Pod Insights 10% Happier with Dan Harris How To Survive the News. CNN's Bill Weir on Moving From Anger and Despair to Optimism and Resiliency. About this episode A node of sanity in these challenging times.
Bill Weir https://www.billweirclimate.com/ is America's leading climate reporter. His new book is a celebration of our planet and human brilliance. It is a hopeful plea for communities to rally around nature, new ideas and each other, to create the kind of resilience that lasts generations.
In this episode we talk about:
How a hotter earth is increasingly changing our lives Why some experts say the climate issue is half physics, half psychology How to work with feelings like rage and despair Why so many of us look away from the climate crisis Why acceptance is not surrender And the utility of class psychological frameworks, including Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross' Five Stages of Grief
Related Episodes:
What to do About Eco-Anxiety | Jay Michaelson https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/what-to-do-about-eco-anxiety-jay-michaelson/id1087147821?i=1000537443496
Follow Dan on social: Instagram https://bit.ly/3tGigG5, TikTok https://bit.ly/3FOA84J
Subscribe to our YouTube Channel https://bit.ly/3FybRzD
Our favorite playlists on: Anxiety https://spoti.fi/3Qa8kMT, Sleep https://spoti.fi/3MjtMxF, Relationships https://spoti.fi/3QvyA5J, Most Popular Episodes https://spoti.fi/3QxZASc
Additional Resources:
Order Life as We Know It (Can Be) https://www.billweirclimate.com/
Transcript 13,443 words · 5 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Dan Harris? It's the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.
0:18 Dan Harris? Hello, everybody. How we doing? For many of you, these may be extremely challenging times to consume the news. There's what's going on in Washington, there's overseas conflict, and always the background hum of climate change, which makes natural disasters like the wildfires in LA last month increasingly likely. Today, we're going to talk to CNN's Bill Weir about how to survive the news. Bill covers climate for CNN. You may have actually seen him on the front lines of the wildfires in LA last month. He's also written a book about how we can be both realistic about climate change, but also resilient. That book is called The World As We Know It Can Be. I've known Bill for nearly 20 years, maybe more.
1:02 Dan Harris? We're friends, but we've also been colleagues. We worked together at ABC News, where he was a journalist and anchor for a decade before switching over to CNN. I like Bill a lot personally, but I've also long been in awe of his skill as a reporter and storyteller, and now as a node of sanity on the supremely vexing subject of climate, which can send many of us into either denial or despair. In this conversation, we talk about how a hotter Earth is increasingly changing our lives, why some experts say the climate issue is half physics, half psychology, how to work with feelings like rage and despair, why so many of us look away from
1:42 Dan Harris? the climate crisis, why acceptance is not surrender, and the utility of classic psychological frameworks, including Maslow's hierarchy of needs and Elizabeth Kübler-Ross's five stages of grief. Bill Weir coming up right after this.
2:01 Dan Harris? Bill Weir, welcome to the show.
2:03 Speaker 01 Dan Harris, I'm so nervous about this.
2:05 Dan Harris? What? No, no.
2:08 Speaker 01 No, I am. You're gonna love this. I actually went and tried to do one of your guided meditations. It's like, you know, I should probably dip back into this world. And the whole time, I just, my inner asshole was going, you're so not worthy. This guy has taken it to the next level of transcendence. But thank you for having me, man.
2:26 Dan Harris? I should just put you on the phone with my wife and she will disabuse you of any notions that are dogging you. I promise.
2:35 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, she married down, obviously, but I think for all of our benefits, really.
2:39 Dan Harris? Yes. It was a Bodhisattva move, really. It was for the benefit of all beings. Congratulations on the new book and I'm excited to talk to you about it.
2:48 Speaker 01 Thank you.
2:49 Dan Harris? This is maybe an unorthodox way to start, but when I met you first, it was like in 2006 or '07 or something like that, and you had just arrived at ABC News and you had been up until that point, a sports reporter.
3:05 Speaker 01 Yeah.
3:05 Dan Harris? So how did you become a climate reporter? Because that seems to me like a decent sized leap.
3:11 Speaker 01 Pretty big leap, yeah. Well, it's interesting because I had this very circuitous winding road to where I am now. It really started back on my, I had sort of a nomadic youth, a gypsy youth. My mom was a very staunch evangelical Pentecostal who had a dream from God and announced at breakfast one day that she wanted to leave Milwaukee and move us to Texas where she could become a televangelist. And so we did, and the dreams kept coming. So I went to 17 different schools in six states, growing up around the country. And at that time in my life, my two heroes were Peter Jennings and David Letterman. I got thrown out of a Bible school in Tulsa after my freshman year. I applied to Hawaii, Miami, and Pepperdine because they were the three schools that offered surfing.
3:55 Speaker 01 That gives you a sense of my maturity and academic excellence. And somehow Pepperdine let me in and they had this great little TV station on campus, newspaper, radio, and I just, I found my tribe up there. And so coming out of college in 1990, the world was a relatively peaceful place. You know, we Gen Xers have been through it. But at that time, it was a world of abundance. And I thought, well, I'll go down the David Letterman road and maybe the path to get there is to be a wise-ass sportscaster like the guys on ESPN. You know, we're just starting to pop. And so I put a tape together that was, you know, sort of my comedy laced sportscasting and shotgunned it out across the country and didn't hear anything for a year.
4:36 Speaker 01 Mailed out these clunky three quarter inch resume tapes everywhere until finally a tiny little station in southern Minnesota called. And so I worked my way up from market 180, whatever. I was in Green Bay for a couple of years, then went to Chicago to be a sportscaster, the number three sportscaster at WGN and was there for the last three years of the Jordan Reign. And then by virtue of the morning show I did there, got a lot of attention nationally, met our mentor, Amy Antalis at ABC News and met some other executives and ended up taking a job doing sports in LA. And so I got to cover the first three years of Shaq and Kobe. And by this point, the novelty had worn off. I didn't care about the standings in the National League West anymore. I was just doing it for the shtick, doing it for the ego boost,
5:20 Speaker 01 trying to, you know, make my co-actors laugh. And, and this is pre-social media. So the only feedback I ever got was a random letter, you know. But when nine 11 happened, and I was still a news omnivore during all this time and cared very much about, you know, geopolitical events, just had no outlet for them. When nine 11 happened, they sent me home for two weeks. And that was like this real sort of Damascus Road experience for me where I'm like, all right, I'm not gonna do funny Clipper highlights for the rest of my life and get bumped by high speed car chases. Maybe I'll just get out of this field entirely. And having been in LA for a while, I made friends with actors and screenwriters and I really loved the fiction world. And I thought, well, I'll go do that. I'll be a Hollywood cliche. And
6:02 Speaker 01 so I, to my, everyone's amazement, I quit that job and spent a year writing screenplays and shooting pilots and NBC signed me to an acting holding deal and set me on auditions. And it was this whole sort of rabbit hole experience in Hollywood. And I quickly realized that nothing ever gets made there. When you work at news, at least you get to see your work on a screen at the end of the day. But after about a year of doing all of this sort of goofiness, we got pregnant. My ex-wife Angela and I got pregnant with my daughter, Olivia. Both of my pilots that I had going at the FX network at the time were canceled. And Amy Antalis from ABC News called and said, we're doing a weekend Good Morning America. Would you like to do it? And I was shocked as anyone. Like, really? You don't have like a, is there somebody in a London bureau? Isn't there a Dan Harris or somebody
6:47 Speaker 01 waiting for this job? And so when I showed up there and met you and my colleagues, I was this nobody goofy sports guy. And
6:56 Speaker 01 I was suddenly working with my hero, Peter Jennings, and spent a couple of years trying to do my best Peter Jennings impersonation and overcome my imposter syndrome being there. But at one point, Diane Sawyer said, you know, there's some interesting things going on in China. Why don't you go explain China to us? You know, and this was in 2004, I guess. And that was the first time somebody had just given me a, you know, expense account and a passport and said, just go find out what's happening. And it just lit me up. I thought this is what I want to do. I ended up going to Nightline after six years at GMA and got to do more of that sort of international exploratory reporting. And then followed Amy over to CNN about 10 years ago.
