they work like this so thank you all for watching and listening and i tha manage cyberprivacy and privacy reforms. here is bill mckibben. >> i'm an investment specialists, and i am an activist, that we get to speak to today, bill mckibben.

hold your years for this part, i assume it makes you cringe but we got to do it. bill's book "falter: has the human game begun to play itself out?" that we are discussing, and began to play itself out, please the story of increasingly rising stakes like climate change, genetic engineering or ai on wrong and how they threaten the collective. in some ways, a companion to his first book the end of nature which was the world's first book on climate change ever. he wrote it in 1989 when he was in his 20s. a prolific and ongoing contribution to that, ago to voice on climate change, it is

important, publishing with problems in vermont. he environment at the grassroots organization and committed his life to putting the words he reads and writes into action. beyond this powerhouse, he's a human dad, dog dad, sagittarius based on wikipedia, athlete, long story short, we are in good hands for our conversation, a sharper understanding of how big what we are up against is but also how powerful we are as a collective force. as we get into the discussion and questions come up, asking the question box, will hit it again. all right. we are ready to get going.

>> a pleasure to be with you, that was a kind introduction and thank you for your good work and activism. >> host: you make it easy, and what it represents more broadly, and the topics, a certain level of bravery to take on. a woman who passed away, and have it written down here. they have more moral sports, spent her whole life engaged in the community, that spoke through her. i miss that voice so much. we are here it's echo as long as we are engaged in this great fight. can you tell us about freddy

and how her work influenced this book? >> absolutely. she is someone i think about almost daily. when we started 350.org, the first intimidation of it, now there's lots of help, the sunrise movement, extinction, rebellion and all the wonderful young people and so on and so forth. when we started we were reaching out around the world to find people who wanted to take on this flight, apparently hopeless. one of the places we started discovering amazing allies, one of the most vulnerable places in new york, the small islands especially in the south pacific.

that may well disappear before this century is out. the marshall islands, one of the places like that. it is phrygian, took it upon herself to be an organizer of so many of those communities. they call themselves pacific climate warriors. i have in my head a remarkable picture of organized people on each of these islands building a traditional community and australia is not that far away and they used them for data blockade newcastle, the biggest coal port in the world, more call goes through than any

other place on the planet and the call as it is burned raises the temperature, melting the ice caps that drown these island nations. the picture, one of the great iconic images, these people led by car ready in tiny canoes stopping the progress of the biggest warships in the world. she was remarkable and lives on in the south pacific, climate warriors are doing great work. >> you touched on a lot we will get to eventually but i love this idea that you bring up often, this is hard work and it can be a daunting and lonely fight and that is why having community and friends you look up to and do this work with, i

am grateful, for your dedication to her. now that we have a sense of who the book was dedicated to, i would like to ask you to rewind, it was published in april of 2019. few things have happened since then, we can definitely hit on that but even before that i don't know when you started writing the book but curious who you imagined reading it and who you saw taking what "falter: has the human game begun to play itself out?" outlined and putting it into action, how it is different from your previous 16 books. >> i think most serious writers

basically spend their lives writing one book, different chapters to it. and service is part and parcel with that work in many ways, pushback for many years, when i started doing this in my 20s i had no idea i would do anything more than right. i didn't think of myself as an activist or anything, over the last 15 years that has changed a lot. it is hard to draw a line and so "falter: has the human game begun to play itself out?" brings the story to date in a lot of ways but one thing it

reflects on is the history of activism and how it really is a tool, i call it technology to allow us to deal with just as we needed a technology to make electricity from the power of the sun so we needed a technology that allowed the small to stand up to the mighty and the few. people like gandhi and suffragists and doctor king and 1 million others whose names we don't know as well, really gave us those tools in the twentieth century and we need to figure out very quickly how to bring them to bear because a lot is on the line including the ability of human civilization to keep going, not to put too

fine a point on it we are facing existence of crises the likes of which we haven't faced before, but the battle is not over. there's a lot of work to be done. >> in any other year it would be okay to avoid talking about an axis sent crisis. in the last 12 months, 12 plus months there is no way around it. you probably get this question all the time, all leaders are being asked to contextualize their work under the umbrella that was 2020, the experience of global pandemic, long-overdue racial reckoning and i mentioned earlier, in

texas, marching through in this year, shutdown our state. it is here with us. perhaps more clearly than in previous years and i'm curious if you were to go back and face another chapter in "falter: has the human game begun to play itself out?" about this year. a lot was written on the wall so to speak, but what about this year has changed what you think about the content of this book? >> guest: a lot has happened to confirm the understanding of people. 2020 was a remarkable year. among other things the hottest year we ever recorded on this earth. that is not what we remember it for because other years surpass it.

