Full Transcript for The witty professor: comedy meets academia, with Prof. Max Boykoff of the University of Colorado

and so I enrolled there finished my PhD. 00:03:29.984 --> 00:04:07.701 During that period of time pivoted into looking at media representational practices, the way that media cover climate change, what that means for the range of our attitudes, our perspectives, our beliefs and our behaviors around climate change, media being a bridge into our everyday lives from those spaces of science and policy, and it's led me into looking at several different avenues of how media cover climate change and then also brought me into the creative spaces of how we can engage with these different media to meet people where they are and to leverage positive change. 00:04:08.343 --> 00:04:11.831 Yeah, that's really one of the things that caught my eye about your work. 00:04:11.831 --> 00:04:25.182 So you know, a lot of people I talk to who are in academia on the environmental side tend to be kind of on the more technical side, right, but you're really talking about messaging policy, governance, those types of things when it comes to climate. 00:04:25.182 --> 00:04:31.704 Can you talk a little bit more about kind of what angles you're approaching those topics with respect to climate? 00:04:32.328 --> 00:05:08.968 Sure, Part of that experience that I described briefly in Honduras in the late 90s was that I was really fascinated by how my own firsthand lived experience of the tragedies of what had happened there mapped onto or were in contrast with some of the international media coverage that I read about later, and so I started to get interested in how can we start to systematically understand where there are these differences and how can we work to improve accuracy and improve good coverage of these sorts of extreme events, of other climate-related events. 00:05:08.968 --> 00:05:17.141 And it brought me into looking at news coverage of climate change, and since then I've developed a network with researchers around the world. 00:05:17.141 --> 00:05:22.723 There's about two dozen of us that do monthly monitoring of media coverage of climate change or global warming. 00:05:22.723 --> 00:05:25.125 It's the Media and Climate Change Observatory. 00:05:25.125 --> 00:05:28.586 Folks want to look that up. 00:05:29.387 --> 00:05:48.692 Moving into the creative spaces, I co-founded a group called Inside the Greenhouse here with a theater professor, a communication professor, an ecology and evolutionary biology professor, to then create this to sustainable fashion and comedy as a vehicle for opening up conversations about climate engagement and action. 00:05:48.692 --> 00:06:13.848 And so those are a few examples of the kinds of things that we've been doing here that it's mapped on to. 00:06:13.848 --> 00:06:14.911 I engage in climate science and policy. 00:06:14.911 --> 00:06:16.480 You know, endeavors all the time. 00:06:16.480 --> 00:06:38.509 I was a contributing author of the most recent IPCC assessment report and I've been participating in climate negotiations now for several years international climate negotiations and so it's plugged into these spaces as it influences the way in which people are considering science and its application in everyday life. 00:06:38.509 --> 00:06:51.086 It's plugged in in terms of the way in which policy actors are then creating and moving forward with different policies that actually are resonant, useful, meaningful and productive for their constituencies. 00:06:51.819 --> 00:07:05.528 There are a few things unpacked there, so kind of the role between, or the sort of loop between regular people and policy humor, which I really want to talk about in depth as well, and then, as you mentioned, kind of the media and how it's covering that. 00:07:05.528 --> 00:07:07.867 So let's go through all three of those. 00:07:07.867 --> 00:07:09.966 Can you talk a little bit about this? 00:07:09.966 --> 00:07:28.064 You've written quite a bit about kind of people's everyday lives and their sense of purpose and how that feeds into the kind of science and decision making and then how that science and decision making feeds back into other people's regular lives, so kind of this loop. 00:07:28.064 --> 00:07:29.909 Can you unpack that a little bit for us? 00:07:35.599 --> 00:07:36.182 that a little bit for us, sure. 00:07:36.201 --> 00:09:01.404 Well, maybe the crumbs of the short story I told about how I entered into all this is helpful, in that I was an everyday person just trying to make sense of how we understood our place at the human environment interface and how certain policy measures were shaping the spectrum of possible decisions that we can make, be them individually, be them collectively, and so at the time I was thinking about it through agricultural practices, through choices of farming and all kinds of other related pieces there, and I sought to make sense and help build up the connectivity between research that's going on within the sciences, research about policy successes and then how that influences people's lives. 