Episode 833 - Al Gore
Guest:Lock the gates!
Marc:All right, let's do this.
Marc:How are you, what the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fucking ears?
Marc:What the fuck nicks?
Marc:What's happening?
Marc:I'm Mark Maron.
Marc:This is WTF, my podcast.
Marc:Thank you for listening.
Marc:Today is exciting.
Marc:I talked to Vice President Al Gore here in the garage.
Marc:He's got a new film that, well, you know what it is.
Marc:It's an inconvenient sequel, Truth to Power.
Marc:I watched it.
Marc:I've seen both of them.
Marc:It's devastating and informative and scary, as my buddy Dean calls it.
Marc:It's an earth crumbler.
Marc:That would be the genre, yes.
Marc:A documentary earth crumbler.
Marc:And I don't always know...
Marc:What to do with the information.
Marc:If information frightens me, I tend to just isolate on that.
Marc:That, okay, now I'm frightened.
Marc:And then I go to hopeless.
Marc:And then I go to what's the point of anything?
Marc:You know, why am I not eating more pie?
Marc:But it was great to talk to the vice president.
Marc:And do I call him former vice president?
Marc:I think they always go by vice president for the rest of time.
Marc:I think that's the appropriate address.
Marc:But it was great to talk to him.
Marc:And it was a specific conversation for the most part about, you know, what we can do, what is happening and a little bit about him and some stuff about what's happening in today's political climate.
Marc:He is definitely a pro.
Marc:He's definitely the real deal.
Marc:He might have been president.
Marc:And I say that not like he almost was.
Marc:He might have actually been president.
Marc:But that's old news.
Marc:And he seems to have put it behind.
Marc:But that's happening.
Marc:That'll be happening in just a few minutes.
Marc:Me and Al Gore speaking.
Marc:All right.
Marc:So here here is a couple of emails I think I need to address.
Marc:And I do want to talk about.
Marc:uh having the president here a sitting president and a former vice president here a little bit but first i want to say um i want to read this uh subject line and and this is reasonable and i'll cop to it subject line my heart hurts when you call new haven a shithole
Marc:Oh, Mr. Marin, for at least the third time you have degraded my chosen city, this time calling it a shithole.
Marc:The first time was with Claire Danes.
Marc:I can't remember the second time.
Marc:And the third time was today with David Allen Greer.
Marc:New Haven is a small and sure it's no New York City or Los Angeles, but it is a great city with a lot to offer.
Marc:I've lived here for 13 years on purpose.
Marc:I even bought a house.
Marc:It has changed enormously since Mr. Greer lived here and since your failed audition with Yale School of Drama, burn in parentheses.
Marc:I know you kind of enjoyed your very brief visit in March.
Marc:Great, great show at College Street Theater.
Marc:We got a tiny shout out then, but you have returned to your insulting ways.
Marc:Please come visit and discover our arts, theater, eclectic restaurants, our rivaled pizza, our compassionate and bright citizens, the hills and sound views.
Marc:Or don't visit.
Marc:Just stop dissing us on air or on pod.
Marc:Your number one New Haven fan, Alicia or Alicia.
Marc:Look, you're right.
Marc:It is a default.
Marc:I do call New Haven a shithole sometimes.
Marc:And there's bigger shitholes in Connecticut, certainly.
Marc:And there's no reason for me to be condescending or dismissive or call any place a shithole unless it's a real shithole.
Marc:But New Haven isn't.
Marc:I had a lovely time there the last time I was there.
Marc:It does seem like it's thriving.
Marc:The college brings a lot of culture to this city.
Marc:It is pretty, and you're right.
Marc:It was just a sort of a reflex for me to do it.
Marc:I don't know why I'd do it, but there was a time, and there probably still was a little bit of that left, just a little decay there, but that's no reason to be condescending, and I apologize, and I apologize earnestly.
Marc:I will not...
Marc:Call New Haven a shithole from here on out.
Marc:And if I do, look, you know, there are bigger problems in the world.
Marc:All right.
Marc:One more email here.
Marc:I like hearing this kind of stuff because it starts negative and then gets positive.
Marc:God, I'm familiar with that.
Marc:Subject line, you're the best thing that's happened to my mental health.
Marc:Hi, Mark.
Marc:I'm listening to your somewhat recent episode with Jason Mantzoukas.
Marc:Love him.
Marc:And in your conversation about anxiety and narcissism, it dawned on me that I should share with you how much your podcast has impacted my life and mental health.
Marc:It would be remiss of me to not start by saying this.
Marc:I used to hate you.
Marc:I couldn't stand your voice, and I felt like all you did was ramble on about bullshit nothings.
Marc:My husband would put on your podcast when I fell asleep during our yearly road trips back to Michigan, and I would wake up deeply annoyed that it was your voice that pulled me out of my escapist slumber.
Marc:And then you interviewed Simbad.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:Wow, that was the big change for her.
Marc:I love that it was Sinbad.
Marc:Anyways, back to the letter.
Marc:My husband and his brother have been listening to you for years, and it wasn't until he literally forced me to listen to your Sinbad interview that I fell in love.
Marc:First, because Sinbad was the comedian who introduced me to stand-up, and I knew anything with him would be amazing.
Marc:But secondly, and truthfully more importantly...
Marc:I was struck on a deep, raw emotional level by your candor and transparency about your own life and struggles with addiction and mental health.
Marc:As a 30-something biracial woman who suffers from depression, anxiety, and PTSD, I never would have thought it would be a middle-aged white man that I connected with so deeply.
Marc:But your own musings, ramblings, and insights have helped me in more ways than I can describe.
Marc:You've created a safe space of sorts.
Marc:And I'm so happy to have it, even if it's just inside my head.
Marc:The struggle is real and it always will be.
Marc:But knowing that I'm not the only one worrying about seemingly stupid shit gives me great comfort.
Marc:So all of this to say thank you for being so incredibly open and honest about your life.
Marc:I refuse to believe that I'm the only person that has found such comfort from WTF.
Marc:So please keep being you.
Marc:Sindel.
Marc:P.S.
Marc:I can't believe that I'm admitting this out loud, but I'm pretty sure I'm Jason Manzoukas' female doppelganger, right down to the curly hair.
Marc:Way less hairy, though.
Marc:Well, I'm glad to help out, and I'm glad that you, you know, I'm an acquired taste.
Marc:I definitely, I get that a lot.
Marc:You know, like I didn't like you, and then I liked you.
Marc:But that's good.
Marc:That's like a cat.
Marc:But I get it.
Marc:Yeah, I didn't like me either.
Marc:So I get it.
Marc:So Al Gore coming over to my house, I didn't know what to expect because I didn't know how long the Secret Service stayed on people.
Marc:I don't know what vice presidents deal with on that level.
Marc:I didn't know how insulated he would be or what would happen if there was a... I just didn't know what would happen.
Marc:And it turns out what happened was...
Marc:We got a call.
Marc:My producer, Brendan, did.
Marc:And they wanted to know if some of his people could come over about a half hour early and bring lunch for the vice president.
Marc:Would it be okay if he had lunch before our interview, our talk, here at the House?
Marc:And that was the only call we got.
Marc:And then we asked about security.
Marc:Nope.
Marc:He's just coming with his staff and a PR person.
Marc:So that was a big difference, considering that there was a lot of prep that went into President Obama.
Marc:Again, he was a sitting president, you know, about 15 Secret Service, about half, about a dozen LAPD snipers on the roof next door, shutting down the neighborhood.
Marc:Helicopters were involved.
Marc:It was it was it was
Marc:Hardcore, hardcore, real security shit.
Marc:But nope, just a publicist came over with a few bags from a vegetarian restaurant before the vice president.
Marc:He came over with his chief of staff, I guess, or his main guy and a bunch of other people that dealt with him.
Marc:And he sat at my dining room table.
Marc:I sat on the computer and he sat and ate a vegetarian meatball sandwich, some vegetarian mac and cheese.
