Tech Won't Save Us - Bursting the Reality Bubble w/ Ziya Tong

Episode Date: April 27, 2020

Paris Marx is joined by Ziya Tong to talk about how COVID-19 is helping us to see the world in a new way, and how that might open the door to reimagining how we organize society. Our "reality bubbles" about work, the food system, technology, and our relationship to nature are being severely challenged, but the question remains whether we can seize this moment to build a better world in the pandemic's aftermath.Ziya Tong is the author of "The Reality Bubble: Blind Spots, Hidden Truths, and the Dangerous Illusions that Shape Our World", a former co-host of Daily Planet on the Discovery Channel, and sits on the board of World Wildlife Fund International. Follow Ziya on Twitter as @ziyatong.Tech Won't Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter.Support the show

We talk about the essential workers, but I think if we were to drill down deeper, what we would see is all life is essential. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, a podcast that wonders why we haven't nationalized Amazon yet, and why Jeff Bezos can keep getting away with opposing his workers' efforts at unionization while making them experience terrible working conditions. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and today I'm speaking with Zaya Tong. Zaya is the author of The Reality Bubble, Blind Spots, Hidden Truths, and the Dangerous Illusions That Shape Our World. She was the co-host of Discovery Channel's science news program, Daily Planet. She also serves on the board of World Wildlife Fund International and was the vice chair of World Wildlife Fund in Canada. She's also on the board of the Narwhal. Today, we'll be speaking

about how COVID-19 must be used to break our own reality bubbles about the world that we live in and to usher us into a better future. Tech Won't Save Us is a new podcast, so if you do like what you hear, please leave us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. You can also follow the podcast on Twitter, where its handle is at TechWon'tSaveUs. My handle is at Paris Marks. And you can find Zaya Tong at Zaya Tong. Enjoy the interview. Zaya Tong, welcome to TechWon'tSaveUs.

Thank you very much, Paris. It's great to be on your podcast. Yeah, it's great to speak with you. So obviously, I wanted to talk to you because your book, The Reality reality bubble seems really relevant in this moment that we're in right now um obviously we're seeing a ton of people losing their jobs right now over 22 million people in the united states and i'm sure that number will be even higher um you know by the time that this episode gets released, we're seeing long food lines of people waiting to get food in their cars. Like it's a very different image than sort of we saw during the Great Depression. We're seeing the numbers of cases and of deaths continuing to go up around the world.

And there are increasing warnings about what might happen once this really starts to hit parts of Africa, parts of Latin America, other parts of Asia. So I was just wondering, you know, before we really get into talking about your book, what your kind of responses to this virus so far and what you're sort of thinking and seeing as this all plays out? Yeah, well, I think one of the things that people have been asking me is, you know, has the reality bubble itself burst, right? This idea of being in a bubble, like I know we all have heard of stock market bubbles, tech bubbles, of course, real estate bubbles. But this bubble in particular, I would say that it's only the outermost perimeter of the bubble that has actually burst, right? There's much deeper layers. To mix metaphors, it's almost like onion skin, right? Like you can get further and further with the amount of bubbles that you can burst. But this outermost layer is a very important one because it sort of shows us how the system that we inhabit works, how it operates, how it functions, and who has been sustaining it for a long period of time. So this realization that people are

having for the first time is, oh my gosh, there are people who are essential to the engine of the system. We're calling them essential workers now, right? These are the people that we really dismiss, that we have not paid well over the years, but these are the people who are responsible for our food, our energy, and our waste, our life support system. So it's just this most this one little part, this first pinprick that we've kind of that has sort of rattled us right and put us into a new frame of mind. But yeah, I mean, obviously, we're starting to see shocks all around the world. When you're talking about these food lines, that is something that we really

need to start to pay attention to, right? Like the food supply chain, all these sorts of things now are a lot more brittle and a lot more fragile than we had previously imagined. Yeah. And of course, you say that, I think you describe the reality bubble really well in the book when you say, just as rocks hurtling at supersonic speed find it hard to penetrate Earth's atmosphere, unwelcome facts and unfamiliar ideas almost never make it through the membrane of the reality bubble. It shields us from thinking about forces out there that are seemingly beyond our control and lets us get on with our lives.

