How I Learned to Love Shrimp

Sjir Hoeijmakers on a small commitment that will help millions of animals

• James Özden • Episode 58

Share episode

Today we're talking about a topic that's really important to me personally: donating and effective giving. Specifically, why donating 10% of your income to the most effective animal charities might be one of the most important things you can do to improve the world.

To dive deep into this topic, I’m so excited to have Sjir Hoeijmakers on the show today. Sjir is the CEO of Giving What We Can (GWWC), the global organisation promoting effective giving and the 10% pledge. Even more impressive than this, he donates around 50% of his income to effective charities, so he really puts his money where his mouth is! 

In our conversation, we talk about the impact your donation can have, why it also makes sense for people who work full-time in the movement and why the act of pledging really matters. We also talk about another important part of Giving What We Can’s work: Their evaluation of regrantors and evaluators, including the Effective Altruism Animal Welfare Fund and Animal Charity Evaluators. 

If anything we talk about today sparks your interest, I really encourage you to consider taking the trial pledge, where you can pledge to give just 1% of your income to effective charities. It's a great way to test it out and see if it works for you. Personally, taking the pledge is one of the things I’m proudest of. Because of this, I’ll be donating £50 to Giving What We Can’s effective animal advocacy fund for each person who takes the trial pledge or full 10% pledge, up to a total of £1000. So, if you sign up via the links below, there is a special tracker that will let me know how many people take it, and I’ll donate accordingly. 

Chapters:

  • What is the 10% Pledge? (00:08:00)
  • Why pledge vs just donate? (00:10:56)
  • Should full-time advocates also give? (00:15:15)
  • When shouldn't you pledge? & the Trial peldge (00:24:18)
  • Should you give to funds or charities directly? (00:30:10)
  • Why is GWWC evaluating Animal Charity Evaluators and the EA Animal Welfare Fund? (00:45:04)
  • How did ACE change with GWWC's feedback? (00:55:09)
  • GWWC moved $6M to animals in 2024! (01:06:30)

Resources: 

Sjir's Recommendations:

With thanks to Tom Felbar (Ambedo Media) for amazing video and audio editing!

If you enjoy the show, please leave a rating and review us - we would really appreciate it! Likewise, feel free to share it with anyone who you think might enjoy it. You can send us feedback and guest recommendations via Twitter or email us at hello@howilearnedtoloveshrimp.com. Enjoy!

Sjir:

There's so little money available currently to do to work on some of the highest impact costs, including factory farming out there. And so for the whole factory farming space, it's maybe in the order of 100 million per year, maybe even less. Compare that to how much money there is in the kind of the opposing forces there, right? The industry is just completely crazy. I think I had a nice analogy there. Just the extra dollar can do a lot of good. So in the effective animal advocacy space, we just know that with every dollar we can meaningfully help, say, a chicken be free from a battery cage. That's just quite quite incredible. It's actually a really bad fact about our world, I think, that we live in a world where it's so cheap to help others because it means we're we're not really taking good care of things. But it's also, in a way, an optimistic message because it means we can do a lot of good if we come together. So that's the effective giving part. It's really there's so much to do, and we just need money, and the next bit of money will help. Your extra dollar, your extra hundred dollars, your extra thousand dollars will help a lot to solve really major problems affecting our world today.

James:

Today we are talking about a topic that is really important to me personally, which is donating and effective giving. Specifically, why donating 10% of your income to the most effective animal charities might be one of the most important things you can do to improve the world. And I wanted to cover this because it's something I've been doing myself for about four years now. I started with a pledge to give 10% of my income to effective charities, and now I'm giving just over 16% of my income. And honestly, it feels like a pretty small thing to my side, and I don't miss it too much. But I know it makes a huge difference for animals, and also a huge difference for all the amazing groups who have come on the show and who are trying so hard to help animals with very limited funds. And if you earn a median salary in the US or Europe, like I assume most people listening do, you're probably in the richest 5% people in the planet, which is a kind of crazy thing to think about, and knowing that it feels like the least I can do given that privilege. And to dive deep into this topic, I'm excited to have Sheer Huomakers on the show today. And Sheer is the CEO of Giving What We Can. They are the global organization promoting effective giving and the 10% pledge. What I find even more pressing than this is he donates around 50% of his income to effective charities, so he really puts money where his mouth is. And in our conversation, we talk about the impacts your donation can have, why it also makes sense to people who work full-time in the movements, like I see many of you do, and why the act of pledging itself really matters. We also talk about another part of Giving What We Can't work, which is their work to evaluate re-granters and evaluators, like the Effective Allerism Animal Welfare Fund, the Animal Charity Evaluators Movement Grants Fund, as well as Animal Charity Evaluators Recommended Charities Fund. And if anything we speak about today sparks your interest, I really encourage you to consider taking a trial pledge, where you can pledge to give just 1% of your income to effective charities. I think this is a great way to test it out and see if it works for you personally. And from experience, taking the pledge has been one of the things I'm proudest of so far in my life and career, and because of this, I'll be donating £50 to Giving What We Can's Effective Animal Adequacy Fund for each person who takes a trial pledge or a full 10% pledge, up to a total of £1,000. If you sign up via the special links in the show notes, there's a tracker that will let me know how many of you take it, and I will donate accordingly. And for the keen beans out there, this will be in addition to my standard pledge. So kind of factual money going to these great charities. And without further ado, please enjoy the conversation this year. Cheer. Welcome. Thanks for joining the podcast. Thanks for having me. So we'd like to start everything off with the same question, which is what's something you changed your mind on recently and ideally related to the animal advocacy movement?

Sjir:

One thing I recently changed my mind on on a higher level is this the importance of this idea of impartiality or kind of expanding our moral circle. So I'm in the kind of business of effective giving, as you might know. So this is what what our organization before we can is about. And there's the effectiveness aspect there and the prioritization. And we often highlight those kinds of concepts, like cost effectiveness, prioritization effectiveness. But I almost assume this impartiality idea, because it feels so natural that you don't discriminate based on where someone is born or their species or when they're born or things like that. And I almost personally assume it because I believe in that principle quite heavily. But I found recently in talking to other people about and getting feedback that it's actually intuitive, but it's not something many people kind of assume. And it's something that actually can be quite powerful. So the best analogy for me here is Peter Singer's drowning child argument or thought experiment that I think has persuaded a lot of people to do more in their lives and also to give effectively. And that actually uses this principle quite well. I've kind of recently reflected on. So it's product this who don't know the drowning child. You're walking down the street and you see a pond, a shallow pond, and it's a small girl who is drowning in the pond. And you can jump in to save her. You will still just be in time. But it would mean you'd ruin your fancy shoes and your business suit because you were just on your way to this fancy business meeting. Now, Singer then asked, Would you do this? Yes, of course you would do this. But then you would ruin this suit, which is worth maybe hundreds, maybe even thousands of dollars. And for a similar amount, you could actually save a child on the other side of the world. Now that example is super compelling for a lot of people. And I think a lot of the work there is because of this idea of not making a distinction between this girl and the girl that's on the other side of the world. And so I want to kind of start highlighting that more in my communication. That's something I've been reflecting on lately.

James:

Is that because you find that you're kind of saying people find it intuitive? But I guess do you think that they struggle with it when it comes to, I guess maybe is it animal stuff is like the link? Or yeah, I guess in what way do you find it kind of breaks down, or given what we can, or you have to do more effort to promote impartiality?

Sjir:

I think people endorse it when you ask them. Like, should we discriminate between people here in the Netherlands where I live or people in a sub-Saharan African country, for example? They will endorse and they will also even endorse that. For example, dogs and cats might have a similar experience as Kids and Tickens to some extent, but then they don't act in accordance with it often, and they aren't often aware that they're not consistent with that principle. And I think Peter Singer's argument really does that, like puts your nose into it, like, hey, maybe you're not being consistent with that principle. And I think we often just don't realize that, even though you want to realize it. So that that's kind of the way I'm thinking about it.

