Doug Abrams On Why Hope Is The Antidote For Apathy

As we grapple with a global pandemic, experiential climate change, mass species extinction, and many other dire calamities—it can feel like the world has lost its moral center. But every solution begins with hope—the antidote to what ails us. Famed primatologist, climate activist, and global icon Jane Goodall has devoted her life to better understanding our natural world and preserving its majesty. As one can expect, the 87-year-old has some thoughts about our enduring climate crisis—thoughts that don’t revolve around cynicism, anger or pessimism—but instead are all about hope. A hope that is fierce. A hope underscored by action, empathy, and optimism. How can someone who has studied the climate crisis for the better part of her life maintain such a positive disposition in the face of humanity’s self-destructive trajectory? 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? Today’s guest Douglas Abrams wanted answers to these questions. Needed answers. So he sought out Jane and spent countless curious hours with her, culminating in the Book of Hope, a beautiful and intimate look into the heart and mind of a woman who has truly revolutionized how we view the world around us. Returning for his second appearance on the show, Douglas is a literary agent, editor, author, and former Stanford classmate. He initially joined the podcast back in February 2017 (RRP 274) to discuss the first in his Global Icon series of books, The Book of Joy—an instant New York Times bestseller that beautifully synthesizes a series of conversations between Douglas, The Dalai Lama and Bishop Desmond Tutu on the nature of human happiness and suffering. A continuation of our former conversation, today, we pivot from joy to focus on hope. Hope as an antidote to helplessness. Hope as our greatest strength. And hope as the foundation upon which all solutions emerge. It’s also a conversation about the importance of empathy. Meeting resistance with patience. Obstinate grace. And what it means to completely devote yourself to what’s right. But mostly, this is a discussion about what we can all learn from Jane Goodall’s example. Why it’s incumbent upon all of us to shoulder an urgent but hopeful responsibility for the future of our planet. And how to best lead by example. To read more, click here. You can also watch it all go down on YouTube. And as always, the podcast streams wild and free on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Douglas is an impressive intellect and a charming, curious conversation partner. I always leave time spent with him better than before. My hope is that this exchange will impact you similarly. Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:05Speaker 01

  So, one of the things that kind of blew my mind was finding out from a neuroscientist that hope originates in the prefrontal cortex, which is where we have language, where we have time travel or the ability to imagine the future, and where we have problem-solving. So, hope seems to be like this kind of component of the human imagination to envision something better than what is now. Hope was part of what allowed humans to evolve and to become what we are today, to create this global civilization. If we had that capacity to hope for something different or something better, it never would have happened. We have lulled ourselves into this complacency that like, life should just be easy.

• 1:50Speaker 01

  And if life is hard, or there are challenges, or the world is faced with crisis, that there's something wrong. Coming back to that fundamental recognition that, you know, 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... With adversity. And actually, when you're coming back to that phrase from my dad, you know, 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. Recognizing that we have to grieve our losses and that there's healing in that, you know, if we grieve and are able to be there in that suffering and don't deny it.

• 2:44Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast. It's no mystery that humanity is currently grappling with all kinds of problems. A global pandemic, climate change that is quickly becoming more and more experiential, mass species extinction, and so many other dire calamities that humanity can feel like it has lost its moral center. Well, Jane Goodall, the famed primatologist and climate activist, a woman and global icon, who now, at 87, has devoted her life to better understanding our natural world and to preserving its majesty. She has a few thoughts about all of this. Thoughts that I think might surprise you,

• 3:28Rich Roll?

  thoughts that don't revolve around what you might suspect, like cynicism, or anger, or pessimism, but instead are all about hope. Hope marked with action, of course, but hope really underscored by things like empathy and optimism. So 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,

• 4:10Rich Roll?

  he wanted answers to these questions. He needed answers. So he sought out Jane Goodall. He spent countless curious hours with her, culminating in this wonderful new book that he co-wrote with Jane called The Book of Hope, which is this really wonderful and intimate look into not only the nature of hope, but also into the heart and into the mind of a woman who has really, truly revolutionized how we view the world around us. This person who has spent her lifetime fighting for that world's future. Longtime listeners may recall my first conversation with Douglas. He's a former Stanford classmate of mine, a literary agent, an editor, and an author himself, who joined the podcast

• 4:55Rich Roll?

  several years ago to discuss the first in his Global Icon series of books, a book called The Book of Joy, which went on to become an instant New York Times bestseller that beautifully synthesizes a series of conversations between Douglas, the Dalai Lama, and Bishop Desmond Tutu on the nature of human happiness and suffering. Well, today, he's back. He's done it again with Jane on the subject of hope, and it's coming right up. But first...

• 5:30Rich Roll?

  Okay, so Mr. Douglas Abrams. So this one is about hope, of course. It's about hope as an antidote to helplessness. It's about how things like empathy, patience, obstinate grace, and total devotion to doing what's right. But it's mostly about learning from Jane Goodall's example, and why indeed it is incumbent upon all of us to shoulder this urgent but hopeful responsibility for the future of our planet, and to lead by example ourselves. Doug is an impressive intellect. He's also a very charming and curious conversation partner. I always leave time spent with him better than before, and I suspect this exchange

• 6:15Rich Roll?

  will impact you similarly. So here we go. This is me and Douglas Abrams.

• 6:25Rich Roll?

  Sweet dude, good to see you.

• 6:27Speaker 01

  So great to see you.

• 6:27Rich Roll?

  It's been a long time. I guess the last time we did this was 2017. We were just saying before the podcast, seems like yesterday, but it also feels like a complete past life.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  A whole nother world.

• 6:38Rich Roll?

  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, Douglas Abrams, we're going to talk about hope. We're going to talk about empathy. We're going to talk about patience. I mean, where to even begin to unpack this?

• 7:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, hope and despair are very close bedfellows. And I think a lot of people are feeling a lot of despair right now.

• 7:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  And it's in the despair that is where we need to find the hope.

• 7:27Rich Roll?

  That was what was so interesting. I mean, in the book, you kind of play semi-antagonist or devil's advocate 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 learned, spending all that time with her about what hope truly is?

• 8:04Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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...

• 8:29Speaker 01

  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 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 kind of three things that we do in relationship to the future. We either fantasize, like, I'm gonna be an NBA basketball player.

• 9:06Rich Roll?

  You are very tall.

• 9:07Speaker 01

  I am tall, but no, I am coordination, not happening. Or we dwell, which is what we do in New York a lot. You know, that's kind of 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 kind of ignoring those. We're actually setting those goals and finding those realistic pathways to get to those goals.

• 9:43Rich Roll?

  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 want to actually take action, hope is kind of a requisite towards getting off the dime to... Doing anything.

• 10:21Speaker 01

  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, you know, paying attention to and then to go, oh, God, this is so awful. We're never going to 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

• 11:01Speaker 01

  are these kind of 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.

• 11:25Rich Roll?

  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?

• 11:32Speaker 01

  I know. It's amazing. It was one of those.

• 11:34Rich Roll?

  What is that about?

• 11:35Speaker 01

  So, I mean, I think, you know, it was really interesting because, you know, 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, you know, what are the outcomes of those people who have more or less hope. And one of the things that was fascinating was people with less hope were twice as likely to die in the next three years than people with more hope. So, like, 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

• 12:16Speaker 01

  like, it's almost this little kind of fundamental, you know, secret of the human mind. And that was really interesting to hear Jane call it this survival trait.

• 12:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  That is what allows us to often make the difference between success and failure, life and death, and even potentially survival and extinction.

• 12:39Rich Roll?

  Does the science shed any light on the nurture versus nature piece regarding hope, like are people, you know, 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, you know, 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.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  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 kind of conquer the world because I was kind of a weak and 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, who has actually challenged, you know, like she overheard her uncle, who is a doctor, say, oh, you know, 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

• 13:51Speaker 01

  for it. And Jane was like, damn that, you know, like I'm gonna.

• 13:55Rich Roll?

  Right, but that's the piece, right? Like where does that come from?

• 13:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:59Rich Roll?

