Speaker 1: What's badly introducing my podcast, Sophie's ashamed to me. I'm
Speaker 1: Robert Evans hosted Behind the Bastards, the podcast where every
Speaker 1: week we talk about a different terrible person in exhaustive detail,
Speaker 1: and I come up with an introduction that's either embarrassingly bad,
Speaker 1: entertainingly bad, or just plain lame in in. Today it
Speaker 1: was the latter. Sophie agrees with my guest today, Eric Lampere,
Speaker 1: Eric Helosa, how are you doing today? I'm doing really good.
Speaker 1: Thank you. I'm actually very excited about this because I
Speaker 1: don't often get thrown into a podcast without any prior
Speaker 1: knowledge of what's going to happen. Well, that's the way
Speaker 1: we like to do it here. Yeah, we like. We
Speaker 1: like our guests are are subjects to be a mystery.
Speaker 1: The guests are a mystery. That would be very a
Speaker 1: different podcast. Yeah, that would be Robert Evans invites people
Speaker 1: in off the street. I also like that you've got
Speaker 1: a machete on the table, just just to let me
Speaker 1: know who is boss here. Well, now you know, this
Speaker 1: is a very democratic machete. Anybody can use the machete
Speaker 1: for any purpose if you feel the need to hit something.
Speaker 1: I have it on good authority that all of the
Speaker 1: equipment in here can be hit with the machetes. That correct, Sophie.
Speaker 1: We're allowed to damage all the equipment, all of the walls,
Speaker 1: the windows, the poison room. Well, technically can can be.
Speaker 1: It is possible. I mean theoretically, this is a big machete.
Speaker 1: He's right, I think you want something would probably be
Speaker 1: throwned upon. I'll tell you what, I don't want my
Speaker 1: fingerprints on there. I don't know. I don't know you
Speaker 1: well enough to know what you're gonna do. I had
Speaker 1: very different plans. I had very different plans for what
Speaker 1: to do with the machete before you said that, Well,
Speaker 1: I don't know who to guess to joke about murdering,
Speaker 1: Um damn. That would have been a great time to
Speaker 1: joke about. Good old Yeah, good old fashioned murder. Speaking
Speaker 1: of good old fashioned murder, today, we're talking about new
Speaker 1: fangled kinds of murder, the kind of murder where you
Speaker 1: just talk to people and write bad books and it
Speaker 1: leads to unspeakable human suffering and possibly millions of deaths.
Speaker 1: Isn't that a cool thing to talk about? That's one
Speaker 1: hell of a murder. Yeah, it is. It is the
Speaker 1: guy that we're talking about today. The actual death toll
Speaker 1: from his work can't quite be quantified yet, but I
Speaker 1: think one of these days he'll be recognized as real
Speaker 1: piece of shit. I'm gonna start with a little bit
Speaker 1: of a winding introduction, so I hope you'll forgive me
Speaker 1: for that, Eric. When I was sixteen years old, Michael
Speaker 1: Crichton released State of Fear, the second to last novel
Speaker 1: he would publish in his lifetime. Now, I was a
Speaker 1: big fan of Crechton's work ever since stumbling across the
Speaker 1: Lost World in second or third grade, I dutifully devoured
Speaker 1: his canon. State of Fear was decidedly different from his
Speaker 1: prior works, though. The plot was that a group of
Speaker 1: radical environmentalists using experimental technology were attempting to create a
Speaker 1: series of natural disasters in order to convince the public
Speaker 1: of the dangers of global warming, because of course it
Speaker 1: wasn't real now. The book was filled with graphs and
Speaker 1: charts and like quotes from actual scientific studies, which is
Speaker 1: not common for a sci fi techno thriller. It included
Speaker 1: a thirty page bibliography, all of which was angled at
Speaker 1: convincing the reader that global warming was not that big
Speaker 1: a deal. Actually cool book. Yeah. While a work of fiction,
Speaker 1: State of Fear also served as Crechton's manifesto against what
Speaker 1: he called the politico legal media complex should politicize science
Speaker 1: and unjustly scared people about the dangers of climate change.
Speaker 1: So the fun book to read at age sixteen. Crechton's
Speaker 1: work was a massive success, as most of his books were,
Speaker 1: because the man did know how to write a crowd
Speaker 1: pleasing thriller, even if it was a crazy piece of
Speaker 1: anti climate change propaganda. Received widespread praise from conservatives. Senator
Speaker 1: Jim im Hoff declared it required reading for the Senate
Speaker 1: Committee on Environmental in Public Works. He called on Crechton
Speaker 1: to testify before said committee in two thousand five. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you want, If you want, like a real nutshell
Speaker 1: encapsulation of how fucked American politics has always been. The
Speaker 1: Senate called on a science fiction the author of Jurassic
Speaker 1: Parks to testify on climate change. That was the guy
Speaker 1: that blends for dogs with dinosaur d n A. They've
Speaker 1: not seen Jurassic Park, jesssic Park two three, jesssic World.
Speaker 1: It's bound to lead the disaster, Yeah, exactly. They trust him,
Speaker 1: how can they trust him. It's like if you had
Speaker 1: if there was like a clown focused terrorist group and
Speaker 1: you called Stephen King to speak to like like the
Speaker 1: Senate about terrorism and stuff because he wrote it. But
Speaker 1: I guess King though it would be interesting to get
Speaker 1: into his mind. I'd love to have him in the
Speaker 1: sort of c I A or FBI table. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: do feel like King would actually have some insight into
Speaker 1: the mind of a terrorist. Yeah, isn't Einstein that says,
Speaker 1: you know, the true sign of intelligence is not knowledge
Speaker 1: but imagination. And potentially maybe that's why Crichton is trusted.
Speaker 1: He was not a dumb man, although like he had
Speaker 1: a very specific kind of intelligence. Michael Crichton, A lot
Speaker 1: of people don't know this. Um was a trained doctor.
Speaker 1: I forget he went on he created Yeah, he's the
Speaker 1: creator of the R And he was a medical student.
Speaker 1: He at his m d and then kind of piste
Speaker 1: off the college. He got his m d. Yet because
Speaker 1: he then didn't work as a doctor and went on
Speaker 1: to become a science fiction author and like apparently just
Speaker 1: got the m d so that he could like write
Speaker 1: good science fiction about medical stuff like um terminal strain
Speaker 1: or whatever the hell that book was um, but yeah,
Speaker 1: so he's he's he's not a dumb man, but he
Speaker 1: has This is the kind of problem you let come
Speaker 1: up with a lot, especially in the global warm and debate,
Speaker 1: people who are not dumb but have a very specific
Speaker 1: kind of education and intelligence, and then assumed that they
Speaker 1: understand climate science. That's like, yeah, that's what this episode
Speaker 1: is really about. So yeah, Crichton Yeah, was called upon
Speaker 1: to testify before the Senate Committee on Environmental in Public
Speaker 1: Works in two thousand five. In two thousand and six,
Speaker 1: the APG awarded Michael It's Journalism Award, which sounds impressive
Speaker 1: until you learn that the APG is the American Association
Speaker 1: of Petroleum Geologists. Yeah, famed unbiased source sub climate journalism.
Speaker 1: Actual climate scientists, of course, did not like State of Fear.
Speaker 1: Several of the people who authored studies that crit and
Speaker 1: used to prove his points even spoke up to complain
Speaker 1: that he completely misinterpreted or outright misrepresented their research. Peter Doran,
Speaker 1: author of a Nature paper on cooling in the Antarctic,
Speaker 1: echoed the concerns of many when he complained, our results
Speaker 1: have been misused as evidence against global warming. This is
Speaker 1: a famous study that cited by anti climate change people
Speaker 1: that how like there's ice and like one of the
Speaker 1: poles is increasing and they're like, look look at these
Speaker 1: ice sheets are actually getting bigger. So and it's like,
Speaker 1: well no, but the other one is getting smaller. In
Speaker 1: the total amount of ice lost from the polls does
Speaker 1: not over like doesn't doesn't like they don't balance out.
Speaker 1: We're net down a shitload. Eyes thank you, Sophie. So
Speaker 1: if he's correcting my mic placement, because I'm here in
Speaker 1: the office this time and she gets to micromanage me,
Speaker 1: but I love. I was just saying, I thank you.
Speaker 1: Is this shattering Greek pillar that's a shattering ashes from well,
Speaker 1: there's it's from a couple of places the Roman empires where,
Speaker 1: but they also there's there's big bronze ones up on Congress.
Speaker 1: It's a symbola. Yeah, sorry, Sophie, I didn't mean that.
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna go cry. I've heard Sophie. Do you
Speaker 1: want to hit something with a machette? I wouldn't hand
Speaker 1: that to me, right, Well, I'm just trying to make
Speaker 1: your podcast better. Well, Sophie, I want everyone to hear
Speaker 1: every single word that you say. Robin. Now you've shamed me,
Speaker 1: and now I feel bad. Great, continue, I'm once again
Speaker 1: the bastard of my podcast. Which is it takes one
Speaker 1: to know one that you have to dive into the
Speaker 1: character to truly understand the complexities of bastardry. As Nietzsche said,
Speaker 1: if you stare into the abyss long enough, eventually you
Speaker 1: hurt your boss's feelings. Natsch was a very poetic man. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he was a great podcaster, a little bit at very
Speaker 1: anti semitic really, but it was a different time podcasting
Speaker 1: was in this evolved an art form. I didn't even
Speaker 1: know how to record things. Anyway, I should continue with
Speaker 1: the episode. Uh so. Peter Duran, author of that Nature
Speaker 1: paper and Cooling in the Arctic, complained that yeah, that
Speaker 1: Crichton had misinterpreted his results and misused them as evidence
Speaker 1: against global warming. The American Geophysical Union, which includes more
Speaker 1: than fifty scientists, stated unequittically that state of fear quote
Speaker 1: changed public perception of scientists, especially researchers, and global warming
Speaker 1: towards suspicion and hostility. This is a big books, like
Speaker 1: number one on the charts. For quite a while, it
Speaker 1: was like a very popular release that had a real
Speaker 1: negative impact on global warming. And this is the place
Speaker 1: where I admit shamefully that young Republican Robert Evans found
Speaker 1: this book deeply compelling. Of course, even then, I was
Speaker 1: a bit too savvy to take the words of a
Speaker 1: science fiction author as the end of the argument against
Speaker 1: vast scientific consensus. So I started going through the bibliography,
Speaker 1: and while I was doing it that I came upon
Speaker 1: the one work that Michael seemed to hold in the
Speaker 1: highest regard, a book called The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjorn Lumborg.
Speaker 1: Have you ever heard of Biorn motherfucking Lumborg. But I'm
Speaker 1: guessing he's Scandinavian. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think Danish. Um. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So there's a couple of versions of the Bijorn Lumborg
Speaker 1: story that you'll hear. I'm gonna read one paragraph that's
Speaker 1: sort of like how he's generally introduced when you read
Speaker 1: a news article about this guy. A former member of Greenpeace,
Speaker 1: a self described leftist, a backpacking outdoorsman, and a vegetarian.
Speaker 1: Lumborg in nineteen nine seven, was paging through a copy
Speaker 1: of Wired magazine in a bookstore in San Francisco. He
Speaker 1: happened across an interview with Julian Simon and University of
Speaker 1: Maryland economists, known for his optimistic prediction that population growth
Speaker 1: was unlikely to exhaust the planet's resources. Later that year
Speaker 1: and intrigued, Lumborg set about in Denmark with ten of
Speaker 1: his brightest students to examine Simon's claims. Expecting to prove
Speaker 1: Simon wrong, Lumborg and his students were surprised to find
Speaker 1: that many of the economist predictions about the state of
Speaker 1: the environment were on the mark. This discovery led Lombard
Speaker 1: to pen a few op eds for a center left
Speaker 1: Danish newspaper and eventually the publication in Denmark of the
Speaker 1: first Day of The Skeptical Environmentalist. Now, the book was
Speaker 1: essentially a thoroughly argued case against the scientific consensus on
Speaker 1: global warming. Lombard pointed out what he called a number
Speaker 1: of inconsistencies that he claimed to have uncovered between the
Speaker 1: hard scientific data and the party line of climate scientists
Speaker 1: and environmental activists. Lomborg would use what looked to my
Speaker 1: sixteen year old brain like compelling scientific data to argue
Speaker 1: his points. Among other things, that Lombard argued, number one,
Speaker 1: species are not going extinct at a weirdly high rate.
Speaker 1: Number two, the world is not losing ice, and thus
Speaker 1: the seas are in no real danger of rising. Number three,
Speaker 1: global temperatures aren't increasing in any worrying way. And number
Speaker 1: four there's more trees than ever. So what are environmentalists
Speaker 1: worried about? It sounds silly like talking about now in
Speaker 1: two nineteen, but in two thousand one it was a
Speaker 1: different media ecosystem, Like the fact that the world was
Speaker 1: shifting its climactic pants was not quite as obvious to everybody.
