Your DNA Responds to Kindness

One ordinary Wednesday morning, a woman pulled up to a Starbucks drive-thru, got an iced coffee, and then she did something small. She paid for the stranger in the car behind her too. That stranger pulled forward, found out that his drink was paid for, and decided to pay for the car behind him. And that car paid for the next one. The baristas grabbed a piece of paper and started counting, because the chain just kept going for 11 hours. By the time it finally broke, 378 strangers had bought coffee for someone they'd never met. Now here's what I find so interesting about this. Not one of those people was really getting anything back. The person they paid for was always behind them. Always a stranger. Always someone they'd drive away from and forget. And they did it anyway. 378 times in a row. It's a sweet story. It aligns with how we see kindness as something soft. A nice gesture, even good manners. But it turns out kindness isn't just noble. It does measurable things to the person doing it. To their happiness, to their immune system, and as you will see, all the way down to which of their genes are turned on. That's what this video is about. And it starts with a man driving a cab. In 1989, a man named Kent Nurburn took a job driving a cab on a night shift. He didn't expect what came with it. The backseat became a kind of confessional. People came in, told him things in the dark that never say in daylight, and then they were gone. One warm August night, he got a call to a quiet address. He drove up, the lights were off, and no one came out. Now most drivers would have honked and left. But he went and knocked on the door. A woman in her 80s opened the door. There was a small suitcase beside her. She asked him to carry it to the car. And then said something he wasn't quite ready for. She said, I'm going to the hospice. She had no family left and the doctor told her she didn't have long. So she got into the taxi and asked him to drive her through the city, the long way. She wanted to see it one final time. So for the next two hours they drove, she showed him the building where she used to run the elevator, the neighborhood where she and her husband lived when they first were married, a warehouse that used to be the ballroom where she went dancing as a girl. Sometimes she'd just have him slow down and sit, staring into the dark, saying nothing. When the sun started coming up, she said she was tired, so Kent drove her to the hospice. As they pulled up, she asked, what do I owe you? He had already shot the meter hours ago. He said, nothing. You have to make a living, she told him. But he said, there's other passengers, don't worry. He hugged her, she held on and she said, you give an old woman a little moment of joy. Then she entered the hospice, the doors closed behind her and he sat there. He didn't pick up another passenger, he couldn't. He kept thinking the same thing. What if she'd gotten a driver in a hurry? What if he honked and left? Kent said he doesn't think he's ever done anything in his life more important than those two hours in the dark with a dying stranger. Just two hours of being kind. And he's onto something the science backs up. Often, we are told a wrong story about kindness. That is, if you give something up, the other person gains, and you're down by whatever it costs you. It could be time, money, or effort. So you might do a nice thing, but at a cost. But the data say the story is completely backward. Researchers in Australia ran a two-week experiment with more than 600 people. Everyone got a different assignment for living well. One group was told to be kinder to themselves, another to be more social, another to spend time on things like art and music, and one group was told to simply help other people. Then, every day, they reported back on how it felt. When it came to that deep sense that your life means something, the Greeks had a word for it, eudaimonia, so-called flourishing, nothing beat helping others. Self-care felt good, socializing also felt good, art and music felt good as well, but none of them touched that quiet afterglow of having done something for someone else. So when you reach out to help, the obvious winner is the person you helped. But there's a second winner, and it's you. And it goes further than good mood, because being kind doesn't stop at how you feel, it fundamentally changes your body. Can being good to other people change you at the level of your DNA? A team of researchers decided to actually test it. They took a group of adults and split them up. For four weeks, one group did kind things for specific people in their lives, another group did kind things for the world in general, another did nice things for themselves, and the control group just tracked their daily activities. Everyone gave blood at the start and at the end of the experiment. The researchers weren't really looking at the genes you inherit, those don't really change, they were looking at gene expression, which genes are switched on and by how much. Specifically, they were looking at a cluster tied to inflammation and stress. When that cluster is activated over the years, it's linked to higher risk for things like heart disease. Now what's so interesting is that only one group's blood changed. The people who did kind things for specific people, their inflammation-related genes got suppressed. Not the self-kindness group, not even the be-kind-to-the-world-in-general group, it had to be real, particular, person-to-person. Now one study is just one study, and I want to be honest with you about that, but a different team ran the same experiment again a few years later with a fresh group of people, and the same pattern showed up. Kind acts aimed at real individuals lower expression of stress and inflammation genes. I'll add another note because the pathway from kindness to gene expression is still tenuous, so