Latest / Blocked and Reported / Episode 228: Climate Karen

Transcript

Episode 228: Climate Karen · Blocked and Reported

• 0:08
  SPEAKER_02: oh wait throw it to me sorry let's just leave that here katie how's it going
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: Professional as always.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_02: Wait, let's edit that so we start with the music and then just eerie silence as the music fades out.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: We're not doing that.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_01: I am fine.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for asking, even though I always ask you not to ask me how I'm doing.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: I am doing fine.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: However, I remembered something that I meant to tell you a while back that I forgot to tell you.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_02: You're gay?
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: You think I'm gay?
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_02: I've been telling everybody.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, not that.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_01: So do you remember our episode about autism?
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_02: Which one?
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_02: Good point.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_01: Someone was specifically about the conflict between autism influencers and actual autism.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: It was a conflict between the people who put...
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_02: The people who literally cannot use a computer and the people who post all day
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_02: about their autism.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_01: The people who can literally not use a computer and the people who use hashtag
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_01: actually autistic to describe themselves.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: So when I was preparing for that episode, you know, I interviewed this woman who wrote a book.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_01: Her son is autistic and she's a medical historian.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: Amy Lutz.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_01: So she told me when we were talking autistic people like her son have a tendency.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_01: What I thought she said was that they have a compulsion to lope.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: And when we were recording, you were like, what is that?
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, like,
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_01: yeah do you know how like a horse runs like that sort of trotting so that's what i
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_02: thought that that that i thought oh did i just accept that like of course autistic
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_01: autistic people are always galloping yeah so that was what i was picturing in my
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: head and that's what we said when we were recording you said what's and i said you
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: know like a like a horse runs and we went with that oh yeah i've heard about that
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_01: yeah
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_01: And then when I was editing the episode,
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_01: I was like,
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if that's that doesn't sound quite right.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_01: So I looked it up and she wouldn't she didn't say lope.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_01: She said elope, which means wander.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: So I edited it out in the final episode.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_01: So nobody heard us say that autistic people run like horses have a compulsion to run like horses.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_01: But we came very, very close to putting that in the world out into the world.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_02: Guess how much of what you just said I was at all aware of or could even remember.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_01: None of it.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_02: None of it.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, so for the record, autistic people, severely autistic people, they wander.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_01: They do not run like horses.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_02: Do they wait?
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_02: You're saying they pair off and go get married in Vegas?
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_01: On occasion, I'm sure.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I wanted to, uh, confront you about something before we begin the episode.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_02: What is it?
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_02: So I got,
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_02: I got a DM from trace tracing wood grains and he asked me,
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_02: he's like,
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_02: I'm getting into slay the spire.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_02: This is the video game.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: I've heard of it.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_02: yep it's come up once or twice and he's like oh i'm just trying to like uh figure
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_02: out where i'm at remind me what levels you got to i won't get into the it's the
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_02: ascension levels for anyone who plays i have to log in just to see what levels i'm
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_02: at in the game this is like giving someone who's been clean for 15 years yeah oh
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_02: just take a little sip of beer it's fine so i'm back i'm back on the horse wait is
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_02: it on the horse or off the wagon
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: You're loping.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: You're loping towards Slay the Spire.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_02: I'm loping to Slay the Spire.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_02: But my theory is that you told Trace to do that to try to... I know what you're going to say.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_02: What do you think I'm going to say?
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_01: That I'm trying to prevent you from finishing your book.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, that makes more sense.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_02: I said you were going to cause performance issues so at my next review you could
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_02: fire me and replace me with a cooler host.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: Like Trace.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_02: But the book thing too because we have books potentially coming out at the same time.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: No, ours are not going to be out at the same time.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_02: Is yours coming out sooner?
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_01: Mine's coming out in the spring.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, Jesus.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_02: How does that work?
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, it's just different with self-help.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: They're fast-tracking me because the book is so important.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_01: They're just like, we got to get this out in the world.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_02: All right.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_02: Katie, what podcast is this?
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: This is Blocked and Reported, and I'm Katie Herzog.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm Jesse Singel.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_02: And today, you're going to tell me about, speaking of performance issues.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_01: You have no idea.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_02: Something environmental.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_02: It's about the environment.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, we're talking about climate change today.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_01: Sort of.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_01: We're not really talking about climate change, but we are kind of talking about climate change.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_02: I think,
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_02: and before that,
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_02: I want to talk a little bit about some of this sort of Elon Musk,
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_02: free speechy,
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_02: people getting arrested,
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_02: showdowns with various court systems.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_02: I want to get into that a little bit.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_02: So should we start with that?
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, let's start with that.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_02: So you've actually been covering this whole Elon Musk Brazil thing.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_02: Here's somewhere you wrote for some far-right pro-fascism website called The Free Press that
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_01: This is great.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_01: You reading my work.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_01: I like this.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_01: Do you want to do the audio for my book for me?
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_01: And I'll do it for yours.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: I'm Katie Herzog.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_01: Blah, blah, blah.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: You got it.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: You got it.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_02: This whole thing has more legal drama than Law & Order season 47.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_02: But here's basically what happened.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_02: After Musk refused to remove the accounts, these are accounts the governor of Brazil wanted to remove.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_02: Justice demorais.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_02: Is that a good Portuguese-Brazilian accent?
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_01: Do they pronounce the J like that?
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_02: Well, in Spanish they don't, so I'm guessing they don't.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_02: Justice de Moraes.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_02: Justice de Moraes.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_02: Threatened to arrest X's lawyers.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_02: Normal stuff.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_02: So must close X's Brazil office and refuse to appoint a legal representative of the country,
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_02: which was required by law.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_02: Then de Moraes was all... Which I had to look up.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_02: That means go screw yourself?
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I thought it was go fuck yourself, but I guess go screw yourself.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_02: Well, it's a family-friendly podcast.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_02: ...froze Starlink's assets in Brazil and ordered the state telecom regulator to
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_02: instruct Brazilian internet service providers to block access to X across the nation.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_02: All ISPs aside from Musk's satellite company Starlink complied.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_02: The blackout went into effect at midnight on August 31st,
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_02: and when users,
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_02: X is extremely popular in Brazil with an estimated 22 million,
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_02: tried to refresh the app,
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_02: they were greeted with nothing but stale old tweets.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_02: I just want to pause there.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_02: This is my dream, being unable.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_02: What is anyone complaining about?
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_02: That is the most precious gift of all,
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_02: and you're spitting in the face of the person who gave it to you to not be able to
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_02: go on Twitter.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_02: Musk responded by encouraging users there to bypass the law using VPNs.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_02: Then Justice de Moraes threatened that anyone who accesses the site could be fined
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_02: up to $8,900 per day for accessing Twitter.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_02: You failed to note, Katie, that that's an annual salary in Brazil.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_01: I blame the editors for that.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_02: Then Starling Bactrington agreed to block Twitter as well.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, and Musk tweeted that de Moraes should be in prison.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, so this is pretty weird.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_02: You've done more research on this aspect of it than I have.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_02: This Supreme Court guy seems like a little bit of a tyrant, right?
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and in fact, the government gave him unilaterally the ability to...
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: order social media companies to censor content.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_01: And he has exercised this power freely,
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_01: and he's done it in really opaque ways so that sometimes there's not even an
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: explanation about why this specific content is supposed to be censored.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_01: And he has specifically targeted members of Bolsonaro's far-right party and people
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_01: who are accused of spreading misinformation and discord.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_02: To threaten to arrest Twitter's lawyer is some real authoritarianship,
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_02: but you left out his biggest crime of all.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_01: Which was?
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_02: Making me side with Elon Musk.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_01: I know.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's tough.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_02: It feels really weird.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_02: I don't want to get distracted,
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_02: but I can't mention TGIF without reading a few of the comments from your massive
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_02: fan base there.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_01: They love me.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_01: They love me.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_02: Man, Katie loves to hear herself talk, doesn't she?
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_02: I hope I'm not wrong in remembering that the daily... Is this a listener to our podcast?
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_02: This is a TG... Free press... Right, exactly.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_02: She does love to hear herself talk.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, free press commenter.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_02: I hope I'm not wrong in remembering that the daily update used to be... Is it a daily update?
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_02: Is it a weekly?
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_01: No, it's weekly.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_02: Used to be more focused on actual news and not so much on what the reporter thinks
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_02: about it or what childhood events it reminds her of.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_02: That's...
