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How I Learned to Love Shrimp
How I Learned To Love Shrimp is a podcast showcasing innovative and impactful ways to help animals and build the animal advocacy movement.
We talk to experts about a variety of topics: animal rights, animal welfare, alternative proteins, the future of food, and much more. Whether it's political change, protest, technological innovation or grassroots campaigns, we aim to cover it all with deep dives we release every two weeks.
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How I Learned to Love Shrimp
Haven King-Nobles on why high agency is critical for entrepreneurship
Haven King Nobles brings us a really refreshing topic this week as we explore high agency and the importance of this particular trait when it comes to entrepreneurship and continuous innovation.
We talk through Haven’s experience of being a young entrepreneur, the mistakes he made in the early days of founding the Fish Welfare Initiative, and some advice on the skills to develop to really excel in entrepreneurship.
Whilst this week's topic was high-agency, we of course talk to Haven about his experiencing the first organisation dedicated to working on fish, talking about some of their programmes and the challenges of working in India on this topic.
Resources
- Fish Welfare Initiative Website
- FWI Stunning project
- How to Launch a High Impact Nonprofit
- The FWI newsletter
- The Lean Startup - Eric Ries
- Who Is a Good Fit for a Career in Nonprofit Entrepreneurship? Charity Entrepreneurship Blog
00:00:00:00 | Intro
00:05:41:13 | High agency
00:09:11:20 | Charity Entrepreneurship funding
00:12:49:12 | Fish Welfare Initiative
00:19:01:21 | Is there issue in movement with high agency?
00:25:37:17 | Cultivation of high agency
00:33:59:01 | FWI and India
00:39:19:23 | How to react to negative feedback
00:46:12:07 | Changing the world without qualifications
00:49:20:05 | Expanding to different countries
00:59:29:21 | Where else would high agency be useful
01:15:03:15 | Closing questions
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And maybe the first thing to remember for people is that this should happen. You should be getting negative feedback early on. If you're not getting negative feedback early on, well, either you're doing an idea that is just so obviously good that I would imagine people have already done it before. It's just not controversial or unique at all. Or you're not talking to the right people. You're talking to a bunch of people who are telling you how great you are and how amazing you are. I really think there's a big problem in the movement where we're all so supportive of each other's work all the time. that people are a bit hesitant to give critical feedback but from a place of care, of radical candor as we think about it.
SPEAKER_03:Hi, my name is Amy.
SPEAKER_01:And my name is James.
SPEAKER_03:And this is How I Learned to Love Schwimm, a podcast about promising ways to help animals and build the animal advocacy movement. This week, Haven King Nobles brings us a really refreshing topic as we explore high agency and the importance of this particular trait when it comes to entrepreneurship and continuous innovation. We talk through Haven's experience of being a young entrepreneur, the mistakes he made in the early days of founding the Fish Welfare Initiative, and some advice on the skills to develop to really excel in entrepreneurship. This deep dive is the start of a shift in our approach for the podcast, where we focus on topics and guest insights rather than focusing too much time on their organizations and programs, information which is normally easily found on their websites. Whilst this week's topic was high agency, we of course talked to Haven about his experience of founding the first organization dedicated to working on fish, talk about some of their programs and the challenges of working in India on this topic. Let us know what you think about the shift in direction by sending us an email at hello at how I learned to love shrimp.com. Hey everyone, so today we're joined by Haven King-Nobles, who is the co-founder and executive director of the Fish Welfare Initiative, or FWI. We love an acronym in this movement. FWI is amongst the first organizations to focus on farmed fish welfare and currently focuses on on-the-ground projects in India. Haven founded the Fish Welfare Initiative through the Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program. Welcome, Haven.
SPEAKER_02:Thank you, Amy and James. It's good to be here. So
SPEAKER_03:I'd love to know what's something you've changed your mind on recently. So
SPEAKER_02:it's a bit technical, but I've changed my mind on the viability of implementing pre-slaughter stunning in India. Previously, I thought it's too complicated for various reasons. It requires electricity that's not there often. It requires consumer demand that's not there. But now I'm inclined to think that we should pursue it. And we are pursuing it. The reason I changed my mind about this was for a couple of things. One was we just have a broader research mandate now. So we're considering more interventions than we ever have before. The other thing is the example of our friends at Shrimp Welfare Project, who have implemented stunning for shrimps, which is great. And they've done this in various farms in Latin America. And now I believe in Vietnam as well. I was thinking, Well, people seem to care less about shrimps than they do about fishes. Now, of course, people should care a lot about both of them. But people seem to care less about shrimps than they do about fishes. It's kind of a more novel species even, and they're making progress on it. So we should be able to do the same with fishes. And for me, it's kind of an example of how the successes in our movement can go beyond just having an impact. They can inspire other people to also take on new projects that they might otherwise not do. I
SPEAKER_01:visited... you guys and fish welfare initiative in India a couple months ago. And we actually went to visit a harvest where the, in this case, tens of thousands, if not maybe just over a hundred thousand fish were pulled out of a pond over a series of four days. And I think what we saw was the fish are often left to essentially asphyxiate or suffocate on the side of the ponds, like on the ground for hours on end. And many are self-conscious for a while afterwards. And is your goal that there's some kind of machinery, which can similar to shrimp stunning that can stun them, such that they die more quickly? What's the improvement or mechanism that would improve this?
SPEAKER_02:That's the high-level goal, that they're not spending these literally hours, as we saw, it's quite horrific, asphyxiating to death. I mean, if you can imagine what it would be like for us to drown over a process of not just a minute or two, but hours, it may be something what it's like for these animals, right? So we want them to be stunned quickly to not go through this suffering. How that will look is kind of unclear. So for instance, what's being done with farm fishes more in Europe and also what our friends at ShrimpWelfare Project are doing with shrimps is electrical stunning, where they do have some fancy machine that is used to stun them. That could work potentially. That hasn't been done for the species on whose behalf we work in India. But we're also keen to explore chemical stunning because it could be the case that these electrical machines are probably not accessible economically to the farmers we work with. And it's kind of a very decentralized industry. We're wondering whether chemical could be better and that it's more affordable to the local context where we work. We're at kind of like the very early foundational stage right now. We're not even looking at kind of what technology will work, but rather who are the people who would be likely to adopt this technology in the first place. And then we'll tailor that specific technology development if there's anything that needs to be done to those people.
SPEAKER_03:Nice. So we're actually talking today about a big lesson that you've learned. We'll get on to fish, of course, and talk about your progress with the initiative. In the last five years since co-founding Fish Welfare Initiative, you spoke to us about the importance of high agency and showing up. Can you maybe just jump right in and define high agency and maybe what it means to you in this context?
SPEAKER_02:I think of high agency as someone who has a wide locus of control. So you can think of it Yeah. Yeah, as you say, people like that, in my experience, are some of the people who are the best fit of entrepreneurs, people who don't really accept that there's something that they can't figure out how to do or that they can't hire someone else to do.
SPEAKER_01:Can you say more about why you think this high agency kind of characteristic is so important for entrepreneurs or for other people?
SPEAKER_02:Because the nature of entrepreneurship is you're setting something that hasn't been done before, right? Or kind of it's like a totally novel problem or you're solving a problem in like a novel way. So almost by definition, the solutions that you're seeking, they don't already exist in the world, you're going to have to kind of combine different types of problem solving different solutions that previously previously exist. You also if you're an employee, or if you're a team of one or two employees, there's a lot of things you'll have to do that you've never done before, like writing a newsletter, for instance, we had to do that. And I never used MailChimp, I never built a website, things like that. Then the other thing I'll say for Why I think this is very important for leaders is just it seems to, or entrepreneurs, it seems to correlate very well with all the successful entrepreneurs and leaders I know. So I just did this kind of personal self-development project where I interviewed seven people I think are really good leaders. And one trend I know...
SPEAKER_01:Wait, wait, wait. Why didn't you interview Amy and I? This is weird. Amy, did you get... I didn't get involved in this.
SPEAKER_03:There was no call.
SPEAKER_01:This is weird, Haven. The way you want to tell us.
