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What could you give away that might amaze you?
I feel passionate about this because this was our experience of Ted.
We discovered that after we took the risk and it was a risk of the time of giving away
our content.
That is the start of everything good that ever happened to Ted and it forced us almost
to adopt the strategy of radical generosity.
It is instinctive the desire to respond to generosity is instinctive.
The desire to be uplifted when you see someone else being generous is instinctive.
Those three things together in an age where we're connected like never before, that is
what creates this incredible engine of possibility that we really could imagine an era where acts
of kindness spread like never before.
So kindness simple act of generosity can change your life.
Your relationships maybe even your community.
But what if there was a way to scale simple acts of kindness on a global level?
Can you imagine how that might make not just your own life better but potentially change
the world and at a time we need it more than ever in his new book Infectious Generosity.
The ultimate idea worth spreading.
Chris Anderson explores how to spark contagion of generosity that spreads around the world.
And as a long time iconic curator of Ted, he spent over two decades immersed in ideas
worth spreading.
Under his leadership, Ted has grown into a global platform that provides free knowledge to hundreds
of millions of people.
And now Chris is on a bit of a mission to spread infectious generosity and he's not just
imagining some fantasy world where everyone wears rose colored glasses.
He's gone deep into the research, the stories and the mechanisms to make it happen.
And in our conversation, he shares specific insights, strategies and stories to not only
start bringing more kindness into your daily life but to be part of the global ripple of
generosity that just might hold the power to make this world a better kind or more connected
place.
In this age of infinite connection, one small act of generosity truly can ripple out in
surprising ways and change starts with one brave move.
That's where we're headed today.
So excited to share this conversation with you.
I'm Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project.
The topic that you're really diving into in the new book Infectious Generosity is on
the one hand I want to say it's of the moment but it's so just interconnected with the human
condition that it's always of the moment.
It's just we seem to be focusing back on it in a different way.
And I feel like a lot of this is related to what you write about which is this notion
that it's felt for so many people like culture in general is just trending, meaner and
more self centered in a lot of different ways.
Take me into what you see going on here.
I think the world is getting meaner and I'm sick of it.
I think most people are sick of it and I think and I hate to say this because I'm a tech
optimist I guess at heart.
I think the internet has played a meaningful role in this.
The last 10 years of the internet have been crushingly disappointing.
Social media especially has found a way to dial up the angriest most divisive voices and
I think has really shaped how we think of each other and talk about each other.
I think it's really dangerous and it's a big motivator for the book really.
I mean one way of thinking about the book is that it's an attempt to figure out can we
turn the tide here?
Can we use, can we find a way in which acts of kindness become more prevalent just sort
of just acts of nastiness?
So take me a little bit more into the argument around social media and also just media
writ large.
I think at this point the organization that you've sort of been in part the face out of
you're like deeply involved in curating conversations around for more than two decades
now it is a part of culture.
It is part of what a lot of people would think as both new and old media at this point
as well.
But you've done it very differently but what are you seeing more specifically?
What's happening underneath the hood that you feel is driving this part of the human impulse
because it's not the only part of the human impulse.
No that's right.
I think for me there's two main things.
First of all I think a lot of people are familiar with these cognitive biases we have towards
threats.
Some are attention to threats than to opportunities probably helped us survive at some point.
But it means that people who use the language of threat gain more attention.
It's just you're just tapping into human focus.
And there's another reason why news media in general and certainly social media I think
hitting on average actually a false picture of the world and it's this good things happen
slowly.
That things happen quickly.
This is just part of the way that universe is.
It's a chaotic thing out there for something good to happen.
People have to plan it.
They have to intentionally reorganize things to make something good.
A building is designed and it can take years for that to happen and then years for it to
get built and go through the approval process and so forth.
At no stage at no moment does someone say hold the front page.
A new buzz laid.
But a bomb can take down that building in a minute.
If the question that you're asking and most news media are asking this question is what
is the most dramatic thing that happened in the last few hours.
Almost always the answer to that is going to be bad.
Then collectively that means we listen to the news and what we hear is bad and then bad
and then more bad.
And that cumulative effect of that is actually to give us a false view of the world because
we're missing all of those slow but good things that have been happening in the background.
We just don't pay attention to them.
We think the worst of ourselves and of the world and we feel despair when we think of the
future.
I think that's really, really, really unfortunate and it's getting to the point where it's
quite dangerous.
That makes a lot of sense.
Social media went out.
So many people actually get their news.
This is where they become informed about the world.
Not just remember the very early days of Facebook where there are only a couple things you
could do on there.
It was more like sharing what you were doing on any given moment.
It's not that anymore.
None of these platforms are.
When so much of what you're exposed to becomes algorithmically determined and those algorithms
are tuned to what will make you stay on the platform for as long as humanly possible
because the business model is around advertising.
Then what you're saying makes a lot of sense from a sort of a quote, just a pure business,
a profit and loss standpoint.
Well, sure.