James:

Nice. Yeah. So in a way, like trying to almost craft more kind of thought-provoking or like challenging thought experiments or like situations where people have to confront this impartiality almost concidissonance a bit more directly, and then hopefully, you know, change their behavior to act on it in terms of giving to effective charities, et cetera, et cetera.

Sjir:

Yeah, and just and also in a positive way, right? It doesn't have to be it is confronting to a lot of people, but it's also about just sharing this principle. I think that a lot of people do believe in, but just might might not be aware they're not acting consistently with. So it's kind of helping them also being more consistent with their values and and kind of that they can also be framed as a benefit to them. So it doesn't have to be as confrontational.

James:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. A big part of probably why a lot of people care about animals is you know, that they see their cats and dogs and they realize, well, why don't we extend the same thing? So I think impartial impartiality is yeah, a very important thing for movements. But yeah, talking about Giving What We Can. So you're the CEO of Giving What We Can. And well, I guess first thing is congratulations on you. You guys recently hit, is it 10,000 pledges since you guys started? And do you want to say what these people have pledged to do and maybe why this milestone is so exciting for you guys? Yeah, it's super exciting.

Sjir:

So this is about the 10% pledge. Yeah. Previously known before it was rebounded as the giving what we can pledge, but that was a whole mouthful. So the 10% pledge, yeah. Which is a personal commitment to give to what you believe are the highest impact charities out there. And that's sounds quite simple. Let me break it down a little bit because there's quite often quite a lot of misunderstandings about it. So I'm really emphasizing it's a personal commitment and what you believe to be the highest impact charities because it's not a pledge to give what we can, it's a pledge to yourself. And it's a pledge to try to find where your money can do the most good. And we're there to support you, not to police you or to say this is the most effective thing and this isn't. We're there to make it easy, basically. So give what we can, the organization I lead exists to make it really easy for people, for those 10,000 people who are already doing this to give effectively. And so we give them recommendations, we give them easy ways of giving via our website, we give them resources, ways of talking about it. The second thing we do is try, of course, to spread the word further that ultimately a lot more people learn about this and might be inspired to join in. Yeah, we're super excited that we've now hit the 10,000. For me, it feels like both a really big celebration moment, but also kind of showing the potential of a lot more. Because frankly, we haven't really tried yet to reach a really broad audience. And I think there's so many people who could join in here and then we could do so much good. So it's a pretty good, good moment to chat.

James:

I don't know if you collect this kind of data, but like off the top of your head, do you know roughly, you know, if all those 10,000 people are, let's assume they're still giving 10%. Do you know roughly how much that total adds up to? Like if they share the salaries or they're giving monthly, but yeah, roughly how much is that right now?

Sjir:

Yeah, even better, we know how much they actually give, or quite quite a lot about that. We don't know it perfectly because everyone reports. And obviously, not everyone gives via our platform, they don't have to, but but a lot of people do. And so we know, in a sense, at least that this community of pledgers gives about $50 million per year. And we can estimate, kind of based on historic giving, that the average pledger gives about a hundred thousand over their lifetime, lifetime. So in total, the current community is expected to give about a billion over their lifetimes. Wow. And the vast majority of that to places that we think are really high impact. That's also what we find when we look into where people give. Not everyone gives in the same place, which is great, where they have to support. And we might not always agree with all our pledges, that's also fine. But we see that a lot of people end up giving to places that have a lot of evidence supporting them, that really are in high high impact causes that need a lot more money. And that's uh really encouraging to see.

James:

Yeah. Well, yeah, that is a kind of a startling number, is just yeah, for the average lifetime pledge is like a hundred thousand, ten thousand members, like a billion overall in donations uh over like this this cohort's lifetime, assuming no kind of no growth. I think that is pretty incredible feat already. So I guess congrats. That that's that's very exciting. And I guess why do you feel like it's important for people to take the pledge? Or like what why did you take the pledge, for example?

Sjir:

I would kind of break that down into two questions. Like, why is it important to give effectively? And then why is it important to pledge in particular, right? I think you a while back, you had top novel, which I yeah, which I'm trying to listen to. And you talked about the importance of effective giving. I think he he described it really well there, which is just there's so little money available currently to do to work on some of the highest impact costs, including factory farming out there. And so for the whole factory farming space, it's maybe in the order of 100 million per year, maybe even less. Compare that to how much money there is in the kind of the opposing forces there, right? That the industry is just completely crazy. I think I had a nice analogy there. Just the extra dollar can do a lot of good. So in the effective animal advocacy space, we just know that with every dollar we can meaningfully help, say, a chicken be free from a battery cage. That's just quite quite incredible. It's actually a really bad fact about our world, I think, that we live in a world where it's so cheap to help others because it means we're we're not really taking good care of things. But it's also, in a way, an optimistic message because it means we can do a lot of good if we come together. So that's the the effective giving part. It's really there's so much to do, and we just need money, and the next bit of money will help. Your extra dollar, your extra $100, your extra $1,000 will help a lot to solve really major problems affecting our world today.

James:

I totally agree. And I guess on the movement is roughly between $200 and $300 million. A bit bigger than you you say, but yeah, still in the big scheme of things, very small. You're right, definitely compared to our opponents. One thing that was really prominent in people probably saw the Dwarkesh podcast with Lewis Bollard, which went very viral and raised lots of money. I think Dwarkesh, he kept repeating that the fact that he was so excited was I I think the stat he used was, you know, one dollar convert, I didn't know if he said like a year of animal suffering, like up to 10 years of animal suffering, like per dollar you give. So it's gunderscores. I think from a lot of problems, you feel a bit like futile, like, oh, if I give $10, what's that really gonna do? But actually in this case, there's pretty good evidence. And like you said, it's a sad fact of the world that the animals are treated so poorly and that there's such little money going into it. Actually, even, you know, $10 to like $100 makes like a huge difference for like literally maybe hundreds of animals. So yeah, it definitely doesn't feel like a space where it's going to some other random big thing and nothing's really, really, really ever changing. So yeah, I think that's a hopefully inspiring message for people.

Sjir:

It's just so hard to intuit these kind of large numbers, and it might feel like a drop in the bucket sometimes, how much you can do. But then if you look at what your dollar can actually do when we look at the evidence there, it's quite compelling and crazy. And a lot of people just aren't aware of that, is our experience. And so that's that's why effective giving we think is important. Now, the pledge in particular, why is it important what we are that we're focusing on the pledge? Is basically that works. So it's it's a mechanism that we've really seen working. And I and you asked me about my about my pledge. I've experienced this myself. I'm confident I would not have given as much as I have if it wasn't for the pledge. And I took the pledge years before I joined, giving what we can. That's one. And it also, it's not just that it helped me give more, but it's also made my giving more intentional and more focused and more fun, a lot more fun just to have people around me who also took the pledge to discuss this with yearly pledge party, say, where we all come together and make our 10% donations. People experience this quite differently. Some people, it's just really a thing you automate and you put 10% away and you know you're doing something good. Some people make a whole thing about it, but we found consistently that people really get a lot of value out of out of taking a pledge, and it really holds them accountable to themselves to have this big impact in the world. So, and again, we see that in the numbers, right? Like I said, we the average person taking a 10% pledge gives about 100,000 over their lifetime. That's a lot of money, and a lot more than the average donor gives. So it just works and the potential here is huge. So even our current community, like we just said, is expected to give a billion over the lifetimes and has already given more than 300 million. The potential for scale here, why couldn't it be a million pledgers? That would be a hundred billion. What we could do with that as a community, as a collective, in a much better way, I think, a more diversified way than only relying, say, on a few billionaires to fund everything. I think it's just super kind of possibly inspiring and powerful to change the world.

James:

Most people who work inside the animalcy movement, so you know, maybe maybe they work for many of the great nonprofits work in the space, maybe they work on policy or you know, academic-related things. But most people I think Lucent are relatively focused on like that this is their life's goal to help animals. And as a result of that, you know, they're probably already committing like probably lots of their professional time and probably lots of their free time. So do you think it makes sense for people who are already like committing loads of like other resources to the issue to also donate? Or yeah, how do you think about people who already work full-time on a given issue?

