How's it going everybody? My names Matt as I said and I'm a recent Princeton grad, I graduated in 2012. I actually took this class when I was a sophomore at Princeton, and when I took this class there was no lecture on how to choose a career so. I even went into Professor Singer's office hours and was like, hey, do you have any thoughts on how to choose a career, so I'm glad to see Will's here, making it easier on future versions of me. When I took the class, the part that really blew my mind, was the part about Gibwell. I don't know, have you guys discussed? Yeah, Okay. So yeah, GiveWell evaluates charities. And they, one of the cool things about GiveWell is that their top recommended charity, they have an estimate for how much it cost to save a life through that charity. And the current estimate is something like $2,300. So, you can calculate out, like, if I think I'm going to make this much money over my career and give this much of it away, how many lives can I expect to save. So turns out, that if you have sort of a normal salary and you're giving away 10% of your income, you can save about 100 lives over the course of your career. And when I did this calculation it sort of blew my mind, because can you imagine just saving one person's life? Like imagine after class today you go out and somehow save somebody's life. Like, that would be a pretty big deal and probably like, stay with you for a while, right. And then if you imagine saving like, 100 people's lives like, you know, imagine there's like, a burning building and you like, run through the flames and you like, kick a door open and like, all these people pour out. That would be like, the greatest moment in your life, you know. and. It's sort of cool or surprising to imagine that actually you can do something like equally as good as that. Just by doing the boring thing of giving 10% of your income away to the most effective charities. So I think that's cool. So, after I took the class I was like, yeah I'm going to do something about poverty, I'm going to like try and save a bunch of lives. And I was like, I realized shit, I don't actually have any money, like what am I going to do? So what I ended up doing was starting a chapter of this organization called" Giving What We Can", so, shoutout to anyone who's currently in giving what we can, and through giving what we can I met Will, and gave me all these arguments And, I found the arguments pretty convincing. So, I decided to go into finance and give away half of whatever I made. And so that's what I've been doing for the past year. One thing that Will pointed out to me which I think is really crucial, is that some charities are hundreds of times more effective than other charities. But if you think about it, it's pretty surprising. You never really see this in a for profit world like You know you never see like two pizza places that like serve the same pizza but one costs like 100 times more, this sort of thing does happen in non profit world.would be like two charity's where you where one is 100 times more effect and they are just right next to each other like asking for money, and i think that i don't know. I think a large part of the reason why it happens, is some charity's choose really effective ways of helping the world Like malaria bed nets. And some choose, not so effective ways, like play pumps. And so one corollary of this is that, sometimes, where you give is a lot more important than how much you give. So, to make that more concrete. You can imagine you have a person who's giving, like, 1% of their income away. And they're giving it to, like a median effectiveness charity. And you have the option of either, bumping them up to giving 10% of their money, or you can give the option of redirecting their donation to the most effective charity, but you can only do one of these, which do you prefer to do? I think you actually prefer to redirect their donation to the most effective charity. So that's what I mean when I say It's more important where you give than how much you give. So I think that's a cool thought. Also we're going to touch on one thing that Will brought up which is burnout and corruption. So these are separate worries. The burnout worry is that, you know, I'll be some idealistic kid surrounded by a bunch of cut throat bankers. And I just want be able to handle the pressure and I'll end up quitting. And the corruption worry is like the worry that I'll be around a bunch of cut throat bankers who all have like Ferrari's and then like one day I'll be like hey you know what screw these charities, I want a Ferrari. And so, in my, and so I'll talk about those in my case, so in my case i don't think burnout is really not that big of a worry. I really like the people I work with, I don't think they're cut throat bankers. I actually look forward to going to work everyday, which I think is rare. so, I'm not so worried about that. I am more worried about corruption. I could sort of see myself slowly giving less and less and like, rationalizing it. One thing I do to try and prevent that, is I have made like a public pledge to donate 50% of my income, and I try and say that a lot so that you know, people, it'll be really embarrassing if I ever go back on it. And you guys all have permission to make fun of me, if I, if I ever do. Also I try to spend a lot of time talking to people like Will, because presumably that'll help, prevent me from getting corrupted. So yeah, those are my thoughts on, burnout corruption, and that's actually, all I really have to say. I guess the summary is that I did the thing that Will's suggesting, and it didn't go horribly wrong for me, so, that's one data point. [SOUND]
