Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - David Pogue: How to Prepare for Climate Change! (#140)

Starting point is 00:00:02 Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishly from magic. So we are joined today by a legend, at least as far as I am concerned, and my family is concerned. Super excited to meet today's guest, David Pogue, so many different outlets. And I want to ask you first, David, if a hyper-intelligent alien wakes you up in the middle of the night and says, what are you? Who are you? How do you define yourself? You do so many things from writing to teach. TV to activism, to just real intellectualism. How do you define yourself to yourself? I mean, I think the one thing, everything I do has in common is I'm a science and tech explainer.

Starting point is 00:00:45 So it's buried over the years. It was the New York Times for 13 years. It's been CBS News Sunday morning since 2002. It's books. It's talks. It's podcasts with esteemed physicists. So, but it's all, you know, communicating science and tech to lay people. Yeah, and you do a phenomenal job. I want to talk to you later about issues of communication, because, you know, they all joke about scientists and engineers, as I'm sure you've heard, how do you know a scientist or engineer is outgoing? He looks at your shoes when he talks to you.

Starting point is 00:01:23 That's my favorite joke. I tell that everywhere I go. I got to get a new one. If you ever come up with the new one, promise you'll give me, you know, credit, or at least I can have the rights to buy them from you. Anyway, David, today you're joining the End of the Impossible podcast because of your marvelous new book, How to Prepare for Climate Change. And I'm going to put a whole bunch of bonus materials and links and so forth.

Starting point is 00:01:47 I first want to express my gratitude to Leo Leport. So I've listened to Leo longer than I've listened to you. And you guys were once together a long time ago. And actually, just this year, when the book came out, you were on this show. and I was listening to it with my son who is more blown away by your presence than almost anyone, except for Neil the Grass Tyson, who was your opening act, as we were discussing it later, earlier. So we were listening, and I was like, David, I wonder if I could get David. There's got to be some way.

Starting point is 00:02:15 I've had nine Nobel Prize winners on the show. Can I get David Pogue? And then I just, like, I reached out. And somehow you said yes and a fit of irrationality. You said yes, but I want to thank you for doing that because it exposed me, gave me a chance to go back. and look over all these wonderful things and express gratitude to Leo Lipport. I hope someday to meet him, maybe host him on the podcast. But he hosts the tech guy and Mac Break Weekly, which is what you were appearing.

Starting point is 00:02:42 But anyway, David, this book is really phenomenal and it's unique. I'm having Dr. Lawrence Krause on the podcast in the coming months to talk about his new book, The Physics of Climate Change. I've got that somewhere around here. He's a physicist like me, and he'll bring a different perspective and rebut every. you and I, no, I'm just kidding. Because your book is not about physics. It is like your other books.

Starting point is 00:03:05 You give these delicious, wonderful ticks and trips and trips and traps and hacks. I think of you as a hacker, and I mean that in the best possible way. Is that what animates you solving these problems, both on how to do the missing manual for iPhones that they don't give you all the way up to how to survive and thrive in the era that's certainly coming climate change? Is that how you think of yourself as a tinker and hacker like me? Yeah, I think so. I think, I mean, you're absolutely right that as a how-to author, that's been a through-line of my entire career.

Starting point is 00:03:36 So I started my writing career writing dummies books. I wrote Max for Dummies and opera for Dummies, classical music for dummies, magic for dummies. And so early, early on in my 20s, I learned to explain stuff simply and winnow out that which was necessary and that which was marketing overload in terms of features. So, yeah, so I've always been a how-to author. This book actually wasn't my idea. I'll freely admit it. I pitched an entirely different book to Simon Schuster, and their chief of nonfiction, Priscilla Payton said, you know, yeah, yeah, we like that. We'll do that book eventually.

Starting point is 00:04:15 But first, we've been kicking around this idea and we think you're the guy. And she says, let me lay this on you. How to prepare for climate change. And like from the moment she said that, I thought. thought, this is the intertwining of the two threads of my life, a how-to author and a science explainer, right, that the two sides could come together in this. And I remember saying could be like where to live and how to ensure and how to invest and what to grow, how to talk to your children. And these became the chapters and her title became the title. Like nothing changed

Starting point is 00:04:52 from that moment in early 2019. Well, I think of it as a sort of a Bible. self-help book, everything rolled into one. I'll note it is longer than the Old Testament, which is kind of cool. And it's certainly more dramatic, although it's hard to compete with God, except in the flooding chapters where you will rival God, of course. And so I found this book very, very, well, unique for lack of a better word, because you don't start with the premise of, you know, is it happening, you know, what is actually the facts and the physics, as Lawrence you know, we'll presumably discuss with me when he comes on. But, but rather, it is happening. And like any other thing, we in science, we talk about, or engineering rather, we talk about

Starting point is 00:05:36 risk matrices. What is the probability of a given risk? What is the financial impact or human impact? But, you know, I always point out, none of us, and no matter how brilliant we were, had global pandemic will strike. And, you know, in our risk registers, we're building our telescope. So I ask you, you know, in this book, it's a fact. We talk about things that aren't, that aren't probabilities anymore. They're facts. The climate is changing. Humans play some role in it. And so you start with that premise. And why was that important as just a given as a starting point to start from that from that assumption? Wow. What an incredible observation, right? Really. That was literally what kept me awake at night is that at the time in 2019, climate change was so controversial,

