Ambassador Of The Heart with Isaiah Saxon & Jane Goodall

0:05Hey, and welcome back to the A24 podcast. For today's episode, The Legend of Ochi filmmaker Isaiah Saxon joins his hero Jane Goodall for a truly enlightening conversation spanning aquatic ape theories, the deep connections between humans and animals, the primates that inspired Isaiah's very own Ochi, and Jane's lifelong mission to save the Earth. We hope you enjoy, and don't miss The Legend of Ochi in theaters nationwide this Friday. Hello, this is Jane Goodall. And this is Isaiah Saxon, and today we're talking on the A24 podcast. Hi, Jane. Hello, finally. Yeah, it's so nice to meet you. Good to meet you, too.

0:43You know, Jane, I grew up in California in the 80s and 90s. And in my household, there were sort of three agreed upon patron saints that we all held up as examples of our values. And it was the Dalai Lama, the Beatles, and you. You've just been this kind of guiding light in my world. And you've certainly been a massive inspiration on The Legend of Ochi. I'm just really excited to talk to you and it's such a privilege so thanks Jane. So I just I first wanted to talk about the connections between the film and your story. So in the film we see this young girl named Yuri and she forms this deep relationship with a fictional primate and before she meets the animal you know she feels stuck and disconnected and she's in a man's world with no place for her.

1:29So this this encounter she has with this animal it becomes an invitation to like a different way of relating. And it's a direct and emotional and intuitive way of relating that she's not getting from the people around her. And it gives her confidence to like act on instinct and like move in the world. And I was thinking how in a lot of ways this kind of mirrors some of the relationships you've experienced with animals. So I'm just really curious, what was the feeling that you had when you were a young woman in England and you were compelled to take this leap of faith on a journey that is still continuing?

2:04Well, I mean, you know, I was born loving animals, all animals, right from the beginning. People say, what triggered it? I don't know. When I was growing up, there was no TV. Most of my young years were in the war, World War II. So I was out in the garden watching the squirrels and the birds and the insects, too, little jumping spiders and so on. And then books became very, very important. Dr. Doolittle was the first one. And, you know, he took animals from the circus back to Africa. And then Tarzan. I used to save up my pennies of pocket money and spend Saturday afternoons in this funny little old secondhand bookshop.

2:46And then I found this little very cheap edition of Tarzan of the Apes. And I'd never heard of Tarzan. So I took it home, climbed up my favorite tree, which is still out there in the garden, and read it from cover to cover and fell passionately in love with this glorious lord of the jungle. And then he goes and marries the wrong Jane. I thought I would be much, much better mate than that wimpy Jane that he married. Anyway, that was my dream. I would grow up, go to Africa, live with wild animals, and write books about them. And everybody laughed because, you know, girls didn't do that sort of thing.

3:24In fact, nobody was doing that except mom. And I had this amazing supportive mother right from the beginning. She didn't get mad when she found I'd taken worms to bed with me. And quite amazing. And so when I was talking about this Africa thing, she said, well, if you're going to have to work awfully hard, you'll have to take advantage of every and any opportunity. If you don't give up, I'm sure you'll find a way. Very, very important to have a supportive mother. Wow. Your film, this young girl, doesn't have a supportive mother, does she? Yeah, part of her journey is reconnecting to her mother and figuring out how to turn her into a supportive mother through her own will.

4:09But yeah, certainly nothing like the mother that you had that made it all possible, it sounds like. He was amazing. Wow. I had very, very little money. So when I left school, all my friends went off to university. I wouldn't afford it. So I had to do a secretarial course, which I didn't want to do. But again, mom said, you're going to do something, you must do it properly. So I did. Is that how you met Louis Leakey, was to apply to a secretarial course? No, I did the secretarial course. I got a job first in Oxford, then in London. And then a letter from a school friend inviting me to Kenya. So I went by boat.

4:51It took about five weeks because the Suez Canal was closed. So anyway, I got there and stayed with my friend. And then somebody said, Jane, if you're interested in animals, you should meet Lewis Leakey. That's how I met him. Was he already the Lewis Leakey? Well, he hadn't made that old of eye discovery. He was pretty well known, yes. Gotcha. So, you know, my movie really does present a kind of critique of anthropocentrism, and it presents all these different attitudes around how to relate to nature. I think there's this kind of core flaw in the history of Western science that has always put us at the center.

