Peter Singer On Being Part Of The Solution

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1:32Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors.

2:20Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Writing for me has hit a little bit of a snag. I think I broke my middle finger playing basketball over the weekend. So I haven't been able to sign as many books downstairs at the store. And my typing has been a little screwed up. I've got these two fingers taped together. But it's funny, it takes me back to when I broke my arm writing my first book. I might have already told this story before, but I broke my arm while I was writing Trust Me, I'm Lying. And it set the book back quite a bit, but it actually eventually ends up queuing up the obstacle is the way because the walks that I ended up taking, the extra time that I ended up taking because of it opened up all these wonderful little avenues.

3:10I guess my point is you never know where life is going to take you. And that takes me to today's guest. I'm writing now the book that is caught up a little bit, or the book that is tied up a little bit is my third book in this virtue series. I'm writing about justice. So when a book arrived, the 10th anniversary edition of The Life You Can Save by the philosopher Peter Singer, I was like, not only do I need to read this book, and not only was I planning to read this book, but he is someone I absolutely want to talk to on the podcast because he's one of the foremost thinkers in the world about these ideas, one of the most influential philosophers in the world.

3:49The Stoics turn up their noses at the so-called pen and ink philosophers. Well, Peter Singer is not just a professor and a teacher of philosophy, but his philosophy has guided billions of dollars of aid that's been given to people all over the world. It's changed how many people think about animal rights, whether they eat meat, don't eat meat, animal welfare. And he's one of the pioneers of what they call effective altruism, which thinks about effectively doing good, how one can do the most good with the good or the donations that they make. And he's just an all-around fascinating person. And I think put his money where his mouth is, quite literally.

4:30He won the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy in 2021, which has a million dollar prize. It's a prize given to thinkers whose ideas have profoundly shaped human self-understanding and advancement in a rapidly changing world. And so what does a tenured philosophy professor do with a million dollars? Do they buy themselves a vacation home? Do they buy a house for their kids? Do they retire? What do they do with the money? Well, Peter Singer donated every cent of it to people in need, to the causes he had been championing about and talking about that he talks about in The Life You Can Save, which I enjoyed so much.

5:13And then I bought one of his older books, which I'm reading next, called The Expanding Circle. And then I'm hoping to have him back on the podcast for one of his animal rights books. He teaches an online course you can check out called Effective Altruism, which I'll link to in today's show notes. You can follow him on Twitter, at Peter Singer. Follow him on Instagram, at Peter underscore Singer. Thank you so much, Professor Singer, for coming on the podcast. It was eye-opening for me and provocative and interesting, and I think it will be for all of you. And I think it will make the new book better.

5:45And enjoy.

5:51I'm picking my kids up from school today and then doing our weekly routine, which is I take them over to Whole Foods. We get all our groceries for the week. Then we have dinner. It's one of their favorite things to do. It's one of my favorite things to do. And then my wife loves it because she doesn't have to take care of it. This holiday season, whether you're a guest or hosting the big dinner Whole Foods Market has what you need to delight everyone at your table. They even have heat and eat sides from the prepared foods department. You can make Whole Foods your one stop shop. Everything follows Whole Foods Market's strict ingredients standards.

6:23So, you know, will be delicious and good for you. You can also order online for pickup and even delivery in select zip codes to skip the crowds. Shop everything you need at Whole Foods Market, your holiday headquarters. You probably heard the headlines about all the different cuts to foreign aid and food benefits. This is having a profound impact on the world's poorest people and the world's poorest communities. But, you know, just hearing about that, that's not what stoicism is about. But stoicism is, to me, what you're going to do about it. And that's where GiveWell comes in. GiveWell is trusted by tens of thousands of donors each year because they provide free and independent research that helps you understand how to have a big impact.

7:06GiveWell has spent the last 18 years researching global health and poverty alleviation, and they direct funding to the highest impact opportunities. Over 150 ,000 donors have already trusted GiveWell to give more than$2.5 billion over the last several years. And research suggests that these donations will save over 300 ,000 lives. I myself am one of those donors. I donate to GiveWell every year. It means a lot to me. And you can find all their research and recommendations on their site for free. And thanks to the donors that sponsor this research, GiveWell doesn't take a cut from your tax-deductible donation to their recommended funds.

7:40And if this is your first gift through GiveWell, you can have your donation matched up to$100 before the end of the year or as long as matching funds last. To claim your match, go to GiveWell.org and pick Daily Stoic from the drop-down menu under podcast. That's how they know that you heard about GiveWell from the Daily Stoic and you'll get your donation matched. That's GiveWell.org. Code the Daily Stoic to donate or find out more.

8:09well i got all the books here got a nice stack of them i'm very excited you've got a copy of animal liberation now i i've just arrived in new york earlier this morning and i do not have a copy a print copy yet haven't actually had one in my hands well i i thought it was fascinating i thought we should talk uh for for people who listened to the last episode you and i had this discussion about your watch that you'd been given. You want to tell the story? Someone gave you a very expensive watch. I don't remember why. Yes. There's a Swiss group called World Minds Espresso, which has half an hour conversations with World Minds, supposedly.

8:48And I was selected to be one World Mind. And instead of paying their World Minds a fee, as they're Swiss, I guess, and they have some partnership with Breitling, the watch company, they gave me a Breitling watch, which when I looked it up online was, I think, worth$6 ,000,$7 ,000, maybe even$8 ,000 or$9 ,000. I don't remember exactly. But I've got a very effective Casio here that costs maybe around$100 ,000. and I don't need anything better than that. It's actually terrific. I mean, not only keeps good time, but it's waterproof. I can swim and go surfing with it. I don't know the people with Breitling watches go surfing with them.