SPEAKER_02:I will say I did put a message in the Charity Entrepreneurship Ambitious Impact Slack asking for good leaders to be nominated. And unfortunately, your guys' names didn't come up. So rude. That is so
SPEAKER_01:rude.
SPEAKER_02:The takeaway of this project with these other seven creative leaders in the movement, or beyond the movement also, I was interviewing people, was that everyone seemed to have this characteristic of high agency. Everyone seemed to have kind of the attitude that there wasn't a problem that they couldn't figure out or their team couldn't figure out how to solve.
SPEAKER_01:I agree with you totally. I think it's super important. And there's the obvious case of, yeah, if you're... And I guess using entrepreneur in the broader sense of the word is whether it's starting something or just fixing a problem like a moral or social entrepreneur, as some people call it. But also, yeah, if you're in a team, fundamentally, you don't want to be, in this case, asking your boss every time, oh, how do I do X? How do I do Y? Ideally, you can have enough agency to actually go out and learn and ask the people, ask your peers without necessarily having to consult your boss all the time and There's an amazing number of problems that can be solved by just asking Google or in this case, maybe asking ChatGPT. So yeah, I totally agree. This is a very important trait.
SPEAKER_03:So thinking about your journey then to founding Fish Welfare Initiative, which I think is where this kind of sense of showing up has come from in this topic. So Charity Entrepreneurship decided that this intervention of working on fish was neglected and needed to be started like ASAP. We need to start working on this topic because obviously so many animals suffering from How did they determine that you starting it off or the people in the incubation program starting it off versus maybe giving money to an established group who was already working on other animal topics was like a better trade-off?
SPEAKER_02:I think charity entrepreneurship has written their reasoning for this. So I may do kind of a poor job of explaining it, forgive me. But my impression of why they're more keen on starting new organizations as opposed to granting to current organizations is is I think broadly that they think new organizations are going to be more flexible and more able to pursue things in an efficient, novel way than giving money to existing organizations. So to give an example, I think Fish Welfare Initiative, it would have been hard to give money to an existing organization, I think, to say, hey, in addition to what you're currently doing, we'd love to give you this grant. to scope out various countries in Asia and start a pretty intensive on-the-ground operation. Unlike anything you've done before, it's going to involve a lot of on-the-ground research. It's going to involve a lot of figuring out how to deal with Indian legal and financial nonprofit structures. I think in some way, it's easier to get some kind of young, idealistic, naive, perhaps, people who are just willing to throw themselves at a problem and don't have the constraints of having already have these jobs or this kind of system that they're used to working in.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, that's fair. And I think even what you've spoken about already, the fact that you're visiting farms, you're witnessing these processes, like for orgs that are working on these topics, I think the approach is really different. Like you say, being on the ground, like actually same as Shrimp Welfare Project, sometimes potentially making decisions that existing organizations advocacy organizations wouldn't make because you're in that like trial and error phase. Whereas perhaps it's just making decisions that they would be like entirely uncomfortable with. So you had some sense of like being a bit more nimble than existing organizations.
SPEAKER_02:I think there's something here that relates to your relationship with the risk. Newer organizations, really, we have nothing to lose, right?
SPEAKER_03:Just your integrity, I respect.
SPEAKER_02:Just our integrity, just our jobs. And
SPEAKER_01:a few years of your life. Yeah, but
SPEAKER_02:I mean, it's certainly been a great time. But you know, one thing I noticed in the movement is that organizations get bigger, they become less nimble, and they have they lawyer up, right, they have bigger legal departments. And there's something that makes sense about that, right? Because you have more to lose, you have other programs, you don't want to be affected by like one crazy program doing something kind of sketchy over there. But with us, we're just running one program. So we're going to try and do it in kind of like the most risk neutral way possible. possible, at least that's kind of our perspective on it.
SPEAKER_01:The same kind of structure or concepts apply, I think, in the for-profit world. You can say, oh, why doesn't Microsoft invent every single good technology product in the world or Google or Apple? But in reality, there's hundreds and thousands of tech startups that do incredibly well and become giant because, like what you said, they're flexible, they're nimble, they understand the problems better, and maybe they have better people. risk appetite. So yeah, I think there's loads of reasons why. So for FWI, Fish Welfare Initiative, you kind of said to yourself, I think previously that you don't think you and Tom, your co-founder, were maybe the best people to found it. Can you say more about, I guess, maybe what you think the ideal people would have been like and how well you guys matched up?
SPEAKER_02:So there's two kind of like ways to answer that. One is to say that the ideal people would have been the people who had the specific skills that we've come to need. So the ideal people are It would have been people who had fish welfare experience. It would have been people who had experience working in lower middle income countries or countries in Asia, especially India, where we ended up working. It would have been people who had experience running field studies. So all these specific technical skills, it would have been helpful to have those people, but ultimately we've been able to hire for those people. So that wasn't a huge impediment. The other way I'll answer, and the bigger impediment that we faced early on in the way that Tom and I were not ideal, I would say, is it would have been helpful to have people who had more work experience, more life experience. Tom and I were 21 and 22, respectively, straight out of our undergrads when we started this. And I think we were reasonably talented for that age. But certainly, there was a lot we hadn't learned yet. One example that really comes to mind is with project and people management. The way we managed projects and people early on was just quite bad, I think, to how we managed them And, you know, it's not that surprising because we've never done that sort of thing before. We'd only been students before.
SPEAKER_03:So how did the charity entrepreneurship criteria of who gets into the incubation program or I guess they were just starting out at this point, right? So maybe the pool of talent that they were choosing from. Maybe
SPEAKER_02:we slipped in. No offense to you, Tom,
SPEAKER_03:was smaller than it is now.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:What about that criteria do you feel like resulted in you being the kind of only ones available to like volunteer to start Fish Welfare Initiative?
SPEAKER_02:Well, you know, they still had 200 people apply and they let in about a dozen people. So it was still competitive. Now, you know, to compare this to today, they have thousands, if not more people applying. So it is much more competitive today. I think why they let us into the program is because Because they value things in entrepreneurs that are different than what other people may think to value in workers or in entrepreneurs. So I think they especially value, maybe do you not have like all the experience? Do you not have the fanciest CV that's not as important for them? What is important for them is are you a quick learner? Are you able to learn on the job? Are you kind of a competent all-around generalist who, you know, you're not an expert in any one thing, but you can become that or more likely you can hire someone who will be that. And they also really value people who have a lot of value alignment with the cause because, and we could talk about this more, but I think when you aren't really value aligned with the cause, when you're running and launching a charity, you're likely to make less optimal decisions and kind of like deviate a little bit from what the optimal path has been passed
SPEAKER_01:would
SPEAKER_02:be.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I think some good examples of, I think that value alignment, I think is present, especially in incubator charity, maternal health initiative, who recently took a decision to shut down. And I think that's something that is very much against the status quo of most nonprofits. I think it's extremely rare that nonprofits shut down, but because, you know, their values were, we don't want to spend, Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_03:And is there other criteria here? Do we think like low salaries, like there's got to be a certain level of like the person's commitment level, maybe had to go and live in India, you have to have certain availability as a person to be able to have that flexibility of movement as well. Is there anything else at play?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I think they favor these more kind of hardcore sacrificial traits, like, are you willing to live in whatever random place that's needed? Are you willing to take a very low salary? Those things are useful, right? But I also want to make clear that those aren't strictly necessary and that if we only had charities being started by people who are like, no, I will work for no money and I will live in whatever random village for the next few years, then we probably wouldn't have enough people or wouldn't have the right people doing it. So there's just a lot of trade-offs. As for other traits that apply... I don't remember any off the top of my head that AIM talks about, but I'd really recommend... They have some posts that you all can link to in your show notes of the seven traits of a charity entrepreneur that they wrote a number of years ago. And that was pretty influential for how I think about this.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, the one I remember most is... I think it used to be called grit. Now it's called irrepressibility. It's being irrepressible. So basically, I guess when the going gets tough, right, you kind of keep going. And there's like, no matter what roadblocks you hit, which many... young nonprofits will hit plenty of you kind of you find ways to get around them and you're innovative you're kind of creative and basically don't take down for an answer i guess do you feel like that is quite similar to what you think is important in this high agency idea
SPEAKER_02:definitely it's like when you confront a big problem and and you will if you're running a new non-profit in a novel field how do you deal with that do you like say okay you know there's no obvious way to solve this so we're just gonna shut down here or we're gonna kind of just be really sad that we can't proceed? Or do you think, okay, this sucks, but let's find another avenue that will work. We're going to spend some time figuring this out. We believe we can get around this problem. I'm going to give that faith and that confidence to our team that this is just one temporary obstacle, but we will overcome it. I think that attitude of grit or high agency, whatever we're going to call it, is really important in the charities I've seen succeed over the years.
