Before you press play: this episode discusses genocide and suicide. Given the subject it could hardly not, but you should know that going in rather than discovering it at minute forty.

Last year I added a new type of show to the Reversing Climate Change podcast where I read some poetry or literature and discuss it literarily as well as its relevance to climate work. Today I released an episode of my reading Charlie Chaplin’s wonderful speech from the end of his film, The Great Dictator.

Reading poetry in the midst of serious climate work is not a new thing to do. Go back and read All We Can Save, the climate anthology edited by Drs. & , and the link to poetry is in plain sight. The riff on Adrienne Rich is right there in the title:

My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
so much has been destroyed

I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,

with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.

— Adrienne Rich in "Natural Resources" from The Dream of a Common Language (1978)

Ayana Johnson continues including poetry and other art in the followup anthology, What If We Get It Right? and it’s all over the Katharine Wilkinson’s new book, Climate Wayfinding. I believe this is such a wise way to mix media. It makes sense to my brain to find literary links to a topic that cannot help but produce some of the strongest feelings of faith and hope but also despair. Climate deserves its poetry and literature.1

Sometimes naivety is correct

I have loved this speech of Charlie Chaplin’s from The Great Dictator at least since my undergraduate days. I do associate its tone as being of that developmental stage. Can’t you just imagine the tie-dyed tapestry billowing from your dorm room fan? But in saying that, I undermine it and knock youth’s naivety. After being pummeled by “real life” in the post-collegiate years of one’s twenties, it becomes time to put away childish things. Noting that the world could be free and beautiful for everyone? So cringe.

But I’ve come back through the other end of that developmental loop, recognized that the “real world” has its own naiveties it nurses while it pretends to be practical, and am coaching myself and those who will listen to change and become like little children, or we will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Unsurprisingly, it’s Gospel phrasing like this that Chaplin cribs in his speech.

As the world’s situation gets more precarious, we will need spiritual wisdom to see us through to whatever we become on the other side of climate change. Reminders of this can only serve to prepare us for what will be expected of us in the years to come.

It’s a truly moving work of rhetoric. Here it is to watch in its entirety. Do that now, then come back:

I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be an emperor. That’s not my business. I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone if possible: Jew, Gentile, black man, white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness—not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way.

Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.

The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men; cries out for universal brotherhood, for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world—millions of despairing men, women, and little children—victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people.

To those who can hear me, I say: do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed; the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish.

Soldiers! Don’t give yourselves to brutes! Men who despise you, enslave you, who regiment your lives! Tell you what to do, what to think, and what to feel! Who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men—machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate; the unloved and the unnatural! Soldiers! Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty!

In the 17th Chapter of St. Luke it is written: “The Kingdom of God is within man”. Not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people have the power; the power to create machines. The power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.

Then in the name of democracy, let us use that power. Let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world; a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give youth a future, and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfil that promise. They never will!

Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people! Now let us fight to fulfil that promise! Let us fight to free the world. To do away with national barriers. To do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness. Soldiers! in the name of democracy, let us all unite!

— Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator (1940)

Stunning, right?

Understanding Hitler

I actually did not mean to record about an hour on World War II, political comedy, and the personality of Adolf Hitler in this episode. Most of the poetry episodes are tiny. Most of them are bonus content that I put out for the love of the game. This turned into something else entirely though.

I started off explaining my theory of what makes political comedy work, and then exploring the historical moment when this film was being made. It was before Pearl Harbor and before many of Hitler’s ideas had been enacted upon the world. And from there, it connects to so many threads: Hannah Arendt, Louis Theroux’s manosphere documentary2, Mel Brooks, Carless People, and why there’s something so clownish and adolescent about the men (and it usually is men) who rule the world and create such valuable systems of extraction.

Albert Speer’s3 book Inside the Third Reich has these stories of Hitler’s dinner parties where he would get his colleagues (and presumably people he considered “friends”, though I get the sense that he didn’t quite understand friendship), and give them repeated four-hour lectures on things they had heard from him at length many times before. They would go into the wee hours of the night and no one was much having that good of a time. Did that bother Hitler? It is unclear if he didn't notice or didn’t care, but when I imagine it, it’s always the former. It strikes me as childish and pitiful, and someone who so desperately wants to connect and be valued but is so blocked from doing so appropriately.

His closest relationships are misunderstood by him. The dinner guests mere prisoners to their boss’s Greatest Hits recollections. He is theatrically a brilliant performer—capable of ensorcelling the masses—and yet cannot break through the cage of his solitude that he may have never surfaced to consciousness.

Tempting Godwin’s Law

At this point we have such great visibility into the leaders of our world since they post their thoughts often and they believe and do so many bizarre things. And it reads very similarly to me. Donald Trump is the obvious example. He is cruel and seemingly enjoys the process of throwing his weight around for its own sake, and is absolutely not a serious person. Of the many examples that could be chosen, have you been following the sage by which engineering reviews are being done to see if the island on aircraft carriers can be moved so they look cooler? Or that they can switch from modern electromagnetic devices to launch planes back to the older steam technology for the idiosyncratic preferences of the commander-in-chief? What about the basic public relations point of, “hey, everyone is watching the sailor of the USS Abraham Lincoln. Maybe don’t make a bunch of strange comments about aircraft carriers now and let the story die down.” But no, that would be far too sensible and something about power includes the power to behave as both a tyrant and a clown.

It’s hard not to read and watch Mark Zuckerberg talk about anything and not think he is a dork who seemingly barely understands what it means to connect to another human, but he got rich designing a social network ostensibly for that purpose. Careless People has a story which alleges Mark always won at Settlers of Catan because his opponents got into the habit of letting him win. When Sarah Wynn-Williams pointed this out to him, she claims she was met with Zuckerberg’s incredulity. Of course they weren’t letting him win. He’s so smart that he wins a game with variance (impossible for the best player to always win due to the randomness introduced by dice-rolling) every single time. Mark Zuckerberg should almost certainly be nowhere near the possibility of Artificial General Intelligence.

Robert Moses (podcast forthcoming on the Robert Caro books…) presumably thought that he was helping New Yorkers by building his parkways and roads and parks. Even when the people who lived in these neighborhoods tried to tell him he misunderstood their needs or that they wanted to minorly adapt the plans to improve their use of it based upon local knowledge, he would basically say “take it or leave it.” He would serve these foolish citizens whether they liked it or not and only as he saw fit.

Many of these people strike me as petty. Hitler (and other leaders) sometimes have such a strong Governor Lepetomane quality to them. It both tyrannizes and feels just straight up silly. Somehow, behavior from leaders can simultaneously be both terrifying and goofy.

And other times, they’re just boring in the same horrifying way that Hannah Arendt documents Adolf Eichmann’s banality of evil. He wasn’t some serial killer who did his work with pleasure. He was just a very effective functionary who kept the trains moving on time. And isn’t that more terrifying, how absolutely dull his monstrosity is?

It rhymes with Hitler’s dreadful repeat speeches at his dinners that Speer notes. Monstrosity has some sort of potential overlap with being absolutely boring and being a clown. It isn’t just the viciousness of Hitler’s antisemitism. It’s the true lack of accurate self-understanding that propels these leaders, that causes them to believe in their own greatness, while also isolating themselves from the feedback they would need to moderate their own overreach. But if they had that humility, they may not seek to do these things and be these people in the first place. Is it actually a requirement, and not an accident?

This is not the end

I’m going to keep returning to these themes, so be sure to subscribe below. They impact so much of the world around us, how decisions get made, and what insulates our leaders from the kindness and gentleness we will need to carry us through this century. The wisdom we need in charge will not come from whatever set of incentives puts these men in such high places.

I will continue investigating this link between the lack of self-awareness and those who climb the heights of history in subsequent posts.

Thanks for reading! I appreciate you.

Sincerely,

Ross Kenyon

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Full Transcript

Ross Kenyon: Hey, thank you for listening to Reversing Climate Change. This is Ross Kenyon. I’m the host of the podcast, and I’ve been working in climate for about a decade.

Do you know right now that I’m curating another podcast? It’s called Climate Workers Anonymous. I’m an elder millennial, so I have strong memories of PostSecret, where people would decorate postcards and write an unsayable truth that they wanted to share with the world without attribution and mail it in. And I started a new thing called Climate Workers Anonymous to allow people to share things about working in climate that they are finding difficult to say. Whether they are too naive and beautiful and end up feeling a bit maudlin or purple to share in mixed company, or whether they’re cynical and experiences of disappointment and hypocrisy about working in climate. And lots of things in between.

If you like Reversing Climate Change, I think you’ll at least enjoy some of Climate Workers Anonymous, and you should check it out, because that’s going right now. The link is in the show notes if you’d like to do that. But also, if you look up Climate Workers Anonymous on Substack, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, all of the regular places you listen to podcasts, it will be there.

Today’s show is a monologue episode. I’ve loved this speech for so very long. You’ve probably heard it before. It ends up sampled in songs. It’s one of those speeches that has broken through and remains popular nearly 100 years after it was released. I am referring to Charlie Chaplin’s speech at the end of The Great Dictator, from 1940.

I’m going to read it, or maybe it’s better to say I’m going to act it. I’m not even sure. It’s a real risk having to recite a Charlie Chaplin speech for which there is a recording of him giving it himself. The Great Dictator is his first talkie. Chaplin, of course, is from the silent film era. He’s a vaudevillian, very strong physical comedy actor, and one of those early film pioneers that was able to make the transition to talkies from silent films. Not everyone was able to do that.

If you haven’t seen any silent films, I would recommend going back and watching some of them. They do a lot with so little. It’s amazing to see how much of that was pioneered then. There’s a scene in The Deuce where Maggie Gyllenhaal is talking to her mentor after coming out of an Akira Kurosawa film, and her mentor says something like, “Yeah, and they did that with nothing.” He was able to pull a masterpiece from behind his ear, essentially, after World War II, being a filmmaker in Japan. And knowing the context of how Kurosawa was able to make such amazing cinema after his country was rocked to its foundations and so poor and struggling only makes his artistic contribution to humanity that much more impressive.

And Charlie Chaplin is like that too. I can’t say this is my favorite Chaplin film. Let me put it this way. You know when you watch a comedian who is political, of basically any stripe? Political comedy is good when the comedy is first and the politics are second. When the politics drive it too much, it loses its aesthetic sense of what is comedic about what they’re telling, and then it starts feeling more like spoken word, or politics. Or think of something like Henry Rollins, for example. Basically a lecturer, someone who talks about politics. And sure, he can be funny.

But many of the comics that I loved when I was in my teen and college years and beyond, the albums that I kept coming back to over and over, they were from people who had clear political convictions. I think I listened to David Cross’ Shut Up You Fucking Baby dozens of times. Such a great album. I bet it has not aged well because it is so topical. He is talking about things that are happening of the moment. But a lot of the album is about being a New Yorker during 9/11. And they’re great stories, and they’re genuinely funny and humane and hopeful and sardonic. And of course, there’s politics involved, but it never feels like the politics is driving this so much. I always really respected that album because it has great balance in that way. It respects the craft of comedy by putting the comedy first, and the politics come later.

Some of the David Cross stuff that would come out during the same era. I remember one time I saw him do comedy live. I forget when it was. I think it was late Bush W years, maybe early Obama years. It was just an hour straight, or 90 minutes, of pointing out Republican absurdity and foolishness and mendaciousness and stuff that, you know, it’s like, if you like David Cross, none of that’s gonna be some great surprise and it’s fun to hear him talk about it. But also I ended up feeling disappointed by it because I had wanted storytelling outside of mere political entertainment or political comedy. I respect it, by the way. I think if you have something to say about politics and you’re able to connect with people in any way, that’s fine. Maybe not every version of that or every flavor of that is gonna connect with one at every moment, and it’s possible I just wasn’t in the right head space to appreciate him that night. I don’t know.

But even still, I look back and I think about the Patton Oswalt jokes that I remember, and basically none of them are him analyzing whether or not George W. Bush is the stupidest man who ever existed. I think a lot of that’s fairly forgettable. But there’s some stories about him being in New York that I still think about as hilarious.

And you can even see this the other direction too. With Dave Chappelle, I think I’ve seen Killin’ Them Softly more than any other comedy special ever. I think I can quote every line in that thing. I adore it. I think it’s great. But if you watch any of his recent specials, just ignore for a second whether or not you agree with what his politics have become, they come off as politics first and the comedy second. Watching him do comedy feels like he’s trying to justify himself in past imbroglios that he is in. He’s trying to make sure he has a chance to get everyone’s attention so he can clear the air about some topic, and it never feels that funny to me. It always feels serious, and there’s an attempt to be profound. But it’s often left me cold, and it’s not just because I don’t love the politics that he has at this point. I think some part of it is because the comedy is secondary to the spoken word element to it. He’s trying to deliver a message and not be funny, and it’s really hard to be didactic, to teach people stuff, and also to be funny. And if you are going to do that, it has to be funny first, or just be didactic. When that comedy mixes, I think it creates a sort of conflict of interest aesthetically.

I think you can see this in The Great Dictator. I think Chaplin, working from the right place ethically, he’s watching what’s happening in Europe. This is made before Pearl Harbor. This is made before the US is in the war. This is released in 1940, so it was released in October. Germans invade Poland on September 1st, 1939. Then you have the so-called Phoney War, and then Paris falls in June of 1940. So this is released in October of 1940, and the film was produced during 1939, but he was writing it and working on it for what looks like several years before that.

So Chaplin had a really strong sense of the moment, that what these authoritarians were doing was wrong and destructive and also worthy of mockery, and he brought it. I think that’s a really courageous thing to do, because he didn’t know how that would end. In the film, he’s predicting war, or nearly so, between authoritarians, the sort of faux Mussolini character and this faux Hitler character going to war over an independent country that borders them.

I admire that he was willing to do this in the moment and to stick his neck out like this. One thing that maybe you don’t know is that before Pearl Harbor, there was actually a fairly strong movement against US intervention in Europe. I’ve never read the book, but I certainly intend to. I thought the miniseries was great. It’s an adaptation of Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, which is about what the world would look like if Charles Lindbergh, the aviator, had become the American president. He was strongly isolationist and thought that America should stay out of European politics and not get involved in any of their conflicts. The Plot Against America really leans into his alleged Nazi racial politics. I actually don’t know enough about Lindbergh to say whether or not that was fair or not. Suffice it to say, I think it’s a really interesting thought experiment.

But Chaplin is making this film about how terrible these authoritarians are at a moment before I think most Americans had thought that America should be super concerned with this. This is before there’s a lot of details about what’s happening to the Jews in Europe. There’s not great information about a lot of it. Certainly not what happens under the General Government in the East, in parts of Poland and Ukraine, where much of the worst parts of the Holocaust happened, that it’s less industrial like you might have at Dachau or Auschwitz and more just, there’s a big hole in the ground and the soldiers are gonna keep shooting people and having them fall into the pit until the pit is full, and then they move on to the next pit, essentially.

I just read Ken Krimstein’s book on Hannah Arendt, The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt: A Tyranny of Truth. Really cool graphic novel. I’ve read a lot of Hannah Arendt, and she’s a great one to engage with. Highly recommend digging into her stuff.

Hannah Arendt very narrowly escaped the Nazis in Berlin. She was engaged in the artistic and intellectual circles there in the pre-war period and was asked by a Zionist organization to go into the German state archives and gather up the regional papers of the Nazi Party, and just German publications in general, and to find documented cases of antisemitism so that this organization could use it to show to the world how bad it had gotten in Germany. That’s my understanding of what was happening. A librarian flagged her, and she was interrogated for several days by a Nazi officer. By some happenstance she ends up getting out for, I think, like a day. She just barely got out, and it seemed like there was going to be a follow-up, so her and her mother just left immediately and went through the one area where I guess the border police for exit purposes were less guarded, on the Czech side of Germany, and got out. And so she makes her way to Paris and falls in with the circle there. Another one of those Forrest Gumpian, everyone who’s anyone in continental philosophy is hanging out, kind of things.

Then the Germans invade France. During the Phoney War, so between what happens in Poland at the end of ‘39 and the middle of the year in 1940, there’s a sort of redeployment. Germans from the east are moving to the west, consolidating. It’s unclear what’s gonna happen. As you probably know, during the First World War, the German invasion of France didn’t go super well. It bogged down into trenches. The French learned the wrong lessons from World War I. Rather than thinking about mobility and breakthrough and blitzkrieg as people like Heinz Guderian did, they end up thinking about how to make static warfare better. How do we make the Maginot Line tougher to break through and make this wall impenetrable so the Germans could never get through again? And so we’ll just defend the entire eastern border of France perfectly.

What the Germans do with combined arms is attack a very, very narrow part of the front, concentrate all of their air power and artillery and tanks, and just send as many through as possible, as fast as possible, and then get into the backfield, and then they can start outflanking and rounding up the lines of their enemy. And this becomes very, very effective, and the German invasion of France happens fast. Once that happens, there’s not this long, slow grind that then slows down and gets stuck at the Somme and blah, blah, blah, all the stuff you know about World War I being so awful. The Germans basically win as soon as they start trying. In my memory, it lasts like a couple of weeks. It’s not long. And after that happens, the Germans, rather than trying to govern all of France, they set up a collaborationist government based in Vichy, France, under Philippe Pétain, army general.

And once again, Hannah’s on the run. They hear from friends near Marseille that there’s some sort of safe house that they can stay with people without being noticed, but they have to go into Marseille all the time to wait in line trying to get an exit visa, and there’s multiple visas that they have to get, and it’s this huge hassle. And if you’ve ever seen Casablanca, you know there’s a whole process of how do you get the right stamps on a piece of paper in order to flee successfully and to get out. Because it’s not as simple as just buying a ticket on a steamer and going. They’re trying to make sure that the people that they would like to have under their control remain there for processing. If you haven’t seen Casablanca, here’s a little clue. It’s great. You should absolutely go watch Casablanca, because that one is pretty much just a perfectly told story. No notes. Go watch it.

There’s a page in The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt where Hannah says, I think it was in 1939 or maybe it was even in 1940, they had heard rumors of what was happening to the Jews in the East and didn’t believe it. The circle that she rolled in was very Jewish. Walter Benjamin, for example, was one of her close friends. He died by suicide trying to escape into Spain from their little area in the south of France.

So even when Chaplin is making this film, it’s not clear how much of Nazi propaganda and speechifying about the Jews is bluster and how much of it is true intent. In fact, The Great Dictator is interesting because it makes several comments about how Hynkel can use the Jews as an economic scapegoat. Post-war, in all of Europe, radical politics are big, and Hitler is certainly a part of that, just from the right-wing persuasion. Economic insecurity, no surprise, is a recipe for political radicalism. When people don’t know where their next meal is coming from, they’re going to interpret that the system has failed them in some way. And one way that political figures and operatives will deal with this is to scapegoat some other group. So the film implies here that, opportunistically, Hitler, sorry, Hynkel, who’s the Hitler stand-in in The Great Dictator, can blame the Jews for economic suffering in the country of Tomainia, Germany.

It’s almost wielded more as something to be done just opportunistically. At one point in the film, he tries to solicit a loan from a Jewish banker and agrees to pause all the antisemitism to get the loan and to just make it work. And there’s sort of a question here with regard to how serious Hynkel’s, and by proxy Hitler’s, antisemitism is, which in hindsight is really bizarre. I do not get the sense that Hitler was an anti-Semite for instrumental reasons. In fact, many of the resources that he had would have been, just for war-winning capacities alone, much better spent in not doing basically the Holocaust. The opportunity cost of the Holocaust for the Germans fighting World War II, very high. If all you care about is winning the war, you probably should not be engaging in the world’s worst extracurricular activity.

It’s something that you would only do if you genuinely thought this was good. And this is true also for how he treated other groups like the Slavs. The Ukrainians hated the Soviet Union for the Holodomor, the great famine of Ukraine, and would have welcomed Nazi, quote-unquote, “liberation” because they hated the Soviets so much. When the Germans came in, they were also terrible to the Ukrainians and basically threw away any possible goodwill of the Ukrainians wanting to fight on the side of the Germans, wanting to collaborate. It ended up just being like, everyone hates Ukraine. This is terrible. And it just turned into carnage.

So that is one of those things when you watch The Great Dictator and look back, you think, “Okay, this is probably not historically accurate. This would not stand scrutiny here.”

Some things I like about how Chaplin characterizes Hitler, sorry, Hynkel. You know what? I’m just gonna say both, and they both mean the same thing. The film is weird because the opening of the film talks about Lindbergh flying across the Atlantic a few decades earlier. It talks about World War I, and yet he’s talking about Germany and Italy, and very obviously Hitler. You’ve got the mustache. The person who’s the Mussolini character, Napaloni, is so obviously Benito Mussolini. There’s no attempt to hide it at all, and all the dates are the same, and I don’t understand why they didn’t try to do something a little bit more obscure or just have it be Germany and Italy. I wonder. I’m sure Chaplin had his reasons. He was a smart guy. It kinda cracks me up, though.

But the question of Hitler’s character, I think he probably missed the mark a little bit, but we also have the benefit of decades and decades of study of Hitler.

World War II was actually the first part of history that I got interested in. I went on a camping trip in Boy Scouts, and I think I was 11 or 12, and I remember being in a tent with my friend Danny, and I should probably send Danny a message, because it’s been several decades since I’ve said hello. He was talking about World War II. I’m like, “What? Have I heard of this? What happened with World War II?” And so, as an 11-year-old might explain, he said something like, “All right, so there’s this guy, Hitler, and he’s really bad, and he’s in Germany, and he starts whatever.” I remember being totally captivated. I’m like, “I gotta learn more about this. This is so interesting.”

And during that time, the History Channel in the US was like Hitler mania, nonstop shows about World War II and Hitler, and there were even shows I remember of things being like, “Was Hitler secretly gay?” Whatever customer research they did, it was like people just want to know more about this person who’s so hateful and bizarre and theatrical. There’s something about it that feels kind of entertainery. But there’s also so many other things that I’ve read about his character that make him both more human and banal, in that Hannah Arendtian banality of evil. This is humanizing, but it’s humanizing in a deeply negative way.

There’s stories from Albert Speer’s book, Inside the Third Reich. I still to this day do not know how much to trust this book. So Speer was an architect, did a bunch of the grand building projects, the neoclassical building stuff that the Nazis loved. But he also was the armaments minister, and he was responsible for logistics and making sure enough shells got made and munitions got made and shipped to the right place and stuff like that, and was very good at his job. And he had a front row seat to Hitler’s social life.

He tells these stories in the book of dinner parties where Hitler would invite these guests over, and they were all upper echelon Nazi functionaries, and some of these people would get regular invitations, and it’s like, if your boss invites you to a dinner, you probably should say yes if you care about keeping your job. And these dinners would go super late, and Hitler would just start going and give like a four-hour speech on something that they’ve all heard hundreds of times. His theory of how Germany was stabbed in the back by politicians at the end of World War I, and the military actually won World War I, but I guess he would’ve called it the Great War. And the guests are just like, “Oh, I so desperately want to go home, mein Führer. I’m so tired.” But you can’t say that. You can’t say that to your boss. Your job there is to let him say his thing, and he’s working himself up and wants to talk about this, but it just sounds terrible. So either he doesn’t realize that he’s boring these people, or he doesn’t care. He lacks this awareness, or this compassion for others, this empathy. He obviously lacks empathy for people, but I think stories like this, if we can trust the characterization of these dinners, strike me as someone who’s so used to adulation that he doesn’t realize that people would not be hanging off of every word.

There’s a story in Careless People where the author tells a story in which she alleges that Mark Zuckerberg would have people play Settlers of Catan with him, and allegedly people would just let Mark Zuckerberg win, or Mark never lost a game, or almost never lost a game, and if he lost a game, in my memory, I think he was fairly upset about it. Don’t quote me. I may not be remembering that exactly correctly, but it’s something kinda like that. And at one point, the author gets really upset with Mark and says something like, “You know they’re just letting you win, right?” And he goes, “No, they’re not. They would never do that.” She is so flabbergasted by him thinking that he is so good at Catan that he could never, ever possibly lose a game because he’s that much smarter than everyone else.

And so I think the dinner party stories about Hitler are probably closer to that. He’s so used to adulation that he doesn’t realize that the people who work with him... One of my favorite ways of interpreting the passage from the gospel where Jesus says, “No prophet is without honor, save in his home country,” is, okay, you might have a reputation in the world as being a smart, competent person, but sometimes to your spouse, your partner, they might think you’re a schmuck. They see you when you have done something unhygienic, or you fell asleep eating snacks on the couch and there’s crumbs all over your chest. If you’re that close to people, it’s really easy to notice their humanity and how difficult things are for them, and therefore the mystique is gone. The bloom’s off the rose when you live with someone. You see them getting dressed in the morning and you don’t see them when they’re only super well put together. It’s just different. You see them when they’re cranky. You see them when they’re sleepy. When they make maybe not the best decisions. They’re not giving their best performance 24/7, obviously.

The reason why I said that I don’t know if I can trust it so much is that Speer spends a fair amount of that book, which he wrote in Spandau, which was the prison that many of the captured higher-up Nazis were kept in awaiting the Nuremberg trials. And in fact, if you watched Band of Brothers, I always thought this was really interesting. Speirs, who I think is a lieutenant in Band of Brothers, yeah, that’s right, a lieutenant, who is courageous and ridiculous in several capacities, later ended up being the governor of Spandau. So I always thought that was a really interesting Forrest Gumpian, everyone knows each other and history just loops around in these funny kinds of ways.

It’s also interesting to see Hitler portrayed comedically. This was at a moment before the Holocaust and all of its horror was fully displayed. So the liberation of the camps in ‘45 hasn’t happened yet. It’s really unclear what exactly is happening and to what extent. Once all of the horror is undeniable and out in the open, things change. The world no longer feels like Hitler as a comedic topic is appropriate anymore. They’re not ready to laugh. It has this sort of too soon phenomenon to it.

There’s a fascinating couple of pages, actually, in that Hannah Arendt graphic novel where one of her books, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, it’s from 1963. I basically just need to reread all of Hannah Arendt. I’ve been thinking about her work so much lately. But maybe you don’t even realize how polarizing that book and that phrase is. Now we say the banality of evil with some regularity. It’s entered the lexicon. People know what it means to be a good German, someone who just follows orders, someone who’s not questioning things.

This book pissed a lot of people off, and for various reasons. One of which is that the Jewish councils that the Nazis composed to sort of internally govern the ghettos in Europe, there’s some sense that some of the Jews that were on the Judenrat governing bodies, some of them were more collaborationist than maybe they strictly needed to be. Some of them used power for their own purposes. It wasn’t only a noble thing. In my recollection, and I haven’t read this book in a while, but in my recollection she was trying to honor that, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn put it, the line between good and evil cuts through every person’s heart.

People don’t become more public-spirited by necessity by having a public role. Sometimes people will enter into a public role and have their own motivations run wild. I’ve actually been reading Robert Caro’s book at long last about Robert Moses and how he remade New York and urban planning. Fascinating book. I’m going to do a show about Robert Caro, Robert Moses, and tie it to some other themes that I’ve been noticing in climate work and things adjacent to it. But this is a great example. Robert Moses had things that he believed about what was in the welfare of New Yorkers, and there were also parts of the book where maybe he believed that or maybe he just wanted to expand his own power. It’s hard to know what was in his heart. But I think it honors his whole humanity to look at his actions and say, at some points this is motivating him, at other points this other thing was motivating him that was maybe less noble. And not all of us are as kind or as decent as we always can be, and that’s something that I think is important.

And so Hannah Arendt talking about this banality of evil, of watching Adolf Eichmann, who was the logistician who made sure that the trains carrying Jews and other disfavored people by the Nazis to death camps and to work camps ran efficiently. And so Mossad and the Israelis had been trying to track down Nazis who escaped judgment at Nuremberg since World War II ended. They’re sort of like the rat lines out of Europe that the Nazis ran down to escape. And many of them famously ended up in Argentina, like Adolf Eichmann.

As she’s watching the trials take place in Israel, she’s noticing that this guy’s boring. He’s not a monster or a serial killer in the way that we might think. He’s sort of a boring functionary, which humanizes him, but also makes it more terrifying, I think. If someone was a unidimensional, enjoys doing bad, knowing that it’s bad but thinking that it’s good, they’re just sort of a cartoon villain, that’s a sort of straightforward antagonist. It’s easy. You either have to kill this person or disable their ability to harm others through incarceration. Hannibal Lecter them. Put them in the thing over the face and put them in the backboard so they can’t move, and you just keep them away from other humans because they’ll do something terrible as soon as they get the first chance.

What was terrifying to Hannah Arendt about Adolf Eichmann was that he was just sort of a normal guy who did heinous, heinous things. And that message did not jive with the moment. Many Holocaust survivors and Jewish leaders did not want to tell a story about the line of good and evil cutting through everyone’s heart in this kind of way. There was still so much anger and sadness and true despair at the destruction of Yiddish civilization and family members and all that cultural legacy that was just obliterated to absolutely no one’s benefit at all. Just pure dead weight loss and suffering. And he was able to stand by his actions, saying that he had just done his job. He was just following orders and therefore he can’t be held accountable.

I think in trying to understand how people can do such awful things, and do it in a way that is so boringly human, is a sophisticated story that is hard to tell. And I think it takes a lot of the power out of the pure good versus evil story. It’s not about these Nazis who are almost a different species from you and I that did these things. Much of Arendt’s work on totalitarianism, about communism and Nazism, is that these tendencies lurk inside of the personalities of humans collectively and individually. There are certain circumstances that can trigger this even in people who are just normal, boring, run-of-the-mill people. And the lesson there about how do we make sure this never happens again is truly a difficult story to communicate and to have action according to.

One brief example. If we’re just talking about good and evil, if someone’s a Nazi, then you basically need to do the Hannibal Lecter thing that I just explained. In the Hannah Arendt story, it’s all of us together watching our own spirituality, our own hearts, and making sure that what leads to the inhumanity, what leads to the cruelty, what leads to the genocide, what leads to us treating humans as means and not ends. And that’s something that all of us need to be watching all the time, and that’s true of Germans, that’s true of Jews, that’s true of people who were on the Judenrat, that’s true of middle class, sort of right of center conservative people in Germany in the ‘30s who maybe missed stability, but they overlooked what they were trading for this alleged stability. They were willing to accept some amount of cruelty, or maybe even indulge in it themselves, because they wanted stability, peace, a return to normalcy, a return to German greatness, something like that.

I still don’t think we’re ready for a message quite like that. It doesn’t fit well on a picket sign. It’s really hard to explain. And I hope you can understand now why Eichmann in Jerusalem made people so angry.

And there is a page or two in the book about how five years after Eichmann in Jerusalem came out, and people were so offended by her book, The Producers comes out, which is Mel Brooks. The producers are trying to intentionally make the worst play of all time, because that would allow them to basically defraud investors and make the most money possible from a theatrical production. And the worst play that they can find out of all the ones that they read is called Springtime for Hitler, and it’s a musical about how Deutschland is happy and gay under Hitler. Of course, in perfect ironic fashion, the audience goes bananas for it because it’s so camp and so ridiculous that it becomes a hit, and the plan of the fraudulent producers backfires. It’s beautiful. I love stories like that, where there’s such a perfect little twist in it.

But there’s a period where I think it’s pretty much from Chaplin, and I think there’s a couple of other films that portrayed Nazis. I’m not sure if any of them portrayed them in a comedic light, certainly not in a mainstream way after Chaplin. There might be a couple, but almost certainly nothing as famous as The Great Dictator. But between that and The Producers, I don’t think there’s much content at all that treats authoritarianism, and certainly not Nazism, as something that is laughable. Actually, that’s not true for European literature. There’s stuff that’s coming out of Czechoslovakia during this time that is mocking of Soviet rule, and stuff that’s happening in Hungary, and there’s stuff happening in literature in Europe. But at least in American cinema, the world is not ready to treat Nazism as a sort of bumbling guy who is so unself-aware that he tells the same story for four hours every night to the same audience expecting huge praise and not getting it and being unaware of this.

There’s something about that that’s so foolish. It’s funny and it’s humanizing, because you have this absolute monster who just does not understand himself and his role here. It’s goofy. This monster is goofy in this way. Goofy almost in the Taika Waititi way, in Jojo Rabbit. Hitler’s just, like, so, so silly.

One of the parts of alternative history that people love to do is, at what point could a different decision have been made that would have changed the course of the war? And you can do it for so many things. But there’s several of them that deal with Hitler’s leadership style, where Hitler has probably the best general staff in the war. Hitler’s generals are best in class. They’re doing really interesting military innovation, the Blitzkrieg, lightning war. Their hardware is better than anyone else’s. They have the best tanks. They have highly trained infantry. They have Fallschirmjäger, the parachute troops that are very effective light infantry. They developed the first jet fighter plane, but it’s too late in the war to change things. They develop offensive rocketry capabilities. They would have likely had a nuclear weapon had they not deemed nuclear physics a Jewish science and sent all of the major physicists, people like Einstein, fleeing for their lives.

But Hitler also, because he was a frontline soldier, he was a corporal, as people likely know, in World War I on the Western Front, was gassed, ended up hospitalized and sort of attritioned out as sick. But he thought he was a supreme military commander. He thought he was a military genius. He did things like, during Overlord, the Allied invasion of Europe, he held tanks in reserve that should have been deployed much earlier, that would have potentially broken some of the connecting sites like Carentan and Caen and some of these other places, had intervention happened earlier. It would have complicated the Allied invasion by a lot. I’m not sure if it would have been decisive, but it’s one of those things that you should have rolled the dice on, because they’re never going to be more vulnerable than when they have very little room to maneuver and they’re very close to the water and they’re sort of penned in in this horrible hedgerow country that’s very easy to defend. And it should have just been released.

But Hitler was able to intuit, he thought, that the main strike had not yet occurred, and he was holding his elite tanks back waiting to figure out what the Allies were actually going to do before he committed them. Major goof. But his generals did not want to do that. And moreover, and this will ring true for anyone who’s worked for or with anyone who’s scary, his staff didn’t want to wake him up to tell him the situation has changed and the generals want to deploy the tanks, or something very much like that, because if you wake Hitler up, he’s going to be really, really pissed off and no one wants that.

So there’s also these parts of leadership, which is that your staff is scared to tell you bad information. They’re scared to wake you up even when your leadership is urgently needed. And this person thinks that they are way smarter and way more competent than they actually are. And they bottleneck decisions around themselves in ways that are highly inappropriate, especially given how masterful the staff around them is. To me it’s just beyond ridiculous.

There’s so many other things. That’s just one example of so many other parts of things that went wrong. Choosing to declare war on the US after Pearl Harbor. That might be the simplest one of all. I think it was like six days between Pearl Harbor and when Germany declared war on the US. There was serious concern in the Roosevelt administration that Germany would not declare war on the US, and America would only have the casus belli to fight Japan in the Pacific, but not do anything in Europe. So you have Lend-Lease and things like that, where they’re helping the Allies, but they’re not engaged in the war effort in a full capacity. And Roosevelt’s worried that there is not enough support to go fight in Europe. And then Hitler is just like, “Okay. Well, we’re just gonna declare war on the US now.” And Roosevelt’s like, “Oh, well, that solves everything for us. How wonderful for us.”

Hitler also just rolled the dice several times and won. His push on the Sudetenland worked. The Anschluss, where Germany unified with Austria, was tolerated. The non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union. All these things were just like, “Uh, what is happening? Okay.” But the Allies drew the final line at attacking Poland. By that point I think it was pretty clear that that was gonna be the final straw, because the Allies had issued a security guarantee for Poland and had to honor that. And in my understanding, that did not exist previously for any of the other parts of this.

Okay, I’m gonna get to actually the speech now very soon. I think it’s hard to even dive into these topics because they touch so many things. How do you start talking about World War II and not have to talk about everything that preceded it and everything that came after, and all of the thinking around the personalities and the questions about how much do individual personalities matter? It’s sort of endless.

I have two remaining things to say and then I’ll get to the thing. Gosh, this show ended up just being enormous. I’ll say one more thing before I get into the speech, which, oh man, this is getting extreme here. But if you watch The Great Dictator and see how Charlie Chaplin plays Hynkel, it’s almost like, I wish it was almost more silly. It reminds me of something like, I’m certain Mel Brooks was a fan of this film. But when I think about how Mel Brooks plays authority figures, and especially someone like Governor Le Petomane from Blazing Saddles, “We gotta protect our phony baloney jobs here,” or the, “I didn’t get a harrumph out of that guy.” It would’ve been good to maybe ham up some of the ways that authority of this kind goes to people’s heads, and also how venal a lot of their desires are.

Like Hitler, at the end of the day, seems like he wanted people to just listen to him and think that he was smart. I think some part of the horror of him is thinking about the emotional disconnect here that sublimated into politics, of just seeing now that he has a captive audience of people who can’t leave, how desperately he wants to share with them the thoughts that turn over in his brain all day long. There’s something about that that I find tragic and sad and pitiful, and it’s hard to look away from. And it also makes me think of Governor Le Petomane from Blazing Saddles with Mel Brooks. There’s something about it that is boyish and kind of childish. It just seems goofy.

But also, just reading so many stories and seeing so much about the titans of industry that rule our world today, many of them strike me as extremely adolescent. They’re blustery. They think they’re smarter than everyone else. Many of them find it hard to believe that they may not, in fact, be smarter than everyone else. They believe very strongly that they deserve their position where they are, and how distorting that can be. There’s something psychologically that happens there that I can’t fully put my finger on.

But in that show I mentioned earlier about Robert Moses and New York, I’m trying to turn over some of these lessons for leadership and cultural health and organizational health and why this happens. And, in the words of F.A. Hayek, why do the worst get on top? They’re not the wisest people, that’s for sure. Their personalities have optimized for something else. And why do we let them do it? And why do they think that they deserve it? I don’t know. Questions I’ll be asking for a long time.

But okay, that is the longest prologue by far that I’ve ever done for a reading show, a poetry show. But okay, I’m gonna go into this now.

So the point of The Great Dictator, as you may have guessed, is Chaplin plays the most thinly veiled Hitler of all time. Chaplin plays two roles. He plays a Jewish barber who looks identical to Hynkel because they’re played by the same actor, and it goes through the worsening process of being in the ghetto and Nazi persecution and getting worse. And then later in the film, the barber version of Chaplin is trying to escape, and in escaping he ends up wearing the Nazi uniform of Tomainia, and then ends up at the sort of troop review. The Tomainian troops are about to invade this country. Hynkel is not there to give the speech. And because everyone also thinks that the barber is Hynkel, because they look identical, and he’s in the uniform for it, the barber is escorted to the stage, and he does a speech which I can only do in poor form relative to Charlie Chaplin, one of the best actors and creative visionaries of all time.

But I’m gonna try my best to honor this speech. I hope you connect with it. If you like this show, you’ll certainly connect with it. And you should go and watch this speech, the Chaplin version of it, immediately, because it’s beautiful, and it’s something that for twenty years or so I will return to every so often and feel inspired and find it to be so beautiful.

This is Charlie Chaplin’s final speech from The Great Dictator.

[Charlie Chaplin’s closing speech from The Great Dictator (1940) is recited here in full.]

Ross Kenyon: There you have it. There are so many lines here that I think are just beautiful.

I like that it centers feeling, and that thinking has not necessarily helped us as much as we had hoped. Our inventions make it easier for us to hurt one another, but not to connect us. And yet Chaplin seems to not link this to reason and science. He thinks those are things that can be rehabilitated. In the beginning of this, he talks like a romantic, that intuition and feeling are more important than science and empirical results and material progress. But by the end of it, he’s talking about how reason and science can lead the way. And what’s fascinating about this is faith and religious ethics don’t seem to play much of a role in it, even though he quotes Luke in the Gospel.

He also likens this to democracy, and there’s questions about, does he mean universal suffrage kind of democracy, or some thoroughgoing economic democracy, democratic socialism? What exactly is he pointing to here? Because we have democracy now, or at least nominally we do, and yet it has not produced the results that we want, and seemingly democracy gets harder every year that time goes by with the various types of media that we have access to.

I think he’s spot on that the technology that should be bringing us together has oftentimes monetized suffering and anger in ways that drive us apart and make our media landscape extremely fragmented and dangerous. For instance, if you haven’t seen the Louis Theroux Manosphere documentary, there’s a section in there about one of the influencers, and Louis asks him, “This sort of anti-Semitic stuff that you’re saying out here, you don’t actually believe this, do you? Are you an anti-Semite?” Something like that he asks him. And the influencer just says, “No, I don’t believe that at all, but it’s what gets clicks. It’s how we monetize.” I think that’s the scariest part of the entire film. Platforms are encouraging you to be shocking and basically be race-baiting and Jew-baiting in order to earn money, and that’s just a state of affairs that we’ve determined is totally acceptable. It’s crazy.

And I think Chaplin looking at that, like, “Cool, we have speed, but do we have humanity?” No. We’ve sort of put a price tag on it and are effectively paying people to act monstrously. And that part of the Louis documentary is the banality of evil. The influencer that he’s profiling had a rough childhood with an absent father that he clearly has a lot of anger towards, is trying to make it in a difficult world. And he’s just following the orders of the algorithm. The algorithm rewards a behavior, and therefore people rise to the occasion and supply the algorithm with what works on the algorithm. It’s truly horrifying.

Those minor quibbles, or questions that I have about democracy and how Chaplin views science and reason and faith and the relationship between these things, and how do we live humane, ethical lives, whatever. You can listen to this, and whatever insufficient words we drape onto the sentiment that’s behind what Charlie Chaplin is saying here, I think we all know what he’s saying, and it’s that we need kindness.

And however we need to get there, okay, that’s on you to figure out, basically. Good luck. If it’s an issue of reason, okay. Some people still argue that. It’s like Steven Pinker, Sam Harris. But there’s also plenty of people who think that reason and science don’t necessarily lead to the right conclusions ethically here. IG Farben, real good at science, made Zyklon B. You can use reason for purposes out of line with dignity very easily.

But also the feeling that he points to can also be turned in toxic ways. The feelings that are active in the people’s hearts of Tomainia are hate and fear and a desire not to stand out. It’s not just feeling or reason.

Look, I like romanticism. It comes up a lot on the show. But also there are parts of it, or versions of it, where I’m like, okay, but we also do need the other parts of our reason. We do not benefit by partitioning our personalities, our brains, who we are as humans, and saying this part is human and this part is not. We need these things working together, guided by a system of philosophy and ethics that is humane. We don’t solve this by saying reason is the enemy, we’re going back to the garden, we’re giving up symbolic language, and we’re just not doing this anymore. And we don’t say that feeling is so easily manipulated by social media, that feeling often ends up in anger, and therefore we need a much more reasonable populace. We need both of those things. We need intuition and reason that check each other, that make sure we’re working with our whole bodies, our whole minds, and that’s how we’re approaching this.

