#18 - Chris Anderson - The Power of Infectious Generosity

32:40Does that fully make sense? Secondly, yes, there are two specific biases that I think are really important for any journalist or any consumer of the news to fully embrace. And I think one of them is understood quite well and the second one less well. The first one is the cognitive attraction that we have towards dark and dangerous, which is there for obvious evolution reasons. We pay attention to threats and media outlets that focus on threats win the circulation wars. and so we're used to this. But there's another bias which is, I think, built almost into the structure of the universe. It's the second law of thermodynamics.

33:21It's that the world is, the universe is fundamentally chaotic and trends chaotic. To do something good is hard and it takes time. To build something can take years. To destroy it can take a nanosecond. and so good happens slowly bad happens quickly now then pair that fact with the fact that the mission of most news outlets is to answer this question what is the most dramatic thing that happened in the last few hours well hello but combine that with human cognitive bias and the fact that good happens slowly you are almost always going to come up with a headline about something bad. So structurally, we are biasing ourselves.

34:10We are ignoring all of the astounding good stories that have built up more slowly. The same day that the plane went down with 100 people in it, 20 ,000 children's lives were saved compared with three decades ago by the decades-long efforts of heroic public health workers who've solved all these different diseases every day. Yesterday, today, tomorrow, the day after, 20 ,000 kids who would have died the last day are alive today. You know, if you could see the smiling faces of the mothers of those kids compared with the grieving faces of the mothers 30 years ago, you would feel differently. So we We are systematically misleading ourselves.

35:00What's some practical low-hanging fruit you think a newsroom editor could do? The editor of the New York Times. Is it like minimum number of positive stories per day? I don't think the right framing... I mean, there are people focused on doing positive stories out there. I think what we want is significant stories. And if an outlet committed to, instead of all the news that's fit to print, which was the New York Times mantra for many years, all the news that actually reveals what is significant about the world and about the future. That to me is what a good media outlet would try to do. And when you do that, you can't, you have to stop just asking the question, what is dramatic that's happened in the last few hours?

35:46And instead ask the question, what have we learned recently that is significant and that we can communicate in a way that will excite people? and so you have to take account of humans cognitive biases that that we can't you could have a um a paper that was full of as as the week used to run they had a section called boring but important you know there are so many things out there that are boring but important we have to make it important and here's how to make it interesting and the way you do that is to turn statistics into human stories. You know, show why, okay, here's a new stat that came out of the UN that shows something amazing.

36:28Turn it into a human interest story. Exactly. Interview someone who's a direct beneficiary of that because, yes, statistics aren't sexy. I mean, I think they're sexy, but most of the time it is not, they're not perceived as interesting things. Whereas if you can add a story to it and put of face to these beneficiaries. A hundred percent. But take pride in being, be the first big media outlet that eschews the journalistic standards of the day and says, no, we're going to go for something bigger and more powerful, but we're going to persuade people that if they really want to understand the world and really want to assess their chances for how the future is doing, we will give them the tools that they need to do that.

37:10So I'd love to dig in a little more into the actual nature of generosity itself. Because in some ways, it's remarkable that we have it seemingly as part of human nature, given we evolved out of a very, you know, nature is red in tooth and claw, I can't remember who said that. But why do you think... Lord Tennyson. Lord Tennyson? Lord Tennyson, yeah. Why do you think we evolved it in the first place? Here's how I think of it. I think the reason why we evolved it is because generosity is fundamentally asymmetric. So that means that even in a world where people are fighting for their survival, there are countless circumstances where it was easy for someone to be generous in a way that was life-changing for another person.

38:01So go back to a world where we're hunter-gatherers, someone's made a kill. They have an animal there that they can feed on and they don't have a refrigerator. You can feed your family and yourself, but then what? Well, it costs you basically nothing to give food to others in your community. You save their life. They remember it. So what you need is an asymmetry in the nature of giving and receiving. And you need people with memories. And from that, you can easily construct a pathway whereby it makes sense in evolutionary terms for a species to gradually develop these instincts that make it faster to give away, where you start to get empathy and caring for someone else.

38:53Along with that, you have other instincts like a sense of fairness, because you need to have a mechanism for holding to account people who try to freeload. or who cheat. And so it's no surprise that every single culture, there is generosity. Every single culture, there is a strong instinct to hospitality, to sharing food, for example, which is where I think generosity all started. It starts combined with a sense of fairness and, you know, cheaters become outcasts. And so this package of powerful emotions evolved in us that make it completely natural to want to look after each other's interests, because we are in, it's not like every transaction is a one-off.

39:42We are in long-term sustained relationships with a community of people. And what goes around comes around is there's a lot of truth in that. Our reputations depend on our being generous. And, you know, it's kind of a miracle to me that the thing that makes human cooperation possible is backed by this fire engine of powerful things. And actually, as well as the desire to be generous, there is this deep feeling of happiness that comes after the fact of, wow, that felt really good. We often don't see that in advance, which is weird, but we certainly feel it. And it's why the wisest people in any society will say, this is the way to happiness.

40:26Be kind to others. That Chinese proverb, which is like, if you want to be happy for a minute, eat something nice. I can't remember what they all are, but if you want to be happy for a month, be married, which seems a little bit short from the marriage thing. But if you want to be happy for a lifetime, help someone else. That's exactly right. Like, yeah, if you want to be happy for a year, inherit some money. Okay. Happy for a lifetime, help people. And cultures understand that the long-term pathway to happiness is to be kind. Right. The more we know about that, the more amazing it is. The more we know about this other instinct in us, which is to respond to generosity, is also, I think, super interesting.

