Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - The Science of Generosity: Why It Makes You Happier and How To Do It Effectively (It Doesn’t Need To Involve Money) | Chris Anderson

Episode Date: February 26, 2024

How to cultivate a generosity mindset— and make a good thing less boring.Chris Anderson is the curator of TED. He is the author of New York Times bestseller TED Talks and has overseen the introduction of, among others, the TEDx program, the TED-Ed initiative, and the Audacious Project, a bold new philanthropic model to inspire change at scale. His newest book, Infectious Generosity: The Ultimate Idea Worth Spreading, is out now. In this episode we talk about:How to create a generosity mindsetThe audacious and daunting goal he recommends for annual givingAnd the promise of the Internet as a tool to dramatically amplify human kindnessRelated Episodes:Adam Grant, The Benefits of GenerosityGenerosity | Bonus Talk with Norman FischerFor tickets to Dan Harris: Celebrating 10 Years of 10% Happier at Symphony Space: click hereSign up for Dan’s weekly newsletter hereFollow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTokTen Percent Happier online bookstoreSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelOur favorite playlists on: Anxiety, Sleep, Relationships, Most Popular EpisodesFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/chris-andersonSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to 10% happier early and add free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, my fellow suffering beings. How are we doing today? One of the quickest and easiest ways to get happier is to be generous. And to be clear, I'm not just talking about money here. It can be holding the door open for somebody, calling a friend who's struggling, giving a compliment.

You get the idea. There is an enormous amount of scientific research to suggest that being generous, financially or otherwise, has significant psychological and physiological benefits. Not for nothing, the Buddha often instructed his followers to train in generosity before he had them do any meditation. So the case for generosity is pretty damn strong. That said, there are a ton of thorny questions that arise out of this simple proposition. If giving is so obviously helpful, why do so many of us struggle with it? And why is the subject often so boring?

How do you give wisely and effectively? How do you make sure it's not going to waste? How do you get past the stinginess and second thoughts that many of us experience immediately following an impulse to give? And here's a sticky one. If you're being generous in part to make yourself happier is the presence of that self-interest a corruption of your generosity. Chris Anderson has spent a lot of time thinking about this. He's the curator of TED.

Basically, the guy who came up with the idea to make TED talks free and widely available and subsequently a huge cultural phenomenon, a story that quite obviously links to the subject of generosity, by the way. Chris has a new book called Infectious Generosity, the goal of which is, in his words, to make a good thing less boring. We talk about how to create a generosity mindset, the audacious and daunting goal he recommends for your annual giving, and the promise and peril of the internet, which he says can dramatically amplify human kindness but is too often used to amplify human cruelty, is going to talk about his ideas for fixing this. Just heads up that at times there are some sirens in the

background of this recording. We were in New York City together when we taped this. When you visit Audible, there are endless ways to ignite your imagination. With over 750,000 titles, including best sellers, there's a listen for every type of listener. Discover all the best in audiobooks, podcasts and originals featuring authentic Canadian voices and celebrity talent. Check out Audible Canadian Originals, including The Downloaded, a sci-fi adventure featuring Brendan Fraser and Luke Kirby. A first listen is waiting for you when you start

your free trial at audible.ca. Hello, I am Alice Levine and I am one of the hosts of Wondries podcast British Scandal. On our latest series The Race to Ruin, we tell the story of a British man who took part in the first ever round the world sailing race. Good on him I hear you say, but there is a problem, as there always is in this show. The man in question hadn't actually sailed before. Oh, and his boat wasn't seaworthy. Oh, and also tiny little detail almost didn't mention it. He bet his family

home on making it to the finish line. What Insued was one of the most complex cheating plots in British sporting history. To find out the full story, follow British Scandal wherever you listen to podcasts or listen early and add free on Wondry Plus on Apple Podcasts or the Wondry App. Chris Anderson, welcome to the show. It's great to be here, Dan. It's a pleasure to have you here. I'd love to hear a little bit of the story behind this book. Why generosity?

So in one way or another, I feel like I've had this topic on my mind my whole life. I've, most of it, actually feeling guilty about it. My parents were missionaries actually. Their whole lives were sort of devoted to a cause bigger than themselves, serving the Lord in this case. And I felt terrible that I couldn't live up to that. Like I really wanted to be a good person, but it was hard.

And early on in a church service I went to, I had the speaker who spoke about how when he came home from his work in a refugee camp, even though he was exhausted, he would remember that there was a child who was suffering more than he was. And so he had to continue his work. And I was so depressed by this because it felt like generosity was,

like if you started going down that road, you would be hit by unlimited demands and you would never have a guilt-free night in your life. And so I didn't know what to make of it. So that's one thread of us sort of wanting to be generous, but also feeling guilty about not doing enough. Especially in a connected world, by the way, when you know that you can just go on the internet, you can find some cause or someone on the other side of the world who needs that $5 that you're about to spend on a latte more than you do. Can you ever have a nice cup of coffee again? So there's that side.

But the bigger thing that happened, I guess the aha moment for me was that I ended up in this crazy position where I got to take over Ted. And as an entrepreneur, Ted was a conference I went to, fell in love with. My business blew up in the dot-com crash to some extent, it just about survived. It's still going today. But I left, and a foundation that I'd set up when I had some money was able to buy Ted. And so I spent the last 20 years running it and seeing this transition from a conference to sharing talks online. And I guess the generosity touched every single step of that process.

I mean, first of all, the comments I bought felt like it was an engine running on generosity. Speakers weren't paid anything to come. The audience was incredibly generous in its response to speakers. It was something weird about instead of a usual industry conference, it was three different industries coming together, technology, entertainment, design, and people somehow wanted to connect with each other and understand each other and give to each other. It just felt different from other conferences. So there was that. But the real thing that happened was that when online video came along, we suddenly thought, oh, we could, if we chose

to, share these talks with the world for free. And we're a foundation and we're supposed to be acting in the public good. Shouldn't we do that? And the other party was screaming, no, you're going to kill the conference. Why would people pay the money to come if the talks are free? So we had this debate, perhaps because it was a foundation and not a business owning it. I don't know. We started giving the talks away and to our amazement,

they went viral and they actually increased demand for the conference. So I started thinking, wait a second, in this connected age, the rules seem to be changing. What you give away and what you hold on to is changing. And we started to adopt this as a strategy for running TED, radical generosity. So we give away our brand, TED. People could do these TED. We had made them add the letter X to it,

but you could do a TED X event anywhere in the world for free on your own time and financial risk. And from a business strategy point of view, traditionally it was crazy. Harvard Business really actually wrote a piece on it, how Ted lost control of its crowd. But it was deliberate doing that. And by giving up control, something truly amazing happened, which is 3,000 events started to be held around the world. It's probably 60,000, 70,000 people right now working on TEDx events somewhere unpaid by us.

They're taking their own risks. They're putting in so much blood, sweat, and tears into it. And we get 25,000 videos a year. Some of the best TED speakers you've heard came up through TEDx. You could never do this without the sort of strategy of just giving things away. So I guess I became a bit obsessed with that as in this connected age, generosity could play a larger role.

And it's complicated because there's payback to you. You get back. Right. You know, like we've always been told, given you shall receive, it's really, really true now in a way that more so than it has ever been. And so I guess I think that in this connected age, everyone should be more generous and be amazed at what happens next. You brought up something that you cover in the book and it's a provocative question, at least in my mind. If you give with the idea of getting something back,

is it no longer generosity? So this is a classic philosophical problem that people have long asked. Emmanuel Kant, the philosopher, argued very directly that no generosity must only be done out of a sense of duty. If there's anything else, it's not real generosity. And I used to, as a philosophy student, I used to literally lie on the floor in my room and agonise over this question because I wanted to be a generous person. And yet when I was generous, I did it for a reason. It felt good solving my conscience. And I did actually feel better afterwards.

