‍[00:02] Jennifer Wu: Hi everyone. Thanks for listening to the Founder Spirit podcast. I'm your host, Jennifer Wu. In this podcast series, I interview exceptional individuals from all over the world with the founder spirit, ranging from social entrepreneurs, tech founders, to philanthropists, elite athletes, and more. Together, we'll uncover not only how they managed to succeed in facing multiple challenges, but also who they are as people and their human story. 

“When that forest was destroyed, I decided I wanted to try to raise awareness about what was happening in tropical forests and why we should save them.”

“Journalism is actually an intervention that can help move the needle, because by increasing transparency, you can increase accountability.” 

“Mongabay has evolved so much since its beginning, and I never expected it to turn out to be anywhere near as big as it is today.”

“You as an individual can make a difference, so start small and see where it takes you. It can be very small, but small things can turn into big things.”

Joining us today is the determined Rhett Butler, founder of Mongabay, a non-profit media organization. Reporting on nature and planetary challenges, it is the leading conservation and environmental science news platform that highlights critical issues often overlooked by mainstream media.

Inspired by his love for nature and motivated by real-world losses, Rhett launched Mongabay in his early 20s to raise awareness about the destructions of tropical rainforests.

Today, he serves as its Editor-in-Chief and CEO overseeing a global network of 1,000 correspondents in 80 countries covering topics such as biodiversity, deforestation, climate change, wildlife conservation, and Indigenous Peoples' rights.

Just how did Rhett, who started Mongabay in his pajamas, come to build a leading media platform in environmental journalism? Well, let’s talk to him & find out.

Hello, Rhett. Welcome to the Founder Spirit podcast. So excited to have you with us today, and thank you for taking the time. 

[02:01] Rhett Butler: Well, it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. 

[02:03] Jennifer: Great. Rhett, growing up in California, what were some of your formative experiences? 

[002:09] Rhett: I was lucky to have a family that appreciated nature. So we would go out often, hiking in the local forests or playing in the creek that's a couple miles from our house. So I had a lot of exposure to outdoor experiences. 

Every summer we would go up to the Sierra Nevadas where my grandparents had a small cabin on this lake. And that was really special for me because I could go see wildlife and hike around this lake and really experience the beauty of nature. 

The other thing that entered into my childhood that was really important was my mother's a travel agent, and my father traveled a lot for business and so we had opportunities to experience places that most people don't have a chance to experience. 

And so we would typically do a family trip once a year, and it was often to a place that was not standard, I guess. So we’d go to Venezuela or another part of the world. So that was also very important in those formative years. 

[02:58] Jennifer: So, as a child, your exotic travels took you to the river banks of Rio Napo in the Ecuadorian Amazon, and also to the tropical rainforest in Borneo. 

What were some of your fondest memories from these early globetrotting days? 

[03:14] Rhett: Yeah. So the first time I went to a real tropical rainforest was eastern Ecuador. So on the Rio Napo, quite near Yasuni National Park. So Yasuni is one of the most biodiverse places on earth, so it has an incredible array of species. 

And so when I had the opportunity to go there, I was really interested in the reptiles and amphibians that lived in the rainforest, because that was just something that I was very passionate about as a child. And, of course, the rainforest has the greatest diversity of reptiles and amphibians. 

And so we stayed in a lodge that was run by a local community that was fairly traditional. And so I would go out with the kids my age from the village, and we would go and look for frogs, and they would show me where the fish were and other things in the rainforest. 

And so it was really a special experience for me, especially liked the tree frogs. So we would go out at night with flashlights and find the tree frogs and just see them in their habitat. And it was really special. 

Obviously (we) came home from that trip, and there was a story in the San Francisco Chronicle several weeks later about this oil spill that happened on the Rio Napo, upriver from where I visited, and so I wondered what had happened to my friends in the forest and animals. 

And so I started to read more about the issues around oil extraction in Ecuador, and that really moved me. And so that was the moment that I transitioned from being a person who was into cool frogs to someone who started to really follow environmental issues in the news. And I had just a hunger to learn more and more. 

The thing that moved me from that to taking action was an experience I had in Malaysian Borneo when I was in high school. We visited this part of Sabah, which is the state of Malaysia, Borneo, that is one of the biologically richest parts of Borneo. 

It's an absolutely beautiful forest full of all sorts of incredible creatures, probably best known for orangutans, which are the great red apes of Asia. But it's also a lot of other interesting animals, and, of course, they have flying lizards, which I was very excited to see. 

In this beautiful forest, and there was a moment that was really poignant for me, which is they've been hiking for hours and I was covered in mud. And then there, you have leeches that will be on your clothes and things. 

And so I was sitting by this natural pool, the waterfall coming in, and I was picking the leeches off my pants so they wouldn't eventually bite me. And as I was sitting there, a male orangutan passed over my head. 

And it probably thought nothing of me, but for me it was a very moving experience. I came home and I kept in correspondence with a scientist there. And eventually I learned that forest was going to be pulped to make paper. 

That happened, so the forest was destroyed, and today that area is an oil palm plantation. And so when that forest was destroyed, I decided I wanted to try to raise awareness about what was happening in tropical forests and why we should save them. 

And so when I began at university, University of California San Diego, I began writing a book about tropical forests. And so (it) had nothing to do with my major, but thankfully, I was able to get independent study credit. So I was able to finish school a year early where I could work on this book. 

I guess I could save the rest of it for later, but those were the transformative moments in my journey. 

[06:12] Jennifer: So this book that you were working on, it was called “A Place Out of Time”, I believe. It's to raise awareness about the destructions that were happening in the rainforest, and it almost got published to continue that story. So can you tell us, how did “A Place Out of Time”, this book, eventually evolve into Mongabay? 

[06:31] Rhett: Yeah. So I worked on this book throughout college, and my major was Economics Management Science. It was basically math, economics and business and some management. So it had nothing to do with this topic, this is just like an extracurricular activity I was working on. 

