Media Shakeups + Who’s Behind the Climate Crisis — with Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben, a contributing writer to The New Yorker and the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in environmental studies at Middlebury College, joins Scott to discuss the state of climate change, including the problem of burning fossil fuels and potential solutions. Follow Bill on Twitter, @billmckibben. Scott opens by discussing the recent media shakeups at Fox News and CNN. He also shares why Ron DeSantis should have never picked a fight with Disney. Algebra of Happiness: the joy of malls. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Scott Galloway?

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• 0:48Speaker 01

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• 1:18Scott Galloway?

  Episode 247. 247 is the calling code assigned to Ascension Island, an isolated volcanic island. In 1947, the Roswell UFO incident occurred, which was when the US Army recovered a flying disc from a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico, and became the center of extraterrestrial conspiracy theories. "I was abducted by aliens and they used an ale probe on me." And then I realized they were just speaking my language.

• 1:54Scott Galloway?

  Welcome to the 247th episode of the Prob G-Pod. In today's episode, we speak with Bill McKibben, a contributing writer to The New Yorker and the Schuman Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College. We discuss with Bill the state of climate change, specifically how he ended up in such a precarious position. Precarious means fucked for those of you out there who aren't pedantic. We also hear about Bill's latest book, The Flag, The Cross, and the Station Wagon. A grang American looks back at his suburban boyhood and wonders what the hell happened. Bill has a nice way of kind of couching all of this in fairly, I don't know, easily digestible terms. Okay, what's happening? Some big shakeups in the world of media.

• 2:37Scott Galloway?

  Tucker Carlson is leaving Fox News. Okay, there you go. I don't think I've ever seen a full episode of Fox News or Tucker Carlson. I was on, actually, Tucker's show. I believe in going on Fox. I used to go on a lot. It was fine. No big shakes. Anyways, as always, I've managed to figure out a way to bring this back to me. In addition, not to be outdone on the left, as we need balance in the universe for every action, there's a reaction. Don Lemon was ousted from CNN, and Jeff Shell, the CEO of NBC Universal, is stepping away due to an inappropriate relationship with a woman in the company. Okay, there you go. Fox News said Carlson and the network have agreed to part ways, and that his last program was Friday, April 21st. However, it's apparent now that Carlson was fired, and according to The Wall Street

• 3:20Scott Galloway?

  Journal, was notified just 10 minutes before Fox made the announcement. The firing comes shortly after Fox settled the Dominion voting case for $787 million. The Washington Post also added, "There's a few reasons that are likely at play here, including how the Dominion case made Carlson's private texts public, where he was being critical of Fox management and using misogynistic language. Not only that, a former booking producer on Carlson's show is pursuing legal action against the network, alleging she faced discrimination and was subjected to vile sexist stereotypes." There you go. Tucker Carlson Tonight averaged 3.3 million viewers in 2022. For context, Fox's overall network averaged 1.5 million viewers last year. That's up 12% year-on-year.

• 4:04Scott Galloway?

  Whereas MSNBC averaged 733,000. That's down 19%. And CNN averaged 568,000 viewers. That's down 27%. I mean, think about that. Fox gets about triple the number of viewers. I know that Anderson Cooper, who's sort of the star of CNN, gets about a million viewers on average, and Tucker garnered 3 million. So there's no, there's just no doubting the power. What was interesting is CNN usually was able to get higher or greater revenues. Why? Because the people who watch Fox are crazy and old, which is licensed for, they don't buy shit. They're cheap. They're buying Life Alert and oxygen tanks. And I don't know, I'm trying to think of whatever else, you know, CPAPs. Whereas people who watch CNN

• 4:46Scott Galloway?

  are a touch bit younger, i.e. in their 80s, not their 90s, and buy things like cars, or if they're young, make stupid decisions and buy things like coffee and tennis shoes and smartphones and other high-margin products. Anyways, the NYT's Deal Book reported that Fox stock dropped 3% on the day of the news, which was more than it did after the firm settled the Dominion case. Yeah, it's not a big deal. Over at CNN, Don Lemon found out about his termination from his agent and said in a statement, "I am stunned. After 17 years at CNN, I would have thought that someone in management would have had the decency to tell me directly." Oh, Don, poor fucking you, Don. What were you making, 5 or 10 million bucks a year? And they didn't call. Something tells me that's bullshit. That's

• 5:27Scott Galloway?

  bullshit. That Don is imagining things. Maybe he's past his prime. Maybe he's in cognitive decline, you know? Truth is, most anchors on CNN really hit their cognitive prime or their peak in their 20s or 30s. Anyways, I like Don mostly because I think he's a good-looking guy. And I think it's important to have good-looking anchors. I mean, for God's sakes. Anyways, Don goes on to say, "In no time was I ever given any indication that I would not be able to continue to do the work I have loved at the network." What about when you really fucked up and everyone was saying, "Oh, you really fucked up and you might lose your job"? Did that, that kind of tip you off, big D? CNN Communications tweeted, "Don Lemon's statement about this morning's events is inaccurate. He was offered an opportunity to meet with management, but instead released a statement on Twitter."

