Using Flow To Solve The Impossible with M. Sanjaya

Hey there, Rhian Dorris here with the Flow Research Collective, and this is a special series on Flow Research Collective Radio called Faith and Flow. We are doing research into the impact that faith and spirituality has on peak performance at the Flow Research Collective in collaboration with Dr. Andrew Newberg. Who pioneered the field of neurotheology, which studies the corollary brain states that show up alongside mystical experiences. And in this series, you're going to hear interviews with some of our clients who have a faith practice, with researchers, with philosophers, and others on this fascinating intersection between faith and flow and science and spirituality. So I hope you really enjoy this series. This is one of the episodes in that series, so I'll let you get to it and enjoy.

There's one moment where we might have been able to understand this kind of the spiritual, emotional value of nature. It would have been during the COVID lockdowns. Like, think about that demand. And that kind of tells me that, you know, during COVID If you looked out of your window, you realized that people really were dying to be outside and that embrace of nature was important.

What does it take to do the impossible? What does it take to level up your game like never before? What does it take for individuals, organizations, for even institutions to achieve paradigm shifting? Nothing is ever the same again. Breakthroughs.

Our mission is to decode the neurobiology of flow and cognitive peak performance. Access the minds of maverick scientists, groundbreaking innovators, and world-leading experts to understand what it takes to achieve ultimate human performance so you can feel your best, perform your best, and accomplish your boldest goals. I'm your host, Rhian Dorris, and together with bestselling author Stephen Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio. First off, just want to welcome everyone to the live broadcast today. Really, really great to have you all on board, and this is going to be a really fun conversation for the launch of Steven's new novel and 14th book, Steven, I think at this point. Is that right, or 15th?

If you count— if we count whatever it's called, my audiobook is a book, uh, Mapping Cloud 9, if that counts as a book. I think this is book 14, uh, or book 13 if you don't count that one, and I'm not sure if I count that one.

Nice, nice. So, well, let's just call it 14 then. I, I, I count that one. So yeah, the launch of Stephen's 14th book, which is The Devil's Dictionary, follow-up to Last Tango in Cyberspace. Um, everyone who has been buying it based on our, our email outreaches and our past Crowdcast has just been absolutely loving it. So really want to encourage everyone to check that out. We'll be talking more about it as we go today. And I want to just take a minute to introduce our esteemed guest today, Dr. Sanjayan, who is a global conservation scientist whose work spans from genetics to wildlife migration to nature's impact on human well-being. He is Chief Executive Officer at Conservation— Conservation. Excuse me, International, a global conservation organization which is working to protect the nature people around the world who rely on for food, fresh water, and a stable climate. And his scientific work has been published in peer-reviewed journals Science, Nature, and Conservation Biology, and his expertise has received extensive media coverage. He has also Hosted more than a dozen documentaries from PBS, BBC, National Geographic, Discovery, and Showtime. And his most recent documentary, Changing Planet, explores how climate change is disrupting 6 of the world's most iconic places and will return each year for the next 7 years to report on these locations and the communities working to bring about positive change. And it's currently streaming on PBS platforms. Steve, I know you've been watching.

Yeah, I have to say, if you haven't seen Changing Planet, it is so cool. It's a lot of— it's basically research into work that Peter and I talked about in Abundance, about this kind of disruptive technology and huge environmental challenges, some low-tech, some high-tech, but really all amazing. It's just a great show.

Nice. Yeah, definitely, definitely recommend everyone check that out. Steve, before we dive in with some Sanjayan, just as the tech's getting fixed there, uh, would love to just hear how you came across Sanjayan's work and why you were interested in having him on with us.

Well, first of all, as the head of Conservation International, he's legendary, um, as somebody who's been at the forefront of talking about climate change and talking about solutions to climate change. He's been around for a while. We also have friends in common, so I think, you know, I knew he was a really good guy. But to me, of all the kind of environmental challenges in my experience in 30 years of kind of reporting on this stuff as a writer and working on it as an environmentalist, conservation is the hardest issue. It's— people don't like the idea of land reserved for plants and animals. And that's what we're talking about, um, in a sense with conservation. So I think anybody who's the head of Conservation International, um, has been a warrior for, for this stuff first and foremost. And I think besides the, all the cool environmental stuff, uh, that, uh, we can talk about, there's a peak performance element to that. Like it, environmentalists, people are working for plants and animals and ecosystems. It's a soul-crushing endeavor. And it like really, really sort of destroys a lot of people who enter into it. So to have a very long and prestigious career, still be an optimist, still be fighting forward, that to me is also a peak performance. Like, how did you do that? So that's the other reason I'm really excited, Doctor. Hmm.

Nice. Super, super. And it looks like we're in gear. All righty. So we're in action. Thank you for bearing with us, folks. We're good to go. Sanjay, I just want to say that someone said that the reverb was a perk because everything was sounding as legendary as you are, which is fun. So to kick us off, Sanjin, one of the things that I think is really distinct and notable about you and your work is optimism. And there's a lot of talk around doomerism, especially when it comes to climate and to environmentalism at the moment. And I would love just to begin the conversation with why you maintain an optimistic outlook and how you've managed to do so.

You know, it's a really good question and it's a difficult question because, you know, it's not that I have examined my life in such great detail that I can sort of break down habits that I have and features that I have in order to do whatever it is I do. So for me, it seems almost effortless. You know, most days I wake up pretty much charging to go, and I do find a lot of energy and a 6th or 7th gear in the gearbox to keep going. You can't connect these dots unless you look sort of backwards, and it's a very hard question to answer. Now, I can just tell you from my own life, you know, I was exposed to nature from a very, very young age. I grew up in— I was born in Sri Lanka, but I grew up in Africa, in West Africa, and we would really, really surrounded by the jungle. You've heard of the famous, you know, natural history BBC presenter David Attenborough. So David Attenborough got his start in exactly the place that I grew up as a child. The very first time you saw Attenborough on TV, the very first TV show he did, he did, you know, just down the road from where I grew up, completely by coincidence, of course. But that's the kind of nature that was around me as a kid. And as I grew up, I never let go of that. And my parents always allowed me to continue to do that, even though this was not a career path that I had. So, you know, for me, I get a lot of, you know, joy and pleasure in being in nature. That's my energy source for me. And if I can get myself outside or, you know, a few days ago I was down in Mexico, you know, spent a morning going birding, and it was immediately a charging environment for me. So, you know, that's where I get it from. I also get it from the people I'm around. I have a great team and a great group of friends. And then I always view my life in narrative arcs. So I see a story in my life, my brain, and, you know, there are these moments that, you know, you want to have in your life. Where you feel like you actually can control something big. Like, who doesn't want to actually try and do something big once in their life? And I think when you're in this space that we're in, the moment is brilliant because we're finally at the place where we can actually see the future, and we're not so far gone that we can't do something about it. So why wouldn't you want to be here at this moment in this life And for me, with the fact that I was born in the global south, that I have all the privileges of the global north, it's just, you know, I see it as a real obligation and a real pleasure to do what I get to do. Doesn't mean I don't get depressed. Doesn't mean that I don't, you know, find despair as well, but I don't ever let it sit for too long.

