be, do you have any advice to people; maybe advice for people who want to be creatives or any kind of life advice that you've thought about in your career or time?

David (01:24:48):

I’ll borrow Scott Young's advice because I thought it was lovely. His advice went for people who were... Basically, if you are seeking to kind of get advice from older artists, professionals, or mentors he suggested that you don't ask for advice. Don't ask for career advice, don't ask for professional advice. Ask people their story. Ask people how they did it and then you can tease out the relevant bits from that. But if you ask people advice they tend to give you these vague platitudes like, "Just keep trying. Don't give up."

Ben (01:25:24):

"Learn from failure."

David (01:25:26):

Exactly. Don't ask for advice, ask for people's stories. That's my advice.

Ben (01:25:31):

Great. Well that seems like excellent advice. David, thank you very much.

David (01:25:36):

Thank you so much, Ben.

Ben (01:25:37):

If you appreciate the show, please like and subscribe as it helps others find the podcast.

Francesca Sanderson: impact arts investing, social impact, creativity, living off-grid | Podcast

Francesca Sanderson managed an ethical equities fund at JPMorgan as an asset manager but quit that to live for a year living off grid.  She then became a social impact investor with Big Society Capital and now runs the Arts Impact programmes at Nesta. 

We chat about what she learned, missed and loved about living off-grid. How she has a more pluralist world view.

Fran talks about what she learned at JP Morgan. The power and the weaknesses of institutional and organisational strength.

“When I was at JP Morgan, I  would be watching people move from their CFA and then go now I'm going to do an MBA and I'll be “why do you want to do an MBA? That's not interesting.”  Now, with the benefit of 20 years hindsight, I don't think there's anything more interesting or crucial than how organizations work and how stuff gets done…” 

We discuss social impact, its opportunities and risks and highlight some brilliant projects.

We chat on the the tyranny of numbers and data and the tension between process and oversight, and over burdensome bureaucracy and slowness.

We play overrated/underrated addressing stakeholder capitalism, the settlement movement, and cycling.

Fran ends on her advice, be trustworthy:

“I think that this is a reflection on life and society and where we are today. Trust is underrated. I think I just behave in a trustworthy fashion. It's a long termist thing. It's not freewheeling, can we get away with its culture at all, but ultimately for the benefit of the planet of society, just be honorable when it's not an easy thing to do.”

Available wherever you get podcasts, or below. Video with captions on YouTube, or above.

---

PODCAST INFO

• Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3gJTSuo

• Spotify: https://sptfy.com/benyeoh

• Anchor: https://anchor.fm/benjamin-yeoh

---

Transcript (only lightly edited)

Ben Yeoh (01:19): Thank you. So I'm going to start with the pivot year, cause I think a lot of people will be interested in that. What did you learn living off grid for a year? What was the experience like? Would you advise it as a thing? How was it for you a year off the grid?

Francesca (01:37): It was an amazing experience. I would not take it back for the world. We had two little kids as well, so that makes it extra complicated because no washing machine, no running water, you really come up close to that challenge when you are living with two small children. I think the thing I take away in terms of imagery, how I remember it, I just remember pace. So we would come back to the UK, I think we came back for a wedding for Christmas and I would come to the UK, not even to London, to Portsmouth where my parents were and I would just be struck by this pace of life and everyone's running around so busy. And then when we got back to Portugal, it was like, ah, okay, I can relax. So, that was a real-- the sensation I think was pace. It was a slowing down of pace. It was almost like slowing down your heartbeat, really being able to be in the moment and I think that that felt like a skill once acquired, I've worked to keep to try and get down to that sort of basic pace and understand what of the busyness is noise and what's unnecessary.

Francesca (02:51): I think it's great to have done it because then when you've got dreams and they're just dreams, then they are fantasies, an element of that is just fantastic. So if I were to go, oh God, my life's really stressful, I want to just run away to the Hills in Portugal, I know how challenging that is and what the challenges are when it's rained so much that you can't actually drive your car up to the house and you've got to carry all the shopping bags in the rain and you've got to drive 15 minutes to have a shower, which we did do probably like once every fortnight, because it was really nice. I don't like washing a bowl. Anyway, I think it was also really nice to be able to focus on each other. I think that I built really strong relationships with the kids because we were just used to a very low distraction environment, I think and I feel like that's sustained as well. I mean, it sounds like a cliche back to basics, but it's a real thing. You realize what you need and we'd put all our stuff in storage in London, and it was kind of painful thinking about that money coming out of the bank account and we're like we're not missing any of it, we're not missing any of that stuff that we're paying to store in London and I think that time I was able to live a very minimal life forever, that creeps up, doesn't it and I wouldn't say I'm living.

Francesca (04:20): I mean, I think it's still there, but you have to hold on quite tight to it, but there's still kind of a core. I do have a reverse urge. I think about living off grid again, I think about living in tiny houses, I think about minimal lives and there was lots of it that was really appealing. At the same time, I really, really missed everybody. I really missed the diversity of people that I was able to-- that's the bit that ultimately why we came back. I miss my friends, I miss my family. I think that there's a real group that thinks about that kind of life. We are living quite an alternative group of people and there was a lot of self-reinforcement going on in the circle about this is the way to live and everyone who doesn't live like this, they're the losers and I can't stand that kind of-- Well, I find that lack of critical thinking in a group really challenging. So I think that was one of the things that I felt like you really lose diversity of opinion in those small and gendered environments, I guess. But it was very beautiful, it's really nice. None of us needs all the stuff that we have but that's the conundrum, isn't it? Consumption keeps the world economy's turning, but it is possible to live with much less and there's a lot that's appealing about it.

Ben Yeoh (05:49): One comment you made which really struck me is that idea of making some time to have essentially a kind of indelible bond with your family, which will sustain you through good times and bad times, which is something I hadn't thought of. I guess, in a way that's why people do these.

Francesca (06:06): I mean, it probably should point out that I'm no longer with my husband, so.

Ben Yeoh (06:11): Worked with the children, doesn't necessarily work with your romantic relationship say. Okay, so we will caveat it there. And so, you pointed out diversity of thought, pluralistic thinking, and also the struggle with missing community and friends. You've obviously have a community there, but there's a community that one grows up in which is that-- Anything else you think was maybe misunderstood or underappreciated by you or that you think people who might be thinking about off grid maybe there was something, what would they most underappreciated? Cause I guess people probably get that this is going to be a simpler way of living and maybe, I guess people sometimes worry about being bored or what do you do with your leisure time or is it much more basic looking after land and looking after the things for that. But I wonder if there's anything else which you kind of think, well, this is the thing, actually, you will be surprised that you miss because actually everything else you would likely know.

Francesca (07:14): I think maybe it's more the things you'd be surprised you enjoy. I did not enjoy gardening. That stage of my life I was in my early thirties. I find it probably still actually, but I mean, I love looking at beautiful plants, but the actual act of gardening, I'm not particularly interested in. So, that doesn't just come with being bucolic which I was hoping it would. I did enjoy being in the environment. The community bit is interesting. There's some really practical things and obviously PV technology has moved on since we were there in 2009, 2010 but there were these people who helped us, we got secondhand panels, we knew who to buy from, we knew who could help us set up the inverter and the regulator. It's all ad hoc systems that we were buying but there's so much opportunity for sort of shared intelligence, making that kind of stuff. The community was really helpful there. Living in a community in that way, community's a really interesting thing that I think about a lot because I haven't really-- community's something that's been not particularly present in my life, I would say. I went to school on a train. I love my kids there at the local school. We just know everyone. You just know people when you're walking around and you've lived in the same place for 10 years, I didn't really have that. So in a way, Portugal was the first community that I'd really felt I belonged to and there was the kind of barter economy and you help with this and I'll help you with that.

Francesca (08:56): At the same time, I didn't really feel like I belonged to it in some ways, because I was less bought in than everyone else and then that can make you feel like an outsider quite quickly. So that was interesting. You've got a lot riding on your inclusion, that can feel quite insecure sometimes, I think. They're all perilous but again, I don't know if I want to go into that too much. A reflection of where my relationship was at at the time, but it sounds really nice until you are on the wrong side of it.

Ben Yeoh (09:37): Yeah. So, there's upsides and downsides to any community.

Francesca (09:40): I guess it's a risk thing.

Francesca (09:43): From an investment point of view, I'm much more of a dispersed risk person and if you're in a small community that's tight knit, you've got all your eggs in one basket basically.

Ben Yeoh (09:53): Actually, maybe we should jump back then to JP Morgan and well, I guess it's ethical equity. So in that sense, it's off mainstream, but it's mainstream in the sense that it was mainstream investing. What did you learn from that and maybe as a way into the learnings from that as you then went into impact or social impact into arts impact?

Francesca (10:15): Yeah, I took for granted everything that I learned at JP Morgan really. I mean, I'd done a completely abstract degree. I stopped studying any humanities when I was 13. I basically knew absolutely nothing about the world and how it worked and wasn't really interested if that doesn't sound too terrible. I've gone to university and made friends but I didn't really think about anything. I just wanted to write books which I still haven't published one by the way and you would think if you wanted to write books, you would really care about how the world works because you'd want to write realistic books. But I got to JP Morgan and it feels like it's very interesting and I was very aware early on that I was learning economics, but it was the first time I suppose I became aware of the agenda of an education. So I was obviously learning at the Chicago school of economics. I was doing my investment qualifications and I was aware at the same time that I didn't know that that was beginning to feel like-- I don't know if I'm an catalyst even though I'm working at JP Morgan cause some of these things I'm learning feel counterintuitive to me or that doesn't feel like something that should be left up to the market. But what I didn't appreciate, I feel like I should go back and say thank you to the bosses I had in a way, because I didn't appreciate how much security you get, how much you're taught, how much you're learning all the time about how institutions work properly well work smoothly I guess and even though I saw through two mergers--

Francesca (11:53): So, my graduate job I got with Flemings and then just before I started Chase Manhattan took them over. And then about three months in, I think JP Morgan and Chase merged. So there was really quite a lot that was disorderly going on at the corporate level, but still the processes worked. It was a smooth machine because your clients are everything in the asset management business. Your processes kind of go towards that and I didn't appreciate how functional that was until I then started later in my career at a place which had no process whatsoever. We were all just freewheeling around and making things up as we went along which is wildly exciting, but it did make me think, oh wow, yeah, processes, they're important. I think the thing-- and I don't Know like I say. I never really wanted to-- my identity wasn't someone who works in the city. I didn't feel like I fitted in, I was very resistant to that. So I was probably childish about, or ungrateful for all the things I was learning and it was obviously a well-paid career and I got opportunities to travel. I lived in New York. My qualification was paid for. All of those kinds of things. Where was I going with the identity bit?

Ben Yeoh (13:16): You were pushing back about being a city girl. You wanted to think of yourself not as a capitalist, even if you were in a capitalist system.

Francesca (13:24): Yeah. You were asking about what I learned.

Ben Yeoh (13:36): The systems and institutions bit is quite interesting because as we both have delved into say charities or startups or smaller organizations, there is this tension between-- So, startups famously sometimes they kind of go fast break things mentality as opposed to, let's say move very fast and try not to break things, which I kind of think is perhaps more sensible and then large organizations. Whether they are governments or corporations, size and process comes with these bureaucracies which people push back against as well. But in some ways, sometimes processes are like wearing a seatbelt. If you are a super brilliant driver, arguably Lewis Hamilton doesn't need to wear a seatbelt because he's never going to crash, but there are things which are not in your control. So actually wearing a seatbelt are kind of the processes which help with that, and it's a difference between sometimes in our world, we talk about governance, these processes, I think, are sometimes like the seatbelt and stewardship or thinking about the future sometimes, just like you're driving. So, your operations and things are like, well, I think I'm the best driver in the world so let's just go and do this and you feel constrained by this is where the analogy slightly breaks down cause you feel constrained by the seat belt, by the other rules and things. But there is this tension and like you say, sometimes they're helpful and sometimes they're not.

Ben Yeoh (15:02): So I'd be interesting in your reflections on moving into say social impact where you're still trying to get returns and do stuff, but you're trying to get, say an extra financial return, whether that's social, artistic, creative, as well as sometimes the financial hurdle that might not be within that case and then that tension between trying to do things properly but also some of these are much more experimental, some of them the processes aren't there. I've always thought if you are maybe a two person organization, even a 12 person organization, the levels of bureaucracy that you would have to account for in terms of say something like measuring impact or doing something is never going to be the scale of JP Morgan, which might have a team of 12, just looking at that. And I don't know where the lines are because of course, if you don't measure impact at all ever then how do you really know you're doing any? And sometimes you do, sometimes you don't. I'd be interested in your thoughts about that now having-- you've worked at a big corporate and you've worked at small and you've done from financial return to impact to, I guess, philanthropic giving as well.

Francesca (16:10): Yeah. We can go back to the previous question now because when I was at JP Morgan, part of my sort of identify into this role that I'm taking on would be watching people move from their CFA and then go now I'm going to do an MBA and I'll be like, why do you want to do an MBA? That's not interesting. Now, with the benefit of 20 years hindsight, I don't think there's anything more interesting or crucial than how organizations work and how stuff gets done and I was listening to the-- we had a presentation this morning at the social investment forum from the national lottery communities fund about their new strategy and giving money away well is really bloody difficult as you know. It's a really, really hard thing to do and I feel always this tension between-- I mean, this is a whole of life fully make a rule and stick to it and be methodical, but you've got to be agile and you've got to work out when what you're doing is wrong and one thing I've been thinking about a lot lately is at Nesta we have-- So, I guess grant givers usually look at your overhead ratio.

Francesca (17:19): So you think, well, how much of this overall cost of a program is going to the people who are distributing the money, who are processing the applications, who are helping the successful applicants with administering their grant and delivering their project. So, what percentage of the overall money is going on that overhead rather than out to the front line, as you might say. Nesta has always had quite a high proportion, partly it's luxury, since it's been out it's an independent foundation it's supposed to be focused on innovation so you can make a case for spending more on those things like getting the cohort together, shared learning, that kind of thing. Also, it didn't have any hard limits. So I think that the non-departmental public bodies, arts council, national communities front, they do have hard overhead ratios, but I think that can be a real false economy if you're just focusing on that number in a black and white way. I'd love to see us all collaborating as grant funders going well, in what circumstances does it actually help to have much more support alongside the money and is it worth what stage, what types of business, what type of grant, what kind of organization you're working with needs more hand holding? I think a lot of the diversity focus funds that are out there now, there are way more structural hurdles like practical, emotional for minority leaders, getting money, delivering projects.

Francesca (18:59): I think there's a really strong case for those to be high overhead products, but at the same time you could argue that means much less of the money is going out to those minority businesses or social enterprises themselves. So it's a tricky one. Another thing that I thought, so my earlier career prior to graduating, so I worked through all of my summers at university. I was working at charity and I found that even as a, as I've said, 18 year old who knew absolutely nothing about the world, I found there were really frustrating inefficiencies to me. So that doesn't feel like a sensible way to do that or it feels like this hand to mouth existence creates real, waste is the wrong word, this all feels like really loaded language. I'm not going to name the charity but I always thought there's-- I was focused on kind of, I think, we can deliver better. I think I just have quite a lean mindset and that's probably because I grew up with a very, very tight-fisted, lovely father. But I've always kind of had that sort of frugal let's do things the most efficient way possible and then obviously I was at JP Morgan was all focused on maximizing earnings per share or when I was on the credit desk, free cash flow and keeping costs low and that sort of formulating in my mind is what do I want to do with my life? I want to write novels, but I'm also really interested in making charities more efficient in a way that works so it's not an extractive process. Say a kind of pay for success model of cost cutting.

Francesca (20:49): So, it only works if you and actually now I think about that, there's lots of problems with it, but coming back to then starting in the social sector and I think that was very much almost a foreshadowing of where big society capital landed. I think we certainly did and I guess the majority of us were ex bankers when it started and there were only seven of us when we started in 2012. I was very conscious that we didn't have a kind of it's okay guys, the banks have landed to save the world of the social sector, which I'm not sure we successfully managed to avoid and it just made me realize that things are a hell of a lot more complicated. I hadn't really appreciated team cultures and sustainability of staff and things that we all think about quite naturally, thankfully these days, because the narrative has changed, but they're really downsized to a sort of one dimensional efficiency mindset, I think. And I think more people are talking about that now and yeah, you have to be careful when answering questions that the answer to everything isn't complicated. It is complicated, but I think that yeah, and there's also fascinating stuff about organizational size, which is another thing that you alluded to or mentioned directly.

Francesca (22:25): I think again, without wishing to name individual organizations, I thought recently that maybe 200 to a thousand is the worst possible size of an organization because it's not big enough that your processes make sense, but it's big enough that you have to have them. So a lot of dysfunction can happen in that size. I mean, maybe not if you are on a growth trajectory, so you can see your way to your 5,000 or your 10,000 staff.

Ben Yeoh (22:55): Yeah, that happens. I think it happens around 120, 150 because below 120, essentially everyone knows the founder CEO type and everyone knows the top, call it three to 12 people in the company. And then once you're at about 200, not, and even actually about 120 often that founder type person has interviewed everyone coming into the company and then at about that stage, it's just not possible to do that. And another thing you mentioned, I really resonated was I'm going to call it the tyranny of the number or the tyranny of the data where and you see there's sometimes adjacent to what you are talking about with a gender number or a pay ratio number and you are just very wedded to this one number cause it's hard data point and you can kind see whether it has been right. But we know that sometimes there's a lot of other things which go around that; the number or the average doesn't really reflect the whole story and if you just go by where that hard number or the hard cutoff is, you will miss a lot of the nuance behind the story and actually in a lot of cases and I'm seeing it increasingly now that that nuance of the story is really important.