Starting point is 00:06:20 more controversial than it is today. And I knew two things. I knew number one, I was going to be beaten up. no matter what I did. And number two, I didn't, I'm not, I'm thin-skinned. I don't like that. So my whole thing was, how can I write a book that nobody can object to? Now, when we say climate change denier, I think that meaning has changed. I think we used to think of a denier as someone who says, the climate isn't changing. And I think that number of people in that category are banishingly small today. I think you'd be hard-pressed to get someone to say the weather is the seasons are the same as they were in the 80s. I mean, it's look at the news. Look at out your window. Today, I think a climate denier is more likely to be somebody who says, well, yeah, the seasons and the weather are changing,

Starting point is 00:07:13 but it's a natural cycle. Earth has always had this. It's not man-made. But the beauty for me, as the author of this book, is I don't care. I don't care if you think it's. natural or not, you still need to prepare. You know, it's still doing a number on your family and your house and your work and your life and your health. So you still need to prepare either way. So the way, so that was one way that this terror of being attacked manifested itself is starting from the stance that, look, let's all agree, something's going on, that you're in danger.

Starting point is 00:07:49 How do you fix it? And the second thing was, you can't tell by reading it, but there are so many footnotes in this book that the editor suggested. No, no, no, we will because, David, I have a 97-page supplemental file that I'm putting in the YouTube description. I love it. It's scholarly, David. It is extremely scholarly. I'd like to invite you to get your PhD with me based on this scholarship. It's rigorous.

Starting point is 00:08:16 It is in all seriousness. This is extremely rigorous. I was going to bring that up. Yeah, there were so many. I read each and every one, by the way. I read each and every one. Of course, like a good academic. I'm looking for my name to be cited.

Starting point is 00:08:26 For some reason that you misspelled keeling and you spelled keeling. Yeah, the text was so thick with little superscript numbers that my editor said, like, no one can read this. Let's rip them all out and make them all in a giant end notes document. And that's the 97-page addendum that you're talking about. So the book is much cleaner to read, but I can assure you there's not a phrase in there that's not backed up by research. Well, it's so interesting about this book, like all your books, it's practical. And it's amazing.

Starting point is 00:09:01 Like, how can it be practical? And I thought about reading it. As I'm reading it, I like to be a little philosophical, but I was thinking of Pascal, Blaise Pascal and his famous wager. And the wager is, robs around the existence of a deity. And he basically says, makes the case that even if you don't believe in God, you should act as if God exists. Now, we're not going to get into God's existence because the penalty, in other words, the risk penalty times the probability is infinite, you know, eternal damnation. You know, if you're wrong and God does exist and you act as if he doesn't exist, it's better. So, but in this book, you can act the way that this book informs you to act,

Starting point is 00:09:36 and it doesn't matter. It's true whether you believe it or not. And in that sense, I found, as Mark Twain said, your books don't, maybe, maybe they don't echo or repeat, but they rhyme in that I was reading, a rereading again, your book about life hacks and, you know, basically, it's a book where you talk about, like, as you're driving down the freeway, if the exit sign has an exit number on the right hand side of the sign, that means the exit will be on the right. And here in Southern California, it's like sometimes there are some freeways here, David, I don't know if you remember from your time that you spend in California. There are some freeways that go north, south, east, and west in L.A., but we're not going to talk about LA.

Starting point is 00:10:13 But anyway, this book is as practical as that, because you're giving examples, insurance, investing. And I thought it very, very beautiful, that you open up with psychology. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that. Once you decided to write this book and make this book up, how did psychology come to be present in it? And why did you lead off with it?

Starting point is 00:10:35 I think my interest in climate change came from my feelings about climate change. So I like many people, many, you know, intellectual, coastal people had, you know, melancholia, climate melancholia, or eco-despair, as they call it. And, you know, the world that we've always known is changing beneath our feet. It's terrifying. We have, you know, I have children. I'm hoping for grandchildren.

Starting point is 00:11:03 You know, so it occurs to me that the first way to prepare for, climate change is somehow accepting it, is somehow coming to terms with it to help yourself. And the above-mentioned editor, Priscilla Payton, hilariously, after reading the manuscript, said, I think you've written the first uplifting book about climate change. And what she meant by that is that an uplifting 12-step program. Yeah, that's right. That's right. In any realm of depression. It's not just that you feel like your situation sucks. It's that you feel like your situation sucks

Starting point is 00:11:41 and you're helpless to change it. That's the key. They did a cool study in a prison where mental health problems are rampant where they allowed inmates one each week to arrange the chairs for the group movie night or the group events. And just that tiny bit of control

Starting point is 00:12:00 over the environment gave people a boost. made them sleep better at night. So that's kind of the idea here. Taking any of the preparation steps in this book will make you feel better about life because you've taken some steps to control your situation. And so really haunting the entire book is this notion of psychology and feeling better. So I did think like we should really start off with calling a spade a spade. You're reading this book because you're worried. Yeah. Yeah, and in that sense, having agency, I found that to be uplifting, as you say.