41:11It is, I mean, we're so profoundly a social species. We respond to anything that is done to us. We want to respond in kind, whether it's meanness or funny or whatever. But for kindness, absolutely. And in fact, in the run-up to this book, I got an inside view of this amazing social experiment that proved this like never before. What was the social experiment? So we called it the mystery experiment. It was a partnership between TED and the University of British Columbia. a TED donor wanted to give away$2 million in a creative way where we'd learn something. And so we helped them construct this social science experiment with Elizabeth Dunn, who's a word expert on generosity.

41:59We recruited people for, we didn't mention any money. It was like, come and be part of a weird, stressful, but possibly very exciting social experiment. 2 ,000 people applied. We called it the mystery experiment. And they got from us this note that probably sent them like a scam email of, congratulations, we'd like to wire$10 ,000 into your PayPal account, no strings attached. So it took a bit of persuading, but eventually they took the money. This was the largest amount that had ever been done as a social experiment on this kind of scale, I think. with the, I mean, there are some universal basic income tests that have been done that are similar kind of level, but specifically as a social science experiment.

42:43And amazingly, more than two-thirds of that money was spent generously. Like, you know, some family members, strangers, friends, causes of all kinds. And these weren't rich people, right? These are just people all over the world. No, people of all different incomes. across seven countries and across multiple different incomes. People gave away the money. And after the experiment was done, I wrote to some of these people and tried to figure out what the hell was going on here. And this common picture came through that basically said, look, probably if I'd won that money in a lottery, I'd have behaved differently.

43:26But because a donor wanted to give this money out, I just felt this, first of all, I felt seen. I felt seen. Generosity makes you feel seen. But I wanted to pass on that feeling to others. And it was this visceral thing in people that they just, they wanted to pay it forward in some way. So I find this just hugely encouraging because when you combine, so generosity is deep inside of us. This response, desire to respond to generosity is deep inside of us. There's a third thing, which is that seeing others give to third parties, not to us, creates a sense of moral elevation that Jonathan Haidt and others have documented as a provable biological phenomenon.

44:17Those things combined with the fact that we're in a connected age, where we can see any number of examples, for example, on video of people being kind to others, that seems to create just an unbelievable opportunity for the human race to raise its game collectively, for us to give to each other, show what we can be and be inspired. And when you look online, you actually see numerous examples of this. You know, I told the story in the book of a, you know, a person sitting in a car, someone is deluging with rain, someone's on the sidewalk, they get out, they give that person their umbrella, get back in and drive off.

44:55Big deal. It's happened. Little acts like that have happened many times. In this modern era, that was captured on video. And when it went online, it was seen by millions of people. On Reddit, 70 ,000 likes and comments on there. And people literally said things like, this has changed. You know, I'm going to stock up my car with extra umbrellas. So a video of a third party can persuade someone to be inspired enough to do that. I just find that hopeful. And to me, that means we should not give up on humanity just yet. I definitely agree. So the way you described generosity as evolving, it sounds like it's come again.

45:37Everything boils down to game theory. In many ways, it's because it actually benefited the individual to find better ways to cooperate. and thus generosity, kindness, reciprocity, these traits evolved. Yes. In some ways that makes me feel a little funny because it's like I want it to almost be like an innate value unto itself. I guess it doesn't matter whether it came from, you know, because it was selfish. And I think that ick, I feel, is because we have this, so many of us have this idea that generosity should be almost as a form of sacrifice, that it should come, we shouldn't gain from it. And you seem to disagree with that notion.

46:29And I also disagree with it because it's, if you're doing something as a, oh, I must be sacrificing so that I can benefit someone else. And that's the only way it's, that's a generous act. Then you're not actually really being that generous because you're just doing a lose win. You're doing another zero something. if you're deliberately denying yourself the pleasure of feeling good, let's say you get a good feeling, or inspiring others and getting social respect for it or credit, people saying nice things about you. So why do you think it is that so many people feel like it has to come with sacrifice?

47:01Often the teaching has been, you know, if you advertise your generosity, then that's your reward and it wasn't generosity. I actually think the picture has always been more complicated. I think people pushing generosity have always known that it's a really hard thing to ask of someone. And so we've said we've always been taught things like give and you shall receive. You know, well, hello, that's saying that there is come back in the end or give and your reward shall be in heaven. So I think there's always been this complicated language around generosity. I think the way to think about generosity in this connected age is to embrace the fact that there is long-term payoff for it.

47:47I think generosity is often a short-term sacrifice. It's hard to do. It's hard to give up what you have right now, whether it's money or whether it's just time and attention and the willingness to break out of your routine and look at someone else and say, how are you? Do you need something right now? Can I help? This takes effort and there is short-term sacrifice in it. But I think it's more important than ever to recognize and to celebrate the fact that there is beautiful, longer-term reward in it. Apart from anything else, in this connected age when a gift can reach millions of people, what you get back can be astounding.

48:31But what the feelings you get back may surprise you. And because we are in an existential battle for attention, for the right kinds of stories, we need to give people every tool that we can to encourage them to go for this because it's hard. But when you remind people what's possible, it makes it that bit easier. I mean, the reason I became so convinced of this was just looking at what happened at TED when we started giving away content, worried that it would blow up our conference because we were giving away, you know, why would someone come into a conference when the content was there for free online?

49:09Actually, so that was 2006. 2006, I was five years into owning TED and finally online video was a thing and you could imagine doing this. And it felt a scary thing to do. But what we got back was incredible. You know, millions of people suddenly came to hear about TED. It actually massively boosted interest in the conference. And it convinced me that in this connected age, the rules around what you give away have just changed, that it makes sense to be brave, to radically give away the best thing you can, and be astounded at what can happen as a result of that. So I guess that's how I think of it.

49:50I think generosity is a short-term sacrifice and long-term it is deeply in your interest like the people who are generous are the people who are going to be happier and they're going to have the best reputation that is worth fighting for even though it's hard i my background was in that got me interested in being generous and philanthropy was through the idea of effective giving um which is i think most people listening to this are familiar with it's like resources are finite uh therefore we should be somewhat strategic in how we deploy them um given that some maybe you know one cause area might impact positively an order of magnitude or many orders of magnitude more people than another so ideally you want to give to to um to that cause a over cause b but again people often seem to get a bit icky about this idea of being strategic with when you're trying to make positive impact.

