thank you for tuning in on behalf of all of us at the locally based independently owned bookstore books and books in miami, florida and in partnership with miami book fair. it's my pleasure to welcome you to a virtual evening with tanya hester and jeanette ruiz to discuss wallet activism use every dollar you spend earn and save as a force of change published by our friends at ben bella books. tanya hester is the author of wallet activism and work optional retire early the non-penny pinching way after spending most of her career as a consultant to democratic politics and progressive issue campaigns, and before that as a public radio journalist tanya retired early at the age of 38.

she is also been an outspoken voice in the personal finance media community to consider systemic barriers and opportunity gaps rather than simply pushing people with lots of advantages already to accumulate more wealth part. why the new york times called her the major of the woman's fire movement? it's moderate tonight's conversation. we are also joined by jeanette ruiz who is a multi-passionate miami native in her current role as program director for the miami climate alliance. she works with the community and member organizations towards people-centered solutions for our climate crisis formally the co-host of the podcast planted in miami. she and husband alex ruiz sought out individuals pushing the city forward through their actions passionate about animal welfare and the environment she is also worked as the developmental director for the number one vegan food festival in the country seed food and wine festival and co-led the miami running club chapter of no me athlete.

throughout this evening's broadcast. you're invited to ask a question by using the ask a question feature at the bottom of the screen. and you can order your copy of wallet activism from books and books below. i pressing the green button. we appreciate each and every order in the generous donations from viewers everywhere and now without further ado. i'd like to welcome our guests to the virtual stage. thank you so much for that warm. welcome. love books and books high tanya, hi. i'm so excited to be having this conversation with you. i've been really looking forward to it. so am i i'm as we were talking this before we started like my book is all marked up. i was reading this over the holiday season where it's prime shopping season, very appropriate time to be reading it because it made me perfect made me think about every single purchase that i made and you save me money, so that's great.

so let's start off with the obvious question. what is well, actually it doesn't and what made you become a while activist? yeah, while it activism is using your financial power to create change in the world, and it's your financial power in all its forms one of the things that i talk about in the book that i think folks can. relate to is a lot of the messaging that you've received about how to operate in the world in an ethical way or responsible way or if someone who cares about the climate is to shop and to shop differently maybe by this instead of by this and i really want to distress that this is about so much more than shopping and oftentimes as you just mentioned. it's about not shopping and i think that raises the point too that it's often much cheaper to live this way than it is to you sort of the quote unquote conscious consumerism phrase that a lot of folks that's will put out there where they say sort of like it's better to buy a tesla, which is really

expensive than it is to buy a forward or it's better to buy patagonia than it is to buy a second hand jacket and those are things that i think we can push back against and so really that push back is also part of wallet activism learning to see through those marketing messages so that you can make choices that align to your values. so what what got you interested in this? i think like a lot of folks. i felt like i really wanted to know that i wasn't funding bad things with the money i was spending and that i was hopefully also doing some good, but it felt really unclear what the right things were to do. and i think a lot of that was because it's so obvious sometimes that things are our greenwashing, you know, that someone is trying to make a product look much more sustainable or environmentally friendly than it is or you can tell that okay that maybe this message sounds good, but i know this person's trying to sell me something. how do i kind of figure this out and i did some research on my

own as a consumer and realized i don't actually know what the right thing is, and i worked in social change and public policy for a lot of years and felt like i had a pretty good level of savvy about how things worked but i still felt lost with some of the decision. so it was really to me trying to find answers frankly for myself. but then wanting to share those with others because i i think a lot of people feel hopeless right now. they feel like there's not much that individuals can do and when we see, okay, well, i as an individual and just one person and then same time. our leaders aren't doing enough. it's really easy to come to that climate doom or that feeling that we're never going to make progress with social issues or equality and i just don't believe that's true and i wanted to make sure that people felt hopeful, you know clear-eyed about the hard realities of things but also hopeful and and empowered to do things that actually make a difference yeah, i think one of the things that i really enjoyed reading this book is that it's definitely a book that you're gonna come back to time and time again, because i