If outrage and rage and bad things are going to keep you tuned in because of the threat
response we have, let's just keep feeding you that in the algorithm because that'll
keep you there longer and they will generate more exposure to advertising.
So it seems like the newer media is sort of piling on to what more traditional broadcast
media has known for generations now about attention spans.
Yeah, I think that's right.
I don't myself see it as this evil plot that a bunch of people plan like.
I think the algorithms discovered it about us that what we pay most attention to is often
dark and that just got amplified and amplified.
But if you do all this amplifying of our lizard brains at some point, you basically
tell us all into lizards.
That's not good.
I don't want to live in a world of lizards.
I want to live in a world where the better part of ourselves, our better angels are in
control and finding ways of telling different kinds of stories.
And those other stories are everywhere and very real and they're just invisible and
it's a tragedy.
And that's such an important point to come back to.
Also it's this, when all we see is the negativity, it is so easy for us to default to the assumption
that well, this is the world.
What you're offering is let's not put our heads in the sand.
This is a part of the world.
This is a part of the human story.
But it's not the entirety of it.
There's so much more that is good, that is connecting, that is generous and benevolent,
that we're not telling.
That's right.
And in the connected age that we're in, even more amazingly, the good things that can
happen with a little bit of tweaking and a little bit of pushing can actually spread
further because when millions of people are connected to millions of people, you have
this amazing phenomenon called virality where if ten people pass things on to eleven
people, suddenly millions of people come to know about it.
So the difference, like when you think about the work that you're doing, say you're a
marketer or a storyteller or you just want good things for the world, you might think
well I just have to work a bit harder to get that many more people to do it.
Yeah, you may reach a point where suddenly interest explodes.
If you can find that point and cross it, then your 20% of extra effort doesn't just mean
20% more people here.
It may mean thousands of percent more people here.
And so it's worth so much just paying attention to what it takes to cross that chasm and
to reach that, you know, what makes something ignite.
And often it's, it can be quite small, you know, it's maybe quite a small difference.
It's definitely true that left to our own devices, the good things we share are more boring
than the bad things we share.
It's just who we are.
That is worth paying attention to and trying to correct.
Can we make the good things non-boring if we do, it changes everything.
Yeah, now that makes so much sense.
It's funny as you're describing that, I'm thinking, my brain was literally scanning.
What was the last thing that I happened to see on some social feed that I just immediately
felt and impulsed to share with everybody I know?
And it was deeply positive.
It was the thing that left a lump in my throat for the best of reasons.
So it is possible that we can actually cross that chasm and say, like, this is the stuff,
too.
And what you said right there is one of the key reasons why things go viral.
You said a lump in your throat.
You felt emotion.
You felt a deep emotion.
When people feel a powerful emotion about something, they will share it.
They will spread it.
And unfortunately, a lot of it powerful emotions, people feel a darker emotions.
Every emotion can lead to things being shared.
And so sometimes it's just the way we tell a story.
Sometimes we're lazy.
Sometimes we don't really put ourselves into revealing the actual human aspect of what
we're talking about.
I mean, I'm afforting this a lot as well.
I'll talk a little sound.
I don't know, overhead-y or something like that.
I'll then tell a story about, I don't know, how I was inspired by my mother and how
you know, although she passed away a couple months ago, I'm so grateful to her.
I'm inspired by her.
And some of what she taught and what she lived, I really, really want to be shared further
and to be out there in the world.
So figuring out how we share stories in a way that taps into who we authentically are
as humans, that's definitely a big part of it.
That's one of the catalysts that can make all the difference.
Yeah.
So I want to tease out two different things that we've kind of been weaving into one conversation.
One is the notion of how do we share in a way where a lot of people are moved by it
and then decide to share it as well.
But the fundamental thing underneath that is how do we share the stories, the impulses
around the good, around the part of human nature, the generosity of spirit that really
centers that part of the story so that we can make that part of our life, part of our
experience.
So talk to me a bit about just the notion of generosity in general.
It was interesting.
I was recently talking to a friend who gave a keynote and she proposed to the audience
that human beings are fundamentally good, that they're generous, that they're kind.
In the line of questionnaires at the end of that talk, she got a lot of pushback and
a lot of people are saying, no, like this is not my understanding, this is not my teaching
in fact, this was not my maybe even faith tradition.
Talk to me about your lens on this.
Yeah, it's not quite how I frame it.
I'm with Soljnitz and I think on this that they'll line between good and evil, doesn't
run between nations or identity groups or classes.
It runs through every human art.
I think we are fundamentally good and also fundamentally bad and it depends on the moment
in the circumstance and what's so complicated about this is that we're a social species,
saying that each of us has ripple effects with others.
So yeah, I resonate with that one comment of your faith tradition may not have talked
about.
I was definitely brought up religious.
I was brought that we were born into sin as it were.
That feels a creepy worldview to people now for understandable reasons.
But I think how that worked out in practice is that we viewed life as this battle between
your, you know, between God and the devil inside you, you know, your demons or an angels,
whatever language you want to talk about.
