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- [00:00]
Commercial Narrator
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Caleb Zakrin
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Caleb Zakrin
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So if you whippersnappers meet one of.
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- [01:01]
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- [01:35]
Caleb Zakrin
I'm Caleb Zakrin, editor of the New Books Network. Today I'm speaking with Ori Brehm, head of Communications at GiveWell, an incredible nonprofit that helps people donate to the best charities in the world. In this conversation, Orey and I will discuss GiveWell and the future of philanthropy along with his fascinating career finding and promoting the most interesting articles, projects and charities. Orey, thanks for joining me today on the New Books Network.
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Ori Brehm
Thanks so much for having me. Of course.
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Caleb Zakrin
I'm really excited to talk. I've been following your work beyond GiveWell for quite some time and it's definitely been an inspiration, I think, for New Books Network and the work that we do. Trying to surface interesting things that don't normally get the time of day. But I was wondering before talking about GiveWell, if you could just tell us a little about yourself and your background.
- [02:20]
Ori Brehm
Fantastic. It's been a bit of a strange career. I think you found an interesting through line in it. But the honest answer is I started out in development economics. I did research at Oxford and Princeton on different programs that could help improve lives in low income countries. From there I became a statistics writer. I wrote a little popular book on statistics for a broader audience, trying to introduce some key concepts to people who might not necessarily enjoy maths. After that I was in South Africa for some time working for two amazing educational nonprofits. I spent a little bit of time as a journalist and then as you mentioned, for the last six years I've been running a great little newsletter and media company called the Browser where we curate and recommend interesting articles. And earlier this year I was really delighted to start working for GiveWell, which as you said is in some sense the browser for charities. We recommend, find, curate and recommend outstanding giving opportunities.
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Caleb Zakrin
Yeah, you've written some books as you mentioned, so that's always. We'll have to have you on and be in some time to talk about the yeah, this is obviously a sort of a non standard New Books Network interview, but I think that when I saw that you started working at GiveWell, I've been familiar with GiveWell for a while. In fact, I have a friend who donates the vast majority of their income to GiveWell. They're one of those effective altruist types. I was wondering if you just talk, tell us a little about how you got involved with GiveWell. Just give a brief overview for those who don't know and what led you to it.
- [03:58]
Ori Brehm
Yeah, I mean, so as you said, GiveWell is a nonprofit research organization that tries to find just like a few really outstanding giving opportunities. These often end up being health interventions for children in low income countries. So a lot of our work is in Sub Saharan Africa and in South Asia. How I ended up here is that sadly, I discovered the job was coming open through a tweet from my good friend Planner. I say sadly because this retroactively justified all the hours I have ever wasted on Twitter. Absolutely devastating news for me. And I knew I wanted to be part of it because as mentioned, I've done a little bit of work in statistics, a little bit of work in development, a little bit of work in writing and communication. And this role at GiveWell seemed to cover everything I was interested in in life. It's all about communicating the very academic work sometimes that GiveWell does to a broad audience and trying to connect people to these great opportunities to do some good in the world.
- [04:58]
Caleb Zakrin
So yeah, you talked a little about GiveWell's primary mission. Especially it's focused on health. How does GiveWell work? So let's just say that I'm a person I want to go and donate some money to charity. I have no idea where to start. Maybe there are some causes that I personally care about, but, you know, maybe my criteria is that I want to make the biggest impact possible, and I don't want to have to do that much work to find the charities that are going to do the extent that possible. So what does GiveWell solve?
- [05:30]
Ori Brehm
Well, if you are such a donor, you've come to the right place. So we're a research organization. All of our research is available for free on our website, and people can just go read our research and donate either to the organizations we recommend directly or to other organizations based on, you know, things that they've learned from the research we do. That's a really core principle for us. And we do also have these two giving funds. So that's kind of. We're kind of equivalent to an investment manager there. Donors can give money through us. We don't take any fees on that, but they can give money through our funds. And then we allocate that a couple times a year to different programs that we think are most cost effective. And the cost effectiveness is really key to our work. This definitely isn't the only way to do philanthropy, but the thing that we're focused on and specialized on is trying to find opportunities where people can do, in some sense, the most good for their dollar. So we believe that you can currently save a life for $4,500, which is obviously incredibly humbling but incredibly impactful for those of us who can.