• 6:10Scott Galloway?

  Okay, so there's a few things here and a few learnings. The first is, you can work your ass off. You can be really good at what you do. And that's about 50% of your brand. And the other 50% happens in about an hour. And that is- How you behave, how you acquit yourself during the hour when you find out that you've been fired. And here, Don Lemon is basically shitting all over his legacy by being, you know, for lack of a better term, kind of a bitch in terms of, is that sexist or homophobic? I don't know. When I say bitch, I mean someone that's just acting like, I don't know, poorly. Anyways, I think he's acting, I don't think he's doing himself any favors. People remember how you leave, and this is how you leave. You're gracious. It has been my honor to be here. I've loved working with my colleagues.

• 6:55Scott Galloway?

  I hope that I get the chance to work with them again, and I wish everyone in the network nothing but good things. And then, by the way, if you really feel that you've been wronged, you lawyer up. But publicly, internally, you're gracious. People remember how you leave. It's tempting on the way out to stick up the middle finger. And guess what? This is what it means to be an adult. This is what it means to be a professional. Because guess what? Someone else has to hire you. And in the world of TV, once you get hired, it means they're gonna have to fire you at some point. It's a very insecure profession. And they see how you are leaving and decide, do we really want to hire someone who's gonna start shitposting us the moment we decide he's the wrong guy or gal for the moment? These people make a shit ton of money. I mean, cry me a river. That's how it happens here.

• 7:37Scott Galloway?

  The other thing, the other thing to keep in mind here is that people will always, always inflate their value relative to the platform. What, you're killing it at Goldman Sachs? Yeah, some of it's you. A lot of it is Goldman Sachs. People are really impressed by you and return your call because you're calling from the White House or government? Well, guess what? That's a really good card to have. And when you're at CNN, you have a platform. And when you're at Fox, you have two very, very powerful platforms. And here's the deal. Anyone here from Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, Shelley Long? Remember Shelley? She was too big for Cheers. She needed to go on to make movies. So did McLean Stevenson at MASH. The platform is more powerful than you thought, and you are less powerful than you had hoped.

• 8:22Scott Galloway?

  If you can find the alchemy of a great platform that leverages your strengths, you want to be very thoughtful about whether or not it's you or the platform. Look at Chris Cuomo, who is remarkably talented and was the number one anchor on CNN. Chris, you know, has gone on to do, and who knows? He may build a big presence, but for the most part, he has been kind of, I don't know, the invisible man, if you will. These platforms are incredibly powerful. More than anything, more than anything, though, this represents a structural decline in ad-supported media. You're just gonna see more of this shit. Uptimes wallpaper over a lot of bad behavior and downtimes make people much less prone or much more woke. What do I mean by that? They get offended more easily and are looking

• 9:04Scott Galloway?

  for reasons to fire you when times are bad. And times are bad in ad-supported media. The cable industry is now in full-throated structural decline. And that is, there are so many options around streaming. You know what really struck me or really highlighted or brought into sharp relief? How incredibly bad of value cable television is? I like to watch live television. I'm an old guy. I like to watch Anderson Cooper. Occasionally, I watch Neil Cavuto on Fox. I think he's a quality journalist. But I like live TV. I enjoy just kind of pinging around and seeing Goodfellas for the 89th time. I also like live news. To get live TV on Hulu, I think it was like 70 or 80 bucks. So that's the cost. That's the value. 70 or 80 bucks to be able to watch, to be one

• 9:49Scott Galloway?

  of the million people watching Anderson Cooper every night. Or with that 80 bucks, what could I do with streaming? What is that? Netflix? Disney Plus? Hulu? Peacock? I don't know. Discovery Plus? Or whatever they call it. Discovery Plus, HBO Max, HBO Now, HBO Joey Bag of Donuts, by the way. Don't get me started on that brand architecture nightmare. But you could basically subscribe to almost every streaming network, get tens of billions of dollars in content, and still, still, be paying less than you pay to have cable television. Which shows you what happened. Cable television incrementally, because they had a monopoly, by running a regulated monopoly, regulatory capture, they convinced the government that, oh, there should only be one or two

• 10:34Scott Galloway?

  cable companies, could basically, these guys could basically increase affiliate fees, they had differentiated content, and slowly but surely woke up, and your cable bill was 200 bucks. And who came in and just with a fist of stone, tagged them on the chin, the mother of all chins, Netflix? At 12 bucks or 10 bucks, oh my god, that's, literally, what is a better bargain? And it's kind of ruined it. Netflix has kind of fucked it up for every other consumer subscription company, and that is, okay, the consumer does the math and says in the back of their mind, or has as a reference point in the back of the mind, anytime I pull out my credit card and agree to a monthly recurring revenue payment, I need a billion dollars in content in exchange for $1 per month. I mean, that is not easy.