And so did that mean that it wasn't generous? That felt off because if that was the case, how could you ever persuade anyone to be generous? I feel more strongly now than ever that we actually have to let go of that sense of pure motivation. And instead of looking for reasons to criticize someone's generosity, actually look, do it the other way around, look for good motivation in people. And you suddenly discover that the world is a lot prettier place than it should be. I mean, if we can celebrate the fact that someone can be generous and at the same time know that their reputation

may be enhanced and know that they may feel some extra happiness at the end of the day and may know that people may respond to their generosity, that is awesome, that is not bad, that is awesome. And we should celebrate that. And that is how the world will get more generous. Because we will all realize, actually, this is not just the wonderful Sunday school good thing to do. It is the smart thing to do. Well, I tend to agree with you. I mean, I absolutely agree with you on purity of motives being almost in most cases out of reach. We are complicated creatures and there are many motivations, many of them unseen. So that all makes sense to me. But on this note that we should celebrate people who give in almost any circumstances, are there no circumstances that are kind of beyond the pale where it's just

transparently transactional in some way? Yes, I think if it's transparently transactional and someone's literally doing it purely for self-promotion or they're trying to get themselves out of a sticky situation where they've really been bad and sure, you don't have to call that generosity. But that's not what the world is doing right now. What the world is doing right now is choosing to be super cynical about a lot of acts that are actually very well intended and are good. So Bill Gates flies to a conference somewhere. And it's like, you flew to a conference in

your own plane, well, anything you did then was disgusting. And by the way, why did you start the pandemic for your own personal gain? That is where the world's coming from. Whereas if you have a different set of acts, like say you knew that Bill Gates actually was using carbon zero fuel that he had paid three times the normal price for his plane so that he wouldn't contribute to footprint and that he spent the flight doing what he often does, which is just read in absolute depth to try and really understand a problem in the world and that he'd spent more than almost anyone trying to fix some of the big global problems, then you have a different view of him. And it's, you know, when Bill Gates first started doing the Gates Foundation, it is entirely possible in my mind. I mean, I haven't grilled him on this

particular question. It's entirely possible that part of it was motivated by the fact that his PR was in trouble. You know, Microsoft was the big evil empire, monopolist, whatever. And he had his father's voice speak at him and will indicate, who knows what the motivation is. But the fact is that part of his motivation for absolute sure is a desire to make the world better. And the same curiosity that he applied running a business was applied to really understanding some of these problems.

And the sincerity and depth of his intention is clear along with other things. So we have to have a more sophisticated view. We have to be able to celebrate people while also saying, okay, and now how about this? Could you do that better? That's okay as well. That all makes sense. So make the case to us. One of the things you said, I believe, I don't know if you've said this widely, but you in conversation with Lauren Smith, who's the producer of this

episode, she was talking to you before we started talking. And you said one of the goals of your new book is to make a good thing less boring. And I really, that really suck out to me. So one way I think we can make it less boring is by really making the case on what is in it for us to give from a scientific standpoint, from a physiological standpoint, from a reputational standpoint. Can you do the sell? Sure. And the first thing to say is generosity, obviously, is not just about giving money. In some ways, that's the least interesting part of it.

There are so many ways to be generous, starting with just a generous mindset and then many acts of human kindness, of gifts of time, connection, hospitality, and so forth. So we're talking not just about money here. So the scientific case, I think it starts from this. We are wired to be generous. We are a social species that scientists disagree exactly the process about how this may have happened. But we about how this may have happened, but we feel each other's pain. When we see another human suffering, we want to do something about it. And it's, in one way or another,

it's weird why that should be so. Like if you're wired for survival, why should that be so? Well, it turns out that a social species survives a lot better if its members are kind to each other. So that is a raw feeling, and everyone who's ever seen something on TV or whatever, where you've seen someone suffering and you've cried, that is a weird piece of biological magic happening in you that is a key part of the generosity engine in you,

because that will make you do things that you wouldn't otherwise do. The second thing that's amazing is that we're wired to respond to generosity as part of one of the things that was the sort of catalyst for the book was I got this inside view of a thing called the Mystery Experiment online where 200 strangers on the internet were given $10,000 each, no strings attached except that they had to report on what they spent it on. And what they spent it on, two-thirds of it was generous, two-thirds. People might expect 10%, 20%. They gave away in some form or other, two-thirds of that money. And that's thrilling. And it doesn't even have to be generosity that you receive personally. If you witness

generosity, someone else is doing something kind to someone else, that can create a measurable sense of uplift that will change your own behavior as well. So all of this to me is exciting. And then the fourth piece of science that is absolutely crystal clear in the numbers is that generosity carries with it happiness. In some ways it's a sort of availed form of happiness. I don't think we always see that going in, you know, for contemplating being generous. What may be top of mind for us is the loss aversion feeling of, I really don't want to give this thing away.

But time and again, when people do give things away, they end up being surprised by happiness. And in fact, there was an amazing Gallup study that looked, I think it was 230,000 people. One of the questions they asked was whether people had given away something the prior month to a charity or a cause or to a stranger or whatever. And the happiness that they got from that, according to this study, was equal to the same happiness as if their income had doubled. I mean, that's an astonishing amount of happiness. And by the way, it seems like for most people

in most circumstances, it's a much easier pathway to happiness. Cause not many people can double their income. Everyone can actually be generous in some way. So yeah, so, you know, that is one key thing that is in it for anyone is that you will end up feeling better about yourself. And you all have a sense

of meaning and happiness if you go that route. And in this connected age, it's not the only thing that happens. Gifts can go further than they've ever gone before. They can basically replicate and travel across the world and they carry with them reputation. Reputation is the most important currency of our age. So, I mean, again, my inside view was what happened at TED. No one knew about TED 20 years ago. And then we started giving stuff away. And then a few years later, lots of people had heard about TED. And that reputation has really been what's driven everything since.

So I think that can apply to individuals as well, to organizations. There is a lot in it for you to be generous, as well as there being a lot fighting in your head to stop you doing it. If we could win that battle and flip it a bit, the world becomes a much kinder, lovely place. You touched on the kind of the role of the internet

and our connected age in making generosity to echo the title of your book, Infectious, and I do want to get into that, but let me just stay on a sort of more basic level for a second. When it comes to the benefits, I believe there's also been some neuroscience that looks at people's brains when they're giving, and it shows things like the part of the brain

that lights up when you give something away is the same part of the brain that lights up when you eat chocolate. And this has been called the Hel helper's high or something like that. Is any of this unfamiliar to you? I think there is science that does that. I don't discuss that particular scientific study in the book. I'm surprised that it said it was the same part of your brain as when you eat chocolate.

Because to me, eating chocolate is pleasure. The happiness you get from generosity, there's probably some pleasure in it, but I think it's deeper. I think it goes to a deeper sense of meaning and fulfillment, honestly. I might have just mangled the evidence too, because I just pulled that out of my head. So that's always a possibility on the show.

I wanna follow up on something else you said, which is this blocker, this hesitation we often feel when confronted with a generous impulse. Before I let you talk, I'll just relay a little story. There's a guy who's been extremely influential for me who listeners to the show have heard me drawn on about ad nauseam. His name is Joseph Goldstein. He's a great meditation teacher.

