 Happy to be here. Thank you all for holding space for such beautiful values. Leadership has a very particular connotation in the world, but when it's embedded with these values that we're all talking about, I think it becomes a very powerful force for social good. So I wanna talk a little bit about my journey, some of the lessons I've learned, some of the work we do, and how we can bring some of these ripples of generosity into the world. So I'll start with a story. This was, maybe I was 14 or 15 years old. I grew up, I was born in India, and our family immigrated to the U.S., so this was our first trip back. I had a friend from kindergarten, and he was very excited. We would go to school together on a bicycle every single day, and when I got back, now we're 14 or 15, he's like, Devon, guess what? He's like, what? I've got a moped. And so he's like, you gotta go up on a spin on this thing. This thing's like way faster than our bicycles. And so we get on, and he's taking me on, and like two teenagers, we're goofing around, we're playing around, and then there's a little pothole on the road. And the common sense thing to do would be to slow down. Instead, this guy accelerates, and we go whoop, and then up, and we survive. He's like, wasn't that amazing? I said, no, it wasn't that amazing. I've got an American stomach now. So he's like, okay, no, it's okay, it's fine. We go a little farther, another pothole, and he does the same thing again. And I was like, look, buddy, we should really slow down because otherwise I'm gonna throw up. And he's like, no, no, no, you don't know what you're talking about. This is, you just wait, this gets funner and funner. I was like, oh boy, all right, so we go on another pothole. And sure enough, this time I throw up. So here we are, two confused kids without our moms, right? I mean, how do you handle throwing up on the streets with a bunch of strangers around? We're looking totally confused. We're trying to figure out how to handle the situation. There's this one guy who's going on the streets, just casually going by on his bicycle. He stops, gets down, goes to a nearby stall, has a bag, from his bag he takes out a lemon. Goes to the stall, cuts the lemon in half, gives me half a lemon, puts the other half in his bag, and he goes away. As if to say, look, if you suck on this lemon, the citrus is gonna make you feel, it really did make me feel good. But at that time, I didn't think much of it. But then I thought about it. It's like this guy, stopped to help a stranger. He took half the lemon back. And I've known people who, for whom even just having one lemon would be a big deal. He gave me half of what he had. And today, he didn't even introduce himself. He doesn't want to be my Facebook fan, Twitter follower or nothing, you know? He just did it out of love because he saw someone in need, and this is my fellow brother. And I look at that and I say, wow, I wanna be like that when I grow up. I've never met that man again. I probably couldn't even remember the exact physical features he has, but I remember that moment very clearly. And here I am so many years later, still evoking that person's spirit. So how can we create that kind of a world, that kind of a community where we are united to help each other in a very natural, effortless way with whatever we have at our disposal here and now? My aunt put it really well. She's in India and she says, you know, I don't understand all the high level stuff, but I'll tell you what. 20 years ago, when we used to go on trains in India, whenever we would go and we had a box of food, we would always take extra. Why? Because you share with those. You would never open up your own food and be like, okay, this is my own thing. Kinda like what we do with our iPhones now, you know? You don't do that. Like you share. And if you know you're gonna open your box in the train compartment, you always take more. That was just, and everybody in India knew this. And now, all those everybody's, everyone will tell you, no one will take it. Even if you offer, no one will offer. And even if you do offer, no one is gonna receive it because who knows what's in there. I can't trust it, you know? Because I've been reading the headlines everywhere and the world is a terrible place. That's the story in our head. So how can we turn some of these things around? So my personal journey along the way, this is me with hair. I had hair once in a while. This is my vanity moment right here, this slide. Like everyone else, I think I wanted to be, the dominant paradigm dream is that you gotta be successful. In high school, you're trying to do a good college. I got to a good college. Then you go there, you're trying to impress all the professors, get your recommendation so you can get to the next run, which is either grad school or an internship or working someplace nice, where you can get a lot of experience. I got a job in my third year. It was like a dream job, actually. Then when you get there, you would think, okay, wow, now I can breathe easy. No, because you gotta get the promotion. You gotta do the right things there so you can climb up the ladder. Six months, I got two promotions. And I'm still in my early 20s, you know? And I'm thinking, okay, this is good. I should feel like I've arrived. Like this is, I'm already ahead of, but your mind doesn't stop because it's the mental rat race that just keeps on going and going and going as totally out of control. And this happened to be where the dot-com boom was hitting. And so for a young 20-somethings with computer science experience and you're like working at a company, that's, oh, what do you mean? You gotta be an entrepreneur. You gotta start talking about fancy cars, big houses, billions of dollars. Everything has to start with a B, otherwise you're not even taken seriously. That was sort of the ethos. And a part of me, a deep part of me, said, no, I just don't sense that this is heading in the right direction. And yet there was a lot of creativity, enthusiasm, energy, innovation, all those. There was a lot of positives to the Silicon Valley, but it was all being used for self-interest, at