Get Happier, Help Others: Some Good Ideas About Giving

It's the season of giving: colorful paper and shiny bows, sure, and charitable giving, too. In this special episode, Jacob Goldstein, the host of What's Your Problem https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/whats-your-problem/id1602541473, gets smart about donating. Did you know that spending money on others makes you happier than spending money on yourself? Or that altruistic nerds have discovered four of the most impactful charities in the world (per dollar spent)? Have you ever wondered how poker players think about giving? Dr. Laurie Santos from The Happiness Lab, Elie Hassenfeld of GiveWell, and Nate Silver and Maria Konnikova from Risky Business talk about how to maximize your giving – and why you’ll be happy you did. Link to donate: https://givingmultiplier.org/happinesslab Listen to The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-happiness-lab-with-dr-laurie-santos/id1474245040 Listen to Risky Business https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/risky-business-with-nate-silver-and-maria-konnikova/id1743213122 See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:13Speaker 00

  This is Jacob Goldstein. When you're a business owner interested in expanding to new markets, there's a lot to consider and countless questions to answer before making the call. The most important one being, are you ready? That's where ChatGPT comes in. Give it a goal, add your files, and ask chat to help you map out different scenarios for the future of your business. So when growth is on the table, you've got an expansion plan ready to implement. Get started today at chatgpt.com.

• 0:41Laurie Santos?

  The Happiness Lab is proudly sponsored by Amica Insurance. You know what they say, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. So go with Amica and get coverage from a mutual insurer that's built for their customers, one that looks after what's important to you together. Auto, home, life, and more. Amica helps you protect what matters most. Visit amica.com and get a quote today. The holidays have a way of reminding us what matters most. Our health, our loved ones, and making memories together. That's why MassMutual's Living Well Rider is now included with eligible MassMutual Whole Life Insurance as part of their commitment to supporting policy owners' total wellbeing.

• 1:24Laurie Santos?

  It's about helping people live well so they can live on. Learn more at massmutual.com/wellness. That's massmutual.com/wellness.

• 1:38Speaker 00

  I'm Jacob Goldstein. I host a Pushkin podcast called What's Your Problem? And I am here randomly talking to you right now because today is the day before Giving Tuesday. Giving Tuesday, as you may already know, is the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, and it's supposed to be the day we give money to charity. And I'm going to be honest with you. In my middle-aged, somewhat calcified heart, I cringe a little bit every time I hear the phrase Giving Tuesday. I think Giving Tuesday is not a real thing. It's not a real day. It's just something somebody made up a few years ago. But that cynicism is not helping anybody. In fact, as it turns out, it isn't even helping me.

• 2:21Speaker 00

  I know this to be true because over the past decade or so, research has made two things really clear. One, giving money away makes us feel better than we think it will make us feel. In other words, we underestimate the benefit to ourselves of giving money to others. That's thing one. Thing two is this, there are charities that are proven, proven by really robust evidence to do a tremendous amount of good with the money we give them. So today, I and my colleagues at Pushkin are leaning into Giving Tuesday. We are putting out this special Giving Tuesday show to get into this evidence, to really

• 3:02Speaker 00

  understand why giving money makes us happy, why we don't do it more, and who we should give money to. To start out on the show, I'm going to talk with Laurie Santos. Laurie is a Yale psychologist who hosts a Pushkin show called The Happiness Lab. And Laurie and I are going to talk about the evidence that shows that giving makes us happy, and then the obvious puzzle that follows from that evidence. If giving makes us so happy, why don't we give more? Later on the show, I'll talk with Eli Hasenfeld. Eli is the co-founder and CEO of GiveWell, and he has spent nearly two decades scouring the world, studying the research, to try to figure out which charities do the most good with every dollar.

• 3:45Speaker 00

  And then finally, I'll talk with Maria Konnikova and Nate Silver. Maria and Nate are a pair of writers who host a Pushkin podcast called Risky Business. But they're also both professional poker players. They are people whose livelihoods depend on making optimal bets. So I'll be talking to them about how they bring that thinking to their charitable giving. Laurie Santos. Tell me why I am not giving enough money to charity.

• 4:17Laurie Santos?

  Well, it's probably because your mind is leading you astray, right? I mean, you're like a smart person, right? You probably think through like, what would be the pros and cons of giving a charity? You probably do some simulations in your head about how it would feel for you. And you know, how the recipients of that money would feel. And there's just tons of psychological evidence showing that when we do those simulations, we get them really, really wrong.

• 4:41Speaker 00

  Huh, we don't know what makes us happy with giving money, as with everything.

• 4:45Laurie Santos?

  As with everything, yeah. I mean, in some ways, the giving money part shouldn't be surprising. You know, I have a whole podcast about how we get happiness wrong all the time. But this one's really insidious because it means that we're like leaving opportunities, not just to make ourselves happier, kind of on the table. But we're also leaving opportunities to just do good in the world and do good in society on the table, too. So in some ways, it's like even sadder.

• 5:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, like people talk about win-win. This is like lose-lose, right? I feel worse and everybody feels worse.

• 5:11Laurie Santos?

  And it's another case where we could be building the pie, right? You know, say, say I have, you know, 10 bucks sitting around in my pocket, right? I could spend it in a way that makes me happy, or I could donate it to a good cause, right? I probably feel better, the research would show, spending that $10 on a good charity than I would feel kind of blowing it on myself. But now the money is going to increase happiness in other people, right? Presumably, somebody who really needed that money. And so we're losing these opportunities to grow the pie. And we really just need to understand this bias better so that we can be happier.

• 5:44Speaker 00

  So you alluded to the research that shows that giving money away makes us happier. Tell me more about that. Like, what is the academic work that's been done on this subject?

• 5:52Laurie Santos?