And that forced you to pay attention to how you felt about individual things like it
forced you to try to find the better side of yourself.
I think people have dark sides to themselves and in the current environment, those dark
sides can easily be aroused and dominate who we are and we can become people who we
actually not that proud of being.
We can become patient and dismissive and angry and all those things.
And the language I use now is not demons and angels, but it's our instinctive self and
our effective self.
And our instinctive self isn't all demonic.
It's actually very good.
It's as Danny Karnamund has said, it's our system one thinking.
It's unconscious.
It's fast.
It actually counts for a lot of the joys and pleasures of life and a lot of human genius.
We are amazing at making clever decisions really quickly without even thinking about it.
It happens all the time.
But we are also in that mode prone and prone to deep forces that have shaped our evolution
of many years and that don't really apply that well to the modern era.
We crave sugar and fat and as much of it as possible.
And we devour it as soon as we can find it.
That's problematic in the world of abundance.
We find it really hard not to procrastinate.
There are so many distractions and we've got this reasoning self, the reflective self
that says, I really think I should be spending more time doing that.
But this other thing is so allure.
So so much of life is about trying to empower our effective selves over our instinctive
selves.
To me, that would be lesson one in every educational system.
And it's probably lessons two, three, four, five, six.
It's a lifelong task to figure out how to do this.
Maybe religion used to play a role in helping people do it.
Be parenting does play a role, but not in every family.
I think we've forgotten how to do this.
And I think when social media were built, they forgot just how powerful the instinctive
side of us is and how easy it is to lead people to becoming and spending time doing what
they they're reflective self really isn't proud of or doesn't like or doesn't, you know,
feels regretful of.
But it's a form of addiction.
Every addiction is like this.
You know, we have these powerful forces in us that we find it hard to resist.
I think everyone has good inside them.
And the amazing thing about generosity is that just a very few psychopaths, it is a deep
instinct wide deep inside you when you see someone else suffering, you will feel something
and you will want to help them in some way.
We're wide to connect to each other's feelings.
If someone is generous to you, you will feel an intense desire to respond.
It's who we are.
And if we don't, we become hated, free-loaders and cheaters.
So it's all in there.
And what's so urgent about the current moment is that we're in danger of losing that part
of us and the nurturing and nourishment of that part of us in favor of the nurturing and
nourishing of the bad part of us that is turning us into people who hate and who despise
and who are angry and who have disgusted.
And those feelings make it impossible for different groups to really connect, achieve anything.
And without that, we're giving up humanity's biggest superpower, the ability for us to cooperate
and build amazing things.
Yeah, so agree with that.
It's a classic story of the good, the bad, wealth, which one wins is the one you feed.
And you're centering the notion that it's not like one thing is instinctual and the
other just takes a really concerted effort over time.
Because I do think that I think this is what you're saying and I would agree with this
if it's right, that generosity is as instinctual as the negative things that we feel, but we
are so much less practiced at centering that in our lives that it doesn't feel as much
of our default state anymore.
And like we have to actually engage in the work of bringing it back to a place of just
such a regular experience that it becomes more automatic in the way we move through the
world.
Does that make sense to you?
100%.
It's like anything that you do as a human, the more you do it, the more powerful that
muscle gets.
It both becomes easier to do and you get to discover again and again the unexpected
upside of being generous, which is that you, it brings happiness with it.
This has been shown time and again, scientifically and in a reported experience of people.
You discover that you like being your better self and you feel you feel a great sense
of meaning and purpose and happiness and the more that you get reminded of that, the
more it becomes natural to want to exercise that muscle and every time you do, are there
respond and ripple effects happen?
So you know, when the cycle is telling the right way, it is truly a beautiful thing and
what's got me so excited is that because we're in a connected age, there are so many ways
in which we can signal to each other and spark each other to respond in a delightful way.
There are amazing stories out there of how this is happening and the more people just
pay attention to that and buy into that, then just maybe, just maybe there's a pathway
to hope.
Yeah, completely on board with that, you know, and for those who are curious, there is
a significant body of research around how generosity affects us.
I'm sure many people are familiar with the work of Adam Grant, Tony Alubramersky, who
really, like, they often describe it in popular parlor and says the givers glow.
We give it because there's something that wants to be of service or help others and yet
there is this measurable, sustained psychological and emotional benefit to us in the act of actually
being generous and researchers are even parsed, what's the best way to do it?
Do it all at once and one big thing, do you spread it out and little sprinkles every
day and, you know, how does that change the effect?
But what you're describing also is another part of the phenomenon and I've seen a little
bit of the research on this, which is the sort of pro-social effect of witnessing generosity
as well.
So it's not just about the person who's giving and the beneficiary or beneficiaries, but
there's something that's kind of magical that happens when people see this phenomenon
that brings them into it as well.
Jonathan Height talks about this, moral elevation.
You don't even have to see it in the real world.
You can just see it on video and it increases the chances that you will be kind.
You know, I tell the story in the book, briefly, of like, okay, so the person pulls up to
a traffic light, it's raining, pouring with rain.