7:38 Speaker 01 And I was gunning for a primetime cable news anchor guy. And I had a bunch of ideas on how to reinvent that genre. But they put me on the air the week that the Malaysian airliner went missing. So I spent my first couple of weeks on the air just talking about the same story. And I thought I'd made a horrible mistake. But my bosses appreciated that, my displeasure, and said, well, maybe instead of the studio, you should do an original series. And they had just hired Anthony Bourdain and his show was doing well. And they wanted more like that. And they said, what would you do? I said, no, exactly what I do. I want to go to the wonders of the world and wonder what will be left of them when my daughter is my age in 2050. And they gave me the greatest green light of my life. And I got to do that show. We shot in almost 30 countries and did four seasons.
8:21 Speaker 01 But in 2016, the election of Donald Trump changed the viewers' appetites at CNN and elsewhere. And when they didn't bring my show back and I was sort of like, you know, you're unmoored. You know how it is when you're not anchoring a specific show and people like your stuff, but unless you have a steady destination, they don't know what to do with you. But at the time, Rick Davis, who was the lead counsel at CNN, big outdoorsman, said, we need to create a climate desk. This is a big enough story to dedicate a beat to this. And up until that point, I had resisted a beat. I wanted to be a journalist. I love politics and entertainment and everything in between. But then I realized that after traveling the world, seeing these stories, seeing the
9:03 Speaker 01 changes, seeing just this seismic period that we were living through, I realized that the climate beat is, is the one that really encompasses all the beats.
9:10 Dan Harris? Hmm.
9:10 Speaker 01 It's economics and foreign policy and health and travel, transportation, housing, food, everything is built for a world in balance that is no longer in balance anymore. And I just love the story of it all. I love the natural world. I'm a huge outdoor nut and having the just absolute gift of the wanderlust to get to actually go to these places and see what it's like in Madagascar or Bhutan or Iceland and talk to the people there and really get to know how they're seeing these changes really fired me up. And it's just bottomless. There's so many angles to the story, but I'm sort of the first marine on the beach, you know? I'm not sure that all newsrooms think about it the way I do. I think we'll be forced
9:53 Speaker 01 to eventually. My, I argue that we're all bound to be climate reporters sooner or later the way everyone became a health reporter during COVID.
10:02 Dan Harris? Yeah, thank you for that. That's fascinating to hear that story retold. And, and I apologize, I got my dates wrong. I said I thought we met in 2006 or seven, but yes, it was 2004. And just for the listeners, I basically made a big chunk of my news career taking jobs that Bill didn't want anymore. So when Bill left Weekend Good Morning America, I did that job for 11 years. And then when he left Nightline, I also did that job for five or six years. So thank you for leaving those jobs. I appreciate that.
10:29 Speaker 01 Pleasure. Here's a bit of trivia. When I got the CNN job, the New York Post ran the story with your picture.
10:36 Dan Harris? That's right.
10:41 Speaker 01 So we were somehow indecipherable maybe at that time. I don't know.
10:44 Dan Harris? Generic white man. Let's get one of those pictures. They basically just took it out of the stock photography library.
10:50 Speaker 01 Exactly, exactly.
10:51 Dan Harris? Yo, I just love that story of like going from sports reporter to a guy who's now written a book framed around Maslow's hierarchy of needs. That's a, that is a, quite a journey. And since I've used that phrase, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, can you explain what that is? Cause I think that's going to play a major role in the conversation to come.
11:14 Speaker 01 Absolutely. So Abraham Maslow was a Brooklyn kid. He grew up not far from where I'm sitting right now. His father was a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant who married a cousin and started this horribly unhappy family. Abe was the oldest of six children and described a mother who was just an awful human being, racist, cruel, withholding of her love. Abe found some stray kittens one day, brought them home. She smashed them against the wall and outside the home, he had these anti-Semitic gangs that were out to get him. He tried to join a Jewish gang for protection. Their initiation was for him to kill a cat, tie up a cat to a clothesline and kill it with a rock. And so he's surrounded by all this sort of human cruelty and took solace
11:58 Speaker 01 in the library, just a prodigy genius kid early on, and grew up fascinated with psychology and studied ape dominance at Wisconsin, did his fieldwork up at the Blackfoot Tribe in Canada. And this was a time when was basically psychotherapists, the Freudians who thought were just unresolved, you know, problems from our parents or the behaviorists who think that we're just sort of rats in life's maze. And Abraham Maslow in 1943 published a theory on motivation that created a new sort of a third way of humanism, the idea that yes, we're a little of that and a little of this. We're all the above, we're messy and that's okay. And we're not these lumps of clay that are birthed destined to be cannibals or CEOs,
12:43 Speaker 01 depending on where we live, but we're sort of like a latticework, a scaffolding that can be really built to great heights, depending on the people and things around us. And while he never described the shape of a pyramid, this became known as Maslow's Pyramid of Needs. And if you imagine sort of a triangle with five stories, a pyramid with five layers to it, and the bottom layer is the physiological needs. It's just the stuff that keeps us alive. It's air, it's water, it's the right minerals, it's sleep and homeostasis excretion and a temperature as close to 68 degrees Fahrenheit as possible. If those needs aren't met, nothing else matters.
13:23 Speaker 01 Level two is your safety needs. This is a house, rule of law, an economy. Information is a safety need. When I go cover a hurricane or a wildfire, it's usually the bottom two layers of the pyramid of needs that's been completely scrambled for people. Level three is love needs. We're social creatures. We want to belong to a partner or a pickleball team or a mob descending on the Capitol. Level four is your esteem needs. You want to be appreciated within these societal structures. And this is where I think a lot of our practice Oscar speeches in the bathroom mirror come from. I was gunning for esteem needs every waking minute at ABC News, you know, trying to fill those in the ways I thought.
14:07 Speaker 01 And then at the very tip of the pyramid, Abraham Maslow called self-actualization. Like, once the lower four layers are filled up, then a person, what a man is meant to be, a woman is meant to be, they should be. If you want to play for the Yankees, you want to open up an artisanal cupcakery, you should be able to do that. A lot of people in psychology were studying the mentally ill. He was fascinated with the most mentally healthy and generals and leaders that he really admired and studied them throughout. And later in his life, he realized that his theory was a little shaky. He died tragically of a heart attack at age 60, going on a jog. And I actually got his journals. And towards the end of his life,
14:51 Speaker 01 he was, I'm ready to scrap this whole self-actualization thing because people in these lectures are raising their hands and going, wasn't Adolf Hitler self-actualized? I mean, he was the best murderer you could imagine. In the end, he came away with the conclusion that the people that he thought were self-actualized, it wasn't about self at all for them. They were transcendent because they adhered to what he called the being values. There are the be values, the being values, or the deficit values, which are the bad ones. But the being values. Fourteen of them. Truth, goodness, beauty, unity, zest for life, uniqueness, perfection, completion, justice, simplicity, richness. You get the idea.