There was an interview, Sanjay, that came out with Chris Anderson, who runs TED, and Elon Musk a couple of weeks ago. And he was asking Elon about whether he is optimistic about the future and what he thinks of the challenges that have been emerging around climate change. And Elon was underscoring a similar point. He was just saying that it's up to everyone whether the future ends up positive or negative, and it's not predetermined. And so you may as well be optimistic if it's going to help you be more effective in bringing about a good future. So I love that point. Wanted to ask you one question here before Steven jumps in. So you grew up in Africa and you were born in Sri Lanka. So I really see you as a citizen of the world, at least in terms of your upbringing. And I'm curious if that impacted your work being focused upon Earth and on conservation itself?

I think it gives me a unique perspective because I kind of feel, I feel a great deal of empathy for people who are in the situation where they don't have that much control over their lives. You know, you take something like deforestation, you know, who wants old big trees to get cut down? No one really. And if you ever try and actually participate in deforestation, if you actually try and go to a tropical jungle and cut down trees and then burn it for charcoal and then haul it out to a road to sell it to a passing truck. That's not easy work. No one grows up aspiring to do that. And it gives you a sense of empathy for people who we in the environmental movement often see as our enemies. You know, it allows me to see a little bit of their lives and understand the solutions must include them. Otherwise, it'll just be a stopgap measure.

Stephen, a question for you on that note. Last, on the last Crowdcast, we were talking about empathy expanding beyond empathy for people and into empathy or connection with wildlife and potentially trees. Stephen, do you think it's plausible that growing up across the world and being less sort of localized could expand your sort of cross-species empathy?

That's an interesting question. I don't— that's a— that's questions about cultural and culture and perspective. And that's interesting. And I don't know if I have the answer to that. But for example, the answer just gave about going birding in Mexico. Caring— when you go birding, like, you're just watching bird behavior. If you've ever, you know, done any primatology or any animal work, you're sitting on your butt and just watching animal behavior for hours and hours and hours. And in the beginning, because you don't speak the language, and like, you know, if you've ever observed— I spent a bunch of time with Patricia Wright in Madagascar observing lemurs. And, you know, in the beginning, it's a bunch of monkeys in the trees. And after 2 days of it, you know the social structure of the tribe, you know who the families are and who's friends and who's trying to cuckold who. And like the details start showing and then those details when you start bridging the gap. So I think not only, you know, obviously the economics and being exposed to different strata, anytime you get multi-perspectival thinking is the formal term. Produces more empathy, but exposure to nature early on opens up your perceptual system to take in the details of nature, right? When you went birding, they didn't have to tell you what you were looking at. You knew what you were looking at because you had been exposed to those details over time. That's where when we talk about, you know, ecological awareness or nature-relatedness or cross-species empathy, all those terms are semi-synonymous at this point. It's really about cognitive biases and information processing in the brain and what information you decide is important and what information is not important. You know, when I plopped down in the rainforest for the first time, I was observing primates. Primates' familial structures, like, weren't important. Like, they were not— like, my life was not going to depend on whether or not, like, this teenage boy got a mate or not, right? But once I started watching, you know, primate soap operas for a couple hours, now suddenly I really care and I'm noticing more details, right? Curiosity. Um, isn't just, you know, an interest. It doesn't just expand attention, it opens up perception, and we take in different and more information. And so I like— I don't, you know, the, the multicultural stuff is probably great because it tells you to look at— you notice more things because different cultures care about different things. You notice you have a wider scope to detail. But it's really, I think, to me, it's the early exposure to nature and how it feeds curiosity and how it feeds perception, that is that loop. I often feel, you know what I mean? Like, I often feel like conservation and a lot of the environmental issues, if I got to take somebody to the backcountry for a couple of weeks, the problems can go away because suddenly they can, they're in the world, the same world as I'm in. They're seeing the nature and they're understanding the cool stuff about how ecosystems work and how one thing feeds another, feeds another, feeds another, and how that human beings are part of that. And not external to it. That's how I think of it. I don't know. What do you think?

Well, I was just going to add, so Stephen's example is brilliant because, you know, I can lay in— I can lie in bed in the morning in East Africa and not get out of bed and know what's going on outside my tent just by the calls of the birds. And they seem like familiar friends, like it's a language. It really is a language. And if you spend enough time outdoors, you know, you start, you know, your brain starts rewiring as if you can sort of speak Spanish or some foreign language and you can start seeing that. So the way, but the key to that is not just exposure to nature, but it's almost searching in nature. You have to, you can't just go for a walk. I mean, go for a walk, it'll help you in lots of ways, but it has to have a walk with a slight intention, you know, like search for a mushroom or look for a specific thing or try to find water or, you know, anything like that kind of trains your brain to make the connections. Otherwise you're passive as opposed to being an active, you know, it's like just to use one of Stephen's sort of, you know, passively relax yourself with a beer in front of the television or actively relax yourself you know, by, you know, going for a walk or getting a massage or something like that. It's that active searching in nature that tunes your brain to really understand a new language. That's why millions of people go through Yellowstone National Park and when they come out of it, they're the same as they went in. That's the problem that we still have. We still see nature as outside and something beyond ourselves, as opposed to understanding that we are part of it. And anytime you can find a way to connect yourself as part of it, like Stephen did sitting in a forest in Madagascar watching lemurs, you know, he becomes part of the troop in some way. That just changes and rewires his brain to see nature as part of ourselves and thus see the connections, and the ultimate connection comes back to us. And to take, you know, Euan's sort of, you know, look, my worry is not that, you know, life disappears. Life on Earth is not going to disappear. Certainly not because of us. It just won't. It could disappear because of an asteroid, but it's not going to really disappear because of us. What could disappear is us and our civilization. That is very fragile.

