coe185_blum.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:22] Hey, everyone, welcome back to the Cultures and Energy podcast, I'm just here with my day colleague Simone, how she's ready to rumble.

Speaker2: [00:00:28] I could have been dead drunk, actually. I just went out to lunch with your mom.

Speaker1: [00:00:33] Yeah, that's

Speaker2: [00:00:33] That's a short pass. Well, she said, Do you want anything to drink besides water? And I knew she meant like a wine or a cocktail or

Speaker1: [00:00:41] Something, preferably in a paper bag.

Speaker2: [00:00:43] But I resisted. I just had a soda pop instead.

Speaker1: [00:00:46] Let's just say she's Simone House Day sober today. She would never, ever drink before working, especially at her real job, which is being a super superstar podcaster.

Speaker2: [00:00:57] Exactly. I had to keep my I have to keep my wits wits about me and keep sharp here. Got it for the for our wonderful listeners.

Speaker1: [00:01:05] People expect a certain degree of witty work

Speaker2: [00:01:07] And our and our guests. We don't want to shame our guests by showing up drunk in the

Speaker1: [00:01:11] Middle of slurring. Thank you.

Speaker2: [00:01:14] The arms and ers are fine. It's a slurring we can't bear. So you edit that out. Dominic, I thought you could edit that out.

Speaker1: [00:01:20] Oh, I've got you. I've got an anti slur editing feature.

Speaker2: [00:01:23] Yeah, you've got like a filter on there and it takes out all the slurs. See, what the listeners don't know is that we're actually totally drunk during all of the intros and all of the interviews. So the interviews and then you put that you put that filter on the editing and edits out the drunken slurs. And that's that's how we end up sounding, OK?

Speaker1: [00:01:41] Yeah, there's two options. Either can get rid of that or it can just overlay an Irish accent. So it sounds charming. Or so it's great that we have the opportunity to talk with Andrew Blum today. Andrew Blum is a journalist. He published a book some years back called Tubes about a journey into the center of the internet, which I think got, you know, got a little moment.

Speaker2: [00:02:03] People know that book. Yeah, got a lot

Speaker1: [00:02:05] Of attention, and he's got a new book that we're talking about on the podcast called The Weather Forecast, which is called The Weather Machine, which is called the weather machine. Because I don't know, because I was thinking it was about weather forecasting. Yeah, OK, it's about sorry, Andrew. Sorry, this again is just drunkenness.

Speaker2: [00:02:23] See, this is proof.

Speaker1: [00:02:25] And then we

Speaker2: [00:02:26] Could only see the bottle scattered around

Speaker1: [00:02:28] Him right now. And then the other thing that we added out is that so many often end up fighting like fisticuffs with each other. And this book, which we talk about at some length in the podcast, is a really interesting and I think very timely discussion of weather and especially weather forecasting and how we've come to know and model and predict the weather today. And it just so happens. And this is going to be our episode image for this week is we have a forecast of a recently created tropical storm named Barry, which has appeared in the Gulf up or in the northeastern part of the Gulf and is moving its way towards Louisiana as we speak. And just, you know, want to share our sympathies and energies with our colleagues in Louisiana because I think they're going to get hit pretty hard, at least with rain. And the Mississippi River is pretty darn swollen and it's going to come close to topping the levees, according to the latest prediction. So just fingers crossed for everyone that you get through that. And if there's anything we can do to help, of course, please don't hesitate to let us know. New Orleans and Houston share a great kinship in disastrous catastrophic weather events.

Speaker2: [00:03:38] Yes, and be a low lying as it is that seem to flood and get soaked

Speaker1: [00:03:42] And so wet. So soaked.

Speaker2: [00:03:45] Wiped out by water every once in a while.

Speaker1: [00:03:47] Exactly. And so but my point was only that this terrific conversation with Andrew is well timed, not by any design of ours, just by the great design of the

Speaker2: [00:03:56] World, by the great design of the

Speaker1: [00:03:58] Weather. One thing we didn't get into in this podcast right is the fact that Simone Howe was an employee, an early employee at the magazine Wired, which is a magazine that Andrew Blum writes for. That's from time to time.

Speaker2: [00:04:13] And you know what they call it? I didn't know this or I had forgotten it. They call it the cold wire. They call Wired Magazine the Rolling Stone of technology.

Speaker1: [00:04:21] Yeah, that's a pretty. That's not a bad description.

Speaker2: [00:04:24] So I found this website, which actually features it's the very first issues of 19 famous magazines. Ok. And so they got Time magazine and there that's number one. And then people is number two and wired is number three. Was it

Speaker1: [00:04:40] When was the

Speaker2: [00:04:41] First issue? So the first issue of Wired, which and the reason I bring up the first issue is because I worked on the first issue of Wired Magazine that first back when it was, we were like six people. Seven maybe. Wow. There were two kind of tech people who did the computer stuff. There were two the two editors, the original editors whose names I can't remember, but there were husband and wife team. Ok, somewhat glamorous. Got it. There was an editor, the editor, the kind of wordsmith guy was named John Battelle. For some reason, I remember his name. I don't know if he's still affiliated. And there was me. I was an intern. So what are we up to now is that that's like about six six, maybe there was one other person, so is either six or seven.

Speaker1: [00:05:30] So you were the low person on the hierarchy?

Speaker2: [00:05:34] Oh yeah, I was. I was low.

Speaker1: [00:05:36] But you were still, you know, probably, you know, if you had stuck with it, you would be owning stock in the company.

Speaker2: [00:05:41] Don't talk to me about that, you know? But I left wired for a good reason. Let me tell you why.

Speaker1: [00:05:47] Thank you for.

Speaker2: [00:05:49] Well, they were paying me. Let me tell you how much they were paying me back in. Ok, we released the first issue in early ninety three, it says, so that must have been in the first few months of nineteen ninety three. I had just come. I had graduated from UC Berkeley in December of ninety two. I had gone and lived in Nicaragua for a few months, doing volunteer work and living with this family. And then I came back to San Francisco and had my friend was one of the tech people we had dial up full on dial up. Like I remember the the screech and the squeal because this was before we really had dial up in our homes. So the the place I first felt and experienced dial up was at the wired offices.

Speaker1: [00:06:32] Well, I just want to put in context for people who don't remember, the nineteen nineties '93 was before Netscape Navigator. It was before people were really exploring the internet.

