Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hey listeners. This special episode of the show was
Speaker 1: produced with support from Walmart. This is solvable. I'm Ronald
Speaker 1: Young Jr. Climate challenges are pressing down with more urgency
Speaker 1: than ever before. In order to hold temperature increases back
Speaker 1: one and a half or two degrees to meet the
Speaker 1: temperature targets set in Paris at the Paris Climate Accords,
Speaker 1: we have until twenty thirty to cut emissions in half.
Speaker 1: Climate experts say that'll be tough, but it might stave
Speaker 1: off complete disaster. That kind of hard truth can feel crushing,
Speaker 1: which is exactly why we need to work actively, keep talking, reflecting,
Speaker 1: and solving the greatest problem we've ever faced on a
Speaker 1: global scale. Here at Pushkin, we're lucky enough to have
Speaker 1: one of the best minds around when it comes to
Speaker 1: making observations and looking to the future. Malcolm Gladwell, So
Speaker 1: today we have a solvable episode that is a little
Speaker 1: out of the ordinary, and I know your guys are
Speaker 1: used to hearing things out of the ordinary in this
Speaker 1: time period we've been in. But Malcolm and I talked
Speaker 1: together and pursue a few thought experiments about where we
Speaker 1: might be headed and who could take us there. We
Speaker 1: discussed the power of the people and the power of
Speaker 1: businesses to bring real and rapid change, and even with
Speaker 1: the topic as heavy as this ever growing global catastrophe,
Speaker 1: somehow there's a lot of laughter in this episode too.
Speaker 1: Here's our conversation. Mister Gladwell, Yes, welcome back to Solvable.
Speaker 1: How does it feel to be back? It made me
Speaker 1: feel like I went, you know, to a country far
Speaker 1: away on a mission that took me away from friends
Speaker 1: and family for many years. I'm being released from that.
Speaker 1: But the point is it does feel. It feels good
Speaker 1: to be back. That's great. I'm sure some listeners were
Speaker 1: very surprised to wake up one day and have me on.
Speaker 1: They were like, wait a minute, that's not very similar.
Speaker 1: Very similar. People can get us confused oftentimes in the
Speaker 1: street everyone says that, hey, didn't you write blink. I
Speaker 1: think listeners are happy to take out an upgrade. That's
Speaker 1: very kind of you to say, very kind of you
Speaker 1: to say. So. You know, I recently listened to one
Speaker 1: of your episodes of Revisionist History, and it's the one
Speaker 1: where you're riding around in the Waymo those electric vehicles
Speaker 1: that are autonomous in Phoenix, and I remember one of
Speaker 1: the things that that struck me there was how effective
Speaker 1: it'll be actually stopping climate change. Do you consider that
Speaker 1: or do you think that we're kind of just hey,
Speaker 1: this is cool, we're an electric car, Like this is like,
Speaker 1: you know, this is the future. Yeah. I don't know
Speaker 1: if you know this, but I'm a car guy. Really yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I care all more about cars to almost say anything else. Um,
Speaker 1: So I've been watching this very closely. What's interesting is
Speaker 1: the change over to your cars is happening way quicker
Speaker 1: than people thought, Like it's been in the background for
Speaker 1: ten years or whatever more. But you know, right now,
Speaker 1: electric cars make up maybe one percent of global fleet.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's tiny, but all of a sudden, it's
Speaker 1: possible to see three years out and to imagine that
Speaker 1: that number would be maybe being a bit aggressive. But
Speaker 1: there are a whole lot of people who don't believe
Speaker 1: they will ever buy a gasoline powered car. Again, I
Speaker 1: recently bought a new car, and I absolutely bought a hybrid,
Speaker 1: and I as I was driving it, I'm like, yeah,
Speaker 1: the next one I probably will get will probably be electric.
Speaker 1: I know I'm probably never gonna get a Tesla, but
Speaker 1: I'm telling you, if one of the major car companies
Speaker 1: say that there could be a test in your future.
