Oscar Nominee Josh Fox Invites you to "The Welcome Table"

Josh Fox is an independent filmmaker, playwright, and environmental activist best known for his Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning 2010 documentary, GASLAND. He is also the founder and artistic director of International WOW Company, a film and theater company working closely with actors, filmmakers, theater-makers, writers, activists, and artists from diverse cultural backgrounds, including activist communities in sustainable energy and design, creating work that addresses current national and global environmental, social and political crises. As a filmmaker, Fox’s work has been featured on HBO, Netflix, and premiered at both the Sundance and Tribeca Film Festivals. His debut documentary film, GASLAND, earned a Special Jury Prize at Sundance as well as an Oscar nomination and Emmy win. As a theatrical director, he has been praised by the New York Times as "one of the most adventurous impresarios of the New York avant-garde”. Fox has also contributed as a journalist to publications such as Rolling Stone, The Daily Beast, NowThis, AJ+ and Huffington Post. Fox’s documentary work returns to HBO this summer 2026 with his latest film, THE WELCOME TABLE, which tells the story of climate refugees across six continents who were displaced from their homes by climate disasters. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

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• 3:05Alec Baldwin?

  This is Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Thing from iHeart Radio. You may remember my guest today from his Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning documentary Gasland. Since we last spoke in 2013, Josh Fox has directed a sequel to Gasland. He made a featurette on the hazardous working conditions of the fracking industry titled gas work. In 2016, Fox premiered his documentary, How to Let Go of the World and Love All the Things Climate Can't Change, at the Sundance Film Festival. This film approached climate change from a more personal lens. After three more environment-focused films and performance pieces,

• 3:49Alec Baldwin?

  Josh Fox's most recent documentary, The Welcome Table, premiered on HBO this summer 2026. The film tells the story of climate refugees across six continents. While the Trump administration rolls back emissions rules and expands fossil fuel production, they're simultaneously closing the border to migrants from the South. I wanted Josh Fox's thoughts on the contradiction of a country that helps create climate refugees and then refuses to take them in.

• 4:20Speaker 07

  I think you've zeroed in on the whole arc of the film right away. You know, there is a culpability of not just the United States, but the entire global north in terms of climate change, right? Which is going to cause the largest mass migration in human history. And they know that that's coming, right? So they are preparing these policies, these authoritarian policies of the wall, of ICE, of $200 billion in enforcement, of, you know, some would say, concentration camps cropping up all over the United States, kidnapping children. 20,000 children right now have been taken from their parents. 20,000 children. This is child abuse as policy, right? And, you know, when I first started thinking about this film, I was thinking about the wall.

• 5:04Speaker 07

  It was 2019, the first child separation policies were happening. And I knew that we were talking about a billion people, 2 billion people, 3 billion people on the move over the next several decades. And thinking, how are they going to try to incarcerate a billion people? I mean, this is madness, right? So I really needed to come up with a, you know, what was the opposite of the wall? Right? What was? Because the wall, in my view, is kind of just a metaphor. You know, because you can get over it with a ladder. And if you don't have 200, you know, million dollars, billion, billion with a B, for enforcement for this new Gestapo called ICE, then it's really just a symbol that says, we hate you, go away.

• 5:49Speaker 07

  We don't like you, you know? It's a deterrent, not at all, for people to come. So I was thinking in metaphorical terms, what is the opposite of a wall? So I thought about the table, and let's do the table at the border. It was originally going to be called the border table. We're going to put the table on the border. But then I got down to the border, and there was tons of border-specific politics that I felt like an interloper. I wanted it to be much broader. And I was doing a campaign event for Bernie Sanders in South Carolina, and I'd arrived at like midnight, and I was in the backseat of a rental car with Dr. Cornel West and Heather Goutney. And there was no place to eat. So we're having McDonald's in the parking lot.

• 6:26Alec Baldwin?

  Taco Bell for me.

• 6:27Speaker 07

  Yeah, well, Dr. West was like, what are you working on? So I told him this thing about the border table. And he said, you know, James Baldwin's last book was called The Welcome Table, but it was never finished, and it's in the, the estate has it, nobody's read it. And I was like, oh, wow, that's an incredible idea, The Welcome Table. That's much broader, that's much more interesting, that's much richer. And then I got to New Orleans, saw John Boutte, the great, great jazz, legendary jazz singer down there. And on his record that he gave me after the show was this song called The Welcome Table. And I was like, oh, my God, this is kind of fate, right? So we built the table on the levee, this very long table. And at the beginning of the movie, he sings the song to this empty table. And then throughout the film, we filled the table with people from all over the world, right?

• 7:12Speaker 07

  From, you know, from five different continents, six different continents. And then build the table 1,000 feet long. It's this ultimate metaphor of how do we celebrate this crisis? How do we come together as a community to say, you know, we're stronger than this?

• 7:25Alec Baldwin?

  Bond over.

• 7:26Speaker 07

  Yeah, Rebecca Solnit's book, A Paradise Built in Hell, was very informative, right? About how during crises, and I experienced this during 9/11 here in New York City, right? During crises, people can come together and people can actually be better and stronger than before that moment. And so rather than pulling on our most base instincts, which Trump always does, can we actually aim in a different direction and talk about how collective joy can be a response to this kind of crisis? And that's one thing that I learned in my, in my many years in New Orleans.

• 7:58Alec Baldwin?

  So Lucy Walker, who did Bring Your Own Brigade.

• 8:00Speaker 07

  I know Lucy very well.

• 8:01Alec Baldwin?

  And you go to Paradise. What I was curious about, I mean, she obviously followed fires in the US, I believe, or whatever she references, I don't know. But she's in, you know, Malibu and up in Paradise and covered. How did you determine with probably a, an inexhaustible number of places you might have gone to cover the results of this? How did you choose the spot you chose?

• 8:21Speaker 07

  Well, after a long time of doing this, you kind of have hunches, right? About, as a journalist, I mean, we do, we do pre-interviews, we do Zooms with people. And you can tell who is immediately right there and responding to you. And for me, I wanted this to be comprehensive. I wanted this to go all over the world as much as I possibly could, right? So, starting in the United States, we taped in Paradise, we taped in the fires in Boulder, Colorado, which were devastating.

• 8:45Alec Baldwin?

  But tell me about that, because I wasn't aware. I mean, I'm ashamed, and I follow this pretty assiduously. I wasn't aware of what, what happened in Boulder was what, two years ago?

• 8:53Speaker 07

  Well, it was a huge wildfire in 2023 that ripped through and knocked out thousands of homes. And immediately overnight, you know, rental prices in Boulder jumped by 3,000. I think it was like three times, right?

