EAG Talks

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"We are much more powerful than we think."
After finishing college in the Netherlands, Sjir Hoeijmakers knew he wanted to do something good with his career — but he didn't know what. At some point, he sat down and Googled "how can I make the world a happier place?" That search led him to Peter Singer's TED talk on effective altruism: his first exposure to a community taking the question of doing good seriously.

He learned that by “combining the head and the heart,” you can do up to a hundred times more good than you might otherwise. One example that still blows his mind: by donating a percentage of his income to high-impact charities, he could save a human life every year.

Now Sjir is CEO of Giving What We Can, an organization that promotes effective giving through the 10% Pledge — a commitment to give at least 10% of your income wherever you think it can do the most good. Giving What We Can recently reached a milestone: 10,000 pledgers across 100 countries, donating more than $50 million every year.

• See more impact stories like this one: effectivealtruism.org/stories
• Birth Lottery: If you were born again, how would your life change? givingwhatwecan.org/birth-lottery
• How rich am I? Find out how rich you are compared to the rest of the world. https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/how-rich-am-i

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Kearney Capano always wanted to help others but nothing ever felt good enough. She would volunteer and work at nonprofits, but there were always more people to be helped, more suffering to address. In university, she joined a neuroscience lab studying people who donate one of their kidneys to a complete stranger — trying to understand what drives that kind of selflessness.

That's where she first encountered effective altruism. "It just blew my mind. Suddenly, there was an entire community of people working on these sort of ideas, thinking about it enough to where they were changing their life paths to do something about it."

Kearney had been set on helping people through neuroscience, but her mentor asked: if your root goal is really to help as many people as possible, might other paths have even greater impact? That conversation, Kearney says, unlocked something important. "Effective altruism provided me with such a sense of hope and gave me an avenue in which I could actually make impact in the world."

Now she works at Coefficient Giving (Open Philanthropy), helping to move money more effectively to high-impact grantees. What keeps her engaged is the intellectual humility at the heart of effective altruism: the idea that we don't know all the answers, but we're going to do our best to figure them out.

See more impact stories like this one: effectivealtruism.org/stories

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"If you want to make the world a better place, just start by thinking about what the world needs and then figure out how your passion can meet that."

In 2016, Arden Koehler was a philosophy PhD student at NYU, studying metaethics. She was considering a career as a “middling academic philosopher.” She might write something great someday, but even if she did, she didn't think it was going to actually make a difference in other people's lives.

Then a friend suggested she attend an EA Global conference in Berkeley. She found a group of people who applied the same rigor and truth-seeking she valued in academic philosophy, while maintaining a focus on improving the world.

Now Arden is the Web Program Director at 80,000 Hours (@eightythousandhours ) helping people tackle the world's most pressing problems with their careers. The organization's name comes from the fact that on average, people work 80,000 hours in their lifetime; for most, this is the largest resource they have at their disposal to improve the world.

See more impact stories like this one: effectivealtruism.org/stories

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“If you want to do good in the world and you don't know how, you're not alone.“
At 22, Will MacAskill had a problem: he had lots of pent-up moral energy, but didn’t know where to direct it. He was planning to become a philosophy professor but felt a duty to do more to help the world’s poorest people.

Then he met Toby Ord. Toby had been working on an idea called Giving What We Can, built on a key insight: people in rich countries have an immense ability to help people in poor countries; the difference between one opportunity and the next could mean benefiting one hundred times as many people. Together, Toby and Will founded Giving What We Can (@GivingWhatWeCanCommunity), an organization that has since inspired over 10,000 people across 100 countries to pledge at least 10% of their income to high-impact charities.

Will went on to co-found 80,000 Hours (@eightythousandhours) which helps people find impactful careers, and the Centre for Effective Altruism, which organizes conferences and communities for people working on pressing problems. Will's book, Doing Good Better, remains the most widely cited introductory book to effective altruism.

What keeps Will motivated? A sense of gratitude. "I am in such a privileged position that I am able to use my time working with amazing people together to try and make the world better. That's this beautiful thing."

See more impact stories like this one: https://www.effectivealtruism.org/stories

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Lincoln Quirk attended his first effective altruism conference in 2013, back when it was 50 people in a house in Oakland. He was already a startup founder, but the effective altruism movement helped him orient toward building something for the poorest people in the world.

Labor migration — traveling from a poor country to a rich country, making more money, and sending it home — is one of the most impactful ways an individual can change their family's lives. But immigrants abroad still had to use services like Western Union,
showing up in person with bundles of cash and paying 8-12% in fees.

