Hope isn't this weak passive response. It's actually one of the most powerful responses that we can have. Wisdom is the ability to think of the whole. Wisdom is the ability to think of the long-term consequences of what we're doing. Wisdom is returning to the natural intelligence of nature. It's no mystery that humanity is currently grappling with a global pandemic, climate change that is quickly becoming more and more experiential, mass species extinction, and many other dire calamities that can make humanity feel like it has lost its moral center. Well, Jane Goodall, the famed primatologist and climate activist, has a few thoughts about all of this. Thoughts that might surprise you. Thoughts that don't revolve around what you might suspect like cynicism or anger or pessimism, but instead are all about hope. But how is it that she can maintain hope in the face of humanity's self-destructive trajectory? I mean, what does hope even mean and why is it desperately incumbent upon all of us to cultivate hope as a strategy to best evolve as humans and a global community? Well, today's guest, Douglas Abrams wanted answers to these questions. So he sought out Dame Goodall, spent countless curious hours with her, which culminated in this wonderful new book that he co-wrote with Jane called "The Book of Hope," which is this very intimate look into not only the nature of hope itself, but also into the heart and the mind of this woman, this woman who has truly revolutionized how we view the natural world. Being a former podcast guest and Stanford classmate of mine, Doug is a literary agent, he's an editor, he's a New York Times best-selling author, he's an impressive intellect, and a very charming and curious conversation partner for today's exploration into the nature of hope, into the legacy of Jane Goodall and why indeed it is incumbent upon all of us to shoulder an urgent but hopeful responsibility for the future of our planet and lead by the example set by Jane Goodall herself. So here we go. This is me and Douglas Abrams. Sweet, dude, good to see you. So great to see you. It's been a long time. I guess the last time we did this was 2017. We were just saying before the podcast it seems like yesterday, but it also feels like a complete past life. A whole 'nother world. I know, I know. Well, here we are, the world is spinning off its axis. We are seeing unprecedented levels of partisanship and a breakdown in our ability to communicate in a healthy way and we're having experiential climate change and mass species extinction and the vitriol of social media inflaming all of it, and yet today, today, Douglas Abrams, we're gonna talk about hope, we're gonna talk about empathy, we're gonna talk about patience. I mean, where to even begin to unpack this? Yeah, well, hope and despair are very close bedfellows. And I think a lot of people are feeling a lot of despair right now. Yeah.
And it's in the despair that is where we need to find the hope. That was what was so interesting. I mean, in the book, you kind of play semi-antagonist or devil's advocate to Jane's unbridled optimism and hope as a means of like getting to the truth of what hope is. And I think there's a lot of misconceptions and misunderstandings around the word hope and what it actually means, specifically through her experience, but in general, like how do you think of it then versus now, like you going into that project and what you've learned spending all that time with her about what hope truly is. Well, I think I was pretty cynical about hope when we started on the project, because I'm from New York and we don't really do hope. We do fear, we do anger, we do outrage. And I think hope can really sound like, "Well, let's hope for the best," and it can sound really passive and it can sound really Pollyanna and kind of unrealistic. And I think in going through this process with Jane and learning more about hope and also going and looking at the field of hope studies and understanding what sustains hope or what depletes hope, I think what I got clear on was that, that hope isn't this kind of weak, passive response; it's actually one of the most powerful responses that we can have. And that there are really kinda three things that we do in relationship to the future. We either fantasize like, "I'm gonna be an NBA basketball player." Mm-hmm.
Hmm-mm. You are very tall. I am tall, but no eye-hand coordination. Not happening. Or we dwell, which is what we do in New York a lot. That's kinda the national pastime of my hometown. Or we hope. And actually in hope, we are anticipating that there are gonna be obstacles and adversity along the way and we're not just kind of ignoring those. We're actually setting those goals and finding those realistic pathways to get to those goals. Yeah, there's this sense that hope is kind of a Pollyanna indulgence when in truth, it's like this active verb. And what really kind of triggered it for me and helping me understand it is the idea of defining it by its opposite. Like the opposite of hope isn't necessarily despair, because despair is sort of a subset or a component of hope depending upon how you look at it, but that the opposite is apathy, right? And if you wanna actually take action, hope is kind of a requisite towards getting off the dime to doing anything. Exactly. I mean, it's so easy to go from denial to despair really quickly, like just to go to the opposite, right? Whether it's about climate, whether it's about political polarization, whatever you're kind of not paying attention to and then to go, "Oh God, this is so awful. We're never gonna solve this," and go to despair. And I think hope, whether it's at a global level or it's in our own life, is really about staying with the reality that life is filled with adversity and suffering and challenge. But that there are, I mean, it was interesting to hear from the Hope Science that there are these kinda four components of hope: one being realistic goals, another being realistic pathways, another being a sense of agency or the ability to, and confidence to make things happen, and the last is social support. And those four things are really fundamental to any kind of enduring hope, and that hope has that necessity of action in it. Yeah. Am I the only one who thinks it's a little bit strange that there's something called hope studies? Like that's just bizarre, right? I know, it's amazing. It was wild.
What is that about? So, I mean, I think, it was really interesting because to go to the science and find that there's actually researchers who study what increases hope or decreases hope and what is the, like, what are the outcomes of those people who have more or less hope and one of the things that was fascinating with people with less hope were twice as likely to die in the next three years than people with more hope. Or in terms of the academic research, that hope was more important to academic success than your IQ, than your grades, than your prior success. I mean, it's almost this little kind of fundamental secret of the human mind. And that was really interesting to hear. Jane call it this survival trait. That is what allows us to often make the difference between success and failure, life and death, and even potentially survival and extinction. Does the science shed any a light on the nurture versus nature piece regarding hope? Like are people, you look at Jane and clearly she's born with a certain disposition towards hope and just this built-in level of resilience and almost obstinance that she's carried without her through her whole life. But I have to believe that, much like resilience, this is something that can be cultivated with intentional practice. Well, actually I was really delighted, if that's the right word, to hear that Jane was kind of a weak and sickly child and didn't have that kind of buoyant, powerful optimism and ability to kinda conquer the world, because I was kind of a weakened sickly child too. And I think she's a really amazing example of someone who, and also when you talk about nurture, like who had issue, who was actually challenged. Like she overheard her uncle who was a doctor say, "Oh, Jane wants to go work with wild animals in Africa. She'll never be able to do it, because she doesn't have the right constitution for it." And Jane was like, "Damn that," like, "I'm gonna"-- Right. Right, but that's the piece, right? Like where does that come from? Does she come out of the womb with that or is that a product of her upbringing? Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things we've talked about in the, so Jane has these four reasons for hope that we can talk about, and one of 'em is the power of young people, and we talked about how do you nurture hope in young people, and I think, kind of what is that nurturing of resilience that you're talking about? And I do think it's, a lot of it is about encouraging kids to be able to struggle and learn from those struggles, allowing kids to struggle as well as being able to help them see that struggling is purposeful on the way to their goals. And so I think that it's having that those, having goals, I mean, part of the challenge is a lot of people don't have goals or they don't have, obviously the world is not equivalently fair and a lot of people don't have the same level of pathways to realize those goals, but I think that we can encourage hope in young people by helping them to identify those goals that drive them forward. She read "Tarzan" and she read, and she read "Dr. Doolittle," and she was like, "I wanna do that." That it was kinda really the spark of the imagination. Yeah, well, setting goals is important, but setting, like you said earlier, somewhat reasonable goals, right? So if you have a young person and you set them on a path towards working to something that's doable but is gonna require some rigor and discipline and whatnot and then they achieve that, that engenders a little self-esteem, it also creates that sense of agency. So all of those play into like the burgeoning sense of hope, right? So hope almost works like this umbrella for these other personality assets that help drive you forward and shape like a worldview. Exactly. I think that it was so powerful to see that hope is, so one of the things that kinda blew my mind was finding out from a neuroscientist that hope originates in the frontal, in the prefrontal cortex, which is the kind of front of, between our eyes, where we have, where we also have language, where we have time travel or the ability to imagine the future and where we have problem solving. Hope seems to be like this kind of component of the human imagination to envision something better than what is now. And as one of the researchers said, "We are hope/fear creatures." So we are either operating out of that part of our brain which can hope and imagine the future and work toward those goals and find those pathways, or we're in kinda the more ancient parts of our brain where we're in fear or kind of frozen with a sense that there is no hope. Yeah, well, the tectonic plates of culture right now are working over time to push us towards the fear side-- Absolutely.
