We Can Solve Climate Change Now: Paul Hawken & IN-Q LIVE

I'm ecstatic to share my first live podcast event, recorded at the Los Angeles Wilshire Ebell Theatre on September 27, 2019. For all of us, this podcast is an abstraction. The motivation behind the event was to create a tactile, analog experience for 1,100 people to gather around shared purpose and passion. An opportunity to cultivate community. Raise consciousness. Elevate intimacy. Deepen personal connectivity around our collective humanity — and the important ideas of our time. An unforgettable lifetime moment, the resulting impact exceeded my wildest expectations. I'm still basing in the glow. And deeply grateful for an experience that left me feeling more intimately connected with all of you — and optimistic about the future of our planet. The program opens with the poetic spoken word genius of my friend and two-time podcast guest IN-Q (check out RRP 81 & RRP 118). Named to Oprah Winfrey's SuperSoul 100 list of the world's most influential thought leaders, IN-Q is a National Poetry Slam Champion, multi-platinum songwriter, and world-renowned keynote speaker. His groundbreaking performances include selling out one of the largest one-man poetry shows in US history, being the first spoken word artist to perform with Cirque Du Soleil, and being featured on HBO's Def Poetry Jam and A&E’s Look Closer campaign, which debuted during the Emmys. He has been featured in major media ranging from Forbes to AdWeek and several of his recent videos have gone viral with over 60 million combined views. I then take the stage to share some thoughts, including a powerful listener e-mail, before settling into a fascinating conversation with Paul Hawken — one of the world's pre-eminent authorities on global climate change and a man who has indelibly shaped my personal perspective on ecological responsibility. A pioneering environmentalist, activist, entrepreneur, architect of corporate reform, and multiple New York Times bestselling author, Paul has dedicated his life to environmental sustainability and changing the relationship between business and the environment. His work includes founding successful ecologically conscious businesses (including the natural foods market Erewhon), writing about the impacts of commerce on living systems and consulting with heads of state and CEOs on economic development, industrial ecology and environmental policy. In addition to penning countless op-eds and peer reviewed articles, Paul has written 8 books, including Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming. Paul is also the Founder and Founding Executive Director of Project Drawdown, an extraordinary non-profit dedicated to researching and implementing solutions for reversing global warming Paul has lectured everywhere, including Harvard, Stanford and Wharton. He has given commencement addresses at Yale and Berkeley. He has appeared on Bill Maher, Charlie Rose, Larry King and countless other media outlets. And his new book, Regeneration: Ending The Climate Crisis In One Generation, hits bookstores in 2020. Enjoy! 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.

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 0:44Rich Roll?

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• 1:05Paul Hawken?

  I feel like this situation we're in, the most gnarly, super wicked problem humanity has ever described and may ever face, is actually a blessing. And if we look at it from the point of view of its feedback, and from, actually, from the whole of the earth, because you can't really separate the atmosphere from plants and forests and water. If you're looking at it from that way, then it's a gift. It's feedback, and you take 100% responsibility for your actions, who you are, and then you begin to imagine, innovate. You do things that make sense to you, that help you connect more to this beautiful, extraordinary miracle we call the living world.

• 1:48Paul Hawken?

  And that's the gift of climate change. The gift is the transformation of self and of the world. And the solutions are transformative. So, we can either accept the offering and the gift, or we can go into self-pity.

• 2:06Rich Roll?

  That's Paul Hawken, and this is a very special live event edition of the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 2:24Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody. How goes it? What is happening? My name is Rich Roll. You probably already know that. This is a podcast. It's my podcast. Welcome or welcome back. As most of you know, we recently hosted our very first super legit live show in Los Angeles. And it was an absolutely incredible experience, top to bottom. It exceeded my wildest expectations. It was really a lifetime moment. I'm never, ever going to forget. And an opportunity to share this work with about 1,100 people. And also, an event that left me feeling more connected with all of you,

• 3:05Rich Roll?

  this incredible community, and really optimistic about humanity in general. I've got so much love, gratitude, and appreciation for everybody who attended. And today, I'm honored to share with all of you, who were not able to attend in person, a program that opens with the poetic spoken word genius of my friend and former podcast guest, In Q. Check out Episodes 81 and 118 from way back in the day, if you missed them the first time around, followed by some brief remarks by yours truly, and culminating in a rather extraordinary conversation with legendary, pioneering environmentalist, activist, author, and entrepreneur Paul Hawken,

• 3:50Rich Roll?

  a man who has spent the better part of the last many years studying solutions designed to reverse the damaging effects of global climate change. And I think it's fair to say, a man who has indelibly shaped my perspective on ecological responsibility. But before we dive in, please indulge me by supporting the sponsors who make this show possible.

• 4:20Rich Roll?

  Okay, RRP Live at the Ebel Theater in Los Angeles. In queue, poetry, community, recovery, personal growth, Paul Hawken, environmentalism, activism, personal responsibility, solutions, food systems, soil, regenerative agriculture. It's all happening, people. And I think that's just about all the purposely oblique prefatory remarks I want to make right now with one caveat. We professionally filmed this entire experience and the production value on the video version of the event is absolutely off the hook, next level gorgeous.

• 5:01Rich Roll?

  So if you typically only digest this show in audio-only format, I would highly, highly suggest that this show, this episode, above all other episodes, would be one you're also going to want to check out on YouTube. It's just amazing. And you can find it at youtube.com/richroll or by clicking on the "Watch Video" button on the episode page on my website. All right, time to get down at the Willshire Ebel Theater. Get it on.

• 5:36Speaker 02

  How are you? Do you feel good? Do you feel alive?

• 5:43Speaker 02

  I'm going to do a few poems for you guys. It's a real pleasure that I was invited here tonight.

• 5:50Speaker 02

  "Life is all about you and not at all about you."

• 5:56Speaker 02

  Now, that's two opposing thoughts, and yet both of them are true. How can we experience everything we choose to do while observing the experience we're having from a higher view? Awareness, but of who?

• 6:14Speaker 02

  I am the journey that I'm getting to. Gratitude is my destination. My destiny is perfectly aligned with this location. I am the map, so my rhymes are like road signs. I have everything I want, because my imagination's mine. But mine is not enough for me, because I am not my mind. I could see it all and never get to see, I'm truly blind. I could be it all, but all identity is intertwined. The moon is only bright because it reflects the sunshine. And I'm not entirely convinced I even write these lines, because my DNA is coded by divine design.

• 6:59Speaker 02

  But if I manifest abundance while humanity is dying, I am equally responsible for all that I'm denying.

• 7:13Speaker 02

  See, you can tell the truth and still be lying.

• 7:19Speaker 02

  I did it for years. My perception was a funhouse mirror. And my projection was exaggerated on reality till my reflection back was nothing more than technicality. So who am I if I'm not who I am?

• 7:38Speaker 02

  What if I didn't have my name, or my age, or my friends? If I didn't do my poetry, who would I be then?

• 7:47Speaker 02

  The things that I've become are not the things I truly am. And everything I think I own owns me in the end. Existence doesn't owe me anything, quite the opposite. Existence will exist long after I am missed, so the art is more important than the artist is. It's not a human race, it's just the human race. There's nothing left to chase. We do not run this place. But both medicine and poisons an acquired taste, so I started taking selfies of somebody else's face.

• 8:28Speaker 02

  Right before I die, I'm gonna tell a joke.

• 8:33Speaker 02

  So that everyone on my bedside can laugh before I croak. Most depart on somber notes, but life is serious enough. And we take our seriousness so serious, for what? Just because we're serious doesn't mean we're tough. It requires more courage to laugh when times get rough. Cause laughter doubles as an outlet. If energy is stuck, it can disrupt your pattern long enough to shift how you look. And if you shift how you look, you shift how you look. That way, people see you differently and it changes shit up. The glass is either half-empty or half-filled up.

• 9:18Speaker 02

  I'm just grateful that I have a cup.

• 9:23Speaker 02

  So many brag about how they don't give a fuck because they have no fucks to give. Me, I give so many fucks that you would think I have none left. But my fucks are exponential, so I'll give until my death. Cause I'll have infinite fucks until my very last breath. And that's when I'll tell my joke.

• 9:43Speaker 02

  And it will be so good. That the waiting room will laugh like they never knew they could. And they'll have to tell their friends, and their friends will laugh too. And pretty soon, the whole city will be laughing at the truth. And they'll laugh until they cry, and they'll cry until they scream. And they'll scream until they love, and they'll love until they dream. It was just a little joke, I didn't know what it could mean. It was just a little joke, now the joke is on me. Because the laughter was contagious, so it spread across the land. My punchline was so outrageous, people couldn't even stand. They started rolling on the floors, they started giving up beliefs. They started begging me for more, but I was already deceased.

• 10:28Speaker 02

  It didn't matter, rich or poor, forget the languages they speak. Cause the heart can understand. So it rippled through the streets, and they laughed beyond their fears. And they laughed beyond their grief, and they laughed beyond their wars. They laughed themselves right into peace. We are pieces in the puzzle, but we've never seen the box. We're addicted to the struggle, it's a fucking paradox.

• 10:52Speaker 02

  But I put that in my joke.

• 10:59Speaker 02

  So the irony was obvious.

• 11:03Speaker 02

  "No mirrors and no smoke. The clarity was so hilarious that people fucking choked. Then they laughed." Everybody, throw your hands up. "People fucking choked." Everybody, put your hands up. Now go like this. "People fucking choked. Then they laughed about the choking. It was universal dope. That humanity was smoking. And humanity was open, overwhelmed by their emotions."

• 11:25Speaker 02

  They heard the laughter coming from the mountains and the oceans.

• 11:31Speaker 02

  They heard the laughter coming from the skies and trees. Even the universe was laughing as it fell to its knees.

• 11:39Speaker 02

  And right then, the laughter stopped. It was almost all at once. At first, it was a shock. The transition was abrupt. But eventually, they settled in, united in their work. They had a lot to do together as they built a better earth.

• 11:58Speaker 02

  I never saw it happen, but I was sure it did. I held my wife and kids' hands as I closed my eyelids. And I dreamt about this world and the things we could create. If I could find the right joke before my soul evacuates. So I opened up my mouth, but I had nothing left to say. So my joke was in the silence as I slowly slipped away.

• 12:46Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 12:59Speaker 02

  If you guys feel alive, say yeah.

• 13:03Speaker 02

  So, I was coming out of my new therapist's office the other day. This is totally true. And sitting in the waiting room was my old therapist.

• 13:19Speaker 02

  My first thought was, I must have made the right decision.

• 13:26Speaker 02

  I hadn't seen him in a few years, and it was like immediately awkward. So there was an uncomfortable silence. I was like, "Hey, man, how are you?" He was like, "I'm good. How are you?" I was like, "I'm good."

• 13:40Speaker 02

  Then there was another silence. And I just said, "All right, man, well, you know, take care." And he was like, "Yeah, you too, man." And I walked away, thinking, "We are all going through this human shit together, aren't we?"

• 13:58Speaker 02

  This is called "One Little Dot."

• 14:02Speaker 02

  How can something this big be invisible?

• 14:07Speaker 02

  The environment is everywhere, and yet it isn't visible.

• 14:12Speaker 02

  Maybe if we saw it, we would see it's not invincible and have to take responsibility as individuals. How can something this big be invisible? If it's all around us, it should show itself on pure principle. The scientists are certain that the damage is residual, and climate change data is reaching levels that are critical, yet somehow that's political. We argue over math. Our citizens are too cynical to believe in facts. We make excuses and hold on to the recent past. We don't want to sacrifice, so we refuse to ask. I grew up in a city.

• 14:56Speaker 02

  It's all I ever knew. So even now, I have nothing to compare it to. I have to hit the park to see more than a tree or two. I have to visit nature like it's in a fucking zoo.

• 15:12Speaker 02

  But California was wild before the parking lots, before the mass malls, before designer shops, before the strip clubs, before the sea change, when mountain lions roam freely over freeways, before the fast food, before the freeze frames. We live around a bunch of dead shit these days. You with me?