Ben Yeoh (24:07): The problem is is that some people who would be minded to be on the opposite side of the argument are just using the tyranny of the data to kind of push their own way without saying actually if our ultimate aim is X, then yes, this number needs to improve and it's not where we want it to be, but actually everything else is, and so we should let it happen. Rather if you're not minded or you forget about X or the people are not very interested in X, they'll just use the number saying, well, this isn't good enough, let's not fund it or this isn't good enough even within that. And I think that's really interesting happening in some of the debates and you actually see this when you go into, say, some aspects of environmentalism or social justice that actually people who are not necessarily you would've thought minded to where the long term cause is going, uses those own numbers back to whichever community grouper says, well, look, you haven't met it on X or we're going to focus on this very niche bit of environmentalism say, but doesn't take in the whole picture, but they're not really interested in the whole picture cause they just want to stop it.

Francesca (25:19): Yeah. I love that, the tune of the number. I think that there's obviously good hearts law, but the thing about metrics is-- Well, one thing to talk about directly is that when we started the arts impact fund, so that's a fund that was a pilot set up with Arts Council England Nesta, Esmee Fairbairn Foundation, and Bank of America which is interesting in a few ways, as I would say, because it's my project, but I didn't design it because it's public, private, philanthropic money blended together and it was the first time that someone put together a fund specifically to make repairable finance available to the arts sector. And we were thinking about how would we measure our artistic metrics and our artistic impact and our social impact and we were very aware of kind of capacity constrained organizations that we were investing in but I started in the job talking to the investors as a group, trying to design a set of guidelines and of course they want metrics cause they want to know whether we are doing well in terms of the fund management and they want to know that they want to achieve the same thing. But if we'd taken from that, this is what we want to achieve and then we push that down on our organizations, we are changing their behavior and asking them to report on this change behavior, capacity wise it doesn't work.

Francesca (26:37): So I said, well, how about we just, you know, the metric that we report to the investors is how well they're doing, it's a relative measure. So it's a relative measure or second order measures, how well they're doing against the target we've agreed with them and what the rate of change of that is over time. So you've got something to look at that you know whether your farm manager's doing well or you know whether the market is ready for what you want to create, but we are not imposing hard first order metrics down on the organizations that we're funding and I think that probably works for time. I think investors are going to be fine with that for a while, but ultimately, probably that does need to morph into something else that's sort of reportable outcomes rather than rate of change in achieving outcomes. But at the same time, it's not as clear in a sector like the arts and the creative economy. It's not like malaria prevention or inoculation or eye surgery. There aren't obvious hard metrics that will show you whether you are doing well or not.

Francesca (27:42): UI was going to say something else about the tune of the number and I think just numbers-- A metrics can't be for anyone an excuse not to think. Yes, it's there as an indication, but it's never going to capture everything and I think it's what's exciting and difficult about impact investment really because essentially you're trying to build a market, you're trying to raise money. Of course, the people with the money have the power and the people with the money are used to being reported to on a very simple basis. It's a linear metric. It's return. What's your total financial return?

Ben Yeoh (28:19): Is it going up and to the right.

Francesca (28:20): I mean, it's obviously it's got time as well, so IRR. It's yeah, exactly, is it going up and to the right? And we are not only trying to say you need to look at more things than that, but also those metrics are going to be more challenging. It's not just going to be one number. So, an impact number isn't really going to make sense. Even if I told you your impact was 3.7, you'd probably want to know what was behind that or maybe ultimately you will get to that stage and then loads of people, brilliant people are working on that being the case. I guess my hope, which may be a bit optimistic, maybe it's the anti-capitalism that's going back out, is that the impact agenda is changing that power balance a little bit in that impact deliverers now have something that holders capital want, which is impact. That's expensive and it's difficult and capital holders can't expect to get it for free effectively. So I slightly differ from Bonnie Cohen in the narrative where I do think that it's costly. I'm sure there will be impact investments that can certainly beat financial investments. I know that's been the case in a lot of sub asset classes to date but I also think that we can manage expectations that investors aren't expecting to get that impact for free. So investors expect to get financial awards and environmental wards and social awards and their total return is the aggregate of that.

Ben Yeoh (29:52): Sure. I think that's really true that there will be certain kinds of projects where I guess, the determinant is concession capital. You cannot expect to have the same as a market return. Although we always talk about it, so-called risk adjusted and you actually don't know the risk before you embark on it. So I always feel this a little bit but neither do you in mainstream investments either. So this is partly the fraud of the number. Not only is it tyranny but there's a false precision in it, 3.2 versus 3.4% on an IRR. Everyone knows that well.

Francesca (30:26): Well, the B2 used to be 1.5.

Ben Yeoh (30:28): Exactly. And we made it up sort of the first time we tried to use this thing and this model and I think probably impact investments may have come up with the same or better return, but they probably took more risk, but who knows because you're also taking a risk that you can't measure very well. Yeah. But actually there is something--

Francesca (30:46): No one's corrected for, you know, a lot of it's property so far and yeah.

Ben Yeoh (30:50): And how can we, we might not be. And maybe that's fair enough. If you want a health return, a social return, an environmental return, you're not going to necessarily all see it in cash flow or necessarily all see it in GDP. So a lot of economists are thinking about how we do GDP plus, natural capital, human capital and the like. I guess that leads me on the arts impact bit or creative impact, what are the projects or ideas you've come across which have most excited you and maybe any successes or ongoing interesting projects and maybe any failures you've learned from? You can do either the success or failure or both sides.

Francesca (31:29): Well, so many exciting projects. It's really interesting--

Ben Yeoh (31:34): Hard to choose between your children.

Francesca (31:36): Yeah, it is and I think another sort of fascinating thing is that I find, and this again, it might just be a personality match thing. I just find I meet the most-- it's such a privilege to meet the people I get to meet in the course of my work, whether they're Nesta colleagues, whether they're people working in the arts, whether they're board members who like giving up a lot of their time for small organizations. So, yes, it's just a totally humbling, really brilliant experience. It's hard to pick out any. Yesterday I went to a symposium at the RCA, which was about the intersection between design innovation and the criminal justice system and that was really brilliant. That was led by an adjunct professor who runs one of the organizations we funded through the cultural impact development fund - Judah Armani - He runs something called in-house records. So he works with the prison population on making music and I think his basic thesis, and you'd have to talk to [Judah] or go to the website to check this. But it's essentially where there are sort of trauma histories or communication challenges, you can process a lot of that better through a creative act than you can through just talking therapy because talking therapy might be quite confrontational, the participant might not necessarily be equipped to do that and also the other side of it is there's an amazing amount of creative talent that is there, that's untapped, it's not been facilitated.

Francesca (33:15): So he is working with the prison population. They've set up a record label. They have recordings and he also employs the people that they've been working with as they come through the gates and come out of prison. So, it's nice, and he's a real systems thinker. He's an innovation guru and that for me is really-- I mean, it's exciting on a personal level because I'm meeting people I wouldn't have met previously. We've had guys from house records come and perform at art events and it feels like an example of someone coming up with an idea that probably felt quite impossible and managing to make it work and now it's a scalable intervention. The Ministry of Justice pays for it. Recidivism rates are much lower than the depressingly high average. They're really, really impressive. So that kind of thing to get to say they're being able to scale in a way that they wouldn't if we hadn't been there is really amazing. It's just almost from an ego perspective the--

Ben Yeoh (34:30): And huge amounts of impact.

Francesca (34:31): Yeah, huge amounts of impact. Another organization that we funded is Earth and Hackney. So, Village Underground wanted to-- they could see the kind of gap in the market for a live music venue in Hackney and they'd been working with community music, which is an arts council, NPO who worked with young people and through-- I think it worked really well. [ ] of course I'm going to say this, but we help them get the money together. So we brought in Unity Trust Bank and Big Issue Invest and then we also worked with them on how they could formalize their arrangement with youth music so that youth music's young people could come and use the equipment when it wasn't being used for gigs. And now I want to think of a female lead initiative. It's an amazing one called [Effervescent]. I think they're down in Cornwall. Ellie Malone they are very much focused on lived experience, so they would be using kids with lived experience at the fostering system, for example, to make content that is for foster parents, basically. Again, they've done some campaigns on mental health and I'm probably really behind on what they've done because Ellie's just like a firecracker of energy and is always doing amazing stuff, so.

Ben Yeoh (36:00): That all sounds amazing and I think this area, I think it's still underrated and underweight partly because it's hard to measure and therefore for what we were talking about earlier, a lot of people are a little bit more cautious, harder to track. But because of that, I think even though the amounts of capital we're talking about in the huge system are relatively small, I do think there should be more interest and money going into it and it's really interesting. So traditional venture capital often talks about the importance of people and you're backing people and you sort of mentioned that and big public equity investing, yes, people are important, but often you're packing a business or a business model and quite frankly, senior management does change. In fact, they often stay there no more than three to five years nowadays which is very different. So I'm interested to know when you are looking at this, how much weight are you putting on the person? Does the business model-- I guess most of them in traditional ventures often have this famous, we call it pivot, right? They have to change because they're not quite working in the first way and I'm assuming there's a lot on the people and in some ways you can't actually take out the business model from the person and a lot of startups. In some ways it's a slightly false question. But I am interested because in that sense, you're doing almost exactly what a venture capital person would be doing, but with a slightly different metric at the end, is that how you see yourself?

Francesca (37:28): I think so. And I think when we talk about ourselves as a relationship based lender that kind of goes right through, and again I don't know whether that's because of the phase of business we're at, because the phase of the market we're at but trust is really hugely important in a commercial level in terms of making our numbers work, but also in terms of building market that functions and being seen as something that is working for the market. And we can get into kind of early markets, things about cooperation and competition and collaboration and lots of things that I'm really fascinated by as the social investment market generally grows. I mean, I do want to talk about the social investment market and some of the really existential risks facing it at the moment. I think there is a lot about people, but at the same time, we've also funded large NPOs and it's less about the person. Again at that stage, I guess it is about implement-- It's how we're judging our execution risk basically but with the person it's a hell of a lot to carry on your shoulders, especially, you know, it is anyway, if you're a venture capitalist and this is the person who's got huge upside potentially, if this is a person who's working a small cash strap arts organization is never looking at a unicorn or even a six figure payday.

Francesca (39:04): It is a lot to hold on one person's shoulder, so I think we have to be aware of that. And a lot of the work we'll do is about making sure that people have got good boards and that's not so much for you know, because they're custodian of our funds, it's because we're all aligned. Everyone wants it to succeed. We want the founder to succeed. We want the leaders to succeed and the best way they can do that is if they're supported. So, I think that, yeah, we do care a lot about people. We do care a lot about the culture of the organizations that we're funding and again, that's from a sustainability point of view and from a kind of ethics and [Diversity]  point of view as well. And I think this is really talking about sizes of organizations and functions. I think this is something we all have to watch out for in the whole system is the impacts of inequality are just playing out. And I think that even if you talk about your 120 size of organization, I think that gets smaller now because there's so much disparity between the top and the bottom. We were just talking in the social investment forum about how we manage in our own businesses the cost of living crisis and how imperative it is to be looking at the people at the bottom who are really experiencing this cost of living. The headline inflation number really means nothing because those of us with more income spend a far smaller proportion of our money on electricity and food. So that kind of thing we're really-- We already felt pretty polarized, but these are really strong polarizing forces that we're experiencing at the moment.

Ben Yeoh (40:46): Do you think that's the biggest existential risk for social investment or the social investment movement or community, or you alluded to other things you are fearful for as well?

Francesca (40:59): Yeah. So that was at the kind of the intermediary level, I think at the social sector organization level, it's really tough. I mean, community assets all have high energy costs, pretty much. There's community pubs, community leisure centers. They're already at the stage even before winter where people are thinking, can I actually afford to keep this open? That's a huge existential crisis and community is a big part of the social investment movement. And then I think also, we've built this market in the last 10 years and essentially a zero interest rate environment. If there are better returns for cash, it's even more challenging to get people to accept concessionally return and high interest rate environment. So, stagnation is one of the worst things that could probably happen at this point in the market development. I don't think that's necessarily a problem. I think there are policy levers we could do to mitigate that. I think you just need to point out to governments. It's really about the horizon. So if you can convince policy makers that, look, we've set up something here, there's a bit of an infrastructure that is hugely valuable to you over the longer term, it's a way to make private public impact oriented capital work together. A lot of this is being and has been built and functions. If this dies over the next three years, you've got longer term problems. Whether the policy makers in this country are thinking in that timeframe, I don't know, but globally somebody must be world bank.

Ben Yeoh (42:34): It's not necessarily at the top of the banking and the treasury people's concerns, but I do think when you articulate it to them, they would understand. So this is the kind of worry about, I'm not sure it goes in because as you point out, the language of say the treasury or treasury functions is often quite different and I think this is why you're kind of uniquely placed. But for instance, you understand interest rates and inflation but on that kind of technical abstract level, which actually, I think a lot of people within social innovation don't quite, and you make the point high inflation, which is cost of living or high interest rates, both of which, and they're slightly interlink could destroy whole segments of the sector and therefore there's a policy lever, you could do something about that. That clarity and line of thought that you have actually isn't articulated by so many people and they are in their different spots, but not through this and I wonder whether it meets policymakers. So anyway, there's something to be done on that.

Francesca (43:34): Well, yeah and the other thing I think is that so much of what we see, it just feels really obvious to me that we have-- There's early intervention opportunities all over the place and the problem we have in the world is not a shortage of capital. There's a hell of a lot of capital seeking opportunity and I'm not talking about private equity people rinsing the care system. That's not what I'm talking about. There are opportunities where we can-- Green Infrastructure's a very obvious one. I personally think it's absolutely crazy. You would be incentivizing fossil fuel extraction in the most recent budget announcement, rather than that was an opportunity to actually get capital working on renewables. So that feels like a big miss to me, but just as a working capital problem there are opportunities here, huge gaping holes, which deliver massive savings to the public purse. I mean, they're huge inefficiencies. Children of care is a really obvious one. It's terribly expensive. It's just an early intervention investment problem and that's about structuring capital to me and that feels like the government should really be listening to that.

Ben Yeoh (44:50): And that's where governments may be uniquely placed. I feel a tiny bit of sympathy on the energy question because there's geopolitics involved as well, but they could go heavy and I think they may have gone heavy on both. So both renewables and say opening up north sea again because of that. Obviously, I'm minded to why didn't you just go completely hundred percent heavy on renewables? Obviously my preferred thing, but I can see why they do it and if you go on both and someone else has told me, wow, you actually need to propose 10 nuclear power plants in order to get one because nine you know will get nick. So I don't know how much actual politicking was involved. There's probably a lot, but maybe we should do a short section on underrated overrated, and then we'll do that and have a couple of final questions. So you can underrate it, overrate it or you can pass or make some sort of comment. So we'll do it. Overrated, underrated, cycling?

Francesca (45:49): Underrated, massively underrated. I love cycling. I am passionate and odd and a cyclist. So they will say I've gotten a bit more nervous since the pandemic. I think I got used to cycling on the quieter streets and then now I feel like there's a bit more rage. It's a bit nerve-wracking. Maybe I'm just older and more aware of my own mortality over the last couple of years. But it is a bit nerve-wracking. We do need to invest in the infrastructure again. That's something that just feels like an absolute no-brainer to me. It's huge public health benefits. It's got huge environmental benefits but there's no bloody bike racks anywhere.

Ben Yeoh (46:35): Tricky, doesn't it?

Francesca (46:36): Again, that feels like a, you know, but the problem is that's not an instant deterrent. That's just a minor rotation for someone like me who might not cycle cause I know I'm going to have to spend five extra minutes finding a bike rack, but just things like that, there's the subtle hostilities to a population.

Ben Yeoh (46:55): It should be a systemic thing. Like let's just not steal anyone's bikes.

Francesca (47:00): Yeah, exactly. Collective understanding.

Ben Yeoh (47:02): Great. The settlement movement?

Francesca (47:06): Ooh underrated. I don't think anyone really knows what it was.

Ben Yeoh (47:12): Well, tell us.

Francesca (47:13): So and I probably won't get this quite right but the settlement movement was about essentially immersing institutions of privilege in disadvantaged areas and creating long term structural bonds between advantage and disadvantage and I think there's also more-- I think perhaps it was religious and origin, so I think there's--

Ben Yeoh (47:53): I think there might have been a touch. Everything was two or 300 years ago. And you still work with Cambridge House?

Francesca (47:59): I don't know. But I must say that was my first non-exec position and I do still say that is the most I've learned in any role, I think. I mean A, because the chief exec Karen Woodley is an extraordinary woman doing incredible work. So, so, so inspirational and the hard work that that team did, being right there as a board member, seeing how hard everyone worked was really impressive and actually it was interesting because they had a big social investment debt, which possibly wasn't, can I say this? I think so. It was very early on in social investment and I'm not sure that the whole process was necessarily--

Ben Yeoh (48:51): Figured out.

Francesca (48:52): Yeah, exactly. So it might not have been the best thing for the organization. So, building a market and also seeing it from the other side was really valuable to me.

Ben Yeoh (49:03): Great. The concept of stakeholder capitalism.

Francesca (49:08): Yeah vital, I think. I mean, it's kind of what I was saying earlier about the power dynamics and money having all the power and how we need to shift that really because it's not working for anybody but it's interesting because we've had shareholder capitalism for a long time and it's inertia is a real thing. Yeah, I think it's underrated.

Ben Yeoh (49:43): Fair enough. And then the last in this section is the social model of disability.

Francesca (49:49): Explain to me a little bit about what that is so I don't get that wrong.

Ben Yeoh (49:51): So the social model of disability is this idea that I guess, if the system were to become more fair to disability or actually a lot of other minority groups which you might put on that then actually you wouldn't have a problem. It wouldn't even be considered a disability. I would do a tiny little kind of, not necessarily as relevant discussion, but for instance, if people who are very sensitive to noise or something like that, which might be if you have ADD or ASD or things like that. And so, if cafes were generally designed so that they wouldn't be noisy loud music places, but there was a bunch of them, or most of them were even designed that they were sort of quieter or had those space, which were then I guess the ideas of inclusion come from that but it's not therefore then the person who has noise sensitive challenges, but it's the social model because actually that's not how cafes and things are designed and you can go on and on about things within that. I guess I was just opening up this idea of how much either within social investment things is the systems led thing where we need to maybe touch on moving the system a bit, or how much, I guess you could do by redistribution of the system, which is obviously another way of getting fairness. But actually if those cafes never change, then you could give, again, this is a slightly silly toy example, but you could give noise sensitive people as much money as you want. They're still not going to be included in cafes.

