Factually! with Adam Conover - How to Beat Climate Change with Aru Shiney-Ajay

Episode Date: January 15, 2025

As the effects of climate change ravage our world, we have no choice but to fight back. While it may feel like a hopeless endeavor, the truth is that we have the power to make a difference through collective action. This week, Adam sits down with Aru Shiney-Ajay, executive director of the Sunrise Movement, to discuss how we can drive meaningful change toward a greener future, particularly in light of the upcoming U.S. political administration.SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a HeadGum Podcast. Hey everybody, before we get into this week's episode, I just want to let you know that we recorded this conversation and the intro that precedes it before the devastating wildfires that just hit Los Angeles last week. Now the conversation is still quite timely because it is about climate change and our response to it. And that's important because these wildfires were caused by climate change and our response to it. And that's important because these wildfires were caused by climate change.

So I think you're really gonna enjoy the conversation, but if you're wondering why we don't discuss the wildfires directly in the conversation, that is why. Now this Friday, we are going to have an emergency episode come out. I'm gonna have a conversation with Daniel Swain, the wonderful Southern California climatologist who's going to explain why the wildfires happened,

dispel misconceptions about them, and talk about the path going forward. So look for that later in the week. In the meantime, if you would like to support the victims of the wildfire here in Los Angeles, and I hope you do, countless people have lost homes, including many friends of mine. Many people have lost their lives.

People out there need a lot of support. There's now tens of thousands of people who are homeless, who were living in homes just a few weeks ago. They need your support. So if you would like to support them, here's a couple places you can do so. If you want to give cash assistance to low income people who've been affected by the wildfires,

head to givedirectly.org slash L.A. fires. Every dollar you donate will be sent to a low income person in need in the Los Angeles area, specifically in the zip codes affected by the fires. That's givedirectly.org slash L.A. fires. And if you'd like to help entertainment industry folks, cast, crew, people like that, who've been affected by the wildfires,

head to entertainmentcommunity.org to donate to the Entertainment Community Fund. They could really use the help. This is a wonderful organization that helps people all the time and is going to be giving out a lot of cash assistance this year. Once again, give directly.org slash L.A. Fires and entertainmentcommunity.org. And now let's get to this interview. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's all right.

That's OK. I don't know anything. Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show. You know, we're living in a moment where a lot of people are feeling hopeless about the state of the world. Thinking, you know, things are just getting worse and worse and there is nothing I can do to stop it. Maybe I should just stay home and play video games

the rest of my life, right? Well, in response to that, I have been trying to bring you stories from people making actual change on the ground who are actually making the world a better place to remind us that it is in fact possible and to give us a roadmap to how we can actually fucking do it. A couple weeks ago we had Maurice Mitchell from the Working Families Party on the show who talked about how he and his party are

actually helping us break out of the two-party system and building a mass movement for real power and change for working people. It's an incredible interview. Go back and listen to it if you haven't already, but we are gonna continue bringing you conversations like that in the weeks and months to come. And this week, we have a really fantastic one because we're talking about climate change. Climate change is one of the most intractable problems facing us.

It was one that people feel so hopeless about, but it is also one that we are making real progress on and that we can continue making progress on in the future. And one of the most prominent groups doing that is the Sunrise Movement. Their intense advocacy involves sit-ins in Nancy Pelosi's office, hunger strikes, and the hounding and shaming of the last batch of conservative Democrats like Kirsten Sinema and Joe Manchin. They popularized the Green New Deal, and after the failure of Build Back Better in 2022, their efforts influenced the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest climate bill in US history.

But you know, if climate legislation was hard enough to pass in the Biden administration, in the Trump administration, it looks even worse, right? Trump and his administration don't even believe that climate change is real. Trump's position on electric cars is to stop the supposed war on the internal combustion engine. I mean, the man literally wants to bring back

incandescent light bulbs. So what is the possible future for climate action under that administration and what can be done? Well, my guest today has an incredible answer to that question that I know is going to inspire you and spur you to action. But before we get into it, I just want to remind you that if you want to support the show,

you can do so on Patreon. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of this show ad free. We'd love to have you join our online community as well. And of course, if you like standup comedy, I am on the road right now with the Nihilism Pivot Tour doing my brand new hour.

Coming up soon, January 10th through 12th, I will be in Dallas, Texas. January 23rd through 25th, I'll be in Toronto, Ontario. February 12th, I'll be in Omaha, Nebraska. February 13th, Minneapolis, Minnesota. After that, Chicago, Boston, Burlington, London, Amsterdam, Providence, Rhode Island, Eugene, Oregon, head to AdamConover.net for tickets and tour dates I'd love to see out there on the road. And now let's get to this week's conversation. My guest today is Aru Shinyajay. She's the executive director of the Sunrise Movement, which once again is pound for pound the most impactful climate change organization in America today. Please welcome Aru Shinyajay.

Aru, thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you, it's exciting to be on. I used to watch your videos in high school. Did you use, you used to watch my videos in high school? Yes, that's right. You are the first guest to ever tell me that. I mean, sometimes people tell me that in person. You know, we started making our show in like 2015.

It ended in like 2020, now it's 2024. And sometimes people will say, oh, I used to watch you when I was a kid. And that's weird for me because, you know, I started making the show in my early 30s. Now I'm in my early 40s. I'm basically the same guy. But I'm like, oh, the audience, like, you guys grew up.

Yeah. Like in the time since. No, I remember talking to my high school friends. People would'm like, oh, the audience, like you guys grew up. Yeah. Like in the time since. No, I remember talking to my high school friends, people would be like, you know, people would have them on the computers and yeah, I feel I, it was a different time for me for sure, but before I even joined Sunrise or anything, I remember those.

Oh my God, well, you're the first guest on this show to ever say that particular thing to me, and I very much appreciate it. So we're off to a great start here. Well, I am a huge admirer of Sunrise Movement and what you guys do. We are doing a little series, we're having more activists on this show

to talk about how we adjust to the political moment. And you are one of the most effective climate change orgs out there by a mile. So first of all, tell me about who Sunrise Movement is and what do you do? Yeah, Sunrise is building a mass movement of young people across the country to win bold climate action at the federal and local levels.

And the way that we think about it is stopping climate change requires huge levels of transformation at every level of government and every sector of society. And getting to that just requires mass movement building at a scale at which we honestly haven't seen before. And we've won really huge things in the last few years. We won the Inflation Reduction Act.

We had a huge amount of energy with the climate strikes. And obviously with Trump in office, we have our work cut out for us in the next few years, but we're definitely not backing down. And you guys are known for using some interesting tactics in your mission of fighting climate change. Tell me a little bit about what you have done in the past and some of the victories that you've had

over the past couple of years. Yeah, I mean, one of the things I love about Sunrise is that we use a pretty wide array of tactics. Like in some ways we are a direct action group. We spearheaded a lot of the things I love about Sunrise is that we use a pretty wide array of tactics. In some ways, we are a direct action group. We spearheaded a lot of the climate strikes that were planned in 2019. We went viral first for a sit-in that we did in Nancy Pelosi's office with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I was there. That was my first time ever risking rest.