  Does she come out of the womb with that or is that a product of her upbringing?

• 14:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things we talked about in the, so Jane has these four reasons for hope that we can talk about, and one of them is the power of young people. And we talked about how do you nurture hope in young people? And I think, you know, 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 or 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, you know, it's having that

• 14:47Speaker 01

  Those having goals, I mean, you know, part of the challenge is a lot of people don't have goals or they don't have, you know, obviously, the world is not equivalently, you know, 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 had, she read Tarzan and she read, you know, and she read, you know, Dr. Dolittle and she was like, I want to do that. That, you know, it was kind of really the spark of the imagination.

• 15:21Rich Roll?

  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 going to 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.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  Exactly. I, you know, I think that was so powerful to see that hope is, so one of the things that kind of blew my mind was, you know, finding out from a neuroscientist that hope originates in the frontal, the prefrontal cortex, which is the kind of front of between our eyes, where we have language, where we have time travel or the ability to imagine the future and where we have problem solving. So that like 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.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  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 kind of the more ancient parts of our brain where we're in fear or, you know, kind of frozen with a sense that there is no hope.

• 17:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, the tectonic plates of culture right now are Working overtime to push us towards the fear side of that balance.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:10Rich Roll?

  You know, and that's, 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.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  Well, it is hard. I mean, and obviously there are a lot of things to feel despairing about, but as Jane said, you know, without hope, there really is no hope, you know, like, you know, it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy, right? And I would say, you know, the merchants of cynicism and doom would love us to just kind of say, well, forget it, you know, we're not going to be able to solve our climate crisis, or, you know, the, this is, our country is kind of inevitably going to be divided in the way it is. And I think that, you know, there's kind of vested interests in those positions, actually. And I think that hoping for something else and actively moving for

• 18:01Speaker 01

  it, and I think that's the decisive piece, which is that real hope, as I learned from Jane, is, is really taking action. You can't, you know, 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 interests.

• 18:19Rich Roll?

  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?

• 18:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:34Rich Roll?

  Like, their hope is just directed in the wrong way. So you can be publicly despairing because you're building some kind of platform.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:42Rich Roll?

  Premised upon that, that will enrich you in a certain way, in a self-serving way.

• 18:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:48Rich Roll?

  Right? So how do you redirect that hope? I mean, there's a, there's a misalignment of social incentives to direct hope into, you know, healthier.

• 18:58Rich Roll?

  Into healthier trajectories that are more communally oriented.

• 19:02Speaker 01

  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.

• 19:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and it's sort of considered more intellectual to be cynical, right?

• 19:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:30Rich Roll?

  In truth, cynicism is lazy.

• 19:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:33Rich Roll?

  And it is less safe to be vulnerable in that way.

• 19:38Speaker 01

  Exactly. I mean, to want something, whether it's for your own life or for the world, is a vulnerable place. You might not get it. But honestly, the alternative, which is kind of like, you know, despaired cynical kind of satisfaction, you know, or something with, you know, your lot in life, you know, in some ways, it's like, wow, okay, maybe that's, 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, you know,

• 20:21Speaker 01

  like, we, you know, 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 had that capacity to hope for something different or something better, it never would have happened.

• 20:38Rich Roll?

  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.

• 20:47Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 20:48Rich Roll?

  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 in, 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?

• 21:06Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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.

• 21:47Speaker 01

  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, you know, through the grieving process of, you know, watching him die and, you know, 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 realities, and working on the book, and talking to Jane in the midst of that. So, it really was, you know, at first, it was kind of theoretical, and it was like

• 22:30Speaker 01

  hope, and, you know, 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.

• 22:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, the juxtaposition of those heavy things with this subject matter, I think it, you know, it gets illustrated in the richness in which you, you know, deal with these themes, because they're so challenging. And... And they're, 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, 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 going to be this ongoing Global Icon series, which is really cool.

• 23:23Rich Roll?

  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, you know, calling the book, you know, the life story of Jane Goodall, or whatever, and just doing a linear treatment of this remarkable life.

• 23:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, and the idea is, for the Global Icons, is that there are these kind of travelogue dialogues. So it's like, the reader gets to come along and either with the Book of Joy, have this kind of encounter with the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu.

• 23:57Rich Roll?

  Right, this very long series of long-winded conversations. Which, in Jane's case, involves, you know, building fires and going on long walks and drinking whiskey.

• 24:08Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. You know, you see, you get to, hopefully not too long-winded, you know, like, but it's a, definitely, to get to go and kind of have the experience and get to sip the whiskey, which I actually, you know, had to train for, because I had heard that she was a serious whiskey drinker. And I had to, I had to practice a little, get my Johnny Walker handled. And, but, so the idea of the series is, yeah, that there's these kind of really amazing icons, and what, but to reveal their humanity, right? So not just kind of them as some kind of, you know, vaunted, you know, laudatory figure

• 24:51Speaker 01

  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... You know, they see these people and 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, 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 it's clear she's been

• 25:31Speaker 01

  this global messenger of hope and traveled the world like prior to the, you know, 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 going to understand joy, you're going to go to the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu to understand it. If you're going to understand hope, Jane was clearly the person we needed to talk

• 25:55Rich Roll?

  to. Right. You know, this is, 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 of like, she's relentless. She's 87 now, like 80, just appearing everywhere and just totally on point, like doesn't miss a beat, so vital, like so present, so passionate. You know, 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. You know, as you said, like 300 cities a year until COVID, and then it just becomes

• 26:40Rich Roll?

  a Zoom bonanza for her. You would think that she would fatigue of this, or that she would get frustrated. And that's a testament, that's a testament to this level of hope, that despite her continually putting out this message, you know, thousands of times, that, you know, she still has to do it, and that she's going to work until she dies. And she remains, you know, just as enthusiastic about, you know, her advocacy as she ever was.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  It's so cool and inspiring, honestly, to see these, you know,

• 27:14Speaker 01

  People in their 80s and even 90s now are just turned 90, you know, or we're actually working with a 101-year-old woman who founded the field of holistic medicine and integrative health. You know, it's like, who has a 10-year plan? By the way, her name is Gladys McGary. And, yeah, it's amazing. And it's just like, you know, 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

• 27:57Speaker 01

  and her passion and her energy and her ability to, you know, she says she's more busier now in the pandemic than ever before.

• 28:04Rich Roll?

  Right, I know.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  And like, she's just doing, you know, and it was amazing, you know, like, and I think the world, it's like, the world is kind of caught up with Jane. As you said, she was, you know, in the 80s. She was beating the drum when nobody was really listening. And I think, you know, sadly, we're becoming, you know, 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, you know? And, you know, so there's a reason that Jane is now, you know, on the cover of Time Magazine. It's like, we need her. It's like the Jane moment. We need her, but we need both the sounding of the alarm,

• 28:48Speaker 01

  but we also need the steady hand of the recognition. And I think what was powerful to hear in the book, you know, in writing the book with her was this sense of, this kind of grounded sense of our ability to handle great challenges, like in World War II, for example. And that, you know, we, 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.

• 29:24Rich Roll?

  This is the way that it is.

• 29:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 29:26Rich Roll?

  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 her confirmation. And in each little drawer, there's a tiny little scroll where she had inscribed something from the Bible or something like that.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:51Rich Roll?

  She pulls it out and it was some, some passage about like, you know, you cannot, you know, you have to continue to sow the field or whatever.

• 30:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:01Rich Roll?

  And just, okay, off you go.

• 30:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think that sense of, you know, like, which her favorite quote is actually one from the Bible, which is like, you know, as your day is, 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.

• 30:24Rich Roll?

  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, you know, cognitively, if nothing else, like, it's just remarkable.

• 30:54Speaker 01

  Right, so I think that sense of purpose is huge. I was also thinking about how, to come back to the conversation about nurturing, like, you know, 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.

• 31:16Rich Roll?

  Right, she needed a chaperone.