Sjir:

My answer, I think, is yes, I would recommend it to most people. And that there's always exceptions, and I think there are exceptions here, but I think they're quite rare, actually. And the reason I I myself like to be an example of this, I also do direct work next to my own pledging. But I have so many people around me, and some of the people who inspire me most with their careers are also pledgers. So that's like the kind of examples I see around me. But I think there's also real reasons why, actually, rather than being a trade-off, these two parts of doing good can strengthen each other, mutually reinforce each other. So, for example, for myself, I just the pledge and the giving allows me to both be able to zoom out every year and think again about okay, what are all these big problems? What do I really think I can support? And also keep me grounded because I know every year that I'm making some concrete impact through my giving. And that's quite different from my job, which can be quite focused sometimes, and it has been over the years. Now it's quite broad, but it has also been, as an impact researcher, which I was before sometimes very focused on a particular space. And that's true for many people in their careers. I think they focus on something, they take risks, and it might lead to nothing. I think it can just be really motivating to know that at least some part of your work is leading to something really incredible.

James:

It's funny. On that, it's funny. I often speak with my partner about this. And I I think, but you know, I think it's kind of normal you kind of have ruts in work. Uh, I'm sure we've we've all been there. It's like, you know, you feel unproductive or demoralized. Things aren't going very well. But I think we I sometimes we say we say to each other, it's like, you know, even if I achieve nothing today, I'm still giving 10% of my income a year. And like that's still a great thing. And it's like, well, that's still like a very meaningful. So it's like, you know, actually the worst case is you're still doing some good, which uh, yeah, I think like you said, is feels very like motivating and very like reassuring that you're still doing something nice, even if like other things aren't going that great in your life. Yeah, exactly.

Sjir:

I think it's an incentive to keep looking broad, keep yourself honest. It's yeah, I think it allows you to advocate more genuinely and independently to other people about a cause, because once you're working in a cause, your identity is so attached to it that people might think, oh, you're just advocating for a job, just for what you are working on. Resident giving, it's quite like a bit more detached than you can give to multiple causes and you because you're giving in different places, you can talk about different things. And so I think there's multiple reasons why it might actually allow you to be a better advocate as well. And I was actually wanted to ask you, James, because I know you're in need of pledger as well. I'm a pledger. You're one of those people I think of. I'm like, oh, yeah, a lot of people work in this space. How did you think about this question?

James:

I guess related to my partner, who I think she is slightly less into effective giving, let's say, that than I am. But then I think for some reason one day I was on the Giving What We Can website looking at the pledgers, and then I saw her name. I was like, what the hell? You pledged before me. I almost like felt like annoyed or competitive. You can see I'm a very competitive person. And I was like, I'm gonna pledge. And I think I pledged straight away. Nice, yeah. I didn't get right in that. It was the thing where like I intuitively was like, this is totally a good thing to do. There's like absolutely no reason why people shouldn't give to tech the charities if they have the means to do so. But I hadn't like, you know, I maybe put two and two together or like actually made a change in my life to do this. So once I take the pledge, I was like, I'm doing this. And I think that was in like late 2021. And I've I actually upped the pledge recently. I I'm now giving 16.5% of my income, a very specific number. Nice. But yeah, and it's something I feel really good about. And like you said, I think at the beginning, you know, it was nice to almost do like a mini little circle with some friends where like eight of us sort of get together and pull our donations and like give to some charities. And yeah, it felt very fun. And yeah, I think I actually read that you give 50%, which is a very large number. Tell me about that. How are you managing that?

Sjir:

I mean, it's it's mostly because I I think I'm paid very well and I just don't need throughout my life. One thing I've tried to do is not link my expenses too much to my income, but more to what I kind of need. So I try to track that. I'm kind of nerd in that way, tracking my expenses and have a spreadsheet since 2016 tracking all that and and try to not have it go up too much, get used to things. And from that, I just I just don't need much more, and I feel like my mother money is better spent on others because I know of the opportunities out there. So yeah, and that for me actually has been a very fun thing. So it's like I'm optimizing, it's like almost a gamified thing as well. I'm trying to just optimize the amount of money I can give over my life and and try to become like giving millionaire or something. Like, try to become millionaire for status and and and like, but no, no, let's go for giving millionaire instead.

James:

That is very cool. Yeah, I mean, I'm like, yeah, that's actually a very inspiring milestone, and like it's like probably challenging, but like maybe not impossible. I don't know. Yeah, like a nice balance, I think.

Sjir:

So yeah, yeah. And I know, of course, I'm very privileged also in in in my salary, how I grew up. And I I don't want to make this sound like I think everyone should try to become a giving millionaire or that everyone can even meet the 10% pledge. There are exceptions, and we also have a trial pledge, where maybe we can talk about a bit more later. I found it to be much easier than I expected and a lot actually more meaningful and fun to give than I would have believed that maybe 10 years ago before I knew about all of this.

James:

You're definitely right. It is some identity thing where like once you do it, I feel like I'm gonna become more enthusiastic about it over time. It's something that like you kind of develop this kind of nice identity and you can share it with people. Yeah, like friends and family, which is I think quite nice. If people are working, you know, let's say full-time on animal issues, how do you think about them or in terms of giving to maybe the charity they work for, like salary sacrificing, giving to other charities in this place, giving to like other issues? How do you think about you know this question of like do you salary sacrifice it back to giving what we can? Do you do you give it to other places? Do you do a bit of a both? Like, how do you think about people who are working full-time and how they should maybe think differently about the donations versus someone who's totally outside movement?

Sjir:

In most cases, I wouldn't probably advise people doing this, but I also think there's definitely cases where it can make sense. And that would be weird for me to say you should never do it because I'm doing it myself. You wouldn't advise how salary sacrifice, you'd advise giving directly to the charities. And to give directly to other charities than the one you work for. There's a few reasons. The simplest one, I think, and the most important one is that it would be quite coincidental, right? If you work for the charity that where your money also does the most good. Yeah, yeah. Talent and money are really different things, and some of the best organizations out there don't need more money, but need more talent and vice versa. And so there are reasons that can compensate for that, right? Because it's more tax-sufficient, that you're just taking a lower salary, you don't kind of take it out and then send it back. And so that can compensate for that. So there are cases, I think, where this holds. I think also you can legitimately, but again, this is up to the pledger to ultimately hold themselves accountable for. In certain situations, I think you could count it against your pledge if you really know I'm sacrificing something that I would otherwise have certainly had, and I really think this is the highest impact place for this money to go, would be my my personal way of thinking about it. That said, I think, yeah, in most cases, you lose out on some of the advantages that the pledge offers. Like we were just talking about that you're giving more broadly and are able to zoom out and and kind of disidentify with only your job and that you're working on, and being an example for others in your advocacy. So I personally do salary sacrifice, a large part of my giving, but I also still give to other organizations and in a broader space, you still get that benefit.

unknown:

Yeah.

Sjir:

And salary sacrifice because I know almost for a fact, because given weekend has an impact evaluation that shows our multiplier that I think our money is going to be spent really well the extra bit. So again, up to the pledger to think about this carefully and thoughtfully.

James:

Given you guys are trying to promote effectiveness, it would it would be kind of very coincidental if like people happen to work at the most effective charity, you know, with their own money. It's like given that there probably isn't that many of those and you know, many different pledges, the act of giving, I think, is just nice. And I think if you have a salary sacrifice, you don't actually obviously don't get it to give. Whereas I find, you know, if I just go on recently, like I went on the giving what we can website and like gave to some charities, and I was like, feels good just to like click a button and like send a bunch of money to go do good. And I think you don't get that like small act of maybe validation, which yeah, the if you're just kind of salary sacrificing it away.

Sjir:

That resonates, yeah. For me as well, the reason to I want to keep having those pledge parties with my friends every year and allocate our 10% and discuss about it and get challenged. Also to keep myself honest again. Like I don't, I think if I give it away everything to my own, it might give me tunnel vision on my own work, even though I currently believe we have strong evidence that it's it's worth it.