Not something I thought I would be doing. Um, but certainly one of the most meaningful experiences of my life. We've. Thanks. Um, but we also like knock doors. We do elections. Um, we run local campaigns. We once had five, five people actually go on hunger strike demanding that the build back better, uh, bill get passed, so it's a wide range of tactics

and the way that we see it is we're sort of like, our mission is to drum up mass enthusiasm for visionary climate action and then hold politicians accountable to actually acting on the enthusiasm, acting on the mandate that young people are giving them and that requires a lot of different tactics. And one of the things that I think is notable about you guys is that you are not an organization

that one simply donates to and then you receive, you know, I don't know, some letters in the mail and more fundraising things like a lot of other climate orgs, some of which I've donated to in the past. You are a movement that one can join. There is a sunrise movement chapter in the area of anyone listening that they could show up to a meeting at, participate in, and actually influence the organization,

participate in your actions, et cetera, right? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, all of our most core work happens through our volunteers. I started as a volunteer. Most people on our staff start as a volunteer at some point or another. We have 140 chapters across the country, and some more are starting right now after the election.

A whole bunch of new people are wanting to start chapters. So you can definitely look up. If you go on our website, you can see a map of all of our hubs and you can join the one nearest you. The way I think about it is our power comes from our people and there's a lot more that people can give. Maybe you can't afford to give much money, but you probably have an hour or two of time a week

that you can spend organizing and that makes a huge difference. Yeah, and that's something that people want to have. Like one of the problems with the climate crisis is that people feel powerless. What can I do about it? And just spending that one hour a week knowing that you're making a difference

can really be transformative for folks. And just to finish up this quick overview of your work, you know, the Biden administration actually did get some work done on climate change with the Inflation Reduction Act, which is the largest climate change bill ever passed. Obviously it had plenty of problems, but it was still a large achievement. So just tell me a little bit about your view of, you know, the progress that's been made specifically over the last couple years, had plenty of problems, but it was still a large achievement. So just tell me a little bit about your view of, you know, the progress that's been made specifically

over the last couple years, and how have you guys contributed to it? Is there anything in that bill or anything else where you're like, ah, we got that in there? Yeah, I mean, honestly, I don't think the bill would have happened if it weren't for Sunrise and groups like Sunrise. Climate was-

Good, take some fucking credit, yeah. I know, they call it in the media, I remember they would call it like Joe Manchin's climate bill, and I've always been like, that was not Joe Manchin's climate bill, that was youth climate strikers' climate bill. And obviously he had way too much influence over it, so I get why they called it that,

but it was ours that we started and we put forward. I mean, I remember in 2018, right before we raised the rest in Nancy Pelosi's office, there was this headline of, I think the words were something like, Dems damp down hope on climate. They had just taken the House and there was a clear mandate for climate. A lot of young people were talking about climate action and House leadership was like, yeah, no, this isn't a priority.

It's not a political winner. That is part of what actually made us do that sit-in of saying like, no, we put you in office, we're delivering you a mandate and you better deliver. And that turned into like mass climate strike energy in 2019, like hundreds of thousands of people walking out of their classes. That turned into the Green New Deal. It turned into every single presidential candidate starting to talk about climate change as a core part of their platform and even saying the words Green New Deal. We ended up winning a climate town hall

where candidates were racing against each other to prove their credentials. And I think one of the biggest interventions we made is back in 2017, 2016, the debate around climate change was really framed as around, do you want a healthy economy or do you want to stop climate change or do you want to save the environment? And we really cut through a lot of that and said, those just aren't oppositional things. Like the amount of work, like physical work needed to stop the climate crisis is huge. There's no way that you don't create jobs

while stopping the climate crisis. And we really made that intervention. And I think that's one of the biggest things that the IRA was built off of. You see Joe Biden saying things like, when I think about climate, I think about jobs. The IRA was a huge investment in unions. It meant that unions were able to stand

with climate interests for the first time in a long time. So I think there was a lot in there that Sunrise really enabled. Yeah, and I think that perspective shift is really important because so often climate change is framed as to fight climate change, we all need to get by with less. We need to cut back.

We need to have worse lives to save the planet. And first of all, whether or not that's true, I don't think it is true, but it's also a political loser if you frame it that way. People don't want there to be less of things. I don't want there to be less of things. We want more of everything. And so framing climate change as we can fight climate change

and have better lives, a healthier economy, a more flourishing civilization, but it'll also have less pollution, it'll have better weather, it'll have less climate disasters, et cetera. That's a vision that's really possible and that you're helping make clear to people.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that there's a lot of things, people talk about college being one of the best times in their lives. They talk about wanting walkable cities. Those are climate solutions. Spend more time hanging out with your friends and less time scrolling for buying things

on TikTok shop. That's also helpful for climate. There's like a lot of pieces of like people's lives can be more full and happier. And- Okay, but I like TikTok. I like scrolling. I like TikTok too.

I scroll a lot. Listen, I was just on TikTok before this. Okay. Okay. Okay. Good, good, good. I mean, you know, you want to let, people still have to be able to make their own choices, good, good. I mean, you know, you wanna let people still have to be able

to make their own choices, you know? No, absolutely. And we want the good things in life at the same time that we want to fight climate change. And so look, the Inflation Reduction Act passed. There was a lot of great stuff in there. It was like truly one of the times I felt optimistic about the future in a way I hadn't before,

or I hadn't in a long time. Now we are entering a different political moment. There's a new regime coming in that does not believe in climate change that in fact is basically the entire premise of the incoming administration is that we should move back to the past, that anyone who wants to do anything

to take us into the future is wrong, that's bad. They're trying to take away your incandescent light bulbs. We're gonna go back to incandescent light bulbs. We're gonna go back to burning fossil fuels, et cetera. That's the sort of ideological and emotional slant of the administration. And we still have a lot of work to do to fight climate change.

We're still gonna rocket past, you know, the various thresholds that we wanna avoid in terms of warming. So how are you adjusting to fit this moment? And what is your analysis of the moment that we're in vis-a-vis climate change? Yeah, I mean, I think that the thing you said of, it's a ideology that wants to take us backwards

is really interesting because the only thing that the Democrats really offered in opposition to that was we are not going back. And I think what climate change and the Green New Deal offers is we can actually go forward and not just not go backwards. That is such a great point. That is such a great point. The slogan that Kamala and Walls used, we're not going back. Pretty good slogan. It's OK. But it beg we're not going back, pretty good slogan.

It's okay, but it begs the question, okay, but so where are we going? Exactly. Like where do you wanna go? Do you wanna stay right here? Because right here's not great. Exactly. Are we on our way somewhere?

And what's the vision? And that's what they didn't do. Mike, I've never actually heard it put better than that, that you really crystallize the entire problem with the Democratic campaign there. Opposition to the other party, but what the fuck do you wanna do? Where are we going? Exactly, exactly.