So how did you realize this idea of the reality bubble that we all kind of experience in our lives? I think that we have a sense of that. We all have a sense. And the reason why I think people loved movies like The Matrix, right, is kind of we know that there is a bit of this other kind of alternate reality that controls a lot of our behavior. You know, if you're looking at, you know, the nine to five system that we work in, or sort of the absurdity of how we've structured space, and like, why is it that some people, you know, make, you know, a million dollars an hour, and some people make 20 cents, right? This is a... Of course. And we're seeing that kind of getting even worse right now, right?

Yeah. And it's really like political philosophers and stoners who are always aware of this, and children, right? And the elderly. There's people that are kind of outside of this bubble at all times that are like, wait a second, this is bullshit. What's going on? But at the same time, there's this tremendous sense of normalcy that we all inhabit, you know, the way in which we go about our lives. And, you know, we're, we're species, we're primates, we're primed to sort of conform to one another. And we've created a large sort of global organism right now that is built and based on a tremendous amount of conformity. And we're happy to do it because for the most part, it feeds us. For the most part, it gives us this energy and these superpowers. We have a lot of independence and freedom. So there's lots of good reasons to not rock the boat. But at the same time, as you know, the book is also a science

book. It's a science and sort of political book. It blends those two things together. And I was also realizing more on the cosmos, like the TV series end of things, that scientists were able to see this other world in a very different way, right? And I, you know, working at Daily Planet, I was always interviewing scientists, and whether they were rocket scientists, or microbiologists, or soil scientists, through their lens, you would see one aspect of the world that would reveal sometimes wondrous, sometimes horrifying things about the way in which our planet is currently functioning. And, you know, the example I often give is the fact that, you know, not too long ago, scientists were able to image a super

massive black hole. Now, this thing has been there the whole time, but our eyes couldn't see it, just as our eyes typically can't see atoms. But with a scientific lens, we can begin to see these things. So I wanted to start to apply the scientific lens to the world around me and start to see what I would see if I looked through this sort of prism, look through all these different lenses of science. And oh, don't mind me while I'm homebound. And it seems like an aircraft is actually flying over, which is so unusual. That's okay.

We're all stuck at home now, right? Oh, I know. Exactly. Exactly. Normally, if you're filming, like when we were filming on Daily Planet, you'd stop everything when a plane went by. This would be ideal filming times because they're so rare. I hope that gives you a sense of what I mean in terms of the bubble and being able to see it through a scientific lens. It certainly does. I thought that was

one of the really powerful parts of the book, because for me, I'm not someone who has much of a science background. But then you really start the book by like, you explain the reality bubble, obviously, but then you kind of go into taking us into space to kind of see beyond earth and and these systems that we don't usually learn so much about and then to kind of go right down to the microscopic level as well and and like there were just some things that you were talking about in the book like how the water that we're all drinking is like the same water that's been around for billions of years and just been cycling around the planet like it's so it's so,

it's so obvious, but it's just small things like that, that you don't really think about when we're just like in the system and living our daily lives and not so much thinking about how nature impacts us. Yeah. And I think that there's an aspect to that. The reason why, you know, I really wanted to blend awe and enchantment in there is because, you know, there's a wonder to being connected and being a part of nature and not being separate from it, right? And, you know, knowing that this water that is older than the sun is that ordinary stuff that comes out of your tap that becomes a part of you, you know? And, you know, the beginning of the book is really a look at human exceptionalism, in a sense, right? It's like, how did we become the species that kind of thinks that it's better than everything else, that kind of thinks that it's the political ramifications of this human exceptionalism are dramatic, and they impact the planet upon which we live.