And he has this little rule, which is, this is only a rule for himself, but he'll talk about it as something he recommends to others, which is, this is only a rule for himself, but he'll talk about it as something he recommends to others, which is as soon as he notices a generous impulse flipped through his mind, he will tell himself, I'm gonna do this, no matter how many second guessing thoughts come up subsequently. He just says, if that first instinct arises,

I'm gonna do it. And he says he's never regretted it. And I've tried to take this on with some degree of success. But so with that as some context, what do you say to those of us who might feel generous sometimes, but then go back to, oh, I need to put solar panels on the house, or oh, I need gas, or whatever it is? I don't think it's easy to be generous at all. And especially many people are in situations where they feel probably rightly that they're in a struggle for survival.

Their only duty is to themselves and to their family. I've got no beef with that at all. And in fact, being kind to your family is a form of generosity. I think there are many different ways to be generous. And I think a lot of the challenge is to know ourselves better. Often what gets in the way of the generous act is not the sort of external

circumstances of this is no way affordable and no time. It's more, it's more just our own addictions, our own sort of... Most people a lot of the time we sleepwalk through life, just doing a routine, doing what seems natural, going from one thing to the other, and we forget the bit where you pause and reflect and you try and find your better self. And there are lots of ways to be generous. So yes, so paying attention to that generous instinct, you know, you're walking down the street and someone annoyingly asks you for money and you feel uncomfortable and you're late and so you want to move on. That's okay, but

sometimes stopping, looking at the person and even like getting a chance to hear their story. I mean, I'm an awkward introvert and I'm pretty uncomfortable around people. But just occasionally I found the time to listen and stop and hear someone's story and you kind of, it's moving and you end up then maybe giving them something not out of guilt, but because you like them, you know, or you... It just feels different. And so it's this process of finding a generous mindset, paying attention,

and then seeing where that journey takes you is at the heart of so many inspiring stories of generosity, many of which end up with huge ripple effects. You know, I describe at least two stories in the book of people where the stories have started that way and they ended up spending out into one man, John Sweeney, ended up creating this global business of suspended coffees where he encouraged anyone who goes into a cafe to be able to pay forward a cup of coffee for someone else, all started with conversations on the street with the needy people. And they felt seen, he felt seen and good about it, and ripple effects happen from it.

You mentioned this term generosity mindset or generous mindset, and you have a lot of great advice in the book about, you know, tactical advice about how to establish this kind of mindset. So I just want to signal that we're gonna get to that. But let me stop for a second on something you just said about yourself, which is that you describe yourself as introverted and slightly awkward.

You picked a funny line of work if that's your factory setting. Yeah, because I curate a conference and see lots of people and so the mingling part of the conference is actually the hardest for me. Like I can do it for an hour, but after that, I do get stressed and it's like I crave escape. I feel like I'm letting people down by not talking.

What's interesting for a lot of introverts, actually being on a stage isn't that hard because it's a structured environment and you're in control of what you say. And so that's different. I think Susan Cain, who wrote the book on being an introvert, gave a brilliant TED Talk. You know, it was so comfortable on stage and amazing.

So those things aren't incompatible, but definitely, like for me, a nightmare is trying to make small talk at a party or at a bar. I just, I can't do it. I'm really bad at it. Yeah. I would describe myself as extroverted, but small talk at a party or at a bar. I just, I can't do it. I'm really bad at it. Yeah. I would describe myself as extroverted, but small talk in certain circumstances makes me uncomfortable too. So, I mean, you're not a mutant if that's... Okay. Well, that's good to hear. Thank you. You may be in other ways. I don't want to rule anything out yet. But let me just go back to

the homeless thing or un-shheltered is the term now. I don't live in the city anymore. We moved to the suburbs, so I've fallen out of this habit. But I used to, through meditation and developing some degree of self-awareness, it became clear to me that the, this is not my preferred term, but I'm going to go with it, hardening that one has to do to ignore the homeless people who populate this city with some degree of intensity depending on the neighborhood. In order to ignore them, if you're paying attention to what that's like in your mind, it's counter-revolutionary. I mean right back to the beginning of your comments in

this conversation. We evolved to be in social intercourse with other people and if you're we evolved to feel their pain and if you're shutting that down, it doesn't feel good if you're, we evolved to feel their pain. And if you're shutting that down, it doesn't feel good if you're paying attention, even though of course it's quite natural. So I was taking an online Buddhist course and one of the teachers recommended that if you live in the city,

you should carry around a bunch of ones in your pocket. And so I started doing that. Again, I've fallen out of that habit, but just to know that I had the ones and I could make eye contact, give them some money, tell them, you know, have a great day. That little and there's a scientific term for this micro interaction, that little micro interaction, that moment of generosity and connection, leavened my day in ways that are hard to describe. Does that land for you?

It does. And I think everyone can, there's many different legitimate ways you can come down this. Some people want to be more strategic about it and say, look, what I care about are the underlying causes of homelessness. And that's why I'm going to make my focus and throwing around a bit of money here and there is only going to increase dependency and whatever. So let me do my research and write a much bigger check to a bigger cause that's trying to solve the underlying. I'm fine with that too, if someone wants to go that route.

But there is something special in just noticing in yourself the difference between a generosity mindset that is willing to open up. It's willing to accept that feeling of discomfort, but that is also a feeling of human connection. And by the way, for some people, there's a legitimate question of danger in some circumstances. So, you know, there's no judgment for somebody who says, no, I can't do that because I don't feel safe. That's all right. And I think, by the way, that same another circumstance where I wish that people would

more consciously, proactively look for that generosity mindset is online. If you're in an online environment and often we're sort of prompted to feel anger or annoyance or whatever, and all these little text zingers go zipping out there on the internet of snark about someone or whatever. There, if you could find the human interaction, say, wait a sec, the person who did this is human being.

They've got their own story. They've got their reason for feeding this way. Why don't I just respond with just a little more kindness and respect or just curiosity, ask a question. And if we could shift 10 or 20% people to do a bit more of that, you know, we're a social species and the whole framing of what happens online starts to shift. And I see some evidence of one that can happen in some communities that happens more easily

than others. But that again, it's just a mindset difference. It's just the shift of looking for the good in people instead of looking for the bad. I agree. A thought popped in my head while you were talking about you were making the case for those who are comfortable with it to have that moment of interaction with somebody who might need the help on the street. And I'm just wondering, like, for people like us who feel uncomfortable sometimes in small talk,

what if we reframed that as an act of generosity? Would that make it easier? I'd have to get comfortable thinking that my small talk would actually be of interest and to someone else. But it's like- It's not the talk, it's the attention. It's the attention. So small listening. Yes.

Yeah. No, I think that's good. I think that's good. And I think that is a gift that anyone can give just to look someone in the eyes and listen to them. Tell me your story. That is generosity. Yeah, I mean, I wasn't saying that.

I was really directing it more at myself because I haven't experienced you as awkward or not wanting to make small talk. Maybe there's a lot going on beneath the surface and times I've interacted with you, but I can definitely interpolate back into my own experiences and think about, and I've been criticized for this, of not making time for like junior staffers and things like that because I'm too focused on my own shit and whatever I've got to do or whatever I believe I have to do as opposed to just relaxing and viewing micro interactions as it's not like it's not a no-bless oblige.

It's not like, oh, I'm bestowing my precious attention on you. It's actually it's enlightened self-interest right back to the heart of this conversation. Because if you can have positive interactions throughout the course of your day with anybody, it's going to change the weather in your mind. I think that's right. It's often a memo to myself that I have so much room to approve on that as well. I get impatient and walk away from people who I should just sit down and spend time with. Look, no judgment here.

