Two doors, and only one of them costs anything.
The free one is very likely to remain free forever. Nearly a decade of episodes going back to 2017, and the essays and transcripts that go with them (working to add transcripts to all of them going back to the beginning!). I am not going to wake up one morning and decide that the back catalogue is actually a lead magnet. It feels wrong to put a tollbooth there.
The paid door has four things behind it, and I want to be specific rather than gesture vaguely at “supporting the work.” But if that’s motivation enough, please don’t let me stop you.
Ad-free episodes. The ads you hear in the free feed are inserted by Spotify at the moment you press play. They are not in the file I make. Paid subscribers get the file I make, on this website and in the Substack app. It does not reach your podcast app, and I would rather tell you that here than have you find out in the car. Substack hands externally hosted shows their own public feed, ads and all, which is a sentence I did not expect to have to write. I am in the middle of moving the whole archive across, so if you hit an episode that still has ads, that is me not being finished yet rather than the benefit not existing. They should all be ad-free before long. The one exception is the sponsorships I read myself. Those are baked in, and I like them.
The extra book. The one I read before an episode that I did not strictly need to read. That is where most of the good questions come from, and it is the part of this job that does not appear anywhere on a spreadsheet. Some of my proudest podcasting moments are having on some serious heavy hitters and them saying, “wow, that was one of the best interviews I’ve done. Most people just skim the latest book and that’s it.” But I will try to read their bibliography and get in there deep. It makes it a much more laborious show to create, but they are the interviews that get closest to being art.
Room to make the show nobody would commission. Paid subscriptions are what let me run the episodes that no one else in carbon removal, and probably no one in climate tech either, would put out. That is where the show goes after what I think is lurking beneath the execute execute execute instrumentality of working in climate. Some shows are very practical. Some, if I’m being grandiose, attempt to be wise. Wisdom doesn’t always lead to compatibility with normal middle class life. Both of these perspectives are useful, but if I was only trying to max out commercial appeal and listenership, I would make many more practical shows. I still enjoy making those quite a bit, but the ones that I think approach something greater tend to be my grappling with the questions of the latter.
The chat, and what is already behind it. Subscriber chat is open, and the bonus material that has gone out to paid subscribers over the years stays where it is. This is not a promise of exclusives I have not written yet. But we can hang in the subscriber chat to the extent that social media does not rot my/your brain.
What the show actually sounds like
I have never found a good way to describe this show to someone who has not heard it, so here are two episodes that could not be less alike. Both of them are the show.
If the second one made sense to you and the first one did not, or the other way around, that is fine. Most people arrive through one door and stay for the other.
Where the show lives
Apple Podcasts · Spotify · YouTube, where every episode goes up with the audio.
Subscribing on any of those is free and helps more than it looks like it does. So does giving the show a great review on Apple Podcasts, leaving a comment on an episode on Spotify or YouTube, giving it a full rating on whichever podcast app you use (primarily Apple Podcasts or Spotify), sharing the show on social media if you love it, and probably other things I’m just not savvy enough to know.
The paid door, since I have been describing it and not showing you where it is
Ten dollars a month, or a hundred a year. The annual works out to two months free, which is the sort of arithmetic that makes me feel like a man in a checked blazer gesturing at a used sedan, and is also just true.
If not, the free door stays open and I meant every word about it. Nobody has to buy anything to be welcome here.