Francesca (51:28): Yeah. I think it's really complicated. I think that it's a lovely idea. I think it is hard to implement and I think you have a lot of variables. I think inclusion in itself is complicated. It's a really lovely idea. It can mean that adaptations are more minimal. So for example if you are a vision impaired kid going to a mainstream school you are more than you might be at a vision impaired school, you are doing a lot of work to navigate a space that's not designed for you.

Ben Yeoh (52:18): And you can make reasonable adjustments by putting that in quotes, but they're only going to be to a certain extent after.

Ben Yeoh (52:25): Yeah. And you've got to work out who it's for. I don't doubt for a second that it's really, really important for all the other kids in that school and that there's a huge benefit for the other kids in that school to have a disabled kid and they will come out better people. But whether that child is somehow paying for it in their labor, I think it just needs to be thought about, I think. I think with anything that feels like there's an obvious answer, there's probably more to it.

Ben Yeoh (52:56): Maybe the answer is always complicated.

Francesca (52:58): Yeah. The answer is always complicated.

Ben Yeoh (53:01): Last couple of questions: future projects, or what are you working on now? What do you hope for in the future?

Francesca (53:07): Well, I was completely forgotten to talk about our international project, which is one of the-- So one of the great privileges at landing somewhere like Nester and having Nester email address is you can pretty much email whoever you want and--

Ben Yeoh (53:19): They reply.

Francesca (53:20): Yeah. And also people got in touch with me. So as soon as we launched the arts impact fund, people would talk about it or get invited to speak about it at conferences and then two people got in contact. I think one of them, called Laura in New York who runs something called Upstart Co-Lab. And Carolina - Both of them are remarkably eminent women who sort of, you know-- One is a consultant, one a lawyer who worked with Rockefeller and both actually ran for a time or were involved in the senior leadership team of their national endowment for the arts. So in Argentina a really interesting model where that's funded specifically by the creative industries. In the US as you know, it's sort of like a very, very small version of our arts council, not a public priority, certainly not under the previous administration. Anyway, I got to meet these two incredible women. I think, hang on, I need to introduce them to each other. We have a zoom called probably halfway through 2019 and we say, look, we're doing these similarish things, we are coming up with the same problems, A, let's stay in solidarity and speak to each other about the stuff we're doing and B, why don't we do a project together? So we thought, well, I'd like to showcase--

Francesca (54:40): We all care about the amazing power of the creative enterprise to do good and the under-acknowledged social impacts of the creative economy and actually globally it's a big disproportionate employer of women, indigenous people, and the craft movement. So it's really powerful, but it's not named in the SDGs. So it's kind of almost like a quiet agent of impact but we want to tell those stories. So, Carolina is like, well, we know amazing people in South America. Laura knows lots of people in the states. We tried to gather some stories from Europe and we've launched this platform called creativity, culture and capital, which is by September, which would be our third launch of essays, we'll have a hundred stories there about the positive impact of creative enterprise around the world and the interesting ways that people are funding 

that.

Francesca (55:35): So for example, Orange Bonds in Columbia and that is something that I really want to take forward. We're looking about how Nesta has funded it so far, but it's mainly been funded by the most extraordinary number of voluntary hours from the three organizations, particularly our partners in Buenos Aires and the US, not to mention all the people who've written their essays for free and contributed their time. So, I would love to build that into, you know, our challenge now is how do you gain critical mass? How do you turn that into a movement? How do you turn a platform and a story into a movement? I mean, I think probably getting a global fund that was focused on the creative economy is of course getting the money first and then everything else is easy but that's something we are sort of looking for partners to take forward and I feel really passionately there's a huge opportunity there. And yeah, there's loads of stories to tell, there's lots of opportunities for investors to invest in really exciting projects with really powerful impacts and or to structure funds or bonds that will do that on a kind of portfolio basis.

Ben Yeoh (56:52): Excellent. So final question. If people are looking to make an impact in their life, say maybe their career or what they're thinking or doing, what advice would you have for them?

Francesca (57:10): I think that this is a reflection on life and society and where we are today. Trust is underrated. I think I just behave in a trustworthy fashion. It's a long termist thing. It's not freewheeling, can we get away with its culture at all, but ultimately for the benefit of the planet of society, just be honorable when it's not an easy thing to do. And yeah, be appreciative, be positive. I think if you can look at the things you do have, rather than the things you don't have and be mindful of making other people's lives better and that being a sort of driving force in what you try and do and how you behave. I think the other thing I'd say is that and I worry about this as a message cause it might sound exhausting, but everything matters, everything you do matters. It matters consequently and it matters because you know that you've done it and it becomes part of yourself image and part of yourself belief. So, don't be glancing about the things you do, do think carefully about stuff. Is that the kind of thing you meant?

Ben Yeoh (58:31): Well, it sounds excellent to me. Be trustworthy. So on that note, Fran, thank you very much.

Francesca (58:39): Thank you, Ben. Thanks. It's been a real pleasure.

Ben Yeoh (58:42): Excellent. If you appreciate the show, please like, and subscribe as it helps others find the podcast.

A story of love, trains, circular economy with a side dash of agglomeration.

I spot the beginnings of circular economy ideas everywhere. There’s many more repair and second hand ideas in the consumer world, but it’s also happening with large items as well.

JP loved and loves these old London Underground District line trains: the D78 stock (photo via wiki, below ).  Unfortunately for him, these were replaced by new stock (the S-stock).

JP has been in deep mourning ever since. Our family is given >38 reminders day about this situation, and it can really impact us and him, mentally.

There are two pieces of fantastical hope. One piece is that there are two modified D78 stocks sitting as rail adhesion trains at Neasden depot, NW London. In old satellite pictures from google earth, you can see them there. He yearns for the day they may appear on the District line. Another smaller piece is that some of the D78 stock went west to Vivarail.

Vivarail are upcycling these D78 trains and putting them back in service. A circular economy idea! Vivarail are attempting battery powered trainsas well for those lines that are not electrified.

We explored the Marston Vale line with its refurbished upcycled D78 trains (old District Line) trains (from Vivarail). #transportsparks pic.twitter.com/6chO7pUVBv

— Benjamin Yeoh (@benyeohben) June 11, 2022

A few upcycled D78 trains have made it to this small railway line: the Marston Vale Line. This line travels between Bletchley (famous for code cracking) and Bedford and passes through a number of quirky English places. (According to wiki) The line is a remnant of the former Varsity line between Oxford and Cambridge, most of which was closed in the late 1960s, although the line is to be adopted and upgraded as part of East West Rail, a project to re-establish the Oxford–Cambridge route. (I’ve seen the site on the Cambridge side which may open between 2026 - 2028 (depending on delays etc.)  This will be a piece of under pinning infrastructure that - I think - would reinforce the London-Oxford-Cambridge triangle of “innovation agglomeration”.

Eg, look what we managed to build in Cambridge over the last few year (and plenty of room for more).

I took a trip to Cambridge, UK, to see a world leading antibody research tools company. This is a UK biotech success story showing, contra skeptics, we can still build.* I passed by the nee Papworth, world class heart:lung hospital and research next to other leading research labs pic.twitter.com/ToAmUcnriF

— Benjamin Yeoh (@benyeohben) June 11, 2022

As an international aside…Two two-car battery D-trains have also been shipped to America (Penslyvania) where they are being used by Railroad Development Corp (a Vivarail shareholder) to demonstrate its ‘pop-up metro’ concept for providing ‘lower cost, lower risk, faster start’ passenger services on under-utilised railways. The thinking behind Pop Up Metro seems to be that it would reduce the risk of any real estate/infrastructure development projects and reduce the time taken to prove and implement a project (from-scratch implementation would ordinarily take longer than a political cycle). [That’s what the rail journals are suggesting, at least]

Recently, we went to visit the Marston Vale line. In some ways it caused as much trauma as joy, as these are converted D78s and not in their original state. But these trains have >30 years of life left in them (and are 35+ years old). They are comfortable and they work.

The Marston Vale line embodies several ideas I’m interested in:

• the infrastructure that powers the positive agglomeration of place based innovation

• circular economy upcycling of material intense items, such as trains

• connecting niche pieces of history and culture to our wandering transport interests

This is a slice of the steady march of progress. Its interconnectedness. Its current, past and future.

Nadia Asparouhova: future of philanthropy, science funding, creator economy, family stories | Podcast

Nadia Asparouhova (previously writing under Nadia Eghbal) is an independent researcher with widely read essays on a range of topics most recently philanthropic funding including effective altruism and ideas machines, and recent ideas in funding science.  She’s written books about the open source community. She has worked in start ups and venture. She set up and ran Helium grants, a microgrant programme. She is an Emergent Ventures fellow. 

How are crypto billionaires most likely to change charitable giving Effective Altruism (EA) aside?

“Broadly my worldview or thesis around how we think about philanthropy is that it moves in these sorts of wealth generations. And so, right now we're kind of seeing the dawn of the people who made a lot of money in the 2010s with startups. It's the “ trad tech” or startup kind of cohort. Before then you had people who made a lot of money in investment banking and finance and the early tech pioneers, they all formed their own cohort. And then you might say crypto is the next generation after that, which will eventually break down into smaller sub components for sure but we don't really know what those things are yet, I think, because crypto is still so early and they've sort of made money in their own way. 

And so, I think when we talk about how will, let's say, crypto billionaires change the world? The way I often see it discussed in public or in the media is we really hone in on individuals and their individual perspectives on the world. So we'll say, oh, Elon is doing this thing with his money or Jeff Bezos is doing that thing with his money. But I think what gets undervalued or discounted is that all these people are sort of products of their peers and their cohorts and their own generations.

When you have a group of people that have made money in a certain way that is almost by definition it's because it's a new wealth boom. They made their money in a way that's distinctly different from previous generations. And so, that becomes sort of like a defining theory of change or worldview. All the work that they are doing in this sort of philanthropic sense is finding a way to impose that worldview. …what will crypto's contribution to that be? I think it's going to be really different from the startup kind of cohort… for example, I think the trad tech cohort is much more interested in finding and uncovering top talent and in the meritocracy worldview where you have these young unproven founders that went on to start companies that rivaled or took down these huge legacy institutions and that really shapes the view of that sort of startup, a generation, where they saw over and over again that you can see someone who may not have a ton of experience in a topic, but it just has the right combination of ambition or grit, or seeing the world a certain way and they can take down these big legacy institutions. That's really what defines that cohort.

Whereas I think in the crypto kind of generation you might see instead of thinking about the power of top talent, I think they're more about giving people tools to kind of build their own worlds. So it's a lot more diffuse. I don't think it's really about going toe to toe against legacy institutions in the way that trad tech is kind of more obsessed with. It's much more about programmatically ensuring that people have access to tools to build their own worlds or build their own lives for themselves. And so again, you can kind of think about how is that going to play into their public legacy or what they do in the world and I just think it's way too early to really know what crypto's public legacy is going to look like. 

I think we are really only in the very beginning stages. It's maybe similar to in the early 2010s where you saw some people who had made money from startups that were doing experiments in philanthropy, but it was so early that comparing that to now is just completely different. And so, yeah, I think we just don't really know yet, but think the answer to that question would just be think about what does crypto actually value that is distinct from what previous generations have valued and then try to extend that into thinking about how might that play into social public values.”

We speak about what she learned from microgranting and reviewing thousands of applications.

We discuss what she thinks about EA influenced philanthropy, and why she is personally pro-pluralism.

Nadia talks about why doesn’t consider herself a creator and the downsides and upsides on he creator economy as currently formed. We discuss parallels with the open source community.

We chat about Nadia’s work as an independent researcher versus her work at start-ups and how they are fulfilling in different ways. 

Nadia examines what faith means to her now. We chat on the importance of intuition and the messiness of creative science and learning. We talk about science funding and how we might be the cusp of something new. Nadia expresses optimism about the future as we discuss possible progress stagnation.

On a more personal note, we chat about how Nadia was a vegetarian and how and why she changed her mind. But also that she could not be a complete only  carnivore  either. We discuss the importance of family stories that shape us and the role the stories of her grandmother played in her life.

We play over-rated under-rated:

• Effective Altruism

• Miami

• Crowdfunding

• Toulouse

• Newsletters

• Katy Perry

Nadia talks briefly about a seed of an idea around anti-memetics. Nadia ends with her advice to others. Follow your curiosities.

Nadia’s website is here. You can follow her on Twitter @nayafia and newsletter. There is a video, if captions are easier for you to follow (pictures only of me). Available where you get your podcasts or below (or aobve in the embedded player).

---

PODCAST INFO

• Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3gJTSuo

• Spotify: https://sptfy.com/benyeoh

• Anchor: https://anchor.fm/benjamin-yeoh

Transcript (only lightly edited)

Ben Yeoh (00:35): Hey everyone. I'm super excited to be speaking with Nadia Asparouhova. Nadia is a brilliant independent researcher. She's written books about the open source community. She's worked in startups. Her essays are widely read. She's given away money with microgranting and is an emergent ventures fellow. Nadia, welcome.

Nadia (00:55): Thanks for having me.

Ben Yeoh (00:56): I read that you hate repeating yourself, so I hope I don't have to make you do too much of that given all the excellent essays you've written on your blog, but starting with the microgranting, I am interested in your view on what you have learned now from your experience with the program, maybe what projects or people did you find the most impactful to fund? And I think you ended up thinking independent research or independent research was a good area to fund, then you ended up being an EV fellow yourself. So I'd be interested to know how your thinking has evolved on microgranting.

Nadia (01:28): Yeah, it's a great question. I think I ended up gravitating towards independent research just because it was an area that I was interested in. So, the impetus for the helium grants was basically just saying why aren't more people just giving away small amounts of money from their own personal income and seeing what happens in the world because maybe a small amount of money-- So, the original grants were $5,000 and then a thousand dollars. Maybe that small amount of money can get someone to do something they otherwise wouldn't have done before and that came from my own experience from my first year out of college where I got a grant from a foundation to do my own research and that set me down this whole different career path, I think, than if I had just gotten a normal job out of college because it made me realize it was possible for me to pursue my own curiosities and design my own projects and then just sort of find ways to fund them and that is basically how I've structured the rest of my career.

Nadia (02:28): So, I wanted to, I guess, impart that worldview onto other people through the grants. And yeah, I think it was a really helpful experience to see that actually affect some of the people that I gave grants away to, and some of whom I still keep in touch with. There's definitely a lot of noise that you get as well and I think maybe one of the things I learned when I first started, I just kind of said, these grants are no strings attached. Turns out if you're just trying to give money away on the internet, no strings attached, a lot of people will flock in with a lot of ideas on how you should give your money away and so I think maybe starting from that sort of idealistic position of I just want to fund your great ideas to having to narrow it down a little bit more, just to sort of manage the inflow of applications that I was getting and just help set the right tone because in the end I realized that even though I wanted to be as wide reaching as possible, I am only human, I'm the person processing the applications and there are things that prefer to look for or not look for. And so, I don't want to waste other people's time either. So I think it was helpful to kind of see the idealism meet pragmatic reality in some ways, if only for my own sort of sanity managing applications.

Ben Yeoh (03:58): Sure. How many did you get in, I don't know, a six month period when it was all flying?

Nadia (04:03): Oh gosh.

Ben Yeoh (04:03): Or even a year? Like a couple of hundred types of things.

Nadia (04:07): I'd have to go back and look at the numbers. It was definitely in the thousands.

Ben Yeoh (04:10): In the thousands. Wow. That's the price of being a bit too famous.

Nadia (04:15): Yeah, and I didn't really expect it. I think the first time I posted it, there weren't really that many other microgrant programs like that at the time, I think. And so, I got a lot of inbound and then I just set up a mailing list and then would sort of pay people. I ran it quarterly, I think, and had a rolling application and yeah, it just got to be a lot to manage. And then I would also, you know, I only had so many grants to give away, so I think it's good on the other end to sort of help set expectations and just kind of manage who's coming in.

Ben Yeoh (04:50): Sure. I don't think Tyler Cowen’s Emergent Ventures get thousands or at least it didn't in maybe its early days, it probably does now. I'm interested, how did you find the experience being, I guess on the other side, applying for, I guess it's a little bit bigger than a microgrant and maybe my second part to the question is obviously Tyler with Daniel Gross has written this book on interviewing and talent and questions, but what question would you ask Tyler if it was the other way around and he was applying for the EV grant

Nadia (05:21): Oh, I have to think about that one. I don't know. I mean, I think the thing that I'd be looking for in anyone applying for a grant is it should be something that is tickling your curiosity so much that you just-- I guess, another way of saying this is, there are a lot of things you can do with your career that pay a lot more money than getting [grants]. I feel like grants are there to sort of fill a little bit of a gap where you can't really-- there's no other sort of path for you to figure out how to scratch this itch or go down this little rabbit hole that has just been sort of bugging you for a while. Whether it's a side project or whether it's a full-time thing. I think seeing evidence of that in someone who's applying for a grant, regardless of what the grant is, is what kind of tips me over the line of, oh, this is something you've been thinking about for a really long time, and this grant is going to help get you over the line. One of the things that was surprising to me about helium grants, at least, was it's often not even about the money itself. I've heard some people say that about emergent ventures as well who've received grants and that's probably true for myself as well, where sometimes it's just about getting external validation or giving you excuse to think about something that on your own, it kind of gets relegated to the bottom of your to-do list or something like that. And so, yeah, it's often strangely not even really about the amount of money that's being given.

