Jane Goodall on Hope, AI, and the Natural World

What would it look like to keep all living creatures in the loop on the development of new technology? Reid sat down for a wide-ranging solo discussion with Jane Goodall on that very subject – and more. They talked about how to maintain hope and focus on local impact in today’s often chaotic world, how technology – and AI in particular – might be helpful for conservation, and Jane’s global youth program, Roots & Shoots. Plus, the Jane Goodall institute shared audio from a cutting edge acoustic array that helped them discover a brand new species in Gombe National Park in Tanzania! Jane reflected on her legacy and shared stories about bridging unlikely divides, defying the scientific community early in her career, young people opening their eyes to the natural world for the first time, and so much more. Thank you to the incredible team at the Jane Goodall Institute and WildMon (L. Pintea, B. Wallauer, K. Harmon, M. Campos, Gabriel Leite, Tomaz Melo, Guilherme Melo, D. A. Collins, D. C. Mjungu) that, with funding from Google, utilized an acoustic array to discover brand new species in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, including Thomas’s Dwarf Galago (Galagoides thomasi). For more info on the podcast and transcripts of all the episodes, visit https://www.possible.fm/podcast/ Topics: 03:38 - Hellos and intros 03:45 - “Name that baby” game 05:34 - How Jane has used technology in her work 09:13 - Discovering a new species with an acoustic array 11:57 - How AI can help conservation 16:55 - AI as an animal translator 19:58 - Essential lesson for research 22:30 - Similarities between humans and chimpanzees 26:42 - Bridging divides between unlikely groups 30:32 - “We must either redefine man, redefine tool, or…” 32:20 - Government funding cut from Jane Goodall Institute 36:26 - Youth program Roots and Shoots 39:57 - How to maintain hope 42:53 - What we can learn from kids 44:33 - Global impact of the Roots and Shoots program 46:18 - Jane’s ideal AI tool 48:22 - Jane asks Reid: Can AI become sentient? 51:27 - AI’s impact on the brain 54:55 - Rapid-fire Questions Select mentions: APOPO’s “Amazing Rats” | How It Works Regeneration by Paul Hawken TACARE Program Roots & Shoots Possible is an award-winning podcast that sketches out the brightest version of the future—and what it will take to get there. Most of all, it asks: what if, in the future, everything breaks humanity's way? Tune in for grounded and speculative takes on how technology—and, in particular, AI—is inspiring change and transforming the future. Hosted by Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger, each episode features an interview with an ambitious builder or deep thinker on a topic, from art to geopolitics and from healthcare to education. Each episode seeks to enhance and advance our discussion about what humanity could possibly get right if we leverage technology—and our collective effort—effectively.

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

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Every one of us makes an impact on the planet every day. And we can choose what sort of impact we make. And as that spreads, it's a way of giving people hope. Too many people look at the problems of the world and they get depressed. And of course they do. So I say to them, what do you care about in your own community? What is it that you dislike intensely? Is it waste? Is it the way we treat people? What is it? See what you can do about that. Get your friends to help you. And then you find that you can make a difference. That makes you feel good. Then you want to do more. And then you inspire others to do more.

• 0:49Reid Hoffman?

  Hi, I'm Reid Hoffman.

• 0:50Aria Finger?

  And I'm Aria Finger.

• 0:52Reid Hoffman?

  We want to know how, together, we can use technology like AI to help us shape the best possible future.

• 0:59Aria Finger?

  With support from Stripe, we asked technologists, ambitious builders, and deep thinkers to help us sketch out the brightest version of the future. And we learn what it'll take to get there.

• 1:12Reid Hoffman?

  This is possible.

• 1:17Reid Hoffman?

  When Dr. Jane Goodall first embarked on her research with chimpanzees in 1960, the idea of animal sentience, or sapience, was a near impossibility in the mind of the scientific community. Scientists were trained to observe behavior, not to interpret experience. But Jane didn't follow the rules. She gave her subjects names, not numbers. She documented tool use, play, grief, and affection, which changed how we understand chimpanzees and ourselves. Slowly, the scientific paradigm shifted. We began to accept that the line between us and the rest of the natural world was far blurrier than we'd imagined.

• 2:01Reid Hoffman?

  Science evolves, and sometimes that evolution doesn't just bring us new knowledge, it expands our moral imagination. Today, as we build artificial intelligence and other powerful technologies, we're once again being asked to redraw the boundaries of who counts, what matters, and what kinds of intelligence deserve our care. What might it look like to build technology with all life in the loop, not just humans? Could AI help accelerate research that protects the natural world? Could it become a tool not only for efficiency, but for empathy? Few approach these questions more

• 2:45Reid Hoffman?

  thoughtfully than Dr. Jane Goodall, our guest on Possible this week. Jane is a legendary ethologist and conservationist, whose 60-year study of wild chimpanzees in Gombe, Tanzania, transformed the field of primatology. She's the founder of the Jane Goodall Institute, the global youth program Roots and Shoots, and serves as a UN messenger of peace. Her lifelong message that hope is a form of action has inspired generations. I took this conversation with Jane Solo, and she and I explored her thoughts on technology, legacy, and the future of all species.

• 3:29Reid Hoffman?

  So without further ado, here's my conversation with Dr. Jane Goodall.

• 3:37Reid Hoffman?

  First, Jane, welcome to Possible. I am so honored and pleased that we made this happen.

• 3:44Speaker 03

  I am too.

• 3:45Reid Hoffman?

  So we're going to start a little unusually. I'm going to turn it over to our showrunner, Sean, as we've got a game for you and me called Name That Baby. He's going to play a few mystery sounds, and you and I will guess what animal it is. These are all vocalizations from young animals. Sean?

• 4:06Speaker 03

  All right, here we go. Let's warm up. Here's the first one.

• 4:12Speaker 00

  Goodness, that could be a crow or a parrot or...