That balance. And that's enough to feel despair. But perhaps within that despair, we can see the seedlings of hope, I don't know. It's hard. It is hard. I mean, and obviously there are a lot of things to feel despairing about. But as Jane said, "Without hope, there really is no hope." It becomes this self-fulfilling prophecy, right? And I would say, the merchants of cynicism and doom would love us to just kind of say, "Well, forget it. We're not gonna be able to solve our climate crisis," or, "Our country is kind of inevitably going to be divided in the way it is." And I think that there's kind of vested interests in those positions actually. And I think that hoping for something else and actively moving forward, and I think that's the decisive piece, which is that real hope, as I learned from Jane, is really taking action. It's not a passive response. And if you're doing that, then you're fundamentally challenging the status quo in some way that can be threatening to vested interest. Right. And those vested interests are also kind of harboring a perverted notion of hope. Like they know fear travels quickly, fear is profitable so they're hopeful about their balance sheets. You know what I mean? Like their hope is just directed in the wrong way. So you can be publicly despairing because you're building some kind of platform premised upon that that will enrich you in a certain way, in a self-serving way, right? So how do you redirect that hope? I mean, there's a misalignment of social incentives to direct hope into healthier, into healthier trajectories for, that are more communally oriented. Absolutely. And there's this wonderful saying that every cynic is like a frustrated optimist. It's very easy to get pushed into that response of like, "It's safer to be a cynic. It's safer to be kind of," I mean, hoping is vulnerable. Yeah, and it's sort of considered more intellectual to be cynical, right? And true cynicism is lazy. And it is less safe to be vulnerable in that way. Exactly. I mean, to want something to, whether it's for your own life or for the world, is a vulnerable place 'cause you might not get it. But honestly, the alternative, which is kind of like despaired, cynical kind of satisfaction, you're a lot in life. In some ways it's like, "Wow, okay. Maybe it feels more comfortable in some ways or more self-protective." But ultimately, the whole, I mean, this was really fascinating, working with Jane, right, because here's somebody who's studied human origins and animal nature and like we, hope was part of what allowed humans to evolve and to become what we are today, to become, create this global civilization. If we hadn't been, had that capacity to hope for something different or something better, it never would've happened. Right, right. So you begin the process of writing this book, from what I can understand in the book, which is wonderful by the way, I loved it. Thank you. While you were putting together "The Book of Joy," right, because you were kind of visiting with those fellows and then catching Jane on the way, like these were sort of happening somewhat, like you were beginning the conversations with Jane while you were also writing "The Book of Joy," is that kind of how the timeline played out? So actually I had finished writing "The Book of Joy." We were working on the "Mission: Joy" movie based on "The Book of Joy" with the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu, but I had approached Jane about working together and she basically gave us the green light and said, "Yes, come to Tanzania like in two weeks," and so we had to kind of scramble and develop all of the questions and the ideas for the book and to go and interview her. And then that was two years ago, in August. And then while I was in Tanzania, I got the phone call from my wife that my dad had gone into the hospital and that it looked really serious. So I had to actually leave and come back and be with him for two months while he was actually dealing with T-cell lymphoma and dying. And then we, so through the grieving process of watching him die and what he called companioning him on his mighty journey to death and then being, and I was flying back and forth between New York where he was dying and California where my son had a traumatic brain injury and kind of, as you know, going back and forth between those two routes, and working on the book, and talking to Jane in the midst of that, so it really was, at first it was kind of theoretical and it was like hope and, as a concept, and then I think when you have your own challenges that you face, like the illness of a loved one or grief and loss of a loved one, it becomes much more personal. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the juxtaposition of those heavy things with this subject matter, I think it gets illustrated in the richness in which you deal with these themes because they're so challenging. And they become complex because of our own life experiences with our loved ones and with ourselves. But I think what's interesting here, was it hope that drew you to Jane or was it trying to figure out how to do a book with Jane? Because you have "The Book of Joy," now we have "The Book of Hope" and this is gonna be this ongoing Global Icons Series, which is really cool, but on some level they're sort of subject matter vehicles to reimagine what a memoir could be. Because you're telling Jane's story, but you're doing it through the lens of this specific idea as opposed to calling the book the life story of Jane Goodall or whatever and just doing a linear treatment of this remarkable life. Yeah, and the idea is, for the Global Icons, as said there, these kind of travel log dialogues, so it's like the reader gets to come along and either, with "The Book of Joy," have this kinda encounter with the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu-- Very long series of long-winded conversations. (Doug laughs) With which, in Jane's case, involves building fires and going on long walks and drinking whiskey. You're right, exactly. Hopefully not too long-winded. But you definitely, to get to go and kinda have the experience and get to sip the whiskey, which I actually had to train for, because I had heard that she was a serious whiskey drinker. And I had to practice a little. Get my Johnny Walker handled. But so the idea of the series is, yeah, that there are these kind of really amazing icons and what, but to reveal their humanity, right? So not just kind of them as some kind of vaunted, laudatory figure gonna, on the global stage that we all say, "Wow, isn't that incredible," but to really get inside their own heart and mind and their own experiences. And that's been the most rewarding part, I think, of both "The Book of Joy" and "The Book of Hope" is people say that it gives them, they see these people in their experience, they relate to them in a whole different way because they're relating to their humanity. And I think that, in this case, so we went to, we knew we wanted to work with Jane, and as somebody who has like incredible insight into human nature and into, has spent her life studying nature, and as clear, she's been this global messenger of hope and traveled the world, like prior to the pandemic, 300 days a year trying to spread hope and understand hope. So it became really clear that that was like, "Who's the best person in the world," like if you're gonna understand joy, you're gonna go to the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu to understand it. If you're gonna understand hope, Jane was clearly the person we needed to talk to. Right. This is something that she's talked about all the time. And it's been fascinating, in the wake of the book coming out and her kind of embracing the press aspect of pushing it out into the world, to like see her all, like she's relentless and she's 87 now, like 80-- 87, amazing, yeah. It's like just appearing everywhere and just totally on point, like doesn't miss a beat, so vital, like so present, so passionate. This is somebody who's been doing this their whole life and started talking about these issues back in the '80s when nobody wanted to hear about it and has been banging the drum ever since. As you said, like 300 cities a year until COVID, and then it just becomes a Zoom bonanza for her. You would think that she would fatigue over this or that she would get frustrated, and that's a Testament to this level of hope that despite her continually putting out this message thousands of times that she still has to do it and that she's gonna work until she dies. And she remains just as enthusiastic about her advocacy as she ever was. It's so cool and inspiring, honestly, to see these people in their 80s and even 90s now or just turned 90, we're actually working with 101-year-old woman who founded the field of holistic medicine and integrative health, it's like, who has a 10-year plan by the way-- What's her name?
Her name is Gladys McGarry. Wow. Yeah, it's amazing. And it's just like these, the people that you find who are most vital at that stage of life are these people who are really living for something more than their own aches and pains. They've got something that they're super passionate about. They feel that they can contribute and give. And Jane has blown me away with her incredible dedication and her passion and her energy and her ability to, she says she's more in busier now in the pandemic than ever before.
Right, I know. And like she's just doing, and it was amazing. And I think the world, it's like the world has kinda caught up with Jane. As you said, she was in the '80s and she had beating the drum when nobody was really listening, and I think as, sadly, we're becoming, gratefully, but sadly the realities of climate and the natural disaster that we've been creating on our earth is so much more clear to people. And so I think people have caught up, So there's a reason that Jane is now on the cover of Time Magazine. It's like we need her. It's like the Jane moment. We need her. We need both the sounding of the alarm, but we also need the steady hand of the recognition. And I think what was powerful to hear in the book, in writing the book with her was this sense of, this kinda grounded sense of our ability to handle great challenges like in World War II, for example. And that we kind of lulled ourselves into this complacency that like life should just be easy. And like if life is hard or there are challenges or the world is faced with crisis, that there's something wrong as opposed to like, "That's how human life is." This is the way that it is.