And so at the end of this, these are all the most minor quibbles for what is in fact a truly beautiful speech, a humane one. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. More than machinery, we need humanity. Our cleverness has made us hard and unkind. The good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way. I say that a lot. Actually, in rereading this, I’m wondering how much this has influenced me in terms of rhetoric, because I say that all the time. I’m like, “Things could be so nice here. We could be living in paradise, essentially.” We are choosing misery for the worst possible deal. It doesn’t make any sense to me. I’m okay being simple and naive in saying that. I’m like, “What are we... Guys, what are we doing? This is not working so well.” And I love that someone could just say this like this 80 years ago.

Millions of despairing men, women, and little children, victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people. Oh man, so many lines here are just great.

I hope you enjoyed. I didn’t mean to go into full who is Hitler, World War II comedy. Ugh. I guess it’s no surprise, really. That’s just kinda how it goes sometimes. I’m not gonna read the entire thing again, because it’s just too long, but I hope you enjoyed it. Have a wonderful day, and thanks for listening to this monologue episode of Reversing Climate Change. I’m Ross Kenyon.

Hello! This is a riff on episode #412 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast by me, Ross Kenyon. You can listen to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can also listen to the full episode right below this paragraph.

Misspent or correctly spent youth

I spent a good chunk of my twenties writing pieces and producing videos while traveling. I studied my final semester of my undergraduate degree in Istanbul, then wandered around the Balkans for a month, growing an unkempt beard, hitchhiking, and generally misunderstanding the region in tragicomic fashion before landing in New York.

Many of my most memorable moments of so many years on the move were disasters that I recount in self-deprecating style. On that same Balkan jaunt, I was having dinner one night in Niš, Serbia.

Niš is a unique place. Emperor Constantine hailed from there, and their gastronomy still haunts me. Their street food is world class barbecue called roštilj . But it’s also a place where the Ottomans put down a Serbian revolt and then built a tower of Serb skulls as a warning to posterity. I’ve seen it. It’s hideous. They keep it covered by a tower that surrounds so that you don’t just walk by it, presumably for reasons of both reverence and protection.

One branch of my family hails from this region: Croats, Serbs, Hungarians, Austrians, Jews1—all mixed up in the chaotic pastiche of genealogy that is true for so many. I love genealogy and have become increasingly obsessed with place, language, history, and the incredible stories that have led each of us to this exact present moment. But at this time in my life, I didn’t yet have this interest. I didn’t yet know the exact contours of my heritage except for an old last name, “Vukcevich” (which means “son of [the] wolf” because I’m really cool), and my hand waving over nearly the entire peninsula.

Now back to the dinner. This was a white tablecloth prix fixe establishment. I had beautiful steak and quince rakija (this was Niš after all), and the restauranteur asked me about my travels. I told him I was next heading to Pristina, Kosovo. He was sure that I had meant Pristina, Serbia. Foolish me, not realizing he was making a normative claim about how he didn’t recognize the state of Kosovo’s right to exist, insisted that no, I was in fact heading to Pristina, Kosovo.

Extremely rapid and agitated Serbian followed. My limited language ability here can only pick out a few words: “Turks”, “NATO”, “Hitler”, and incongruently… “Mahmoud Ahmadinejad!” The waiter, struggling to keep up in translating, rushes out “everyone picks on the Serbs: the Turks, NATO, Hitler. And your shitty beard makes you look like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad!”

To this, what can be said? I had clearly stumbled into Balkan nationalism and revanchist thought in the most avoidable and careless way possible. All I could do was pay my tab quickly and leave before I somehow made it worse.

It was so bizarre to me. I feel so insulated from history and identity as a white presumably gentile American that I would have to synthetically recreate a white American identity in order to be offended by insults to it. Some white Americans still find a way to be defensive about it, but I digress.

This restauranteur’s experience was so instructive and revealing to me. How deeply wounded and near to the surface was this person’s trauma both personal and epigenetic to be sent into a tirade against this ignorant American.

Of course, he was also seemingly cut off from his own ethical culpability in how the Albanians of Kosovo might also feel similarly to him and about him, and that they might also have a legitimate grievance.

There is something beautiful and tragic about how ensnared he was in the pain of his people and potential inability to recognize the parallel pain of his neighbors. It points to history not as a place to settle scores but a game to leave behind entirely. “An eye for an eye will make the world blind.” The goal is to forgive our historical and recent antagonists, ask for forgiveness from those our group(s) have harmed, and try to find a way to live free and beautiful lives on this planet. This might be the first time my safety and distance and race was disarmed enough to understand how identity works outside of that most peculiar of nationalities: being American.

And it happened in what I hope was a halfway humorous way for you. It was (ideally) profound, but also self-deprecating, as I brought this calamity on myself.

J. Maarten’s Troost’s travels and life in Oceania

J. Maarten Troost’s books about Oceania all attempt and I think succeed at doing something similar. Like any travelogue, they point to difference among peoples, of culture shock, and inconvenience. But also of respect and friendship and the recognition of the universally shared nature of fellow humans. And it mostly involved Maarten screwing something up and getting bitten by centipedes or swimming in raw sewage or something of the like. It’s at Maarten’s expense, and I believe that editorial decision is genuinely wise.

Travel writing is so much more than escapism, or it can be. And while Maarten’s books are genuinely funny, I do think he treats his genre with the respect that it deserves.

To this day, I am still so chuffed Maarten hung out with me on the Reversing Climate Change podcast. This is a personal favorite of mine where we got to discuss his books, how Oceania is/was changing at the time, and what he’s learned by being a fish out of water for so much of his life.

I hope you enjoy listening to this episode, and maybe even picked up a little extra appreciation for a genre that is sometimes not treated as seriously as it deserves to be.

The full transcript is below if you prefer to read rather than listen. But if you scroll to the top of the piece you can listen in several different ways.

Thanks for being here with me!

Sincerely,

Ross

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Full Transcript

Ross Kenyon: Hello. Thanks so much for listening to Reversing Climate Change. This is Ross Kenyon, I’m the host of the show.

You know that old King James line about new wine into old bottles? This is a new intro for an old podcast. I’ve been podcasting for, like, a decade, and there’s a bunch of people who are more recent listeners, and they may have missed some of the earlier gems of the show, which I’m actually going through the catalog right now trying to pull out some of my favorites that I just don’t want to die in obscurity.

Not die in obscurity. Maybe be buried pleasantly for the super fans who wanna go back through the catalog of old shows.

Some of those old shows are good listening, but they’re very much time-stamped. Some of the things that are in there, the way that issues are discussed, they will be part of the oral history of the late teens when carbon removal was gaining its footing. But if you listen to them, you would have old stats and old insights from a world that no longer exists. And while that can be very useful sometimes, to go back through and poke around in and see what you can learn, they’re more of a time capsule than anything.

And in fact, I’m going to do a show about this for a bunch of different reasons. I’ve become somewhat obsessed with it. One of the funny things, and maybe this is being an American, maybe this is being anyone, but I haven’t really thought of myself as being that historically situated at all in my life. Or maybe it’s just youth, I don’t know. But there’s something about those years of your life, maybe it’s your 20s, maybe it’s earlier than that for you.

It’s like when you’re the generation that has the cool slang that everyone else tries to use but fails at. You know? And you can see this too, like some of the shows that I’ve been most influenced by and really love, like I love Six Feet Under. If you’ve never seen Six Feet Under, it’s an amazing show for various reasons. It’s a little bit soapy. It’s a little bit like a soap opera. And parts of it maybe aren’t great, and some parts are campy and maybe a little bit silly, and not all of it aged wonderfully.

But it’s one of those things, it’s like, it’s the perfect Gen X show. So I’m an elder millennial. I’m not Gen X, but you come of age looking up at the Gen Xers who are making the music that you listen to and things like that. And you think about someone like Nate Fisher, you know, Peter Krause in Six Feet Under, and there’s something about that sort of... I link it so strongly to Stephen Malkmus and Pavement and this sort of DIY early indie, slacker, Richard Linklater, lifestyle artist kind of vibe. And I’m sure at the time that Alan Ball was making that show, it felt like that was so true, and it felt like it was pointed at something that was urgent and a way of life that needed to be documented.

And it’s only if you watch this show 20 years after it’s made, you realize how strongly time-capsuled it is. The references in that show are the dinner table debates that would’ve happened during the early Bush years. They’re about why is the US in Iraq if Iraq didn’t attack the US for 9/11? That was, like, not a connection. And what’s actually driving foreign policy, and is it all about energy politics?

This isn’t unique to Six Feet Under, obviously. There are other shows of that same era that I also feel that way about. If you watch Arrested Development now, if you did not come of age during the W. Bush years, if that was not a time period for which you were politically aware in any way, or your brain was not being turned on to politics during that time like it was for me, Arrested Development, so many of those gags will go right over your head.

You won’t understand the various things about Halliburton or the Bush family as a whole. There’s just a lot of jokes that are at the expense of political culture and the W. administration during that time that you’d watch it and be like, “That’s a reference to something, but I have no idea what it’s a reference to.”

It’s bracketed in time. And now if you watch it, it’s almost like studying this show that’s been dunked in amber and sort of like, “Oh, what an interesting artifact from a previous era.” And when you’re living it, it feels much more universal than that. And maybe one just needs to have enough life experience that you don’t think that you’re always going to be at the crest of the wave.

But sometimes the things that you grew up with will fall away and become a thing of the past. That’s a bittersweet way of putting it. It doesn’t have to be. That’s just the way of the world. Things do pass like this. And there are many, many episodes of Reversing Climate Change that you can go back and listen to if you want.

I doubt in all of them I’m especially wise or astute, and I like to think that I’ve gotten better over time, but I’ll probably look back on this period and think, “Wow, I really did not know all of the things that I did not know at that time.”

And again, that might just be part of life. And some of them I’m not going to bring to the forefront. I’m sure they’re still good listening. There’s probably some good points in there.

But there are some that I think do deserve to be brought to the fore, you know, shows that are favorites of mine. Now that I’m doing Substack more, I’m being able to bring out full transcriptions of episodes. I’m able to write about the ones that I like and why I like them, what did I not get into in the podcast itself that deserves some riffing on, and this is a way of doing that now.

And this episode is one of those. I think I’ve only done one of these previously, or at least recently. I did a re-release of the Charles C. Mann episode just because wizards and prophets kept coming up. I’m like, “All right, it’s time to revisit this and let people hear the original episode with the man himself.”

And this is one of these episodes where I’ve been able to get some of my favorite authors on the podcast, and I’ve been able to do it by just being an obsessive fan and being like, “Wait, wait, hear me out. I know you don’t really do climate stuff, but here’s why you should be on the show.” And me doing that shtick has worked a decent number of times because if you’ve engaged with someone’s work seriously, you wanna talk about it.

I think authors wanna hang like that. I think when they go on their press junkets when a book comes out, interviewers just read a little blurb about it and then have them on the show, and the conversations aren’t that deep. But for the artists and the authors that I’ve been able to have on, they’re often people where I know their work super well, and I’ve prepared for this. And people I’ve been really proud to have on.

Like, I’ll probably re-release the episode I did with Karl Marlantes. If you watch the Ken Burns Vietnam War documentary, which you absolutely should, it’s incredible, and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross do the score for it, so it’s extra good. But Karl Marlantes is one of the main people that are interviewed from their time serving with American forces in Vietnam. He’s a novelist. He’s written a bunch of really cool books, none of which are about climate. And again, just able to be like, “Wait, wait, hear me out. You should be on this podcast. Let me tell you why.”

And I was able to do this with today’s guest that I’m re-releasing, J. Maarten Troost. Maarten’s a journalist whose partner at the time got a job with a nonprofit or an NGO in Kiribati, formerly called the Gilbert Islands, in Micronesia, and moves there and writes a book called The Sex Lives of Cannibals. And we talk about the appropriateness or inappropriateness of that title in the episode in the beginning. So hold your horses. We’ll talk about that.

But he’s written several books about his time living in Oceania, which has also become no easier for me to say since I asked him about that as well. I just love his writing. We end up talking about climate change, what he had observed in the region during his time there, what he’s watching out for in the future, and just able to talk about the craft of travel writing and why it’s important and why it’s good and why it’s a beautiful thing, and why it can be so funny and humane.

And one of his last books was about recovery and addiction and what it was like doing travel writing while in recovery. And he’s got a gimlet eye for everything, and he’s got a funny satirical take. And I found it to be such a nice maturation of theme and no less funny or humane as a result. And it’s one of those shows that’s a personal favorite. I’m so happy that I was able to get J. Maarten Troost on Reversing Climate Change.

One of the rules, or at least my rules, of making art is that the only way I can tell if it’s good is if I can get excited about it. There are shows that I’ve made that I don’t have that feeling for, and sometimes people will tell me how much they liked that episode and how good it was, and I’ll be like, “I can’t really tell if it was, but thanks for telling me. I’m glad you liked it.” And this is one of those episodes where I was like, wow, I put together something that no one else would probably make a show like this, and got to hang out with sort of a legendary travel writer and how fun that was.

And not to just pat myself on the back, but some of those shows where you know you maybe did something that wasn’t going to be done. Like, there are some artists and authors, you know, like right after you interview them, you’ll see them go on all the other climate podcasts too, and you’ll be like, “Okay.” Yeah, that’s because it’s not a surprising guest choice. And some of these ones are a little bit more esoteric, a little bit stranger.

But it also takes a little bit of vulnerability to share something like this because it is time capsuled in the same way that I described Six Feet Under and Arrested Development. And even my choices of those shows are so time capsuled, isn’t it? Can’t you just peg me as an elder millennial for even name-checking those?

And going back and listening to stuff that you’ve made, oh man. I think this is five or six years ago. Some parts are probably gonna be cringey, but also some gems are gonna shine through, and I’m happy enough with it. I’m gonna take that risk, I’m gonna bring out an old episode where I might feel a little bit goofy, but I’m really happy that we got to do it.

Thank you for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed this episode that I did with J. Maarten Troost, travel writer of the Pacific, and here it is.

Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon. Today, I have with me J. Maarten Troost, author of The Sex Lives of Cannibals, Getting Stoned with Savages, and Headhunters on My Doorstep, which is part of his South Pacific trilogy, or I guess I should just say Pacific trilogy, and then also Lost on Planet China: One Man’s Attempt to Understand the World’s Most Mystifying Nation. Maarten, thank you for being here.

J. Maarten Troost: Hey, it’s good to be here. Thanks.

Ross Kenyon: Indeed. I’ve read all your books. I think they are very funny and insightful travelogues. I enjoy the genre. I am puzzled by... yeah, I don’t even... This word sticks in my mouth. Maybe you can help me. Oceania?

J. Maarten Troost: Sure. Oceania. You don’t like the word?

Ross Kenyon: For some reason there’s, like, too many vowels in it, or there’s too many syllables for how short it is, and I can never pull it off.

J. Maarten Troost: Oh, for sure. Hard one. It’s not something that comes up in everyday conversation. Most people just use the Pacific or the South Pacific or something like that. But I think Oceania is maybe a better literary word than a conversational word, because it really does describe sort of life in the islands, which feels more like being on a boat than on a continent.

Ross Kenyon: Oh, so that’s a nice little poetic interpretation. I think it’s good. Because I have trouble with it, and it is a little bit puzzling, that’s how I feel about the entire region, because it is just enormous in scope. It’s giant. I’ve long wanted to do shows for Reversing Climate Change about the region, but I haven’t found the right way in yet.

So I was reading your travelogues, and I read Paul Theroux’s The Happy Isles of Oceania and Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia by Christina Thompson, and I’m trying to find the way to be doing shows about this region. I’d like to do a lot more. So you are a very nice intro into this space, and you’ve clearly spent so much time there, but this isn’t like going to Europe. Everyone at this point of my peer group, they’ve gone on trips to Europe. It’s easier and easier to travel, yet this has not happened in the Pacific. This is still a hard place to get to, yet you’ve spent a huge amount of time there. How did that happen? Why were you in the region? And then also, you started in Kiribati, which I doubt many listeners even know where that is.

J. Maarten Troost: No, it is kind of a peculiar story. I think the origination of all this is, like, after college I moved to Prague in what’s now the Czech Republic, and someone made a terrible mistake and hired me as a journalist there for an English language newspaper.

And so I spent these years in Eastern Europe, traveling to the former Soviet Union and Russia. I covered the war in Bosnia. I was down in Croatia during the fighting there. I was there for the dissolution of Czechoslovakia. And all the meantime, I’m living in Prague, the most beautiful city basically in Europe, in my opinion, particularly back then. It was still a raw place to be.

And then I moved back to D.C. and I finished my last year of grad school, started temping. So you can imagine the difference between sort of living with mercenaries in Mostar, Bosnia and getting shelled at, and going to your temp job at the American Overeaters Association or whatever it was that I happened to be assigned to that week, and feeling sort of this dissonance, like I’d become accustomed to this really exciting life in a really formative point for me.

Ross Kenyon: This is like that scene in Hurt Locker when he comes home and he’s in the grocery store. That’s you basically?

J. Maarten Troost: It is basically like that. But I have to say my experiences in Eastern Europe were a lot more fun than whatever was going on in the Hurt Locker. All right? So it was a little different. I don’t mean to make it sound more dark than it was, ‘cause it was just a lot of fun as well, and it was really adventurous. You know, you’re twenty-two, you’re twenty-three, you’re off to these exotic, difficult places that no one wants to go to. Cost of living was nothing back then, so you can actually afford to do it as a recent grad.

So anyway, that was my mindset. And then I came back to D.C., did grad school again, finished that up, found that tedious, didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, was working stupid temp jobs, which as most of us know, at some point in life we typically all go through something like that. It’s boring, it’s saddening, it’s depressing. You’re looking at the next sixty years of your life going, “Really? This is it?”

And then suddenly out of nowhere, my girlfriend, she worked at a non-governmental organization that had offices in the South Pacific, and their person in Kiribati had to leave for personal reasons, let’s just say. And they needed an emergency fill-in, so that’s how we ended up in Kiribati. I’d never heard of it either. It was just sort of like, okay, I can get on the metro at 7:30 every AM and go to my tedious temp job and rearrange the files, or I have this offer here to move to a tiny little island in the South Pacific. So, what are you gonna choose?

Ross Kenyon: Seems pretty easy to me.

J. Maarten Troost: It seemed really easy to me as well, but of course I had absolutely no idea what I was in for. But that’s ultimately how I ended up in Kiribati, and that’s how things started.

Ross Kenyon: The TLDR of what you were in for is the Macarena, essentially, right?

J. Maarten Troost: Exactly, exactly.

Ross Kenyon: Indeed. And I wanted to ask you about this too. So the titles of these books are very provocative, and when I see them they remind me of this sort of 19th century understanding. So this is the age of industrialization, and then you have these reports coming back from sailors who are going to Tahiti where the sexual culture is very free, people are just lounging under coconut palms and eating off the land, and it’s this beautiful sort of prelapsarian society. And they would write these things that sort of... They have that era’s racism, which is this sort of noble savage kind of quality to it. Right. And then it seems like you’re kind of playing with this. I imagine someone listening heard those titles and was like, “Why those titles?”

J. Maarten Troost: Yeah. No, ‘cause I get that. The thing is, when you look at the literature of this region, the South Pacific, almost nothing has been written about it in the post-war years. Really, literally almost nothing if you really go through it. And so once you start digging into it and you start doing sort of the background reading that’s available to you, some of it dates back to sort of Rousseau and the noble savage kind of nonsense.

Then you have sort of your Paul Gauguin-type stuff where he’s looking for paradise, but he’s a complete scum as a human being. And then you’ve got some of the James Cook stuff. James Cook stuff is actually pretty good. That’s not so bad. But a lot of it is sort of this, you’re right, it’s this Victorian mindset of these dominant, more advanced Western cultures coming to explore and understand the savage people that live in faraway places.

And it had my eyes rolling most of the time, and I thought sort of like with these titles, I’d just be making a mockery of that. It was meant completely ironically, just in jest, just in fun. Basically, what it did is like once I came up with the title The Sex Lives of Cannibals, it made me snort with laughter. And I figured if I could make myself laugh, other people would laugh. And I think it becomes very apparent to anybody who’s ever read my books that the only idiot in any of my books is me. So it just comes with that. They’re just silly, fun titles.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. There’s a big incongruity there between the titles and the contents of the books, a lot of which is self-deprecating of you just trying to live your life, and you have these expectations for how things shall go. And as anyone who’s ever traveled outside of your own culture in some significant way, it’s often baffling. Like, one of the cultural norms that happens in Kiribati is, I forgot the name of this, but if someone asks you for something, you just give it to them. You have to.

J. Maarten Troost: Yeah. It’s called the bubuti.

Ross Kenyon: Bubuti.

J. Maarten Troost: Yeah, it’s the way sort of on small, difficult islands things work. I will ask you for your fishing net. You’ll give me your fishing net. That creates a certain obligation. So later on, maybe you need to use my, I don’t know, my canoe or something like that, and so on and so forth.

And it was a way of creating a very egalitarian society. The bubuti, you can’t abuse it because it comes right back at you. But it’s just the way the island culture worked, because to survive on these islands every village needs to work as a team. It doesn’t work otherwise. And so that was just part of the cultural development that occurred. But it’s an interesting thing to observe when you’re an outsider, that’s for sure.

Ross Kenyon: Definitely. And this is just one example of many things where you go in and nothing in your life has quite prepared you for it. So sure, these titles sound idyllic and Edenic, and actually you get there and you’re like, “I would kill for a fan that worked.”

J. Maarten Troost: Oh my God, yes.

Ross Kenyon: And yeah, so I like the incongruity there. Well, this is the Reversing Climate Change podcast, so I have to at least try to find a way to make it fit in, or my colleagues will get mad at me, Maarten. So what exactly was the arc of your experience with climate change and your time in the Pacific? Because I believe in your first book, The Sex Lives of Cannibals, there is a mention of climate change, but it isn’t very prominent. And then by the last book on the region, Headhunters on My Doorstep, I remember there being much more involvement with climate change as a theme. What happened during that time?

J. Maarten Troost: I think it’s partly both my evolution as a writer and also as an observer of what’s actually going on around the world, and willing to be honest about things. Even when I lived in Kiribati the first time, for those first few years, we were all well aware of it. I mean, it was an issue and all that kind of stuff. But I didn’t want to highlight it in the book because at that time, it just seemed in America, and I knew my audience would be mostly Americans, they would just put it through a partisan lens, and I just didn’t wanna go there with people for that particular book.

I do recall living there, even at the time, from time to time the tides would get up really high. I mean, there’s the king tides that come up high. And I remember my second year there, we had tides that would cover parts of the islands. I mean, these islands are only 100, 200, 300 yards wide. There were parts that were inundated from ocean to lagoon, and there was no storm. This was just a perfectly sunny, calm day. The water would be glassy smooth, and it would just come up and up and up, and it would cover the causeways and all that kind of stuff.

Ross Kenyon: Wow.

J. Maarten Troost: And then when I came back some years later for my fourth book, and seeing what had happened, the way all the coconut trees near the shoreline had died. I mean, they were just shells. And these coconut trees were 50, 60 years old, but they’re gone because of the salination, the saltwater coming in. The way people had to change their gardening habits. The only gardens that still worked were the ones that were only in the middle of the island. Anything close to either the lagoon or the ocean, nothing would grow anymore.

And seeing the tides come up. Coral is like limestone. It’s very porous, so you can’t really stop it. Even with a sea wall, you can’t stop the water coming. It comes up through the ground itself. And actually observing that, like a high tide coming in, and the water, it’s not just coming from the waves and the water just rising higher. It’s coming from the ground itself. And just immediately recognizing that as long as this goes on, this is completely unsustainable.

And we’re looking at the death, first of all, of the atoll nations in the South Pacific: Kiribati, Tuvalu, the Marshall Islands, other island groups like the Tuamotus, others. They are going to become uninhabitable, I think, within the next 20, 30 years.

Ross Kenyon: Wow. And for listeners who may not know, they might be imagining Hawaii or the Marquesas. So you have these giant, tall mountains that are verdant and beautiful. But atolls are... I have a hard time even wrapping my head around what exactly they are, but they’re very low-lying.

J. Maarten Troost: Yes. They’re typically not more than two or three feet above sea level. They’re basically the rim of an old undersea volcano. So coral grows on top of that rim of the old volcano, and coral seeks the sunlight, and so that’s what builds the atoll. And so it just reaches to get above the water level, and that’s it.

So there’s no mountains growing here. It’s just like walking around the rim of a gigantic ancient undersea volcano, with lots of channels and all that kind of stuff. Your tides, they run the day. Where you can possibly go on these islands, it’s all dependent on the tides. Yeah, they’re very, very difficult places. I don’t think there’s any place in America that’s comparable. Deeply unique. The environment runs everything. And they are, for sure, going to be unsustainable.

Ross Kenyon: Wow. That’s pretty grim. Well, when you’re spending time in the Pacific, do people... Okay, you’re a writer, so here, I’ll make some literary comparisons to you, or cinema references. Like Rick from Casablanca. So at the last minute he goes from being indifferent and saves the day. Or kind of like a Han Solo moment. Do you think people on the islands are waiting for the Earth to wake up and figure this out, or are they just expecting to have to immigrate or do adaptation or both?

J. Maarten Troost: In my experience, there’s two schools of thought in the Pacific. One of them is... You have to remember, the missionaries had enormous influence in much of the South Pacific.

Ross Kenyon: Oh, yeah, I’ve read both of those too.

J. Maarten Troost: Yeah. Many of the islands are deeply Christian, and they had a very powerful influence on many of the islands. So there is still a segment on many of the islands that really truly believes that God will take care of them, that their people have survived on these islands for hundreds of years, God will look over them, and so on and so forth.

And then there’s another group of people that see what they see and accept what they accept, and are now starting to make plans for what’s next. Like in Kiribati, you’ll notice that they’ve bought land in Vanua Levu, which is the largest island in Fiji. So they bought 20 square kilometers in Vanua Levu in the expectation that that will be their emergency exodus. Vanua Levu is a high island, it’s a mountainous island, it’s a very fertile island, and so they bought land there with the expectation that they’ll migrate to Fiji when sustainable life in Kiribati becomes untenable.

And then you’ve also noticed them changing the way they educate their young. There’s a lot more emphasis on vocational training right now, and that’s to prepare the kids fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years old, so that they can get a job in New Zealand or Australia or something like that, something vocational.

So it’s really those two different schools that are kind of in conflict with each other, and that tends to be the on-the-ground reality for what I’ve seen in much of the Pacific.

Ross Kenyon: Wow. So it doesn’t sound like there’s too much middle ground. It either sounds like it’s faith or it’s exodus. Is there much emphasis on adaptation and making the islands flood-proof, or dealing with the water table with all the salinization that’s happening?

J. Maarten Troost: Well, I think people have sort of accepted reality for what it is. An atoll is a very finite space. You can’t have just, like, a landfill. You know what I mean? A landfill will pollute your groundwater. You can’t do so many different things that we take for granted here living on a continent, because everything affects everything else, and I think people are very mindful of their geography. So we’ll see how it goes. But reality is reality.

Right now, when you look at it, we’ve already raised temperatures almost a degree Celsius since industrial times. By 2100, so 80 years from now, on our current projection, we’re looking at almost a four-degree centigrade increase in temperatures. That’s completely unparalleled. Those islands will be gone. The people will disperse. It is what it is, and not much that can be done about it unless there is some divine power that decides to use his special magical powers to change things. But yeah, no, it’s bleak. It is what it is.

Ross Kenyon: Very bleak. We’re working with Nori. We’re a carbon removal marketplace, and we’re trying to scale up that industry. What we say internally is, “Don’t look down.” The stakes are actually very high if you fail, or if we do fail.

Have you seen much, though, in the way of... I’ve heard this described as climate porn, of people going on cruises to the Arctic or Antarctic, and it’s like, “See it before it’s gone.” Has there been much of that happening in the Pacific yet?

J. Maarten Troost: I don’t know. I haven’t seen that in the Pacific myself, but the islands that I’m most accustomed to are really obscure islands that people just wouldn’t go to anyway. The only people I run into are missionaries. So I don’t see that there, but I have to plead guilty to some of that myself. I was in Africa last year, and one of the reasons I wanted to do it was because I wanted to see rhinos in the wild, and so that’s one of the reasons I went to Africa. I’m doing something like what you’re talking about. I want to see some of these things before they disappear.

I do think that’s something that’s going to happen in the foreseeable future. Not in the foreseeable year. You know, coronavirus is going to decimate the cruise ship industry, that’s for sure. But yeah, no, I think for real, it’s going to be people going off to see a glacier while they still can, people going off to see an atoll while they still can, people going off to see a certain animal because they still can, because they’re so pessimistic now that they realize that in 10, 20, 30 years you won’t be able to see these places like they were. The world is changing incredibly rapidly right now, as you know, I’m sure.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I don’t think... Obviously calling it climate porn is pejoratively framed and is kind of an insult or a criticism of the behavior. I guess I’d have to read more. I don’t know if it’s bad in and of itself to wanna do this, especially if you’re pessimistic. Alternatively, you could go and be inspired to work extra hard to avoid these consequences that will make this type of tourism irrelevant, impossible, et cetera. So I don’t know if there’s the self-crit that is too necessary.

J. Maarten Troost: No, but it is one of those things, like, everything that we do by ourselves, we travel in a certain way, we have an electric car, we don’t use any plastic, and so on and so forth. All that we do as individuals doesn’t match up to what is happening at a systemic level. You know what I mean? We drastically need to drop carbon emissions, and for the past two, three years, our carbon emissions have been going up again.

And it’s a hard battle to fight, and particularly when there are so many nations around the world who are electing absolute morons to be their leaders. We have that here in the US, we see it in Australia, we see it in Brazil, we see it in so many different other countries, that we are not creating... Like, all this is going to have to happen politically, and we’re not creating a political infrastructure where we can really create those systemic changes that will help mitigate the worst of climate change.

And as you know, a lot of things are already baked into the system. I mean, we can stop everything right now, but things are gonna continue for years to come. It’s hard not to be pessimistic, to be perfectly honest. I hope that doesn’t ruin the vibe of your show.

Ross Kenyon: You’ve totally ruined it. No, we try to be optimistic. We work in the field. We want to have a very large impact in addressing this. The emissions you’re talking about that are locked in right now for temperature change, we would like to begin drawing that out and making the financial infrastructure to fund that sort of thing happen as quickly as possible.

The stakes are very high though, and we see that. And there are definitely times when I will read something that will really bother me. I don’t have a lot of climate anxiety. I try to be productive and focus on what I’m actually doing to address it. But there are definitely times where it gets to me. It sounds like you get got to more often than I, perhaps.

J. Maarten Troost: Well, it’s ‘cause I had to do some research into all of this, and it’s like, let’s look at human... All right, let’s go big. Let’s go real big right now. Let’s look at human civilization. All right? So we’ve been around in our current evolutionary form for roughly 300,000 years. 300,000 years ago, people were just as smart as we are. Same physically, et cetera, et cetera.

But let’s be completely honest here. We didn’t do squat until 10,000 years ago, right? I mean, no great civilization, no great agriculture, no great cities, no space shuttle, no supercomputers, no anything for 290,000 years. So what changed 10,000 years ago? And that was the end of the last real ice age, and our temperature stabilized. And in these 10,000 years, our temperature has never deviated more than one degree Celsius, even during the little ice age. I’m talking global mean temperatures.

The entirety of human civilization, from the first farms and the first villages to quantum computing and everything we’re doing now, has occurred in a very, very tight climate zone bandwidth. And now we are talking about changing that bandwidth by three degrees, four degrees centigrade. It changes everything. It changes everything from agriculture, it changes everything from fisheries, it changes everything from what’s habitable and what’s not. These are, I believe, profound challenges to civilization, and it’s going to go on for decades.

And there’s no quick and easy solution to any of this. And then you have to take into account, of course, the modern realities of politics and blah, blah, blah, and economics and jobs and infrastructure and all that kind of stuff. It’s a hard road to get out of this hole.

Ross Kenyon: God, Maarten, you really killed the vibe in here.

J. Maarten Troost: I know.

Ross Kenyon: You’re supposed to be the happy-go-lucky... Yeah, I called you a cartoon character of Jimmy Buffett. Like, come on, man. Be the island guy, the beachcomber I want you to be.

J. Maarten Troost: It’s why I’ve been taking time out, dude. It’s like... But when you really start looking at it, I mean, we all live our own lives and all that kind of stuff, and everyone’s capable of having a happy life. But when you’re looking at things at the macro level and looking at where we’re at now, our response is completely inadequate. Completely inadequate. And there’s so much that we can do, as you know probably more than I, but we’re not getting there. We’re not electing the people that will bring us to these places. We are not creating the economic incentives, in law, that will help renewables and help with climate mitigation and all that kind of stuff.

It’s a hard one, and we’re going downhill right now. So I hope that changes. I hope that changes very rapidly. I mean, I’ve got kids, you know? I don’t want them to deal with this. So we’re already seeing it, every season, wherever it is you live. You’re in California. You’ve got your fires. I’m currently in Washington, DC. I don’t think we’ve had a snowflake yet this year.

Ross Kenyon: We’re actually... We’re in Seattle. We’re in the coronavirus land right now. We’re feeling it.

Well, I’m glad you said all that, Maarten, because now I’m about to nail you. It’s gonna be ugly.

J. Maarten Troost: Go ahead. I’m up for it.

Ross Kenyon: Assuming that you like this term, and maybe you don’t, but you’re a travel writer. Travelers, man, aren’t they the worst? They’re sort of buying stuff. They’re flying all over the world. Their emissions are gigantic. What’s the role of the travel writer in the age of climate change? How is this supposed to work now?

J. Maarten Troost: Yeah, that’s a good one, and that’s not something that I’ve ever had a real deep think about. I’ve never thought of my role in writing my books in any kind of moral light. It was sort of, I come across some interesting material and have interesting experiences that I think I can create something that will be enjoyable or informative for other people to read, and I didn’t really think much of it beyond that. I don’t put myself on some kind of totem pole to be representative of what one should follow. I’m curious about the rest of the world, so I spent many years seeing it.

I don’t know what the role of a travel writer today is, to be honest. I think the era has just changed for that genre. Like just hopping on a plane and going someplace new and writing about whatever you encounter, I don’t know if there’s a huge market for that right now. I think everyone is looking for travel as a source of personal meaning. And I don’t think that ever really goes away, you know? And it won’t, because you were a traveler. We’ve all gone somewhere to experience something novel that changes us and hopefully enlightens us and improves us. And that’s hard to negate. We’re always going to want to go someplace else to experience something new.

But yeah, no, I have no idea what the role of the travel writer is right now. I mean, all I know is that I don’t wanna be one of those stupid travel writers always writing about sunsets or whatever. You either get some red meat or you don’t. So we’ll see. I don’t know if I’m gonna go back to that genre, to be honest, so we’ll see.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. I’m curious to know what you’ll end up doing next. I think the genre probably has taken a hit because when I... So I spent most of my 20s traveling. People who’ve listened to the show all the way through, they probably heard me talk about this some. And sometimes people would build me up too much. They’d be really impressed that I’ve been able to do this, and I was really like, “All you have to do is buy a plane ticket and not have a job.” It’s not that impressive. It’s not like I’ve done Kon-Tiki or something. I just flew somewhere.

And then, yeah, there is something about finding yourself. So before Nori, and before I got into the tech world at all, the last thing I was doing is I was working with a manager in LA on a sitcom pilot, and it was a satire of travel and travelers, because I would go places and be often miserable. I would find the company to be very much in that, like, fulfilling, faux yogi bullshit and, like, super, super spiritual.

J. Maarten Troost: Oh, so the indie act is... Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ve done that.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. And I’m just dirty and miserable, and oftentimes kind of ill or not exercising nearly enough. I’d spent, like, a decade doing that, and I wanted to just nail the entire genre of it, and I ended up getting sucked into this thing anyways, what I’m doing now. But there’s something about that whole milieu that I find really obnoxious. And so how do you travel write when basically anyone with even a small amount of disposable income can experience the same thing? Within, like, 12 hours you can get anywhere on planet Earth.

J. Maarten Troost: Yeah, but that’s different. And so, like, when you’re going out as a travel writer, like I remember being in China and having some really sort of awful experiences. I remember being encountered by this sort of gang in Hangzhou, and they were, like, slapping me on the back of the head, and of course they were speaking Chinese. That was terrifying. I didn’t know what’s going on. I don’t know if I’m about to be knifed.

And there’s a thousand people on the street, and no one’s helping with anything. They’re just stopping with their dead-eyed faces staring at me. Everyone’s removed, no one’s engaged. This really sucks. It’s a little terrifying, but all I know is that I get five pages right here. I’ve got five pages of going through this. All right? So that’s the thing, sort of like when as a travel writer, even when you’re experiencing the suck, you know you get some material.

You know, a book just full of la-di-da experiences, I mean, I would not find readable. So I’m aware of the reality of all that. And again, it’s interesting. It’s different. It’s not Seattle, it’s not DC, you’re experiencing something novel, which is for me something I greatly enjoy.

Ross Kenyon: Well, it’s getting easier to travel, but that’s not to say that it is... Like, there’s a Larry David deep in my heart that just—

J. Maarten Troost: Lives in all of our hearts. Deep down in our dark space.

Ross Kenyon: Oh, he’s there. Yeah. And any of the big travel writers, like Bill Bryson, has made an entire career out of just, like, niggling over the smallest little social interactions, just complaining. Or Paul Theroux can be a cantankerous kind of guy, and I love that. But I also compare that to something like Instagram, and that medium just rewards this sort of false idea of what travel is. I don’t know what it is about images versus words there, but—

J. Maarten Troost: The big difference though is, people like Paul Theroux, people like Bill Bryson, they have a voice. You know what I mean? They have cultivated, they have worked very, very hard at their craft, and they’ve developed a voice that resonates with a lot of people, and that’s not anything you’ll ever find on Instagram. It’s a totally different medium. What those writers are doing is they’re connecting with something deep inside the reader’s brain or heart or soul.

You don’t even have to go far away. Like, I always think one of the best travel articles I’ve ever read was David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. He goes on a little seven-day cruise through the Caribbean, right? So from a travel writing genre, that’s a big fat nothing. You know what I mean?

Ross Kenyon: Yes, not impressive.

J. Maarten Troost: Yeah. It’s sort of like, I got nothing there. It’s a freaking cruise. Hundreds of thousands of people do it every single year. It’s going to be awful. Not my thing, whatever. He writes such a great thing about it.

And then I think about John Jeremiah Sullivan. He’s a writer, sometimes writes for The New York Times Magazine. He wrote an article about going to Disneyland, and he’s a pothead, so he’s always trying to look for places to smoke in Disneyland. I can’t believe The New York Times published this, but they did. And it’s really good travel writing.

So you don’t have to go far. You don’t have to do anything exotic. What people connect with is a writer’s voice, and that’s so different than the pathetic Instagram stuff, which I don’t even follow and don’t do anything with.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. That’s the thing that’s terrible about going to Pisa and seeing thousands of people all holding it up at the same time.

J. Maarten Troost: Oh. And but you know what? The thing is, with a good writer, you can make that good material that you can all connect with. But the Instagram stuff isn’t trying to do that. The Instagram stuff is more about, “Look at me. I’m bragging. This is where I’m at.” It’s tedious. It’s tiresome to see. It’s not interesting. Whereas a good writer will bring out the human in almost any setting. That’s what I’ve always been kind of attracted to with the writing.

Ross Kenyon: That’s a great point. I have often said that I like meeting people who are passionate about anything. Like I love it if I’m at a party and I’ll find someone, like pick a boring hobby that you would never wanna do, and if that person is really into it, I’ll be like, “Okay, I can kinda see why you would like that. Yeah, I get in that head space.”

So I think if you can do that with any location, yeah, you don’t have to go somewhere exotic. Like a lot of the travel books I’ll see, I saw one recently about someone biking the Silk Road. I was like, “Wow, that’s amazing.” Or a lot of them are endurance-based or weirder places that are off the beaten track to do. But also I could probably just, if I was a good enough writer, write a great book about cruising around Seattle and the Pacific Northwest, that would be good, right?

J. Maarten Troost: You absolutely could. You absolutely could. It’s all about cultivating the voice. It has nothing to do with the location. It’s all about the voice and whether or not people click with it. And there are some people who are very, very, very good at it, and I will read just about anything from them.

But I do see that for a while in the travel genre it was like whoever could do the most extreme thing. That doesn’t appeal to me. It’s all about... I can tell within 10 pages whether or not I’m gonna like something, no matter where they are.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think that’s a good point. Well, what can you say about what you might be doing? You’ve alluded to the fact that it may not be more books. I know you’re writing articles now. What are you looking forward to doing?

J. Maarten Troost: So I divide my time right now, you know, kids going to college and all that kind of stuff. So I do some consulting for some of the big multilaterals here, and I’m hoping to get a TV show launched. I have a writing partner for that, and we’re starting to go through the process for that, kind of have the story figured out. That’s what I would really like to do for the short term.

Ross Kenyon: A narrative show, not a documentary?

J. Maarten Troost: No, no, no. It’d be a fictional thing. Totally fictional. Something completely new. It’d be a lot of fun, I think. It’d be collaborative, which is very appealing for me. It’d be topical, it’d be funny, it’d be dark. I mean, it’d be perfect. So I’m hoping to see if I can get that worked out. That’s where I’m at right now. I just decided to take a time out from writing books for a little while, so maybe in the future.

Ross Kenyon: Cool. Yeah, that’s good to know. I would love to watch anything you made for television. I wish you lots of success with that.

J. Maarten Troost: Yeah, thanks. I hope this one works ‘cause it’d be so much fun to work on. I believe we’ve got something solid with this one, but we’ll see how it goes. New York publishing and Hollywood are two entirely different beasts, and I’m familiar with one, and I find the other difficult to read. So we’ll see how it goes.

Ross Kenyon: Well, Maarten, maybe you could help me plan out some future shows for this. You don’t have to name drop if you don’t want to, but who should I be talking about? I’d love to talk to people who are actually from the various islands in the Pacific. What type of work on climate change in the region is good that you know about? And I’ll of course do research on my own and keep programming here, but where should I be looking?

J. Maarten Troost: For me, my contacts are more with... I know somebody that works on coral reefs in Fiji. He’s been doing it since I lived in Fiji, so for a long time. He’d be good to talk to. He’s a lunatic, but he’d be good to talk to. There’s another guy who used to be an ambassador to the United Nations and the US from Solomon Islands, who is very much on top of things as well. So those would be good people to talk to. That’s what I can think of off the top of my head.