People don't realize how many hominid species there were that went extinct before, along the way to get to us, right? Like the fact that we're the only remaining hominid species is a historical rarity, right? The vast majority of time there are a bunch of us, that there's one left is ridiculously rare. And as you pointed out, I don't remember who said it, life finds a way. Life will always find— oh, that was Jurassic Park. It was Jurassic Park, but they're basing it on— I want to say it was based on a complexity biologist named Stuart Kauffman is who I think said it originally. But life finds a way. But human life may not find a way. One of the things that I— and I love this about the new show also, and it's a thing that I think is hard for people to wrap their heads around, and it's particularly important when it comes to kind of environmental work. You talk a lot about nature-based solutions, but which might be better terminology. I think of when I think about disruptive technology and its ability to impact environmental challenges. One of the things that I always have to pause and say is we don't just mean high-tech. We also mean low-tech. I mean vertical farming and cultured beef, but I also mean regenerative agriculture and, you know, silvian pastures and things like that. And when you start talking about nature-based solutions, is that a solution to that, to the storytelling problem around— I think people hear technology and they first automatically assume it's going to be big technology instead of low-tech solutions. And I do a lot of work on forest health and forest fire. And I know that your show, you covered the indigenous methods of bringing back indigenous burning of forests, which is a really sort of low-tech idea that's been around for 500 years. And there's a bunch of high-tech solutions for fighting forest fires and fighting the damage they do to forests, but it can't be done. You have to do it in conjunction with indigenous wisdom, with these low-tech approaches. And I find from a storytelling perspective, That's hard. It's one of the reasons I think environmental challenges are sort of tricky to talk about because you want both of these solutions at the same time.

Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. And one of the things that you're pointing out is that I don't think the technological revolution that has impacted almost every aspect of our lives has still really impacted, you know, sort of conservation and the environmental challenge. Kind of the greatest challenge facing the planet. That part is still in its infancy. I mean, just think about virtually anything you do in your life, from, you know, how you publish your books, to travel, to how you might order your food tonight, to how you, you know, move around. Like virtually— or banking— like virtually everything you do has been massively transformed by technology. But, you know, taking your own sort of problem of dealing with fires in the West, You're still going out there with people and a sort of essentially a pickaxe-type tool and cutting fire lines and using sort of like, you know, planes that were built in the 1970s to drop basically water, right? I mean, it just hasn't gone much further than that. Like a wire can fall on the ground and spark a fire that can destroy a giant chunk of California to me is still not just low-tech, that is prehistoric. So one of the things about technology is in our field, and I'm really waiting for this, and I'm really waiting for the Elon Musks of the world to sort of help with this because, you know, we are applying technology and there are great places where we are applying technology to make big changes. And I'm not suggesting that's not happening. Our ability to map the planet, for example, is fantastically, you know, accelerated because of technology, but it hasn't still fundamentally transformed how we do what we do. And I think that transformation will have to involve that high-tech way and the low-tech way. So indigenous wisdom and the best tools we have.

I agree. I, you know, all of this for me, all the technological stuff, I started with a simple question. I had heard about, you know, early on in my career, I heard about Michael Soule and you know, megalinkages and the Wildlands Project and the Yellowstone to Yukon. And I love those ideas. David Quammen wrote a book called Song of the Dodo back in the '90s that we were both at Outside Magazine at the time. And it was hugely impactful on me and my thinking and really shaped me forward. And so one of the questions I started with and how like I actually came to write Abundance with Peter, I was looking at, okay, we need huge contiguous unbroken tracts of land that stretch across the entire continent if we're going to really save species, where the hell do we get the land? So I started looking at cultured beef because it moves cattle ranching off land and into the laboratory. First of all, it's cruelty-free, which is a big bonus to me as an animal rights advocate. But it was also 30% of our land is cattle ranching. And if we could get the cattle off most of that land, and give the land back to plants and animals. And then vertical farming was the next technology. And I met Dickson Despommiers very early on because of that. And I was like, okay, we can get agriculture off the farm and into the city and we can rewild as they're doing all over Europe at this point and turn the farm. I started with a conservation puzzle and where do you get large tracts of land for plants and animals and which technologies enable that? That was my whole people like, oh wow, we can use technology to solve environmental challenges. Those are sort of my gateway drugs because I was trying to figure out how could you create mega linkages and how you would ever get that much land.

And you know, you have such a— I mean, you know, you are thinking transformatively. I have been sort of a reductionist and I've kind of gone the other way. So one of the things that has always been a driver in my life is not making a promise that I can't fulfill within my own sort of working lifetime, right? So I get really upset when corporate CEOs, for example, I don't get upset, but you know, I kind of roll my eyes a bit when they make a promise for 2050, knowing that the average lifespan of most corporate CEOs is like 5 years. And so of course it's easy to say, well, by 2050, we'll have this miracle machine that's going to do all this. And, you know, and I'm like, yeah, I get that. It's okay. Set long-term goals is important. 'But I want to know what you're going to do, you know, in 2025 and 2030, like in our timeframe.' So I've kind of gone the other way in some ways, and I've asked in the next 5, 6 years, you know, what are the places on the planet, for example, that are so full of, say, carbon, or so precious and undeniably important for humanity's future that we can't lose them? And, you know, and kind of gone to that sort of way. And one of the things that technology has allowed us to show is, you know, we just published these amazing maps on irrecoverable carbon. So that's basically carbon that is trapped in trees and in the ecosystem that if you lose, you will never get it back in a human-relevant timescale, which means forget the Paris climate goals or anything like that. You'll never get the math to make that work. And here's the amazing news about this. Amazing news is just 3.5% of the surface area of the planet contains about 50% of the world's irrecoverable carbon. Or 5% of the planet contains about 75% of the recoverable carbon. And here's the bonus, and about 90% of all vertebrate life on Earth. That gives us an actual fighting chance. That actually means that you and I in our lifetime, in our working lifetime, not passing the buck down to our kids, can actually protect, restore kind of the most important bits.

So first of all, how much of that is of polar ice that we got to keep as polar ice is in that calculation? None? And Amazon rainforest, obviously. What else are we— what are the other big levers?

Yeah, so it really is looking at living carbon. So, you know, any place that is really thick and green and often with deep soils are going to pop up, right? And where there's some effort to destroy them. So parts of the Amazon, So 3 big rainforests in the world, the Amazon, the Congo, and West Papua in particular in Indonesia just light up. Everything that's a mangrove or coastal ecosystem pops up. So the mangroves or seagrasses are really the hardest working environment on the planet. Less than 1% of the planet, and I think it's 6% of our carbon budget, it can be met if you stop destroying them and restore them. I mean, it's just, there's no reason why anyone ever anywhere should be cutting down mangroves. Just idiotic. But then others come up too, you know, the Emerald Edge, you know, the big forest between Northern California and kind of, you know, lower part of Alaska, you know, that the Great Bear Rainforest, you know, really lights up some parts of the boreal. The peatlands of Scotland light up. So anyway, when we publish this map, it's a fascinating map. You can go down to like, you know, half a square kilometer and get very fine. And even in countries where you don't think there's a lot of carbon within that country. Let's say you were born in Namibia and you wanted to protect the most important carbon-rich habitats in Namibia. Within Namibia, you can downscale and find bits of, you know, the parts that go near the Okavango Delta that you need to protect, right?

