#194 – TED Talks and Infectious Generosity With Chris Anderson

Wes Moss [00:02:01]:
One of our guests on the show has been Mitch album, who really, the theme of Mitch album, who wrote Tuesdays with Maury, was so much about giving, so he talked about giving is living. It is kind of one of his core tenets in the world. And we see a real propensity for retirees who are more generous and who are more giving tend to report higher levels of satisfaction, life satisfaction, purpose, et cetera. So this is why we wanted to have you on, is with obviously your new book, Infectious Generosity, and you being an expert around that and really kind of your entire life, it seems as though your purpose has been to figure out how to be generous and give back to the world. And you’re tackling some very big issues in this book. And I know what your TED talk. So let’s start with Ted, because it’s been a global phenomenon for so many years. It’s been over 20 years, and it’s one of the most fascinating creations on the web.

Wes Moss [00:03:10]:
And maybe let’s just start there because it’s funny, I’ve seen your advice come up online for years around how to give a good talk. And it’s not just TED talks, but just in general. I’ve followed you and your advice around presenting and the thought around ideas worth sharing. So maybe let’s just start there to talk about the phenomenon that is Ted.

Chris Anderson [00:03:34]:
Well, thank you, us. It’s lovely to be here. Yeah. Ted used to be just like an annual conference in California. Technology, entertainment, design. It’s a TEd and I fell in love with it in the late ninety s and had a chance to buy it. I was an entrepreneur. I had, I’d set up a foundation.

Chris Anderson [00:03:55]:
The.com bust was not kind to me, but the foundation still had some money. And so I was able to buy Ted from its founder and run it as a nonprofit. And one of the biggest questions we were asking was, well, we’re a nonprofit. We’re supposed to be acting in the public interest. How do we let out the inspiration and magic that happens at Ted? These short talks that are accessible to people outside any given discipline, how do we make them accessible to the world? And we couldn’t figure out how to do it until online video came along. And suddenly we had a chance to give away our content for free. But it felt like a crazy thing to do because that might kill the conference. Why would people core to the conference if they could get the content for free? We did it anyway.

Chris Anderson [00:04:41]:
I was surrounded by a brave team, and we were, after all, a nonprofit. And so we felt we had to. Turns out that even if we’d been a business, that would have been the smartest thing we could possibly have done, because far from killing the conference, it actually increased the demand for that much. More importantly still, it sort of sent TED talks spinning their way across the world. And it was that act and the insights from that that really were the seed to this whole book I’ve written. Now that in this weird, connected age that we’re in, the rules around what you give away and what you hold onto are just different. I mean, they just are. You give away something today, it can spin across the planet and bring you back stuff that you never dreamt of.

Chris Anderson [00:05:27]:
And so really, Ted has been since that was 2006, when we did this experiment and these talks went viral and we’ve tried to run Ted that way ever since, tried to imagine what could we give away. That would be amazing.

Wes Moss [00:05:40]:
Well, let me ask this. So from, let’s say, 2001, and Ted was very much a destination and it was once a year, then you did Ted for a while. Ted continued on for a while. It was what, five or six years before you made this decision around essentially giving it away. And what was the evolution leading up to that when you turned on the switch?

Chris Anderson [00:06:06]:
Well, it wasn’t possible to give away the content in 2002, three, four, other than to a small number of people. You could burn it onto a dvd. It would cost $2 per dvd, per lecture. And so that doesn’t scale, that would bankrupt you.

Wes Moss [00:06:20]:
Well, I guess at the time it’s hard to even remember this, but during the early two thousand s, Internet was so slow, you couldn’t really stream video. I guess that was the issue.

Chris Anderson [00:06:28]:
Correct? That’s it. YouTube didn’t exist back then, so that wasn’t a thing you could do. And in 2005, six, it became a thing you could think about doing. And so, Wes, we tried this experiment and to our shock, the talks went viral. And what was even more surprising was that the emotional reaction of people seemed like it was as powerful as people who were in the room. And I did not see that coming, that someone in a room, you can capture an audience. Turns out that someone on a video can actually move people to tears and can really spark really important conversations and changes. So that was the shocker.

Chris Anderson [00:07:13]:
And it meant, wow, wait a sec, we’ve got this incredible opportunity obligation here. We’ve already got a pretty good archive of recorded stuff. And with a few changes, we could record our talks so that they look more theatrical. They’re better done. No one else kind of owns this space yet. In the digital era, we should go for it. We did, and we’re just so lucky on timing that right place, right time.

Wes Moss [00:07:44]:
You had arguably the best content in the very beginning and you were able to kind of have a foothold right out of the gate. The numbers are. Can you share just some general numbers? I think I’ve seen that you get something like a billion views. Is that per year or is that total?

Chris Anderson [00:08:03]:
It’s more than that. The total views, I mean, as you know, on the Internet, how you count impressions and listens and views, it’s a bit squidgy around the edges, but approximately speaking, we get about 3 billion impressions a year. So views or listens to audio a billion of those are from TEDx, which is another act of just giving things away. We gave away our brand to allow people to do these TEDx events around.

Wes Moss [00:08:32]:
Okay, so is a TEDx almost a franchise of TED?

Chris Anderson [00:08:36]:
How does it. It’s a free franchise, so people don’t pay anything to do it. And we don’t control, ultimately, the content of who they pick for their speakers. We give them tools for how to run an event in our format and in our style, how to coach speakers and so forth. And there are some guiding principles, like to steer clear of politics and religion and pseudoscience, stuff that.