- [06:32]
Caleb Zakrin
You mentioned a little bit some of the work that the charities do just at the top level. What are some of the qualities that GiveWell looks for in great charities? What do they have in common? And if there's any particular causes that charities have been really effective at managing.
- [06:51]
Ori Brehm
Yeah, so we kind of have four things that we look for in a great charity. One is evidence of effectiveness. So there isn't an innate feedback loop in philanthropy. Often you can have an organization that is definitely trying to do good work, where everyone is very motivated and where the donors are hoping for a particular outcome. But without specific evidence that a program is leading to the results that you're looking for, it won't always be the case. And the real world is complicated and messy, and it's often not trivial to figure out. Even for the very simple interventions that we do, let's say, incentivizing vaccinations, it takes quite a lot of maths and some rigorous academic thinking to figure out, does this program really help in the way that, you know, you obviously hope that it does. Another big thing for us is cost effectiveness. So again, you know, this isn't the only way to do things and we, we are just trying to do a good job of the thing that we are focused on. But for us, cost effectiveness is trying to calculate as well as we can. If you give a dollar to this cause, like, what will the impact be and how do we make that as high as possible? And the upshot for this for us is that just because of the huge inequality in the world, a lot of the opportunities that we found are for low income countries. We're certainly open to funding any program that makes sense anywhere in the world. But since a lot of people in lower income countries can't afford even very basic medical interventions that we're able to provide and distribute, that makes those interventions especially cost effective. I've got two more and I'll pause there.
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Caleb Zakrin
Yeah, please tell us the next two.
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Ori Brehm
Yeah, so the third thing that we look for is room for more funding. So effectively an intervention could be very effective in theory. Like maybe there's some academic research saying that something is incredibly helpful, but if mostly it's already been covered, then that doesn't really help. The classic example for this is surgery. In some low income countries, surgeries can be very impactful and helpful for health, but the real constraint on how many surgeries are done is, is how many surgeons there are. And if you're in a place where there's a limited number of surgeons, just throwing money at the problem won't actually help. Like they're doing as many surgeries a day as they can. In the longer term. You could fund kind of education for surgeons or fund ways to bring more surgeries in and so on, but we look at room for more funding to say, can more money today help improve this problem? And the last thing we look for is transparency. As I said, the world is very messy and complicated and that's something that we're painfully aware of. And so we're looking for funding opportunities where, you know, the charities are open to our very invasive, rigorous, very pedantic investigation process where they're very public about what they do and how things shake out and, you know, sometimes public about things that don't work out the way that we hope they would for us. That's a very good sign if a program or a charity is open about that.
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Caleb Zakrin
Yeah. You know, something that really struck me about GiveWell when looking at the website and I really do encourage listeners to go to GiveWell's website because it's just. It's a treasure trove of information on charities. But the thing that is most striking about it is that there is a page called our mistakes where GiveWell lists hundreds and hundreds of mistakes that they've made in nearly 20 years of operation. So why does GiveWell give so much attention and publicity to. To their mistakes? You know, what's the point of this?
- [10:26]
Ori Brehm
So I think we want to be open with ourselves and with the world about, again, the way that things are complicated. I think every academic knows this, like the world is much, much, much more complicated than it looks on the surface. We want to learn from our mistakes. So by publishing them, we hope that we can be transparent with ourselves and with others and find ways to improve in future. We also just want to share with our donors. We want donors to know that we don't think we're perfect. In fact, we know we're not perfect, and we're trying to learn. And we think a culture of transparency and truth seeking is just more helpful in the long run. Obviously, as a nonprofit, you know, if. If we can share more about how we do things and if in any way that can help other nonprofits operate better, we're not competing with other nonprofits. We're all in this together and trying to do the most good. So we hope it can be useful in the world as a whole.