Marc:And then actually, and I don't know if I'm speaking out of turn here or I'm divulging anything or betraying our former vice president, but he had two desserts.
Marc:I will say that Vice President Gore had two ice creams.
Marc:I watched it happen.
Marc:And I tried not to talk to him, but it was hard.
Marc:But we talked a little bit, but then we got in here and did the business, which was obviously much different than the President Obama interview.
Marc:And I'd like to take this opportunity to tell you that the Obama interview is actually featured throughout our new book, Waiting for the Punch.
Marc:And one of the great things about the book is that we could take someone like President Obama and
Marc:and put him in conversation with other people who have been on the show, actors, comedians, directors, and the president, all talking about the same thing, a theme in the book.
Marc:So here's a great example of that from Chapter 5 of Waiting for the Punch, Words to Live By from the WTF podcast.
Marc:This is Paul Thomas Anderson, Jim Gaffigan, Bob Odenkirk, and President Barack Obama all talking about parenting.
Guest:My mom and my dad had four kids, me and my three sisters, and my dad had a first marriage where we had five kids.
Guest:Really?
Guest:So he had nine kids total.
Guest:How many kids you got?
Guest:Four.
Guest:Is that just something you did because you grew up like that?
Guest:Probably.
Guest:I mean, it's nice to have a lot of kids running around the house.
Marc:Really makes you feel good, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's like having a warm fire.
Guest:And every once in a while, it's like throwing a bag of cats into a warm fire.
Guest:It could be a nightmare, but it's the best.
Guest:I think we've been culturally told that it's weird.
Guest:I think that people have been told that, like, by the way, when you think about it, if someone says, I have six cats, you think they're crazy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But what if someone really enjoys six cats and their apartment isn't covered with cat turds?
Guest:That's a long shot.
Guest:And there's something about I make a decent living, so as long as I can afford a decent cheeseburger, I'm all right.
Guest:It's not like I need a boat.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:That's how I always describe it.
Guest:I'm like, oh, I can't get my boat.
Guest:It's like, so I'm going to be balder a year earlier.
Guest:It's like, oh.
Guest:Well, what you're saying is that you'll do whatever is necessary for the kids, and you love the kids.
Guest:And what I get from these kids is,
Guest:is immeasurable.
Guest:And I know it sounds like a rationalization, but it's amazing.
Guest:And how old are your kids?
Guest:They're 9 and 11.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:Yeah, they're growing up.
Guest:It's great.
Marc:You like it?
Guest:It's nice, yeah.
Guest:It's nice that they're getting older because the other option is they pass away at a young age.
Guest:Did you find it?
Guest:No, it's great that they grow up because life gets easier, I think.
Guest:The biggest fun I've had is watching my girls grow up.
Guest:And they are magnificent.
Guest:Look, hopefully every parent feels the way I do about my daughters.
Guest:But I think they are spectacular.
Guest:And when Michelle and I came into office, the biggest worry we had was, is this going to be some weird thing for them?
Guest:And are they going to grow up with an attitude?
Guest:Or are they going to...
Guest:think that everybody eats off at China.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:Are they?
Guest:You know, it turns out that they've just become...
Guest:They're kind.
Guest:They're thoughtful.
Guest:They treat everybody with respect.
Guest:They don't have any kind of airs.
Guest:They're confident, but without being cocky.
Guest:They've got great friends.
Guest:They've been able to
Guest:You know, they're not stuck in the bubble the same way I am.
Guest:You know, they go to the mall.
Guest:They have sleepovers.
Guest:They go to prom.
Guest:Malia's started to drive.
Guest:You know, they're doing great.
Guest:So my biggest fun has been watching them grow up.
Guest:Now, unfortunately, they're now hitting the age where –
Guest:They still love me, but they think I'm completely boring.
Guest:And so they'll come in, pat me on the head, talk to me for 10 minutes, and then they're gone all weekend, right?
Guest:And they break my heart.
Guest:And so now I've got to start thinking, well, what's going to replace that fun?
Marc:It's wild to hear it all.
Marc:And then to read it all is even more intense.
Marc:I can't explain how much I love the book we put together.
Marc:That was Paul Thomas Anderson, Jim Gaffigan, Bob Odenkirk, and President Barack Obama, as you'll read in the parenting chapter of Waiting for the Punch.
Marc:You can pre-order your copy now.
Marc:And when you upload your receipt to our pre-order site, we'll send you a special Waiting for the Punch book plate signed by me.
Marc:that you can stick right on the inside cover of your book.
Marc:Just go to WTFPod.com and click on book at the top of the page or click on the cover of the book anywhere on the site.
Marc:There's also a link in my newsletter and on the WTF social media pages.
Marc:Dig it.
Marc:All right, so look, global warming, the end of the world.
Marc:Is it happening?
Marc:I would say that most intelligent people
Marc:And I mean that for most intelligent people, the jury is in.
Marc:It's happening and we have something to do with it.
Marc:Knowing what to do about it as an individual, as a person who...
Marc:just as living life, that's trickier, and I'll talk to Al Gore about that and about other things, but I just don't know what it's gonna take.
Marc:I was in Florida less than a year ago at my mother's in Hollywood, and we got home late at night, and the streets along the ocean were filled with water.
Marc:I'd never seen it before.
Marc:I don't know when that started happening.
Marc:I asked my mother, when did that start happening?
Marc:And she goes, I don't know.
Marc:It just happens now.
Marc:It's some sort of tidal thing.
Marc:No, it's water levels rising.
Marc:And I know some of you, probably not many people that listen to my show are saying like,
Marc:No, no, no, no.
Marc:It's not what's happening.
Marc:Hannity says it's actually the sand rising and that some of the buildings are too heavy.
Marc:That's all.
Marc:You know, it's a cyclical thing.
Marc:Sand rises.
Marc:It's not global warming.
Marc:You know, just don't be crazy liberal with this.
Marc:You know, what's so terrible if we, you know, if the water moves in a little bit, if we add more sand.
Marc:That's what Hannity says.
Marc:More sand will solve the problem.
Marc:Yeah, but it is an issue, and I don't... It's terrifying on a lot of levels.
Marc:If you read that New York Magazine piece about the worst scenario, the absolute...
Marc:Worse that can happen, just like the permafrost melting and releasing prehistoric microbes and bacteria that that the human animals never had to build an immunity to just apocalyptic.
Marc:viral bugs just waiting in the ice is that a possibility i guess it's a possibility no no hannity says those bugs aren't even there he says that you know they're not dangerous they were only dangerous to dinosaurs and we're we're stronger than dinos yeah no that's that's liberal bullshit the bug thing hey i don't know i don't know
Marc:It's scary and it's real.
Marc:And I don't know what it'll take.
Marc:I don't know what it'll take to get people to believe it.
Marc:And I don't know what to do about it all the time.
Marc:And I don't even have a horse in the race.
Marc:I got no kids.
Marc:You know, I mean, obviously there's part of me that was like, I would have preferred this to all this shit that's happened.
Marc:And that is happening every fucking day in this country to never have happened or to at least have happened after I had shuffled off the mortal coil because I'm a little selfish.
Marc:Didn't want to deal, don't want to deal, but now we have to deal.
Marc:That's the bottom line.
Marc:But, you know, Mr. Gord does have some practical approach to to what we can do.
Marc:I just don't.
Marc:What does this guy have to catch on fire?
Marc:Like, oh, my God.
Marc:Oh, my God.
Marc:The sky is on fire.
Marc:Oh, fuck.
Marc:This is bad.
Marc:God, the sky is on fire.
Marc:That's got to be... That's bad.
Marc:Oh, no, no.
Marc:Hannity says it's normal.
Marc:It's happened before, I think, once or twice in, like, India in 1902.
Marc:Sky caught fire.
Marc:And then right after that, it rained really hard for a few days.
Marc:No problem.
Marc:Hannity says it's part of the... It's a cycle.
Marc:Yeah, I don't know.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:See, you know, how long do apocalypses last?
