Some More News - The Right-Wing Media Machine, Elon Musk's Blowhardiest Thoughts, and EVEN MORE Tools to Fight Climate Change

Episode Date: April 8, 2022

Hi. David Roberts (@drvolts) joins Katy and Cody to talk about Joe Manchin being a thimble-headed asshole, the clean energy revolution, Mitch McConnell's Supreme Court hypocrisy, and why the Crypt Keeper should really retire and have a margarita. Please fill out our SURVEY: kastmedia.com/survey/ Support SOME MORE NEWS: http://www.patreon.com/SomeMoreNews We now have a MERCH STORE! Check it out here: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/somemorenews Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/some-more-news/id1364825229 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6ebqegozpFt9hY2WJ7TDiA?si=5keGjCe5SxejFN1XkQlZ3w&dl_branch=1 Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/show/even-more-news Athletic Greens is going to give you an immune-supporting FREE 1 year supply of Vitamin D AND 5 free travel packs with your first purchase if you visit http://athleticgreens.com/morenews today. Right now, save up to 60% off your subscription when you go to babbel.com/ MORENEWS. — Language for life Go to magicspoon.com/MORENEWS to grab a variety pack and try it today! And be sure to use our promo code MORENEWS at checkout to save five dollars off your order! Follow us on social media! Twitter: https://twitter.com/SomeMoreNews Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/SomeMoreNews/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SomeMoreNews/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@somemorenewsSupport the show!: http://patreon.com.com/somemorenewsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello and welcome back to even more news the first and only news podcast my name is katie stole it is and i have a different one and that name is cody johnston yes it is and joining us today we're very excited for the first time is podcast host, writer of the Volt Newsletter, David Roberts. Hello, David. Hello, hello. Thank you for joining us. This is always the fun part of the show where we're like, yeah, we were just chatting and now we're going to pretend like we're saying hello for the first time.

Hello again. Before we're going to chat, we're going to get to know you, but I got to call out the holiday of the day today the day of this release april 8th is national all is ours day yeah national all is ours day which sounds like some propaganda weird creepy shit um but i guess it's about celebrating nature and its natural beauty. Okay. Sounds a little culty. It does. Sounds a little culty, doesn't it?

All is ours. All is ours. All is ours. Sounds a little culty. Name it something else and people would like it probably and know about it and celebrate it. Yeah, a show about nature called All is Ours. It seems like the wrong message also. So say we all.

This is an honorable shout out for holidays that I got to bring out. Today, April 7th, the day that we are recording is National Girl Me Too Day. And I hate it. I'm sorry. Yep. National Girl Me Too Day. And it's not about me too this is about celebrating i was gonna say like women and all their achievements girl me too but what's weird is

that um it doesn't have a comment so the the name is just national girl me too day and you need a comma between girl and me too otherwise it's just a girl me too. Yeah. Girl me too. Girl me also day. Or like girl me too. Girl me also. I'm looking at this National Day Calendar website for National Girl Me Too Day.

And I want to adjust one of their suggestions on how to observe this day. The first item is give a greeting card of encouragement to a woman you don't know or don't usually associate with. No. Please don't do that. Don't do that. I think maybe don't do that. Maybe keep your greeting card of encouragement to yourself.

Or if you have to me too like if you're at least give it to somebody you know did you get a creepy letter girl me too for the love of god don't give a strange woman every year I send out like I send out 10

just random girl me too cards just people in the neighborhood I flip open the phone book I'm like girl you're getting a girl me too cards just people in the neighborhood i flip open the phone book i'm like girl you're getting a girl me too card from me happy girl me today me too you don't know me but i've been watching you and girl based on a it's a organization it's a non-profit organization of girl me too i think that they've done a very bad job branding yeah i think it's probably like it seems like it's a it's a an organization that probably helps people and then like we need a day let's name it after our

organization and it just sounds silly they're probably wonderful and like helping orphan girls and we're awful points are very well taken i hear you guys counterpoint when did this organization form you do not call your holiday me too at this point and if you already did you change it it's done it's done that's not working that's got a different connotation unless you want to shift the focus of your holiday to sexual harassment and prevention. If it's like girl, me too, that's a whole different holiday. But that has nothing to do with the description. I'd love to see like the Rose Garden address on that holiday. Nothing about the holiday and how we observe it changes, but it is now about me too.

So you are encouraged to pick a random woman and send them a card okay this is maybe too dark for jokes david you're fun so far we're thrilled to have you we love that i love your stuff we love that you love it love it give keep them coming you love that i love your stuff so right all right i'll right. I'll start that. You left Vox in, I believe, December of 2020 to start your newsletter and your podcast. And I'd love to just hear a little bit about that decision and what do you cover? What's your deal? I cover climate change and clean energy, mostly clean energy, mostly efforts to solve climate change. I started in the early 2000s at a little nonprofit called Grist,

little nonprofit media outlet called Grist. I worked there for 10 years, went to Vox, covered the same thing for five years. And then by then had sort of built up enough of an audience that I thought I could get away with just going out on my own and having no bosses and no deadlines. Yeah, that's the way to do it. No colleagues and no meetings. And it worked. So here I am. Do you ever miss meetings? It's been well over a year now since uh i i've been to a meeting or or open slack oh yeah we people keep suggesting that we use slack and it you know what it might help us but we're not gonna it's not gonna help you it'll just eat your brain like everything else yeah we tried slack a

