About this episode
What does a cognitive scientist’s journey into climate tech reveal about the intersection of human behavior and environmental action? In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Pooja Paul, a former academic who traded her research into human cognition for a mission to make climate action fun and accessible. From watching Captain Planet as a child in India to founding Habitable Earth, a startup creating game-based apps that drive sustainable behaviors, Pooja’s path shows how expertise in understanding the human mind can help tackle our greatest environmental challenges. We explore her transition from academia to entrepreneurship, dive into the science of behavior change, and discuss why solving the climate crisis might require fewer perfect environmentalists and many more imperfect ones.
Notes and resources
- Pooja Paul’s LinkedIn
- Habitable Earth
- Live Podcast Recording: Climate Swings Interview with Wildfire Expert Lisa Micheli @9Zero
- 9Zero Climate Innovation Hub
Full transcript
Michael Gold (00:00)
Hello everyone, and welcome to Climate Swings, the show for people reaching for the next vine of climate and sustainability in their professional lives, produced in partnership with climate education and action platform, Terra.do. I’m your host, Michael Gold.
Michael Gold (00:18)
What does a cognitive scientist’s journey into climate tech reveal about the intersection of human behavior and environmental action? In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Pooja Paul, a former academic who traded her research into human cognition for a mission to make climate action fun and accessible. From watching Captain Planet as a child in India to founding Habitable Earth, a startup creating game-based apps that drive sustainable behaviors, Pooja’s path shows how expertise in understanding the human mind can help tackle our greatest environmental challenges. We explore her transition from academia to entrepreneurship, dive into the science of behavior change, and discuss why solving the climate crisis might require fewer perfect environmentalists and many more imperfect ones. Here’s Pooja.
Michael Gold (01:16)
Pooja Paul, welcome to Climate Swings. It’s so great to have you here.
Dr. Pooja Paul (01:21)
Hi Michael, it’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Michael Gold (01:24)
So my opening question for all my guests is basically just to do a quick self-introduction of your professional background and what you’re currently doing in a professional capacity.
Dr. Pooja Paul (01:36)
Sure. So I’m a cognitive scientist by training. I spent about a decade in academia studying the human mind. And today I am a climate tech founder leveraging the background that I have in cognitive science to help accelerate behavior change towards pro-environmental behaviors. And my company is called Habitable Earth. I’m happy to share more about it shortly.
Michael Gold (02:00)
Absolutely. That’s a very high level, background and description of what you do. Why don’t we go back a little bit further? know that you’re from India originally and your interest in social issues, guess broadly defined came from an early age. Can you start in your childhood and just describe kind of how your interests in what you’re doing now started to germinate?
Dr. Pooja Paul (02:10)
Mm-hmm.
Sure, yeah. As some of you might know if you’ve seen my TEDx talk that came out recently, for me, I think it all started with Captain Planet. I watched a lot of cartoons growing up and my favorite show was Captain Planet. And that’s how I first learned about all the terrible things that humans were doing to the planet, you know? Like I learned about deforestation on the Amazon, what we were doing to marine life, the pollution that we were creating and…
And the message from Captain Planet was that, hey, look, we have the power to change this. We can change this. And I believed it. And I couldn’t wait to help be part of the solution. so, of course, as a child, I felt pretty helpless. But I was always a little baby environmentalist and also a baby feminist, I should add. And I ended up at a high school in India that was, you know, that was run by a woman who was very environmentally sort of, I guess, focused. I was, again, for maybe the first time, encouraged to sort of lean into my activism, so to speak. And so, yeah, we did a bunch of different things while we were there. We went around the neighborhood from the high school and went door to door kind of explaining how composting works and rainwater harvesting and stuff like that. So it’s great to actually feel like you were doing something about what for the environment. But that was kind of it. I had this. So at that point, was a teenager, no longer watching cartoons really, so to speak. But I didn’t really know what I wanted to study in college.
And I did end up in California at a liberal arts school and I did consider environmental studies, but it was the closest thing I could find that was environment related at all. I found, at least to my mind at the time, it felt a little dry. And then it turns out it’s because I was deeply curious about humans and I didn’t know what cognitive science was just yet. I did discover it soon enough, but I…I tried anthropology actually as one of my first potential majors and wasn’t finding it exciting enough either. It wasn’t hands-on enough for me. And then I kind of randomly chanced upon or discovered cognitive science through linguistics, which was offered in the same department where I went to school. And I took that intro cognitive science course and it just completely kind of changed my world.
