How to solve the world’s biggest problems with Natalie Cargill (Transcript)

[00:00:00] Chris Anderson:
Hello everyone. Chris Anderson here. Welcome back to The TED Interview. The season we've been delving deep into all aspects of generosity, which I've come to believe is the single most crucial idea we're spreading in our modern world. I wrote a book about it called Infectious Generosity, and thanks to the generosity of a donor in the TED community, you can claim your own free copy of the book by going to ted.com/generosity.

Now, today we're focusing on the potential for financial giving, and I have a super ambitious goal for this episode, namely to actually get you excited about philanthropy. Not necessarily your own philanthropy, though, that would be lovely, but more just rethinking the role that philanthropy could and should play in our world.

Now I have the perfect guest for this. She has been a key thought partner for me in thinking about philanthropy's potential, and her work is at the core of what many readers have described as the most exciting chapter in the book and for good reason. So, I'm really pleased to introduce you to Natalie Cargill.

She's the founder of the strategic giving consultancy, Longview Philanthropy, she works with wealthy individuals from professional poker players to CEOs to plan and execute their giving plans. And a few years ago, she embarked on a truly remarkable research project into what problems we could solve if we gave philanthropy its best shot. Last year she gave a wonderful TED talk outlining that work and, uh, I can't wait to discuss it with her now.

Natalie, welcome to The TED Interview.

[00:01:58] Natalie Cargill:
Thank you so much, Chris. It's a delight to be here.

[00:02:01] Chris Anderson:
Let's start by hearing a bit about your own background and what on earth got you interested in questions of generosity and philanthropy in the first place. What were you like as a, as a girl? Were you interested in this way back then?

[00:02:13] Natalie Cargill:
Well, I was a very forthright child. There was no shortage of issues about which I had an opinion. For sure, and I remember graduating from university and I was just really keen to work on something that both was to do with improving the world in some way, but also was really intellectually challenging.

And I was fortunate, I think, in my early twenties to have experience of very different kinds of ways of doing good. So, I worked for a couple of nonprofits out of university. One of them was essentially my dream job, it was working on human rights for a nonprofit that worked with the United Nations Human Rights Council, particularly focused on the rights of women and girls in the Middle East, and that was something I just felt so incredibly passionate about.

But unfortunately, I think as I progressed in that role, it became pretty clear to me that a lot of the work that was being done wasn't really having much of an effect. I wasn't really moving the needle on advancing rights for women and girls. And so I left and I was very like angsty and and upset about this in my early twenties, and I felt fairly disillusioned.

I also did some work for another nonprofit. I was just taking minute meetings, really, and they're called the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition. They're a fantastic organization and they work to combat malnutrition by fortifying various staple foods. So, for example, if you put vitamin A in sugar in Costa Rica, which which they help do, you can eradicate that vitamin deficiency.

And I remember being struck by just how effective this was. And I remember in particular seeing this 2 cent sachet of micronutrients, if you give them to children at school, these 2 cent sachets have a massive impact on reducing malnutrition. And that was the first time I was like, “Oh wow some things seem to like, really, really work better than others.”

[00:04:03] Chris Anderson:
One of the great untold stories, isn't it, of how just these super low cost things scaled out have, have saved millions of lives.

[00:04:10] Natalie Cargill:
Yeah.

[00:04:10] Chris Anderson:
And it's, it's almost un, hugely unreported or underreported. Hmm. So you, so you had basically two, these two experiences, one much more satisfying than the other. But then you went into law, uh, how, why did that happen?

[00:04:23] Natalie Cargill:
Yeah, so I was, I was working at, for a human rights charity. I was not particularly impressed by how efficacious they seem to be. However, an incredible human rights judge sort of took me under his wing and was like, “Look, why don't you go and train in law? It gives you a framework.”

You know, you can be in a system with teeth and you can, rather than just saying, you know, “Oh, please, you know, improve your human rights track record.” You can say to a country, “Hey, you signed up for this convention and you are not abiding by its terms.” And like law really appealed to me as this like systematic way to hold governments or or other individuals to account.

[00:05:02] Chris Anderson:
Okay, so this is making a lot of sense to me now.