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_01: Did I mention childhood events anywhere on this?
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think so.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_02: No, I didn't.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe we could get back to that now.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_02: This other one is such a non sequitur.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_02: This has nothing, well, very little to do with anything.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_02: Here's some news for everyone concerned about illegal versus legal immigration.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_02: Pelosi praises California bill giving illegal migrants money to buy homes.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_02: American dream, quote, available to more people.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_02: I wonder how quickly that money will go to the cartels.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_01: Very relevant.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_02: Finally...
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_02: Second to last,
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_02: it really seems that Katie resents that the UNC frat boys prevented the downing of
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_02: the U.S.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_02: flag.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_02: What has the free press become?
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: Is that because I said that their party sounded lame?
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: It did sound lame.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_01: The free press actually sent a reporter to the party.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_01: You know what I'm talking about?
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, these are the UNC frat boys.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_02: They prevented pro-Palestinian protesters from taking down the stars and bars.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_01: And then this conservative,
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_01: this,
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_01: like,
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_01: GOP operative raised half a million dollars for them to throw the biggest rager ever.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_01: And they sent out apparently 7,000 tickets.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_01: Less than 1,000 people came, probably because it got... I wonder why.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: It got... People read this as conservative.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: Chapel Hill is... There's not very many conservatives in Chapel Hill.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_01: There really aren't.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_01: And so the students apparently didn't want to go,
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_01: like,
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_01: listen to minor country stars lecture them about...
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_02: american unity or whatever well also the kids in the frat themselves some of them
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_02: were quoted in the times being like yeah we don't want a half million dollars to
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_02: spend on a party said it to like some of them said like israeli relief stuff right
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_01: i mean it was a jewish frat i mean these are not yeah right these are these are not
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_02: really maga people uh finally last comment i thought this column was funny and
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_02: entertaining it had no likes that was from friend of the pod katrina gulliver
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: So the one person who liked it was our listener.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Katrina.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_02: But you're done with that now, right?
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_02: No more TGIF?
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_01: I am done.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: Thank God.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: TGIF is a lot of fucking work.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's like three part days.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_01: It's one full day and like two part days to do this column.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_01: One column.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_01: I don't want to do it again.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, on to the actual issue.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_02: I thought you did a good job summing the Musk thing up, which is complicated.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_02: We're going to gloss over a little.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_02: There's a good Washington Post editorial you recommended and a good write-up by Casey Newton.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_02: We'll link to those.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_02: I wanted to talk about another take on this.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_02: This is a sizzling take from Robert Reich in The Guardian, headlined, Elon Musk is out of control.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_02: Here's how to rein him in.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_02: Katie, what do you know about Robert Reich?
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_01: He's very short.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, you spoiled it.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_02: What else do you know about him?
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_02: What did he used to be?
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_01: He was the labor secretary in the Clinton administration.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_01: Is that right?
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_01: It's hilarious because you remember a couple years ago when it turned out that he
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_01: had so he lives in now he I believe he lives in San Francisco,
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_01: Berkeley,
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_01: Berkeley,
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's and he had in recent years,
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: he'd been involved in some effort to stop development in his neighborhood.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_01: He's a NIMBY.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it nicely sums it up.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_02: He can recite what the right policy should be.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_02: But anyway, I don't know the details of that.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_02: It was a really good class.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_02: He was an excellent lecturer.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_02: I also can't get over the fact that he's 4'11 and was able to be Secretary of Labor
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_02: despite that shortcoming,
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_02: if you will.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_02: Short king.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_02: Katie, describe the cover of this 2003 book he wrote.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_01: It looks like a flag sort of theme.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_01: And... Oh, my God.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_01: I'll be short.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_01: Essentials for a decent working society.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a picture of him on the front.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_02: If you, like...
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_02: Neither of us knows what it would be like to be four 11.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_02: If you're four 11, you got to lean into it.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_02: I'll be short is a great title.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_02: Um, also this is deep Robert Reich lore.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_02: He once appeared in a Conan O'Brien sketch in which he and Conan played like hard ass detectives.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_02: At one point in the sketch,
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_02: Robert Reich propositions,
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_02: a woman who appears to be a prostitute at another point.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_01: I was going to say something about her coming up to her nipples,
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_01: but it just,
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_01: we shouldn't make jokes about people's bodies.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody talk.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_01: Uh,
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_02: coming up to her mammary glands.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_02: At another point, he and Conan encounter this recalcitrant witness who's like, I've got rights, man.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_02: And Robert Reich,
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_02: again,
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_02: former Secretary of Labor,
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_02: says,
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_02: you have the right to be my bitch and starts beating him with a bat.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, this definitely happened before The Great Awakening.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_02: So Robert Reich, definitely funny.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_02: For all I know, great thinker on labor economic stuff.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_02: But on free speech stuff, not so much.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_02: So this Guardian column,
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_02: I thought it was really illustrative of a way certain free speech skeptics look at
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_02: the world.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_02: It first points out a lot of genuinely bad things Elon Musk has done.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_02: There's no shortage there.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_02: But it then lists some ways to, quote, reign him in.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_02: Katie, mind reading this first one.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: Regulators around the world should thrive.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_01: Let me try that again.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_01: Regulators around the world should threaten Musk with arrests if he doesn't stop
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_01: disseminating lies and hate on X.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_01: Global regulators may be on the way to doing this,
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_01: as evidenced by the 24th of August arrest in France of Pavel Durov,
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_01: who found in the online communications called Telegram,
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: which French authorities have found complicit in hate crimes and disinformation.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_01: Like Musk, Durov has styled himself as a free speech absolutist.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_01: This is unbelievably crazy.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_02: To just gloss over the fact that French authorities arrested the head of a company...
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_02: over stuff the user said and to not have any problem with that or even think through why that might be.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, this is someone who, I don't know, man.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, go ahead.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think that he thinks that the, who's the head of Verizon now?
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_02: Oh God, I don't know.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_01: Does he think that all telecommunications executives are responsible for the many,
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_01: many,
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_01: many crimes that get discussed on the phone?
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_02: Or the internet?
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_02: I do think where it gets more complicated,
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_02: and this was in one of the Casey Newton article,
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_02: is some of these conflicts come down to how much they cooperate with authorities.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_02: So like in Elon Musk's case, he just didn't participate in the process.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_02: He just pulled out of Brazil.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_02: But either way, yeah.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_01: In this case...
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_01: But he has.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_01: This is one of the things that I realized when I was writing that little thing for the free press.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_01: So Twitter does frequently comply with government takedown requests.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_01: And he has said in the past that he'll comply with a request if it follows the law
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_01: of the country that the request is coming from.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_01: So like in India,
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_01: he complied with requests to take down links to a BBC document that was critical of
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_01: Narendra Modi.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_02: Documentary, right?
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, what did I say?
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_02: I think document.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, sorry.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_01: Documentary.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_01: He's operating within that country.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_01: He is complying with the laws of that country.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_01: And he has said that he was not complying with the laws in Brazil because they're extra... Because...
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_01: And he has said that he's not complying with the laws in Brazil.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_01: I think or I mean, I think this is what he would say.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_01: He wouldn't comply with the law in Brazil because these laws are extrajudicial.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: But that's not true.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: Like the Supreme Court of Brazil just upheld the ruling by this guy, Justice de Mores.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's absolutely wrong.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_01: But the law has been upheld.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_02: either way for like an ardent liberal like Robert Rice to not express and not only
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_02: not express concern about the authorities arresting the heads of companies but to
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_02: say regulators around the world should threaten Musk with arrests plus
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_02: disseminating lies and hate like we've said this so many times it's ridiculous we
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_02: have to repeat this but people keep saying this who determines what's a lie and
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_02: what's hate this is not settled territory one more thing to read and also just the
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_01: fact that he's an American citizen yeah
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you're saying you want him to get swept up by a foreign government.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I guess if you land in a foreign country, you are, of course, subject to their laws.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_02: But there is a nice etiquette where we don't run around arresting high-profile
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_02: folks from other countries when they visit.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, luckily for Vladimir Putin in Mongolia.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_02: Anyway, one more paragraph, please.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_01: In the United States,
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_01: the Federal Trade Commission should demand that Musk take down lies that are likely
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_01: to endanger individuals.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_01: And if he does not, sue him under Section 5 of the FCC Act.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_01: Musk's free speech rights under the First Amendment don't take precedence over the public interest.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_01: Two months ago, the U.S.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_01: Supreme Court said federal agencies may pressure social media platforms to take
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_01: down misinformation,
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_01: a technical win for the public good,
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_01: technical because the court based its ruling on the plaintiff's lack of standing to sue.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_02: First of all, try to parse what he's even arguing.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_02: Musk's free speech rights under the First Amendment don't take precedence over the public interest.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_02: What does that even mean?
