How to Master 'Infectious Generosity' | Chris Anderson

[00:00:07] A fascinating guy, Chris Anderson has run the TED Talks for over 20 years. He's the author of the new book, Infectious Generosity. And we talk all about the benefits of generosity, not only for the entire world, but for you,

[00:00:24] the individual who is generous and all of his adventures along the way with Ted. Here he is, Chris Anderson. This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is the James Altucher Show. Well Chris, thanks for coming on the show again.

[00:00:55] I really enjoyed the first time. And you know, of course, you've been running TED for 23 years. I've spoken a couple of TEDxs and I always watch the TED Talks. You've really been a great beneficiary in my life. Well, it's great to be back.

[00:01:11] And yeah, I actually just watched your TEDx San Diego talk and you were great. It's amazing to me that these people around the world are putting on these TEDx events. You know, I have only ever seen a fraction of the speakers who've been on there.

[00:01:28] But when you dig in there, there is just so much intrigue and goodness happening. And it makes me very excited. I know. Thank you. And look, you're welcome. You're very welcome. I actually just spoke at TEDx Spoker Rotan a year or so ago.

[00:01:43] And I would like to do more because this is related to your book, Infectious Generosity. I feel for me, I feel like I'm a good communicator, podcaster, writer. TED has become a way for me every few years to impart what I've learned and what's

[00:01:59] benefited my life and share that with others. So it's a form of generosity as you point out. It's through storytelling. But I really want to talk about this great new book you have, Infectious Generosity. Let's break apart the words infectious and generosity.

[00:02:14] I'll start off, you say something at the end of the book towards the last chapter where it's very important that generosity is hand in hand with gratitude. And I'm paraphrasing. And I remember I had an interview with Steven Kotler who was telling me that everybody

[00:02:31] has a baseline of happiness. So if they get too happy, eventually they'll go down to their baseline again. And if they get too sad, eventually they'll go up to their baseline again. And the only thing that's really known to increase the baseline is a daily habit of gratitude.

[00:02:45] What do you think about that as regards generosity? Yes, I think you're exactly right that these things are really deeply connected. The way in my thinking about it, gratitude is kind of like an essential start point.

[00:02:59] You can't really be generous until you've felt some level of gratitude to the universe. You know, people who are full of angst, full of self-loathing are rarely generous. It's very hard for them to be.

[00:03:13] So I think for me, the sequence is that you start with finding a reason to be grateful to the universe for something, whether it's just to be alive on a sunny day or to be alive at a time when there's so much extraordinary

[00:03:29] innovation around us all the time. I mean, there are so many things that one could be grateful for in addition to the obvious ones of your loved ones and so forth. But if you start with that, that helps put someone into a sort of generosity mindset,

[00:03:44] which is just the willingness to respond. And so we're really wired to be generous if we're in a certain mindset. And the other link to happiness, I mean, I think happiness does come from gratitude, but it also comes very, very powerfully from generosity.

[00:04:02] So if you can turn gratitude into acts of kindness, you may be stunned at how much happiness that ultimately brings with it. And that's the sort of delicious surprise, I think. It's there in the science, it's there in many people's wisdom

[00:04:19] and reported experience, but it's not widely top of mind for most people. You're kind of commuting to work and you've got all those other stuff on your mind and you're feeling gray about the world and your pathways to happiness

[00:04:32] you think are a bit more money or having a lunch with a friend or whatever. We don't think so much about if I devoted a little bit of my time or a little bit of my money to just giving it away in a surprising way.

[00:04:47] I might be surprised at how that makes me feel and it's a very, very, very powerful effect. Yeah, and I wonder if it works in reverse too in the sense that you were mentioning you can't really be generous until you experience gratitude

[00:05:05] so then you know what a sense of what generosity means. But perhaps there's a faggot to you make it notion as well. Like maybe I could be generous and that returns me to a state of gratitude. You mentioned when we're commuting to work and all this stuff.

[00:05:18] We're usually thinking about ourselves like how do I ask for promotion at work or how do I deal with this one employee or colleague I hate or whatever. You're stuck with yourself. And another word for generosity is to be selfless.

[00:05:31] And so I wonder as you pull yourself out of the self a little bit that not only increases generosity because you're thinking of a bigger picture but gratitude because you're also thinking like you said, you think of innovation, you're thinking of sunlight,

[00:05:47] you're thinking of these things outside of yourself. I think that's right. I think all of this all of these mental traits are tightly interconnected with each other. If you can find a way to sort of take in a breath and just be selfless

[00:06:02] even though you don't feel like it, yeah, you absolutely may be surprised at what the impact of that is. I mean, first of all, it may draw a surprise response from whoever you're being kind to and something magical happens, you know, or just in yourself.

[00:06:17] You go, huh, I guess I can be that person. I didn't know I could be that person today. And we all somewhere in ourselves take pride in being our better selves, you know, and it feels good to be our better selves.

[00:06:32] But it's really hard to do because most of the time we're on autopilot and there's just lots and lots of reasons to feel crabby or fearful about the world. When you can escape out of that and discover that better self, it's like, huh, that was great.

[00:06:47] Yeah, like I guess you mentioned something just two minutes ago how, for instance, we could be grateful for all this innovation in the world. But I noticed a lot like I recently went to a dinner of all scientists actually and writers of science

[00:07:01] and so many of them, all of them, except me, that were pessimistic about innovation. Oh, AI is going to destroy the world. Genomics is going to create clones who will be made into slaves. Robots are going to destroy everything and on and on.

[00:07:18] Crypto is meaningless and blah, blah, blah. So why are these people so pessimistic about innovation? Why are so many people afraid of innovation? I think people are afraid of change. Many people are. You don't know what's going to come. It's sort of better.