• 11:17Scott Galloway?

  As you've seen, newspaper companies are going away. Do you get a billion dollars in content to get, I think the New York Times is 150 bucks a year, to get 150 billion dollars with the reporting? No, you don't. And nor do you get anything resembling that, nor do you get 80 billion dollars in content from cable companies when you spend 80 dollars a month on Hulu. The difference here, the price value equation is just, just remarkable. Axios reported the primetime viewership dropped 14% last year collectively across Fox, CNN, and MSNBC. I mean, that's just staggering. That means basically every three years, it's getting cut in half. That is just absolutely crazy. You know how you can tell that cable

• 11:58Scott Galloway?

  TV has just jumped the shark? Look at the ads. The ads are basically like, hey, we know life hasn't worked out for you and that you're poor and old and sick, and we're going to start pelting you with ads about your restless legs or your opioid-induced constipation. Is that what we have to look forward to? Seriously? Is that it? Is that what's waiting for us on the other end of 40s and 50s? We're going to see more and more pain in the ad-supported ecosystem. We're going to see all sorts of consolidation. And by the way, it's leaking into digital. It's leaking into digital. All of a sudden, Google looks tired overnight. They look as if they've been poorly managed for the last 10 years when ChatGPT-4 comes along and it ends up that actually Google had it. Talk about the innovator's dilemma.

• 12:40Scott Galloway?

  Let's go a little bit off script here. One of the brightest companies in the world, greatest concentration of IQ, more access to capital, they come up with some of the fundamental technologies that go into AI, and they don't leverage it because they don't want to fuck with this 150 billion dollar toll booth called search, which by the way, has not only not gotten better the last 10 years, it's gotten shittier and shittier. Now your entire first page on some search results don't take you to the best place, they take you to another place they can further monetize. It is the premier example of modern day innovator's dilemma, where they said, we can't risk our core business by coming up with new ideas or introducing new ideas that might cannibalize our existing business. Bob Iger, Iger, if you will, I don't know how I caught here, cable. By the way, Bob Iger.

• 13:24Scott Galloway?

  This fight with Disney, this is Governor DeSantis going a bridge too far. Very strong political instincts, felt that the woke mob had gone too far, and then found soft tissue around COVID, around loosening COVID restrictions. Florida got it right. I hate to admit it because I was a critic in the beginning. Florida got it right about the same per capita mortality from COVID as every other state, but kept the schools open or reopened them sooner, sequestered seniors, and tried to let the majority of people who weren't at risk have regular lives. And guess what? You gotta give it to Governor DeSantis. That was the right call. Going after trans people, making stupid laws that are trying to figure out what offends the far right as opposed to actually what affects people, and passing these hateful laws,

• 14:09Scott Galloway?

  and then taking Florida back to Old Spain by banning abortion? Jesus Christ, what the fuck is going on in my home state of Florida? Seriously, what is going on? And this is a perfect example of minority rule. The majority of Americans believe in the right to choice. The majority of Americans believe in some sort of gun control. And they basically, Florida said, "You can now carry concealed weapon without a permit." Come on already. Literally, come on. What is going on here? What is a bridge too far? What has cost him probably the Republican nomination? Getting into a pissing match with Disney. One of the key tenets of a democracy is that once you are elected to higher office, you don't take your personal vendettas and start trying to go after your political enemies.

• 14:54Scott Galloway?

  That is a fascist play. That is a page out of the fascist playbook when you go after your political enemies. You also don't target companies. You pass laws. And the notion that Disney was getting special tax breaks, or wasn't in fact complying with the same laws or being held to the same standards as other companies, that is a worthwhile conversation you should have on a systemic level, and make sure that any changes apply to Ryder, or Carnival Cruises, or some of the other great companies in Florida. But to target Disney with this bullshit because they weren't supportive of your political ideological radical agenda that you're using to inflame the right, hoping that they will take you to more straws in Iowa? That is very short-term stupid thinking.

• 15:39Scott Galloway?