So, you've got someone who ever since her childhood was concerned about the world, you saw the effective side of a nonprofit, a less effective side. You developed the skills to be a persuader, put the pieces together, and you had this dream to create this nonprofit that could persuade well-resourced people, rich people, influential people to do nonprofit work the right way and to fund the right kinds of nonprofits.

[00:05:31] Natalie Cargill:
Which is kind of a mad thing to do as soon as you've qualified as a barrister.

Um, however, I felt as I was doing my own donations, as I was doing research to help other people with their donations, it seemed like there was this real gap in the landscape of philanthropic advising that I might be able to fill. So, it sort of like presented itself and I guess I can explain what I mean by that gap.

I think if you are a donor who's looking to give away, say, you know, 10 pounds or a hundred pounds or a thousand pounds, there are some amazing resources out there to help you decide how to do that. The best resource, I think, for this is an organization called Give Well, and as I'm sure you know Chris, what they do is use hundreds of hours of research that go into identifying the very best opportunities to help as many people by as much as possible with our limited resources, and they have recommendations, and you can go online, see those recommendations, see the insane amount of research behind them and make those grants.

So, that's great. On the other hand, if you are a multi-billionaire and you want to think about how to use your wealth to transform the world.

One thing you can do, and this is fantastic, is set up a foundation and over many years, build up your model of the world, your theory of change, your grant making staff, and you know, after many years and a lot of learning, you can be doing grant making at scale there. What I found was there's a whole group of people in the middle, essentially.

So, people who want to give away large sums of money, want to do it really effectively, are overwhelmed about where to start. Don't just wanna rely on a kind of static list online. Don't need to set up an enormous foundation. And I wanted to set up the org to help those people.

[00:07:14] Chris Anderson:
And it's quite a clever model 'cause you don't charge people for it.

Your, your costs are covered separately by other philanthropists so that you can go and just offer a pro bono service to people.

[00:07:25] Natalie Cargill:
Yes, which is very unusual. Sometimes I'm working with people and they're like, really? Like, are you sure? And I think there's a few things that set us apart really. One big one is that we're a nonprofit and most of the time philanthropic advisors are for-profit organizations.

I think another thing. That's also slightly different about what we offer is that it's not just a series of fixed recommendations. It's really like looking at a field that seems particularly neglected and going, “Okay, what needs to happen here? Who's already doing it? How much funding do they have? What new organizations need to exist? Can we bring those new organizations into being? Can we create new scholarships?”

So often philanthropists will be part of creating a project rather than just funding an existing nonprofit.

[00:08:10] Chris Anderson:
Right. So, this is why I found you such a great thought partner in, in the questions I was asking because it we're really looking at philanthropy almost from a blank sheet of paper.

It's like, what could it be if, if all that you started with was the question of how do we make the world a better place?

[00:08:26] Natalie Cargill:
Yeah.

[00:08:27] Chris Anderson:
What next? And so, so I wanna dive in, in a minute into some of the amazing research you've been doing, but before we go there, some, some people listening most pe people aren't your potential clients.

They're not multimillionaires, and most people have a view of philanthropy, which is that it is this annoying thing that rich people do that they use to launder their reputation or to make the specific kind of change that they want to see in the world. And it's philanthropy's become a target of so much criticism and cynicism.

How do you talk to people who say, well, you have just set a niche market for rich people. There shouldn't be this much wealth inequality anyway, so I'm really not interested in what you have to say.

[00:09:16] Natalie Cargill:
I could not agree more that we need to change the conversation on philanthropy. I think like philanthropy at its core is this insanely valuable type of capital.

You know, if you think about what philanthropy is, it's, it's this funding that can do things that markets aren't gonna do. It's the funding that can do thing that governments won't do. And because of that, it's this really powerful tool that can accelerate all kinds of social progress and scientific progress and moral progress that wouldn't have happened otherwise.

And I can give you some examples of this. For example, the, the contraceptive pill, that initial research was funded by a philanthropist because it didn't look like the product was gonna be profitable enough for companies to invest. And so private philanthropists called Katherine McCormick came in, funded that research, and then of course, the pills had huge benefits in terms of, um, women's rights and women's freedom to choose.

Or for example, philanthropists funded some of the conferences that led to nuclear arms reduction. After the Cold War it was, you know, too difficult for governments to arrange it. Philanthropists were able to come in, fund research that led to acts that caused, you know, the reduction of nuclear weapons by 15%.

