S5. E21: Jim Greenbaum: Giving it All Away
“I sat down, did some number questing and said, okay, 85% is going to be given away during my lifetime and the rest of thereafter. I sleep much better at night. I do live comfortably, but there's a limit. I'd rather that money go to save lives.”
- Jim Greenbaum
Jim Greenbaum is the Founder and Managing Director of The Greenbaum Foundation.
After college, Jim entered the workforce with one goal in mind - to make as much money as quickly as possible in order to use those funds to help make the world a better place.
In 1985, Jim founded and became CEO of Access Long Distance. Less than a decade later he made the decision that he would leave the corporate world at the age of 40. Keeping true to the plan, he sold the company in 1999.
Jim has committed to contributing in excess of 85% of his assets to charitable projects ending human and non-human suffering during his lifetime, and the remainder of his estate soon thereafter. The foundation’s assets will also be spent down during his lifetime.
The Greenbaum Foundation focuses funding on effective and efficient projects working to bring about the end of human and non-human suffering in areas of the highest need and where they have the most impact.
"Being a bystander to suffering is not an option." – Jim Greenbaum
During the early years the foundation focused solely on human rights, but have since shifted their efforts toward non-humans, and toward moving the world to whole foods plant-based diets and ending factory farming. Their portfolio also includes projects aimed at increasing the awareness, protection and improvement of the lives of all animals.
Jim is also an Executive Producer of several documentaries, including “The Game Changers,” “What The Health,” "Cowspiracy," and "Not My Life."
Learn More About The Greenbaum Foundation
Transcript:
Jim: [00:00:00] I sat down, did some number crunching and said, OK, 85 percent is going to be given away during my lifetime, and the rest thereafter. I sleep much better at night. I do live comfortably, but there's a limit. I'd rather that money go to save lives.
Elizabeth: [00:00:21] Hi, I'm Elizabeth Novogratz, this is Species Unite. We have a favor to ask if you like today's episode and you have a spare minute, could you please rate and review Species Unite on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts? It really helps people to find the show. This conversation is with Jim Greenbaum. Jim has publicly committed to give at least eighty five percent of his assets away during his lifetime, to organizations that bring the end of suffering for humans and non-humans. Jim, thank you so much for being here today.
Jim: [00:01:17] Beth, it's my pleasure to join you.
Elizabeth: [00:01:18] There's a lot of things I want to cover, but I want to go back. I keep hearing how these seeds to really end suffering and fight injustice were planted when you were a little kid. So, can you talk about that?
Jim: [00:01:31] Essentially, I was born this way. I mean, from the youngest age that I can remember, I was always driven to fight injustice and suffering, it just came out that way. For a great part of my life I've always tried to look at my life, see what’s happened and see if there something that happened that could have led me on this journey and I had various theories at different times that might fit that. But in the end, somehow, I was just born this way.
Elizabeth: [00:01:56] Did you know when you were like a kid that you'd somehow do something in this realm?
Jim: [00:02:01] I was thinking I would go maybe into politics or go the legal route. It was only after applying to all of the top tier law schools and getting turned down by them and the second tier of schools saying yes. At the last minute, I said, to hell with this, you need a lawyer, hire a lawyer. Let me go into business instead, make money. Then I'll use that money to change the world.
Elizabeth: [00:02:20] You had this plan the whole time.
Jim: [00:02:22] My entire life I kept telling people, I'm going to make a difference and that I want to help on a global scale. It was in my early 30s, when the business was actually doing really well, I was probably 32, 33 years of age. I saw a story on the news one night, I think it may have been a new story from Nightline, about this guy from Ohio that had gone to Romania and was getting kids out of these horrible orphanage conditions. It just hit me, I said, when am I going to quit talking about it and telling people I'm going to do something, versus actually doing it? Am I nothing but talk? So right then and there, I set a timetable. I said, okay, I’ll have another six or seven years in business until I am age 40, then I'm out of here and I will go full time to the philanthropic world and make the difference then.
Elizabeth: [00:03:05] Is that what happened?