Speaker 1: The whole climate change debate has been around one a
Speaker 1: long time, in the eighties at least at least oh yeah,
Speaker 1: and really even before that. Um Murray book Chin, who
Speaker 1: is a philosopher I'm a fan of um, kind of
Speaker 1: an anarchist political thinker in nine in the nineteen sixties,
Speaker 1: wrote a lengthy series of essays talking about how, uh,
Speaker 1: carbon emissions and like fossil fuse we're going to lead
Speaker 1: to like massive climate catastrophe unless we adopted like vastly
Speaker 1: radically different ways of living that we're like not compatible
Speaker 1: with kind of the consumptive capitalist system that we existed
Speaker 1: in currently. Like that's nineteen sixty five. He's writing this
Speaker 1: stuff very clearly later. So, yeah, people knew about this
Speaker 1: for decades. It's just that nobody took it seriously until
Speaker 1: we had what three category five hurricanes hit the US
Speaker 1: East Coast in the course of like a y area.
Speaker 1: But even that doesn't seem to be enough evidence for people. Well,
Speaker 1: fine fastening, and there's an elemententy that's sort of not sympathizers.
Speaker 1: But until you experience something, you can't actually know anything's real.
Speaker 1: And so when people say, oh, you know, it's all
Speaker 1: melting beyond and the poles and stuff, until they actually
Speaker 1: visibly see it, they can't fully understand the complexities of it.
Speaker 1: So um, it's that. It's that Christopher Nolan mentions in
Speaker 1: Inception and about how like one wants a seed is
Speaker 1: planted in your head, it's very hard to sort of
Speaker 1: un route. Yeah, and if you don't have trust in
Speaker 1: your government, then why would you trust that. They say,
Speaker 1: but the climate is being destroyed and I'm just talking
Speaker 1: to hear like, because obviously the climate is changing drastically. Well,
Speaker 1: you need to do is rub your hands together and
Speaker 1: you understand the friction causes heat. And the more people
Speaker 1: that are on the planet, the more cars there are,
Speaker 1: the more food there needs to be grown. All of that.
Speaker 1: It is logical, But I am trying to understand why
Speaker 1: people don't believe. You know, there's a lot of reasons.
Speaker 1: I think a lot of it comes down to people
Speaker 1: like Lumbourg because there's this this kind of war that
Speaker 1: really started in the nineties, the late nineties against scientific consensus.
Speaker 1: Like there was a time when if scientists in like
Speaker 1: nature came out with a study saying like, we've got
Speaker 1: a big fucking problem. Um, the idea that you'd have
Speaker 1: a bunch of people just rejected out of hand because
Speaker 1: they believe there's a conspiracy by China to like convince
Speaker 1: people global warming is reel like that would that would
Speaker 1: sound absurd to people, And now the president has essentially
Speaker 1: spread that same line, like it's um, this is a
Speaker 1: lot of this is like where we are right now
Speaker 1: is the culmination of a process that lumb war was
Speaker 1: a major part of starting this, this war against kind
Speaker 1: of an understand a shared understanding of reality. Um. And
Speaker 1: part part of the problem is that this issue was
Speaker 1: so politicized and it's like, I don't think al Gore
Speaker 1: was wrong in making it like a key cornerstone of
Speaker 1: like his presidential campaign and just like his personal activism,
Speaker 1: but the fact that Gore was associated with Clinton and
Speaker 1: that Republican having grown up in a Republican home, I
Speaker 1: can tell you the kind of hatred of the Clintons
Speaker 1: that existed in the late nineties and in two thousand
Speaker 1: was beyond rational. It was. It was a kind of
Speaker 1: mania that overtook the conservative right and that is still
Speaker 1: very much asn't in prevalent um. And so because al Gore,
Speaker 1: who was connected to the Clintons, was making this point,
Speaker 1: it had to be fake and so that was a
Speaker 1: big driver of all of this. So there's a lot
Speaker 1: of this that's tied together. It's it's the end of
Speaker 1: a process in which kind of at the the apex
Speaker 1: point of the process, nobody believes anything. There's no sort
Speaker 1: of authority beyond the one guy that you like, if
Speaker 1: you're that sort of person or whatever pundits you trust. Um,
Speaker 1: And yeah, it's it's a real problem. Yeah, um, it's interesting.
Speaker 1: I also wonder though, if all the people are pushing
Speaker 1: the climate change is a hoax thing generally are quite
Speaker 1: wealthy well, and they won't be affected by ultimately, ultimately,
Speaker 1: you know, the world and the humanity will survive. Right now,
Speaker 1: there may be millions billions of death caused because the
Speaker 1: climate change, but ultimately humanity will survive. And I think
Speaker 1: they're very rich, will always be good. They could just
Speaker 1: move somewhere else. Yeah, they'll move somewhere. That's going to
Speaker 1: go from having brutal winters to being like Los Angeles
Speaker 1: when Los Angeles burns down, So ultimately there and give
Speaker 1: a ship. Well, yeah, that's actually kind of where this
Speaker 1: is headed a little bit. Yeah, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: this is this is what the podcast is for. So
Speaker 1: the unavoidable conclusion from reading Lomborg's book and taking it
Speaker 1: seriously was that everything was more or less hunky dory
Speaker 1: with the climate. Uh Now, Bjorn did not deny that
Speaker 1: there were some environmental problems. He didn't even come out
Speaker 1: and deny that human beings were changing the climate. But
Speaker 1: his argument was that all of the issues we were
Speaker 1: having were things that could be solved by better conservation
Speaker 1: and modest infrastructure investments. Nobody needed to say stop driving cars,
Speaker 1: or stop burning coal or stop fracking gas. The people
Speaker 1: telling us to do all that, we're just fearmongers. That's
Speaker 1: that's Bjorn Lamborg's line. Now, sixteen year old Robert Evans
Speaker 1: took Lumborg's book apart and used many bits arguments for
Speaker 1: a series of debates in his speech and debate class.
Speaker 1: And then he grew up and into the real world
Speaker 1: and stopped being a young Republican. Somewhere between reading the
Speaker 1: work of actual climate scientists, which Lumborg is not, and
Speaker 1: living through four of the hottest years on record, he
Speaker 1: came around on the whole climate change thing. But I
Speaker 1: was not the only person fooled by Bijorn Lumborg. The
Speaker 1: median narrative around him was just too good for bunches
Speaker 1: of overly credulous journalists to not flock to him. One
Speaker 1: example of this was a two thousand and one New
Speaker 1: York Times profile released right before the publication of the
Speaker 1: English translation of The Skeptical Environmentalist. The title scientist at
Speaker 1: work from an unlikely corner eco optimism. That's nice eco
Speaker 1: optimism quote. Strange to say the author of this happy
Speaker 1: thesis is not a steely eyed economist at a conservative
Speaker 1: think tank, but a vegetarian, backpack toting academic who was
Speaker 1: a member of Greenpeace for four years. He is doctor
Speaker 1: Bjorn Lumborg, a thirty six year old political scientist and
Speaker 1: professor of statistics at the University of our hosts in Denmark. Now.
Speaker 1: The article went into loving detail about how Lumborg had
Speaker 1: been converted from environmental apocalypticism by reading the work of
Speaker 1: Dr Julian Simon, Who's that doctor we talked about a
Speaker 1: little earlier. Now. Simon is famous for having some very
Speaker 1: public arguments with a guy named Dr Paul or Like
Speaker 1: over resource scarcity. Erlick was like a doom kind of
Speaker 1: a doomsayer. He wrote like a book about how like
Speaker 1: human population was going to like reach an apocalyptic level
Speaker 1: and cause massive resource scarcity, and his predictions turned out
Speaker 1: to be largely untrue. And Simon actually made a bet
Speaker 1: with him about, like, you know, they picked five resources
Speaker 1: and Airlock bet that they would all increase in cost
Speaker 1: over the next couple of decades, and Simon bet that
Speaker 1: they would decrease, and Simon wound up being right. Um,
Speaker 1: can I ask you, do you think that people aren't
Speaker 1: necessary worried about the whole climate change thing as a whole,
Speaker 1: as an actual doomsday possibility because they've gone through so
Speaker 1: many doomsday possibilities. So we've had the millennium bug, we
Speaker 1: you guys have had the nuclear threats from Russia. We
Speaker 1: are constantly barraged by these end of the world scenarios
Speaker 1: that never usually happened. That when we are presented with
Speaker 1: one that's actually in front of us, happening live in
Speaker 1: front of our eyes, that most people can just brush
Speaker 1: it aside because I've experienced other doomsday scenars that have
Speaker 1: actually just sort of gone bine wind. I absolutely think
Speaker 1: that kind of particularly some of the Hollywood like the
Speaker 1: Day After Tomorrow ship, like that's that's actually really hurt
Speaker 1: the cause of getting people to take this seriously, because
Speaker 1: the problem is not um that the world is going
Speaker 1: to end. Human beings are very adaptable. The majority of
Speaker 1: us will find a way to survive no matter what
Speaker 1: happens to the climate. Like even if a fucking asteroid hits,
Speaker 1: I have no doubt that a lot of people will
Speaker 1: figure out how to make that ship work, because we're
Speaker 1: just we're cunning little bastards. Um. The problem is that,
Speaker 1: like it's not an apocalypse thing, it's like what what
Speaker 1: do we want the world to be? What do we
Speaker 1: want the world to be for our kids, for our grandkids.
Speaker 1: Do we want it to be the sun racked nightmare
Speaker 1: healthscape where people knife fight to death over jugs of water? Um,
Speaker 1: A lot of people don't. Yeah, that's that's another scary thing.
Speaker 1: Is I am hoarding water and nights? But that's very
Speaker 1: little to do with the podcasting machete. Um No, it's
Speaker 1: it is weird how a lot of people will uh,
Speaker 1: you know, height being by themselves, which means that they
Speaker 1: always have like bad voices in their heads. And if
Speaker 1: that have bad voices in their heads, I don't really
Speaker 1: care about other people. And so the idea of an
Speaker 1: apocalyptic yes scenario where where their their life gets twist
Speaker 1: turned upside down is actually welcoming because most people's lives
Speaker 1: are kind of difficult and challenging. Well, if I can
Speaker 1: get into like, uh, my my own fringe political beliefs
Speaker 1: on this, I think a lot of that has to
Speaker 1: do with the fact that there are some very dehumanizing
Speaker 1: aspects to the kind of capitalism that we enjoy in
Speaker 1: the United States, and a lot of people's lives are
Speaker 1: incredibly difficult and there's very little hope that things will
Speaker 1: lighten up or that they'll be able to retire. There's
Speaker 1: like no light at the end of the tunnel. There's
Speaker 1: just a series of distractions. And so the ideal that
Speaker 1: it might all come tumbling down and you would get
Speaker 1: to be king of the waste land and not have
Speaker 1: to clock in at work at Target the next morning.
Speaker 1: Right that that that does, that is very attractive to
Speaker 1: a chunk of the population, especially the people who believe
Speaker 1: that they would thrive that environment. Yeah, that's that's an
Speaker 1: important key I think, is that they would believe they
Speaker 1: would thrive when the reality is two days in the woods. Now, Eric,
Speaker 1: speaking of the dehumanizing realities of modern American consumerst capitalism,
Speaker 1: it's time for an it plug. Is this a good
Speaker 1: This is a good one, Yeah, nailing it products. We're
Speaker 1: back boy. A lot happened in that break number one.
Speaker 1: I grabbed my throwing bagels. I don't know if you
Speaker 1: if you're aware of this, but I throw bagels on
Speaker 1: the show. It's a much in a kind of substitute
Speaker 1: to think, Well, your guests. I actually planned to combine
Speaker 1: the two. So here's what I'd like to do when
Speaker 1: we when we hit a point of maximum rage in
Speaker 1: this episode, um or perhaps at the end of it,
Speaker 1: I'm going to throw these bagels and I want you
Speaker 1: to slice them out of the air like a modern
Speaker 1: samurai with the Sisters machete. You want to do that?
Speaker 1: All right? Sophie says that it's approved by everyone at corporate,
Speaker 1: so we're good to go. I also have to say
Speaker 1: I just tried the pair editions sugar Free Red Bull.
Speaker 1: I hate Red Bull as a general rule. I hate
Speaker 1: the company, the ad campaign. This is delightful. The pair
Speaker 1: version is really tasty. I hate that it's so good,
Speaker 1: but it's fantastic, and I like that you gave it
Speaker 1: a little like you are a commercial now. Thank you.
Speaker 1: You've become America. I God, damn it. It happens every
Speaker 1: time I come back to Los Angeles. When can I
Speaker 1: show him a photo of this fucker? Yeah? Show him
Speaker 1: young beyond Lumborg so you can see how this guy okay,
Speaker 1: because I was gonna say, Michael's all right, Michael's in
Speaker 1: all right face. No, No, he's fine. So this is
Speaker 1: young born Lumborg. So for anyone listening, he looks like
Speaker 1: Hitler's wet dream. He kind of looks like, um, what
Speaker 1: I like, what Aaron Carter would look like if he
Speaker 1: didn't do drugs, like you know, this little blue eyes,
Speaker 1: blonde hair, and it works for him. Yeah, but how
Speaker 1: does he look now, Well, we'll talk about that a
Speaker 1: little bit. I want to get to where this guy
Speaker 1: winds up bad but not great? Right? Is he a
Speaker 1: personification of what's going on inside his mind? Yeah? Kind of.