50:50Why do you think that is? Yes. So again, I think we have this battle between our instinctive self and our reflective self. The pathway to philanthropy that is most instantly feel good is the purely instinctual one. I see a family in need, or I see a child crying. I hand over money and I see a problem solved and I feel great because there it is in full biological instant experience. But that's not the pathway to making a better world long term. Paul Bloom has a very powerful book called Against Empathy, where, I mean, he's not really against all forms of empathy. Empathy is the start of everything, but it's an unreliable guide to using our generosity for its best effect.

51:46Because for one thing, it tends to steer us just to our own in-group. And secondly, it says nothing about effectiveness and about the fact that there could be orders of magnitude difference between one generous act and another. One may just cause dependency or whatever, another may leverage something remarkable and create literally orders of magnitude more. So I think, as with everything else, the wise thing to do is to bring our effective selves to bear. Philanthropy has to be both head and heart. And we actually need a strategy. We need to think about it so that we can figure out what is most effective.

52:28And so, yes, so I think with you, I think it's a tragedy that in the last year, effective altruism has run into, you know, a branding issue. Thank you, Sir Wagner-Fried and so forth. And, you know, it's definitely possible for people to, if they use brain only and ignore all traditional guidelines around morality, can get themselves into deep trouble. Like ends, justifies the means type. It's a journey, you know, it's a journey to discover what the most effective ways are. The conclusions it reaches at any one time are provisional, just like science. The conclusions you reach at any one time are provisional.

53:13But the journey actually really matters. And the question of how we make our philanthropy more effective really matters. And, you know, for me, the single biggest answer to that question is look for forms of powerful leverage of your money. How do you feel about the trade-off between intent behind a generous act and the consequences? Because it seems like there's sort of two philosophical schools of thought battling here. You've got the Kantian or deontological, which is... It's all intent. It's all about the intent. Something is either morally good or morally bad, dependent on some kind of moral truth in the fabric of the universe.

53:59and whether your intent comes from a pure place or not. It's almost like a form of puritanism, actually. And then you've got the other sort of end of that, which is purely consequentialist. It doesn't matter what your intentions were. Your intentions could have been very bad, purely selfish, but actually if the outcome is fantastic and lots of people benefit, then that's all that matters. Where do you personally lie on that spectrum or how do you think about that trade-off? I think anyone who has good intent for something and does it and it goes wrong, I don't think we should team up and blame them and get angry.

54:33I think it's beautiful that someone wanted to do something good. But in our complicated world, it's really, really important to spend time to think about how that act can work out. And so those are the people I most admire, are those who are willing to use good intent both in terms of their own sacrifice and in terms of how they direct what they do. Someone who does something, who's done it from really nasty intentions, but it works out well, I don't admire that person. They were lucky. They were lucky. But I still want a world where good things happen. And so I think where the vast majority of acts are are that people want to do something good, but they also have other motivations in mind.

55:32They may well realize that by doing this, it's good for their reputation and that they may get other benefits back. right now our culture is set up to criticize those people if you can like the way that the cynical mindset works is if I can find any piece of negativity in what someone did how did they actually make their money were they are they greenwashing in some way are they um you know doing this for some other benefit that that is a reason to savage that that person I think that's a real tragedy. I think we should flip that and say, can you find a piece of actual good intent in there? If so, celebrate the act.

56:15Celebrate it. Honestly, you can always, maybe there's ways it could be better. But we, our future depends on whether most people become net givers or net takers. Right. That is the simplifying metric, I think, that everyone, we can all apply to each other. If someone is showing signs of seeking to be a net giver, cheer them on, on that journey. The fact that they are also doing some other things, well, that's a separate conversation, but don't criticize the good act. That's the worst thing to do. That makes it harder and harder for others to follow suit. It kind of broke my heart the way that the media reacted to Mr.

56:59Beast, right? Okay, yes, some of his things are not the most effective, or they aren't always done in the most tasteful way they could be. But ultimately, the dude is going about giving away money to people. And it keeps coming back in these positive feedback loops. Yes, okay, he keeps getting richer because he's so good at it and he's so good at harnessing, as you say, like he's really, he's mastered the acts of like the, like the positive contagion. Right. And it's such a shame that he gets dunked on so hard by, in many ways, the establishment media. I mean, to be fair, it's not like the New York Times or anyone doing it.

57:43It's more like the lowbrow things, but But yeah, because it's pretty clear the guy is, he's been a net positive. He's actually just so given people sight that didn't have it. When you think about infectious generosity, he, more than anyone on the planet, has mastered what that can look like. So he's mastered the art of virality, what it takes. He actually spent years doing this as a budding YouTube influencer, figuring out how you edit a video, how you title it, the pictures you put up, what will make people get something to spread. I think it's true that some of his interventions aren't really getting to system change.

58:21So, you know, he cures 100 people, 1000 people of blindness. I mean, that's amazing in its own right. You know, there's an eye hospital in India called Aravind, where the founders there have spent decades figuring out how to cure blindness on the scale of millions and they charge for some of their operations. Many others are given away free. It is an astounding achievement that is a much more profound solution to the problem. But. Very few people in the West know about it. Mr. Beast is persuading he's got 200 million subscribers. his videos within a few days of going online are typically seen by 50 or 100 million people.

59:04And there is a whole generation coming through that are thinking that the world could be more positive than negative. I've spoken to, for example, the person who runs Mr. Beast's philanthropy and grilled him on him. And he is completely convincing that Jimmy Donaldson, Mr. Beast is, that his motives are pure, that he is doing this ultimately to do good in the world, that all of the money he makes is going to get recycled. And so, look, I think everything, no one is completely black and white. But I think in terms of a net giver to the world, Jimmy Donaldson, hello. Massively, massively, massively a net giver.