00:09:01.986 --> 00:09:23.081 And so there is a back and forth in that the processes within science, the priorities, are driven and guided by some semblance of public interest, public pressure, public needs, and same with policies is that policies are designed based on what is viewed as priorities within their constituencies, within the general public. 00:09:23.081 --> 00:09:36.980 And so I've been moving in different ways over time, through environmental studies, through environmental sciences, through some other disciplines as well, to help build up and strengthen connectivity between these spaces. 00:09:37.682 --> 00:09:38.705 Have you looked at all? 00:09:38.705 --> 00:09:47.799 So you know that loop works really well when the constituency has kind of views and then the policymakers reflect those views and enact policies that that work that way. 00:09:47.799 --> 00:09:58.269 But then there's the spoiler that you know, this wildcard that's been cropping up more and

more, and that's lobbyists, right, and these, you know astroturf groups and that type of thing that we're seeing more and more of. 00:09:58.269 --> 00:10:02.442 I'm imagining this is probably something you're looking at pretty closely as well. 00:10:02.923 --> 00:10:13.701 Yeah, so necessarily because we're talking about ideal conditions here, is that as it mapped onto realities, particularly here in the United States. 00:10:13.701 --> 00:10:21.243 I know that your listeners are around the world, but here in the United States being the belly of the beast, if you will, around carbon based industry. 00:10:21.243 --> 00:10:26.274 That, when it comes to lobbying, that plays a big part. 00:10:26.274 --> 00:10:37.608 And so it's drawn me into research, it's drawn me into work that looks at how climate obstruction impedes policy action here in the United States and around the world. 00:10:37.608 --> 00:10:47.190 And so, just as an example of that, I've looked at folks, organizations, individuals that are referred to as climate contrarians that's the term that I prefer. 00:10:47.230 --> 00:10:58.482 I mean other people use denial, skeptics, you know, but you kind of get the picture, and so I've tracked how these climate contrarians influence media coverage of climate change. 00:10:58.482 --> 00:11:01.403 That's kind of a first cut of work that I've done over time. 00:11:01.403 --> 00:11:37.964 And then I've actually gone into some of these meetings One group in particular, the Heartland Institute, which is a right-wing, multi-purpose annual meetings and listened in on their talks better understood their perspectives of contrarianism in a variety of ways and interviewed several of the speakers to understand their motivations, to understand their impact and to understand the kind of effects that they have in the US policy arena and in terms of how they then are influencing the public sphere and how people talk about and act on information about climate change. 00:11:37.964 --> 00:11:50.542 And so you're absolutely right that lobbying I focus in on that lobbying that is seen as obstructing, impeding, distracting from, delaying concerted policy action. 00:11:50.542 --> 00:12:00.134 There's certainly lobbying across the political spectrum, though that lobbying that influences more progress and more aggressive action on climate change, more urgent action. 00:12:00.879 --> 00:12:01.925 I made a note about that. 00:12:01.925 --> 00:12:06.149 So the Heartland Institute, and dove in kind of a little bit on some of the. 00:12:06.149 --> 00:12:15.314 I think you wrote a journal article about it and you looked back so maybe you attended their annual conference 10 years in a row, or was that right? 00:12:16.019 --> 00:12:20.874 No, it's twice across a 10-year period, so 2011, 2021. 00:12:20.874 --> 00:12:22.499 Yeah, not 10 years in a row. 00:12:22.499 --> 00:12:26.627 That would have been for anybody, I think. 00:12:27.028 --> 00:12:38.653 Yeah, that would be rough,