• 4:16Reid Hoffman?

  Yeah, I was going for parrot or a...

• 4:17Speaker 00

  Parrot or a lamb or a parakeet or...

• 4:21Speaker 03

  You're getting very close because that is within the set, but this one, in fact, is a goat.

• 4:26Reid Hoffman?

  A goat?

• 4:27Speaker 03

  A goat. All right, here's number two.

• 4:29Speaker 00

  We both failed.

• 4:30Reid Hoffman?

  Yes, exactly.

• 4:31Speaker 00

  Zero.

• 4:32Reid Hoffman?

  So works for the goat.

• 4:34Speaker 03

  Next one.

• 4:41Reid Hoffman?

  Orangutan?

• 4:43Speaker 00

  No.

• 4:44Reid Hoffman?

  Okay.

• 4:45Speaker 00

  Not a monkey.

• 4:46Reid Hoffman?

  Oh.

• 4:48Speaker 03

  You may have already guessed this animal.

• 4:49Speaker 00

  Crow?

• 4:50Speaker 03

  Bing, bing, bing, bing, bing.

• 4:51Reid Hoffman?

  That's a crow?

• 4:53Speaker 03

  That's a crow, a baby crow. All right, now we're getting closer to the subcontinent that was mentioned.

• 5:02Reid Hoffman?

  Well, that also sounds to me like a bird.

• 5:04Speaker 00

  Well, baby baboons can sound like that, but it isn't a baby baboon.

• 5:10Reid Hoffman?

  You're the expert.

• 5:12Speaker 03

  Crocodile.

• 5:14Reid Hoffman?

  Crocodile?

• 5:15Speaker 00

  I would never, even on a pink moon, I wouldn't guess.

• 5:19Speaker 03

  All right, very difficult. I don't know anyone who would get this. Anyway, thank you so much for trying that. We'll have another acoustic array for a later question.

• 5:26Reid Hoffman?

  All right, so we started with my complete lack of knowledge of young sounds.

• 5:32Speaker 00

  Apparently mine too.

• 5:33Reid Hoffman?

  Yes. So let's talk a little bit about, I think most people are familiar with the kind of decades of dedication and research and conservation, but probably most people aren't familiar with the fact that you've actually engaged a serious technology in this effort. You know, you've been leveraging cutting-edge technology to help with conservation for decades. Talk a little bit about, you know, kind of use of satellite geospatial imaging to understand animal migration, forest evolution. And then what's the most interesting ways that technology has actually kind of enhanced your work?

• 6:11Speaker 00

  Well, can I go back a moment? Absolutely. Because I think what's interesting, when I was growing up, television hadn't been invented. You know, so in my ninety years, I've seen the advance of technology. I mean, when I began, all my notes were handwritten, and then I graduated to a typewriter. Finally was persuaded to go on to a computer. So the technology came into our field research with a wonderful young man who did his PhD at GOMBI with satellite imagery, GPS, Lilian Pintea. And he's now our head of conservation science. And he's the one who introduced all these technologies.

• 6:55Speaker 00

  And it's enabled us to do a lot of things. You know, part of our conservation is you can't save forest chimpanzees or anything else unless you have the local communities behind you. When I flew over them in the mid nineteen eighties, and what had been forest was bare hills, and it hit me that if we can't help these people find a way of making a living without destroying their environment, we can't save anything. And that began our Tacare program. And it started with just growing new food and scholarships for girls. And then Lilian came along and trained young people who volunteered to be forest monitors

• 7:40Speaker 00

  to read iPhones or iTablets to monitor the health of their forest so that it could be uploaded and visible to the village chiefs and so on. And, you know, so then it just went from one thing to another thing. So it's just enabling us to do things now which I couldn't have dreamt of before.

• 8:00Reid Hoffman?

  What kind of, like, one or two of them has been? The most surprising or magical for you in the use of technology for conservation for the local communities?

• 8:11Speaker 00

  Well, quite a few, actually. The use of satellite imagery to enable the villagers to make land use management plans and, for the first time, set aside areas for conservation with the villagers approving of it. Because, thanks to satellite imagery, they understand the value of these mappings to show where they, you know, when there's a lot of rain, you get landslides because people have been cultivating too steep slopes. But then, you know, exciting for me was when drones came into the picture and the drones could go and map areas that would take weeks to go on foot. And then, I think, even more exciting, the technology that allows you to

• 8:56Speaker 00

  not only look down at the species of trees, but measure the height and width of a tree and calculate how much CO2 it can store. So these things are revolutionary. Camera traps, fantastic. And these auditory, I don't know what they're called, but little microphones that we set up all around Gombe and, within two weeks, identified two species that we didn't know were there.

• 9:27Speaker 04

  The incredible team at the Jane Goodall Institute in Wildmon, with funding from Google, used a super cool acoustic array to discover a brand-new species of bush baby in Gombe National Park, Tanzania. Thomas's bush baby is a fascinating species of primate that's native to sub-Saharan Africa. Here's a clip from that super cool acoustic array where you can actually hear the call of the newly-discovered bush baby.

• 10:06Reid Hoffman?

  And how did you, because it was like, we don't know what that sound is. So what is that species? How did you go from your acoustic array?

• 10:14Speaker 00

  By sending, I mean, it was pretty obvious that both of them were Galaeos, you know, these little Prosimian creatures. And so obviously, we don't have the expertise to know what they are. But it was clear they were new sounds. So we sent it off to the Galaeo experts. When you can hear the sounds, and this is all from nighttime, nighttime recordings. When you hear the sounds, you can tell something about the number of species that you have. Probably AI would help you to find out if there's any communication between different species, which is something that fascinates me. Something about the nature of the calls.

• 10:59Speaker 00

  Are they alarm calls? Are they friendly calls? That sort of thing. And to make distinctions between, I mean, sometimes at night, it's loud calls of all sorts of different species. And presumably, AI can untangle those so that you can hear the individual species separately. And that's all really fascinating.

