Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 493: Peter Kalmus

Episode Date: February 17, 2022

Peter Kalmus, wonderful synthesis of a climate scientist and spokesman... and a terrifying genius, re-joins the DTFH! Please note: Peter is speaking on his own behalf in this interview, and does not claim to represent the opinion of any other entity. You can follow Peter on Twitter, @ClimateHuman, read his book Being the Change, and be sure to check out his climate change sites/apps: Climate Ad Project (which has a great short film you can watch for free), the Earth Hero climate app, and NoFlyClimateSci.org. If you want more from Peter you can check out his list of climate impacts, "Two Worlds: Basic Projections", and two articles he recently wrote: "I’m a climate scientist. Don’t Look Up captures the madness I see every day" and "Forget plans to lower emissions by 2050 – this is deadly procrastination". Photo courtesy of Keith Carlsen, follow him on instagram! @keithcarlsen Original music by Aaron Michael Goldberg. This episode is brought to you by: Lucy - Visit Lucy.co and use promo code DUNCAN for 20% off your first order! BLUECHEW - Use offer code: DUNCAN at checkout and get your first shipment FREE with just $5 shipping. Squarespace - Use offer code: DUNCAN to save 10% on your first site.

Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now. I'm dirty little angel. You can get Dirty Angel anywhere you get your music. Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now. New album and tour date coming this summer. Hello, pals. I've just returned from Los Angeles, the city of angels. And in case you didn't know, that's

what it meant, Los Angeles. Sometimes I've thought that was a very sarcastic name for the city. Sometimes I have thought that that was a very sinister name for the city. But having just returned, I've got to say, that's a pretty accurate name for the city. It's beautiful there.

After you've been on the East Coast during a dreary Seattle style winter, being in California is a little bit like being in paradise. It's beautiful there. And I was fully prepared for LA to be only a little better. Then when we departed, which was the first summer of the pandemic, that kind of feels crazy saying that,

that we've already had two fucking pandemic summers. It's just wild to me. But when we left, Ash was raining from the sky. There were, you know, the 10 cities were just stretching out everywhere. And on top of all of it, no one knew what was happening. We're talking police tape around playgrounds. For a second, living in LA felt like you were trapped

in some kind of never ending, shitty, red hot chili peppers song. City of Angels, my how you have fallen. Police tape around your playgrounds. Police tape on the brown mound. Police tape in the brown mound. Who used to be my butthole as a burial ground? You know what happens there is I think, oh, that would be fun

to try to like imitate the red hot chili peppers. And then I realize I'm not the red hot chili peppers. And then I realize that I want to sing the line. Used to be a butthole, now a burial ground. And then I spend an hour making what you just heard. That's the process of podcasting. Regardless, as far as I could tell, LA is on the mend. Is a perfect no or any of us perfect now?

No. Is civilization perfect? No. Is there some possibility that we are all gradually being inhaled into some future transhumanist singularity and what we're experiencing or the seismic shockwaves resulting from tachyon particles being blasted backwards through time, as Terrence McKenna said, absolutely.

Is asking yourself questions on a podcast annoying? Probably. Should you stop doing it after you have already gone through at least four questions? Of course you should. Do you know how to stop asking questions once you've started asking them in this weird self interview style?

No. Are you realizing that once you get caught up in asking questions on your own podcast to yourself, that you've essentially jumped the podcasting shark, that you're becoming some kind of thing falling in on itself? I don't know. I can't remember the question I asked myself. And this is the process, as I was saying before.

Anyway, LA seems great. I don't know what's gonna happen to the city, but most importantly, it just feels like home. I lived there for 17 years and I don't wanna get all sentimental and shit. I'm a horrible meditator and Buddhist. I don't even know if I am a Buddhist, but I'm sort of haunted by the idea

that no matter where you go, there you are. You're carrying your mind with you anywhere you go and that theoretically you should be able to live anywhere that if you can calm your mind down and find a place of true inner peace, then it doesn't matter where you're at. You could be living on top of a gigantic ice cream sundae made of frozen shit and a little stupid shit tent

where you just eat sugared shit all day. And if you were enlightened, then you could theoretically enjoy it. But that's like me saying if I had massive, I don't even know what they're called, glutes that I could do the America Ninja Challenge. I don't know. I'm not there yet.

I'm where I'm at and where I'm at is, I wanna be in the sun. I don't wanna do any more winners. And I know all my East Coast friends out there, you love it, you like it. You like being frozen down and I get it. There's something beautiful about the cold and walking you out into the cold

and being like, fuck, this is cold. But I kinda wanna be near the ocean again and most importantly, all my friends are there. Most of my friends are there, some of them split. But I just love that city. I think it's okay to feel sentimental about a place. And so yeah, I think we're gonna head back there pretty soon. What does that mean for the DTFH?

Absolutely nothing, except more than likely you're gonna get some shitty recording quality as we begin our migration back west. I do feel like I'm in some kind of Buddhist parable. I'm sure you've heard the one about the person who's like sitting in the shade and gets too cold and then moves out of the shade and gets too hot and then moves back into the shade.

Well, I don't give a fuck. I'm going back into whatever part of that parable represents Los Angeles and I'm really excited about it. We have a great podcast for you today. And my apologies if in this podcast I seem a little cynical or something. Today's guest is Peter Kalmas.

He's an environmental scientist and honestly I hesitated bringing him back on the show not because he's not interesting and not because he's not super fucking cool and not because he's clearly a fucking genius but because his brilliant way of sort of articulating what's going on with climate change is terrifying and off-putting and I don't know, just like freaks me out.

But in this conversation you'll see that somehow I managed to be the fucking buzzkill. Still, I think if you stick around you will find that Peter Kalmas is a wonderful example of a synthesis of scientist and spokesperson. You know, because a lot of scientists, no offense to my scientist friends out there. Look, there's a reason there's not a show

called America's Funniest Scientist or America's Best Scientist Singer because they've decided to spend their entire lives lost in their laboratories while all of us go cavorting around in various degrees of narcissistic hedonism. I mean, not everybody. Again, I'm making sweeping judgments here.

Point is Peter is very charismatic, super smart and is actually, I would guess, I don't know this for sure but if I had to roll the dice, he's gotta be part of the inspiration for the movie Don't Look Up, which by the way is fantastic and when I tweeted I thought it was great, boy did it piss off a lot of people who told me I was cringe or virtue signaling,

which is really fucking crazy to me because that movie to me wasn't just roasting the sort of poisonous hyper-right but also the sort of impotent, can you say impotent, impotent? The sort of impotent gesticulating left and everybody in between, it's a good movie. Regardless, when I was watching it, Peter popped into my mind and then I reached out to him

and we set up this podcast. So stick around, with us here today is climate scientist Peter Kalmas. We're gonna jump right into it, but first this. Thank you Lucy for supporting this episode of the DTFH. You know one of my favorite Stephen King stories is in his book On Writing and he talks about how his family didn't intervention with him

and showed him this bag of shit they gathered from his office when he was writing bloody, clean exes that he was shoving up his nose because it was bleeding from doing so much cocaine as he was writing the shining old cigarette butts. But anyway, the thing he said is of all of the drugs, the hardest one to quit was nicotine and the reason being that he actually had some sense

that maybe it was helping a little bit with the writing. You can look it up, sadly, I only say sadly because nicotine is so addictive, there's a new tropic effect that nicotine has. All I'm saying is, you know smoking is fucking bad for you and there's better ways to absorb nicotine. If you enjoy using nicotine, you should definitely check out Lucy's Products at lucy.co.

That's L-U-C-Y dot C-O and use promo code Duncan at checkout. Also, I must read this disclaimer, warning, this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical. That's the end of the warning. Remember, if you're interested in a better way to use nicotine, visit lucy.co

and be sure to use promo code Duncan. And remember, nicotine, it's fucking addictive, like insanely addictive and the reason it's so fucking addictive is because it's awesome, sadly, but it is, but that's why. No need to smoke, come on, you smell like burnt popcorn. And we are back. Friends, I'd like to invite you to join my Patreon.