15:35 Speaker 01 And the societies that foster these traits in people will be successful. And so when you ask a lawyer, why did you become a lawyer? Well, I just really care about the law. I care about justice. That feeling, that B-value is as much a part of them, Maslow thought, as their spleen. And we carry these things around in us that certain things anger us. I get super angry at polluters, at litter bugs, and I really care about the truth. So journalism is kind of that path, I guess. And you can make the same argument for comedy, that comedians are truth tellers and they're hewing to that B-value. And so reflecting on the fact that I'd just become a new dad in April 2020, a new old dad at age 52, and holding my little boy and realizing this kid's going to live to
16:20 Speaker 01 see the 22nd century. I started writing these Earth Day letters of apology to him and also trying to give myself a pep talk about how to focus on the good things. And they ended up morphing into this book, which really started as a sort of a guide on how to live in the age of climate change. Like, where should my little boy live? Where should he put down roots? What's the safe, you know, latitude? What kind of house should he build? What will food look like? And because when I was a kid, I never gave two seconds thought to the bottom of my pyramid of needs. I was sort of middle class, lower middle class, lived in trailer parks with my gypsy mom, but never questioned that we would have food and water, you know, the quality of the air.
17:02 Speaker 01 Or I do remember pollution from the 70s a little bit, but never thought about the basic bottom of our pyramid of needs. And now, and even Maslow acknowledges, this is written at a time of peaceful abundance. So I wondered, well, what does the pyramid look like? Well, we can't take those things for granted anymore. So I structured the book around that. Chapter on air, chapter on water, food, shelter. And just looking not just for a clear eyed sort of assessment of the threats, of the challenges that we have to overcome, but also tools and role models and dreamers and doers and points of inspiration and new ideas on how to get through what is sort of built in to his future. And also just tools to wrestle with the psychological tumult that this story brings.
17:46 Speaker 01 I mean, my first couple of years on this beat, Dan, I was very dark. I was in a really, really dark place. Cause you know, as a generalist, as an anchor, you could lighten your palate on some days and take your mind off. There are the horrible days, there are the school shootings. There are always going to be those, but I could balance it out. And I wasn't balancing it out on the climate beat. I was just immersed with this fire hose of peer reviewed dread about, you know, how ecosystems were breaking down around us in real time. And if I had to turn this book in when it was due a couple of years ago, it would have been a much darker book. But enough happened and I spent enough deliberate time focused on, as Mr. Rogers said, look for the helpers. Mr. Rogers said, when he would see a scary event on TV,
18:31 Speaker 01 his mom told him, look for the helpers, there's always helpers. And so I get to meet them. You've met them, you know, covering disaster. And now I'm meeting so many more that are invisible, trying to prop up this little blue marble we're all riding on through space. And I do wake up some days, most days with more wonder than worry.
18:52 Dan Harris? You may have just answered this question, but you, you used the phrase earlier, tools for working with the psychological tumult of this story, which you cover, but all of us are living through, whether we're paying attention to it or not. And I do want to talk about why we may not be. But for now, for you as the guy who's drinking from this fire hose, what are the psychological tools that you have found that have helped you? Because your book is essentially optimistic. So what has helped you?
19:23 Speaker 01 Uh, I'm faking it.
19:26 Speaker 01 Some days I'm faking it. Some days I'm like, okay, I'm gonna choose to ignore this story over here because we have to balance this out. Part of my joy of doing this podcast, Dan, is to try to understand how your skills can help me more. I've dabbled in meditation a little bit. And in rereading some of your book, I've always been fascinated with this world, but never had the discipline to really truly immerse myself in it. So the stuff that's, any sort of wisdom that I come across that seems to stick is purely accidental. And so I'm gonna throw a question back at you, like, how would Eckhart Tolle deal with the members of the Petroleum Club at Houston who are making the decisions bringing
20:11 Speaker 01 this pain? What would the Buddha have done if somebody came and chopped down the Bodhi tree, you know, and turned it into toilet paper? It's one thing to condition yourself to ignore the rude person on the subway or somebody who cuts you off in traffic. It's another thing to ignore the actions of a few that literally threaten life on earth.
20:28 Dan Harris? Yeah, right. So it seems like there's a lot there that you just brought up, but it seems like the tail end of the pointy end of the question there was kind of managing your antipathy toward the wrongdoers in this story.
20:43 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah. Because what comes up a lot for me is anger about the story. And my first couple of years on the beat made me very angry and very depressed when you peel back the systems that have been put in place that could be so much better. Ultimately, it just comes down to a few people profiting from the old way, and that's what's in the way of a better way forward. Another tool that really helped me from another sort of bold-faced name in the field of psychology is Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, who devised the five stages of grief. And she's another fascinating character that I fell in love with writing this book, who, as a girl in Switzerland, she wanted to be a doctor.
21:24 Speaker 01 From her earliest memories, like Albert Schweitzer, but her father was this stern man who didn't see that as a future for a woman, wanted her to be an office manager. She defied her father's wishes, was working as a maid, got some help from her employer to go to med school, ended up getting her M.D., started in Chicago at a big hospital at a time when... Doctors would not tell cancer patients that they were terminal. Over ninety percent wouldn't. And a terminal illness was like the dirty words within the hospital. And the clergy who worked there understood which folks were in really bad shape and wanted to help them. And she said, well, why don't we just interview them? And that was such a radical idea, the doctors hated this.
22:08 Speaker 01 And so she said, anytime somebody does finally get that diagnosis that they only have so much time, I want to interview them. And to everyone's surprise, almost all of the people said yes. And they'd wheel them into these rooms and she would have these intimate interviews in front of a room full of people with a person who'd just been told they're going to die. And she witnessed over hundreds and maybe thousands of these interviews, this pattern of five stages, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. And it doesn't happen in a linear form, really it can happen, some of these can happen at the same time. But at a certain point, when I was working on a big climate special for CNN,
22:50 Speaker 01 I realized that taking a road trip across America to talk to people about climate was like taking a road trip through the five stages of grief. A lot of denial in the Petro states, a lot of anger on the coasts with young people. Bargaining is happening in places like Miami and Charleston where they're building seawalls and raising streets, you know, we can build around this, we can adapt. Depression is the stage that everybody eventually falls in at some point when you realize that a species you love is on the brink of extinction or something much more personal has happened to someone you love. But then acceptance is the place where, at least in this iteration of,
23:31 Speaker 01 I'm using it as climate grief, acceptance is the place where you go from survivor to rebuilder. And you go from, you know, victimhood to resilience. We accept this happened and that the physics have changed on this planet we live in and we have to adapt to it. I use this analogy on Al Gore and he hated it. Because to him, he said, he just rejected, he's like, you're skipping right towards fatalism without doing anything to bring the patient back to life. And I understand that, but my argument is that acceptance is not surrender. Acceptance is empowering yourself with the idea that, okay, I now have to build for a hurricane.
24:15 Speaker 01 That blows at 200 miles an hour. My grandparents didn't have to think about 200 mile an hour hurricanes, but now I have to. And that's going to influence the kind of community I want to live in, my neighbors, the kind of house I want to build. And so some days I'm in anger, some days I'm in bargaining, some days I'm in depression. But overall, the thing that I've come back to, and this is hard for me because I'm kind of a introvert and would much rather be in a tent in the woods or home watching TV than at a cocktail party or something. But in the end, it's other people, it's tight connections, it's building community around a more resilient future, whatever that means, wherever you happen to live, that is, I think is the ultimate salve.
24:59 Speaker 01 And turning your anxiety into action around the stuff at the bottom of the pyramid, connecting with your neighbors around water, or the temperature, or new energy streams that might be coming into your community, or your food supply. And the term climate change has been so loaded that people don't want to talk about it. But I think the more we do connect around those basic fundamentals at the bottom of the pyramid, the other stuff will follow. We'll end up filling our love and esteem needs as we heal the earth, you know? Self-care is earth care and vice versa, in the future that I'm at least imagining for my little boy.