least so it seemed to me at the time. And it really was. And so I said, how can we use all the positives for the benefit of other people? In a very different direction. So a few of us went to a homeless shelter in 1999, and we said, look, we wanna help. We don't really know how, but we're a bunch of kids. Can we help? What can we do? We ended up building them a website. Now, this is mind you at the time, they didn't even know what a website was, right? They said, oh, what's that? So we said, oh, it's good for you. It'll help your homeless shelter do more things. And so we had a whole explanation. Then the woman actually goes and, okay, fine. Here's a screwdriver to my computer. Can you put the website in there? And we said, no, no, actually, we're gonna do it from home. She's like, you're gonna volunteer from home? How are you volunteering for me? She had no idea of this connected network there. And that was the first project, came home. And it felt so good, it felt so right. We just gave selflessly. No strings attached, we didn't want anything. And we just said, we just wanna help you. And we thought we were helping them, but actually in the process, we were igniting an inner transformation we were feeling connected. So he said, wow, this is great, right? I felt like I received, I thought I was giving, but I felt like I received. So we went and told our friends, and they were like, hey, you should try, you know this generosity thing? Like the stuff they tell you you should do when you're 65 and you retire? I found a loophole, we can do it now. And they were like, okay, sure, what should we do? And they joined on. They had the same experience as they had the same experience. Yeah, are we good? As they had the same experience, more people, they told their friends. And pretty soon from four people to 40 to 400 to, you know, 4,000 to 40,000 to 400,000 now, it just kept on going. So for me, it went from personal success, from me-orientedness to a kind of we. This is actually, so it was a caricature of me. Yeah, that's supposed to be me with hair and monastic robes and a palm pilot. I'm dating myself now. So this is like trying to use, and it says I had a plan to change the silicone, I really didn't have a plan, but you know how the media does its own thing. And there was a lot of attention. They were saying, look, these guys could make money doing this, but they're just doing it for free. They said, they're crazy. There are a lot of stories that said, look, these guys have lost their minds, except that people read those stories and said, hey, sign me up, I'm crazy like that too. I like giving, because you know what? Giving ignites something much deeper in me and that has value too, and I want to practice that. So lots of people came on. And so for me, this idea of just going from me-oriented success to a we-oriented possibility through service was very important. But then there was a third phase for me. And this was around stillness, 2005. This is probably one of the weakest moments of my life. My wife and I, in 2005, six months into our marriage, we decided to go on a walking pilgrimage. So we go to the Gandhi Ashram and we said, you know, we were doing all this stuff. It was at the peak of service space. It was at the peak of the work that we were doing. And we said, you know, we have a lot of influence in the world, we can do a lot of great things, but we should really continue to transform ourselves. Where is that quantum leap? Sometimes power can corrupt the spirit. And how do you know it's corrupting you? Only one way to find out, can you drop it? So we left it. And we went to India. We put a whole bunch of our boxes in my parents' house and sold everything else we had to go one way ticket, went to India, went to the Gandhi Ashram. And we said, we're gonna walk south. We're gonna eat whatever food is offered. We're gonna sleep wherever place is offered. And look, if people are generous and kind and compassionate, we'll survive. If they're not, who knows what happens. But our faith was that we're gonna meet each situation with compassion and love and that we would, you know, in turn be taken care of. Of course, as you might imagine, you have a lot of, you know, a lot of different testing moments. This was one of those moments, it's super hot. It's, you know, maybe 45 degrees centigrade. People, there were just a bunch of people that that particular day, they were just being mean. They were like, what are you doing? Why are you doing this? People like you, you know, should be going out, doing more meaningful things in the world. And all this stuff, and I was just, I had, I was just a bad day. You know, I was just not feeling good. I was not feeling centered. I was not feeling loving at all. And my wife, my wonderful wife who's here, she was on the pilgrimage and she says, Nipun, why don't you sit down and meditate? So we go to a roof and we didn't even have a place to stay and sometimes this kind of stuff can really knot your head and I just went to a rooftop and I just meditated. And as I was meditating, I remember thinking, why can't the world be a little kinder? And that was a question that was very present for me. Why can't the world be a little kinder? And then as I sat and as I felt, as I fell into a deeper kind of stillness, the question changed itself. And the question was, why am I not a little kinder in the world? How can I be the change? Instead of saying, oh, why is the world not kind? How about you step it up? How about you take this state that you're in where you're feeling all down and out and how can you birth a fountain of love in this very moment? How about you be that change? And that flip has continued to stay with me and continues to deepen as I go on this journey. It's a continual cyclical process. And so I think I went from me to we, which I thought was great and broad, but stillness broadened it even more to a kind of us. What's happening? It's us. Because even out of a we, we can create all these identities and a lot of different problems. So in this context of my personal journey, we started Service Space. And Service Space was doing lots of different