Speaker 1: Actually it's a personification of what's happened to his arguments
Speaker 1: over the years, which I think happens. I mean, look
Speaker 1: at Steve Bannon. If Steve Stevie Banny, right hat Steve Bannon,
Speaker 1: if he looks like you know, if he looked like
Speaker 1: Hercules and was like just you know, I hate these
Speaker 1: types of people, I'd be like, I'm gonna listen to
Speaker 1: that guy. He's a beautiful man. He must be healthy,
Speaker 1: both physically and therefore mentally. But Steve is full of
Speaker 1: like regular type skin, you know, where like clearly skirmishes
Speaker 1: have happened on this face. Yeah. Yeah, Yeah, there's a
Speaker 1: war between his acne and his cirrhosis, and like it's
Speaker 1: it's a vicious battle. Paul, Steve, No, don't ever, Steve Bannon.
Speaker 1: You know what, it doesn't get said enough, Paul Steve
Speaker 1: Steve Bannon, uh Stevie b So, yeah, Lumbard. When we
Speaker 1: talked about Julian Simon, the guy got into that argument
Speaker 1: with Paul Aerlic And he's like a frequently quoted scientist
Speaker 1: by people who want to deny climate change because one
Speaker 1: of the things that they'll always argue is that we'll
Speaker 1: back in the seventies and eighties, everybody was telling us
Speaker 1: there was going to be a population bomb and population
Speaker 1: a resource crisis, and that didn't happen, so clearly like
Speaker 1: this is the same thing, and everybody's worried for nothing.
Speaker 1: And Simon is one of the apostles of he was
Speaker 1: right about the population crisis. And that is one of
Speaker 1: the things whenever we're getting too talks about climate change
Speaker 1: and people bring up population is a problem, that's zero
Speaker 1: percent of the problem. The the overall human population is
Speaker 1: not an issue. It's resource expenditure by people like us.
Speaker 1: Um It's not like the issue is not that there's
Speaker 1: too many people being born in Sub Saharan Africa, or
Speaker 1: in India or in China. It's a little bit, but
Speaker 1: that's most A lot of that's because they're making stuff
Speaker 1: to be sold in the Europe and in Europe in
Speaker 1: the United States, it's not a population issue. It's the
Speaker 1: types of resources being consumed. And also like more than
Speaker 1: anything related to Yeah, it's more an issue of billionaires
Speaker 1: and millionaires and upper middle class people in the kind
Speaker 1: of resources they spend, like celebrities flying their private jets
Speaker 1: from one airport in l a to the other to
Speaker 1: skip midtown traffic, which happens way more often than you
Speaker 1: would expect. Oh, you can track their planes. Yeah, Um,
Speaker 1: it's more of that than it is like look at
Speaker 1: all these people and yeah, that that's part of like
Speaker 1: what Steve Bannon Actually that's one of the racist arguments
Speaker 1: that he'll make about like, well, if you're really concerned,
Speaker 1: we should like be concerned about all these population, you know,
Speaker 1: problems going So it's like this weird thing on the
Speaker 1: right where but both point to Paul Erlick and his
Speaker 1: fears of a population bomb to be like, look, climate
Speaker 1: change isn't real because they were wrong about overpopulation. And
Speaker 1: they'll also complain that like all these hordes of of poor,
Speaker 1: non white people from like the global South are going
Speaker 1: to like using up the world's resources, when that's not
Speaker 1: at all the case, like it's this double edged sword
Speaker 1: of racism, uh, and also not doing anything about the
Speaker 1: core problems of climate change. It's very frustrating. I do
Speaker 1: wonder with these signs who say, you know, they're opposing
Speaker 1: climate change and stuff. I do want to sometimes if
Speaker 1: that's just good money it is with Lumberg, I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna say Simon died. I think before the debate really
Speaker 1: took off, he was right about the population stuff, So
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't want to lump him in with Lamborg,
Speaker 1: but Lumborg sees himself as that kind of figure. So
Speaker 1: Simon gains a lot of renowned for being right about
Speaker 1: the fact that like there was alarmism around the global population,
Speaker 1: and Lumborg painted himself as that kind of guy, and
Speaker 1: he would bring this story up specifically when he did
Speaker 1: news interviews so that people would conservatives in particular, would
Speaker 1: see him as like, oh, this is the next iteration
Speaker 1: of that kind of scientist. This is the clear eyed
Speaker 1: Galileo type contrarian scientists who sees the reality through the
Speaker 1: political bullshit of climate change and understands that it's not
Speaker 1: really a problem. We can keep fracking. Like that's how
Speaker 1: he's painting himself. So it's important to understand that so um.
Speaker 1: One of the reasons that Lumborg was so convincing, particularly
Speaker 1: to journalists who again didn't know anything about science, like
Speaker 1: the guys at the New York Times wrote this profile piece,
Speaker 1: is that his book had a shipload of citations in it. Uh.
Speaker 1: In many of the articles about Lumborg in the early
Speaker 1: two thousand's, you would read quotes like this one from
Speaker 1: the Times. Dr Lumborg has presented his findings and the
Speaker 1: Skeptical Environmentalists a book to be published in September by
Speaker 1: Cambridge University Press. The primary targets of the book, a
Speaker 1: substantial work of analysis with almost three thousand footnotes, are
Speaker 1: statements made by environmental organizations like the World Watch Institute,
Speaker 1: the World Wildlife Fund, and green Peace. Virtually every one
Speaker 1: of these pieces you would find includes references, and often
Speaker 1: multiple references, to the fact that Lumborg's book had like
Speaker 1: three thousand footnotes. So like that's part of the claim
Speaker 1: of like, how how like this is a really seriously
Speaker 1: research scholarly look at how many footnotes it has, Like
Speaker 1: people would like there's you can find like videos and
Speaker 1: stuff of people like like whole opening the book and
Speaker 1: like pointing out how thick the section of footnotes is,
Speaker 1: and like I did that when I was in school,
Speaker 1: to point out, like, look, this guy is really like
Speaker 1: look at how many fucking we're excited he has. That
Speaker 1: means it's like a real solid work of science. So
Speaker 1: you see you once sort of side Oh yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 1: I was. I was raised very conservative, very Republican. Um
Speaker 1: I thought that George W. Bush was the best president
Speaker 1: since Ronald Reagan? Who was the best president? And when
Speaker 1: and how long did we take you to sort of
Speaker 1: distance yourself from him? I mean as soon as I
Speaker 1: went to college and made friends who both were not
Speaker 1: white and also had not grown up middle class. It's
Speaker 1: a bear in mind, like how challenging it had to
Speaker 1: take you to be from one place to another. And
Speaker 1: you're clearly smart, and you clearly have resources where you
Speaker 1: want to read and stuff. Then we're asking the general
Speaker 1: populace to just switch off to Netflix for an hour
Speaker 1: and maybe read an essay. Yeah, it read an essay
Speaker 1: that's like dense and hard to understand, and they might
Speaker 1: come across stuff like research on how one Arctic ice
Speaker 1: sheet is increasing in density, and like you have to
Speaker 1: also ask them, no, no, don't stop just because you
Speaker 1: read one thing that doesn't seem like like it actually
Speaker 1: takes understanding a lot of different things, like not just
Speaker 1: like what's happening with like ice sheets, but what's happening
Speaker 1: with like air currents and like like weather patterns, species, like, well,
Speaker 1: they have to understand chaos theory, yeah, in its most
Speaker 1: complex form, which is ah and and then you get
Speaker 1: to this situation where like you wind up telling people
Speaker 1: just look, all the scientists agree about this, so just
Speaker 1: believe them. But then there's maybe if you need to
Speaker 1: know comp chaos theory, maybe we should talk to Michael
Speaker 1: Crichton about it. It's seemed frustrating he didn't get that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and Creighton Lost World still a fine book, but god
Speaker 1: damn it, dude. So yeah, Journalists who liked Lumbourg would
Speaker 1: point out, like all of those fucking footnotes, like that
Speaker 1: was one of the biggest arguments to like why the
Speaker 1: Skeptical Environmentalist was a credible book, um, And most people
Speaker 1: who looked at all those footnotes assumed that his arguments
Speaker 1: were actually supported by the research included there. In spoilers,
Speaker 1: it was not as with Crichton. Several of the scientists
Speaker 1: cited in the Borg's books spoke out to warn that
Speaker 1: he had misinterpreted their work. A bevy of experts took
Speaker 1: to the field to complain that the skeptical environmentalists was
Speaker 1: nothing but a pack of deadly lies. For one example
Speaker 1: of how dumb this ship is, I'd like to quote
Speaker 1: an article written by Dr E. O. Wilson, a Harvard professor,
Speaker 1: a two time Pulitzer Prize winner, and an actual biologist.
Speaker 1: He's commenting on Lumburg's claims that fears of mass extinction
Speaker 1: brought on by climate change are bogus, using bad data
Speaker 1: and lies. Lumbarg estimated a species lost worldwide of just
Speaker 1: point seven percent over the next fifty years point zero
Speaker 1: one four percent per year. Now, Dr Wilson, who was
Speaker 1: an actual biologist again and not a fucking statician and
Speaker 1: economist like Lumborg, wrote this. Before humans existed, the species
Speaker 1: extinction rate was very roughly one species per million species
Speaker 1: per year point zero zero zero one percent. Estimates for
Speaker 1: current species extinction rates range from one hundred to ten
Speaker 1: thousand times that, but mostly hover close to the one
Speaker 1: thousand times pre human levels point one percent per year,
Speaker 1: with the rate rejected to rise and very likely sharply.
Speaker 1: Wilson goes on to note, based on the work of
Speaker 1: Stuart Pim of Columbia University's Center for Environmental Research and Conservation,
Speaker 1: anywhere from one to several birds species go extinct annually
Speaker 1: out of ten thousand known species. Hence, say point zero
Speaker 1: one to point zero three percent of all living bird
Speaker 1: species are extinguished per year. But birds are unusual, and
Speaker 1: that threatens bird species receive an extraordinary amount of human intervention.
Speaker 1: The real figure of observed extinctions would be much higher,
Speaker 1: very likely ten per year, point one percent or more,
Speaker 1: if it were not for their heroic efforts to save
Speaker 1: species on the brink of extinction. Now, that article and
Speaker 1: that quote from Dr Wilson came from two thousand one,
Speaker 1: but time has proved Dr Wilson right and Dr Lumbourg wrong.
Speaker 1: The Center for Biological Diversity notes we're currently experiencing the
Speaker 1: worst spate of species die off since the loss of
Speaker 1: the dinosaurs sixty million years ago. Although extinction is a
Speaker 1: natural phenomenon, it occurs at a natural background rate of
Speaker 1: about one to five species per year. Scientists estimate we
Speaker 1: are now losing species. It up to a thousand times
Speaker 1: the background rate, with literally does is going extinct every day.
Speaker 1: It could be a scary future. Indeed, with as many
Speaker 1: as thirty of all species passably heading towards extinction by
Speaker 1: mid century. So Lumborg says point seven percent of all
Speaker 1: species by mid century. The reality is but even even
Speaker 1: that forty, I think most people don't care. Right, But
Speaker 1: what it seems like people don't understand is if you
Speaker 1: lose one animal, it's snowballs and sort of triggers effect.
Speaker 1: Like you need to like we need to win the
Speaker 1: heart of people in different ways I learned. So there's
Speaker 1: this woman called Dr Erica McAllister. She works at the
Speaker 1: Natural History Museum, and she is a fly expert, and
Speaker 1: I did an interview with her about flies. And there
Speaker 1: is one fly that creates chocolate, pollinates chocolate, and because
Speaker 1: of global warming, we're actually losing that fly, which means
Speaker 1: that potentially we could lose chocolate. If you get to
Speaker 1: people in that way, I can see people protesting fast
Speaker 1: ladies and chocolate if you can convince the it's real.
Speaker 1: Like one of the problems is that, like there's a
Speaker 1: lot of people who when you tell them that we're
Speaker 1: losing species, will get angry and say, funk all those species.
Speaker 1: I want them dead. I'm going to drive the biggest
Speaker 1: I'm going to modify my car to release more pollution
Speaker 1: so that it will kill them faster. Because there's this
Speaker 1: big propaganda game that's been played in the US to
Speaker 1: make it look like um, the point of a couple
Speaker 1: of specific cases where like the Environmental Protection Act led
Speaker 1: to farmers losing access to pieces of their land to
Speaker 1: preserve like wetlands and keep it species of frog alive,
Speaker 1: and it like led to people murdering some of those species,
Speaker 1: like like as an act of protest against what they
Speaker 1: saw as government overreach. Like it's this, there's this hateful
Speaker 1: and utterly lunatic chunk of the right that has been
Speaker 1: trained to respond to any talk of global warming with
Speaker 1: just like violent rage, which is why you'll see people
Speaker 1: threatening to kill Greta Tunberg, that that that the young
Speaker 1: environmental active. It's amazing to watch, you know, obviously really
Speaker 1: sad for her and almost kind of fair what could
Speaker 1: happen to her. There's a piece of me that's like
Speaker 1: as fucked up as it is, and I'm horribly sorry
Speaker 1: that she is going through this and very proud of
Speaker 1: her for being an activist. It's good that it's been
Speaker 1: made this obvious that there's this young girl just saying
Speaker 1: I want the world to be habitable by currently like
Speaker 1: when I'm an adult, I want to be able to
Speaker 1: like enjoy wetlands and like glaciers, Like I want to
Speaker 1: be able to live in the kind of world that
Speaker 1: y'all grew up in. And every like this chunk of
Speaker 1: the populace threatening to murder her um and like like
Speaker 1: like that we see this this kind of hate unleashed
Speaker 1: that like it really is that irrational. It really has been,
Speaker 1: because yeah, Lumboard is ground zero for spinning that up,
Speaker 1: like he's a part of this convincing everybody like that
Speaker 1: was the first stage was convincing them there's this conspiracy.