25:38 Dan Harris? I asked you, how have you gone from despair, depression, anger, to resilience and optimism? And your first move was to kind of ask me, what would you recommend? But then you said a bunch of words in which you kind of answered your own question, which is, it really is about other people. And as listeners to this show know, I'm on my high horse about this a lot, as somebody who is by nature a frosty New Englander. But the data are quite clear that if you care about human happiness, the quality of your relationships is the most important variable. So it seems like that's where you've landed. Am I correct on that?
26:15 Speaker 01 Yes, yes. Every day I find new members of this tribe that cares about the story and is working on it in different ways, and that just inspires me. The more you sit around. Wringing your hands over the fact that the house is on fire, the more of it's gonna burn, the faster you can get up and start talking about what size hose we need to put this thing out, all of that anxiety melts away, right? You're doing things. And part of my book was not just inspired by covering disasters or talking to scientists. A lot of it is drawn from the Wunderlist, where I visited some of the happiest, healthiest communities in the world, from the Blue Zone in Icaria, Greece, to Vanuatu in the South Pacific.
26:56 Speaker 01 All the communities that I really admire the most have two things in common. They're very connected to each other. The level of trust is at a corny level by American standards. And they're very much in tune with the ecology around them, the landscapes, the seasons, nature. And I remember you saying on one of your pods that, I might have bookmarked it, that people are a pain in the ass. And that we have created this frictionless economy now with our technology to where I can enjoy a five-star meal every night and never have to look a person in the eye. You know, they can just deliver it outside the door.
27:39 Speaker 01 That is not how we are supposed to be as humans. And you're seeing all this science now around our kids and the isolation, and we've created this golden age of addiction, depression, distraction because of loneliness, because we don't have to get out and raise barns together the way we used to. You know, Malcolm Gladwell had this typically Gladwelly and contrarian take that when people stop smoking, we lost this social bond, you know, that might have been keeping us alive longer despite the lung cancer threat. It feels like our society is becoming more convenient and more lonely by the day, and we can't fix all of our big problems unless we get outside and look each other in the eye and hug and slap backs and shake hands.
28:24 Speaker 01 So, and that in the end, I think, is the ultimate therapy.
28:28 Dan Harris? Yes. And so if the question that we're kind of swirling around in this episode is like, how do you go from despair, rage, depression to optimism and resilience? One, among many answers, and we'll get to the others, but one of them is find your tribe and look for the helpers and lock arms with people. That's a huge part. And it's linked to something else inextricably that you've also mentioned, which is that, this is not my phrase, but I like it, that action absorbs anxiety, that one way to deal with things that you're freaking out about is to take action. I think, interestingly, you don't
29:10 Dan Harris? even necessarily have to take action on the prop. Like, if you're freaked out about any election, you don't need to necessarily put up yard signs. You don't need to even work for your favorite political party. You can volunteer at an animal shelter and it'll still help. And it's just restoring your own sense of agency and to be a little grandiose, like nobility, that will help. Am I on the right track here? There are two entries we're covering thus far. One is other people, even though other people can be a pain in the ass, and two, it's doing something.
29:44 Speaker 01 Yes. And people say, what can I do? And I say, what do you love? What are you good at? This is a story that literally touches every part of our lives. So yes, volunteering at an animal shelter, connecting with people who care about animals, which creates other discussions about extinction patterns or ecosystems, whatever. If you love the arts, you can connect with people around that. If you are good with numbers, your accounting skills might be able to help out an NGO that's working to save your favorite species or your favorite part of the world, or fight the global problem writ large.
30:25 Speaker 01 And for those who are really good at, who like to dispense information in the neighborhood, boy, what better person to have go to your utility board meetings and then download all the neighbors on what's really going on and who these people are that are deciding whether we're powering our lives with coal or sunlight. And I argue that those folks, you know, the local utility commission folks have so much more power over our futures than anybody who attends the COP28 climate conventions overseas. Well, I grew up, it was, the environmental phrase was think globally, act locally. And these days, if you think globally for more than five minutes, you can't help but get depressed and wanna like crawl into a bottle or a bong. But I argue that those are the
31:08 Speaker 01 times when it's most imperative to act locally and lean across maybe the yard line to a neighbor who may have a different yard sign than you and really try to connect with them on what's their story, try to understand why they wanna vote the way they do. But more importantly, try to connect with a shared value that you both agree on is precious to your community, a water fishing hole or hiking trail. And, you know, to sort of tighten up those communities because as we learned during COVID, it was the communities that had as much trust in each other and the science had the lowest mortality rates. And in places, one example in that space was there's a bright red Republican County upstate New
31:48 Speaker 01 York that led the nation in vaccination uptake for a while. And it was purely because the people who had set it up were the local librarians and nurses and people who everyone trusted within that community. And I think now's the time for us to really try to make those bonds. As hard as it sounds in an election year, Dan, I've seen it so many times where I've driven into places where I was just, I was sure we were gonna be jeered out of town when they realized I was with CNN. And in the end, people were so gracious and welcoming and curious. And Much more nonpartisan than you would imagine. But we live in sort of a media ecosystem where divisive
32:31 Speaker 01 soundbites are the currency of the realm and social media is not helping, right? And so part of the book too, I get into is, I think, one reason for my darkness in those two years is I was deeply addicted to Twitter.
32:46 Speaker 01 Which I started early on, I still remember the day Jake Tapper walked into our offices, the GMA offices in Times Square and said, are you on Twitter yet? I think he'd really like it. And as I remember that now, he's like the pusher in the after-school special. I love Jake anyhow. But I'm like this doe-eyed kid going, oh, yeah, you know? And at first, it seemed like a great tool to fill the bottom of the pyramid as a reporter, like to check out sources when you land somewhere, immediately see what people were talking about on the ground. But when I tried to use it to fill my love and esteem needs, that's when things got dicey. And that's when I got really unhealthy. You know, the class clown who wanted to be David Letterman, now suddenly I was using
33:31 Speaker 01 Twitter as the outlet for that and really getting myself in trouble. And it was artifice. It wasn't real community. It wasn't how we biologically evolved to interact with each other. And I think it just made me worse. And at the time, I could say, well, I need to be a voice of reason. You know, like, like my voice in that massive space even matters. Obviously, I think it's valuable to share our work and connect with people. And just like anything else, social media is a tool, like a blade or a flame. And depending on who is holding it, it can either heal you or take your wallet or burn your house down. And I was just using this tool of social media in all the wrong ways. And even worse, I gave my daughter a phone at age 10.
34:16 Speaker 01 I talk about in the book. And I'd just come back from profiling Kevin Systrom, who sold Instagram to Mark Zuckerberg for a billion dollars. And it was Olivia's 10th birthday and I thought, oh, this will be great. We share the same birthday. And when she was born, I got my first iPod and I thought, oh, it's this Apple coming of age. We went down to the Apple store, gave her the phone, showed her how to use Instagram. God, do I regret that. Yeah. I didn't know that I would be injecting.
34:43 Speaker 01 All the worst parts of seventh grade, you know, into her brainstem 24/7. And of course, we're all understanding that in real time now. But this, you know, second chance at fatherhood, you reassess these things. You think about these things in deeper ways. But once I got cleared out of the social media and I, and I really got back out into the world and really made a deliberate effort to meet people who were doing things that made a difference. Boy, my mood brightened a lot.
