We all want to make sure carbon removal works. But who is working to make it beautiful? And could creating beauty be one of the most important jobs in all of climate?
Leila Conners is a filmmaker who has been making environmental films for decades, including legendary ones like The 11th Hour with Leonardo DiCaprio. Her latest opus is Legion 44, which is a wonderful documentary highlighting so many alumni from this podcast and the CDR industry.
We also discuss why the antihero is such a popular archetype, how you should construct your media diet, and the role of the feature film when long-form and short-form content are polarizing media duration.
Legion 44 is now available for viewing on its own website and several other places, as well as on Tree+: Leila's new tv channel that you can download right to your smart tv. Please support her work spotlighting climate solutions and the delightful world of carbon removers.
"The world will be saved by beauty."
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
-- Dorothy Day
--- Michael Scott (jk... unless?)
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Resources
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Philip Glass's theme from Koyaanisqatsi
Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty: An Intimate Portrait of My Grandmother is also a lovely book by Kate Hennessy, and also probably what highlighted this beautiful sentiment for me.
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hey, thanks for listening to Reversing Climate Change. I’m your host, Ross Kenyon. Before we get going, I’d love to tell you a little bit about our sponsors. They make the show possible. I would love it if you could listen for just a minute while I tell you about Philip Lee LLP and Arbonics.
If you work in carbon removal, you very well may have come across Philip Lee LLP’s work. I originally saw Philip Lee give a presentation about some of the common provisions within offtake agreements, and I was impressed by the quality of their scholarship and their work, and I’m happy that we’re able to stay in touch and finally do this together. I think the law is an underrepresented part of what happens within carbon removal. We assume it’s the background, we assume it’s the mechanics. It actually takes a very smart and creative person to be a good lawyer. If you’ve ever had a bad lawyer, you know that there’s quite a big difference between a good and a bad lawyer.
What’s good about Philip Lee, beyond the good experience that I’ve had personally, is that they’re also just the largest legal team dedicated to the financing and development of carbon projects globally. They were awarded Environmental Finance’s VCM Law Firm of the Year for each of the last two previous years. They have offices in the US, Europe and the UK. If you have business law needs around nature-based carbon projects or engineered ones, if you’re working with sustainable aviation fuels and the integration with CORSIA, anything to do with the VCM generally, Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, the CRCF that’s coming out of the EU now, get in touch with Philip Lee. If you’re working in this field, you really do need a good eye to the law. These projects need legal care. There’s a lot of structuring that takes place. It’s really not turnkey at this point still, and there’s a lot more innovation and creativity that’s going to be needed to make sure that the legal infrastructure that supports carbon removal is there. The link is in the show notes.
Our other sponsor is Arbonics. Arbonics is great. They’ve been on the podcast before. I did a show with Lisett Luik, which I’ll link to in the show notes too if you want to go listen to it. Arbonics is working on forestry in the Baltic states of Europe. Europe used to be much more heavily forested. The great majority of forestry projects take place in the Global South, which is generally a good thing, but we also do need forestry to take place in the EU and in Europe as well. Arbonics has put out some great research recently about the state of afforestation projects, about the bottlenecks in the industry, why the high quality credits are selling out far ahead of issuance, and what that means for people who want to be buying carbon removal credits for forestry but cannot. It’s a really important set of questions that Arbonics addresses with grace. I would recommend checking out their work, and also just checking out Arbonics in general. If you want to support forestry, give Arbonics a look. Link is in the show notes there. Thanks for listening, and now I will go into the show itself.
Ross Kenyon: Hello, and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon. Thanks for listening. I’m really grateful that you’re here. My career in climate tech has mostly been around carbon removal, but not exclusively. The shows are basically of two kinds. They’re often hardcore nerdy shows about carbon removal, literally pulling carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere, destroying them or storing them. I did PhD work in political philosophy before deciding that wasn’t the right path for me, and then I went into filmmaking. So I care a lot about storytelling, about the humanities, philosophy, theology, history, literature. Those are things that keep me engaged and I keep coming back to.
Working in this field is fascinating, and endlessly so, because of the interactions with so much that takes place around how we treat one another, how we live on this planet, where is this planet going, how cruel or how kind will the future be. I like engaging on those topics. So you might see a show that’s about hardcore deal mechanics of a major offtake agreement within carbon removal, and then you might see a show about the Quran the next week. I don’t know. That’s just whatever I’m interested in, whatever I’m reading. It often ends up finding its way into the podcast.