And thanks to that credit, I finished school a year early, and I spent that year working on the book. And then to pay the bills, I was trading derivatives. And so the markets only opened a few hours a day and I had a model, but so I had a lot of time for working on this book. And so that's what I did. 

I eventually found a publisher that was (an) academic press, and the publisher said they wanted to publish the book, but they weren't going to put photos in it because it was going to be too expensive. And so basically what they were proposing was essentially a textbook.

To me, that defeated the purpose of what I was trying to do, which was to convey to the beauty of rainforest and why we should save them. So I thought, I didn't write this book for money, I wrote it for impact. 

And so I decided not to publish a book - I took the text and put it online so people can read it for free. And I decided to name it Mongabay, which is derived from the name of an island off Madagascar (Mungabe). 

The reason I chose that name… Well, first of all, that was a very special place for me as well. This is like a beautiful island covered with rainforests, full of all sorts of amazing animals. And it's surrounded by coral reefs and there's humpback whales nearby. So it's close to paradise for me. 

But I wanted to have a unique name when I started this thing, and I didn't know it was going to become a popular website, but I just want to have some way to track this thing and have it be unique. And so that's where the name came from. 

Initially, Mongabay was just this rainforest website. But I had written a book earlier when I was in high school about tropical freshwater aquarium fish. So that may seem like a really obscure topic, but when you go to the pet store, the fish you typically would see most commonly would be tropical freshwater fish, beyond like goldfish.

And I was very interested in the ecology of these fish, like where were these fish coming from? And so the angle I took with that book was describing the species that were commonly seen in aquariums, then talk about where they came from. So that was the unique angle. 

And so I had actually sold that book when I was 17. But I put in a clause of a contract, which said if they didn't actually publish the book, that the rights would revert back to me in, I guess that was 2001. 

And so what happened was I sold the book to this publisher, and the publisher was then acquired by another entity, and then another entity, and then the book didn't get published, so the rights reverted back to me, And so then I put the fish content on Mongabay as well. 

So when Mongabay launched initially as rainforest, and then, a couple years later, then there was this whole section about tropical freshwater fish. So again, like very random topics, but that was the origin of Mongabay. 

[08:56] Jennifer: Right. So while you launch Mongabay dedicated to rainforest conservation and tropical freshwater aquarium fish, you were also working full time at a tech startup in Silicon Valley. Can you tell us, what was it like working two startup jobs? 

[09:11] Rhett: So I guess I wouldn't call Mongabay a startup at that point because it was really just a website and I wasn't monetizing it or thinking about revenue or anything, I was just trying to get information out there. 

So I started Mongabay, I had the website, but I began consulting. So this is the first dotcom bubble around 1998-2000. And back then, it was kind of a weird world, I guess, where people would hire me to work on their business plans, even though I was a 21 year old or whatever who had no experience in this. But they liked the way I would model things and do stuff, and so they saw value in it and they were willing to pay me for it. 

So I was consulting for a number of startups then, but I kind of felt like this bubble was going to explode and I obviously wasn't going to run a website for a living. And so I decided to join one of the startups, which I thought was pretty promising, and I knew the people involved.

And so I sort of reduced the risk of this livelihood, which I didn't think was actually going to be viable because when the bubble bursts, who would hire a 22-year old to work on business plans?  So I joined one of the startups and I was doing that, and that was like a normal Silicon Valley job. 

And then on nights and weekends, I'd be working on Mongabay. And I was just adding more and more information at Mongabay, and then I also started taking photos everywhere I went because I didn't want to have a problem not having photos again. So I was just constantly taking photos and adding them to the site. 

And the site started to grow, but yeah, it was a lot of work. I mean, it was the normal job and then nights and weekends working on Mongabay, so it was definitely fully engaging. 

[10:29] Jennifer: But Rhett, I understand you like to work. You're someone that works regularly 16-18 hour days, from what I hear. 

[10:36] Rhett: Yeah, I mean there's not as many 18-hour days now, but I now have a family. But that was certainly, yeah, there was a lot of my life was like that. I try not to work quite that much now, but it does happen sometimes. But yeah, I do work a lot. 

I wouldn't say that I like to work generally, but I like the work that I do. So that's the difference. If you had me filling out forms or something like that, I would not be able to pull a 16 hours or 18 hours day. 

[10:57] Jennifer: That's right. Because when you love what you do, it doesn't seem like work.

[11:03] Rhett: Lot less like work, right? 

[11:04] Jennifer: That's right. In the summer of 2003, so that's about four years after you launched Mongabay, Google introduced AdSense, which is a program through which online publishers could serve advertisement based on content and audience. 

And by this time you had already garnered, I think, 100,000 visitors per month. So you quickly adopted this pay per click model, business model. And Mongabay was finally generating revenue. 

And at age 25-26, you decided to quit your job to pursue your passion. Can you tell me what this decision was like for you? Was it a difficult one to make? 

[11:43] Rhett: It wasn't that difficult because I could see the growth curve with the advertising-based business model. So I could see that if traffic increased and that would correlate with this potential increase in revenue. So I could forecast what my income would look like. 

And I live a pretty simple life and careful with things and I save money, so there's nothing extravagant. And so I could say like, okay, well, I'm currently making about half as much money as my take-home salary, so after taxes, from Mongabay. But I could see that there's a potential for it to grow. And so I can quit this job, which I like, but software was not my passion, and really pursue this thing that is my passion. 

So it wasn't like I was stepping off into the abyss, taking a huge leap. I had a sense of, this is safe. I also knew that I could probably find another job in the tech industry if things went really badly because of these other skills I had. 

So it may have seemed like a risky decision, but I didn't feel like it was that risky of a decision. I was pretty confident that I could make it work. 

[12:40] Jennifer: And when you started to devote full time to pursue your passion, you had already started to add more content to the website. But did you have a very clear vision of what you wanted to build at that time? 