SPEAKER_03:Do you think there's an issue in our movement with high agency or a sense of like showing up being confused with maybe like an arrogance or something else? Like, I definitely remember, well, first of all, so I feel like AIM, Charity Entrepreneurship have this reputation with like skewing young, as we've said, like kind of less experienced, fresh out of uni types. And I really specifically remember meeting you here when I was working for THL at the time. And it was at the CARE conference and you were coming to us saying like, we're starting Fish Welfare Initiative. And I feel like the general impression was like, who are these guys? They're like, like you say, like early 20s. Yeah. Just going to take on fish. That's, you know, that's totally fine and acceptable. Do you feel like it's a challenge now? in the movement that maybe we don't look at high agency in the same way that you're presenting it today?
SPEAKER_02:This is a tricky question. I do feel like it can certainly come across as arrogant to be someone who seems and who frankly, in many ways, is not qualified to do something to say, hey, like this heart problem in the movement that you all haven't prioritized yet. We're tired of waiting. We're going to take it on. We're going to do it. If you want to help us, great, but we're going to do it. Yeah, that can certainly come across as arrogant. In some way, I do think you need almost a naive level of confidence in your ability to pull this sort of thing off. So probably the people who are likely to succeed are more likely to be ones who skew more towards the overconfident and even arrogant side of things. My theory about the movement at the broadest level is that we're more likely to succeed If we have a really pluralistic movement where there's a lot of different approaches, it's a bit messy. People are innovating a lot, trying new things. And almost necessarily, if we take that mode, there will be a lot of failure, right? There'll be a lot of new projects being started, either with a current organization or a new organization where we try something crazy and it doesn't work. And that's okay. I think we need to accept that this failure is a byproduct of being bold and and trying novel things. So I would ask that, you know, Amy, the more experienced people like you, when you're meeting these upstart kind of charities or new projects at a current charity, give them like a little patience. Sometimes they will come across as arrogant, sometimes naive. You certainly shouldn't just say, okay, you do your thing and I'm not going to worry about it. Where more experienced people have an idea that someone is approaching something wrong, they should nudge them on that. So one of the It seems really stupid now that we didn't think of this, but one of the key pieces of advice we got early on from Christoph, who used to work at Compassionate World Farming and now works at Shrimp Welfare Project, was that, hey, are you guys thinking about species differences at all? Because you're talking about fishes like they're just one group of animals, but actually there's all sorts of different ones. And you're
SPEAKER_01:like, what? How many are there?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, there's hundreds. It's crazy. But we literally just hadn't thought of this, but I really experienced wise person like Christophe taking the time to sit us down and like question something that like seems so obvious we should have thought of it, but we didn't. That was really helpful for influencing our strategy and helping us get to the right answers quicker.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. And for reference, you know, I feel like I think about this moment a lot and the position that I was in. And actually, I don't think we were as collaborative as I think would have been helpful. I do actually think about it personally a lot when I now think of entrepreneurs, people that have gone to conferences and they're like presenting and saying, this is a new thing we want to work on. Like they're like balls that you have to have to be in that position. I think I just respect way more now than I did previously. So yeah, I've definitely changed my view on how I would approach people in that position.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. And I totally agree with one of your earlier comments, Haven, that there is an element of naivety or like idealism that actually is super helpful. And I think
SPEAKER_00:Right.
SPEAKER_01:You can tell I've been reading too many business books because I'll give another business analogy. But like so many startups have been founded by people in their early 20s who were like, oh, this is a problem in the world that why doesn't anyone fix it? You know, like big challenger banks in the UK like Monzo or Starling. They were like, oh, like banking sucks, like super slow, super legacy. Why don't we just improve? Everyone else is like, no, regulation is so complicated. You never want to do that. They're like, we'll do it. And I guess what? Like they did it. So it's like, I think even now, even though I haven't been in the movement for uber long. Even now I feel a bit jaded. I'm like, oh, this idea will never work. That will never work. I can feel a bit critical. But I think you're totally right in that. You know, people should, we should just have more shots on goal and we should have people trying things that may or may not fail. And if it fails, great, we learned something. And if not, then we're proven wrong. And it's probably something good for animals. So I totally agree. Being a bit more open-minded seems, yeah, and supportive actually seems very useful.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, definitely.
SPEAKER_03:There's something about taking it from the drafts as well. And I wonder if early on, actually, some of the impression goes from the fact that it's not as if no one ever thought about fish and then you guys came in and did. I feel like it's on people's back burner. It's like in their drafts. And so then you're coming and saying, oh, I'm going to go on this topic. There was a sense in the movement. We all now need to up our game in the fish area because maybe there's going to be funding there or whatever the motivations are. and you're just speeding up that process for them. So just getting stuff out with drafts, I think is always helpful. We're actually going to start on our site when there's campaign ideas that just never really took off, just like giving them to people like, oh my God, I would much rather someone else did it than it stayed like an idea that just sits in our heads for years and years and never takes off. So yeah, I think the drafts thing is important too.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. I did feel and sometimes still do feel like people have kind of like the stay in your lane, don't step on people's toes thing. And, you know, there's some validity to that kind of when it's the case that like one group is just much more qualified or more likely to succeed at a project than another group. But I think mostly that sort of intuition comes from the wrong reasons. It comes from the motivation, whether or not we admit it to ourselves that, hey, we want the funding. We want the credit for doing this. Yeah, the glory, right?
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:When ultimately, I think the way we ought to all be thinking about this, of course, as we all know, right, it's for the animals. How can we best help the movement? So, you know, I'm really against kind of like intellectual property, we could say, in the movement. I really like your idea. If someone has a good campaign idea, it should be out there for anyone to run. And whoever runs it first, great. Like, let's see how that goes. Provided, of course, they can do it at some reasonable level.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. How do you think either you or... tom kind of cultivated this i guess characteristic of high agency and and or do you think actually it's something you don't really cultivate it's something you know yeah curious kind of how people can kind of try integrate this more into their life if they agree that this is something important i think as with a lot
SPEAKER_02:of traits like this it's that it's a combination of both nature and nurture right it's you start with some foundation that inclines you to want to do this but then you really cultivate it over the years through like conscious development, deliberate practice. So for me, what was helpful was being someone who started things. The first thing I remember starting was environmentalist group in my church in high school, where I was this 17-year-old kid leading these about 60 or 70-year-old people, a good group of a dozen or so, and trying to implement recycling in the church, right? And I saw a need and I went after it. Later, I started the effective altruism group at my college. And these were hard things that at the time. Now I see they kind of like pale in comparison to what I've done since. But I think they taught me a lot of useful skills about how do you get something going? How do you learn on the job? How do you lead people? The other useful thing about starting stuff is that it makes you more attractive to future grantors or employers who might hire you or give you money to start something in the future. So in my case, I think the fact that I had started the Effective Altruism Group in college made charity entrepreneurship much more likely to accept me into the program because they saw, oh, this is a kid who has this level of agency. He has this level that's proactiveness and he can start something and see it through.
