LONGTERMISM: Why You Should Care About Future People

The Next Big Idea

Next Big Idea Club

Self-improvement, Arts, Books, Society & Culture, Education

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 13 October 2022

⏱️ 74 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

If the human race lasts as long as a typical mammalian species and our population continues at its current size, then there are 80 trillion people yet to come. Oxford philosophy professor William MacAskill says it's up to us to protect them. In his bold new book, "What We Owe the Future," MacAskill makes a case for longtermism. He believes that how long we survive as a species may depend on the actions we take now. --- To hear the Book Bite for "What We Owe the Future," download the Next Big Idea app at nextbigideaclub.com/app

Transcript

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0:00.0	LinkedIn presents.
0:06.4	I'm Rufus Griskem, and this is the next big idea.
0:10.4	Today, how to keep humanity going for another million years.
0:30.8	Hey, folks, a quick disclaimer before we begin, you're about to hear an interview that I recorded in September, 2022, with William McCaskill, who just published a book called What We O The Future.
0:46.2	Will is a professor of philosophy at Oxford, and one of the founders of effective altruism, a philanthropic movement that encourages folks to use reason and evidence to figure out how to do the most good for the greatest number of people.
1:00.8	In our interview, and in many others, Will spoke admiringly about one of the movement's most successful adherents, Sam Bankman Freed, the billionaire founder of the crypto trading firm FTX.
1:13.2	The two of them met in 2012.
1:15.8	Sam was in a student at MIT, and he was thinking about finding a job at an animal welfare organization after he graduated.
1:23.2	Will encouraged him to consider another path.
1:25.8	What if instead of working for a nonprofit, he went to Wall Street, made a fortune, and gave it away?
1:32.6	Was it possible he could make an even bigger impact on the world by doing that?
1:37.6	Sam took Will's advice, going to work for a quantitative trading firm before founding FTX.
1:44.0	We ended up using the introduction of this episode to tell Bankman Freed's story because we thought it was a great encapsulation of the power of the effective altruism philosophy.
1:53.9	Here was this 30-year-old guy with a personal net worth that, at one time, reached $26 billion, and he claimed that the only reason he'd worked to amass that fortune was because he wanted to give 99% of it away.
2:08.8	After this episode aired, Bankman Freed's story took a dark turn.
2:13.1	Tonight, the cryptocurrency world is reeling after the meltdown of one of its most popular trading platforms.
2:20.0	The exchange FTX filed for bankruptcy protection today has fallen.
2:24.3	Crypto King, Sam Bankman Freed stepped down as CEO.
2:27.9	The sudden collapse of FTX wiped out Bankman Freed's net worth.
2:32.0	It also put him in legal jeopardy.
2:34.5	In November, allegations emerged that Bankman Freed secretly and illegally transferred billions of dollars of customer deposits from FTX
2:42.8	to the hedge fund he co-founded Alameda Research.
	...

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