• 15:36Speaker 02

  It's not an argument for better or worse. It's an observation on how we've been treating Mother Earth. And we always seem to mistreat the ones we love first. But we protect what is ours. My land, my life, my house, my kids, my job, my wife, my dog, my car, my country, my culture. But when it comes to nature, our perspective is external. The planet, the forest, the ocean, the skies, the mountains, the valleys, always the. Never mind if it's not me, never mind. I'm too busy all the time.

• 16:19Speaker 02

  And without the ownership, we ignore the warning signs. Just look at all the species on the planet that are dying. The coral reefs, the honeybees mysteriously dying. One-fourth of all the mammals that exist are dying. A third of all amphibians are at the risk of dying. We're on a path to mass extinction. It's almost like we're trying because we're relying on an atmosphere that we've been frying. I could use more statistics, but you probably think I'm lying because over half the politicians we elect deny them. Well, since when did their opinions outweigh the science?

• 17:01Speaker 02

  I thought experiments are fundamentally unbiased.

• 17:09Speaker 02

  Capitalism uses nature as its example and excuse for competition.

• 17:16Speaker 02

  The only problem is, we've removed it from the ecosystem.

• 17:22Speaker 02

  Profit and balance in the market are attainable, but growth without a conscience is completely unsustainable.

• 17:34Speaker 02

  A lion doesn't kill all the gazelles.

• 17:41Speaker 02

  Why do we have to have it all to ourselves?

• 17:46Speaker 02

  Pretty soon, there'll be nothing left but concrete and cars. And when you see an animal, it'll be like seeing a movie star. The planet, the forest, the ocean, the skies, the mountains, the valleys, always the... Never mind if it's not me, never mind, I'm too busy all the time. And without the ownership, we ignore the warning signs. Our planet, our forest, our ocean, our skies, our mountains, our valleys, always we, always mine, my planet, my forest, my ocean, my skies, my mountains, my valleys, always we, always mine, always ours, always yours.

• 18:34Speaker 02

  One little dot in trillions of stars.

• 18:40Speaker 02

  One little dot. It's all that we've got.

• 18:45Speaker 02

  We just forgot that none of it's ours. We just forgot that all of it's ours. One little dot in trillions of stars.

• 18:59Speaker 02

  My name is NQ. Thank you so much for listening. I appreciate it.

• 19:12Speaker 02

  And now, it is my absolute pleasure to introduce the man of the hour to the stage. He's somebody that I very much respect and admire, and I also consider him a friend. So, give a huge, huge round of applause, a lot of fucking love. Give it up one time for Rich Roll.

• 19:47Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 19:53Rich Roll?

  Thank you.

• 19:58Rich Roll?

  Imagine walking out onto a stage after that guy, being expected to talk. It's a gift and it's an honor to be up here with all of you this evening. This event has been long in the making, and I've visualized it many times, and it just warms my heart to see so many people turn up tonight so that we can collectively experience ideas and a level of consciousness that together we've collectively experienced, but only in the digital space. Tonight is about analog, it's about community, it's about communication, it's about connectivity

• 20:42Rich Roll?

  and intimacy, and I just appreciate everybody being here tonight. So, before we get into it, I had like, a whole like, speech that I was gonna give, and I decided to toss that out because I received an email yesterday, and for those of you that listen to the show, you know, like, I like to read emails from time to time, and I thought that it would be good to read this one because the person who sent it to me happens to be here this evening. So, bear with me.

• 21:16Rich Roll?

  This is from Ron. Ron writes, "Hi, Rich. I'm headed to LA tomorrow to join you for the live podcast event and very excited for the experience. We met at the Conscious Capitalism CEO Summit coming on two years ago. We had lunch with a small group and I shared with you afterwards that my 16-year-old son was in treatment for drug and alcohol addiction. You said the greatest thing to me and that was, wow. What I would have been able to have done with my life if I'd learned the recovery skills at 16 versus 40." He wrote 40, he was actually 31. "And that comment gave me hope. I also started listening to your podcast on a regular basis and it has been part of

• 22:01Rich Roll?

  my journey to be a better father, husband, and leader. I get to share that through my involvement as the founder and board chair of Conscious Capitalism, Kansas City, so thank you." Jumping back to this week, my son that I mentioned will be in the audience with me. He is now 18. He's been accepted to LMU in Los Angeles for Fall of 2020. He is at LMU this week, taking part in the dedication of their new Lions for Recovery Center in the Student Union and speaking on a panel, sharing his story. Right?

• 22:43Rich Roll?

  And this is the part that got me. So you were right, and I learned that recovery gives expansion and not contraction. Recovery gives expansion and not contraction. I appreciate you for being a light and inspiration to us to live better lives and create a better world with gratitude. Ron. Ron Hill, are you here? Can you stand up and wave? And your son, Alec. I can't see the crowd, but there you are. Beautiful.

• 23:17Rich Roll?

  Thank you.

• 23:26Rich Roll?

  This is why I do what I do. This is my sustenance. Beyond the simple, sort of, personal gratification of hosting the podcast and being able to have the privilege of being in conversation with so many amazing people, it's messages like that that really are my energy. This is an act of service. And so, thank you for that message. That really kept me going and it's an honor to be able to share that with everyone tonight. As I said, tonight is about community. It's about connectivity. And in mulling over that theme, it has me thinking about the humble origins of this show.

• 24:07Rich Roll?

  It's very surreal for me to be up on a stage, talking to you tonight, and I can't do this without thinking back to the very beginning of this show. It was about seven years ago. It started in a warehouse with perhaps the worst acoustics ever, on the north shore of a Hawaiian island called Kauai. And I believe at the time, I was feeling a little bit lonely. I was having a little bit of island fever. I had written a book that had come out some months prior and was feeling a little bit of a void. And I had this creative impulse to try to plug back into humanity by plugging a microphone into a recorder and just starting to talk.

• 24:47Rich Roll?

  And I did that for no other reason than curiosity and a desire to connect with other people. And I loved it. And it was something that I never thought would ever transcend just being a simple hobby. But here we are, seven years later, about 500 episodes in, maybe 1,000 hours of conversations that have brought us here together tonight. It's unbelievable. And in reflecting over the course of this seven years and all the conversations that I've been blessed to have, it's taught me so much about life, about how to make decisions,

• 25:29Rich Roll?

  about how to be a sober human, a dad, a husband, a responsible member of society, about how to live a fulfilling, purposeful life. But I would say I've probably forgotten way more than I've learned, but... A couple of themes have emerged that are very clear. And those themes are: community, connectivity. If we want to grow, if we want to expand, recovery begets expansion, not contraction. When we think about that word "recovery," let's broaden the aperture. Let's expand the definition of that word "recovery." It doesn't have to be limited to overcoming substance abuse. Let's just call it "growth." Growth begets expansion. Growth begets expansion.

• 26:14Rich Roll?

  And that journey of personal growth requires a level of personal responsibility. But true healing, true growth over the long term, is a group effort. It happens with community. It happens collectively. It is a team sport. And as gratifying as the podcast has been, in truth, it's an abstraction, because it lives in the ether, in the clouds. I have people come over to my house, some weeks or months later. It gets uploaded to the internet. People enjoy it through their earbuds. I'm so grateful that it's made an impact on people, but it's still an abstraction, and

• 26:58Rich Roll?

  it's an abstraction for me. And this call to community, to cultivate greater connection and intimacy, is what spawned the idea of having this event. To have an analog experience. To gather all of these like-minded people who are blazing this path that I'm on. Let's get in a room together, and let's connect. So, thank you. We are going to get into the main event now. We are so blessed to have an extraordinary legendary guest for tonight's conversation. You know his name. His name is Paul Hawken. He is a pioneering environmentalist. An entrepreneur, an architect of corporate reform with respect to ecological practices,

• 27:43Rich Roll?

  a multiple New York Times bestselling author, an activist who has dedicated his life to environmental sustainability and changing the relationship between business and the environment. His work includes founding successful ecologically conscious businesses, like Arowan, which we're going to talk about, writing about the impacts of commerce on living systems, and consulting with heads of state and CEOs on economic development, industrial ecology, and environmental policy. Paul is the executive director of Project Drawdown, which is an extraordinary nonprofit dedicated to researching when and how global warming can be reversed. In addition to countless op-eds and peer-reviewed articles, Paul has written eight books, four

• 28:27Rich Roll?

  bestsellers, including Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming. He's an amazing human, his bio goes on for like 20 paragraphs, so I think I'm going to leave it at that. He has lectured everywhere, including Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton. He's given commencement addresses at Yale and Berkeley. He's appeared on Bill Maher, Charlie Rose, Larry King, basically everywhere. It is a gift to have him here tonight, so let's hear it for Paul Hawken, everybody. Hey. How are you? Good to see you. How are you doing, Paul?

• 29:12Paul Hawken?

  I'm doing great. I'm so happy to be with the ritual. I've been having ritual in my earbuds for two years. And I'm a connoisseur, I can review it. I just love, and I'm so grateful for you. It's more than a podcast, I mean, that's how it comes to us, but it's, to me, it's an exploration with such breadth and depth, and I find myself...

• 29:38Paul Hawken?

  Turning on a podcast where I say, "I'm not really interested in that." Okay. And then I am. And because of the way you interact with that person, the fact that that person actually opens up to you in a way that I don't think they do normally, or maybe they do, but you know, for me, it's like so singular. And I just want to acknowledge that and thank you because it just shows, I think, you talk about recovery, but I mean, with all due respect, we all need to recover. We're all addicted to one thing or another in this culture. And so I think it's exemplary what you're doing and how you've manifested that. So, thank you.

• 30:23Rich Roll?

  I appreciate that. I'm blushing. We can end the podcast now? We're good?

• 30:31Rich Roll?

  Wow, thank you. It is truly an honor to be able to have this conversation with you tonight. And I think it's so prescient because we're in the middle of an extraordinary moment right now in terms of climate activism and awareness. We saw some historic activity over the last week with the beautiful Greta visiting our shores. And so I think the best place to kind of launch into this is hearing a little bit about how you think about what's happening right now. Like, where are we right now? And how are you thinking about the movement and the prognosis for the future, given what we've seen over the last few weeks?

• 31:16Paul Hawken?

  Well, I'm glad you used the word prognosis because it's come to me that people think diagnosis is prognosis. And mostly what we hear about is diagnosis. It's as if we went to a doctor for our annual checkup and he says, "You have a, you know, a life-threatening disease, and this is the disease in detail, and this is probably how long you're going to live." And then gives you an invoice and says, "See ya." I mean, that's what we're doing to each other because we're just getting assaulted by the science, which is impeccable. I don't argue with the science. But at what point do you have enough of it to know that you either do something or not, but you're gonna have to do something? And I feel like that this week was really about the fact that the world has become woke.

• 32:01Paul Hawken?

  And actually, nothing happened much in the atmosphere from one week to the... Right. Before what happened is to us. I mean, we, whoever we are, but I mean, there is this sense, and the media for once is no longer doing fair and balanced coverage, which is to turn the microphone to a denier. You don't see that anymore. It's actually flipped. Something has changed. But underneath that, though, what hasn't changed is basically that it's still based on fear, threat, and doom. And we know what happens when we make people afraid. And they shut down, they make the little lights up, I mean, the whole survival thing comes up.

• 32:46Paul Hawken?

  I mean, Cuba's right there, I mean, it's a poem about that. And so, and our prefrontal cortex shuts down, which is the problem-solving part of our brain. And so, from my point of view, and I've been, I'm an English major, so I'm not a scientist, but I, a journalist, and I've been watching and reading the coverage on climate for three decades. And inside, I just felt like, I wouldn't say it that way. I wouldn't communicate that way. I wouldn't use that adverb. I think that's the wrong verb. I'm just like convincing to no one. And no one heard me, but I kept thinking, I don't think this is really working for

• 33:31Paul Hawken?

  us, you know? Yeah. And I feel like it still isn't, by the way, because 99% of the world is disengaged.

• 33:41Paul Hawken?