And it's the reason why we're in such deep shit today, really, right? You know, it's because we're like us, human beings, all powerful, you know, like we have dominion over the earth. And what's shocking, of course, right now is that a tiny invisible speck of a virus has just shut us all down. So the other key thing that this book is really about, as you know, because you've read it, is it's about invisible threat. And invisible threats surround us everywhere. But inside of the bubble, you can't necessarily feel them. Right now, you and I are, you know, I saw somebody post this and I thought it was quite clever.

The four classes that exist during COVID, right? 19. There's the billionaires. There's the Zoomer class. There's the essential workers. And there's the unemployed, right? That's basically the four classes right now. And you and I are the Zoomer class, right?

Or Skype class or whatever. We're able to sit here. And it seems like, you know, we are still in safe bubbles because just by virtue of the fact that you and I can sit here and have a conversation means that all of our necessities are being taken care of by another class. And it's a very privileged position for us to be in, of course, because we are able to stay safe because these other people are putting their lives at risk. And as you said earlier on,

it's many of those people who we're now saying are essential workers, but who up until a couple months ago, we had kind of denigrated and treated as though they didn't deserve a living wage or benefits or employment security or any of these things, right? Because they were seen as not having skills or not having the kind of skills that are deemed as important in the society that we have built. Yeah. And so I hope, you know, there's one thing that is positive or there's many actually positive things that have come from this in a way. And that is that human beings are

nimble and we're able to shift our thinking and perception really quickly. Like, I mean, if you think about it in February, we were all living normal lives within a month, you know, you have 7.7 billion primates completely in lockdown. I mean, that's insanely fast. It's incredible that we were able to do that. But I also think that we'll hopefully for a lot of people have a deeper sense of gratitude and appreciation for for different forms of work, hopefully a little less adulation and lavishing all that ridiculousness upon celebrities. And, you know, like, I mean, there was an immediate backlash, as we saw when all those celebrities decided to get out and sing Imagine from their mansions, because it's all apparent now. The illusions are starting to crack and break open a little bit. And all those things that we were kind of suckered by in the past, we're not as suckered by now. Yeah. And I wonder now, if these illusions are going to be broken, and if we're going to start

sort of breaking down some of these reality bubbles, obviously, there are a number of perception that the virus has come from these wet markets when there's actually been a lot of reporting that suggests that it's not as simple as kind of pointing the blame at wet markets or whatever, because it's kind of like what we would consider the equivalent to a farmer's market, if I'm kind of understanding it properly. But there's been a lot of reporting that suggests that a lot of these viruses actually spring from the way that we've built our food system, especially the industrialization of the food system over the past number of decades. And the food system in particular is one of the reality bubbles that you talk about in the book. So could you discuss, I guess, how we don't really see what actually

goes on with our food system and how that's really affecting us right now? Sure. Well, I mean, again, to bring it back down to the fact that we're just animals and we're one species amongst 8.7 million other of these animals. And we're this animal that thinks that we're kind of dominant over the rest, that we have rights that none of these other animals should have, and that we're the only sentiment, sentient and intelligent ones. And, you know, a lot of what's been happening, and my friend Astrid Taylor wrote a great article in The Guardian yesterday about this, is it has a lot to do with just our eating meat, eating animals. We eat a lot of different animals.

And, like, every year we eat about 66 billion land animals, right? 66 billion. This is not even counting fish. I mean, think of all the fish that get killed or murdered. Nobody likes using those words though, right? Nobody likes saying that. Because when it's our sustenance, it's actually, we don't think of the fact that we're taking up another body that doesn't want to necessarily be eaten. You get thrown into the vegan category or whatever. But I think it's really important that we discuss it because, you know, we've got these industrialized systems,

as you mentioned, that are largely invisible to most of us. People love pandas. They love all these, you know, you know, I know, you know, I work with the World Wildlife Fund. So I know, you know, you put a you put a cat on the internet, people lose their frickin mind. They love animals, right? But, you know, at the same time, the way in which we've created our food system is really rather horrifying to most of them, whether we're talking about the ones in the industrialized factory farms, whether we're talking about the ones that have had their homes raised in the Amazon, like all those jaguars and sloths, all those cute animals are disappearing so that we can have hamburgers. And then there's other wild animals, right, that aren't part of that traditional system that maybe some other cultures may eat.