So, it has this really, really valuable role to play. At the same time, the type of philanthropy that dominates the headlines is absolutely awful. Philanthropy shouldn't be a vehicle to distract from your terrible business practices. It shouldn't be a vehicle to, you know, to make yourself look good and feel good.

It should be something in service to humanity. And what I would like to do, and what I hope Longview does is put the focus on the beneficiaries and on the very best thing we can do for the world rather than on the donors. And, and there are lots of things, there are lots of changes that I would hope to make to how we perceive philanthropy.

And perhaps we can come onto those.

[00:11:05] Chris Anderson:
As someone who said, but look, the, the world shouldn't be so unequal. We shouldn't have a world where you have a bunch of rich people who are in a position to give away a ton of money in the first place.

[00:11:17] Natalie Cargill:
I would agree. Yes. I think it's insane how much wealth inequality there is.

It's awful that some people have so much and have so much sway over the world, while the vast majority of people don't. And I think we need to be doing things to address all the problems that we face. It's also the case that we do live in reality and you know, people say to me, “How can you work with billionaires or how can you work with ultra high net worth? This shouldn't be the case.”

And I say, “Yes. I'm like extremely in favor of billionaires, unbecoming, billionaires by giving away their wealth in ways that will do as much good as possible.” And let's do that.

[00:11:56] Chris Anderson:
The way I think of it is that two things can be true at once. It can be unjust that so much private capital has piled up, but at the same time, crazy not to try to then do something with that capital or to advocate for how that capital can be deployed in, in a right way.

And it's so, it, it's, it's almost like we, we would both support someone who wants to advocate for different tax structures or, or other ways of addressing inequality. We also both know that a lot of the people who have the wealth are actually quite serious about wanting to give back and wanting to do it in a smart way.

It's a kind of shameful abrogation of our, of our kind of collective interest. If we ignore that and just say, this is this uncomfortable to talk about philanthropy shouldn't be a big part of how the world works. I don't want to think about it. And then that leaves a huge amount of capital just sitting there idle.

[00:12:51] Natalie Cargill:
Yeah, I completely agree. I mean, you know, a more extreme version of this would be saying, well, poverty shouldn't exist and therefore we don't need to do anything to solve it. You know, that, that seems perverse to me. Like, let's fix our problems.

[00:13:03] Chris Anderson:
So let's start on this journey, Natalie, of trying to reimagine and reframe what philanthropy can be, start with almost like the big picture, like right now in the world about how much philanthropy is given away each year.

Do you have just a rough range for that?

[00:13:23] Natalie Cargill:
The estimate that we've used in, in our report on this is $1 trillion a year, and that's counting very broadly and a majority of that tends to go to projects in the country where the donor is resided, a fair chunk goes to religious charities.

A fair chunk goes to education, and then there are, you know, smaller pieces of the pie.

[00:13:43] Chris Anderson:
Your thought experiment started with imagining how much philanthropy could there be in the world. Like what, what would be reasonably affordable by people of means if they took philanthropy seriously?

[00:13:57] Natalie Cargill:
Yes. So, the calculation was what if we took the richest 1% of people in the world, which surprisingly you are in, if you are a person earning over 65,000 US dollars, uh, per year. And what if the richest 1% gave away just 10% of their income? So, as you know, as you know, there's real historical precedent for this 10% in various traditions, religious traditions, other traditions.

So, we took that as the basis for our thought experiment. What if we gave away either 10% of your income or 2.5% of your net worth, whichever is greater? We crunch some numbers and it turns out that we would have around four and a half trillion.

[00:14:41] Chris Anderson:
So an an extra three and a half trillion, basically a quadrupling

[00:14:44] Natalie Cargill:
Exactly.

[00:14:45] Chris Anderson:
Of what's being given away right now,

[00:14:47] Natalie Cargill:
Which is about, I believe the GDP of Germany or is about what we spend on air travel, fast food, and luxury goods per year.

[00:14:56] Chris Anderson:
Right. That two and a half percent of net worth, by the way, comes from a different religious tradition from Islam.

[00:15:01] Natalie Cargill:
Yes.

[00:15:02] Chris Anderson:
Right. That's the tradition called Zakat. Where, where the, we are expected to give one 40th of their wealth away each year.