Starting point is 00:12:41 And so I wanted to commend you on that kind of counterintuitive way to start off a book about, which necessarily at its root is a book about physics and the impact of things downstream from a physical process, which is, as Lawrence points out in his book, if you took all the carbon and all the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere and condensed it magically, it made it into like, you know, kind of a layer that coated the planet. It would coat the entire planet one millimeter thick. Now, imagine like a shell, like carbon fiber shell surrounding the earth. It's visceral. And in this case, you know, but it's the way that we talk about climate change.

Starting point is 00:13:18 It's in the future. And yeah, it's bad for people in the future. But I always say, like, maybe I'll ask you this, David, because, you know, I know that I love you. What's the name of your paternal great, great, great grandfather? What's the first name? My paternal great, great, great, great, grandfather. Or five generations back. I mean, his last name was presumably Pogue.

Starting point is 00:13:38 That's right, yeah. But I made it easy, but the first name. Yeah, no idea. You don't know. So I say, well, that would be fools to think that doesn't apply to us. So in other words, your great, great, great, great grandson or daughter, five generations. I probably won't know about you. So sometimes I hear the argument, who cares about that guy or that girl?

Starting point is 00:13:56 Like, we should live for today. How do you answer people that make those kinds of a? objection. I mean, that's just a moral conscience issue. That's just, you know, the central thing about caring for others, even people we don't know. I mean, it has nothing to do with them being my descendants. I care for people I don't know no matter who they are. Yes. Yeah. And in the sense that we, you know, we have, you know, evidence, we have reason, we have the faculty of rational thought, you know, being able to take action, I have heard from some of your previous podcast that I've listened to, people criticizing you and saying, well, you're thinking rather venally. You know, you're saying,

Starting point is 00:14:36 how could you invest? How can you decide where to move? And isn't that part of your privilege and that you have agency in all these dimensions and maybe everyone else doesn't? How do you answer critics like that? Yeah, that's another thing that haunted this whole book. Climate change, as we all know, disproportionately affects poor people, communities of color. always has, for some really nasty reasons having to do with redlining and policy early on, this is not supposed to be a book on how to spend money to come out ahead when the climate chips are down. So there is a chapter on where to live, where to move, but it begins with an acknowledgement that not everybody can move of any income level.

Starting point is 00:15:21 You have a social circle, you have a job, but it takes off from the premise that 40, million Americans a year do move. They get out of school, they get out of military, they get married, they get divorced, they get a new job. And so increasingly, where to move is becoming one of the decision factors, especially by the way, after the pandemic, when we realize, oh my God, I don't have to go into an office every day to do my job. So you can now choose more or less where to be to do your remote work. So that's on the where to move thing. And on the, on the investment thing, I really stressed about that until I started interviewing investors. By the way, I'm not an expert on any of the topics in this book. I'm not an investment guy or an

Starting point is 00:16:08 insurance guy or a psychology guy. It's all based on expert interviews with fantastic people. And what the insurance people told me was, yeah, investing is about making money if you have money to invest, but when you're investing in companies that will make you money through clean energy, you're doing something good for everybody. You're supporting mitigation as well as adapting and making a profit from the adaptation. So I recognize that not every American is capable of making investments, but if those who do make investments that support green technologies, then the world is better for everybody. And I guess the last piece of that answer those are the two smoking guns on the is this an elite book question all the other chapters

Starting point is 00:16:57 how to garden how to prepare a go bag how to survive a hurricane all of those are things that are free to everybody and also the impact of these things and by the way the footnotes the 97 pages in all seriousness they contain tremendous numbers of resources for free websites free activities you know plotters modelers um computers all the way down to like basically sell help, you know, free self-help organizations where you can go or not self-help, group help. And I think it's fascinating. And it's a wonderful service, David, in all honesty. I want to turn to, you know, something that I, by the way, I am, I'm really pretty

Starting point is 00:17:40 vehemently opposed to the term denier as a Jewish person. I find that that term is so loaded, it's so freighted, that it's almost impossible to have a conversation. It's like calling somebody a racist. Like, once you use that racist term, as a person. I was by, almost was by Neil deGrasse Tyson later earlier this week. But that was in, and, you know, maybe it was well deserved. I don't know. But we had a wonderful conversation. I'm just kidding. But the, but that term is, is a loaded one. So it's, it's hard to have a

Starting point is 00:18:07 conversation when somebody accuses you. So, but one thing that people that, not, that don't object, that don't deny that it's happening, as you say, there are very few people that actually will say that. But they'll say that, you know, requiring the exact termination, of the phenomena that led to the problem that we're in is short-sided. And in fact, in some ways, it's against the scientific method. And one of my favorite ways to kind of play that devil's advocate, maybe literally, maybe figuratively, is ask you about something, which I know you're an expert in, but maybe I'll describe anyway, the great horse manure crisis of 1894.

