The funny side of Climate Change

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Hi and welcome to Sustainability Solve, the sustainable business podcast. I'm Will Richardson, the founder and CEO of Green Element Group, incorporating Green Element, Compare Your Footprint, and of course Sustainability Solve.

We've been empowering organizations to manage their environmental impacts And I'm Charlie Luxton, an architectural designer who focuses on sustainable buildings. Climate change is no joke, but are we all guilty of losing the room by being a little bit too serious all the time? Well, Stewart Goldsmith is a man who knows the power of taking the lighter approach to green communications. Stewart is an award-winning comedian and business speaker. Hello, I'm Stewart Goldsmith. Who attracted headlines at the Edinburgh Festival last year with his show Spoilers about climate change. So Stuart, welcome to the podcast. Tell me a little bit about yourself. What's your background?

Oh, thank you. Thank you very much. It's lovely to be here. My background, I suppose the headlines are that I used to be a street performer at Covent Garden as a teenager. I did that for about 10 years and then that led me to stand-up comedy. And then I've been doing stand-up for nearly 20 years now. So I've never had a real job. And I try to use my sort of outsider status as a benefit in order to try and talk to people about my— I was going to say my increasing eco-dread, but the truth is, now that I've engaged with it and I'm talking about it and learning more about it, my eco-dread has abated somewhat sometimes.

So why do you think that that's happening? Why? How are you being less fearful of the coming Crunch, should we put it?

Did you consider and then reject the word apocalypse? It looked like you did. I think that it's so in comedy, the problems are the material, right? So all of my shows, I've written 10-hour-long stand-up shows over the last few years, and all of them have been an attempt to wrangle with a particular problem. Like, I sort of can't write about anything else than what's on my mind. And then a few years ago, I realized that I couldn't think of anything else apart from the climate crisis. I know we're all at different points on our sort of journey as to how much we think about it, obsess over it. And I was at a conference recently where there were people who'd been working in sustainability for 30 years who were sort of saying to me after the stand-up show that I did there, just they kind of clutched my hand and looked deeply into my eyes and went, thank you, because I think they've been crying out for more people to talk about it. So we're all at different stages of that journey. So I was very kind of new to it and I just noticed, I began to notice more and more, or rather, I'd noticed news stories about the climate for a long time, but my ability to be able to ignore them lessened. So they kind of built up, and I'm a dad, and I suppose during the pandemic as well, we had a lot of time to pause and reflect, and it just started to drip in more and more and more until I realized that I was thinking about it all the time. And I realized— I don't know if I realized at the time, but I realized since starting to engage with it more That what I was doing was on some level I was thinking, I don't want to think about this because if I think about this, if I find out any more about this, I'm going to be more scared. So I was sort of rejecting the concept of finding out more. You know how easy it is in a life, a modern life with kids and family and work and everything else. You can just easily focus your attentions elsewhere and not think about the difficult thing. And I realized I'd been doing that. And now that I've focused on the difficult thing and really sort of plunged into it and tried to learn as much as I can and write about it and take those jokes to comedy clubs up and down the country and be sort of met with often, as you said, in the early stages, anger or blank indifference or questioning. What do you mean climate crisis? What are you talking about? Like a staggering amount of, of people at early stages.

So people are angry about you talking about climate change.

Well, I think that there were definitely a few walkouts, and I had to get used to that as a sort of people pleaser.

Oh, wow.

That's the first walkouts of my career. My stock in trade as a comic, and this isn't something I ever designed, but it became apparent early doors in my career that I'm one of those people that when I walk on stage, everyone relaxes and thinks, oh, this guy, this is going to be all right. And so I've never had people walking out, and kind of like, if I've had heckles, they haven't been personal, you know. And to be fair to them, this was— this would be on a Friday or a Saturday night on a mixed bill of comics where suddenly the headliner comes on and goes, 5 minutes of trust me, I'm a comedian, and then now I'm going to talk about climate change. Laugh. No, no, I really am. And then I do jokes about the climate crisis. So these are people who've got babysitters and have made an effort to come out. They maybe don't want to think about it during their leisure time or at all. So I was met with a real Resistance, I suppose. And part of that is down to me because I was learning the territory and learning how to talk about it in a way that I could sort of hold them by the hand and take them through some upsetting stuff. And part of it was down to them. I honestly thought when I started doing jokes about the climate crisis, I honestly thought, you know, I'd say words to the effect of, God, you know, you're terrified of the climate crisis, right? And there would be a vibe in the room. There'd be a sense of, yes, And instead the sense was no. And that's the last thing I'd anticipated. You know, people really were like, oh, I'm not—

oh, it's—

oh God, this again. Do you know what I mean? Sort of like tiredness or indifference or sort of mild frustration. And yet in a few cases, grumpy walkouts.

And do you— I mean, so do you think it's sort of a— and this is probably too early to hit this question because it's quite a fundamental one, but is it a kind of activism for you?