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, there's that story of her coming up against some fatigue with the relentlessness of the interviews and the speaking and there's that matchbook box thing that she created when she was a little girl around confirmation. And then in each little drawer, there's a tiny little scroll where she had inscribed something from the Bible or something like that. She pulls it out and it was some passage about like, "You cannot, you have to continue to sow the field," or whatever and just okay, off you go. Yeah, I mean, I think that sense of like, her favorite quote is actually one, from the Bible, which is like, "As your days, so shall your strength be," or something like that, which is just like you're given just enough to sustain you through the challenges that you face. Yeah, and there's so much to be gleaned from understanding that her ability to show up and be that vital is so rooted to her passion and her deep sense of purpose, right? Like if you can anchor yourself in something that you care about deeply and channel it in a way that is in service to others, like it gets her up out of bed every morning, it keeps her invigorated about life and cognitively, if nothing else, like it's just remarkable. Right. So I think that that sense of purpose is huge. I was also thinking about how, to come back to the conversation about nurturing, like it's amazing, like it was kind of mind-blowing that her mother picked up and went with her into the African forest, into Gombe to do the research because they wouldn't let a white woman-- Right, she needed a chaperone She needed a chaperone. They wouldn't let a white woman kinda go into the forest back then. And like that's kind of incredible. And I think one of the things that, that sense of, one of the things that, most interesting things I learned about hope is that, as one researcher described it, it's a social gift. It's something we give to each other. We encourage and support each other's sense of hope. And obviously our parents do that immensely for us as children, but we do that for one another when we're facing those obstacles, that social support and that sense of hope. And that was also really interesting, that hope and hopelessness are contagious. That this sense of like we think we're all these separate kind of minds and separate people, but then our sense of hopefulness or despair about the future deeply impacts everybody else's. Right, right, right, yeah. That's a really powerful idea. I can't help but think that, you get into this section later in the book about spirituality and faith, and I'm interested in how faith differs from hope technically, but there's this sense that I can't escape of like predestination with her. I mean, that tracks all the way back to the beech tree and her climbing the tree and just this deep-rooted connection to the natural world that's almost preternatural for a young person to have, that she remains true to her entire life, like her interest never wavered. And on some level, like obviously when you look in the rear view mirror, it's 2020, but it all adds up perfectly. It's like, "Of course this is the life that this person lived." And along the way, there were these amazing kind of synchronicities and coincidences, and the fact that she even ended up being, doing secretarial work for Leakey and like what kind of came after that, like, you couldn't script that. Like if you put that in a narrative movie, it just would be too unbelievable. Well, it's funny, like I totally get that and I think, from one vantage point, that's totally true. And from the other vantage point, it's this like, it's exactly what you said about hindsight being 2020, it's like we all live these lives and from day to day we don't understand where they're going or what the meaning of our life is. And then in retrospect, we're like, "Oh yeah, like I get it. Like that led me to this, to that." My dad had this wonderful expression when he was dying. He said, "It's all part of my curriculum." Right. It's such an amazing perspective. It's such an amazing perspective, right? Because whether you believe it's predestined or you believe in God or you don't believe in God or you believe that there's purpose in life or not, you can make it meaningful in your own life by seeing it as part of your own curriculum. And I think that Jane, Jane definitely took a lot of botany and biology kind of in her early, like if you wanna kinda say what her curriculum was, like she definitely fell in love with the natural world, but lots of people read "Tarzan," lots of people read "Dr. Doolittle," and what I think made her an amazing example of this kind of active hope is that then she said, "I'm gonna keep pushing myself closer to my goals. I'm gonna find those pathways," right? I mean, so yes, is it amazing and miraculous. And could we have scripted it in a Hollywood movie that she would go work with Louis Leakey, who would then be wanting to understand our ape-like ancestors and send her into the jungle? But she had to get her way to that secretarial training. She had to find her way to his office. She had to impress him on the digs that she, and how she dealt with the lion and the rhinoceros, like she had to convince him that she was the one for the job. Right. I think in some way we're all, in our own curriculum, trying to prove, like, to ourself, that we're up for the task. Yeah. Of course, the story of her being in Gombe and spending all the time with the chimps and it all being documented is so well-told, but I didn't know a lot of the details of her life story and I truly did not appreciate just the level of resistance that she faced and the kind of state of science at the time, this idea that perhaps we were not evolved from apes and these animals did not have an interior emotional life and there was nothing to be learned or gleaned by observing them. And her, back to that kind of obstinance or this very directed sense of purpose, to put herself in that position and then have the patience to literally be there like 10 years in order to take what she was observing and then with Leakey's help, contextualize it in a vernacular that it could be even received by the scientific community, I mean, the barriers and the obstacles and the resistance was unbelievable. Unbelievable. I mean, to remember, first of all, that she-- And being a woman on top of that. Exactly. Yeah, that she was a woman at a time when, as she says, "Men weren't even going into the forest to study animals." She didn't even have an undergraduate degree, right, and let alone a PhD, which he later got. Right. She didn't even have an undergrad degree. She literally had a secretarial training course and she's going into the jungle and having to-- With her mom, at first. With her mom as a chaperone. And God bless moms, and-- After this proper upbringing in England, where it was all about finding a rich guy to marry and debutantes and all that kinda stuff. Right, exactly. It definitely was, like it was the path less taken. But that determination that she was gonna fall, and she had these goals, she was gonna follow them, she was gonna find out pathways. I mean, the story that she tells about how the guy who drove them from Kenya to Gombe said he'd never thought he'd see them again alive. And she just really just kind of, she was very lucky obviously. There were a lot of dangers that she was facing that made her life really dramatic and more dramatic than most of ours. But to come back to the point of what you were saying about like what she did for us in terms of changing our understanding of humanity, right, there's, I mean, this whole relationship to the natural world that obviously we've lost so much of that we are animals and that we can't survive without the ecosystem and without nature and that we are nature. She was one of the first people to help bridge that gap and help us see that, yeah, animals have personalities, have emotions, that this is a continuum of intelligence. And I asked her, "Do animals have hope?" And she said, "Well if you think about it, your dog waiting at the door with his tongue hanging out kinda waiting for you to come home, that's a version of hope." What we've done with our consciousness and the evolution of our consciousness is be able to take that hope and go into the distant future and go to Mars and come, solve problems far into the distance. But it is all on a continuum. And I think that it's almost like she re-grafted us back into the natural world and helping us to understand our place. And I think one of the key things, if we're gonna solve so many of the problems that we face, but most especially our environmental crisis, is that ability to recognize our relationship with the whole and with the natural world. And that, as she says, if we keep pulling threads from the tapestry of life, it will disintegrate and we will lose what sustains us and supports us. Yeah, that's so well put, the idea that we take for granted this continuum now. She's like the missing link, like she's the piece that bridges that gap. Yeah, and she-- And without her work, how much longer would it have been before we started to piece that together for ourselves? It's incredible. It is amazing. It's totally epic. And to have a life where you do that, just pioneering scientific work and and then the changes, the zeitgeists, as Leakey said, "Now we have to," recognizing that animals use tools, which was one of her discoveries, when at the time we were called the tool-making ape that was like only humans use tools, that ability to shift how we think of ourselves. And I think what she's doing now, I mean, one of the interesting things about the way we talk about "The Book of Hope" is it's like her first book about humans. Like we've heard that chimpanzee story and her research story, but this, now it's like, "Okay, what did all that research tell us about us and about our ability to survive and thrive individually and collectively," that's what I was really intuit for and that's what I wanted to know. And I think that that ability to recognize that we are this, like her desire now to really help us at this moment of crisis, to face the despair and the challenges that we face, the mess that we've made, in my mind, is like to go from scientist to activist in that way is so inspiring. Yeah, yeah. On that interconnected, I mean, her climate activism was initially triggered when she started to see encroachments on the chimp and the ape habitats, right? So this is back in like late '70s, early '80s. And that's when she kind of shifts her focus away from being this observational scientist and being more of an activist and an advocate. But what she also realized very early that is now sort of more widely understood is that redressing these habitat issues or kind of pushing forward her climate measures or her biodiversity protectionist measures was gonna require empowering communities. Like you have to go to the people, right? Right. You have to make these people activated. And to do that, you have to sort of empower them to figure out how to make a living and be sustainable with it so that the incentives are aligned for them to be invested in it. Totally. If you make a mother choose between feeding her family and chopping down a tree or destroying the environment, the forest is gonna lose every time, right? It's only when we create pathways for people to be able to recognize that those children depend upon that thriving ecosystem and that folks who are impoverished throughout the world have another way of sustaining themselves rather than destroying the environment. Here in our part of the world, it's a very different issue, right? It's not typically about whether we can feed our kids in the same way; it's often about overconsumption and the fact that we're using too much of the world's resources.
Yeah. I mean, she was doing like microlending way back, right, before it became like a tech thing. Right, right. She understood that. Like she's so far ahead of the curve in so many ways. Do you know this, have you've heard of this guy Damien Mander? Actually no. He was a Australian special forces soldier who kind of went off the rails and reinvented himself in Africa by becoming like, being very active in the anti-poaching community. Oh cool. And he's put together this all-female-- Oh yeah, oh yes, maybe I have-- Brigade called Akashinga, where he's empowered these women in a similar way where they feel, like he realized that the women were the answer. Right. Is this in Zimbabwe or Mozambique or something? Yeah, yeah, yeah, one of those. I can't remember. He's been on the podcast before, but it's an extraordinary story. It is amazing.