  Yeah, well, there's tons of studies now. You know, one of my favorite is a really straightforward one. It comes out of the lab of Elizabeth Dunn and her colleagues at the University of British Columbia. And their method is really straightforward. They walk up to some person on the street and they say, hey, do you want to be in a psych study? I think the person kind of begrudgingly is like, okay, fine. But then it turns out it's an awesome psych study because Liz and her colleagues just hand you 20 bucks and you're like, cool. The key, though, is that she tells you how to spend that money. She either says, hey, by the end of the day, do something nice for yourself with this money. Treat yourself, you know. Something you wouldn't have expected. Or by the end of the day, do something nice with this money for somebody else. Right. You could donate it to charity. You could buy your friend a latte. Right. It doesn't matter, but it has to be for somebody else.

• 6:34Laurie Santos?

  And then the key is that she calls participants later that day, and even in some cases later in the week. And what she finds is that people tend to feel happier when they donate the money to somebody else or do something nice for somebody else with the money, more so than they feel when they felt spent the equivalent amount of money on themselves. And this study I love because it's just so straightforward. It's just suggests that, you know, what we predict will happen, right? And Liz has actually done these studies where she asks a different group of participants. Hey, imagine you're in the study where I walked up to you on the street and gave you 20 bucks. Would you be happier spending that on yourself or somebody else? And like robustly, people say, oh, I'd be happier spending on myself, right? Because I get something out of the deal. But what she finds is that we're just, our prediction is just totally wrong.

• 7:18Laurie Santos?

  When we spend on others, we're happier.

• 7:20Speaker 00

  So I feel like there's a subtlety there in the spending on others group, right? Like, it is, in some ways, more intuitive to me that like, whatever. Buying lunch for my friend would make me happy because my friend would be so happy and we'd be happy together and the thing would be happening in this very, you know, social, real, physical way. Like, I get that one. It seems less obvious to me that like, giving 20 bucks to a charity, helping people in Sub-Saharan Africa would make me happy. Even though clearly intellectually, analytically, I know that the 20 bucks going to Sub-Saharan Africa is going to do more to increase abstract human happiness than buying lunch for my friend, who could have bought lunch for herself.

• 8:05Speaker 00

  So like, how does that piece of it work? How do we think about that piece of it?

• 8:10Laurie Santos?

  You are on to an important point, which is that there are better and worse ways to give to charity. Right? In terms of like boosting our own happiness and sort of feeling the impact from that. We are, we are a lot happier if we can see the impact of our work. Right? But even when we don't see the impact of our work, the act of donating winds up making us feel better than we think. Again, I, I share the intuition that you have, Jacob, right? Like, I know these studies, I can kind of quote the stats. Uh, and I still don't have the intuition that it works, but the results really just suggest that we feel better than we assume we will.

• 8:42Speaker 00

  Why do you think we get it wrong? I mean, I know we get everything wrong, but why do you think we get this wrong?

• 8:47Laurie Santos?

  Yeah, I mean, we get everything wrong, right? Our minds. I wish, I wish we could just like update like mind 2.0. It'd be so much better. I, I think there's some, there's some reasons that we get this one wrong. One is sort of when we're doing an act of kindness, what we focus on as opposed to what the recipient will focus on, right? I'm sort of focused on whether or not my gift is kind of in some sense competent. Like, am I doing the right thing? Am I picking the right charity? Maybe in more local acts of kindness, am I doing it the right way? Right?

• 9:15Speaker 00

  Yeah. I don't want to be awkward. I don't want to be rude or make this person feel some sense of obligation or reciprocity that might not work for them. You're over, overthinking it. You're saying we're overthinking it.

• 9:25Laurie Santos?

  But in terms of the overthinking, that's not what's happening on the other side. You know, think of the recipient of a compliment, right? If, you know, if someone walks up to you in the street, it's like, hey, you know, love those glasses. They really suit you, Jacob. Like nicely done. You're not thinking.

• 9:38Speaker 00

  Thank you. I know you didn't even mean it, and I like it.

• 9:41Laurie Santos?

  But you're not, you're not thinking of like, did they say it right? Did they use the right adjective? Was it cool glasses or stylish? You're just like, oh, my gosh, I'm surprised and I have this incredible warm feeling. And so this is part of the disconnect is that when we're making the decision to do something nice, we're overthinking, we're caught up in if we're doing it right and so on. But the recipients, they don't feel any of that. They're just like, oh, my gosh, I feel amazing. And so we kind of mispredict what they're paying attention to when they react. And that means their reactions are often a lot more positive than we expect. And then we're like, oh, I guess, I guess it was nice to do that kind thing for somebody.

• 10:16Speaker 00

  It's the broader lesson of like, everybody's just thinking about themselves all the time. We're thinking about ourselves as givers and am I the optimal giver? Am I giving in the optimal way? But the recipients aren't thinking about you. They're just thinking about them.

• 10:28Laurie Santos?

  Yeah, and we get so caught up in the awkwardness of it, right? You know, how many compliments have you not given just because you're like, oh, I don't want to do it wrong or seem weird? And some of Nick Epley's, a professor at the University of Chicago's data, he finds that about a third of the compliments we think in our heads, we don't actually tell the people around us, right? Which, when you think compliments usually are received really well and make people's day, it's like a lot of positivity that's just like stuck inside people's heads that we're not giving out.

• 10:56Speaker 00

  Friction seems like another interesting piece, right? There's like, you're in your own head too much. And the other core piece is like, eh, I don't know. I'm just some guy in the world. How do I figure out who to give to? And like, I feel like that one is underrated in the world in general, right? Like, we just, we're like water. We just flow to the easiest route. I mean, how do you, how do you see that playing out in charity more, more generally? In giving more generally?

• 11:20Laurie Santos?

  Yeah, I mean, I think that friction is a huge thing, right? I mean, a good friend of mine just had a baby with his wife. And my instant reaction was like, oh, my gosh, I should, I should do something nice for them. Maybe I'll get them some food or some onesies or something. But I was like, do I just show up at their house? Like, do they have any dietary restrictions that I'm forgetting about? Is this weird? Like, all, again, all this overthinking in my head. But another good friend of ours was like, I'm setting up a meal train. Here's the date. You click on this link. It's super easy. Write what you're gonna, you know, give him. If it's a lasagna, whatever. Here's how you drop it off. She just made it really easy for me to do the nice thing that I was thinking about doing anyway. I needed somebody to make that friction go away for me to help.

• 12:01Laurie Santos?