2020 was the year of the pandemic and that should have taught us a few things, reminded us of a few thing. one of them, the physical reality is real. i have spent 30 years trying with varying degrees of success to convince people that chemistry and physics are real and if they don't negotiate a compromise it will have to follow the dictates and the pandemic was a reminder that biology works the same way, didn't do any good that our president told us it was going to go away or whatever. he wasn't in charge, the microbe was in charge, if you don't stand 6 feet apart and wear a mask it was the -- it is the authority.

one of the corollaries when you are dealing with physical reality, sometimes speed is an important factor. our systems are not geared for speed, one of the things historians will note when you write about the pandemic is that the us and south korea had their first case of coronavirus on the same day in january of 2020. the south koreans went right to work and everybody got a mask, started testing everybody on and on. fewer people died in south korea at the height of the trouble in the country because what did our president do, said was going to go away by easter, not to worry, did nothing. we were unable to flatten the virus curve before things got

out of control. the same substitute for february and march in the pandemic, substitute the last 30 years of the climate story, despite clear warnings from scientists, we ignored it, pretended it would go away. we do end up seen amount of work in a short time, that happens. the third thing, the most important thing, this goes directly to questions about george floyd, solidarity really matters. political life is in the shadow of ronald reagan who changed our politics in this country and his basic understanding was

markets solve all problems, government was a problem, not a solution, his famous laugh line in all his speeches was the nine scariest words in the english language where i'm from the government and i'm here to help. ha ha ha but it turns out missouri's word in english language are we have run out of ventilators and the hillside behind your house is caught on fire. these are not problems you:it forces to solve, you:the fire department, the hospital was solved and those are reflections of their ability to work together is human beings under some kind of effective bonds because government that allow us to deal with. that was only heightened by

watching what played out in the streets of minneapolis and so much else to the rest of the country. the most important thing george floyd, in 2020 was what george floyd said as he was dying, i can't breathe because being able to breathe is the definition of being alive. you can't breathe because there is a racist cop kneeling on your neck or you can't breathe, there's coal-fired or gas-fired power plant down the road and it is always the same road. african-americans have two times the asthma rate of white americans not because of physiology but geography. you can't breathe because wildfires have gotten so terrible the governor of the state of california or oregon or washington told you to go

inside, stay inside and tape windows shut so none of the particulates destroy your lungs. we can't breathe because it has gotten too hot. we set a new all-time record for the highest temperature ever observed on this planet, it reached 130 degrees fahrenheit. that is at the upper limit of the human body's ability to survive even for a few hours but the computer modeling makes clear there are a wide swath of the planet, by the middle of the century unless we get climate change under control very fast. in the end, all of this is a

stark reminder that we live in the world in which we are not the master and our way of dealing with it has to be to try to gather and deal with questions, so we are not a collection of individuals but a working society and working civilization. >> host: that is really will put. you put up two areas that "falter: has the human game begun to play itself out?" does hit on but after looking through this last year, inclusivity is working towards justice and urgency, i'm often torn on how to hold those things at once in the same breath and i want to start with urgency, you had a bit of a

back-and-forth with bill gates who has a different view. a lot of shared knowledge, was:nuanced approach for the sake of today and offered something alluring to folks who find their beliefs to be proactive about moderate, who don't like climate change, they believe in climate change but they might find something like the green new deal to be too aggressive and radical and i wonder how you think about the role that neutrality, not of the carbon kind but where used and may be on the sidelines, how does that play into addressing climate change and the shrinking of the board as you put it in your book? >> really good question.

human beings and institutions change best when scrolling gradually. that is just the truth. it is less expensive, less traumatic, less divisive, the best way to deal with climate change would be to deal with it slowly with the kind of cultural and technological shifts that allow us to not have to make big shifts, i have solar panels on my roof, the thanksgiving season 30 years down the road we have changed dramatically. of the things i have to keep myself from doing is saying to

people if you only listened to me a few years ago this is the point we were trying to make. we didn't listen for serious reason, the shorthand is the fossil fuel industry, they paralyzed our political life. we have to change very fast. the basic dynamic not our political dynamic which is different groups of people arguing with each other and reaching some kind of compromise, people should get a good wage, $7 an hour is fine, then come back and fight it out again a few years later or whatever, that is how compromising our system works