Speaker 1: Those guys are cool with their with their insane mode
Speaker 1: and all that stuff that go the bells and hoots
Speaker 1: that come with that crisis mode. Yet but no, I'm
Speaker 1: sitting there thinking about it, and I'm just like, I
Speaker 1: know that there's going to be a point in the
Speaker 1: future where I get, you know, probably an all electric car. Now,
Speaker 1: we haven't seen the model T forward point where it's
Speaker 1: just like here it is, everybody can afford it, everybody
Speaker 1: goes get one, and we just you know, easily make
Speaker 1: the switch. Yeah, there's been this really interesting evolution in
Speaker 1: what people think of as their responsibility, what parts should
Speaker 1: we play in addressing this ongoing crisis, And a lot
Speaker 1: of that has to do with our perception of what
Speaker 1: the crisis is. You know, there was I think there
Speaker 1: was weirdly a lot more fatalism about climate change. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, what do you what are you going to
Speaker 1: do if it's driven by fossil fuel use and you
Speaker 1: look around and you literally can't do anything, can't heat
Speaker 1: your home, can't drive to work, can't fly to visit
Speaker 1: your parents without burning fossil fuels. Then yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: what do you do? You just sort of shrug and
Speaker 1: say it's inevitable, it's coming. But now I feel like
Speaker 1: there's just been a kind of shift in that thinking.
Speaker 1: The inevitability that I feel now is that we have
Speaker 1: to change. That's like I feel like, so for me,
Speaker 1: like if we just and I know, I'll keep using
Speaker 1: the example of the electric car, but for me it'll
Speaker 1: always be I know, eventually I'm going to get an
Speaker 1: electric car, so that that feels inevitable to me. But
Speaker 1: when you talk about the shift, what do you mean.
Speaker 1: One of the most important is the number of people
Speaker 1: who are taking steps to do something about climate change
Speaker 1: is growing, and the kinds of people is changing. So
Speaker 1: you had a situation twenty five years ago where it was,
Speaker 1: you know, my dad who was a huge environmentalist in
Speaker 1: the seventies, and you know, he would do things like
Speaker 1: chop down wood with an axe and not a chainsaw
Speaker 1: because you didn't want to use gastling. Okay, And as
Speaker 1: I and one of my one of my podcasts, I
Speaker 1: talked about how my mom didn't want to use the
Speaker 1: dryer because it used too a chenergy, so she would
Speaker 1: hang her clothes outside even in the middle of a
Speaker 1: Canadian winter. That was kind of phase one. It was
Speaker 1: like weirdos like my parents doing quirky things. But you know,
Speaker 1: you're never gonna get anywhere with Joyce and Graham Gladwell,
Speaker 1: you know, cutting down trees with axes and hanging her
Speaker 1: close outside. But if it's I, it's no longer individual.
Speaker 1: If it's no longer weirdos in rural Ontario and it's companies,
Speaker 1: large corporations or governments, then you begin to say, Okay,
Speaker 1: a car company is willing to invest ten billion dollars
Speaker 1: in building a fleet of electric vehicles like General Motors
Speaker 1: is doing right now, then you say, okay, that that's different. Yeah.
Speaker 1: When I think about my own circle and I think
Speaker 1: about my own area of influence, my parents robed cr
Speaker 1: Peggy Lee. You know, for a while, I was like,
Speaker 1: yalk out of a cycle recycling? Did it there for cycling?
Speaker 1: Why are you recycling? By Dad's like sudden, the recycling
Speaker 1: isn't even and I'm like, now you gotta recycle, and
Speaker 1: I'm just like so they start recycling and the recycled
Speaker 1: truck would barely show up. They wouldn't show up on time.
Speaker 1: So I felt like I failed when it came to
Speaker 1: converting one set of people. And at the time, you know,
Speaker 1: the focus was individual responsibility. So here I am trying
Speaker 1: to convert as many individuals as possible. But now we've
Speaker 1: shifted into more urgency. We need to address this on
Speaker 1: a larger scale, Like we need military level, national level,
Speaker 1: corporate level, We need bigger involvement in order to actually
Speaker 1: make the changes than we want to see. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: during the Trump administration, there was a hearing on Capitol Hill.
Speaker 1: We're a very senior Pentagon official testified before Congress. But
Speaker 1: how there were so many military bases that were, you know,
Speaker 1: near water, and they had so many valuable things that
Speaker 1: were vulnerable to rising seas or even to flooding or
Speaker 1: all those kinds of things that they were undergoing to study.
Speaker 1: They had to kind of like reconfigure all these military
Speaker 1: bases around the world. So you have like a senior
Speaker 1: hardcore military guy talking about climate change, not in this
Speaker 1: kind of ideological way, but in the kind of like
Speaker 1: I got, you know, a nuclear tipped warhead that I
Speaker 1: really don't want that thing submerged in water next time
Speaker 1: there's a hurricane, And like that, I remember listening, I
Speaker 1: was thinking, man, that's different, that's a whole new conversation.
