How to Experience the Joy of Giving Right Now: A Giving Tuesday Special from The Happiness Lab

December 2, 2025·48 min·3 clips

Laurie Santos wrote 'have fun at MIT' on a six-year-old's ticket stub in 2008, and Avery Miller kept it on her desk until she graduated as an aerospace engineer.

The episode opens with host Laurie Santos introducing the annual Giving Tuesday special, this year part of a multi-podcast campaign called Pods Fight Poverty, aiming to raise a million dollars for GiveDirectly, which distributes cash directly to recipients in extreme poverty. Santos recounts a prior GiveDirectly campaign with John Green that raised over $100,000 for tuberculosis treatment in Malawi, citing the story of Margaret, a 30-year-old patient who could not afford bicycle taxi rides to the clinic until a cash transfer enabled her. Tim Harford, host of Cautionary Tales, then shares a story from Cameroon in the 1990s, when two men on a motorbike drove miles to return a passport that had fallen from his pocket, then rode off without waiting for thanks. Harford and Santos discuss how this defied his assumption that Cameroon's corruption meant people would be predatory, and how economists have inadvertently reinforced a homo economicus view of human nature that doesn't actually reflect the models' formal content. Harford argues that classical economics never ruled out altruism — practitioners just simplified it away. Army veteran J.R. Martinez, host of Medal of Honor, describes being unexpectedly given a black lab puppy named Romeo at a veterans auction in 2009 by a bidder who had won the dog but gave it to him instead. He credits Romeo with helping him heal emotionally from his injuries and the grief of his military career ending. Author Michael Lewis, host of Against the Rules, shares his new practice of always carrying $10 bills to give to anyone who asks, noting that the small discomfort of handing over money is actually a signal you've given enough. Dr. Maya Shankar, psychologist and host of A Slight Change of Plans and a former student of Santos at Yale, tells a detailed story of being severely bullied as one of few children of color in her school, until a classmate named Adrian stood up for her on the school bus. She later became an Adrian for a college friend named Noah who was being bullied for struggling with mental illness, and recently received a text from Noah saying he remembered her support. She explains the concept of moral elevation — the psychological finding that witnessing kindness not only feels good but changes the brain and expands a person's sense of what they are capable of. The episode closes with Santos reuniting via video with Avery Miller, now an aerospace engineer, who kept a 2008 World Science Festival ticket signed by Santos on her desk through every setback until she graduated.

As heard by us

A warm, practical case for giving that treats generosity as a habit, not a slogan.

The episode builds around a simple, steady argument: doing good for others can also make people happier, and that effect can change how they move through the world.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

Press play if you want generosity to feel practical, not merely sentimental.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from The Last Archive