Somebody Should Do Something | Individual Action vs. Systemic Change

In this episode of Earthbound, we talk with philosophers Michael Brownstein and Alex Madva, who, along with their colleague Daniel Kelly, wrote the book Somebody Should Do Something.

Listen in to learn how we can shift from either or thinking to both and thinking to bridge the gap between individual action and systemic change.

Racism, injustice, inequality, climate change.

Somebody Should Do Something.

In an article titled I work in the environmental movement, I don't care if you recycle.

Stop obsessing on your environmental sins.

Fight the oil and gas industry instead.

And yes, the title is a mouthful.

Author Mary Annais Haigler rightfully rails against the shame heaped upon us by industrial and social forces for our eco iniquities.

And when we don't recycle or eat meat or fly or inadvertently, or on occasion inadvertently use, single use plastic or otherwise move through the modern world as expected of good consumers.

As if my singular actions have any meaningful impact on the state of the world.

And Hegeler has a point, because they don't.

Roughly 90% of carbon dioxide emissions come from burning fossil fuels and industry.

Most of the rest is deforestation and land use.

So yeah, instead of obsessing about recycling my soda can, I'll force Exxon to change its ways.

And so how does that work?

As for Big Oil and the rest, they're happy to stoke this powerlessness and guilt, then turn it back on us, making us feel responsible for their transgressions.

And they magnanimously offer us a way to absolve ourselves of our sins.

Consider the personal carbon footprint, a concept promoted in the bowels of BP's PR department.

A sleight of hand, really.

Pay no attention to the oil bubbling up from the ocean floor, spilling out onto the ice, burning a hole into the Holocene.

What about that carbon footprint of yours, eh?

Or consider the infamous crying Indian anti littering ad of the 1970s and how it subtly, or not so subtly, shifted responsibility for pollution and environmental ruin from industry and regulators onto individual consumers.

People start pollution, people can stop it.

That the Indian in the ad wasn't Native American at all, but Italian American is a further irony.

One more layer of misdirection.

Look at what your littering has done to the pristine land once inhabited by a proud people.

Meanwhile, industrial pollution had gotten so bad that rivers burned and entire ecosystems were poisoned.

So one camp points at the individual recycle harder.

Shrink your footprint.

And another camp points back at the corporations.

It's Big Oil, big plastic corporate greed, rampant consumerism.

So why am I agonizing over a soda can but here's the twist.

Even Hegler, whose headline practically dares you to stop recycling, tips her hand a few lines in.

Don't let the headline fool you, she writes.

I do care if you recycle.

What she's really after isn't individual action at all.

It's the shrinking of individual action down to consumer guilt, the idea that the price of caring about the planet is a spotless recycling bin.

Fight the industry, she says, and act.

See yourself as more than a consumer.

And notice the sleight of hand tucked inside her emissions statistic.

90% Of emissions come from fossil fuels and industry, true, but that fuel is the gas in our tanks, the power in our walls and the flights we take.

Their emissions are in no small part ours.

The line between the individual and the system was never as clean as either camp pretends.

And that's the trap.

The trap of either or thinking.

As Brownstein and Madva explain, either or thinking blocks the path to real change.

It insists that caring about how systems work means dismissing personal agency, and that personal agency is naive against the sheer weight of the system.

Frame these everything problems that way as a choice between changing hearts and minds or changing faceless mammoth structures, and you drive a blade between the two.

It leaves us feeling powerless.

Either I change my ways or I change how the world works, and no one of us on our own can change how the world works.

But somebody should do something.

Somebody.

Me.

What can I do to make a difference?

How could one person ever dent these everything problems, these wicked problems that seem to resist any solution at all?

These are the questions caring people ask when they look out at the world and feel small before it's big behemoth institutions and dogmas, big fossil systemic racism, oligarchy run amok.

In their book Somebody Should Do Something, Brownstein, Madva, and Kelley answer with social science and hard won examples, closing the schism between the world outside our windows and the forces shaping our lives and the planet's future.

In response to the paralysis that we feel, they offer one deceptively simple insight.

My choices are your situation.

We have a profound and often unacknowledged capacity to shape the world of the people around us.

Call it social gravity, the same quiet force we usually dismiss as peer pressure.

Our private decisions become part of everyone else's landscape, reshaping what people near us think is normal, possible, or worth doing.

And the evidence is more concrete than you might expect.

One of the best predictors of whether you will put solar panels on your roof is whether your neighbor already has.

Also One of the best predictors of whether someone quits smoking is if their spouse or a close friend quits first.

We tend to imagine these choices are ours alone, and they rarely are.

And that influence runs in two directions.

It ripples outward through our neighbors, our coworkers, our families.

And it runs forward into our future selves, where one act becomes a foot in the door to the next and the one after that, instead of a way to wash our hands and call it done.

In other words, by reflecting our values and our daily actions, we have more influence than we likely imagine.

This is a theme carried throughout my conversations with many of my guests here on Earthbound the power of community in forging shared values into effective, positive, and sustained change.

From the temperance movement to Mothers Against Drunk Driving and the youth climate movement, even organizations some may find little affinity for, including the nra.

Somebody Should Do Something highlights how advocacy organizations have grown their influence by building a social identity around specific issues that people care about.

Breaking free from the either or trap isn't easy in a world increasingly framed in in binary terms.

Yet when confronted by the overwhelming weight of the current polycrisis, those daunting everything problems, we find ourselves at a familiar crossroads where the sheer gravity of the situation compels the quiet realization that somebody should do something.

And that somebody is you and me, showing up every day and doing our best with what we have in the in that there is agency, in that there is change.

Enjoy this fascinating discussion with Alex Madva and Michael Brownstein, authors along with Daniel Kelly, of Somebody Should Do Something.

One way to describe the book is pitched toward people who look out into the world and see all kinds of really complicated global systemic problems, whether it's climate change or systemic racism or income inequality, and feel like, what can I as an individual do about that?

I think we've all maybe not we've all, but lots of us, especially on the progressive left, have realized that in many ways these are not individual problems, that they're not whether again, whether it's climate change or racism or whatever else, right?

It's not as if the problem just exists in each of our individual hearts and minds.

They're woven into the fabric of our laws and our economies and our histories and so much else.

And so it's sort of easy on, on the one hand to see how these problems are systemic.

But as soon as you recognize that I think we want to argue, or at least we've experienced and observed by talking to lots of people, you get this sort of disempowering Feeling like, you know, I know how to do little local things in my individual life, but what do I know about changing energy, infrastruct or eliminating racial hierarchy from our economy?