  And we still have a world where people, if they go see a documentary on climate change, they think they've done something, you know.

• 33:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah, right, right. I mean, my sense is, sorry, I don't mean to interrupt. My sense is that we saw this groundswell of civic activity over the last couple of weeks. People pouring out into the streets, a level, I feel like we're at a tipping point in terms of civic-mindedness and awareness and activation. But I feel like the story is all about, is still all about trying to get the powers that be at the top to implement change, whereas the people aren't left with that many solutions that they can implement in their own lives. So it's a top-down solution as opposed to what you're always talking about, which is the middle path, like the solution that's in the middle.

• 34:31Paul Hawken?

  Yeah, I really do think it's a middle-out solution, middle-out manifestation. Yes, New York Climate Week this last week, and the top was there. CEOs and heads of NGOs and heads of state, it was you and we, you know, as well. And there is a sea change, no question about it. It's as if they, a lot of people suddenly, particularly on the corporate side, woke up. And you had two weeks before that, you had, you know, Jamie Dimon from JP Morgan saying, with the business council, you know, saying basically, there's things more important than this shareholder value, which the, you know, but I mean, but they said it under the biggest corporations in the world.

• 35:13Paul Hawken?

  And a lot of that was happening in New York, where you had these trillion, multi-trillion-dollar commitments from different configurations of the business and governmental world. However, having said that, I hope it all happens, I hope it happens faster, but I still think we've been looking for love in all the wrong places. I mean, the Conference of the Parties, which is in Chile, Santiago this year, it's the 25th one. When we started Drawdown, Project Drawdown in 2013, in the 2015, excuse me, we started in 2015, in 2015, there was the Paris Agreement. Before the Paris Agreement, I had lots of friends there, staff there, and I said, "Ask anyone if they know the top 10 solutions."

• 35:59Paul Hawken?

  In any order to reversing global warming. And the fact is, after 30, 40-plus years of being in the public sphere, no one knew. I mean, this is phenomenal that we didn't know.

• 36:21Rich Roll?

  To what do you account for that lack of awareness? Like, that inability to focus on solutions? We're very good on what's actually happening and the science of what's causing all of this. Why the glaring omission when it comes to solution-based activity up until drawdown?

• 36:42Paul Hawken?

  I think it's for several reasons. One is that we started with impact, like, we're making impact. We have cars, we're burning coal. And so I think it was very much dominated by men, the whole climate conversation, the science, you know, the solutions. And, well, we have to stop making so much impact. Well, yeah. I mean, that's reduction, lessening. No, it's just slow down. Let's, you know. And so that was one of the conversations. But basically, society led by men was looking at impact and the reduction of impact. Well, that impact is about greenhouse gases going up there. And so, obviously, we have to stop putting them up in the atmosphere. But there was nothing about bringing them back home.

• 37:24Paul Hawken?

  And the conversation, and from very well-known people, I don't need to name them, was about solar wind and solar wind and recently Elon Musk. And somehow, if we did those three, we got a whole past to the 22nd century. And that's just scientific nonsense. Those are crucial solutions, the first two. But we haven't really seen it in a holistic, systemic way. It's a system that causes it, it's a system that cures it. And we tend to look at it very... If you break something into pieces... And try to fix the pieces. You haven't fixed anything. David Quammen had a great thing about, if you take a Persian rug and cut it into one inch squares, it's just unraveling wool. It's not Persian carpet. And that's what we've kind of done.

• 38:05Paul Hawken?

  And so what it's done, I think, to individuals is either whether it's solar wind, to think, well, I hope they do it. I mean, because I can't do that. I can't do a solar farm or a wind turbine in the ocean. And so in a way, it's been disempowering, because then the solutions for individuals will recycle, ride a bike, and, you know, less, you know, use cold water in your laundry. And even the Union of Concerned Scientists had a list. And one of the things on the list of what you could do

• 38:32Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 38:32Paul Hawken?

  was to put a power strip in your home entertainment center. I'm coming. And unless you have an IQ lower than room temperature, when you read, when you read that list of what you can do

• 38:42Rich Roll?

  The list is hilarious.

• 38:43Paul Hawken?

  You know we're screwed. You know we're screwed.

• 38:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 38:45Paul Hawken?

  I mean, it's inadequate to the task at hand. And so in a way, it's been sort of patronizing to individuals. And so don't worry, the experts are going to take care of it. And, well, wait a minute, you know. And so I feel like the, and the media still really propagates this. It's all the Democratic candidates, what do they talk about? Energy, energy, energy. They threw a little corn cob to the Midwest for farming. But, I mean, it really wasn't about the whole solution. And the whole solution is so much more interesting. I think the science about climate change is much worse than we know.

• 39:21Rich Roll?

  And what means

• 39:22Paul Hawken?

  Well, let me finish this. The solutions are much better than we know. Both are true.

• 39:26Rich Roll?

  When you say the science is much worse, elaborate on that.

• 39:30Paul Hawken?

  The science is great, but I mean, that is what's going to happen in the radar, which is going to happen.

• 39:33Rich Roll?

  Okay, I see what you're saying.

• 39:34Paul Hawken?

  Yeah, I think it's still being tented.

• 39:36Rich Roll?

  Well, I think it would be worthwhile to kind of walk us up to the process of drawdown, like what led you to this? And how you put this team together to try to actually do the math and figure out what the most effective solutions would be.

• 39:53Paul Hawken?

  Well, it started in 2001 when the third assessment came out from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and like every assessment, they're more dire and pessimistic than the prior. And the reason for that is that they're based on consensus science, which of course, there's no such thing as consensus science. Science is evidentiary. And you don't agree, like you don't have a, you know, a functional medicine doctor talking to, you know, allopathic doctor and say, well, let's come to an agreement about how to treat cancer. It's not gonna work, right? And that's essentially what the IPCC was. You had, you know, the Saudis and the Russians and earlier the Chinese and the Venezuelans, everything's cool, you know, tamp it down.

• 40:36Paul Hawken?

  And that's why each one has been more pessimistic, because the data supports that. There's three billion data points in the next assessment is coming out, and so the data's extraordinary. But I think that in 2001, I read the third assessment summary, and then at that time, simultaneously, or a few months later, out of Princeton came the Carbon Mitigation Project, which was these seven wedges that were comprised of 15 solutions, and if we engendered and enacted those solutions, each wedge was a billion gigatons of carbon, not CO2 carbon, and that we could stabilize emissions by 2050. And everybody who read it, and the media, it was like, yeah, we're on it.

• 41:19Paul Hawken?

  And I, me too, it's like, whoa, wow, good old Princeton University. And then I read the solutions, and 11 of those solutions, I kid you not, could only be adopted by the boards of directors of super conservative corporations, eight of them being coal, gas, and oil, the ninth one being utility, the 10th one being a car company, and the 11th one being a big appliance company. And each one of those solutions was deeply underwater financially, which means what they were saying is that the boards of directors would have to basically spend down their balance sheet and get sued for. It's never gonna happen. Never gonna happen. Yeah. And there's only one and a half things that you and I could do, which is drive

• 42:02Paul Hawken?

  less and put a solar panel on our roof or something. And agency was left out. And there was no agency to it. You know, what about teachers? What about schools? What about small companies? What about farmers? What about foresters? What about graziers? What about ranchers? You know, what about cities? What about towns? I mean, all that was left out. And I thought, and that's when I started to go around to NGOs and universities. I knew, and two things. Can we name the goal? You guys, to this day, you guys are using verbs as goals? Like mitigating? I'm sorry, not a goal. Combating? Doesn't work for me. Fighting? Those aren't goals. And so I wanted to name the goal, which is to stop going the wrong direction,

• 42:46Paul Hawken?

  turn around and go the other way, which means that first time on a year-to-year basis, where greenhouse gases peak and go down. That's drought out.

• 42:54Rich Roll?

  How dare you?

• 42:55Paul Hawken?

  I know.

• 42:56Rich Roll?

  Nobody, I mean, nobody was talking about bringing it down. It's all about slowing down the emissions, trying to get to neutral or zero. But no conversations about how we're actually going to reduce that and pull that carbon out of the atmosphere.

• 43:10Paul Hawken?

  That's absolutely right.

• 43:11Rich Roll?

  And sequester it.

• 43:12Paul Hawken?

  No one was. And I said, we need to map, measure, model the 100 most substantive solutions to reversing global warming. And we said, what a great idea. We don't do that. I went to big NGOs and universities and said, why don't you do it? I said, if I knew how to do it, I wouldn't be asking you. And so it went. And finally, I stopped asking until 2013.

• 43:35Rich Roll?

  So you put together this incredible team of researchers?

• 43:38Paul Hawken?

  No. In 2013, actually, an article came out in Rolling Stone from Bill McKibben.

• 43:42Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 43:42Paul Hawken?

  About global warming's terrifying new math. And what he had done is taken the work by Mark Companali in London, his carbon tracker. And Mark, he measured, he was a financial analyst. And so he analyzed the balance sheet of every coal, gas, and oil company in the world whose balance sheet he could get a hands-on. Some of them you can't, like in Russia and so forth. And... And he coined the term unburnable carbon because he said you're counting this as assets on your balance sheet, but if we burn it, you know, basically we're Venus. So how could this be valuable? In fact, we wouldn't even be here to burn it by that time. And so what Bill McKibben did in Rolling Stone was burn it. So that was why it was

• 44:24Paul Hawken?

  global warming, terrifying new mass. And I had so many friends come to me using the same language, which is, it's game over. We tried, we did our best, we worked hard, but it's game over. And the thought occurred to me, and it kind of relates to recovery and addiction in a sense of sometimes when it's game over, it's actually surrender. It's like, I don't know what to do, or, you know, and I thought this is actually a teachable moment, when people give up. And that's why I started Drawdown. And I just knew that if it was staged on the stage, you know, if it was like a white charismatic male vertebrate telling the rest of the world, listen up, I know what to do. I mean, that's just so

• 45:07Paul Hawken?

  over, so dead, so nothing. I mean, the problem is because white semi-charismatic male vertebrates have told us what to do. And that clearly didn't work. And so, and so I felt there had to be a we, had to be a we, talking to we, you know, let's have a conversation together, community, collaboration, connection, you know. And so, we got research fellows from all over the world, 21 countries, almost half women, half PhDs, all the major religions, and it's just amazing group of young people, astonishing. 128 advisors, everybody from,

• 45:49Paul Hawken?

  you know, religious leaders and political leaders and governors to even Tom Brady from the Patriots. I mean, it was really eclectic. And then 60 outside scientific reviewers to review our models. So what we wanted to do is present something that was pretty much bulletproof, you know, in terms of gotchas, you know, because the scientific community is such a gotcha community. And it's held up, actually. There hasn't been one Criticism of the data since it came out in April 2017, but it's conservative. It's actually conservative.

• 46:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you make these conservative estimates. You're working with the median numbers, not the extremes on either side. But talk a little bit about the expectations that you had going into it. As a scientist, you're trying to be neutral, but I'm sure you had imagined what these top solutions were going to look like. So contrast that expectation versus what you actually discovered.

• 46:45Paul Hawken?

  Well, remember I said in Paris, I was, at that point, I could tell, shoot, I don't know. Not that I knew, that I don't know. Oh, my gosh. How could I not know? How could we not know? I mean, after all this time, they're meeting in Paris, they're signing the agreement. And we didn't know until two months before a pub date, what the ranking. And the reason that is models are never finished, they're about the future, and therefore inherently wrong.

• 47:15Rich Roll?

  Yeah. But you're going into it thinking it's going to be transportation, it's going to be wind, solar, you know, all these typical things.

• 47:21Paul Hawken?

  Yeah, absolutely. Energy, energy, energy. And they're vector models, so they all interact, so you can't pull one out and say, okay, that's the biggest one. And we designed the book, we had it all on a hard drive, it's all ready to go, just stick it into a printing press, so we could wait till the last moment to put in the numbers and impact. And we were shocked. I was shocked. And the number one solution is refrigerant management, and I was so disappointed.

• 47:50Rich Roll?