• 11:20Reid Hoffman?

  And in addition to acoustic arrays, have you been doing cameras and discovering different kinds of social behavior? Or?

• 11:27Speaker 00

  We study chimps in six other African countries. And it's been absolutely beneficial to studies where the chimps are not habituated. Through AI, we can actually, from the camera trap, from the images of the chimps, work out the individuals, which we couldn't do otherwise.

• 11:48Reid Hoffman?

  I know nothing about, or know very little about the kind of the on the ground, never been to any of your conservation sites. But I know a little bit about AI. You know, like, one of the things that I've thought about AI is you can like, pipe kind of through a camera and ask the AI to study for certain things and highlight certain moments and so on. Like, these are some of the things I was thinking about AI when I was thinking about your work. Is what questions has it made arise for you?

• 12:15Speaker 00

  Well, I have to say that to start with, I was really scared of it. And in some ways, I still am, because in the wrong hands... It can harm communities and individuals. And I've seen examples of that in some countries. And I'm really afraid this may come to the US at some point. But my son is a passionate advocate of AI. And he's always telling me, you know, new things. So I've got, I've got a sort of idea of as to how AI can help when it's in the right hands. And it's a tool. And, you know, it's a tool and some people.

• 12:56Speaker 00

  And I'm, I'm not sure, I would like to ask you, do you think that it can ever have its own? I mean, can actually think things like humans? Or is it bounded by what we feed into it, which is our human brain?

• 13:13Reid Hoffman?

  So I think in one pattern, AI will have some deep human resemblance. Because the central training is off over a trillion words of human writing and data and various things. So that causes a bunch of human patterns to be included. And it's also by doing reinforcement learning with human feedback. That also tends to quote unquote, humanize it some more. But precisely one of the things that, you know, as we kind of dive into some kind of more philosophical or cultural lenses. I think that the thing that we're going to get with AI is understanding in what ways

• 13:55Reid Hoffman?

  its pattern of thinking, its pattern of inferring or reasoning, its pattern of experiencing or communicating is different than ours. Because I don't, I think it'll be very similar. And I don't know yet when and how it might go from being a tool to a creature. I think saying philosophically it could never be is a little silly. Just like, you know, as, you know, I'm sure you encounter this a lot is most people tended not. Realize how well animals, you know, not just chimps and gorillas, but like dolphins and whales, think and speak.

• 14:36Speaker 00

  And octopuses and crows and all kinds of creatures, pigs and rats.

• 14:42Reid Hoffman?

  Exactly.

• 14:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:44Reid Hoffman?

  And so my hope is that by the lens and AI, we will begin to have a richer sense of, as opposed to is it sentient or not? Or does it speak or not? There's almost like a topology, a much richer, you know, ecosystem of types of sentience, types of communication, et cetera. And I think AI will have lenses of that. So it won't be exactly like human, but it also won't be unhuman either because of how it's made. And since we're, we're first like today, I think it's all tools. And as those tools are trained on kind of human data sets, that makes it very natural amplifiers of us.

• 15:28Reid Hoffman?

  So for example, if you're thinking about conservation, you think about like, okay, what might it do to help me understand the world? To help me make that world visible, tactile, present to other human beings? Because human beings can only tend to be compassionate or engaged when they see it in some way, which is obviously what, you know, your life's work has been about making happen. And that's part of like, how does technology help you see it and help amplify? That's the reason why I think it's more of a when and how than an if with AI. But I think that's the, that's my hopes around AI.

• 16:05Speaker 00

  You know, if AI can find a way of pulling together all the different strands of research and understanding to make one picture. Because, you know, you learn very quickly. Everything's interconnected and this amazing web of life where every species, plant, animal, has a role to play. And they're interdependent on each other. And so if AI can find a way of pulling these strands together into one picture that makes it easy for people to understand. Because a lot of people find it hard.

• 16:45Speaker 00

  I mean, there are examples out there, but I think largely it's not really understood. That's something I'm always pushing in my talks.

• 16:55Reid Hoffman?

  One of the things from some of your talks, I wasn't quite sure what you'd think about AI as a translator of animal communication.

• 17:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a big thing now. I don't think it can. We can know an animal really, really well. I can know, I know the chimpanzees really, really well. I know what their calls mean. I know what their gestures mean. But to actually understand exactly what they're thinking and feeling and saying, I, I think I'd rather leave it that there are these species and we're all different and yet we're all connected, oh, we're sentient and sapient. But that's got to be that little bit of mystery left.

• 17:44Reid Hoffman?

  Uh huh. And, and I, I'm totally good with mystery. But obviously, you know, kind of when I was thinking about this on some of your talks was, because, you know, I, I helped stand up this thing called an Earth Species Project, which is recording crows and whales and dolphins and so forth, and trying to use AI to understand and also potentially to even have a conversation.

• 18:08Speaker 00

  We needed AI to understand these animal calls at the beginning.

• 18:13Reid Hoffman?

  Yes. And, and the, the notion is, I think we're, in translation, there's always some mystery. Like, for example, if you say, well, you know, subjects that are deep around human beings, like, you know, what is the nature of love or compassion or friendship or family? And those concepts are probably different in.

• 18:34Reid Hoffman?

  You know, kind of English speaking cultures versus Chinese versus Japanese versus, you know, et cetera, et cetera, because that fabric comes together and that's a microcosm more easily understandable by us human beings.

• 18:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:50Reid Hoffman?

  And so there's always some mystery, but I think like getting some like a deeper understanding, like for example, understanding how to have a conversation with a chimp. Like if we could make it 2X the conversation it would be before, I would presume that would be a good thing, but that I was curious, but given some of your talks about whether or not you thought that would be good, mixed, bad.