Starting point is 00:18:44 Are you familiar with that? Oh. Okay. So back in 1894, in the Times of London, a writer estimate, that in 50 years, every street in London would be buried under nine feet of manure. And it actually took an exact same tack in Wall Street in Lower Manhattan as well. They were claiming that the stock market was going through these awful kind of gyrations because traders couldn't get to work.

Starting point is 00:19:13 And then actually, they'd come in. They get really tremendous illnesses. The water was polluted and terrified. And of course, the way that we solve that is not with horse diapers or getting horse to use a toilet or something like that, it was, we invented the automobile, or the automobile's rise came up. So what do you say to those that say, by saying that we just curtail everything, we're actually diminishing the power of human ingenuity to innovate our way out of this problem and perhaps go beyond it. In other words, the way that the automobile radically improved life,

Starting point is 00:19:46 not just made the horse manure problem better, solving that, but actually improved our life in innumerable ways. Who's to say that innovation can't solve this problem as well? I mean, it will. Let's hope it will. Right now, we're pulling every string we've got. We are pursuing every avenue. In fact, the last chapter of my book is called Where to Find Hope. And it was for people who have spent through the last four years of presidential administration, seeing the words climate change wiped from federal websites and pulling out of the Paris Agreement and so on. It turns out that no matter what the federal government has been doing for the last few years, an awful lot of people, institutions, and even 24 states are still moving full speed ahead to solve the problem. There is all kinds of innovation going on. Another related question is, is it right to write a book about adaptation, which this book is about,

Starting point is 00:20:47 will that cause people to lose their zeal to stop polluting in the first place? Is it throwing in the towel and saying, oh, okay, let's just cope with what we've got instead of trying to fix the problem? No, no one's saying that. We're all saying we have to do everything. We're way behind. We're 40 years behind getting started. We have to try everything. So there are some amazing new technologies at work. I mean, those carbon removal plants that suck carbon dioxide back out of the air and pump it into the ground or even some of them are even selling it to carbonated beverage companies. They need carbon dioxide. That's a big point.

Starting point is 00:21:30 Even the IPCC, the intergovernmental panel on climate change, confesses that we're not going to get there unless those machines are part of. of the equation. So yeah, we need to innovate, we need to mitigate, we need to adapt, we need to do everything simultaneously. And the other, I mean, the other problem with criticizing dismantling the fossil fuel thing is that it doesn't hurt us to do so. In other words, solar and wind power are already less expensive than most other kinds of power and in most parts of the country. And it's millions of new jobs. It's a whole new infrastructure to build.

Starting point is 00:22:13 Why wouldn't we want it? Why wouldn't we want to make this change as long as it helps everybody. It gets less bad stuff that we're breathing. It stops climate change. It doesn't. And of course, reusable clean energy like wind and solar will be with us till the end of the planet. Sucking oil out of the ground won't.

Starting point is 00:22:34 That's got a finite end to it. Yeah, that's one thing that Charles Keeling's son, who's a professor here at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, they, you know, he makes the point there's a finite amount of carbon on the earth. It's not like there's an infinite amount. And so he predicts, I think there's a peak, just, you know, if you were to use some efficiency factor times the total storehouse of carbon in the planet, you know, there weren't infinite numbers of dinosaurs. Let's put it that way. So, so eventually we'd run out of carbon and then, you know, the problem solved. The question is, you know, do we. we reach some tipping point. The last, you know, kind of non-specific to this book, but kind of general to global warming or climate change, is this notion that, you know, we already have a solution that actually could be advocated for on behalf of by readers of your book, and we're talking about how to prepare for climate change. And that is nuclear power. And in fact, nuclear power has this awful stigma, but actually the coal that replaced the nuclear power plants in Europe after the Fukushima disaster, you know, contributed in some way much more to human

Starting point is 00:23:41 suffering and human illness than the, than radioactivity ever did, not to minimize the tragedies, et cetera. But nuclear power we know is as a tremendous capability to power all electrical needs. And yet we, here in Southern California, just deactivated one reactor, San Anofrey, not too long ago. And there aren't plans to build any new ones here, at least in California. what do you make about nuclear as a not not obviously from the physics perspective, but for advocacy. You know, you actually go through about 10, 15 pages of really practical advice. Coming down to admitting that some of the times the best way to get your Congress, you know, critters' attention is through a donation.

Starting point is 00:24:24 You're not actually afraid to say that, which I love that you do. You're a realist. You're a pragmatist. But anyway, getting back to the advocacy, why would, you know, it doesn't play as big a role in book? And I'm curious, is there a reason for that? Yeah, I think, I think because, well, there is some, there's a chapter on advocacy. And I think that most of the results of advocacy is, again, mitigation. I got to tell you, you think this book is long at 620 pages. It used to be longer. When I turned this, when I turned

Starting point is 00:24:59 this book in, it was a thousand pages long. And my editor was just like, oh, no. No, oh no, oh no. We can't do this. And she suggested that I draw a line between adaptation, which the book is supposed to be about, and all the mitigation stuff. There was all this stuff on how to reduce your carbon footprint. We cut that out. We made that an online appendix, got 300 pages off the book. So I think that's probably the reason there's not more in it about advocacy. That and the fact that it's not a political issue to me. It's a humanity survival issue, and I really didn't want to get all messed up. I think that the word Trump doesn't even appear in the book, even though I was writing it during that period. Because, like, why lose people through some political reference when I had them with me up until then? And on the nuclear stuff, you know, I love – and you probably – I'm stomping on your turf here. You probably know way more about this than I do. But what I've learned is that uranium powers our nuclear plants today