But the principles, the reason I bring it up, is that the underlying principles are the same. Like empowering these women, understanding that the manner in which these women are embedded in their communities, in the way that they communicate will create the level of cooperation to combat this in a way that like a battalion of men with M16s are not gonna be capable of doing. And it's really cool. And they're having like amazing results. It's totally amazing. I wrote a novel a while back called "Eye of the Whale" and I went and worked with biologists and, marine biologists and heard from them that basically the most powerful instinct in mammals, all mammals including humans, is this maternal instinct and this parental instinct that we have. And that is ultimately what, as we're talking about it, is gonna destroy us because we're gonna think that we have to support our kids at the expense of the environment, or actually what it can do is save us because we can realize that we can do it for our children. And I do think that we humans tend to do the right thing at the last possible moment. Yeah, I know. We're at race against time here. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think, what Jane says about us kinda stealing from our children, stealing the earth from our children is so powerful. And really, like I think all of us who are parents are, who love kids, want our kids and grandkids to thrive and there's no thriving on planet earth without a thriving planet. Yeah, 100%. So in the book, there are these four kind of pillars, these four things that give us hope. We have human intellect, the resilience of nature, the power of young people, and then the indomitable human spirit, right? And this is how Jane thinks about these things. How does that measure up against like with the hope scientists are determining? Yeah, it's interesting. Well, I mean, we could take 'em one at a time. I also was thinking back to your comment about hope and faith and hope and optimism actually. I think those distinctions are really useful as well. So we can come back to those. But I think the amazing human intellect, like what Jane will make this distinction is like the intellect is that part we were talking about of our brain that allows us to do problem solving and have language and time travel and be able to imagine the future, imagination, and, but it's not necessarily the same as intelligence, right? Like if we were intelligent, we wouldn't be destroying our planet, right? That's not so smart. And so she makes this great distinction between intellect and intelligence. But that cleverness that we do have, that is what allows us to send, go to the moon and send rovers to Mars and come up with carbon sequestration, strategies for dealing with climate change and just changing our way of life in such a way that we can sustain ourselves. I mean, one of the, but I asked her, "I think you said I was kinda the devil's advocate or kind of the," a little bit of challenging her on some of her views. And one of the things I said to her was like, "Are we 41%, 51% good or 51% evil? Like how can you say the amazing human intellect is gonna, is one of your reasons for hope when it's caused such all this mess and this disaster?" And she said, well, she thinks we're actually split down the middle, 50/50, and that what determines which way we go is our environment. Which actually like, there's this kinda moment where your whole world just gets turned upside down and you see life totally differently, and that was one of those moments. Because suddenly all the things that we think of as evil like aggression or selfishness and greed, suddenly I could see that those were, as she said, things that helped us evolve, helped us survive, and they were useful, and they played their, they played, served their purpose. But now we have to create an environment and a culture, which is kind of back to what we were talking about in the beginning, the challenge that we're facing culturally that encourages those better angels of our nature to succeed and win. Because if we don't, then we go to the way of the dodo bird. Yeah. I mean, every man is right from his own perspective. And if you were to walk, not just a mile in that seemingly, quote, unquote, evil person's shoes but you followed them around from childhood, you would understand and develop empathy for why they behave the way that they do. Yeah, I was watching this amazing documentary about narcos and drug smugglers on the border and one of the guys was saying to the filmmaker, "If I could do your job, I would do your job. This is the only job I can get." So it is really a reminder. I had a writing teacher who once said, "No villain is a villain in their own mind." Sure, yeah. You can't literally hit the old lady over the head and take her purse if you don't think at that moment you're doing the right thing. And so I think what this says in terms of the amazing human intellect, as Jane said, is that we do have this incredible cleverness, but we actually have to take it and use it intelligently. We have to use it with wisdom. And one of the things she talked about is like wisdom is the ability to think of the whole. Wisdom is the ability to think of the long-term consequences of what we're doing. Wisdom is returning to the natural intelligence of nature. I mean, we were work with another amazing researcher named Suzanne Simard, who did a book called "Finding the Mother Tree" and she was the woman who discovered the intelligence in communication of trees and how they communicate with each other. And there is this amazing intelligence in all of nature. And so some of it is getting our clever little monkey mind back in touch with this deeper sense of intelligence and wisdom that has sustained species throughout history. Right. She has this quote, "My hope for the future is that we learn wisdom again," right? And that, again, at least the way I interpret it, is to return to this state of man where we are immersed, we appreciate that we are part of nature, that we're immersed in this oneness and that everything truly is interconnected, which is deeply embedded in Jane's DNA because she's lived it her entire life. But we live in such separation from our natural habitats that we lose sight of that and we compartmentalize and we apply the scientific method and we look at things on a variable by variable basis. But in truth, and I love the part in the book about the trees and the fungi and the underground networks and understanding that every single thing is interdependent on everything else. And if we wanna live harmoniously and synchronously on this earth, we're not gonna be able to do it until we can truly appreciate that. Absolutely. And we were just kinda finding our way back to that. I mean, I think we've kind of thought that nature was all about competition, red in tooth and claw, and it's all about might is right and survival of the fittest. And actually what we're finding, the newer sciences, it's actually survival of the kindest. It's like we evolved actually, and part of what's allowed humans to survive and thrive is this amazing social capacity, this being a social species, this is part of what language made possible. And so it's like seeing, it's not that there isn't competition and we're not competing with each other, but it's like this fascinating thing where we're competing to cooperate and we're cooperating to compete, it's like they're totally interdependent. Right. So if you take like a forest, for example, this idea that perhaps there's a greater intelligence, like a hive mind that exists amongst the billions of living things within that forest, that on some rudimentary level understand that their survival is dependent upon the survival of the whole. So it's not about one tree competing with another tree for sunlight or water or et cetera, but an understanding that all these trees need to thrive and this network has to be healthy. And if we can maintain that and sustain that, then that's good for everybody. It's kind of amazing that, so yeah, it's totally, I mean-- And it works.
It works. Without us being involved in it. Right, exactly. It has that like inherent intelligence. And one of the fascinating experience, experiments that Suzanne Simard did was she actually found that trees exchange carbon with one another. So in other words, their kind of version of food, based on how much they're shading each other. Like they know one needs a little bit more than the other. Right, exactly. Okay, I'm shading you but I'm gonna give you a little food. A kid tied you over there. So it's this incredible interdependence and mutuality that we've lost sight of. And I think kind of this way in which like this amazing human intellect has been a little too clever for our own good and we've separated ourselves out from the rest of the natural world and from, even from one another and recognizing that profound interdependence. Yeah, well, part of the problem with the human intellect is the hubris that comes with it, that we can outengineer this thing and problem solve and figure our way through it without that level of humility and appreciation. Right. And I think there's a kind of hyperindividualism that has, that we have, especially in the, this kind of modern Western culture of, that we've lost track of that interdependence and that connection. And we're not gonna make it if, it's like saying, "Okay, it's," we're being taught this lesson in the most profound way, "There's one climate." If we pollute or somebody else pollutes, it doesn't really matter because we're all breathing the same air, we're all impacted by the same climate. But humans are not very well-designed to appreciate that. It's amazing how, like I think, it's interesting. I mean, when we were hunter-gatherers, I think there's this really, we had much more of that perspective, but we did, we do have this kind of deep competition and kind of, potentially Jane also observed the apes being genocidal and having a war, that was really one of the things that she discovered. So we got, there are parts of us that are-- In us.
Are not going away? That it's like we're, like I think that any real sustained hope has to be based on reality. So like to fantasize it, somehow we're going to become a different species or we're gonna like get rid of our selfishness or our greed. That's a fantasy. That's fantasizing about the future. That's hoping about the future. The hope comes from taking what we are and the reality of what we are and finding out how do we encourage what's best in us. Yeah. When COVID began and everybody stopped and no one was driving and everyone was at home, the air seemed to clear pretty quickly, as like to this second point of the resilience of nature like if we just get out of the way, it self-corrects pretty rapidly. And my sense is that there's a little bit of despair with Jane that we couldn't leverage this COVID moment to make more substantial changes in the way that we live, but it is what it is. But there are these amazing examples in the book of nature's ability to bounce back if we just make some simple changes, if we can deploy that human intellect in an appropriate way. And I love this story of the cement, the guy who owned the cement plant and then, I don't know, atoning for that or whatever, decides he's gonna restore it to nature and it becomes this unbelievable forest preserve, and not that long, didn't take that long. Well, that was really hopeful to hear that, like ecosystems typically bounce back in 10 to 50 years. Like if there are marine environments, it's more like 10. If there are, depending on the kind of ecosystem it is, it can be on the outside of 50 years. And I was pushing her, I was like, "How can these," like, "Isn't there a point where nature basically breaks and we just destroy it all?" And she was saying like, "Basically, nature is gonna be here. The question is whether we will." Like 99.9% of all species have gone extinct throughout history. So like for us, there is a real chance that we could go extinct. And the question is, are we going to, we can't evolve physically anymore, we just don't, we're not gonna do that at any timescale that is fast enough, so can we evolve culturally, fast enough so that we can do what is necessary in order to stick around and earn our place? I mean, there's this fascinating woman I spoke to named Janine Benyus who does this work on biomimicry, and she said, "The difference between being an invasive species and a welcome species," like a naturalized species in any ecosystem, "is an invasive species takes more than they give, a welcome species gives more to the ecosystem than they take." And so we've been taking and taking and taking and been this invasive species. So now the work is can we actually reimagine our culture and our society and our way of life so that actually gives more than we take? And having just been at the TED Climate Countdown with one of our other authors, Christiana Figueres who did the Paris Climate Treaty, it was so inspiring to see how we are coming up with so many of these technological solutions, but also just recognizing this, that we don't have to be this kind of extractive society; we can actually give back to the environment and create technologies and ways of living that actually give as much as we take. And fundamentally, dealing with the climate crisis we're in is not waiting around for some technological bright miracle to happen. It's really, I mean, they were quantifying it as the trillions of dollars we need to be investing over the next 10 years to transform our infrastructure and our way of life, and we know what the technologies are, we just need the political will to do it. Yeah, the political will is problematic. (Doug laughs) Then we can get hopeless about it. Our society, yeah. Yeah, because we need it on both ends and Jane talks about how we've been told to think globally and act locally and how that actually leads to depression. Because when you think globally, it's too overwhelming for you to do anything. So what's the alternative? Well, we can like not use plastic straws. And I guess there's some level of agency that we feel with that. We can adopt a plant-based diet, we can recycle, we can compost, we can gauge our food weight. There are plenty of thing, we can get renewable energy. So all these things, that there are certain consumer things that we can do and that basically allows us to feel more emotionally invested and develops that sense of agency, like at least we're taking the small actions that we can every single day, but on some level there is a sense like, "Yeah, that's not gonna cut it. Like we need it on the other end, too. We need it from the highest levels down." And I'm glad to hear that you came out of the TED conference somewhat inspired. And here we are on the cusp of COP26, like there's a lot of speculation about whether we can get our shit together and deploy the level of political and financial resources that are gonna be required to tackle this in a really meaningful way. The future was never one without a battle. And I think we are in a battle for the soul and future of humanity. And it's not gonna be easy. And whether we succeed at COP or, like there were a lot of COPs before Paris that Christiana was first to get the treaty, that she got was quite miraculous, got 190 countries. But what's amazing about, and it's not happening fast enough. There are all sorts of parties that are not pulling their weight, ourselves included. And yet, like at that conference, I was talking with somebody who represents the top 10 oil and gas companies and who are obviously some of the villains in this story of destruction of our planet, and they are committed to net-zero by 2050. They've basically recognized the writing on the wall that there is no, like they have to become renewable energy companies. I mean, the fact that solar and wind have, prices have declined as dramatically as they have, that a third of all energy right now is already renewable. I mean, these are things that, like you could've been, we could've been on this program a couple of years to say, "Oh, it's never gonna happen," right? And so I think what, it was really interesting to hear Jane's comment of having lived through World War II and having lived through democracy on the precipice of extinction in the face of fascism and in the face of Nazi Germany and the bombings. History does not happen in a textbook; it happens because individuals make decisions that change that history. And it's so easy to think about history and society as being these big political bodies or these big corporations, and who are we? But as you said, our consumer choices drive a lot of those corporations to change. Fortunately, in democratic societies, we are the ones who do elect our political leaders and determine what policies we are going to follow. So a lot of it, I think, is, I think what Jane would say is, I say, I think you're right, and what Jane would say is, "It's not about paper or plastic, it's not about like that decision is gonna change the course of history; but it is about the overall carbon choices that we each make in our own lives and it is also about our political will." I mean, look at a school girl in Sweden named Greta Thunberg, who was able to unleash an entire youth movement because she was willing to miss school and sit in front of the parliament, right? You could've said, "Who is she," but look at the impact that she's had. Yeah, it's unbelievable. I've thought a lot about the juxtaposition of Jane and Greta because they're sort of analogs to each other, like on some level you could make the argument that Greta is the sort of successor to a certain strain of advocacy that Jane helped initiate, and yet they're very different. Like generationally, they have very different sensibilities in how they advocate. And you asked Jane point blank like, "What do you think of Greta," right?