things. It spawned a whole bunch of, it's an incubator of gift economy projects, of pay it forward. I'm so, it's so exciting that there's a whole paid forward station here. What does it mean to pay forward? What does it mean to feel connected? What does it mean to care for the person before you and the person after you? These are all questions that we don't have enough basis to ask. And so we were creating projects that were birthing this kind of value in the world. But of course, being from the Silicon Valley, that innovation thing, we're like, look, if we're gonna step it up, let's push some bounds. Let's go all out. Even if we die and fall flat on our face, let it be. Here died a bunch of kids that were recklessly generous. Fine with me. And so we went. And so this was 200 years ago, we made food on a farm. 100 years ago, we started making stuff in a factory. But now, in the information economy, we make ideas. And leaders today hold space for these ideas for many to many connections to happen. YouTube doesn't make videos. Flickr doesn't create post photos. Meetup doesn't have events. There are spaces where they're holding space for many to many connections to happen around a certain value. And for us, that value was generosity, service, selflessness. So we did that. But our innovation was this. Is that usually, here, I'll just go to the slide here. Usually you say, look, I got a big company. I should have a lot of staff. I gotta go out and raise a lot of money. And then I'm gonna have big impact in the world. Because I wanna change everything because the world is messed up and I'm gonna fix it. That's sort of a kind of story in our head. I think a lot of people are sold to that story. But we said, if we really wanna innovate, let's change it up. So we went, we said, instead of having a lot of staff, let's have no staff. As our organizing principle, no staff. All volunteers, okay? Instead of having, doing big money, let's do no fundraising. Because you know, money starts to get heavy and toxic. And you can tell inspiring stories, but then in the back door, you're doing all this other stuff to get ahead. And there's a kind of toxicity to it. And as kids, we were like, forget it, man. Let's, we're just not gonna fundraise. We're just gonna do power of love all the way through. And instead of big, big impact in the world, we said, forget about changing the world. Let's do small things, right? Let's be that change. And so collectively, you look at this movement, it's the exact opposite of what the dominant paradigm tells you. And so most people looked at us and said, that's cute, you know, that's really nice. You know, that's really sweet of you guys to do. Oh, that's so, you know. And we said, okay, fine, fine. You think it won't really go anywhere? Yeah, they said it's impossible. Such kind of things don't go too far. This is in the late 90s. They hadn't seen so many revolutions coming. Francois talked about Roger Bannister. I don't know if you know this story. This is an incredible story. This is the guy who was breaking as, you know, in that photo. This is Roger Bannister. May 1954, he broke what was humanly thought to be impossible, the four minute mile. Everywhere, media, everywhere. Oh my God, this is a human miracle. Three minutes, 59.7 seconds. Amazing. Humanity can break four minute mile. Except three months later, this guy named John Landy on an Australian track, does it in three minutes and 56 seconds. And the more, even more incredible thing was that over the next three years, 18 runners broke the four minute mile. So what happened? Steroids, you know, new shoes, new technology. Was it just that we broke a mental barrier? What we thought was impossible, now all of a sudden it's possible and everyone's doing it. So in a way, for us, we had, so because we were all volunteer run, we had, instead of having five staff doing 40 hours a week, 40 hours a week, we had 40 volunteers giving five hours a week. Previously, in 1980 or something, you know, you would say, oh, that's too much overhead. Except with the internet, you could do that. You could aggregate these small pieces and have institutional capacity. She says, wow, okay, this works. And then, oh, I'll get, I'll get there first. And then we didn't fundraise. And because we didn't fundraise, it allowed us to broaden our idea of capital. Right now, we have this equation in our mind that wealth equals money. Money is a type of wealth, but there are so many different kinds of wealth. And if you don't have a diversity of the different wealths, we're gonna have a very broken society. And we see that with all kinds of inequity showing up in our society. So this was something we discovered. Because we were not, you know, when I was young, I had a music teacher and he was blind. But because he was blind, his sense of hearing was remarkable. So like that, when you're not just focused on one thing, you end up discovering, wow, there's so many different kinds of wealth and I can engage those wealth and I can use my creativity to put them together to create new solutions. Because everyone's after this one kind of wealth and they're really beating each other up around it, but wait a second, there's all this abundance of wealth, we're not even looking at that. So we started discovering that. Similarly with small actions. The internet connects all these small actions. Here's a data point for all of you. On Wikipedia, everyone goes in and edits. Volunteer editors. Prior to the internet, it would be impossible to have something like Wikipedia. On Wikipedia, they actually measured the number of hours that people have contributed. Volunteer hours, of course. 100 million volunteer hours. 