  It's not sexy.

• 47:53Paul Hawken?

  No, that's the point.

• 47:54Rich Roll?

  Air conditioning, basically.

• 47:56Paul Hawken?

  Well, who's going to write the press release? Who would believe it?

• 48:00Rich Roll?

  Explain this. Why are we not talking about the number one thing?

• 48:05Paul Hawken?

  Because it's not sexy, and because there's not much we can do about it, and because we don't understand it. I mean, refrigerant gases are one to 10,000 times more powerful than CO2. And they're just all over the world, they leak, and then when they're recycled, they're not, actually the gases escape. And so that's number one. Number two is wind turbine, which is expected. But I didn't see number three coming, which is reduced food waste, food waste being the number three.

• 48:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah, food waste is huge. So let's spend a little time talking about that, because the impact of that is so massive. And it seems like the solution to that is extremely doable.

• 48:52Paul Hawken?

  Well, what's wonderful about that solution is that everybody sitting here with us tonight eats two or three times a day, or maybe more, but anyway, at least two or three times. So it makes you conscious, three times a day, about your relationship to land, food, farming, atmosphere, self, health, other. I mean, it's quite extraordinary. I mean, and it's not just what you choose to eat, it's what from the food is. In other words, where did it come from? And the farming and the soil, because soil is absolutely the number one solution to reversing global warming,

• 49:35Paul Hawken?

  not refrigerant management. And I can get into that, but we waste a third of the world's food. The industrial ag companies, for years, have said, if we don't basically poison the earth and kill it with herbicides and pesticides, we're going to run out of food. What they're saying is, trust us, we're going to kill more and more life to have more life. I mean, that's Monsanto, Syngenta, Dow. And of course, that is so upside down and backwards. I mean, it's extraordinary, but we don't need more farmland. Actually, we need less.

• 50:14Paul Hawken?

  And 97% of all soybean production goes into confined area feeding operations to raise pigs and cows. I mean, come on. And I mean, that's just for starters. Go to corn, and it's the same. And so...

• 50:31Paul Hawken?

  We have been, we've sort of bought into this whole thing. If we focus on food waste, we have more than enough food for not only the population that exists right now, but for the nine to 10 billion that are expected by 2050.

• 50:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, a couple of things. I mean, what's interesting about the food waste discussion is that it's coming in so high in this ranking, and yet you're not even accounting for all the methane that's produced by the food waste going into the landfill. Like, you left that out of it. If you were to factor that in, it would be even higher on the list.

• 51:04Paul Hawken?

  Yeah, I'd love that you did your homework. That's absolutely true.

• 51:07Rich Roll?

  I always do my homework.

• 51:09Paul Hawken?

  The reason we didn't include it is because we didn't have the data.

• 51:14Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 51:15Paul Hawken?

  But absolutely, once it goes into a landfill, it becomes anaerobic. Methane is 28 times more powerful than CO2 as a greenhouse gas. And if we added that in, that would vault to the number one solution by far. And that's just the tip of the veritable hay bale, you know, in terms of impact. Food is really eight of the top 20 solutions.

• 51:38Rich Roll?

  Eight of the top 20 solutions are food-related. So if you take all of those eight and add them up, it becomes the number one thing.

• 51:47Paul Hawken?

  By far.

• 51:48Rich Roll?

  And to what extent does that trump transportation and energy?

• 51:52Paul Hawken?

  Yep.

• 51:53Rich Roll?

  I mean, it's a multiple of that, right?

• 51:55Paul Hawken?

  In terms of reversing global warming, not in terms of emissions necessarily, but in terms of the means to actually bring carbon back home.

• 52:04Rich Roll?

  Because it's the only solution that actually is able to take the carbon down and put it somewhere, right? Remove it from the atmosphere. So it's working on both sides of the equations.

• 52:15Paul Hawken?

  Been doing it for three and a half billion years. Photosynthesis, chlorophyll, you know, microalgae, phytoplankton. I mean, that's what it does, you know, right to this day. And I go back to when I said about the impact, remember? I felt like... Remember, some of you may remember, but there's this movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and they're in Devil's Postpile, you know, and this little flying saucer came down and

• 52:38Rich Roll?

  Richard Dreyfuss's greatest role.

• 52:40Paul Hawken?

  And they're all looking at it and going, "Yeah, you know, we made contact with, you know, the second kind, not the third kind." And then behind them, the mothership is coming up, you know, behind them, and they turn around. I just found out the other day, somebody who was at the shooting, they're looking at a little piece of tape on the wall. When they did, they turn around and go, "Ah," there's a little piece of tape. It was CGI, of course. But, I mean, here's this mothership coming up. And so the mothership here is the mothership. The biggest solution to reversing global warming isn't in the city, isn't, you know, our cars, isn't all that. We have to crucially stop putting it up there. It's soil, forests,

• 53:20Paul Hawken?

  and oceans. It's extraordinary. We can sequester a trillion tons of CO2 by regenerative farming practices. We have to increase, if we increase by a half percent of soil organic carbon in our grasslands and forests, I mean, not foresting, our farms, that's a trillion tons of CO2. That takes us back to 1870, just to give you a sense of dimension. And the Swiss EHT, the Federal Institute of Switzerland, came out with a report two months ago from the Crawford Lab that said, and they studied with, using Google Map, like these, I think, two hectare or five acre plots all over the world, and identified in five countries

• 54:02Paul Hawken?

  where we could put 800 million acres of new forest that would sequester 750 billion tons of CO2. And finally, there's the oceans. And nothing sequesters carbon faster than kelp. It's nothing. And there's another trillion tons. That's 2.75 trillion tons. I mean, that would make us, again, Mars. So we're not going to do that, because there's 3.3 trillion tons up there. But I don't want to geek out on the numbers so much as it gives... Us a sense of what the breadth and depth of what we can do. And it lies within life, creating the conditions for life.

• 54:43Rich Roll?

  Right, so in the book, you have these hundred solutions. Eighty of them are vetted with science. And then you have this section on coming attractions. And I think there was two super fascinating ones in there for me. And one you just touched on, which is the marine phytoplankton. Like sort of, you know, creating permaculture in our oceans.

• 55:02Paul Hawken?

  Yes.

• 55:03Rich Roll?

  But there's this crazy story that you tell about discovering that cows that ate kelp had methane, like this incredible reduction in their methane emissions, right? And so this idea is baked to feed them this algae that they, that comes from Hawaii or something like that. And they feed the cows this and then it resolves the methane problem? Like, explain this to me.

• 55:30Paul Hawken?

  Sure, it happened. It started in Prince Edward Island in Canada, where a farmer, every farm virtually is on the coast, except for small island, not quite. And he noticed that the dairy cows that were eating kelp, some were, some weren't, produced more milk. So why? And he called this county agent who said, hmm, not sure. Let me get a scientist in there. And so they brought in a scientist and he said it must be because of reduced methane metabolism. Because methane actually is a pirate. I mean, it got aboard, you know, rumenins a long time ago. It's not innate to being a rumenin, it is now. And it's very inefficient metabolically.

• 56:14Paul Hawken?

  That is to say, it doesn't do anything much for the cow, or those sheep, or the goat. And so they split the herd and kelp, no kelp. And they put plastic bags on their heads five times a day and measured exhalations. And sure enough, there was less methane exhalation from the cows that ate kelp and more milk. Well, that's what you call a science project. Good science, but doesn't mean anything because you can't feed the cows or the sheep or the goats in the world kelp. But that scientist heard of a scientist in Australia who was doing the same or had the same observation. And together they discovered that there was an algae called Sperragopsis taxiformis

• 56:58Paul Hawken?

  that grows actually in the whole tropical belt of the world. That if fed to ruminants reduces methane emissions from 50 to 90 percent.

• 57:07Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 57:08Paul Hawken?

  Depending on, you know. And, I mean, methane emissions from, you know, animals is a huge, 14 percent of emissions.

• 57:15Rich Roll?

  Very high, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's a while.

• 57:19Paul Hawken?

  But you know what this, what it tells us? I mean, I don't, I don't think we know the good news. Remember I said solutions are better than we know? I mean, the rate of innovation in, I'm not talking about direct air capture and these kind of silly things, you know, we're going to replace trees and capture carbon. I'm talking about the, the rate of brilliance and innovation that's happening in the world today with respect to all aspects of what we do, including regenerative agriculture, which is just exploding in terms of techniques. It's not technology, techniques and breakthroughs is, is truly extraordinary. And that's, I mean, I'm not plugging it, but that's why I'm doing the next book, Regeneration.

• 58:01Paul Hawken?

  And it says, "Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation," because we don't know about these solutions.

• 58:05Rich Roll?

  Right, but one of, one of the amazing things about a lot of these solutions, if not all of them, is the compounding impact of them, right? Like you write about the fact that even if these solutions weren't reducing carbon and weren't part of the global warming solution, that they're still good ideas. They empower communities economically, they create jobs, they're treating the planet better. It's not just, it's not a binary thing, right? I mean, I think the, the algae story is, is, you know, exemplifies that very thing.

• 58:39Paul Hawken?

  Sure, because you get higher productivity. I think that there's no question that if you take the solutions and draw down And we didn't have, say, a climate scientist. It was, we didn't even have climatology, okay? We're clueless. We didn't understand where extreme weather came from or what was caused by it. We just had it, you know, "Oh, Hurricane Dorian, woo." And we would want to do all these solutions because of their second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth order effects that are beneficial in terms of water, health, education, prosperity, children. I mean, it just, it just goes right, check, check, check, check, check. And the only exception to that, in my opinion, is nuclear.

• 59:19Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. All right, well, coming in hot at number four, plant-rich diet. You gotta talk about that, right?

• 59:28Paul Hawken?

  You knew about that.

• 59:29Rich Roll?

  The plant-rich diet.

• 59:31Paul Hawken?

  Yeah.

• 59:32Rich Roll?

  Is this not a euphemism for eating a plant-based diet? Come on, Paul, you just gotta take that extra leap to get there.

• 59:39Paul Hawken?

  I thought, I thought plant-rich.

• 59:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah, come on, right?

• 59:43Paul Hawken?

  Okay, show of hands for plant-rich. I think plant-rich was more enticing to people, frankly, because it's rich.

• 59:56Rich Roll?

  I, I get, I feel ya. I feel ya. You don't want to alienate anyone, I get it. It's okay.

• 1:00:01Paul Hawken?

  It's a role. Plant-rich.

• 1:00:03Rich Roll?

  It's named after me, it was just, it was, it was for me. I hear you.

• 1:00:07Paul Hawken?

  I felt like, in order to model, we had to have a methodology that was straight up and down. And the thing that surprises people about Drawdown is we never advocated for anything. It's odd, you say, "Well, of course you did." No, we didn't. There was no advocate, there was no should, must, need to.

• 1:00:29Rich Roll?

  No.

• 1:00:30Paul Hawken?

  Because that makes people feel like bad, or they didn't, or they could, but they can't, or all that sort of stuff. We used no fear, threat, and doom. We didn't blame anybody, we didn't shame anybody, we didn't demonize anybody. I said right in the introduction, "This is not right." We think it's approximately right, because when you're right, you make somebody wrong. I'm right more than by de facto somebody else is wrong, because what you could be right about. And so one of the things we didn't do also is advocate. And the reason for that was we wanted to create spaciousness around the subject, because the way it's been communicated has really put people off, or makes them numb, or makes them feel bad. And so we wanted to communicate in such a way that actually drew people into it. And it played out.

• 1:01:14Paul Hawken?

  It's taught from every grade, from 4th grade, 5th, etc., all the way to MIT Graduate School, Harvard Graduate School, Stanford, UC Berkeley. It's in 14 languages. It's in the second biggest hotel chain in New Zealand, along with the Gideon Bible in every room.

• 1:01:30Rich Roll?

  That's fantastic.

• 1:01:31Paul Hawken?

