The Daily Stoic - David Wallace-Wells on Empowering the Future

Episode Date: September 10, 2022

Ryan talks to journalist David Wallace-Wells about his new book The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, seeking out information, challenging assumptions, and becoming empowered through better understanding.During his 11 years at New York magazine, David has emerged as one of the nation’s most formidable thinkers about science and society, writing agenda-setting essays on the dangers and complexities of global warming. His 2019 book, “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming,” was a number one Times bestseller, and reviewers called it both “brilliant” and “the most terrifying book I have ever read”; The Washington Post aptly called it “the ‘Silent Spring’ of our time,” and it has become a touchstone for the younger generation of climate activists who have helped redraw the landscape of global climate politics in just the last few years.📕Pre-order Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" and get exclusive pre-order bonuses at https://dailystoic.com/preorder ✉️  Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoke. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stokes, something to help you live up to those four Stoke virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend when you have a little bit more space when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly to prepare for what the week

ahead may bring. Hi I'm David Brown, the host of Wundery's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. I guess it would have been, it's either 2017 or 2018, I was in New York City on my book tour for Conspiracy and my friend, Tim Irvin, threw together a little dinner at this steakhouse. It was really cool.

I forget everyone who was there, but one person was there. I wasn't familiar with his work before, but he has since become one of my absolute favorite writers, especially over the last couple years. I'm talking about David Wallace-Wells. You've almost certainly read some of his columns in the Times or in New York magazine. He has a really cool new newsletter for the New York Times that I very much recommend, but he is a climate change reporter, a pandemic reporter, and just a really thoughtful, intelligent guy. In his 2019 book, The Uninhabitable Earth Life After Warming was a number one bestseller. It was, as one reviewer said, one of the most terrifying books you will ever read, The Washington Post called it, The Silent Spring of Our Time.

I really enjoyed this conversation. I've been waiting for it to come out somehow. I've got like lost in the shuffle, so it's a little later than I would like it to run, but I very much think you are going to enjoy this interview. I won't belabor the intro too much. I am a bit exhausted. I just got back from Mantino, Illinois, where the warehouse for Daily Stoke is. I was trying to sign as many copies of the book for the pre-orderers that I could. I ended up doing like 2750 to the first day. I did like 35 35 3600 the second day. So more than 6000 copies already signed and then I'm back at the office here on a Saturday

but signing some more copies, you guys have been overwhelming in the support of the book and it means so much to me. If you haven't prior to discipline is destiny yet, you can do that at DailyStow at Backcom slash Pre-Order. But back to David, when I said that he went on to become one of my favorite writers, there was a part of me that was somewhat resistant to reading his writing at first, and we talk

about this in the interview. I guess, you know, it's not that it's a buzzkill, but it's not exactly the most inspiring stuff to read about how badly we are screwing things up. But to me, this is a really key part of Stoicism, the virtue of wisdom, which I will tackle, two books from now. But the idea that you have to seek out uncomfortable information, and if you are studying information that makes you comfortable, that confirms your viewpoint, you're not learning, you're not pushing yourself, I really think David does a great job of challenging assumptions, looking at data both dispassionately as well as passionately. And, you know, he lays

it all out there. His reading was a load star for me during the pandemic. And I would say his pandemic reporting and how right he was and how wrong many other people who I previously, you know, liked to read were, you know, it's definitely made me reevaluate some of the climate change stuff that maybe I wasn't as concerned about as I should be, but remember, a key part of this doses is giving a crap about people you will never meet, including future generations. And that's why I very much recommend David's book. You can read the uninhabitable Earth life after warming. You'd follow him on Twitter, D Wallace Wells, and you can get his new New York Times and subscriber-only newsletter. Just go to nytime.com slash newsletter, David Wallace Wells, there's a dash in between each one. And yeah, I really think he's a great writer. I really

enjoyed this conversation, and I think you will too. enjoyed this conversation and I think you will too. I'm trying to think so we met at that dinner. Like when was this? This is 2007. No, 2017, I guess, right? In New York. Sounds ballpark right to me. Yeah.

I think that was it, right? This is right before uninhabitable Earth came out. It was, well, it was probably, yeah, I mean, the book came out in 2019. I don't, I mean, somewhere in that ballpark, 2017, 2018, it might be like closer to a, like a landmark day in your life than mine. So if you say, if you're like,

it was definitely 2017, I'm sure you're right. Oh, yeah, no, actually I don't know when that, this, I think I was there because conspiracy had just come out, but I honestly, I don't remember. Yeah, it could also be like getting older. I think that is, that is true. It does blur together. Yeah, like when you're younger, like even, okay,

so let's say that was four or five years ago, like five years used to be a long amount of time, right? Like because- Journal-ledding high school. Yeah, it only been through a number of five year spans. And then as you go through more of them, it all blurs together. Yeah, I mean, I'd something I think about a lot

with my kids, which is that it's a, I'm, you know, as like any parent is, I'm constantly amazed at how fast they're growing up and then you're like, oh, I'm aging at the same exact speed. Yes. Which doesn't occur to any of us, but. I am. My youngest was like nine months old

when the pandemic started. And so you know those little frames that you have or you take like the nine month photo and then the 10 month photo, the one that we just stopped. It's like that's when that's when the Titanic hit the iceberg and my watch stopped. You know what I mean? We have this weird, that's when it happened. You know kind of a thing.

So your kids do help you benchmark. It is funny. I wrote this email a while ago where I was saying, every time you cut your kids' nails or every time you take them to get your haircut, you think it's like this wonderful moment, which it is, but then it's also a terrible moment if you think about it, because that's like a one-way street. Not just getting older, but it's a one-way street for both of you, like heading towards a place where that won't happen anymore.

Yeah, my older daughter, who's four.5, has never had her hair cut. And we were just talking about it the other day. And my wife was like, I think that means like the end of your hair may have been inside me. And it's amazing to think that that's like, oh, right. That is, that's both beautiful and weird. Yes. So I was talking to, I thought you would like this.

I was talking to John Embarry, who wrote the great influenza, certainly. And I loved, I read his book Rising Tide many years ago, which I think is kind of a climate change book. It's certainly about what happens when we fuck with the climate and the consequences there. And so I was like, okay, so you wrote this book like 15 years ago about climate change basically, or 20 years ago, about climate change, and things have gotten worse,

then you wrote this book about pandemics, and then that was like sort of eerily prescient. And I was like, could you stop writing books about these topics? That would be nice. And we laughed at it. And then later in the interview, he mentions, I said the phrase church in state,

and he was like, you know, I wrote a book about that too, which I did not know. And I read, he wrote this book about the invention, like we think of America being founded as people who fled religious persecution, right? Which is kind of true, but they weren't seeking religious freedom for everyone. Dr. Justin Trinum established religious societies just their own.