[00:15:09] Natalie Cargill:
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

[00:15:09] Chris Anderson:
And, and the reason it's relevant perhaps now is that, is that for a lot of the very rich income is, is a very soft idea.

Many of them don't really have much income. There there's, if you, if you have a huge net worth, you can borrow money and live off that and not really have any income at all.

[00:15:25] Natalie Cargill:
Exactly.

[00:15:25] Chris Anderson:
And so at that point, net worth is a, is a better thing to be as a, as a sort of guide. So, before we go further into it, someone's listening to this saying, wait a sec, I make 65 or $70,000 a year.

First of all, the shock you're saying, “I'm in the top 1% of the world? In, in my country I am maybe a bit above median income.” But it's a kind of shock to people to know that globally speaking, they are. Actually in the top 1% of, of earners at that level.

[00:15:57] Natalie Cargill:
Oh, it, it really is. It's quite funny if you talk to people and you say, you know, the global 1% should be doing this, should be doing that, you know, everyone's like, yes, absolutely.

And you're like, oh, by the way, you, you are the global 1%, which is always, you know, funny to realize.

[00:16:09] Chris Anderson:
But I think the next thing to say though is that for, for a lot of people in the West with where you've got the expenses of living in the west, 10% of income if you are making sixty 5K, say you have a, a kid and maybe you're single and so forth, like that is impossible for many people in that circumstance to picture that they could give away anything like 10% of their income.

What, what, what do you say to that?

[00:16:34] Natalie Cargill:
I think that's absolutely the case. I think, you know, particularly in the US and also the cost of living crisis in the UK, a lot of people are struggling. And while it may be the case that you are in a global 1%, and that's one helpful reference frame, I do think another very valid reference frame is the country where you're living, looking at your expenses, et cetera.

And I think for people saying, “:ook, this is impossible and unattainable.” I would say, “You know, please pause thinking about donations for now, there are many, many other ways to be generous. Please read Chris Anderson's Infectious Generosity. You can get a free copy even.” Yeah.

[00:17:09] Chris Anderson:
So I think when you, when you dig into the math of this, even if you make a generous allowance for people who would struggle to do that 10% just.

[00:17:19] Natalie Cargill:
Yeah.

[00:17:20] Chris Anderson:
Top loading it to the 1% or the 1%, you still get a huge amount of this three and a half trillion of extra capital.

[00:17:28] Natalie Cargill:
Mm-hmm.

[00:17:29] Chris Anderson:
And so I think it's a truly astonishing thought experiment 'cause what you.

[00:17:21] Natalie Cargill:
Mm-hmm. Mmm-hmm.

[00:17:32] Chris Anderson:
Asked yourself was what could you actually achieve with that amount of money? And what you could achieve took my breath away and I, and I, I think if we knew what could be achieved.

[00:17:45] Natalie Cargill:
Yeah.

[00:17:46] Chris Anderson:
It would just change how we think about philanthropy. It would shift from being an annoying thing to being kind of an awesome possibility space for humanity to explore where we could genuinely tackle many, perhaps all of the major problems we face.

Give the headlines of what this three and a half trillion per year could do.

[00:18:04] Natalie Cargill:
Absolutely. And. I mean, it really is breathtaking. So, say we had three and a half trillion, what could we do? We could end extreme poverty. We could prevent the next pandemic. We could double what we spend on clean energy R&D.

We could quadruple what we spend on nuclear weapons policy. We could 10x what we spend on ensuring we have safe and beneficial AI. We could ensure that everyone has access to clean water and sanitation. End hunger and malnutrition, give women control over their reproductive health. I mean, I'm, I'm gonna continue.

We could eradicate, uh, malaria, tuberculosis, HIV, eradicate all 20 neglected tropical diseases and half factory farming by 2050. You can read much more detail on all of these in a report on our website, but it is astonishing. I mean, you know, there are limitations here, here. Of course, money's not the only thing you need, but to me, this thought experiment it's really about trying to bring about this change in our attitude and our priorities.

I think just seeing, hey, these problems that sound like they're just part of being human, you know, poverty, extreme poverty, maybe they're actually solvable and maybe they're actually even organizations right now with really large scale plans to solve this problem in the medium term.

I find that really inspiring.