5:33You know, we started with the idea of like, we're at the center of the universe. We thought that the stars all rotated around us. And then we realized that, no, we're just one little planet orbiting one little star in one little galaxy. among billions of galaxies. And the same pattern can be seen with how we've thought about our place among the animal kingdom as separate and superior. But you contributed this pivotal milestone in the evolution of this thinking, proving that chimpanzees use tools, which then caused Western science to redefine humans from man, the only tool maker to something else.

6:09And I just would love to hear the story of how you made that discovery. Well, you know, when I first got to Gombe, the chimps ran away for four months. I couldn't get close. And that was, you know, the authorities insisted I didn't go alone. So mum volunteered to come for four months. I only had money for six months. You know, I knew with time I could get the chimps to trust me, but did I have time? And Mark was there to say, you know, Jane, from this peak, you're seeing learning more through your binoculars than you realize. So it was very sad. She left just before. And that was the one chimp who'd begun to lose his fear of me.

6:51I named him David Graybeard because he had white hair on his chin. and I saw him sitting on a termite mound, breaking off grass stems and fishing the termites. I also saw him picking leafy twigs and to make them into tools, he had to strip the leaves. So he was using and making tools. And as you say, we were defined as man the toolmaker. And so it was, I only had two weeks left, but this brought in the National Geographic and they said, we'll fund Jane's research. Good old David Graybeard, you know, it was just magic. The moment you saw this, did the significance of this discovery and the weight of it hit you?

7:37Or were you just vibing with David Graybeard? Well, the thing is that there was a book written called The Mentality of Apes. It's written by an Austrian psychologist. Right, this is Wolfgang Kohler, is that right? And he describes their characters, finds that they can use different tools to different objects, and some are smarter than others. Well, science discounted all of that. It wasn't true because the chimps had picked it all up from us. Right. I see. They had an explanation that could dismiss it all. Yeah. Yeah. So to answer your question, when I saw David using tools, it didn't really surprise me because of Cola.

8:20but I knew that this was going to be a shock for Western science. You certainly hadn't shown David how to pick termites. There's some reason I had. Since it was running away, it was quite hilarious. I've heard you say before that this kind of anthropocentric thinking in Western science was like an inherited misinterpretation of the Old Testament. Could you explain this misunderstanding idea? Well, you know, the Bible says that man was given dominion over the birds and the beasts and everything. But it's a mistranslation of the Hebrew word, which I don't remember. It's not dominion. It's stewardship.

9:02That makes a very big difference. That makes all the difference. So, you know, Niki sent me to Cambridge after I'd been with the chimps about one and a half years. And he said there was no time for a bachelor's degree. I had to go straight for a PhD. And I was really scared. I mean, I'd never been to college. Imagine how I felt when all the professors told me I'd done everything wrong. Chimps should be numbered, not named. They're your subjects. And you can't talk about personality, mind, or emotion because those are unique to humans. And you can't have empathy with your subjects because science must be cold and objective.

9:39And you can't be objective if you have empathy, which is rubbish, but still. And luckily, I'd had a great teacher when I was a child, and that was my dog. He taught me that what the professors were saying was rubbish. Amen. Thank you, Jane's dog, for world history. Rusty. Wow. What kind of breed was Rusty? He was a mutt. The best. I actually want to ask a little bit more about that feeling you had presenting your evidence. In the movie, there's this character played by Emily Watson, And she's dedicated her life to understanding this elusive primate, the Ochi. And she studies, you know, everything about them, their behavior, migratory patterns, diet, social structure, and especially their way of communicating.

10:23And this research is all going against the grain of how her society understands these primates. I'm just curious what it was like. You're this young researcher. You're a woman. And you've just upended the field and or are proposing to. and you're sharing these discoveries in the face of this scientific establishment. How did that feel and how did you navigate it? Well, you know, funnily enough, it didn't actually bother me. All I wanted to do was be with the chimps and study them. This man, he said the only reason that Geographic gave me money was because they wanted me on the cover because I had nice legs.

