TED Talks Daily - Sunday Pick: How Bill Gates spends $9 billion a year

Episode Date: April 14, 2024

To get a free copy of the Infectious Generosity book, visit ted.com/generosityEach Sunday, TED shares an episode of another podcast we think you'll love, handpicked for you… by us. Today: an episode from The TED Interview. Back for a new season, Head of TED Chris Anderson interviews amazing thinkers about the ultimate idea worth spreading: infectious generosity.Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft and the co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is one of the top ten richest people in the world. But since 2008, he has traded his day-to-day role with Microsoft to focus full-time on his foundation's work to expand opportunity around the world.Chris interviews Bill about his philanthropy philosophy and digs into the opportunities and challenges that face one of the largest private charitable foundations in the world. The two also discuss The Giving Pledge, the movement Bill co-founded with Warren Buffet, which encourages wealthy individuals to commit the majority of their wealth to charitable causes within their lifetimes.Chris and Bill examine the importance of solving the world’s most pressing problems efficiently, talk about why meaningful change requires scale, and compare notes on how to best encourage collective excitement about giving back.

TED Audio Collective. Hey, TED Talks Daily listeners, I'm Elise Hu. Today we have a special treat, an episode of another podcast from the TED Audio Collective, handpicked for you by us. The TED interview is back for a special season on an idea that can truly change the world, infectious generosity. Inspired by his new book of the same name, Head of TED, Chris Anderson returns as host to chat with inspiring guests about how small acts of thoughtfulness and kindness can spread to change lives at a scale

never experienced before. You're listening to the first episode of the season where Chris talks with Bill Gates about his philanthropy philosophy. You can find the rest of the TED interview wherever you get your podcasts. And if you want a free copy of the book that inspired the podcast, check out TED.com slash generosity. Support for this show comes from Airbnb. If you know me, you know I love staying in Airbnbs when I travel. They make my family feel most at home when we're away from home. As we settled down at our Airbnb during a recent vacation to Palm Springs, I pictured my own home sitting empty.

Wouldn't it be smart and better put to use welcoming a family like mine by hosting it on Airbnb? It feels like the practical thing to do, and with the extra income, I could save up for renovations to make the space even more inviting for ourselves and for future guests. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca slash host. AI keeping you up at night? Wondering what it means for your business? Don't miss the latest season of Disruptors, the podcast that takes a closer look at the innovations reshaping our economy.

Join RBC's John Stackhouse and Sonia Sinek from Creative Destruction Lab as they ask bold questions like, why is Canada lagging in AI adoption and how to catch up? Don't get left behind. Listen to Disruptors, the innovation era, and stay ahead of the game in this fast-changing world. Follow Disruptors on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform. Hello, everyone. Chris Anderson here. Welcome to a brand new season of the TED interview. This is where we dive into

issues in much greater depth than is possible in a TED Talk. And this whole season, we're going to be diving into the idea of infectious generosity, the ultimate idea we're spreading. The cast of characters that I've connected with in producing this podcast series collectively give us the playbook to show that acts of kindness and other forms of goodness can spread virally across the internet more powerfully than the anger and divide that is currently framing our narrative.

I'm hoping that by now you've read or listened to my book, Infectious Generosity. If not, the trailer that preceded this episode tells you exactly how you can claim your free copy. The podcast series is designed to mesh in with the book in a beautiful way. But if you haven't read it yet, don't worry. What you're about to hear will still make perfect sense because our first guest is none other than Bill Gates. Yep, the Bill Gates, the man who for years held the title of the world's richest person and who would probably still be the world's richest person if he hadn't given away so much money, $60 billion and counting. The conversation you're about to hear, I think, is pretty remarkable.

You've probably heard Bill interviewed before, but this time it felt like we went deeper. I really tried to push him on some of the issues I've often wondered about with him, like his initial motivation to get into philanthropy. Was that, in part, a desire to bolster his reputation at a time when he and Microsoft were under attack? And what he makes of some of the criticisms of the Gates Foundation work, like are the amazing efforts he's made to transform how drugs and vaccines are distributed across the world all they're made out to be? Or has he been used to some extent by Big Pharma? Or take the Giving Pledge, in which he's sought to persuade other billionaires

to give away the majority of their wealth. Is it really working? Also, what does it feel like to be hit with so many conspiracy theories? I have to say, I was excited and impressed by his answers. See what you think. Without further ado, here's Bill Gates. So, Bill Gates, welcome to the TED interview. Hi, Chris. Great to talk to you.