Notches as a person by the side of the road, gets out of the car, gets soaked, gives
that person his umbrella, goes back in the car and drives off.
Kind of people have done this from time to time, no doubt, as long as there have been traffic
lights.
But this particular act was, uh, 2022, it was picked up on video.
That video was then seen by millions of people.
And when you look at the comments on Reddit, for example, responding to this, it's just
clear that that moral uplift, that sense of elevation, is there in space?
People are saying things like, I'm so inspired by this.
Well, he really did that.
Boy, I have got to pay attention to people on the side of the road.
One person wrote, I'm now going to carry more umbrella.
I'm going to carry several umbrellas inside my car.
So in an age where one person's act can change the mindset of a very large number of people,
that feels like in principle that that could be incredibly helpful.
Yeah.
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I mean, you use the phrase the infinite village.
Is this what we're talking about or is there more expansive understanding that you have
of it?
Yeah, the infinite village.
So we, you know, we evolved in communities of about maybe 150 people or so they tell
us.
Now the people we can be connected to is everyone.
And so what are the rule changes there?
I think the traditions of generosity have all been built around the assumptions that
were in a small community.
And in the connected age, I think we have to pay specific attention and be willing to
change our thinking about it a bit.
I mean, one of the most obvious things is that precisely because it's easier now to give
to a huge number of people for actually zero cost.
If you can give something online, it's knowledge or music or, you know, beautiful photography
or art or a video, software, things that we value, those things can be given away for
free to huge numbers of people.
Well, we should put more emphasis on that and encourage people to do that.
Even if their motivation to do it is sometimes slightly mixed, you know, because all those
people get that thing, maybe they hope for enhanced reputation, you know, across the
world.
Now, traditionally on generosity, if we think people are doing something for reputation
or reasons, we may discount it.
It's like we're supposed to give anonymously and all the rest of it.
I think we can't do that in the connected age.
I think we need to celebrate every reason for people to give more because there is so much
at stake here, whether someone chooses to give something or not.
It's not just three people who will benefit.
It can be millions of people who benefit.
And so I think this idea of encouraging everyone or wants to work out, I would say that generosity
strategy.
What could you give away that might amaze you?
I feel partially about it this because this was our experience at TED.
We discovered that after we took the risk and it was a risk at the time of giving away
our content, that is the start of everything good that ever happened to TED happened.
People responded, you know, this stuff spread around the world and people wanted to help
and translate us and all the rest of it.
And it forced us almost to adopt the strategy of radical generosity.
And so we gave away our brand.
So people could do TED X events around the world.
We didn't control.
They controlled them.
It was a risk.
But it led to 3,000 mostly beautiful events around the world happening and huge numbers
of videos being recorded and so forth.
So the rules are different now, an infinite village is different from just a village.
And we need to pay attention to that.
What we hold onto and what we give away, not the same now.
And it's exciting if we embrace the potential of what this possibility of giving to so many
people could imply.
Yeah, that makes so much sense here.
The way you describe the decision, Ted, to say, hey, listen, we are creating really highly
valuable content and experiences from some of the most incredible thinkers and feelers
and doers and creators in the world.
Let's just give it away and see what happens.
Now granted, there is an event where people can come to and they are now actually thousands
of smaller events like satellite, the TED X as you described.
But the notion of what if we take this risk and we're investing all of this energy in
creating something and give it away and trust.
I was very fortunate to have at Cesar Ken Robinson on the show.
And we had a wonderful conversation.
I know the world misses him dearly for so many reasons and so many ways.
I don't know if he still has the most viewed Ted talking on Ted, but it's certainly one
of them.
I think he does.
I think he does.
Yeah.
And I've watched that myself countless times.
And then to just sit and ask him questions and hear about his stories and his, you know,
it's interesting because you described the decision to make these experiences freely available
for anyone.
But then there's the ripple effect of this.
Like what happens and you write about this actually?
What happens when someone watches Cesar Ken?
Like what seeds did that then plant in thousands or millions of other peoples or teachers
lives that then sort of like created this like ripple after ripple after ripple.
So it's not just the immediate experience.
It's like what am I setting in motion that may.
I have no idea when this ends or how it ends and I will never know that anyone it touches,
but you just know that it will.
So this is the thing.
We never really know what happens at the end of all those ripples.
But when you when one comes back and you find out about it, it is such a joyful thing.
And yes, Ken, you know, he gave that talk to five or six hundred people at live at the
time.
And it's still today seen every day by several thousand people.
Ten years ago, one of those people was this woman who I only met a couple years ago, super
poor.
She was a college kid, wanted to be an accountant or a father wanted to be an accountant.
And she saw Cesar Ken's talk in this little video, wriggling it's way across the internet,
changed her mindset.
So profoundly she wanted to do the same thing in India for people in India who didn't
have access to education.
So she and a partner raised money and they basically started off their own version of
research for India, didn't last permission.
I don't know if we've given it.