So, Sanjiv, could you just, just to make sure everyone's on the same page, could you explain the mechanism at play there and why those areas are important for folks who are just unfamiliar with Sure, sure.

So I think most of your audience would have heard about the Paris Climate Agreement. You know, it happened about 6 years, 5 years ago, 5 and a half years ago, where the world came together, 190+ countries, and agreed that the only way to chart a habitable future for humanity is to try to keep our temperature within about 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius, right? And they did the math around it, like how much emissions can we still afford to put up How much do we need to draw down in order to get there? All of that, which virtually every country signed on to, all of that math was predicated on one fundamental assumption. That assumption is nature is left alone, meaning nature will remain the same or get better in that time period, which is incredibly ridiculous because all you have to do is look out of your window or go for a walk to any familiar place you know and just look at the assault on nature. So all of this climate math is predicated on the assumption that nature will remain the same. Now that's my job. That's how I see my role is to keep the table standing, to keep nature at least the same, if not better. Otherwise everything else that what Elon is trying to do, what people are trying to do with solar, what people are trying to do with your infrastructure, you know, all of that will be for naught if you don't keep nature at least the same, because it's such a huge part of the climate budget. Now, when you look at nature, living nature, it turns out that trees are pretty good at sucking carbon out of the atmosphere and holding on to them, and then putting them into the soil and putting them underwater when it comes to mangroves, deep, deep underwater, for example, right? And when you burn a forest, when you convert it into agriculture, when you destroy it in some way, all that carbon dioxide and other gases go up in the atmosphere and they contribute to, to climate catastrophe. And so it's really important to keep nature intact. Now it turns out that nature is not even everywhere, that there are some places on the planet that just light up as very, very carbon-rich. And mangroves and seagrass beds, which are basically coastal forests, are like 6 times more dense in carbon than say a rainforest is, which is many times more dense than say, you know, your garden might be, right? So by finding out what are the places that really light up, we can hone in our strategies to first and foremost protect and restore them, because if you lose them, you're not going to get it back.

There's two things coming off what you're saying, because one of the things I know is I'm listening to you And I'm just thinking, I remember back in the '90s, like sort of as I was starting to cover environmental topics as a journalist, just as a reporter, mapping projects were just getting underway, trying to like biodiversity hotspots and like, and people don't get like, it sounds, I remember I was, I was working on the Everglades Restoration Project, the $8 billion public works project, right? The largest conservation effort ever done. And we were out Midnight one night, we were doing an alligator survey. So you go around in a boat and you shine your flashlight and you look for eye shine, and then you try to tape measure the alligator. And we're running around and we're doing this all night. And I, and I finally, I turned to the lead scientist, I was like, why are we doing this? And he said, well, we need baseline data. And I said, what do you mean? Because we spent $8 billion to restore sheet flow to the Everglades. The way you measure the health of an ecosystem, one of the easy ways is the keystone predator. How many major predators do you have is an easy way to determine the health of an ecosystem. They hadn't even done the work. So literally it was this $8 billion public works project. Nobody even knew what victory looked like. They had not— like, they didn't— they hadn't measured anything. And I remember thinking to myself, oh my God, the mapping, the counting, the basic science is— we're so far behind the 8-ball on this stuff. And then when I hear you talk about we just put out a map of all all the super carbon-rich areas. One of the things I think to myself is, oh my God, the tech has come so far from being in a boat with a flashlight, shining a flashlight into the— everybody's trying to measure an alligator. And that in itself, from an environmental perspective, it's such a huge victory. People don't talk about it. We talk about even technology not impacting the environment, but from a historical perspective. God, I remember when we like couldn't even figure out how many trees were in a rainforest or which are the biodiverse hotspots that we want to protect and all those kinds of questions. So the first thing I wanted to say is, since I just wanted your opinion on that, like what you've seen in conservation that way, like the tech that nobody pays attention to, but the fact that we can now do that, it's amazing to me. That was the first place I wanted to sort of start.

Well, there's, and you know, Stephen, part of the reason why he was probably doing that is also it's fun to be out in the boat looking for giant predators, right? So just don't forget that there's a huge element of what we do that, you know, has this excitement to it. And otherwise, why would we do this? But there are some amazing things that are happening right now. So we have technology, for example, that, you know, uses AI to detect wildlife. And instantaneously tell you what it is based even on a fragment of a photo. So thousands of millions of images immediately processed, then made immediately available to, to managers. We have programs that can send alerts to cell phones about fires in very remote areas, like in Bolivia. A forest fire in Bolivia, a ranger living way out there with no other connectivity will get like cell phone messages that allow them to prepare and detect and fight fires, right? So there is just these, you know, the restoration principles that we're using for coral right now, like our ability to grow coral in labs and get coral from places that are, you know, super warm and then spread them to other places. We're doing a million polyps of coral in Colombia now, like at a bigger, bigger scale. And the restoration we're doing is also now going up to massive scale. So we have a project, for example, with MasterCard to restore 100 million trees. You know, so the scale has grown and that's really because technology is allowing us to do things now at scale. And that's exciting.

Yeah, a friend of mine, Lawrence Fletcher, is a friend of mine. He's the inventor of Tree Planting Grounds. So the ones that they were using to restore mangroves in Myanmar was his creation. And we've been doing some of that work in around fire. Turns out the same drones that you can use for reforestation, you can repurpose and use them hurling instead of seed pod missiles that plant a tree. You can put paintball missiles that fight forest fires. You can use the same drones to whole woody biomass out of the forests as well to get the dead trees out of the forest. So the fuel loads go down and we're working like we're trying to take those. So the drones basically work 365 days a year. It's not just planting trees during tree planting season. It's working all the way year round. And it's exciting because, as you know, you can suddenly plant 100,000 trees in an afternoon with a drone.