Bill, as I think you know, I've become obsessed with this idea of infectious generosity. And that's why you're the perfect person to open this new series of the 10 interview. By so many measures, whether you look at the lives impacted, the reshaping of so many areas of philanthropy, I mean, the ripple effects from what you've done are astonishing. So I think you can legitimately be called the typhoid Mary of infectious generosity. I have so many questions for you, but I would love to start with your own generosity journey and how that began. Take us back to the 90s and what got you into all this in the first place. Yeah, I had a great upbringing where my parents would volunteer quite a bit and were involved in things like United Way or Planned Parenthood. And so I had that example, but I sort of ignored that as I went off and became obsessed with the magic of software and my role at Microsoft and really didn't let myself read even things like different sciences,

like biology, what was advancing. Only as I stepped down as CEO, then I got extra time. You know, I was going out with Melinda. We got engaged. We were talking about, okay, what would happen to the gigantic wealth that the success of Microsoft had created? And how should that go back to society? What are some causes where you could have high impact? Sort of thinking that, you know, all the

really high impact stuff would have been taken. And so we'd have to just find things that were kind of marginal. And then to our shock, we found a variety of things that are super dramatic in their impact per dollar. And so we built the foundation. The big gift that made it the largest foundation was in the year 2000. And then I retired from my full-time work at Microsoft and went to the foundation full-time in 2008. So I'm 15 years in to having that be my primary focus. And it's been unbelievably fulfilling. And certainly in global health, the impact is even far beyond what we would have dreamed of. I'm so interested in the motivation of what makes someone make a shift like this. From what you said, and from what I've assumed

is just trying to put myself in your shoes, I could see different sort of contributing motivations to wanting to do this. In the 90s, you were under intense criticism from people for Microsoft being monopolistic, predatory, whatever. Surely maybe part of it was a desire to show that there was a different side of you and that reputational thing mattered. Is it legitimate to say that played

some factor? Would you discount some of them completely? Well, obviously, I'm not an objective observer of my own motivations. I don't think the reputational thing was there because even though there were lots of criticisms of Microsoft, I was still polling and to this day, you know, as, you know, most admired business person and a variety of things. So you have tons of people who like you more than you deserve. And then you have tons of people who dislike you, some of whom for good reasons, you know, like their software crashed or something. And many, you know, it's more about, okay, this person is rich and powerful. Should there be

people like that? Even some jealousy or resentment. But overall, my reputation was extremely positive because that American dream, particularly outside America, in India and China, you know, the American dream of somebody creating a company and making lots of money and not coming from a powerful family or anything like that is still extremely vaunted. So I don't think it was reputation. The thing that I think some people miss is that my day-to-day work where, like we spent three hours yesterday talking about making gene therapy super cheap so we can cure HIV and cure sickle cell, the kind of brainstorming session with innovators that I do in my foundation work is, it's the kind of stuff I love doing at Microsoft. And although, yes, I need to know some immunology and biology,

on a daily basis, the people I get to work with are just unbelievable, whether it's people in the field, you know, where I go out to Africa to see it, or the scientists in the lab, or the people are convincing government that helping poor countries is still a priority. This is really fun work. You know, obviously, I don't take a salary, I don't need to work, but I choose to work still pretty long hours. I really do love it on a daily basis. And, you know, the fact that it has this kind of profound impact is just icing on the cake. Part of the reason I'm interested in motivation is that I've just noticed how cynical so many people are in trying to use any kind of possible motivation

other than absolutely pure generosity to try to nitpick at acts of kindness, just across the board, actually, but certainly in big philanthropy. And I've sought to argue that's just unbelievably counterproductive. So if you told me that half the motivation was to improve your reputation, I'd have actually been great with that. Other people maybe in that situation should consider the same thing.

But what I heard instead, another surprising motivation that I think isn't what most people have in mind when they think about philanthropy. I think a lot of people think, oh, I've got to do some generous giving. It feels like a sort of a moral obligation. It's going to be hard work and worthy. What I heard from you was excitement that you got to dig into the issues and the process of doing that felt just as cool and interesting as some of the other brainstorming you've done. Talk a bit more about that because I've always observed you to be just hungrily curious. You read like, know what I know, and that seems in this case to have allowed you to shift looking at a problem from just being, oh, this is awful and overwhelming, to actually, this is really interesting. Well, definitely, you know, when it comes to giving,

there are things that are tricky because you have people telling you various things that they think you should give to, and you have to think about how long you're going to live and how you involve your kids or you don't. And it is terrible if giving is sort of this, oh God, I have to think about that type thing. And so helping people on their journey of generosity, particularly if they're lucky enough to be successful, do they get to a point where they can say, no, this fund is making the fortune, is giving it away. The start of our foundation, over 10 million children a year are dying. And although it's broadly known that diarrhea, pneumonia, malaria are the majority of that, what's causing the pneumonia or the diarrhea or

which tools we should make for malaria, it's not well known. And I thought, my God, from a moral or human condition point of view, these questions are so interesting. And because of rich world diseases where there's a market to do gene sequencing and come up with things. The tools of biology have been advancing during this 23-year period incredibly. And so we can take those tools and apply them to malaria and diarrhea. And so we've been able to make unbelievable progress. You know, we've cut that number down to under 5 million now. So yes, ideally, you get to a point where your morally driven work is even more fulfilling than the other things you did in your life. And just like I was super lucky with Microsoft, I was very lucky to find these causes. I mean, I think there's something

here that a lot of us could take away. Come to think of it, at TED, when someone comes to the conference wanting to present a really difficult issue, often their temptation is to come in and say, look at this, isn't this awful? And our advice often is to them, say, that's not a way to win people's attention and get them engaged with you. That's too hard.