That's a really interesting question. I have flirted with active, like capital A activism, going on marches. I've never glued myself to anything, but I've sort of, I've thought a lot about people who engage in that kind of big activism. I suppose it's sort of, it seems a bit mealy-mouthed to consider activism to be anything less than some of the really extreme things that we see people do. But I think that, like, I wouldn't call myself an activist. And something in the show, something I say early on in the show is that I'm not an expert, I'm not an activist, I'm just just a scared member of the public just like you. I think there is a real danger in trying to communicate with people if you set yourself up as something different. Like, if I was an expert, I could say I'm an expert, but I'm not. I'm really just someone who feels that I wasn't having as many conversations as I felt I should be having about the climate. And I feel like the, the one of the, the protests that I went on— I went on a big, the big one, you know, the Extinction Rebellion thing, 100,000 people in front of the Houses of Parliament. I didn't feel like it was my normal social group. There weren't really people that I knew there. There was one or two people I knew, and there was a lot of quite intense-looking, quite extreme, we are activists, we're doing a thing. And I, I don't want you to think for a minute that I'm making fun of those people, because I really respect their energy and I like them. But I wasn't showing off to my friends, like I wasn't motivated to go, hey everyone, I'm doing this thing, you should join me, because it didn't feel cool. It didn't feel like a sort of cool, interesting thing that I wanted to tell people about. It felt like, oh, what is this? I'm— there's a lot of fear and tension here and hope and joy and love and all sorts of exciting things. But it didn't feel like— it just wasn't something I was talking to anyone about. I got a Just Stop Oil pamphlet through my door here where I live in Bristol, and I went along to the meeting. I thought, I'll check out what these— this is just before the soup, just before the soup incident. So I sort of knew vaguely who they were, but not that much. And but there were so few people at the meeting, and I thought, I'm sure amongst my friends, or, you know, parent friends in the playground, there would be people who would be interested. Why is no one interested? So I don't think I am an activist, no, but I do think I'm someone who feels that a lot more people should be talking about it than are talking about it in my social life.

Because that's interesting, because I would say you are an activist because you are tackling the issue and trying to get the issue onto more people's agenda. Now, one way of doing that is with soup. Another way of doing that, if you're Will, is, is running a company that, that makes it easy for businesses to understand the impact and the production of carbon in going around their daily business. In what I do, it's about trying to take clients on a journey to understand how you can make a less impactful building. And that, that's my activism, right? What I do for a job is my activism. That's the way I see it. So therefore I would, I would counter that and actually say what you're doing is framing this terribly difficult issue in a way that more people can understand and engage. And to me, that is probably the most important thing that anyone can be doing, even if you know you're succeeding or not, you're trying.

Could I just jump in and say, I don't necessarily exactly agree with what Charlie's just said. I think now It's become more mainstream to do what I do. I would say activists are people that put themselves out on a limb. So, and I would say that's what you are doing. I think that's what you are doing because you've had people walk out. I would say that when I first set up Green Element and started helping organizations, I wasn't easy to find work and I could have gone and got a job and be paid a lot more, but I was putting myself out on a limb then. I would say I was probably more of an activist then.

Yeah.

But now I would say there's more of us, therefore I'm less of an activist.

Yes, I think so. To me, I think the word activist suggests kind of bravery, and I think I see a lot of bravery amongst people who I consider activists. Now, it, you know, you might say, oh, but you know, people are walking out of your shows. That's not— listen, I've been a, I've been a comedian long enough that people walking out doesn't impact me at all emotionally. Do you know what I mean? Like, I, I, I get—

That's so nice to hear because I always feel really bad when I see people walking out of people's shows.

And I always go, anyone—

that's awful, they're so rude.

Yeah, listen, people are, people are entitled to opt out. People are entitled to walk out of the show. I don't think that doesn't incur any— like, I don't— before I go on stage to talk about the climate, I don't feel the fear that I imagine someone who I consider to be an activist would feel when they're about to lock on at a protest, like when they're about to really invest their Their freedom, do you know what I mean? Or like, or just their flexibility. Like, you know, one of the things, and genuinely, I've tried to write jokes about this and I haven't, I might return to it in a future show. When I went to the Just Stop Oil meeting, one of the things they said, probably the thing they said that resonated with me most, is that you can still help as part of their organization even if you don't want to risk arrest. They need people to go and collect people who've just been de-arrested. Like, you can help without gluing yourself to a thing. You can still help. Now, you know, Just Stop Oil as an organization, I, as I said, I don't really have a relationship with them, although I admire them to an extent. And I probably am less angry with them than a lot of people because I understand a little bit about the theory of the radical flank and what they're doing and why. But I think that the parallel of that, like, you can still help even if you're not part of the— even if you're not at the tip of the spear. you can still help. And that's really important to me because I have had a wonderful, if not entirely glittering career. I've made people laugh for a living one way or another for 30 years. And yes, that's, you know, there's no altruism in that. Yes, it makes people happy the majority of the time, but mostly I've just been going, aren't I a clever boy? Yum, yum, yum. Laugh at all my jokes. Me, me, me. And that's lovely. It's been lovely for me and it's been fun for my audiences. But more and more, I'm really inspired by the idea of being useful. And I think you can be useful in ways that aren't simply the tip of the spear. And so that was— that's a few— I mean, it's a while ago now, maybe 2 years ago. I just started to feel like, oh, there are other ways I can help. Like, this is a thing that, to be honest, troubles me. I wonder whether the most— the single most functional use of my time as a comedian with my skills would be to talk to all of my much more famous comedy friends and turn them onto the climate. Like, if I could get, you know, whoever, you know, name your comedian— I'm through the podcast that I do, I'm very well connected in comedy, as are most comedians anyway. We largely all get on with each other. Maybe I should be finding those friends of mine who've got 5 million followers on something and just drip feeding, hey, you should do this, you should do this. Maybe that would have a lot more utility at the end of the day than me writing jokes and telling jokes about it. But I do, I do try to put myself in a— I try to learn as much as I can, go to as many places as I can, say yes to everything in the hope that maybe along the way I will have some sort of entrepreneurial comedy adjacent idea that helps.