9:39You'll never get mugged for it. That's true. I'll never get mugged for it either. So, I decided the best thing that I could do with it was to put it up for auction with the funds to go to The Life You Can Save and the effective charities that The Life You Can Save recommends or just helping The Life You Can Save to promote the idea of giving to the most effective charities. So that's what we did. And you got involved then when we spoke previously, right? You publicized it. I think I was the one that suggested that you auction it off. Oh, could be. Could be. Maybe I'm thinking, you know, appropriating your brilliant ideas for my own.

10:21No, no. I thought you told me you didn't know what to do with the watch, and I said you should auction it off for charity. And then I think it raised like$15 ,000 or$16 ,000, right? Yes, it did raise, which was generous, because that's clearly more than somebody could have bought it for it. The only difference is that I did briefly wear it and photograph myself with it, so I have worn it. But then there was a second episode, right? Did you wear it as well then? It got sent to you? I think what happened, and we'll put the links to this, because I don't think it's gone live yet, but the donor who bought it decided not to keep it either.

11:02He's sending it to me, and then I'm going to re-auction it also. We're going to keep a chain of fundraising going for this thing. Right. So what I was curious about, though, is that a couple of times in your life you've done that. I remember you got a very big prize, like a million dollars, and you donated it. Then you get this expensive watch and you donate it. But how do you, is that difficult for you? Like, is there a practice in like, hey, I think we can admit most people don't do this when they get a nice expensive gift or they make a lot of money. They go, this is mine now. And now my life is better for having it.

11:44How have you developed the practice of going, I have everything that I need. Everything else is extra. I'm going to be generous with it. Yeah, I think that is the attitude that I've got. that I'm really very satisfied with my standard of living. It's perfectly comfortable. There's nothing that I feel, oh, I'm really longing to have that, but I can't afford it. So if I do get extra, like that million-dollar Berggruen prize, I suppose I could think of things to spend on, but I'm not sure that I would really enjoy it. I don't think it would really enhance my life, And certainly, it wouldn't enhance my life nearly as much as knowing, wow, I've had the opportunity to make a really big difference to the lives of people in extreme poverty or to help some of these wonderful organizations that people work very hard to reduce the suffering of animals on factory farms, for example, or to promote more vegetarian and vegan eating, not only for the animals, but also to reduce climate change.

12:52And I know some of these organizations, they're quite small. People are really dedicated. And a relatively modest amount of money,$50 ,000 say, is going to make a big difference to how effective they can be. So that's what I did. You said, I guess I could find a way to spend it or to use it. That's the modern world, right? We all have, not all, but the vast majority of people in developed countries have more than they need to survive. Well, many, many, many millions of people have more than they need to be comfortable. And yet, and I'm not exempting myself from this, we find ways to spend that extra money as opposed to put it to use for other people.

13:44Yes, but I mean, so I could go on holidays and spend it on luxury hotels. And it's not that I never take a holiday. I do. I love to be particularly in nature, outdoors somewhere. And living in Australia, there are lots of beautiful places to go to. But I certainly don't need to stay in expensive hotels. they just make me rather uncomfortable with the level of luxury they provide. And you think, not only could this money be used for better purposes, but environmentally, it's undesirable, I think, to have this level of consumption. They always put these little things on the towel saying, we're environmentally friendly, you use your towel again as if that's a big deal.

14:34And quite often, you put it where they say you should, but they still change it. Um, so yeah, I, I just don't enjoy those places. And, uh, I think I have enough opportunities with rather modest, more modest kinds of things than, uh, than I would want to have. But do you think that's just your natural disposition or is that a discipline that you have cultivated? I guess I'm saying is, is this replicable? Like it's work for you or, you know, there's just some people who don't appreciate music, right? Are you someone who just doesn't appreciate these things? or are you someone who has cultivated a distaste or a disdain for these things?

15:12Or is it somewhere in the middle? I think I could have developed in a different direction so that I would have wanted these things. But very often, I think people want them because it brings status to have them. Like it brings status to know about fine and expensive wines and to drink them. and really the difference in pleasure that you get from drinking a really expensive old bottle of wine from something much cheaper, I don't believe is all that great. Now, some people will say that that just shows I don't have a discerning palate. But I think that's something that you learn to develop and appreciate and you don't have to.

15:54And I think maybe you actually spoil the pleasure that you get from eating something simpler and more basic. As with food too, I think often a hearty peasant-style food, which comes inexpensively, is just as good as fine dining at a Michelin three-star or three-hat restaurant. So I think it's something people cultivate. I recommend a reading of Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class, which I think shows very nicely how a lot of these things that wealthy people or aristocratic people have are really displays to show the way they live. For example, this doesn't happen so much now, but the idea that ladies wear white gloves to show that they don't do anything that gets their hands grubby.

16:46If you're really going to wear white gloves and you want to keep them looking white, you can't do very much. So, you know, a lot of those things are that kind of thing. The fact that, you know, you go to these dinner parties where you have to wear a tuxedo and a special shirt and a bow tie, which you, you know, only will bring out for those few occasions, you know, maybe only once a year where you need to do that, but you have to have this whole outfit to go with it. I mean, I think that's just conspicuous consumption to use Veblen's term. Yeah, I think you talk about this either in the expanding circle or in the life you can save the sort of paradox of hedonism, which is that we think that by chasing pleasure, we'll get pleasure.