Wes Moss [00:08:58]:
Same rules as thanksgiving dinner table.

Chris Anderson [00:09:00]:
Yeah, exactly. But everyone told us not to do this, that it would be very damaging for the brand. And maybe there were a couple of embarrassing moments, but what was amazing about that decision is that the vast majority of people sweat blood and tears to make a great event. And the events got better each year. They learned from each other, we learned from them. And just the scale takes your breath away in terms of what you could do. So I had ten people in the end overseeing this program in New York. They collectively oversee now 3000 global events, which generate 25,000 videos online each year and amount to now about a billion views on YouTube each each year.

Chris Anderson [00:09:52]:
I mean, you could not build a media company that way with ten people at all. The only reason it was possible was by adopting a kind of radical generosity principle strategy. This is why I’ve just become convinced that the rules haven’t just changed a bit, that there’s just massive new opportunity in this connected age to rethink how we think about generosity. Because it’s not just organizations like Ted that can do this. Any organization, I think, has an opportunity here. I think any individual who has something that they could share online could potentially really make a difference this way as well.

Wes Moss [00:10:31]:
So, Chris, though Ted is still a nonprofit, correct?

Chris Anderson [00:10:35]:
Yes.

Wes Moss [00:10:35]:
And then, so if you’re giving this away for free, but I guess, has it just been built on advertising, though? The revenue that comes in and then you can continue to expand the message?

Chris Anderson [00:10:46]:
Yeah, well, the business model keeps changing. I mean, for a long time, our main business model was still selling tickets to conferences, and the demand for the conference rose, and so we had the funding to just give away content. Globally, we get some advertising revenue, places like YouTube and elsewhere, we have some sponsors and partners who we work with. And then there’s a growing amount of philanthropy. We are dependent on donations to Ted for the rest of it, there’s 200 people. Now. It’s about, gosh, now I think it’s like 100 million dollar operation. I did not see this coming when I took it on.

Chris Anderson [00:11:34]:
But as everyone who is involved with sort of trying to navigate this online space now, the business models need thinking about carefully about how you get your mix of revenue. But the one thing that is crystal clear is that if you can find something to give away online that people love, it will spread like wildfire. And that creates enormous opportunities for you. It all begins with that spread. If people know who you are, if you’ve got a reputation, so much can happen as a result of that.

Wes Moss [00:12:10]:
So if we think about thinking about you were going through this path and just, you’ve had this propensity for generosity, obviously for years, probably for your whole life. Then as you’re experimenting with this, it’s working, and you’re getting back, to some extent, you’re getting back a multiple of what you’re giving. And then you start to think about this idea maybe as more concrete, with generosity and then infectious generosity. Was there a moment in the world that we live in today? That is, we’re bombarded with social media and it bleeds, it leads, and the news is always scary. And I’m in the financial industry, so it’s about 80%, 90% of all headlines are fear mongering. Once in a while, you get the aspirational headline, which is, woman who does part time work now lives in a bus and makes $30,000 a month. Right. It’s like once in a while you get something that, oh, that sounds fun, but most of it is about fear and correct scaring folks.

Wes Moss [00:13:17]:
Did that just boil to eventually bubble up for you? What happened?

Chris Anderson [00:13:22]:
Yes, it did. So I’m naturally optimistic. And during the early years of the Internet, I was a huge techno optimist about what the Internet was doing. It felt like at last there was something that could bring the world together. You could see people on the other side of the world. We could break all manner of sort of barriers between us. And it was, I would say that the last ten years has been crushingly depressing of seeing what actually happened. To cut a long story short, and everyone has their own version of this, but it turned out that the Internet, and especially social media platforms, ended up contributing to a world that was getting increasingly divided.

Chris Anderson [00:14:07]:
And I was utterly dismayed by this. And in a way, this book is partly an attempt to try and fight back against it, because I don’t think it has to be this way. In fact, I think it cannot be this way if we continue to divide ourselves, talk ourselves down. We will not, as a species, will not be able to achieve anything. Everything great that we have ever done has depended on people being able to cooperate with each other and listen to each other and learn from each other and work together and build things together that we all get excited by. And we’re taking away that superpower. It’s super dangerous. So what can we do about it? I mean, I think the first step is trying to understand why and what happened.

Chris Anderson [00:14:49]:
And there are specific reasons why we tell ourselves these dark stories. The main thing is this evolutionary reason that we’re wired to respond to threats that bit more than we are wired to respond to opportunities. And so the voices that get the most attention early on are those that shriek, danger, danger. Look how horrible those people on the other side are and what they’re doing. Danger, danger. And they get the followers and they end up dominating the conversation, even though what they’re saying truly is not reflective of how most humans people think. Yes, most people, we have different opinions, but we all have hopes and dreams. We all have kids we care about.

Chris Anderson [00:15:38]:
We all want the future to be better. We all weep, we all laugh, we all bleed. When people talk with each other about their life experience, they can find more in common than not. And I think the key, and the reason why I get so excited about ideas in general is that if you can shift the conversation from push pull, who has power? Who doesn’t? Who gets to control the conversation? Who doesn’t? If you could shift it from that to a conversation about imagining, what could the world be like? Let’s dream a bit. Let’s innovate. Our human superpower is to be able to dream about multiple possible futures. And that is fundamentally a non zero sum world. So even people who disagree can actually, in the right circumstances, can find common ground, can build things together.

Chris Anderson [00:16:34]:
But the first step is to get us just believing in each other. And so some of the most important acts of generosity today aren’t financial. They’re just simply being willing to see each other with respect, to listen and to connect, to try to bridge, to try and to not be part of the pylon culture, and instead be part of the let’s actually look for what’s good online and amplify that instead.