Yeah, they were attempting to set up a religious theocracy for their religion, right? And it's only this guy, Roger Williams, who sort of differs from that, goes on to found the state of Rhode Island. But I was like, God damn it, could you stop writing about the terrible things that are happening right now in the world, but the historical prequel to them. And then I guess it's just like humans have always struggled with these things and struggled with collective action problems, with thinking about complicated topics. And then we're so often at the mercy of singular mercy and at the saved by heroic or evil individuals who sort of decide to exert their will on everyone else.

And now we're in a situation on a number of fronts where one big question is whether these are unprecedented challenges or whether we just feel that they are. And it's something we can talk about, but it's something that I feel differently about almost like every minute of every day. I can find myself thinking especially the climate crisis, but also the whole sort of poly-crisis that we're living through right now is really daunting in its scale and unprecedented and has no meaningful analog in human history. And then there are other times and other ways of looking at it where I think, you know, this is obviously very serious and

managing it poorly will result in an enormous amount of suffering and probably even managing it well will result in some amounts of real suffering. But the question of how we relate to it emotionally, politically, philosophically, I think is kind of an open one. And I do wonder slash worry a little bit, whether or to what degree our sort of presentism and our cultural, present tense apocalyptic impulses, to which I've contributed,

are pulling us towards a darker vision of what we're living through now, what we're heading towards, then someone in 50 or 100 years might think looking back. I don't know. Yeah, I was going to ask you about that. Not in the sort of don't look up sense of like, how do you stay positive? But I am curious as someone whose job it is to write about or to seek out almost universally unpleasant information, right? Like the data that you look at, the people that you talk to, whether it's your COVID reporting or your climate change reporting, like you're talking to the people who are looking at the worst information that there is, right?

Like the things that the fringes or at the extremes or the doomsday scenarios. And then on top of that, you're a journalist, which means that you're sort of in this media culture of presentism and social media and sort of competitiveness and the day-to-day news cycle, which isn't super healthy just even when you're not talking doomsday scenarios.

How do you manage to stay sane with them? I don't want to, I don't mean like how do you see the good and everything, but how does that not just break your brain? Because it seems like it could break someone's brain. I guess I look at it from the opposite perspective, which is to say that if I wasn't seeking out that information, then I'd be turning away from what knowledge there was to help us guide thinking about where we are and where we're going. So

you know, the alternative world in which journalists like me are telling, like just a good news, and our media just has a good news by us. And that would actually be a really scary world for me to live in, because I would think that there would be an enormous number of threats that we weren't taking very seriously, but which were very real. And you know, it's, I think to some degree, a matter of just pure temperament. some amount of sociopathic, slash journalistic distance that I'm able to write about these stories, sort of as stories. But, you know, the, the fact is that we are living through this enormous transformation and taking that seriously means looking very hard at where we are, looking very hard at where we're going and not shining away from whatever might be embedded in that information that is quite scary.

So, to talk in slightly less abstracted terms, you know, talk about climate change for a second. The planet's like 1.2 degrees Celsius warmer than it was before the industrial revolution. And that, which doesn't sound very much, but it literally means it is warmer now than at any point, at any point, previous to this one in the entire history of human civilization. So the planet is already warmer than at any point when there were humans around to walk around and talk about it. So much of what we know of as human history, our politics, our agriculture, our culture, our psychology are, you know, everything, is the result of cultures that arose from climate conditions that are no longer

here. And that means that we are today embarked on a genuine experiment, which is to say how much of what we have can survive and how much can't, how much will have to be transformed. I don't think it's like, you know, doom saying to look into the future with that frame. I think it's just honest. And I think we're- It's not better bad, it just is. It's facts or facts. And you know, those people who are like,

well, we've gotten through challenges in the past, I actually, I do think that that wisdom is valid, although I also don't think it's total. And I don't think that we can assume success based on previous usually mixed success. But I also don't want to let that sort of crowd out. For me, the central dramatic, emotional, political, philosophical question of our time,

which is just, how are we going to survive in this new world that we're making for ourselves? No, I get that. And I totally understand the duty of it, and I'm not saying that you shouldn't be doing it. I'm more saying it's like if I was talking to a police officer or a special forces operator, you're seeing dark shit on a daily basis, right? Like your job forces you to stare into a kind of a this, right? Their job does, but also yours.

I'm asking like, how do you actually process and think through that or is it just not affect you and you just see it as sort of like, this is the information I'm processing and my job is to make sense of it and tell that story. I sense, though, from your writing, that there's a moral element of it to you that alarms you and scares you and upsets you.

So how, as you day in and day out are living in that world, like how do you not bring that home? How does it not depress you, how do you function with the climate in your work that you have to acclimate to? Yeah, I mean, I don't know that I have an especially satisfactory answer to it because, I mean, I can tell you the way that it affects me, which is, add an abstract and intellectual moral level more than at a base emotional psychological level. And that may make me well-sited to this work, or it may make me a sociopath, who is not just talking about these things, I don't entirely know.

And I think it is important that I came to these stories as a journalist, which is to say a sort of a, someone who's making narrative out of the messiness of the world. And on these two big stories, in particular, climate change in the pandemic, it was the bigness of the story that really excited me, which is to say I didn't find it intimidating

or overwhelming, I mean, in certain ways, overwhelming and intimidating, but in other ways, I just found it exciting to be carried along on a huge drama. And the pandemic in particular was fascinating in the sense that as a reporter, which I sort of am part-time, I guess you could say, it was amazing to be very rapidly pulled into a saga that no one understood because

the disease was so novel. And you could talk to experts who had, you know, rules of thumb, they were caring for mother, you know, epidemiological experience and there are ways of sort of conceptually modeling it based on previous influenza's respiratory illnesses, etc. But we have not seen anything like this pandemic in 100 years. You know, a disease that literally infected the entire planet within a couple of years. And we were all figuring it out from scratch at the start. Now at the time, I think the world as a whole responded in terror, primarily.