but did you get a sense, kind of you know, from that and then maybe backfilling some of the stuff that they published in between about how the narrative has changed or has it changed from the contrarian side? 00:12:39.896 --> 00:12:42.700 Yeah, I mean for listeners who want to dig into that paper. 00:12:42.700 --> 00:12:43.802 I hopefully have written it. 00:12:43.802 --> 00:12:49.850 It is an academic journal article, but I've hopefully written it in a way that's accessible for people to have takeaway points. 00:12:49.850 --> 00:13:04.377 Some of the speakers have remained the same. 00:13:04.377 --> 00:13:06.161 Some of their slides and arguments actually have remained the same over time. 00:13:06.161 --> 00:13:06.321 In part. 00:13:06.321 --> 00:13:10.009 That can be seen as an aging contrarian group. 00:13:10.575 --> 00:13:20.184 Others have written about the way in which climate contrarians tend to be older white men, and so there's a piece there that the arguments haven't changed. 00:13:20.184 --> 00:13:21.487 It's partly attributed to the. 00:13:21.487 --> 00:13:29.142 The arguments haven't changed is partly attributed to the evidence and the facts that it's really. 00:13:29.142 --> 00:13:44.341 A lot of their motivation is to muddy the waters of productive action on climate change and so continuing to roll out some of the hackneyed and tired arguments you know that it's too expensive to take action or that they question humans' role in a changing climate continue and persist. 00:13:44.995 --> 00:14:11.649 In terms of things that have changed, though, I think one of the key pieces just to share with you and your listeners is that they have changed up strategies, that there was a much more national, international focus, engagement with sending out pamphlets to educators around the country here in the United States and such and really being out front in the spotlight of influencing decision-making and policy action. 00:14:11.754 --> 00:14:45.208 I think that they've well, I've observed and written up about how they've really moved into small ball, if you will, to use an analogy from US baseball, which is to say that they've moved into state and local efforts which may not be seen, may not be as visible, but are nonetheless still part of a strategy that that institute and many other right-wing organizations have taken up as they're seeking to influence policy across from our local communities up to national and international spaces, and so it's part of a. 00:14:45.208 --> 00:14:52.226 It feeds into other strategies that we can see within, beyond climate change, within some of these movements. 00:14:52.226 --> 00:15:12.584 You know there is a Project 2025 here in the United States, and so what I had observed and written up a few years ago is consistent with what is evident in Project 2025, which is moving across these different scales of engagement and influencing policy and influencing the way that everyday people are considering climate change in their lives. 00:15:13.634 --> 00:15:22.341 It makes me think also of Sinclair Media buying up all these kind of local news channels or you know local channels and syndicating kind of a right-wing perspective across. 00:15:22.341 --> 00:15:24.024 You know local channels and syndicating kind of a right wing perspective across. 00:15:24.024 --> 00:15:32.506 You know thousands and thousands of these channels and it has that kind of folksy, homegrown feel to it but it's actually coming from a very centralized voice. 00:15:32.995 --> 00:15:33.937 It's an excellent point. 00:15:33.937 --> 00:15:43.580 Yeah, that's another piece of this and it can be kind of I don't know easy convenient to dismiss some of the people that are involved here. 00:15:43.580 --> 00:15:52.311 Some of the speakers is just goofy folks that just don't have their handle on really accurate information about climate change. 00:15:52.676 --> 00:16:12.771 I think we learned our lesson about that, about not taking people like that seriously, especially in the top office there you go yeah there you go, yeah, so, but you keep a close eye on media and you also publish an annual review of media coverage of climate change and global warming. 00:16:12.771 --> 00:16:18.024 So this is a report in the media and climate change observatory which you mentioned before and last year. 00:16:18.024 --> 00:16:25.117 So in the 2023 report, one of the takeaways was that the hotter the world gets, the less media covers climate change. 00:16:25.117 --> 00:16:31.459 Do you want to talk a little bit about kind of what was in that report and some of the trends you're seeing over time with media? 00:16:32.081 --> 00:16:34.927 Sure, yeah, we've seen spikes in trends. 00:16:34.927 --> 00:16:40.335 If folks are interested in going to look at our website, we've got a bunch of different ways of taking a look. 00:16:40.335 --> 00:16:57.017 There are interactive figures that you can download that you can start to use for your own purposes, and then we have our baseline data sets that, with a partnership with our libraries here, we've been able to offer them as open access data, and so there's a lot to dig into there. 00:16:57.017 --> 00:17:02.639 But there have been ebbs and flows, there have been spikes and there have been downturns over time. 00:17:02.639 --> 00:17:09.947 Generally there has been an increase since we started tracking it and in certain cases our monitoring picks up in 2000. 00:17:10.475 --> 00:17:23.509 I've written a fair bit about where coverage really started to pick up in the late 1980s for several different reasons, but we continue to track it now across really five different themes, one being political themes. 00:17:23.509 --> 00:17:38.123 If a policy actor, political elected official, has something to say about climate change, it generates news coverage Economic dimensions of climate change, decarbonization that's associated with it, energy choices, cultural dimensions of climate