It's at patreon.com forward slash DTFH. We are a collaborative group of creators and we just actually finished a book of erotic cryptid short stories which we're gonna be publishing in the next few weeks and we want you to join us. We need your mind, we need your talent. And if you sign up at patreon.com forward slash DTFH,

you'll get instant access to commercial free episodes of this podcast along with lots of extra content. Subscribe to the video tier. You can join our weekly meditation group journey into boredom as well as our family gatherings which happen every Friday plus just access to all kinds of extra content. That's patreon.com forward slash DTFH.

And now everybody, please welcome back to the podcast. Peter Kalmas, you can find him on Twitter at twitter.com forward slash climate human. He co-founded the climate ad project. He co-founded the earth hero climate app which is at earthhero.org and it helps people do take action on climate, check it out. And he also wrote an awesome book called being the change

which you can find for free at peterkalmas.net. Now, this is super important, Peter works for NASA but he's speaking on behalf of himself during this podcast, not NASA. These are his own personal views. That's an important disclaimer. And you can also find two really cool articles he wrote in The Guardian, I'm gonna have links to that

at dunkintrustle.com. Okay, here we go everybody, please welcome Peter Kalmas to the DTFH. National Anthem Peter, welcome back to to the DTFH. I was watching, don't look up in the whole time, I'm just thinking, my God, this is about Peter Kalmas. This is your story.

And then I loved that movie, not, I love the movie because I just saw a super amazing satire. And then I tweeted that I like the movie and immediate attacks from people say, what, oh, you're virtue signaling to say you like this movie about the environment. And then that's what I virtue signaling because you want a habitable planet. Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, come on. But to me, that what really inspired me why I reached out to you is because I realized like, oh, God, it's not now you can't even talk about it.

You now to even talk about the this reality that we're all experiencing is to be attacked by a lot of people. And so if that just happened to me for saying I liked a movie because I thought it was great satire, what's your life like that in that regard, do you get attacked for your public the way you keep reminding us of this environmental disaster that we're all just beginning to get a taste of? You know, there's the hardcore deniers out there and they love telling me what an idiot I am.

And they like to say that they'll leave their, you know, truck running in their driveway for a week nonstop because of something that I said. And I don't I don't mind that at all, actually. I mean, I don't think they should do that. I think it's stupid. But I don't mind getting attacked like that because it makes me feel like I'm starting to have an impact, you know, that my message is starting to get out there. But it is so weird that we can't as a species all get on the same page about wanting to

have a fucking habitable planet. I mean, what could be more fundamental than that? Well, I mean, I think I don't know, as I'm like, as I wrestle with it, like everybody does, I think that it's it's the sense of no, no good solution, like, or, or, or another way to put it is, I think there's a you could chalk up COVID to climate change. There's a way to make a direct connection to our like ability to instantly get from one place to the other are hyper connectedness as why this pandemic is never is not going away according to people's timelines.

You know, that this is an experience of climate change. But maybe the reason the problem is the solution seems to be increasingly fascist. People get this sense of like, no one is going to stop. People are running their cars in their driveway to punish you and all the other people who are just sort of like, you know, leaving the lights on, driving gas, guzzling cars, taking trips on planes, living, you know, living in a mock quote, modern way, that there isn't really a no one's really going to change. It's not going to change.

And so there's so much to unpack there. So it's not so, so, you know, I wrote a book when I started down this path of like getting really worried about climate and ecological breakdown, there was no real movement. I didn't know how to connect and engage sort of as an activist very well. Like back in 2010, like 350.org was barely there. There was no extinction rebellion. There was no Greta. There are no big marches in the street.

And so one of the things I did was I just started to feel kind of really gross about burning fossil fuels. And I kind of got made a game out of it to reduce my own use of fossil fuels. And then like after about a year, that was fun. It was a lot of fun. After about a year of that, though, I realized, man, you know, I can I can reduce my own emissions a little bit every year. And it's it's fun.

And there's a lot of great other reasons to do it. But, you know, if humanity is emitting 40 some billion tons of CO2 per year, it's not enough. It's really not this this path of me reducing my own emissions isn't enough. So I, you know, I was also thinking, well, it can help sort of spark cultural change. You know, people can see you doing this and they can be like, well, that's that looks like fun, maybe, or that's interesting. Or, yeah, you know, this is a problem we should start reducing our emissions to. Maybe we should start flying less, for example.

And what I quickly realized with that is there are a few people out there who will start to take these kinds of steps and reduce their emissions. But it's a smaller fraction of humanity than I thought it would be. And I think there's a lot of interesting reasons for that, too. There's so many stories that are deeply baked into our cultural operating system. Stories about, you know, how great technology is, how humanity can do anything with its technology. Technology is going to save us. We can never go backwards.

Like we could never, I think the majority of people out there who have been on an airplane can't imagine life without airplanes now. Whereas just a few decades ago, there were no airplanes and everyone was perfectly happy. But there's this the sense of not being able to go backwards at all. So then what I realized kind of like the third step is how important it is as an activist to engage with systems and to sort of get collective policies that would make it so that people wouldn't burn fossil fuel this much. So you can't expect people to any significant fraction.

I think it's probably far less than one percent, I think, of people that would actually significantly reduce their emissions. So you need to get some kind of policies in place. And these policies probably ultimately have to be international because this is a global problem. And so then the question as one mammal walking around out there, one one person interacting with these huge overwhelmingly huge global systems, right? The food systems, the transportation systems, the political systems. What the question is, then, what do you do?

How do you engage with that in a way that's maybe somewhat effective, that feels somewhat meaningful, that doesn't make you burn out? So that's the I think that's really the fundamental question as an activist. And one one, I think just to sort of set the stage here, one really important rule that I've realized when I get asked over and over again, like, how do I be a better activist? How do we what should we do? Right? That's the fundamental question. Really, you got to kick that back to people and say it's up to you to figure that out.

Like, that's part of that. That's such an important part of the path is to dive in, you know, and start swimming in this water and you get better and better at it. And you start meeting other people and you start figuring out what you like and how you can contribute. And, you know, that's it's sort of a lifelong journey into climate activism. And anyone who, you know, likes having a planet with decent temperatures and good food and water and air to breathe, et cetera, which is literally 100% of us at this point should be a climate activist.

I mean, we all are literally the earth, and we have to start protecting the earth like we protect ourselves. So that's what to me, that's what climate activists are now. They literally are the earth protecting herself. I want to thank Bluetube for supporting this episode of the DTFH. It's time. I don't want to say why. You got the feeling I got the feeling it's time for us to get out there and start humping again. And Bluetube can help. Look, confidence can take you very far in life. And when you feel confident, you're at your best. And this is

why as someone who is plagued by all forms of insecurity, not just related to my own sexual health, but the amount of hair on my asshole and how I smell, I can't smell anymore. So I don't even know, like do I stink? And also, you just are hearing me on this podcast that you right now, no one's going to be like, wow, he's really in an erotic phase of his life. This is why I love Bluetube. It gives me confidence, like having a little safety parachute in my pocket. Bluetube, it's a unique online service that delivers the same active ingredients as Viagra and Cialis, but in chewable tablets and at a fraction of the cost. The process is simple. You sign up at Bluetube.com, consult with one of their licensed medical

providers. And once you're approved, you receive your prescription within days. The best part, it's all done online. No visits to the doctor's office. No awkward conversations and no waiting in line at the pharmacy. Bluetube's tablets are made in the USA. Praise America. Prepared and shipped direct to your door in a discreet package. All that aside, the most important part, they work. These aren't some kind of shit pill that you get at a truck stop that was made in some weird underground factory on the moon. These are the real things. And this is why I love them so much. Also, I gotta say, it's a little exciting to imagine that I'm helping, you know, create hardcore fuck sessions for my listeners. We've got a special

deal for you all. Try Bluetube free. When you use our promo code Duncan at checkout, just pay five bucks shipping. That's Bluetube.com promo code Duncan to receive your first month free. Visit Bluetube.com for more details and important safety information. And we thank Bluetube for supporting this podcast. To me, that's what climate activists are now. They literally are the earth protecting herself. But also there is a undeniable, legitimate, joyful aggression people feel towards the earth. So I think that there is an assumption that people do want to have a habitat they can live in, or that people do have some kind of like inkling of respect for the planet.