[12:53] Rhett: I did not have a clear vision of it at the time. So there were some gaps in the space that I was working in that I felt like, well, Mongabay could contribute here. 

But one of the first things I did was create this section for children, which I had adapted into about 40 languages by native speakers, because I felt like it was really important for that next generation of kids to learn about these ecosystems and be inspired by them, because that's what got me in this space. And so that was a priority for me. 

I also wanted to not have the problem with photos again, I just kept taking photos. 

But then beyond that, I saw this gap between advocacy organizations, which were putting out information about tropical forests, which was my party at the time, that is telling you what to think and do, and had a certain objective. 

And so I noticed that sometimes the information they put out there didn't really square with the realities of what was happening. So there was a message that was being conveyed, but it was colored by the desire to raise money or drive certain outcomes. 

And then at the other end of the spectrum was the mainstream media outlets, who were sometimes covering these issues and covering them very well, but not doing that much coverage. And so I felt like there was this place where Mongabay could have a new service that could fill this gap. 

And so I started to think, okay, creating this new service could be a valuable contribution that drives meaningful impact in the world. And so I started to write news articles. This was the origin of what Mongabay is best known for today. 

And so I think I started producing those news articles in 2005 and pretty quickly got picked up by Google News. So I had syndication and it kind of took off from there. 

[14:22] Jennifer: And so I understand in the first year of publishing the news service, you wrote almost a thousand stories by yourself in your pajamas, in your apartment. (chuckles)

[14:31] Rhett: That sounds about right. I mean, some of those would have also been written by the road and don't always wear pajamas, but yeah, I mean, basically accurate - yes. 

[14:38] Jennifer: And I'm also curious, for someone who is a business economics major with no journalism background, how did you become such a prolific writer? 

[14:47] Rhett: Well, I think the key is really just working like a maniac, so just being willing to put in the hours. I think that pretty early on, I identified the importance of being able to communicate. And for whatever reason, I seemed to be able to do that via writing pretty well. 

I think part of it may have been my education, I went to public schools and things, but we just had to write a lot of essays. And I think that was probably really helpful for developing my writing skills. I also read a lot, which I think is very useful for becoming a prolific writer. 

I'm not going to say I’m a good writer, but a prolific writer. And so writing was my medium. I'm not like an on-camera person or like a good voice person, but I could communicate via writing. And so that's what I focused on. 

[15:26] Jennifer: You operated Mongabay entirely by yourself in the first seven years. What was it like in the early days? 

[15:33] Rhett: I mean, it was constant work. It was dealing with a lot, just a wide range of issues and people reaching out. And it was a different era of the Internet. It was just a lot of putting out fires, but then also just a ton of writing. 

And I think the quality of the stories was highly variable. I mean, there'd be some very short pieces where I might misspell Brazil in the title, which is always embarrassing because there's no copy editing or anything like that. 

So you'd make these very dumb mistakes, typos and things you wouldn't catch when you publish something. And then you'd be looking at, oh, man, very silly mistake. 

But then there were some like, you know, in-depth investigations that would take months to produce. So it's just like a very large degree of variation, quality of the articles that were coming out. 

[16:12] Jennifer: And by the time you took on your first employee, the ad revenue from Mongabay had declined sharply following the global financial crisis in 2008. I understand that you stopped drawing a salary for yourself for about a year and a half. And those were some stressful times. 

And even though Mongabay's traffic and influence continued to rise, why did you decide not to take on any external investors? 

[16:39] Rhett: Well, I never really had any interest in having investors, I don't want that pressure. I think I'd have a hard time if I wasn't able to return the full amount of investment to an investor, I would feel really bad about it. 

And I was also reasonably confident that I could make it work without an influx of capital. So, I thought the market would eventually come back, I figured I could do consulting, I could fall back on my other skills. It was a hard time, but I felt like it was something that would end, like it would eventually get better again. 

And eventually it could get better again, the ad market came back, it was different. It was just a very different market. That meant you made a lot less revenue relative to your traffic, but because traffic was growing, it kind of balanced out. 

So my decision to form a nonprofit was not actually a function of any financial strain. It was this desire to do new and bigger things and expand impact. 

[17:27] Jennifer: When you set up the nonprofit organization, Mongabay.org Corporation, I understand that you planned to expand its impact by establishing an Indonesian language environmental news service locally in Indonesia. 

Tell us about the pivot, like what made you decide to start expanding its impact to Indonesia? Because at that point, you were just a few people. 

[17:49] Rhett: Yeah, I mean, it's probably useful to provide kind of a little bit broader context. 

So back around that time, I'd been approached by a very successful literary agent who wanted me to write a book about my story and about some trends in the world. 

I don't know what it's like now, but in that era, I learned that the majority of the effort with writing a book was actually the marketing after you write the book. So the breakdown looked to be about 80% of the effort was going to be marketing this thing through roadshows and book readings and all sorts of stuff. 

And to me, it was, I don't want to do that. And I have 100,000 people coming to the website a day. And if this book does really well, maybe it sells 50,000 copies. So if it's about building up my ego or something like that or building my profile, yeah, a book could be a good thing to do. 

But that doesn't matter, it doesn't matter at all to me. I care about having impact in the world, and so it's much more impactful for me to focus on this platform, which already has this audience. I don't need to sell books and build up my profile, so it makes sense to focus on this. 

And I have all these ideas I want to pursue that aren't going to work with this ad-based model that I could do if I formed a nonprofit. I'd done a ton of reporting in Indonesia, and I had seen that a lot of the environmental issues in Indonesia were related to corruption, mismanagement in the natural resources sector. 

And journalism is actually an intervention that can help move the needle, because by increasing transparency, you can increase accountability. 

And there wasn't an Indonesian language news service that spanned Indonesia. So you had some coverage in mainstream media outlets, you had some localized coverage in certain geographies, but you didn't have anything that really went from Papua to Aceh. 

