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Sanam Hey, everyone. As the summer gets going and we plan the next season of If You Were In Charge, we wanted to re-up some of our past episodes and share with you sort of on a thematic basis the discussions that we've had. The second pairing that we put together, which is an interesting compare and contrast, is the episode I did in the first season with Abigail Disney, speaking about the difficulties and the threats, if you want, of dealing with extreme capitalism and extreme wealth inequality and how she's dealt with it in her work and in her life. And contrasting it with Chris Wormer, who speaks on behalf of Giving Tuesday and the whole movement of individual giving and how giving in small ways actually results in people feeling so much better psychologically, emotionally is quite striking. So we thought that those two conversations could also be really interesting and, again, hopefully inspiring over the summer as we plan for the third season of If You Were In Charge. Thank you.
Hi, Abby. (.) Hi. Glad to be here. First of all, how are you doing and how's life? Life is good. You know, I got to know you because my cousin was your architect and then you got involved in the world of women peacebuilding and you made all those amazing films, 12 films. And you've won Emmys, you've won awards from religious organizations, from women's organizations, and then you've also won the Class Trader Award, which was extraordinary. (.) So, was that, was that a good moment, was that a strange moment for you? //S00: Yeah.//
Abigail Disney I love that moment because, actually, I'm a practiced and willing class trader because I think anybody who emerges from my class feeling perfectly comfortable with all the advantages is just either not paying attention or doesn't have a heart, you know, because it just shouldn't feel comfortable. Imagine what life would be if we all weren't just simply loyal to the class we were born into. And the class you're born into is a matter of, you know, basically winning the lottery or not. You know, it's not anything about whether or not you're a good, deserving person. So, and I've just felt that way since I was a child. So, I'm, I'm delighted to be a class trader. It's a good thing to be.
Sanam Does it make for awkward family gatherings or like, you know, have you lost friends and family, you know, around this issue of tax reform?
Abigail Disney My parents had both passed. And with my parents and grandparents, it was hard, especially one particular grandmother. It was really hard and, and it was about more than class because, um, they came from the South and it was also about race and other things. And so, um, it was really hard. We fought a lot. And, um, and before Fox News existed, there was just a lot of conflict that I tried to navigate as well as I could. But, you know, what are you going to do? It's just, you love your family. Um, you don't want to just break with them. You have to find a way to navigate it. I, I sort of feel like that's a superpower I have because, uh, when I made the Armor of Light, I made it because I've always been able to talk to conservatives. (.) And, and I feel like I have, I call it bilingual. I'm bilingual because it is a different way of talking and thinking. And most people don't know how to do both sides. So I wanted to use my superpower for good. (.)
Sanam When did you realize that you were a Disney-like, as in what it meant to have that name? I mean, did you, you know, I mean, the rest of us grew up with this idea of Disneyland and Disney World. Even in Tehran, we were like, I want to go to Disneyland. You know, it was such a global thing. (..)
Abigail Disney Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know it's, it's strange because, you know, any child grows up, first of all, as a fan, right? That's, that's their first encounter with it. And then you realize somewhere along the line that, oh, that's also us, you know? And so we lived in LA, so we went to Disneyland a lot. And we would only go if there was a reason for us to be there. There was a new ride opening or some kind of special parade or something. Um, so we tended to go in our best clothes and we'd have to be on our best behavior and we'd have to sit on whatever podium next to all the famous people. And, and so that's when you begin to absorb the idea that you're not like everybody else and you have some kind of closeness to this thing, but it doesn't feel great because you don't get to go get messy with the other kids, you know? And that felt frustrating. So it was a, it was a complicated thing, very complicated. It wasn't until I got to college, really. I mean, the seventies were a terrible decade for being a Disney because the seventies, the company was really on its last breath. I mean, it really was very close to dying. It couldn't make a film that would be successful to save its life. And it was just all kinds of uncool.
Sanam Is, is there a sense of which, of which you sort of wonder whether people are friends with you because you're a Disney or whether, because they actually like you?
Abigail Disney Always. Always. Always. There, there are some people who can't hide it. Right. And it's like, I can look into their eyeballs and I see like little D's written there, you know, like, they're like, I'm talking to this person. And that is a thing I think about every single day. And I kind of hate that, but it just sort of comes with the territory. So, you know, when I left for college, it started to kind of happen around me and I could hear that people had been talking about me and things like that. It felt weird. And there have definitely been moments in my life that have very painfully, it's been revealed to me that, oh, that's why you were my friend. You know, so once in a while that will happen. And it's crushing to me. I mean, I really hate it. But, you know, the thing is like my, my, my mom, you know, reacted to that kind of thing by basically just not trusting anybody ever. And I felt like I'd rather be burned once in a while because you don't get burned all that often. And that would be just the price I would pay for having an open heart, you know, so, so I shouldn't maybe broadcast that to the world. But, but I've made a policy of just defaulting to trust and it's almost never the wrong choice.
Sanam That's, that's great. It must be very hard and you almost have to do triple the work to be able to whether, you
know, in terms of friendships, in terms of, in terms of the work you've done, I mean, I, you know, it's sort of, you know, when I talk to my kids about what they see in the world and how they're dealing with it, one of the issues that comes up, of course, is the, the sort of disparity of wealth and opportunity. And yesterday, Sola was saying, you know, so often, like it's as if young people, the millennials
or the, or the Gen Z are being, you know, they're being accused of, oh, you know, well, you guys eat too many avocados or, you know, as if the avocado, one less avocado is going to allow them to put that, put a down payment for a home. How do you see it? How did you get involved in this discussion? And, and, and you've, you've talked about it being a threat to democracy, sort of, yeah. Well, how do you understand the problem?