35:15 Dan Harris? Hmm. Okay. So if you're keeping track at home, we're making a list of shit you can do to not be so freaked out and actually be more resilient and effective in the face of really anything, but in this case, we're talking about the climate. We started with community, then we moved to action. And then the third is kind of like be smart about your media diet.
35:36 Speaker 01 Totally. Yeah. Be deliberate about it. Don't let it wash over you. It's incredible, though, that the algorithm has responded to my habits. You know, I was feeding the wrong wolf for those two dark years. And once I started feeding the right wolf, if you know that Native American parable, it's reflected in what I see in my feeds, right? And now I get, instead of just division and argument, I get a lot more of the community I want to be part of. And it's a powerful thing to use to be able to connect with people. Otherwise, you would never have a chance of meeting. And so to be deliberate about it, if it wasn't for Greta Thunberg and Twitter, that combination, I don't think the Inflation Reduction Act would have passed the biggest climate legislation in American history and the world history, really.
36:21 Speaker 01 But if it wasn't for Donald Trump and Twitter, democracy might be in a much different place, right? So it, it all comes down to, to the intent of who's holding it and what you can do with it. And when I think about AI now and the potential, good and bad for that, man, we have no idea what's coming.
36:38 Dan Harris? Mm hmm. Just super quickly, I'll just, for anybody who hasn't heard the parable, it's Some kid goes to his grandfather, and this is in an indigenous setting, and says to the grandfather, "I've got these two wolves inside of me, like a good wolf and a bad wolf. Seems like they're always kind of fighting, like an angel on one shoulder, a devil on the other. And how do I deal with this?" And the grandfather says, you know, "It's like really down to the one you feed." And so, social media, or any media, it really is, you know, you're making a decision consciously or subconsciously all the time about which wolf you're feeding. But just moving down the list, I want to get back to the question you asked me earlier, and again, I think it's a question that you already have the
37:20 Dan Harris? answer to, of, you know, how not to vilify the quote-unquote "bad guys," or how to handle them in your own mind and in reality. But you write about a scene where you're out, I think in Texas or somewhere, and you're with some oil drillers or some type of drillers, and you notice this reflex in your mind to otherize these guys, but then you don't. So anyway, maybe tell that story, because I feel like the answer is in that story.
37:51 Speaker 01 Right. Yeah, this was a few years ago, we were filming a story on methane, which is sold to us as natural gas, and was sold for many years as a much cleaner alternative to any of the other fossil fuels. Turns out it's not. It turns out it's actually 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide when it comes to cooking the planet. So if carbon dioxide, which comes out of anything you burn, a campfire, a tailpipe, if that is a blanket of average thickness around the earth, methane is a blanket as thick as LeBron James is tall. And it's much more temporary. It dissipates after about 20 years. So to fight this problem, that's the easiest place to start. And it leaks everywhere.
38:34 Speaker 01 And that's the thing, because it's so cheap and abundant, the fracking revolution in which, you know, oilmen figured out, instead of trying to drill and scrape the bottom of these wells, if we pump water down there, like a big earth enema, we can capture the gas that comes tooting out and sell it as natural gas. And now... You know, we're the biggest petrostate in human history as a result of that, and it's happening. Anyway, we went there to with these special cameras, a FLIR camera, that it can actually show a leak at an oil well. And my premise is if we could see the problem, if carbon dioxide and methane were visible to us, the way that particulate pollution was so visible in the seventies, back when you could taste the air in LA and you could
39:17 Speaker 01 see the rivers burning in Ohio, that gave us the Clean Air and Water Act. But now it's mostly invisible, this planet cooking gas. So if we could see it, wouldn't that be powerful? So we went there and I went up with the Environmental Defense Fund. They had a special plane that could sniff out and measure particulate around different regions and with this special camera to capture them. And we're shooting some drone video. We take a wrong turn, cross a cattle guard, don't realize we're in private property, and we're suddenly surrounded by half a dozen pickup trucks, just angry roughnecks. Because anybody from outside with a camera drone is a threat to them, and understandable. They were either an NGO or journalists. And me saying, I just want to see what you're
39:59 Speaker 01 putting in the air, wasn't going to win any hearts and minds in the Permian Basin. This is, you know, their entire lifeblood is this industry, right? And as we sat there for an hour, they were trying to figure out what to do with us. At one point, we tried to escape and they cut us off. It was very fraught. And what I realized, these guys are like veterans of an unpopular war. These guys do very hard jobs, risk life and limb to keep the lights on. These guys built the modern world in many ways. And it's not their fault that it turns out that the product that they were chasing has all of these horrible consequences that go with it. And gosh, wouldn't it be great if they were given a pathway
40:42 Speaker 01 to use their skills to work in geothermal or work in other carbon capture industries, which are just now taking off? And it was so tempting to other them as the enemy. They're not the enemy. And if I could go back in time, I would want to, you know, stand on the tailgate of our SUV and have the speech with them. In the end, they just sort of said, take off and let us go. But
41:07 Speaker 01 It's the division that just gets in the way of our progress sometimes and our own hangups about stuff. And you can see this even within the so-called environmental community of bird people versus wind people, or, you know, the divisions are all there, but we don't have any time for that anymore. We gotta get past that. We gotta break through those defenses and connect with each other, not just for the good of the planet or the good of the United States and a functioning democracy, but for our own interior lives, for our own mental health.
41:39 Dan Harris? Yeah, I mean, I love that story. And I think it's the answer to the question, or at least partially, that you asked earlier, like, what would the Buddha do if somebody was mowing down the Bodhi tree? I think that's the answer, that he, the Buddha, Eckhart Tolle, whatever, the people we think of as spiritual masters, I think empathy would be it. But empathy, like, sort of understanding that if you came out of that same womb, you would be making the same decisions, most likely. Understanding what the causes and conditions that are leading to people's behavior in the moment does not preclude action, which is a little bit higher on our list. And so you, the two can coexist. You, at least ex
42:22 Dan Harris? post facto, were able to generate some empathy for the roughnecks, but you still did the story. And so these two can coexist.
42:33 Speaker 01 It reminds me of another story I was working on in southern Louisiana, also big oil and gas part of the country. And we were doing a story on this community of Ildes Jean Charles, mostly Native American community, that lives way down in the bayou. And 95% of their land has disappeared. As the water has risen, the land has subsided. And they won, this tribe won a $50 million grant to relocate 50 miles inland and build a whole new town. And it was such a fascinating glimpse into the psychology of the climate story and how retreat is not in the American, you know, lexicon, really. And some were very suspicious. Half the town ultimately decided not to go.
43:16 Speaker 01 But when we were going into the bayous, I had the scientist with me who had a couple brothers with a boat. And so they were just on the boat, taking us out to see some of this and shoot some footage. And I got in a conversation with these two local guys and realized that one of them believes in manmade climate change and the other doesn't. And these are brothers, raised to the same blood, on the same soil, with completely different views of what's happening to the world. And ultimately, it came down to their media intake. And, you know, one was a Republican Fox News viewer and the other one wasn't. But it opened up this beautiful conversation. Rarely is it that stark, where it's like, do you believe? No, do you? You know, but in the end, it opened up this beautiful conversation about a shared sense of stewardship that they have and real shared concerns.
44:01 Speaker 01 But they had been told completely different stories. And another big theme in my book is that we are made of stories, that everything around us, from our borders and our currencies and our flags and our corporations, are just stories that people agree upon in the moment and they're constantly changing. So it starts with having empathy with other folks and then really examining the story that has influenced those roughnecks. And where that story needs to change or how to introduce a new story into their minds about, I know you don't have to think about this when you're a tool pusher in the Permian Basin, but the product of all this is having real ramifications on your kids' lives, your grandkids' lives. How can we think about it in a proactive way?
