WASHINGTON: It’s like the opposite of naming your dream dinner party guests. In a Netflix interview aired posthumously, Jane Goodall, who died last week at 91, said she’d gladly send Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Benjamin Netanyahu off the planet in a SpaceX rocket.

Clips from the show “Famous Last Words” have since gone viral with tens of millions of views, drawing praise but also some scorn for the legendary primatologist, and even sparking debate over whether the footage was real or AI-generated.

Netflix said she filmed the interview in March with the understanding that it would not be released until after her death. “Do you have people that you don’t like?” host Brad Falchuk asked Goodall, who began the interview by sipping a glass of whiskey — her pre-talk ritual to keep her voice supple.

“Absolutely, there are people I don’t like, and I would like to put them on one of Musk’s spaceships and send them all off to the planet he’s sure he’s going to discover,” she replied.

Musk, the world’s richest person, has made it his life’s mission to colonise Mars and make humanity a “multiplanetary species”. Goodall added that Musk would “be the host, and you can imagine who I’d put on that spaceship”.

“Along with Musk would be Trump, and some of Trump’s real supporters, and then I would put Putin in there, and I would put President Xi — I’d certainly put Netenyahu in there, and his far-right government. Put them all on that spaceship and send them off.”

The conversation then turned to aggression in chimpanzees and whether the men she’d named were “alphas”. Goodall said among chimps there are two kinds of alpha: those who rely on brute force and burn out quickly, and those who build alliances and endure.

Her research, she said, convinced her that aggression is innate to both chimps and humans, who share nearly 99 per cent of their DNA. “But I truly believe that most people are decent,” she said.

Goodall closed the interview with a message of hope — and a warning to those who would harm “Mother Nature“.

“If you want to save what is still beautiful in this world, if you want to save the planet for the future generations, your grandchildren, their grandchildren, then think about the actions you take each day,” she said.

She added that she believed in life beyond death and that “consciousness survives.”

Published in Dawn, October 9th, 2025