We were the only people in this room and both of the people in this room have plenty of things to improve on and I would imagine that applies to anybody listening. All right, so let's go back to the role of the internet because you talk a lot about it and I think it's really interesting. I believe, and please correct me if I'm wrong, that a huge part of, again, the book is called Infectious Generosity, a big part of the infectious piece of this, which you believe is novel and good,

is that in a connected age, our generosity can ripple beyond the act itself. Am I stating that with some accuracy? Yeah, no, that's exactly it. So it's really two things that came together for this. One is just a deeper understanding of some of the psychological pieces that are in everyone, have always been in everyone of, you know, why to be generous or why to respond. But when you connect those things to the fact that we're in this age where we're all connected

with each other, that creates so many more opportunities for generosity to be expressed and at much, much, much bigger scale. So I mean, you know, the big insight for me was, you know, so pre-online video, Ted did actually occasionally distribute contents online and it was in the form of DVDs and they cost $2 each. And you know, so to have a talk that was viewed by 100,000 people would be a massive investment. It couldn't really happen. In this connected age, all of those distribution costs of sharing anything that can be shared online, which as I'll mention in a minute, is actually much of what we actually care about,

it can all be done basically at less than one 10,000th the cost of what it was a mere 20 years ago. It's like orders of magnitude. It's basically free. You put it out there and any number of people can view it or receive it. That creates potential for all these amazing gifts. You say, oh, it's just online stuff. What are we talking about here?

We're talking about knowledge. We're talking about how to do something, the learning of something. We're talking about great pictures and art and aesthetic experiences. We're talking about free software that you could give away to people. I mean, if you actually look at what we spend time doing, so much of what we'd spend time doing is absorbing or thinking about or using non-material things. All of those non-material things can be shared

freely on an infinite scale on the internet. So put that together. In principle, you can have a world where millions and millions of people are engaging in either giving or receiving things or seeing other people do that, which carries with it its own sense of uplift. So you have all these potential ways

in which generosity could spark further generosity. And I mean, this is why, you know, in the early days of the internet, people were so optimistic about it. This is the technology that can bring the world together. We can have empathy like we never had before. We can do things for each other like we never could before. And the tragedy is that in many cases

that has been swamped by other things going viral online called things like fear, resentment, mistrust, anger, disgust, outrage. Those things, because of the weirdness of human brains, travel faster, more naturally, than the good things. So I guess the fundamental question in the book is, can we do something about that? How can we outwit the darker side of what spreads

with a sort of a deluge of stuff that shows the good side of humans? Can we find a way to do that? Can we find a way to make good not boring? Can we find a way to spread good, not boring, can we find a way to spread the right kind of infections online? And I think by looking at what's actually happening out there under the radar, there is a kind of playbook you can put together for how that might happen.

Much more of my conversation with Chris Anderson after this. I'm Afwa Hirsh. I'm Peter Frankipan. And in our podcast, Legacy, we explore the lives of some of the biggest characters in history. This season, we delve into the life of Mikhail Gorbachev. This season has everything. It's got political ideology. It's got nuclear Armageddon. It's got political ideology. It's got nuclear Armageddon. It's got love story. It's got betrayal. It's got economic collapse.

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There is a real-life binary in how his legacy is perceived. In the West, he's considered a hero, and in Russia, it's a bit of a different picture. So join us on legacy for Mikhail Kurbachev. Where can I get help hiring people with disabilities? There are hundreds of thousands of Canadians with disabilities who are ready to work, and many local organizations are available to help you find qualified candidates and make your workplace more accessible and inclusive.

Visit Canada.ca slash right here to connect with one near you today. A message from the government of Canada. A quick reminder that the free basics course in the 10 percent happier app features my meditation teacher and great friend Joseph Goldstein who will also be appearing live with me at Symphony Space in New York City on March 28th. Go to symphonyspace.org for tickets and download the 10% happier app today wherever you get your apps. Have you followed the work of Mr. Beast?

Yes. Yeah. So I write about him and he's, he is a classic case of someone who has understood and figured out what it takes for, I'm going to say, good things to go viral at massive degree. I mean, here is one guy in his team who, every video they put out now, within a few weeks, is like 100 million views. Not in history has there been a media company worth billions of dollars that can do that. What he has discovered, now he has cracked the code of YouTube. And you know, a lot of what he does, so people who don't know,

he creates videos about amazing, wacky, incredible, fantastical scenarios. Some of them aren't to do with generosity particularly, that's it, let me show you what a $1 house looks like and then what a $100 million house looks like. Let's go right the way up the scale. And at every stage, you've got an audience that is sort of jaw-dropping, that sort of breadth of experience that he's willing to joyfully throw himself into.

But he applies it to generosity as well and has, you know, okay, here's how we dug wells in a hundred African villages, or here are a thousand people whose eyesight I restored. I think some people are irritated by him because it's we're in a cynical age and people go, yeah, but that's a little bit self-promotional or yeah, but that's not really tackling the underlying cause of the problem. Well, so, but is it better that he did it than that he didn't, you know, talk to the people whose eyesight was restored. Talk to the tens of millions of people in the next generation who are coming to believe that generosity can

be cool and fun and that they aspire to do it. And talk to someone like Millard Murgh, who I met, who was inspired by Mr. Beast and who is another influencer online. So he, you know, saw this trend on TikTok of food waste being dumped, like huge globs of massive amounts of peanut butter dumped and exploding on a kitchen table and felt disgusted by it. And he said, okay, I'll show you what this could be. So he got huge quantities of peanut butter and jelly and made them into like a hundred sandwiches that he wrapped, took them out into the street, gave them away. His video was seen way more times than the trend he was taking on and actually persuaded people

who had started that trend to kind of change course and to do more like the generosity type videos. So I think at least in the next generation, there's a lot of evidence that the battle is being won and that actually good things are in many cases becoming more infectious than nastiness. Like it seems like an absurd project when you first glance at it, but it actually is happening and there's things you can learn, so much you can learn from Mr. Beast. I haven't studied Mr. Beast. I'm aware of him. I have a nine-year-old son, so I'm definitely aware of Mr. Beast and I've seen some of his more high-profile videos.

So, I don't have enough ammunition or information to say anything super positive or super critical. Although I've seen some other online folks do what might be dismissed as ostentatiously generous things to make videos go viral. And I do get a little bit of discomfort. Having said that, I think I come around to what you're talking about here, which is it's better to be making generosity cool than to be making food waste cool or cruelty cool or any other potential human attribute. I mean, you can definitely cross the line. There was a video I mentioned in the book

about someone who they gave flowers to a lady on a bench or whatever, filmed it. She seemed grateful this video went viral. But then she saw how the video was done and she felt completely exploited by it. They hadn't asked her permission for anything. So she was really upset by it and they'd edit it in an unfair way and so forth. So you can like generosity purely for views that doesn't

respect the recipients of the generosity. That, I think, is a key distinction there. I've met the man who runs Mr. Beast's philanthropy. I've been persuaded that he is, in himself, his motivations are to do good in the world, that the money he's making will all get recycled back in, and that I think he's very much on the right side of that line. So the book, if I'm understanding it correctly, you'll hopefully tell me if I'm not, is operating it on at least two levels. One is helping us as individuals think about how we can have a generosity mindset in our own lives, and then also helping us think structurally about how we can have a generosity mindset in our own lives. And then also helping us think structurally about how we can make generosity more infectious.

Is that the accurate? Okay. So let's just start with the individual and then we'll ladder up to the macro. Is that cool with you? Yes. Okay, so if I, Dan, am convinced and I am by everything you've said about the benefits to me of developing

a generosity mindset. And if I believe you and I do, that it doesn't make me in some way corrupt if I have some strand of self-interest flowing through my generosity. What are the basic steps towards setting up a generosity mindset? I think it can start as early as dealing with some stuff in your own head. So, and you played a role here at Daniel, a feature in the book, because you gave this TED Talk describing what it was like to give yourself permission to love yourself, to get rid of the hatred that some people feel for themselves.