• 31:17Speaker 01

  She needed a chaperone, they wouldn't let a white woman kind of go into the forest back then, and, you know, like, that's kind of incredible, you know, and I think, one of the things, the most interesting things I learned about hope is that, as one researcher described it, it's a social gift. You know, 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. You know, that this sense of like, we think we're all these separate kind of minds and separate, you know, people.

• 32:03Speaker 01

  And but then our sense of hopefulness or despair about the future deeply impacts everybody else's.

• 32:09Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right. Yeah, that's a really powerful idea. I can't help but think that, you know, 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, it tracks all the way back to, you know, the beech tree and her climbing the tree and just this deep rooted connection to the natural world. That's almost, you know, preternatural for a young person to have. That she remains true to her entire life. Like, her interests never wavered. And on some level, like, obviously, when you look in the rearview mirror, it's 2020.

• 32:54Rich Roll?

  But it all adds up perfectly. It's like, of course, this is the life that this person lived, you know? And along the way, there were these amazing kind of synchronicities and coincidences. And, you know, the fact that she even ended up, you know, being, doing secretarial work for Leaky and like what, you know, 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.

• 33:19Speaker 01

  Well, you know, it's funny, like, I totally get that. And I think, you know, from one vantage point, that's totally true. And from the other vantage point, it's this, you're like, it's exactly what you said about hindsight being 2020. It's like, you know, 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. You know, my dad had this wonderful expression when he was dying. He said, you know, um, he said, it's all part of my curriculum.

• 33:55Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 33:56Speaker 01

  And

• 33:57Rich Roll?

  It's such an amazing perspective.

• 33:58Speaker 01

  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, you know, Jane, you know, Jane definitely took a lot of botany and biology, you know, kind of in her early, like, if you want to kind of say what her curriculum was, you know, like, she, she definitely fell in love with the natural world. And but lots of people read Tarzan, lots of people read Dr. Dolittle. And, you know, what I think made her, you know, an amazing example of this kind of active hope

• 34:38Speaker 01

  is that then she said, I'm not going to be, I'm going to keep pushing myself closer to my goals. I'm going to find those pathways, right? I mean, so, yes, is an amazing and miraculous. And could we have scripted it in a Hollywood movie that, you know, she would go work with Louis Leakey, who would then be, you know, wanting to understand our, you know, our ape-like ancestors and send her into the jungle. But, you know, she had to get her way to that secretarial training. She, you know, she had to find her way to his office. She had to impress him on the digs that she, you know, and how she dealt with the lion and the rhinoceros and, you know, like, she had to convince him that she was the one for the job.

• 35:22Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 35:23Speaker 01

  I think we're, in some way, we're all, you know, in our own curriculum, trying to prove, you know, like, to ourself that we're, we're up for the task.

• 35:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Of course, the story of her being in Gombe and spending all the time with the chimps and it all being documented is, 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, and the kind of state of science at the time.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:56Rich Roll?

  This idea that, you know, 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, you know, back to that kind of obstinance or this, you know, Very directed sense of purpose to put herself in that position and then have the patience to literally be there like 10 years.

• 36:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:20Rich Roll?

  In order to, you know, take what she was observing and then with Leakey's help, contextualize it, you know, 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.

• 36:34Speaker 01

  Unbelievable. I mean, to remember, first of all, that she went-

• 36:37Rich Roll?

  And being a woman, like, on top of it.

• 36:39Speaker 01

  Exactly. Like, she was a woman at a time when, as she says, you know, men weren't even going into the forest to study animals, you know. She didn't even have an undergraduate degree, right? And let alone a PhD, which she later got. But she didn't, you know, she didn't even have an undergraduate degree. She literally had a secret training course, you know? And she's going into the jungle and, you know, having to-

• 37:00Rich Roll?

  With her mom.

• 37:01Speaker 01

  With her moms as a chaperone, you know, and God bless moms.

• 37:05Rich Roll?

  After this proper upbringing-

• 37:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 37:07Rich Roll?

  You know, in England, where it was all about finding, you know, a rich guy to marry and debutantes and all that kind of stuff.

• 37:14Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. You know, it definitely was, you know, like, it was the path less taken. And, you know, but that determination that she was gonna follow, if she had these goals, she was gonna follow them, she was gonna find out pathways, you know. 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, you know, and she just really just kind of, you know, she was very lucky, obviously. You know, there were a lot of dangers that she was facing that, you know, made her life really dramatic, and more dramatic than most of ours. But, you know, to come back to the point of what you were saying about, like,

• 37:57Speaker 01

  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. You know, 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, you know, I asked her, you know, do animals have hope? And she said, well, you know, if you think about it, you know, your dog waiting at the dog, the door with his tongue hanging out, kind of waiting for you to come home,

• 38:42Speaker 01

  that 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, you know, solve problems far into the distance. But it is all on a continuum. And I think that, like, it's almost like she regrafted us back into the natural world and helping us to understand our place. And I think one of the key things, if we're going to 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

• 39:24Speaker 01

  threads from the tapestry of life, it will disintegrate and we will lose what sustains us and supports us.

• 39:31Rich Roll?

  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.

• 39:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:44Rich Roll?

  And without her work, you know, how much longer would it have been before we started to piece that together for ourselves? It's incredible.

• 39:51Speaker 01

  It is amazing. It's totally, you know, epic. And, you know, to have a life where you do that, just pioneering scientific work, and until, you know, and then that changes the zeitgeist, you know, as, as Leakey said, you know, now we have to, you know, recognizing that animals use tools, which was one of her discoveries, when at the time we were called, you know, the tool-making ape, you know, that was like, only humans use tools, you know, 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,

• 40:34Speaker 01

  you know, like, we've heard that chimpanzee story and her research story, but this now, it's like, okay, what does all that research tell us about us and about our ability to survive and thrive individually and collectively? That's what I was really into it for, you know, like, 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, you know, to go from scientist to activist in that way is so inspiring.

• 41:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah. On that interconnected, I mean, her, her, her climate activism was initially triggered when she started to see encroachments on the chimp and ape habitats, right? So this is back in like, you know, late seventies, early eighties. And that's when she kind of shifts her focus away from being this observational scientist into 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, her biodiversity protectionist measures was going to require empowering communities.

• 42:01Rich Roll?

  Like, you have to go to the people, right?

• 42:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 42:03Rich Roll?

  You have to make these people activated. And to do that, you have to sort of empower them to figure out how to, how to make a living and be sustainable with it so that the incentives are aligned for them to be invested in it.

• 42:18Speaker 01

  Totally. If you make a mother choose between feeding her, her family and chopping down a tree or destroying the environment, the forest is going to, you know, 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 in, throughout the world have another way of sustaining themselves rather than destroying the environment. Here in our part of the world, you know, it's a very different issue, right? It's, you know, it's not typically about, you know, whether we can feed our kids in the same way. It's often about overconsumption

• 43:02Speaker 01

  and the fact that we're using too much of the world's resources.

• 43:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I mean, she was doing like micro lending way back, right? Before it became like a tech thing, you know? But she understood that, like she's so far ahead of the curve in so many ways. Do you know this, have you heard of this guy, Damian Mandar?

• 43:18Speaker 01

  I haven't, no.

• 43:20Rich Roll?

  He was a Australian special forces soldier who, you know, kind of went off the rails and reinvented himself in Africa by becoming in, like, you know, being very active in the anti-poaching community.

• 43:35Speaker 01

  Oh, cool.

• 43:35Rich Roll?

  And he's put together this all-female.

• 43:38Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yes, maybe I have.

• 43:40Rich Roll?

  Brigade called Akashinga.

• 43:42Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 43:43Rich Roll?

  Where he's empowered these women.

• 43:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:45Rich Roll?

  In a, in a similar way where, you know, they feel like, he realized that the women were the answer.

• 43:50Speaker 01

  Right, is this in Zimbabwe or Mozambique or something?

• 43:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah, one of those, I can't remember. He's been on the podcast before, but it's an extraordinary story.

• 43:56Speaker 01

  It is amazing.

• 43:57Rich Roll?

  But the principles, the reason I bring it up is that the underlying principles are the same, like empowering these women, understanding that the, the, the manner in which these women are embedded in their communities and 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 going to be capable of doing.