And we kind of raise their environment too, so that our habitat bubbles are really close to those wildlife areas. And basically, most of our problems right now, a lot of these sort of pandemics, whether it's avian flus that we're looking at, or whether we're looking at the situation that we're in today, this has to do with eating meat. And, you know, one of the things that people don't often talk about is the antibiotic resistance. Like that one keeps me up at night because that's worse than what we're facing right now, potentially, right? Imagine not being able to take antibiotics and that's starting. A good friend of mine, her son had surgery in France and he developed some problems that antibiotics couldn't fix very easily anymore

because of antibiotic resistance. And that has a lot to do with all of the antibiotics that we're pumping into the animal. So again, it's more about the fact that there are so many different animal species out there, but the way in which we assume dominion is incredibly unhealthy to them often this really terrible way, but then to make the meat and kind of the products that come from these animals appear more palatable to most people. Like you talk about fish being gassed with carbon monoxide so that the color is something that we would expect to see when we go to the supermarket, or eggs which have their yolks colored so they're the right color yellow that we would expect to see, birds soaked in chlorine. So not only is it bad for the animals, of course, to start, and not only is it putting us at risk by making it easier for these viruses to develop and from us, either by dying, by using these different gases or whatnot. But there are also these laws, of course, in the United States, I'm not sure, in other jurisdictions that hides us from really knowing the full extent of what's going on. Yeah, exactly. Those ag-ag laws that we're getting here in Ontario as well. So yeah,

I think you know that there's one thing that I mentioned a little bit with the book, because the book is essentially about blind spots, right? When you're in a bubble, you can't see clearly. And I had a sort of, you know, shower thought one day, which is in the 21st century, there are cameras everywhere, except where our food comes from, where our energy comes from, and where our waste goes, right? So these critical, critical sort of landscapes that allow us to survive are the things that we don't see. And yeah, you're right, when you talk about the carbon monoxide on the tuna to puff it up so that it turns like that bright orange, these are forms of chemical blindness in a way, right? And there's no harm in actually doing that. What's harmful is you may think that you're buying fresh fish,

but that fish is not fresh. That fish has been arrested a couple of times. You have no idea. And the same thing when you're looking at the salmon, all that salmon that's farmed, of course, isn't naturally pink. It's also given food additives to give it that pink color because most people wouldn't find gray salmon particularly palatable. And so we're constantly deceiving ourselves. We live in a world that is kind of created to deceive us. I mean, people who work in advertising and marketing, you know, and lots of people do because you know what, when people are getting out of school, and I can, you know, speak for lots of people that I know, and especially because I worked in that field for a time, I did create an ethical media division that advertised for Greenpeace, but that's the

same thing. So I was like, I'm going to advertise. I want to do something that I want to sort of work with. But it's a place where people who are creative, that's where they get hired, right? It's actually very hard, and it takes a tremendous amount of courage in this world to be an artist because that's where you're creating a gift and it doesn't necessarily fit into the economic model or the world. And if you want to be able to feed yourself and if you want to have kids and do all that sort of stuff, you have to move into a different landscape. And I find that advertising and marketing is one of the easiest places for people who are creative to go. But then your job is essentially to dupe

other people into hyper consumption. And this crazy model that has us buying shit that none of us actually need at a hyper speed so that we can create growth in our economy and then throw all that stuff away. And then we have all these environmental problems that we have. But what a different world it would be if we had all these brilliant minds working in advertising and marketing, but getting us to think differently, getting us to make those big shifts in how we need to see the world, getting us to embrace things like quality again, and having things for a long time. You know what I mean? Like, these ideas that we have of a disposable culture are so brand new. They basically date back to the 50s, which is like my parents'