while ago uh our old uh place and it was just it's just another place you have to check why do i need that i have too many places to check already i don't need that if i'm not responding on email i'm not responding on slack yep uh i've somehow finagled my way into a job now where 98% of my time is spent doing the actual job, like researching and writing and podcasting. So in your work, you cover politics. Yes, you cover media. And you've written a lot about how the right wing has a whole media apparatus that supports its claims, but the left doesn't really have something similar. No pressure, but how do we as a society go about giving broader information to people on the right, to reaching across the aisle,

to bridging some of these divides? Well, there's sort of two ways you could look at it, two directions you could go. One is given current circumstances, the left needs to fight back, which means we need, like basically what happens is if as a right winger or a right wing politician, you want to get a message out, or if the right wants to get a message out, it has these organs, thousands of them, Fox, the radio, thousands and thousands of websites, boom, blast it uniformly. And so if you're a conservative, you know what you think about that immediately. You know what we as conservatives think about this.

The left Democrats basically go out to the podium, toss their messages out into a sea of mainstream reporters and just hope for the best, hope that those messages filter their way down to voters. And they just don't. They don't at all. And there's no equivalent. Like on the right, they're under this bizarre delusion that CNN is the equivalent of Fox. But anyone who's ever watched those two networks knows that that's ridiculous, knows that the mainstream news is not friendly to Democrats. They love shitting on Joe Biden. They shit on Joe Biden constantly. That's how they prove how tough they are.

It's how they prove how independent they are. So there's no media apparatus devoted to getting the truth about what Democrats are doing and saying and want to do directly to voters. And so basically, what happens is the right dominates the sort of media sphere, like they can insert stories into media almost at will. And, you know, and I like, like, I would just every day I think about what would Democrats do if they had something like that? What if Democrats had a fox? What would today look like? New Supreme Court justice is pro-pedophilia despite the fact that the U.S. right wing is ridden with sexual creeps and assaulters and pedophiles. I mean, the list goes on and on and on.

I was tweeting some the other day. There are like three or four separate lists of – I mean, there are literally hundreds. Many serving. One was president and maybe president again. Yeah. So if Democrats had a fox, if Democrats had a fox, it would be saying it through all these organs to everybody on the left. Let's talk about how the right is full of creeps and pedophiles and they're grotesque hypocrites on the subject.

Yeah. But who's saying that? That message is nowhere because there's no one to carry it yes there's an apparatus they have an apparatus and the apparatus thrives on just clicks and eyeballs and they don't give a fuck about what it is that they say there is no integrity to the system and um on our side of things are playing not that there isn't shades of republicanism conservatism within that party, but they do have a tendency to fall in line together, you know, versus us.

Their top priority is the health and welfare of the conservative tribe. That's true of conservative media. It's true of conservative think tanks. It's true of conservative politicians. They're all- And so it doesn't matter. They're going to say what it serves them.

They're all one team. And the media is on that team. And versus on our side, where just even within. The left. There are so many different people with different. I think in general. More and more, the vast majority of the left can agree on certain things that they want, like Medicare for all, free tuition, things like that. But even within the party, there is a lot of discrepancy and there is no consensus on how to go about that.

And it's you feel disillusioned because you're not seeing that on our media either. It's empirically true that the left is much more heterogeneous, much more varied. That's true demographically. It's true racially. It's true on and on. But one thing they all agree on is that there's a reactionary fascist movement rising around the country trying to remove the right to vote and trying to destroy U.S.s democracy and that seems to really suck so just unity on the message that republicans are bad would be great like who's out prosecuting that case where is the media apparatus actively prosecuting that case and there's plenty of truthful you don't have to make shit up to prosecute that case yeah and then well then

you have also like because the you know there's it's not it's not the same like there's a sensationalism that the media wants and there's also like on the right you have like this apparatus that's attached to them and this desire like their goal is stripping down the government also and that is also true i think for a lot of like trying to like talk about like the left and the democratic party is sort of like separate entities i think there is a lot of division there where you know you have like like a joe biden who's like the leader of the party is not going to go out there and say like actually the republicans are bad and we want medicare for all so there isn't even like within the party or like there's no leadership at all.

I think that's a big problem. It's just like the lack of any leadership and singular goal or voice or. Yeah, I don't know. It's it's just frustrating to watch all around. It's true. It's, it's one way, one way I often put it is any attack on any portion of the left will be joined by the entire right and by some other portion of the left. So, so it always looks bipartisan, right? It always looks in a sense. So the lack of left unity, I mean, what I was going to say earlier at the very beginning of this question, like there's two ways you could go.

One is just a competing apparatus from Dems if left-wing billionaires would like get it together and build some institutions that can do this kind of thing. But long term, you really need institutions that are trusted, widely trusted in society. You need social trust for a society to persist. Do you know what I mean? Like you need some baseline, you need some baseline common information. So long-term, the project has got to be restore some kind of media that has fealty to values above partisanship, other than partisanship on both sides. And that people can trust, right? above partisanship, other than partisanship on both sides.