Right.

These big complicated ideas are very abstract.

They're very far away from our day to day lives.

And so the idea for the book was to really rethink the relationship we have as individuals to these systemic and structural problems and put them in closer contact.

And that was the sort of launching off point for how we found.

And both of you are philosophers.

We are, both of us and our.

Co author, Dan Kelly, who's also a professor at Purdue University.

What led you to your thoughts about how you describe the either or both and concepts of addressing these.

Would you consider them.

Would polycrisis be an accurate phrase?

Yeah, I love that episode you had on the polycrisis.

I'm blanking on her name right now.

Dana.

Dana Fisher.

Fisher, yeah.

That was a really cool.

I was going to bring her up.

Absolutely.

Right, yeah.

So we, you know, in our text we tried to have more folksy language so we called it an everything problem.

Right.

Which is also a send up to the idea of wicked problems.

Right.

But so it's.

Right, so it's, it's this complicated thing where there are all these different interacting forces that are making it hard for us to act on these things.

And so either or thinking, we think, is one of those phenomena.

So, you know, in our evolution as philosophers, we all sort of came up as philosophers of mind where we were interested in kind of pretty abstract questions about the nature of the mind.

And then we started thinking about questions related to social justice.

And we started thinking about things like implicit bias, where we thought that given our background in studying and trying to understand the mind, maybe we could help shed some light on thinking about biases and how they work in the mind.

And then immediately we started getting this objection from folks that was like, well, why are you looking at people's minds?

Racism is embedded in our institutions.

Racism is embedded in these structures.

It's due to segregation, it's due to wealth inequality, it's due to systematic discrimination and the criteria we use to hire people and so on and so forth.

And so people were saying, why are you talking about minds at all?

Minds don't matter.

Right, Right.

And that's a version of this kind of what we think is a kind of either or thinking where it's like, either you're paying attention to what's going on in people's minds or you're paying attention to what's going on in larger systems and structures.

And we think this exact problem plays out in the climate domain as well.

So recently in an episode, you talked about Iron Eyes Cody and Keep America Beautiful and this successful effort over decades to brainwash us, as Michael was talking about, into thinking that what it means to care about the environment is to care about my isolated individual actions.

And then there's been this shift to thinking about, well, what about international treaties, what about energy infrastructure?

What about renewable resources?

What about all these larger structural things?

And so either or thinking basically is this framing where it's saying, either you're just focusing on your mind or yourself as an individual, but then it seems like when we're thinking about these big problems, our actions don't matter.

Or you're focusing on these large structural issues like racism or climate change, or the ways those intersect in the form of environmental racism.

But then what do my actions have to do with those larger structural forces?

So it's a kind of damned if you do, damned if you don't scenario.

And we think it's honestly, it's a kind of sort of fallacy or bias that people can fall into where.

Where people recognize that existing solutions are flawed, but they can't.

Well, this is a little bit of a strong way to put it, but it's hard to handle that.

The response to that is things are really complex and intertwined, and instead people want to make this other kind of simplistic move where they say it's just these external structures.

And of course it's not wrong to talk about those larger systems, but we always have to keep in mind that we are part of those systems.

Our actions are embedded in those systems.

Our actions partly make those systems what they are.

So to note the importance of systems is never to deny the importance of individual, but that we have to think about individuals and systems in an interconnected way.

Yeah, I did an episode, reviewed a book called Catastrophe Ethics by Travis Reeder.

Yeah, I haven't gotten to that one yet.

He kind of approaches it in a different way, that people can feel just hopeless in the face of.

Of the systemic.

But that just doing actions based on your values, if, if you want, if you want to buy a big Hummer and, and pollute the air, go for it, whatever.

That's your value, do it.

As opposed to just feeling like anything I do is pointless.

It's not pointless.

And you address that in the book, in that my situation is your situation.

I'm not saying that quite right.

My choices are your situation.

Yeah.

So that even if it feels like just my putting my can in the recycling is, oh, my gosh, this doesn't make any difference, that it might actually make a difference in ways you don't even understand.

And so it kind of spreads out.

Now I'm thinking of was the RFK speech way back in the 60s about the expanding waves of individual action can actually move structures.

So there's a.

There's a long history of talking about the relationship between individual choices and the broader systems and institutions that organize our society.

And in many ways, what we're doing in this book is not new from that perspective.

I mean, in the.

In the university, there is a century of theorizing about the relationship between what sociologists call agency and structure and all kinds of sophisticated and nuanced ways of showing how they're interrelated, and that percolates out through.

Through the RFK speech and all kinds of other places in popular discourse.

What I would say is new about what we're doing is trying to take that appreciation for the relationship and the complex relationship individuals have with the institutions and structures that organize their lives and turn it to the question, okay, so if that's right, what does it mean for the choices I make?

If I'm concerned about X, Y or Z?

If my concern is the climate crisis, then what does that tell me about what to do?

And so since you brought up this idea that we write about in the book, my choices are your situation.

That's one of the ways that we try to turn this idea of the deep interrelationships we have with the broader world and into a practical set of ideas.

So there's.

There's one way of thinking about our influence on others, which is that we just have a lot more influence on other people than we tend to appreciate.

We all grew up, or many of us grew up with lots of sort of invocations not to succumb to peer pressure.

Right?

Like doing what the crowd does is supposed to be like an infringement on your autonomy or authenticity or something like that.

But what's less appreciated is that if other people have so much influence over us, that means we have influence over other people.

That's the idea of my choices being your situation.

And there's all kinds of really interesting data that is surprising and powerful that illustrates this in people's personal lives.

We were influenced by research on what leads people to quit smoking.

And Nicholas Christakis has really great research showing that some of the best way to predict who quit smoking is when their spouse quits or when a close person in their family does.

And you see that same lesson with climate change.

One of the best ways to predict who's going to put solar panels on their roof is if their neighbors put solar panels on their roof.

One of the best ways to predict who's going to be a lifelong voter is if they're a college roommate was a voter.

Right.

So these are all illustrations of the power of social influence that we can use for good.

And then the second thing I'll say is another way of framing that is, is that we don't only have influence over other people, but we also have influence over our future selves.

So one worry people have voiced about thinking that you're doing something meaningful for the climate by recycling or buying fair trade coffee or something like that is the problem of what's called moral licensing, that once you've done some good thing, you kind of like wash your hands of any other obligations.

You go on and then jump in your gas guzzling Hummer or whatever it is and drive home from Whole Foods.