If you’re listening and you really like that, you can become a paid subscriber. It’s $5 a month. The link is in the show notes. That helps me know that what I’m doing is adding value to your life for the price of a cup of coffee a month. Well, not really anymore. It’s less. For the price of two thirds of a cup of coffee a month, you can keep my ego sated and let me know I’m not speaking into the vacuum. You get bonus content, it removes the automated ads that Spotify injects into it in the distribution process, and it’s very much appreciated. If you’re not ready to become a paid subscriber, open up your app right now. Five stars on Apple Podcasts and or Spotify are very much appreciated. In some ways that may even be better than becoming a paid subscriber. It helps a lot. It recommends the show to more people and helps grow it. That’s really important too.
In any case, I started off by talking about media, the kinds of conversations I like to have, and why industry is so important, at least as I see it. Today’s guest is someone that I have a lot in common with, given my previous career as a filmmaker that I mentioned, nowhere close to as successful as Leila Conners has been. If you look at Leila’s IMDb page, I’ll put that in the show notes too. Walton Goggins has never narrated a movie that I’ve been involved in, and neither has Leonardo DiCaprio.
Leila made The 11th Hour, which if you’re listening to this show, you probably have seen. How could you not? It was a major film when it came out, one of the early films about climate change, up there with An Inconvenient Truth. Leila has been making films for a very long time, and her newest film is called Legion 44, and it’s been making the festival circuit for a while now. If you work in carbon removal, you’ve either been interviewed for it or have had friends who have been interviewed for it. You’ve probably seen it at a screening at some point. If you haven’t, you soon will, because how could you not? It’s basically a gathering of all of our friends.
Leila makes our industry look kind and warm and beautiful, both the people involved and also the actual activity. I think there are certain types of carbon removal that have a sort of bucolic tenderness to them. Anything that involves farming will have a sort of natural bonus attached to it, rhetorically, presentationally, just because it has that beautiful back to the land quality. It’s kind of like a cheat code. It’s like having a British accent. If you’re an American listener, you automatically gain 15 charisma points just because you sound British and erudite, even though you might be the dumbest British person that exists. You still get the bonus.
Anything that shows farming is like that. So Leila has some of that in the film. But there’s also a lot of means of carbon removal that are not typically associated with beauty, that do appear to be beautiful. Direct air capture, in the environment in which it is located, can also be a thing of beauty. I just love that Leila’s doing something different. She could have chosen so many different subjects to make a film about. It didn’t even have to be in carbon removal. It didn’t have to be in climate. There are other things that she could be doing with her time. She chose to make a movie about carbon removal. I think that’s a wonderful thing.
I just love how prioritized beauty is. Aesthetics do not play a major role in much of carbon removal. To the extent that they do, it’s often seen as an afterthought. Once we’ve done the important work, let’s call in the designers and communicators and whatever, and they can wrap some beauty around it, and then we’ll be good. I think there’s something that’s really important about going the other way.
The show’s title is cribbed from a Dorothy Day quote. She’s quoting Dostoyevsky. But the world will be saved by beauty. It’s a line that’s inherently beautiful. It’s a wonderfully perfect, compact sentence, and it says so much. It also has a gnomic quality to it. I come back to it often. You’re washing the dishes, you’re walking the dog, and you’re like, the world will be saved by beauty. What does that mean? I’m not even sure I have a discrete answer to give you. I’m not even sure that I want one. The world will be saved by beauty. It is something I’m thinking about, and I want you to be thinking about it as you listen to this show, as Leila tells you what it’s like making a film that is so focused on beauty.
And hey, you should absolutely go see Legion 44. If you’re listening to this show, you likely are passionate about carbon removal, or at least passion adjacent. Oof. Everyone just loves saying whatever adjacent these days and I’m no better than anyone else. The link to that is in the show notes. Leila also has a TV channel that you can download to your smart TV called Tree+. So if you want to support Leila’s work and help get more positive, beautiful climate content out there, biophilic content out there, please support Leila’s work. Links to all these things are in the show notes. Thanks for listening, hope you enjoy. Here is your show.
Ross Kenyon: Thanks for being here, Leila.
Leila Conners: Thanks for having me on, Ross. Nice to see you again.