Start with, hey, I want to show you something that's really amazingly interesting. For a lot of us, that can take us where empathy in its sort of most heavily expressed form is too much. So, I mean, I love that you've expressed that. I suspect that's been very effective in terms of bringing others along with you on that journey. Am I right in assuming that? Yeah, absolutely. How you mix in the fact that in poor countries, there's these grim things like kids who are malnourished or kids who die for the lack of a bed net. How you mix that in the message is very important. You know, I got a chance to

read your book this week, and I thought it was fantastic at reminding us that how you balance that message in one of hope. And, you know, as you say in the book, if you tell people they can save millions of lives, it's less powerful than just handing them a picture of one kid and saying, do you want to save this kid's life? When I showed my daughter a movie about polio and how we've made all this progress that, you know, we've gone from a quarter million kids being paralyzed every year now down to less than a hundred. At the end of the video, there was a kid limping along. And so the video was over and I thought, okay, what do you think? And she said,

are you helping her? And I said, who? And she said, that girl at the end of the video who's limping along. And I'm like, wow, you are really retail. I mean, my mindset is so wholesale. That didn't even occur to me. But you can be sure I made sure that girl has really good crutches and good care. So I could tell my daughter that her impulse that, hey, if you're going to make her feel bad about the girl, let's do something about it was fulfilled. Shame on you, dad. You got 249,990. But that last 10. But this is it. So this dance between head and heart, I think we'll return to because it's so important to try and figure it out. Tell me, Bill, when was the moment when you really felt, wait a sec, there actually is something big that our foundation could do? It's not just small pieces on the side.

What was the big aha? Well, you go to Africa and you see the great energy and the great beauty, but people literally without shoes and are without enough food. And you're like, wow, these are humans and we should be helping them get to self-sufficiency. And then there was a Nick Kristof article about kids dying of rotavirus, which is the majority of diarrheal deaths. And there was a vaccine that protected against rotavirus, but it was only being given to rich kids. And rich

kids, because they have a nice health system and good nutrition, their chance of dying of rotavirus is near zero. Whereas in India alone, you had over 100,000 kids dying every year because they didn't have this vaccine. And then I looked into the cost of making vaccines and saw that almost every vaccine, if you do the right things, you can get down to less than a dollar of cost. And, you know, then it just seems so horrific that because the poor people don't have any money, their voice in the marketplace of innovation and products isn't adhered to. And so the market works for, should we have Chinese restaurants or Thai restaurants? But for the health needs of the poorest, the market alone just doesn't work.

So that insight and that we could use our philanthropic dollars to get that vaccine cost down and to invent new vaccines, get them out to kids. That, you know, became the, okay, we can go full speed ahead here. And so every quarter I would have a meeting where we looked at what percentage of the world's children were getting rotavirus vaccine and what steps we were going to take. You know, and now that number is up close to 90%, up from about 10% when we got going. And that alone is the biggest single reason why so many fewer kids are dying before the age of five. So what happened was, Melinda and I gave some money in the late 90s.

We gave $125 million to what was called the Children's Vaccine Program. And they had a dinner for us to be nice to us. And I guess the people had been coached not to beg too much. But then I said, hey, what would you guys do if you had more money? And then, you know, so the rotavirus guy has his idea and the pneumo guy has his idea. And they're all, you know, there's a cholera guy. So there's at least six different people who are like, oh my God, thank you for asking. And I was like, wow, this is crazy. Why isn't this getting done? And in a U.S. foundation, you have a minimum payout of 5%. You know, so when I did that first gift in 2000, we were required to spend over a billion a year. But I had gotten the confidence

that we'd have no problem spending that money for incredible impact. Yeah, that was a hell of a first step. Donate 20 billion and have to figure out how to give away a billion. I mean, giving away money is a thing we may return to, but it's one of the problems. It's actually quite hard to do it well. I mean, sometimes people get blamed for not giving enough. Would you agree that that is a part that's missed, that it takes? No, absolutely. The U.S. has a very thriving nonprofit sector. But if you go into countries where philanthropy hasn't been a great tradition,

then there's not just a lack of money to be given, there's a lack of organizations. If you want to give in that country, you have to build up that side as well. And so pick a measure like lives saved or getting rid of malnutrition and try to make sure you're good about that. But you don't have that same feedback that the private sector does. If a foundation is giving money inefficiently, it's not driven out of business. And, you know, of course, the recipients of your grants are always like, this is such a brilliant grant that you're giving me. You know, just keep it up. And, you know, so saying, did I explore things as much as I should have? It's less clear than in the place where you made money.