Ben Yeoh (07:01): Yeah. Someone's telling you your idea is valuable, you are not crazy, we back you, you should go for it. I think there is a lot of truth to that. I think I would maybe ask him one of his own questions about what his most irrational thought that he might believe to be true is, but it is quite interesting on that. Your recent essay ideas machine looks at effective altruism EA and philanthropic giving. I have a question from Tyler on this a little bit before we get into the EA and his question is how are crypto billionaires most likely to change charitable giving EA aside? So I kind of think this is interesting on the whole machine idea, but maybe there is this new class of different crypto billionaires. Obviously we have the future fund, which is more EA aligned, but they might well think about giving differently. Do you have any intuitive sense about what might happen there?

Nadia (08:02): Yeah, definitely. Although I think I could probably talk about this quite at length.

Ben Yeoh (08:07): Go for it.

Nadia (08:08): Broadly my worldview or thesis around how we think about philanthropy is that it moves in these sorts of wealth generations. And so, right now we're kind of seeing the dawn of the people who made a lot of money in the 2010s with startups. It's the “ trad tech” or startup kind of cohort. Before then you had people who made a lot of money in investment banking and finance and the early tech pioneers, they all formed their own cohort. And then you might say crypto is the next generation after that, which will eventually break down into smaller sub components for sure but we don't really know what those things are yet, I think, because crypto is still so early and they've sort of made money in their own way. 

And so, I think when we talk about how will, let's say, crypto billionaires change the world? The way I often see it discussed in public or in the media is we really hone in on individuals and their individual perspectives on the world. So we'll say, oh, Elon is doing this thing with his money or Jeff Bezos is doing that thing with his money. But I think what gets undervalued or discounted is that all these people are sort of products of their peers and their cohorts and their own generations.

.

Nadia (09:31): And so, when you have a group of people that have made money in a certain way that is almost by definition it's because it's a new wealth boom they made their money in a way that's distinctly different from previous generations. And so, that becomes sort of like a defining theory of change or worldview. All the work that they are doing in this sort of philanthropic sense is finding a way to impose that worldview. And so, what will crypto's contribution to that be? I think it's going to be really different from the startup kind of cohort and I've written about [that]. I can go into it as well if you'd like, but for example, like I think trad tech cohort is much more interested in finding and uncovering top talent and in the sort of like meritocracy worldview where you have these young unproven founders that went on to start companies that rivaled or took down these huge legacy institutions and that really shapes the view of that sort of startup, [this] kind of generation, where they saw over and over again that you can see someone who may not have a ton of experience in a topic, but it just has the right combination of ambition or grit, or seeing the world a certain way and they can take down these big legacy institutions. That's really what defines that cohort.

Nadia (11:01): Whereas I think in the crypto kind of generation you might see instead of thinking about sort of like, yeah, the power of top talent, I think they're more about giving people tools to kind of build their own worlds. So it's a lot more diffuse. I don't think it's really about going toe to toe against legacy institutions in the way that trad tech is kind of more obsessed with. It's much more about sort of like programmatically ensuring that people have access to tools to build their own worlds or build their own lives for themselves. And so again, you can kind of think about how is that going to play into their public legacy or what they do in the world and I just think it's way too early to really know what crypto's public legacy is going to look like. I think we are really only in the very beginning stages. It's maybe similar to in the early 2010s where you saw some people who had made money from startups that were doing experiments in philanthropy, but it was so early that comparing that to now is just completely different. And so, yeah, I think we just don't really know yet, but I think we would expect-- I think the answer to that question would just be think about what does crypto actually value that is distinct from what previous generations have valued and then try to extend that into thinking about how might that play into sort of social public values.

Ben Yeoh (12:39): That's really interesting. So it's this idea that perhaps the world building element, which seems to come with crypto perhaps might enter the thinking, whereas your point was with the kind of tech startup Silicon valley basis, they were searching for talent and that type of thing which has kind of influenced their thinking. I hadn't thought of it like that. That's quite interesting. You asked the question also within your essay about why there are not more ideas machines, but I was unclear if you actually answered that question to your satisfaction. You came up with quite a lot of other ideas machines, which have kind of started going. Do you have a clearer view now maybe with some feedback on why there are not more and where that would be going?

Nadia (13:27): I mean, I guess, and part of the impetus for that essay is that I think to some extent effective altruism has had a little bit of a monopoly on idea machines in that, yeah, if you are someone who has an interesting idea that doesn't quite fit into the typical sort of startup machine, if we can call it that the only place for you to go is [EA] and try to convince them that your cause is interesting. I think the answer might just be as simple as there's a lot more capital slashing around now than there was before. And so, in the past we were sort of, and I kind of touched on that in the essay of, yeah, there's just so much more capital available and so many different people now that are controlling that capital that you don't kind of have to be forced into the same machine to get your ideas heard. So I actually do feel optimistic that this is going to be very different. It is already now different and is only going to be more different in the next few years, but I think we are starting to see more and more idea machines crop up. But yeah, I think the answer might just be simple, but there's just way more money now than there was 10 years ago.

Ben Yeoh (15:05): Sure. That makes sense. A lot of it is driven by the cash available. You talk about, or you seem to argue for a pluralistic view of the world that there are many types of giving or philanthropy that we might be interested in and I was interested what areas of giving or impact do you really rate, which don't really fall under an EA framework that you'd be interested that people should think about giving to, or spending their time on?

Nadia (15:36): I'm not sure that-- I get asked that sometimes, but I guess, I'm not sure that my opinion really matters that much to be honest because I am sort of pro pluralism. I think I'm oddly sort of agnostic on what people actually do with their money and I've never really resonated with this concept of doing good. I don't even know what good means. I think it means something different to everyone. So, what I mostly care about is that more people are experimenting and doing things right and that was again, sort of what was driving-- Writing that essay about idea machines was just like-- effective altruism is great, I personally don't resonate with its ethos, but like why aren't there more people trying experiments like that? That is the concerning question to me. So yeah, I think it's more about just wanting more people to be experimenting with more things.

Ben Yeoh (16:37): Sure. I think for me it's part of the kind of impact on systems and particularly the power of art, which I guess because some of it's got utilitarian roots, they somewhat dismiss. Although I think you noted this, for instance, the future fund has got a little bit of thinking about, well, what the power of media and arts and books and that type of thing can do for that type of movement. So maybe it will evolve again. And it seems to me you write, you blog, you do research that in a way you are part of the so-called creator economy, even if it's not readily understood by everyone by that term, but your work is kind of more open ended and less transactional than say social media creators who are trying to have to earn a living just via their channel or something. And you've also touched on your work about the importance of rituals and things like that. So I'd be interested in your evolving thoughts on what it means to be a creator today and how you think of yourself and whether you, do you think of yourself as part of that creative community and what that means?

Nadia (17:42): I guess by the book, I probably fit into the category of creators. I don't think I think of myself in that bucket and I'm not exactly sure why. I think I may have touched on this a little bit in this essay about sort of creator economy and my qualms with the concept of creators at least the way that they kind of look today. So, people will call me a writer for example and I don't really identify with that term either, because I think it feels like this terminal state of I exist to write versus I just think of myself as someone who's just driven by curiosity and I want to explore things, but for me, the writing and the research is all about trying to understand a question that has been bugging me for a really long time. And then once I've figured out I want to go do something about it, or I want to figure out how to translate that into action. I think getting to hung up on a sort of creator as terminal state can make people lazy or at least that's my fear of it is that you just sort of end up-- Like when you know that you're being rewarded just for thinking out loud or for your ideas or for whatever, you're kind of just like-- it's very low cost to you to kind of just like spit ideas out and I think a lot of creators or writers have had this strange of experience of realizing that it's almost a little bit easy to sort of game the system if you really wanted to.

Nadia (19:47): You start to notice the things that you can say online that will get you the clout and the attention if you really wanted it. You start to see the same sort of pattern of like yeah, just sort of attention that you can get and it can sort of soil the experience a little bit, I think, or at least that's my experience of it because it's like, well, I could just say, you know, I could just keep spitting out these things kind of mindlessly and people will pay attention to it, but that's not actually rewarding. And so, I think that's maybe what I want to fight against is feeling-- I always want to feel like the work I'm doing is rooted in action and not just sort of creating for the sake of people to consume content and maybe that's just a cope. I'm not really sure, but that's sort of how I think about it.

Ben Yeoh (20:43): Yeah. I think you did touch on that and that's the kind of transactional nature, you can kind of game the algorithm, or I guess you even see, like, I think one of the most successful YouTubers ever is Mr. Beast and he spent a lot of time figuring out what makes a great video on YouTube and obviously he's very successful and things like that, but there is an element which feels a little bit transactional, whereas your work is quite a much more open ended than that. But I do think that if you kind of consider well writing or being, say an essayist you do write essays and they are wonderful and thought provoking and all of that. So, I think that in some ways that is what it means to be a writer, even if you haven't got the transactional part of it and maybe, like you say, you've kind of gone down a, not quite patronage, but like a grant fellow type route in order to keep that thing alive rather than to having go a more transactional. And I think that's interesting because it seems to me that it's almost a thread that you can pull out from maybe some of your thinking around open source communities and being around that for so long.

Ben Yeoh (21:56): So, I'm kind of interested in that since your book, many of your insights still seem to be true, that for instance a small number of dedicated people maintain much of the open source code and what it is to be that community within that. But do you see any resonance there between your work and open source and how you're working kind of in public today? And is there anything maybe different around how you think about those types of communities since your book was published?

Nadia (22:23): Yeah. I definitely see that they're parallels between how open source works and how creator economy more generally works, which was part of the impetus for writing the book. And yeah, I think I've just sort of continued to see that play out like a huge thread that had not quite fully hit its stride at the time hat working in public was published was just sort of the explosion of web three and dows and like all these sort of new experiments in organizing creativity, I guess. So, I think if I were to write the book again today, I would absolutely include a lot more of that. There just weren't as many examples to draw from. I don't think web three even was a term people were using by the time that that book was published. So it's been cool to see it play out in all these different ways that I had not even fully covered in that book, but I still think like open source as a north star for me of like something that has been around for a while and that we have had the chance to see play out for, let's say, 20 plus years is a really just like yeah, helpful example to make sense of everything that's happening right now and all these different new incentive models and ways of people getting paid and doing things.

Nadia (23:53): In terms of its relevance to my own life or my own work, I mean, I think even probably one of the strange sort of paradoxes about open source developers is a lot of them have full-time jobs as software developers, not doing open source. They're just sort of working a typical software engineer kind of job, and then they do their open source on the side. But the thing that they're best known for is their open source work, which is on the side and I kind of feel that way about my own sort of writing and research as well, cause I mean, in the times when I'm more in full time writing research mode, as you've said, I'll do grants or contracts or whatever to sort of fund that lifestyle or just do it out of my own savings. But then I do go and work at startups as well. But I don't feel like I'm known for the work that I do at startups. To me, that's sort of the translating it to action component of research where I've already spent some time trying to deeply understand a topic and then I'm going to go work somewhere to put those ideas into practice.

Nadia (25:05): But I would hear from open source developers, some version of this, you know, it's really strange that the thing that I'm actually getting paid to do full time is not the thing that I'm actually known for. Why am I not getting paid for the thing that I'm actually known for? And I think I feel that way a little bit too around, yeah, I don't think people associate me with being a product manager at a startup, for example, they associate me with the work I've done that I don't necessarily get paid for that is like writing on the side or the periods in which I'm doing research.

Ben Yeoh (25:37): Sure. How did that contrast with having a more regular-- cause you did work for a startup, well, I guess two startups for a time? I guess you found that fulfilling but in a different way, but actually independent research is kind of where it went for you.

Nadia (25:52): Yeah. It is definitely very fulfilling in a different way. I mean I can only be in my head for so long. It's very different to get to work with a team and in every case where I've gone to work at a company it's also this really wonderful-- You can kind of sit in a corner and say, I think the world should work like this, but then when you're actually trying to make the world work like that you'll hit harsh realities of why things don't work the way that you expected and I think it's really good. And I've noticed this pattern in other independent researchers that I know, I think a lot of the reason why people who become independent researchers, like the reason why they don't go into academia is because academia is much more sort of sequestered away from practice. You really are spending time in the system of ideas and you don't get the chance to really translate your ideas into practice. You're just fully in academic mode. Whereas with independent research, you actually have the opportunity to sort build your life the way that you want and I've noticed that other independent researchers who are also very interested in this idea of both research, married with practice and that definitely is something that I care a lot about too.

Nadia (27:11): And so, yeah, I think being able to work at a company and sort of see your ideas play out and realize why certain things don't work the way that you expect or, oh yeah, that definitely works the way that I expect or whatever it is. I think that can be very rewarding and then, yeah, again, just sort of on the personal level, just being able to work with people and collaborate with people in that way is yeah, just being part of a team shipping things can be really satisfying. All of that is very fulfilling in a different way.

Ben Yeoh (27:44): Cool. Yeah, that's kind of really interesting seeing that balance, all those differences. And I guess it's part of like the pluralistic view of life that you can get different things from different areas all at the same time. Great. You created a personal reflection on faith with Henry Drew on a podcast where I think you concluded that maybe you had a little bit more faith or call it spirituality than perhaps you thought you had. Have your feelings around faith changed since then and what does faith mean? Or perhaps in a pluralistic view, some of the stuff that you might not think rationally in the mathematical world now mean to you?

Nadia (28:29): So yeah, I was just talking about this with my husband this weekend. I mean, some aspect of that has not changed in the sense of yeah, I think I'm very driven by and interested in the things that are sort of ineffable in the world. I always think about my friend Michael Nielsen, who I think this used to be his Twitter bio. I don't really know why I associate this phrase with him, but maybe it's still his Twitter bio, 'searching for the numinous' and he's, I think similarly, just sort of looking for that thing that creates that feeling of maybe being touched by God or having just like a strong feeling that you don't necessarily know how to explain. Let's put it that way. And I think that drives a lot of people who are interested in science and technology as well. I think there's this false divide that is placed between, let's say, science and art or science and religion. But a lot of scientists that I know are deeply moved by something spiritual or this sort of wonder about the universe. I don't think that's universally true, but think it's more true than it may often seem. And I feel like that drives so much of my work when people sort of ask, why do you choose the topics that you're interested in? Or how do you know what you want to pursue in research?

Nadia (29:58): I never have a great answer to that. To me, it's just sort of like, I have such a strong feeling or this thing has sort of gripped me or taken a hold of me and I have to just follow it to the end. I don't even have a choice in the matter. And to me that is sort of like spiritually motivated or moving. So yeah, I think that has been very consistent in me throughout my entire life but there's multiple roles that I think religion or faith or spirituality can play in someone's life and something that is definitely newer for me since exploring that that podcast series with Henry is, I think I've become more interested in ritual and tradition. Especially as we're talking about having kids now and thinking about what are the traditions that you want to pass down to your kids? And I think religion can provide a lot of continuity in that and it doesn't have to only drive from religion. There are obviously many different ways that you can find rituals in your life but I think that's one place that it can come from and that's something that I'm starting to explore and understand and appreciate more now than I did before.

Ben Yeoh (31:16): I think it's really good intuition to follow that first impulse that you have, which is why I'm putting you kind of in this bucket of creativity, because I think that's an impulse that a lot of creatives have. And for instance, I think accountants are sometimes quite creative, not in the bad sense, but they're having to follow some sort of intuition. And I think there is some research in the early science or science of progress. I can't remember the exact researcher, but he called two types of science progress, I think S1 and S2 where S2 was the formal scientific discoveries that you have, which you put in equation, which are declamatory statements that you can argue about and go into the cannon. But before you get into S2, you actually arrive in a state of science or creativity, which he called S1 and in that is much more messy, intuitive. You have a lot of individual stories or anecdotes, like how Einstein thought of relativity and all of this before, where it's really messy and unformed by its nature. You haven't got a declaratory piece of algebra that you can debate yet and actually a lot of the stuff in S1 is very interesting and less well discovered. And I think what you described there about following an intuition or a curiosity, or however it might be, is where a lot of progress happens in that S1 space.

Nadia (32:44): Yeah, definitely--

Ben Yeoh (32:44): So riffing on that-- go on.

Nadia (32:46): That definitely resonates.

Ben Yeoh (32:47): So riffing on that, I mean, there has been much talk about this science of science or progress, and you've written about science funding and tech over the last decade. But I'm quite interested to know where do you think it will go in the next decade? And maybe if there was anything special about what's happened in the last decade? I guess, you noted a lot of things which happened just in the last one or two or three years, arc Institute, different ways of science funding. But I was wondering, what you saw over the last 10, what does it mean for the next 10 and was there anything special that we've just gone through?

Nadia (33:25): Yeah, it's hard. I feel like I'll have a much stronger intuition on this in maybe two years because I really do feel like we are just on the cusp of something that has immediately turned. And so, it's so hard to know how it's going to play out. But I think one thing I feel like right now, the conversation in science funding is more about, there's a bunch of new tech wealth that has come in that's more from what I call like the trad tech or startup kind of cohort and it's now budding up against sort of the legacy ways of funding science, even within science philanthropy, but then also just sort of broadly science institutions. And so, the tension that I think people are sort of noticing or seeing is with this new tech wealth coming up against sort of like the old way of doing things. Whereas I think in the next decade, that's probably going to shift one more notch downstream where I think the tension we will be seeing is between sort of trad tech ways of thinking about funding and the sort of crypto influenced ways of thinking about funding.

Nadia (34:44): I feel like we are seeing that tension build and build now between the startup cohort and the crypto cohort in many different ways and I think it's hard to know really like what direction that's going to go in, but I think the question might become less about do I get government funding for my project versus take this sort of funny money from a bunch of weird startup people. It might be even more extreme than where it's like, do I go work at an Institute at all or do I do one of these crazy science dell things or something like that? And again, I think it's probably important to zoom out of all that and say all these experiments are really at the fringe. There is a whole world of science that fundamentally doesn't even care about any of the stuff that is happening. These are all very small drops in the bucket of more broadly how science is done but I think if I were taking a snapshot of it right now, I think people are vaguely aware there are these [Inaudible:00:35:49] initiatives that are happening and that people are experimenting, but it seems like really fringe and just sort of like who knows what's going to happen there, whereas maybe a decade from now we'll look and say, huh, like some of those experiments are actually starting to play out and people will be taking it a little bit more seriously.