And also just the ability to link these things up. So just in December, I went to visit one of our projects in Northern Kenya, in, sorry, in southern Kenya. And these are the Chulu Hills, you know, what Hemingway wrote of the green hills of Africa. They're the hills that feed Tsavo National Park, the biggest national park in Kenya and one of the biggest in the world, as well as Mombasa, the second biggest city in Kenya. And they have suffered an unbelievable drought for the last two years. The rains have skipped and big animals and cattle and livestock have just been decimated. But in the Chulus, the communities, about 140 40,000 people, mostly Maasai but not all, have been essentially protected. They've been, they've been able to get water, they have fodder, and they also have a source of income. And the reason for that is because they have managed to quantify the carbon in the chulus, and with our help, they've managed to put that up on the market, and companies like Apple And Netflix and Gucci have come in and bought those credits that now provide those communities around $2 to $3 million a year, a year without any philanthropic help. Now you just think about this. It's a Maasai, it's a nomadic tribal community in Kenya that is quite literally linked to my iPhone. To me, that is a miracle, and that's the way we're going to get scale in conservation, right? Once we can make that production and protection model really fit with each other. So to me, that was like an amazing thing because it's— I'm so tired of just philanthropy being the only driver of conservation, you know? I mean, you know, imagine if we could get climate change to pay for itself, or like if you can get like Instead of people seeing it as someplace you got to dump money in, but it's actually generating income for us.

Some of the coolest stuff going on, I think, in conservation— I'm psyched to hear you talk about it— are these new kinds of finance models, forest health bonds, things that— I spent so much of my career trying to remove this term externalities, which was things the market won't pay for, which were ecosystem services. And I was in that fight with Amory Lovins trying to like, should we put dollars on externalities? Because maybe that's the way to get people to pay attention. And now the fact that companies are coming in and saying, oh no, we benefit from the clean water, we benefit from the carbon capture, we benefit from all this stuff and we're going to pay for it to support it is so amazing. And it is, it's got to be how we get to scale. It's got to be done that way. So exciting to kind of hear that work. And it's also— I was— when you were talking about coral, I'm sure you remember this because you've probably been up close to it further than I have. But I remember it was like there were two things that you couldn't do. You couldn't regrow a rainforest because the soils were too delicate and you couldn't regrow coral. And right, like, these were the— I remember this from like in the late '90s where people used to say this stuff all the time. And these were like truisms in conservation environmental work, and it's 20 years later and neither of those things turn out to be true. They're hard to do unless you're doing it right, but now that we know how to do it right, it's actually not that hard to do. So one of the things that I think is really cool in conservation— we don't often realize this— is a lot of the stuff that we thought was impossible, we just, we didn't know how to do it right. And now that we've actually figured out how to do it right, because science is taught us a little bit more about how corals breed, for example. It turns out, no, it's actually totally possible and you can actually do it at scale. And that's amazing. Reef restoration work is astounding because 20 years ago we just all thought it was going to go away.

Yeah. And the same thing with regenerative agriculture, the same thing. I mean, we're having communities in Botswana who are changing the way they graze in order to put more carbon back in the soil. So I mean, I feel like we're on the cusp of finally using both technology and the power of the markets to scale up these things that I always thought, my parents thought was a hobby, and I thought was maybe a small, small career in a very niche market. I mean, I tell you the thing that gives me some sense of hope, and that's, you know, 5, 10 years ago we were on the outside like yelling in, then we were asked to come into the lobby, And now you go to any major conference, you open up any major newspaper or website, and, you know, the issues that I've cared about all my life are now front and center, front and center. And every corporate CEO is talking about it. You know, every young person is talking about it. Every Indigenous community is talking about it. I mean, the eloquence with which my friends in the Maasai community talk about carbon markets is astonishing to me because I'm just starting to catch up. Not just caught up, but they've actually created it and they're benefiting from it directly. So that gives me an enormous sense of optimism and hope. I'm sure we're going to solve this. My only worry is, will we do it fast enough to also enjoy some of the benefits?

Stephen, before you respond there, I actually just want to ask you to clarify for the listeners what you see the link being between these kind of disparate fields of flow and peak performance. There's exponential technology, given your work with Peter Diamandis. Then, there's the themes that you cover in Devil's Dictionary around empathy, environmentalism. And, I would love for you just to articulate the linkage between these fields. Yeah.

So, my core interest has been, what does it take to do the impossible? And, solving environmental issues is a total impossible challenge. And invariably, whenever you see the impossible become possible, you see two things. You see people expanding human capability and you see people leveraging disruptive technology. Those two things, when they bump into each other, you usually— that's usually the breeding grounds for when the impossible becomes possible. And on the environmental side, on the flow side, which, you know, underpinning peak performance, it really deeply ties in to the environmental stuff for two reasons. First is, and I've written about 5 or 6 newsletters about this fairly recently, we talked about it last time, but it's worth bringing up again. When you're in flow, when we're in the state of peak performance, a lot of different things get amplified, learning, creativity, productivity, et cetera, empathy and environmental awareness, ecological awareness, both expand when we're in flow, especially if we're having a flow experience outside. There's a bunch of different neurobiological reasons for it. But empathy and empathy and flow tends to expand not just— I'm not just empathetic for all human beings, which is super important. I'm empathetic for plants, animals, and ecosystems. It naturally pushes it out into the natural world. It widens our sphere of caring. All of this matters. One of the reasons we were starting this conversation talking about Details in nature, being a birder and noticing the little details in nature, that's ecological perspective, perception. If you talk to psychologists, neuroscientists about our current environmental crisis, one of the issues is because of how the brain filters information, right? We're bombarded with information every second, 11 billion, 11 million bits a second coming from our senses. And the brain consciousness is 2,000 bits and attention can focus on like 250 bits. So like almost everything goes away. And if it's not foundational to survival, the brain edits it out. And we live in boxes. We stare at boxes all day. I'm now staring at 3 boxes inside a box, inside the box I'm sitting in. My brain thinks box world is what's important, and so it filters out. If I don't go take my dogs hiking through the mountains every day, if I don't go into the backcountry every day, my brain is going to start filtering out that world. I'm literally you're not going to see the plants, the animals, the ecosystems. And then when you want to take it to the next level, I was hiking this morning and I've gotten in the habit of trying not to walk through spider webs because it takes a spider a lot of energy and a lot of time to spin a web and they're kind of everywhere at this point. But if that web doesn't catch that spider food, it's probably not going to procreate. And it's, you know what I mean? And spiders are good. But like, the level of like, first I have to take in enough information about nature to even notice a spider web, which most people don't notice when they're walking around. And now I have to care enough to walk around it because those spider webs are really good for the ecosystem. They're catching insects that blah blah. So like, that's a level of— that's what you get with ecological awareness. That's stuff that starts showing up in flow Those are the kinds of changes people need to make. When we can feel about plants, animals, and ecosystems the way we feel about families and friends, now we've got a chance. I always say that one other way you can tell how far— when I go into a forest, I'm not lonely. I can be totally by myself, but I go into a forest, as long as trees are around me, I'm never lonely. Trees are my friends. And it's— there's a feeling that comes that way, like I'm less lonely in forests. And that's, that's a weird kind of relationship. That's the stuff that starts to happen to you as you start to develop ecological awareness. And so like, it's not just we got to see nature, it's a whole frickin universe out there that you actually get access to and get to interact with in really neat ways that flow can be a gateway drug into. The other side of it is I did all the flow work because the whole training side, like the Flow Research Collective works in 140 companies. Why are we training people all over the world? Because it's not just I want people to learn how to be more productive at work. I want people to learn how to be more productive and get into flow and use the tools of peak performance so we can go after the world's grand challenges, so we can go after climate change, so we can go after poverty and energy scarcity and water shortage and all these things. Because it's going to take people performing at their very best and working together at their very best to solve these challenges. I agree, Sanjay, that like it's an amazing— we live in an amazing time, right? It's either a catastrophe or the greatest opportunity in the history of the universe, and it's going to go down in our lifetimes. Like the next 25 years, at a certain level, If you're talking about bio— if you take biodiversity and climate change and these crises seriously, and you know what we know, we got 30 or 40 or 50 years to like window. We either save our species and save our planet, or we don't. Peter and I used to joke, because it was funnier in 2010, we used to say, it's abundance or bust. It's less funny now in 2022. Logic hasn't changed. It's still abundance or bust, but it's no longer as funny because the crises are coming closer and the impact of climate catastrophe— the West is going up in smoke every summer. The East Coast is underwater every winter. Huge parts of the world are at war over water and energy and things like that. It's really real. It's not funny anymore, but the opportunity is amazing. And I think flow is part of the solution. And I think disruptive technology is part of the solution. At a personal level, I always said the impossible challenges I came here to solve are all about plants, animals, and ecosystems. And, you know, it's because I read the Lorax when I was a kid and I was brainwashed by Dr. Seuss, you know.