Speaker2: [00:06:40] Even know the first person, the first normal.

Speaker1: [00:06:44] Yeah, something everyone

Speaker2: [00:06:45] Did exactly, which is why we had really slow dial up and I did not have dial up at home like I had no internet at home at that time. I don't think most people did. In ninety three early 93, the first leg, regular civilians I knew who are using the internet didn't do so until like ninety five in my recollection. But so it's very early on and my job I was kind of a, you know, kind of catchall intern assistant, but I got paid. I got paid one hundred dollars a month, Jesus. And this was in. This was in San Francisco, California, and you know, it was the early nineties, but it was still, you know, a costly ish city to live in. And I, you know, I can live very close to the bone. Oh my God. And I was living as I was living in a shared and shared housing, sharing a room. So I had a roommate and housemates. So it shared shared living all the way down. So my rent, I think, was maybe one hundred and fifty dollars a month because our sharing one room with someone else. And then I lived on the way I ate was that I volunteered for food, not bombs, which is an organization that still exists, that provides food for homeless people. And it's a great organization. I loved working with food, not bombs, but it was also a good thing. I was working with food, not bombs, because that's how I got about half my meals

Speaker1: [00:07:59] And maybe a throw your bombs.

Speaker2: [00:08:01] Yeah, but they didn't do the bombs.

Speaker1: [00:08:03] Oh, I see. Okay?

Speaker2: [00:08:04] But we would go food, not bombs would go. They'd pick up like old groceries that were no longer saleable on the grocery store floors from organic places like nice groceries. So we get really yummy organic vegetables and make soups and serve those two people. So that's part of the way I lived, but that's the reason I had. The reason I left Wired magazine is not because they were only paying me a hundred dollars a month. It's because I felt that they had sold out their principles. So when I started, I was told that there would be no advertising in the magazine and really none at all. And I was like, This is totally cool. It's a creative project. I'm going to get to work on this really cool publication and they have morals and they have scruples. And I was super principled back then. I'm pretty principled now, but I was really principled back then. And as soon as they broke the news that they were going to have advertising not only advertising, but like advertising booths and cars and all that nasty stuff, I was just like, Fuck you guys. Wow. Which, you know, I don't know. Maybe it was sort of a hasty decision because it was a fun thing to work on. One thing I did is, I wrote, I was given the assignment of viewing several Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes, which is a big thing back then.

Speaker1: [00:09:15] I know, and they did pop culture stuff too.

Speaker2: [00:09:17] I remember and I wrote a little review about Buffy the Vampire Slayer and why it was so cool and what was so hip about it, because it was like really a thing

Speaker1: [00:09:24] Back then and that was published.

Speaker2: [00:09:26] I think so. I'd have to find my copy of the original Wired magazine. I'm sure I have it in a bottle. It was. I'm sure I have it in a box somewhere, but now I'm I'm looking at the the cover here and I remember it well. So what does it have? It has. It says Paglia and brand on McLuhan.

Speaker1: [00:09:44] Oh, Camille.

Speaker2: [00:09:45] Remember Camille? You remember Camille Paglia? Yeah, she was like the kind of iconoclastic, goth feminist critic. She was amazing. I can't remember the name of her book, but I read it like four times. So this was the era Bruce Sterling the cyberpunk. The lead. The lead title here is Bruce Sterling has seen the future of war, so they talk about how technology is going to become part of the war machine, which actually coincides with what we talked about with Andy.

Speaker1: [00:10:12] I was going to say that the thing that I remember about that issue, I didn't see the first issue, but I read it later when I was writing my book on McLuhan because. There was, you know, Wired, I think in the first issue had this whole not manifesto, but just this whole celebration of McLuhan and you know why McLuhan was really ahead of his time and why we should return to him again and be thinking about him in this new media environment. And that was also pretty prescient because I mean, these folks had, I guess, an inkling that something really big was about to happen, which was the internet and that it was going to transform a lot of things. And as we know, the rest of the 90s were like ginned up into like weird internet utopianism and dystopian ism.

Speaker2: [00:10:52] Here you see the lead for the medium dot dot dot. Look, Nicholas Negroponte. Yeah. I mean, this is like an all star cast here.

Speaker1: [00:11:00] So get this all star 1993 cast.

Speaker2: [00:11:04] Yeah, here here. It says this is on. This is just on the website. It says it had a feature about war technology, a piece on what life would be like if our appliances had computer chip brains and a jarringly prescient look at quote libraries without walls for books without pages.

Speaker1: [00:11:21] There you go, man.

Speaker2: [00:11:22] A full decade before e-books were a thing people had heard of, the full issue was released on iPad in Twenty Thirteen for Wire's 20th anniversary.

Speaker1: [00:11:31] Oh wow, okay, so we should check that out. Well, you find your Buffy things.

Speaker2: [00:11:34] You know, I also got to go to a lot of good parties.

Speaker1: [00:11:36] Yeah, I'm sure.

Speaker2: [00:11:37] I'm sure the other good party that would compete like the wired parties would always compete with this other magazine. At the time that ended up dying out, it was called Mondo two thousand and Mondo 2000 had really cool parties. So I don't know. Yeah, it was a blip. It was blip in the moment, but I still remember the office very well. It was on, I think second in Harrison, I used to ride my bike down there. I had parked my bike. There was a kind of basement underground and and I thought it was very auspicious because the the kind of basement where I dropped my bike was a sort of storage area and there was all kinds of scattered shit all over the place like random stuff. And I found rolled up in the corner this poster. And it was a digital, a digital rendition of Augusto Sandino, the revolutionary hero of Nicaragua. And I had just come back from Nicaragua, and so I saw this weird, auspicious melding of my life trajectory. At that point, I still have that Sunday night picture that I just snagged from the basement.

Speaker1: [00:12:35] That's cool. Yeah. Right. Well, high quality reminiscence. I tried to get Simone to talk about this during the podcast, but she didn't really begged off. I didn't know it was. It was also towards the

Speaker2: [00:12:45] Shoved it in towards the end when I couldn't really elaborate it. So it was kind of.

Speaker1: [00:12:49] So we want to take a little time here in the intro segment to really walk down memory lane.

Speaker2: [00:12:53] Now she tracked down. I should go track down some of those people. I try remember some names.