  And going after Disney, what does the Florida brand mean? What does the great brand of Florida mean? What are the underlying associations that pulse against the brand Florida? One, the weather. Two, we have the capital of Latin America in the form of Miami. A fantastic diverse culture. The Latin culture, the Latin vibe, that awesome feel that you're in Latin America when you're in certain parts of Florida. That is what it makes America great and it makes Florida great. A diverse community. We have a wonderful gay community in Florida. What else is amazing about Florida? Disney. Disney. They employ 80,000 people, tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars in economic growth. And DeSantis wants to go after Disney? What the fuck?

• 16:24Scott Galloway?

  The mouse is gonna bit slap you so hard, you're gonna be smacked back to Knott's Berry Farm. A much inferior tourist experience where in 11th grade Scott Galloway had to go because I didn't have the money for my birthday to go to Disneyland. That's right. Busch Gardens. Busch Gardens where you get free beer and you go on a log ride. The log ride was the bigger... What on earth is a brewer doing with an amusement park? Anyways, take me back. 11th grade. That's what I did for my 16th birthday. What did you do? Anyways, Bob Iger is smart, he's disciplined, and he is going to tag this guy over and over and over. What is the summary of Disney versus Governor DeSantis? One, is threatening to build more prisons next to a company, a private company, and

• 17:09Scott Galloway?

  some sort of weird fascist fucked up target the company without any real notion or intention of systemic change. The other guy, the other guy, is celebrating his LGBTQ brothers and sisters. So in sum, Bob Iger for president.

• 17:28Scott Galloway?

  By the way, Daddy is at the World Retail Summit in Barcelona. The light here is beautiful. I'm always happy when I come to Spain. I think Spanish is the most beautiful language in the world. It just feels happy and optimistic and I know that there's probably ham involved at some point in my near future. I absolutely... I'm at the hotel, I'm at the Hotel Arts. Very fancy. I've stayed here several times. I've got a view. And I'm on a fucking podcast. It's beautiful outside. I'd like to be out. I would be recognized here and people come up to me and say hi. This nice Scotsman in the elevator said, "Hey, did your dad ever go to the Coles Yard?" Because he knows my dad's Scottish because he's seen my podcast. Lovely guy. Lovely guy. I think it was called Coles Yard or Salt Coles Yard. Anyways, I forget. Not that my dad would remember anyways. My dad's struggling. My dad's struggling. He called me last night and he asked me to come get him.

• 18:11Scott Galloway?

  First off, he thinks I'm his brother, not his son. And he's worried. He says there's guns in the facility. Chances are at the Wesley Palms Retirement Facility, there aren't a lot of guns. And he's scared, and this is very upsetting. I don't know how I got here. Anyways, we'll be right back for our conversation with Bill McKibben.

• 18:30Scott Galloway?

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• 19:12Scott Galloway?

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• 19:31Scott Galloway?

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• 20:51Scott Galloway?

  Welcome back. Here's our conversation with Bill McKibben, a contributing writer to The New Yorker and a Schuman Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College. Bill, where does this podcast find you?

• 21:02Speaker 02

  I'm in the green mountains of Vermont.

• 21:05Scott Galloway?

  That sounds nice. So, let's talk about climate change. How did we get here, Bill?

• 21:09Speaker 02

  Well, the very long answer is we got here by burning a hell of a lot of coal and gas and oil and putting a lot of carbon in the atmosphere. But the slightly shorter answer is, we really got in trouble when we ignored the clear warnings from scientists 30, 35 years ago. I wrote the first book for a general audience about climate change way back in 1989, and we knew everything, basically, then that we know now. Our understanding of the problem and of the solutions hasn't changed in fundamental ways in all those years. It's just that we haven't done anything because some combination of inertia and mostly

• 21:51Speaker 02

  vested interest have kept us from taking the clear and obvious steps we should have been taking.

• 21:57Scott Galloway?

  I keep reading that there's kind of the windows closing, that if it goes much longer, there's a point of no return. What are your thoughts on this quote-unquote "point of no return," where the curve becomes parabolic and there's no reshaping the curve?

• 22:10Speaker 02

  Well, there's no, I don't think, singular failure point. It's not like other political problems that we deal with, in that you go past particular moments along the way from which there's no retreat. So, for instance, we're more than halfway through melting the sea ice in the summer Arctic, and it turns out that's having extraordinary effects on the operation of both the Jet Stream and the Gulf Stream. So, we're monkeying around in very profound ways with some of the biggest forces on planet Earth. The Gulf Stream, the flow of the Gulf Stream is 100 times the flow of the Amazon.

• 22:50Speaker 02

  We're not going back, no one's got a plan for how we're going to refreeze the Arctic anytime soon. So as we go past those tipping points, our options get fewer and fewer and the damage gets higher and higher and the ultimate outcome gets worse and worse. I don't think we're going to go past a point where there's where there's nothing that can be done to keep things from getting worse. But we're already in pretty bad shape and we've only increased the temperature of the Earth a little more than one degree Celsius. We're on a trajectory to increase it three degrees Celsius, you know, in the next few decades. And if that happens, we probably won't have civilizations like the ones we're used to.