But yeah, the South Pacific is gonna go through some difficult times, unfortunately. And the unfortunate thing about it too is that Pacific Islanders, for the most part, are the most chill people ever. You know what I mean? And so it just saddens me so much that they’ve got so much catastrophe coming in their future, ‘cause for the most part they’re good people who have it figured out about what’s important in life.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, and they’re also the least responsible, or among the least responsible, for climate change.

J. Maarten Troost: Oh, absolute least responsible. Completely. They have nothing to do with it at all, and the fact that they’re going to be the first to really suffer from it is most unfortunate. And then the other thing is, each of these nations, really not even nations, each of these islands has such unique cultures, and to see that disappear in a fairly rapid span of time I think is tragic.

So we’ll see how it goes. But who knows? I mean, you know more than I do. Maybe we’ve got some carbon-sucking machine that’s right around the corner that’ll fix everything. I know people are working on all sorts of solutions, so we’ll see.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. We’ll keep plugging on that, and we’ll see. And if you’re listening out there and you know of good stories that are happening in regions that we haven’t yet covered in nearly enough detail, please let me know. You can reach out at podcast@nori.com, podcast singular.

Yeah, I guess, Maarten, is there anywhere that you want to steer people to? You want them to buy your books, or is there someplace online where they can follow you?

J. Maarten Troost: I’m just skulking from the online world. It’s one of the big things that’s changed in the publishing industry. When I first started, you could quietly write your book, get your material, then publication day comes, and you do like a month of publicity. You get to travel and talk to people and all that’s very nice, and do some radio or TV and blah, blah, blah, and you feel really special for a few weeks, and then you’re left alone, and you can go back to just doing your damn thing.

You know what I mean? That’s kind of how I started, and then over the years things changed, and now it seems to me like writing books has become more an extension of developing a brand for yourself. It’s like I see so many of my writer friends that have to spend so much time cultivating their Instagram and Twitter feeds, and they have to deal with the garbage that is Facebook. And I just took a... Like I said, I’ve taken a long time out from all of that.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I had to track you down.

J. Maarten Troost: What’s that?

Ross Kenyon: I had to track you down. I was like, “Okay, who’s Maarten’s agent at least? I will get to him.”

J. Maarten Troost: Yeah. No, you found my agent, so that can be done. But I’m inactive on Facebook, but I will from time to time check whatever messages appear on there. So I guess that’s the easiest way, but I’m not active on it. Yeah, I know. I’m being a total recluse these days. But that’s all right.

Ross Kenyon: Well, that’s fine. Yeah.

J. Maarten Troost: And when it’s time to go back into the sun, I’ll go back into the sun. But that’s all right. I don’t mind being in the shade for the time being.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. There’s links in the show notes if you’re listening and you’d like to follow up with Maarten’s work. I feel very similarly, too. We just launched a Patreon for the podcast and I’m not, like, on Twitter. I’m not really that accessible. You could email me if you really wanted to, but you have to put in a little bit of effort to track down where that email is.

I don’t like what social media has done to humanity in lots of ways. Like, I don’t wanna be that accessible. I’m happy to talk to people who wanna make the effort, but I don’t wanna just be like someone can tweet at me and oh my God, now I have to respond or something. I don’t know. I feel like a recluse.

J. Maarten Troost: Well, it’s a complete rabbit hole, and I think that’s been... Let’s continue with our negativity. I think the internet, think of what we were thinking about the internet 10, 15 years ago, how promising it was. Like, we’d have these phones that would have all the knowledge of the world available to us. We could be connected to everybody. I mean, right now there’s more than 5 billion people that have smartphones. The Androids that most people use are very affordable, so everyone’s connected or whatever, and look at this garbage environment we’ve created.

You know what I mean? We all have to sort of navigate our own space and all that kind of stuff, but when you think about the misinformation and the way the algorithms kind of accelerate antagonism and conflicts and all that, it’s disappointing. And I choose not to play right now. So maybe one day.

Ross Kenyon: When I was in LA, one of the things I would hear in meetings too was people wanna know how many followers you have, and I’m like, “Can I just be a screenwriter?” I also have to have a personal brand and have insightful stuff to say every day?

J. Maarten Troost: Yeah, you do. I know. I’ve dealt with that myself. And yeah, you do. It’s unfortunate, but it is what it is.

Ross Kenyon: There’s people out there who, I don’t know, like for instance, David Sedaris is amazingly generous with his time when he’s on tour. He will, like, hang out after every reading until, I think, every fan who wants to say hi has said hi.

J. Maarten Troost: Yeah. He’s great. I’ve seen him myself. He’s a really good dude.

Ross Kenyon: But does he do that online? I think he just does that in person and then, like, online—

J. Maarten Troost: Well, I’ve seen him in person. I went to one of his readings. And he will stay and he’ll meet with everyone. And the other thing that I like about him is ‘cause he has such a big platform, he will always mention writers or works that he’s come across that he wants to promote and all that. He’s an incredibly generous man. No, I think David Sedaris is a great guy.

Ross Kenyon: But I also... I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anyone share anything out from it. Like, is he active on Twitter at all? Or is he just, like, the analog version of what everyone’s expected to be online now.

J. Maarten Troost: Yeah, I think he was maybe of the last generation who could get away with this, where he could just write his books, I guess he publishes every two or three years, something like that. He’s on tour a lot, I know that. He spends a lot of time on tour, and he just does it that way. But like I said, I’m not a big social media guy, so I don’t know what he does online.

Ross Kenyon: I just looked. I don’t even think he has one. So my instinct was correct. But yeah, I think maybe it is that. That’s the last generation. Like, I’ve been thinking about writing a book, or doing more creative endeavors as Nori grows and we focus on creative media more and more, and I’m like, “Ah, but then I have to do all this other stuff.” I don’t know. It trips me up more than the actual writing of a book, and I know how hard it is to write something that is long and arduous itself.

J. Maarten Troost: Yeah, the big difference is, when I’m working on a book and I’m writing something and, you know, is this the right thing? Is this the right direction that I wanna go? Is this the right thing to say, or is this too much? Is this just too much? You know what I mean? Is this going to be a trifle offensive to people? I will have lots of time to go back and reconsider, and figure things out, and make whatever it is that I’m trying to do the best possible.

Twitter, for me, is a dangerous beast because I am impulsive. I have my thoughts. I can tweet them out. I can destroy my life in seconds. And we all know how many people that’s happened to, you know? We all have our idiot friends. Or we’ve seen it happen, where somebody tweets something out and poof, they get fired or their career is over, and all that kind of stuff. That would totally be me. Absolutely.

Ross Kenyon: You’d be in, like, have you read Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed?

J. Maarten Troost: I’m familiar with it. I have a friend of mine who reviewed that book, and who’s talked to me about it. You know, we’re human beings. We all have stupid thoughts, and the fact that we have a little thing in our pocket now where we can share our stupid thoughts is an incredibly dangerous thing for some of us, including me. Yeah, it’s not a good medium for me. Not for now in any event.

Ross Kenyon: Okay. Well, in the show notes we’ll put up the places where you can buy your books and, I don’t know, I guess we’ll just have a lacuna there instead of something that’s more ready.

J. Maarten Troost: Yeah, sorry. I apologize. I know. I’m a publicist’s nightmare right now. I’m just doing things a little differently right now.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that’s good. I feel you on this one. I think we are kindred. Maarten, thanks for being on the show. I think this is a good place to call it.

J. Maarten Troost: Great. It was my pleasure. Thanks for the chat. I really enjoyed it.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. It was a lot of fun. And if you like the show, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, tell your friends. I hope you don’t mind that this was a little bit of an elliptical episode. I mean, there’s some solid climate change moments in there, but I like that we were able to talk about creative stuff. And thank you so much for listening.

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I recorded it with J. Maarten Troost in April 2020 and published it as S2E9, "Travel writing a disappearing Oceania". It remains a personal favorite of mine.

Maarten wrote four travel memoirs: The Sex Lives of Cannibals (2004), about the two years he spent in Kiribati after his partner got a job at an NGO who operated there; Getting Stoned with Savages (2006), about their move to Fiji and Vanuatu; Lost on Planet China (2008) where Maarten ends up wandering around quite a bit of China; and Headhunters on My Doorstep (2013), a Treasure Island retracing written in recovery.

We talk about his time in a huge place that very few have visited to the depths he has, and how the world was changing (or maybe beginning to change) since his time in the region.

Travel writing when it's good, acknowledges both difference and universality. It helps us understand Other, and mocks the way that we are in taking our Otherness for granted. Maarten does a wonderful job at both.

And he hates the f*@!ing Macarena.

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J. Maarten Troost at Penguin Random House

J. Maarten Troost at BJ Robbins Literary Agency

The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific (2004)

Getting Stoned with Savages: A Trip Through the Islands of Fiji and Vanuatu (2006)

Lost on Planet China: One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation (2008)

Headhunters on My Doorstep: A True Treasure Island Ghost Story (2013)

What became of the Kiribati land purchase in Vanua Levu

Kiribati's Office of Te Beretitenti on the Fiji land purchase

Paul Theroux, The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific (1992)

Christina Thompson, Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia (Harper, 2019)

David Foster Wallace, "Shipping Out," Harper's, January 1996, later collected as "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again"

John Jeremiah Sullivan, "You Blow My Mind. Hey, Mickey!", The New York Times Magazine, 2011

Jon Ronson, So You've Been Publicly Shamed (Picador, 2015)

407: Charles C. Mann on the wizards & prophets of climate change, the first rerelease

326: Confronting our shadow: Jung, the Vietnam War & climate change, w/ Karl Marlantes, the other author episode Maarten's intro name-checks

Climate Workers Anonymous

This is episode 411 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. You can listen to the full conversation between Poppy and I (Ross Kenyon, the host) on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or pretty much wherever you enjoy your podcasts. You can also listen to the full audio or watch the full video right below this paragraph.

Sending your aggressive rebuttals to Poppy…

Toward the end of this episode, Poppy Russell said she hoped people wouldn’t come at her once it aired. I assured her they would. This was her first podcast ever, and it really is hard to say anything of interest to which no one would object.

In fact, one of the short films I made so long ago it feels like a different life entirely (it was), was about a local guy running for public office in Arizona who thinks that we’d all get along a lot better if we stopped talking about religion and politics. His platform is full of the neighborly banalities that make the world go round, like the incredibly regional Arizona gag of, “well, at least it’s a dry heat.” pause for all Arizonans to nod and politely smile

But Poppy has takes, and having a take means some amount of judgment. Some amount of judgment means some are judged wanting.

Being bearish on some things is part of the gig

Let’s consider what she actually said:

• She’s skeptical of ocean CDR due to the concentration of CO2 in seawater. The mass concentration is far lower than in air, so you have to move enormous quantities of water to capture anything. Her back-of-envelope number is that if you partnered with every piece of water-moving infrastructure that already exists, you’d get seven to ten million tonnes of removal potential.

• She’s bearish on policy in the near term, because the EU’s 250 million tonne allocation for removals in its emissions trading scheme over the next decade sits on top of a price gap between removals and the carbon price, and the ETS spent recent weeks adjusting to slow the pace of its own decarbonization targets—a “smart political move,” she said, which I take to be the diplomatic rendering of a less diplomatic thought. None of this is mean.

All in-bounds. All debatable. All things which people do debate the bounds on quite frequently!

Taxonomies serve the taxonomist

If you truly can’t get enough of the following question, you’ll want to read this piece…

Poppy’s job at Counteract, a venture fund specializing in carbon removal, is to look at more companies than nearly anyone else gets to see and then sort them into groups. The sorting is where the trouble starts.

Companies open the report, find themselves boxed with four others they consider nothing like themselves, and write in. Her defense is disarmingly modest: “it’s just a way that we’re grouping companies for the sake of it, that’s helpful for us.” Which is the honest answer. A taxonomy is worth the most to whoever built it, and she built this one to make investment decisions with. From inside a company, the differences between you and your box-mates are your entire reason to exist, so of course the box looks deranged. From her chair, you have to group or you can’t think at all. On the show I resorted to Life of Brian’s legendary, “You’re all individuals.” “Yes, we’re all individuals,” in unison—which is roughly what a portfolio category sounds like from the inside.

I wrote a whole piece a couple of months ago about how the taxonomy of this field refuses to hold still, so I won’t relitigate it here (and it is linked to above), except to say that Poppy is the person that problem happens to professionally.

When you start writing that rebuttal email

One thing I’ve learned from working with so many companies in this space is that if someone does miscategorize your company, it may be that the story you’re telling is not working. The nuance you hoped would read does not. And what I often find is that if the story is confusing, the fundamental business strategy often is as well.

This is information you need though. It’s honest feedback, and that can be a true gift. And if being misunderstood feels bad, being understood sometimes feels worse.

There’s an old adage I brought up on the show: the fastest way to get good information is to say something wrong on the internet. Poppy has run the experiment, though she insists the wrongness was unintentional. A couple of years ago Counteract published its skepticism about enhanced rock weathering unit costs, and the analysis was simple in the way good analysis often is. You move a tonne of rock, you can only sell credits against a fraction of it, you realize that fraction slowly, and in the meantime you’re paying to source the material, move it, spread it, measure it, and service the capital you raised to do all of that. Companies wrote back to tell her where she’d gone wrong and what they were building to solve the crunch points she’d named.

A year and a half later, Counteract invested in a company that had reached the same conclusions independently, saw the research, and figured here at last was a fund that would understand the pitch. Even if it didn't lead to this entrepreneur solving the problems Poppy laid out, she definitely put a candle in the window hoping someone would show up with it figured out in the future.

Investing in toxicity

There are some places I’m tracking, and of course Poppy is too. As everyone knows, venture money is going right now to electrification services and data centers, chasing energy demand. What Poppy is watching is toxicity. We put an enormous volume of toxic chemicals into our food and water systems, and the research tying specific chemicals to cancer and to hormonal and fertility problems keeps growing. Her angle is that many of the chemicals that are bad for humans are also bad for the climate, but the value proposition sits on the human health side—pesticides, agricultural inputs, microplastics, compounds that resist breaking down—with climate riding along as the secondary benefit. She was clear this isn’t hard climate tech, isn’t carbon removal at all, and that the open question, as ever, is who pays, and can we ever overcome the discount rate of such long-term problems?

I like the thesis for a bunch of reasons, partly because Deep Science Ventures is pointed the same direction, and partly because toxicity might be the rare concern that crosses political lines. The second Trump administration’s marriage of convenience with RFK Jr. never looked durable to me—I don’t suspect Trump enjoys much in the way of organ meats. And after the glyphosate case played out, RFK clearly lost the intra-administration battle over what to do about toxicity. But parents of every political stripe want less toxic environments for their kids, and we all know by now how much behavioral and social damage turned out to have lead underneath it. Get upstream of a poison and you solve problems that would otherwise take decades to surface. If there are climate benefits in the bargain, that’s just upside.

Where Poppy is bullish

Her bullish case is industrial integration, and her favorite example right now is Vateris. Their feedstock is gypsum, a nuisance waste with genuinely painful disposal costs. They carbonate it with point-source CO2 into a material cement companies can blend into concrete, improving its strength and durability, and they also produce a potassium sulfate fertilizer, which turns out to be where the core revenue lives. Set that beside portfolio-mates CREW Carbon, which sells wastewater treatment plants a more efficient way to run, and CarbonRun, which doses acidified rivers with limestone and gets restored salmon habitat out of the bargain.

She did hand me the best one-sentence compression of this field I’ve heard in a while: “Climate change is an acidity problem, and carbon removal is finding loads of sources of alkalinity to counteract that acidity.” I’d been toying on recent episodes with sorting companies into The Alkalinity Gang^TM and everyone else—because what else is there at the end of the day except taxonomy?

The plan for when we don’t know what to do

Which returns us to the flinch. Poppy noted that pre-seed carbon removal deal flow has dropped off significantly, and that most of the pre-seed founders still working on removal have stopped calling it carbon removal. I suggested somebody in this industry is running the Shaun of the Dead plan—go to the Winchester, have a pint, wait for this whole thing to blow over—and asked whether it’s funnier if that’s the founders or the investors. She allowed it’s probably the investors. Then, quickly: not that that’s what Counteract is doing.

Whenever I say bearish things on this show, that’s when the complaints arrive. What use is pessimism? My honest answer stands: me saying a thing has no bearing on whether it’s so. But the aversion isn’t stupid, either. This is a small industry running on fragile capital through a hostile political moment, and every public doubt may be a quotable line for someone who’d prefer the whole enterprise dead (which doesn’t mean we don’t say it…) See below for proof:

Climate Workers Anonymous

PostSecret for climate. Anonymous stories from the climate industry trenches.

By Ross Kenyon

I understand wanting to keep the doubts in the group chat. I just don’t know how a field that only permits good news is supposed to learn anything or do work that has a halfway decent shot at feeling joyful.

Poppy’s version of hope, if that’s the word, is that pragmatism about policy pushes effort toward business models that don’t depend on future carbon prices, and that’s the durable stuff anyway. Whether that counts as optimism I honestly can’t tell.

She survived. She said so twice. Godspeed to you and your inbox, Poppy!

Links to several of Poppy’s research pieces are below this paragraph, and the full corrected transcript follows below.

• ⁠Between a Rock and a Hard Cost: The Economics of Enhanced Weathering

• Not All Carbon Removal Projects Are Created Equal

• ⁠Industry has a central role in CDR’s next growth phase

• ⁠Locating the sweet spot for biochar carbon removal

• ⁠Treading Carefully in the Waters of Ocean-based CDR

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Full Transcript

Ross Kenyon: Hello, welcome to Reversing Climate Change. This is Ross Kenyon, the host of the show. I work in climate tech and carbon dioxide removal.

While I have you here, could you please open up your podcast app right now and give this show a great rating and review in Spotify or Apple Podcasts? A lot is taking place on Substack.

The other podcast I’m working on, Climate Workers Anonymous, has a publication that’s very active over there right now, and the podcast itself is being published through there. So you should follow Climate Workers Anonymous in whichever podcast app you use, or on Substack. There’s a lot of extra content on Substack if you like Reversing Climate Change.

The full transcript of episodes is being published on Substack, as well as extra commentary from me that didn’t fit into the show. I’m just trying to use that platform a lot more. Of course, a lot takes place on LinkedIn as well, because this is a, quote-unquote, professional carbon removal podcast.

But a lot’s happening on Substack as well.

Now to get down to it, today’s guest is Poppy Russell. If you work in carbon dioxide removal, you have probably seen Poppy’s research. She is the research manager at Counteract.

Counteract is a venture capital investor in carbon removal. If you haven’t pitched to them previously, you certainly have worked with or spoken with companies that have, or are part of their portfolio. Poppy puts out great research. I think her analysis often points to trends that other people will soon be talking about, but haven’t realized just yet.

I respect Poppy’s takes. They’re often ahead of the curve and interesting. They’re data-driven, and they’re often done with a very nice visual style that makes it easy to absorb the synthesis of quite a lot of information. I’ll put links to several of her articles in the show notes. You should go and check out her work, as well as Counteract generally.

And I’ll just get right to the show with Poppy. Thanks for listening. Here it is.

Episode

Ross Kenyon: Poppy, this is your first podcast ever.

Poppy Russell: It is. What an honor. Yeah.

Ross Kenyon: No honor. Right to the top. You just cut the entire line. Thanks for being here. I’ve enjoyed your research and chatting with you for a long time now, and we had to do it.

Poppy Russell: Yeah, we did. We did. It’s cool to be on it, because I think when I started, or before I started working in the space, I did listen to some of the Reversing Climate Change podcasts. So yeah, it’s fun to actually be talking on one.

I think it was Jennifer Wilcox’s episode, which was probably a long time ago now, but it was a really—

Ross Kenyon: It was a very long time ago. I think it was when the CDR Primer came out. When even was that? I don’t know. In the long, long ago.

Poppy, when your writing comes out, I always make sure to read it, because it’s often pretty. I like that there’s graphs involved, it’s visual. There’s also a lot of very serious analysis and data crunching that’s happening in there. And I often find that you covered maybe trends that are not super visible to others. It’s hard for you to acknowledge this without it seeming like you’re patting yourself on the back, but this is an accurate summation of how you do your work, no?

Poppy Russell: Yeah, I guess we have just an interesting lens on the carbon removal landscape based on the number of companies that we speak to. So we’ve got a bit of a privilege in the type of access we have to different data, different models, different ideas. And so part of our job is obviously filtering through a lot of that data and trying to understand trends that exist there within pathways, but also across the carbon removal landscape as well.

So definitely part of what we do at Counteract is trying to put back into the ecosystem and explain some of those trends that we see. And it’s always nice to know that people are actually reading it. And often people come back to me and tell me why the analysis is wrong or what I’ve missed, which is also equally useful.

So it’s definitely a unique sort of lens that we have on the market, and it’s a fun lens as well.

Ross Kenyon: Do you ever get to say something very British like, “It disappoints me to contradict you in this way, but I’m afraid it is you who are wrong”? Something very dour like that? Do you ever get to say that, or do you just go, “Hmm, interesting”?

Poppy Russell: Hmm, interesting. Or, I understand your point of view. Yeah, I mean, it’s always difficult when you put out content with names attached to it, with company names, because everyone who’s within a company has their very specific positioning. And so when they see themselves grouped with some other companies which they might themselves feel that they’re very different to, you can get some pushback.

And I always like receiving that pushback, but at the end of the day, it’s a category. And I’m not making this huge judgment that one category’s bad and one category’s good. It’s just a way that we’re grouping companies for the sake of it, that’s helpful for us.

So I find that can be a bit of a tension when you’re naming, and so you have to be a bit careful about it as well. And I’m sure I’ve made mistakes, as always.

Ross Kenyon: “You’re all individuals.” “Yes, we’re all individuals”—in unison. Yeah, but obviously categories compress information in order to note commonalities and divergences that are useful for some purpose, usually useful to the person who created the taxonomy. That’s probably the person to whom it’s most valuable.

But I think if you’re zoomed in enough to be one of those companies, maybe those distances start looking wider and wider to you, because you’re only in that one quadrant rather than you evaluating, judging everyone. What is worthy of investment from your distant ivory tower, Poppy? Hmm.

Poppy Russell: Yeah, but if you can explain why you’re better than all of the other companies in that category, then that’s a good thing, right?

Ross Kenyon: That is a good thing. Yeah, I think if you’re able to do that. I imagine it feels bad if you can’t.

Poppy Russell: Yeah.

Ross Kenyon: I mean, that’s information too though, right? Like, you should know that. If you aren’t that different from your rivals, then it’s not insulting to know that. If someone points it out and it’s true, it’s your job, I think, to find a way to hear that productively.

Poppy Russell: Sure, sure, sure. And if it’s my understanding that’s wrong of you, then it’s also a positioning thing—maybe a way that you’re positioning yourself is not cutting through in the right way.

Ross Kenyon: I work so much on strategic communications issues and positioning and branding, and how do you tell a story that shows asymmetry in a positive way that makes you stand out in a way that might look good for your company? I think I’ve just had hard lessons learned of some of the really fine-tooth ways of communicating.

As a company, often people just do not internalize those differences. There’s just so many companies to keep track of that they’re only gonna remember a couple details about you unless they diligenced you for some reason, or they got really interested in what you’re doing specifically. Most of the time it’d be like, “Oh, but you do soil carbon.”

And then you have to be like, “Well, we do this, but we also pair it with this and it works like this.” And they’re like, “Yeah, so it’s just like soil carbon, right?” I’m like, “Okay, fine. Sure, if that’s the way that you need to understand it.” I think people do get a little frustrated if you don’t use their particular verbiage sometimes, or maybe they think that they’re communicating successfully but the listener is not wanting that much information and so they aren’t hearing it.

Being misunderstood is not a good feeling.

Poppy Russell: No, it’s not. And I can resonate with it, in that I will often, if I put out something to get attention on LinkedIn, if it’s a nice picture that grabs someone’s attention, but actually it’s pointing to an article where all of that nuance is unpacked within it, then a lot of the time it’s…

And people are time constrained. They haven’t read the detail within the accompanying analysis. So yeah, I resonate with that feeling as well.

Ross Kenyon: Do you know the old adage that the fastest way to get good information is to intentionally say something wrong on the internet?

Poppy Russell: Ooh. Yeah, yeah, probably, as people will come back at you telling you why you’re wrong straight away. Is that what you do? Is that your special approach?

Ross Kenyon: Oh, I’m wrong all the time, but it’s always unintentional, I think. No, I think that that’s actually resultant. So maybe, given that your job is researching and this research is meant to filter into diligence work and creating a useful map of the ecosystem and where the world’s going, you might be getting better information just by occasionally having a provocative taxonomy that pisses someone off.

Maybe it’ll work somehow. It is attention too.

Poppy Russell: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. We had done some research on the enhanced rock weathering space a couple of years ago. And the analysis is quite simple, in the scheme of things, for an approach which is really complicated. But it was just sort of demonstrating to people where we saw some of the challenges in the enhanced rock weathering space, which mainly was tied to: it’s really difficult to get unit costs down, because you have a ton of material of which a fraction of that you can charge carbon credits for.

And you realize that portion over quite a long space of time. And you have all of these costs associated with actually being able to get money for that removal, whether it’s getting the material, whether it’s moving it to the area of land, whether it’s measuring all of this, and whether it’s also paying back your interest against the amount of capital that you’ve taken out for that project as well.

So we’d put out this analysis just to show, these are some of the things that we’re concerned about in this space. And a whole series of companies come back to me and explain, one, areas in which I’ve been wrong in the analysis, but two, all of these different innovations that are actually happening to solve some of the key crunch points that we had identified.

And so you’re always slightly ignorant to the whole sphere of things that are going on. And getting the pushback from some of the stuff that you’re putting out is always beneficial to understanding the space better. So I don’t think we were intentionally being wrong, but I think we were being a bit provocative with saying that we think that the unit costs of enhanced rock weathering are really difficult to get right.

And now, a year and a half later, we’ve actually invested in a company in the space, someone who’d come and had answered what we thought some of the key problems were in this really clever way. So that was a really cool example of how putting out some research from our understanding has led to a company that’s satisfying some of this stuff coming towards us and saying, “Hey, I think I’ve got a solution that you might be interested in.”

Ross Kenyon: I love when entrepreneurs do things like that, assuming that they read this research and they did something that they wouldn’t have otherwise have done, unless they were just doing it in isolation and then realized, “Oh, Counteract is looking for this, and I saw this.” Oh, go ahead. Yeah.

Poppy Russell: I think it was literally that they had come to the same conclusions, and so they saw what we’d put out. I don’t think we made them do anything that they weren’t doing before. But I think they saw us and were like, “Okay, at least they understand why our solution is interesting.”

Ross Kenyon: What’s it like having your research not be additional?

Poppy Russell: Hey.

Ross Kenyon: That’s mean. No, I’m just kidding. It’s nice to have that. I feel like independent confirmation of ideas like that is trustworthy. When I see people come to similar conclusions like that from different ways of getting there, I think that’s really useful. I also love when entrepreneurs do engineer based upon criteria like that.

I think one of the mistakes a lot of entrepreneurs make is that they want to be first at something. You know, as the old Navy line goes, “Get there first with the most.” And I think once companies make bets and they’ve already decided on what the future’s gonna look like, and if they have to go first, they are deployed, and they’ve made staffing decisions, and told their board what they’re going to do with their money and stuff like that, it becomes pretty hard to change.

And then the companies that just wait and watch for a while, and they see, oh, there’s an RFP that we can just engineer something specifically for, or these companies are all stuck into the wrong type of measurement and they’ve invested all this money in this—what if we did something else? I like it when companies are able to do that kind of go-to-market, or just build a company around a demonstrated “these are the criteria.”

I like that.

Poppy Russell: Yeah, and I think we’ve definitely seen that trend over time in the carbon removal space, right, over the last few years, where there was initially so much white space and new carbon removal pathways and new technologies that weren’t really being commercialized.

And then we saw lots of companies arise filling a lot of those, and then the next stage of companies have been like, “Okay, how are we gonna create a compelling business case where removals are a part of that?”

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think whatever the next thing is that I found or co-found, if I do that again, I think I’m gonna be looking for opportunities to be part of that second wave who watches where all the first wave companies got stuck, and you’re like, “Okay, we’re gonna do something that builds on that, but goes in a different direction.”

‘Cause I watched those companies with a little bit of envy from Nori, where I’m like, “If only we still had that kind of optionality to redo everything in this kind of way.”

Poppy Russell: Yeah. What do you think the next space will be?

Ross Kenyon: I don’t know. I really don’t. I don’t know. That’s your job. Aren’t you supposed to—you’re the pattern matcher. You’re supposed to be telling me what the thing is to invest in with my career, with my time, with your money. What is gon—

Poppy Russell: With my money.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, with—

Poppy Russell: My money.

Ross Kenyon: —with the money that you’re closer to than I am. You’re supposed to be making decisions, kind of.

I don’t know. What do you think is going to be the next thing, either in climate or carbon removal or things adjacent to it? What are you watching closely?

Poppy Russell: Mm-hmm. This isn’t the best time to ask me this question, but—

Ross Kenyon: Why? Is there ever a good time to ask this question? It’s hard anytime you ask, I think.

Poppy Russell: It’s hard any time I ask, but yeah, I’m not doing so well at this question right now. This is a side take to the podcast.

Ross Kenyon: This is why you asked me about it. You had to buy yourself time so you could think while I was rambling. Great.

Poppy Russell: Yeah. Okay.

Ross Kenyon: It seems like it’s gonna be juicy, Poppy.

Poppy Russell: It’s not—no, it’s not gonna be juicy.

Ross Kenyon: Sounds sad. Okay.

Poppy Russell: Well, yeah. I’m really rambling here, so feel free to chop a bunch of this out. But I think—so in the venture capital space, obviously it’s quite clear where the trends of investment are going right now, which is electrification services, data centers for the growing energy demand, ‘cause there is a serious growing market there right now.

Whether that’s a purely pre-seed space—obviously it’s not a purely pre-seed space at the moment. But there’s probably scope for a fair amount of innovation there. Then I think one of the new trends that we’re seeing is on this conversation of toxicity, and detoxification.

So this might be kind of interesting to you from your Nori background, which is, we have a huge amount of toxic chemicals that we release into our food and water systems, and there’s growing understanding of how those chemicals are impacting our human health.

And you’re seeing these links between cancer and toxic chemicals, as well as hormonal regulation, fertility issues. And there’s growing research there which is tying particular chemicals to these serious human health problems. I’m kind of interested in it for the reason that a lot of these chemicals that are harmful for humans are also harmful for climate.

But the value proposition is more on the human health side, and then the climate side would be a secondary benefit. And so we’re seeing innovations there on pesticides and some of those agricultural inputs, but also you’re seeing stuff in the plastics, like the microplastics space as well.

And being able to break them down or eliminate some of the chemicals that are difficult to break down there. So that’s kind of an emerging space that I’m curious about, but it’s not a hard climate tech space. It’s just something where you’ll see significant benefits to climate and ecosystem. But the driving force behind it is the public health conversation.

Ross Kenyon: I like that angle for various reasons, and I’ve also seen others working in climate focus that direction too. I saw that Deep Science Ventures is focused on toxicity, and I’m not surprised that they are. It’s a cool angle for them to pursue. I also like that maybe it crosses political boundaries more, in the same way this comes up on the show, like one in three episodes at this point.

But one of the big marriages of convenience, seemingly, from the second Trump administration was RFK Jr. and Trump, and seeing how the glyphosate lawsuit and Supreme Court case played out. So RFK clearly lost the battle of what to do with toxicity. And it never seemed like the guy who prides himself on eating McDonald’s all the time was going to be aligned with the guy who has much stranger health proclivities, one might say.

But it was seeming like maybe one of those things that parents especially, of all political stripes, care about—making sure that their kids have less toxic environments. We all know at this point how bad things like lead have been for seemingly all behavioral criminality issues, sociological issues. So much of it is toxicity related.

And if you’re able to get upstream of that and eliminate some of these things, you might be solving problems that may take decades to truly show up. But of course, we’re also living with—I mean, I’ve known so many people who have had fertility issues at this point. Maybe it’s just people are talking about it more.

Maybe I’m just in that age demographic where people do talk about it more, where when you’re in your 20s, you don’t really hear about it at all, or you just don’t know. But I feel like at this stage a lot of people are much more open and culturally it’s maybe more—so there’s like some confounding variables that are happening in there, but toxicity is very much on the menu across the board.

And I don’t think it depends a ton on politics. And if there’s climate benefits, I hadn’t even thought about that, but just gravy.

Poppy Russell: Yeah. The climate benefits would be secondary. Obviously, who’s gonna pay, that would be the question to answer. But that’s not a carbon removal related space, but it’s something that’s interesting. On the carbon removal side, we have seen a significant drop-off in the pre-seed CDR companies.

So I think we’re maybe in a phase at the moment where, just as you said, you’ve got people who are maybe stopping and waiting to see how the next year or so is gonna play out, and where there are new opportunities. And most of the pre-seed companies that we see that are looking at carbon removal will not be saying that they are looking at carbon removal. So that’s definitely a positioning thing at the moment.

Ross Kenyon: Ugh. I’m only laughing because, one, ADHD brain active, and then two, knowing that you’re British, I was just thinking of—is it funnier if it’s carbon removal project and tech developers, or funnier if it’s investors? Go to the Winchester, have a pint, wait for this whole thing to blow over. Do Shaun of the Dead.

Poppy Russell: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s a fair point.

Ross Kenyon: So if you were talking while I was thinking about that, it’s just a point I’m gonna have to relearn when I listen back to this show.

Poppy Russell: Yeah. I mean, it’s probably the latter, right?

Ross Kenyon: Oh, of investors just waiting? Is that what you’re saying?

Poppy Russell: Yeah. Not that that’s what we’re doing.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. How does that work with investors where you have duty of care requirements legally, of making sure companies—especially if you’re on the board of and have liability—of making sure that you’re stewarding them in a way that is appropriate? But also there’s a lot of companies within similar categories of carbon removal that I imagine you’d like to invest in, and maybe sometimes their interests overlap in ways that might be conflicting. How do you think about that? Is it good to invest in 10 different biochar companies or something like that, or do you just get one bite at the apple and then have to move on?

Poppy Russell: Maybe it’s more helpful to just discuss our broader approach when we’re looking at companies, and what our investment mandates are. But we look for—as a very, very focused fund, which is specializing in carbon removal, we try and introduce as much diversity as possible in the types of companies that we’re supporting.

So yes, that of course means the carbon removal mechanism, but it also means the geographies, it also means business models as well. And it might be where they’re an input provider or whether they’re a market enabler. We try and cover as much diversity as we can.

And then we also look for companies that we’d call catalytic, and for us that means either some foundational IP that’s really moving the needle on some specific problem in a technology space. So in direct air capture, that might be on the energetic side, significantly lowering the energy costs.

And then we also look at new pathway enablers, so something that we think is new in the space and might unlock a whole different mechanism for carbon removal. So companies in our portfolio like CREW Carbon or CarbonRun—CarbonRun are looking at dosing rivers with limestone and doing this river restoration that also removes carbon at the same time.

And CREW Carbon are doing a similar thing in wastewater treatment. Actually, CREW Carbon and CarbonRun, their fundamental mechanism is quite similar. They’re ultimately introducing limestone into an acidic water source and removing CO2 in that way. And from an MRV and a data perspective and an efficiency perspective, they will have some similar findings from the technology space.

But how they’re going to go to market and the way they’re gonna position themselves is completely different. CREW Carbon are looking at the wastewater industry and they’re looking at how can they improve the efficiency that wastewater treatment plants run at, and where can we reduce costs to wastewater treatment plants. CarbonRun are looking at—it’s actually a bit more of a nature-based solution in its philosophy. It’s like, how can we restore acidic rivers that will boost salmon populations, provide a nicer space to live? And they’ve actually got a lot more of a lean in from a resilience and ecosystem protection perspective.

So they’re two companies where the fundamentals of what they’re doing are very similar, but the way that they scale will be completely different. And they’re both in our portfolio, and we’ll make sure that we market everyone to other investors and to the broader carbon removal ecosystem in the way that it most makes sense for them.

So the type of investor who might be interested in CREW Carbon will probably not be interested in someone like CarbonRun, because one’s very industrial and one’s more on the nature restoration side. Did that answer the question? I think it did.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think so. That’s one way to split it, but one thing that’s come up on this show recently has been, I’ve been thinking about how you could categorize companies as being in the alkalinity gang or not. And maybe we don’t ever talk about, well, we do alkalinity-based carbon removal, because then people would be like, “Well, so does almost everyone?”

Or like half of everyone—if you take biochar out, it’s mostly alkalinity based.

Poppy Russell: Yeah. Climate change is an acidity problem, and carbon removal is finding loads of sources of alkalinity to counteract that acidity. And everyone is leveraging alkalinity in one way or another in the space. So it’s probably not the easiest separation there.

Anyone could argue they’re an alkalinity company. Yeah. Source massive sources of alkalinity—that’s also been a space that we’ve been interested in investing in. So we have a couple of companies in our portfolio that are really not carbon removal companies, but they generate alkaline byproducts that could be really useful for CDR.

So there’s a company called Magrathea, and they’re producing magnesium from brines. They have a magnesium hydroxide byproduct that could be a feedstock to be leveraged in the CDR space. But their business model’s around making metal, or extracting metal.

Ross Kenyon: I think this ties in really nicely with your work on industrial tie-in. That’s something that I think you’re fairly bullish on, yeah?

Poppy Russell: Yeah. Yeah, I think it’s been an interesting conversation over the last couple of years on how carbon removal is going to be scaled in industry, and where is there strategic value to be had by industries within the carbon removal landscape. So industrial integration kind of means quite a lot of things. I think there’s lots of ways to do it. And some of the neatest companies that we see are the ones that are able to explain their value to an industrial, or provide real value to an industrial company.

And we see it in a few different ways. So you have companies that are leveraging and valorizing true waste, materials that are costly to dispose of, and tapping into those. Then you have companies that are providing useful products to industry that have material value, but also might have carbon sequestered in them.

And then you also have companies that might improve some process efficiency in one way or another. I mentioned CREW Carbon earlier, but they’re an example of that, where they’re doing carbon removal, but the buy-in from industry is because they’re improving the wastewater treatment process.

But companies who can integrate and explain their value to industry really well, we’re seeing have some quite interesting progress. And happy to go into more detail there. I think my favorite example at the moment is a company called Vateris. Their main product is a carbonated cement alternative. And the process is they take CO2 from point source, so it might be from a bio-CCS, but it also could be from a cement flue stream.

And they create this carbonated material that a cement company can displace some of their cement with, integrate it, and that material releases CO2 slowly over time, and it improves the strength and durability of the concrete. That’s the angle of why they’re providing an interesting product. But they also have some other neat things in their business model, where the feedstock that they’re using is gypsum.

So gypsum’s this really annoying nuisance waste material, which has got very high disposal costs associated with it. And they’re taking that, valorizing it. And then they also produce a potassium sulfate fertilizer. And so actually their core revenues are driven from the fertilizer sale, but they’ve got this really valuable material that’s interesting to cement companies.

And I think that that’s a really nice example of a company that’s fitting into industry and also able to use another revenue stream to reduce their costs on the carbon side. The cement company can decide how they use that embedded carbon, whether they use it for their compliance reasons, or else just claim it’s a carbon benefit.

Ross Kenyon: They seem like they have probably better than average odds of survival. That’s pretty neat.

Poppy Russell: So I think the industrial integration side is gonna be helpful for companies in the near term, if they can show that value.

Ross Kenyon: What’s an example of something that you’re feeling bearish on right now?

Poppy Russell: Um.

Ross Kenyon: You can be as mean as you want.

Poppy Russell: I don’t like to be mean.

Ross Kenyon: You don’t disappoint anyone.

Poppy Russell: Um—

Ross Kenyon: Well, people are just gonna infer from what you just said that if they don’t have an industrial integration possible to them, that you’re being mean to them. So there’s really no way out of this.

Poppy Russell: It’s definitely easier, if you’re going down the venture capital route of raising money, it’s easier to have that industrial partner. It’s definitely not the only way that you can survive. Biochar companies, for instance, you have other financing routes available to you.

If you have your project and can get your offtake agreements and you sell your biochar, you can start to finance your projects in other ways. So it’s definitely not the only way to survive. But if you’re trying to raise it on the venture side, you definitely want to show that industrial buy-in.

I guess I’m bearish on some of the ocean CDR stuff. I know it’s early days of that.

Ross Kenyon: You’re in trouble. Early days? Yeah. Sorry, continue. Yeah.

Poppy Russell: Too early, so it’s a bit of a cop-out anyway to say that. But I’ve always been quite skeptical of the ocean CDR stuff.

Ross Kenyon: Hmm. All of it? Or just alkalinity focus, dosing approaches, something else?

Poppy Russell: Yeah, I think also I’ve been skeptical on the direct ocean capture side as well. You often hear this phrase around the concentration of CO2 in water, that it’s so much higher than in air. But it’s also like your mass concentration of CO2 in water is significantly lower than it is in air.

So you have to move a lot more mass to capture the same amount of CO2. So that I’ve always found an interesting challenge. And you can find ways around it, like you can partner with companies that are already moving and pumping water, infrastructure that’s already there.

But the scale of that, in the scheme of things when we’re talking about the amount that we want carbon removal to scale to, is quite small. I think I did some maths a while ago that it was like seven to 10 million tons total potential if you partner with all of the existing water moving infrastructure.

Ross Kenyon: Okay. What’s another thing that you’re bullish about, Poppy? I’m like unpacking all of your research in rapid fire way now.

Poppy Russell: I think one of my sarcastic answers for what my favorite carbon removal approach is, is planting trees. But I have been quite interested in some of the synergies that these large nature-based project developers might have with more novel carbon removal approaches.

And one of the dynamics that we think about when we’re looking at carbon removal projects is what we call the carbon curve. So the sequestration profile of which a project removes carbon over its lifetime. So you have a project which is maybe a forestry project where you have this slow buildup of carbon over time.

And that’s quite difficult to finance, because you have this period at the start where you don’t have anything to buy or sell. And I think that these large project developers have quite an interesting opportunity for integrating some different carbon removal pathways that might also need land that have a different carbon sequestration curve.

That means that some of these project developers will be able to tap into revenues sooner than their initial project expected. So that’s something that I’ve been mulling over recently. And I think that there’s an opportunity in some of the mineralization approaches here, particularly in enhanced rock weathering, where you have your front-loaded carbon removal sequestration profile—most of your removal happens in the first couple of years.