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's false.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_01: I just don't think that's true.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I mean, first of all, it's false.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_02: First of all, it's false.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_02: Second of all, it doesn't apply here because this has to do with
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, the First Amendment issues are complicated if the government is pressuring to do it.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_02: But either way,
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_02: just pragmatically,
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_02: the Federal Trade Commission should demand that must take down lies that are likely
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_02: to endanger individuals.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_02: Can you imagine enforcing that?
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_01: So the FTC should violate the First Amendment.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_02: I mean,
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_02: I guess you could define it as in danger,
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_02: like straightforward harassment or threats,
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_02: but those are already illegal.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_02: None of this makes any sense.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_02: He's actually calling for policies that would turn into this like weird sort of pseudo legal morass.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_02: And this has just been a chronic aspect of free speech discourse since probably forever.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_02: But to me, like since 2015 or so, I've really noticed that they just like don't.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_02: When you and me talk about free speech,
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_02: we can acknowledge there are downsides to our view,
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_02: including misinformation spreading.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_02: Twitter's a shit show now.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_01: Way worse.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_01: Way worse.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_01: Way worse than it was when there was a...
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_01: I'm surprised that I feel this way,
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_01: but I think it is a much worse platform than it was...
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_02: Than when Cox ran it.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_02: We want the Cox back.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_01: Can't there just be a balance between the two?
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_02: Between Cox and Nazis?
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_02: The Cox-Nazi accord where they meet right in the middle?
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_02: You can question if the Holocaust happened, but you have to do it politely.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_02: No slurs.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean, but part of it is also just the algorithm changes.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_01: So we're being fed more and more of the right wing racist outrage.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_01: We were getting a lot more left wing outrage before.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_01: And frankly, it was more entertaining.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_02: Do you know Conscious Philosopher?
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_02: Have you come across that user?
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think so.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_02: He posted this comic to explain why he was upset that his friends had abandoned him.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_02: And the comic unironically shows him disagreeing that Nazis are bad.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_02: Like that's the whole thing.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_02: He had been told his whole life Nazis are bad.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, he found the truth.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_02: He said he thinks Nazis are good.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_02: And now people are canceling him over it.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_02: He's been listening to Martyr Maid.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_02: Whole other thing.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_02: We'll have to talk about that next Primo episode.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_02: Anyway, yeah, this column was not good.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_02: Robert Rice, you should be ashamed.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_02: Also, you should grow a little bit taller.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_02: Come on.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_01: I was happy to see that the Washington Post editorial board came out in defense of Elon Musk.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_02: I wonder how that... That's not, but they're a little conservative.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_01: The Post editorial board is?
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_01: Interesting.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_01: I was going to say, I wonder how that went over in-house.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you would think that this is the sort of thing that reporters would support, but you never know.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_01: You really don't.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, harm.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_01: Not these days.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_01: Harms, Jesse.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_01: Harms.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_02: Harms.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_02: I hate harm.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_01: Game or gate.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_02: Should we do a very quick housekeeping before we get to your main story?
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_01: Sure, you do it.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_02: We've been told housekeeping is too short, so we're going to make it extra long.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_02: Blocked it?
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_02: No, we're going to do it quickly.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_02: Blocked Report is a podcast.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_02: You can listen to us at blockedreport.org.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_02: Best ways to support us are to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_02: But the bestest best way to support us is to become a premium subscriber.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_02: You get two extra episodes.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_02: Wait, three and a half extra episodes a month every month.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_02: Double.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_02: What's the one we're recording tomorrow?
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_02: We're working on a Saturday, Katie.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_02: That's how much we care about our listeners.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_02: What are we recording about?
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_01: Tomorrow's going to be a good one.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_01: Tomorrow we are talking about the news of the week.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's been a very interesting week.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_01: We're going to talk about Russians.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_02: We're starting a new segment called Thank Goodness It's Saturday, where we'll do the week's news.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_02: We're talking about Russians?
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yep, we're talking about the Russian operatives giving $500,000 to Dave Ribbon.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_01: Such a good start.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_02: Dave Rubin just sitting there like, someone is paying me $100,000 a week to do nothing.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_02: It's so good.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_02: Or a month, maybe, whatever it was.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_01: I worked out the per click.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_01: Don't give it away.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_01: Don't give it away.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_01: I worked out the per view price that Dave Rubin got from the Russians.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_01: Extremely good conversion rate.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_02: Dave Rubin, I got a complete 180 on this.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_02: Dave Rubin is good.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_01: Genius.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_01: He's a genius.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_02: Such an amazing scam.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, we'll be talking about that.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah, blocktoimported.org, $5 a month and up.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_02: You can join the community.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, and NaNoWriMo.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_02: And we're talking about NaNoWriMo.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_02: There's been controversy over artificial intelligence and national novel writing...
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_01: national novel nano national november writing we should know this we did a like a
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_02: 17 hour we've done multiple yeah whatever it's called the writing thing so yeah
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_02: block report that are also blocked reported that reddit.com for all your reddit
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_02: needs oh also i'm talking to uh richard dawkins september 21st in chicago buy
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_02: tickets katie let's get on with the show
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, the main event today comes from the world of climate change activism.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_01: So the first character in our story is Dr. Genevieve Gunther.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's how you pronounce it.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's G-U-E-N-T.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_01: You speak German, right?
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_01: Gunther.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_02: Gunther?
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_02: Hans Gunther.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_01: Gunther.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_01: Should I call her Gunther or Gunther?
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_02: Something in the middle that's like, we'll offend everybody.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to go with Gunther.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_01: So she's the author of a recently published book called The Language of Climate Change,
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_01: Fossil Fuel Propaganda and How to Fight It.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_01: And she's also the founder of an organization called In Climate Silence.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_01: This is an organization dedicated to ending silence.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_02: Has there been silence on this issue?
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you can be forgiven for thinking that there is not silence on this issue.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_01: This is a much discussed topic.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_01: But in climate silence, want to hear about it in pretty much every news story.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_01: So here's what their website says.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_01: And by the way, I'm reading this in all lower case.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_01: That's a stylistic choice.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_01: Climate change is not just a topic for the science or environment section.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_01: It's the essential context for stories about extreme weather,
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_01: energy,
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_01: politics,
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_01: business and finance,
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_01: immigration,
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_01: real estate,
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_01: travel,
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_01: health,
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_01: food,
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_01: sports and arts and the arts.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_01: Weird.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_02: So they're really saying they should just be everywhere.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_02: They did the same thing with a race.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_02: There was like one quote from like journalists was like, we should have this in all our stores.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_01: So they want it in everything.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_01: It is not as of yet,
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_01: they have not gotten their wish,
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_01: but it is a lot more common to hear reporters talk about climate change in the
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_01: context of most environmental stories.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_01: This is actually pretty recent.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_01: So when I was at Grist, Grist is a climate change focused website and,
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_01: I was there about 10 years ago.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_01: And every year Media Matters would quantify the number of minutes climate change
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_01: was discussed on cable news and network TV every year.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_01: And it was appallingly low.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_01: It would be like 15 minutes a year per outlet.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_01: It was genuinely very it was like really not discussed, but that has changed.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_01: And now climate change is the explanation for almost every environmental disaster,
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_01: even ones that aren't actually connected to climate change.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_01: Jesse, can I give you my favorite recent example of this?
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I do.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so I might have mentioned this before, but it has to do with mountain goats.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_01: So where I live in Washington, I live right between two mountain ranges.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_02: Two mountain goats.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_01: Two mountain ranges.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_01: To the west, there's the Olympics, and then to the east, there's the Cascades.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_01: Now, mountain goats are native to the Cascades, but not to the Olympics.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_01: And a couple years ago,
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_01: the National Park Service,
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_01: the State Department of Fish and Wildlife,
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_01: the Forest Service,
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_01: they collaborated on this plan to relocate 325 mountain goats from the Olympics to
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_01: the Cascades.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_01: I guess there had been one actual human death in 2010.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_01: Somebody got attacked by a mountain goat.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_01: Killed by a mountain goat?