• 23:35Scott Galloway?

  As we think about a cure or as we think about ways or means of addressing this, what are the common misconceptions about the biggest culprits around carbon emissions? Because I just read the other day, I think that kind of plant-based foods to beef is responsible for 8% of emissions. I don't know if I had that right. And that that was equivalent or that beef was basically as big a perpetrator here as transportation. And I may have that wrong. So set me straight here, stack rank the culprits here.

• 24:08Speaker 02

  Well, burning fossil fuel is about three quarters of all the emissions that go into the atmosphere, probably a little more. That leaves a quarter or more for the effects of methane, which comes in many cases from cows and for the effects of deforestation, often on behalf of cows. So the best guess is that altogether agriculture accounts for about 18% of emissions, which is a huge portion. Much of that is livestock, especially cows, which are off-the-charts problem for climate change.

• 24:52Speaker 02

  But that still leaves you with the fact that the biggest percentage by far that we have to address is the burning of fossil fuel for mobility, for heating, for power, for all the things that constitute modernity.

• 25:09Scott Galloway?

  Within that, who are the bad actors? And talk to me about different nations and talk to me about different types of fossil fuels.

• 25:16Speaker 02

  Sure. So there's no shortage of bad actors. Among the worst actors, because they've been the most powerful, are the fossil fuel industry largely headquartered in the US. We know now from great investigative reporting that companies like Exxon knew everything there was to know about climate change back in the 1980s, back when I was writing this first book, back when Jim Hansen at NASA was doing his work that he would testify before Congress about in 1988. Exxon was, for instance, the biggest company in the world then. They had a great staff of scientists and their product was carbon. So it's not surprising that they wanted to find out what the hell was going on. And they did.

• 26:00Speaker 02

  Their scientists gave their management a full understanding of the greenhouse effect and predicted with uncanny accuracy what the temperature was going to be in 2020. And what's more, they were believed by their management. Exxon, for instance, began doing things like building its drilling rigs higher to compensate for the rise in sea level that they knew was coming. What they didn't do was tell any of the rest of us. Instead, across this industry, not just Exxon, they hired many of the people who used to work for the tobacco industry. And they set to work building this architecture of deceit and denial and disinformation

• 26:43Speaker 02

  that's kept us locked for 30 years in this utterly sterile debate about whether or not global warming was real. The debate, remember, that both sides knew the answer to at the start. It's just one of them was willing to lie. And it's turned into the most consequential lie perhaps in human history because it's cost us the one thing we most need at time. Instead of having 30 or 40 years to deal with this crisis, because we didn't act decade after decade, we now have to move with truly uncomfortable speed all over the world.

• 27:19Speaker 02

  So that's, I think, the original sin around climate change.

• 27:25Scott Galloway?

  If you had a magic wand and you could take two or three things and substantially change either the consumption patterns of that nation, or the type of fossil fuel, or implement a certain type of technology or regulation, where would you go first?

• 27:38Speaker 02

  If you had a magic wand, does this magic wand come with a time machine? Can one go back in time?

• 27:43Scott Galloway?

  Let's assume it can't go back.

• 27:44Speaker 02

  All right. I mean, the two huge puffs of carbon into the atmosphere have been associated with American suburbanization in the post-war period and Chinese industrialization right on either side of the millennium. The US is, you know, has put more carbon into the atmosphere than any other country, nor no other country will ever match it. And it's all up there. I mean, the CO2 that came out of the back of my family's Plymouth Fury while I was getting my learner's permit in 1985 is still up there in the atmosphere trapping heat.

• 28:23Speaker 02

  And we remain, in pre-capita terms, the, you know, league champions, Americans. The Chinese now produce carbon on a huge scale, and that's added immensely to the crisis that we face. One of the really interesting questions, and if you really had a magic wand where you might want to go to work, is what's going to happen in the third huge country on Earth, India, which is sort of at the same stage in its energy evolution that China was 15, 20 years ago. But India comes into a world that's very different. Renewable energy is now the cheapest form of power on Earth.

• 29:04Speaker 02

  We live on a planet where, over the last 10 years, the engineers have driven down the price of sun and wind so sharply that the cheapest way to make power on our planet is to point a sheet of glass at the sun. And it's possible that India could develop fully without passing fully through the fossil fuel development stage that everybody else has gone through on route to modernity.

• 29:29Scott Galloway?

  Give me your thoughts on the role that, if and what role, nuclear power plays in climate change or addressing climate change?