But I have listened to religious sermons, where the earth is considered to be a kind of phase that we're going through. It's a sort of testing ground of souls, ultimately that is meant to be like exploited for its resources. And people that's part of their like some religious people feel like their religion is being threatened with the idea of we're all the earth. They're like, I'm not there. I'm not of this earth, Peter. I'm of heaven or I'm a spiritual being temporarily inhabiting this earth. So people get really upset with climate activists, because they see it as a kind of paganism, you know, they see it as a kind of neo paganism that is actually satanic. I'm just saying what you're

up against here is some group of people who share what you just said, like, oh, we want to live in a, it would be, I don't want my kids to be like experiencing 500 mile per hour winds or whatever is, you know, possible. But then there's people like, no, it's the apocalypse, Peter, it's the end of the world. Now you see this is the end of the world. And there's no way you can stop it. You can't stop it because God's coming back. This is why stories are so important, isn't it? I mean, maybe religion is one way to understand it is it's just a very deep kind of story, like a story that's so deep in someone's brain that it's not questioned. It's like, got this, it's a platform upon which everything else

they do and think and how they understand the world is built on this story, essentially. So and to go back to don't look up, I think that's part of what's so interesting about climate stories and storytelling. You know, we're, we're kind of, I think we're kind of as a species in a period where the old stories aren't working anymore. They're starting to break down like that, that story you mentioned about Dominion over all the earth and all of the, yeah, the creatures that crawl on the earth and swim in the water, yeah. And you know, to me, a new story that that's emerging, that that has emerged in my life, or I don't know that I felt called to from a very young age is the story of just awe and wonder at

the earth and the trees and the creatures and the sensation of breathing air and the sensation of feeling sunlight on your face or the sound of a stream in the mountains or the waves on the seashore or the, you know, the laughter of children playing. It's just, you know, looking at the night sky, right, seeing the Milky Way and starting to understand the universe a little bit. To me, it's also very deeply woven in with science, the sense of just kind of this animistic wonder of walking around on the planet, but then also to like, to learn about Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism or Einstein's equations of general relativity and how gravity is geometry. And the, to me, the sense of wonder is exactly the same that from

science as from like seeing my lemon tree and like feeling a tree being happy, like somehow feeling a connection to this other being deeply enough to see the color of its lemons and how abundant it is and get the sense that a tree could be happy or that, you know, a crow could be happy or unhappy as the case were. So I don't know. I think almost feels like maybe we need this kind of a deep story to emerge of kind of interbeing of interconnectedness of sharing each other's carbon molecules. And when I say each other, I don't just mean other people. I mean, all the earthlings, like all the beings on this planet and this joy, this joy that doesn't exist in the metaverse, right? Like when you're, when you're, it's, you know, one in the morning, and

you're, you know, you get bored with Netflix, and then you go on, you know, some other website, and you know, that feeling of kind of internet boredom, like there's, it's like, it's like the feeling of eating potato chips, right? You'll never get, get to the bottom of that sort of longing. But then when you, like, if you go out and do gardening, and you're like, planting plants and, you know, looking at the dirt and smelling those sensations and, you know, just being with the earth, I don't, I don't get that. So, so to me, like just the real, you know, soil and trees and birds and clean air is, that's to me, like the real metaverse, like the joyful metaverse, because there's, it seems like there's kind of an element of joy that is missing from

all of the, like, kind of corporate technology, to me, at least. And maybe a sense of connection, like it's, it's all about connecting, right? The internet. But there's a deeper connection that is maybe hardwired into our brains, because we evolved in this, this planet, right? With kind of this, the primal, the primal, more primal stuff, right? Being a body on this planet, and the joy that that, that goes along with that. Oh, yeah. I mean, I know, I know what you mean. I love it. Like, I love that feeling of going up into the woods with my kid and watching him play in streams around here and like just, you know, just, I don't, that sense of the whole thing, whatever the game is we've been playing,

it's turned off. But I think don't look up like what it captured was this, the cultural layer that is acting as a force field, keeping people from even getting close to that taste that you're talking about, that, and there's so many different versions of it. That, you know, one thing I think that's really fascinating about the way people react to that movie is certain groups felt that they were called out or scolded like Trump people, not seeing, no, you weren't the only ones, everyone was dragged through the coals, including climate scientists, you know, and spoiler alert everybody, but you know, at the end, when they're sitting around the table kind of saying we did everything we could, it's like they didn't quite believe it, you know, that there's a sense of like,

did you really do everything you could do? Because, you know, to me, this problem, the problem that we're talking about, unless you want to enjoy like disregarding literally 90% of what scientists are saying, or you want to ignore all the crazy shit that's been going on around the planet, pretend that's always been going on, that it's not anomalous. If you choose not to ignore that, you enter into this bizarre place when you start thinking of solutions, your solution is pragmatic and I love it. It's sweet. Maybe if we get everybody to touch the earth and feel it again and understand how beautiful the earth is, there'll be a reawakening, a new story. Well, that's the story. I think the, you know, it's again, so much to unpack. We, so okay, so

going back to like doing everything we can do and sort of the layers of collective denial that don't look up revealed, especially in the media, and it's fascinating how the like elite film critics panned the movie. So being kind of really in the trenches of this movement, one thing I've noticed is that there's kind of a divide. It's probably a continuous spectrum, but you can think of it as a divide between the people who, they know that we're in a, we have a real problem here and they accept the science, but they don't truly understand how short the time scales are and how much we stand to lose. And to them, like talking about potential civilizational collapse is a kind of taboo, and they'll try to minimize you and kind of, you know, deflect you by saying that you're

doomist if you even mention the possibility of civilizational collapse. And then on the other side, there are people who are like, holy fuck, this is an emergency. We stand to lose possibly everything. Like, you know, billions of people could die. We're, we could have massive food shortages. Everything's going to get worse, you know, every single year until we end the fossil fuel industry. And that's the key thing, you know, the people who see this as a planetary emergency of the highest order. They, they'll say like, you know, net zero by 2050, what is that bullshit? You know, 2050 is way too late. We're not going to have a civilization in 2050 at this rate. And what's with this net zero bullshit? That's, that's fossil fuel industry propaganda

to deflect attention away from the root cause of everything that's happening, which is the fucking fossil fuel industry, right? So we have global heating, which is driving, you know, reduced agricultural yields, which could end up to severe kind of, you know, multi regional crop failures, which is driving the flooding that we've been seeing, which is driving the heat domes and the wildfires and the sea level rise and the loss of ecosystems like the Amazon rainforest. All of this is caused by global heating, which is caused by burning fossil fuels makes makes the planet warmer. Right. And that's the fossil fuel industry, which has been literally lying to us for decades. They've known exactly what they're doing. They chose their own. It's the, it's, it's

like the super villain. You can't make this up. Right. I don't think there's ever been a movie villain that's as bad as the real kind of fossil fuel capitalists, which knew that they were selling out the planet for their bank accounts, which were already like bigger than they could ever possibly spend. Right. I mean, it's, it's really just insane. But here we are. And you have, we have to call out the real problem and the real solution. Right. The first order solution is ending the fossil fuel industry as quickly as we can. And yet you, you know, you look at COP26, right. And there's no discussion at all there anywhere of ending the fossil fuel. There's discussions about like reducing methane leaks. There's discussions about, you know,

dealing with deforestation, but they dance around ending the fossil fuel industry, which is that's the thing we have to go after. Right. Nothing, nothing we do will be meaningful until we, we ramp down this industry quickly on a schedule. But guess who was the biggest delegation, for example, at COP26, the fossil fuel industry, the fossil fuel industry, what they were, they were like invited to this, you know, meeting of kind of the nations of the world to set climate policy. Right. And they were, they were there kind of looking over things. There were literally more kind of delegates there from the fossil fuel industry than from any other single country, which is just insane. And then, you know, look at what Biden did a few days after COP26. Right.

