Full Transcript:
Jane Goodall (00:05):
I shall never forget the time when Mary Lewis and I were touring in the US. We were flying to Oklahoma for a gathering of Roots & Shoots, and we had to change planes. And it was one of those places where there are many gates leading out of one central waiting room and people are sitting around waiting for their particular flight to be called. And there was a group of students also waiting, and so we went over and started talking to them. We were all sitting on the floor, and of course, we told them about Roots & Shoots. And they were absolutely fast wanting to know all about it and wanting to know about Gombe and the chimps. Suddenly, I said to Mary, goodness, what’s the time? We had absolutely failed to hear the announcement of our flight, so engrossed were we in talking to students. It was late evening, and we had to stay in an airport hotel and catch an early morning flight. Our hosts were not very happy with us, but it all worked out okay in the end.
Intro Voices (01:14):
We are all connected, all our voices matter, and it’ll take all of our pooled talents and strengths to create a healthier planet.
Intro Voices (01:22):
Our mother, our one and only home.
Intro Voices (01:24):
I aspire to change the world too because the hope she gave me.
Intro Voices (01:27):
The earth is beautiful.
Intro Voices (01:29):
She devoted her life to this.
Intro Voices (01:30):
Together we’ll save the world.
Intro Voices (01:34):
Together we can. Together we will.
Jane Goodall (01:36):
What is your greatest reason for hope? I’m Jane Goodall, and this is The Hopecast.
Jane Goodall (01:46):
Today, I’m joined by an American politician, attorney, and author whose dedication to environmental justice inspires me, Senator Cory Booker. Senator Booker lives a plant-based life, practices what he calls radical love, and fights every day for the health, access, and rights of underserved communities. He’s also an ardent climate activist. Cory and I may have different approaches, but our shared belief in the power of hope and empowering individuals to take action brings us very much together. I’m looking forward to our discussion about creating positive change on a local, national, and global scale, and what it means to be a public servant. I hope you enjoy this hopeful conversation with Cory Booker.
Jane Goodall (02:48):
It gives me enormous pleasure to welcome Senator Cory Booker. I’m really excited to get to know you a little bit. You’ve done such amazing things in your life, and I truly look forward to chatting with you.
Cory Booker (03:05):
I cannot tell you, this is one of my great privileges to be, digitally at least, in your presence. I have so admired you, and you’ve inspired me in so much of my work professionally. And in a spiritual way, you’ve been a light worker in my life and a guide in many ways to living a good life. And I’m just so grateful for you. And thank you for inviting me into this conversation.
Jane Goodall (03:28):
So, Cory, what fascinates me always when I meet people for the first time, what was it in your childhood that pushed you in the direction you’ve gone? And when did you know you wanted to go into politics?
Cory Booker (03:42):
Wow. Well, my mom has this thing, behind every successful child is an astonished parent. And…
Jane Goodall (03:49):
I love it.
Cory Booker (03:49):
And my mom loves being astonished at how her child turned out. My parents got the Fair Housing Council and a white couple to help them integrate a town. They literally had somebody pose as them to buy the house. I grew up in a privileged area of New Jersey and grew up with these civil rights activist parents who really modeled for me this activism. I think James Baldwin said it best, that children are never good at listening to their elders, but they never fail to imitate them. And I really believe I am who I am because I had parents who were activists. And then by the time I got through school and was coming out of law school, I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a part of a community that was fighting to manifest the best ideals of our country.
Cory Booker (04:36):
And I moved into what was then perceived as a very, very tough neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey, where I still live today. But the median income was below the poverty line, and it was known for violence. But often those are the things people say about a community. When I moved in there, through the eyes of some incredible leaders who adopted me, I saw the beauty and the specialness and the value of the folks. It may not have had that much wealth, but the treasure I found there changed my life. And I am who I am because that community really adopted me, and eventually they told me to stop my lawyering and to run for city council against the city’s big, very powerful machine at that point.