• 29:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, nuclear power is low, pretty low carbon. So if you have a nuclear power plant near you now, it's probably a good idea to try and keep it open, at least while you're putting up solar panels and wind turbines and stuff. My guess is that it's not going to play a huge role in the next couple of decades. And the reason is not its dangers or anything. The reason is it's super expensive. It has to compete with incredibly cheap power that we get now from using the nuclear reactor that's 93 million miles out in space. So

• 30:19Speaker 02

  my guess is it's going to be a secondary thing for the moment. Now, there's a lot of smart people saying that we may have a fourth generation or fifth generation fleet of nuclear power in the not so distant future, that they could have small modular reactors, on and on and on. We don't know yet. No one's really put them into operation, at least on a scale large enough to know the critical thing, which is how expensive are they going to be? But it's quite possible that they, or some form of fusion, which as you know, came a little closer to reality last year with these latest set of experiments, could

• 31:04Speaker 02

  a generation out be a really important energy source. Our job, at least my job, given my age, I'm in my 60s now, is to do what we can to get the world through this next bottleneck to the point where people have some choices about what they're going to do. And it's possible that nuclear will be a high on the list of those choices. But for the moment, the off-the-shelf, cheap, available technology that we could deploy

• 31:33Speaker 02

  In enormous quantity, very fast, and very fast is key here because this is a time test, is solar panels, wind turbines, and the batteries to store what they produce. And I don't think people have fully cottoned on to the rapidity with which the price of those things has fallen. We're used to talking about clean energy as alternative energy. You know, it's the whole foods of energy while coal, oil, and gas, or whatever, are the, you know, the safe way. But in fact, it's now the opposite. You have to be willing to pay a higher price or to subsidize fossil fuel in order to make it work.

• 32:19Scott Galloway?

  And are you hopeful about the climate bill?

• 32:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, in certain ways. I mean, it's not a very good bill. Joe Manchin, who took more money from the fossil fuel industry than anybody else, did his best to gut it, and it was a pretty good job. It has no enforcement, no sticks of any kind. There are a lot of carrots, $400 billion worth, maybe more, depending on how it plays out. And, you know, a good chunk of that's going to go for things that we need to be doing: EV chargers, heat pumps, solar arrays, you know, on and on and on. I don't know whether it's going to be enough to catalyze this transition to happen at the speed that we

• 33:02Speaker 02

  need it to happen. But it's the first thing that, it's the only thing that the US Congress has done in 34 years. So, you know, credit there, anyway.

• 33:16Scott Galloway?

  Coming up after the break.

• 33:19Speaker 02

  Government, which is our name for working together, was, in Reagan's parlance, the problem, not the solution. Markets were supposed to solve all problems. And that way of thinking, that revolution that Reagan enacted was so powerful that, basically, it's dominated our political life since.

• 33:40Scott Galloway?

  Stay with us.

• 33:45Scott Galloway?

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• 34:30Scott Galloway?

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• 34:52Speaker 03

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• 35:22Scott Galloway?

  So let's switch gears and talk about your latest book, The Flag, The Cross, and The Station Wagon. In your book, you describe the United States as an increasingly doubtful nation, strained by all sorts of inequality. And you ask the question, "What the hell happened?" Question mark. Did you reach a conclusion?

• 35:40Speaker 02

  Sort of. I mean, this book is as close to memoir as I'll ever write. And the question that interested me was about what happened in the decade of my...

• 35:51Speaker 02

  Adolescence, the 1970s, because I think that that's sort of the critical decade in the American suburbs. You know, and it begins with America still engaged in the kind of group project that had possessed it since the Depression. The Great Society, the Civil Rights Movement, the Apollo Project, all the, you know, all the kind of things that even in a period of contention were about trying to build what Dr. King called the beloved community, what LBJ called the Great Society, whatever. And by the end of the decade, we were done with that. We'd made, beginning, I think, with Proposition 13 in California, the tax avoidance law that

• 36:34Speaker 02

  passed in 1978, and then crescendoing with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, we'd made a big decision that working together was not what we wanted to do anymore. Government, which is our name for working together, was, in Reagan's parlance, the problem, not the solution. We were each supposed to get rich ourselves. It was his great friend Maggie Thatcher who said, "There is no such thing as society. There are only individual men and women." Markets were supposed to solve all problems. And that way of thinking, that revolution that Reagan enacted was so powerful that basically it's dominated our political life since.

• 37:17Speaker 02

  And one of the problems with it was, it turned out not really to be true. If markets solve all problems, then why is the Arctic half melted now?

• 37:26Scott Galloway?