Yeah, I, you know, Steve, I absolutely love that. And I think if there's one thing that folks should try to take from all the things that you've done and this new book as well is try to take some of what you're putting out there and use it to empower themselves to be better warriors in that moment. You know, that I think environmentalists, you know, and I'm using that word very loosely. So anyone who thinks beyond themselves about the planet and about their kids' future, frankly, is an environmentalist, right? You know, how do you achieve peak performance? I think we in science, you know, have spent so much time trying to figure out the what that we've really forgotten about the how. So me reading about, you know, like James Nestor's book, right? You know, like it blew you away about how quickly, you know, you could just amazingly become this, you know, like how quickly you could hold your breath. right? And I read it and I intuited it and I went, this is amazing. Then I went to Hawaii and I took a class and I showed myself that I could do it. And it was just mind-expanding. So there's a big difference between reading about how to be a great athlete and then getting engaged in an activity that moves you there. And I think what we have forgotten in environmentalism and conservation, we've focused on the what, we've not focused on the how. And part of that how is how do you create that generation of leaders in corporations, in business, in classrooms, in homes, in ranches in Montana that are empowered with what you're putting out there in terms of flow to maximize that expanded human capability. Because it is a tiring job and it feels endless and it feels exhausting and it feels impossibly big. And we're now replacing the sort of the denialism of climate with the despondency of climate. And that's not a good trade to make. If you look at like Don't Look Up, which is a phenomenal movie. I mean, it's a phenomenal movie and I loved watching it. And it's probably the one movie that I talked about so much to other people. It didn't really make me want to go out and work harder because what they were doing was exactly what I was doing. And guess what the outcome was?

It's interesting on that front because one of the things I think about— and you've— your work covers this a lot, um, especially the, like, the Vox series you did on little, like, climate snippets where you show up for 5 minutes. By the way, the, the woman who all the waste—

oh, amazing—

for 7 years fit into it was the craziest thing ever. That was really crazy. That blew my mind. This woman, 7 years of her life She produced only enough waste that it filled like a penny jar like this big. And he was freaked out by it. I was watching it. But what I love and what I think that show especially emphasizes is I always say, we hear these words like, I'm an environmentalist or whatever. Environmentalism, like peak performance, they're both about, it's one decision at a time. Am I gonna buy chicken for dinner or am I gonna buy steak? Am I gonna— going, right? Do I want leather car seats that are made from animal skin, or do I want cloth car seats that are made without cruel data? Like, these are— we— environmentalism is a choice, is, is just a daily choice. It's like peak performance. Performance, like 6 things you do every day and 7 things you want to do every week if you're following biology, right? Just the science of peak performance, what the biology teaches us. Conservation, environmentalism, something very similar to series of like 4 or 5 choices you could make every day and 5 or 6 things you could do every week. And like, so that's also an interesting thing that I don't think, you know, we hear this great despondency and people don't realize how unbelievably empowered they are in the first place. And I think the other thing, and I want you, you said this earlier and I just have to agree with it because it's, to me, it's stunning for For 30 years I've tried to do this work, not at the level you've tried to do it, but for 30 years it's been an ass-kicking. And then suddenly in the past 2 or 3 years, suddenly I'm no longer shouting at the rain. Suddenly I'm in the boardroom and the guys in the boardroom with me who used to be the enemy are now, we're speaking the same language. And suddenly those triple bottom line goals that people were just giving lip service to for years, unbelievably real. And, you know, people— one of my climate heroes for the past 4 or 5 years has been Microsoft. Like, of all the companies, like, Microsoft and Luke Joka and their sustainability programs are amazing. And 25 years ago, you would have— I would— I couldn't think of a company where I'd like, well, this company is one of my environmental heroes. Like, that's crazy. And that's really fast. The mindset shift that's important to me that you were talking about, I think it's actually happening. I sort of feel like this stuff, we're moving in the right direction. It probably would naturally evolve over the next 25 to 50 years. I think we'd get there. We just have 5 to 10 years to solve the problems. We have to step on the gas, but everything's already— it's moving in that direction. To me, it's the most joyous thing in the world because I'm not the only guy on the block who right now wants to save the whales. We all want to save the whales. That's cool.