change. 00:17:38.123 --> 00:17:54.585 That can be social movements, that can be those everyday spaces, those kinds of stories that come up, scientific stories, certainly, new papers that are influential, research that's coming out in IPCC assessment report in our governmental panel on climate change has tremendous influence. 00:17:54.585 --> 00:18:29.561 And then, finally, a big one throughout time has been ecological or meteorological events, and those are like the hurricane that I referred to, but they can be floods and droughts and other types of issues that generate media coverage that is connected with climate change through the UK and Europe and now building this out to over 120 sources across nearly 60 countries and in 14 languages. 00:18:29.561 --> 00:18:38.872 That it's mainly newspapers, but also television and radio, where we attempt to put our finger on the pulse of how and why news coverage is cropping up. 00:18:38.913 --> 00:18:40.876 So what you would refer to our annual reports. 00:18:40.876 --> 00:18:52.683 We've now had seven years of those reports and we've had monthly reports that lead up to them that we post all the time and that it's a way to have a first cut of our understanding of what's generating news coverage. 00:18:52.683 --> 00:19:00.735 And then from there, our group and we encourage other researchers to grab a hold of those data and then dig into other studies. 00:19:00.735 --> 00:19:14.885 So our group has done all kinds of offshoot studies, of looking at more into the how and why coverage has been as it has been, and so it's turned out to be, I think, a productive contribution that we've made. 00:19:14.885 --> 00:19:22.855 It's been taken up and used on the floor of the US Senate and in international meetings, in the IPCC as well, and in other spaces. 00:19:22.855 --> 00:19:25.584 So we're glad that it makes that contribution. 00:19:25.584 --> 00:19:27.538 We hope it'll continue to do so. 00:19:28.079 --> 00:19:28.380 Amazing. 00:19:28.380 --> 00:19:34.163 And this is a group of 24 people academics and scientists around the world I think you mentioned. 00:19:34.163 --> 00:19:36.580 That's right and the details. 00:19:36.620 --> 00:19:44.282 I'd love to name, check each one of them because they all make an important contribution, but the details you can find on our website if folks want to go take a look at it. 00:19:44.743 --> 00:19:46.807 Yeah, perfect, I'll put that in the show notes, as always. 00:19:46.807 --> 00:19:48.855 Thank you, shifting gears a little bit. 00:19:48.855 --> 00:19:58.384 So you're a proponent of using comedy to engage people in climate change, and it was actually Stuart Goldsmith, who's been on the podcast, who put me in touch with you. 00:19:58.384 --> 00:20:06.788 And so not only do you believe in the power of comedy and this messaging, but you also have a course on this at the university. 00:20:06.788 --> 00:20:08.116 Talk about that. 00:20:08.116 --> 00:20:10.464 I think that will be surprising to some listeners. 00:20:11.054 --> 00:20:13.282 Yeah, I'm so glad that Stuart connected us up. 00:20:13.282 --> 00:20:23.846 Stuart is a talented and super sharp person who's been innovating in these spaces and of anybody he's one to look to for insights about how this works effectively. 00:20:23.846 --> 00:20:24.427 He's great. 00:20:24.427 --> 00:20:27.580 We, you know so we being theater. 00:20:27.580 --> 00:20:30.635 Professor Beth Austin is here at the University of Colorado, boulder, she and I. 00:20:31.196 --> 00:20:39.934 This is like we're going into our 10th year of experimenting with comedy as a way to communicate effectively on climate change, and so we were drawn into it in different ways. 00:20:39.934 --> 00:20:48.745 I sort of described a bit of my own backstory of looking at how media covered climate change and looking at how these different channels can influence behavior. 00:20:48.745 --> 00:21:04.000 Beth had come at it from performance and from she actually has taught courses on the history of comedy as performance and so we teamed up together to interrogate how comedy could leverage greater engagement and change. 00:21:04.000 --> 00:21:07.135 We partnered with our own students. 