Marc:Hannity says the apocalypse is like it's a two or three day thing.
Marc:Then we're out of it.
Marc:Part of the cycle.
Marc:Anyway.
Marc:It was an honor, and it's always exciting to talk to people who have had a very high place in politics.
Marc:And I want to mention that the documentary, an inconvenient sequel, Truth to Power, is now playing in New York and LA.
Marc:It opens wide this Friday, August 4th.
Marc:Oh, before we start this conversation, I do need to tell you that the pocket knife
Marc:that Vice President Gore is referring to right at the beginning of our conversation is the same knife the United States Secret Service would not let me keep in the garage when Obama was in here.
Marc:Same knife.
Marc:I didn't tell Al Gore that, though.
Marc:This is me and Al Gore talking.
Guest:That is a mean looking pocket knife.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:You know, I just have like, I don't know where that, I just have stuff around.
Marc:In case people want to play with stuff, sometimes people do.
Marc:Vice President Al Gore is in my garage.
Marc:You know, you're the only, just you and Obama, that was it, for the politicians.
Marc:You're it.
Marc:Really?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, I'm honored.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's a much easier visit.
Guest:Yeah, well, yeah, it came the helicopter route, and I got the full experience.
Marc:Yes, you did.
Marc:You drove.
Guest:It's kind of hard to get here.
Marc:Do you like coming out to L.A.?
Guest:I love coming out to L.A.
Guest:One of my daughters lives here.
Marc:Oh, yeah?
Guest:Kristen Gore is a screenwriter.
Guest:Oh, really?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Oh, so you're here a lot?
Guest:Well, yeah, good bit.
Guest:She's married to Damien Kulesh of OK Go.
Guest:Have you ever heard their music, seen their music videos?
Marc:I haven't.
Marc:I'm old, though.
Marc:I'm getting older.
Marc:I don't know what's going on.
Marc:Go check out it.
Guest:OK Go?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They did one in Zero Gravity.
Marc:Oh, really?
Marc:You probably saw it.
Marc:Floating around?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, that's fun.
Guest:Anyway, so I come out here to see them, and Participant Media is out here, and Paramount, and they've made this.
Guest:The sequel.
Marc:Yeah, an inconvenient sequel.
Guest:Truth to Power.
Marc:Truth to Power.
Guest:An inconvenient sequel, Truth to Power.
Marc:Now, when you were thinking about titles, what happened to Wake Up, Dummies?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:What do I got to do, you idiots?
Guest:Yeah, well, we discarded that one there.
Marc:I want to circle around to this because we were talking a little bit in the house.
Marc:Now, the things I've watched recently are that 10-episode documentary from Ken Burns in Vietnam.
Marc:And I've watched the Inconvenient sequel, Truth to Power, your movie.
Marc:And I'm watching current politics news unfold.
Marc:And I just think it's interesting when I sort of looked at some of your biographical history that it actually says in the information that I read that you wrote a thesis at Harvard about television's impact on
Guest:On the constitutional system and the relationship between the three branches of power.
Guest:I haven't been asked about that in a long time.
Marc:But it's like the dates were sort of interesting.
Marc:It was like from 1947 to 1969.
Marc:Right.
Guest:I wrote it and I finished it in 69.
Guest:So that explains one date.
Guest:The other was when it really first started with television.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Well, I think that was what's interesting to me is that given all the work you put in previous to being vice president and being vice president to sort of expanding the role of technology in our lives, that these questions I would imagine that you were asking in the thesis are still very relevant today with the Internet and everything else.
Guest:Yeah, definitely.
Guest:I'll give you the short version.
Guest:I don't want to spend too much time on it.
Marc:No, we'll get to everything.
Marc:We've got time.
Guest:You know, I think that we've had three big changes in the information ecosystem in which our democracy works.
Guest:is placed.
Guest:And of course, the printing press 500 years ago really created the reality that gave rise to America in the first place.
Guest:The feudal system was broken up when the masses could become literate and gain access to information previously limited to elites.
Guest:Libraries had 12 to 15 books written in a language only the monks copying them could understand, basically.
Guest:And then the printing press just exploded that old feudal order and distributed knowledge to everybody.
Guest:And over time, that changed everything and led to the dream that inspired America's founders.
Guest:And then the electronic communications revolution started with the telegraph and radio was a big deal.
Guest:And then the addition of the picture was
Guest:made television the big kahuna, and it displaced print.
Guest:And all of a sudden, that changed the way our democracy operated big time.
Guest:Gatekeepers all of a sudden controlled access to the public forum and charged tons of money.
Guest:And so the big donors, including corporate donors, got in the driver's seat and got way too much control over who was elected and who wasn't.
Guest:And now the third...
Guest:wave is coming in of which you are a a part um the internet actually aggregate ad revenue on the internet surpassed revenue to television broadcast cable satellite for the first time this year really yeah the big advertisers still prefer television but that's changing too and
Guest:And there are no gatekeepers anymore.
Guest:You don't have to pay a ton of money to get your show out to whoever wants to hear it and more and more do.
Guest:And individual bloggers now can have an impact.
Guest:And in a way, it kind of recreates.
Guest:the architecture of the print ecosystem in that a single individual who takes the time to gather the best available evidence and think through it and reaches out and connects with others who share that point of view can use knowledge as a source of power once again and displace money and force of arms, which money has been hacking our democracy and still is,
Guest:But, you know, the Sanders campaign last year, whether you agree with his positions on this or that or not, he proved that you can now run a big, credible, potentially successful campaign without any special interest contributions or big fat cat donors just by reaching out to individuals on the Internet.
Guest:And if that model can take hold, then we can revivify the dream of our founders and make American democracy work again.
Marc:Well, that's true.
Marc:But I think that the there's also the dark side of that, you know, the sharing the point of view, you know, that little echo chambers, right?
Marc:The bubbles, the echo chambers, the dispersion of misinformation, of bad information to to ignorant or uneducated or angry people on either side can, you know, can create tremendous problems.
Guest:Yeah, that's definitely the case.
Guest:It was also true of the first phase of the print media also.
Guest:And before mass advertising, subscriptions were the main revenue for newspapers, and they were echo chambers also.
Guest:And you go back and look at the campaigns in 1800 and in that era, and boy, it was even more vicious than anything you see today.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, but they didn't have Twitter then.
Marc:If you really wanted to troll somebody, you had to go to their front yard and you had to yell at their door.
Guest:Well, pamphlets played a big role.
Marc:I guess that's true, right?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And this is stuff you were thinking about in 1969.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So it's always been, you know, in terms of information and democracy, this was always your interest, even before environmentalism.
Guest:Yeah, well, both were of interest.
Guest:But yeah, Marshall McLuhan was a big deal in my upbringing.
Marc:The medium is the message?
Guest:Yeah, among other things.
Guest:And his predecessors, Daniel Bell and others.
Guest:And I just kind of got tuned into that and found it fascinating.
Guest:And I've always really been interested in that stuff.
Marc:And when you went to, when you enlisted, I don't, the story about you in Vietnam was you didn't have to go.
Guest:I could have found a fancy way to get out of it, as certain other people have.
Marc:And your father, as he was a senator or a congressman at that point?
Marc:He was a senator.
Marc:He was running again.
Guest:Yeah, the coming year he was.
Guest:And he was not before the war.
Guest:He was one of the most prominent opponents of the Vietnam War.
Marc:Primarily because he thought it was unwinnable?
Yeah.
Guest:No, because he thought it was based on a lie.
Guest:He always said that the one vote he regretted the most was for the Tonkin Gulf resolution.
Guest:They all found out soon after that it was a false narrative that was used as an excuse to provoke the war.
Guest:And he came to believe it was not winnable without destroying the whole...
Guest:Southeast Asia.
Guest:But I was really proud of him.
Guest:I was a college student during that time.
Guest:But the reason I volunteered to go is that my upbringing was in two places, the big city of Washington, D.C., where my father served there, and then a small town in Tennessee.