• 9:06Alec Baldwin?

  It was like the suburbs.

• 9:07Speaker 07

  So if you were paying, yeah, it was, it went through Boulder County, it went through a number of the suburbs surrounding the city. And it left a lot of people. Not exactly right downtown or anything, but it was very close, right? And there's a lot of fires in that area right now. And I think what's happening is there's so many climate disasters that, that the news media has not been willing to cover. We're losing an American city once a month, and they're, and they're being destroyed faster than they can be rebuilt. So when we're talking about one out of every three people losing their homes from climate change, we're not talking about faraway places from this studio. We're talking about America, right? We're going to have a, a heat dome, the second or third of them in this week here in New York City. And we had a polar vortex winter like you'd never believe, right?

• 9:51Speaker 07

  We had snow, and this was not, oh, winter's making a comeback. No, this was climate-induced polar vortex spinning down. So we're experiencing these impacts. We've seen wildfires in upstate New York, places that you, we've never had wildfires before. And obviously, some of that has to do with our overall attitude towards ecology, and we're not managing forests, in which we could be doing much better.

• 10:11Alec Baldwin?

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• 10:12Speaker 07

  But it's never been, well, it's never been this hot, and it's never been this dry. And the conditions that firefighters are going through and trying to deal with this. Additionally, people are not being informed about how toxic those areas are afterwards.

• 10:24Alec Baldwin?

  9/11 is my favorite example of that. Where you pulverize millions of square feet of real estate in a matter of hours. Then the following day of, if I recall, it rained. So all the ash and sluice and shit there that's all toxified and all melted umbrellas and computers and your screens and everything and phones and furniture, all that goes down into the New York Harbor.

• 10:47Speaker 07

  Yeah, well, I also into people's lungs, right? I covered this in my book, which I brought you, because I was down in nine eleven right afterwards.

• 10:57Alec Baldwin?

  So was I.

• 10:58Speaker 07

  But I had a good respirator mask because we were working on a play called The Bomb, which was like a post-apocalyptic nuclear war scenario. And as I was down there, we were working out of the Church of Pompeii on Carmine Street. So we had big banners that said Church of Pompeii. It couldn't have been more appropriate, delivering Joe's Pizza to first responders down at fire stations and, you know, down, we kept just getting waved down further and further. But friends of mine got vicious cancers that went all through their body, people who I know who volunteered down there died because they were not informed. In fact, the EPA said it's safe, so just go home, it's fine. And this is something that's happening with respect to these fires in all across America too, right? Like that, everything in your house is pretty much toxic, right?

• 11:41Speaker 07

  And it becomes 10 times more so if you light it on fire. And then you put fire retardant spray, that pink stuff that's coming out of the plants, that's all carcinogenic, and then it washes down into the water table.

• 11:52Alec Baldwin?

  One good idea after another.

• 11:53Speaker 07

  Yeah, and then your water supply is toxified and the remains of that site, whether your house is there or not, if it's been bulldozed or not, is going to be off gassing for years and years, right? So that's not a safe situation to live in, and here we go with real estate prices tripling. And those empty lots that were burned to the ground, when I got to Boulder, there were for sale signs on almost every one of them because that's a very...

• 12:20Alec Baldwin?

  Lots.

• 12:21Speaker 07

  Yeah. Burn down houses, for sale, here you go, move in tomorrow.

• 12:24Alec Baldwin?

  But did they rebuild in Boulder, to your knowledge?

• 12:26Speaker 07

  I have to check, but I mean, some of it's been rebuilt, but, you know, I don't know. I mean, like, when I got to Paradise and places like that, the idea was, this is never going to come back, because once you get toxins in the water supply, once you've contaminated the aquifers, which we've covered in my previous film, that pollution doesn't come back out, right? That's stuck down there. You can't fix that, you have to be filtering your water forever. And if you don't have a water supply, it's very hard to have a business or a home.

• 12:49Alec Baldwin?

  I don't know what those people in the Palisades are telling themselves, I just don't know.

• 12:52Speaker 07

  Well, there's been a lot of coverage on that as well. It's one of the things that's making people have to move and migrate, right? So it's worse than the mold in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, because you're talking about really toxic substances.

• 13:05Alec Baldwin?

  Well, that's what I always reference, I come back again to nine eleven, because when I was there, I remember standing there thinking to myself, this is all, all this ash, these two massive buildings have been turned into like porridge, and where did it go and ran?

• 13:17Speaker 07

  I still have a cup of it in my house, because I was walking down through those, and you're waiting knee-deep in that ash, which was everything you say, it's pulverized building, it's burned office furniture, it's also its people. And it was one of those moments of truly surreality in my life, but it was also the moment where I realized, like, we were doing this play called The Bomb, which was about American intervention all across the world, and we adapted the second act to start at nine eleven. And it was one of the most popular shows that we'd ever done to that time, it was my claim to fame in 2002. And it was when I realized that when we could really make art that brought these questions

• 13:58Speaker 07

  to bear and weigh in on this as activists, as artists, as people who were frontline citizens, right? So and when Gasland came along, when the fracking companies came to the Upper Delaware, being a frontline, part of frontline community, you know, doing that reporting, doing that storytelling as a documentarian rather than as a narrative person, you know, really showed that people's stories matter, especially from the front lines, they're your first line of data. And we're in a moment right now where all you see of these migrants on the news media mostly are them being wrestled to the ground, or are them being dehumanized by both, you know, the Trump administration, ICE themselves, and even also in the news media, you don't see a lot of stories.

• 14:42Speaker 07

  So one of the ambitions of The Welcome Table was to tell people's stories, in the same way that I told them with Gasland, in the same way that I've tried to bring humanity into these big, you know, global questions. So in The Welcome Table, going to people who have been displaced, redefining this idea of who is a climate refugee, you've got this...

• 15:02Alec Baldwin?

  Climate refugee.

• 15:03Speaker 07

  Well, yeah, but that's...

• 15:04Alec Baldwin?

  No, I love that phrase, it's so apt.

• 15:06Speaker 07

  I mean, I like to think of them as climate survivors, because I think there's something about that that is, I don't know, a little bit more strength. But yes, these are climate refugees, the people in Paradise are climate refugees, the people in the Palisades are climate refugees, the people who are, you know, forced out of New Orleans are climate refugees. And so we're talking about this group of people called climate refugees, you know, becoming two, three billion people in the future. And now it's already happening. So another thing the film covers is what is the legal status of a refugee, right? A refugee is defined back in the 40s or the 50s by the compact on refugees.

• 15:40Alec Baldwin?

  You have a beautiful section in the film about that.