00:21:07.135 --> 00:21:37.709 In our classrooms we have a course that's called Creative Climate Communication, where we, over the years, have now put our students on stage, we scaffold and prep them so they're not just out there on their own, but we work through different ways to approach serious issues around climate change, but using the tools of comedy to help leverage conversations about solutions, conversations about their place in the contradictions that we're living in and on and on. 00:21:37.709 --> 00:21:53.029 Primarily, you know, it certainly reverberates out for younger people who have been born into a world where this has been in the public sphere, in public conversation, since they were little, and then there are a lot of them majoring in environmental studies here. 00:21:53.029 --> 00:21:54.516 It weighs heavily on them. 00:21:54.516 --> 00:21:58.629 So this gives them a place to find their voice, to express themselves. 00:21:58.629 --> 00:22:06.861 A range of emotional reactions from their, you know, frustrations and their worries across to their ambitions and their hopes for the future. 00:22:06.861 --> 00:22:12.399 And so it's been this really productive and fertile place for us to engage. 00:22:12.399 --> 00:22:25.317 We don't trivialize climate change in doing this, but we play with it, as Stuart demonstrates, to be able to open up these conversations, and so we ended up partnering with Stuart and several other professional comedians. 00:22:25.457 --> 00:22:44.644 As the coronavirus pandemic hit, we pivoted into an online environment, just like the rest of the world, and we ended up starting to hire in working comedians that were underemployed during that period of time, and we basically developed these writer's rooms

with our students where we could exchange information. 00:22:44.644 --> 00:22:56.961 Our students would get ideas from these professional comedians for their performances, and then folks like Stuart would use those interactions that influence the work that they're doing back in the UK. 00:22:56.961 --> 00:23:04.643 In his case, we've partnered with folks in Los Angeles, in New York, in DC, for shows that they've done. 00:23:04.643 --> 00:23:09.884 That we've then supported over time and it's proven to be a very popular course. 00:23:09.884 --> 00:23:14.158 For one thing, it's proven to be a place that garners a lot of interest. 00:23:14.158 --> 00:23:30.750 We have an international video competition that's also going into its 10th year and we've had entries from all over the world, which is also a fascinating way to see how different communities, different cultures, are interpreting these considerations around how to harness comedy for climate action. 00:23:30.750 --> 00:23:44.814 But we continue to press ahead with it because we see it as a place where we can walk this tightrope between sites of subversion, sites of sedation, where we need to engage young people and everyone. 00:23:45.375 --> 00:23:45.817 With what? 00:23:45.817 --> 00:23:46.438 Sometimes? 00:23:46.438 --> 00:23:47.140 With comedy. 00:23:47.140 --> 00:23:49.766 It's this licensed transgression, if you will. 00:23:49.766 --> 00:23:54.485 It's this way to poke at and prod at incongruence. 00:23:54.485 --> 00:24:02.145 You know the kinds of contradictions that we're all living in and trying to make sense of, and so that's been driving a lot of our work. 00:24:02.145 --> 00:24:10.958 We, as part of our work as researchers and teachers on this campus, that we've been also researching what works, how, when, why, under what circumstances. 00:24:10.958 --> 00:24:24.384 So we publish a lot of that work over time and we continue to press ahead in partnership with comedians like Stuart and others, as we see this as a way to provide a little bit of emotional self but not to distract our students from the. 00:24:24.384 --> 00:24:27.904 You know the critical importance of addressing climate change now. 00:24:28.454 --> 00:24:33.444 I'm a big believer that humor is one of the key ingredients to resilience. 00:24:33.444 --> 00:24:39.838 And you know, if I look at the people who have been working in climate change for a long time, a lot of them have just wicked gallows. 00:24:39.838 --> 00:24:53.010 Humor, you know, that pops out at the reception at a, you know, after a couple of glasses of wine at the reception at a climate tech conference and stuff like that, and you kind of have to right, because otherwise the weight of the world, literally, you know. 00:24:53.010 --> 00:25:00.298 I mean it's such an important mission and you need to kind of blow up the steam somehow, and humor seems to be a pretty effective way to do that. 00:25:00.899 --> 00:25:01.521 It's well said. 00:25:01.521 --> 00:25:02.262 I mean the gallows. 