the WHY:
Finding the secrets of how to live a good and meaningful life and how to create a wiser, healthier, and more just world.
Doug Abrams is a multiple New York Times-bestselling author as well as an editor, literary agent, film producer, and life adventurer who is committed to helping catalyze the next evolutionary stage of our global culture.
Doug co-wrote The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World with the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu, which inspired the film MISSION: JOY, which is now on Netflix. Doug served as the interviewer in the film as well as an Executive Producer. He also co-wrote The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times with Jane Goodall. He has coauthored many bestselling non-fiction books and has written two novels, The Lost Diary of Don Juan and Eye of the Whale, which together have been translated into over thirty languages.
Doug is the Founder and President of Idea Architects, a creative book and media company helping visionaries to create a wiser, healthier, and more just world. As a literary agent and editor, he has helped create 18 New York Times Bestsellers and had the privilege of working with many great thought leaders, visionary scientists, and humanitarians including Nobel Laureates Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, Jody Williams, and Elizabeth Blackburn. Doug also worked closely with Desmond Tutu as his coauthor, editor, and literary agent for almost two decades. He also worked with Stephen Hawking on his last book.
Books and films he has developed have been credited with convincing then-President Bill Clinton to stop the genocide in Kosovo (The Bridge Betrayed), for launching the modern anti-slavery movement (Disposable People), and for helping to expand a mass incarceration reform movement (Just Mercy, a book and film starring Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Foxx), and for helping to address our environmental crisis (A Life on Planet Earth, The Future We Choose, which inspired a near future grounded sci-fi feature film which he is Executive Producing with the Obamas’ Higher Ground Productions for Netflix).
Dialogue is key to Doug’s work, and he believes that genius is a collaborative process. His goal is to bring people together in a cultural conversation through books and media that transform lives and, ultimately the world. He has had the privilege of being in dialogue with global icons, including the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, Jane Goodall, Jimmy Carter, Bono, Carlos Santana, Richard Branson, and many others.
He is also interested in the power of the internet to create positive social change and was also on the founding team of JustGive.org, a philanthropy website that has pioneered new forms of giving and has been responsible for giving over half a billion dollars to charity.
His current projects include The Adventure of Life, a wisdom adventure podcast and book series, as well as a gathering of thought leaders committed to personal, interpersonal, and planetary change, a curriculum for human well-being, and a protopian New Human Story that can help us to imagine the future.
Throughout all of his wide-ranging projects, Doug aspires to create life-changing and world-changing conversations and culture that can contribute to a world of thriving people on a thriving planet.
He lives with his wife and lifelong conversation partner, Rachel Carlton Abrams, M.D., an integrative family physician and founder of the Transformational Medicine practice (link), author of BodyWise (link). He and Rachel have three grown children, Jesse, Kayla, and Eliana, who are their greatest joy.
on a PERSONAL NOTE—
“I am HUMAN and nothing human [or Baby Yoda] is foreign from me.”
— TERENCE