  And so I think there's so many cases of this in, in terms of what we could do to, to do nice things for others, whether that's with a charitable donation or even just like, you know, asking a friend if they need some support or checking in on the people we care about, sharing compliments and so on. The friction kind of gets in the way. And I think this is the idea is that we can overcome the friction by kind of reducing how much work it is for us to do the nice thing, right? Sometimes the nice thing is just texting a friend or you're already there, you know, like, you know, in the subway and you compliment somebody who's walking by, right? These are the kinds of things that we can do quickly. And if we do them enough, then there's a second way that we can reduce friction, which is that it just kind of becomes a habit, right? If we just get in the habit of doing this over and over again, doing more and more

• 12:45Laurie Santos?

  nice things, then all of a sudden, it just becomes easier. Because so much that we know about human psychology, even though we're kind of, you know, in the crappy beta version, shows that when we do something over and over again, it just becomes easier to do that same thing. And so, one of the Giving Tuesday practices that I talk about on my, my show, The Happiness Lab, is just, hey, practice doing nice things and it will make it easier. You'll kind of experience less friction over time, just because like, it's just the thing you do. When you see somebody, you know, at work who, you know, has some, is wearing something nice, or they do something great in a team meeting, you'll just get good at expressing compliments, expressing gratitude. It'll just become second nature to you.

• 13:22Speaker 00

  So you have this project through your show, The Happiness Lab, of giving money away, like built on this premise that we're talking about, that not only would recipients be better if people gave more, but that givers themselves would be better if people gave more. You have this project that you do every year for Giving Tuesday, which is coming up. Tell me about that project.

• 13:45Laurie Santos?

  Yeah, so the site that we've worked with is this group called Givingmultiplier.org. And their goal is to fight a different kind of thing that can go wrong when we think about donating to charities, which is that many of us really do want to be kind of competent about it. We want our money to go to really good causes in the world. But we also kind of fall prey to the causes that feel really close to my heart. Right? You know, like I might want to give to my local food bank, which is great, you know, it's good to do that. But that 10 bucks I give to my local food bank, it might not have as much impact as, you know, giving to somebody maybe in extreme poverty, right? In like Sub-Saharan Africa. You know, I haven't really analyzed, is my local food bank doing the best with the money and so on?

• 14:27Laurie Santos?

  And so Givingmultiplier.org has this really nice combination of they say, okay, you really feel compelled to give to your food bank, but what if you gave just part of that 10 bucks to one of these so-called super effective charities, right? They've done the research. They're like, the dollar that you give from that 10 bucks to the super effective charity is going to go even further. And so they kind of allow you to make this distinction between your heart and what you kind of really feel locally, the kind of thing that make you feel good because you can see the impact in your community versus what's doing the best work out there. And Givingmultiplier.org this year has picked a really great, super effective charity, which is called GiveDirectly. This is this group that just gives these unconditional cash transfers, like no strings attached, like cash bonus,

• 15:12Laurie Santos?

  to people living in extreme poverty.

• 15:14Speaker 00

  And there's a Happiness Lab URL, right? Shout it out. Shout it from the rooftops. What is it?

• 15:20Laurie Santos?

  It's Givingmultiplier.org/happinesslab. Super easy.

• 15:24Speaker 00

  Go right now. Phones are open. Operators are standing by.

• 15:29Laurie Santos?

  You know, and one of the things we've seen is that a lot of our listeners will donate five bucks, three bucks in some cases, but those kinds of donations really add up. And especially if part of your donation is going to one of these super effective charities, like that dollar is going a really long way.

• 15:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'll say, and I know analyzing super effective charities ends up being about randomized controlled trials, which is great, like real evidence. But I will say that I actually, for a story I did 10 years ago or so, I went to Kenya to a village where GiveDirectly was giving money. And I saw how profound the impact is. I mean, as people get $1,000, at least at that time, no strings attached. And like, I talked to a guy who bought a motorcycle so that he could start a motorcycle taxi business, right? So it's not just like, they buy food and then the money runs out. It's, people have no capital. They have no money. And so getting $1,000 allows them to make these investments that can change their lives forever.

• 16:30Laurie Santos?

  Yeah, we saw that last year where we really focused on GiveDirectly in particular, and one community specifically. So we worked with this community, Kabobo in Rwanda, which is a tiny village just on the outside of Kigali, the capital. But they just like, all, most of the people in the community live off less than a dollar a day. And just like you're saying, they just lack so many of the basic conveniences that we take for granted, right? They have to hike two hours to get access to water. And then the water comes back and it's like, are you going to drink some water? Are you going to give your kid a shower, right? There's no access to schools and these kinds of things. And last year, Happiness Lab listeners were able to generate over $100,000 for this community in particular. And so, just like you're saying, GiveDirectly was able to give each person in the community

• 17:12Laurie Santos?

  a $1,000 unconditional cash transfer. And the money went to things like motorbikes, like you mentioned, fixing roofs, buying mattresses, right? Most of the people in Kabobo were sleeping on the floor. They just didn't have access to a mattress. But some people did these really creative things that, one of the things I didn't expect is that one of the couples that got the cash transfer bought a pub, which you might think like, huh, they got a pub.

• 17:36Speaker 00

  A pub, like a bar?

• 17:37Laurie Santos?

  Like a bar, basically.

• 17:38Speaker 00

  I love that, yeah.

• 17:38Laurie Santos?

  But the bar, like, wound up employing people in the community. It became this community hub where people could get together with each other at night. And it's generated more income for them. So now they're turning kind of the side of their pub that they put together into a little mini grocery store, which is one of the first spots that people can buy food in town so that they don't have to leave town. And so it's like, if you leave it up to people's ingenuity, they kind of come up with these interesting things.

• 18:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, there's a really simple idea. Like, the reason I wanted to do that story all those years ago is like, people know what they need, right? Like- They know if they need food or a motorcycle or a roof, they just don't have the money.

• 18:18Laurie Santos?

  Yes.

• 18:19Speaker 00

  So like if you give them the money, they can buy what they need. That's the great thing about money.

• 18:23Laurie Santos?