[00:19:22] Chris Anderson:
Yeah, me too. So let's, let's dig in and try and understand a few of these 'cause what you've just said there is that whether you care about poverty or climate change or pandemics or nuclear weapons or human rights, but basically there is enough philanthropic money in that three and a half trillion to tackle at massive scale every single one of these issues.

[00:19:45] Natalie Cargill:
Mm-hmm.

[00:19:45] Chris Anderson:
So, so I think in, in the plan, you allocate 258 billion to extreme poverty and tackling that each of these ideas is based on actual work out there.

[00:19:56] Natalie Cargill:
Yes. So there, there have been many actually, large scale proposals for how we might tackle extreme poverty. The one we, um, included in the report is cash transfers.

So, direct cash transfers. It's it incredibly simple. It's incredibly effective. There's an organization called Give Directly. They identify villages where people are living in extreme poverty. They ensure everyone in that village has access to a SIM card and donors can then transfer money to give directly to the poorest people in the world.

And this just works. There have been over 300 studies showing that these transfers work. They reduce poverty, they increase school attendance, they reduce child labor. It seems that over time they cause people to invest in things that will bring in an income over a much longer timeframe than, you know, just the initial transfer, and this is just an extraordinarily promising and direct way of ending extreme poverty.

[00:20:54] Chris Anderson:
You know, so much international aid, a lot of the money leaks away to consultants and middlemen and so forth. The, the fact that we're suddenly in an era where people can get money transferred directly, 'cause most people have access to a phone.

So, I mean, it's, it's a really special time. And, um, that number. 258 billion would allow you to do this just at massive scale across the world, and probably at the same time change how aid is offered forever because aid aid budgets are bigger than this, but a lot of them are spent very inefficiently.

[00:21:29] Natalie Cargill:
Absolutely. 90% of the value doesn't make it to the recipients by the time it's trickled down through all the various bureaucracies. I think the potential for this organization to scale up massively is so exciting. I know they're working on potentially trialing this with an entire country, and I'd be, yeah, really excited to see what could be done at large scale.

[00:22:00] Chris Anderson:
This goes to a really key role that philanthropy can play, which is to shine a light, you know, to to show a different way of getting things done, which can be effective in itself, but can also then show governments that this way of doing things is actually effective. And by leveraging government, you gain a lot more power.

[00:22:23] Natalie Cargill:
Absolutely. I think a lot of the very best philanthropy comes in early and as you say, shows, governments, “Hey, this policy could work or shows markets, hey, we've done the initial research on this promising new socially beneficial tech.” Now investors are excited and, and I think that's often the most effective, most highly leveraged philanthropy.

[00:22:43] Chris Anderson:
I mean, the last pandemic cost the world trillions of dollars as well as millions of lives. You think that philanthropy could prevent the next pandemic for a little under $300 billion? $300 billion dollars is a huge amount of money, but pandemics can wreck the world.

[00:22:59] Natalie Cargill:
And to add to that, actually Chris, I think we could prevent the next pandemic for vastly less than $300 billion dollars.

So in this report, one thing we tried to do was. Which is kind of the opposite of what we normally do, was like really see what you could achieve if almost money was no object. I think the areas of work that need to be invested in urgently, the first thing we could do is build a screening program to detect potential new viruses in wastewater.

So sewers and hospitals. And you'd look at that water every day and see,” oh, is a new virus growing exponentially?” And if you see that is happening in the water, you can detect the potential pandemic really early and stop it becoming a pandemic. The second thing I think we could do would be to upgrade all lab facilities around the world so that if we did have a new virus and a new vaccine, that vaccine can be made for everyone who would need it within six months.

So speed is just really crucial here. You know, when you're dealing with a, a pandemic, catching it early, containing it early, stopping it early is the way you save millions of lives. A third thing we could do would be to stockpile enough next generation, super effective PPE for every essential worker in the world.

And I'm not talking about kind of masks that we were wearing during COVID. Masks that have been developed to provide near perfect protection. And this will be to everyone in the world, not just for people in which countries, which was, you know, largely what happened during COVID. A final thing we could do is to develop this technology called Germicidal Light.