Ross Kenyon: We were going to do this a while ago and then we had some scheduling hiccups that gave me the chance to rewatch the film. So I’ve actually seen Legion 44 twice at this point, so I’m now part of an elite crew of yours. I think you’ve probably seen it hundreds of times at this point though.
Leila Conners: Probably, yes. The cumulative effect of that much.
Ross Kenyon: One thing that I think is entirely unique about you, or that puts you in a very small cohort of people, is that judging from how the film was composed, you are someone that prioritizes beauty to an extent that is not common in a very STEM-y space filled with nerds. Why is beauty so important to you?
Leila Conners: I’m so happy you saw that. And that has a great deal to do with Harun Mehmedinović, who is our cinematographer, but also myself. I think that part of the ascension pathway that humans have to go on away from destruction is through beauty, and the sense that there’s so much horror, and there’s so much in the storytelling space anyway that is very negative and very sadistic, images and storylines. And even in the world, there’s so much death and destruction right now, and there’s a need for appreciating what is beautiful.
The great majority of the world is beautiful. And actually when you visit, and we do a great amount of travel to see what people are doing, it’s not just the visible beauty, but the beauty in human beings that are efforting to make the world a better place. Most people are doing that in their daily lives pretty much everywhere. Most people are trying to make things better. So thanks for noticing. That’s why we do it, to bring something that I think is important for when you’re learning about things. It’s nice that it is pretty.
Ross Kenyon: Even within this category of environmental or ecological filmmaking, visions of destruction are still pretty common. Granted, they might be used for contrast with the world that we could have but are choosing not to have. But I don’t think there’s hardly any of that in Legion 44. It’s pretty much entirely a film of beauty. Drone shots, cinematography is beautiful. Even the people that I know in it, they don’t look half as good in real life as they do in this film.
Leila Conners: No makeup.
Ross Kenyon: No makeup.
Leila Conners: No makeup. Yeah. The no makeup comment just kind of put me off. But I think that there’s so much efforting in the right way, there’s so much good news going on. And I’ve been accused in the past of being too negative too, like The 11th Hour, agreed, even Ice on Fire. These had a lot of degraded shots of the world going south, which is true. There are a lot of things that you can show that are not doing well at all. But we did that. That was the early 2000s. So if I was still coming at you with collapsing glaciers and floods, which is still happening, the story has to move on, right?
We do know that this is happening. I’ve been in so many conversations about how do you motivate people to do X, Y and Z. It’s almost like it’s not that I’m motivating people so much as I’m showing what is. And if you’re motivated after you see what is, then that’s great. So for example, if you’re motivated because you see a collapsing glacier or something on fire, then that’s who you are. If you’re motivated by seeing someone else invent something and have an innovation that’s changing the world, then you’re this other kind of person. And what I’ve learned over time is that fear is not a great motivator, only if it’s extremely short term. Like that famous example of the sabre-toothed tiger coming at you, at humans a long time ago, and they know what to do. Everyone always said, oh, with climate, we need the sabre-toothed tiger. I disagree. I think you need the innovations. I think that’s the sustainable pathway. It’s not sustaining fear over decades. That’s really very destructive.
Ross Kenyon: What’s the reception been like versus something like The 11th Hour? Do people respond to the optimism and the beauty in a way that was unexpected to you?
Leila Conners: Given that we haven’t yet come out, and this podcast probably will come out just as we’re hitting what we call OTT and then very shortly thereafter Amazon and Apple, we don’t know yet because we haven’t had a mass audience. That said, in our international VIP screenings, it has been very moving, and people that I consider to be harder to get to, say investors or bankers or people in policy, they’ve come up. I’ve actually had someone in a think tank who’s very hard nosed come up crying and said this is the most moving thing for them. Not to say that it’s moving for everybody, but for this person who’s very hard to impress, they said this is the first time they see a pathway from their point of view. So yes, it is moving. It works.
I think the hardest thing about doing a feel good story, and it’s not Pollyanna, we’re not saying we’re out of the woods, we’re saying look, here are a few ways that we can fix this problem that we’ve been worried about for quite some time, is that people will only do certain things based on what their purview is. So in this case, I would think that the solutions that are actually present are more intriguing than the fear that was present prior. So for example, carbon dioxide removal is very interesting as opposed to, say, renewable energy. Again, we are not saying don’t do renewable energy. We’re saying do it. But when you say, oh, we’re burning this, it’s going to the sky, it’s going to be there and it’s going to destroy the world, the young people are coming along saying, well, we’re just going to take it out of the sky. There’s a lot of purchase in doing that. That’s where I think the movie really grabbed some people where prior films did not on the subject. Does that make sense? The long winded way of saying that.