Abigail Disney I'm old enough to remember when Ronald Reagan took office and pretty much jumped right in to the plan. And I mean, it was, it was its own version of Project 2025. You know, there were a bunch of conservatives in the seventies. They ran Reagan in 76, but he was too radical to get the nomination, which is interesting. And then they kind of repackaged him in 1980 as this grandfatherly old guy who wouldn't say scary things. Or if he was going to say scary things, he'd say them more genially. And he came with this massive tax cut, massive, massive, mostly benefiting the wealthy. And, and then through the eighties and the nineties, um, and that's Bill Clinton on the helm. There was a long string of tax cuts and revision of the tax code so as to just privilege people in the finance business mainly. And things changed, things radically changed. It was not just that the taxes, the laws had changed, the ethos had changed. It had switched into something else. And I was there in a theater in New York city, watching the movie wall street and 1984, 1987, whatever year it came out. And I can remember that when Gordon Gekko says the famous line, greed is good, the theater erupted in applause. You know, he was meant to be the bad guy in that movie, but that was how totally inverted our value system had become. And in such a short period of time, it was, it was, it was horrible. And I, I kind of sat back and watched the hedge fund industry happen and the private equity business happened. And my family did some private equity and some hedge fund. And so I knew it kind of in, in a small way from different angles. And all I could see was these are people who are making shit tons of money. Sorry for this wearing it at the same time as when I was doing my foundation work in New York city, working with low income families in New York city, it just was steadily getting worse and worse and worse. And what, what the upshot of that was that they lowered the capital gains tax so low that I was taxed less for not doing anything, you know, for just taking dividends for my stock or selling stock than a person who worked all day long got taxed. And, and, and that just, that we've, we've lost it completely, you know, and a lot of this in the eighties, the, the ideologues who kind of set us up for this were, were really people who hated FDR. They wanted to unwind everything FDR had put into place. They believed he was a communist. They believe anybody's a communist who believes that, that we're all in this together. And they wanted to unwind every last shred of what had been accomplished in the thirties and forties. And by the eighties and nineties, they had done that. So right now the, the, the, we need to talk about the income tax and the various brackets and how we tax capital gains and stuff like that. Um, but, but because the taxes at that level have been so not aligned with our values, the wealth building has taken place over the last 40 years has put the wealthy in such a huge position of, of, you know, this astronomical amount of wealth. And so far from regular people that merely addressing it through income taxes won't be enough. We won't close the inequality gap unless we think about taxing wealth.
Sanam I grew up, uh, in the eighties here in England, and we saw the same thing with, um, Mrs. Thatcher, right. That it was kind of changes in tax laws, privatization of everything, privatization of water companies. I mean, right now we have Thames water, which is, um, you know, basically is the, is the source of water for, for, you know, half of the Southeast and it's owned by a hedge fund in, I don't know, Dubai or somewhere. And they give dividends to their shareholders, but literally there is sewage pouring into the rivers and into the sea because they didn't, um, there weren't enough regulation and, and the government didn't care and, um, and it, it just, this, this disparity, I, I call it kind of extreme capitalism. It's like, we're not against capitalism, but I am against extreme capitalism. Yes, exactly. You know, that seems to be the sort of the, the era that post cold war, like it's almost like politics ended and it became all about money. Is that kind of what, what you saw as well from the eighties and nineties?
Abigail Disney For sure. I, I've been calling it fundamentalist capitalism. Yeah. So we're on the same page about it and, and, you know, all faith systems have a version of itself that's fundamentalist and usually it adheres really tightly to a text or a set of precepts that are very old and they adhere literally and with sort of slavish belief, even to the parts of it that are absurd. Fundamentalist capitalism, it has the same quality as a fundamentalist. faith system in the sense that it will take you to crazy places if you don't put limits on it, if, and if you don't all agree as to what your values are. And, um, there was a long period in the nineties and the oddies where it didn't really matter what our values were. The world was being shifted in front of us without our permission because the, the finance world especially had gained so much power and had so totally, um, co-opted anybody who was regulating them that everything became possible for them. So there was little antitrust work being done, very little work being done on campaign finance reform. We had the horrible citizens united decision. And now we have so much money in politics, which is warping the entire system, which is precisely why it's a danger to democracy. And I think that the really insidious thing about offering the wealthiest people that much power and visibility and leeway, it's like telling them that they are in fact that great, that they are in fact worthy. And they get an idea of themselves that they should be running things. And if you listen to the new, you know, national conservatives, the, the folks that JD Vance represents, they're, they're a totally new group of thinkers who are, who weren't even talking to the public as little as four years ago. They weren't, they're brand new and they have an ideology that, you know, it's essentially monarchist. It's autocratic. It's like the people with the money know the most, just give them power.
Sanam It's, it's, it's kind of hard to believe that we're there and accept that we are. I mean, that, that's, that, that's kind of what we're seeing in terms of your group, patriotic millionaires, are you getting more people involved?
Abigail Disney I didn't found it. I'm just one patriotic millionaire. It has a brilliant founder, Erica, and, and she's been bringing in loads of people. I actually am amazed by the number of people who want to join and it feels actually quite logical. You know, it's a little bit in self-interest to say we want the tax codes changed because we are seeing increasing, you know, amounts of social unrest. There is every chance that the country could break out into a kind of a low level civil war. That wouldn't surprise me a bit. That is partly about economic inequality. It's about the way workers have been treated by very empowered managements. You know, they're not wrong when they say there's a handful of elites who control everything. They're not wrong about that. That is, is raising the temperature in the country so much that, you know, we have to think about a way to read, refix this thing or, you know, so there are a lot of wealthy people. I have a wealthy friend and patriotic millionaires who gave up this private jet. Yay. Bravo. And that's a really big deal for someone to do that. But, you know, it's time we stopped taking up so much more space than we're entitled to as individual human beings.
Sanam And, and it's, it's interesting because when you link it to the political space and democracy, one of the things that we saw was after the Biden Trump debate, one of the first signals of the fact that Biden was not going to be a tenable candidate was when people, including you and others said, we're not going to give money anymore. Can somebody look at that and say, oh, well, that's how you're using your power? Or, you know, aren't you, aren't you being sort of hypocritical about what you're saying? Or, or is that something that in the U.S. political space, election campaigns are run by donors. And so donors do need to weigh in based on their own ethics and morals and values as well.