00:25:02.262 --> 00:25:05.717 Humor is one flavor of many approaches to comedy. 00:25:05.717 --> 00:25:07.341 That's one way to approach it. 00:25:07.341 --> 00:25:08.685 Satire is pretty common. 00:25:08.685 --> 00:25:18.522 There's also this idea of good natured comedy that my partner in this bath has really been pushing forward to focus in on the contradictions we're living in. 00:25:18.522 --> 00:25:20.836 But you're absolutely right, it's a way to be resilient. 00:25:20.836 --> 00:25:26.788 It's a way to share our you know, our concerns and our hopes in ways that resonate with other people. 00:25:27.355 --> 00:25:33.801 Now you know I'm going to ask you this question right, but is there one joke that stands out from one of your students over the years that you want to share? 00:25:34.394 --> 00:25:39.206 Yeah, yeah, there's so many and I'm glad that you'll put the some links in the show notes. 00:25:39.206 --> 00:25:41.438 I invite listeners to check out. 00:25:41.438 --> 00:25:55.108 We have so many different clips from the live performances from our professional comedian partners as well, and then on the YouTube Climate Comedy channel, we've got our full shows over the last years that are available for people to check out. 00:25:55.108 --> 00:26:02.708 I would say one of the most adept and talented people working in these spaces is our primary professional partner, who's Chuck Nice. 00:26:02.708 --> 00:26:06.237 These spaces is our primary professional partner. 00:26:06.237 --> 00:26:06.658 Who's Chuck Nice? 00:26:06.658 --> 00:26:13.138 He's co-host of Star Talk with Neil deGrasse Tyson, but he's also been showing just how you can tell jokes about climate change and science effectively. 00:26:13.138 --> 00:26:16.706 So check out for your listeners, check out the work of Chuck Nice. 00:26:16.706 --> 00:26:20.685 But when I think about our own students, there's so many different performances. 00:26:20.685 --> 00:26:22.578 So what we do is we have students. 00:26:22.578 --> 00:26:36.451 They can choose between stand-up or sketch comedy, and in our own students' kind of lived worlds there's sketch comedy about parties that they have off campus and ways that they're talking about climate change there and plastic cups, and on and on. 00:26:36.451 --> 00:26:47.816 Or they're doing sketches about dating shows it's kind of common too or other shows, but then we have stand-ups that surprise us sometimes, and so I think in particular to your question. 00:26:47.855 --> 00:27:04.274 There was a student that we had, tommy Lee, who came into the class and he was a self-proclaimed car guy but he wanted to move into these spaces and talk about the movement between cars as he knew them and appreciates them. 00:27:04.274 --> 00:27:11.501 Into the electric vehicle movement he focused in and had this brilliant standup act that folks can find online. 00:27:11.501 --> 00:27:29.314 It was short but he was basically saying I'm a

car guy so I know how car people think and car people claim that electric cars have no soul because they hardly make noise, that car people love that engine and get pumped up and want to shout America and that sort of thing. 00:27:29.314 --> 00:27:36.879 You can watch it from him yourself and he talks about these behaviors around rolling coal which maybe your international audience doesn't know about. 00:27:36.879 --> 00:27:44.188 But it's a way to increase the smoke coming out of your tailpipe to pour on to bikers and walkers. 00:27:44.188 --> 00:27:45.532 It's a really terrible thing. 00:27:45.532 --> 00:27:46.778 He gets into that. 00:27:46.778 --> 00:27:49.956 But then he talks about how the EVs have that backing up. 00:27:49.956 --> 00:28:09.533 Some of you may have heard that just kind of humming noise that helps people know that there actually is an electric car that's around safety and he kind of toys with that to get at some of the funny parts of how we're transitioning as a society into that humming noise being kind of the new roar of the engine. 00:28:09.754 --> 00:28:13.522 So well, I'm not going to just straight up, maybe tell you a climate joke. 00:28:14.530 --> 00:28:22.721 I think that piece by Tommy Lee and there's many others, many others that I could talk about of students' work that has been done that we've got captured on our websites. 00:28:23.309 --> 00:28:38.918 You know, I will say that if you plug in, you know chat, gpt and all the rest of those GPTs, all the rest of the generative AI tools, if you plunk in climate change joke in there, you can get some really nonsensical, pretty bad jokes. 00:28:38.918 --> 00:28:50.224 I've pointed in as an exercise just to kind of see what comes up over and over and over and they don't make sense or they're just not very good and it reminds me of just the creative power of us as humans. 