Ross Kenyon: That original hook is what got me into carbon removal, and I think it got a lot of people into carbon removal. It turns out the details of how you actually do that are much more complicated than that simple story. But it’s an amazing story. It’s a great hook.
Leila Conners: Yeah, just remove the problem. I mean, thermodynamically and energy and all of the details on how that happens is where this whole industry is having its communication issue. Hopefully Legion is helpful. We’re actually doing a whole other movie on trees now. We’re in development on a movie called Sanctum Verde, which is about the nature side of this, and which is necessary. It was in Legion 44, but it was just too much to talk about. A lot of people are like, oh, they’re only talking about machines and this and that and the other. I say, well, it’s because of many things. The removal space has the nature pathway, and then the additional long term removal geologic storage pathway. And so Legion 44 is about those long term removal pathways that have emerged.
Ross Kenyon: You cover a number of different technologies though in Legion. It’s not just direct air capture. There’s a lot of croplands, mineralisation, enhanced weathering, biochar involved.
Leila Conners: That’s true. But those are longer term sequestration pathways more so than, let’s say, trees mostly. Give or take. I’m opening a huge can of worms [unclear]. I’m just saying, the life cycle of a forest is very different than enhanced rock weathering going into the streams, going to the bottom of the ocean, getting incorporated in the Earth’s crust and things like that.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, for sure it is. I like it, though. I think for many people who are watching, unless they come from the world of carbon removal, I suspect at least one of these techniques will surprise them. They’ll be like, that’s happening? People are doing that?
Leila Conners: I really hope so. I really hope so. I think that’s one of the things we wanted to do. I wanted to just show, here’s how this is possible, and then there’s this way, and then there’s that way, and then there’s another way. And yes, there’s another way. And it keeps going. And so the good news just keeps coming. It’s just not this one-off idea, there’s so many. And ever since we filmed, there’s many more that have occurred, that have been invented since we did the story. So it’s been great.
Ross Kenyon: I want to ask you about that in particular, because the world has changed a great deal since I remember talking to Fabien years ago about looking for subjects and who should we consider for the film. And it’s only now coming out, and this is, gosh, what, four years ago?
Leila Conners: Five years ago? No, no, no. Three. Three years ago.
Ross Kenyon: OK, my memory gets a little hazy. I remember where I was, in the Nori office, talking to him about it. I can’t place it exactly in time. That’s a long time, and the world has changed quite a bit from there. Has it changed as much as maybe I’m alluding to here, or tonally is it still fit for a world that looks like ours does now?
Leila Conners: I mean, the one thing we’re, I think, pretty good at is making movies that are evergreen, in the sense of knowing full well that what we’re talking about will change, especially when you’re dealing with innovative technologies. So Legion 44, for those of you who haven’t heard of it, is about the effort of taking carbon from the sky and putting it back in the ground. Given that we’re talking to the general public, we obviously have to go through what the basic mechanisms of that are. So regardless of whatever new companies have emerged since then, none of that information is going to be outdone. Basically it has to do with rocks.
In terms of the long term storage stuff, most of these pathways have to do with rocks or [unclear] or things like that. Everything from enhanced rock weathering to direct air capture to even biochar, which can turn into these longer lasting minerals in the soil. These are all sort of dealing with the geologic carbon cycle. That’s what Legion is about. And then we have the innovations of Heirloom, which they call direct air capture, but it’s like enhanced rock weathering and direct air capture at the same time, which is really fascinating. And what they’re doing in Oman with the mountain there. And then of course we do have Seafields and the sinking of sargassum, which is the biologic pathway, and then we have the algae too, in the pools and things like that. So those are the two biologic pathways, but they both rely on carbon being stored very long term, underground or at the bottom of the ocean. So none of those things are going to go away, and all the things that will be different are just other companies that emerge with maybe other ideas. But none of these pathways that we talked about are going to go away. So it’s pretty evergreen, I think.