• 19:11Speaker 00

  Well, I think it would depend on who was using it. I would love to be able to use AI to get into the brains of people doing horrendously cruel experimentation on animals. If they could find a way of feeling and seeing and having exposed to them the suffering of the animals they're working on, they seem oblivious. And if AI could do something about getting through to them, that would be a very good use. Indeed, it would.

• 19:42Reid Hoffman?

  You know, what I hope is that we, if we can get, just like, for example, we learn more compassion for other people when we learn to listen to them. If we can learn to listen to other species and the earth better, we also learn more compassion there. What are some of the principles that you've kind of learned on your own listening journey that like AI technologists should think about, right? In building things that other people can listen to. Say, for example, you have a new apprentice coming on to Gombe. How would you train them to listen and to see the right way? Because that training process would be the kind of thing that we would hope, like what

• 20:25Reid Hoffman?

  would be the principles of look for this or do this and don't do this, which would help technologists think, well, how would we, how would we build our? Machine to learn the similar kinds of lessons.

• 20:39Speaker 00

  Well, I have to say that, you know, you have to answer part of that question. Because we're still observing the chimps in the same sort of way. Technologies come in and that the field staff can can take little recording machines with them. Machines that record like every five minutes what they're doing. But I've always stressed, we also need the written notes about events that happen, which cannot be recorded in a format like, you know, every five minutes. And if you don't write what happens between the five minutes, then you you miss out. And, you know, I was taught when I went to Cambridge, I wasn't taught, I was told.

• 21:23Speaker 00

  Not taught because I didn't listen, but I was told that when you see a behavior just once or twice, it's anecdotal and anecdotes are not important. I totally disagree because I think an anecdote, something that's rare, can give you a feeling of how a species can behave. It gives you an insight into what they can do when the circumstance arises. We've seen many examples, I collect them. Now, if AI can help with that, I don't know if it can.

• 22:00Reid Hoffman?

  Actually, I think it can. It's actually, again, a when and a how than an if. But my guess is even now, because you have these multimodal systems that can take in video. I philosophically or intellectually agree with you that it's actually, in fact, the very interesting lenses into some very unique behavior to discover what the worldview is or what the experience that is. What were some of the of those anecdotes that kind of made you begin to realize that there were? Many more similarities with the chimps than with us.

• 22:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, there was one, one which I always remember very vividly was when we were feeding bananas. And the chimps weren't completely habituated, some were, but some weren't. And there was one very intelligent male who actually used his brains to become top ranking. But on this occasion, there he was, and they all love bananas. So I held out a banana at him, he was beginning to lose his fear. And he looked at it, he didn't dare come up. So when a chimp is angry, they shake something like that, that's one of their threats.

• 23:22Speaker 00

  So he shook a tall patch of grasses, which was near him, one of which touched the banana. And it was just like this, from that moment of this touching it, he let go of those grasses. He picked up a long, thin, wiggly stick, dropped it, looked around, picked up a thick stick and knocked the banana from my hand. So it was that immediate, you know, from a thing touches the banana, okay, that's what I can do. And that really gives you some insight into how their minds work. It's an ah moment, an aha moment.

• 23:58Reid Hoffman?

  Well, because one of the things that if the complete scope of tool usage is one of the things that I'm sure you've seen more than the vast majority of human beings, is that they, that same like visual thinking, or similar, not same, similar visual thinking, tool use. And so like if you see, for example, then if another chimp saw this chimp do that, they go, oh, I could do that too.

• 24:31Speaker 00

  That's right, that's right. That's right. I mean, when I first mentioned that I thought chimps had culture, I was blacklisted by other scientists. That's unique to humans, just like tool-using and tool-making. And gradually, every time we discover one of these attributes in animals that used to be thought unique to humans, mainly by Western science, I have to say, then they find something else. And the last barrier is language, which, okay, animals communicate in very sophisticated ways. Chimpanzees can learn to use computers. I know a parrot who knows over 1,000 words and can write poetry

• 25:15Speaker 00

  and does extraordinary things. So animals have the capacity, but they haven't developed the words that enable them, like, I can talk to you about things that you don't know about. You can talk to me about things I don't know about. We can learn from each other. That's, I think, what animals can't do. We can teach our children about things that aren't present. We can bring people together, as AI does, I'm sure, from different disciplines to solve problems.

• 25:45Reid Hoffman?

  Yeah, no, exactly that. Although, one of the things that I've, because I have studied bits and pieces of animal cognition, because I've been curious about how cognition works generally, ours, that's how I got into AI, because I was curious about human cognition, right? It's kind of like, okay, what's the lens of looking at this? And like, for example, some of the studies of rats, when they are, the neurological studies, when they are navigating, you can actually see that they have something of a simulation of the world, right? Which is the, no, no, I go here, and I go left, and I press that button, and you know, like, that kind of thing. And so...

• 26:27Speaker 00

  Please, after this, Google "five amazing rats."

• 26:31Reid Hoffman?

  Okay, I will, indeed.

• 26:32Speaker 00

  I think you will be amazed.

• 26:34Reid Hoffman?

  Okay, I'm sure I will.

• 26:36Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 26:37Reid Hoffman?

  That'll be great.

• 26:37Speaker 00

  All your listeners, "five amazing rats."

• 26:41Reid Hoffman?

  I look forward to it. So, one of the things that I love about your lifetime of work... Is that you will go and talk basically to anyone with an attempt to build a bridge and an understanding of the world we're in, of the connectivity we should have between human beings, between human beings and the natural world. What has been some of the work where like, for example, you know, even working with, you know, oil companies or others that has been part of that, that building bridges journey and what did you learn from it?

• 27:14Speaker 00

  Okay, well, I have to say there are some oil companies I wouldn't even want to make a bridge with.

• 27:20Reid Hoffman?

  Got it.