• 44:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 44:19Rich Roll?

  And it's really cool, and they're having like amazing results.

• 44:22Speaker 01

  It is, it's totally amazing, and, you know, I think, I wrote a novel a while back called I Have the Whale, and I went and worked with biologists and marine biologists and heard from them that basically the, 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, you know, as we were talking about, it's going to destroy us because we're going to 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, you know, we can do it for our, our children. And I do think that, you know, we humans tend to do the right thing at the last possible

• 45:07Speaker 01

  moment, so it's, you know, it's like.

• 45:11Rich Roll?

  We're in a race against time here.

• 45:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly, but. That, you know, I mean, I think, you know, what Jane says about us, you know, kind of stealing from our children, stealing the earth from our children is so powerful. And, you know, really, like, I think all of us who are parents or, you know, who love kids, want our kids and grandkids to thrive. And there's no thriving on planet Earth without a thriving planet.

• 45:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah, 100%.

• 45:46Rich Roll?

  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?

• 46:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:00Rich Roll?

  And this is how Jane thinks about these things. How does that measure up against, like, what the hope scientists are determining?

• 46:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's interesting. Well, I mean, we could take them 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, you know, the amazing human intellect, you know, 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, you know, be able to imagine the future imagination. But it's, you know, it's not necessarily the same as intelligence, right? Like, if we were intelligent, we wouldn't be destroying our planet, right? You know,

• 46:49Speaker 01

  like, 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, is what allows us to send, you know, to 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. But I asked her, you know, I think you said I was kind of the devil's advocate or kind of the, you know, a little bit of, you know, 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, you know, is one of your

• 47:33Speaker 01

  reasons for hell when it's caused such a, you know, all this mess and this disaster? And she said, you know, 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 kind of 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, greed, suddenly, I could see that those were, as she said, things that helped us evolve, helped us survive. And they were useful.

• 48:16Speaker 01

  And they played their, they played, and 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 at the beginning, the challenge that we're facing culturally, that encourages those better angels of our nature to succeed and, and, and win. Because if we don't, then we go to the ways of the dodo bird.

• 48:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I mean, every man is right from his own perspective. And if you were to walk, you know, not just a mile in that, you know, 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.

• 48:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was watching this amazing documentary about, you know, narcos and drug smugglers on the border. And, you know, one of the guys was saying to the, to the filmmaker, you know, "If I could do your job, I would do your job." You know? "This is the only job I can get." I was like, I was like, oh, you know, so... It is a really reminder, you know, I had a writing teacher who once said, "No villain is a villain in their own mind."

• 49:23Rich Roll?

  Sure, yeah.

• 49:24Speaker 01

  You know, 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, you know, what this says in terms of the amazing human intellect, as Jane said, is that, you know, 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 work with another amazing researcher named Suzanne Samard,

• 50:09Speaker 01

  who did a book called Finding the Mother Tree. And she was the woman who discovered the intelligence and 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, you know, history.

• 50:36Rich Roll?

  Right. She has this quote, "My hope for the future is that we learn wisdom again."

• 50:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:41Rich Roll?

  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, you know, our natural habitats that we lose sight of that and we compartmentalize and we apply the scientific method and we look at things, you know, 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

• 51:25Rich Roll?

  is interdependent on everything else. And if we want to live harmoniously and synchronously on this earth, we're not going to be able to do it until we can truly appreciate that.

• 51:37Speaker 01

  Absolutely, and you know, we were just kind of finding our way back to that. I mean, I think we've kind of thought that nature was all about, you know, competition, red and tooth and claw, and it's all about, you know, might is right and survival of the fittest. And actually, what we're finding, the newer sciences, it's actually survival of the 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, you know, made possible. And so, it's like, seeing, it's not that there isn't competition and we're not competing

• 52:21Speaker 01

  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.

• 52:30Rich Roll?

  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, you know, 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.

• 53:05Speaker 01

  It's kind of amazing that, yeah, it's totally...

• 53:08Rich Roll?

  And it works.

• 53:09Speaker 01

  It works.

• 53:10Rich Roll?

  Without us being involved in it.

• 53:11Speaker 01

  Right, exactly, it has that like inherent intelligence. And, you know, one of the fascinating experiments that Suzanne Samard 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.

• 53:29Rich Roll?

  So like... Like they know one needs a little bit more than the other.

• 53:32Speaker 01

  Right, exactly, okay, I'm shading you, but I'm gonna give you a little food, you know, tie you over there, you know? So it's this incredible interdependence and mutuality that is, that we've lost sight of, and I think, you know, kind of the... 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.

• 54:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, part of the problem with the human intellect is the hubris that comes with it.

• 54:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:07Rich Roll?

  That we can out-engineer this thing and, you know, problem solve and figure our figure our way through it without that level of humility and appreciation.

• 54:16Speaker 01

  Right, and I think there's a kind of hyper individualism that has that we have, especially in the, you know, this kind of modern Western culture of that we've lost track of that interdependence and that connection. And, you know, we're not going to make it if, you know, it's like it's like saying like, okay, um, you know, it's we're being taught this lesson in the most profound way. There's one climate, you know, 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.

• 54:50Rich Roll?

  But humans are not very well designed to appreciate that.

• 54:54Speaker 01

  It's it's amazing how, you know, like, I think, you know, it's interesting. I mean, we, uh, when we were hunter-gatherers, I think, you know, there's this really, you know, we had much more of that perspective, but, you know, we did, you know, we do have this, uh, you know, kind of deep competition and kind of, you know, potentially, you know, Jane also observed the apes being genocidal and having war. That was really one of the things that she discovered. So we got, you know, there were there are parts of us that are are not going away, you know, that it's like we're, you know, like, I think that any real sustained hope has to be based on reality. So like to fantasize that somehow we're going to become a different, you know, species

• 55:38Speaker 01

  or we're gonna like get rid of our selfishness or our greed, you know, that's, you know, fantasy. That's fantasizing about the future. That's unhoping 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.

• 55:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah. When COVID began and everybody stopped and no one was driving and everyone was at home, the air seemed to clear pretty quickly. It's like, you know, 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, you know, 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 the story of the cement, the guy who owned the cement plant.

• 56:39Rich Roll?

  And then, you know, I don't know, atoning for that or whatever, decides he's going to restore it to nature.

• 56:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:44Rich Roll?

  And it becomes this unbelievable forest preserve.

• 56:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:47Rich Roll?

  And not that long.

• 56:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:48Rich Roll?

  Didn't take that long.

• 56:50Speaker 01

  Well, that was really hopeful to hear that, you know, like ecosystems typically bounce back in 10 to 50 years. And that, like, if they're marine environments, it's more like 10. If they're, depending on the kind of ecosystem it is, it can be on the outside 50 years. And, you know, I was pushing her, I was like, you know, how can these envi, you know, like, isn't there a point where like nature basically breaks and we just destroy it all? And, and she was saying, you know, like, basically, you know, nature is going to be here. The question is whether we will. And, you know, we, you know, like 99.9% of all species have gone extinct throughout

• 57:35Speaker 01

  history. So, like, for us, you know, 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 going to do that in any time scale 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 Benias, who does this work on biomimicry. And she said, you know, 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

• 58:19Speaker 01

  give, a welcome species gives more to the ecosystem than they take. And so we've been taken and taken and taken 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 that we don't have

• 59:01Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 59:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah, the political will is problematic.

• 59:42Speaker 01

  Well, then we can get hopeless about our society.

• 59:47Rich Roll?

  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 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 things, we can get renewable energy. So all these things, 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.

• 1:00:33Rich Roll?

  That we can every single day. But on some level, there is a sense like that's not going to cut it like we need it on the other end, too. We need it from the highest levels down. And, you know, I'm glad to hear that you came out of the TED conference, you know, 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 and deploy the level of political and financial resources that are going to be required to tackle this in a really meaningful way.

