Using Exponential Technology to Uplift the Overlooked and Underestimated
The Prime Directive
Van Jones has a single organizing principle: Make Wakanda Real.
It sounds like a pop culture reference. It's actually a civilizational Moonshot.
"If you can create a future where people who look like me are thriving, using technology, connected to the land, connected to their ancestors, happy and heroic – then that's a win for the planet."
Van is a three-time New York Times bestselling author, CNN host, Emmy Award-winning producer, and founder of multiple social enterprises. He received Jeff Bezos's Courage and Civility Award: $100 million to distribute to philanthropic efforts worldwide. He's worked in the Obama White House and collaborated with the Trump administration to pass landmark criminal justice reform.
But the through-line isn't prestige. It's justice.
"I'm a seventh generation American. I'm the first person in my family born with all my rights recognized by the US government."
That fact shapes everything.
Van graduated from Yale Law School in 1993—right after the Rodney King verdict. He immediately started suing police departments and prisons. For a decade, he worked in Oakland's toughest neighborhoods.
The work nearly broke him.
"I couldn't sustain the effort just working against racism. I needed to be working for some kind of end state."
That end state arrived in the early 2000s: the intersection of criminal justice, economic justice, and environmental justice. Van called it "green jobs, not jails."
He launched the Oakland Green Jobs Corps, teaching young men standing on street corners how to install solar panels. Fighting pollution and poverty at the same time.
Nancy Pelosi heard about it. Then George W. Bush. Van's ideas became the Green Jobs Act of 2007. By 2009, he was the Obama administration's Green Jobs Advisor, overseeing $80 billion in clean energy investment.
The pattern repeated with criminal justice. During the Trump administration, Van helped pass the FIRST STEP Act: the most substantial prison reform in a generation. Fifty thousand people have left federal prison since.
"I've seen a lot of stuff from the jailhouse to the White House."
Van's real focus is civilizational.
"We are all founders of a new human civilization. What we build matters. What we dream matters."
The question: Are we heading toward a new dark ages or a new enlightenment?
"If the operating system is about distract and divide, if the incentives are all greed and speed—you're headed toward techno-fascist dystopia. But if you get incentives aligned so people do good when they're doing well? You could have an unimaginably beautiful planet."
His framework: artificial intelligence is interesting. Ancient intelligence is more interesting.
"Prayer still matters. Meditation still matters. I want to stand at the intersection of artificial intelligence and ancestral intelligence – so we have not just data, but wisdom."
Van's current ventures put this philosophy into practice.
Rapport, backed by Reid Hoffman, works like a Fitbit for the firm—using AI to increase emotional intelligence across distributed, diverse workplaces.
"Rather than using AI to replace humans, we're using AI to make humans more human."
Dream Machine Innovation Lab runs the AI Library Project in partnership with Google. The team delivers free AI education in public libraries across Brooklyn, Atlanta, Detroit, and Miami. Forty-five percent of participants are over 45.
Van has also invested in Rasa, which uses AI to expunge criminal records for $400 instead of $10,000, and Untapped Solutions, a platform functioning as LinkedIn for formerly incarcerated people.
"We have an incarceration industry that makes money locking people up. I think we need a de-incarceration industry that makes money keeping people out."
Van sees something most technologists miss: wisdom collects at the bottom of systems.
"Put technology in the hands of people who've been excluded. They start solving problems that the people who run society don't even know exist."
The light is at the crossroads: where people with real problems meet people with real new technologies.
Van's ultimate success metric: when Black excellence in technology becomes as assumed as Black excellence in athletics.
"Nobody's surprised if somebody from China or Singapore is doing something amazing in technology. I want it equally a given for somebody in Kenya or Nigeria."
His Moonshot of all Moonshots:
"Can you create a new human civilization more at peace with itself and the Earth? Can you create an economy that is post-scarcity, post-growth, and post-hate?"
That's the question. Van Jones has been working on the answer for 30 years.
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