• 27:21Speaker 00

  But when I first went to Congo and there were all these orphan chimps whose mothers had been killed and it was desperately important to make a sanctuary to look after them. And Conoco was there then and they were the most environmentally friendly oil company that I'd ever met. And, you know, they were so concerned about the environment that rather than drive a bulldozer through for their seismic exploration, they would go around sacred sites, they would walk and have supplies dropped rather than destroy the environment. They would put earth to the side and then if they found nothing, they'd bring it back. They had botanists. It

• 28:06Speaker 00

  was, of course, it was, it was too expensive to sustain, but that was their ethic. And, and I, the reason I began working with them, I thought it through. So I thought as I was about to arrive, I'm on a plane, I'm using fuel, I'm going to be met by a car, I will be taken to where I want to go by using petrol, fuel. And, and yet, I don't want to take their money to do something that's good.

• 28:40Speaker 00

  So I, you know, I think that we have to think in that way every time we want to make a bridge. And I did the same with chimpanzees and medical research. Our closest relatives in five foot by five foot cages with bars all around, bars ahead, bars below. And so the first time I went into one of these labs, I was so emotionally shocked. And I came out and, you know, I was feeling just close to tears. And I was sat at the table and the heads of NIH involved with the animal research, I didn't know they

• 29:22Speaker 00

  were going to be there. They were all sitting around this table. And I sat there and then I saw they were all looking at me and waiting for me to speak. And I, what can I say to them? So I said, I imagine you're all caring compassionate people and probably feel as I do about what's going on in there. So they couldn't exactly say they weren't caring and compassionate. So they expected me to harangue them and point fingers at them and tell them what bad people they were. No, I showed them pictures of the chimpanzees in Gombe, lying around grooming each other, lying in their nests, playing with their young. And I could see them turning inwards and thinking things through. And, you know,

• 30:07Speaker 00

  eventually with lots of other groups helping, the chimps are all now in sanctuaries.

• 30:13Reid Hoffman?

  Yes, that's great. Actually, I recently saw a documentary about a chimp sanctuary in Louisiana.

• 30:20Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 30:21Reid Hoffman?

  Which is like very large.

• 30:22Speaker 00

  Yes, I've been there.

• 30:23Reid Hoffman?

  Yes. Just look, lots of characters in this documentary.

• 30:32Reid Hoffman?

  So I have a quote from Dr. Leakey that I'd be curious your reflections on. "We must either redefine man, redefine tool, or accept chimpanzees as men."

• 30:47Speaker 00

  As human.

• 30:47Reid Hoffman?

  As human.

• 30:48Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 30:49Reid Hoffman?

  Yes, exactly.

• 30:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:51Reid Hoffman?

  What are your reflections on that quote?

• 30:53Speaker 00

  Well, the quote came because I'd seen the chimp I named David Greybeard breaking off stalks of grass, using them to stick down into a termite mound, pulling them out and eating off the termites. I saw him picking leafy twigs, and then he had to carefully strip the leaves to make a tool suitable for fishing for termites. And it was that observation at a time when we were defined as man, the toolmaker. That was why Leakey made that observation. And it was a turning point for me because it brought the National Geographic in. At start off, I only had money for six months. And this was four months into the study.

• 31:38Speaker 00

  The chimps had been running away from me. You know, I was thinking, I know, given time, I can get their trust, but I've only got two months left. And now suddenly the geographic comes and says, well, you know, we'll support your research after the money runs out. And then I began, you know, getting to know these chimpanzees just like my family. So it was a very important moment for me. And it upset a lot of scientists at the time. Some were saying, well, why should we pay attention to her? She hasn't even been to college.

• 32:14Reid Hoffman?

  Well, it's, there are many forms of deep learning, and not all of them are college. So say a little bit about what you're doing with the institute and conservation. And then, you know, part of, obviously, what we've talked about a little bit is that there's A lot of political turmoil right now. What does that political turmoil mean?

• 32:36Speaker 00

  From our personal point of view, the Jangul Institute, US, we with one stroke of a pen have lost five and a half million dollars a year for the next four years with the closing down of USAID, just like that, gone. And, you know, that's a big hole in our budget. And that's for the program, the community-led conservation program around Gombe. So we're struggling to fill in the gap.

• 33:08Reid Hoffman?

  And make that visible and tangible, like what we, because obviously can't fund a bunch of stuff, but what will we, what we will lose out in learning about our, you know, kind of chimpanzee brethren?

• 33:26Speaker 00

  Well, it hasn't so far affected the chimp study because that wasn't funded by USAID. So what's gone is program, the Tukori program, which is community-led conservation. So where scholarships for girls, microfinance, so villagers can start their own small environmentally sustainable business, clinics for mothers with babies, that's gone.

• 33:54Reid Hoffman?

  So the economics of the whole community, getting involved in conservation, getting, you know, kind of pathways for, for young women and girls developing into this.

• 34:09Speaker 00

  And we also have in all the villages through chimp range in Tanzania. Now, this program has cut many of those things. And it's, it's, you know, in some cases, right across Africa because of this, people are dying, they can't get their medications, HIA, HIV AIDS victims are dying. It's a big shock right across Africa and other developing countries.

• 34:39Reid Hoffman?

  We've made our own Chernobyl catastrophe, which we didn't need to make. A friend of mine was the deputy director of USAID, and so I've, I know about a lot of the human cost. Of this and, and, you know, contrary to misinformation, it wasn't a whole bunch of fraud and everything else. It was actually.

• 34:57Speaker 00

  I mean, let's face it, in some cases, there was misuse of money, but it needs to be evaluated case by case by case. And we were the first organization in Africa where USAID allowed the money to go not through JGI USA, but directly to JGI Tanzania. Just because our program was so foolproof that every penny or dollar was used the way it was meant to use, and it should not have been closed down. There was no justification for it at all.

• 35:35Reid Hoffman?