can see it as you evolve as a person and your situation like there'll be certain circumstances where you can practice while that activism and for me, i'll give you a perfect example our dryer in our house broke recently and we had to go out and purchase a new one. right and i was reading the book at the time and i'm like trying to do my due diligence of like is it energy efficient? like, you know, is it where was it manufactured? what is the carbon footprint etc etc. but the reality was i had a certain amount of space put this dryer in. and only one fit the profile and that was the one that we have to go with so. you talk about perfection in the book and how you know, you can't be perfect right? so i wanted to kind of talk about that a little bit because it does get overwhelming when you do try to be more conscious with your purchases. so right off the bat, like, how do you deal with them? how do you dress it in the book? yeah, i mean, i think that we

all. are surrounded by imperfect choices. they're really frankly under capitalism. there are no perfect decisions that we can make everything that we're going to do is going to do some harm in some way whether it's just using some resources that could remain in the ground or go to someone else and i face something really similar last winter a little over a year ago. our furnace died when it was zero degrees outside and in a perfect world, we would have loved to have painstakingly researched and tried to find exactly the best furnace and i really would have loved to go with the heat pump, but it's such an expensive thing and it was zero degrees outside and we needed heat and so we ended up buying like the best furnace we could get quickly and i really am unhappy about that, but you know, we're all just doing our best here and it was one of those things where we said. okay. well if we know we just bought a new natural gas furnace, we'd

really prefer if it could have been electric that could be powered by solar, but we're going to resolve to use as little heat as possible. so even though it's a fossil fuel appliance. we're gonna try not to use it too much and i think with a dryer, you know, if you have to buy an imperfect dryer, maybe it's resolving then to try to hang laundry up if you can i know they're in miami. it's humid a lot of the times that might be challenging. yeah your own care way s that i impact this choice, you know if you have asked our car and you don't feel great about that are there times when you could leave the car home and walk or bike or take public transit or carpool with someone else? they're always ways to scale back the resources that we're burning through. yeah. no, i love that. and i think another thing that was super helpful while i was going through that whole process was you have a chapter on developing an activist mindset and you list different values in

it and trying to not be perfect. but trying to just pay attention to like these are the issues that i want to support right? so when you're making purchases like you keep these in mind so that you're not completely overwhelmed because you'll have a situation where like you really don't have a choice, but then there are other situations where you do, so can we talk a little bit about that and how you have your value statement because i believe that yeah, great. i'm glad that that's spoke to you the analogy that i probably use too much, but i think it just really illustrates. this perfectly very quickly is if you are a vegetarian and someone says do you want a burger? you don't have to use any willpower. you don't waste any of your limited attention or energy thinking that choice through you just say no. i don't eat burgers and so the idea with trying to come up with a financial value statement is trying to figure out what are the things that are most important to you. and what are the values that you hold dear. what are the issues? you care most about because sometimes things will be in conflict like for example, if you are solely focused on climate and climate change.

you're probably going to be focusing on reducing what you buy as much as you can all the time versus someone who's really focused on reversing the racial wealth gap they might be focused on spending a fair amount of money at maybe small businesses owned by people of color women of color people with disabilities, you know, any sort of marginalized status that you're focused on and that's going to be a very different set of financial behaviors that go with that so by doing this exercise and figuring out okay, here is what i let guide me here is what i don't money on or a financial choice. i don't make it just it lifts that burden off you from always having to feel exhausted by the choices and it helps you automate a lot of that. so i think that that's a really helpful thing and i know it's early in the book. so it's one of those things where it's easy to skip over it, but if you do that come back to it make a point, you know after you've read the rest to spend a little time thinking about it because it's really for your own sort of sanity you go to the store so that you don't feel like you have to do a ton of

research on every single little thing. and i think it also helps you realize that you're already doing a lot of that already right? because that's that's when i did the exercise, i realized you know what i've already been making these purchases like mindfully so consciously, but you know, but i have been like supporting the things that i find important right? so that's why this i think it's definitely important to to do this and to kind of put intention behind what it is that you want to support and since it is the new year and people are making resolutions. i think that that's a great exercise to do to just kind of like frame how you'd like to move forward in terms of like which companies you want to support you also talk about the bad guys the good guys and how to tell the difference right and i think to me this was very enlightening because we you mentioned greenwashing before and how these companies really try to make we saw in 2020 with