Abigail Disney Well, the thing is that if you don't do what the bad guys are doing, you're unilaterally disarming and they have to be beaten. They just have to be beaten. And I was on more than one phone call with a lot of Democratic donors. And on the phone calls, there was, they were unanimity about, like, we are going to lose this election. We are definitely going to lose this election. And I kept saying, well, then we have to say something. I mean, it's not right for us to be quiet about this. Well, it's Biden's decision. It's Biden. And I'm not sure it's Biden's decision because, like, this affects not only all of us as Americans, but also, like, the world. So I just got really tired of the fact that people were afraid to speak up. partly out of the fear of being called a hypocrite for using our money to express a big, strong opinion and break pressure on the president. And I just thought, you know what? Being worried about, yes, I'm being a hypocrite. And from time to time, life requires that. You know, there was not much time. It had to be heard. And somebody had to be brave enough to say it. Nobody on those calls wanted to be public about it. I just thought, then, like, fuck politics. I mean, fuck politeness. (.)
Sanam This is too important. You know, what's the piece of the puzzle that you've actually taken on and you're working on?
Abigail Disney What I'm doing is I'm latching on to people's pre-existing campaigns where I can and where it can be helpful. I can help with raising visibility. And I can help with raising credibility. The capital gains tax needs to be changed, for instance. Because people who own stock are not job creators. They're stock owners. And so rewarding stock ownership with the capital gains tax is not promoting business and is not helping small business people. That's absurd. The inheritance tax is something that Republicans have been trying to get rid of for years. And I've been speaking up and defending it because that's a ridiculous thing to think that a person can amass a great amount of wealth over a lifetime and not have it taxed when he dies, even though the infrastructure caused his wealth to happen, the investments by the government into their trades had made it happen and so forth. So that strikes me as just ridiculous. And it tends toward creating dynasties. And we have to think about all the different manifestations of wealth that are new, that have happened in the last 40 years, like people owning multiple homes, which are basically places where they're parking cash all around the world to keep it from being repatriated and being taxed. So we have to look at the systems that have grown up around tax avoidance. And we really have to hold people's feet to the fire and get the IRS to be able to collect the taxes they're actually owed. And then we have to think very seriously about a wealth tax. Now, a wealth tax is unconstitutional. And the reason a wealth tax is unconstitutional is because slave owners were scared that the North would tax the slaves they owned. And they would essentially create an abolitionist tax system. And so that is why that's in the Constitution. It was yet another stop to slave owners who got the three-fifths of a human thing into the Constitution, which, you know, how anybody was willing to sign that, I don't understand. I think it's possible to take another look at a wealth tax and the particular part of the Constitution that says we can't have it. I mean, Elizabeth Warren has a lot of great things to say about it, and I want to help her in any way she wants help.
Sanam You know, when we talk about these things, so often people, the narrative from the other side, it's as if it's going to affect ordinary people, right? So when you say, you know, I mean, I think you've talked about the higher marginal tax rate and how your grandfather and your great uncle, Walt Disney, you know, they amassed plenty of wealth and they had 90% marginal tax rates over a certain amount. What's the threshold that you would be talking about?
Abigail Disney AOC famously said that, like, in her first day in office, every billionaire is a policy error or a policy failure. I do think that as a threshold for really bringing in a lot of taxation is a billion dollars, because if you can't live on $999 million, I don't understand you at all. So, which is not to say that people shouldn't be encouraged to amass wealth if it, you know, if they're building a company or whatever, but come on, I don't think Elon Musk is motivated by being a creative, you know, contributor to society. He's amassing wealth, period, end of story. And with that wealth power, same with somebody like Jeff Bezos. So, so I do think that over a billion dollars, we really need to look at a wealth tax and something like a 2% wealth tax, they always say, oh, but our assets are hard to value and blah, blah, blah. And they're illiquid. It's like, just baloney. That's like the kind of thing people say when they're bullshitting you. 2% wealth tax would not interfere with the growth of their assets if the return on their assets is more than 2% a year. So, it would still grow, it's still compound, but it would create enough to just create the best public education system in the world. I mean, that's the kind of money we're talking about if we were to actually tax billion dollars plus at 2%. If we went to a half a billion, it would create even more money. So, so that we're not talking about affecting people, you know, who are, who are struggling. This is the last thing on earth that's happening. And if they have to sell an asset to pay the tax, how many other assets do they have lying around? This is crazy talk. So, that's the first place to start. That's the place that'll make enough of a difference that the wealth gap will start to close. Because income taxation is incremental. And so, it only will get you so far.
Sanam You know, do people get that, you know, if you give back to society, if you give back to people, if you give back to the world, it, it gives you, it gives you so much more. I mean, selflessness isn't, isn't actually just selflessness. It's, it's also selfishness.
Abigail Disney Right? Exactly. Exactly. You know, it's funny because Adam Smith, the patron saint of fundamentalist capitalism, also gave away most of what he had at the end of his life to charity. Spent time wrestling with the idea of whether or not there was such a thing as altruism. He, you know, he wanted us to believe everything we did, we did in our own self-interest, including altruism. And yet, and yet he, at the end of his life, committed the great act of altruism. So, what's going on in those men is a very specific kind of thing. And I, I've seen it. I've seen it in these men. More than just my father, but I certainly saw a very up close with my father who, being a white man with a lot of money, he was surrounded by people who would never tell him anything he didn't want to hear. And it takes an enormous amount of strength of character to not surround yourself with those kind of people because they find their way in, they find ways to push the others out, you know, and, and, and they will fire anybody that they don't want to hear from. So, I, I have watched, I mean, I've seen wealthy, wealthy men who can't get sober because getting sober involves you having to say, I'm just a regular person. And the rules apply to me the same as everybody else. And like, that's the sticking point for them. They just won't accept that. So, so there's, there's ways in which their personality has changed. I actually call it going feral because like, I do feel like they kind of become uncivilized. Like they, they've been de-civilized by, like, you could tell the wealthiest guy in the room is always the worst dressed. Like he doesn't feel like he owes you the courtesy of putting on nice clothes when you come to his house. That's always the case. His hair is always a mess. He's the guy who says the rudest thing in the room because nobody will tell him not to. It's just over and over again, there are all these signs that they've just lost track of all that they were raised on. You know, all the like, don't bite, don't kick, share your toys kind of stuff that you got as children. (.) They've lost track of it. That's a mindset I can't begin to understand. I've, but I've seen it over and over again. And we need to find ways to speak into that mindset because a lot of them still have that good guy inside of them. They just don't have access to him anymore.