Could you ask at the end of every show, just turn it around to being serious and go, you've just seen a show about comedy. Have I changed your opinion? Put your hands up if you know.

The show about the climate, you mean?

Yeah.

And see, just because that will, I guess people will then walk away and go, oh, I know I've just been laughing the whole time, but actually he's just asked me a serious question and I put my hand up to say, yeah, I think I know a bit more now.

I, I think this show does do that in a, in a different sort of a way because I think the data that I could reasonably get, I can ask an audience to put their hands up for anything and they'll all put their hands up, right? I'm good at asking for things and, you know, I'm charismatic on stage and I can, that's one of the, The early lessons of being a street performer: if you're confident and funny, people will eat out of your hand. And that is a terrible power that we see abused all the time in all spheres of politics.

No, what do you mean?

So I could do that. Whether that would be genuine data or not, I don't know. But I do at 2 different points in the show, and this is just the first show, there's 2 different points where I solicit climate confessions from the audience. So I ask people, you know, what grubby little thing do you know that you do even though you know it's bad? And then I riff around their answers and it's warm, it's friendly. I'm not sort of, you know, annihilating anyone. I'm not that kind of a comic. What I'm trying to do is have compassion, and I'm hoping that the compassion that I have and that I display resonates such that people feel more comfortable starting conversations with their friends about the climate, because I think a lot of us Think to ourselves. I think there's lots of different tracks this conversation happens, or lack of conversation. Again, it's like omitting, omitting and letting our thoughts slide away from really finding out more or doing anything. I think in a similar kind of way, people will feel bad about the fact that they don't really recycle their Chinese takeaway containers, or they— oh, it's just full of goop. I think I'm just— I recycle normally, but I'm going to bin that one. Or whether they'll go, well, I fly a lot, you see, so I shouldn't really say anything about the climate because someone might point out I'm a hypocrite. But the thing I say in the show is that we are all bound up in the carbon economy. It wraps around us like a boa constrictor, and you can't wait until you have shed all of your carbon guilt before you say anything and before you participate in the conversation. So trying to— there's a joke on the end of it as well, but it's out of context. I've decided not to deliver it here. But because I don't— the problem is I talk about this and I care passionately about it. The show is funny, and then when I talk about it, I put my serious hat on and I forget I'm a comedian on a podcast. So apologies when that happens. But I think that those are the things I want to do. I want people to feel like it is far more commonplace to talk about it all the time. And I think one of the inhibitors to that is people secretly feeling guilty about their own You know, I'm not very good at this, I'm not very good at that.

It's a really interesting one, isn't it? Because it's sort of like a double-edged sword. And I think we saw that with Jeremy Clarkson, just to, you know, go back into the early days of, you know, when Top Gear was the hugest thing on TV. And he would make these, I assume from his perspective, fairly flippant comments about, you know, and I don't think he truly understood the hinterland of what he was doing. He was giving people reasons not to act, I suspect. Maybe he didn't mean that. I mean, are you very conscious that you're walking an incredibly fine line in that you're talking about something arguably deadly serious? And how do you construct humor out of that without belittling it or undermining it?

Absolutely. I mean, something that really struck me about 6 months into the process of making the show As the stuff that I was saying started to become more successful and more funny, I started to think, am I, am I a shill? Am I the bad guy here? Am I making people laugh as a means of relieving pressure? Whereas actually it would be more useful if that pressure built up and then turned into anger and turned into action. I don't want to sort of let all the air out and then people remain inert. So I did wrestle with that. I have to say, I don't wrestle with that anymore because I don't think that is what I'm doing. And I've had enough, as I said, I've had enough kind of sustainability professionals say, oh, thank God, thank you for talking about this. And I mean, that's something that has happened a lot, particularly recently, like last week. So sorry if I've mentioned that twice, but it's really important to me and it's really encouraging. So I don't mean to blow my own trumpet about that, but I sort of feel like, I feel really not vindicated, but I feel like—

Yeah, vindicated.