the racial injustices and the protests of how a lot of these companies they came out in solidarity and you're like, is this something that's authentic or is this something that you're just trying to sell us more stuff, right? so can we talk a little bit about that and how you can navigate those waters. yeah, i think it's becoming trickier because every brand would have you believe that they are perfect on every issue all the time and you know and with black lives matter when george floyd protests were happening, especially so many brands came out and put the black square up on their social or put all these messages out saying we stand with you know, black lives matter which that's fine. you know, that's a good first step. it's good to normalize having that conversation, especially with groups that have been talked about as fringe before but it's very easy to look on a company's website and look at who are their leaders who is on their board of directors and to see does this match they claim

to be committed to racial equity, but that's a lot of white men on their board or you know with a lot of environmental organizations. it's often a lot of white folks employed and you can take a look at that and see if what their promising to you as a customer or potential customer matches what they're actually doing and it's not just say you can't ever shop with a company like that or do business with them in some way but you might use that as a moment to let them know that your future business is contingent on them actually backing up their words with action because that's how things change is when businesses hear from customers, you know, one of the things that i think is important about is that sometimes the best way to create changes actually to shop or actually to give business to companies, which i know runs counter to what a lot of folks who are in the environmental movement will say but you know if you boycott something, but you never shopped with them to begin with they're unlikely to listen to you, you know and the

care of future business or being able to get sort of a veneer of good corporate social responsibility can often be a big motivator for companies. so that's not excuse a lot of bad behavior say we should all be consumers 24/7 we have to consume less that's really essential to address climate change, but there are ways that you can do it that are really intentional and that can actually over time lead to good progress. yeah, now i completely agree and you know those lines to you talk about the true cost of purchases and externalities even pronouncing that correctly you give this, okay? you give the example respiron notebook and i have to tell you it sent me into a tizzy because i was like, oh my gosh, just tracking this one spiral notebook and what it has to go through to get to us and then once we possess it, that was another thing that was enlightening for me too was like once you possess something whether it's a pen or you know a

book and it's like how it got to you the process and then what you plan to do with it, right? how you even plan to dispose it. um, so can you talk about just like a true cost of a and and what that means? yeah, i mean whether we're talking about the food that we eat the things that we buy where we live the work we do so much of our experience and what we see is really divorced from the full reality of it, and i wanted to use something really similar or really simple rather like a spiral notebook to say. okay. this is made out of two things. it's paper and it's a metal spiral but even for something so simple it's still involves mining in the global south it involves trees coming down. it involves pollution water is the most i'm sorry paper is the most water intensive industry in the world. so producing that paper means bringing through a lot of water putting a lot of pollution out and then it goes through a lot of human hands as well to get to you and all of that stuff

matters and adds up but almost none of that is actually priced into the dollar you might pay for a cheap notebook or the and $20 you might pay for an expensive notebook those, you know, most of that price. the company who made it and paying their profits. it's not going to the people who manufactured it. it's not going to the communities impacted by the mining or the factory pollution or any other number of you know, the externalities externalities are just things that are required to make something but are not actually priced in so you think about with cigarettes that's an easy way to think about externalities when you buy that pack which my understanding is they're quite expensive everywhere now, but even still that's not covering healthcare costs of you as a smoker. it's also not covering any of the healthcare costs of all the people who will be impacted by the second hand smoke or the farm workers who pick the tobacco and are thus expose to

herbicides and pesticides and all those those, you know, harmful chemicals, so, thinking about that and thinking about what is the true cost of something, you know, is this something that's really inherently polluting. is this something that's made of fossil fuels which means that carbon is coming out of the ground and going into the atmosphere. is it something that's never going to biodegrade and it's going to be entuned for all time in a landfill all of that stuff when you just sort of have an understanding of it. i think it becomes easier, you know might feel overwhelming at first, but the goal is to personalize that stuff so that the next time you buy something you recognize that okay, it's not just a pen. this is a barely complex mechanism. it's got metal in it. it has plastic and it has ink what's with that ink made of, you know, we're just sort of helps you i think say let's hit the pause button before i buy something without thinking about it and when you combine that with your value statement, then it becomes easy to say, okay. these are things i'm just not gonna buy anymore, or i'm not gonna engage with and a financial way anymore. and these are things where i