SPEAKER_01:It seems like there's something in there about almost starting small. It doesn't have to be some big new organizations. It can just be, you know, you're part of a group and there's something you can do to improve it or you're part of like a membership society or something. So is that the kind of thing? It's like start small and just do stuff? Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_02:So this to me kind of feels like The lean startup style is like, don't try to do the biggest thing immediately. Start with a series of small tests and try to proceed past these tests as you pass them. So don't start an organization immediately or don't start a new big project at an existing organization. Maybe start a reading group. See if you can succeed at that. Learn some lessons from that. Start... I don't know, pub quiz night, like attending that and leading a group there. And you slowly work your way up and you build more and more of these skills. And when you feel confident, like you can take the next big step, then you do. But I will also say there's always some baptism by fire. You know, following my own methodology I just outlined earlier, probably I should have waited for a few more like intermediary level groups before going to starting a new organization, right? But we managed to pull it off starting this new organization. It was just very difficult. There were still a lot of lessons we had to learn on the job.
SPEAKER_03:And how do you practice that sense? Because we're talking a lot now about starting things, right? So starting FWIs, starting groups. What does it look like in the day-to-day practice? Do you still feel like it's as present as it is at that crucial early stage of actually getting something from nothing to something?
SPEAKER_02:No, I don't think it is because... Your job is just fundamentally different. So now we're about 23 people. Of course, at the beginning, we were just two of us. Now my job is more about empowering the people who are leading our various departments, and also doing some communication and fundraising to kind of making sure the whole thing runs smoothly and all the different aspects of it are executing well, all the different people are doing their jobs well. At the beginning, it's like, Every bit of work that you have, you are doing. If you need to visit a farm, you are the one doing that. If you need to talk to the government official, you are the one doing that. If you need to design a field study, you're the one doing that. Now, fortunately, we now have people who are much better at all those things than I am. And my job is really just kind of to have like a high level overview of the machine and ensure that people are sufficiently empowered to do their jobs and also getting back the entrepreneurship bit, making sure that people are empowered to start new projects kind of within their mandates. But I would say you probably lose a bit of this early stage, swashbuckling, risk-taking attitude that you have when you have a bigger departmental structure and people are hired as experts to do their specific things. And that's just a trend that you need to reckon with as you grow as an organization.
SPEAKER_03:Do you feel like less fun?
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:I hope
SPEAKER_01:they have to be on team isn't listening
SPEAKER_02:yeah I mean I would say I think we still have a pretty good time
SPEAKER_00:but yeah I don't
SPEAKER_02:know does that compare to like the early days when maybe we didn't care quite as much about deadlines and a lot of my job was just traveling around to random places meeting random activists they're talking away on to random farms it's just like you never know what tomorrow will hold and for me that was very exciting right Today is now more like, okay, we have structure and we're following structure. And maybe that's a little less fun. It's rewarding in a different way.
SPEAKER_01:On this idea of what it feels like maybe to start things or have agency, I guess something I think maybe I've experienced in Curious Era Thoughts is also there's an element of you feel out of your depth and you feel like this imposter syndrome and you shouldn't be doing. Also, you're kind of in free fall, like, oh... I'm making these mistakes. I'm messing stuff up. Is that something you think is just like part of the game? And have you also experienced that as well?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I would say I've probably experienced it less than other people, maybe because of some like displaced or misplaced confidence I have in myself. But I certainly have and still do experience it to some extent. This reminds me how I think of public speaking. I don't know if public speakers, even after they have years and years of experience, still like just do not at all get nervous before a big talk or something. So you will certainly get better at it. But will these feelings ever go away? And would you even want to kind of not feel some anxiety about your work and feel some pressure to make sure you're doing a good job? No, that's probably part of it. But you know, at first, it can just be overwhelming, all consuming and kind of lead you to thinking less of yourself than perhaps you ought to.
SPEAKER_03:How do you feel as though kind of privilege plays a part in this? I think there's an interesting correlation for me between high agency and the position that you're in, the background that you have. There's a celebrity over here who said on a podcast that we all have the same 24 hours in a day. And it was hit with this like... media backlash, people saying it was kind of tone deaf. So I wonder what your thoughts are on how much kind of privilege plays a part in this. Obviously, there's certain sacrifices you needed to make to be a part of the charity entrepreneurship incubation program. What's your thoughts on the correlation between like having high agency, but also having the privilege to be able to act on that high agency? I
SPEAKER_02:think privilege is kind of an uncomfortable part of all of this, because the reality is that the people who In my experience, the people who are most inclined to want to take some really risky job, like starting a new organization, or also who are most inclined to not worry as much about making money, but worry more about social causes, are the ones who've never suffered for lack of money or lack of suit. And the question is, what should we do about that? That does seem to be some fact in the world, right? And I'm not quite sure. I don't know what the answer is. I mean, we certainly need to put in resources into making the opportunities of entrepreneurship and especially the broader opportunity of getting involved with animal advocacy open to a wide variety of people, both because that is best kind of aligned with our progressive values, but also because we're probably likely to get better outcomes if we have a greater proportion of the population really engaged in this project. So I do think that's something that we ought to be aware of. And it does, I think, show in the sort of people who are inclined to take the sort of career paths that I've taken so far.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, yeah, sure. Did you feel like that played a role? Obviously, you were starting an organization in India. Do you feel like that's been... any kind of part of the conversation? Like you said, ideally, this would have been set up by people who were in India, right? Had like experience of that cultural setting. How's that played a part in how you've managed to develop Fishwell Furniture?
SPEAKER_02:And this may be where people disagree with me, but that's okay. I think we started with the view, and we got this from both being very progressive that, okay, we want to like avoid any sort of like neocolonialism. So our job is not at all to make decisions on the ground. Our job is to find the right local people, empower them sufficiently with money, and then stay out of the way. The other extreme that I think sometimes our movement or certainly people historically have been guilty of is like we're going to totally micromanage things even though we don't understand the context. I'm going from here in Chicago or in London or wherever. I'm going to run this charity without ever visiting India. We're going to hire people there. I don't want to go there because it's like some village I don't want to live in. I mean, obviously the second one is wrong, right? But I think also the first one of being totally hands-off and totally deferential is also not quite right. Where we're at is somewhere closer to the first, but in the middle, where we have one team at FishWall Furniture, an international team with most of our colleagues being from India, but also some people, one person from the US, but some people from Europe, someone from the Philippines. Our thought and what I think has worked well, not perfectly, is to have One team where everyone's spending some time in India and really getting to learn the situation, we defer to local knowledge. That's what's worked well for us. But it's not the case that if one of our ground team members says, hey, farmers won't do this, we're like, okay, we're not going to consider this further. Maybe if I or other people in the leadership, whether or not they're from India, really think this thing will work, then we'll push them that further. And sometimes we'll overrule the ground person. We'll say, hey, Actually, we are going to try this because we think it could work. Sometimes that doesn't work out, right? Sometimes they're right. But, you know, sometimes the person who's overruling the decision is also right. So kind of where I fall with all of this is that human relationships are really important. It's really important to build trust and to have neither a relationship of total control nor total deference, but to treat people as equals, treat people as equals. someone like you who has specific localized knowledge, but also who can make mistakes in their decision making. And we should keep both in mind when we're dealing with these international organizations.
SPEAKER_01:All seems very reasonable. Yeah, you kind of talking before that, you know, I do well, the person who would start people that would start a fish welfare charity, you know, had some experience in fish welfare, or maybe in India, in this case, you and Tom had, had neither, which I don't think we look back and be like, it seems like I worked out fine. But I guess what's your view on when is specific expertise essential? Or do you think generally it's overrated or you can get by without it? And as long as you find the right people or experience somehow.
SPEAKER_02:So one of the key things here is hiring, right? Like you want people who can lead and who can build teams. They don't necessarily have to have the skills themselves, but they need to be sufficiently competent to hire those people and to manage them effectively, right? I mean, certainly it's helpful to have a founder have some of the more technical skills that you need. So I'm thinking of global health charities, for instance, where one of the founders is a doctor. Not only can they kind of better understand the specific issues than I, as a non-fish welfare scientist, can do in my case, but they also bring more credibility to their work. And that's useful for fundraising. It's useful for public communications. Again, I don't think that's like a knockdown. There's all just trade-offs, right? So for a global health charity, is a doctor who's also a really good entrepreneur better than someone who's just an entrepreneur? Yeah, definitely. But would I rather have a doctor who's kind of like a very specialized person, not as much of a generalist, not as much of like can learn loads of things, is keen to try those on? I'd rather have that person than someone who's just an entrepreneur and they've demonstrated and ability to do that.