  It does feel as if because of a lack of an existential threat, because of social media polarizing us, because maybe our society has become more heterogeneous, which has a lot of wonderful upsides, but some externalities maybe that we don't like to admit, that we are, the connective tissue is fraying. If, if America was a horror movie, the call's coming from inside of the house. People trust their neighbor less than Putin. So I guess the question is, well, one, do you agree with that? And two, how do we restore that connective tissue?

• 37:59Speaker 02

  I do. I think that that Reagan era ushered in what I would call a kind of epoch of hyper-individuality.

• 38:08Speaker 02

  Where we are taught systematically to care first and foremost about ourselves. And I mean, as I said before, it doesn't work very well, you know, combined with physics. That's why the Arctic is melting. It also doesn't work all that well combined with human psychology. Because I think really, if you look around our country, one of the interesting things about it is that despite our strong focus on each of our own happiness all the time, we're not that happy. And I, I, I think that that's very connected. I mean, the average American has half as many close friends as they did in the 1950s. That's a big change for socially evolved primates. So how do you fix it?

• 38:51Speaker 02

  Well, there is no easy, obvious way to fix it in all its dimensions, but one starts trying. Joe Biden, to give him credit, is doing his best to, not to bring back the Clinton or Obama eras, but really to bring back the LBJ era. He's trying to use the government as a big problem solver that produces, among other things, factories for people to work in. One of the things that I think is interesting about the climate moment is, one of the ways you do it is through the thing we need to do to deal with the climate crisis, which is rely far more on locally produced energy than we do at the moment.

• 39:34Speaker 02

  I mean, right now, energy is something you purchase from Vladimir Putin, or the King of Saudi Arabia, or the Koch Brothers, all of whom have strong interests in degrading and deforming our democracy. But sun and wind aren't like that. Vladimir Putin can't embargo the sun, you know? Instead, it moves us more in the direction of a small d democratic world, one that can produce more of what it needs.

• 40:01Scott Galloway?

  You also, let's talk about your most recent project, Third Act. You're using it to organize people over 60 years of age for progressive change. Why focus on people over the age of 60? And what's your message to members of your generation?

• 40:15Speaker 02

  Well, I've spent most of my life working with young people, Scott. I, you know, founded 350.org, which was the first global grassroots climate change campaign. I was in my 40s, but with seven college students. And we worked together for years. You know, we ran these divestment campaigns from fossil fuel and college campuses. And so many students were so good at that that when they left, they formed the Sunrise Movement that brought us the Green New Deal. And you know about Greta Thunberg and the, all the amazing people like her around the world who have organized high school and junior high school students, all of which is good. But I did hear a few too many people say, oh, it's up

• 40:55Speaker 02

  to the next generation to solve these problems, which seems ignoble. And it also seems impractical. Because for all their energy and intelligence and idealism, young people lack the structural power that you'd need to make the change we have to have in the time that we've got. I think both on the issue of climate change and on the other issue that we work around, protection of democracy, of the political climate. And so, one of the places to turn for that structural power is people like me. Over the age of 60, there are 70 million of us in this country. So, bigger population than France. There's 10,000 more of us every day, which I think is slightly more than the number of people born every day in this

• 41:40Speaker 02

  country. Multiply that by some factor, because we all vote. There's no known way to stop old people from voting. And we ended up with most of the resources. Fair or not, we've got about 70% of the country's financial assets compared with about 5% for millennials. So if you want to push Washington or Wall Street, then useful to have some people with hairlines like mine. But conventional wisdom was that people just got more conservative as they aged. There was no use trying to organize it. And I don't know if that's true historically, but I don't think it's true of this generation. Because if you're in

• 42:20Speaker 02

  your 60s or 70s or 80s now, your first act was actually in this period of great solidarity in that period of the 1960s, when we started taking women seriously as political actors, when the apex of the civil rights movement, the first Earth Day. Look at the things that the Supreme Court, in its retrograde assault last summer, went after. They went after the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Gun Control Act of 1968, the Clean Air Act of 1970, and Roe v. Wade, 1973. These are the things that people my age spent their whole lives, you know, understanding as part of the framework of our society. And it turns out they're willing to defend them.

• 43:04Speaker 02

  We have tens of thousands of volunteers in our first year, chapters across America. And, you know, we're doing big, large-scale civil disobedience against the banks that are funding the fossil fuel industry. And we're registering voters by the tens of thousands and on and on and on.

• 43:22Scott Galloway?

  And at this point in your life, what box is left? I mean, you're, I think I've read you have 20 honorary degrees from different universities. What box is left for you to check personally and professionally? What are you, what are you hoping to achieve over the next decade or two decades?