Right, right. The Gates Foundation obviously is involved in so many areas now. You're now giving away as much as $9 billion a year, which I think is about at least five times more than what anyone else is doing. I mean, it's pretty amazing. I'd like to focus on one area, especially so that we just get a picture of you and the foundation at work making change. So you've mentioned vaccines, let's go there. I mean, for one thing, there's a beautiful analogue, right, with the software business model that you've had, which is you spend a huge amount of money building something. And then when you've built it, you can reel off units of it at very little cost. And it's a very powerful thing that you're reeling off. And I'm guessing that that's part of what drew you to

vaccines as well. This could be amazing if we really got behind these. Yeah, it's quite magical that, you know, this dollar shot, you know, it's a metal needle and, you know, the infant cries. And so it's very non-intuitive in terms of saving that child's life. That's the best thing you can do. But, you know, we got rid of smallpox altogether by getting vaccination up and it's gone. You know, we're very close to achieving that with polio. And so not only won't any child be paralyzed, but you won't have to vaccinate anyone once it's certified as having been eradicated.

You know, we'll often go to drug companies and we'll say, hey, we'll help you support to vaccinate anyone once it's certified as having been eradicated. And we'll often go to drug companies and we'll say, hey, we'll help you support this work, but we need to know that for the 90 poorest countries that you won't charge anything but your cost, you know, and that all the rights and everything will be available at no cost for the poorest countries. And so that model has worked for us to tap in to getting these drug companies as partners. Because for them, for a drug company, in many ways, the economics of vaccines aren't ideal. You know, they're a take once, your life has changed. There's not, in most cases, recurring customers, as it were. And so, left to their own devices,

drug companies kind of prefer to develop drugs for chronic diseases that they can make you take every day. To that extent, the market's perhaps a little bit broken. And did you see that a key role of the foundation was to make the market work where it was needed most? Yeah, well, for a disease like malaria that doesn't exist in rich countries, we're giving grants to get private companies involved, to get the resources allocated the way they should be. With diseases that exist both in rich world and poor world, like HIV, Gilead, who's very generous in their licensing for poor countries, we can help fund projects knowing that for every project they sign, that they've agreed not to including by people like Médecins Sans Frontières,

of kind of kowtowing to the economic demands of big pharma and actually not fully being on the side of the poor who actually need these vaccines. I'm guessing you're not a fan of these criticisms. What are the critics missing? Well, it's fair that every time we work with private companies, did we strike the best deal we could on behalf of the poorest? You know, it's great that people look at what we do there and say, no, you should have done better. You should have done this. You should have done this other thing. You know, as you look into those, most of them are wrong. But because you don't have market feedback, you better listen to your critics because sometimes they will be right about those things. There is a perverse

thing that can happen, though, which is that for the companies who actually work on infectious disease, they get asked to give the stuff away and lose money. And so what you've seen is that many pharma companies don't work on these issues at all because it involves them in the moral dilemma. It's like you say in your book, is this a sticky wicket? Asking private companies to just give these things away, that is probably not scalable as we need more vaccines. We need to engage them. Have you personally been involved in some of the negotiations with, say, the CEO of a pharma company? And without necessarily naming names, can you just tell us the story of what it feels like and what is going on in your head? How are you deciding that this is a fair deal and that you're

excited about it? Well, we publish every year. We fund a group which is called the Access to Medicines Index, which looks at all the drug companies and says, do they take some of their top R&D people and work on infectious disease? There's a strong correlation that as pharma companies do well, they get more generous. And as they do less well, they get less generous. So Eli Lilly and Nova Nordisk,

who are benefiting from their GLP-1 obesity drugs, are actually both stepping up to help with global health things pretty fantastically. And I give credit to the leadership of those organizations. You know, when I'm talking to a pharma CEO, and I do a regular meeting with all those CEOs, clearly we can offer praise where they're giving away drugs, for example, for neglected diseases. Or if somebody really lets us down, you know, we'll speak out. And as you say in your book, you know, their employees are anxious to be at an enterprise that not only is bringing health to rich people, but bringing it to the world at large. And so the sort of carrot stick there has been reasonably powerful.