Jane Goodall (05:21):
What time in your life was it when you, if I got it right, you lived in a tent and you went on a hunger strike?
Cory Booker (05:29):
So I was transformed when the tenant leaders in this community really pulled me in. And eventually, I moved into this housing complex. It’s these two big brick bill buildings, these projects called brick towers. And I was encouraged to run for city council, and then, at the time, became the youngest city council person in Newark’s history, beating a person 40 years my senior and who had been in office a very long time. But my initial foray into politics was awful. My first year was bad. I wasn’t getting anything done. I was being outvoted all the time on city council. All my reform ideas seemed to be hitting against implacable walls of resistance. On my lowest day, a year into office, the tenant president of my buildings and I had a bit of a clash because there had been a violent incident and another set of projects where I represented, and I didn’t know what to do about it.
Cory Booker (06:23):
And I told her that angrily. This whole year has been a waste. Why did I go into politics? This is such a mistake. I should have stayed as an activist lawyer. And she looked at me, and she goes, well, I know what you should do right now about the problem. And I looked at this elder in our community who was very wise, and I thought, well, maybe God had given her some wisdom. And I said, well, what should I do? And she repeated herself. I know exactly what you should do. And I wasn’t… I had no patience. I said, tell me what I should do. Stop playing with me. Tell me what I should do about the violence at the other housing project. And she looks at me and she goes, you should do… And I leaned in as if she had some great wisdom. She goes, you should do something.
Cory Booker (07:01):
And I said, that’s it? And she goes, yeah, do something. And I was so angry. I disrespected her. I wheeled around, stormed into the projects… And I always say, God has dominion over the world, but one place that I think sometimes he doesn’t look at his housing projects’ elevators. The elevator was not working, and I stormed up 16 flights of stairs, plopped myself on the couch, feeling sorry for myself and angry at the world, then the wisdom of her words, that I was giving up before I tried. And I decided to get a tent and bring it out to this area where the violent incident had just happened, set up the tent, held a press conference which us politicians know how to do, and I announced that this is abhorrent to the very ideas of our country. How could people ignore this? It was literally right under an underpass that cut through Newark and went into some of the wealthiest suburbs in America.
Cory Booker (07:52):
And I said, how can people ignore the struggles? And me and five or six other people slept under that tent the first night. The drug dealers who had been working their operations, that we disrupted, threw things on top of the tent that were really nasty. But the next morning, I woke up and these 12 guys came, big guys said, are you Cory Booker? And they said they had seen what happened on the press conference. And they said, we’re not letting you stay out here alone. And they stayed with me. And next thing you know, dozens came out, hundreds came out. And before you know it, that community that had been struggling so much, had hospitals coming to do health screenings, people donating computers, people coming in to do job fairs. And it was this 10 days of a hunger strike that let me just witness the goodness of people trying to come together and think more determinably how to solve this problem.
Cory Booker (08:45):
And the end of this story is really one of the most special parts of the experience for me, because my great adversary, the mayor of the city, who I would go on and have big clashes with, but who came out because he had been pressured by the press about… as I was going day on day on this hunger strike. And I’ll never forget, when I saw him after 10 days of fasting and praying with people of all different faiths, he came out, and I didn’t see an enemy. And I’ll never forget we hugged other. And when I hugged him, I had that strange experience where I smelled him and he smelled like he was my father’s age. He smelled like older men in my family.
Cory Booker (09:23):
And we both sort of announced that this would end, and then we did a final prayer, and hundreds of people holding hands, Black, white, Asian, Muslim, Christian Jewish. There were rabbis, there were imams. And it was the strong as I’d ever felt in my life. 10 days without eating in that circle of strength, and as people pray prayed in Spanish and English and Hebrew and Arabic, I heard the words of our ancestors, especially that old African saying that spiderwebs united could tie up a lion. And it really shaped me. That was one of my earliest experiences in politics and probably changed my approach in many ways.