17:27Instead, we don't because the pleasures are always fleeting. Meanwhile, you know, chasing purpose. So would you rather have the sensation that by giving up a watch, you saved X amount of people from malaria or poverty or what have you? That's deeply meaningful and tends not to be ephemeral versus the sensation of the weight of the watch on your wrist, which you get used to almost immediately. And the questions about it tail off pretty quickly. And in the end, you're left with a hunk of machinery that, while finely crafted, you take for granted as any other timepiece. Yes, exactly. And maybe once you've bought your first$8 ,000 or$9 ,000 Breitling watch, you then start to aspire to the$50 ,000 Breitling watches, which are also available special models.

18:28And there's very little limit as to how far you can go. So it really is a kind of a treadmill that you're on if you get into that idea of wanting to have these essentially status goods. You can just go on and on, and I think you have to keep doing it to keep up the level of pleasure. Whereas if you have purpose and fulfillment, that seems to be really important to think that what you're doing is worthwhile and to enjoy it in a way, really, to get something out of it. And that's to say nothing of what we talked about, the fear of being mugged, the fear of losing it, the fear of scratching it, the cost of insuring it, you know, down the line, it's not free to have these things.

19:12One of my favorite quotes from Seneca, he says, slavery resides beneath marble and gold. His point is, if you have this beautiful mansion or palace, you know, you think you own it, but to a certain extent, it owns you. That's not even getting into the opportunity costs of what you could have otherwise done with those funds. But there is something, we think that getting these fancy luxury items is going to be deeply rewarding. And in fact, often we come to regret those things. Yeah, that's right. It's a burden that then you have to worry about. And getting attached to these very valuable and precious material objects, if something goes wrong, that's a major cause of loss and you feel that deeply that you've put a lot into this and now it's gone.

20:05So I think it's better to try to avoid that kind of attachment to expensive material items. So to put it in perspective though for people because I think that's one of the remarkable things I've taken from your work which is you don't have to donate or give at giving pledge level amounts to have a sizable impact? So something like$10 ,000 from the watch that you sold, what kind of impact can something like that have in the world? Well, certainly you could expect to save more than one life with a$10 ,000 donation to a really effective charity. An example of that would be the Against Malaria Foundation, which distributes bed nets to protect children and adults against malaria.

20:58And it's been shown through pretty carefully controlled randomized studies in villages where bed nets were distributed or not distributed when there wasn't enough bed nets to distribute them everywhere, that you do save children's lives. maybe it costs around$4 ,000, I think was one estimate. So you could say for 10 ,000, you would save two and a half lives. But in addition to saving two and a half children's lives, you would save many more infections with malaria of people, whether children or adults, who would get very ill from malaria. And okay, they weren't going to die. So they don't figure in that cost per life saved.

21:40But it's clearly a benefit not to have malaria. I got it once many years ago when I was in New Guinea. And it's not fun, I can tell you that. Yeah. And it's weird to think that if all someone did in the course of their life was save two people from death, they would probably be sitting on their own deathbed, whether they lived a long life or a short one and go, I had a pretty good run. I left this place better than I found it. Um, and, and, and yet we kind of shrug off, I guess, how in reach that, uh, that kind of impact is like the, the moral luck that you would have to have to save, to be in a position to save two and a half people from drowning or to alleviate that kind of suffering, to be where Oscar Schindler was rescuing a certain number of Jews from the Holocaust.

22:48There's a right place, right time, or wrong place, right time, kind of a fortuitousness to being able to do something like that. And meanwhile, the decision to wear a Timex versus a Breitling like that can have the same impact. Yeah, I think that's right. I've, you know, though I wrote this little analogy about rescuing a drowning child from a shallow pond, and that was 50 years ago now that I wrote it, I've never actually been in circumstances where I could rescue a drowning child from a shallow pond or even rescue a child from surf at beaches. And I do spend quite a bit of time in Australian beaches and occasionally someone does get rescued, but I have never been in a position to rescue somebody.

23:34So on the other hand, I have, as I say, quite easily in some circumstances, like giving away this watch that I received, that I just clearly knew immediately that I did not want to wear a watch like that. I have been able to save a number of lives and also to encourage other people to do the same. So hopefully, I don't really know how many lives I've saved, but hopefully it's indirectly a larger number. And then all of those people have saved lives. And that's something that should be important to them. Have you read Camus' The Fall? A long time ago. You're going to have to remind me about it.

24:15Well, I'm just thinking the central conceit of that book is he's walking through the canals of Amsterdam or somewhere, and he hears a scream and a splash. Someone falls into the canal or jumps into the canal and he suspects someone is in need of rescuing, but he sort of shakes it off and continues. Right. And he's haunted by this moral guilt that he could have done something when somebody, uh, he was in a position to help someone and he didn't do it. And the, the, the rest of the book is sort of wrestling with the fallout of that guilt, which eventually kind of destroys his life. But it is interesting if, if, if you were in a position to save a, uh, child drowning in a small, shallow pond, and you didn't, chances are that would haunt you.