You went through your own intense experience and described it in a hilarious way, if I may say so. And by the way, that is such a gift. Anything that can be done with humour is going to go more viral, by the way. So it starts right there. Like if someone's sitting there feeling that fundamentally deeply ashamed or disappointed themselves, it's very hard to be generous in that state of mind. So watch your talk, you know, deal with that, find some way of dealing with that. You may even be able to do it without going on a two-month retreat or whatever. I think that the essential next step is gratitude. It's finding a gratitude habit. And there are so many things that when you take a breath and take a step back, that you can feel

grateful to what? To God, to the universe for, or to other people for. And most people start with the obvious stuff of, well, I'm so grateful for my kids or my parents or my friends or whatever. But we live in an amazing time. And there's, you know, my favorite story that happened at TED was when we asked a new employee, said, what are you grateful for? He said, yeah, people I love and so forth. But really what I'm grateful for is distributed electricity. It's everywhere.

How incredible is that? It's incredible. We're all within 10 feet of a little plug in a socket. You can put a wire into and a machine will clean your house or will clean your dishes or will warm you up or will cool you down or like it's amazing. The fact that we live in these bodies and can experience the world around us and all its beauty and it's different every day. You know, you get a free multimedia show every day and if you stop and just think about that and look at that, anyway, so whatever means

that it is, like for me, I don't do this every day, but I'm glad every day that I do do it. Just remembering two or three new things to be grateful for. You know, being grateful is thinking about something that we have been given by the universe. So you want to respond to that, I want to give back. And so that's the fundamental start point. And from that point, there are just many different things you can do with that. And we can talk about some of them because they are literally available to anyone

in different degrees. It's like, pick your choice. Find the right way that you can be generous. But yeah, I think it starts with gratitude. This is something I said to you before we started rolling that the cliche is you can't pour from an empty cup So if you're interested in developing a generosity mindset the first step for some people can be a big one Which is developing some gratitude no matter how objectively

Terrible aspects of modern life or your own personal life may be developing some gratitude and developing a certain Lightness sense of humor sense of affection for yourself. Yes. These are, this is no small matters. It's no small matters. And I guess a question I have, is there a catch 22 there? Like, just occasionally people might be stuck there thinking, I'm a horrible person, so I can't do this. When actually, if you just started, if you just started with a little teeny generosity experiment, it actually might change how you think of yourself. I mean, it is one of the amazing things that happens

through being generous, is that you feel better about yourself, you discover, wait a sec, am I discovering my better self? How cool is that? So I think it's possible that part of the process of learning to love yourself is to just try, even if you're not sure, and even if you don't particularly feel like it. Two comments are coming to mind based on everything you've just said. One is, another person I've been deeply influenced by is the Buddha.

And the Buddha explicitly taught generosity even before he taught meditation, I believe, that generosity was for at least some members of his community the key first practice to open you up to teach you to let go. I mean, that is the endpoint of the Buddhist path is letting go in a world where everything's changing all the time, clinging is the source of unhappiness.

So letting go is the answer. The second thing that came to mind is, you know, I have been to deep and sometimes not very helpful allergy to cliche and yesterday I was having a conversation with a friend who called because he's having a personal crisis of medical stuff in his family and And I didn't know what advice I was going to give, what any, if I had anything useful to say, but my first step is usually just to listen for a while and ask some probing questions. And what became clear in the conversation was

this situation that he's in is terrible. And it is starting to remind him in small ways that he was overlooking, but that I helped him to focus on That he has the capacity to be helpful and useful And that that actually might be a counter argument against the habitual long-running story he'd been telling himself that he was a wretch and an addict and a horrible person and I think

Generosity can do this for us. It can get us out of our ancient storylines And help us to of our ancient story lines and help us to tell a new story. There's a, this is the cliche that I'm allergic to. There's a poem about reminding a thing of its loveliness. And that I think is, and please tell me if you agree or disagree, I think that is one of the roles

of generosity. Absolutely. I mean, there's lots of ways to be kind. And some of the ones that I speak about in the book is, I mean, it wants you, you know, there's definitely, you know, giving attention and just noticing someone and listening and so forth. But maybe it all starts there. And then obvious things like, you know, you can volunteer time and so forth. But I think one of the ways of being generous right now that matters a lot is people being willing to bridge. We're in a world of so much division.

People have stopped listening to each other, they sort of distrust each other, even in a small way, just for example, in your online experience, just being willing to say, wait a sec, there's some common ground here. Or again, to listen, to be respectful and so forth. People who can do that I view as modern heroes. A really cool way to be generous is to share some of your contacts with people. We forget how much of our life is, we're part of these communities of resources and so forth. If you give someone, thoughtfully give them access to some part of that, that can be a

gift that takes you 10 minutes and changes their life. One of the best things about generosity is that you can think of it, it's asymmetric. Often the benefit to the receiver is vastly greater than the cost to the giver. Every time a rich person gives money to a poor person, costs the rich person nothing, transforms the poor person's life. So why the hell don't we do more of that? Or the gift of enchantment. Someone who's creative, especially in the area where we're now, the connected area,

you can bring beauty to many people. Or the gift of hospitality. One problem with the connected age is that we're forgetting the joy of in-person, just humans sitting with humans and discovering the deeper things about ourselves. So many good things happen when a group of people come together. And one special side benefit is that it allows you to imagine generosity as a team game. So for example, if you did nothing else, it's all to this, can't tell you about, inviting a group of friends around,

just have dinner, hang out, whatever. But maybe ask the question, hey, is there anything that we all care about? Like what do you care about? What do you care about? Maybe there's some project you could work on together, locally or whatever. These are all sort of

simple, very natural human ways to give. But if you do it, chances are surprising things will happen as a result. So in terms of developing a generosity mindset, step one is take a look at and start to treat in some gentle way any sense of inner impoverishment you may feel. The second is take a look at the vast universe of options for generosity and see which ones are a fit for you. Yeah, absolutely. And if someone feels, oh, I'm too busy for any of these sort of human things, but I do have some money, then there's another whole set of questions you can ask, which is how to spend that wisely. Most people's philanthropy is often just driven by impulse.

You get some guilt moment, you see some crisis on TV or whatever, or some Girl Fund Me thing, and you sort of hastily send a payment. Really there's a difference in effectiveness of orders of magnitude, I would say, between some ways of spending money charitably and others. It's a really interesting and ultimately a joyful process to investigate that and to try to find the things that are more effective, to try to find ways

of spending money that carry with them leverage, like a piece of technology can turn $100 into $1 million or knowledge has huge leverage around it. So funding education, for example, maybe the great thing for some people, or funding some effort to put pressure on the government to release the VASums that it has. People will find different types of leverage,

but taking the time to think about that, about what will be effective, I think is a really, really cool thing to do. We don't need to go too deep on this, but any recommendations for people who have some extra dollars to give away and may want to figure out the most effective ways to do it? I think it starts with what types of things are you most concerned about. If you are someone who could become interested in another part of the world, for example, I would say, look there, because your dollars will go a lot further. Costs are lower, and a lot of the problems that have been eliminated in the

West or in the North are not yet solved there. And so that there's sort of low hanging fruit. It costs 50 cents or less to do a deworming procedure for a kid in Africa whose whole ability to be educated and to grow is being stunted or spoiled by the fact that they've got a belly full of worms. And like more than 100 million kids have this. And so this is something which philanthropy can address. For example, and there's so many amazing organizations overseas who are achieving incredible amounts with their money. But there's also a lot to be said for doing something on your doorstep, especially if you want to get involved

more personally and so forth. I think it's finding the area. Give Well is one of the websites that has tried to make an effort at looking at which charities are most effective. But there's plenty of other resources that perhaps go even deeper on things like, can this organization achieve real system change, etc. But I think start with curiosity, go on a research journey and see where it takes you.

