Giuseppe Ugazio
Description: Giuseppe Ugazio is an assistant professor and Chair of Behavioral Philanthropy at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. His research focuses on moral philosophy, neuroeconomics, and behavioral science in the context of philanthropy. In this episode, Professor Ugazio shares insights into decision-making regarding the value of human lives and money and explains the complex balancing act between philanthropic and for-profit partnerships. We also discuss the future of philanthropy, including his work on building a personalized, AI based philanthropy model to match individuals with causes they are truly passionate about. Professor Ugazio shares how his training in philosophy has influenced his interdisciplinary career and emphasizes the need for individuals to help others and promote societal well-being.
Websites:
Geneva Centre for Philanthropy
Publications:
Resources:
Show Notes:
[0:00:01] Introduction and Background of Professor Giuseppe Ugazio
[0:04:14] Second PhD: Moral Decisions and Brain Stimulation
[0:08:01] The Intersection of Philosophy and Neuroscience
[0:16:31] WEIRD Participants and Generalizing Conclusions
[0:21:03] Valuing Human Lives and Money as Distinct Neural Currencies
[0:25:00] Decision-Making About Life and Death Situations
[0:28:41] Decision-making in Intertemporal Choices and Life Support
[0:33:21] Personalized philanthropy: matching interests and moral values for effective giving.
[0:36:51] Donor advice funds and alternative investment mediums for philanthropy.
[0:41:57] Findings: Areas of focus and common approaches in Swiss philanthropy.
[0:43:19] Philanthropic Organizations: Similarities and Barriers in Communication
[0:45:42] Different Legal Statuses of Philanthropic Organizations
[0:54:04] Lack of Transparency in Philanthropy Organizations
[0:55:50] Introduction to Sustainable Development Goals
[1:00:27] Unrealistic Timeline and Revision of Goals
[1:03:40] Scaling Solutions and Risk Assessment
[1:08:32] Understanding Social Entrepreneurship and its Impact
[1:11:51] Balancing Philanthropy and For-Profit Initiatives for Change
Unedited AI Generated Transcript:
Introduction and Background of Professor Giuseppe Ugazio
Brent:
[0:01] Welcome, Professor Giuseppe Ugazio.
Thank you for coming on today.
Giuseppe:
[0:11] Thank you for joining me here in Geneva. It's a great pleasure to be talking to you today.
Keller:
[0:15] We'd love to start off by hearing a little bit more about your story and how you got to the University of Geneva.
Giuseppe:
[0:20] Right. So it's been quite some traveling before this.
I started in Milan with my studies, then moved to London to LSE.
Then I joined in Zurich my PhD.
And being in Zurich and getting to know the research context of the Swiss universities, I really liked the environment here.
[0:39] So before, well, actually while leaving to the US, then to do some postgraduate training, I really wanted to come back here.
And there was this perfect opportunity to join as the chair in behavioral philanthropy at the University of Geneva that then basically made my dream come true to come back and pursuepursue my career as an academic in switzerland yeah and with your phds you have two right right and one's philosophy and the other is neurobiology correct neuroeconomics economicsyeah correct yeah um so why did you transition or make that extra shift at the two economics and more of that focus yeah so there's two main reasons why i have two two phds that one ismore the contents and the interest reason so i started my i did my career in undergraduate graduates in philosophy philosophy social sciences and moral philosophy and while doing myphd in the area of moral philosophy i started realizing that i was not so much into uh just thinking how people think about doing the right thing but more how do actually people do theright thing or fail to do the right thing and i was lucky enough to be doing my phd in an interdisciplinary group that had philosophers but but also economists, ecologists, neuroscientiststhat all were thinking about the topic of altruism and prosocial behavior.
[1:59] And so I started to get familiar a bit with the experiments and the behavioral experiments that you could do in order to study how and why people make decisions.
So I started drifting towards researching how do people make moral decisions.
For instance, how do emotions play a role in distorting, if you will, moral decisions?
How the state you're in could affect how you're doing a decision, which is something that normally moral philosophy wouldn't even consider possible because moral decisions are justsomething about reasoning and how you choose one principle and then stick to it for your actions.
Brent:
[2:43] So then, were your first...
Giuseppe:
[2:46] Parts of research as masters in like your first dissertation was that all philosophy was it emotion-based like when we looked at your research there's a lot of papers about likeemotions, correct right so there is yeah there's one paper about emotions one paper actually it's uh quite interesting because it's uh i went directly from just you know philosophy and doinga little bit of behavior to one of the at the time frontiers uh in uh neuro neuroscience big cognitive neuroscience science research which was using brain stimulation in the context of pro-social behavior so those were the two papers that i um that i used in the thesis that were more applied or empirical and then i had a third paper where we discussed uh the implications ofthe findings that you could get through uh experimental science for philosophical thinking and so those were the the bulk of the of the first thesis and then the reason why i started thesecond phd is actually quite pragmatic that But together with my advisor, we thought it would be easier to get a grant to self-support my studies if I were to apply as a PhD student ratherthan a postdoctoral researcher because I had no formal training in anything scientific or either neuroscience or behavioral psychology and so on.
So then we actually managed and were successful in getting this grant to kick off the second PhD.
[4:05] And then basically I just did the research work and took the courses that I needed to complete the second PhD, which was the topic was basically the same.
Second PhD: Moral Decisions and Brain Stimulation
[4:14] How do we do moral decisions or we fail to comply with moral decisions?
Very similar to the disparate simulation study that I mentioned before that focused on fairness. We had the second study where we looked at how we make decisions about honesty andhow could we manipulate this with brain stimulation.
So it was more or less a natural follow-up study.
[4:39] I took a bit of a deeper dive into understanding or studying how do we treat moral decisions, moral values, compared to values that are more practical like financial values.
Basically, that was the main focus then of the other papers that I looked at in my thesis for the neuroeconomics PhD work.
Brent:
[5:06] And then real quick, before we get into the neuroeconomics, Were you able to manipulate decision-making or with brain stimulation, could you actually see different outcomes basedon that?
Giuseppe:
[5:17] Yeah. So basically, in both experiments, we had to the one on fairness or honesty, we had a control group that received a stimulation that lasts a few seconds.
And this stimulation has no actual effect on the neural activity or neural excitability.
[5:32] While we had active stimulation groups where we lowered or increased excitability of the neurons we stimulated, this means that these neurons were more or less likely to beengaged in a task.
And in the fairness case, we could actually show that receiving one type of stimulation, people would be more compliant with the fairness norm when there was no punishment, so whenthey had only to rely on their own moral compass, or they would be more, or less depending on type of stimulation and vice versa when there was a punishment threat enforced the theeffect flipped so those who before were more compliant in the voluntary situation became less compliant and vice versa those who were more less compliant in the voluntary situationbecame more compliant when there was a punishment threat and so what we concluded from this was that this brain area we're stimulating is actually responsible for or helping you toadapt to the social context so that in the end you can behave in the optimal way.
So when there is a punishment threat and this error is more engaged, you're more compliant with the norm so you wouldn't get punished.
But then if you realize you can actually get away with not complying with the norm because there is no punishment, then you actually comply less with it.