SPEAKER_01:No, I
SPEAKER_02:take the entrepreneur in that case.
SPEAKER_01:A fun fact for everyone, two days ago, there's a company called Boom Aerospace that actually is the first company, I think since the Concorde, that have broken the supersonic, broken the sound barrier, essentially. And the founder is just a guy who was a product manager in tech who worked in software. And he founded a supersonic plane company, which to me is kind of insane. And everyone was like, there's no way you'll do this. You're absolutely insane. There's like a 0% chance of you achieving this. And lo and behold, you know, the plane two days ago broke his record. I was like, did this feat for the first time in 50 years. I think what he says, right, is if you just find the right people and if you're a good leader, you can basically get most of the value.
SPEAKER_03:How do you deal with kind of negative feedback or maybe pushback on your idea early on? I guess when you have this high agency, you're like, you are... feeling really optimistic about your idea, you wanting to put that high agency into action and push forward. How do you deal with like negative feedback and knowing, I guess, when to listen to that and kind of wrap it up and give up versus like pushing through and thinking, no, actually, we should be giving this a try. Like, how do you determine at what point you should be doing either?
SPEAKER_02:The main way I think about that is something called Not to get a bit too like, yay, like rationalist nerdy. I'll explain that in a sec. But maybe the first thing to remember for people is that this should happen. You should be getting negative feedback early on. If you're not getting negative feedback early on, well, either you're doing an idea that is just so obviously good that I would imagine people have already done it before. It's just not controversial or unique at all. Or you're not talking to the right people. You're talking to a bunch of people who are telling you how great you are and how amazing you are. I really think there's a big problem in the movement where we're all so supportive of each other's work all the time that people are a bit hesitant to give critical feedback from a place of care, of radical candor as we think about it. So to get into the kind of Bayesian updating, when you have like a belief about, say, your project or how your charity ought to run, You should have a prior, like this is the plan that we're currently thinking is best. So for instance, this is the farm program that we're currently thinking to run. And then you treat every additional piece of information as an update to that. And the update doesn't and probably shouldn't totally change your prior belief, but it should update you one way or another. So if I'm talking with Amy, who has experience with corporate campaigning, I'm saying, hey, we want to do this corporate campaign in India. What do you think? And if Amy's like, this campaign sounds horrible, it's definitely not going to work, then my reaction to that is okay. We're probably not going to change the whole plan based on that, but we definitely need to think about this further. This is a big update. And another thing relevant to this situation is kind of adjusting based on the expertise of the person. So how likely is this individual to be the sort of person who gives you useful feedback? If it's like, your buddy at the bar and I'm telling him about our farm program and he's like, yo, that sounds horrible. No
SPEAKER_00:way that's going to work, man. Then
SPEAKER_02:maybe I don't listen too much because he probably doesn't know much about fish welfare and farm programs, right? But if I'm back to Amy with corporate campaigns, if I'm asking her about how we should do this and she says, hey, in my experience, this is not how you do it, I take that very seriously because she is someone I would expect has a lot of knowledge in this field.
SPEAKER_01:You mentioned earlier a problem might be when You're trying to elicit feedback on your idea and actually people are sugarcoating things or giving you overly positive feedback. Do you have any tips on avoiding that, basically getting people or the right people to give you kind of honest and critical feedback? Two things come to mind. One
SPEAKER_02:is actively seek out people who have a reputation for being willing to be more critical. I think we all know people in our lives who we know they're going to tell us how things are. And I really value our advisors who are like that. And then the other thing is just with those people, but with everyone, making it clear that you're comfortable receiving critical feedback. So maybe what I'm asking you, James, for input on our idea, I'm like, okay, here's our plan. We're going to do X, Y, and Z. What do you think? And please be brutally honest here. I know it's not perfect. I'd love to hear kind of where you think there are issues. And just by giving people that nudge, they're more likely to feel that, okay, it's acceptable that I give this person negative feedback. They're not going to take it super personally
SPEAKER_03:yeah i think like you say it's so difficult in the movement like we're constantly putting on our like feedback forms you know we're not offended like please just like help us improve like we you know i i think everyone's so conscious that we're all like competing for funding and you know we all want like the positive quote anecdotes to share with them and I think, James, actually, you've alluded to this when we've had some of our funding conversations. Often when they're more honest and more upfront about the challenges they've faced, it makes you trust them more because they're just being more upfront. They don't want to hear just like, everything's great, you know, everything's really successful. We want to hear some of that, the honesty coming through and the feedback.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Actually, on that, it makes me think before we were talking about this kind of tension of, you know, agency and maybe it seems like overconfidence, arrogance, but actually, whatever I've spoke with you, you always can be like kind of very brutally honest. And somewhere it sounds pessimistic on like, you know, how good the fish welfare initiative is doing in terms of helping fish or some idea you have. So I guess, yeah, it seems like you don't seem to have a problem with kind of balancing the agency, but also being quite like brutally honest and I guess humble or uncertain about your work.
SPEAKER_02:Well, people tell us that at least, and I'm always glad to hear it. I think that is probably something we're a little more secure about doing later on than we were at the beginning. Just because we're more secure in our positions, we feel like we've done something, we built something for ourselves. We're not Amy back at that care conference and talking to all these very impressive people and thinking that, oh, are they going to like us? We have to really show that we have smart ideas or something so they don't think we're just these kids who have no idea what Yeah. So I think imposter syndrome for people who are more early on in their careers and who are early on in kind of like the idea stage of their charity can disincentivize people from being brutally honest. I think it did with us. So I think we're still reasonably good at this. I just encourage people, like you guys said, funders appreciate when you're being brutally honest. Advisors appreciate when you're saying like, Hey, here's our key uncertainties. We're doing this program, but we're not sure if this part is going to work. That kind of brings a bit of more humanity to you in some way because people know that not everything's perfect all the time, especially not in a novel, crazy field like animal advocacy.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Yeah, I think I've always said I find it more worrying when new or groups, basically any group is like, everything's totally fine, everything's on track, you know, no problems here, don't worry. Yeah, like you said, that makes me very suspicious because that's almost never the case.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. And as you said, Haven, maybe that just means they're not like pushing hard enough or like trying something more novel. You know, if they're staying quite safe, that's also maybe not a useful use of the funds.
SPEAKER_02:You want to be somewhere in the middle of being like totally crazy, wild, novel idea, never been tested before, like very unlikely to work versus like really safe idea. People have done it loads of times. I think the best innovations are somewhere in the middle of that. Maybe even pushing the envelope of what's a bit crazy.
SPEAKER_03:So maybe just to wrap up this section, then I'd love to know any other examples of people changing the world who don't on paper have the qualifications to be doing this. So they're like examples that we can all learn from and that we might know.