generation. That's one generation. And we can flip it. We can flip the script. But we have to really shift some of our work models. And that's what COVID gives us an opportunity to do right now. It's collapsed so many things. It's collapsed so many businesses, so many fields. And the people who are going to come out of this, well, I mean, there's a couple situations here. One, there's always industry and big corporations and think tanks right now that are already doing their best to, you know, sort of a la Naomi Klein's shock doctrine method of pushing through things and processes and getting rid of, you know, EPA, that all that sort of stuff can happen right now, right? Environmental protections, etc. But at the same time, this is an opportunity for people to

really rethink the systems that sustain us. You know, right now, for the first time, people are starting to understand why being able to give people, you know, universal income might actually make sense, right? This is something that was seen as absurd and utterly left-wing, having a basic income. Sure doesn't seem that way right now. So there's competing interests that are going to come out of this. And I've been seeing it kind of like a Scooby-Doo ending, right? We have to unmask the corporate evil a little bit here and, and shift our strategies. I just have to let you know, Scooby Doo was one of my favorite cartoons growing up. So I love that you brought up Scooby Doo. You know, I think that's exactly right, right? We we do need

to change the way that we're thinking about what's happening. And obviously for people like us in this Zoomer class that you talk about, we are kind of existing in this world where everything that we're doing now is kind of dependent on technology, right? But even essential workers and everyone else are kind of depending on technology to talk to their family, talk to their friends more than they would have in the past. And we're reliant on technology so much more than just a few weeks ago, but that doesn't mean that even then the influence of technology in our lives wasn't massive, right? And we see technology companies right now, Amazon in particular is the most obvious one,

that is trying to take advantage of this crisis in a very Naomi Klein sort of way. Brian Merchant called it like a techified shock doctrine. So like tech and especially tech's relationship to surveillance is another of the things that you talked about in the book. And I feel like that's one piece that is particularly worrying right now as well, because obviously everyone's relying on Zoom. We're seeing these stories of how Zoom doesn't have kind of the security that you might expect. But then we're also seeing that governments and companies are using

new tools in order to track where everyone is going to see if they encountered other people and may have spread spread coronavirus to them. So when it comes to technology, what are the aspects of it that we should be particularly concerned about, especially with how coronavirus might change the way that we use technology and the power of technology in our lives? Well, I think that when you're looking at Zoom, it's been very interesting because, of course, the discussions about Zoom and issues to do with privacy take place on the internet, and there's a lot of privacy nerds on the internet. So I've been glad to see that Zoom has been quick to respond to that. And they seem to be a somewhat patchable system. I'm not seeing people too much about Zoom a little bit. Obviously, you don't want to... There's a lot of things you don't want to do on Zoom. For example, you don't want to

private message people on Zoom because you can export the text chat and then you can see what everybody is saying to each other. There's lots of things like that. The contact tracing stuff is also another interesting thing. I mean, I have serious problems with the deep surveillance state that we live in. And while I didn't listen to Edward Stone's recent talk, he is talking about the fact that this is a clear moment for that turnkey tyranny that he's been worrying about for a long time, which has taken place to a large degree. But with the contact tracing, in terms of some of the stuff that I've seen right now, some of the ways that they're going about using it, I think with Bluetooth and the MIT

developed stuff, they're trying to develop it in such a way that doesn't reveal too much about you. People are being thoughtful about it. There's problems with false positives, for example. So if you're using even Bluetooth, it can go through your apartment building, right? So you might be saying, hey, I was in touch with my neighbor when you never necessarily were in touch with your neighbor. So there's always going to be problems with technology. I don't know if you're familiar with Virilio, who's the political philosopher from Italy, but he always wrote about this notion of every technology within every technology is the accident, right? Like if you design a bus, you've got a bus accident. You design a plane, it's going to