They were like, let's bunker down, let's cut ourselves off from one another, we need to protect ourselves, we don't know what this is. And I didn't fight that impulse myself. I wasn't like, no, I wanna be going out to nightclubs in March of 2020, but I was also really pulled forward and excited by the idea that there was a, you know, a grand historical narrative

that was not only unfolding through the time of our lives, but had just begun, and in which I wasn't behind anyone else who had more expertise. I was able to like, as much as anyone who was not a scientific expert in respiratory infection, I was like, as well positioned to be understanding that at the Vanguard as anyone else in the world. And that found, that's all really, really exciting, particularly in contrast to writing about climate where no matter how expert I ever got, I would always

know that there were thousands of people who knew the material actually much deeper than I did, and you could understand the physics of ocean currents and explain them in a way that I probably never would be able to. And it's one of the sort of strange facts of my life now is that I am in certain ways this expert and in other ways this total novice. You know, the other day I was like, I had a couple of interviews on CNN and MSNBC and I like literally walked off set and like didn't interview with a climate scientist and I was just like, let's start from scratch. Like, really a big picture like, you know, and I, it's like disorienting to be playing both an expert and an ignoramus. But I think it's also, there's something sort of, it reflects our, you know, everyone's basic ignorance

about so much of what's transpiring in the world, and the more that we can try to do both of those things, both understand how little we know and do whatever we can to understand more. I think to get back to your original question, the sort of more thoughtful and empowered will be about the future of facing both as individuals and sort of as a collective. It is kind of weird because you think about history and you think about these moments, but like all the edges are rounded off those moments. It just feels like it's this thing that happened. You don't get the sense, it doesn't fully strike you that the people who were living in

it were not aware of what it was. Its significance or where it would go. They were experiencing it day to day, right? So like the depression happens, you know, the stock market crashes in 1929. Nobody knows that this is the great depression, right? They'd obviously lived through panics and things before, but they didn't know how big it would be. They certainly didn't know it would last this many years. They didn't know that this president would flub it and then this president would come in. Like they had no idea. They just, it was just day to day life.

And then so something like the pandemic happens and this is also happening, I guess with the climate, but it's over a longer time span. Now, I don't just mean like decades, but just like years. So it doesn't feel the same way, but like the pandemic is one of those things where you're like, oh, this is history. This is the things that I read about. dynamic is one of those things where you're like, oh, this is history. This is the things that I read about. That's the day to dayness that I'm feeling.

That's what World War II was like. That's what the Great Depression was like. That's what the Great Influenza was like. And that history is not fun. Really, you know what I mean? Like just a reminder that like, this is what I think is the reason for us now. Yeah, because I think one of the uncertainty

about the course of the larger narratives in our lives is was a much bigger part of human experience for all of human history. But we sort of more recently started to believe that we were really profoundly in control of everything or should be. And I think it's a much deeper emotional violation to us to try to accept the basic uncertainties. And embrace a sort of more humble perspective about what's about to come.

Then it would have been 50 or 75 or 100 years ago where we didn't even have models, let alone no other models didn't work all that well. And so I think that we were all knocked off our feet a little bit more and really wanted to believe that we could, if we had chosen to, stop this disease, especially across the West, there was this mantra all through 2020. We know what we need to do. And I think to some degree, we knew what tools we had, that's true. But I think that we really were flattering our capacity to fundamentally change the course of a once in a generation, a once in a century pathogen. And there were places in the world

that did better and managed, especially by taking very, very rapid early action, were able to sort of eliminate the disease from their borders, but they were actually very few and they were culturally relatively foreign from places like the US and Europe. And while in overall, long enough, time span, it even out for the most part.

Yeah, I mean, now you're like, would you rather be living in China or the UK? You know, probably the UK, I mean, for many reasons, but even just on the pandemic front, like probably in the UK. And, you know, and yet we told ourselves all through the pandemic, we told ourselves these stories that it was essentially, you know, we were living through, not just history, we were living through a fable, which was revealing our virtue. And we said in 2020, oh, it's political malfeasance that our leadership was so broken about this, which I think, you know, that's very enough to say. But I also think that, you know, it wasn't like Angela Merkel, like oversaw a dramatically

better pandemic than Donald Trump did. It was better, but it wasn't categorically better. And, you know, these failures were really pervasive because the challenge is really hard and really human and not reducible to ideology or partisanship, which revealed itself, I think, again, in 2021 when we told ourselves that the main driver of the disease was vaccination, which to a certain degree, again, was true, it was not untrue. But the gaps in vaccination between red state, similar states, Republicans, and Democrats were large, but they were roughly comparable to the gaps by education, by race, by income.

And we didn't want to see that complexity. We wanted to see pandemic death in 2021, almost as willful and the people who chose not to get vaccinated as deserving whatever fate they got. I actually think we're in a slightly more healthy place narratively about the pandemic now because we've sort of, because of reinfections and because of breakthrough deaths, we've sort of dropped that pretense

that pandemic suffering is elective. And we've started to just treat it as background noise, which is probably how earlier generations would have treated it, gotten around. They would have gotten around to that point much more quickly because they were much more familiar with the idea that things were out of our control, but we're so addicted to the idea, especially the wealthy, powerful countries of the world, especially wealthy, powerful people, in wealthy, powerful countries in the world, we're so addicted to the idea that we can control

whatever we set about to control, that we were just unwilling to admit that this virus was bigger than us, which turns out to have been, I mean, it's literally infected the entire planet. Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life. But come on, someday's parenting is unbearable. I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondry that shares a refreshingly honest and insightful take on parenting. Hosted by myself, Megan Galey, Chris Garcia, and Kurt Brown-Oller, we will be your resident not-so-expert experts.

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You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. Well, no, it's interesting that this idea of like what's in our control, it's out of our control. Do we come to terms with things? Do we practice acceptance? This is like the essence of obviously of stoicism, and I go back to the Antonin plague, this plague breaks out in Rome. And it's not like a one, two, three-year thing.

I mean, the Antonin plague lasts for 15 years, right? And so, and I think one of the things, one of the, one of the lessons we've wrongly learned in the modern world is that things happen quickly, right? Because we can, they have, like, yes, we still know things happen that are outside our control, but then we cook, as you're saying, we figure them out, we come up with solutions, and then that's the end of them.