Ross Kenyon: Biomass sinking has had a hard go of things, probably since the film was conceptualised and shot. But I really do hope that it figures it out and comes back and is another mainstream carbon removal technique moving forward. Whenever we lose a technological pathway, I’m always really concerned. People feel a little bit of glee about it. They’re like, haha, I always knew that biochar wasn’t going to scale or whatever. Every one of those that we lose is bad for everyone. It just puts more pressure on everyone else to be successful. So I think that is maybe one case where the world has lapped it, maybe in biomass sinking, because biochar is scaling really well.
Leila Conners: Biochar is doing pretty well right now.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, for sure. Although privately I hear complaints about various things too. But I mean more like biomass sinking in the ocean, especially since Running Tide has sort of been on the outs, and I haven’t really heard as much development.
Leila Conners: Well, I think it had to do with the kelp and what it had to grow on, where sargassum doesn’t need any substrate. So that’s interesting, and there’s so much of it in the Caribbean, and a lot of this stuff is very locally based. So I would say it’s true if you’re thinking about something in San Francisco and it is actually mostly best implemented in the Caribbean. Maybe it will never be implemented in San Francisco. It’s probably a Caribbean based idea.
I think a lot around direct air capture in Kenya, and what Kenya’s doing, and how they’re abundant. Geothermal is ideal, and because there’s a need for more demand for electricity, it’s not a problem when it comes to using energy. Whereas doing direct air capture, let’s say in New York City, might have different implications for energy use. A lot of people criticise these plans because some of the energy should go to electrification rather than sequestration of carbon. So I think a lot of this stuff is hyperlocal.
I also like to say, from what I understand, let’s just say people who analyse the space are like, oh, well, seaweed sinking is not as efficient as let’s say whatever else. What happens if you’re someone that lives in a place that has a lot of sargassum and you’re sinking seaweed and selling the credits? It works for that person. Everyone is going to maybe attack this however they can, and for them it works. So I guess when you’re modelling out what civilisation does, you have a different approach to these technologies. But when you actually go and talk to people, that’s what they’re doing. You know what I mean? Regardless of someone who’s saying, well, actually maybe we should all be doing whatever else, which mostly people are telling me we should only do wind power or solar.
Ross Kenyon: Your comments at the beginning of that response caught my ear, because I don’t think of documentary as a medium that is focused on being evergreen. There are films like Koyaanisqatsi or something like that. You get Philip Glass to score it. That thing is good forever. You never need to update it or change it. That thing is done. But documentary, especially ones that have a stronger editorialising frame, tend to go out of fashion or become outdated relatively quickly. What’s it like trying to make a documentary that is not of that style, that is trying to be there for the long run?
Leila Conners: Well, it’s not very popular.
Ross Kenyon: I was really hoping you weren’t going to say that.
Leila Conners: Well, it’s kind of true. It would be better for me as a filmmaker if I were doing a lot of hit pieces or really dark stories. If you look at a lot of the docs that get green lit, silly serial killer, whole series on serial killers, or murder mysteries. That’s sort of when everyone’s like, documentaries are having a day. A lot of that content is pretty dark content. So when you’re coming along, and I’ve had conversations with people green lighting projects, and they’re like, we’re really looking for the antihero, we’re looking for the black hat, we’re looking for something a little more edgy. So there’s that.
And then making a good story that’s evergreen. I’m not saying that we’re always 100% correct about things, but we do have now over 20 years of experience where I still get requests for our Urban Roots movie, on the urban farming revolution of Detroit, that we made in the early aughts, or no, 2011 I think it was. So a lot of our movies do last. And also, how shall I say, I always look at it like a time capsule. It’s sort of telling future generations that we’ve thought about these things, and these are the people that have been thinking about these things, and this is what we were doing in 2025 or whenever we’re filming it. And for those young people, or anyone who’s coming at this fresh, if you watch Legion 44, if you know nothing about CDR, it’ll go from not knowing to knowing quite a lot about it by the end, where you can actually engage in the space. That’s sort of why I think it’s evergreen. What will end up happening is the industry will evolve and change with the markets, with tech, with everything else. But if someone comes at it fresh, let’s say in 2028, they’re still going to have to go through what Legion covers, pretty much.
Ross Kenyon: I think it makes sense. Although you dropped bait at the beginning of your response here that we have to go back to, which is, I’ve been obsessed with the role of the antihero in our culture. It’s been done to death for decades at this point. Tony Soprano is often considered to be pretty close to the start of it. TV did it pretty well. Walter White did it pretty well. Are we done with it? Is this still going on? Why do we still want antihero content? I feel like it’s been done. It’s boring. I want robust good characters at this point.