I feel like I made a set of decisions that this is worth doing and this is a good thing to do. And recently a lot of people have agreed with me, and I feel really good about that, probably because it was a real thing that I wrestled with. I think the sort of comedy that I do doesn't just refer to the climate crisis and get a laugh out of it. Some of the show tells a climate fact and has a joke on the end of it, like, here's an interesting thing you should know, and here's a joke that sort of is an arbitrary joke, and I've bolted the two together so that I can get away with the first bit. But the best bits of the show, and this is the stuff I want to do more and more of, are completely imbued with the nature of the climate crisis like this. You know, it's— that is the whole of the joke for some parts of it. So for an example, there's a bit which is— there's a clip. This is the only clip of it that I've kind of released and it's on my website. There's a clip of a bit of material I have about flying business class where the gist of the bit is that, you know, I feel bad about flying, but I still fly. I haven't made the commitment not to fly. And I love flying. You know, I love and enjoy flying. I feel terrible about it, but I love it. But I hate walking through business class. One, because, you know, they're— there's, you know, they think they're better than me and it sort of affects my narrative of myself and everything. And then I did a show where I was offered business class for the first time. I flew business class. And then at the show, I was in Zurich. I found out that it's 3 times worse for the carbon emissions. It generates 3 times the carbon. And so now what I do is I decline business class on climate ethics grounds. And the punchline of the bit, just to butcher it here, is that flying feels great, business class feels amazing, but nothing feels as good as walking through business class knowing that you were offered it and declined on climate ethics grounds. And I've done that last week to 1,000 global heads of sustainability, and they laughed, and loads of them didn't know. And so now they know, and they laughed. And someone messaged me afterwards and said, we were all razzing this guy at the airport who, uh, he was going into the business class queue, and we were all like, whoa, didn't you listen to the comedian? And they were genuinely disseminating that information. I didn't condemn them and make them feel bad in a way that they went, now I feel bad. I'm not going to listen to that message. Instead, it was funny and they'll think about it every time they buy a ticket for the rest of their life.

But what you've just told me is awful because you've just told me that sustainability professionals didn't realize that business class was 3 times worse and they've been doing it for 30 years. I'm kind of just sitting here going, wow.

Yeah.

Um, surely that's like, that's like air travel 101 in sustainability consultancy. It's not rocket science that I'm just a bit kind of amazed.

It's, it's probably not fair for me to paint all of them with the same picture. 2 of them, I didn't speak to all 1,000 of them. 2 of them came up afterwards and said, God, I didn't know that. And, and I don't know, I can't tell you the job titles of those two. So apologies if I've told the story in a lazy way.

No, no, no, no.

These are— I'm sure the vast majority of them knew it. I will say at this event I did loads of learning stuff. I did the Climate Fresk. I don't know if you've ever done a fresk. And I also played with En-ROADS. I don't know if you've seen En-ROADS. Do you know En-ROADS?

No, I don't know En-ROADS actually.

It's— oh my God, it's incredible. I will try and find a link to send you or put in the show notes. It's an online— it's almost like the sequel to the fresk. You have 15 sliders that you can, you know, they operate a graph in real time on the screen of the temperature that we end up at over the next 100 years. So the sliders are, do we incentivize different types of renewables or what have you? And you can, I mean, it's amazing. My point being loads of things like that. Lots of people there were very knowledgeable and were still learning. Yeah, but, but the reality is I flew to this conference. I flew— it was in Arizona, and I flew there, and I felt very challenged about whether or not to do that. And I thought, you know, because the danger is you sort of start thinking to yourself, well, it's okay for me to fly because I'm delivering an important message, which is bollocks, you know. But also there are people— this, and this is the other end of the scale to the sort of Extinction Rebellion people— the other end of the scale is people who genuinely have their hands on enormous levers of power And those people are kind of big corporate people who, some of whom are very passionate about sustainability and have been doing it for years. Some of them are newly passionate about sustainability. Some of them are like lying in wait, waiting for the old white male dinosaurs at the top to die and then bang, there's going to be a huge change. But they're all operating in a system in which currently everyone flies around the place. So people in sustainability do still fly to places in the, in the wider world. Now we're talking about America here. Talking about people who maybe are responsible for 50,000 employees. So I don't think that the— I'm sort of talking about a different thing here, but for my part, I don't think the solution is to try very hard to convince individuals to never fly again. I don't think that's the solution. I think the solution is enormous, enormous metastructural change in how we live. And until that happens, I'm not, I'm not saying, well, until that happens, I'm bloody flying. I still feel challenged about every journey, you know.

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There's a statistic about flying that I think is quite interesting in that 3% of global emissions are through aviation. Half of that, so 1.5% of global emissions are through aviation, through private jets.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So actually 1.5% of the general public are producing, which actually is very, very small. There's so much more we could be hitting. And if you think about how much we know about each other's cultures, how much we've recognized each other's way of living. through flight and through going to each other's countries. I think that's way more important than that 1.5% of global emissions. And I totally understand the aviation of why is Taylor Swift flying 15 minutes? That's absolutely appalling. But actually to have more and more people understanding each other will actually help climate change way more than it will be more disastrous. Absolutely.

And maybe outrage at Taylor Swift and the fact of memes about Taylor Swift Maybe they have a huge cultural resonance. I think that one of the things I thought was fascinating about En-ROADS is seeing the difference. And, you know, it's using the available data, but it seemed to have some pretty bulky data to back it up. The difference between when you move one of the sliders on making existing types of transport more efficient, I always assumed that was a SOP. I always assumed, well, of course everyone would like to just go, oh, Efficiency is the secret because that on some level lets them off the hook and it's business as usual, but we just tweak it and make it more efficient. Making the transport network more efficient saves us half a percent. It's absolutely enormous. Like I said, everyone's at a different place in their journey. There is definitely a sense that we should do everything. Please let me attribute this quote. I don't know who said this, but it's, what do we do about the climate crisis? And the answer is everything. I don't know who said that. I keep saying it on every podcast I'm on and I love it and I think of it every single day. If you know who that is, or one of your listeners does, I would love to know.