So sorry, please continue. And I think that's what climate offers, is like there can be a hopeful version of the future where we tackle our problems and we have better lives, which is what we were just talking about, right? But you asked about the moment that we're in in terms of climate. I mean, I don't wanna understate the threat that Trump poses.

I think just looking at his some of his cabinet picks is already so concerning. Lee Zeldin for the EPA, Chris Wright as energy secretary. Chris Wright is literally an oil billionaire like this man is has a vested interest in expanding oil and gas. And we should see that for what it is, which is like corruption in our higher offices. It's corporations running- There's an oil company running the federal government.

There's an oil company running, yeah, right. And Trump really built himself as like this, work for the working class, for everyday people. The first time he ran on drain this month, this is the opposite of that, which I think is really important to name. It's not just that we disagree with each other on policy, it's that the people with money who have an interest in not letting us stop climate change are the ones in power because they are able to spend that money and get access to power.

So that's what I'll start with is I'm like, it's really, really dangerous. That's what I'll start with is I'm like, it's really, really dangerous. The one thing that I'll say, and you know, I'm a gospel type of person, I think there's a big opportunity here and that is that in some ways, I think we're about to see a moment where the failures of our political system

are really laid bare for everyone to see. It'll be very clear very soon that Trump cannot deliver on a lot of the promises he made. Because he ran saying like life is bad for you and I'm gonna make it better and he just won't be able to make it better in the ways that he has promised to. And when that happens I think there's a real way to talk about climate and also talk about working people and talk about how we can make people's lives better and offer an alternative vision. I think the reason climate plays a really cute role in that is that it's actually one

of the places where Trump and the MAGA movement is most out of sync with where most people are. Most people do actually think that we should slowly phase out of fossil fuels. Most people do definitely think that we need clean air and clean water, especially when the message comes from young people. It's tremendously popular to actually act on climate action. And the Republican Party just doesn't have an answer to that. They have no answer whatsoever. And especially in moments of climate disasters, I think that is going to be like torn wide open for people to see. So that's some of what I see is I'm

like, it's really bad. I don't want to understate how bad it is, but I think there's a way to actually take this crisis and use it to point to the degree of, uh, change we need. And also like vision and possibility that there is. You know, when it comes to grocery shopping and meal planning, I have zero chill the second I see something remotely tasty, it is in my cart. You know, when it comes to grocery shopping and meal planning, I have zero chill. The second I see something remotely tasty, it is in my cart, and next thing I know, I've got an expensive pile of random food that doesn't make a single complete meal and definitely

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That's squarespace.com slash factually. So I love that vision. I want to push out a little bit though, because you know, the main thing that Trump does is say that he is doing something and not actually do it. And you know, half the country believes him, right? Because they believe what he says more than they believe, you know, their own lying eyes, right? That's sort of a lot of the point of his manner of speech is to say, don't trust yourself, trust me, right? And there's plenty of cases in which Americans for the past decade have been suffering from the effects of climate change

and have not connected it to our political culture. A good example of this is like Florida. There's many places in Florida that currently experience flooding on sunny days. If you look at the municipal governments, a lot of them are currently fighting against the effects of climate change. Water coming into places and cities

where it never had been before, stuff like that. And yet, Florida as a state is not turning in a direction towards climate policy. It's actually turning away. It's becoming a deeper red state. And we're not really seeing a sort of like surge in climate awareness. As far as I know, I don't spend a huge amount of time

in Florida, but that's my experience. And so, you know, a lot of Trump's political technique is to disconnect people's political beliefs from their material experience to a certain extent. And so, how do we fight back against that? Because he's certainly going to keep doing that for the next four years. He's going to say, as things get worse, he's going to go, they're getting better. Everything's getting better.

And, you know, a lot of people are going to go, oh, yeah, they are, because that's what I'm seeing on TV. Right. Yeah, totally. I mean, I think you put your finger on something really important, which is that this doesn't just happen. It actually has to be, you know, Trump is creating a narrative and it is important that the climate movement also contests for that narrative. I have been in way too many conversations

where a disaster happens and a lot of people are like, oh, we shouldn't politicize that. Oh, that should, like, we should like, just talk about like direct aid or FEMA. And I'm like, no, this is a political issue. And it's actually absolutely incumbent on the climate movement to draw those dots. And we've been experimenting a lot with that this year

with some mixed success. I think one of our best moments was right after hurricanes Milton and Helene, we demanded that CBS actually ask a question on climate right during the vice presidential debates and that moved like it was the second question. It was the earliest climate had ever been asked about. So I think that there's a question about when disaster like this happened, when the media and the public are extra receptive to hearing narratives about climate, how do you jump

in on that and like do direct actions, do storytelling that actually can cut through some of what Trump is putting out there and put forward our own narrative, which is actually that these disasters are happening because fossil fuel companies have bought out our government and they have stopped progress and we could stop them from getting worse

and we could prepare so that when they happen, you're actually like supported to evacuate. You're actually like given time off work. Your home gets rebuilt. There's actually support after a hurricane, after a fire, after a flood. And I think that is something that people are really receptive to.

We did a lot of like door knocking in North Carolina. I talked to people who were Republican and were like, yeah, this is a really politicizing moment. And even in Florida, like you were mentioning, it's absolutely true that we haven't seen the degree of climate progress we want. It's also true that a lot of Florida Republicans are starting to talk about climate resiliency. And they skipped over the cause to just go to, well, it's already happening, we might

as well shore up for it. But to me, that is interesting. I'm like, okay, at least you are talking about resiliency. Something is moving. The effects are felt enough that you feel the pressure to do something. That's not nothing. I'm not saying that it's what we should settle for,

but it means that there's an opportunity there to me. Yeah, there's an opportunity where maybe our politics are gonna become very slightly scrambled in ways Yeah, there's an opportunity where maybe our politics are gonna become very slightly scrambled in ways that we can take advantage of as a movement. There'll be little openings in certain places. Exactly. I mean, there's so many people in this country

who are at risk of immediate disruption from climate. I mean, Phoenix is the fifth largest city in America. And by the way, when I tell people that, people are blown away. No one thinks of Phoenix as being the fifth largest city in the country. It is. It's already a city where people barely leave their house

for six months a year because of how hot it is. A couple degrees in Phoenix is gonna, you know, lead to a couple degrees increase, you know, can lead to major changes in quality of life for people there, and a demand for change, and that's currently a swing state, right? Like there are opportunities for, I don't wanna be like, when things get worse,

that means they can get better, but that's kinda what you're saying a little bit, huh? I'm saying if things are gonna get worse anyway, let's find ways to use that crisis to make them better. You know, I don't wanna say. Much better way to put it. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's not good for things to get bad. No, it's not.

But there's always new windows opening that we can take advantage of. Yeah, exactly. You talked a lot about narrative. I think about this a lot in terms of climate change because I think sometimes people feel that the conversation can be futile. Because look, so I work in Hollywood,

there's a lot of organizations that are, sort of want to work on climate change storytelling. I encounter them at conferences and things like that. And I was literally talking to somebody who was saying, how do we use the media to make people more aware of climate change? That was their question. And it just sort of came out of me,

I was like, you don't. People are aware of it. Like, at least everybody in my generation, we're all aware, we know. The problem is, everyone's fucking depressed about it. Everyone says nothing is being done, what do we do? We don't need more Netflix movies about like, hey, climate change is happening, did you know?