Ben Yeoh (36:06): Sure. Do you have an intuition about what one or two of those might work out? Because I guess in some ways, this is the really interesting part because we haven't had the decade, so we don't know which of those, whether it's a dell thing or something else, or are you so uncertain that you wouldn't want to make a little forecast?

Nadia (36:26): Yeah. I still feel really uncertain. I think crypto land has proven itself to be so unpredictable in so many ways and it moves and changes so fast that it's hard to know, but I think that just broadly that the things that seem a little bit radical right now might, at least some of those might work out and start to seem like viable ways of funding your research or organizing your research or disseminating it.

Ben Yeoh (36:52): Sure. That seems fair enough. So, there's a lot of debate or I guess evidence that science or productivity or science may have slowed down in the last decade or two and now just recently there's been some sort of counter arguments that maybe there's some areas which have stopped slowing down perhaps in biotech and some other areas or maybe even increased again. And I think it's kind of interesting that if we are saying that there's an old blob of how science was funded and that was ticking along, and we're still getting some discoveries, but maybe at higher cost or lower rate, but you've now got this kind of tail end of more radical, or they seem radical because they're new that actually that might spark a little bit more innovation or different innovation, cause it's going to come from something that we haven't done. And maybe my kind of intuition is that's perhaps a glimmering of where we're seeing that actually this productivity is at least flat lining or maybe going to increase in a couple of areas, say AI and say biotech. Do you think there might be any truth to that kind of idea? Or do you think this is just such a small amount and it's so uncertain who knows what it does and do you sense that we have had this same slowdown in productivity or progress or science that people are kind of envisaging on the macro level from your experience in startup world and speaking to open source communities and the like?

Nadia (38:23): I don't know that I buy that progress has been slowing down or stagnating in any shape or form. I think I'd probably just say I'm fundamentally somewhat unopinionated on it because I just prefer to look forward rather than backwards. But in as much as any opinion I might have about it, I feel like, I don't know, it just doesn't-- I think I'm just fundamentally very optimistic about human civilization and I really, I don't know. I believe that we're capable of so many great things and I've just never really had this sort of like what I feel is a bit of a pessimistic view of us not doing as much as we could be. So yeah, I think my interest in a lot of these topics comes less from a place where science is slowing down or we need to sort of improve progress because it's stagnating somehow. I'm sort of unconcerned with it and I'm more about-- I just want to make sure that all the barriers are removed and we are moving as fast as possible to the future. But yeah, and maybe that's just a matter of aesthetics of what is the fundamental driving reason to get to the same outcome or the same area of interest but yeah, I don't know. I'm very, very optimistic that people are doing great things and I don't know, I have a very rosy view of the world in that sense.

Ben Yeoh (39:56): Well, someone told me there's a quote that, something like a pessimist never builds anything. Something like that. So maybe it's one of those things that even if it is true, we should fool ourselves into thinking something else because we build a better world that way.

Nadia (40:13): Yeah, totally.

Ben Yeoh (40:13): Even if it's not quite true. I was intrigued by something you wrote about how you were vegetarian and then not and I guess this is personal for me because I worry a little bit having met some [EAs], a lot of them are very into animal welfare and I had wondered whether not being a little bit more veggie was a kind of deep, moral failing of my own, or maybe not deep moral failing, but some sort of moral failing and every year I kind of eat a little bit less. Although, it's kind of strange, cause it's not really animals., I don't really eat octopus anymore because I've seen all of this research about how kind of clever and curious and alien they are, but it doesn't feel consistent cause I still eat pork and things like that. But I was kind of interested that you sort of went the other way and I'm meeting a few people who go the other way and said actually, you know what, it isn't too big a deal. Not having over thought that, has it been a big thought that you've had, or it was just kind of like, oh, well, it's time being vege is not a big issue.

Nadia (41:17): Yeah. I don't think I've ever been asked this before in an interview, so yeah, I'll think about it now. Yeah, I guess for context I became a vegetarian when I was, I think, 11 or 12 and then I remained a vegetarian for about 10 years and then I started eating meat again and now I eat a lot of meat. I even tried being a carnivore for about six months, but it was really hard to just eat steak all the time. And so yeah, I mean reasons why-- Originally, I became a vegetarian out of concern for animal welfare. I think I literally saw a pita something on the internet when I was 12 and I was like, oh my God, I can't do this. I mean, there were just so many-- it's funny cause it's really hard to know where to draw the line and I think being a vegetarian for a decade kind of gave me an appreciation for how there just really is no perfect black and white. I remember, cause I would be on all these vegetarian forums and stuff and there are some people that are really extreme. There are people that also troll vegetarians. All the fun of the internet, culture, early internet culture but I remember seeing things like, you know, there are field mice that are being killed in the fields when you're growing your plants or something. It's like, well, what are you going to do about those mice that are dying? It's impossible to get to a point. And then of course drawing a line between like vegan and vegetarian and then even within vegans, it's like, do you eat honey or not? Or do I wear leather products or not? If I'm a vegetarian, should I not be wearing leather?

Nadia (42:55): There's just so many things and I think at some point I think it just made me realize there is no perfect answer. One of the things that I felt I would run into a lot as a vegetarian was sometimes it's hard, you go to a restaurant and there's-- I've been places where there's literally nothing on the menu that doesn't have meat in it. And so, you end up being like, well, I need to eat something. So you order something and then you take the meat off and it's like, well, but now I've paid for a meal that I did order the meat, I just didn't put it in my body. But didn't I basically just still buy into the system and which isn't it almost worse that I'm now throwing away the meat and it's been completely unused instead of just eating it myself. So I just felt like there were just so many nuances and I think my interest in starting to eat it again, I was just kind of like, well, maybe I can-- So, I started eating meat again when I was whatever, maybe 10 years later, but then it was a very, very slow reintroduction of meat. For most of that time I think it was like, I have a meat of the month where I eat meat once a month and have it just kind of be a special kind of treat or I will eat it in this situation where I know that the animal was treated really well, very high bar for the meat I'm going to eat. And then I was like, only eating seafood and it was just sort of like slowly, slowly, slowly.

Nadia (44:26): I still don't really eat pork very much and also I didn't grow up eating very much meat, I guess. So, I still am a little bit, you know, I don't eat tons of certain kinds of meat and things like that but yeah, I don't even really know where I'm going with this, but now I'm just kind of going down memory lane on vegetarianism. But, I just think that maybe the TLDR is it's pretty gray and pretty difficult I think to have a perfect answer, to live this perfectly moral animal cruelty free life. Everything is tied to everything and everyone needs to figure out where to draw that line for themselves. And for me, my personal health improved drastically when I started eating meat again and so I felt like that was the best choice for me.

Ben Yeoh (45:19): Sure. That makes a lot of sense. Even going to being a complete carnival, which is maybe too much and actually completely fits into your pluralistic kind of worldview, which seems to be shaping and I'm also super glad from my point of view that I managed to ask you a unique question.

Nadia (45:38): First time thinking about that.

Ben Yeoh (45:39): Yeah. Somewhat and it is really complicated. So, from an EA point of view, you can actually argue for instance that beef, that cattle, if they're well treated and they only have one bad day has a lot less what they would call suffering risk or suffering with it. On the other hand, environmentalists will say, well, we have a lot of beef consumption, again depending on how you do it, that's very bad for methane and stuff like that. So, it's a tricky individual trade off like you say. Maybe sticking slightly with the personal as well on this one I picked up that it seemed to be that your grandmother was quite important in your life or at least seemed to have been an influence about where sort of she came from and what she was doing. I was wondering whether you had a reflection on what she might have taught you or that feeling of what you learned from knowing about your grandma's life.

Nadia (46:42): So my grandmother actually died before I was born. So, I did not meet her at all but the stories I know of are through my father, her son. I guess, I hadn't really thought about it, but there's the stories that get passed down throughout a family, of course, and I think something that I've really taken from both my dad and from the stories about his mother is just this sense of adventure and embracing uncertainty. I really get that from both my parents since they both came to the US, immigrated from other places and I think in both cases, I just really admire how-- My mom came to the US when she was, I think 29 and just basically upended and I can't imagine as a 29 year old sort of just upending her entire life and just moving to a different country and being like cause I just want something different is I think pretty cool and my grandmother similarly, my dad's mom. So my dad's side is Persian. So my grandmother's Persian and they left Iran when my dad was five or something and moved to Germany and nobody spoke German. My mom or my grandmother spoke a lot of different languages, but when she came to Germany, she didn't know anything. She was this older woman with two small kids and didn't speak the language, just had to figure everything out.

Nadia (48:18): This was also kind of post-world war II. Germany was not exactly a place that people are dying to move to and she just sort of, at least the way that my dad has sort of told stories about her and my relatives, she kind of just embraced it and was like, yeah, I don't know, I'm going to watch a lot of German TV, I'm going to try to make German friends and just figure out how to speak this language and at that point she must have been in her late forties, I want to say mid to late forties. And so again, just sort of imagining-- I think this theme has actually persisted throughout a lot of my parents and my extended family, just cause immigrant life, people's lives get upended by revolutions and things you don't really expect but I think, yeah, this sort of theme that has captivated me about a lot of my extended family has just been one day your life completely changes as you know it and I think we associate that level of sort of high intensity change with your teenage years or your early twenties or a time when you're kind of finding yourself. But other cases it's like, yeah, you're in your forties, you're in your fifties and suddenly everything you know is completely wiped away and you just kind of show up and have to start over and just embracing that uncertainty with this cheerfulness and saying I'm just going to figure it out. That's the way it is.

Nadia (49:44): I think that's the perspective that I really cherish and want to embrace in my own life. Anytime my life has seemed hard or there's something very, yeah, there's just been a lot of change happening in my life, I just kind of think about some of my other relatives where I'm like they have been through way worse and they got through it and it was fine. So I'll be fine too.

Ben Yeoh (50:07): Yeah. I think that family folk law, the stories we tell ourselves are really important in shaping how we are and I did wonder about that because of coming through that. So, is there a Zoroastrian influence running through your family as well then?

Nadia (50:21): There is not.

Ben Yeoh (50:22): Do you want to play a short overrated underrated then, maybe perhaps in honor of Tyler of a few things for that and then we'll just have a couple of questions.

Nadia (50:34): Sure. Sounds good.

Ben Yeoh (50:35): Sure. So you can pass, overrated, underrated, or you can just make some sort of comment. A couple of those we've already touched on. We'll start on the big one, I guess, effective altruism: overrated or underrated?

Nadia (50:48): Ooh, that's a tough one. I think it's both underrated and overrated. So it's just kind of a cop out but if I really had to pick I'd actually probably say underrated.

Ben Yeoh (50:58): Yeah. I think you could get there. It's probably underrated by those who don't know anything about it and maybe a touch overrated if you are very deeply in it or something like that. How about Miami, overrated or underrated?

Nadia (51:16): Ooh, wow. I guess I'm not very good at this game cause I'm going to just probably say both underrated and overrated for everything. Yeah, I think it's underrated as a real city. I think people associate it as a party city and I do not have that relationship with Miami at all and I love it here. Yeah, I'll just keep it underrated.

Ben Yeoh (51:34): Yeah, maybe underrated, right.

Nadia (51:35): Yeah, maybe just underrated.

Ben Yeoh (51:37): It is, I guess, underrated maybe compared to San Francisco or are you putting them in an equal bucket?

Nadia (51:43): That's where I feel like they're just kind of different. I don't think I have the same sort of density of like, I mean, nothing will-- Now I'm going to sound like an old person, but I'm just like nothing will ever really compare to 2010s San Francisco. That was just such a special time. I don't know that Miami is quite there yet but I do think it's a really wonderful place to live and it has a reputation for being a party capital, which I, again, just completely don't relate to at all. I love Miami because it's filled with sunshine and it feels very restorative and peaceful to be here.

Ben Yeoh (52:16): Yeah. And that's the thing about cities and places. It's also time and place and then actually it's probably time and place and people. In fact, I think you've mentioned something and I think it's really true now that we probably are somehow underinvested in being close to our close friends. I think of this now, I'm in my forties and I kind of feel like I would really love to be in walking distance of a handful of my close friends and we are not because of the way life has come about, but it seems to me that that's often the case and that might be perhaps a moderate mistake that we somehow all make.

Nadia (52:53): Yes, definitely share that.

Ben Yeoh (52:55): So underrated, overrated crowdfunding?

Nadia (53:00): Crowdfunding. Ooh. I do think crowdfunding is overrated. Yeah, I don't know. Again, pluralism, so maybe that's a cop out, but I've seen it work for friends really, really, really well. And so, I think it is absolutely an option that should exist and has transformed many people's lives. I just don't think it's the one panacea that is going to solve everyone's problems in large part because it depends on being able to market yourself really well and having a certain kind of audience and not every type of creativity or creative work is going to fit into that I personally have-- I don't think I've ever used crowdfunding to fund my work. And so yeah, I think it's overrated in the sense that there are other ways to do it.

Ben Yeoh (53:49): Yeah. And do you differ between project crowdfunding or kind of patronage Patrion type crowdfunding?

Nadia (53:57): Sorry, what was the first option?

Ben Yeoh (53:59): First one is where you just get a kind of project done, like a kind of Kickstarter Indiegogo. So you're just funding that as a sort of one time, I guess, versus this kind of patronage system, which I guess is the modern day incarnation of maybe old patronage. I'm not quite sure because you've got these fellowship grant things. I don't know if there is a difference.

Nadia (54:19): I don't distinguish between the two for the purposes of this particular conversation, because I think in both cases you're having to appeal to a wide set of people and get sort of small amounts of money. I mean patrons still exist. Patrion also exists, but it's also possible to just find a single source of funding.

Ben Yeoh (54:42): Sure. Toulouse?

Nadia (54:45): Toulouse. Oh no, my mother-in-law's going to be listening to this.

Ben Yeoh (54:52): Well then it has to be underrated then.

Nadia (54:54): Yeah. I just came back there, I was there for a week visiting my in-laws. The duck is definitely underrated. I did not know that Toulouse is basically the duck capital of France maybe. I don't know. There's a lot of duck in Toulouse and apologies to my former vegetarian self, but I absolutely love duck. So I was eating duck in every shape and form. Highly recommend going to Toulouse if you like duck.

Ben Yeoh (55:23): Great. Well, and would you family aside, would you like to go back?

Nadia (55:28): I don't know that I had enough of a sense of-- we were kind of doing a lot of family things, so I don't know that I had enough of a sense to have a strong opinion on it.

Ben Yeoh (55:35): Sure. We can go neutral. Newsletters?

Nadia (55:40): Newsletters. Oh boy. Maybe similarly at this point, I think they're just rated.

Ben Yeoh (55:51): Right. Neutral. Fair enough.

Nadia (55:53): Yeah. I would've said they were underrated maybe two years ago, three years ago and now I think they're appropriately rated.

Ben Yeoh (56:03): That feels fair. I still think they're underrated by the median person, but then I'm quite--

Nadia (56:08): Yes, actually.

Ben Yeoh (56:09): I started blogging in the first golden age of blogging and I still kind of really miss that and newsletters are sort of a rift slightly on that. Those are days of being a blogger and things like that. Okay. Maybe the last one, the last fun one, Katy Perry?

Nadia (56:28): Katy Perry. Oh boy. I don't know if I've thought about Katy Perry in quite some time.

Ben Yeoh (56:33): Well, yeah, you compared her to Mark Rothko. That's where this comes from.

Nadia (56:40): I'm vaguely remembering. The downside of putting a lot of your life in public is then you say things and you're like, oh geez, did I say that? I did say that.

Ben Yeoh (56:48): You could move on from it.

Nadia (56:49): Yeah, I remember saying this now, saying that people will look at Mark Rothko and kind of be like, I don't understand this guy's work, it's just a canvas that is entirely black or something, where is the art in that? And yeah, similarly with Katy Perry, although now probably updating those cultural references to someone more recent, but people look at, let's just say, any sort of pop star and kind of be like where is the art in that? But I think making it like-- simplicity often sort of hides a lot of the complexity and a lot of the work that had to go into making something look that simple. I think there's a lot of hidden art behind it. So yeah, I'll go with the underrated.

Ben Yeoh (57:32): Yeah. I think that's really interesting and that's why I kind of don't worry about the future of art in a kind of digital world, because art there's a big bunch of our, I don't know quite how much the percentage is, but it's representative. Like you have Duchamp's toilet, right? It's raising all sorts of other things behind the actual surface object and I don't know Katy Perry work that well, but I could see similar that there's a whole creative production, what it means, what it means in the world and that which is beyond just the kind of surface things and songs and things like that.

Nadia (58:07): Mm-Hmm.

Ben Yeoh (58:08): Great. Okay. So just final two or three questions. What do you think is something that you might understand or you think about the world that perhaps others do not?

Nadia (58:22): Ooh. I'm all sort of terrible at these something questions because I feel like my brain all wants to go into a lot of different directions. I don't know that I have any sort of unique insights on the world.

Ben Yeoh (58:38): Really. Fair enough.

Nadia (58:40): But I'll say something that defines how I think. I think I just tend to live a lot in the nuance of things and tend to resist oversimplification of the way the world can be and I think a lot of new ideas and a lot of creative work lives at the intersection of, and this is not a unusual statement but you can see over and over again. A lot of creative work comes from sort of mixing domains or having inspiration from these unlikely places and you kind of combine it with a different idea and you're just mixing and remixing ideas. And so, I think it's just very, very important to remain in that sort of nuanced open-minded kind of place because that's where all the unexpected ideas are going to kind of come from.

Ben Yeoh (59:36): Sure. I think that's maybe not absolutely unique, but not sure everyone thinks like that and I mean, you have an already, I think quite a significant interesting body of work where you have made some of these provocations and you go into things some in depth and now doing independent research. I think that's a particular form of brilliance. So last two questions. Are there any future projects or future thinking you'd like to share?