And in the second case, when we looked at honesty, we could also show that on average, because we only looked at group decisions, We don't know exactly who lied or not within thegroup, but we could find that those who were stimulated were much more honest than those who didn't receive stimulation.
Brent:
[6:59] Is this electric stimulation with humans?
Giuseppe:
[7:02] So it's electric stimulation. Of course, it's completely safe.
And the effect lasts only about five to 10 minutes after you stop the stimulation.
So the experiment usually lasted 20 minutes and 10 minutes after you have no noticeable effect, even at the neuron level.
Level uh practically what people feel is a bit of tingling on their on their on their skin and but it's completely safe yeah um and for for me for both studies what was really interesting isthat if you ask people what should be your behavior what's the from you know again more or philosophy what how should you behave they all knew what their yeah good behavior wasand then they failed to put it into practice when they received the the stimulation or they were better when they received the stimulation.
Brent:
[7:47] Very interesting.
Keller:
[7:48] And with these papers, you said that on the back end, you also wrote a piece about kind of what to do with the results.
Could you give some advice on like how people should make better decisions?
The Intersection of Philosophy and Neuroscience
Giuseppe:
[8:01] So the paper we wrote was not so much about what to do about the findings, more how philosophers or a philosophical search could use these findings.
There is one very long lasting debate called the naturalistic fallacy that you cannot derive what you ought to do from what you actually see.
So is it actually meaningful at all or not when we know how you behave?
So that was what the paper was looking at um to come to how to interpret these findings of what could people take of this i think was really helpful from these studies is you understandwhat are the building blocks of decisions we try to link the brain activity the brain areas that we stimulated we know is responsible for what we call a social cognitive control so basicallyyou have to control your behavior in a way and when you're in a social context and this brain error is helping you to do that so whether it's sticking to a social norm understand when youcan safely violate it and so on that's what this brain area is doing so when you understand this then you could think of strategies you know that people could deploy to stimulate this areawithout having to do it with electricity right so in a way you could think about we know this area is important for this type of behavior now let's find out a way that we can teach people touse this to have have this part of the brain more involved in their daily decision-making so that then they will behave in this way.
[9:31] That would be the easy and simple takeaway from it.
What's really hard about it is that when you learn about how one brain area is working, you don't know how you're going to affect a number of areas that are connected to this.
It could be that in this very specific situation, what you find is that people are more honest, But it could be that if something else has changed that you don't observe in an outside, thenactually people become less honest or they become more honest.
But at the same time, they also become, say, a jerk.
So you don't know what's – it's really a complex matter then to understand what are the long-lasting effects or sort of the cascade effects of changing the way one brain area works, right?
It's trying to take a scientific look at what we're already doing with schooling, what we think a method is working and yields desirable effects.
Could we already anticipate if we were to change something else, then what would happen?
And hopefully it goes in the right direction. But that's a very big question.
Brent:
[10:36] Do you think philosophy takes into account the biological mechanisms for a lot of decision-making and moral?
When people use their ethics is it common for philosophy to really take into account the biology behind it?
Giuseppe:
[10:52] It's a great question. Actually, there is a paper. It's called The Secret Joke of Kant's Soul.
And it was written by Joshua Green and colleagues.
And basically what the paper is about is showing, so Kant was this philosopher that had this theory that moral decisions should be rational deductions.
So you should basically deprive yourself of any emotion, anything else than just pure reason. And by following pure reason, you would find the moral principles that are universalizable,everybody could use.
And following these, then you can make perfect moral decisions.
And what the paper was about was showing that actually the decisions that Kant would make in certain situations, especially in the trolley dilemmas, are stemming from rationalizations ofour emotional reactions to a situation.
So what we think is actually the right thing to do in that situation is actually an emotional reaction to it. and vice versa.
If you think of utilitarians, they would be better at just looking at consequences, be more rational and use more like what would be pure reason rather than relying on emotion.
So long story short, I think it's always helpful to know how you come to, why and how you come to a certain conclusion.
And then if you can still use what we would say the pure reason to justify or to justify.
[12:20] To support your thinking, then even better, right?
But you should be aware of how and why you make a certain decision.
I think nowadays what's really common and really popular is talking about biases, implicit biases.
Keller:
[12:34] Yeah.
Giuseppe:
[12:34] So they're still there, right? When you're making a decision, even if you know they're there.
But at least you know they're there and you can put something into place to alert you of your decision, that your decisions could be affected by these biases.
Or how could you make sure you're not going to be affected by anonymizing certain things, being blind to certain aspects that would then bias your decision?
Brent:
[12:57] When we get into the algorithm stuff later, I'll be interested to hear about biases in the language models and how that might come up. But we'll get there.
Keller:
[13:07] Yeah. So before we keep going, could you explain what neuroeconomics is as well as what behavioral philanthropy is?
Giuseppe:
[13:14] Is right so let me start from the second so behavioral philanthropy is just uh uh it's a way to use behavioral science even neuroscience if uh if we will get at some point we'll getthere to to understand philanthropic behavior so the the giving behavior uh broadly defined uh for myself philanthropy counts both from for like you know big grant makers so the the bigfoundations organizations, philanthropic organizations, institutional philanthropic organizations, as well as the individual givers, right?
And we do know a lot about the individual givers. There is a lot of studies on that.
We know much less about the institutional way of giving and how the patterns of behavior are there, which to reconnect to the natural language models that we'll touch later.
That's what we're trying to do with is to get an idea of the institutional behavior, of philanthropic organizations. So behavioral philanthropy is just using insights from behavioral science tounderstand philanthropic behavior.
[14:14] Neuroeconomics, it's similar to behavioral economics, experimental economics, behavioral finance, neurofinance.
Basically, they're studying how we make decisions that entail economic incentives, for behavioral looking at the psychology or the cognitive mechanisms, emotions and so on that have arole in this type of decisions and try to explain these decisions.
So if you come back to the point on philosophy, we have also in economics the theoretical models, right?
You should be making a certain decision in this way that would be optimizing your returns.
However, we see that people are risk averse. We see that people don't like uncertainty.
They are present buys and so on. So that we know because of the experiments we're doing, right? Before we would just say, oh, they are irrational.
They're not making the right decision. Now what we're doing with behavioral and neuroeconomics is trying to make sense of this irrationality, right?
It's why do we make these supposedly wrong decisions.
[15:19] Neuroeconomics then, it's looking inside the heads of people when they're making decisions, trying to understand where do we represent value, where do we represent risk, wheredo we represent uncertainty, the timing of the reward, and so on.
So that we have more building blocks to understand how economic decisions are made.
So we don't treat, we have an input, what the decision you're making about and the output and then a black box.
We are trying to open this black box and see what are the mechanisms that lead to different types of decisions within the economic or financial domain.
Keller:
[15:55] And with the...
Giuseppe:
[15:58] Experiments how do you go about choosing participants because i imagine having participants say from geneva as compared to los angeles like that alone like the region that theygrew up in that alone would influence it very heavily right so we have uh normally what's um i would say 90 of the papers we read about use uh bachelor students so students from theuniversity who normally volunteer either for study credits or for financial rewards, some monetary reward.
WEIRD Participants and Generalizing Conclusions
[16:31] So what we know, and there is actually a big current, especially in the evolutionary biology domain, you may have heard a weird psychology.