We need to somehow change the entire narrative so that people don't feel bleak. I mean, for the last five years, I've noticed people in my generation saying stuff like, oh, the world is ending, if I even have kids, oh, I never will, blah, blah, blah. People are talking in apocalyptic terms. if I even have kids, oh, I never will, blah, blah, blah. People are talking in apocalyptic terms.

And so how do you approach that problem in terms of narrative that people are aware of the issue, but they fundamentally don't feel that anything ever will or can be done about it? Yeah, I mean, I think the first thing I'll say is that it's important to remember that that is actually a strategy of the fossil fuel industry and there's also a strategy of our opposition in general.

There was literally a concerted effort. First, they were like, let's deny that there was ever a problem. And they spent a lot of money denying there was a problem. And then once that became really clear that there was a problem, they were like, let's talk about individual actions. And like that's the, you know, I don't know if you know,

but BP actually coined the term carbon footprint. That's not to say that individual choices are meaningless, but that was a push from them. Yeah, it's like they wanted to push personal responsibility over systemic change. So that was the next step in their strategy. Yeah. I didn't know that.

Very similar, yeah, very similar. to you need to recycle your plastic bottle rather than looking at the fact that we're creating the plastic bottles. Exactly. I didn't know that carbon footprint came from the exact same place. Yes, exactly. And that's not, like, you know, I know a lot of people,

I don't mean to say like give up on any changes in your lives altogether, but I'm like, it's not just on you, it's about a systemic problem. And then after that, when it became clear that people wanted to talk about the problem through the climate strikes, the next level of the strategy, which you see now, is they're just like, it's already so bad,

we can't stop it, we might as well just live our lives and shore up, invest in, you know, carbon capture is something they talk about. And like, this is how they talk about it. And like, I think it's really important to identify this as a pushed narrative that we have fallen susceptible to because I think it helps people be like, oh, it's not just my feelings,

it's that billions of dollars or millions of dollars has been spent to make me feel this way. So that's the first thing I'd say. And that we train on that often, and it helps people sort of like break through. And that's something that is beyond just climate too. Like even if you look at the ways that protest is talked about,

it is often talked about as like heroic individual actors. One thing I often think about is people talk about the story of Rosa Parks on the bus as like, oh, there was just this tired woman who wanted to sit down and didn't want to, you know, like that's how it's told. And like, this was a campaign. Rosa was like, I think the second or third person who they tried this tactic with, it was like organized, it was an effort of many, many people. And every successful movement story that we hear has like 50 failed attempts behind it.

And failed is maybe the wrong word because they actually do give you something, but they're not necessarily the viral snap moment. So I think I like to talk about that as well as like the work of movement building is not always as like glamorous and immediate as it is often told to be. It's not like you do one action, you don't sit down one time and then suddenly everything changes. It is trying something over and over again. It's being pretty disciplined.

It's having a lot of conversations on the doors. It's not just like virality. And I think that's also helpful to invite people into of like, I get it, I get that it's hard, but also we've been told that it works really fast and that works to discourage us and we've been told that it won't work at all. And I think the Joe Manchin climate bill is a really good example of this, like a different, a society that understood mass protests and protests as a key way that things moved would maybe not have reported on this bill as Joe Manson's climate bill. It could have reported on it as all those climate strikers

who walked out of school, you won this bill. And now I talk to people who walked out of school for weeks on end and they're like, it didn't work. And I'm often like, no, it did. Like you did something. So I think that's like something I like to point to. We've won things and this has worked in the past. It's continuing to work now and everything that's like something I like to point to. We've won things, this has worked in the past, it's continuing to work now,

and everything that's telling us that it isn't is actually a concerted effort to get us to give up. I find that this is a real problem that modern day social movements have is not promoting their victories. And I'll tell you, I experienced a good example of this after the writer's strike in 2023, when we won this big victory.

And at our final meeting, our negotiating co-chairs, wonderful man David Goodman, passed guest on the show, everyone's cheering. He points at all of us and he says, you guys won this. You won this by walking the picket line every day. Never let anyone take that away from you. I get chills just thinking about that moment, right?

Because it was something that we did together and we won. And you need to have that moment where you said, you did this. And I never heard the IRA framed that way, that this was the result of, this was a victory on the part of climate activists. There was so much focus on Joe Manchin and so much focus on what wasn't won

that I think the story was missed that this was a victory for you and other people who care about this issue, for all of us. If you don't celebrate your victories, if you don't find a way to win and to say we won and we're gonna do it again, how do you ever build momentum? That's a real problem for movements, isn't it?

Yeah, I think it really is. And I also think, I think particularly on climate, it's hard because the task is so big that no matter what you win, it sort of feels like, well, is it enough to stop the climate crisis? And sometimes it's like an unhelpful question to think that way, it's just not black and white. You make big strides and then you use those

to make more big strides. The other way that I think about it. We improved the future, right? Yeah, we improved it. We didn't make everything perfect, but there's gonna be a better world 10 years from now than there would have been otherwise because of what we just did, and we can do that again.

And that's all you can do is try to make tomorrow better today, right? Yeah, I mean, I certainly think so. And that's all you can do is try to make tomorrow better today, right? Yeah, I mean, I certainly think so. And the other way I think about it, and I don't, you know, I'm not certain about this, but sometimes I think about a lot of the wins that the fossil fuel industry got in the IRA are not actually huge wins for them.

Like, you know, they talked about like, they got leases that they could get, but a lot of the leases were actually not drillable land. But they really talked about that a lot and they claimed the IRA as a victory. There was even this quote of fossil fuel billionaires and they were like, oh yeah, this is actually fine for us. And sometimes I think it's important to be like, they know us as well as we know them, and it is in their interest to get us to fight each other and to get people to say like, we aren't united, this doesn't work. And I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist here, but there is actually so much

money and effort that is spent on behalf of the industry into researching and undermining climate campaigns. And I think sometimes we, I'm like, it's really important to understand that they are playing chess and we shouldn't be out here playing checkers. So I think about that a lot. Guys, buddies, pals, fellas, let's be real. Wearing uncomfortable clothes just isn't worth it anymore. Am I right? I mean, why settle for stiff, restricting fabric when you can have something that looks as sharp and feels as comfy as your favorite sweats?

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that I have about climate change. And I'd love to hear you respond to it. Because I talk to a lot of climate change scientists and social scientists, people who work on this, on this show. And we talk a lot about what doesn't work. What doesn't work is individual responsibility. Hey, everybody cut back.