Starting point is 00:26:10 because when nuclear power was getting started decades ago, the government wanted something that could also be weaponized. They use that element to develop nuclear power because it could also be made into bombs. But there are other elements that can't be used for bombs that don't have the meltdown potential that could still be nuclear power. there's thorium nuclear that that's been demonstrated in five or six countries Bill Gates is heavily invested in this thing traveling wave nuclear which is a different isotope

Starting point is 00:26:45 of uranium and can even be derived from the fuel rise that we're throwing away from our current plants so nuclear is not out of the question at all even if you're afraid of uranium power plants Yeah. Did I get that right? That's absolutely correct. Yeah, thorium is an amazing. Yes, absolutely. Thorium is one of the most promising alternatives to uranium, which has a much lower half-life and much more, it cannot be weaponized, as you say, as uranium, plutonium can be. That's certainly true. And there may have been also other governmental reasons that, you know, this is in the race to defeat, you know, an enemy during war. now we don't have those time pressures. You'd think that we'd be acting more, you know, kind of cogently.

Starting point is 00:27:31 But I think it has as terrible, you know, just like the search for aliens, you know, it's kind of damaged by the, you know, prosthetic foreheads that appear in every sci-fi movie. You know, the association of, you know, fusion or fission power with uranium, with bombs, with destroying the planet is, of course, unfortunate, but, you know, maybe is a guilt by association. that's unnecessary. I love the fact that you, you know, you dig in, literally, pun intended, into things like gardening, because all these things that you talk about, David, this is actually a stealth science book. And I know you are a science technology report. But this, you know, I was like thinking with my kids, you know, it's just terrible to admit, but I'll admit it to you

Starting point is 00:28:15 because we're friends. We go way back to the top of the hour. But I was planting some seeds after I started reading this book, as I do every year. And I was thinking, it actually allows you to learn tremendous amounts of things from statistics. There's something called Pareto principle, which is that 80% of your results come from 20% of your crops or, you know, in your business, you know, 80% of the problems come from 20% of your fellow reporters in the newsroom. And then there's, and so you actually see 80% of your seeds are, you know, that blossom come from just 20%.

Starting point is 00:28:48 And I actually observed that exact phenomena. I tweeted about this. And I'm like, damn you, Pareto, why do you have to be so accurate? But then one of my kids, I got a bunch of kids, and 20% of them are evil. No, they're not evil. They're lovely. But 20% of them will come up and they'll destroy like one of these saplings, one of these beautiful saplings that like, you know, won't grow in just dirt.

Starting point is 00:29:10 Like we can't just go to the, you know, go to the store and get some silica and some carbon, mix them together with some phosphorus. It won't grow. It needs microbes. And so I'm teaching them about microbes. And then, you know, so it's biology. And I'm a physicist. What do I know about biology, right?

Starting point is 00:29:22 spherical cows are the most closely related things to biology that I get it to. And then one of my kids like takes the whole thing of seeds and like falls in the ground. And I swear, it was like someone took a sledgehammer to my, it was just like, I was like going to yell at him. And he's like three years old almost. But I realize how close you get to these things, like, you know, almost like a goldfish or something. You know, it becomes like part of you. And then you learn about it through getting your hands literally dirty. And so, again, this is a science book.

Starting point is 00:29:53 It's a book for children, even though you talk about thinking about the children and protecting children later on. So was that kind of, you know, one of the goals is like the part of coping and acceptance is taking action. And I feel like that was a very strong theme in this book. Yeah. And not only that, but this is a book about personal adaptation. In other words, I, this all came, this whole mitigation adaptation thing came from this this quote by Obama's senior science advisor, he said when it comes to climate change, there's mitigation, there's adaptation, and there's suffering.

Starting point is 00:30:30 And how much suffering we're going to do depends on how much of the first two we're going to do. This is John Holdren. And the thing is, if you look on Amazon right now, there's something like 300 or 400 books about climate change mitigation. And there were zero books, about the second half of his equation. There were no books about adaptation. None. That's what I wrote. I wrote the only one. And so, but adaptation isn't a new thing to businesses and governments and industry. I mean, that's why cities build sea walls. That's adaptation. That's why Monsanto is developing drought resistant seeds. That's adaptation. So the question is, what things can an individual do? What can families do? And so that that's where this, peculiar set of chapters came from, you can set up a garden. Even if you live in an apartment, you can do gardening. You can check over your insurance and realize, oh my gosh, nobody's home

Starting point is 00:31:31 insurance covers flooding. Nobody's. And flooding is a big, big deal. There's so many great statistics in the book, as you have shrewdly observed. But one of my favorite is that seven of the 10 most flooded states in the U.S. are not on the coasts. They're inland states that are flooding from things like the ground, getting baked by drought, and then a heavy rain can't soak in so it floods, or dams breaking or rivers overflowing their banks and stuff like that. So anyway, so that's where this peculiar set of chapters came from. The number of things an individual can do isn't infinite.