11:01You couldn't say that today. But I thought, well, I want to get back to the chimps. Geographic are giving me money. thank you legs nice legs too i look at them on the geographic cover they were great legs i don't think it's true for one moment the geographer was really fascinated in the research legs was just the male scientists they were pissed off to be honest why should we believe this young girl she doesn't have a degree you know it was just they wanted to write me off And then the graphics sent a filmmaker that was sealed in the bag. Absolutely. You mentioned another thing, which was about using empathy in the scientific method.

11:43And I've heard you criticize this approach to science that starts with like a theory or a strong hypothesis. And then it just leads people to be biased, to kind of bend reality to fit their theory. And your work in Gombe was kind of the exact opposite. You used like patience and curiosity to observe what you were seeing with an open mind. And then it led to all these big discoveries. And I can relate because in filmmaking, there's the same issue where everyone thinks you should have a really strong vision and a waterproof plan. So you storyboard and figure out the whole movie on paper before you go shoot it.

12:21And then you're just going out to execute it. But both in movies and in science, it's like if you have a bold vision, sometimes it can just reduce what's possible because reality is presenting things to you and you might not be nimble enough to catch them. You know, in my case, when I reflect back on why do I plan my films so tightly, it's just fear of failure. It's just, you know, time pressure. So I don't want to fail. So I'm going to do as much as I can beforehand. But is it kind of the same thing in science? Like, does it work this way that you have to have a strong theory to go out and gather research?

12:55And that's what some people seem to think, but it never occurred to me. I mean, I'm that not just to learn about the chimps, to learn from them. So I'm open. What are they going to teach me today? And the other thing which really, you know, you're not supposed as a scientist to pay any attention to anecdotes. So you see something happen, maybe you just see it once or maybe twice. So you're not supposed to use it as an anecdote. You can't prove anything. You can't make it into numbers. But the observation like that can show you what is the chimp capable of. This is not normal behavior, but given this particular situation, this is what the brain can do.

13:39So I think anecdotes are really, really, really important. Because then they can shape further research that you can try to get data for, but you got to start somewhere. Yep. Okay, so when I was inventing this fictional primate, the Ochi, I was referring a lot to existing patterns of behavior that we can observe in other primates. So I was really inspired by bonobos and their kind of matriarchal social structure, which I'm not a primatologist. I hope I'm getting this right. But as I understand it, they are led by older females and they have a kind of more cooperative and less aggressive culture than other apes.

14:17And they're the only non-male dominated social hierarchy in the ape world. Have you spent time with bonobos? No, I haven't. What do you think about bonobos? Well, all I can say is I'm really glad Leakey didn't send me to study them because the females have this constant genital swelling and the geographic would never, ever shown any photographs of them. They're the X-rated primates, so they're not ready for Nat Geo. Okay. Nope. We've got this lovely photo of four male palsies all facing the camera. They're all excited. So they've got these big penile erections. you look at the final photo there's a mist at groin level right across the photograph wow okay so basically bonobos too hot to research a little bit okay i think a male can dominate a female but basically it's the fact that there isn't this amount of aggression that you find i mean chimps can be very very aggressive yep i mean they can kill have a kind of primitive war that's not being recorded in bonobos.

15:27Right. The females use sex as a kind of relaxing force across the whole social group. Yeah. Okay. So my film in a lot of ways is about the possibilities of nonverbal communication. And in it, I explore this idea of a fictional primate language, and it doesn't rely just on words. And I've seen you in your field work with chimps able to communicate through nonverbal gestures and posture, basically body language. And I'm just curious, like, what kind of information can you transmit between a human and an ape through body language? Well, the thing is that their nonverbal communication is basically the same as ours.

16:10Kissing, embracing, holding hands, patting, begging, swaggering. So it's probably a language that we used before we somehow got into using words, which I think is the biggest difference because once you get words, you can have discussions, you can bring people from different backgrounds to solve a problem. You can talk about things that aren't present. Right. You have a deeper knowledge repository that you can keep growing. Yeah. But we don't communicate with them in the wild. it's where we're looking after them in sanctuaries those others have been shot so you could just reassure them as if you were a chimp and they understand that's incredible so i have this line in the movie and i had to sadly cut it but it goes there is no hierarchy of animal intelligence there are only different skills adapted for different situations so to me it's clear that like pigeons are better and more intelligent at certain things than we are.