It opened up a lot of questions for me that I was really curious to get to the bottom of, and I decided to go to grad school for cognitive science pretty early on. And again, and in that process, I guess, childhood dream of growing up and helping save the planet was sort of put on hold. It was kind of there at the back of my mind, but I figured I didn’t explicitly decide that that’s not something I was gonna do, but I figured I’d find a way to link these two up somehow. I had no idea what that would look like at the time. Fast forward, you know, quite a while, I end up in grad school right after college and then, and during grad school really I wasn’t, you know, thinking about working on anything environment related, but I was very, very much focused on my cognitive science ambitions and it was actually in my postdoc, my second postdoc actually, which was at Stanford, that I started to think about that connection again, because I got involved with this group called the Stanford Environment and Behavior Group. And that’s when I kind of came full circle back to, ooh, how does behavior, human behavior link up with the climate crisis? And what can I do with my background? What are the problems to be solved? This was back in 2018. A lot has happened since then.
But yeah.
Michael Gold (06:37)
That’s a good, no, that’s a much more detailed overview. Thank you so much for that. So I wanted to go back and pinpoint a little bit on what you were describing during your high school experience. You talked about a teacher that you had at a high school in India and how that kind of started cultivating in you an interest in more sort of community-based environmental work, I guess you could call it. How was the ecosystem around that at the time? Like were your parents supportive?
Dr. Pooja Paul (06:40)
Hahaha
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Michael Gold (07:05)
Was the rest of your peer group supportive? Were you kind of a bit of a unicorn in that sense?
Dr. Pooja Paul (07:10)
So it was actually not the teacher, but the woman who founded the school. You know, activism was very much in the ethos of the school. You know, I wouldn’t say every student that attended had activists tendencies. I certainly did. I was one of those, you know, again, sometimes what makes you weird as a kid, you know, ends up being a strength as an adult. But I was the weird kid who cared about all the stuff that—
Michael Gold (07:14)
Okay.
Dr. Pooja Paul (07:36)
—a lot of people around me didn’t seem to care much about, a lot of kids around me didn’t seem to care that much about yet. But it was a sort of deep drive for me. So I wasn’t entirely alone, I would say, but I was certainly maybe more engaged than average. But one of the things, the Indian school system, it’s great on the one hand where you it’s pretty rigorous when it comes to math and science and so on. But there isn’t as much of a focus on critical thinking and, you know, kind of speaking out and taking a stance, for example. But that is, these are things that were encouraged in the high school that I went to. And so that was really good for me because I got to grow into myself a little bit and when I got to the US for college, I think that it prepared me better for being here.
Michael Gold (08:40)
Yeah, I mean, being in California, obviously there’s a lot of people who like to speak out on a variety of issues. And so you talked about in college, starting to study environmental science and feeling like it wasn’t really resonating with you kind of at a gut level. But how did you see your, I guess, community environmental work taking shape? Did you do things in college that sort of carried through what you were doing in high school? Anything that you can describe about that experience?
Dr. Pooja Paul (08:46)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Right, I actually didn’t take any courses in environmental science in college. I considered it. I didn’t go past looking at the coursework on the course catalog. Because, so I didn’t quite know, again, at the very beginning, I didn’t quite know why or hadn’t figured out why, but I think I know now. I have always been drawn to human and biological systems, really.
Michael Gold (09:15)
Okay.
Hmm.
Dr. Pooja Paul (09:38)
And so in high school, I liked biology best. And in college, I discovered cognitive science early after a detour via anthropology. Those were the questions that really just sparked my curiosity. In terms of activism in college, well, I was in a very sort of activist environment, I would say, in Southern California. I didn’t stand out in that way as much, I really do consider it quite a detour. So I feel like I came full circle eventually, but that is why I like talking about my climate, my personal climate journey, because for the first, not decade, but the first, yeah, actually decade or so of my adulthood, I never stopped caring about the environment, but I really wasn’t working on the environment or studying anything related to that. And yet, I did come to a, maybe the more relevant pieces actually in grad school, right? Where I had this constant sort of, I experienced this conflict between being a researcher, loving the intellectual questions. And really I did, I loved going deep into things, but I also tended to want to go broad. So I’d go successively deep into adjacent fields and try to make connections across them.
But I had this recurring sort of conflict of like, but how is this positively impacting the world in ways that I can, you know, see measure, you know, experience it. Cause I do believe in the value of basic research. I truly believe in it. Even if we don’t know exactly what the applications are, sometimes that is a third party that discovers your research in the future and then does something with it. You can’t actually anticipate what that will be. Right. So you need basic research and then applying it as the next step. However, I somehow wasn’t fully satisfied with only doing basic research, right? I wanted to feel like I was interfacing with the world in a way that was positive and impactful. And I kept going back to this with my advisor and she would be like, well, have you considered applied research questions? And then I would consider some and then it just didn’t, I really preferred the core, the basic questions. Again, this was all having to do with cognitive science and the mind and language and all of that, maybe the tangent, like the sort of, what that led to for me though, actually maybe the relevant like turning point for me in graduate school was I had a one year fellowship at the teaching and learning center at Harvard, which is where I was for my PhD. And I learned about what’s called the translation gap, right?