100 million volunteer hours that previously were just unused now create something like a Wikipedia for us. And that they say is only 1% of the possible time that we have access to, but we're just not tapping into that. So we started tapping into all these abundance, right? All this abundance because of our principles and allowed us to do a lot of impossible things. But underneath it, we were just doing it for service. And what service was doing was creating these circles of possibility. It was connecting each one of us. It was going into a train compartment, opening up not just your box of lunch, but actually sharing it, having a conversation, learning about them, sharing your tidbits with them, taking those back to your home. We were not doing it on the train, but we were doing it in the small spaces that we had access to. And we were doing it online, we were doing it offline, and we were doing it within our own self. So I look at people like Gandhi. It was a big inspiration. You know, I don't know if you know, there's so many Gandhi stories. There's a great story. Gandhi is on a train one time with someone else, and he drops one of his shoes. And you know, the guy, Gandhi's response was remarkable. He, as soon as he realized, oh my God, it's a moving train, I've lost my shoe, right? He takes his second shoe and throws it down. So the guy next to him, someone like me, he's like, Gandhi, you're a pretty smart guy, but then that didn't really seem so bright. Why did you throw your second one away? And he did it very spontaneously. Gandhi's like, well, if I drop my first one, and if I have one and the guy who finds that one, we're both gonna have one. And it's no good. So I just thought that, look, if I've already dropped one, I might as well drop my other one. So the guy who finds it has a pair. And who thinks like this? Usually if it's a very me-centered person, they're thinking, oh my God, I've paid this much, I should've done this, I knew I should've tucked my feet in, these Indian trains, all this stuff. You can go on. But here is Gandhi who spontaneously is thinking of the other guy who finds that one shoe. What does it take? What were the kinds of questions? What would he see in the world today? And if you look at the world today, we have two billion people in extreme poverty. Rich and poor divide is the highest ever. Nature is being pillaged like never before. Mass urbanization is really destroying village culture. Economic growth as the track we're on is unsustainable. So there's a lot of different problems. This is a man, not Gandhi. Reid Hoffman, CEO of LinkedIn. LinkedIn is billionaire, one of the most influential people in the world. He has this quote in the Wall Street Journal that I think sums it up. And I think it's a challenge to all leaders, especially leaders who care about values. And he says, social networks do best when they tap into one of the seven deadly sins. Facebook is ego, Zynga is sloth, LinkedIn his own company is greed. Is that the best we can do? We just wanna appeal to people's base instincts and create business models around it? Open question. Couple weeks ago, iPhone 6 came out. Of course we know that social media and technology has ever really created a revolution. I'm from the technology sector. There's a lot of good that comes out of it. But this is the line for iPhone 6. It stretches 12 city blocks this morning. This is in New York. And people are sleeping in boxes for an iPhone that they could get a week later. What is it that goes on? I mean, what is it that goes on inside that person that they need to just have it now and they're willing to sleep in a box in New York or so many blocks? What are we doing? This was a, I was speaking to all these like, massive venture capitalist type of people. And this was the quote I saw in the newspaper that day in Bloomberg. First in the US divorce rate points to improving economy. We've lost the sensitivity and when we do we start seeing headlines like this. In hundreds of schools around the world they are now saying that look to appeal to people's basic human instinct doesn't work because they're so desensitized. Because all they want are gadgets and stuff and you need money to do that. So if you want to motivate them, give them money. Should we pay kids to go to school? It's a really weird kind of question, right? Except that it gets weirder and weirder, right? Paying your kids to do chores? Why don't we just, like we can't get them to do homework. We can't get them to do chores around it. Let's pay them to do that. And hey, let's create an app for that, right? Social technology. And then how about if you pay kids to eat vegetables at school, study finds they'll actually do it. Oh my gosh. Oscar Wilde, more than a century ago, said it best. He says nowadays we know the price of everything with a value of nothing. And it's more true today than ever before. And so how do we create value? That is priceless to be honest. I mean, how do we create that and we owe it to ourselves? Because that's a very deep form of wealth. Our society, if you talk to economists they say, look, many years ago, we had a lot of gift in our society. We had a lot of selfless giving, right? The kind that used to exist in train compartments. We had, oh, not Bart, we had a lot of barter. And we had a lot of commerce. We had some commerce. And we had some amount of casino. Except today that casino part has really taken over. If you look at this slide, this is a number of trades on a particular stock. They just did this graph. It's incredible. This high spree trading, if you look in the bottom left corner, you see this is 2007, right? We all have faith in the market and the stock markets. And there's a lot of good stuff out there. So this is not to criticize the whole chauvin. But this is starting in 2007, the number of stock trades that are happening in a very short period of time for a particular stock. And as you will see, that number starts to, the graph really starts to skyrocket. And you start to say, Native Americans in the US had this organizing principle. Whenever they would have to make a big decision, they would sit in council, and they would say, how does this decision affect not me and my tribe and my community, and not just today, not tomorrow, not day after, seven generations down the road. How does this one decision affect seven generations down the road? And today, as you see here, the EU actually passed a law, a law, I think a year and a half ago, they said, please hold on to your stocks, not for seven generations, not for seven years, not for seven months, not