It's a framework that's been talked about, especially by Professor Joe Henrich.
Now he's at Harvard, I think.
That says that WEIRD stands for a wealthy, educated, no, sorry, Western, educated, rich, industrialized, and democratic participants.
These are the ones we make big inference, big conclusions about, right? So we study these participants.
They're quite homogeneous and quite weird with respect to actually a representative population.
Population and to me what was most striking is when you look at basic decisions like in terms of where vision science right recognizing some some patterns we find these basic functionsare completely different in people who grew up in a say in a urban environment compared to a less urban environment so if these decisions are completely different then we cannot reallyextrapolate those what i would call higher order decisions or more complicated decisions decisions, say in economic terms, from these samples we use that are mostly university studentsto then the general population.
[17:51] Now there are these taking more and more into account. We're trying to get around this by, for instance, using services like mTurk from Amazon or Prolific or similar serviceswhere anybody could really register from the US, but anywhere in the world.
And then you would ask these people to complete experiments for you, participate in studies.
So you're broadening at least the type of people you're experimenting on.
You're inviting to your studies. So you get a bit more representative sample that then you can really generalize your conclusions to.
Brent:
[18:25] Are those done online now?
Giuseppe:
[18:27] Yeah, many, many studies are done online. There is also studies that look, that compare the online studies to the in-lab studies to try to see, you know, how similar they are.
And normally, especially a few years ago, you would find a lot of similarities.
Similarities now we are getting a bit uh to this to the point where there is so many research done online that those people start to get familiar with first with with the tasks they're doing soit's a bit of repetition and secondly they're starting to get more and more sophisticated in trying to get away without doing your study properly just complete as quick as possible and getthe demonian go yeah so then there will be the issues on the quality of data data online.
So there is some concerns there and there are different ways that services like the ones I mentioned are trying to counteract this to ensure you have the highest possible quality.
Brent:
[19:16] Very interesting. And then, Earlier, when you were talking about risk aversion, and especially in finance, do you think financial models will start to account for how differentinvestments might make people feel better?
When you talk about ESG and those things, because right now I know there's the beta and risk involved in the models.
Do you think they might start to add more human emotional components to the models to hopefully better reflect the decision-making process? Yeah.
Giuseppe:
[19:47] So there are models already that do this. However, when you take it on aggregates, and that was most of the finance model look at this behavior, but on the aggregate, so these tendto cancel out.
So we don't have too many models that focus on individual, in the after-measure specific for an individual.
We will get in that direction, especially now with artificial intelligence and sort of the services that try to help, these robots trying to help you make your personal investments and so on uhwe will we're going in that direction we don't have too much data on it yet yeah on it but i think it's going to be uh becoming more and more important right as of today the at least here inswitzerland what you have it's when you go to a wealth uh manager they are required and required to ask you you know how risk tolerant you are basically so then they would do a moreor less tailored strategy depending on whether you're very risk risk-averse, mal-risk-averse, or not so much risk-averse.
And to come back to the ESG question, now they're, I don't know if they already did this, or they're in the process of wanting to implement something similar where they want to ask aboutyour preferences for investing more or less according to the ESGs as well.
Valuing Human Lives and Money as Distinct Neural Currencies
Brent:
[21:03] Yeah, that makes sense.
Keller:
[21:04] Yeah. Then could you explain the idea of human lives and money being valued at distinct neural currencies and a little bit about that paper?
Giuseppe:
[21:13] Yeah, so this comes back to the PhD in Neuroeconomics.
[21:18] What I wanted to do there is that in Neuroeconomics, we have this theory called the common neural currency theory that basically suggests or finds that most of the things wevalue, so say fruits, beauty, money, whatnot, is represented by the same neural activity.
So you have a network of brain areas that represent the subjective value that each person assigns to a certain item.
And this also allows us to compare apples and oranges, to go to the famous saying.
So that's what allows us to compare things.
Now if you look at the literature, you find some examples that this is maybe not the case for moral values, that moral values are somehow different.
And just to give you an intuitive example that comes from Michael Sandel's book What Money Can't Buy yeah it's a book So what this lecture and this book is about is giving examples ofsituations in which people really find it wrong to put on the same plate human lives with money, right?
Being the car makers that decide to prioritize their revenues over the potential loss of life to other examples.
And this kind of gives an intuition that there may be something special about human lives, right? than in general moral values.
[22:47] So then in the paper, in the research we conducted in this paper where we look at this, we said, okay, no one actually tested directly.
[22:56] If when we're asking people to make decisions, trade-offs, when the matter of the choice is human lives or when the matter of the choice is money, if we get a similar pattern ofactivity or not.
There were some papers that looked at the two independently, so people would just look, okay, let's make a risky decision where you either save for sure one life or can, with a certainprobability, save a larger amount and found something similar, but they didn't compare directly with the monetary choices.
So there could be something that's still special and not caught up by the studies.
So what we did was exactly that. We didn't put participants in a situation where they had to make decisions either about money or about human lives.
Lives, and then we compared the neural activities underlying the two types of choices and found differences.
[23:46] So we found that human lives were not, that the value they would assign to human lives was not represented by this neural activity that you find in the common neural currency.
So we found areas that are typically found in social decision making, like the TPGA, the temporoparietal junction, which is an area involved in empathy or taking the other's perspectiveor other types of social decisions.
We didn't find this sort of common neural currency activations for this type.
We did find it unsurprisingly for the monetary task.
When you make interest about money, you would see the subjective value being correlated to this common neural currency.
Brent:
[24:28] And so in very, very simple terms is basically you have the map of the brain and you see different areas lighting up.
Giuseppe:
[24:34] Exactly.
Brent:
[24:35] Whether they're making it moral or like a financial.
Giuseppe:
[24:38] Exactly. When you're, yeah, basically we estimate the moral values that you are assigned to each of the options in the moral situation.
And we see that the correlation in your activities in a separate part of the brain compared to when you're doing it for money.
Brent:
[24:50] And then when you say making a decision about a life, is it a life and death situation about people? Or is it like that's just going to have a human emotion impact on someone?
Decision-Making About Life and Death Situations
Giuseppe:
[25:00] What we chose to go was life and death.
And we tried basically what we used. We had told people they were taking care of someone in a coma.
And then they had to decide to switch off the life support in order to then harvest the organs and donate it to people who were victims of an accident.
So that was the kind of a bit more ecologically valid scenario of a trolley dilemma.
Still, it's quite fictitious and requires some mental work, but that's the situation we chose to use.
Brent:
[25:37] Was it a random person to them or were they told a picture of a family member?
Giuseppe:
[25:41] No, so it was someone they wouldn't know. It was a complete stranger.
And we actually used faces, a random face we picked from internet.
And it was the same cartoon face for both the victim and the people they would save.
What we did tell them was that the person that we're taking care had a series of one of six different criminal records that range from not having any to being convicted for being a serialkiller.
And the idea was that we wanted to see if you would change your decisions depending on the moral deservingness that you would assign to this person.
Brent:
[26:16] And did they?
Giuseppe:
[26:17] So basically, you are much more ready to end life support for a person who had a crime, especially a serious crime.
So you would do that when you could save two others or already only one other person.