Speaker 1: And he didn't say it was a conspiracy. He just
Speaker 1: said that, like, look, there's this the reality if you
Speaker 1: look at the real data, it's actually not that bad.
Speaker 1: On all these groups are just trying to scare you,
Speaker 1: like there's this conspiracy of fear. Then that's that. Like
Speaker 1: the whole lady behind Crichton's book is that there's a
Speaker 1: literal conspiracy to like make you believe if this is
Speaker 1: happening when it's not. And that's the that's step one
Speaker 1: to getting and the in stage of this like long
Speaker 1: and I don't even think it was really a plan,
Speaker 1: but the natural conclusion of the start of this, where
Speaker 1: you just get everyone to distrust this information believe they're
Speaker 1: being lied to, is when this young woman steps up.
Speaker 1: People are just like screaming spittle flecked hatred at this
Speaker 1: this girl for daring to be like, I'd like it
Speaker 1: if there were ice in the future. Yeah, it's pretty
Speaker 1: scary the people, the people that are out there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And Lumbourg is an important guy to understand to know
Speaker 1: how we got from, like where we used to be
Speaker 1: as a species, about like kind of basic scientific consensus
Speaker 1: and where we are right now, particularly in the United States.
Speaker 1: But but also the thing is I do try and
Speaker 1: understand people that don't understand, right. And if most people,
Speaker 1: well actually all people can only experience life through their
Speaker 1: own sis, right, And if people are also not curious
Speaker 1: because the majority of people are not curious, which is
Speaker 1: their curiosity is focused. They're curious about whatever they're into.
Speaker 1: They're not curious about but even now. Some people just
Speaker 1: aren't right. They just sort of float around, just sort
Speaker 1: of colliding into things, and just life takes them in
Speaker 1: a different path and they almost have no control and
Speaker 1: where they're going. And most people just haven't got that
Speaker 1: curiosity to read more than one clickbay article. And so
Speaker 1: it's very so it's so easy to be brainwashed into
Speaker 1: thinking that, yeah, yeah, what if it is a conspiracy?
Speaker 1: Because all the proof I have is it's getting hotter,
Speaker 1: but because the news tells me is getting hot. Look
Speaker 1: at this nicely dressed Danish man with beautiful blonde hair
Speaker 1: holding up a book with like three thousand citations telling
Speaker 1: me not to worry. All right, Well, I I'm going
Speaker 1: to go back to worrying about, like, you know, the
Speaker 1: fact that my kid doesn't have healthcare or whatever. I
Speaker 1: have other ship to deal with out so yeah, the
Speaker 1: uh it turns out that Lomborg, also speaking of that bibliography,
Speaker 1: puffed it up to a kind of ridiculous extent by
Speaker 1: including a lot of sources that were not rigorously researched
Speaker 1: scientific studies. So like the way that it was framed
Speaker 1: is like this is all the scientific citations. It wasn't
Speaker 1: all scientific citations. I'm going to read a quote from
Speaker 1: an article by Matt Nisbet, a professor of communication and
Speaker 1: a writer with a skeptical inquirer. He uncritically and selectively
Speaker 1: cites literature, much of it non peer reviewed, and misinterprets
Speaker 1: or misunderstands the previously published scientific research. Several scientists observed
Speaker 1: that most of Lamborg's three thousand citations are to media
Speaker 1: articles and secondary sources. Lomborg's research is conceptually flawed. He
Speaker 1: ignores ecology and connections among environmental problems, taking instead a
Speaker 1: human centered approach. In several cases, he uses statistical measures
Speaker 1: that are not valid indicators of the problems Here. Reports
Speaker 1: are improving on the topic of biodiversity. E. O. Wilson
Speaker 1: and a team of reviewers find that Lomborg's work is
Speaker 1: strikingly at odds with what every expert in the field
Speaker 1: has stated. The review, appearing in Nature goes broader in
Speaker 1: concludes that The Skeptical Environmentalist is a hastily prepared book
Speaker 1: on complex scientific issues which disagrees with broad scientific consensus,
Speaker 1: using arguments too often supported by news sources rather than
Speaker 1: by peer reviewed publications. So he picks news sources where
Speaker 1: people have misinterpreted scientific studies, then uses those arguments in
Speaker 1: his book, and then includes those citations to puff up
Speaker 1: his three thousand citation counts. That it seems like because
Speaker 1: people think he's actually reading science and actually understands it,
Speaker 1: but of course he can't. Like, one of the things
Speaker 1: you noticed that's really frustrating that we're gonna get to
Speaker 1: in a bit is how many different types of scientists
Speaker 1: it takes to debunk Lumborg's work, which points out that
Speaker 1: it's fundamentally absurd to assume that any statistician, any economist
Speaker 1: period anywhere in the world could write a competent book
Speaker 1: on climate change. It's not possible because it requires so
Speaker 1: much different expertise from so many different fields to actually
Speaker 1: have a hope of understanding the whole scope of the
Speaker 1: problem and analyzing all this correctly. And Lumborg that's not
Speaker 1: what he's good at. I'm sure he's fine enough at
Speaker 1: fucking economics, but like that, this is not economics. Is
Speaker 1: there not artificial intelligent programs now to sort of create
Speaker 1: models of climate change and where it could possibly begin
Speaker 1: in the future. Well, that's just the chi coms trying
Speaker 1: to trick us, right, right, there is so much wrong
Speaker 1: with the Orn Lumborg's book that I could literally right
Speaker 1: five or six episodes just going through everything that's been
Speaker 1: debunked in it, and not finished getting through everything lumbarg
Speaker 1: got wrong. And I'm not going to do that because
Speaker 1: we all have better shipped to do, and because a
Speaker 1: number of incredibly authoritative scientists have already gone through the
Speaker 1: trouble of doing line by line breakdowns of everything in
Speaker 1: the book. Rather than just go over every single thing
Speaker 1: that beyond got wrong, I'm going to quote from the
Speaker 1: Union of Concerned Scientists. They invited a group of the
Speaker 1: world's leading experts on water resources, biodiversity, and climate change
Speaker 1: to review the skeptical environmentalist quote. Reviewing Dr Lumborg's claims
Speaker 1: are Dr Peter Gleek, an internationally recognized expert on the
Speaker 1: state of fresh water resources. Dr Jerry Mallman, one of
Speaker 1: the most highly regarded atmospheric scientists and climate modelers, and
Speaker 1: top biologists and biodiversity experts. Doctors Edward O. Wilson, Thomas Lovejoy,
Speaker 1: Norman Myers, Jeffrey Harvey, and Stewart Pim This is again,
Speaker 1: that's uh, what are we at? There? Seven doctors seven
Speaker 1: different experts at the top of their fields, all reviewing
Speaker 1: this book. Liars, liers, and of course none of them
Speaker 1: are statisticians, are economists. Quote these separately written expert reviews.
Speaker 1: They all had them like right, separate things that like
Speaker 1: they weren't influencing each other, unequivocally demonstrate that on closer inspection,
Speaker 1: Lumborg's book is seriously flawed and fails to meet basic
Speaker 1: standards of credible scientific analysis. The author's note how Lumborg
Speaker 1: consistently misuses, misrepresents, or misinterprets data to greatly underestimate rates
Speaker 1: of species extinctions, ignore evidence that billions of people lack
Speaker 1: access to clean water and sanitation, and minimize the extent
Speaker 1: and impacts of global warming due to the burning of
Speaker 1: fossil fuels and other human caused emissions of heat trapping gases.
Speaker 1: Time and time again, these experts find that Lumberg's assertions
Speaker 1: and analyzes are marred by flawed logic, inappropriate use of statistics,
Speaker 1: and hidden value judgments. He uncritically and selectively cites literally
Speaker 1: You're often not be reviewed that supports his assertions, while
Speaker 1: ignoring or misinterpreting scientific evidence that does not his consistently
Speaker 1: flawed use of scientific data is, in Peter Gleek's words,
Speaker 1: unexpected and disturbing in a statistician. All this makes me think,
Speaker 1: you know what, maybe free speech isn't the right puff
Speaker 1: for humanity. It's it's it's it's hard to read the
Speaker 1: story of Lumburg and not feel like we need to
Speaker 1: have a couple extra laws about when you and I
Speaker 1: don't think it's a free speech is a problem. I
Speaker 1: think it's that it's we too narrowly interpret the the
Speaker 1: fire in a crowded theater rule that nobody disagrees that. Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: if somebody's shouting there's a fire and causes a stampede
Speaker 1: and someone dies, Yeah, of course that person should be
Speaker 1: criminally liable. What happens when a guy does this? Why
Speaker 1: isn't he criminally liable for the impact? He knows what
Speaker 1: he's doing, Like, yeah, that that should be more tests.
Speaker 1: Like you should just be allowed to have a book,
Speaker 1: I think, you know, speaking as a guy who's written
Speaker 1: a book. Yeah, yes, you should just be allowed. You
Speaker 1: should have like some basic knowledge. Basic you should have
Speaker 1: some knowledge know all you're doing. It's it's frustrating, like
Speaker 1: there should be One of the difficulties with this is,
Speaker 1: like so many of these issues and the issues we
Speaker 1: have with like getting people on board with like a
Speaker 1: basic understanding of the consensus of climate change is that
Speaker 1: there's so many individual studies, Like if you just read
Speaker 1: the summary of the study, you could argue like, oh,
Speaker 1: this proves that climate changes in a problem, and then
Speaker 1: if you actually go into what the scientists are saying,
Speaker 1: they're like, no, no, no, no no. This may seem
Speaker 1: like it's not a problem, but it actually plays into
Speaker 1: this problem and this problem and this problem, and it's
Speaker 1: a part of this chain of events that leads to
Speaker 1: this thing. That's exactly what scientists have been telling everybody
Speaker 1: for years. You're misinterpreting my research. But that doesn't matter
Speaker 1: because somebody just like, waves, look, this study says it's
Speaker 1: not a problem on Fox News, and then my parents
Speaker 1: are like, well, I guess we don't have to worry. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's frustrating, you know, it's not frustrating. Um ice cream,
Speaker 1: ice cream? And what the ads for this podcast might
Speaker 1: be ice cream? Sofiare we sponsored by ice cream? Let's
Speaker 1: hope that it's ice cream sponsoring this and not another
Speaker 1: coke Brother's ad. It might be another Cooke Brother's add.
Speaker 1: I hope it's a vaping add and not a Coke
Speaker 1: Brothers add. Same thing. No it's not. I mean, technically
Speaker 1: vaping could reduce overall climate emissions if it really is
Speaker 1: killing people. But that's so, that's what I said on
Speaker 1: the Daily's Like guys a cople of days ago, I
Speaker 1: said that, Um, I think that the n r A
Speaker 1: is actually the best thing America has currently in its
Speaker 1: fight against climate change. You know, every every death leads
Speaker 1: to a few a common footprint. I will, I will say,
Speaker 1: if we really want to get down that road. The
Speaker 1: greatest ally the world has in fighting climate change its
Speaker 1: climate tobacco industry. Man, the best fight is climate change
Speaker 1: in itself, like it will kill at people, kill that
Speaker 1: many people. We've gotten too good at disaster recovery. And
Speaker 1: this is how we get sponsor, Yes, sponsors like Philip
Speaker 1: ors tobacco solving climate change one year olds lungs at
Speaker 1: a time. Was that a good ad? Plug? Sofie absolutely
Speaker 1: not products? All right, we're back. So all of these
Speaker 1: debunkings we've gone through were public information basically as soon
Speaker 1: as Biorn Lumborg's book was out in serious people had
Speaker 1: time to read it, but none of the authoritative deconstructions
Speaker 1: of Lumborg's work seemed to matter. He kept right on
Speaker 1: making bank as the profit of Everything's fine, and capitalism
Speaker 1: will save us all from the climate catastrophe capitalism created.
Speaker 1: His website Boron Lumborg Get the Facts Straight, includes a
Speaker 1: short selection of the many awards he received. One of
Speaker 1: the hundred Top Global Thinkers foreign Policy two thousand eleven,
Speaker 1: Thought Leader Bloomberg's Summit two thousand eleven. One of the
Speaker 1: hundred Top Global Thinkers Foreign Policy two thousand and ten.
Speaker 1: One of the world seventy five most Influential People of
Speaker 1: the twenty first century, Esquire two thousand and eight, One
Speaker 1: of the fifty people who Could Save the Planet UK
Speaker 1: Guardian two thousand eight, One of the top hundred public intellectuals.
Speaker 1: Foreign Policy and Prospect Magazine two thousand eight. One of
Speaker 1: the top hundred public intellectuals Foreign Policy and Prospect Magazine
Speaker 1: two thousand five. One of the world's most hundred influential people.
Speaker 1: Time Magazine two thousand four. Wow, Right, isn't that fucked up? Well,
Speaker 1: it's It's also not surprising that because these people making
Speaker 1: those lists are probably in turns, like ultimately the truth
Speaker 1: is that the people making lists aren't educated in that field.