  I completely agree. And I'm hoping that we'll recover, but it's a bit of a, I think the times will get worse before they get better. So I'm.

• 35:43Speaker 00

  Well, we're not letting it go. We're not closing down.

• 35:46Reid Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 35:47Speaker 00

  People are coming in to help, particularly from the private sector.

• 35:51Reid Hoffman?

  Oh, great.

• 35:52Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 35:52Reid Hoffman?

  Yes, yes. Have you found that the conservation efforts also gives you a lens into the kind of different interests of, you know, call it American culture, European, African, South American, Chinese, you know, various Southeast Asian, Japanese? What have been some of the different ways that different human cultures have engaged with your conservation?

• 36:18Speaker 00

  What I think is fascinating, they've more or less all engaged in the same way.

• 36:23Reid Hoffman?

  Oh, I understand.

• 36:24Speaker 00

  Yes, because, you know, with with our youth program Roots and Shoots, which is young people learning about how to protect the environment, treat each other and animals. And in China, mainland China, we've got over 1,500 groups right across the country.

• 36:43Speaker 00

  And so the young people everywhere, they respond in the same way. And they're, once they understand the problems and they're empowered to take action, they just roll up their sleeves because they can choose. Roots and shoots is unusual. The young people can choose the projects that they do. So it's what they care about. And we've got members now from kindergarten through university, with more adults forming groups in seventy-five countries.

• 37:15Reid Hoffman?

  Wow. Have we gotten cross, you know, country, cross society collaborations?

• 37:21Speaker 00

  Absolutely. We try to bring the young people together from different countries, cultures, religions. And it's just grown naturally that the young people understand much more important than the color of our skin, our language, our culture. We're all human. We all laugh, we all cry, we all hope. The unfortunate thing is we all seem to be able to hate. And that's what Roots and Shoots is not, we're not addressing it directly because I don't think that's the way to do it, but by sharing the stories.

• 38:04Reid Hoffman?

  What have you discovered is there's the learning path and the ability to participate. So it's like, hey, I could make a difference. I could participate in this, in the greater Earth ecosystem. But what also starts getting shaped in forms of a culture that we might want to try to bring to in a more mainstream human culture? Like what's the kind of like, it's almost like if it's the Roots and Shoots, you know, tribal pack, right? As big as it is. What would be the hope about how that would spread?

• 38:38Speaker 00

  Well, I think one thing that's spreading is Roots and Shoots, and its main message is that every one of us makes an impact on the planet every day. And we can choose what sort of impact we make. And as that spreads, it's a way of giving people hope. Too many people look at the problems of the world and they get depressed. And of course they do. People come to me and say, well, look at all that's going on. I'm one person, there's nothing I can do. And we have this expression, think globally, act locally. It's the wrong way around. Because if you think globally, you can't help but be depressed. But so I say to them, well, what do you care about in your own community? What is it that you dislike intensely? Is it waste?

• 39:23Speaker 00

  Is it the way we treat people? What is it? See what you can do about that. Get your friends to help you. And then you find that you can make a difference. That makes you feel good. Then you want to do more. And then you inspire others to do more. And that's, that's my way. Because you know, my, my mission now is giving people hope. Because if we lose hope, we become apathetic, we do nothing, we're doomed.

• 39:50Reid Hoffman?

  Yeah, the loss of hope is a self fulfilling prophecy.

• 39:53Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 39:53Reid Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 39:54Speaker 00

  And we are at a crossroads now.

• 39:56Reid Hoffman?

  Yeah. You know, we have, you know, some large number of people listening to this podcast. All different countries, all different ages, a little bit more technologists, a little bit more business, but you know, broad range. What would you offer as kind of the reason to hold on to hope in these challenging times?

• 40:18Speaker 00

  Well, I sort of think I've answered it.

• 40:20Reid Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 40:20Speaker 00

  Because, you know, honestly, if people lose hope and become apathetic and do nothing, as I say, we're doomed. But also, if you lose hope, thinking, you know, thinking of myself at times, you can't help it when you feel depressed. Sometimes elections in different countries, and it is all around the world, make you feel depressed. But you mustn't let that last because it dooms your own, who you are as a person. It means that you're going through each day unhappy. And that's got to change. And I think the reason it works for me is,

• 41:01Speaker 00

  A, I'm good at living in the moment, and B, I'm pretty obstinate. And I'm not going to let other people push me down. I'm going to jump up again.

• 41:12Reid Hoffman?

  Mm hmm. The thing I would add, I love what you've said, and I think it is absolutely right. It's like if you give up hope, you're, you're, it's a self fulfilling negative prophecy. But I think also is to look at challenging times as the opportunity to, to, to show that why it's important you're here, why it's important you can make a difference. That, that, that challenge also gives you the opportunity to have meaning, to be real, to show that you can make a difference. And it doesn't mean it's easy, doesn't mean it works all the time.

• 41:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:49Reid Hoffman?

  But it gives you that chance to be meaningful. The same joy of, hey, I could make a difference in this conservation is also I can make a difference in these difficult times. And so, you know, convert challenge into the opportunity to, to, to be real, to be present, to be meaningful.

• 42:08Speaker 00

  I was talking to people in LA after those terrible fires. And, you know, it becomes very obvious if you look at terrible situations like that, it, it, for some people, it brings out some heroic streak in them that they didn't know they had. And they perform amazingly heroic deeds, which if you'd asked them maybe a little while before, they would have said, no, I couldn't do anything like that. But it just, the challenge, as you say, it's really important for people to find out who they actually are and what they're actually capable of.

• 42:47Reid Hoffman?

  And the challenge gives you the opportunity to be more than you think maybe you can be.

• 42:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:53Reid Hoffman?

  Right. What are some of the standout moments that if we look through the lens of young people connecting with the natural world that we as adults might remember? We all need to remember to see the world sometimes as a five year old or an eight year old or a 12 year old, you know, what are some of the things that you've seen with that connection that we as adults should also see?