Yeah. And she was very politic in her answer. I suspect that her position is like, "That works for Greta," like Jane is much more empathetic, she's much more gentle, she's very direct and clear in her messaging, but she doesn't come, she doesn't come at it as hard as Greta does. And you need every, you need both-- Exactly.
You need all of it. It's all great, but it's interesting how they differ. Yeah, it is really interesting. I loved it when I asked her like, "What do you say to somebody like Greta, who says, 'Don't give us your hope; give us your fear,'" realize that your house is on fire and act like your house is on fire, right? And Jane's response that we need fear, anger, and hope, we need all of 'em. It's not fear alone, it's not anger alone, it's not hope alone. We need all of these responses to the crisis that we're facing. And I do think, to your point about they're being really different, I think that Jane is more, I mean, one of the amazing things that Jane did was to get animal testing to be outlawed on chimpanzees, where we were doing all these experiments on animals and she's been really active in animal rights issues, and was a huge activist. Her experience was that she got a lot of those changes by changing, telling stories and changing the hearts and minds of the people who are making those decisions and I think that that's a really powerful and important way to do it. I also think that there's a role, I mean, personally, I think there's a role for demonstration and civil disobedience and a kind of harder edged, angrier activism that, and I think young people recognize that it's their future that's at stake and that we need to change. Yeah, it's a tension between that absolutism. Like Greta would probably say like, "Well, Jane's been talking about this since the '80s. Like, I don't wanna have to talk about it for 50 years before something changes." Sort of the impetuousness of youth versus the kind of coalition building. Like, I think storytelling really is the best way to win hearts and minds, but there's a patience required with that as well. And there's this idea of being in partnership or cooperation with some of the bad actors to help them develop a greater awareness of what's actually going on and kind of shift the incentives to nudge them into the right direction. But those two things working in concert with each other, sometimes in opposition but ultimately with the same goal in mind, I think are, become powerful like dual drivers. Absolutely. I think you need it all. And you need, both are all of the options. You need to be driving internal change and you need to be driving external change. I mean, one of the things, the stories that we tell in the book was from Christiana of the kinda CEO of Shell, who was at this TED climate meeting, basically saying that his daughter had come to him and said, "Are you destroying the planet? Because that's what I'm hearing in school, that you're ruining the planet and Shell oil." His change of heart and mind, you can ask whether it's greenwashing or how sincere it is or how real it is, but his desire as a father to, as he says, "Get this done for you and your generation," there's that kind of emotional shift and change. But we also need the demonstrations and the political will to be taxing carbon in a way that makes it, makes sense financially and as a business and absolutely legally necessary to make the shifts because we can't depend on everybody's hearts and minds changing in time. Are you going to COP26 now that you have this, you have a client and author who's like immersed in that? Yeah, so I decided that I wasn't, this is more of a policy forum and the TED climate meeting was more of a kind of culture and thought leadership forum, that that was a place I could be most useful. So there's still a possibility that I may go, but it's, I think, again, to wanna use the carbon to get there for only if I'm needed and useful. Sorry to interrupt the flow, we'll be right back with more awesome. But first, I do wanna snag a quick moment to talk about something I care a lot about, which is the importance of nutrition. And the thing is most people I know actually aspire to eat better, to incorporate more whole plants, fruits, vegetables, seeds, beans and legumes into their daily regimen. Sadly, however, without the proper tools and support, very few end up sticking with it. And so, because adopting a plant-based diet transformed my life so profoundly and because I want everyone to experience some version of what I've experienced, we decided to tackle and solve this very common problem. And the solution we've devised, I'm proud to say, is the Plantpower Meal Planner, our affordable, all-in-one digital platform that sets you up for nutrition excellence by providing access to thousands of customizable, super delicious, easy to prepare plant-based recipes. Everything integrates with automatic grocery delivery. You get access to our team of amazing nutrition coaches seven days a week and many, many other amazing features. To kickstart your health intentions this new year, we're offering you $20 off, a one-year membership with the code POWER20 throughout the entire month of January. Again, that's promo code POWER20 for $20 off at meals.richroll.com. All right, back to the pod. I mean, the other pillar here is the power of young people, right? And this is another thing that like Jane was way ahead of the curve on. She starts this roots and shoots thing that is empowering all these young people and engendering that level of hope by connecting them with natural environments and giving them tools and resources to actually, like in a very tactile way, like participate in creating the change. Yeah. I mean, it's often called the Jane generation. She's like, in 68 countries, she's been having these programs which have been helping activate and get kids into activism and into kinda caring about their environments and their communities. So I think it's a powerful example of the ways in which you can intervene in the culture and actually change hearts and minds at a very young age. I asked her, I was pretty skeptical, because I was like, "How can you say the power of young people is gonna save us or is gonna, is this reason for hope, where we haven't been able to get, other previous generations haven't been able to get it done, and what's to say that they're gonna be different?" And she said, "Well, I think in terms of the environment in particular," but I think in terms of social awareness more generally, "they are aware." And I mean, I think this is one of the amazing things about our species. We talked about this a little, but we have this kind of prolonged childhood in which we are, we create this whole kind of nurturance that transforms and educates and changes the next generation. A lot of species obviously, they're basically pre-programmed. They come out, every generation does the same thing as the last generation. We have this capacity, we call it education, we call it parenthood, to actually change and transform the next generation to evolve our species in this really amazing way from generation to generation. And if you think about it, I mean, this is, also back to the work with the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu because we talked a lot about hope and despair and the state of the world, and if you look at the news, as they said, "All you see on this planet is the doom and gloom." But it's news because it's actually unusual, it's not the vast majority of what's happening on this planet. And so if you look at the reality of most of human life, there's an enormous amount of compassion and kindness and caring that takes place every day that we're doing. And if you think about, the other thing they said, if you take this long view and you see like, "What was our society like 100 years ago?" Like, women couldn't vote just over a century ago. Yeah, I mean, it was like five seconds ago. Yeah, five seconds ago, right? I mean, like the transformation, we used to think, we thought that slavery was like morally justifiable, like less than 200 years ago, right? I mean, we have been evolving our culture in these phenomenal and dramatic ways and it's so easy to forget that and to get caught up with the quarterly cycle or the political cycle and to say, "Oh God, we're doomed." But if you think about it as this much larger evolution and process of transformation, then it's really a question, it's not like whether we're gonna deal with the crises because we are gonna have to or we're gonna go extinct. It's really a question of how skillfully we do that, how fast we do that, how much human suffering, and suffering of humans and the rest of the natural world we're going to need in order to get where we need to go. Yeah. I don't know that we've forgotten how much we have progressed as much as we're literally brainwashed, by dent of our media landscape, into believing that everything is terrible all the time. And this is something that like Steven Pinker talks about all the time. We're actually way better off than most of us recognize. And if you really look at just a few years ago, decades ago, hundreds of years ago, I mean, it's just, it's statistically by every metric like we're in a much better place. And it's almost as if we need a 24-hour network that is just sharing the uplifting stories or telling the tale of like how we're progressing in meaningful, positive ways, that could be a germinate of that kind of hope. But there's nothing like that and perhaps there's no economic, a viable economic model to create something like that. But imagine the impact of something like that. And we all celebrate lives like Jane and stories that make us feel uplifted and yet when push comes to shove, we click the channel and we indulge ourselves in whatever disasters are happening around the world like every single day or scrolling through our Twitter feed. Yeah, I think there's something that the neuroscientists call the negative bias of the brain, which is we evolved to look for the problem, we evolved to look for what's gonna kill us. To look for the threat, the danger. And so it's not surprising that we're kind of glued to the car wreck and to see--