He expanded drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. He had a lease sale. And then the administration tried to say that this was, you know, ordered, they had to do it because of court orders. But the Justice Department even had a document that said that that wasn't true. They could have certainly delayed, if not completely delayed, you know, basically indefinitely or, or not had. So we have, you know, the industry kind of calling the shots right now, and we're still expanding, even though we know we're heading towards this, we're already, things are already burning up. Right. It's already too hot. I don't know if you've personally experienced kind of climate impacts with your own body, but I certainly have. Yeah. And yeah, it's, we, we have to start going

directly at the heart of the matter. But isn't the heart of the matter design, I mean, not like, yes, I know the fossil fuel industry, if you and I could like do some kind of incredible bit of magic and just make it go away, that would be great. Although it's all gone. But then we're still going to have this desire for convenience. And for, like you were saying, the idea that we're always going forward, we don't go back. We got up in the air. We can get, I can get from here to Hawaii in no time. It used to take forever to get to Hawaii. I could take these awesome trips to Tulum, no problem. And not only that, like the reason that we all want to do that, the reason we do want to get in airplanes and take vacations and go visit our

friends and go to spiritual retreats and go and do all these things is desire. We have a basic human desire. I mean, this is where like, only because for me, whenever I am, whenever I'm playing around with this solution, which is probably idiotic, because there's not any one solution, but just in the sense of if we were both running the Sims or some game where we could alter variables with complete, with complete success, the way it looks to me as well, okay, is climate change real? I think it is. Okay, so the climate change is real. Then essentially, we're waiting for the earth just to kill enough people so civilization falls apart, so that naturally things start cooling down, because there's not any people anymore. They're either glaciated or fried up or whatever,

it's gone. And if there are people, they're just some, you know, Mad Max people, whatever, they might be driving around the desert and fucking cool cars. But they're just, they're having to dig up gasoline, right? So that's, that is the, that is some version of the future, probably not even close to as cool as that, more like the road or something, just a dusty uninhabitable planet that gradually turns into mercury or something like that, because we fucked it up so bad. So we're talking mass deaths, mass casualties, and which is why one of the solutions, and I think the reason people push back against climate activists is because they have this sense that climate activists in some way must understand, well, maybe fascism is the answer. Maybe the answer

under the compassionate thing to do is not to be like, okay, it's, well, 2055 or whatever, it'll be fine. We'll do 2055. Maybe the, you know, at Chogam, Trump or Rinpoche talks about idiot compassion. And idiot compassion is where you imagine you're doing something compassionate, but you're still prolonging the problem. It's like enabling or something, you know, it's like buying someone heroin because they want heroin, you know, that's idiot compassion. True compassion would be helping them get off a heroin. So anyway, I'm sorry, in Buddhism, you have these sort of three root poisons, as they're called, the claysias, the three, and there's different names for them, but essentially it's desire, aggression, and ignorance.

These are the three things that are driving all of the suffering in the world. And so I'm saying, maybe the answer is not getting rid of the fossil fuel industry. Maybe it's going one level deeper. I don't know what that looks like, but figuring out a way to, I don't know, help people overcome that itchy thing, that quick, impulsive itchy thing that makes it make sense to take these trips. And we're back to, I think we're back to stories. So I think, you know, to me, like I said, the kind of the first order thing is to put the fossil fuel industry directly in the crosshair. But then you have to ask like, so let's say we could magically convert all of our energy from fossil fuels to renewable energy, for example. And yeah, we had the same

amount of energy as we have now, but was always suppose that like suppose we could do that, then what will we do with that clean energy? We'd keep paving over nature and building stuff and extracting for profit. We'd have instead of three billionaires with space companies, we'd have a thousand billionaires with space companies, we'd start getting trillionaires, et cetera. And we'd still fuck things up and we'd have other ecological problems. And we'd basically be more or less in the same place, right? So yeah, the second thing has to be a complete rethinking of how we do economics and how we kind of inhabit this planet as a species. So you could call that degrowth. And you know, in my mind, one of the kind of the first things

that the one of the most important pieces of that is figuring out ways, systematic ways to redistribute wealth. What do you mean degrowth? Wait, I'm sorry. What do you mean degrowth? Basically, an economic system that isn't all about, isn't designed for our economic system right now is basically designed for two things, right? To maximize GDP growth, to get as much GDP growth year on year as you can. And for capital to accumulate. So you have capital, people with billions of dollars, corporations with billions of dollars. And that capital tends to create more capital until you have this kind of black hole of capital that gets so powerful that it can work politics. I mean, it's so cheap,

relatively cheap to buy a politician. If you had a trillion dollars, you could probably own every politician, every newspaper around the planet. And then there's, you know, forget democracy at that point, right? And that's kind of, that's pretty close to where we are now. I just saw a fact that the, the 10 top billionaires, the 10 highest, the wealthiest people on the planet, their wealth doubled in the last two years during COVID. And they now control 1.5 trillion dollars of wealth, which is crazy. Like that's, you'd have to make a million dollars a day for more than 4,000 years to accumulate that much wealth. Like that's how much it is. Like I'd be totally happy with just a million dollars. Like I could, you know, set that aside,

plan for the entire event. A million dollars a day for 4,000 years. No human being needs that much money. And it's, it's kind of an accumulation of basically social energy that's just being wasted in these kind of. But isn't that just an agreed upon? Like when you get to that level of alleged wealth, like at some point, isn't that just sort of like, you're just sort of agreeing that everyone's in this hypnotic trance where we're just agreeing that that, that value is even real? Is it, you know, like we've, we, that part of, part of what's happening here is that, you know, billionaire, for bill, for a billionaire to exist, there has to be a global agreement regarding the value of a dollar, right? So the whole planet has to agree, yes, that's a dollar,

a billion of those things mean something, right? Like, you know, somebody, if somebody could say, I own a billion grains of sand, nobody gives a shit, it's just sand, you know, it's, but we're, similarly, we're, we're giving these people their power, that black hole you're talking about, its power isn't coming, I don't think. Duncan, they're just ones, they're just ones and zeros in some database somewhere. Right. It's even less, it's even less than sand. Yeah.

Because it's silicon based, but you know, all money is, is, is just a way to keep track of social contract between people, between entities, between nations, etc. It's just, it's just a reckoning system for kind of social obligations that we all have with each other. And when you get to the point that we're at now, what you have, we, we can't even make inroads in homelessness. We have people even in the United States who can't buy your food for the week that can't pay for rent that are getting evicted, that don't have healthcare. It's totally fucked up out there. And then at the same time, we have these people who, you know, make $200 billion in a year during a pandemic, right? Because they've, they've managed to capture that capital and that capital

just accrues more capital like, like that black hole. So what that tells me is that the social contract is completely broken and needs to be completely rethought and rewritten in a way that's more equitable. And that's part of what climate and ecological breakdown is telling us is that we can't keep living in this way with this much inequality. You know, the billionaires, the amount of emissions they, they put into the atmosphere is like thousand time what the average person puts in or something. I mean, it's the, there's a direct correlation between somebody's wealth and how much they damage the planet. Like they can't spend that money. Like I said, it's, it's more money than, it's, it's astronomical. You can't, it's hard to explain how much money,

you know, $500 billion is and what you could do with that money. They can't spend it. So they, they buy these mega yachts, they buy multiple private jets, they start their spaceship corporations and which that's an incredible amount of fossil fuel emissions. And that's just the stuff you hear about. That's just the stuff you hear about. There's no telling what they're at, what's really going on. I mean, that to me is the, I mean, if the stuff that you know we're witnessing is this, you know, the rocket ships and the, you know, the, you know, the yachts and all that, God knows what is happening behind the scenes between these people who have essentially become post capital. Like once you have that much money,