Speaker1: [00:12:59] Well, we'll ask Andrew to put the word out. And speaking of which, it's good to know that Wired still is keeping the quality coming after all these years because Andrew Blum is writing for them. And I think there's a piece that's based upon this book that is in Wired, actually. But you know what? I think you should do. I think you should read the book. Yes, the weather machine. Definitely not the weather forecast. That's what I've been reading today as I've been trying to figure out whether Tropical Storm Barry is going to hit Texas or not.

Speaker2: [00:13:24] We understand that you sometimes have trouble with words.

Speaker1: [00:13:27] Yeah, I do. Again, the drinking doesn't help. Yeah, right. So come on. Well, somebody's going to make me stop drinking before I podcast, but I'll just leave it to Simmons.

Speaker2: [00:13:41] I'll just get you on the one hundred dollars a month salary regime and that'll cut back on your drinking.

Speaker1: [00:13:46] Yeah, I'll just just the booze I can brew in my own bathtub.

Speaker2: [00:13:49] Yeah, whatever you can, whatever you can brew out of, like rotten organic peaches. Nice that can be yours.

Speaker1: [00:13:55] Organic peach schnapps. Delish. All right. So, you know one thing one thing Wired wasn't able to do was give you a signature catchphrase, which your podcasting life has.

Speaker2: [00:14:05] So yeah, which is basically a to go? Yeah. And then the person's name and so

Speaker1: [00:14:11] Famous at this point for saying go in somebody's house.

Speaker2: [00:14:14] So now I get to say, Go Andrew,

Speaker1: [00:14:17] It'll be on. It'll be on your grave. Go, Simone.

Speaker2: [00:14:20] Go. Just say

Speaker1: [00:14:22] Go. All right. Let's try one more time.

Speaker2: [00:14:24] Go, Andrew.

Speaker1: [00:14:44] Welcome back, everyone, to the Culture of Energy podcast we are delighted to have on the line with us from, we didn't check beforehand, but I'm thinking New York, possibly

Speaker3: [00:14:51] I am in New York yet.

Speaker1: [00:14:53] Andrew Blum, the author of Tubes A Celebrated Work and most recently of the book We're Going to Talk About Today, I think mostly the weather machine, a journey inside the forecast that just came out from Echo, which is an imprint of HarperCollins. Andrew, welcome to the podcast.

Speaker3: [00:15:07] Thanks for having me.

Speaker2: [00:15:08] So we're really excited to talk to you about this new book. It's a wonderful read brings together a lot of really important elements about what you call the weather machine, as is captured in the title. And what I really appreciated about the book overall was the structure in which you bring together kind of ethnographic vignettes, journalistic practice and then historical narratives and biographies of these important figures. And then it kind of sets sensibility and logics to the way that you're thinking through this object called the weather forecasting and the weather machine.

Speaker3: [00:15:40] Yeah, thank you.

Speaker2: [00:15:41] Yeah. And so one of the things that one of the claims that you make in the book, which I'm convinced of by, you know, having read it, is that we're now in a golden age of meteorology. And in part, you say that's due to pretty important factor. And that is the advancements in computer simulations and supercomputing algorithms. So that now we're like the weather. The sort of predictive aspects of weather are much more dependent upon these year to year advances in computer simulations than they are on the kind of day to day predictive prognostications of meteorologists and weather people around the world. So I wonder if you can tell us a bit more about what this golden age of meteorology looks like?

Speaker3: [00:16:22] Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think the first thing to do is to set the parameters of why the meteorologists think that's the case, and they're kind of top line statistic is this figure of a day a decade, as they put it, which is that today's five day forecast is as good as the four day forecast 10 years ago or the three day forecast 20 years ago or the most. Remarkably, as you kind of go farther back in time, the kind of two day forecast 30 years ago, which immediately sets up the idea that you know that within our recent lifespan, you know, within not only lifespan but within like the lifespan of the iPhone, you know, the forecast has gotten meaningfully better. So I think that's the first piece to consider with it. I think for me, the recognition that it was, you know, that that that was all being done deliberately and collaboratively was central to my approach to this, the recognition that it's not, you know, I had first, my impulse and addressing the topic was to find the savant meteorologists, the self-congratulatory, you know, hurricane forecaster who's better than everyone else. And it was reassuring to recognize that it was no longer about this sort of particularly skilled pattern match or someone who kind of understood the three dimensional structure of the atmosphere better than other people. That was the kind of heroic image I had going into it, but rather was instead this system of systems and this very slow incremental improvement of each piece of it with collaborations in institutions like the European Center for Medium-Range Weather forecasts the kind of place that does it best, I think, and that, you know, that brought me into more familiar territory of, you know, of humans making infrastructure. And that's kind of the sweet spot for me.

Speaker1: [00:17:55] Yeah, I was going to say, I mean, that seems to be something that connects this project with your first book. Two is your interest in locating that human presence within these massive informational infrastructures like the internet or or weather forecasting. And I think that that is something that in some ways brings these projects back down to Earth and makes them kind of more. It's easier to connect to them. Maybe if we find the human presence that's within these infrastructures at the same time. So I kind of wanted to ask whether the interest in weather forecasting did in any way grow out of the earlier project on the internet? Or were they two totally separate projects from the beginning?

Speaker3: [00:18:30] They were separate projects, but in some ways the interest in the weather predates the interest in the internet. So I'm I'm a I'm a failed academic geographer. I'm not sure if that's quite evident in my in my biography, but I spent a year in the University of Toronto Human Geography program, and you know, I did that as a way to not study urban planning. Uh-huh. And as a way to not go to architecture school. But my interest was in place philosophy. And so I kind of and and I and in my sort of passion with sort of way into all of this is through the lens of place. And so I that led me to write about architecture primarily. But it also means, you know, if you're writing about places, the sort of weather is always in the background. You know, it's just you can't, but it's just it's frustratingly inaccessible. They're just there. Books I think of, like outermost house the Henry Besten book about life on Cape Cod or some of the, I mean, what's considered the sort of traditional nature writing canon, you know, Barry Lopez or Peter Matheson or Thoreau. And the stuff that I was was sort of very taken with, particularly in college and sort of thought it had a lot of weather atmosphere in it and over time came away from it because. I just found the weather, at least the weather pieces of it that I wanted to emulate couldn't help but want to emulate a little bit empty.