What doesn't work is just leveraging the logic of capitalism, right? There are ways that that can be helpful, reducing the cost of solar, X? There are ways that that can be helpful, reducing the cost of solar, XYZ, that can be good, but it's not gonna be enough because it'll be captured by these giant corporations that will bend it to their interest and it'll be too slow. And so what the smartest people I talk to say is,

what we need is a mass movement. We need the American people to get out there in the streets and like fight for climate change. We need something on the scale of the civil rights movement of the sixties, right? Like something that large. And sometimes we look around and say, man, I don't know if that's fucking happening, right? Because there's a lot of issues right now

that people care about. And climate change is one where, even though we are feeling the effects, the biggest effects are still further down the road, until we literally start feeling them and our houses start burning down at a faster rate, by which point bad things will have already happened. So it's hard to mobilize,

the civil rights movement happened because people have been suffering for hundreds of years. We're talking about hundreds of years of suffering that is still in our future. And it's uniquely hard to mobilize people around that. And so sometimes it feels like this is a problem that is structurally difficult for a society like ours to mobilize around and to take seriously.

That's what I think when I'm up at 2 a.m. and I can't sleep, right? And I'm having dark thoughts about it. And I'd love just for you to respond to that and see what you think when I'm up at 2 a.m. and I can't sleep, and I'm having dark thoughts about it. And I'd love just for you to respond to that and see what you think about it. Yeah, I mean, I won't say that I never worry whether we'll take the level of action that we need. I think there's two things I'm thinking about

as you say that. One is, before I was executive director of Center Eyes, I ran our trainings program and I have a lot of our slides. They just live in my brain, read free. And there's a slide that we have that says, moral protest takes private suffering and turns it into collective action through telling a story about the problem.

And it's next to an image of members of ACT UP, which was a gay rights movement in the 90s, taking the ashes of their loved ones and throwing them over the White House fence. And it was this like really powerful moment of this, these dots that were pretty invisibilized and they chose to make them very visible by putting their suffering on display.

And I think that that is a really helpful way to think about the role of movements in this, is that actually a lot of people are already facing the effects of climate change, but they haven't quite connected it to it being the effects of climate change. And what direct action and moral protest can do is actually help people see something and be like, oh, wait,

that's about me too. I want to do something about that too. And whether that's like, I talk to people being like, I get more worried about my house flooding every year. I can't get home insurance anymore because of like fire is being more common. People talked about grocery prices all year last year and I'm like, you think grocery prices are going to get any better under climate change when we have droughts and famines? People talked about grocery prices all year last year, and I'm like, you think grocery prices are gonna get any better under climate change

when we have droughts and famines? The effects of climate change are here and they're getting worse. And I think part of the role of direct action is to actually tell people that they are already experiencing this and see it as part of their everyday life. So that's the one thing I'd say.

Oh, Bri. Yeah. Oh, well, that just makes me think that something I think about as a communicator and as a comedian, I've been thinking about this a lot lately, is you cannot tell people what they should care about, right?

You can't say, this is so important, I implore you to care about it. I don't care about it. I care about my favorite sports team and my family and my income, and I have all this other shit to care about. You can't like give me caring homework. You know, like it doesn't work that way.

What you need to do is find what people already do care about and then connect it to, you know, if you're an activist or a communicator, connect it to the message that you're trying to get across. And so what you're talking about is finding the ways that people already do care about climate change, but don't know it yet. And connecting them to the movement so you can bring them in, which does seem possible and sound super effective to me.

That's really cool. Yeah, I think that's a big part of it. And then the other thing I'd say is that it's also about when you actually take a step back and understand the level of systemic change that we need to stop the climate crisis, you actually realize that a lot of the solutions are so tied together.

I think about healthcare as a really good example of this. We talk about healthcare as part of the Green New Deal. People are often like, why is healthcare in there? It kind of just seems like you're making a progressive wish list. And what I say to that is one of the things that we're going to need to do is have massive amounts of people like move into the green economy. And one of the biggest things that keeps people in their jobs currently is access to health care

because their jobs give them health care. So if you want to create a society where rapid transition over your economy can actually happen without people just like sticking to their jobs, part of what you need to do is create a social safety net, including healthcare, that actually creates an economically flexible society. So that's why I'm like, yeah, universal healthcare is part of creating the type of society that can rapidly respond to the climate crisis. And there are things like that. There are many examples like that. I think that's true of housing in different ways. And so that's the other piece of it is on stopping climate change requires a lot of investing in our social safety net. It requires a lot of job creation. If you

want those jobs to actually attract people, they need to be good paying jobs. A lot of the things that people are talking about in their day-to-day lives, like people are like, I care about jobs, I care about housing, I care about education. Those are all related to how we need to stop the climate crisis. So those are the two pieces I'd say is, I'm like connect to what people care about by telling them that they already care about climate change, which is true, and also talk about how stopping

climate change is connected to other issues, which it is. Yeah, I love that answer. It raises another, I'm not gonna be too skeptical. I like giving you, provoking you a little bit and hearing your answer to it. But if, okay, to fight climate change, all we need to do is get universal healthcare in America and solve the housing crisis.

Well, that sounds like we have two other intractable problems we need to solve. I mean, the housing crisis has been caused by, you know, 70 years of not building enough homes, right? Or like 50 years, say. And healthcare, you know, we've been trying to solve that since, for decades, right? I mean, the Affordable Care Act was an inflation reduction

act sized bill that was passed in 2008 that attempted to fix healthcare in America. And it clearly did not, right? And that was like such a titanic effort no one has even tried since. And so, it's a little bit. Like how do we? You're like, you're making this harder. Yeah.

Yeah, well, it makes it, I understand what you're saying, but then when I look at it that way, I'm like, ah, the problem simply becomes more titanic to deal with, doesn't it? I can see how it feels that way. And I think the thing I'd say is, American democracy is not very responsive to public opinion. And what you end up finding. Clearly.

Yeah. Yeah, and to, you know, this is just me being a little bit of a history nerd, but I'm like, and it was designed not to be that way. You know, like we were the first democracy, it was designed to sort of be like, we're not so sure about this whole democracy thing. Let's put in a lot of measures to make this not super responsive. And we still are in that model.

And on top of that, corporations have an outsized amount of power in our democracy. And when you look at those two things, I think actually everything else becomes, in my mind, a lot easier because, you know, we talk about being in a polarized country, but a lot of what I see when I knock doors of MAGA voters, when I knock doors of Republicans, when I knock doors of people who don't vote, and when I knock doors of Democrats. You hear so much of actually the same content, but people just directing their anger and their almost tribal identity in different directions. And I actually think there is a lot of unity

on a lot of things that we've talked about, including things like we should act on climate change, things like how the health on climate change, things like how the health care system should be better. Like a lot of these things are just like tremendously popular and are not left versus right issues. And to me this is where I'm like, oh you actually, I think there is a way that there is what we are currently seeing is an up swelling of like populist energy. and Trump was able to tap into that populist energy and say that I am the person to fight for you and the reason

you don't have good things in your life is because of immigrants and because of trans people. I think there's an alternative way that we're like, actually, that's not true. We could have good things in our lives and corporations are the ones holding us back. Let's fix our government so it's actually responsive to people, kick corporate money out, and act on the things that the majority of American people want to act on. I think you then suddenly see a flood of legislation coming through the doors.