The idea that like, this is how things are now is a more ancient, or we might like to believe antiquated idea, but that is the human experience. That new variables are introduced, new species are introduced, new events, things happen, and then that becomes the new normal, as they say. But we're more interested in getting back to normal than we are to say, like, this is how the world is now. Although you wrote that piece recently where you're sort of talking about people who wanted to COVID to go to the endemic phase,

and you're like, endemic COVID is still pretty fucking bad. Like, it's just because it's normal, doesn't mean that normal is good or acceptable or even reasonable. It can still be quite tragic on a day-to-day basis. And just out of population scale, I mean, it's one of the things I think connects, I've been thinking a lot both about in climate and about the pandemic is just when you have impacts that are relatively trivial, that affect a small number of people, but everyone is, you know,

in fact, they're applied to everyone, the number is really add up. So even before vaccines, even in the initial phase of the pandemic, we're still talking about, you know, a infection fatality rate that was, you know, between one and two percent, which is, and all of that was,

or not all of that, but most of that was concentrated in the very old. You know, this is not Ebola, but Ebola doesn't infect the entire planet within a couple of years. And we had such a hard time wrapping our mind around that set of facts. Like people either acted as though

almost anybody getting infected was effectively getting like a death sentence and needed to run from the disease as though it was that scary. Or that we didn't need to worry about the spread of a disease at all because nobody was going to die. And both of those are really, really misleading conceptual models for what we're going through, which may, you know, depending on where we end up on a climate, may also be true for our climate future, which is to say there's probably going to be considerable really unconscionable levels of human suffering

that come out of climate changes, I see it. But it also isn't, I don't think going to be the case that, you know, every person on the planet alive in 2070 is going to look around and think that, you know, we're living in a total hellscape. There's still going to be life going on. And we need to be able to think about both of those things as being true at once that many are affected and suffering without the world ending as a result. But our emotional impulse is always to, if we're scared, to treat it as a sort of a universal

apocalypse, which I think, you know, yeah, I think it's not the best at it. No, no, that's, that's really interesting. It's like, we have this blind spot for things. Like, it's like, no one would want their country to become, like, overrun and become a totalitarian state, right? This is an analogy. You would, you would reject that, hopefully. But we struggle with dealing with understanding

why we should care about a system that might be totalitarian for 0.01% of the population. So it's like, you know, it's unlikely you driving down the street, you're going to be harassed by the cops thrown in jail, never see a lawyer, never see the light of day again. And because of that, you're not that worried about it. But the fact that that potentiality exists for a small fraction of the population, doesn't make it any less of a human travesty

and any less of a sort of problem that should be dealt with. So we struggle with this idea of like, what doesn't really affect me, and I'm not like seeing the body's pile up in the street or I'm not being paraded by the injustices, we struggle when things are happening to people or places or things at the margin. And as you said, when the world gets bigger and bigger and more interconnected, more interconnected, things that happen at the margins, cumatively mean a very large amount of people are negatively affected by this thing and a lot of our best instant like the US legal system is supposed to be

Predicated again to go to the analogy on the idea that like it's better that a hundred Guilty people go free than one innocent person be convicted but it's hard to get a person to care about an innocent person getting convicted because that's not happening to the vast majority of people. And so that sort of fundamental may also know more victims than no criminals. Yes. And you're actually getting upset that the people who are breaking car windows in San Francisco or shoplifting at the CVS are getting bought. And so that fundamental tentative justice that like you have to care about people you

will never see or meet and bad things happening to them that you have to care about that. It does feel like we're struggling both to agree about that and then is struggling even more to care about it or martial resources to do anything about it. In a lot of these problems, whether it's climate or COVID or criminal justice or, you know, and just to stick with your analogy for a second, that's not just how like creeping authoritarianism works. That's how real authoritarianism works, too, because most people in the authoritarian state are not being policed in a daily way by the, they're living lives and they're thinking, well, it's nice to, there's no trash on the ground.

Yes. And so it works all the way up. And I think about this a lot, I've been writing a fair amount about air pollution, which tells a very similar story, which is they're range of scientific work, but the high end estimates suggest something like 10 million people are dying every year, annually, from air pollution.

And even the low end estimates are still in the millions. So we're talking about an unbelievably large toll. And yet it has, in some profound way, not even registered on our, our, anybody, aside from a very small number of advocates, anybody's sense of, you know, political social outrage. There are a lot of reasons for that. It's complicated, but one of them is that, you know, what we're talking about is an ambient, you know, an ambient stressor, which is ultimately affecting a small fraction of people

in certain parts of the world. And that's super visibly in the sense either. Like it's like, I imagine dying from the effects of air pollution. It's probably comorbid with a lot of other things. Yeah, I am totally right. So it's not like you're just keeling over and dying and then there's a mark on your face and they say, oh, air pollution death. So the ambiguity of all of it too makes it easier.

If you already didn't wanna care or you're already inclined not to care, it's conspiring with you so you don't have to. But that part of it is really important too in the sense that so much of it is concentrated in, I mean, in particular in India, where in Delhi, the average resident of Delhi is life expectancy is 10 years shorter than it would be without our pollution, which means

every single person in Delhi on average could count on 10 extra years of life if there was no air pollution. That is just mind bending. And it's especially wild when you think, okay, well, that's just the average. So for a lot of people, those effects are much, much bigger. And so how much we care about those people when the average American life expectancy is being reduced only by 0.2 years or a couple of months by our pollution is really relevant. And in fact, I think in some perverse ways, the fact of pollution and our sense of the

dirtiness of the developing world and by dirtiness, I mean, pollution, is making us, it's like it's poisoned our sense of, even what those people's lives could be like, sufficiently, that we treat it as just what it is there, and not something that could be designed differently there, because we don't treat them as the same category, ultimately moral creature as we would treat someone who lived down the street from us or in our family. And part of that is natural, but part of that is totally inhumane and unforgivable.

Yeah, it's like they could get on a plane, although that might contribute to said air pollution and land in a different country and immediately their lifespan increases by 10 years. That's like, and Tyler Cowan has talked a lot about this on immigration and Alex Terabick is writing partner two, just the idea that like, you know, your average medium wage is here, and then you travel across this line and it doubles or triples, the

policies that prevent people from doing that are— I found this on the way— Sorry, I'm a stupid Apple Watch. Anyway, the policies that prevent someone from doing something like that are profoundly unjust. If you think about it, it's a daily human rights travesty that someone who lives here dies 10 years earlier, or can't afford this or that. And then if they could just go here where there's plenty of

space, and that we don't see ourselves as complicit in maintaining that status quo because we're concerned with this or that. But there is blood on people's hands as a result of that. Yeah, well, I think the even darker interpretation of that, which I find myself thinking occasionally when it comes to climate, is that there's something we find comforting about the suffering of people living elsewhere because it reassures us of our relative privilege and

prosperity and you know, it's not just that we don't want to be bothered to help the people in the developing world It's that we actually like having them suffer and I think about that not just in terms of climate as I mentioned, but you know About the global vaccination rollout um, you know the IMF in 2021 estimated that I think it was global vaccination program would cost $60 billion and they thought that the returns by 2025 would be nine trillion. So it was like the biggest economic no-brainer you could possibly imagine. And even if like the US paid for it entirely themselves,

the returns, even within the US economy, would be so much bigger than the outlay. And yet there was no interest in taking that up by any leader of any country or any group of countries around the world. We've in fits and starts talked about maybe loosening IP and maybe donating some vaccines here and there, but nothing like a,

we're actually gonna get the entire world vaccinated kind of a program. And that's just like this is a deal in which not just, you know, the people of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asians, South East Asia would benefit, but Americans would benefit too. Right.