We've built a little AI called TIG, the infectious generosity guru, that you can talk to it and it will help you plan your generosity journey in a charming way and perhaps hallucinate a bit less than some of the other AIs can. Where do we find TIG? TIG, it's at infectiousgenerosity.org. That's very helpful. You raised a question at the beginning of this conversation that I made a note that I wanted to come back to and now seems like the time. You talked about

feeling like it's horrible if you spent five dollars on a latte knowing that that five dollars could have potentially helped somebody else. Where do you net out on that personally? Do you still drink lattes? I do. So I spent a lot of time thinking about this and I've ended up in a place here. There's a chapter of the book devoted to this called The Pledge That Could Change Everything. The start point was if you're going to have a set of moral principles that you widely circulate, you can't have moral principles that make life hell for people, that don't have a chance of being adopted. Moral principles have to have a realistic view of what humans are capable of because you want your moral principles,

not just to be for saints, you want them to be widely adopted. So that was one step. A second was to look at what has actually happened in the past, like religions, for example, have for hundreds of years tried to put moral obligations on their followers, including obligations around money that they spend. And where they've ended up is, I mean Judaism and Christianity ended up with this tithing tradition, which is to give 10% of your income. Islam has as one of its pillars, zakat, they call it, which is to give away 1-fortieth, two-and-a-half percent of your total wealth every year. So I tried this thought experiment in the book. I said, what if we said to people, one, okay, say you're not religious, do you want your moral principles to be at least as good as those of the old religious traditions?

I think most people would say, well, yes, I think so. Well, in that case, how about this? How about you take a pledge, which is to do the harder of those two things, 10% of your income or 2.5% of your net worth annually? Now then, this is not something that someone who's just come out of college, can do with a lot of debt, or there's a lot of people who aren't in a position where they can do that. But people who are basically comfortably off and who have been thinking about this, what would happen if those people

took that pledge? So then I ran the math. If only a third of those people took that pledge, which like in my sort of optimistic view I could picture gradually it becoming a norm among a third of the people who could do it. It would actually raise three and a half trillion dollars of philanthropy annually. So I went to a woman called Natalie Cargill who has an organization called Longview Philanthropy and said, Natalie, what could the world do with three and a half trillion dollars of extra philanthropy annually?

And what she came back with took my breath away, because basically you take every single big problem that we care about right now. That amount of money can tackle it. Like if we had that much philanthropy, you wouldn't need any more philanthropy. What you would need is an incredible global execution effort on how to spend it. Philanthropy would not be the bottleneck. And so I ended up with this,

at least to me a satisfying argument, that saying that that pledge of 2.5%, the higher 2.5% of your net worth or 10% of income is a good thing to do. It is also enough. It is enough. You don't have to feel guilty beyond that. is a good thing to do. It is also enough. It is enough. You don't have to feel guilty beyond that.

Now, for me, that is a powerful argument because it allows me to joyfully take that pledge and then live my life and be happy about it. And I think that I'm not the only person who is daunted by starting a generosity journey, especially when it comes to writing checks, because of this exact fear that there's no end to it. You can never enjoy another latte. No, you can enjoy another latte. But if you can see a pathway to building up

maybe over several years, but building up to that pledge, I think that's enough. I think that's all the world needs from us in terms of financial generosity. And so that's the argument I make, and it's possibly self-serving, and maybe I'm just trying to relieve my own guilt, and maybe it's also, in many cases, a pipe dream. But the thing is, like we look at the very rich, we critique them in a big donor philanthropy,

as sort of view of the cynicism. My belief there is that the problem isn't the people that rich are being philanthropic, as they're not are being philanthropic, because they're not being nearly philanthropic enough. If they were to give away 2.5% of their net worth annually, it would probably triple what they're currently doing on average, and it would make a huge difference in the world. What I would love to see happen is that we move from this discussion about cynicism,

about billionaire philanthropy, for example, and try and move it towards more, no, let's dream about what that could actually achieve because what that could achieve is actually amazing. This is a legitimate conversation not just for billionaires for the whole world to be thinking about. All that private capital is sitting there. Yes, we should tax it differently. Go work on that. I'd love you to achieve that. While you're doing that, there's $13 trillion sitting there. Let's put it to use. Let's put it to use.

I think where I'm getting hung up is not on that at all. Where I get hung up is around, okay, so 10% of annual income or 2.5 of net worth. I'm not proud of this, but if I think about how my wife and I'm not proud of this, but if I think about how my wife and I are running our family finances, we cut it so close to the bone that if we were to make a pledge like this, which I find very attractive,

it would throw us into disarray. And I can't imagine I'm alone on this. I think that's a completely legitimate response. What I think is good is for people to start somewhere. I think studies have shown that even the very poorest in many cultures give away 1% of what they have. And so start there, start there, 1 or 2%, and hope over time that you can raise it. There's a website, I'm giving what we can.org that allows you to register a pledge at any level. But just the act of pledging something

flips you then from random acts of charity on impulse to a plan. You make a plan, like what do I actually care about? And so just start somewhere and see whether it can grow. What I imagine you do not want is for people to listen to this and say, well, shit, there's no way I can get to 10% or 2.5% right now. So I'm just not going to think about it. I assume what you're saying is, no, shit, there's no way I can get to 10% or 2.5% right now. So I'm just not going to think about it. I assume what you're saying is, no, no, no, hear that as

aspirational. Yes. Hear that as a thing maybe you could build to over time. And where can you start now? And by the way, there's a lot in this for you. Yeah, exactly. It turns out that the process of going down this route brings joy with it. It could bring your family together. It is its own fuel. And these are levels that religions have for years been insisting that their flocks do. People have found a way to do it. Often that money has gone into the church, say, and may have been, who knows whether it's been well spent. But the point is that people often did give at that level and were proud to do so. To me, it's been well spent. But the point is that people often did give at that level

and were proud to do so. To me, it's exciting to picture a world where some of that comes back because if it came back at scale, it is genuinely amazing what could be achieved with that money. I'd love it in part to be pulled by us rethinking, wow, if society's more generous,

we really could solve some of the things that we're thinking, wow, if societies were more generous, we really could solve some of the things that we're stuck on. Much more of my conversation with Chris Anderson after this. Hi, I'm Anna. And I'm Emily. We're the hosts of Wanderer's podcast Terobi Famous, a show where we bring you outrageous true stories about our most famous celebrities.

And our latest season is all about the one and only Katie Price. You might think you know her, you might have an opinion, but there is way more to the former glamour model than just her cup size. Yes, this is a woman who's gone from pin up to publishing sensation. We all have teenage dreams and for Katie, it was simple, massive fame and everlasting love. I just wanted to kiss a boy. Just one boy.

Well, she does kiss a few boys, but there are plenty of bumps along the way. And when I say bumps, I mean terrible boyfriend choices, secret dates with spiky-haired pop stars, and a tabloid press that wants to tear her apart at every opportunity. And she surprises even herself when suddenly she becomes a role model for a whole new generation of young women who want to be just like her. Want to hear more? Follow Terribly Famous wherever you listen to podcasts,

or listen early and ad-free on Wondery Plus on Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app. When I say the word history, what do you think about? Horses and buggies and dust and a bunch of white dudes riding their horses and buggies in the dust? Facts! Definitely not enough melanin on all those history books. But we are about to flip the script on all of that. From Wondery, this is Black History for Real. Together we'll weave Black History's most overlooked

figures back into the rightful place in American culture and all over the world. Follow Black History for Real on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. We just talked about how to establish a generosity mindset and then some thoughts about how to act on it. Let's talk about the infectious generosity of it all,

how to harness the features of modern life in order to make our generosity even more impactful. You list in the book five ways to make your giving go viral. Maybe that's a good place for us to start. Sure, sure. So a lot of this is just paying attention to the people who have actually been successful at it.

