Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I am the editor-in-chief of

Curate Affairs Magazine. Joining me on the program today, returning, in fact, to Currude Affairs,

is Emil Torres, the author of the forthcoming human extinction,

a history of the science and ethics of annihilation coming in July from Routledge.

Emile is an expert on a number of things.

Emil is a philosopher and historian, who has been writing recently,

including four current affairs, about a philosophy known as long-termism, as well as about

effective altruism, which is related and which I have written about myself for

Current Affairs, Mil Torres. Thank you for joining us on current affairs. Yeah, it's great to be here.

Thanks for having me back. So here's my worry with any conversation that you and I might have on these

topics, is that you and I agree, for the most part, about effector altruism

and long-termism. And we also, having both written a lot about these things, might end up

speaking in ways that assume a familiarity or diving into the conversation that you and I would

have, rather than for listeners

and readers who are totally unfamiliar with these things and don't know why they should care.

So we need to begin at the place where listeners and readers who don't know why they should

care begin. And I thought one question I could ask you to begin with was, let's say that I am where I was

in 2013 when I met my first effective altruist, and they tried to tell me what this was all about

and why I should believe it. Could you give me the pitch that effect of altruism would give me in order to try to get me to become an effective altruist?

In other words, let's be fair to the ideology before we discuss why it's so toxic and terrible.

Yeah, sure. I think one way to approach understanding effective altruism is to sort of decompose it into its two main components.

So you've got the effective aspect and then the altruism aspect.

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