59:50What role do you think competition could play in terms of inspiring more generosity and kindness? Like, could there be contests done? because I guess to an extent, like YouTube is a kind of contest. Who can get the most subscribers? MrBeast has won it. He's won YouTube. Is there some other kind of competition you think could help spur this? I think it's an important question. What you want to see is a race to the top. I think even between social media platforms, to some extent, I think there's an opportunity to make the case most clearly that you are committed to the public good. You're committed to trying to find the best in humanity, not the worst.

1:00:38I think ultimately that stance, express the right way can win. The thing is it can't be done in a way that's earnest and boring. You know, we have to figure out how to make good not boring. Too much of good is not as interesting. You know, every filmmaker knows this, every artist, it's so much easier to win the game by going to the dark side. but the reflective choices that people make, I don't know, I think people are sick of the mean world that we're in. And I do think there's an opportunity to compete by saying, we're going to be the most fun, the most delight, the most wonder, you know, come and be part of this game.

1:01:16It's a beautiful game. And I think there is an opportunity there, but it's going to have to be done with immense creativity and skill and courage and, you know, and it's going to, we're gonna have to persuade each other to kind of support those kinds of efforts for it to have a chance what impact do you think the decline in religion has had on generosity or in terms of conventional religion i actually would say that we it's just that again people have a desire for religion they just don't realize it and that energy will go into something else um in some cases it can be like people would believe in certain movements with a religious fervosity but it's the same kind of stuff, I think.

1:01:57But yeah, I'm curious what you think. So I think it's a hugely interesting question. I was influenced by a TED Talk by the philosopher Alain de Botton called Atheism 2.0. Alain de Botton is an atheist, but in his talk, he said, we have to be really careful before we throw out all the accoutrements of religion from our culture because they've been with us for centuries and have shaped who we are in so many ways. So like a really powerful question he asked, and I think is really worth thinking about, is can it be a coincidence that every major religion has required its faithful to gather every week to be reminded that there is something bigger than them to pay attention to, to be reminded that they have an opportunity and a moral obligation to be of service to their community.

1:02:58I view, through the lens of evolutionary biology, I view humans as this weird bag of different things that have evolved in very different circumstances to when we live today. We are fragile, quirky, weird, weird, weird beings. and all of life is this sort of battle between different parts of ourselves. The worldview I grew up with was that life is a battle between your inner demons and your angels, you know, the devil and God or however you want to frame it. I think in some ways that was a helpful framing because you realize that some choices you made could genuinely be bad. And I think the sort of the, almost like the blank slate, you know, I would say naive, hippie, you know, we're all beautiful beings who we just have to go with the flow, do what feels right, and all will be well.

1:03:55That is, I think, a catastrophic view of the world because it's not who we are. We have, that we all have within us, strong feelings, which in the wrong circumstances can lead us to do really bad things. So I worry about letting go of that habit of reminding ourselves that living the best life is actually hard to do. Being the person you want to be takes effort. You've got to figure out. I wish this was actually built into every education system. The single most important thing you can do as a human is to figure out how to empower your reflective self over your instinctive self. It's our reflective self that on our deathbed will say, are we proud of the life we lived?

1:04:44It's our reflective self that on any week, when you take a moment to sit back and say, am I happy with who I am? And so this quest for our better selves, it's not easy. And I really think that the secular world has to figure out a replacement for the weekly gatherings that religious people have. We may not do very well without it. I think it's probably one explanation for why things are getting meaner. I mean, there was also the kind of negative incentive of feeling like God is watching you that would drive people in many ways, like this all-seeing eye. And there's been studies done of, there was like a crime hotspot where there was regularly like cars being broken into or something, and they put a pair of eyes, they painted a pair of eyes on a wall over it, and the rate of crime dropped significantly in that area just because of the act of people sensing these eyes, even though they were just a painting made on people.

1:05:46And I think you mentioned in the book about how the sort of fear of God is judging you. Or for children, we make them believe in Santa Claus. Santa knows whether you've been naughty or nice. So this kind of all-seeing eye. And then you mentioned that the modern-day internet, given that whatever you put out there is now kind of out there forever and people can see it, it's one of the possible upsides of the seeming erosion of privacy that we're having. And I like that there's a positive view of that. At the same time, it obviously comes at a cost, a very major cost of the loss of privacy, and especially with the emergence of cancel culture.

1:06:35So do you have any thoughts on how we can navigate the worst excesses of that? I mean, this is a huge issue to me. I think on the one hand, one of the reasons why infectious generosity can take off now more than ever is that the internet can amplify reputation more than ever. And mostly, I'd like to highlight the upside of that, that if you do something great, you will discover five years later, someone who will meet you and say, you know, five years ago when you did that, I heard about that. It actually inspired me to do this. And I just want to thank you. Good things will come of it because we're in an age of infinite reputation amplification.

1:07:20The downside of it, most people think of as purely downside. How awful is it that, you know people can know about our nastier stuff um and i think it is i think it is worrying and it is uncomfortable but i also think there is potentially a good side to it um in that that's traditionally how humans have been forced to behave throughout history and you know we you know god is watching you or your tribe if when we were living below the dunbar number everyone knew everyone. Right. That's right. And if you, if you, if you, if you were, if you were, if you were, if you did some bad act in your community, you would be outcast.

1:08:00You would, you would suffer a short and miserable life. Um, with modern anonymity, it's been possible to avoid that unless you were in a, you know, if you're in a religious community, less so because, you know, you, you, you live under this, both the desire to help the community, but also a little bit of fear. And so the question, I guess the question is, do humans need a little bit of fear in them to help them nudge them to the level of good behavior? Part of me worries and thinks that the answer may be yes, that actually a little bit of fear is not the worst thing in the world. And so I've, for myself, I have tried to embrace the notion that discomfort is a driver towards progress sometimes in ourselves.