Sanam Now, the big question is if you were in charge, how would you go about making the changes and what would be the first change that you would want to enact?
Abigail Disney Wow. Okay. Wow. I think the heart of the heart of political polarization and chaos in our country, it's partly about economic inequality, but it's really about racial justice, white supremacy and patriarchy. And if you want to change America, you would go to that. I'm, I really believe that it's eating away at our insides that nobody's ever said, I'm sorry. (.) And, you know, isn't it remarkable that we set up our economy, the economy on top of which we're still building our economy on free labor, stolen labor and stolen land. And yet at no time does anyone consider that we have to acknowledge the wrongs. (.) And the longer we go without acknowledging them, I think it festers. So I would start a process of reconciliation, racial reconciliation led by people of color and especially indigenous people and, you know, kind of open it up community by community because it can't happen at a national level and see what communities come up with as a way of thinking differently about how to go forward. So that is the first thing I would work on. And then the second thing I would work on is taxation. I would rearrange the tax system so that, yes, we have a wealth tax and it becomes punitive, a wealth tax over, over a billion dollars, because look, you, you shape a society. Your tax code is a statement of your ethics. It's a statement of your values. And plenty of countries don't want billionaires. They just don't want them. I mean, I hear that Denmark is going a little crazy right now because of Ozempic and there are all these super rich people wandering around in a country that doesn't want them. So we have to find a way to kind of reshape income distribution and yes, redistribute, even though that's a word that is so unwelcome, not necessarily in the form of cash, but in the form of opportunity for the people who've been locked out of opportunity. You know, my eldest is living in Paris and thinking about getting married and having a child there. None of her friends, she's 33, none of her friends the same age in the United States are having children because they can't afford it, because they have debt, because they can't afford health care, because they can't afford housing, because they can't imagine having a job that could support all of them. This is, this is a terrible crime we've committed against that generation. And we need to start fixing the economies and the way society is shaped such that the younger people thrive. (.) I'm not interested in me thriving anymore. Well, what, if you care about society, your young should be thriving.
Sanam My children and their friends, and of course, my nieces and nephews, everybody's sort of in college or graduating, and the push to go into banking, you know, or consulting. And if you want to do environmental work, which is where my kids are heading, or medicine, you know, I have one of my daughters, you know, has a friend who wants to be a doctor here in England. It's barely a living wage, let alone teachers and social workers or dancers and, you know, musicians. I mean, all these things that a society needs.
Abigail Disney I started college in 1978, Reagan took office in 1980, and I left in 1982. And the people who had shown up in sandals and Grateful Dead t-shirts in 1978, suddenly started showing up in suits and ties because they were going to interviews at Goldman Sachs and Bear Stearns and other places, and so many of these people. And in the 80s, as there was tax relief, there was a certain kind of Wild West ethic that formed around making money, and as they started making more money, they started crafting laws around their self-interest, taking the cap off the money they could make. And what became clear in the 90s was if you were smart, if you were creative, if you had a good mind, why would you go and be a doctor? You go and you work for the bank. I mean, all of our best and most promising intellects went into banking, and that has been very much to our detriment because they're not out there creating the new company or thinking of the new product that needs to be done or making a film or taking care of low-income people or solving the housing crisis, figuring out a better way to get food to everybody. those people are just thinking about, like, what's a great way to make money on top of this thing I'm already making money on? What's a good new idea to squeeze some more pennies out of this transaction? And, you know, one of the questions is, like, when is it enough?
Sanam You know, the high net worth and the uber wealthy live in a different tax universe, but more and more, they just live in a different universe. I mean, whether it's, you know, mega yachts or the, you know, gated homes and schools. To what extent do they ever interact with ordinary people?
Abigail Disney No, that's really important to me. I mean, I've kind of been making a point of not getting on a private airplane anymore, and that's partly about greenhouse gases. And it is the low-hanging fruit in terms of greenhouse gases. It's ridiculous how many of them there are and how few people are flying on them. But on top of it, I just think it's bad for your soul. I think it's really bad for your soul to never stand in a line, to never have to be patient, to never have to wait with people you might not have chosen to wait next to, or to sit in a seat that's a little smaller than you like. That is a part of being a human being. And they have given themselves, like, a get-out-of-jail-free card for being human. They think they can sort of finesse their way out of having to be normal. I mean, right down to they think they can cheat death. They're lost. (.) They're lost. I feel bad for them. I know so many unhappy, wealthy people. And the unhappiness is partly because it doesn't make you happy to be wealthy.
Sanam The next big question that we always ask people is, and it's kind of ironic, I probably know the answer, but I'm going to ask you anyway. So if you were a billionaire, or if you may be a billionaire, what would you do to address this problem right now?
Abigail Disney Wow, that's such a good question. I mean, I think if I were a billionaire, I would go down the same path Mackenzie got. She is going down. She is, like, finding really great organizations run by really great people and offering them enough money to set them free from the hamster wheel that they're always, always on. And it's amazing what a healthy injection of capital will do for an organization like that. And, you know, the way philanthropy works now is it funds everybody at about 75% of what they really need to do the work we're asking them to do. And then we expect them to do it anyway. (.) So I think what she's doing is brilliant and creative and has a chance at changing the sector. But I also don't think that the answer is in philanthropy. You know, I would hope that we would not leave the well-being of our society up to the whims of a handful of billionaires deciding whether or not we need new roads or a polio vaccine. So I would also take all of that money out of the freaking New York Stock Exchange. And because everybody on the Stock Exchange is playing according to one set of rules, and it's not the only set of rules we need to play by. And it's a set of rules that has hardwired into it damage to real human beings and to the environment. And then I would invest it in companies and in people using capitalism to do the right thing all around the world.