Wes Moss [00:17:00]:
So this is your attempt to fight back against it, because we’ve always had a world where fear does kind of lead, but now there’s this ten x fuel behind it, which is social media. I think it’s a really interesting point. It’s that the extremist views are held by so few people, yet they get so much of the attention. And it’s almost as you look around and people look around and say, well, how many people really are that extreme? And the reality is that we’re just not as a people, as a humanity, we’re just not that extreme. It’s just that extremism is really what gets the attention, and it’s harder to combat it today, Chris, I think, than ever, because social media is so big. I mean, it was just this week, right? You’ve got the heads of social media companies at Congress, and they’re getting hammered because there’s a much more widely accepted thought that social media is, for the most part, is pretty terrible.

Chris Anderson [00:18:02]:
So under the surface, there are thousands and thousands and thousands of people doing amazing things online. There’s so many honestly deeply inspiring stories. I mean, talk about infectious generosity. There’s this woman, Catherine Barrett, who, in the early days of the pandemic in Australia, just posted a picture on Facebook of a box of tissues that had been left by a neighbor in her building. Hey, if someone needs a cry, whatever, please take one. And she was moved by this. She posted this on Facebook, started this group called the Kindness Kindness pandemic. 500,000 people joined this group and deluged her with all of these tales of ordinary humankindness.

Chris Anderson [00:18:49]:
They’re around us every day, and when given a chance, they can spread like wildfire. So this was an example of a social media platform, in this case, Facebook, creating a kindness pandemic. What I’ve been trying to do in this book is to try and find the playbook. What is it that would allow us to elevate these stories and give them a chance to outcompete the rest of the nastiness of what’s out there. How do we make good more compelling than bad? Usually, good is boring. This is the problem with media. We find good boring. And so those of us who have something good to share, we have to find a way, yes, to trigger human emotion, the way that that box of tissues did in Catherine.

Chris Anderson [00:19:35]:
Also, just to be more creative and more courageous in what we do. If we could do generosity with audacity, the rules change, and suddenly these things can take off and can spread. And there are actually so many astonishing stories of the Internet spreading generosity that I get hope. And especially when you talk to people in the next generation coming through, they’re even more sick of the mean world than we are. And I think they’re determined to not let the Internet just be that.

Wes Moss [00:20:16]:
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Chris Anderson [00:21:11]:
Well, let’s start with, actually with an experiment. There’s a lot of different things we’ve done in the book, but, I mean, I had a ringside view of this crazy new social science experiment that was done online in partnership with the University of British Columbia, where a donor in the Ted community, a donor couple, wanted to give away $2 million in a creative, courageous way, an audacious way. And so we brainstormed with them, and here’s what happened. We recruited people online for what we called the mystery experiment. They didn’t know what they were signing up for. Thousands of people applied. We picked 200 people from seven different countries, different income levels, and they got what seemed like the ultimate spam. Email.

Chris Anderson [00:22:01]:
Congratulations. We would like to send $10,000 to your Paypal account, no strings attached.

Wes Moss [00:22:09]:
It does seem difficult for people to accept that in this day and age.

Chris Anderson [00:22:13]:
It actually was. But we persuaded them, and they eventually took the money. The only string attached was that they had to tell us what they spent it on. Amazingly, I don’t know what you would predict would happen if you did this. Two thirds of that money was spent generously. It was given away to family members. It was spent on strangers. It was spent on charitable causes of many different kinds.

Chris Anderson [00:22:42]:
It was really, really surprising. And by the way, separate thing. It brought with it a lot of happiness, this whole process. We may come on to that link between generosity and happiness, but this led to some important social science papers being published. It also convinced me that I just had to write this, that what we are seeing is that I think it’s widely known that generosity is, at some level, inside humans. There’s many things inside us, but everyone in certain circumstances, feels a strong instinct to be generous. But there is also this really strong instinct to respond to generosity. And there’s also a strong instinct to respond to seeing other people’s generosity, even when it’s not targeted at you.

Chris Anderson [00:23:29]:
That’s the infectious video of this. This is the infectiousness of this. So if people see a video of someone being kind to someone else, they feel often a sense of moral elevation in themselves and are more likely to be kind. So I’m going, wait a second, by the way, all of that, by the.

Wes Moss [00:23:45]:
Way, Chris, was there a thesis to this donor? Did they have an idea of what it would do? Did they think 50% would be given away? Or did they really just want this as an experiment?

Chris Anderson [00:23:57]:
I mean, publicly, they were just happy to give away the money to other people. And one of the papers that was published as a result of this was that they had achieved a 250 multiple of happiness by, like, they gave away money. So maybe technically they lose something there, but the number of people who benefited from it, there was at least a 250 x multiple of happiness. So there was that. But no, there had been no social science experiment done of generosity at this scale. Most social psychology experiments are done with psychology students at a university who are given $20 and what will happen next. So this was serious money, and the results were really startling. And so it certainly helped convince me that I had to write about this, because it’s like, wait, if you’ve got these deeply wired instincts of generosity and a desire to respond to generosity, and we’re in the connected age, hello.

Chris Anderson [00:24:57]:
The possibilities there just seem extraordinary. It seems like there is a world where we could be really helping each other and really using the Internet for what it was made for. And there’s one other key thing that in thinking about this, that I think is really profound. And I think most people kind of know this, but haven’t, don’t really know it. And it’s this. It’s that. Generosity is fundamentally asymmetric. Like we think of typically a transaction.