[00:07:35] The devil, you know, is how a lot of people's psychology works. And I think it's understandable and frankly, the pace, the accelerating pace of change right now, especially with AI is pretty terrifying. It, you know, if you like there is a lot that could go wrong.

[00:07:57] I feel one reason why I wrote this book was actually feeling a sort of sense of urgency that we have to proactively try to take back the Internet. You know, the Internet was so many people's dream at one point. There were a lot of tech optimists like me

[00:08:15] about 20 years ago would have it saying, this is the thing that can bring humanity together. Good Lord, you can see people right across the planet. You can experience them, converse with them. At last, we can break out of our tribes and, and, you know, imagine one humanity.

[00:08:30] And, and what the experience has been is that social media, especially seems to have actually promoted division and fear of the other in a way that's really, really disappointing and quite alarming. And now my worry is that it's that Internet

[00:08:48] that is training AI as to who humans are. And, you know, AIs are being built to sort of, you know, try and reflect our values and so forth. Well, what values do we do? We want to put out there and that, you know,

[00:09:01] a lot of the values that are online, like if you build an AI just purely off all the comments on X or Facebook or whatever, you, you, you, you, that may not be a very nice AI when all said and done. And so I think I think there's,

[00:09:16] there's an urgent obligation, but also a great opportunity here to try to figure out how to make the Internet a kind of place. And I think it's, I think there is a pathway to doing that. I'm an optimist, not in the sense of always feeling

[00:09:35] hopeful about the future, but more in it, I would say in a sort of determination sense of being, I mean, what else can we do? You know, it's being determined to try to find the pathway to a hopeful future. The future doesn't exist. It literally does not exist.

[00:09:49] It's all to be determined and it's speeded to be determined by all of us. And so if there is a pathway to a hopeful future, it's really important to try to eliminate that pathway and then say to everyone, hey, let's go that way.

[00:10:05] And that's I guess that's that's part of the motivation for doing this. But let me focus on the take back the Internet phrase, which on the one hand I massively agree. On the other hand, because we spend so much time

[00:10:20] in the Internet now and arguably it's harder to be generous on the Internet. Who are you being generous to? What do you think there's there's there's not it's not like, oh, I'm going to send goodwill to someone on Twitter. Like there's no mechanism really for that.

[00:10:35] So so the default is to not be generous on the and actually the default turns out to be mean on the Internet, it seems. But since the beginning, do you think that it seems like look, it used to be called social networking. Now it's called social media.

[00:10:48] So networking, it's like you and me chatting right now. We're networking. We're communicating directly with each other and we know each other, whereas media is like a one is like a broadcast kind of channel. So the same entity like Twitter or Facebook is now called

[00:11:04] by a completely different description, which I think has less generosity in the meaning. And I don't know if you can take that back. Yeah, so this is this is the whole question here is how to think about it? You know, my own experience was definitely shaped

[00:11:20] by what happened at Ted, where basically we found that giving stuff away turned out to be amazing for us and forever for others, many others as well. So, you know, we gave away content. That is what actually made Ted. There was a risk it would kill our conference.

[00:11:38] No, it actually enhanced the conference and it made us kind of get upset, obsessed with this idea of radical generosity. It's like we're in a connected age. All the rules have changed. It's suddenly really easy to give away things

[00:11:53] that are actually matter a lot to people and are amazing. I mean, think about what you do. You give away your wisdom and that of your guest to many people, you know, every week. Mostly just the guests. But it's you can actually view that

[00:12:09] through a lens of generosity. 50 years ago, people did not have access to this. You could be doing something else with your time. Yes, you have other motivations than generosity for doing it, for sure. But it's still, it's kind of amazing that the internet is this gateway

[00:12:27] to an endless series of gifts. If you choose to look at it that way, we got so excited about this idea that it led to us giving away our brand in the form of these allowing people to do TEDx events around the world.

[00:12:40] Again, people told us this was a crazy business move because you lose control. But what we got was 3,000 events around the world and suddenly, you know, a little team in New York can oversee 3,000 global events. That would be completely impossible without the logic of generosity.

[00:12:58] We give away the brand and people, these organizing teams around the world put in so much time and energy to putting on these events and people like yourself go out of the goodness of your heart, give talks. You're not paid for that. There's wisdom from that.

[00:13:14] And so I just, I became convinced that in the connected age, you can really, if you put the pieces together, you can come up with a mantra, which is to say, give away the bravest thing you can think of giving away

[00:13:30] and kind of be amazed at what might happen next. And I think that applies to organizations, companies. I think it applies to individuals. And it's just easy to forget it because in one way, it's so easy to give things away online and that there's this torrent of content

[00:13:46] pouring out of us the whole time and we don't think of it as gifts. We think of it as just noise or people trying to promote themselves or whatever. But generosity is actually part of it. It's mixed in there are, I think, beautiful gifts

[00:14:02] that if you receive them in a spiritual generosity, it changes how you feel about them and about the internet. And I think we could probably change the tone of the conversation. I think the 10 examples, a great example. One because like you said,

[00:14:30] everyone said you were crazy for doing it. But obviously in retrospect, we know now that it was the opposite of crazy. And in retrospect, we could do a post-war and I'm on why it worked. Like I think a lot of TED talks are known for their vulnerability.

[00:14:44] Someone goes up on stage and said, oh, when I was 12, I was hit by a car and I've never walked again. And then they talk about how they came back from this experience. And then now they're successful at this, successful at that and blah, blah, blah.