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of guilt-free cereal at magicspoon.com slash more news and use the code more news to save five dollars off nay mule horse whatever bye we're gonna talk about the ipcc climate report next and get into that and this is a through line on our show and i'm sure you're all of your work navigating this world that we're living in. It just feels very clear to me that what we need to survive is to agree. each other. We fucking need each other. And whatever it takes for me to convince this person that I'm not their enemy and for us to say, like, I disagree on this, but together we've got to tell these motherfuckers that this is now or never. It's time to make a change. I'm really trying to approach, not that I have a lot of interactions with people that are of a different political persuasion than I am, but whenever I do, I'm really trying to bring it back down to brass tacks.

Because when you talk to them about it, for the most part, you can get away from this apparatus of the media and you can say like, yeah, I'm scared about X, Y, Z. I don't know how I'm going to pay for this. Like the reality of it is sinking in. Anyway.

But I feel like one of the things we've discovered in the past few years, and this shows up in surveys and polls and social science research, too, is for for people, let's just say with a certain kind of personality, the feeling of belonging to a tribe, to an identity of having a shared identity, which means an us and a very clearly defined them, right? That's having that identity is in a way more important to people than their immediate material interests. You know what I mean? Like, even if you can appeal to them on the basis of like food on their table and healthcare, still, I mean, I'll never forget the guy in the interview. I think it was one of my colleagues in Vox. He gave this quote too, but basically I forget the exact quote, but it was tantamount to saying, if getting rid of Obamacare means I'll die, that's okay with me because Obamacare is socialism. I'd rather save

the country from socialism. That's more important than my life. And I was like, well, what could I appeal to this guy on? Like, you'll die? If you'll die, does it work? Objectively, that's not logical. I don't want to be ableist and use words, but I'll say that isn't logical. It is if your identity gives you more than your material circumstances give you. And to a lot of people, I think it does. It's also, it's that sort of like,

this is my identity. This is above like the facts that are out there. But also like, especially the past few years, that identity has been tied to a new reality. It's not just that like, yeah, this is my tribe. This is this. This is my tribe. This is the world I live in.

And it's a completely different world. And that's been happening, like specifically with climate change, I think where it's just like, it's either it's not happening or it is happening and we can't really do anything about it. And I think for so long we've been in this, you assume you hope like ideally in a functioning society, if there's only two parties,

which is not ideal, but let's say there are, then you disagree on what to do about something, but you agree on the reality of the situation. Okay, climate change is real. What do we do about it? You can say nothing, but you say nothing after you admit that it's happening, right? Whereas now it's just like the reality is different and you tie your identity to the tribe, to the reality, and then it makes it even harder to have these conversations. your identity to the tribe, to the reality. And then it makes it even harder to have these conversations. Well, let me suggest this to you. Perhaps U.S. reactionary conservatives,

the right wing base, senses on some level that acknowledging these facts, acknowledging, say, climate change or whatever, really does get you on a slippery slope that carries you away from the tenants of u.s reactionary conservatism you know what i mean like like it can't no form of sort of primitive tribalism that's that's that that's become as curdled as it is can survive in the right you let one beam of light in then it exactly it cracks and cracks true facts exactly exactly that's why they're paranoid about about slippery slopes is because it's really true like once you once you grab the string of climate change just the logic the logic of it the facts of it and start pulling you you end up with the necessity as as you were saying early, Katie, the necessity of global cooperation.

You have to agree and cooperate across the globe. It's inexorable in the logic of climate change. And I think on some level, they recognize that and reject the whole thing because they know where it will carry them if they let it in. Yeah, absolutely. will carry them if they if they let it in yeah absolutely right because it's not and not only like we need to okay well i guess we need to like all work together for for a common cause but also we need to think about like well then how do we if this is true how do we get here oh maybe like we shouldn't base everything on like profits and like let companies do whatever they want like all these sort of things that like got us to that point are also wrong and then yeah but i don't have time for

them to unpack all that bullshit i need you to wake up like yeah yeah go to therapy later right now i need you here and showing up it's true with the pandemic too you grab the logic the logic of a pandemic grab it pull the string you end up with solidarity and cooperation as the only viable solutions. And they don't like solidarity and cooperation. So they reject the whole thing. I mean, that's what a lot of this weird dysfunction is about. Well, and the Republican Party, if all of a sudden there's a lot of solidarity and cooperation, then what are they for? Who votes for them? Because when you start to tear down the walls and and unpeel the layers you see i mean another thing we say a lot in the show the republican party isn't for anything their

entirety is about being against things against change against well therefore the there they are for the continued hegemony of yeah white white male christian but like everything that they propose that we will talk about i mean like absolutely no need for there to be a law about child marriages yes they've amended you know we'll get into that but like what is the point of this if your priority is the hegemony of white male christian you know then you will have experienced the whole last century as an insult just one thing after another of the federal government getting bigger, more people getting rights. And it's not like white people have been particularly hurting relative to other groups, but other groups have been rising relative

to white people. And if you're, I forget what the cliche is, but if you're the hegemon, you experience more equality as an attack, right? Yeah. They've experienced the whole last century as an attack. So of course they say no to everything because almost everything on the table these days is some step forward toward multicultural democracy. Those steps forward towards multicultural democracy, towards everything that we've been talking about and

continue to talk about means equality for all of them means that because the vast majority of the white working class are also poor the vast majority of this country and just in general are oppressed and don't even fucking know it um we gotta talk about this ipc report ipcc report it's difficult to say. Yeah, they should just change it. It might solve all of our problems, honestly. I know. A more clever acronym.