but our problem is the basic conflict is between human beings and physics and since physics will not compromise that becomes our job and the scientists told us how fast we need to work. in 2018 the intergovernmental panel on climate change, the international group of scientists the world relies on for their analysis, for its greatest challenges, published their latest port and it said we had until 2032, to transform our energy systems which they define as cutting emissions in half, and if we did not meet that target by 2030, the prospects for meeting the targets we set in paris five years ago are nil. that is the deadline, literally

the deadline and in the face of that, like it or not we have to move very fast, the good news is along with all the other activists, the engineers have done their job in the last decade and they dropped the price of solar power and wind power and the like to the point it is the cheapest power on earth, batteries are becoming just as fast, that means if we want to move fast we really can't] means being willing to grapple with vested interests, the fossil fuel industry that wants to keep its business going. if i have a problem with people like gates, they don't want to

engage in the messy work that is standing up to power and if i were a multibillionaire i might not want to stand up to power either. all is technological flights of fancy about what to do 30 or 40 years down the road are pretty and we may well need them, we will only need them if we do the work in the next 10 years of dramatically deploying the technology we have now, solar panels and wind turbines to keep this fight alive. we can't win the climate fight in the next 10 years which it will take a lifetime but we could lose the climate flight in the next 10 years. if we don't do what we need to do we go past certain tipping points, and the prospect for

recovery is limited, nobody has a plan for replacing the ice once it is melted. the arctic may seem like a long ways away but it is one of 3 or 4 biggest is ago features on earth. we think the reason texas grows in february is so much of the arctic is melted the jet stream now works in strange ways and allows the collapse of the polar vortex and the intrusion of air that should be over the arctic across the lower 48. we are missing with huge forces, and more than any of us find convenient or politically comfortable. it is up to physics.

>> host: it is not up to us but it relies on us. and i think i'm not alone in feeling overwhelmed by the problems sometimes, my favorite, the top 2 hit on this kind of tension between needing people to act and looking squarely at the reality of the situation, to not shutdown, you say in reference to the fossil fuel industry, let anyone to it they want is a flawed argument

then no one can stop them in any way, insisting some horror is inevitable no matter what you do is the response of people who don't want to be bothered trying to stop it was i heard it too often to take it seriously. when investigator reporters prove that exxon has known all about global warming and covered up that knowledge plenty of people told me in one form or another of course they did or all corporations lie or nothing will happen to them anyway. this cynicism is no threat to exxon, it is a gift. we don't precisely know how it will end, only giving them a pass because of their power makes no sense and this land in a few different ways but the part i want to pull out is how cynicism can be a self defense mechanism. a lot of us need to wake up and do our jobs and be with our

families and do the things that do that. breaking the pattern ultimately comes down to changing minds. i'm wondering, in your 30 plus years of doing this work if your mind has been changed on something regarding climate change, if something has reached you in a surprising way and what that looks like so we can apply it to folks who really need -- we really need to show up and not re-sign. >> guest: there are lots of things we've learned over time and usually they result in hopes being a little dashed. there was a time people thought natural gas was a bridge to the future and so on and it turns

out that it wasn't. a variety of scientific reasons it was more problems than solutions, we have to recalibrate and go forward but sometimes the surprises are good ones. you know, i think an awful lot of us have thought that you were going to have to completely -- that the things that made it so difficult was there might be no way short of shutting down an awful lot of what human beings did to deal with this. because it seemed things like solar power and wind power resort of frivolous, on the edge, not capable of taking up real slack in the system. and about that we turned out to be wrong. the great human capacity for

engineering asserted itself and people figured out how to build this stuff in ways that were cheap and powerful. .. eventually we'll run the world on sun and wind because it's free. so, 75 years from now that's what the world will run on. but if it takes 75 years to get there it will be a bren world that runs on it. so, our job now is to kind of make the -- force the spring, as it were, make the politics -- maybe it happen faster than it otherwise would and that's a political challenge.

for me the biggest single change of working on this has been the understanding that we were going to have to engage in that kind of political -- i began as a writer, and i spent ten or 15 years after writing "end of nature" writing more books and giving talks and having symposiums and things because i had assumed incorrectly that we were in an argument and that once we piled up enough evidence and won the argument that our leaders would act because why wouldn't they? this is the worst problem we have ever faced. why want you take action? and it took me two long too long to figure out we had won the argument. the swines was clear there wasn't some other side that was pushing back. we won the argument. we just were losing the fight because the fight wasn't about data and reason.