Nadia (01:00:07): Ooh. I don't know if there's anything I'm ready to share yet. In addition to sort of the interest and looking at kind of these new generations of wealth that we've talked about. I've had a couple little side projects on the brain. I have this piece I've been meaning to write about antiemetics. I don't know if that's a topic you've come across but--

Ben Yeoh (01:00:33): Referencing Girard?

Nadia (01:00:35): A lot of it has been driven by this I guess we call them sci-fi author quantum who wrote this book about anti-memetics and that was at least my first exposure to it. The medics being ideas that spread virally and antiemetic idea is something that is very compelling, but resists being shared. So taboo, for example, would be an example of something antiemetic. I just feel like there's room to explore those ideas on this spectrum of whether they're not just memetic or not. If we say something is not memetic, we think, oh, it's just not compelling. But the ideas that are very compelling, but don't get shared mimetically and so like, why is that and what does that kind of spectrum look like? So I have a lot of messy working notes on it, but I haven't actually taken the time to put together an essay about it, but I'm working on it.

Ben Yeoh (01:01:35): Yeah. Okay. That's really fascinating. I hadn't really come across that concept articulated like that, but that kind of makes some sense, like taboos. Even, I guess, some sorts of, I guess, conspiracy theories or not even right conspiracy theories, secrets, I guess. Some sort of secrets. I guess some sort of process and knowhow is sometimes like that as well.

Nadia (01:01:57): Yes. A lot of different categories to put ground on.

Ben Yeoh (01:02:01): Great. Okay. And then just ending this excellent conversation. Do you have any advice or thoughts for others? This could be life advice or thought advice or maybe advice for those who are thinking of following an independent researcher career path?

Nadia (01:02:18): Yeah. I mean, it sounds maybe simple or obvious, but I just would really encourage people to follow their own curiosities. I think a lot of people have really great ideas, but we often kind of dismiss it as oh, but I'm not really ever going to go down that rabbit hole or that's not realistic thing for me to pursue, but I think one of the most rewarding things about independent research is you get to make your own world exactly as you want it to look and if you take those sort of nagging curiosities or those intuitions, if you actually just take them seriously, instead of dismissing the little voices in your head and you just go all in on them, life kind of just reorganizes around you to make those things possible. At least that has been my experience. So yeah, I would encourage everyone to sort of listen to those little voices in their head and follow their own curiosities.

Ben Yeoh (01:03:17): That's a great note to end on, follow your curiosity. Nadia, thank you very much.

Nadia (01:03:23): Thank you for having me. This is great.

Ben Yeoh (01:03:26): If you appreciate the show, please like and subscribe as it helps others find the podcast.

Why is a stock price like a piece of art ?

Why is a stock price like a piece of art ? And on balance, why I remain hopeful about the future of art in the face of NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens), digital forms and AI.

In a fashion, a stock price in a number embodies all of the reputation, social, natural, financial capital, assets, liabilities and cash flows both negative and positive discounted back to this exact moment in time.  All of the human thought as to what is the “value” of a company’s equity embodied in that moment in time. 

It’s a human construct. Like all money related phenomena it’s based in intersubjective myth or intersubjective trust.  It exists because other humans believe it to have value.

The fish do not care. The sky does not care.  The parrots do not care. 

Natural science does not care about the stock price directly (although if a collapse in price forces a person to sell their parrot, or they buy new parrot food with their profits then at the second order the parrots care; and to the seventh order if the stock prices lead to or reflect a world where Miami is underwater and the fish can swim there - to that extent the fish would care).

There is human skill in its art forms. Some art can only be made by people who have honed their skills for 10,000s of hours, and even then these people may only be almost singular. 

I once met a Kyoto artisan who claimed to be one of the the last 5 hand makers of buckets left., link end.* 

Humans on occasion value this type of art very highly. 

(*It turns out, I think he wasn’t quite the very last. And he was certainly poorer than this other artisan who elevated his art of bucket making even higher.  I bought his bucket for about £100+, the artisan/artist bucket is £1,000s+ )

Some art does not require the same physical skill. Take Duchamp’s toilet urinal. 

Marcel Duchamp's toliet (1917), likely value today >$2m. pic.twitter.com/pJzY3b8he4

— Benjamin Yeoh (@benyeohben) May 28, 2022

For those interested in or wanting to converse in this type of language of art and culture, the toilet embodies many different strands of human thought and values embodied in a toilet. (What is art? Can an artist say anything is art? When are found objects art? Who decides what is art? What is the strucutre of belief and value associated with the concept of art?)* See, link to essay end.

‘I was drawing people’s attention to the fact that art is a mirage. A mirage, exactly like an oasis appears in the desert. It is very beautiful until, of course, you are dying of thirst. But you don’t die in the field of art. The mirage is solid.’ (Duchamp)

…Just like a stock price the parrots don’t care except perhaps as a place to perch on or defects on even. 

But the history of art suggests that art works always have a portion of their value in what they represent. The value of Duchamp’s urinal is not in its material cost and skill of labour, no more than the price of most biopharmaceuticals are not in the material manufacture cost of chemical compounds. It’s in the ideas - the intangibles - that such work represents. (And in the case of pharmaceuticals the intangible value of innovation that went into the drug, and intangible value of life extension a drug brings).

The representation maybe be allegorical in the painting, it may be representative of the artist’s life, her skill, what she represents; or the culture of the time, and so on. That is all embedded in the piece of art.  Much like value is somehow embedded in a stock price.

So as art moves digital - and you have a piece like Beeple’s “Everydays - The First 5000 Days”  which sold for $69m in 2021….  The art works means of digital production, the NFT, the work being on the block chain, are only a portion, and perhaps a very small portion of the value of that piece and what it represents. Beeple worked on the piece for 5000 days. 

In this reading, the piece represents the years Beeple spent on his work, the advent of digital art - the culture and presentation of web3.0, and crypto, and all the hopes and dreams of a crypto cyber punk future; expressed in an array of digital pixels.

Until Oct 2020, the most Mike Winkelmann — the digital artist AKA as Beeple — had ever sold a print for was $100.

In Mar 2021 an NFT of his work sold for $69 million. millionhttps://t.co/m4j4SevHgO

— Benjamin Yeoh (@benyeohben) May 28, 2022

Although note as Alex Evans implies this particular selling price might be part of something a little odd and like a scam. That too is the story of art.

source: https://t.co/YhVAprcM3A lets not got back over the yucky scammy world of en eff tees again

— tanh(mmalex) 🇺🇦 (@mmalex) May 28, 2022

The art still means nothing to the parrot. Just like the stock price.

If this reading of art is correct, it partly explains the relevance of cave paintings from thousands of years ago - what they express then, the cultures the art represents and what they express to us now. These bison art are >30,000 years old.

Bison from Cauvet caves, (cc) wiki.

It will also explain the value of art in a digital world. It’s obviously not the pixels we are buying, nor the skill or lack of skill which went into their making; but what they represent to us now and in the future. 

And the parrot still won’t care. 

The Future of Art

The Future of Art… in honour of the effective ideas blog project (which you should check out, link end), I thought I’d spell out an idea for what this might mean for the future, say in 2072. 

My argument is that art will be more accessible to a wider range of peoples because technologies will allow them to express their imagination better without as much physical skill. Physical skill will still be valued as it always has, but physical skill is only a component. (Else we would value the hand made buckets of Kyoto more; and the urinals of Duchamp perhaps less). In many cases, representation, imagination, culture and all those things that matter to humans make up art more. 

I will continue by talking about the now. Computer programmes - AI art makers - have made the creation of complex images possible in seconds.  The image at the top of the blog was generated from a few works “Stock Market as a piece of Art). There is limited physical skill in creating these images. 

But they allow people with little physical skill to express a much wider range of imagination and in that basis create a wider range of art. 

Fast forward to 2072, the technological possibilities will defy our imaginations of today. 

In the same way that most of us in 1972 could not have imagined Beeple’s art, AI art or the regenerative art processes of today. 

Critics might worry about the skill in art. The cave paintings survive. The art of bucket making may be gone by 2072. 

No one is saving the buckets of cedar wood. I am sad we have lost so many of these arts.  So many that there must be thousands if not millions we do not even know of - we almost did not know of the poets of Bengal; we have lost the recipe for Roman cement; the gardens of Babylon are but a dream; no one alive now or in the future will ever see a vision of the pyramids in their orginal white.

And yet, what we gain is more than what we lost and as long as we progress this is ever so. 

The stock price and the stock market is the sum of the hopes and dreams of listed businesses. 

But art is the sum of the hopes and dream of humanity, its culture and its progress. 

And as our life expectancy progresses which is our health; and as our morals and social relationships progress from the end of slavery, to womens votes, to minority and disability rights…

This will be seen in our art. Our arts will reflect our progress.  We will still have the expression of physical skills perhaps not in bucket making, but in something new.

In 2072, we will have technologies that dwarf ones we have now. 

We will be able to voice our thoughts and visual images will be created; animated films will be accessible to many; sculptures that will be the legacy of 3D printing in materials and structures we can not make now.

The sum of art will have grown because the sum of human culture will have grown. 

Some old arts might only evolve. Poetry may have new  forms but will still be poetry. 

Dance might be more accessible as robotic technology enables artists to defy age or physical limitations. 

Performance arts may merge with the digital and find a way to be both live and accessible; and make work that is impossible to perform today. 

Music will still thrive. The future of art will be extraordinary.

There is an unlikely chance we will have the technology to speak in the language of parrots but if we don’t 

the parrots still won’t care. 

---

Check out the Effective Ideas blog competition.

Listen to a podcast on intangibles and future innovation with Stian Westlake.

Check out my newsletter on substack.

Reviews are weird things for theatre makers.

Reviews are weird things for theatre makers. We give them an oversized space in our brain partly because they become (if we are “lucky” enough to gain one) the comment of record. Partly - we must admit - from some human sin of vanity. There are few pieces of journalism I remember over the years, and perhaps to my dismay, theatre reviews are some of them! I think on this as Arifa Akbar - now chief theatre critic at the Guardian - wrote on how her opinion on a play changed over time.*

In 2003, I watched one of my first plays, Lost in Peru, almost every single night and if you count the rehearsals this probably took viewings over 40 times which eclipsed the viewing of everyone else, even the director. (The actors counting differently.) Performed at Camden People’s Theatre with the sound of traffic drifting through.

On one level, without the play, I would not have met the love of my life (who came to watch the play), it also impacted at least some of the audience who came to see it, taking them places and challenging them to think about matters (in this case torture survivors, also love) they had never thought about in such ways.  This is probably the better measure (and not a measure we can really count), if we should or can measure this form of art at all; and also the development of the artists involved (for instance, designer theatre maker, Mamoru Ichiguru, actor Lucy Ellinson, director,  Sarah Levinsky, who have all gone on to create extraordinary art). But, the play’s most notable written record is a 2 star review in the Guardian by Lyn Gardner. You can read it still*. Why on earth do I remember this, 19 years later?  And am I still  the person she wrote of:

“But, goodness, it is great to see a young writer reaching out beyond his own experience.” 

Perhaps, she reached the truth of it, as I am certainly still reaching out although no longer young.

I think I watched the play so many times for many reasons. I am/was fascinated by the art of live performance, how it changes with audience, performers, time and yourself. How - even as the writer - I discovered new aspects to my own work. Do visual artists ever speak about finding the same - a painting revealing new insights to them as they view their own work over time? And because, underlying I sensed I might never produce theatre work again [I have an intense “day job” managing pension fund money]. And certainly never see this work again.

I was incorrect on not making theatre as in 2007, I adapted a Noh play, won a prize and had Nakamitsu performed at the Gate Theatre.  Here I remember, to the positive, Sam Marlowe’s review* in the Times which probably remains my “best” review still with the quote:

“Rare and Riveting”

Although blogger Travis Seifman* probably produced the most insightful review* [Travis has now been blogging 20 over years, and thus is one of many archives of lovely insightful essays hidden on the interweb] and my blogging friends, Westend Whingers, one of the more fun reviews*.

Nakamitsu sold out and probably touched perhaps 500 to 1000 people maximum. On one level, making fringe theatre a minor art, although quite possibly the impact it had on some of those people may have been great. I reflect that now a single podcast episode* I make is likely heard by more people than who will ever see Nakamitsu.

Marlowe and Gardner are still reviewing, and I am sure artists are still remembering. I happen still to be making theatre! My work still plays to tiny audiences. Thinking Bigly: How We Die has been seen by 80 people [and in some elliptical fate was performed at Camden People’s Theatre* where Lost in Peru was shown - but this time minus the traffic sounds], but I’m told has heavily impacted some.  I may only perform it a handful of times more, or maybe never. At least, I feel I am almost over never having a critic see it. 

The record of note will be in the thoughts and dreams of others.

---

Below, Sam Marlowe’s review in the Times, as no longer on the internet except in archive.

Arifa Akbar on changing her mind on a play: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2022/may/03/theatre-criticism-views-change-and-so-do-plays

Travis Seifman blog: https://chaari.wordpress.com/2011/05/12/nakamitsu/

You will see a slice of Japan if you follow Travis, and discover ideas and art you never knew.

Lyn Gardner’s 2 star review of Lost in Peru: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2003/apr/14/theatre.artsfeatures1

WestEnd Whingers review of Nakamitsu (in general don’t get friends to review your work, I think!): https://westendwhingers.wordpress.com/2007/06/08/review-nakamitsu-gate-theatre-notting-hill/

(last review by Phil was Dec 2020, I hope one of the last blogs of the golden age of theatre blogging still goes on…)

Bigly at CPT in March 2022, 19 years after Lost in Peru: https://cptheatre.co.uk/whatson/Thinking-Bigly-How-We-Die

Podcasts: https://www.thendobetter.com/podcast

Death Haiku

There is a tradition with Zen monks and Chinese, Japanese poetry to write a poem when you are dying. In the Japanese tradition, this has ended up being a death haiku – although some have been written in other traditions, like a Chinese poem rather than a haiku. Many of the stories relate to the very final few minutes of life. For instance, 

Goku Kyonen died on Oct. 8, 1272. He was 56. Here is his death poem:

The truth embodied in the Buddhas 

Of the future, present, past;

The teaching we received from 

the Fathers of our faith 

Can be found at the tip of my stick.

And the story:

When Goku felt his death was near, he ordered all his disciples to gather around him. He sat at the pulpit, raised his stick, gave the floor a single tap with it, and said the poem above. When he finished, he raised the stick again, tapped the floor once more, and cried, “See! See!” Then, sitting upright, he died.

Perhaps the story is “fake news” but it does seem to be handed down.

I think I am going to write my own death haiku to put in my next performance of Bigly | Death, if I do it again this year.

Death Haiku, Chogo

People I long for

People I loathe

End of autumn

I like this one as it centres around people. The image zings out to me. The sentiment is one I feel clearly, and so many of my friends and loved ones seem to feel at times.

We really miss and want to be with people.

Yes, sometimes, we really do not want to be with people.

And this can be the most important thing of a moment.

JP will often articulate this to me.

I do not want you with me, Daddy.

Sometimes, I want you.

But now I want to be alone in good fortune.*

JP has this with people. The presence of others is sometimes too much for him to bear.

(*This is a reference to Walt Whitman’s poem ‘Song of the Open Road'“, which JP often quotes phrases from.)

But, other times, company is enjoyed. Like most of us.

My dangerous jeep ride to a lost civilisation

This week I’ve been reflecting on a haiku that I have returned to over and over across the years. 

summer grass

all that remains of

soldiers’ dreams

夏草や　兵どもが　夢の跡

Natsukusa ya | Tsuwamonodomo ga | Yume no ato ~ Basho (c. 1689)

I first came across it at 14 years old as I stumbled across Japanese and Chinese literature. I encountered  old pond / Frog  leap / splash  around the same time. The frog haiku also comes back to me in quiet / surprising moments in nature.

古池や蛙飛こむ水のおと Furuike ya kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto

Fu-ru (old) i-ke (pond) ya, ka-wa-zu (frog) to-bi-ko-mu (jumping into) mi-zu (water) no o-to (sound)

Old pond

Frog leaps

Ker sploosh

But summer grassses haunts me more.

I was reminded of this in a recent exchange with a philosopher. I mentioned I was cycling across London. He recalled a terrifying taxi ride when young. This triggered my memory of my most terrifying vehicle ride.

The scariest vehicle ride I had was in Indonesia. In 1998, I was travelling in Sulawesi. We heard about puzzling megaliths in the Bada Valley. Getting to the valley would involve a jeep ride. This jeep was stacked seemingly with the possessions of 3 families, their chickens and their wares, and us. My travel companion thought we would die as the jeep careened around the crumbling path that clung to the slopes. The burned out car wreckages lining the slopes did not allay our fears. Amongst the fear, I do recall an impression of beauty about the valley.

I remember this trip, not so much for the jeep ride, but because in the Bada Valley we trekked to see these mysterious statues. (also see Moxon, link below). This statue (locally named, Palindo “the entertainer”)

Leaning megalith

all that remains

a civilisation’s entire dreams

Now to be gawped at by tourists.

Nobody really knows how old the Bada megaliths are, or who made them, or even why they're there. They date anywhere between 1,000 and 5,000 years old. The locals don't have a clue – 'They've always been here,' is the most common response if you ask someone where the statues came from. They seem to pre-date the current Bada people. Adding to the mystery, all the objects in the area are made from a type of grey stone of which there are no deposits in the vicinity. cf. Stonehenge or Easter Island, The statues are huge, heavy, and in the middle of nowhere, a long way from any stone which could make them….

…I ponder what this era will leave behind and what will be remembered. Bringing me back to the haiku poet,

Basho…

…Having left Edo in late spring of 1689, Matsuo Basho and Sora travel north, arriving at Hiraizumi on June 29th.  Once the seat of the Northern branch of the Fujiwara family, it was destroyed in 1189. As the poet gazes down at the old battlefield, he hears in his head the words of the ancient Chinese poet Du Fu and explains:

“In the space of a dream, three glorious generations of Fujiwara vanished; two miles in the distance are the remains of the Great Gate. Hidehira’s headquarters have turned into rice paddies and wild fields. Only Kinkeizan, the Golden Fowl Hill, remains as it once was.