• 43:20Speaker 00

  Well, there's one, and actually it was a 17 year old. And he was African American, from a very poor community. And we were having a roots and tuts gathering. And he was kind of forced, I'm not sure by who, to bring a few younger African Americans with him. He didn't want to come. And we had boats going out on the river. And we were taking the young people. And he was very grumpy and, you know, but he came in my boat. And we went past some swarms. And he was looking at them, like, oh, my goodness. I don't think he'd ever seen a swan before. And then afterwards, we were down on the riverbank.

• 44:05Speaker 00

  And they had little nets. And they were scooping up from the mud. And they had a microscope, a technology again. And they were looking at this and seeing these little tiny wiggly things in there. And he was so changed that he actually invited me to talk at three schools, where his friends went to school. Because he was totally a different person.

• 44:29Reid Hoffman?

  You learn to see.

• 44:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, you learn to see.

• 44:32Reid Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 44:33Speaker 00

  Since we began in nineteen ninety-one, many of our early members are now in decision-making positions. And, oh, there's just one example. This was in Tanzania. And he became Minister of Environment. And it was a time when we had a very unfortunate president, who's now deceased. And this president wanted to build a dam in a place that would absolutely destroy all the surrounding environment. And he announced on the radio, and this was the time when people were being disappeared. And he announced, anybody who opposes us will face the consequences. So this minister stood up to him

• 45:18Speaker 00

  and said, he explained what would be the result. Luckily, he wasn't disappeared. He didn't lose his life, only his job. But that's that they're bringing with them the values that they gain by working with each other in a global community. We call it a family, you know, in seventy-five countries. And young people have discovered they go to a completely new country, they're feeling homesick, they find a Roots and Shoots group and they're immediately at home.

• 45:50Reid Hoffman?

  What's the kind of order of magnitude, rough number of people in those seventy-five countries, total across all the seventy-five countries who participated in Roots and Shoots?

• 45:59Speaker 00

  It's hundreds of thousands, literally hundreds of thousands. Because like, like I said, there were, you know, over one thousand five hundred in China, and it began in ninety-four. So think of the number who've been through, same in the US and other, many other places.

• 46:18Reid Hoffman?

  If you were gonna ask one thing for AI technologists to build, now I, I got your earlier one, which is, look, AI can be used for good and bad, and we wanna, we wanna restrict as much of the bad as we can. But in terms of your work and AI for good, what's the thing that you would most wanna see AI technologists build that would help kind of your mission?

• 46:42Speaker 00

  I would like it to build a tool to bring together for the local people what's going on around them, to, so that they could get a better holistic understanding of why it was important to protect the environment, of the effects of protecting the environment, that could all come to them in, in some magical AI way. You know, I don't pretend to understand AI, and I told you that at the beginning, but I have a very clear understanding of the good it can do and also the harm that it can do. And, you know, like I said, it's a tool, and it depends on whose hands it's in and whose minds are developing it.

• 47:26Reid Hoffman?

  Well, and actually, from the conversation, I would add to your answer, which I think is doable, is to also help not just see the environment, see the effect, but also see what ways you can create sustainable economies and businesses and stuff for a way of making a life with that that connects to the health of the environment and the conservation. So it's see the thing, but also ideate about like, well, what kinds of things can I do that create a environment and conservation positive way of life for me and my community? And so it's healthy and adaptive in that way. And I think AI can help with that, too.

• 48:10Reid Hoffman?

  There may still be a bit of time to get there, but I think that's a reasonable ask.

• 48:15Speaker 00

  I want to ask you, while I have you there.

• 48:17Reid Hoffman?

  No, please.

• 48:18Speaker 00

  Things that I really haven't understood. And that's the idea, which we did mention before, that AI might grow into something that's greater than humans, but different from humans, but able to think for itself. Could it ever be sentient?

• 48:39Reid Hoffman?

  I think can AI be sentient? The answer is trivially yes, right? Just question of when and time and evolution. The question is, can the current AI tools, the path that we're on, will that lead to sentience? And that's not 0%, not 100%, somewhere in between. And part of, I think, you know, my own training at Oxford was philosophy. It's this question around, I think it's going to throw a lot more lens on what does sentience mean?

• 49:10Speaker 00

  Everybody's arguing about that.

• 49:13Reid Hoffman?

  Exactly. So like, how much is it that I make my own plans? How much is it I have my own agency? Part of the reason I, you know, kind of focus on agency with super-agency? How much of it's that I'm contextually aware and adaptive in the way that entities are, human beings, chimps, others, but human beings, the way that you've emphasized is also like long-term hypothetical planning and ability to talk about circumstances that are not here in ways that can be entirely an image of the world that's not currently present and be able to plan about that. We already have in these devices, things where they are superpowered beyond human capability.

• 49:56Reid Hoffman?

  And it's not just play chess or something. If you take the large language models, they have a breadth of human knowledge. And if I wanted to ask, for example, what the parallels between Jane Goodall's work are and the training of mixture of expert systems than AI, it can give me an answer, right? Like, you can't give that answer because you don't have the AI. AI people can't give the answer because they don't know you, but it can give that answer. That that exists already.

• 50:24Speaker 00

  Bringing them together.

• 50:26Reid Hoffman?

  Yes, so it has that.

• 50:28Speaker 00

  But it couldn't answer what happens when we die.

• 50:32Reid Hoffman?

  No, but then again, not clear. We can either.

• 50:35Speaker 00

  No, but that's the point.

• 50:36Reid Hoffman?

  Yes, yes. Well, but the question.

• 50:39Speaker 00

  Now, I see. No, I get what you mean, but you get what I mean, too.

• 50:42Reid Hoffman?