SPEAKER_02:Well, I think this applies to a lot of organizations. and leaders in the animal movement. Just because we are a young movement, we don't have a lot of track record beyond the past few decades of doing this. So people really had to figure out how do we make effective change for animals. I'm, of course, most familiar with the organizations and the ambitious impact shared entrepreneurship community. So our Friends of Shrump Welfare Project come to mind. Aaron was doing his PhD in machine learning before. Andres was an investment banker that two co-founders of Shrimp Welfare Project. No shrimp experience, but now they've launched this awesome organization. I think also many of the staff or the early staff at the Humane League, Animal Quality, Mercy for Animals, these people were also people in their early careers. They had only done activism before. They probably didn't set out to build a massive, big organization, but they saw that, hey, animals are being abused. This is unacceptable. Here's a problem, and we're angry about it. We're going to try and solve it. And then the organization gets built in the process.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. I mean, yeah. I think a nice lesson I take away from that is ultimately no one has experience until they do the thing. And everyone starts off, you know, at one stage inexperienced, young and junior. And even people you really look up to, at one point they were, you know, just like you, just figuring things out. So I think, yeah, like you said before in the agency, often these things aren't innate, right? They're learned. So I think you just got to kind of get stuck in. And speaking of getting stuck in, so tell us about the... the backstory for Fish Welfare Initiative. So you and Tom met through the Child Entrepreneurship Incubation Program and then what happened?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so we both got into the program probably to our surprise that they would let in a couple of basically undergrads like us. We got in, we met each other there. We were keen on the idea of what became Fish Welfare Initiative. Not because, again, we kept our experience with fishes or not even because we emotionally... resonated with them. In my previous advocacy and activism, I would talk about, yeah, and chickens are in these cages and they're forced to grow so big so quickly that they suffer and pigs are in gestation crates and cows are forced to be impregnated. And fishes, they're overcrowded or something. I didn't really know or wouldn't talk about them quite as much. So the decision that led us to FWI was not one of kind of passion, it was one of more planning, strategic thinking. Where do we think we can have the greatest impact? And FWI seemed that way for various reasons. So we started then in the summer of 2019. We were just the two of us. We hired our first staff, Jennifer and Marco, six months later. Then we were four. That's about when we began our scoping visits. The scoping visits led to us later launching in India and then growing up our team there.
SPEAKER_03:You've thought about expanding to different countries, right? There was some scoping about trying out the same kind of on the ground action across different countries. Can you talk about the thought process of moving that across and maybe why you've retracted and just kept your focus on India?
SPEAKER_02:This has been a perennial problem of or a question of FWI is do we just focus on one country or how much do we focus on a lot of different countries? We have done projects also in the Philippines and China, and we're actually going to be scaling up more in China with the hire of our new program director. For us, ultimately, why we've chosen to stay focused in India was because we want to prove ourselves and want to prove our model before taking it to a second country in a big way. For us, this kind of gets at the virtue of humility. Do we think we're people who... have the right ideas and who can start on the ground evidence-based projects in lots of different lower middle income countries. Yeah, we kind of do think that, but we don't have sufficient confidence in that yet. And the point of India, aside from all the impact we are having and intend to have even more there, is one way for us to prove that we have the right model. We are correct in our approach for developing evidence-based scalable programs. for how we collaborate with a combination of international and local people. And that is a useful model that can be spread across other lower middle-income countries to develop precedent and to help fishes there in ways that so far the animal movement has not reached them at all.
SPEAKER_01:And you mentioned earlier on, I guess we were talking about this importance of innovation and like most of the kind of positive things, like great things in the world are created by kind of some middle ground between crazy speculative idea and like sure bets. And it seems like FWI, I think that definitely recently has quite doubled down on, you know, R&D. So like trying to improve your programs, try out new things and pilot. Can you talk more about, I guess, why that's such a big thing for you and how that's going?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so I think this relates to, I forget exactly what it's called, but kind of the curve of how your confidence varies with time, right? So at first, when you approach an issue, You quickly gain a lot of confidence because you look it up online. You're like, okay, I know how to do this. And then later you start working on it and you're like, hey, actually, I don't know that much. Really, how much you think you know actually goes a lot down. And then you, of course, begin on the big project of eventually learning a lot to become experts in the field. We've gone back and forth. At the beginning, we thought we knew a lot and we thought we didn't, so we have to run this study. That study didn't work. Like, okay, we have some ideas. We're just going to run this farm program anyways in kind of like a smaller, simpler capacity. The more recent shift has been that our farm program that we run, and we can talk about that currently with 152 farms, this program is good, but it has certain limitations. And it does not hit what are now our more explicitly defined criteria for when we want to scale a program to thousands of farms. So because it doesn't hit those criteria, for instance, because it doesn't seem sufficiently scalable with our reliance on farm to farm visits, we're investing in a lot of different tracks for hitting our program scaling goals, which looks like developing other interventions simultaneously. Do
SPEAKER_01:you want to give a bit more detail on the programs? Because I think, yeah, like I said, I visited you guys a few months ago, extremely impressive, you know, going to a bunch of farms, doing water quality monitoring, looking at if there's any notable signs of stress for the fishes. But obviously, you kind of alluded to before, the Indian aquaculture landscape is super fragmented, loads of small holder farms. But each farm is still maybe tens to hundreds of thousands of fish. It's still not small by any means. Obviously, you guys want to not just do 150 farms, you want to expand. Do you want to talk more about, I guess, the problems you've had with the farm program and what your aspirations look like?
SPEAKER_02:To explain a bit more about the farm program, it's making two key welfare improvements. One, it's making water quality improvements. So that's what you saw, James, where our team goes around every morning, they hop on their motorbikes, drive to these farms, take measurements where there's an issue. We say, hey, farmer X, the ammonia in your farm is too high or the oxygen is too low, and you should take this corrective action. Otherwise, your fishes are likely to, and the thing we care about is they're likely to suffer. Maybe the thing they care about more is they're likely to catch some disease or start dying. The second part is the stocking density cap. That's the other thing we implement now where farms who enroll in our program have to maintain a density no greater than 3,000 fishes per acre, at least when they stock on the next cycle. That's what we do right now. The limitation we have with the program is, I mean, the main one is scalability, and that also relates to cost effectiveness, like I said earlier. It is hard to scale a program that involves us going to each farm to sign them up individually and then going back to every farm every couple weeks for water quality monitoring, as we do right now. So we're thinking about how can we overcome this challenge. One way we have of doing that is our satellite imagery project, where we're investigating the use of satellite imagery water quality monitoring, as opposed to our guys going out to every single farm. We would just be at our office and we would, for instance, see which farms are having poor water quality issues based on the way that certain levels of oxygen or ammonia correlate with the satellite data. And then we would only go to the farms that have an issue as opposed to going to every single farm proactively. That would hopefully enable us to be much more scalable and cost effective, but we are still in the process of studying this technology and it's still unclear whether it will work. And that's part of the process of... R&D is like you invest in a lot of things and probably most of them don't work. Most of the studies resolve negatively. But we think that, okay, we just need one to resolve positively and that will get us to a program that we want to scale to thousands of farms. That will enable our current farm program to scale up or that'll help us build another program that we want to scale.
SPEAKER_03:To what extent do you feel as though the movement's kind of waiting for these trials of Fish Welfare Initiative to conclude to have more confidence in rolling these programs out across different countries? It was kind of funny when you were founded because I remember talking to you about this, but it was like, oh, you guys are doing fish now. Cool. Yeah. So they do the fish stuff, even though, as you say, there's like so many species, it's like a really challenging issue with lots of complexities in so many different countries. Do you think there's a reason why there aren't now like 30 fish welfare initiatives starting and focusing on a country, doing the on the ground actions, trying to learn as much as possible? Is there a sense that like we're waiting on seeing how successful you've been in India and then trying to found things to like replicate that same study across different countries. Do you have a sense?
SPEAKER_02:I really wish it was the case that there were like a lot of people kind of waiting in the wings to see how we do. Okay, if this satellite thing works, we're going to implement that in all these places. I unfortunately think that's not what's going on here at all. Now, if we do hit a big breakthrough, I think we are likely to Well, we'll obviously promote that a lot, both because it's good for fundraising, of course, but also because we want other people to take this up and we don't want to kind of like be the sole owners of any big innovations we have. I think the reason that more people aren't working on the sort of work that we do is because it's hard and because it's different than what most advocates are good at and comfortable doing. The work we do is hard because it involves being in the field not just in kind of like taking meetings, but actually, James, as you were in rural India, right? In places where most activists who are very kind of urban progressive people don't necessarily want to live, right? They don't want to live in a place where it's like farming country.