25:06And yet, again, I'm just thinking to myself here, I don't wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night like the character in The Fall and think, I spent an extra$4 ,000 to get leather seats for my car. Let's not even get into the animal stuff. I'm just hypothetically here. But I spent extra money to have this or that to remodel my bathroom. The opportunity costs are just as real as the ignored drowning person, but it doesn't seem to haunt us the same way. Yeah, I think in Camus' story, you actually see the person, even if you don't get a really good look at them, but you see the identifiable person.

25:50And I think that's part of the power of my child in the shallow pond. We can visualize that and we can think, oh, how terrible it would be to let that specific identifiable child or in Camus' story person drown. And I would have that on my conscience. And maybe, you know, you could embellish the stories a little bit like the child in the pond, maybe the parents would then rush up and say, where is our child? You know, our child got away from us. We were distracted. And you say, oh, there was somebody splashing in the pond, but they seem to have gone under the water now and they must have drowned.

26:29I was on the phone. Yeah, right. Or I didn't want to ruin my expensive shoes. So you would feel pretty terrible with that. Whereas with the fact that you didn't save some people by donating a watch or spending money on renovating your bathroom, you can't identify the people who you could have saved. And I think emotionally that explains why we don't wake up at night troubled with guilt about it. But really when we sit down quietly and think about it, there is going to be some specific child, even if you never know who it is, who has died because you didn't help the Against Malaria Fund to distribute more bed nets.

27:17And you should feel just as bad about it, really, even if you don't have an image of which child it was. And I suspect that we like it that way, right? we we try not to think about it because if we think about it then we feel bad right or we out of sight out of mind particularly I would say with the animal stuff right which you talk about in animal liberation now there's a reason they try to make it illegal to film what goes on in slaughterhouses or certain factory farms there's a reason that we don't like watching those documentaries about where our food comes from, why we don't want to think about it when we're hungry and we're on a road trip and the choices between McDonald's and nothing, right?

28:16We don't want to think about it because if we think about it, then we're complicit. Whereas if we close our ears, we don't hear the scream and then we don't we don't have to do anything about it. Yeah, I think there are a lot of people who are like that and people have said it to me too, quite personally, don't tell me about it, you'll spoil my dinner. Yeah. And when you think about it, that's a really awful moral stance to take because you're effectively saying, I believe that probably if you did tell me about it, I would recognize that it's wrong of me to plan to eat what I'm planning to eat for dinner because I am then complicit in the suffering of the animal that I'm eating.

29:04So I want to just go on doing that anyway without knowing about it and I won't feel bad about it. But really, you know, it's unpleasantly reminiscent of Germans who saw the Jews being taken away by the Nazis and didn't want to inquire what was happening to them or anything. And in fact, it's less excusable because they were running a serious risk, I suppose, if they did say something to the police about you shouldn't be doing something. They could well be suspect themselves and rounded up by the Gestapo. That's not going to happen to us if we object to factory farming and refuse to eat it.

29:49Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Bastro County, I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on, thought this isn't going to work, stopped, parked it, walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove in Austin and bought a truck. What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation getting me to and from my house. It unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns. There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields, and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in.

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31:56Yes, that's right. I mean, and it's, it's, it's both, the hard part about it is that it feels very hard. And then the other hard part about it is that it's not very hard to do something about it. And yet most of us, and I'm certainly not exempting myself here, we just go with what's easiest, which is to keep on doing things the way that we've done them. Well, let me push you then a bit further. If you are still eating factory farm products, what is it that is stopping you from changing? Because that really isn't all that difficult, right? Either you could eat plant-based foods instead? Or even if you said, I will continue to eat meat, but I will make sure that what I eat comes from animals who were allowed to go outside and had decent lives?

32:46No, I would say I'm somewhere in the middle. I just ate at a vegan restaurant, which is right behind my bookstore. I live out in the country, so a good chunk of the food that I eat, like the eggs that I made my son this morning came from my own chickens, which live outside. And I have no intention of slaughtering. And I try to eat at restaurants that have higher standards. I try to shop at Whole Foods and I look at the little ranking of where the things come from and I'll pay the higher amount to get the thing that's more ethically sourced or whatever. But I think there is, and I think this is the boat that a lot of people find themselves in, is once it gets to a certain level of inconvenience, we're like, oh, I'll just do what I have to do here.

33:47I think intellectually, most people are on board. Certainly morally, I see very few people who go, I love what they're doing over at the factory farm. I don't even like driving by it. It smells bad. But, you know, in a pinch, I don't think, I think it's hard, not hard. I think in a pinch, most of us are not strictly orthodox. We just, well, what's on the menu? Yeah. Well, Well, I think you're a little, as you say, in the middle. And I should say, you know, I mean, I'm not – it's not a religious practice. I'm not orthodox. It's not that I think I would be polluted if I did once go into McDonald's.

34:36And, you know, maybe I wouldn't want to eat the – if they don't have any impossible burger or plant-based burger or whatever, I wouldn't order the meat burger. I just wouldn't – couldn't enjoy eating that. I might eat the French fries and then somebody might say, you know, they were cooked in animal fat or something. I mean, at that point, I might say, look, you know, I'm hungry. There's nothing else around. Don't tell me what kind of oil the French fries were cooked in. But that's because it's a pretty marginal contribution. If you think what difference is this going to make to, you know, contributing to the revenues, it's not going to encourage them even to order more beef burgers.