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  You know, the future was never won without a battle. And I think we are in a battle for the soul and future of humanity. And it's not going to be easy, you know, and whether we succeed a cop or, you know, like there were a lot of cops before Paris that, you know, Christian was the first to get the the treaty that, you know, that she got was quite miraculous to get 190 countries. But what's amazing about, you know, and it's not happening fast enough. It's, you know, there are all sorts of, you know, parties that are not pulling their weight ourselves included. And yet, like at that conference, I was talking with, you know, somebody who represents

• 1:01:49Speaker 01

  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, you know, no, you know, like they have to become renewable energy companies. I mean, the fact that solar and wind have, you know, prices have declined as dramatically as they have, that a third of all energy right now is already renewable. I mean, this, these are things that, you know, like, you know, you could have been, we could have been on this program a couple of years ago and say, oh, it's never going to happen, right?

• 1:02:31Speaker 01

  And so I think, you know, what it was really interesting. To hear Jane's comment of having lived through World War II and having lived through, you know, democracy on the precipice of extinction in the face of fascism, you know, and, you know, in the face of Nazi Germany, you know, and the bombings. And like, you know, history does not happen, you know, in a textbook. It happens because individuals make decisions that change that history. And it's so easy to think about, you know, history, you know, and society as being these big political bodies or these big corporations and who are we?

• 1:03:15Speaker 01

  But as you said, you know, our consumer choices drive a lot of those corporations to change. We, you know, fortunately, in democratic societies, we are the ones who do elect our political, you know, leaders and determine what policies we are going to follow.

• 1:03:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:36Speaker 01

  So a lot of it, I think, is, you know, I think what Jane would say is, I think you're right. And what Jane would say is, there are, it's not about paper or plastic. It's not about, you know, like, that decision is going to 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 schoolgirl, you know, 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? So, I mean, that's what, you know, you could have said, who is she? But look at the impact that she's had.

• 1:04:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's unbelievable. I thought a lot about the juxtaposition of Jane and Greta because they're sort of, you know, analogues to each other. Like, on some level, you could make the argument that, you know, Greta is, you know, the sort of successor to, you know, 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?

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:50Rich Roll?

  And she was very politic in her answer.

• 1:04:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:53Rich Roll?

  I suspect that her, you know, 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, you know, come at it as hard as Greta does.

• 1:05:11Speaker 01

  You know.

• 1:05:12Rich Roll?

  And you need every, you need both.

• 1:05:13Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:05:14Rich Roll?

  All of it, you know, it's all great.

• 1:05:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:05:16Rich Roll?

  But it's interesting how they differ.

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is really interesting. I, I loved what, when, when, when I asked her, you know, like, what do you say to somebody like Greta, who says, don't give us your hope, give us your, your, you know, your fear, like, you know, realize that your house is on fire and act like your house is on fire, right? And, you know, Jane's response that, you know, we need, you know, we need fear, anger, and hope, we need all of them. You know, you, you know, it's not.

• 1:05:42Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:05:42Speaker 01

  Fear alone, it's not anger alone, it's not hope alone. You know, we need all of these responses to the crises that we're, we're facing.

• 1:05:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:52Speaker 01

  And I, you know, I do think, you know, to your, your point about their being really different, I think that Jane is more, you know, her, she, I mean, one of the amazing things that Jane did was to start get animal testing, you know, to be outlawed on chimpanzees, you know, 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

• 1:06:35Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:06:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's a tension between that absolutism, like Greta would probably say, like, well, Jane's been talking about this since the eighties, like, I don't want to have to talk about it for 50 years before something changes, you know, this 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.

• 1:07:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:09Rich Roll?

  But there's a patience required with that as well, so, and there's a, there's this idea. Of being in partnership or cooperation with some of the bad actors to help them, you know, 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, you know, sometimes in opposition, but ultimately with the same goal in mind, I think are, you know, become powerful like dual drivers.

• 1:07:39Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I think you need it all. And you need both or all of the options. You know, 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, the kind of 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, Shell Oil. And, you know, his change of heart and mind, you know, 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.

• 1:08:23Speaker 01

  You know, there's that kind of emotional shift and change. But we also need the demonstrations and the political will to, you know, be taxing carbon in a way that makes it make sense financially and as a business, and absolutely, you know, legally necessary to make the shifts, because we can't depend on everybody's hearts and minds changing in time.

• 1:08:48Rich Roll?

  Are you going to COP26? Now that you have this, you have a client and author who's like immersed in that?

• 1:08:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I, you know, I decided that I wasn't, you know, this is more of a policy forum. And, you know, the TED Climate Meeting was more of a kind of culture and thought leadership forum, that that was the place I could be most useful. So there's still a possibility that I may go, but it's, I think, again, to want to use the carbon to get there, only if I'm needed and useful.

• 1:09:21Rich Roll?

  Right, right. Back to the Greta thing. I mean, the other pillar here is the power of young people, right? And this is another thing that like Jean 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. You know, tools and resources to actually like in a very tactile way like participate in creating the change.

• 1:09:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's often called the Jane generation. You know, she's like in 68 countries. She's been having these programs which have been helping activate and get kids into activism and into kind of caring about their environments and their communities. So I think it's a powerful example of, you know, the ways in which you can intervene in the culture and actually change hearts and minds at a very young age. You know, I asked her, you know, I was pretty skeptical because I was like, you know, how can you say the power of young people is going to save us or is gonna, you know, is this reason for hope where, you know, we haven't been able to get, other previous generations haven't been able to get it done.

• 1:10:34Speaker 01

  And, you know, what's to say that they're going to 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 didn't, you know, we talked about this a little, but we have this kind of prolonged childhood in which we are, you know, we're, we're create this whole kind of nurturance that transforms and educates and changes the next generation. So, you know, we're, a lot of species, obviously, they're basically pre-programmed, they come out, they, you know, every generation does the same thing as the last generation.

• 1:11:18Speaker 01

  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, you know, also back to the work with the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu, because we talked a lot about hope and despair and, you know, the state of the world. And, you know, if you look at the news, as they said, all you see on this planet is, you know, the doom and gloom, but it's news because it's actually. You know, unusual. It's not the vast majority of what's happening on this planet. And so if you look at the reality of, you know, most of human life,

• 1:12:00Speaker 01

  there's an enormous amount of compassion and kindness and caring that takes place, you know, 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? You know, like, like women couldn't vote, you know, like, you know, just over a century ago.

• 1:12:19Rich Roll?

  I mean, that was like five seconds ago.

• 1:12:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, five seconds ago, right? I mean, like, the transformation, you know, we used to think, you know, we thought that slavery was like, you know, morally justifiable. You know, like, you know, just, you know, less than 200 years ago, right? So, I mean, you, there's, 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, you know, the quarterly cycle or the, you know, political cycle and to say, oh, God, we're, you know, 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 going to deal with the crises

• 1:13:05Speaker 01

  because we are going to have to or we're going to go extinct. It's really a question of how skillfully we do that, how fast we do that, how much humans suffer 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.

• 1:13:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:29Rich Roll?

  I don't know that we've forgotten how much we have progressed as much as we're literally brainwashed by dint 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. It's like, we're actually way better off than, you know, most of us

• 1:13:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:51Rich Roll?

  recognize. And if you really look at, you know, 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.

• 1:14:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:02Rich Roll?

  And it's almost as if we need, you know, 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, you know, a germinator of that kind of hope, but there's nothing like that. And perhaps there's no economic, you know, a viable economic model to create something like that. But imagine the impact of something like that. And, you know, we all celebrate lives like Jane and stories that make us feel uplifted. And yet, when push comes to shove, we, you know, click the channel and we indulge ourselves in whatever disasters are happening around the world,

• 1:14:46Rich Roll?

  like every single day, or scrolling through our Twitter feed.

• 1:14:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, you know, there's something that the neuroscientists call the negative bias of the brain, which is, you know, we evolved to look for the problem. We look, we evolved to look for what's going to kill us. And so, you know, to look for the threat, the danger. And so, it's not surprising that, you know, we're kind of glued to the car wreck, you know, and to see-

• 1:15:13Rich Roll?

