How to Master 'Infectious Generosity' | Chris Anderson

28:48And I agree with that. I can notice that for myself on my own social media experiences. Like the TikTok videos I see, and I know it's all because of the algorithm, because what I look at, they figure out what I like. But I basically see constantly kids doing superhuman things, like jumping, you know, playing amazing, you know, four-year-olds playing like a violin, like a professional or people jumping. Like there's like all these kids who are superheroes are jumping from building to building and doing magic tricks. And so I don't, at least on TikTok, I don't see a lot of the negative stuff. But in general, what's the trend?

29:23Like how do you, I don't, I think the trend is worse and worse, which is why we've gone from social networking to social media. Well, I think it's all to play for. and I've seen lots of counter examples. So take TikTok. I mean, I think you're right that a lot of people's experience on TikTok and Instagram is mainly of just seeing a world full of wonder and, you know, stuff that the TV networks never brought you, but that some, you know, curated selection of millions of individuals churns up things that are genuinely amazing and maybe, you know, too addictive and we spend too much time on it, but certainly in their own way, kind of inspiring.

30:00But there was a particular person I spoke to in the book, a guy called Millard Merck, who, you know, his parents were immigrants. They run a sandwich shop in New Jersey. He worked there. And he started, you know, he spent time on TikTok and noticed this trend where some people were going, they were celebrating disgusting amounts of food waste, you know, dumping huge sort of urns of peanut butter on the table just because they could. And he was disgusting. by it because, I mean, you know, business of making sandwiches. So he did his own video, which started with a huge amount of peanut butter and jelly beans dumped.

30:40But he turned it into like 100 carefully made, you know, sandwiches, wrapped them up and then went out in the street and handed them individually to people. This video clocked up 400 million views and basically blew away the trend that he was responding to and ended up persuading some of the people who were involved in that original trend going, wait a sec, there is a better type of video we could do. So literally, this is a guy who's inspired by Mr. Beast and did this. And when I spoke to him, he was adamant that this is a winnable battle. He said, look, anything can go viral that sparks emotion.

31:22So yeah, sure, you can get something to go viral. You slap someone in the face, you know that that may go viral it's it's but ultimately how many people want to be a dick for a day you know when you can actually that the good stuff you do gets remembered for longer so he was arguing that there is an asymmetry between the bad and the good where that actually works in favor of the good which is that people people's long-term motivation like you could do one video for a fun but if you want to be in the business for it for a long time you will get more personal energy from it by doing stuff that's good and that kind of, you know, builds your own reputation and makes you go to bed at night feeling better about yourself.

32:03I was blown away as a kid in his early 20s. He's very, very convincing on it. And I think in that generation, there's a lot of people who are determined to start using the internet differently. So what are some other ideas? Like, that's a great idea that he came up with and it cost him basically nothing. Like what are some, some other ideas you've seen or ideas you have where someone could be generous in these unique ways and not only benefit the people around them, but benefit themselves? Because again, you're right. You have to take into consideration people want benefit as well. Well, just storytelling.

32:42Um, you know, in the early days of the pandemic, um, everyone was locked up and feeling scared and miserable. And, uh, There's a woman in Australia, Catherine Barrett, who went down to the common area in her building and noticed this box of tissues that her neighbour had just left there and had put a note there saying, hey, you know, please take one. And she was aware, obviously, people were sad and, you know, needed to cry. And, you know, it was like she was really moved by this. Oh, my God, here's a neighbour who's looking out for the rest of us. She took a picture of this, posted it on Facebook, wrote the story and said, I just, you know, there is kindness out there still in the world.

33:24This sparked an absolute avalanche of stories that came in. She ended up calling the site The Kindness Pandemic. So many people joined. It crashed for a bit. Like 500 ,000 people joined. It's still going. And you go in there and you read story after story of just simple acts of human kindness, everyday human kindness. It's the kind of stuff that isn't normally reported because, you know, it's not part of our news culture or whatever to do it. But it is part of who we are. It's richly part of who we are. I mean, like I saw right on there, a story of someone who's, you know, her father had died, but he was on the other side of the world.