To me, the question is, how do you build a mass movement that is strong enough and in my mind disruptive enough to force actual structural changes to our democratic system that allows us to pass the type of climate legislation and other legislation that we need and that's that's sort of how Sunrise is thinking about the next few years and we've been we've been actually talking a lot about I don't know if you've heard the United Auto Workers have put out this call for a general strike in May of 2018. They've asked their unions to align their contracts. And we've been thinking a lot about the role of students

and of climate in thinking about that. Because I think that could be an opportunity to actually demand and talk about the level of structural reform needed to our political and economic system to clear the runway for climate legislation. That's really cool. Wait, so how would you coordinate with the United Auto Workers and any other union

that has coordinated their contracts? Like, you know, Sean Fain made that call. I don't think he gave a lot of specifics of exactly what once we have those aligned, we're all gonna be fighting for simultaneously, right? It's a big ask to ask even just unions to coordinate in that way. And union, of course, density is not very high in this country. So how do you see sunrise say, you know, in May of 2028, there's a couple

unions that are ready to go on strike. Sunrise is not a movement. How do you see yourself coordinating with them? Yeah. Well, first of all, when I saw that May Day, I was immediately like, oh, that's not a student-based timeline. So I think one one thing I'd say is our role comes a little bit before that. But if you look historic,

just because the school year escalating in May for students is just not that helpful. But I think if you look historically, that actually lines up really well, that a lot of times in other countries, students are able to take sort of like a leading edge in social movements because we often have less things that we are responsible for, less things tying us down. So students often strike first in social movements across the world. I think particularly in scenarios like what we might be driving towards right now where Donald Trump might act in really authoritarian ways.

So I think the role that students can play is actually like, you know, walking out of school, leaving their classes, you know, maybe sitting down, like taking over city halls. Maybe it looks like that. I don't know what their tactics would look like four years from now, but doing that actually opens up political space for other unions and also just other workers who aren't in unions,

because as you mentioned, union density is so low to see that like, okay, if students can do it, I can do it too. And that's how it's worked in other countries a lot of the time. So that's how I sort of think about it, is I'm like students have it, to me a critical role to play, young people have a critical role to play.

We also have a lot of moral authority because there is this burningly urgent issue of climate change to be like, well, this is our entire lives, it's our entire future, and we need to act on this right away. So like, let's get our act together and build a political system

that will actually be responsive to the crises that we face because it's ridiculous that it isn't. I love that answer. I wanna talk about another challenge in building mass movement. Something that is, the left has quite a reputation for is fractiousness, right?

And that can get in the way of building a mass movement when you are too busy fighting amongst yourselves. How do you move on mass when you can't even agree? And you know, I would put under this everything from, you know, the climate movement versus Joe Manchin, right? I mean, Joe Manchin was a member of the Democratic party. He was part of the reason that, you know, the bill was able to pass in the first place

was because here's a Democratic senator from West Virginia. He's, there's not gonna be a Democratic senator from West Virginia, you know, in the future, right? And so this is a guy who you do have to deal with, even though he's opposed. That's a real ideological difference within the party. But then also, you know, within our, even the ideologically aligned movement, we can tend to, you know, have fractiousness. I mean, we don't need to delve into the details, but you know, I remember I read an article a couple years ago about a lot of discord within Sunrise itself, right?

A lot of organizations like yours have had, you know, little blow ups, or like people don't get along, or et cetera, right? There's an endemic problem in left movements. And so what do you see as the cause of it, and how can we get past it, so that we're not like bogged down in these like internal disputes

that could actually work on what we care about? Yeah, I mean, I definitely have experienced that in different moments on the left. And it's definitely a huge challenge to our ability to movement build. I don't, two things that I'm thinking about. One, it's actually two center is things that we train on. One is we often would tell people,

even if you got everyone on the left to agree with you and agree on your campaign, we still would not have enough power to win. And it's just a light agitation that we talk to each other a lot and actually we're not the majority. And we need to take that seriously and try to be the majority if we're going to win what we want to win. So we really try and orient people to that.

And I think that has been somewhat successful in getting people to just be like, oh, what do ordinary people who maybe don't have my full ideology think about and how would I talk to them to bring them into the movement. So that's been one helpful thing. We also have a phrase that we say around politicians, we say no permanent friends, no permanent enemies. I feel like John Fetterman is a good example of this.

We elected him in 2018 and then he flopped on fracking. We were like, actually, no. But then right now, I'm like, if there's a version where he's willing to be like an anti corporate Democrat, I'm like, I would stand up to John Fenderman and say like, yes, we should get corporate money out of the Democratic Party, like, no permanent friends, no permanent enemies, there are always or like, even Republicans, like I'm like, I would stand next to a Republican that said, yes, let's get corporate money out of politics. and that's not to say like throw out all your values it's to say like we're here to win things and you should figure out who your allies are that will help you win things and you

should get them to stand with you to win the things and To me that like that sort of orientation we we almost sometimes we call it like a hegemonic orientation or a majoritarian orientation. It's something that I think it's really essential that the left gets oriented to. I think it can happen through trainings and political education.

I also think it happens in the way that leaders on the left can talk and hold their line about things. So we certainly try in Sunrise to put that in our training program to lead that way, to help our hubs lead that way locally. I don't wanna say that we've figured it out, but it definitely feels like a core challenge that we're trying to navigate in how we movement build.

Yeah, I think it's a really core challenge. I wanna maybe just pose a hypothetical to you, because you mentioned John Fetterman, for instance, right? Very polarizing guy on the left. He's a obviously massive, extremely vocal supporter of the state of Israel, right? So say he moves in your direction on some climate thing and he wants your support, right?

And you're like, oh my God, he's so on board with what we're trying to do here regarding climate. If you stand with him, some portion of your coalition says, hold on a second, he's so diametrically opposed to what's happening, what Israel is doing to the people of Gaza right now, that how can we stand with this guy and these issues are linked and et cetera, et cetera.

Now you've got some division and you're trying to act strategically and advance the goals linked and et cetera, et cetera. Now you've got some division and you're trying to act strategically and advance the goals of the climate crisis, but you've got this sort of like fundamental split in the part of your coalition you really care about. You're having difficult meetings over this, right? How do you navigate that kind of situation? Because I see that come up time and time again,

where you've got a good faith disagreement that risks blowing up your movement, you know? Yeah, absolutely. The very brass tax version of my answer is like, we vote on our endorsements, we vote on a lot of our stuff. And I think that I actually think that sounds like a process-based answer, but I think the thing actually think that sounds like a process based like answer. But I think the thing that it does helpfully is that it agitates people who are critical

of different decisions to be like, well, what would you do? What would you want to do? And I think that a lot of the time what I see as like, fractiousness in the left comes also from like not having a place to exercise like your own political power and giving people that place by having in my mind democratic structures in your movements actually is helpful and we really found this with You know the way that we approached the election this year like at the end of the day when you give people We didn't endorse Biden and we didn't endorse Harris. We were pretty clear that their stance on Climate and fracking and as well as their stance

on Gaza, felt incompatible with endorsing them. But we did make the decision to do get out. We contacted 4 million voters telling them that we didn't want Trump to be in office and that would be an existential threat to the climate and that meant voting for Harris. So that's how we walked the line there. And that is something that we came to through a lot of discussion with our movement. And I think what we found is actually like when you give away the keys and when you ask people like,

what would you do? Actually people do wanna win and they like, part of the problem is like when your main political exercise is tweeting, you just get to be as critical as you want to be, but when you're taking responsibility for winning, you actually end up acting more, yeah, in a more majoritarian way. And I don't wanna say that will solve everything,

and that's not actually an answer exactly to what you were asking, like would you endorse or not? And I, you know, but that's how I would like, those are the types of structures that we would invest in. Be like, yeah, I think that's what you need to do. Yeah, no, I wasn't asking if you'd endorsed, I was asking how would you handle that sort of scenario? And I think that's a wonderful answer.