Guest:And that was my emotional, spiritual home always, still is now.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, you know, everybody knew who was on the draft board.
Guest:Everybody knew who was up in each month.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I just couldn't feel right about using some of the strategies that were available in the big cities and, you know, if you had connections with your family.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I just felt like I couldn't imagine some –
Guest:A guy, one of my friends in Carthage, Tennessee, going in my place, getting killed.
Guest:What would I say to his family?
Guest:You know, it sounds corny, but that really was it.
Guest:And the fact that my father was going to be a candidate the following year as an opponent of the war brought it kind of in sharp relief for me, too.
Marc:And you thought that by going it would provide what in terms of his campaign?
Guest:I didn't have any illusions that it would make a big difference either way, but I wouldn't have felt right about doing –
Guest:you know, getting out of it in a kind of a sneaky way.
Guest:And if that should have contributed to his defeat, that wouldn't make it even worse for me.
Marc:I guess the reason I'm starting here is because, like, I know that, you know, we talked a bit in the other room about how you were not, you know, you were of that generation that protested the war.
Marc:And then, you know, you put that uniform on.
Marc:I'm sure you felt that come back at you.
Marc:You know, the contempt from the people, other students that,
Guest:You know, I actually did.
Guest:I did feel that and it was quite a shock.
Guest:I went through basic training and before I went to, I had a few days off after basic training and I went back to see my friends in Boston where I'd been in college and my hair was all cut off and I was in the uniform and
Guest:wow, the reaction on the sidewalks was really something.
Marc:You felt it.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:How'd that make you think?
Marc:I mean, what did that change in you to see both sides of it like that?
Guest:Yeah, it did.
Guest:It caused me to think differently about the divisions on the war.
Guest:I never changed my opposition to the war.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And then when I got to Vietnam and got to know
Guest:as friends, a lot of the people in South Vietnam, that was a big change too, because it was all of a sudden a lot more complicated.
Guest:Again, I was still opposed to the war, but for example, some of the Catholics in South Vietnam were really terrified of what would happen if the North Vietnamese were
Guest:took over.
Guest:And, you know, you have to take that into account.
Guest:It was still a really horrible mistake.
Guest:The second worst policy mistake, foreign policy mistake in the history.
Guest:That went on for a decade.
Guest:Of our country.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, the invasion of Iraq was clearly the worst mistake.
Guest:We're still living with that more than a decade later.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And that one would have been on your watch had you been elected.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, and I like to think a lot of things would have been different, but no point trying over spilled milk.
Marc:But the thing that struck me about the documentary was it seems to me that the anti-war movement and the progressive movement and everything that happened in the late 60s and early 70s is still the dividing line today.
Marc:That there's the right and the conservative movement.
Marc:And then what happened against that war really out of that, you know, came, you know, new progressive politics, environmentalism.
Marc:It all seemed to happen around the same time.
Guest:Yeah, I think for you and me and people who lived through those years, it may have looked like the starting point of that, but I think that left-right division goes back much further.
Marc:Oh, yeah?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, well, you've done the homework.
Marc:Like, how far back?
Marc:It's just always been there, huh?
Guest:Well, Hamilton and Jefferson were on opposite sides of a lot of things, and back to the English Revolution before that, and I'm sure somebody more learned than me would take it even farther back.
Marc:And what made you, when you come back from Vietnam, what were you doing there?
Marc:What capacity were you serving?
Guest:I carried a pencil and an M-16.
Guest:Oh, yeah, you had the M-16?
Guest:I was an Army journalist with orders to travel all over the country writing stories about whatever the combat engineers were doing.
Guest:And I went all over the country.
Guest:It was really, really very interesting.
Marc:And you come back and you decide, what made you decide to go into politics?
Guest:Well, I didn't.
Guest:I thought politics would be the last thing I ever did.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Since my dad was in it as a little kid, I thought I'd do what he did.
Guest:And he was, he and my mom both were heroes to me.
Guest:But when I saw the Vietnam policies and even, you know, Johnson, and then after that was Nixon, I thought, wow, I want nothing to do with this gig.
Guest:And I thought I would be a journalist.
Guest:The Army, actually, I went in as a private.
Guest:They made me a journalist.
Guest:And I wrote stories over there that caught the attention of my hometown editor.
Guest:And when I got back to Tennessee, he called me and offered me a job, $95 a week.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:So I started doing general assignment and then worked my way up to police beat and then city hall reporting.
Guest:We called it the Metro Beat.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Became an investigative journalist before that title had any cachet.
Guest:Did you love it?
Guest:At all.
Guest:I absolutely loved it.
Guest:I absolutely loved it.
Guest:And I started writing stories about corruption in local and state government.
Guest:And
Guest:My editor was kind of a pioneer, a guy named John Sigenthaler, and he sent me to a school for investigative journalism.
Guest:And I'm telling you this story because it's relevant to what's going on today.
Guest:It was in December of 1972.
Guest:Nixon had been reelected in a landslide.
Guest:But these two young hotshot reporters at the Washington Post, Woodward and Bernstein, had written these amazing stories.
Guest:And the group of us from all over the country who were digging into investigative journalism...
Guest:We're talking about whether or not investigative reporting was dead because nothing was happening.
Guest:Nobody seemed to care about these incredible stories.
Guest:And we thought, oh, well, maybe in the age of television, nobody really takes the time to read this stuff and connect the dots anymore.
Guest:But then three months later, all hell broke loose.
Guest:And, you know, the spiraling downward of Nixon led to his resignation.
Guest:And the reason I bring it up, of course, is that right now—
Guest:a lot of your listeners a lot of people all over the country are are connecting dots on their own with the russia story and the trump white house and all of that and i hear some of the same questions does nobody does nobody care about how grotesque this is and underneath the news cycle is an investigation and you
Guest:like the Watergate investigation, it may be following its own rhythm, hidden from public view, as it should be.
Guest:And when they get a package of connected dots and surface what they've found, who knows what's going to happen.
Guest:It may well be
Guest:that the next several months are going to be a challenging time for our country.
Guest:It sure feels like that, doesn't it?
Marc:Yes, it feels like that to me.
Marc:And having you come over here to talk to me, knowing what you've seen both inside politics as a young man, but also being on the inside of difficult times, do you worry for our system?
Guest:Yes and no.
Guest:Yes, because as a citizen of our country, we all have a duty to be alert and diligent.
Guest:But no, because I think we have more resilience than we sometimes realize.
Guest:The courts have already blocked some of the crazy things he's proposed, and even this Congress is failing to support some of the other things he's trying to do.
Guest:And the state governments and city governments.
Guest:You know, Jerry Brown here in California is a hero on climate.
Guest:After he withdrew from Paris, the states and cities and business leaders filled the gap and said, we're still in the Paris Agreement.
Guest:We're going to meet the commitments anyway.
Guest:So I think there's a lot of resilience.
Guest:Just today, some of the Republican senators who...
Guest:by my lights, have been way too slow to speak up against Trump, are all of a sudden saying, hey, don't fire Sessions, don't fire Mueller.
Guest:As Lindsey Graham said, it'll be holy hell.
Guest:I was glad to hear him say that.
Marc:And you know these guys.
Marc:You worked with these guys.
Marc:They were all there when you were there.
Guest:Yeah, a lot of them were.
Guest:I was in the House with John McCain and then in the Senate with John McCain.
Guest:And
Guest:I know Lindsey Graham very well and most of the others.
Guest:And I don't know, I could be wrong, but I think they're beginning to find a real source of strength in standing up to Trump.
Marc:Well, you did cover some of that, you know, the state government stepping up to fill the gap environmentally in the film a little bit.
Marc:There's that governor from Texas, right?
Marc:Is he a governor?
Marc:No, he's a mayor.
Guest:The mayor of Georgetown, Texas.
Guest:Mayor Dale Ross.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Conservative Republican Trump supporter.
Guest:In the heart of oil country, the reddest city and the reddest county in Texas.