Jim: [00:03:06] Almost to a T. I mean, at age 40, I started phasing out of my business. We put it up for sale and we were looking at either option. Even if we didn't sell it, I'd already told my partners that I was going to be stepping back so I could go full time into philanthropy. The deal closed a couple of weeks after my 41st birthday and I was out of there.
Elizabeth: [00:03:24] For the first 10 or plus years since you've been doing this, you focused strictly on human suffering. Is that correct?
Jim: [00:03:30] Yeah, it was human related issues.
Elizabeth: [00:03:32] Then later came the animals.
Jim: [00:03:34] Exactly, about 11 or so years ago, I was at the gym working out and a friend of mine was talking to me asking, what kind of diet do you have? I told her and she said, well, do you have any family history of any heart disease or other medical conditions? I started telling her, yeah I have a family history of heart disease, I've had high triglycerides, high cholesterol, and been seeing a top cardiologist for about 12 years taking medications. She kept saying, you don't need those meds, they're not good for you, they cause all these other problems. Just change your diet, go vegan. I said, are you kidding me? That's a hippy diet. There's no way, you know, there’s no science behind that. She kept nagging and said, there's a book out there you've got to read, it’s called the China study, her name is Deanna Bramble. I said, fine let me look at this book. I went and got it, started reading it, and wow, it seemed to make a lot of sense. So I said, let me try this out. I went and checked my blood, where the numbers were and I said, okay, let me change the diet, stop the pills. Went and checked my blood again after a few more months. Everything went into perfect alignment for the first time in my life.
Jim: [00:04:41] I was pissed. I mean, 12 years of all these top doctors who kept saying, cut back on this and get your exercise and take these pills for the rest of your life. It's not one of them ever said there's another alternative. So I immediately said, okay, I got to take some of these foundation resources and try to start educating people about the health benefits of plant based diets. In fact, going back in my life, prior to my early 20s, I've got an old English sheepdog. He's a big old guy, not the brightest sheep dog in the world. I said, finally, what’s the difference between him and a cow? They're both, not the brightest, but very loving and I said I'm not going to eat my dog so I shouldn't be eating a cow. I gave up red meat for about a year. I came home from work one day, and my dog is eating a mouse. Maybe chewing it or something, I don't really want to go there. I said, son of a gun, here I'm doing it for him even though he's not that way. So, I immediately acted like an idiot, changing my diet back in with a standard American diet, it was horrible.
Elizabeth: [00:05:50] But I think that it's an important point, especially when people first quit eating meat or go vegan. Something that simple can really just throw them back, but that doesn't mean you're thrown back forever. I do think a lot of people think it means, oh well that wasn't for me.
Jim: [00:06:06] Then jump ahead, another 20 years or so, and I decided at one point I wanted to lose a couple of pounds really quick. So I said, let me try this Atkins diet thing. I did it for about just about a month and my cholesterol went down. I'm thinking, wow, it must be necessary to eat meat because my cholesterol went down. Since then, I found out that when you're losing weight right away, there'll be an immediate reduction in cholesterol from the weight loss, but the diet itself over the long run will skyrocket your cholesterol.
Elizabeth: [00:06:39] And it would kill you.
Jim: [00:06:40] So I only did it for a short period of time, I was back to eating my meat still. Buying into the storyline out there that Melanie Joy calls normal, natural and necessary the lies that were taught. It wasn't until my friend got me to read the China study that it all finally clicked together. Then it was like, thank goodness that in my gut I've known this my entire life. But finally, there's a science behind it and it's been explained to me, I was then delighted to change my diet.
Elizabeth: [00:07:08] Did you read the book and then go vegan immediately? What happened?
Jim: [00:06:40] Yes, right away.
Elizabeth: [00:07:16] What changed for you once you actually went full vegan?
Jim: [00:07:18] Well, since I went plant based, I wasn't taking the pills anymore. My workout routines at the gym, which I've been doing for years, literally within a day it was like I had a 30 percent increase in my energy and the endurance for things that I was doing in the gym. The energy was there.