Because I think that sometimes the left or, anybody who's part of a movement of any kind, a lot of times we lose ourselves in powerlessness. We accept that we're powerless and that all we can do is talk. And when all you do is talk, you can talk forever. You just keep tweeting, you just keep having meetings, you just keep sitting in a circle

and going around and complaining and talking. But when you give people an opportunity to say, okay, what should we actually do right now? Let's take a vote. Then people can register their disagreement, and then maybe the vote goes away they don't like, but hey, they got to weigh in. They got to put in their input,

and now we're gonna move forward. Exactly. And that's a way to, you're not gonna resolve the question to everybody's happiness, but at least you can like take a step forward with that. And some, and you know, then each of those individual people have the option to go, okay, I'm, I'm in coalition with a movement that I don't always agree on,

but at least I got to put in my two cents and now I can decide whether I want to stay or go. I, I think that's really powerful to take people from this situation of powerlessness to, hey, I had a say and we discussed and then we voted. That's such a great answer. I love that. And the other thing that that does is that it incentivizes involvement.

Like if you want to have your way, you should be involved. And like people naturally want to follow people who are effective. And so if you've led a really effective hub, then people naturally want to follow people who are effective. And so if you've led a really effective hub, then people are more likely to listen to your opinion. And so I think that's a helpful way to be like, yeah, the way that you gain power is not through, like I said, tweeting a lot or being really loud

or critical. It's like, can you actually move people? Do you have people who will follow you? Do you think that part of the less problem is a little bit of an addiction to losing or an addiction to negativity that like, whenever something happens, we sort of have to find the way in which it wasn't good enough.

I think again about Joe Manchin, right? That like, there's two ways to frame the IRA. You can either say Joe Manchin stopped all this good stuff from happening and ruined the bill, and he's the big villain and we didn't stand up to him enough, et cetera. Or you can look at it and say, hey, we got a whole bunch of shit passed

despite Joe Manchin. He was pissed off about a lot of things in that bill. And guess what? It got passed even though he was trying to do all that stuff, do all that bad shit. Like, there's a real framing issue that I feel like we have. Yeah, I mean, I think that's true. I think it's a cultural issue where we sometimes like

to be small and we like to be right and only with the people who we agree with on everything. And that's just not helpful and it's not how you win. I think of, there's a book that I read and that a lot of people in Tenerife, we read and refer to called Hegemony How To. It's by someone called Johnson Smucker. And it's sort of a look at Occupy in particular, but also the left in general and the cultural elements that have held us back from power.

And I think he tells a story, and I might be botching it because I was really young then about how at Occupy some famous pop star wanted to come and amplify. And people were like, no, we don't want that because like X, Y, Z political stances. And there is just something about being oriented to being right over being oriented to power, or that's often what we do and we should flip that.

Like I'm like being oriented to power and winning is really, really important. And without that, you just never get done what you wanna get done. Yeah, I wanna, let's dwell on the word power, because I think that it's a word that's used a lot on the left, but we don't actually think about like what we mean by it and how do we build it.

So what does power mean to you as a movement leader? To me, the power is the ability to make what you want happen. And if I have power over a politician, it means that I have something that they want more than they have something that I want. And if they have power over me, it's the other way around. And so to me, I'm like, what do they want? What is essential to them?

And how do I have control over that? Like whether that's votes, whether that's reputation, whether that's like stability in their district, like whatever it is, you're like, great, what do you want? And how do I move it? Yeah, and having power is like how we actually make the world a better place in the ways that we want. It's how we fight climate change and everything else.

Power is the ability to force the world to change whether or not other people like it. Exactly. And to a certain extent, that's what the Trump administration is gonna have. And if you don't agree with the goals of the Trump administration or of that segment of American society,

then you need to claim power. You need to say, okay, we're gonna make shit happen whether or not they like it. And I think one of the mistakes that the left makes is not focusing enough on how do you build that. Again, to bring this back to the writer's strike, that was such a profound feeling of power for me because we were able to force those CEOs

to give us what we wanted and change our industry. We didn't ask them, we didn't beg them, we didn't vote, we didn't donate. We like forced it to happen. And that's because the Writers Guild has spent 90 years building that power where, you know, it's on some level irresistible. And I feel like a lot of folks on the left

have accepted powerlessness and only focus on rightness, correctness, or arguing with each other rather than saying, no, no, the most important thing is being able to fucking move the boulder of reality, right? And you can be wrong a little bit sometimes, or you can hang out with people who you don't agree with all the time, if it gives you the ability to move that boulder better.

It seems like sometimes we've lost sight of that goal. Absolutely, and I think, you know, we were talking earlier about sort of the disillusionment that people sometimes feel with protest or our ability to make change. And in my mind, this is very tied to the question of power and how we wield it, that in some ways, we've fallen back on like many people in the streets

is the way that change works. And sometimes being a little bit more ruthless in our strategy of like, okay, why does many people in the streets change something? I think, I'm not saying it doesn't change things. I think it has a lot of narrative power. It sets the standard of like, what's normal and what's acceptable. Okay, so maybe you change like the narrative standard,

but is that enough to outweigh the other interests that people are facing? And if not, like what is? Sometimes it's votes. Sometimes it is like what you said, it strikes. Like, you know, it's all very well for Nancy Mace to be like, you know, people can only use this bathroom in the Capitol, but if people just don't do that, it doesn't matter. You know, like that's as simple as that. Or like, if, you know, you're ordered to like...

There's a million examples I could give like that. And I think if you look at some of the most powerful social movements throughout history, it's often just like not complying with what you are told to do. Right. But in terms of you guys being able to, so bringing it back to power

and bringing it to sunrise movement, what does power look like concretely for your movement and for the climate movement and how do you build it? Yeah, I mean, I think there's a couple things we need to do. One, I think we need to like raise the saliency of climate change again and make it an issue that makes people want to switch their vote.

And I think that's like part of how it's like narrative power that leads to electoral power. And I think that's part of how it's narrative power that leads to electoral power. And the more that you actually say climate is an urgent issue and people are like, oh wow, it is, that's the one of the top ways I'm gonna vote, that actually has an impact on politicians, it has an impact on how they act. That's one thing that I think is quite important.