00:28:50.224 --> 00:29:21.458 Maybe the AI will continue to improve and things will change, but at this point it's bringing in our lived experiences and particularly students bringing in their experiences in these spaces that create content that Beth and I and others couldn't come up with ourselves, and that's something that we continue to try to champion and promote here I do consulting work and talks in accelerators and stuff like that about investment readiness and pitching and these types of things, and sometimes it's a lot of content. 00:29:21.499 --> 00:29:40.600 I have a half-day workshop on due diligence and you can imagine for investors that that is at risk of being a bit dry, and so I really try to put a lot of humor in there and some ridiculous case studies and stuff like that to keep things light, because it's a way to keep people's attention, to engage them. 00:29:41.610 --> 00:29:52.757 And so when I talk about pitching and investment readiness, and a lot of times people think I'm going to first start with opening, opening an Excel sheet and talking about, you know, net present value of a

company and these types of things. 00:29:53.310 --> 00:30:20.221 And mostly what I'm talking about is storytelling and finding ways to, you know, get your message across, get all these data points across, without it feeling like you're hitting me over the head with stats, right, and going from one slide to the next with here's five numbers, here's five more numbers, here's five more numbers, but trying to kind of thread the needle on this a little bit and make sure that people walk away having learned something and learn what you want them to learn, but without feeling like they've. 00:30:20.221 --> 00:30:27.182 You know, they've just sat through a very boring lecture of numbers and so I wonder like what else in your experience? 00:30:27.182 --> 00:30:28.043 So humor works. 00:30:28.043 --> 00:30:30.186 In my experience, storytelling works. 00:30:30.186 --> 00:30:40.621 What doesn't work is telling people they're wrong and they're stupid, and this is why what are some of the other ways that you can get through to people who might be contrarians or contrary and adjacent? 00:30:41.509 --> 00:30:44.297 Yeah, and what you just shared is absolutely spot on. 00:30:44.297 --> 00:30:45.600 That's been our experience too. 00:30:45.600 --> 00:30:48.307 Yeah, and what you just shared is absolutely spot on. 00:30:48.307 --> 00:30:49.309 That's been our experience too. 00:30:51.929 --> 00:30:55.076 We have found comedy just to have this power to connect people, information, ideas, new ways of thinking, new ways of acting in the world. 00:30:55.076 --> 00:31:08.894 And, like I said before, I mean it brings forth multiple truths that we're sorting through in our lives and multiple meanings of ideas, statements, words that get uttered and like hey, wait a minute, let's think about that together. 00:31:08.894 --> 00:31:19.442 It can also exploit cracks in arguments, bad arguments, and it can point to those kinds of issues as we're trying to sort through our everyday lives. 00:31:19.442 --> 00:31:27.955 I mean, some have joked in our classroom like you know, the best environmentalist is one that just stays in bed all day and doesn't contribute to emissions. 00:31:27.955 --> 00:31:28.877 But what are we going to do? 00:31:28.877 --> 00:31:30.161 There's a contradiction. 00:31:30.309 --> 00:31:35.730 We need to productively contribute to society, and so comedy helps us get into those spaces. 00:31:35.730 --> 00:31:47.342 Instead of putting up our defenses when maybe we're told you're wrong about this, comedy can kind of creatively work our way in and say well, have you thought about it in this way? 00:31:47.342 --> 00:31:49.638 This is my experience. 00:31:49.638 --> 00:32:14.553 This is the story of how I ended up coming to this understanding, you can help lower those defenses and help connect up and bring people together, because ultimately, this is a collective action problem and we need to be talking about it and if we're not talking about it and if we're not thinking about it as a collective action problem, we're not going to get anywhere near the kind of scale of responses and actions that are needed to address it. 00:32:15.235 --> 00:32:27.038 You spent a few months last year, a semester last year, at Yale's campus in Singapore and one of the things you've talked about or touched on here is kind of the cultural lens of climate change and how that's viewed in different places. 00:32:27.038 --> 00:32:32.897 I wonder, being halfway around the world, did that change your perspective in any meaningful way? 00:32:32.897 --> 00:32:34.601 Or you know, with maybe one or two examples. 00:32:35.230 --> 00:32:39.117 Yeah, yeah, that's right, and not only in Singapore. 