Sanam That's very, very cool. Thank you. And on the philanthropy note, I so relate to that because it's not just dealing with philanthropists. It's also dealing with governments. The burden that they put on us as nonprofits is just growing and growing and growing. From your word to the ears of those who can make this difference. Yeah, if only. Yeah. And then, so in all of this, what is it that gives you hope? (.)
Abigail Disney Well, you know, I feel hope whenever I think about that the majority of people are still kind, thoughtful, honorable. That is no matter the cynicism brought to you by most of the right wing, that is still my experience of the world. And I will continue to believe in that for as long as I live. (........)
Sanam Hi, everyone. Today, my guest is Chris Werman. He is the Chief Global Partnership and Strategy Officer at Giving Tuesday and Chair of the Board of the Wings Network, which is an organization, we're going to hear about it more, that brings together many of the big philanthropy organizations around the world and foundations together. And it's all about the business of generosity. Is that right, Chris? Is that the world you're in, how to make people generous?
Chris Worman Yes. And sort of the range of generosity from the individual to the more institutional.
Sanam And how did you get into this universe? (..)
Chris Worman It wasn't direct. I was in my university years. I had sort of fallen in love with community organizing and increasingly out of love with my degrees in classical music and classical theater. And somebody said, hey, you should think about arts administration. And so my first sort of forays beyond community organizing into civil society were really in the kind of fundraising and PR side of the arts. Then I ended up joining Peace Corps. And I was in Romania starting in 2005. The European Union was coming, which meant all of the American money was leaving. And a lot of the more recognized, more formalized civil society entities were quite scared about where they were going to get their money. And after many, many, many, many trainings sort of got into a conversation about, look, we can sort of go one organization by one organization. But what we're lacking in the country at the time was infrastructure for communities to come together around the things they cared about, the ways that they might actually give money to organizations and create that sort of community-based funding resilience that so many organizations so desperately need in the world. So I ended up starting the first community foundation in the country back in 2007. (.) And I've been in the space of sort of how civil society manifests in action with citizens as giving time and money and what that really means in the world. It's not, yeah.
Sanam It's interesting you say because there's so many aspects of this and it is such a critical moment right now, right? So we've seen the Trump administration come in and take a wrecking ball to USAID and $40 billion that these are the numbers they throw at us, that this is the amount that they give abroad. But when you then unpack it so often, it's really not that much because, you know, people are being paid and a lot of the money comes back to the U.S. for services provided by Americans. So, but there is that wrecking ball of, you know, ODA. In Europe, the Dutch, the British, the Germans in 2024 are just slashing their international overseas development assistance. Why does it matter? How do you talk to your friends and family or others that are not necessarily directly involved in this space? Why does it matter that we should have overseas development assistance, development, humanitarian, peace building, which is the sector I come from? Why does it matter?
Chris Worman I think there are some things that philanthropy is well set up for. There are some things that overseas development assistance is well set up for. There are certain things that the more institutionalized side of giving, be it government or private foundations, will be able and willing to do that governments in country sometimes may not have the capacity or willingness to do, sometimes in terms of things like human rights or peace building. You know, sometimes the governments just aren't going to pay for that sort of thing and may not have the money to do it. Infrastructure. It's another space where if you think about things like the infrastructure for civic engagement and civil society, a lot of the places where it is lacking in the world, that isn't to say that the human intent isn't there. It very much is. But then the infrastructures you would need to sort of channel that intent, organize that intent, magnify that intent through civil society may be lacking. And who's going to pay for that? It isn't going to be local civil society because they're too busy taking care of what they need to take care of. It might not be their government because maybe their government doesn't really agree with the construct of civil society. So it's got to be somebody and, well, if you want sort of open society, somebody has to pay for the infrastructure, probably going to be somebody in the ODA space or larger philanthropies who've invested in these sorts of ecosystems. So there are times, you know, every there's a time and a place for these kinds of funds when there's a disaster, you know, when there's a humanitarian crisis, you need the sorts of large funding mechanisms and infrastructure and intermediaries to be there. You can't expect grassroots civil society to suddenly help recover a country or an economy after a major disaster. We would all love that they might have the capacity to do so. Their heart's in the right place. But do they have the money? Do they have boats? Airplanes? No, they don't. So there are those times where it is extremely critical. I think, you know, in a moment like this, there's also a moment of reckoning to say, and where were they maybe invested in things that were less critical, where it should have been somebody else. You know, you mentioned the $40 billion from USAID and the various other governments in the world that have cut budgets. When I, over the years, I've spent a lot of time working on sort of what is the actual size and scope of civil society? I was at TechSoup for many, many years. And TechSoup has about 1.7 million NGOs in its database globally. Gives you a really interesting look at the size of the social economy. And the most plausible numbers that I've seen anybody come up with and sort of composites of numbers, because nobody has really good data on this, would indicate that the economy, the social economy, all civil society, transactionally, the turnover of civil society in a year is somewhere north of $3.6 trillion. (.) So somewhere closer to $4 trillion, which if you look at all ODA, plus all institutional philanthropy in a year, the number that you come up with is on the order of $400 to $600 billion in the best of times.
Sanam Wow, okay.
Chris Worman Which is a thousand times smaller.
Sanam Than what's actually happening.
Chris Worman Than what's happening. And that's coming from individuals.
Sanam And that's just the monetization, right? That's not the time and emotional and psychological and even security risks and investment that people make, right? And this is one of the things that I find fascinating that we say, okay, again, you know, we're sending money to organizations in Syria that have risked, and it's people who have risked their lives to create spaces to learn how to dialogue and mediate and negotiate and negotiate. And in a way, you know, that's why kids are still able to go to school or that's why HTS gets to go in and there isn't yet a civil war, right? We don't even monetize that, the contributions of human beings in terms of their, I mean, generosity in a whole other way, right? Like, how do you, how do you put a price on that?
Chris Worman Well, and how do you put a price on hope?
