A truly legendary conversation between The Legend of Ochi filmmaker Isaiah Saxon and his hero Jane Goodall.

Topics covered include: Jane Goodall as Isaiah’s lifelong Patron Saint, a very cheap edition of Tarzan of the Apes that changed a young Jane’s entire world, supportive mothers,The Legend of Ochi as a critique of anthropocentrism, stewardship versus dominion, using empathy in the scientific method, inventing a fictional primate for the Ochi, filmmaking’s parallels to science, the possibilities of nonverbal communication between man and animal, a quest to understand if adult male chimps like rock and roll music, Jane experiencing the effects of USAID defunding, a shared determination to heal the world by reaching hearts and enacting change, and the aquatic ape hypothesis.

Jane Goodall: Hello, this is Jane Goodall.

Isaiah Saxon: And this is Isaiah Saxon, and today we're talking on the A24 podcast. Hi, Jane.

Jane Goodall: Hello, finally.

Isaiah Saxon: Yeah, it's so nice to meet you.

Jane Goodall: Good to meet you too.

Isaiah Saxon: 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 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, she feels stuck and disconnected, and she's in a man's world with no place for her.

So this encounter she has with this animal, it becomes an invitation to 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 act on instinct and 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?

Jane Goodall: Well, I mean, 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 to little jumping spiders and so on. And then books became very, very important. Dr. Dolittle was the first one, and 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. And 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 made than that wimpy Jane that he married. Anyway, that was my dream. I will grow up, go to Africa, live with wild animals and write books about them. And everybody laughed because girls didn't do that sort of thing. In 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 it was 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.

Isaiah Saxon: Wow.

Jane Goodall: Your film, this young girl doesn't have a supportive mother, does she?

Isaiah Saxon: 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. But yeah, certainly nothing like the mother that you had that made it all possible, it sounds like.

Jane Goodall: She was amazing.

Isaiah Saxon: Wow.

Jane Goodall: Because we had very, very little money, so when I left school, all my friends went off to university. We couldn't afford it, so I had to do a secretarial course, which I didn't want to do. But again, mom said, “If you're going to do something, you must do it properly." So I did.

Isaiah Saxon: Is that how you met Louis Leakey was to apply to a secretarial course or?…

Jane Goodall: 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, it took about five weeks because the Suez Canal was closed. So anyway, I got there, I stayed with my friend, and then somebody said, "Jane, if you are interested in animals, you should meet Louis Leakey." That's how I met him.

Isaiah Saxon: Was he already THE Louis Leakey?

Jane Goodall: Well, he hadn't made that Olduvai discovery. He was pretty well known, yes.

Isaiah Saxon: Gotcha. So 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. We started with the idea that 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 and 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.

Jane Goodall: Oh yeah.

Isaiah Saxon: But you contributed this pivotal milestone in the evolution of this thinking, proving that chimpanzees used tools which then caused Western science to redefine humans from man, the only toolmaker to something else. And I just would love to hear the story of how you made that discovery.

Jane Goodall: Well, when I first got to Gombe, the chimps ran away. For four months, I couldn't get close, and the authorities insisted I didn't go alone. So mom volunteered to come for four months. I only had money for six months. I knew with time I could get the chimps to trust me, but did I have time? And mom was there to say, "Jane, from this peak, you're 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. I named him David Greybeard because he had a white hair on his chin, and I saw him sitting on a termite mound breaking off grass stems and fishing for termites. I also saw him picking leachy 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 tool maker. And so 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 Greybeard. It was just magic.

Isaiah Saxon: The moment you saw this, did the significance of this discovery and the weight of it hit you, or were you just vibing with David Greybeard?

Jane Goodall: Well, the thing is that there was a book written called The Mentality of Apes. It's written by an Austrian psychologist.

Isaiah Saxon: Right. This is Wolfgang Köhler. Is that right?

Jane Goodall: Yeah. 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.

Isaiah Saxon: Right, I see. They had an explanation that could dismiss it all. Yeah.