James:

You you kind of hinted at that there's maybe times when you're not sure if it's the best thing for people to take the pledge. I guess what are the kind of factors or situations where you maybe wouldn't advise it or you'd advise an amended version of the 10% pledge?

Sjir:

Yeah, so I think definitely for the 10% pledge, it it might not, it's not for everyone. First of all, of course, it's not for the vast majority of the world lives in in a lot more poverty than you and I do, right? And I think most listeners to this podcast will probably be in the in the top 10% or so of the world's income. And if you want to know where you are, there we have this How Rich Am I calculator on our website that kind of tells you where you are in the global income distribution. It's quite surprising, I can tell you.

James:

So yeah. I mean, maybe just to linger on that for a second, that that's a really good thing that we didn't bring up yet, which I actually found very powerful, and I think was almost certainly an inspiration for me giving and giving more was I think I I put my salary into the calculator and I think I don't remember the exact numbers, but maybe the top like three percent globally, and that's kind of um a crazy thing to to think about and to realize. And I think, you know, yeah, if you're basically living in Europe and in the UK, like on a median or above salary, you know, you probably are in the top like five or ten percent, which is yeah, it's like if you're not gonna give, then it's like who is gonna give? So yeah, I definitely think I definitely would recommend people checking out the calculator and doing it for them and yeah, seeing what it feels like.

Sjir:

I think still there might be people might give different amounts. Like I said, I give a lot now, but it's just also because I'm able to and in a really good position for that. People might have, I know in the US, health insurance is a much bigger issue, getting your kids into college, things like that might really make it much more difficult. Well, some of the reasons might just be financial reasons. And I think for that we have this other thing, which is called the trial pledge. And the trial pledge allows you to specify a percentage yourself between one and 10%, and and also your duration, so between six months and five years rather than a lifetime pledge. And it exists for various reasons. One is just as a try, as a trial, and so it might be a bit of a big thing to take your first step immediately, pledge 10% of your income for the rest of your life when you're new to something. Bit of a big ask. And the trial pledge is really a way to figure out what pledging can mean for you, and so to kind of get that identity feeling of like, oh, I'm putting this apart aside to allocate to higher impact charities. I took one myself in 2018 before I took the 10% pledge in 2019, and it allowed me to really feel confident about the 10% pledge when I took it. I took a 5% trial pledge the year before when I got my first kind of regular salary. I really recommend it to people who feel like 10% a lifetime. There's some people who are like immediately, yes, I I obviously I'll do this, but for the vast majority of people, it will be a big ask and something you want to try out first. It's also if you if 10% is just too much for you in your life currently, you might just want to choose a lower percentage with your trial pledge and then adjust it every year to your situation. We have a lot of people who do that as well. And with a trial pledge, you get the same benefits, if you will, as the 10% pledge. You're a full member of our community. It's not that you're in any way a less regarded or or a part of it. We ultimately our goal is to reach a million pledgers, not only 10% pledgers. And so we we do think the 10% pledge is a really good aim for a lot of people because many people can miss 10% and it's easier than it seems. And we think it should be a norm in that sense, but it doesn't mean everyone can do it.

James:

I think there's still yeah quite along with the trial pledges, and it definitely does make sense to maybe see how it goes for the first period of time before you commit to a lifetime thing. It's like a personal commitment, it's not necessarily it's not like a legally binding thing where like you have to give and give what we can, your money. So I guess I assume if like circumstances change, you can change, or like yeah, how does that work if like your life situation changes? Good point.

Sjir:

So one misunderstanding about the pledge is that it's a 10% per year pledge. So every year you have to give 10%. So it's a lifetime pledge, and that means that over from the moment you pledge until you retire, you pledge to give 10% over that total amount. That means that if you have a year in which you can't meet the 10%, that's completely fine, and you might make it up in other years where you can. And so it's really about you expecting to give 10% over your lifetime. And so we know there are some people who feel like they don't want to do it because there might be years where they can't pay it. Yeah, yeah. That's actually a misunderstanding. It's completely fine to do that. Of course, we do recommend people to kind of stay on track when they can, or even maybe be a bit ahead of it. That's what I try to do myself. As with any promise you would make to someone, there are always reasons you could break it. This is true for marriage. This is true for marriage, quite quite quite literally. But it's true for the pledge as well. Marriage is also a quite powerful pledge you make. There are situations that can change. And so, for example, if you think, oh, I'm gonna go into this career uh and I'm I'm gonna be able to give 10%, but then it turns out you can't, or you get a you some misfortune hits you or your family, you can de-pledge. So there is a possibility to step away. Obviously, we don't encourage people to do that too regularly, but yeah, I really like the metaphor, the analogy that Toby Ord, one of our co-founders, uses for this sometimes. If you pledge to pick up someone else's kids from school, right? Say you bring your kids to school and you say, Oh, I'll I'll promise to pick up your other kids from school as well. And then on your way to school, you hear your house is on fire, they wouldn't blame you for not picking up their kids, right? They would be fine with running going back quickly and and doing something. And it's a similar thing here like you can't predict everything, we don't know whether we'll be able. To fulfill everything, but we can make a very serious commitment to doing this if nothing crazy happens.

James:

You kind of assume that the default is nothing crazy happens. Where do you personally give? So I guess there's always giving what we can. You said, but is anywhere else that you give to and like, yeah, maybe thoughts on like funds versus individual charities and how how you guys, or how you maybe how you personally think about this?

Sjir:

It part of the need goes to giving what we can, and it's not not just because it's giving what we can, because I generally think there's a strong argument for meta or like effective giving charities that promote the idea of effective giving itself because of this multiplier reasoning that every dollar that goes into say giving what we can can bring like more than five times that amount of money is kind of our estimate currently. And and there's all kinds of caveats to it, but the multiplier effect itself seems to exist. And to me, it's just it means that there's more money going to a lot more other charities. Yeah, yeah. That's one. So it's not only giving what we can, I also have given in the past to Dunia Effective here in here in the Netherlands, for example, and also to other meta-organizations outside of effective giving. So Animal Advocacy Careers, for example, is one I've supported in the past. I've supported some early stage AIM incubated charities. Oh, nice. AIM is Ambitious Impact. So they they have a charity entrepreneurship program that starts new charities. I try to really diversify, also to keep myself honest for where I think I just really don't know what is the highest impact area. And I want to kind of be able to speak to different ones. So it's a good incentive for me to read up on various things and to be able to represent those to other people as well.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Sjir:

But I'm probably most excited, my best guess for where all the impact lies is in these kind of multiplier charities. Yeah, yeah. The hard thing there is you need kind of insider info to be able to know where to give, apart from maybe giving what we can because we have an impact evaluation, but there's no funds out there, charity evaluators on this space. So you're going a bit more on other information. On the funds versus charity point, I generally give to funds where where that's possible. So if there had been a meta-effective giving fund, I'd probably give them there. Because funds for listeners who don't know how they work, they're expert directed. And so someone allocates the funds where they are needed most in the moment at that point. And so that means that you're getting the money where it's needed at that point and not just based on, say, maybe now deprecated evidence or and you're able to fill the most urgent gaps in the space rather than going on previous information. For example, in the animal advocacy space, I've given to our own effective animal advocacy fund, which is based on our research into where you can best allocate your money there.

James:

Yeah, you have recommendations in animal affair space. So yeah, excited to dive into that. But maybe before that, I'm kind of curious how have people in your personal life reacted to your giving? And I guess how do you think about getting your friends and family involved in effective giving?

Sjir:

Yeah, well, this actually is a really it's been a kind of a revelation for me. This was, I think, before, maybe when I was just a given weekend, I was just, of course, talking to people about effective giving sometimes. And then I heard from two friends who took a pledge based on talking to me without me actually really advocating for it. They just done it. And I was just astounded, be like, whoa, this is crazy. Like these people are now giving because of these fun conversations we've had. And that was kind of really meaningful and also kind of deepened our connection. One thing I found is that generally people are just quite positive when you're not trying to push them to do anything and when you're not like pushing, saying like you also should do this. Yeah. That's not too surprising, maybe. But what is surprising to me is how positive also for my relationships and just how much fun it has been to share more actively and invite people to join, not persuade them to join, but just ask them to talk about it. So, an example here, when I started doing this more, talking about this, because I heard from my friends, I was like, oh wow, maybe I can more proactively talk about this now. For my birthday, I asked people to have a 30-minute conversation with me about effective giving. That was my only birthday gift asked. Not that they give anything, but they take a pledge conversation. And that actually led to quite a few people pledging ultimately. And it was not because in that 30 minutes I had like a pitch prepared and a presentation. Yeah, yeah.