Sanam Yeah.
Chris Worman How do you put a price on agency? The idea that I think, you know, all of those numbers are important. You know, the, if we didn't have people giving money, then there wouldn't be the capacities to do the work that civil society does. And we all know we'd love more of it, these sorts of things. But the money is, the money is critical. However, it is the byproduct of this incredible idea that humans might actually leave the world better than they find it. And what they learn through the engagement, the process of civil society. I think we all, in a world where the trust in institutions, large institutions, is not great, we have to be looking at why. How do we end up here? There's been so much investment in sort of big D democracy for years and years and years, decades. It's kind of failed, if we're going to be honest about it.
Sanam Political parties and things like that, right? //S03: Yes, correct. Off we go, yes, yeah.//
Chris Worman Correct. And much less institutions of justice, bilateral trade, global peace, these sorts of large D democratic institutions, the pillars of an open society, right? And a friend of mine who's been investing in that space for a long time, recently, when I was describing Giving Tuesday and what it actually does, said, ah, this is so great because you're working on the personal democracy. The reasons that an individual through the process would understand why the big D institutions were needed, were necessary, were important to them. And I couldn't agree more. The money is important, but the actual what people learn, what communities learn through the process of engagement in civic life is probably more important in its own way. (..)
Sanam And it's, it's fascinating because when you look at the sort of public cultural discourse, right, civil society, the sectors that we don't exist. People might know about a human rights activist or, you know, when I, I often do this test of saying, and when people ask me and I say, well, I work with women who become peace builders. And immediately they'll go down a path of girls' education or something, like these sort of little things. But the essence of saying, you're living in a community and you care about that community and there is violence and you are taking the responsibility to go and talk to the police to say, hey, this is what we need. Or we need some channel so that there's community. The community can trust the local police and the local police can trust the community. And so these are, these, as you say, these are individuals who have incredible courage to sort of make, create those bridges. And, you know, I wonder whether partly in Western society, we've just taken it for granted that the state provides that service, even though, you know, if you're in a minority community in the states, it's not so, you know, it's not so secure and trusting, right? But we expect the state to give it in some sort of way. Right. And, and we, we're disparaging to the, to those that, or society seems to be disparaging to those who want to be in public service. Right. Is, is that something that you'd see happening?
Chris Worman Yes. And I think this podcast is called, If You Were In Charge. Yes. If I were in charge, one of the things I might have is a time machine and I would use it to go back and find the person who said voluntary sector and kick them in the shins really hard right before they said it. Now I'm Quaker. I probably couldn't actually kick them, but I could figure out a way to make them not say the words because that has really undermined this, this community. You know, you're talking about a sector that is the best manifestation of humanity. Exactly. Yeah. That provides the hope, that provides the vision of what could be versus what will be if left to policy, which is inherently sort of reactive and backward looking, or the corporate sector, which is not going to be in the long-term enlightened self-interest of society. It will be in the self-interest of itself. That's, that's capitalism. I get it. So this sector is the safeguard for humanity. It is where, it is the wellspring of all that is good. And yet we have, again, undermined it by calling it voluntary, as if, as if it were voluntary to survive. This is, this is antithetical to logic.
Sanam I'm an anthropologist. And I remember years ago, the very famous anthropologist called Ernest Gellner, and he wrote about what is civil society. And this has been, like, sort of, in a way, my guiding post, because he says, you know, you have societies where you have your tribe, you have your church, you have your, you know, that clusters us in little components. But civil society is that place where we come together because we are all interested in planting trees, or we are all interested in, you know, professional organizations. It's a way of enabling alternative and our multiple identities to come together, to forge and weave us together. And, and this is something that every society, especially in the age of extreme pluralism, we need. We need to be able to come together and say, despite you and me, you know, all of our supposed differences, we come together around the question of giving and philanthropy and generosity, right? It weaves the society together. And again, it's just that invisible canvas that's, that seems to be there. And it's critical for peace, but it's, it's just taken for granted.
Chris Worman And it is, it is where I think we refresh our understanding of a social contract and revalidate it. And the, the other, it's like, that's, it's an interesting metaphor or look at what civil society is. Years ago, I was reading a book, I think it was Paul Hawkins' book, Blessed Unrest, where he talks about civil society as humanity's white blood cells. And there's a pain point, and the first human shows up and tries to solve that pain point because they're angry. Because in the words of Saul Alinsky, happy people don't change the world. That person shows up because they're angry. They want it to stop, whatever it is, or start the thing that's going to solve the other problem. And if they do, job done. If they don't, they call their friends. And now you've got collective voluntary action. And they try to solve the problem. And if they do, great, job done. And if they don't, they form an NGO. So they can raise money, and so they can ramp up their game, and maybe get to the point where ultimately they change policy. And they excise whatever the problem was in the first place, which is an interesting arc to think about. Like all metaphors, it's not perfect. But it's one that I've, similar to how you've reflected on yours, I've reflected on that and sort of what that process means to people. Whether you ever get to the end point or not, you know, we have to have those spaces, as you said, that are beyond church, beyond the other things, to come together and figure things out.
Sanam It's that question of, am I willing to look up and care about something which is beyond my own circle of concern? Or, you know, very often in my universe, you know, the reason why people get involved in peacebuilding is because they've experienced something horrific that happened to them. And they're saying, I don't want this to happen to someone else, right? Not everybody has that compassion, but in the 30 years I've worked in this space, I find it everywhere, right? So I'm like, I'm not, because I'm like, am I crazy thinking that women become peacebuilders in war zones? They're like, nope, war breaks up. You find them. They're out there. So something in our DNA or something in the way that our brains are wired that, you know, you get a lot more when you give.