for seven days, not even for seven hours. They said, please hold on to it for a minimum of half a second, half a second. Like that's how short term we have become. And as you can see in the graph, like this is the kinds of casino activity that's going on all the time. I mean, you can look at the science of all this. People move their offices entirely in one direction just so they can have the microsecond advantage over these stock trades. Let's just take a second, it's about to climax in Crescendo. And this has continued to skyrocket. I don't have a graphic for what happens after 2012, but it continues, look at that. So what we start to lose when, see we started with this and you saw where it went. What we start to lose is a lesser and lesser connection. As we go from gift to a casino side of the world, we start to have lesser and lesser connection to our inner ecology. And the opportunity here is that inner transformation can rebalance the spectrum. It's not to say that the whole world needs to be gift. It's fine, but you have to have a healthy spectrum. You cannot take the gift part away even if it doesn't make the headlines on society. You cannot commoditize everything. My mother's meal is gonna taste so different than a meal at a subway, right? There is value to that and we cannot lose that value. It's not to say let's do away with all that, but let's have a healthy ecosystem. Let's have a healthy spectrum. So that's the inner transformation possibility. Usually we say I wanna create this impact in the world. I need this project to create that impact. Here's my plan. This is the staff I need. And if staff have some kind of an inner transformation, it's great. If they don't, that's fine. It's an accessory. But what happens if you lead with inner transformation? You do something kind that connects you to people. Those people then allow projects to emerge and those projects create impact. And I think this is the core question that we can be asking. What emerges when we lead with inner transformation? This is Gandhi's Jharka. As all of you know, this is the spinning wheel. And I think if he were to ask this question, all were to ask this question. I don't know if there's an answer, but I certainly know this is an important question to ask. So we've asked this question. And I'll tell you, to frame the answer, I wanna go to a friend of mine to frame a hypothesis. I wanna go to a friend of mine, Adam Grant. I don't know how many of you have heard of him. Youngest tenured professor at Warden. When he was 14, he says, I wanna be a diver. All right, he goes to the tries out for the team. And the coach says, look, you're like two left feet. You should not do diving. This is not your sport, go do something else. He's like, nope, this is what I wanna do. Works out six hours a day for the next four years, makes it to the Junior Olympics. Goes to Harvard, super sharp guy, goes to Harvard. And at Harvard, he's on the swim team and he makes it to the NCAA finals. In the round before the final round, he sees someone do a dive. It's his competitor. And he goes to me and he says, hey, look, buddy man, you know, your dive is a little off. You should fix it, you should do this. He's helping his competitor. And what ends up happening is that that guy wins the finals and he gets second place. So he's like, oh, darn, I shouldn't have been a nice guy, you know? In his next year, makes it to the finals again. He sees another guy, he helps out another guy and that guy ends up beating him again. He got second place. And so he had this thing in his head that look, nice guy's finished last, you know, because if you help your competition where they're gonna beat you and they're gonna be up ahead. So he always had this hypothesis in his head. When he got to Wharton, he started doing a lot of research particularly in the realm of business because he was now doing a lot of business work. And he says, look, do givers, people who are giving, right? Do they always end up at the bottom of the pyramid? And he noticed, he first went to look at the bottom of the pyramid. He's like, yeah, a lot of givers here. But then he ended up looking at the top. He says, wait a second, there's a lot of givers at the top too. And when givers succeed, they succeed in a very different way. And so he started looking at this holy ecology and he said there's three kinds of people. He says there's givers, there's takers, people who are just gonna take my interest first. There's matchers, people who say, look, I will take, I will take, I will put a boundary if you're a taker, I will give if you're giving. I'll match you wherever you are. And then there's people who are just prone to giving and they just give. So he says there's these three kinds of people. But how do you shift the ecosystem more towards givers? And this is research at Kellogg that says all you need is just one consistent contributor. If you just have one consistent contributor, a consistent contributor is someone who looks for the collective good first and a personal good second. And if you just have one consistent contributor, then all of a sudden the whole group starts cooperating. There's a lot more trust and productivity goes up. So in a larger group, the way they sum it up, it's really well, he says, in a larger group, if someone consistently acts as a friend, it's easier for others to act as friends and everyone benefits. So this is Adam Grant saying, do we just need one consistent contributor? And where have I seen that? I thought about it and I was like, I've seen that somewhere. So every Wednesday at our home, in our own home in the Silicon Valley, and now it's spread to many cities around the world, our doors are open. People walk in, they sit in for an hour of silence. We just move the furniture out to the side. We have a simple home. We move furniture out to the side. People sit in silence for an hour. And then in the second hour, there's a circle of sharing. And in the third hour, there's dinner in silence. And then over the last, I think 16 years that my parents have been hosting this, more than 40,000 people walked in through our home. My mom has fed