But there's another possibility, which is that doing some small thing initially is like a foot in the door for getting involved in other ways, more impactful ways later down the line.

And there's some really interesting research showing that when people say make a choice to buy a sustainable product, it actually causally leads them down the line to change the way they vote in elections and they're more likely to say, vote for a pro climate party.

And so not only can social influence radiate outward to our friends and family and social networks, but it can also radiate sort of into the future on ourselves and the next choice we make and the next one and the next one after that.

Like building.

Building habits in a way.

That's exactly right.

Yeah, yeah.

And so we have a chapter actually in the book about a habit building framework for reducing prejudice.

And I think that we see the two as quite closely related.

And you also speak of, I guess, the kind of the fallacy of the lone wolf, the individual.

I think we're just speaking about that, you know, that people are separate.

I'm going to do my own thing and doesn't matter what anybody else says or does.

Getting back to the crying Indian, I have to say I bought into that for years, man.

It's a great ad.

It's a great ad.

It's a great.

I remember watching that back.

I'm old enough to remember watching that back in the 70s on my parents big old console TV even later when I started Global Warming is Real, the blog and everything.

I thought that was a great thing to present to people.

I think what it does, obviously, it's shifting blame to the individual, and I have to do something, and everybody else doesn't matter.

It's up to me to do something which can lead to people, to paralysis.

If you don't understand that it's a social.

We're a social species.

We're a storytelling social species, and that's where change happens.

Yeah, I think that's absolutely right.

And, you know, I do the, the.

The Crying Indian ad.

I think, you know, it's definitely important to put it in context, right.

So it comes out a year after the first Earth Day, which is the largest collective action movement in American history, where 20 million people came out to vote.

And it's, you know, it's.

People are, in that context, like, desperate for being able to do something.

And one of the really powerful things about the ad is that it's not saying, you know, it doesn't just show the smoke plumes coming out of the factory and say, deal with it.

It's saying, you can, you know, you can stop it.

You have power, you have agency.

And it was really effective in reducing littering.

Littering is a real problem there.

It was an earlier time period where people would just, you know, go on a picnic and then just like, lift up the picnic blanket and leave all the junk there and just walk away.

And it was, you know, really effective in those ways.

But so, you know, I think it was also an important ad because it was coming out at a time when collective aware awareness about the Native American genocide was gaining steam, and it was tapping into that.

So I think there was a lot about it that was really powerful.

So the, the idea that it was engaging people, that it was letting people feel implicated in these problems and thinking that they had something to do.

Those are great steps.

But then the, the, you know, the master stroke was to get people to focus on their individual, isolated behavior rather than on changing systems.

And, you know, it's interesting that you talk about how we're a storytelling social species, because there's this sort of delicious irony in the American imagination, which is that we have been brainwashed by stories of individualism, right?

Stories of people who, you know, sort of rose up from nothing to become something.

Right.

And lots of individuals who didn't live those lives but still try to claim them.

Right.

So, you know, we talk in the book about how, you know, Tesla was, you know, benefited from a $400 million loan from the Federal government.

Right, but that's a fact that Elon Musk doesn't want to talk about.

Right.

And you know, he's on, on X, he's trying to put labels on, you know, government sponsored initiatives.

And it's like, well, you should put a label on SpaceX too, because you're totally government sponsored.

Right.

But there's this, you know, I mean, we're fascinated with, you know, superheroes like Captain America and these sort of lone wolves who push against the tides.

Right.

And that has captivated people.

And it's actually, you know, one of the interesting stories that we tell in the book is about Candace Leitner who, you know, she had family members who died from drunk driving, including her own daughter.

And as a result she got fed up and created mad, which is one of the most sort of well known collective action movements out there.

And in the 80s they were incredibly influential in for example, raising the drinking age minimum to 21 years old and to doing all kinds of work on these problems.

And it was one of the most impactful social movements out there.

But part of what's striking about MAD is that we know it as Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

But when she initially introduced it, she introduced that the original title was Mothers Against Drunk Drivers because it was this individualistic thing that blamed individual drivers.

Right.

So she said, you know, no one says there but for the grace of God go I.

In other cases of death, it's.

There's this weird carve out that people have in their minds where, where drunk driving doesn't count as homicide.

She said it was the only socially acceptable form of homicide.

And so part of what was so effective about that movement is that it took people place during the 80s and the 90s and the war on crime, which was unrepentantly blaming individuals for their social problems and trying to treat these things in a criminal justice way.

And so it's a striking example of someone who was, as an individual, an effective change maker.

But the way that she did that was by tapping into the individualism that has brainwashed Americans for generations.

Another story about how movements.

This is a little bit different with the nra.

The NRA had been around for a while, but it completely morphed.

But was the gentleman's name that kind of took it and ran with it and made it what it is today.

Boy, we should.

Harlan Carter.

There we go.

Thank you, Alex.

Good, good gracious.

Sort of the semester problem.

Yeah, it's such a, it's such a central story to our, our whole book.

And it's just like totally spacing on it.

Yeah, but so Harlan, the NRA before was outdoorsy.

You know, people that were into hunting, fishing and not shooting people.

Harlan was able to take that structure and turn it into completely something different.

So explain that transition and how that happened.

What you do in the book is present examples of how people took their own personal actions and changed structures, good and bad.

And Harlan would be perhaps an example of a bad example, but.

But good in the fact that it's an example of how you can.

Individuals can change structures.

So let's talk about Harlan for a second.

Yeah, sure.

Yeah.

I mean, I think we are definitely in favor of learning from our opponents.

And I would consider the NRA an opponent of mine for their values and goals.

But.

But they really mastered an organizing strategy that, you know, to the point of it being able to be used for both good and ill.

They really adopted from the temperance movement before them and then was actually adopted after the NRA's sort of heyday by the climate movement and in particular the youth climate movement.

So there's clearly something powerful here.

So the question is, what is it?

So Harlan Carter was the one who was most responsible for turning the NRA from a small sportsmanship association, as you said, mostly geared toward people who were into marksmanship and hunting, into a really powerful gun lobbying organization that changed the foundational interpretation of the Second Amendment and really became, I think, one of the most successful advocacy organizations in American history.

So what he did, I think, most fundamentally was create a social identity around owning a gun.

So he transformed it from something incidental to your personality, one amongst many of your hobbies, to something that people defined themselves in terms of.

And when you are able to do that, what you're able to do is have a really reliable block of voters.

People who will turn up at rallies, people who will donate money, people who will refuse to vote for someone who betrays them on that single issue.