Chris Anderson [00:25:29]:
If someone gives something to someone else person, one loses it, the other person gains it. So zero sum, zero sum, that’s not what happens in almost every generous act. In almost every generous act, it’s what the loss to the person who gives may be far less than the loss to the person who gains. So certainly in case of money, a rich person gives away money to a poor person, it’s a tiny fraction of what they have. It doesn’t really cost them that much to the other person who needs it. It may be life transformative, enormous, other types as well. Just if you give away, for example, a connection. If you introduce someone to a network of resources, that could cost you a ten minute email, and it literally could transform that person’s life.

Chris Anderson [00:26:13]:
In general, the spread of generosity, it lifts all boggs, because in each of those transactions, a small cost has been turned into a huge benefit. Wow.

Wes Moss [00:26:25]:
What about the link around gratitude? I guess that’s the receiving end. So we were generous, and then the gratitude of someone who receives something, is that where the multiple is?

Chris Anderson [00:26:41]:
Yeah. Gratitude plays a huge role, I think, in starting really anyone’s generosity journey. Like, it’s very hard to be generous if you’re feeling grumpy and sort of inward looking, it’s hard. And I think the first step often is to find gratitude. So that might happen. Just someone is kind to you and you just naturally respond. Or you might just start your day with a cup of tea, sitting on the sofa and thinking, wait a sec. This actually is a pretty amazing time to be alive.

Chris Anderson [00:27:15]:
I mean, look over there. There is a tap. I can switch it on and I can fill my kettle with water. I can make myself a cup of tea in three minutes, and it’s delicious. Over there, there’s an electric socket in the wall, and I can plug things into that, that can clean my house and make me warm and make me cool and iron my clothes. That’s kind of amazing. And with a bit of imagination, in addition to the normal things that we’re so grateful for, like our loved ones and so forth, there is just a lot that we take for granted. And when you start to think of it, then you kind of want to give back to the universe.

Chris Anderson [00:27:58]:
Finding that generosity mindset is the first step, and it often comes by a practice of gratitude. Gratitude. Starting your day with gratitude is just such a healthy thing.

Wes Moss [00:28:08]:
By the way, is that something you practice?

Chris Anderson [00:28:12]:
I do. Some days I wish I did it every single day. I’m working on that, but I think it’s. I used to swim. I like to swim in the summer. And one of the things, one of the best ways of swimming, 30 lengths of the swimming pool is on each length, you think of something else you can be grateful for. Like, there’s lots of different ways you can find a moment to build in this practice. But yes, the days when I remember to start with, just thinking about something new that I’m grateful for, those are.

Wes Moss [00:28:48]:
Better days, does have an impact for you. How about if we think about now, the link between so there’s gratitude and then there’s this feeling of, let’s say, what do you think the science is behind gratitude and happiness? Is there a biological, evolutionary link that you think that is powerful?

Chris Anderson [00:29:14]:
I think there is. I haven’t studied directly the link between gratitude and happiness. What I’ve looked at is the link between generosity and happiness, which is almost the biggest surprise you could see. If someone feels gratitude, that feeling of gratitude almost is a feeling of happiness. It’s a form of happiness. And so there’s clearly a close link there. But what’s surprising is the link between generosity and happiness. So there was a Gallup study done with it, like, 130,000 people across many countries, and they asked lots and lots of questions.

Chris Anderson [00:29:48]:
One of the questions they asked is, did you donate meaningfully to a cause you care about? In the last month, the people who had done that reported levels of happiness that were equivalent to, as if their income had been doubled. So it’s shocking. That’s a shocking number. And there may be an element of correlation there rather than causation, if you like. But lots and lots of other science really robustly shows that the act of giving brings with it happiness. And it’s funny, because in the moment of giving, we’re often not thinking about that often. What we’re thinking about, we’re worried about, is this the right decision? Right? Giving away.

Wes Moss [00:30:37]:
Am I giving away too much? Right. Just like you were thinking about with Ted. Right. Am I giving away too much money? Am I giving away my content?

Chris Anderson [00:30:46]:
Once it’s gone, it’s gone. There’s a name for it. It’s loss aversion. It’s a powerful psychological feeling, and that often blocks us, and yet we forget that once you’ve done it, it’s a very special form of happiness. It’s not the same happiness you get from eating an ice cream or whatever. It’s not like an instant moment of pleasure. I think it’s a deeper form of happiness where you find yourself being whispered to by that reflective inner voice. I like this better version of myself.

Chris Anderson [00:31:17]:
This is the version of me that I kind of like being. There’s this feeling of meaning and fulfillment, and I think deep happiness that can come with that.

Wes Moss [00:31:28]:
Do you think we need to see results, or is that really almost just like, is that an afterburner of our gift and our time?

Chris Anderson [00:31:38]:
So that’s a really good question. I think in some ways, for the feeling of happiest, like short term, you actually don’t need the results. There’s just this thing that if you give with an intent to do something good for someone else, you’ve done your part. And if it goes wrong after that, you still did the right thing. I think people still feel happy about that. But I also think that we almost should teach ourselves to care more about results. Because I think applying our reflective minds to how we give can actually multiply by an order of magnitude or more the effectiveness of what we’re doing. And longer term, if we’re to do this, we not only want to feel, haha, I’m a good person, I was generous.