the fight is what fights are usually about which is money and power. and the fossil fuel industry had so much money and so much power that it didn't matter that they were losing the argument. they were still winning the fight. you live in texas so you have some sense of the extraordinary power of what even a few years ago was still the richest industry on earth. and so that's why i ended up doing all this organizing, because eventually dawned on me we were going to need some countervailing power to the fossil fuel industry. it wasn't going to come from money. we don't have a lot of money, but that is why this sort of history of activism is so interesting to me. it indicates from time to time if you can assemble lots of human beings that their sheer numbers and creativity and willingness to sacrifice and things, adds up to political

under a its own right, and so that's what people have been doing for the last time. and i'll add, one shouldn't -- in a rational world, one shouldn't really have to do this. i've been to jail a dozen times now. that's absurd. why would anybody have to go to jail in order to make governments pay attention to science. but that's the world we live in. it's not entirely rational so you have to figure out how to work in it. and i'm sorry i didn't figure it out sooner. >> host: i think your point about leave one argument but we haven't won the fight, it sounds kind of similar to we got -- we got the question right but we haven't figured out how to turn into it the solution.

>> guest: yep. >> host: one area where this is just my perspective, you push back, bill, you've been at this for much longer. one area where the climate movement has some growth opportunities is around inclusivity and centering the voices of folks who are most impacted by climate change and things like its cal a.i. and genetic engineering and folks who have done so much good work that doesn't get the spotlight the way a greta, for example, might. and so i'm wondering from your perspective, first if you would cosign that sentiment and if so, where are the areas that we need to do a better job being inclusive and which voicessed could be need to do a better job at centering. >> i think you're absolutely right. i'd always been told that

environmentalism was something that rich white people did and didn't know where your next meal was coming from you wouldn't be an environmentalist because you had more important things to worry about and on and on. and for me that understanding shifted dramatically when we did our first big day of inaction 2009. we had been working myself, and seven college students and did this international day of action and turned into probably because of beginners luck, a kind of big thing witch managed to coordinate 5200 simultaneous demonstrations in 181 countries, and so cnn said it was the most widespread day of political action in planet's history. a first coming out party for the climate movement. we asked everybody to upload pictures of their events, and my job that weekend, one, was to just be monitoring them as they

came in, and spreading them out again. we rented the billboards at the end of times square that were normally showing whiskey adds and were flashing the pictures and they were coming in 10 and 20 a minute sometimes from around the world. peru and -- one country after another, and watching those took me a half hour to realize that idea that it was affluent white people who were at the heart of the environmental movement was simply incorrect. most of the people we were working with were poor and black and brown and asian and young, because that's what most of the world is. by far and away most of the world is. and people were exactly as worried about the future in those places, maybe more so because the future bears down

harder on the poor and more vulnerable you are. the iron law of global warm is the less you did to cause it the sooner and harder you get hit. and i think it's entirely good, useful, appropriate, when people like -- are at the absolute forefront of this work. frontline communities, vulnerable communities who have been in the vanguard of activism in recent years and let me give a particular shoutout to indigenous peoples around the world. not a very lodger percentage of the world's population but in this case, in many other cases, they're punching way above their weight as we used to say. and i think that it's -- people

saw it standing rock and at curtis emergence of a lot of indigenous leadership on this continent. didn't surprise me because many of those people are people if ie been working with for years and know them to be the best activists around but the saming this true around the world, in the pacific, and latin latin am, just about everywhere, and i think that's really, really important for a couple of reasons. one is that when we exiled indigenous people from the places where they were and put them on reservations and things we thought we were giving them worthless land but it turns out now it sits on top of a lot of hydrocarbons and coal, gals or oil 0, astride the corridors you need to get it to port and things.

so there's a lot of practical power that people are utilizing very wisely as the firsts over keystone and dakota access and line three in minnesota now and things but also in a deeper sense, it's powerful moment to say the boldest wisdom traditions on the planet and the newest wisdom traditions on the planet kind of syncing up. sweat lodge and the view from the satellite and the super computers seem very much in sync to me, and what they're seeing is that the view of the rest of us, the conventional wisdom of the world, that we're just going to keep growing the size of our economies and having more -- essentially wrong. and that we need to think a lot more detailed. and to me that is very powerful moment with those very ancient wisdom traditions and very new