While for someone who didn't have a criminal record, people would be hesitant to say they would support the end of life support until you would save four or five people.
So that was, it was a module and we would modulate when you would decide to, to, that it was okay to, to end, uh, to end the life of this person.
Brent:
[26:51] Was it with a typical philosophical, like you're talking about Kant earlier, would it just be like, if you can save more than that person?
So once you hit more than two people or two or more, do you make the decision to pull the plug?
Giuseppe:
[27:04] Right. So that's a great, uh, very great point that leads me to, to, to consideration. First, Kant would say the opposite, that you shouldn't look at the consequences shouldn't mattertoo much.
So what Kant would say is you have to come up with a moral norm that is universalizable so that everybody could use in the same situation and come to the same conclusions.
So he wouldn't look at whether you save or not more or less people or you wouldn't, that wouldn't be so important.
That's more for what's called consequentialists or for instance, utilitarians would exactly say that, right?
If you have, or they were ready to say, if the utility of the life of the person you can save, it's higher because he's not in a coma, done the one in a coma, they're already one-on-one, youshould turn off life support.
[27:50] However, what's, you know, what's hard to know it's, you know, where, you know, how do you count utility, right?
It's probably different from one person to the other. So then for me, you need some moral principle to determine that.
And then that's kind of a philosophical discourse. course but what's uh irrespective of what's moral philosophy you um you follow or you you believe more more it's better to to governyour behavior is that if you follow this norm then what you should find is what i would call a step function right that you never kill someone and then you get to a certain point where youalways uh end the life support of this person right and we don't find this so what we find is a kind of a smooth transition that people uh start to decide it's it's okay to end life support,maybe when it's two or three, and then they just become certain of their choice when, say, it's already eight, right? So they're a bit unsure.
Decision-making in Intertemporal Choices and Life Support
[28:41] So they're not following this kind of, what they would call a step function in their decision.
And they're actually mirroring the same way we're making the decision in an intertemporal choice domain, right?
So when you're choosing money now versus the future, people are not that good at making just a consistent switch that after, you know, if you have to, If you get more than X money in Ydays, then I'll pick the other option.
They also have what they call a curve, a hyperbolic curve.
So the two decision functions were actually quite similar, but they were then correlating in very different areas in the brains.
Brent:
[29:17] Yeah. And then one last question on this. Do you see the use of VR, like virtual reality, coming into the field to make these scenarios more realistic?
Giuseppe:
[29:29] Yeah, absolutely. So VR, as you say, is allowing us to make the scenarios more realistic by basically asking people to make decisions that feel more real and where theconsequences are literally in your face. Yeah.
We've been using this in one study to measure if people are more likely to give money to the International Committee of the Red Cross when they're solicited through, basically by beingput in a situation where people from the Red Cross work, so a conflict zone through VR, compared to when they were watching the same thing on a computer screen.
And we found that people actually were more likely to give money to the Red Cross in the situation where they're using VR compared to videos, which could be because of being moreimmersed.
It's easier for you to put yourself in the shoes of the Red Cross personnel, and then you feel more compelled to help the activities of this organization.
It's just one study that goes in that direction. There are also studies in the trolley dilemma that use this, but I'm not too familiar with them.
But yeah, it's being used more and more for that.
Brent:
[30:40] Very interesting.
Keller:
[30:41] Yeah, I could see that definitely taking a lot more weight in the future.
And then another question about the study.
You said that the decision to pull the plug and harvest organs went up as more crimes occurred or theoretically occurred.
Did that shift from no crime to one crime? Was there more weight on that initial crime?
Giuseppe:
[31:01] There's not a number of crimes people did, it's just a different quality of crime.
So it went from riding the public transportation without paying to being convicted for robbery.
I don't remember the exact ones, but then it went.
So we had the, and you see those in the data, a bit of a difference between violent crimes where someone got hurt compared to those who are just robberies or less violent crimes.
So there could be already something there. We didn't dig too much in depth on what the different quality of the crimes were that could lead them to different types of moral decisions.
We did ask people to rank how bad these crimes were for them so that we could individually calculate, so to say, the badness of the crime and then use that in our data.
Keller:
[31:54] And at what point would you add the theoretical lives saved?
Because you said like, oh, harvest organs, it's two lives saved.
And then eventually you could go, oh, it's up to eight. At what point would you add the theoretical lives?
Giuseppe:
[32:08] So basically they're just making decisions in different scenarios.
One is basically you harm one person to save one and the other is two, three, and so on up to 10, right?
So it's completely different situations and they know the trials they're going to face in advance. Yeah.
Brent:
[32:23] And then would you change race of the person, uh, on my support?
Giuseppe:
[32:27] No, we kept that neutral.
Brent:
[32:28] Oh, so they didn't know like the race or it just like, it was all, it was just this white person, uh, with yeah.
Giuseppe:
[32:34] Brown hair was, yeah. I think there should be in, in the publication, there should be a screenshot of the, you can see there.
Uh, yeah. So basically we wanted this person to be as similar to the decision maker as possible and being in Switzerland, that's kind of the, uh, yeah.
Um sorry one second um what is personalized philanthropy right so as um.
[32:59] Um when i moved and started working in in philanthropy um one of the first things that i thought about for bringing behavioral science to philanthropy it's uh maybe what we'rerelated to what we were talking about before how can we use insights from decision making to then then help people make their own decisions better.
Personalized philanthropy: matching interests and moral values for effective giving.
[33:21] So personalized philanthropy is this kind of theoretical work, the theoretical paper that I laid out where I try to link and try to suggest that we could use insights from behavioralscience to then put people in situations where their philanthropic interests are actually best matched so that they feel more compelled to help others.
They realize that the causes they work for are actually linked to what they care about and so on.
And the suggestion was that to achieve this, if in finance to make the person happiest is to understand their risk tolerance and their time framework of influence and so on, in philanthropy,not only you need these two because you have this financial component of disbursing funds and so on, but you also have a moral component.
So, we have to take into account also where do the moral values of people, what are the most important moral values for people and, you know, would they be, for instance, moreconsequentialist, would they care more to maximize their actions, the consequences of their actions, or would they care most of promoting a certain principle, say equality or goodeducation and so on.
So personalized philanthropy is a way to try to understand how a person thinks when wants to engage in philanthropy and help this person make the best decisions for themselves.
Keller:
[34:46] Yeah. And was part of that to get people who aren't currently in philanthropic endeavors to get them to start, to incentivize them to start, or to more so just help people that arealready philanthropic?
Giuseppe:
[35:00] I think both ways, right? For those who already are philanthropists to then be more satisfied with what they're doing, be more in line with what they would feel that is a good way ofdoing philanthropy, and also to make people who are not doing philanthropy realize, you know, in which situation they would be, you know, they could do philanthropy and howrewarding it would be for them. So sometimes, you know, if you find they're...
Maybe people are not doing philanthropy because they feel that what their values are could not be promoted through that type of actions.
But maybe if you do manage to show that they actually can, then they would be driven into the philanthropic world as well.
[35:44] And the VR paper in a way goes a bit also in that direction.