This is a very interesting thing about housing. And when you say to people, well, what should I do to make my existing house more sustainable? You basically everything, because there's no single silver bullet that solves the problem. And I think that's just a microcosm of the wider economy. You said quickly that making the transport networks more efficient saves us half a percent. Is that correct?

I mean, as soon as I say a number out loud, I go, oh God, does the ADHD fail me on this one? I don't know. Anything I write, anything I end up writing a joke about, I make sure is really deeply researched.

Yeah, no, but it just seems incredibly low, doesn't it? I mean, half a percent, it's like—

Oh well, there's 15 sliders on En-ROADS, and you're allowed to— the game is you can use 5, you can twiddle them all, and you can use 5, and you've got to get us down to 1.5. And it is— God, it's hard.

Oh, sorry, half a percent? Half a degree.

Oh yes, so, so, I'm so sorry, half a— yeah, you get us from like 2 2 degrees to— I'm so sorry. Let's roll back and redo that.

That makes way more sense.

In my defense, the percent symbol, what is it? It's 2 little degree circles with a line in between them. Hence, any credibility I've just had, I just blew it out of the water. I'm sorry, I was speaking quickly. But yes, I can visualize this thing very clearly. We're at 3.3 degrees and we're trying to get it down to 1.5 degrees. And you save half a degree if you increase the efficiency.

Well, it's hard not to get political. I mean, do you find it difficult when you're talking about this not to end up getting political? Because ultimately, whenever I end up in a conversation about sustainability, I can talk about architecture and I can talk about what we're doing and embodied carbon and blah blah blah, but ultimately it ends up going— and they say— ends up saying, well, politicians need to set an agenda and set a framework in which going— being sustainable is the only option. And Do you not end up at that place? It's like the bottom of the basin, isn't it? It's where you always end up.

I think that another thing that I heard doing research, I interviewed someone who's a global sustainability person for a huge investment bank in the States. I had a Zoom interview with them. I'm not a big book learning guy, as you may be able to tell, but I love interviewing people and finding out what's important to them. Them. And he said one of the most optimistic things I've heard said by a sustainability professional. He said capital has decided it's real. That's the big difference. Capital, money has decided that. I think he was talking in the context of the possibility of Trump getting back in, the possibility of American leadership and where that leads us or the lack thereof. But He said capital has decided it's real. And I think the point he was making was there is only so far you can lobby against what's immediately apparent. If you're an actuary dealing with billions of dollars, you can't pretend the climate crisis isn't a thing. When you're predicting the future, when you're setting insurance metrics of some sort that I don't understand, you know, you can't pretend it's not real because now they all know it's real. So I think in a similar sort of a way, as it all becomes more and more apparent and inescapable, and I think this is already happening, the concept of politics is extraordinary because we regard them as our leaders, but really they're running scared in case we all change our minds. They're running scared all the time. It's like being a movie star. We think movie stars are powerful, but really they're these terrible hunted people who are thinking, God, I'm only one bad decision away from tanking everything. And I think it's the same with politicians, and I think we have to remember that, and we have to make demands of them, and they will react to those demands. But I think that— I'm not quite sure the point I'm trying to make about the capital. It's like it is less and less possible to pretend it isn't real. And I think the— we're seeing, I hope, almost a singularity, you know, one of these hockey stick kind of curves in, in how quickly people are becoming— And I, I don't know, is it just me? Have I been absorbed in this world for 2 years and now I think everyone cares about it more than they do? That's probably part of it. I'm not a completely impartial observer. None of us are. Certainly in my life, more than it ever has been. But I feel like it is in the same way 50 years ago a politician could say something openly racist in Parliament and now their career would be over in the UK at least. I think that there will be an equivalent track of you can deny climate change or you can deny specific aspects of it, but you can't anymore. And next year, you'll be able to do even less and even less and even less.

I think the kind of the working example of that is Trump and his massive push for reopening the coal mines because it struck a, you know, a bell with his, his base, his core voters. And ultimately, no real coal miners got open— coal mines got open because no one would invest in them because they're just— it's the most expensive way of getting— it's exactly a terribly expensive way of getting energy. And they're just like, No, we're not doing that. It doesn't make any money. Why would we do that? It doesn't matter what Trump says. No one cares. And so I think that is true.

That's precisely the point he's making.

Is it fast enough?

No, no, no, no. I should say the end of that conversation was— the end of that conversation with this gentleman I was interviewing, I said, so do you feel optimistic then? And I'm sorry, this is why I'm not naming him. He said, no, no, we don't have time. that, you know, do we have time?

No.

I won't give up hope, but do we have time? And I think that's when you then get into the next sort of, I mean, you know, as we predict and worry about the future, there's lots of other things to worry about. There's war and there's AI and there's other loads and loads and loads of challenges. And then you get into a much wider, bigger conversation where you stay. It's like when you start thinking about, you know, climate justice, You've got to ask climate justice for who? You know, people are already running for their lives. People are already dying as a result of the climate crisis whilst we do a nice podcast. Do you know what I mean? So, so there is always enormous social inequality. And, you know, who will survive? Will it just be billionaires in a bunker in New Zealand, or will, will it be a different version of it? What will humanity look like? Who knows? Much, much bigger and more horrifying subjects.