So, as you know, ultraviolet light sterilizes things, but it's also harmful to human skin. It seems that there's a wavelength of ultraviolet light called Far-UVC that isn't harmful for humans and also would kill pathogens in the air. Very, very early days for this technology. A lot of research to be done, but it seems as if it's promising and scaled up it could mean the end of airborne disease.

[00:25:01] Chris Anderson:
One of the challenges with pandemics is that it's hard for politicians to get support like in normal pre pre-COVID. Lots of people warned that the world was overdue for a pandemic, and the potential damage was clear that many, many, many millions of lives could be at risk.

But to get politicians to actually take action and allocate funding to it really, really hard. Now we've had the wake up call and I guess we also have a situation where AI could empower forms of sort of terrorism that, that use a, a pathogen to create mass casualties. It's certain that the world really does need to be ready for philanthropy could play a role if governments are not willing.

[00:25:46] Natalie Cargill:
I'm really excited to see philanthropists entering this space. In fact, you know, one of the grants that we recommended at Longview last year to a philanthropist was to fund a conference bringing together all the scientific experts in the world so that they could decide which safety studies would need to be done on this UVC light.

So, you know, that's the kind of thing where if the studies are done and everything looks good, the markets will pick that up. But right now it's so early that philanthropy is able to, I think, have an enormously leveraged impact by funding that very, very early stage research.

[00:26:20] Chris Anderson:
Mmmm. It is actually amazing how much can be achieved just from a convening, just sometimes the ideas are out there and they don't execute because there's just no moment.

There's no catalyst to get people to agree and say, yes, this is the right thing to do. Let's do it.

[00:26:41] Natalie Cargill:
I was talking about this this last week. I was looking back historically to the Pugwash Conferences, which were a series of conferences started in the fifties designed to reduce the risk of nuclear war and other existential outcomes.

Brought together scientists, thought leaders from all around the world who couldn't convene via normal channels because political tensions were so high. It was funded by philanthropists and I think it went on to change the course of history on nuclear risk.

It was work done at Pugwash that led to the test ban treaties that led to other treaties on reducing the number of weapons that led to the negotiations, even the end of the Vietnam War. So, I think a huge amount can be done by philanthropy when it can step in and convene people that couldn't be convened via the usual channels.

[00:27:29] Chris Anderson:
You see a role for philanthropy in, in reducing nuclear risk. What could philanthropists do?

[00:27:34] Natalie Cargill:
Absolutely. I mean, I think nuclear weapons policy is almost the prime example in my mind of something where governments are not prioritizing enough markets and there's no market case for reducing this risk and the amount of money going towards nuclear weapons policy philanthropically is tiny.

It's about 40 million, which is, as I think I pointed out in my TED Talk, less than we spend on novelty socks, and there's a lot to be done. There's, I mean, I can give you some examples of grants that have been recommended by our program officers. The Nuclear Information Project, for example, use its satellite imagery to see what's happening on the ground, like where nuclear weapons are, if countries are adhering to their treaties, that policies that need to be researched and drawn up, particularly in time for the upcoming US election around things like making sure AI doesn't dangerously accelerate or change nuclear norms, like advocating for reassessment of things like should the president be able to like unilaterally detonate nuclear weapons.

There's just lots of really low hanging fruit there that philanthropy can do a lot to solve

[00:28:38] Chris Anderson:
And it seems like so many of the things that we should legitimately worry about are result of huge bias towards caring about the things that are most visible. You know, because you know something disaster happens and then everyone gets really upset about it and you can get action on it.

[00:28:56] Natalie Cargill:
Mm-hmm.

[00:28:56] Chris Anderson:
Something that is a theoretical danger, even when it's a danger of half the world dying. It's really hard for us to care that much about it.

[00:29:05] Natalie Cargill:
Yeah.

[00:29:06] Chris Anderson:
And it, it just, it does feel like it's an amazing role for thoughtful philanthropy to, to step in and say, “While you guys are sleeping and doing your doom scrolling, there's a little issue here that we should be paying a little more attention to.”

[00:29:21] Natalie Cargill:
Yeah. Yeah. I was talking with a philanthropist about this last week and like, risk reduction is thankless work, right? Because the best case scenario is that nothing happens, which is not that rewarding to our kind of, you know, lizard brains. And I think that's why we need, you know, not just philanthropy, but in all the actions that we take to improve the world, we, we can't solely respond from like our media emotional intuitive sense.