will still buy them, but i want to be more intentional about it. it. that's really the goal. but kind of understanding broadly that anything we buy the cost you pay is not really reflective of its true impact other people in the environment. i think is really good for kind of changing your view of just casually buying stuff. yeah, um, you're frozen on my end. i'm not sure. if other people are seeing that i mean i can hear you. so i'm hoping other people can hear you. i just took my video off to see if that if i could turn it back on and that would help. okay, let's see. but i'm not sure how to bring it back something if you're there. do you know how to bring my camera? thank you. you're back. okay now. yeah, okay good so that brings me to your your guiding questions which are also helpful because i i keep asking myself

that question over again over and over again. is it too cheap, you know at the miami climbing lines one of our members is we count and they advocate for farm workers down in homesick. and they're always front of mine for me when i go shopping for food because we they talk about just the horrible conditions that they have to work in not only out there in the heat but like you said being exposed to pesticides and just the living conditions, and i'm just a portable conditions. so, you know, there is a cost that's not included with your avocado right when you go in there. so when you see it be when you see something that is so cheap. like that's one of your questions. is it too cheap, right? so you have four here for whom can everyone do this? is it too cheap and what am i funding? so can you quickly go through those? yeah the idea of the guiding questions is to take a lot of this. i'm sure if you haven't started reading the book you have a

sense that some of the stuff can feel sort of big and overwhelming and i really wanted to make sure that readers felt trusted. you know, i wanted to trust readers and say there's some bad news out there, but i believe you can handle it and we're gonna find a way through so the guiding questions are there to help you find a way through some of that complication and to say, okay. i'm getting this marketing message. i'm getting this marketing message. i'm hearing this from environmentalists on instagram like this and folks in my community. you know, how do i make sense of it all so that's really the idea of the four questions. so the first one is you said for whom is really meant to help you evaluate, you know, if someone is proposing a particular solution i'm for you to be able to say, okay. does that actually serve justice? i wish i mean giving more power and more financial resources to those who've historically been marginalized or kept out of that. power or those resources because oftentimes you'll see people who mean very well but just haven't really thought about this from a justice frame say okay.

hey, we're gonna you know do a whole bunch of like permaculture forming and you think okay. that's great. you know, that sounds really good permaculture is about regenerating the land, but then you dig a little deeper and you realize like this doesn't include farm workers. this doesn't include indigenous people who need food justice or food sovereignty. it doesn't include a lot of folks. it's really just for sort of like well to do hobby gardeners on and that's not true of all permaculture but some projects i've seen just as an example and so on that might be something where you say, okay, i've heard this compelling thing that thinking about who it's actually benefiting. it's not benefiting those with the least power and so, how can i think about a different solution or dedicate my time or money to something else that will actually help can everyone do this is sort of a similar idea but like what would happen if everyone tried to do this, like if everyone was a freaking and tried to eat all their food out of the dumpster then we wouldn't have food because we need to pay for to pay the farm workers everyone which is not to say that some folks can't do that if they're really gung ho but it's not a great solution on

a broader level similarly to it telling everyone to buy a a tesla or shop at patagonia. is it too cheap i think is really a big one and i come out of personal finance space where everyone's looking for a deal all the time. they're trying to save as much money as possible and it often leads to people prioritizing price above anything else and that often is a really quick way to shop on ethically, you know to shop in a way that harms other people and the planet much more than it should and so if you see an avocado for 30 cents that you didn't pick off a tree yourself, you know, okay, that probably was picked by someone who got was getting paid literal pennies anything on and especially being from another country and is very cheap, you know? okay. well it was probably flown in and just that cover that and you know some unscrupulous practices when finally what am i funding that's i use the chick-fil-a example a lot. i'm chick-fil-a is well known for supporting anti-lgbtq+ legislation and being just sort

of generally anti-gay by transgender rights and so understandably a lot of folks might say well, i don't want to give chick-fil-a any business and that is a totally valid thing to say based on that or you might apply that to amazon walmart, you know, whatever company you disagree with their practices on you can also think about scaling it. so i like to think about it in terms of political contribution if you pick a politician you really really don't like you think okay the amount i'm gonna spend with this business if i was gonna give that amount of money to this politician, how would i feel about that and that can be just a really good guiding way to figure out you know, okay. am i am i okay doing this because you know, it's very different to spend five or ten dollars at a restaurant once or twice a year than it is just been thousands of dollars at a big retailer. so i really encourage folks to think about august things you do first, and we've talked a lot tonight about shopping, but that's again also how you earn money if you're able to invest where you invest it where you save it how you give money.