  Yeah, and this is something we forget with gifts in general. I think this comes up in charity, but there's also work, you know, Giving Tuesdays sort of the prelude to other holidays and gift giving moments coming up. And it's just something we get wrong all the time. Like, we want to be able to come up with the creative gift for somebody. But one of the best ways to figure out the best gift is to just ask people, what do you want? And if you buy someone that thing, they're going to be happy because that was what they wanted.

• 18:48Speaker 00

  Yeah. It goes back to the like, we're thinking about ourselves, right? Even when we're giving gifts, this notionally, you know, other focused thing, we're actually like, oh, am I a good gift giver? Am I a good? It's just ego. It's just, we're just screwing ourselves with our ego as always.

• 19:04Laurie Santos?

  Yeah.

• 19:06Speaker 00

  It was great to talk with you, Laurie. It was, it was truly a delightful conversation. Thank you.

• 19:11Laurie Santos?

  This is super. Thanks for sharing the love on Giving Tuesday.

• 19:16Speaker 00

  Laurie Santos is a professor of psychology at Yale and the host of The Happiness Lab. They have a whole episode on the psychology of generosity coming out this week. We'll be back in a minute with my conversation with Ellie Hessenfeld, who spent nearly two decades scouring the planet to find the most effective ways to spend money on other people.

• 19:47Laurie Santos?

  There's nothing quite like having pieces in your closet you love and know you can count on for any occasion, except maybe giving someone else that same feeling. And I have to tell you, when it comes to my go to gift this season, I think this might be the year of the hoodie, specifically Quince's Mongolian Cashmere Full Zip Hoodie, which I bought for myself and absolutely love. You know, when you get something that's so comfortable, so soft and so easy to throw on that you suddenly want to wear it every day? That's where I am with this hoodie. And I started to think that instead of agonizing over what to get everyone on my holiday list, I might just buy them all one of these. I mean, who on my list wouldn't love a gift of perfect coziness? But it's not just hoodies. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials like Mongolian cashmere

• 20:32Laurie Santos?

  and organic cotton. And if a cashmere hoodie isn't quite right for someone on your list, Quince has so much more. From leather bags and jewelry to cozy scarves, down outerwear, and even hotel-quality bedding. Give the gift of quality this holiday season. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks you where you heard about them, let them know it was the Happiness Lab. It's the best way to support the show. Flu season is here, and with everything we have going on, it's easy to put getting a flu shot on the back burner. But taking a few minutes now can help protect you and your family. That's why I'm headed to CVS Pharmacy to get my flu shot.

• 21:17Laurie Santos?

  And honestly, I was really impressed by how easy it was to schedule. With CVS, you can schedule appointments for up to four family members at once, so you can take care of everyone in one go. Just visit CVS.com/flu or use the CVS Health app to find an appointment that works for you. So make protecting yourself this flu season one less thing to worry about. Did you know that flu shots are free with most insurance plans? Visit your local CVS Pharmacy for your flu shot and get a $5 off $20 coupon with any vaccine. Schedule today at CVS.com/flu. Flu shots are no cost with most insurance. Eligibility varies by patient and insurance plan. Coupon offer not available in select states and is subject to availability.

• 22:02Laurie Santos?

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• 22:47Laurie Santos?

  them with, well, blueberries and almonds. It's right there in the name. But it's so good. And Kashi Gut Health Granola makes a great breakfast. It's also the kind of afternoon snack that's just so satisfying. I mean, it's straightforward. It fuels your gut and it tastes great. Gut fuel is in the bag. Say hi to new Kashi Gut Health Granola.

• 23:14Speaker 00

  Okay. So Laurie Santos explained convincingly that giving away money makes us feel good. So now the question is, who do we give the money to? That is basically the question that Eli Hasenfeld asked himself almost 20 years ago. It's a question that led him to co-found GiveWell, where he's now the CEO. And it's a question that, in some really interesting ways, as you will hear, has started to change the way charities themselves think about what they do. To start, I asked Eli how he came to found GiveWell in the first place.

• 23:51Speaker 02

  Back in 2006, I was a couple of years out of college, working at a hedge fund. And a friend, Holden Karnofsky, and I wanted to give to charity. And at the time, we were trying to give a few thousand bucks away. And we wanted to find charitable organizations that were getting a lot of bang for their buck. And when we went looking online for information, we just couldn't find great information about what charities do and how well it works. We heard a lot about the overhead ratio, how much do they spend on administration versus programs, but nothing that said, "This is what they're doing and this is how many people they'll help with their programs." We spent months trying to answer this question. The two of us got a little bit obsessed with it.

• 24:35Speaker 02

  And eventually, after about a year of working on this project, left our jobs to start GiveWell as a full-time project. And the idea was to create the resource that we had been looking for as donors.

• 24:45Speaker 00

  Well, and there is this interesting sort of broader idea in the charity world, right? In the philanthropic world, which is, what are they measuring? You know, you can have a charity that builds schools, and they might tell you how many schools they build, but presumably, you're not actually giving money to build the school, right? You're giving money so that children get a better education. And so I'm curious, I mean, as you started to look deeper at the time, as you founded GiveWell, like, what was just the basic landscape of measurement within the charity world like?

• 25:23Speaker 02

  It's just really hard to get information about the outcomes that we cared about, that I think donors ultimately do care about. And those outcomes would be things like, do you save children's lives if you are providing funds for health programs? If you're trying to reduce poverty, do you increase people's income so that they can buy more of the kinds of things that they want? I would say that by and large, this information was not available. When we were calling up organizations and asking them for information, they were often shocked that anyone would be even asking a question like this, because it was just

• 26:01Speaker 02

  in 2006, 2007, it was completely unusual that someone would be wondering about, like, what is the program actually accomplishing? What is the impact that it's having on the world?

• 26:12Speaker 00

  Uh huh. I mean, is it almost a rude question? Was it almost like, look, we're spending our lives helping these people. We're giving them cows, we're building clinics. Like, who are you? What are you asking about? Why? Where do you come off asking these questions?