• 15:42Speaker 07

  Thank you. By people who were oppressed by their race, by their religion, by their sexual orientation, those things that sort of would have killed you in World War II.

• 15:50Alec Baldwin?

  Political.

• 15:51Speaker 07

  Yeah, political refugees. But those people are allowed to step across the border, they don't have to do anything except step across the border and declare asylum, and they can apply for refugee status, any country they want to go to, that's a human right, that's in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But climate change is not one of those categories in the current stature, right? So what we need is climate refugees to be recognized as a legitimate reason to become a refugee, right? So, yes, where we started the conversation, the United States and the Global North is responsible for climate change. They have, we have reaped the benefits of centuries of polluting the atmosphere.

• 16:32Speaker 07

  The Global South, conversely, has not burned a lot of coal, oil or gas, they are not the people who've created these conditions, but are now bearing the worst impacts. So as those people are forced out of their countries, out of their homes, yes, there is a responsibility, I think, that the Global North has to take care of those people, to welcome those people. We've talked about this as climate reparations, but it's also a thing that's happened within the COP and the UN, the Loss and Damage Fund, right? So these people have had damage to their societies, they've had losses, incredible losses, losses of whole towns, civilizations, cultures. There's no way to compensate that.

• 17:13Speaker 07

  But the idea is that the West contributes to a loss and damage fund that then goes to compensate people in one way or another.

• 17:20Alec Baldwin?

  I want to go back biographically just for a second. When did you first pick up a camera? You were a legit actor working in the theater, and they said, when did you first pick up a camera with an intention of making a film?

• 17:30Speaker 07

  Well, you know, when you're making independent theater in New York City as a nonprofit, you know, the plays you work so hard on, you could work on them for, you know, a year, and then they play for like, you know, four, five weeks, eight weeks if you're lucky. And so I became rather obsessed, once the digital technology came out, with documenting the plays. So I was up in the back of the house, you know, running the sound and also be shooting like crazy, because that's how you get grants, that's how you're able to show people your work after the play's closed. So Morgan Janess, the brilliant dramaturg of all of downtown theater, who was my right-hand person for 20 years, she passed away a year ago, and I still misheard the film Welcome Table was dedicated to her. Everybody in downtown theater knows her name, Morgan Janess, her obituaries in the New

• 18:15Speaker 07

  York Times, and we had a huge celebration of her life at Judson Search last year. She saw me up there and she was like, hey, I see you with that camera up there, do you ever want to make a movie? And I was like, you know, as an artist, to me, the idea of trying to like, find fundraising, go to Hollywood, do the thing that you needed to do before it was possible in our hands, right, was just, you know, I wanted to work on what I could achieve, I have my space in Brooklyn, I have wonderful actors, you know, let's just make things. And then she said, do you ever want to make a movie? I said, yeah, of course. And she introduced me to Jim McKay and Michael Stipe, who had a new film company, and I made a five-minute trailer for them about a film called Memorial Day, which was not a documentary. And they got involved, and that was produced by Hunter Gray and Journeyman Pictures and Jim McKay.

• 19:00Speaker 07

  And I made a film on a very, very shoestring budget that premiered at CineVegas in Las Vegas. And on my way out to Vegas, I asked them if I could, I had learned about fracking, this was 2008. So I asked the festival if they wouldn't fly me, if they could just pay my gas. And so on my first trip out, I filmed about fracking in Texas, and on my way back, I filmed about fracking in Colorado and in Wyoming. No, no, I knew very well what I was doing. I did the, you know, I had a vision of, I love Wyoming, I fell in love with Wyoming when I was a kid, like, and to see that place getting fracked, to see oil rigs everywhere, to see this incredible landscape that had changed my life when I was like 22 years

• 19:41Speaker 07

  old, getting destroyed, I was horrified that, first of all, that was happening there and that that was going to come to New York and Pennsylvania. And I had many, many sleepless nights and somehow had a vision of myself with the gas mask on, the same one that I had in nine eleven, you know, and the banjo and the oil rigs in Wyoming, and then I, and that ended up becoming the poster of the film and an image that went all over the world. So, you know, these things are all interconnected, but it was because Morgan saw me with the camera up there obsessively recording the live performances, that she was like, you know, maybe you should make a movie. So I had something I'd always wanted to do from when I was six years old.

• 20:22Alec Baldwin?

  Once you got on the documentary train, you never wanted to go back and make narrative films?

• 20:27Speaker 07

  I'm about to do that now.

• 20:28Alec Baldwin?

  You are?

• 20:29Speaker 07

  Yeah. This has been a very fascinating 15-year side quest.

• 20:32Alec Baldwin?

  How so?

• 20:33Speaker 07

  Well, Gasland was the first documentary that I'd made, but it was working with all the techniques that I used from creating international theater with actors who, my international wow company, my company, was a company that, or is still a company, that works with actors from all over the world. And a lot of the time, I had to interview them, because I didn't know what was really making them tick and what their stories were. And that became a way of building narrative pieces that were encompassing actors from Asia, from Thailand, from Japan, from the Philippines, from Germany. And so working with actors to devise new pieces, writing for them specifically, is a kind of documenting of their experience, which is an acting and artist's experience, but translating that to becoming a journalist and actually interviewing...

• 21:18Speaker 07

  People who aren't actors was just the next step, right? So compiling those stories into a compelling arc, into a compelling narrative, was what I'd been doing in the theater. And then it translated into documentary. And I have done a few performances and plays since then, since 2010, when Gas Nine came out. But, you know, look, these movies have been really important. And they've been really popular and they've worked, right? Incredibly effective, right?

• 21:43Alec Baldwin?

  Effective.

• 21:43Speaker 07

  And so, you know, going back and doing the next piece, the next piece, the next piece. It's been, I think, eight movies at this point. Gas Nine One, Gas Nine Two, How to Let Go of the World, Awake, The Standing Rock Film, which I documented, which is on Netflix. And then now Welcome Table on HBO. It's one arc of a guy who is living in a house in Pennsylvania, and the oil industry knocked on my door one day. And then it took me all over the world. And that is a saga. And I think this is the last one. Well, at least for a while. So, yeah, I'm going right back to narrative. I've got a script in development.

• 22:14Alec Baldwin?

  Is it tough to immerse yourself in this material all the time?

• 22:17Speaker 07

  Well, I don't think so, because it's just the backdrop of life, right? Climate change is the backdrop of life. And if you, once you understand it, once you see what's happening, it's not absent ever. So what I'm doing is talking to people about their lives and their stories. And that is the most fascinating thing you could possibly do, right? And so, as an artist, I'm not going to make like a rom com. I remember when Zoolander came out right after 9/11, and they cut the Twin Towers out of the building, out of the edit of the film. And I went to see it in San Francisco, literally like three weeks after 9/11. I was working with a theater company, a Japanese company. And I was like, is the world going to be like this now? Are we just going to ignore that this happened? And that's kind of how I feel about the climate.