  Disaster porn.

• 1:15:14Speaker 01

  Disaster porn, you know, and, you know, we, that is really fascinating to the human imagination and the human mind. And that's not, again, that's not going away either. And I think that the, you know, and yes, I think the media has become this kind of, like, if you think about, you know, pre, you know, media culture, you know, like, you know, 100 years ago, you know, people were not saturated with this, you know, kind of the horrible things that are happening everywhere in the world, right? There was kind of like, you know, in your neighborhood, was shit going down or not, you know, is there bad, you know, like, you know, you just didn't have that same kind of global

• 1:15:57Speaker 01

  perspective. And you weren't being, you know, as you said, saturated by disaster porn or misery porn, or outrage. And I think this is an example of, you know, do our algorithms encourage outrage? Or do they encourage the facts and, you know, and a more balanced view of-

• 1:16:17Rich Roll?

  Well, I think we've answered that question.

• 1:16:19Speaker 01

  Well, certainly the algorithms as they are programmed now do, right? Kind of enhance the outrage and the despair and the depression. And, you know, 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-

• 1:16:36Rich Roll?

  BJ?

• 1:16:37Speaker 01

  Actually, well, we work with BJ, yes. This is actually-

• 1:16:39Rich Roll?

  He's like patient zero for that. He taught the class that, you know, spawned all these technologists that went out and created algorithms.

• 1:16:47Speaker 01

  Well, they, yes, exactly. That's the problem with technology and science. You can use it for good or you can use it for evil. But, no, this is actually Ethan Cross. 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, but if they're more engaged in it and using it for that social support, for that hope contagion, for that, you know, that hope is a social gift and getting support and giving support, that's where it can be actually really useful.

• 1:17:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. You know, 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?

• 1:17:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:39Rich Roll?

  Are you using it to have healthy communication? Or are you just mindlessly consuming it?

• 1:17:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:44Rich Roll?

  And if you're using it for creative purposes, then it becomes an incredibly powerful and often uplifting tool.

• 1:17:51Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, is it, you know, 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, you know, like, so the human mind is, you know, there's the amazing human intellect, but there are all sorts of other little challenges of the human mind, too.

• 1:18:13Rich Roll?

  Little dark corners.

• 1:18:16Speaker 01

  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 for the first time, we have this global mind. We have this, 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.

• 1:18:54Rich Roll?

  Right. If you could take that global hive mind and direct it towards positive change, there can be no more powerful force.

• 1:19:03Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:19:03Rich Roll?

  And therein lies the hope.

• 1:19:06Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:19:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Had you ever met Jane before this project?

• 1:19:39Speaker 01

  No. Actually, 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.

• 1:19:48Rich Roll?

  Oh, no way. Wow.

• 1:19:51Speaker 01

  And I had brought her a bottle of Johnnie Walker, which I knew was her fave. So she was sitting there with her Mr. H, her little monkey that she was given by a man who was blind, that she carries around the world. And so she was there, and I introduced myself. And I said, you know, 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 Johnnie Walker. Walker with me. And she set it on the counter next to this, you know, like what looked like a two gallon

• 1:20:34Speaker 01

  pour over bottle of Famous Grouse whiskey that was half gone. And I was like, oh damn, this is gonna be intense. And so I was a bit intimidated.

• 1:20:43Rich Roll?

  She shamed you and told you you should have bought the cheaper one.

• 1:20:45Speaker 01

  She did. She also told me I should have bought the cheaper one and donated the money. But, you know, so she, you know, is a big fan of whiskey. She, I think, she, you know, 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, you know, whenever, wherever she was in the world, she and her mom would kind of toast in the evening together, which was a very sweet tradition. So.

• 1:21:13Rich Roll?

  But obviously, you know, her reputation precedes her. You go into this with a certain sensibility about who she is and what she's gonna be like. Like, were there, was there anything about her that surprised you or that was different than what you had read or, you know, kind of consumed in all the media that there is about, you know, footage of her doing her thing?

• 1:21:34Speaker 01

  Well, a couple of things. I mean, I think that just seeing that in this 87 year old woman was like a military general, you know, like that she's like, she's very sweet, very kind, but she's tough as nails. And she, you don't get to be Jane Goodall. You don't go into the, you know, the forest without some serious, you know, will and some serious, you know, kind of sense of yourself. And so that was really powerful and amazing to see her power and her strength, you know, as gently as it is deployed, you know, like, you know, you shake the Dalai Lama's hand and you feel like you're about

• 1:22:17Speaker 01

  to be thrown across the room. And then, you know, in a martial arts move, you know, like, there's power and strength in that. And, you know, even in Archbishop Tutu's hand, which is, was, you know, feeble by polio, you know, you feel the strength and the power there. And I think that's really inspiring is just seeing, you know, somebody that doesn't, isn't fading away, you know, there, if anything, they're, you know, they're like Yoda or something, you know, they're becoming more powerful. So that was really amazing. The other thing that.

• 1:22:50Speaker 01

  I was really impressed with was that she has this kind of seeker's willingness to ask the big questions, you know, like about life and its meaning. You know, a lot of scientists, they're kind of focused on their little expertise and their little area of study, or maybe 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's willingness to follow the facts wherever they may lead.

• 1:23:21Rich Roll?

  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.

• 1:23:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:36Rich Roll?

  Which was at odds with this notion that, no, empathy is at odds with the scientific method.

• 1:23:41Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:23:42Rich Roll?

  And having that like conviction about that as a young person is amazing. Like, just in, she's naming all the, you know, the chimps and the apes and everyone's telling her, "Don't do that."

• 1:23:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:23:53Rich Roll?

  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, you know, that gravitas, like, she's always quoting Winston Churchill.

• 1:24:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:10Rich Roll?

  Clearly, you know, and being a child of the war and all of that, like, that looms large. Like, this, you know, what I take from that is like, she knows that she's a leader and she's looking to the greatest leaders for, you know, her own inspiration about how best to lead and how to maintain conviction in the face of, you know, tremendous obstacles.

• 1:24:31Speaker 01

  Well, this kind of transitions us to the fourth reason of hope of the indomitable human spirit, which, you know, 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, you know, her own indomitable human spirit and where does that come from? And that resilience that you spoke of before and that sense of, you know, kind of really not being stopped by, you know, the, you know, either the seeming Or the biases and the prejudices of the time that would say a woman wasn't able to do what she did. You know, that ability to really be indomitable. I mean, she really, you can see that in her.

• 1:25:14Speaker 01

  And I think that was really fascinating, you know, 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, you know, survival and meeting the challenges that we face and that it's something bigger than us. You know, 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, you know, so there's this almost kind of transpersonal piece of it,

• 1:25:56Speaker 01

  which was really inspiring of like, you know, 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.

• 1:26:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that reminds me of this quote. Do you know who Scott Harrison is? He has this nonprofit called Charity Water.

• 1:26:17Speaker 01

  Oh, yes.

• 1:26:18Rich Roll?

  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.

• 1:26:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. You know, that reminds me of a story that Brian Stevenson told me when one of the projects that we worked on, his book, Just Mercy. And he, 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, Brian, that's gonna make you tired, tired, tired. It's like, yeah, we can't, you know, if we think about it as it's just, you know, that I think one of the things that You know, our whole kind of educational system, our whole society makes it all about us

• 1:27:13Speaker 01

  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? You know, that's where misery comes from. You know, that's where hopelessness comes from. When I realized, you know, 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

• 1:27:58Speaker 01

  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. You know, we're here to help something much greater, whether that's our kids and our family, or whether that's, you know, 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. You know, when we are able to go beyond just the kind of like

• 1:28:40Speaker 01

  fixated on our own, either, you know, our own bank account or our own survival and our, or our own success, there's that indomitable human spirit, I think, comes in even more powerfully because it becomes bigger. We become bigger than us.

• 1:28:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Yeah. It's not my natural predisposition. It like, it requires work. You know, it's like, I'm caught up in my own bullshit and I'm thinking about like, how does this affect me? And like, you know, where am I going to 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, you know, two of the biggest... Global icons in modern history. It's easy to get caught up in 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.