Guest:But he's a CPA, and he did the numbers.
Guest:And he said, you know, if we switch to 100% solar and wind, we're going to save money.
Guest:And they've done it now.
Guest:And the electric bills are going down, and the air is cleaner.
Marc:Isn't that interesting?
Marc:So it took economics.
Marc:Not science, but economics.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And he says in the movie, you know, you don't need scientists.
Guest:Isn't it just better not to put stuff in the air?
Guest:You know, okay, that works for me.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:And that is a trend that you see picking up speed?
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:And it's driven by a couple of big changes in the last decade since the first movie, An Inconvenient Truth, came out.
Guest:Number one, the climate-related extreme weather events are way more common, way more serious.
Guest:There are 100 fires going on right now as we're talking.
Guest:These rain bombs and mudslides and droughts and the sea level rise.
Guest:I mean, Mother Nature has entered the debate.
Guest:Turns out she's more persuasive than any of us.
Guest:And that's the first big change.
Guest:The second change is the solutions are here now.
Guest:The cost reductions for electricity from solar and wind are just so dramatic.
Guest:It's almost like computer chips, mobile phones, flat screen TVs.
Guest:And when they scale up the production, the cost declines, increase.
Guest:And jobs, there's new jobs.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:Solar jobs are now growing 17 times faster than other jobs in the economy.
Guest:And the single fastest growing job is wind turbine technician.
Guest:So this shift away from dirty fossil fuels is going to be a big economic boost in the best way.
Marc:Well, let me ask you a question.
Marc:Somebody that was in the House, in the Senate, the vice president,
Marc:You know, this this this fossil fuel paradigm, this oil paradigm with all their lobbying and with their, you know, corporate power.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know how at this point?
Marc:I mean, you know, it seems that, you know, what we're obviously the sort of one step forward, two step back thing is is is relevant and happens.
Marc:But it just seems that we're back into the full-on petroleum paradigm with this administration, that even with the progress and even with some of the oil companies moving into cleaner energy, that there's still this need to gut the government and exploit anything we can in the name of fossil fuels philosophically from this administration.
Marc:So how do you you know, how did you reckon with that when you saw it, you know, in Congress and the Senate and as a vice president?
Marc:What do we do now with this almost spiteful return to the oil paradigm?
Guest:Yeah, it's a it's it's a problem and they have a lot of power.
Guest:they're among the biggest campaign donors.
Guest:They have these huge lobbying teams.
Guest:And even beyond that, they've done something really despicable.
Guest:They took the playbook of the tobacco companies who decades ago were confronted with an existential threat to the cigarette business by the Surgeon General.
Guest:The doctors and scientists linked up the
Guest:connection between cigarettes and lung cancer and other diseases.
Guest:And so the tobacco companies hired actors and dressed them up as doctors and put them in front of cameras and a teleprompter where they just falsely reassured people that they'd say, hi, I'm a doctor and there are no health problems.
Guest:connected to cigarettes.
Guest:It was really awful.
Guest:And the large carbon polluters like the Koch brothers and ExxonMobil and others have hired the same PR firms, and they're using the same blueprint, and they're putting out these phony pseudoscientists and creating false doubts.
Guest:There was a great book that documented this called The Merchants of Doubt, and they've spent over a billion dollars trying to pull the wool over people's eyes.
Guest:Brainwash them.
Guest:Yeah, absolutely.
Guest:Psychops.
Guest:Well put.
Guest:But people are beginning to see through it in larger numbers now.
Marc:Because they can't breathe?
Marc:Or their beachfront condo in Florida is underwater?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I was down in Miami on a sunny day watching fish from the ocean swim in the streets.
Guest:And I mean, I'm being literally serious.
Marc:My mother lives in Hollywood, and one night we were just staying down there, and there was water.
Marc:Like, there was ocean water in the streets, and I'd never seen that before.
Marc:And I'm like, what's going on?
Marc:And she's like, yeah, it seems to happen sometimes.
Marc:High tide.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:High tide.
Guest:Very high tide.
Guest:Well, the sea level has risen enough so that the high tide now floods a lot of the streets.
Guest:And it's true in Fort Lauderdale.
Guest:It's true in Norfolk, Virginia, in Annapolis, Maryland, all up the coast, Galveston, Texas.
Guest:And it's much worse in places like Bangladesh and the Maldives.
Guest:you know, Calcutta and Mumbai.
Marc:Why is it worse there?
Guest:Well, because there are many more people who live in lowland coastal areas and don't have the money to build seawalls or protect themselves.
Guest:And so the world is girding for these larger numbers of climate
Guest:refugees.
Guest:But in any case, because of the impacts that are getting so much more serious, people are waking up to this.
Guest:And because the alternatives are now cheaper, as we talked about in Texas, people are saying, okay, we can solve it.
Guest:We don't have to get into the science of it.
Guest:We don't have to use the words global warming.
Guest:We can just say, okay, let's get cleaner air and create jobs and save money all at the same time.
Marc:But not to be cynical or to be realistic in the sense that when you talk about the Koch brothers or where you talk about ExxonMobil or when you talk about these PR firms that twist it, I mean, they live on the same planet.
Marc:I mean, like, what is, in your experience, what is their endgame?
Marc:Are they like, well, we're going to build some sort of new suit that we can all wear when it gets too hot to live?
Marc:Like, where does capitalism see the climate change and what the world is going to look like as opportunity?
Marc:I mean, where's their conscience in this?
Guest:Well, you know, I think that some of them go to great lengths to avoid engaging their conscience.
Guest:A great investigative journalist over 100 years ago, Upton Sinclair.
Guest:Right, the meatpacking thing.
Guest:Yeah, the jungle.
Guest:The jungle.
Guest:And other things.
Guest:He was great.
Guest:He wrote a sentence that I think applies.
Guest:He says it is difficult to get a man to understand something if his income depends upon him not understanding it.
Guest:And I think, you know, human nature makes all of us vulnerable to stuff like that.
Guest:But at some point, you've got to shake that off and be honest with yourself.
Guest:And a lot of them are just not.
Guest:And, you know, who was the movie character that said greed is good?
Marc:Oh, yeah, from Wall Street, Michael Douglas.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Gordon Gekko.
Guest:Gordon Gekko.
Guest:Yeah, I mean, I think there's a...
Guest:blinders of a kind when greed is the only thing occupying somebody's mind and power yeah and these these carbon polluters are are hell-bent to squeeze as many more years as they can out of a business plan that relies on using the the sky as an open sewer
Marc:Well, but but there's got to be discussions in those that you've provoked or within these corporate realms of them saying, well, why can't we diversify?
Marc:I mean, I haven't some of these larger energy companies that were once petroleum based.
Marc:Are they not doing cleaner things?
Marc:Well, two points.
Guest:First of all, the LA Times, Inside Climate News, Columbia Journalism School, there was a Pulitzer Prize given for their work last year, maybe it was two years ago, where they went back and looked at how companies like ExxonMobil put their scientists on this task decades ago.
Guest:They knew.
Guest:They totally knew.
Guest:It's like Vietnam.
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, they figured it out.
Guest:And wherever the rising seas affected the location of drilling rigs, they made the adjustments.
Guest:They planned out how they were going to take advantage of the melting polar ice cap.
Guest:And yet, there came a time when they made a very cynical, immoral business decision to
Guest:to consciously, deliberately confuse the public by saying falsely, this problem isn't real.
Guest:And they gave lots of money to these climate denier groups to go out and manufacture false doubts.
Guest:It's part of the business plan.
Guest:I get it.
Guest:It's really unethical.
Marc:Of course.
Marc:And the problem is, like, I was trying to think about, you know, how I felt when I watched a movie and I saw the first movie.
Marc:And, you know, I don't know that I changed my life dramatically after I watched the first movie.
Marc:I felt worse.
Marc:Yeah, you know, I think I used less plastic.
Marc:I'm very aware of the bags and stuff like that.
Marc:But in terms of what I do as a person.