Yeah. Yeah. And on your technology piece about leveraging technology, I think it's what you said before, it's leveraging technology, but that means new technology as well as really ancient wisdom. Because if you think about something like how do we fight fires or how do we take care of the land or how do we find water? You know, these are things that humans have wrestled with since the dawn of humanity. I mean, since the dawn of hominids, if not before. So we've had 4 million years to figure out how to find water. So why are we ditching all of that in the last, you know, couple of decades? Whereas if you're thinking about how do you fly, fair enough, that's like a pure new technology kind of thing. We've had 50 years of that or so, right? But these other fundamental things, like how do we live in a place, or how do we take care of ourselves in drought. We have enormous, enormous indigenous wisdom, local community wisdom that we have just ditched, that we absolutely need to bring back because that's, it's that combining of that old tech in some ways, or wisdom-based technology that is indigenous and new tech that really, for me, gives you the leverage of tech.

Sanjin, just a question for you on the fact that Steven is no longer the only one trying to save the whales in boardrooms. So a lot of our audience, a lot of our listeners are CEOs, leaders, executives with P&L responsibility, not necessarily of companies as large as Amazon or Microsoft. Sometimes these are smaller bootstrapped businesses and you were touching on the fact that sometimes the overly long-term goals that are set by C-level execs who may be doing it to an extent for virtue signaling or other things like that, that that's not necessarily the best way to go. So I'm curious what your advice would be to, let's say, the CEO or the leader of a 50 to 100 person bootstrap company on how they can support biodiversity, nature, and just environmentalism overall. What is the most effective way way to do so?

So here's what I would say. I would say that the choices you make are important. Obviously, set long-term goals, but break them down into sort of bite-sized things that not only you, but your employees and your customers can engage in. Little choices that you make do matter. You know, I mean, I'll just give you a really simple example, right? So I drink coffee at home and I boil water and I do the pour-over method, but I nearly always boil way more water, like way more water than I need for my coffee. And I bet you it's probably the biggest energy use in my household every day that I could cut instantly by half, by just a second of like trying to get it just about right.

Right?

That's just a simple, simple, simple little thing. So take steps that you can make in your own business Set goals that you can try and reach, measure them, engage with your customers, engage with your employees because they're going to want it in the future. I'm telling you like flat out, like you can be on the right side of history and those innovations that you make now are going to pay off in the long run. You know, the one thing I know for a fact is that nature tomorrow is going to be more valuable than it is today. That is an absolute truism. So why not invest in it because it is—

what I don't know is what the shape of the curve is, but that's true. So that's what I would say, you know, to company CEOs.

You know, I would also say that, you know, your customers are becoming incredibly sophisticated and technology is allowing them to have real-time information about what you're doing. And I think that the pledges you make, you're going to have to step up to.

Love it. Super. It's great, Sanjay. And I use the pour-over method as well. One of the most satisfying things is filling up the cup that you're going to drink the coffee out of, pouring that into the coffee kettle, and then you've got the exact perfect amount of water when you use the pour-over. So definitely, definitely going to back you on that one.

Guess what?

I wasn't doing that.

Yeah.

So there you go. Stephen, have you got any final questions before we close here?

The one thing I sort of wanted to get a sense of, because I said this sort of as my teaser, in my experience of all kind of the environmental jobs, conservation is the hardest one. And Conservation International, you guys have been around for so long and you've probably done as much work globally as almost any organization I know. How have you seen, what are you seeing on the front, like on conservation? I know, like, it's amazing. We, you know, I use the term megalinkages.

I remember when E.O.

Wilson wrote Half Earth and I was like, oh shit, he said it out loud. He told them what we all know, but oh my God. And now to the fact that like Half Earth fits the UN goals, fits climate change goal, it's So how have you seen conservation and on the front lines when you go out into the world and raise money for your organization, raise money for projects? What's the experience? How has it changed over the past 5 years, 10 years since you started doing this work? Just curious about that.

When I started doing it, it was a hobby. It was a niche. It was something that you did and people who, after they had made a certain amount of money, could afford to then kind of dabble in it or support it because it was a nice thing to do. And there's nothing wrong with that. But that's genuinely how I saw my life. And, and I did it because I was passionate about it, not because I truly thought I could change the world. And here's why. Because the dirty secret I was carrying was that I never could see a solution that was big enough. I could actually tackle the challenge in front of us at scale. And I think even without climate change, I think we would have ended up with massive biodiversity extinction, you know, and loss of life on Earth in a different way. We would have gone down the path in a different way. In a weird way, because climate change came along and we started becoming aware of it and so quantifiable, and you can actually put a number around it, and you can put a threshold around it, and you can say these are the planetary boundaries that we can't exceed, it actually gives us some framework to actually kind of motivate to a goal. Right? If you don't know you're going to get to the top of the mountain, I don't think people would be climbing. I just don't think— I imagine if mountains didn't have tops, would people still climb? And I just don't think they would. So that's what I, you know, kind of a weird sort of psychological sort of thing in my brain saying like, this gives me— put everything into a frame. And I'll tell you the other thing, like, so the other thing is that so younger people are getting involved. They're way more impatient for change. I'm not alone in the room. I mean, you, you think you're lonely in a boardroom? Jesus Christ, how do you think I feel? You know, like, how many people from the Global South do you see invited to Davos, right? I mean, just like big things that now I don't feel alone anymore. I also find that companies can often hire people way smarter than me. Like, I mean, like, you cannot believe the access that I now get to people in industry, to folks like you guys, to, you know, like, I mean, amazing people want to talk to me about this thing that I always thought was my, like, stamp collection hobby on the side. So that is incredibly empowering. I almost feel like I have all this, like, you know, amazing talent at my fingertips. I just need to figure out a way to utilize it better. And the final thing I'd say is we are no longer capital constrained. That's an amazing thing. So it's no longer about money. Don't get me wrong, like I love the fact that people give us gifts and I'm deeply grateful for every cent, every dollar that we get. But the reason we're not scaling is not just because we don't have money. It's like, that's a small problem compared to the bigger problem. It's not a capital constraint thing anymore. It's almost a supply constraint problem now. We have way more demand than supply. Imagine that we have way more demand for solutions than we have supply.

That's a cool way of thinking about it.

So high-quality carbon projects, for example, like the thing I told you about Kenya, if I had 20 of them, I could get them all done instantly right now. Like right now I have customers ready to go do it.

So the bottleneck is actually at the level of entrepreneurs, at the level of innovation, at the level of Yeah, creation policy.

So don't forget, Polly, we not talked a bit about this. So the reason policy becomes important with something like climate or biodiversity is that if governments don't have clarity about policy, then investments won't come in because it's just too risky. And, you know, you could just change the rules overnight. So the reason why we do our carbon projects in Kenya and in Colombia or in Peru is because they have clarified the rules under which you can engage. And when it comes to that kind of global policy, frankly, I think the US has really been a bit of a laggard. You know, we haven't been clear about the value of nature and how we would incorporate it into policy.

