David Nassar: Welcome, Kaitlin, to the Templeton Ideas Podcast. We are coming to you today from beautiful Montreal, Quebec, where Kaitlin and I are both attending the Templeton Annual meeting, the gathering of the John Templeton Foundation, the Templeton Religion Trust, the Templeton World Charity Foundation, the boards of directors of all the foundations, and the honorary members of the Templeton world.

Thank you for joining me today. Let’s start at the top. Kaitlin, where are you from?

Kaitlin Yarnall: I grew up in Humboldt County, California.

David Nassar: And where’d you go to college?

Kaitlin Yarnall: I went to undergrad at Humboldt State University, and then I went to grad school in DC at George Washington University.

David Nassar: What made you wanna leave at that point and go all the way across the country?

Kaitlin Yarnall: I actually got a call from a professor, an undergrad professor, who said National Geographic was hiring cartographers, and that I should go do an internship there. And so I did the internship, flew across the country, thought that would be a three to four-month thing, and have been in DC ever since. So, I did the internship, then National Geographic hired me, and I stayed on a while. Then I decided that I wanted to go to grad school. I officially quit at National Geographic, but they were great, and gave me, you know, part-time production work, basically as much as I could handle. GW was great. I got a master’s degree in geography and then went back full-time to National Geographic.

David Nassar: Alright, so walk me through how you go from a focus on geography specifically to getting the title of Chief Storytelling Officer at the National Geographic Society.

Kaitlin Yarnall: Yeah, so the abbreviated version is I pretty quickly moved from being a production cartographer to being more of an editorial research cartographer. So, I did production work, but I started working quickly on like the conceptualization of what should our maps show. The big pullout maps that came in the magazine.

David Nassar: I love those, by the way. When I was younger. I sometimes would put them up on my wall to show you how much of a nerd I am.

Kaitlin Yarnall: Oh, I did too. So, here we are. But I used to research them. What should we do? What should we put in them? I started working on atlases, and I wrote texts for them. So, my role quickly became not just of the production cartographer, but looking editorially. At some point I moved to the magazine, National Geographic Magazine, um, I had various titles there. I was the art director, creative director, executive editor.

David Nassar: No experience actually in media and publications prior to that…

Kaitlin Yarnall: All on the job. And I tell people I went to the best J school, design school that one could. I learned at the feet of masters there. And, I also, it was an interesting time at National Geographic in that we had a bunch of like mass retirements and reorganizations shortly after I got there. So, when I started, there were a couple like old cartographers there who like had come in at the end of World War II. Like, I mean, it was really incredible. And so, I got to learn that, and learn on the job about how to be a journalist, how to be a designer, how to run a publication. I went to press with the magazine every month. It was such an incredible education and growth trajectory. And at some point, there were some corporate changes at National Geographic, and I’d been there about 10 years.

David Nassar: Mm-hmm.

Kaitlin Yarnall: And we really was kind of tired. The thing about publishing is it’s amazing, but at that point, I was also doing a lot of digital work. When the first iPad came out, it came out with National Geographic Magazine on it. And so, we had to design,

David Nassar: I remember that, actually.

Kaitlin Yarnall: Yeah. We had to design for that without seeing what an iPad looked like, like there was a lot of fun. But, at some point, there was gonna be a corporate change, and I just said, you know what? I think I’m tired. I, I wanna try something new. I think I’m gonna take a break. At that point, I went to do the then CEO’s office to basically say, you know, I don’t have anything else lined up, but I, I think I’m gonna step back. And, uh, he said, well, why don’t you stay on the nonprofit side and help me figure out, uh, how we do storytelling in a nonprofit way.

David Nassar: Mm-hmm.

Kaitlin Yarnall: So that’s kind of been the next chapter, the last roughly 10 years. It was an interesting conundrum because storytelling at National Geographic is literally what built the house. It’s exactly everything we did. But now we had to figure out how to do it in a nonprofit way. In the past, we had done it as a media company.

David Nassar: Yep.

Kaitlin Yarnall: And so, fast forward to now, we’re the largest funder of individual storytellers in the world. We have. You know, an in-house production team. We, we are a fully-fledged storytelling organization again and still have our incredible partnership with the media side, now in partnership with the Walt Disney Company.