I've been trying to put myself in your shoes. I think I've been wrestling with this. You know, over time, you form relationships, friendships with the heads of these companies because they're doing work that matters. And I'm just curious whether, in your own mind, are you willing, if it comes to it, to say, enough, you're not doing this right, to not necessarily call someone out, but to risk losing one of those friendships over what the needs of the vaccines in this country that really needs it demand? Yeah, there's companies who were high in our access to medicines index and fell very dramatically. You know, it often comes with the change of the CEO. You know, when you say,

okay, what's making money, the global health stuff just doesn't make the cut. So it's often when they go through tough times. And I'm rarely criticized for not being hardcore enough. So when a pharma CEO is on the phone with me, it's not about some friendship, although some of these people are quite impressive. It's about, hey, come on, how come, you know, you didn't make enough rotavirus vaccine or you haven't brought the HPV vaccine price down, you know, I'm going to have to go to India and China to get it made. We have also huge relationships with the developing world manufacturers, Indonesia, India, and China. And over time, as we're getting the prices down, the volumes do tend to shift because they are more focused on low-cost

manufacturing than the Western companies. So give us a sense of scale here, Bill. Over the years, at least plausibly as a result of Gates Foundation work, how many vaccines have been delivered to the developing world? And how many lives do you believe have been saved as a result? So deaths under five were over 10 million a year, and now we're down below 5 million a year. You know, the majority of the reduction is due to vaccines. So these are incredible numbers. Yeah, I find this so amazing. And it's so frustrating to me that so many of us walk around under a cloud of misery at how bad the world is. And we think about all these terrible deaths that are in the news.

And I just think that we'd feel better about ourselves, better about humanity overall, better about the future, if we somehow found a way of holding those numbers in mind and being able to picture it. Yeah, you and I are in total agreement about this, that when people say we should throw out our current system or change it radically, people should understand that our system in many ways is working well. I admit that income inequality is still not great and that access to great education is still not great. But it's better today than at any time in the past. There are a few negative trends like opioid use

and polarization, and we should particularly take our innovative powers, our generous thinking, and apply to those things. But most things are improving, and it's sad that because of the nature of bad news, which you talk about, that people are far more gloomy about where we are than they should be. And then their motivation to do more of the good stuff is definitely reduced because of that. Yes. I love you. a recent vacation to Palm Springs, I pictured my own home sitting empty. Wouldn't it be smart and better put to use welcoming a family like mine by hosting it on Airbnb? It feels like the practical thing to do, and with the extra income, I could save up for renovations to make the space even more inviting for ourselves and for future guests. Your home might be worth more than you think.

Find out how much at airbnb.ca slash host. Often the good news is not it's not like a sort of soothing band-aid on reality. It's the opposite. It's actually opening people's eyes up to what the data actually show. Let's talk about this, Bill, because this is amazing to me. You've been, because of your deep involvement in vaccines and because the issue of vaccination itself has somehow, God knows how, become politicised, you've been the subject of the most bizarre conspiracy theories, which would be comical were it not for the viciousness with which some of them are pursued? The theory that you engineered this thing so that you can make money from your vaccines is probably the most extreme and obnoxious thing out there. I'm curious how you cope with it, honestly.

Yeah, I mean, there's some people who say that, you know, I gave the TED Talk warning about the risk of a pandemic. And then, you know, years go by and it's not coming true. So I felt I had to do something to validate my prediction. Otherwise, I was going to look foolish. And it's pretty bizarre that you have a, you know, candidate running for the US presidency who writes a book, you know, with my name in the subtitle saying that I'm using vaccines to kill millions of children and making billions of dollars. We're talking there about Robert Kennedy, right? Yes. You know, the bizarreness

is strong. I certainly have no complaint. I mean, my life is fantastic and wonderful. And the fact that some people have crazy views, you know, I've even had people come up and yell at me on the street. At least, you At least they didn't physically attack me. They just were saying, why am I tracking them? And the idea of why I would want to track that particular person, it never occurred to them that it really doesn't make sense. The scale of misinformation during the pandemic blew my mind. So the fact that the reputation of vaccines has been really damaged, that is tragic.

And I would have thought a pandemic would get us to rededicate ourselves to global health. But sadly, it's almost done the opposite, where people talk about, oh, let's not fund the WHO or let's, you know, not do any new vaccine work. And somebody who put their life into this kind of work like Tony Fauci, let's attack him as a villain. It's amazing to me. I want to ask you about whether there are some unintended consequences about, because of the vast size of the foundation, unquestionably, by any objective measure, you are the gorilla in the room in many discussions about public health and how to make it better. I guess I've heard some people wonder whether there is a risk of a kind of chilling effect, that you're so powerful that other ideas struggle to get a look in somehow because the foundation is so confident in what it's doing. Do you worry about this? And when you talk to your people out there in the field,

is there any kind of instruction that says, you know, you guys are the source of the main money and that that gives you a lot of power? Is there any issue here that you think is real? Oh, yeah. It's a big issue that, you know, just take malaria as an example. It's tragic that there's not more funders of work on malaria. And because other than the U.S. government, we are so much the biggest funder that if we make a mistake, if we miss a vaccine effort or a drug effort or some new tool, the chance of somebody else coming in and picking that up is actually very low. So I don't think that's a good argument for saying that we shouldn't work on malaria at all. But it does mean that our care in terms of doing open solicitations and finding ideas out there that the normal people that we engage with might have.