[00:14:59] I think, I mean, that's not the average talk, but I think vulnerability is kind of this currency of success. And then there's a lot of vulnerability in TED talks. So when you gave that for free, you have really smart people talking about times

[00:15:13] where they were down and how they became then successful enough to be on your stage and you're giving this away for free. So it built the brand, then everybody wanted that brand. They wanted to go to the FutureTech conferences. They wanted to sponsor TEDx conferences

[00:15:27] by giving away your brand and the vulnerability layer that was on top of that brand, everybody wanted to be a part of it. I don't think every brand can do that. Like if Procter & Gamble said, we're gonna do the Procter & Gamble speech of the year

[00:15:41] and they gave that away. I don't think everybody would want to do Procter & Gamble talks. No, that may be true, but I do think that companies for example could give away some of the things that they think is like a prime asset that they have to hide.

[00:15:55] I mean any company with great expertise could put out like a free university course or whatever in that topic. So in the book, I quote a fantasy example of say, GE puts out a course on all that you need to know about wind energy.

[00:16:12] We're gonna tell you all that we've learned over 30 years of doing this and how powerful that would be as a, yes a gift to the world, but also a way of building their own reputation. Cause that's the thing that happens with these online gifts

[00:16:27] is that they carry with them reputation. Reputation is actually the most important currency of the connected age. And so I think it's possible to simultaneously be generous but actually discovered that that act of generosity is massively in your own long-term self-interest. And that's one way that I think

[00:16:50] the way that we think about generosity, we need to tweak it a bit. Traditionally, generosity has been frowned on if there was any mixed motivation in it. It's like, oh no, you're only giving out of the goodness of your heart.

[00:17:04] Well, the truth is no one has ever done anything purely out of the goodness of their heart. They do it for a reason. They do it because they're scratching something in their conscience or like it, we all do things for a reason.

[00:17:17] And I think now more than ever, it's probably healthy just to embrace that and say you could be kind and you can want to do it for the sake of kindness but also knowing that it's good for your long-term happiness. It may be good for your long-term reputation.

[00:17:33] It may be good for your long-term success. These things are actually not in contradiction to each other. Yeah, and I like how you're building this up almost from the ground up. So like let's say an act of generosity could make you just feel good internally

[00:17:46] like regardless of what happens on the outside world. And then the next layer is doing good, being generous could improve your reputation. Then the next layer is being good, being generous might make your brand better which is a little different than reputation

[00:18:04] and improving your brand might make you make more money. So it's kind of like this, starts at this core like what's your baseline of happiness? How can I feel better? And then all the way to, there could be corporate reasons or financial reasons why someone would be generous.

[00:18:21] And then of course there's the top down which is it would just be better for the world if more people were generous. And do you see a trend of more generosity? Steven Pinker mentions how in every possible way life is better over the past 100 years

[00:18:38] compared to other centuries. Do you see the same thing happening with generosity? Well, I think there are really encouraging signs. I think it's all there to play for. One of the big things working against us right now is that a lot of people love playing the cynicism game

[00:18:56] where someone does something and the game is to try and find out what is wrong with what they did. Here are the many ways in which that act wasn't perfect. Someone gave something away, yeah, but they could have given away more

[00:19:08] or they were doing it for their own self-interest or whatever. What if instead of having a perfection filter on life, we were actually looking for the good in what people did? We were trying to find some way in which someone did something.

[00:19:22] You know, there actually was a good thing in that. That would be equally true and it would change the conversation I think. And so I mean, I think of if you want like signs of the pendulum swinging and a generosity being actually encouraged online.

[00:19:40] So take Mr. Beast, right? He's one of the biggest, perhaps the biggest influencer on YouTube. He's got more than 200 million subscribers and he's done it by figuring out how to make awesomeness go viral. His videos have these outrageous ideas behind them

[00:20:02] but many of them are actually anchored in generosity. Hey, I gave a thousand people their site or I brought wells to 100 villages or whatever. And to some people, perhaps of my generation, you look at this and go, that's kind of a little self-serving or whatever.

[00:20:22] But actually, I think Jimmy Donelson, who is Mr. Beast, there's a heart of gold in there. He's committed genuinely to making the world a better place. And he's inspiring tens of millions, probably like a couple hundred million people, largely next generation

[00:20:37] to believe that generosity can be cool and fun. And I love that. He's so creative with his generosity. Like a lot of people think generosity is, oh, I'm gonna just give a million dollars to this person or whatever. But he is really creative.

[00:20:53] Like of course, the money he's made through YouTube has benefited and allowed him to give more. But I love how he doesn't just write a check. He, like I heard one story, he set up a car dealership and he priced every car at $50.

[00:21:08] But he didn't advertise it that way. And people will just come in and they go, oh, I like this car. What's the cost? $50. And just videotaping the reactions, that's his way of spreading the generosity because it's unusual. It's unique way he's being generous in every situations like that.

[00:21:24] Exactly. So he's figured out some of the keys to making generosity go viral. And this, I think is the key thing that we have to do because the reason why the internet it seems like a dark place is that

[00:21:38] often what more easily goes viral is the dark stuff. It's sort of the threats and the fears and the people online who make a living out of highlighting how dangerous the world is. Often, that's the easiest route to getting a bunch of followers.

[00:21:53] But he's shown actually generosity can do the same and the key is that ultimately in creating or deep human emotion is what is the first and foremost thing that makes it go viral. Yes, it works with the darker emotions. It works with the positive emotions.

[00:22:11] If you can make someone go, wow, that is so cruel. Cool, so cruel, so cool. And like a tear rolls down someone's face, then they're gonna share that and pass it on. And I think part of what those of us

[00:22:25] who want to make the web a better place need to figure out is understand these tools of what makes goodness go viral. Human emotion is one piece. I think there are several others like creativity, wild creativity which he also has is really important.

[00:22:40] I think courage is really important. And there are a few other things that talk about in the book but if we can unlock those tools, we can actually take on and reverse and turn the tide on the ugliness of modern culture. I believe that.