Economy would be so much stronger as a result that even just thinking about our narrow self-interest, it makes it worth doing. And we wouldn't even take that deal. So we didn't take that deal that maximized our own well-interest, it makes it worth doing. And we wouldn't even take that deal. So we didn't take that deal that maximized our own wellbeing. We didn't take the deal that maximized the world's wellbeing. We took the deal that maximized the difference between the people who were best off

and the people who were worst off. And that is, right, we're like, where's my stuff? And they're like, yeah, the people who would be making it in the already moral abomination sweatshop, you know, sweatshop, they're dead. That's why they're not working on making this or that, right? Like that when you, when you put it in the starkest terms as it can be, it becomes so repugnant as to be almost parallel. Like you're just like, man, are we the worst? You know, it's, it's, it's difficult to comprehend. There's a one of the Middle Stoics's name is Heracles. He, he comes up with this exercise. He says that

there's like these concentric circles. So the first circle is you. He says, everyone's born thinking of themselves, right? I have to survive. Then yeah, you're, you know, your parents and your spouse and your children. And that these circles get bigger and bigger and bigger. And he's like the point of the philosophy, which is funny because people think of Stoicism as this individualistic philosophy, which it is. He's like the whole point of the philosophy is to figure out how to draw the outer rings inward, right? So how to care about the faceless person in India, although they literally do have a face, there's faces to you. It's how you just find out caring about them. But how to draw that just the 80-year-old woman dying at 70 in India instead of the 10 years that she's entitled to, her dying of

air pollution. How do you pull that person into the inner circles to the degree in which you care about them and want to do something for them? But I don't think just in the form of mindless, meaningless sympathy, but like you said, let's approve this global vaccine package. What are you actually doing about these problems? Were you asking me personally? No, no, I'm saying that that's that's yeah, there are, I mean, you have written a lot about what to do with the point we we we just don't do it like some people get to a place where they at least have empathy about it. Well that's some level that's also there's a way in which that's kind of ugly too because it's a way that we exercise our moral feelings without ever actually asking, demanding anything for ourselves materially to fall from that.

So it's a little bit like, yeah, we're going to the morality gym for a little while to feel guilty about our carbon footprint or whatever. By the way, I don't say any of this to say that I'm immune to it. And the expanding circle idea that you talked about is interesting. Peter Singer writes about this too in a more modern context. And I've always found his formulation interesting in the sense that it's certainly the case that our liberal cultures tell us that our circles are growing and more and more people are included and more and more people are counted as human

and counted as equal over the centuries. And that's not just what we've been told. It is from broad strokes of history, true. But I also think, you know, it's interesting to think about in terms of where we started the conversation about the sort of networked bad news bias that we have in our narrative impulses where we now know so much about the rest of the world that we see so much more suffering, not just in the

sense of poverty, but in the sense of natural disaster. And you know, there're just more bad news stories that rise to the level of global attention because we are all network together. We're also made in certain ways more vulnerable because of those networks. Although you could argue that on network, less vulnerable. But there are some vulnerabilities

that are introduced by globalization effectively. But we are in this like incredible tragedy economy, narrative tragedy economy as a result of globalization that I think is really, really in the context of your expanding circles or whatever is really novel as a human experience. Like, we just didn't hear these stories in centuries past. And tragedies might have been overwhelming when they were local, but they were also experienced collectively by everyone who was local. And obviously in differential ways, but a community would see

something immediate and understand that as a tragedy. And I don't think we really have a lot of the tools we maybe should try to develop for how to process and contextualize tragedies which we understand to be horrible, but which are not ultimately not even relevant to our particular lives. It's just a very different experience than we've ever had before as people. Well, yeah, you go back not that many hundreds of years, and like, not only did they not know the bad stuff that was happening, let's say you live in Europe,

you don't know what's happening in North America, till the, you know, a certain period there, you're not even aware that North America exists, you're not even aware that North America exists. You're not even aware that things are happening to those people, right? So like, as our ability to understand more and more what's happening in the world, there are more things tugging at your heartstrings, which I think is good because it allows you to do something, but then you're right, it can become kind of this, like, information overload where you're, you're like, everything's terrible. I'm just going to care

about the seven people around me or whatever. I think it gets back to what we're saying earlier about the, you know, the way tiny adjustments to to calibrations of any kind when when applied to the entire planet have huge effects. So even if you're bad news bias is just tiny. It's just like a little to the negative side. If you're really news bias is just tiny. It's just like a little to the negative side. If you're really applying that to a planet of 8 billion people, it's going to add up in an absolutely overwhelming way. And I actually think that's, you know, that's a bigger part of the why is the media so depressing story than clickbait, which in many cases isn't as relevant anymore now that we're doing subscriber-based stuff. Yeah. Or like the sensationalism, or you know,

I think it really is just like, it's just like a little bit more of a story when something bad happens, like people care a little bit more. And even just a little bit when you're talking about a global feed has an unbelievably dramatic effect. Well, my first book was about medium manipulation. So I've always thought about this, and you mentioned a word a couple times.

I think the bad news bias is there. The more the other distorting bias is just the human bias you mentioned, which is narrative. Like a journalist can't, a journalist can't be like, here's a complicated series of facts, you figure it out, right? The journalist has to put it in the form of a narrative or has to to come up with an argument and explain it like you have to put it in a story, right? To go back to the word of narrative. And so that's the other problem is like people are consuming information day to day, even though our understanding is changing

on a slightly different time span and an events are transpiring on a different time span. So I think one of the things that makes, even if we could all immediately download everyone give us a shared consciousness of all the problems of the world, that would be hard to mobilize us to solve those difficult problems.

But that can't happen between us and the alignment we need is this inherently unreliable, unevenly distributed media system. Like I wouldn't say I was a climate skeptic or that I have been, but I would say that given my experiences with media, I was skeptical of some of the media, let's say, lenses on the climate story. And so then you play that out with lots of people. People don't trust the media. And then the media is how they learn about COVID. The media is how they learn about pollution deaths in India. The media is how we learn about this stuff.