Chris Anderson [00:32:30]:
We actually want to know I’m being wise about this. And humans are so complicated. The psychologist Paul Bloom wrote a book called against empathy. And the essential argument of that was that our empathetic instincts, I mean, they’re beautiful, but they’re kind of, in some circumstances, they can be shallow, they can be tuned to. So we see a disaster, there’s a girl suffering, wes, write a check to the agency and then we’re done. Or we direct our empathy to people in our own community, as opposed to people further away. There’s a case to apply our reflective thinking to this and say, okay, I actually want to be serious about what I give away, and I want to spend my money really wisely. If money is our chosen route for generosity, I want to spend it wisely.

Chris Anderson [00:33:30]:
And then, yes, we really should care. And I think there is a different kind of happiness that comes with that kind of satisfaction at having taken the process seriously and reflectively and responsibly. And I spent 3 hours researching, and I finally found an amazing organization. And I’m not only going to give them money, I’m going to go to their next event and learn about them and meet the community of people who are around them. Like I said, because some organizations have figured out how to leverage philanthropic money in the most spectacular way, they can have a much, much bigger impact. So it’s complicated, but I would say let’s use our reflective thinking to go there as well.

Wes Moss [00:34:15]:
I think this has been a long term challenge for me, and I think it’s a hard thing to find, and maybe that’s what you’re touching on here. But when you start thinking about generosity and you, let’s say, have a propensity to be generous, it is very difficult and confusing to figure out what is the right place to be generous. And I remember over the years, I’ve hired philanthropic consultants and people who will sit down with you and they will say, let’s talk about this. I find that that’s a difficult job to continue to be in. I’ve had this experience over the year over the last decade, where I think I’ve worked with and talked to two or three separate philanthropic consultants, and they do it for a little while, and then I guess it’s a hard business to be in, and then they’re gone and like, okay, I got to go find another one of these people to do this. It’s hard to figure out not only where to give, how to give, but it’s maybe even equally as difficult to find somebody to help you with this, because the reality is most philanthropic folks are also subscribed to their particular cause, and they’re not just wide open. So how do we find this, Chris?

Chris Anderson [00:35:42]:
Is it possible? No, it’s such an important journey there. So I write about the book about this. There’s one particular idea that I think is very helpful to think about. It’s leverage. The usual advice, often from people charities, is, oh, just look for those that have the smallest overhead or whatever. That’s really poor advice, I think, because overhead means most charities aren’t passed through things that are just sending your money to somewhere else. Most charities are hiring a bunch of people, aka overhead, to try to figure out what system change looks like in a particular area. And so the real question to ask is, what is the impact per dollar sent to an organization? And I think if you can understand what an organization’s use of leverage is, it’s important.

Chris Anderson [00:36:39]:
So leverage. There are so many things that can amplify the power of money. Technology, an invention. Would you rather support an egg, a golden egg or a goose that can lay 1000 golden eggs? Technology is an amplifier of human intent. And so people who have figured that a powerful use of it, that is one thing. Education is incredibly powerful. You’re changing someone’s mind for life. And so investing, that may be the point of amplification.

Chris Anderson [00:37:12]:
You like the government, is super powerful. Some philanthropies that their whole effort is to nudge the government or to take risks that government won’t take and show ways of intervening on a social problem that can then be scaled massively by a government. There’s lots of examples of that. The entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship, I think, is an incredible point of leverage. If you can invest philanthropically in people who have the energy and the power and the skills to build a team around them, raise money, build something, and put it out there, there’s incredible leverage right there. The Internet offers incredible leverage. You think of something like the ice bucket challenge or something which went viral, or something like GivingTuesday.

Chris Anderson [00:38:02]:
You invest in GivingTuesday, whatever this hashtag is spread around the world. In the case of GivingTuesday, a few million dollars of philanthropy is unlocking billions of dollars of donation elsewhere. So I just think, for me, that notion of finding your leverage, for me, the big aha moment was ideas. Ted can take ideas and amplify them into a million minds. So that’s powerful. But find your leverage, that piece that gets you excited, and you go, aha. I like that. I get that.

Chris Anderson [00:38:35]:
And then you can spend philanthropic money feeling excited about it, not sort of wearily dutiful. So much of our charitable giving is wearily dutiful, and that is a tragedy, because some of them.

Wes Moss [00:38:51]:
What do you mean by that? That we can just, like, we have to do it.

Chris Anderson [00:38:54]:
We feel guilty to do it. Yeah, that’s right. There’s this person who’s doing lovely work, and I kind of feel like I ought to support them, but it’s done from a sense of duty, not excitement. And I think what the future needs is for change makers to come up with really, really exciting plans to change the world. That will have us jumping up and down with excitement. We want to support you. We’re so inspired by what you are doing. Go.

Chris Anderson [00:39:29]:
That’s what I really think it can be like. But to get there, it takes a bit of research, but finding the right community. There are amazing nonprofits out there, and I think in the future, more and more people are going to decide that that is how we’ve got all this technology coming. The robot is going to do all the work. AI is whatever. There will always, always, whatever else is happening in the world, there’s always going to be a need for people of good heart, good spirit, good mind, to team together and say, how can we address problem x? How can we make the world more wonderful?

Wes Moss [00:40:09]:
So, reading infectious generosity, your book is helping the reader figure out through a series of questions where they should be spending their time. How do they find some sort of path that gives them leverage? So I guess that’s one way to do it, is to read a book like yours that can help people really think about what would give them an enduring sense of gratitude around giving, as opposed to going to a consultant. Is that something you’ve ever.