35:18so I don't think in that sense you have to be absolutely pure in what you're eating I think you have to think about is my lifestyle making a contribution to supporting factory farming in a significant way and if you can truly answer that no and maybe from what you were saying you can then I don't think you need to feel you know bad about your contribution we should all feel bad about the fact that it continues to exist, but not personally guilty. I try to think about it too. It's like more often than not, am I making decisions that are part of the solution or part of the problem, right? And I know, you know, a sort of, from a purely philosophical or moral standpoint, like an act is either virtuous or it's not, a person's either virtuous or they're not.

36:11But I try to think about it in terms of, hey, one, am I making progress as an individual as opposed to because I despair of perfection, I make zero progress? But I just try to think, hey, on a fairly consistent or regular basis, when faced with choices to order this or that, to buy this kind of car or that kind of car, or to work in this industry or that industry, am I making decisions in accordance with my values that I think are reducing suffering or being of use or service to people? or am I doing what's easiest or most expedient or rewarding to me? Right. I think those are good questions to ask yourself.

37:02I wouldn't necessarily think that the criterion is, am I doing the things that are virtuous and on the right side more often, like 51 % of the time and the other is 49? I think you can aspire to do a lot better and you can think about how important is this to me. And maybe eventually you'll get up to where you're doing the right thing 95 % or 98 % of the time. And then I think, yeah, you can relax about the remaining 2 % that it might be. I'll give you a little one that just came across my desk as I was walking down to do this interview, which is I got offered to do a speaking gig in Washington, D.C.

37:45or right outside Washington, D.C. to a sort of a group. And I've been doing a lot. And I didn't want to be gone more as it was going to require me to miss one or two nights, at least two nights away from home. And so I passed. And they came back and they said, we'll send a plane for you, just for you. And there's a part of me that thinks, well, that would be a cool experience. And I have flown on someone else's plane before. It was an interesting experience. But I know morally it's basically indefensible in terms of the impact that one has on the climate to send, first off, just to send two pilots to interrupt two people's day to fetch one person and fly them across the country, but also just the environmental impact of a single plane carrying a single individual.

38:39It's just not who I want to be. But I feel like At a different point in my life, I would have just not thought about it and said yes, because it seemed fun. So to go to what we were talking about earlier, I do think there's a discipline or a muscle involved in going, sorry, I got to pass on that one. Yeah, absolutely. I think you certainly made the right call there. It's quite funny because, as I said, I just arrived in New York this morning after being in Los Angeles. and my flight, which was the overnight red eye, was scheduled to leave at 9.15 and actually got delayed four hours. It left after 1 a.m.

39:21And I was sitting around in LA airport for more than four hours getting really tired. And the friends that I'm staying with in New York said, oh, we must set up a special fund for you to provide you with a private jet so this doesn't happen again. He was joking, of course. But yeah, that is the kind of thing that I think we just should not be doing. And really, nobody should be doing. I mean, maybe somebody's got such urgent commitments that they are going to do a great deal more good and they're going to earn large amounts of money that they could donate to effective charities. You can think of hypothetical circumstances.

39:58But generally speaking, this whole private jet stuff, again, is just another example of conspicuous consumption. Yes, we're of the class that has their private jets and flies around in them. And to hell with what it's doing for the climate or to hell with what else we could be doing with that money. And not that long ago, just getting in any kind of plane and flying to your destination was considered a miracle. It saved days or weeks of your life in terms of how much more efficient it was than ocean liners or what have you. And so how quickly we get used to the newest comfort or the newest advantage or source of efficiency.

40:44And then we go, hey, I can fly by myself now and save 90 minutes or an hour and a half or save the inconvenience of rubbing elbows with the hoi polloi at the airport. And I am worth that. But what we don't think is, hey, yeah, first off, that would have been$15 ,000. And that's, you know, three or four lives that you could save by that efficiency also. But we try not to think about the externalities of our actions, environmentally or ethically, in a lot of cases, because we'd rather save 90 minutes. Yeah. I mean, I think that is a temptation from the kind of society we've gotten into. That's right.

41:34But I certainly agree with you. We ought to push back against it. Yeah. And then the hard part is the unilateral disarming of it, right? So if one sports team doesn't fly private, they're at a disadvantage against the other teams that do. Or if one hedge fund CEO doesn't fly private, they lose out on the clients to the people that get to those people faster or whatever it is. There is a sense, I think, for people that I got to keep up with the Joneses, not just for status reasons, but also for other reasons. Yeah. And with the thing about losing out on the clients, do the clients really prefer that?

42:27Do they prefer someone who took a private jet to fly to them over either taking a standard commercial flight or even zooming as we are now? because we've all got used to that during the pandemic. And to a certain extent, I think we now recognize that's another option. And it's something you could have said to the people who wanted you to come to DC. No, I'm not gonna - That's what I did. Oh, you did. Great, okay, terrific. Yeah, good. And I think it works pretty well. It's not absolutely identical. And if they want you to sign your books, you can't really do it over Zoom. But these are minor inconveniences.

43:06Sure. And, you know, this also goes to when we think about the transmission of diseases, when we think about all these things, there are advantages to not globetrotting as much as we sort of do because we can. Yeah. Yeah, certainly there are. Although I admit I'm doing this tour now in order to promote animal liberation now. So I am moving around, but I hope that it's a more important purpose and that it contributes to rallying and revitalizing the animal movement. And I justify it that way. And I hope that's not just a rationalization, but it's something that really happens. But I think that goes to what I was saying earlier, which is like more often than not, right?