And we're in a real difficult situation because now we can't even get people to understand the reality. Let alone do something about the complicated reality once they learn about. I was just looking at some polling the other day. Yale does this sort of, it's kind of considered like the gold standard opinion polling about climate.

They've been doing it for like 20 years so they have a very good running data set. And I think that 72% of Americans think that global warming is happening. And 55% of Americans think that scientists agree that global warming is happening. And 55% of Americans think that scientists agree that global warming is happening. So there are more Americans who believe this is happening than think that there are scientific consensus about it, which is an incredible example. What is that? Well, I think it gets back to the basic trust in institutions and authorities that like you're talking about, but

yeah, it's kind of remarkable. I mean, there's another way of looking at it that it's a sign of, you know, the sort of disinformation denial campaigns of the last couple of decades, which is probably playing some role, but it's notable that so many of those people who are basically discarding or discounting,

can you hear me? I'm sorry to have a second. I can't sense this. Are doing it by saying we actually know better than the scientists and are more concerned, rather than less concerned. Um, there there's you. You back on. Yeah.

Yeah. Sorry. Keep going. No problem. Wait. So I just did that riff about the more you believe climate changes happening. I believe scientists believe it's happening. Yeah.

Why I just said that like I went through it so I do I get through you. Yeah, yeah, I go. So yeah, I mean, what it basically, there's part of it, which is just a basic distrust and elites and institutions and media in particular. I think part of it is also a sign of some amount of disinformation and denial in the sort of fossil fuel

campaigns that have been up the last couple of decades that's playing some role. But nevertheless, it's remarkable that there's a really significant chunk of people, even among those who are discounting the conventional scientific wisdom, who think both that they know better than scientists and that they are more worried about climate than scientists. Like 17% of America, that's the gap between those two numbers, 17%. That's, you know,

what's that? 50 million people. And we hear a lot about people who distrust the science and distrust the public narrative, but we don't hear about those who distrusted in the other direction very often. And it seems like at least according to this, like I said, it's sort of concerned the gold center pulling. There's quite a lot of them.

I always go back to that study that said, like 15% of Americans think that chocolate milk comes from brown cows. And then I use that at like whenever, whenever they're like, can you believe this many million people think this or this many million? I'm like, do you know how many 15% of America is right? The same thing. And you're like, and they they look at a cow and they think that's a chocolate milk cow. And you're just like, ah, okay, that's again, when you

think about percentages, that's a lot of dumb people or a lot of people who aren't thinking very much. My I used to use the number of people who believe that aliens were living among us on planet earth. But now it seems like that's, you know, that's that might be true. We're directors of the CIA now believe. Yeah. And on the on the bigger question, you know, it's something that I've tried to do more on in COVID in my COVID writing than in my climate writing.

But I've tried to be a sort of counter narrative writer and someone who treats the narrative itself as a sort of subjective, an area of inquiry. And I, you know, who knows how useful that is, but it's been really, really interesting to me. Just all of the complicated ways that we, as we were talking about earlier, have narrowed advise this pandemic, almost beyond the point of being sensible, legible to us.

And it's just wild, the things that our brains have allowed us to do. And I think a lot about how liberals, I know, spend 20, 20 yelling at people for going to visit their family at Thanksgiving and being like the thing we need to do most of all is to protect one another and to sacrifice in order to protect one another. And then by 2021, they were really just like, you know, your death is on your own hands.

You've chosen not to get vaccinated, and I don't wanna do anything to help you know stop the disease from getting to you Why is that in life in like a year? Yeah, well, don't you see this in the in the peer group that we're in because we both have young children Where you're like they were hardcore everyone's got to get vaccinated You know Vaccine mandates blah blah blah and then you're like so hey, so, hey, I heard your kid just turned five. Did you get him vaccinated? And though, I think I'm gonna wait, right?

Like the difference between the decision they made personally for themselves, and then the cognitive dissonance they've picked up about kids and COVID. Of course, it's super, it's not nearly as dangerous for children as it is for adults, which is wonderful news. But like, I was talking to a reporter I know about this, I was saying that what the government did

is the government was like, a good, they wanted to convince people they're like, there's no danger sending your kids to school, right? And then so, all the parents sent their kids to school and then they're like, and then by the way, you can vaccinate them now to make them safer, but they already internalized the idea that COVID's not dangerous.

So why would you go take this precaution if it's not dangerous, right? It's like cognitive dissonance being this super powerful force. But I found it really interesting. The same people, they are super hardcore on COVID, shaming people who visited their families, shaming people who didn't get vaccinated, and then they're like, I'm not going to get my kids vaccinated, though.

Right? So it's like when they actually take that, when they can do something tangibly themselves, but they feel a little weird about it, and it's not obvious, then they're the difference between behavior and public morality is different. And you know, just to talk numbers for a second, like 350,000 Americans died of COVID in 2020, about 400,000 died in 2021. We're on track for about 250 or 300,000 deaths this year. So we're like in the ballpark of the previous years. And you know, it's very different.

We're taking many fewer precautions. So if we had been this reckless or reckless is probably too low to determine. But if we had been this carefree about mitigation in 2020, we would have had many more deaths, same in 2021. It's not exactly an Apple's apples comparison. But just at the level of like ultimate death toll, like think about this as a human story, as a tragic human story, how big is it?

How big is that tragedy? I mean, 250,000 American lives is an enormous toll. And most of the scientists that I speak to expect that, you know, that'll be a little bit lower next year, probably in the range of 100 to 150. But we're not getting like down to nobody knows anybody who's dying of COVID. We're getting down just in the range where like, oh, it's only grandparents that are dying of COVID. Right.

And, you know, in some basic way, actually speaking of narrative, you kind of could have said the same thing in 2020. That would have been more of an oversimplification than it is now, but nevertheless, I think one of the big things that was undersold by public health 30s in 2020 was the HQ of the disease. And I do think there's some... Well, because they wanted people to care. They didn't want them to be able to do precisely what we're doing now, which is pretend that it's not real.

Totally. And there's some wisdom in that. On the other hand, this HQ is so profound. I mean, your risk doubles every eight years about. So someone who's in their 80s is like thousands of times more at risk of death than someone in their 20s. That is not just like eight times more, 10 times more, 12 times more. It is a whole different disease. And, you know, when you get vaccinated, that reduces your risk of mortality by about

the equivalent of about 20 or 25 years. So someone who's, you know, a well-vaccinated 85-year-old is still more at risk than a totally unvaccinated 55-year-old. And that's how profound and ginormous the HQ is. And yet, all through the beginning of a pandemic, we were given such a sense of uniform threat and uniform risk. I think, like you say, for some good reasons, but it ultimately was, you know, it was ultimately a distortion of the story that anybody looking at the data could follow themselves.