  It just goes on and on. And it's selling better now than it did two and a half years ago. The 12th printing was the biggest printing so far. By the way, this is a book the Penguin did not want to print because climate books don't sell. But the point being is, I feel like if you create spaciousness for people to come in and make up their own mind and get interested in narratives and stories and so forth, you're going to do much better than if you hammer them and say, "If you don't do something, or we don't do something, we're screwed." And that may be true in a kind of interesting way, but it's ineffective.

• 1:02:11Paul Hawken?

  And so I'm always trying to think, how do you create the spaciousness so it's not a duality? And I mean, in Cus, his poetry is about nonduality, right? And so duality is really the core dis-ease that we have. And when we say combating climate change, or "I'm going to fix it," you know? I mean, or "we're going to fight it," you know? It's so crazy because it's like there's an "it" somewhere. "I'm going to go like this right now, okay? This is it, right? This is the atmosphere. Go fight it and tackle it as you will."

• 1:02:52Rich Roll?

  Climate's not the problem, we're the problem.

• 1:02:53Paul Hawken?

  We're the problem, it's a human problem.

• 1:02:55Rich Roll?

  And we actually want the climate to change. We're trying to get it to change in a different direction.

• 1:02:59Paul Hawken?

  If it doesn't, we're screwed. So we need it to change. The question is, we need to change what we do and how we relate to each other down here in order to stabilize the climate, and that's what Drought on...

• 1:03:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, this stems from, and you've talked about this a lot, this... The sense of other- otherness, right? When we look at the, at the climate or our environment as something that's other, or, or other individuals and what they're doing as other, as opposed to embracing the, you know, unifying holistic nature, you know, of oneness that we all are, that's what we need to step into and to really, to really like grok the solution here.

• 1:03:38Paul Hawken?

  We all grew up with a conditioned mind that basically steals our joy.

• 1:03:43Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:03:44Paul Hawken?

  If we let it.

• 1:03:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:46Paul Hawken?

  And that conditioned mind, first of all, is like we're an individual.

• 1:03:49Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. Well, so, here's, here's, here's a question for you. As a man of science and, and somebody who worked very hard with their team to, to create this, here we should show it for those who haven't seen it, this, this beautiful book that's so inviting that you can read if you're in fourth grade or you're a PhD student. It's all very organized and digestible and it's about the data and the math. How do you square being this man of science with your, you know, sort of Buddhist leanings and your spiritual perspective on how we solve these problems?

• 1:04:25Paul Hawken?

  Well, I'm not a man of science, I'm a man of science appreciation. I'm a journalist.

• 1:04:30Rich Roll?

  Okay.

• 1:04:31Paul Hawken?

  Yeah, okay. I don't think I would have done well in science. At all. And the, a Buddhist perspective is really one of, a really, obviously used terms mindfulness and, you know, awareness. I'm a really piss poor Buddhist, so I just want to put that out there. I, I know some that are fantastic and I only, you know, bow to them every time I see them. Jack Kornfield's a friend, I just think he's an incredible teacher and, but, the, but the, the, the, the basic teachings are about practice, about what to become if you understand that...

• 1:05:16Paul Hawken?

  Identity. And if you're confused about identity, I am, fill in the blank, you're confused. Basically. And then, from that confusion arises actions that are inappropriate, or unskillful, or harmful, or unkind. And generosity arises from that transcendence. Kindness arises from that. Compassion arises from that. And I feel like this situation we're in, the most gnarly, super wicked problem humanity has ever described, and may ever face, if we're still here, is actually a blessing. And not a curse.

• 1:06:00Paul Hawken?

  I mean, you can look at it like it's happening to me and say I'm a victim and be pissed off. And then you live your life in that mind. That's the mind you're living in. That's the world you're living in. And that's kind of a hell realm. And if we look at it from the point of view of its feedback, and from the atmosphere, but actually from the whole of the earth, because you can't really separate the atmosphere from plants, and forests, and water. If you're looking at it from that way, then it's a gift, it's feedback, and you take 100% responsibility. You don't ask other people to do it. You take 100% responsibility for your actions, who you are. And then you begin to imagine, innovate. You know, you do what Incu is doing. You do spoken word, or whatever.

• 1:06:44Paul Hawken?

  You do things that make sense to you, that help you connect more to this beautiful, extraordinary miracle we call the living world. And that's the gift of climate change. The gift is the transformation of self and of the world. And the solutions are transformative. And those are just some of them. There's a lot more. And so, we can either accept the offering and the gift, or we can go into self-pity.

• 1:07:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:25Rich Roll?

  As I try that on, this idea that global warming, global climate change is happening for us as opposed to us. And how does that feel? There is an empowerment, I think, with that. This sense of possibility, that there are things that I can do, you can do, we can do collectively. And then I scroll through my Twitter feed, and I see what's happening at the highest levels of government, and what's happening with well-funded lobbyists on K Street, and the farm bill, and the subsidies, and the lack of regulation and oversight, and the stripping away of protections and all the like. And all of that goes out the window.

• 1:08:09Paul Hawken?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:10Rich Roll?

  So how do you navigate that minefield of what's happening in government? The things that actually you can't control. You don't have a say.

• 1:08:23Paul Hawken?

  Yeah. Well, I mean, I read the same RSS feeds and stuff that you do every morning. I don't read them at night.

• 1:08:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:32Paul Hawken?

  I think, first of all, I mean, Havi says this famous line, you know, "Fear is the shabbiest room in the house. You deserve better conditions." And so fear is not a place to live in. It doesn't work. And so to me, it's about curiosity, which is like, huh, look what they did, look what he said, look what he tweeted, oh my gosh. It's like, really? And then when I read the presidential tweets, I go, he's talking about himself again. He's talking about himself. He's a disgusting, bad, corrupt. You know, I said, yeah, it's true. I mean, I thought, he knows himself really well. He really does. You know?

• 1:09:10Paul Hawken?

  And so I say, you know, and so when I see the ignorance or the inability to connect, again, it's like, connect, you know? I become curious as to what is the solution to that. In other words, what is the communication? What is it that's going, what will it take, actually? And one of the things about this week and the week prior, not just the things that Greta Thunberg said, which was so extraordinary, but I mean, the science as it was coming out, is that the sense of urgency is really growing exponentially, which is quite interesting.

• 1:09:55Paul Hawken?

  And I feel like, and I mean, that basically, and people say, "Well, we're not doing enough, and we're losing, and it's happening too fast," and all that sort of stuff. But I think if you actually look at the climate movement and the rate of growth, it's growing faster than the inertial problem of killing the Earth. And we are at that stage where I think more and more people are going to realize that degeneration or liquidation of the Earth, actually, we're coming to a dead end on that one. And so I feel like the urgency is going to change very rapidly. And those who think they're ineffective, and I mean, Zach Bush and I were on a stage together a few weeks ago, and what I said came out. I said, "We're rehearsing the future."

• 1:10:39Paul Hawken?

  No, we're rehearsing an awareness and understanding and practice that as people wake up, they will move to and look to and practice and enact. And it doesn't go the other way. Now, is there enough time? Unanswerable question. Will we make it? Unanswerable question. Those questions are irrelevant. What's relevant is our hearts and who we are and what we do. And are we actually fully engaged? I mean, there's no difference between a climate denier and somebody who's literate in climate and doesn't do anything. They both don't do anything. So what's the difference?

• 1:11:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:20Paul Hawken?

  Right?

• 1:11:21Rich Roll?

  I hadn't thought of that. Yeah, beautiful.

• 1:11:29Rich Roll?

  Your beginnings took place in the civil rights movement, in the world of social justice, back in 1965, with you working with Martin Luther King in Selma. I'm interested in...

• 1:11:50Rich Roll?

  How you think about the relationship between social justice and civil rights and environmentalism? Is there a relationship there? Is one an extension of the other? Is environmentalism the new civil rights? Like, how do you think about that?

• 1:12:05Paul Hawken?

  I don't think environmentalism is... hasn't been. I don't think it has been at all. One of my critiques of the climate communication has been that it's very much about future existential threat, deadlineism. 2030, if we don't do it, reduce by half, we're screwed. This deadlineism is... I'm not saying it's incorrect, but it's been going on since, you know, 1990, 2000. We've had deadlines all along, and we've just been ripping past through them. And I feel like that way of looking at the world is...

• 1:12:49Paul Hawken?

  excludes almost everybody, because we don't think that way. Most of humanity is worried about today. Maybe we aren't here, we're so fortunate and so privileged and so lucky, but most of the world actually has to worry about food, about safety, about habitat, about work, about their children, about getting books, about... I mean, their everyday worries surmount everything else. And most of humanity is thinking about what they need today. And so if we, as a movement, don't understand that in order to reverse global warming, we have to actually meet current human needs, not wants, needs.

• 1:13:34Paul Hawken?

  And it's the other way around, because the only way it's going to happen is if people, billions of people, see...

• 1:13:43Paul Hawken?

  That reversing global warming is in their self-interest. It actually makes better food, better housing, more secure in terms of safety, food security, which is huge for so many people, here in this country too. And so I feel like we, again, have kind of looked the wrong way. We're looking at the future, "Come on, quick, you know, it's gonna happen if we don't get together." And you look behind you, there's no one there. Ninety-nine percent, as I said earlier, the people in the world are disengaged. How could we possibly do that? I mean, that's so inept, excuse me. The science is so skillful, the communication has been so inept, and that sense of inclusion has been missing.

• 1:14:24Paul Hawken?

  And so if we're not addressing poverty in the world, we're not going to succeed. It's not a movement of regeneration. It's not a movement that can reverse global warming. And so there's huge benefit there. I mean, in terms of inclusion, in terms of getting people, you know, feeling like what they do for themselves, for their family, is for their community. The biggest, you had Jan Hari here, you know, on your program. It's a beautiful podcast, but, I mean, he talked about addiction, you know, and depression, but he said the biggest lack in the world is actually connection. And that's where addiction is, the lack of connection. I think it affects all of us. That's what we have, we don't have purpose and meaning. We have the earth about burning up,

• 1:15:08Paul Hawken?

  and people are worried about Kardashians and this and that. And the fact that they focus on social media and this and Nazism, all that sort of stuff, ISIS, it just, it speaks to the fact that people are looking for identity, and they're finding it in all the wrong places. And as a climate movement, if you call it a movement, so forth, we haven't communicated in such a way that everybody feels like we're together in this thing, and they get, they receive something from it, not just money, but actually a sense of value, that they have value, and they have respect from their children and their community, that they're doing something that is transcendent of just individual identity.

• 1:15:52Paul Hawken?

  And we haven't done that.

• 1:15:54Rich Roll?

  So to engender that kind of engagement and to create a sense of ownership over these ideas, like, how do we catalyze that? Like, how do we solve that problem of communication to get people more connected to...

• 1:16:08Paul Hawken?

  We don't do it by communication, we do it by action. I mean, one of the subtitles of regeneration is how to create 1 billion jobs. I mean, we have this situation where we steal the future, call it GDP, and congratulate ourselves and put it in the bank. I mean, we can just as easily heal the future and call that GDP. That's the choice. It employs hundreds and hundreds of millions of people to regenerate the Earth for how many people it took to degenerate it, right? I mean, so, all the work is there. It's really about action, so people feel like, I have a job that is purposeful, meaningful, you know?

• 1:16:49Rich Roll?

  So what are the impediments or the blind spots right now?

• 1:16:52Paul Hawken?

  The blind spot? The blind spot is it's a technical fix. You know, that there's a technology. I mean, again, with all due respect to our gender, you know, it's such a male thing, you know, like, we're gonna fix it and...

• 1:17:06Rich Roll?

  Right. Or that we, we're just gonna sit back and let the billionaires figure it out, and we'll end up on Mars at some point.

• 1:17:14Paul Hawken?

  Oh, yeah, well, that's the Silicon Valley one where I'm from. It's really curious. We don't know how to live here, we're gonna figure it out how to live on Mars.

• 1:17:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah. If we're gonna terraform Mars, why don't we terraform Earth?

• 1:17:31Paul Hawken?