Because that's interesting, because I do quite a lot of talking about this to business and interested individuals. And it's really interesting is that I often try and set out why I care. And there's obvious reasons. And one of the reasons why I care is what happens if we don't solve it? And I always find that a really difficult subject to discuss. And I remember, I think it was It was James Lovelock and the guy in one of his later books on Gaia when he talks about going from, you know, 8 billion or whatever we are down to about 1.5 billion living in the very north and the very south. And that's fundamentally what he says if we hit 4 or 5 degrees is a realistic possibility. And I suspect he's, he's not sort of overemphasizing that. And actually, that's the only thing I sort of say to people is that we're likely to go from about 8 billion to about 1.5, 2 billion, and that's not going to be pleasant. Do you get into that? Because in a way it's like the elephant in the room, isn't it? You know, we've been talking about 1.5 and we bust 1.5, not, not, not annually, but we bust it. Right. So where are we going to stop and what does that world look like? And I don't think anyone is really talking about that or framing that or— because it's, it's horrible. It's, you know, it's frankly—

I certainly do cover some of the horror aspects of it.

Okay, go on.

Give us, give us, give us a joke around the horror. That's the worst thing. I mean, I mean, I can.

No, it's not in context.

I don't— I mean, I know, but how do you attack—

how do you approach it rather than give me a joke?

How do you approach that? We are talking about a shift in our society that will be immense.

I mean, utterly immense, potentially.

The thing is, I think when communicating to an audience, if you tell them how horrible it is, they will stop listening because it's so horrible. And I've experienced that And I've experienced that from both ends. I've been an audience— what a sentence— I've been an audience member and I felt turned off by stuff and I've thought, God, I can't bear it. I just can't. I have to safeguard my mental health. I've got to get up and do parenting stuff. I think I also went through a phase in the creation of the show, the iterations of the show, whereby I was punishing them. I was angry that they didn't care as much as I did. Oh, it's a bunch of people on a Friday night in Tamworth and none of them give a toss. And, you know, I'm angry at them for not caring and not being more educated about it. And that doesn't get a message across either. And I had to try and find the delight and the silliness, and I had to find a way to be my best comic self, my silly self, whilst talking about some really difficult things. So I'll give you an example joke from the show, and if it bombs, we'll cut it out. Okay? So I— one of the threads running through the show is a conversation I'm having with a couple of dad friends of mine, a couple of local mates of mine for kind of playground dads. And one of them says that he's been considering this really dark thought. He says, I don't want to have a conversation about the climate. I keep having this one dark thought going round and round my head. I've been having it for months. I can't get it out of my head. I don't want to talk about it tonight. The conversation moves on. The rest of the show happens later. At the end of the show, I return to it. when I've been mulling over my— the ability of a comic to do anything, whether comedy can ever make a difference, whether, whether, whether my ability to occasionally blurt something out and draw a ring around it and go, that's writing, has any real kind of function. And then I return to that conversation with him and he says, I just honestly, I don't want to talk about it tonight. I've just been having this one really dark thought. And in that moment, I say, the comedy gods spoke to me and through me. And I blurted out, how would you kill your kids if you had to? And he laughed so hard for so long that I thought, maybe I can make a difference, right? Now, let the record state that Charlie laughed, but it was silent. I saw his face and he did laugh. You know, like, we are— that's at the very end of the show, and maybe it's not sensible to use in here, but it's an example of people are having some horrible, horrible thoughts.

Yeah.

And they're having them alone. They are having those thoughts alone and they're not sharing with them because they're totally socially unacceptable to say. And I have experienced this myself, feeling cold and scared and horrified. And we're doing that on our own, and that isn't going to help us solve it. I talk in the show about this sensation of falling down a well. You hear a new story, you see this— God, this thing in the paper yesterday about all the flies over this river. Suddenly the fly population isn't there this year. You see a new thing like that and you— I can't help but fall down this well in my head. But you have to climb up out of the well because the tools to fight the climate crisis aren't at the bottom of a well.

I've got a probably fairly serious question to ask you, and it kind of goes back to you were talking about, could you talk to your fellow comedians on the circuit and, you know, some famous people, etc.? Um, what is the demographic of your audience, would you say? Is it fairly mixed? Because I think one of the things that I find in sustainability, having been in it for so long, is it's very white middle class. And that does not help. And actually, when we're talking about climate justice, it's very hard to get into climate justice when you're in a very small circle.

Yes. Um, that's a great question. The audience depends on where I am. I think I've done the show most often in a big chunk at the Edinburgh Festival last year, where it is a predominantly white, predominantly middle-aged—

I remember your show, actually. I wanted to see it.

Oh, I see. I live in Edinburgh.

And I actually feel really bad now, 'cause I was like— but you know when you're trying to juggle normal life? I wasn't up to the Fringe.

Sure, mate. I know, you're very welcome. I hope to be up there this year for a couple of days doing a little mini sort of reprise of it. Um, and I expect to see you there, and at every show I will walk on, my first word will be, is Will here today? I don't want to go. Um, ladies, gentlemen, Will. Um, it is a very white middle-class audience, absolutely. I don't know, it's, it's really difficult to talk about because I know the sorts of people to whom I'm relevant. So I have my voice on stage, and I'm a middle-class white dad in his 40s.