17:13In fact, like every single animal has just found a sort of evolutionary niche that has shaped a specialized intelligence. So I'm really fascinated by kinds of intelligence that animals possess that we don't, like magnetic navigation in birds and echolocation in dolphins and bats. Are there any animal capabilities that you find like particularly mysterious or fascinating? Well, there's lots that chimps do that we don't understand. We don't understand really why some females migrate to a neighboring community at adolescence and stay there. Others migrate but come back and have their babies in their own community.

17:53We don't know why there's various theories. You know, there are things like that. We're on a 60-50 year now. So we can look back through the records and say, ah, he's behaving like this because when he was a child, he had that traumatic experience. So he always hates whatever it is. Wow. That's an incredible corpus to be able to go back to. It makes me think about, there's this idea of cultural evolution. And for many years, another bit of anthropocentrism, we've all thought it was only in humans that there was any cultural evolution. Animals were just set. You know, there's been a bunch of different studies that have challenged this.

18:34There's the Robert Sapolsky study about baboons who, you know, all the aggressive males had this kind of generational die-off because of a tuberculosis outbreak. And then it was observed for several generations that these kinder, gentler males that inherited the top of the social hierarchy, like changed the culture entirely. There's also, you know, evidence that like bird song and whale song are their artworks that evolve culturally, that the song is passed down. It changes a little bit. It has regional variation. Each generation modifies it a little bit. Have you seen other examples of cultural evolution in the Gombe data set?

19:15Or I almost don't want to call it that. The vast span of awareness that you have about these chimps in Gombe. Well, we certainly see culture. In fact, you know, I mentioned it way back in the late 60s. And of course, I was blackboard. I mean, only humans have culture. But if one relation is behavior passed from one generation to the next through observational learning, we find chimps across Africa, they have different tool using behaviors. They sometimes use inborn gestures, but in different contexts. So we've observed the spread of a behavior, their new behavior till it becomes part of the normal cultural repertoire of the chimps.

19:58Wow. Then sometimes, you know, the infants are the ones usually that make the new discoveries. So on this occasion, one of the infants, you know, when females want reassurance or they want to be mated or something, they present their bottoms. and the typical thing, a chimp male will poke the female's genitals and sniff, like, is she ready for mating? So on this occasion, this young chimp, the female, came and presented to him, and she had diarrhea. So he looked, and then he picked up a twig and poked her with that. The other infants began to copy him. So there were all these infants going around, poking females' bottoms with twig.

20:42It wasn't adaptive, so it got time. No, I see. Right. So when a new behavior is introduced, it can be a fad as well, because unless it has some sort of benefit. Absolutely. Okay, I want to talk a little bit about animals and music. So in the movie, I'm exploring the way that animals might communicate complex feelings through a musical language rather than one that works like ours. And any human that's ever heard music understands that there's emotional information being transmitted in pitch and rhythm. But the idea that animals might use this as a form of communication and might be actually trying to express themselves emotionally or communicate emotions is underexplored.

21:32And the exploration we do have is kind of into a black box because we don't know what they're feeling. What do you think about this idea? Well, I mean, we know that whales sing, they have songs, and birds communicate through music all the time. I don't know. It's been something that's fascinated me. I wanted, I've tried and tried to get somebody to test, do adolescent males like rock? Do, you know, what do they prefer? Do they like music based on their own cause? Do they like something, you know, classical? Or do they like rock? and does it change with age and sex? Right. You know, nobody's done it yet.

22:14Oh, well, we got to get on this. They've even done that with plants. I've seen the studies of plants growing at different rates depending on the style of music you play. Yeah, I mean, I just noticed with my own dog that pitch is just everything, you know. The tone of my voice is a form of music. It's not so much the content, And although she can slowly learn what some of these things mean, it's the pitch that matters. Yeah, they can learn words as well. Some dogs are very smart at learning words. Oh, yes. Absolutely. I've read that you're partial to dogs. Favorite animal. Absolutely. One's way too human.