• 23:00Alec Baldwin?

  When they edit actors out of films, too.

• 23:01Speaker 07

  Well, now, right? But this is kind of how I feel like a lot of the culture in America operates, is where we take the, we extract the politics, you know? Like, we take it out like with a syringe, like it's gone, like the context is gone. But if you're a person who knows what's happening with the climate in the world, you can't take it out of anything, right? So what I'm focusing on right here is welcoming. What I'm focusing on is song. What I'm focusing on is the ways in which we get through.

• 23:27Alec Baldwin?

  Not so much, not why so much music, but why that music? Was it different? You have a good plank of music in the film. You chose all the musicians, I mean, yourself, and why did you choose them?

• 23:38Speaker 07

  Well, they're friends of mine. But, I mean, you know, New Orleans is the backbone of this movie. And it is a love letter to New Orleans. And the resilience, I don't like to use that word, but, you know, in New Orleans, you celebrate everything. You celebrate death. When you have, when a very, very important person in that culture dies, there's a huge parade called the Second Line with bands and dancing and people screaming and shouting. And there's something there that I felt like had to be a part of this. Not only that New Orleans is the very first great climate displacement in America, right? But also the fact that John Boutte had this song called "The Welcome Table", and out of that, everything sort of fell into place. But, you know, New Orleans--

• 24:19Alec Baldwin?

  He's the guy that sings in the beginning.

• 24:21Speaker 07

  Yeah. He sings in the beginning, he sings in the middle, he sings at the end. And he talks about, he wrote the Tremé theme song that every, you know, everybody knows from HBO, The Tremé Show. And he's a legendary figure. And there was something about that collaboration, which was at the center of this film, right? That he's a very, very political figure in New Orleans. He sings and always talks. When he's talking at Jazz Fest, he's not pulling any punches at all. And so there were musicians in New Orleans that I knew about, that I had access to, who are absolutely brilliant, who are not national figures, right? And putting them in the film was a no brainer. But also bringing these climate refugees from all over the world to that single table in New Orleans, which is the spine of the film,

• 25:03Speaker 07

  I wanted them to be welcomed in the fashion that you might be welcomed in New Orleans. And that would be to sing to them, right? So, or to play music for them. So the idea was, here is this table full of refugees from Nigeria, from Kenya, from Italy, from, you know, from Paradise, California, from the Virgin Islands, from Australia. And, okay, so interspersed with our little conversation that we're having up there, working it out, I want the New Orleans musicians to be singing songs of welcoming. You know, music can translate the kind of spirit that we need far more than anything else, right? Tim DeChristopher, the great activist who went to jail for two years protecting areas in Utah from oil and gas auction.

• 25:47Speaker 07

  He like bid against in the auction. He won the plots instead of letting the oil and gas industry buy them. His famous quote is, you know, "We will be a movement when we sing like a movement." So songs have always been a part of our movement tradition. And the New Orleans musicians are not just jazz, not just classical jazz, but there's all sorts of variety that's happening in there. And wanting to showcase that, and just the spirit that's inside of it, I think permeates the whole movie. And with a film that can go very deeply into the dark, you pull yourself out by music.

• 26:24Alec Baldwin?

  Filmmaker and environmental activist Josh Fox. If you enjoy conversations with filmmakers whose work examines powerful industries, check out my episode with Alex Gibney.

• 26:36Speaker 03

  The ghosts of all my films tend to follow me. And I often keep in touch with sources and interview subjects. And in odd ways, they keep coming back to films I make henceforth. So they kind of reverberate. It's a little bit like that moment in Ghostbusters, where they say, "Don't cross the streams." Well, my streams are constantly getting crossed. It seems like characters from one film are intruding into another.

• 27:04Alec Baldwin?

  To hear more of my conversation with Alex Gibney, go to hereisthething.org. After the break, Josh Fox details the new climate disaster he was introduced to while filming in Brazil.

• 27:29Speaker 04

  911, what's your emergency?

• 27:33Speaker 04

  Please help us, they're everywhere. We think they're murder wantons. 911 Nashville returns. It's a homicide detective down here. Three bodies on the ground. With emergencies of biblical proportions. Hell, since swarms upon you and upon your people. That's one of the plagues for a biopic. And somebody's unleashing them on Nashville. Brian Phillippeach, once 911 Nashville. All new Thursdays on ABC, next day on Hulu.

• 27:58Speaker 05

  Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover, seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 28:29Speaker 06

  Whether you're buying, renting, or selling, Zillow can help make your someday today. To help find a home that fits where you are in life, or that apartment that's a little closer to where you want to be. Zillow has the right information, tools, and support to help turn your future home into a reality. Because someday starts today. Visit zillow.com/today to get started. Hola a todos, soy Jamie Lynn Sigler. Cuando me diagnosticaron, tenía veintitantos años, y todo mi mundo cambió por completo. Pero con el tiempo decidí que no iba a permitir que eso frenara mi vida. Quise tomar las riendas. Y después de hablar con mi médico sobre mis opciones,

• 29:14Speaker 06

  la elección para mí fue obvia. Boom, eso es KISSIMTA. Obtenga más información sobre KISSIMTA o FOTUMA MAP en kissimta.com.

• 29:25Speaker 05

  Breathe in and reset with Lincoln Rejuvenate. An available multisensory feature in the 2027 Lincoln Navigator SUV. Experience the luxurious massage, visuals, and sense to help you relax in the driver's seat. It's your time for a reset. Visit lincoln.com to learn more. Lincoln Rejuvenate does not operate unless the vehicle is in park. When the vehicle is off, or if any doors open, do not use the feature in a closed garage or in other enclosed areas. See owner's manual for important operating instructions. Lincoln and Navigator, trademarks of Ford or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

• 29:59Alec Baldwin?

  I'm Alec Baldwin and this is Here's the Thing. Josh Fox's first documentary, Gasland, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2010 and won the Special Jury Prize for documentaries. The film was nominated for an Academy Award in 2011 for Best Feature Documentary. Gasland also won the Emmy Award for Best Non-Fiction Directing. Many of Fox's films, including his new documentary, The Welcome Table Found a Home, at HBO. I was curious if Josh's relationship with HBO started with Gasland at Sundance in 2010.

• 30:36Speaker 07

  Yes, well, they bought it at Sundance. And then Gasland Part Two was a no-brainer to make, for them to make, because that first film, you know, was, you know, did it all over the world and was Oscar nominated, won an Emmy, and was very, very popular. And then the third film that I proposed to them was called How to Let Go of the World and Love All the Things Climate Can't Change. That also went to Sundance.