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_01: Don't fuck around with them.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_01: But mostly I think it was probably because they were, you know, fucking up the ecosystem.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_01: Would you like to see a picture of this process in action?
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_01: Click on that link in our notes there.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_02: that's awesome okay describe it oh man it's a it's a choppa and then like they're
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_02: using these orange like sacks to lift them harness like a harness and the goat is
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_02: just like hovering there oh man that poor goat do they uh like at least get them
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_01: high first or something i would assume so i would guess that they darted them yeah
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_01: My guess is that they darted them, but I don't know.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_01: But so they would capture these goats, blindfold them, and then airlift them into a helicopter.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_02: Beat them senseless.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_01: And then drop them 100 miles away on what is essentially a different planet.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_01: And Jesse, what do you think happens?
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, the goats are not... Sorry.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_02: They extraordinarily rendered these goats.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_02: I'm guessing the goats did not like it and there were like habitat issues.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_01: They died.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_01: They all died within a few years.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_01: There's just a tiny number of these goats left.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_02: That's less funny.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_01: And then over and over again,
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_01: I saw and heard media reports claiming that the reason for these goats dying was
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_01: climate change.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_01: It was climate change.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_01: It was climate change.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, their climate did change.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_01: That is literally true.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_01: You know what?
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_01: I take it back.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_01: It's actually fine.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_01: The obvious explanation is that the goats were kidnapped and flown to a new
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_01: mountain range with a totally different environment.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_01: But instead, I kept hearing fucking climate change.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_01: And...
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_01: In their defense, the media didn't make this up whole cloth, like they got quotes from researchers.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_01: But come on.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_01: Climate change might be a part of the problem.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_01: You know, food and water were less available in that environment.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_01: But I checked with a climate scientist this week on this,
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_01: and I asked if the warming in the North Cascades,
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_01: where these goats were moved to...
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_01: If that would have led to significant changes in the ecosystem.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_01: And he said that the North Cascades have warmed two degrees Fahrenheit over the
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_01: past 50 years and there's probably 10 to 15 percent less snow.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_01: So, no.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_01: He also said that the forests have been mismanaged and there's an invasive grass problem.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_01: But that's not just climate change.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_01: And it's just like it's just like slotting this explanation into everything.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_01: And this you hear this with wildfires all the time.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_01: And it makes me really mad.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_01: I get so annoyed when I hear this because climate change has become this boogeyman
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_01: that is like haunting the landscape.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_01: And the problem is that it gives people the false impression that the only things
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_01: that can be done to fix this is to decarbonize the economy.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I worked in climate journalism.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_01: I fully understand how serious the problem of a warming environment is.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_01: I want solar panels on every house in America, too.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_01: But there are things that can be done right now to improve climate.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_01: land management, just for instance.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_01: And by not explaining that to the public,
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_01: it lets government agencies that are doing the mismanagement off the hook when what
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_01: we need is public pressure to fix these problems that can actually be fixed.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_01: And you don't have to start driving a Tesla to fix this.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_01: It really drives me crazy.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_02: This was sort of related to that time Trump said something about like- Raking the forest.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_02: It's forest management and everyone made fun of him.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's true.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_02: But you told me, I don't know anything about this.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_02: You said he was basically right.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_01: He was.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, he said you should be raking the forest.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_01: That was sort of ridiculous.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_01: You should be doing prescribed burns.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_01: And there's lots of things that you can do.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_01: And the federal government is the biggest owner of land in the country.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_01: And they have mismanaged forests for 100 years.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_01: And it is true that climate is a part of the story.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_01: The planet is getting hotter.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_01: It's getting drier.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_01: That is a part of the story.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_01: But it's going to take and it might not ever happen.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_01: Like it's going to take more than decarbonization to to fix the wildfire problem.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_01: And this is something that, you know, affects me a lot because I live in the West.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_01: It affected affected you last year, even last fall when I was in North Carolina.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_01: It was so strange.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_01: We were getting wildfires in North Carolina in November.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_01: It was so bizarre and eerie.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_01: And it's all connected.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_01: But land management is a really big part of the problem.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_02: It affected my enjoyment of Europe, which is like really fucked up.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, back to the topic at hand, which is Dr. Genevieve Gunther.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_01: So as you can probably guess, Gunther's life is pretty much dedicated to fighting climate change.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_01: She writes articles about it.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_01: She tweets about it constantly.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_01: With that in mind, there are two things you need to know about her.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_01: For one, she's not a climate scientist.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_01: She's a girl.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, her own website refers to her as an expert in climate communication.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_01: And her book,
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_01: which again is called The Language of Climate Change,
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_01: Fossil Fuel Propaganda and How to Fight It,
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to quote here from the publisher,
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_01: dismantles and reframes the terms that dominate our current climate debates.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_02: I don't like the sound of any of this.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_01: OK, so there are unfortunately very few excerpts of her book available online.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_01: But Jessica,
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_01: the 80s baby found a review in this Canadian newspaper that says that the book
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_01: focuses on six key terms that Gunther considers inappropriate to the climate debate,
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_01: like the term resilience.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_01: She doesn't like that.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_01: So I haven't read the book,
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_01: but according to the reviewer,
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_01: Gunther says that the problem with the term resilience is that it's used by right-wingers,
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_01: right-wing politicians to obfuscate the danger of climate change.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_01: So she writes...
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_01: It misrepresents the physical reality of the climate crisis.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_01: If we do not force decision makers to phase out fossil fuels and eliminate emissions,
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_01: climate change will cease to be a series of discrete disasters from which
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_01: communities can just bounce back.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_01: So she seems to think that using terms like resilience, get in the way of action.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_02: This is a like there's a subset of person who look for all I know,
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_02: this person's a genius and great and wonderful.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_02: But like there are people who don't seem to be able to do much else than to like
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_02: nitpick word choice and they can build careers out of it.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_02: Do you think she's in that category?
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_01: 100%.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_01: And this specific term resilience is going to come back in a few minutes.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_01: So remember this.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_01: But everything I've seen about this book suggests that it's essentially climate
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_01: activism with an added layer of purity policing.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_01: This word is bad.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_01: This word is good.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_02: So she's a doctor, but she's not a climate scientist.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_02: She's in communications.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_01: So she goes by doctor.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_01: Her name is sort of a Jill Biden situation.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_01: Her name on Twitter is Dr. Genevieve Gunther and her handle is at Dr. Viv.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_01: So she's serious about the title, but her PhD is in Renaissance literature.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_02: How did she get from Renaissance literature to climate change?
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_01: Okay,
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_01: so according to the bio on her website,
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_01: after she had a kid,
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_01: she found that she was,
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_01: quote,
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_01: increasingly alarmed about the world her son could inherit after she died.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_02: As a mother of a son.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_01: So she was sitting around nursing thinking about the end of the planet.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_02: I have friends with kids and I totally get it.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_02: You just start thinking apocalyptic thoughts when you're a kid.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_01: That's when you should up the doses of your sedatives.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_01: So it sounds to me like she dove into a rabbit hole and never came out.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_01: But her academic background does inform her approach to climate change.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_01: So her interest is how we talk about climate change and how we should talk about climate change.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_01: And she's very well known for this.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_01: She has 75,000 followers on Twitter.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_01: She was profiled in The New Yorker in 2020.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_01: That piece goes more into her background.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_01: So before she had her kid and had this existential crisis,
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_01: she had a tenure track position at University of Rochester.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_01: Her husband works at Google.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_01: They're quite wealthy.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_01: And so she quit working to stay home with the baby.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_01: And she was doom scrolling climate news.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_01: And then in 2017, she witnessed a radicalizing event.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_01: Jesse, do you want to guess what that is?
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, probably had to do with those poor goats.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_01: Brett Stevens was hired by New York Times.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_02: That was the radicalizing event, a conservative columnist.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, do you remember this?
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_02: It was very strange.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_02: He was called a climate denier.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_02: I assume he's not a straight... I'm sure it's more... I'm guessing it's more nuanced than that.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_02: I've never cared to look it up.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_02: People don't like the fact that conservatives ever write for The Times,
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_02: and they really freaked out about Brad Stevens.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_02: I remember that being the line of attack on him, that he was a climate denier.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah,
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_01: so here's a quote from...