Chris Anderson [00:40:41]:
Look, I’m sure there are great consultants out there, but there are structural problems to how philanthropy works right now, where so much of it is one donor gives to one organization at a time, and there’s no real chance for people to dream big. I’m a believer in big dreams, and I think what we need are ways of creating collaborative philanthropy in many ways. If someone’s listening to this, do you have a group of friends who you could invite round for dinner? First of all, hospitality is a lovely form of generosity right there. And just have a little brainstorm about what do we care about? Is there any overlap in the things that we care about? And could we do anything about that? Could we support someone locally together, or is there a cause that we could engage in that has more reach than just locally that we all of us care about? We could help amplify, and I just think there’s a lot of potential right there to expand it from just being one person talking to one professional who steers you to one philanthropic.org.

Wes Moss [00:42:03]:
Just to.

Chris Anderson [00:42:03]:
A more dynamic dreaming together, because that.

Wes Moss [00:42:08]:
Is the way it is. It’s the squeakiest wheels that end up getting donations. It’s hammered. Call text. Hey, can you give? Can you give? Sure. But I’m reacting very often when it comes to charity, as opposed to thinking proactively. So tell our listeners about. You mentioned several ways.

Wes Moss [00:42:29]:
You have six different ways. Can you share some of those to be generous, but are not necessarily money based?

Chris Anderson [00:42:35]:
Exactly. So many of the best ways to be generous don’t involve writing a check. They all start from.

Wes Moss [00:42:43]:
I’ll remember that next week when I get another request to write a check.

Chris Anderson [00:42:47]:
Exactly. They all start from a generous mindset. And the very first one is just the gift of attention. It’s a bigger gift than it seems because we spend so much of our time in our own zone. You’re walking down the street and you’re worried about things and focus, Wes, don’t really pay. We can’t afford to pay attention to the people around us. But many of the most beautiful chain reactions of generosity have started just by being willing to see someone and to look at them and ask them a question and pay attention to them. And whether it’s an individual or whether it’s a cause, just being open to shifting your attention away from your immediate needs, that’s the first and sort of fundamental act of generosity.

Chris Anderson [00:43:29]:
And I’ve got lovely stories in the book about people who, from that point, what happened next can be amazing. And then there’s many other things. The gift of knowledge is a huge gift. Do you know something that other people potentially could know? Again, talk about asymmetry. It may actually be quite simple for you to share that knowledge that’s similar.

Wes Moss [00:43:55]:
To what you’ve done with Ted.

Chris Anderson [00:43:57]:
Well, Ted has turned out to be an example of it’s. And in fact, it’s what we tell speakers when they come is. Here’s what your number one goal is. When you’re on the stage, you’re not promoting yourself or a platform or a company or an organization. You’re offering a gift. You have got something in your head that others would like to have inside their heads and it could actually benefit them. So it’s this gift of knowledge that can then spread out to the world. And it’s so miraculous and beautiful that humans can do that.

Wes Moss [00:44:27]:
It is a gift. And so many of our shows over the years, and whether it’s radio or podcasts or topics or guests, are because of Ted, because that’s where there’s so many ideas that are so impactful that I want to reshare them to some extent.

Chris Anderson [00:44:49]:
Yeah. And in doing that, Wes, you are being generous. I mean, this is one of the most important forms of generosity. Many people listening to you, stuff that they’ve heard on this podcast, has changed how they’ve thought about their future. That is as big a gift as it gets in many ways. So that’s a beautiful thing and anyone can do it. Everyone has something that they know they’ve experienced that others haven’t. And whether it’s just listening to someone and then sharing something of yourself or whether it’s making a video that goes online, the Khan Academy, which now reaches countless kids, just started because a guy wanted to teach math lessons to his relatives and too many of them wanted it.

Chris Anderson [00:45:39]:
And so he started recording them and putting them up on YouTube and they loved those videos and boom. It’s amazing what can be done.

Wes Moss [00:45:49]:
It was a similar virality from what you guys did. It was right. It was just great, generous content and it helped so many people that it spread like wildfire. Attention which to we live in a world where it’s hard to pay any one thing, any attention because we’re bombarded sharing knowledge.

Chris Anderson [00:46:11]:
Okay, and then how about this one? Just the sharing of connections. That again, is something that can be quite easy to do, but it can.

Wes Moss [00:46:20]:
Change and powerful someone’s life.

Chris Anderson [00:46:22]:
Yeah. So it’s not like you shop your friends emails to anyone who asks, but thoughtfully, if you introduce someone to someone else, that can be life changing and it can be relatively easy to do. Another really important one is hospitality. I just mentioned it. But I mean, so many great things start when people open up their homes. You’re tapping into something that’s very ancient biological. Humans have always met in every culture, humans meet together to eat and drink and they build different relationships coming out of that.

Wes Moss [00:47:04]:
You talk about enchantment.

Chris Anderson [00:47:05]:
Enchantment. Enchantment. Yeah.

Wes Moss [00:47:07]:
I love this.

Chris Anderson [00:47:07]:
Yeah. Enchantment. So if you are a creative person, whether it’s music or photography or art, creative in any other way, cooking, you can give the gift of enchantment. There’s many ways that you can share it, but, I mean, online is the thing that in a way that can scale most, that there are just beautiful stories of artists and photographers who have given away their work, and so many people have benefited. This is definitely a complex issue because there’s also a lot of artists, photographers and so forth who need to make a living from their enchantment, and that is okay. And I think collectively, we all have to figure out better business models here. Like, if you are the recipient of beautiful art or music or photography from anyone, consider signing up for them on Patreon and supporting them and so forth. We need to view this as generosity that we can respond to.