So all of these insights that get accumulated within academia, they don’t really leave academia. They might not even leave its disciplinary boundaries unless someone makes those connections. So then within academia, I was very interested in fostering interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration. did a lot of work at Harvard kind of helping to make that happen in the cognitive science fields at Harvard. It’s called the Mind-Brain Behavior Initiative.
But that, but you know, I learned around 2015 or so long before I knew what I was going end up doing in my post academic career that I really had a role to play in helping build bridges within and between academia and the outside world. and that’s what I’ve ended up doing. That’s what I find really meaningful because, you know, there is value in the research, but the value is really amplified when we find a way to use it to make the world better, in my opinion.
Michael Gold (13:36)
Can you just provide like a pretty high level on what you did your PhD on? Like what specifically?
Dr. Pooja Paul (13:42)
Sure, yeah. And so my PhD then was turned into, know, which kind of grew into my post-doctoral work. It started out with language. I was interested always from the get-go on what language told you about the nature of the human mind, the structure of it, right? What is shared across cultures and languages, because, what is fundamentally, what fundamentally makes you human? And, but as my, I guess, as I sort of intellectually kind of developed in this world, I became increasingly interested in not just language, but what is the role of non-linguistic cognitive domains in what we think of as everyday human reasoning, right? You can look at it just from a language perspective and you can look at it just from a psychology perspective. So for example, we have our social brains, our social capacities, and we take it for granted because we do it so intuitively, but it’s actually quite an incredible capacity that we have. So we talk about language as being one of the things that distinguishes us from other species in the animal kingdom, arguably whales. And there’s other kinds of communication that would happen, but it’s not compositional the way the language is. But the other thing that actually helps us stand apart is, makes us stand apart is our social reasoning capacities. It is what has allowed us to collaborate, co-cooperate, build civilizations, and also pass on culture, right? Again, there’s some evidence that there are primates that are genetically close to us that might pass on a little bit of culture, which is really cool, and it makes sense.
But yeah, so I was interested in what is, in understanding the contribution of our social cognition in reasoning. And that is actually one piece of my expertise from grad school that has actually been relevant in the work that I do now in the climate space, because really, you know, we don’t know we to get behavior change at scale. We have to understand that we should understand the dynamics of how behavior spread and our social brains, right. So we’re not just independent atoms in the world, you know, making decisions just by ourselves, we are deeply affected by what we see around us and by the other individuals in our networks, in our many networks and with technology and the internet and social media, our networks are just huge. We are exposed to so much more, also in both directions. We see and counter so much more, but also many more people than in a village 200 years ago, see what you do.
You can think of this as something potentially, it’s neutral. It can be dangerous. It can be empowering, right? You could use the fact that we have this power now to reach so many people to help change society. We kind of have that capacity, right? And so I think about that a lot. I think about how can we take these insights about behaviors, the spread of behavior and the kind of social levers that we can use to facilitate that spread. How can we take those insights from academia and productize it, right? To accelerate the shift towards pro-environmental behaviors that we desperately need to keep our planet habitable.
Michael Gold (17:18)
Yeah. So you brought us into the climate part of the discussion, I suppose, which I was trying to sort of make a bridge over to. We’ve been talking for 15 minutes without mention, without really getting into climate, which is, which is great because I like these kind of meandering passageways into the climate discussion. That’s, that’s really sort of where the interesting parts of it is, parts of it are. But when you’re talking about what you did in your PhD in terms of looking really deeply at a problem and.
Dr. Pooja Paul (17:33)
Hahaha
Michael Gold (17:48)
You were describing earlier how academia is designed to be very siloed and very catalyzed and you’re meant to drill down very deep, but not really go very wide. Were you thinking at the time that you were doing your PhD that there was going to be a climate element to it afterward that you were going to apply it to climate somehow? Where was climate in your schema during that time?
Dr. Pooja Paul (18:12)
Yeah, so like I said, I, really, it really wasn’t on something that was, I never stopped caring about the environment and I tried to, and I experienced it as a citizen, as a consumer, the sort of challenge of living a life that was aligned with my values when it came to climate. But I wasn’t thinking of climate as something I was working on again. This was something that sort of pushed to the side to focus on cognitive science. And I was in academia with the sort of intention, at one point of like going into like a research position afterwards and you know faculty research position. So that was where my focus was. In fact, one of the things I wish I could change because I didn’t see I didn’t make this connection until 2018 or so when I was at Stanford, right? So and that was just the very beginning. I kind of wish I had made that connection sooner because then it could have informed some of my research questions.
But that would have been a very, but maybe I don’t need to wish I could turn back time because some of the connections I did make were, know, something are ones I’m proud of. And, and, you know, maybe those connections wouldn’t have happened if I’d been, if I’d shifted too early, you know.
Michael Gold (19:31)
Can you describe that group that you joined at Stanford? What was it? The environment brain connection?