1:08:45You know, an organization, something bad happens, you're on the front page, you know, whatever. You can actually use that discomfort for good. And so I think it's not a terrible mantra to have out there, act as if everybody is watching you. Because we're entering an era where that may well be true. I'd love to dig into one of your biggest philanthropic projects, the Audacious Project. Could you explain what the Audacious Project is? So we're in the world we're in right now. If you want to make change at scale, many of the people, many of the best reported ways of doing that are through companies.

1:09:24People build a big product that they have a dream of and they take company public and billions of people around the world at some point benefit from that product. And we kind of know that story quite well. so the first issue is that when it comes to tackling the world's challenges most of them I think can't be solved just by building a product that can be sold at a margin and be profitable like a company isn't can't solve these problems often the companies actually create some of these problems so there's this huge number of people out there who have devoted their life to quote making change you know call them social entrepreneurs or they run charities or nonprofits or are working as advocates or campaigners or whatever, so many of them, and this strikes me as completely crazy, are having to spend 50 % of their time or more raising money.

1:10:25So first of all, how insane is that? Why would we want a world where the most heroic individuals who are willing to sacrifice, devote their life to this really quite challenging work? and then we make them spend half their time raising money instead of doing the work. There's got to be a better way. The second thing is that many of the people with the most to spend, most to contribute, have themselves got to where they were by dreaming big. That was how they made, say, their billion dollars or whatever. They're big dreamers and big thinkers. And philanthropy that they hear about is often kind of boring.

1:11:03it's like please you know because people get beaten down by meeting after meeting and so it's like please fund our overhead for the next year or whatever um what they are much more likely to respond to is a much bigger dream of we could make the world so much better in this amazing way if we were funded for the next five years at this level so so what we try to do and you know i've been so lucky at TED to have visibility of both those changemakers and the donors who could make a difference. So I tried to put them together by saying to the changemakers, okay, give us your biggest dream. What actually could you do if money was no object?

1:11:43And the answer you get back from that is often amazing, thrilling. You find the best of those and help turn them into credible, evidence-backed, five-year, shovel-ready plans, take a collection of those plans. We typically take 10 at a time and then bring donors together so that you get out of the one meeting at a time thing, bring together, say, 20, 25, 30 donors at a time and share with them these plans. Have them gravitate to the one or two or three that they most are attracted to. So you have a smaller group working around that, go in deep. And then at the end of that gathering, it's a two-day gathering, you invite people to donate together as an act of collaboration.

1:12:32And amazingly, and this has worked a bit better every time we've done it, we've done it six times now. The last one we did in February, there were 10 plans. We raised just over a billion dollars for those 10 plans. And it happened in about the last hour of the retreat, and it happened through infectious generosity. Someone says about one plan, I'm persuaded I will support this if some of you will come in with me. And ping, I'm in, I'm in, I'm in. It's so exciting to see. It's inspiring for the people involved. And it's convinced me that there's actually much more that we could do here. big philanthropy right now is the subject of so much cynicism in the world it's like how dare those rich people decide our future and I kind of get that but if we can flip it so that start with the big dream you know from the tireless hard-working heroic group of people who are actually they're at the cliff edge trying to make change.

1:13:36Start with them, then go and try and raise money from them and discover that actually people are willing to do that and support that collectively. So, yeah. So like the actual core decision-making of what ideas in the first place is not coming from the rich donors. It's coming from the people on the ground who are trying to identify like this problem really needs fixing. They aren't wealthy people. So yeah, instead of it's someone on high going, I have all this money to give away. Oh, I'm going to do this project. I mean, there's still obviously, that is always going to be the problem with billionaire philanthropy is that it's still ultimately, there's one or two people making huge decisions of how to deploy this capital.

1:14:22But you're saying that this is a more democratic approach. the way that I think the world should work here is that every person with a brain and with a heart should be involved in the conversation of how can we make the world better? Everyone should be part of this conversation. And the incredible thing about humanity is that we are capable of visualizing futures that are different from the one that we're in. We're capable of visualizing amazing ideas for tackling even the biggest problems. Anyone can come up with an idea. Those ideas should be the start of something amazing. You then, just as happens in the commercial world, a team of people who can execute on those ideas should come around that idea.

1:15:10And then we collectively, as a world, should fund those ideas. The very rich should pay their part. They should pay more than anyone else. All of us should be part of it. And so my, my, I guess my, my dream level of the future of the Audacious project is that it, that, you know, that there's this moment of excitement once a year, let's say, where a new set of amazing projects are there that could go a huge way to solving whatever our biggest concerns are, wealth, wealth inequality, or the risks from AI or climate change or whatever. ideas that get our collective hearts pumping and we've we've we've given a chance to do this the right way to to to really identify and find the best teams that can do something amazing and that we cheer these people on their way i think there's i genuinely think there's a pathway to getting there and the audacious project has what what everything in the connected age wants which is critical mass.

1:16:11There's a wheel turning there. It gets a bit better each year. And I'm hoping we can continue to grow it, honestly. Is there one particular audacious project that you are especially excited about or one that you want to see get off the ground? Well, there's a couple we're working on right now for the next cycle. I mean, of past ones, you know, I'd point to things like Jennifer Doudna, the Nobel laureate who came up with CRISPR and realized, you know, she spent several years trying to figure out what is the best use of CRISPR. It's clearly quite, could be dangerous, could be massively beneficial and came up with this dream of creating a new branch of science that would use CRISPR to edit not just individual organisms, but microbiomes.