And so I thought this could be a real value-add and maybe Indonesia could undergo a transformation like happened in Brazil in the mid-2000s, where it moved from this sort of deforestation dependent business model, very extractive, to something different, so continue to grow the economy without growing deforestation and actually reducing deforestation. 

And so I thought, well, this could be a really interesting to pursue. And so instead of going after doing this book, I'm going to start a nonprofit to create this Indonesian language news service. 

But a key point of that was I knew that if I began a nonprofit and was going to run a nonprofit successfully, I was going to have to give up doing what I loved, which was the journalism side. I was going to have to become a fundraiser and a manager and an operations person. 

And I didn't know whether I was going to be good at any of those things because I hadn't done it before. I had no connections to wealth, I didn't know the philanthropy world, I'd never raise money, I'm not a salesperson. 

So all this stuff, there are a bunch of questions which I didn't have the answers to, but I was going to try to make it work. So anyway, I decided to do that, and I formed nonprofit, and then I applied for a grant, and I got the grant, and then the rest is history, I guess. 

[20:19] Jennifer: There's so much more to unpack there, especially about your leadership style and other things and giving up writing to fundraising and running an organization. 

How did this shift in business model, so going from a dotcom to a nonprofit, change the operational focus of the organization? 

[20:37] Rhett: Yeah, well, I think it's important to note that the transition developed over time. So I didn't just shift everything over to the nonprofit initially. 

We started our nonprofit operations in 2012. So at the time, we had basically two and a half staff. Started in Mongabay Indonesia, then we went up to six or seven staff. But the rest of Mongabay didn't come over to the nonprofit fully until 2015, so I was basically subsidizing the nonprofit out of the revenue from the for-profit for that first four years, and then I donated all the news articles to the nonprofit.

So there's a major shift. Fundamentally, (we) went from a model of focusing on monetizing page views or traffic via advertising to one that was much more focused on impact. 

So the page views didn't really matter as much, it was really like, who's reading the articles and what do they do with the information. And so it leads you to make decisions now, as a nonprofit, you would never make as a for-profit. 

So, for example, from a few years ago, Facebook accounted for about 80% of our referral traffic around 2020-2021. So that's traffic that comes from the outside world, not like internal traffic or, you know, people directly going to Mongabay. 

I was looking at the data and you can see that the quality of engagement is very low from Facebook. There's a lot of people who are just sort of coming and then leaving after a few seconds. 

And so that's not really translating into impact, it’s like empty traffic. So if you're just monetizing off of traffic via advertising, then that's fine. It doesn't really matter, it’s like you just care about eyeballs. 

But if you're trying to have a meaningful influence in the world where people make decisions off your articles, they're probably not going to make much of a decision off an article if they look at it for 3 seconds. 

And so basically, (we) determined that a lot of Facebook traffic was just not high quality. And so why are we putting staff time and resources into promoting stuff via Facebook and doing all these Facebook posts and whatnot? 

So I gave a heads up to some funders and the board that we're going to change our outreach strategy and essentially abandon efforts on Facebook. So it's still auto-publish stuff to Facebook, but we're not going to put a lot of time into making custom Facebook content or engaging with an audience there. 

We're going to instead put all those people and all that effort into other platforms that are driving higher quality engagement. We did that, and the next month after we flipped the switch, we lost 4 million visitors, which getting off an ad model that would be pretty devastating. 

But the thing is, there's a lot of other metrics we're tracking. And so, we're also looking at the total aggregate amount of time measured in hours that people are spending on Mongabay. And the amount of time that people spent on Mongabay actually increased with that 4 million user drop, I think it went up by like 8% or 10%, I can't remember exactly now. 

But it was interesting because focusing on these other platforms meant that we were reaching people who spent more time on the site and they clicked on more things and they scrolled further and things like that. 

So it's actually like if we're trying to use time as a very basic proxy for potential impact, this is a positive thing. So that loss and all those visitors was meaningless in terms of impact. Again, with an ad model, we probably wouldn't have made that decision because it would have lost all that advertising revenue. 

[23:23] Jennifer: Yeah, that's interesting because even though that you had less people coming, but you attracted an audience who really cared about the environment. 

[23:32] Rhett: Exactly, so it's like a higher quality audience in terms of engagement and what they then did with that information. 

[23:38] Jennifer: Right, exactly. 

Nowadays, Mongabay has become a respected source of information for policymakers and researchers and environmentalists and also the general public. And its in depth coverage resulted in some substantial on the ground impact over the years. 

Can you give us some examples of the impacts that Mongabay has had? 

[23:59] Rhett: Sure. So a relatively recent example is from Central Africa. So the country of Gabon, which is part of the Congo basin. And we had a local reporter who was doing a story about this community that had been managing this forest, its ancestral forest, for generations, and it was a very high quality forest. 

And so they had basically preserved this forest as a health and functional ecosystem while deriving livelihoods from it. And a Chinese company had recently been granted the right to log the forest, and so the community was very upset about this. And so that was what the story is about. 

And the story caught the attention of the Environment Minister of Gabon, who went and then visited the site. And he was supposed to just be there for a few hours, he ended up staying, I think it was for like two days. So after he was there, he came back and decided to revoke the permit of the company and recognize the tenure rights of the community. 

And so while the forest was protected, one of the most important things was conservation in Gabon intended to be very top-down. And this was the first case that we had seen of a bottom-up conservation initiative where this community had conserved it and then had their rights recognized. And so it set this precedent for creating other community-led conservation areas in Gabon. 

So that was a really exciting direct impact where we knew that we did this reporting, we were the only people reported on it, and then there was this outcome. And we know that the environment minister had read the story and reacted to it. 

Another case from a few years ago was related to fishing in the high seas. So the story began as an investigation into labor abuse within a tuna fishing fleet that was run by a Chinese company called Dalian Ocean Fishing. 

And so what was going on is there were people who were applying for jobs, like office jobs or other things. They would show up, and then they'd get put on a boat They'd have their passport taken away, they'd be stuck on a fishing boat for years. 