It's trying to pull in people to feel that when you do philanthropy, when you do help then you actually maybe feel good you know the warm glow hypothesis and so on could actually thenmove people by feeling this in a more immersive situation would be the first step then for them to engage um in a different situation as well yeah are there like funds or something similarto like financial institutions where you could give this fund money and then they donate it based on your desires or anything like that because like i'm sure a lot of people out there theywant to be philanthropic they don't know all the different philanthropies out there though so they could as like an investment medium to distribute the money based on whatever theirdesires are right so there is the normal way that you just give money to organizations that fundraise like unicef or wwf and so on right that's one way you just contribute your little littleshare because you know if you say you only give five dollars really hard to have an impact with them but then if you give it to these organizations that are trustworthy and.
Donor advice funds and alternative investment mediums for philanthropy.
[36:51] So on they can you know put everything together and then work on very large projects there are what's called the donor advice funds that is a bit of a different thing which isbasically people that tell you know we just put large amounts of money and we tell this fund what we want to achieve and then we hope that the returns generated by these funds as well asthe way the money is invested through these funds is generating the positive outcomes we expect.
However, there is a bit of...
[37:24] Skepticism around these funds especially in the u.s there was a an article recently showing that because you have tax incentives to use these funds that they were basically used forand not really for philanthropic reasons but for for other reasons okay very interesting and does the work with the ethical and inclusive ai does that fit in more with personalizedphilanthropy or more of the blended finance work so the ethical and inclusive ai it's a it's a kind of a side project that started because we were using artificial intelligence in one of the inthe form of natural language processing in one of our models then we got this interest in artificial intelligence and the role that philanthropy could play so ethical and inclusivephilanthropy refer sorry ethical and inclusive artificial intelligence ai refers to to this current thinkers and practitioners and doers that are actually trying to develop AI in a way that isgoing to help those who need it the most that are normally those who are mostly excluded.
So you're trying to break a bit the logics of the winner takes all that is being exacerbated by AI and instead trying to deploy AI to really maximize those who can benefit from it.
So that's the AI AI.
Brent:
[38:42] Okay, yeah. And then such as...
We've mentioned it a few times now. Could you explain what work you're doing with the natural language processor and all that?
Giuseppe:
[38:51] Right. So basically going back to square one on defining behavioral philanthropy and trying to understand how philanthropic institutions and why they engage in doingphilanthropy.
So one of the ways that we do behavioral science and try to get at the motives is to ask people, right?
You just give a questionnaire and have them make decisions and so on.
But with this technology available, I thought that maybe this could be a bit redundant since we already have documents that say why a philanthropic organization is engaging in somethingand in what. This is the mission statements.
And they're not super easy to get, especially here in Switzerland.
I think they're a bit easier to get in the US.
And there is similar work done in the US.
[39:34] Basically, what we did was to take the mission statements that are deposited and publicly available available from the registry of all the foundations, philanthropic organizationshere in Switzerland.
We took this and said, okay, here we have all the answers to the question we want to ask.
Let's now have, you know, we have this 15,000 documents with, I don't know, at least a thousand words each.
Sure. How do we then make sense of them? And there's where we use natural language processing to try to identify in which areas do organizations in philanthropic organizations inswitzerland work uh whether they how do they do it do they give money then grants do they ask fundraise and then run their own operations they both do both and for which reasons sofor which reasons then basically this first part we did using unsupervised uh learning in natural language processing so basically just took the bunch of of words, and Aston algorithmmakes sense of it.
Very loose and unspecific terms.
For finding motives, what we did, we came up with two of the most plausible motives for philanthropists to engage.
One, it's moral values, and the other is emotions.
[40:46] Um maybe a bit arbitrary but i think if you ask uh um most philanthropists why they they engage one of these two will come up sure uh and then what we did we basically lookedtook from the literature there is already uh vocabularies that define emotions so all the words that could be used for say anger or sadness or happiness okay and then we created vectors ofthese words and then we did what's called supervised learning so we looked for these specific words inside the documents to try to identify what are the predominant emotions, withinthese mission statements we have.
Similar where we did the same for our moral values.
And here it's a bit of a caveat because we took the words that define moral values we took from from US research, so there may be different in Switzerland or elsewhere, but still we, usethis text to then get the vocabulary for different types of moral values and look for this in the mission statements as well.
So then we did the supervised search and that's how we use the natural language processing.
Findings: Areas of focus and common approaches in Swiss philanthropy.
Brent:
[41:57] So what were some of the findings? Where are philanthropies doing most of their work or what's most common, at least here in Switzerland? Right.
Giuseppe:
[42:05] So the number one is education, which is a bit unsurprising, I think.
What we found that was not easy to predict was that there is a sort of regional unspecificity.
So organizations are not all based in one part of Switzerland if they work on environment and in another part of the world.
So the causes are evenly spread across the country.
So are also the type of organizations. organizations we did find density corresponds to you know there is then more philanthropic organizations when there is a more dense more densecities basically in urban settings, so in general these are the parents right education is probably number one we found a trend that it's mostly it's a moral i'm sorry positive moral valuesbeing described so i work work to promote equality.
I don't work to fight inequality in a way. And the same way also positive emotions are more present than negative emotions.
So I don't alleviate pain, but I promote happiness, so to say.
Right? So that's another of the trends that we find is that there is a more positive discourse used than a negative one. One interesting.
Philanthropic Organizations: Similarities and Barriers in Communication
[43:19] Comparison we did was we took the organizations that are grant makers and those who are operational and we tried to see if the language they use is actually similar or not and wefound that overall there is but that there are areas in which they're much more similar especially in science and education and areas where actually they're not so similar so there could be abarrier then in communication there and the ultimate goal of this work was really to try is really to try to create a network map of philanthropic organizations to try and promote synergiesbetween them.
So one thing, again, I speak for Switzerland, but I think it's probably possible to generalize it as well abroad, is that philanthropic organizations are supposed to be collaborating and allworking towards the same goal, but most of the times they're working in silos, not talking to each other, reinventing the wheel over and over again.
And so what we're trying to do is to generate a map that easily can show then to organizations or to anyone where is most of the work done, who is working on a certain topic, so that thenif you want to work on this topic, you can actually ask what's being done or try to partner instead of just restarting a new project that maybe is already being developed.
Or you can find areas in which no one is working and maybe there is some need and you could then start in this niche.
Brent:
[44:42] This would be like a map online.
Giuseppe:
[44:44] Exactly, yeah. That's what we're hoping to get. It's a map online that's, you know, just have different nodes and then say the node could be the area of work and then we have all theorganizations working on this.
Brent:
[44:56] That'd be really cool.
Giuseppe:
[44:56] Connected to it.
Keller:
[44:57] Yeah. And then with the model that you guys were creating, I have a couple of questions about, I guess the qualifications is, firstly, did you guys look at donor size between theorganizations while you were sifting through the mission statements?
And also when you're defining philanthropic organizations, Did you include for-profit, non-profit, and government, or just non-profit?
Giuseppe:
[45:18] We only included non-profits.
If there is, so we didn't exclude, for instance, corporate foundation, right?
So if a bank has their own corporate foundation that is registered independently, then that would be included. The bank would not be included.
We had to exclude pension funds because here in Switzerland they're classified as foundations.
Different Legal Statuses of Philanthropic Organizations
[45:42] They have a similar, basically have a similar legal status. So then you would find it in the same registry.