David Nassar: Why don’t you, if you could, just briefly walk through the history of what happened in those years? So that people can get a sense of the context.

Kaitlin Yarnall: Yeah. So National Geographic Society was founded in 1888 as a nonprofit. That was when the first issue of the magazine came out. It was always a grant-giving organization, launched expeditions, gave grants, had public lectures, a magazine, and that is how the company started in a nonprofit way, and that’s how our media business started. Fast forward through the years, we added a television arm. We added a channel. We added international channels, we added books, we added travel, like we became really a media company. But always with non-profit status and always non-governmental, non-profit, and always grants running expeditions, we at some point expanded a joint venture that we already had within 21st Century Fox. Since then, that portion of 21st Century Fox has been acquired by the Walt Disney Company. So today, what does it mean is that the National Geographic Society, where I work, owns the copyright, the brand, that yellow rectangle, and we have a partnership with the Walt Disney Company. They have the license to run National Geographic media in a consumer-facing way. Because of that, we also share part of the profit which allows us to then do the nonprofit work that we do on our side.

David Nassar: Okay, so now you’re Chief Storytelling Officer. What does someone do with a title like that? What’s the, what does the job entail?

Kaitlin Yarnall: The real answer is a lot of management and spreadsheets, and budgets like the rest of us. But, at the highest level, I’m responsible for the storytelling, the impact of storytelling insociety. I have five teams in my division. One is our grants and programs, so these are the people who identify and fund, photographers, filmmakers, writers, cartographers around the world, and we give them grants from $10,000 up to multimillion-dollar grants. We often do that in partnership with other organizations, like we’re doing right now. That’s one team.

The next team is mapping and geography. So, still maintain the Cardio graphic database’s own mapping policy that anyone who works with our brand has to follow. And we also do quite a bit of mapping for our explorers. explorers at National Geographic are people who receive grants. from us.

I have something called the Impact Story Lab. This is our in-house production team. So they do everything from, you know, our brand videos that you’ll see to, a lot of fundraising videos too. have a museum that’s going to open next year. We had a museum. We’re gonna expand it. We’re doing a big remodeling. and we’re right now in the process of loading in, over 120 videos into that. then we also do impact. Storytelling film, photography, AR VR podcasts, um, with express purpose of making impact. So that looks like social narrative change or policy change. And we do that working with our explorers. So, a scientist wants to change a piece of legislation in her country, we’ll work with her to create media to make that happen.

My fourth team is special collections, which is the National Geographic Society Archives, so as you can imagine, that’s 137 years of a basement, filled with treasures. And so, part of that is just normal archival custodianship work. But it’s also really doing a lot of recontextualization of our archives, making assets available for other institutions, for our explorers. And, it’s really exciting work.

And then the fifth team is something called our Storytellers Collective, which is a revenue-generating center where we teach other organizations and train people to tell stories better. So that’s public speaking, visual narratives. We do a lot of work in that space.

David Nassar: So, some people may wonder what the connection is between the National Geographic Society and the John Templeton Foundation. And so, I would remind our listeners that the John Templeton Foundation’s mission is to fund interdisciplinary research and catalyze conversations that inspire awe and wonder. The National Geographic Society clearly engages in funding scientists, research projects that instill a sense of awe and wonder in the world.

Science is a doorway to the transcendent, and I’m wondering if there are any projects that come to mind where you feel like science has been a doorway to something mysterious. Let’s just call it that. something that really made you think about the nature of the universe, our role in it, the big questions.

Kaitlin Yarnall: Yes, absolutely. One of the reasons I’ve stayed at National Geographic for over 20 years is because of this very thing.

Every time I hear a scientist or, a photographer, or a filmmaker come back from the field, and I have the incredible privilege of seeing and hearing what they’ve done, this very phenomenon happens to me. It just generates more and more questions and really makes me feel small in the best way. So, a couple examples. I’ll give, give, one, we have a project currently, with a National Geographic explorer. He’s a scientist named David Gruber, and his project is called Project CETI. And he’s working with incredible interdisciplinary team of linguists and, deep computer programming, AI people, and biologists, and he is decoding the language. of sperm whales.