all these people. I go to different cities and people are like, yeah, I know you. I said, oh, maybe I know you too. He's like, no, no, no, you're like my brother. I was like, what do you mean? He says, I've had your mother's food. It's an amazing feeling, right? So we have a whole bunch of videos. So this was one of the nights, some of the people there were singing a birthday song for someone, and we all just kind of took a random photo. And one very curious thing happens. Here you have like 60, 70 people that are fed in a home. But after the food, there's dishes. And we all do the dishes. But this amazing thing happens that everyone starts fighting to do the dishes, right? This is actually a photo of me many moons ago fighting with this guy, Pancho. And we're just like fighting, and all these wives and husbands, you know, wives are like, how come my husband doesn't do that at home? Like he's fighting to do the dishes here. What's going on? And then husbands are saying the same to other wives. It's like, it's like, but it's because they're consistent contributors. There's that one or two people that are saying, I'm gonna do the dishes no matter what. As soon as you have the consistent contributors, the matchers start to tilt towards givers. And as soon as you have a lot more givers, it really starts to create a very different ecosystem around that. And this is not just with dishes. You can do that, of course, with so many things around the world, in groups, in organizations, and in cultures. So I think the core question becomes, how do we shift? How do we shift towards greater generosity? And clearly, if you have takers, matchers, and givers, you need three different kinds of solutions. You have takers, or takers? Well, we call what you need the prescription, not quite the prescription, but I think what you need is giftivism. Giftivism is a practice of radically generous acts that change the world. Radically generous, radical, why? Not just because it's a generous act, but it's a movement of the 100%. If you look at people like Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Dalai Lama, Cesar Chavez, Ang Sancti, Nelson Mandela, whom we heard about, these were people who did not say me versus you. My change versus your change. My worldview versus yours. It was a movement of 100%. In February 1922, in India, all these people are going for independence. Lots of people end up meeting a whole bunch of police, the British police. Things get a little angry, things get violent after that, and all of a sudden, there's this protest. 22 people died. Gandhi's response, Gandhi's response from there is let's abandon the whole movement for a week. India is not ready for independence. They had the power, they had the numbers, they could have, it was only 100,000 British soldiers, but he's saying we're not ready for independence. He actually disbands the whole movement. And so this idea of giftivism is actually to say, look, it's a movement of the 100%. We're not here to take a strategic shortcut to get to some outcome. It's a movement to uplift not just me and you, but everyone. And that giftivism becomes incredibly powerful when it is rooted in that sort of spirit of service. Today, in the previous world, of course, 20, 30 years ago, you had those one too many kind of heroes. Today, that has been intermediated. Now you have many everyday heroes doing so many heroic acts, and these are all accessible because we live in a connected era. Here's a great story of a guy, Julio Diaz, I don't know if you've heard the story, one of my favorite stories. So Julio's going home from work one day, he's getting off, he's at a subway, and some kid comes up to me and says, give me all your money, okay? Well, this guy's like, okay, here's my wallet, you've got the money. He says, and then he's about to take off. He says, but hey, wait, you know, it's a little chilly, do you want my jacket too? And the kid's like, okay, oh my God, you know, I don't know, how does this work? Do I take it? Sure, all right, he comes back. Okay, yeah, it is kind of cold, I don't have a jacket, and you got a nice jacket, I'll take it. He takes it, now Julio says to him, hey, man, you know, I'm about to go to dinner. Do you want to join me? And again, this kid's like, you know, wait a second, how does this work? You know, he's like, actually, I am kind of hungry, sure, we go. So they go to have a meal. This is like a true story. They have a meal at the end of the meal, the check comes and Julio says, look, I would treat you buddy, but you have my wallet. And so the kid gives him back the wallet. Gives him back the wallet, Julio says, can I ask for one more thing? Can you give me your knife? And he gives him the knife. This is not the kind of social change that a government or an NGO or a business can create in the world. This has to be a one to one, one ignited heart who believes in generosity and the power of love to touch that person in that particular way. And this is not just a one off story. And this is not just a story of being in very dramatic situations, right? Here's a friend of mine, another friend, incredible guy. He was working on a Wall Street where they bill every three minutes. You know, it's like time is money, literally, right? And he goes up to his boss, one of his boss, they had a great year. His boss says, what do you want? Blank check, right? He could ask for something probably in seven figures. Who knows? You know, these guys talking very astronomical numbers. So he says, you know what I really wanna do? I want a minute of silence before every group meeting we have. A minute of silence? What is that? What are you talking about? I mean, no man, time is money. We go, we're on a roll here. We have no time to waste. You know, we can't, no. Anything else? Like, no, that's all I want. He kinda doubled down on it. He didn't ask for anything else. Next day, the boss comes back and he says, you know, really? You want a minute of silence before every group meeting? That's all you want? Just fine. If that's what you want, we'll do it. Minute of silence turns into two, to three, to five. Today, they're doing 30 minutes