So I have recently decided to take something called the 10% pledge, which is where you donate 10% of your income to effective charities for the rest of your life.

Now, I actually took this pledge back in 2019 for my personal income, but this year I've decided to take the pledge for my business as well.

So we as a business from now on forevermore are gonna be donating 10% of our business profits to effective charities every year.

And so in this video, I want to share a little bit more about what is the 10% pledge, why I am taking it, and why you might want to consider it as well.

What is the 10% pledge?

Okay, so the 10% pledge is run by a nonprofit called Giving What We Can.

They are not partnering with us or sponsoring this video in any way, just for the record.

And there's two aspects to the 10% pledge.

There is the 10% bit, and then there is the fact that you are donating it to effective charities.

Now, the first thing to say is let's talk about this effective bit of effective charities.

What is an effective charity?

Now, the key thing here is that just like there are some businesses that are better or more effective than others, there are also some charities that are more effective than others.

This was a real game-changing insight for me when I first heard about it like five years ago, which is that not all charities are created equal.

Like people who specialize in researching the effectiveness of charities have found that sometimes there is a 100 times difference in effectiveness between a less effective charity and a more effective charity.

Like what these guys say on the website is many people lump charities into one doing good bucket.

Others are skeptical that donating works at all.

The reality is that not all charities are created equal.

Most do good work, but the difference between good and great can be substantial.

Some charities are significantly more impactful than others.

And they've got a really good post on their website about effective giving 101.

So what does it mean to give effectively?

Well, give means using our resources to benefit other people.

When we see suffering in the world, it's natural to feel an emotional pull to do something about it.

Giving to charity is one way to turn this emotional response into direct positive action.

But then you have the effectively bit, which is where you're achieving the best results with the resources that we choose to give.

In essence, giving effectively involves taking action on the basis of where our charitable giving can do the most good, rather than doing some or a little bit of good.

There's reason to believe that choosing where to give can be more important than choosing how much to give.

Since charities often differ considerably in how effective they are, it's worthwhile to take the time to research which ones can produce the greatest benefit with each dollar.

Okay, so why is it important to give effectively?

There are many pressing problems facing the world from extreme poverty to the mistreatment of animals to existential risks that threaten humanity's very survival.

Moreover, there are millions of charities to choose from, 1.5 million charities in the US alone, and it isn't always clear which ones we should support.

And by giving effectively, you can significantly increase your positive impact in the world.

Let's see how this is true with an example.

Suppose a donor is considering making $1,000 donation to one of two charities, charity A, which offers corrective surgery for blindness-inducing cataracts, and charity B, which provides sightseeing dogs to individuals with limited vision.

On the conservative end, it costs about $1,000 to reverse a severe case of visual impairment, i.e. about $1,000 to literally cure someone's blindness if they're affected by this disease.

Conversely, it typically costs $30,000 to $50,000 to provide one sightseeing dog.

So I think this example is pretty interesting.

There is another thought experiment.

Imagine you're walking in a park and you see that there's a pond and you see that there is a child drowning in the pond.

Would you jump into the pond to save the dying child?

Of course you would.

Anyway, like, yeah, it's not even a question.

Anyone would do that.

What if you're wearing a really expensive pair of shoes or your expensive suit?

Would you jump into the pond ruining your suit to save the child?

Of course you would.

You'd have to be a real psychopath and associate path to not do that.

Who cares about the few thousand dollars that your suit costs if you can literally jump in and save the child?

And you're like, okay, cool.

Well, what if you were walking on the border of France and Germany and you see the pond and you see the drowning child, but they're over the border.

Would you still walk over the border, assuming you're not gonna get shot by the border force and go and save the child?

Yeah, of course you would, right?

Like just because they're technically in a different country doesn't mean their life is worth any less.

And of course you would still give up your fancy expensive suit in order to save the child.

Then the thought experiment continues.

What if there was a wall?

A wall separating you.