Jane Goodall (10:04):
I’m sure it did. So rather than have a baptism by fire, you had a baptism by love.
Cory Booker (10:12):
I have tried my best, and been very imperfect, but to dedicate to my life to that as the highest principle of humanity and to try to live as radical in my love as possible.
Jane Goodall (10:23):
That’s a wonderful story. Thanks a lot for sharing that. And so from that point on, what happened next after that 10 days?
Cory Booker (10:33):
I decided to change my tactic. This idea that we are our job title is wrong. We are bigger than our job titles. Life is about purpose, not position. And I told my team then that we were going to rewrite the script on what it meant to be a city council person. And eventually I would say the same thing as a mayor and just try to bring the best of our activism and our imagination to the work we did. And we did different things. I lived in a mobile home for a while, parked it on tough corners in my district and just showed up and was present for people.
Cory Booker (11:08):
And it’s amazing how, when you’re in a community, your empathy deepens by being there for people. It kept continuing until, as a very young man, I ran for mayor and lost. And there’s no such thing as a failure if you don’t give up. And I would eventually become mayor of New Jersey’s largest city. And we had a great run, two terms of helping to transform the city and get a city that had long been looked down upon to become a model of resurgence and promise and, as you say, a model of hope.
Jane Goodall (11:43):
It sounds as though you are like me where those… You know those dolls that children play with, they’re weighted at the bottom and you push it over and it bounced back up?
Cory Booker (11:52):
Yes.
Jane Goodall (11:53):
I think that sounds like you, and it’s certainly like me.
Cory Booker (11:57):
You must have what I call a very durable hope. I don’t think hope is real if it’s shiny and unvarnished and unscarred. I think real hope is scarred deeply.
Jane Goodall (12:21):
I always say, well, hope is tied to action. And I think of it as we’re at the beginning in a dark tunnel, and this tunnel is strewn with many obstacles. And right at the end of the tunnel is a bright shining star. That’s hope. But we don’t stop and just give up and say, well, I hope that that star will come. Mm-mm (negative). I love that expression in the Bible, girding your loins. You gird your loins, and you’ve got to crawl under, climb over, work your way around all these obstacles. And as you go, you’ve got to take others with you until you’ve got a whole great, vast hoard of humanity, all fighting to get to that kind of world we want where we finished with racial discrimination and gender inequality, where we show respect to the natural world, respect to animals, and above all respect to each other. And I was very moved when you talked about the different kinds of people who came out with you and everybody praying together, because that’s what it’s all about.
Cory Booker (13:29):
I can’t tell you how much I agree with that. I think a lot of us surrender to cynicism at times about the world, or we look at the world and just condemn it. And we don’t understand, it’s not about blame. It’s about what responsibility am I willing to take? And it’s about understanding that your very surrender to inaction or cynicism contributes to more cynicism and more inaction. Back to the woman I told you that was such a powerful figure in my life, that tenant president who told me to do something, her name is Virginia Jones. I would later find out… I didn’t know this. I moved into those buildings. I would later find out that her son was murdered in the lobby of those buildings. I can’t even imagine what that pain and hurt feels like.
Cory Booker (14:17):
And I went to her, and this was years into our friendship, and I told her, I didn’t know that in the 1980s, her son was murdered in the lobby of the building I lived in. And I was like, why did you stay in these buildings? And she looked at me in an almost annoyed, amused way, and she said, why am I still in these buildings? I go, yes, Ms. Jones. Why am I still living in apartment 5A? And I said, yes, Ms. Jones. She goes, why am I still the tenant president of these buildings since the day they were built in 1969? I’m like, yes, Ms. Jones, why? And she folds her arms and looks at me proudly, and she says, because I’m in charge of Homeland Security. Now this is a woman without a title, without a presidential appointment, but she took responsibility.