James:

Wait, wait, but for some background, like are these friends like, you know, your friends who are already like sympathetic or interested in like effective altruism or effect giving, or people who were like totally unrelated and yeah, kind of curious like how these conversations actually went.

Sjir:

Yeah, these are high school, university friends, my parents, family. Like it's it's really been people who actually didn't know about this because the friends that are active in these spaces knew about this already, and many had pledged. Or what happened often in those conversations is I would just ask them what they knew about effective giving, whether they knew about this 10% pledge, and then what they thought about it. And then I'd clarify things that they might not know about or give them some information. But they mostly just told me, Oh, this sounds actually pretty good. Why would I not give 10% if I can have so much impact? And then I'd ask them at some point, have you considered it for yourself? And often something would come back of like, I think it's good, but maybe not now, or maybe I don't have enough money now, or I first want to buy a house or like have a child or something like that. And then often it would end up with them taking a trial pledge because they're like, Yeah, that makes sense. And that's all in like half-time conversation, or with some follow-ups often, it's often not just one conversation. But yeah, and that can just lead to someone becoming a pledger and maybe giving 100,000 over their lifetime. I I think that's just really underappreciated how much power we also have with our networks and with sharing what we're doing. So that to me has been a really big discovery and also something that's made me really exciting about the role I'm in now and working as if we can, the power of just sharing information with people, not having to persuade them, but just yeah, giving them the opportunity basically to use it.

James:

Nice. That is cool. Yeah, I I've tried a few small things like this. Like I've done did like a triathlon fundraiser for I guess what one global health, one animal welfare charity. And I guess try to like, you know, share this with my friends and family, get them excited about giving, and I think it'll work, but yeah, I guess maybe I haven't tried this for Deal for the Pledge. This is an interesting one. Although maybe I need some more friends who are not so bought in. I'll work on that. Although actually, fun fact, maybe you don't know about this. I play for a tag rugby team and uh we have giving what we can on the on the front of our on the front of our t-shirts. Yes, yeah. I spoke with Grace to make it happen. We have the humane league UK on the back and giving what we can on the front, which is which led to some good conversations. I I think it's like some fun ways that you can try to bring it in. So if anyone is in the amateur sports teams, I highly recommend doing this. Obviously, if you guys are okay with it. I remember the picture now. I've seen that come by at some point. I've forgotten about it. I'm glad. I'm glad. It's it's cutting the wash. I would show the video, but it I played last night. But yeah, actually, one thing you mentioned that maybe we haven't spoken about too much, which I guess it's like this challenging thing where maybe you could give money away and you could be okay with it, but it's also like you know, you're trying to plan for your future, like, oh, I should save for a house, or I want to save for a retirement, and like there's like these like uh human tendencies, like maybe natural things you you want to do to feel safe and secure in your life. Um, and this is obviously stronger depending on how you grow up and how much money you actually have, etc. etc. I guess like how do you think about navigating giving versus planning ahead and thinking about your future life? Because it's yeah, it needs to kind of feel an intention at least a little bit.

Sjir:

It could be one reason to delay at least taking a 10% pledge, I think, for many people. People have no reserves, for example, coming straight out of university or being in university, and you and you really feel unsure and financially insecure, and you feel like giving that 10% would really make you feel even more insecure, you might instead say consider it 1% trial pledge. Yeah. And note, of course, that the pledge is always proportional to your income. So the 1% will be of whatever income you earn. I do think that there is value in just starting, right? And that's also why I kind of do recommend the trial pledge so much. And I'm less kind of, you know, if you will, pushy on the 10% pledge because I feel the 10% pledge is such a serious commitment. You really want to make that when you're serious about it and you know you want to do this and you're ready to do this for the rest of your life. Whereas a trial pledge can just be like a one-year, 1% commitment and is quite a simple ask and gets you going. And it means that at the end of the trial pledge, you automatically get a reminder, hey, what do you want to do next? And it means that you get to ask again. And so what I've noticed, oddly enough, also have people very committed to these principles in this broader effective giving, effective altruism movement, and advocacy space. There's quite a few people that maybe already even give effectively or or are very open to doing so, but haven't taken a pledge simply because they haven't been asked or because they never sat down to do it. Yeah, yeah. That's a shame because those people, not only would they give more themselves, maybe, but they are also great advocates. And so the trial pledge really activates you as an advocate at that point and makes it possible for you to keep evaluating over time whether you want to do more or less, or drop it. Yeah. So for in most of those cases, in planning things, if uh I would think about that. And I also just think there is some value in trying, because only then will you see the benefits.

James:

It's almost coming back to this like how rich are your calculator. It's like, you know, as this is more philosophical, but like as nice it is for you to plan ahead, it's like you could also be helping so many things, beings, humans, whatever, with the money you're giving. So it's like I kind of think of it as like if maybe in the case of getting a salary raise, I try, would like give which one while my push percentage went up, I would kind of maybe save a bit for myself to maybe for saving and then give maybe some of the raise away. Because I'm like, okay, uh like you said at the beginning, clearly if you could live previously and and you're okay and come comfortable and happy, there's no reason why your expenses need to keep on going. So you kind of expect that if people get raises, that hopefully they they can you know give a good chunk of that that raise if they are getting them towards effective giving. So that's a really good important point.

Sjir:

Like adaptation is both the the enemy and the friend here in the sense that it's why people get they get used to their income and therefore it feels like a like a big loss to lose 10%. But then the other way around, once you're doing it already, you'll never miss it because you've already reserved it anyway. And so we see a lot of people who maybe take the 10% pledge in university and just always do it and never felt like they missed anything.

James:

Yeah, yeah. Now that it's been a few years, I just have you know, money leaves my leaves my bank account, you know, the same day every month. I don't do anything, and it's just like it's almost like I don't feel anything, it doesn't exist. It's just like it's just like a unchangeable part of my life now. There's just like it's happening without my my kind of like direct influence. So yeah, trial budget definitely seems like a good place to start and then see how see how it goes for you. Yes, so we we've spoken a bunch about centages and how much people give and the amounts people can give either you know in a year over their lifetime. We haven't spoken too much about how effectively they give or where the money actually goes. So can you touch about how important this bit is into the puzzle? Like, do you think this is more important than then giving? And yeah, how how do you think about their donation decision in terms of where they go?

Sjir:

Yeah, really good question. Thanks, Jim. Important point to make because we might maybe be, as we're both pledgers and have been doing this for a while, kind of thinking about effective giving as a kind of given. Yeah. But it is quite a counterintuitive thing in itself. And I think the most important point indeed is actually this idea that you can give, say, a hundred times more effectively than if you just randomly give. So if you if you follow evidence and if you follow principles that can be used. And that's just a uh again a counterintuitive thing. It's like having a 99% discount on something, and but then not but then not that suspiciously. So say if you'd say if you'd buy a TV for a thousand euros and you'd find one for $10 or something, right? Then you maybe be suspicious about the quality of the TV. But now imagine that $10 TV actually has all these amazing reviews from people who have also bought it, and that's kind of what effective giving is. It's like you're not only choosing for things that seem 100 times better, you're choosing for things that have these evaluators, these evaluations, supporting them, have some evidence, supporting them in many cases. Uh, a big difference is when we look more deeply into how much good charities do. And this is true across cars areas. This is true for human uh well-being and suffering, with some charities saving a life, like with with the most famous example is malaria nets. By distributing malaria nets, you can save a life on average for $5,000. Whereas we're happy to spend, say, $100,000 easily in some countries to save a life year of someone and living in a high-income country, just these these contrasts are crazy. A similar thing is true in the animal space, where yeah, for for a couple of dollars or even just a dollar, you could probably save a hen, a negative hen from a battery cage. Whereas people spend, might donate to their local animal shelter and spend maybe tens of dollars, multiple tens of dollars to just help one animal be sheltered for a little bit. There's these huge differences there as well. And that's because what drives money in the charitable sector is not necessarily effectiveness, it's not necessarily what helps animals most or helps humans most. It's what does the best in appealing to donors. And that's what we want to change with effective giving, right? Not fully change because we want our pledgers and our donors to be able to give where they think they can do the most good, but that's often not the thing that first appeals to you first, or like the thing that pulls your heartstrings the most when you hear about it, or that has the best marketing budget, or has the most people on the street. So that's that's the big innovation here of effective giving, in addition to the impartiality thing that we've talked about before, which is that we try to really weigh people and animals and the likes equally as much as we can in our exigence here.