Dr. Pooja Paul (19:38)
So at Stanford, they’re called the Stanford Environment and Behavior Group. I don’t know if they’re still active, but it was just a small group of folks from the Woods Institute for the Environment and some folks from psychology who are interested in that intersection of behavior and I guess environmental science. And it was just a group that got together every so often and somebody would present research and so on. But it kind of got me thinking about that intersection anew, right? Maybe for the first time really. And so it was grad students and postdocs mostly, a lot of them are now faculty in various departments around the country and world. And at the time I had no idea that this was the beginning of this long journey that would kind of transform my, totally pivot my career into something radically different from what I’ve been doing at the time. But I think of it as the beginning of my journey.
Michael Gold (20:40)
You started dipping your toe into climate around then, is that—at least in a professional capacity, is that accurate to say?
Dr. Pooja Paul (20:48)
Yeah, in a—yeah, more of a thinking about it capacity, right? It was sort of the seed that turned into the, you know, into the sapling later in around 2021, 2022, when I, you know, was maybe maybe that’s a bit of useful background. So, so when I was at Stanford, I kind of already was becoming aware that, yeah, I really need to do something more impactful and more personally fulfilling for me. But I didn’t really want to stop being a cognitive scientist. I, I love this stuff, right? I just wasn’t convinced anymore that academia was the path for me, the end goal for me. But I didn’t really know what else it was. And it was a really difficult time, I would say, so circa 2021.
This is during the pandemic and like a lot of people, the pandemic was a moment of reckoning for us, right? We were like questioning everything. What is it that I’m doing and why? What is it that I truly want to do? You know, kind of looking at ourselves and asking ourselves questions that are challenging, but really ultimately, you know, in my case profoundly shifted my life trajectory, right?
So there was a moment where I did, I had no idea what I would do, but then a couple of things I was considering was, well, climate for obvious reasons, lifelong interest in that, and, know, being increasingly concerned about the inaction that I was witnessing with governments and so on. And then the other was really ed-tech for me. Part of my, I’m actually trained in a couple of different fields, but one of them is early, like cognitive and social development. And that’s very relevant to education and ed tech. And so I considered that. But then in the end, I realized that climate was far more urgent. I mean, there are lots of important problems to be solved. I can only focus on one at a time. And I decided that climate was the thing that I wanted to focus on. And so in 2021 was when I was diving deep, I was doing the sort of work to figure out, you know, I came across this idea of, know, this is almost cliche now, but the whole Ikegai concept, right? You know, what do you love to do? What are you good at? What does the world need, et cetera? And so I kind of went back to like, first principles, like kind of like stripping everything I’ve done away and all my ideas I had about the future, like putting this is putting that in the trash really. And then being like, let me start from scratch. What really matters to me, what impact can I have in the world with the expertise that I have and what really speaks to me. So, yeah, so that’s how I started to think about it. it was just to sort of, just to wrap up this free thought, like what I’m working on now is vastly different from the first idea that I had, right? I mean, you, I did done a lot of, I mean, I had lots of conversations, lots and lots of research to slowly, slowly sort of, I wouldn’t say pivot, but iterate into the thing I’m working on now.
But early on, thought it was, we need an education tool to make climate science accessible. And then I was thinking, we got to have a carbon calculator, like carbon footprint calculator. neither of those are good enough, I think, today. So we’re doing something that I believe is going to be far more effective.
Michael Gold (24:26)
And so around that time, I suppose is when you properly, I guess, entered the climate community. I mean, I use the term climate community kind of in a sort of euphemistic sense, is there really a climate community? But when you started thinking that you were going to sort of put climate in your byline, so to speak, what did you do to make that swing happen? Like you were in such a different space and you did your Ikegai sort of, you know, re-imagining of yourself. Like what did you do?
Dr. Pooja Paul (24:43)
Mm-hmm.
Yes.
Michael Gold (24:56)
to start that process tangibly.
Dr. Pooja Paul (25:00)
You know, so I, this is a really interesting question because now I feel pretty deeply embedded in the climate space. But back then I felt like a total outsider and an imposter, right? Because when I’ve, when my heart was pulling me back towards climate, I had this big concern that I, that my background was insufficient, right? I didn’t end up studying climate science. I thought you needed to be a climate scientist or I thought I needed to have I mean, I do have far, I wouldn’t say I’m an expert on climate science yet, but I did actually spend a lot of time kind of trying to understand the climate science that year really, so late 2021. But so in terms of my transition, once I was considering climate as potentially the next phase of my career, a lot of my early sort of how I got my toes wet, so to speak, so it was so climate Twitter was one of them, right before it went before it became a dumpster fire. The which you know, which it is now. But in my opinion, no offense to anyone who still loves it. I actually I actually learned a lot about—
Michael Gold (26:15)
Right, right, right.