Starting point is 00:32:11 And I just wanted to make sure I covered everything you could do. And as a graduate of Case Western Reserve University in beautiful Cleveland, Ohio, as I am, a former Spartan like you from Cleveland. Yes, I know that. I also point out that even though you talk about something which at another interview, which shall be nameless, you know, could be construed as elitism, actually it's kind of the reverse. Because you say, you know, moving to Cleveland, your dollar stretches two times as far as a day. does here in Sandy, maybe four times as far as it does here in San Diego or New York City. And actually, is that not a dividend to a parent who says, look, the quality of life is better. I love Cleveland, Ohio.

Starting point is 00:32:57 You know, it's, and it's certainly, you know, my main objection in 1993 when I graduated was the winters, you know, are so harsh. And it's a good thing that they only last from, you know, September 30th to May 30th. It actually snowed on my graduation day in 1993. And I don't think it's done that recently, right? No. So, yeah, so you're talking about the chapter about where to consider moving. And, you know, the basic rule is you want to move north far enough to avoid the hurricanes and the heat. You know, west far enough to avoid the hurricanes on the east coast and the ticks of the mosquitoes. East far enough to avoid the droughts and the wildfires. And as you say, that leaves you with the Great Lakes area. And all these grand old cities that used to be far more populous, you know, Cleveland, Duluth, Cincinnati, Madison, Syracuse, that people fled when industry went away. Now they're poised to be climate havens. And yeah, for Cleveland, that figure is a dollar in New York City buys you $2.71

Starting point is 00:34:00 cents worth of stuff in Cleveland. It's incredible how much house you can buy in Cleveland. It is. But the 14th cities... And a culture and the arts. Exactly. It's not just about climate havens, right? The 14 cities I picked in the book to look at are ones that also have great quality of life, great people, great workforce, diversity, room to grow. Education. Hospitals. If you want anything in the climate change era, you want access to good health care, airports, and so on.

Starting point is 00:34:33 So I was very happy to. And I actually did a story for CBS Sunday morning on this topic. What's the best climate haven city in America? and actually visited Madison, Madison, Wisconsin. And, you know, that's the same argument. Right. Isn't that really cold? It's five degrees warmer than it was in the 80s,

Starting point is 00:34:56 and it's expected to get another 11 degrees warmer in the winters by 2050. So those cold, cold winters of those Great Lake cities, yeah, but they're getting warmer, and that's why you want to move there now. And as you point out, so I see. spent right after Case Western, I went to University of Wisconsin at Madison. No. So you're like, you're following me around. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:35:25 Yeah, exactly. So there, and there you point out, which I always love this little treat. First of all, the best farmers market in the world every Saturday morning on the Capitol. And you could always see the Capitol because, as you point out, the architecture, what does it do? They have zoning rules. You're not allowed to build anything. not just taller than the Capitol building, but that would block your view of the Capitol building.

Starting point is 00:35:50 So it'll never become a concrete jungle. David, next I want to introduce our audience who has never heard this term on The Into the Impossible podcast. Reminder, we're talking with David Pogue, one of my favorite authors of all time. I can't believe he's on the show. He's kind of hanging out with somebody like me, but I've listened to him for years,

Starting point is 00:36:10 decades probably closer to reality Sunday morning, CBS. We watch them all the time. And it's funding for me, David, to have a second generation of my family involved in the Pogue worship that we do so have. Clearly, you have excellent taste. Someday I'll get a finger puppet made of you like we did with Galileo, Galilee. But that will be after maybe your next book comes out. I want to talk now about a term that we've never used. This is a neologism, as they used to say at the New York Times, where you used to be regular.

Starting point is 00:36:45 And that is, at least for this audience, Tio Tawaki. Tio Tawaki. Can you explain what that is and how one should deal with that in the coming years and a practical way, as you describe and how to prepare for climate change? Yeah, that's one of these survivalist acronyms. It stands for the end of the world as we know it. And they have all these great ones. You know, there's S-H-T-F, which is when. when the hits the fan.

Starting point is 00:37:11 And it all refers to... Bug out bag. Yeah, that's right. When the chips are really down and disaster hits. And what's really curious is that the survivalists, you know, some of whom are whack jobs, but all of them have this premise that the world is going to be in bad shape and they're going to be sitting pretty when the rest of us are fumbling for a bottle of water at the grocery store. They love the whole pandemic thing.

Starting point is 00:37:38 They love hurricanes. They love wildfires. They are not making runs to the grocery store. They do not worry about where they're going to get gasoline for their generators. They've already got it. They have studied how to ride out this kind of disruption. And believe it or not, some of that leaks into this book, leaks into this concept of personal preparation. Obviously, I'm not talking about building an underground bunker with food for six months.