44:44 Speaker 01 Those are tough conversations to start, but I think they're vital.
44:47 Dan Harris? Say more about stories, because this is a big theme in your book. Stories got us into this mess. And your view and a key aspect of your current optimism, whether you're faking it or not, is that different stories can get us out of it. Can you expand on that?
45:04 Speaker 01 Sure. I'll use a non-climate example for this, just about the power of stories. For most of my life, I was told the story that if I wanted to express my love for someone, a true commitment, I had to spend three months' salary on a diamond because diamonds are forever and they're super rare and precious. When in reality, there are gigatons of diamonds under the earth in vaults. It rains diamonds on other planets. The rarest material in the known galaxy is wood, a tree. Now, good luck giving your fiance a wooden engagement ring. But ultimately, we've set up that value system and our love and esteem needs around this idea of a particular resource being more valuable than any of the others.
45:48 Speaker 01 In the 1970s, when the oil embargo happened, 1973 Yom Kippur War, the Saudi OPEC and the Saudis were trying to punish friends of Israel with an oil embargo. Some of my earliest memories were sitting in a gas line in my dad's red Ford pickup truck, listening to him curse at somebody called OPEC, who I thought was some evil Irishman. But at the time, there were some scientists and designers at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana who said, if we can't produce more energy, maybe we can reduce our demand. Can't up our supply, let's cut our demand. So let's design a house that uses two-thirds less energy. And they used the early computer modeling of the time to design a house that they called
46:32 Speaker 01 the Illinois locale house, that basically had really thick, well insulated walls, windows, double glazed or triple glazed windows facing south to catch the sunlight throughout the day. And it basically takes the ideas of the pueblo people and just updated them to modern technology. But then, just as that idea was starting to ramp up and people were building prototypes, Ronald Reagan was elected. He took the solar panels off the White House that Jimmy Carter had installed. The idea in sort of diplomacy with oil-producing states, the price of oil fell below five bucks a gallon and the need to conserve and think about energy conservation just went away. It was the 80s, man. People were ready to burn, baby, burn.
47:18 Speaker 01 Some Germans took that idea and have now, and what is now known as the passive house, and sort of ramped it up. And it's now catching, catching on across America as people realize that if we just rethink how we build our shelters, you can use so much less energy, live in a house that's so much more healthy and resilient and with much less cost in the end. And so the story that in order to care about a planet in balance, you must live in a yurt and eat tree bark and walk to work is not true. It hasn't been true for decades. Now we're so advanced with clean technologies, the tools are so readily
48:03 Speaker 01 available right now that you can make drastic reductions in the waste in your life without really noticing it. And I'm not a evangelist of changing your light bulbs or selling your car, although I've, I've been riding city bikes daily for years now and I haven't owned a car in years, but not as a sort of a Captain Planet virtue signaling thing, just because it makes me feel better. I like moving through the city that way. And I think the stories we tell about a cleaner, more resilient future aren't told enough, you know, so much of the climate beat is, is starving polar bears and rising seas and we're all effed. Well, we remember Dr. King, not because he said, I have a nightmare. He said, I have a dream. We don't talk enough about
48:48 Speaker 01 the dream of, wouldn't it be cool if the school bus at drop off didn't choke us with diesel fumes because it ran on sunlight? And then the school could plug the school into the bus at the end of the day and use it to light up classrooms as a, as a battery source. You can have that conversation and not mention the word climate change. It just makes more sense. And the story that we're divided into these red and blue states, Texas is the greenest state in the country right now. Texas leads the nation in wind and solar. Florida's quickly catching up with solar installations, whereas liberal California is bogged down in red tape and making it much harder to electrify your life. And that's purely comes down to the economics. Now, they're trumping ideology.
49:31 Speaker 01 Most of human history, our species just burned whatever was cheap and available, whether it was dung, or whales, or kerosene. But now, the two cheapest forms of energy ever invented are solar plus storage, and onshore wind. And that's why Texas is the greenest state. And so, the story around this stuff is not the reality sometimes.
49:54 Dan Harris? I love hearing that alternative story. And I find myself like checking myself in some way like, don't get, don't get too comfortable, don't get too optimistic. And, and I'm hearkening back to what you said earlier, which is that sometimes you're faking it. So I guess what I want to ask is, like, how optimistic are you really?
50:16 Speaker 01 I'm optimistic that the 22nd century, hopefully my son will get to see it, that the 22nd century will be a better place in terms of, it will be a much warmer place. A lot of how warm it gets depends on what happens in the next decade or two. But I worry about how, how much loss of life will come between now and then. I dread the idea of sort of the planet being balkanized, for lack of a better word, into places of utter devastation and more affluent fortresses of daily life.
50:59 Speaker 01 But that's where it gets dark, is when you start doing the math, or when you sit down with paleogeologists, or paleoclimatologists, and they really open up to you about their worries. Because a lot of this is just physics that's sort of built in. And my climate beat is, it's half physics and half human psychology reacting to the physics. And I'm not sure which one is more unpredictable, or scarier. But we are capable of incredible things. I mean, it's just as, the, the same big brains that got us into the mess, mostly by accident, and some by mendacious greed, I think can get us out.
51:44 Dan Harris? I'm thinking about the comedian Theo Von, who said, "We humans are miraculous creatures, and we're also straight Muppets."
51:56 Speaker 01 Absolutely, yeah. And I was raised by my old man, he was one of these sort of outdoorsman, curmudgeon. He was a very social guy, but he used to say, "The more I'm around people, the more I like dogs." And he infused that sense of misanthropy in me. But, my goodness, what will we do without them?
52:20 Dan Harris? Yeah, yes. So, just to put a fine point on this, it sounds like a tempered, reasonable, not Pollyanna-esque optimism. From what you can tell after years of looking at the science, we may very well have some rough days, years, decades ahead of us on a warming planet. And humans have displayed near miraculous resiliency and ingenuity in the past, and we're already starting to see that now. And there's a world in which, at least for some meaningful segments of the population, these challenges could bring out the best aspects of humanity.
53:01 Speaker 01 Absolutely. And as I wrote, it helped me to sort of focus this in on, let's be honest, pretending to talk to my kid. This is voiced to the front end of the book, is to my son, the back end to my daughter. A lot of it is just to myself and fellow parents who worry about this kind of stuff. But I know for a fact that if River, my son, uses the tools that are available to him, plugs himself into a community that trusts each other, understands the ecology around them, that he can not only survive, but thrive on a long life. I worry about the people who are much less fortunate in the global south, even in the United States, you know, who are just,
53:42 Speaker 01 their margin of financial error is so thin right now that when those storms come, they got no capacity to think about adaptation.
53:53 Speaker 01 And I think about our responsibility as a wealthy country to those folks. And so you can get fired up if I tell a story about a new piece of technology. For example, I can bring myself down from the buzz of getting that story on the air. When I think about, well, is this going to help those families I met in Botswana? You know, a few years ago, is this really going to help these folks? But, you know, the people who led some of the great social movements of all time, I can't imagine let themselves get too bogged down in that stuff. It's just, here's the right thing to do. And I'm going to get up today and try to work on doing it and hold to these values. The analogy I got accidentally along the way about how to describe the problem of climate change
54:37 Speaker 01 came to me from a fisherman scientist up in Maine named Marty Oddlin, who had started this earth ocean repair company. We're sitting on this dock and I'm talking about how hard it is that the story is, it's as if an evil genius came up with the ultimate way to take out humanity. It would be something like climate change. It would be slow motion where you really wouldn't notice. It would be asking people to change certain aspects of their life. It would involve your experts all being reticent to seem like alarmists. So nobody wants to, you know, get out there. And global warming, I mean, people like warmth. Nobody's afraid of a greenhouse, you know? And so, and in the middle of this, this guy Marty goes, it's a Godzilla. It's a carbon Godzilla.