  Well, the wonderful thing about terraforming Mars is really, that was the origin of the Gaia hypothesis, Jim Lovelock. He was hired by NASA about how to create an atmosphere, really, literally, for Mars. Here's your job. Okay. And, so, to figure that one out, he had to discover, well, what's this one? How does it work? And that's when he discovered that there is no explanation for the extraordinary balance in our atmosphere between carbon dioxide, you know, oxygen, nitrogen, and, and then

• 1:18:15Paul Hawken?

  he looked back, you know, the Bostock Ice Record over 400,000 years and so forth, and came out with a hypothesis that the Earth actually, in its entirety, is a living organism with feedback loops. And that those feedback loops, I mean, you have this, you know, up and down in terms of ice ages, you know, and then melt again, and then, you know, big plant life and this oscillation. But underneath that is actually you have the Earth, in a sense, it's not controlling, but, but, I mean, it's hard to say, because it's like this other and there's atmosphere, but, I mean, the Earth is an organism. And now, people say, "That's not true, scientists don't like that," and so forth.

• 1:18:58Paul Hawken?

  But he just, he definitely identified something that's extraordinary. And that is something, I think, that has been lost in the climate conversation, is that, I mean, when a photon comes down, you know, from the sun, that fusion reactor, it hits this little tiny pool of chlorophyll, and it goes bouncing around like a billiard ball, until it hits this little thing in the middle, and swallows that photon like that, and creates energy, and grabs some H from the H2O from the water, you know, spits out oxygen, makes a sugar that goes into protein, fats, carbohydrates, and goes down to the roots, and basically feeds the soil, feeds the fungi, feeds the bacteria, you know, which makes better healthy plants, healthy soil, retains water.

• 1:19:43Paul Hawken?

  I mean, you have this extraordinary thing happen, and everything we see, everything we touch, everything that's here tonight is made by light. Everything is made by, we eat light, we're sun eaters. All our food, everything, even if it's artificial, it's like, it's plastic, whatever, where did the plastic come from? Coal swamps, okay? Or gas, or oil, and it came from sunlight. And so that disconnection, that this sacred, beautiful thing that's happening on Earth, also, in a sense, is the, um, description, if you will, of how the atmosphere is, um,

• 1:20:26Paul Hawken?

  interacts with the biosphere, right? And the cryosphere, right? And, and it's just a friggin' miracle. The more you read about it, the more you study, you're more, you're in awe, like... Who could have even invented chlorophyll? Much less the whole nine yards, the whole banana. It's so beautiful. In a handful of soil, there's more bacteria, protozoa, you know, nematodes, mites, and that are there than there are in all the human beings that have ever been on the planet. Right, right in your hand. It is the most complex ecosystem in the world. Go out tonight, pick up a handful of soil. It's more complex than the oceans.

• 1:21:11Paul Hawken?

  Every forest system, you name it, is in your hand. And 90% of what's in that, we don't know what it is. We do not know. And we have, you know, gene sequencing. We have the means to know. And we do not know what's in there. And we don't know how it works. And we don't know the interactions. And yet, you know, we take it for granted. Just not take it for granted. That's what I was saying earlier about, and it's not just what you eat, you know? It's where did it come from? And are the people who are producing our food absolutely honoring this? And regenerating soil? Because if they do, the food that comes out of it is extraordinary. It's so different than the food that comes out of, basically,

• 1:21:56Paul Hawken?

  I call it Monsanto soil. But it's not soil, it's dirt. They took soil and made dirt. They killed the life in it and said, "You need us." Because the soil is dead. And what we're saying is, you bring it back to life, and you reverse global warming.

• 1:22:12Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:22:15Rich Roll?

  Where's Zach Bush? Is he in the, he's out here somewhere? Zach Bush is here somewhere. There he is.

• 1:22:22Paul Hawken?

  There he is.

• 1:22:23Rich Roll?

  Beautiful Zach Bush.

• 1:22:32Rich Roll?

  So Zach, I've explored this with Zach a couple of times on the podcast. Soil regeneration, soil depletion, the pathetic state of soil today and the extent to which it's depleting our food of nutrients and the projections are pretty dire in terms of how much topsoil is left if we don't make changes and revert to these regenerative practices. But what is amazing and encouraging and leaves me feeling optimistic is seeing all of these farmers now realizing that they can increase their yields, they can increase their profit margins when they make these changes.

• 1:23:14Rich Roll?

  And the sort of scare tactics that this is going to be a long-drawn-out, multi-year process is proving untrue. And in fact, the soil is quite adept at regenerating itself when you do a couple of simple things.

• 1:23:29Paul Hawken?

  It is. I mean, it's fairly straightforward. At the same time, I mean, Zach does this wonderful work with farmers. But it is simple. There's a great story in a book called The Call to Read Warbler by Charles Massey. It's absolutely the best book on regenerative agriculture in the world to me. But there's a story of this farmer, and he inherited his father's farm, and it was pretty much played out. And so he did what you do with a played-out farm, is you put in more inputs, more fertilizer, more phosphate, you know, more potash and so forth, and cranked it up. And then it just went to hell, of course, and he lost more money.

• 1:24:13Paul Hawken?

  And he was about ready to sell it, move back to the city, and he wanted to take a picture, the last picture, and he stepped across his fence.

• 1:24:24Paul Hawken?

  To take a picture. And he was standing on the soil, the verge, you know. And it was soft and spongy and there was grasses growing and butterflies. And he looked at his farm. And he looked at where he's standing and going, "Oh, my God." You know, like, "I haven't done anything to this, not even my land." You know, and it's beautiful. And for him, that was the door back. And, you know, years later, because he key lined, there's so many techniques to regenerative farming. It's not just, basically, no till, that's one. Cover crops, complex cover crops, number two.

• 1:25:04Paul Hawken?

  You know, animals is very important in terms of grazing or some interaction with the cover crop or the stubble. That's important. But what the key lining is actually having the water, you know, you channel it so it's not going down, you know, or, you know, causing erosion. And so you keep the water. You start to recreate the carbon sponge, which is a water sponge. The soil becomes a sponge again, as opposed to a channel. And then one day, he heard a reed warbler, which he hadn't heard since he was a child. It wasn't any around for 100 miles.

• 1:25:46Paul Hawken?

  And a reed warbler grows on, you know, goes to reeds in a wetland. And he realized that he turned this desert back into a wetland in key areas. And that's why it's such a beautiful story and title the book, because it really is about regeneration. And what happens, you don't just regenerate soil. You regenerate biodiversity and pollinators and birds. There's a wonderful story by Isabella Tree called Wilding, wonderful book, about she and her husband Charlie Burrell inherited their family estate, 3,500 acres. And he did the same thing, this farmer in Australia there, which is basically, it was losing money, and so they amped it up.

• 1:26:27Paul Hawken?

  Better equipment, better pesticides, better controls and bigger fields. And they just almost went bankrupt. I mean, got worse. And they decided to do something that actually...

• 1:26:41Paul Hawken?

  Was very controversial. They tore down all the fences, put a big ring fence around it, and brought back the ancient animals that had been on that land. The long-horned cattle, the Tamworth pigs, you know, and a type of horse. And his name is the Exmoor Horse. So these were the animals that were on that land, you know, 1,000, 1,500, 2,000, 4,000 years ago. And they didn't do anything. Nothing. And they watched it. And it was stunning what happened to that land.

• 1:27:20Paul Hawken?

  And the birds that came back, and the trees, and the plants, and the water. And the pigs started to turn to be hippos, and diving in the water and getting freshwater mussels. And the nightingales came back, the turtle doves came back, the purple emperor's butterfly. They became a red-listed hotspot. In other words, for species that were red-listed as going extinct. Basically, all concentrated on this farm. And so, there is just, there's this, the prospect of basically of wilding, you know, really wilding our earth again is there.

• 1:28:02Paul Hawken?

  It's not just about row crops and regenerative agriculture. It's about an agriculture that actually brings back life on earth in ways that are so fantastic. And again, I just want to say, it is simple in some ways, but actually, it is infinitely complex in terms of its prospects and possibilities.

• 1:28:22Rich Roll?

  And what is, yeah, thank you for that. And I should point out

• 1:28:30Rich Roll?

  that in addition to the work that Paul is doing in this area, Zach has his Farmer's Footprint, nonprofit and documentary series that goes into this subject matter in depth. And I believe Ryland from Kiss the Ground is here as well. Is Ryland here?

• 1:28:47Paul Hawken?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:48Rich Roll?

  They're also doing amazing work in this field. I encourage you to check out both of them to learn more. So what is, how can we, is it communication? Like how? Is it better storytelling? How do we catalyze more of the farming community to make this?

• 1:29:07Paul Hawken?

  We don't. We let farmers talk to farmers.

• 1:29:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:10Paul Hawken?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:11Rich Roll?

  Right, right.

• 1:29:12Paul Hawken?

  Farmers don't believe us for shit.

• 1:29:13Rich Roll?

  Okay. Right.

• 1:29:15Paul Hawken?

  They don't, really. They believe each other. And it's interesting, when you talk to the regenerative farmers in this country, I mean, they're almost, every one of them is a red state or politically bent that way. And some interesting things come out. First of all, the hardest thing for them in terms of making the transition wasn't the technique, it was their neighbors. Because they're so used to having these glyphosate fields that just are pinned neat, you know, no weeds, you can see the bare soil, and there's the corn coming up or whatever. And there's pride. They have a sense of pride about that, like this, you know, it looks so beautiful, like Versailles or something, you know, for farms. And all perfectly groomed and perfectly green and all that sort of stuff.

• 1:29:59Paul Hawken?

  And when you go to regenerative agriculture, you never kill, and so there's always cover. And so there's cover crops that are, you know, 20, 25 different seeds in the seed drill. I mean, it just looks like chaos.

• 1:30:12Rich Roll?

  Looks like a mess.

• 1:30:13Paul Hawken?

  Yeah, and then it's grazed down, and then it's crimped, you know, and then you drill into the crimped straw and plant, and then outcome, whatever it is you're planting. And they said the hardest thing for them was going to the coffee shop in the morning. And their neighbors going, "Hey, Joe, what's, uh, having trouble out there?" It's like, "Mm-hmm." And, "No, no," you know, and, but I feel like, you know, those smaller rural communities, they're, they really do, they are communities, and, but, the bad thing about communities is that they can also be conformities, which is, you don't really want to stick out.

• 1:30:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:52Paul Hawken?

  You know?

• 1:30:53Rich Roll?

  Become a social pariah.

• 1:30:54Paul Hawken?

  You do. You do. And I've heard that again and again, and then, but, what happened now is you have these farmers who, I don't know of a farmer, maybe Zach does, but, who is in regenerative agriculture that didn't hit the wall. I mean, in other words, they were gonna lose the farm. And when you talk to them, they experienced this enormous amount of shame. It's not just stress, financial stress for sure, of course, but shame. It was like fifth generation, fourth generation. And everybody had done pretty well and handed over to this person. And they were gonna fail, lose the farm, you know, lose the land, be foreclosed upon, sell off the equipment, and it's just like... And their sense of the shame that they were interiorizing was extraordinary.

• 1:31:39Paul Hawken?

  And the... When you listen to their stories about, you know, turning it around, I mean, it is so... It is an American tale. Because these farmers are really, really good people. And they got sold a bill of goods that worked initially after the war and for a long time. You know, you stick NPK, you know, into the soil, and you get more. There's no question about it. You don't get more better. It's like, not nutritionally so good, but you get more of it. When I started Erwan in 1966 in Boston, the first farmer we went to was Ted Whitmer in Bloomfield, Montana, for wheat.

• 1:32:23Paul Hawken?

  And I remember being in his truck, and it's just flat and cold there. I don't know how anybody would wanna live there. I'm from California, but, you know, with all due respect, eastern Montana. And, um... And he stops by Elk Horn, and he threw it in the truck and, like, stopped, threw it in the truck. And there was other horns in the back in the pickup, the bed. And we talked about that. He would go and bones and horns and whatever he could find from the slaughterhouses and so forth, and grind it up and put it on his soil. Grind it up, put it on his soil. It was dry land wheat, no fertilizer, nothing. He didn't convert to organics. He never went off it. And his wheat weighed 63 pounds a bushel.