I don't want to oversell it, but I'll say this, the early evidence points in a remarkable direction that small specific acts of kindness, just helping the actual person in front of you, may be doing something beneath the skin that we're only beginning to uncover. And what's strange and fascinating is how little it took. It wasn't an expensive program, there was no instructor, it was just people being kind to other people. So kindness changes a giver inside and out. But there's a bigger claim I want to make, that is that kindness is incredibly contagious. One single act of kindness can travel far, like really far. How far? Let's see. There's an old parable. A storm hits and it strands thousands of starfish on a beach. A crowd gathers, watches, and does nothing. Then a child starts picking them up one at a time and throwing them back into the sea. A man tells a child, it's pointless, there are miles of beach, thousands of starfish, you can't make a difference, he says. The child picks up another starfish, looks at the man, throws it in the water and says, made a difference to that one. The man goes quiet, then he takes off his shoes and joins in. Then a couple more people join, then the whole beach. Now that's a cute story, but the contagion it describes is real, and it's actually been measured. Researchers followed thousands of people over decades and tracked how emotions and behaviors moved through social networks. What they found is that happiness spreads. When one person becomes happier, he lifts their friends, and their friends' friends, and even the friends of those friends, three layers out, to people the original person has never met. So you can picture a chain. A woman, Eleni, does something generous. The person who benefits, Lukas, turns around and is more generous to the next person he meets, Erika. Then Erika carries it to Jay. Jay carries it out to Brecken. So Eleni never met Brecken. She has no idea he exists. But her one act reached him anyway, three people down the line. Now this is from a study where researchers tracked exactly this kind of chain and measured how far the ripple held. So generous behavior kept influencing the next person and the next, out to three degrees of separation, before it faded. And when they added everything up, the effect roughly tripled. So every bit of generosity and kindness you put in gets multiplied as it moves through the people around you. Here's the thing though, as the authors of the same study noted, quote, the reverse is also true. And each reduction in one's contribution in the first period can generate a cascade of uncooperative behavior through parts of the network subsequently. That is, if Eleni had been stingy instead of generous, that would cascade too. Lucas a little colder to Erika, Erika colder to Jay, and down the line. This is to say that your worst moment travels the same road as your best one, which is either terrifying or motivating, depending on how you want to take it. To be fair, this particular chain was traced in a controlled setting. And whether kindness ripples out this way across the messy real world remains partly an open question. But I think the direction is pretty clear. And we already saw an example of this in the real world. Remember the Starbucks chain? 378 strangers buying each other coffee? Well, here's how it ended. Car number 379 pulled up. She was told that her coffee was already paid for. And when asked if she would like to keep it going, she said no. She just paid her own drink and then drove off. So one person, one choice, and the whole thing stopped. That's how fragile it is. It takes one person to start a chain like that and exactly one to end it. And here's why this all matters more than you think. Back in the 1960s, the psychologist Stanley Milgram ran the experiment that gave us the phrase six degrees of separation. He basically found that people could reach a total stranger through a chain of about five or six people. But things have changed. We are now far more connected than we feel because when researchers re-ran the math on a planet full of social media, that number dropped to around three and a half degrees of separation. So three and a half people. That's the average distance between you and almost anyone else alive. And if you remember from the previous experiment, if kindness reliably travels three degrees before it fades, it has nearly enough reach to cross that gap. And I don't want to exaggerate, but your one good or bad act might just make it to the other side of the world. Just for example, Kent's cab story is still moving even decades later. He still gets emails from complete strangers, especially young people, who read the story and decide to be a little kinder. You might just be the next person in that chain right now. In a small but notable study, researchers took people with no meditation experience and split them into two groups. One group did eight weeks of mindfulness training. The other group was a controlled activity. Then they set up a test the participants didn't know was a test. At the end of the eight weeks, participants were scheduled to go to the lab under the guise of completing a cognitive test. There, they came into a waiting room. There were three chairs. Two of them were already taken, and the participant took the last one. After one minute of sitting, an actor came into the room on crutches. As the study's methodology notes, the sufferer who visibly winced while walking stopped just as she arrived at the chairs. She then looked at her cell phone, audibly sighing in discomfort, and leaned back against the wall. If you had to bet, who do you think got up and gave their chair? In the control group, about 16%. Okay, it's not too bad. But in the group that had been meditating, 50%, over three times as many. Here's what makes the number way more interesting than it looks. The room was rigged against kindness. The chairs