[45:50] But then we were open. So here we have two of the predominant type of legal status of philanthropic organization gets its foundation.
Normally these are grant makers or associations. These normally are more operational organizations.
So those are the two of the most common ones, but we included all of them.
So as I mentioned before, philanthropy for me is redefined as those who work to promote the common on good irrespective they do it through you know investing time and work orinvesting or using money so we we kept an open mind as well in that in that search in terms of size we didn't that doesn't come in the picture in selecting it comes in the picture later interms of you know if we have an organization that is more developed and larger as more funds or more employees and so on it will probably be more elaborated and then we could look atthat in the richness they of of description of what they do, right?
[46:48] It's easier if you have more funds or more people to have a good website with all the description of what you do than if you don't, right?
But there is a lot of variance there, and it's already a big win if we have a website for an organization here.
So, yeah, we can look at that as well.
But mainly we took whatever information on the mission statement and that it's basically describing quite in broad terms what the organization wants to achieve.
Keller:
[47:21] And with the map, have you thought at all or would you envision that you could pick an organization and it would show kind of the efficiency of the dollar or the franc that if youwere to donate, how much that would carry?
I think it's called like the qual scores.
Giuseppe:
[47:35] Scores so here in here in switzerland with the data we have that's a dream because we have zero information on the financials of an organization unless they want to openly uhreport it on their website but they're not required uh so they'd have to disclose it to the authorities but this is not publicly available information so we don't know uh this is too big uhproblems first we don't we We can't answer this, you know, how effective an organization is.
[48:03] Which is not to say effective if it's positive or bad, right?
Especially in philanthropy, if you're very ineffective, it could be also good, right?
You're just testing if a solution would work. You invest a lot of money and show the solution doesn't work.
You can afford that because it's philanthropic money. You're not going to bankrupt and leave, you know, a thousand people without a job because you failed your investment.
But still it was maybe if it was a good uh well-thought decision to try this solution then it's actually what philanthropists for some people should do take these big risks it could be abreakthrough 10 breakthrough or 90 failure philanthropists with those who could do it right so effective here it doesn't exactly correlate with something positive or not but then the secondthing is that we don't know if an organization in their mission statement has 90 90% of the words that refer to education and 10% to health, we don't know if then actually they put 90% oftheir investment or their money in education and 10% in health. Maybe they do actually the opposite.
[49:09] Yeah. We have no idea about it. Yeah. Hopefully we will get access to more data and give a more precise picture.
But yeah, so that's, we don't have information to answer that question.
Brent:
[49:21] And then going back a little bit when you were talking about more of the wording being positive is that more effective at getting donations especially for like those who arereceiving donations have you looked at the decision-making process by like playing to the emotion of the donor more kind of also similar to the vr thing by being in the country virtually ifeel like that plays to their emotions and they're more likely to donate have you guys started looking at those those factors?
Giuseppe:
[49:51] So we really wanted to look at this and in the VR study, and I'll come back to it, we actually manipulated the ending of the story, whether the person was then, you know, was savedor not.
And if that affected then how much people gave.
We also wanted to know, we would like to know in the actual organizations when they use positive or negative discourse, if they are better or less or worse in fundraising.
Fundraising and but we don't have this information because we don't have any information how much they they fundraise and and or in any of the financial so i don't know about that umthere is a lot of mixed evidence on whether you know negative images are stronger than positive images in motivating people to give and some find that yes it's the case other finds fatigueso that people then if you exceed with the negative emotion then you're really just you know backing backing off.
Some people find that using positive emotion is better.
So there is a lot of different findings there.
In our VR studies, we found no effect of using positive or negative ending.
So we found that the mediums of VR versus video had an impact, the increasing donations.
We didn't find that it was not affected by the type of emotion, positive or negative, nor we found an effect of positive or negative emotion per se.
We don't have a solid answer for this yet.
Keller:
[51:17] One more question on the VR study, because we keep talking about it.
Did the people that ran the study use an Oculus type of VR, or was it more of an immersive?
Because I know some have full suits that you can get physical feedback, or it's more of a surrounding square that you're in. What VR system do they use?
Giuseppe:
[51:36] No, we bought just a headset that projects people in this war zone.
I think it was supposed to be Syria.
And what they did have was they could interact with some objects so you you had a control in your hand you could wave a white flag so you could to some extent interact in the scenariothat's also something we manipulated how much people could interact but no it was not you wouldn't get it was not a super advanced vr experience where you get you know vibrations ormotion or stuff like that yeah it was um and then we're talking a lot about how there's not a lot of good data are how are you guys is the map your main way of trying to increase theamount of data sharing amongst philanthropies or are you guys doing other things to really try to create more data transparency so we are trying to ask to get as much data as we can uhpromoting data transparency one way to do this is we're trying to show the good you can do with data how we can and help back the organizations that share the data and why it'simportant to have it.
[52:41] The data we have, it's going back to the natural language process in this mapping exercise.
The data we have is actually quite poor in quality because we're using mission statements that by design they're very general and broad because these are fixed in time.
It's really hard for you to go to the authorities and say, from a year to a year, I want to change my mission statement.
That's not possible by law. So people don't want to say, I really work on protecting this species from this thing, because then they would be bound only to that.
So they say, we want to protect the environment.
So then it's going to be quite hard for us to find the fine-grained differences between them.
[53:24] We're finding more and more organizations that are open to share data.
And I hope that the more we show the benefits of doing this, the more others will be intrigued and will join in this.
And in a way, what we're also trying to do is to make do with what we have and show that even with little data, we can still have quite a good impact on the philanthropic sector.
Brent:
[53:54] Yeah.
Keller:
[53:55] And are there any laws or policies that are moving in that direction of data transparency for philanthropic organizations? Because I know for like the U.S..
Lack of Transparency in Philanthropy Organizations
Giuseppe:
[54:04] Mostly don't have them and that's a big issue talking to people that want to donate is they have this idea especially like larger organizations that they're just corrupt and that theirmoney is not going to be used properly is there any movement in that direction so not to no there is no at least not in switzerland we don't have any um anyone who's actually pushing forthis uh concretely right so and and here in switzerland is probably the last place where you will get uh a law that that forces someone to give data, more because there is much more atradition of showing that if it's good, people will just do it.
So you have a very slim legislative system here in Switzerland.
There is very few laws if you compare it.
In philanthropy, I think, I'll just give you a random number.
I don't know the exact number of laws that are related to philanthropy in Switzerland, But say if it was 10 in Switzerland, in Italy you would have 5,000, right?
So it's much more let the people do what they do, self-regulate.
And then if we see there is a need for really having a hard law to fix something, we'll do it. Sure.
[55:20] This allows for the environment to be much more dynamic and efficient, provided that it also leaves room for a bit of cheating or some negative side of it. But then it's always atrade-off.
So you try to be less bureaucratic.
So I don't think we'll have that anytime soon, a law that forces organizations to open their data.
And there's still a lot of question whether that's good or bad.
Introduction to Sustainable Development Goals
Keller:
[55:50] And then as we transition to the blended finance topic, I was wondering if you could just give a brief explanation of the Sustainable Development Goals.
Giuseppe:
[56:00] So the Sustainable Development Goals, they're a set of goals that were ratified in 2015 by all the United States member states, countries.