Chris Anderson [00:48:07]:
But in general, there are just magical stories of how the sharing of creative wonder is uplifting to a large number of people. And there was one more as well. I think that bridges.

Wes Moss [00:48:21]:
By building bridges.

Chris Anderson [00:48:22]:
Yeah, bridges. Building bridges. In the era that we’re in, of division, that is one of the kindest things that someone can do. And I guess we spoke about it briefly earlier, but again, it’s something that anyone can do online. It’s not easy to do because you can get shot at by people from both sides, but it is worth trying.

Wes Moss [00:48:41]:
To do what has maybe given you a little bit of hope. It’s easy to find that we live in a scary world, but is there anything giving you hope at this point?

Chris Anderson [00:48:53]:
I think it’s the belief that despite a world that’s full of this division and outrage and toxicity and so forth, I think the pendulum can swing on this one. I got a lot of hope talking with some people, especially in the next generation, who are convinced that the tide is turning. So that there was this kid, Milard Merg, who I spoke with, who’s early 20s, who was inspired by an influencer, Mr. Beast, who has like 200 million followers on YouTube. He’s one of the most popular people on YouTube. Yeah. He is not a spreader of doom and gloom. He’s a spreader of crazy, wild, hilarious, fantastically audacious and ambitious acts, many of which include generosity in some form or other.

Chris Anderson [00:49:43]:
It may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I’m convinced he’s inspiring a generation that kindness, charity of different kinds, can be cool and fun. And certainly Millard Merg was inspired by him, and he noticed that there was this trend on TikTok of food just being wasted for the views. Big, huge vats of peanut butter. Splat. Look how I can wreck my parents kitchen. He was kind of disgusted by this, so he did a different version. He had huge amounts of peanut butter and jelly. Splat.

Chris Anderson [00:50:16]:
Splat. And turned it into 100 hand. He made all these sandwiches, wrapped them, took them out onto the streets, met people who looked hungry, and gave them a sandwich. The video of this was seen far more times than the trend that he was combating. And talking to him, he was like, look, he was so eloquent on this. He said, anything that is emotional will go viral, and there are easy ways to do it. By being a jerk. You can slap someone and you’ll have a viral TikTok video, but you could be a jerk for a day, but it won’t last.

Chris Anderson [00:50:56]:
Like, if you want to do stuff that actually lasts and that builds an enduring relationship with people, kindness works better. And so his embracing of this idea of asymmetry, that actually people who are trying to do the right thing on the Internet can ultimately win this battle. I found that hugely encouraging. Listening to him, I guess my message would be, it can seem naive to think that there is a better way forward. I don’t think we have a choice but to try to find that better way. I think if we can’t figure this out, we’re giving up on humanity’s biggest superpower of being able to cooperate and do things together. So let’s not. Let’s find that way.

Chris Anderson [00:51:44]:
And people like Milard, Merg, and others coming through have helped convince me that it’s a battle that actually can be won.

Wes Moss [00:51:51]:
Is there something we can do? If you think about what is something tactical that you listen to, this podcast, you think, okay, how do I do something generous today? What’s your suggestion on that? Something easy?

Chris Anderson [00:52:08]:
Honestly, I think the easiest thing that could have real consequence is to meet with a group of friends and start there.

Wes Moss [00:52:14]:
I do love that idea. Yeah, I love that there’s another simple.

Chris Anderson [00:52:17]:
Thing that people could do if they’re out of ideas. We built this artificial intelligence, this AI called the infectious generosity guru. You can find it@infectiousgenerosity.org so, Tig, the infectious generosity guru, it is designed to help you brainstorm what your contribution to infectious generosity could be. So it’ll ask you what you care about, what are your skills? What do you know? And then get involved in a playful conversation. And it’s a lot of fun. And a few people using it have really said, this might have changed my life. And so that’s been very exciting to see, and I’m so curious to hear any stories coming out of that.

Wes Moss [00:53:03]:
So for those of us listening, if we go to this and we use infectious generosity guru, which is infectiousgenerosity.org, then we want to hear. So Chris wants to hear what has the brainstorm led to and what is the generosity that has resulted of that I cannot wait to. That’s going to be a book in itself. That will be a book in itself.

Chris Anderson [00:53:24]:
I hope so. I really do. It’s a lot of fun, by the way. It also helps create little social media images that you can share and recruit other people if you come up with a plan. AI is going to change our lives so much, and it’s kind of a battle. It could go in dark directions. But while we’re all here and all surviving and saying we still have jobs, then there are some ways to use AI for good. And this is one.

Wes Moss [00:53:51]:
This is a totally unfair question. I’m sure people ask you this all the time, so I’m sure you already have an answer for this. But what’s to you? Maybe not the but can you give us your idea around an idea from.

Chris Anderson [00:54:06]:
TEd.

Wes Moss [00:54:09]:
That you have loved that has moved you dramatically? Not your favorite TED talk, that’d be no.

Chris Anderson [00:54:23]:
I mean, the biggest single takeaway for me is just a conviction that we’re not helpless spectators of history. It’s not like we have to just sleepwalk into the future. The future literally doesn’t exist. The future could be anything. It’s not like it’s there and we don’t know it. It literally hasn’t been written yet. The conviction from watching Ted is that in this connected age, everyone plays a part in writing that future. Literally everyone.

Chris Anderson [00:55:02]:
We’re all connected. Our views. It can be a flap of a butterfly’s wings that may be felt across the planet in surprising ways. So it’s just that everyone should be part of this. We should be writing this together. We do not need to sleepwalk into the future. We will write the future together. And there is at least a possibility, there is a pathway.