22:55Oh, chimps are too human. I see. I don't think of them as animals, you know. Right. They're your cousins. They're just beings. We're beings. and dogs are beings too, but you know what I mean. Yeah, I mean, the size of a dog's heart knows no bounds. That's the special thing. Yeah. So speaking of heart, you've said the primary reason we're destroying the planet is that we have a disconnect between our exceedingly clever brains and our hearts and that the key to solving the situation we're in is integrating these two. And when I hear the word heart, I just think, okay, that's empathy, curiosity, compassion, vulnerability courage selflessness fearlessness all things that you embody and you know you've become a kind of ambassador of the heart so how do we make more genes how do we how do we encourage this capacity in other people well that's um through our roots and judes program you know which is young people from kindergarten through university uh all doing three projects to help People, animals, environment.

24:01Now in 75 countries. I began it in 91. So we know now that people who've been through it at school come into decision-making positions. And they hang on to respect and compassion. So that's the rest of my life, however long I have. You know, I want to grow it and grow it and grow it. Because it is head and heart. It does bring head and heart together. How does this decision affect people in the future? You know, instead of this commercial money-driven, power-driven society we live in now. And, you know, the other thing is how do you reach people who don't have a heart? I can think of some people right now who don't seem to have a heart.

24:44I'm sure you can too. There's a lot of them. Or I would say their heart has been buried, buried under layers of pain and humiliation. Yeah. So Roots and Shoots, what does it constitute? It's a curriculum. It's a, can you explain it a bit? Yeah. So you form a group. Let's say we're now at high school level, which is how it began. So they come together. Some of them, when I first met this first group, they were worried about poaching in the national park. Some were worried about street children with no homes. Some were worried about throwing stones at dogs. They had different concerns. So I said, well, get your friends together.

25:27and you decide what problem do you care about with picking up trash or not wasting water or being kind to cats or, you know, whatever. So they choose their project. It's not top-down, it's bottom-up. Because they choose and then decide what they can do. They work with passion because they care about it. It's their problem. And I've also found that with adults too, when they start working on something they care about. It makes them feel good and they want to do more. And so they lose this feeling of helplessness that so many people have today. Wow, that's an amazing approach. So it's about empowering communities to identify their own problems and then experience what it's like to try to fix them.

26:19That's right. And so Roots and Jokes is super flexible because it'll depend on their age, it'll depend on their culture, it'll depend on are they rich or poor, their religion. It fits into wherever you are, you can start Roots and Shoots. Amazing. Okay, so I think it was in 1986 you really decided to become an activist. Is that right? Yeah, that conference. I didn't decide. I mean, a tough decision to leave Gombe. So I went to this conference as a scientist, had my PhD, I was having the best days of my life, learning about the rainforest, getting this spiritual connection with it. And then this session which showed cross-apricot chimp numbers were dropping, forests were disappearing.

27:09In captivity, the chimps are closest relatives in five foot by five foot cages in medical research labs taken from their mothers as pets and so on. So I left knowing I had to do something. I didn't know what to do, but I didn't decide. It just happened. so you've dedicated your life sense to creating meaningful practical on the ground change in the world and many artists including myself sometimes we just think nothing we do really matters and coming from you someone who has said there's a place for stories a really important place for stories could you help us like what is the role of fiction and stories in making a better world Well, I think it depends on the fiction and the story.

27:56Of course. You know, the story is something that reaches the heart. And it can be fiction or it can be real. It doesn't matter as long as it just touches inside. And so you think, oh, I never thought of that. Yes, yes. And then you fit it into your pattern of life. And it can change you. Yep. I want to talk a little bit more about some of your on-the-ground activism. So in my movie, the Ochi are considered a threat to the way of life of the rural people. And the rural people, they depend on timber and livestock for their survival. And you've been doing this really incredible work with local communities all around the world to collaboratively support them to protect their habitat, habitat that they need to share with endangered species.

28:43So can you talk about that process and that mission? How does it work? Well, the great thing there was the man I was working with at the time was so wise. He'd been working with local people for 14 years in Tanzania. I hadn't worked with him at all except field staff helping to follow the chimps. I had learned from that that once the local people understood the chimps, they loved them as much as I did and were fascinated by them. But going into a very poor village, George, this guy, he said, Jane, don't talk about saving the environment for wildlife. Talk about helping them find a way of living without destroying the environment.