  Yes, exactly. So I think that the the sentience question, I think the mistake in the question is to ask, is it sentient exactly like us? And that continues almost like the path you were on between Western science and chimpanzees. Well, this way, it's not exactly like us. Okay, well, this way, it's not exactly like us. And it's like, well, that's not the most interesting question. The interesting question is what do we discover about sentience, ways of being, through seeing what it's capable of, what we're capable of? And it's really a question of when, but when may be a very long time, centuries, of when it has sentience. It also, of course, may be a very short time. That's that's the that's the puzzle of our of our current moment.

• 51:27Speaker 00

  I go back to my son, who's passionate about AI. I mean, he's grown up now, you know? So he's told me most of what I know about AI. And he said, Jane, you know, AI will write a poem. And he showed me an example that he told AI to write a poem about, I can't remember what. He said, I can write an essay. So the question I have here is that for children, and I also always already worried about this with Google and search engines and so on. What's it doing? I mean, I used to research a subject, going to the library, having this detective, you know, going from one book and climbing up a ladder in a different

• 52:10Speaker 00

  corner and getting the results and writing an essay and feeling, you know, really good about it. Now they can press a button. And when you add AI work and write your exam questions for you, what does it do to the brain? Could AI tell us what it does to the brain?

• 52:29Reid Hoffman?

  Oh, not today. But, you know, a simpler parallel is when calculators were invented. People were like, oh, this will degrade our ability to do math.

• 52:41Speaker 00

  I think it does for me.

• 52:43Reid Hoffman?

  Well, but actually, in fact, I think it means that certain kinds of math tasks become easier and it frees you up to doing other kinds of math tasks or other kinds of tasks if you weren't necessarily that good at math. That's, I think, the parallel to the kind of amplification intelligence. Because my earlier book, Impromptu, was saying AI is amplification intelligence, it's human amplification. And I think for school students and everything else, it's a new form of amplification that's like, you know, a calculator, you know, exponentiated, right? Like, just, just much bigger in these things. But that doesn't mean that you don't, like, for example, when early high schools were saying, hey,

• 53:28Reid Hoffman?

  I want to ban the use of ChatGPT in writing an essay. My tendency would say if I was a, say, for example, an English teacher, and say I was teaching on, you know, kind of Jane Austen and the cultural parallels to the Industrial Revolution, what I would have done is gone to ChatGPT, created 10 essays off basic prompts, handed those out and said, these essays are D minuses. Do better.

• 53:58Reid Hoffman?

  Because then the idea is to say, okay, I'm using this this new superpower. But now I have to understand what a really great essay is, what the details of thinking are, not just kind of rehashing a point from a book or from Wikipedia on what how, you know, Jane Austen might have illuminated, you know, in the Industrial Revolution or not, but actually coming up with something of a more interesting question or different angle or thesis on it. And I can do that because I'm iterating on it. And that's, that's what I think is our potential. And I think ultimately is where we'll get to, just as I think now, for example, we allow students to bring calculators with them everywhere. We, of course, have them on our, on our smartphones and all the rest. And I think that's, that's

• 54:41Reid Hoffman?

  my hope for where we'll go. It doesn't mean that there aren't lots of road bumps and, and, you know, potholes and everything else and getting there. It's not going to be just a simple, easy path. But that's the, the hopeful future.

• 55:01Reid Hoffman?

  All right, I'm going to move to rapid fire. Is there a movie, song, or book that fills you with optimism for the future?

• 55:08Speaker 00

  Well, I think Paul Hawken's book, Regeneration, I can't remember the subtitle. And I gather that a film has been made based on that. I can't remember its name, but this regeneration is taking shape all over the world. And I wrote the foreword to his book, and it is really, really inspiring and hopeful.

• 55:30Reid Hoffman?

  Yeah, great. What's a question that you wish people would ask you more often?

• 55:37Speaker 00

  What happens when I die? Or what is my next great adventure?

• 55:43Reid Hoffman?

  Yes. Where do you see progress or momentum outside of conservation that inspires you?

• 55:50Speaker 00

  Well, I think all around the world, more and more groups, organizations have sprung up that actually care about social issues that, that are fighting in a way that, that they never did before about social justice and human rights and things of that sort. So greater understanding of the human condition and the problems that we face.

• 56:16Reid Hoffman?

  Our final question. Can you leave us with a final thought on what you think is possible to achieve if everything breaks humanity's ways in the next 15 years? And what's our first step to set off in that direction?

• 56:30Speaker 00

  The first step is for everybody to understand that every day they live, they make some impact on the planet. And they can choose what sort of impact they make. What do they buy? How was it made? Did it harm the environment? Was it cruel to animals like factory farms? Is it cheap because of unfair wages? Then find a more ethically-produced product. Cost a bit more, value it more, waste less. And how do you treat the humans you meet each day? How do you treat animals and plants and the environment? And even if it's a tiny thing like saving water or something like that, turning off

• 57:11Speaker 00

  lights, when hundreds and thousands and millions of people all take that tiny step each day, it makes a big difference.

• 57:19Reid Hoffman?

  That is an awesome note to end on, Jane. Thank you so much. It's been an honor.

• 57:25Speaker 00

  Thank you, and I love talking to you.

• 57:31Reid Hoffman?

  Possible is produced by Wondery Media Network. It's hosted by Aria Finger and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Sean Young. Possible is produced by Katie Sanders, Edie Allard, Sarah Schlied, Vanessa Handy, Aliyah Yates, Paloma Moreno Jimenez, and Malia Agudelo. Jenny Kaplan is our executive producer and editor.

• 57:53Aria Finger?

  Special thanks to Surya Yalamanchili, Sayida Sepieva, Fanasi Dilos, Ian Alice, Greg Beato, Parth Patel, and Ben Relis. And a big thanks to Cara Solars, Daniel Dupont, Erin Griffin, Lillian Pintaya, Susanna Name, the Jane Goodall Institute, and Yaltown Podcast Studio.