So that could be an interesting opportunity for integration there.

Ross Kenyon: Enhanced weathering would have to issue some credits in order to see that happen. But—

Poppy Russell: Yeah. I mean, there’s a suite of other challenges in the enhanced rock weathering space, but I think that that’s an opportunity. And I think particularly enhanced rock weathering companies that are leveraging approaches that mean the minerals are reactive and actually weather very quickly and have a higher signal, they might have an opportunity there.

Ross Kenyon: I do like seeing more project developers focus on having multiple different pathways to carbon removal, or just other types of environmental attribute crediting available to them.

Varaha has been really interesting to me. It’s cool seeing Residual do stuff like this. It’s also cool if you can see the same or nearby project sites sort of cycling into each other to level out the revenue curve that they have accessible to them. I think companies that have not yet figured out that issuance speed is very, very important, for a myriad reasons—

Poppy Russell: Of course. Yeah, there’s stuff that we don’t really know yet. And for example, I’ve just said quite a diplomatic answer about the enhanced rock weathering space, which I have traditionally been really bearish on. But we’ve just invested in a company that I think’s quite cool.

Ross Kenyon: You could say you’re bearish on policy. You kind of started off with that a little bit too. You’re like, a decade away might as well be on the moon, basically.

Poppy Russell: Oh, it’s just such—it’s also not diplomatic right now. I don’t know why I’m trying to be diplomatic. But—

Ross Kenyon: I say deflating things about policy on a regular basis on here. I’m like the voice of, I don’t know if the political trends are gonna be that good. I don’t know, you’re in the UK. I’m sure you’re watching Reform and being like, “Hmm.” Like UK ETS stuff. What’s gonna—is Farage gonna touch this thing?

I don’t—

Poppy Russell: Yeah. Okay, okay. Okay, I am slightly bearish on policy at the moment. And I think we’ve been interested in the evolving compliance case for removals and how and when that’s gonna come in. And we’ve had some really exciting news in Europe around the integration of removals into the EU emissions trading scheme, where they’ve allocated this 250 million tons of removals in the next decade. But I think there is a huge caveat in that announcement, which is just around the price gap between removals and the carbon price. And I think where we sit, it’s really, really difficult to project the future of the ETS carbon price right now, because there is so much political uncertainty around it.

And we’ve seen the ETS also make some adjustments in the last couple of weeks that are delaying the speed at which they’re targeting decarbonization. And that’s obviously a smart political move. But it does mean that the future of that carbon price is really uncertain.

So whereas they’re showing that there’s going to be this use case for removals in the compliance carbon market in the future, in the near term I’m a bit bearish on the degree to which that actually supports removals. So there we go.

That’s another thing I’m a bit bearish on.

Ross Kenyon: Whenever I’ve said bearish things about carbon removal, I think those are the times when people complain to me the most. I’ve heard, “Why are you—what use does it serve to be pessimistic in this way?” Or, “Why do you…” Don’t you need to know if that’s a possibility or a reality?

And I don’t want it to be that way, but me saying something doesn’t impact whether or not it’s real.

Poppy Russell: Well, you need to be pragmatic as well. And I think being pragmatic around that side of things will mean that some of this stuff on the business model innovation that we spoke about already, there’ll be more of a push for that side of innovation.

And that’s the stuff that’s gonna be really scalable and sustainable, because it’s not going to be reliant on some of these future prices, and that will just be a nice additional option to tap into.

Ross Kenyon: I see where your head’s at. The investment thesis according to Poppy Russell is very obvious to me. Thanks for being here, Poppy. Was it an okay first podcast experience for you? You survived.

Poppy Russell: I survived. I survived. I hope that people don’t come at me after this.

Ross Kenyon: They’re gonna come at you, I’m sure.

Poppy Russell: Yeah, I don’t like answering the bullish and bearish questions, particularly on a carbon removal podcast that’s been around for all of this time and has all of this carbon removal following. So…

Ross Kenyon: You could have just said you’re bearish on Reversing Climate Change, and then I would’ve been like—and the stop button is here. Okay.

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"Toxicity: The Invisible Tsunami" by Deep Science Ventures

• "Between a Rock and a Hard Cost: The Economics of Enhanced Weathering"
  

• 
  "Not All Carbon Removal Projects Are Created Equal"
  

• 
  "Industry has a central role in CDR's next growth phase"
  

• 
  "Locating the sweet spot for biochar carbon removal"
  

• 
  "Treading Carefully in the Waters of Ocean-based CDR"

This post is about episode #410 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. You can listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you get your podcasts, or right below this very paragraph.

What is remove?

If you’re in CDR, you probably know about remove. They’re a European nonprofit who has trained hundreds of carbon removal entrepreneurs in how to stand their company up. They run accelerator programs across many world regions, and this fall are launching their Latin American program in which I am so proud to coach.

I started working remove after I had been volunteer mentoring in accelerator programs for awhile and had discovered how much I loved the work. I get to collaborate with CDR teams all around the world and help them learn more and go faster. It’s a real treat.

If you are a Latin American carbon remover or know someone who is (or who may soon like to be), be sure to send them the link to apply for remove’s LatAM program.

Full Transcript

Ross Kenyon: Hey, thank you for listening to Reversing Climate Change. This is the host, Ross Kenyon, and I am proud to call today’s guests my colleagues. I’ll explain a little bit more about who they are and how we came to work together.

Before I do, two quick little notes. Do know that there’s a second podcast going on. It’s a collective art project called Climate Workers Anonymous, where if you have feelings, experiences, or analysis that you have generated through your work in climate, you can send in an anonymous recollection that I will read on your behalf. We’re like six episodes deep right now, something like that. It’s been really great to see people share things that have clearly bothered them for so long in private. I’ve really enjoyed being able to facilitate that through this sort of PostSecret for climate collective art project, if you will.

Secondly, I’ve been writing a lot on Substack. The podcast itself has a Substack. You can go to rosskenyon.com, which is the same as the Substack. Climate Workers Anonymous is hosted through Substack, so it has a lot of benefits there as well. I’m just trying to use it a lot more. So if you like Substack, come find me: Ross Kenyon, Reversing Climate Change, Climate Workers Anonymous, and also I’ve been trying to get Carbon Removal Memes to pick up over there as well.

Today’s show is with two of my colleagues from remove. If you work in carbon dioxide removal, you almost certainly know remove. They are a nonprofit in Europe that runs accelerator programs for carbon dioxide removal. They tend to focus on different geographies, their programs are geographically split, and they just announced a new Latin American program with support from Milkywire, who also supports so many early stage CDR startups. Really hoping to see more companies come out of Latin America, and how we can give them the greatest chance possible for success.

Hans Westerhof, and I’m taking a risk here, I think you say your last name properly with a V sound, is the co-founder and managing director at remove. Marian Krüger, you have the same title as Hans. How fun, I didn’t realize it was literally the same.

I’ve really enjoyed working with Marian and Hans and the rest of the remove team. They’ve been wonderful the entire way through. I got into coaching because after my previous company Nori closed, I just kind of started volunteering, working in accelerator programs, working with startup founders, trying to figure out what was next for me, and I found out that I really loved the work. I got good enough reviews that I just kind of kept going, felt like I was adding value at a time when I didn’t really know which way was up career-wise, and that has just turned into more and more opportunity. And so I am a startup coach in remove’s programming, and I love it. I get to work with a bunch of different teams that pass through their programs. They teach me a ton. I get to point out all of the big holes that I fell into and how I learned to stop falling into them nearly so often.

If you apply to this program, there is a chance that we will be working together, which could be a very fun experience. If you are a Latin American company, or know someone who is interested in carbon dioxide removal in Latin America, you should apply, or encourage this person to apply. Help make this an amazing cohort of dedicated Latin American co-founders in carbon dioxide removal. We need everyone that we can get using their brainpower to help make this whole thing work.

If you are a buyer or an investor that’s interested in working with Latin American companies doing CDR, feel free to get in touch with me or with Hans and Marian. They will be very happy to figure out if and how there’s a possibility to collaborate here. Thanks so much for your time. Here is the show.

Ross Kenyon: Hans and Marian, thank you so much for being on the show. How have we not done this before, by the way? I guess, Marian, you’ve been on. Hans, this is...

Hans Westerhof: It’s my first time, Ross. Thanks for having me.

Ross Kenyon: It was only a matter of time. We’ve been working together in remove’s programming now for a while, and there’s exciting news coming out of remove that I’m excited to see. You’re expanding. Congratulations. The only organization in carbon removal that’s expanding right now.

Hans Westerhof: We don’t wanna be the only one, but yes, we are expanding.

Ross Kenyon: I know, I’m so sorry. But I don’t know, you’re going to Latin America. Some of the biggest, most successful companies in carbon removal hail from Latin America, and remove now has a footprint there. What’s happening in Latin America?

Marian Krüger: Absolutely. Yeah. For folks who might not know what remove is, we’re a nonprofit that works with carbon removal startups, have been doing so since 2021, and our origin is in Europe, right? We started out working with European founders, and then started expanding to the Global South because, for many reasons that we might wanna get into today, there is plenty of opportunity to deploy carbon removal, certain pathways more than others, but to realize really the megatons and gigatons we need.

At the same time, from a climate equity perspective, it would also be the right thing to make sure that we make carbon removal a just and equitable industry. So we’ve been doing this in India and in Africa as well. It’s been more than 200 startups, and we’ve had the pleasure of working with you as part of those programs as well, supporting those startup founders.

And it was only a matter of time. If you look at where the potential for carbon removal lies, and if you look around the globe and also at CDR.fyi, you quickly stumble upon the Latin American continent, in all its diversity, but one thing is clear: the potential of carbon removal is just tremendous and immense, while the ecosystem itself is in its infancy.

You have players such as Exomad Green. Talking about organizations in carbon removal that are expanding, here’s one, expanding their production lines. But apart from that, it is quite disparate and really in its infancy, and that typically is where we feel comfortable getting in and helping to build the ecosystem, and helping to make sure that the entrepreneurs who are already daring to build carbon removal companies, which in itself, as you well know, is difficult, and doing that in an ecosystem that is immature is even harder.

So that’s where we luckily got Milkywire on board to fund our first cohort there, which we will launch very, very soon, or actually, as when this podcast launches, we will have launched it. Expecting a lot of interesting applications, and then we will start working with the founders on the ground starting in fall of this year.

Ross Kenyon: Anything to add, Hans? Or do you feel like Marian covered it pretty well?

Hans Westerhof: Of course, he covers it really well, right? So yeah, I think for us the premise that we see is that there is a tremendous potential in the Global South, and as Marian said, ecosystems are in infancy, and that we can help by building a bridge between the more well-developed ecosystem in the Global North, if you will, by providing access and relationships to teams that operate in the Global South.

In some countries, there’s just a few teams working on carbon removal, right? So as an entrepreneur, you’re pretty lonely there. There’s not many peers around, and we provide a community and a bridge towards the global CDR entrepreneurial community.

Ross Kenyon: Talking about an ecosystem for carbon dioxide removal developers, or maybe just carbon dioxide removal in general, what specifically do you mean? How much of it is this peer-based community? How much of it is something else? It’s one of those terms that... well, there’s an LBJ line. It’s like, “It’s like grandmother’s nightshirt. It covers everything.” You know? Like, what is not ecosystem, ultimately? Can it not be everything?

Hans Westerhof: I would say that...

Ross Kenyon: I’m not sure if I’m gonna keep that, by the way. That might be too ridiculous. He was a very colorful president, I will say that. I’m sorry, I love that line. Please say whatever thing you were going to say now.

Hans Westerhof: Yeah, keep the line in. The ecosystem is not only peer-based, although that is part of the proposition of our program, bringing entrepreneurs together, but connecting them to registries, protocols, to portfolio builders, to buyers. As we know, CDR is a niche market. There is still only a few players. If you look at it as a global industry, there’s still a limited number of players out there.

There might be a few thousand people, maybe 10,000 people working in CDR. There’s less than 1,000 teams working on CDR, entrepreneurship teams. They all need access to registries, to protocols. They need to develop the right procedures. They need access to buyers. And broadly also, we need a supporting CDR policy ecosystem, which some organizations are really focused on, and others, politicians with a broader mandate, need to incorporate in their mandates.

So doing some evangelizing there is again part of supporting the CDR ecosystem. So maybe, you know, it’s pretty broad in that sense, but I think if you look at it globally, it’s still a limited number of people that are engaged.

Ross Kenyon: I like to say that I’m involved in ecosystem building, but I think for someone who’s especially perceptive, they might just read that as unemployed, because it’s like, “Well, does someone pay you, or are you just helping a really big group of people in a one-off capacity, or what exactly is this?”

I feel like I’m contributing to the ecosystem somehow, but it is one of those things that’s not the same as having cash on the barrelhead, money changing hands kinds of deals. But it’s one of those things where I can kind of feel the connections coming together. Do you have that sometimes, where you know that you made the right intros, you made these things come together that wouldn’t otherwise do it? And is that part of ecosystem building, or am I imagining that for my own ego?

Marian Krüger: No, I do think so. Although, I think maybe to ease your concerns about how that might be perceived, the effects of ecosystem building are not always linear and not always clearly connected to the activities. Or you might only be able to connect the dots afterwards, right? So I think you are active in a variety of things where, in essence, you’re trying to see what sticks.

You look at the ecosystem, you look at the players that are in a system, and you try to see gaps and try to fill them, and not all of the gaps actually need filling, or not all of the gaps immediately lead to an outcome. But unfortunately you don’t always know from the get-go. I’ll give you an example where it’s quite evident for us what ecosystem building means.

Hans already mentioned that for us, a main thesis of going to the Global South is connecting the developers there with the Global North, because that is where the buyers are. Unfortunately, we don’t see a lot of buyers in the Global South, and I don’t see that changing relatively soon. That is where the capital is, and that is also where the supporting, enabling ecosystems such as the registries are, right?

But I think the Global North ecosystem often falls prey to the availability heuristic, right? For those of us who’ve read Daniel Kahneman, the rational homo economicus is not a thing. We’re all terribly biased and actually terribly wrong and bad at making rational decisions.

Ross Kenyon: Speak for yourself, Marian.

Marian Krüger: Okay, I will speak for myself then. But I have the whole of behavioral economics, I’m standing on those shoulders to make those statements. Anyways, the availability heuristic essentially says we only perceive those things as relevant that we have recently been in touch with. So to make this concrete, if I’m a buyer or if I’m an investor, and I see certain developers at Carbon Unbound in Europe, in New York, wherever, those are the ones that I have top of mind if I’m thinking about who to invite for an RFP, or who to buy from, or who to invest into. A lot of the founders from the Global South, for reasons that are financial, or emissions-conscious, or about access, they cannot make it to Carbon Unbound.

So does that mean that they should be considered less in any RFP processes, less for any investment? In our minds, no. But that is a gap that we saw, and we felt it needed to be solved. So just coming out of London Climate Week, we ran an event where we invited three founders from three continents working on carbon removal to give them the space to speak to a group of buyers, investors, and other folks, because otherwise they probably wouldn’t have been able to.

And we know that they specifically just came for this event, otherwise they wouldn’t have made the trip. Because, well, if you’re at a Carbon Unbound and you’re one of 200 developers trying to catch Microsoft once they come out of the bathroom, I don’t think that is necessarily the highest leverage point of either your money or your time.

Ross Kenyon: If you want the highest leverage, you follow them into the bathroom. That’s how you get a... You don’t wait outside. What a rookie mistake. Bad advice, ecosystem builder. That’s great. Well, did that event go well, by the way? Do you feel like there actually were results, in that you were able to overcome the availability bias there and get people to be like, “Oh, maybe we should zoom out a little bit”?

Marian Krüger: I mean, we needed to kick people out at the end because they still wanted to connect. I think that’s always a good sign, right? One thing that landed too, and I’m also looking at Hans, he’s probably also got stuff to say about this. In the main, and you know this, Ross, because I believe you’re also a proponent of this, we think just relying on voluntary carbon markets as a business model is not a smart idea these days, and that in itself is not a bold statement.

I think a lot of the CDR ecosystem would agree. So what does that mean? You diversify revenue streams. You look for other business models. And that is also a main thesis of ours, that we need to enable founders to do this. So we deliberately made sure to have two founders on stage that did this. And why am I saying this?

Not only because this is a thesis of ours, that it’s important that you integrate into industrial pathways, into existing industries, but also because afterwards I was talking to folks who up until recently were rating these projects, right? Rating biochar projects, rating ERW projects, and they said afterwards to me, “Huh, I’ve always looked at these projects and read, oh, diverse revenue streams, co-products. I never knew what this means, and now I finally understand.” Right? So for me, that’s fighting a bias pretty evidently.

Hans Westerhof: And to Marian’s point, just seeing these founders in real life makes a real difference. Again, the recency bias, the people you’re familiar with. There’s of course many great founders in CDR, but if you don’t see them, you don’t hear them speak, you don’t exactly know what they do, why would you engage? It’s difficult, right?

You’re not gonna browse a couple of hundred websites to find a biochar startup to buy credits from. Seeing these people in the room, you immediately see, wow, right? The charisma is there, the dedication is there, the progress is there. People make huge strides and have impressive results to show for.

And suddenly you think, oh yeah, that I don’t know doesn’t mean that it’s not worth knowing. And I think to Marian’s point, just based on this event last week, it’s not only that people stay, but people are indeed also wowed, I think I can say that, by the quality of the entrepreneurs. So it’s not about us, right? It’s not about us. It’s always about the entrepreneurs. You see what these people are working on, and it’s just fabulous, right? In its variety, in the differences, but there’s no doubt about the quality of the work that they’re doing. So that, I think, also led us to believe that, okay, yeah, we should do more of this, and this truly creates an impact.

Ross Kenyon: How much of the gap there is due to knowing these people, seeing them in person? How much of it do you think is investors or buyers not understanding property law in formerly Spanish and Portuguese places? Or not trusting the legal system, or understanding how property rights work, or how seniority works in the case of liquidation, or something like that.

And maybe it’s just not understanding these places as well, not being able to track their politics. Is that a factor, or do you really think it’s just that they’re isolated from where decisions are being made?

Hans Westerhof: Oh, of course. No, yeah, of course, you’re spot on, right? So, early-stage teams, pre-seed, seed, raising some money, but not huge amounts. In that phase, investments overseas, across continents even, doesn’t happen easily, right? And in the Global North, so VCs based in the Global North, they would want to have a manageable sort of portfolio, also geographically.

So of course, to your point, that is another hurdle, right? I’m based in the Netherlands. For a Dutch VC to invest in Zambia and understand Zambia, if that’s not your specialty, is almost unfeasible, right? The transaction costs are way too high for a deal of half a million or a million.

So that’s another hurdle, which is related to the ecosystem that these entrepreneurs operate in. Right now, CDR is maybe a little bit different because it’s a nascent industry. It’s a weird industry. I think we all know that, right? So it’s led by charismatic buyers willing to pay quite some money for their credits, right? It’s by entrepreneurs who so believe in what they need to do that they roll this rock uphill and just take on the challenge. And that might create a little bit of an openness for some early-stage investors to look across the borders and to also take on investments that are a little bit farther away.

But if you broaden the ecosystem and try to get more funding in, you also get more classical funding in, and then those drawbacks that you just mentioned are there. So it’s not only presence. There’s multiple hurdles that we need to overcome in order to grow this industry. Marian mentioned one, which is diversifying revenue streams, right? Because we’re pretty persistent around this sort of thinking, because relying on credits alone for the growth of the industry, yes, it grows. We know that. It grows. It does not grow exponentially. There are not enough buyers to meet the demand, or to meet the supply that we need to deliver.

And in order to have classical proper market mechanisms kick in, you need classic B2B value propositions, right? If I deliver a solution to you that creates an improvement in your business tangibly, then you create demand. And that is the magic of creating scale, right? And CDR does not fit that bucket perfectly. I see you smile, so I wanna see...

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I know. I want it to happen. I’ve wanted that to happen for so long, but it’s so very hard. But some people are doing it, and successfully too.

Hans Westerhof: Yeah, exactly. And that’s where we need to move, right? So that CDR is not only this thing you do because you feel for the climate goals, but also because it makes radical business sense to do so, right? So we do not have to raise our finger and say, “You need to do this because...” It just makes rational sense to do so. That is only when we unlock that lever.

Marian Krüger: And Ross, I think before, you kind of threw investors and buyers into one bucket by saying, you know, they might feel uncomfortable with their perceived political risk or other risk types that they can retire or feel like they can take on. I do think there’s a difference between the investor side and the buyer side, just because thanks to standards and rating agencies, there is a level of understanding that they can otherwise, as part of the due diligence process that you would go through in an investment process...

You would look at a lot more risk types than as a buyer. As long as there’s risk mitigation in place for non-delivery, et cetera, you might feel more comfortable if the project is Isometric-certified and has, I don’t know, a non-delivery insurance and potentially even a rating. Then in my mind, I don’t necessarily need to care where it’s placed, because while not a commodity, I’m buying something that is less individualized on its location and more on its properties, if that makes sense.

Ross Kenyon: I think so, and they’re not insurmountable problems either. Many of these companies can set up a British private limited company or a Delaware C corp, and then they have their local subsidiary in the country of operations or something like that. There are ways of making investors feel more comfortable, and also, as you know, the tools for buyers to feel more comfortable are pretty robust at this point.

Like, yeah, if they’re on one of the registries and the registry has given it a thumbs up and it has a decent rating on one of the ratings agencies, those are pretty effective proxies for quality, I think. Not foolproof, of course, there’s always gonna be some amount of risk. But that does de-risk it significantly. So, not to be a deal killer there. There are ways around that.

Which kinds of partners are y’all looking for? And are there others that you’d like to connect to besides companies? I guess the question here is what types of companies should be applying, and what are the partners that maybe you want to get involved in this Latin American cohort that could help these companies along?

Marian Krüger: Let me speak about the partners first, and then Hans can tackle the startups. This brings us back to the magic word of this episode, ecosystem. Because of course, an ecosystem is not just the immediate players that are relevant to the startups, but a broader system that can bring to bear new startups.

So that brings us to academia, that brings us to venture builders. But also that is able to sustain these ventures, so that brings us to the financing landscape, be it VCs, be it DFIs, be it other capital providers, and lastly also the policy side. So if we look at our established geographies that we’re active in, be it Europe, but maybe now more India and Africa, we have close ties and partnerships with organizations from all those parts of the ecosystem.

In India, we collaborate with IIT Bombay, the premier research institute working on carbon capture, carbon removal, and a variety of carbon storage options. Professor Vikram Vishal is our partner there. Excellent, couldn’t have a better partner.

I think that is something that in all geos we try to anchor ourselves in, just because the academic landscape isn’t only the springing ground for new startups that we can then support, but also a lot of times advises policy and does research that is not basic research on cation exchange, but how does ERW specifically work in the soils of Brazil with the tropical rainfall that you get there, right? Which is of course then very relevant to our startups.

And then if you go further, on the policy side, think tanks. Think tanks that understand the carbon removal or broader carbon and climate policies in a given geo. Now, that might be quote unquote easy if you’re in India or in Europe because it’s a bloc, or in North America because it’s Canada and the US. So that, I think, is a challenge, to find partners that are able to do that. And sometimes they do not exist yet, so that is then a gap that we try to help solve. We’re certainly not the ones to do that, but we can point that out and help make sure it exists.

And maybe the last thing I’m gonna say, because it’s quite specific and it’s not often top of mind for people, but it is absolutely crucial for these founders in some of the pathways to make it from a first pilot to a first commercial project: lab infrastructure. You won’t think that probably 90% of the startups in the Global South, when they start out, they send their biochar, they send their soil samples to Europe or to North America for lab analysis, which you can imagine what cost that incurs and what timelines that then operates on with all the shipping.

So I think that’s an underestimated lever for carbon removal scale in those geographies, is lab infrastructure, and we’re thinking mostly about biochar and ERW here.

Ross Kenyon: I was at an ocean science conference very recently, and one of the attendees was telling me that they’ve seen a lot of encouragement of Global South startup founders to dive into CDR project development, and the big gap there is that there often aren’t enough local scientists even doing appropriate baselining to make this work. At the very least for mCDR and ocean alkalinity enhancement and stuff like that.

But I imagine that’s true for terrestrial carbon removal as well, just the applied science of that specific geography is not robust enough to support adequate baselining. And it’s one of those things I think people maybe are overlooking, or maybe it’s something that I’ve just overlooked and I’m projecting onto the entire industry. But it was a really nice wake-up call for me to know that that is a big gap.

Marian Krüger: I do think that’s true, and that forces this challenge or this task up onto startups who at the beginning are cash and resource stripped, and that really shouldn’t be their job. But I guess because either they are so determined, or, and probably both, the opportunity is so big, they still do it. So I can confirm for you that that is not just true for marine CDR, it also is true for terrestrial CDR, specifically if we think ERW.

I do think the variety of combinations of soil types and rock types, and then how much rock you distribute, that ideally should have been analyzed before, so the startups can hit the ground running, which unfortunately they can’t.

Hans Westerhof: Only to illustrate how odd CDR is, right, as an industry, that these challenges, which are in fact fundamental scientific unknowns that need to be answered, are on the plate of a startup that is not equipped to do that or should not have to do that. As you know, I’ve worked a lot in more classic B2B environments, and it’s like the equivalent of asking yourself when you have delivered a ton of bricks. I deliver you a ton of bricks at home, right? Nice bricks, Ross, right, to build your house. And then you say, “Oh, is this a ton?” Would be an odd question, right? It’s a little bit of an odd question. So you might not like the bricks and all of that, but, you know, is this a ton? Yeah, I mean, we’re raising our eyebrows, right?

So, we have software installed. Here’s the interface. It does stuff, right? So is it really happening? Well, mm, right. You don’t have these questions. And in CDR it’s very normal to entertain these questions. We think that’s normal. It’s abnormal, right? So it is strange, but we can support indeed by building more local infrastructure, because that’s one of those hurdles again to overcome.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think it’s a really good point. It’s one of those boring points that underlies so much that I think it’s really easy to skip past it and focus on the sexier parts of, like, new technology or better unit economics or something like that. Sometimes it is this simple.

Okay, Hans, tell us about the startups that you wanna see apply here. I wanna know. Make this pitch. You’re a Latin American right now. You’re listening. Buenos días. Thank you for listening. Gracias. Gracias a todos por escuchar. Hans, make the pitch for them. I can do Portuguese as well. Sorry. I got shit like bom dia and saúde and stuff like that, but please.

Hans Westerhof: Then we need Mateus here to speak Portuguese. Yeah, we’re looking for startup teams that work in CDR, right? That want to work with peers, that want to have guidance in a community that truly understands CDR, right? To explain what you’re working on, to really meet with people who are knee-deep in CDR, to get connected into the ecosystem. That is what we’re good for.

Traditionally, it’s startups, it’s pre-seed, seed stage, early stage startups. Sometimes we have more well-developed teams for whom CDR is something new that they need to discover as a sort of byproduct for green hydrogen production, for example. And then, okay, if CDR is an angle that you discover, I think we’re the perfect fit.

Our program is really CDR-focused. You know this, Ross, but you asked me to pitch, right? So not a lot of generic startup stuff. There’s many great startup programs around, and if you need support there, just avail of these programs. We really specifically focus on the idiosyncrasies of CDR, I would say. And if that is what supports you, you should come to us.

We really have no stake for ourselves in your success. Our only success as a nonprofit is the success of the entrepreneurs, right? So there’s no commercial benefit to us to work with you. We don’t take equity, for the listeners who don’t know. Your success is really our success. We’re funded by philanthropies, right, your earlier question. And they look at our success as the success that we create for teams that we support.

Marian Krüger: My strongest pitch would be, you founders will get to work with Ross. So apply.

Ross Kenyon: They get enough of me here. They don’t necessarily need a whole lot more, but thank you. Yeah, I am really excited to return for the Latin American cohort. I love remove’s programming. It’s so well organized and so specific, and it is really encouraging to see the full breadth of founders that you’re able to attract too.

Some of them are, like you just said, Hans, people who are maybe more experienced in a different kind of area, like hydrogen, and they found CDR. Some of the teams I worked with in the Indian cohort have been doing pyrolysis for longer than almost anyone else that I’ve ever met. And it was, like, so impressive that they were like, “Oh, we can also do a specific type of pyrolysis that leads to carbon crediting.” Like, oh, this is fascinating. You might have just leapfrogged everyone else that I’ve ever met, with few exceptions, because of that. And then all the way to people who just got bitten by the bug one day and realized that we needed to remove carbon and they were passionate about doing so, and everything in between.

You’re able to attract founders that really are diverse, that I really like. I haven’t seen that in every program that I’ve worked in, by the way. I feel like that’s somewhat rare.

Hans Westerhof: Hey, Ross, I think it’s not only our program, right? It’s also about the domain of CDR. I’ve been working with startups for 15 years right now, and I do find that the average entrepreneur, if there’s such a thing, that engages in CDR is of extremely high quality, which also, for me personally, makes it a privilege to work in CDR. Of course, all founders are great and dedicated and committed and all of that, but I do find that the average entrepreneur that we see in CDR is of high quality, and I think that has to do with people understanding and dedicating their life to the mission that CDR represents. They feel it’s tremendously, unavoidably important.

And we see many entrepreneurs, as you said, with already a long career changing gear towards CDR, and that is just a privilege to work with.

Ross Kenyon: I’ve seen a lot of people in the middles of their career also decide they wanted to do something that was more meaningful too. Some of the other founders that I’ve encountered outside of CDR, I’ve heard them pitch things to me and be like, “Yeah, we’re gonna make so much money doing this.” I, like, never hear anyone say that in CDR. That guy rubbed me the wrong way. I’m like, “I do not trust this guy at all, really.” But CDR does tend to attract people, I think, who are very much here for the right reasons, very mission-driven, and often had to give up a lot to do this work too. These are professional people that could get good jobs elsewhere. Sounds like you’ve both seen this too. I love that.

Hans Westerhof: Yeah, happens in CDR a lot, disproportionately I would say.

Marian Krüger: I think it’s due to, and Ross, you mentioned, you know, a lot of people that might also be mid-career, they are bitten by the bug, they drink the Kool-Aid, and then you cannot unsee what you saw about climate. And I do think the beauty about carbon removal is that it provides a solution that is easier to grasp, and more direct to the fundamental problem we’re addressing, namely too high a concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. And here is a solution that actually directly alleviates this, while obviously keeping in mind that it will never be enough to do it, and it only goes together with decarbonization, et cetera, et cetera.

But I do think that is what attracts people that might not have been in climate before and start their climate journey towards carbon removal, because there’s this rather direct problem-solution fit that you might find a bit harder when you go into renewables. And I can speak for myself, because I was in renewables before. I built a startup in solar, and I did feel I wanted to work even closer on the actual problem, which was the levels of atmospheric CO2. And I do think there’s probably no other element in the world that allows you to do this than carbon removal.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think that’s probably true. I’m gonna frame this in a Latin American way. This is pandering, but it’s a good pandering. I’m gonna pander to Borges. So, Garden of Forking Paths here. remove could have chosen something else to do with its sweet, sweet Milkywire lucre. You could have gone into super pollutants. You could have gone into solar radiation management stuff. I’m sure you probably could have raised, and helped support new organizations working on that. Why go deeper into carbon removal? Don’t you know there’s cooler things now? Carbon removal is old and boring. There’s cooler things to be working on. Why are you still here?

Marian Krüger: I guess because we need it. That’s probably the easiest answer. I think there is an argument, and it’s a discussion that we have internally a lot around: in an environment with a VCM that’s barely able to sustain the startups that we have, or the developers that we have in the market currently, does it really make sense to push more developers into that market? Right. It’s a fair argument. And I think we have taken actions because of that argument.

At the same time, us doubling down in the Global South is, I think, due to three reasons. One being the climate equity perspective, right? I think it’s the right thing to do that that part of the world participates in the massive amounts of value that will be generated through carbon removal.

Second, the Global South just on a unit economic basis will allow us to generate massive amounts of carbon removal at prices that are competitive, if not, and likely, better than what we can have in the Global North. So I do think it enables demand for durable carbon removal in a, let’s say, 110 to 145 or 150 US dollar range, which I think if you can deliver at scale there, there is decent demand there, right?

And the third one is, and that might be a bit anti-cyclical, but I would much rather be a direct air capture founder right now, living off of grants, looking to raise my pre-seed maybe in a month or in a year, than needing to raise my Series A right now of 12 million, 15 million in that challenging environment. Because my timelines align actually quite nicely with potential integration to a compliance regime in 2030, right? I can see how my first commercial plant five years down the line could pay into that market. And up until then, I keep my burn low, and I make it till then. So it might be a bit counterintuitive, but you could also argue right now is the exact right time to found a carbon removal startup.

Hans Westerhof: On top of what Marian said, you know, it’s a new market, so you go through all of these predictable phases, right? So, boom, bust. Currently, CDR, challenging. There’s also something like a simple moral imperative, as far as I’m concerned, right? So, oh, it’s not happy-go-lucky in CDR right now. It’s a little bit of a tough environment. Sure. And now we bail out? That sounds like a silly choice to make, right? So for me personally, it’s also, yeah, sure, we should see through these couple of years, and this industry needs to grow. The mission is unchanged.

And of course, there’s other work to do. And, you know, we cannot all of us do everything together. We focus here. We’ve built something. We think we can contribute and keep building value there. I have nothing negative to say about super pollutants. Let other people address those, right, that are equipped to address those better. But for us to bail out of CDR feels like, I can’t even say how wrong that feels, right?

Ross Kenyon: I’m the same way too. I don’t wanna leave. We still need this. Obviously, there are things that will get more attention because they are newer, even though super pollutants is... I called it once recently, it was like the oldest novel approach to carbon that exists. It also goes back to, like, very old parts of the carbon market as well.

But yeah, no, no shade being thrown by me either. We definitely need all of these things happening and being researched and advancing. But also I’m a carbon removal person. Times are difficult right now, but they’re difficult across the space, and it would seem, I don’t know. I like to support founders who are still here, who still feel vocationally called to this kind of work. Sounds like you both do too. So we’re diehards, basically. Carry us out in a pine box, basically, is when we’re gonna leave carbon.

Hans Westerhof: I hope that will be still some time, Ross, before that happens.

Ross Kenyon: Me too. When the last molecule is captured and we create a new ice age, then we can retire, right?

Marian Krüger: If pine box, then please burn me and make sure I don’t decay, so that someone can get at least a credit off of it.

Ross Kenyon: God, that was one of the darkest memes we ever made. It was sort of like a carbon... it was like cremains, cremoval or something. It just had a picture of, like, going into a crematorium. I don’t know that it had that many likes. I’m not sure that it deserved that many likes, but it was creative.

Marian Krüger: Did you just out yourself as the main writer of Carbon Removal Memes, Ross?

Ross Kenyon: Ah, no. It’s known. I have it on LinkedIn. But I also just... it always surprises people. There is a writers room, though, by the way, and I definitely do not make all of them. And I’m just the really annoying person who gets to say, “What’s the editorial on this? What are we actually trying to say? I don’t understand your...” So I get to do that, is really the only distinction between me and everyone else. But yeah, so I guess I’m out now, Marian.

Marian Krüger: Thank you for your work. Thank you for your work. Yeah. Please continue.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, the most important job in carbon removal.

Marian Krüger: Talking about feeling unemployed, yes. Oh no, we might wanna cut that.

Ross Kenyon: I earned it. It’s okay. This is a tough question for you, ‘cause I don’t even know that you’ve thought about it or wanna be thinking about it, but what do you think is going to be next for remove? Are you gonna go deeper into any of these geographies? Are you gonna find some other way to grow? What do you think will be next, while fully recognizing that you haven’t even done the next thing yet, so, tough question.

Hans Westerhof: Yeah. Well, we’ll be doing the next thing for sure, right? So, work in those geographies and in parallel across all of those time zones, Ross, and then bring people together. So that also brings a limit to our expansion, right? So we can’t go farther east or farther west, because then in time zones it doesn’t work anymore. Or we have to build separate programs, right? But we work now from India to western Latin America. So I think Mexico is the farthest time zone out, that is 12, 12 and a half time zones. Of course, that’s a practicality only. That’s what we will build first, and let us do that, right?

So I think there is quite a big lever that we integrate into our programs, which is what Marian referred to earlier, and that is how we support teams in developing their business models, and where previously it sort of by default centered on the credit market, right? A couple of years ago, right? For a few years we’ve been looking closely at revenue diversification, meaning finding solutions to develop business models outside of credits. And now I think we’re doubling down there, right? To really work with partners in existing value chains who might have a need for the solutions that CDR startups provide. Not primarily for the credits, but primarily for the products or the technical solutions that are being built.

And I think that is, for the coming years, a new angle in our work, or an angle that we’ll be doubling down on. That is not an afterthought, that becomes a central thesis, right? It’s not, “Oh, yes, and let’s also do something like this,” or, “This is also important,” but that we will build programs around this thesis, really to engage industries and startups to work together about integrating biochar in fertilizer value chains, or bio-coal in the steel industry or in the aluminum industry as a reductant, what have you, right? To really build demand for products so we scale this industry.

Marian Krüger: And to be very clear, we’re of course aware that using biochar or bio-coal as a drop-in for PCI coal is not carbon removal anymore.

Hans Westerhof: Sure.

Marian Krüger: But to be very clear, we couldn’t care less if this allowed a biochar developer to deploy 50, to scale to 100 plants, and once the market switches, they can go the carbon removal route. I think we’ve done a great job. So in our minds, that is the future of the next couple of years in carbon removal.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think it’s one of those places where focusing on it being carbon removal potentially holds it back. Like, however you slice bio-coal, which is a term I don’t really like that much at all. I wish we’d found a better name for metallurgical coal but biochar than bio-coal. But even still, like, we need that. That’s a...

Hans Westerhof: Yes, of course.

Ross Kenyon: Can we make that...

Hans Westerhof: Of course. And it’s not CDR, it still works above the zero line, right? So, and to Marian’s point, right? So there is demand, right? In volumes you can’t even comprehend, right, if you hear those numbers. So imagine you find a fit there. Imagine you find a fit there. You’re not walking around with your 1,000 tons and saying, “Hey, Ross, you wanna buy? I’ve got 1,000 tons. I can also deliver you 1,200 if you want, but then I know.” So people only want to talk if you can deliver 20,000, 25,000 tons per month, right? So not immediately, obviously, but if that potential is there. So if you want to build this industrial platform underpinning carbon removal, that is a big lever to pull. Yeah.

Ross Kenyon: And that cracked me up, because the way you were describing it sounded almost threatening to me. I’m like, “Uh, gah, back off. Sure, it’s fine. It’s not carbon removal, but it’s okay.” I love the idea of focusing the program... Being serious now, I love the idea of focusing on a program that has insetting as a goal, or just finding ways to plug into industries, whether or not it’s carbon removal. I think focusing on that as a go-to-market is really powerful. Obviously, when we’re talking with companies, we are all looking at VCM policy and value creating for B2B plays. I think focusing on that third way might be, like, a really cool way to orient a program, or just collect companies that are very well-suited to do so, and then you could gather partners around that.

remove has focused on geographies, and that’s how your programming is often split. I imagine some of that is for time zones, so people don’t lose their minds trying to do it. For me, in the Pacific, it’s 12 and a half hours for India, so I had to be up super early, but I’m that dedicated. I’m happy to do it. And also you probably wanna build a community around a specific...

Hans Westerhof: Yes, of course.

Ross Kenyon: ...group that will see each other and build those. But you could also do it by direct air capture companies or enhanced rock weathering companies. You can gather it that way, or those who are just focused on insetting, or you focus on the go-to-market. There are lots of different ways to taxonomize companies. So are you saying that maybe in the future you’ll focus more on that commercial angle rather than the method of getting there?

Marian Krüger: I think how you would approach it in a more classic B2B context, you would focus them around a problem of a customer, or a challenge that a customer has, right? So we know carbon removal is weird, but let’s make it maybe a little less weird and try this paradigm instead of just going all out on the VCM, right? So if there’s a challenge of a steel manufacturer or the steel industry to have a drop-in for PCI coal, okay, then let’s see what kind of startups we have in the ecosystem, in our program, as alumni, that can match their specs.

Ross Kenyon: That is fabulous advice, and if you’re listening here, listen extra hard to what Marian and Hans are saying. I think this is likely going to be the path to survival for a number of companies, if you’re still able to do so. If you’ve been looking at credits, you’ve been filling out RFPs and trying to get big offtakes, maybe don’t. There’s probably people in your backyard who might need your product for their own sake, for their own reasons that are not credit related. You might have a path to a viable business for that. And even if it’s not removal, even if it’s not going to have the big blue chip offtake, you’re still doing super important work. I still will consider you part of carbon removal. Let me say that. You can still come to the conferences. You’re still part of the club. You’re doing bio-coal? Great. Bio-coal is fine. Keep doing it. Will you guys stamp that? You endorse that?

Hans Westerhof: Yep.

Marian Krüger: Yes, endorsed. Thank you for putting it better than we ever could have.

Ross Kenyon: No, I love that focus. Woo! You’re getting me all hyped here. Yeah, I’ve had, what, four months off now from remove coaching. I’m getting ready to go back. It starts in, what, October is when the...

Hans Westerhof: Yeah. You’re getting back in, Ross, sooner than you think, right? So you have your US-based summer break.

Ross Kenyon: Always so threatening. It always sounds so... So you scare me a little bit, Hans. Yeah, I’m coming back, I swear.

Hans Westerhof: You are. Are you? Yeah. We want you back. So after your US holiday, which is shorter than the European holiday, right? So then before you know it, we kick it off. Yeah. We look forward to that, man.

Ross Kenyon: Amazing. If you’d like to apply, the link is in the show notes to do so. You absolutely should if you’re working in Latin America. If you’re working somewhere else around the world, basically anywhere that’s not North America, there’s a program for you. I guess Mexico is technically part of North America, but they’re gonna be in the...

Marian Krüger: We consider it LATAM. Yeah, we consider it LATAM.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it’s sort of an arbitrary distinction in many regards anyways. But pretty much every different geographical focus, there’s a group, except maybe not Asia yet. Maybe that’s another one that’s en route. We’ll see.

If you’re basically anywhere outside of the US and Canada, there’s a specific program for you, or potentially one in the future, and they’re great. I think they’re really powerful programs, and the network is amazing. A lot of these people you will see for your entire time in carbon removal. Many of them are going to be the people that you will hear about one year, three years, five years from now as big, successful companies. It’s a great opportunity, so I highly recommend getting involved in remove’s programming.

Is there anything I forgot to ask you about that we should do now before we close? You’re just waiting for me to ask you, and I didn’t.