Jane Goodall: Yeah. So to answer your question, when I saw David using tools, it didn't really surprise me because of Köhler, but I knew that this was going to be a shock for Western science. And of course-

Isaiah Saxon: Right. You certainly hadn't shown David how to pick termites.

Jane Goodall: Some people said I had since they were running away. It was quite hilarious.

Isaiah Saxon: 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?

Jane Goodall: Well, 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. That makes a very big difference.

Isaiah Saxon: That makes all the difference.

Jane Goodall: Leakey sent me to Cambridge after I had been with the chimps for 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, and you can't be objective if you have empathy, which is rubbish. But still, and luckily I 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.

Isaiah Saxon: Amen. Thank you Jane's dog for world history.

Jane Goodall: Rusty.

Isaiah Saxon: Wow. What kind of breed was Rusty?

Jane Goodall: He was a mutt.

Isaiah Saxon: 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 everything about them, their behavior, migratory patterns, diet, social structure, and especially their way of communicating. And 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 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?

Jane Goodall: Well, funnily enough, it didn't actually bother me. All I wanted to do was be with the chimps and study them. This man said the only reason that Geographic gave me money was because they wanted me on the cover because I had nice legs, you couldn't say that today. But I thought, well, I want to get back to the chimps, Geographic is giving me money, thank you legs. They are nice legs too, I look at them on the Geographic cover and they were great legs. I don't think it's true for one moment, that Geographic was really fascinated in the research. Legs was just a male scientist, they were pissed off, to be honest. Why should we believe this young girl? She doesn't have a degree, they wanted to write me off. And then Geographic sent a filmmaker that was sealed in the bag.

Isaiah Saxon: Absolutely. You mentioned another thing which was about using empathy in the scientific method, and I've heard you criticize this approach to science that starts with 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 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 this 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, and 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.

In my case, when I reflect back on why I plan my films so tightly, it's just fear of failure. It's just 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, does it work this way that you have to have a strong theory to go out and gather research?

Jane Goodall: And that's what some people seem to think, but it never occurred to me. I'm there 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 are not supposed to do as a scientist, is to pay 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. It's an anecdote, you can't prove anything, you can't make it into numbers. But an observation like that can show you what the chimp is capable of. This is not normal behavior, but given this particular situation, this is what the brain can do. So I think anecdotes are really, really, really important.

Isaiah Saxon: Because then they can shape further research that you can try to get data for, but you’ve got to start somewhere.

Jane Goodall: Yep.

Isaiah Saxon: 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 they're 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 and they're the only non-male dominated social hierarchy in the ape world. Have you spent time with Bonobos?

Jane Goodall: No, I haven't.

Isaiah Saxon: What do you think about Bonobos?

Jane Goodall: 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 show any photographs of them.

Isaiah Saxon: They're the X-rated primate so they're not ready for Nat Geo. Okay.

Jane Goodall: We've got this lovely photo of four male chimpanzees all facing the camera. They're all excited so they got these big penile erections. We look at the final photo, there's a mist at groin level right across the photograph.

Isaiah Saxon: Wow. Okay, so basically Bonobos are too hot to research a little bit. Okay.

Jane Goodall: 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.

Isaiah Saxon: Yep.

Jane Goodall: They can kill, they have a kind of primitive war that's not being recorded in Bonobos.

Isaiah Saxon: Right. The females use sex as a kind of relaxing force across the whole social group.

Jane Goodall: Yeah.

Isaiah Saxon: 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 in your field work with chimps that you’re able to communicate through nonverbal gestures and posture, basically body language, and I'm just curious, what kind of information can you transmit between a human and an ape through body language?

Jane Goodall: Well, the thing is that they're nonverbal communication is basically the same as ours. Kissing, 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.

Isaiah Saxon: Right, you have a deeper knowledge repository that you can keep growing, yep.

Jane Goodall: Yeah. But we don't communicate with them in the wild. It's where we're looking after them in sanctuaries, those and others have been shot. So you can just reassure them as if you were a chimp and they understand.