We evolved in a very, very different environment to the one that we now find ourselves in. And while it was true in our ancestral environment that basically all the threats out there you could see and you could predict and you'd seen many times, we just don't live in that world.

And I think we need philanthropists to take seriously the challenge of preventing existential risk, preventing catastrophe 'cause it is. It is something that I think by default will be neglected.

[00:30:13] Chris Anderson:
Yeah. Well, speaking of risk prevention, let's talk artificial intelligence. You just held a convening, bringing together many of the most powerful, one of the wisest voices in the field. What do you see as the main risks and what could and should philanthropy do?

[00:30:30] Natalie Cargill:
I see two categories of risk. One is that we don't yet know how to make AI systems do what we want reliably, which is a problem. Um, for obvious reasons. You know, researchers, all the top labs are like, we don't really know how to control this and yet we're gonna keep scaling it up, and yet we're gonna, you know, make the world more and more dependent on these systems and while we still haven't solved that problem for every one person working to solve it, about 300 people are working to accelerate AI capabilities.

That's one area of work. The second is misuse. So, let's say we do get AI systems to do what we want really reliably, we solve that problem. You know, then comes a question, well, what do we want to do with really powerful technology?

Humanity is not universally benevolent, it seems, and this technology could be used to really accelerate existing trends that are not in the best interest of humanity. Things like the erosion of civil liberties. The erosion of our ability to figure out what's true. Entrenching totalitarianism. There's just a whole host of these challenges that we're gonna come across very soon and we are really not prepared, I think, to, to deal with them.

[00:31:41] Chris Anderson:
So look, when you add all the bullet points together and what, what it implies to me is that it's really possible for philanthropy to make just a giant contribution to changing the way we think about the future from one of dread to one of a real hope. How do we make this a broader conversation, Natalie?

Because it's, it can't just be a discussion among the rich, you know, the people with the resources. “Yes, I am going to go out solo and solve the nuclear threat.” What we want is a thriving. Public discussion around this so that even people without the resources can contribute ideas.

[00:32:23] Natalie Cargill:
And in many ways, I think the way philanthropy is seen kind of echoes the way the world is seen for a lot of people.

I think there's a pervasive culture of pessimism. You know, the world is getting worse. Also, fatalism, there's not a lot we can do. Also kind of disenfranchisement. I think a lot of people, you know, rightly, in many cases, don't feel that they have a voice in how these big problems are tackled or prioritized.

What I'd like to do is find a way for ideas like ambition, like, “Hey, we can solve big problems. We've done it before. We can do it again.” You know, the world in many ways has been getting better and better over the last 200 years, and we can continue those trends and I think, how to do that is a really hard question 'cause it's kind of large scale cultural change.

How does cultural change happen? You have writers and thinkers and art and media. You have opportunities for people to engage. I mean, you know, one thing I'm really keen to do is, is find ways to support writers and thinkers and people who want to change the culture from pessimism to informed, realistic, optimistic ambition.

[00:33:31] Chris Anderson:
Yeah. My takeaway from your work was just this huge surge of excitement that fundamentally the world is capable of solving it's worst problems. There is enough resource on our planet to tackle the biggest things that we worry about. I mean, for most of history, that hasn't been true.

[00:33:52] Natalie Cargill:
We can't actually solve every problem, right?

There's there, there's just mundane suffering everywhere. There's, there's unlimited problems in a sense. Even the richest countries in the world, you know, look at the rates of, of depression and, and other things that cause huge suffering. But if we prioritize, we can actually solve really big chunks of really crucial problems.

The way I thought about it was like, okay, if you are going to prioritize solving the world's problems, how to do that? You know, let's look at problems that are some combination of really large in scale, solvable and neglected. And I kind of ended up with sort of two buckets that I think made sense to us.

One bucket was just things that cause enormous amounts of suffering and we know we have solutions for them and we just need to scale them up. Very often this is things that affect the poorest people in the world. We know how to prevent and treat diseases very cheaply and easily and just need to do that.

And there's lots of examples I think, of just really, you know, intense suffering that could be solved. And the second category was we want to preserve this world gor future generations as well. You know, we don't get to be the tyrants that say, this is how the future should go, or we're going to recklessly endanger the future.