34:06And so she couldn't go to the funeral. But a stranger not only live streamed the funeral for her, but basically took her phone and walked with her father's coffin the whole way and just allowed her to just be there present. And the way she wrote about this was just so, so moving. And there's just countless stories like this that if we knew about them, it would change how we think of each other. And you're right. There is a viral component to that. Like I was talking to this guy, Tank Sinatra. He has an Instagram page. I actually forget. It's probably just Tank Sinatra's page. And it shows funny memes.

34:52And it has millions of followers and so on. but then he set up another instagram page called tanks good news and nobody he started from scratch he didn't say oh this is from you know on the tank sinatra from this other page he just all he did was just put like a good news story up every day on instagram and again nobody knew who he was it all was from the sharing this he said i've never had any kind of instagram page or website go so viral so quickly he got millions of followers right away he's still posting every day tanks good news. And you're right. Like people respond to that and you have to be clever.

35:27You always have to be clever because it's all about communication, but, uh, you're right. You know, on the flip side, I will say the reason why you, people get that short-term viral fix on negative stuff is that negativity is more powerful for evolutionary reasons. You're going to, you're going to more quickly run from a tiger than you're going to run towards a, you know, a food because you're, If the tiger could kill you, the food will just satisfy you for a while. Like they say in a marriage, if there's one negative interaction, you have to have five positive reactions to make up for it. So negativity has some short-term strength very quickly.

36:03Right. So this is such an important truth about us. It's something that should be taught in school because if you know this stuff, you can start to navigate around it. We are weird, weird creatures. like we have this millions of years of sort of biological history stuffed into our brains that give us instincts for you know how life used to be and it's if you if you're not aware of it you get owned by it and so so I think there's huge power there's a huge liberating power to understand why the news you read every day is so bad and I think there's two reasons one of them is the thing that you've just talked about, which is that people respond more powerfully emotionally to the dark stuff than the good, which means that, you know, your earnest story about, hey, life is getting better, that's on one media outlet next to it.

36:58It's someone, look out, you know, the immigrants are coming or whatever. That is scary. And it's that one that gets bought. And so that one wins the ad dollars and all the rest of it. And so you've got that set of biases in there on the one hand. There's another really powerful thing that's less reported that contributes to this, which is to do with just the nature of the world, which is that good things happen slowly. Bad things happen quickly. By what I mean by that, so just to take an example, you know, like to build something good. Say you want to build a beautiful building in a city. You know, that's an eight-year project.

37:37From the dream in someone's eye to raising the money for it, to pulling people together, to getting planning permission, to building it and all the rest of it. Um, but that building can be blown up in, in an hour or in a minute, in a second. Um, if, if a news outlet's mission is to answer this question, what's the most dramatic thing that happened in the last hour or in the last day? Almost always the answer to that question is going to be something bad because that's, that's what's noticeable. That's what's dramatic. You You know, there was no point during that building's construction where, you know, there was a sort of front page headline.

38:14I mean, maybe the opening ceremony or whatever, but that's page 22, you know. There's no dramatic moment. But when the bomb blast goes off, wow, put that up there. Every day in some part of the world, there is dramatic bad things happening. And so inadvertently, the combination of these two factors means that the news that we get, and therefore our picture and our beliefs about the world are that almost everything that's happening is bad. So no wonder we're fearful. And I think there's just, it's hugely important that we are conscious of this and try and address it because the stories we tell ourselves literally shape who we are.

38:57And I think the amplification of traditional media, like social media itself, it's even worse. There's an even bigger tendency to highlight what's bad and ugly. We are talking ourselves down in a way that's dangerous. And we have to turn that around. So your friend's Instagram feed, I think a lot of people are sick of how mean the world is. And traditionally, a good news slot would get zero attention. I think that's shifting. I think people are craving that, not because, just because it's good, it's actually giving us a truer view of the world. It's not that it's just you're deceiving yourself, like, oh, I can't stand all the bad, give me some good news just to ease the pain.

39:42No, it's actually all that bad news is distorted. And we need to correct that bias by taking the effort to look around at what is actually good in the world. And there is so much that actually is good. You know, I would like to believe that the trend is changing, but let's say I'm a media company and I've got millions of dollars to spend on creating content. Am I going to go and make tanks good news or I'm going to make the newspaper that has the blown up buildings? Obviously, to make money, I'm going to make the newspaper that has the blown up buildings because that's a proven model. And it's hard going up against all that money to shift the trend.