Cory Booker (15:03):
And in that moment, she taught me a spiritual lesson about hope, that hope is the active conviction that despair will never have the last word. And it’s that word active, that she was not going to give in to despair. But every day you have the ability through your kindness, through your active goodness, decency this world, through your individual actions, to plant seeds of possibility that will bear a harvest for the world. The challenge I face and the frustration I often face is we are separated from each other like we’ve never been before, the delusion of separateness. Just five miles down the road, people could be experiencing struggles that you know nothing of because we have this poverty of empathy that is so real. And we have a lack of understanding the crisis we’re in that is a World-War-II-like crisis when it comes to the environment.
Cory Booker (15:58):
And so I tell you I’ve come to these awakenings in my peer… in my life. One is I just used to take for granted the food on my plate and never think about where it comes from. And now that I’ve studied our food systems and see how much powerful injustice lies within these broken systems that have divorced people from the land, killed our land with millions and billions of pounds of chemicals poured into the earth that’s killing our wildlife, that’s poisoning our rivers, that’s poisoning the farm workers, these big multinational corporations that are driving independent farmers in my country out of work that are producing foods that our government tells us not to eat, but yet most of our subsidies, only 2% of subsidies go to the food they want us to eat… And then you have my children and communities like mine who walk into a corner grocery store and they find a Twinkie product cheaper than an apple because of all of our subsidies. And the childhood diabetes rates, the type 2 diabetes rates amongst children have been exploding amongst Black children in America, it’s doubled in the last 10 years.
Cory Booker (17:09):
And so now we’re getting sicker people, more obesity because of this top toxic food, ultra-process, empty nutrition that’s so cheap and available because of our subsidies and our broken food system. And then we pay the healthcare costs. With America, one out of every three of our government dollars is going to address sickness of diet-related diseases. And so you have this whole food system that’s hurting our environment, that’s contributing to global warming, that’s killing our animals, that’s doing horrific things, torturous things that most consumers wouldn’t tolerate, that’s driving independent family farmers out of business, that’s hurting food and agricultural workers, and that ultimately is poisoning people with an explosion of diet-related diseases that’s driving healthcare costs with nearly one of every five of our dollars in our economy going to treat this sickness. And so, I mean, half of America now has diabetes or pre-diabetes because of this broken food system.
Cory Booker (18:07):
But often now it’s hard to get people to understand that the system that we are all within, the food systems that we’re all in and participating in, to even be aware of how it’s killing us and doing so much harm and damage to the world. I find that the policy follows the empathy. The policy follows the awareness. The policy follows the expansion of our moral imagination. I look at the great movements in America of change. And I always say, change never comes from Washington, it comes to Washington by people demanding it. And why do people demand it? It’s because they somehow take a leap in empathy.
Cory Booker (18:52):
One of my favorite moments in history is in May, in the spring of 1963, before I was born, these children in Birmingham, Alabama, marched against a man named Bull Connor who had fire hoses and dogs. And the news cameras happened to be there and captured the horror of it. And suddenly people that were comfortable, thousands of miles away from New Jersey to Iowa, saw on their evening news this violation of basic human decency and rights and suddenly realized they had to do something. Many people flocked to Birmingham, and within a few weeks, if not shorter, the segregation fell.
Cory Booker (19:35):
The problems are not bigger than we are. The necessity is for each of us to begin to help to expand the moral imagination of the world, to expand the level of empathy. And so that to me is the challenge now. I know this from my work with advocating against animal cruelty. I know if people knew the industrial farm animal system that they work so hard to hide… I’m sure you’ve probably been like me to go out to see some of these CAFOs, these concentrated animal feeding operations.
Jane Goodall (20:07):
Oh, it’s horrible.