Disaster porn. Disaster porn. And that is really fascinating to the human imagination and the human mind. And again, that's not going away either. And I think that the, and yes, I think the media has become this kind of, like if you think about pre-media culture, like 100 years ago people were not saturated with this kind of, the horrible things that are happening everywhere in the world, right? That was kinda like in your neighborhood. If shit going down, we're not. You just didn't have that same kind of global perspective and you weren't being, as you said, saturated by disaster porn or misery porn or outrage. And I think this is an example of do our algorithms encourage outrage or do they encourage the facts and a more balanced view of life? Well, I think we've answered that question. Certainly the algorithms, as they are programmed now, do, right? Kind of enhanced the outrage and the despair and the depression. I mean, it's interesting. We work with a researcher who studies the impact of social media on people's happiness and well-being and they found that-- BJ? No, actually we work with BJ. Yes, this is actually-- He's like patient zero for that, right? He taught the class that spawned all these technologists that went out and created algorithms. Yes, exactly. That's the problem with technology. And in science, you can use it for good or you can use it for evil. No, this is actually Ethan Kross. And one of the things he discovered was that when people passively consume social media, they're just like scrolling through their feed, yeah, they're more miserable and unhappy for a whole variety of reasons that we don't need to go into. But if they're more engaged in it and using it for that social support, for that hope contagion, for that, that hope is a social gift, and getting support and giving support, that's where it can be actually really useful. Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. One of the ways that I try to communicate to my kids around this stuff is to think of it in terms of consumption versus creation. Like, are you using this to create something? Are you using it to have healthy communication or are you just mindlessly consuming it? And if you're using it for creative purposes, then it becomes an incredibly powerful and often uplifting tool. Right. I mean, in some ways one really fascinating way to think of social media is we've just basically wired up all of our brains together into a global mind. And now the question is like, so the human mind is, there's the amazing human intellect, but there are all sorts of other that it'll, challenges of the human mind too. Little dark corners. (all laugh) We ruminate a lot, we dwell, we can be really cruel, like all sorts of things that we can do with our mind. And so the question is, now we've, for the first time, we have this global mind and how do we take the realities of the human mind, the individual human mind, and how do we wire up a global mind that actually helps us and encourages us, as Jane was saying, like an environment that inclines us toward who we need to be and how we need to be in order to evolve and change and sustain ourselves. Right, if you could take that global hive mind and direct it towards positive change, there can be no power, more powerful force. Exactly, I mean, you said-- And therein lies the hope. Well, you saw it in the Arab Spring, which obviously had its challenges and didn't all go the way we wanted it to go. But social media played a really important role in that. And I think, and also in societies where there isn't a free press and where there is a lot of government suppression, social media can be incredibly powerful and important. Yeah. Had you ever met Jane before this project? No. It turns out, on my flight to Tanzania, that Jane was actually like right in front of me, in the airline seat right in front of me. Oh, no way.
(Doug laughs) Wow. And I had brought her a bottle of Johnny Walker, which I knew was her fave. She was sitting there with her Mr. H, her little monkey that she was given by a man who is blind that she carries around the world, and so she was there and I introduced myself and I said that was coming and she was very gracious. And so she invited me around to have dinner with her family the next day before we started our interviews. And so I gave her the, I brought the bottle of Johnny Walker with me and she set it on the counter next to this, what looked like a two gallon pour-over bottle of Famous Grouse whiskey that was half gone, and I was like, "Oh, damn, this is gonna intense." And so I was a bit-- And she shamed you and told you you should've bought the cheaper one, right? She did. She also told me I shoulda bought the cheaper one and donated the money. So she is a big fan of whiskey. I think it helps her voice because she's constantly talking all the time, but she also started the tradition of what she calls having a wee dram with her. Wherever she was in the world, she and her mom would kinda toast in the evening together, which was a very sweet tradition. But obviously her reputation precedes her. You go into this with a certain sensibility about who she is and what she's gonna be like. Like, was there anything about her that surprised you or that was different than what you had read or kind of consumed in all the media that there is about, a footage of her doing her thing? Well, there are a couple of things. I mean, I think that just seeing, that in this 87-year-old woman was like a military general. She's very sweet, very kind, but she's tough as nails. You don't get to be Jane Goodall, you don't go into the forest without some serious will and some serious kind of sense of yourself. And so that was really powerful and amazing to see, her power and her strength, as kind of soft, as gently as it is deployed. Like, you shake the Dalai Lama's hand and you feel like you're about to be thrown across the room in a martial arts move, like there's power and strength in that. And even in Archbishop Tutu's hand, which is feeble by polio, you feel the strength and the power there and I think that's really inspiring, is just seeing somebody that isn't fading away. If anything, they're like Yoda or something. They're becoming more powerful. So that was really amazing. The other thing that I was really impressed with was that she has this kind of seeker's willingness to ask the big questions, like, about life and its meaning. A lot of scientists, they're kind of focused on their little expertise and their little area of study, I mean, not that little, but their specific expertise and they're not really willing to stray from that. She's willing to ask the biggest questions in life and she's got this scientist willingness to follow the facts wherever they may lead. One of the core kind of things about her is this idea of empathy in science, right, which was really kind of radical when she was starting. Like, you have to have empathy to be a good scientist, which was at odds with this notion that no, empathy is at odds with the scientific method. Right, right. And having that, like, conviction about that, as a young person, is amazing. Like, just in, she's naming all the chimps and the apes and everyone's telling her, "Don't do that." Right. And just her kind of seeing things as clearly as she did and the conviction that she was on the right path, like, is really remarkable. And I also, to your point of like having that gravitas, like she's always quoting Winston Churchill. (all laugh) So it's like clearly, and being a child of the war and all of that, like that looms large. What I take from that is, like, she knows that she's a leader and she's looking to the greatest leaders for her own inspiration about how best to lead and how to maintain conviction in the face of tremendous obstacles. Well, this kinda transitions us to the fourth reason of hope, of the indomitable human spirit, which obviously Churchill is one of her examples, and I think she is, I mean, that was one of my interests, the things I wanted to understand, was her own indomitable human spirit, and where does that come from, and that resilience that you spoke of before and that sense of kind of really not being stopped by either the seeming facts or the biases and the prejudices of the time that would say a woman wasn't able to do what she did, that ability to really be indomitable. I mean, she really, you can see that in her. And I think that was really fascinating. When we were having that conversation about how she really feels like there's something, what she calls this indomitable human spirit that is both deep in our own individual self and our own capacity for endurance and survival and meeting the challenges that we face and that it's something bigger than us, that it's not just like, as she said, it's also, if we don't get there, others will pick up the baton and finish the race. And that's this, so there's this almost kinda transpersonal piece of it, which was really inspiring, of like it's not ours to finish the work. We need to do our part. But if we don't get it done fully, there are others who will pick up the cause and make it happen. Yeah, that reminds me of this quote. Do you know Scott Harrison is? He has this non-profit called Charity Water. Oh yes, ah-huh. But he always says like, "Do not be afraid of work that has no end." Like, it's not about the destination; it's about devoting yourself to solving a problem, even with the understanding that in your lifetime it will likely not be solved. Yeah, exactly. It reminds me of a story that Bryan Stevenson told me in one of the projects that we worked on his book "Just Mercy" and he talked about how, when he met Rosa Parks and he was telling her that he was gonna be working on mass incarceration reform and getting people off of death row, and she's like, "Ooh, Bryan, that's gonna make you tired, tired, tired." (Doug laughs) It's like, yeah, we can't, if we think about it as it's just that, I think one of the things that our whole kinda educational system, our whole society makes it all about us and our own ego and our own success or failure and our own, what Archbishop Tutu calls, self-regard. And what I learned from the Dalai Lama and Tutu about joy is that it's like, there's so much more joy when we go beyond our own self-regard, when we go beyond our own sense of like fixating on ourselves. So like when I was in the room before the interviews with them, thinking like, "Who the hell am I to do these interviews," that's where misery comes from. Hopelessness comes from. When I realized like I'm just there to do what needs to be done in that room so that what's meant to happen can happen, then there's something much greater than us that settles into us and gives us this incredible strength and power that we're talking about with people like Jane or Bryan Stevenson or Archbishop Tutu or any of them, but even in our own lives it'll give us this kind of superpower because we realize it's not about us. We're here to help something much greater, whether that's our kids and our family or whether that's getting our society to the place that it needs to go to be able to survive and thrive on this planet or whether it's about developing a bipartisan reality in our society that allows us to solve the big problems that we have. When we are able to go beyond just the kind of like fixated on our own either our own bank account or our own survival or our own success, there's that indomitable human spirit, I think, comes in even more powerfully because it becomes bigger. We become bigger--
Percolate up, yeah, yeah. It's not my natural predisposition. Like, it requires work. It's like I'm caught up in my own bullshit and I'm thinking about like how does this affect me and like where am I gonna have dinner or whatever. But I think that example that you just shared is so powerful. Like, when you're in that situation and you're just about to go have conversations with two of the biggest global icons in modern history, it's easy to get caught up and thinking about like, "Oh, I'm gonna screw this up," or like, "Why am I here," or like, "This is all wrong. They've made a mistake." When is Oprah or Anderson Cooper coming? I know. And it's like, why can't the default just be like, "I'm here for a reason. Like, I don't know what led me to this point, but there are forces, invisible forces, at work that have put me in this position, so just allow me to be a channel or a vessel for the greatest good. Like, allow whatever happens now to be beyond like my personal self-will so that it could be, the greater than the sum of its parts, so to speak," right?