once a week in their office, right? It's not religious, it's just about stealing the mind. And once you steal the mind, it creates all kinds of other opportunities. You start to see a whole lot more. And here is this guy. That's an act of giftivism, to be on Wall Street, where you're billing every three minutes. Everyone's just so focused, go, go, go. And he's saying, I want to pause, I want to breathe. That takes a certain kind of inner kung fu. There's another woman. She works at Cisco. She did something amazing. She says, you know, here you have the Pay It Forward stall. She decided, she didn't have such a conscious group. She's working in one of these big buildings at Cisco. And she says, you know what? I want to fill this space up with the spirit of love. What should I do? Goes to the vending machine. They have subsidized Coke cans. It was 50 cents. This is in the US. So she puts 50 cents, gets her Coke can. Then she's like, you know, I'm going to put two more coins. And she puts two more coins. And she puts a little note. And the note says, someone before you has paid for your Coke can, please enjoy. And there's a little smile card. If you want to pay it forward, keep the chain going. Pretty soon, everyone in the building is like, oh my god. There's always this extra Coke can all around. You never know which vending machine what's happening. Someone sends out an email to the whole building. And they're like, hey, guess what? Someone is doing these acts of kindness. And then who is it? We don't know. But it's happening all over the place. And then someone else says, oh, you know, I've noticed it happens on floor 3 from 245 to 330. And so instead of a neighborhood crime watch, there is a neighborhood kindness watch. And it just changed the whole flavor. Everyone is now like, who's doing that? And a whole bunch of people got excited. They started doing it. And in very small ways, it started to create a very different culture, very different ethos in that building. So I think for takers, you need that giftivism spirit. You need that tough action. For matchers, you need spaces. These are offline and online contexts where transformation can emerge. You can't teach compassion. A lot of research now makes it very clear there's no way to teach compassion. What you can do is create conditions for compassion to arise by itself. So you can do that online. You can do that as we see with smile cards in so many small ways. There's amazing stories of people who are just ignited by the smallest of facts. You do a small act. You leave a smile card behind that tells a person, don't let the chain stop. It's not just from one to one. Keep that chain going. Do something kind for someone else. And that's the hope that we can all create here. There's a whole bunch of opportunities that I'm sure you'll be hearing about over time. And then there's spaces that were offline, like Karma Kitchen. I think most of you heard of Karma Kitchen. Karma Kitchen is a restaurant. We have Stephanie here who just tried this in Indonesia. Karma Kitchen is a restaurant where you walk in and your check reads zero. It's zero because someone before you has paid for you and you get to pay forward for people after you. And people say, well, what's the big deal, man? I still have to pay. All right, like here you can say the same, well, what's the big deal? I still gotta pay for my coffee and all the nuts and all the things I'm getting. Well, the big deal is that when it's just me and it's my money, my order, my food, it's owed to me. It's a very me-centered experience. But here you are invited to connect with the person before you whom you will not see and pay forward in gratitude. Evoke a sense of gratitude to the person after you who will not be able to say thank you back to you. How do you expand that? There was a kid, I spoke about that at Stanford one time. He's like, oh, well, what's the difference? I said, imagine two toll booth lanes. In one lane, everyone is paying for themselves. In another one, everyone is paying forward for the car behind them. At the end of the day, money is the same. Which lane do you wanna be in? Do you wanna be connected to the car in front and the car behind you? Or do you just wanna be in a me and mine kind of world? And that's the opportunity. We don't have spaces that create that. So there's a lot of different, there's some amazing karmic kitchen stories. There was a guy who comes in one time, first time, and he looks to the waiter and he says, oh, that karmic kitchen t-shirt, that's really nice. Where can I buy it? This guy's like, sorry, you can't buy it, but we'll see, I'd let me inquire if there's any other t-shirts. And you have to volunteer to get these t-shirts. So, okay, sorry. He decides to take off his own t-shirt, put someone else's t-shirt on, gift him the shirt. I'd imagine going to a space where you're served by a volunteer and then you tell him nice t-shirt and he takes off the shirt off his back. And then he puts a little note, please laundry before using. And so here he is. And this guy doesn't know how to process it. 10 minutes later he calls him back and he says, man, this is amazing. You guys are all doing this. Everyone is doing this. Everyone in this restaurant is paying for each other. We care for each other. What a great statement. And he comes back and he tells him, he says, look, I work at eBay, I get these gift cards, here's two $50 gift cards. This is for Karma Kitchen. And this guy says, well, Karma Kitchen, who is Karma Kitchen? It's all of us. So he goes to a random table and he gives him one of these cards. This woman's first time, she had brought a kid with a piggy bank to teach him about pay-forward and this empathy. And here's this woman hasn't even ordered and he says, ma'am, here's a $50 gift card for you. And it's like, what, money rains up from the top? Where have I landed on heaven? What's going on? And he just says, well, how much cup of gratitude overflow over there? And they just wanted to gift this to somebody in this space. And now this woman's turning pink and purple. This guy who gave the card is completely going nuts. And bit by