• 30:56Alec Baldwin?

  But Chippin was on that.

• 30:57Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, so it became kind of my wheelhouse at HBO to bring them these environmental films and to continue this story, which has been popular over the years. And it is, to me, like, one big, long story. And it is the project, those are the projects that I proposed to them, for one reason or another, they've said yes to. So it's a long history. I'm still working with Nancy Abraham, who I was working with 15 years ago. Sheila Evans, who was my mentor and the guru of all docs.

• 31:29Alec Baldwin?

  She was on the show.

• 31:30Speaker 07

  I love her to death. She's no longer there. There's been a lot of changeover. Like, first it was purchased by AT&T. That canceled one of my projects. Then it was canceled, then it was purchased by Discovery. That canceled another one of my projects. But this one, we managed to get through, you know, and it was very important to get it out now, because who knows what's gonna happen with this merger coming up. This is very, very terrifying, that Trump's cronies could take over CNN, Warner Brothers, and HBO.

• 31:55Alec Baldwin?

  Sheila Evans built an institution there. That's all gonna be happening right now with the merger.

• 31:58Speaker 07

  She built the whole idea of documentary on television. First at PBS and then, and then at HBO. But I want to say, when I was in Australia, I met with this incredible Aboriginal author named Judy Atkinson. And she, her book covered this idea of songlines. There's 500 different tribes. And when one tribe would have to go, like, as a kind of bar mitzvah, they would, like, at like, age 13, they would have to travel, like, a couple hundred miles down the coast and get this certain kind of red cedar and bring it back. And, and they would encounter different tribes along their journey. And the trails that they traveled along were called songlines. And those songlines, you could see them, ridges on the mountains and whatever.

• 32:41Speaker 07

  And they would have to learn the song of the next village in order to gain entry. And that song would be like, yeah, there's a tree over here and a, and a lake over there, and now I know where I'm in. They wouldn't sing it in the language of the next tribe, right? So although that part of the movie, that interview is not in the film, it sort of became, to me, like, an operating system, you know, like, to get to the next place, we have to sing the song of the, of the next place. Whether or not that was actually from the place, but it was like the thematic transition into this next piece. Whether that was an editing idea or as we were planning trips across the planet, where we were gonna go. And I think, you know, that's, that's cool. That's like a secret inside the film.

• 33:24Speaker 07

  So songlines are traveling through one section of the film to another.

• 33:28Alec Baldwin?

  One of the most affecting things to me when I saw this was this woman, Karina, and you're at Verdascola, and that was in Brazil. Now, when you went to Brazil, again, I'm assuming you have a metric for what places you went and why. That's not a coastal area, you're inland there in Brazil.

• 33:44Speaker 07

  It is a coastal area.

• 33:45Alec Baldwin?

  It is coastal.

• 33:45Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 33:46Alec Baldwin?

  I didn't know that. But the water coming down is from the mountains, correct?

• 33:48Speaker 07

  There was a piece of, of that section, which was cut about sea level rise, because they were getting it from both sides, right?

• 33:53Alec Baldwin?

  They were.

• 33:53Speaker 07

  They were getting sea level rise on the coast, where all the rich people live, and in the favelas, in the poorer areas. Well, what we're talking about, though, is landslides, right? Which was a new climate hell for me. I didn't really understand this. But landslides are induced by these rain bombs that are coming out of the sky, right? The Earth's atmosphere is 5% wetter since the dawn of industrial times, right? And warm air can hold more water vapor than cold air. So all that water, once it goes up in the atmosphere, it's gotta come down, right? And it comes down in downpour and deluge and flood. And so in that area, in Brazil, and a lot of other places in Brazil and throughout the world, you're having a year's worth of rain fall in eight hours.

• 34:36Speaker 07

  And that will deteriorate that entire landscape on the mountains and the land slides. And when that landslides, you're talking about millions of tons of earth coming at your neighborhood?

• 34:49Alec Baldwin?

  Like in Matacito.

• 34:50Speaker 07

  And it's just wiping out whole neighborhood blocks, right? One block is fine, because the mud didn't go there. And the next part of that neighborhood is just gone. And the people who were living in those houses are buried under the mud, and some of them have survived. But you're, you're, when you went down, when I went down to San Sebastian, which is this beautiful little beach, it's kind of weirdly like the Hamptons. It's sort of like, if you had the Hamptons and the south side of Chicago, sort of in the same place, right?

• 35:17Alec Baldwin?

  Landslides.

• 35:17Speaker 07

  Yeah, so the, the favelas on the incredible economic inequality. But when I got there, it looked as if, it looked as if a giant jaguar had just scraped claws down the side of the mountain. So you saw these trails of red earth. And we go to Maria Antonia's house, who's quite a wealthy person, who runs the local NGO. Her house was demolished, her housekeeper was killed, her grandchildren would have been killed, had they been there that night, they weren't. And then we also go to up, up the mountain to the much poorer areas, where people like Karina and other subjects live, you know, that, whose houses just tumbled down the side of the mountain. And we're lucky to run out of the house.

• 35:57Alec Baldwin?

  Even if they remain, they're not safe.

• 35:59Speaker 07

  Well, that's the other problem, right?

• 36:00Alec Baldwin?

  If they don't go down the mountain, they're just, they're like hanging.

• 36:02Speaker 07

  Yeah, well, the poorer areas are much more dangerous places to live, and that's part of the addressing of this economic inequality that goes throughout the film.

• 36:10Alec Baldwin?

  When you talk about economic inequality, though, what it brings to mind is, and I want to find the right words here, but for lack of that, do you find when you're in New Orleans, when you're in the continental United States, is the vibe different, where there's the presumed availability of some federal money? And then you go to these other countries in the south, in South America, and there's no presumed. Do you find that people in the United States are a little bit more, you know, they're pained, and it's terrible, and it's miserable, but someone's gonna come and help? Someone's gonna bring money here to fix this?

• 36:37Speaker 07

  I think that illusion is gone.

• 36:40Alec Baldwin?

  It is.

• 36:40Speaker 07

  In New Orleans, for sure. I mean, there, I mean, there are still buildings in New Orleans that are completely destroyed from Katrina, right? Right across from the French Quarter is a park called Armstrong Park, named after Louis Armstrong, right? It's an incredibly beautiful place. Congo Square is there, where the birthplace of jazz happened. Down the street is where rock and roll was born, where 2D Fruity was recorded, and Tennessee Williams House is right around the corner. And the National Park Service has a series of buildings in that area, which was the National Park, the Jazz National Park, and it's building, beautiful buildings, five or six of them in the park. And they are, have never been repaired since Katrina. They are falling down. The amphitheater that's in that park has never been repaired.