James:

Yeah, I totally agree that maybe we didn't speak about it too much because in a way, at least for me, it seems kind of like a a given or kind of obvious that, of course, you know, the same amount of money, if you can help you know more chickens, more fit more fish, whatever, else with less, of course you you pick the better option. But then the question is, you know, how well can an individual you know actually decide which charity is more effective, it's hard to know, which is yeah, I guess thanks to charities like animal charity evaluators I guess is the main one doing things farm kind has recommendations based on on ACE. So yeah, I I think it's definitely can't be kind of understated how big the differences are. And I I think in in global health that well there's much better evidence, you know, people do estimate the the range, like you said, it is on the order of a hundred X if not more. So it's like it's not just something to pass at. And I think someone else made a good comment is often people quite try really hard to to give based on like tax deductibility and other things. And it's like, you know, it's good to be tax efficient, but maybe you save like you know 20% of your donation amount. But actually, if you give effectively, you can give like 100x more effectively. So surely that's like actually way more important. So yeah, I think again, just underscoring how important that this point is. And I'm kind of curious, what's the role like giving what we can plays in nudging people to give more effective advice? Like who do you recommend maybe in animal space or who do you rely on to give good advice?

Sjir:

Yeah, so we like I said, really exist to help our pledgers give effectively and support them in doing this. And we do this by kind of collating all the evidence out there from various valuators and various cause errors who are trying to find the highest impact charities according to certain value systems and empirical beliefs. Again, we we have a lot of different pledgers. We all have different values, and we're trying to support all of them and so provide kind of multiple different types of information there. We do this, we don't have the internal capacity to evaluate all the charities in the world ourselves. And so instead of trying to do that or trying to evaluate a few charities, we really rely on other independent evaluators that we then evaluate for their recommendations. What that means is we don't evaluate their recommendations, we evaluate the process by which they make their recommendations so that we can so that we know we can rely on their recommendations in the area they are specialized in. This means that we don't need the specialized knowledge in the area. We just look at the processes they use, the methods, and it means that we can serve a lot more donors. And and also we provide a really nice, I think, function in the in the broader impact ecosystem by being a check on many of these independent evaluators in a hopefully positive way.

James:

Yeah, yeah. It's funny, I remember when Game of We Can launched the Evaluating the Evaluators project, I think maybe I guess a couple of years ago, and I was like, is this April Fool's Day? It's like, what's happening here? It's like how many layers of meta and abstraction? I'm like, who's gonna evaluate Game What We Can to see if they're good at evaluating evaluators? Why did this start? Obviously, you know, obviously I'm being a bit facetious, but like, what kind of led you to be like, oh, this is a role we need to play in in the ecosystem?

Sjir:

Yeah, so back in 2022, I was hired as director of research for Given What We Can. I was coming from Founders Pledge, where I had been an impact researcher and advisor. And at Founders Pledge, we did direct evaluations of charities in various cause areas, and I had done those myself. But then I became director of research at Give What We Can. And my job was really to justify our recommendations. And Given What We Can was already recommending many organizations, but it was in a way purely based on public reputation and trust in certain other organizations. Yeah. And fortunately, the ecosystem, so the the set of organizations providing this was growing, but it also meant that there's just a lot of organizations that can say, hey, I'm an impact folks devaluator, trust me, here's some nice statistics. Well, how do I know they actually are, right? And I didn't feel like I could justify kind of even also personally knowing some people in those ecosystems. Like I would afraid, be afraid I'd be biased. I think, I think as we professionalize and grow this ecosystem, we need more than just relying on trust and claims there. Yeah, yeah. But the first reason was just we needed recommendations, I need to justify them. And I felt we need to practice what we preach, follow the evidence, do the checks.

James:

Nice.

Sjir:

Now, there were more benefits that I found out kind of exploring this. So it took me a while to kind of explore whether this was worth it. And I also found there's just many other organizations which had the same problem. Smaller organizations in say many countries that don't have their own researchers available that that needed this. So we're also kind of providing a service to them sharing our research, and which makes it very important that our research is public, right? And it is, so it's all it's not just an internal thing. And then last but not least, I think actually one of the things I've been most positively surprised by so far in this project is the impact on the evaluators themselves and on the ecosystem. So the question was could we bring out kind of best practices and hope they were shared more between evaluators and put in place incentives for people and for evaluators to put in place those best practices? And I think we've seen very concrete evidence sometimes of that working, which is really rewarding for us to see how receptive some evaluators have been to that. So those are kind of the three buckets, like our own recommendations, those of others, and then the ecosystem of evaluators improving that.

James:

On what criteria, like or on what metric are you evaluating the evaluators? You kind of mentioned you're going for the process, but you know, it is the end goal. You just want to understand which process you think ends up with the most effective donation opportunities, and that that's like the end goal.

Sjir:

Kind of. So to maybe to give listeners a bit of an idea of what these are by these evaluators. So we're talking about organizations like Give Well, who tries to find the most cost-effective opportunities to save lives, to improve lives globally, global health and development generally. Animal charity evaluators, you already mentioned, many listeners will be familiar with them, who does this in the animal welfare space. You also have Giving Green, for example, in the climate space. You have various of them. And the Happy Alive Institute, which tries to do this within the broader well-being space. Now, they have different metrics themselves by which they they look into things, but what they share are certain concepts and principles and methods that we can evaluate them on. So are they really taking into account that it's not the same that you're doing a lot of good work and that you need money for that work, for example, right? Are they really recommending organizations that need money for their next project, or are they just recommending organizations that had really good successes with their previous projects? Those are kind of broad principles that work across global health or animal welfare or climate change or anything like that. And so we generally evaluate those kinds of questions, those process-based questions. Obviously, we can't stay fully away from the more specific questions of the area, and that's hard. Most of our evaluations are really based around those big questions, and ultimately, like you said, they amount to asking what we've defined as two separate questions. So one is is an evaluator really trying to even find the best things in a space in a particular cause area, or according to what we call a plausible worldview. So some set of volume, and obviously a lot of subjectivity in there, but we try to argue for that in our in our reports and be transparent about how we view that. And the second thing is even if they're trying it, are they doing a good job at it? Are they using the best practices we know about across cause areas? So those are the two questions we ask, and then we we use a lot of judgment calls, we have to with our limited capacity, using our principles of uh usefulness, transparency, and justifiability for everything we do. So we can't be comprehensive, but we can at least try to be useful, transparent, and do things that are justifiable. And that's what you'll see in our reports.

James:

Yeah, yeah, it makes sense. And I also made a point of clarification is you guys aren't just evaluating charity values in the traditional sense, you're also evaluating re-granters, right? So you evaluate the the various EA funds, the animal welfare fund, for example, right? That's right.

Sjir:

And that's uh in a way harder and in some in some ways easier. And there's interesting complications there, but we are because because we think, and we talked touched on this a little bit earlier, that funds often may actually be the best place for donors to give. Because these expert re-granters will will find the best places for your money to go. Yeah and in fact, many of our recommendations currently are funds in most areas because of this.