• 26:28Speaker 02

  I think it's definitely a, an odd question to ask. Something that I say a lot internally, I give well now is that, you know, we're the people who react skeptically to organizations saying, we're just trying to help people around the world. And we say, well, how do you know? And can you prove it? And, you know, that's not a socially normal thing to do, but I, I think it's necessary because, gosh, it's so hard to have an impact on people around the world. And asking those questions helps get better information so we can ensure that funding goes to the best place.

• 26:58Speaker 00

  So you do have this short list of top charities that seems kind of like the center of what you do in some way, right? You've looked at all of these charities in the world and you've landed on this very small number.

• 27:12Speaker 00

  Briefly, what are they?

• 27:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, you know, these top charities account for about two thirds of the funds we direct. There are four of them. One is the Against Malaria Foundation, which delivers malaria nets in Africa. The second one is called Malaria Consortium and we support their seasonal malaria chemo prevention program. That's a preventative malaria program, giving medicine to young children. The third one, and these are in no particular order, but the third one is Helen Keller International's Vitamin A Supplementation Program. This is a program that gives a small amount of vitamin A to children under the age of five, and it is shown in numerous studies to reduce child mortality. And then finally, New Incentives, which is the organization that provides conditional

• 27:57Speaker 02

  cash transfers, small cash transfers to encourage immunization. You know, the, the top charities reflect, you know, roughly two thirds of the funds that we direct. And we see them as the, you know, really the tried and true. Like if, if you're a donor and you want to have a lot of impact and you want to have confidence in that impact, these are organizations that we have followed for many years and we have a lot of confidence in because they are, there's a lot of evidence that supports their impact.

• 28:24Speaker 00

  So how do you get from sort of generally being interested in charity and in, you know, research-driven outcomes?

• 28:33Speaker 00

  To specifically focusing on saving the lives of children in the developing world.

• 28:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, so at its core, GiveWell is about finding outstanding programs that we can support with the aim of getting, having the most impact with the funds that we direct. And when we started, we didn't know where we were going to find those programs. So we were looking at health programs focused on low-income countries, but also social programs focused on New York City, where we lived at the time. So job training programs, education programs, et cetera. And after our first year of work, where we were focused on both US social programs and also global programs, we looked at the data and just saw how big the difference was in

• 29:23Speaker 02

  what a dollar could accomplish overseas versus at home. And just to make it concrete, you know, we, we estimate roughly, but I think it's the right ballpark, that five, $5,000 or so dollars will avert the death of a young child in a low-income country. That's about what it costs to put a child through school for a couple of years in a New York City charter school. And so that differential really showed us that the opportunities to use money to have a big impact on the world were stronger overseas, and it drove us, it drove us to focus our efforts there.

• 30:04Speaker 02

  We're finding the, the groups that are, I think, like importantly, like not sure that their own programs are working, and so want to ensure that they're gathering the data so that they know where the programs are effective, where they're struggling, so that they can make changes to run those programs more effectively.

• 30:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, so that's an interesting idea, right? Like, that idea of the groups themselves being unsure, it, it requires a sense of...

• 30:34Speaker 00

  What is, what is the real endpoint? Right? I think quite often, and reasonably, like, things are clearly helpful if you, whatever, give someone a cow and, you know, training on how to take care of that cow. Like, pretty clearly, that person is going to be better off than if you hadn't done it. And so it might not be obvious to say, oh, we need to measure. Well, how much does it cost to give them the cow? How much better off are they? Are there things we could change that would be even more helpful? Like, most people clearly don't do that. Right? Most people in their jobs in many domains are not constantly measuring and trying to optimize.

• 31:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I just think the stakes are so high that it's just absolutely critical that there is a recognition that failure can happen and we have to do the best we can. Billions of dollars go to health aid every year. And the stakes are quite literally life and death. And so therefore, the difference between some of the best programs that can very roughly, say, avert the death of a young child for approximately $5,000 to $10,000. And then other programs, which could have very limited impact, I think in the worst case, even cause harm, the measurement in that feedback loop to say, this, we want to see whether it's working. We want to see the extent to which it's working.

• 31:56Speaker 02

  And we want to learn from what we've done so that we can do better. That's true for the organizations we work with. That's true for us as an organization. You know, we're trying to follow the same project of learning from our own track record and history to make better decisions in the future and hopefully help people even more. The groups that we work with most, and I think the kinds of people who are most drawn to what we're doing, whether it's donors or practitioners, are people whose, I think their interest, you know, the idea that they have, that we have, is to try to find the way to use charitable dollars to accomplish as much good as possible. And if that idea is preventing HIV in young children, then great.

• 32:38Speaker 02

  And if we can do better, if we can distribute oral rehydration solution to prevent- Deaths from diarrhea, or if we can encourage additional testing and treatment to prevent cases of tuberculosis in children, what I ultimately care about. The thing that's important to me is just helping children. And I'm not drawn to the specific cause or disease as much as the outcome, which is trying to enable more people to live long, healthy lives.

• 33:05Speaker 00

  I feel like, you know, traditionally philanthropy was largely about making donors feel good. And maybe it still is to some degree, the nature of human nature being what it is. But it seems like the growth of GiveWell and of sort of

• 33:25Speaker 00

  research-driven philanthropy more generally has coincided with the long boom of Silicon Valley, right? And it strikes me that the kind of people who get rich in tech are more numerically driven, are more metrics oriented, perhaps, than earlier generations of rich people. And that that might be sort of part of what is going on, part of the wind at your back, part of the rise of research-driven philanthropy. Do you buy that?

• 33:57Speaker 02

  I think there's a kind of person in tech and also in parts of finance. Those are the two sectors from which we draw most of our donors who have, I think their perspective that they take on the world is one, we know that there's a lot we can be wrong about. We know there can be big differences in the investments we make or the decisions we make as a company leader. We also know that we can be wrong and we want to learn about how to do it better. And I do think we see that coming out of those industries. And it's a big part of what, has helped us grow to the size that we are today.

• 34:36Speaker 00

  So you were mentioning that when you first started out and you were calling up charities and saying, what evidence do you have that you're actually helping people, basically? And they would say, how dare you? Who are you? Why are you asking me this? I'm spending my life helping people. What do they say now when you call them up? Has that changed?