Chris Worman And there's plenty of research that backs it up, you know, that that act of giving people find joy in that. They find they take agency. They feel more powerful. We have done a lot of research over the last couple of years, randomized, weekly randomized sample surveys that look at people's pro-social behaviors that they've exercised in the last week. Have you given? Have you volunteered? Have you taken advocacy positions? Whatever. And their sort of polarization, their personal polarization. And one of the most fascinating statistics that has popped out of this is that on a spectrum of least polarized to most polarized individuals, regardless of socioeconomic status or political party affiliation, those who have volunteered in the last week are 1,500% more likely to be in the least polarized category than those in the most polarized category. 1,500 times more likely. Because what? Because they gave a little time and effort? Because they looked up from their phone, they connected with real humans and said, yeah, we can do this. And then they tried. And they felt good. Really good about it. They felt powerful. They felt trust. Even if whatever they were doing didn't work, that is almost entirely inconsequential. The social capital indicators go through the roof when people participate in civic life. And this is, you know, sort of the obvious antithesis to Robert Putnam and bowling alone. And his whole point, which was when we stop affiliating, when we quit going through these associative processes, we lose trust because we quit paying attention to each other. We quit listening to each other.
Sanam And we're now being programmed to be in our own little, little silos, whether it's, yeah, that's 1,500 times. That is, that's extraordinary, right? That's, that's, in, in terms of Giving Tuesday, so my exposure to Giving Tuesday was in the U.S. when, you know, it was Thanksgiving, it was Thursday, Black Friday was, you know, consumption. //S01: Cyber Monday. (.)// And then Giving Tuesday was, like, the antithesis of that. (..) So tell us a little bit about what's happened, how it's evolved. And where, now that it's gone global, where do you see the most generosity, you know, in terms of what people have and what they give? Or what sectors of society are we seeing? Do you have that kind of disaggregated data as well? (.)
Chris Worman Yes, and increasingly more of it, though, data gathering on these things is very hard. We have 30 people on the data team, and they spend all their time with, we have 50 research collectives around the world who are looking at both things like how much people give, but also the intersection of generosity in time, money, and voice with other issues. Conflict recovery, crisis recovery, gender, age, lots of different things. AI, where does AI fit into all this? Like, there are a lot of interesting research groups. So Giving Tuesday the rest of the year spends a lot of time understanding this space, what motivates people, how they manage through their generosity. So that's a lot of what the organization has built over the last two years, very global research capacity to help people understand this is how humans come together to solve collective needs, communal needs, not necessarily their own personal ones. But then, to your point about war bringing out the worst and the best in people, people who've been through crisis tend to be the most generous. And people who are in hard, hard positions are the ones who are really coming together the most obviously to work on resolving their local problems. And this is something where often in our community, people will do that year-round under the banner of Giving Tuesday. So building clinics in Sudan and DRC, under the banner of Giving Tuesday, wearing a jersey that says they're a Giving Tuesday volunteer, and it's not after Thanksgiving. It's a Thursday in April. You know, but this has become sort of a...
Sanam It's like a global club, right? //S03: It is.// Give, right.
Chris Worman Yeah, it's a way that people affiliate with the concept of civic action. And I would hesitate to say who's more or less generous, because there are indices for that kind of thing. And I just usually find them questionable.
Sanam And I mean, I ask that because there's a tendency often for people to think that generosity is the check that you write, right? And how big is the check that you write? Sure. And what I've found often is that I'm asking people, you know, the check is the easy part, but really, I would really appreciate it if you would put your money where your mouth is, right? Because as somebody who might be big in the finance world or in the media world, if you say, you know, you might be giving us an anonymous check in the background, but if you actually have the courage to say what I'm saying, right, and open certain doors, that has more impact than, you know, the generosity that comes with that is very different to the generosity of the money. I mean, it's privileges we have and how we're willing to share those privileges.
Chris Worman Yeah. And if you look at the research on things, you know, sort of who gives the most as a percentage of their salary and places where or their personal wealth and places where you can get that data, then people who have less give more as a percentage. And part of that's reciprocal because they've been a part of support mechanisms. But everyone has, if you think about, so, you know, the arts and culture side of our, you know, some of our childhood sports, these sorts of things that certainly people in more privileged Western societies would have grown up with, faith-based organizations. These are all civil society run. You know, the things that are outside of the school and not in your home tend to be civil society. And we forget that. But I think it's interesting, as you were speaking about sort of the check being, you know, not necessarily the thing. The check is an important indicator of agreement, which is not the same as solidarity. (.) And I think that that's a very good point.
Sanam That's a very, very good point. Yeah.
Chris Worman It's a distinction that I don't think I'd necessarily drawn until this conversation until four and a half minutes ago.
Sanam I'm glad that it's part of some thoughts. Yeah.
Chris Worman It is welcome and, again, damn critical that people write checks because they agree with this and, you know, they believe. It's an indicator that they believe in it. It's not the same as standing with you in the street.
Sanam Yeah. Okay. So on that note, and we've already, you already mentioned, you know, if you were in charge. If you were in charge right now of this universe that we're looking at and this phenomenal kind of distinction that you made between the universe of generosity, the universe of philanthropy, government. If you were in charge, what would you be doing and what would you be saying and what would you be putting out in the world? (..)
Chris Worman It's interesting, you know, in these moments of collective crisis, you have an opportunity to look at the world and say, okay, what are the institutions that have failed? What are the institutions we need and work towards the things that we need? We, I feel we largely failed to do that during the pandemic, and I hope that we do not fail to do that now. But I hope that this conversation about sort of a post-aid world also comes with a very large dose of humility about what aid was or wasn't, for whom, and how much of the point, you know, the, as we raised earlier, as a percentage of global social economy, drop in the bucket. An important one for certain things at certain times, humanitarian response, etc., extremely important for the rest of civil society, the millions of organizations, the many more millions of informal groups who never could have, would have wanted such money, less of an issue right now. Now, they're being hit by a couple of forces in this. One is for communities who had relied on certain kinds of support that's suddenly gone. So has their trust in the idea of organized civil society. That is something that we really need to take seriously. The other is what this allows governments to do, either those who want to step into the void or those who want a bigger void. This is an enabling factor in ways that are not good for civil society. We also need to talk about that. If I were in charge, I think what I would work with people to do is invest in those enabling infrastructures that are lacking and do that, you know, just very simply. If you think about things like how easy it is for the average American or Dutch person where I live to give money to civil society, much less volunteer, much less all the other things we talked about. It is freakishly easy. I have so many options. Any time of day or night to do so. And the technology is there. The infrastructure is there. The cultural conversational infrastructure. It's all there. And it's being reinforced and not only just perpetuated, but evolved all the time. (.) That needs, the sort of foundations of that are not true in a place like Burkina Faso. The human intent is there. The human intent is there. The potential is there. But the technology, the training, the support mechanisms that are locally rooted to build that civic sense collectively and then evolve it, not necessarily there.