So a number of people died, a much larger number of people got really ill and sick and just had a lot of health problems. And so the story focused on this abusive practice and the horrible outcomes for the people who'd kind of gotten shanghaied, as they would have said, put in the situation. 

So, as we dug into the story, it turned out that this tuna fishing flea was also opportunistically... Well, either opportunistically or intentionally doing a lot of shark finning, so they were catching huge amounts of sharks. 

The number of sharks being caught by this one tuna fishing fleet was greater than all of the sharks being reported by China as being harvested from that region of the Pacific. So it's like just this huge underestimate of how many sharks were really being killed by this fleet, and so it was essentially a cover for shark finning. 

And so we did this reporting, and there were immediate repercussions from it. So the US Department of Treasury sanctioned this company, and they cited the exclusive data that we produced through this investigation. 

So we know that they were reading these stories and then using it for these legal proceedings. So the company was sanctioned, it was then delisted from the stock exchange, which was important because it couldn’t then raise the capital it needed to expand operations. 

And then a number of other things happened after that, which extended more broadly beyond just this Chinese fishing fleet to certain practices in terms of how tuna fishing is done. 

And so it had this much broader implication from exposing these labor abuses on these ships, which was the initial focus. And so that was a very positive. It was nice to see that kind of outcome in the world. I could list more, but I don't want to talk for too long. 

[27:21] Jennifer: No, that's a great story, I love it. I think if every media organization focused on having a meaningful impact in this world, then we would be living in a much better place. 

So, for example, that article that you cited about the tuna fishing boats, how long would it take a journalist to do an article like that? That's investigative journalism - how long would something like that take? 

[27:46] Rhett: So that story took about two years. So it's a very significant commitment of time and resources. 

[27:52] Jennifer: Wow, that's much longer than I had expected, interesting.

Indonesia was where Mongabay first built its network of local journalists. And these days, you operate local bureaus in Latin America, India and Africa. How did you manage to scale Mongabay over the years? 

[28:13] Rhett: So Mongabay Indonesia provided a really good blueprint for how we could replicate the model and other geographies. 

So Latin America was a very obvious choice for us because it's the most biodiverse place on earth. You know, Spanish is a widely spoken language across borders, so you could potentially reach a lot of people in a number of countries through a single language. And then there's also a lot of readership beyond Latin America in Spanish. 

And so it was really just a matter of finding the resources to support that. And so that process of raising the money took quite a bit longer than I had hoped. But by 2015, we'd finally had being able to raise some money. So in 2016, we launched Mongabay LatAm (Latin America). 

And every region is a little different, but there's similarities. And so the key thing has really been taking an adaptive approach where you iterate based on the feedback you get from the ground. And so all these initiatives are led locally. 

So it's not like I'm going there and telling people what to do. It's really more about listening and if they want my advice, I'm happy to give it, but I'm not going to offer unsolicited advice, essentially. 

So it's a model that's really based on leveraging the experiences and expertise of local people. So you're essentially delivering resources to them, a framework which they can adapt as needed, and then also being there to help them through challenges. And so that's really the model that we've taken, and I think it's pretty widely applicable. 

The main bottleneck is usually around finding the resource to support it. And so for Mongabay India, it took a couple years or probably about a year. Africa took a lot longer, but eventually we got there. But, you know, it could be applied in most places. 

I mean, one of the other limiting factors is the ability to do journalism. So there's certain markets where you really can't do journalism, at least journalism around controversial issues. And so those places would be lower priorities for us just because our model won't work as well. 

[30:06] Jennifer: And in going from a one-man show to operating this global network of a thousand local journalists with most people working remotely, what lessons have you drawn from building the culture of your organization? 

[30:22] Rhett: Yeah, I should also clarify that we're pretty much 100% remote because we don't actually have an office anywhere, never have. 

[30:28] Jennifer: Yeah, I figured everybody was working remotely, and it's a very strong culture that I hear. So how do you build such a strong culture with everyone working remotely? 

[30:27] Rhett: Yeah, well, I guess I would say is I've never tried to build something where people aren't working remotely, so maybe that's helpful. 

And part of it really begins at the beginning, which is you really had to look for people who would fit well in an organization where you didn't meet in person. So thinking about are people motivated to work independently? Are they good communicators? So some basic building blocks like that. 

But more generally, I've always wanted to foster a culture of respect and make Mongabay a place where I would personally want to work as an employee. So, it's listening to other people, being open to feedback, minimizing assumptions in terms of where they're coming from, what their ideas are, what their background is and things like that. So I think that those are some fundamental pieces of it. 

But the way that manifests operationally is we don't have a blame culture. So if someone makes a mistake, we don't separate them out and say, like, oh, you know, Barbara Smith did this horrible thing, and let's call her out. We talk about an issue that comes up much more generically and what we can learn from it. 

And so I think that has been for a lot of people who've worked in the media space, that is unusual. And again, I don't come from a journalism background, but I've heard a lot of stories in terms of what newsrooms look like. 

And again, this isn't all newsrooms, and it may not be newsrooms even today, but the stories I've heard can be quite degrading experience to work in a newsroom like 20 years ago, let's say.

And I didn't want to have Mongabay like that. I wanted it to be a place where they could be happy and productive in their work, but also be respected. And so that's just what I tried to build. 

But I think what that's manifested as is that people are generally very happy to work at Mongabay. And we have a very low turnover rate, very few people want to leave Mongabay. And whenever we have an opening in the newsroom, we are kind of overwhelmed by the number of really impressive people who want to come work with us. 

It's a very good place to be from a hiring standpoint, because you have so many people who are passionate about your organization and the work you're doing. And so we're able to get very good people who want to be part of Mongabay's team. 

[32:29] Jennifer: That's right, I understand your first employee is still writing for Mongabay. 

As you mentioned, on a personal level, your role at Mongabay has changed significantly over the years. You've had to abandon writing to focus more on running the organization and fundraising. 