[00:22:54] Yeah, I do as well. The question is how do you turn the tide? The trend has not been good, at least if we're talking about the internet. And there is a lot more wealth in the world now. Every year there's more wealth in the world

[00:23:08] than the year before. And you do see examples of extreme generosity because of that. But as you mentioned in the book, a lot of the bulk of let's say generosity or philanthropy is a lot of it is local and that involves smaller individuals

[00:23:22] who don't necessarily have the wealth. We'll talk about it later but I love the guidelines you have of creating a group of people together who are generous. But how do you turn that tide on an individual level, particularly as regards to the internet?

[00:23:37] So there are so many ways to be generous and many of the best forms of generosity are not about writing a cheque at all. It's not only with money, it's just acts of kindness, gifts of time, talent. Everyone's got something that they can do

[00:23:51] that in our connected age can have ripple effects beyond the incident itself. There are so many stories of this of just someone does something kind, someone else notices someone doing kind. They tell the story online, boom, it can spark beautiful ripple effects

[00:24:09] and that we just need to pay attention to. One really small thing that anyone can do is just pay attention to how you are interacting with other people online. Like literally, so many of us, you're in that sort of doom-scrolling mode

[00:24:26] of just going down and you see something and you want to react to it quickly and all the rest of it. Taking time to like and repost the people who are being constructive and they're sharing beautiful things and slowing down our sort of,

[00:24:41] the ease with which you do throw some snark at someone else, that can ultimately make a huge difference and there's already, people hate social media for all the bad things it does. Actually, if you go on and you carefully curate your experience and follow the right people

[00:24:59] and you can actually persuade the algorithms to feed you wonderful things. And I think if more of us did this and more of us made just a bit more effort to amplify the good stuff, that in itself is an act of generosity. Reading something ugly online

[00:25:17] and instead of just instinctively going right in there, taking a moment to say, wait a sec, that person has a story. They probably have a reason to say that, take a deep breath. You don't have to assume the worst in people. How about assuming the best in people?

[00:25:30] That generous mindset, that is a gift right there. And I think it honestly, it all starts there from there. You can build from that into something beautiful. And I agree with that. I can notice that for myself on my own social media experiences,

[00:25:47] like the TikTok videos I see and I know it's all because of the algorithm because what I look at, they figure out what I like but I basically see constantly kids doing superhuman things, like jumping, playing amazing, four-year-olds playing like a violin, like a professional or people jumping.

[00:26:04] Like there's all these kids who are superheroes are jumping from building and doing magic tricks. And so I don't, at least on TikTok, I don't see a lot of the negative stuff but in general, what's the trend? Like how do you,

[00:26:17] I think the trend is worse and worse, which is why we've gone from social networking to social media. Well, I think it's all to play for. And I've seen lots of counter examples. So take TikTok. I mean, I think you're right,

[00:26:30] that a lot of people's experience on TikTok and Instagram is mainly of just seeing a world full of wonder and stuff that the TV networks never brought you but some curated selection of millions of individuals churns up things that are genuinely amazing and maybe too addictive

[00:26:49] and we spent too much time on it but certainly in their own way kind of inspiring. But there was a particular person I spoke to in the book, a guy called Millard Merck who's, you know, his parents were immigrants. They run a sandwich shop in New Jersey.

[00:27:04] He worked there and he started, he spent time on TikTok and noticed this trend where some people were going, they were celebrating disgusting amounts of food waste, dumping huge sort of urns of peanut butter on the table just because they could and it didn't splat.

[00:27:21] And he was disgusted by it because I mean, you know, he's in the business of making sandwiches. So he did his own video which started with a huge amount of peanut butter and jelly beans dumped but he turned it into like 100 carefully made,

[00:27:37] you know, sandwiches wrapped them up and then went out in the street and handed them individually to people. This video clocked up 400 million views and basically blew away the trend that he was responding to and ended up persuading some of the people

[00:27:56] who were involved in that original trend going, wait a sec, there is a better type of video we could do. So literally there's a guy who's inspired by Mr. Beast and did this and when I spoke to him he was adamant that this is a winnable battle.

[00:28:12] He said, look, anything can go viral that sparks emotion. So yeah, sure you can get something to go viral, you slap somewhere in the face, you know, that may go viral. But ultimately how many people want to be a dick for a day?

[00:28:24] You know, when you can actually, the good stuff you do gets remembered for longer. So he was arguing that there is an asymmetry between the bad and the good where that actually works in favor of the good which is that people's long-term motivation.

[00:28:39] Like you could do one video for a phone but if you want to be in the business for a long time, you will get more personal energy from it by doing stuff that's good and that kind of builds your own reputation

[00:28:50] and makes you go to bed at night feeling better about yourself. I was blown away as a kid in his early 20s, he's very, very convincing on it. And I think in that generation there's a lot of people who are determined to start using the internet differently.

[00:29:09] So what are some other ideas? Like that's a great idea that he came up with and it costs him basically nothing. Like what are some other ideas you've seen or ideas you have where someone could be generous in these unique ways

[00:29:22] and not only benefit the people around them but benefit themselves? Because again, you're right, you have to take into consideration people want benefit as well. Well, just storytelling. In the early days of the pandemic, everyone was locked up and feeling scared and miserable.

[00:29:42] And there's a woman on Australia, Catherine Barrett, who went down to the common area in her building and noticed this box of tissues that her neighbor had just left there and had put in a note there saying, hey, please take one.

[00:29:57] And she was aware of it, see people were sad and needed to cry. And it was like, she was really moved by this. Oh my God, here's a neighbor who's looking out for the rest of us. She took a picture of this, put it posted on Facebook,

[00:30:10] wrote the story and said, I just, you know, there is kindness out there still in the world. This sparked an absolute avalanche of stories that came in. She ended up calling this site the kindness pandemic. So many people joined it crash for a bit.