it's all of those different things in there, but thinking about the biggest decisions first. both avoid driving yourself crazy and it will make the biggest impact. yeah, i think you're frozen again. oh, no, but i could hear you fine. she's not frozen on my end. okay. she was good. yeah. yeah, she has a reason so i'm not sure what's going on. okay, great. okay. we will press ahead and just hope for the best. so tying it, you know, i couldn't help but just think about you know in in miami we are. experiencing an affordable housing crisis on top of a lot of other crisis right just today one of our organizations miami workers center. they are at an apartment complex because the residents received eviction notices over the holiday break and they did

refuse to leave so they went they just raised their rate. they're raise their rent from a thousand dollars to 1650. um so here the average person spends over 50% of their income on rent. right, so when i was reading this book, i have all the communities that we advocate in mind included were low and middle income and who really have a choice. when they go to the store on what to buy like you have to you know, you want to go to you want to get some affordable food you go to walmart, right or you go to other establishments sedanos or other places around here where you can get cheap food you want to get clothes you have to just go where you can't afford right and that that kind of just like running in the back of my mind the entire time because i feel like there are people who are in a situation that are privilege enough to read this book make some of these choices and then there's others who are just like i just i'm just trying to survive, you know, um, what i

thought was also interesting in the book was how you broke it down to like what you buy and like the food and i almost feel like there should be like little cards that come here that you could tear out that just can let you can take with you to the store because there are little things that you can do it, even if you're on a really tight budget, so what would you say to someone who would say that to you? like i just i can't do this like i have to just get what i can. um, yeah, i would say that's completely valid, you know, we live in in a deeply unjust society economically speaking, but on a lot of levels as well. and so absolutely i mean, i think that the the thing i really wanted to do with the book was to make the action steps as actionable as possible and i think that for many of us we can consume less we can shift some of our maybe food we buy from one thing to another thing instead, but for folks who can't the reality is those folks also aren't the problem, you know people who can't afford to make a lot of different choices also

aren't the ones driving climate change. they're not the ones running companies that are exploiting workers and contributing to massive inequality. and so i think for folks who feel that they look at this and say, okay, i love these principles, but there's not much i can do here. i mean, i'm sorry, and i know i think we should all fight for better economic justice, but that's not the reality for as many folks but for anyone who feels that we reading it i think. the good news is that you're not the problem. if you know, it's really the wealthier folks who are over consuming who are exploiting others or benefiting from the exploitation of others, even if you know, you don't feel like you're doing it directly, you know, we're all we're all in some way benefiting from the exploitation of others including folks who can't afford to have a lot of choices and are buying the cheapest food, you know, that's made possible by other people with limited options who have to do some of that really underpaid work. and so yeah, i wish that i could

have written this book in a from within a just society in which everyone had choices, but if we lived in that world, we also wouldn't need books. i know and i know people in virtually all cities are are facing that problem of having to spend an extremely high percent of income on housing people who are in the median wage can't afford a two bedroom apartment in a single american city, and i know that in miami, also dealing with a ton of kind of the front wave of climate change that other places aren't dealing with and then that impacts the available housing. we all certainly saw the horrific collapse of the condo building. it was not just last year my goodness. what is time? i know. but it all of these issues are interconnected and so really what i would say is just for those who do feel you have choices, i think listening to this and seeing that lots of folks don't think if you're able to make choices it sort of says that those who can make those choices have a responsibility to

do so because so many others are simply unable to yeah, no, i i really appreciate you that and i you know, i was also thinking about when i was reading those just the impact of covid and how we're now seeing kind of like the ripple effect with our supply chains and people getting sick and just just rupting like my niece goes to school in dc. she goes to college in dc and she sent us pictures. she wants grocery shopping and there was nothing like nothing on the shelves and i was so worried for her because i'm like, i i just couldn't believe it. i mean i've been experiencing but it's been kind of like a slow trickle thing and when you go to the grocery store like one things out of stock and this is that so it's gonna become harder and harder to support those brands that you do want to support with all that's going on. i'm so happy thought that as well. for sure and in a lot of different ways, you know and one of the things that i think is really important to talk about is when we say supply chain and