What do you miss most about the old days? Is it wildlife photography? Is it writing? 

[32:50] Rhett: It's writing. It's writing substantive pieces, because I do some writing, but it tends to be stuff I can turn around very quickly. 

So it's like looking at Brazil forest data and just being able to whip out something in ten minutes or it's maybe an interview or write an introduction. I'm not doing that substantive in-depth analysis or investigations or field reporting anymore, so it's been hard to let that go. 

I mean, a lot of what I write is for an audience of three people (chuckles). Yeah, it’s like, say some program officers or a donor prospect. And so it's that kind of writing. 

Lately I've been writing more for LinkedIn because it's a good way to reach certain audiences. But I cap my total time spent on LinkedIn, which means anything writing related or responding to anything, an hour and a half a week. So it's not that much time. 

And actually having a short format is good because you can't write too much, so you have to be very succinct and efficient with what you're trying to say. So it's good for discipline, I think. 

[33:40] Jennifer: That's right. And who likes writing emails anyway? (chuckles)

[33:44] Rhett: Yeah, I do a lot of emails. 

[33:47] Jennifer: In early 2020, Philip Jacobson, a Mongabay editor, was detained in Indonesia over a period of 45 days. 

And during that time, you organized a media blitz, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, local Indonesian newspapers and social media. You also coordinated his release between members of Congress in the US and officials in Indonesia, civic society. 

Can you tell us the story behind how you managed to free Philip Jacobson? 

[34:18] Rhett: Yeah, so that was a very stressful time. So Phil was detained in late 2019 and he was under house arrest. And it was interesting because he was arrested for doing journalism at a time where he actually wasn't doing reporting on that trip, he was an editor. 

There's a long backstory in terms of who was involved with this ultimately, but it was related to the palm oil oligarchy and whatnot. But essentially, it's very hard for journalists to get journalism visas to work in Indonesia. And so the normal practice is to get a KITAS, which is like a business visa. 

And so it would be very hard to win a legal case around an issue like this in Indonesia. It would be very expensive, it would take a long time and just very uncertain because of a lot of gray zone. 

And so what I tried to do for the first month was a diplomatic effort, trying to get him released, like explaining he wasn't reporting and things like that, very back channel communications, very quiet, no public statements, all this stuff. 

And then he was moved from house arrest to prison and it started to look like, okay, this could actually become really serious and protracted. And so at that point (I) made the decision to turn this into a political case by going public. 

And so a lot of thought went into that in terms of the risk and the strategy. If you think about the timing, this is January 2020. The other factor was there was this respiratory ailment that was emerging out of China that was spreading very rapidly. 

And my thinking was is that the last place you want to be if there's a pandemic is in an Indonesian prison. And so (I) wanted to get Phil out as soon as possible in case this thing spread and ended up becoming Covid. And so that was also an important consideration. 

So I basically like ramped up the outreach through very targeted communications and we just got a lot of press coverage. So there were some wire services that covered the story. I think there was something like 3,500 press hits or something in week. So a lot of people were interested in this story. 

And one of the things that made it interesting beyond the environmental community or expat community was the fact that he had been detained while traveling under this business visa. And it created this uncertainty around anyone who's traveling on a business visa within Indonesia. 

And so it's a much broader issue and so can't get into all the details, but basically I had some high-level conversations and there was a very prominent op-ed in the South China Morning Post and then he was released shortly thereafter. 

So he was actually in jail, I think it was four or five days. And then he was deported from Indonesia and all the charges were dropped. But it was very stressful time, but we were glad that it was resolved in that way. 

[36:42] Jennifer: Yeah, that's a good story. 

These days, with over 1,000 journalists and across 80 countries, and with a monthly readership of 7 million in multiple languages, what is the next phase for Mongabay? 

[36:57] Rhett: So last year we published our 2030 strategic plan, which lays out our roadmap for expanding impact over the next several years.

So one is around the types of the stories that we cover, so that's both geographies, but also topics. And so geographically, we've already made a lot of progress on one of those priority areas, which is Africa. 

So spinning our Africa team out as their own bureau, which means that they now have the infrastructure to scale up more rapidly, both through working with more journalists, having a larger team, but also establishing more partnerships with local media outlets. 

Brazil is also on that list. So we have Brazilian reporters and a Brazilian team, but they're not a bureau yet. So our hope is that we can eventually have a Brazil bureau next. 

But it also means topics, too. So that's like covering more of the Planetary Boundaries around pollution, things of that nature, which Mongabay traditionally hasn't done, more oceans coverage. 

Another bucket is how do we reach and engage people? So we've been doing more video, more podcasts, but also thinking about, okay, well, some people can't read or because certain platforms are subsidized, consume your stories for free. If it's like a short audio message, also going into other languages. 

A third area is around upskilling and providing more opportunities to local journalists. We've developed webinars, and then we have a paid fellowship program for journalists in low and middle income biodiversity hotspots. We just started a pilot, which is for indigenous journalists in the Ecuadorian Amazon. But we have a lot of ambitions in that area as well. 

And then the last area I would call out would be Mongabay data studio, which is a focus on data journalism. And so within data journalism, one is increasing our capacity to work with primary data sources like satellite data or bioacoustic data. So our journalists can work directly with the scientists who are gathering this data and then turning it into actionable information for certain audiences. 

The second area under this initiative would be turning the data that we generate from the reporting into tools to help with decision making. So, for example, we developed a database on reforestation projects worldwide, we also have a database on the effectiveness of different conservation interventions. 

And then the third area is trying to foster data journalism around environmental issues more broadly beyond Mongabay for journalists to integrate more data into their environmental reporting, whether they work for Mongabay or other outlets. 

[39:20] Jennifer: That's awesome. 

And travel stories, I'm dying to hear some of Rhett Butler's travel stories. 

[39:27] Rhett: Yeah, so I had some adventures. So I guess I could start with elephants. So this is a long time ago now, 2006 or 2007, I was in Kenya, and we were in the mountains above the Maasai Mara.