So like a Mr. Beast and others. And some of the things that you see when you do it and that make a lot of sense to me. I mean, the first one is just to, if you do something that unlocks human emotion in some way, that is the fundamental engine of virality. People see something, they feel something, they want to share it. That's basically how it goes. That's why Mr. Beast videos, you watch those, people feel excited or whatever. And so they share it.

And any kind of emotion is possible here. It's not just the traditional charity emotions of look at this poor suffering child or animal. It's others as well, like laughter can do it. You know, if you remember the ice bucket challenge, that was hilarious. And it was basically laughter that, you know, spread that. And so, you know, spreading a sense of wonder, all this sort of stuff can help. So emotion, two, creativity, the wilder the better.

Often we're very earnest and serious in how we describe generosity and that kind of kind world. And it makes it boring. What if you did it differently? So one of the examples I give in the book is of this team of friends in Japan who wanted to clean up the streets. They dressed up in samurai costumes and did this with incredible style. It's like the sword slashes into the plastic bottle, flips it

up in the air and they catch it with the basket and videoed this, of course. And these videos go viral and it sparked thousands of other groups forming and wanting to pick up litter. Pick up litter. So creativity did that. And it's the second piece. Courage is a huge deal. Tell the story of Darryl Davis who was puzzled why lots of people, he's an African American musician, he was puzzled why some people didn't like him because of the color of his skin. He invited the local leader at the Ku Klux Klan to a meeting, and very tense meeting. But it led to another meeting. He ended up even going to KKK rallies.

They got a friendship. Eventually, this man left the KKK. Many others did as well. His story was picked up and went worldwide. Why? Because this is courage. It's like, wow, he did that. That's amazing. So

courage, creativity together, there's a word for those two things combined, which is audacious. It's like being bold, you know, taking a risk, doing stuff that is surprising. So I think that's really the core engine. And then beyond that, teaming up with people, collaborate, do it with a group of friends. And there's obvious virality just in that, in that you've got a lot more people at the party doing their thing. And then if you can, in some cases, not everyone can do this, but build some kind of amplifier.

So Catherine Barrett noticed someone during the pandemic who put a box of tissues and said, please take one. And she took a picture of it, put it on a Facebook group. She called the group the kindness pandemic. And 500,000 people ended up joining this group or telling their own stories. So even a Facebook group can be this massive amplifier of kindness, whether it's a website, a hashtag,

there's lots of ways that different people have built things that have ended up just astonishing. But don't start there. Start with the act of kindness and just take a moment extra to say, is there a more fun way that we could do this? Can we do this with a little more delight or boldness? And if you do, there's a much better chance that other people will notice and come along for the ride.

I thought it would be fun and maybe a little self-serving to ask you while you're here about a germ of an idea that I have along these lines and see if we can figure it out together. Let's think. So this would be an idea that would involve this show and my community. My family were by no means super wealthy or anything like that.

My parents were doctors, so we were upper middle class and very comfortable. But we weren't, you know, we're, I'm not talking about billionaire philanthropy here at all. When my grandmother, who was by no means high income, when she passed away 15 years ago, my parents took what was left in her bank account and started something called the Harris Family Foundation. I think it was like $100,000 that she had to her name when she died. And then my parents started putting money into it over time.

And we went to get together as a family and decide where we wanted to spend this every year. Now my parents are not able to run it anymore. So my brother and I have taken it over. And my brother, who has recently gotten interested in meditation, had the idea that we should focus this entire foundation on bringing mindfulness and or the Dharma to underserved communities.

So we have this foundation, I've never talked about it publicly before and we've been giving, but kind of giving under the old idea that I learned in Hebrew school of, you know, if you talk about it, you've corrupted the whole enterprise. So I think now in part from looking at your materials and having conversations with my brother, we've had the idea to like, let's make it public and let's get people who listen to the show or follow me in some way to also give not to the foundation, but to the organizations that we've vetted and are supporting and are making our support

public on. So I'll stop talking. I'm curious to hear if you have any thoughts based on the conversation we're having. Well, first of all, I'm really moved that you would share it because that first step of doing what is an uncomfortable thing of, you know, talking about your own foundation and what, you know, we do find that hard and I think the rules around that should change and that the fact that you're saying this right now will, I suspect, have ripple effects that in a couple years' time you think, wow, so that was worth doing then, right?

So thank you, honestly, for having the courage to do that. I mean, look, there's so many ways you could go. One is to engage your audience with the creativity part of it. It's like, what do you think? Like, have an email address people could write to and just say, if you like this idea, think more on something, but you've got suggestions about who we should support, how we might amplify it, bring them in.

I mean, you've got this incredible reach from the podcast. Is there an organization you could partner with where you could do a feed that actually helps people directly? Like, use this amazing connection and the feed you have to say, here's a free lesson or free attempt at your own kind of meditation or mindfulness or whatever. There's obviously lots of people have tried versions of that. But it depends how crazy you want to be, right? You could invite people to say, could you spend money to advance this course somehow? Don't tell me how. Just tell me how much you need, and you pick one or two at random, and you take a risk on

them and give them the money and see what happens. And say, all you have to do is tell me the story. What I've found is that in many cases, just letting it go, it can be amazing what happens next. There's risk in it, it doesn't always work. But it's the kind of crazy thing that you could try that in itself might get buzz and might get, like if it led to something, I mean, you won't believe how we found this person.

I love that. So basically saying, hey, if you think you've got some clever idea for delivering mindfulness or meditation or the Dharma to people who otherwise wouldn't hear it, crazy or the better, propose it to me and we'll take a look at the greatest submissions and if we the ones we like, we'll give you $50,000 and you can go go or $10,000, whatever it is and you can go make it happen. The only thing we ask is, document it and let's turn it into a story.

That's right. And I think there's a trade-off. Like traditionally, at one end, that's a grant proposal. Make your grant pitch to us, and it's 200 pages and you've told us every last detail and we'll have seven meetings and then maybe we'll write you the check. That's one way to go,

which minimizes the risk of a disaster. The other way to go is to do super light touch and say, tell us your big idea, and on one sheet of paper, three reasons why you think you're going to be successful. And we're gonna take the top five and then we'll give one a big check at random or whatever. But by going lighter touch,

you may be surprised at what comes back because it allows more potential for surprise and for ownership. I mean, again, we've just been astonished at this every stage of the way at TED where by letting go of control of these TEDx events, they have done things that we could never have imagined. They have done, okay, we'll do TEDx in a prison.

We're gonna do TEDx in a refugee camp. We're gonna do it inside a rainforest and bring people out so that they're actually in it. So you could do that? I never thought of that, that's incredible. And yet they do it. So we've been constantly amazed and delighted by what's happened just by letting go.

But the main thing I'd say, Dan, is cute us for opening it up. Like just doing that, people are gonna contact you with ideas and it will put you on a journey that you probably won't be able to stop. It'll lead to something. I love it. Before I let you go, I do wanna talk about,

we mentioned before that the book is working on a couple of levels. We've spent a lot of time by design on my side on the individual level. What can we do to develop a generosity mindset? But the book also talks about what can be done structurally to make our society more generous.