you are now existing in a world where money is valueless in a sense. And that like no one's going to be like, no one's going to be able to buy you. Like how much are you going to give a billionaire to do something? Like they don't need money. So you, it goes back to trade again for billionaires. They trade favors. They don't, the flow of money becomes more irrelevant to them, right? We need to figure out a way to come together and create a new economy, which is centered on human flourishing and sort of human happiness and not about just accumulating more capital and extracting as much from the natural worlds. God bless you, Squarespace for supporting this episode of the DTFH. Squarespace is an ever-evolving

platform that gives you all the tools you need to create amazing websites, online stores, to get you the analytics you need. And they also have incredible marketing tools like the ability to use Squarespace's cutting edge design technology to send out mass mails to your subscribers and your clients. Look, I could go on and on about how awesome Squarespace is, but the proof is in the pudding. Head over to dunkintrustle.com and set your eyes on a site of such blazing glory that it might be the last thing you look at. It might send a ray of holy light through your retina, illuminating your third eye, allowing you to see the true reality that we're existing in and causing you to transcend into the next incarnation where you get to live for a million years as a God.

Can't guarantee it, but it's worth trying. It's dunkintrustle.com. Anytime I upload an episode of the DTFH, I use Squarespace's incredible technology. They're awesome and I've been using them for years. So head over to squarespace.com for a free trial and when you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com forward slash dunkin save 10% of your first purchase of a website or a domain. Again, that's squarespace.com forward slash dunkin to save 10% of your first purchase of a website or a domain. And please use my offer code so Squarespace continues to see just how much we love them. Thank you, Squarespace. So we basically need, we need policies and we need stories. So I'd say kind of like the third thing.

So this can all happen simultaneously, right? Like targeting the fossil fuel industry to end it, because that's like the fossil fuel industry, that's like our arms been chopped off in the bloods, we need to get the tourniquet on, right? That's ending the fossil fuel industry. But then we need to like start kind of living in a healthier way. That's kind of rethinking economics and kind of not centering things around this growth and capital accumulation. And then the third level is just kind of like waking up as a species, kind of what we were talking about earlier. And I think stories are critical to that, right? And don't look up didn't tell that story. Don't look up was just the like, holy fuck, we're heading towards collapse and we

got it. And the media is blocking a mainstream movement. That's kind of the story that don't look up was telling. And there's thousands of other climate stories that need to be told. And there's a few I think really key primal ones, which is, for example, the story of how a species came close to destroying the only oasis of life in the known universe, this beautiful, miraculous place, this riotous place with all these crazy, colorful species, right? And food that you could just pick off of trees. And this, you know, the species came so close to destroying all of that. But then they woke up, and they kind of figured out that they were stewards, they weren't here to conquer. They were here to enjoy and to sort of uplift and to wonder, to be in awe at this

planet. And they realized that just in time, and the fires kept getting worse for a while, things kept dying for a while, ecosystems got worse, the sea levels rose, all the coastal cities had to be abandoned. It was really confusing. But then things started slowly getting better. And they realized that life would be better for their kids and life would be better in 10 generations, and that the biodiversity would start to recover. And it was this, this, this party, this celebration with all due respect. I can't admit that is just, just, I can't imagine. I mean, I can imagine that if it was you and me and our friends, but like looking at what's happening right now globally, you've got, you know, Russia amassing troops, we're somehow we're back,

we're right back at almost at the Cuban fucking missile crisis. Like right now, suddenly on top of everything else, this pandemic, right now on top of that, there's just some slight extra possibility that there might be a nuclear war. Like suddenly the reality of like, of like, oh, guess what? We still have nuclear weapons. Talk about environmental disaster. Talk about just getting it all over within one fell swoop and one potentially one afternoon. You know, this is, this, this is where we're at. You there, there, these, these, and when, when the these events happen that have been happening, where shit is just suddenly all of a sudden, like in New York, people are drowning in their base, drowning in their basements.

This has never happened. Just all of a sudden that was shocking to me too. Yeah. Yeah, right. Well, that stuff, whenever that's that that stuff is happening, it's not like the next day people are like suddenly coming out of their apartments in New York and be like, Hey, is this a good idea? This whole New York thing that we're doing this whole driving around all the time thing? Because no, it's like we literally like robots just go right back to it, right back to it. And it and if we don't go right back to it, the way we don't go right back to it is generally not some mutual intent of healing the earth. It's generally like getting scared and then angry and then and then bowing down to whoever seems to be the most powerful monkey who has the weapons and then

following what they're doing. I mean, I'm sorry, I just can't. God forgive me because I I want it to be what you're describing, but I can't picture it, man. I like it's it's hard to picture. How do we get there? Yeah, I'm not sure. Again, you know, so okay, so there's there's a few things that kind of I know for sure, which kind of help keep me going. Okay, so one of them is that I've kind of given up. This is sort of a sad thing to say I've kind of given up on the world leaders, you know, kind of waking up and freaking out about climate breakdown as much as I do and kind of doing the right thing. We they've had so many decades to do that. It's and there's and like I said before, they're still and this is not just in the US, it's everywhere. They're still expanding

the fossil fuel industry. And they're, you know, they love talking about things like carbon capture because it's like a distraction away from ending the fossil fuel industry. Right. So it's clear. It's clear to me that we need a mass mainstream climate movement. Like we need people to organize, to get out in the streets, to bring out the pitchforks. It's not exactly clear how that happens. It's starting to happen. It's, I mean, we're at a way better place now in terms of the movement than we were like four years ago. COVID took a huge chunk out of the movement. I think I think it slowed things down dramatically. Things were really starting to get going. And now, of course, so there's this other thing, which when you're talking, it made me kind of think about, which is

there's a real problem with the way we organize kind of collectively, which is that the sociopaths tend to rise to the top, you know, in the corporations and in the governments. We've never, I don't think we've ever really, you know, I don't think the people who wrote the Constitution were really kind of, we have to kind of reframe how we do government with that in mind. Like that has to be the thing at the top of our minds as we were like rewrite stuff. And like, how do we figure out this like government thing and organizing together? I don't think a document written more than 200 years ago by a bunch of slaveholders is necessarily the most relevant way for us to self organize today. And it's very hard to see how we redo that without a ton of violence and

bloodshed. I hope there is a way, but it definitely seems like things aren't working right now. You know, minority rule isn't working, because the vast majority of the electorate wants rapid climate action. Your climate change is now one of like the top quote unquote issues. And I think as we get more heat domes, as we get more crazy floods, as we get more food price spikes, which are probably going to continue being, you know, ascribed to inflation, but I think more and more there's going to be a climate signal driving higher food prices. But as all of this stuff gets gets worse, you know, that climate breakdown will become more than an issue to a lot of people. It'll be the top issue. But if we and if we had real democracy, we'd start taking

real action on it. But but if we if we have kind of, you know, fascism or kind of pseudo democracy, which, which we have now right with the Senate, for example, the Senate is not a Democratic, the Electoral College is not a Democratic institution. We have basically rule by the minority and rule by the ultra wealthy and the corporations. Yeah, Alec Alec writing this American legislative and exchange commission literally writing laws, mostly at the state level, because they realize that, you know, the state level is easier to kind of write laws and pass laws and that are very, very, you know, corporate friendly and planet unfriendly, right? Yeah. So so if we can figure out a way to kind of come out of this, this anti democracy, and you're right, it feels

like things are getting worse right now, instead of better, it's sort of like a race between kind of the fascists and maybe the the earthy hippie climate activists. The earthy hippie climate activists are fucked. They don't have nuclear weapons. That's the that's the whole spooky reality. I think people like us forget. Let's bring let's bring in the killer robots now too, because if I was a fossil fuel capitalist with billions and billions of dollars, I wouldn't really trust the human military so much. I'd really want those robotic, you know, because they can't they you can't they can't rise up against you, right? So we're at it. Remember learning about the robber barons in high school. Yeah, we're we're right now at a historical point,