1:16:56And by doing that, there's a whole category of diseases you can cure that have never been cure before. And things like, you can imagine solving one of the biggest problems in climate, which is methane. And a huge part of that methane comes from cows. And a single intervention when in a calf fetus with a CRISPR edited microbiome, it looks like you can get rid of 95 % of those sort of methane emissions. So it's kind of, there's amazing stuff like that of funding sort of bold, new so she's starting this whole new scientific institute to work on this, which is thrilling. Right now, you know, I'm thinking a lot about AI, I'm really worried about, there's lots of ways AI could go wrong.

1:17:43What is the what role could philanthropy play here into trying to help discover the right way to intervene? That's a very exciting conversation. Wealth inequality, you know, there's there are amazing efforts to there's a new possibility now which is not impossible for thanks to the smartphones being ubiquitous is that you can wire money directly into the accounts of poor people so much age traditionally has got entangled for lots of reasons from corruption to just inefficiency there's a lot of evidence and if you listen to someone like Rory Stewart who will say it's absolutely overwhelming evidence that if you wire 500 to 700 dollars into every individual in an in a village every adult that village can break out of poverty forever and um and that you know just amazing things happen so we're exploring that what what could you do like to me it's some version of the future we've got all this inequality i think if there was real proof here that this worked we could persuade a lot of people who can afford it to wire one or thousands of those$500 gifts to lift a huge part of the world out of poverty?

1:19:07One that I'm thinking about is I think we need to do a lot more research into geoengineering because the climate change trends right now on actually, I had kind of stopped worrying about it because I was like, ah, we've got to, there's enough people, there's a critical mass of people thinking about it and then the ocean temperatures have gone wacky in the last few months and i i yes i have a suspicion that some feedback loops are starting to kick in and i wonder that would definitely be possibly the most audacious project possible but obviously it would have to be done extremely carefully and but that's why i'm saying research do you understand doing research i'm not saying actually do it but just the fundamental research i agree i I think there's three really promising areas there, one of which is whitening clouds for better reflectivity, one of which is dispersal of microparticles in the stratosphere.

1:20:05And I think it sounds scary, but that can create enough shade to make a huge difference. And again, what's so interesting about these is that we think of climate usually as a sort of multi-trillion dollar problem to fix, But you could probably make a temperature difference of a degree or two by spending a few tens of billions of dollars. Like orders of magnitude, less money, very, very affordable amount of money to save the planet. The third is basically deacidifying the ocean. There are ways that you can sequester carbon in the ocean much more cost effectively than the kind of direct air capture.

1:20:51type interventions that people talk about. There's a beautiful thing called Project Vesta that wants to do that by grinding up olivium, which is a volcanic product that is everywhere on the planet. If you grind it up into sand, put it on beaches, you can use the energy of the waves to sequester carbon. You're basically accelerating a natural process that happens anyway. And simultaneously deacidify the ocean for probably, they think, as little as$30 a ton of carbon compared to hundreds of dollars per ton currently for direct air capture. So anyway, there are these things that are out there that could potentially be deployed at scale.

1:21:37And I think they're very exciting. And I bet the big argument against that people will say is that you're entering moral hazard territory and that if you let these take off, that you're going to give oil companies permission to continue to pump oil and so forth because they could just invest in these instead. And I get that argument, but I think I agree with you. We're getting to the point where it's potentially reaching emergency status. And if we don't have some of these up our sleeve, we're taking a very big risk. Right, and the thing is, is that if we suddenly stopped pumping oil, civilization would collapse and the amount of death would be inordinate and that would also be a devastating outcome.

1:22:17So that would be a win-winny type solution. and we can still be slowly weaning ourselves off oil, which we're doing. A lot of our energy production is moving progressively cleaner, but it's not going to be an overnight thing. This is what I so wish was on the front page of the news every day. It's like, here are the dreams. Here are big dreams of the future. They're not fully formed yet. But here's how they are advancing and here's what's exciting about them. And I just think the world needs more big, bold dreamers. It really does. You are an advocate of the Giving What We Can pledge. Could you explain a little bit what that is?

1:22:52So the Giving What We Can pledge has traditionally been a pledge that says, give 10 % of your income to a well-chosen charity. It says it in a way that is recognizing that a lot of people may not be in a position where they can do that right now, but at least that should be an aspirational pledge that you should do. You know, all my life, I've actually been consumed by a kind of guilt on philanthropy and a worry that by going down the generosity route, it's a sort of pathway to endless obligation. You know, that because if you buy some of the arguments of Peter Singer and so forth, because we have an obligation to someone suffering on the other side of the world, just as much as we have someone suffering on our doorstep, if we take this seriously, can we ever enjoy a cup of latte again?

1:23:46And so I started to try and dig into this thing of, is there an art you can give that is enough? At which point you can feel like you've, quote, done your bit and you can get on with your life. And I kind of think that moral rules need to find that because we're human beings. We're quirky, we're vulnerable. we're not going to persuade anyone to be generous if we say to them, no matter how generous you are, there's going to be another ask. That's too daunting. So one thing I love about the pledge is that it's clear. Some people may want to give more in can at some point, but it's basically saying, do that and we'll celebrate you.

1:24:26This is great. You are part of a generous community of humans who, if we were all doing this, the world would be much better. So I dug into that question of, well, how much better would the world be? And there were two things that I concluded. One was that the pledge might need to be expanded, that the problem with income is that for the people who are wealthiest, it doesn't really put much of an obligation on them at all. Right. All that's a fanatic. Because the very rich have structured their lives. they may not have much income at all. They have these huge net worths that they just, you know, they can borrow against it or whatever, that they can, income isn't the thing that drives them.