were filled with actors, and every one of them sat there and did nothing. They saw the woman in pain, and they watched her lean against the wall, and they did nothing. The setup has a name. It's called the bystander effect, and it is one of the most reliable findings in all of social psychology. The more people who are present and unmoved, the less likely any single person is to step in. We take our cues from the crowd, and when the crowd does nothing, doing nothing starts to feel like the correct thing to do. It's not cruelty per se. It's a powerful social gravity that keeps us frozen even when bad things are happening right in front of us. So the meditators weren't just choosing to be kinder, they were actually overriding a powerful unspoken norm that everyone else in the room was obeying. So something in those eight weeks had made them, well, more compassionate. And the researchers didn't bury the finding in cautious language. They literally titled the paper, Meditation Increases Compassionate Responses to Suffering, and you don't need eight weeks. Follow-up work found that just a few weeks of practice can make a significant difference. Now here's another way to become kinder, and it's more simple. Ah, in one study, scientists had people stand and look up at towering eucalyptus trees for one minute. A comparison group looked at a tall building instead. The people who'd been gazing up at the trees were measurably more likely to help someone afterward, and they rated themselves as less self-important. So feeling small in the face of something vast seems to make room for other people. And then there's another tool you can start practicing today. Abigail Marsh, a neuroscientist and empathy researcher, explained to me this simple formula. When X happens, then I will do Y. So you decide the trigger in advance. For example, when I walk through a door, I check if someone's behind me and I hold it. When I notice someone wearing something I like, I say so out loud. When I pass by a stranger, I make eye contact and smile. It might take effort at first, and then it becomes a habit, which is a whole game. You don't wait to feel kind and then act. You act regardless. And with time, you become kind. I asked Kent, the former cab driver, about how he decides, in the moment, whether to do the kind thing. He gave me a model I want to share with you. He basically just asks himself one question. Will doing this good thing mean more to the other person than it inconveniences me? And when the answer is yes, do it. That's it. And of course, sometimes it's a risk. Sometimes people do take advantage and sometimes you get hurt. But over the course of a whole life, the balance may just tilt in your favor. Morally, I would say spiritually. And if the science is right, physically too. Because the thing about those moments is that they come to all of us every single day. But if we're not paying attention, we might just miss them. So here's the upgrade. You don't have to do something great. If you notice a small thing you can do right in front of you, just do it. Take the moment and be kind. In the long run, your life is going to be a whole lot better. And now you know it's not just a saying, it's literally in your DNA. If you enjoyed this video, let me know by leaving a like and share with me in the comments some of the kind moments in your life. And also let me know, if you were in the experiment I mentioned, would you give up your chair? And finally, subscribe so you don't miss our next episodes. Thank you so much and see you in the next episode. I went looking for answers the way I was trained to. Science first, then philosophy. Both gave me a lot, but neither gave me everything. So I wanted to make a film that doesn't choose. Final Hours is both science and philosophy. It's data and storytelling. It's contemplation and beauty. At the center of it are people who, by every definition, were dead. But then they came back. Something called a near-death experience. Something that is unexplainable, but as I found out, holds answers to our deepest questions. So I sat with them and I listened. I didn't shy away from the uncomfortable questions and they didn't shy away from the answers. And after long travels and even longer conversations, I'm honestly not the same person I was when I started filming. Why? Well, the things these people shared with me have made me think more carefully about how I spend my time and how I treat other people. The implications of what these people experienced on the other side are profound. And they're profound for all of us, including you. It doesn't matter what background you have, where you live, or what you believe. I promise you, you will find something in this film that speaks to you. And I really hope you'll watch with curiosity, holding in your mind the questions humans have been asking forever. What is this life actually for? And what waits on the other side? Don't be afraid to ask the big questions. Watch Final Hours. The full documentary is linked below. We collided at very high speeds. What happens after death? There was really no way that you could muster a dream or hallucination out of that brain. As the surgical team kind of gets ready to operate on me, that energy in the room shifted. The next thing I knew, I had left my body. I looked up behind the surgeons and there were these huge light beams. It's a place that was very kind of primitive, of course. It's like being underground in dirty jello. I cried out, God help me. In the flash of just a second. It was a world of perfection. I was shuttled into this life review. I saw this vision of what I was meant to do. It says, I know that you died full of this regret. I'm here to offer you that second chance. But if I give you this offer, you have to make sure that the next time you die, you're I heard my dad say to me, now that you know the truth, go back and live your life fearlessly.