 Daniel Goleman, he, of course, is the famed best-selling author globally of incredible books on all kinds of issues that help us look at issues in such a different way. Welcome. Thank you for being here. Thanks, Liz. Well, this is about the ecology and solving our issues and our problems on this planet, which is a very important topic of conversation for the World Economic Forum. How do we solve these ecological problems in the question? And this, obviously, is something that keeps you up at night, I'm sure. Well, Liz, what keeps me up at night is I've got four grandchildren. You've got two kids, you just told me. I love my grandchildren, and we all love our children, but I'm very worried about the planet they will inhabit. They'll probably live into the next century. And the trajectories look very bad. We're in what's called the Anthropocene Age. This is a term geologists now use for the last 300 years of geological time, where for the first time in the planet's history, one species is driving the eight planetary global systems that support life on the planet in the wrong direction. So we need a solution for this planetary crisis, and I think one that will be a little more systemic, because this is built into our systems of construction, of energy, of transport. Everything, really. You can't do a thing without having a negative impact on the planet. And so we get this litany of all the bad things we're doing, and it's very depressing. And that actually is my point. The discussion arouses fear, anger, depression. The wrong range of emotions. So how will we fix it? Two ways. One is the solution to a blind spot is transparency. That is there's a new information system, a platform, that will allow companies to share their LCA data. This is very important, because if I'm buying from in the B to B world, if I'm buying from someone in terms of my footprint, it will pay me to know what this guy's footprint and what their supplier's footprint is, and what their supplier's footprint is. So that's happening. And this opens up a vast entrepreneurial opportunity. Because all of the systems we have, all the industrial platforms, processes, our entire chemical palette are legacy. They're a legacy of a time when we didn't know LCA. We didn't have a metric for what is the actual footprint of this. Can you define one more time for our audience LCA? Yeah, life cycle assessment, which looks at every step in the over the whole life of a product and gives you a measure of full spectrum of impacts. And in business, what gets measured gets managed. So this opens up a new doorway for a huge entrepreneurial opportunity, which is for people to reinvent everything. But the problem is this. There's another psychological dimension. And that is when we talk about footprints, we're engaging the wrong part of the brain. If I tell you, the other day I was in the UK and I bought some salt and vinegar chips, and then I read the bad news. The first bad news, of course, is there's 14 grams of fat in it, but the more pertinent bad news is that it's 75 grams of carbon. That's the wrong way to talk about it, because I just did something bad. I added 75 grams to the footprint. When you tell someone that and it gauges a system for threat, the system for emotional distress, the system for fear, for anger, for depression, as I was talking about, what we should be doing is engaging the reward system, the system that keeps us going, that feels good about what we're doing, that motivates us, that where we get enthused, where we get energized, and there is a way to do it. Let's just start with an example. You and I were talking on the phone, and I should tell you that Daniel said, if for example, instead of getting on a jet, or instead of getting in a car to go meet face-to-face with someone, you then Skype, you just lessened or shrunk your carbon footprint. But that's the negative side of it. So what is a positive way of sort of manifesting this? Well, there's a new way, a new concept emerging. The footprint is all the bad we do. There's something called a handprint. The handprint is the sum total of everything good we do. So if you bike instead of driving your car, if you take your own bag to the grocery store, if you have a video conference, there's a new math, actually, that we need to get involved with. If the question is, for example, let's say you buy an e-book reader. Well, how many books do you have to read on that e-book reader in order to justify its ecological impacts? There's an answer. It's 100 books. So we need to start thinking this way and thinking in terms of what can we do that will enlarge our positive contribution to the solutions. There's actually a website for this, beneficience.org. Basically, using a metric like that, there are three steps. First, you have to know your footprint. Second, you have to subtract from that all the good things you do, that is your handprint, and keep trying to enlarge it. The third thing is tell everyone you know, because we can go to scale. We can multiply it. In the aggregate, if we all started to do that, would the picture improve marketly or do we still have such an incredibly long way to go? There's both. We have an incredibly long way to go and we get there faster because to the extent this goes to scale, it would create a market force that would drive the entrepreneurial innovation that would give us a better range of choice. Right now, we're stuck. We are choices or legacy choices. We need to get competitive on good handprint choices. To do that, we need a market force. We need consumers and we need businesses that are looking to enlarge their handprint. The bottom line is this. We need to tell a story in which each of us is a hero and not a villain. Does that then make something like the Kyoto Protocol just a little bit obsolete or in need of some