supply chain shortages what we really is people you know, we don't have less fossil fuel in the ground or not meaningfully so that we can pump out and use to make plastic. we don't have it's not like all the machines around the world that make things and transport things are broken down. it's that people are sick all over or a lot, you know millions of people have died of covid and that though a lot of those folks were old enough to be out of the workforce a lot of others weren't, you know, they were still working and performing really essential functions. so supply chain shortages really means we've been deeply deeply mistreating our fellow humans and that's affecting us, you know here when i live in lake tahoe, california, which is in the mountains. we've had shortages compounded by heavy snow. and so we had empty shelves also because just trucks couldn't get through to restock the stores. and so i think a lot of people are feeling that stuff compounded and feeling like you just have to do your best, you know in the early days of the

pandemic i'm pretty significantly and you know compromised from birth and we didn't feel it was safe to go to the store before we were vaccinated and so we were having to shop with people who i don't normally shop with or companies that i don't feel great about just because we couldn't get groceries otherwise and that's with me having a decent number of choices. but so i think that it really just underscores. i think what maybe the first point you raised tonight about not aiming for perfection, you know doing the best you can with the choices you have. in that moment and during covid we have even more imperfect choices than usual. i think where you can consider could i live without this thing? do i need to buy it? sometimes the answer might be yes, but other times it might be no and in that case do your best and then i'm not, you know, i don't want to make everyone feel super stressed out. it's like do your best and don't lose any more sleep about it and then just over time trying to

continually improve. that's really the goal. it's not to say okay. i'm morally pure because i never shop at store at or anything. yeah, do your best and only sleep about it. that's a tattoo. that's good. question box and we will answer them for you. but until then i wanted to also i like how the book is broken down into two parts. so one is becoming a wallet activist and then part two is practicing while i activism in every aspect of your life and one that really stood out to me was where your money lives so you talk about banks right and you talk about investments and i want to focus on banks because it's something that we've encountered with jp. morgan chase right and other things that invest in fossil fuels and they're also very much so in environmental conferences and you know, like just trying

to be that good guy, right so i learned a lot in terms of like what where else you can place your money and you've given me a lot of food for thought with that and i think that's something that some that most of us could probably do is like change our bank to make a difference. so can you elaborate on that low? yeah, i'm so glad that that jumped out at you because honestly if that's the one outcome of this book is that more people change where they bank? i will consider that a complete success if you yeah, if you look in personal finance conversations, there is so much conversation around responsible investing. which first of all most people can't afford to invest anything so that's not a very inclusive action, but second of all, you can't actually draw a straight line between like if you buy a share of exxon mobil, you know, one of the biggest oil companies in the world and a you know, huge polluter and climate terms and an exploiter of humans around the world that dollar that you've invested.

then doesn't go to someone at exxon it doesn't you know affect their profits. it does help hold the share price up, but it's a it's a much murkier line and if you get rid of a share of exxonmobil a lot of those shares of fossil fuel companies are just being snapped up by private equity investors who are saying hey all the people who care about the climate are dumping this stuff. we're gonna get a bargain, but they're still holding on to that stock. so it's not necessarily pushing the companies to do things any differently, which is really the goal of divesting with banking. however, people don't realize that you know, we think the money that's going into our savings account or even checking account in some cases is funding small business loans and your community or mortgages for first-time home buyers in your community. and it's true that maybe some of that is happening. but a lot of the money if you're banking with a big bank, we're talking about jpmorgan chase bank of america wells fargo city that sort of level of big. those are the largest funders in the world of fossil fuel

projects. and so the money sitting in your savings account is being lent out to fun things like the dakota access pipeline or offshore drilling or our sands drilling or fracking or any of the practices that we know are really destructive and you know, just a disaster from a climate perspective and so if you switch instead to a credit union or a community bank or black-owned bank or you know, there are so many different kinds of options all over the country. it really depends very much where you live then you ensure that your money is not funding those projects and more over if others join you and also leave that bank and tell the bank why you're leaving because you don't want to fund fossil fuel projects that can actually completely cut off the funding for the foss. industry and at a time when our leaders aren't doing enough to address climate change or to curtailed actions of fossil fuel industry. that's an incredibly powerful thing. and so yes, if people will just switch away from the big banks and tell them why you're leaving