Well, we're not good at changing narratives, right? So like people do this now to undermine what they're saying about COVID now. They go, oh, but they said this, but they said this. A lot of what they said this, but when they said this, it was true, or it was the understanding of that time, whether it was true or not,

is what they believed they, was the understanding of that time, whether it was true or not, is what they believed they, is what the information made it look like was true. And then that narrative changes. And then once people, even people have said several times, it's like, oh, it's over. And it's like, maybe it was and then it's changed.

I still, so I have this bookstore here in Texas and we still require masks. We're probably like the only business left in America that does at this point. But I remember someone posted a picture and then someone said, well, what's this mask? I thought the pandemic was over. And that's also a narrative, right? In their head, they've decided a thing is over. And so people can't change things.

And I think that is the problem with narrative, is life. The story is always changing if there is a story. But once you lock into a narrative or an identity around that narrative, it's very difficult to update or counter the narrative as you were saying with your writing. Yeah, I mean, the mask story is such an interesting one to me. So, Yeah, I mean, the mask story is such an interesting one to me. So, you know, we now, quote unquote, know that there are some meaningful benefits in reducing transmission through high quality masks. So, N95s, KN95s.

But for most of the pandemic, we were not given advice that was focused on that. It was focused on covering your mouth with anything. And actually, the science that we have from that suggests that the effects there are quite limited. And you know, there are often people point to this big Bangladesh randomized control trial, which found some effect from surgical masks. It found zero effect on cloth masks from cloth masks. And the effect on surgical masks was, you know, they grew the uptake of mask wearing by 3,000%.

And the reduction of disease transmission was I think by like 15%. So in theory, that bargain at the peak of a pandemic, at the peak of a wave, that bargain may well be worth taking in a local way, you know, I personally have always thought, like, well, what's the big deal? Like it's wear mask, it's, you know, even if it has a marginal benefit,

it's like, what's the cost to me? That seems like a very easy, pro-social thing to do. But I wonder if we rewound the clock to, say, April, May of 2020 when the public health establishment was like, you know, turning towards mask wearing, having been against mass wearing at the very outbreak of the pandemic and saying everybody should wear a mask.

If they had known then what we know now about the relatively limited effect of cloth and surgical masks on transmission, would they have still been making those giving that advice, would they still choose to do that? And my own feeling is that, or would they have chosen that as the hill, if they knew the political consequences, like the hard consequences, they're so enormous. I mean, when people talk about, you know, lockdowns, it's like, well, there haven't been lockdown since the summer of 2020. What we've had is maskment. It's like, but that's not the same thing. And yet, for people who are opposed to pandemic mitigation policy, is they sort of became the same thing. And they were so offended by any public mask policy,

but also any private establishment requiring masks, that they sort of, I don't know, they developed a deep hostility to it. I think out of proportion, both to the cost to the person, but also to the benefit. And I wonder if we would have taken that part. And like, if we could have taken that part. And like if we could have avoided that, at least part of the pandemic culture war, at relatively limited cost to the actual levels

of the disease, if we had just chosen to like, you know, whatever, not push. No, no, that's a really, that's a really interesting counterfactual, because part of the reason they were, like there's two reasons they were saying don't wear a massive first. One was they didn't have very many masks. And two, the studies that they had,

it wasn't that masks didn't work. It's that masks were a complicated or ineffectual public health measure for the population at large, right? So there may have been an argument where there's a counterfactual where they decide masks are not going to be part of the government toolkit, but then you and I as individuals who had done research or learning, we're wearing a mask

voluntarily everywhere we go. We're probably not getting COVID, but then COVID doesn't become the politicized thing that it becomes to the same degree. And then maybe people actually listen better when they say, hey, these vaccines, this is the main thing to treat COVID or this other treatment or whatever it is. Yeah, maybe the thing goes differently. And then you're like, man, that gut call

that whoever made in March, April of 2020, that actually was the right call. And then they second-guess themselves. And then here we are We'll never know. It's also it's interesting in in when you play out the whole narrative because according to at least Survey data, which is probably misleading, but maybe directionally accurate in the fall and winter surge of 2020 into 2021 there was very little difference in mass-quaring among even the most conservative places

in the country and the most liberal places in the country. So we had a narrative that like red states and Republicans were like totally unwilling to mask. That became true in 2021, much more than it had been true in 2020. But I think that narrative, which existed in 2020, primed us for the same fight over

vaccination, which became much more significant and profound. And even there, there are some really interesting kind of factual. So we know that the FDA delayed approval of the vaccines until after the election for, you know, again, it's a kind of a defensible position. They didn't want it to be a campaign trail issue. But even a delay of three or four weeks then would have made a really profound narrative difference in the sense that Trump would have been talking about the imminent vaccines in the last weeks of the campaign.

He might have won because the margins were small enough that maybe some additional boost there would have helped him. In which case, maybe we wouldn't have had the partisan split that we have today at all. And that's just like, you know, a war that, or the rollout was then bungled even more. And you know, it could also be infinitely worse in so many other ways and probably, yeah, probably would be. But go ahead.

Go ahead. No, go ahead. No, go ahead. I was going to say as far as policy goes, the other interesting thing I found for COVID stuff is like, yeah, basically everyone's like, life's back to normal, do whatever you want. The only people I know that have strict COVID protocols that treated seriously at this point are musicians who are still on tour. Because there's something you lose by getting sick, right? And I've had to do this as a speaker. It's like I've not had not a gig in like further than two weeks apart, like basically consistently

for like the last year or so, right? So like there's not a window in which I can get COVID that it would not cost me a large amount of money, right? And so like I have to individually think about the choices that I'm going to make. And so there's also this interesting dichotomy went as you were saying, like when COVID becomes endemic and we often make these individual decisions, there's still people for whom COVID is costly, either because they're immunocompromised, they're someone on the edges of society or life, or they're someone who is trying to do or see certain things.

So it's this weird thing where it puts the burden on the individual to have to make these choices, but then because things have been politicized and complicated, people don't actually really know what those choices are. So it's a weird sort of Balkanized world that we live in now. Yeah, I think everybody's sort of confused and choosing to relate to that confusion by indifference. Yes, yes. Well, it's like we are with all things. Like, if I don't think about it, then I don't have to be confused by it.