You know, it's very incumbent upon us to stay incredibly open-minded. We need more independent thinkers in global health. And we're large, but governments are also very large in this space. And, you know, we're trying to draw more funders in and more government money in, you know, in the same way that a good idea can really be phenomenal. If we miss good ideas, that's super, super bad. Yeah, so that feels powerful to me, actually. If you can instill that value throughout the org that we've got these resources, but we know we're not always right. And it's so that other people can contribute to the conversation. I think that's powerful.

Bill, I'm interested in infectious generosity. And I want to ask you about what strikes me as one of the most consequential examples of infectious generosity, namely the Giving Pledge. There are many billionaires in the world. The pledge is that they give away the majority of their wealth in their lifetime or in their will. You and Melinda and Warren took it upon yourselves to persuade as many of them as possible to sign this pledge. I mean, there are trillions of dollars owned collectively by billionaires. That's a potential difference of literally trillions of dollars to the public good. What do you feel about the pledge?

You must be deeply proud of it at some level. And I'm guessing you also have some frustrations with it. Well, it was Warren's idea to get together people who were doing serious philanthropy and kind of talk about why they were doing it and what role could any of us play in facilitating people's philanthropic journey. You know, so we learned a lot about the barriers to giving and the dilemma you talk about in your book of, okay, should you be very visible in your giving or should you be very invisible? You know, where there's strong arguments for both of those things. So I spend a lot of

time every year doing dinners with people who are lucky enough to have significant wealth, and not necessarily just promoting the Giving Pledge, but chatting with them about how they think about things and sharing examples of, say, how the family gets engaged or how you pick different causes. And some of those people choose to join the pledge. The pledge in no way will ever take credit for the member's generosity. You know, that entirely goes to them. So, you know, we haven't gotten even half of the world's billionaires signed up. But I think we've had a significant effect on getting people to pick causes connected to an equity and getting them to accelerate their giving journey, partly by meeting other people who are further along in that journey or may share a common cause. which is I've been puzzled what it actually means. Like when you say give away 50% of your wealth,

the thing is that someone's wealth is a moving feast. Like a typical billionaire who's in their, say they're 30 years old or one of the youngest billionaires, by the time they're 50, they may well own 4X, the wealth that they had when they were 30, just from the accumulation of value through investing or through the rise of their company stock or whatever. Is the pledge to give away 50% of what you have at the time you make the pledge? 50% of your peak wealth? Yeah, so there's no enforcement of the

pledge. It's a moral commitment to the public, which is why the one requirement we have is that your name is posted as having taken the pledge. Ideally, you write a pledge letter that talks about why you're engaged and what you're trying to do philanthropically. I think about 80% of the pledgers have letters up on the Giving Pledge website, but there's no anonymous members. So that exact definition is not black and white. We're trying to get people to give more sooner. And so the idea that you have, going back to Zakat, of, okay, above a certain level, you should give a 40th every year. Zakat is the Islamic tradition of giving a 40th every year.

And when people are in a big accumulation phase, you know, like Warren Buffett, who's mind-blowingly generous, he was criticized by Ted Turner because when Berkshire was in its early years, he chose to be doing more accumulation than giving. And now he's in a phase where he is doing massive giving. And so there's a certain personal element in that, particularly if you want to have your time available to engage in it. You know, the sooner you do it, the better. But at first you have to get started.

And often you'll get started with pretty small gifts or doing it collaboratively. So, you know, we're trying different formats that draw people in. I mean, I've spoken, obviously, to quite a few members who have signed the Giving Pledge, and I've been struck about their serious determination to give back. They want to do it. Many of them confess that it's quite hard to do. The numbers are a little troubling. I mean, I spoke with Steve Levitt at the University of Chicago. I don't know whether his study is right. He claims that the average Giving Pledge member is still giving well under half a percent of their net worth each year and

that it hasn't really budged much since they signed the pledge. But it's very, very hard because people are so busy and because understanding the smart way to do philanthropy is really hard. I guess I argued that there is a case to try and turn that into an annual pledge of at least a percentage. It's not necessarily two and a half percent of your net worth, but start somewhere and step it up precisely because money makes money. Wealth is accumulating. At some point, if someone's serious about giving away half of their worth, by the time they're in their 70s or 80s, surely they need to be hoping to get to 10% plus of their net worth a year to have a chance to get down. People are a long way from that still. I'm just wondering if there's anything more to do to persuade people to take it seriously on an annual basis. No, and that's, you know, we're really saying to ourselves,