Dr. Pooja Paul (26:27)
—the startup world and the climatic world and climate science. I learned a lot from Twitter, to be honest. I also kind of started building my network on there, funnily enough, including several people who have really been incredibly useful resources for me and are today, are people I met online initially. And the other was the MCJ podcast, again, I feel conflicted about some of their recent content, but they were actually really useful for me as a way to kind of learn about the climate tech space, right? I know that Terra.do was also one of those. And so yeah, there were these resources that I found online and communities that I found online that helped support me. And I would say the first big thing that I did was, this is around early 2022. I, this is after I’d committed to starting a company in the climate space. I, know, OnDeck used to have a climate tech arm called OnDeck Climate Tech. So Candice Omori used to run it. Now she has climate buying, which is fantastic.
So yeah, so Omda Climate Tech was a fellowship and it was called a Build for Climate Fellowship, what I was part of for aspiring climate tech founders. And this fellowship is where I really kind of got this sort of kind of crash, this crash course into what it takes to be a founder in the climate space and to be a founder period, right? And then, there’s a lot of, it was also a tumultuous time for me in my personal life. I’d been in the US during the pandemic and I’m not a US citizen and Trump had a visa ban, which meant that I couldn’t transition out of academia as I had hoped because I couldn’t get, it was not possible to get a visa. So I actually ultimately had to leave the country. And after living, having lived here for all of my adulthood up to that point, I was in my early 30s then.
That was pretty tragic, but it also meant that when I left, could now focus on my company, on this company idea that I had. So I did initially go back to India and then later in 2022, while I was in India, I just continued my education mostly online and building my network. And also I’d done a bit, I’ve done some user research already, but then I was connecting with other founders and other—
Michael Gold (28:54)
Did you go back to India during that time?
Dr. Pooja Paul (29:15)
I was just, it was just my intensive R&D phase kind of validating both the problem I was trying to solve and then what might the solution look like, what are missteps I don’t want to repeat that others have made, what are roadblocks that other founders have encountered that I could design a solution around, stuff like that. So that was, yeah. And later in 2022, I also, I ended up at in the UK for Carbon 13, which is a venture builder for climate tech. And so, and at that point I was realizing that, you know, I felt like an outsider at the very beginning, but actually my cognitive science background was really an asset for what I’m trying to do, which is to shift behavior. And I’d also realized at that point that, you know, the reason I felt motivated to do this is not just because I had the right background for it, but I, I noticed a, how critically important this behavioral shift was. The IPCC wasn’t out, actually was out that year and it was clear from it, but there was a research that fed into the IPCC that was out even sooner that I’d seen that we need on top of all of the government action and all of the corporate responsibility and all of the climatic innovation. We need bottom-up shifts in demand, bottom-up shifts in behavior. And it just wasn’t being focused on enough, I thought, and needed to be. So I saw that I had something really important that I could be working on. And I also saw that people wanted a solution. And so it was kind of a no brainer for me when I made those connections. Yeah. So in 2022 was the year I really went from, you know, kind of an ex-academic to, okay, I’m a climate-tech founder now. Yeah.
Michael Gold (31:02)
Climate-tech founder. Yeah, you made that swing properly. So you went through several of these fellowships and you entered that Climate Tech startup community. Were you the only person working on the cognitive science climate nexus as a startup founder? I can only imagine that there’s not too many others, that this is not a huge ecosystem, is that right?
Dr. Pooja Paul (31:24)
Yeah, you know, it’s an interesting question. there are, there are and there have been plenty of people who have tried to address the consumer behavior side of things, because it’s a real problem that needs to be solved, right? But as far as I can tell, I might be the only one with the deep expertise to tackle it. So yes, as a cognitive scientist, I was I was kind of alone in that space, but I don’t think I’m alone in trying to address this problem.
Michael Gold (31:54)
Yeah, and presumably you scanned the landscape of other consumer-facing apps, other startups. What did you feel like was missing? What did you feel like you could add from a product or a solution sense that wasn’t being addressed?
Dr. Pooja Paul (32:05)
Mm-hmm.
Absolutely. So that’s a great question, right? So here’s the thing, behavior change is hard and it’s not as easy as, you know, just enumerating the tips, you know, but getting a bunch of sustainable living tips and just like, you know, dumping it on people. That’s not really going to shift behavior in any effect. And it’s not in a way that is effective. So I realized that some of the solutions that are out there, you know, there are some that were actually quite sleek and, know, had great UX, UI design, and so on, which is, I think, important. But they just weren’t sticky. It wasn’t managing to capture and maintain people’s attention over time. So people would download something, and then a few days later or weeks later, they’re moved on, because it just wasn’t bringing them back. And I realized that it’s important to find a way to—for this app-based approach to be effective, you needed to create something that was engaging for people, right? Maybe even delightful. And that is actually where I first started with the realization that you need cognitive science to get behavior change effectively. But then I realized, that’s not enough. It needs to be fun. And the group in the world that really understands how to make things fun are people who design games.