• 34:57Speaker 02

  Very practically, it's changed for us because when I was calling people up almost 20 years ago, I was offering them a thousand bucks. And now we have a lot of funding to give, and so that does make them more responsive.

• 35:09Speaker 00

  Oh, that's interesting. So there's a sort of pull. So basically, because you're directing hundreds of millions of dollars a year, organizations have an incentive to be more research-based.

• 35:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, very fundamentally, you know, there's a problem, so to speak, in the charitable market where the person deciding to open their wallet is not the person who's ultimately receiving the service. So there's a disconnect between the recipient and the giver, where in the consumer market that we're used to, you know, I purchase my laptop and then I also use it and see how good it is.

• 35:43Speaker 00

  And if it sucks, that company goes out of business.

• 35:46Speaker 02

  That company goes out of business. But that's not how it works in charity. If you're great at fundraising from donors, but terrible at delivering a program, no one might ever know. And so I think just concretely, GiveWell has helped support the literal, in a very small way, the creation of an incentive to operate in a way that is focused on demonstrating impact, because the dollars that we have to give, the dollars that we have to influence, are going after that evidence of strong impact. And I should say, of course, like, we are just part of a larger and, I think, ever-growing ecosystem. You see this in the academics who launched the randomized controlled trial movement in

• 36:29Speaker 02

  economics, organizations like Evidence Action, the Clinton Health Access Initiative, GiveDirectly. I mean, it's a large and growing group of institutions even beyond the scope of just GiveWell that are operating in a way that is explicitly aiming to deliver great results and demonstrate that those results are coming to fruition. And I think that is just a massive change from where we were 20 years ago.

• 36:54Speaker 00

  So you mentioned GiveDirectly, and as it happens, the... There's a sort of charitable giving project out of one of the shows at Pushkin that gives money to GiveDirectly, basically. And I'm curious about GiveWell's sort of ongoing evaluation of GiveDirectly. Like, what do you think? What do you think of GiveDirectly's work in a quantitative, professional way?

• 37:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think extremely, extremely highly of them. I've personally been a GiveDirectly donor for many years, you know, continued to give to them last year and will this year because I really love what they do. I think it's just so critical to say, you know, with some of our giving, let's make sure that we're just supporting people to purchase, you know, what they most want.

• 37:41Speaker 00

  Still to come on the show, LA talks about some of the most surprising things he's seen in his nearly two decades in the charity world.

• 37:57Laurie Santos?

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• 41:20Speaker 00

  What do you make of the fact that $5,000 can save a child's life?

• 41:26Speaker 02

  I think it is just an illustration of, on some level, how unjust our world is. You know, potentially how, um, I think all of us, myself included, don't, perhaps don't really take as seriously as we should, the, the kind of impact that we can have overseas. But fundamentally, uh, you know, I think it shows that something is very broken in our system for allocating resources globally because it's, it's very hard to accept that it's possible to save someone's life for $5,000.

• 42:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, with all the money, even with all the money that people give away, like, why don't people give enough money to buy bed nets for kids so they don't get malaria? Right? Like, there's some amount of money, the more money people give, the, the less valuable each marginal net would be, right? Like, why haven't people given enough money to these programs to sort of give away all the bed nets that you need to give away and give away all the malaria medicine that you'd need to give away to stop kids from dying of malaria, at least in these high intensity malaria areas where it's obvious that kids are going to die of malaria every year?

• 42:42Speaker 02

  Yes, I think, I think first of all, it's just worth noting how much progress we have made globally in the last 25 years. Um, the, the US government has given huge amounts to a program called PEPFAR focused on HIV, the president's malaria initiative focused on malaria, and has been instrumental in the creation of the global fund, which focuses on AIDS TB and malaria, and GAVI, which focuses on immunizations. So since the year 2000, the amount of funding going to global health problems has gone up a huge amount. It has plateaued more recently, but it's gone up a huge amount and we see a massive reduction in child mortality. So we're doing a lot better today than we

• 43:24Speaker 02

  were in the recent past. And then, I guess, like fundamentally, I don't know why people don't give more.

• 43:30Speaker 00

  Or even give more to these charities, right? It's it's more a question of direction. It's not even why don't people give more money? It's like if it's really that easy to save a kid's life, like, we want that number to go up, right? Like, the the cheaper it is to save a kid's life. I mean, it's kind of you cuts both ways, right? On the one hand, it's like, well, great. We know a thing that is helpful. But on the other hand, like, well, let's buy all the bed nets. So it's not so easy. Do you know what I'm saying?

• 44:00Speaker 02

  Uh, completely. And and, yeah, I think that, um, you know, GiveWell raises about $300 million a year. A GiveWell that was raising $1 billion a year would the the marginal dollars would be much less cost effective.

• 44:14Speaker 00

  Right.

• 44:14Speaker 02

  Because we would have gone much further.

• 44:16Speaker 00

  Um, weirdly, you want to get to a place where it's more expensive to save a child's life. Like, the more expensive it is, the less inequality there is in the world, the more kids' lives we're saving.

• 44:26Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly. Uh, you know, and then I think I GiveWell itself is an institution that has raised much more money over the last 15 years than was raised previously and is going, and I think it reflects more people giving. Why why aren't people giving more to these programs? I think because the honestly, the the suffering and the poverty of, say, the poorest parts of Sub-Saharan Africa is something that we are largely blind to in our day to day lives. It's not, you know, we we cover, um, natural disasters when they occur, but no one is covering literally the the daily catastrophe

• 45:08Speaker 02

  of child deaths due to infectious disease in Sub-Saharan Africa. You know, very roughly, 1,000 children die every day of malaria. We know how to prevent it, and that's not covered because it's oh, I I guess it's I don't know exactly why. That's a question for you, not for me. But it's not it's not covered. And I think because of that, on some level, um, we're able to live as if it's not really there and that motivating force to get people to see it and then act isn't isn't happening.

• 45:38Speaker 00

  You've been doing this now for 15 years-ish.

• 45:45Speaker 00

  If you go back to when you started, what's been surprising to you? What has happened in a way you would not have expected?