ones coinciding, and so it's been really a flour watch this moments when elders from native communities and great scientists and things are together on the same stage or in the same jail cell. it's powerful moments. >> host: i think you have done a really good job in your career, as far as i can tell, recenterring voices who have been doing this work for a long time and impacted by this work but who haven't always received the credit for the lip service for doing it and so couldn't agree more that it's these folks who are at the heart of this movement. >> guest: i get to do this newsletter every week for the new yorker, on the climate crisis, which is free newsletter that a lot of people read, and the apart like is this little interview section called passing the mic. and so that's -- i think i've

managed to do it now a couple of years without interviewing any other white guys because there are an extraordinary number of powerful, interesting, rich voices, and help us see a lot more interesting corners than we noticed in the past. there are that's awfully useful. it's going to be a very, very close call to make it out of the cul-de-sac we're in now as a civilization if we make it out, and if we do it will be because we managed to get all voices working here-everybody working in the same direction. we haven't been very good about that as societies, and it's one of the things that better change fast. solar power is useful but a kind of broad people power is at least as useful going forward.

>> host: i want to make sure we hit on that idea of passing the mic i. think specifically with your transition within the movement that you helped create at 350 and the role you play now. it's an interesting model for leaders to think about cultivate thing next generation of talent that can help uplift these ideas that maybe older generations helped leave, but before we get there i just want to close out this idea on inclues sift, something i'm -- for lack of a better word was bad at for a while, is understanding that the nuance within the kind of proposition of a just transition, understanding that the folks at work in the coal mines, out on the oil wells, they are being paid right now

more competitively than some of the renewable opportunities, which you can point fingers at why that's happening, but just taking a step back and looking at what seems to me to be a little bit of classism within the environmental movement, and i think there's def fitly a way -- definitely a way to thread it but can you help us understand the tensions and how you have improved navigating it over the years. >> guest: the very real people who through no fault of their own, the grownup working industries that now are dangerous to the planet, shouldn't bear the brunt of the -- this is to say oil fuel workers are different from oil executives who knew very well what they were doing and i hope contemplate occasionally the

thought they might end up in a jail cell at some point for what they've done. but that's not true. just the opposite of people who have done perfectly honorable work over the years, and now as we have to transition away from that, we have to figure out how to make their lives work, too, going forward and it's one of the best things bout the green new deal that outcome people have propose -- young people have proposed and large parts of that have made its way into the new biden infrastructure bill. they have to because it's right, and they have to because it's politically necessary, too. think about who holds the power here? it's people like senator mansion or west virginia who probably represents more coalminers than anybody else. and he's in a position to make sure they can -- that they can

either if they're young be retrained to do something else and if they're not, they can retire in -- with dignity, and that's a perfectly good bar -- bargain to mack. it's well within our economic able to do it and it should be one of the firsting the should focus on so i'm grateful to people like aoc and joe biden for focusing and precisely that issue. >> host: it's really helpful. thank you, bill. i see some questions coming in. we'll hit on one or two more ideas here before we turn it over to the folks that are with us at home and online, who have some really interesting ideas and thoughts for you, but i have to name the fact that a big part of this book is about a.i. i haven't really asked you any questions about it because as you point out, it is a scary and

overwhelming topic that is not a straightforward as climate change. it makes climate change, which i pretty complex, look straightforward. you have-helped me where figure out where to start when i was 18 or 19, how to act on climate change. can you help me now at age 30 figure out how to act on the threats you bring up in your books about a.i. >> guest: so i think that they're kind of in the same category that climate change was 30 years ago when i was your age. that is we can see them on the horizon and as potentially ovwhelming threats and be very smart to have the conversation about them right now, not 30 years from now when they're fait accompli, when they're -- and

one of the first things we can and should do is at least make sure that the forces behind them are not so powerful that they can't be checked in any way, which means taking on silicon valley, and whose power has grown unchecked in recent years, and who is doing -- forget a.i. doing insane amounts of damage already just with things like algorithms that run what you see in your facebook feed and are devoted to making you angrier and contracts 'er with every -- crazier every passing day. so breaking the power -- when we get concentrations of power that are too large, whether they're in the ends of exxon or mark zuckerberg, it is a good idea to

lessen that power quickly before it overwhelms society society's ability to cope and it's possible that facebook has already jumped past the point where it can be controlled but i'm glad to see finally people in power beginning to ask real and important questions. so i think for me moment it's really important just to be talking about questions around a.i. and human jeanettes tick engineering and saying let's until we reach some social consensus on these things let's not take steps that take us irrevocably past places where we can retreats from because they do represent an enormous challenge and they do have the possibilities of reordering what it means to be human, and those are big enough questions that we should think first.