Isaiah Saxon: 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 pigeons are better and more intelligent at certain things than we are. In fact, every single animal has just found a sort of evolutionary niche that has shaped a specialized intelligence. So I'm really fascinated by the kinds of intelligence that animals possess that we don't like magnetic navigation and birds and echolocation in dolphins and bats. Are there any animal capabilities that you find particularly mysterious or fascinating?

Jane Goodall: Well, there's lots that chimps do that we don't understand.

Isaiah Saxon: Wow.

Jane Goodall: We don't understand really why some females migrate to a neighboring community at adolescence and stay there and others migrate, but come back and have their babies in their own community. We don't know why, there's various theories. There are things like that, we're on our 65th 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.”

Isaiah Saxon: 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. There's been a bunch of different studies that have challenged this, there's the Robert Sapolsky study about baboons who 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 changed the culture entirely.

There's also evidence that bird song and whale song, they're artworks that evolve culturally that the song is passed down, it changes a little bit, it has regional variation and each generation modifies it a little bit. Have you seen other examples of cultural evolution in the Gombe data set, or I almost don't want to call it that, the vast span of awareness that you have about these chimps in Gombe?

Jane Goodall: Well, we certainly see culture. In fact, I mentioned it way back in the late Sixties, and of course I was blackboard, only humans have culture. But if one generation has 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, a new behavior, until it becomes part of the normal cultural repertoire of the chimps.

Isaiah Saxon: Wow.

Jane Goodall: Then sometimes the infants are the ones usually that make the new discoveries. So on this occasion, one of the infants, 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 at it and then he picked up a twig and poked her with that-

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 twigs. It wasn't adaptive, so it dropped out.

Isaiah Saxon: No-

Jane Goodall: But-

Isaiah Saxon: 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.

Jane Goodall: Absolutely.

Isaiah Saxon: Okay. I wanted 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 under explored. And the exploration we do have is kind of into a black box. We don't know what they're feeling. What do you think about this idea?

Jane Goodall: 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? What do they prefer? Do they like music based on chords? Do they like something classical or do they like rock? And does it change with age and sex? Nobody's done it yet.

Isaiah Saxon: Oh, 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 just noticed with my own dog, that pitch is just everything. The tone of my voice is a form of music. It's not so much the content, although she can slowly learn what some of these things mean. It's the pitch that matters.

Jane Goodall: Yeah, they can learn words as well. Some dogs are very smart at learning words.

Isaiah Saxon: Oh, yes, absolutely. I've read that you're partial to dogs.

Jane Goodall: Favorite animal. Absolutely.

Isaiah Saxon: Amen.

Jane Goodall: Chimps are way too human.

Isaiah Saxon: Oh, chimps are too human. I see.

Jane Goodall: I didn't even think of them as animals.

Isaiah Saxon: Right. They're your cousins.

Jane Goodall: They're just beings. We're beings. And dogs are beings too, but you know what I mean?

Isaiah Saxon: Yeah. 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've become a kind of ambassador of the heart. So how do we make more Janes? How do we encourage this capacity in other people?

Jane Goodall: Well, that's through our Roots & Shoots program, which is young people from kindergarten through university, all doing three projects to help people, animals, and the environment. Now in 75 countries. It began 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, 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 instead of this commercial, money driven, power driven society we live in now? And 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. I'm sure you can too.

Isaiah Saxon: 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 & Shoots, what does it constitute? It's a curriculum, can you explain it a bit? Yeah.

Jane Goodall: 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 parks. 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 and you decide what problem do you care about, whether it's picking up trash or not wasting water or being kind to cats or 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.

Isaiah Saxon: 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.

Jane Goodall: That's right. And so Roots & Shoots is super flexible because it'll depend on their age. It'll depend on their culture. It'll depend on if they are rich or poor, their religion. It fits into wherever you are you can start Roots & Shoots.