1:25:10What would be a challenging give for them is to go to the other religious tradition. 10 % has been part of Judaism and Christianity for centuries and not always very well observed or whatever, but it's been out there as an ideal to aim for 10 % of income. In Islam, they've gone a different route, which is one fortieth of your wealth or two and a half percent. So if billionaires and others of the very rich gave two and a half percent of their net worth every year, that would probably be on average triple what they're giving currently. It would raise an absolutely spectacular amount of money. So what I did, and I was working with someone who I think you know, Natalie Cargill from a long view of philanthropy, just doing the math on this of what that leads to, if a third of the people who were in the world's top 1 % of givers honoured that pledge, it would actually raise about three and a half trillion dollars of philanthropy a year.

1:26:12And it turns out that that is enough to do pretty much all that philanthropy can do. So in a way that, you know, the part of the book that I love most is Natalie Cargill's list of what three and a half trillion dollars a year could do. And whatever problem that you are worried about, that you name, there is approach, an approach that philanthropy credibly could take to solving that problem. So when you put those pieces together, that changes for me, the guilt feeling. It says, this is a standard that we should try and advocate for everyone to adopt. And if we do, we can do that and still embrace our lives, spend the rest of the money on ourselves and enjoy it.

1:26:59We got to know each other in part through a game of poker. We've played some poker. What I love about your poker games is that, you know, whenever I play, I'm usually just playing Texas Hold 'em. but you have this smorgasbord of bizarre poker type games that you've in part either you've invented or your friends have invented and I've never played like talk about a mixture game just learning on the spot that completely different game I've never seen before so have games always been a large part of your life and were you are you would you describe yourself as a competitive person? Yes and yes. I mean, gosh, as a, like, I think probably as a six and seven year old, learned to play Monopoly and became obsessed with that.

1:27:49It was a lot of fun and similar games like that. Those board games like Risk, Monopoly, I definitely got obsessed by. I tried to create a game once and sell it and almost worked. It was, it's actually amazingly hard to fine tune a game so that it really it's balanced survive survives all scenarios you know can be completed in a reasonable amount of time and and so forth um my my game was brilliant but it ended up in some scenarios lasting five or six hours which was not marketable has the flavor of your competitiveness changed at all as you've gotten older yeah i'd like to i'd like to think so I mean, look, I used to be a media entrepreneur and we were, you know, I assembled a group of people back in the early 80s, mid 80s, I guess, when technology was changing so that you could produce magazines using computers at a much lower cost than the big publishing houses were doing.

1:28:44So, you know, I assembled a cast of characters doing special hobbyist magazines around computers and video games and other special interest areas like music and cycling and so forth. And we saw ourselves as a kind of rebel alliance. You know, we were outside London in Bath, England, of all places, and loved taking on the big, bigger, much richer, but it's kind of slower moving publishers by going ding, ding, ding. And it was very, very exciting to be able to launch something much faster than they could and, you know, go, go, go.

1:29:22in a way when at TED even when we first started giving away content probably part of that was driven competitively you could just see that

1:29:39knowledge content was starting to take off online and we had a very good archive of material at TED already that was well shot and we knew that on the internet, you know, things, there is a kind of winner-takes-all mentality. A lot of things, once you have critical mass, that becomes, you know, when someone thinks of, I've got to give a talk somewhere that I wanted to have a huge audience, you know, a couple of years after we'd started giving content, we started to get a lot of those speaker applications because we were the brand that people had heard about. And so even though there was, you know, it was a very complicated motivation thing, But I think there was a competitive feel there that let's, if we're going to do this, let's be the brand that stands for public speaking, giving away online.

1:30:25Now I'd like to say, I mean, I genuinely want a more generous world. And so I don't, I think I'm, when it comes to professional stuff, like I welcome other people taking ideas and running with them. So there's this group in India called Josh Talks that arguably, some would say, sort of ripped off the TED brand. I didn't even know about them, but they produced talks with a little red rug that looks like a TED Talk and so forth. And I met the founder of this, a woman called Supriya Paul. She's a co-founder. And I so admire what she's doing. And I've celebrated her. And in fact, I've said, through the generosity mindset, you can see something like that as just wonderful.

1:31:20You see the world in ripple effects. You want ripple effects to spread as far as possible. If someone takes what you've done and improves it in some way, she is taking TED-like talks to people in India, to 50 million people a month, who are outside the usual education system. I mean, and there are so many stories of self-empowerment there. For me to be mad at that would be so small and so churlish. And so there you have to take, you just celebrate the stuff going and it's wonderful. Did you have to train yourself to feel this way? Because like I noticed, I've described myself almost, certainly myself in my teens and early 20s as like pathologically competitive, almost like destructively competitive.

1:32:08and I would get jealous sometimes. I like to be seen as the hot new female poker player or whatever. And then if another hot new female poker player came along, there'd be a part of me, my logical brain would be like, this is good. She's going to raise poker even more. She's not your competitor. But there was a part inside of me, the pathological side that felt this threat, was coming from this form of scarcity because I think that's where jealousy comes from, right? It's like an idea of like scarcity, but it was false scarcity. And I've had to like train that out of myself basically. And I still sometimes notice it.

1:32:45Like if someone else started a podcast called Win-Win, I know there'd be a part of me that'd be like, and I'm like, well, are they doing a truly Win-Win? Are they doing a good thing with Win-Win? If yes, then that's actually a Win-Win thing. Great. Like Win-Win should spread, you know, and it's not like, it's not like a trademark term but I've had to it's like it's like a muscle that I've personally had to train and what I want to understand is like as a fellow competitive person was this something that just like you've had to also train or did it was it just like part of your being from the beginning like this this generosity mindset I mean I've always been guilted out on generosity and my parents were so crazily generous and in their whole lives they were missionaries they gave their lives to doing expecting bigger than they were.