thinking is a thing that human beings are theoretically good at. theoretically is what sets us apart so might be a good idea to do it once in a while. >> in that same section of the book you talk about flow, which is easier concept to get your arms around, and we are of course, all albeit virtual, talking thanks to a festival but reading and books, and i'm wondering if you can tell us about flow and how reaping might activate it in a way that scrolling -- >> guest: think of one of the -- the reason i write is because i'm trying to write about human beings at their best and unthing we thirds thank you the work of important thinkers and researchers is that human beings are at their best when they

enter into a kind of state of absorption, get lost in whatever it is they're doing, painting paintings, climbing difficult rock faces, whatever it is, and everybody who is a reader knows that the feeling of becoming absorbed in a book, losing track of time and losing track of your surroundings, and at some level entering mentally into the -- with a good writer into the -- that's not something that happens with twitter, and it's the opposite. you're forever jarred by the next little hit of dope mean whenever the night -- dopamine and never escape out into that

kind of place of absorption and so on that's why it's so unsaferring at the end of the day and hopefully why books will persist, though one worries that at a certain appoints our attention spans will get so attenuated that even sitting down to read a book will seem too hard, and when that happens we'll have lost something very, very important. >> host: we heard yesterday on a panel about listening, about how shrinking our attention span is, but i couldn't agree more that it's just a different experience. you do access flow when you read in a way you are right that twitter -- the last question from me and then we can hit on the questions that come. in you open this book dish love this opening. you open this book by saying that an author does not owe its

reader hope, and there's a great quote by michael stone but hope without optimism. this idea that hope is motivating and the belief there's still some wiggle room that change is possible, and i do feel that come through in your writing, not just in this book but in most of your publications and in most of your thought leadership. if it wasn't there, you probably wouldn't be so relentlessly advocating for it. so i don't want to ask you what gives you hope but i want to hear from you what does hope feel like? >> guest: beautifully put. so, you're right, the best proof of my willingness to -- my able to be hopeful is the fact i

still get up every morning and work hard on this stuff, and if i didn't think it was reason to do it issue want do it. i don't have a martyr complex or something. i would just go sit on the porch and smoke cigars and drink whiskey and that would be fine and maybe i'll reach an age when that's all i can do anyway but for the meantime, the fact that we watched over the last 10 or 15 years as this enormous movement has arisen, gives me enormous hope that at the very least we'll make a fight out of this. i don't know where we will win. we avoided so throng get started the systems are so large that we're not going to stop climate change but maybe we can stop it short of the place where it cuts civilization off at the knees and if we can, its will be because enough people aroused themselves and for me it's

always particularly moving, since i work all over the world, we have organized demonstrations in every country on earth except north korea. it's always extremely moving to me to reflect that so many of the people that we're working with come from places that's have done nothing to cause the problem we're in. and that being the case its does seem to me it should be possible for those of white house -- of us who live in the belly of the beast to get together to do what we can. so, that's why i. happy to keep going. >> host: it is my deep sorrow to share that we're coming up on time. so i'm going to give you one last kind of lightning round question from the folks at home. i think it's one i don't have the answer to. and then we religion close

our -- he we'll close our time together. folks are curious in this country, which i'm guessing in the u.s., at this time, what would be the most significant legislation to address climate change that we should urge our government to enact? >> guest: at this opinion in time it's absolutely crucial to get biden's infrastructure bill through congress. it's not going to solve the problem, burt it's going to do far more than any piece of legislation the federal government has ever pass nets the last 30 years to do something about it. it's a real start. and it's completely moderates, sensible, straightforward way to address the economic crisis from the pandemic and try to start down the path of protecting us against this next crisis that looms much larger than the pandemic. so, make the phone call. make sure that your senator is willing to stand up for families

and jobs and the future, and it shouldn't be too hard. >> host: i thought you might have an answer to that one. thank you for leaving us with an action, something we can take away from this conversation and put into place. i think what i heard today and what i read in the book is that the worst thing we can do is nothing, and given how big the problems we're up against are, doing nothing can feel better or at least is easier to reach for. so, my hope is that today we'll leave this conversation with recognizing what we heard from bill really that two things can be true at the same time, that things are really bad and that we are a beautiful and powerful species on a beautiful and powerful planet and together we have a shot at this. so, bill, from the bottom of my

heart, thank you for your, and thank you for being with us today. >> guest: katherine, back at you. thank you for all you do and you're very good at this. this was a great pleasure this morning,