I certainly now I'm so joyful about it.
I'm delighted, you know, they have their own little red rug and so forth.
But it is it is amazing that this thing now reaches 50 million people plus a month.
And I heard about she described to me some of the people, some of the ripple effects from
that during the pandemic, someone hears one of her talks and learns that they can find
a new way to make a living, which was by sharing knowledge and their village.
And then a kid heard that talk and his life has been changed.
And so you think, Cesar Ken, if you're still with us, for you to know that 8,000 miles
away, there's a country being materially impacted by that one talk that you gave.
That is just so incredible to me.
And it could happen to anyone.
We're in an era where butterflies are flapping their wings and hurricanes are happening as
a result every day, every day.
So why not try to be one of those butterflies?
You describe another really interesting example.
The couple I believe it was who decided to give away substantial amounts of money anonymously
to strangers online and the ripple effect of that.
Take me into that story a bit.
Right, so that was a couple in the tech community that made a couple million dollar windfall
investment and they decided to give it away.
But to do so in an interesting way that would lead to new social science.
So we helped working with the University of British Columbia.
We helped design this sort of crazy social experiment that we called the mystery experiment.
We invited people to apply for it, not knowing what they were signing up for.
And basically 200 people ended up getting being offered $10,000.
No strings attached.
We wired into their pay Balakab.
It took some just sweating to accept it.
But when they did, the only rule was that they had to tell us what they spent it on.
And what they spent it on really blew people away.
I mean, two thirds of that money was spent generously.
Gifts to all kinds of organizations as well as gifts to family, friends, strangers.
I mean, it was so beautiful to see it.
And I got to speak to some of the people after the experiment was over and say, what
happened here?
Why would you do this?
And the typical answer that came back was that, look, I'm not sure I would have done this
if I had just won the lottery.
But because of this enormous couples generosity, I felt seen and I felt the need to pass that
on and to let others feel seen like I felt seen.
And so, you know, there was one woman in the UK that we, there's seven different countries,
lots of different income levels.
So a woman in the UK who got it and decided she was going to give away $10,000 in $500
chunks.
And then the next day had a tax bill for more than that $10,000.
And she stuck to her guns and she gave it away and she said, I go to work and I feel joy
at every step because I'm seeing another organization and I walk past places where I've just
been able to donate a small amount of money and it meant something to them.
So I don't know, the New York Times published a piece on this saying, David Brock saying,
people are more generous than we think.
And I think it's profound and it's because of that.
So you put the two things together, right?
First is instinctive, the desire to respond to generosity is instinctive.
The desire to be uplifted when you see someone else being generous is instinctive.
Those three things together in an age where they're connected like never before, that is
what creates this incredible engine of possibility that we really could imagine an era where acts
of kindness spread like never before.
Yeah, just that notion that generosity, we get generosity.
When you look at that at scale, it can be incredibly powerful.
As you're describing the stories, it had this instant remembrance of being at an event
that a friend of mine put on for a number of years.
And the organization behind the event that he had created was a nonprofit and he knew
that he had a certain amount of additional money that came in during that event.
So as a final act to close out the event, when a thousand people walked out of the
theater, they were each handed an envelope.
And in each envelope was a hundred dollar bill.
It was like every dollar of the excess was given back.
And the only request was let us know what you do with it.
There was no control.
There was no you have to spend it in this way.
You can't buy lattes for yourself.
Let us know and so much of it again.
The people felt so good about like, okay, so this is how do I keep paying it forward?
And there were a thousand people who were seated, both emotionally but also in a tiny little
stake that they could have used for our own lives.
But so many, like you were describing, people wanted to really say, how can I make this
feeling happen in other people too?
I love that.
That's great story.
And that impulse, I think, we forget is a part of us until something reminds us.
And then we're like, oh, right.
This is part of what life can be about.
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You also talk about this phenomenon though which is this notion of am I giving right?
You know, is it I want to do just right I want to be perfect in the way that I'm doing
it and how that can you can really be a bit of a stumbling block for generosity first
of all it is right for us to apply our brains as well as our hearts to generosity especially
when it comes to giving away money. It's all too easy to fall into the trap of giving away
money when you know you see some story on television of some tragedy or a friend asks
because there's a specific need has come up and it's kind of it's random and the truth is
that there's an order of magnitude difference between organizations out there that are doing
things effectively and wonderfully and really making change and those that haven't really
found their way and and it's quite it's easily possible to give away money in a way that
just creates dependency etc. So it is right to have a plan to have a generosity plan for
your money and to say how much am I willing to give away each year now what am I going
to spend it on and to think through it. One of the things that goes wrong though is that
we can get so worked up into saying am I sure I'm doing this right that no money
ever gets given and so there's this toxic question that I think a lot of people
fund themselves asking which is am I sure this is the best use of my philanthropy.