Speaker 1: It's it's a lot of it's. I think it's a
Speaker 1: mix of those and like editors who come from a
Speaker 1: wealthy background, because a lot of news editors do, and
Speaker 1: who have like friends in all these industries and stuff,
Speaker 1: and they're like, ah, this is the guy telling us
Speaker 1: it's fine. Yeah, I think that's a chunk of it,
Speaker 1: especially for like Foreign Policy and Esquire. Um. Now, you
Speaker 1: know when you do your behind the Bastard podcast, Yeah,
Speaker 1: do you have a lot of anger just boiling? Are
Speaker 1: your things? Yeah? I go shooting about once a week.
Speaker 1: I have a lot of different machetes that I hit
Speaker 1: stuff with. I work out about ninety minutes a day. Yeah,
Speaker 1: very nice. YEA. I wonder like, how just hearing all
Speaker 1: of that out, how you just stays in? I do
Speaker 1: not stays in. I do a lot of drugs. It
Speaker 1: does help, Yeah, to be honest, like speaking of the
Speaker 1: n r A shooting is probably the best cathartic thing
Speaker 1: for dealing with that kind of rage. I have to say,
Speaker 1: you know, like I'm very much sort of an anti
Speaker 1: gun person. But at the same time, I don't want
Speaker 1: to judge people, especially once i've until I've experienced it,
Speaker 1: and I think it's a shooting range and it's fun.
Speaker 1: Whether or not you think they should all be banned,
Speaker 1: it's objectively fun. Yeah, it's very fun. Yeah. Yeah. That
Speaker 1: has nothing to do with what the law should be
Speaker 1: right right right now. Um, if you've noticed from all
Speaker 1: of those Top Thinker awards, they all came out at
Speaker 1: latest in two thousand eleven, and a majority of them
Speaker 1: are from two thousand ten or earlier. It's weird that
Speaker 1: Lumborg seems to be considered a top thinker much less
Speaker 1: often in these days of Category five hurricanes and apocalyptic
Speaker 1: mud slides in the Midwest and hottest years ever on
Speaker 1: record in California's largest wildfires, and like weird, Yeah, because
Speaker 1: I guess what what what people's thought behind it is
Speaker 1: that things like that have always happened, So I I
Speaker 1: know that for example, in the UK during the Roman
Speaker 1: times there were melons that you could grow, you can
Speaker 1: grow melons. And then in Charles Dickens times, in one
Speaker 1: of his books, I think it was David Copperfield, the
Speaker 1: Thames was frozen over which is the river that runs
Speaker 1: through London, which I've never seen it frozen, Like it
Speaker 1: was so frozen they could build bonfires on it. So's
Speaker 1: it's wild And so I understand that that, you know, clime,
Speaker 1: it does change all the time, but I think people
Speaker 1: don't understand that it's sort of changing at a rate.
Speaker 1: I think part of Lumburg's falling from graces that people
Speaker 1: have started to like like California has always had wildfires,
Speaker 1: We've never had Malibu burned down, Like I think that
Speaker 1: was a wake up call to a chunk of people.
Speaker 1: I think that, like especially in like Florida and stuff,
Speaker 1: part of why it's gotten harder and why like a
Speaker 1: lot of people on the right no longer say climate
Speaker 1: change isn't happening. They'll say that like either humans aren't
Speaker 1: behind it or that you know, and we'll get to
Speaker 1: this the line Lumborg especially now, it's like, oh no,
Speaker 1: it's absolutely happening. It's just what everyone says we should
Speaker 1: do cut emissions and stuff that's wrong, and there's other
Speaker 1: things that we should do, but like you can't even
Speaker 1: like a bount of the arch conservatives living on the
Speaker 1: Florida coast, one of the most conservative, like you can't
Speaker 1: you can't have those kind of hurricanes hit as regularly
Speaker 1: as they are and be like nothing's changing. It's it's
Speaker 1: at this point it's like, oh wow, we've had three
Speaker 1: once in a century storms in like a couple of years,
Speaker 1: like maybe there's a problem. Um. So now the debate
Speaker 1: has changed, like well what do we do about the
Speaker 1: problem and stuff? And Lumborg has tried to pivot on that.
Speaker 1: He has been less successful. Once again, we'll we'll, we'll
Speaker 1: get to um. But you know, it's in the first
Speaker 1: few years after The Skeptical Environmentalist was published by the
Speaker 1: Oxford University Press and two thousand one, which fucking Oxford
Speaker 1: University Press, Lumborg was everywhere he was on. He was
Speaker 1: on Newsnight, sixty Minutes, the Late Show Larry King, and
Speaker 1: he made regular appearances on CNN, MSNBC and of course
Speaker 1: Fox News. All of these sources accepted Lumbourg as an expert,
Speaker 1: while the real expert shouted desperately that he was as
Speaker 1: ship filled as a poop factory. I'm proud of that one, Sophie,
Speaker 1: thank you. I think one hint as to why this
Speaker 1: happened is included inside that first fawning New York Times
Speaker 1: article from two thousand one, Dr Lumborg also chides, and
Speaker 1: this is him talking about like what he calls the litany,
Speaker 1: which is the term he used for like the doom
Speaker 1: and gloom like stuff being said about climate change in
Speaker 1: the early two thousand's. Dr Lumborg also chides journalists, saying
Speaker 1: they uncritically spread the litany, and he accuses the public
Speaker 1: of an unfounded readiness to believe the worst. The litany
Speaker 1: has pervaded the debate so deeply and so long. Dr
Speaker 1: Lumborg writes that blatantly false claims can be made again
Speaker 1: and again without any references and yet still be believed.
Speaker 1: This is the fault not of academic environmental research, which
Speaker 1: balanced incompetent, he says, but rather of the communication of
Speaker 1: environmental knowledge, which taps deeply into our doomsday beliefs. And
Speaker 1: I think if you completely reverse everything that he just said,
Speaker 1: that is an accurate explanation for lumborg success. The problem
Speaker 1: is not that journalists uncritically spread the gospel of climate change.
Speaker 1: The problem is that journalists uncritically accept people claiming to
Speaker 1: be experts and will write glowing articles about them. If
Speaker 1: they just have a three thousand you know, entry work
Speaker 1: cited page and their bibliographies. People don't want to buy
Speaker 1: into doomsday beliefs, not really. Most people want to believe
Speaker 1: that everything is going to be fine and they don't
Speaker 1: need to worry about a problem. So we'll happily listen
Speaker 1: to a handsome European who misreads real studies to show
Speaker 1: us that everything is fine. And I think Lumborg's ability
Speaker 1: to tap into all of these things is why he's
Speaker 1: been successful, or at least why he was. Do you
Speaker 1: think that uh, I like to sort of asking you questions.
Speaker 1: You're very smart, and I want to see what comes
Speaker 1: out of your face. Um, do you think that the
Speaker 1: world is sort of experiencing a mass by stand or effect?
Speaker 1: So always it's like always, yeah, I'll just con that's
Speaker 1: just going, oh well, someone else will sold that out. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think we always are. And I think it's like
Speaker 1: a natural consequence of I think like one of I'm
Speaker 1: on record of saying, like one of the worst things
Speaker 1: that ever happened is twenty four hour television news. It's uh,
Speaker 1: might be what destroys us as a species. Like if
Speaker 1: there is a big apocalyptic nuclear war or something. I
Speaker 1: think the core of it will lie in the twenty
Speaker 1: four hour news cycle, UM one way or the other,
Speaker 1: because it's just this this machine that exists to exhaust
Speaker 1: people's ability to give a fuck and to productively deal
Speaker 1: with problems. UM. And I think it's a big part
Speaker 1: of like why you have this kind of decision fatigue,
Speaker 1: in this assumption that like somebody else will handle it,
Speaker 1: which is like what a lot of people on the
Speaker 1: right will point to now that we you can't completely
Speaker 1: deny climate change, so they'll say, well, scientists are going
Speaker 1: to figure out a solution, like they'll figure out a
Speaker 1: way to fix the whole problem. Well yeah, as well, yeah,
Speaker 1: they share, well, uh, there won't be consequences. Hey, as
Speaker 1: a French person, I really miss beheading people. You know, honestly,
Speaker 1: I really think we should bring that back. I you
Speaker 1: know what, I think the actual solution would be, Like
Speaker 1: the worst thing you could do to the people who
Speaker 1: are actually responsible for most of this is if you
Speaker 1: were to take away like the the oil and gas executives,
Speaker 1: the people that like, uh, what's the company? Um starts
Speaker 1: with an E. No, no, no, well yeah, those guys too,
Speaker 1: But like the the people that like these these oil
Speaker 1: and gas companies who like new Back and like at
Speaker 1: least the seventies and stuff that climate change is going
Speaker 1: to be a problem, and like direct like like the
Speaker 1: cigarette companies, covered up evidence that it was going to
Speaker 1: be an issue so they can maintain their profits. I
Speaker 1: think you take all of those people's money. I think
Speaker 1: you take all of their family money and you lack them,
Speaker 1: uh in, anyone who profited from the family business into
Speaker 1: making no more than the like median American salary and
Speaker 1: make them live in a normal apartment and make them
Speaker 1: just be a normal person. And you have that enforced
Speaker 1: upon them so that they never will ever be able
Speaker 1: to get access to do anything like that. But on
Speaker 1: the way there that they have to do to Sessa
Speaker 1: Lanister style of walking, I'm okay with a little bit
Speaker 1: with a bell, and they have to walk around naked.
Speaker 1: I think Mitch McConnell naked walking around the streets of Washington,
Speaker 1: they say, with his big yeah, but okay, hear me
Speaker 1: out on this. That makes him into that gives him
Speaker 1: the the opportunity to behave as a victim. If Mitch
Speaker 1: McConnell has to work seven shifts a week at the
Speaker 1: Applebee's to make rent on his one bedroom apartment, and
Speaker 1: then he's got like number one. He's got to like
Speaker 1: depend on all these people, and they have to depend
Speaker 1: on he has no privileged position. But also like all
Speaker 1: these people are like, hey, Mitch, it's a hundred and
Speaker 1: fifteen today, thanks, asshole. Like I I do think that
Speaker 1: like the worst thing you could do to a lot
Speaker 1: of these people. Um. I think there's folks like your
Speaker 1: your Paul's Maniford out there who need to be locked
Speaker 1: up because they're just too dangerous. But I think most
Speaker 1: of these people need to be um locked away from
Speaker 1: the things that are most valuable to them, which is
Speaker 1: wealth and influence. Um. And I think that will hurt
Speaker 1: more more than any guillotine ever could. Although I get
Speaker 1: the impulse, I don't know, it's just a restaurant, chack.
Speaker 1: I didn't say it's bad. I don't want him, like
Speaker 1: like I want him at a restaurant. Yeah, I don't
Speaker 1: want the people. I don't want the staff members of
Speaker 1: Apples have to deal with. Mitch McConnell. I want to
Speaker 1: be able to go to an Applebee's and get problematically
Speaker 1: drunk off of their terrible cocktails and make Mitch McConnell
Speaker 1: serve me in you know what you know, and we
Speaker 1: need to open a brand new apple base, right so
Speaker 1: the oldest stuff member mc Apple's, Ms McConnell and Alex Jones.
Speaker 1: There a just running that would be a great just
Speaker 1: just an Applebee's staffed by the people who are like behind,
Speaker 1: like largely behind our current era of like post truth
Speaker 1: like nonsense. That's that actually would be a great place
Speaker 1: to get Like I would never not be mettingly drunk
Speaker 1: in that place, Like I would be a problem to that.
Speaker 1: That would be man, It would finally be like I
Speaker 1: try to be on my good behavior when I get
Speaker 1: really drunk at like restaurants and stuff because they don't
Speaker 1: want to cause a problem for like the white staff
Speaker 1: or something, because they're working people. But if Mitch McConnell
Speaker 1: was serving my table, I would make it my business
Speaker 1: to puke. Can I make a suggestion? Yes? So, according
Speaker 1: to cheat sheet dot com, the most hated restaurant and
Speaker 1: fast food chain in America is Red Robin, and I
Speaker 1: think it's a great place for choccon. Mitch McConnell at
Speaker 1: a goddamn Red Robin or a uh this roadhouse. Hey, hey, hey, hey, Okay,
Speaker 1: I've not had the privilege of of enjoying an Applebee's
Speaker 1: or a Red Robin. Oh man. Applebee's is great, Applebee's
Speaker 1: is well, what if you use at a waffle house?
Speaker 1: Everybody's thrown up at a waffle house. Yeah, but they
Speaker 1: don't serve liquor like a waffle I I have been
Speaker 1: I actually, I've never been sober in a waffle house. Um,
Speaker 1: but you I want to go to a place where
Speaker 1: I could get I want Mitch McConnell to hand me
Speaker 1: like a gigantic margarita that's like a leader in length,
Speaker 1: and I want to as he's handing it to me,
Speaker 1: take a sip from it while it's still in his hands,
Speaker 1: and then vomit directly onto him. And then you can
Speaker 1: bring me another. But now you're victimizing him. That's fine,
Speaker 1: I would Washington. I'm out about David Busters because people
Speaker 1: also bring their screaming children. That would be Chucky Cheese.