Speaker3: [00:19:47] And so I ended up in this weird spot where I wanted to write about the weather full stop, but didn't really know what the story was about the weather. And that's really where the sort of tube's experience came in, because I'm particularly as a magazine writer, you know, it's like you can't can't pitch a story without characters. You can't pitch a story without some sort of timeliness and books. At least the kind of books that I write are sort of, I want to say, they're expanded magazine articles, but they do have the same sort of need for a headline and for a particular and legible angle and for a different kind of timeliness, the sort of timeliness of the decade scale rather than a peg at least a decade scale or a five year scale, rather than a month scale of a magazine article. So it was the experience writing about the sort of grand global infrastructure in tubes combined with a real abiding obsession with with places and with weathers, the kind of baseline of our experience in places that sort of brought me to the topic before I even figured out how to tell the story or what the story might be of that topic.

Speaker1: [00:20:44] No, I think that comes across really well, and it's compelling with the beginning of the end kind of gestures towards the problem of climate change and maybe weather pattern shifting in the future. You mentioned Hurricane Sandy is being part of that situation. And of course, Hurricane Harvey was part of ours in Houston, and

Speaker3: [00:21:02] Harvey is an amazing weather model story as well. We should get to that.

Speaker1: [00:21:05] But yeah, yeah, I would love to. I'd love to hear your insights into it because this is something we continue to live in that aftermath and are really still struggling with it down on the Gulf Coast. But you know, I was thinking that weather forecasting for me is always something that is kind of been in the background, you know, it's like kind of what's going on and the TV screen in the corner of the room when you're not paying attention to it. But when Harvey was coming, everyone in Houston became fixated on weather forecasting and especially on this one website, I don't know if you've heard of it called Space City Weather.com. I want to shout, shout those guys out for the work that they do. Eric Berger Yeah. Yeah, Eric Berger. Exactly. It feels like everyone in the city who kind of knew about it was on that website, you know, hitting refresh constantly just to see what the latest latest kind of, you know, no nonsense, you know, no hype, no drama. Weather forecast was like and I realized, you know, in this era that we're living in, we not only have these great tools that we may not have had in past years, but we also have this maybe greater need for weather forecasting just because we're living in a time of uncertainty regarding the climate both, you know, long term, but also short term. And I was wondering whether that was something you were thinking about, too when you were putting this text together.

Speaker3: [00:22:06] I was certainly I mean, I I mean, I had made it a decision that I then reversed in 2006. That carbon was the only story. You know, I I just I had a real moment when I was writing mostly about cities at the time. And, you know, it just seems so obvious that this was the one story that that sort of all of their stories rotated around. And then we went through, I say we as journalists went through this period of time where it was very hard to write these climate change stories. And when I pitched this book, which was basically five years ago, climate books were where radioactive, both by editor and we wanted to make sure that that climate was not near this book. This was a weather book, not a climate book, and that was just the reality of the public discourse for books. Fortunately for the planet, for every, you know, in all senses, that's really radically changed just in the last year or so that there's a partly as I think as blowback to Trump is, so many things are, but there's much more of an appetite. Both of the people who read books and the people who talk about books for this discussion, and I say, this is just kind of the world I live in of trying to think about what how these conversations enter the, you know, enter the news cycle.

Speaker3: [00:23:06] So it wasn't it was both in the background and for a long time it was it was really in the background. And at the end there was a real, deliberate effort to pull it up to the foreground. And you know, you just don't have to go a day without recognizing without coming face to face with some ostensibly new weather event. I mean, I was in Washington yesterday and on my way down, you know, Washington received yet another hundred year storm, you know, for the third year in a row. And and it's just it's that kind of, you know, that sort of constancy of these events that we're that we're living with and I think are well-served by with this new forecast. So I mean, it was ironic for me that we have new forecasts for new storms, but also a sort of, you know, rare, reassuring moment of the technical systems that we've built to ride out the current moment.

Speaker2: [00:23:52] And I think this question of climate is obviously very central to the present context, but I see some metaphorical work going on with climate to even in the deeper history of the creation of weather as a scientific and diplomatic project, as you point out. And I'd love to talk more about that. But actually, you know, there's an interesting conversation that I know you're aware of around the convergence of climate science and how abstract it is for your average reader or viewer or listener and the ways in which climate, especially as it's modeled by supercomputers and different systematic climate models, are difficult for people to grasp. And so one of the ways in which people have tried to convey climate more directly is by talking about the weather, right, and having these direct experiences with superstorms or. Erratic weather events kind of makes believers out of doubters or disbelievers in, you know, in kind of incremental ways, but you actually point out that, you know, while the weather is not climate and climate is not the weather, you do point out that in the history of creating weather science and weather forecasting that there was a certain pattern in that happened, that kind of looks like the way we talk about climate now. So, you know, even in the mid-19th century, you say that the weather no longer merely described the conditions at a specific place on Earth, but weather patterns that stretch thousands of miles. And it just reminded me quite a bit of the way that we think about climate science now and talk about climate in that it's an abstraction in one way, but it's a set of patterns and created models that in fact, we can sort of trace back, maybe even to these earlier days of meteorology and recognizing these patterns in weather that that you begin to see actually with the emergence of electricity and with the emergence of the Telegraph, which is another fascinating story that I think is not intuitive, but that we get in the book,

Speaker3: [00:25:52] You know, it's a really interesting link you make. I hadn't I? I have to confess, I hadn't made that link myself between the weather systems that are that you come face to face with once you can begin to draw a weather map. Once you have the Telegraph, once you can actually make that first leap into the, you know, to have that global view that that view back towards the planet. I mean, it amazes me that, yes, of course, you have maps new pictures of globes for four centuries before which is has has its own history. But it's really this the idea of simultaneous conditions, you know, the sort of news from all over all at once that that allows for the sort of first, first weather maps, you know, for the first sort of live view that we now know from from satellites. So well, but it's interesting question with the climate, I have to admit, you know, there's often a sort of refrain of climate is not weather and whether it's not climate, but perhaps because my my frame is so is so much about place and so much about our experience of place, and that the gap between our imagination of place and the visceral experience of place, you know, I just I'm constantly in my mind and in my world view, toggling between where I am on the map and you know, and what the wind feels like, both the phenomenological and the sort of the more the more conceptual that I just I don't I don't often then feel the need to extend it to to climate like I like. I don't, you know, I'm sort of happy that if there's crazy weather, then that's indicative that crazy weather is happening. I don't I don't need to be convinced or I didn't in the book feel the need to make the argument that the crazy weather indicates sort of some sort of broader scale discussion about climate change. I think that is an important one, and other people have done that incredibly well. But I confess, I'm so sort of stuck in my boots in place that that I don't really go there that much.