Elizabeth: [00:07:38] I have that too.
Jim: [00:07:39] You know, better health all around. So, I've been delighted. I used to spend my life thinking, I've got a family history of heart disease, my father had a heart attack at age 50, my uncle did and his grandparents. Many of them died from heart disease. I said, okay, that's my fate and at some point in my life, I'm going to die from heart disease. I don't think about that anymore, I don't worry about that anymore. I'm going full steam ahead and delighted to have great health.
Elizabeth: [00:08:03] I love it. How did it go from being for health, to the actual ethical side of it coming into play?
Jim: [00:08:10] The ethics had always bothered me my entire life. That's why I would always lean towards being plant based. It was the health side that when I finally understood we didn't need to eat meat to be healthy, that led me to doing it right away. So the morality of it had always bothered me, now I had science behind me as well.
Elizabeth: [00:08:29] Right.
Jim: [00:08:30] And very soon I started on the foundation side. Focusing on the suffering side as well, the health side, trying to educate physicians and other people in the healthcare industry about the benefits of plant based diets. As you well know, the average physician in the U.S. gets virtually no training on nutrition and medical school.
Elizabeth: [00:08:47] It's like four hours, right?
Jim: [00:08:49] Something like that. A little bit they get after that is generally from trade journals and such that are put out by the pharmaceutical industries and often paid for by the meat and dairy council, it appears. So educating these people, that's been a big part of our philanthropy in the last couple of years as well.
Elizabeth: [00:09:06] Talk about that. How do you do it?
Jim: [00:09:08] We've funded different groups like the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, we've been working with them. We have been funding their outreach throughout China, where they've got a doctor that's been traveling around educating physicians and laypeople about the benefits of plant based diets. We work with the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, we funded their outreach to go at grand rounds with speakers and tours to educate people that way. Then a couple of years ago, I was at a CRM event and there was a lady sitting next to me who I started chatting with. She was a second year medical student at one of the colleges here in Southern California, and she'd been plant based for several years. So, I asked her, are there many other people at medical school that are plant based? She said, no, there's maybe two of us that were in the starting class. So I said, do you do outreach to other medical students to try to educate them? Oh, all the time, she said. I'll show movies at my apartment and have dinners and invite people over and we'll discuss things, she said. Then I said, well, medical centers are so busy, how do you get them to show up? She says, because of the free food! Then it hit me, low hanging fruit. So I reached out to the American College of Lifestyle Medicine and said, I'd like to do a program of micro grants to any medical student that's already plant based and who wants to do education to other medical students. This would be for what they're showing, movies or whatever. We would pay for their food and the drinks and stuff for the event, you know, $50 to two hundred and fifty dollars per event, to any of them to do the outreach. They wouldn’t be bringing in outside speakers, it's just a medical student talking to another medical student to educate them. That has since expanded, where we've had some professors at these medical schools saying, I'm already plant based as well, can we participate? So we then let them host events as well, if the low hanging fruit.
Elizabeth: [00:10:59] It's amazing to me that people still go to the doctors with diabetes or they go in with heart problems and it is so almost a miracle, if it ever happens, that doctors talk about diet in the sense of plant based.
Jim: [00:11:14] There's so many studies out now showing the benefits of plant based diets, whether it's on heart disease, type two diabetes, many different cancers, autoimmune diseases, erectile dysfunction. In fact, soon after I went plant based, I was going to the Clinton Foundation, just the retreat, being aware of how frequently Bill Clinton had been in the hospital for his heart disease. I said, okay, I need to convince him to go plant based as well, it's doing great for me, I have got to convince him. I called up some of his staff and I said, I'd like to bring some books with me and try to convince him about this, what do you think? They said, no way, he's never going to change, don't even waste your time. I showed up at the retreat and on the first night there, I'm looking around at the food at the cocktail party and there's virtually nothing for vegans to eat at all. There was a little bit of one salad but it wasn't a very good salad, that was it. So the next morning I went up to President Clinton and I had several of the books in hand. He looked down and he said, Jim, I just read that same book. You know, 87 percent of people with coronary artery disease can reverse their heart disease. I'm going to be one of them and I'm so excited about this. I'm going plant based and I've never felt better. So then I went and talked to the staff and said, What are you guys doing? He's already changed his diet. He's trying to live longer and be healthy, you've got to support him on this. There were no vegan choices for the food last night. You want to have job security, then you need him to be healthy. The next night we were at a five star restaurant having a meal. There were about four or five of us that were either vegan or vegetarian. It was like a seven or eight course meal and the staff really took note and said, OK, we got to do this.