Speaker 1: I can't suggest Chuckie Cheese as my friendship with Jimmie
Speaker 1: Loftus is very important, but honest people can debate over
Speaker 1: which specific type of shaming would be most maybe have
Speaker 1: him circulate, because it would be fun to have him
Speaker 1: like clean up after me at a six Flags too,
Speaker 1: because I can funk up a six Flags. I really
Speaker 1: would love to hear him say, would you like fries
Speaker 1: with that? These would all be very helpful if we
Speaker 1: could just if we could just establish like basic income
Speaker 1: and healthcare, uh, and then make it so that like
Speaker 1: our most unplay doesn't service jobs are all held by
Speaker 1: former Republican congress people kind of managed by the former
Speaker 1: people who used to do their jobs. Here's question. A
Speaker 1: lot of these people are a religious in terms of
Speaker 1: like a lot of the religious Yeah, right, because I
Speaker 1: do wonder like the real religious people wouldn't they want
Speaker 1: to take care of the planet. You know, I've never
Speaker 1: understood that, like the people that preach will and stuff
Speaker 1: and then they're going, it's God's will for me to
Speaker 1: be an asshole that they're not taking care of the planet.
Speaker 1: That gets into a really complicated subject of like theological debate,
Speaker 1: because there's a there's a sizeable chunk of American Christians
Speaker 1: in particular, it's not just the United States phenomenon, but
Speaker 1: it's bigg here who believe that um the apocalypse is
Speaker 1: preordained essentially, so that's like, why would you take care
Speaker 1: of this world? It's ending soon. There's also a chuck
Speaker 1: of people like who believe like God gave us dominion
Speaker 1: over this planet, so we're supposed to use it and
Speaker 1: use it up and like use all the resources. And
Speaker 1: there's even people who will argue that like God provides
Speaker 1: with new resources when we use the old ones, and
Speaker 1: like that's why we've discovered all this this gas under
Speaker 1: the earth to frack. That was God being like, don't
Speaker 1: worry about those pesty arabs holding all the oil here,
Speaker 1: just suck it out of the earth, the like whatever problem. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a bunch of different frustrating things, and I think, um,
Speaker 1: those people, once upon a time you couldn't take them seriously,
Speaker 1: like like in mainstream politics. Um, And what Lumbourg provided
Speaker 1: was a chance for like kind of the more technocratic
Speaker 1: conservatives like my parents who are like religious but not
Speaker 1: really religious. Um, they could look at this guy's arguments
Speaker 1: and be like, well, now here's a smart, educated scientist
Speaker 1: with a doctor in his name, and he's making he's
Speaker 1: not saying like God's going to take care of it.
Speaker 1: He's saying that like you know, he's making what seemed
Speaker 1: like very logical arguments Forroy, this isn't a problem or
Speaker 1: why what problems exist will be solved very simply, um,
Speaker 1: without us changing our lifestyle or dealing with the problems,
Speaker 1: and like a fundamental level of our society. And it's
Speaker 1: it's consumption of resources. Um. So yeah, it's uh, it's
Speaker 1: come that's killing humans, actually, isn't it. Yeah it always Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just comfort. People are scared of change. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's always comfort that's killing humans. Um. From a literal
Speaker 1: point of view, um, in terms of just the fact
Speaker 1: that we're eating stuff that's clogging our arteries and giving
Speaker 1: us heart attacks at a younger age up to like
Speaker 1: the fact that we'll ignore uh doom as it rules
Speaker 1: like leers down on our heads because we want to
Speaker 1: go out to Applebee's and we don't want to worry
Speaker 1: about climate change. I'm not saying Applebee's is bad. Um. Yes,
Speaker 1: you know what, I'm gonna go to an apple Bae's
Speaker 1: off for this, not today, but maybe not today. I
Speaker 1: know that when I go drive past one, I might
Speaker 1: stop just to experience I uh, you know, Applebee's is
Speaker 1: often a staple place for me to get wasted when
Speaker 1: I'm not at home and I'm at like a roadside motel,
Speaker 1: because you'll often run into an Applebe's next to a
Speaker 1: roadside motel, and I have I have gotten drunken mini
Speaker 1: and Applebee's. And if Mitch McConnell were the ones serving me,
Speaker 1: I would happily troubled the pocket on his apron. That
Speaker 1: would be great, especially if Paul Ryan came out with,
Speaker 1: like this the sawdust that you use to soak up
Speaker 1: the vomit, and like, yeah, that would be really sweet.
Speaker 1: Now back to Bjord Lumborg. So another reason Lumburg was
Speaker 1: able to have such an outsized impact on the debate
Speaker 1: over climate change in the United States is the simple
Speaker 1: fact that misreading and misrepresenting a mix of actual scientific
Speaker 1: papers in news articles it's a lot easier than conducting
Speaker 1: authoritative research. The people who do conduct authoritative research are
Speaker 1: very busy, and when a guy like Biorn comes along
Speaker 1: and shotguns at a book full of nonsense, they have
Speaker 1: to spend valuable time slowly debunking all of the many,
Speaker 1: many things he got wrong. I'm gonna quote here from
Speaker 1: something Dr E. O. Wilson wrote about the difficulty of
Speaker 1: combating the sort of misinformation. My greatest regret about the
Speaker 1: Lumborg scam is the extraordinary amount of scientific talent that
Speaker 1: has to be expended to combat it. In the media,
Speaker 1: we will always have contrarians like Lumborg, whose salies are
Speaker 1: characterized by will for ignorance, selective quotations, disregard for communication
Speaker 1: with genuine experts, and destruct of campaigning to attract the
Speaker 1: attention of the media rather than scientists. They are the
Speaker 1: parasitic load on scholars who earned success through the slow
Speaker 1: process of pure view and approval. The question is how
Speaker 1: much load should be tolerated before response is necessary. Lumbourg
Speaker 1: is evidently over the threshold. And this is kind of
Speaker 1: what we were talking about, Like what do you what
Speaker 1: do you do about these people? In a perfectly sane world,
Speaker 1: Like I think that someone like Lomborg would face criminal
Speaker 1: charges for his misrepresentation of scientific fact for the same
Speaker 1: reason that like if you caught um a diving instructor
Speaker 1: telling kids that the safest way to dive was head
Speaker 1: first into the shallow wind of the pool, that guy
Speaker 1: would face charges even though all he was doing was
Speaker 1: giving people information. Um, because you're clearly misleading people into
Speaker 1: a dangerous situation. Charasitic skullars. Yeah, that's a great quote
Speaker 1: from Yeah, parasitic scholars. And that's another thing is you know,
Speaker 1: why did these people go into that field? So did
Speaker 1: they go into the field because of the bettlement of
Speaker 1: the world all the betterment of themselves? And do they
Speaker 1: do the betterment of themselves because they love themselves little?
Speaker 1: Because they have a desperate need for affection, and because
Speaker 1: like the old oose, go two different paths, right, And
Speaker 1: I think in Lumberg's case, it is that desperate need
Speaker 1: to be famous. I think it's this sort of narcissism
Speaker 1: that like he he couldn't accept he was a professor
Speaker 1: of like statistics and ship like that's not in the
Speaker 1: most exciting life in the world. I'm sure it's very
Speaker 1: satisfying that the people who legitimately like it, um but
Speaker 1: I think Lumborg is the kind of guy that had
Speaker 1: a thirst to be famous and was like, well, this
Speaker 1: is the fucking easiest way to do that. I mean, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: Now we've just talked about sort of how Dr el
Speaker 1: Wilson was like expressing his frustration that like a guy
Speaker 1: like Lumburg can just like shoot out a bunch of nonsense,
Speaker 1: and then real scientists, whose time is incredibly valuable and limited,
Speaker 1: have to like spend hours debunking all of it. And
Speaker 1: it's it's a very frustrating problem with our current system.
Speaker 1: Um And that might make it seem like there were
Speaker 1: no penalties Born faced for lying constantly. There were a
Speaker 1: little bit of of There was a little bit of
Speaker 1: a penalty he faced. Several official complaints were made to
Speaker 1: the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology in Innovation. They evaluated
Speaker 1: these complaints and found that the work that he had
Speaker 1: published was fundamentally dishonest. But they found that they couldn't
Speaker 1: punish him because Lumberg wasn't an expert in any of
Speaker 1: the relevant fields, and thus he couldn't be considered guilty
Speaker 1: of like fraud essentially, like because he was not really
Speaker 1: a climate scientist, they couldn't say that he was purposefully
Speaker 1: misrepresenting his case rather than just sucking up does sane? Yeah,
Speaker 1: isn't that crazy? Oh? The world is so annoying sometimes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you've come around on climate chande people. Yeah. In two
Speaker 1: thousand seven, Born published a new book, cool It, in
Speaker 1: which he explicitly accepted the reality of human caused climate change.
Speaker 1: This was seen by many as an abrupt reversal of
Speaker 1: his previous attitude. Borne clarified in an interview with The Guardian,
Speaker 1: who declared him an influential thinker, that it was not
Speaker 1: or I think they were one of the ones who
Speaker 1: said he was going to save the world. Yeah, uh yeah,
Speaker 1: they they voted him one of the fifty people who
Speaker 1: could save the planet. So an interview with them, and
Speaker 1: they were more critical of him in this. In this article,
Speaker 1: Lumborg denies performing a U turn. He reiterates that he
Speaker 1: has never denied anthropogenic global warming and insists that he
Speaker 1: long ago accepted the cost of damage would be between
Speaker 1: two and three percent of world wealth by the end
Speaker 1: of the century. This estimate is the same, he says,
Speaker 1: as that quoted by Lord Stern, whose report to the
Speaker 1: British government argued that the world should spend one to
Speaker 1: two percent of gross domestic product on tackling climate change
Speaker 1: to avoid future damage. Incidentally, ship like this is why
Speaker 1: Reginda Pechori, chairman of the UN Climate Change Panel, compared
Speaker 1: Bjord Lumborg to Adolf Hitler, not because she thought he
Speaker 1: was a literal Nazi but for the statistical crime of
Speaker 1: treating human beings like numbers. And the odd thing is
Speaker 1: Bjorn isn't even all that great at numbers. The Stern
Speaker 1: Report estimated it would take between five and twenty percent
Speaker 1: of global GDP to effectively fight climate change. The Guardian
Speaker 1: pressed Lumborg on this quote, not on a expectedly however,
Speaker 1: the Stern Report estimates that damage at five of GDP, however,
Speaker 1: not two to three percent. The difference, according to Lumbarg,
Speaker 1: is that the two use a different discount factor. This
Speaker 1: is the method by which economists but recalculate the value
Speaker 1: today if money spent or saved in the future, or,
Speaker 1: to put it in another way, the value today of
Speaker 1: this generation's grandchildren's lives. So sorry, I got it wrong.
Speaker 1: The Strent Report did and say it would take five
Speaker 1: to of GDP to fight climate change. It said that
Speaker 1: the damage of climate change would be five to of
Speaker 1: GDP if nothing was done to fight it. Um Lumbourg
Speaker 1: said that the damage would be two to three percent,
Speaker 1: and then he claimed, by sort of weasel math that
Speaker 1: the reason for the difference between the two numbers is
Speaker 1: the differing value that he and Lord Stern put on
Speaker 1: the lives of our current children. Basically, yeah, so that's cool. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean I guess in a way there is a
Speaker 1: sad truth to that. Sure, I mean I do hate kids,
Speaker 1: so yeah, them invaluable little fuckers. But um, I don't
Speaker 1: like too much when people just go straight for the
Speaker 1: ad Hitler um nausea um or whatever whatever that that
Speaker 1: Latin phrases that whenever people just want to use an example,
Speaker 1: they'll go to Hitler. Because there is a truth to
Speaker 1: people being numbers. We're just algorithms walking around with little legs,
Speaker 1: just walking around, right, That's what we are, which is numbers.
Speaker 1: We're not there with them. I think in her case,
Speaker 1: she was making a really she wasn't like. I think
Speaker 1: she was making actually a pretty salient point, which is
Speaker 1: that when you treat people like numbers in this way,
Speaker 1: you really are creating humanized scientific crime. You're devaluing their
Speaker 1: lives in the prod like in the course of like
Speaker 1: making into an argument that shouldn't be an argument over
Speaker 1: the numbers purely, like like deep devolving it into that.
Speaker 1: But but I guess, but yes, but the reality is
Speaker 1: that it is like that, right, I mean, there's those
Speaker 1: beautiful paintings of generals on on horseback, right, and you'll
Speaker 1: see behind them thousands of soldiers just sort of marching
Speaker 1: towards the war that they want to fight. But ultimately
Speaker 1: the most important person and is that person in the horseback,
Speaker 1: and everyone else is just sort of chess pieces at
Speaker 1: the back, right, I mean. And and we are using
Speaker 1: less and less humans to to get the needs of humans.
