Heavyweight · Pushkin Industries

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

December 2, 2025·48 min·3 clips

Psychologist Maya Shanker was bullied so badly in elementary school that kids pretended she was invisible, until one girl changed everything.

The holiday is Giving Tuesday. Dr. Laurie Santos treats it as her preferred November ritual, a day for compassion set against Black Friday and Cyber Monday. The cause is GiveDirectly, whose pitch here is plain: cash goes straight to people in extreme poverty, and they decide how to spend it. Then Michael shares his rule. He carries ten-dollar bills so that when someone asks for money, the answer can come before hesitation turns into prudence. It has only happened like five times, but he wants the habit to stick because it changes more than the transaction. Giving feels good, he says. Still, a line from a dad he met while working on the Blindside keeps complicating the easy part of generosity. The gift should hurt slightly. That ache is not punishment. It is proof that the act has moved past spare change into something more alive. Laurie hears the happiness in it. She suggests each ten-dollar bill may have given Michael more back than the lattes or small purchases it replaced. Michael thinks about city defenses, how moving through public space braced for requests can close a person off from everyone. The bills loosen that armor a bit, without drama. Laurie links the same instinct back to GiveDirectly. The campaign asks listeners to donate through the Happiness Lab link, or share it if they cannot give. The ending stays practical: a URL, a hashtag, and a promise to keep working through holiday happiness worries next time.

As heard by us

A guest's $10-bill habit and a borrowed line about the cost of giving amount to a short argument for impulsive generosity.

Giving Tuesday gets a practical argument in this Happiness Lab special, one episode inside a cross-podcast drive called Pods Fight Poverty. The guest, Michael, carries $10 bills and hands them out when asked, a habit built around a borrowed idea: that giving should cost…

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Why you'd press play

A guest's $10-bill habit turns out to be the cheapest happiness upgrade you have never tried.

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