Well the answer to that question is always no you will never be sure and if you went through
the day saying am I sure because the very best thing I could do with my next five minutes
you would sit frozen as a statue and be a sad life. The actual question to ask is is this a good
use of of my money. I mean in general giving is the right thing to do it's because of our loss
of version because it's hard to do usually we don't giving leads to other people having a chance
to do something good in the world and it probably makes us happier. So finding the right
psychology to know yes think but don't overthink get to the point where you can just be confident
in say two or three organizations that you love get to know the other people who are supporting
them this joy in that as well by the way and then just be a regular giver and find ways of
reminding yourself what the benefits are of that and the good that that money is doing. I think
that's that's that's a good good mantra. Yeah it was recently talking to somebody about personal
finance and she was sharing the research around how a very simple shift in the decision making
process is goes back to Danny condiments work on loss of version right is it makes a profound
difference in the way that we save she said if you automate the decision so you're no longer
saying how much of my paycheck will I allocate to savings you just automate like every paycheck
x percent is automatically deducted that you adapt really quickly to not having whatever that
amount is available to you to spend and then it automates the process of you saving money over a
very long period of time that has a tremendous benefit and I wonder what you're describing also
is subject to generosity and I guess this is the notion between typing or siddhaka and all these
different traditions you know like let's choose like think about how you want it to be allocated
but then just make it a part of like take the thought process away from it making an automatic thing.
Yeah exactly we're very bad at following through and our good intentions so we need these
life hacks to achieve all sorts of things and I think a really powerful one is a giving pledge
certainly religions have bled in this for Judaism and Christianity it's tithing it's like
please give 10% of your money away to the church to for the poor or whatever and in Islam it's
a artist you should give if you're wealthy or well off you should give a 40th of your wealth every
year that's 2.5% every year of your wealth not your income what what I say is if you're not religious
I'm not religious at this point particularly if you're not religious do we want our ethical values
to be lower or higher or at least as good as those of religions and I think most people want
their ethical standards to be as high and so what I invite people to consider is to pledge the higher
of 10% of income or 2.5% because in different circumstances those pledges have different forces
for most people 10% of income is the is the challenging pledge to make but for the very
wealthy that's not a challenging pledge at all many of them don't even have much income at all they
borrow against their wealth or whatever they um 2.5% of their net worth annually is a huge commitment
many I've seen research that many billionaires currently even the ones that I think want to be
givers are giving less than half a percent of their net worth annually and so I think that the
force of the pledge is to kind of do your sort of automation every year you're going to sit down
with your family and reaffirm that you know these this is the kind of areas we want to give to
and here are the organizations that we've found to be effective and to just do that and then once
you've done it it becomes part of your lifestyle and I think that there is an even deeper joy
you know the obvious joy from giving comes you know you give them money and you see someone
small or cry and they're so happy that that is lovely but there's there's also a deep satisfaction
by saying I'm proud of being a thoughtful person and of harnessing my generosity my generosity
instincts in in a way that I think is defendable and wise and you know I think again your reflective
self can be your friend here and can tell you this this was this was good so look not everyone
is in a position where they can do a pledge that high but I I think as a life goal I think so many
things would change if as a society we just saw this as one of the sort of sensible moral rules
that people who could should should sign up to sign up you know no pledge something annually each year
compared for example with a lifelong pledge like the giving pledge which is a pledge for the by
the very rich to give away most of their wealth before they die that's beautiful but it's on the
never never and to actually get around to it because giving is hard so many of them never actually
get around to the king giving part and they're going to end up with a world that gives away
half the money and then the other half will make their children miserable it's it's hard I also
like the fact that you've been we've been talking about like well how do we think about money in
generosity but you're also and you list this out in the book a number of different ways let's say
for whatever reason you feel like you're not in a circumstance where that's available to you right
now and you basically invite people to say but there are other ways like I am not excluded from
this experience 100 percent and one of the things that you explores and you know you list out
six different things one is attention which I think is so beautiful because I often talk about I
use the phrase exquisite attention it's this ability almost cast a spell of attentiveness where
the people who are encapsulated and it feel like them they've transcended the moment the world
around them vanishes away and there's just something exquisite there's something deeply connected
about it where you feel seen in a way that rarely happens and I feel like we discount things like
this so often the value of experiences like that but then when you actually experience it you're
like this actually happens so infrequently in day to day life now that when it does you're just
cat divided by it and it really is a generosity driven experience 100 percent I mean I think
actually all generosity starts there with that gift it's it's you can call it a generosity mindset
I mean somehow people need to find their way into a place where they can actually deliberately
choose to focus their attention on something outside themselves or someone outside themselves
usually we could talk about the role that gratitude plays in getting someone to that point because
it's hard you know like we had all these sort of busy stressful lives and our default mode is
just to sleepwalk through the day almost and just from one mini crisis to another or one calendar
obligation to another to take time out of that and actually look at another human being and try and
say you know okay they have a story and maybe they have a need and so so many of the most amazing
ripple effects of generosity just start with someone willing to let someone else feel seen and
the beautiful thing about it is that often they themselves then also feel seen in a new way I
you know I a woman I know who works with us at events I gave her the book and she she told me
the story of just it was the smallest story but you know she was on the subway and someone came in
who she would have been shied away from normally didn't necessarily look super well and so forth
but she plucked up a courage and just said how are you and what's your name and they started a
conversation and you know she ended up giving him $10 and it was very meaningful to him being seen
part was meaningful and it was meaningful to her she felt differently about herself I think from
that and whether it's that or whether it's just being willing to take out time and pay attention to
you know I know that this is an issue I'm worried about in the world I'm going to dig into it I'm
going to look at it you know I'm going to pay attention to it and I'm going to start that that
curiosity journey and see whether that takes me that in itself is an act of generosity.