Speaker2: [00:27:31] So do you want to do you want to say a little bit more about the emergence of some of these important figures and innovations back in the mid-19th century, with the emergence of the telegraph and electricity as a form of conveyance of information?

Speaker3: [00:27:46] Yeah, I think for me, the most surprising thing was that there are kind of two weather histories, you know, and the the the first one is of heroic men looking at storms, you know, and that's and most of the weather histories are very much in that pattern. And I was just couldn't believe as I kind of began to read more deliberately of meteorological history, how much it kind of ended when I thought it began, you know, it just it didn't, you know, even more recent work, it didn't. It didn't connect to the to the present day, the present day apparatus, you know, the present day weather models. And I, when I went to sort of trace back the origins of the weather models, they again, often those histories often begin with with the first computers or with the Louis Freeh Richardson story. That's that's that's a great one of the English mathematician who tried to calculate using what he thought it would take sixty four thousand humans without human computers to calculate the sky. And then you, if you keep going back one more step, you end up with this very strange figure of William murkiness, this Norwegian meteorologist. And he's a strange figure in the history because there's an amazing, definitive biography of him written in the I think, finished in the eighties by by Robert Friedman, who's an American who then spent his entire has spent his entire career in Scandinavia. But in some ways it's such a good book that nobody else touched it again. I think it was, you know, it was striking to me until until recently, actually. But Beargrease himself sort of writes to histories because he came up with this idea that you could calculate the weather and actually, as a physicist, wrote down what meteorologists call the primitive equations that are still the kind of root of the weather models, you know, based on the laws of physics and thermodynamics.

Speaker3: [00:29:22] And then when he couldn't make them work, when they were impractical to actually forecast the weather because he didn't have computers and he didn't have enough observations like we know from satellites in particular, he then sort of reversed course and came up with another way of forecasting the weather. And it's that method the sort of Bergen School methods Bergen in Norway. Where he taught that the latter half of his career, it's those Bergen School methods that then dominated meteorology for 50 years until the weather models came in. So he kind of invented, you know, to, you know, you know, to schools. But it was amazing to me that his first, you know, it was the mathematical that came first before the more empirical. And as a result, you know, a lot of the history sort of don't. They don't connect a to see they go connect B to D, if that makes sense. So it was really exciting to me to recognize that the sort of deeper history of calculating the weather was there to be told more in a more distinct way. And it's in Robert Friedman's book, and he helped me with it personally himself as journalist. I get to I get to sort of willy nilly switch back and forth between interviewing historians and reading their reading. They're reading their books and going to Norway, but it was great. I really enjoyed the chance to to figure out the different layers of the weather model history.

Speaker1: [00:30:35] Mm hmm. Yeah, you know, I've been thinking, you know, so you're talking to a couple of anthropologists in their day jobs here and just, you know, part time podcasters and approaching weather forecasting from that vantage point. You know, I'm thinking, you know, there probably hasn't been a time in human history when humans haven't had some interest in knowing, you know what, the weather will bring right, the divination and almanacs and all of these technologies that might have existed in the past. But the thing that seems distinct about the story you're telling is the idea of being able to forecast a day because it wasn't it Richardson, who was really focused on constructing the the model for the weather of a particular day.

Speaker3: [00:31:12] Yeah, he used the upper air, you know, the higher altitude observations that bureaucrats had collected. And then he tried to calculate a day's forecast for Europe, and it famously was wrong. And there's a great book about why it was wrong. I'm very technical sort of book lots of equations about why it was wrong, but that's set the it's set the whole project back. But sorry, but you were focused, but which much of the day part is interesting to you?

Speaker1: [00:31:35] Well, I guess I was thinking, you know, in the past, probably if we're thinking about like Farmer's Almanac and things like that, people are interested in kind of probably weather forecasting, you know, for the harvest or for the season, let's say, right? You know, what's what's the weather going to be like during our growing season? But now this idea that we have in the day is kind of an arbitrary unit when you think about it. But this idea that people are interested in, like a daily forecast seems to me to be somehow like a more modern concern, right? I'm not going anywhere specific with that. Here's something that kind of struck me that there's something about the modern interest in weather or the daily forecast that now we're, you know, we're breaking down into the hourly forecast. And now, you know, when you get on your smartphone, you can see, you know, OK, what's the next hour we're going to be like, should I go outside or not? You know, there's this kind of constant like break down and attempt to kind of master time at smaller and smaller levels, right? I find that kind of fascinating.

Speaker3: [00:32:26] Yeah, you know, there are a couple of things in there that I that interested me. And I mean, one of the one of the real challenges of of writing the book was finding a balance between the two weather registers, the register of Banality and the register of Catastrophe, right? You know, and you know, if you're you're either writing a, you know, I mean, it's the kind of weather operates in both ways. And if it's too banal, it's banal. You know, it's like, you know, you can only have, you know, I can't tell you how many times I wrote, you know, openings to chapters that began, you know, sitting, getting my haircut and, you know, talking to my barber, you know, just to, you know, as evidence of how the ultimate sort of taxicab small talk of the way in which we talk about the weather. And then there's the alternative, of course, which is starting with storms, which is the other way to always tell the story of weather and both, you know, you kind of need both, and neither capture the entirety of that. But I. But I think that, you know, it points to the way in which we forget that the goal of a forecast is to be useful, which is to say is to make decisions based on it. And I and I think that we, you know, there's a sort of technical love of the perfect forecast and this improvement in a simulation of the atmosphere.