Cory Booker (20:08):
And they cover the torture. They don’t want consumers to know. It’s a perversion of what our great-grandparents did to raise livestock. And they cover it. They even pass laws, they call them Ag-Gag laws, where they make it illegal for people to have a camera and film the horrors of the torture that goes on to these animals. And when you go into those communities, like I did in a place called Duplin County, North Carolina, the lowlands where they have all these pig farms, who are very intelligent animals, who, as you have shown through your incredible life work, that these animals have a range of emotions, and they live in horror. And then they have so much feces that in these little tiny cages that goes through these grates that they stand on and into these massive lagoons of pig feces. And then they take that pig feces and spray it over fields that happen to be in low income area, always. And in this case in Duplin County, in African American communities.
Cory Booker (21:11):
And I remember sitting in this room filled with people telling me their stories, that they can’t breathe their own air. They can’t open their windows. They can’t run their air conditioning. They can’t put their clothing on their lines to dry their clothing. They live like prisoners. And now their values of their lands have been driven down all by these international multinational corporations. And the people that do the farming of the pigs, they call them contract farmers, live like sharecroppers because of the dictates of these big corporations. And so you look at a system like that, and nobody really knows. Nobody’s had to sit and listen to these Black communities talk about the horrors of living around horrors. And so to me, it’s a challenge of empathy. Because if people knew when they eat their bacon, all the suffering that goes into it, then I don’t think they would choose that.
Cory Booker (22:07):
You say this all the time. It’s one of the things I most love about your light and your philosophy. It’s what King said. You live it elegantly. King said it elegantly. That we are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. That is not just true for human beings. It’s true for all living things. And so when we are, in our part, participating in this injustice, this lattice of integrated and interconnectedness, the suffering in one part, it is our responsibility to address. And so what I see as the challenge… And again, I don’t look at myself a narrow way. I am not just a politician. I’m a human being. All of us now are syndicators of information. Many of us have platforms, whether it’s Twitter or Instagram. And I always tell young people, I say, go back and do an audit of what you talk about. Is it trivialities that you’re posting? Or are you a great truth-teller like the activists in the Civil Rights Movement? Are you pointing out the injustices that other people ignore?
Cory Booker (23:16):
Because I think the more awareness, the more we let people know, like that civil rights activists in Birmingham did, that suddenly found a way to break through the noise of the world and show people closely what’s happening, the more we’re going to trigger and instigate activism that suddenly people are going to say, hey, Washington, why does the FDA, the Federal Drug Administration, mandate animal testing when it is unnecessary? People will start saying you can’t… my government can’t do that, especially when it’s scientifically unnecessary. And I may have a bill on that that’s sitting there waiting, a bipartisan bill, waiting for more people to help demand the change we want to see in this world. Because what happens to those animals affects me in that you can’t treat animals in horrible ways without it [inaudible 00:24:03]humanity.
Jane Goodall (24:15):
So what can breach this horrible divide in the US?
Cory Booker (24:20):
I think about it a lot. And it’s one of the reasons why I ran for president, was this idea that what we needed was not doubling down on division and talking about how we were going to beat, in my case, it’s Republicans. Those children who marched against Bull Connor, they didn’t win because they brought bigger dogs and bigger fire hoses. They won because they managed, in a time of hate, to change the frequency of our nation with their energy of love. And in this nation, now more than ever, we don’t need doubling down on division. We need to change our frequency. Democracies are based on trust, on this sense that we have common purpose. We’ve got to find a way to, again, manifest our common purpose. And that’s one of my missions in public life, is how do we do that?
Cory Booker (25:12):
We all have to understand that we don’t have a monopoly on truth. A piece of legislation I got passed, it was an amendment on a big bill on education. And when I got to Washington, I wanted to… I was so try to make friends with Republicans, take them out to dinner and… or go to their offices. And there was a very big senior Senator named Inhofe who had Bible study in his office. And I went to his office to Bible study. He’s one of the men… You may have heard about him, Jane. He brought a snowball onto the floor of the Senate as evidence that there’s no global warming.
Jane Goodall (25:47):
Yes.