I would also say that we are, with our strategy and the approach we're taking, we're investing a lot in like the power of direct action and student strikes. Like actually, if you have a bunch of high schoolers who are like, yeah, I'm just not going to go to school unless you do X, Y, Z, that is a freaky thing for a lot of society. Because suddenly parents are like, wait, my 14 year old is just like running around in the streets like hang on you need to do something and like you know it sparks something and I think there are other versions of that as well. It could be like well we're going to take over the capital and like you know don't pass anything until you

pass this like that type of like state capitals like you do a sit-in there like that type of thing is also a version of like actually the way that we are exercising power here is like physically not letting you do anything until you say yes to our demands. So there's different ways to look at it. I think we like look at elections, we look at narrative and we certainly look at like direct action as sources of our power.

And all of those take people. You know, in terms of the Democratic Party doing sit-ins and things like that, there's this discussion happening right now in Democratic circles about maybe the problem is we spent too much time listening to all these different groups that want us to do things, right? That all the different groups had too much power

and caused the party to like drift away from what people actually want, you know? And that, you hear Ezra Klein talking about this the last couple of weeks, the party needs to say no to the activists and to the groups. You represent one of the most effective groups of the last couple of years. You sat in Nancy Pelosi's office and you made the Democratic Party do shit.

So maybe you're one of these groups that he and others like him are talking about. I'm curious what your reaction is to that conversation. I think there's a couple of things I'm thinking about. One is, in some ways I'm like, it is my job to actually make politicians listen to me. And it's politicians job to calculate whether listening to us,

listening to young people, asking for climate action is going to cost them more than it will gain them. And I'm here to be like, no, it won't. Like you'll actually gain more and here's why you need to do this. And they get to make their own assessment. And like, frankly, like if you, like some of the way I think about it is unlike Democrats saying yes to everything is partially because they have felt pretty unclear on their own ideology. And so they try and hold together a coalition that has like fossil fuel actors and climate activists in the same coalition. And I'm like, well, like, if you make the calculation that you think like saying pleasing possible and just is more important than pleasing climate organizers and young people,

you can make that calculation and then you'll face the consequences. And it's also on us as a climate movement to be like, well, let's make sure those consequences are big enough so they don't do that again. You know, like that's how I think about that relationship is I'm like, we're not all doing the exact same project. Like the Democratic Party is there Like, the Democratic Party is there

to make the Democratic Party win. I am here to like try and win a better world for people where we can stop the climate crisis. And they get to choose like what they say yes and no to. So that's like one thing I'd say is I'm like, I don't agree with the calculation that they should have said no to groups like sunrise. Um, I think that they've been saying yes to every group and that does end up having

some repercussions, you know? Um, and that's how you end up having no vision for the future is you said yes to everybody, but you can't actually make a discrete pitch of here's where we're going to do cause that's going to piss off half of your donors or whatever, half of the constellation of groups around you, because they're in opposition to each other. And it's very interesting that it's groups such as yours

or racial justice groups or criminal justice reform groups that are called the groups that we need to say no to. What about the billionaires? What about the large businesses? Why is nobody talking about saying no to those groups? Are people really aligned with the, are the American people really aligned with the billionaires? Is that who they really wanna vote for?

I don't think so. Yeah, and I think everything that we've seen this year about, honestly, everything going on in Gaza has been a really good example of this, where a lot of politicians have decided the majority of the American public supported a ceasefire. That is just true that it stayed consistent in polling over the months. And there was a lot, specifically, APACAC as a lotting firm spent millions of dollars to make an example of a handful of politicians.

So the other politicians would try and tow the line as much as possible. So, and there are a lot of examples right there, right? Where like public opinion is actually like on the side of popular issues. That's true of gun violence, it's true of crime chain, it's true of health care. It's like true of so many issues. And yeah, so that's that is part

of what I'd say is I'm like in I do agree with some of the argument that Democrats have become a party that is about coalition management rather than saying here's what we're trying to achieve in the world and people can try and influence us and we'll say yes to some of them and no to others of them. Yeah, and I think that's like somewhat true. I think that it was the right calculation to say yes to climate organizers in that effort. Well, that's a really great point that like,

it is true that just managing your coalition and keeping everybody happy is a dead end if you don't know what you actually stand for. And that that is the real problem that the Democratic Party has had, is a lack of leadership. And a Democratic Party wants to have power, but is not sort of willing to make the choices required

to present a vision that will allow them to take power. And I think then that's what ends up being like the whole strategy is about opposing Trump, which has limits and who can attract it can attract. So I'm like, I think there's a different like less coalition management more like how I think there's a version of the Democrats are like, we are going to be the party that ends corruption in politics that kicks corporate money out and that makes the government work for everyday people. And Trump's actually saying that.

And I'm like, there's no reason that Trump should be the one saying that because it's just not true of him. And I think it could be true of the Democratic Party. And so there's a real way that they could like get a lot of energy from that. But so yeah, I think to the question of the groups, do they have too much influence?

I'm like, some of them do. I don't think Sunrise does, but you know, maybe some people do. I love talking to you. You are so smart and strategic about all this stuff and really concrete in your political analysis. It's not abstract. It's like, here is what we actually need to do

to actually fight this problem. And that just makes me feel, I don't know, optimistic's the wrong word, but like, there is something that can be done and you are thinking effectively about how to do it. I love that. If people want to get involved, what do they do? Give us the pitch to the average person

who's listening to this saying, oh my God, I love how concretely she talks about power and climate change and all this shit. I wanna join in. Where do they go? Great. You should come join Sunrise Movement. It's sunrisemovement.org.

We have weekly welcome calls online and they will give you everything you need to know to find your local hub or start a hub if you want to start a hub or join a national volunteer team. If you're like, there's no hub near me. Everything you have is on that. You just go to our website and that's the easiest way. Or if you're like, I's no hub near me. Everything you have is on that. You just go to our website and that's the easiest way.

Or if you're like, I can't type in a link, you can look us up on Instagram or TikTok or any social media platform. And those also have a lot of links to join. So that's what I'd say is like, come join. The biggest thing we need is people and people organizing with us. Aru, thank you so much for being on the show. I can't thank you enough. This has been such a wonderful conversation.

Thanks, Helens, it's been really fun. Well, thank you once again to Aru for coming on the show. I hope you found that conversation as enlightening, as inspiring as I did. If you wanna support the show and all the conversations we bring you every single week, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of the show

ad free for 15 bucks a month. I'll read your name in the credits of the show and put it in the credits of every single one of my video monologues. This week I want to thank the Dusty Shredder, Thor Tron, Samuel Montour, David Snowpeck, Eric Carlson, Scooty Chimkinuggy, Miss Me With The Fascism, Eric Aaron Explosion, Robert Fuss, and Game Grumps, the wonderful YouTube channel Game Grumps. Thank you so much for your support. All of you. If you would like to join them once again, patreon.com Adam Conover is that URL. If you want to come see me on the road in Omaha, Nebraska, Toronto,

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