Speaker3: [00:33:35] But there's an equal emphasis on how the moments where a three day forecast is more useful than a two day forecast. And so I sort of I have fun moments and, you know, texting with friends, you know, is it going to rain, you know, Sunday afternoon, you know, can we make a plan, you know, and how good is the forecast? And you can't stop the rain from coming. But you know, if you know it is coming, then maybe that will be something useful. So I think that the modern, you know, this modern construct of this kind of everyday time travel, you know, is the part that's that's the way in which that sort of alters our behavior and the way in which that just is just the air we breathe. So the poor metaphor. You know, we just we just live with that every day, you know, and it's only, you know, it's like if you have an outdoor wedding and you really want to know what's going to happen, then you really focus on it. But for the most part, we just at least been places where it rains and it doesn't rain. We're very used to kind of quietly making decisions based on it and of course, being wrong, not about the forecast, per say, but about the decisions we made from the forecast.

Speaker1: [00:34:32] Hmm. Yeah. And I think, you know again, to come back to this traumatic event of Hurricane Harvey and all of us nervously, you know, watching. And looking at space city weather, you know, seventy two hours out, and the cool thing about that website is they actually do show you some of the projection data. They don't just give you the narrative, they show, OK, they show you how the model runs work and then you realize the model runs suggest possibly very different things happening in the next 72 hours. And so it seems to me that, you know, to get back to the human presence issue. In addition to all that incredibly sophisticated modeling labor, it's still really critical that there's somebody who's able to kind of interpret and translate and narrative eyes that data in a way that makes sense to people who are really looking for reassurance and and, you know, sometimes fundamental existential questions like Should I evacuate or not?

Speaker3: [00:35:20] Right, right. Yeah, I mean, I think there I mean, the way that I've been describing it, and I'm not sure it really goes the distance, but is as a lag, you know, a lag between the information the technical systems provide and what we're willing to hear and the decisions we're willing to make based on what we're hearing. And I think that's where the humans excel. But I think that one reason Eric Berger and Space City Weather is so good is because he, you know, he does acknowledge the technical system behind him. He does very deliberately interpret that technical system rather than treating it like a black box and just sort of saying, you know, I am the master of the weather and let me tell you what's going to happen, which of course, is, you know, immediately means you either have to trust me or not. You know, it's a very common pose in our sort of age of very complex systems. You know, I am Google, you know, trust me, you know? And I think I think that's that's something that the meteorologists, particularly the younger ones, are waking up to. I mean, I worked hard to find a meteorologist who would tell me that the models stink and you shouldn't trust them. And I found one and I was just sort of, you know, he had an adjusted his worldview in 15 years. You know, he he still thought that the models worked as they did 15 years ago, and you couldn't blame him 15 years ago for saying, I'm not going to trust this. It's not going to be right by the water, you know, by the beach. But times have changed the technology. It changed. The systems had changed. So, you know, I picture them as kind of a, you know, sort of meshing of gears between what we as the public here and the decisions we make and what the modeling system spit out. And then the meteorologist in the moment, I guess, are getting crushed in the middle of this at the moment.

Speaker2: [00:36:53] Hmm. And one of the things that struck me throughout the book was really this priority or a desire to see a certain efficiency and specificity in weather prediction and forecasting. And again, we see that going all the way back into the history of the discipline. If you want to call it that, going back to Burke Ness, who is a figure I really liked a lot. So he's interested in theoretical physics and also empirical observations. But you quote him when he says, and I love this line, he says, what satisfaction is there in being able to calculate tomorrow's weather if it takes us a year to do it? And it's a very profound kind of philosophical statement. But it got me thinking, you know, how quickly do we and specifically, do we need to know the weather? And have you seen a kind of increase in the temporal pace where there's a kind of rush to like just in time weather or just in time climate where the expectation is that, you know, we'll know exactly what the weather will be like on Fifty Seventh Street Beach as opposed to Fifty Ninth Street Beach. You know, at this particular minute of the day, like, is that the direction that we're going?

Speaker1: [00:38:02] Those are not New York. Fifty seven or fifty?

Speaker2: [00:38:04] Sorry, right now we're in Chicago, so I'm just I'm I'm dreaming myself down the street here.

Speaker3: [00:38:10] I I think it's still this thing where we we have a lot of trouble separating the weather from the weather. You know, we have a lot of separate trouble separating the sort of the forecast from the weather that exists, no matter how we forecast it. And we just I feel like we often can we conflate them so easily. I mean, yesterday, D.C. was a crazy example. You know, I I talked to Jason Samenow, who's the founder and editor of Capital Weather Gang, which is sort of similar to the space city weather. And the two of them are, I think, are special United States of having really good weather blogs that sort of pull back the curtain on what's going on. But you know, yesterday, when DC had record breaking rain at rush hour, you know, there was a forecast for rain, but not like that. He describes how he sort of woke up to what was happening between like seven and nine o'clock yesterday morning and then had to respond to it on Twitter and collecting images and answering questions from The Washington Post newsroom about what was happening and things like that. You know, but he he can't. He can't do anything about it. You know, he, you know, in some ways, you know, he, you know, he told his wife not to leave for work, you know, say, you know, wait for this to pass.

Speaker3: [00:39:11] And I think a lot of people made that decision. That's an example of a decision that can be made. But I guess, you know, we want to know if it's going to rain or 57 street beach so we can decide whether or not to to go out there, you know, but but that doesn't change that it is going to rain. It's just funny. I mean, there are moments, certainly where it's very useful to say, let's wait an hour and we'll go then and then there are moments where, you know, it's not really the answer we want to hear because it's going to rain anyway, right? Right. That's not very profound, but I just I spent a long time thinking about and never really resolve. Solved this incredible gap between the sort of inevitability and uncontrollable reality of the weather itself and the incredible the specificity of the system we've built around it and as well as the predictions work, they still don't change the catechesis. I don't mean that technically, I just mean the basic thickness of clouds, you know, and that was always frustrating to me, I have to admit.

Speaker2: [00:40:03] Mm hmm. Yeah. It just seems that in the kind of calculus of the way that people maybe want to encounter weather forecasting, as you said, you know, back in the seventies, they could do two days as well as they can do now five days. So there's that future illogical forecasting into the, you know, a few days into the future, let's say. But then it seems to me that there's this immediacy of wanting to know exactly what's happening minute to minute or hour to hour. That's increased the expectations of how, how weather it can be seen or viewed or predicted and with with place too, as you were talking about, you know, this kind of interest in place, you know how specific we need to be or the expectations are that people begin to have around what they can, what they'll experience in one place or another from one minute to the next.