So there are 17 of them. Each have their own sub-goals and metrics to measure them.
And basically, these are a set of goals that were agreed upon to say, if we want to have a better world in terms of how livable it is for people, for how protected the environment is, and soon, we should achieve these by 2030.
So, it was a 15-year target or time horizon for these goals.
And yeah, basically, there are different ways to measure.
They're completely voluntary. A country should report every X years on how they're doing on these different goals, but there is no body that is enforcing these reports to come in, norcountries to stick to, say, pledges to fulfill these goals and so on.
So they're completely voluntary. What was really interesting of these goals is comparing to their predecessors, the Millennium Development Goals or the other sort of targets that were setat the UN was for the first time, all the states ratified them, accepted them as a good thing.
Keller:
[57:23] All member states did?
Giuseppe:
[57:24] All member states. And that the civil society and NGOs could participate in the definition. So, it was really a bottom-up, as bottom-up as possible effort to define them.
And then, of course, there's all the political discourse and issues that for having everybody sign on them, you don't find the term human rights in it.
Or you don't find certain terms that are not acceptable for certain cultures or certain states.
So, then there was a compromise there. But it was, yeah, it was a very interesting effort.
Maybe the desirable thing for the next set of goals is to have some mechanisms that binds states to then actually fulfill them, at least to make their best effort to achieve them.
Brent:
[58:13] Yeah, kind of on that note, do they...
Put out data saying like we are on pace we're below pace or like do they track every country and they show like this one's fallen behind or anything like that to like kind of not just say thatthese are the goals but we're actually working on it and also somewhat similar does anyone audit the reports of the countries say like this is what we did how do we know that's true, So it'scompletely voluntary to report on this.
Giuseppe:
[58:45] And as you can imagine, most of the reports are positive reports.
We achieved this, we achieved that.
Of course, it's also a lot of bias because people choose which goals to report on.
So if I'm already doing very well in education, then I'm going to show you I'm doing very well in education.
[58:59] And I'm not showing that I'm very bad in environment protection.
Section um and there there is uh so once you submit the your country report there is an audit so to say to control but again it's all completely voluntary so it's going to be a lenient auditoryou're not forced to disclose data that may show that you're not really actually achieving what you are there are organizations that try to keep track and unfortunately we know that most ofthe goals are uh so most of the targets are missed and actually we had a step backs right we we were doing not so well and now we're doing even worse especially after uh the pandemicyeah um yeah there was a there was a big uh regression then to towards uh in away from achieving the sdgs and we know no we won't achieve any of them uh by 2030 yeah and that'skind of the sad story of but they're there like a sort of a utopia to to get their um guiding actions hopefully in the in that direction and yeah that's a similar sentiment to a podcast we did inlondon uh that about esgs and the esg funds saying they'd want to do this but in actuality they had companies they invested in companies that had higher carbon output uh impact so it'svery interesting to see what people say versus what they do yeah yeah maybe we can come back to brain stimulation and force how aggressive is.
Unrealistic Timeline and Revision of Goals
[1:00:27] The 2030 timeline do you know like how because you said it's unrealistic how unrealistic is it because i'd imagine if you know we're going to get to 2030 and i'm just gonna haveto kind of go back to the drawing board and create new goals but it'd be a lot i think more inspiring if you were okay 2070 70.
Keller:
[1:00:46] We knew you have that much time to get this done, but here's like, we can start to build up a lot more and see the progress over time.
Giuseppe:
[1:00:53] Yeah. So I think the, you know, maybe it was a bit optimistic, but you know, the 15, I think it's also a bit of a tradition that every 15 years you kind of revise where you are andthen set the new goals.
Uh, if I'm not wrong, the millennium development goals were set out in 20 to end in 2015 and then you would ratify the SDGs.
[1:01:10] Um, so what's the, what I know in the future, what they're going to try to do is to actually pull the sdgs into sort of areas you know it's uh you have uh sdgs on protecting life onland life on water so you actually would put those who are um more similar together and you would try to set priorities right you cannot have say you cannot work on anything if you don'thave peace and uh and try to this uh to diminish corruption so that what are the or you can't do anything you don't have a planet to live in so let's prioritize certain goals and try to build ahierarchy on them of course that's going to be political um and uh so in in terms of setting a longer time frame you know we're really far from them um and the thing is that you can putmaybe an unrealistic time and time time frame or a realistic or unrealistic one but then i think if you put it sooner at this you're kind of trying to force people to do it it's like asking astudent do an essay in a week and then maybe you know if it's a week later it's fine if you give a deadline in one month the student will the day before send an email saying you know justuh just kidding right yeah it's always helpful to have uh uh to have sort of deadlines or you know goals and targets that are uh closer or at least easier to to imagine uh then sending itmaybe a more realistic but very far goal that then wouldn't be as motivating so then.
Brent:
[1:02:35] What is blended finance and how can blended finance be able to help us meet these goals?
Giuseppe:
[1:02:42] So blended finance is a relatively new concept or recent concept.
And it's basically thinking of how do we mix capital that is for profit, mainly intended for profit, or at least to generate some profit, with capital that is more intended for just doing goodand that doesn't need to generate any profit.
So philanthropic money and for-profit money coming together, how can we use this too, right?
So if you think about what we were talking about before of trying a new solution, philanthropic money would be the, and with a blended finance approach would be, we have, say we havethis solution that costs 10 million.
And now we have 4 million from philanthropic capital and 6 million from for-profits, from market capital. Now, we take this $4 million from philanthropy and just put them in thesolution and kickstart it and see if it works or not.
And we get, hopefully, some good result.
Scaling Solutions and Risk Assessment
[1:03:40] And then we say, okay, now we showed that this solution could work.
Let's bring in also the other capital.
So, then we can scale it and make it work.
And that would be one way. The other way is that we put all the partners together and we assume that this $10 million intervention has a 40% risk of complete failure.
And now we say, if this fails, everybody gets some money back besides the philanthropists that put this $4 million in.
They don't want any money back. So they're the first ones that are not going to be repaid.
So if you have a – you layer who is going to get repaid first, basically. And philanthropists are those that won't be repaid in the end.
So maybe you have the complete for-profits or you have the smaller investors that get paid first and you have nine different type of investors and so on.
And this is all negotiated at the beginning, right? You have this plan and then you set who wants to be in which, who can accept this amount of risk and who can't.
And you try to have a solution that fits a larger number of people so then you can attract more people to this initiative that you wouldn't be able to in a traditional model.
[1:04:51] On one hand, you wouldn't have enough capital if it's only philanthropy.
In the other hand, you wouldn't have enough people who would be willing to take such a large risk.
So with this compromise, then you're mixing a bit of contributions for both and hopefully you innovate, promote new solutions that would be too risky for a company to do, and at thesame time, it's larger than what only a philanthropic approach could achieve.
And for the SDGs, this is really important because in many areas, we just need to experiment with new solutions. and the business as usual has failed and we need really to find a new wayto...
Catalyze interventions to make things quicker, to make things in a new way so that the SDGs could be achieved.
Keller:
[1:05:36] Yeah. And with that, is it just the division of capital between philanthropic nonprofits and for-profit companies?
Or are they, like you said, are they working together on the solution?