David Nassar: Hmm.

Kaitlin Yarnall: And notice I said language. They are speaking, and they have culture.

David Nassar: Mm-hmm.

Kaitlin Yarnall: One of the scientists he’s working with is another explorer named Shane Garrow, who’s an incredible marine biologist who works with a population of sperm whales in Dominica. And, they are listening and watching the whales, and they are figuring out what they are saying. And when you start thinking about that, you know, that in and of itself is mind-blowing, right? Mind-blowing.

David Nassar: Mm-hmm.

Kaitlin Yarnall: But I think the thing that leaves me wondering and really more questions is when you start playing it out. Okay. If we can understand them, should we talk to ’em? What should we say? What are the ethics around? this? And once we do sperm whales, who we know are incredibly sentient beings. What should we do? Others, yes or no, they’re just more questions than answers. I love the program and, and they’re getting very close, very, very close. They have the alphabet decoded now.  Another project that I love is called the Wonder Lab, so it’s appropriately named, run by a scientist, photographer inventor named Varma in Berkeley, California.

And he is a science photographer, but he invents camera systems ’cause he takes pictures of things that are too small, too big, too, you know, fast for traditional cameras to capture. And in doing that, he’s really focused on evolutionary biology. And I’m not talking about deep evolution, I’m talking about like the insides of chicken eggs.

No one has ever put a camera in and visualized, from chicken, egg laying, to hatching. That’s his current project right now, which is very exciting. And every project Onin does one, it’s just the human ability to see and create and imagine and fail is incredible. But then also, simple things like who thinks about a chicken egg? And like, you know, something right in front of us. And then we realize we don’t know. There’s so much that we don’t know.

Kaitlin Yarnall: In 2023, NGS submitted a proposal to the John Templeton Foundation, and it’s called the National Geographic Society Storytelling Project. And it was approved and began to run in January 2024. It’s expected to run through December 2026. Can you tell us a little bit about what the project broadly aims to do, how it aims to do it, and the questions that it seeks to address?

Kaitlin Yarnall: Yes, so this program is very exciting. I’m, I’m thrilled with it in that, at its core, at its essence, we have issued A-R-F-P-A request for proposals to storytellers around the world. And they are applying with project ideas that look at, we’re calling it, the big questions. So, some of the things we were just talking about. What is the connection between the natural world and humanity? How do we look at diverse areas of intelligence? What is the connection between spirituality and nature? And we left it pretty wide open by design, which is really exciting. and what I love about this call for proposals as well is that unlike some of the work we do, where we are asking people to come up with action plans that lead to direct conservation outputs or lead to direct, impacts on the ground, this is not that. This is looking for illumination and pondering.

David Nassar: Mm-hmm.

Kaitlin Yarnall: Which is really exciting, particularly for storytellers who, that’s what many of them do. So, we have awarded our first tranche out of that RFP, to some incredible projects. And then it is open right now; it closes in days, probably by the time you hear this, so it will be closed.

David Nassar: Can you say a little bit about any of the particular projects that were in the first tranche?

Kaitlin Yarnall: One is by an incredibly talented, Russian photographer and filmmaker named Evgenia Arava. She was nominated for an Academy Award a couple years ago, and she is working in her native Siberia and looking at the spiritual and paleontological, is that a word? Sure. It is now. Basically, questions that are coming because of climate change. So basically, as permafrost is melting tons of ice, age beings are coming out of the ice.

David Nassar: Beings. What do you mean by beings?

Kaitlin Yarnall: Animals, viruses, we’re talking everything from like woolly mammoths to giant sloths to, we don’t really know everything that’s gonna come out of this ice. And there are paleontologists, she’s following a particular one, who are working on this and, it’s, you know, in some ways a gold mine to them to see this stuff, and capture it. But the paleontologist she’s following is also indigenous.

David Nassar: Mm-hmm.

