This transcript is generated with the help of AI and is lightly edited for clarity.
JANE GOODALL:
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.
REID:
Hi, I’m Reid Hoffman.
ARIA:
And I’m Aria Finger.
REID:
We want to know how, together, we can use technology like AI to help us shape the best possible future.
ARIA:
With support from Stripe, we ask 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.
REID:
This is Possible.
REID:
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. Her work 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. 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?
REID:
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 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. So without further ado, here’s my conversation with Dr. Jane Goodall.
REID:
First Jane, welcome to Possible. I am so honored and pleased that we made this happen.
JANE GOODALL:
Oh, I am too.
REID:
So we’re going to start a little unusually. I’m going to turn it over to our showrunner, Shaun, 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. Shaun?
SHAUN:
Alright, here we go. Let’s warm up. Here’s the first one.
JANE GOODALL:
Goodness. That could be a crow or a parrot.
REID:
Yeah, I was going for parrot.
JANE GOODALL:
Or parrot, or a love bird, or a parakeet.
SHAUN:
You’re getting very close because that is within the set. But this one, in fact, is a goat.
REID:
[laugh] A goat?
Shaun:
A goat! Alright, here’s number two.
JANE GOODALL:
We both fail.
REID:
Yes, exactly.
JANE GOODALL:
Zero.
REID:
So works for the goat.
SHAUN:
Next one.
REID:
Orangutan?
JANE GOODALL:
No.
REID:
[Laugh] Okay.
JANE GOODALL:
Not a monkey.
REID:
Oh!
SHAUN:
You may have already guessed this animal.
JANE GOODALL:
Crow?
SHAUN:
Bing, bing, bing, bing, bing!
REID:
That’s a crow?
SHAUN:
That’s a crow. A baby crow! Alright, now we’re getting closer to the subcontinent that was mentioned.
REID:
Well that also sounds to me like a bird.
JANE GOODALL:
Well, baby baboons can sound like that, but it isn’t a baby baboon.
REID:
You’re the expert.
SHAUN:
Crocodile.
REID:
Crocodile?!
JANE GOODALL:
I would never—even on the pink moon, I wouldn’t get that.
SHAUN:
[Laugh] Yes. Alright. 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.
REID:
Alright. So we started with my complete lack of knowledge of young sounds. [Laugh]
JANE GOODALL:
Apparently mine too. [Laugh]
REID:
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 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 use of satellite, geospatial imaging, to understand animal migration, forest evolution. And then what’s the most interesting ways that technology has actually enhanced your work?
JANE GOODALL:
Well, can I go back a moment? Because I think what’s interesting, when I was growing up, television hadn’t been invented. You know, so in my 90 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 onto a computer. So the technology came into our field research with a wonderful young man who did his PhD at Gombe 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. 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 1980s, and what had been forest was bare hills.
JANE GOODALL:
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, 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.
REID:
What 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?
JANE GOODALL:
Well, it’s 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, you know, when there’s a lot of rain, you get landslides, because people have been cultivating two 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 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.
PI:
The incredible team at the Jane Goodall Institute and 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 bushbaby 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.
REID:
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?
JANE GOODALL:
I mean, it was pretty obvious that both of them were galagos, 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 galago experts. When you can hear the sounds—and this is all from nighttime recordings—then 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. 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.
REID:
And in addition to acoustic arrays, have you been doing cameras and discovering different kinds of social behavior?
JANE GOODALL:
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.
REID:
I know nothing about, or know very little about, the on-the-ground. Never been to any of your conservation sites, but I know a little bit about AI. One of the things that I’ve thought about AI is you can pipe through a camera, and ask the AI to study for certain things, and highlight certain moments. And so these are some of the things I was thinking about AI, when I was thinking about your work. What questions has it made arise for you?
JANE GOODALL:
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 U.S. 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 a sort of an 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, and 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 bound by what we feed into it, which is our human brain?
REID:
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 in it. It’s also by doing reinforcement learning with human feedback, that also tends to “humanize” it some more. But precisely one of the things, that as we dive into some more philosophical or cultural lenses, I think that the thing that we’re going to get with AI is understanding in what ways it’s pattern of thinking—it’s pattern of inferring or reasoning, it’s pattern of experiencing or communicating—is different than ours. Because 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—I’m sure you encounter this a lot—is most people tend to not realize how well animals—not just chimps and gorillas, but dolphins and whales—think and speak.
JANE GOODALL:
And octopuses, and crows, and actually all kinds of creatures. Pigs and rats.
REID:
Exactly. And so my hope is that by the lens in 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 ecosystem of types of sentient types of communication, et cetera. And I think AI will have lenses of that. So won’t be exactly like human, but it also won’t be un-human either, because of how it’s made. And since we’re first, like today, I think it’s all tools. And as those tools are trained on human data sets, that makes it very natural amplifiers of us. 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 your life’s work has been about making happen. And that’s part of how does technology help you see it and help amplify it? 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.
JANE GOODALL:
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. 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.
REID:
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?
JANE GOODALL:
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 think I’d rather leave it that there are these species and we’re all different, and yet we’re all connected. We are sentient and sapient. But that there’s got to be that little bit of mystery left.
REID:
And I’m totally good with mystery, but obviously, when I was thinking about this and some of your talks, was because I helped stand up this thing called 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.
JANE GOODALL:
We needed AI to understand these animal calls at the beginning [laugh].
REID:
And the notion is I think in translation there’s always some mystery. For example, subjects that are deep around human beings, like what is the nature of love, or compassion, or friendship, or family? And those concepts are probably different in English speaking cultures, versus Chinese, versus Japanese versus et cetera. Because that fabric comes together and that’s a microcosm more easily understandable by us human beings. And so there’s always some mystery, but I think getting some, like a deeper understanding—for example, understanding how to have a conversation with a chimp. If we could make it 2X the conversation it would be before, I would presume that would be a good thing? I was curious, given some of your talk, about whether or not you thought that would be good, mixed, bad?
JANE GOODALL:
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.
REID:
You know, what I hope is that we, 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 learned on your own listening journey that AI technologists should think about 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 would be the principles of look for this, or do this, and don’t do this? Which would help technologists think, “How would we build our machine to learn similar kinds of lessons?”
JANE GOODALL:
Well, I have to say that, you know, you have to answer part of that question. Because we are still observing the chimps in the same sort of way. Technologies come in and that the field staff 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 miss out. And, you know, I was taught, when I went to Cambridge—I wasn’t taught, I was told [laugh], 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.
REID:
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 those anecdotes that made you begin to realize that there were many more similarities with the chimps than…
JANE GOODALL:
Than us?
REID:
Than with us? Yes.
JANE GOODALL:
Yeah. Well, there was 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 loved 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. 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 [the banana], 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 that 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.
REID:
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 same visual thinking or similar—not same, similar—visual thinking, tool use. And so if you see for example, another chimp saw this chimp do that, they go, “Oh, I could do that too.”
JANE GOODALL:
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 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.
REID:
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 like, okay, what’s the lens of looking at this? And, for example, some of the studies of rats when they are—the neurological studies—navigating, you can actually see that they have something of a simulation of the world, right? Which is the, “No, no, no. I go here, and I go left, and I press that button,” and you know, that kind of thing. And so…
JANE GOODALL:
Please, after this, Google “Five Amazing Rats.”
REID:
Okay, I will indeed.
JANE GOODALL:
I think you’ll be amazed. [laugh]
REID:
Okay, I’m sure I will. That’ll be great.
JANE GOODALL:
All your listeners. “Five Amazing Rats.”
REID:
I look forward to it. So one of the things that I love about your lifetime of work is that you’ll 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, for example, even working with oil companies or others, that has been part of that building bridges journey, and what did you learn from it?
JANE GOODALL:
Okay, well then I have to say there are some oil companies I wouldn’t even want to make a bridge with.
REID:
[laugh] Got it.
JANE GOODALL:
But when I first went to Congo and there were all these orphan chimps whose mothers are being 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 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. Of course, it was too expensive to sustain. But that was their ethic.
JANE GOODALL:
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. So 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.
JANE GOODALL:
And I was sat at a table, and the heads of NIH involved with the animal research, I didn’t know they 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 what can I say to them? So I said, “I imagine you are 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, eventually, with lots of other groups helping, the chimps are all now in sanctuaries.
REID:
That’s great. Actually, I recently saw a documentary about a chimp sanctuary in Louisiana. Which is very large.
JANE GOODALL:
Yes, I’ve been there.
REID:
Yes. Lots of characters in this documentary. 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.”
JANE GOODALL:
As human.
REID:
As human. Yes, exactly. What are your reflections on that quote?
JANE GOODALL:
Well, the quote came because I’d seen the chimp I’d 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 tool maker.” 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. The chimps had been running away from me. You know, I think, “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 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 though? She hasn’t even been to college.”
REID:
[laugh] Well, 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?
JANE GOODALL:
From, from our personal point of view—the Jane Goodall Institute U.S—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.
REID:
And make that visible and tangible. Because obviously, can’t fund a bunch of stuff. But what will we really lose out in learning about our chimpanzee brethren?
JANE GOODALL:
Well, it hasn’t so far affected the chimp study, because that wasn’t funded by USAID. So what’s gone is the TACARE 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.
REID:
So the economics of the whole community, getting involved in conservation, getting pathways for young women and girls developing into this.
JANE GOODALL:
And we also have in all the villages through chimp range in Tanzania. Now, this program has cut many of those things. And, in some cases right across Africa, because of this, people are dying. They can’t get their medications. HIV/AIDS victims are dying. It’s a big shock right across Africa and other developing countries.
REID:
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 know about a lot of the human cost of this. And contrary to misinformation, it wasn’t a whole bunch of fraud and everything else.
JANE GOODALL:
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 [Jane Goodall Institute] 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 be used. And it should not have been closed down. There was no justification for it at all.
REID:
I completely agree. And, 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.
JANE GOODALL:
Well, we are not letting it go. We are not closing down.
REID:
Yes.
JANE GOODALL:
People are coming in to help, particularly from the private sector.
REID:
Oh great. Yes, yes. Have you found that the conservation efforts also gives you a lens into the different interests of, call it, American culture, European, African, South American, Chinese, various Southeast Asian, Japanese—what have been some of the different ways that different human cultures have engaged with your conservation?
JANE GOODALL:
What I think is fascinating, they’ve more or less all engaged in the same way.
REID:
Oh, interesting!
JANE GOODALL:
Yes. Because, you know, 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. And so the young people everywhere, they respond in the same way. And 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 75 countries.
REID:
Wow. Have we gotten cross-country, cross-society, collaborations?
JANE GOODALL:
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 Root and Shoots—we’re not addressing it directly because I don’t think that’s the way to do it, but by sharing stories.
REID:
What have you discovered—theres 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 into more mainstream human culture? It’s almost like if it’s the Roots and Shoots tribal pack, right? As big as it’d be. What would be the hope about how that would spread?
JANE GOODALL:
Well, I think one thing that’s spreading is Roots and Shoots, 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 and 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? 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 my way. Because you know, my mission now is giving people hope. Because if we lose hope, we become apathetic. We do nothing, we’re doomed.
REID:
Yeah. The loss of hope is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
JANE GOODALL:
Yes. And we are at a crossroads now.
REID:
Yeah. You know, we have 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, a broad range. What would you offer as kind of the reason to hold on to hope in these challenging times?
JANE GOODALL:
Well, I sort of think I’ve answered it. 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 of myself—there’s 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 are going through each day unhappy. And that’s got to change. And I think the reason it works for me is, A, I am 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.
REID:
The thing I would add—I love what you’ve said, and I think it is absolutely right, if you give up hope it’s a self-fulfilling negative prophecy—but I think also is to look at challenging times as the opportunity to show why it’s important you’re here, why it’s important you can make a difference. That that challenge also gives you the opportunity to have meaning to be real, to show that you can make a difference. And doesn’t mean it’s easy, doesn’t mean it works all the time. 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 convert challenge into the opportunity to be real, to be present, to be meaningful.
JANE GOODALL:
I was talking to people in LA after those terrible fires and you know, it’s becomes very obvious if you look at terrible situations like that, 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’ve said, “No, I couldn’t do anything like that.” But it just, the challenge, as you say, is really important for people to find out who they actually are and what they’re actually capable of.
REID:
And the challenge gives you the opportunity to be more than you think maybe you can be. 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 5-year-old or an 8-year-old, or a 12-year-old. What are some of the things that you’ve seen with that connection that we as adults should also see?
JANE GOODALL:
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 Shoots 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. But he came in my boat and we went past some swans 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 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.
REID:
You learn to see.
JANE GOODALL:
You learn to see. Yeah. Since we began in 1991, many of our early members are now in decision-making positions. And, well 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 a time when people were being disappeared—and he announced, “Anybody who opposes this will face the consequences.” So this minister stood up to him and he explained what would be the result. Luckily he wasn’t disappeared. He didn’t lose his life, only his job. But 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 75 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.
REID:
What’s the kind of order magnitude, rough number of people, in those 75 countries, total across all the 75 countries, who’ve participated in Roots and Shoots?
JANE GOODALL:
Hundreds of thousands. Literally hundreds of thousands. Because like I said there were over 1,500 in China, and it began in ’94. So think of the number who’ve been through the same in the U.S. and many other places.
REID:
If you were going to ask one thing for AI technologists to build—now I got your earlier one, which is, look, AI can be used for good and bad, and we want to 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 want to see AI technologists build, that would help your mission?
JANE GOODALL:
I would like it to build a tool to bring together for the local people what’s going on around them too. So that they could get a better holistic understanding of why it was important to protect the environment, of the effect of protecting the environment, that could all come to them in some magical AI way. You know, and 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.
REID:
Well, and actually from the conversation I would add 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, that connects to the health of the environment and the conservation. So it’s see the thing, but also ideate about, “Well, what kinds of things can I do that create an environment and conservation positive way of life for me in my community? And so it’s healthy and adaptive in that way.” And I think AI can help with that too. It may still be a bit of time to get there, but I think that’s a reasonable ask.
JANE GOODALL:
I want to ask you while I have you there.
REID:
Great. No, please.
JANE GOODALL:
One of the 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?
REID:
I think, can AI be sentient? The answer is trivially yes. Right, just a question on when in 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—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?
JANE GOODALL:
Everybody’s arguing about that.
REID:
Exactly. [laugh]. So, how much is it that I make my own plans? How much is it, I have my own agency? That’s part of the reason I focus on agency with Superagency. How much of it is that I am 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 long-term hypothetical planning, and ability to talk about circumstances that are not here, in ways that can be in 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. And it’s not just play chess or something. If you take the large language models, they have a breadth of human knowledge that if I wanted to ask for example, what the parallels between Jane Goodall’s work are, and the training of mixture of expert systems within 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 exists already.
JANE GOODALL:
Bringing them together.
REID:
Yes. So it has that.
JANE GOODALL:
But it couldn’t answer what happens when we die.
REID:
No. But then again, not clear we can either.
JANE GOODALL:
No, but that’s the point.
REID:
Yes, yes. Well, but the question…
JANE GOODALL:
Now I see it. No, I get what you mean, but you get what I mean too.
REID:
Yes, exactly. So I think that the sentient 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 sentient 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 the puzzle of our current moment.
JANE GOODALL:
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. It can write an essay. So the question I have here is that for children—and I also 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, going from one book and climbing up a ladder in a different corner, and getting the results, and writing an essay and feeling really good about it. Now they can press a button. And when you add AI, where it can write your exam questions for you, what, what does it do to the brain? Could AI tell us what it does to the brain?
REID:
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”
JANE GOODALL:
I think it does for me anyway.
REID:
Well, but actually, 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 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 a calculator exponentiated, right? Like just much bigger in these things. But that doesn’t mean that you don’t—like for example, when early on high schools were saying, “Hey, I want to ban the use of ChatGPT in writing an essay.” My tendency would be to say, if I was a, say for example, an English teacher and I was teaching on Jane Austen and the cultural parallels to the Industrial Revolution. What I would’ve done is gone to ChatGPT, created 10 essays off basic prompts, handed those out and said, “These essays are D minuses. Do better.”
REID:
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 Jane Austen might have illuminated 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 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 smartphones and all the rest. And I think that’s my hope for where we’ll go. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t lots of road bumps, and potholes, and everything else in getting there. It’s not going to be just a simple easy path, but that’s the hopeful future.
REID:
Alright, I’m going to move to rapid fire. Is there a movie, song, or book that fills you with optimism for the future?
JANE GOODALL:
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.
REID:
Yeah. Great. What’s a question that you wish people would ask you more often?
JANE GOODALL:
What happens when I die? Or what is my next great adventure? [laugh]
REID:
Yes. Where do you see progress or momentum, outside of conservation, that inspires you?
JANE GOODALL:
Well, I think all around the world, more and more groups, organizations, have sprung up that actually care about social issues, that are fighting in a way that they never did before about social justice, and human rights, and things of that sort. So a greater understanding of the human condition and the problems that we face.
REID:
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?
JANE GOODALL:
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 lights—when hundreds and thousands of millions of people all take that tiny step each day it makes the big difference.
REID:
That is an awesome note to end on Jane. Thank you so much. It’s been an honor.
JANE GOODALL:
Thank you. And I love talking to you.
REID:
Possible is produced by Wonder Media Network. It’s hosted by Aria Finger and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Shaun Young. Possible is produced by Katie Sanders, Edie Allard, Sara Schleede, Vanessa Handy, Alyia Yates, Paloma Moreno Jimenez, and Melia Agudelo. Jenny Kaplan is our executive producer and editor.
ARIA:
Special thanks to Surya Yalamanchili, Saida Sapieva, Thanasi Dilos, Ian Alas, Greg Beato, Parth Patil, and Ben Relles. And a big thanks to Kara Solarz, Daniel DuPont, Erin Griffin, Lilian Pintea, Susana Name, the Jane Goodall Institute, and Yaletown Podcast Studio.