• 37:24Speaker 07

  There are hospitals that you can see along the, the Greenway, that are completely gone, dilapidated, I mean, like, that town has not been repaired by the federal government. It has been completely abandoned.

• 37:35Alec Baldwin?

  Written off.

• 37:35Speaker 07

  Yeah. And most of these places are having the same issue, right? I think Trump just, what, dismantled FEMA completely? So we have, as a nation, or this government, I wish, I should say, has decided to give huge tax breaks to the billionaire class, now the trillionaire class, right? Who are, you know, Nazis or Nazi sympathizers. And has completely abandoned its people when it comes to climate change, right? And so when I talk about, like I said, the very beginning of this film redefines climate refugees. There's this white California couple with children who are now climate refugees. So as we go through this landscape in the film, it's, it's apparent that the mutual

• 38:18Speaker 07

  aid organizations, the first responders, those are the heroic organizations that are working right now. And we have a list of them on our website, they're co-producing organizations of our film. We want people to get involved with those organizations, right? So when I was down in Brazil, I was following a firefighter named Leo Farah. Currently, right now, he's in Venezuela, trying to help people in the, in the earthquakes that just happened. He just goes from disaster to disaster to disaster. And his organization's called Humus. And, you know, it's an independent organization that he created because he was frustrated with the lack of government.

• 38:49Alec Baldwin?

  He's not blue haired from the favela, no.

• 38:52Speaker 07

  No, no, no. That's but well, no, the blue haired angel. He was just a working. Well, this is the story of a lot of those mutual aid organizations. So Leo Farah was hired by Verdi Scola, who is the after school program in the neighborhood. Can you imagine like the after school program, which is all these kids turning into a hospital, turning into a surgery room, turning into a psychiatry center, turning into a place for children who've lost their parents to to live all of a sudden. So the the wealthy people who run Verdi Scola brought in Leo Farah to help manage the disaster. And Gabriel, his incredible character, the blue haired angel, lost his apartment, lost some family members, and decided he was going to volunteer rather than mourn. And he was their coordinating aide.

• 39:35Speaker 07

  Because when you have refugees moving out of their vibrant favela in this film, they're moved to basically a refugee camp like sort of look like a project, right?

• 39:45Alec Baldwin?

  You show them in the apartment building, but you also make a comment, if I'm not mistaken, you said that was an abandoned building? Or you said other people were displaced to house the displaced?

• 39:53Speaker 07

  Yeah, well, that was a that was like a basically a project complex that had not yet been finished. Right? So you could see like fixtures lined like the showers didn't have heads and like. Yeah. So but because the crisis happened and displaced so many people, they moved the displaced people into that complex.

• 40:11Alec Baldwin?

  The people that were buying those places were told to.

• 40:13Speaker 07

  And the people who were coming in were displaced by that. Right? So there's a ripple effect, right? And I remember in the fires in Boulder, I had friends who were, you know, just renting a room in a house and their rent was maybe, you know, $800 for a room. And then overnight it became $4,000 for the room. Right? So that is another level of displacement. The same thing happened in, and we cover this in the film, climate gentrification, right? So Katrina emptied out the Tremay, and that brought in developers who then ran out the black population in the Tremay, who were musicians and incredible community. And now you have Airbnbs all over the Tremay

• 40:55Speaker 07

  and not a lot of the original population who have been displaced and moved to to other areas. So you are starting to see climate gentrification take hold because of greed and because developers use this like the shock doctrine, right? It's an opportunity. The disaster is an opportunity for them to make money. And what does that do? That that's the next wave of displacement. So it's a domino effect.

• 41:16Alec Baldwin?

  If I recall correctly, because Gasland is a while ago. First of all, what's the status? If you know, I mean, I've had documentarians walk in here and say they were finished with the subject, they never wanted to hear about it again. They didn't keep current on it. But with fracking, is fracking still?

• 41:30Speaker 07

  Well, we banned fracking in the United States.

• 41:31Alec Baldwin?

  Right.

• 41:32Speaker 07

  It took six years. It was a huge accomplishment. The water that we're drinking right here is unfracked. We banned fracking the Upper Delaware River Basin. So where my house is at in Pennsylvania, that whole.

• 41:42Alec Baldwin?

  But it's still growing strong other places in the US.

• 41:44Speaker 07

  Fracking is going like gangbusters in Pennsylvania and in places in Colorado. They have passed many, many legislative bans, referendums, bans, bans in California, and somehow the only gas essentially keeps coming back. The biggest issue right now, I would say, is the LNG terminals that are exporting this gas out of ports in Louisiana that has devastated certain, you know, parts of the Gulf of Mexico. But the biggest issue on the horizon is the fact that these data centers and the the growth of AI in America, they want to use fracked gas, they want to use coal, they want to use fossil fuels. And these data centers are incredible power. You know, the worst thing we could possibly do for the climate right now,

• 42:29Speaker 07

  data centers, private space programs, right? Or and and giant cars, right?

• 42:35Alec Baldwin?

  Wars.

• 42:35Speaker 07

  Yeah, wars too. But you know, the the fact that that these space programs are proliferating from Jeff Bezos, from Elon Musk, from Richard Branson, from the like, that's that is depositing black carbon directly into the stratosphere. And by some studies says will raise on its own, just the private space programs will raise the temperature by two degrees Fahrenheit. So more than what we've already doing, right? So data centers are the new fracking. We're seeing the same issues come about, the NIMBYs, the people who are saying not in my backyard because the noise is horrible, the water pollution is horrible, the water usage is horrible. The fact that these data centers are going to use unbelievable amounts of fossil fuel energy that is not accounted for in any of our climate models.

• 43:19Speaker 07

  But, you know, when Bernie Sanders says we need a moratorium on data centers, it's very similar to the moratoriums that we've proposed for fracking, but it's a package deal, right? The data centers are going to create misinformation, disinformation, deep fakes. They're going to put a lot of us in Hollywood out of jobs. And they're going to create more and more confusion of what's going on online in terms of what we think is real and what's not real, what's true and what's not true. And at the same time, they're going to burn an enormous amount of coal oil and gas and

• 43:50Alec Baldwin?

  Or nukes.

• 43:51Speaker 07

  Well, potentially nukes, but I mean, you know, what I'm seeing right now is escalated need for fracking. And that's that's going to be a whole next battle. Although we've won a lot of battles, very, very important battles, especially in Europe. And fracking is a dirty word. And I'm very proud of the fact that the movement rose up to do that. And we've had really significant victories. At the same time, I'm worried that it's coming back.