Leila Conners: I think that’s why mainstream media is collapsing. I think that’s why Hollywood’s collapsing, because people are not watching what they’re making as much as they used to, because I think a lot of the podcasts are talking about real things. They’re talking about what people are doing and learning, and that’s what’s fascinating to people. I have younger kids and they don’t watch movies. They’re watching their favourite YouTubers. And it’s not about the dummy YouTubers, it’s about what they’re interested in and what they’re trying to learn. So I think the reason why YouTube is winning the day is because it’s a bunch of real people talking. Let’s say you’re into golf. There’s a whole YouTube world of golf. If you’re into baseball, if you’re into music. Everybody is looking into their world about how to do or be what they want to be, and they see that in YouTube.
All of the black hat antihero stuff. I studied both political science and art history at university, and I realised then that art is before politics. Whatever you’re seeing in the art world, you’ll see manifested in political life later. If you saw it in the Renaissance, you’ll see it maybe hundreds of years later. But obviously everything’s sped up, so now we’re down to decades or years. I think the nihilism in our culture is extremely dangerous, and the storytelling is obviously going to create our world. So if we keep talking about monsters, we create monsters. We’ve always had the intent to talk about beautiful things and beautiful people. It’s not popular though, in terms of the green lighting in the mainstream. They’ll do it, but not at the rate that they do the other stories. For that reason, by the way, I just founded Tree+, which is our own television channel, that I know will probably be an extremely low traffic area for a while. But we are going to put a little stake in the media sphere and say, look, this is where the stories are, where we can build this world that works. Because I feel like there needs to be a place for that. The other side of it is pretty grim, and I’m tired of it. I’ve been tired of it for a long time. The last horror movie I saw was Aliens. I was 16, a long time ago, in the theatre.
Ross Kenyon: Go see the Ari Aster films at least. Go watch Hereditary. It’ll mess you up much worse than that.
Leila Conners: I can’t. I saw The Exorcist also when it came out. I couldn’t sleep for 10 years. So yeah, I can’t do it.
Ross Kenyon: I can say this. I’m OK and I’m talking a good game about beauty and how important it is. I also consume some amount of true crime podcasts. Something about that is compelling to me, even though I know culturally it has us on the wrong path. What’s happening inside of someone that can appreciate both the good and the bad like that?
Leila Conners: I don’t know if I can answer that question because it’s so personal to everybody. I think voyeurism is very interesting. I think human beings are very curious, and by seeing this content, it’s stuff that they would never experience, hopefully, in their lives. I always say to my sons and also to other people, it’s like energetic dumpster diving. So go right ahead, but understand what you’re doing to yourself. Into your mind, into your emotional state.
I remember I was at a meeting in LA around the impact on human psychology when you’re watching something on screen. The cortisol levels sometimes match what it would be if it was really happening to you. I can’t quote the numbers, this was a good 20 years ago that I heard this, but it’s not inconsequential to watch someone be tortured. Your body will respond with cortisol and fight and flight chemicals, and there are neural pathways that are being created. I think that if you’re aware of that, then you can maybe have more sovereignty over the outcome. But if you’re unaware, it could be a slippery slope for some people. It’s a big argument. Everyone argues about what was the reason why someone did X, Y and Z, is it because they watched this thing or not. I don’t think the answer is clear. It’s very individual. But what you do want is to have supportive storytelling in the world that talks about the good in people and the good in the world, because most of the world is efforting in the right direction. Otherwise it would be complete and total chaos.
Ross Kenyon: Smart answer. I think there’s something that pulls a lot of people towards synthetically creating extreme circumstance. Parts of our emotional regulation are dead, and elsewhere maybe our agency is less than we might hope, and there is something that is just thrilling. You can’t always go on a roller coaster. You can always put on some horrifying film or listen to some brutal murder podcast, and it can give you a jolt of the right brain chemistry that maybe you need to regulate through a difficult life. For whatever reason that’s more prominent now, we probably also just have less of the positive stuff happening. People are not really hanging out as much as they used to. Maybe they live away from their family. They’re not in a bowling league anymore. Maybe we’ve at least partially replaced that positive brain chemistry with any type of brain chemistry that gives us a feeling whatsoever, even though, do you really want to be feeling cortisol as opposed to dopamine or oxytocin?