We're not gonna be able to get to all of your big arguments and big ideas in the book, but what comes to mind as being worth sharing in whatever time remains? To me, the biggest thing that's gone wrong on the internet, and especially social media, is that it's been designed based on a naive view of human nature. It's been designed as if humans were basically fully in control of their lives.

If you just optimize for user choice, you're going to have a nice outcome. Whereas I think the way we should think of ourselves at a minimum is of these complex creatures with an instinctive self and a reflective self. And much of life is a battle between those two selves. And I think the reason why people meditate and so forth is to try to give power to their reflective selves. It's our reflective selves that will tell us on our deathbed whether we're proud of the lives

that we lived. And it's our reflective selves that whisper to us every so often, you're doing it, you're okay, you're happy, this is what happiness is. So online that this battle to take back the internet as a force for good in society, I think will largely be one on whether or not we can empower people's reflective selves. Because our addictive selves or our doom-scrolling selves or whatever are always going to get pulled into the easier, the more visceral, primal feelings of mistrust,

anger, you know, all these things. They are more powerful, unfortunately, in human psychology than the other feelings of generosity and kindness. There's an instinct to them, but they need to be amplified by reflective, deliberate, proactive intention. So that's what it's about. And there's stuff that we can do by just paying attention to that and carefully curating how we spend our time online, who we follow, finding that generosity mindset, contributing to the good conversations, and finding the people. There are so many people online who are doing beautiful things. Support them financially, just amplify them, like them, repost them, whatever. There's so much we can do just as individuals there.

And then there's a lot that the platforms can and must do in terms of empowering that reflective self. So one example is, so just on X, where I spent some time, Elon Musk has publicly committed saying the goal here is to maximize unregressed user minutes. Regret is a function of the reflective mind. If you're serious about that, there is a pathway where X can become a wholesome place.

Some people will say that it already is showing signs of that. Obviously, there's a debate raging on its future. But it's that kind of thing that is necessary. We need to, you know, on TikTok in China, attention breaks are built in, especially for kids. After a bit, it says what your mother says to you, stop, count to 10, now respond. And you, you know, that brings your reflective self to the table. Just encouraging voice communication over weaponized tech snippets is powerful. Different parts of our biology are triggered. It's much, much harder to be really mean and nasty to someone when you're speaking to them face to face

than when you're texting them anonymously. So fundamentally, that's the lens that I think it takes is how do we empower our reflective selves? You mentioned Elon Musk. I think a lot of people would argue that he is expressing insufficient regret for his ex-moments, you know, that he's said a lot of things that seem unhinged on ex. Yeah, I think that's probably fair. He's a very complex man. He's got a lot of internal demons, as he himself would say. Part of him really does want to use the platform for the

betterment of humanity. He feels passionately about this whole woke mind virus and the need to, you know, the damage that he believes that is caused. And I think there's a personal family reason why some of that has happened. Some of the company that he's formed in tackling that is unpleasant. Certainly to people on the left who knows how that plays out. But that unregressive use of minutes as a target is valid. That is the right target. And the other thing that I think is hopeful on X

is community notes, which is this crowd created thing where people will identify if a post has gone up that it contains inaccuracies or is really toxic. They'll say, actually here's some broader context. They're doing that really quickly before often posts have really sort of escaped and gone viral. I think that's hopeful that they didn't have that before and that is definitely an improvement.

I've seen many cases of some of the nastiest stuff getting sort of pulled back. But look, a lot of people still hate that platform, still hate some of the other platforms. There's a huge battle to be won here. I actually believe that it can be won. I think that enough people working in those companies are themselves passionate about wanting to do work for the good of humanity, not the bad of humanity. And I think there's new insights being learned all the time. There's brilliant people like Tristan Harris and Eli Parris,

and others out there who are sort of working on this problem. I think we'll learn how to fix it. And of course, there's AI as the wildcard here, and that's a whole other topic. One reason why I feel urgency about trying to do some repair on the Internet is that AI's are developing their wisdom from the internet. Well, you know, what version of humanity do we want them to learn?

Just in closing here, I want to say something on Mike that I said to you off Mike before we started rolling here about Ted and my experience there. And you can respond if you want. And hopefully it's not too embarrassing, but for you to get gushed at here. But my first experience at Ted was in 2022, where I actually saw you do perhaps the most thoughtful interview I've ever seen with Elon Musk, actually. I gave a talk that year, but I think the more moving experience for me was going back in 23, where I was not giving a talk and so didn't have that stress. It was just there to volunteer and help the speakers get ready for their talks. And there is, this is your term,

a kind of generosity economy at play at TED that I had, I'd never experienced a community like that before where I could come and meet these incredible people and help them do a better job at getting their ideas out to the world and how astonishingly rewarding that was for me to not only get to play that small role, but also to be part of this community.

I had watched TED Talks, of course, but had not experienced what I believe to be the even more substantial magic of the organization until going. So I say all of that by way of kudos to you because it is an act of generosity to have established and run this organization over time and to continue to do it. So thank you.

Well that's very kind of you. If you haven't seen Dan's Ted Talk you should go out and watch that because it's already, I mean it's been deeply meaningful to a lot of people including a close personal friend of mine who's really was really transformed by the notion of finding a way to forgive himself for certain things. And yeah, we don't always get it right, Ted, but it does start with generosity. Like the generosity of speakers coming, it's the number one thing we say to them when you come to the stage, don't use this as a way to promote your company or self. Use it to give a gift of an idea and potentially that the right idea

at the right idea at the right moment for the right person. That just might be the most important gift they ever had, because it can change their life forever. So anyway, so thank you for what you said. My pleasure. Thanks for coming on the show. It's so fun to have you. It's been a delightful conversation. Thank you. Before I let you go, can you just remind it because the new book is called Infectious Generosity. If people want to learn more, the website is. Yeah, it's infectiousgenerosity.org.

And it's ted.org as well. What, funny enough, it's ted.com. Ted is a nonprofit, but the main website is, we have ted.org, but the main website is ted.com. Okay, anything else that we should, I know we just talked about not promoting, but is there anything else that we should promote here while you're here? No, no, no, I just

Some some aspects of generosity are really annoying What I really hope happens is that people find the part that isn't annoying for them embrace it and and get joy from it That's what I hope Amen. Yeah. All right. Thank you Thanks again to Chris Anderson we've done several other episodes where we touch on Amen. Yeah. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks again to Chris Anderson. We've done several other episodes where we touch on the issue of generosity. I'll put some links to those in the show notes if you want to go deeper on this.

10% happier is produced by Lauren Smith, Gabrielle Zuckerman, Justine Davy, and Tara Anderson. DJ Cashmere is our senior producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior editor. Kevin O'Connell is our director of audio and post-production. And Kimmy Ragler is our senior producer, Marissa Schneiderman is our senior editor, Kevin O'Connell is our director of audio and post production, and Kimmy Ragler is our executive producer, Alicia Mackey leads our marketing, and Tony Maggar is our director of podcasts. Nick Thorburn of Islands wrote our theme. If you like 10% happier, I hope you do, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus and the Wondery App or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music.

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Today, hip-hop dominates pop culture, but it wasn't always like that. And to tell the story of how that changed, I want to take you back to a very special year in rap. 88, it was too much good music. The world was on fire. Fire, yeah. I'm Will Smith. This is Class of 88, my new podcast about the moments, albums, and artists that inspired a sonic revolution.

And secured 1988 as one of hip hop's most important years. We'll talk to the people who were there. And most of all, we'll bring you some amazing stories. You know what my biggest memory from that tour is? It was your birthday. Yes, and you brought me to Shoday. Shoday. Life-sized artwork cut out.

This is Class of 88, the story of a year that changed hip hop. Follow Class of 88 on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts.