Chapter 157: Paul Hawken junks jargon to jolt generations

Listen to the chapter here!

[Paul Hawken]

Everybody's an environmentalist because they live in an environment. You could spend 12 lifetimes saying you really wouldn't understand what's outside. We have a crisis.

It's not a climate crisis. It's a human crisis. A relationship, understanding, grief, violence, power, you know, there's a whole list there.

You know, that's the crisis. Warming is the symptom. And I just suggest that there's another way of looking at time and our passage and that can be imbued with grace and kindness and patience and understanding as to what other people are experiencing.

But it doesn't mean we have to do that.

[Neil Pasricha]

Hey everybody, this is Neil Pasricha. And welcome or welcome back to chapter 157, 7-7 of three books. Yes, this is the only podcast in the world by and for book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians.

We are on a 22-year-long quest to uncover and discuss the 1,000 most formative books in the world. Today, like every day that we launch a new chapter, we will be talking about three, hence the name of the show, three books. Did you read a lot over the holidays?

Did you read much in January? As always on this show, there is no book guilt, no book shame. The world right now is conspiring against reading.

I was talking to somebody high up at Hudson News, you know, the airport bookstore that's in all the airports, and they were talking about how the square footage on books has shrunk to like a quarter of the size it was even 10 years ago. And I was like, well, what are you replacing it with? And she's like, candy, chips, and cell phone covers.

Cell phone covers were taken over the place you buy books before you get on the plane with accoutrements for a cell phone and candy to eat while we watch and imbibe the constant streaming of whatever it is that we're downloading before the plane. I mean, I know it's harder to read. It is harder.

That's why we have a show dedicated to the art, to the science, to the sort of push us that we all need to kind of get to reading. As Casey Neistat once said, reading a book next to a phone with TikTok is like trying to eat a kale salad next to an ice cream sundae. So reading is a challenge, but it shouldn't be a chore.

After you're done reading, you should feel stimulated, rewarded, learned on a different valence, on a different degree. That's I hope what will happen to you after you listen to this conversation with the one and only Paul Hawken, a dream guest for Three Bucks for many years, since I read his 2009 fabled commencement speech, one of those viral commencement speeches that's kind of been going around the internet forever. Back in 2009, he says, hey, you, the class of 2009, are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on Earth at a time when every living system is declining and the rate of decline is accelerating.

Basically, civilization needs a new operating system. You are the programmers and we need it within a few decades. So captivating is Paul's eminent ability to distill kind of the ancient wisdom of the Earth into like the here and now, almost like a soundbite quality.

He's 79, turns 80 this year, and he's got this compressed wisdom about him that you're going to hear, you're going to love, but just going to pause in his bio for a second and some of the learnings to interrupt the opening with what we always do, which is a letter. We always feature a letter. This chapter's letter comes from Joe B., who's talking about Jonathan Franzen, our guest last year. This is an absolutely amazing interview. I can't believe I only just saw it. I love Franzen.

He's an intimidatingly clever guy and he can be likably spiky at times. Check out his video about overrated novels as an example. But you seem to have charmed him.

The breadth and depth of his answers are wider and deeper than usual. He's so fascinating. I can't believe this video only has 14,000 views.

Good job. Also, I am English and I can confirm that Turkish delight really is disgusting. It's basically perfume-flavored jelly, not the stuff you spread on toast.

Jam that the Americans call Jell-O. Covered in chocolate. Don't listen to any vaguely negative comments, Neal, whether about you or Franzen.

This is a treat. And then he goes on and on to say, By the way, not having adverts makes a huge difference. It's a massive relief not to have to listen to them and lets us know your heart's in the right place.

Yeah, I guess my heart's in the right place. No book. No book.

No ads and books. No ads and book podcast. I mean, part of the.

I saw this viral tweet, like all caps, one sentence tweet. Like a few weeks ago, that's like books are the best because they don't have ads. And everyone was retweeting it and liking it.

It's true. Like we're so slathered and bathed in the idea that we just have to watch this slurry of things yelling at us now that we just accept that. I do not accept that.

You should not accept that. We got to find places and spaces that are ad free. I think that's important.

I like the margin alien by our guests in Chapter 138. Is it Maria Popova? And, you know, the margin alien is partly beautiful because it's like the Sesame Street model.

You donate if you like it kind of thing. George Saunders, beautiful sub stack story clubs kind of like that are guests in Chapter 75. Of course, people like Peter Atiyah and Sam Harris are in their pockets like that, just like we are.

So, you know, yeah, it's a it's it's a rare world right now. No ads, but it's something that we value. Joby, thank you so much.

As always, if you drop me a line, I would love to mail you a book of your choice to say thank you for the comment. Thank you for the letter. As always, write me a letter just by emailing me.

Neil at global happiness that or or you can leave a comment on Apple podcast or Spotify or anything like that, too. I will pick it up. Now, Mr. Paul Hawken. Like I said, he is like an elder statesman. I think my my friend Rich Roll called him. And if you haven't already done so, Paul's interviews with Rich Roll are really wonderful.

He's done a couple of them over the years. Paul wrote the wonderful book Regeneration, how to end the climate crisis in one generation. He has this big viral video where he's interviewed by Bill Maher.

And, you know, Bill Maher is like, hey, Paul, what makes your plan to end the climate crisis different? And he's like, I got not only is it different. Paul's like, I have the only one.

Like, have you ever tried to slow down the amount of carbon we release? Why don't we just why don't we reverse it? The new book that he wrote, Carbon, is a deep, dense, compressed form of ancient wisdom talking to us through the earth, through the mycelium, through the trees, through the plants.

And it will give you a sense of being alive on earth two or three hundred thousand years into our species existence. Pretty fresh. Two or three millions of years.

And I guess Homo erectus existence still pretty fresh with this grand understanding of what's happening here on our planet and how we can be more involved. Paul Hawken, he doesn't like the term environmentalist, although most people call him an environmentalist. But he says, you know, if you live in the environment, you are an environmentalist.

Don't create this bifurcation where if you label someone environmentalist, you're saying they're not, you know, a feminist or they're not something else. Don't use labels. Don't use jargon.

Big message from Paul. Don't use jargon to obfuscate, I think is his word, kind of clarity. But for sure, he is an entrepreneur.

For sure. He is an author. For sure.

He is an activist. Did you know he's born in 1946 and age 19? He was already the press coordinator for Dr. Martin Luther King during the civil rights movement. He's going to tell us a harrowing story about being kidnapped by the Ku Klux Klan. Listen, as we're going to talk about that, I mentioned carbon. I put that in my best of twenty twenty five books.

Go over to Neal blog if you want and check out my best of twenty twenty five. The top 20 books I read last year. You can sign up for my book club if you're interested.

And other books he's written that are wonderful include Drawdown, Regeneration, Blessed Unrest, The Ecology of Commerce, The Next Economy and Growing a Business. He serves on a ton of boards, a lot of environmental organizations, got six honorary doctorates, which is a lot for those that don't know. We're going to talk about how nature cooperates instead of competes, why fighting climate change may be the wrong metaphor, why the climate crisis is really a human crisis, how jargon disconnects, what decades of activism have taught Paul Hawken about being human.

This is a conversation that has stuck with me. I really think of Paul as a stage of stages. I hope you agree.

We'll warm up. So if you take if it takes five or ten minutes to kind of get into this, be patient because we warm up. It goes deeper and deeper and deeper.

He's a profound thinker. Please enjoy this conversation with the one and only Paul Hawken. Let's flip the page into chapter 157. Okay, we should be good. Hi, Paul.

[Paul Hawken]

Hi, Neil.

[Neil Pasricha]

Oh, my gosh. I have been looking forward to talking to you for, I want to say years, but it feels like almost a millennia in a way because through your work, I feel so connected to life on the highest possible scale. Your book, Carbon, the book of life, it touched me in a deep and meaningful way. I have so many quotes I've pulled out from it.

I wondered if you could tell us where you are right now because I know you live in a watershed with pileated woodpeckers.

[Paul Hawken]

Yes, I do. You don't see them often, but they're here.

[Neil Pasricha]

And you see the trees that they decimate probably more.

[Paul Hawken]

Yeah, you can hear them. Mostly redwoods. Woodpeckers have no luck on redwoods because there's no insects, but every so often I come to the pine and fir, you know.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah. So you were in Cascade Creek.

[Paul Hawken]

Yeah. Which is in California. Yeah, it's a watershed off Mount Temple Pass, which is to the Miwok who lived here, it's called the Sleeping Maiden before the mountain.

And if you get way back from it from a distance, it looks like a woman lying down on Earth, you know. So that's how I prefer. I mean, Temple Pass is the proper name in some ways, you know, but people don't realize what the name stands for.

[Neil Pasricha]

Wow. That is so similar because here in Ontario, there's a city called Thunder Bay, and they have something known as the Sleeping Giant. And similarly from a distance, the visage of the Sleeping Giant.

Right, right. You know. Oh, interesting, interesting connection.

I pulled a ton of quotes from Carbon. I wondered if I could just throw a few to you that I've picked out as resonant to me, and then you could offer, you know, your reflections on them or expansion if you'd like. Absolutely.

From page three, Earth's climate is not breaking down as some would have it. However, it is changing faster than humans can adapt. If human-induced greenhouse gas emissions are not curtailed, civilization will be.

[Paul Hawken]

Simple. It's like, can we just get to the point and then move on? Because I feel like there's so much rhetoric, which is sort of— it doesn't obfuscate, but it's jargonizing the situation, and jargon is a good way to actually occlude understanding as opposed to generate understanding.

[Neil Pasricha]

Wow. Yeah, beautiful. True.

Agree completely. I mean, even today as I woke up, the top story in the news is how Bill Gates is writing a, you know, a big public letter sort of saying, you know, there really isn't as much of a concern around climate change as people like him have originally suggested. And I thought, oh, this is interesting.

He's going to take the conversation and move it that way.

[Paul Hawken]

Yeah, that kind of conclusion and understanding could only come and arrive at somebody who doesn't spend time outdoors, who is not a farmer, who doesn't really understand the function and extraordinary variety of pollinators, you know, what's happening to the oceans, you know, what's happening to the dead zones, what's happening to— in other words, if you don't have the scope of understanding or the experience of being, you know, for a long time in a natural world, whatever landscape that might be, and seeing the changes, having the capacity to see the changes as well, then you would look at, I think, so-called climate change.

We'll get back to that term because that's just a silly term. It's more jargon. But you see it then very much in the eyes, in the mindset that created the problem.

[Neil Pasricha]

Mm-hmm. Absolutely. You mentioned pollinators, you mentioned dead zones.

On page 44, noise is increasing exponentially worldwide, a form of uncontrolled pollution unraveling the living world. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

[Paul Hawken]

It actually bespeaks that phrase. I'll go back a little bit. Sometimes if I go back and look at my books, I discovered that oftentimes the last paragraph augurs the next book, and I didn't know it.

Now, in this case, it's not the last paragraph at all, but the noise, human-created noise. The next book is about the 3.4 trillion Earthmates that are here with us, creatures. And one thing we don't understand, we didn't begin to understand it very well.

There's just a whole raft and bevy of new scientists out there doing marvelous work, but all 3.4 trillion creatures are communicating all the time. They're talking. We use the word talk.

That's our verb, but not theirs. They don't have verbs in that sense. In that sense, they do actually.

And we don't listen to it. We don't hear it. We'll hear a bird.

We'll hear a cry of a wolf or a coyote or something. We do hear sounds, but actually just a tiny, tiny fraction of the communication is occurring constantly, every second on Earth. And so, Neil, I'm writing a book and the subtitle is Leadership is Hearing All the Voices.

We don't hear all the voices at all. We don't even hear each other anymore, for goodness sakes. I mean, much less creatures and things that are speaking in, I wouldn't say language, but in ways that we cannot understand.

For example, because of Adam Askey's work at the Royal Society, and along with Toby Cures and Giuliano Ferrucci and others, we know that mycelia speak with a clicking sound, like the sun people do that, right? And so do sperm whales. It's like Morse code almost, click, click, different shades of click in packets.

That's Morse code for us. But they speak in Morse code in a way, and there's this clicking sound that occurs in packets. And then Adam Askey's work is saying, well, these packets are repeating themselves, and then they're also in sequences that repeat, which is like a sentence.

And so we know that. So the mycelia are basically connected to every hyphae, that is that root tip with the mycelia in the world. And the plants in the mycelia are communicating.

Now, how they're communicating, we don't know. But they are definitely communicating because the plant has got sugar, carbohydrates. The average plant puts about 30% of its photosynthesized sugar in its roots.

Okay, so it's legal tender. For what? For who?

For mycelia and bacteria. And the plant wants to keep bacteria there because they feed it and they change the environment. But mycelia have this ability to give it, the plant, or to really exchange with the plant, nitrogen and phosphorus, but also selenium and zinc and strange things like that.

And so every millisecond, a plant is in a transactional mode in the earth by celia. And that's communication. We have no idea.

And I'll stop here, but I'm just saying, our idea of communication and memory and all that sort of stuff depends on a central nervous system. And they don't have one. So that, for us, is kind of like, oh, they couldn't be doing this.

They couldn't be doing this. They couldn't be doing that based on what we think communication and intelligence is. We have to revisit that one in a big way.

[Neil Pasricha]

Well, that kind of reminds me of what you say on page 30. In school, we were taught that life is a competitive struggle. The word cooperation was not mentioned in science class and was seldom seen in school.

We were graded on a curve, not as a team. We were taught Darwin, not St. Francis. Plaguent insults, cattiness, hazing, and the occasional pummeling verified the classroom tutorial.

In the background was the nightly news detailing convulsions of regional wars and economic tumult. Yet, I never saw conflict in the apple trees, the creek by my house, or amongst the crows that gossiped at dusk in the pines.

[Paul Hawken]

Yeah. I mean, that's the world we live in. If we actually just slow down and take a look and listen, it doesn't mean that there isn't conflict for territory.

You can think of different animals. But they're rarely in conflict on a steady state. In a sense, it's not a cultural attribute.

It's a food attribute when food is scarce. And they'll fight for it, for sure. But the living world is extraordinarily cooperative.

Cooperative, actually, is kind of a small term for what they're doing because exquisitely interactive and symbiotic is probably the better description of the living world. And I think human beings have done that, too, and do that. Human beings can be amazing.

I'm not trying to put human beings down and exalt animals or creatures. I'm just saying that that's not what we see right now, and that's not what we're taught. And so much of our education comes from the North, from the West, the European, the scientific revolution.

And we take it for granted as being the highest level of understanding and so forth. And so, in that process, we marginalize cultures who have been here 10, 20, 30, 40, 50,000 years who seem to have got it right when it comes to communication, for sure, but socialization, how they listen, how they work together, because they wouldn't be here if they hadn't. That's for darn sure.

And so there's a lot of available learning for us there which we have always looked down on from the West for a long, long time until recently. And I think that's changing. Yeah.

[Neil Pasricha]

I was struck by the sentence you say, in Carbon, where 6% of the world's population today is the diaspora of our nomadic hunter-gatherer ancestors in the form of what we call today our indigenous peoples across the world. I don't know why I never married those two thoughts together, but it was one of, you know, every page in this book is like, what, what, what? And you continue to do that.

I could keep going. The last one I just want to put onto you is page 185. So now we're near the end of the book.

And it was just something that, it made me think of my conversation with Jonathan Franzen, who, you know, one of his most formative books was one of the books of Narnia. And in one of the books of Narnia, there's this sort of meeting of animals that he, as a lonesome, you know, adolescent, was thought of as his, as a friendship and as kin. And then on page 185, you say, I once walked on the unseeded land of the Wampanoag, I probably said that wrong, Wampanoag near Cape Cod, following a winding, unused dirt road.

As I rounded a bend, seven animals faced each other in a circle. It appeared to be a meeting, like a council. I froze, so did they for a moment.

There was a hognose snake, a box turtle, a possum, a rabbit, a white-footed mouse, a meadow vole, and two bobwhite quail. I couldn't believe what I'd seen. I checked their tracks.

They were there. People who spend time in nature have experiences for which there is no logical explanation.

[Paul Hawken]

Right. If you spend enough time outdoors, in different environments, absolutely that will happen.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah. I find that happens all the time. I just got into birding five years ago, and I sleep with my windows open.

And I'm like, oh, why do all the squirrels kind of go up into the trees? And they're always kind of clicking at night, and there's a territorial. And I was kind of typing with chat GPT to explore this, and like, it has no idea.

It has no real understanding that they do this. And I'm like, well, I see it every day. Like, what's happening here?

And I realize so much of what's out there is just not captured in what we're trying to do with zeros and ones and data right now. And of course, birders see this all the time. Look, you were described many different ways in many different places.

Your own website, of course, says that Paul Hawken explores the connection between nature and commerce, working with leaders and CEOs in ecological regeneration. Of course, that's the title of one of your books, this wonderful website, this great resource. But then I also think most people might enter and meet you, as they do on the front page of the internet, through Wikipedia.

And the five descriptors there that immediately follow your name are, in order, environmentalist, entrepreneur, author, economist, and activist. And I thought I might just ask you to, is that how you define yourself? And how would you define those words?

Environmentalist, entrepreneur, author, economist, activist. That's how you are labeled on the central channel of Wikipedia.

[Paul Hawken]

I never look at Wikipedia, so thank you for sharing. And I don't write it, of course. I have no idea.

I think I've written about economics, for sure. The Next Economy, that was the book. That doesn't make me an economist.

So that's sort of a jump, a real leap forward. And so I think activist, yes, of course. I did direct action, both in the civil rights movement and environmental movement.

So entrepreneur, yes, I've created a business, that's true. What are the other two I'm missing?

[Neil Pasricha]

Environmentalist and author. And I wanted you to both just define environmentalist for us today.

[Paul Hawken]

I can't. That's not a word I would use. I would shed that one.

It's an ism. I would never say I'm an environmentalist. As opposed to what?

As it contrasted to. And I understand why people use that word, but it's also a word of separation.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah.

[Paul Hawken]

And isolation. All those people are environmentalists. Well, what does that mean?

Yeah. It means they don't care about children and the plight of women. I mean, there's so many social issues in terms of the rate of disease occurring in the United States due to ultra-processed foods.

And they don't care about how Pepsi, Coca-Cola at all are doing everything they can to make people addicted to non-food. Basically, it's non-food. And et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

So there's so many aspects of human endeavor and human civilization that we encounter and we deal with. But everybody's an environmentalist because they live in the environment.

[Neil Pasricha]

I like that. Everyone's an environmentalist because they live in the environment. We're catching you on your 80th spin around the sun.

You mentioned the Civil Rights Movement. For those that just don't know, it's pretty astounding that, of course, at age 19, I think, in 1965, you were the press coordinator for Martin Luther King Jr. Like, you know, actually having clashes with the Ku Klux Klan, being, I think, rescued or intervened with by the FBI, if I read that properly.

[Paul Hawken]

They didn't rescue me until I was kidnapped. So, I mean, that's why.

[Neil Pasricha]

Otherwise, they would... You took photos of the Ku Klux Klan members who had kind of murdered three of the activists in the Civil Rights Movement, I believe.

[Paul Hawken]

I don't know who I photographed. What happened is after Schroeder, Cheney, and Goodman, the three civil rights workers, were tortured and killed and buried and then discovered, of course, somehow. And the FBI was all over it, you know.

And Mississippi. And John Doar, who was from the Justice Department, got an injunction against the Klan that they could no longer march with their hoods. And so the first time they didn't do that, and this is all in Meridian, Mississippi, where sort of the epicenter of all this, they were going to march without their hoods.

And somebody where I worked at the Congress of Racial Equality in New Orleans, yeah, I was a photographer, said, anybody want to go photograph this? I said, sure, you know. I'll do it.

And that's when I was quickly kidnapped, if you will, or thrown into a car and driven out of town. And what was so remarkable about that experience was that I don't know how far we got out of town before the car I was in was pulled, was, you know, just pulled off? No, I mean, a car next to it just pushed it off the road.

Pushed it off the road. And there was four guys in that car, there was three guys in mine, and they were like, you know, and I go, oh, this is getting worse. I've been kidnapped from the kidnappers.

But, you know, I just remember so distinctly the driver of the car that pushed us off the road got out, turned to the driver of the car I was in, and said, God darn it, Jimmy, I told you we couldn't do this shit no more. And I'm going, what? And they obviously knew each other.

They probably played football. They were in high school. They knew each other.

Who knows what they did together? You know, I don't even want to know. But that car was FBI, deputized or somehow, you know, and they knew.

They grew up with these Klansmen, you know what I mean? And then they took me out of the car, threw me in there, drove me back to town, and I was put in jail for disturbing the peace. But I think the cultural thing about that is how deeply embedded racism and violence was in that culture, you know, sanctified, really almost sanctioned, maybe not sanctified, but sanctioned for a long, long time.

And it just gave me another dimension of understanding, you know, what happened to the people from the Atlantic passage that came over from Western Africa and how they had been treated for hundreds and hundreds of years. And I was nothing. I was just an irritant, really.

But just that little kind of opening, you know, of seeing the cultural pathology, you know, act itself out on the highway again.

[Neil Pasricha]

Wow. What an astounding life you were living. We're flashing from today back to 19.

And of course, before age 19, you were kind enough to share three books that you read that had a disproportionate effect on your life. I've bought the books. I've tried my best to read them.

I made it through one of them. I flipped through another. But I'm kind of, like, immersing myself in these books.

I wondered if we might start. And I'll just explain the book to our listeners. Since most people will be listening to this rather than watching it, I want people to picture, you know, standing in a bookstore and you're holding this book in your hand with Paul and I kind of standing next to you.

The first one here, of course, is Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin, published in 1953 by Alfred A. Knopf Publishing. This is James Baldwin's first book, the novel he says he had to write.

I wish I had an old cover, but mine is a 2013 vintage paperback edition.

[Paul Hawken]

Yeah, it's good.

[Neil Pasricha]

It has a young black boy in a white T-shirt standing against a wooden wall near a high-rise window, which I assume is supposed to be 1930s Harlem, looking sad, kind of gazing down. James Baldwin is in tall, skinny all caps on serif in white and in a diagonal black ribbon with the small caps Go Tell It on the Mountain in green cloudscape just below. James Baldwin lived from 1924 in New York City.

He died in 1987 in France at age 63. He is the novelist, essayist, playwright, and civil rights activist known for his insightful explorations of race, sexuality, and class. This is his powerful semi-autobiographical novel about faith, family, and identity taking place in 1930s Harlem and beyond.

Paul, please tell us about your relationship with Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin.

[Paul Hawken]

Well, it's one of the books I read so I didn't stop there. And it was a time when the civil rights movement was emerging. I grew up in Berkeley, California.

And so my father worked in the library and so I was, you know, Bill's kid, as they called me, in the library. But I had a free run of the library and all the different libraries at the University of California. But I really wanted to understand the civil rights movement in a deeper way.

And Baldwin was just such an extraordinary writer. And he did write about his sexuality and about what it was like. He wrote about how dysfunctional his family was too.

But to me, it was obvious that he was becoming a voice for the black community that was poetic and could turn a sentence really well. And so to me it was just like an aperture that opened up. And was I gay?

No, I wasn't a gay man. So it wasn't like identification with respect to his sexuality. But it was a reading of what happened to him because of his sexuality and because of his color.

And so he's like a twofer. He experienced an incredible amount of discrimination because of both aspects. And then also self-hate.

Because he didn't fit in at all. And I think for me, I could identify that last part. I didn't feel like I fit into this society, this culture.

I wasn't black. I wasn't gay. It doesn't matter.

What matters is that I couldn't understand what was happening at that time in the world in my city. I mean, I grew up in a very liberal city. It didn't make any difference.

I didn't understand. I was confused. And so I went to others who expressed their confusion in a way that I wanted to turn the page and read about it and understand and learn.

And so that was Go Tell It On The Mountain. And I feel like that title is so interesting. When I was thinking about talking to you, I was going, well, it's more apropos now than ever was.

We need to go tell it on the mountain. And it's such a beautiful phrase from Black Spirituals, that phrase. And we need to go tell it on the mountain because we're listening to the wrong voices completely, politically, sociologically, social media.

I mean, to me, I mean, the press, the Post, the Times, all these other things have really shut down. I mean, they do really, really good research on certain subjects. But they are conforming.

They are in fear. There are newspapers that do not want to cross Donald Trump, the president, the new proto-fascist in history. And so even then, where do you go for insight, for information, for understanding?

And we need more and more people who go tell it on the mountain.

[Neil Pasricha]

Listen to the mountain. You were in Berkeley, California. I know at 19, you've already mentioned you were in Mississippi. I know you spoke to our mutual friend, Rich Roll, who's a former guest on the show as well.

We love Rich here. You told him that you lived in Nevada City as well and that you were taken in by a family there. Was that after this book, or I'm missing a piece of the puzzle?

[Paul Hawken]

That was before. I was, my family, and go back a little bit, the reason I spent so much time outdoors is because it wasn't safe indoors in my family. Okay, it was not a safe place.

And so outdoors was safe. And so that has carried forward with me for the rest of my life. I don't feel any threat.

My uncle was a herpetologist, and he taught me how to handle snakes, including, okay, here's a rattlesnake. This is how you hold it. And okay, it makes sense.

And so I always saw the outside as sort of a sacred, as a sanctuary, and the inside as a danger zone. So somebody in Nevada City who was an accountant and worked in different companies and so forth and had a family there asked if I would come live there so that his wife and daughter would be around a male figure. Not a formidable male figure, but when he was down in the Bay Area.

So that's how I got to live in Nevada City. But then as now, I was just a voracious reader, a bit voracious reader. But it was so great to have horses and to be out there in the wild down the river and all that sort of stuff.

It was incredible.

[Neil Pasricha]

What a beautiful, and thanks for coloring that in a little bit for me because it was sort of mentioned as an aside with Reg, and I wanted to double-click on it, but it was right near the end of one of your wonderful two-hour chats with him. We talk about how you and we and us in this era need to kind of go, tell it on the mountain. You talk about your comfort and connection with the outdoors.

You are partly now, you've received six, by my count, honorary doctorates and given a number of really well-known and quite viral commencement speeches. I wanted to ask you about the state and faith you have in humanity, especially around young people. On page 53, a minor character in the book named Sister McCandles clocks on a night when nearly nobody shows up to church.

She says, The Lord ain't gonna bless no church what lets its young people get so lax. No, sir. He said, Because you ain't neither hot or cold, I'm gonna spit you out my mouth.

That's the word. You, of course, have said in your 2009 commencement speech, Civilization needs a new operating system. You are the programmers and we need it within a few decades.

You've always had a great knack for communicating across generations. You mentioned we need to go tell on the mountain. What do you say to younger generations today?

[Paul Hawken]

Well, I listen. As opposed to say, you know, or stay, or no, you know. I feel like when I was 14, 20, 30, whatever, when I was young, whatever, I didn't listen to very, very many people who wanted to tell me what I should know, what I should do.

I just didn't. I was finding out myself. I was making it up as I went along.

Now, lookit, there are people and cultures in which you really do have extraordinary elders, you know, and you do listen to them, and you do learn from them, and you do pass on cultural almost tokens, but, you know, that have originated way, way back, you know. So I felt like I was a changeling, you know, and, you know, that's an Irish, I guess, term. I don't know if it's an English word, but, you know, the idea of fairies coming in at night, you know, and taking a human child and then exchanging it for, you know, one who's elvish, and then, you know, the elvish child is the changeling, you know, and he, she grows up, and they're really confused about what they are and who they are.

And so I always felt like a changeling in that sense, you know, like my parents didn't make any sense to me as human beings, nor did my relatives, with all due respect, certainly not my brother. I had a twin sister, but, you know, so I always had this sense of, like, I really didn't belong here. And so at my age now, even more so, I don't feel like I have, you know, I can write.

I love to write. I love to share, but not in sort of a didactic, you know, post style, you know, where listen up, you know, I got something to tell you. I got something to share.

I know so much. No, no, no, no, no, no. It's really the opposite, which is, you know, trying to open up areas for the reader that invoke or evoke, really, a sense of wonder and curiosity.

And I think that, you know, I think that comes from being outside, going back to that, you know, like I was safe outside. Okay, well, but what's outside? And you can spend 12 lifetimes and you really wouldn't understand what's outside.

And so, you know, the sounds, the creatures, you know, what's in the soil, you know, all the things, they're red. Pyrocanthus, is that edible? Not really, but, you know, birds get drunk on them.

You know, I mean, just learning bit by bit by bit, you know, where I was and how it worked. And I still feel like I'm in that same modality after all this time. So, in that sense, very little has changed.

The only remarkable thing about me, I believe, is I'm intensely curious. And so, curiosity is the desire to understand, to know. And that's on all levels of, you know, life on Earth, you know, and that includes us, homo sapiens.

And that curiosity continues to this day. And it drives me. It's really behind all of the books I've written.

And those books, the sequence of them, in a sense, is a map of my mindscape and how I expanded in some ways, in many ways, you know, the scope of what it was that I was interested in.

[Neil Pasricha]

Wow, how beautiful is that? And, you know, I always think the outdoors has no ad campaign and no one telling you to do it, and there's never an interruption and your social media will tell you to go outside. I might just pause on the number of times you've talked about the outside and just to say to you, what are the ingredients of a great walk?

[Paul Hawken]

Well, the ingredients of a great walk are that you find in your way. Okay? In other words, it's not the path itself.

If there's a path, then it's rough terrain. That's very helpful. But it is that you don't know where you're going, even if you can see it on a map or a trail or you can see a mountain.

When I was in Bhutan, you know, you can see Tomahawdy. Well, I can see it from 50 miles away at 25,000 feet, snow covered. But if you look down and then look, you know, straight ahead for a while, you didn't know where it was going to take you.

You didn't know this river, this path, this trail. And so I think that a great walk is discovery and appreciation, of course, you know, and delight and just being alive. It's like, to me, it's being totally alive in your present.

You have to be present, you know, trip and fall, if you don't. And then, but being alive in terms of the sound, you know, and obviously not just the fauna, but the flora and actually even imagining since most cases, you know, you're walking where other people have walked. Sometimes it's animal trails, for sure, but sometimes it's both.

And sometimes, it's always both, actually. But some more human than not. And when you do that, then in a sense, you're in a flow of history.

You're in a flow of movement and, you know, all life is flow. You know, it's not static. It moves all the time, whether it's either a trillion molecules in every cell or the whole of the earth and everything and the land and sea.

It's always about movement and flow. So, I think when you're walking, you know, you're entering into a non-static relationship and most of our relationship with nature is static.

[Neil Pasricha]

Mm.

[Paul Hawken]

Mm. Yeah.

[Neil Pasricha]

Mm-hmm. When you're walking, you're entering into a non-static relationship. Most of our relationship is static.

I like how you said rough terrain helps. Absolutely. Which I live in downtown Toronto and I cannot think of any rough terrain.

I don't have any rough terrain around me, but the idea that rough terrain helps makes a lot of sense. On page 132, Esther, who's one of my favorite characters in the book, her voice, as you said, Baldwin's writing really pops. She says, I'm going to take this quote a little out of context, but she says, I just want to go somewhere, go somewhere and have my baby and think all this out of my mind.

I want to go somewhere and get my mind straight. That's what I want you to do. And that's pretty cheap.

I guess it takes a holy man to make a girl a real whore. But just that phrase, I just want to go somewhere, go somewhere and think all this out of my mind. You know, one thing I love about your work in your speeches and in your books is that you take this cascading fall of every living system globally, as you've said, every living system globally is declining, right?

Birds, insects, animals, clean water, clean air, it's all declining. And yet you are able to, at the same time, articulate a unique form of optimism that comes from your ability to connect and see people doing such great and meaningful work. And so I just wanted to ask you how you personally metabolize that emotion that a lot of us feel of environmental despair.

You know, there's something you're doing. Is it through your lens? Is it through your vision that you're seeing so much great stuff happening?

A lot of people feel what you're feeling. I mean, one of Jonathan Franzen, not to bring him up again, but one of his formative books was called Reason in a Dark Time by Dale Jameson, why the climate movement failed, you know, in the 50 year, and he said that was formative to him because it like pushed him down that path of, okay, it's failed, now what? Like he kind of went to the next step and I wouldn't say he's an optimist, you know, but I detect a lot more glimmers of optimism from you and just wondered how you would talk to that specific emotion that a lot of people feel.

[Paul Hawken]

Well, working backwards from what you just said, I mean, I agree the climate movement has failed. No question about that. Now, let's be really careful here because the movement, okay, and it does not criticize their, you know, people and what they're doing, what they care about and their effort and their sincerity.

That's not what I'm talking about. I think as a movement, it failed because the narrative is upside down or backwards. And so facts don't change our minds, stories do.

And the story from the climate movement, you know, has been jargonized, you know, and it's really a specialty language. That very few people understand and speak. And that's why 99% of humanity is disengaged from climate.

They may be very sympathetic and they may want something to happen and they're maybe very concerned about it. But on a daily basis, what do they do? Nothing.

Now, many cases they can't, you know, they're just based, they're survival based. Okay, let's put that aside. But in most cases, you know, in the West, you know, from Europe and right across, you know, to the United States, Canada, Japan, Korea, all those places where you have a fairly robust economy, they can do things that they don't.

And they're busy, they're this, they're stressed. Going back to that quote from Esther, in a way, I just want to go somewhere. I mean, I just feel like, you know, we have to step back and how are we talking to each other?

Because, you know, if you're having surgery and the doctors are using jargon, they go, hallelujah, they don't have time to do complete sentences, right? That's what jargon's for. But if you're talking about the fate of humanity, I think we need to slow down a little bit there and tell stories, you know, and reach out and listen.

Because decarbonization, net zero, you know, all these things are just, not only are they jargon, but they're actually, in many cases, complete nonsense. Complete nonsense, you know. And you can know what the intent is of the speaker or somebody coined the term, you know, but the intent doesn't matter.

What matters is the word. And does the word make sense given where we are today? And in most cases, the jargon makes no sense whatsoever.

I mean, you even have things like direct air capture, which sounds like, oh, what a brilliant thing. We'll just take this carbon back out of the air, suck it down four parts per 10,000. We're going to separate the C from the O.

You know, here's the carbon. We'll put the O back out somewhere. We're going to liquefy the carbon, pump it in pipelines to geologic formations and put it down, you know, 5,000 feet below the surface of the Earth, you know, and bury it.

Okay. They can do that now, okay. And billions are going into it, you know.

Bill Gates was one of the investors. Now, the problem with that is ninth-grade science, which is called entropy, which is energy only goes one direction, you know. And that's the second law of thermodynamics.

I don't want to get scientists— I don't want to just speak on science, but the fact is we all know that. You know, like an ice-cold glass of lemonade is going to get warm, okay, in the room. We all know this.

And what's happening is this direct air capture is using to suck the air from, you know, four parts per 10,000 of, you know, CO2 and then separate it, you know, and then liquefy it and then pump it. And this takes energy, a lot of energy. So the greenhouse gases that we are troubling us, CO2 being foremost, but also, you know, methane and others, are the result of entropy.

That is to say, you burn coal, oil, gas, the ash is CO2, okay. So you're, in a sense, trying to use entropy to cure entropy. And that is so laughable in terms of physics.

You know, it's like any ninth grader would say, you know, when you're smoking, this is not physically possible. And yet we hear about it as being one of the ways that humankind, you know, is going to save its ass. And excuse my talking about the day, but it's just like, it's like, come on, you know.

So it goes back to the movement. So that kind of language, that kind of rhetoric, that kind of financing, that kind of belief, it's a belief, it's not actually factual in terms of what it will do for humanity and the earth and living creatures. That kind of thing plagues the climate movement.

Now that's on the tech side. But there's also on just the activist side, we're going to what? Fight, tackle, combat, climate change, you know.

Just stop right there for a minute. First of all, those verbs are male verbs. Okay, very male.

I'm not saying women can't fight, tackle, and combat, but I'm just saying is that that's how men think. You know, first of all, that's Don Quixote. You know, the fact is climate, you can't fight it, you can't combat it, you can't tackle it, you know.

And so what you've done, you know, is other, climate. You've made it a thing that you can do things to, fix. Here's another male verb, you know.

And that thinking is the cause of global warming. Othering nature, othering people, obviously, othering resources, othering the earth that we live upon, you know. And then, you know, and then it just goes out there to, oh, we're going to fix the climate, we're going to do this to the climate, you know.

We're going to combat it, tackle it, you know, this sort of heroic imagery of complete nonsense because the biosphere and the climate are absolutely inseparable. That's what creates the climate is the biosphere. And again, just these basic understandings, you know, they are just fact.

Now, can we talk together? Can we share? Can we listen?

Let's talk now. But we can't talk in a mindscape of untruth and BS and being right, for example. You know, that doesn't help.

So the climate movement has failed, no question about it. Now, it doesn't mean people out there aren't doing extraordinary things with respect to the biosphere and culture and people and place. They are.

[Neil Pasricha]

But when you talk about that despair that feeling people have and you're talking about how it's story-based and, you know, jargon is partly pervasive, so where do we find these kind of lucid, clear voices?

[Paul Hawken]

They're everywhere. They're everywhere. We just don't listen to them.

We listen to the people who have the microphone, you know, who have the New York Times editorials. We listen to the people who are running these companies. We listen to Silicon Valley saying, oh, you know, we're going to fund climate tech.

You know, I mean, we're listening to the wrong people. Not the wrong people. We're not listening to the people who actually have these clear, resonant, beautiful, extraordinary minds and voices on Earth.

And they're here. They are here. But you don't meet them in the New York Times.

[Neil Pasricha]

Are you talking about a lot of the indigenous cultures that you reference throughout your book?

[Paul Hawken]

I'm including that, but I'm not limiting to that. You know, there's farmers and there's activists all over the world that we don't know about, that we don't hear. You know, we don't hear their voice, you know.

And they're barely recognized. You know, at least every so often you get an award or something. Oh, yeah, that's great, you know.

But we did a lot of work with Greta Thunberg and just, you know. But I'm sorry. There are so many other people besides Greta Thunberg, and yet the media is always the perfect, you know, thing.

You know, she sat on the steps with her sign, you know. And we want to honor her for sure, you know, for her courage and bravery. But then to make her kind of the archetype.

[Neil Pasricha]

Because humans, we can't focus on too much stuff. So we have to simplify it down to like one name or face and one key point. And, you know, you're a keynote speaker.

I'm sure you're told all the time, make it simple, Paul. Have three key takeaways for us. Talking to farmers and indigenous communities is not something that's easy for a lot of people to do.

[Paul Hawken]

Right. But what's missing here is farmers talking to farmers, okay. Students talking to students, you know.

I mean, indigenous people talking to indigenous people. And they hope that we would listen who are not indigenous, you know. But we are not part of the conversation if we're city-bound activists, you know, who are jargonized by what I call the pseudo-climate movement.

You know what I mean? It's like not really. That's why we have the highest rate of carbon emissions after 50 years.

After 50 years. But this is, last year was the highest, number one.

[Neil Pasricha]

And it never stops going up. And as you pointed out, or I think it was actually Dale Jameson's book that pointed it out to me that, you know, this is something that John F. Kennedy said in his inauguration speech was a massive issue then.

And every, I think you've said before, every minute since, we've increased our net output of greenhouse gas emissions to our own detriment. Every minute since. And so in some ways it was sad for me to read, you know, ending the climate crisis in one generation, your book Regeneration, because a lot of the dates and times you're talking about, of course, this book is not that old, right?

Published in 2021, but a lot of the days you're talking about are like by 2030, by 2030. And I'm like, oh crap, now we're talking 2025, 2026, like we're five years into this book. And it's only gotten worse.

[Paul Hawken]

Yeah, but what the subtitle is, ending the climate crisis in one generation, isn't a crisis. It's the crisis of our thinking, the crisis of our mind, the crisis of our belief. That's what we can end in one generation, is a complete insanity with which the climate, and really let's put climate aside.

Climate is perfect. It always will be. That's not the problem.

The problem is heating. It's warming. That's the problem and so forth.

And I wanted to put global warming on the cover and the publishers didn't, they wanted a crisis. Okay. But that's what I'm talking about.

Not like, hey, I've got all the tools. I've got the techniques. I've got the solutions.

Listen up. If you do this, this, and this, we're good to go in one generation. No, we're good to go in one generation.

If we actually relate to each other in the living world in a completely different way. And that's what regeneration is about.

[Neil Pasricha]

Hey, I heard I'm Canadian, one of the most famous Canadian actors in this space. I won't say environmentalist, is David Suzuki. And he often says, you know, we mistake economy for ecology.

And he talks about that root word of eco and how we have superseded economy over ecology in our minds and in our society. And he says we have to re-prioritize ecology over economy. And that is the tip he talked about.

I mean, I'm talking about a speech I heard him give maybe 10 years ago. But when you talk about at a high level, climate is fine and it always will be. I mean, that's not a phrase that I think most people have heard before.

[Paul Hawken]

Well, it has no choice. It's not like climate is volitional.

[Neil Pasricha]

Volitional?

[Paul Hawken]

It doesn't choose. I mean, it doesn't have desires. You know, it's not animate.

Although on a higher level, that would be an interesting discussion. But I mean, and so we have to stop. We have a crisis.

We have a crisis. I couldn't agree more. It's not a climate crisis.

It's a human crisis. A relationship, understanding, greed, violence, power. There's a whole list there.

That's the crisis. Warming is the symptom.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah, exactly. How do you see things playing out?

[Paul Hawken]

I have no idea. I have no idea.

At this point, especially with the new administration in the United States, the giant leap backwards. Not to say that were the policies of the Biden administration continued, that that would be sufficient until today. They would not be.

But they would certainly at least be directionally correct. Let's go this way instead of that way. And so I don't know how it's going to work out.

I feel, let me share something with you. Okay. And so you're listening.

This will be the first you hear about this. You can go online and see it. Okay.

So it's going to be online. And it's called the Alliance for Earth. Okay.

The Alliance for Earth. And you can go to a splash page, the Alliance for Earth, and go look at it. And what you'll see is a mandala.

And what you'll see is a phrase that said, the way you heal a system is to connect more of it to itself coming soon. And then on the upper right-hand corner, you'll see 105 languages. In other words, you can read that in 105 different languages.

All right. Now, who cares about reading that in different languages? But actually it's there for a reason, which is that what it will do or pretends to do, whatever we're trying to create, is to bring together we, I, whatever, think, that there's an extraordinary amount of work and people and efforts all over the world to not only reverse global warming, but actually to, you know, restore the Earth and all its manifestations and cultures and people and to take care of each other. And that sounds so wishy-washy, except when you understand the number of organizations that do that around the Earth right now.

It's quite extraordinary. You never hear about them. You don't read them.

Occasionally they pop up here and there, but, you know, otherwise you don't. Where this came from, Neil, was, you know, in the Sierras, I was a caretaker at this ranch in Nevada City. And there you get fires.

California's fire ecology is a fire state. You're always going to have fires, whether people set them or not. And like in the Pacific Palisades in L.A., that was a human-made fire. But there's always going to be fires. And so in those places in California and so forth, you're all volunteer fire people. That is to say, oh, fire, and the community gets together, you know, and they put on their metal sole boots and this and that and they have equipment maybe at the firehouse, and you're taught to not fight fires downwind.

Things, you know, basics go that way. And anyway, eventually the fires go out and then you tamp it down to make sure there's no Antonita embers there, you know, that could light up the fire in the middle of the night with the wind. And then it's out.

You go home, shower, all that sort of stuff. Okay. But in the spring, everybody, I think, been around a fire has seen this.

And, you know, you get this beautiful explosion of grass, right? And the color of the grass is so exquisite. And why?

Because that grass seed is fed by the ash, the minerals in the ash. You know, it's a highly fertilized grass. And the human eye, human brain, really, can see more colors of green than any other color.

Red, blue, don't even hold a candle to green. Why is that? Well, because plants have been important to us since we were, you know, whatever, you know, sedge and moss.

For the 420 million years that, you know, life has been on the planet and on land, you know, green was a tell, a signal, you know. And so we have that ability still, you know, to look at green. Okay.

Then, you know, there was a fire in Berkeley, Oakland, and eucalyptus trees, a really hot fire. And I think 200 or 300 homes were destroyed. And I was just coming back from Bhutan, and I was reading about it.

And then I wasn't there. But then I noticed that botanists were saying, we're seeing wildflowers that we haven't seen for 75 or 100 years. Wow.

I went, what? How? That was scorched, you know.

I mean, eucalyptus burns really hot. And what they pointed out on queries, that's called fire-triggered succession, that there are seeds that are in the soil that require heat, not directly on them, but surrounding them, above them, for the carapace to flake off, be removed, and to germinate. Hmm.

It's like, how beautiful this adapt, these plants are so adaptive. These will wait 50 years, wait 100 years, and then when we show up again, then we'll have bloom, the seeds, and we'll put them back in the ground. And what I think we're seeing right now is fire-triggered succession.

The world is on fire, literally, and every other way you can think of it. You know, it's self-immolating, it's burning itself, it's destroying itself, and I say it being humanity, okay? But what we don't see is that simultaneously, there's fire-triggered succession.

And there's hundreds of thousands of communities and co-ops and land trusts and so many different ways to describe, the body you use and scientists that are working on the restoration, the revival, the regeneration, the restoration of life honors. They're here, and they are multitudinous in ways that are mind-boggling. So the Alliance, what it's going to try to do is be a website that makes itself.

In other words, it's not like somebody's in charge. I mean, obviously, they'll be technically in charge to make sure it works. But that is that it will have the organizations inside it, okay?

And then you can search, you know, and you can search because it'll have agentic AI within it. So you can go in and say, I want to know about people in Botswana who are working on reforestation. Good question.

Who's that? I don't know. It'll be there, but it'll be there in maybe a different language.

It may be your query in English. It can come back. In other words, you can take whatever information's out there and read it in your native language.

And it'll show the website. It'll have scraped it. It'll show the citation, where it is and who it is, and the science of the people or the communities and the indigenous and whoever is part of it.

And that way, a teacher, say, wants to teach, is told to teach climate, you know, and what do I know? And then she can go there and start to ask questions. You know, how do I teach?

How do I do this? What does this mean? So forth.

And she can be in Somalia. She can be in Chile. She can be anywhere in the world.

She can ask it in her native language, and she'll get it back in her native language, or she can convert it if it comes back in English. And the midst of all this is going to be what's called the Earth Oracle. And that Earth Oracle, again, is AI for sure, but it's there.

You know, it can't go anywhere. And it's not trying to figure out what the rest of the world is doing. It's just showing what is happening on the Alliance.

And it's really important, I think, for people to understand that humanity is on the case. They really are. They are us.

And you can read the New York Times until you're blue in the face, and The Guardian and The Post and FT and, you know, all these papers, you know, very much. You know, you can read and listen, watch, hear, see, and stay away from social media. And you'll never know that this is true.

This is fascinating that the greatest human movement in history is right there underneath, not underneath, but hidden, occluded, and we can't see it. It's here. So that's what the Alliance for Earth is about.

And again, you put your own organization. We have a place for podcasts. It's a category.

It's a really important category. Look at you and Rich, and you can name a whole bunch of podcasters. You know, Rachel Donald, I mean, it just goes on and on and on.

They're amazing, amazing people, podcasts, and their guests are amazing too, you know. Right. Yeah, yeah.

[Neil Pasricha]

Oh my gosh, it's another one in a series of really inspiring and kind of collectively convulsing projects that you kind of have done throughout your life. I'm inspired by it, and I'm excited to see that launch, the Alliance for Earth. We've gone down into Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin.

I wondered if we could just sort of tip over to one of your other formative books, and I thought we might introduce people to Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe. Not to be confused with Tom Wolfe, you know, the guy that wrote Bonfire of the Vanities and Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and stuff. This guy actually lived only 37 years, from 1900 in Asheville, North Carolina, to 1938 over in Maryland.

Two novels published during his lifetime, and five published after he died. I have, once again, a newer paperback cover, but the original cover is kind of these angular color and motion shards of red and fuchsia and orange type of bursts. I don't know if that's the version you originally read, perhaps.

With an Art Deco kind of all-caps, it says LOOK HOMEWARD, and then ANGEL. It's a coming-of-age story of Eugene Gant, in the fictional mountain town of Altamont, North Carolina, from his birth in 1900 to his departure in 19, exploring formative experiences shaping his identity, passions and conflicts in his family, bittersweet beauty at first love, and the awakening of his artistic dreams. This guy's a very unique writer.

He's what people call rich, lyrical prose, just these long, stringing, hanging sentences that bring to life the vibrant characters and rugged landscapes of Altamont, while probing universal struggles of belonging and individuality. You can follow this one, do e-mail us at 813.52, for American Fiction in English, 1900-1945. Paul, would you tell us about your relationship with LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL, by Thomas Wolfe?

[Paul Hawken]

No, his entire work I read was, he's just a hell of a writer.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah, it really is. It's stunning prose.

[Paul Hawken]

Yeah, it's stunning. And for me, when you read something like that, at least for me anyway, and so forth, your brain cells change. In other words, your capacity to understand, to speak, to parse, to discern, changes, because it's coming right at you and going into your neurons.

That's literally, yeah. Yeah, number two, his story, I felt I could identify with it. Not exactly, especially when he was in New York and stuff, but I actually started reading it when I was in New York and waiting for a freighter to take me to Europe, a coal freighter from Norfolk News, and so I had no place to stay.

The cheapest place was the Y in New York, also the most dangerous place for a young boy. By the way. Really?

Oh, yeah. I mean, you had to be in your room at 6.37 because of all the predators, sexual predators at the Y. I mean, it was just open season on boys for older men.

You couldn't take a shower except during the middle of the day. You got your takeout food, got it in, put it in your room, and locked the door. So I would start reading, I don't know what time, early in the evening and be reading right into 2, 3 a.m., book after book after book. I was just gobbling up this stuff. So he just, it's hard to say what his influence was or what the influence of those books were, except I do remember just gobbling them up at a very influential age in my mind.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah, exactly. That's the definition of formative to the point where it's shifted you in ways that you can't really see anymore.

[Paul Hawken]

Yeah, yeah. But, yeah, I was, it just opened up my eyes, and, you know, to, you know, I was very poor, getting by, you know, scrambling.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah, well, I wonder if one thing you got from him, and I don't know if you did or not, but he has this ability to conceptualize time on these vast scales that not many people have. Like, one of the quotes from this book is, each of us is all the sums he has not counted. Subtract us into the nakedness and night again, and you shall see, begin in Crete, 4,000 years ago, the love that ended yesterday in Texas.

Yeah, I could. And that type of stuff, you do that. I mean, in the book Carbon, I was, like, stunned by your illuminating the metaphor of the Mahakalpa.

The Mahakalpa, yeah. Mahakalpa, the amount of time it would take a pigeon to, like, wipe a silk sheet over the top of a mountain higher than Everest down to dust, was, like, you were using that as a metaphor for time. You use all, you just said earlier, like, the trillion atoms of carbon that are in each of your brain cells.

Any cell. Yeah, you're doing this in each cell. You're doing this high-flying, like, gymnastics all the time, and it's really vertiginous and exciting.

And, I mean, ultimately, I think a lot of it gets to the root of our own existence. You know, that famous Einstein quote that you kind of close your book with, with Einstein saying, the biggest question we have to ask ourselves is whether the universe is friendly or not.

[Paul Hawken]

Yeah.

[Neil Pasricha]

Which is, like, I still don't think I understand it. You know? Obviously, I'm no Einstein, but what is happening here with your time scales and what are you trying to say in terms of where we are and when we are?

And I think this is partly what you even open the book with, which I said at the very beginning of this conversation. The Earth's going to be fine, guys. It's just that we won't make it.

That's kind of what you, that's, again, like a separation of time that kind of hits you in the head, like, oh, it's just, the Earth's fine. Right. It's just us.

[Paul Hawken]

Yeah. I mean, one of the teachings in Hinduism is periods of time that start to, time compresses. That sounds so weird, you know, because compression is a physical thing and time is not physical.

But, and it's kind of like an ice skater, you know, who is twirling, and when she or he brings their arms closer to their body, they spin faster and faster and faster.

[Neil Pasricha]

Oh, yeah. Yeah, of course. I mean, I can picture that from the Olympics.

[Paul Hawken]

Yeah, in Hinduism, we have a period where time gets speeded up, you know, and this is a cycle, just, you know, and we're in that time, and it's speeding up, and it's very hard to get your bearings when time is so fast. You know, at the end of the day, you go, wow, wow, that was some day, but I've got to get up and do this and this. I mean, you just feel it, you know, and read it.

So, to me, the Mahakalpa really was a story of cyclicality, that this idea that, you know, the universe, you know, was born, you know, it was an explosion. It was such a Western. You're talking about the Big Bang?

Yeah, the Big Bang, yeah. I mean, there's such a Western concept.

[Neil Pasricha]

But you're saying that that is obviously immersed in a much larger thing that we don't really know or understand.

[Paul Hawken]

I'm not saying it is or isn't. I'm just saying is that there are other ways of seeing the Big Bang, which is that time is cyclical and over extraordinary expanses of what we call time, and that it is like everything else we see in the universe, you know, it ebbs and flows, it dies, it's born. And that our concept of time is a very Western one, you know, based on, you know, the observation of the Big Bang.

I'm not arguing with that observation. What I'm saying is this culture says that, yep, Big Bang, that happened, and, you know, that's a whole cycle on the universe, and then it happens again, and then it happens again, you know, which is kind of mind-boggling when you think about it. But it's also meant to convey to all of us, and to myself for sure, to relax a little bit.

You know, we're part of this extraordinary journey, and we're going to come here, and then we're going to go. You know, we're going to, we leave, you know, I mean, our body anyway. And to just open that up, because you read and hear and see, you know, that we don't have much more time.

If we don't do this, you know, we're going to all be screwed and all that sort of stuff. It doesn't mean there's not urgency that we must have in order to address human suffering. And to me, global warming is about human suffering, and it's the suffering of all creatures on the planet.

And we're not only engendering it, but we're also speeding that up. And then we feel that ourselves, you know, as families, as people, as women, as children. And it's freaky.

It's really freaky to feel that, to go to sleep with that, to wake up with it, or to ignore it, which is oftentimes what people do, because they choose things that are distractive and addictive in order to blot it out. And I just suggest that there's another way of looking at time in our passage, and that can be imbued with grace and kindness and patience and understanding as to what other people are experiencing. But it doesn't mean we have to do that.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah, exactly. Another quote from the book kind of reflecting what you're saying. Each moment is the fruit of 40,000 years, the minute-winning days like flies buzz home to death, and every moment is a window on all of time. You say distract us, you know, with social media and addictive stuff.

Partly, probably, at least for me, it's just because it's hard to hold that thought. It's a hard, it's a big, vast thing to hold, the idea that time is much more massive than we can picture. We're much smaller, and it's in cycles and not waves, and our role here is, you know, we're almost just this thing flying through space to briefly experience these endless pleasures and delights and senses, and to contribute to them, as you said, with patience and with kindness and with generosity and so on.

And that's it. I mean, I'm assuming that's it. And then we go into the soil, and we become a tree, or we get reborn as another form of sentient life.

[Paul Hawken]

Yeah, and we don't know, and what happens. And I feel like it's more about patience and kindness to self and other. So if we're here for a short time, it's a very short time that we are in our body, who do we want to be during that time?

And what are we going to do? People often have said this, what will we remember?

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah, the legacy question is pervasive.

[Paul Hawken]

It is, but in a larger context, this idea that you're dead, you're gone forever, we come and go. I mean, whatever we is, I don't know what we is, by the way. I'm not a scholar, I'm not a teacher, I'm not a religious figure, I'm not.

But I think it quickens the mind. And it's just a matter of time before somebody actually sees themself. And I just feel like those teachings, these ancient teachings, 4,000 or 5,000 years old, and in some cases longer, provide a way of being on the world at this time that is sane, makes us more sane, more calm.

It doesn't make us inactive or indifferent, not at all, to the contrary. And so what are those touch points that would enliven us in a time when almost everything that's coming at us is making us smaller?

[Neil Pasricha]

Wow. Wow. Yeah, what a great question.

It reflects back to me something I got from a conversation with former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, who says that exact question, does this make me bigger or smaller, as a directional guide, because he feels that all decisions are based in love or fear, if I'm paraphrasing him properly. But patience and kindness to self, pause there before you get to other, those are two things I would like to have more of. I don't know how to learn them.

I mean, you're a lot older than me. I'm assuming some of this comes with being a student, a curious student of the world, and more times or rotations here. But patience and kindness to self, that'd be a great place to start.

That'd be a heart. I don't know, you have kids. Are there things that you tell them to do to try to do some of these things, or lessons that you share with them as a father?

I'm a dad as well. I would like my kids to be speaking to themselves better than I speak to myself. And the risk, of course, is that when I say comments about myself, which I do all the time publicly in my house, I catch myself, if I'm lucky, and then I see my kids saying that, and I'm horrified that I put thoughts into their heads.

So a food that isn't good to eat, or a show that isn't good to watch, or a candy that they shouldn't be eating, or something they shouldn't be doing, or they should be doing. A lot of shoulds, a lot of right and wrong, a lot of good and bad, a lot of this is healthy, this is not, until I read your book, and then you say, even oatmeal and protein bars are ultra processed. I'm like, oh shit, Paul once again, I should just be eating apples and celery, man.

Like, I am still screwed on that. The point is, I don't know how much I don't know, but that would be a wonderful place to start, is patience and kindness to self. I'd love your advice on that.

[Paul Hawken]

I have no advice. I have no advice on being a parent, you know. I do think it's all about embodiment, and my kids are really amazing, and I don't take any credit for that at all.

[Neil Pasricha]

Really, my kids are really amazing, and I don't take any credit for that. No, no.

[Paul Hawken]

And, no, I don't. And, yeah, I don't know.

[Neil Pasricha]

You said it's all about embodiment, so you're saying something by saying that, which is, you know, you can't pour from an empty vessel. Put the oxygen mask on yourself first. Don't do as I say.

You're going to do as I do. This is what your type is saying.

[Paul Hawken]

Yeah, well, it's a mixed family, and so it's so interestingly complex. I don't think it's something so easily dispatched in a conversation. Okay, okay, okay.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah. I hear you. I hear you.

Okay, let's move to your third book. I got a few closing questions on that, and then I want to be respectful of your generosity here on your time. So we're going to close things off with a very interesting and unusual book.

Of course, like many on the show, I had not heard of before, and you give me a couple by him, but it is Kokoro, K-O-K-O-R-O, by Lafcadio Hearn.

[Paul Hawken]

Lafcadio Hearn, and the book is called, in Japanese, Kokoro.

[Neil Pasricha]

Kokoro, okay, which means, I think, heart. Yes, it does. Okay, Lafcadio Hearn.

It was published in 1896 by Houghton Mifflin. I have a shiny covered paperback with no details, by the way, on my copy of author or anything, just a downward kind of sepia pencil drawing of the author on the cover. He lived from 1850 to 1904.

At that time, it's pretty amazing that this guy lived from the islands off of Greece to Dublin to London to Cincinnati to New Orleans, and then he died in Tokyo at age 54. He's best known for bringing the culture and literature of Japan to the Western world, the inner culture, the mind culture, the psychological culture. Fifteen essays are in here examining the inner spiritual life of Japan.

Dewey Decimal has just got an interesting one, 915.204 for history and geography slash travel slash Asia slash Japan. Paul, tell us about your relationship with, I know it's not just Kokoro, but the broader work of Lafcadio Hearn, H-E-A-R-N.

[Paul Hawken]

I think because I grew up in Berkeley, and there was a big interest at that time in Zen, Buddhism, Suzuki Roshi, Alan Watts. It was on a lot of people's minds, and there was a lot of talk about it in practice, too. And so I became very curious about Japan myself, about Buddhism.

And so Lafcadio Hearn was, I forget his racial thing, but anyway, he married... Ionian Islands was where he was from. Yeah, I mean, he was an American, and he married, of all things, a black woman at that time.

And then at one point they go to Japan. I can't imagine, a gaijin is what Japanese call foreigners, a gaijin with a black wife going to Japan and integrating, just integrating into the culture. But somehow he did get under...

in and started to... I don't know who his teachers were or who he was talking to, how quickly he learned Japanese, which is both a very difficult and simple language, depending on how you look at it. Simply, I don't mean simplistic, but I mean...

And so I write about Japan, and for me it was just the beginning of understanding, reading about Japan, and learning more about it, and then ending up eventually spending time there myself and living there. So I think that... It was the first book I read, and Kokoro means heart.

And it's a very heart-based culture in that sense. I mean, the way Japanese relate to each other, the way they speak, the way they interact and respect not only each other, but also the living world, that is nature. And so for me, it was the doorway in.

It's not that the door was that important, but that was the one that showed up for me.

[Neil Pasricha]

I know you don't dispense didactic advice. I get it. I hear you, and I understand that.

And the way you communicate is really eloquent and beautiful and sort of post-didactic in a lot of sense. This book on Japan turned my mind to my first trip there. I went there once.

I was in my early 20s. Of course, lots of things about the culture struck me. The food was one of the biggest points where I had culture awareness and clash.

You read a lot about food, a lot about food, and you read a lot about food and carbon. On page 48, you say, there are an estimated 300,000 edible plants, but less than 200 are commonly used by humans. And today, 12 plants and 5 animals provide 75% of the human diet.

On page 51, you echo something you mentioned earlier. We became culinary hamsters in the treadwheel of supermarket food. Glistening fat-infested desserts, sugary ketchup, salty heart-eroding snacks exploit innate appetites that are there to protect us, not kill.

Nutritional literacy was reduced to intense taste only. Salty, fatty, and sweet. For 99.5% of time, humans have lived on the planet. Fat, sugar, and salt were difficult to obtain. I'm looking at a very healthy and vital man on his 80th trip around the sun. I'm just curious, and I've been looking on the internet for this.

I couldn't find it. How do you eat? What are your principles for yourself on your diet?

And how do you think about that?

[Paul Hawken]

Oh, I mean, I eat very simply. You know, I eat vegetables and food and some grain and protein. Usually small, either eggs or small fish like sardines.

It's like, but I mean, there's, you know, I'll do soups, you know, that are Japanese, you know, with miso and sea vegetables and root vegetables and, you know, white miso. And then sometimes I'll just poach some fish in it, you know. And that's a treat for me.

But I just eat very simply. I don't have any dietary restrictions per se, no dietary directives to anybody else, you know.

[Neil Pasricha]

Well, here I am at age 46, kind of following, you know, the emerging longevity movement, which is saying to sort of start your day with these 10 pills and end your day with these 10 pills and make sure you have this many grams of protein and make sure, you know, it's just, it's so, what do you make of this longevity fascination, the idea that's emerging very quickly that we're not going to die?

[Paul Hawken]

It's just another form of narcissism. And I don't take any pills at all. I don't take any vitamins.

I don't take, you know, I don't swallow things like that. I chew. And if there's something that, like berberine or something, I want to take for whatever reason, I'll chew it.

If I, and if you don't, if you're wanting- Berberines, right? Berberine, B-E-R-B-E-R-I-N-E, berberine. But if you want to take something that shows up as a capsule or a pill, eat it.

Don't swallow it because your body, your tongue, your mouth is absolutely brilliant on what it will accept and not take. How do you eat vitamin D? Don't bypass it.

Well, I don't. Well, I have the sun, you know. It's like, well, I buy something that shines on you.

And sometimes for days it doesn't, for sure. But your body is very resilient that way.

[Neil Pasricha]

But- Yeah. But you're saying rather than taking pills for creatine and vitamin C and whey protein, get it from the thing it's made in and eat that and chew that.

[Paul Hawken]

Well, whey protein is not a vitamin. It's actually just protein from milk. So that's a choice.

Some people need more protein, some need less. But when I was early 20s, I knew that being a vegan was the- Come on, get out of here. It's the smartest thing to do.

Everything else was kind of stupid. And so I was living in Boston. I had access to Harvard library and BU library.

And so I researched it, you know. And then what I discovered was the opposite, which is there's no third generation vegan in the history of the human species. No third generation vegan.

And I've challenged people. If there was one, find it. I'm happy to be wrong on that one.

So then I said, well, why? Come on, let's figure this one out and so forth. But then you look latitudinally, if you're living in the far north, the Nunavuts and so forth.

I mean, what's your diet? It's going to be primarily seafood. It's going to be fish and could be seals, could be other things.

And you do get some berries and stuff in the summer. There's a short period when you can eat those. And then you go back to pretty much a solid carnivore diet, pretty much.

And these people live there for 10,000, 20,000 years and then seem to do okay. Okay, and so then you go down equatorially. Then as you go down to India, places that are very warm and where there's a very abundant amount of natural food and trees and this, you could live almost off the land without even cooking or buying anything.

And there's a lot of sweet foods, fruits and mangoes and things like that. And there you do find people who are very close to vegan. For sure, they'll maybe eat some milk, cream, maybe not.

Maybe they'll eat some honey. Maybe they'll, you know, whatever. It depends on the religion almost, you know.

But so here's the big difference, Neil. So I said, okay, intestines. So if you live where you can only survive on animal food, you're just like a dog intestinally speaking, which is your intestines need to be short.

That's who basically evolved to be there because you don't want to leave meat in your intestines for very long. It putrefies and it'll poison you, okay? So if you live equatorially, the food density is not there like it is, you know, in the north in terms of animal food.

So you're eating foods that are less nutrient dense, right? And the intestinal length can be three times longer than somebody who lives in the north because it takes that long before the intestine is able to get all the nourishment out of these foods. All right, I'm speaking sort of.

[Neil Pasricha]

No, I love it. I love it. I want it, I need it, I'm asking, yeah.

[Paul Hawken]

Yeah, so in terms of what to eat, how much protein, how little, what kind of protein or vegan, all that sort of stuff, it depends on where your biological inheritance, you know. Yeah.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah, and you know. Mine's near Lahore in India and I live in a formerly frozen tundra land. Hence, my allergies are all skittery in the falls and the springs.

I think my nasal passages and sinuses are like, what the hell is going on here, you know?

[Paul Hawken]

Right, so there's no question you can be a vegan. There's monks in monasteries who are vegan, no question about it. But in terms of reproduction, find me a third generation vegan at all, but find me one that reproduced, in the history of humanity as we know it and so forth.

So pro-vegan, anti-vegan, everything in between and so forth, it really depends on place and who you are and your physiology.

[Neil Pasricha]

And it's not like you're drawing upon a certain book or a dictum or a guide. You are drawing upon the Earth's natural producing food. Yeah, and you're also not trying to bypass it.

[Paul Hawken]

You're not trying to outthink it. You're not trying to be smarter than your body. And so your body will tell you what to eat if you listen.

But if you are coming at it from a conceptual point of view, you're bypassing and overriding what your body is telling you.

[Neil Pasricha]

How will your body tell you? What will you notice in your body?

[Paul Hawken]

What do you notice?

[Neil Pasricha]

Well, you said your body will tell you what to eat if you listen, and I agree and love that phrase. And now I'm like, how do I unlearn what I've learned and how do I learn how to listen to my body?

[Paul Hawken]

I don't know how you would, because I don't know your lifestyle, but the first thing I would do probably is not take pills and then see how you feel. And then you say, well, I don't feel good, or I feel fine, or I feel better. I mean, there's going to be some in that spectrum.

And then you want to look at why you're taking this supplement, this supplement, this supplement. Is it because you read something somewhere? Because somebody told you?

[Neil Pasricha]

Doctor says I have low iron. Take the iron pill. Doctor says I have low vitamin D.

Take the vitamin D pill. Influencer says everybody should take five grams of creatine. Helps with this.

Helps with brain health. Helps with muscle. I take that.

I mean, it's an array of sources that I'm trying to keep up with.

[Paul Hawken]

Yeah, and basically, I won't name the doctor, but he's well-known. They also sell the products. And so they benefit from the idea that somehow.

[Neil Pasricha]

That's part of the issue is that we live under the saran wrap bubble of late-stage capitalism. And so it's hard to puncture that seal and see outside of the matrix. Always.

Right. About our news. It's a theme here about our elders, about people that are making a change in the world because they're quiet and they are not on the cover of the papers.

About our food supply. It's disheartening. That's why I love your stuff.

That's why books. I mean, look. Read Carbon.

Like read Paul's latest book. It is so magnificently eye-opening. It's like a flower blossoming in front of you as you read it.

And it's on my reread permanent. My permanent reread shelf. I have a shelf of books I just want to keep reading for my whole life.

It's on there. Besides Siddhartha, you know? But that's why I'm loving talking to you.

And also I noticed, I happened to notice, that all three of your formative authors, I know there's many. You were one of the generous guests who when I asked about this question, you give me a list, you know? And Seth Godin did this and others who are massive, voracious readers did this.

But you know, James Baldwin lived until his 60s. This guy lived until his 50s. Thomas Wolfe lived until his 30s.

I'm looking at you. I'm like, you're thriving. You're healthy.

I've interviewed a few people of your age and experience. I interviewed, I didn't interview, but I met a Zen Buddhist priest last year. And I said, how old are you?

And he said, no, don't ask how old I am. Ask, when was I born in this life? And I wondered if you had principles or precepts that you've used to guide yourself or steady yourself directionally or in other ways through your healthy and productive, very 60s and 70s and soon to be 80s, outliving, I will point out, many of your inspirants.

[Paul Hawken]

I mean, I was just making it up as I went along and just trying to figure it out by listening to my body. I've never had health insurance, which is weird, I know. And I did go to a hospital once when something happened.

Suddenly I was chewing some vegetables that were less rawish and one got stuck in my sarcus. And so I had to go and have them push it down. So I have been in a hospital that way.

[Neil Pasricha]

You talk about it like it was one instance long ago. I was in a hospital this morning, getting a picture of my heart taken with iodine flooded through it. I mean, I hang out there.

Yeah, no, I don't. I have no relations.

[Paul Hawken]

I love this. It's really medical.

[Neil Pasricha]

But it's not just health. Is there something you're doing in terms of purpose or time? You know, you're outside.

We get this from you. It comes through in spades. Vitamin D comes from outside.

Especially rugged terrain, outside a lot. Outside in nature, talking to the mountains. Huge ingredient that is, I'm sorry to say, but I would wager, unless you're listening to this while on a walk, most of us are like a fraction of a percent of what you're doing on outside.

I've read that the percentage of time our kids are spending outside is currently the lowest in history.

[Paul Hawken]

Yeah.

[Neil Pasricha]

Where kids today spend 7% of their days outside, which I know you can't multiply percentages, but if you multiply 7% times 7 days a week, it means it takes kids a whole week to spend half a day outside now. Recesses have been tightened. Lunch hours have been shortened.

What used to be they'd come home with two hours of outside time at school, now they come home with like 45 to 75 minutes. Like I'm just saying, I've interviewed a woman about this topic, and of course in the evenings they have seven extracurriculars and piles of homework. Never mind the addictive tendency of all the screens that we feed them to as Jonathan Haidt past guest said in 103, we serve to them as old as they can lie because this hilariously fake age 13 limit on TikTok and Instagram, you know, if you just say you're 12, it doesn't check.

There's no, it doesn't matter. It doesn't care. It wants you anyway.

So what an uphill battle just being on the side is now on the food, I take great inspiration and then I'm asking you, and this is kind of a closing question, but you just ooze wisdom. So I just, I'm looking foolish by saying what other tools or principles or precepts have you used to guide your life for the last few decades and will you continue? Because I know a friend of yours, Jane Goodell, just died when she was 91 and your blurbs are from like luminaries, right?

Like cornfield is in your book. It's clear to me that you surround yourself with the sages of our era. Yeah.

[Paul Hawken]

And Rick Roll is one of your guests. He's amazing. I would say first of all, back to children, we're creating ultra-processed children, okay?

And because they have to be smarter and better and they have to get ahead of thinking in junior high school, junior high school about what universities and colleges they're going to apply to. I mean, getting ready and studying those universities and who gets in and who doesn't and all that sort of stuff. I mean, there goes childhood.

So childhood is a teaching and learning is how children learn. They can't learn just by being outside. They also need to be with elders.

Elders are people who have spent a lifetime learning about self and other in place and in a way that is admirable and that children gravitate to. I mean, I never saw, I saw many times, but children love Jane Goodall. Why?

Well, not because of what she did as primates. It's because who she was, her presence. You know, they're like, they want to be there.

And so where are those elders? What are they doing? And Paul Goodman is one who famously, you know, in Growing Up Absurd, talked about we do an interesting thing in this culture.

We put the elders off in rest homes and we put the children into nursing schools and things. In other words, the children need attention and love and care from the elders and the elders need something to care and to pay attention to. Yeah.

And they're completely separated.

[Neil Pasricha]

I mean, I completely agree.

[Paul Hawken]

Yeah.

[Neil Pasricha]

It's so opposite to how I grew up. I mean, obviously I'm first generation kind of in Canada, Indian, but just one generation above, of course, in Indian communities you have the oldest and the youngest living together. Yeah, absolutely.

But even now, as I say it, you know, if I picture my own parents at age 80 and 75 knocking on my door and saying, hey, one of us died. Can the other one live with you? I have a gulp in my chest knowing my life and my lifestyle and my partner in that world being so different than the one I now live in.

So it's hard for me. I embrace it mentally.

[Paul Hawken]

Yeah, yeah. No, no. It's very, very difficult now.

We don't live that way. We have too much. There's too much money.

And it's kind of like stepping on a fork, you know, a rake really just hits us. We have the money and now we pay and pay and pay, not in monetary terms but in so many other ways in terms of our life and our relationships to whether it's our parents, our children or others. And it's very difficult to be wealthy in this culture at this time.

And that sounds like a ridiculous term because everybody's trying to be more wealthy. But I think that actually it works against us. Because it's like a rake.

But hey, families used to live together. They used to sleep in one room together for goodness sakes. And what was that like?

What happened to the people that had that sort of attention and warmth and connection to their family? There's a continuity there that doesn't exist anymore in the United States. Not that it ever did in the same way as it does in India.

I don't know what's happening in India now. But that should be true. But we definitely balkanized family due to money.

And I'm just going on and on and preaching. I should shut up. But I'm just saying that the beauty of a child, the beauty of an elder should not be separated, should not be pushed apart.

They should be together. And I think we'd have a healthier, kinder world. But you have nine-year-olds running around with phones.

Hello?

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah, and the 1950s life insurance movement to advertise retirement as something you work towards so that you deserve. There was this active living theory I'm sure you're familiar. Nobody wanted to retire.

This was a marketed thing for decade after decade to the point where the people that said I want to actively retire is now the majority. But it never used to be this way. There was active living theory.

And then, of course, that created the Dell, the Sunshine State, Phoenix, Arizona, the rise of these places that are separate from ours. And again, it rises back up to the manner in which we live. But through your wisdom, I will say, and you have an ability to see that since the days in Berkeley when you sat in that bed and you read those books and you said I feel like I'm an outsider here.

To today where, you know, post being captured and driven down a highway by the Ku Klux Klan and living in Japan and traveling around the world and creating these incredible movements, not environmental per se as those of living and breathing through wisdom and elders. I met you through a commencement speech that I still think about all the time that you gave 16 years ago, and it's touched me so deeply. The book Harbin is truly a life-changing read and one that I highly recommend.

So you are pointing us to this, as you say, this large movement that's just not in the news. There's a lot of people. And by the way, when you look at those charts, the newest generation, the newest, they're using cell phones and social media less, less.

It's like one of the best charts I've ever seen. It's going down, and the schools are starting to ban them. And there's a rise of the local food movement.

So we can feel together that, yeah, we're smart enough to know that what does us poorly over the long term must, as you put in the beginning of your book, must be extracted. We have to get rid of things that don't serve us.

[Paul Hawken]

Right. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I have a lot of faith in humanity, as long as I read the headlines.

And I really do. And that's what I was talking about with the alliance, actually. We don't see how extraordinary, generous, kind, brilliant people are.

I mean, we do in our personal life, maybe amongst our friends or this or that. I'm not trying to describe anybody else's life. I'm just saying on a macro level, it doesn't come through.

And because it doesn't have scale. It doesn't, you know. And people rather read about some ridiculous thing that Donald Trump said yesterday because it gets their, you know, whatever going.

[Neil Pasricha]

And getting their whatever going is all he's going for.

[Paul Hawken]

That's all he's going for. He's just trying to be in the news every single day.

[Neil Pasricha]

And if there's a FIFA headline for five days, well, then he's got to talk about canceling the sports. Like it's just, you know, he'll go where the headline is.

[Paul Hawken]

Yeah.

[Neil Pasricha]

Tail wags the dog, as that old movie used to say, right? Wag the dog, I think. Yeah.

Or infinite jests, right? David Foster Wallace warned us about this in 1996. The total entertainment forever world.

So we're aware of it. And that's why we listen to our podcast with wise people like you. And we read your books and we follow your work.

And you help us connect to the deeper connected roots that connect all living things.

[Paul Hawken]

Yeah. I mean, we just have to realize that we have an earworm in chief, you know, as our political leader in the United States. And it's your ear and you have choices.

[Neil Pasricha]

Paul Hawken, thank you so much for this gift. I love what you're doing.

[Paul Hawken]

I love the way you do it. I love the way you crawl, but, you know, you move into the inner spaces of the people you interview, who oftentimes are writers too, but people of real interest and real, you know, a lot of really thoughtful people. But I love the fact that I didn't understand it at first, you know, three books.

Okay, here. But now I actually do understand it. If we ever do it again, I'll give you three more books.

But I really, really, really respect what you're doing and I'm very grateful to it.

[Neil Pasricha]

Those words mean more than you can imagine. Thank you so much, Paul Hawken. I'm touched and this is a real honor to talk to you.

Thank you.

[Paul Hawken]

Thank you, Neil. Thank you.

[Neil Pasricha]

Hey, everybody.

[Neil Pasricha]

It's just me, just Neil again, hanging out in my basement, wearing my Paul Hawken-inspired dress shirt.

[Neil Pasricha]

I have this dress shirt from Dan the Tailor. Cousins has a baby and the baby says like two words, Mama, Dada and Santa, I guess it's three words. And she kept pointing at my shirt saying, Santa, Santa, Santa, because there's a couple of characters on here that kind of look like Santa.

So I'm feeling, you know, inspired by Paul. I mean, he kind of brings the mood down a bit, but necessarily so, because of course we are, what are we talking about? Like, what are we talking about?

We're talking about Venezuela and Trump taking over, you know, countries. And we're talking about, you know, authoritarianism. And we're talking about, like, what are we talking about?

Like, we're not talking about life on this planet and the long-term trajectories that we're seeing and experiencing. But if you know, if you go outside, you know, you're probably like, there used to be more chimney swifts above my house last year. And yeah, this winter isn't really as cold as it was.

I remember when we used to do the rink at the park and it used to be every winter and now it's so often. Now it's like, yeah, it used to be big snow banks. You know what I mean?

I'm like not that old and I can notice these trends. And of course I can see them and I rely on somebody like Paul to kind of expose me to them. So many quotes jump out to me from this conversation.

I'm going to have to, I usually do three. I might have to do nine or six right here. How about, the living world is extraordinarily cooperative.

Cooperative actually is a kind of a small term for what they're doing because exquisitely interactive and symbiotic is probably a better description. So the living world is exquisitely interactive and symbiotic. I love that.

So much about colonialism and history is all about like capitulation and taking over and winning and like, you know, being overbearing, but it's not the way it really works. Everyone is an environmentalist because they live in the environment. You know, I thought that was an interesting way of putting it.

Really, he's kind of refusing that term, which is, sometimes the more you look into something, you know, the more you don't like that term, right? That happens a lot. He has this quote on walking that I really love.

I think when you're walking, you're entering into a non-static relationship and most of our relationship with nature is static. I was reading an interview in the Financial Times this past weekend with the former head of AI of Meta and apparently his ouster or his leaving, because he was reporting to like some 25-year-old that Mark Zuckerberg hired for like $100 million or something, and this guy's like old school, like this guy's like a, you know, Geoffrey Hinton type character from University of Toronto from like the 70s, and he was like, my big argument to Mark Zuckerberg was that all of our LLMs, which he thinks are terrible, large language models, he's like, none of them understand the natural world. That was his argument. That was like led to his ouster.

That's what he's starting as his own personal startup. How does AI understand the natural world? I don't understand what he's talking about, but I like the idea that this guy who's kind of like running AI for like the world's, you know, second or third largest company, his big ouster was because he thought AI doesn't understand the natural world, which is kind of true, right?

I mean, it makes sense. It's a really long quote, so it's hard to read it, but he has this whole point, Paul, about how we use these male-dominated kind of violent images to talk about climate, like tackling climate change, fighting climate change. And, you know, there's a problem with that, combating things, because it creates, in his words, heroic imagery of complete nonsense, because the biosphere and the climate are absolutely inseparable.

You can't be it. You are part of it. It's like saying we want to conquer life, you know?

More specifically, Paul says, we have a crisis. I couldn't agree more, but it's not a climate crisis. It's a human crisis.

It's a relationship crisis, understanding, greed, violence, and power crisis. Global warming is the symptom. Such a good point.

Like, is it global warming is the problem, or is it like what we want and need way more stuff to have a higher quality of living, so we need more boats, like, you know, dispersing more gas in the oceans and killing things to get furniture to our houses? Like, that's kind of, is that climate the problem, or is it like, you know, late-stage capitalism and crazy income inequality? You know, these things kind of exacerbate the issue.

Global warming is the symptom. That's the quote. Global warming is the symptom.

And then he says, I suggest there's another way of looking at time and our passage, and that can be imbued with grace and kindness and patience and understanding as to what other people are experiencing. Those are the big things, right? I think novels give us that.

That's kind of what gets missed in nonfiction a lot, I think, is that, you know, unless you're reading a book about grace or patience or something or understanding, it's really the feeling of human emotions in specific situations that novels can sort of share with us in its unique way. Paul says, I have no advice on being a parent. My kids are really amazing, and I don't take any credit for that.

I thought that was kind of interesting from somebody who's so deeply connected to the earth that whether his kids end up great or not great or however you define that, he doesn't take any credit for that. And then the last quote, this kind of probably falls in line with a lot of stuff we've been talking about on the show, with our conversations with Jonathan Haidt and with Jenny Urich and with Lenore Skenazy. He says, we are creating ultra-processed children.

When he goes on, and I won't include this as part of the quote, but he talks about, you know, they've got to be smarter and they've got to be better. They've got to get ahead in junior high school. They've got to, like, apply to college universities at a young age.

So you end up, you know, creating ultra-processed children. I actually toured a private school in Toronto with my wife and my kid. You know, he didn't end up wanting to be interested in it.

But it was like, I honestly felt like I was walking into a pamphlet. I felt like I was walking into a pamphlet. The music, the setup, the design, the speech the kids gave.

I was like, has this been edited like 12 times by administration? Like, this just feels like everyone in here ends up kind of same-y. You know?

And then when you talk to the grads and where they go into and what they study, it's like, you know, finance. And I had no judgment on finance. I have lots of friends in finance.

I have no problem with finance as an idea, but it's just like we're all going into just the managing of capital and moving money. Like, that's not... Well, what's happening with makers?

You know, Jonathan Fields, he's the host of Good Life Project, a wonderful podcast. He's a good friend of mine. He just gave a wonderful TED Talk.

We should put that in the show notes. He just gave a wonderful new TED Talk. I think where he lives in Boulder or Boise.

I think he lives in Boulder, but I think that's where he gave the TED Talk. And it's all about like rekindling the making aspects of our identities and our personalities, like hands in the dirt, working with your hands. Martels Bennett told that too, right?

Honestly, we were on a holiday trip. We went to France and I was in this like tiny wooden, like almost outhouse, you know, in nature. And, you know, it was just cold water and like kind of a dirty toilet.

And as I closed the door, there was this like cross-stitch, you know, of a mountain scene. And I could just feel in that cross-stitch. I was like, you know, somebody spent time, you know, like doing needlepoint.

I think is needlepoint and cross-stitch the same thing? Needlepoint and like creating this big image. It's probably been there for 50 years and no one's ever moved it when this bathroom was like a really nice bathroom.

And you know what my compulsion was? I wanted to do it. I could just feel my hands like unclenching from like, you know, cell phone fingers.

And just I was like, oh yeah. Like how fun would it be to do needlepoint? And of course I was reminded of my own TED talk 15 years ago, 16 years ago now, where I talk about Rosie Greer, the NFL player who created the book, Rosie Greer's Needlepoint for Men, which I thought where he's needlepointing his own face on the cover.

Needlepoint, bring back needlepoint. Not sure how we ended up there, but that was just the rant. I went on lots of quotes, lots of quotes from the eminent and wise and sagacious Paul Hawken.

Of course, he also gave us three more books to add to our top 1000. We have number 545, Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin. Number 544, Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe.

Not to be confused with Tom Wolfe. That's Thomas Wolfe, T-H-O-M-A-S. Maybe Tom Wolfe later on went by Tom because of this guy.

And number 543, Kikoro by Lafcadio Hearn, H-E-A-R-N. Three more books, no asterisks added to our top 1000. On today, the snow moon of 2026.

February 1st, 2026 at 10.09 p.m. We will be back, of course. I wanted to say another day in February because there's always one month that has a couple full moons. It's not February, people.

It's March 3rd. We're going to be back. We're going to be back.

It's going to be a fun conversation. Stick around, everybody. Thanks so much for being here.

Until next time, you are what you eat and you are what you read. Thanks so much for listening to Three Books. Are you still here?

Did you make it past the three-second pause? And so I want to welcome you back to the end of the podcast club. One of three books, not three books, one of three clubs that we have for Three Books listeners, including the Cover to Cover Club, people trying to listen to every single chapter of the show, hardcore listeners.

We got you out there. We feel you. I hear your energy.

And, of course, The Secret Club. If you want to know more about The Secret Club, you've got to call our phone number, which is 1-833-READ-A-LOT. Call the phone number, then listen to the message, and you will be given a clue to joining The Secret Club.

And there's many steps afterwards if you dare to enter. Anyway, as we kick off the end of the podcast club, let's do what we always do, which is go to the phones.

[Karen]

Hi, Neil. This is Karen Danczowski. I'm calling you from Glencoe, New York.

I've actually called once before. I just wanted to recommend a guest. His name is Steven Johnson, and he is an author.

He wrote The Ghost Map, which, by the way, is the very first book I read that just ignited a passion in me, and I haven't stopped reading since. He's also written Where Good Ideas Come From, How We Got to Now. So I'm wondering if you've ever heard of him or if you've ever reached out to have him as a guest, but I think that two of you would hit it off because he is gifted.

He's a very gifted thinker and writer about connecting themes and ideas across broad categories, and I just think that two of you would hit it off and have a lot to talk about. And that's it, and I love your show. I truly love your show.

Thank you very much. Bye-bye.

[Neil Pasricha]

Thank you so much to Karen from Glen Cove, New York, for that really kind message. I feel your heart. I feel your energy, Karen.

I feel like I found my people here too. My wife isn't as into books as me. My closest friends are not as into books as me.

I myself go up and down through my own love of books and my ability to kind of fly through books. Right now I'm almost at the end of Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy, which I'm really loving, and I've got the William Stieg book on my bedside table. I've got a Stephen King book, The Dark Half, that I read when I was a kid.

I saw it in Doug Miller Bookstore. I was like, oh, I should read this again. By now I'm like 50 pages in, and I'm like, oh, it's scary.

I read this when I was 12, but it's scary. So I go up and down through my own interest in books, but I love this show and this community and these lovely, amazing people like you, Karen, to just help push me and cajole me and kind of be with me here in spirit and in this container of love towards reading. And I think we get each other, and we get how good books are and what they can do for us.

Stephen Johnson gets that. I heard of him years ago, I think probably one of his first couple of books. I checked him out again online just now.

I will add him to the pitches. I will send him an invite to see if we could kind of meet minds. And I really appreciate you dropping along with his name.

Who else do you want on the show? I actually should have mentioned that Joe B., at the beginning, the guy whose letter I read, at the top of the show, he said, could you get any crime writers like Dennis Lehane, Richard Price, George Pelokonos, and Daniel Woodrow? I mean, I don't know any of those people, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't.

And I have so many blind spots, as we all do, but thank you for your calls and your suggestions because they point me and poke me out of my blind spots. If you have a guest you'd like to hear on the show, please call me, 1-833-READALOT. If you have a formative book that you want to share with us, that's also another kind of voicemail I love sharing.

Just call, say, hey Neil, one book changed my life is this, because then we get the suffix, you know, long-form conversation with a really short message. 1-833-READALOT, R-E-A-D-A-L-O-T. And what some people are doing now, because it's just easier on your phone, is they just record like a little voice memo, and they just email it to me, Neil at globalhappiness.org.

If that's easier for you than doing the calling like voicemail answer machine thing, which I guess is somewhat archaic now, but I still am going to keep it for sure, then do that. Just email me and attach the two in a voice note, and that's just as well. That works just as well.

Thank you. So we did the letter, we did the voice note. Now it's time for the word of the chapter.

Is it already time for the word? Oh yeah, baby. The eminent wordsmith, Paul Hawken, you know he's going to get a word cloud.

Let's jump into that word cloud now.

[Paul Hawken]

I feel like there's so much rhetoric. It doesn't obfuscate, but it's jargonizing, exquisitely interactive and symbiotic. I felt like I was a changeling, and that's what regeneration's about.

It's not like climate is volitional, fire triggered succession. Time is cyclical. It's all about embodiment.

We're creating ultra-processed children. We definitely Balkanize.

[Neil Pasricha]

Holy cow, that was a great word cloud. There's a lot of good stuff in there. Ultra-processed children is sticking with me.

But I think ultimately, we're going to have to go with jargon.

[Neil Pasricha]

Jargon.

[Neil Pasricha]

Jargon. Jargon. According to Merriam-Webster, that would be the technical terminology or characteristic idiom of a special activity or group, such as sports jargon.

Ah, that's just the first definition. The second definition is obscure and often pretentious language marked by circumlocutions and long words. Circumcolutions, by the way, is using an unnecessarily large number of words to express an idea.

I'm sure I'm guilty of that sometimes, as we all are. It's just maybe a function of trying to be the opposite of that, but you just kind of scramble and search and you float around. That's what words are sometimes.

But here's the third definition, and this one I think is the most interesting. Confused, unintelligible language, like strange, outlandish language. Right?

And then it says it could also be like synonyms for the verb jargon, like to jargonize. It could also be to Twitter or to warble. What?

Ah, that's because in the mid-14th century, this word came from the chattering of birds, unintelligible talk, gibberish, chattering, jabbering from the old French jargon, which means a chattering, a chattering of birds. So you see a bunch of European starlings on the sidewalk making that amazing squeaky, warbly, almost metallic radio type of sound that they make. If you know, you know.

They are indeed chattering. They are speaking in jargon. Jargon, people.

That is where it comes from. What a cool, interesting history. In the 1640s, people used it as like mixed speech pigeon.

Phraseology peculiar to a sect or profession. Jargon, mixed speech pigeon. Oh, in reference to the bird screeches.

Yeah, I love that. Okay, that's good. Anything that gets us back to birds is always a win for me.

Hey everybody, thank you so much for being here. This is a fun pilgrimage. We're just, we're just hanging out.

We're hanging out with smart, interesting people. I'm talking about you. I'm talking about Paul Hawken.

Thank you for being here. I hope you took one thing away. And if, you know, if you're like thinking about your day today and you're like, hey, did I have a good day today?

You did, you already did. Because we hung out, we talked, we explored, we learned, we had fun together. It's a win, people.

You don't need to do much more. Go easy on yourself. Don't be too hard on yourself.

You don't have to do everything. Just take it a little easier. And remember, until next time, you are what you eat and you are what you read.

Keep turning the page, everybody. And I'll talk to you soon. Take care.

Listen to the chapter here!