- [11:19]
Caleb Zakrin
So one of the reasons why I was really interested in, in GiveWell is because, you know, obviously, as you pointed out, there's so much research that GiveWell does on these charities, and, you know, the type of research that goes into looking at charities that GiveWell operates with, it's not that dissimilar from some of the work that scholars or academics might be doing. You know, anthropologists or sociologists, Obviously, it's for a different purpose. But, you know, many of our listeners are graduate students or postgraduates looking for alternative careers in academia, as there aren't as many jobs as there used to be. So, you know, what sort of roles at GiveWell employ the type of skills and research that scholars might excel at.
- [11:59]
Ori Brehm
Well, so firstly, let me say we are always, always on the lookout for outstanding researchers. We've got a senior researcher position that has been almost permanently open for the last five years. The constraint is finding the rare individuals who can do that job to an outstanding level. And, yeah, we would love to hear from anyone who might be a good candidate for that. The way it works is we're looking for people who combine the outstanding quantitative skills that you often only See, in academics who have spent seven plus years of their life really digging into quantitative methods, understanding evidence, understanding research, a lot of the interventions we support are based originally on a piece of academic research based on randomized control trials. And a lot of the work we do is about looking at that research and figuring out how to expand it and extrapolate it to other contexts, figuring out where it would fit, where it wouldn't fit, and how you have to frankly discount the strength of the results depending on the context that you're looking to implement them in. The other half of the job is being incredibly decision oriented and happy to make decisions with limited information and be quite rigorous about triaging. There's lots of questions that we have to leave unanswered and have to say, look, this isn't going to be a major component in our ultimate calculation. So no matter how interesting it is, we have to let it slide and prioritize the factors that are going to have the biggest contribution to our bottom line. With all the love in the world, this is the part that is hardest for academics. I think some of my best friends are academics and often the person who is attracted to that role is someone who likes digging really deep and getting really, really into the details of a specific piece of research which we need in the world very badly. But it's harder to do at GiveWell. So I would say that's the main role that we're looking for. And anyone who thinks they would be a good fit for that, we would love to hear from them. Most of our senior researchers, as I said, are people with a quant social science background. And it's a really wonderful role where you can have an extraordinary amount of impact. I think each individual senior researcher is just like meaningfully responsible for saving thousands of lives. And I think that's a really nice element of going to work every day.
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Caleb Zakrin
Yeah, absolutely. I was curious if you could tell us a little bit about the size of GiveWell. How many people are there?
- [14:31]
Ori Brehm
Yeah, and so we are currently about 70 people, about half of which are on the research side and the other half are people like myself in communications and outreach and people in operations. Over the life of our organization since 2007, collectively we've moved $2 billion. We've had more than 125,000 donors. And we estimate that the donations have saved over 200,000 lives so far.
- [15:01]
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- [15:03]
Ori Brehm
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- [15:08]
Commercial Narrator
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Ori Brehm
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Caleb Zakrin
Wow. So it really, in the past year or past couple years, it seems like it's really grown significantly. You know, I am, I'm curious too, because I think, I think I first heard about GiveWell, like years ago maybe on a podcast. So I'm curious a little bit, you know, to learn a little bit about, you know, the communication strategy. Obviously you haven't been there for the, for the, for all of it. But, you know, what is, what have you seen or what do you think is like, been the most effective ways that GiveWell has been able to get people to donate?
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Ori Brehm
Yeah, I would love to hear how you heard about us and what you remember from it because obviously to me, that's the big question in my life.