Marc:And then when I watched this movie and I can see as a 53-year-old man the weather changing and everything else.
Marc:You know, why...
Marc:what do I do and how do I deal with this information?
Marc:And I think a lot of people are just sort of like, yeah, I kind of know what's happening, but I don't want to, I kind of want to deal with it.
Guest:Yeah, well, you know, when I grew up in the South, the civil rights movement was gaining momentum.
Guest:Same kind of thing.
Guest:People who knew it was wrong to discriminate on the basis of skin color would say, you know, what do I do?
Guest:But then the laws began to change.
Guest:People won the conversation.
Guest:It became clear.
Guest:What's different now is that it's much easier for people to be a part of the solution.
Guest:You can contact one of the solar energy companies here in California, and here's the deal they'll make you.
Guest:They'll say to you, we'll put solar panels on your roof.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the next day your bills will drop 20%.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:How much will it cost me?
Guest:Zero.
Guest:They'll do it for nothing.
Marc:As an American, my first thought is like, they're going to stick me somehow.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:No, no.
Guest:The laws in California make it possible for them to make a profit and give you savings on your bills.
Marc:Oh, because they have a deal with the electric company here, right?
Guest:No, the electric utilities have been resistant to this, but because of the people of California having a state government that gets it,
Guest:And by the way, the subsidies for the fossil fuels are 40 times bigger than the subsidies for renewables.
Guest:But it's changing now because the cost of these renewables is coming down so fast.
Guest:Now Tesla's about to introduce a consumer version of the electric car.
Guest:All major car manufacturers are beginning to introduce electric vehicles.
Guest:India, this is great.
Guest:It didn't get a big splash in the Western news.
Guest:Two months ago, India announces within only 13 years, 100% of their cars and trucks are going to have to be electric vehicles.
Guest:Really?
Guest:It's incredible.
Guest:India and China are closing hundreds of coal-burning plants, vastly expanding solar and wind, and they're creating jobs there.
Guest:We need to get with it and push back the resistance from the big oil companies, gas companies, coal companies, and coal-burning utilities.
Marc:What do you how do you outside of this bubble effect and and a certain type of of specific anger in this country?
Marc:Like, you know, this whole, you know, President Trump is very focused on coal and barely anyone's using it anymore.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Like it's a dying paradigm.
Marc:It is.
Marc:And the idea to hang some sort of national pride or future progress on it is peculiar.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And obviously, you know, the nomination of heads of, you know, departments who are specifically there to undermine the department.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But that's a Republican tactic.
Marc:That's not new to make the government ineffective and small.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:What is it about people that are like, you know, who are literally like, you know, it's all who are the people that are screaming?
Marc:It's a myth.
Marc:And why are they doing that when it's so obvious?
Marc:What what do they get?
Marc:Where do they stand to gain?
Guest:Well, some of them are paid to do it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Some of them are motivated by these carbon polluters who make tons of money from it.
Guest:And first of all, the coal industry is dying for sure.
Guest:And we've got to take care of the coal miners.
Guest:Most of their jobs were eliminated by the coal companies with automation a long time ago.
Guest:And by the way, the famous coal museum in Kentucky, in the heart of coal country, just switched to solar electricity.
Guest:Oh, that's in the movie, right?
Marc:No, not in the movie.
Marc:I read that somewhere else.
Guest:But they're saving money.
Guest:But I think one of the reasons why— That's irony on the good side.
Marc:I like it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I think one of the reasons why Trump made the coal thing a big deal was that he benefited from some...
Guest:widespread anger on the part of people who have watched middle class wages stagnate for decades and they're angry about the current pattern of globalization and outsourcing and now intelligent automation is coming in and making some of that the job losses but that's not a partisan issue i
Guest:No, but it's not.
Guest:But when you have a demagogue who comes in and says, I'll take you back to the good old days, we'll recreate the past, we're going to go back to the age of coal.
Guest:Well, we're not going back to the age of coal.
Guest:The market capitalization of the coal industry in this country has gone down almost 90% in the last decade.
Guest:Last year, almost three-quarters of all the new electricity generation in the U.S.
Guest:came from solar and wind.
Guest:The rest came from gas, 0.2% from coal.
Guest:It's going.
Guest:It's dirty.
Guest:It's terrible.
Marc:Yeah, and I guess that the paradigm that he's trying to recreate is not just economic, it's also racial.
Marc:It's about white nationalism that you grew up with somewhere down there.
Guest:Yeah, all of us did.
Marc:Yeah, and that, you know, I mean, geez, when your dad was in office, the South was still Democrats a lot.
Guest:Yeah, well, when I ran for Congress for the House of Representatives the first time in 1976,
Guest:My race was in the primary.
Guest:There was not even a Republican on the ballot in the general election.
Guest:It was practically illegal for him to run.
Guest:I'm just joking when saying it that way.
Guest:But now most of the public offices are held by Republicans.
Marc:And what happened when you met with Emperor Trump and Ivanka?
Marc:Yeah, did you meet with Ivanka?
Guest:Met with her first and then met and spent time with the then-president-elect Trump.
Marc:How did you find him as a person?
Marc:Had you met him before?
Guest:I had met him before, yes.
Guest:He never supported me, but any elected official that goes through New York for years and years would have run into him in those years, and I did.
Guest:And I actually had a chance to, he came to my office in the Senate on professional football business when he had that USFL team way back in the day, the New Jersey Generals.
Guest:And I've protected the privacy of my conversations with him.
Guest:That was not the only conversation that continued when he was in the White House.
Guest:And
Guest:My focus was on trying to convince him to stay in the Paris Agreement.
Guest:And I thought, really, that there was a chance he would come to his senses, but I was wrong.
Marc:And do you think that they are his senses that he came to, or he's not really making those decisions for himself?
Guest:Well, if you're asking me to give you a theory of Donald Trump's mind, I don't have one.
Guest:But I'll answer your question by saying I think that he's thrown his lot in with this rogues gallery of climate deniers.
Guest:And he seems to think he can succeed as a president by just being president of the right-wing fringe of the Republican Party and the ones even to the right of the Republican Party, and that he doesn't need to care about the rest of the country.
Guest:I think that's a profound mistake, but that's the way he's acting.
Marc:Well, yeah.
Marc:And even the it seems like even the worst of them, whatever side you're on, at least paid some lip service to unifying the country somehow.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's sort of a demonic and frightening thing to be, you know, shamelessly screw you to more than half of the people of the country.
Guest:Yeah, you used one word in that sequence that gave me a little pause.
Guest:But, you know, one of the saving graces is that his regime is a mixture of malevolence and incompetence.
Guest:And so he's not seemingly able to do all of the bad things that he sets out to do.
Marc:Now, have you taken this movie to Washington?
Yeah.
Guest:We had a pre-screening in D.C.
Guest:last week.
Marc:A lot of Republicans come out?
Guest:You obviously read something.
Guest:We invited everybody, and none of the Republican members of Congress came.
Guest:Guys you know?
Guest:Some of them, yeah.
Guest:But, you know, they're now in a position, the Republicans, where their main concern when it comes to reelection is
Guest:It's not about the general election.
Guest:It's about getting an ultra-conservative primary opponent.
Guest:And so they're not really worried about...
Guest:trying to reach out to the middle.
Guest:A few are.
Guest:Some of them are.
Guest:But the way the congressional district lines are drawn now is another part of this problem.
Guest:I'm sure you're quite aware of that.
Guest:And we talked about the echo chambers on the Internet.
Guest:These congressional districts, some of them become echo chambers, where the only thing Republicans have to fear is somebody way to the right of them.
Marc:And how do you get through to them with a nonpartisan message of global catastrophe?
Guest:Well, it's not only a message about catastrophe.
Guest:The risks are unprecedented for sure.
Guest:But the opportunities are also unprecedented and the cost savings that I mentioned earlier.
Guest:I'll give you a quick example.
Guest:One of the founders of the National Tea Party movement is a woman in Atlanta, Georgia named Debbie Dooley.