00:32:39.117 --> 00:32:52.112 So it's a privilege to be here at the University of Colorado, boulder, and I had a sabbatical and I spent part of it there at Yale National University of Singapore and taught a few classes, one in environmental communication, one in climate policy. 00:32:52.112 --> 00:33:02.140 I actually just this past summer spent 15 days in Jerusalem and was teaching a class there at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and that was a climate policy class. 00:33:02.140 --> 00:33:23.740 But also understanding cultural dimensions to engagement in these different spaces is really fascinating and beneficial, and so working with the students in Singapore, as you mentioned, in the environmental communication class I put to them putting together some comedy around climate change as well, and it's a very different political, cultural context. 00:33:24.361 --> 00:33:25.704 It is not a democracy. 00:33:26.289 --> 00:33:29.119 Right to protest, civil rights are much different there. 00:33:29.730 --> 00:33:50.092 It's seen as a consultative, authoritarian state, and so from that place we had agreed to keep it within the classroom environment, but with the kind of safe spaces of academic engagement with students, their perspectives about what they found funny, incongruent, contradictory in their lives. 00:33:50.092 --> 00:34:13.250 There were certain elements of connection around the world that we face, singapore, for instance, being a small island that is forced to get a lot of its food from nearby countries that has a large generation plant that's just to the south that people can look at all the time, and how they're getting their energy through natural gas is on their minds on a daily basis. 00:34:13.250 --> 00:34:43.103 How they can develop this highly industrialized society on a small island and engage in these ways with the global community generates all kinds of fascinating insights from students themselves that I benefited from and that I continue to try and bring back into the environments here in Boulder with you and your audiences, with the communities in Jerusalem, the students that I was teaching over there, and I think that's part of the exchange that helps us better work through these common challenges. 00:34:44.230 --> 00:34:48.280 Amazing, and so I'm going to put a whole bunch of links in the show notes to the things that we talked about here. 00:34:48.280 --> 00:34:56.858 Anything else you want to add, anything you're excited about or ways that people can get involved in this mission beyond checking out the YouTube skits. 00:34:57.570 --> 00:35:01.559 Yeah, check all that out, Reach out if anyone's out there is interested. 00:35:01.559 --> 00:35:04.192 We have our international video competition. 00:35:04.192 --> 00:35:05.333 That just got posted up. 00:35:05.333 --> 00:35:09.838 I'll share with you, ryan, to put in the show notes so people could apply that. 00:35:09.838 --> 00:35:18.126 It's got a long time to the deadlines in February, so you got plenty of time to put together great content two minutes or less, share with everybody. 00:35:18.166 --> 00:35:38.376 You know it's a way to creatively start to make these connections across places, and so that excites me, that we now live in a world where we can make these connections much more readily and effectively across communities, across different perspectives, cultures and across the political spectrum. 00:35:38.376 --> 00:35:39.800 That really excites me. 00:35:39.800 --> 00:36:07.217 I am really excited, you know genuinely, about younger people today and their appetite for engagement on these topics and related issues and challenges and opportunities, and so I'm really pleased to have this, as I mentioned it as a privilege to have this positionality in this work, to work as a professor on this campus and as a researcher to hopefully advance this so that we can start to really affect change significantly and that I see on the horizon. 00:36:07.970 --> 00:36:14.539 Okay, I think for sure there are some listeners out there who have been looking for their opportunity to make their standup debut and you've got it now. 00:36:14.539 --> 00:36:16.231 This is your chance, max. 00:36:16.231 --> 00:36:17.134 Thank you so much. 00:36:17.134 --> 00:36:19.340 Thank you, thank you for this. 00:36:19.340 --> 00:36:22.699 Thanks for listening to another Climate Tech podcast. 00:36:22.699 --> 00:36:26.516 It would mean a lot if you would subscribe, rate and share this podcast. 00:36:26.516 --> 00:36:33.664 Get in touch anytime with tips and guest recommendations at hello at climatetechpodcom. 00:36:33.664 --> 00:36:37.036 Find me, ryan Grant Little, on LinkedIn. 00:36:37.036 --> 00:36:39.681 I'll be back with another episode next week. 00:36:39.681 --> 00:36:40.784 Bye for now.