which is even more intense than the robber barons and even harder to figure out how to deal with, because the corporations and the ultra rich have had, you know, like 100 years since then, to figure out how to do it better and how to capture the media. So when you don't have a media, basically, you know, the media has been almost completely absent in terms of telling the story of climate and ecological breakdown. So is it any wonder that the climate movement has been relatively fringe, right? And hasn't been mainstream and hasn't been powerful enough yet to fight against the fossil fuel industry. And they've captured the politics, I think even more than the robber barons of old have and you capture control the politics, then you control the military,

you have, you know, a monopoly on violence, and you're starting to see climate activists who do things as as relatively benign, for example, as break windows, they're starting to get multi year sentences, right? And there's a systematic push to make any sort of direct climate activism, you know, to label those people as terrorists, for example, to try to to squelch the movement down and keep it from getting bigger. So it does feel like a sort of race to me. Does it wait? Okay, go ahead. Sorry. Well, I was gonna I was gonna come back to the movie again. That's why that's why I wrote that op ed. I was so happy that, you know, something came out of Hollywood that was genuinely mainstream. Yeah, hundreds of millions of people watched and kind of resonated with a lot of the

latent climate anxiety and concern that's out there, right? That hasn't been discussed in either the mainstream entertainment media or the mainstream news media at all. So for that to break through and to be financially successful for a corporation, Netflix, that doesn't rely on advertising, right? So it's kind of independent of the fossil fuel industry. I'm a little bit heartened to see what comes next. And if we can have climate stories that are resonant enough to contribute to building a truly mainstream climate movement, because that's that's what I've been pushing for for years and years and years. Because like I said, that's to me, that's the little tiny window, you know, the Indiana Jones door stone wall that's closing down that we have to slide under,

right? Okay, to build this movement. Let me add to the story idea. I want to push back a little bit on not just your, I don't want to call it scorn, but the rush cough is has such a brilliant way of articulating this too. There's a name he asked for people who believe the singularity is like coming and, you know, is going like the technology is going to save all of us. It's like a religion. And it was definitely beautifully. That's what I loved about Don't Look Up is because they made the main technology guy look like, you know, who he was, I'm pretty sure was designed to look like the leader of Heaven's Gate, the Heaven's Gate cult. He wore the same clothes. He had the same

affect as the Heaven's Gate cult. So like, it was such a brilliant way of saying, if you're like, believing that technology is going to save us from what's from what's happening, you are in a genuine kind of death cult. But this is my pushback to that. The metaverse, which everyone is talking about right now, in a way, isn't one of the big problems right now, the problem of getting meat body from point A to point B. That's why we have fucking fossil fuels. We like to haul our asses to places where there are other people and hang out with them and then haul our asses back, not to overly reduce it. That is pretty much what's going down here. The metaverse, right now, in whatever phase it's in, is probably looks pretty stupid. I've seen

some of the weird Facebook shit they put out there, meta or whatever they're calling it now, and it just looks silly. But as technology and the ability to emulate reality becomes increasingly powerful, as neural interfaces inevitably appear, isn't there actually some kind of potential that we can experience as sort of digital teleportation, where we are senses are actually immersed in that way that you're describing when you go outside, that for better or for worse, technology does come close to replicating those experiences, thus reducing the need for travel, thus decimating the fossil fuel industry. Why am I getting on a fart filled fucking plane wearing an uncomfortable goddamn mask across the ocean to go to Hawaii

if I can put on some neural interface and be there instantaneously? I think as long as it's not kind of co-op, the corporations are moving in, they're investing into this, and if it's just about driving more consumerism and optimizing the algorithm for extracting more money from people, from consuming products and from knowing what they're thinking, basically, and monetizing that. The capitalists, they try to enclose and monetize as much as they can, and they realize that they can even enclose and monetize sort of how we think. But if somehow the metaverse doesn't just end up being a giant commercial that leads to even more consumerism and more sort of products that are designed to break

after six months, so you buy more of them, etc., which would just accelerate everything that's happening to the planet now, then you're right. So to go back to like 2010 when I was talking about my kind of desperate attempts to reduce my own emissions that turned out to be kind of joyful and fun, but also not nearly enough, one of the surprising things that came out of that for me was that three-quarters of my own emissions at the time were from flying, because at that time I was an astrophysicist. Yeah, and at the time I was kind of like, well, maybe if more people knew what a big slice of how bad flying really was for frequent flyers, they might stop doing it. And I was wrong about that. And it turned out, the most intense

conversations I've ever had kind of on Twitter, after talks that I've given, they're all around flying. People really get emotional about flying, because I think they tend to associate it with really good things like freedom, like power, like giving, being important and going to conferences and going on nice vacations and stuff. And that's a very human thing. But the fact is, look, we are in a climate emergency. If you're on the side of that, the kind of divide within the movement of whether this is a genuine emergency or whether we just need more electric cars, basically, and things aren't really that bad. But if you're on the side that it's a genuine emergency, I think more and more of those people are starting to realize that we don't need to fly. It's not like if you

don't get on that plane, no one's going to die. So if you start seeing climate and ecological breakdown more and more as a real life or death thing, you start to think like, all right, so we have this fossil fuel, let's say we want to get rid of all the fossil fuel by 2030, which is really ambitious. I think if we were truly in emergency mode, that's the kind of time scale we'd be thinking about. So if we're all on the same page, I know there's 40% of the United States that kind of still thinks the election was stolen and everything. And so we're not all on the same page. But if we were, and we agreed that we had to get things done by 2030, I think commercial aviation would be just about the first thing we ramped down and got rid of,

because it's not necessary. We'd be like, we need the electricity. We'll die without that. We need the food system and we need the food to be distributed. We'll die without that. So we're going to keep those things to run on fossil fuel. So we're going to have to ramp those things down gradually. But let's deal with the easy stuff right away, like all these huge SUVs, these private jets and the commercial aviation industry. And then what COVID, just to kind of finish up, what COVID sort of taught us is that that's true. We don't really need commercial aviation. We could do a lot of this business, quote unquote, travel remotely. And if we could get that, you know, better than Zoom calls, if we could make that sort of remote interaction better through

kind of virtual reality, I am all for that. I think that that would be a tremendous asset to humanity. So long as we can, again, if it doesn't become a giant commercial, and if we can leverage it to do things like eliminate commercial aviation, at least until we have fossil fuel free aviation, which we don't have. Right. Well, okay, so this to me, if you do want to find a place where everyone's going to agree, I don't care if you think the election results were fake. I don't care if you believe the earth is flat. One thing I think everyone can agree on flying fucking sucks. Nobody likes it. It's horrible. No one likes getting going to the airport. No one likes getting on an airplane. It's a it's a it's a horrible

experience. So it contributes to pandemics too. Right. We know that now. It spreads the disease and it sucks. It just I mean, all the pandemic should decide. It just sucks. Your arms rubbing up against somebody's fucking arm. You want to out you want it. Someone's people are getting increasingly raucous on the plane. People are getting duct taped to chairs now, right? Because it's that bad. That's why it sucks. It's making people go nuts. So this, I think we can all agree the flying sucks. And then to me, like, you know, if what you're if you're right, if fossil fuel, if the fossil fuel industry, and I think you must be right, because you're way smarter than me. I haven't spent I'm gonna lean into this. If the fossil fuel

industry is is the culprit. And if I think we're both, I don't know about you, I'm pretty skeptical about the idea of shutting that shutting the coffin on that Nosferatu anytime soon. Then this means we need to either come up with a weird way to do quantum teleportation using some as of yet non existent device that allows people to get from point A to point B without burning fossil fuels. Or we should be putting all of our energy into replicating the experiences that people are achieving by getting in a car and going to someplace. Because if that could happen, what who's going to get in there? Who's going on an airplane? Seriously, who gets on an airplane when you can just like, from your home, technologically teleport somewhere. I just feel