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_02: And I think I was already in the habit of ignoring people who got really sure about
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_02: stuff on Twitter.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_01: So here's a quote from that New Yorker piece.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_01: Gunther was outraged.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_01: She said she started an online petition to call for Stevens to be fired.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_01: as one does didn't work but this is what put her on the map of climate change
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_01: activists and scientists and now she writes articles about how the media should
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_01: give climate change more coverage and then when it does she responds with lengthy
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_01: commentary about those articles so
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_01: let's take a look at one of her pieces.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_01: This is something she wrote in her newsletter.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_01: This is a response to an article that was in The Guardian about climate scientists
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_01: experiencing existential angst about the fate of the planet.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_01: That article contains this cheery quote.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_01: Many of the scientists envisage a semi-dystopian future with famines,
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_01: conflicts,
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_01: and mass migration driven by heat waves,
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_01: wildfires,
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_01: floods,
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_01: and storms of an intensity and frequency far beyond those that have already struck.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's very cheery.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_01: So she responds to this in her newsletter.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_01: Actually, Jesse, will you read this passage?
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's in our notes.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_02: The reason for any one little human to take climate action,
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_02: to stop eating beef,
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_02: to stop flying,
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_02: to zero out the carbon of their other transportation,
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_02: to electrify their home,
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_02: to vote and engage civically,
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_02: to do direct action,
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_02: to communicate,
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_02: communicate,
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_02: communicate about the danger we're in and the villains at issue is not that any one
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_02: person is going to make a noticeable difference to global emissions.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_02: It's that doing these things is going to make a noticeable difference to you.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_02: Doing these things is a way of, this is very Robin D'Angelo, but for climate.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_02: Doing these things is a way of transforming your life,
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_02: of holding the beauty and sacredness of existence suspended in your thoughts,
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_02: of acting with love,
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_02: of giving your life and your legacy meaning.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, that's probably enough.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_02: That's what we have now.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_02: That's what we have to help people to feel.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, yeah.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_01: I want to stitch this on a throw pillow.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_01: It is very self-helpy.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it really captures her approach.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_01: I don't disagree with her that these actions aren't going to make a huge difference in the big picture.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_01: They're still benevolent.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_01: I still think that people should do them when they can.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_01: But she makes it seem almost selfish.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_01: It's not about the planet.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's about you.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_01: And Jessica,
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_01: the 80s baby,
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_01: so she lived in Europe for a long time,
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_01: and she says that she recognized a lot of this attitude when she lived there.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_01: And she said that in this case,
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_01: Gunther comes across as an outlier,
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_01: not because her views are uniquely wacky,
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_01: because they're uniquely wacky for an American.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_01: She said, And that seems like an astute observation to me.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_01: I mean...
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, Extinction Rebellion, they know by now that throwing soup on the Mona Lisa is counterproductive.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_01: They do it anyway because it feels good.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_01: And Matt Iglesias, he tweeted something about this recently that captures this well.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_01: He said,
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_01: one reason to be angry at climate activists is that they are often ambivalent to
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_01: hostile to emissions-reducing policy ideas.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_01: Like, how many Extinction Rebellion activists do you see campaigning for nuclear?
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_01: There's one.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_01: Her name is Zion Lights, and she actually left
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_01: Extinction Rebellion to campaign for nuclear.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_01: And I searched the term on the Extinction Rebellion website.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_01: And they talk about nuclear in the context of nuclear bombs and disarmament and the
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_01: nuclear holocaust more than they talk about nuclear power.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_01: These are not serious people.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_02: Okay,
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_02: so she's in this – Gunther is in this camp of this like – well,
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_02: on the one hand,
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_02: it's very like wine mom liberal normal.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_02: But it's like it's fundamentally radical in that it's just like this all or nothing
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_02: approach that doesn't really work or get people on board.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah,
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_01: and Matt Iglesias and Gunther,
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_01: they've had run-ins before,
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_01: and she really likes to argue with people on Twitter.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_01: In early August,
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_01: she called Matt Iglesias a climate denier because he thinks that climate activists
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_01: should work to reduce emissions.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_02: Sorry, there's so many parallels with the racism thing where the term just comes to lose any meaning.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_02: And like, isn't that bad?
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_02: Shouldn't you want to be able to accurately identify a climate denier?
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_02: But I'm sorry, I talked over.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_02: She called him that because he thinks climate activists should actually try to reduce emissions.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_02: That's the.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_01: Rather than police people's language.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_01: OK, so our other key character is Holly Jean Buck.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_01: She's a tenured professor in the Environment and Sustainability Department at
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_01: Buffalo University,
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_01: and she's a Harvard Radcliffe Climate Justice Fellow.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_01: She has a Ph.D.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_01: in sociology, a master's in ecology, and she's been working on climate change for years.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_01: And she's a serious thinker when it comes to climate policy.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_01: She's written many, many articles and books, including a book called Ending Fossil Fuels.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_01: why net zero is not enough.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_01: So you might think that she and Gunther would generally be on the same page about this.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, they're both climate activists.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_01: They're both very concerned about what they see as an existential threat.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_02: It seems like they would be natural friends.
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_01: Well, they're not.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_01: So what happened is that in August,
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_01: Buck wrote an article for the left-wing magazine Jacobin entitled Obsessing Over
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_01: Climate Disinformation is a Wrong Turn.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_01: And it's a very interesting piece.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_01: It begins with this sentence.
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_01: In Canada, false environmental claims are now illegal.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_01: And she goes on to explain that in June in Canada,
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_01: they passed this legislation at the behest of climate activists that penalizes
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_01: companies that make claims about their products' ability to mitigate climate change without,
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_01: quote,
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_01: adequate and proper tests.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_01: So it's an anti-greenwashing law.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I didn't realize this,
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_01: but apparently the disinformation obsession is very much alive and well in the
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_01: climate movement.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_01: Here's a quote from her.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_01: Given that funding and public attention is limited,
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_01: this climate disinformation obsession is a missed opportunity and a strategic dead end,
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_01: part of a larger liberal tendency to make disinformation a boogeyman we can blame
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_01: for our major political problems.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_02: I agree with this completely.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_01: So she argues that this obsession with stopping wrong think is counterproductive to
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_01: the climate movement.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_01: And her job is all about engaging with the public on this issue,
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_01: including people who Genevieve Gunther would call climate deniers,
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_01: although Buck herself doesn't like that term.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_01: So Buck argues in her piece that the climate movement is alienating working class people and non-elites.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah,
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_01: I mean,
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_01: I can't really think of a better way to turn working class people away from your
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_01: movement than to shut down freeways and tell people they're evil for driving cool,
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_01: big ass trucks.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, you know, it makes no fucking sense.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_01: For the record, I fucking hate those trucks.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_01: They terrify me.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_01: But from what I can tell, people like them.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_01: And besides, calling for deplatforming so-called climate deniers doesn't change skeptics' minds.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_01: It makes them think there's a conspiracy to hide the real truth.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, totally.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_02: It's always going to have the exact opposite effect because anyone who sees
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_02: powerful people trying to suppress what they can say or read is going to respond in
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_02: a very predictable way to that.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_01: Does it make us hypocrites that we are complaining about Elon Musk not moderating
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_01: Twitter more while also arguing that suppressing dangerous ideas doesn't work?
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_02: it's a good question because i've thought about this i'm very free speechy the
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_02: question is okay first of all we're talking about legal action should it be
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_02: outlawed that's the context of this debate no holocaust i don't think i don't like
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_02: the european approach i don't think holocaust denial should be outlawed no uh if
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_02: you allow holocaust denial on a platform like twitter will it make it a miserable
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_02: place we're seeing that the answer to that is yes and yeah
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_01: You know what it should be?
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_01: Freedom of speech, not freedom of reach.
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_02: Wow, that's really good.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_02: You just came up with that?
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I just came up with that.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_01: No, but I do think there is some conflict here.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_01: I just wish when it comes to Twitter,
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_01: honestly,
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_01: like the people on the platform who are being horribly racist and anti-Semitic,
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_01: I wouldn't care that much about it if they weren't in my fucking feed.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_01: He has just like tweaked the algorithm in this way that it's what I see because the
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_01: default tab is not,
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_01: it doesn't default to people I specifically have chosen to follow.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_01: It defaults to the for you tab,
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_01: which my for you tab is full of like black on black crime and people talking about
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_01: Jewish noses.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, there's a lot of that.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_01: But there is a I do think there is a conflict here.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, here's one of my favorite quotes from Buck's piece.