fall out of the sky. There's going to be problems with any form of technology that we develop. So like you, I'm not a technological determinist. I don't necessarily believe that technology can save the day. But God help me, am I not happy that I have the ability to talk to people right now over the internet in the middle of this bizarre, isolating time, because I simply could not imagine how harsh those conditions would be. But this provides us with a really opportune time to rethink and reorganize. These are structures that human beings have built. And I'm a little bit older than you, and I know that certainly my generation is the one that actually created the infrastructure, didn't develop the internet, but certainly built it in that phase one dot com situation, right? And we always have the ability when we shift our thinking to build and rebuild, and everybody is going to become, you're going to have a lot more tech

workers. What would be nice is if it wasn't so opaque and transparent, and everybody wasn't just sitting on, you know, three platforms like Facebook or Twitter or freaking Instagram anymore. You know, the internet used to be a real wild west because everybody was involved and everybody had a website and it was a lot cooler because it wasn't so homogeneous. And what I would hope is we can break away from the homogeneity of the internet so that it's not just, you know, a corporate landscape, and it has some human spice and flavor in it again. And maybe that's a way in which we can start a different form of community building that we've lost in the last decade.

Yeah, I would love to see that. I guess I started using the internet, like right as we were kind of starting to leave that phase of it, know right right I was reading Joanne McNeil's new book Lurking I'm not sure if you've read it but it kind of goes through that progression and kind of like the experience of the user on the internet from that stage that you're talking about up to what we're experiencing right now and how like the way we've with the, the way we use the internet has changed, but also how that kind of changes us and affects us as well. It's a really fascinating read. I really, I really wonder, actually, this is like just a side thought, but I have a VR headset and, um, I put it on a little while ago and I went into one of those chat rooms and it was really interesting interesting for me because for the first time ever, I felt like I was in 1997 internet because it was back there, right?

Because it's not developed in like, you know, certain aspects of it are super slick. But the chat rooms are like super weird, weirdly human designed, clunky, bizarre. And there was a part of it that I just fell in love with because I was like, oh, this is awful. This is great. You know, the corporations haven't completely taken it over yet. So there's a bit more. No, I mean, it's definitely owned by a corporation. There's definitely it's all corporate entities. But it has it because not everybody has hopped on board yet. just like just like gay areas and gay neighborhoods you're like come on gays come in and then all of a sudden you've got like a

beautiful neighborhood it's the same thing with with like our arts artists right you bring in artists and the same thing with like a vr landscape you can invite all those people but what pisses me off is once it gets great, sometimes the people who originally built those structures are eked out of it. You know what I mean? You no longer have this wonderful landscape for artists inside of the internet like we used to. I know it's a little bit of a side rant, but yeah, I'm just saying. Side rants are welcome. In the book, you were also talking about kind of these systems that are being developed. There's often a lot of focus, I think, on the Chinese social credit system that they're trying to develop to rank everything that people are doing and potentially creating blacklists for some people and benefits for others who potentially have a good or negative social credit score. But there are these kind of potentially really oppressive technological systems being developed around the world. And I feel like obviously a lot of people who talk about that often ignore the degree to which surveillance has expanded in the United States and other Western countries as well, right? And obviously you talked about Edward Snowden,

and after 9-11 we saw this massive expansion in the powers of the surveillance state. I'm talking about the United States, but obviously that happened around the world. Do you worry that governments might try to do something similar after coronavirus, especially when we're seeing, say, companies like Amazon and Palantir and these other ones trying to sell these facial recognition and surveillance technologies to massive government agencies like the Pentagon?