55:19 Speaker 01 We've unearthed this monster from the bowels of the earth. And at first it helped us do a lot of the heavy lifting, but now it's gotten so big and out of hand. It's killing all the fish and, you know, ruining winter sports and everything that's free and fun about life on earth. We should get pissed at this Godzilla and go kill it and chop it up and bury it underground. Right? And that was such a helpful analogy and I use that now. It's like, are we making carbon Godzilla bigger today? Are we doing our best to take a whack at it? And however, we decide to. And if you think too much about the size of Godzilla, it makes you quake in your boots sometimes. It's, it's a trillion tons, more than a trillion tons. That demands, you know, rail cars and shipyards and guys in hard hats burying carbon Godzilla
56:03 Speaker 01 at industrial scales in order to bring carbon parts per million down to where it was before this mess started. In addition to that, we gotta get off of the fuels that burn and onto something cleaner as soon as humanely possible. It's the hardest thing we'll ever do as a species. And it doesn't have a real, that's the problem is there's no satisfying season finale. The climate story. The best I can hope for, when I tell these stories is, all right, here's the looming issue, but there are these ideas and then these folks who are really working on it. And again, it goes back to Mr. Rogers and looking for the helpers.
56:42 Dan Harris? I'd be curious, you, you answered this to a certain extent, but why people don't pay that much attention to this? I mean, I don't pay that much attention to it, if I'm honest. I mean, I, I pay some attention. And I've noticed that when we do episodes on the show about climate, they are the lowest, they get the fewest downloads. There's some, is it boring in some way? Is it technical in some way? Does it cause too much despair and people just wanna tune out? What is going on here that, I guess it's a two-part work. If we've got a climate Godzilla out there and it's a trillion tons, why are people not like acting on it now? And why, when we do stories about the climate, is it, you know, are they not, you know, more devoured by the audience?
57:29 Speaker 01 I think there's a couple of reasons. For one, it's a problem that is usually somewhere else.
57:37 Speaker 01 FEMA a couple of years ago did an evaluation of all the threats to society. And basically came away with, there's only two that could shut down an entire nation or the planet at the same time. And that is a global pandemic or a solar storm, like the one we just had a few days ago, that could wipe out grids and GPS and plunge people into darkness for months, that sort of thing. In climate, as the climate is changing, it's such a complex system. There are horrific floods happening right now in five different spots around the world, but they're not here. Here, it's a pretty nice day and the sun always comes out after a wildfire or a hurricane.
58:18 Speaker 01 And I think we are wired to think about these events as bad luck. You know, this was a once in a century storm. Phew, glad we made it through that. Hashtag, we will rebuild. Without having been forced to realize that past is no longer prologue for the physics on planet Earth. The Goldilocks Earth that you and I grew up on is gone now. And we're not sure how this new planet really works. And that is a massive idea to get your head around. So the easiest stage of the five stages of climate grief is denial. Like, well, it can't be that bad. And look, it's fine now and the water will never get this high. But how you think about that informs everything you do thereafter.
59:03 Speaker 01 I just did a story up on the border of Massachusetts and New Hampshire, Salisbury Beach. And because they've seen the tides get higher and higher and the state doesn't really replenish private property, about 100 neighbors have to go in once a decade and buy a big load of sand to fortify their beachfront homes. They spent $600,000, 15,000 tons of sand earlier this year. They thought it would last them five years. It washed away in a single storm, like in a day and a half. And I'm interviewing these folks who live there. And the guy who organized the whole sand purchase, the local Realtor says, I'm not really a climate guy. They've been saying this place would be gone since the eighties or still here.
59:45 Speaker 01 His neighbor says, I used to think that way, but you cannot deny the trend lines here. And it's really hard for these people to think about this place where so many memories have been made, you know, where their grandkids hopefully will raise up and raise their grandkids that could somehow be unlivable, made unlivable by this idea.
1:00:05 Speaker 01 I empathize with both of their points of view. It's really, really, really hard. And again, there's no satisfying conclusion to that. But we have to talk about this because that's one of 30 cities in just in Massachusetts that's within this sort of flood zone now that's going to just get worse as the seas rise, as the glaciers continue to melt. And so there's that piece of it, just the psychological, it just seems so big and so distant. And then there's also the misinformation, which has been deliberate. It's the center of dozens of court cases as states and municipalities and tribes sue big oil and gas companies, basically for for false advertising, for hiding the truth
1:00:49 Speaker 01 about the side effects of their product for years. And we'll see what comes of that, if it's like a big tobacco settlement idea, you know, some places are suing, they're trying to set up a super fun scenario in Vermont where, you know, the result of these horrible storms would be paid for by big oil companies. So it's been so politically charged, there's been so much misinformation around it that just the words sort of divide the room. When in the end, it's just physics and it's the phenomenon that can be proven in a seventh grade classroom. And everywhere else in the world, it's pretty much accepted as much as gravity as a force.
1:01:29 Speaker 01 But here in the United States, power of the industries and their favorite politicians has bogged it down to the point now where, depending on how this election goes, it will have a huge impact.
1:01:43 Dan Harris? Yep. In our remaining moments, let's just, I want to close by just going back to acceptance in your little debate with Al Gore. Just to refresh people's memory, Bill was interviewing Al Gore, said that, you know, he kind of thought about climate psychology as having some relationship to Elizabeth Kubler Ross's stages of grief. And one of those stages is acceptance. And Gore, per your telling, Bill, took issue with that and that acceptance, in his mind, was kind of akin to resignation. And there's still more we can do in this fight to prevent things from getting worse. But I think to the, I mean, I wasn't a party to this debate and I don't know all everybody's points of view, you know, chapter and verse, but I think I come down on your side, which is acceptance doesn't rule out action.
1:02:28 Dan Harris? It just means you're acting from a place of seeing clearly.
1:02:33 Speaker 01 Yes, yes. Acceptance is not surrender. It's just pushing past. Look, you see, I see this play out when you go cover a disaster, right? I was in Maui after the wildfires in Paradise, California. I've been through the last dozen hurricanes. And people cycle through it in real time, right? You pull up to your house and it's burned to ash. Or you push the mattress off your family in the bathtub and look up and realize the roof has been blown off. And this isn't happening is the first thing. Like, this can't be happening. And then anger kicks in. And whether that's at your fate or FEMA or God or whatever the case may be. And then you're sort of bargaining around putting your life together. Depression sets in.
1:03:17 Speaker 01 But until you sort of, like, I've been dealt this hand. I'm accepting that this has landed in my lap. And now it is a test of me, of my skills, to overcome this unbelievable challenge. And I was coming at Al Gore really from the point of view that in his speeches, The Inconvenient Truth and all the others, he goes from a place of very scary predictions of doom that are coming this way to a sort of acceptance. And like, here's what you can do without any sort of room for the people in between, without people who are bargaining, without understanding the anger and depression and how to process all those things before they end up on Team Al Gore, wherever the case may be. And so when people say Al Gore is the wrong messenger
1:04:01 Speaker 01 for this particular warning, or they just don't want to believe that this could possibly ruin their lives. You know, they're in that complicated early stages of the five stages. And so, and we have to acknowledge that. And so he rejected that with the fact that Earth is not a terminal patient. It's way too soon to worry that we're going to flatline. And I understand that. You know, there's this big debate within climate communication on what motivates people. Is it fear? Is it hope? Is it both? Do you try to implore upon their best instincts as a parent? Or, and I say all the time, but these CEOs who are in charge of these super polluters, their grandkids can't spend that inheritance on a dead planet. But we don't think in those terms.