This is really the origin of the concept of single issue voters.

So how did he do it?

Well, lots of different ways.

One of the things that the NRA did was provide lifestyle benefits to members.

This is one of the things Harlan Carter innovated.

Right.

So they would provide perks for people in terms of their daily lives, their life insurance benefits, things that.

That would help people, again, kind of start to see themselves as part of this group of gun owners.

What they also did was they created and cultivated relationships with journalists and with newspapers and magazines, and they gave them identity related concepts to use.

Right.

So concepts like anti gunners and Gunners.

Right.

Things that people can latch onto as a form of self identity, freedom loving.

Freedom loving.

Right.

Yeah.

And there's really interesting historical research that we draw on, on the book, really tracing the NRA's effort to kind of feed those terms and concepts into publications and then to see the impact in those publications for their recruitment and mobilization.

So the fundamental steps were like cultivate social identity, organize around it, and then trade it as a reliable bloc of voters through relationships with political and legislative elites.

And so that was the way the NRA organized itself and it was really eye opening to us in doing the research for the book that their power wasn't just money.

Right.

So I think for many of us who have thought about the NRA and kind of found it mind boggling how they have been so influential, how it could be that large majorities of Americans want stricter gun laws and yet we don't have them.

And surely the NRA has something to do with it.

It's not just that they have a ton of money.

Their influence actually predated the money.

And it came from this focus on cultivating a form of social identity and organizing around that.

And it's what the temperance movement did before them and it's what the youth climate movement attempted to do after them.

And we really think that it is one of the most powerful ways to organize toward any end for social change.

And obviously we're arguing for ends that are justice promoting rather than justice undermining.

But I don't think that it has to be that way, unfortunately.

Yeah.

I believe you say in the book that all politics are identity politics.

Yeah.

So in our polarized times, it can be very tempting to think like, let's stop thinking about our tribal identities.

Let's just focus on, focus on everything we share in common.

And certainly in the context of the climate movement, it's like we're all members of this earth.

We are all, we all live on this planet.

This is something that affects all of us.

You know, there will be some communities that are hurt worse by climate change than others, but everyone will be affected.

No one is safe.

And there's.

And it makes all the sense in the world to try to talk about these sort of universalistic concerns in relation to climate change.

And we don't think that that's a mistake, but that some of that sort of anti identity thinking can go too far where there's this hope that we can just sort of invoke these universalistic values and that those will be motivating to people.

Right.

So Everyone is like, yeah, I care about the planet, I care about taking care of things, I care about my future generations.

Those sorts of broad, generic, universal values everyone will adopt, but they're not going to get people off the couch necessarily.

And if you really want to get people off the couch, you have to tie into a sense of their identity.

And so when people use the phrase identity politics, it's typically nowadays it's like a term of derision for folks on the left who are fighting for social justice related to race or gender or sexuality or a salient social identity like that.

But part of what we document in that NRA example is that they were 100% doing identity politics.

They created an identity and then leveraged it as this incredibly powerful voting bloc.

And I think, I'm not sure Michael mentioned, but part of what's so amazing about the NRA is how incredibly unpopular their policies are.

So a majority of Republican gun owners, 57% of Republican gun owners, think that people should have to pass a safety course before they can buy a gun.

Right?

And so like, so, you know, there's overwhelming consensus, I shouldn't say consensus.

Overwhelming super majorities of people believe that we should have stricter gun regulations, that we should close loopholes about buying guns, and so on and so forth.

But because there is this crucial identity based voting block, they've been able to be incredibly influential.

And so we think the upshot of that is not to just abandon identity and not just try to find values that appeal to everyone, regardless of who, who they are, but to do identity politics the right way.

And so one of the folks that we're really moved by is Ian Haney Lopez, who is a social scientist and a legal activist who has studied different ways of messaging around identity.

And he finds that certain kinds of identity politics are pretty unpopular.

If you just sort of, every time someone does something racist, you call them out as a racist, then that can be pretty good for animating your own side, but not necessarily great about animating the other side.

And so that can lead people to think, oh, let's take this universalistic perspective.

We're just going to talk about universal healthcare, we're just going to talk about pollution or something like that that sort of appeals to everybody in a bland, generic way.

But unfortunately they found that those sorts of universalistic, colorblind appeals to folks are actually less popular than good old fashioned dog whistling and racism, where you're saying, you know, the reason that we have these problems is because people don't want to work or because there's some, you know, you know, sort of coded stereotypes about criminals or, or something along those lines.

And so what he finds is that the.

The most effective strategy is one that recognizes identity, recognizes that people face different challenges, and calls out racism in a kind of strategic form.

So rather than saying, oh, this political leader, they have racism in their heart.

I'm worried about their racism as an individual.

They're pointing out how that person is invoking racist ideas in order to better themselves and better corporations rather than other people.

And so you start out by recognizing that we're all situated differently, that we have differences and so on, but then you kind of pivot from that to talking about universal concerns that we all share.

Right.

And that's a way of leaning into identity, but not just stopping at identity.

Right.

And so it's not just about, let's advance this one policy that will help this one group, but let's think about solutions that work for everybody.

I've had conversations with people that don't want to talk about climate change, but they want to talk about a clean environment.

So what I've found is lately is the best way to talk about climate change is to not even mention climate change, to kind of work around it somehow and to create, I guess, an identity that's not focused just on climate change, because that is like calling somebody out as a racist.

You're a racist.

You know, it doesn't work.

It just doesn't work.

You can preach to the choir all day long, but you're not.

You're not, you're not affecting.

I don't know.

If you sit and preach the choir all day long, does it actually impact structures when you just keep preaching to the choir and maybe the choir gets a little bigger.

Any thoughts about.

Yeah, I mean, one thing that I think is that for sure, if the only people you're talking to or the only people you're signaling your values to are in your tight private sphere and they're all people who agree with you already, then the sphere of your social influence is going to be more limited than it would be otherwise.

I'll say.

Well, I'll say something directly about that and then maybe return briefly at the end to the question of climate messaging, which I think is related, but a slightly different question sometimes, because maybe.

I don't know if this is true of you, but like, for us, most of our social world is comprised of people who are very convinced about the problems associated with climate change and worried about, can become convincing that everybody thinks that way, that everybody sort of already knows about it and cares about it.

But the reality is, in the like, even just thinking about the United States, leave aside the rest of the world for a moment.

There is a great bit more diversity out there of opinion than we tend to realize.

But we tend to often get trapped in our own preconceptions about what it is.