Hans Westerhof: I’m afraid to say something because I don’t wanna threaten you, right? So...

Ross Kenyon: It’s just something about that, like, Central European intensity.

Marian Krüger: No, you can be very direct. It’s Dutch.

Ross Kenyon: Oh, it’s Dutch. It’s Dutch. Okay. Got it.

Hans Westerhof: Yeah, yeah. That’s my Dutchness, yes.

Marian Krüger: No, I think we’re good.

Ross Kenyon: Understood. Hans, you feel that way too?

Hans Westerhof: Pleasure chatting with you, Ross.

Ross Kenyon: Okay. Yeah, it’s my pleasure. I’m honored to be invited. I know there’s a lot of people who could be good coaches for remove’s programming. I’m so happy to be involved, and thank you. I’m glad to call you both colleagues, and love the remove team and the programming. My sincere thanks.

Hans Westerhof: Yeah, we love having you on board. Yeah.

Marian Krüger: Appreciate having you, and also appreciate you inviting us on the pod. And yeah, being part of, guess what word I’m gonna use now, our ecosystem.

Ross Kenyon: Ecosystem builders, that’s what we are. All right.

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If you are a Latin American carbon dioxide removal project and/or technology developer, you should apply to remove's LatAm cohort. Applications are out now, and there is a chance we might end up working together.

I have had nothing but wonderful experiences with the team at remove. They offer focused training, a powerful network, and an unmatched peer group in your cohort. Hoping to see you there!

In today's episode, cofounders and managing directors of remove, Marian Krüger and Hans Westerhof, join the show to talk about the program, what it means to be ecosystem builders, and how they aim to grow capacity in the Global South generally and Latin America in particular.

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This is an essay and full transcript based upon episode #409 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast, hosted by me, Ross Kenyon. You can listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, whichever other podcast apps you use. You can watch the full video (which has D.W. Pasulka and me on-camera if you like to watch podcasts) or listen to the episode in its entirety right below this paragraph.

Also, this is a good pre-listen/read for the show if you’d like to start here:

Reversing Climate Change

A Hyperstition for Carbon Dioxide Removal

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2 months ago · 3 likes · Ross Kenyon

Learning from D.W. Pasulka

Well, you know me. I like a huge topic. Sometimes I choose one so big it threatens to engulf the entire podcast. That’s how I knew it would be when I at long last hung out with Dr. D.W. Pasulka, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW). Her new book, ⁠The Others: UFOs, AI, and The Hidden Forces Guiding Human Destiny, will be released on July 28th⁠⁠.

I’ve been reading Diana’s books for a very long time. They were some of the first books I started reading when I started challenging why I was being fairly judgmental about New Age, occult, and/or paranormal beliefs that were becoming culturally so dominant. I dove in if for no other reason than to understand why they were becoming popular and what that might mean for religious practice, identity, politics, and just navigating a changing social landscape in a halfway competent fashion. It’s good practice to know about the world and its many peoples—it’s interesting and helps us all get along better.

And what I love about Diana’s work is that it’s not ever merely about whether this person’s experience was credible or not. Or whether the stories of the saints were actually UFOs, etc. It’s essentially a story about how our technology shapes our experience of being ourselves, and how media representations interact with that process.

Enter Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan is a very famous scholar. He’s considered the founder of media studies, which is somehow both too bizarrely generic a phrase and also so limiting. The idea that is most useful for understanding Diana’s research is his classic line: “the medium is the message”. In other words, it isn’t just the content of the message that should concern you but the how and why it is transmitted in that particular fashion.

For example, when the internet began to reach more and more regular people, it wasn’t necessarily what they were communicating about on the internet, but the fact that there was a somewhat decentralized digital space where an affective economy could be built without the mediation of physical bodies or authority figures gatekeeping information. That says a hell of a lot more than whatever recipes or political information people were sharing. Since you’re reading this in 2026 and we’ve lived through the internet as a democratizing and connecting technology and have witnessed it become an extractive and dopamine-manipulating dysfunction multiplier, it might seem that maybe the medium was never really sure about its message in the first place.

But McLuhan was very farseeing. And much of what can now be seen by normalos was gamed out by theorists like him, fiction writers like Arthur C. Clarke, and scholars who came after like D.W. Pasulka.

What they were seeing was that media technology was only going to improve. One decade you’re standing in the movie line with Woody Allen and Diane Keaton, soon there are tvs with remotes, then cable, then dialup, then LAN parties, then broadband, then smart phones, and now many live lives perhaps principally online. What becomes of our identity and our humanity when it isn’t a question of how do we create virtual versions of ourselves in digital spaces (a huge discourse in the early years of the internet), but how do we recreate a physical identity for ourselves in a meatspace that has, for many, grown unfamiliar, disappointing, or worse. And we haven’t even seen what will happen to the kids raised at least partially by tablets yet…

When we use technology, one way to think of it as becoming almost literally a part of us. Using your iPhone to access Wikipedia is your hand using a tool that connects to a megamind outside of yourself. It isn’t asking your cousin who’s four years older than you and has his driver’s license—it’s accessing essentially all human knowledge in an impersonal and universal way. And it’s connected to your hand (much like the gun is connected to James Wood’s hand below.)

Or another bonus way to think about technology is a version of Michael Pollan’s line from The Botany of Desire: did we domesticate technology, or did it domesticate us? Is it serving our interests, or are we servings its? Diana documents a fair number of people in AI who would speak of their work as “ushering in” a new entity rather than “making” something, and that is a clue.

Long Live the New Flesh

Which brings me to Videodrome, David Cronenberg’s 1983 body horror (but you knew that as soon as I said his name if you’re this type of nerd.) It is both campy and obscure—one of those didactic films that feels profound but is also trying pretty hard to have you feel that way. I personally think it’s great and still well worth a watch.

One of the reasons why it reads as so camp is that it locates this question of how media changes us and becomes us through television. Television in 1983 strikes me as pretty dang innocent compared to the possibilities of cable when I was growing up in the W years. But it only looks that way because I wasn't there to experience what came before it.

In the final scene shared above, James Woods’ character has essentially merged with the television. He is instructed by Debbie Harry’s (of Blondie; how fun!) character that in order to become this new being, this “new flesh”, he must kill his old flesh. To transform himself he will essentially become pure representation. He will leave his physical form and become media, become television, be beyond physicality but maybe be everywhere all at once as an entirely virtual or mediated entity.

That seems like a huge stretch for a tiny tv screen in a huge box with a knob on it. It sounds less outlandish for the age of smart phones. It probably starts sounding very scary with consumer AI and how that might link up with new religions movements like Ray Kurzweil’s singularitarianism.

In fact, I suspect a whole bunch of old sci-fi just got very relevant and cool again now that all of their musings on AI went from being something we might figure out in the coming centuries as opposed to this very moment. Time to go back and watch Robocop, Blade Runner, Videodrome, and probably also 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Speaking of, Diana loves this video and mentions it in her research. Lo and behold, was Stanley Kubrick and his junior partner on it, Arthur C. Clarke, tuned into what screens would later become for us? Some of these themes were so far ahead of how media technology would change us that they were functionally invisible except to the most prescient.

But what does it mean for us? And the climate?

I don’t know. What does it mean for you? What would it change for you to know that the universe is so much weirder than you once thought? How would it be to know that we were not the ultimate species on the planet any more?

My guess is that if didn’t send you to a place of doom it would you into a spiritual place of wondering what it means to be human and how we live here well together. Maybe it makes you want to put aside a lot of the crap you were worried over to focus on love—what most wise people believe it’s ultimately all about anyways.

In my work as a strategist, I’m often helping people figure out how to make big decisions. Ones that sometimes involve betting the company. One lens I like to use is strategic asymmetry. If you’re the mouse, Jerry, from from Tom and Jerry, you don’t try to outbox the cat, Jerry. You run your ass into the mouse hole and come up with a plan that nullifies Tom’s advantage.

If humanity is creating non-human intelligence that may soon be self-improving and will surpass collective human intelligence, I think at that point we’ve basically just got compassion, love, humor—things we associate with being humane. We will likely need to mature as an Earthly civilization and pull ourselves out of the systems and ways of thinking that have made us miserable. Unfortunately, there are many. Maybe somehow AI will be even better at being humane than us, in which case, I’ll definitely need to write another essay.

I hope you enjoy the podcast. Dr. D.W. Pasulka has made me think so many new thoughts over the years, and you should be reading her work. I barely covered half of the things we discuss in the podcast, so go listen to that in your apps or at the top of this page. There’s also the full transcript below. Thanks so much for your support!

Sincerely,

Ross Kenyon

PS I reference this scene in the podcast, but also, it kind of fits with this final section, no?

Full Transcript

Ross Kenyon: Hello, this is Ross Kenyon, host of Reversing Climate Change, the podcast you’re listening to at this moment. I’ve worked in climate tech and carbon dioxide removal for about a decade.

You might be wondering why a show with D.W. Pasulka has popped up on your playlist today. Thanks for listening. Before I explain the what and the how — the improbability of such a thing — if I could ask you: while you have your phone open, and you haven’t started some other task yet, open up your podcast app — Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, whatever you use — and give this show a great rating and review. It really helps get the show out to more people, and it’s much appreciated. It’s one of the most important things you can do if you like this show. I’m also doing a lot on Substack right now, so if you’re over there, you should follow Reversing Climate Change, or me personally, Ross Kenyon. The links to do those things are in the show notes.

And thanks so much for listening. I’m really excited about this show. I’ve been preparing for it for a long time. Pretty much as soon as I heard Dr. Pasulka had a new book coming out, I went right for her email: how can I make this happen? I’ve read her books several times. They’re very good and very accessible books on what it means to treat the unidentified flying object — unidentified aerial phenomena, UFO, UAP, what have you — as a religion. And what does it mean to take some of these beliefs seriously?

Her book American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, and Technology is a fantastic introductory resource. It’s not a dense academic tome, although if you read Diana’s work you can tell she hangs at that level elsewhere — she certainly has the theoretical frameworks to make it happen. But American Cosmic opened me up a little bit to start thinking more seriously about where my belief in what is possible ends, and why. And I’m not even sure I’ve come to some finite conclusion about anything, so much as to say: I don’t think the pure materialist story is all there is — or, if that’s all there is, there’s likely a lot more to materialism than we really understand, and it might be far stranger than we think. But independently of the truth content of experiencers’ stories, it’s important to understand how these types of events impact society, and especially how they impact society given their technological overlap.

Her next book, Encounters: Experiences with Nonhuman Intelligences, starts talking about what’s happening with AI before AI really just takes over. What it is now — it was not like this two years ago, you know? She starts detailing how people are thinking about what it means to have experiences with machine intelligence, and what it means for there to be nonhuman intelligences. And she gets into this in much greater detail in her new book, The Others: UFOs, AI, and the Hidden Forces Guiding Human Destiny — which, oh my goodness, releases literally on July 28th. You can learn all about D.W. Pasulka’s thinking around artificial intelligence, around Marshall McLuhan and media theory.

We have some jokes in here about people who predicted the future long ago, like McLuhan. But we also spend a fair amount of the show talking about David Cronenberg’s 1983 film Videodrome, which is basically Marshall McLuhan’s thinking on television — how it was changing the way our minds worked, networking our brains, and how we were sort of fusing with media. You watch it and it seems kind of hokey — like, yeah, whatever. It’s obviously more true now that people have smartphones, but with AI I think it’s going to look very different, and not that much longer from now. So we get to talk about how the tools we use become us, how we somaticize them, and what that means. We go into Donna Haraway. There’s just a lot of freaky cultural theory involved. And I think even if we’re just talking about how AI is going to change society, that alone is worth the price of admission, and will likely have something to teach.

Our work in climate is going to happen within a context that will need to relate to these ideas successfully. I’m not sure exactly where all of this is going to come out, but I know we need to start thinking about these ideas and their relation to how we live well together — with regard to the climate, and with regard to politics and ethics generally.

I won’t belabor it any further. Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoy this show. I’m so excited to have Dr. D.W. Pasulka on Reversing Climate Change. Here it is.

Episode

Ross Kenyon: Diana, thank you for being here.

Diana Pasulka: Pleasure.

Ross Kenyon: Are you weirded out that you ended up on a climate change podcast? Does this ever happen to you?

Diana Pasulka: Well, I’d say the people who read my books are demographically varied. So no, I’m not weirded out.

Ross Kenyon: I think maybe the reason you’re not weirded out is that you seem like someone who’s so transdisciplinary — how could you not see links to basically all of human experience? That might be putting too much pressure on your work, but I think it holds. What do you think?

Diana Pasulka: I think so, yeah.

Ross Kenyon: How would you describe the continuity of your work? It crosses so many different areas, as I just described. What’s new about this book vis-à-vis your others?

Diana Pasulka: Yeah, sure — that’s a great question. The continuity is that the one thing I look at is belief — religious belief. How do people come to believe in certain things that we don’t necessarily have hard evidence for? And technology — how these two things interact and inform each other. This has been something I’ve been studying forever, it seems. And I study it in different contexts. The first part of my career was looking at Catholic history, and how media of the past — like popular culture and Catholic tradition — influences the ways people believe certain things. Here’s an example: I wrote a book about purgatory. Purgatory is a Catholic dogma which suggests that when people die, their souls don’t immediately go to heaven — usually because their souls may not be good enough to be in God’s presence, so they have to be purified. Purgatory is the place where this happens. It’s also referred to as a state, a state of being. And, contrary to the idea of what a dogma is, it’s changed — the ideas of purgatory have changed within the last thousand years. So what I did in that book was look at how popular culture, and culture in general, shifts the belief, and even influences the Catholic hierarchy. That was a case study, and a very academic book. So that’s what I did in the first part of my career.

In about 2012, I started to look at the shift in infrastructure to digital technology, and I thought, “Well, the UFO phenomenon is probably the best representative of this shift,” because it’s decentralized. There’s no pope, no hierarchy. People have their phones; they can record things in the sky, post them on social media, and so forth — and this influences what people believe. A lot of belief in UFOs — if you go back to the 1940s, when Kenneth Arnold sees the flying saucers over Mount Rainier, and then you have Roswell — these are already interpreted, even in the 1940s, as spiritual events. So I thought it was going to be really easy to make the case that the UFO is this thing we have no hard evidence for, but a lot of people believe in, and it’s due to this shift in infrastructure — very much like the printing press helped the Protestant Reformation, because everybody had their own Bible. So the technological infrastructure has a direct impact on what people believe, and on their religion. What I didn’t bargain for when I started this was that the government was studying UFOs, and people from the government would reach out to me and be interested in my research, because I had a lot of it from the historical record. And this caused me to have my own shift in perspective — like, maybe we do have hard evidence for UFOs. Oh my goodness. It took me about a year to get over that. So I had to shift everything in that book. That was called American Cosmic, and in my interpretation it was a very academic book, but it became a breakout bestseller. Surprise. So I’ve been studying UFOs ever since, because of the impact that actually had on me. And then, obviously, we have the UFO disclosure going on, with the release of all these files. My book came out right as that disclosure began, and it’s been quite interesting.

Ross Kenyon: I was worried about this interview, because there are just a million different angles and questions to have — I’ve read pretty much all of these things, some more than once, and I’ll be listening to your new book all over again once it’s out on audiobook, because there’s so much to it. One of the big splits I’ve found in everything relating to any of this phenomena is: to what degree is it a material or a supernatural set of phenomena? You have people like Luis Elizondo, who think this is a near-term security threat with strong materiality to it. And then there are some people who... There’s a story you tell — I forget which book it’s in — of a devout Catholic woman and her materialist husband, and they both see the same thing in the basement, healing her dog, and he sees it as a machine and she sees it as an angel. So there’s also something clearly phenomenological and subjective happening in the experiencing of this too. I’ve noticed the communities tend to be quite polarized in this way. What do you think explains that phenomenological understanding of what’s happening?

Diana Pasulka: Okay, so it’s really, really interesting. The case you mentioned is Rey Hernandez and his wife Dulce. Let me give the context. Rey’s an attorney, he’s an atheist, and he’s married to Dulce; they live in Florida, and Dulce is Catholic. They’re going along, they have a dog, they love this dog — but it’s an old dog, very old, and it’s kind of on its way out; it’s going to die. So they’re really upset about this. And Dulce, being Catholic, prays and asks God for some kind of milagro — a miracle. And so that night, Rey wakes up in the middle of the night, and Dulce’s calling him. He gets up and goes downstairs, and he sees this thing that to him looks like a greenish-blue light hovering over his dog, with sparks coming out of it. And Dulce is on her knees. They’re both really surprised — I wouldn’t call it terrified. But Rey does something that’s not characteristic of a situation like this: he looks at it, kind of laughs about it, and then walks back upstairs and goes back to bed. So she stays down there. The next day he gets up, and his dog is completely better. He said it was as if she’d lost 10 years — she’s running around like a puppy again. And his wife is convinced it was an angel, an answer to her prayers. He’s not so convinced, but it freaks him out to the point that he thinks it’s like a UFO. So he does a lot of research. He meets the astronaut Edgar Mitchell — who I’ve also talked to before, and who definitely believed in aliens; he’s passed away now. Edgar Mitchell becomes a mentor to Rey and tells him, “Well, there’s a variety of these things; you have to figure out what they want with you.” So Rey has a mission. He becomes no longer atheist, but he’s not necessarily Catholic or Christian like his wife. All right — so I use this example to show that people can and do have the same event, but see it differently.

Now, you do have cases of this in the history of religion, in various religions. You have examples in Buddhism, but also in Catholicism, a religion I’m very familiar with.

Ross Kenyon: Right — is that another one of those?

Diana Pasulka: Yeah, that’s right. So, the Miracle of the Sun in 1917 — for listeners who don’t know what that is, this is an apparition of the Virgin Mary. It happens in Fatima, Portugal, and the people who witness it — I think around 70,000 to 100,000 people are there. A lot of them see that they’re at the same event, but they see different things. Some see the same thing. People miles away notice something going on in the sky, so it was an aerial phenomenon. So it’s not this UFO situation of having the same event but seeing different things. This is something that’s not unprecedented; we do see it in religion. So it was really surprising to me, nonetheless, when I noted that this is something often cited when people have these experiences — including military people. I met a lot of people who’d have these experiences: fighter pilots, people out at sea, naval intelligence officers, you know? The testimony — there’s so much testimony that it’s overwhelming, actually. So how do I account for this? First off, there are physicists involved. A known physicist is Kevin Knuth. A scientist friend of mine is Gary Nolan at Stanford University — he’s very well known now; he’s in American Cosmic under a pseudonym, his name’s James there. They’re better equipped to explain the physics of it than me, because I’m a historian of religion. So how do I explain this? I can only say that I believe these people, and I can’t explain how this happens — I can only explain that it happens. I can give you the details and the data, and that’s partially why the military personnel were interested in my work. I had a log of events that I kept from doing my purgatory research — I’d come across these events and say, “I don’t know what these are, but I’m going to write them down,” because they’re so weird. And this is the stuff they wanted to see. I have a friend now, Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet.

Ross Kenyon: I’ve met Tim, actually, at an event that wasn’t related to any of this. It was about ocean tech, for a client of mine. He didn’t talk about any of his UFO experiences, and I wanted to ask, but I would’ve thrown the whole event into turmoil. But yes, I know Tim.

Diana Pasulka: Is that right? Isn’t that interesting? So, I’m at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, which is very well known for oceanography and marine science. So they know him too — a lot of my colleagues know him. And he’s very much out there now about saving the oceans, but also about unidentified submersible objects. These are objects that my own father actually saw in the 1950s, when he was in the Coast Guard, and we just thought it was a weird tale my father would tell. And then when I met Tim Gallaudet, he showed me data from people going back to the 1920s out at sea — people keep those logs, and that’s what his work is doing right now. He’s looking at this data. There’s so much of it — that’s the thing. I think a lot of people have to understand that there’s so much data out there that it’s very overwhelming. There are astronomers looking at old data, from before we actually had things in the sky — we still had telescopes, and we did have data about things we couldn’t explain, people out at sea seeing things we couldn’t explain. And then the work I do, which is looking at historical, archival records, and seeing that people would see things, be very confused about what they were at first, and then say, “Well, maybe it’s the Virgin Mary’s flying house,” or “Maybe this is a soul from purgatory.” They just had different interpretive frameworks for understanding these things.

Ross Kenyon: I think American Cosmic is one of the first books I read where I was trying to take this phenomena very seriously — because I’m Catholic as well, and that’s a really weird story, right? God sends down his son to be crucified and die, and he’s resurrected from the dead. It’s a bizarre story, and it’s no more or less bizarre than many other stories that are either old stories or parts of new religious movements. I took a religious studies course in college, and they drilled into me that we don’t call them cults — we call them new religious movements, and we take them seriously. That was actually a pretty hard lesson for me to internalize. I had a friend who was a religious studies scholar, and he was describing doing ethnographic work, I believe, in the Caribbean, and said these people practice magic. And I remember saying, “No, they believe they’re practicing magic.” But part of doing good work is taking it at face value — that these people are doing what they say they’re doing, and granting it some amount of credibility, so they aren’t just people you’re studying from a hierarchical positionality. And once I started doing this — with the UFO phenomena, or UAP, or just hearing lots and lots of what I believe to be credible reports through shows like Otherworld, which I know you’ve appeared on — I started being overwhelmed by: what if there is something happening here, and it’s actually quite sophisticated and interesting, and no more or less strange than what I already believed? Now, I don’t know where to draw the line, though. How do you know if you’re talking to someone who’s sincere, or whether there’s crankiness in here? Should I just be open to literally all possibilities at the same time? Does it become a sort of — I don’t know — Cabin in the Woods postmodernism, where everything is true at the same time? We’re going to get into media theory, don’t worry — I’m going to reference a lot of films, and Videodrome is coming. But is it not just: everything is true at the same time? And how do I know what to make of all these things being experienced by people? That’s an enormous question. I’m so sorry to lay it on you — but what do I make of this?

Diana Pasulka: This is such a good question. In my field — you did a good job, you probably got an A in that class. So, the first thing we have to do is train people to understand that in the field of religious studies, it’s not theology. We’re looking at things from the perspective of a scientific framework. We’re looking at data, at people’s behaviors, to ascertain... Most people in the world are religious — more than 80 percent of the world is religious in some way. So religion is something important to study. But the question you raise... First, let me explain: in religious studies, we have what we call bracketing. What we do is listen to a lot of people. You’re right — a lot of stories about religion are weird. If we’re coming from a rationalist, modernist, Enlightenment framework, yeah, it looks weird. Jesus walking on water — well, I’ve never seen anybody walk on water. He’s born of a virgin. How do we account for these kinds of ideas? Thomas Jefferson was a person who believed in ethics, and he called himself a Christian, though he was a deist. But he didn’t like the miracle stories in the Bible, so he created his own Bible — the Jefferson Bible. He wanted to create an Enlightenment form of Christianity — a secular form — where he made Jesus into an ethical man, but not necessarily a divine being. In a sense, we’ve inherited that idea, a lot of us. It’s the basis for the university, for how we study. Religious studies is no different. So when we go into a community that has different beliefs — different from mine — I have to understand them as a different framework for reality. They have this framework for reality; it’s not my framework. I’m not asking them to accept my framework. That’s what we do in religious studies. But that doesn’t mean that’s how reality is. I believe reality is a certain way. I don’t know exactly how it is, but I believe it has certain attributes. I’m a realist. I do believe that two plus two is four. I don’t think we can just make up a truth. So I’m not a relativist. So when I’m going into communities of people who believe in UFOs, I want to see why they believe in UFOs. Sometimes they don’t have any evidence at all — they just say, “I had this experience.” Well, a lot of people in religious traditions just say that: “We had this experience.” So there’s that category. And this is what my problem was: I was used to working within that framework, where they just have testimonial evidence — no actual hard evidence. Well, I moved into an arena, the study of UFOs, where that became something we did have evidence for, and that’s why it was a problem for me. The problem you’re articulating was my problem too, and is still my problem. So I had to write that book differently. I had to approach it differently, and say: on the one hand, it appears there is evidence. There are radar reports that show that when people see these things in the sky, radar also picks up something they can’t account for. There are also fighter pilots — the people in the sky — who say, “We’ve encountered these things that we do not believe we created. We don’t believe it’s ours; it’s not China’s, not Russia’s, not the United States’. It’s a seemingly super-intelligent flying object.” And that does present some issues, like Lou Elizondo says. People, it seems forever, out in the ocean, have recorded things they couldn’t understand in the sky — anomalous objects. And this is all data that constitutes evidence. Then you have somebody like Gary, who’s now looking at debris from some of these events. He’s a microbiologist, an amazing one, one of the best in the world, so he’s able to drill down into these objects at a level that can identify the isotopes and the isotopic ratios. And he says that in the 1940s — and even today — if we were to create something like this, it would be incredibly expensive and almost unheard of. It would be unheard of in the 1940s. So he’s looking at this and going, “It’s manufactured. We don’t know by who, or how, it was manufactured.” Could it be super-advanced technology that’s secret and stealth? It could be. So, that said, I am not finished with that problem. That problem is still there. So that’s how I’ve been grappling with the whole thing. It’s a good question. To answer it: I don’t think we should take all of these and say they correspond to reality. Not all of them do. Some of them do.

Ross Kenyon: Well, I can see why you’re in Jacques Vallée’s good graces — you don’t have all the answers, nor pretend to. I think maybe that’s where some of this stuff ends up in crankier territory, where people think they have a universal theory of what this is, and I feel like your research often points to more questions — especially as it pertains to media theory. I don’t think anyone would’ve guessed you’d go so hard into Marshall McLuhan as you do. Why would a religious studies scholar working on the UAP phenomenon end up in Marshall McLuhan and media theory?

Diana Pasulka: Oh, yeah. I’ve been a fan of Marshall McLuhan and his work for years and years. I think he was right. He’s predicting a time when human beings are going to shift because of their relationship with technology. Technology’s—

Ross Kenyon: You know this is a risk, though, right? Woody Allen could come out at any point and drag him on camera to tell you you know nothing of his work. It’s really risky to talk about him for that reason.

Diana Pasulka: Because of Woody Allen?

Ross Kenyon: Like that scene in Annie Hall where he brings Marshall McLuhan out to scold the guy. It’s dangerous, talking about Marshall McLuhan. Anyway — please continue your actual point.

Diana Pasulka: Yeah, no, it’s true, it’s true. Marshall McLuhan — first off, I was interested in this time period. I’ve had a persistent focus on media as technology, media technology, and from my Purgatory book I just kind of brought it to the contemporary period. In the contemporary period, I think Marshall McLuhan called it correctly — what’s happening right now with the shift from digital technology to AI-super-powered digital technology. He said it was going to change the way we live and perceive reality, change our brains. He said a lot of things that were really interesting. And he wasn’t the only one, but he was the most recent and, I think, the most accurate. So I chose to look at his theories again — and I’ve always taught him, by the way; when I do my religion and popular culture class, I always teach Marshall McLuhan. He’s interesting because what I found is it’s not just him — it’s also the Jesuit paleontologist of the early 20th century, Teilhard de Chardin. He said very similar things to Marshall McLuhan. In fact, they predict a new form of human being. Now, how does this correspond with UFOs? When you get into the communities of experiencers — experiencers are people who’ve had UFO sightings and events in their lives, and they call themselves experiencers — they tend to say similar things. One of the things they say — and this is where it gets into religion, so it sounds weird to a lot of people — is that human beings are undergoing this shift because of UFOs. The aliens, or the extraterrestrials, or interdimensional beings, whatever they are, are actually cultivating human beings and helping them evolve. Some of them believe that evolution is bad — a bad cultivation — and a good portion of them believe it’s good. So you have this dichotomy. Marshall McLuhan is not saying it’s the aliens’ fault. He’s basically saying, “We are definitely changing, and this is because of technology.” And he predicts how that’s going to happen. That’s where, in my book The Others, I do a deep dive into Marshall McLuhan, look at Teilhard de Chardin, and Arthur C. Clarke, of all people. Those are the visionaries whose work I’m looking at. They all say relatively the same thing. And then there’s a person who’s living — his name is Mark Stahlman — and he says similar things. Thankfully, I can ask him: “Is this what you mean, Mark?” Everyone else has passed away, but Mark is Catholic. He’s a person who knows a lot about AI — he’s used it and worked with it for many years, most of his life. He’s the godson of Norbert Wiener, who a lot of people don’t know, but if you read his books from the 1940s and ‘50s, you’ll see he was already warning us about AI, saying, “This is going to take over. We have to be careful of these intelligent machines.” Norbert Wiener worked with Mark’s father, who was an MIT professor, and they did the same kind of thing, and Mark inherited that. He knew Marshall McLuhan’s grandson and son, he knows about McLuhan’s work, and he’s also the head of the Center for the Study of Digital Life.

Ross Kenyon: When I think about Marshall McLuhan — and this is a very layperson’s reading, correct me if I’m wrong — it’s about the tools we use becoming somaticized. They become part of our body, part of our mind. Media is a tool we use, and the phone and digital devices become extensions of our brain — and in fact become like a networked brain in some way. And I also link this to someone like Donna Haraway — someone I know you’ve had a relationship with, and whose work has puzzled me for a very long time. It’s a hard read, and she’s obviously very clever, but it’s one of those things where you have to wrap your mind around quite a number of things to make sense of it. I think it’s easier now with AI, where we can see the impact of an external brain-of-brains, or a mind outside our own. If you watch something like — I imagine you’ve seen David Cronenberg’s Videodrome. Have you seen that?

Diana Pasulka: Yes.

Ross Kenyon: How could you not have? But yeah — “long live the new flesh,” and you have the merging with television. It feels hokey in hindsight, because you’re like, TV wasn’t really that important. But I’m sure if you were at that time, noticing the advent of cable and how ubiquitous television was becoming, maybe it was different. In hindsight you’re like, “Eh, people watch TV, so what?” But now, with AI, you can actually see the going-into-the-TV-screen — that moment in the film — actually happening now. Whereas I don’t think that happened with television. Although maybe, because I was raised in an age where television was so ubiquitous, I just don’t see how my own brain and personality were impacted by the union with media technology at that exact moment in time. That’s why I’m sort of blind to it. So is it actually a new thing with AI? Was television as important as it’s portrayed in Videodrome? Or is AI just the same thing magnified — multiplied several thousand times?

Diana Pasulka: Yeah, I think it’s definitely magnified. But, okay — David Cronenberg is interesting because, I could be wrong, but I believe he was a student of Marshall McLuhan’s. And—

Ross Kenyon: That movie is basically Marshall McLuhan in video form, is it not? It feels pretty on the nose.

Diana Pasulka: It is, yeah. I just want to be careful what I say. But yes — Marshall McLuhan is Professor O’Blivion in the movie, right? So the movie is about the transition of the human being into the evolution of human beings through this co-evolution with technology. Technology is basically the new flesh, like you put it. And you’re correct — it somaticizes. There’s an enfleshment that happens with our interaction with technology. This becomes very evident when we look at social media. Take the progression of social media. First we have Facebook — which Mark Stahlman calls “television social media.” We’ve got a television version of social media: you can write stuff — in fact, there’s no limit to what you can write — you can upload photos and videos, and we’re all looking at it, and there’s a feed. It kind of makes sense to us. Then we get to Instagram and Twitter — second-generation social media. No more can you write anything on Twitter; you can only write, what is it, like 140 characters. So you’re stuck with posting what you can post, very short. It kills your attention span right there. And you’re interacting with it all the time, because who doesn’t have their phone with them all the time now? Then you’ve got Instagram, which is just photos, videos, these kinds of things. And then you have TikTok, which again shifts everything, and even the social media images migrate into internet culture — so you go on your search engine, and everything is a short video. YouTube now integrates TikTok-style short videos, and so forth. You can’t really get away from it. Does it impact the way we think? Absolutely. Does it impact us physiologically? A hundred percent. This is what the AI trials we’ve recently been watching — with Meta and so forth — are about. This is really important, because it’s the design of these platforms that’s hurting us, especially young people and the development of their brains. It’s not the content. And that’s what Marshall McLuhan was trying to say. Television — what did it do? It shifted people. They no longer had community events down at the pub. And by the way, a pub is a public house — that’s what a pub is. We no longer have these public houses; everybody’s insulated in their living rooms, watching TV together. And what’s sad is that now that seems like a healthy thing to do — at least you’re with each other, you’re not on your phone; your son’s upstairs, you’re downstairs, this kind of thing. So that’s what’s sad: we’ve even forgotten how to be together in public spaces. Television did that to us. And you and I, we grew up with TV — we were acclimated already, we were born into it. We never had the “before” time. So think of what young people today are going through. My kids are Gen Z-ers, so they’re all between 18 and 22, and that’s the age of my students. I started teaching 24 years ago, so I got to see the whole shift — when students were actually hanging out with each other in the hallways, talking to each other, doing the things students do. Now, nothing like that; they’re all on their phones. Students come to me now, Ross, and ask me if I’ll be the head of the chess club, because they want to hang out with each other without phones. I’m not kidding. It’s really sad. They know what’s happening. It’s really difficult — it’s almost as if we can’t fight against it.

Ross Kenyon: Is this where you begin to link to a broader concept of nonhuman intelligences? Is this the linkage point for your work?

Diana Pasulka: So — there are a few things, and a few that were surprising to me. This is why I like my work, because I do a lot of things. When I was looking at purgatory, I found that purgatory was a place in Ireland, and you could still go there. It’s on a lake — it’s called Lough Derg, an island on this lake, the Red Lake in Ireland. It’s still a pilgrimage; probably a million people a year go there. People used to go there and go into a cave, and if they were able to survive the night in the cave, they were free of sin. So that was purgatory.

Ross Kenyon: You had to cut off Darth Vader’s head, and you take the mask off, and it’s actually yourself the whole time.

Diana Pasulka: Yeah.

Ross Kenyon: You have to confront your Jungian shadow in there? How fun.

Diana Pasulka: Yeah. They thought they were demons, so I guess they were bad people. In fact, you had to be really bad in order to go to this cave. So — my point is that I’m surprised when I find this stuff out. I’m like, “Wow, really?” So I was surprised to find out, when I looked through Marshall McLuhan and through the work of Teilhard de Chardin, that there were instances of other intelligences. In Marshall McLuhan, though, it’s not — he’s not talking about UFOs. He’s talking about a new form of the human. Now, he also has a conversion. He doesn’t start out Christian. He’s learning all of this stuff at Cambridge — this is the Western tradition — and then what happens is he decides, “I wonder if this stuff is real.” He says, “I’ll just ask God. I’ll test it out.” So he prays: “Is this stuff real? Send me a sign.” And lo and behold, a bunch of signs come, and they don’t stop — they keep coming. He’s overwhelmed, and he converts to Catholicism. And he talks about this thing called his spiritual sense, which apparently he has. I was really amazed by this, because he described it perfectly, exactly like Teilhard de Chardin’s spiritual sense. And the spiritual sense is something you see in religious tradition. In my basic intro-to-religion class, I say, “What do we know about religion? Tell me some common things.” And a lot of students say, “Well, people pray, they meditate, they do this.” Yes, they do. Why do they do that? What are they doing? It seems kind of odd — they all do it? What they’re doing is engaging with this sense, this spiritual sense. We’ve lost that tradition today; we don’t believe we have it. But these guys — Teilhard and Marshall — they knew they had it, because theirs was just like our sense of sight, or taste, or touch. Theirs was that obvious to them, as our senses are to us. And I had to write about that, because it was overwhelmingly important to their work. In fact, that’s where their work comes from — this very intense recognition that there’s a spiritual sense. Marshall McLuhan said the spiritual sense will be shifted through technology, and I do see that. Today, of course, we have people who study the brain. There have been these studies — that’s what I decided to look into when I saw, wow, the spiritual sense is really important to these people. I wondered what people are saying about it now. So I started to look into cognitive science — there’s this author who wrote The Awakened Brain, and she does cognitive science, looking at how, when people are involved in religious practices, certain parts of their brain light up. This would indicate regions of the brain where perhaps the spiritual sense resides — I don’t know. But that’s what I’m looking at now: this spiritual sense. And what happens is that when young people are using social media, they’re not engaging that sense. In religious traditions, it’s built in — there’s bar mitzvah, there’s confirmation in Catholicism — that bring young people into the recognition that they’re now responsible for cultivating an interior sense. But this is a lost tradition. There are some religions that still practice it and still teach young people that, but for the most part it’s definitely being lost — and it might be permanently lost, if we allow social media to inhabit that sense now.

Ross Kenyon: In one of the early chapters of the new book, you mention that social media, and the world it’s created, might actually be a good candidate for the Antichrist — contra Peter Thiel’s Greta-Thunberg-safetyism kind of take on that. Is that an accurate representation of how you feel about this?

Diana Pasulka: Well, that’s a provocative description of it. But I’d been to a conference where Peter Thiel gave his talk on the Antichrist, and it caused me to think hard about the Antichrist. And I thought, “You know, I don’t think he has that right,” because he never talked about the interior sense. He did talk a lot about precedents — literary precedents, Catholics writing about the Antichrist and so forth. One of the books is by — I forget his first name, but his last name is Benson — and it’s called Lord of the World. And his point — he’s writing in the early 20th century — is this: during the end time, what happens is that people have completely lost their interior senses. They don’t even know they exist. And because they’ve lost their interior sense, their spiritual sense, evil becomes routine. Euthanasia is rampant — these things that Christians don’t like — and it’s considered a good thing. In fact, “euthanasia” is Greek for “a good death.” So they think when a person reaches a certain age, if they don’t want to live, they should be allowed to die — and many people believe that today. Christians generally don’t believe that. So his point is that there’s good — there’s good in boring, ordinary life, in boring, ordinary things; there’s goodness in those. And because we live in a world that doesn’t recognize that, it’s just going to go away. What will be the end time is that we just don’t even know we have a spiritual sense, or a spiritual life, and that ordinary good things are ordinary good things. We won’t even know that. So that’s what I wanted to point out. And I said, “What’s doing that to us now?” Social media is doing that to us now. It’s literally erasing that part of our brain, and I thought that would be the candidate. I’m not saying social media is the Antichrist — because in some countries it’s regulated, and it’s actually helpful. But certainly the way it is here — if we’re going to identify one, that would be a candidate. That would be my top candidate.

Ross Kenyon: One thing I wanted to ask you about while I have you here: for some reason I’ve read a lot of science fiction, and I never noticed how much psychic phenomena show up in it. And Childhood’s End — I hadn’t read that one until I came across it in your work — you discuss it at length in The Others, but there’s a strong sense that the evolution will not merely be technological, but will in some cases be networked brains, psychic phenomena. It’s possible this is parable or symbolism about how we’ll network — as envisioned from a pre-cybernetic stage of human development, like when Arthur C. Clarke is writing. Why is that so prominent in science fiction, and why does it basically go invisible for so much of it? Once you pointed it out, I started watching films like Solaris — which I recently watched — where I’m like, “Oh, I didn’t know this was a supernatural... it’s an alien, space movie, but it’s also psychic. It’s spiritual. Something else is happening here.” Why isn’t that represented? Because science fiction almost presupposes a materialist paradigm — and it’s not true — and I think people misunderstand the genre when they make it too materialistic. Why do you think we’ve misinterpreted the genre?

Diana Pasulka: Yeah, it’s really interesting. First off, Arthur C. Clarke definitely believed in telepathy, mind reading, that kind of thing. He thought there were a lot of fakers out there making money from it, so that kind of turned him off to studying it — but he definitely believed in it. And so did Marshall McLuhan. What’s interesting is that both of these men believed in it, but they didn’t necessarily give it the status of something supernatural — because they believed... This is one of Arthur C. Clarke’s laws: it’s technology we just haven’t figured out yet. And my point in writing that — and I included some examples — is that technology’s already figured it out. I’ve written a lot of articles that are free out there, by the way — they’re kind of academic, boring stuff, you have to want to learn about that thing, but they’re journal articles — and one of them talked about these professors, I think this was in 2017, so you can imagine this has gotten much, much better. They were basically creating software that could read our brainwaves in various ways. Fast-forward to 2023, and I’m at South by Southwest talking to some tech people, and they’re talking about experiencing this — having a computer software program read their brainwaves while they’re thinking about their dog, and then seeing their dog appear, just as they imagine it, on the computer screen. So this, I think, is what McLuhan and Arthur C. Clarke were pointing out — that nothing’s really supernatural, it’s more naturalistic. It’s this naturalistic kind of idea. And I also link this to Steven Dick’s analysis of what he calls post-biological existence. He’s a NASA historian, and he’s written a lot — he has a huge bibliography on potential extraterrestrial life. He said the reason we’re most likely not aware of it is because it’s so advanced that it’s incommensurable — our brains aren’t capable of understanding it. But he provides an analysis of how we can understand how it exists today, and it’s technological. It gets beyond a certain technological stage — past the AI stage — and it’s self-replicating, and it becomes its own life form, and for us it would be like a deity. It would be able to read our minds, blink in and out of our reality. So he sees it as a natural evolution.

Ross Kenyon: So you’re just rejecting the framing of natural versus supernatural? You think that’s a misleading taxonomy?

Diana Pasulka: I’m not necessarily rejecting that — no, I’m not doing that. What I’m doing is saying that certainly Arthur C. Clarke rejects it, and certainly in a sense Marshall McLuhan does on some level — even though he’s a professed Catholic, he’s basically saying certain things are definitely going to be more natural, like mind reading. We’re not going to have any sense of privacy in the future, he said — and he was speaking in the 1960s, ‘70s, ‘80s, really. So he’s talking about our future, what we’re living through now. He’s saying: privacy, kiss it goodbye. There are a lot of things we take for granted in terms of what a human being is, and he says those things will not obtain in the future. That’s what I’m saying. Personally, my own religion — I am Catholic. I believe in God and the supernatural reality of God. But does that preclude looking at these kinds of things and seeing them from their perspective? No, I can do that. And in fact, if you look at the history of the saints, like Joseph of Cupertino and so forth, they mind-read. They do mind-read.

Ross Kenyon: What do you think it’s going to be like to be a human moving forward, in the next couple of years? Are we going to radically change our ontology, or are we going to have to update what it even means?

Diana Pasulka: Oh, definitely. I think we’re going to update what it means. I think religion is going to be very important for people — I think they’re going to rethink what it means. And I know a lot of communities right now are already doing this. If you look at certain communities — and we should not look down upon them, like the Amish. There’s a lot of wisdom there. Many Amish communities — by the way, they’re varied in their beliefs, they’re not all the same — in certain of those communities, they don’t entirely reject technology. They reject what will prevent them from being fully engaged with God and their families, and the things their religion tells them are important, like family life and community life. So if family life and community life are so important, they reject television. You see what I’m saying? There’s a lot of wisdom in certain communities. Certain Indigenous communities have rejected writing as a form of technology, because they knew it would change their culture if they lost their oral tradition. So there’s a lot of wisdom, I think, that we can gain from looking at the variety of ways that what you’d call non-secular religions relate to technology and what we’d call progress.