- [16:39]
Caleb Zakrin
Yeah, I mean, as might not be too shocking, I listen to a ridiculous amount of podcasts and I can't remember which podcast it was, but I think it was like a host read podcast. And normally if it's a host read ad, and normally if it's a host read ad specific, especially for a cause, I'm more likely to listen or pay attention sometimes, sometimes not every single ad gets my attention. But I think I'd heard about GiveWell around the same time that I had read the book Animal Liberation by Peter Singer. So I was very interested in kind of like modern utilitarian approaches to charity giving and, you know, some things around effective altruism. And I knew that there was a lot of charities out there that were trying to do sort of the GiveWell thing, but GiveWell seemed like the one that was doing the best job at it. And you know, the other thing too, I think why part of what I was interested in is actually this is, and this is now. I know listeners don't care about my story with this, but I think part of the reason why I was interested in GiveWell is because years and years and years ago when I was in high School. And I was a part of this at my local synagogue. I was a part of a charitable giving group, and we raised $100,000 or something like that. And we had these fierce debates over what causes we should give to. And I was a strong advocate of we should give to the causes that will make the greatest impact, no matter where they are, where there was another contingency saying we should donate to the causes that are closest to our home. And, you know, I'm from California, Los Angeles. There's a lot of money. There's certainly a lot of people still in need that need help. But my perception was that, you know, we could do a lot more by giving to people in places where there really is, you know, where they really are strapped for resources, where they need, you know, the most basic things that people in California, you know, might be able to easily access, like vaccines and things like that. So I think I was. I was looking for something like GiveWell. So when I finally heard the ad on. On a podcast, then I thought, oh, this is a great cause that I should. I should pay attention to. And then, yeah, like I said, too. Like, I, you know, also have a friend that is a. You know, it makes a lot of money and. And gives a lot of money to give. Well, so, you know, I think. I think, yeah, that was how I. How I kind of heard about it from different. Different places. But, yeah, more or less from. From podcast.
- [19:18]
Ori Brehm
If there's one lesson to take away from all this, it's listen to podcasts.
- [19:22]
Caleb Zakrin
Yes. Yeah. Waste time on Twitter. Go to look at podcasts.
- [19:26]
Ori Brehm
Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is wonderful. So I always do want to stress that we're trying to be as good as we can at the thing that we're trying to do. But GiveWell is a tiny slice of philanthropy. There's lots of causes that we just don't cover. They don't fit into the kind of research we do and the kind of model that we have. And I always think that thoughtful giving is kind of. What I think is important is whatever cause you're interested in trying to figure out how you can do it deliberately and thoughtfully and carefully and find the programs that achieve the goals that you really care about within that world. Obviously, we're delighted to hear that you feel like we're doing a good job. That really does mean a lot to us in terms of our communications. I would say we spent the first decade plus of our existence really focused on getting the research to the absolute pinnacle that we felt that we could. And that was Incredibly hard. I was not here for it. But I have heard the stories and I really think it's a difficult task. I think it would have been easy to give up much sooner and say, oh, the research is good enough. But to be honest, GiveWell's core communication strategy is being so incredibly pedantic about research that no one ever doubts, you know, that we chased every last footnote. We considered as many objections as we could. We tried to be as open and transparent and open minded about the programs that we're supporting. And so for most of our existence, that was kind of what communications at Giveaway was about. And it's a very exciting time now. I just came in as we're speaking, I joined three months ago and my remit is ready to think, hey, like, how can we share more about this work? How can we talk to more people and yeah, how can we make what we're doing engaging and accessible for as many people as possible?
- [21:16]
Caleb Zakrin
Yeah, I think there's a lot of exciting things on the horizon for the organization. You know, I wonder if you talk a little about the, you know, what do you view as the future for GiveWell? Is it just going to be continuing to focus on the same, you know, core, core issues or areas? Are there any big plans, events, changes on the horizon that you foresee?
- [21:38]
Ori Brehm
Yeah, at the core, I think we're going to keep doing what we've been doing. One of the exciting things coming up this year is our first new book network listener hire. We're going to hire at least one listener as a senior researcher. I hope that would be wonderful. We're trying to be more heads up in the world. We're trying to communicate more and reach more people. Again, we've kind of honed our research team to the point where we feel really, really good about where research is at. So just being able to share that is really exciting for us.