Right. And that requires kind of like a surrender and a humility and a getting out of the way and a kind of sensibility of allowing that is not, like, natural but can be cultivated. And I just know in my own personal experience. When I approach situations and I'm able to live in that space, that it's always better. And it's also more gratifying, because your, when you can kind of transcend your selfish personal desires and be in a space of service and giving, the result is always better and everything actually ends up working out a lot better anyway. You know what I meant? Yeah, I think that it's, when you say, it's interesting, like it's not natural, I would say that it's not encouraged in our society to think that way. It's all about our grades and our career and our success. And look, somehow life evolved for this kind of separate locomotion and we, are these individual people, and we see the world through our own eyes and we, are the director and hero of our own movie, 24/7, that's how our consciousness works and we're not getting away from that either. But I think that when, like there's this interesting thing you were talking about, about the difference between hope and faith of like, well, a belief structure that says there's something greater going on here, that there is a greater purpose to life I think can be hugely sustaining. Or a belief in God, for many people, can be really, really, really powerful. And hope is a little different than that. Like faith says, "Okay, I know these things to be true." Hope says like, "I hope these things are true." It's self-defining. It's humbler in some way. It's not so confident. But I do think that, to come back to the point about whether it's the challenge of getting out of our own kind of self-absorption and our, like I am as self-absorbed as anyone, I mean, I've got the same, like the same rumination, the same kind of self-doubts as everyone that has and we're not getting, again, getting rid of those things. I think it's like can we step into a state, right, not necessarily, it's not necessarily, I think some of these people who do devote their lives to something greater than themselves develop it as a trait, but can you step into this state where you're able to set aside this sense of isolation, fragmentation, alienation, separateness and step in, back into that tapestry of life that Jane describes and feel a part of something greater and recognize that we have that capacity to be something greater? That is, I think, when we tap into that indomitable human spirit. I think the indomitable human spirit can happen in our own survival. Every survival movie is an example of the indomitable human spirit and our will to survive, but it's a little different. I asked her, "It's a little different than the will to survive. It is something greater than just our own individual will to keep living." Yeah, because the will to survive might compel you to opt out of whatever that solution is out of self-preservation. So there's a selfless aspect to it, like the human, the indomitable human spirit, like being called upon to perhaps even put yourself in danger for the greater good. Exactly, which people have been doing throughout all human history for something greater than themselves. It's interesting. When we're talking about the indomitable human spirit and kind of our own life and the end of our life, obviously Jane is 87, and we had this fascinating conservation about death. And I don't know if you, if we should talk about that. No, let's do it. But I think that that was even really interesting and hopeful. I asked her what her next great adventure was going to be, and she said death. And I had this image of Jane Goodall with the binoculars and the notepad heading out into the afterlife like, "Okay, what are we gonna find here?" But it was fascinating to hear her views on the afterlife. Yeah, so expound upon that a little bit, because it is interesting. I mean, she's obviously contemplating this deeply, as she inches closer and closer to this inevitable end. But I think she has such a healthy and thoughtful approach to it. Not just similar from your father. Yeah, I mean, it really is this kind of view that, when my dad was dying, he said, I asked him how long he was gonna stick around, and he said, "I'm just waiting here for landing instructions." It's unbelievable, yeah He had this view that there was some kind of consciousness after death. I was really skeptical about that again. I mean, maybe it's just because we rebel against what our parents' kinda view. And I think he actually came to that in his life. I don't know if that was always there. But Jane had this similar view, and here we're going to, we're going from hope to faith, right, we're going to beliefs, but this view that we go on into another realm and that our consciousness goes on beyond the grave. She shares, in the book, we share some of her incredible stories of when her husband died or other stories that she's experienced or knows of that speak to that. And as my dad was dying, we were also working with a guy named Bruce Greyson, who wrote a book called "After," which is about, he's a guy who, kind of the world's leader and expert on near-death experience, people who've kinda come close to death and kinda peeked over but then come back. And even Alexander, who wrote "Proof of Heaven," went to, try to get some understanding of what the hell had happened to him. He went to Bruce Greyson and Bruce Greyson looked at his medical charts and-- Was he the guy who was like a surgeon? So Eben Alexander was the guy who was a surgeon, yes. Yeah, yeah, I know that story. Right, and so Eben Alexander went to Bruce Greyson to kind of figure out what had happened to him when he had this near-death experience. And so Bruce Greyson spent the last 40 years developing the field of near-death studies and looking at thousands of these cases of, and one of the things that was fascinating to have him say was that in all, like all of those, from looking at all those cases, there's an enormous amount of commonality. And they're fundamentally based on that kind of, so it's not an experimental science, they don't kill some people or put them in near-death experience-- Yeah, inherently anecdotal. It's anecdotal, it's observational science like astronomy. It's observational science. But from observing all those people's experience, what he's come to the conclusion is that there is consciousness after death, that our consciousness goes on in some way. And Jane clearly felt that way too. Watching my dad die and kinda being there, fortunate enough, to hold his hand as he was transitioning, which many of us have not had a chance to do during COVID, it was, you start wondering. It's like being pushed up to the front of the row and you just start thinking about death and the meaning of life in a whole different way. So has that shifted your cynical New York mind? Yeah (laughs). The New York in me says, "Hey, it could be possible." There's a chance. All you can hope. You can hope, right, exactly. There's a possibility. And like none of us will know until we get there. And Jane's gonna probably get there before many of us. And maybe this'll send some notes back from the field-- Right. But what I would say is I think that I've come to feel like, whether it's our own curriculum that we're creating in our own life or it is some greater sense of purpose or indomitable human spirit that goes beyond our own life and binds us together from generation to generation and across generation that there is this human project that we are up to, that we are trying to figure out how to be a welcome species on this planet, how to survive and thrive in a way that has become more urgent now than ever before. And it's an incredibly exciting time to be alive and it's not unlike World War II and that we have got to become the greatest generations that have ever lived if we're gonna face these challenges. Sure. And on the subject of consciousness and faith, I mean, the way that I interpreted where Jane was coming from is that it's a choice, like you can choose. She's like, "Look, either nothing happens or something happens. I'm gonna choose to believe that something happens," and then she tells these amazing stories of coincidences that have occurred throughout her life, like this amazing story of coming up from the beach when the bombing raids were going on and her mom takes unlikely route that she's never taken before and where they would typically walk like a bomb explodes, like her life is peppered with a lot of these stories. And I think if we're all honest with ourselves, we can all find weird synchronous things that have happened in our lives and coincidences. And we have a choice like, "Are those meaningful? Can we look at those and extract some wisdom or develop some level of awe and wander about the mysteries of life," or are we just gonna say, "Well, that's just coincidence," and kind of move on from there. And I think what's beautiful about Jane's example and her testimony and her lived experience is that because she is so immersed in the interconnectedness and the tapestry of life, like so wedded to it, she's able to appreciate the mysteries that that provokes. Like, the humility that's required to understand, like we don't have all the answers and there's so much more going on and we've only, she says like, "We've only begun to even understand the first aspects of what is actually happening." And with that humility, I think there's so much opportunity and space to have faith. Like the more you know, the more crazy and mysterious it is. Right, exactly. And I think that lots of the most visionary scientists, we got to work with Stephen Hawking, who, at the end of his life, and they're, I think they're able to kinda peer there, they recognize that humility of what we don't know and the mystery of it. And obviously Einstein was very famously-- She talks about him, yeah.
Talks about that. And I think that one of the interesting distinctions is between hope and optimism. And so optimism is more often a kind of disposition or a philosophy. Whereas hope, I think, is this thing that you actually have to engage in. You have to cultivate. You have to nurture it. You have to pursue it. You have to take action to encourage it, to have more of it. And Christiana Figueres, who we were talking about who did the Paris climate treaty, has her version of kind of hope or what she calls stubborn optimism. And I think what she explained was getting the Paris climate treaty done, you had to put optimism and hope into the process. You had to create the imaginative possibility for people that this could be done, right? So we're often sitting around there, saying, "Am I hopeful today? What do the facts look like? Am I feeling optimistic?" Like, "No, it's gonna rain. I'm not hopeful." What I think she's saying to us, which is so powerful, and I think Jane is saying the same thing, which is actually, "No," it's, "You actually don't wait for the facts to be hopeful; you actually create the facts that then generate the hope." Yeah, that's the opposite of what you would think. Yeah.