Starting point is 00:38:05 But I do think it's safe no matter where you live to have. have two weeks of storable groceries, you know, beans and canned stuff, in case you are supposed to lock down in your house for a while, as just happened in 2020, right? These survivalists are like, aha, pandemic, see you suckers, while the rest of us were panicking about leaving our homes. So there's all kinds of reasons you might want to have simple preparations, like a storehouse of food, like some water in the basement, like a go bag. I helped my youngest kid make a go bag for his Boy Scout Merit badge. And you know what? It was fun. You know, it was a scavenger hunt. We ran around a go bag is something you keep in a backpack you keep in the front closet for when

Starting point is 00:38:56 you are told by authorities to evacuate. And it's got everything you'd need to last for a couple days outside your home. It's got snacks and water purification pills, first aid kit, A flashlight, a mirror, stuff like that. And I mean, to people in California, as you must know, Brian, this is not a new concept. A lot of Californians already have them. Increasingly, there's no place in America where having a go bag isn't useful. I mean, I live in Connecticut, and you would think, well, what on earth is the problem with Connecticut? I'll tell you, Hurricane Sandy was a problem in Connecticut.

Starting point is 00:39:33 We lost power for six days. it was cold. We had no heat, no electricity, no internet, no TV, nothing. I had three little kids. And yeah, sure, you spend the first afternoon playing cards by candlelight and talking about how lucky we are to live in the modern era. You know what? By that night, you're losing your gourd. Dad, what can we do? So it doesn't let. I want a pizza. Yeah, six days was listening. But again, that's an activity. Another example of kind of the homesteading education of the bygone era that you can engage in with this really phenomenal book, How to Prepare for Climate Change. I have it in Kindle and other formats and audio as well. We can listen to it. But I want to also mention that one of my sons, when hearing about this, he said, David needs some merch. He needs some merch. So I was thinking about some Pogue brand bugout bags. What do you think? Can I get a little kickback from my, of my older sons. Absolutely. You need some of my personal, for sure. So speaking of kids, before we close out the show with the questions I ask,

Starting point is 00:40:44 all my guests who are so illustrious, just like you and honor me by coming on the end of the Impossible Podcasts relating to kids, the one part of the book I found kind of a downer was, but only because it's reality, is that people are having fewer and fewer children. I think last year was one of the fewest on record, both in the U.S. and Europe. And, you know, part of that is because of climate anxiety and some case, obviously COVID was, you know, some people were saying, we're going to have a boom in weddings. And I said to my wife, or divorces, you know, it just depends on, you know, what side you want to focus on. But this, this thing. And then, and then you bring up all these statistics in the footnotes again, let's say, you know, only kids are a lot more likely to be overweight. I don't know what my excuse is. I'm overweight. I have three brothers. You could have any one of them, by the way, if you want, no, I'm just kidding. I love my brothers. But how is it, you know, how can we deal with that? I found that only because, you know, if we have more people on Earth, we have more scientists, we have more engineers, we have more committed citizens, even if they're not scientists or

Starting point is 00:41:48 engineers. I despair that because I think, you know, we're here on Earth. We don't know why. But one of the most delightful things is engaging the next generation of human beings and having them. And if we don't have them, we won't be able to engage. Anyway, what do you make of that trend that seems to be in decline, the birth? the birth rate, the fertility rate, whatever you want to call it?

Starting point is 00:42:07 I don't think you have to worry about population. If that's what you're saying, if you think there are enough people worried about the future that they won't have children. That number is a tiny number of people. If you look at where the population booms are happening, China, India, South America, Central America, we have no worries about the world becoming underpopulated. In fact, it's overpopulation that underlies all of this climate. concern. What are they going to eat when we hit 9.7 billion people by 2050? I mean,

Starting point is 00:42:43 what are we going to feed them? The population is growing by billions. And in many countries, consumption equals success. And some of the experts I talked to said, it's not just decarbonization of our energy network that we have to work on. We also have to work on this idea that the purpose of being on Earth is to acquire stuff. That's another part of what's driving the climate crisis is we buy more stuff, we fly more places, and so on. There are those, there are experts who say that we will have to also scale back our consumption-driven universe. And that's, you know, if there are fewer people, that means fewer people consuming, it means less factories belching out methane and carbon dioxide, less people eating beef, which is, oh man, if there's anything that blew

Starting point is 00:43:39 my brains out researching this book, impact of beef. That's 12 gallons of methane per cow per hour. And by the way, methane, yeah, methane is 80 times worse than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. So, oh my God, I have not put another bite of dead cow in my mouth since I learned that. But anyway, yeah, so it is depressing that there are people who are... I made up for it. I make up for that, David. I made up for it. Sorry. It is, yeah. So it is a worthy concern to worry about the next generations and to be depressed about the world we're leaving them. That's legitimate. But one thing you don't have to worry about is not enough babies and not enough future scientists.

Starting point is 00:44:29 those numbers are still skyrocketing. All right, David. Well, we've reached the final conclusion of the show when I ask my illustrious guest to answer the following three questions, which I call the thrilling three impossible questions. To hear David's answer, you're going to have to subscribe to my mailing list, Brian Keating.com, and I will send it over to you post-haste. And the first one, David, revolves around your expertise. You've done so much for both PBS.