Yeah, a lot to talk about here. Basically, the IPCC says we need global emissions to peak in 2025 and then drop by 43% by 2030 to keep us at the one and a half degrees Celsius goal. Basically, that gives us three years to turn this ship around and it ain't happening, I don't think. Yes, that would require a drastic change of pace and reduction in admissions. Yeah, I don't know. know i'm gonna throw to you guys to have your initial reactions before i get into some of these yeah i can explain the background if you are are interested so the idea is countries got together several years ago and agreed that the

global average temperature is rising and if it rises more than two degrees Celsius above what it was pre-industrial times, that's sort of the line where things become catastrophic. And then later research, later meetings, and a lot of voices of more vulnerable countries came in and they revised that. And they're like, you know what? Actually 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. That's dangerous. That's dangerous. Two degrees is catastrophic. And they're like, you know what, what actually 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, that's dangerous. Like that's dangerous. Two degrees is catastrophic. And then everything above that, of course, is worse and worse and worse. So 1.5, limiting temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels has been the target now for a while, but the closer we come, the more carbon we put in the atmosphere, the more difficult hitting that target becomes. And now we're basically at the last... Even now,

hitting that target would require basically every economic sector in every country across the world every economic sector in every country across the world turning on a dime and sprinting in the other direction you know tomorrow which you know if you look around at the world doesn't really look like that's going to happen so so the message of the ipcc report is still technically possible to hit our 1.5 degree target but it would require everyone to start doing everything now. It's not happening. Okay, so we're going to be fine. It's going to all work out. We're all going to make that decision.

Yes, but this is always where you need to say, this is always super important to emphasize that there's no scientific significance to two degrees or to 1.5 degrees. These are just sort of rough heuristics. They're thresholds that they picked somewhat arbitrarily. Things get worse and worse and worse incrementally. So 1.6 is worse than 1.5, et cetera, et cetera. Two is bad. Above two is way bad. We look like now, if we continue continue to fuck around they estimate we're going to come in somewhere between 2.5 and 3.4 those are all super bad super bad but so i think the message

here is 1.5 is if we're being pretty bad yeah they're pretty bad probably not going to happen it would require something uh truly cosmic and extraordinary. Like at the end of the Watchmen, when the space octopus, you guys know what I'm talking about? We have one of those. That's probably not going to happen. That's probably not going to happen.

So, but two degrees maybe is still within our reach, but regardless, regardless of all the numbers, the point is just shit is coming. We need to all get together and start doing things differently quickly. This is the moment in the movie where we should be banding together. Because the next time the IPCC comes together to do one of these massive comprehensive reports, they do them every five years.

The next time they get together, we might already be past 1.5. It's entirely possible. But the other half of the message is we now have the tools to solve climate change, the technologies, the procedures. We know now how to do it quite well. And the tools with which to do it are getting incredibly cheap. And they're profusing. And there's all this innovation. it are getting incredibly cheap and they're profusing and there's all this innovation. So like the story of clean energy, the story of, of solving climate change is just buzzing

right now. It's huge. It's hugely, you know, it's, it's like, uh, for the two thousands and 2010s, it was like pushing a boulder up a hill. This is my analogy. And the boulder is finally crested the hill and it's rolling downhill. Clean energy is winning. Emissions are going to go down eventually,

but it's just a matter of making it go faster. It's accelerating what's happening. It would help if the government would encourage this more, if there were leadership. And we're going to talk about Joe Manchin in one moment, but I did want to highlight what you're just talking about

because I do think this is really important and a really important takeaway. And when we talked about it earlier in the week, we spoke on our other show a lot about the fears that we're carrying and like, what do we do when we're talking about this, when it feels hopeless? But there is hope in here and there is something to focus on. And my hope would be that media outlets and other people start taking this and people start paying attention and seeing the different things that are possible because you're right. The green energy has become so much more realistic, affordable, exponentially that technology has accelerated and coal is on its way out despite what Joe mentioned and everybody else. It's really interesting. This is what I

always say too to my fellow journalists. Like climate change itself is slow and incremental and there's not that much to say from one day to the next, but clean energy is just like shit is constantly happening. And what I hear from my readers, and this is the number one thing I've heard from readers almost from the day I started this, is nothing soothes their climate anxiety,

this nameless anxiety that's hovering around them all the time, like reading the concrete practical details of what people are doing to fix it. Just like getting into the muck, figuring out batteries, figuring out, you know, transmission grids, just getting, seeing how many people are out there doing all these clever things to help fix it that is what makes people well and because we don't we don't talk about on the news i i've quoted this or referenced this a few times on our show but chris hayes once responded to somebody's tweet by like why don't you guys ever do run climate change stories and he's like the short

answer is that the ratings tank nobody wants to watch yeah this is real no one wants to hear about climate change but but but conversely the biggest stories i've ever had on any medium or outlet anywhere are hopeful stories about clean energy clean energy the solutions do play they do good ratings i do get good ratings kind of what I mean. It's like if we're focusing on the things that we need and continuing to channel our energy into that, that makes people feel hopeful. It makes people feel – and they should be because there's absolutely no other way for us to proceed except with hope. And there are plenty of things to be hopeful for.