40:24Yeah, so I think that is the assumption. But I think with a bit of creativity, it's possible to change that. And I also think that pendulum swing. You know, I think the world seems so dark to so many people right now. People are actually craving a different way. I'm personally convinced that a media company that set out to say clearly, we are going to try and pay attention to, we're not going to be owned by our psychological bugs. And we're not going to be owned by the fact that the easiest events to see in the world are usually bad. We're actually going to try to bring you what's actually significant about the world right now.

41:10We're going to bring you the facts that will actually shape your long-term future. and that if you set out consciously to do that, you could over time persuade a large number of very influential people to come and pay attention to you as a leading news source. And I think you will be helped in that by the fact that people are sick of the current media landscape. There's so much distrust now of mainstream media. There's just a weariness with the whole mess of it. And I think that's why a lot of people are. and finding, you know, on the internet and in different places, they are finding joyful media content.

41:51So I don't know. If I was, I mean, I used to be a journalist. If I was running a news operation right now, this is the challenge I would set people. Let's make the significant stuff, the exciting stuff, the stuff that really gives, shows what future possibility could be. Let's make that vivid and exciting. Let's use our imagination to do that. I absolutely think it's doable.

42:30I was going to save telling you my own personal experience till after the podcast, but it's relevant to what you're saying. So I've been writing since 2002, like being paid to write since 2002. And at first, I was writing about finance and stocks and investing. And okay, I was a good writer. I had a good audience from that. But at some point early on, I got sick of that. And I changed everything completely. I just started writing, hey, this one period, I went broke. I was depressed. I was suicidal. This is what I did. And that became my style. I was just very vulnerable in a way that other people weren't doing.

43:12And my audience 10x'd, like literally maybe multiply by 100, like in terms of number of followers across every platform and got me this podcast and so on. And so there's something negative a little about that. Like I was telling about a bad experience I was having, but always had like kind of a positive outcome. Like people would read for the ultimate positivity as opposed to just like stocks. It's just, you know, bad things, good things. It's like there's no real material content there. Yeah, I enjoyed reading about you, actually. And your story is amazing, I have to say. It's amazing, both in what you write about and in your approach to material things as well.

43:56You've been pretty radical about that. You've seen what a lot of other people don't see as clearly, which is that it's, you know, we assume that, you know, having 20 % more is our sort of gateway to satisfaction. You've had a lot and you've lost a lot and you've formed your own conclusions about actually living light is probably the way to go. And there's, you know, that's pretty amazing in its own way. I think the kind of psychological issues you've worked with and written about are almost key to winning our own internal battles towards generosity. Because often, you know, the science is amazing on generosity.

44:41What the science says is that people who are generous get a happiness boost that is about equivalent to doubling their income. Wow, I did not know that. Yeah, yeah. There's a big Gallup survey that I mentioned in the book, but that is basically what it shows. And this is, people don't know this. And if they did, we would put extra, we'd be braver in trying to wrestle with those sort of inner demons that obsess on a bit more, a bit more, and actually consider some of the more radical steps to make. Actually, what would happen if I tried to live lighter and spent more time focused on other people's needs and trying to do the occasional good thing for them or whatever?

45:36There's many, many, many, many, many different ways to be generous. But I think your story is remarkable, which is one reason I'm happy to be having the conversation now. and i mean the reason i i tell the story now is just because if if people are looking for ways to even have short-term benefit there are ways to do it with with giving back even if it feels even if it requires courage to do like being blatantly honest about something that that you did that was bad and that you had to overcome and um but like we're so so when i first picked up the book and looked at it i i you used the phrase earlier radical generosity and i actually coincidentally wondered why this is before i even opened the first place i wondered if radical generosity would have been a better title i had i didn't know anything i didn't read the book at that point and so i was curious about the word infectious infectious because i'm sure you can consider radical that's like an obvious word there i did consider it i did consider it um it's it's a word that's infectious a better word by the way because it's more you know So here's where I ended up with infectious.