Speaker 1: So we don't need as many farmers, we don't need
Speaker 1: as many soldiers because we've got drones and we'll have
Speaker 1: robots one day and stuff. And I guess there is
Speaker 1: that sort of sad truth that we don't need that
Speaker 1: much manpower anymore to run society. And so the people
Speaker 1: at the top, And I'm not saying I agree with this,
Speaker 1: but I'm just saying that the people at the top
Speaker 1: are going to go, no, we don't need as many
Speaker 1: people anymore. Oh yeah, I think the people at the
Speaker 1: top think that way. And I think what you're getting
Speaker 1: at is sort of a debate that historians they have
Speaker 1: like the great man theory versus like the trends enforces
Speaker 1: theory of history. But I think one reason why the
Speaker 1: people at the top um never stay that way all
Speaker 1: that long on like a generational basis. Why things switch
Speaker 1: and turn and the nations and power change so much
Speaker 1: is because they think that way. They think that the
Speaker 1: most important guy is the guy marching like sitting on
Speaker 1: the horse with that army of nameless people around him.
Speaker 1: And then uh, poor Serbian peasant named Gavrilo princep pulls
Speaker 1: out a gun and shoots the Archduke of Austria Hungary
Speaker 1: Empires fall in. The British Empires no longer really a thing, um,
Speaker 1: and like that that I think is And that's the
Speaker 1: kind of thing that people like Lumbourg always miss when
Speaker 1: they treat people like numbers like that. And it's the
Speaker 1: kind of thing, you know, on the other side of thing,
Speaker 1: It's the kind of thing that people like um, Hillary
Speaker 1: Clinton miss when they derive a bunch of people making
Speaker 1: memes on the internet is like unimportant to the overall
Speaker 1: thrust of the election, and then it turns out that
Speaker 1: actually that may have made a real difference. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that the people in power always disregard the
Speaker 1: potential impact of like one or a small group of
Speaker 1: just random people who have a thought in their head.
Speaker 1: And like I think that's I think there's nothing that's
Speaker 1: more powerful, um than individual people's ability to funk up
Speaker 1: the works. And that can be good and that can
Speaker 1: be bad because it means that a little girl like
Speaker 1: Greta Thumberg um can make a an international impact on
Speaker 1: a problem just by being the face of it. I
Speaker 1: think that is it the dala lama paraphrasing. But one
Speaker 1: of these quota is if you think that you're not important,
Speaker 1: or if you're if you think you're not big enough
Speaker 1: to make a change, try and sleep with a mosquito. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: And I'm really paraphising it and butcherying it. But you know,
Speaker 1: there's the positive side of that, then there's the negative side,
Speaker 1: so that a guy like bord Lumboard can misread or
Speaker 1: directly misinterpret a bunch of scientific studies and lead to
Speaker 1: have a major impact on like why we don't deal
Speaker 1: with the problem back when the problem is manageable and
Speaker 1: instead it becomes something that might consume huge chunks of
Speaker 1: the world uh and its population. Um. So I think
Speaker 1: in both ways, the little person is always more important
Speaker 1: than the big people want to give them credit for
Speaker 1: being um. That just not entirely a good thing. It's
Speaker 1: completely a moral factor in history, but it is I
Speaker 1: think a factor in history that the people at the
Speaker 1: top often Now, the good news about all of this
Speaker 1: is that by two thousand seven people were starting to
Speaker 1: get wise to be Orn's little schemes. The Guardian noted
Speaker 1: in their rite up of his second book, some statements
Speaker 1: appear to contradict each other directly. In the space of
Speaker 1: four pages of cool It, he writes that climate change
Speaker 1: will not cause massive disruptions are huge death tolls, that
Speaker 1: the general and long term impact will be predominantly negative,
Speaker 1: and that it is obvious that there are many other
Speaker 1: and more pressing issues. The point I've always been making,
Speaker 1: he explains, now, is it's not the end of the world.
Speaker 1: That is why we should be measuring up to what
Speaker 1: everybody else says, which is we should also be spending
Speaker 1: our money well. Speaking of spending money, well, Bjorn has
Speaker 1: a bunch of suggestions for stuff that we should be
Speaker 1: investing in rather than reducing emissions to directly fight climate change.
Speaker 1: He's a big advocate in improving nutrition in poor countries,
Speaker 1: improved access to contraception, more vaccinations, all of what you're
Speaker 1: great things. In two thousand two, Lumborg formed the Copenhagen
Speaker 1: Consensus Center, which he build a away to bring the
Speaker 1: world's top economists together to solve the planet's greatest problems,
Speaker 1: because of course economists are the best folks to solve
Speaker 1: our problems. If I had to think of one group
Speaker 1: of professionals most famous for never being wrong, it would
Speaker 1: be economists, or maybe weatherman. In two thousand eight, the
Speaker 1: Consensus Center ranked thirty priorities in order of like what
Speaker 1: should be confronted first to deal with like the greatest
Speaker 1: challenges of the world. Mitigating global warming was ranked last number.
Speaker 1: Thirty six was improving crop yields, sevent was green energy research,
Speaker 1: and twelve, interestingly enough, was geo engineering. And this gets
Speaker 1: us onto the subject of what precisely Lumborg thinks would
Speaker 1: be a better use of money than reducing emissions. He's
Speaker 1: come around to the necessity of climate engineering, because now
Speaker 1: more than a decade after he started urging everyone not
Speaker 1: to worry about climate change, reducing emissions is too expensive
Speaker 1: and slow a way to reduce climate change for his tastes,
Speaker 1: So that's nice. So this is something Lumborg wrote in
Speaker 1: two thousand nine. There is a significant delay between carbon
Speaker 1: cuts in any temperature drop, even halving mobile emissions by
Speaker 1: mid century would barely be measurable by the end of
Speaker 1: the century. Making green energy cheap and prevalent will also
Speaker 1: take a long time, consider that electrification of the global
Speaker 1: economy is still incomplete after more than a century of effort.
Speaker 1: Many methods of atmospheric engineering have been proposed. Solar radiation
Speaker 1: management appears to be one of the most hopeful. Atmospheric
Speaker 1: greenhouse gases allow sunlight to pass through, but absorb heat
Speaker 1: and radiate some down to the Earth's surface. Althose being equal,
Speaker 1: higher concentrations will warm the planet. Solar radiation management would
Speaker 1: bounce a little bit of sunlight back into space, reflecting
Speaker 1: just one of the total sunlight that strikes the Earth,
Speaker 1: could offset as much warming as that caused by doubling
Speaker 1: the pre industrial levels of greenhouse gases. When Mount Pinatubo
Speaker 1: erupted in nineteen nine, about a million tons of sulfur
Speaker 1: dioxide was pumped into the stratosphere, reacting with water to
Speaker 1: form a hazy layer that spread around the globe and
Speaker 1: by scattering an absorbing incoming sunlight, cool the Earth's surface.
Speaker 1: For almost two years, we could mimic this effect through
Speaker 1: stratospheric aerosolid insertion, essentially launching material like sulfur dioxide or
Speaker 1: soot into the stratosphere. Another promising approach is marine cloud whitening,
Speaker 1: which sprace water droplets into marine clouds to make them
Speaker 1: reflectable sunlight. This augments the natural process where sea salt
Speaker 1: from the oceans provides water vapor with cloud condensation nuclei.
Speaker 1: It is remarkable to consider that we could cancel out
Speaker 1: the centuries global warming with nineteen hundred unmanned ships spraying
Speaker 1: seawater missed into the air to thicken clouds. He sounds
Speaker 1: like he's learning his signs from that Mr. Burns episode.
Speaker 1: He wants to cover the sun. He's just a we'll
Speaker 1: just shoots sudden the sky and build two thousand boats
Speaker 1: to fire water up into the clouds. That's way better
Speaker 1: than reducing emissions. That sounds economically friendly. It's just so
Speaker 1: fucking dumb, like like out, it's just like, don't do
Speaker 1: He tells everyone don't do anything for more than a decade,
Speaker 1: and then he's like, Okay, we need to launch two
Speaker 1: thousand giant boats to shoot seawater into the clouds and
Speaker 1: also if we considered spreading sulfur over the stratosphere. So
Speaker 1: he's gone so far on the other side that he's been,
Speaker 1: he's lost it again. Yeah, that's clearly more rational than
Speaker 1: cap and trade stopping rainforest log you know, in any
Speaker 1: of that stuff like unmanned boats and sulfur into the sky,
Speaker 1: all perfect solutions with no conceivable downsides. Yeah. Biorn's tactics
Speaker 1: have gotten no better in recent years. Uh. No better
Speaker 1: than that is suggesting thousands of boats, uh, shooting water
Speaker 1: to the sky. Uh. In two thousand fourteen, John Stossel,
Speaker 1: writing for Real Clear Politics, asked Bjorn Lumborg how much
Speaker 1: President Obama's goal of getting one million electric cars on
Speaker 1: the road by ten would slow down warming. Lumborg replied
Speaker 1: one hour. This is a symbolic act. Once again, Lumborg
Speaker 1: was very wrong. Greg Layden, a biological anthropologist writing for
Speaker 1: Science Blogs, actually spoke to an expert quote. I asked
Speaker 1: atmospheric scientist and energy expert John Abraham about this, and
Speaker 1: here's what he said. If you put one million clean
Speaker 1: cars on the road and have them last fifteen years
Speaker 1: before moving them, and you take the typical admissions of
Speaker 1: a vehicle and you have saved over in the last
Speaker 1: fifteen years, and you know, there's a bunch of number.
Speaker 1: Basically he crunched the numbers on it, uh, and he
Speaker 1: like came to the conclusion that over their lifetime just
Speaker 1: one million cars. If you did not build any additional
Speaker 1: cars after that point, you just put will million on
Speaker 1: the road and kept them there fIF fifteen years, you
Speaker 1: would have saved the total equivalent of twenty one hours
Speaker 1: of emission for the entire planet um, which is a
Speaker 1: significant amount. And that's again just a million, not increasing
Speaker 1: it at all, not replacing them after they wear out
Speaker 1: in fifteen years, which means Lumbourg's calculations to John Stossel
Speaker 1: was off by it does seem like a little scientists
Speaker 1: are going beyond shut up. Yeah, they're constantly shut up
Speaker 1: for more like twenty years now. Yeah, they've been saying,
Speaker 1: shut the funk up. Dude, you don't know what you're
Speaker 1: talking about. But I think he knows what he's doing.
Speaker 1: In two thousand sixteen, Bjorns Copenhagen Consensus Center was paid
Speaker 1: sixty thou dollars by Australia's Education Department to help produce
Speaker 1: a report that, among other things, called limiting world temperature
Speaker 1: increases to two degrees celsius a poor use of money,
Speaker 1: since it would leave you less than one dollar of social, economic,
Speaker 1: or environmental benefits for every dollar spent. Meanwhile, reducing world
Speaker 1: trade restrictions through the Doha Trade Round would be orn
Speaker 1: calculated yield two thousand and eleven dollars of benefit for
Speaker 1: every dollar spent. Universal contraception access would return a hundred
Speaker 1: and twenty dollars per dollar spent. Now, reading stuff like
Speaker 1: that might make you question a couple of things. Number one,
Speaker 1: how good is Bjorn's math? Are there any factors that
Speaker 1: might influence his calculation? Might have led him to calculate
Speaker 1: that reducing global temperature increases only yields a dollar of
Speaker 1: value for every dollar spent, Well, reducing trade restrictions leads
Speaker 1: to two thousand dollars of benefit, Like are there may
Speaker 1: be any conflicting interests he has that might be influencing
Speaker 1: his math in some way? What he thinks like economist?
Speaker 1: He does think like an economist. He thinks like an
Speaker 1: economist who might be being paid by a specific group
Speaker 1: of people. Well, yeah, yeah, and I do sometimes like
Speaker 1: some comedians. So a couple of comedians in the UK
Speaker 1: have gone sort of gone to the right, yes, politically speaking,
Speaker 1: when they weren't really like that when I sort of
Speaker 1: first met them, and uh, I was observing them and
Speaker 1: from afar and so not admiring, but understanding that, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's more money. Yeah, if you're not getting that much
Speaker 1: work as a comedian that you are currently now, and
Speaker 1: you understand that the right is rising. They went there
Speaker 1: and and now they're going there and they are getting
Speaker 1: more work. And it's interesting because I'm going, whoa, You've
Speaker 1: become something totally different because you have to survive. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you've decided that it's worth it to take money
Speaker 1: from you can't you know, you're not gonna make that
Speaker 1: greater living as a statistician teaching at a college in Denmark.
Speaker 1: You'll be comfortable, but you're not gonna you're not gonna
Speaker 1: be rich doing that. Whereas if you become born lumbourg
Speaker 1: and tell people that climate change isn't a big deal
Speaker 1: and open this consensus center that advises people that reducing
Speaker 1: trade restrictions is a better way to fight global warming
Speaker 1: than stopping global warming. Um, well, that actually turns out
Speaker 1: to pay pretty well. So I found a good break
Speaker 1: down of where Bjorn Lumborg's funding comes from, written by
Speaker 1: Graham Redfern of Diesmog, a website focused on cutting through
Speaker 1: the pr spin around climate change issues. Their research revealed
Speaker 1: that the Copenhagen Consensus Center or c c C, registered
Speaker 1: as a nonprofit in the United States in two thousand eight.