I would say humans are goal-directed machines. And you made a really interesting comment, and it's going to stick with me for a long time, that if we had to have a crisis, Because climate change is easier. I was at the forefront of the biodiversity crisis for fucking ever. Trying to put numbers around the biodiversity crisis is impossible. We were trying to put value ecosystem services, one of which is the spiritual value of nature. That's an ecosystem service. How do you put a number on the spiritual value of nature or even begin to put a number on it? It's an absurd situation to be in. But how do we cap warming at 1.5 degrees? That's measurable. That's interesting. And as goal-directed systems, I can see that that makes a lot of sense to me. That's interesting.

Now, I would say that if there was one moment where we might have been able to understand this kind of the spiritual, emotional value of nature, it would have been during the COVID lockdowns. Like, think about that demand. Like, every bike trail in where I live, like, I can bike to work. I live basically on the Potomac River, very close to it. And there's an amazing trail called the Mount Vernon Trail, runs 38 miles along the Potomac River, and I bike it all the time. It's so crowded now that I often bike on the roads because I can't get on the trails because there's just so many people on it. And that kind of tells me that, you know, during COVID if you looked out of your window, you realize that people really were dying to be outside and, and that embrace of nature was important.

I think that's very true. I also liked what you had to say about policy as just clarity. It's interesting because the fire discussion, right, a lot of the fire discussion is a policy discussion. Like, I never— I have spent more time since I started working, I'm in meetings about zoning and sawmills all the time. Like, things I never thought that would happen in my lifetime. How do you reopen sawmills in the American West is a question that I spend a lot of time And it's a policy issue. It's a zoning issue. And I do agree that the US has sucked on this and really could have been one of the leaders here. But I agree with you.

Or even send a signal, because if the US sends a signal, the global markets will sort of react on it. And look, I think I have real hope that Secretary Kerry and the administration will be able to send signals around deforestation, around, you know, the value of carbon and the value of nature in sort of global policy, which will then help the markets, you know, get behind it. Because I really think that the CEOs, the capital markets, the private markets are ready to go.

I think so too. And I also, if you just look at the growth of like venture capital climate funds and some of the really big ones that get set up. What's interesting is if you look, for example, Chris Sacca, who started Twitter, has a big— his carbon fund. If you look at the companies in his portfolio, he's not just looking at what companies are going to make money. It's all the solutions. He's really tried to surround the problem. And when you see stuff like that in huge. That's a billion-dollar fund at this point. That's really far from business as usual. And it's what I think is interesting in the US that I'm starting to see in FIRE and in other places is because the policy side is so shitty, business is starting to lead instead of government, and government is playing catch-up to business, which is— it doesn't surprise me. I saw that happen with Singularity University and a lot of the exponential tech that, you know, came out there where you were so far ahead of the policymakers, the policymakers were coming to the technologists to figure out how the hell do we keep up. And I'm seeing sort of the same thing on the environmental stuff where like business is oddly leading this and government is, you know, turning to business to figure out how to steer, which is nothing I ever thought I'd see in my lifetime. And it's amazing, but I think it's true or sort of from my limited view.

Yeah.

Feels true.

And you know, I think the last couple of years during COVID I think you saw the best companies really step forward. You know, I always felt that it was kind of an amazing thing. You know, when the lockdown happened, we really didn't know our future was uncertain. As a charity, you know, I'm relying on, you know, my donors and my corporate partners. You know, I had no idea where they were going to land on, on continuing to support the works that we do. I'll tell you, to a company and frankly to a philanthropist, but to a company, Every single company we're engaging with, except really the airline industry, which I understood was in a very different kind of existential crisis. But outside of that, every single one of them not just stood with us, they tripled down, they quadrupled down. Like if you look at the sort of corporate engagement deals that we had going into COVID and coming out, it's an order of magnitude, sometimes two orders of magnitude bigger.

Wow.

Punishing. And I thought, why is this? And I, you know, again, going back to cycling, you know, I always feel like when I ride this trail, the only time I can overtake people is on the uphills, right? Like, it's really hard to pass someone on the flats or the downhills. Like, that's why, like, Tour de France, if you watch it, like, you know, the mountain stages are exciting. That's where the passing happens. And I actually think that the best companies kind of recognize this intuitively. And use this moment to accelerate. And that's exactly what they did. Now they're so far ahead in some ways that I think that's exactly what they kind of took that moment to do. I think that we're in a good place. I think it all depends on how quickly we can do exactly what you said, expand human capabilities and be inclusive about it, leverage technology, but new technology as well as ancient wisdom And then do that, in my opinion, in a way that is compassionate to all, because that compassion has been missing from conservation in a long time. It's often been smug conservation, and I think we need to define it as compassionate conservation.

Is that like compassion conservatism? We tried that. I don't think it works so well.

No, I think compassionate conservation— No, humans at the center of it. Of it and makes us just realize that at the end of the day, we are trying to save ourselves.

The tagline along those lines for Conservation International switched, like you put people back into the, how you think about the equation. They weren't in the equation for a while with Conservation International. And I noticed that how you describe the organization now includes, you know, nature for the benefit of people as well, which I thought was interesting.

Yeah, I mean, the only way people will save nature is if it's in their own, you know, enlightened self-interest, as our founder, you know, Peter Seligman says. But, you know, I, I kind of— I do buy that. And certainly coming from the Global South, I see that all the time.

Sanjum, thank you so much for joining us. This has just been absolutely phenomenal. We've had no one, literally no one, drop off over the entire conversation, which is a huge compliment. To both. So, yeah, thank you so much for your time and the work you're doing as well, Sanjit. It's incredible. And this was a great, great conversation. Anything you want to mention before we close here?

I just— Sanjit, I just did— you're again, like, your work is so hard and it's such an uphill battle and you do it with a smile on your face. You've done it for a while. I just want to thank you. Really, it matters so much. It's so important. Important, and I just appreciate it.

Thank you.

Yeah, and I want to just emphasize as well, everyone should check out your PBS series also. Do you want to just mention that briefly?

Oh yeah, that's so cool.

Yeah, it's called Changing Planet, and if you go to pbs.org, you can find it there, and Netflix and all the other apps have it too. So Changing Planet, it's once a year for the next 7 years around Earth Day.

Amazing. Super. Alrighty. Thank you both so much. And yeah, thanks everyone for tuning in as well. If what you've heard on Flow Research Collective Radio has been helpful, please consider doing us a solid and leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you are listening to this. Reviews help us connect to a wider audience so we can get these performance principles out to more people.