So I'll just give you one data point that we talk about in the book, and it always, like, fits in the front of my mind.

If you ask average Americans to take a guess about what percentage of other Americans want stronger climate legislation, so you say, what do you think?

Is it 10%, 20%, 50%, 90% of other Americans who prefer having stronger climate legislation in this country, on average, people will guess that it's about a third.

They'll say, I think about a third of Americans would prefer that.

The reality when you just directly ask Americans, do you want stronger climate legislation?

Is that about two thirds do so.

So people are, on average, strongly underestimating the support out there for climate legislation.

This goes by the term in the, in the social scientific literature of the problem of pluralistic ignorance, that we don't know what everyone else thinks or knows.

And pluralistic ignorance is not just a problem for climate change, it's a problem for all kinds of other contemporary issues.

But to me, the fact that pluralistic ignorance is so pervasive suggests that talking about our concerns, talking about what choices we're making in our lives, hey, I got a heat pump, hey, I got an electric bike so that I could get to work rather than driving every day, actually is likely to be a meaningful source of social change, because it is the, the way of puncturing that bubble, of, of spreading the message.

But it also matters, the details matter, who you talk to, who you spread the message to, who you are to spread the message, right?

So it's one thing if you kind of keep hearing over and over again from your one super lefty friend all the things they're doing from climate change.

But it's another thing if you start to hear from your neighbor down the street and this other parent at your kid's school and someone at work, right?

That's kind of social proof that more and more people are caring about this.

And so I think that we can contribute to that social proof by talking about our values, our choices and signaling them and so on.

But we can also kind of do it intentionally and strategically and look for those kind of higher leveraged opportunities where because of who we are, because of who we're talking to, we can we can lend a more kind of powerful note to the chorus on the question of climate messaging.

Right.

There's this sort of where the discourse has evolved as to precisely what you suggested, that maybe the best way to talk about climate change is not by talking about climate change, but by talking about, about electricity prices, by talking about the health benefits for reducing local air pollution.

I just saw a study today that suggested that in New York City, because of congestion pricing, air pollution has gone down 22% in the congestion pricing zone.

Right.

I bet almost nobody knows that.

Yeah, right.

I didn't know that.

So I guess I want to be a both and thinker about this, which is to say, I think it's really valuable to talk about electricity prices and air pollution and all the sort of indirect benefits of addressing climate change.

And again, I'll try to be strategic in the sense of who I'm talking to.

And if I think the first time I mention the word climate change, they're going to shut down because of the way it's been politicized, then, yeah, I'm going to focus on these more in directions.

But I don't want that to be a reason for anybody in many other circumstances to hesitate to say, hey, I'm actually really freaked out about what climate change is going to mean for me and my family, and I'm really excited about the progress we're making in other parts of the world.

And why can't we have that in the United States?

Right.

I mean, I think these are not mutually exclusive options.

I think there's a couple other important points to think about here in the context of thinking about, like, feeling like our own futility when we're trying to interact with people and so on, where.

So in the later chapters of the book, we talk a lot about the dynamics of social change and we talk about tipping points where it can seem like there's no progress being made on an issue and then all of a sudden a switch flips and it seems like overnight everything is transformed.

And that can conceal the fact that lots of people across lots of different contexts were working, you know, towards that end.

And then.

But it was only at a certain point when the dynamics of the social system changed that we see that.

Because part of what's going on is that, you know, the nature of being part of a social network of people is that we often don't see in real time direct feedback about the positive effects of our efforts.

Right.

Like, like you're not, like, especially with something like a podcast, you're not on the other end, we don't know who's listening to this and what they go on to do, Right?

So one example we mentioned in the book is we talk about the students that protested after the shooting in Parkland High School.

And you know, we would have thought at that point that that would have been a kind of tipping point in favor of towards better gun control legislation.

And there has been some movement there, but not enough.

But actually, one effect of that was that Greta Thunberg was, was watching and that motivated her to start her movement to, you know, protest against climate change.

And so it's like.

But that's not something that those students would have seen in real time.

And so in particular, if you're having a conversation with someone, it might seem like it's blowing up in your face.

It might seem like it's not going anywhere, right?

But, but rarely does persuasion happen in real time.

This is a particular sort of funny thing for us as philosophers, because if you go all the way, way back to the Socratic dialogues and Plato's debating with someone about the nature of courage or the nature of right and wrong, almost never at the end of the dialogue do they.

Do they go, oh yeah, you've persuaded me, Socrates, thanks.

Instead they just say like, ah, I got a thing, I gotta go, leave me alone.

Right?

And so we don't actually see it happen in real time, right?

But of course, you know, we don't see what the person does right after they have a conversation with us.

Right.

And maybe even though in the moment they get defensive, in the moment they get prickly, right.

They might go on to change their behavior down the line.

And so part of, you know, there's a little bit of a trust fall component to working for social change where you have to be willing to put in the work without sort of, you know, getting this kind of direct feedback.

Like, especially.

We're especially programmed by our phones now to like, interact with something, you post something and then you get a, like right away or something like that.

And that's not how social change works.

We.

We often don't see the immediate impact of our actions.

And so there's a level of trust where we have to say, we're all going to work together on this.

We're going to, you know, the different social roles that we occupy, and we got to hope that it's going to make a difference.

And our book is littered with examples of folks who did successfully work for social change.

Sometimes changes that we agree with, sometimes changes that we don't.

But you Know, in many cases there were tireless efforts and they didn't see the fruits of their labor right away or even in their lifetimes.

But nevertheless, they were part of a larger movement that ultimately led to success.

That speaks to the temporal aspect of all this.

There are tipping points.

Like you say, there's tipping points.

It's not really social, but it's like talking about climate change.

There'll be a tipping point.

Once that's crossed, everything changes.

There was a lot that had to happen for that tipping point to occur.

Another example of blame shifting, I call it, is the personal carbon footprint.

The idea of the carbon footprint, which is something else I've bought into, which that's an interesting thing.

I mean, I've bought into all these things and I'm only, only now at this late stage coming around.

This is all bs, you know, not, not that it's.

I'm not saying that being aware of your activities in terms of carbon emissions is not important, but this speaks to the idea of being an individual and looking at this huge system and feeling powerless.

You know, I want to reduce my carbon footprint, but how can I get through the day without emitting carbon?

A lot of people that I've spoke with just kind of, ah, screw it, you know, they, they give up and then we're in a really fraught time.

I mean, let, let's talk about the elephant in a room for a second.

Sure.