Kaitlin Yarnall: And so in the cosmology of this particular group, um, this is not a good thing. This is like the underworld spirits coming out. And so it’s this connection between this cosmology and what it means versus the science of how do we learn about our past, but also, this indigenous wisdom is pretty bang on. This is not a good thing. You have warmed the planet. Mammoths are cool, but what viruses and bacteria are we unleashing? And so, it’s and gonna be aesthetically stunning. It’s gorgeous up there. And she has an incredible eye, and I can’t wait to see it. She’s making a documentary. Nobody else could tell this story, either. In that, she has all the access in the world being from there.

You want another one?

David Nassar: Sure.

Kaitlin Yarnall: Matt Machu Paley is a French photographer who is doing a really cool story, that’s a global story, but he’s focusing it in really Central Asia, where he spent a lot of time, and he speaks Tajik and Uzbek. And, he is looking at the human connection, of culture and walking, our ability to walk, and how that impacts everything that we do. The very obvious to, looking at nomadic cultures and what that looks like, and how our walking and our walking speed is in sync to animal movement. But then he also has a whole section of the project that I’m really excited to see, that is about religious pilgrimages and uh, about how not only do we walk to move our livestock and to follow seasonality where grasses are and, and seek shelter, but we do this in a deep spiritual meaning way that most faiths have some form of pilgrimage, and most of these are done on foot. And so, what do they look like? And, why do we walk now? Why are the many of the great pilgrimages still done on foot? Also, just even though he’s focusing there because of the nomadic cultures, and the pilgrimages, and it’s where he’s comfortable. This story, you could tell it in Mexico City, too.

David Nassar: I’ll just mention a couple of the other titles from some of the other storytelling projects besides the two that you mentioned. Um, why is Life Purposeful from Melanie Challenger. Interconnected, The Snow Leopard from Gungeon Menon. The forest effect and exploration of the human forest psychophysical interconnection from Elizabeta Zevoli. These sound fascinating.

Kaitlin Yarnall: They are.

David Nassar: Um, I can’t wait to see them. So, let’s return to your work more broadly. What have you learned about science communication?

Kaitlin Yarnall: A lot. I think that. In some ways, science communication has been almost like fetishized, that it’s like this special thing, there are people getting PhDs in science communication, and I’m throwing no shade at them, like that’s incredible. And we need them and the research that they’re producing, I use right? However, I think we’ve made it to feel like this thing that we can’t all do.

David Nassar: Mm-hmm.

Kaitlin Yarnall: Right. Which is not true. I think science communication is the same as. Every communication you have to meet the audience where they are. And I think you’ve gotta take them in their door, and then you can take ’em out yours. But we have to make science stories compelling, and that doesn’t mean dumbing them down. We have to make them understandable and relatable, and relevant. And dare I say, entertaining. And beautiful. We’re competing for people’s time and attention. And so, yes, there are the people who are going to read the scientific journals. There are the people who are going to tune into to scientific podcasts and bless them. We need them. But how do we get outside of that bubble? We have to make the stories interesting enough, compelling enough that they’re just good stories. And I tell you like the natural world is more dramatic and interesting and compelling than any fiction.

David Nassar: Mm-hmm.

Kaitlin Yarnall: And the burden is on us as the quote-unquote storytellers, which I would say is everyone to, to pull those stories out and get them in front of people, and so I think that science communication is no different than any other kind of communication.

David Nassar: There are people who I think resist the idea of popularizing the kind of work that NGS funds. Some might even say dumbing it down, which I don’t like that term, but I know people use it. You think there’s a place for what NGS does, or you wouldn’t be doing it, is, does that mean there’s not a place for more technical kinds of storytelling?

Kaitlin Yarnall: No. Um, it’s just different. And, a scientist who I like very much, Jonathan Foley, said one time to me that we don’t need a silver bullet. We need silver buckshot. And I think that that is true. Like we, we need to tell stories to different audiences. I think that National Geographic’s audience is important and relevant, and more technical, academic audiences are also incredibly important. They’re different.

David Nassar: Mm-hmm.

Kaitlin Yarnall: And you do not have to dumb science down to make it popular. You may have to simplify, you may have to edit, you may have to switch the vocabulary, but you can be incredibly precise and accurate with non-academic language.

David Nassar: In our field of communications and storytelling, what are you seeing right now as the methods or the mechanisms that you feel like are working? Is there anything you think that’s just flat out not working anymore? What are you seeing in the industry as a whole?