46:49There were two things. One is that there's new science showing just how deeply embedded generosity is in people and also how we respond to generosity. You know, I got this inside seat on this thing we call the mystery experiment, where we gave away$10 ,000 to 200 strangers, 200 people on the internet. They didn't know what they were signing up for. They just got an email saying, hey, we'd like to transfer$10 ,000 into your PayPal account. No strings attached. You just have to tell us what you spend it on. And what happened was amazing. It amazed the social scientists we work with who wrote papers on this.

47:33On average, people gave away two-thirds of that money. Gave two-thirds. They paid it forward. This is completely outside what traditional economic theory would say. You know, people are rational agents. They spend on their own interests. Well, it turns out that people wanted to respond to generosity in kind. They felt seen by this act and they wanted to pass it on. And this applied to people in all seven countries that we did the experiment in and across different income levels and so forth. So anyway, so that's actually one of the reasons that sparked me into doing this. It's that if it's the case that people are both naturally generous and also are actually in a weird way hardwired to respond to generosity, in the connected age when people, it's actually easier to be generous in different ways than ever before, for example, by giving away knowledge or video or software or recipes or pictures or art or whatever it is, you can do that at unlimited scale well that creates a huge possibility because people are wired to respond to that and we are you know at TED we experienced that in ways that blew our minds because we gave stuff away people responded what we got back from for example TEDx organizers was far more than we gave them and so it just it made me think that when you connect the dots here of what we've learned about human psychology and what this connected age makes possible, we could completely reframe how we think of generosity and view it as this beautiful self-fueling cycle that can do what the internet was always supposed to, which is, you know, be a good thing for the world.

49:20It can spread goodness, it can spread knowledge, it can spread aesthetic, it can spread art, enchantment, all these things that can be spread and that people would respond to it. So that's why we call it infectious generosity. It's because you put it out there and it spreads. And the whole idea of things going viral is, obviously the pandemic showed us how powerful a force that is when something becomes infectious. But good things can become infectious. And so that was kind of where the title came from. And again, I want to talk about what you described later in the book, how you could form almost like an accountability group of generosity.

50:00But in that experiment, I wonder if they, so the idea is to show that when someone was generous to them, they were more inclined to be generous with the money. Did you compare with, or did anyone ever do an experiment comparing, like if someone, if they just got the money, they found it on the street or they got it as a surprise bonus at work, would their response have been different? We didn't do that specific experiment. I think the chances are it would be different, that part of what happens is this feeling of this desire to respond. But there is evidence that it's not just you receiving something that makes you generous.

50:45Actually, when you see someone else being generous to someone else, that in itself creates this feeling of uplift that's been documented and makes people want to be generous. So right there, that's another thing that I find incredibly helpful. It means that to take the Mr. Beast example again, you know, I think of these 200 million subscribers watching his videos, they are all to some extent getting a feeling of uplift and extra motivation to be kind as part of their playbook. I think that is incredibly helpful. it reminds me of um there's a kind of a coach slash sports coach i don't know how i would describe it but todd herman wrote a book called the alter ego effect and it's and i'll describe with an example what he means like he says many professional athletes like let's take a professional baseball player as they're walking up to the plate they no longer are themselves they might imagine themselves as like a giant or paul bunyan you know someone super strong like Superman.

51:48And now they're one, they're about to swing. They're Superman. And they almost hypnotize themselves into believing that. And then they play better than they would if they were quote unquote, just themselves. And like Kobe Bryant, he gives us an example. He turned into a black mamba snake to play like, cause he studied up on that. And he liked the attributes of that. And he thought he wanted to be a fighter like that. And I wonder if one could do the same thing with generosity. Like, you know, it's sort of like the, what would Jesus do expression, but maybe there's a character from a movie that's like extra noble and you think oh I want to be you know even just thinking about it like my posture gets straighter and you know I want to be like that a noble person someone who rises above the daily tensions and stresses and has a certain nobility to him which includes generosity I absolutely think that that is powerful look so much of our lives is wrestling with, it's a battle between our reflective selves and our lizard brains, I would say, you know, and our instinctive selves, what Danny Kahneman would call system one thinking and system two thinking where we can reflect and tell a story about who we are.