Ross Kenyon: And a secular religion being something like transhumanism, or Ray Kurzweil singularity-type talk — that might be an example of a secular religion?

Diana Pasulka: Okay, sorry — I didn’t identify what I meant by that. Those would be new religious movements, which you’ve learned about — religions within the last 150 years. But I’m calling “secular religion” even Christian religions that have acclimated to the rationalist, Enlightenment frameworks. Not necessarily people who aren’t practicing Christians, or whatever their religion is — but the tenets of their religion are that nonhuman intelligences, like angels and demons, exist, that supernatural things exist. But they say, “Well, they existed in the first century, but they don’t exist now.” I would call that secular Christianity.

Ross Kenyon: How interesting. I feel like belief in those things is probably stronger than it’s been in a long time, with the rise of occult practice and people being really interested in astrology and various new age and occult things. But I imagine there’s a fair amount of overlap between summoning AI and summoning trans-dimensional beings. Some people do weird out in that kind of way.

Diana Pasulka: That’s right. That’s right. They do. Absolutely.

Ross Kenyon: Although “weirded out” is sort of a pejorative way to put it — I don’t even know how I want to keep it exactly as framed. Diana, thanks for coming on. I’m going to have to make the link to climate change in this intro — but climate change is a big question about what it means to be human in a world that’s changing, and your writing is interesting to me because it deals with that from what seems like a perpendicular angle, but isn’t at all. I feel like all this stuff is wrapped up in the same kinds of questions. And thanks for taking a flyer on a show like this.

Diana Pasulka: Oh, yeah. This is great. I really had a great conversation.

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I've been reading Diana's books for years. I forgot how American Cosmic found its way into my hands, but I loved the restrained religious studies orientation of treating unidentified flying object (UFO)/unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) experiencers seriously, the intersection with Marshall McLuhan and media studies, and the forcing function of non-human intelligence like AI bursting onto the scene whether we were ready for it or not.

Her new book, The Others: UFOs, AI, and The Hidden Forces Guiding Human Destiny, will be released on July 28th. Grab yourself a copy and dig into some real mind-bending and fun ideas. Even if you think this stuff is far out, as society increasingly takes supernormal/paranormal activity seriously and embeds artificial intelligence in so many places, books like Diana's are going to be key for understanding what is happening to our humanity, our being, and our experience of being.

And yet, somehow I only said "ontology" once in this podcast. I guess that religious studies restraint is rubbing off on me.

Long live the new flesh!

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The Awakened Brain: The New Science of Spirituality and Our Quest for an Inspired Life by Lisa Miller

Luis Elizondo

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I have way more links on the Substack article about this episode. Come check it out.

Listen in as I read an essay I recently wrote about the endless quest to perfectly categorize the world, and while that may be a useful project for some purposes, it isn't anywhere close to the main reasons the world looks the way that it does.

Listen in and you'll get surrealist sculpture, Michael Polanyi, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Plato. Who can truly say no to an offer like that?

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Here's the essay on Substack if you'd like to read along and check out the endnotes.

I did something I have not done before: I rereleased an old episode of Reversing Climate Change. You can listen to this rerelease on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you get your podcasts, or the entire episode in full right below this paragraph.

Lately, it seems it’s been all about Charles C. Mann. Wizards and prophets as a conceptual schema keeps coming up. Over and over. His split between the wizards, who think that progress and technology will continue to solve more problems than they create, and prophets, those who think we’re beyond limits and need to find balance, order, and simplicity, is applicable to so much in climate and environmentalism. In fact, I did a whole monologue show about how his framework helps us make sense of splits over things like Ezra Klein’s Abundance and Paul Kingsnorth’s entire corpus.

And it also recently came up in the episode I did on science fiction and literary theory…

I am going to continue experiment with rereleasing some of the excellent old content buried in this catalogue. The ones that might still be relevant and add some modest value to your life.

I hope you enjoy the quaint strut down memory lane, with the old Nori branding no less!

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Full Transcript

Ross Kenyon: Hello, this is Ross Kenyon, host of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m not sure I’ve ever done this before: I’m re-releasing an old episode. There are so many great episodes buried in the catalog — including bonus episodes, there are probably the better part of 500 of them on Reversing Climate Change — including some of the ones that have influenced the show the most.

Recently, Charles C. Mann’s taxonomy of wizard and prophet has come up on several shows. It’s such a great shorthand for understanding some of the big disagreements in climate politics and environmentalism. I recently did a monologue episode where I contrasted Ezra Klein with Paul Kingsnorth and discussed the abundance paradigm as paradigmatic of being a wizard, and I contrasted it with Paul Kingsnorth’s prophet status.

Sometimes I’ll be catching up with someone and they’ll ask me, “Hey, did you ever read 1491?” And I try not to pat myself on the back too much, but I’ll say, “Well, since you mention it, Charles was on the show once upon a time, and I was so happy to get him, because he’s a wonderful writer and has taught me a lot.” This happened with a friend recently, and if she didn’t know this episode existed, I suspect there are probably a lot of great episodes that should be resurfaced in this way.

In any case, enjoy this time capsule. You’ll hear all of the old Nori branding for the podcast — this used to be a project of a company I co-founded called Nori. Don’t let that distract you; it’s the same show. There have been a lot of new listeners since. But whatever — enjoy the show. Take this walk down memory lane with me, and enjoy this episode with Charles C. Mann.

Ross Kenyon: Hello, and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon. Today I have with me Charles C. Mann, journalist and author of 1491, 1493, and The Wizard and the Prophet. He’s also a correspondent for The Atlantic, Wired, and Science. Thanks for being here, Charles.

Charles C. Mann: It’s my pleasure.

Ross Kenyon: Your work comes up all the time, and we recently did a Nori Patreon book club for The Wizard and the Prophet for the month of April. It generated a lot of discussion and debate. I think this is a great book, and a great way to frame various schools of thought within the environmental movement. Why don’t you give us a nice baseline here: what exactly are these camps? Who are the avatars of each that you feature in the book, and how are you conceptualizing the split?

Charles C. Mann: Basically, I’m a journalist, as you said, and I’ve been reporting on environmental issues since the late 1980s — talking to activists, politicians, and above all, researchers. Over time, I came to realize that the answers I was getting to my questions fell into two broad camps. Not always, but generally, and I thought of them as wizards and prophets. Wizards essentially are the people who want what’s disparagingly called the techno-fix. Their argument is, “Look, we have these technical challenges from the things we want to do and the growth of our economies, and so what we need to do is switch on the science-and-technology machine and essentially produce our way out of our dilemmas.” The prophets, on the other hand, say, “That’s completely wrong. That’s exactly the wrong direction. It’s doing more of what’s gotten us into trouble in the past, and what we need to do is conserve and radically cut back and reduce the human footprint.”

And a while ago, it suddenly dawned on me that these two approaches were kind of the opposite of each other, and that many of the conflicts I saw — both within the environmental movement and between the environmental movement and society — were expressions of the conflict between wizards and prophets. And I thought, “Geez, I’d really like to read something about that.” And then I didn’t find it, so I decided, well, okay, I’ll try to do it, since nobody else is.

Ross Kenyon: And I think you do a very good job of being fair to both of these camps, because they each have a part of the puzzle. Depending on the issue or the application within environmental concerns, you might find yourself leaning one way or the other. I think you do a very good job of steelmanning for the listener — the opposite of strawmanning. You treat both of these schools of thought maybe even more fairly than you had to in order to write this book.

Charles C. Mann: Well, thank you very much. I think it’s important, and the reason is that relatively soon in my research, it dawned on me that these differences were not just pragmatic differences about how you do this or that — they expressed values. And they’re values that everybody shares, in one proportion or another; we just give different weights to them. So typically, prophets value community and the idea that we’re all part of nature, that we’re embedded in this much, much larger system in which we should play our assigned role. And the wizards, on the contrary, are much more about individual liberty and freedom — the idea of maximizing human potential and people living in the best possible way they can. And we all like both of these things in different amounts. It’s just that they come into conflict, and where you end up on which side of that conflict determines a lot about whether you’re appealed to by the wizards or the prophets.

Ross Kenyon: And in the book you use a very interesting framing device. I saw your book described as a joint biography, or some such. So you have these two avatars of these two ways of being and thinking. Who are they, and what, broadly, are their life arcs?

Charles C. Mann: Well, as I said, I’ve been a journalist for a long time, and over the years I realized I’d often heard this name, Norman Borlaug. People who I later came to think of as wizards would say, “I want to do for X what Borlaug did for wheat.” Norman Borlaug is the main figure in what’s called the Green Revolution, which is the mix of high-yielding hybrid seeds, high-intensity fertilizer, and high-volume irrigation that doubled, tripled, or even quadrupled global grain yields in the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s. It had a huge impact on our lives. One way of putting it is that as far back as historians can go, the majority of humankind has faced hunger at some point in the year. When I graduated from high school, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimated that between 40 and 60 percent of the world’s population was malnourished. Now those same people estimate it’s on the order of 8 to 10 percent. So you see this enormous, dramatic decline that the Green Revolution had a lot to do with. People saw that, and took a very powerful lesson from it: you switch on the science machine, and you can have this dramatic impact on life — and they hope they can do the same in whatever field they’re in. So that’s the reason for looking at Borlaug as this sort of prototypical wizard.

At about the same time, I realized that when I talked to especially older environmentalists, I’d hear this name occasionally that I’d certainly never heard in public discourse: a guy named William Vogt. Essentially, he put together the ideas behind the modern environmental movement. He wrote the first modern “we’re all going to hell” book, if you know what I mean — and that was back in 1948. It was called Road to Survival. If you read people like Jared Diamond, or Paul Ehrlich, or Bill McKibben to some extent, or Naomi Klein — all these kinds of people — their ideas directly trace back to William Vogt. And then I was fascinated to realize that they both got their ideas, which are diametrically opposed to each other, at the same time and in the same place: rural central Mexico, in the mid-1940s.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I bet the journalist in you loved that you found that nice little connection.

Charles C. Mann: Oh, absolutely. I was like, “Wait a minute. There’s a way you could actually tell this story — the two people got their ideas at the same place and time, met, had this immediate collision, and never spoke to each other again.”

Ross Kenyon: Wow. Yeah, I like that. Nice intersection. I’m trying to think — you just gave a great list of other people who may qualify as prophets that are currently operating. Who might be some of the great wizards? The first person who comes to mind is also an alumnus of this podcast: Ted Nordhaus of the Breakthrough Institute. Do you think that’s fair? And who else might be in his company?

Charles C. Mann: Sure. There are lots of those kinds of people. Hans Rosling, the guy who wrote Factfulness, would probably be another. Jesse Ausubel; lots of people with Resources for the Future. And one of your guests, Ramez Naam — a good friend of mine — would certainly count as one; he’s told me so himself. You can find them all over. They’re the people boosting the idea of huge solar installations, huge wind installations; the people who want to do next-generation nukes; the people who argue — I think Emma Marris recently argued in Wired that GMOs are necessary to save nature. So that kind of approach is a wizard’s approach. And by the way, just by naming them, I’m not trying to single them out or criticize them. I’m just saying they’re exemplars of a kind of tendency that’s been around in the environmental movement since the very beginning. Norman Borlaug, the guy described as an agricultural scientist, also saw himself as an environmentalist, because he believed that intensifying production and having this much more, quote-unquote, “scientific method of agriculture” would lead to increased yields and fewer demands on nature — so you wouldn’t have hungry people going out into the forests and meadows and stripping them bare.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s my intention not to name and shame these people either, because I think it’s very useful in learning to split ideas into their various camps. I like that there’s a wizard and a prophet group, and that helps me really wrap my head around this in a clear way. If one of them clearly was right about 100 percent of everything, there would no longer be a dichotomy and this partition between them — one of them would’ve just concretely won, once and for all. So I think that means each of them has something to say here. That being said, when you create a nice partition and there are two broad schools of thought within an issue group, that’s just begging to be disrupted and complicated. So what are some of the complexities that might face such a divide?

Charles C. Mann: Well, first I should say that what I’m talking about is a kind of mental model, for how to sort things. There’s a famous expression that all models are wrong, but some are useful. So the first thing to stipulate is that there are tons of exceptions and caveats in this model. The question is: is it a useful way to break things down? I think it is. And one of the complexities is that, say, take Ted Nordhaus at the Breakthrough Institute. I think Ted would be appalled if any of this were taken as somehow meaning that his belief in technological solutions equals a lack of love of nature and a lack of respect for the natural world. And similarly, I think prophets who are, say, in favor of organic farming, embedding themselves in the community, are very upset at being taken for anti-science. There’s a guy just down the road — I live in a small town in Massachusetts, and just down the road from me is a small organic farm, and they regard themselves as highly scientific, because they see themselves as embedded in the ecosystems around them, and they’ve gone to considerable trouble to understand how these work. So one way to put it is that they both express different parts of a love of nature and different parts of a love of science.

Ross Kenyon: Okay, that’s useful. One of the other axes that seems like it might map onto wizards and prophets is: to what degree do you believe in economies of scale versus decentralization?

Charles C. Mann: Yes, that’s exactly it. The wizards typically — not always — look to centralized solutions and economies of scale. The prophets regard those as brittle, and tend to look for decentralized networks. And there’s a whole division about whether they are democratic or not.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, because I could definitely think of counterexamples too, especially with something like the potential of blockchain to be radically decentralizing in an important way. A lot of the people who are extremely wizardly about blockchains are also some of the strongest advocates I know against centralized institutions. That isn’t to say it breaks the model, just maybe—

Charles C. Mann: Well, take solar power, for example. There are sort of two models of solar power. One is gigantic installations. You hear this calculation: you cover X amount of the Arizona desert in solar panels, and that would be enough to power the entire country. And the idea is that on some level you should actually do that — we should have these huge places in the desert, pipe it around the country, and leave the rest for nature. And the prophets tend to viscerally react against that, because they see it as creating a kind of sacrifice zone. What they like is the idea of these immense networks of neighborhood solar — lots and lots of rooftop and small-scale installations, all networked together, passing power back and forth. They see that as under much more local control, much more decentralized, much more resilient in case of disaster. So you get an identical technology, the PV panel, thought of in two remarkably different ways.

Ross Kenyon: Another axis I’d like to plop on top of this and see if it maps at all: do you see it fitting along partisan lines, or even just political-philosophy lines? Or is it more complicated than that?

Charles C. Mann: Well, it’s a little bit. It’s certainly the case that at various times... For instance, as we speak, there’s a relatively recent, Michael Moore–produced documentary, Planet of the Humans—

Ross Kenyon: Oh, I saw this. Everyone’s been yelling about it, so let’s dig in.

Charles C. Mann: Yeah. Well, in my opinion, it’s not particularly good — let’s put it that way. But one of the things it does is it calls various environmentalists who have embraced larger-scale solutions — which are typically wizards — corporate sellouts, and the implication is that they’re sort of playing into the hands of the right and the capitalists. So there’s a kind of political gloss you can put on it. But I think at bottom it isn’t really like that, so much, because there are plenty of people on both sides who like the different values. Typically wizards are the ones who argue that technology will let everybody pack in together into these super-dense cities, where knowledge can be centralized and accumulated and passed on better, leaving the rest of the world for nature. And the prophets typically are small-town-type people, who like the idea of these smaller-scale communities and regard the mega-cities embraced by people like Ted at the Breakthrough Institute as kind of cesspools of corruption and inequality. And you’ll find people on the right and left on both sides of that debate.

Ross Kenyon: Absolutely. And when I think about this too, especially within the prophet camp, I can think of many conservatives I know, thinkers I like, who prefer much smaller institutions that are much more local. And I also know a lot of people who are more in the permaculture, small-farms movement, who very well might end up neighbors and agreed on that one thing, even though their lives may look very different.

Charles C. Mann: Yes. And one of the things I was pleased to see — it’s not really something I thought of when I first started — is that it occurred to me that if I looked at things from this viewpoint, I might get a little past a kind of partisan divide right now that has devolved into often a kind of score-keeping that isn’t really particularly useful.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. When you say something like that, it reminds me of — I think I got this from Nathanael Johnson at Grist — that fights over nuclear power are more symbolic of a values divide than actually about the science of whether nuclear is good or not. Is that what you’re hinting at?

Charles C. Mann: Yes. The thing I’d slightly amend is that often it’s said that these fights are “just about values and what you prefer,” rather than about science — and that’s said to dismiss the values. But I actually think the values are really, really important, and the discussion would be much more useful if it were actually about the values, rather than the sort of pretend argument about the science.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, so there’s a proxy war way downstream that we’re fighting, but you want to go back and say, “What kind of world do you actually want to create?” You think we should be talking on that level?

Charles C. Mann: Yeah. The reason that people I know of don’t like nuclear power, at bottom, is not because of this or that radiation counter, this or that environmental footprint. It’s because they see it as this giant facility that’s tinkering with things people should have a lot more humility about.

Ross Kenyon: Got it. Yeah, I think that’s a very fair point.

Charles C. Mann: And that’s not a bad argument, to me. The idea that we need to think about our place in the order of creation and respect it — that’s not a terrible argument. But people are afraid to make these kinds of spiritual or religious or moral or ethical arguments — whatever word you want to use. And so instead they drag in these proxies, as you pointed out, where they say, “Oh, it’s unsafe,” or something, when at bottom, even if it were somehow proven to be safe, they just don’t want to go down that path. And very similar logic applies to GMOs.

Ross Kenyon: Oh, Charles — I remember I wanted to do this, and I’m glad I recalled it. I think I found basically the perfect summation of the prophet way of thinking at its most extreme, and it also fits very neatly in here. I don’t know if you know this, but have you read The Call of Cthulhu by H.P. Lovecraft?

Charles C. Mann: Well, that sentence did not end up like I expected it to. Uh-oh. Yes, I read it, but a long time ago.

Ross Kenyon: All right, check this out. I love this paragraph. It’s beautiful, and a bit terrifying. “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.” What do you think of that? Phew.

Charles C. Mann: That’s pretty close. That’s pretty close. Vintage H.P. Lovecraft — super overwritten, but onto something.

Ross Kenyon: Well, yeah, absolutely. There’s an ornateness there that’s out of fashion these days, among many other things he thought.

Charles C. Mann: Yeah. I read that when I was 17 or 18, and it certainly left an impression in general, but obviously I didn’t remember that paragraph. Terrific — thanks for sharing it.

Ross Kenyon: No problem. Sorry to just add a non-diegetic insert there, for my own edification. Well, okay — one thing I wanted us to get to: when I think about schools of thought or paradigms, I like to think of them kaleidoscopically. I like being able to flip through them and say, “Okay, if I think about a problem this way, it illuminates this thing, but it also has its own blind spot in this way.” And I think one of the signs of intelligence I look for — because I value this, I’m sort of placing myself, but that aside — is that the more of those you can hold, oftentimes the better off you are at understanding problems. So if we’re able to treat the wizard and the prophet paradigms kaleidoscopically, what do you think they’re showing us, and what do you think they’re obscuring?

Charles C. Mann: Interesting. So you’re saying that a point of view is — I guess I’d think of it this way — like a spotlight. It casts intense light, but also dark shadows.

Ross Kenyon: Yes, exactly.

Charles C. Mann: In this particular case, I’d say one of the things wizards often do is make a kind of pragmatic case that this is the way to go, because these features of the prophet’s worldview are counterproductive, or don’t make sense, or will make things worse. So you see all the time calculations like: “If all farming were organic, we would produce much less on much more land, and it would be an environmental disaster.” I’m sure you’ve read things like that.

Ross Kenyon: Mm-hmm.

Charles C. Mann: And I want to say to them that what’s missing here — and missing from many of these things — is that the current type of farming we have is a social arrangement. It’s been carefully put together in some places and haphazardly in others, but it depends on an entire body of institutions and laws and practices that have largely been created since the 1940s and ‘50s. There’s nothing inevitable about that. So one of the exercises I did: I went to northwest Illinois, and I met this guy who’s kind of a model prophet farmer, and his neighbor is a kind of model wizard farmer. And I got them to write down all the subsidies of various types that they were eligible for. Essentially, the wizard farmer produced an entire page of different programs devoted to helping his kind of farm go. And the prophet farmer had nothing — he didn’t exist, as far as the state, local, and federal governments were concerned. And the wizard farmer cheerfully confessed that without all these federal, state, and local initiatives he was embedded in, his farm would collapse. So it’s very difficult to make that kind of comparison, because they exist in such different worlds. And often the wizards forget about the social, legal, historical, cultural aspects of this. The prophets, meanwhile, are often quite strong on the potential risks of these things. They’re much less good, in my view, at understanding the nitty-gritty social changes that would be required to achieve their vision.

Again, to talk about the same example — the fundamental difference, as far as I could see, between the organic farm and the farm next to it, which was all GMOs, with corn and soy... it wasn’t what they were growing, it was the different labor amounts. The smaller-scale, much more complicated farm needed many, many more workers. The one was 1,200 acres, and it had two workers and two million dollars’ worth of equipment. The other one had a thousand different crops and was recreating natural ecosystems — it was an amazing place, but it had 30 different workers. And the need to pay those workers meant his prices were very high; you couldn’t charge cheap for this. The reason is that there are a zillion subsidies for agricultural equipment, but zero subsidies for farm labor. The fundamental difference between them was social. And I typically think that people who are very embracing of these ideas don’t see how contingent their successes would be on these social, historical, and cultural arrangements.

Ross Kenyon: That’s an interesting angle. I hadn’t thought about it that way. When I think about prophets, their aesthetic ideal strikes me very much like The Shire — and they’d like to recreate that.

Charles C. Mann: Yeah. And the thing is that The Shire presumably had a whole bunch of institutions — I don’t know what Tolkien was thinking of; presumably they were similar to the ones that existed in the English countryside in the 1920s. But there are hundreds of years of history that underlie the fact that the English countryside worked in the 1920s. So I think it’s very easy for both sides to dismiss the others as not being likely to exist for pragmatic reasons, when the real reasons have to do with institutions. There’s no particular reason we couldn’t, if we wanted to, subsidize farm labor. We subsidize labor all the time. For example, recently Amazon wanted to create its second headquarters, and states and cities competed for it, and they offered Amazon millions of dollars — what they were essentially doing was subsidizing the labor of Amazon workers. New York offered several billion dollars, and in return would get 50,000 jobs. That’s subsidizing labor. We do that all the time for labor we consider valuable. The reason we don’t do it for agricultural labor is that we don’t consider it valuable. But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be done. And if you subsidize the hiring of labor, the prices from these small-scale farms would drop dramatically, and much poorer people could afford the produce from them.

Ross Kenyon: That’s a fascinating point. What do you call it when there’s a tendency of the human mind to view whatever is around us, that we’re acculturated into, as natural, quote-unquote? What’s the name for this way of seeing that’s clearly blinding us to how constructed our reality actually is?

Charles C. Mann: Yeah, I don’t know what it is. Possibly it’s related to what historians call presentism—

Ross Kenyon: Hmm.

Charles C. Mann: —which is judging the past by the standards of the present, something you should avoid. But there is this idea that these things around us are, quote-unquote, “natural,” when in fact they’ve often been constructed. That doesn’t mean they’re bad, but it does mean they can be changed, if we want. So note: I’m not advocating that we should subsidize farm labor — that’s not the point of the argument. The point is that people who say this or that is inherently less productive or inherently less affordable are missing the point that there are reasons underneath what they do that have nothing to do with some imagined agricultural productivity.

Ross Kenyon: Oh, sure. I’ve seen arguments like that all over the place. Perhaps most famously against Norman Borlaug is Vandana Shiva’s work, saying, “If you take into account all the ecological costs and the subsidies, is this actually feeding the world? Is this actually cheaper?” Answer: probably not.

Charles C. Mann: Yeah. And I’d take her calculations, like all these calculations, with a grain of salt, because it’s very difficult to imagine what the actual cost would be in some completely different social arrangement.

Ross Kenyon: Oh, sure. I think that’s perfectly fair. I don’t have the chops necessary to evaluate these competing, highly technical claims either. So I read these things and go, “Hmm, seems plausible.”

Charles C. Mann: I just think you should be skeptical of them. To take the Vandana Shiva argument about industrial agriculture — what she’s essentially saying is that there are environmental costs, and the environmental costs are so high that they wipe out all the gains. And you could say, well, there’s an entire literature of economics about how to handle those kinds of external costs; they’re called externalities. The first textbook on externalities was written back in 1918. So there’s a whole lot of things you could do that would dramatically reduce it. For instance, there are all kinds of reasons right now that farmers way overuse fertilizer — because it’s cheap, and it’s cheap because it’s subsidized in all kinds of different ways. If it were less cheap, possibly people might look at using it more sparingly, or in ways less likely to cause washout into rivers and streams, or it might be formulated differently. There’s nothing inherent about the way we do fertilizer right now, which is one of the main costs — because the fertilizer goes into the streams and the rivers and ends up in the ocean. Fertilizer in the ocean is still fertilizer; it causes these immense blooms of algae and other aquatic plants. They die, drop down to the bottom, bacteria eat them, the bacteria multiply in such a frenzy that they suck up all the oxygen, and you get these dead spots. There’s one in the Gulf of Mexico that’s about the size of New Jersey. There’s one in the Bay of Bengal that’s three times bigger than that. That’s a huge environmental cost. So Vandana Shiva is totally right to draw our attention to that, because when we eat our Wonder Bread or whatever, we’re not thinking about the fact that producing it led to this gigantic dead spot in the Gulf of Mexico. She’s dead right about that. But there’s nothing inherent about using fertilizer that automatically gets you there.

Ross Kenyon: Okay, yeah. This is great nuance — thank you for bringing it here. Charles, I’m going to reveal my bias here, and then maybe you can tell me what I’m missing. Nori as a whole — I believe the company is premised around the idea that technology can help us solve environmental crises, notably climate, and help us wrap our heads around that, and help us get to a healthy level of PPM, get that carbon down to a safe, stable level that we can build expectations around, based on what human life has come to expect and depend upon. Then I was watching Planet of the Humans too — because I had to, because everyone was yelling and saying not to watch this movie, so of course I had to watch it immediately. There’s a line in there that always bothers me — I’m paraphrasing — that the same way of thinking that got us into this problem cannot get us out of it, and it was applied to industrial technology. But it was posed in this rhetorical fashion: “Can we use the same technology that got us into this problem to get us out?” And me at home is just, “Yes. Yes, we absolutely have to, because we can’t just walk away from this.” There’s already a certain amount of warming that’s locked in. We have to start pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. We can’t just retreat and go to Hobbiton and live our little permaculture lives. That’s a great thing to do, but we also need large-scale technology to make that sort of prophet’s lifestyle even possible at this point. What am I missing?

Charles C. Mann: So, first, I’m not going to argue with you. What’s wrong about the argument is that it’s not the same technology. The kinds of things you’re talking about — carbon-eating, photovoltaic panels, windmills, power lines that don’t waste 50 percent of their power in resistance — that’s not the technology that got us into the problem. The technology that got us into the problem is coal-fired power plants, and we’re dramatically reducing their number. So to me, it’s like you’re saying, “You’re allergic to apples, therefore you shouldn’t be eating oranges.” It’s a nonsensical statement. So that part I’m not going to disagree with you on. What I would argue is that this living in Hobbiton, in a modern sense, involves all kinds of technology; it’s just different kinds of technology. Right now, if you put solar panels on all the roofs, and little ones in the backyards, and made them much more efficient, and developed methods of localized storage — the sort of idea Elon Musk talks about, storing in his batteries — I just don’t think we know how much that could do. Right now the most efficient solar panels are on the order of, I think, about 48 percent of the incident radiation coming in. They’re very, very expensive, because we don’t choose to subsidize them. There are lots of things in our society we choose to subsidize; if we wanted to, we could choose to subsidize that. We could kick up a lot more research into how to switch power back and forth. And we could get a lot of the way toward Hobbiton if we wanted to. It would be difficult, but all paths are going to be difficult. Doing the other kind of path — where we construct large-scale, centralized installations and somehow send the power all around, like the square mile in the Sonoran Desert — that’s also extremely difficult. So I just feel that we just don’t know.

If you don’t mind — I’m going to go on a little bit of a tangent. Is it okay if I go on it?

Ross Kenyon: Please do.

Charles C. Mann: Okay. I feel that the role of ignorance is insufficiently appreciated. There are lots of things we simply don’t know whether we can do, and that means we don’t know that they’re not possible, and we don’t know if they are possible. All we can really say is that we could go quite a bit of the way toward Hobbiton if we wanted to, or we could go quite a bit in the opposite direction if we wanted to — and we don’t really know, because we can’t predict the future, what the fundamental consequences would be. So I tend to get upset, or annoyed, when I hear people saying with great confidence that this or that is not possible, because I think the answer is: we just simply don’t know.

Ross Kenyon: And it all comes back to that gigantic Lovecraft quote that I forced into this episode. I think humility is underappreciated all over the place, and we try to do that. Basically, the number of things I hold with any degree of certainty shrinks as I get older. Are you that way too?

Charles C. Mann: Mm-hmm. Yeah. One of the things this also tells me, though, is that because we’re very lousy at predicting the future, maybe both sides should be a little bit less dogmatic. We should investigate what you can do with very, very small-scale nukes, for example — I don’t think we know the consequences well enough for either side to rule it out. Similarly, we should look at what GMOs can do. And we should also try to see: well, how much can we get with neighborhood solar? Why not really kick it up and run some serious demonstrations of the best neighborhood-solar technology we can, and see what we get?

Ross Kenyon: I think that’s a fine way to go. I think we need all the experiments and all the bets we can get.

Charles C. Mann: Right. And it wouldn’t be so hard. My wife is an architect and designer, and she’s very interested in sustainability, so she’s been building these small-scale, near-net-zero-energy homes. There should be some way for her to convert them into totally neighborhood-locally-powered grids and see how that worked.

Ross Kenyon: Seems fine to me. I’d certainly be interested in that.

Charles C. Mann: To build a little version of Hobbiton and then look at it.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Charles, one of the applications of your ideas that we played with in the Nori Patreon book club is: to what degree does this apply to how one lives one’s personal life? And I ended up seizing upon a passage I really like. It’s the most famous passage from Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. It’s called “The Poor Man’s Son.” Are you familiar with that?

Charles C. Mann: I read the book in college, so the answer is I should be more familiar with it than I actually am.

Ross Kenyon: It might be worth revisiting this section. It’s definitely the most famous, and it’s beautiful. It starts with, “The poor man’s son, whom heaven in its anger has visited with ambition,” which I think is such a powerful opening. Adam Smith sees ambition and this desire to get rich as a form of a curse. Granted, the person, in the process of trying to get rich, develops many instruments and technological advances that make our lives better — but this burden of ambition doesn’t necessarily produce the most livable life, one could say. For instance, I don’t personally want to be Elon Musk. I don’t want to live that life.

Charles C. Mann: I was just thinking the same name. It’s funny.

Ross Kenyon: Oh, yeah. Well — I’m glad he’s a father now, and that’s great; he and Grimes have better behavior than I saw. But he’s also got, like—

Charles C. Mann: Six other kids. Geez Louise.

Ross Kenyon: Oh, and that too, I guess. Yeah. That one just caught my imagination. But that life seems so demanding. Basically, I’m relatively prophet-esque. I don’t expect to be remembered very long, especially not by people far removed from my own family, and I’m relatively okay with that. I think the most important thing most people will do is raise children who are halfway decent, compassionate, kind people. I think that’s great, and I have the same ambitions myself. Anything I get above that is just happenstance. But I’m so glad there are Elon Musks out there, because ambition is a form of human sacrifice. This wizardly developing of new things — we need that. But I think they lay themselves at the altar for the benefit of humanity, by their own curse of this ambition. Does that halfway make sense to you?

Charles C. Mann: Yeah. And I should, in fitting with our theme, point out that on the opposite side, Bill McKibben has sort of wrecked his life to lead 350.org. I know him very slightly, and I can tell you he does not enjoy being a public and political figure.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah.

Charles C. Mann: It’s not fun for him. He’s doing it because he believes it. And by the way, that documentary we were talking about — something that really annoyed me about it was the idea that Bill is a corporate sellout. I’ve disagreed with him plenty; sometimes he’s been so mad at me we haven’t spoken. But geez — the idea that he’s not a figure of huge integrity is completely ridiculous. He’s kind of sacrificed his life, in exactly the same way, to try to create a political movement for fighting climate change. And I think that’s — again, with the theme of social and political arrangements — absolutely necessary. No politician’s going to stick their neck out to do it unless there are a lot of constituents behind it. They have to show it, and organizations like 350.org are for that.

Ross Kenyon: That’s great — a great additional example, from a totally different angle. Yeah, I don’t know that I’d want to change places with any of those people. That sounds very stressful. Everyone scrutinizes everything you do and calls you a bad person. Doesn’t sound fun.

Charles C. Mann: People call McKibben — you know, “if his ideas were followed, we’d all die,” this sort of thing. That can’t be pleasant.

Ross Kenyon: No, no. Well, one thing that’s comforting, in the darkest of ways, is your relationship with Lynn Margulis. That’s one thing we haven’t even gotten to. What was that like? And also — does this wizard-and-prophet dynamic even make sense in the face of her insights? Which — what even were they?

Charles C. Mann: So that was part of the reason I included her: because she’s a critic of the entire thing. I wanted to incorporate the idea that there are perspectives from which everything I’m talking about is just stupid and isn’t even worth considering. Lynn Margulis is this famous biologist, famous especially for her contributions to understanding the micro world of bacteria and viruses and protists and all these other tiny creatures. From her point of view, which is pretty justifiable, they’re what’s important about life on Earth. They’re 99 percent of the biomass, 99 percent of the evolutionary creativity in terms of genetic variability. They’re just amazing. And so people are like this epiphenomenon. Her point of view is that we’re just a species like any other — like protozoa, not fundamentally different. And she argued that this was Darwin’s key insight. Darwin talked about evolution, but before you could talk about evolution, you had to have the idea that there was a single set of laws that applied to everything, no exceptions. It’s not like dogs have special rules that apply only to them. Evolution applies to everything, including us. We’re just part of nature, just another species among all the others. And one of the other rules is that species that are inordinately successful don’t live very long, because they either wipe themselves out, or drown in their own wastes, or exhaust their own resources — or all three. So she saw that as happening to humans. And the idea that both wizards and prophets are arguing about ways to save us — if you don’t think we can be saved, because the laws of nature say no, then it’s sort of stupid to have an argument between them.

Ross Kenyon: On the one hand, I like that she just out-pessimists the prophets, in the most serious of ways. But I also find it kind of comforting. It takes the pressure off the human race a little bit. Whenever I zoom out and think in deep time, it really calms me.

Charles C. Mann: She regarded me as a sort of sentimental sap — reading books about polar bears and the like. She thought we were completely deluded if we thought we were special. She liked to say this. I didn’t know her well, but she knew me well enough to prick my bubble whenever she could, and she’d say, “Oh, you think we’re special — somehow a different species from everybody else. How nice it must be to be you.” That kind of thing. And if you look at it her way, you can say, well, we’re conducting this gigantic experiment now to find out if we’re just a species like everything else, or if we’re actually capable of changing in ways no other species can. She would say, as a betting person, the odds are very definitely that we’re not special.

Ross Kenyon: This is a favorite theme of the show too. We get into the Fermi paradox, and whether this is a great filter event, and whether human beings will supersede this challenge. I hope so. The reason I do what I do is that I hope we’re able to do it. But there’s a chance Lynn is correct, and we’re just following the pace set by every other creature that’s been so successful that it’s killed things off.

Charles C. Mann: Right. And I think, though, that if she were around, and we were talking now, even she would say that if we were successful, that really would mean we were special. That would be an astounding thing.

Ross Kenyon: It totally would be.

Charles C. Mann: It would be really cool, right? If success is not given, then to actually be successful would be just awesome.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think so. Well, Charles, we didn’t even get to talk about your other books. 1491 and 1493, which I’ve read in the last year — I read both of them, and they made a really big impression too. I like this focus on... Well, one thing that’s come up quite a lot inside Nori, and also in the book club, is this idea of Native Americans as this sort of noble savage — this romantic idea of them interacting with a primeval force and not changing it. And now, of course, we know — and your work has documented — the degree to which humans, and Indigenous people in particular, have shaped these environments. So I think that’s a really cool insight. But I’m wondering, bigger than that: is there some connection between your work on Indigenous peoples and the Columbian Exchange, and wizards and prophets? What’s the connection?

Charles C. Mann: Well, I thought of these two books mentally... I should first say I’m kind of embarrassed to talk about this, and I was hoping you wouldn’t bring it up, because the answer I give is going to sound really pretentious. And the reason it’s going to sound pretentious is that it actually is pretentious.

Ross Kenyon: Oh no. I’ve got to know what this is.

Charles C. Mann: So I apologize in advance. I thought of these books as a trilogy — already bad.

Ross Kenyon: Wait, why is that bad? That’s not necessarily bad.

Charles C. Mann: Oh — everybody wants to read a trilogy. In their past, present, and future: the past represented by 1491, about the world that was created; the present being 1493, which is this ricocheting of environmental consequences around the world; and then the future, which is how we’re going to get out of the situation we’re in — which is what’s discussed in The Wizard and the Prophet. But unlike normal trilogies, they don’t say one, two, and three, and you can read them in any order.

Ross Kenyon: That’s cool. So that makes sense to me, because you’re saying that the world we live in — from 1493 and the Columbian Exchange, when you have various organisms crossing giant barriers that had never previously been superseded in a large way — that’s still the world we’re living in right now.

Charles C. Mann: Right. And it’s a world of globalization. So one of the funny things is that there are these various protests against globalization, and I’m sort of thinking, “Man, you’re locking the door 500 years after that particular horse has been stolen.” We’re living in a globalized world, and the current president trying to stop that — who are you kidding?

Ross Kenyon: Fair enough. So our choices for the future are whether we follow a wizardly or a prophet-esque path — or maybe some hybrid. What’s the choice in front of us?

Charles C. Mann: Oh, we can decide. Because these are all human arrangements, there’s nothing that says you couldn’t combine parts of the wizards and the prophets. It’s not like we’re dealing with laws of physics. I can certainly invent scenarios of greater or lesser plausibility that would combine them. But people seem to typically fall onto one end or another of this particular spectrum. It could be different. And I guess, a little bit in the back of my mind, I hoped that reading it all in black and white in my book would inspire the reader to think about ways of escaping that particular paradigm.

Ross Kenyon: How are you feeling, you personally, yourself, Charles C. Mann — more wizardly, or more like a prophet these days?

Charles C. Mann: Oh, boy. I guess in a certain way I’m feeling both, because you’re seeing in the current crisis with the coronavirus the necessity for both science and community. We really need to come up with some scientific advances, test them properly, and rapidly disseminate them — and that’s going to be very difficult to do without some kinds of centralized controls. But while we’re doing that, we also need to have functioning communities in which we all look out for each other. So here’s a case in which both are needed. And you see people splitting into this funny thing, focusing either on the community measures or saying, “There’s going to be treatments and vaccines, so we don’t have to worry.”

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I suppose so. And it appears that The Wizard and the Prophet, as a set of paradigms for understanding these decisions, goes far beyond just environmental ones. It seems like maybe this is much broader than that.

Charles C. Mann: I think so. You can find echoes of this in Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson’s famous arguments about whether the real heart of the country was located in the city or the country, right?

Ross Kenyon: Federalists? Anti-Federalists? Oh yeah, sure. I could see that.

Charles C. Mann: And Locke, and Voltaire versus Rousseau. These are modern versions of philosophical disputes that have been going on for centuries.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I love that. I think this is such a good way to teach these concepts and to play with them. If I were trying to bring someone into the environmental space, I think this is a very useful rubric, and also a heuristic for testing what people’s inbuilt assumptions and values are. It’s a great tool. Kudos for that.

Charles C. Mann: Well, thank you.

Ross Kenyon: My pleasure. Well, Charles, if someone wanted to keep up with your work, obviously they should read your masterpiece — your trilogy, your pretentious trilogy. It’s not that bad; that wasn’t the most grandiose thing I’ve ever heard on this show. I’ve probably said worse myself, so don’t be too hard on yourself. How should someone keep up with your work?

Charles C. Mann: Oh, I don’t know. I’m working on another book, and when it comes out, you can buy it.

Ross Kenyon: Buy it in the hardcover, people. Really, really help this guy out.

Charles C. Mann: Yeah, exactly. Buy them — and apparently now what they want you to do is buy it all in the first week, so that it rockets up the bestseller list. I was told by my publisher recently — I hadn’t really thought about it — that pre-orders on Amazon are gold.

Ross Kenyon: Oh, is that right? That’s good to know. Are you able to tell us — tease us a little — with what it might be about?

Charles C. Mann: Yeah. It’s a personal thing for me, related to stuff I’d done before, but personal. When I wrote 1491, it was originally supposed to have a final chapter about the North American West. That’s where I grew up. It’s an area that has special personal meaning to me — kind of about the deep history of the West. When I outlined it, the outline for the chapter was longer than all the other chapters. I tried to cut it down, and it just didn’t work, so I ended up cutting it out completely and papering together an end. If you look very carefully at the end of 1491, you can still see the sutures and the scars where I lashed together an end. This has been sticking in my mind, and I finally thought, “Well, I’ll see what I’ve got.” Last year I wrote out a lengthy outline, and I realized — wait, this actually is a book of its own. It’s about trying to consider the West in terms of its future as part of its ancient history. What we know about the West, without going into too much prediction, is that it’s going to be hotter and drier than it is today. We know it’s going to be roughly 40 percent Hispanic and something like 8 percent Asian. We know water issues are going to be really, really important. And we also know — this is probably the most, quote-unquote, controversial thing — that the 274 federally recognized tribes in the West are going to gain more and more sovereignty. That’s the trajectory they’ve been on since the 1960s. So in 2050 or so, there will be essentially almost 300 small nations in the West, in this time of environmental convulsion and tremendous mixing. So the conventional history of the West — which involves the frontier, people coming in from the East, nature being tamed, and the West essentially disappearing — just doesn’t seem very relevant to that. So it’s a history of what the West might be in the future.

Ross Kenyon: I love it. I want you back on the show to talk about it. We can even time it so it helps with your publisher.

Charles C. Mann: Oh, gee, thanks.

Ross Kenyon: I’m from Arizona, and I have a lot of affection for the Southwest — spent so much time out there. I’m very interested in this. I can’t wait. When might this come out?