[00:30:26] Like 500,000 people joined it, it's still going. And you go in there and you read story after story of just simple acts of human kindness, everyday human kindness. It's the kind of stuff that isn't normally reported because it's not part of our news culture or whatever to do it.

[00:30:46] But it is part of who we are. It's really part of who we are. So I mean, like I saw right on there a story of someone who's, her father had died, but he was on the other side of the world.

[00:30:59] And so she couldn't go to the funeral. But a stranger, not only live streamed the funeral for her, but basically took her phone and walked with it with her father's coffin the whole way and just allowed her to just be there present.

[00:31:16] And she, the way she wrote about this was just so moving. And there's just countless stories like this that if we knew about them, it would change how we think of each other. And you're right, there is a viral component to that.

[00:31:34] Like I was talking to this guy, Tank Sinatra. He has an Instagram page. I actually forget, it's probably just Tank Sinatra's page. And it shows funny memes and it has millions of followers and so on. But then he set up another Instagram page called Tanks Good News.

[00:31:54] And nobody, he started from scratch. He didn't say, oh, this is from, you know, on the Tank Sinatra from this other page. He just, all he did was just put like a good news story up every day on Instagram. And again, nobody knew who he was.

[00:32:06] It all was from the sharing. This, he said, I've never had any kind of Instagram page or website go so viral so quickly. He got millions of followers right away. He's still posting every day, Tanks Good News. And you're right, like people respond to that.

[00:32:19] And you have to be clever. You always have to be clever because it's all about communication. But you're right, you know, on the flip side, I will say the reason why people get that short-term viral fix on negative stuff is that negativity is more powerful for evolutionary reasons.

[00:32:35] You're gonna more quickly run from a tiger than you're gonna run towards, you know, food because if the tiger could kill you, the food will just satisfy you for a while. Like they say in a marriage, if there's one negative interaction, you have to have five positive reactions

[00:32:51] to make up for it. So negativity has some short-term strength very quickly. Right, so this is such an important truth about us. It's something that should be taught in school because if you know this stuff, you can start to navigate around it. We are weird, weird creatures.

[00:33:12] Like we have this millions of years of sort of biological history stuffed into our brains that give us instincts for, you know, how life used to be. And it's, if you're not aware of it, you get owned by it. And so I think there's huge power.

[00:33:30] There's a huge liberating power to understand why the news you read every day is so bad. And I think there's two reasons. One of them is the thing that you've just talked about, which is that people respond more powerfully emotionally to the dark stuff than the good,

[00:33:45] which means that, you know, your earnest story about, hey, life is getting better. That's on one media outlet next to it. It's someone, look out, you know, the immigrants are coming or whatever. That is scary. And it's that one that gets bought.

[00:33:59] And so that one wins the ad dollars and all the rest of it. And so you've got that set of biases in there on the one hand. There's another really powerful thing that's less reported that contributes to this,

[00:34:11] which is to do with just the nature of the world, which is that good things happen slowly. Bad things happen quickly. By what I mean by that, so just to take an example, you know, like to build something good. Say you want to build a, you know,

[00:34:26] like a beautiful building in a city. Now that's an eight year project from the dream in someone's eye to raising the money for it, pulling people together to getting planning permission to building it and all the rest of it.

[00:34:38] But that building can be blown up in an hour or in a minute, in a second. If a news outlet's mission is to answer this question, what's the most dramatic thing that happened in the last hour or in the last day? Almost always the answer to that question

[00:34:57] is going to be something bad because that's what's noticeable. That's what's dramatic. You know, there was no point during that building's construction where, you know, there was a sort of front page headline. I mean, maybe the opening ceremony or whatever, but it's that's page 22, you know?

[00:35:12] There's no dramatic moment, but when the bomb blast goes off, wow, put that up there. Every day in some part of the world there is dramatic bad things happening. And so inadvertently, the combination of these two factors means that the news that we get

[00:35:30] and therefore our picture and our beliefs about the world are that almost everything that's happening is bad. So no wonder where we're fearful. And I think there's just, it's hugely important that we are conscious of this and try and address it because the stories we tell ourselves

[00:35:48] literally shape who we are. And I think the amplification of traditional media, like it's on social media stuff, it's even worse. There's an even bigger tendency to highlight what's bad and ugly. We are talking ourselves down in a way that's dangerous and we have to turn that around.

[00:36:06] So your friend's Instagram feed, I think a lot of people are sick of how mean the world is and traditionally a good news slot would get zero attention. I think that's shifting. I think people are craving that not because, just because it's good, it's actually giving us

[00:36:26] a truer view of the world. It's not that it's just you're deceiving yourself and like, oh, I can't stand all the bad. I give me some good news just to ease the pain. No, that it's actually all that bad news is distorted

[00:36:39] and we need to correct that bias by taking the effort to look around at what is actually good in the world and there is so much that actually is good. You know, I would like to believe that the trend is changing, but let's say I'm a media company

[00:36:55] and I've got millions of dollars to spend on creating content, am I gonna go and make tanks good news or I'm gonna make the newspaper that has the blown up buildings? Obviously to make money, I'm gonna make the newspaper that has the blown up buildings

[00:37:10] because that's a proven model and it's hard going up against all that money to shift the trend. Yeah, so I think that is the assumption, but I think with a bit of creativity, it's possible to change that. And I also think that pendulum swing,

[00:37:33] you know, I think the world seems so dark to so many people right now. People are actually craving a different way. I'm personally convinced that a media company that's set out to say clearly, we are going to try and pay attention to,

[00:37:50] we're not gonna be owned by our psychological bugs and we're not gonna be owned by the fact that the easiest events to see in the world are usually bad. We're actually going to try to bring you what's actually significant about the world right now.