SPEAKER_01:On the way back there, the customs official, when he found out where I was, he was like, what were you doing there? He's like, there is nothing there. This is touchy. I was hanging out with my friend and looking at some fish. The kind of stuff that I saw, I guess, like, the field research facility, you know, people in some cases are staying overnight in this small messable shack to make sure you guys check on the fish every few hours, make sure they're fine. And I think it feels very different for me being in air conditioned laptop land, you know, doing documents and emails. Yeah, I totally agree. A whole different
SPEAKER_02:ballgame. Yeah, I think the other thing that is tricky about our work is kind of like the morally gray at times nature of it, where it's We're interacting directly with the animals ourselves. We're interacting directly with farmers ourselves. We, you know, spend the whole lives of these fishes trying to get the farmers to improve how they treat them, but the farmers still suffocate them to death at the end. We run live animal studies with our feed fortification study and dissolved oxygen tolerance study. And we think these are really important, but we are running at the end of the day studies with live animals and sometimes animals die. in those studies. It's not the purpose of the study, but sometimes it does happen. So it kind of requires you to get your hands dirty. And I think our movement has a problem, probably now more than ever before, of liking kind of comfortable lives in our nice cities where we're working from home and have kind of the lifestyle we want. We're just on our laptops all day doing advocacy there. And that's great. And that's really important. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:We would love like 30 clones of Fish Welfare Initiative in different countries. Are there any other gaps that you see in the animal advocacy space where maybe a sense of this high agency would be useful?
SPEAKER_02:So I think it's important to remember that we are at what I believe is the beginning of our movement. We've done a lot of useful work already, but still we have such a long ways to go and certainly more time ahead of us. And I think we have behind us in our kind of serious advocacy space. I believe if we are successful, this could be remembered as a century of animal advocacy where we really fundamentally change how our species interacts with other species on this planet. And to that, and I'm really keen on innovation. I'm keen on ideas. I'm going to tell you five ideas that I think people ought to be showing up for more or starting. These are just my ideas. The big takeaway, though, is that people should innovate and people should be thinking, what are the gaps that they see in the movement? And can they start those either kind of in their own organization or as an activist on the side or by starting a new organization? The first is corporate welfare. We've had a lot of success already with cage free and broiler chicken welfare. But what are the next generation of corporate welfare asks? What's going to come after this? How are we going to use all this infrastructure for the next thing? Number two, food policy. So we have, as I said, this infrastructure buildup around corporate campaigning. How can we use that infrastructure for not just welfare-focused asks, but asks that focus on food policy? So transitioning away from animal products altogether. Number three, putting people in the right places. So how can we get a new generation of animal advocates, not just to get jobs in the movement? That's, of course, very important. But how can we also get them into high places in corporations and in government where they will be really influential for us in the future? Number four, mobilizing public support. So I think, for instance, Pax Fauna or Pro Animal Future, as they're now referred to, does a really good job on this. I'd recommend the podcast you all did with Aiden. Oh, nice. You have the pen there. Great.
SPEAKER_01:People who are listening, I'm wearing the Pro Animal badge. Very proud owner of it.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I've also got one actually. Yeah, I think the question here is how can we use the already very strong pro-animal sentiment in the public, right? Because everyone loves animals. No one supports animal cruelty. If you ask them if they're animal lovers, they'll be like, yes, of course, I love my dog. Like, I love all animals. They're great. But how can we use that nascent sentiment we already have to A, gain wins for animals to make an impact, but B, grow the movement, grow the number of people who identify as pro-animal in some meaningful way? And number five, the last thing is how do we make this whole thing global? How can we make traction in places like India and China, which are some of the most important and most neglected countries in our movement? This is a lot of the work that FWI is trying to do right now, but we are going to need more work here if we're going to truly succeed as a global movement.
SPEAKER_03:I'm interested to hear from you, obviously, with this sense of high agency. You've been through an entrepreneur journey. program and then founded an organization. How do you trade off between starting again? And should you be taking on one of those five projects versus are you the right person to be taking FWI into the next five years of progression in fish welfare in India?
SPEAKER_02:That's a tricky question. I think for most people depend a lot on their personal circumstance. So Do you want to keep doing something where you're kind of pulled in a lot of different directions where you have to travel? Or do you want a more stable job? As you advance in your career, a lot of people will choose a ladder and there's nothing wrong with that. It is the case that the people who I think maybe Dave Coleman Heidi on your very first podcast or someone else talked about the distinction here. It's not always the case that the person who's really good at growing the organization from one to 20 people is the best CEO for an organization later. And it could be the case, right, that I'm kind of being more like scrappy and like travel inclined myself. I'm really good at kind of like the early days, really willing to get my hands dirty, get in the field and all that. But I'm not good at running like a big kind of departmentally structured organization. And if that's the case, then I think my comparative advantage would be to go start something new at some point later on. I'm not sure what I will do. I'm still kind of trying my fit perhaps as being executive director of a 23-person organization, certainly learning a lot along the way. But yeah, I'd love to see more serial entrepreneurs in our movement, people who start a project, who get it going, who work on it for the first five years or so, and who build a strong team. Because ideally, as a founder, your job is to build up the organization so good it can function without you. Then after that five years or so, then they move on to the next thing. Through this way, we start a lot of new organizations. It doesn't have to be an organization necessarily, but volunteer projects or projects at existing organizations. We become better at being more pluralistic over time.
SPEAKER_01:Haven, I'm trying to remember those five points. One is expanding corporate welfare and then One is food policy, so maybe using the same infrastructure on that. And it's getting people in powerful places. Is that the third one? There's something on mobilizing public support and then making it more global. Wow, I did surprisingly well. Is that right? Perfect. I was like, maybe it'll come out. It did. I'm curious to know why those five areas. What's your kind of diagnosis of either what's going well or what's missing that you think those five are particularly
SPEAKER_02:important? So I would say these are more like my intuitions. Now, I wouldn't quite call them half-baked intuitions. And I have thought about this a fair bit and talked with a lot of people. But I haven't gone through some sort of rigorous prioritization process of all the areas we can invest in. These are the five things I think are most important. So I wouldn't update too much on those. Maybe I'll just talk about the first one, corporate welfare. The reason I think this is so promising is that the cage-free campaign in particular is probably the most successful thing our movement has ever run. It's probably been the best thing of reducing suffering our movement has ever run. It's probably also been the best global collaboration we've ever had as a movement with organizations like the Open Wing Alliance funding work across the world to run these very specific targeted and impactful campaigns. That's great. But in some countries, we're already getting most hens out of cages. In other countries, there's still a long fight ahead of us. But if we succeed as a movement, we will win that fight. But what comes after that, right? How do we use the same infrastructure and talent that we have that's been built up around running cage-free and now broiler campaigns into the next corporate welfare campaign? What's the next corporate welfare thing we're going to ask for? Something else with chickens. People also talk about running corporate campaigns for fishes. I think that's more complicated for various reasons we could get into, such as the species distinctions here. I want to basically learn from our past successes to bring forth something into the future.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Something I think is really like the more I think about the corporate campaigns, similar to maybe the more, I guess, positively I feel about it. This is one of the very few things that kind of scales globally. And I think it's just like, you know, every country has companies. It's kind of obvious, but like, and the mechanisms influence companies are not uniformly the same around the world, but someplace more challenging, but it's pretty similar compared to like trying to influence companies. policy in the UK versus Ghana, extremely different, but like corporations, somewhat similar mechanisms. So I definitely do agree that that is been a very powerful vehicle. And it's not clear we have another one that's as universally kind of adept at winning change for animals.
SPEAKER_02:I would say that where this breaks down, this is kind of part of our work is that corporations don't impact all animals and maybe a few. include fishes. They don't even impact most farm terrestrial or farm vertebrate animals. Because in our case, the fish farms we work with, they never sell to a corporation. They sell to some middleman who sells to another middleman, then it goes to a wet market. At no point is there like a public facing corporation involved in this process. And that means that for the majority of fishes in India, and I believe other similar contexts, it's not the case you can really make a big difference by doing corporate welfare. And we need us to focus on a different level, perhaps policy, though there's issues there with enforcement. But what we've chosen to do is work more on the ground with farmers directly, at least at this stage.
SPEAKER_01:Do you think that will change over time? Because I remember seeing a graph, I think it was something like BCG or someone, that basically as the GDP of a country rises, the markets get more formal, including the retail market. Do you think that's something you would expect to be true in places like India, where even though it's a very big informal market now, as kind of growth and development happens over the next couple of decades, it will become more and more formal.