Charles C. Mann: Well, I’m hoping — it would be next year sometime, probably a year and a half from now.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, book publishing, with their long lead times.

Charles C. Mann: Well, this is actually good, though — because if you think about it, it forces you to try to imagine something and to write something that will have some value beyond the immediate.

Ross Kenyon: That’s a good point. That makes me feel better about it.

Charles C. Mann: And I’m hoping — you know, I wrote 1491, it was published in 2005, and I was kind of tickled to hear that you read it last year and it had some value to you. I thought, “Oh, wow, it’s sticking around a little bit.”

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that thing holds up, as far as I can tell. It’s great. And you’re also on Twitter, I see.

Charles C. Mann: Yeah.

Ross Kenyon: What’s your handle there?

Charles C. Mann: @CharlesCMann.

Ross Kenyon: All of these links will be in the show notes, if you’d like to buy Charles’ books or follow him on Twitter. Is there a website too?

Charles C. Mann: It’s actually down. While it was down — while I was tinkering around with it — my website expired for, I don’t know, an hour, and a domain snatcher got it. So I have to deal with that, which I will do as soon as I finish this chunk of the book.

Ross Kenyon: Okay. Good luck. I’ll keep my eyes peeled.

Charles C. Mann: This is what happens when you’re just a person and you’re fighting algorithms.

Ross Kenyon: Man versus technology. There you go.

Charles C. Mann: Unsuccessfully versus technology.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. You lost. You got Skynet-ed. Oops.

Charles C. Mann: Yeah.

Ross Kenyon: Well, thanks for being here, Charles. That was a lot of fun. I learned a lot, and thanks for stimulating my mind — and the Patreon book group is grateful too, for giving us such fruitful terrain to march over. So thank you.

Charles C. Mann: Oh, it’s my pleasure. That’s what I wrote the book in the hopes it would do. So thank you very much for the kind words.

Ross Kenyon: Well, thank you so much for listening. If you like this show, please rate and review it in Apple Podcasts and/or Stitcher. It really helps us a lot to get this content to a wider audience. If you think what we’re doing is useful, interesting, fun — hopefully all three — we’d certainly appreciate your rating and review.

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Somehow, I don't believe I've ever rereleased any old episodes. But there are many great ones buried in the archives. I am going to start bringing more of them out that remain relevant.

If you aren't familiar with Charles C. Mann, he's written a bunch of great books including 1491 and 1493, both of which I'd recommend.

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Charles C. Mann on Wikipedia

The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles C. Mann

You can listen to this Reversing Climate Change bonus podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or the entire thing in full right below this paragraph.

Climate Workers Anonymous

PostSecret for climate. Anonymous stories from the climate industry trenches.

By Ross Kenyon

Working in climate is hard. We all have things we wish we could say. What if we could actually say them?

If you love the Reversing Climate Change podcast, you should check out the new show I’m working on, Climate Workers Anonymous.

It came about as my work has become more emotional in nature. Working with so many founders has led me to see that many business problems are less about GTM motions or product-market fit. They’re often about identity, attachment, and shame. Being able to speak openly about those feelings, even if anonymously, can be an enormous relief.

Moreover, many people in climate have strong feelings about who they do business with, how their companies are structured and make decisions, and maybe think the entire space has deeply lost its way. Can they say that in public? Sure, but that could have career repercussions beyond what many are able and willing to tolerate. It reminds me of the old joke, “all mushrooms are edible. Some are only edible once.”

And yet, are those feelings any less true? No. They are not. And thus, Climate Workers Anonymous was born. People fill out a Tally survey with their unattributed takes and send it to me to publish in written form on Substack and as audio in your podcast feed—it’s the old Carbon Removal Newsroom feed if you’re still subscribed to that.

Please go check out Climate Workers Anonymous, give it a great rating and review in your podcast apps, subscribe on Substack, become a paying supporter of the show if you believe in what it’s doing, and thanks so much for supporting creative media in climate and carbon dioxide removal!

If you’d like submit your anonymous (and unverified) hopes, fears, or experiences to Climate Workers Anonymous, you can use ⁠this Tally survey⁠ or email climateworkersanonymous[at]protonmail.com, though I believe the Tally survey is more secure. Do not communicate anything you wouldn’t want a hacker to have access to, including an email address that could be linked to you if you email the account on Protonmail.

And thank you to the legendary PostSecret, which I suspect all elder millennials reading this will know, for showing us the way.

Sincerely,

Ross Kenyon

Climate Workers Anonymous

PostSecret for climate. Anonymous stories from the climate industry trenches.

By Ross Kenyon

If you love the Reversing Climate Change podcast, you should check out the new show I'm working on, Climate Workers Anonymous.

It came about as my work has become more emotional in nature. Working with so many founders has led me to see that many business problems are less about GTM motions or product-market fit. They're often about identity, attachment, and shame. Being able to speak openly about those feelings, even if anonymously, can be an enormous relief.

Moreover, many people in climate have strong feelings about who they do business with, how their companies are structured and make decisions, and maybe think the entire space has deeply lost its way. Can they say that in public? Sure, but that could have career repercussions beyond what many are able and willing to tolerate.

And yet, are those feelings any less true? No. They are not. And thus, Climate Workers Anonymous was born. People fill out a Tally survey with their unattributed takes and send it to me to publish in written form on Substack and as audio in your podcast feed—it's the old Carbon Removal Newsroom feed if you're still subscribed to that.

Please go check out Climate Workers Anonymous, give it a great rating and review in your podcast apps, subscribe on Substack, become a paying supporter of the show if you believe in what it's doing, and thanks so much for supporting creative media in climate and carbon dioxide removal! And thank you to the legendary PostSecret, which I suspect all elder millennials reading this will know, for showing us the way.

Sincerely,

Ross Kenyon

Resources

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Check out my new show, Climate Workers Anonymous⁠⁠⁠

Subscribe to the Climate Workers Anonymous Substack⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Subscribe to the Reversing Climate Change Substack⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

An amazing rating and review on the podcast apps does a world of good. Would you please do that for me now? Here’s Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. Subscribe as well while you're there!

If you’d like submit your anonymous hopes, fears, or experiences to Climate Workers Anonymous, you can use this Tally survey or email climateworkersanonymous[at]protonmail.com, though I believe the Tally survey is more secure. Do not communicate anything you wouldn’t want a hacker to have access to, including an email address that could be linked to you if you email the account on Protonmail.

The great carbon crossover

For most of the last decade, the carbon market has sorted itself into two camps that don’t talk to each other much.

There’s the established avoidance side, which has been around for longer: REDD+, cookstoves, improved forest management, and conservation, with its own investors, registries, and political baggage. Then there’s the carbon dioxide removal side, which is largely newer entrants to the market: direct air capture, enhanced rock weathering, biochar, and a habit of defining itself against everything the first camp built.

Whatever the messy terms, the two sides have spent a lot of energy being unkind to each other. But some players are waking up to relinking this estranged family.

Substrate Biochar is one of the companies healing this rupture. Rainbow was a natural registry partner for them in part because Rainbow also straddles both worlds (they cut their teeth on non-removal credits before expanding into removals). This overlap is becoming less of an exception and more of a pattern, and is worth paying attention to: it may say more about where carbon markets are heading in 2026 and beyond than we realize.

What Substrate is building

Substrate Biochar is a UK-registered, South Africa-based biochar project developer founded by Oliver Glanville and Charlie Cornish. Their first production facility, near Port Shepstone on the KwaZulu-Natal coast, is commissioning a roughly 5,000-tonne-per-year carbon removal operation. They plan to double capacity on the same site. They have a pipeline of additional locations targeting around 50,000 tonnes per year. And they’re unabashed about their mission to scale biochar carbon removal in Africa.

The feedstock is what drew them to the region. South Africa has a large forestry industry, and the small and midsize sawmills that serve it have a genuine waste problem. Wet sawdust accumulates in massive piles, and until recently, many mills simply burned it in the open. That’s no longer permitted, and some mills have had to stop operating because they have nowhere to put the material.

Substrate collects the sawdust, runs it through continuous pyrolysis using rotary drum kilns, and produces biochar with physical offtake into three markets: low-carbon asphalt, large-scale organic fertilizer companies, and mine rehabilitation. They’re also seeing early interest from the macadamia and citrus farmers that surround their site, drawn to biochar’s benefits for soil health.

It’s a lean operation by design. The model, which relies on large, point-source forestry biomass, is built for scale. It’s what drew Substrate to South Africa in the first place: the existing biochar and forestry market meant they could produce a high-quality biochar product without taking on extra value-add in-house, like mixing their own fertilisers to sell into an early market. Glanville had seen other biochar companies, particularly across Africa and the Global South, try exactly that and run into complexity that didn’t work at scale. Substrate’s approach freed the founders to apply what they knew best - carbon markets, engineering, infrastructure project development at scale - to the market in as lean a way as possible.

The same logic extends to how the business is financed. Glanville is direct about the reasoning: if your ambition is to scale carbon removal, the business model can’t rely on a single revenue stream. Substrate deliberately positioned itself where there is existing demand for physical biochar, not just carbon credits. The company is also structured to be capital-efficient enough to reach cash-flow-positive operations without the kind of fundraising that most CDR companies treat as a prerequisite. The carbon credit is one revenue line in a diversified model, not the entire business.

Why this investor, and why this structure

Okavango Capital Partners is a small impact investment firm with a portfolio concentrated in Africa. Their track record on carbon is mostly focused in nature-based avoidance projects like conservation and REDD+, though their investments include exposure to removals around forest regeneration, improved grazing, and savanna fire management. Their thesis has long been that protecting and restoring ecosystems in emerging markets is both good impact and good business: it creates diversified revenue while reducing exposure to risks like flood, drought, fire, and soil degradation.

Okavango recently invested in Substrate through TerraLabs, its carbon-focused holding. At first glance, it might seem strange for an investor who’s been in carbon markets for so long to branch into something new like biochar. Normally the communities between novel and legacy credits remain divided with not a ton of crossover.

But Okavango Managing Partner Josep Oriol frames the move as evolution, not contradiction. Biochar, in his telling, sits at a natural intersection: you take refuse biomass that would otherwise rot, burn, or become a hazard, and you transform it into a stable carbon store that also happens to be a high-quality soil amendment.

“It’s an incredibly nice story,” Oriol told me. “Not everybody does it that way, but one of the things that we really liked about the guys at Substrate is they got very right the value chain they wanted to affect.” The forestry waste, the agricultural demand, the mining rehabilitation market, the carbon credit… they all reinforce each other in a way that makes the business more resilient than a company that depends on any single one.

The investment was made through Terra Labs - a holding company, not a fund - and the distinction matters. Oriol is blunt about why: carbon doesn’t lend itself well to limited-life fund structures. When you raise a typical ten-year venture fund, you’re eventually dragged by your investors toward liquidity events, which means you end up incentivizing quick exits rather than patient company-building. Terra Labs’ preferred investment period, borrowing from Berkshire Hathaway, is “forever.” If Substrate gets the model right, it will be a cash-flow-positive business that can fund its own growth. And the right structure for that is a long-term hold, not a countdown clock to a sale.

Oriol was also candid about what he saw in the broader biochar landscape and why Substrate stood out. His team looked at multiple companies. Some were well run, but many struck him as overvalued; biochar companies were pricing themselves at venture-capital multiples as though they were Silicon Valley software businesses. “Biochar is an industrial endeavor,” he said. “You’re moving atoms, not bytes.” Substrate’s founders came with a reasonable valuation, a lean setup, and a plan that didn’t require magical thinking about the market. For an investor who has watched carbon project scandals erode trust across the sector, that sobriety was part of the appeal.

Choosing a registry

Substrate evaluated multiple registries before landing on Rainbow. Oliver described the decision as partly about methodology fit: their project produces biochar that goes into applications like asphalt, which not every methodology accommodates cleanly, and partly about operational reality. For an early-stage company, the speed of the certification process and the responsiveness of the registry team are not minor considerations; they’re existential. Cash flow matters, and the time between starting a project and issuing a credit is time you’re burning runway.

Rainbow, by Glanville’s account, moved fast and stayed engaged. The co-founders were personally accessible. They answered technical questions quickly and walked through the process in a way that felt built for a company at Substrate’s stage. “They’ve been incredibly helpful,” Glanville said. “Rainbow really bent over backwards to try and demonstrate it had what we needed.”

Bringing together an estranged carbon family

Substrate’s story hints at a much-needed maturation and bringing together of an estranged carbon family.

Rainbow and Okavango both straddle the line in dealing with removals and non-removals alike, and they both see a future with more companies like Substrate. Carbon dioxide removal project developers have focused to date on seeking new investors and new buyers from outside of the “legacy” carbon space. Bringing new interest in is, of course, a great value for growing the industry. But we need the expertise from those who have been doing this work for decades.

If more investors make that same move, it changes the capital landscape for biochar in particular and CDR more broadly. The money that has historically backed nature-based projects at scale is orders of magnitude larger than what’s available in the CDR-specific investor pool. When that new synthesis occurs, old rivalries and positioning narratives can fall away, and we can focus on delivering high-quality carbon projects, whether they are removals, avoidances, or whatever categories we create next. When that happens, it’s going to be a big day for carbon markets, and those carbon dioxide removal project developers savvy enough to build this future.

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This blog is based upon a Reversing Climate Change podcast that just came out. You can listen to it on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, or the entire episode in full right below this paragraph…

The basics of “dialectic” and “hyperstition”

Be not afraid!

I know “hyperstition” and “dialectic” seem scary. They’re words that in an earlier era would have had a clove cigarette dangling from their lips. But relax and I’ll sketch out some basics here for you.

A dialectic is a process by which competing forces resolve into a synthesis. That synthesis then becomes the thesis of a new thesis/antithesis pair that will also resolve into a synthesis. Historical forces proceed in this oppositional and then synthetic advance until we reach the fabled “end of history”—the “teleology” towards which we are inexorably marching.

If one is Marxist, that means historical materialism leads to a classless society. If you’re a Gen X’er, that might mean the democratic capitalism of Francis Fukuyama. If you’re a transhumanist, it’s the singularity. If you’re a German Idealist like Hegel, it’s a perfect sort of spiritual freedom as made concrete by a rational constitutional order. If you’re a Christian or Muslim, it’s apocalypse or The Last Judgment.

A hyperstition is an idea or an entity from the future or which exists outside of time (in either the quantum physical sense or as a Platonic Form, etc.) that creates the conditions of its future existence through actions in the past. This idea is likely stranger to you than the dialectic because it requires a nonlinear understanding of time: time doesn’t only move backwards to forwards. For some experiencers, it could run in the opposite direction, or exist without directionality but in total. But you can also use this concept in a purely literary fashion: imagine an entity with a different experience of time that seeds its future existence in the past.

One applied dialectic of climate change

I’ve been deeply influenced by both David Grinspoon and Robin Wall Kimmerer. I want to see humanity as a permanent civilization capable of technological cathedrals like asteroid defense and reversing climate change, while also wanting to curl my toes into wet Earth. I want the best of technology without the amoral or toxic leadership of tech bros and technocrats. I want science without scientism. But we earn the right to become a transplanetary and permanent civilization by maturing such that we can live well and non-violently with one another on Earth while regenerating the living systems we have so disrupted. We go to the stars by becoming more rooted and loving of this specific place from which we grew.

The “small is beautiful” vs. abundance debate each carry truth with them. There is productive tension and dialectic between them, and one way to end in a stable synthesis (insofar as that is possible; I’m not quite sure how I feel about the idea of teleology…) is to recognize they are both needed for humanity to mature into this moment of our greatest success, or most dismal failure as a species.

Reversing Climate Change

For Climate, It's Wizards vs. Prophets All the Way Down

This is a summary of episode #380 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. You can listen to the episode in its entirety on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you enjoy your shows…

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8 months ago · 4 likes · 3 comments · Ross Kenyon

A hyperstition for climate change

In this oppositional unfolding of history, the hyperstition I imagine is some future humanity that has evolved to be genuinely wise. We are kind to one another. No one dies from preventable illness or from lack of food or clean water or healthcare. Humans are safe and free to develop their potential as we regenerate and venerate the living systems upon which life depends. I imagine them transmitting a signal back to us in 2026 that we need to develop both the technology and the wisdom to use it well, to become the kind of creatures that can flourish on Earth forever.

Because it’s possible we are in a Great Filter event right now where our technology has outpaced our politics and it ends in our conclusion (or a great reduction in biological complexity.) That is one explanation for why we do not see life elsewhere in the Universe, is that other species get here and they have more power than wisdom and the conflicts are too great for them to overcome.

But I do feel sometimes the hand of the future or of God or the Holy Spirit or the Universe itself, reaching back to us in the present to push us towards the individual wisdom, shared culture, and collective institutions that would allow us to create the conditions on Earth we actually know are possible. We don’t have to live as brutes. Some don’t need to suffer so others might feel pleasure.

And even if this is purely a literary exercise, and some fancy words used to dress up a simple message of hope—cannot that be good too? Don’t you wish you had a little of that saved for a rainy day?

Some relevant clips

I won’t post Arrival or Interstellar here, though both make good use of hyperstition as a plot device.

Here’s some music and comedy that is either referenced in the episode, or that might enhance your enjoyment and understanding of it.

No joke, this is a genuinely wonderful intro to Immanuel Kant.

I like to keep a Tom Waits handy for every mood.

It is so easy to forget, and yet so important to remember.

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Full Transcript

Ross Kenyon: Thanks for listening to Reversing Climate Change. This is Ross Kenyon, host of the show. Today’s episode is a monologue about some big ideas from media theory, from film, from literature. And it might get just a little bit weird.

Before I go there, a couple of quick shout-outs. I have another podcast that I’ve recently started up. It’s on Substack, as writing and as a podcast. If you were a follower of Carbon Removal Newsroom, that feed has now become Climate Workers Anonymous, where people can share their anonymous and unverified information, experiences, and feelings about working in climate. If you want to support that show, please subscribe in your podcast app, or even better, on Substack itself. I’m trying to do a lot more on Substack for both Reversing Climate Change and Climate Workers Anonymous, and Carbon Removal Memes is doing more stuff on Substack now too. It’s still very early, but I’m trying to figure out how to make the best of the platforms without getting endlessly sucked into distribution and self-promotion — the things you have to do in this world to seemingly get stuff noticed.

Today’s show is about two big concepts, two big scary words that are likely to alienate perhaps as much as they provoke. These two words are hyperstition and dialectic. And if you’re scared and you quit right now, I can’t say I’d fully blame you.

Coming soon is a Reversing Climate Change episode I did with D.W. Pasulka. Dr. Pasulka is a religious studies scholar and author who’s written several books that I found to be genuinely fascinating. She started her work as a Catholic historian, as a religious studies professor. She was interested in stories of the saints and hagiographies, and how some of those themes and experiences overlapped with modern UFO — unidentified flying object, or UAP, as the term is more in vogue now, unidentified aerial phenomena. I’m not asking you to engage on whether any of that happens to be true or not; it’s not germane to this episode. But much of the work she points to in media theory and media studies, and some of the people who work on these strange phenomena, have interesting ideas that I think have something to teach people who work in climate. And I very strongly connect this work to my thinking on climate.

In order for this to make sense, I’m going to start with the term dialectic. If you have any association with it, I have to imagine it’s likely negative. It’s one of those terms that’s sometimes abused. Okay. So it’s most famously associated with Hegel, but it goes back to ancient Greek philosophy, and it’s basically a way of discerning truth. It’s a method. It has some commonality with dialogue — it’s between people who are speaking. And in its simplest form, you might have a thesis: someone sets out a thing they believe to be true. An interlocutor, their conversant, has an antithesis, and they sort of battle. And ideally there’s a new synthesis, a new understanding between these two unresolved wholes. And in this resolution, one can progress.

One association you likely have with Hegel and the term dialectic is Karl Marx’s famous inversion of Hegel. Hegel was part of the German idealist tradition; he was working on the level of spirit, or geist — you know, zeitgeist, spirit of the times. Hegel has this line that the state is God marching on Earth, which I always thought was a really powerful, strange sentence. And the historical process is a dialectic that’s working its way toward human freedom. As human civilization grows in complexity and transforms, it engages with both the ideas of the future and its concrete historical past. And it’s in constant negotiation and synthesis between these various forces — huge forces.

One of the big questions of history is: how much do ideas drive progress, and how much of it takes place at a more material level? So if you’re familiar with how Marx inverted Hegel — what determines history is conflict between classes. Aristocrats and peasants, factory owners and the proletariat. In their friction against one another, history advances. We come to a growing sense of freedom and of self-actualization, one might even say.

Once you start thinking in these terms, it’s really easy to see how history might have an endpoint, or a teleology. Humans have something they’re pointing themselves toward that is, frankly, inevitable — it’s going to happen. You don’t have to buy this, by the way. You can obviously see history as chaos, and you can see the various forces running into each other and battling as leading to sound and fury signifying nothing. It doesn’t have to have human freedom as the endpoint. History is not necessarily the development of human freedom. It could be, as is said in Game of Thrones, a ladder. It might just all be power, and at some point it might seem like the average person has a leg up, and then something else will happen and they’ll take a big step backwards. There’s no guarantee that we’re progressing toward greater spiritual and material freedom.

It’s actually genuinely challenging to look at history and not see some amount of teleology in there. You look at human civilization in prehistorical times, and there’s a sense that things are developing, moving — something is coming, something is arriving. Some part of that may be true. Some part of that may just be how our brains work. Our brains think in terms of stories, and we’re guessing the ending before it’s even arrived. In the words of Tom Waits, “How’s it gonna end?”

At this moment in history, it’s hard not to start peering into the future and wondering just how radically our lives will reorient with the ubiquity of artificial intelligence — especially if artificial general intelligence does arrive. That would be the moment when human beings are no longer the top species on the planet, but you have a self-reinforcing system of intelligence that is non-human, that doesn’t require human inputs to grow smarter and better — at least in terms of its abilities, if not its wisdom, kindness, or the other things we consider to be humane.

One way I like to think about the dialectic as it applies to working in climate goes back to the fights between wizards and prophets. I had Charles C. Mann on many years ago — journalist, author. He wrote 1491 and 1493, both really interesting books about the so-called Columbian Exchange and the American civilization that preceded it. And also his book The Wizard and the Prophet, about how these two paradigms — ways of seeing reality — exist within environmental movements, and also within human debates writ large. Wizards are people who think technology will improve things, that the future will be better than the past, that we’re largely on the right track. Prophets are those who wag their fingers and say we’ve gone off the track — the course we’re on is bad, we need to revert to an earlier time, a simpler time, a more spiritual time. What’s coming may in fact be worse.

You’ll likely have your reactions to the way I’ve characterized these two groups. You might like one and hate the other, or vice versa. You could probably think of examples of wizards and prophets that you like, and versions of each that you don’t like as much. You could see yourself as a sort of yin-yang, with a little bit of wizard inside a swirl of prophet, or a little bit of prophet within a swirl of wizard. You are large and contain multitudes. You can do that if you want. No one’s stopping you. You can think that all you like, and that’s fine with me.

One place I see this especially come through is in debates about whether or not humans should leave Earth and settle other planets. For the people who say we should leave Earth, the Arthur C. Clarke line is something like, “Earth is the cradle of humanity, but we were not meant to stay in the cradle forever.” Meaning we should expand and grow. It might be a good insurance policy. There could be an asteroid that hits Earth and wipes us out, or sends us down an entirely new evolutionary pathway that would take who knows how much time to come back from. There could be any sort of disaster here that would make this really challenging. Or they point to the fact that once we’re doing off-world projects, we’ll have access to microgravity, and that will have pharmaceutical impacts. We’ll learn so much more, and technology will grow so much faster if we’re doing this.

Prophets would say, “We are not living well here on Earth. Things are not going especially well. We are harming the biosphere tremendously. We’re stressing all of Earth’s systems, and until we’ve figured out how to live well without greatly harming one another or the systems upon which we depend, what right do we have to influence another planet?” Alternatively, someone could be a prophet and say even that is not something we should do — that there’s something transgressive about leaving Earth, that this is actually not what we’re meant to do at all. Even if we’ve earned the right and live peacefully on Earth, it signifies some greater dissatisfaction with life on Earth to seek to leave it, that is spiritually, symbolically unwise. We should listen to Indigenous wisdom, stick our toes into the mud, feel the earth, feel our bodies, stop trying to escape all of that. Be content with what we have.

A wizard would retort something like: we have to develop new solutions to the problems in front of us, and that depends upon growth and expansion and trying new things. We can’t solve the problems we’ve created with the technology of today. We have to keep going. I’m doing my best here to represent these opinions faithfully and non-pejoratively.

Of course, a synthesis between the thesis and antithesis here would be to say that if we are to expand and become a trans-Earth, trans-planetary civilization, we need to be at home on Earth. We need to be wise. We need to earn that so that we can leave in the first place. We need to develop good institutions on Earth — not merely so we can live well on Earth, but so that we can become a truly permanent civilization, one that’s not at risk of wiping itself out, but that can explore the universe in perpetuity, in peace and plenty, as a wise human order. And this is very akin to something like David Grinspoon’s Earth in Human Hands — if you’ve heard any of the podcasts I’ve done with him, or a recent episode where I summed up some of his work. This is a big influence on the show. So the synthesis between these two ideas, between the wizard and the prophet, is ideally to earn the right to be wizards by being good prophets. That’s how you synthesize this — not by choosing one over the other, but by trying to unify them and discarding the versions of each that are toxic. That is my synthesis of that key wizard-versus-prophet dialectic.

I suspect we need both of those things. You shouldn’t want one to permanently win over the other, wizard or prophet. The reason this is a dialectic is because these forces are archetypal. If this were an opposed set that could be easily synthesized in a permanent fashion, then one would likely permanently win. But that isn’t the case. There are times we need the bold creativity of wizards, and times we need the stern warnings of the prophets.

And you can tell that you have both of them in you in how you play against others you speak with. If I’m with people who are strongly wizardly, the prophet parts of my personality will come out. They’ll be provocative in ways that I think need to be checked with some of the wisdom from the prophetly tradition. And when I’m with prophets, I often play the opposite role and represent the wizard. The bad way of reading this part of my personality is that I’m a contrarian and I just like picking fights. Maybe there’s a piece of that that’s true as well. But I think what this signifies is that we’re in constant dialectic over these issues.

And you can get to synthesis, but it’s a constant re-becoming of synthesis. It’s almost like — if anyone listening has read Eve Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet, an early piece of queer theory about how, quote-unquote, coming out of the closet is not a singular event so much as a process of re-coming out of the closet in various social scenarios, in various ways — it’s not just a one-and-done kind of thing. One is constantly re-coming out of the closet, again and again. And to theorize the closet and the coming-out as a singular, time-bounded event is to misunderstand what it means to do so.

By merely listening to this show, you are participating in this wizard-prophet dialectic with me. You might write me an email, you might run into me in public somewhere. Or maybe you’re just going to be having a conversation with these ideas in your brain about this process of synthesis and its continuing recombination and reforming of both the ideas and the material reality that creates space for these ideas to rub against each other.

If you have more of an idealistic basis — and I don’t mean that in the romantic sense, I mean if you think ideas move the world — you’ll see that in our literary life, in the images we use. If you have a materialistic basis for understanding how the world changes, you’ll see this in fights over data centers. You’ll see it in fights of political economy. And again, even as you try to split idealism and materialism in this way, you’ve just created a new thesis-antithesis complex. Which is the foundation? Which is the structure, and which is the superstructure? Is the basis of reality material — about conflicts between classes and who controls the means of production? Or is it about ideas, and ideas determine those things? And how do those more abstract parts of our reasoning about freedom and identity and ideas generally shape material reality? Is that actually the substrate, and the material stuff is just on top of it? My guess is that the correct synthesis is yes to both. How could you possibly distinguish between these two? Ideas and material reality are so intertwined — how could you possibly think to split them?

In fact, one of the good rules that’s also annoying to operationalize — and many people have grown impatient with this way of thinking — is that whenever you do have a dichotomy, it’s always threatening to break at any moment. If you start pulling on stable categories, even a small amount... what’s the John Muir line? You realize that everything is hitched to everything else. Should it really be a surprise that it’s that way? My guess is no.

I really like the idea of the Lindy effect. It’s one of the ways I choose which books to read. If books have been around for a long time and are still being discussed, they’re often worth reading for that reason alone. They’ve informed civilization in some persistent way. It’s one of the reasons I come back to the classics over and over again. And I tend to be more skeptical of recent literature, because I’m waiting to see which of those will truly be worth reading and stand the test of time. Many of the novels or works of art that later proved to be prophetic, or genre- or zeitgeist-defining, were not that way at the moment of their creation. Sometimes it takes a while. Sometimes it’s only in hindsight that we’re able to look back. Again, the Hegel line — I’ve quoted this before on the show — “the owl of Minerva flies only at dusk.” Wisdom arrives in hindsight, looking backwards after it’s done.

That dialectic — of carbon dioxide removal, climate tech, working in climate — runs through the show at such a core level that if you at all enjoy the way I present ideas and engage with them, it’s because you probably have some of that in your brain too. You might not have known — until I just explained a little bit of how my brain works — that you can see, “Oh, that’s why I like this,” because it’s not editorializing in the same kind of way that maybe other places do. If the show annoys you sometimes, it might also be for that reason. Maybe you want something that has a sharper edge, that stakes out a much stronger position in one of those dualities. Either way you go, you’re probably going to enjoy the show I’m working on about the Bhagavad Gita. Get ready for that. That’s another one of these that’s coming soon. Whoo. Keeping things weird over here at Reversing Climate Change. Okay — I think that gives the dialectic a fair shake, in how to think about it with regard to climate change and carbon dioxide removal.

One way to reach through the dialectic entirely is something called a hyperstition. There are many ways to explain this funky concept. I think the easiest way is through narrative, and it’s going to be through two films that, funnily enough, are contemporaneous and very similar with regard to their use of hyperstition. If you have not seen Interstellar and you have not seen Arrival — both of them use hyperstition in really fascinating ways.

I sat here for a while trying to figure out the exact right way to introduce you to hyperstition. I’ll share a couple of definitions that live online, and then I’m going to riff on that and add a little of my own complexity and flavor to it. On Wikipedia, hyperstition is a self-fulfilling idea that becomes real through its own existence. It’s also described as memetic ideas that bring about their own reality.

This show is a sort of intro prequel to the D.W. Pasulka show that’s coming out soon. There are some people who work on the paranormal, the occult, new religious movements, new spiritualities. Some of the people who study those ideas will sometimes theorize that what people experience as cryptids — like Sasquatch — or unidentified aerial phenomena, or things like that, are hyperstitions. They are some kind of transdimensional being that exists outside of a human sense of linear time. Humans, as far as I know, experience time in linear, backwards-to-forwards directionality.

As physics has gotten weirder and weirder as time has gone on — and this is especially linked to things like quantum theory — there’s a sense that time can be experienced all at once, going backwards and forwards, forwards and backwards, all of it at the same time, and that the way we’re seeing things is because that’s how our senses have evolved to see and experience reality.

If you want to liken this to someone like Kant, and look at Kant’s relationship to someone like Descartes — Descartes’ very, very famous “I think therefore I am” is his attempt to use deductive reasoning outward from the fact that he’s aware of himself. All he knows, essentially, is that he has consciousness in some way, and there is sensory input flooding into his body through his senses. To what degree can one trust the senses? That’s one of those super-basic questions in epistemology — the study of what we can know — that opens up so many questions. Can you trust your sensory input? Descartes was a rationalist of the highest order, and thought that the experiential nature of the senses was fundamentally untrustworthy. He could only trust the pure rationality of his brain’s intellect, and distrust the material world.

In fact, Descartes for this reason is often pointed to as, quote-unquote, “Western man’s split with nature,” because it alienated the mind from the body, and in doing so, it privileges the mind over the body — and that’s extended onto material reality, into which we abuse nature because it’s part of a collective body that we misunderstand. Like all good dualities, it eventually gets linked to Christian Gnosticism, which is a well-known heresy, at least as it’s considered by mainstream Christianity. The world is controlled by a demon. Pure spirit is good, but the world — material reality — is controlled essentially by the devil. And the point of Gnosticism is to become pure spirit and to not trust the things of the material world.

If you run with this idea, it’s really interesting to see how it plays out in something like Hinduism — and, as I mentioned, the Bhagavad Gita show that’s coming. It has a really interesting, nuanced take on material reality beyond what’s typically considered to be part of Hinduism. But Buddhism, and various types of asceticism in general, is very much about rejecting the senses, the body, and focusing on spirit or mind or nothingness, and getting beyond maya — the things of this world that are distracting to us.

In fact, a lot of people see Protestantism especially as a very cerebralized version of Christianity. Older forms of Christianity were much more embodied and sensory, and focused on what’s called smells and bells — incense, songs, liturgy that’s meant to be impressive. Protestantism, in its focus on the written word, so deeply prioritizes being able to articulate ideas in finite form. Protestantism may in fact only be possible because of the printing press. This ability to access the written word privileges reading and writing to such an extent that it reordered our minds. Much of Catholic and Orthodox practice is about the body; it isn’t purely a cerebral exercise. In fact, Orthodoxy is famous for being less intellectual — I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense here. I think Orthodoxy privileges a mystical experience, and the Desert Fathers, and things of that nature.

Judaism is interesting too. I read Daniel Boyarin’s book The No-State Solution recently, which is a really interesting Jewish studies, sort of critical theory / cultural theory text. A lot of it was spent trying to analyze what makes a Jew a Jew. He argues that it’s not Halakha — Jewish law, and whether or not someone is matrilineally descended from a Jewish woman — but much more about connecting to a text line that runs throughout Jewish history. Do you engage with these texts, yes or no? And if so, one has a claim to Jewishness, in a way, among other things. And while that might sound like it privileges the intellect and cerebralizing God’s law or something like that, so much of what is debated — “disputing for the sake of heaven,” as is often put within Judaism — is about what we do with the body, about how the body is meant to be treated. So it’s one of those things that’s both extremely high and cerebral and intellectual, but also heavily embodied as well.

I’m realizing that the way I’m framing this may not feel super great to Protestants, and I’m not doing that intentionally. They’re all different ways of comprehending reality, and I’m trying not to say one of these is better than the other right now. This is something people point to Descartes on. And anyway — back to Kant.

Kant very famously has the split between phenomena and noumena. Kant has this way of understanding perception: that we are locked into our bodies, that what we experience is a set of phenomena, and phenomena are inherently subjective. And there may be a trans-subjective nature to it — maybe — we may not be able to know that, because we cannot see outside of our senses. We cannot sense out of our senses. We cannot reason outside of the rational structure of how our brains work. And so there’s this noumenal realm that might be outside of what we can sense, and we’ve only evolved senses for very specific evolutionary purposes. Does this help survival, yes or no? If the answer is yes, those senses will likely be enhanced and protected over time. If no, less so. And how do we know that we’re perceiving the full range of what’s available in terms of information that exists? We don’t know. And in fact, we get better at knowing this all the time.

If that’s true, one must be open to the fact that there must be information — at the very least, there may be information — that exists outside of our ability to perceive it right now, or perceive it in full right now, or maybe perceive it in full ever. Maybe that’s something that exists beyond human capacity, ipso facto.

If one is open to the idea of ultimate unknowability, and open to the fact that physics may be far stranger than our experience of it — and that, by some accountings, time may not only move backwards to forwards — and it’s possible that non-human intelligence exists, which is another huge question. I did a show about this as a thought experiment last year, about great filter events, with David Grinspoon, that you should check out. Because, again, I’m not claiming there are non-human intelligences in this way — I’m not trying to convince you one way or the other. Right now we’re talking about it in a very theoretical, thought-experiment kind of way. Then there may in fact be entities who are able to access time in the opposite direction, or to experience time in full, all at once. And a hyperstition is something that comes from what we perceive as the future, reaches back in time, to either create itself or create the conditions for itself in the past.

If you haven’t seen Arrival or Interstellar, I basically need to spoil them to discuss them. That’s the tough part about using literature or film as an exploratory device here — there often isn’t a good way to do it otherwise. If that bothers you, go ahead and pause and come back to the show another time. But also, I think it’s okay to have movies spoiled a little bit and then go back and watch them. Sometimes I feel like that even increases the enjoyment of them. For instance, I just watched Mother! by Darren Aronofsky, and I wish I’d read a little bit about it before I just dove in. Sometimes it’s nice to go in with literally no information. Sometimes it really does help the enjoyment to know a little bit about the symbolic order that’s being presented.

In Arrival, extraterrestrials arrive on Earth. Various humans are sent to try to make contact with them, to learn what they can, and to figure out what exactly is happening — because the extraterrestrials are just parked on Earth, floating above it. Amy Adams goes with a couple of other people, chosen from various scientific disciplines, to do this work, and she’s a linguist. Her job is to figure out what they’re saying. She notices that they have a unique orthography. Actually, it’s not even orthography, because they’re not letters — they’re full ideas. The language is circular. The symbols they use are these circles with various types of definition on the outside. It almost looks like black paint has been splattered.

Everyone thinks that what’s going to be learned about these creatures is going to be learned by the other scientists, and that the linguist is essentially there to assist them in figuring out the important stuff. Only it turns out that the language itself is what’s important. Their language is circular, and it conveys an awareness that time is not linear, backwards to forwards — it exists all at once. As Amy Adams learns how to speak this language, her awareness of time also changes, such that she experiences time all at once as well. She experiences her entire life, and can see her entire life and what that means for her.

Near the end of the film, things are not going well. Various governments have sent up their own representatives and scientists to speak with the extraterrestrials in their vehicles above various world cities. There’s tension between the US and China at this point in the film. And because Amy Adams has learned how to see reality in this alien way, she’s able to pull... she knows that she can call the Chinese leader and tell him something that no one else would know, that would get him to stand down and relax this escalation. Amy Adams pulls a memory from the future — which, in our view of reality, hasn’t happened yet — into the present, in order to create that future. Hyperstition.

But funnily enough, almost the same mechanism exists in Interstellar. Matthew McConaughey, an astronaut on a dying Earth, goes through some wormhole — much like Contact — and ends up in a tesseract. Or at least what the movie says is a tesseract: a sort of four-dimensional cube that has a temporal element to it that I’m still trying to wrap my head around. What exactly this might be isn’t super important for the purpose of explaining this. But inside this tesseract, Matthew McConaughey is back where his daughter is, when his daughter hears a ghost in her bookshelf — and it’s Matthew McConaughey, trying to reach her from the future, or a trans-temporal dimension, to tell her to do something in the present, as she experiences it, that will impact the future. The future calling back on the present to change, or to enact, the future. Hyperstition.

It’s a very cool literary device. Or you can be critical of it and say it has a little bit of the deus ex machina. There’s a famous scene from South Park where they make fun of the fact that the rules of time-travel movies never really make sense. Maybe I’ll put the link in Substack if you really want to watch that little clip. But let’s just take for granted that this idea of hyperstition is a worthwhile literary term. Ignore all the other stuff about whether or not this exists in some sort of real sense, and just think about it as a story about history that we tell ourselves.

Our ability to handle climate change is a hyperstition. Think about it this way. Future humans — whether ourselves or our descendants — are calling to us from the future to create the conditions of a planet they now live in, with a stable, livable climate. It’s only a hyperstition if we hear it this way. If we don’t do it, it’s a daydream. But if we’re able to pull it off, it’s because in some sense the future has called to us in the present to enact the future that they now inhabit.

It’s a weird way of seeing this. It may not be immediately actionable to understand it this way. But I find this way of experiencing working in climate to help me make sense of it, and to work toward making the daydream a hyperstition. It’s motivating. It’s beautiful. I like to be open to the possibility of things like this, because I used to be much more closed off to them. And I’m just open to the fact that reality might be a really bizarre thing that we’ve all sort of lost sight of.

It reminds me a little bit of when I was a younger person — I really liked Bill Hicks. If you’re out there listening and you like Bill Hicks, shout out to you. He reads as so much angrier now that I’m older, but there are parts of him that I find helpful. I especially like his famous speech from one of his standup specials — that life’s just a ride. We get so distracted by conflict and by pleasure and by our own suffering that we forget that this is a... what is this thing? How did we end up here? We have bodies, there’s an atmosphere. We grew out of a space rock — and isn’t that amazing?

And I think spiritual practice should do at least two things. It should probably do some others too, but the two I’m going to focus on here are: it reminds us that we ultimately are not in charge of everything. It reminds us that whether it’s a living Earth, whether it’s the cosmos, whether it’s a god or gods — humans are not the ultimate power. We don’t actually have to decide literally everything. It’s too much responsibility for us. And moreover, believing that we can and should be this powerful can have a toxic effect on us, and it’s better that we don’t embrace and try to do this in that way.

Secondly, it should remind us that life is incredibly sacred and important, but also kind of funny. It’s amazing that this exists. And if it’s amazing that this exists, and it’s kind of funny that we control bodies and are on a space rock, then can’t we just be nicer to each other? Can’t we just laugh about why we set everything up like this? Why are we choosing misery when we could have a world that’s beautiful for everyone? And ideally that should make us more humane and connected with one another, and better able to do this work. Because life’s just a ride, right? We can laugh at it a little bit, right?

And if you’re thinking about that hyperstition reaching back into the present, I imagine it just piercing all the way through synthesis, all the way through thesis and antithesis, breaking that dialectic and sort of shaking us out of this conflict, and getting us to think about: how do we create the world that is calling to us from 2050, that needs us here to create it? Some of the dialectical suffering we’re experiencing may not be necessary at all. Maybe some of these things we can set aside, so we can make sure we’re oriented in the right ways to achieve the things we so desperately need to, in order to become the species we must be for us to continue and to develop as a permanent civilization on Earth.

We can do it. If I didn’t believe we could, I’d be building a bunker somewhere. That’s not what I’m trying to be about. And some days, ideas like the hyperstition just give me that little boost I need to stay on track and continue with this very difficult work.

Thanks for listening. Hope you loved a strange, monologue-y kind of show. Tell you what — think about this. Don’t tell anyone about it. You can just think about it privately for a while, and don’t do anything on any of your apps. Just think about this privately, and I’ll consider that a win for this one. Ugh — you made it to the end here. You’re one of the real ones. I really appreciate it. Hope this gave you something new, something to chew on. And be sure to listen to the show with D.W. Pasulka that’s coming out, and the episode about the Bhagavad Gita. Bye for now.

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Today's a biggie. We talk about some huge concepts, but don't be scared. They're simple enough. You'll get the hang of it while walking your dog and listening to this and soon you'll be able to wow your friends and family with some fancy new $5 words.

In all seriousness though, I think these concepts are genuinely useful, and have helped me make sense of my own feelings, how my brain works, and how to understand what it means as a little person to relate to ideality, materiality, and the Antropocene.