James:

I don't know if you remember this. We had a little bit of back and forth from the EA forum when I think your first round of recommendations came out. There's kind of like a few different things here, but like I mean, the first question is like if you're evaluating, I think in your case, it was you're looking at ACE movement grants, ACE recommended charities, and the EEA animal welfare fund as like three different donation opportunities for people interested in animal welfare giving, which are all can make sense of those like very good options. I always found it hard to understand like how would giving what we can decide between these ones, like who's making the right subjective calls? Because ultimately, when you go down a couple layers, you know, of course there's processes involved, but I think ultimately a bunch of this stuff like relies on subjective judgments, like, you know, do we think this campaign will be good in the future or like broadly, like what's the future of the movement, or like, you know, what are we missing? And I guess I was like unsure on how an unaffiliated animal world organization, like even we can would like could accurately kind of make a judgment on like who has the right assumptions. Like, do you have any thoughts on this? Like, how have you guys can handle these, I'm I'm sure, difficult situations?

Sjir:

Yeah, let me just first of all just acknowledge that it is tricky and and I don't think we can or have always done a perfect job at it. I don't think we we even aim to in a way. We we we can't. We're trying to do, we're trying to add value, right? And and yeah, I hope and I think we've added quite a bit of value by by doing these evaluations, even though they're far from perfect, and people can disagree with them, which is also why the transparency point is so important that people who do want to delve in like you do and have criticisms can can air them and then also publicly erase them where that's relevant. Um, and then we can improve as well, and and so we can keep going. Starting this off, I didn't know whether this would work. This was the first for me as well. I had a background in this field, so I I knew about some of these best best practices across cross areas, but I didn't know whether, indeed, with my limited knowledge in many areas, particularly also in animal welfare, whether I could indeed say anything useful. And I must say, I was positively surprised by how much was to say in terms of just structural choices in evaluation. One example I could give. So two years ago, we evaluated the need ACE recommended charities, and they used certain models to make recommendations. And so ultimately we ended up at that point not recommending them. In large part, that was really because of structural reasons in their model, not because of the inputs in that model or whatever you put in there. It was really about did they look at cost effectiveness or did they consider all types of information in a kind of consistent frame? Still by my judgment, of course, but I felt like I was more able to judge that with my background than by other things on the normal wealth, like how how certain interventions in the uh in the factory farming space would compare across different species or something like that. And I do think, and it's up to the readers, of course, to judge that of these reports, like that, that we can say meaningful things there. And we've also gotten, I think, to my point earlier of what was my most surprising positive find on what we've achieved. Ace in this case did take on a lot of that feedback very positively. Obviously, that wasn't always easy, but I think they have actually really made lots of improvements to their to their evaluation methodology since. And we've seen that in our re-evaluation of them last year. Yeah, is why we ended up recommending their movement grants fund last year. And that was just really encouraging to see. And that's not all because of us. I don't want to claim that they weren't gonna do that anyway to a large extent. Yeah, yeah. I think there was some of that, and there was also some acknowledging of them of like, hey, yeah, we can also improve there. And then they had feedback for us, of course, and our processes and how we did this, which also helped. So ultimately, I feel like we're not here to be a judge and and an executioner or something of who is the best evaluator. Yeah. We're there to help donors and the evaluators themselves hopefully get to a better place.

James:

I should probably declare some conflict of interest. My girlfriend runs the Ace Movement Grants fund, Eleanor. So, you know, it's like yes, that's right. It's a fun thing. Yeah, but I mean, I I think I think you're right in that. She did find the process useful because I think she joined and then the evaluation started. So she hadn't done a round yet. So in a way, it was useful. And she was planning off lots of things to change. I think even what we can was very helpful. Also recommending a bunch of, like you said, a kind of structural and process and model-based changes. And clearly it was good on your lights because, like, like you said, now now the two recommendations you guys have for animal welfare is ACE movement grants and the e-animal welfare fund, which is like split evenly. Is that right? That's right. I know less about the changes in the ACE recommended charities, but I I I think that they they do more back of the end back of the envelope calculations trying to figure out the cost effectiveness of charities. Am I memorized? Is that like a change that has happened as a result of some of these?

Sjir:

Yeah, so one of indeed the positive notes in our report last year. So we did a re-evaluation of both programs and we ended up recommending movement grants, but not still recommended charities. But we did know those improvements for exactly that, like they are doing more back of the envelope calculations, including cost effectiveness in their consideration. Ultimately, what we're trying to find is where we think donors with various worldviews can give most effectively. And we concluded against the recommended charities simply because we thought movement grants was significantly better still at this point. And so we compared them directly with the movement grants program. And the largest reason why we didn't end up recommending recommended charities is because the movement grants program specifically evaluated new projects. They evaluated, hey, this extra money could do uh this grant could do this thing, and that would have this much impact. Whereas for many of the recommended charities programs, past programs would be evaluated, and there will be less consideration of where your money, your extra money, your new money would go. And that's just a pretty big advantage. There's of course some value in looking at past programs, but because movement grants so explicitly looked at where is the money really needed extra, and recommended charities mostly looked at are these charities doing good work generally, and less about like where does the extra money go now? Less, right? Of course, there's all nuances. We all ended up recommending one of the big reasons we recommended movement grants.

James:

Interesting. So yes, so like this focus on forward-looking funding allocation seems like a big criteria for you guys. Is that accurate?

Sjir:

Yeah, it's what it's one of the one of the large, yeah, kind of best what I call best practices of when you're looking for where you just show dollar really do the most good. And it's it's very nuanced, and I think it's super interesting. I find a very super interesting conceptual thing of like trying to tease apart in your head that's this difference between what is the best organization kind of in what they do, and which organization needs the most money now. Yeah. Like there's no such thing as a high impact charity, actually. There's charities that do a lot of good, and then there's charities that need a lot of money to do even more good.

James:

Yeah, yeah. This is interesting. But also, I think it's you know, a bit of a counterintuitive finding in the case of Ace, because also maybe for interested listeners, we had Steen van der Bleu. I hope I got that name, another another slightly complex Dutch name on quite a few episodes ago. Maybe I'll I'll link it in the in the show notes. But on ACE, yeah, they kind of hold up their recommended charities as like these are things we we feel the most confident in, and these like high-impact opportunities and moving grants is slightly more groups with, like I said, can maybe less track record, but like can be very promising. And but there's this funny tension where, like, yeah, if you were saying actually the moving grants is maybe the thing that is more cost effective, but then it excludes the recommended charities, like maybe it's a bit of like a funny irony there. Like, how do you guys think about that?

Sjir:

That's a great point. And so I should also flag, and it's also flagged in our reports, that we didn't recommend all of Ace's recommendations, right? So that we didn't follow the recommendations doesn't mean that they're Recommended charities aren't some of the best places to give. Yeah. So we evaluated their process for arriving at the recommendations, but there may still be many of those could be more impactful than movement grants, maybe even all of them, maybe, maybe none of them. We just couldn't completely, we couldn't be confident enough in the process at this point that it would be competitive with movement grants. And but it was still a powerful signal. So it's still a positive signal if you're recommended by ACE, we think, a very positive signal, even. Yeah, yeah. This is also again why we don't think everyone has to follow our recommendations. If you have the time and the expertise to delve into ACE charity recommendations and check for yourself which of these seem seem best to you, I still recommend you look at other expert opinion as well, but that might be for you as a pledger as well. But we, based on evaluating just the processes, ended up kind of being more confident in movement grants generally allocating on average money really well currently. And it it also has to do in this case with it just intrinsically being harder to provide charity recommendations than doing grant making.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Sjir:

Charity recommendations are longer term and charities change all the time. And a grantee, uh grantor, a re-grant that can just change over time. Yeah, yeah. So it's it's not too surprising in a way that that that ACE recommended charities are harder to meet the same bar.

James:

Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I think like the recommended charities program has a minimum you have to be going for three years kind of criteria. So I guess that will obviously restrict a bunch of groups that can be eligible. So it seems like given what we can recommend individual animal charities as well, like at least maybe they're listed on the platform, and these are like somewhat from ACE, but not. Can you expand more on this? I didn't quite get that.