like the metaverse is getting, I don't know, the metaverse is getting bashed when I think any kind of hypnotic technology at this point is a is a positive, even if it is consumerist, you know, like, if the like, if people are buying, I don't know, shit in the metaverse, whatever it may be, land in the metaverse, if people are buying houses in the metaverse and constructing houses in the metaverse, this is not hurting the planet at all. And yeah, aesthetically, is it going to be a pleasing future for us? The idea of like, just a bunch of us in our houses, like twitching under some like, virtual reality, neurological interface slash psychedelic drug being blown into our faces to prove the experience. No, it's but it I'll tell

you, it's a lot more pleasing than drowning in your basement, having your eyes ripped out of your face by splinters being blown by Hurricane Force winds that unexpectedly sweep through your neighborhood. To me, I think the metaverse might be actually one of the most logical solutions. Let's get rid of people's reasons to travel, not by making not by thinking that we are going to implant in humans right now any kind of ethical or moral responsibility, but by creating a more desirable reality inside the machines. Well, I think there's, you know, there's different reasons to travel. And as the metaverse gets better and better, or as like virtual reality options for, you know, kind of meeting people remotely. And so doing business, for example, I think you're

right, like you probably don't need to fly across the planet to meet people. If you could meet them in virtual reality. And if that was if that got the job done, you know, if that was satisfying enough. But there's a there's another option too, which, you know, is again, it's like a taboo thing to say because of this religion of technology that we have, which is like, let's reinstitute fucking sailing ships. They were beautiful. They were amazing things. We could do them all 21st century, you know, we could do like the Star Trek sailing ships. There's this amazing passage in Kim Stanley Robinson's recent novel Ministry for the Future, which is set in the near future. And the main character is on a ship

crossing an ocean to go to a meeting and just enjoying the hell out of it, getting a ton of work done being with like the ocean planet that we actually inhabit, you know, kind of enjoying the sun rises in the sunset and wondering why the hell we ever gave up this beautiful thing of kind of slowly crossing the planet on the oceans, you know, having a little time out from your hectic schedule and then, you know, truly kind of valuing travel and valuing the time that you spend in the far away place and making the most of it because it's not just something that you kind of booked at the last minute and right a couple hours you were there and all of your like the, you know, all of the fucked up hecticness of your life is just like amplified and you can't

like really run away from the stuff that's making you unhappy. But maybe if you had like these kind of like, you know, a week long timeout to cross an ocean and just kind of like breathe a little bit like there's nothing really bad about that. So pirates, you know, I think I think all of the above pirates, pirates are real, they're real. No, you can, I listen, I'm, I'm gradually realizing pirates that you are more of an optimist than you are more optimistic than me. I feel like, you know, sometimes like when I was getting ready to talk to you, I get nervous because I think maybe because I'm projecting my own negative sense of humanity onto you, you have this beautiful humanist view of some possible future. And I think it's wonderful.

Maybe I'm just being a little too hard on my species or something, because my sense is more a kind of Machiavellian analysis of why we are, why we consume. Why do we consume so much? Why do we do it? And I know, and it's a dumb answer, it's because it makes us feel good. So to me, if, if we are to, you know, short wire that quality of humanists, we're not going to do it by somehow giving like great Dharma talks to people so that they begin to gradually let go of their addiction to matter. We're not going to do it by telling people, listen, I'm telling you, if you don't, if we don't stop living in this way, we are literally going to be like choked, coughing blood from the poisons in the atmosphere. Everything's going to catch on fire and die,

because that just clearly hasn't worked. No one's really, that was actually my favorite, one of my favorite parts of the movie, when God, what was, I don't remember what her character's name was. Oh, shit. Like the one person who had the right reaction, what's her name? When she started screaming, screaming, no, the God, what's her, she was in Mockingjay. I can't believe, she's a super famous actress. I can't believe I can't. Jennifer Lawrence Lawrence. She's on TV. She's the one person who has the logical reaction to a meteor fatted, which is like, we're all going to fucking die. And she's just like made fun of, immediately turned into a meme. You know, so. She is my favorite character. Amazing. I loved her. So anyway, what I'm saying is,

all of the current, as the clock keeps ticking, all of the subtle ways of trying to deal with this stuff seem to be somewhat pointless to the point where it seems like the idea is, let's hijack the human nervous system. Let's get people what they want, not tell them to revalue life. And by giving them what we want, I mean, let's find a way to hack into the human nervous system and blast people with digitized experiences that replicate why they travel. I'm sorry. I'm going to keep going back to that point. You know, there's other, there's almost a billion people and they're so different. You know, we have a lot of similarities, but we have a lot of differences. And yeah, there's other ways to hack into the human brain, besides the metaverse, right? A great way,

like we've been talking about throughout this conversation to hack into the human brain is through stories. And really, I think, you know, movies are incredibly powerful. Comedy, comedy is incredible, incredibly powerful. Like what if Pixar decided that it was going to just start making movies about this beautiful kind of world slash story that I have in my brain that a lot of people have in their brains right now that we're trying to get out and kind of like make more real for everybody. Right. And they're, and they're, they're so good at storytelling. And they would be, they'd be like putting those messages right into the brains of our kids who, you know, in 10 years and 15 years, they're going to be running the show, right? That's

incredibly powerful. Instead of just, you know, kind of movies about cars or movies about kind of escapism, right? Or, or, you know, whatever movies that are designed to just make money for the studio. If they were really kind of trying to hash out, like what does it mean to be human on this gorgeous planet that's in the process of degrading right now? And how do we, and then, you know, so I have, I have this kind of, I guess you could say vision or story in my brain that that I'm constantly sort of working on, like as I'm falling asleep and trying to figure out and trying to articulate and not doing a great job of it. And then the other thing that I have, which I wonder if a lot of people share, I think they do, is just this like, this deep sense of

paradox of being human, like to, even if you're vegan, right, to eat means to kind of like, to kind of remove habitat for like other species and other animals. It's like, it's just being alive on this planet, like, which is like constantly cycling carbon and, you know, people are getting born and other animals are getting born and they die and then they turn into trees and then fruits and then they get re-eaten again. It's like this, the earth is this, it's so beautiful, but in some sense, it's kind of brutal in the way. It's just like constantly chopping up bodies and then composting them and then making, it's sort of beautiful. At the same time, it's kind of horrifying. And, you know, humans need energy.

It seems like every time we come up with a new technology, which is kind of, it's a wonderful skill that we have as a species. We fuck it up, like it makes things get worse. We're like these really war-like apes that run around with spears and kill each other and bash each other on the head and then design like nuclear weapons that can be delivered at like ultrasonic speeds. You know, it's like we're such a paradox. You know, we do such wonderful things and, you know, if you kind of wake up on the wrong side of the bed, you can see like how kind of horrible we are too in a lot of ways. So I don't know. I think that if all, you know, close to a billion of us, we're sitting on that meditation cushion for, you know, an hour in

the morning and an hour in the evening, it would do wonders for our species. And maybe in a hundred years or a thousand years, we'll get to that point where we're all basically Buddhists and we're walking around. We're not afraid of death anymore, which allows us to be kind of really selfless with each other. And we're just kind of like enjoying the wonder of being in this cosmos together for a brief instant and the awareness of literally being the universe, little folds of the universe that are having conversations with each other and kind of enjoying jokes with each other and enjoying eating fruits with each other. It's just so fucking amazing that we're here at all. We should be constantly in a state of wonder, in my opinion, but we're not quite there yet. We

still have, you know, we still have people that don't have enough. There's artificial scarcity. There's people that can't get access to medicine. There's the whole global north, global south divide. Like we're kind of an adolescent species that I think climate and ecological breakdown is telling us to wake the fuck up. And I hope we do it soon and save what can still be saved on this amazing planet, right? But anyway, you know, until we have that sort of like level of kind of collective buddhahood, you know, maybe to get there to help bridge that gap. Again, I really think we need stories because I don't think you can have a movement that instead of having a few million people has a few billion people kind of making making this their life's goal to stop climate