Yeah, well, I mean, I think definitely. I think that there's several things about that. One is the unexpected results of what can happen with something like coronavirus. So here we've been worried about facial recognition for ages, and now we have masks, right? So obviously it's fast for the first time. That's pretty amazing. But yeah, no, it's definitely, we're in a situation where we have to be quite careful because governments, at the same time right now, they're in a situation where we have to be quite careful because governments, at the same time right now, they're very well aware that, and have been preparing for social

unrest for some time, right? Ultimately, when you're in the government, you're like, despite the fact that I think that people who get elected don't want to think this way, they realize that they're in charge, quote unquote, of large populations of people, very large populations of people. If you're looking at China, what is it, 1.4, 1.57 billion people? That's a lot of freaking people to control, right? And when there's disruptions like to food, oh my God, God help you if you're going to be able to do anything without all hell breaking loose. And I think they're always trying to manage all hell breaking loose. But at the same time, what they do is they trap us in a system that makes us like that hamster wheel, right? So then we're stuck doing the same thing, which is ultimately

very damaging in the end. And that's really one of the biggest problems with surveillance is that it forces us to not look at where our food comes from, right? Like you can, those activists, I have a good friend who's an activist, who's a photojournalist who goes and shows what's happening in factory farms. They get put in prison. Same thing that happened very recently, you know, even with the Wet'suwet'en, right? When you're looking at energy systems, or you're blocking a pipeline, you end up going to jail too. Or even if you're an activist, you're showing where the pollution is going up going to jail too. Or even if you're an activist, you're showing where the pollution is going. So surveillance is incredibly dangerous when it doesn't let us look at how our survival system operates. And it forces us to sort of continue with the status quo. And I think that, you know, with this huge loss of jobs that we're going to

be seeing right now, we will start to see social unrest, you know, in many, many places around the world. And ultimately, though, the eyes are there to stop us from gathering. And the problem is the coronavirus will also stop us from gathering. So we need to find new ways of gathering and we need to find new ways to protest together, because it's going to be very difficult for people to gather en masse without worrying about getting sick in the near future. So how do you fight for your rights

when that is the case? Because traditionally, we've always taken to the streets, right? So I think that we need to be nimble and we need to think very, very differently in this next phase of activism. Yeah, I completely agree. And it certainly makes it more difficult when we think about, you know, obviously there's a lot of discussion now about what happens post-coronavirus, right? And obviously there have been a lot of comparisons made because

we are entering this really significant economic downturn right now about how it might be similar to the Great Depression and what happened in that time. And of course, we can remember that just a few months ago, we were talking about a Green New Deal. We're still talking about it now, of course. But now Bernie Sanders has dropped out, so it seems like it's going to be a more difficult thing to achieve. And if Joe Biden, or hopefully not a re-elected Donald Trump, is going to take any action, there's going to need to be sustained pressure from below to make them adopt those sorts of policies. But that becomes a lot more difficult if, as you say, people can't turn out in the streets and actually use their bodies to illustrate that they disagree and want something different.

What's interesting, though, is just even seeing the other day a different type of protest altogether, America being America, people protesting in their cars and creating gridlock, you know, just getting in their cars, their little vehicle bubbles and protesting that way. I think we'll find different ways of protesting and different ways of putting things forward. It's going to be, but we're about to enter some very, very, very hard times. So, so yeah, I, I definitely, it's very discouraging of course, that, you know, another centrist has been elected obviously in the States. Um, but I do feel, I feel grateful to be living in Canada right now, because despite my many criticisms of Justin Trudeau, I feel that this government has done a far better job than our neighbors down south. There's no question about that. And I still think that they do. I think that the question now is like, you

know, this government here in Canada, because it is science based, it's been waiting for this opportunity, right? There's been a big leveler now. People are just as unemployed in Nova Scotia as they are in Alberta. Everybody needs a new type of workforce and a new type of mobilization. And the book that I'm reading right now is Seth Klein's new book. It hasn't come out yet. I'm very lucky to have a chance to read it. And you may want to interview him as well, because his book is really about World War II scale mobilization and how Canada did it and how we can apply those lessons today. And I think that that's a really critical discussion