[00:38:03] We're gonna bring you the facts that will actually shape your long-term future and that if you set out consciously to do that, you could over time persuade a large number of very influential people to come and pay attention to you as a leading news source.

[00:38:21] And I think you will be helped in that by the fact that people are sick of the current media landscape. There's so much distrust now of mainstream media, there's just a weariness with the whole mess of it. And I think that's why a lot of people are

[00:38:36] and finding on the internet and in different places, they are finding joyful media content. So I don't know, I used to be a journalist. If I was running a news operation right now, this is the challenge I would set people. Let's make the significant stuff, the exciting stuff,

[00:38:57] the stuff that really shows what future possibility could be. Let's make that vivid and exciting. Let's use our imagination to do that. I absolutely think it's doable. I was gonna save telling you my own personal experience till after the podcast, but it's relevant to what you're saying.

[00:39:32] So I've been writing since 2002, like writing for, like being paid to write since 2002. And at first I was writing about finance and stocks and investing. And okay, I was a good writer, I had a good audience from that.

[00:39:48] But at some point early on, I got sick of that. And I changed everything completely. I just started writing, hey, this one period, I went broke, I was depressed, I was suicidal, this is what I did. And that became my style. It was just very vulnerable

[00:40:03] in a way that other people weren't doing. And my audience 10Xed, like literally, maybe multiply by 100, like in terms of number of followers across every platform and got me this podcast and so on. And so there's something negative a little about that.

[00:40:19] Like I was telling about a bad experience I was having, but always had like kind of a positive outcome. Like people would read for the ultimate positivity as opposed to just like stocks, it's just bad things, good things. It's like there's no real material content there.

[00:40:35] Yeah, I was enjoyed reading about you actually and your story is amazing, I have to say. It's amazing. You both in what you write about. And when you're approached to material things as well, you've been pretty radical about that.

[00:40:51] You've seen what a lot of other people don't see as clearly, which is that we assume that having 20% more is our sort of gateway to satisfaction. You've had a lot and you've lost a lot and you've formed your own conclusions

[00:41:10] about actually living light is probably the way to go. And that's pretty amazing in its own way. I think the kind of psychological issues you've worked with and written about are almost key to winning our own internal battles towards generosity, because often the science is amazing on generosity.

[00:41:34] What the science says is that people who are generous get a happiness boost that is about equivalent to doubling their income. I mean, think about that. Wow, I did not know that. Yeah, there's a big Gallup survey that I mentioned the book,

[00:41:52] but that is basically what it shows. And people don't know this and if they did, we would put extra, we'd be braver in trying to wrestle with those sort of inner demons that obsess on a bit more and actually consider some of the more radical steps to make.

[00:42:16] Actually, what would happen if I tried to live lighter and spent more time focused on other people's needs and trying to do the occasional good thing for them or whatever, there's many, many, many, many, many different ways to be generous. But I think your story is remarkable

[00:42:37] and which is one reason I'm happy to be having the conversation now. And the reason I tell the story now is just because if people are looking for ways to even have short-term benefit, there are ways to do it with giving back,

[00:42:52] even if it requires courage to do, like being blatantly honest about something that you did that was bad and that you had to overcome. And so when I first picked up the book and looked at it, you used the phrase earlier, radical generosity.

[00:43:10] And I actually coincidentally wondered why, this is before I even opened the first page, I wondered if radical generosity would have been a better title. I didn't know anything, I didn't read the book at that point. And so I was curious about the word infectious,

[00:43:25] because I'm sure you can considered radical. That's like an obvious word there. I did consider it, I did consider it. It's a word that scares some. Infectious is a better word by the way, because it's more unique. Here's where I ended up with infectious. There were two things.

[00:43:43] One is that there's new science showing just how deeply embedded generosity is in people. And also how we respond to generosity. You know, I got this inside seat on this thing we called the mystery experiment, where we gave away $10,000 to 200 strangers, 200 people on the internet.

[00:44:09] They didn't know what they were signing up for. They just got an email saying, hey, would like to transfer $10,000 into your PayPal account, no strings attached, you just have to tell us what you spend it on. And what happened was amazing. I mean, it amazed the social scientists

[00:44:23] we worked with who wrote papers on this. On average, people gave away two thirds of that money, gave two thirds, they paid it forward. This is completely outside what traditional economic theory would say. You know, people are rational agents, they spend on their own interests.

[00:44:39] Well, it turns out that people wanted to respond to generosity in kind. They felt seen by this act and they wanted to pass it on. And this applied to people in all seven countries that we did the experiment in and across different income levels and so forth.

[00:44:58] So anyway, so that was, that's actually one of the reasons that sparked me into doing this. It's that if it's the case that people are both naturally generous and also are actually in a weird way, hardwired to respond to generosity, in the connected age when people,

[00:45:16] it's actually easier to be generous in different ways than ever before. For example, by giving away knowledge or video or software or recipes or pictures or art or whatever it is, you can do that at unlimited scale. Well, that creates a huge possibility

[00:45:35] because people are wired to respond to that. And we, you know, at TED, we experienced that in ways that blew our minds because we gave stuff away. People responded. What we got back from, for example, TEDx organizers was far more than we gave them. And so it just,

[00:45:50] it made me think that when you connect the dots here of what we've learned about human psychology and what this connected age makes possible, we could completely reframe how we think of generosity and view it as this beautiful self-fuelling cycle

[00:46:07] that can do what the internet was always supposed to, which is be a good thing for the world. It can spread goodness, it spread knowledge, it spread aesthetic, it spread art, enchantment, all these things that can be spread and that people would respond to it.

[00:46:23] So that's why we call it infectious generosity. It's because you put it out there and it spreads and the whole idea of things going viral is obviously the pandemic showed us how powerful a force that is when something becomes infectious, but good things can become infectious.