and ecological breakdown. You don't get something that big unless you have really, really compelling stories in my opinion. Or I guess maybe if everyone is panicking enough because of all the floods and fires and heat waves, maybe you get that then. But then you're right. Like if you don't have the kind of positive stories that can lead to a feeling of solidarity, then everything might just kind of descend into chaos and be really horrible. And then you kind of get to the road, right? So I think we need stories at this kind of critical bottleneck in our species and in our planet's history. Yeah, I love, no, I love that. Yeah, I love it. It's a Chogyam Chopra Rinpoche, who was a great Buddhist teacher. That was he said that the way that the dharma, these ideas

will grow will spread is through art, that it's it art is a vehicle through which some of these ideas that do like anyone who has meditated or anyone who's like, you know, had any spiritual practice gets that intuition, that sense of like, wow, if everyone was doing this, there would be legitimate change in the world. Real, real, because you start to you start to plug into this like force field of meta, this like, to me, like one of the most kind of profound parts of my meditation practice is doing a few minutes of meta after the end of a sit. And what meta is, I'm sure a lot of your listeners know this is basically loving kindness, and you can you can sit there and kind of with the awareness of bodily sensations and like, you know, maybe

you're feeling these subtle vibrations, and you could basically beam loving kindness towards yourself, but also towards all beings in the universe, not even just on the earth, right? And you're beaming this like loving kindness, may all beings be happy, you know, like, your happiness is my happiness. My happiness is your happiness. I just want there to be, you know, happiness throughout the universe and love and harmony throughout the universe. And then when you start beaming that out, you realize that there's other beings, certainly on earth, probably on other planets that are doing the same thing. Yeah, beaming it to you. And you're just like, holy fuck, like I live in a universe where there are there are

beings that don't even know me, but that genuinely want the best for me. And to me, like that's such a powerful story, because you start coming out of this sense of being alone, and the sense of needing to battle for everything that's yours, and this, this sense of zero sum. And it all comes from realizing that the, the universe was here before you, the universe is going to go on after you. And you literally are the universe. So you don't, you start to dissolve the fear of death, right? Through kind of like this sense of profound connection. So I do wish everyone could have that. You can't give it to somebody just by talking. You have to, they have to experience it. And for them to experience it, it takes a little bit of work. It takes a little bit of commitment.

It takes some a willing to a willingness to relinquish some of these stories that we have in kind of Western society, right? That, you know, everything is the dollar and everything is science. You have to be able to kind of, or maybe that everything is Christianity, you know, and when I was growing up as a Catholic, like I literally had this image in my brain of some guy with a beard and a white robe in the clouds, right? So you have to be willing to give up some of that stuff and to just experience what's really happening like in your, basically in your body and in your mind, which is to me, like that's a very scientific thing to like just literally observe what's really going on, right? Right. Now that I, this is, yeah, this, um, what you're meta Tong Lin

is another name for it. The, um, the, that's a big piece of it is not like necessarily abandoning some like global cultural story, but yeah, just like whatever the reason that you have told yourself for why you're suffering for a second, get rid of that, give it up, forget it, and just experience the thing itself. And not just in the experience of what you're talking about, the beaming out of love, but in the experience of your own suffering, however you're suffering, if you're, you know, lonely or scared, or maybe you're going through, uh, you know, you have some disease and you're going through healing from that disease, whatever your experience, millions of other people are simultaneously having that identical

experience. So when you take your own story away and just feel that, then you are experiencing, um, the suffering of the world. It's not, you know, the stories everyone has about why they're hurting might be different. Generally they're not, but they're the feeling itself is real. And I love that stripping away the story. Um, and maybe that's where it needs to start is not with some like, you know, the conditioning, the money story, or the, you're going to be happy once you have this much money or this kind of house, but even deeper than that, just strip away the story that you tell yourself to help you cope with your own personal pain. And then you can start feeling compassion for everyone else and you can start feeling

compassion for the ignorance out there. Um, and I say that, you know, we, we all have ignorance and we all, we all react with ignorance, right? And we make things worse for ourselves and other people when we react. Um, but you know, there's a place for, I think there's a place for rage as well and for hard action to with, if it's done from a place of kind of centered spiritual, um, and, and a desire to protect as much as possible and to prevent suffering. Yeah. It's also interesting. I get a lot of, um, people, you know, that I, for example, like in responses and Twitter that say things like, um, like the earth's going to be fine. Like we're the ones that are going to be fucked. And it's, yeah. And it's this sense that,

like, um, almost like the, the subtext is like, why even bother trying? Like after 10, they're right. After 10 million years, the, this will be a geologic layer and biodiversity, even if this even if we don't stop the six mass extinction, even if we keep recklessly accelerating into the six mass extinction, after 10 million years, biodiversity will recover. There will be some other, you know, probably a lot of turning of species and the, the kind of species that are here in 10 million years might look very different, but they're right. But meanwhile, I mean, we're here for this, like this cosmic nanosecond on this planet and it's beautiful. And like, why wouldn't we want to, with that time, engage in, in trying to, you know, to help as much as we can to prevent

suffering and harm and death on this planet and to kind of, to, I don't know, to me, that's really meaningful to just like, try to make things better here for, for everyone and for also for nonhumans and to kind of figure this out. Like it's this, it's so confusing to be born into this hot mess, right? But there's something really, what else do we have to do with, with our few years on this earth, then to try to figure it out as best we can and to try to make things better. I don't know what else to do with this time. Like, I'd be really, I'd find it really depressing to not try, you know, like to not try to go back to the movie again, to not try to do everything that I can to, to make things better here. So, you know, I hope everyone starts to

kind of shoulder some of that load. And that, you know, we kind of, I don't know, we sort of celebrate about that. And I'm yearning for a sense of kind of solidarity and joy in this movement as we kind of do this together and try to pull things back and try to, you know, make things better for the people on this planet who don't have anything right now and who are suffering in ways that a lot of us in the United States can't even really imagine. All while trying to like figure this whole, like, how do we exist on this planet thing out, right? Peter, thank you. You made me feel better. I was afraid to talk to you, because I was, I don't know, I've been very, you just made me realize how absolutely cynical I've allowed myself to get

about the, regarding my ideas about climate change. So, I think that, yeah, I like your solution a lot better than mine. And yeah, it's a more beautiful thing to be part of telling stories that inspire people to help than to invent technologies that hypnotize people using hyper-advanced artificial intelligence so that their nervous systems are hijacked for the brief time that they're here so they won't hurt things. Brother, we just, we just got to keep doing everything we can, right? So, what a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you. Where can people find you? I'm on Twitter at climatehuman, and I also have a website, petercalmas.net, which I should really update, like, at least once a year. I got someone who can help you with that, friend.

Peter, thank you so much. It was a wonderful chat. Thank you. Thank you. That was Peter Calmas, everybody. All the links you need to find them will be at dunkitrustle.com. A tremendous thank you to our sponsors, Lucy, Blue Chew, and Squarespace. If you need those offer codes, you can find them at dunkitrustle.com. And if you enjoy this podcast, won't you subscribe to us? Join our Patreon. It's okay if you don't do any of that. I'm honored that you listen, and I will see you next week with two episodes. Until then, Hari Krishna. Extra Affordable Check out the latest in store and we're never short on options at jcp.com. All dressed up. Everywhere to go, JCPenny. A good time starts with a great wardrobe.

Next stop, JCPenny. Family gets-togethers to fancy occasions, wedding season two. We do it all in style. Dresses, suiting, and plenty of color to play with. Get fixed up with brands like Liz Claiborne, Worthington, Stafford, and Jay Ferrari. Oh, and thereabouts for kids. Super cute and extra affordable. Check out the latest in store and we're never short on options at JCP.com. All dressed up. Everywhere to go, JCPenny.