Speaker 1: Since then, it has received more than four million dollars
Speaker 1: in grants and donations. Three quarters of that came in
Speaker 1: two thousand eleven and twelve. Lumborg salary for a single
Speaker 1: year was seven hundred and seventy five thousand dollars, representing
Speaker 1: it nearly a quarter of what it had received by
Speaker 1: two thousand twelve. He's basically an Instagram model that's pushing
Speaker 1: those like drinks to lose weight. Yeah, that's exactly what
Speaker 1: he's doing, but like instead telling everyone not to cut
Speaker 1: global emissions now. Back in two thousand six, when the
Speaker 1: uh CCC first started to look at gaining support for
Speaker 1: its efforts in the United States, they hired Washington lobbyists
Speaker 1: in PR veteran James harf Um and so like they like,
Speaker 1: this is a this is like a lobbying group for
Speaker 1: somebody in the lobbying group's primary goal has been to
Speaker 1: like convince people that emission should not be cut, that
Speaker 1: carbon should not be taxed, that fossil fuel use should
Speaker 1: not be reduced. Now, again, this leads us to the
Speaker 1: question of, like, who's actually giving these people that money,
Speaker 1: And we don't know where all of it comes from.
Speaker 1: We know that in its first year, the center received
Speaker 1: a hundred and twenty dollar grant from the Randolph Foundation.
Speaker 1: That foundation's money comes from the one point two billion
Speaker 1: dollars the Randolph family made by selling the chemical company
Speaker 1: to Procter and Gamble. The trustee of the Randolph Foundation
Speaker 1: is Heather Higgins, the CEO of Independent Women's Voice and
Speaker 1: chairman of the Independent Women's Form. And that sounds good, right,
Speaker 1: Independent Women's Voice. That sounds like a woke progressive organization. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's actually a hardcore right wing lobbying group that accepts
Speaker 1: money from, among other people, Charles Coke. I look forward.
Speaker 1: I look forward to when they start implementing like the
Speaker 1: transgenders against clouds and all of these different we'll get
Speaker 1: it really woke. Yeah, we'll like Biorn wouldn't be the
Speaker 1: right spokesperson. Now, you'd hire someone who is like very
Speaker 1: much like I don't know, you hire someone like all
Speaker 1: of that money, yes, like an eight year old, like
Speaker 1: an eight year old kid from Cameroon, and you'd have
Speaker 1: him be like I love fossil fuels like that is
Speaker 1: that is where we're going next. Yeah, and then you'll
Speaker 1: call everyone racist who argues with him, and while complaining
Speaker 1: that all the left does is call everybody racist who
Speaker 1: argues with them like it's it's it's beautiful. I love
Speaker 1: the way the media works. It's perfect, there are no problems.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I'm going to read a quote from d
Speaker 1: smog about the Independent Women's name d smog blog. So yeah,
Speaker 1: they do a lot of really good analysis on like
Speaker 1: the disinformation campaign. The name of a company. I thought
Speaker 1: it was the name of a person. I was like, no,
Speaker 1: the great name for someone that works Graham red Fern,
Speaker 1: which is also a pretty good name for something read
Speaker 1: firm actually, but I think it's pronounced at fern. It's
Speaker 1: fucking Australian. I don't know, people, nothing makes sense over there. Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: that's not I was like most Scottish, Yeah, well Scott's
Speaker 1: Irish quote. Staff Writers of both organizations regularly express skepticism
Speaker 1: about the science of human clause climate change in site
Speaker 1: Lomborg's views approvingly. A recent article from the International Women's Form,
Speaker 1: senior fellow of Vicky Alger claimed a majority of scientists
Speaker 1: believe that global warming is largely nature made, ignoring several
Speaker 1: studies that show the vast majority of research from scientists
Speaker 1: studying climate change believe exactly the opposite. Now funders of
Speaker 1: the i w F include, as I said, the Claude
Speaker 1: Lamb Foundation, which is controlled by Charles Coke and the
Speaker 1: Donors Trust, a conservative political action fund that spent millions
Speaker 1: of dollars on climate change denial. This means that Charles
Speaker 1: Coke indirectly has helped fund be Yord Lumborg. Now Higgins
Speaker 1: continued to pump tens of thousands of dollars directly into
Speaker 1: Lumborg Center over subsequent years, but in two thousand and fourteen,
Speaker 1: when that de small article was written, the author was
Speaker 1: only able to track down where about five thousand dollars
Speaker 1: of the four point three million in funding it had
Speaker 1: received up to that point had come from. However, in
Speaker 1: two thousand fifteen, read Firm revealed that Paul Singer, a
Speaker 1: Republican billionaire venture capitalist was one of the CCCS major backers.
Speaker 1: He gave more than two hundred thousand dollars to the group.
Speaker 1: Mr Singer also helps fund the Manhattan Institute, the think
Speaker 1: take behind the fallacious claim that Alexandria Accassio Cortes's Green
Speaker 1: New Deal would cost a hundred trillion dollars. In recent years,
Speaker 1: Biorn Lumborg seems to have dropped most of the pretense
Speaker 1: of being a leftist environmentalist. He's appeared in five videos
Speaker 1: for Praguer University with titles like his climate change our
Speaker 1: biggest problem, our electric cars really green, and the Paris
Speaker 1: Agreement won't change the climate. His grift seems to be
Speaker 1: less profitable these days than it was in the era
Speaker 1: before mega hurricanes regularly battered our shores and records setting
Speaker 1: summers and wildfire seasons where a matter of course, but
Speaker 1: Lumborg still does a brisk business and media appearances. As
Speaker 1: of the writing of this episode, his most recent appearance
Speaker 1: was in a Fox Business video with the title green
Speaker 1: Innovation Trump spending. When tackling him at Change Colon Expert,
Speaker 1: he was the expert. YEA, let' show him what he
Speaker 1: looks like, now, this is Bejord Lumberg after twenty years
Speaker 1: of climate denial. Does he look at me? It doesn't
Speaker 1: look that bad. So I think you really have sold it.
Speaker 1: I think I was expecting like a gruesome creature. I
Speaker 1: think he's he's Mick jaggered at least fifty in the
Speaker 1: last twenty years. Jagger hasn't Mick jaggered that much. But Sophie,
Speaker 1: Sophie's definitely has a very negative reaction to his waddle.
Speaker 1: A waddle wattle shaming. This is waddle shaming. Yeah, she's
Speaker 1: holding her skin and making it so thicker. Now, Eric,
Speaker 1: if I know my audience and I don't, the one
Speaker 1: thing they love more than anything else is when we
Speaker 1: hit things. The one thing they love more than anything
Speaker 1: else is when we hit things. So I'm gonna give
Speaker 1: you the giant machette and I'm gonna throw I'm gonna
Speaker 1: throw it right past all of the recording equipment. But
Speaker 1: because that's a good idea, Yeah, he's got holding one.
Speaker 1: Are you holding the whole bag? I'm gonna throw the
Speaker 1: whole bag. I always took the whole back. It would
Speaker 1: be irresponsible to throw a single bagel, all right, So
Speaker 1: I'm going to throw them at Eric, who's wielding the
Speaker 1: machete as if it were a baseball bat, and he's
Speaker 1: going to try to hit him as hard as he
Speaker 1: can and really just swing it. There's nothing you can
Speaker 1: hurt in this room full of delicate electronic equipment, nothing
Speaker 1: at all. Audience. I have Anderson, she has protected Anderson's fine.
Speaker 1: All right, I'm gonna throw it. Yeah, alright, tossing back
Speaker 1: to me. We got it, you got you got it.
Speaker 1: We gotta get it. We gotta get him going across
Speaker 1: the road, because it's conscious going if you drop it.
Speaker 1: No one's ever been hurt by a two ft machete, never,
Speaker 1: not once in history. Yeah, I didn't make a very
Speaker 1: smooth samurai cut. It's okay. It takes practice to really
Speaker 1: be able to do damage with that thing. But I
Speaker 1: definitely got really happy with how that went. How did
Speaker 1: it feel? I felt? I feel really manly. I want
Speaker 1: to go to war now. Yeah, I see. I see
Speaker 1: how easily I could be turned. You know, everyone can.
Speaker 1: And if people like Lumbard get their way that that
Speaker 1: I will be buying a lot more machetes for a
Speaker 1: lot of people to try to get him. The field
Speaker 1: that way, I see that there is a box of
Speaker 1: tissues on the table. I'm now gonna grab him and
Speaker 1: I will remove the prints from the actual machette out
Speaker 1: of dumb man. There we go, I did grab the blade.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna find Lumbourg's Hollywood Hills home. I've seen enough
Speaker 1: cs I to know how to get rid of. I
Speaker 1: don't think he lives in the Hollywood Hills because it's
Speaker 1: one of the places it's going to face the consequences
Speaker 1: of climate change fastest. Anderson is on the mic and
Speaker 1: you get onto me for pouring liquids on the microphones?
Speaker 1: What's wrong with Anderson on the microphone? Anderson slabbers sometimes
Speaker 1: the classy broad, classy broadskin slab She's a good dog. Eric,
Speaker 1: You got any plugg doubles to plug now or at
Speaker 1: the end of our episode? Yeah. I do have an
Speaker 1: album called Alien of Extraordinary Ability, which is the title
Speaker 1: that the American government gives you, and I say, you know,
Speaker 1: outsiders when when they come in and apply for a visa.
Speaker 1: That is a sweet title, like our our immigration. But
Speaker 1: that's a great title, Alien of Extraordinary Ability. So I
Speaker 1: like that. So that's an album I've also got you know,
Speaker 1: my show. If you're in Los Angeles, I've got a
Speaker 1: show called Born of Chaos, which is about the time
Speaker 1: I escaped the psychiatric hospital. Um, so you know I've
Speaker 1: got some things. Just basically follow me on Instagram. That
Speaker 1: title makes me want to marry a European, renounce my
Speaker 1: US citizenship, become any UTH citizen, go through that whole
Speaker 1: year's long process, and then move back to the United
Speaker 1: States and get a green card so that I can
Speaker 1: be declared an alien of an extraordinary ability. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: pretty cool. Also, I'm no longer because now I have
Speaker 1: a green card. When you get a green car, yes,
Speaker 1: and now I'm I'm a permanent resident. Well that's not
Speaker 1: as cool as it being an alien with extraordinary ability. No,
Speaker 1: but I want was and it felt good and I'm
Speaker 1: sure it did right well, audience, check out Alien of
Speaker 1: Extraordinary Ability. Um, I will say as well. I'm now
Speaker 1: leaving this podcast slightly angrier. Yeah you should. Everyone should
Speaker 1: leave the podcast angrier. I mean, I hope like Catharsis
Speaker 1: of hitting the bagels with the Yeah. Sure, yeah, I
Speaker 1: see I see why. Um, I see why people get
Speaker 1: there and go out. I am in no way training
Speaker 1: the audience for things to come by by pushing machetes
Speaker 1: and bolt cutters on people and teaching them that these
Speaker 1: objects can can can help them deal with their anger
Speaker 1: at the bastards or what I'm doing at all. And
Speaker 1: I do wonder what your machetes coming by them? You know,
Speaker 1: any machete company that wants to sell branded behind the
Speaker 1: bastard's machetes. I feel like we can make a lot
Speaker 1: of money with them. Same thing with bolt cutters, because
Speaker 1: we're we're big into the pushing bolt cutters right now.
Speaker 1: I just have to suggest people get basically anything with
Speaker 1: the cheap Harper freight ones because that's won't cut through
Speaker 1: theoretically beats his security gate. You really you want some
Speaker 1: like heavy beuty bolt cutters you want to be spending.
Speaker 1: I'm sure it's available. You could in fact get the
Speaker 1: bolt cutters from it one that you used to break
Speaker 1: through his security. Uh yeah, not that we encourage that behavior,
Speaker 1: because we don't. It does seem like that's what that's
Speaker 1: where I was gonna go, like in twenty years time,
Speaker 1: like you know, it's gonna be Hunger Games style. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, the masses versus Amazon you know, my hope
Speaker 1: is that we can avoid that by by making some
Speaker 1: pretty sharp course corrections now. But if we can't, Fiskers
Speaker 1: brand machetes resist rust very well. Uh. So you know
Speaker 1: they'll chop bagels, they'll chop through Uh okay, yeah, you're right, Sophie.
Speaker 1: How do we lead this out without me at suggesting
Speaker 1: more crimes? A firm handshake? Do you have, UM anything
Speaker 1: you want to plug? I already talked about bolt cutters. No,
Speaker 1: I mean, like, hey, what about the environment? Bro? I
Speaker 1: just want to plug trees. I do want to plug trees.
Speaker 1: What tree frogs? Not mine? Sophie's wearing a sweater. It
Speaker 1: seems comfortable. We have shirts on t public dot com
Speaker 1: behind the Bastards UM. You can find the podcast on
Speaker 1: behind the Bastards dot com where the sources will be
Speaker 1: although the coding of the site is sometimes broken, but
Speaker 1: you can generally figure out what the sources are. UM.
Speaker 1: And you can find us on Twitter and Instagram at
Speaker 1: at Bastard's pod. Uh. You can find me on Twitter
Speaker 1: at I right, okay, And I have a new podcast
Speaker 1: with my friends Cody and Katie called Worst Year Ever
Speaker 1: about the election, so we I definitely will definitely talk
Speaker 1: more about bolt cutters and machetes on that podcast, so
Speaker 1: if that's something you're into, check it out. Eric. Thanks
Speaker 1: for being on the show until next week. Hug a
Speaker 1: Cat buy some bolt cutters. Consider investing in the machete
Speaker 1: your three