Kaitlin Yarnall: I think what’s interesting is the industry is more and more diverse.

David Nassar: Mm-hmm.

Kaitlin Yarnall: You know, and I think over time, you know, television was gonna kill radio.

David Nassar: Right.

Kaitlin Yarnall: And we’re doing a podcast, right? I don’t see much going away. Attention spans are getting shorter. That is true. And yet, young people are watching long-form on YouTube.

David Nassar: Yeah.

Kaitlin Yarnall: Right. So, I think there is time and space for everything. I think what’s happening is, media outlets are becoming more niche

David Nassar: Mm-hmm.

Kaitlin Yarnall: To meet that, knowing that the audiences are more fragmented. I also think the way that we tell stories is, is evolving and changing. I see this acutely in big old National Geographic nature documentaries. It used to be like almost a voice of God coming from above. Even look at Sir David Attenborough and how this changed, and now there is a recognition that humans are in the story. And the good ones are bringing in scientists, and conservationists, and local communities. Right. And so, I think there is that understanding. It is no longer as mysterious to the average audience of how television’s made, how is radio made? Because we walk around with these phones in our pockets that are better than most cameras anyone could imagine 10 years ago. Right? And so, I think because of that one, the barrier to entry is a lot lower. Two people are less duped by the magic of it all. And so, I think audiences are more sophisticated in that way, which is a good thing. And again, television interviews aren’t dead. Podcasts aren’t dead. Radio’s not dead. It’s just a new form. And almost a mashup of it all.

David Nassar: Yeah. I love that you’re saying that. And the same thing is happening with journalism and Substack now. Journalism’s dying, but people are writing on Substack.

Kaitlin Yarnall: I don’t think journalism’s dying. I think the industry’s kind of in crisis, and the publications are having a heck of a time. And I worry about without the publications, how do people learn? But writers are gonna write, reporters are gonna report, investigative stories are happening.

David Nassar: You, also must also see storytelling differences in storytelling around the world.

Kaitlin Yarnall: Absolutely.

David Nassar: Do you write primarily for an American audience, or are you increasingly trying to produce stories for other places in the world?

Kaitlin Yarnall: So, the media side is interesting in that they operate out of Washington DC and a lot of that content is distributed globally, but then there are also international content creators and distribution mechanisms.

 On the society side, we either give grants or fund content creation. Most of our grants go outside of the United States we get to see this diversity of how people tell stories. And as long as applicants can tell me their intended audience and purpose, and that their storytelling fits into that, great. It does not necessarily have to fit into a North American or Western European model of distribution or even style. And then in terms of our creation, so some of like our impact work, we made a, a film several years ago in Setswana, which is the language of Botswana, that aired on Botswana public television every week for a year. And that looked very different, not just the language, but the music. Everything looked very different than if we were making it for us. But it was an impact film for Botswana. So, it made sense that we did it in that way and had local composers and crew. And so for me, not being tied to one media distribution platform like I was for years. It allows you to play. And it allows me to learn to see like, oh, this is interesting, what’s happening in the Philippines right now. Wow, look at these photographers in Colombia, they see differently. And isn’t that cool? And by looking at all this work, this produced it, you start to see the media landscape, how it’s shifting and different.

David Nassar: This has been wonderful. Is there anything that we didn’t talk about that you wanted to touch on?

Kaitlin Yarnall: I don’t think so. Thank you.

David Nassar: Okay. Well, I will say publicly what I’ve said before: I am always jealous of the idea that when your kids were little, you were able to tell them you were the Chief Storytelling Officer at the National Geographic Society, and I hope that’s been fun for you.

Kaitlin Yarnall: And they don’t know what it means, but I, I’ve got good swag. So, it’s great though.

David Nassar: It must come up when it’s story time, like, hey, mom’s the chief storytelling officer. Does your husband ever get to tell the stories?

Kaitlin Yarnall: And the 14-year-old, now, her favorite trick used to be to, to flip over the magazine and find my name for her friends. But, I think that’s worn off a little. You know, high schoolers are tough.

David Nassar: Sure. Alright, well, thank you for joining us today, and we’ll see you out there.

Kaitlin Yarnall: Okay, thanks.