• 44:13Alec Baldwin?

  We have a guy that I posted, I reposted him online on my Instagram, where he is a fire, not a firefighter, but a consultant. And he was in charge of different fire departments. His expertise is obviously in firefighting. And he gets up in front of the Texas House Natural Resources Committee just on June 23rd of this year. And he's talking all about how, and I found this fascinating. He says, you know, we're gonna, they're gonna want to access the water. And there was a fire at one of these data centers. And in the fire there, he said they used a million gallons of water to put out the fire. Now, there's some of these data centers that are being planned in places, he said, where you don't have a million gallons of water available to fight a fire in a timely way. So they have to bring it with airplanes. He goes, that's what, a thousand trips at a thousand gallons a plane or something?

• 44:57Alec Baldwin?

  Because the fire is going to be like in the next county by the time you get the water there. The the safety issue, not just data centers with their avaricious appetites for energy and water, he said, they're not safe.

• 45:10Speaker 07

  Well, not just that they're not safe, but even if they're operating the way they're supposed to operate, they're using enormous amounts of water for.

• 45:15Alec Baldwin?

  Oh, yeah, but he's saying they catch fire, you're screwed.

• 45:18Speaker 07

  Well, look, the bottom line with the data centers and AI in general is who wants this?

• 45:23Alec Baldwin?

  Right. Who's it for?

• 45:24Speaker 07

  Who wants this? You know, the only time in the history of civilization that we actually diminished emissions in the world was the first 10 months of COVID, right? We shut everything down. We actually reduced climate change emissions for the only time in Western civilization by about eight or 10%, right? We would have had to do that every single year to actually meet our goals for climate, for Paris, for the 1.5 degree threshold, which everyone, all the science says is the the absolute limit of climate change. We did that in the first 10 months of COVID. Now, COVID was a horrible, tragic. It was a tragic experience, but also a lot of people look back at COVID, and I made a film about this also called The Edge of Nature.

• 46:08Speaker 07

  It didn't get picked up by HBO. But the first 10 months of COVID, you know, we could see the stars again. There was water running clean and clear in Venice. We saw a significant upturn in the complexity of birdsong because birds regained their polyphonic vocabulary when they could hear each other. And people, I think, look back at that moment of COVID when we were doing puzzles, we were playing board games, we were at home, we're eating. There was something amazing that happened at that moment. Transformative to our human experience. And, you know, that is, we have done exactly the opposite of learn the lessons of what happened during that time from an environmental perspective, right?

• 46:52Speaker 07

  We've gone whole hog in the wrong direction because of people who frankly are the most evil motherfuckers I've ever seen in my fucking life. Elon Musk, you know, Peter Thiel, these people who want to do mass surveillance, who who want to replace Hollywood actors in every possible movie, who want to replace writers. Yeah, right. But, you know, who want to replace writers, who want to replace painters, who want to replace artists, who are banking on and who also want to leave the planet, right? They have so much money, they can't just enjoy the shows here.

• 47:24Alec Baldwin?

  Why aren't we going to another planet?

• 47:26Speaker 07

  They have so much money that they could do anything they want. I don't understand why they want to leave and go to someplace. I know, for real, put them on Mars. But the point is that like, we've entered into this moment where we are in a polycrisis. And the things that happening in Welcome Table is trying to bring us back to some very simple elements like we need to welcoming is a virtue. Well, everyone has a welcome mat. Everyone has a table. Let's invest in these things that keep us human beings, keep us human, right? Let's move away from what we're seeing with this violence, this racism, this xenophobia, and invest in being together, solidarity, you know, support of each other, mutual aid, bringing the best of our virtues out in a crisis

• 48:09Speaker 07

  rather than looking at what is the these worst ideas and the worst people in the world, frankly, who they look like antisocial beings in a lot of ways, right? Trump and Musk and Peter Thiel.

• 48:21Alec Baldwin?

  Nothing left to be said about him.

• 48:22Speaker 07

  And Palantir and the, and you know, the people who are creating AI. We have to reinvest in our humanity. So what I'm trying to do with this film is bring this thousand foot long table. We already have a date to do it again in New Orleans in the fall. But I want to bring that thousand foot long table and put it down to Times Square. I want it to be in Minneapolis. I want it to be in Chicago. I want to be in LA and, you know, MacArthur Park, perhaps where ICE invaded. I want to take that table and put it in the faces of these people and say, look, this is much more fun. Our side is much more fun. Let's figure out how to have a conversation about welcoming rather than a conversation about walls and incarceration and a Mad Max militarized future. We can be human beings, it's still possible. So that's what I want to try to do with this table, and I'm going to bring it all over the place.

• 49:09Alec Baldwin?

  Filmmaker and environmental activist Josh Fox. If you're enjoying this conversation, tell a friend. And be sure to follow Here's the Thing on the iHeart Radio app, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back, Josh Fox talks about how climate change is not just the weather, but a form of systematic political oppression.

• 49:41Speaker 05

  911, what's your emergency? Please help us, they're everywhere. We think they're murder hornets.

• 49:49Speaker 04

  911 Nashville returns. There's a homicide detective down here. Three bodies on the ground. With emergencies of biblical proportions. All sins swarms upon you and upon your people. That's one of the plagues of the Bible. And somebody's unleashing them on Nashville. Brian Phillippe joins 911 Nashville. All new Thursdays on ABC, next day on Hulu.

• 50:10Speaker 05

  Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 50:41Speaker 06

  Whether you're buying, renting, or selling, Zillow can help make your someday today to help find a home that fits where you are in life, or that apartment that's a little closer to where you want to be. Zillow has the right information, tools, and support to help turn your future home into a reality. Because someday starts today. Visit zillow.com/today to get started. Hola a todos, soy Jamie Lynn Sigler. Cuando me diagnosticaron tenía veintitantos años y todo mi mundo cambió por completo. Pero con el tiempo decidí que no iba a permitir que eso frenara mi vida. Quise tomar las riendas y después de hablar con mi médico sobre mis opciones, la elección

• 51:26Speaker 06

  para mí fue obvia. Boom, eso es KISSIMTA. Obtenga más información sobre KISSIMTA o FOTUMA BAP en kissimta.com.

• 51:36Speaker 04

  Breathe in and reset with Lincoln Rejuvenate, an available multisensory feature in the 2027 Lincoln Navigator SUV. Experience the luxurious massage, visuals, and sense to help you relax in the driver's seat. It's your time for a reset. Visit lincoln.com to learn more. Lincoln Rejuvenate does not operate unless the vehicle is in park, when the vehicle is off, or if any doors open. Do not use the feature in a closed garage or in other enclosed areas. See owner's manual for important operating instructions. Lincoln and Navigator trademarks of Ford or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

• 52:07Alec Baldwin?