SPEAKER_02:I think that's the case, provided we don't have some massive shock to the system, which kind of like in the state of political affairs and the state of like rapid AI development, I think it's not totally clear that there won't be some like game changing event in the next few decades. But that is a trend we're looking at. One question is, is that a good thing for these animals? So it is good in that There's more upstream avenues like corporations where we can affect them and we can run these pretty effective campaigns. But it's not a good thing in that more consolidated industry tends to be more intensified industry. So do we want the semi-intensive industry of carp farming in India to become like the intensive industry of salmon farming in Scotland? Probably not. And part of the work that we do and part of the work that I think a lot of people do in lower and middle income countries is to resist intensification, is to say, hey, what you guys are going right now certainly can be improved, but you shouldn't try to make it more intensive because of the animal welfare costs. And ideally also that aligns with some incentives for the farmers to not be caught in a more intensive system. I would say though that I'm quite uncertain whether we as a movement now or in the future are or will be powerful enough to resist these pretty intense and powerful economic forces, right? Like if an industry is facing a lot of economic, especially like external export pressure to intensify, it's not clear that a few nonprofits who don't have kind of like direct profit incentive that they can apply to these industries will be able to resist that. But I certainly think it's worth trying in an area worth exploring.
SPEAKER_03:Thanks for going into that in more depth. And I definitely, I would love to have another hour on the podcast to go into those, but I would definitely recommend Haven's often at the various conferences. And I know it's super open to chat through stuff. So I'd recommend having a session with Haven if you're interested in one of those particular areas and want to know more. Just kind of to wrap up then, I'd love to know from you, maybe how in that early stage of entrepreneurship, how you could have been like better prepared to take this on. Are there kind of, specific skills that you wish that you'd had or like attributes that you think you did have that made you really good fit for entrepreneurship? Is there kind of some top tips that you can share with us?
SPEAKER_02:A couple attributes I had that I'll tell you about one thing I wish I would have done differently. So I think the kind of high agency thing that we've talked about a bit, just being willing to show up and be there and take things on was really important for me.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:I also think something that was important for us early on was having a large network of advisors that we could talk with and being very transparent publicly about our work. We've always had the idea that we'll let how we get donations operate on a free market. We're conscious that any money we get is probably money that another animal organization worth counterfactually would have otherwise gotten. And the way we deal with this is we think, okay, we're not going to set out to raise lots of money. That's not our first and foremost goal. Our first and foremost goal is to have an impact and be as transparent as possible about what we're doing, about what's going well and what's going poorly. And we'll leave it up to donors to make decisions about do we seem like we're worth the money or not. And then it's really up to them. And the idea is that they know enough about kind of the broad portfolio of organizations they can give to, to see whether kind of FWI is one thing that makes sense for them to support in the movement. Yeah, so with that, it was really important to communicate externally. And that helped get us a lot of external support early on, I think that proved to later be useful and proved to be good for fundraising as well that people appreciate how transparent we were. The thing I wish we would have done differently is also related to advising. While we had a lot of advisors in kind of animal advocacy. I don't think we had advisors that were as well adjusted to our experience in solving the sort of problems they really needed to solve, right? So, we talked with people who are used to writing animal charities. Amy, we talked with people like you who had done corporate campaigns, and that's great. But the people I think we really missed out on were people who had run field studies before, who tried to make change, and maybe not even with animal welfare, but with global health and development in lower and middle income countries and people who develop new interventions from scratch, whether those are to benefit non-human animals or humans. And because we didn't talk with these people, our research process was quite poor, I think, for a number of years. I mean, maybe there's probably other reasons as well, but I think had we explained, here's like the specific studies that we're trying to do, then we would have heard probably an earful about, especially at first, that, hey, this isn't going to work. You're not approaching this in the right way. And honestly, probably why we didn't talk with those people, or at least one part of it, was that we kind of knew that deep down, that what we were doing was not as rigorous as it ought to be, and maybe we were a bit hesitant. And there's two lessons for people there. One is to make sure you're classifying your project correctly and talk with people who have experience in that So our project was not just animal advocacy. It was not just corporate campaigns, which we didn't really end up doing that much of or at all, really. Our project was also more similar to running global health and development studies in the field. And that's who we should have been talking with. The other lesson for people is if you kind of have like a nagging doubt on the inside that, hey, this thing maybe isn't going to work. You should bring that to the daylight, bring that to the forefront, expose it to criticism. You don't have to be perfectly confident in things to do then. But when you have a doubt that that should be addressed and you should be like, okay, we're not sure this is going to work, but at least we've looked into it. You shouldn't kind of push things to the background. It's like, oh yeah, it's too complicated. It's too scary. I don't want to think about
SPEAKER_00:it. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. And often if you have that thought, probably many other people also have that thought in your team. And it's really important to bring that out because I think probably so many So many of us have this nagging doubt like, oh, this is a good campaign and everyone stays silent and something doesn't work. And, you know, maybe we could have averted that. So, yeah. Nice. Well, with that, we'll wrap up the main sections and we'll move on to our closing thing, which we always do. So, Haven, what's one bit of news you're grateful to hear recently? Yeah,
SPEAKER_02:so
SPEAKER_01:I know
SPEAKER_02:we're kind of down about... politics in the US nowadays, understandably so. Well, I mean, half was a very happy haven, speak for yourself. And we're not for voters. But one, I'll say at least interesting development is that the state of Washington recently banned commercial net and farming of fishes, the whole state. I should say at FWI, we're officially agnostic about whether people should be farming fishes to begin with. And That's largely because it's important for us not to be anti-industry when we're working directly with farmers. But what I will say is it's very interesting to see policymakers and activists, and in this case, not necessarily animal welfare activists as much as environmental activists, are really considering this issue thoroughly and taking action on it. It's exciting for me to see fish farming as a political agenda here.
SPEAKER_03:Can you tell me what NetPin, what is it?
SPEAKER_02:This is where they have floating cages off the coast of somewhere, a big, maybe 10 meter across cage. And it goes down maybe 10, 30 meters in the water and the fishes are kept in this floating net. So it's the system that they had off the coast of Washington and will have till they phase it out. It's also how salmon are farmed in Norway and Scotland and Chile too.
SPEAKER_03:So it's a ban on having those types of
SPEAKER_02:cages.
SPEAKER_03:Exactly.
SPEAKER_02:which I think is the main form of fish farming in Washington. So Washington will not be farming much fishes at all after this. Well, that is big.
SPEAKER_03:Any recommendations for our listeners? Any kind of books that have inspired your journey? Any blog posts, etc?
SPEAKER_02:I read a lot and I would recommend that to people. That's been helpful for getting a big diversity of ideas into my head. The one I'll recommend today, sitting with the theme of this podcast, is the book, The Lean Startup, that's been influential. I've only read it once a number of years ago, but it was influential a lot when I read it. And I think it's been influential through charity entrepreneurship for how we've come to run our organization, which is by running a series of tests where you test something out, see if it works. If it works, great, then you can scale up. If it doesn't work, then you have to rethink how to approach things. So I'd really recommend that book to people who are interested in entrepreneurship, either kind of at a small level of just starting some project in their day-to-day life or at their current job or something as big as starting a new organization or company.
SPEAKER_01:And final question, how can people either follow or get more involved in your work?
SPEAKER_02:Probably the best place to follow us is on our website, fwi.phish or our newsletter, fwi.phish forward slash news. As for how people can get involved in our work, people can donate if they like, but mostly we don't utilize volunteers as much because our work is more on the ground. And most of the positions we hire for are in India. So if you have listeners in India, as I'm sure you have some, we'd be keen for them to apply and they should keep an eye out for future job openings in our newsletter.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I would recommend checking out the FWI donate page. I'm pretty sure it's one of the few that actually gives you reasons to not donate to this charity. It actually says here are reasons why maybe you don't, which is, I think, very funny and in true FWI spirit, I think. Nice. Well, on that note, Haven, thanks so much for joining us. This has been super interesting. And yeah, thanks for all the great work you guys do. Thank you, guys.