Isaiah Saxon: Amazing. Okay. So I think it was in 1986 you really decided to become an activist. Is that right?

Jane Goodall: 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 across Africa chimp numbers were dropping, forests were disappearing. In captivity, the chimps, our closest relatives, in five foot by five foot cages in medical research labs taken from their mothers and 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.

Isaiah Saxon: So you've dedicated your life since 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? What is the role of fiction and stories in making a better world?

Jane Goodall: Well, I think it depends on the fiction and the story.

Isaiah Saxon: Of course.

Jane Goodall: 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.

Isaiah Saxon: 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. So can you talk about that process and that mission? How does it work?

Jane Goodall: 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 them at all except field staff helping to follow the chimps. I had learned from that once the local people understood the chimps, they loved them as much as I did, and were fascinated by them. By 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." And this was brilliant because eventually the people understand that protecting the environment isn't just for wildlife, it's their own future, and they become our partners. So it's community led conservation, listening to them and asking them what we can do to help and helping them find ways of operating without destroying the environment. Then gradually, they come to realize they need the environment.

Isaiah Saxon: This sounds like the same approach that you'd take with kids.

Jane Goodall: Much the same. Yes.

Isaiah Saxon: There's a pattern. Yeah. It seems to be about listening and respect and letting people solve their own problems and providing light facilitation.

Jane Goodall: Yeah. A helping hand, sometimes a big helping hand. But with Trump and Musk, we've lost all our USAID support for our big program in Tanzania.

Isaiah Saxon: Fuck.

Jane Goodall: So it's all come to a standstill. The clinic for mothers and babies, the scholarships for girls. All of those things are frozen.

Isaiah Saxon: Well fuck.

Jane Goodall: Yeah.

Isaiah Saxon: You've talked a lot about, you have this approach to change where you can't just argue with someone and confront them when they have more power than you, you need to tell them stories and connect to their heart. But as you've alluded, we might be dealing with people whose hearts are so buried that this process is challenging. Now in your 90s, you have more wisdom than anyone I've ever spoken to. What are you thinking right now, how do you approach them, or how do you approach change in this time?

Jane Goodall: Well, honestly, I hate to say it, but there's some people I don't think I could change. I think they're beyond it. I would say you couldn't have changed Hitler and you couldn't change Stalin, and there are people today I put in that category. So that's why I'm concentrating so much on young people, especially at university when they're about to come out into the big wide world. Whether we have time for them to reach those decision-making positions, I don't know. Basically, we're trying to create caring, compassionate citizens. Because the citizens have a role to play, they can do peaceful demonstrations. Like I gather right across the US, there were peaceful demonstrations in every national park to try and get the people back who've been fired. We all have some role to play. If you can reach the heart, and I've seen it happen and there are stories, you have to first listen to the person, because maybe there's something you never thought of. So listen to them, get a feeling of who they are. I'm lucky I've lived all these years so I've got many stories of all kinds of people.

Isaiah Saxon: So as someone with direct experience in presenting a scientific theory that is considered heretical in its time, your observation of chimp tool use, I'm curious to get your take on a few other modern-day heresies that I just think are very interesting in the ape world. And the first is the aquatic ape hypothesis, which is this idea that during a critical period in human evolution, as we were these quadrupedal, arboreal, tree-dwelling, fruit-eating ancestors. We descended from the trees, eventually becoming bipedal hunters in the plains, but in that in-between, we lived in a swamp like habitat, and this explains our physical distinction from other apes, like our hairlessness and our fat layers, both are traits that we only see in other aquatic mammals, like dolphins and hippos. That's the theory, I'm not a scientist, I'm curious what you think.

Jane Goodall: Well, I've obviously read about it. I've thought about that, and somehow I don't believe it.

Isaiah Saxon: You don't believe it? Okay, we've got an “X” on the aquatic ape hypothesis.

Jane Goodall: No, I don't- it doesn't gel properly.