First, we climbed Takadachi, Castle-on-the-Heights, from where we could see the Kitakami, a broad river that flows from the south. Nearby, Koromo River rounds Izumi Castle and at a point beneath Castle-on-the-Heights, it drops into Kitakami. The ancient ruins of Yasuhira and others, lying behind Koromo Barrier, appear to close off the southern entrance and guard against the Ainu barbarians.

With his most loyal retainers, Yoshitsune fortified himself in the castle, but his dreams of glory quickly turned to grass.

“The state is destroyed, / rivers and hills remain. / The city walls return to spring, / grasses and trees are green. “

With Du Fu’s lines in my head, I lay down my bamboo hat and let time and tears flow.”

I once adapted a Noh play. It happened to win a prize. Was performed in London (at the Gate theatre) and garnered good reviews.

I’ve loved Scrabble and word play from a young age. Translation and adaption - across a language and culture - is one of those satisfying puzzles.

Let’s look at this poem. First consider for Basho - or any poet in this style - the calligraphy or writing style adds to the impact of the poem. You can compare this, for instance, to the hand written poems of Emily Dickinson.

For the average English poet, the hand writing form or written form in general matters less - another exception would be the typewriter form of ee cummings.

In Emily Dickinson - to my mind her hand written forms are a superior art to the typed page form. The length of her “dash line” varies, and the vigour of its stroke conveys a sense of pause and fluidity that the standardised text does not.

The same for Basho. Even more, Basho’s writing would often be intertwined with ink drawing for an even more complex impact. As the below (the writing itself seems to be falling quietly at the start)

horo horo to / yamabuki chiru ka / taki no oto

quietly quietly / yellow mountain roses fall / sound of rapids

I can not find Basho’s original calligraphy here but we need to possibly imagine the flow of ink.

Take the first line - ignoring the syllable structure at first - the syllable in Japanese being different to english.

夏草や

Natsukusa ya

Natsukusa - those characters conjure a specific image of fields of grass - almost weed like. Most translators say summer grass but it’s not quite as evocative as the original to my mind. That is also to do with the sound and the visuals. 

And then we come to the “ya”  or や

There is nothing close in English which can represent this character. In poetry, it has both a sound use and a slight technical conjoining use -

Going back to the sound - you have 

a - u - u - u - a

Some translators put “Ah” or “O!” to give some sense of this sound and character

Summer grass - Oh -

Ah - Summer grass

Summer grass - sigh -

Or - some other punctuation - perhaps a flourishing Emily Dickson long dash with a curl - would represent this better - or a squiggly ampersand -

Although to do this - you lose the sound pattern…

Look at line 2:

兵どもが

Tsuwamonodomo ga

兵 tsuwamono is an old term for a soldier - suggesting a lowly soldier - a foot soldier - it also has a plural form

This is an image of “ranks of foot soldiers” as opposed to  single well-armoured samurai - (although the Basho diary note does refer to Yoshitsune more precisely (along with his retainers) 

The plural form adds sound 

u - a - o - o - o - o- a

And note already the lack of “e” sound

And we have  “ga”

Again this is a post-preposition word in Japanese that has no good English equivalent - it tends to denote the “subject of the sentence” or to give some word or idea extra emphasis -

This potential puts the soldiers at the heart of the poem considering the poem started with the summer grass

The technical meaning adding an emphatic touch and the “a” sound adding more. There is also - to my mind - a visual break stop with the character - the line break adds a stronger break | caesura - but this character itself also issues a break - we might expect a new idea, linked but separate

And we do, we have:

夢の跡 yume no ato

The mark, trace - vestiges of a dream. Not the middle clear lucid vision you can have. But the decaying echoes of a dream you might have on w

aking, and one that vanishes out of mind, or is going to vanish. 

This is a stronger image than “dream” and doesn’t need the potential clumsy english parts such as “remains of”, “traces of” to give the impression of a fading ideal.

Then we have the meaning behind the poem. The first order meaning seems clear given Basho’s travel entry. 

But now time has passed, and the poem has left its original context, many people today (and in the future) can read this as poem that critiques wars in general. Implying life is lost, dreams are lost, and all that remains of those lost humans are grass and weeds.

---

My further travels in Indonesia in the 1990s here when I went to visit the Wana tribe.

I found this account from Moxon, and his one of the funerals of Toreja land similar to my experience and one year earlier then my visit.

Sophie Woolley: deaf culture, hearing culture and her creative journey

What is it like to go deaf and then gain back your hearing? On this episode, I speak to Sophie Woolley.

Sophie is a writer, performer and theatre maker.  We have been friends for a while and I have learned a lot about Deaf culture and from her personal journey and one as a creative.

We have a meandering chat about her creative journey, how felt she had to write about her story of going deaf and then gaining hearing again via a cochlear implant. We recorded the podcast while Sophie is in Taiwan. She chats a little on her experience there and Taiwan’s COVID management. 

This is a long conversation between friends discussing the complexities of Sophie’s experience. I was particularly intrigued by her thinking on what it might mean to be a cyborg and being augmented and being part of both Deaf culture and hearing culture.  I am still thinking about her comment about captioning AI being her friend and how we can often simply criticise AI in a way we would not critique a human. (But also there’s no need to anthropomorphize AI either).

Links: Sophie’s website is here. Disability rights drama, Then Barbara Met Alan.

Image credit: Justin Munitz.

Listen below or wherever you get podcasts.

PODCAST INFO

• Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3gJTSuo

• Spotify: https://sptfy.com/benyeoh

• Anchor: https://anchor.fm/benjamin-yeoh

---

Sophie Woolley, Transcript (only lightly edited)

Ben Yeoh (01:30): Hey everyone. I'm excited to be talking to Sophie Woolley. Sophie is a brilliant writer, performer and theater maker. Sophie, welcome. 

Sophie Woolley (01:41): Thank you. Thank you, Ben and thanks for calling me brilliant. You're brilliant as well. We've known each other a long while now.

Ben Yeoh (01:50): Quite a long while, and now across geographies, time, countries. One thing I'm really interested in is that you are really knowledgeable about hearing culture and also deaf culture. But to some degree you knew deaf culture first. I was wondering what it was like finding out about aspects of hearing culture or hearing culture sort of rediscovered after being so involved in deaf culture? 

Sophie Woolley (02:23): What was it like rediscovering hearing culture after being immersed in deaf culture? Yeah. I'm going to unpick the question a bit. [ ]

Sophie Woolley (02:54): So yes, just to unpick the question a bit. I grew up hearing. So, I come from a deaf family and our hereditary deafness is such that we got hearing and from adolescents we go deaf and we become profoundly deaf. So, it's quite a bit a strong deafness gene that runs back through the generations and I think most people who are in my family, married hearing people but the deaf genes are winning and so I grew up hearing and my mum was deaf and my youngest sister started going deaf before me. It was always a big mixture, so I was very immersed in human culture and the hospital decided I would not go deaf and my sister was going deaf, they picked it up. But with me, it was a happening bit later. So, I always had him in mind that I was obviously the hearing one.

Sophie Woolley (04:14): Like I said, I did hear people's stuff. I was also aware of deaf culture and the deaf rights movement and the disability rights movement. So, you might've seen that Jack Thorne and Genevieve Bart drama that was on last night on BBC, which I haven't watched it. Well, it’s about the disability rights movement, and that was all going on and my mum was involved in that when I was a kid. And then, I wasn't expecting to go deaf, when people go deaf, all of them, if you know an elderly deaf relative or someone who's starting to go deaf, they will always sort of be the last to admit him. 

Sophie Woolley (05:11): So, I was doing that classic thing, even though I was coming from a deaf family and people were saying, has your hearing got worse, Sophie? I was going, oh no, no. Just saying how it is because the hospital said that I'm not going deaf. So, I went through all the different levels of deafness and so deaf culture is not mono culture, it's this lots of different types of medical deficits, but also with that in that deaf people of different cultures and requirements and access requirements. But what I found helped me because I was always doing well as a writer and performer; what helped me get to the next level professionally was when I kind of made the full adaptation, started using access to work and using sign language interpreters and panel typists. You have a code; you have the stenographers they code in instantaneous verbatim caption. So, I had those in, in meetings and when I was in rehearsals or sometimes in auditions, I had sign language interpreters. 

Sophie Woolley (06:37): So, although we use sign language and speech at home, I wasn't fluent in sign language because I was more immersed in hearing culture, went off in to the world doing that. So, I was more becoming fluent in sign language when I started using sign language interpreters. So, you know like when you learn a language and you can read more than you can speak it or more than you can write it. So, I sometimes feel like that, like I can watch my mates, making their BSL videos on Facebook, chatting about that. Like I call it deaf web. So, when people are just making comments in video in BSL, I can understand what they're saying, but I'm not doing that myself.

Ben Yeoh (07:36): Wow. Really interesting. What do you think people who really only know about hearing culture, perhaps most misunderstand about deaf culture or maybe something you'd like to explain to them? I hadn't fully appreciated for instance, or the many levels of a deaf culture and it varies by geography as well as label and things like that. Nor, I think until I came across it well, I guess quite a few years ago, I really did not appreciate how rich and kind of amazing and poetic it is with this huge, very rich culture, but I'd be interested in your reflections on what I'm hearing culture really misses, I guess a lot of your friends would know, but I guess a lot of people haven't come across a deaf culture very much.

Sophie Woolley (08:39): What does hearing culture not notice about it? 

Ben Yeoh (08:42): Yeah. And what do they miss, or maybe don't appreciate? So, something which you would love hearing culture people to understand about deaf culture or maybe show them if you want to find out more, this is something you'd be really interested or excited to learn.

Sophie Woolley (09:06): Yeah. So, it’s a really good question, sometimes when someone asks me that question, my knee jerk reaction is to go, all right, this is one chance to have a bit of a moan but that's not what you're asking you come by as well. 

Ben Yeoh (09:27): You can moan as well if you like. 

Sophie Woolley (09:30): Yeah. That'd be a very podcasty, good album one. I guess people who get into deaf world would always have a moment, like a light bulb moment when they discover something and it makes them want to get to know more deaf people or learn to sign or something. And there's nothing to beat when you walk into a room and everyone's signing. If you get the chance to walk into a room where everyone's signing and you don't know the language then yeah. So, I guess if you go and see a play that’s in sign language and where the audience is mostly deaf. It's quite something; it's another language that's going on in different countries. And, in Britain, the deaf art scene and the deaf filmmaking scenes, the deaf TVs scenes, and it's really strong. And so, there's lots of opportunities where you could go. I'm trying not to say the words, another world, like it's alien or something, 

Ben Yeoh (11:23): Because it's our world. 

Sophie Woolley (11:35): So, what people often ask me on the main front and the standard things that people will always say to me when they find out I'm deaf and they might be able to talk to me about sign languages. So, it's international, right? So, everyone always says, the language is international and it's not. It's not only English people that say that. So English speaking people think that English is international but there were also people who their first language isn't English, but who also asked me this question, because I've been around the world and, and then they'll go. It’s an international question, but sign language has its people in France speak French and people in Taiwan. I speak Taiwan sign language. So, it's an international question and then the next question that people ask me is not a question, it's a complaint. So, people say that that's so stupid, why isn't it? It should be international; it should be an international language. And there is some more information that you can give to people about all of that, but it's once they've started complaining about how stupid sign languages, because it is not international, I don't feel like telling them.

Sophie Woolley (13:18): Because I'm speaking to you actually from Taiwan. I’m in Taiwan at the moment, I'm not in London where I normally live. So, I thought I want to try and meet some deaf people in Taiwan. And I went to and Googled deaf people in Taiwan, and there's a cafe about half an hour away that’s run by deaf people. So, I went there knowing that if I go in there and start signing, I will be able to have a chat with them a bit easier than people speaking Mandarin or Taiwanese or Hakko. And because I can do some hand shapes and I know some signs from other countries and so I went in to buy a coffee and I said I'm deaf and then I signed, I've got a cochlear implant. And, these positions, they recognized so they came outside because it's COVID restrictions. And at the time I went to visit that café, you have to go into the cafe, order the coffee and wait outside because it's a really small coffee shop. 

Sophie Woolley (14:49): So, they had to come and outside them, the deaf couple or two people and we had a basic chat and we were doing some typing on the phone, on Google translate. And so, we were able to have a chat a bit faster than if we were having two languages, we didn't know. So, there is an international sign language that gets used. Sign language is not international.

Ben Yeoh (15:32): It’s one of those really, really annoying questions. Well, maybe some impressions of Taiwan as you’re there would be really fascinating because I think you mainly grew up in London, like around maybe Halston, Northwest London, actually, not too far from where I am, but I think maybe first born in Glasgow a little bit of time in South Africa and obviously you being around the world, I'd be interested in your impressions on how it's like in Taiwan at the moment. Obviously, we still have the Pandemic happening, but maybe either some of that everyday life or deaf culture, even food, transport, shopping, anything you kind of think, wow, this is really different about Taiwan, or I really like this; this is something we should bring to London or vice versa. I’d be interested in your impression. 

Sophie Woolley (16:34): Yeah. It's so the first thing you're struck with when you come to Taiwan is the COVID theater, the pandemic theater is different. And when I say theater time, I mean like security theater. But it's not for show. It's proper. In many ways, it's like they're handling the pandemic in the way I wanted it to be handled. But that makes it quite difficult to get into the country. So, when I arrived, I had to do two weeks in quarantine. When you arrive at the airport, there's lots of people in hazmat suits and you have to wait and get COVID test and then go in a special taxi straight to the hotel. And in, in the hotel, the hotel reception staff are wearing their PPE. Oh, I missed a bit before I got in the taxi, the taxi driver, he's wearing PPE as well, sprays the whole of me, disinfects me and spays all of my luggage and the windows are down. So proper. I'm trying to remember if there is anything else that's done proper about coming into the country? There's really this digital system, so I have to register health form and then every day I'm texted by the CECC. So, the Command Center for Epidemic Control, I might have said the acronym words wrong, but they text me a message and I have to reply saying I'm well and the CECC says, thank you, we care about you. So, there's that automatic system and then police officer also calls as well and say eventually you get out of quarantine and there's at the moment is a full mask man mandate say everyone's wearing masks. 

Sophie Woolley (19:18): Sometimes people say, oh, it's lots of restrictions in Taiwan, but really it feels like a layer of kind of distress is removed because you don't have to think about it. Everyone wears a mask and everyone just gets on with it. So, there's no awkwardness either way. So, you wear a mask and you go to a restaurant and take you off. And there's no COVID. I haven't looked at the stats, but people aren't dying and there's no COVID but they have an issue with I think 45% of older people over a certain age haven't been vaccinated. So, their hesitancies with the pensioners. So, the long quarantine periods, I think Taiwan might be looking at Hong Kong where there's also a lot of people who didn't get vaccinated and now Hong Kong has got a very bad pandemic going on. So, it just feels like a kind of pandemic. 

Ben Yeoh (20:48): And has that changed how you viewed the arts and culture or restaurants and food? Or you give me the impression that everyone’s just getting on with it so it's as a normal part of life. But I'd be interested in how different Taiwanese culture or food seems to you to versus your experience in London.

Sophie Woolley (21:15): Yeah, the culture and the food. So, when I first came here last year, I came out of quarantine. And they did have an outbreak, they got the Alpha variant, the British one. And so, all of the arts closed, so I didn't see very much. So haven't seen very much, but I've seen some incredible visual arts and mainly me educating myself about the food. So, I go to the night market and also, I live near the night market. It's open opening the day as well. And that's really, really dazzling in different ways in the day and the night. So, there's the fish stores, the meats stores, then vegetable stores and then stores that are full of the different kinds of tofu, dog food and then stores that I think are full of many types of tripe.

Ben Yeoh (22:36): Wow.

Sophie Woolley (22:37):  I don't want to eat tripe, but I'd like to ask them questions, but I don't want to eat it but sometimes you do order something that you think is just a vegetable soup or have bits of tripod. So, you just sort of order the wrong thing so you did get to experience some tripe accidentally and then there’s these jellies and puddings. Like when I was in quarantine and I ordered some puddings and the consistency of food is very different and the puddings and cakes are not as sugary. So, at first, I was really unused to the food so I thought, well, I don't know if I'm ever going to get to like them food, but now I'm getting to like crave the different foods. And I really liked the red bean paste stuff and the congees and the jelly is made of different plants. 

Sophie Woolley (23:56): So instead of being made of animal the jelly is made of things like the other day I had some made of figs. The jelly is made of rubbing fig seed each together, and it's like jelly, it's cold. 

Ben Yeoh (24:14): It's very, very different textures, the food around Taiwan. It's really, really fascinating. So, I have a question here. I know none of us like to be pigeonholed, particularly in terms of our creative work. But you did a whole show ‘Augmented’ kind of about sort of deafness or finding out about that. I'd be interested in your process for that. And I think you've spoken also about a little bit of the moments when your cochlear implant was first turned on and, and how that all happens. So, I was wondering whether you'd like to comment on that and also your process and thinking behind creating your show ‘Augmented’ and using sort of your own life as kind of source material for theater making. 

Sophie Woolley (25:15): Like you said, the show is based on my past experience. So, I went totally deaf over 20 years and I thought I was going to just be deaf for the rest of my life. So, I knew about cochlear implants and I thought they weren't very good. I just had a lot of prejudices and fears about them. So, the original idea for the doing a show about someone who becomes what I call it, a deaf cyborg came from the moment I realized I was a deaf cyborg and the world had to know.