And it provides villains, concrete, proximate villains which are important for getting people worked up right it's also interesting because like the the like chris hayes tweet we do talk about it every once in a while because it's just like it's right there there's it's just an example of it yeah yeah um but because the uh so many of these stations and like the 24-hour news cycle that their their focus for so long has been to be like negative stories tragedy uh all this shock and like all this stuff going on uh to create that anxiety and this despair and stuff and that's what got them ratings that's why it works like the constant just like look at all this fucked up stuff going on and it's just interesting that it doesn't work for this one thing that they should be talking about.

And the reverse actually is what's going to help them instead of the model that they've been going for with for decades. Well, part of that is that Republican apparatus that we spent time talking about earlier, that believing in climate change is not in the best interest of their sponsors or you know the people who got them into office oh yeah but like i mean like like like an msnbc or like a cnn or whatever like they're they're also like very much like yeah you have to do the 24-hour news fear-mongering stuff well still they're also beholden to sponsors every outlet every outlet i've ever worked for, I have had to work and push to convince it to allow me to publish long, explanatory, not news hooked, you know, just sort of like, here's how batteries work, you know. Yeah. Here's useful information for everybody. People love that shit.

They love it. I've had it reinforced over and over and over again. I think that people who run the news have overlearned. I mean, maybe it's true on cable news. It's just such a dumpster fire. I don't pay much attention to it. But generally, I think the news people have overlearned the lesson that people need constant stimulation. I think there's a real appetite. There's a real appetite out there now for calm talk about true things. I don't think it works anymore. I mean, it works in a certain way. I don't have crystallized thoughts on this, so I'm just

spitballing here. But I've been talking a lot to people about the vibe shift. There was actually a good article on BuzzFeed about what you're sensing isn't a vibe shift. It's a permanent change. And our brains, I think, are different. And we've got so much information and so much bad stuff. And we see the need and the urgency in a lot of different arenas in our life. And it's hard. It's a little bit immobilizing and it's hard, but we're craving information and we have people that want to do things. So I do. I'm hopeful. I don't know if it'll happen, but I think that the media we need a huge media landscape shift. We need to be conveying information differently. We need to be approaching people differently because it's not working where we don't have a consensus. Hey, stop what you're doing right now just for a second,

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What are you waiting for? Right now, Athletic Greens is going to give you an immune-supporting free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first purchase if you visit athleticgreens.com slash more news today. Again, simply visit athleticgreens.com slash more news to take control of your health with AG1, a product that legally speaking, you shouldn't bathe in. I think we need to remember that a lot of the news that dominates uh our sort of collective attention specifically cable news is mostly watched by old people yeah like and and politics is mostly run by old people and there's just a lot of ideas living on well past their prime because of old people and their habits. So I think, yeah, I don't know. I think the vibe shift is just there's generational stuff coming. That's been building up under the surface for a long time,

but like the geriatrics just clinging, clinging and clinging to power and to, you know, like. In many, many different arenas. And it's like, everywhere you look, you're like, just many different arenas yes and it's like everywhere you look you're like just like take a break like it's so it all like baffles me every time like you've earned a rest old one grasley is running again and isn't he like he's like 130 now or unbelievable yeah like at a certain point shouldn't like the crypt keeper be able to just like go and like have a margarita on the beach and just like chill out it's fine i know i know it's it's it's this weird double brain now

watching the news like on the one hand you're seeing like literal book burnings teacher bannings you know abortion bannings of course now they're going after gay people like the most predictable thing in the world of course you know like it was never going to stop at trans people just the whole and like taking away the right to vote and the constant lies and this criminal mafia figure that was president for four years may run again like the whole thing's falling apart in the democratic leadership like in congress just it is as though they are still living in west wing as though they never as though in their bubble it's the same as it ever was and it's so bizarre to watch i'm like when do you start pulling the alarm lever like when they don't because they don't care

because they're just as bad and they're just maybe not just as bad, but they're bad. They need it to be the same. They need it to be as it used to be. Otherwise, they can't really function within whatever the new system and environment is going to be. It's what they know. It's what they know. And the worst, the thing they're farthest behind on, although it's probably a tight contest, is media stuff. It's how to reach people, how to talk to people now,

like what you guys are doing to sort of funny, but truthful, funny, but information verified videos. Like why isn't there a left, a bunch of left-wing billionaires who have created a foundation that's just seeding and funding dozens of you. Left-wing billionaires.

We're waiting. waiting right we are willing for the investment we have to hate you we have to publicly hate you but please get fun but winkety wink but we will accept your money we've uh we've talked about this a little bit before too where it's like okay if you're on the right and you want money like yeah give me a bunch of money i'll lie for you so easy and it'll get you more and it'll get you want money, like, yeah, give me a bunch of money. I'll lie for you. It's so easy. And it'll get you more money. It's so easy. Whereas like with us, it's like, we actually want you to have less money. Give us some and we'll talk about how you should have even less.

But I do think that that's one of the reasons why people on the left are afraid of that. Like if there was a left wing version of Fox News, people think it's MSNBC. But if there truly was one of course i feel like we on the left think that we would have to be the ones to always compromise we'd have to get on board with the centrist stuff and give up medicare for all and climate change stuff and any hope of racial and social justice all of these things over and over that's why it's so hard to square it because it feels like oh so wait we'll win all these elections, but we'll never get what we want, which.