Leila Conners: This is outside of my area of expertise. I only know from my own anecdotal evidence as a human that’s lived a little bit of time on this planet, and watched what’s been going on and how it makes me feel. I decided a long time ago that there’s a world in the media that I want to create just out of my own interest. And I’ve also noticed how hard it is to do what we do, because for some reason there’s a lot of interest in this other dark side. But again, like I said, human culture is like water. It’s going to move where it’s going to move. I was just listening to Joe Rogan talk with, I forget the individual, about ancient history. All the ancient history stuff is fascinating, like what humans were doing maybe 100,000 years ago. That gets a lot of attention because it’s interesting, and it’s different than talking about how horrible human beings are. It talks about how humans were building amazing things, and how did they do this, because this vase was cut with some hard object and we don’t know how they did it and it was carbon dated to 300,000 years ago. How did that happen? I think people are more interested in that right now.
Ross Kenyon: Sounds like it might have been Graham Hancock.
Leila Conners: No, it wasn’t Graham Hancock. It was another guy.
Ross Kenyon: Another guy. Are you able to watch films like David Attenborough’s, which are still beautiful but also have quite a bit of danger in them, and some imagery that’s not necessarily as happy?
Leila Conners: It’s interesting you mention that. I have not watched recent Attenborough stuff. One of my favourite moments of Attenborough I actually put in The 11th Hour, which was his joy in seeing a blue whale breach. He was on the ship, and it’s in The 11th Hour, and you can just see this absolute joy in seeing this blue whale come up and out of the water. It brings so much love within you, watching this human being enjoy this incredible moment. I do know from people that programmed PBS, for example, that Shark Week was extremely lucrative, and this whole animals attacking each other thing, and Discovery had to peter that out for a while. I don’t know if I buy it. I get it. I just don’t know. Personally, when looking at the Attenborough stuff, I really appreciated his massive series which was all about insects, the land animals, and you’re right, as you move into our time they do become more violent. Those are not my favourite ones. Obviously the earlier ones, when he just talked about the fascination of insects for an hour. Although insects do some really interesting things. Wasps are crazy, I’ll agree, it’s kind of scary.
But yeah, I don’t know, I can’t answer it. These are all things outside of my purview. It’s actually, again, why I have my own production company, Tree Media. We have our own channel that is literally going to launch in two weeks called Tree+, on OTT like Amazon. I’m doing a little pitch, but you can get it on Apple TV or Amazon Fire or whatever. I just feel like we have to create our own little island of content, and whoever wants to join us, come see us.
Ross Kenyon: Are you seriously protective of images that enter your brain?
Leila Conners: Yes, I try.
Ross Kenyon: Tell me more about that, because I suspect many people listening are not thinking about that at all.
Leila Conners: Are you sure? I don’t know. I think it’s when you choose what you’re going to watch. Again, it’s like food. I would urge everyone to think about media like food. It’s energetic food, where you’re just taking in ideas and thoughts. I’m not trying to say that I want to live in a world that’s a Pollyanna world, because I know that the world is, well, I read the news. So it’s more what I don’t like.
And it’s funny, I’m digressing, but early in the day, prior to the invention of the World Wide Web, I lived in New York and there was the WELL, which was Stewart Brand and everybody out in San Francisco, and then in New York it was called Echo NYC, run by Stacy Horn, and Esther Dyson was involved. It was the beginning of being able to use the Unix shell, and the internet before the web was created, before Andreessen did the browser. I actually hosted a discussion on the Unix shell for Echo NYC, and that had a lot of intellectuals in New York and some people in San Francisco. It was just fun because we were able to converse. It was the first online chat, but we had to know Unix to do it. You had to jump to the Unix shell out of your computer with the terminal, and then you could discuss things.
One of the discussions that I hosted was around sarcasm and nihilism in movies versus meaningful violence. So for example, if you are watching a war movie and you’re watching the storming of Normandy or whatever sort of battle, versus sadistic torture scenes in a Quentin Tarantino film or whatever. Do you know which is more damaging to the human brain? What is worse? Because the idea of violence is a big topic. So we had that conversation for a while. I don’t remember what the conclusion was, but that’s something to think about. So to answer your question, for me it’s just random acts of violence that have no context. If you’re defending somebody, let’s just say somebody’s coming at you or at an innocent person and they have to defend them and then they have to hurt somebody, that’s different than just really hurting someone just because. And there’s a lot of that in Hollywood storytelling right now.