• 1:33:07Paul Hawken?

  Well, wheat is 60 pounds. That's their equivalent. A bushel of wheat is 60 pounds. 60 pounds is a bushel. His was 63 pounds. The wheat we are growing today is 54, 55, 56 pounds volumetrically. It's fluff.

• 1:33:24Paul Hawken?

  It doesn't have minerals and Ted's, of course, had more minerals than normally. And so there's this beautiful intelligence out there in our farm community that has been suppressed by the constancy of the propaganda and the BS coming from large corporations and they have really convinced people that that's the best and right way. And they've tried to shame the rest of us who question industrial ag as saying, well, you know, when I started Ewan, I mean, I had these debates at MIT, at Harvard, or in Boston. And they're always shaming me because, well, if everybody went organic, you know, all the children would starve. I mean, really. Yeah. And with a straight face, you know?

• 1:34:09Paul Hawken?

  Yeah. And so basically, we were inculcated, you know? And it's just, so farmers are waking up one by one. And what really wakes them up is farmers like Gabe Brown now, who is the sort of the poster child who wrote a book about it in North Dakota. And, you know, he goes around, I think you can see it on YouTube. You can see Gabe talking to farmers, you know? And, and he knows what to say. He said like, you know, I just got tired of writing my name on the front of the check. He said, I signed it now on the back of the check. It's like, it cuts right through, you know? And, and they believe him, you know? Because he's buying more and more land, you know?

• 1:34:52Paul Hawken?

  Land is degraded and then restoring it.

• 1:34:55Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's almost like an escape from indentured servitude.

• 1:35:00Paul Hawken?

  Exactly.

• 1:35:00Rich Roll?

  This lie that has been told for generations that, that better living comes through chemistry and that the yields that you seek can only be garnered through GMOs and Roundup and these pesticides and fertilizers. And then, you know, enter stage left, Monsanto now Bayer that controls all the seeds, all the way up to the diseases that the food is creating. I don't know how that company, that merger passed antitrust muster.

• 1:35:29Paul Hawken?

  They're all wondering at Bayer, they're saying things. It's wiped out the whole network.

• 1:35:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and, and, and the debt structures that are set up to keep these farmers. Sort of in line and permanently indebted to these corporations. And so it's so encouraging and empowering to see these individuals figure a way out.

• 1:35:51Paul Hawken?

  They're experimenting. I mean, they're really learning about the different covers, cover crops, you know, and how they interact. And this selenium, this does this, obviously this fixes nitrogen. I mean, they're playing in a way that they never did. Like, again, quoting Gabe. And you'll see it on YouTube. He said, "I used to wake up every morning to figure out what I was going to kill today. And now I wake up every morning thinking, what am I going to make live today?" That's a fundamental shift in thinking about. And those farmers, they're coming alive too. You know? And because farmers have been hammered, both financially, but also reputationally because of the poison, the glyphosate, the dead zones, you know, in the Gulf of Mexico

• 1:36:37Paul Hawken?

  from nitrogen fertilizer. And actually, in Iowa and these communities, they're seeing in fifth generation, well, you have five generations alive. Okay? You're seeing cancers that are so rare. I mean, there's 13,500 diseases you have to learn to be a doctor. And this is the 13,501 first. I mean, they have to go to Boston or someplace to figure out what these little babies have. How in the hell can a one-year-old or two-year-old get these kind of rare cancers? Well, I mean, it's hazy in Iowa. And the haze is glyphosate.

• 1:37:17Rich Roll?

  Wow. Let's talk about Erawan.

• 1:37:22Paul Hawken?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:37:24Rich Roll?

  So you founded Erawan in?

• 1:37:26Paul Hawken?

  66.

• 1:37:27Rich Roll?

  66. The Erawan Trading Company back then.

• 1:37:34Rich Roll?

  And talk to me about the impetus behind it.

• 1:37:38Paul Hawken?

  Yeah, well, my motivations were unusual. Basically, I wanted to read. And there was this little buyer's co-op down on Newbury Street in the basement, and nobody wanted to take care of it. And I thought, well, nobody's coming in there, so I'll take care of it. Did $25 on a good day, and I couldn't be happier. I loved to read, and still do. And one day, somebody came into the store and said, "How do you know that your oil is cold-pressed?" And I, you know, I had a, I said, "Cold-pressed," you know. It was from Hain.

• 1:38:18Rich Roll?

  There you have it.

• 1:38:19Paul Hawken?

  It was from Hain. And then, pretty soon thereafter, somebody else came in and said, "How do you know your oats are organic?" And I said, "Because they come from menonites." "Give me a break," you know? "They're menonites, they don't even..."

• 1:38:33Rich Roll?

  They're not gonna lie to you.

• 1:38:34Paul Hawken?

  You know, I mean, of course. And when they left, I mean, as a journalist, I felt like, "You're just a bullshitter, Hawke, and you don't know either one of those." It's crap. So I wrote to Hain, "Dear Mr. Who," or whatever, "And tell me about your cold-pressed oils." And I got a letter back, beautiful stationery, everything, and said, "Well, there isn't really any more cold-pressed oils. They're all solvent-extracted. What cold-pressed refers to is that the oils are cold-processed, which means that, once they're solvent-extracted, we reduce the temperature to 34 degrees

• 1:39:17Paul Hawken?

  and filter out the sterates that make the oil cloudy, because nobody likes cloudy oil." And I'm going, I was so pissed off. I was so mad. And then, two days later, the oats come, the Mennonites in Pennsylvania. I go, "Okay." And I'm grabbing these oats off the truck. And there's a label sewed into the Bemis bag. And it says, "National Oat Company, Des Moines, Iowa." And one after another, like six of them. So, I call up the National Oat Company and say, "Tell me all about your organic farming program." And it's the nicest woman ever. And she said, "Honey, can you explain that to me?" And I said, "Well, organic farming, you know, no pesticides and this and that, blah, blah, blah, blah."

• 1:40:01Paul Hawken?

  She said, "Well, see, that sounds very interesting." You know, "We just buy oats and roll them."

• 1:40:08Paul Hawken?

  And I decided then that I was gonna replace every single product in that store from a farmer I knew or had visited. And that was it. I was just mad. And that's what I did. And the Erawan that's here today is somebody else's genius and brilliance. It's nothing to do with me. I mean, we opened the original store here on Beverly Boulevard. I did that one. But, I mean, but the DNA of Erawan is that, which is, "Let's get it right and not lie." And just be truthful and be very open. And so, every label at Erawan had the name of the farm, the name of the farmer, where it's from, the type of soils. I mean, the labels are, and said, "Don't believe us."

• 1:40:54Paul Hawken?

  Because everybody else, there's a lot of people not really being very truthful about this. And so, to be totally transparent. Kind of what Everlane does now with clothing. It says, "Here's the factory, here's the workers, this is what happens." And we did it then with food.

• 1:41:08Rich Roll?

  It's gotta be bizarre, though, when you go into an Erawan now, which is very much a, I mean, Erawan's a beautiful institution. They have amazing food. But it's also very much a see and be seen thing. It's like, you know, it's like a nightclub.

• 1:41:23Paul Hawken?

  You know, if I was a paparazzi, I'd just sit in front of it, you know, in Venice, you know, and just wait. Why chase the stars? They'll come to you, you know.

• 1:41:34Rich Roll?

  I mean, could you have ever, like, imagined that?

• 1:41:37Paul Hawken?

  Well, when we opened the store in L.A. in 1970, we did have a lot of stars.

• 1:41:44Rich Roll?

  Right. It was the one place where you could go.

• 1:41:46Paul Hawken?

  Yeah, we did have a lot. And I used to deliver to them and so forth. But, so, that's true. Because actors, at least some actors, they knew they had to take good care of themselves.

• 1:42:01Paul Hawken?

  So that's not surprising. But surprising about Erawan is it's extremely well done, and the quality of the food is amazing. And, you know, Jasmine, my wife, is here. We go there. It's not because of the name, it's because it's delicious.

• 1:42:19Rich Roll?

  They give you a discount?

• 1:42:21Paul Hawken?

  Huh?

• 1:42:21Rich Roll?

  Can you get free stuff there?

• 1:42:26Paul Hawken?

  I haven't been offered a discount yet.

• 1:42:29Rich Roll?

  All right. So, you're this amazing entrepreneur. This isn't, you know, Erawan isn't your only thing. You've got One Sun and Smith & Hawken, the garden supply company. You've, you know, reinvented yourself as a businessperson many times. You're this activist, you're this environmentalist, you're this incredible writer. It's rare, I mean, you find people that excel in maybe one or two of these areas, but for you to be able to kind of make your imprint on the world in all of these areas is quite a remarkable thing. So, talk a little bit about where and how the writing came to be.

• 1:43:08Paul Hawken?

  The writing came about, my mother told me, and I have no memory of this whatsoever. She said, "When you were four, you always said, 'I'm gonna grow up and be a writer.'" And I was the youngest recorded case of asthma in San Mateo County history. I had asthma until I was 20 years old. The reason I got into natural foods was because of asthma. And...

• 1:43:30Paul Hawken?

  And she would just leave me in bed. And then at three years old, I learned to read. And books by the bushel from the library. And little bookworm contests, you know, paste on the book. Used to win all the bookworm contests, you know, because I had nothing else to do. And so that writing comes out of reading, really. I mean, where does a great musician come from? Listening to great music, really, you know? And great poet comes from reading poetry and knowing poetry. It's all the same in that sense, all those kind of professions.

• 1:44:08Paul Hawken?

  And so, but I think it also came from being an outsider. You know, I mean, I came from a really... It wasn't safe to be in my house as a child. It was unsafe. And so I would spend as much time as possible outside. And I felt safe there, always. Doesn't matter rain, or lightning, or floods, or even forest fires. And I always felt safe, like I was held in hands, you know? I mean, Mother Nature really was a mother for me, you know?

• 1:44:52Paul Hawken?

  But the thing about being outside is it's different than inside in many, many ways. But one is that if you stay inside, if you're a child, you can master the inside in an hour or two. Here's the bathroom, here's the refrigerator, here's TV or whatever. Here's a light switch. I mean, there's not much to master, understand in a house. Outside, you can spend 10 lifetimes and not know really what everything is, and the sounds, and how it works, and what crawls away. And so it just fed this insatiable curiosity.

• 1:45:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's... I mean, curiosity is a word that comes to mind. I mean, if you could, you can be outside. If you're not a curious person, all of that will elude you, right? So you're, you have this... Predisposition to curiosity, that's almost

• 1:45:39Paul Hawken?

  Right.

• 1:45:40Rich Roll?

  You know, preternatural.

• 1:45:41Paul Hawken?

  The idea that I mastered something is actually, I would put it in differently, which is, I got very curious about something. And then I took it on to do it, even though I didn't know how to do it. Or even writing, I actually learned by writing. In other words, I have some insight. I think, I think it might be, I might think this is a better way of looking at it. We've never looked at it this way, or should we talk about? College of Commerce, you know, and blessed unrest, but, but it really comes from wanting to know as opposed to knowing. It's not that I know, it's because I don't know. And I feel really comfortable in unknowing. So I felt comfortable in Erwan.

• 1:46:23Paul Hawken?

  I mean, I remember at Erwan, like sixth or seventh year, I mean, we were favored target or subject for Harvard Business School, the people getting their, you know, MBA and they do their thesis on Erwan.

• 1:46:37Rich Roll?

  Case study?

• 1:46:37Paul Hawken?

  Yeah, oh yeah. Six of them. And just across the river, close by, you know, all that sort of stuff. And I remember one guy came in once and I used to bicycle with him a lot. He was on the Olympic team in the Harvard Bicycle, but we used to bike a lot in Concord. And his name was Graham. And he said, it was like 10:00 in the morning, he said, you know, I have to go to talk to you, I've got to talk to you. I said, well, talk to me. It was an open office, you know, he said, I can't talk to you here. I said, well, what do you want to do? He said, well, let's go down to the No Name Bar, which is in South Boston. I said, it's 10:00 AM, you know, come on. He said, well, you'll need a drink. And I said, whoa, you know.