Sanam And it's interesting because it's also, we're making it more and more difficult. So at ICANN, we run a fund and it's called the Innovative Peace Fund and we say we will do the small grant making, right? The paper, the administrative burden and the legal burden that we take on because now we're imposing sanctions and we're imposing all sorts of other things. So even if somebody in an ideal world, it should be that you care about community peace building in Burkina Faso or tree planting in Burkina Faso. There should be a direct click and you just hand over your 100 bucks and it goes. But we're actually making it difficult because of the legal restrictions. The other thing that I found interesting, appalled me, was that when we do the financial, when we do the online clicking, we have now financial institutions that are taking a 5% or a 4%, you know, and I'm like, can you guys not just, you know, why don't I give 100? Can you just not hand over the 100 and let it be? Why do you have to take $5 out of that, right? It's such a lack of generosity. That's also kind of frustrating. But, yeah, so you're talking about building and the enabling environment for people to be able to give.
Chris Worman Yes, and the enabling infrastructures. Like if we're going to, if we say enabling environment and we could agree what that meant, it would reside on infrastructures. And in some countries those exist and in some countries they don't. The idea that localization or some of these other movements within the development aid community could have manifested in a way that was, I'll just manifest it, period, was predicated on an idea that people had the infrastructure to do those things. And it's simply not true. So there's work, I think, both in the domestic, in whatever country space, so that you can get to all of the community actualization side of things that we're talking about and the money. And then there's the sort of foreign transfer and everything else. It's a long way to go. People are struggling through.
Sanam And it's interesting, again, because in a way part of the model that we've had to deal with is that when you've had international organizations go into fragile context, they have, instead of building the local infrastructure, they've been hiring the staff and the good people. And not, you know, and then they're there, you know, I remember with Iraq, lots of American organizations went in, they did what they had to do, but they hired Iraqis. They didn't really support the local organizations. And then the money ended and they left and they'd left very little behind. And so that's also kind of the community or the international civil society sector has to have its own reckoning on these issues of what is it that we mean by localization. So, okay, so that's question one. Question two is, if you were the billionaire right now, what would you be doing? If you were Mr. Musk right now, what would you be doing?
Chris Worman Well, there's no risk of that. Yeah, there's. No, I would build the fund for local infrastructure development. It's simply not there. And if we do not make these investments, then we're never going to get where we want to be in the sort of global civil society development community. Anytime people have made those investments, the return on those investments is exponential. It is orders of magnitude more than anything that people put in in the first place. You look at something like a website being developed for online giving in a particular country in Eastern Europe, of which I'm very familiar. And, you know, you're talking about $50,000 to $100,000 of work to build a truly robust online giving platform that has since generated nearly $100 million of local giving in that country. And this is not a rich country. Now, $100,000 to $100 million. Show me anywhere else that people have had that kind of return on their social return on investment. You know, as you said, what actually usually happens is they show up and then they take their infrastructure home with them because that's what they were kind of paid to do. That's the opposite of getting people into a position where they can take their own sort of agency and route, the sort of equity mindset of making sure they have what they need to do what they need to do. (..)
Sanam That's got to come from somewhere. There are so many examples of this. So, you know, back in 1998-99, the Ford Foundation gave the organization I worked for at the time, International Alert, an $180,000 grant with, you know, we were doing a global campaign women building peace. And part of it was get a Security Council resolution. So I was, you know, sent off to New York to do this. We got it. Like it was, you know, we built a coalition and we did all the work. And when I think about what that $180,000 has done in terms of the millions of lives, conflict prevention, violence prevention, I mean, it's really hard to monetize it. But they've probably forgotten that that's what they did, actually. It's, you know, ICANN. We started with a grant of $25,000 from the Channel Foundation and it has leveraged and done such huge work. And so maybe that's the note I'd kind of end on. What gives you hope right now when you think about the world and, you know, the atmosphere and the culture of nastiness or meanness that seems to be coming out, emanating from the U.S.? What is it that gives you hope? And what's the message you would want to send out to people who are listening? (..)
Chris Worman There have been an awful lot of nasty people in history.
Sanam That's true. That's true. This too shall pass.
Chris Worman Yeah. I mean, it will. And I think it'll take a long time. And I think it's going to be extremely painful for a long time as well. But, you know, I have a lot of hope in civil society and civic action and people's capacities to leave the world better than they find it for their families, if nothing else. And people do organize and they do solve problems. And it doesn't always look like an NGO. And that's okay. That's not the point. The point is that they're doing it. And I think this is really going to be a fascinating century for civil society. We are facing not just crazy shifts in governance and the idea of what a society should look like from a governing standpoint, but climate, the march of digitalization being so inequitable. We've got all of these major sort of trends, the mega trends of our polycrisis world, and none of them are going to really be easily survivable if civil society isn't centered and its intention to engage people in the work around dignity and rights. Otherwise, it all falls apart. So we have the potential. (.) We have history in the sector of humans being their best selves and coming together that way. I have hope in that.
Sanam My thanks to the Bijan Reisar Foundation, my own organization, ICANN, and Africa Digital Audio for making these podcasts possible. If you have ideas for topics or for people that I should invite and have a conversation with, please let me know at info at ICANNpeacework.org. Info at ICANNpeacework.org. You can also follow the events on our newsletter, which is on the ICANN website, same address. I really hope that the conversations, the ideas, the solutions, the hope, and the inspiration that you've heard in these conversations keep you going over the next week and that you join us again. So stay well and see you soon, and I hope to hear from you. Thank you. Bye-bye.