And that's what I was alluding to by you talking to other comedians. You will be able to transfer that knowledge and that, um, you know, talking point to other demographics, basically.

Yes, absolutely. It doesn't— I'm not absolving myself. I'm not abdicating from wanting to talk to as many people as possible. But, you know, I'm not a 20-year-old TikToker. And so I don't, I don't connect with a, with a younger audience. So I hope that I can connect with as many people as possible, but I'm very aware of that. And I've had some really invigorating conversations after the show whereby people There was one of the Edinburgh shows, there was a lady who was vegan who afterwards said, excuse me, and I'm not characterizing or typifying vegans like this at all, but she said, why on earth aren't you telling everyone to go vegan? Because that's the single biggest difference everyone can make. And I sort of felt like saying, well, A, is it? And B, why aren't you telling everyone to go vegan? Like, you do your own show, mate, right? But I don't disagree that that's an important thing, but that's not my story. This isn't a show about how I did or didn't go vegan. Similarly, I did the show in London. I had a very passionate lady who was very kind of very activist, saying, "Why aren't you saying that the climate crisis is a racist crisis?" And I said, "Look, I don't disagree, but I've got my story and my audience and the thing that I'm trying to to contact. I can contact parents in their forties, other people as well, non-parents I hope enjoy it as well." People younger or older than 40 as well enjoy it as well, but I know who I am and I'm telling my story from my perspective. And one of the challenges is that we need to hear more comedy voices, and I'm pleased to tell you that we are hearing a lot more. I think it's been very apparent over the last 5 or 10 years, and it will become even more visually apparent as the people who are now the cohort of really exciting new comedians is far less pale, stale, and male than it ever has been. It's just comedy careers take a long time. 5 years ago I said in 5 years it's gonna be different, and it is. And 5 years from now it'll be even more different. So the proliferation of voices is something I am able to have a very small role in assisting. I like to get people on my podcast who are from all sorts of backgrounds, ethnicities, diversities. So I like that to be inclusive in order to help in, in that small way. So I think it's the more voices that are talking about it, the better. And I feel like that's heading in the right direction.

I'm still sat here and I want to go back and just kick this around one last time. And maybe, maybe it's not relevant. And maybe—

Sure.

How do we talk about not getting— not solving climate change or keeping within 2 degrees? I mean, that is the thing. And because you basically are— you're an expert at walking on the edge, you're tackling this complex thing that people don't want to hear, especially not on a Friday night down the pub. Or you know, in a comedy show, I think it's probably the last thing they want to hear, and therefore I have a huge respect for what you're doing. But even you're saying there is an area that we just can't go, and and is that part of the issue? And and I get it.

I think I'm invoking the idea of killing your own children.

I don't really think okay, right, okay, yeah, no, that is true because I mean I also I mean I do I totally understand your position as well because I felt for so long. Sustainability has been from a position— people perceive it as a position of no, like you can't fly, you can't eat meat, you can't drive a big car, you can't do this, you can't do that. And what it doesn't focus on is what are the good things that come from, for example, living in a highly insulated house? Yes, you don't turn the heating on, you turn the thermostat down, but you're healthier, you're warmer, you're more comfortable. You know, there are benefits to a society that is more sustainable. And we don't also— we don't seem to focus on the upsides of sort of tackling the climate crisis. Either as well, I don't think because it will be a fairer world if we do it. So I mean, I I think I've sort of talked myself in circles.

Yes, it's hard, isn't it? That's not much of a carrot, is it? It's not much of a carrot, is it? Guys, do you want a fairer world? Sure. Do you want it to inhibit you even slightly? No. No, that's it's it's really really hard, and I think that is you know that's an endemic problem of being a human, isn't it? Like you know we are like do you want a fairer world right now? Are you going to donate all of your money to the Trussell Trust and sort out a million kids in? destitution in the UK. Well, I hate that that's the situation and I want to do something about it. There is an enormous proliferation of problems and we all have to pick a lane and go, I'm going to focus on this just now. And at the same time, we've all got a million other things to think about. How do we— yeah, God, I mean, how do we talk about the very real end of the world? I'm sure you've both read the George Marshall book. The climate crisis is a long way away, apparently. It appears to be a long way away. It's complicated and it's frightening. And so it's the last thing anyone wants to think about or anyone wants to talk about. But it is going to— the fear isn't going to change. Maybe, maybe it'd be useful if the fear changed. It's certainly going to start feeling a lot less far away and it's going to— yeah, I mean, I don't, I don't know. I don't know. I wish I could say, guys, what we've got to do is this. It is. It's horrifying. And I think I swing— I swing, as I think we all do, between wild optimism and absolute despair on a daily basis. And I think when I learned that that's par for the course, that helped my mental health and that helped me feel more engaged and active because I felt less like, oh God, I just met— you know, you know what it's like. You work in sustainability, you have this conversation or others like it, or you deliver something, whatever it is. And then you go and talk to your mates and it's— and no one mentions it and you don't mention it because it'd feel weird. And then you start feeling mad. You're like, why is this real? Is this thing that I'm spending so much time on, is this real? Because no one seems to notice or care. And, you know, that is— I forget my point, but isn't it awful?

You know what I mean?