• 43:38Speaker 02

  That's a good question. The only thing I really want to achieve over the next decade or so is some progress on this big project of slowing down the flow of carbon into the atmosphere. And I think that that's, we're still at the point where organizing is the sine qua non of that, organizing to stand up to the fossil fuel industry, but also organizing to get, you know, heat pumps and electric bikes and things out all across the country and the world. I'm old enough now that, that I have a feeling that my days are really global organizing. I mean, 350.org, which we founded, has organized something like 20,000 demonstrations in every

• 44:22Speaker 02

  country on earth except North Korea. I love this work of joining other people my age in backing up young people, in providing that kind of support. Our job, as I said before, is somehow just to help our planet and our democracy limp on along enough that the next generation of people really does have some options for, for how to keep this fight going.

• 44:47Scott Galloway?

  Bill McKibben is a contributing writer to The New Yorker, the founder of Third Act, which organizes people over the age of 60 for progressive change, and the Schuman Distinguished Caller in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College. He is the author of 20 books, including his latest, The Flag, The Cross and The Station Wagon: A Gray American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened? He joins us from his home in Vermont. Bill, thanks for your time and your good work.

• 45:13Speaker 02

  Could not have been more a pleasure. You have a very good day, you and everyone else there.

• 45:27Scott Galloway?

  Algebra of Happiness, the joy of malls. My son, my youngest, my oldest, who was always sort of, parents say they don't have a favorite. Here, let me give you some bad news. You're gonna have favorites. The good news is it switches back and forth. My favorite for a long time has been my oldest because he looks, smells and feels like me. And it's like a mini me. Loving him is like loving me, which I'm very good at. Recently, though, my older one has become much less lovable. He is a 15 year old going through puberty. And what's the term? He's awful. He doesn't want to talk. He's just, oh, he's just, he's just mildly disgusted at everything. And so he's, he's easy not to love right now. Of course, I love him and I miss having him.

• 46:12Scott Galloway?

  He's at boarding school. He's only home on weekends. But my 12 year old has just stepped in, stepped up and is just awesome. And he's so curious. Whenever we go anywhere, he'll pull up YouTube and now he's discovered AI. And he will type in, what are the coolest malls in London? Which he did this week. And it ends up there's something called the Battersea Power Station in London, where I guess it was a power station, go figure. And they spent 20 years and $9 billion turning it into this mall. So he's like, isn't this going to be great? Going to a mall is not how I would traditionally decide to spend my Saturday. But here's the thing with a 12 year old, spending time with them, you're going to look back on it.

• 46:55Scott Galloway?

  It's okay at the time, it's even good, but it ages well. It's like wine. You look back on it, it's the memory together. The moment you even leave, it starts to get better. The experience starts to get better. You were, you were a young dad, or I feel like a young dad, even though I'm not a young dad. I was fit. I was with him. I was doing fun stuff. We were waiting in line for gelato. We were taking that ride to the top of the Battersea Power Station. Just a spoiler alert, if you have boys, they are fascinated with going to the top of anything. If there's a ride. Also, this is a lesson to any business person. If you own or in charge of anything that has any height to it, just charge people 50 bucks to go to the top and they will pay for it. Because the boy will see, oh, we can go to the top. We have to do that.

• 47:39Scott Galloway?

  Anyway, so we went to the top of the Battersea Power Station, bought some Nike football cleats, just a great time. And then the next day, that night, back onto AI and finds out that there's something called the Coal Drop Yard, which is where I guess they used to drop coal in London. And that too has been totally refurbished billions of dollars and turned into a mall. So we go to that. What's my point? I am doing shit I would just not otherwise do. I just wouldn't do it. But here's the thing. When you're with that 12 year old, that time is finite. That shit is going away. And I can't tell you how well it ages. I did not really enjoy going to each of these malls. Well, that's not true. I enjoyed it, but having done it, I loved it. I absolutely loved it.

• 48:24Scott Galloway?

  It's something he and I will have forever. So lean into malls and specifically lean into yes. And your job as a dad isn't as much to guide them as it is to draw out of them things they're interested in, even if it's stupid shit. Even if it's your 12 year old decides he's really into malls, lean into it and have fun with them. Before you know it, before you know it, he's going to be home and he's going to be mildly disgusted with everything. Lean into the mall, the mall, before the disgust sets in.

• 48:55Scott Galloway?

  This episode was produced by Caroline Shager and Jennifer Sanchez is our associate producer and Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prof G Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy, No Malice, as read by George Hahn, and on Monday with our weekly market show.

• 49:22Scott Galloway?

  Me llamo Scott, vaya a la biblioteca.

• 49:26Speaker 02

  Love Spain. Love Spain. Spain loves the Perro.

• 49:31Speaker 02

  Okay, where are we? What was I talking about? The fuck was I talking about? Where am I?

• 49:35Speaker 04

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