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Oh my goodness. There are so many references in this show. I will come back and add them, but if I could only choose one...

"Immanuel Kant song"

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This is a summary of episode #405 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. You can listen to it on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you enjoy your shows. You can also listen to the full thing in its entirety right below this paragraph. Attached to this blogpost is a full transcript of the episode and some brief additional points of analysis up top.

Varsha Ramesh Welsh, cofounder and CEO of Offstream, was on the Reversing Climate Change show this week to talk about her work living and breathing MRV (Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification). To my delight, we sketched out what a future might look like where humanity gets much better at measuring what happens on our planet. But first, some quick definitions…

Key taxonomy: MRV, dMRV, and Managed MRV

• MRV (Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification): This is the overarching process that must be followed to get credible carbon credits issued. It involves a project developer or a contracted third party monitoring developer operations, reporting on that data, and having an auditor verify it in some way. Depending upon the project type, it often requires detailed plans that outline exact sensor placements, hardware usage, and monitoring frequency. Historically, this was often done using pen and paper.

• dMRV (Digital MRV): This refers to the category of software platforms built to ingest various sources of operational data, visualize it, streamline reporting, and send it off for verification. Despite the “digital” label, Varsha notes that 95%-plus of projects still rely on some human intervention, such as combining a digital truck odometer reading with a human-taken photo or bill of lading. It perhaps just shifts the wet-to-dry system ratio to dry.

• Managed MRV: This is the service model Offstream leans into, recognizing that simply selling a dMRV software tool still leaves the project developer with the burden of managing the software. This can literally require a full-time hire. Managed MRV combines the software platform with human expertise to make critical judgment calls on what data is most efficient to track, while handling the administrative heavy lifting of actually collecting that data every month.

• Unmanaged MRV: is just a joke because I spend too much time on memes it turns out. Willem Dafoe implies the existence of Willem Dafriend…

Anyways, here are some big thoughts:

Does Carbon Dioxide Removal Have a Surveillance Capitalist Future?

It shouldn’t be surprising I lit up when Varsha started talking about a future where our ability to gather improves so much that essentially all infrastructure has a positive or negative carbon benefit that is monetized. It’s such a fascinating thought experiment, not least of which because it tells you a lot about a person by how they react to it. Any world sufficiently advanced to have that type of tracking surely has it for much else.

What does the world look like when we (or really I should say, some) have access to so much granular detail about humans and their behaviors (I mean more than now, by way of Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism)? Are you happy that your car insurance goes down because your insurer knows you drive less and stop less rapidly? Or do you get the sense that over the coming years you will be more measured than any previous generation by many fold? Will it stop at some dignity-respecting limit, or will our thoughts eventually be read? Will it be advanced punitively, or because it saves us money to provide our data? (Likely both.) Before you know it, the whole social contract around data and what we opt-in to might make it too expensive or annoying to opt out of.

And with so much riding on behavior prediction, it’s hard to see how we wouldn’t end up in some Minority Report world, or even a world where those with the access to the best datasets and AI models use it to accrue massive wealth via markets of all kind, including prediction markets. Those not on the right side of the K-shaped economy will have their data help the well-off make more money off of the data which they can’t afford to opt out of giving. It’s easy to see why those inclined to Marxian thought liken this to a new form of primitive accumulation.

Varsha is nonplussed by this grim scenario I painted. She thinks it’s a pretty good deal if data lowers transaction costs and lots of other costs and we can solve some of humanity’s persistent issues with a tighter feedback loop around accountability both good and bad. A world that rewards carbon stewardship and punishes pollution would certainly be a cleaner one. It might be a healthy and happy one, where good habits result in wealth and we lower the gains that come from charm, deception, and life’s soft skills. It might be a more meritocratic and just place. It might even permanently end debates over theodicy, which will disappoint many working theologians.

If things get weird, she has faith in humanity rising to overturn the bad social contract and replace it with something new. I’m hesitant to expect that, but I can respect difference on this matter. Kudos to Varsha for presenting a bold envisioned future and making me think of how this could play out.

How’s it make you feel? Hopefully, at least conflicted. If I could introduce some of this energy to your life, I consider this entire podcast a success.

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Full Transcript

Ross Kenyon: Hey, thank you for listening to Reversing Climate Change. This is the host, Ross Kenyon. I am a climate tech and carbon dioxide removal entrepreneur. Before I introduce today’s guest, do you know that there’s a second podcast right now? I took the old feed of Carbon Removal Newsroom, which has been sitting dormant for a couple years, and I just built a new show on top of it called Climate Workers Anonymous. If you’re a millennial American, you probably know about PostSecret, which is where people would anonymously submit things that they were too embarrassed, ashamed, scared to talk about publicly, mail it in, and it would be published as part of a collective art project. And that’s what I’m doing for people who work in climate. You listen to this show, it would not surprise me if you did work in climate or something adjacent. If you have something that you’d like to share that you would not like attributed to you yourself, you should go check out Climate Workers Anonymous. Subscribe on Substack, whichever podcast apps you use.The link to do that is in the show notes.

Also, if you wouldn’t mind, before we start, opening up your podcast app and giving this show, Reversing Climate Change, a great rating and review on whichever podcast apps you use. I’ve been noticing a lot of people on Spotify recently have been giving me five stars. Thank you if you’re listening. I really do appreciate that a lot. And if you aren’t over on Substack following me, Climate Workers Anonymous and Reversing Climate Change, you’re missing some really cool content that ties in with the audio versions of the show. So if you are on Substack, you want a little extra, let’s connect over there.

Today’s show is with my friend Varsha Ramesh Walsh. I invited Varsha on to untangle essentially what the D is in MRV.There’s MRV, there’s DMRV. I used to see people talking about MMRV, where these fault lines are, how that’s changed over time. And I asked Varsha on to explain taxonomical differences between all of these various approaches, as well as specifically what Offstream is doing at this moment, because I know that they’ve grown and changed a lot. Essentially Offstream helps biomass carbon credit producers or those who might theoretically like to produce carbon credits figure out how to do so in as easy a way as possible. It’s a huge lift to figure out how to quantify all of these things and then also to figure out the relative merits of which methodology to use, which registry to issue your credits through, and about a thousand other questions. There’s a lot to know.

And also coincidentally, Offstream was the first sponsor, I believe, of Reversing Climate Change. When I started taking sponsorships a few years ago, Varsha was an early supporter of trying to stand that up, and I am very grateful. So thank you, Varsha. Appreciate you helping validate that as a way of valorizing the podcast. You help other people valorize their carbon removal projects, and you helped me valorize mine, funnily enough. Thank you so much to Varsha for being willing to hang with me on this level without a lot of warning. I had a lot of fun hanging with her. If you like what she’s doing, you should definitely check out Offstream. The link to do so is in the show notes. Thanks for listening. Really appreciate you hanging out. And here’s the episode of Reversing Climate Change with Varsha Ramesh Walsh.

Ross Kenyon: At long last, Varsha, thank you. We did it. We’re in the same room together digitally.

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Yeah.

Ross Kenyon: I was explaining to you earlier that you’re in this very unique spot that a lot of friends of mine find themselves in, where you’ve got a lot to say, you’re very experienced, you’ve been doing this for a long time, and somehow that disadvantages you for coming on the podcast because then I second-guess myself. I’m like, “Varsha can do so many things. We need to wait until for the exact right, perfect thing, and then we’ll do it.” And that just means we’ve been talking about doing this for, like, two years or something foolish.

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: It’s probably been two years. Yeah, but I think that it’s perfect. And I appreciate it, one, because I don’t get that many chances to come on your podcast, so I really wanna make it worth it. And I feel like I did a lot of podcasts when we were about maybe over a year ago now, and they all capture how we thought about what we did at Offstream then, but it has actually evolved a lot. And so this is my first podcast in quite a while, and I think that the way we understand what our customers need and support them today is actually sort of different and much clearer than it used to be, so I’m really excited to get to talk about it. Yeah.

Ross Kenyon: It’s a really cool thing to talk about because you started off doing one thing, it sounds like, and maybe the market changed or your customers changed or you understood yourself in a different way than you do now, and it’s changed over time, which also isn’t that easy for people to do. Sometimes people get really stuck on the way that they set out to do things, and it’s hard for them to change, and maybe you’ve held this a little bit more lightly than others.

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Sure. I mean, I think if you’re game, I can go into some of the evolution and also, I mean, you’re a founder too, like why we... Like founding’s a little bit of the story, but I think the way I like to think about it is that our North Star has actually always been the same, which is true. Not everyone gets to have that. And I think I’ve been really clear that since starting Offstream, our goal is to help project developers get carbon credits more seamlessly. And that North Star is broad enough that I think what we’ve learned is the way we do it matters a lot, and that has been what’s really refined.

So when we started, I think SaaS was king. I was obsessed with this concept that it was gonna be a software platform. But I also believed that the best way to build good software was to do the work yourself and then build software once you figure out the work. So I actually have to thank Grant Faber suggested... Our very first paid customer at Offstream was actually just a climate accelerator called Brink. But Grant Faber was doing a...

Ross Kenyon: Brink was your first customer?

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Brink, the APAC, yeah.

Ross Kenyon: I worked in their climate tech accelerator. That’s-- I didn’t realize that was your...

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Yeah. I mean, when you think in the sense that like Offstream LLC was a thing and they paid Offstream LLC to give a workshop on carbon credit certification. And when you’re early, all you’re looking for is someone to pay you to do something in the realm of what you’re thinking of. So they weren’t paying us a subscription or anything. But I was like, “This is sick.” Like Grant introduced me to Nina at Brink. She was sold. Like we put a contract in place. And doing that content, like it was validating that people had questions about this process and needed support, right? Like that was all I was looking for. The bar was much lower then.

And we had a couple projects like that that we did, and then we were starting to really hone in on things. But anyway, the broader philosophy was that, you know, if you think about what you want to build a platform to support, if you can break it down into 10 pieces and try to do the work at each of those 10 stages, it’s the best way to then figure out what can you automate? What can you not? How do you build a platform to support it? So we always had that philosophy at Offstream, and so we were kinda just doing the work for our customers while we built the platform alongside them. And that really started to accelerate through, I would say, late 2024, all of ‘25, and in early ‘26, we had kinda been doing that now for over two and a half years, and what we realized was what our customers wanted was actually someone to just do the work for them.

And so we had kept thinking we were gonna automate our human team out of doing what they were doing, and then at some point we were like, “Oh, actually, this is the thing people really want.” Like, this is why they’re choosing us. This is what makes it actually work. And it’s allowing us to deliver more value than we would if we were just a software platform. And so kind of what we first started doing by necessity turned into exactly what I think we’re meant to do now, which we’re calling Managed MRV. But the way I like to think about it is we’d always been doing it. We couldn’t really articulate to the market and to customers what it was called or why it was different from the many, many software platforms out there. But finally, the words came together and I think we wrote a blog post about it, and it’s really caught on. Like, I think the language Managed MRV resonates with people. I like to think about it as just we get the job done, but you can’t sell a product called We Get the Job Done. So instead, we came up with this. And it really is just words to describe things we’ve been doing for a while. But I think that that’s an important skill for any startup to really get right is how can you differentiate what you do and embrace it? So yeah, it’s been really energizing.

Ross Kenyon: If you want to understand the wormholes that have been chewed through my brain by the internet, the way that I’m gonna ask this question will elucidate that for you, which is, do you know the... God, I’m so, so sorry to do this to you, Varsh. Do you know the meme format of the X implies the existence of Y? It’ll be like, Willem Dafoe implies the existence of Willem the friend and stuff like that.

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: I...

Ross Kenyon: It’s like managed MRV implies the existence of unmanaged MRV. Is that a...

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Yes. Oh my gosh, that’s such a good meme format. Should we...

Ross Kenyon: Oh yeah, ‘cause there’s a crossover with, by the way. I don’t know if you wanna reveal that or not, but you have...

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: I will reveal that one of my moments of pride was when our teammate Emma was accepted into the Writer’s Room of Carbon Removal Memes, and apparently she’s doing well. I mean, I only hear from her, but she’s really...

Ross Kenyon: Reliable narrator.

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Yeah, we have a moderately reliable narrator in Emma, but genuinely, no, memes are a big part of our culture at Offstream, and it’s actually... It’s like, I’m so happy that... Like, Emma came to Offstream not from carbon removal, not from anything in climate. And so a proud moment is just that she understood the market enough to be able to contribute with humor, which I think is a really good milestone, so...

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, to be funny about something, I think you need to...

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: You need to get it. Yeah.

Ross Kenyon: About the fault lines, and you need to... Yeah, there’s a lot you need to know. Yeah. She’s up to speed.She’s very good.

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Good. I’m so glad. Yeah. So yes, for managed MRV, the existence of managed MRV does imply the existence of unmanaged MRV. Maybe the way I’d frame it is just somebody has to manage MRV, and it’s just a question of who. So, unmanaged MRV might be somebody purchasing a software tool that hooks up to their machines and pulls data in, collects it, has some automations like looking for anomalies, and then prepares that data to be pushed out, usually to a registry, maybe to a buyer or another intermediary. Like, I think every good software DMRV platform does that.

And I think what we realized through doing our work and building, like, we do have a software platform because it’s hard to do managed MRV well without it, is that there are lots and lots of steps that require both expertise, like making a judgment call. What should I track? If I could choose to track a photo of this versus an invoice, what’s better? What’s more efficient? And then advocating for it, kind of like what’s easiest, and then managing the admin work of actually getting all the data every single month, making sure it gets collected, and making sure systems are designed well, that they’re actually working, and then reminding people, following up with them, kind of looking at it with the human touch and then pushing it out the door. Like there’s often a full-time person, whether they’re a head of carbon or a head of MRV sometimes, using that software platform. And so the management has to be done, and from our perspective, it’s more expensive in many cases to do it in-house than to purchase something like managed MRV.

Ross Kenyon: Okay. What do even people mean with MRV and DMRV? And I see these things get thrown around and we didn’t really define it for people.

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Oh yeah, we didn’t...

Ross Kenyon: People probably listening, I imagine that they know, but these terms are alienating to some extent.

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: They definitely are, and we actually shied away from the acronyms for a while as a result of that.

Ross Kenyon: Or did it make it more confusing paradoxically?

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Hard, right? Because, so I’ll define... I’d like to define MRV and DMRV, but before I do so, I’ll just spend a second on this. Like, we see that DMRV is something that gets asked a lot about in requests for proposals, RFPs, and then as a result, lots of early-stage developers are going around with a checklist. They’re like, “Okay, well, what’s my registry? What’s my DMRV? Like, what’s my path forward?” Like, years before they need those things. But we sort of started to see that that acronym, as well as registry selection and some other choices, were signals that developers felt they needed to send to the demand side of the market to show them they were serious. And so, since we did that thing, we kind of embraced the category acronym. But in embracing it, we’ve also had to sort of figure out how to articulate our unique approach to it.

But we can start with MRV, which is a much broader category. Stands for monitoring, reporting, and verification. It’s basically the process that needs to be followed to get credible carbon credits issued. Like, monitoring needs to happen of what’s going on, it needs to be reported on, and then somebody needs to verify it. And actually, often there are three different parties doing those three things, right? Like, the project developer is monitoring, a platform is helping them take that data they monitored and report out on it, and then an auditor is usually verifying it. And so when people refer to MRV, I think they have different definitions, but often we’ll hear it described like, “What registry did you choose? What methodology are you following?” And like, “What are you monitoring? Who are you gonna report it to, and who’s gonna verify it?”

And so that is like a much bigger umbrella category, and within it, there are these specific deliverables. Like, you could have an MRV plan, which essentially is a more detailed version of like what exactly are you gonna monitor with what sensors and what frequency? Where is that data gonna live, and where is it gonna go? And depending on the project type, that MRV plan might be 80 pages. Like a BECCS project has to, in an MRV plan, identify every single sensor placement in the capture process and the storage process, and then also report out on often like the specific hardware that’s gonna be used. All of that kind of lives in the MRV world, and then the DMRV acronym stands for digital MRV. And it’s been kind of co-opted by the category of software platforms that ingests various sources of operational data, visualizes them, helps to make reporting easier, and then sends them to be verified. And the D standing for digital is kind of funny to me ‘cause like everything’s digital in 2026.

Ross Kenyon: It’s like kind of my follow-up here. Like how... Is there someone just standing there monitoring in person with a clipboard? And like, no...

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Okay, so yes, yes. Like early, early MRV was done on pen and paper. So that’s why the D had to be added. But...

Ross Kenyon: That’s just the default, so maybe it’s just MRV as well. Are there any more dudes with clipboards or is that fully...

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: I think there are still dudes with clipboards. I think the reality of most DMRV platforms today, even that have the D in front of them, have some data that might’ve been originally captured via clipboard. Yeah. And I think that if that data on the clipboard is accompanied by some other data, I’m actually totally okay with it, you know?Yeah. I think people get on their high horses about data collection and data integrity, and there are things that are just impossible in certain contexts and often those specific projects are the ones that potentially have the most social benefits or just are creating the most jobs. And so in an ideal world, there would be no human intervention in any of the data that is collected as part of a carbon credit. But I’m confident that in most projects today there is, like 95%-plus projects. So, it is what it is. And I think credit buyers understand that, and when there’s human intervention, they just look for two or three different data points to back up the one that was touched by a human so that they can have confidence in it. And that’s okay.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. So the project type you’re describing strikes me as something like the work that’s being done with distributed biochar, and there’s cameras that are being installed on kilns so that they can theoretically have that captured digitally. No one can-- Of course, I think probably any system can be gamed, and I’m wondering if you’ve seen much of that come through your system. But...

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: It doesn’t have to be distributed biochar. Like, we work with a ton of North American lumber mills, and they receive feedstock deliveries and they need to track them. And so that feedstock is being delivered by a human driving a truck, and often the way we track them is some combination of the truck odometer plus a bill of lading plus a photo taken by a human, you know? And it doesn’t have to be a rural distributed project to have these data collection limitations.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, you’re like, “Okay, so what? You could put a transceiver on the car. You can track the mileage if you wanted. You could have cameras doing things.” Like, I could see how if you had a perfect panopticon of a surveillance state, you could perfectly measure all of this, and like maybe that’s the direction that the world is heading.

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: I don’t think so. Yeah, no, I don’t think so.

Ross Kenyon: You don’t think so? I’m being a little hyperbolic. Not really, but a little bit. What here, take issue with it.What do you...

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: No, I think that we have two forces. One, akin to what you’re saying, like, there’s definitely a lot more private data just in the public ether. But I also think that people are much more aware of data privacy and trying to push back in some instances. So I think those will be opposing forces for balance. That’s all. Maybe I’m just less sold that that’s the direction. You know, I think we’ll see. Yeah. But I think the art... Maybe just to bring it back to projects for two seconds. Like, I just, I think that in the future, every type of operator with a physical asset will be a carbon project developer, and we’re already starting to see that. Like for...

Ross Kenyon: Everyone?

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: What? Everyone. Like, if you own an asset that could either avoid emitting carbon or remove carbon, at some point like you will be removing it and then getting credits for it, or avoiding it and getting credits for it.And this isn’t actually that crazy. Think about it. Like, you buy a heat pump, you get a tax credit for that. It’s just an extension of that. And so anyway, the reason I believe this is ‘cause we’ve seen it in like the biomass space, carbon removal space. So, you know, three years ago, the folks developing projects were all startups. They were all like biochar project developers, and that was their full-time job. Now, there are these operating companies that have wood waste that just want to produce biochar, and the carbon credits are mission critical to the economics. So now they’re a project developer, but not really, right? Like they’re not gonna necessarily... They’re like a lumber mill operator that needs another revenue stream. And so I just see it going that way. And as a result, we can’t have these gazillion hoops that everyone has to jump through to get one credit. Like the way we get data needs to feel flexible to them so they can just keep doing what they’re doing and we can get the data we need. So that’s...

Ross Kenyon: Don’t mess with our hoops.

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Yeah. I, the hoops are... I’m for hoops. I’m for hoops. But...

Ross Kenyon: Heard it here first, Varsha’s pro...

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: I’m for hoops. I’m kind of bummed actually that the NBA finals are over. I wanted another game.

Ross Kenyon: Mm, yeah.

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Call myself a Knicks fan or a Spurs fan, but that’s okay. I just wanted more hoops. So, no, I think that the hoops, like it’s a delicate balance, right? It’s like you need to set rules and people need to adhere to them, but also we’re... And they need to improve. But at the same time, like there’s... If we want this industry to scale, it can’t be so expensive in both paying for vendors like Offstream, paying registries, changing your operating a lot, asking people that pay you for information that’s really proprietary for them. Like I think there’s just some things that are challenging about the hoops. So our philosophy is like how easy can we make it to get the data we need with minimal changes to your operations? Um, so you can just text us your data if you need, or you can WhatsApp it instead of using an app because we all know apps are dead. It’s 2026, so...

Ross Kenyon: This vision of the future you paint is so interesting to me, where it’s like everyone who could theoretically create an avoidance or a removal will eventually do so. I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone make such an all-encompassing prediction about that. It’s really fascinating to me. It makes me think of... There are both good and bad ways to view this, but there’s car insurance you can get now that’s much cheaper because it measures your mileage and it has algorithms it runs it through and knows that youre low risk or high risk. And...

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Totally. And you need your phone in the car all the time, right? They...

Ross Kenyon: And there’s a thing that you plug in and you’re like, “Okay, this will save a couple hundred bucks a month,” but there’s also this lingering thing of like, what else are you learning about me and how-- is that gonna be monetized? Or like this is starting to creep me out. And also everyone who has anything right now in AI, if you can build a proprietary data set that’s industrial or something like that that has value, that’s the new moat that everyone is looking to have so that they can train their own smaller sets and build their own models off of these smaller sets, and that’s really gonna be the future. The way that car insurance works in that case is it makes your life cheaper and easier in so many regards. But also you’re just increasingly tracked and you’re incented positively. It’s not like there’s some big brother watching you. You’re just like, “Oh, I’m saving a couple hundred dollars a month.” And if you have all of that stuff that you’re like, “Okay, I’m making carbon credits over here. All of my health data is going into my app here. This is saving on my health insurance. All of my life is being quantified by algorithms outside of my control by billionaires who are frankly very bizarre men,” then is that the future that we’re heading into? And some of it’s good, like obviously better health decisions, better driving, better carbon credits, but also we’re being observed constantly.

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Yeah.

Ross Kenyon: Out? Is that too much for you? Have I...

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: No, I mean, I think that it doesn’t freak me out, the future you just painted. But this is... I think it’s a social contract, and if I wanted to opt out of it, I would just opt out of it. Like, I would move somewhere, I would go off the grid, I’d get rid of my phone. I wouldn’t participate. But I am happy with the contract. I’ve opted in, and it serves me today. Like, they already monitor my energy consumption, you know? Like, they already know what I’m doing. They know when my sprinklers...

Ross Kenyon: Are they in the room with us right now?

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: They might be... And I think, you know, with AI as a great example, like, I know we pay for the tier of AI that doesn’t train on our data, so we have to, so we do that. But like, it still has our data, and it’s a contract that I opt into because the utils I get from the AI are higher than the downside of my data being out there, and that equation may change, and if so, I would just opt out, you know? So that’s how I feel.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah. I wonder too, this is maybe going too far I feel, but it’s all related here. I wonder as remote imaging and sensing gets better, you’re just like, “Oh, if you’re outside, everything’s being captured and that’s being fed into various systems.” You’re like, “Cool. Is there...”

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: See that you’re really concerned about the surveillance state, Ross. I am seeing...

Ross Kenyon: I had zero idea this podcast would go this direction, and I am really sorry if that’s not what you wanted it to be.

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: No, it’s okay. I actually just don’t share the concern. Like, I hear that you are, I think I probably don’t know enough and I don’t want to. Like, I’m currently opting out of learning about that.

Ross Kenyon: What?

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Yeah. And this is something we talk about a lot. I think that as a founder, you kinda have to control what data you take in versus not, and you just ignore some. You just actually ignore some data sometimes. And this is a category of information I’m just not actually gonna open the door too much. So yeah.

Ross Kenyon: You’re one of the few people who talks to me in this kind of way. I remember we had a conversation at Carbon Inbound, which I can delete this part if you don’t want, where you’re just like, “You know what? That’s not a thing that I need to be thinking about, and it’s gonna pollute my information...”

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: It is. Same. Yeah, no, I agree. I love that I have that, but go ahead. I’m one of the only people who talks to you in that way.

Ross Kenyon: I just think I like that idea. I’ve read books about controlling what goes into your brain so you have enough space, your RAM isn’t eaten up by a bunch of foolish things and blah, blah, blah, or just things that you can’t control and like you shouldn’t be focused on. But I’ve never heard anyone block a conversation topic in that same kind of way where you’re just like, “I-- No, thank you. We will go somewhere else.” Like, okay, fine, Varsha.

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: You’re right. Well, perhaps there’s a more tactful way to do so.

Ross Kenyon: You weren’t rude about it. I’m being a little bit silly, but...

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Was being open with you because we’re friends, you know? Yeah, I actually think that’s been really an important tenet of my growth. It was the ability to decide that like I didn’t need to process all the information that was thrown at me all the time, and this came up for me during COVID when I really struggled. Like, I had a hard time with the news. Like, I just was anxious all the time. I mean, the news was insane. There was so much uncertainty and like I didn’t like it, and I was like, “I could just not watch the news ‘cause what’s gonna change? I’m in my home.” Like, you know? So for some time I just didn’t, and it really helped me because I think there’s so many problems in the world and like I really think it’s my job to focus on the ones I can fix.

And so as a leader of an organization, I think I have an obligation to keep myself educated on world news, and I do through channels that are less alarming, let’s call it. And then I choose to like read a ton about energy policy and that sector of the news and then I just listen to our customers and I just have faith that those are the sources of data that I need.And so that means turning off faucets where like I don’t wanna have that in my sink. I don’t know if I love that acronym, but I just turn off the channel if I don’t want it, and it’s really served me actually. So, yeah.

Ross Kenyon: I have so much envy for this, and I wonder what my life would be like if I were that because I’m the opposite. I’m like, well, clearly I need to read the entire Talmud and clearly James Joyce. I’ve only read a little bit of James Joyce. I need to read all of that too and all the energy policy and all the other stuff and the news at the same time.And it’s cool that you get to sound smart when you make connections that maybe other people aren’t connecting in that way, but it’s not like laser-focused.

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Probably more worldly than I am in this moment, Ross.

Ross Kenyon: How valuable is that though? Like you’re serving customers, you know what they want. You’re building something that is actually doing a thing that you think is really important. I hope that I’m on that track for my own specific customer set. I never think of them that way, but...

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Yeah. No, I think it’s also, it’s like chapters, eras, as my favorite artist likes to say. Like, I’m definitely in a very focused chapter right now, and I think it’s actually important to be able to modulate, right? Like focus and then zoom out if you need to. And so I do zoom out from time to time, but I zoom out within the context of typically the energy sector and decarbonization and climate, and more broadly, like infrastructure. Like, the question I ask myself a lot is just like, “What’s getting built?” Because of my thesis that everything that’s getting built has the opportunity to be a carbon removal asset in the future. So like, how can we just get it to do so, basically?

Ross Kenyon: We’re talking about hooks. How come that’s not the hook? I’ve never heard anyone say such...

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Oh, well that’s actually my whole thing. Like, every piece of infrastructure today is clean infrastructure, even if we don’t call it that. And we’ll need to generate some sort of credits and do reporting. Yeah. I really believe that. Like, it just is.

Ross Kenyon: And so whenever you’re in investor meetings, you get to say, “Our TAM is the entire world.”

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Yeah, pretty much.

Ross Kenyon: Everyone loves that, right? That’s a great thing people love.

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Yeah. No, I try not to spend too much time in investor meetings, one, so in terms of channels.Two, it is actually what I’ve always believed and the big question, like whenever we’re interviewing candidates, they always ask me this too. It’s like, I wish I knew our path from where we are today to that future, you know? That’s the part that’s uncertain for me that I’ll likely share in your new project on things that bring me... Like, things that make me... I wish I knew the perfect clear path how we, where we go from, okay, there’s this really small segment of the population today who’s doing these projects that utilize physical assets, whether they’re new or existing, to remove or avoid carbon.Like, everything that’s happening, low-carbon materials, CBAM, like, all that’s happening in parallel, but how do we get from where we are to then this future economy where everyone is incented through capitalism to reduce their footprint and then remove carbon, because I just, I think that’s inevitable. It’s just the direction we’re going. It’s just like those steps.I wish I had the perfect plan ‘cause then I think we could... But I think the market will evolve, and it’ll be very interesting to see the journey.

Ross Kenyon: Uh, I know you don’t think of it this way, but is it a nice version of surveillance capitalism? That’s like, is that actually what that fut- maybe?

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: I don’t have enough-- I haven’t thought about it enough. I mean, I think surveillance is like a negative way to put it, but I think humans are sharing a lot of their data today with various stakeholders as part of a social contract and like if that’s no longer serving the human population, like we will figure it out and get out of it, you know?Like, collectively. So I guess I just believe in the future collective action of humans figuring it out. You don’t, it sounds like. You’re like really worried about it. Yeah.

Ross Kenyon: No, I have like, you know, inside me there are two wolves, and one of them is George Orwell’s, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stomping on a human face forever.” And like that’s in me a little bit. And then I also have this naive, beautiful version where we figure it out and we stop being so cruel to one another for very few real reasons, and we sort of get it together before our technology outpaces our politics and we kill ourselves off before we can...

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Yeah. That is a concern for me, the slowness of politics and policy. Um, you may or may not know I was actually a political science major.

Ross Kenyon: Did not know that. That’s so interesting.

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Yeah. I had aspirations of serving in the Foreign Service. I wanted to work in the government, and then I realized everything moves so slowly, and I would lose my mind. But, you know, like, I get it. My personal experience aside, I think that is one of my concerns is that partisan challenges globally. Like the US is particularly challenging, but even ex-US, like there’s just really not this... We’re so far from, I think, where we need to be, which is that people put policy, politics aside and pettiness aside to just come up with some solutions that align with whatever their monetary policy is, whether it’s capitalism or something else, and then other priorities. And the change takes so, so, so long no matter what. Like even in our current administration and in the US right now, like the farm bill is such a challenge. Like it’s not even that partisan, you know what I mean? And so that’s probably the thing that concerns me the most of everything you just said is that the policy will take too long to catch up with some of where technology is going.And so the solution for us is the way I bring peace to my own brain in that is just like, are there-- can we continue to find private sector standards that companies choose to hold themselves accountable to? Because then at least there’s some quasi-regulation. So yeah.

Ross Kenyon: Okay.

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Yeah.

Ross Kenyon: I wanna ask you before it gets away from me. We were talking about words, and it sounds like not only did finding the right words unlock new customer relationships or how you pitch Offstream to customers, but maybe it even helped you personally change how you understood what you’re doing in your business. Did I understand you correctly?

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: That’s right. Yeah.

Ross Kenyon: Tell me about that.

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Sure. So I guess by embracing, like by having this language, like managed MRV to describe what we do, it definitely has helped us communicate to external parties the difference between what we do and just standalone software. But also, it has meant we have leaned into who we hire, how we staff the team, how we build product, and how we then want to grow. So we’ve always had customer success leads who were really talented, like typically engineering background or carbon science, and really understood the methodologies. And now that we’re leaning into this managed MRV, we’ve doubled down on that. Like, our most recent CS hire was a carbon science PhD. She’s our first PhD, which is very exciting, but she’s not too PhD about it. She’s like really talented and humble and awesome and very customer-oriented as well. But I’m doubling down on the basically expertise within our customer success team is a big change.

We build a ton of tooling that our team uses internally. So from a product perspective, we have a roadmap that’s pushing things to customers, but where customers just don’t wanna use software, we’re like, “Okay, they can just notify us some other way, and we’ll do it with our own software in-house.” And like, I do think that’s the future of software. Like I’m not necessarily into all of my apps replacing their dashboards with AI agent type things, but like I do think user interfaces are going to go away over time. And then the third thing is like as we expand, we’re really focused on biomass-based CDR right now, but we’ve always wanted to support other types of projects and other types of credits. So we already do work in tax credits, specifically a lot in 48E ITC, which is for energy production today. But as we do that, this managed MRV just parlays into managed compliance basically, right? It’s like, I think we’re gonna really stick with the managed part of it because it lowers risk for us, it lowers risk for our customers. It gives them what they want. And it also, I think, is potentially required to be successful in any sort of compliance field because everyone thinks compliance is black and white, but it’s actually just a bunch of gray area, you know?

Yeah, I actually broadly... Like, that was something one of my, one of our advisors said to me early in Offstream’s existence. He is just a close mentor. His name’s Gabe. He used to work at Indigo with me, and then he was at Ripple buying carbon credits for a while, so he’s really familiar with the market. And yeah, I do think most of compliance is gray area, and so having management of it with a human who can reason and make judgment calls better than AI will ever, and just hold AI accountable is actually just the future where we’re heading. So yeah.

Ross Kenyon: Oh, Varsha, you’re such a strange, interesting combination of a person ‘cause you’re... Okay, so there’s really big thoughts, but you also block out a lot of information. I think also, my guess is you probably had dreams about the soil enrichment protocol, and you dream in details, too. And so it’s both of those, but then very, very practical. Like, I would trust you to get stuff done, for sure. But also our long-running joke is you are such a noticer of body language that I will have the most small thing. I’m like, “Okay, Varsha, I know that you notice everything emotionally that is happening here at the same time.” The combination of things that you are is so bizarre and fascinating to...

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: That was really kind of you to describe me so well. Thank you, Ross.

Ross Kenyon: I got it right, broadly?

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: So. Yeah. Yes, and like I’m actually a big believer in that. Like, everyone’s got a lot of parts, and I just let mine shine. So...

Ross Kenyon: I think you definitely let them shine.

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you.

Ross Kenyon: Varsha, we did it. I’m not even sure that it was the show that we intended to make. It’s okay though, right?

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: I think it’s a great show. I think it was a perfect balance of everything I wanted to cover. Thank you for having me, and we’ll talk soon.

Ross Kenyon: Okay. Thank you, Varsha.

Varsha Ramesh Walsh: Bye, Ross.

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In this episode of Reversing Climate Change, host Ross Kenyon sits down with the cofounder and CEO of Offstream, Varsha Ramesh Walsh, to untangle the complicated web of carbon credit data collection.

Offstream has evolved significantly after realizing that carbon project developers don't just want another software tool to manage... they want someone to simply get the job done for them. Varsha introduces us to the concept of "Managed MRV," explaining why handing off the heavy lifting of Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification can sometimes be cheaper and far more effective than trying to handle it all in-house.

But this show also gets big. Varsha argues that practically every piece of modern infrastructure has the potential to become a carbon dioxide removal or environmental asset. For that to be true, we would likely enter a world where we are all much more persistently observed and quantified, and with rewards and punishments to match. Is the future of carbon crediting one of surveillance capitalism with the social contracts of data sharing to match? Would that solve more problems than it creates? How are we even meant to live?!

Varsha also shares her incredibly disciplined approach to information consumption as a founder, offering a highly focused counter-narrative to being "well-informed".

Turns out nothing is truly small when you start to poke at it just a little bit.

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Offstream

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff

This is a summary of a bonus episode of the Reversing Climate Change podcast wherein I read the poem, “Jerusalem [and did those feet in ancient time]” by William Blake. You can listen to it wherever you enjoy your podcasts, such as on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, or right below this paragraph—and in full!

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Some of the best art I’ve ever consumed has been Harold improv. And it’s also been some of the worst. An improv troop will start with a single audience-suggested word or phrase and build an hour-long set of interconnecting sketches that ideally tie everything back up with a nice bow by the last gag. When done well, it’s as impressive as any symphony or painting I’ve admired. When bad, imagine watching comedians flailing to find connection with theme and one another for a painful hour—not good! Cringe, even!

This is why with podcasting I always try to leave a little room for randomness to find me. I trust the process. Sometimes it’s a failed joke or reference that doesn’t ultimately make sense and it gets cut. Sometimes that means I get inspired to start singing a hymn that Monty Python’s Flying Circus taught me as a young teenager.

I recently made an episode of the Reversing Climate Change podcast with Tom Mills from Mati Carbon. Tom is formerly a Stripe Climate Fellow, where he busted his hump trying to embed carbon dioxide removal into agricultural supply chains. You can find the full episode and some writing about it below this paragraph.

Tom’s love for rural England, where he still lives, came out. And coincidentally, this very hymn/poem made an appearance at his wedding. It was originally composed in the first decade of the 19th century, and during WW1 it was turned into a popular hymn still well-known today.

In this bonus episode, I spend a few brief moments discussing this poem, William Blake’s relevance to climate and also just humanity’s persistent struggles, and why Romanticism’s simplicity can sometimes do enough and say enough (but not too much) that it can keep coming back again and again and again.

To this end, I recently heard Liel Leibowitz in How the Talmud Can Change Your Life discuss Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature by Erich Auerbach. Auerbach argues that Homeric poetry overdefines character motivation such that it is basically exactly as you read it. Biblical writing is so robust because it presents characters and ideas in a way that invites active hermeneutical participation. It isn’t something to memorize and learn so much as something to notice, critique, and dispute for the sake of heaven. It is an invitation to a discussion always in media res, always being recreated by you and those with whom you debate.

Does William Blake get here in this poem? I think that, despite my preamble, it is simple but also tells you essentially how to think about industry and nature. It is simple yet overdefined. It can still be a great and memorable poem (and work of music!) but simplicity alone does not achieve the high aesthetic standard Auerbach lays out (but maybe “Auguries of Innocence” does?)

Judge for yourself.

“Jerusalem [and did those get in ancient times]” by William Blake

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon Englands mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On Englands pleasant pastures seen!
 
And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
 
Bring me my Bow of burning gold:
Bring me my arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!
 
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.

What does this poem make you feel? Do you miss the slower and simple pre-industrial life (and atmospheric concentration of carbon)? Can a plaintive call to these mountains green inspire you to notice where you are today and what it must have looked like before we put a data center on top it? Or does it make you worry that greater cataclysm is coming if Jerusalem is being rebuilt—surely a sign of the end times? The foreshadowing of the battle to come for the future of England—and maybe by way of synecdoche, the future of the world itself?

Chew on that for awhile. I’m not here to tell you what it means. I doubt I’ve earned the right. And even if I had, why ruin you connecting synapses yourself? Wouldn’t I be doing you some artistic disservice?

I believe that engagement with the arts and humanities can make us better at our climate work and also—dare I say it—live better lives. Sometimes a simple bucolic image can do the work of biophilia and rootedness that something more “serious” could never. But also, it made me notice my environment more today. For this reason, my sincere thanks to William Blake!

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Full Transcript

Ross Kenyon: Hey, thank you for listening to Reversing Climate Change. This is Ross Kenyon. I’m the host of the podcast. I did a recent episode with my friend Tom Mills, and somehow we ended up talking about... what do I mean, somehow? I brought up the fact that something he said made me think of the song I originally heard from Monty Python — “And did those feet in ancient time”—which Tom Mills very eruditely pointed out is a poem called “Jerusalem,” ultimately by William Blake.

William Blake is an early Romantic British poet. His work pops up in film and television a decent amount; there are lines that get quoted quite a bit. I originally heard the famous lines from “Auguries of Innocence” by William Blake in Dead Man by Jim Jarmusch, which is a really amazing film that you should see. I actually saw it in a film theory class years and years ago, in my undergraduate years, because it’s considered a revisionist Western. In most films with cowboys and Indians, the cowboys are the good, civilizing force, and the Indians, or Native Americans, are the sort of bad savages who are preventing civilization from advancing. And Dead Man is a really cool film because it flips that. White, quote-unquote civilization is a toxic presence that’s encroaching and corrupting, and it’s actually the Indigenous way of life that’s the thing to be preserved here. I really loved that flip, and it’s a beautiful film. Neil Young does the score; Johnny Depp stars. It’s a good film.

And the famous lines, if you don’t already know them, I’ll read them for you. This is from “Auguries of Innocence,” which is only a small part of the poem:

Every night and every morn
Some to misery are born.
Every morn and every night
Some are born to sweet delight.
Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.

More recently, outside of Dead Man, you probably associate this with Westworld. This is sort of the leitmotif of the entire show. A thematic core of the show is that some beings are meant to suffer, are born into a system that causes them to suffer, and some are born into one that provides them with pleasure, often at the expense of those experiencing endless night. The endless night is dependent upon the sweet delight, at least in a show like Westworld.

And one thing I like about William Blake is that his poetry is so earnest. It often feels very simple. The rhymes are not complicated. “Auguries of Innocence” is a complex poem, and there’s a lot to it, but at least superficially it doesn’t have a lot of technical chops to it. I don’t feel like it’s intentionally obscure. I don’t feel like it’s doing a bunch of fancy footwork meant to throw you off, or something that requires the close reading of modernist poetry. It’s very straightforward. And you’ll see what I mean here. This poem is “Jerusalem,” also known as “And did those feet in ancient time,” by William Blake.

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon Englands mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On Englands pleasant pastures seen!
 
And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
 
Bring me my Bow of burning gold:
Bring me my arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!
 
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.

Ross Kenyon: A fairly simple poem in many ways. There’s a strong contrast between a mythological vision — there are artifacts that have spiritual power, weapons, a bow of burning gold that shoots arrows of desire, war-fighting and conquering — and, of course, William Blake observing England during the Industrial Revolution. He’s looking at England’s land being transformed from this bucolic, Old English... you know, you watch something like Downton Abbey — ignore the class dynamics and all of that for a second, but think about what rural life is like, at least for those who enjoy such a thing. It has the slower pace of life connected to the natural world. And then he’s staring at the dark Satanic mills, where people are working very long hours doing repetitive, dangerous tasks, and William Blake is declaring war upon it.

And he also links it to building a new Jerusalem. You’ll rebuild the temple. This is the end times, and any time we’re talking about building Jerusalem, there’s a sense of the apocalypse, of a new world being born. And what a short, effective poem this is. It has Christian eschatology in it, apocalyptic thinking — it’s an apocalyptic poem; he’s got a lot of those. It’s where “dark Satanic mills” comes from. Everyone knows this phrase; it’s very, very common. And is it any surprise that this is sort of a national British hymn that people listen to? A connection to land and its people, lamenting our disconnection from nature, the old pastoral, bucolic, agrestic ways of being.

So, in case you weren’t familiar with that poem, here it is — that was “Jerusalem,” “And did those feet in ancient time,” by William Blake. Hope you enjoyed it, and have a wonderful rest of your day, with or without any more poetry that you add to it.