And I was traveling with someone who had set up a luxury tented camp a decade or 15 years before. And they'd abandoned the area, I don't remember why, but he'd be paying the local community to watch the camp and keep it going, even though no tourists have been there in 10 or 15 years. 

And so we went, and it was a really amazing experience. But we were out in the forest one day, and one of those (things) we noticed is the forest had been pretty heavily ransacked by elephants. So it's clear it was a very high elephant density (area). 

And we were with three local guards for the camp guiding us through the forest, and there was a mound of vegetation in front of us. And the guardians had us stop and they sensed there were elephants around, but the wind wasn't quite right and the visibility was very low, and so they were trying to assess situation. 

And then we heard a stick break, and then this draco flew out, which is this beautiful bird flew out of the vegetation. And also these elephants just started charging through the wall of vegetation. So I guess the wind shifted and they smelled us and knew we were close, as though it freaked him out. And so just started charging towards us and so we just all started running. 

And I was just looking for a big tree that I could get behind, but all the trees were knocked over, and so just we're all running as fast as we can. You know, elephants are obviously faster than people. So I was like, I don't know what to do, so I'm trying to weave. 

I'd heard you could stand still and the elephant wouldn't bother you, but in the moment, I have no idea whether it's going to work. So I was just trying to find a tree. And so we're all running, we get separated. 

Eventually, the elephants run by us, and it seems like it's okay. And then we just hear this horrible screaming awful screaming. And then the guy who is with us, like, just runs out and says, the elephant's got George, he's dead. 

And then more elephants come and they're charging. And so we just start all running again and trying to weave through and figure out how to evade the elephants. Eventually they run by us, and then we go to look for George. 

We start calling for George, and, I mean, I don't know how long it is. It felt like it was a long time. It was probably ten minutes. And then George stumbles out of the forest. So he's not dead, right, but he's covered in blood. 

And so what happened was one of the elephants had caught up with George, and he had jumped into one of these piles of vines, and the elephant had come down and stomped him and tusked him, because he had penetration wounds on his side, his bicep. Because there was so much vegetation and the mud was soft, and so it didn't break his legs or anything. He was very heavily bruised and everything, but he could walk.

So that was a very exciting experience with an elephant. I've had other ones, but that was by far the most exciting. But George is okay now, he’s fine. We got out of the forest. 

[41:53] Jennifer: Those are stories that you can tell your grandkids later. (chuckles)

[41:56] Rhett: Yeah, I don't need to experience that again, once is enough. 

[41:59] Jennifer: What about the one where you're held at gunpoint? 

[42:02] Rhett: Yeah, we got shot at once in Borneo. I was taking pictures of an oil palm plantation, and I was on a public road, so I wasn't trespassing or anything. I was taking some photos, and this guard came out running towards us. It's like a guard with a gun, and all of a sudden he fired. 

I actually think it was an air gun, I don't think he was shooting a shotgun. But you know, he was far enough away and it was just chaotic enough where I don't know exactly what was going on. I just know that there were shots fired. 

And so the woman I was with, we just ran as fast as we could and jumped in the car and took off. So we didn't want to stick around and see what he wanted. But we were on a public road like a highway, so it wasn't a trespassing situation.

These people say, oh, I heard you like adventure. And, my philosophy on this is, adventure is what happens when things go wrong. So I don't go out looking for adventure, but because I have been in a lot of situations in the world, adventures sometimes happen, but I prefer things to run smoothly and to not have problems. 

But there have been a lot of adventures over the years, for sure. 

[42:57] Jennifer: And Borneo, is it still one of your favorite destinations? 

[43:01] Rhett: Oh, yeah. I love Borneo. It depends where you go obviously, it's a big island, but there's tons of wildlife there, a lot of biodiversity, beautiful forests. You've got reefs, you have very interesting cultures. 

I had the opportunity to stay in an indigenous village with the Penan Dayak in West Kalimantan several years ago, and they end up winning a UN prize for protecting their forests against logging. 

But they have an absolutely beautiful forest, it's their ancestral forest that they've protected, whereas most of the rest of the area has been logged or turned into oil palm plantations. That was a beautiful place. Yeah, I do love Borneo. 

[43:32] Jennifer: And do you recommend certain travel destinations for family, maybe with your own family? 

[42:36] Rhett: Oh, so, I mean, honestly, I haven't traveled internationally with my family yet. Our kids are relatively small, so I can't make personal recommendations on that front. 

But I definitely recommend Borneo. I mean, you also want to think about the impact of your travel as well. So you want to be sure you're traveling responsibly, but I think you can do that certainly in parts of Borneo, whether it's the Malaysian side or the Indonesian side. I haven't been to Brunei, so I can't speak about Brunei. 

[43:57] Jennifer: Good to know. 

Rhett, you've developed this beautiful friendship with Dr. Jane Goodall, an English primatologist. In fact, a few days ago, you joined her on stage in San Francisco to celebrate her 90th birthday and the 25th anniversary of Mongabay. 

Earlier this year, I also had a very brief encounter with her. And I'm curious, just from your side, what have you learned from Jane Goodall? 

[44:20] Rhett: The first thing is just, I'm astounded by her level of patience. The amount of people who recognize her and approach her is just, it would overwhelm me. And she's so great, gracious and thoughtful. And just to be able to navigate that is one of the most amazing things I've ever seen.

I think also the importance of having a simple message, it’s something I've always believed. But with her, she's able to convey sometimes very complex, sometimes very controversial topics in a very simple way, which is ultimately how you reach a lot of people and engage a lot of people. 

Also her ability to be an icon despite not wanting to be an icon, like, she didn't choose to be in the spotlight, but that's what's happened. And now that she's in that space, she's doing the most that she can with it, even though it's not something she's fully comfortable with. You know, that's very important to be able to do that and also just recognize how hard that is for a person. 