And I do believe that game designers from a totally different angle have figured out some core things about human psychology, motivation, attention, stuff like that, engagement. And I think those are really critical in this endeavor. So I started to think about how do we combine the science with the fun? Science and play. So that is actually, that is our moat, that’s what we do differently. And there are others out there who do just the play without the actual real world action or without the cognitive science. And then there’s folks who are trying to focus on shifting behavior, but there isn’t the play. But also, you know, maybe their approach isn’t as deeply informed by the science of behavior.
Michael Gold (34:29)
And so now you have one app, I believe, that is live, right? And another that is in development. Can you talk about the actual products and how all these things that we were talking about come together?
Dr. Pooja Paul (34:35)
Mm-hmm.
Sure. OK, so my company is called Habitable Earth, and our flagship product is called the Habitable App, right? It’s the mobile game, and this is the one that’s still in development that you refer to. I can share that. So the game itself, the goal of the game is twofold. One is to help consumers shift their real world behaviors, right? So it’s not enough to engage with climate issues within a game and then you like quit the game and you’re done, you know, without any real change that you can measure in the world. So I wanted to find a way to sort of measure real world behaviors and track it through this app, but also have that be intrinsically tied to the game experience. The second goal is to divert capital towards conservation and habitat restoration efforts. So in my TEDx talk, I start with this, right? So we have a few years left to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half. We’re maybe not going to reach the 1.5 goal, although we might make some progress later. But we’re behind there. And human behavior, bottom-up shifts in demand are a critical piece of getting there. So that’s one goal.
The second piece is that we’re in the midst of a mass extinction event. Most people don’t know this, right? There are one to actually two million species of plants and animals at risk of extinction. And we really have only a few years left to invest the resources and the financial and human capital to actually bring these species back from the brink of extinction. The irony, and maybe the opportunity, is that people actually care about this. They don’t want this to happen. They just don’t know that it’s happening. And then once you know it’s happening, there isn’t an easy way to help. Right. So the second goal of our game that we’re building is to help divert capital into these conservation efforts, right. And the restoration efforts by tying it to gameplay so that the who play this game, they can know that they’re having a positive role in this effort. you’re both shifting behavior at scale, but also because we tie in-game achievements to restoration of real-world habitats, and that’s funded by our corporate sponsors. there’s a of a cause and effect relationship between progress in the game and what happens on the ground. Yeah. So that’s…
Michael Gold (37:27)
So what are you actually, I’m just curious, what you’re actually doing in the game? Like how does it actually work? Are you planting trees? Are you feeding hungry people? Like what are you actually doing?
Dr. Pooja Paul (37:37)
Uh-huh.
Okay, so in the game, so I will disclose some details. So the game itself involves taking care of a baby koala avatar, this is the Tamagotchi effect that I talked about in my TEDx talk. And so how do you take care of this koala? By shifting your behavior in ways that we can track in the real world. Now, after a certain stage and the, the baby koala is a little bit older, you then help it restore its habitat within the game. But we tie that to actual habitat restoration in the real world, koala habitat restoration as a matter of fact. As we scale, we want to expand to other critically endangered species and other ecosystems. That’s the flagship game.
Now the other game, the one that you mentioned was released, it’s called Rad Rabbit. It is a much smaller scale, limited scope project. It is separate from the flagship product, but it’s also got some common themes. For example, the Tomogatchi effect. So Rad Rabbit involves a cute rabbit avatar that is sad every day, but you cheer it up by logging your fruits and vegetables. Now it’s very, very simple. It’s intentionally so.
But, you know, so we just target one behavior. So the World Health Organization has the recommendation of five portions of fruits and vegetables every day. Now that’s a somewhat arbitrary number, but it’s a doable number, right? Most people aren’t having that much every day. So we decided to gamify that. And it’s ostensibly about health because it truly is better for you physically and in terms of wellbeing and also health, not just currently, but also in terms of, you know, later health, you know, to get these nutrients, but it is also about climate, right? Because as you may well know, we do need to shift collectively to a more plant-rich diet. I do separate conceptually plant-based and plant-rich. Plant-based is vegan. Plant-rich is compatible with being vegan or vegetarian or omnivorous, but it does involve eating a higher proportion of fruits and vegetables. And I think we can all do that, whether or not we are able to become vegan. And so that’s what I’m trying to promote. And nobody really disagrees that you need to be eating more fruits and vegetables, by the way, right? it’s just, might, no, but it’s, that’s, is an example of the intention action gap. You know, you know, you need to do this and you should know, you know, but it’s hard to actually implement in your day to day life. And gamification can be really effective to do that.
Michael Gold (40:12)
Not a controversial idea.
Dr. Pooja Paul (40:27)
Having a daily goal and like a cause and effect relationship between logging vegetables and know, shearing up a rabbit sounds simple, but it can be powerful. That’s what we’re hoping to achieve with Rad Rabbit.