Sjir:

Yeah, it's a good question as well. So we have our recommendations, which is what we've talked about so far. And these are really based on this evaluating evaluators project, and that's things we're really as confident as we can be currently in, that is really a high impact place for people to give. So if you just want, we want to make it easy for donors, right? So if you just want to make sure that your dollar is doing a lot of good and you have a certain value system, whether it's focused on animals or on human suffering or on the long-term future, then you can just follow these recommendations by giving to a fund like the Eve active animal advocacy fund on our website. Now, for many donors, or for some donors, they might want to be more specific or delve deeper or disagree with some of our assumptions or challenge those or just have a different value system that's not captured here well. And we also want to help those donors. And so, in addition to just those 10 recommendations or so that we currently have, we have about 50 more programs on our platform that are programs that we have some information on that they are really promising, but we don't can't recommend them. We don't have enough confidence to recommend them. It could they could be better even than our recommendations, we just don't know currently. They could also be a lot worse. So we but we have some information to think they're really promising. So they have less stringent criteria than the other things we recommend. So and that includes indeed a lot of ACE's recommendations because the fact that they're recommended by ACE is a really strong positive signal for them, even though we currently can't include them in our recommendations.

James:

That makes sense. So which are the ones that are on like that that fit into this criteria?

Sjir:

Which specific charities? Okay, so the charities that we think are really promising, that we have some positive uh note on. But I should also say these are obviously also not all the charities that we have a positive thing on, they're really just a few options that we offer to donors. So are the Humane League, uh, the Good Food Institute, Planalytics, uh, Well Animal Initiative, Fish Welfare Initiative, and Animal Advocacy Africa currently on our website. Now, by the time this podcast airs, this might be different because we're actually currently have applications open for new supported programs and have a refresh there. So it's possible that it has changed by that. And we try to at least yearly update this list, for example, based on new ACE recommendations.

James:

Nice. Interesting. Yeah, that is an interesting list because I've yeah, for example, Adam Lab Victory Africa isn't recommended by ACE. So that information must have come from like an independent source, or I guess maybe the EM Welfare Fund. So yeah, I'm kind of curious, like, where does this list come from? Then if you guys don't have the capacity to do your own research and you don't rely fully on ACE, where does the Intel to form these decisions come from?

Sjir:

Yeah, there's a there's a combination of things. So we and for each of those organizations, you can look at a page for the specific reason why they are why they are included. They have to meet a few criteria. And one of those can be indeed being recommended directly by an evaluator, or it can be that they've received a grant recently from a fund or a moving grant for the AM Welfare fund, for example. There's some historical legacy of some having been recommended over a few years, but then at some point they'll have to meet the bar to show new evidence. And if not, they might be removed from the platform. So we try to keep it relatively up to date, but also not change around every year, which would also be very inconvenient for donors and for the for the programs themselves. So there's a balancing of various criteria there to give donors a variety of options, not an exhaustive list of options. I want to really stress that this is not our top list again. We have these recommendations, which are really our recommendations, and these are other options that we think donors should consider or could consider if they want to delve deeper, but they're also not an exhaustive list.

James:

Yeah, makes sense. Yeah, I think it's always a fine balance between like you want to recommend things that you think are best because you know, like we said, the best opportunities are you know 100x even more better than kind of even the average opportunities, but at the same time, you know, different people have different kind of values or kind of preferences, so you don't want to like lose out on giving opportunities by not by not being flexible enough, I guess.

Sjir:

Yeah, that and and also just be humble. I think we need to be humble about how much we know, right? Yeah. Just talked about the limitations also of evaluating evaluators and our approach. And I think those are real. I I always go back and forth between feeling like almost imposter syndrome about how little we know, really, and then feeling like, oh, if only people knew about this, the whole world would be so much better. And I think both are true. So I think both there's just so much to gain by giving to some of these really highly effective charities and by following expert research and evaluator research. But it's also true that we know so little still, and there's only so much we can know. And but collectively, I think we're really making a lot of progress by by yeah, by using these principles to determine where to give.

James:

Yeah, makes sense. Okay, sure. So we are getting to the posing questions we like to ask all of our guests. And the first one is what's one bit of news you're grateful to hear or excited about recently?

Sjir:

One thing I have been excited, frankly, by is just the the amount of money going to animal welfare, effective animal welfare opportunities via giving what we can as well. Nice. One really big thing I don't know if many people know is that from 2021 to 2023, we had four million going to our recommendations and other supported programs on animal welfare on our platform.

James:

Each year or each year, yeah. Wow, that's a lot. Way more than I thought. That's amazing. Yeah, and last year it was actually six million. So there was a 50% increase. That's incredible.

Sjir:

Yeah, yeah, and it and it's actually growing still. So I've I I think this year we're probably gonna top that if I look at I can't share the exact numbers, but I've just looked at it and it's it's it's looking really promising this year as well. So I think that's a really exciting development. There's just so much more need for this. And uh, but we see that it is it is starting to happen.

James:

Nice. Well, that is indeed a very exciting bit of news, especially for the groups that are recommended or you know funded by the funds or evaluators. The next thing is what are some media recommendations you might have for listeners? That could be books, podcasts.

Sjir:

I wanted to recommend Moral Ambition by Rutge Brechmann, my compatriot in Medelin. I think I I listened to your episode with with Tom from Farmkind, and I think he recommended it. So I need to think of something else.

James:

As a theme with the effects of giving people really into Rutge Breckman.

Sjir:

Yeah, well, yeah, there's there's a lot of alignment there. I think Rutge is really good at telling the stories and what's possible also when you when you really not just uh effective giving, but more broadly, if you direct your career, yeah, his direction. So really quite inspiring book. I thought a bit more, and uh, I'm a big fan of good YouTube explainers, video explainers. And so I don't know if you've ever had Kurz gesagt being recommended on your podcast, but that's one I just think people, if they're not aware of it, are it's worth checking out, just such high quality explains on all kinds of things, including things relevant to our work, making the world a better place. That's that's one I'd recommend for sure checking out. And the other one is quite specific. It's an email series by Spencer Greenberg from Clearer Thinking uh website. It's called One Helpful Idea. And he he's he just shares one helpful idea every week. He also this website also has a podcast and a and further resources and tools and all that, and a newsletter, but there's a specific thing called One Helpful Idea, and it's one of the very few newsletters I actually read. It's very short and sweet, and it's just like one concept or thing to think about that I can actually do when cleaning up my email. I'm like, oh, it's interesting. I'll I'll take notes. So I recommend uh checking that out. I'll share links with you, James, if you nice.

James:

Yes, of course. Uh as always, we'll we'll link all those recommendations as well as other things we spoke about in the show notes below. And then finally, how can people get more involved with you or follow you or yeah, be part of this game that we can pledge to like a mission to get maybe is it one million pledgers? That that's the goal.

Sjir:

One million pledgers together giving three billion each year to high-impact charities. That's where we're going. The most obvious thing is, of course, join in and take a trial pledge. Consider that. Have a look at our website, read more, start reading, resign up to our newsletter, and then have a think whether just trying it out, even if it's only one percent for six months, that's the most obvious way. Like that's ultimately how we're going to spread this. And we also see a lot of people find us through peer advocacy, so people talking to their friends and family about this. We talked about that a bit during this episode as well. So that is another way people really can help, is then sharing with friends and family if they're comfortable too, about that giving, which can be really meaningful and positive, as we also discussed. Lastly, we also do, we will be hiring. We're we're we're we're growing, we're we're have ambitious goals. Uh so currently I think we're hiring for a few marketing type roles. Yeah, there's marketing roles, but there will be more. There will be operations roles, research roles probably coming up in the short to medium term there as well. Uh so keep an eye out there if you'd like to join in and work on this. But uh, given we get as much more than just its organization, it's a team, it's it's a whole community now of 10,000 plus 10% pledges and trial pledgers. And I yeah, I really invite you to to consider joining us uh as we try to uh make the world a bit better.

James:

Amazing. Sure, yeah, thanks so much for all your work and thanks for joining the podcast. Thank you.