• 45:54Speaker 02

  I was really surprised when we started at how strange our questions seem to the organizations that we were going to. The question of

• 46:06Speaker 02

  how effective are your programs? How much are you accomplishing? And how do you know? Seems like a really

• 46:14Speaker 02

  an obvious question. It's also really surprising to me how much we've grown. When we started this, I think we thought that we were just

• 46:24Speaker 02

  we were a couple of guys who had this idiosyncratic interest in an approach to charitable giving. And when we talked to people who worked in philanthropy, they they reacted like we were nuts, that no one would ever be into this. This is not what donors go to galas and donors like stories and their names on buildings. And wow, it's shocking. You know, people are people are normal people are just giving $300 million a year to help people around the world. And they're by and large anonymous. They're not getting their names on buildings and they're just, you know, following along, trying to make as big a difference as they can in people's lives. So they'll never meet. And, you know, on some level of that, maybe that makes sense, but that's also really surprising.

• 47:08Speaker 00

  It seems like the happy surprise.

• 47:09Speaker 02

  The happy surprise.

• 47:11Speaker 00

  I appreciate your time very much. It was great to talk with you.

• 47:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was great to be here. Thanks so much, Jacob.

• 47:17Speaker 00

  Eli Hasenfeld is the co-founder and CEO of GiveWell.

• 47:23Speaker 00

  Last conversation on the show is with Nate Silver and Maria Konnikova. Nate is a statistician. Maria is a psychologist. They are both writers and together they host a podcast called Risky Business. They are also both professional poker players. And that's really why I wanted to talk to them about charitable giving. One of the things they do on their show is they talk about bringing a poker mindset to the decision making of everyday life. And so I wanted to hear from them how professional gamblers think about giving money away.

• 47:57Speaker 00

  So like, the core idea of the show is making better decisions using this expected value framework, right? In like, one sentence, what's expected value?

• 48:08Speaker 03

  Expected value is the net benefit you expect to get averaged over all the uncertain outcomes. Now, I guess with charitable giving, maybe it's more deterministic, where we know, for example, that mosquito nets in Africa have a high return on investment, they save lives and prevent malaria at a relatively low cost. It's not like a random element there, exactly, although there are always some implementation issues. But really, it's a framework about utility.

• 48:40Speaker 04

  And I would just jump in a little bit to say that, you know, we have the economic definition of expected value, and then when you look at behavioral economics and the way that people actually make decisions, you realize that there is a lot of psychology involved as well. And so calculating expected value is not as straightforward as just kind of doing these dollar calculations, because, you know, how do you put a dollar amount on how good you feel after a decision, or how bad you feel, or the regret that you might feel when you don't take a decision? And when we're looking at kind of the broader picture of expected value, you do have to try to quantify that a little bit, and try to account for all of those different psychological factors that come into play as well.

• 49:25Speaker 00

  One of my favorite things about your show is when you talk about the culture of professional poker players, basically. You're both professional poker players, and you live in this universe where people treat money really differently, right? And there are these two terms that come up a lot on the show, two kinds of people, nits and degens. What's a nit?

• 49:49Speaker 04

  I'll leave this one to you, Nate.

• 49:52Speaker 03

  A knit is basically George Costanza, right? It's like a neurotic, risk averse, cheap, but more, more someone who is so neurotic that they aren't taking plus EV bets, right? They're too conservative for their own good when it comes to playing poker hands, for example, and have a low openness to experience perhaps and can be annoying. They're the ones who want to itemize the bill when the check comes through.

• 50:23Speaker 00

  Wait, I didn't need the app. I shouldn't have to pay for one third of the app? That's the nitty behavior?

• 50:27Speaker 03

  That's a knit, yeah. Whereas a degen is someone who likes to gamble, is risk tolerant, maybe to their own detriment, is freewheeling with money and splashes around.

• 50:39Speaker 00

  Yes, and degen is short for degenerate gambler, but in a loving way, right? That's my favorite.

• 50:45Speaker 03

  Usually, yeah.

• 50:46Speaker 00

  So, in your experience, who is more generous, a degener or a knit?

• 50:51Speaker 04

  Degen, absolutely.

• 50:53Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, for sure.

• 50:54Speaker 04

  I don't think it's even close.

• 50:55Speaker 03

  You guys give to charity?

• 50:57Speaker 04

  I give to charitable causes that I believe in. So, for instance, I gave a lot of money to Ukraine when Russia invaded. And that is how kind of I calculate my charitable giving. I understand that mosquito nets in Africa are incredibly important. I have not given to malaria because that is not something that, you know, I feel strongly about. There are other people feel strongly about that. So for me, part of it, you know, I have given to educational causes. You know, I give to things that I have a connection with and that I feel also are underfunded.

• 51:34Speaker 03

  Maria, you mentioned giving to Ukraine, and I mean, I know you a little bit. I know your, your life story seems connected to that, right? Tell me about your connection to, to helping Ukraine defend itself against Russia.

• 51:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, so my dad is Ukrainian and my mom is from Moscow. And I was born in Moscow and then came to the United States when I was four years old and have always been very anti-

• 52:01Speaker 04

  The autocratic tendencies of Russia, very anti Putin. And I think, you know, when Putin invented and invaded Ukraine, to me, that was a no brainer. I think at this point, Ukraine is one of the only things standing between us and the Third World War, basically the fact that they're able to to resist him. So for me, it was incredibly personal. And so I I'm all in on the Zelensky camp.

• 52:27Speaker 00

  Nate Silver, do you give money away?

• 52:30Speaker 03

  I'm having to reevaluate. I mean, the short answer is I haven't.

• 52:34Speaker 00

  Uh huh. Does either saying on a show that you haven't given money away or hearing Maria talk about giving money away, like, honestly, does it, you think it makes it any more likely that you'll give money away? You think it's going to have any effect on you?

• 52:47Speaker 03

  I'm generally not a person who is governed by guilt.

• 52:51Speaker 00

  Ah, that's.