Michael Gold (40:37)
So the gamification idea and the idea of taking care of a cute animal that sounds like your target consumer, your target audience might be children, right? Because they’re the ones who, as I recall from when I was maybe like 11 years old, taking care of the Tamagotchi. I took care of that Tamagotchi for a long time. So is that who you’re going after? Is that your target consumer?
Dr. Pooja Paul (40:44)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Uh-huh.
Great question. No. So, so Rad Rabbit certainly is all is actually definitely child friendly and intentionally so because we got that feedback early on in development that it’s, I would want this for my kid. And we were like, sure, we’ll make it kid friendly, but it’s not just for kids. So yes, you remember the Tamagotchi from your childhood. So do I. And that speaks to the point that if you’re a millennial, the Tamagotchi have immense nostalgic value, right?
And Gen Z, maybe even more so. I mean, if not the nostalgia, is, where we grew up in a time with cartoons and certain kinds of motifs that mean something to us. And I think that, I don’t think it’s only children that this appeals to. In fact, it might appeal just as much to those of us that are a bit older than children. And also think about Pokemon Go, think about Duolingo. Without the data to back it up, we would have guessed that it’s for kids because, it involves cute characters, but cute characters are appealing to way more than just children, right? In fact, I remember initially noticing during the pandemic when Pokemon Go kind of took off, I met several of my neighbors in their 40s for the first time because they were walking around with their phones. I was like, what are you doing? That’s how I learned about Pokemon Go from like…
Michael Gold (42:10)
Fair enough.
Dr. Pooja Paul (42:28)
…you know, 40 somethings in my neighborhood. And then it turned out that, you know, that they were a pretty significant sector of the audience that were, you know, that was using Pokemon Go. But anyway, so yeah, so we asked, yes, we, our products have the sort of cute theme to it, but it’s not just for children.
Michael Gold (42:49)
The idea of climate, does that enter into the actual product interface or the product marketing? Because this is always a question when you are talking to consumers and you’re trying to get them to change their behavior. Sometimes people really resonate with that. We need to save the climate, for example. Sometimes it’s like…
Dr. Pooja Paul (43:00)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Michael Gold (43:13)
I’m just like trying to put food on my table or I’m just trying to finish my homework assignment. I don’t care about this big picture stuff. I mean, what do you think about that question?
Dr. Pooja Paul (43:21)
Yeah, we’re not shying away from making the connection to climate, but the goal is to make something that feels huge and overwhelming and make it playful and simple, right? So what if, you know, so people care about climate, the climate concerned, as I’ve said, often enough recently, like are the new majority. Six out of 10 Americans are concerned or alarmed about climate change. But also if you look at Gen Z millennials, it’s more like 80 to 85%, right? That’s basically everyone. these are not folks who are not, and the sort of, again, the sad thing, but also the opportunity really, depending on how you look at it—
Michael Gold (43:56)
Yeah, it’s huge. Yeah, yeah.
Dr. Pooja Paul (44:10)
—glass half full or half empty is that people care, but the people who care aren’t always doing much about it yet. But that means that we could, if we could then help these people that care do something, if we could make it easy and fun to do something, then that could actually change everything, right? And so that’s what we’re trying to do. So I like the, you know, I often refer to habitable earth as the Duolingo of climate action and the analogy there is not so much that we’re building a education platform, no. The reason I use that analogy is because Duolingo took something like learning a language, which used to be extremely time and motivation intensive, right? And turned it on its head. Suddenly you could, basically all the hard work was outsourced.
Michael Gold (44:58)
Made it fun, right?
Dr. Pooja Paul (45:04)
Right. There’s a lot of science into the hood of like how people learn languages and, know, there’s a lot of data that they were using, but on the surface from the user’s perspective, it’s playful and simple. Right. That’s what I realized we needed for climate action. We need to make it easier for people. Most people, like you said, are, they have, you know, we have our day-to-day concerns. We know there’s putting food on the table, paying the bills, kids work, everything else. And so even if you care about climate, ends up being lower on your list of day-to-day priorities, right? And then you might still feel guilty, but it’s just not rising to the top, right? So, and that’s a shame. I wanted to make it easier for people to take action without necessarily taking up too much bandwidth, right? Making it really much more fun than it currently feels.
And also just totally stepping away from the blame and shame game. if we don’t want perfect environmentalists, we want, or a few perfect environmentalists, want many, many millions of imperfect ones, right? That is actually what will give us the numbers that we need. So that’s the hope and that’s a core ethos for us.
Michael Gold (46:17)
Yeah.
That’s a great way to put it. I think that is a great place to sum up the journey that you’ve been on and what you’re doing now. I have a couple of quick-hit questions that I’d like to cover off on the pod. First is around the idea of mentorship. You were talking about entering climate, making that swing, feeling like an outsider, but you went through these fellowships, obviously.
Dr. Pooja Paul (46:35)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Michael Gold (46:45)
How have you encountered mentorship and what would you say the kind of lessons of that are for people who are also trying to make the swing into climate that you could share?