  I'm Alec Baldwin, and this is Here's the Thing. Josh Fox has focused his films on climate change and environmental policy for nearly two decades. His latest film, The Welcome Table, focuses on climate refugees around the world who have been dislocated by devastating wildfires, floods, and other climate crises. With his research, on-the-ground interviews, and experience, I was curious who Fox turns to for insight into where the world is headed on the climate front and what we can do to meaningfully fight climate change.

• 52:45Speaker 07

  The IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, right? Their recent report in 2023 is thousands of pages long. We summarize it in the film in about seven minutes. They outline 127 different impacts from climate change, right? 127 different cataclysms, 127 different types of despair and apocalypse. And, you know, the scientists can see the future. They can see what's coming. And they talk about how it's not just fires, floods, famine, landslides, extreme weather. Those are bad, but those conditions then create worsening terrorism, gender-based violence, diseases, also things that you would wars, right? Destabilization of countries, failed states.

• 53:30Speaker 07

  When you see Chris Obahie in the film, who's a brilliant musician who survived a raft trip across the Mediterranean and then ended up in Sicily and becomes a famous musician with his song Non Siamo Pesci, which is, "We are not fish, we are human beings," right? "We're not going to be swimming in the Mediterranean, we're going to get here." When you see those people who have survived, he left Nigeria because of Boko Haram. Boko Haram is a terrorist organization that regularly goes and kidnaps schoolchildren, an Islamist terrorist fundamentalist organization. They are being helped by climate change, right? So the IPCC gets it, and they're not just saying it's extreme weather, it's not just like Al Gore's polar bear that's being harmed right now. They're talking about displacement, they're talking about water scarcity, they're talking

• 54:15Speaker 07

  about wars, they're talking about the fact that when rural populations who are farmers can't farm anymore because there's no rain, they go to major cities, the gang activity increases, you're talking about, and then people who are under stress, there's greater domestic violence. All of the indicators that are bad, frankly, for the planet are exacerbated by climate change, and that's causing a lot of people to move. So the IPCC gets it, it's incredibly overwhelming, and we do deliver some of that message in like five, six minutes in the middle of the movie to say, here's where we're at, how much we're going to get, and, you know, what is the forecast? And the forecast is really, really bad.

• 54:56Speaker 07

  The second group of people who get it are insurance companies. You can't get insurance in a lot of places where there's fire. Insurance companies are like, sorry, we're not insuring your house. Because they understand that the risk is too great, right? So looking at what's happening with insurance companies will tell you just how bad it's getting. I think the third group of people who get it are the authoritarians and the fascists. I mean, authoritarianism is one of those 127 different impacts, right? Increased authoritarianism. And I think the fact that they are using these crises to create fear in people, to gin up racism in the population, they are using that fear-based politics, which we

• 55:40Speaker 07

  know so well, to capture, you know, democracies and dismantle them. And that's what we're seeing happening in the United States, right? And a lot of other places as well. But as far as I understand who gets it and who understands how to do this the best, it's the people on the front lines. I mean, apart from the obvious, who I have to give props to all the time, Bernie Sanders, our wonderful new mayor, Azar Mumdani, could do better on climate change, to be honest. I think he needs to address climate change a lot more clearly. But we are seeing a new group of people on the left who are coming up, who are coming up, but it is the first responders, it is the people on the front lines, and those are the people who I'm talking to in my film, right? This is not a film full of like experts, there are no talking heads in this movie,

• 56:24Speaker 07

  it's just story after story of people who've experienced this. And when you watch those people from all over the world who have different races, different culture, different sexual orientation, different class, come to that one table in New Orleans, which is sort of like the spine of the film, it's kind of like the Breakfast Club, you know, of climate change that's happening throughout the movie, they come as strangers and leave as friends in four days. We can build community out of nothing. And when we're talking about a world that's falling apart in all these different ways, climate-wise, the big question of the film is, where is home? Where are we going to find home, right? If you're very likely to lose your home, your home is your security, your home is your safety, your home is home-based, right? So it's a feeling, and what we try to say in this film, that the home that we have left is each other.

• 57:09Speaker 07

  And if we don't have each other as home, if we don't have community, if we don't have strength, if we don't have mutual aid, then we have nothing. Then we're living in a world full of enemy.

• 57:17Alec Baldwin?

  That's the thing that you sit there and go, someone's home is humble. You know, be it ever so humble, they used to say. And someone's home is very humble, then it's gone, it's like, but that was their home. My stuff was there, they knew where everything was, that's where they locked the door and they felt that they were safe and welcome.

• 57:33Speaker 07

  What you started this program off with is that they are leaving because they have no choice, they have to feed their kids, they have no food, they have no money, they have no opportunity, and a lot of that is because the climate has become, the climate change is not the weather. Climate change is a form of systematic political oppression that is happening in the global south. So it's not that people are like running and invading the United States, it is that there is a debt that these people are owed from the global north. I think that there's this idea in America that people want to come here for some exploitative reason for their own, you know, like money or whatever, like they want to take our jobs.

• 58:18Speaker 07

  Let me be really clear, people don't want to leave their homes, they want to stay where they are.

• 58:23Alec Baldwin?

  Right. They have no choice.

• 58:25Speaker 07

  Look, I was born in New York City, I've lived all over the world, but I come back here all the time, I always come back here. I still live here, because this is where I'm from. And people don't want, one thing Chris Obahie says really clearly in the movie, even though he was in Nigeria, he made it to Italy, he became a pop star, he says, nobody wants to leave their home. They only leave if they have to leave.

• 58:48Alec Baldwin?

  My thanks to filmmaker and environmental activist Josh Fox. This episode was recorded at CDM Studios in New York City. We're produced by Kathleen Russo, Zach McNeese, and Victoria DeMartin. Our engineer is Isaac Kaplan-Wolner. I'm Alec Baldwin, Here's the Thing is brought to you by iHeartRadio.

• 59:30Speaker 00

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  What's that? My fresh detector. Uh, your what? There it is. What is it detecting? Fresh produce, fresh meat. Okay, what happens if it detects something really fresh? Apparently we celebrate. At Food Lion, you can count on fresh food at fresher prices when your fresh detector is going off. Head to your local Food Lion or shop at foodlion.com. Lisa, tell them about our new show. We have a new podcast, it's called Don't Lie to Me. I'm Lexi Wano, we're two best friends, 22 years apart, but so close at heart. And I'm Lisi DiGiulio, the old one, which means we have wildly different references,

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