for us to all be having because there's ways in which we can shift societies. We know it, we've done it before, but that needs to be made explicit. So we need to have a better sense of, okay, we're in this moment now. We need to utilize some strategies to get us out of it and to employ people. What is the best way to employ people and do it in a way that doesn't get us into

the same old rut that we were in before? Yeah. I'm also really looking forward to Seth's book. I heard a talk by him last summer, I believe, where he was kind of giving the premise he was still working on at the time. And I think it sounds absolutely fascinating. And it does kind of, I feel like one of the pieces that is often really important to these discussions is the role of history, right? Because so often we forget really important parts of our history. And one of the things that Seth seems to be doing with this book is kind of reminding us what actually happened during World War Two, and the scale of the response that governments engaged in, and the degree to which they kind of put aside the market, and really

just started planning and organizing the economy to meet these goals that in that time they needed to win the war. But in the future, we might need, you know, to transition away from fossil fuels to put people back to work to get the economy back to a place where people are not really struggling. Yeah. And I think that's the thing, right? Like, you can tell that we're able to, they didn't even have a blueprint and they were able to do that back then during the second world war. But I just, yeah, yeah, it's tricky. It's tricky for all of us. We have to, I think you're very, very right in like remarking on history and what we need to learn from it in this present moment. The thing though, is that, you know, the threat needs to be palpable. And right now the threat is palpable. And one of the key things is we're seeing a level of urgency being delivered by the government. So despite the fact that all these countries around the world declared climate emergencies, none of like when a government declares an emergency, you know, and we're like, OK, we'll listen to you. We'll do what you want to say. It's really an emergency. We believe you. We believe it's an emergency.

Whereas with the climate emergency, it was like there's a climate emergency and that was it. You know what I mean? Trudeau didn't get up at 1115 every single day and deliver a report to the country. That's what needs to be happening. I completely agree. And I had that same criticism when governments around the world started declaring these emergencies. And then it was like, but there's no like action.

It's just words, right? Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, it's, you know, but the threat again needs to be something sort of palpable. And, you know, here it's an invisible threat, but I think that people, there's a really random element to it, right? Like anybody could die. Anybody could die. And I think everybody

feels that very personally. Whereas with climate threats, of course, a lot of that has been, well, and the same with COVID, right? There's a lot of inequality that distributes death in a very different way. You know, black communities, obviously, poorer communities, indigenous communities are going to feel both climate threats and COVID threats more intensely. But yeah, it's definitely quite the grand awakener for all of us. It does illustrate the importance of recognizing how these threats affect us in a way that's not equal, right? Because as you began the conversation by saying, we are in the Zoomer class, we are relatively protected

compared to the essential workers that are just now considered essential. And we're already seeing these stats come out of the United States showing that people in Black communities, people who are Hispanic, are dying a lot more often to a disproportionate degree from COVID-19. And that's also going to happen with climate change. It's going to hit the global south much more than the global north, even though we are the ones who primarily caused the change in the first place, right? And then also, you know, when we talk about that chain of what is essential, right? I think that being human-centric and being human exceptionalists, we tend to think of it

from a human-centered way. We talk about the essential workers. human exceptionalists, we tend to think of it from a human centered way. We talk about the essential workers. But I think if we were to drill down deeper, what we would see is all life is essential. And until we recognize the essential nature of all the creatures that surround us and all the habitats and all the life forms, until we change our perspective with that, until we recognize that as essential, we're going to be stuck in the same situation. Business will continue as usual. That's the big shift that we have to make. I think that's a great place to leave it. Thank you so much, Zaya Tong. Thank you so much, Paris Marks. Great to speak with you. Zaya Tong is the author of The Reality Bubble, Blind Spots, Hidden Truths and the Dangerous Illusions That

Shape Our World. It was published by Penguin Random House, and you can surely find it at your local bookstore, library, or anywhere else that sells books. Tech Won't Save Us is a new podcast, so if you did enjoy the episode, please leave us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, and feel free to share it with anyone who you think would enjoy it. Thanks so much.