Lincoln's company @Wave made it simple: open the app, enter a phone number, and send money for just 3%. Today, Wave serves 20 million active users across Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, and the rest of West Africa.

Lincoln’s advice to people wanting to make a difference? Consider for-profit entrepreneurship.

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This video is part of a series featuring leaders in the effective altruism community sharing their personal journeys and the impact of their work.

Read/watch more stories: https://www.effectivealtruism.org/stories

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Will MacAskill is a cofounder and senior research fellow at Forethought; before that he was an Associate Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford University. He's the author of Doing Good Better, Moral Uncertainty and What We Owe the Future, and the cofounder of Giving What We Can, 80,000 Hours, and the Centre for Effective Altruism. His current work focuses on preparing for very rapid AI-driven technological development; this includes reducing the risk of AI-enabled concentration of power, designing how AI should behave, and sketching a positive vision for a post-superintelligence society.

Learn more about effective altruism at: www.effectivealtruism.org
Find out more about EA Global conferences at: www.effectivealtruism.org/ea-global

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In this talk, Toby Ord discusses the uncertainty of AI timelines and what that means for the EA community.

Toby Ord is a Senior Researcher at Oxford University's AI Governance Initiative. His work focuses on the big picture questions facing humanity. What are the most important issues of our time? How can we best address them?

Learn more about effective altruism at: www.effectivealtruism.org
Find out more about EA Global conferences at: www.effectivealtruism.org/ea-global

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Effective altruism community members want to maximize the impact of their careers, but often undervalue replaceability in their role. Devon Fritz argues for replaceability as a key consideration for impact-chasers and goes into practical implications for career decisions.

Devon Fritz is co-founder of High Impact Professionals and has spent eight years across various roles coaching professionals on maximizing their career impact and advising on strategic philanthropic giving. He most recently served as Chief Operating Officer at Ambitious Impact, leading programs that help philanthropists improve the impact of their grantmaking. Previously, as Managing Director and CTO at Founders Pledge, Devon helped grow the organization's pledge value to over $2 billion. He is a Giving What We Can 10% pledge member and holds degrees in computer science, information technology, and computational linguistics. His new book, The High-Impact Professional's Playbook, helps professionals use their career, income, and influence for good.

Learn more about effective altruism at: www.effectivealtruism.org
Find out more about EA Global conferences at: www.effectivealtruism.org/ea-global

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Effective altruism has developed sophisticated ways of thinking about how best to save lives and reduce poverty. But it has lacked a rigorous way to measure and compare improvements in quality of life. That missing metric — wellbeing — has left a blind spot.

Michael Plant explains why wellbeing was thought impossible to measure in the 20th century, how 21st century advances have made it feasible, and what changes if we take happiness seriously. He shows how WELLBYs (wellbeing-years) and the last decade of research reshape charitable priorities, allow global cross-cause comparisons, and open a new agenda for donors, researchers, and policymakers — including how to better understand the growth of political dissatisfaction in the West.

Dr. Michael Plant is the Founder-Director of the Happier Lives Institute, which looks for the most cost-effective ways to improve human wellbeing around the world, as well as a Research Fellow at Oxford University's Wellbeing Research Centre. He has a PhD in philosophy from Oxford, where he was supervised by Peter Singer. Michael is a co-author of the 2025 World Happiness Report and has advised philanthropists and policymakers on decision-making, including recent work for the UK Treasury.

Learn more about effective altruism at: www.effectivealtruism.org
Find out more about EA Global conferences at: www.effectivealtruism.org/ea-global

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Over the past two years, over a dozen of the largest retailers in Europe have committed to taking meaningful action to reduce suffering for billions of farmed shrimp. Activists across Europe have begun taking to the streets to demand action from companies that have not yet taken these steps. Major media outlets across the continent have written about this issue favorably. Chrystine Liptrot shares how the International Council for Animal Welfare (ICAW) is winning for one of the most numerous and neglected farmed animal species in the world, and how lessons from this campaign can be applied to other neglected cause areas.

Chrystine is the CEO and founder of ICAW and a longtime animal rights strategist with over thirteen years of experience leading corporate pressure campaigns. Chrys has played a central role in securing hundreds of animal welfare commitments from major global food companies, including landmark cage-free, broiler, and shrimp welfare victories. After a decade working primarily in corporate negotiations and inside-game advocacy, Chrys now focuses largely on rebuilding unified grassroots power for pressure campaigns. Her work centers on pressure campaign strategy, movement building, and activist training to ensure corporate accountability and lasting change for animals.

Learn more about effective altruism at: www.effectivealtruism.org
Find out more about EA Global conferences at: www.effectivealtruism.org/ea-global