[00:46:41] And so that was kind of where the title came from. And again, I want to talk about what you described later in the book, how you could form almost like an accountability group of generosity. But in that experiment, I wonder if they,

[00:46:57] so the idea is to show that when someone was generous to them, they were more inclined to be generous with the money. Did you compare with, or did anyone ever do an experiment comparing like if someone, if they just got the money, they found it on the street

[00:47:12] or they got it as a surprise bonus at work, would their response have been different? We didn't do that specific experiment. I think the chances are it would be different that part of what happens is this feeling of this desire to respond.

[00:47:32] But there is evidence that it's not just you receiving something that makes you generous. Actually, when you see someone else being generous to someone else, that in itself creates this feeling of uplift that's been documented and makes people want to be generous. So right there, that's another thing

[00:47:52] that I find incredibly hopeful. It means that to take the Mr. Beast example again, I think of these 200 million subscribers watching his videos, they are all to some extent getting a feeling of uplift and extra motivation to be kind as part of their playbook.

[00:48:09] I think that is incredibly helpful. Yeah, it reminds me of, there's a kind of a coach slash sports coach, I don't know how I would describe it, but Tart Herman wrote a book called The Alter Ego Effect and I'll describe with an example what he means.

[00:48:27] He says many professional athletes, let's take a professional baseball player, as they're walking up to the plate, they no longer are themselves. They might imagine themselves as like a giant or a Paul Bunyan, someone super strong, superman. And now when they're about to swing,

[00:48:44] they're superman and they almost hypnotize themselves to believing that and then they play better than they would if they were quote unquote just themselves. And like Kobe Bryant, he gives us an example, he turned into a black mamba snake to play like cause he studied up on that

[00:48:59] and he liked the attributes of that and he thought he wanted to be a fighter like that. And I wonder if one could do the same thing with generosity, like it's sort of like the what would Jesus do expression, but maybe there's a character from a movie

[00:49:13] that's like extra noble and you think, oh, I wanna be, even just thinking about it like my posture gets straighter and I wanna be like that a noble person, someone who rises above the daily tensions and stresses and has a certain nobility to him, which includes generosity.

[00:49:30] I absolutely think that that is powerful. Look, so much of our lives is wrestling with, it's a battle between our reflective selves and our lizard brains, I would say or our instinctive selves, what Danny Kahneman would call system one thinking and system two thinking, well, we can reflect

[00:49:49] and tell a story about who we are. And a lot of us aren't happy with the story that just our instinctive selves would generate by itself. And so yeah, you tell a different story about who I, that's not the person I am.

[00:50:06] That's not the person I want to be. I want to be a different person. And that, I mean, this is what cognitive therapy is all about. The beliefs you have about yourself can change who you are. I think one of the things that may have gone wrong

[00:50:21] a bit in the modern world is that, is that, you know, we've, as we've stepped away from religion or a lot of people have, I don't think it's a coincidence that every religion requires its people to gather every week to come and be reminded

[00:50:37] that there are things that are bigger than them out there in the world, to be reminded that they have moral obligations to be kind to each other and all these things. Like we're fragile animals and we don't necessarily always do this naturally.

[00:50:51] So I think if we're not gonna go to a religious service every week, we have to find other ways to remember our better angels to remember our better selves and remember that actually by living that self is a more satisfying way to be. It doesn't necessarily come naturally.

[00:51:11] You know, it doesn't. I think it takes conscious effort and it's in every sphere of life, we know this already in terms of diet, in terms of exercise, in terms of procrastination. We know that you kind of have to take special effort sometimes to, you know,

[00:51:28] we call them life hacks or whatever to persuade ourselves to get it right. It's why people meditate. It's why people go on long walks or work out or exercise or whatever. And I think it's true with generosity as well is that it takes, there is a conscious effort

[00:51:43] that's worth making because what you discover if you go there is that life becomes more meaningful. It's just more joyful. And by the way, the people around you will thank you too. I'm sure you've read the book Blue Zones or at least Dan Butenor has probably done

[00:51:58] a thousand TED talks about this. The Blue Zones for People Who Don't Know are these places around the world like seven or eight places around the world where a large number of people more than statistically expected live to be have a high quality life over the age of 100.

[00:52:12] So, Alcunawa is one, some island off Greece is another and he looks at what's common in their diets and so on. But there was one interesting place, Aventura, California, where it was ethnically diverse. So all the other places,

[00:52:26] it was the same ethnicity and same diets and so on. But there was one place in all the Blue Zones and again, there's only seven or eight, Aventura, California, where it's all sorts of ethnicities. And so he goes there to study it further

[00:52:40] and it turns out once a week, they all get to, there's some kind of their seventh day Adventists. So they're all in the same religion and once a week they get together on the Sabbath and take hikes together and cook together and so on.

[00:52:55] So this idea of like this whole community coming together is really, you know, and being obviously generous with each other leads to longer life even. 100%. I mean, we're social beings, you know, and we so much of what we do and feel can't be understood

[00:53:10] except in context of how we're interacting with each other. I think it's an area where the West and Western thinking and Western philosophy has probably let us down a bit because there's been a real tendency to try and navel gaze and to understand everything

[00:53:23] in terms of the individual or the individual versus the government or whatever. Actually, you know, the unit that really matters is the neighborhood, the community. And it's, we're much more like an ant colony than like an ant. I think we have to embrace that side of ourselves

[00:53:39] and that is in a way why, you know, the tagline of this book is the ultimate idea we're spreading, you know, it's humans' ability to cooperate with each other, to trust, to find a way to trust, to find a way to love, to give back. Without that,

[00:53:54] we would still be an anonymous ape on the savannah somewhere if we were alive at all. It's that superpower that has allowed us to do everything that we've done. You know, towards the back of the book, you give a suggestion of how you can start to get involved

[00:54:10] and you have a bunch of steps. Maybe you can outline those steps because I was even thinking of doing it with my friends in local community. Well, I love that. It's hard sometimes to do this stuff solo. Like I say, with social beings.