tweaking or changing? This is kind of an end-run. The more governments can do to move things along, great. But the problem with governments is the short-term thinking. Politicians are looking to the next election cycle, certainly in our country. They're not looking to save the species. They're looking to, frankly, save themselves. We have this terrible problem where you just cannot get agreement through legislation, through laws, through rules, except on some specific ... That's all to the good. This, however, uses the market as a driver of innovation. How does this square with what you really came to fame with? That was your book Emotional Quotient, which got you huge attention bestseller on the New York Times bestseller list for a year and a half. Forty different languages translated, talking not necessarily about the IQ, but the EQ, and sometimes just having an incredible IQ is not necessarily the ticket to success, but that the emotional quotient is. If we look at things in a more EQ way versus IQ as it pertains to the ecology. Well, what I meant by emotional intelligence was being intelligent about emotions. And I'm now bringing that same lens to the ecological crisis, because I think this is an emotionally intelligent way to mobilize people. The big problem with every environmental organization, people trying sustainability initiatives in companies is indifference. And it's because we're talking, the narrative we're giving people is speaking to the wrong brain system. We've got to engage the positive reward system. We've got to get dopamine working for us. Hard when you look at, let me bring back what you talked about with the oceans and a gigantic floating mass of trash and plastic, which has a shelf life of, let's just call it a billion years. That stuff is not going to degrade properly. Should this be legislated? You know, there's always the belief that, oh, the private market will solve this problem. That's not really happening. Should this be government legislated? And does it help if the U.S. does it, but then China doesn't? Well, two points. One is the private market hasn't done it yet. I think the private market is going to for a number of reasons. We didn't talk about generational shift. I grew up during the Cold War. My generational trauma was something called duck and cover, which is a drill we had every month in our school, where we got under our school desks, and you have to imagine seven-year-olds, nine-year-olds. In California. And we put one hand over our eyes and one over our neck to protect ourselves from a nuclear blast. Luckily it did not come. Today's kids are going up with a different generational trauma, and it is the constant litany of bad news about their world and the future. So what this says for companies is that there is going to be a new force in consumers over their lifetime, where consumers tomorrow will care much more today than consumers today who grew up with the wrongs, with the belief that it was all endless. It didn't matter what we did. Kids now know it matters, and companies are paying attention to that. Starting from the corporate side to the government side, is there a country that's way ahead in all of this that should be held up as an example? I think Denmark, for example, is very, very good at it, and has been for a long time. They've been way ahead, for example, on their power grid, a lot of wind, a lot of hydro. Canada, of course, has the luxury of having lots of hydroelectric power. And I think that countries ought to compete on this. What about a hand-print Olympics? You know, there's a World Cup for soccer. What if they're a World Cup for hand, best hand-print for countries, for any unit that can do this together in a focused, cohesive way, companies, universities? Why not? You talk about the issues of your childhood, and then the issues of the kids today, and in a lot of schools, they're having them recite, reduce, reuse, recycle. They have a little song that goes with it. But how do we raise children to be better citizens in this regard? How do we get kids to grow up and then figure out ways to really embrace this? Well, the way to engage the reward system long-term is to present a very positive goal, which is meaningful to the person, which they can see that they can take concrete steps with immediate feedback, positive feedback. It'd be great if our kids, A, knew what mattered and knew what the alternatives were. B, did it collectively. Made it a cool thing to do, and you and your friends are doing it. And third, started thinking about new ways to do things. We really need to rethink every system. Is there one thing that you think that if we were to remove that, eliminate that, that that would be a huge first step that could help both handprints square off with footprints? Well, you know, you can begin almost anywhere because everything we do has negative impacts across the board. But one thing I'm very concerned about is our chemical palette. Industrial chemicals, there are 80,000 industrial chemicals. And most of them have been invented without any regard to human consequence. In fact, we didn't know. They're now discovering, for example, that two chemicals that independently pass screening processes in the body combine to become carcinogens. And there's what's called an inflammatory syndrome because we all, no one in the world escapes a body burden of these chemicals. And so there's information, which is a prior step to every major disease, diabetes, heart disease, cancers, you name it. So we're poisoning ourselves through our chemical palette. I would love to see that taken care of because one impact that we didn't talk about is that for human health. And I think that's just as important as the long term impacts on the planet. Thank you so much. And thank you to the World Economic Forum. Thanks, Liz.