Sophie Woolley (26:06): And so, the process started in 2013 when I was switched on and in the hospital. But it took me a while because it's autobiographical and to find them the language for telling this story, because the three painful three audiences that I was thinking of when I was trying to write the show. So, there's hearing painful and deaf people who are not implanted and then there was people who are implanted or people that I thought might be like me and my it's life-changing. So, I didn't want to be an improv pusher, but I just saw there's just not anything culture about that's realistic about implants. It's always, oh, as a kind of there's a lot of old-fashioned dramas about it and saying, no it's controversial and showing people being unhappy with their implant. And it was, there was a lot of joy about it. But when I thought about making a show that that showed joy about implants also felt ashamed. I thought this would be quite impressive to a lot of deaf people who can't implant or don't need to implant. And implant. then I realized that that was a confidential conflict of the show. So, it's a show about me, my progress as a writer, by journeys as a writer. I know my journeys of a former employee takes out me to tell this story because I'm pulled in different directions by my duties to the different audiences.

Sophie Woolley (28:35): So, it's like the hearing audience is easy because they understand the standard story, you go deaf, you want to go hearing again. But really, I haven't gone to hearing again because in the story of augmented, I tell the story. I can't tell the story of going hearing until I tell this story of going deaf. And it's a story that show Sophie doesn't really want to tell the story of going deaf because It's a traumatic journey and she wants to present herself as a brighter hero as do I. I don't want to be a pitiable character. I'm proud of my deafness.

Sophie Woolley (29:29): It's very complicated. So, in the play, it's about I work with Sarah Dickinson, a dramaturg and she's brilliant and a brilliant director called Rachel Bagshaw and who implicitly understood whereas coming from, because she also has a quiet disability. And so, she feels free for transformation so they helped me and encouraged me to dig into the complexity of the story rather than make it but someone gets switched on and they cry and then everything's brilliant because I when I’m in a show you see, when I got switched on, my deaf family were there and they were subverting, it was kind of family chaos and my mom's hearing dog was farting and make everyone laugh. And so just to explain to my mum, she was deaf and she has a hearing dog and that's a working dog for deaf people. And so, it wasn't a kind of romantic moving switch on. But it was a really serious moment for me. And so, this faith in that moment, that way to shine that made it cheesy but it wasn’t. 

Ben Yeoh (31:10): I mean, one thing I love about the workers, it's really complex and shows that these things are not like our fairytale myths. They are story about being human, which has all of these complexities about it. One thing we've talked about maybe on the little bit more of the positive, surprising side was when you picked up incidental sound again and I think I had not appreciated as a hearing person, how incidental sound infuses everything. And also in your show, you talk about toileting and how toileting is a visceral thing, but actually sound is very much associated with it. And so that also is something I hadn't appreciated.

Sophie Woolley (32:07): Can I interrupt you? Because this is a deaf I sometimes I have to stop someone if I didn't understand a word or I think I heard a word and I think that can't be right. And did you say toileting? 

Ben Yeoh (32:21): Yes.

Sophie Woolley (32:23): When I'm toileting? 

Ben Yeoh (32:25): Well, the sound of the sound of urination. The sound of urination, which was just an incredible moment just in the show and for me, I hadn't really appreciated what we have as sort of hearing audience. And this was also around an incidental sound and hearing about that. So, I was just interested in, I guess the thing about incidental sound coming back and how that was for you. 

Sophie Woolley (33:06): Yeah. This is why I'm glad you pick out those details because they are details. And that's why it's so important for deaf writers and deafened people and deaf people who have had implants to write these stories, because then you get the specifics and the specifics are just as important as the general drama that people see from afar that you you've got these really moving, funny sound details that really, really give people more empathy than a kind of generalization that someone's got from a consultant and then got hearing writer to write it. 

Sophie Woolley (33:56):  So, the bit about the shock of when I went deaf and still must've still been in denial when I was profoundly to totally deaf and then one day realizing, wow, I can't, I can't hear myself, I can't hear that anymore. So that's gone, so I think things disappear and that’s quite philosophical, isn't it? Not being able to hear what you're doing. So, the detail is really important. 

Ben Yeoh (34:42): And I guess on that philosophical level there, I detect a sort of certain fear amongst many people about this idea of being augmented or cyborg. I guess we've got the idea that we can have artificial limbs, people I think are more peace about that but when it's to do with things like hearing or maybe brain or maybe other sorts of things, and I thought that was one thing really great about your story is that, at the heart of it, I thought, well, we're still really human, we might have other bits. I'm sure sort of when glasses came along, people thought, oh, that's an extra bit that we put on our body. And maybe that's the way that some of the human body is going. It might have bits which are not which are not as biological, but I don't think that really makes us any less human than I thought on that level is something that the story really resonated with me. I felt that was one of the underlying messages. Is that something you think about in, in general with, with where this has got to? 

Sophie Woolley (36:01): Yeah, and also, I think I need to write another show or film about it because I want to dig deeper into the duality of that. So yes, when I got switched on, I realized I hadn't been switched on as a Frankenstein monster. I had a sense of horror. The other people who have that stigma of seeing someone with the thing on the side of their head. I felt that horror in advance and having someone, it's very invasive, like having someone digging into my skull and such and then realizing that it gave me access to parts of myself and my identity that I hadn't been doing for a long time. And people close to me saw transformation in me. I find it difficult to talk about and that's why I had to write about it because I'm trying not to say oppressive things. Yeah, it's really because I am from the deaf community and I self-edit. So that's why I have to write things that are really hard to say.

Sophie Woolley (37:43): And the other thing I want to mention about the duality as well. We're human. Just because I’ve got this freakish thing in me. But also, immediately when I got switched on, I had all of that yeah, oh she's back, the old me. Also, there's a new me, I'm a cyborg.  So, things sounded very strange at first and science fiction and I loved all that and I miss all that liminal period of weird sound. But I also feel very appreciative of AI and machines and the sound of machines. And I'm not a transhumanist, but I wonder if there's kind of side of future humanism, and it's not the dodgy version.

Sophie Woolley (39:07): There's a book that I want to get that I think I can only order by the post that's just being published by a Caviar as it's a computational philosopher. And so, I saw a friend post about it, when people put picture of the book, they like so I looked up that writer and he's talking about other forms of intelligence. So, I looked up an essay done and he was critiquing humanism and saying, why is AI so bad? Why are we so arrogant to just dismiss that? And there is something in that I think, not having read his book yet, but I saw, I didn't explore that so well because what I find happens is people have this knee jerk response to that? It's like it's really an evil force and there are really, really bad things happening in computers and AI because they've been developed by non-diverse teams and things but it’s not what people have been knee jerked about, I'll be on a zoom and I'll say I'm just going to put the automated captions on so that I've got a transcript and people sometimes switch them on and stop criticizing their AI captions. And that's kind of allowed because the AI is not human, that I'm a cyborg and the AI is my friend.

Sophie Woolley (41:11): Like people wouldn't criticize my sign language interpreter. Some of them didn't always behave well with the interpreter, but that's understandable. They emphasize the ethics of that, but yeah, I've got a cup on about 

Ben Yeoh (41:33): Yeah, I think that's fascinating. And I think this gives you such brilliant insights because of these dualities, understanding deaf culture, understanding hearing culture, understanding AI and robotics, so I I'd be really interested in hearing you write more about these topics. I guess, with this duality, what I'm hearing though, is that you still feel part of deaf community and deaf culture as well as part of hearing you haven't lost that in being able to hear or do you feel also a little bit of a sense of loss because when we gain one thing you lose another and you talked about that liminal state where you have a set of sounds,  would you only have in that state and you pass out of it you lose something I'm interested. is that a tension in the duality or do you find you sit in a balance that no, you can accept being part of both cultures, like they're a little bit antagonistic sometimes because they don't understand that other half as well.  

Sophie Woolley (42:51): It's really been a beautiful journey. So, the play focuses on some of the tension. So, you know, my hearing and definitely if their response to me suddenly changing and them having to adapt to the new me. So, there's a sort of sense of loss maybe when I get back that over time. I've learned that it's not a loss, so I'm I have more time. So, I can do more work for them for the deaf group and rather than like be focused so much on myself because I used to have to spend a huge amount of time because I was a freelancer going from one job to the other. Insourcing access workers or being very tired from using access workers or lip reading. So now I have the hearing privileges, is not having that fatigue or having more time and also in real time, being able to have more instant access and hearing privilege in the world, the anger about that doesn't go away. The anger about the injustice against deaf me who didn't have this, doesn't go away.

Sophie Woolley (45:53): I'm not going around feeling angry all the time, but it's in the core. So, I can't walk away in theory. So, I can do thing that me and my sister used to talk about well, hearing people who can sign, they can still just walk away. Like if you're deaf and this is something you can't walk away from being deaf. But like, I sort kind of do that. I could walk away. But I don't think I do; I'm still very much involved in in deaf things as well as hearing things and there are things I do behind the scenes. I really want to spend more time being a cyborg. 

Ben Yeoh (46:03): I see that. I don't know if you see it the same, but that you are a bridge between these cultures and therefore you can advocate more effectively for deaf culture. Until I came close to people who had accessibility needs, and I think I don't even still fully appreciate it because I don't have those needs myself, about how difficult its cyborg. is. And there's a whole different set of these accessibility needs that people who don't have them who are in the majority simply ignore, not necessarily out of bad intent, but just from ignorance. And I think the more we have kind of these bridging things and exploring that, is a positive. 

Ben Yeoh (47:01): What made you think about being a cyborg or would you like to explore more about the AI thinking or the kind of machine thinking? Is it this idea that we could treat AI perhaps a little bit more like we consider humanity or what part of that duality is most interesting to you at the moment? 

Sophie Woolley (39:07): No, I don't know if we have to anthropomorphize the robots, but maybe we can learn from them. But I’m going to do some reading and thinking. I also want to get my external processor upgraded and I’m interested to see what will happen with the sound mapping of that? That's a very technical thing. So, whether my sound map board change, I have more control over it in real time or will the company be controlling the sound world. It's amazing, it makes you appreciate how many parallel universes that are because each time I get a new map, I think this is a great version to hear the world in, you know, you tweet it in the hospital. And then sometimes I come away and I have to go back and go no that's wrong, it's too Bassy. And but then I get this, the version I've got at the moment I'm really happy with.

Sophie Woolley (48:45): There are still things that are difficult to hear. So, there's a lot of technical things that I want to do that's more of a personal thing to work on the hearing. So, there's things that I think I'll never be able to do than I can do. So recently I was listening to some hip hop. So, I, I don't listen to as much music as I want to because I'm a writer. If I listening to music which Bluetooth directs to my brain. I get too distracted, but I thought I'd never be able to understand hip hop lyrics with my implant, but now it's becoming clearer.

Ben Yeoh (49:36): That's amazing how you can change or how the sound world changes with your sound map and you can sort of upgrade it or change it over time. Has the sound of your own voice change that much for you over time and these different processing’s and how do you feel about the sound of your own voice? Do you have a changing relationship with it? I guess there's the useful things, right? Of your voice or how you can voice them in terms of acting and things and changing voice but has it changed over time and you kind of interested in that? 

Sophie Woolley (50:21): Yeah, that's another thing I want to do about the cyborg thing is, I want to do some more acting and I think for that to happen, I am going to be writing my own parts and I don't know if it'll be a cyborg story, but I it might have to be. But my voice has changed in terms of when I was getting deaf, I was doing lots of different voices in plays, different accents and I was working with Jemma Fairly, a brilliant director. And so, I was really into doing that and then I was beginning to be cost is deaf characters on TV and radio. Since I got my implant, I haven't been getting so much of that work. My voice had changed after I got the implants, I didn't work on it but it changed because I was able to monitor my speech. 

Sophie Woolley (51:41): So, I'm learning Mandarin in Taiwan and that just feels incredible to me. While I'm learning, the teacher has got a mask on, so I can't lip read her. So, this isn't the case for all people with implants, but for me I can follow speech without lip reading. And it's not easy learning Mandarin or hearing it when it's muffled, you know, how everyone's deaf in a pandemic because all the speech is muffled by the mask. My voice is different when I'm speaking Mandarin. I wish there was more time to know the languages and I wonder if I can use that in my work. I hope someone is making a film where they need a Londoner who speaks a little bit of Mandarin.

Ben Yeoh (52:54): Yeah, that'd be great. So maybe the last couple of questions is do you have any advice for people, either advice from how you lived your life or perhaps advice for people thinking about having implants or those interested in deaf culture. So yeah, any thoughts or advice that you might have?

Sophie Woolley (53:21): Is there any advice about deafness or getting implants?

 Ben Yeoh (53:25) Yeah, definitely. Or just general life advice. It doesn't have to be something specific, but final thoughts. 

Sophie Woolley (53:32): Yahir really think I'm specific. It's really important with deafness. So, I want you to say more specific things in our chat. One of the things is that all deaf people are different. I grew up in a family where we are deaf and we sign and speak and sign language has been very empowering for us and so I have cochlear implants. One thing that's been happening in the last six months, and I'm not sure why is it, people have in working context, people have been asking me if I want them to book me a sign language interpreter. I haven't used sign language interpreters since 2012. Yeah, that was the last time I used them at work when I was working on a play for the culture, ‘The Olympiad’. And then I got the info and I found out that I just had to use one access last year implant, but what's been happening in the last six months is maybe the people in the pandemic have been like seeing a lot of access on the public zooms and things and so the question has changed. So instead of asking me what access do you prefer people have been asking, do you want me to procure sign language interpreter? Because I come from, signing, speaking background, I can take it. But I just think for there's a lot of deaf people who go deaf later in life and they don't sign and they it's going to be quite difficult for them to be asked that question. So, the question to ask people is do you have any access requirements? Is there anything I can book?  Just something more general in that context, because people have all different specific requirements.

Ben Yeoh (55:57): So that's a good question to know. And overall, I mean, that's probably the kind of way we should be asking sort of everyone, do you have accessibility needs? Can I help you with something rather than sort of pigeonhole people into a particular way?

Sophie Woolley (56:13): Yahtzee was a producer that I worked with who is really good on the access front and I think he has a sign off after his name. Some people have pronouns and things like that. I mean, he has the thing after his name on the emails saying if there's anything access wise, that I can organize, let me know. I can't remember the wording. So that's on the sign off and that's so useful. I think for a lot of people who might be have to pluck up the courage to ask, because it's difficult to know when everything's online, how, how it's going to land sometimes.  So, a lot of them, the labor that people have when they're becoming deaf is the fear of asking for what they need. Fear of looking weak or something. So, the, the advice I'd give to someone who's going deaf or, or just going into them the working, working life is you have to sort of take the bull by the horns and assertive and ask for what you need. But I think get your foot in the door first and then be organized about what you want, because you're going to need X, Y, and Z actually some point. And if you ask for it late, then that's not a collaborative approach to your access. So, you'd sort of be organized it about it. The style I used to do is organize all of my own. I think other people organize it for people now.

Sophie Woolley (58:17):  Access to work is more difficult to get. I don't use it anymore. I understand that it's more difficult to get. So, if people are unemployed, they should be doing some of the work to get access to work for their workers. I feel like I'm straying a bit from my remit which is as a being a writer or an actor. 

Ben Yeoh (58:47): No, I don't think that strays from your remit at all. I think that's really useful actually advice as its pretty practical and any advice or thoughts for creatives, maybe reflecting on your own personal creative and a writer performer journey. 

Sophie Woolley (59:10): Yeah. I make my own shows, applied my own path and I wasn't working for the big companies at first. I was just getting up in pubs and clubs and teach myself. So, if you don't have training, then that's quite a good way to develop your own voice. If I go back and do it again, I would learn some craft and structure a bit earlier on because that's expected and it also speeds up the writing process and

Ben Yeoh (01:00:01): Great. And what future shows or shows where we can see some of your work. Cause I think that the Deaf Faker series is still available on YouTube. Is that right where we can see some of your work? Any particular work you're proud of that, we could look at and future projects that you're interested in working in, which might be coming up?

Sophie Woolley (01:00:25): Yeah, you can. I've been writing between the pandemic, writing for EastEnders and I'm proud of the episode that was last done in October. I think that was the 12th of October or something like that. So, if you go on my website, sopheywolley.com, there's a link to the EastEnders episodes and I also start as a villain in a short film called ‘Veneer’ by Jean Sinclair, who is a brilliant deaf actress and writer. He also worked with me on ‘Augmented’ so that's on BSL zone. You’ll probably get to that from my website as well. And yeah, I've got YouTube channel I did a kind of short experimental film with Dudley Reese and Told by An Idiot in 2021, I think, or 2020. Oh, dear it's sort of blur and that was called ‘Best in Lockdown’ and it was quite strange to make that because I was using my technology and the director was in another room, so we did it all very safely. So, he gave me instructions and questions through a gadget that just beamed sound to my brain. That's called Best in Knockdown. And the other advice away to give, going back to your other question. 

Ben Yeoh (01:02:14): Yeah. Please do.

 Sophie Woolley (01:02:18): Don't be hard on yourself and I have to tell myself. 

Ben Yeoh (01:02:24): Yeah. I guess be kind, don't be too hard. Be kind to yourself. I remember you telling me quite important to try to never get repetitive strain injury. So, these other little practical things that's again, don't be too hard on yourself. 

Sophie Woolley (01:02:47): Yeah. Yeah. When my play ‘Augmented’ when it did nine shows and then the tour had just stopped because it was March, 2020 and I was like oh I couldn't work at the time because we couldn't go out and I did the whole workaholism thing. I know, but I didn't get RSI. So, I've got my desk go set up really well now these days. 

Ben Yeoh (01:03:22): Excellent. So, any other final thoughts you'd like to share? Advice or something I haven't covered that you think actually, I quite like to chat about that. 

Sophie Woolley (01:03:37): Yeah. I think go to you mingles if you can. That if we were still on the advice thing, they’re really good 

Ben Yeoh (01:03:52): Yeah, meeting other people. I feel I've learned so much from your work and just following what you've been doing over time. So, I find it's really fascinating and important. And so, thank you for being brilliant.

Sophie Woolley (01:04:11): Yeah, thank you. It's really good to hear that all the way over in Taiwan. Thank you. I hope I get to see your shows when I when I get back to London soon. Yeah. 

Ben Yeoh (01:04:27): Well, thank you very much Sophie. If you appreciate the show, please like and subscribe as it helps others find the podcast.