[00:54:25] So one great way forward as a simple start is just to have hosted dinner, invite a group of friends around, have a dinner and just talk about, first of all, you know, dreams, you know, what do you really care about in the community?

[00:54:44] What do you wish was different? You know, what problem is there there that maybe is fixable? And to start to plot together about whether there is some issue, some cause, some thing in the community that you could collectively get behind. You know, for me, the thought of,

[00:55:04] I don't know volunteering at a soup kitchen or whatever is exhausting. And I can't really bear the thought of it. But with a group of friends, if we decided to do it and go do it together, I could sign up for that. And you know, there may be,

[00:55:18] you know, there's a dozen things that could be. Maybe you guys, maybe instead of something local, there's some illness that someone, one of you's experienced and you want to tackle and so you want to research it together and see if there's an organization that's working on it

[00:55:33] that you could support in some way or whatever. There's just an array of things that may or may not connect. But if you as a group can find a common cause, that is great. And then beyond that, I lay out this idea, which I've tested with,

[00:55:51] you know, some of the donors and change makers who come to Ted and I've seen this work incredibly powerfully. It's based in something that we call the Audacious Project, where we've encouraged people who are running, say a nonprofit, whatever, to dream much bigger than they normally were,

[00:56:08] to basically answer the question, what could you do if money was no object? And to come up with these thrilling, long-term really bold dreams and then try to help craft it into a sort of workable idea. And then when we've got a few of these ideas together,

[00:56:24] we'll put them in front of a group of donors and say, okay, there's a huge amount of work has gone into doing this. These are amazing ideas. Can you support this together? And when you do this, you avoid the usual problem that happens

[00:56:38] in fundraising in the nonprofit world, which is that the can basically gets kicked down the road. Most money in the nonprofit world is raised one bloody meeting at a time, neither the donor nor the proponent really loves the process at all. And it's just painful.

[00:56:54] But when you have a group of donors together and a clock ticking saying, we're gonna decide to support it now or not at all, at some point in that moment, someone will say, well, okay, I like this. I'm in if you guys are as well.

[00:57:10] And you look around that room and people go click, click, click, click, click. It's an example of infectious generosity in action right in that moment. And so several times I've seen, like in the biggest cases, like literally a couple hundred million dollars committed to a project

[00:57:27] between six or seven people in about a minute after a year of work to get it ready for that moment. Now, I think a version of that can be done at local level by a group of friends. And it would break out,

[00:57:42] I think it could have absolutely amazing consequences. And it would be something like this, that you basically, one, try and identify three or four people locally who are doing something amazing. Maybe someone has a dream for a new park in the place

[00:57:57] or someone wants to tackle the homeless problem or someone wants a novel new way of cleaning up the trash on the streets or whatever it is. People have these ideas and you like them. So you go out to them and each, you divide responsibilities here,

[00:58:12] maybe each person gets assigned someone. You go and sit with them and say, okay, dream bigger. What could you really do if you had a huge amount of money here to develop this idea and encourage them to turn that into an actual plan?

[00:58:23] Well, what would that actually look like? Who would do this? You know, how long would it take? What are the obstacles that you would need to knock down? What evidence is there that you actually could do this if the money was there?

[00:58:32] So you do the work and get those plans in place. And then you seek to convene and pull it together. Some of the local people with resources, it could be a successful local business owner or a philanthropist or who knows? And this is obviously the hard part

[00:58:50] because these people get a lot of asks, but you have something unique to say to those people which is we're going to show you something that you've never seen before which is the most thrilling local initiatives that have ever been dreamt up in this community.

[00:59:04] And there's no obligation. You don't have to do anything unless inspired but at least come and listen. And if you can get half a dozen and half of them to come in and then present these ideas, all bets are off as to what happens next.

[00:59:18] And I really think there's a process here that could if it was successful, change the local dynamic because it turns out that a lot of people with money locally are actually dying to do something for the community. Right now, if they try and do it

[00:59:35] in philanthropy the normal way, people will turn up their noses at them and say, well, you're just rich and why should you get to decide what this community needs? This flips that narrative. The actual needs are defined from the grassroots up

[00:59:50] and they have a chance to be heroes and to make this possible. So I think there's a chance to actually bring together rich and poor, if you like in a way that would be quite thrilling. And yeah, one of my hopes from this book

[01:00:06] is that we're gonna get some real stories of people doing this, trying this and doing it. And I think it's an idea that could spread and could be really beautiful. I can't wait for you to give the TED Talk that describes all of things like this

[01:00:22] that happen because you wrote this book, like and tell those stories. Like that's gonna be an incredible TED Talk. So Chris Anderson, you were so generous in giving us the amazing TED Talks for the past 20 years and that's become a worldwide phenomenon. Now this book, Infectious Generosity,

[01:00:39] I love it, people should read it. And it's really important to note that as selfish as this sounds, it really improves your life in many ways as we talked about before from internally to health, to brand, to reputation, to money.

[01:00:53] Not that that's the reason you would do it. You could do it for that first reason. It just makes you feel good and that's a selfish enough. But thank you for this book. I hope the book goes viral. That's why I wanted you on the podcast

[01:01:05] as soon as I heard about it. And thank you again for coming on the show. Thanks so much, James. I've really enjoyed this. I love what you're doing. I'm guessing that your audience, because they're attracted to you and what you've been doing,

[01:01:19] will actually like some of these ideas. And so I'm very excited to have the chance to share this and I really wish everyone success. Just start with one small thing and see what happens. That's key and definitely they'll be interested. Thank you. All right, take care.