53:00And a lot of us aren't happy with the story that just our instinctive selves would generate by itself. And so, yeah, you tell a different story about who I, that's not the person I am. That's not the person I want to be. I want to be a different person. And that, you know, I mean, this is what cognitive therapy is all about. You know, the beliefs you have about yourself can change who you are. I think one of the things that may have gone wrong a bit in the modern world is that, is that, you know, we've, as we've stepped away from religion or a lot of people have. I don't think it's a coincidence that every religion requires its people to gather every week to come and be reminded that there are things that are bigger than them out there in the world, to be reminded that they have moral obligations to be kind to each other and all these things.

53:52We're fragile animals and we don't necessarily always do this naturally. So I think if we're not going to go to a religious service every week, we have to find other ways to remember our better angels, remember our better selves. And remember that actually by living that self is a more satisfying way to be. It doesn't necessarily come naturally. You know, it doesn't. I think it takes conscious effort. And it's in every sphere of life. We know this already in terms of diet, in terms of exercise, in terms of procrastination. We know that you kind of have to take special efforts sometimes to, you know, we call them life hacks or whatever, to persuade ourselves to get it right.

54:40It's why people meditate. It's why people go on long walks or work out or exercise or whatever. and and i think it's it's true with generosity as well is that it takes that there is a conscious effort that's that's worth making because what you discover if you go there is that life becomes more meaningful it's just more joyful and and by the way the people around you will thank you too i'm sure you've read the book blue zones or at least dan buettner's probably done a thousand ted talks about this the blue zones for people who don't know are these places around the world like seven or eight places around the world where a large number of people more than statistically expected live to be have a high quality life over the age of 100 so okinawa is one some island off greece is another and he looks at you know what's common in their diets and so on but there was one interesting place aventura california where it was it was ethnically diverse so all the other places it was the same ethnicity and same diets and so on but there was one place in all the blue zones and again, there's only seven or eight, Aventura, California, where it's all sorts of ethnicities.

55:45And so he goes there to just study it further. And it turns out once a week, they all get to, they're some kind of, they're Seventh-day Adventists. So they're all in the same religion. And once a week they get together on the Sabbath and take hikes together and cook together and so on. So this idea of like this whole community coming together is really, you know, and being obviously generous with each other leads to longer life even. A hundred percent. I mean, we're social beings, you know, and we, so much of what we do and feel can't be understood except in context of how we're interacting with each other.

56:20I think it's an area where the West and Western thinking and Western philosophy has probably let us down a bit because there's been a real tendency to try and navel gaze and to understand everything in terms of the individual or the individual versus the government or whatever. Actually, you know, know, the unit that really matters is the neighborhood, the community. And it's, it's, it's, we're much more like an ant colony than like an ant. I think we have to embrace that side of ourselves. And that is in a way why, you know, the tagline of this book is the ultimate idea we're spreading. You know, it's, it's humans' ability to cooperate with each other, to trust, to find a way to trust, to find a way to love, to give, to give back.

57:00Without that, we would still be an anonymous ape on the savannah somewhere if we were alive at all. It's that superpower that has allowed us to do everything that we've done. You know, towards the back of the book, you give a suggestion of how you can start to get involved. And you have a bunch of steps. Maybe you can outline those steps because I was even thinking of doing it with my friends and local community. Well, I love that. It's hard sometimes to do this stuff solo. Like I say, we're so So one great way forward as a simple start is just to host a dinner, invite a group of friends around, have a dinner and just talk about, first of all, you know, dreams.

57:49You know, what do you really care about in the community? What do you wish was different? You know, what problem is there there that maybe is fixable? and to start to plot together about whether there is some issue, some cause, something in the community that you could collectively get behind. You know, for me, the thought of, I don't know, volunteering at a soup kitchen or whatever is exhausting, and I can't really bear the thought of it. But with a group of friends, if we decided to do it and go do it together, I could sign up for that. And, you know, there may be, you know, there's a dozen things it could be.

58:27Maybe instead of something local, there's some illness that someone, one of you's experienced and you want to tackle. And so you want to research it together and see if there's an organization that's working on it that you could support in some way or whatever. There's just an array of things that may or may not connect. But if you as a group can find a common cause, that is great. and then beyond that I lay out this idea which I've tested with you know some of the donors and change makers who come to TED and I've seen this work incredibly powerfully it's it's based in something that we call the audacious project where we've encouraged people who are running say a non-profit whatever to dream much bigger than they normally would to basically answer the question what could you do if money was no object?