And so things like pandemic preparedness and AI risk reduction, I think not only help us today to have good lives, but preserve option value for future generations.

[00:35:14] Chris Anderson:
And the other piece I love about the work is that it is fundable by people who have some means to make definitely a challenging pledge for many people, 10%.

But some people talk about moral philosophy and our obligations to others as if our obligations with all of what we have. I've definitely lived a lot of my life fearful of that, of that feeling of guilt, of there is no limit to what I ought to give and I've therefore almost just not wanted to go there.

You just change the subject please, but, but when you actually do the math that you've done, it turns out that this 10% or two and a half percent by the top 1% of people in the world actually generates more than enough. I mean, it would generate so much philanthropy that the bottleneck would no longer be philanthropic money, it would be executing on, on this amount.

So I dunno, I personally just took great delight and hope in that even though it's a hard pledge, it is actually just about possible to manage that. And it means that, wow, here's this, this weird human race with all its flaws and all the rest of it.

It has somehow got itself into a position where it can do truly amazing things. What, what your work I feel like could help do is switch the conversation around philanthropy from such a negative, cynical, frustrating conversation of, to one of thrilling possibility. Uh, how have are you finding that you're able to bring people along and get them to see things differently like that?

[00:36:46] Natalie Cargill:
I mean, for the philanthropists we work with very often their philanthropy rather than being this kind of moral obligation that they're just about managing to do is the source of joy in their life is like the thing where they bring their financial resources, their expertise in various domains. And I think what I would like to see for philanthropists who are able to give it really large scale is putting themselves even kind of further back, like it really isn't about the donor.

It really is about like, can we bring together, you know, five or 10 very large philanthropists to do something enormous, you know, to fund the project to end pandemic risk or the trial of universal basic income in an entire country.

And I would love to see those kinds of huge milestone achievements for humanity celebrated rather than such a focus on individuals and how they might be getting it wrong.

[00:37:36] Chris Anderson:
Alright, so this is fantastic. If there was one resource that you would love to refer people to.

[00:37:43] Natalie Cargill:
I would love to refer people to the Giving What We Can Pledge, and there are also lots of great recommendations on that site.

I would also refer people to the Longview website where if you click on our menu, you can see a tab called What if the 1% Gave 10%?, and there you can find our full report and exactly how we calculated all of our crazy numbers.

[00:38:03] Chris Anderson:
Okay, so that's givingwhatwecan.org and a longview.org.

[00:38:09] Natalie Cargill:
Yes.

[00:38:09] Chris Anderson:
And I also recommend, by the way, just googling Natalie's TED Talk.

You will be amazed by what she had to say and the impact that had on the room. Natalie, thank you. It's been a delight talking with you. This is, uh, these are big, bold questions and uh, I'm so glad you're asking them.

[00:38:26] Natalie Cargill:
Thank you so much.

[00:38:30] Chris Anderson:
Okay, well, we've now had 10 big conversations about the power of generosity. You should be well equipped in your own generosity journey, big or small. If you want to stay motivated, consider reading my book, Infectious Generosity or listening to it, which you can do for free at ted.com/generosity. You can also use a new tool we've created called TIGG, the Infectious Generosity Guru.

It's an AI tool that can help you brainstorm ideas for what you can do with a little generosity and creativity in your own life or community. And it's, honestly, it's quite fun. To find that, head over to infectiousgenerosity.org and check it out.

Well, I hope you enjoyed this TED Interview series, and before I go, I want to give you a special recommendation for what to listen to next. The TED Audio Collective just launched a new podcast, The TED AI Show. Hosted by visual effects artist and spatial computing expert Bilawal Sidhu. At this moment, I think it's crucial to keep up with this evolving technology.

So, whether you are optimistic about AI or feeling a bit scared, I think you'll get a lot from this show. The TED Interview is part of the TED Audio Collective, a collection of podcasts dedicated to sparking curiosity and sharing ideas that matter. This episode was produced by Jess Shane. Our team includes Constanza Gallardo, Grace Rubenstein, Banban Cheng, Michelle Quint, Roxanne Hai Lash, and Daniella Balarezo.

The show is mixed by Sarah Bruguiere. If you like this show, do please share it with someone. This is your own act of infectious generosity. It's the best way that we can get this thing out there. So thank you for doing that, and thank you so much for listening.