EP 19: What If Every Time Business Was Done, Something Great Happened in the World?

Twenty years ago, a mentoring session went sideways in the best possible way. Paul Dunn was the mentor. A tiny Japanese woman named Masami Sato walked into his book-lined office, sat down, and asked if they could flip the arrangement — could she ask the questions today? Then she asked one that redirected the rest of both their lives: what if, every time business was done, something great happened in our world? She'd already named the idea. Buy One, Give One. Paul's first reaction was that it sounded like a terrible business model — buy a TV, get a second TV? She told him he'd misunderstood. When you buy that television, how would it be if someone who couldn't see got the gift of sight? Someone buys a coffee and a child gets clean water. An author writes a chapter and a tree gets planted. Paul's next question wasn't about the mechanics. It was: Masami, can I be your mentor for the rest of your life? Nearly two decades on, B1G1 has facilitated over 400 million individual acts of giving through thousands of businesses around the world — and it works from as little as one cent. This is a first for the show: two guests at once. Paul met them ten months ago in Bali, arriving late to the welcome dinner and getting seated squarely between them, interrupting their conversation. A friendship came out of it, and now the conversation the Rethink audience gets to hear. Masami explains the machinery, and it's genuinely clever. B1G1 vets charity partners against financial, integrity, and impact standards, then works with them to break large projects into micro-units. A well costs five to ten thousand dollars to build — impossible for a small business to fund alone. But run the numbers across the years it'll last, the people it serves, and the days in a year, and access to clean water for one person for one day comes down to a few cents. Suddenly a solo entrepreneur can attach real, measurable impact to a podcast episode, a website visit, a sale, a meeting. There are more than 490 projects on the platform. She talks through the ones she finds most beautiful — fruit trees that give a family income while they clean the air, rescued food that cuts landfill emissions and feeds people at the same time, ocean plastic turned into building blocks for schools in disaster-hit communities. But the back half is where this episode earns its length. Masami makes an argument about language that's worth sitting with: swap the word donating for gifting, and the whole dynamic changes. Donating carries guilt, hierarchy, haves and have-nots, givers and beneficiaries. Gifting is something humans have always loved doing — and it uplifts the person doing it as much as the person receiving. She extends it into a case about why voluntary contribution beats compulsory taxation, and why the connection between a family burning a forest to feed their kids and the climate outcomes we all live with isn't charity at all. It's self-interest with a longer time horizon. George pushes hard on the parts he's genuinely wrestled with — government corruption and the smoke-and-mirrors of "the rich paying their fair share," the honest admission that when he donated at a Tony Robbins event, part of what he wanted was to see his name on the screen, and his half-serious proposal that everyone should be handed a quarter acre and judged on how fertile they leave the soil. Masami's response — drawn from a period she spent farming in the Japanese countryside, learning from microorganisms in the soil that she could stop trying to be right and just be part of the system — is one of the more quietly powerful moments in the episode. The line that stays with you comes from Paul Dunn: the power of small becomes the power of all. If you run a business and have ever felt that giving back was something you'd get to later, once you were bigger — this conversation dismantles that gently and completely. Learn more about B1G1 and how to build giving into your business at b1g1.com Listen & subscribe: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0i1GYauyKzywre3YbAlPOT Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-rethink-podcast/id1896340851 YouTube (full video): https://www.youtube.com/@RethinkAndGrowRich Get the books on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B001K7ZD68/allbooks Download the free Rethink Habits planner: https://rethinkhabits.com