how do we help people make that transition? The giving level of giving pledge people has gone up versus what they were doing beforehand, but not as much as we'd like to see. You know, so you almost think, okay, could there be a category called activated giving pledge member, you know, where they're hitting the 2.5% or above. We don't want to make things too complicated. And as you say, the math on your wealth varies. And also, I disagree with

you. Wealth doesn't always go up. There could be significant periods wealth isn't accumulating. Yes, the US tech sector, many people's wealth has gone up a mind-blowing amount. But, you know, we will reach limits in terms of that and other fortunes. I even had a Giving Pledge member who at one point was worth $15 billion, and then they were worth $10 billion. And I was saying to them, come on, you have to give more, come on. And he's like, no, no, no, until I get back. You know, I'm poor right now. Until I get back to $15, I don't want to give. And I'm like, oh, back. You know, I'm poor right now. Until I get back to 15, I don't want to give it. I'm like, oh, no. You know, they've adjusted. It is nice that people don't raise their spend. Your spending habits are largely set, you know, when you're young and not that wealthy. And yet

for people, they still think of a million dollars as a big gift. But if you're, you know, worth several billion, you have to change your mindset. And although you can start off with gifts like that, you really have to learn to give gifts 10 million, 20 million, 30 million, you know, and it takes time for people to wrap their mind around it and get that. But we need to do better at helping people accelerate because a lot of them want to and the needs are unbelievable and the examples where it's worked are so compelling. I mean, it feels to me like just the simple metric of asking people, is there a percentage of your net worth that you plan to give away each year? Any percentage, like just shifting it to that way of measuring it gets you

past the, oh, a million is a lot to actually a million is a tiny percentage. I want to ask you about the Forbes list and whether it is actually playing a weird role here. Most of the people who are really wealthy, especially those who've made it entrepreneurs or whatever, you know, they're super competitive people. And you've got this list out, the world's wealthiest, I worry that it's possibly, even though no one might admit to it, acting as a kind of drag on people's willingness to give away really large sums, because in doing so, you knock yourself down that list. Do you think that's a possibility? Maybe a tiny bit. But I think the idea of the Forbes list

is a very positive thing because for society to know, you know, where these great wealth accumulations are and think, okay, that affecting political influence or, you know, what does it say about the competitive nature of the economy? I remember, you know, as a young person, when that list first came out, I found it fascinating that, okay, here's a real estate fortune. Why do these Wall Street guys do so well? And, you know, thinking, would I ever be on that list and thinking that I wouldn't be, which turned out to be stupid. So I think the transparency is good. I'd be higher on the list if I didn't give money away.

And I'm proud that I'll be dropping down over time. I know Randall Lane, the editor of Forbes. I think he's a wonderful journalist, and I agree with you that the list is net positive. But I've argued with him that it would be super cool if the definition of wealth could somehow be extended to lifetime financial footprint. I mean, that the wealth that matters is the wealth you've accumulated and what you've done with it. No, absolutely. I agree with you. And they're doing better on this, mostly with side articles, but you're right. There's a lack of transparency. So the more they try and report, they're going to have to, in some cases, guess. But your point's a good one.

I think given the psychology of everyone involved, if you could involve a different kind of competitiveness to be at the top of the footprint of who's given the most away, I think that would be thrilling. Compete on percentage, compete on absolute amount. All those things should be figures of merit. Good. Well, we'll continue that discussion with him. And your own situation is pretty remarkable.

I mean, I think when you just from a cursory look online, and you can correct me if I'm wrong here, but it looks like at the time you originally made the giving pledge, you were worth about $100 billion. And you've, on the numbers I saw, you've given away like $60 billion and counting. So in a way, you've already met the pledge viewed one way. And yet your total wealth now is like $120 or something. It's continued to rise. And so it's kind of amazing. Yeah, no, I'd love to see more people doing what Chuck Feeney did, where you really are giving at a rate that it all can be given away in your lifetime. You know, Carnegie said, to die rich is to die disgraced. That goes a little bit too far because, you know, you don't know when you're

going to die. But if you live out, if you live to, say, your late 80s, ideally, you would have a plan that, in my view, the money is given away. A few people try and do in perpetuity foundations, but overall, I think most people should have a plan that during their natural lifespan, they will give it all away. I love that. So we've been talking about the big money. Let's end this by just, most people listening here are fascinated by what billionaires are doing and can do and are probably cynical about them, many of them. One of my goals with the book, Bill, is to say that actually there's a different conversation to have, which is to accept that giving big is really hard and and that if instead, we could collectively get excited about the possibility of philanthropy, we'd feel differently. So I guess that's almost my

question to you is, can you picture a way in which we engage more people in the world in discussions about how big philanthropy can be done. I think the single most annoying question that people have, or the question that annoys them the most, is why should these people get to choose? You know, how the world gets better? How can we do this? How can we engage more people into the process of contributing to the ideation of big dreams about what philanthropy can achieve so that we can take pride in it together. It's all of us and not just the less rich being annoyed at the very rich. Well, the idea of scaling up philanthropy pretty substantially, you know, say by at least tripling it both from the very rich and the well-off. I'm completely in line with your goal.