Ross Kenyon: I’m interested in the duration of content and how structure is changing, for the examples that we’ve spoken about. You mentioned JRE, famously long form, like four hours every couple of days. It’s a lot. And then also people are watching, like your kids are watching, things on YouTube that in some cases can be quite long as well, but sometimes they’re 30 seconds long, a minute long, a couple of minutes long. And you’re somewhere in the middle. That’s sort of like feature films. What’s going to happen to that middle? Is it going to hang in there?
Leila Conners: I think so. Media length, I’ve been in so many conversations about that, and sometimes people come in and want to discuss what the length is. I always say it just depends on what you’re trying to do. I call them media objects. So if you have a thought or a world in which you’re working, for example Legion 44, or in this case our next project Sanctum Verde, different lengths matter for different things. If we go to the mangrove forest somewhere, obviously we can do a ton of short clips of how beautiful it looks. You obviously can put out a two hour conversation with maybe a native person that’s been planting the mangroves. You could also cut together a beautiful movie about it. These are all different media objects with different reaches. So I do believe that people enjoy seeing a whole concept, and oftentimes that takes an hour or so to unfold.
I do think that what the podcasters are doing, like Joe Rogan, is extremely important, because you have time to hear that person talk for an extended amount of time and it helps the authenticity to emerge. If you’re talking for hours and hours on end and then you come back and talk more, certain human qualities come out. As a listener, you feel like there’s a certain level of understanding that’s a little more coherent than if you’re being told something by, let’s say, a newscaster who is just editing down whatever it is that was said to them. So you’re getting rid of the middleman, and I think it’s incredibly important to do that.
Ross Kenyon: That’s nice. I’m glad you were not thinking that the future of film will be going away. Maybe the studio, maybe less of that.
Leila Conners: No, I think it depends on the business model too. The problem that we’re all facing is who’s going to pay for it. That’s the hardest thing for us, it’s not free to make this stuff, because you have to pay for people to go to these different countries. And AI is going to maybe replace some things. But there is reality. I guess AI can make it up for you and animate it or make it so that it is that person, but it isn’t a documentary. So I do think that docs will survive AI to a certain degree. But I just think that it takes time to say something, and so there’s going to be a certain length to it. Now, whether or not they’ll pay for it is another issue, and whether you get it through people paying, transactional video on demand, which is where you pay ten bucks to watch it, or you can put it on YouTube and get ad revenue, or put it on Amazon and get some .003 cents per view. I don’t know. But all I know is we have to be very attritional, and thankfully with AI and with digital we can at least make it more efficient to do what we do. Not that we would replace the location, but at least some parts, like colour correction or mixing or whatever.
Ross Kenyon: Leila, thanks for being on. I really enjoyed Legion 44. Probably going to watch it more times just because, in carbon removal, how could you not? This thing is about to be everywhere, I think. Thanks for making a film that also makes all of our friends and colleagues look smart and beautiful, and makes carbon removal look like the amazing intellectual adventure that it actually is. It’s a wonderful invitational film like that. I’m glad you made it.
Leila Conners: I appreciate your time and watching it. I know everyone’s so busy. And also your identification of beauty. I thought we had a really interesting conversation about media in general, and what we see and watch. And I think simultaneously we have to tell stories that lift people up, and also we have to participate in the world itself. So I know I’m purveying in the creation of something that requires you watching it on a screen, but I also encourage everyone to get outside and see people, because it’s so important.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Touch grass, as they say on the internet.
Leila Conners: Yeah, really important.
Ross Kenyon: Links to all of those things are in the show notes. By the time this airs, in a couple of weeks, you said Tree+ is what?
Leila Conners: Yeah, and I’ll give you the link so people can download it. It’s free. You don’t have to subscribe. If you want to see the movies, you have to pay for them. I feel like I’m not going to win any streaming wars. I’m going to ask you to be a subscriber, but if you want to, I mean, a lot of free content’s on there, but also the big movies, you just have to pay some money. No big deal. So I appreciate your time. And yeah, we can talk more about media. This is fun. I don’t get to talk about these subjects too much.