Dr. Pooja Paul (46:56)
Mentorship. So I would say that if you are working in the climate space already, most of us, you know, really understand the urgency of the problem. Most of us understand how important it is for more people to enter the climate space. Right. So for me personally, and I think I’m not at all alone here, when I encounter somebody who really wants to move into climate, I get really excited and like, how can I help you?
And I really try to be supportive because I know what it felt like to be on the other side. And I also try to disabuse folks of some of the kinds of concerns that I had. I don’t have the right background or blah, blah, blah. But we need all kinds of talent in the climate space, right? And I think I certainly underestimated the value of my background and I think many of us do. so, yeah, I think that reaching out to folks in the climate space is actually a great way. Talking to people who do things that you’re curious about and figuring out what their journey was, you know, we want to help. We want to help get more of you, you know, because perhaps maybe one of the more impactful, there’s, day to day lifestyle choices I talk about and I’m trying to work on. There’s who you vote for at the ballot, but also with your dollars, like what companies you support.
And there’s also, what do do for work, right? There are ways to incorporate climate into your current roles, probably, but also there’s just a burgeoning of roles that are in the climate space, as you will know from, you know, Terra.do and, know, there’s, ClimateBase and others, there’s just so many roles cropping up. And sometimes I think people need help navigating those options. And that’s also where making connections with people who are in the climate space who can be mentors, can be really effective. And I’m also happy to support how I can, the caveat that I have limitations on my time, but I really like to try to be supportive.
Michael Gold (49:09)
Especially maybe for all those cognitive scientists or budding psychologists out there, right, who are concerned about climate but don’t know how to dip their toe in. So another kind of quick hit question is, looking back, what are a couple of things maybe that you would tell your younger self or that you might actually do differently to set yourself up better for success now or are you kind of regrets-free? That’s also okay.
Dr. Pooja Paul (49:13)
Absolutely.
Right, you know, I think a couple of things that come to mind I already mentioned even. So one is, well, one was knowing earlier on in my journey of like after I was curious about transitioning into climate that, hey, look, my background is not a liability, it’s an asset, right? I wish I’d been convinced of that sooner, but I was soon enough, right? The other was, I’m still a big nerd and there are still, you know, I chose to leave academia to have an impact in the world, but I still have this, you know, if I could live two different lives simultaneously, I might still be interested in doing the research. And then I have all, yeah, but I think that I think what I really truly want is to sort of bridge the two maybe, maybe—
Michael Gold (50:20)
Like being in academia as a cognitive scientist still.
Dr. Pooja Paul (50:31)
I would.
Michael Gold (50:31)
adjunct professor-dom, but still run your startup or something.
Dr. Pooja Paul (50:34)
Yeah, I’m not sure I necessarily want to teach anymore, but I do want to do the research, right? So I mean, teaching was fine. It was great. But there are questions that come up for me that I want data on and that I want rigorous data on. And there are lots of theories that are yet to be tested in terms of getting empirical data to support validate them. And I’ve I—I’m not doing this so much right now because I’m focusing on getting my company off the ground and getting this vision of Habitable, the game into the world. I—down the line, maybe. So instead of framing it as a regret, maybe down the line, what I would be interested in doing is collaborating with researchers, but actually helping ask the, helping shape the questions that I’m interested in answering, but then also being able to get data at scale because I used to work in labs and behavioral research labs and the sample sizes are relatively, there’s a few hundred participants is plenty, it’s lots, but with technology, we can actually get data from—you know, like Duolingo does like millions of people, right? Lots and lots of data points that, you know, could give us much clearer answers about what interventions work and when. So, yeah.
Michael Gold (52:07)
And then I guess last question, if you could cast your mind sort of to the end of your career, and I know that’s a long, long, long way away, you’re certainly closer to the beginning than you are to the end. But just thinking about what you would want people to say your contribution was, like what would you want your epitaph to be, if you could describe it simply.
Dr. Pooja Paul (52:14)
Haha
Well.
I that…
I think that we, one thing I’ve really have wanted to help people understand is our role as individuals in the collective, right? That our actions matter and there’s no collective without the individuals that make up the collective, right? So I’m not sure what the succinct epitaph would be, but I do, do, hope to be remembered for helping people realize that they’re part of this greater whole and that we can actually help change everyone around us simply by acting differently, speaking up about things.
Michael Gold (53:27)
That sounds like a pretty succinct way to put it to me. So I think that’s a wonderful place to end. Pooja Paul, thank you so much. This was a really fascinating discussion.
Dr. Pooja Paul (53:37)
Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure having that—chatting with you.
Michael Gold (53:43)
Climate Swings is produced, hosted, and edited by me, Michael Gold, with promotional support from climate education and action platform, Terra.do. Opinions expressed on the show are exclusively those of the guests and do not reflect the views of Terra.do, its founders or employees. Show notes, transcripts, and other material can be found on the podcast section of my website, wordclouds.consulting/climateswings.
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