• 1:47:17Paul Hawken?

  So I went down there and he said, I hate to tell you this, but basically, you're out of business. I said, really? I said, how do you know that? And he said, Paul, these papers, he says, you have negative net worth and you have negative working capital and this and that, all these terms and my balance sheet and this and that. And I was looking at him and he said, doesn't that bother you? I said, not really. And he said, why? I said, because I don't know what you're talking about.

• 1:47:48Paul Hawken?

  I didn't know what negative working capital is. No, I really didn't. I mean, it's like, oh, well, okay, you know, it's interesting. And he said, well, you should just cut a check and, you know, pay people off because the government's really gonna hammer you if you don't do that first, you know, and then close doors. Anyway, I said, what do you think I should do? He said, well, he said, with your knowledge of deficit financing, you'll probably get a job with the US government.

• 1:48:20Paul Hawken?

  I was just kidding. It was like, it was a lame joke at the time, but anyway, it went on. Been to an Aeron store, maybe some of you. But it was so interesting because, you know, I mean, when I was drafted, you know, the same questions came up, you know. And so earlier, and when I was drafted, I got a hundred, it's not really an intelligence test, it's a stupidity test. You'd have to be stupid not to pass the test. But I had asthma all my life, so I had asthma, and so I was, you know, 4F and all that sort of stuff.

• 1:49:02Paul Hawken?

  And I was taken to a counselor, was doing LBJ in the Great Society, and she had my high school record, my high school record. And she's like, looking at it like this, like that. And she's saying, high school wasn't your finest hour, was it? I said, no. And she said, I don't really see a career path for you. She was a career counselor, you know.

• 1:49:36Paul Hawken?

  And I think she was right, actually. And she said, tell me, did you just not care, or do you do your homework in the dark? No, she said, do you come from a family of artists? I might say this, or do you do your homework in the dark?

• 1:49:50Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:49:50Paul Hawken?

  And I took real umbrage at that first part because I was surrounded by artists. My father and his friends were artists, and, you know. And I said, well, what do you suggest I do? She said, I think you should get a job at the post office, they take anyone. There was twice in my life where people said, "Go for the poster." So going back to mastery, I never felt like a master. I felt like a learner. And I just felt like, "We're here to learn, both self and other and place."

• 1:50:18Rich Roll?

  Right. Somebody who has, whose muse is curiosity and always has followed their curiosity, and that has led you on this circuitous path that I guess we can call a career.

• 1:50:29Paul Hawken?

  Sometimes at my peril, others, yes.

• 1:50:33Rich Roll?

  Our time is short. We have to wrap this up soon here. But before we do that, I wanted to give you a little bit of an opportunity to talk about this new book that you have coming out. It's a sequel to Drawdown. Can you talk about that a little bit?

• 1:50:46Paul Hawken?

  Yeah. Regeneration is the name of the book. The working subtitle is "Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation." It doesn't mean ending it in finality. It means pushing out the horizon. That is the sense of, "We only have 11 more years to go, and otherwise, we're gonna go right over the cliff." And so, it's undertaking enough activity and actions in such a way that when we get to, whether it's 2025 or 2030, we actually see that we still have a horizon that is doable, and we've undertaken enough things that make us feel like we know what we're doing, that it's working.

• 1:51:27Paul Hawken?

  And it's really based on, as I said, turning around to the mothership, really, and looking at the scope and breadth of what is possible if we start to live in alignment with nature. And it doesn't mean abandoning our cities. In fact, there is a section on cities, section on food, section on energy. But it actually talks about making cities like forests. In other words, cities that are sinks instead of sources. The idea that we can reduce our energy, be a lead goal, that's great. But why not think big? There is in Drawdown, a company named Trial for Energy. It's a fusion company. And I love it because their purpose is to make starlight on Earth,

• 1:52:12Paul Hawken?

  because that's what fusion is. Starlight. The sun is a star.

• 1:52:19Paul Hawken?

  I feel like we need unreasonable goals. Drawdown, in a sense, it shouldn't be, by the way. That's a reasonable goal, but it was at the time. And regeneration is really about that. And trial for energy was an unreasonable goal. And unreasonable goals are forcing functions, like in calculus. They force a different outcome. When JFK announced that a man, he could put a person on the moon within a decade. That was the goal. Thirty thousand different technologies came out of that that would not have been invented necessarily then or at all had they not actually had this forcing function of putting a human being on the moon. It sounds simple. It was not simple.

• 1:53:04Paul Hawken?

  And I feel like Drawdown was all peer-reviewed science and modeled and, in a sense, very bounded by science and by peer review and by economic robust data, I E A, and so forth. It was a reflection back to the world what it knows and what it's doing. Where regeneration is all also about science, but it's not peer-reviewed. We don't have time to peer review the science. It's emerging and growing. And it's just extraordinary what's happening underneath these headlines around the world. And we don't hear that. What we hear is headlines in the media and the back and forth and the fighting.

• 1:53:46Paul Hawken?

  And we get books, Uninhabitable Earth, and The End of Ice. And I don't know about you, but I don't read those at night. I mean, those aren't bedtime stories. And it's not that the science that David Wells Wallace is basing it on is not valid. It's just that it's not helpful anymore to know that. And so I want to create a book that does that, but I also want to show, which I spoke of early, that it's really about meeting current human needs. That it is just so much about mountains and it's about migrants, both. It's about forests, but it's about favelas as well. That actually, this othering of the world,

• 1:54:31Paul Hawken?

  seeing everything as separate, is the cause of global warming. It's the cause of our disconnection. It is the disconnection. And so regeneration is very much about that. My wife... Blessed her, said, "Paul, if you don't have a what to do in this book, I'm leaving you."

• 1:54:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:51Paul Hawken?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:52Rich Roll?

  Because you have said, like, people say, "Well, what can I do? Tell me what to do." And you're like, "I can't tell you what to do. What kind of person do you want to be? This is the journey that you have to go on for yourself."

• 1:55:01Paul Hawken?

  I know. I used to say that.

• 1:55:03Rich Roll?

  Which leaves you at square one.

• 1:55:04Paul Hawken?

  Now I gotta shut that up and go and say, "This is what you can do."

• 1:55:06Rich Roll?

  All right.

• 1:55:07Paul Hawken?

  And on every level of agency, you know, whether an individual, city manager, buildings and grounds, or you run a company. And it's very clear, and it has the seventh section, it's called social, which is about the path, communication, mobilization, complex adaptive systems. It talks about how we naturally organize ourselves, and it proposes the interorganizational panel on climate solutions, the IPCS, not the CC. And what it says is, anytime three or four or five people can get together in a church basement, a school, a company, city council, whatever, that's the IPCS. And the way we solve this, get together, talk, "Rich, what do you know?

• 1:55:52Paul Hawken?

  What you doing at your house? This is what we're doing. This is what we found out this really works. Do you know so and so? Yeah, I know Zach Bush. Well, bring him in." I mean, that's what people do. That's community. And the way we're going to solve this is to be community around this in a way that's effective, because only what's going to happen is in place, not from Paris, not from Chile, not from New York, certainly. God bless everybody who's doing that, meeting. I'm not speaking against that, I'm just speaking towards this fact that the way we're going to do it is to come together in ways that actually, you know, honor our relationships and our community and our sense of who we want to be right now.

• 1:56:36Paul Hawken?

  Who do we want to be, you know? And so, that's what regeneration is about. There's more to it, but that's essentially, yeah.

• 1:56:43Rich Roll?

  Bringing it around to community.

• 1:56:44Paul Hawken?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:45Rich Roll?

  Thank you, Paul Hawken.

• 1:56:48Paul Hawken?

  Thank you.

• 1:56:55Rich Roll?

  You are a beautiful human. I salute you. So much respect for the work that you do and what you're putting out into the world. Your work is important and thank you so much for sharing. Rich, thank you for everything you do. And thank you to all of you for coming out tonight. I appreciate you. I love you. What a fantastic evening. Thank you so much. Thank you for coming.

• 1:57:28Rich Roll?

  That was it. Our first live show. A dream fulfilled, a goal achieved. I loved it. I hope it translated in podcast format. I think it did. In any event, I hope you dug it. If so, stay tuned. We're working on producing more of these events, taking the show on the road for a multi-city tour in 2020. More on that as it develops. In the meantime, check out the show notes on the episode page for links and resources to expand your experience of today's conversations and experiences. You can find InQ at InQ Life on Twitter and Instagram. You can also dial up episodes 81 and 118 for deep dives with him. And I'm working on getting InQ back on the podcast again soon.

• 1:58:13Rich Roll?

  You can also let Paul Hawken know how this one landed for you. You can find him on Twitter and Instagram at Paul Hawken. Also, don't forget to pick up a copy of his latest book, Draw Down: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming. It Will Change Your Life. While you're at it, maybe consider checking out some of his other books as well. They include The Next Economy, Growing in Business, The Ecology of Commerce, Natural Capitalism, which is a great one, and Blessed Unrest.

• 1:58:44Rich Roll?

  If you'd like to support the work we do here on the show, subscribe, rate and comment on it on Apple Podcasts. That really helps us out. Tell your friends about your favorite episode. Share the show on social media. Subscribe to my YouTube channel, Spotify and Google Podcasts. And you can support us on Patreon at RichRoll.com/donate. I want to thank the many, many people who helped put on today's show. This is a much more expansive list of people because a lot of people contributed to the success of this production. As always, Jason Camiolo for audio engineering, production, show notes, interstitial music, super audio expertise on the day, on the day, the evening of the event. Blake Curtis and Margot Lubin for videoing this podcast and overseeing the

• 1:59:29Rich Roll?

  production. Jessica Miranda for graphics. Ally Rogers for her portraits. DK David Kahn for advertiser relationships. Brian O'Hara for work on redesigning my logo. Daryl Smith from Kung Pow Production, the people who are behind the incredible film production version of today's show. Plus, the cameramen Calvin, Tyler, Dan and Sergey. Jonathan Retzak at RXR Sports for helping pull all of this together for the theater experience. Greg Anzalone, my business partner, for really making all of this happen. Tyler Trapper, my two stepsons, Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, Harry Mathis and Dylan Brosnan, the beautiful band that graced the audience with a couple of songs. And also, the people

• 2:00:13Rich Roll?

  behind the theme music by Analemma. Appreciate the love, you guys. I will see you back here next week with Impossible Foods founder and CEO, Pat Brown. He's the man behind the Impossible Burger. And it's an incredible conversation about the plant-based future of meat. And I'm going to leave you with a meaty taste of that exchange. And until then, let's all think and act a little bit more mindfully about how we tread on our precious blue spinning globe. Peace, plants. Namaste.

• 2:00:47Speaker 03

  La misión es muy simple: reemplazar completamente a los animales en el sistema alimentario para 2035. El uso de los animales como tecnología alimentaria es por un gran margen la tecnología más destructiva de la Tierra y realmente posee una amenaza catastrófica. Es una fuente principal de gases de almacén, más de todas las formas de transporte combinadas. Es el mayor usuario de agua fresca en el mundo, el mayor contaminador de agua fresca en el mundo. Y el mayor problema es que aproximadamente el 50% de toda la superficie terrestre de la Tierra está en uso activo en este momento, o creando cultivos de alimentación o cosechando animales. Y ese huellaje de tierra viene a costa de toda la biodiversidad

• 2:01:32Speaker 03

  que previamente ocupaba esa tierra. Sabes, en los últimos 40 años básicamente hemos eliminado la mitad de los animales salvos que vivían en la Tierra entonces. Y es simplemente a lo largo del planeta: mamíferos, pájaros, reptiles, amphibios, peces, incluso insectos. Y eso ha sucedido tan rápido y sigue acelerándose porque el motor es el huellaje de tierra de la agricultura animal y el excesivo fishing. Y la demanda de carne y peces está creciendo más rápido que la población.