Chris Anderson [00:55:24]:
I am certain that that future could be a beautiful one.

Wes Moss [00:55:29]:
That is an optimistic way and I think a realistic way. I agree with you on your sense of optimism here, that we do have a shot at making things better, and we do have a shot of calming down the division and the divide, because I think that we feel it maybe more than it really is. There and I think that’s another part of what you speak about. And then generosity may be one of the main elixirs for this. And that’s what your book talks about, is that it could potentially be the elixir for this divide in the world.

Chris Anderson [00:56:06]:
That we have generosity slightly reshaped for the modern era, like a generosity where we don’t, instead of what happens today, wes, is that so many people nitpick each other’s generosity. Someone does something kind, and there’s a whole bunch of cynics who say, was that really kind? Or were they just doing it for their self promotion in some way? Or could they have done more? Or how did they make that money anyway? I think we have to let go of that and embrace an idea that I call imperfect generosity. There’s always been multiple reasons why people do things, even in the old days, like give and you shall receive. That’s imperfect generosity. There’s an additional motive there. Give and your reward shall be in heaven. That’s imperfect generosity. But it’s beautiful still.

Chris Anderson [00:57:00]:
So we should just encourage generosity in all its forms. We should embrace it. And if we do, there’s a chance that we can get into this world where all boats rise. Because each of us can give the thing that is easier for us to give. And even if we get nothing back, we’ll get joy from it, but we actually will get something back from it. It’s the way it works. People are delighted by generosity. Your reputation changes.

Chris Anderson [00:57:30]:
Things will come back as well. All boats rise. If we were to collectively agree to let generosity play a bigger role in our lives. All boats rise.

Wes Moss [00:57:42]:
As we wrap up your careers is so fascinating from media, and you took a company public, and then you did, Ted, and it’s grown into a global phenomenon. What is next for you? I know you’re working on. You’ve just published a book recently. What are you excited about now? What is next for Chris Anderson?

Chris Anderson [00:58:02]:
Thank you. One of the things I’m most excited about is this thing I’ve been building with a few others called the Audacious project, which is an attempt to try to move nonprofit work from being this sort of weary worthiness sort of thing to being genuinely exciting. I’ve been so frustrated watching what we put change makers through. I’m married to one of the world’s great changemakers, Jacqueline Novogratz at acumen. And I’ve seen for someone like that to have to spend 50% of their time raising money is just criminal. We should not be expecting that of people we don’t expect that of our business entrepreneurs. But the fundraising mechanisms for nonprofits aren’t there in the same way. There is no IPO, for example, for a nonprofit.

Chris Anderson [00:58:49]:
And so money has to be raised, one grinding out, meeting after another. It’s really, really bad. And so how do you change that? Well, you change that by trying to create more of a market that brings together a group of donors at one time to look at preselected, amazing nonprofit ideas. And so the audacious project asks change makers, what could you achieve if money was no object? Like, honestly, what is the best work your team, you and your team could do? And what you get back are these thrilling ideas for a better world that tackle a Giant problem or open up an amazing new opportunity. Those you then test for credibility. You’ve got a dog. Those you then test for credibility and take to a group of donors who at one time get together and have to decide together, will we support that? And what happens in that moment, Wes, you get infectious generosity before your very eyes. Someone finally says, I’m convinced.

Chris Anderson [00:59:52]:
I want to support this, if you guys will. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Suddenly, you’ve raised a ton of money, and this nonprofit can then go and do their actual work instead of just raising money.

Wes Moss [01:00:05]:
By the way, you just woke up Cody. You awakened my snoring dog by the. Him. Did you hear him snoring?

Chris Anderson [01:00:13]:
I didn’t hear him snoring. I heard him bark.

Wes Moss [01:00:15]:
He’s right under my legs, and it’s pretty loud. And I was like, I don’t think it’s coming through.

Chris Anderson [01:00:20]:
No.

Wes Moss [01:00:21]:
As soon as you started talking about the audacious project, he just jumped up and scared me.

Chris Anderson [01:00:25]:
You see, he wants to contribute anyway. There’s a wheel turning there, and I would love that to go bigger. I just think that as a world, we could get much more excited about the work that is possible by nonprofits if we allowed them to dream a bit more.

Wes Moss [01:00:41]:
Well, I would say you’re an enchanting human, and you’ve had such an amazing career. So I hope the book is a huge success. I think it really gets you thinking about a problem that I think is hard to solve. And that’s where do we put our attention for something that’s so important, which is generosity. It’s philanthropy. It’s charitable giving. It’s related back to gratitude. It increases happiness.

Wes Moss [01:01:02]:
But it’s hard to figure it out because we have these endless options. And the way you describe about how to really think it through, I think it’s worth thinking through because it’s such an important thing. So I think you continue to contribute to the world and I’m appreciative of that.

Chris Anderson [01:01:22]:
Well, thank you. Thank you so much for this time and great questions and a really interesting conversation. I wish your listeners well as they dream about their own futures.

Wes Moss [01:01:32]:
Thank you. God bless you. All right.

Mallory Boggs [01:01:35]:
Hey y’all, this is Mallory with the retire sooner team. Please be sure to rate and subscribe to this podcast and share it with a friend. If you have any questions, you can find us@wesmoss.com that’s wesmoss.com. You can also follow us on Instagram and YouTube. You’ll find us under the handle Retire sooner podcast. And now for our show’s disclosure. This information is provided to you as a resource for informational purposes only and is not to be viewed as investment advice or recommendations. Investing involves risk, including the possible loss of principal.

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