In so many ways.

Racism, climate change, energy policy.

I'm just going to rant for a second.

Some of the lowest cost of energy right now is renewable sources.

And yet.

Just read this morning.

I think it's in Montana, some coal fire plant.

He's demanding it stay running or it was going to be shut down.

Beautiful, clean coal.

You've never seen coal so beautiful.

That's right.

So when you're facing, you know, there's the structures and then there's the Trump inspired structure, what do you see with the reaction, the social reaction, like with the ICE raids and the no kings protests?

How effective do you think these things are in battling the systems, the structural systems that are being promoted by the current administration?

Okay, that's a tough one.

There you go.

I'll try to say something both about the personal carbon footprint and Trump might be a stretch, but I'll do my best.

Okay.

I mean, you know, in the book, at least, we talk about the personal carbon footprint in the same breath as talking about the crying Indian ad and other PR efforts to individualize problems.

And in many cases, what I often say about it, when people ask about these specific examples is, and I think Alex was gesturing about this before, that there's something right and there's something wrong in all of these examples.

The right thing is the empowering thing, right, that they are giving you something to do, giving you a feeling of agency.

And there is just no way, through any theory of change that that is going to make real change in the world that doesn't involve people feeling agency and making choices to try to change things.

Of course, we've already talked about the insidious part of, of that kind of pr, right, that what it tells you to do is this sort of self serving, minding your own garden kind of type of actions.

But what you can take from that is the importance of motivating a sense of responsibility, a sense of ownership of the world we live in and, and making it a more just place.

Now, of course, the hard question is like, how right, so what do we do?

We take inspiration from this quote from Bill McKibben in the beginning of the book where he says the most important thing an individual can do is be a little less of an individual and work with others to create really deep change.

And so when I look out and see how awful the things that Trump are doing on climate legislation in the United States and how dark it looks, you know what, what I want to do is what we do in the book, look at history and see what's worked.

Look at the sciences of social change and all the really great social science that looks at what motivates people to get involved, what's effective, what's not, and in particular, to sort of take up that spirit of the Bill McKibben quote, what inspires people to work together and to work together effectively for change.

And so we've already talked about some ideas for that, you know, focusing on our identities, building coalitions and so on.

So I'll just add one more bit that I think is maybe directly relevant to the sort of Trump questions about climate legislation and to sort of how dark it looks right now, which is that I think it's sometimes a little too easy for people who are feeling overwhelmed in the climate fight to ignore the real sources of progress that we have made on a global level.

You know, if you look at per capita emissions in rich countries, they have gone precipitously down.

If you look at the economics of renewable energy right now, it is just 180 degrees different from, from even what the best experts thought it would be 10 years ago.

And the fact that the cheapest way to make electricity now is through solar and wind.

Really changes not just the economic calculus, but the political calculus.

And you're seeing that all over the world.

I mean, you know, so I mentioned Bill McKibben, right?

He's barnstorming the country right now, trying to tell people about what's happening in Pakistan, in Africa, in China.

And these are really, really inspiring events.

And of course, you can sound Pollyannish and glib by talking about progress in the midst of, you know, Trump's effort to destroy democracy and, and science and, yeah, you know, promote, quote, unquote, clean coal and all the awful things he doing.

He's doing just in this one domain.

But we have to keep in mind what it is we're fighting for and learn from where progress has been made.

And so, to me, that's like an essential element of the.

The message around.

Okay, if.

If the personal choices I have to make aren't just focusing on my own little corner and counting up my personal carbon emissions, what are the personal choices I have to make?

And they might be, you know, going out and voting for the candidates or organizing with nonprofits and advocacy groups that are promoting precisely the policies that are successful in other places in the world right now.

I think it's also important to circle back to thinking about tipping points and social change dynamics in this context.

So Michael talked about the precipitous drop in the cost of renewable energy.

And so the truth is that we have passed a tipping point where green energy just is way more cost effective and better in all these other ways.

And so no matter, like, Trump is slowing it down, and that's terrible, and, and it will cost thousands or millions of lives in terms of, you know, downstream effects.

But, like, the broader picture is one where he cannot stop the changes that are happening.

And it's, you know, really heartbreaking that the US has dismantled most of the Inflation Reduction act and move back off of a lot of its climate goals.

But China is, you know, producing tons and tons of EVs, and Europe is just going to buy those instead of ours.

And so that's bad for us, as you know, but it's good for the Earth in terms of, like, there are these processes that even the most powerful person in the free world doesn't have the power to stop.

And you might also think, when we're looking at all of the, you know, creeping or sprinting authoritarianism that's happening, you might immediately jump to thinking that that's also part of sort of a tipping point trend that's Just going to keep going in that direction.

But it, but it often doesn't play out that way.

So over the last hundred years there have been something like a hundred events where there were, you know, moves in Democratic or non democratic states towards more authoritarianism that.

But then did a U turn and turned back the other way.

We, it just happened in Brazil.

Right.

Bolsonaro is, you know, was.

Right.

He, he tried to do, he tried all these things, but they were able to turn it around and he was actually convicted.

Right.

I mean, apparently Trump is trying to like sneak him out of Brazil or something.

Pardon them.

Yeah, right.

Like when we see trends, you know, when there was, I mean, there was a lot of hand wringing after the 2024 election where people were looking at different members of different social groups voting more Republican and there's this immediate default assumption to think like, oh, that's just a trend that's going to continue in that direction.

Right.

But it might not be, it might just snap back the other way where people who were vote who, you know, they, Republicans have something somehow they have, you know, kitchen table issues and economics as part of their brand.

But as people see that, you know, eggs are not any cheaper and so on, like, you know, there's only so much gaslighting you can do.

And so what might seem like a trend towards losing whole, you know, young people and members of various social identities and so on could just be a blip.

And so, you know, we never really know when we're part of, you know, a social trend that's going to keep going in that direction or one that's, you know, going in the other direction.

But we know that these changes happen all the time.

And so for all we know, our efforts to stop authoritarianism could be, you know, tipping points that switch things back in the other way.

And so it's really important not to lose hope because it could be that, you know, we ourselves are the tipping point that stops a rollback or that promotes a positive progressive feedback loop going forward.

I think that's a very wise suggestion.

I've been intrigued with the generational the Fourth Turning.

Have you heard of this idea?

I don't know the concept now.

Oh, who's the guy now?

I'm basing on the name, but it's a book called the Fourth Turning.

And the idea is that history goes in cycles, roughly a period of a long lifetime.