59:18And to come up with these thrilling, long-term, really bold dreams and then try to help craft it into a sort of workable idea. And then when we've got a few of these ideas together, we'll put them in front of a group of donors and say, OK, there's a huge amount of work that's gone into doing this. These are amazing ideas. Can you support this together? And when you do this, you avoid the usual problem that happens in fundraising in the non-profit world, which is that the can basically gets kicked down the road. Most money in the non-profit world is raised one bloody meeting at a time. Neither the donor nor the proponent really loves the process at all.

59:59And it's just sort of, it's just painful. But when you have a group of donors together and the clock ticking and saying, we're going to decide to support it now or not at all. At some point in that moment, someone will say, well, okay, I like this. I'm in if you guys are as well. And you look around that room and people go click, click, click, click. It's an example of infectious generosity in action right in that moment. And so several times I've seen, like in the biggest cases, like literally a couple hundred million dollars committed to a project between six or seven people in about a minute after a year of work to get it to get it ready for that for that moment now I think a version of that can be done at local level by a group of friends and it would break out I think it could have absolutely amazing consequences and it would be something like this that you that you basically one try and identify three or four people locally who are doing something amazing maybe someone has a dream for a new park in the place or someone wants you know to tackle the homeless problem or someone wants a novel new way of cleaning up the trash in the streets or whatever it is.

1:01:12People have these ideas and you like them. So you go out to them and each, you divide responsibilities here, maybe each person gets assigned someone. You go and sit with them and say, okay, dream bigger. What could you really do if you had a huge amount of money here to develop this idea? And encourage them to turn that into an actual plan. What would that actually look like? Who would do this? You know, how long would it take? What are the obstacles that you would need to knock down? What evidence is there that you actually could do this if the money was there? So you do the work and get those plans in place.

1:01:42And then you seek to convene and pull together some of the local people with resources. It could be a successful local business owner or a philanthropist or who knows. And this is obviously the hard part because these people get a lot of asks. But you have something unique to say to those people, which is we're going to show you something that you've never seen before, which is the most thrilling local initiatives that have ever been dreamt up in this community. And there's no obligation. You don't have to do anything unless inspired, but at least come and listen. And if you can get half a dozen of them to come in and then present these ideas, all bets are off as to what happens next.

1:02:25And, you know, I really think there's a process here that could, if it was successful, change the local dynamic because it turns out that a lot of the people with money locally are actually dying to do something for the community. Right now, if they try and do it in philanthropy the normal way, people will turn up their noses at them and say, well, you're just rich and why should you get to decide what this community needs? This flips that narrative. The actual needs are defined from the grassroots up and they have a chance to be heroes and to make this possible. So I think there's a chance to actually bring together rich and poor, if you like, in a way that would be quite thrilling.

1:03:08And yeah, one of my hopes from this book is that we're going to get some real stories of people doing this, trying this and doing it. And I think it's an idea that could spread and could be really beautiful. I can't wait for you to give the TED Talk that It describes all of things like this that happened because you wrote this book, like, and tell those stories. Like, that's going to be an incredible TED Talk. So Chris Anderson, you were so generous in giving us the amazing TED Talks for the past 20 years, and that's become a worldwide phenomenon. Now this book, Infectious Generosity, I love it.

1:03:46People should read it. And it's really important to note that as selfish as this sounds, it really improves your life in many ways, as we talked about before, from internally to health, to brand, to reputation, to money. Not that that's the reason you would do it. You could do it for that first reason. It just makes you feel good and that's selfish enough. But thank you for this book. I hope the book goes viral. That's why I wanted you on the podcast as soon as I heard about it. And thank you again for coming on the show. Thanks so much, James. I've really enjoyed this. I love what you're doing.

1:04:19I'm guessing that your audience, because they're attracted to you and what you've been doing, will actually like some of these ideas. And so I'm very excited to have had the chance to share this. And I really wish everyone success. Just start with one small thing and see what happens. That's key. And definitely they will be interested. Thank you. All right. Take care.

1:04:55Thank you.