You know, you're in the French and German borders.

There's a wall.

You can't see the child on the other side of the wall, but you know the child is there because you can hear the child.

You can hear the child drowning and you have to, you know, get up and scale the wall, jump onto the other side and then save the child.

Would you save the child?

Again, of course you would.

You would have to be dumb not to save the child.

Just because you cannot see the person who's drowning does not mean the person is not drowning.

And you know that if you were to take action, you could save that child.

And then the question becomes, what if you knew with certainty that there is a child dying right now, let's say in a random country in Africa or something like that.

And you knew that there's a child drowning and you can't see the child, you can't hear the child, but you know that that child is drowning.

That child is dying.

And what if you knew that if you were to donate $5,000 to an effective charity like the Against Malaria Foundation, for example, you could literally save this child's life.

Would you do it?

Is the life of a child in a developing country worth any less than the life of someone in America or someone in the US or someone in Germany or Canada or the person that you can see?

The whole idea behind, you know, Peter Singer's philosophy here, which I broadly agree with, is that all lives are created equal.

And so if there is stuff that we can do to save those lives, then, you know, living an ethical and moral life means choosing to do that stuff.

Now, when I first heard this, I was like, yep, I agree, I agree, I agree, I agree.

And then I felt really shifty when the question came to, would I donate $5,000 to save the life of a child?

And I'm like, well, yeah, in theory, but like, you know, I don't have that much money.

This was back when I was working as a doctor and it's like, it's kind of expensive and like, oh, it feels weird because I really wanted to buy the Apple Vision Pro and like, it starts to feel like a weird sort of, like I'm being told I'm a bad person for not donating 100% of all of my money to save the lives of people because then I can't live and stuff.

And so like, for years, I was like, yes, I agree in theory, but like, there's nothing I can do about this because I don't wanna give up my entire, I don't wanna like, I don't know, give up my life in the UK and go and work for a charity.

That sounds boring.

Maybe I'm a bad person for not wanting to work for a charity.

I don't wanna give up my quality of life just so I can save the life of kids in developing countries.

Like, you know, that kind of thing.

You can imagine that, you know, the confronting nature of that situation.

But then I came across the 10% pledge and there's this thing that very, like many thousands of people, tens of thousands of people around the world do where they just give 10% of their income to charities, effective charities every year.

And that 10% feels like a good number for me.

It was like 10%, for most people, in most parts of the world is not really gonna change your quality of life.

In fact, what Giving What We Can tells us based on the research is that if you earn $60,000 a year post-tax, you are in the top 1% globally.

You might not think that if you earn $60,000 a year and you're living in like New York or California or someplace that you're in the top 1%, but you are, you are the top 1% globally.

In fact, if you earn more than $19,000 a year, you are in the top 10% globally.

The scale of global inequality is so insane that by leading a normal life in a developed country like the US, the UK, Canada, Germany, Australia, that kind of thing, you're probably in the top 1% globally.

And so when I realised that, I was like, okay, at the time I was earning like 40K a year as a doctor.

It's like, if I were to donate $4,000, 4,000 pounds, it's not really gonna change my life in any meaningful way.

But that 4,000 pounds or $5,000 can literally save the life of a child.

Holy shit, that's pretty cool.

There's also this guy called Greg Lewis who did an analysis of how many lives a doctor saves in their career on average.

And this was actually updated in 2023.

I'll link all three parts of his analysis down below, but essentially being a doctor in the UK, if you were to model statistically how many lives does that save, you land on over the course of your entire career working as a doctor, you on average save somewhere around seven or fewer lives.

People get all up in arms about this.

Like if you wanna read all the stats and all the analysis, there'll be a link down below.

Yes, of course, doctors are good for things other than just saving lives.

And of course, it's important that that doctor that you saw when you were struggling held your hand and was nice to you and stuff like that.