Yeah. Well, just wait for midterms, which we're now in. And so now we get some some sweet tweets from Congress people about health care being. Yeah, they're going to trot it back out. It's happening again. Oh, there she is. Yeah. oh there she is yeah speaking of democrats and delivering david you brought up one of our favorite ghouls as someone you want to talk about um and i think this is a good time to bring up joe

mansion oh i mean it's awful i think about him way too much um i do i think about what i would say you guys know how sometimes people say to you sometimes people say to you too like how could you talk for a whole hour about ben shapiro and you're and you're thinking how could you capture the the perfidy the thumb-faced thimble-headed evil how could you contain it in an hour how could could you stop after one hour? This is how I feel about Joe Manchin. Unfortunately, I don't have a like, I don't have a like. We're here for it. A moral to the story other than he's awful and I hate him.

Like, I don't have it. Yeah, yeah. That can be enough. I don't have much beyond that to say. It's unbelievable to me that he is allowed to have this much power, knowing his connections and his ties and his business ties. And it's unbelievable to me that this is the thing that is allowed and we all see it happening and it's

we all fucking it's like the most believable thing it's sort of unfortunately i think it's sort of like a fencer sense of history though it shouldn't be the case that one asshole could do this much damage it's just like you want to think grand historical forces are at work. Just this one contingent dickhead being the thumb in the dam, preventing like literally millions of people from surviving and getting healthcare and getting, you know, guaranteed preschool and getting climate action and all of it, this one dude. And,

and the reason I, and the reason I hate him, you know, there's a, there's a strain of sort of savviness on, on, among democratic commentators and pundits and stuff. There's like, of course, like he's from West Virginia. We should be thankful. We have him at all. We should love Joe Manchin for who he is, this, this sort of thing. And of course I know West Virginia is conservative. Of course I know he wouldn't, you know, no Democrat could win there and probably he won't win again if he runs again. Of course, I know that. And of course, I know that there's only 50

votes. Nonetheless, even all that said, at a certain point, you just have to expect a basic level of decency. And here's a guy who found out he was saying nice things early on, like we're going to make Joe Biden a success. Like he's talking about $4 trillion in spending and, you know, clearly was like geared up to go along, but you could just watch the process as the weeks went by of him slowly realizing, oh, like it's literally, I get to write federal policy for two years they have to ask me for everything yes for everything and he was the biggest dickhead possible about it he did it in a way that humiliated his entire party humiliated biden remember when biden promised the progressives oh we'll split the bill and don't worry, Manchin says we're going to pass Bill Better right alongside the infrastructure bill.

He promised me. He told me he gave me his word and I'm giving you my word. And then Manchin just left Biden fucking swinging on that in the most humiliating way. Like he's corrupt as hell. He's just like even given the circumstances, he's worse than he needed to be. Like he's just right. He just doubled down. He doesn't give a fuck.

I mean, history will not look at him kindly. I don't know. He'll die rich and happy. Katie, just like, just like Joe, just like Joe Lieberman will people.

No one's ever going to hold him accountable. Look at that. He doesn't care about that, but yeah, no, it's horrifying because I forget the actual statistics or what it is, but West Virginia is being deeply impacted by climate change and the severe storms. It's like affecting their agriculture. Well, all of Build Back Better would have shoveled, shoveled tons of federal money onto West Virginia. There's no question about it, but they don't know.

They don't know. Those voters don't even on the climate stuff, just looking at the climate and energy stuff in isolation, even that stuff alone would have shoveled billions of dollars into West Virginia. And let me just say, while I'm on the subject of mentioned being an asshole. So he kills all of Build Back Better based on just based on like the kinds of things that old white men talk to each other about on yachts. Just those kind of talking points, even though one colleague after another came begging, like all these women in the Senate coming to him saying,

you know, people need childcare. Like it's really a big deal, gritting their teeth, trying to kiss his ass. And he just, he doesn't care. He listens to the old white guys on the yacht, but so he kills all the build back better, but it says supposedly that the clean energy stuff, the climate stuff, which everybody wants and is really good. He says, I'm still open to this. So, So everybody's like, okay, well, we'll just pass that bit. Can we please just pass that bit? Saying, well, maybe Manchin will save this little bit of us after all. And now over the past month or so, he has started slowly chipping away even at that stuff. Now he's mad about subsidies for electric cars. And let me just

tell you, we just had this IPCC report that's literally a catalog of climate mitigation strategies. And it shows every viable scenario, it has electric vehicles dominant in it. There's no way to do this without electric vehicles, but he wants money for hydrogen cars why because they make hydrogen out of natural gas in west virginia well and he i this whole there was this whole report i mean we all know he's involved with you know coal and mining but like he has a whole company that uses the gas byproduct, the most toxic gas stuff that then they then burn fuel. That's a company of his. He directly profits from it in the most direct way possible.