Guest:And the Koch brothers reached out to her group, the Atlanta Tea Party, and wanted her to support them to support legislation to slow down solar and block solar.
Guest:But she had put solar panels on her house, and she said, what's this?
Guest:And so she joined with the Sierra Club and the Atlanta Tea Party did to form a new organization called the Green Tea Party.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And they defeated that legislation.
Guest:And I saw her just recently on TV just giving hell to the Koch brothers and the carbon polluters who she said are lying to people.
Guest:And, you know, it's hard to find a more conservative person than Debbie Dooley.
Marc:Well, yeah, because this shouldn't be a political issue.
Guest:Correct, correct, correct.
Marc:So have you reached out to the Koch brothers to invest in green energy or in clean energy, renewable energy?
Guest:No, no, I have not.
Guest:I have not.
Marc:Why can't that be part of their portfolio?
Guest:Well, you know, some of these carbon polluters are really not interested in investing in things that will destroy their legacy business.
Marc:But if the legacy is already compromised by just the momentum of planetary progress, you would think that they would hedge their bets a little bit at least.
Guest:You know, there was a book that came out a few years ago called The Innovator's Dilemma, and it's a little...
Guest:a nerdier way of making the same point that if you got a business and it's based on a particular plan and somebody comes to you with a brand new idea for something that's cheaper and better and you're looking at it and you say, oh, wow, I could invest in this.
Guest:And then you pause and say,
Guest:But if I do, then it's going to destroy this business I've got going, and I've sunk all my assets into this legacy business, and I'm never going to make as much money with this new better approach.
Guest:And so what some of them do is decide to just hang on and try to fool people and obscure the truth about it and keep making as much money for as long as they can from the old ways.
Marc:And they try to kill
Guest:that new business.
Guest:That's correct.
Guest:And that's what the electric utilities that are based on burning coal and gas are trying to do to solar in states and cities around the country.
Marc:And they've been doing that forever.
Marc:I mean, here they don't have no public transport because of the automobile industry early on.
Marc:Right.
Marc:There used to be, you know, subways and trains in L.A.
Guest:And even trolleys.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:So that's been going on since the beginning of this.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The difference is these carbon polluters have way more money than their predecessors.
Guest:And they they control a lot of politicians who will when they say jump, they as the old saying goes, they say, yes, sir.
Guest:How high?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And when did you first start bringing this stuff up in in Congress?
Marc:Right.
Guest:Yeah, I had been fortunate when I was in college in the 60s to learn from a great professor from here in California.
Guest:The guy's name was Roger Revell.
Guest:He was the first scientist to measure CO2 in the atmosphere.
Guest:And he's the one who opened my eyes to this.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Some seven, eight years after that, when I was elected to Congress, I asked what's going on with global warming, and nothing was.
Guest:So I helped organize the first hearing on it.
Guest:And I invited my professor to come and be the leadoff witness.
Guest:And I thought it would have a big impact down there, but it didn't.
Guest:And that's when I first started asking myself, how can this...
Guest:be communicated more effectively so that i can recreate for others the aha moment that i had yeah learning from this professor and it's been a lifelong journey since then and when you do something like that in congress is that like you invite other congressmen or they come to the chamber how does that work
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, there are committees.
Guest:This was a subcommittee and I wasn't chairman of it, but I got the chairman to let me do this.
Guest:And you schedule the hearing and the press comes and the witnesses are invited and there's a little crowd out there and the lobbyists will also come.
Guest:And then you go through the day with one witness after another and compile a report.
Guest:That's how it works.
Marc:And now you stuck with this, though, and there was progress made with the ozone issue.
Guest:Absolutely, yeah.
Marc:How did that unfold?
Marc:Because we fixed that, right?
Marc:Yeah, big success story.
Guest:And actually, Ronald Reagan was one of the reasons we fixed it.
Guest:Margaret Thatcher, he respected a lot when she was the prime minister of England.
Guest:And she had a degree in chemistry, and she understood this stuff.
Guest:A couple of scientists from California, Sherwood Roland and Mario Molina, Mexico City and La Jolla, they discovered the linkage between these chemicals called, forgive me, chlorofluorocarbons that were used for a lot of things, and the destruction of the stratospheric ozone layer.
Guest:Notice, first of all, above Antarctica, where this huge hole started opening up and
Guest:Every September through November.
Guest:And they said, wow, this is these chemicals.
Guest:So the politicians actually listened to the scientists.
Guest:Maggie Thatcher got Ronald Reagan to listen.
Guest:I was in the Senate back then.
Marc:Was he hard to get to listen?
Guest:Not for her.
Guest:I mean, I think that he really respected her, and I think he had a science advisor who listened also.
Guest:And anyway, there was a negotiation in Montreal in 1987, and they passed a treaty.
Guest:Three years later, it was toughened.
Guest:And that's a big success story.
Guest:Yes, it'll take some time for the full healing to
Guest:to take place, maybe another 75 to 100 years, but it's already beginning, and so that's a big success story.
Guest:Here's the difference between that problem and the climate crisis.
Guest:The chlorofluorocarbons, they were used in, you know, for a while, spray cans and air conditioning and cleaning circuit boards, etc.,
Guest:But they were a very tiny part of the economy overall.
Guest:Fossil fuels, by contrast, still supply more than 80% of all the energy the global economy uses.
Guest:So dealing with fossil fuels is way harder.
Guest:And yet we are doing it now.
Guest:We are seeing it.
Guest:There was an oil minister in Saudi Arabia years ago who said the Stone Age didn't end because of a shortage of stones.
Guest:It ended because something better came along.
Guest:And the oil age and the fossil fuel age is going to end not because they're in short supply, but because something better is now here, solar and wind.
Guest:We get more energy from the sun in one hour than the entire global economy uses for a full year.
Guest:So if we improve the fraction of that that we harvest and use productively, then, you know, we can replace fossil fuels.
Marc:I guess it seems that when you say like that, one of the things that scares aggressive capitalists who are part of the fossil fuel industry is they may not see a way to make a boatload of money off of that.
Guest:Yes, but here's a really big change.
Guest:The Paris Agreement that we talked about earlier in a year ago, December, huge historic deal.
Guest:Virtually every country in the entire world agreed to phase out on a net basis global warming pollution by mid-century or as soon thereafter as possible.
Guest:And it sent a powerful signal to all these companies and to governments at the regional, local, national level.
Guest:It is really a big deal.
Guest:It's almost like the old saying, the train is leaving the station.
Guest:Are you on or not?
Guest:And every country, with very few exceptions, said, yeah, we're on.
Guest:So now even some of the oil companies, we talked about this earlier, but in Europe, you take Total, a huge oil company in France, they're shifting massively to renewable energy.
Guest:I don't expect ExxonMobil or the Koch brothers to do it because they're still determined to try to fool the American people into trying to get them to kill solar, and they want to hang on to their old outdated business plan.
Marc:So now, like when you have this big article that came out, what was it?
Marc:New York Magazine.
Marc:That, you know, I could barely read it because it was so terrifying.
Marc:That, you know, when you start thinking about climate plagues, like, you know, the defrosting of ancient bacteria and unbreathable air and complete economic destabilization, extinction, and these kind of things.
Marc:I can see, not unlike people not wanting to really face the fact that they're going to die just as people, that the denial around confronting those possibilities has got to be part of the reason why people don't want to deal with this.
Guest:Yeah, I think that's right.
Guest:Human nature is...
Guest:And if something's unpleasant to think about, many of us are eager to latch on to any evidence, even if it's not true, that maybe we have plenty of time before we have to start worrying about it.
Guest:And the magazine article you're talking about was a cover story in that magazine.
Guest:And boy, it was a hard-hitting, worst-case projection piece.
Guest:Some of the scientists took issue with it.
Guest:But some others said, well, you know, let's hear all points of view on this, and this is a worst-case deal, and maybe some of the facts are a little bit off, but we need to know if things go really wrong, it could be really bad.