Speaker3: [00:40:47] Yeah, I mean, the counterexample and I realize how resonant this question is of, you know, OK, well, what when is the the technical improvements incredibly useful and meaningful? And I'd be curious to hear your Harvey story. I mean, the more recent amazing example was Cyclone Fanny in May and India. You know, there was a similar storm to one 20 years ago where tens of thousands of people were killed and this after that storm in part and infrastructure was put in place to evacuate a region and that that decision was made, you know, because of the confidence and the advance warning of this more recent storm and very few people died the other way. They couldn't stop the storm, but it was absolutely a moment where the confidence and lead time allowed a decision to be made that that was enormously meaningful. It's one of these great one of these great successes. You know where, where it's really monumental. I mean, everyone, everyone's incredibly proud of.

Speaker1: [00:41:40] Yeah, and it's in an area like that which is so vulnerable to cyclonic activity and where there's so many people living, you know, just a metre or two above sea level, you know, really, you need that type of a warning system to get people out in time. I think so. It's really amazing story. You know, I wanted to to talk about one another theme that I think is really critical here. In the conclusion you say the weather machine has to be a global system. It won't work any other way. And, you know, to go back in time a little bit, I wanted to ask you to talk to us a little bit about how the situation of on the one hand, I guess you call it like the satellite revolution brought the planet into focus in a way that it hadn't previously, but also how the Cold War context kind of laid the groundwork kind of maybe counterintuitively for the global weather machine we have today.

Speaker3: [00:42:30] Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, there there's certainly we live in an age where so much of our technology is is conjoined with the sort of the military dollars that paid for it. And I think we're we're familiar with that. And, you know, from GPS to computing to just the entire sort of missile era and certainly in this kind of summer of Apollo, it comes up quite readily. I was I was amazed at the way in which the the weather was in the background of the Apollo era and sort of, you know, real peak of the space race to the extent that the man on the Moon speech, the spring nineteen sixty one, you know, within the decade before the decade is out, we'll put a man on the Moon. That was point number one and bullet point number four was we will build weather satellites. You know, it's just it's amazing to me that that it's right there and it's in the same, you know, obviously the man on the Moon gets all the attention to, say the least. But that notion of weather prediction as a as a global project on the on the order of putting a man on the Moon, not an American on the Moon, American on the Moon, but the man on the Moon. Sort of international goal, I think was really it was really surprising to me, and Kennedy really glommed on to it as a as a point of cooperation. You know, if the space, if the space race was really about the Americans, the Soviets, you know, he it seems as if he really said that weather could be a place where, you know, while we're doing these other things we could we could collaborate technically and scientifically.

Speaker3: [00:43:55] And in fact, it's exactly what happened in this period in the 70s, when the actual observing system that we have today was very deliberately constructed and tested as a planned project of the World Meteorological Organization. It began with director of research at the time at the National Weather Service, a guy named Harry Wexler and his Soviet counterpart, this guy, Viktor Biograph. It's an amazing twist in the story, but Wexler, almost as soon as he started the project, died of a heart attack. And so some of the first planning reports come in the fall after he had had died suddenly in August. And it's just it's just, you know, he would have what he envisioned over the previous decade was completely built. And it's interesting to think had he carried it through, either if it might have happened faster or with different kinds of success. But I just I'm fascinated by the way that it's both the missile race technology, but also the sort of, you know, America's peak of the American era sort of post-war internationalism that that really allowed for the system to be built and with all sorts of strange connections between with funding of of sort of very, very colonial funding of smaller weather services around the world that continues today.

Speaker2: [00:45:06] Mm hmm. And I think this is a really important element of the book. Andrea is the kind of inexorable relationship between the weather machine and the war machine of U.S. Empire, and the way we have that together is really critical. Do you have a section in here where you talk about some developments at the JPL, the Jet Propulsion Lab and here you point out to the larger space program's fundamental duality that they create machines that open up this new world in terms of human exploration, going out to all the, you know, reaches of the Solar System, but that these are also technologies that destroy humanity. And you have a line where you say there was no excising the genes of war from the DNA of weather satellites. So this is a really important history to tell. Absolutely. But I wanted to ask you a kind of forecasting prognostication question future illogical, if I could. And that is is like if the weather machine has been has kind of grown up together with war machines of various kinds. Is there a way in which we can imagine a future where weather gets weaponized or becomes part of a military effort in ways that we haven't yet seen?

Speaker3: [00:46:16] You know, it's funny. They're the sort of history of weather prediction and weather control is conjoined. You know, it's it's and and actually there's a second Kennedy speech where he he calls for, you know, cooperation and weather prediction and weather control, where he brings it in. I mean, I think my best answer for this would be to acknowledge that we are controlling the weather and in the worst possible way. And I did. I have gotten a couple chem trails questions in the process of talking about the book at Camp Trails. Conspiracy theory is alive and well. You know, people really believe that when you look up in the sky and you see a trail behind airplanes, that it's a government plot to control the weather and you know that that sort of it fits. It fits. It's of a piece of so many other conspiracy theories right down to the fact that I hadn't realized that the phrase weather machine is a sort of anti-Semitic trope of Jews controlling the weather. Oh, really?

Speaker1: [00:47:09] I never

Speaker2: [00:47:09] Yeah, I've never heard that either

Speaker3: [00:47:12] Kind of thing. You learn me search whether machine on Twitter. Really? So it's kind of it's all there. I'm a horrible science fiction fan. I just I don't I don't consume it. I never have. I mean, I just it's, you know, I love I love these broad systems without the kind of more speculative fantasies. And so it leaves me of ill prepared to kind of talk about the future that way. That's not an answer.

Speaker2: [00:47:36] Yeah, no, it is. I just wanted to I wanted to see, you know, where you would go with it because

Speaker1: [00:47:40] I'm still thinking about it.

Speaker2: [00:47:41] Well, I really I didn't. I didn't mean it in the conspiracy theory sort of way. In fact, I didn't realize that that was a thing with chem trails. But so I've learned something there. But it's just interesting, like if these two kind of systems have grown up together or worked in cahoots, and in any case, it would make sense that they will continue to be birds of a feather, shall we say, in the future.

Speaker1: [00:48:03] Here's a here's a good quote from the book, too. You say we learned to see the whole earth thanks to the technology built to destroy the whole Earth. That's a great yeah, that's a good one. I mean, it's a terrible sentence, but a great sentence.