So World War II, about 80 or so years ago was.

There's four turnings in these cycles, each lasting about a generation.

And the Fourth Turning is a crisis phase.

And we went through that with World War II, and we came out the other end with a whole new world order, and that we are now in another fourth turning another crisis phase and a tipping point, perhaps, and we're going to come out maybe in the early2030s, and the world's going to be completely different.

Do you, in your.

In your research come across anything like these.

These historical cycles in terms of social change?

I don't know that we've come across.

I mean, maybe Alex will have ideas, but I don't know that we've come across the specific idea that there are cycles of crisis and stability that are predictable, temporally predictable, which is to say, like, it's every generation or every number of generations.

That's not to say it's not true.

I just, I'm not familiar with that particular book, but I definitely am sympathetic to the idea that crises are opportunities.

And I mean, I think that that's evident looking at American history, where you see the kind of greatest moments of progressive advance after crises of.

Of one form or another.

And so with all the due caution that Alex just described, in terms of our ability to see what's coming and which trends are persist and which ones are going to change, I think there's reason to think that it's somewhere between not impossible and likely that we come out of this really terrible and terrifying period with a kind of renewed interest in addressing deep structural problems in American democracy in really, like, genuine ways that we have not had the political capacity for in, you know, the kind of post 70s political era, I guess, is the way that I would put it.

Yeah, yeah, I think that.

So I'm only familiar with that concept from earlier episodes of your podcast where you talked about it.

Okay, so I think, I mean, we're definitely out of the prediction business, right?

I mean, if you had asked me, you know, in like, January 2021, when the new the vaccine for Covid was coming out and I was hearing about vaccine hesitancy, I was totally like, once it's out, like, everyone's going to take it.

Come on, give me a break.

My favorite example of this recently is also coming out of the COVID pandemic, when, you know, there was a big spike in inflation and most of the economists said, we've had such low inflation for such a long time.

This is just going to be a blip.

It's just due to supply chain issues.

It's going to go back.

But Larry Summers, who is now notorious for further reasons at his to his lists of notoriety was out in the front saying, no, I think this is going to stick around.

Right?

And then the, and then it did stick around and the inflation continued to be bad and it was, you know, probably really influential in the 2024 election.

But then, and then all the economists were saying, ah, inflation's not going to go back down.

It's going to stay really, really high.

Right.

And then it plummeted again.

And so it's just like if even economists, this, this whole group of people can't predict these basic things, then who are we to predict?

But I do think when we're thinking about these large world historical levels of social change, I think one thing that is, it's, it's.

I think it's hard to think about in, you know, there was so much about World War II that was so beyond the pale, from the Holocaust to the atomic bomb to, I mean it was just so.

The death toll was so high that, you know, the war crimes were so bad that there was this, you know, generations level of sort of awareness like, we can never let this happen again.

And so it's really hard now seeing the rise of basically neo Nazi parties around the world and white supremacist parties around the world, where it's hard not to interpret that as a kind of forgetting about what happened.

But I think sort of, again, a little bit of a positive spin to put on that is that I think part of what happens is some of the social structures that we have in place to protect people, whether it's the UN or it's Social Security or the CDC and so on, people just take them for granted.

They just sort of become part of the background that people take for granted.

And then you just think, why couldn't we do without those things?

Because you don't realize all the things that they're doing for you.

And so I think that sort of taking for granted of the structures in place to support us is part of what can lead to these future crises.

But again, there's an opportunity there where we can play a role in saying, hey man, the CDC does really good stuff.

You know, like the world, the global, like NATO is good, like we can, we can talk about these things.

And so that's an opportunity for us to play a role in, you know, as we talk about it, surfacing the state, talking about all the positive things that the world order has done and of course balancing that against some of the, all the negative things that the world order has done.

Right.

But there is a positive role for individuals to play in talking to each other about the benefits of the system that we have and to try to, you know, hopefully again, sort of block a kind of full regressive tipping point, spin into.

Into chaos or authoritarianism that we have a role to play in saying what the government is doing for us, what social institutions are doing for us, and being vocal about that can, you know, be one of the important things we can do to stop that kind of regress.

Right?

Yeah.

I mean, I guess things start to get bad before they get better.

Right.

It's unfortunate, but it's like people have to see things getting bad and then say, oh, I don't want that.

Right.

And then.

And then that can motivate them to take action.

Yeah, yeah.

So to wrap it up, a couple of questions.

First off, in your researching this book, were there any surprises?

Anything that you didn't expect to discover?

I'll give you one real quick, which goes back to the first chapter.

And we've talked some about the personal carbon footprint and the crying Indian ad.

I was really shocked to learn how far back that strategy goes.

So we open the book with this little set piece description of a battle that was going on in the 1920s between the American Automobile association and people who were worried about increased pedestrian deaths in cities because cars were on the streets all of a sudden.

And at that time, people were used to kind of living life in the streets.

Kids would be playing or people having conversations.

And so some cities were starting to try to solve the problem by passing laws, like a law that cars can't go more than 25 miles an hour.

Like they would have to have a governor, quote unquote, in the car, preventing it from going that fast.

But of course, the car companies didn't want that.

And what they did was they created a public relations campaign to again, like individualize the problem, put it on individual people's shoulders.

And they came up with this term that's still with us today, the jaywalker, which was a combination of an insult, being a J, which meant being like a country bumpkin and a jay walker is someone who's walking like a country bumpkin in the city, not paying attention to cars on the streets.

And so I really had no idea that that Tanny strategy had roots so far back in American history.

I was also surprised, speaking in terms of things having roots far back, how many social movements and social processes had such long histories?

So one of them was the temperance movement that led to Prohibition, that that was a decades long process, but also the complexity of that process, partly how it was rooted, rooted in, for example, battles against domestic violence.

But one of the examples we talk about in the book is pasteurization.

And so Louis Pasteur discovers pasteurization in the 1860s, but it's not until 1947 that the first American state requires milk to be pasteurized.

And so what happened in that almost 100 year span, right?

And when we tell the stories, we just sort of say, oh, there was this, you know, individual genius, lone wolf inventor, yada, yada, yada, snap your fingers now no one's getting sick from milk anymore.

But that obscures all the different individual people, from philanthropists to scientists to activists to journalists, all the different roles that people played that can lead to those changes.

And so I was just repeatedly blown away by the complexity of these processes, how long they sometimes took, and all the different individuals roles that people could play in bringing them about, individual roles.

So let's wrap that up with that theme.

People listening to the podcast hopefully want to make some change and they feel, you know, how do I make change?