1:04:46 Speaker 01 We're not making decisions today for the grandkid that isn't even here yet. And so I think it's a combination of the worst instincts of human nature. Combined with the enormity of the problem that makes this sort of a buzzkill. I don't know if you remember, do you remember the Earth Day special at ABC News around the time that Inconvenient Truth had won and got all these accolades? We did a primetime special. There was a reporter live on every continent. I was in Australia underwater on the Great Barrier Reef, talking to Diane Sawyer live back in New York, and they turned out the lights in Times Square as a symbolic moment of energy conservation. And I thought we had sort of turned a corner on this story then.
1:05:29 Speaker 01 But then Bear Stearns went down, the Great Recession happened, the Obama administration really went in all in on health care with their policies. And the idea that Newt Gingrich and Nancy Pelosi could sit on a couch in front of the Capitol and talk about climate, which was actually a PSA ad that they filmed at one time, that just seems like an antique now. So it's all of those things. It's the politics, it's the media, it's the enormity of the problem, and it's our own sort of human psychology around dealing with these things.
1:06:01 Dan Harris? Yeah, and that's very helpful. Just to put a fine point on the acceptance thing, because as we're speaking, I'm making the list, I've come up with five, and I'm sure that's not exhaustive list of ways to, you know, manage your psychology as it pertains to the climate. And the fifth entry, after community action, managing your media diet, and empathy, the fifth is acceptance. But it seems to me that this was a linguistic misunderstanding between you and Gore, that you're saying the same thing. You're basically in the AA school, which is the first step is admitting it. And once you see it clearly, what the Buddhists might call sampanjana, which is just seeing things for what they are, then you can take action.
1:06:43 Dan Harris? It's kind of, almost should be the first thing on the list, the way it is in AA, just admitting what is non-negotiable true and then proceeding from there. And in no way precludes taking action. Am I summing you up with some degree of accuracy?
1:06:58 Speaker 01 Totally, totally. That, like the guy on the beach in Massachusetts, if we live in a world where this isn't happening, it only makes it harder for you to fortify for what's coming next. And what's coming next is coming, whether you believe in it or not. And that's why it's super incumbent on leaders at every level.
1:07:21 Speaker 01 To be thinking about the resiliency of the people under their care. And I think we should really hold our scorn, not for the story believers, like the folks I met in oil country here and there, who just consume a certain media diet that gives them a certain view of the world. But we should really hold our scorn for the storytellers, who are misinforming now. The defense of the quote unquote bad guys, the super polluters, is that we didn't know, even though there's internal documents from these companies that their scientists were warning what was going to happen. Their defense now is we didn't know. Well, now you know.
1:07:57 Speaker 01 So what are you doing now? What are you doing now about carbon Godzilla? And I mean, I don't know how we how we change things until people do start having uncomfortable conversations with the members of the petroleum club in Houston, and asking them, really, how do you justify this? And so I understand the motivations of these young people who want to go throw soup at the Mona Lisa. I don't think that's a very effective strategy. You end up turning off more people than you went over. But if you look back at movements through history, I think there was a professor at Harvard who did this study a few years ago. I'm sorry, I don't remember her name. But she looked at all the great social movements, from civil rights to India under the British rule, and Gandhi's resistance,
1:08:42 Speaker 01 and found that if you can get 3.5% of a nation's populace engaged on a daily persistent basis, you can enact change. And that's not that many people in this country. We got more than that who care about this story. And there are more around us than we realize. It's called pluralistic ignorance. You ask somebody to guess how many fellow Americans care about the story, and you have data with your podcast numbers. But most people guess, ah, maybe 33, 40% care. It's the opposite. It's 66 to 80. We're surrounded by people, allies, we really didn't know we had, because people are so resistant to talk about this. They don't want to be the buzzkill at the party or the school drop off. But we must talk about it. I used to make fun of Boy Scouts.
1:09:27 Speaker 01 I was one of those kids who mocked the Boy Scouts, as much as I love the outdoors. But now I'm an old man who's just yelling, be prepared.
1:09:36 Speaker 01 Be prepared. Learn how to read a paper map. Trust me.
1:09:39 Dan Harris? Is that followed by get off my lawn?
1:09:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly.
1:09:44 Speaker 01 Well, now it's like, help me tear up this lawn.
1:09:47 Dan Harris? Yeah.
1:09:47 Speaker 01 Because lawns are horrible for the ecosystem.
1:09:51 Dan Harris? Definitely not inviting you to any parties.
1:09:56 Speaker 01 Yeah, I used to be fun at parties.
1:09:58 Dan Harris? Yeah, you're probably almost as annoying as me talking about mental health and meditation all the time.
1:10:05 Dan Harris? People love that.
1:10:06 Speaker 01 They do, they do.
1:10:08 Dan Harris? Is there something you were hoping to get to that we didn't get to?
1:10:10 Speaker 01 No, no, not really. I'm happy if you are.
1:10:13 Dan Harris? Yeah, I'm very happy. Let me ask one final question, though, which is, can you just remind everybody of the name of your book and anything else they should check out from you?
1:10:22 Speaker 01 Sure. The name of my book is called Life as We Know It Can Be. And at a certain point, I realized that this is not a story about saving the earth. The earth is gonna be fine. The planet itself has been spinning through fire and ice for four and a half billion years. This is a story about us. It's about life as we know it. And that's over, for better or worse. If we do everything the scientists recommend, it will change sort of landscapes, a lot more visible wind turbines and solar farms. The physical structures of our lives will largely stay the same. You won't notice a lot of it, but massive reinvention has to go into the way we take care of ourselves. And so, the old way is gone, and that's the best-case scenario.
1:11:05 Speaker 01 If we do nothing and just let the ravages of this problem destroy modern life, we've lost it that way. So, either way, life as we know it is over. But life as we know it can be, which already exists around the world, is there for the taking. And that became the title of this book, Life as We Know It Can Be, in parentheses, Stories of People, Climate, and Hope in a Changing World. And I'm working on a special for the whole story with Anderson Cooper around the themes in the book. We're visiting innovators in construction and energy and resilience, lessons learned
1:11:46 Speaker 01 from the worst fires and the biggest storms, you know, how to build resilience for our families, for our communities, and how to connect around those things. So hopefully, that'll be on this summer.
1:11:59 Dan Harris? And The Wonder List, all four seasons can be seen on Max.
1:12:04 Speaker 01 Yes, sir.
1:12:05 Dan Harris? And you have a website. What's the website?
1:12:07 Speaker 01 Well, I have a website for the book called billweirclimate.com and just place to check out the reviews so far, but I hope to be filling that with newsletters in the not-too-distant future.
1:12:18 Dan Harris? Cool. And also, you're on Twitter, but less frequently and venomously.
1:12:25 Speaker 01 I'm a post and ghoster these days.
1:12:27 Dan Harris? Got it, got it. Bill, thank you. It's a huge pleasure. Thanks for doing this.
1:12:33 Speaker 01 Thank you, Dan. I really admire you, your work these days, and I really appreciate you giving me the time.
1:12:42 Dan Harris? Thanks again to Bill Weir. We've done another episode not too long ago on eco-anxiety with my friend Jay Michaelson. I'll drop a link to that in the show notes. Thank you, as always, to everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vassili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the great band Islands wrote our theme.
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