Starting point is 00:44:59 You've been a host, many, many specials on PBS, including how many did you do? 18 Nova special, science now, the elements, hunting the elements, just so many things. Plus being involved as the MC in the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. Therefore, I can ask you this question. David, if you're willing to play along, can you please first begin with a 14-dimensional representation of loop quantum gravity that is unified with the electromagnetic and electro-week physics theories? I'll give you a minute. No, I'm just kidding, David. Oh, my God.

Starting point is 00:45:33 It's every podcast. I'm sure you've got to ask that all the time. I know you're sick of that question. You're sick of that question, aren't you? All right, no, seriously. When in the religion of Judaism, the tradition is you wish somebody to live to 120, because that's the age Moses lived until. I want to ask you, when you get to the age of 120 and spring forth this mortal coil,

Starting point is 00:45:53 what wisdom do you want to leave in what is known in Hebrew as an ethical will, a kind of a wisdom will, not a material will, but a wisdom will that you, biological and ideological errors will be air too. That's a good one. That's almost as hard as the physics question. I think the wisdom that I would leave is a quote from Wayne Gretzky. He once said, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take. and that has been the most useful piece of information in my own life.

Starting point is 00:46:32 Every time I considered undertaking a project and people said, oh my God, that won't work or that's been done or why bother you won't make money from that. Whatever it is, you don't know until you do the project whether or not it'll be a hit or not. I left The New York Times in 2013. I used to write a weekly column. Since then, I'm a freelancer for them. And what that means is when you have an idea for a story, you pitch it to the editors. And they either hired it knew the story or they say no thanks.

Starting point is 00:47:04 Well, my hit rate is about on par with every other freelancer, which is about two and ten ideas they take. So you pitch them 10. And two of them, they'll say yes to. You miss 100% of the shots you don't take. Wow. Yeah. And also, as Gretzky said before he retired, he said, I stopped. playing hockey because they wanted to start paying me with a check, with a check. Get it, David?

Starting point is 00:47:32 Okay, next question. Sorry, dad jokes. I figure I could do at least one dad joke to you. Next one involves Arthur C. Clark's famous film, the 2001 of Space Odyssey by Kubrick. You've seen that, I assume. There's a monolith, which looks a lot like an iPhone four when you used to cover that. There's these monoliths and these apes come up to and they're hitting it, they're bashing it. But it's meant to to be kind of like a time capsule from an ancient alien civilization. And we can't talk about that legally. I'm forbidden by NASA to talk about my exploits with aliens. But I want to ask you, if you had a billion-year time capsule, what would you put on it or in it to encapsulate what humans have learned about the natural universe or technology?

Starting point is 00:48:14 It seems to me our greatest distinction with the rest of the animal kingdom and our greatest distinction in the universe as we know it is our creativity. is our art, is our ability to contemplate consequence. So I would put in that capsule every kind of art and science examples. So not just the obvious ones, music, painting, sculpture, but also our creative accomplishments in other realms, you know, architecture, engineering, physics. I think that would be what we would want to communicate to the future species

Starting point is 00:48:55 we weren't all that bad. Very good. And the last question also involves Arthur C. Clark. I'm the co-director of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination at UC San Diego. Wow. And he had all these different laws, one of which is any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And another one is for every expert.

Starting point is 00:49:16 There's an equal and opposite expert. But the last one is how I got the name of the podcast. And it really relates to advice to your former self. and the quote is, the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. That's the name of my podcast. I'm going to ask you, what about life perplexed, a 20-year-old, 30-year-old self? And by the way, belated happy birthday. I think you just came up on a birthday and not too long ago.

Starting point is 00:49:42 What perplexed you when you were 30 years younger than you are now that would give a younger version of you the courage to go into the impossible as you so have? I don't know if this is wise for everybody to take, but if I could give myself advice back then, it would be the money will follow. Don't do stuff just for the money. Do stuff that fulfills you. You'll figure out the money later. I wish I had known that when I was much younger. That's wonderful.

Starting point is 00:50:15 Well, David, I want to thank you so much for being an inspiration to me, keeping me and my kids entertained and my wife for many, many years. I wish you all the success till 120 and beyond perhaps. And thank you for writing this a particularly useful, actionable, and hopeful book. It really is. And I want to just thank you so much for the impact you've had in my life towards the good. Wow. Well, thank you, man.

Starting point is 00:50:38 This was obviously a huge gift to my ego. And your kind words meet the world. And I'm glad writing this book wasn't a shot I didn't take. Thanks, David. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Thanks for listening to End of the Impossible with Professor Brian Keating. Please support the show by rating, commenting, sharing, and leaving reviews. We appreciate hearing from you, and it really helps keep our universe expanding.

Starting point is 00:51:14 Watch our YouTube channel at Dr. Brian Keating. That's DR. Brian Keating, and join our premieres Tuesdays at 8 a.m. Pacific Time. Follow Brian on Twitter and Medium, and support us on Patreon at Dr. Brian Keating. For exclusive content, visit Brian Keating's website and sign up for his informative newsletter at Brian Keating.com. Into The Impossible is produced with the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination in the Division of Physical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. Produced by Stuart Volko and Brian Keating.

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - David Pogue: How to Prepare for Climate Change! (#140)

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.