Speaker 1: There's also this idea that you know, we've been talking
Speaker 1: about the problem for a long time, and there's a
Speaker 1: point at which talking about the problem repeatedly I think
Speaker 1: starts to backfire. Climate change is a word about our
Speaker 1: global warming, well words about the problem, and I think
Speaker 1: what's happening, you know that's really encouraging me is that
Speaker 1: now people are talking much more about solutions. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: I love that you're plugging solvable unsolvable, because that is
Speaker 1: what we do here. We talk solutions. We actually talked
Speaker 1: with Rachel Stroyer on an episode of Solvable and we
Speaker 1: talked about regenerative agriculture and specifically about using perennials over
Speaker 1: annuals because perennials come back every year, they're harder to kill,
Speaker 1: and they you don't deplete the soil in the ways
Speaker 1: that you do when you use annuals. So, thinking forward
Speaker 1: to the future, how can we use regenerative concepts to
Speaker 1: think bigger about addressing climate change? Yeah, yeah, Well, the
Speaker 1: concept of regeneration as it's used in agriculture think beyond
Speaker 1: you know, the growing season. It's right in front of you.
Speaker 1: You can also use that same concept in terms of
Speaker 1: how businesses operate. For example, I did I did a
Speaker 1: in an episode of Revisions History this year on cold
Speaker 1: water tide without producturing Gamble. They had a massive audit
Speaker 1: that they did of their carbon footprint producing tide and
Speaker 1: really a carbon footprint of a load of laundry and
Speaker 1: trying to figure out what are all the components that
Speaker 1: go into the environmental consequences of doing your laundry. You
Speaker 1: know everyone realizes used to be when you bought tide pods,
Speaker 1: they came in a hard plastic container. Now more and
Speaker 1: molar in soft plastic bags. Yep. They ran the numbers
Speaker 1: and they thought they realized, oh, the carbon footprint and
Speaker 1: putting it in a plastic bag is a lot lower
Speaker 1: than in a hard plastic tub. And every one of
Speaker 1: the plants that produce tide is powered by wind energy
Speaker 1: because they realize, oh, our manufacturing plants are in places
Speaker 1: where you know, wind energy and other sources of renewable
Speaker 1: power can do the trick. That kind of that's regeneration.
Speaker 1: They're thinking about building a process of making your tie
Speaker 1: that either your laundry with that is sustainable. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: the same kind of principle that we were talking about
Speaker 1: earlier in agriculture. What's really interesting is just how many
Speaker 1: corporations are engaging in that kind of very focused analysis
Speaker 1: of all of the steps that go into what they do.
Speaker 1: I mean, it sounds very optimistic. I mean, and I
Speaker 1: think it sounds like we can maybe we can count
Speaker 1: on some corporations. I felt hard that you run you're
Speaker 1: such a you're such like an old school like you
Speaker 1: can like you can take your plaqueer to go and
Speaker 1: pick it somewhere after this is over. Like, come on, man,
Speaker 1: you saw that you you saw that happening in me
Speaker 1: as I was attempting to even hilarious. I No, corporations
Speaker 1: are run by people like you and me. I mean,
Speaker 1: like by people who are who are also simultaneously citizens
Speaker 1: of the world, who who drive home in a terrible rainstorm,
Speaker 1: and who you know, who who like observe around them
Speaker 1: all the same things we're observing. So it's not surprising
Speaker 1: to me that they take those same ideas and impressions
Speaker 1: to their off Yes, I mean that goes back to
Speaker 1: what we were talking about earlier, which is that the
Speaker 1: nature of our understanding of the problem is changed. You know,
Speaker 1: it's not this It used to be this kind of
Speaker 1: abstraction and now we're interesting. No, no no, no, it's it's
Speaker 1: making everything weird, yeah, and sort of scary. And that's
Speaker 1: we can't know. We can't. You can't hide from it
Speaker 1: by moving to north in Canada. Again, I say it
Speaker 1: as a Canadian. That's always my my backup plane is
Speaker 1: always to go home. Oh. There, there's gratification in knowing
Speaker 1: that corporations now do have instructions on how to move forward,
Speaker 1: but there's still I still feel sub sub sub sense
Speaker 1: of the kids say saltiness, Now what it what it
Speaker 1: thinks of, like what it took to actually get corporations
Speaker 1: to change. But I am excited that they are changing.
Speaker 1: That is helpful. Yeah. The other limiting factor on corporate
Speaker 1: evolvement in a lot of this is technology. So if
Speaker 1: you think about the airlines for the longest time, I
Speaker 1: am sure there were many people who were involved in
Speaker 1: the senior leadership of airlines who recognize the incredible contribution
Speaker 1: airlines make to climate change, But their questions, well, what
Speaker 1: is our what choice do we have? There's no you know,
Speaker 1: where we've put sixty years or no more thnant it,
Speaker 1: you know, seventy five years of research into the jet engine.