I'm reminded when I first got into this thinking, boy, we can activate people because they do want a moral purpose beyond just their net worth or even their immediate family, you know, if they've taken care of those needs. And so I think, God, we should be able to use digital to make the world a smaller place and to have common human desire, providing basics and activate more philanthropy. There are days when I think, God, that's so naive of me because in fact, digital giving, although there's some good examples, you know, like supporting teachers and things, the actual amount hasn't gone up that much. And your book is such a reminder that we have to be smarter about this and we have to create a movement around it and not let the difficulty of it discourage us. You know, and the idea that it even connects to the kind of depression and

polarization that the internet's been part of accelerating and that this is a pushback against that by defining generosity in the very broad way you do. I'm re-energized to be, you know, one of the people who's trying to help. And that's, you know, I love Giving Tuesday. The foundation's been helpful to that. You know, I love Audacious. The foundation's helped support some of that. But, you know, we need to go way beyond those activities, you know, and to learn from what's worked in those things, but set a much, much higher goal. Last cue. Someone's starting a generosity journey or wants to.

Any advice for them? Well, I think the, you know, your early giving, a lot of it will be local, where you can kind of get your hands on the local food bank or training center and be reminded, wow, these are basic human needs and the volunteers here are such wonderful people. So getting behind them, you know, and then collaborative giving where you find a group that, you know, whether it's domestically like a Blue Meridian or globally like Co-Impact, where other people who are further along in their philanthropic learning, you get to work with them and learn from them. And then eventually you pick, you know, your causes that you go directly into. The best tactic we've ever found is getting people to go to Africa and see the work on the ground and meet the people. That's not always easy to do, but, you know, nothing is close. The sad thing about digital is it's too easy to click away. You know, if I know

I have you for five minutes, I'm allowed one minute of telling you these deaths are awful, and then four minutes of saying all the progress you've made and how you're getting involved, that my money is not enough and that your money will really be responsible for great things happening there. And you can either see that digitally or go see it on the ground. Digital has meant that your engagement can be very light. You know, it's not like getting on a bus to go do civil rights, you know, in the South where you're chosen to put your life at risk there. And so how can the light nature of it get those next stages going? You know, and do we have the most creative people helping us in this endeavor?

But despite all the challenges, I think I've heard you say, ultimately, it's worth doing this journey. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I wish other people could know how much fun and how much progress they can be a part of pushing forward. Their whole view of the world and of human nature will be greatly improved by getting hands-on on one of these causes that, although still far to go, what is a great news story that's not well known. Well, that's a great place to end on. I've heard someone excited about what they're doing, someone who's willing to listen to critics, not defensive. And when I think back on the impact you've had, I mean, really, you've changed the whole conversation there is about what generosity

can look like, the scale at which it can happen. So thank you for your inspiration and leadership in this whole area. It's been really been a delight to talk with you. Thank you. Well, thanks. Your book reminds me that we need to set even more aspirational goals in this area. So I look forward to working on that together. All right. Let's do that.

Thank you. Thanks. Okay, that's pretty much it for this week. If you'd like to dig into this subject more, check out my book, Infectious Generosity. You can get a free copy of either the digital book or the audiobook by going to ted.com slash generosity. If you were struck by the Giving Pledge and feel like you'd be interested in

making your own kind of pledge, I recommend that you take a visit to the givingwhatwecan.org website. So it's givingwhatwecan.org. They allow you to do a customized pledge to what makes sense to you. And as I argue in the book, and as you may have gathered from this conversation just now, that is a beautiful thing to do. But next week, we're shifting more to non-financial ways of giving. We're going to meet an amazing woman who posted a picture on Facebook and in so doing just sparked a hurricane of kindness across the planet. If you like the show, please

leave us a review. Honestly, it really makes a difference. It helps others find us. We will read every one. This interview is part of the TED Audio Collective, a collection of podcasts dedicated to sparking curiosity and sharing ideas that matter. This episode was produced by Jess Shane. Our team includes Constanza Gallardo, Grace Rubinstein, Ban Bang Cheng, Michelle Quint, Roxanne Heilash,

and Daniela Valoreso. Thanks so much for listening. I'll catch you next time. Looking for a fun challenge to share with your friends and family? TED now has games designed to keep your mind sharp while having fun. Visit TED.com slash games to explore the joy and wonder of TED games.