Cory Booker (25:50):
And so I could mock him or leave him in contempt, but no, I wanted to go and sit and study Bible… study the Bible with him. And so when I walked into his office, I was immediately confronted with something that challenged my implicit biases. We all have implicit biases. And what I saw was him in a picture with a little Black girl, and I would not have expected this white, elderly man, conservative… It… Again, this was my implicit bias. This was my prejudging. And I asked him about it, and it was his daughter. He adopted her out of a very difficult situation. And I was really moved by that. And it challenged me and my, again, my judgment, my pre-judgment. And so months later, this big education bill is going through, and they’re not allowing any amendments on the bill, but I really wanted to get an amendment on there that would’ve helped foster children and homeless children.
Cory Booker (26:48):
And I remembered him with that picture. And I walked over to him and I said, sir… I explained it. I gave him a little card on it. And he said, let me think about it. And I walked to my other side of the aisle on the Senate floor, and I turn around and he’s making a beeline walking over to me. And he hands me the card and says I’m in, and walks away. And I didn’t know… I ran after him. Sir, what do you… exactly do you mean? He goes, I will co-sponsor your amendment. It’s now the law of the land. We found a common decency where we saw each other’s humanity, and we learned more about each other. And that very effort made it enough of a foundation for us to build something that made our country better. And so you don’t have to agree with everybody, but don’t ever otherize them or have so much contempt that you don’t see their humanity and you don’t understand that you still have threads that connect you.
Jane Goodall (27:35):
Yeah, that’s one of my big things that you’ve got to listen. My mother taught me that. She said, if you meet somebody you disagree with, listen to them, try and find out more about them. Why do they think this way? Maybe they’ve got a point you never thought about. But you can’t persuade people by shouting at them, yelling at them, pointing fingers, because they’re not going to listen. But if you try and find something like that man, with that little girl, that’s the perfect example, some little thing that you have in common, a link, one human being to another human being, and you start there.
Cory Booker (28:11):
I live in a neighborhood that’s mostly Black and Brown, that’s low income, and people make these assumptions. And I’ll never forget having this conversation with a man I respect about children who bring weapons to school and how the reaction of this society is say, oh, this is a predator, this is a danger. And let’s lock them up. But if you actually sit and begin to talk to… why did this fourth grader bring a knife to school? You’ll find out that it’s because of fear. They didn’t feel safe. And I have children in my community. Half of America’s murders… And we have a murder rate like no other country. Half of America’s murders are Black men, mostly young Black men. And when you live in an area of such trauma where you walk to school and you see sidewalk shrines of people that were murdered, where you hear gunshots.
Cory Booker (29:04):
On the 4th of July, when the colonies got our independence, we put fireworks off. But in my neighborhood, when those fireworks go off, children hide. And so that children living in a constant state of cortisol pumping in their brains, constant stress, constant fear, when we are afraid, we do things like look for safety in. And so the quick job is you brought a knife to school, you’re going to jail. We’re going to call the police, as opposed to realizing that that is a symptom of something deeper. And if we brought our empathy to this situation, and as a society addressed the larger, deeper underlying causes to this violence, we would create more peace. And I know you know about this from an African context, as often people judge conflict zones in Africa and what the people often do for survival.
Jane Goodall (29:54):
It’s going to get worse before it gets better. We have to acknowledge that. There’ll be more and more and more climate refugees, and at the moment, sadly, the way that these climate refugees greeted along with the political refugees and those fleeing conflict, they’re not exactly given a very warm welcome. The only way that we can hope to progress is getting more and more people… as you say, let’s work on the empathy. How do we do that? We tell them stories. We help them to think by spreading goodness and empathy far and wide, further and wider than the hate.