• 1:29:36Speaker 01

  When is Oprah or Anderson Cooper coming?

• 1:29:38Rich Roll?

  I know, 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, you know, beyond like, you know, my personal self-will. And, you know, so that it can be, you know, the greater than the sum of its parts, so to speak. Right?

• 1:30:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:30:06Rich Roll?

  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, you know, like, natural, but can be cultivated. And I just know in my own personal experience, you know, when I approach situations and I'm able to live in that space, that it's always better, you know? And it's also more gratifying because you're, you know, 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.

• 1:30:48Speaker 01

  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. You know, it's all about our grades and our career and our success. And like, somehow, life evolved for this kind of separate locomotion and we, you know, are these individual people and we see the world through our own eyes and we are the, you know, the director and hero of our own movie all, you know, 24/7. That's, you know, how our consciousness works and we're not getting away from that either. But I think that when, you know, like, there's this interesting thing you were talking about,

• 1:31:29Speaker 01

  about the difference between hope and faith, you know, of like, like, well, yes, a belief structure that says there's something greater going on here, that there is, you know, a greater purpose to life. I think can be hugely sustaining and, you know, or a belief in God for many people. It can be really, really, really powerful. And hope is a little different than that, you know, like faith says, okay, I know these things to be true.

• 1:31:58Speaker 01

  Hope says, like, I hope these things are true, you know, like, you know, like.

• 1:32:03Rich Roll?

  Self-defining.

• 1:32:04Speaker 01

  You know, it's a lot, it's humbler in some way. It's not so confident. It's like, and, but I do think that, you know, to come back to the point about whether it's, you know, the challenge of getting out of our own kind of self-absorption and our, like, I am as self-absorbed as, as anyone, you know? I mean, I've got the same, you know, like, the same rumination, the same, you know, kind of self-doubts as everyone has, and we, we're not getting, again, getting rid of those things. I think it's like, can we step into a state? I think some of these people who do devote their lives to something greater than themselves, develop it as a trait, you know?

• 1:32:47Speaker 01

  But can you step into this state where you're able to set aside, you know, 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, you know, the indomitable human spirit can happen, you know, in our own survival, you know, like, you know, it's every, you know, survival movie is, you know, an example of the indomitable human spirit and our will to survive. But it's a little different, I asked you, you know, it's a little different than the will to survive.

• 1:33:29Speaker 01

  It is something greater than just our own individual will to keep living.

• 1:33:36Rich Roll?

  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 humans, the indomitable human spirit, like, being called upon to perhaps even put yourself in danger for the greater good.

• 1:33:53Speaker 01

  Exactly, which people have been doing throughout all human history, for, for something greater than themselves. You know, it's interesting, we.

• 1:34:03Speaker 01

  When we're talking about the indomitable human spirit and kind of our own life and the end of our life, you know, obviously Jane is 87 and you know, I, we had this fascinating conversation about death. And I don't know if you, if we should, you know, talk about

• 1:34:19Rich Roll?

  No, let's do it.

• 1:34:19Speaker 01

  But, you know, I think that that was even really interesting and hopeful. You know, I asked her what her, her next great adventure was going to be, and she said death. And, you know, I had this image of, you know, Jane Goodall with, you know, the binoculars and the notepad, you know, heading out into the afterlife, you know, like, okay, what are we gonna find here? But it was fascinating to hear her views on the afterlife.

• 1:34:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah, so expound upon that a little bit because it is, it is interesting. I mean, she's obviously contemplating this deeply as she, you know, inches, you know, closer and closer to this inevitable end. But I think she has such a healthy and thoughtful approach to it.

• 1:35:04Speaker 01

  You know, so

• 1:35:05Rich Roll?

  Not dissimilar from your father.

• 1:35:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it really is this kind of view that, you know, when my dad was dying, he said, you know, I asked him how long he was gonna stick around and, you know, I was, and he said, you know, I'm just waiting here for landing instructions, you know, and so

• 1:35:21Rich Roll?

  It's unbelievable.

• 1:35:22Speaker 01

  You know, 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, you know, kind of view. And I think he actually came to that in his life. I don't know if that was always there. But, you know, Jane had this similar view, and here we're going to, you know, 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. And that, you know, she had, shares in the book,

• 1:36:03Speaker 01

  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 And you know, as my dad was dying, we were also working with a guy named Bruce Grayson, who wrote a book called After, which is about, he's the guy who, kind of the world's leader and expert on near-death experience, people who've, you know, kind of come close to death and kind of 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. You know, he went to Bruce Grayson, and Bruce Grayson looked at his medical charts and, you know.

• 1:36:44Rich Roll?

  Was he the guy who was like a surgeon?

• 1:36:47Speaker 01

  So even Alexander was the guy who was a surgeon?

• 1:36:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, I know that story.

• 1:36:51Speaker 01

  You're right. And so even Alexander went to Bruce Grayson and to kind of figure out what had happened to him when he had this near-death experience. And so Bruce Grayson spent the last 40 years developing the field of near-death studies and, you know, looking at thousands of these cases of, and one of the things that was fascinating to have him say was that in all of, like, all of those, you know, from looking at all those cases, there's an enormous amount of commonality. And they're fundamentally based on that kind of, you know, so it's not an experimental science, you know, they don't kill some people or have, but they're near-death experience.

• 1:37:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's inherently anecdotal.

• 1:37:31Speaker 01

  It's anecdotal, it's observational science, like astronomy is anecdotal, you know, is 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. You know, I, you know, watching my dad die and kind of being there, you know, 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 know, you start wondering, you know, like, 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.

• 1:38:16Rich Roll?

  So has that shifted your cynical New York mind?

• 1:38:21Speaker 01

  You know, I'd say, you know, like, But the New Yorker me says, it could be possible.

• 1:38:27Speaker 01

  There's a chance.

• 1:38:28Rich Roll?

  Well, you can hope.

• 1:38:29Speaker 01

  You can, right, exactly. There's a, there's a possibility. And, you know, look, none of us will know, like, until we get there. And Jane's gonna probably get there before many of us.

• 1:38:42Speaker 01

  And, you know, maybe this will send some, you know, some notes back from the field.

• 1:38:48Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:38:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. But, you know, we don't, we, what I would say is I think that I've come to feel like, you know, 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 welcomes species on this planet, how to survive and thrive in a way that has become more urgent now than ever before.

• 1:39:34Speaker 01

  And, you know, it's an incredibly exciting time to be alive. And it's not unlike World War II in that we have got to become the greatest generations that have ever lived if we're gonna face these challenges.

• 1:39:48Rich Roll?

  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 a unlikely route that she's never taken before, and where they would typically walk, like a bomb explodes, like, but her life is peppered with a lot of these stories. And I think if we're, if we're all honest with ourselves, we can all, you know, find weird synchronous things that have happened in our lives and coincidences. And we have a choice, like. Are those meaningful?

• 1:40:33Rich Roll?

  Can we look at those and extract some wisdom? Or develop some level of awe and wonder 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."

• 1:41:18Rich Roll?

  And we've only be-- she says, "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.

• 1:41:36Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. And I think that lots of the most visionary scientists, you know, we got to work with Stephen Hawking, who, at the end of his life, and, you know, they're, I think, they're able to kind of peer, they recognize that humility of what we don't know and the mystery of it. And obviously Einstein was, you know, was very famously, you know, talks about that. And I think that, you know, one of the interesting distinctions is between hope and optimism. And so, you know, 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.

• 1:42:17Speaker 01

  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--

• 1:42:27Speaker 01

  Christiane 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, you know, 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, you know, saying, you know, is my, you know, am I hopeful today? What do the facts look like? Am I feeling optimistic? You know, like, no, you know, it's gonna rain. I'm not, I'm not hopeful, you know, like. But what they, I think she's saying to us, which is so powerful, and I think Jane is saying the same thing, which is actually, no,

• 1:43:12Speaker 01

  it's you actually don't wait for the facts to be hopeful. You actually create the facts that then generate the hope.