- [22:08]
Caleb Zakrin
You mentioned there's obviously a lot of focus on giving to, you know, anywhere in the world where you can make the most impact. So like, you know, I guess for you, like, you know, you're based in New York, you know, what is your, are you just in an office all day? What's your, what are you, what are you doing?
- [22:26]
Ori Brehm
What is my life like? Yeah, I work from home, I'm delighted to say I enjoy being near my cat and near my fridge. Those are two very important elements of work, life balance for me. But yeah, we've got a great team. We're a remote organization so we have people across the United States and Across the world. We have a headquarters in Oakland and another here in Brooklyn. And yeah, we. It's just like a hard working group of nerds who argue about things all day and try and figure out quite how deep you can go on questions that might seem simple at first.
- [23:03]
Caleb Zakrin
Yeah, wonderful. I think obviously if you go to the website, I think it's givewell.org, you can easily. It's pretty simple to find out how to donate, but I guess if you want to spell it out as simple as possible, we'll obviously put the link in the show notes too. But how can listeners go and donate to causes with GiveWell?
- [23:25]
Ori Brehm
Well, first, we really appreciate it. Yeah, the website is givewell.org and all of our research is there. As I said, the research is completely free. Like anyone can read it and make their own giving decisions. We do have two main funds that we advertise through the website. I'm really delighted I'm speaking here to a more academic audience because it lets me describe them in a little bit more how I think of them, which is not the easiest way. So we have the Top Charities Fund and this is currently just four programs. These are the programs that we think are incredibly cost effective, but we also think have the absolute deepest quality of evidence. So it's programmes that have been running for a long time or where all the studies are especially high quality. We have really great RCTs. So those are the programs where we feel like we can say not only is the cost effectiveness really high, but our confidence is incredibly high, exceptionally high. We also have a great fund called the All Grants Fund. And this one, again, the programs are also have a very strong evidence base and are very cost effective, but the evidence base is just that little bit weaker. Like there is some question as to whether the impact is necessarily what we think and hope it will be. One way to say that is that, you know, the expected value on the All Grants Fund is slightly higher, but the variance is slightly wider or the confidence interval is slightly wider. So those are some programs that we're a little newer to or where the mechanism for action is a little bit more complex within that. We currently have some great programs around water chlorination. We're trying to get, you know, clean water to more people, which obviously is a wonderful thing. We have a program about clubfoot, which is a medical condition that can be solved with a simple device and we're trying to see whether, you know, it's cost effective to put more funding into that. And yeah, so donors can go to our website. They can give through us, as it were, to either of these funds or to any of our top charities. We don't take any fees. We're very lucky to have that covered by donors who support our work directly. And yeah, for whatever it's worth, obviously any donations are tax exempt, so you get that tax benefit as well. And yeah, we equally are just delighted when people read our work and engage with us. I think anyone who sees our work and wants to argue with us make it better is something that we're extremely open to and we'd love to hear from anyone who has great ideas about these difficult topics that we spend our time on.
- [25:52]
Caleb Zakrin
The culture at GiveWell just really does seem fantastic and I think I really do recommend people go to the website because there's so much great stuff there. It really is a wonderful organization and you know, really happy I happy to highlight it because I think that New Books Network listeners this is the oftentimes, you know, the types of people that want to make impact don't know. You know, it's hard to hard to figure out how to make an impact, you know, with especially on a you know, maybe a postdoc salary. And I think GiveWell does a great job of showing how, you know, even with very little donation you can you can really do something significance. So yeah you know listeners, I really recommend go go to givewell.org and go and in the show notes I'll put a link as well to more information. But Orey, thank you so much for being asked in the New Books Network. It was really fantastic to talk to you about your career and about GiveWell.
- [26:48]
Ori Brehm
Thank you so much for having me. Bundle and safe With Expedia you were.
- [27:04]
Caleb Zakrin
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- [27:06]
Ori Brehm
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- [27:08]
Caleb Zakrin
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