Cory Booker (30:35):
Well, you say this about the climate refugees. I had a conversation with David Beasley, who’s head of the World Food Program, just about the scope and scale on the planet now of food insecurity and how we are at the worst we’ve been in your lifetime, our lifetimes. And it’s a combination of a lot of things from the ravishes of climate change, all the way to areas of instability. And I’m working with great bipartisan ways… I talked to Senator Chris Coons from Delaware and Lindsey Graham, and trying to figure out for America to put billions of dollars more into our world feeding programs, because I don’t think most of us in privileged countries understand where we are heading. We could be heading into one of the greatest refugee crisises that our planet has ever known. And so the challenge for all of us, I think, circles back to that wisdom from Ms. Virginia Jones, is do something.
Cory Booker (31:37):
We cannot just deplore the darkness of the moment. All of us have a responsibility. And at the end of the year, last year, I’m not a man of great material wealth, but I still try to give resources. And I talked to a friend of mine who is a Jewish… Orthodox Jewish man who gives to this Christian group in Africa that does medical care, helping women with fistulas and… Well, he just did the calculus to me of the dollar invested in their work and the lives that are affected. It made me think of like, why wouldn’t I give as much as I possibly can to these… If I can’t do anything else, at least I can give of my resources. But then I also realized that one of the things that I can do, having my platform as a Senator… But we all have platforms. If you have more than two people following you on social media, you have a platform of influence. Tell these stories to let more people know, because right now we need it. This planet is in peril, and people are suffering, animals are suffering, and the environment is in crisis.
Jane Goodall (32:43):
In other words, we must all gird our loins.
Cory Booker (32:47):
Yes.
Jane Goodall (32:48):
And March forward.
Cory Booker (32:49):
Yes.
Jane Goodall (32:51):
And tell stories and spread love and empathy and compassion.
Cory Booker (32:55):
Which you are doing, Jane. Which you are doing. And you have been light. When you wrestle with the darkness, you look for light workers. And you are part of the constellation that illuminates my sky. So I cannot tell you how grateful I am and I hope we can partner either… The things you’re doing with young people excite me. The evidence you have that supports legislation I’m trying to push, the way you continue to let people know about the beauty and the wonder, and the urgent necessity of the animal kingdom is so important to me. And I hope we can find ways to work together.
Jane Goodall (33:34):
Cory, I am so immensely grateful to you for being on this Hopecast, not just because you gave up your time, but because you have enriched me, and I know so much more about you and the part that you are taking and the values that we share. It’s been fantastic. Thank you so very much.
Cory Booker (33:56):
Well, you have been a blessing and you are a blessing to me, and this is more of a privilege than I can express. Thank you for engaging me in conversation and inviting me to be with you for this time.
Jane Goodall (34:08):
And hopefully we can actually meet, and I’ll give you that same hug that your wise woman gave you.
Cory Booker (34:13):
Yeah. I would love that hug. That would be one of the more epic moments of my life, a hug from Jane Goodall.
Jane Goodall (34:24):
And I want a hug back, please, Cory.
Cory Booker (34:26):
Yes. Yes, yes. A thousand times, yes.
Jane Goodall (34:45):
Because I think we are actually beginning to move towards a different way of thinking, and there are many young people out there who are as determined as I am. The problem is that we’ve lost what I call wisdom, the wisdom where we make a decision based on how will this decision I make today affect my people generations ahead? And now it’s how will it affect me now, my family now, the next shareholders meeting? So I think there’s a disconnect between this very clever brain and the human heart.
Jane Goodall (35:29):
Feel hopeful and inspired to act with the Jane Goodall Hopecast by subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, and anywhere podcasts are found. I’m your host, Jane Goodall. The Jane Goodall Hopecast is produced by the Jane Goodall Institute. Our production partner is FRQNCY Media. Michelle Khouri is our executive producer, Enna Garkusha is our producer, and Matthew Ernest Filler is our editor and sound designer. Our music is composed and performed by Ruth Mendelson, with additional violin tracks from Angie Shyr. Sound design and music composition for the Conservation chorus is by Matthew Ernest Filler.