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_01: One reason why the focus on misinformation is seductive is that it gives pride a
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_01: place to those who specialize in communication rather than those workers and
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_01: planners who need to transform energy infrastructure industry in the built environment.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_01: If disinformation becomes the main problem, then the chattering classes are central to the climate fight.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_01: This reminded me of Ben Collins after the shooting at that gay club in Colorado.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_01: You know what I'm talking about?
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, he gives this really... And we got to say, current Onion CEO Ben Collins... Is he CEO or CM?
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_02: He works at the Onion.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_01: CEO.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_02: The least funny guy in history.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_02: Or the most humorless guy, I should say.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah,
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_02: he gave this almost tearful soliloquy on TV about how the shooting was his and
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_02: journalists' fault for not fighting against anti-LGBT sentiment enough.
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_02: And this also reminds me of...
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, this is so true.
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_02: This piece is really good.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_02: But the focus on the chattering class is so like – I'm thinking of microaggressions
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_02: where this whole cottage industry sprung up of coming up with lists of things you
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_02: can't say because there are microaggressions and it will hurt minority students.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_02: And that – this complicated problem of helping to make –
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_02: you know first generation black and latino students making them feel welcome on
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_02: campus who gets to who has to do that oh it happens to be like the sort of word
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_02: cell right so i think it like there's something to this like there's a you're
• 41:31
  SPEAKER_02: creating a market for yourself if you're saying how do we stop climate change oh we
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_02: fight misinformation we make sure people don't use the wrong words right climate
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_01: change is is fueled by misinformation misinformation is very hot is it a dirty fuel
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_02: misinformation
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_01: It is.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_01: OK, so after Buck's article goes up, she posted on Twitter and she writes a thread.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_01: Here's one of her tweets.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_01: Quote, I used to think, cool, some people work on tracking the evils of oil companies.
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_01: Some work on local adaptation or national policy or tech.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_01: Everyone has their lane.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_01: But now I think that we have a problem.
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_01: Is the climate movement evolving into an anti-disinformation movement?
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_02: So it's like it's like it's enough to focus on climate change.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_02: Are we also going to be doing this other thing?
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_01: It's concept creep.
• 42:15
  SPEAKER_01: That's what she's talking about.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_01: And we've seen this in so many other social movements.
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_01: And as you might guess, this managed to trigger a certain former Renaissance scholar.
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_01: So Dr. Gunther starts tweeting about this, claiming that Buck is a show for the fossil fuel industry.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_01: So her first tweet reads,
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_01: the author of this piece is a strategic engagement slash comms person at the
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_01: Department of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_01: Seems relevant to assessing her ask that we should ignore fossil fuel disinformation.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_01: Do you understand that, Jesse?
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_02: No.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_02: What's the accusation here?
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_02: What's the Department of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management?
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_01: So it's part of the Department of Energy.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_01: Quoting from their website,
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_01: they are focused on investing in technologies to reduce carbon emissions and
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_01: minimize the environmental impacts of fossil fuel generation and use,
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_01: which you might think would be a good thing.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_01: But maybe minimize is one of those words that Dr. Gunther doesn't like.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_02: So weird.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, Buck doesn't work there anymore.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_01: And she responds and she says,
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_01: yes,
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_01: that she had worked for the department during a public service leave from her
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_01: academic job.
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_01: But that was over.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_01: And and what Gunther was saying is that this basically like this current employee
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_01: of the Department of Energy is making the argument that we shouldn't care about disinformation,
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_01: like connect the dots here,
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_01: people.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_01: And Buck corrects her, you know, she's not there anymore.
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_01: And during her time at the department,
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_01: she wouldn't have been able to publish something like this as a government employee anyway.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_01: But Gunther's thread managed to catch a lot of attention, but not in the way that she was hoping.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_01: So she basically got dogpiled, including by some important figures.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_01: So there's a woman named Jane Fleagle.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_01: She worked on climate policy in the Biden White House, and she responded to this defending book.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_01: She said,
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_01: very sick of watching Genevieve baselessly bully people who devoted their lives to
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: deeply understanding and combating climate change,
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_01: actually combating it,
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_01: not policing speech,
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_01: and even more grossed out by the people elevating her voice in the climate movement.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, so at this point, this just isn't going well for Genevieve Gunther.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_01: More people pile on.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_01: Matt Inglasius, you know, he had this earlier spat with Gunther.
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_01: He got involved.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_01: He dug up her PhD dissertation,
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_01: which was called Magical Imaginations or Instrumental Aesthetics from Sydney to Shakespeare.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_01: He said,
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_01: there's a kind of surprisingly straight line between this concept of magic and
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_01: Renaissance poetry and certain notions of communication rather than technology,
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_01: engineering,
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_01: political bargaining,
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_01: and economics is the key issue in climate policy.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_02: That, as far as like by Madagascar standards, that is an absolutely sick one.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it is.
• 44:45
  SPEAKER_01: So this all ends with Gunther in tears.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_01: So one of her critics was the founding executive editor of Heat Map News.
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_01: This is a climate focused outlet.
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_01: And Gunther tweeted at him.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_01: Wait a minute.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_01: You like Jane Flegel's incredibly mean tweets about me,
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_01: which suggested I was unqualified to write my book and said that any respect for me
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_01: was gross.
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_01: I woke up crying in the middle of the night.
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_01: That hurts so badly.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_01: That is a personal attack.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I know you forgot, read the end.
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, why is that okay?
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_01: You know,
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_01: I was surprised at how many people were defending Buck and how little traction
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_01: Genevieve's argument got.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_01: I think a few years ago,
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_01: people would have been a lot more likely to pile on Buck and support Gunther,
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_01: but we're on Elon's Twitter now.
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, over on Blue Sky, people were probably bitching about the article.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_02: I just like...
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_02: If you're a public intellectual type and you pull out the I'm literally crying card,
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know about that.
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_01: And then you go private.
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_01: She did not, to her credit, I think, go private after this.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_01: So there's a lot of criticism.
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_01: Gunther responded to it with a very long Twitter thread.
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_01: She outlined all of her grievances with Buck,
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_01: although it takes a full 16 tweets before she...
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_01: She's ugly.
• 45:53
  SPEAKER_02: She's fat.
• 45:55
  SPEAKER_01: She's short.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_01: It took a full 16 tweets before she even mentions the article that she was supposedly critiquing.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_02: And what are the actual...
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_02: It seems like one disagreement here is how important it is to fight misinformation
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_02: on climate stuff,
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_02: but are there more substantive disagreements?
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and that's what I think this is really about.
• 46:12
  SPEAKER_01: So Buck supports carbon dioxide removal in geoengineering, and Genevieve Gunther doesn't.
• 46:17
  SPEAKER_01: So Jesse, do you know much about carbon dioxide removal geoengineering?
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah,
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_02: the basic contours of the debate seems like,
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_02: okay,
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_02: if you were an evil fossil fuel executive,
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_02: you could be like,
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_02: we're just going to let technology take care of all of this.
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_02: But it's also true that the world hasn't really shown the political will to
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_02: actually reduce carbon output.
• 46:41
  SPEAKER_02: So a lot of people, like serious people, increasingly think that developing carbon dioxide removal –
• 46:46
  SPEAKER_02: Technology has to be part of the equation.
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_02: And I think geoengineering is a little bit more controversial,
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_02: but that would be things like releasing aerosol particles into the atmosphere to
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_02: reduce the amount of sunlight that gets through,
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_02: stuff like that.
• 46:59
  SPEAKER_02: But I think if these are increasingly mainstream positions that this has to be part
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_02: of the equation,
• 47:03
  SPEAKER_02: right?
• 47:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_01: So carbon removal is basically capturing CO2 from the atmosphere and storing it elsewhere.
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_01: This already exists in low tech ways like planting trees, soil sequestration.
• 47:15
  SPEAKER_01: So farmers can do it through cover crops, planting perennials, tilling less, things like that.