Everything about this has been fitting and lining his pocket. Yeah, he used to be. Remember, he used to be West Virginia governor before this. And like all of West Virginia state politics is such a fucking swamp. There's so much coal corruption like even the the jim jim justice the other the governor that took over after mansion owned a mine and had a bunch of safety violations and was like paying someone off i don't know the whole the whole system is he's a he's basically like a small backward state corrupt good old boy

politician who's been thrust into this position of immense historical importance just taking as much as he can he's small his role now is big and he's still just a small a small man all right that's i just had i had to get that hate on the record i won't go on forever no we really appreciate it's registered It is seconded and I think we've all voted and this is now law that we know him Before we move on from climate change. I do want to ask one quick question. That's okay While we have you here We had we had Peter columnists on and he was talking about like if we were really serious about this We would stop the commercial airline industry like right now and obviously that's not happening but like in in everything i've read i've never

seen like what's the plan there are there electric planes i haven't like it doesn't seem possible what do we what do we do about that teleportation well high-speed rail a number of strategies yeah you substitute away by building out better rail is one short, you know, sort of short haul flights, kind of regional flights. You could probably do with electric at this point, like electric planes are big enough now to do sort of, uh, you know, those, uh, short run flights. So you could build the structure of flights to have more short hops on electric planes. And then you can make a liquid fuels with hydrogen mixed with some sort of hydrocarbon. You can make fuels that you can drop into airplanes. That's very early in.

How realistic is it? It's happening. It's not commercial yet, but it's definitely underway. And it's another one of those things that if we pass Build Back Better, we'll spend a lot of money on and we'll specifically spend a lot of money on it in West Virginia. But yeah, so planes are, I mean, there's nothing left that's totally beyond the reach of decarbonization at this point. Like we at least know how to get at everything at this point. Some things are much earlier in the technology curve and need a lot more innovation. And it's hard to predict how much they'll end up costing and that kind of thing. But we at least have everything in sight now. And the big problems, which are the electric

system, generating electricity, transportation, and buildings, those three, we know very well now how to do. You electrify transportation. You electrify building heating and cooling. And then you clean up the electricity generation. We have all the technologies. We need to do all those things. We just need to put some money toward it. Do it.

Decide for it. Literally decide to do it. All right, Jonathan. It is that time of the show for insert music cue, broken news. We're getting that music cue. The end of the show. Any day. Theoretically, we move through the stories quicker, but we never actually do.

Okay, lay it on us. Well, this is the one. The big one. There's a non-broken story every once in a while. Yeah, this is a good one. And this one is that Katonji Brown Jackson got confirmed to the Supreme Court a little bit earlier today. We got three Republicans joining all 50 Democrats in supporting her. Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Mitt Romney.

You mean the pro-pedophile Collins, Murkowski, and Romney? Yeah, they decided they were going to be in the aisle this week. I don't know why I did the sound. I'm sorry for even bringing that up, actually. I don't want to taint the good news. Jesus. The groomers. Yeah, the grooming trio.

The grooming caucus. Of pot-smoking hippies, Mitt Romney, Susan Collins, and Lisa Murkowski. So Stephen Breyer is going to be stepping down this summer. She'll join. And for the foreseeable future, she'll just get to dissent on everything for the next several years. Isn't it interesting that all these cases are going to come down to voting in dissent against a large... Yes, it is. Quite interesting.

I'm sure there's nothing there. It's exciting. It's great. I do think about like, boy, do you sure you want this job? I know. It is going to be a lot of frustration. Right.

You know, you're going to lose for a long time, right? Thrilled for her question mark. I am happy. I'm excited for this. I mean, yeah, it's very,

it's really, really cool. And it's great news. But not thrilled for her i think she's got a bad well yeah she just she's just got there just in time to watch the supreme court dismantle a lot of basic 20th century jurisprudence and and law i mean she's gonna see up close the american system of uh law and regulation dismantled. Any news on Clarence Thomas? He didn't die.

He didn't resign. He doesn't seem to be around. Did he show up? I thought he was... He's in the loving embrace of his wife at home. His best friend. I feel like he's sicker than

he's letting people know. One would only hope, but then he's I think I feel like he's sicker than he's letting people know. One would only hope. But then he's going to hang on until we lose the lose in the midterms. Oh, that's not what is going to happen. Let's not manifest that. We lose the Senate in the midterms and then then we'll get to see Biden nominate another great justice. And McConnell just refused to have hearings at all for two. Well, you can't have two years before an election.

That's the rule, right? Love to see the writing on the wall. The ridiculous writing. And two years after an election, you got to give a cooling off period. Yeah. Yeah. You've really got to bake this in. You got to be smart about it.

A week, two week period right in the middle there. That's perfect for Supreme Court. It's a sweet spot. McConnell also before the vote today, he was criticizing Jackson for not saying if she was for or against court packing. Because in her hearing, she refused to say if she was for or against court packing.

And she was like, well, that's not up to me. That's up to Congress. Also, Amy Coney Barrett did not say that I was going to say did anybody else answer in a similar way and he was fine with that you seem awfully defensive Mitch why are you so

defensive that's so like god what a fucking piece of shit I hate this guy so much he was interviewed by Axios oh yeah I just saw that today you see that clip it's like and he's being asked about um where like where does he draw his like moral red lines and he like acts like what what he's he's visibly flummoxed by by the question he's like excuse me like not do something that i could do for moral reason?

It's just like, what place are you speaking? Define moral. It's a fascinating interview because like, yeah, he's like baffled and confused and like angry

and like, why don't, like ask somebody else. Well, I'm talking to you right now. You sir, yeah. And just this back and forth.

It was, I was actually like very happy with, not happy with how it went because it was pointless and useless and he didn't say anything. But the pushback, the consistent pushback from the other side of like, well, I'm asking you. Well, like I'd like to know. These things are not – He's genuinely creepy. These things don't work together.

He's creepy. He's deep down creepy. Yes, he is. Yes, he is. He's all the way down creepy. Go check out that clip if you're listening. I will check that out. I haven't seen it.