It's, it's really hard. But recognizing that everyone who is sort of switched on to this is going through a version of that. And there is an extent to which I think you need to pick your role. Oh, what's the quote? Do you mind if I read you a quote? This is something I saw at the conference. Hang on a second. This puts it better than I could. It's not funny, but it's very poetic, and I can attribute it because I clicked a picture of it on a board. This is by Sandra Steingraber, about whom I know nothing. She said, we are all musicians in a great human orchestra, and it's now time to play the Save the World Symphony. You are not required to play a solo, You are required to know what instrument you hold and play it as well as you can.

I like that. I really like that, actually.

I like that. I like that because I think it's another obstacle to action is thinking, God, well, I can't do everything, so I won't do anything.

Yeah, I think that brings us around to my initial point, was that that's why I think you are an activist, because I don't think solo activists are the way we're going to solve this thing.

Everyone needs to actually just do what they're doing My rule of thumb is if you've not been arrested, you're not an activist. So I wouldn't dream of calling myself an activist, but I am active. I tell you what, I'm not an activist, but I'm active.

Active. Okay, there you go. We'll take that. I think it's incredible that you're attempting this very difficult tightrope walk, that you're bringing this topic up. And, and I, I think the most kind of reverberating thing will be the fact that you're sitting at a dinner party, it's like, we're not talking about this. And if you do, People are often like, I don't want to talk about that. I don't want to talk about that. Let's not talk about that. It's almost becoming like religion and politics, isn't it?

Yes, this is really— it's one of those things that I, as I work out the instrument that I'm playing and try to play my contributing melody in the symphony, I think that there are jokes which I think about all the time. There are jokes which, whenever I do a particular thing, I remember someone's joke about that And if I can write a joke about recycling or flying or not flying or something, or veganism, if I can write a joke about it that is a joke that everybody thinks of every time they do that thing— not everybody, but if I can do that, or, you know what I mean, if we can all start doing that, that can make an enormous difference.

Yes, change your bank account and change your pension is the biggest 2 things really.

What can I ask you, what are your 3 things? What are your top— because everyone always says to me, other comics start coming up and going, Stu, are we screwed? Are we really in trouble? And I'm like, well, long answer, it depends what you mean by we. But I think it's, I think everyone has their, has their 3, like, what are your top 3 things that you say do these and then you are, you're at least on the right track?

Change your bank accounts, make sure you've got an ethical pension fund.

And change your energy supplier.

Yeah. And energy efficiency. And energy efficiency in your house as well makes a big thing. If you can afford to put insulation up, Then do that. If you can afford to change your windows from single closing to triple closing, do it.

I got, I should say, just a little shout out to Retrofit West and the Cheese Project. They came and did me a thermal imaging survey for next to free because you get like a voucher and you pay for it. And they put a big sucky fan on your door, depressurize your house, and you learn where all the gaps are that the wind whistles through. And that was a joyful experience that the next day found me on my hands and knees with a caulking gun Sealing all those gaps and a very fun day it was too. But yes. Okay. So, so ethical pension, uh, bank account, and what were the others?

Energy supplier.

Energy supplier.

Energy supplier.

Energy. And what—

I mean, those, those are the, those are the easiest things you can do.

Are they the most impactful or are they like on a nexus of easiness to impact?

Um, yeah, bank accounts and pensions. Yes, they are more scarily impactful than veganism. And that's incredibly controversial. Because the problem about veganism is, as a rule of thumb, being a vegan is definitely very, very environmental and way more than anything else. But you can source meat ethically, but it's just incredibly hard.

Yeah.

So therefore most of the crop, you know, most of the Amazon is being cut down because of growing crops in order to feed the— Yes, of course. Um, beef that's all around the world. So it's kind of, it's so intertwined with the system that it's actually easier Just be a vegan. That's actually very true. And that woman that came up to you, she's absolutely spot on, but it's quite nuanced actually. And, but pension funds and banking, it goes back to your comment about finances talking. That isn't nuanced. That is easy to do. Just do it.

Thanks. Thanks. I feel like we're wrapping up the interview now, but that's a great place to end. I've done a lot of interviews and occasionally I forget my position. But that is a that's a lovely point to end us. Thanks, Will.

Thanks, Charlie.

Remember everyone subscribe to the podcast.

But yeah, I think Stuart Stuart's brought us to a close quite wonderfully.

Thanks, lads. That is it. So if people want to hear more about me or find out more about what I do, they can go to Stuart Goldsmith dot com. If you go to Stuart Goldsmith dot com slash climate, then you can find out more about the work that I do for businesses. organizations of all sizes where I go in and kind of write bespoke jokes about people's internal climate comms, which I can then sort of refresh their talking points and sneak those into my climate set. So if people are doing strategy days or, you know, Earth Day events or anything like that, then that might be just the ticket. And you can also follow me on Instagram @StuartGoldsmithComedy or listen to my podcast, which is called The Comedian's Comedian. I thank you all.

Thanks, Stuart. Thank you for that. So that's it for this episode of Sustainability Solved. Next month, we're going to be talking to Seryl Osman from Verdant Search about sustainability careers. Do you want to switch industries? Do you want to plan for your children's future career or make your first hire into a sustainability role? There'll be something for you. Make sure you hit follow in your app so you get notified as soon as the episode drops.