And you just described one, one example where pasteurization, it took a lot of people to get it from the idea of pasteurization to actually structural change.

So what hope can we provide with people that want to affect change in all these every.

Everything crisis, everything problems?

I think it's really easy to, when you think about social change, think about world historical figures, you know, whether they're presidents of countries or Mother Teresa, you know, people who just have had unusual opportunities to dedicate their whole life to some fight for justice.

And of course we should admire those people.

And it's perfectly fine to aspire to be one if, if that's who you are.

But I think for most of us, that thing you just said about our roles, plural, providing opportunities to create change is for me a very hopeful idea.

Because all of us, no matter who you are, play lots of different social roles.

We are somebody's kid, we are often somebody's parent or somebody's sister or brother.

We're somebody's employee or somebody's boss or somebody's coach, somebody's teammate, right?

And all of those are different ways of relating to other people and, and offer different and unique opportunities to try to voice and embody our values.

We.

So we end the book on just this notion that I think slots in there nicely, which is the concept of job crafting, where people make their jobs, no matter how sort of otherwise menial or uninspiring, they might be a bit more meaningful, a bit more pleasurable by infusing them with their values.

So we talk about people whose jobs are cleaning at hospitals who take a certain extra moment to think about, well, what is it like lying in a hospital bed staring at the ceiling?

Well, if the ceiling is dirty, that might make their experience a little worse.

And if the ceiling is clean, that might make a meaningful difference in their life.

And people who job craft an experience like that and think, you know what, I'm going to try to take a moment and make the ceiling nicer.

Not only do they like their jobs better and find a bit more meaning in it, but they also, I think, exercise that capacity to influence someone else who then may have the possibility of going on and influencing someone else and really show how we are these, we always are possible creatures of social change.

Everyone is already an agent of social change.

The question is, like, how do we use it and how do we amplify it?

So when we're looking to our different social roles, there can be this tendency to just sort of think like, I'm going to clock in and clock out, right?

I'm just going to go, you know, sweep the, you know, mop the hospital floors and then clock out.

Right.

But we, we can try to take a more expansive understanding of those roles.

So one example that happened to me recently was I was in a reading group with a student, with a group of students, and one of them, several of them actually work at a restaurant.

And they were like, talking about the book that we were reading with their co workers.

And then one of the co workers came to the reading group one time and it was like a really meaningful experience for him to be part of that reading group.

Right.

And so, you know, instead of just thinking about, like, I'm just going to clock in, clock out at my, at the restaurant, you're thinking about, like, being there for each other.

And so when we're, when we're trying to work on a large problem like climate change, and it feels like we're not necessarily making an immediate difference, where it's hard to see the immediate difference, we can take a lot of strength or comfort in being there for each other and, and knowing that we're supporting each other.

Right.

And so, you know, you might like, I've been playing pickleball lately and hypothetically, you know, maybe it, like, if I'm going to be like, if I'm going to go to like a climate protest, I could sort of mention that at the pickleball group, like, oh, I can't make it on this day because I'M going to be going to the climate protest, and then that's an opportunity to, you know, there are folks who I am bonding with over something else that I have common ground over some other things thing.

But then there's an opportunity to sort of let people know that here's something that I care about and here's the ways that I'm taking action about it in my life.

And I think it's really important to bear in mind for folks who are chronically online, they might think that we're all just shouting at each other all the time and that the number one thing we need to do is just be nice to each other and avoid conflict and try to be, you know, peaceable to each other.

But the problem today, by and large, is still the problem that it's always been, which is passive bystanding.

People are not getting involved as much as they could.

And there's a fear of conflict, there's a fear of difficult conversations.

We've got a holiday coming up right now, and lots of people are going to avoid leaning into potentially challenging conversations.

And I wouldn't say like, you know, show up at the, at the holiday dinner and like, you know, roll up your sleeves and like, get ready to battle, but I would also say don't be afraid of, of having difficult conversations.

Approach them with humility, listen, and so on and so forth.

And again, even if you don't see the effects of your engagement in the moment, there's room to trust that we're part of a larger movement that could be building towards something more just and healthy for everyone.

That's good.

That's good.

So community finding, opportunity and perseverance sticking with it.

Well said.

Yeah.

Amen.

Okay, well, thank you.

Thank you, Alex and Michael.

I appreciate it.

This has been a great conversation, and I highly recommend the book Somebody Should Do Something and Let's Make a Better World.

Thanks, Tom.

We're so grateful for the opportunity to speak with you and be part of Global warming is realearthbound.

Earthbound.

Yes.

Yeah.

Thanks for the opportunity.

It was a real pleasure.

Yeah, thank you very much, guys.

You too.

You too.

Okay, bye.

And that's the conversation.

I'm grateful to Michael and Alex Sport and to Daniel Kelly, their co author, who wasn't with us today, but whose.

Fingerprints are all over the book.

One point that stuck with me is that when you ask Americans how many of their neighbors want stronger climate action, most guess about a third.

The real number is closer to two thirds.

We are so many of us, a silent majority that doesn't know it's a majority, each of us quietly assuming we're outnumbered.

And that's the trap that this whole book is built to spring us from.

Not by asking us to become someone we're not some lone hero riding out to save the world, but by noticing the roles we already fill.

Neighbor, parent, co worker, friend.

Each one is a small doorway through which our choices become someone else's situation.

The change rarely announces itself.

You may never see the ripple you set in motion.

Michael called it a kind of trust fall.

And I think that's right.

We act and we trust that it matters because the evidence says it does.

So talk to someone this week.

Put the panels on the roof.

Be, as Bill McKibben once put it, a little less of an individual.

Somebody should do something.

And it turns out that somebody is us.

Check the show notes to find out more about the book.

Some somebody should do something in Other topics discussed in this episode and I'd love to know more about you.

Who's listening, what brought you here, and what you'd like to hear more of.

I put together a short listener survey and it would mean a great deal to me if you could take a few minutes to fill it out.

The link's in the show notes.

I'm Tom Schueneman, and this is Stories from the Life on a Warming Planet.

If this episode moved you, made you think, or helped you feel a little less alone in all of this, please take a moment to leave a rating and review wherever you listen.

It generally helps other people find the show.

And if you haven't already hit subscribe so you never miss an episode.

Thank you, dear listener.

I'll see you in a couple of weeks.

And in the meantime, stay safe.

Sam it.

Come up with some cute jokes for some B roll.

That's good.

Yeah, global warming isn't real.

I don't.