Isaiah Saxon: Yeah, okay. And you've spoken before about keeping an open mind regarding the possibility of unknown primates. Obviously, I'm really into this, because I just wrote a movie and made a movie about undiscovered primates. We're still finding new species. We found a monkey and a lemur in 2020 that we'd never seen before, we found a tarsier in 2008, and the mountain gorilla wasn't really discovered by Westerners until 1902. If there were an undiscovered ape species, let's say they did exist and they were in remote regions of the world and they were a descendant of Australopithecus or Gigantopithecus or something, what kind of behaviors or traits would you expect these beings to exhibit to be able to stay so hidden? Would they be burying their dead, living in caves? How could we explain their elusiveness?

Jane Goodall: That is the secret. That is the one question. I do believe that these things exist. I've got lots of stories with no time for them, but I was in the wild, wild part of Ecuador and we'd flown over forests for miles, and the people live in little communities of about 30, like the chimps, and there's nothing between, no roads, and they communicate with a hunter who will go from one little community and take messages, and it's totally wild, nowhere near civilization. So I obviously had an interpreter, and all I said was, "When you see one of these," messing with these hunter messengers, "Have you seen a monkey without a tail?" No more than that. And about two months later, I got a reply, three of them, three of these hunter people said, "Oh yes, we've seen a monkey without a tail. It stands about six-foot high and walks upright."

Isaiah Saxon: I love that. I got a hmm, that was good, yeah.

Jane Goodall: If I'd only had money, I would've got people out there to investigate, but I didn't have any money.

Isaiah Saxon: I myself, I'm an agnostic, but a deep enthusiast, and I get really, really excited about analyzing hardcore evidence for Sasquatch. But I do it almost all as a joyful hobby. I think we're still trying to figure it out and there's nothing more mysterious.

My last real question is, it's about one of your other superpowers, which seems to be persistence, and this mission that you're on to understand and protect and honor nature, it's been going for 65 years, and you must have found some kind of secret energy reservoir of physical strength and motivation that just keeps you traveling around the world 300 days a year, and now you're into your 90s and you're still going. So what renews the motivation, when you're tired and discouraged, what strengthens your resolve?

Jane Goodall: Well, it may sound weird to you, but I feel that all of us are put on this planet with a role to play. Many people never know what it is or they don't even think it's possible, but I think I was given a mission. When I look back over my life, I see here and here and here. There were places where I had to make a decision. I believe in free will. Hopefully, I made the right decision, and that took me to here. And then, there was another decision, and that took me... And so now, because I've got this mission, then when I get really tired…

The other day, there's somebody coming around following me from time to time making a film, either called the Real Jane or Chasing Jane, that same question, and he said, "Jane, I saw you. You were in the green room getting ready for a lecture, you were absolutely exhausted. You were saying, 'Just tell the people out there I've had to go into emergency, that I'm sick, I can't give a lecture,'" and then, of course, I have to go onto the stage. And he said, "Something happened and you totally changed and you gave the best lecture I've ever heard you give." So mentally, I'm saying, "You put me to do this, you jolly well help me."

Isaiah Saxon: That's how you speak to the universe?

Jane Goodall: That's how I speak to the great spiritual power that I feel, especially in the rainforest. But I do feel like, what happens after you die, is it the end or is there something? I believe there's something. And so, when somebody said, "What's your next great adventure?" I said, "Dying." And there was deathly hush, there were 5,000 people, there was deathly hush, then a few titters. Then I said what I just said to you, "If there's something, I can't think of a greater adventure than finding out what that something is."

Isaiah Saxon: Yeah. To me, the biggest mystery is why is there anything and not nothing, which is-

Jane Goodall: Well, that's-

Isaiah Saxon: ... part of the same question.

Jane Goodall: I've read just about every book on near death experiences, I've met people who've had them. Some of them are really strange ones, a book written by a neuroscientist. There's things that you can't explain, and I'm fascinated.

Isaiah Saxon: Me too. Jane, thank you so much for giving us this hour and for being you and inspiring me my whole life.

Jane Goodall: Thank mom for me being me.