That makes so much sense one of the other modes of non-monetary giving you talk about
also just sharing knowledge sharing your wisdom and we see this happen so organically I think in
multi-generational families but there's so many opportunities that I think we miss around us you
know and we do see it institutionalized in certain fields I mean so often so many different small
towns around the country that are these score organizations where you know like senior mentors
generally the entrepreneurs who often retire they just kind of want to they're like I know a lot
I learned a lot I got kicked around a lot I really want to help young people with ideas in their
heads who want to start something and they just offer their services freely just to share that and
I wonder if there are more opportunities to try and sort of like codify this or institutionalize
or create structure around this because I do feel like there are so many people who would love
to share knowledge but they don't see a really easy path to being able to actually step into that
mode what's your take on that I mean it's such an important gift you know one of the most beautiful
things about generosity in general is it's asymmetry it's the fact that the cost to the
giver may be far less than the benefit to the receiver this is what makes it possible and
knowledge is a prime example of this of you know it might take you 10 minutes to explain something
to someone and it might transform their day or even their life so how do we have more of that
well there I mean there are obviously I mean YouTube is actually when you view it one way is this
incredible new education engine for the world like you can get free knowledge on YouTube on pretty
much any topic there is and I find that astonishing and some people are putting up videos because
they hope to make some ad revenue others are just doing it because they they want to share the
knowledge and either way it's you know I think it's it's a it's a really great thing could we do more
I mean I probably someone could set up some knowledge exchange thing you know what do you know
what do you need to know try and make a market in connecting people one-on-one because they're
types of knowledge that don't so just about recording a video and watching it it's lit it's a
conversation and what's so interesting about so many of those conversations is that is again that
both people benefit in different ways you know the connections between old and young people are
often yeah the young person learns knowledge experience you know of life and the older person
eases their loneliness for chance there's a human connection there you know both are giving a
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you know we've been talking about some modes of giving but i do want to circle
back around to the infectious part of this conversation because i think that's that's where the
the game is really changing now like there are all sorts of different ways that we can step into
this space of generosity you know and now with this infinite with this global village we can
we can we have access to so many more people into the ripple effect we talked about one of the
ways to help these experiences of generosity or stories of generosity to spread into that global
community earlier and you you were sharing how the experience of emotion is one of the things
that really allows these moments these stories to express talk to me a bit more about how we effectively
help nudge generosity to go more viral so that it becomes a more regular experience in people's
lives yeah i mean i think in addition to just figuring out a evoke authentic emotion to other
very big things one is just creativity the more insane the better there's so much noise out there
people who can do something in a way that generates wow i did not see that coming break through
and they get attention i mean to take a fairly one on an example of that whole ice bucket
challenge thing that happened i mean that was a very creative idea where you wanted to raise money
for a l s they challenged people to dump a bucket of water over themselves and then to name two other
people we'd have to go through the same thing and so there was sort of a variety built into this but
in a very clever and creative way and just the fun of it and the craziness of it the syncs spread
like crazy the other one i think is courage people respond to courage i told the story in the book
about dowel davis african american musician who had the courage to reach out to a local member of
the kuklaq's car and have a meeting with them and listen to them dance meeting as it turned out
amazingly they somehow formed a relationship they kept seeing each other
darl went to kkk rallies eventually his friend left the kkk and many others did as well and
this story became a new story that spread around the world the journalist and me is certain that
the main reason why cnn said wow is because of his courage it's like who would do that that is
a very very brave thing that he did and so you know sparks attention and as a result of his courage
millions of people around the world got to hear about a form of i would say generosity that is so
important for the moment of rain which is the willingness to bridge you know to listen to your enemies
with respect to try to understand where they're coming from and to understand whether there's any
common ground that you can find the amazing thing is if you do that you probably will in that case
courage lit a fire so you combine those things together and i just think in general too many of us
we're trying to do good in the world fall into this mode of this anist you know well meaning come
on let's do this this is going to be good and it doesn't quite cut through i think it's it's lovely
and it's good but if we can figure out how to be bolder more audacious more creative that is what it
may take to break through and really have something wild and amazing ripple out and take take off
you know it's interesting as you're describing this i'm nodding along and there's a there's a
sub storyline that's starting to certainly emerge with me which is that we live in a world now where
one person's perception of what is profoundly generous maybe another person's perception of
what is profoundly offensive or harmful and i wonder if people resist what they think is an
obvious act of generosity whether it's sharing knowledge or sharing wisdom or whatever it may be
out of this fear of but what if i step out into this global village where everything's interconnected