• 47:21
  SPEAKER_01: And there are also high tech ways like direct air capture where machines actually
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_01: pull carbon from the air,
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_01: filter it out,
• 47:28
  SPEAKER_01: capture it and then store it underground.
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_01: That tech is still in development and it's controversial.
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_01: For one, it's very energy intensive, as you would imagine.
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_01: And there are also concerns that the energy would be stored in like black neighborhoods.
• 47:39
  SPEAKER_01: There's always a social justice angle.
• 47:41
  SPEAKER_01: And that like, OK, maybe that sounds like woke paranoia, but it's also true.
• 47:47
  SPEAKER_01: Like people think that, you
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_01: People hear the term environmental racism and they think it's this,
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_01: like anti-woke people hear the term environmental racism and they think that it's a
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_01: ridiculous concept.
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's not crazy.
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_01: It refers to things like landfills or giant incinerators being built in poor and
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_01: minority neighborhoods and not in wealthy neighborhoods.
• 48:05
  SPEAKER_01: It is true that if you look at places like Seattle,
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_01: air quality is worse in minority neighborhoods than it is in whiter neighborhoods.
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_01: This is a real thing.
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_01: This is not just like woke doomerism.
• 48:17
  SPEAKER_02: No, I know.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_02: To me, it's always like, how much is environmental racism versus poorism or whatever?
• 48:23
  SPEAKER_01: No, I think you're totally right about that.
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_01: Race becomes a proxy for poverty.
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_01: So that's one concern.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_01: But the bigger issue is that climate activists like Gunther are afraid that
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_01: technology like this will just encourage us to burn more fossil fuels,
• 48:39
  SPEAKER_01: which might be true.
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_01: But the thing is...
• 48:42
  SPEAKER_01: Even if we stopped burning all fossil fuels today,
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_01: there's already too much carbon currently in the atmosphere.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_01: So the Earth will continue to warm for decades,
• 48:51
  SPEAKER_01: even if no car,
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_01: like even if the solar flares took out humans today,
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_01: the Earth is still going to continue to warm.
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_02: Well,
• 48:59
  SPEAKER_02: it's also a weird argument because it's like this could distract us from the super
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_02: good job we're doing now.
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_02: The status quo is terrible.
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's not as terrible as it was 10 years ago.
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_02: No.
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_01: But if you want to stop global warming,
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_01: you have to both stop burning and you have to remove what's already there.
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't think this should even be a debate, but it is.
• 49:20
  SPEAKER_01: And then geoengineering.
• 49:21
  SPEAKER_01: Sorry, go ahead.
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_02: And then tell me if this is right.
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_02: I'm guessing the geoengineering side of it,
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_02: you're probably more sympathetic to that being controversial because like carbon sequestration,
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_02: fundamentally,
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_02: we understand what we're doing.
• 49:33
  SPEAKER_02: We understand how you take the carbon out of the atmosphere,
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_02: where to store it,
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_02: pretty low downsides and risks.
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_02: Any large scale geoengineering,
• 49:41
  SPEAKER_02: it's the climate,
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_02: such a complex system,
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_02: our atmosphere is so complex,
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_02: we don't know exactly what the end result will be,
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_02: right?
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, this is way more controversial.
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_01: This is stuff like solar radiation modification,
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_01: which as you mentioned,
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_01: this is introducing aerosols into the stratosphere to create a cooling effect or
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_01: like things like space mirrors that would deflect sunlight.
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_01: This could go very poorly.
• 50:03
  SPEAKER_02: By the way, Mr. Burns did this in The Simpsons and it worked out fine.
• 50:05
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure.
• 50:06
  SPEAKER_01: And there could be unintended consequences.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_01: And Book even wrote a book about this.
• 50:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's called After Geoengineering, and it goes over best and worst case scenarios.
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_01: She is not a booster for putting space mirrors into the atmosphere.
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_01: She's not naive.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_01: And in fact, she thinks like solar refraction, she told me she thinks that's too risky.
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_01: But what she's in favor of is trying to develop this technology in these transparent,
• 50:29
  SPEAKER_01: interdisciplinary,
• 50:30
  SPEAKER_01: holistic ways that involved ecologists,
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_01: sociologists,
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_01: etc.
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_02: Podcasters.
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_01: Broadcasters, yes.
• 50:37
  SPEAKER_01: Communications experts.
• 50:39
  SPEAKER_02: It's interesting because I feel like there's a parallel here where people are like,
• 50:43
  SPEAKER_02: nuclear power has to be part of the transition to clean energy.
• 50:47
  SPEAKER_02: And then there's this weird purity response.
• 50:49
  SPEAKER_02: Like, no, no, we can't have that.
• 50:50
  SPEAKER_02: I feel like it's the same thing.
• 50:51
  SPEAKER_02: Some people think these other measures have to be part of the solution.
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_02: And there's this real purity impulse.
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_02: The only thing we're allowed to do is solar panels and producing less carbon in general.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_01: And
• 51:06
  SPEAKER_01: It's naive.
• 51:07
  SPEAKER_01: All of these technologies, including solar and wind, have downsides.
• 51:12
  SPEAKER_01: All of them.
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, I'll post a link to an excerpt from Holly's book in long reads.
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_01: And she points out in this piece that humans already are geoengineering.
• 51:21
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's not intentional, but we already are messing with the climate.
• 51:23
  SPEAKER_01: We do it every time we drive a car or get onto a plane or whatever.
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_01: And this is, as she acknowledges, it's an inherently scary topic, right?
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_01: We're talking about potentially changing the color of the clouds, right?
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_01: And it's inevitable that this sort of even the conversation about this is going to
• 51:39
  SPEAKER_01: lead to a lot of disinformation and misinformation and conspiracy theorizing.
• 51:43
  SPEAKER_01: How do you communicate with people who are so resistant to the message that they
• 51:48
  SPEAKER_01: think climate change is a hoax or they think that it's happening,
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_01: but the government is causing it?
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not sure I've come across that.
• 51:55
  SPEAKER_02: So these people, they don't deny it's happening.
• 51:57
  SPEAKER_02: They just think the government's causing it.
• 51:59
  SPEAKER_02: This is a real thing.
• 52:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 52:00
  SPEAKER_01: So I have a face.
• 52:02
  SPEAKER_01: I've seen this in real time.
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_01: So I have a Facebook friend.
• 52:04
  SPEAKER_01: This is not someone I've ever met or talked to.
• 52:06
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not actually sure why we're Facebook friends.
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_01: She seems like a hippie kind of living off the land.
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_01: She seems like a hippie living off the grid type.
• 52:15
  SPEAKER_01: And she posts a lot about geoengineering.
• 52:17
  SPEAKER_01: And every time there's some sort of abnormal weather event where she lives,
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_01: she doesn't say this is evidence of climate change.
• 52:24
  SPEAKER_01: She says this is evidence that the government is controlling the weather.
• 52:28
  SPEAKER_01: So I want to play you a video that she posted.
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_03: I'm live here at the climate realism gathering at the Berry Legion with a group of
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_03: environmentalists and climate activists who are here for a non-typical
• 52:40
  SPEAKER_03: environmental reason.
• 52:42
  SPEAKER_03: Yet rather,
• 52:42
  SPEAKER_03: we're here to find out why is the government controlling the weather to enhance
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_03: their warfare efforts?
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_03: depopulation.
• 52:50
  SPEAKER_03: This is all about them empowering themselves to get rich and this is one of the
• 52:54
  SPEAKER_03: ways they can laugh at us.
• 52:55
  SPEAKER_03: It's just a new way to put their thumb on the people to control.
• 53:01
  SPEAKER_03: There's always going to be someone who wants to control.
• 53:05
  SPEAKER_03: That has been the way since all of recorded history.
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_03: It's a way to keep us submissive, keep us cowed down.
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_03: Absolute power controls absolutely.
• 53:16
  SPEAKER_03: They're destroying our food systems, keeping us in fear.
• 53:19
  SPEAKER_03: They're creating a global refugee situation.
• 53:23
  SPEAKER_03: Control the population.
• 53:25
  SPEAKER_03: They think, well, you know, somebody's going to be doing it, so we have to be the first ones to do it.
• 53:31
  SPEAKER_03: Kind of like the nuclear bomb.
• 53:33
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, exactly.
• 53:35
  SPEAKER_00: To create a one-world government.
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_00: The end goal is totalitarianism and to control the people.
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, I think I get the gist of it.