It's like frustrating, but also kind of nice to see somebody just say like- Frustrating, but validating. No, you're being a silly man. He didn't say that, but somebody just tell him that. Okay, Jonathan, one more. One more. Lay it on us. You got it.

What do you got? Our friend Elon Musk. Yeah. Friend of the show. Friend of the pod, Elon Musk. Yeah. Friend of the show. Friend of the pod, Elon Musk. There's our leftist billionaire funding. It was revealed in an SEC regulatory filing this week that he purchased 9.2% of Twitter. The next day, Twitter announced that he'd been appointed to the board.

Musk says he wants to make significant improvements to Twitter. He doesn't, you know, he has been a big, he's a, you know, he's a free speech absolutist, he says, so he cares a lot about free speech and he wants to make some real critical changes there as one twelfth of the board and a guy who owns a tenth of the company. Can I just say one thing at the beginning there? Because this is like,

this is the whole fucking game these guys play. No one is a free speech absolutist. It's just not the case. Like Elon Musk, if you ask him, can people come on to Twitter and advocate for killing all black people in the United States tomorrow? He'll probably say like, no, that's over the line. There's some line. He's got some line. Everybody's got some line. So the argument is always, it's not about abstractions, free speech versus whatever. It's about where's your line. And that's the argument that these people never want to have the first order argument about the thing itself that they're saying,

because they don't want to go out in public and say, I want to be allowed to say that trans people don't exist without consequences. Like you don't want to have the argument over whether you should be allowed to say that. You have to retreat to the abstraction, free speech. And Twitter already lets you say that. Twitter doesn't have a problem with that.

I'm also like, are the what what are these free speech issues that we have here the president tweeting misinformation i i don't know like things that are provably doing damage to the world um uh but i will say it's great. It's very some diver, a pedophile. I mean, I got away with it. That's what I mean is like part of this. I guess he got in trouble in 2018 when he tweeted about Tesla in a way that violated X, Y, Z. And, you know, like so there's there's that area i guess where he sort of gets in trouble but he's not getting in trouble but i love that he now owns significantly more of this company than jack well all these guys just in their heads want to be the one who

gets to decide what's okay and what's not okay to say and they all end up deciding like people like me get to say things that are that make sense to me and the other people that i don't like are bad and dangerous and they shouldn't say things like everybody ends up there all this sort of procedural neutrality is just a fucking smoke screen for everybody that's all he wants is to be the decider of what who gets to say what that's that why else yeah exactly um and he and he knows that and also i mean didn't he like he like shit on twitter for like a week and then bought yeah this like he knows what he's doing and he knows how to like play this game um and even like you know hinting like maybe i'm

gonna start my own social network maybe i'll do that and it's like well no you know that even if you do that it will be swarming with Nazis. It'll be the Nazi social. And then you'll have to, because that's what you'll have to draw some lines. Like that's right. Or don't. And then you're the Nazi Twitter. Like,

right. Or it's a total dumpster fire. You either have a line or it's a dumpster fire and all it's about where the line is. And once he starts getting in first order arguments about the propriety of particular things, he'll get bored and frustrated and sick of the whole thing and then go off to space or do something else. My take on this is that he actually doesn't really care about free speech at all and has

no ideas for Twitter. He's just on the website 10 hours a day. He needs attention. Like that is his outlet. He needs his validation through there and he just needed a reason to buy it or whatever like a justifiable thing but that's not actually yeah he's pretending

it's some sort of like a moral line in the sand he's drawing he doesn't give a shit he just likes getting all the attention now has become like a performance like his whole life now has become like a weird performance like it's all performance art now it must be so weird to be around him yeah because he's performing like he's doing you know like always with everyone probably um yeah he's got this uh he's the character that people expect of elon musk and

so he does that uh he also like you know fires people for speaking out right then there's a lot he's not a good guy maybe he'll bring an edit button and we'll all have turned out to be wrong about him yeah and we'll all start tweeting and then our tweets will retweet things and then our retweets will magically change and we'll be like oh self-driving twitter self-driving twitter i think you should only be able to edit within five minutes or something i don't know i don't know five minutes or something. I don't know. I don't know. Well, it should be like, if it exists at all, it should be like word changes, like similar word changes for like spelling errors or something like that. I don't know how they would do that. Elon can figure this out.

He's the engineer, guys. Yeah, he did. He went to space. He did invent all of his products. So he's the guy who did it all. The edit button is going to be invented by like the pig with the chip in its brain that makes, you know. Or like one of the surviving monkeys.

Yeah. The NFT monkeys? No, the monkeys that he killed for his chip experiments. Those monkeys. David, it has been wonderful having you. You're a fabulous guest. Please come back anytime. Awesome.

And tell our listeners where they can find your work, follow you online, etc. The website is volts, V-O-L-T-S dot W-T-F. Easy to remember. And I'm on Twitter at Dr. Volts, D-R-V-O-L-T-S. Do people think you're a doctor frequently? This joke goes back to way when I was Dr. Grist and then I was Dr. Vox and now I'm Dr. Volts. And I do have a doctorate in takes. So I feel fine putting that out there. A doctorate in takes.

Yeah. It's very well earned. Yeah. Well, thank you again for joining us. This was great. We'll be back next week, guys. In the meantime, remember, we love you very much. Much.