that's one of the most powerful things you can do and i know it's kind of a pain you have to switch your deposits and everything, but it's like one time you do that one time and you switch to something better and then you don't have to think about it anymore and you know that you're doing good every day. i just honestly, that should be the big sticker on the front of the book is change right? because that i hope everyone that as a takeaway. yeah, there was a lot of examples you talked about wells fargo and jp morgan chase and i was just like oh i've been with yeah many many years and you gave me great reasons to stop. i'm finally gonna do it. like you said it's a little bit of pain, but it's okay, so we have some questions first question. what advice would you give someone in their early 20s on while activism? yeah, um, i think honestly the more that you can get into some of the habits the butter so, you know sort of just the american way the capitalist way is very

much to as you grow in your career and you earn more you're supposed to spend more you're supposed to buy nicer things. you're supposed to, you know, people call smaller homes starter homes with the application that you're always supposed to move up into a bigger home if you can just sort of set your expectations at looking for what is and this is a concept that i don't talk about in this book that i do talk about in my first book work optional of finding your comfortable spending level. once you get to a point where you say, okay, i can pay all my bills. i can do not everything in the world that i want to do, but i can do enough things that i feel good about. you know that the work i'm doing is worth it to me, you know, whether that's going to restaurants or going on vacation or do you know being able to do certain hobbies really that's up to you to shape what that looks like, but once you hit that point then any new money you earn on top of that one you can save it so that you can give yourself a maybe an earlier retirement or a secure retirement at least which is

becoming increasingly more difficult to achieve but you can also then keep yourself from getting into a habit of over consumption because i think it's much harder to find yourself in your mid 30s 40s 50s and to say okay i need to cut my consumption back by half or more than it is to have never gotten on to that treadmill in the first place over so i think starting out skeptically is good. i think so much of it is is just really focusing on your own values. also, you know, we started out kind of talking about that of thinking about what are the issues you care most about what are the things that just make you angrious and that you want to address because especially younger folks tend to have fewer financial resources fewer choices, so it's good to be able to prioritize and if you say okay climate is most important thing to me on that you make your choices in line with that versus again the example from earlier the racial wealth gap you might make different choices in line with that. but so give yourself permission

not to do everything, you know, you don't have to address every issue with every choice you make really focus your efforts on the things are most important. awesome. we have another question. what was the writing process like for this book? oh. this was a tough one for folks who have seen the book. um, no the last let's see. it's a good chunk of its footnotes because i really wanted this to be extremely intensively resource or research. so they're about 500 different citations. so it was really really research heavy because i didn't want it to be my opinion or the opinion of others out there. i really wanted to say okay. what are what are sort of the standard lines of reasoning that are out there and is that sound is can we back that up and say okay if everybody did x it truly would would be better or is the way that people are talking

about things really the right way and how can we think about that? and so it was very much sort of putting some things together that i thought were right doing the research discovering that in plenty of cases. i was wrong. yeah we needed to do something else like one of the big surprises was i did not expect to find but buying only organic food for example is not the best choice for your wallet. it's not the best choice for the planet and it's not the best. for our fellow humans organic is better some of the time but not all the time and that was pretty surprising to me. i assumed that my advice was going to be by as much organic as you can possibly afford by but not the case. so i think any big book project tends to be really consuming it took me about a year total to write it and it was in my brain kicking around for at least another year and a half before that and then we spent about six months in rounds of editing and then final little things. you know it a book like this

that has so much current information you're afraid before it comes out that something will become outdated before it's even released like i was thinking like what happens a few weeks before the book comes out ap morgan chase office fuels. i know that wasn't gonna happen because they are really committed to making money off of oil and gas and coal but but you know you sort of think about that stuff. so fortunately none of that happened, although maybe unfortunately i would have loved to have wrong about some of that stuff and to see more product to see more progress, but still hopeful. it was very timely especially with the covid stuff. okay last question. there are some local businesses that make delicious hummus and bean salads and i want to be able to support them as much as i can. however their products come packaged in number five plastic tubs, and i am aware of how much plastic we are adding to recycling bin. do you have any ideas how to get my head around this or do we resign ourselves to only eating food that we make ourselves at home, which is perfectly fine, but nowhere near as tasty.