43:54Is the decision to go on this tour and do this thing, is that your mode of living most of the year? Or do you do it when it needs to be done, when it's better than, say, not doing it? That's different than just default going anywhere and everywhere you want and never thinking about the externality of the decisions. where, you know, sometimes I ask myself the question, what would the world look like if everyone did what I'm about to do all the time, you know? And how quickly a lot of the things that we think are okay because it's just us quickly become unsustainable if everyone had equal access or opportunity to do that thing.

44:39Yeah, I think that's right. And I do definitely keep a lid on my travel. I mean, a tour like this, I actually haven't done for many years, but then I haven't had an important new book out like I think and hope Animal Liberation now is for many years either. And I definitely try to limit my overseas travel. Obviously, I go to Princeton as I've been teaching there for the fall semester and otherwise living in Australia. So that involves me in some travel. But again, I think that's, I hope that that's achieving worthwhile benefits. There's also a difference getting on a plane that was already going to go, and you're one of 500 other people on that plane, than, again, chartering a private flight to take you and just you across the ocean.

45:31No, I've never done that, and hopefully never will. Um, yeah, I was thinking the animal liberation now seems to be an outgrowth or an extension of what my favorite book of yours, which I read after we talked last time, the expanding circle, the idea that the which I think is a very stoic idea that you have this sort of natural inclination to care about yourself, to care about people who live near you, to care about people who are related to you, to care about people who look like you. But really the work of moral progress is expanding that circle to include more people, more places, and I think ultimately more species or natural things and caring about them to a degree that you would care about any of these other things that you naturally have an affinity for.

46:35Yes, I think animal liberation now is a kind of application of that thought. And I remember when we talked last time, I hadn't realized that this was a stoic idea, but you put me on to Herocles. Yes. And yes, it was there. And that surprised me that nothing is new under the sun and that includes the book you held up, The Expanding Circle. But what I did in animal liberation now was to, of course, apply that to the world that we're in today and to look in detail at factory farming, which is unfortunately something new. I don't know whether you should say under the sun because these animals never go in the sun.

47:13They're confined in dim sheds with, as you were saying, terrible manure smells or ammonia if they're chickens. and but it is it's a new phenomenon you could say the attitudes to animals speciesist attitudes to animals have existed for millennia but the technology that enables us to take so many animals and and literally it's something like if we just focus on vertebrate animals that we raise and kill for food so i'm not talking about wild caught fish but i am talking about including fish in aquaculture and chickens and so on. It's something like 200 billion animals a year that the 8 billion or so people on the planet are raising and consuming for food.

48:02And that's unprecedented, obviously, on a scale completely different from anything that there was before in terms of the amount of animal food that is being produced, but also the amount of suffering that this has produced, which you really cannot imagine, right? You can look at one group of animals, whether the chicken's crowded into a shed or pigs in a pig factory farm or fish in agriculture. And even then, it's hard to focus on one animal, but you can. I remember actually once when I was in Australia, we learned of a pig farm that was half owned by the Australian Prime Minister at the time.

48:49And an employee had told us that the conditions of the pigs were very bad. They were not only in stalls, but they had chains around the neck. They were being chained by the neck. And because they were sort of moving and trying to get away from these neck chains, the chains were actually biting into their necks. There were open sores in their necks. So we went into that farm at night and each one of us chained ourselves to a stall that was holding a sow. These were the breeding sows and sat opposite that sow. And then we called the police and said, there's cruelty going on here. You should prosecute.

49:21Instead, of course, predictably, they prosecuted us for trespass. But that's another story. But I actually got to feel something for that particular sow in those conditions. But then you have to generalize that to not just hundreds, not just thousands, but millions or hundreds of millions of sows living like that. And if we talk about chickens or fish, we're talking about billions or tens of billions. You can't really grasp the scale of the suffering that we are inflicting on animals today. Yeah, I think we should obviously always be very careful when we make Holocaust analogies. But I remember I was reading about, and I'm going to butcher her name, I think it's Mize Geep, the woman who was delivering food and items to Anne Frank and ultimately preserves Anne Frank's diary.

50:13You know, she said something once which was like, you know, Anne Frank wasn't special, right? Anne Frank was just this girl. And to a certain degree, it's easier to just think about the one person who was the victim of this injustice, because it's almost impossible or unfathomable to truly extrapolate that single bit of suffering, you know, at the scale of five or six or seven or eight. million people. But that is the true scope of the tragedy of something like that. So yeah, you see one limping animal or one cow that's never been outside or it's swelled up or you see one preposterously overbred steroid infested chicken.

51:15It's hard to even, for the human mind, to even comprehend what this looks like at the scale of billions of billions of billions of similar animals all over the world. Yeah, that's certainly right. And, you know, it is useful to look at some of the videos that are around that have been taken by brave people who've gone into these places and videoed and sometimes even rescued animals. And you do get a sense of the individual there. But then you have to say, yes, you know, that's really sad that that individual was treated like that and died. But it just goes on and on and on. That's the problem.

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55:04I'm interested that you brought up the prime minister who had some sort of factory farm or particularly unjust, you know, sort of animal raising operation. It is interesting. We tend to think, and I think the Stoics would agree with this, like, what do we control? We control whether we participate in that system or not. Right. Whether we eat the fruits of that screwed up system, right? Do we eat the chicken from a fast food restaurant? Do you invest in companies that do this, blah, blah, blah? But it is interesting we don't talk that much about or to the psychology of the person who owns that factory farm.