Guest:And by the way, the projections of the scientific group, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, you'll hear people talk about the IPCC,
Guest:They have been pretty cautious in the past.
Guest:They do a very thorough job, but science is culturally conservative.
Guest:They really want to hedge their bets until they can lock everything down.
Guest:But when you go back and look at what they projected in previous years, they have kind of lowballed some of these things.
Guest:Not to be misleading, they're trying to do the best job they can.
Guest:But it is important to realize that there are what they call tail risks, lower probability chances of it going wrong, much worse than the mainstream projections now.
Guest:I always default to optimism and hope because I think the hope is real and it's there.
Guest:And despair can be paralyzing for people.
Guest:You know, the old saying, denial ain't just a river in Egypt.
Guest:Well, despair ain't just a tire in the trunk.
Guest:It's a real force.
Marc:And if you combine despair and hopelessness, you get a type of nihilism.
Guest:Yeah, that's right.
Guest:Party on.
Marc:Yeah, exactly.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And that's a problem.
Guest:Yeah, definitely.
Marc:Because that has some political momentum in the culture we're living in right now.
Guest:Yeah, but I don't think it's the dominant strain at all.
Marc:Oh, I think just general apathy is probably more dominant.
Guest:Well, I see a big uprising of progressive activism now.
Guest:I really do.
Guest:You know, there's a law of physics that sometimes operates in politics.
Guest:For every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction.
Guest:And I think the reaction to Trump includes a lot of people saying, hey, I've got to get personally involved in this.
Marc:Well, okay, that's a good place to go.
Marc:Like, you know, you got this lovely book that came out with the movie, An Inconvenient Sequel, Truth to Power, your action handbook.
Marc:Yep.
Marc:Now, this is for everybody.
Marc:Everybody.
Marc:Of all ages.
Guest:Of all ages.
Guest:And 100% of the proceeds for both the book and the movie.
Guest:Go to the Climate Reality Project to train climate activists around the world.
Guest:So yeah, the book is getting a really good reception.
Guest:And for anybody who wants to learn about the problem, the solutions, this is it.
Guest:And the last 40% of it is a guidebook for how you personally can be an effective activist.
Marc:And so let's start.
Marc:So I guess the first step is buying the book.
Guest:Yeah, learning about it.
Guest:And the book and the movie are good places to learn about it.
Guest:And then what happens?
Guest:Then what do you do?
Guest:Then use your voice, first of all, and win the conversations on climate.
Guest:I saw in the civil rights days how the conversations were won before the laws were changed.
Guest:Then use your votes.
Guest:And not only your votes, but play an active role as a citizen.
Guest:I have been on the receiving end of this, so I'll tell you what works from my point of view.
Guest:If you go to a candidate running for office or an office holder representing you who wants to be reelected, you deliver a two-part message.
Guest:You've collected your friends, those on your social networks, and the two-part message is, number one, Mr. Candidate, Ms.
Guest:Candidate, if you're with me on climate, I'm going to help you get reelected.
Guest:I'll be there for you.
Guest:If you're wrong on climate...
Guest:I guarantee you I will not rest until I defeat you and get you kicked out of office.
Guest:That two-part message, trust me, works.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I talked to Al Franken a few times.
Marc:He wrote a book.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:A giant of the Senate.
Marc:Yeah, and he tells a story about you in the book.
Guest:Oh, I didn't know that.
Guest:I haven't seen it yet.
Marc:He said, you know, when he was getting beat up by Coleman's campaign, he said he called you and asked you, like, you know, like, God, they get pretty mean.
Marc:It gets pretty tough out here.
Marc:How'd you handle it?
Marc:And you said, suck it up.
Yeah.
Guest:Al's a great friend.
Guest:And by the way, when I ran for president in 2000, nobody did more than Al.
Guest:And so I returned the favor and I really went all out for him.
Guest:And then he had a recount of his own, you know.
Guest:I know.
Guest:And it lasted forever.
Guest:They were trying to keep his seat.
Guest:Months.
Guest:Yeah, absolutely.
Guest:And I had fundraisers for him and went up there and campaigned for him.
Guest:And he's doing a great job as senator.
Marc:It really is.
Marc:Yeah, it really is.
Marc:It to me, it's like because I'm out here and you guys who are in the chambers and like even as a vice president, you were more active than almost many vice presidents.
Marc:You really kind of had your agenda and you did it.
Marc:And then and then after you, we had a vice president who was president.
Yeah.
Marc:and a more insidious it was more insidiously uh uh engaged but uh but like i like i i'm prone to panic on a daily basis come on yeah and then when i talk to you guys who are in there i'm like what are you doing are you guys freaking out or like what but you know you talk to alan it's like well this is the context of the government this is how it works and now we've got to you know we can only do what we can do yeah and that's to me that's very frustrating yeah
Marc:But I guess that's the way it works.
Marc:Now, when you look back, are you happy to be out?
Guest:There's some things I miss about it, being able to pull the levers and push the buttons and make things work.
Guest:But there's a lot that I don't miss about it.
Guest:And overall, I'm really grateful to have found a way to make the world a better place outside of that system.
Marc:And when you look back, because this is a quite we kind of touched on it a little bit with Iraq that, you know, when you look at the presidency that you probably had, but was was not that did not go the way it was supposed to.
Marc:Do you have regrets about that or do you feel like maybe that four years would have been a tough four years?
Guest:Oh, I mean, I wish the Supreme Court decision had gone the other way, of course.
Guest:I'm under no illusion that there's any position in the world with as much potential for making the world a better place than the position of president.
Guest:So, you know, I don't have that illusion.
Guest:But since it didn't happen, I'm fortunate and feel grateful to have found other ways to serve the public interest.
Marc:And what do you think that, you know, with this new war on science that is, you know, every day, you know, that, you know, this administration seems to be engaging in what, you know, if it wasn't happening would be ironic attack on the structures of education, of government, of, you know, of everything.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:What do you see as a career politician?
Marc:What the hell is his end game?
Marc:I mean, what do you think he's gunning for?
Guest:Well, you know, there are things called heat-seeking missiles.
Guest:I think he's a power-seeking president.
Guest:He just wants more power, and I can't psychoanalyze him, but he seems to have a place of high importance on public approval among those who he thinks are part of his base, and that he doesn't seem to have any...
Guest:grand plan other than that i mean nothing's nothing good is getting done it's it's another set of distractions and tweets every single day yeah and and nothing's getting done do you have people do you still check in with people yeah sure government like what are you guys doing about this yeah sure absolutely no i served
Guest:I served with a lot of them who are still there, and I've gotten to know some of the ones that have been elected since I left.
Guest:And, no, there are a lot of good people there.
Guest:There are good people trapped in a bad system.
Guest:I think there is hope for changing it for the better.
Marc:I feel that from you, and I appreciate that, and I believe you.
Guest:Thank you.
Marc:I'm going to leave this discussion feeling like, all right, Al Gore seems to be confident.
Marc:I'm going to go ahead and enjoy my day.
Guest:Go to the movie, an inconvenient sequel, Truth to Power.
Guest:It opens in L.A.
Guest:and New York July 28th, which is tomorrow as we tape this.
Guest:And then on August 4th, everywhere in the country.
Marc:Well, thank you for doing it.
Marc:Thank you for your service.
Marc:And it was an honor to talk to you, Mr. Vice President.
Guest:Thank you so much.
Guest:Pleasure to be here in your garage.
Guest:You got it.
Marc:That's it.
Marc:That was me and the vice president.
Marc:Let's do what we can and hope for the best, folks.
Marc:And I do need to say that that noise that you hear at the end there was someone knocking on the garage door so we would wrap it up.
Marc:Have places to go.
Marc:Places to go.
Marc:So there you go.
Marc:That's it.
Marc:I don't think I'm going to play guitar today.
Marc:If that's all right with you.
Marc:All right.
Marc:Take care of yourself, yourselves, your animals, whatever you need to take care of.
Marc:Boomer lives.
you