That's so interesting. Can you be a hopeful pessimist? (all laugh) I think when we were researching optimism and pessimism and hope like, it seems like there's just a certain, temperamentally, some people are more optimistic or more pessimistic. It's not clear how much of that is nature and how much of that is nurture, right? Some of that is trauma actually, these people who've kind of had their hopes dashed and are kind of in defensive postures as a result of that. Some people, it's probably because that, just their wiring, that they're more biased towards that, that negative bias and they're kind of more oriented towards being vigilant, and that's probably necessary for our species too. I mean, that's the other thing when you look at it, when you see the diversity of human minds. And speaking as a dyslexic here, we need all of the minds, we need all of their diversity. And so some people probably have that more pessimistic disposition. But I think that's why this is not dispositional. This is about what Jane calls hope, a fundamental human survival trait without which we perish. It's this capacity, like language. You don't have to develop that language capacity. We have the ability for language. But if you don't cultivate it, then you're never gonna learn language. And that hope is this thing that we have that now we have some way of understanding how we can cultivate it, how we can nurture it in one another, how we can sustain and support it in one another. Yeah, how does that translate into parenting? Like, we're now in a situation where we have this new generation of young people. We're both parents. And this generation is inheriting this climate crisis. And with that, there's a distrust of the Gen Xers and the Boomers and all of that. There's perhaps a little bit of anger, a little bit of despair, a little bit of self-righteousness, and also kind of a mental health epidemic-- Totally.
That's precipitated by the pandemic and social media and everything else that's going on. So how do you instill hope in the next generation as a parent trying to help guide young people to maturity? Such a great question. I think there is a mental health pandemic that's going on now and I think young people are kinda disproportionately affected by it. I think that the rampant kind of cases of depression, anxiety, both clinically and subclinically is a huge crisis in our world. I think one of the things to say is that I think this is the way that the crises in our world are expressing themselves through people and through our children, right? It's like, again, we like to see this as individualized and itemized and somehow like my child's mental health is somehow separate from the state of the planet and the health of the planet or that because it feels, "Okay, I can give my child Prozac or deal with this." And yes, obviously we need to deal with our kids' challenges. My kids have talked to me about whether they wanna have kids or not because there's so much despair out there about the world that our children are inheriting. And I think that we really have, we have not done what we needed to do to be good ancestors for our kids and grandkids and great grandchildren. I think that, that said, I think, coming back to this idea of hope as a social gift, is like we can model hope in our own lives. Obviously as a parent, what we do is way more important than what we say. So our own relationship to life and our own relationship to the future and how hopeful we are, I think, is really significant. I think that supporting them and also that social support that helps them in their times of crisis is huge and important and like the most important thing. And at the same time one of the things that, the hardest lesson I have had as a parent is realize that I cannot save my children from their suffering and that it's actually not my job to take away their suffering. Their suffering is actually how they grow and develop what sculpts their soul. And what I can do is be in the suffering with them when requested, but try to take it away from them. And I think that that's the other piece of like resilience and of active hope, is like it's not about being a helicopter parent or a bulldozer parent or trying to solve all the problems or make the path easy. Coming back to that fundamental recognition that human life is filled with challenges. You look at people like Tutu and the Dalai Lama and Jane, and you're like, "Wow, these lives are amazing because they're filled with adversity." This wasn't like some unending yoga class that they were in that it's like blissful from start to finish, right? And actually when you, coming to that phrase from my dad, if we see this as a part of our curriculum, then even the anxiety and the despair and the depression that's part of the curriculum too, that is part of the work. And I mean, I think having grown up with a mom who suffered from depression, I think, I thought for a long time that my job was to kinda run away from sadness and ran after joy. And working on "The Book of Joy" with Tutu and the Dalai Lama, I realized there ain't no joy without sadness and there's no joy without sorrow and that those two things are intricately connected. And so helping our kids to experience the pain, I guess this is the other thing I would say, is grief. Like recognizing, you were so griephobic in this society. But we're experiencing enormous grief as a society and we grief for all we've lost in the pandemic, grief for what's happening in our world. I mean, there's this amazing story that we tell in "The Book of Hope" about this woman and her, who's working with the Inuit people and her relationship to grief, which we can talk about, but I think that recognizing that we have to grieve our losses and that there's healing in that if we grief that and are able to be there in that suffering and don't deny it. Yeah, our culture isn't exactly permissive to that process, and yet that's the only path towards wholeness. Like, you have to feel those feelings. You have to go through it. You can't short circuit it. You can't repress it. So hard, man. (Doug laughs) That impulse of like wanting to make it okay for your kids, like I just wanna--
Yeah, oh my God. I wanna alleviate the pain. I wanna swoop in and make it okay. And the sense that, like, this world that they're inheriting, like this, it's a real heavy kinda vibe that they shoulder for themselves. And you feel like the culprit in that on some level. Well, I was just down with Archbishop Tutu in South Africa and we were talking about when our kids suffer and he said it's like a double blow, because you suffer because they're suffering and you feel responsible in some way you could've, you're responsible in some way for that suffering. Yeah, to the extent that you helped create it and your responsibility to alleviate it. Exactly. And I think that that is the noble curriculum of a being parent is coming to terms with all of that and recognizing, again, that we can't, it's not our job to save them from that suffering is really powerful. So you had the privilege of spending all this time with people like Jane and Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama, like how does that all kind of percolate in your consciousness? I feel like there's a similarity in what you do, in what I do and that, like, I have the privilege of like seeking out people that I'm curious about and then forcing them to sit down and talk to me. (Doug laughs) And you do a version of that. And you've created like this really interesting business that is very different from a typical literary agency. It's almost like a production company meets creative agency on some level, where my sense, and correct me if I'm wrong, is you just seek out these really interesting people that you're really curious about. And not only do you kind of enlist them as clients and you agent their books, but you are deeply immersed in these books, like you function as editor, as co-creator, it's not just like, "Okay, send me your book proposal," it's like, "Okay, come and get an Airbnb in Santa Cruz and we're gonna like hang out for two months until we figure out what this book is." Right.
Right? Well, so yeah. In my agenting kind of creative life at Idea Architects, so working with my colleagues, incredible teammates that like Laura and Rachel, what we do is we help, our mission is to help visionaries create a wiser, healthier, more just world. So we kind of seek out people who have the most compelling ideas and stories and then help them to develop those in a way that aligns that messenger with the message and the culture in a way that hopefully can help catalyze the next stage of our global evolutionary culture together. That's the mission. It's a really bold mission. It's been amazing to get to do that with such extraordinary people who are pushing the envelope of human possibility in some way. We do it, first, often in books where we'll storyboard the project. So we'll actually go into a two-day process where we'll kind of storyboard and think about the arc of the book. We also are doing it in film and television now and podcast. So it's really about trying to create, somebody, it's funny, somebody just wrote to me this week and said, "You've created like a new genre. It's like a hope genre." So it's a genre of media that is trying to give us, I don't know if I'd say just hope as much as new possibilities in our individual lives and in our kind of, so what we look for is life-changing and world-changing. And some projects do both, some are really focused on changing people's, individuals. I mean, I'll tell you, like, we're talking about despair and our kids and stuff, so when I was seven, when I was one of those kids, I was pretty despairing too and I was in that reality of growing up with a depressed mom and really isolated in an apartment in New York and at one point I was like, "I'm not so happy here. I wanna check out." And I was one leg over the balcony of our apartment and looking down at the kind of matchbox cars and the little people who looked ant-like below and I had to make a choice about whether I was gonna jump or not. And in retrospect, I think that I got the understanding that my life was a choice. And I think our work is really about, and my work, has been about helping, give people more choice, giving people an opportunity to recognize that they have choices in their lives about how they live. They get to cultivate more hope or not. And we together have a choice of how we wanna live as a nation, as a world, as communities and that we can create societies that are, that we come from that amazing imagination, that amazing superpower that we have that are wiser, healthier and more just. Yeah, that's really beautiful, being mission oriented and so intentional about the authors that you work with and the kind of books that they're putting out into the world. Thank you, thank you. It's a huge privilege to get to work with very well-known people, not yet well-known people, but people who are all trying to participate in that indomitable human spirit in some way. Yeah, cool. Well, I think that's a good place to put a pin in it for today. To be continued. What's the next book in the Global Icon Series? The Book of? We don't know yet. We often say we just do what the universe tells us to do, so we'll be interested to hear what your listeners and viewers tell us they wanna hear next. Yeah, like shoot us a tweet or whatever with who you think the next book should be about. The next global icon, yes.
The Book of, blank. Exactly.
And which icon. Exactly. I always love talking to you, man. That was so fun. This book is a beautiful accomplishment. It's been really cool to see it out in the world and see Jane out there making herself available. I mean, cover of Time Magazine. It's already like a huge success. Thank you. And everything you do has such a, it has that intentionality behind it. When you read it, you're like, "This is somebody who's trying to do something good in the world." I mean, like, it's very honest and genuine in that regard. Thank you.
Appreciate that. Well, if I can say, on behalf of all of your listeners, what you have created here on this podcast and those conversations that you have with all the extraordinary guests that you get to be mind-melding with is it's a real privilege to get to eavesdrop and listen in. And thank you for spreading all the goodness that you are. Yeah, thanks, man. Appreciate that. All right, to be continued. Next time.
Peace at last. (slow instrumental music)