Elizabeth: [00:12:58] That's awesome.
Jim: [00:12:59] I ate more food that night than I've ever eaten. There were huge portions and I didn't want to disappoint. To this day, we haven't seen Bill Clinton back in the hospital in the last 10 years.
Elizabeth: [00:13:07] Don’t you also work with organizations who are actively fighting to end suffering?
Jim: [00:13:12] That's correct, we work with about 60 or 70 different organizations at any point in time each year. Some of them being, Mercy for Animals, The Humane League, Balanced Compassion, World Farming, Ethical Choices, Factory Farming Awareness Coalition. We work many of them trying to reduce the suffering and the amount of animals that are going to be killed. As well as outreach to educate people to go plant based completely, educating the physician and educating people about the environmental aspects. We are literally trying to hit it from every angle we can, to make the difference
Elizabeth: [00:13:47] With all the different groups you work with and organizations you work with, what kind of work do you see having the most impact?
Jim: [00:13:54] Dollar for dollar films seem to have the most impact. However, it's got to be the right film, most films don't have much impact. Fortunately, the ones I picked with and worked with, almost all of them have gone viral globally, so films, number one. Secondly, is educating the medical community. We have to educate the doctors, so the doctors start changing the stories to get people and then we're not going to see the recidivism that we see among people that go plant based.
Elizabeth: [00:14:21] Right. What about your documentaries, can we talk about that a little bit?
Jim: [00:14:25] So several years ago, I came across an early cut of the movie Cowspiracy. It was referred to me by someone and I started watching five or 10 minutes and said, Wow, this is amazing. I was so blown away. By the end of it, I reached out to the filmmakers and I said, How can I help? I got on board giving them funding with the project and became an executive director with them. Then they were starting their next film, called What the Hell. I became an executive producer with them on that film as well. It was Kip Andersen and Keegan Coon, brilliant filmmakers, both of them. I've since worked with each of them on some additional films as well, some of them in the works. Eventually, I came across The Game Changers and I've been a big supporter of them and executive producer with them. The one thing you'll notice is that, almost all the films that I've been involved in funding they reach a mass audience. They weren't made for the vegan audience, they're made for the masses that aren't plant based. We show minimal, if any, suffering of animals. Showing suffering of animals, at this point, will usually only move someone to being plant based if they’re almost at the edge of going plant based because of the animal suffering. However, the masses, they turned a blind eye to it, and don't want to talk about it or see it. People want to experience happy, fun movies so that they say, wow, that was actually fun. If you see a bunch of animals suffering and dying. They would never say, hey, you've got to watch this movie, it's amazing. That doesn't happen.
Elizabeth: [00:15:56] How many people can you actually get to watch Earthlings, unless they're already borderline vegan or vegan?
Jim: [00:16:05] Well, Sean Monson, who did Earthlings, is a very close friend of mine. A couple of years ago, I said to Sean, nobody's going to watch it, it just makes them suffer too much and they won’t do it. However, the number of people I come across occasionally who say, I saw Earthlings and it changed my life. Every time I find one of those people, I send it to Sean and say, OK, you're right on this one, right on that one. So, there is a segment of the population that it does move. When it first came out, there weren't films like that out there. So, many people that are leaders in the vegan movement today, got there from seeing Earthlings.
Elizabeth: [00:16:40] I fully agree. I would say at least a third of the people I've had on this show went vegan because of Earthlings. But those are people that probably would have gone vegan at some point in their life, like that was their right and their push. That's not the mainstream. Are you working on any films right now?