[45:06] Jennifer: You know, we often talk about saving the planet, but the truth is that we must do these things to actually save ourselves. And yet I think many people don't get that message. 

I don't know if you think about this very much, but I think about it from time to time. Like, why do you think that is? So in other words, like, why do you think we're so stupid? (chuckles)

[45:26] Rhett: Okay, well, I think by our evolution, people are naturally kind of self-interested. So you're focused on today and what I need or maybe what your family needs, you know, so it's like a pretty small pool. 

And just being able to expand the circle of compassion to the broader community or the state or the world, but then also other species, is not something that necessarily comes naturally in our western culture. And fundamentally, that's one of the challenges but it's also an opportunity from a communication standpoint. 

And one of the important things about conservation is you need to broaden the constituency. So you don't want conservation to just be the realm of a few northern scientists or something like that. You need to show that preserving or maintaining nature has benefits for everyone. 

And if you lose nature, costs go up, your life gets worse, all these other things. So it's not just about protecting pandas. Protecting pandas in their habitat has significant implications for the wellbeing of people who live around the forest, for example. 

[46:23] Jennifer: You know, it's interesting because one of the first things that you talked about was your early encounter with this orangutan. My first “wildlife” encounter was actually with a martin that lived in the roof of my house. 

And I remember that one night he came down from the roof and I was sitting in the living room. And our gazes locked and we stared at each other for a few seconds and there was obviously no verbal communication. 

But I was looking at him thinking, so you're the guy that's scratching on my roof at 02:00 in the morning, waking me up. What came back to me was, I know you occupy the house, but I live here too. 

Because I think that we often live in a human-centric world, right? Because we are the dominant species and we lost that connection to nature and also a bit to ourselves, and understanding that there are also other species, plant or animal species, that help us thrive. I think that connection is somewhat missing. 

[47:28] Rhett: Yeah, I mean, I totally agree. I think just by nature of moving out from sort of rural societies to cities, you have less and less of that interaction. And so you kind of forget about those connections, seeing other species as other beings which you can interact with. 

I had early interactions with the creatures in our yard, like the alligator lizard that lived on our doorstep. And we realized that, okay, this alligator lizard's territory is the doorstep of our house. And if you messed with the alligator lizard, he would bite you because you were encroaching on his territory. So you'd have a mutual respect there. 

I noticed things like that. And I would just take the time to be there and appreciate these things. These other creatures were there and just try to respect them for also being other beings that were there first, and sharing that space with them. 

[48:08] Jennifer: Right. You've been now doing this for 25 years, and as a father of two young children running an environmental news outlet, the news isn't getting much better these days, I would say. What gives you hope about the future? 

[48:23] Rhett: Yeah, one thing is that progress is happening in many areas in the world, whether it's education generally or poverty reduction, better health outcomes, people living longer, even like, compassion for other species, compared to, say, like 100 years ago, it feels like we're making progress there.

Specifically in the conservation space or the planet, there's also progress. There are species and ecosystems that have recovered and humans can have a role in that and they can assist the process. 

At a micro level, there are a lot of sources of inspiration as well. So people who are doing incredible work at the front lines of nature, where they're defending their traditional territories against encroachment or destructive companies or governments. There are communities that are developing solutions, so there's a lot of green shoots out there, things to be hopeful about. 

So there's a lot of negatives in the trend, but there are positive things happening. And there's also evidence that transformation can happen pretty quickly. So if you look at electric vehicle adoption in certain markets, it's been much faster than predicted in some markets. Or the shift to solar energy has outpaced even the wildest sort of extrapolations. 

And so I think there is reason for hope. And it's not just hoping for hope's sake; it’s what I would call informed optimism. You can see that change is possible if the right opportunities are there and people's interests are aligned. 

[49:43] Jennifer: And what would you want the audience to take away from your story? 

[49:46] Rhett: I think what I want the audience to take away from my story is that you as an individual can make a difference, so start small and see where it takes you basically.

I was a guy who was really into cool frogs and became interested in rainforests, started a website and just kept building off it. And it's ended up having some impacts in the world and providing opportunities for a whole bunch of people to get involved as well. 

You know, maybe you start a community garden, maybe you're able to raise funds for a local conservation group. But most people who'll be listening to this podcast have the ability to do something, to make a difference in the world. And it can be very small, but small things can turn into big things. 

[50:22] Jennifer: Thank you. And last but not least, what does the Founder Spirit mean to you? 

[50:26] Rhett: I think it's this whole idea of an entrepreneurial mindset, a willingness to take risks and think about things differently and look for opportunities. It's the ability to wear many hats, overcome adversity or challenges, and then also recognize opportunities, build off successes. Have resilience and be adaptable. 

So Mongabay has evolved so much since its beginning, and I never expected it to turn out to be anywhere near as big as it is today, but it's a product of being willing to listen and then iterate based off feedback. And so that flexibility has been absolutely critical for our existence. 

And having that passion and drive, that really deep commitment to whatever your mission is. 

[51:04] Jennifer: Congratulations on Mongabay, I think it's a testament of your blood, sweat and tears, that's for sure. 

We're now coming to the end of our interview, and as you know, we end every episode with a quote. And for this episode, we have a quote from David Attenborough, a British broadcaster, biologist and natural historian.  

“Nature is our biggest ally and greatest inspiration.” 

Rhett, many thanks for coming on the Founder Spirit podcast today, and inspiring us with your love of nature.

[51:32] Rhett: Well, thank you for having me, it’s been an honor and a pleasure.

[51:36] Jennifer: If this podcast has been beneficial or valuable to you, feel free to become a patron and support us on Patreon.com, that is P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com/TheFounderSpirit. 

As always, you can find us on Apple, Amazon and Spotify, as well as social media and our website at TheFounderSpirit.com. 

The Founder Spirit podcast is a partner of the Villars Institute, a nonprofit foundation focused on accelerating the transition to a net-zero economy and restoring planetary health. 

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