Speaker 1: I don't have an alternative that I can turn to.
Speaker 1: And what's interesting is you're finally starting to see a
Speaker 1: real conversation about what a technological alternative to a jet
Speaker 1: engine might be. You know, could it be hydrogen? Could
Speaker 1: is it possible to fly electric planes? Maybe not, maybe
Speaker 1: not commercial airliners, but like small, I'm not going to
Speaker 1: be the first. That's exactly the kind of thing that
Speaker 1: discourages them. You should be saying, Ron And if you
Speaker 1: do a plane that doesn't have a conventional jet engine,
Speaker 1: I will be the First's my number call me. Look, Malcolm,
Speaker 1: if you want to get on first. I'm like, I like,
Speaker 1: there's just something about being first anything that I'm just like, oh,
Speaker 1: I'll be a second. I will totally be first. I
Speaker 1: love that. I'm I'm all there, funny like they're there.
Speaker 1: If you kind of like root around in the kind
Speaker 1: of popular literature on on aviation right now, people are
Speaker 1: starting to talk about this. That's a function of the
Speaker 1: fact that the technology is catching up. That's another sort
Speaker 1: of exciting difference. What do you want to see next?
Speaker 1: From corporations, like, do you think there are actionable steps
Speaker 1: in the world of doing, which is what the corporate
Speaker 1: world is, that notion of whether something whether it's a
Speaker 1: case to be made for something right. They're in the
Speaker 1: business of making a case for action or inaction, and
Speaker 1: so having something concrete to say this is a direction
Speaker 1: you can go in. That's also what's sort of new
Speaker 1: and interesting and exciting about the direction the climate change
Speaker 1: debate has gone. Unlike those of us who don't work
Speaker 1: for big corporations, these people can actually do something about it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: bit power. I mean, we can talk all day long,
Speaker 1: but you know, Malcolm, Globble and Rundally Young do not
Speaker 1: have any power. But yeah, I mean, Miles, that's like
Speaker 1: one of us has a little bit more than the other.
Speaker 1: But you know what else not real I mean, but
Speaker 1: these people about power, I mean, that's what's happening here
Speaker 1: is the intelligent application of power with the goal of
Speaker 1: solving this problem. And that's exciting. Malcolm, thank you so
Speaker 1: much for stopping by and coming back from your long
Speaker 1: journey away and joining us to get here at Solvable.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much. It's been really fun. Ronald, Malcolm
Speaker 1: Gladwell is the host of our sister podcast here at
Speaker 1: Pushkin Revisionist History, and though I may be asked on
Speaker 1: the street, he's the actual author of Blink, among many
Speaker 1: other best selling books, including my personal favorite, David and Goliath,
Speaker 1: and if you stay tuned to the Solvable feed, you
Speaker 1: may hear another conversation between me and him about that book.
Speaker 1: Our cultural and corporate thinking about climate change may finally
Speaker 1: be shifting, and that is due in part to the
Speaker 1: extremely hard working scholars, activists, and policy experts working on
Speaker 1: this every day. There's no single solution to climate change,
Speaker 1: so be sure to check out our past episodes, which
Speaker 1: explore in much more detail how to address not only
Speaker 1: regenerative agricultural practices, but also clean water access and wastewater treatment.
Speaker 1: In a conversation with visionary Catherine Coleman Flowers. We have
Speaker 1: a great episode about world reef bleaching and marine biodiversity
Speaker 1: with Sarah Hamlin, another about innovation and scientific incentivization with
Speaker 1: Anusia and Sorry, one about wildfire management with Eric Apple,
Speaker 1: smart transportation with Laura Showell, and a fantastic conversation with
Speaker 1: longtime climate scholar and activists Bill mckibbon. Links to all
Speaker 1: those Solvable episodes can be found in our show notes.
Speaker 1: Thanks to our sponsors who made this episode possible, and
Speaker 1: to Pushkin's Royston Reserve for the custom content production. Solvable
Speaker 1: is produced by Joscelyn Frank, research by David Jah, Booking
Speaker 1: by Lisa Dunn. Our managing producer is Sasha Matthias. Our
Speaker 1: executive producer is mil LaBelle. Special thanks to Heather Fane,
Speaker 1: Carl Migliori, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor, and Nicole Morano. I'm
Speaker 1: Ronald Young Jr. Thanks for listening. Eight