Jim: [00:16:56] There are several that are in the works right now. One of which I'm excited about, Keegan is involved with it, and has a group out of England primarily overseeing it. It's called Slay, and is about the clothing and fashion industry. It's really a high impact film, I think it's going to be a big success. My guess I would probably have another eight months, to a year before you'll see that one. There's also another one called The End of Medicine, which is the working title. We agreed to fund that and start work on that prior to the pandemic coming out. Its focus was showing about antibiotic resistance and all these other areas, now that are being affected because people are still eating animals.
Elizabeth: [00:17:43] Still the next pandemic will probably come from the fact that we eat animals.
Jim: [00:17:47] Yeah, virtually all pandemics have come about because of animal agriculture.
Elizabeth: [00:17:54] So, your plan is you're going to give eighty five percent of your money away in your lifetime.
Jim: [00:18:00] I had originally when I set up my foundation, I figured it'd be multigenerational for my kids, grandkids, so forth going forward. As a way to give them values if I died early in my life. Over time, as I got more and more involved in philanthropy, I realized I'm really good at what I do, and the money that I saved. A life saved today is worth much more than 1.3 lives or 1.5 lives, saved seven years down the road. So I said, from a moral viewpoint, it's better to do it now. Then I came across a book that I read, it was entitled The Billionaire Who Wasn't. It's a story of Chuck Feeney, who started the duty free stores around the world. The guy at one point in time was one of the wealthiest people in the world, about eight billion in net worth. He then decided to give it all away, without anybody knowing it. He literally gave $8 billion away with hardly anybody knowing he was doing it.
Elizabeth: [00:18:59] Where was he giving?
Jim: [00:19:01] A lot of his focus was on educational systems in the U.S. and elsewhere. He would leverage his giving, to get other people to give as well. It was very creative and businesslike. So after reading his book, I sat down, did some number crunching and said, OK. Eighty five percent is going to be given away during our lifetime and the rest thereafter. So, I sleep much better at night. I do live comfortably, but there's a limit. I'm not having second homes, I'm not doing the private plane route. I'd rather have money go to save lives. That's the hard part about being a philanthropist on a daily basis. When I do trips or anything that involves spending money. I’m deciding, Is this moral? Is it OK? Finding that balance of spending and self-indulgent versus charitable and making a difference, it's a hard thing to make the decision about. Part of my other obsession is encouraging other high net worth individuals to be philanthropic as well. Throughout the world, there's probably about 250000 high net worth individuals, that's defined by one group as over $30 million in net worth. So getting those people to be more philanthropic and do it during their lifetimes. An essay that I read years ago was Andrew Carnegie's Gospel on Wealth, written somewhere in the 1890s. He talked about, with a mass of fortunes, what do you do with it? You can wait until you die and let somebody else give it away for you. You can wait till you die and leave it all to your kids and screw them up with too much money. Or, you can start giving away during your lifetime and make a difference now.
Elizabeth: [00:20:46] Yeah.
Jim: [00:20:49] I took all these lessons to heart, and that's what I've done.
Elizabeth: [00:20:48] It's awesome. Jim, thank you for this. Everything you're doing in the world is just absolutely amazing, so thank you for all of that.
Jim: [00:20:57] It’s a pleasure. Thank you so much.
Elizabeth: [00:21:08] To learn more about Jim and to learn about the Greenbaum Foundation, go to our website Species' Unite.com. We'll have links to everything. We're on Facebook and Instagram @SpeciesUnite. If you have a spare minute and could do us a favor, please rate, review and subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps people to find the show. If you would like to support the podcast, we would greatly appreciate it. We're on Patreon. It's Patreon.com/species unite. I would like to thank everyone at Species Unite, including Gary Knudsen, Natalie Martin, Caitlin Pearce, Amy Jones, Paul Haley, Santana Poky and Anna Connor, who wrote and performed today's music. Thank you for listening. Have a wonderful day!
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