i'm going to be everything i offer i put out there will be seen and people can respond to it
and what if my intention of generosity lands in the lap of somebody else who experiences that
as harm i mean it's a huge huge huge issue and it does take courage to to do it you will get if
you're on any issue that has been politicized and many of them have you're in danger of getting
your head blown off possibly by people on both sides the thing is that most people actually aren't
on those extremes and i think there is a way of fighting for a sort of a beautiful more
reasonable more thoughtful i wouldn't necessarily middle ground but non-extreme ground where there's
where actually lots of different people can find some sort of alignment is interesting i had an
experience just two days ago where we'd had this amazing good fortune of having in our home
one of the developers of cultured meat cultured chicken in this case so this chicken grown
not from a factory farm but from just a little droplet of muscle cells and you know right now it's
a very expensive process and there's egg factor for it for a lot of people until you actually see it
and i saw it fried in our kitchen and and then sliced up and tasted it was absolutely delicious
and i guess thought it was delicious and it was kind of like how chicken is supposed to be so i
posted a picture of this online and i couldn't believe what what happened i mean there was just this
sort of flood of interest in it i think it had like more than a million views in about two days and
a thousand people reposted it and comments yeah absolutely very very divided for some people
this is so exciting i can't wait for this to come i want a future where my meat doesn't come at the
expense of massive animal cruelty and then there's a whole group who is saying this is frank and food
you know you're part of this global conspiracy to take away in our future and to take away what
is natural and god given and and so forth and so it's it's really hard to bridge this stuff and yet
you could find in the middle there people who are willing to buy the type say you know i
never thought i'd be interested in this kind of meat but looking at this it's actually kind of in
i'm open to it and you could see that there is there is an addressable group in there and so if
you can get yourself into the position where you just you don't mind you you expect you know
savage comments from some people that's just the way it is you have to figure out how to not be
owned by those then do it go go go try and be the bridge it because we we need those voices so badly
at the moment speaking about being the bridge as we start to come towards the close of our conversation
a lot of people probably can be listened to this and say okay like i their ideas popping into my head
there are things that i didn't really think about before and you know if if i have financial
means to give great and that now i have some ideas if i if i don't now i have some other ideas
and i understand that that maybe there's a reason to do this in a more publicly observable way
and also this last part of the conversation that that there's also some risk to doing this
i'm sure you've had this conversation with so many both within your organization with
colleagues and friends but you know when when somebody's listening and they sort of like at this
point where they're like okay so i want to take the first step in but i want to do it in a way
where i don't feel like i'm completely confused i'm paralyzed i'm doing it wrong or i'm going to
recoil because there's going to be such a negative effect or the risk of that that it's going to
make me never want to do it again do you have a sense for sort of like what a what an an inclusive
and easy and accessible first step is when somebody is thinking about this i say two things one is
don't do it alone do it invite a group around have a have a dinner hospitality is first of all one
of the most beautiful forms of generosity there is and it's very deep and it's in every human culture
and so it's it's beautiful just in itself it will build friendship but dream as a group about
you might do say in your community like is there are you aware of someone who's doing
toiling away under the radar and deserve support or is there some issue that you could elevate
together or whatever just have have that single conversation dinner and see if anything emerges and
then you it's you can gain much more confidence by by doing something as a group and then the second
thing i'll say is that we we actually built a tool to help people brainstorm and help people figure
this stuff out at our site infectiousgenerosity.org there's an AI called tick the infectious
generosity group but you can you can go and connect with tick and brainstorm it'll tick what
ask you what your passions are and what your skills are and and then just brainstorm simple acts
of generosity could be anything from a little event you do with your kids for the neighborhood
or piece of research or anything and some of the plans that you we've seen tick come up with
in brainstorming partnership have been absolutely amazing and thrilling so I think that's that's
it's if nothing else it's fun to try. I love that and a great example of a use of AI for good
yes we hope so fantastic well feels a good place for us to come full circle Chris and this container
of good life project if I offer up the phrase to live a good life what comes up just to look
beyond yourself it's so weird that that is how we're wired we don't no one actually leads a good
life solo I don't think our good life is led by reaching out to others seeing how we can make their
life better and somehow the universe arranges it that that makes our own life better there is
exploitation that can happen it doesn't happen very often you know there's not things you can be
wise to but basically look to the needs of others and be amazed what happens next. Thank you.
Before you leave if you'd love this episode safe that you'll also love the conversation we had
with Dr. Keltener about the power of awe you'll find a link to Docker's episode in the show notes.
This episode of Good Life project was produced by executive producers Lindsey Fox and me Jonathan
Fields editing help by Alejandro Ramirez Christopher Carter crafted our theme music and special
thanks to Shelley Del for her research on this episode and of course if you haven't already done
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I'm Jonathan Fields signing off for Good Life project