If I don't think about it, I don't have to make decisions by it. And then this is, if I don't think about, as you were saying, that the lifespan in the years, 10 years lower because of pollution, then I don't have to make any changes. I don't have to live my life any differently. And although, then this may be a good place to wrap up, the other problem with COVID climate change, et cetera, is that these aren't things that can be dealt with individually, right?

So it's like, hey, the climate is, all this stuff is happening. And so I'm gonna recycle or do whatever I can as an individual. This is nothing compared to Kylie Jenner's 17 minute private jet flight, right? Like there's not anything I can do as an individual that would make even a microscopic difference compared to corporate or national decisions that people are making

unthinkingly that have enormous impact. So it comes back to how do you solve a collective action problem? Well, I think it might be useful to answer that first by talking about the pandemic and then about climate. So we have evolved this very particular sort of risk assessment dynamic that you're describing, where it's basically all on the individual to make decisions about what they're comfortable with and what they're not. And I think in some way that is useful and empowering,

that individuals can make their own assessments and make their own decisions. But we are talking about navigating a landscape that is shaped profoundly by collective and social actions. And by that, I don't mean whether New York City is in a lockdown. What I mean is like, we knew in spring of 2020 that better ventilation systems in public prices

would make a huge difference. We did not spend that money to upgrade ventilation systems in schools in, you know, in my carcloth masks. Right. We were like, we're going to put this, put the burden on the, and the cost on the individual. And as a result, we are living with a considerably riskier environment than we needed to. And there are other ways which are play out slightly more subtly. I mean, you were talking about the, you know,

touring musicians, speaking gigs in a slightly like less sort of like, you know, high rolling kind of way. You should have people who are like, they don't have paid sick leave. Yeah. So if they want to protect themselves or or their co-workers and they get COVID, they can't do like a two-week quarantine and they can't elect to do that. The law does not support them doing that. And that's really broken. Total should, if we're gonna try to empower individuals

to navigate the risk landscape of their own lives on their own, which I think is, like I said, a pretty useful thing to do, we should also be trying to design that landscape so it minimizes the absolute risk to everyone and makes it possible for people who want to make responsible choices to make responsible choices. And the same is absolutely true in climate. So, you know, the average American refrigerator uses more carbon than the average person living in Sub-Saharan Africa. Like you just cannot live in the United States responsibly by global standards when it comes to carbon. You cannot live in two refrigerators. I got an extra one in the garage, right?

Yeah, your flat screen is just as bad. And like, you know, you can buy your, you can buy your EV. You can do what you can to try to power your home through, you know, personal solar power, but many people can't do that. I just did this, by the way, I don't know how anyone can afford to do it. It was insanely expect. Like, do you know what I mean? Like I could have just, yeah, I probably should have just bought. It would have been better for the world if I just bought a small house and put a homeless person in it. Do you know what I mean? Like, that's how much it cost to put solar on my house. Like, it was not, it was insanely expensive. Yeah, well, I like Texas.

Stay by state. There are tax incentives elsewhere that make it better, but yeah, it's, it can be cumbersome and certainly beyond the reach of, you know, working class poor people in the country who are just gonna get whatever electricity comes into the plug in their wall and don't have any say about it. But, like, collectively, we have a say in what kind of electricity goes into the plug in your wall. And we have a say in whether our grid

wastes two thirds of the power that's put into it through waste heat, or whether it delivers it much more efficiently. Officially. Right. You know, on a longer time scale, thirds of the power that's put into it through waste heat or whether it delivers it much more efficiently. Efficiently. Right. You know, on a longer time scale, we can be pouring money into carbon neutral jet fuel. So that a 17 minute private jet flight doesn't have a carbon impact at all, let alone one that is so wildly disproportionate.

And this is like, this is, you know, true of everything. It's a sort of a naive, basic thing to say. say, but it's really true of every aspect of climate. Like, we are living in a policy landscape that has been designed for us in part to maximize the use of fossil fuels. And if we are able to change that architecture so that fossil fuels are less present, less dominant, or ideally absent, it means that we can make any choice we want to make

without any guilt or responsibility at all. If we get to a genuinely net zero future, which is, you know, it'll take a lot, and I think we will get there. The question is whether we're going to get there in 2060, 2070, 2100, but when we get there, we won't have to be thinking about our consumption patterns

in terms of environmental guilt, because anything we consume will have no carbon footprint at all. And the fact that we're not excited by that prospect, says a lot about, I mean, our political economy is, but it also says a lot about our limited moral imaginations that we're not even... So, provision.

Both. I mean, it's some, you know, but like we're not even interested in bringing about a future where we don't have to think about how much of a burden we're not even... So, co-vision. Both. I mean, it's some, you know, but like we're not even interested in bringing about a future where we don't have to think about how much of a burden we're imposing on the rest of the world. We can just make the choices we want to make and trust that the impact will be neutral, responsible, sustainable, however you want to think about it. So, you know, that's just like to circle back to some of the themes we were talking about earlier in the conversation.

Like, you know, if you're the kind of person who is burdened by a sense of guilt and responsibility, there is a path forward to, you know, eliminate that from your sense of, you know, the political shape of the world and the political shape of your own life. And yet we're not moving, I think, nearly fast enough to sort of embrace that opportunity, which is worth embracing for many reasons, like saving the 10 million people a year who dying from air pollution, more prosperity, economic growth, more global justice, environmental justice, et cetera. But even at the level of the selfish consumer American individual, you're like,

you could be, you'd have more freedom. If we made these larger policy choices, you would have more individual freedom to do what you wanted and live how you wanted. Yeah. And you would have to feel much less guilt about making those choices, even if they were by today's standards, like obscenely wasteful, grandiose, and ultimately harmful to the planet. In a future that's not that far off, those same choices wouldn't have any of those impacts at all, and could be just embarrassing on a personal level. and could be just sort of embarrassing on a personal level. No, I will say once we got the solar panels installed, I was much less of the cliche dad of like giving a shit

where the thermostat was, right? Yeah. Because it's not really my problem. Like, you know what I mean? Like, I saw you solved the problem at the source instead of dealing with the pitiless shit on the margins. That seems like a good deal. It was not a good deal, but I made it work.

Anyways, dude, this was awesome. I really appreciate you taking time. No, my pleasure. Great to talk, and yeah, let's hopefully cross paths again soon. Let's do it. Thanks so much for listening to the DailyStow podcast. If you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day, check it out at dailystow.com slash email. Hey, Prime Members!

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