55:48And sometimes it's corporate, but sometimes it's not, right? Sometimes it's a family that has just been in the chicken business for a couple of generations, right? What have you come to understand about the psychology of it? I understand why if I'm a normal person and they're looking between two kinds of shoes, they buy the Nikes because they're cooler and there's been a lot of marketing towards it. They're not thinking about the children in the sweatshop that made that. But we don't talk a lot about who owns the sweatshop and the people who are surveying that sweatshop and going, yes, this is how I want to do business.

56:34What have you understood about the psychology of the people more, I think, much more morally complicit in those exploitative or evil systems? Well, if you focus on the factory farms, which I think maybe you know a little bit more about than the factories that are producing sneakers, I think there's two different things going on. There are people who have traditionally been farmers and who grew up on the land farming and producing food. And often they feel bad about what has happened to farming. You know, certainly the older ones who were farming when they had small numbers of animals outside. You know, let's say they were dairy farmers and they had, you know, 100 cows maybe.

57:26100 cows, yeah. Yeah, and they could make a decent living from 100 cows and they knew the cows individually. The cows would be outside on pasture during the day. They would bring them in for milking, obviously, maybe, you know. But then the big dairies got into it, right? And incidentally, we just saw an example of how big these dairies are with this fire in Texas that killed 18 ,000 dairy cows. I don't know if you heard about that. It got some news media. And it's pretty horrible that 18 ,000 cows should get burnt alive, of course. But you've got to ask the question, 18 ,000 cows together? You know, that's what dairy farming is.

58:09And yes, that is what dairy farming has become. So obviously - It wasn't over 18 ,000 acres, I imagine. No, no, it was not. No, no. So yeah, it's, and those older farmers, you know, they may regret that this has happened, but they've just said, you know, I couldn't feed my family. I couldn't earn a living now unless I had a big, more concentrated dairy. And that's happened to, obviously, chicken farmers. There are virtually no traditional chicken farmers with small flocks of chickens running outside. Maybe some egg producers, but even that's pretty rare. So, some of them feel that this is just to stay in the business.

58:56They've got to do this, and they don't have a choice, and they don't like the lifestyle, but they don't know what else to do. And then at the other scale, there are simply the big corporate investors who are really dominating the industry and are responsible for putting the small producers out of business.

59:16And that's just a financial thing for them. I think that's just a return on capital. We can do this. We can make money on it. We can show that we're more efficient than the small farmers. We can undercut them in the market and the big supermarket chains will take our products because we can produce in bulk and it's a reliable, consistent product. So it's a way of making money and the animals don't count. They're really just machines for converting the low-priced food that we give them into the higher-priced meat, milk or eggs. And what of the managers and the supervisors of a dairy operation that's got 18 ,000 stinking, mooing, you know, steroid pumped, full of steroids cows?

1:00:07Like, how do they square or think about what they show up and work on every day? I don't think they think about the well-being of the cows beyond the fact that the cows are producing milk. That's what you care about. And incidentally, in the dairy industry, the cows have to be made pregnant every year to continue to produce milk. Otherwise, the milk dries up and you have to take the calves away from them. They're mammals. The bond between mother and calf is very strong. The mother calls out for the calf. and the calf, if the calf is male, will be sent for veal or maybe slaughtered very soon. If she's a female, she may be brought up as a dairy cow herself.

1:00:54But that's also, I think, a pretty heartless thing, which even the traditional dairy farmers had to do. But on the big ones, it's all about getting the most out of the cows. They produce vast quantities of milk, and after they do that for a few years, essentially they're burned out. They don't live as long as a cow on a more traditional dairy farm would have lived. So I don't think there's any real thought about the welfare of the cows as long as they're producing. Yeah, we get desensitized to whatever it is that keeps the thing going. It's like the Upton Sinclair line. It's very hard to get someone to understand something that their salary depends on them not understanding.

1:01:40I imagine you could plug in empathy for understanding there. You don't have empathy for the thing in which you are taking advantage of or in which your market efficiency derives from, whether that's labor or an animal or environmental externality etc. You just, you can't think about it or you can't do your thing. That's right. You would have to change. You would be replaced by someone who can't. Yeah, you would have to change. Occasionally you hear about a farmer who does change and, you know, tries to set up a more organic natural farm and maybe some of them succeed, some of them don't. There was even a news item in the UK a year or so ago about a beef producer, I think, who decided to start, switch to growing vegetables and made a thing about that, that didn't want to be in the beef or industry anymore.

1:02:35So it occasionally happens. But in terms of the large scale of the animal production industry, it doesn't make a blip. I read a book recently, I think it was called The Ledger and the Chain. And what struck me about it is so often you think of either the slave owners, or you think of the society, which is morally complicit in slavery, but it was really a focus on like two or three of the most prolific entrepreneurial and let's say successful, because there's no other word for it, but successful slave traders and breeders in America in the early to mid 1800s. And what I found so interesting about it was these were clearly sociopathic, if not outright psychopathic individuals, right?

1:03:29It wasn't just that they, this wasn't a Thomas Jefferson, you know, hey, I don't want to think about what's happening here. I inherited this from my parents and I'm going to keep it going because I have to sell Monticello if, you know, if I let the slaves go. Or even, you know, in Thomas Jefferson, the sort of moral ambiguity or contradiction, the sort of knowing that there's something wrong about it, wanting it to change, but hoping it happens later and not at your own personal cost. Just watching how profoundly psychopathic these individuals were, that it wasn't like they were reluctant slave traders, but they liked the work.