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_01: Right,
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_01: so there's a lot of this,
• 53:45
  SPEAKER_01: and most of what she posts seems like lunacy to me,
• 53:47
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 53:48
  SPEAKER_01: chemtrail shit.
• 53:49
  SPEAKER_01: But every once in a while, I'll look into something that she posts, and it turns out to be real.
• 53:54
  SPEAKER_01: Like, have you ever heard of Operation Popeye?
• 53:56
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 53:58
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so this was a cloud seeding experiment conducted by the Department of Defense in 1967.
• 54:02
  SPEAKER_01: They seeded clouds with silver iodide and lead iodide to increase rainfall over the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
• 54:10
  SPEAKER_01: This was to disrupt North Vietnamese military supplies by softening road services and causing landslides.
• 54:16
  SPEAKER_01: And this sounds like something you'd hear on like Hour 10 of a Joe Rogan podcast, but it's real.
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_01: You can see documents on the State Department website.
• 54:24
  SPEAKER_01: They say the experiments were undeniably successful.
• 54:27
  SPEAKER_01: One area received nine inches of rain in four hours.
• 54:31
  SPEAKER_01: They flew over 2,600 seed sorting planes in five years.
• 54:35
  SPEAKER_01: So it's true.
• 54:36
  SPEAKER_01: The government can and has controlled the weather for nefarious causes.
• 54:41
  SPEAKER_02: Well, okay, do you think winning the Vietnam War would be a nefarious cause?
• 54:44
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it didn't work.
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_01: So she posts this kind of stuff a lot,
• 54:47
  SPEAKER_01: and some of what she posts will be removed and marked as false by Facebook's
• 54:52
  SPEAKER_01: independent fact-checkers,
• 54:53
  SPEAKER_01: so you won't be able to access it.
• 54:55
  SPEAKER_01: And does this make her think, you know, these fact-checkers say this is false, so it must be?
• 55:00
  SPEAKER_02: Of course.
• 55:01
  SPEAKER_02: If some faceless person told me I couldn't post something, I'd be like, they must be right.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_01: It makes her post memes like this.
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_01: Jessie, I put this in our notes.
• 55:09
  SPEAKER_01: Please describe this.
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, God.
• 55:11
  SPEAKER_02: Nazis used to call it control of information.
• 55:13
  SPEAKER_02: They call it fact-checking.
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_02: The left is the Nazi.
• 55:18
  SPEAKER_02: Is that the, what's his name, the propaganda guy?
• 55:20
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not going to try it.
• 55:21
  SPEAKER_02: Robert Reich.
• 55:22
  SPEAKER_02: Either way, Nazi on the left, Mark Zuckerberg on the right.
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's Goebbels.
• 55:27
  SPEAKER_02: Wait, I should know my Nazis.
• 55:29
  SPEAKER_01: You should.
• 55:30
  SPEAKER_02: That'd be a fun children's game, know your Nazis.
• 55:32
  SPEAKER_01: He's got a twink body.
• 55:33
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, the Nazis were not strangers to homosexual endeavors.
• 55:38
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway,
• 55:38
  SPEAKER_01: so this is a long way of saying,
• 55:40
  SPEAKER_01: I mean,
• 55:40
  SPEAKER_01: I think Buck is right in the way to convince people that climate change is real or
• 55:44
  SPEAKER_01: vaccines don't cause autism or whatever.
• 55:46
  SPEAKER_01: Whatever the case is, is not to condescend to them or to yell disinformation at their memes.
• 55:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's to have actual real conversations with them.
• 55:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I wanted to know specifically how you talk to someone like this.
• 55:57
  SPEAKER_01: Like, is it even worth trying?
• 55:59
  SPEAKER_01: So I called Buck.
• 56:01
  SPEAKER_01: And I asked her,
• 56:01
  SPEAKER_01: and this is something that she,
• 56:03
  SPEAKER_01: unlike Genevieve Gunther,
• 56:04
  SPEAKER_01: deals with on a regular basis.
• 56:06
  SPEAKER_01: So she goes to places like Oklahoma or whatever, and she does these focus groups.
• 56:11
  SPEAKER_01: And she said that the way to talk to people is to lead with empathy.
• 56:13
  SPEAKER_02: Fuck that.
• 56:14
  SPEAKER_01: I know, it's so hard.
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_01: You can't go in yelling, hey, moron, haven't you ever heard of Snopes?
• 56:19
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, wait, there's got to be... I don't want to lose all my condescension.
• 56:23
  SPEAKER_02: What about something like...
• 56:25
  SPEAKER_02: Hey, moron, there's a website that I think would make you less dumb called Snopes.
• 56:29
  SPEAKER_01: Try that.
• 56:30
  SPEAKER_01: Please try that.
• 56:31
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 56:32
  SPEAKER_01: And she said that one thing that's changed in recent years is that for the most part,
• 56:36
  SPEAKER_01: people have stopped claiming that things haven't changed because they can see it,
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_01: right?
• 56:42
  SPEAKER_01: And we can all see it.
• 56:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's hotter now.
• 56:44
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't snow as much.
• 56:45
  SPEAKER_01: Things are weird.
• 56:46
  SPEAKER_02: My Europe trips?
• 56:47
  SPEAKER_01: Their vacations on the Riviera get canceled because of wildfires.
• 56:50
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 56:51
  SPEAKER_01: And people can especially see this if they actually work on the land.
• 56:55
  SPEAKER_01: And she said that in terms of reaching people,
• 56:57
  SPEAKER_01: what you can do is you can sort of talk around the issue of climate change.
• 57:00
  SPEAKER_01: You can talk about weather.
• 57:02
  SPEAKER_01: You can talk about energy resilience.
• 57:03
  SPEAKER_01: You can talk about mitigation.
• 57:04
  SPEAKER_01: You use the very terms that Genevieve Gunther says that you shouldn't use.
• 57:09
  SPEAKER_01: So I also asked her about my own sense that she wouldn't have had as many defenders
• 57:13
  SPEAKER_01: on Twitter just a few years ago,
• 57:14
  SPEAKER_01: like in the pre-Musk era of Twitter,
• 57:17
  SPEAKER_01: racial reckoning era.
• 57:18
  SPEAKER_01: And she agreed.
• 57:19
  SPEAKER_01: And she told me that in the world of climate activism,
• 57:22
  SPEAKER_01: there's a lot of groupthink and cancel culture has its own forms in the sciences
• 57:26
  SPEAKER_01: that manifests with people like Genevieve Gunther who think you can just cancel
• 57:30
  SPEAKER_01: fossil fuels.
• 57:31
  SPEAKER_02: Fossil fuels, you're canceled.
• 57:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 57:33
  SPEAKER_01: Like if you just muster enough outrage, that will lead to change.
• 57:37
  SPEAKER_01: She called them climate Karens.
• 57:39
  SPEAKER_01: And she said that she thinks part of the reason she had so many defenders is that
• 57:43
  SPEAKER_01: people in her world are just sick of dilettantes like Gunther coming in and trying
• 57:48
  SPEAKER_01: to dictate the terms of the conversation.
• 57:51
  SPEAKER_01: They're especially sick of, frankly, rich people doing it.
• 57:54
  SPEAKER_01: And they're sick of those voices being elevated rather than scientists or people on
• 57:59
  SPEAKER_01: the ground who are actually trying to fix the problem.
• 58:02
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean, I know who I'm siding with in this dispute.
• 58:06
  SPEAKER_02: One person is making way more sense than the other.
• 58:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but the other one has a PhD in Renaissance literature.
• 58:11
  SPEAKER_02: I forgot about that.
• 58:12
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, her piece is very interesting.
• 58:13
  SPEAKER_01: And we will put a link in the show notes.
• 58:15
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, I look forward to reading that.
• 58:17
  SPEAKER_02: Katie, thank you for that.
• 58:19
  SPEAKER_02: This has been Blocked and Reported.
• 58:20
  SPEAKER_02: As always, we're produced with help from Jessica, the 80s baby.
• 58:23
  SPEAKER_02: I'm Jesse Single.
• 58:25
  SPEAKER_02: And remember, climates don't change.
• 58:28
  SPEAKER_02: People do.
• 58:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm Katie Herzog, and also remember my deepest apologies to our autistic listeners.
• 58:34
  SPEAKER_01: I know you don't run like horses, but Jesse does.