i feel you chris. yeah, i think we all feel that and unfortunately in a lot of places number five plastic isn't even recycled at all a lot of towns and cities and recycling systems. only recycle number one and two plastics and even then there's no guarantee that it's actually going to make it into a final product. it might go through sorting and then end up in the landfill anyway, which is a huge boomer. i think there are a couple of different things that you can do. so first is if there's a business that you really love and you love their product talk to them and ask them. what are some other options here. could i bring in my own container and have you put the food in it in some places in some cities? they're actually working on pilot programs to make that happen so that we can reduce waste in some places like where i live. they've actually started where you can buy this reusable takeout container for five dollars and then when you go in you bring your dirty one and

then they give you your food in a clean one and so it's sort of like a pack. change process and so that's happening in more places. you can also engage your local government a lot of cities and towns are looking at alternative packaging to try to reduce single-use plastics. i talk in the book about the nuance that's really necessary in that and how for example the push for plastic straw bands have been really harmful to disabled communities and also to a lot of lower income folks who can't afford to have a stainless steel straw that they carry around and so it's really important to think about those changes in ways that are just an inclusive, but it might be something where often when cities in towns or states enact measures to try to reduce the waste that's used. they also provide grants so that the stores can upgrade to different packaging or can install a dishwasher so that they can use regular dishes instead of plastic that kind of stuff so you've got a lot of

different options, but definitely start with the business itself and tell them how much you love them and a number five plastic tubs are really a problem for you and you never know what's possible. yeah, i totally agree with that. i think that i'm as i said earlier like this this book is definitely one that you will come back to time and time again, and it gives you so many great tips. i mean you talk about just in the food chapter about garlic and how 90% of it is grown in china, which i did not know because why would i think about garlic but it's something so simple that we can grow ourselves and my husband was right away. okay, we have to grow our own garlics. we're gonna try to grow our own garlic because these a lot of it, you know, but it's like little nuggets like that that you drop in the book that make it approachable like even if like the big things you can't, you know necessarily make the decision to practice while activism on the small scale. you can definitely do something. so i really appreciate that and that if we don't have any more questions or if there's anything

that i left out that you would like to mention on you. um, i mean as you can tell i can talk at length about any of this because i just hear a lot about it as i'm sure everyone watching does as well and i think a lot of us are really concerned about the climate and where it's headed and the lack of action on a policy level both in the us and globally. so i just i want to assure everybody there is actually a lot that we can do and as consumers sure your individual actions all by themselves. don't necessarily fix all our problems and the goal isn't to lie to you until you that they do, you know, we've been doing all these things thinking they would help like we've been recycling for decades and we haven't saved the earth yet some of the stuff that we do is good, but not necessarily the impact that we need but with capitalism and with corporate profit structures, you know, if you think about how you change a law

or how you change policy in a way that is for the better you have to win an election, which means getting at least 50% of the vote. then there has to be public support through polling of at least 50% even then it doesn't often do it. you know right now we've got more than 70% of voters are really concerned about climate change and yet we don't see meaningful legislation going through but when you're talking about corporate profits like we've talked about banking example tonight if oregon chases quarterly profits go down by three four five percent. the shareholders are going to notice board of directors is going to notice and they're going to want to know why and what they can do to reverse that. and so if we talk about this in a capitalist frame, we actually in a way have more power than we do as voters because the threshold was voting is so much higher. it's at least a few percent. we're with capitalism. it could be 3% and so that's what i would really encourage folks to focus on is to the extent that you can tell other people around you about some of

this stuff and get your friends and family to switch banks also and really speak up in a way that folks notice. there's really tremendous capacity for change that we can drive as consumers. so i think that's what i'd love to leave folks with. there's really so much power that you have and i want you to feel that, you know, even if you don't feel like you have a ton of choices you have much more power than you think. i love that. we don't have a question. it's just a statement and i think it's perfect way for us to end. it says no question, but tanya is awesome. thanks for writing book. and i want to step in that. thank you so much for writing this book if you haven't picked it up yet. please do and thanks so talking me tanya. so that you're amazing. thank you so much for your great questions and seeing all those flags in your book just totally made my night. have a good night. thank you both for this wonderful conversation and thanks everyone again for joining us tonight. don't forget that you can buy your copy of the book from books and books' website or in store and don't forget to shop indie

during these times and thank you both again. thank you. everyone have hope everyone has a great night.