But if you take a kind of mathematical approach to how much like trying to quantify the impact of a doctor, for example, working in a country like the UK, for example, you land on the number of a few lives saved in the course of a career.

So if I were to work 40 years as a doctor, I can save maybe seven lives on average.

If I were to donate 10% of my income as a doctor every year to effective charities, I could save more lives than that in the developing world.

Crucially, yeah, those lives would be in the developing world, they wouldn't be in the UK because it's actually fairly cheap to save the life of someone in the developing world, about $5,000 in the Against Malaria Foundation.

It is very expensive to save the life of someone in a developed country because all of the low hanging fruit like vaccines and sanitation and food and poverty, like broadly that stuff has been taken care of.

But basically a country like the UK is willing to spend an enormous amount of money to extend someone's life by even just one year, whereas that amount of money could save 10 lives in a Sub-Saharan African country, for example.

And that was pretty mind blowing to me when I realized this.

I was like, oh, hang on, if I agree that all lives are created equal, and I agree that the life of someone who happens to live in London is worth no more than the life of someone who happens to live in Nigeria or Ghana or something, then, huh, interesting.

By giving away, by donating money to certain charities, I can actually save more lives than literally working full-time as a doctor, working 60 hours a week in the UK's National Health Service.

Mind blowing.

And so eventually that's why in 2019, I decided to take the 10% pledge for my personal income.

Yes, of course, in an ideal world, I would be a full-on philanthropist and donate millions and millions and millions to charity, but there's something around not letting perfect be the enemy of good.

I think for a few years, I also felt like, well, 10% is not enough then.

I should be donating 90% of my income to charity because I can just live on the poverty line in the UK and stuff, and 90% of my income should go to charity.

And because I thought I should do that, I ended up not taking any action at all.

And then I spoke to some people about it and I realized I was being dumb about it.

Like, yeah, honestly, I don't wanna give all my money to charity, at least not yet.

While I'm young, I like having a nice quality of life.

I like growing my business.

I like being rich.

But I'm very happy to give 10% of my money to charity and have been doing for the last five years.

And now that's gonna be the case for our business profits as well.

So this year, our business is projected to do about 2 million pounds in profit.

If these projections work out, we will be donating $260,000 to charity.

And if, for example, you look at the stats on the Against Monero Foundation, it costs $5,500 to save a life.

That means this year, we as a business will be saving 47 lives if we were to donate that money to the Against Monero Foundation.

That's pretty cool.

That means that like me sitting here and filming these fricking YouTube videos, which may or may not be sponsored by random sponsors and selling courses and stuff, I can be a multimillionaire, I can live the life that I want.

And on top of that, I can donate $260,000 to charity this year and do that 10% thing for the rest of my life.

And just this year alone, by doing that donation, we as a business will have saved 47 lives.

That is fricking mind-blowing.

You know how hard it is to save 47 lives?

Like imagine there's a burning building and there are 47 lives in that building and you're able to go in and like save each of those lives.

Like saving one life is a heroic thing, right?

Being able to save more than one of those by simply writing a check, by simply donating money that doesn't make a difference to my life anyway.

That's just fricking mind-blowing.

And that's why I took the pledge in 2019.

But for the last few years, I have felt a bit weird about this pledge because I took the pledge in terms of personal income.

Like the business is making millions in revenue and profit, but my personal income is actually like, I don't know, a hundred K or something like that.

Because for tax reasons, it's useful to just not take income out of the business and it's all in the business and it's invested in the business.

And so for a while now, I've been thinking that as a founder of a business that's doing very well, it's a bit, if it feels wrong to be taking the 10% pledge and only doing it like from my personal income.

And so I've decided that from now on, my business, my holding company, like whatever businesses I do in the future, we'll be donating 10% of our profits to effective charities every year.

And since making that decision, I signed the pledge on our team offsite in Portugal a couple of weeks ago.

And it's really brought a new sense of purpose to what I'm doing with this business.

I have at various points felt like, oh, I've got enough money.