• 1:43:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's the opposite of what you would think.

• 1:43:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:25Rich Roll?

  That's so interesting. Can you be a hopeful pessimist?

• 1:43:34Speaker 01

  You know, I think, you know, what we, when we were researching optimism and pessimism and hope, you know, like, there seems like there's just a certain, you know, temper mentally. 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, is people who've, you know, kind of had their hopes dashed and, you know, 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, you know, that negative bias and they're, you know, kind of more oriented towards, you know, 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,

• 1:44:19Speaker 01

  you know, we need all of the minds, all their, with all of their diversity. And so some people, you know, 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, huge... Human survival trait without which we perish. You know, 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 going to learn language. And that hope is this thing that we have. That now we have some way of understanding. You know, how we can cultivate it, how we can nurture it in one another. How we can sustain and support it in one another.

• 1:45:02Rich Roll?

  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, you know, 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.

• 1:45:34Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 1:45:35Rich Roll?

  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? You know, as a parent trying to help, you know, guide young people to maturity?

• 1:45:50Speaker 01

  Such a great question. I think there is a mental health pandemic that's going on now. And I think young people are, you know, kind of disproportionately affected by it. I think that the rampant, you know, kind of cases of depression, anxiety, both clinically and, you know, 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, you know, the crises in our world are expressing themselves through people and through our children. Right? Like, it's like, again, we like to see this as individualized and atomized.

• 1:46:32Speaker 01

  And somehow, you know, 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, you know, give my child Prozac or deal with, you know, this. And, you know, and yes, you know, obviously, we need to deal with our kids' challenges. You know, my kids have talked to me about whether they want to have kids or not, you know, and because they're so, you know, there's so much despair out there about the world that our children are inheriting. And I think that we really have, um, we have not done what we needed to do to be good ancestors for our kids and grandkids and great grandchildren.

• 1:47:16Speaker 01

  I think that, that said, I think, you know, coming back to this idea of hope as a social gift is like, we can model hope in our own lives, you know, obviously, our, as you know, as a parent, you know, what we do is way more important than what we say, you know? Yeah. 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, you know, that social support that helps them in their times of crisis is huge and important and like, you know, like, the, the most important thing.

• 1:48:00Speaker 01

  And at the same time, one of the things that, the hardest lesson I have had as a parent is to 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, you know, and, but not try to take it away from them. Yeah. And I think that that's the other piece of like resilience and, you know, 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, or make the path easy.

• 1:48:44Speaker 01

  Coming back to that fundamental recognition that, you know, 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. You know, this wasn't, you know, like, some unending yoga class that they were in that, you know, was like, you know, blissful from start to finish, right? And actually, when you, coming back to that phrase from my dad, you know, 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, you know, having grown up with a mom who suffered from depression,

• 1:49:27Speaker 01

  I think I thought for a long time that my job was to kind of run away from sadness and, you know, run after joy. And working on the Book of Joy with Tutu and the Dalai Lama realized there ain't no joy without sadness. There's no, you know, 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, you know, like recognizing we're so grief phobic in this society. But we're experiencing enormous grief as a society.

• 1:50:08Speaker 01

  And we're grief for all we've lost in the pandemic, grief for what's happening in our world. And 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, you know, if we grieve that's and are able to be there in that suffering and don't deny it.

• 1:50:39Rich Roll?

  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. It's so hard, man. That impulse of like wanting to make it okay for your kids.

• 1:50:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50:58Rich Roll?

  Like, I just wanna, 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, this, you know, it's a real heavy. Kind of vibe that they shoulder for themselves. And you know, you feel like the culprit in that on some level.

• 1:51:20Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I was just down with Archbishop Tutu in South Africa. And, you know, we were talking about when our kids suffer. It's like, 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 have. You're responsible in some way for that.

• 1:51:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that, you know, to the extent that you helped create it and your responsibility to alleviate it.

• 1:51:46Speaker 01

  Exactly. And, you know, I think that that is, uh, you know, that is the, the, the noble curriculum of being a parent. You know, is, is coming to terms with all of that and, and recognizing, you know, again, that we can't. It's not our job to, to, to save them from that suffering is, is really powerful.

• 1:52:10Rich Roll?

  So you've had the privilege of, 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? Like, 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, you know? And, and you, you do a version of that. And you've created like this really interesting business that is very different from a typical literary agency. Like, it's, it's almost like a production company meets creative agency on some level.

• 1:52:51Rich Roll?

  Where my sense, and correct me if I'm wrong, is you, you just seek out these really interesting people that you're really curious about. And not only do you kind of enlist them as, as clients and you agent their books, but you are deeply immersed in these books. Like you function as editor, as co-creator. Like, it's not just like, okay, send me your book proposal. It's like, okay, come to the, you know, come and, you know, get an Airbnb in Santa Cruz. And we're gonna like hang out for two months until we figure out what this book is.

• 1:53:22Speaker 01

  Right? Well, so, yeah, in my agenting, kind of, creative life at Idea Architects, so, working with my colleagues, you know, incredible teammates 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.

• 1:54:07Speaker 01

  It's a really bold mission. It's been amazing to get to do that with such extraordinary people, you know, who are pushing the envelope of human possibility in some way. We do it primarily, you know, 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 podcasts. So, you know, it's really about trying to create, you know, somebody, it's funny, somebody just wrote to me this week and said, you know, "You've created like a new genre,

• 1:54:51Speaker 01

  it's called like a hope genre." So, it's a, you know, 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, you know, kind of, 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, you know, I'll tell you, like, you know, we're talking about despair and our kids and stuff, so when I was, you know, when I was seven, you know, when I was one of those kids, you know, I was pretty despairing too, and I was in that reality of growing

• 1:55:34Speaker 01

  up with a depressed mom and really isolated in, you know, an apartment in New York. And, you know, at one point, I was like, I'm not so happy here. I want to check out. And I was one leg over the balcony of our apartment. And, you know, looking down, you know, at the kind of matchbox cars and the little people who looked ant-like below and, you know, I had to make a choice about whether I was gonna jump or not. And, you know, 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

• 1:56:19Speaker 01

  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 want to live as a nation, as a world, as communities, and that we can create societies that are, that are, we come from that amazing imagination, that amazing superpower that we have, that are wiser, healthier, and more just.

• 1:56:50Rich Roll?

  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.

• 1:57:01Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:57:14Rich Roll?

  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?

• 1:57:23Speaker 01

  We don't know yet. We, you know, 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 want to hear next.

• 1:57:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah, like, you know, shoot us a tweet or whatever with who you think the next book should be about.

• 1:57:43Speaker 01

  The next Global Icon, yes.

• 1:57:44Rich Roll?

  Blank.

• 1:57:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:57:45Rich Roll?

  Which icon?

• 1:57:46Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:57:48Rich Roll?

  I always love talking to you, man.

• 1:57:49Speaker 01

  Oh, it's so fun.

• 1:57:51Rich Roll?

  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.

• 1:58:03Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:58:03Rich Roll?

  And everything you do has such a... You know, it has that intentionality behind it. But you know, this, 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.

• 1:58:19Speaker 01

  Thank you. 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 this, the extraordinary guests that you get to be mind melding with, is it's a real privilege to get to Eve's drop and listen in. And thank you for spreading all the goodness that you are.

• 1:58:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah, thanks, Ben. Appreciate that. All right.

• 1:58:44Speaker 01

  To be continued. Next.

• 1:58:46Rich Roll?

  Peace.

• 1:58:47Speaker 01

  Thanks.

• 1:58:58Rich Roll?

  That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and/or comment.

• 1:59:43Rich Roll?

  Supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, of course, awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the Meal Planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo, with additional audio engineering by Cale Curtis. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis, with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davy Greenberg. Graphic and social media assets courtesy of Daniel Solis, Dan Drake, and A.J. Akpodiette.

• 2:00:30Rich Roll?

  Thank you Georgia Whaley for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants.

• 2:00:46Speaker 01

  Namaste. [music]