So if you have a for-profit company that's working with an environmental focus, are they sitting down at the table and say, okay, here's what we need to get to.
Giuseppe:
[1:05:54] And it's more of a team effort or are they still going about and using the capital individually within their organizations no they're going to go together okay i'm defining uh who'sgoing to be the first one to get uh to get hit basically who's going to take the largest hit if things goes out okay okay and then would a model where a for-profit company say we donate 10of our profits to our philanthropic arm would that be like a similar model to or like that's more what it would be like a corporate foundation okay uh so it's not like it's not really blendedfinance and that's the company the organization itself that's uh the size that's uh yeah this 10 percent goes for philanthropic initiatives more uh what's called a csr or you know initiativesthat um it's It's moving towards philanthropy, but it's normally blended finance is really taking different types of institutions and mixing them together so that they can basically bring, thebest out of all these institutions for the solution that wouldn't be possible if they were to go at it alone.
Keller:
[1:07:05] And with philanthropic organizations, what are some of the biggest gaps that exist between, let's see if like Red Cross and WWF, like what are the biggest gaps in communicationbetween the same problems that they're trying to solve?
Giuseppe:
[1:07:20] That's a million dollar question. So I think the...
One of the biggest things is that really don't know what's, it's really too hard for them to know how to talk to each other, right?
So what constitutes failure or what constitutes a win for one or the other and how can they help each other on that or what strategies they could do in order to work together, right?
If you have an initiative that could benefit both, if we're talking about regional Red Crosses, that the poor people in WWF also benefit in the animal life or the environment.
It's what could be win-win situations.
But then you have people who are overworked and have already enough on their plate.
And then it's really hard for them to think, how can we promote a joint strategy?
And then this leads to a lot of inefficiencies that could actually benefit both organizations.
So hopefully the, you know, being able to provide that tool that's like the mapping tool that we were mentioning before that can be used to, to, to find who's doing what could help, couldhelp organizations and be more, more efficient and more work in synergies.
Understanding Social Entrepreneurship and its Impact
Brent:
[1:08:32] Yeah. And then kind of building on the whole note of like, how do we create more efficient philanthropy and how do we get more communication and how do we meet thesegoals?
Giuseppe:
[1:08:41] What is social entrepreneurship and like how might that also be helping us try to hit these goals right so social entrepreneurship we think about again the spectrum we said beforefrom the complete for-profit oriented organizations to the complete philanthropic ones are those who still want to in the spectrum they're still closer to the you know wanting to haveprofits but that they all not only value financial profit they also value uh social and environmental environmental um and environmental uh welfare basically they're trying to promote uhyes profit but within certain boundaries so we don't want to have any child labor in our uh in our chain of supply or in our especially in our own workforce we want x amount of holidaysyou know want people to to feel good and to work in good life and good uh in good work situation and we don't want to to just sacrifice everything for the sake of profit, which kind of, ifyou take it from a spin around, you should actually ask what are non-social entrepreneurship, right?
So what does it mean to be a non, or if you're not a social entrepreneur, that's kind of, everybody should say, all the companies should be social entrepreneurs, right?
Even if you're for profit, you should want to maximize everything, not only capital. capital.
But yeah, so social entrepreneurs, those who are basically putting a larger percentage or a lot of importance in generating value beyond only their financial returns.
Brent:
[1:10:10] And then is there data showing that they are effective?
Giuseppe:
[1:10:14] So there is actually a work by the director of the Center of Philanthropy here that is called Corporations as the New Philanthropist.
That basically they touch on this and showing that long-term organizations that are more concerned about their employees' welfare, about basically about being better in ESG terms,they're also performing better than other companies.
So they are less, they're more resilient to, say, natural shocks.
They're more resilient to crisis.
[1:10:44] However there is limited data on it so we don't really know for sure yet um but yeah so hopefully it will show it will come up again bottom up it will be come up naturally that theorganizations are doing better also in not only in generating profits they'll also be more long-lasting yeah and better than other companies but there is some data that shows that yeah andthen kind of scaling back a bit do you view like philanthropy as being a more effective way to create change or do you think that like for-profit companies have the ability to reallyimprove lives more so where do you like see that balance playing out so i think philanthropic organizations have more drive to create this change and less means and for-profit companieshave more means but less initiative to do it so i think that the the truth lies in in the middle so So that combining, for instance, for banded finance or alternative approaches, combining thelogics of both types of organizations would help then create different types of solutions.
Balancing Philanthropy and For-Profit Initiatives for Change
[1:11:51] And in some cases, we'll find that the purely philanthropic initiatives will be better than the for-profit ones.
There could be situations where, say, in education, it would be very, very hard to show that you can generate profit just by educating.
So the idea of bringing in a market solution, that's what you ideally want at some point, right?
Something that is sustainable to a certain product is not feasible.
So in that case, the philanthropic approach is better.
[1:12:22] Other situations, it's vice versa, right? So I think what we need to be is promoting both approaches and trying to be as flexible as possible and provide as much data as possible tofigure out what's the right mixture of the two approaches so that then we can generate all the change we need as fast as possible.
Brent:
[1:12:43] Certainly.
Keller:
[1:12:44] And then as we transition out a little bit, could you tell us how studying philosophy, impacted in any way your work within philanthropy and then also maybe even what it is aboutphilanthropy that you find beautiful?
Giuseppe:
[1:13:00] Right. So for the first question, I think what philosophy teaches you is mostly a method and a way of thinking.
And it's what benefited me, I think, the most, especially as I went on to have a quite interdisciplinary career, is to find connections or ways of bringing one approach to a different field thata philosophical mind finds easier than someone who's trained in a specific way.
You don't have a normal if you want.
And when you're thinking about problems in an interdisciplinary way, then not having a strong standard helps you see many faces of a thing.
And so in terms of you know what's what's beautiful about philanthropy it's really this.
[1:13:51] Surprising if you want need for so many people to just help others right to promote society help others and you know you talk about WWF there's so people so many peoplepassionate about helping you know animals so you don't even have to think about you know helping your neighbor that comes it's almost like taking forgiven but there is a drive in peoplethat they really want to be to do good so hopefully we'll manage to by studying philanthropy and promoting philanthropy we'll manage to you know bring even more people to realize orto find ways in which they can do their own share of creating goods for society and that's what's really the beauty of it so we newspaper sell negative and sad stories and you look atphilanthropy you find the opposite so it's.
[1:14:40] Good to see that there is so much good also happening not only uh negative things yeah do you have any favorite philanthropies or do you have any words of advice for peoplelooking to like get involved in philanthropy, yeah i do have a word of advice and it's uh you know philanthropy it's a very nice uh nice thing to do and but uh getting some training andthinking really about how to do it well it's probably a better a better way of doing it than just waking up a morning and decide to solve a next problem without any expertise on it um so ithink you're really getting some training in how to do philanthropy properly is my my strongest advice and in terms of a philanthropist i can really think of catching me off guard hereyeah if you if you think of any we'll put it on the website even if it's like your personal favorite just we'll put something out yeah yeah well thank you for your time today it's been apleasure it's been a pleasure talking to you guys and And thanks a lot and good luck with the rest of your podcasts.
Brent:
[1:15:41] Thank you.