1:33:35So it's probably always been there in some form, but nothing like them. I mean, it gets complicated. Competition, I don't think it's all bad. I think the whole, it's the same as capitalism, right? Capitalism is a miracle in many ways. It spreads ideas across the planet through the force of competition and people fighting like crazy to win is part of the dynamic that has allowed ideas and amazing products and inventions to spread. And then there's a destructive side of it where it becomes exploitative and bad. So, I mean, I don't think it's evil to be competitive. I think it's, I just think, for me, the word that goes on in my head sometimes is, do you want to be big or small?

1:34:23Like, there's, sometimes it just feels bigger to let things go and let other people shine. What I've noticed is that if you want to influence the world, the more you can give someone else control of something, the more likely it is they will surprise and delight you. I mean, the best people will only give of their best if they control something. Right. Or if they feel a sense of ownership to a degree. Yeah, that's right. That's why TEDx basically works. We gave up control of the brand, and 3 ,000 curation teams around the world have produced amazing events, you know, using the TED brand. And we get to post the videos.

1:35:08And, like, it's been a huge win-win. And Giving Tuesday, it was interesting speaking with them. So here's a story in which a single hashtag spread across the Internet from nothing to now, you know, they raise several billion dollars annually and are spreading the meme of kindness and generosity everywhere. Asha Curran, who runs that, told me that the key to that thing working was that they put in minimal rules on how that hashtag could be used. A lot of people who came up with the idea said, hey, nonprofits, you can use this to raise money. All we want is 5 % of what you raise. Or here is how you have to link it back to this website so that we can control it.

1:35:51If they'd done that, it probably wouldn't have spread. But by letting go of it, it's become this global phenomenon. And so that's often the dynamic. How much are you courageous enough to let go and let your idea find its best form of flourishing out there? And I just think, if in doubt, maybe let it go that much more. TED has been running for 30 years? 40 actually the first 10 was in 1984 the same year that the apple mac launched and the sony like cd the first cd in technology it was technology entertainment design and in both of those it was like wait a sec there is a synergy between those three things obviously the brand has in some ways become completely synonymous with this idea of single person on stage giving talks and yes, you've used the power of franchise to spread it enormously.

1:36:55I think it's brilliant with TEDx. Given the sort of competitive, the increased competitive landscape of content, like it's more competitive than ever. You know, my second TED talk just came out and I'm like scrutinizing the numbers and looking to see, because I was like, oh, the first one got this many numbers and that was five years ago and this one has gotten this many. Is that a result of just how competitive the landscape is or is it the content of the talk? But it's probably, to a degree, it's just harder to get numbers. I speak to YouTubers these days. They're like, it's just a different game to 10 years ago.

1:37:27So what strategies, well, A, are you trying to, how competitive are you trying to stay in terms of like fighting for market share or like eyeballs in the attention economy? And if so, what strategies are you guys going to do? Are there any, are you going to stick with this formula? Are you going to like branch out and try different stuff? Well, we're thinking very hard about every aspect of this question, because it's definitely more, it is definitely more challenging now. I mean, when you think about what's happened to the world, you've got literally millions of people on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, elsewhere, trying every damn thing that they can think of to tap into some weird quirk in people's minds and win the attention battle.

1:38:16And the net result of all of this is that all of those platforms, if you do scroll on them, it is so compelling to do that. So if I've got 15 minutes free, do I want to watch one TED Talk or do I want to scroll through 1 ,000 posts? on my, you know, most people are going to scroll through the thousand posts and they will definitely get more instant dopamine hits from doing that. So there's several things we're working on. One is yes, to convert some of our best content into shorter form that can work in a doom scrolling environment. So we have a channel on TikTok called TED Talks, of course. And it's, you know, it's doing okay.

1:39:09yeah, it's nice, it's good. There's some stuff that's really working on there. I think the bigger thing that we need to stand for, though, is just to remind people that not all of life is doom scrolling and that something's more. So we're actually in the process of changing our actual tagline from ideas we're spreading to ideas change everything. so what that's meant to signal is that the stakes are higher if you're if you're really willing to immerse deeply in an idea that's powerful um that could be a more important thing and so i would say you know someone who's doom scrolling if instead they watched your your brilliant talk on ai and on the the moloch trap and how dangerous that is and how important it is we figure out a way around it, that is a better use of their 15 minutes, honestly, because that idea won't leave their minds.

1:40:08It hasn't left mine. And in fact, it's helping, it has helped motivate what will, I hope, become a very large philanthropic contribution to trying to solve this problem. In terms of winning the general attention battle out there, I truly don't know. It's why I wrote this book. I think every form of kindness, which basically means all kinds of stories and acts that spread goodness and wonder and interest and valuable knowledge, we all have to play our role in amplifying those. Or the future gets ugly. And I don't know if we can do it, but I feel like there's no reason why we shouldn't.

1:40:54thanks so much for listening everyone and huge thank you to chris for taking the time to speak to me i mean if this has inspired you all at all i highly recommend you go check out both infectious generosity.org or if you're feeling really ambitious then go check out audacious project because as i mentioned in this conversation i appreciate so many of you are sort of thinking yourselves about how to fix some of these systemic issues. And systemic change really is audacious. So that's exactly what that project is set up for. If you want something a little simpler, and perhaps with a little less friction, but you want to do something generous, I'd highly recommend checking out the Giving What We Can pledge.

1:41:35I personally signed it myself about five years ago. And I found it to be sort of the cleanest, crispest way for me personally to sort feel like I'm doing my bit for generosity. So if that appeals, also check it out. They've even made a special win-win landing page because I told them I was recording this episode with Chris. So yeah, check that out. I've linked it below. And if money isn't what you want to be generous with right now, totally fine. As we said, like there are so many ways to be generous. If you're feeling inspired, share, like, subscribe, the usual. That's actually the best way you can be generous.

1:42:12And from me to you, thank you for being generous with your time, because that's the ultimate finite resource. And you guys just listened to this conversation for close to two hours. So thank you for that too. All right. On that note, I will see you very soon. Bye. Have a nice couple of weeks.