bit, every small thing that we can do, it can generate greater and greater connection, almost out of nothing out of that one gift you created so many different possibilities. And that kind of potential is there all the time in all kinds of spaces. So lastly, forgivers, people who are already giving, who are already on that edge, who are already prone to a kind of generosity, a kind of selflessness. We need incubators that allow them to create these kinds of gift ecologies. There's a guy who runs a magazine on this paid forward basis. There's a rickshaw driver in India, amazing. In India, when you go, they will say, oh, you wanna go from here to there? Okay, well, Sasanakijang is just on the way. And it's not. It's like way out here, you know? But they would just take you around. And you say, wow, there's like no ethics in this country. But then if you go and live with that guy, you would realize that, man, he's got dreams for his kids too. But he's shortchanged by the system, so he sees a tourist and he's taking advantage of that because he has to. So it's a stalemate. How do you break that stalemate? This guy says, Udevay says in my rickshaw, no meter. I trust you to pay forward whatever you want. Because what am I having faith in? I'm having faith in your capacity to respond to love. I'm having faith in your capacity to know that, wow, this is meaningful and valuable and needs to be nurtured in the world. So I told him, look, everyone's gonna ask you, does this work out financially? So he has a book, point A to point B. People paid, someone paid this much. Point C to point D, someone paid this much. Some people give more, some less. On balance, it evens out. And this is not like Bill Gates doing his philanthropy. This is a rickshaw driver. This is a guy you could say, qualifies in those U.N. metrics that say the number of people getting a dollar a day or two dollars a day. He is wanting to step into this love. And economics-wise, it works out. But whenever you ask him that question, he says, oh, by the way, take a look at the second book I have. This is where I ask people how they felt sitting in my rickshaw. And imagine sitting in a rickshaw where you have a rickshaw driver teaching you about generosity. Where you have a rickshaw driver having faith in love. Where you have a rickshaw driver being the change. It's incredibly powerful. So this guy, Uday Pai, was already, he was already a giver. But once you hold space, he can really create a project and incubate it and bring more people into the fold of a gift ecology even in his own community. Like that, there's a woman who runs a clinic like that. There's so many examples. But this is where, so I feel like you have givers, takers, and matchers, each one of them need different kinds of solutions. And we on the whole owe it to ourselves to create such possibilities in the world. And I think previously, this is why this is so exciting, is that previously it would be one too many. This is sort of the era of like the heroes, hub and spoke model. Then we now have the possibility, then we had the possibility of, this is sort of the, first is the broadcast model, the TV model. This is one to one, the telephone model. And now we live in an era of many to many, which is the internet era. And we can do that. We have done this for profit, we have done this for protest, but we haven't done enough of it for love. And the reason why love becomes so significant, the reason why service is so significant is because on paper, those are just lines in between them. But in practice, these are profound connections. If all of us connect in the spirit of selfishness, it would not be as powerful. But if we connect in the spirit of love, you try doing an act of kindness for anyone in this room and see how you feel. I'd see how that connection is and imagine amplifying that over a network. That connection is a weighted connection. It's a strong, deep connection. And that's why this is a photo, and I think to conclude, I wanna share this little anecdote about the quality and the depth of those connections, not just the breadth and the number of those connections. This is Hurricane Katrina. Post Hurricane Katrina in New York, this is a woman walking down the street where she grew up. Everything's destroyed. And after, I mean, this is another photo of the kind of destruction. I mean, it was just, it pummeled everything. Except there's this one thing that has survived and it has survived for 5,000 years. And there's a reason why. These oak trees. And the reason why these oak trees survive is because they have deep roots. And they don't just have deep roots. Their deep roots are connected to deep roots of other oak trees. And sometimes the network, that underground network of these roots spans over 100 miles. So here comes a big hurricane and who shakes it up. And if you don't have any roots, you're completely gone. You're what happens in the previous photo. But if you've got roots, if you've got that depth, and if you go deep enough into those roots that it connects with the roots of other people and those roots connect with so many other people and spans 100 miles to 1,000 years, man, it can really change something in a very profound way. And I think that whole journey of connecting the branch tips to the roots is the journey of surface. And this is why, and I think the key lever is really our own heart. Key lever is paying forward for people after you. Not because they need it, not because you're doing an act of kindness even, but because it allows your own heart to open and stretch. I think if change starts from here, it creates a very amazing possibility for the world. I think this is why Gandhi didn't say you must, he didn't say go out and create the change. He didn't say go out and talk about the change. He instead said you must be the change. He knew how to create, he knew how to talk, he knew how to create projects, but instead he says the point of greatest leverage is in your own self. When you are being that change, you can create incredible ripples, very different kind of ripples. And I think that's the possibility in front of all of us. Thank you.