1:04:13They were good at the work. They took pleasure in doing the terrible things and just the world in which they lived to do that thing. I don't know. It was interesting to me to think that they were not only exporting slaves literally, but they were exporting their own terrible sort of worldview onto the world. Like they needed this industry to survive and to thrive and they had no qualms about it. And so they sort of built a business that their industry was an industry on which other industries depended. And I don't know, it just struck me like we don't talk a lot about the person. I think it's one thing to be a hedge fund investor who has a bunch of pig futures or a conglomerate that makes benefits from factory farming.

1:05:13And then the people who were the pioneering innovators in the technologies that, let's say, lets you stack 18 ,000 cows on top of each other. Or you talk in the book about these factory farms in China that are literally buildings where the animals are on top of each other. Like somebody came to work and didn't just think this is what I have to do to survive. This is somebody who is putting their best energy towards making an evil thing more evil. Yes, that's true. And I think there is a clear parallel between the people who you described as psychopaths or sociopaths because they were working with human beings and slaves and were doing that with enthusiasm and ruthlessness.

1:06:05And what happens with factory farming? Because we recognize now that slavery of humans is wrong. We have not recognized that slavery of non-human animals are simply making them do for us whatever we want, ignoring their well-being and their lives and treating them as machines to produce things for us. We haven't recognized that that's wrong. And so we don't call these people psychopaths or sociopaths. But in terms of their lack of concern for the well-being of the very large numbers of animals under their control, it's precisely similar to what you were suggesting. And again, I'm not saying that cows suffer the same as human beings when they're enslaved.

1:06:53They are different. But I'm talking about the psychology behind ignoring the interests of a group of beings whom you designate as the others, the outsiders, not part of the group that has moral status. And that is certainly what is going on. I think it is also something that Americans developed. developed. Early factory farming seems to have started in the United States in the early years of the 20th century, although admittedly, the Soviet Union with its collective farms also independently produced similar kinds of things. And now, as you just said, it's spreading and intensifying. And China is building these 26-story buildings with floor after floor filled with thousands of pigs who live in those buildings all of their lives until they're slaughtered.

1:07:46And, you know, that's a really pretty nightmarish scenario because in China there are really, you know, you can do to those animals in the process of raising them whatever you think will be most productive for you without any restrictions on how you can find them. And that's a little different from some countries in the world. The European Union, for example, would prohibit a lot of those forms of confinement that exist both in China and in the United States. And California now has these laws which fortunately the Supreme Court just upheld in one of the better Supreme Court decisions, I'm pleased to say, for the last few years.

1:08:31that California has the right not only to require that pigs in California have a certain amount of space that they don't in other states, but also that if you want to sell pig products, and this applies to other farmed animals as well, you can only do it if they have the minimum amount of space that California requires. So that was a significant victory and a small setback for the pig industry and perhaps for other factory farming industries. I want to go back to the idea of the expanding circle for a second, because I think, you know, obviously, Steven Pinker's work on the decline of violence is encouraging.

1:09:10Whether it's totally correct or not, I don't want to speculate. But there is this sense that the progress of society, the moral arc of the universe has been towards expanding that. But does it alarm you that it seems like there is a sizable group these days that not only doesn't seem to be on board with expanding the circle, wants to go the other direction. There seems to be this sort of urge to other, to discriminate, to use the power of the state or culture to say, we shouldn't care about these people, whether they're refugees, whether they're trans people, whether it's gay people, whether it's women and their reproductive rights, there seems to be this movement afoot that is almost reveling in or animated by a desire to shrink the circle.

1:10:12I think that's happening in some people. Look, I've just looked at the time, Ryan, and I'm sorry, I've got this hard stop because I've got a radio program that wanted me to connect. It's been terrific talking to you. We'll talk soon. Thanks so much. I hope we can do it again soon. Great. All right, bye. Well, you know what? I'll answer that question for him. I try not to be super political here in what I do, but I do try to talk about where the Stoics obligate us to think about the public good, right? Mark Cerullo talks about the idea of the common good, something like 40 or 50 times in meditations.

1:10:53Hierocles, as Peter and I were talking about, talks about the expanding circle, that that is the work that we're trying to do, to care about more people, to be more inclusive, to be less exclusive, to expand and open the world and our considerations and our hearts and our emotions and our resources to more and more people. And it's one of the hardest things I've found about being here in Texas lately is there is a movement, an ascendant movement even, that seems to revel in the removal of rights, removal of consideration, closing the circle, saying, this is not for you. you are not like us. You are not human.

1:11:37You are inhuman. And thus, we don't have to feel bad or guilty or complicit when we take things from you, when we demonize you, when we slander or slur you. And look, I get it. I know people, good people that don't think that's what's happening, don't think that's what their movement is doing. I've believed certain things like that myself in my life, but I think the work we have to do, why I wanted to have someone like Peter Singer on, the work I'm trying to do on myself is to push back against that, to not be sucked into that vortex of dark energy, but to sort of carry the fire, to reference Cormac McCarthy there, to carry the fire forward of expanding the circle of including people.

1:12:27That's the work we're trying to do. That's certainly the work I'm trying to do. And anyways, message over. I really enjoyed this conversation with the one and only Peter Singer. And you should check out The Expanding Circle, Animal Liberation Now, his new book, Ethics in the Real World, and The Life You Can Save.

1:12:51Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, That would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it. And I'll see you next episode.

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