• 52:52Speaker 03

  I mean, I think I should. I but there's like a lot of long term financial planning that gets put off. I mean, these are discussions that, you know, my household, we've had. And so we're we're aware of this question and what we want to do with our money in the long term, and we're thinking about it actively. But kind of things get short circuited during. I mean, look, clearly, I think that, you know, in some abstract sense, you are being selfish. If you're not, if you have a comfortable life, then you are being selfish to not give.

• 53:23Speaker 03

  But it's easy to make excuses.

• 53:25Speaker 00

  I appreciate your honesty. So Nate, does that make you a nit? And Maria, the DJ? I never would have guessed.

• 53:34Speaker 03

  Well, but I am, I think Maria is also, I am generous in those other ways, with things like tips, with things like, you know, picking up checks, even at fairly expensive meals or something for my friends. And so maybe psychologically, that feels more satisfying than the abstract charitable giving.

• 53:50Speaker 00

  Yes. I mean, that is an interesting tension, right? Like, it feels better to buy lunch for your friend than to send the money off to somebody thousands of miles away, even though obviously, the the marginal benefit of that, whatever, a hundred bucks, 50 bucks, any, any bucks, is clearly greater if you send it off thousands of miles away.

• 54:08Speaker 03

  You gone out to dinner, Jacob, in in New York recently? I mean, 50 bucks would be great.

• 54:11Speaker 00

  I was trying to be, I was trying to be a man of the people, Nate. And when are we getting dinner?

• 54:16Speaker 04

  I totally agree. And I also just want to want to add a little bit to say that I think that in this particular case, like role models really do matter when it comes to charitable giving tendencies. So psychologically speaking, and one of the things that has made me actually kind of give more than I have in the past is my parents who don't have a lot of money. And, you know, are a single income because my mom no longer works and they give a recurring donation every single month to causes that they believe strongly and including Ukraine.

• 54:58Speaker 04

  And when I think about it, I'm like, you can't afford to do this. And yet they do it. And that, you know, it I won't say guilt me into, but like, it makes me realize that, like, you know, it is important when you are donating to causes where it actually makes a difference. Nate and I talked a lot on our podcast about kind of donating to political campaigns and, you know, don't donate to the presidential campaign because they they don't need the money. But I, you know, I think that that's kind of that's what we're talking about at the end. Where do you donate in a way that your money actually makes an impact right now? And it doesn't have to be millions of dollars, right? You can leave, I hope I have millions to leave at the end of my life to to good causes. But, you know, there are

• 55:43Speaker 04

  causes where even a few hundred dollars actually can make a huge difference.

• 55:48Speaker 03

  But I guess that because there probably is some pleasure from it, right? You kind of recognize the ephemeral nature of money. And it's kind of more an emotional reaction. And then when I'm thinking about charity, it's kind of the more rational part of your brain, right? You can make excuses along the lines of, well, maybe I should just give it away at the end of my life. And I pay a lot of taxes and, you know, figuring out where to give is a discussion to have with your partner. And that can get, you know, we'd have disagreements about that. And so it's different than the kind of, oh, let's get a nice bottle of wine and I'll pick I'll pick up dinner tonight because I know you had a rough tournament series or something like that.

• 56:25Speaker 00

  I never thought of you as such an emotional guy. So I'm curious in particular, so this show is about giving away money fundamentally. And, you know, we can talk about maximizing EV and what charities are good, but there's also just this more general idea of pro-social behavior. Spending money on your friends is part of this. And so I'm curious, what's your favorite Dgen dropping a bunch of money on their friends, on charity, on anything, story?

• 56:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, this isn't Dgen-y, but I think it's something that is quite important. The poker community actually does give a shit-ton of money to charity. You know, those aren't the fun Dgen-y stories, but that's, I think, you know, I think it's important to note that poker players actually are on top of this, and there are a lot of poker players giving millions to charity and matching charitable donations.

• 57:17Speaker 00

  Thanks, you guys. It was a delight to talk to you.

• 57:20Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 57:21Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 57:25Speaker 00

  So just before we end the show here, I want to just mention one last thing. There was a moment in that last conversation when Nate was talking about the reasons he hasn't given money, you know, how giving money to charity is tied up with all these other household financial planning decisions, et cetera, et cetera. And I thought back to that thing that Laurie Santos said at the beginning of the show about friction, you know, how friction and not knowing how to give or who to give to winds up being this huge barrier. And I thought about how Eli Hasenfeld has spent all this time trying to find charities that are very clearly doing good, that you can just give money to and feel good about. So to close out the show today, and to fight against friction in my own life, I'm going

• 58:08Speaker 00

  to go right now to that website that Laurie was talking about, givingmultiplier.org/happinesslab. And I'm going to give 50 bucks. Is it the perfect amount of money? I don't know. I'm just going to do it right now.

• 58:32Speaker 00

  Thanks very much to Nate Silver and Maria Konnikova, the hosts of Risky Business, Ellie Hasenfeld of GiveWell, and to Laurie Santos, the host of the Happiness Lab, who got me thinking about Giving Tuesday in the first place.

• 58:46Speaker 00

  Today's show was produced by Lucy Sullivan and Isabel Carter, edited by Sarah Nix, and engineered by Jake Gorski. Special thanks to Ryan Dilly, Farah DeGrange, and Owen Miller. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and I host the Pushkin Show What's Your Problem? Thanks for listening.

• 59:17Laurie Santos?

  The Happiness Lab is proudly sponsored by Amica Insurance. You know what they say, "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together." So go with Amica and get coverage from a mutual insurer that's built for their customers, one that looks after what's important to you together. Auto, home, life, and more. Amica helps you protect what matters most. Visit amica.com and get a quote today. A business gift should do more than check a box. It should reflect your brand and show someone they're appreciated, recognized, and truly seen. That's why teams trust 4imprint. With thousands of high-quality customizable products, like premium apparel, drinkware, tech, and more,

• 1:00:01Laurie Santos?

  it's easy to create a gift that feels meaningful and on-brand. And with 4imprint's expert support and their 360-degree guarantee, you can be 4imprint certain your order will arrive exactly as intended. Explore gifting with confidence at 4imprint.com. 4imprint, for certain.

• 1:00:20Speaker 05

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.