Speaker3: [00:48:13] I I wouldn't be writing about these things if I didn't maintain some sort of childhood fascination with these, you know, with with gadgets and airplanes and space and all of that type of thing. And I was really moved by my experience going to see the Snap satellite launch from a military base because I had to I really had to reckon with with a rocket as a missile like, you know, and I just. And that's hard. It just it's, you know, I, you know, I sort of had to to to acknowledge that that the two that the two were the same, quite literally. And then I also I mean, I was it was bizarre at Vandenberg on the California coast, where the map satellite that I watched launch or I should say, didn't watch launch because it was postponed and I ended up watching it. Spoiler. But I ended up watching it for, you know, from from home. But I was amazed that it's the home base of the Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles, which are still the sort of nuclear missile force, active nuclear missile force, the United States. And it didn't make any sense to me that the complexity of launching this one satellite when ostensibly if there were, we would launch two hundred of these missiles all at once, and it sort of begged the question of either. That's a sham that's not actually going to happen or the system is so much more expensive and more complex than than we often grasp. And both answers are sort of sad and troublesome. But, you know, so when I think about the sort of the future piece of it it's built out of. An era of crazy spending for four, for world domination of the last of the American era, of the last 50 years and where I think I think it's important to the next place to go with this conversation is to replace to replace Soviets with Google, you know, to replace the kind of international cooperation between nations with the incredible capability and sort of unknown effect of the kind of global super corporations of the Googles and Facebooks and apples and Amazons of the world.

Speaker1: [00:50:09] Have they gotten into the weather game yet?

Speaker3: [00:50:11] Subtly, I mean, IBM is the sort of most literally present. They they bought the weather company, which was The Weather Channel several years ago. They just this year launched their own private weather model of a kind of different type, sort of more significant type because it really isn't kind of glommed on to the outputs of the government weather models, but it's really meant to sort of replace them or stand alongside them and IBM in their language, in their sort of presentation, in their sort of pitch about what they're doing with this and how they're going to use it is a very sophisticated company at working with governments and talking about the good things they can do for society. You know, they're very mature in that sense, unlike another startup I talked to called Climate Sell, that really in the classic current startup frame is really about world domination. You know, they just they want to sell you the best thing that nobody else has, and it's going to make you a lot of money. And they might, you know, have the equation of stranger weather and more dollars at stake with with extreme weather impacts has really changed the formula of weather being something that only governments do because it's too expensive. Mm hmm. So I do think we we a golden age implies a sort of an imminent decline, and I worry about the future of this international collaboration, partly without the American leadership I see at every turn a decline in American infrastructure, including with the weather. So I wonder what happens next if we do have a fragmentation of this, this hundred and fifty year old system of governments collaborating on the weather? And then you have a sort of gold rush of the IBM's and other startups of the world offering weather as a commodity, right?

Speaker2: [00:51:44] And owning that data, as you point out towards the end of the book, right? Who owns that weather data and who can aggregate it and put it out?

Speaker3: [00:51:51] I mean, that's that's the strange moment we're living in of of of how much you know what the real consequences are of owning data. I just fully aware of the way in which Google and Facebook and so, so many Silicon Valley companies don't make things but own things. You know your own information. And that's, you know, it's it's been amazing and surprising to me to see how consequential that's been over the last decade. And it seems quite clear to me that that as we, you know, as sort of smart money is on crazy weather that they sort of successfully muscle into what has been a public project.

Speaker1: [00:52:26] Yeah. I wanted to say this is a total non sequitur, but I was thinking a bit about our war machine discussion and also about some of the most fascinating and kind of arresting moments I found in the book. And hands down, I think one of my favorite moments in the book is that bananas story about the Nazis building up a weather station in Canada and then like painting, camouflaging it. And and I mean, I never heard of that before. What a fascinating story. And the book is filled with, like, really interesting anecdotes, to be sure, but that one really stood out for me. Did you find a lot of kind of weird weather anecdotes as you were going through this research that anything that you you didn't put in the book, perhaps that you might have?

Speaker3: [00:53:04] Yeah, let's see. You know, it's funny. I didn't. It's the D-Day weather story that gets told so often, which I cut out of the book about how sort of the D-Day weather forecast, you know, save D-Day was pushed back a day thanks to the forecast thanks to the Bergen School, Bergen School trained forecasters. I'm trying to think, are there other I think there is a sort of there's there's a kind of particular sensibility, both with the Nazi weather station story with Lewis Richardson and his sort of very vivid image of a stadium filled with human computers. And he describes the kind of architecture of that with the the weather balloons and the weather stations. I became actually, here's the one I became really obsessed with a Norwegian weather station called Yalnizyan, which is, I think I want to say, a thousand miles kind of north and west of Norway, you know, and I think there's something like eight or a dozen Norwegian military personnel and like two dogs who live there and and take weather observations. And I know this was this was total catnip. Like, I was like, This is the place I have to go. And but there's only it's only supplied by a military plane, you know, like three times a year. And that's I'd have to go for like six months. It's the place I ended up going. Was it kind of more accessible on my and this other island off the coast of Norway called Dussehra? But unlike on my end, there's like a 20 minute ferry that runs six times a day. You know, it's a little bit more accessible, right? But it really did amaze me that this sort of genre of strange islands, the kind of corners of the map are almost always all you do.

Speaker3: [00:54:34] There is watch the weather. I mean, they analog to that, which isn't the book briefly and which I wrote about more recently. Magazine article is the lonely weather observer, not often the Arctic Ocean, but at LaGuardia Airport in New York. You know, there's a on the top of the marine air terminal, which is the old, you know, nineteen thirty nine, the last standing piece of the airport, still this historic piece of the airport. There's this office that was like straight out of my grandfather study of where there's a round the clock weather observer and the daytime guy, Paul Sauer. He's a Ph.D. in religion, which I thought was kind of kind of amazing. And and once an hour, he goes up on the roof and looks at the clouds and then affirms what the machine's out on the runway had recorded. But I have to say, though, you know, as much as I was sort of drawn to the the poetics of these of these places, you know where the action was at from a in a practical sense was was with the software programmers, the European Center, you know, it's the weather forecast is software. So it's the poles of of the banality of the of the of the algorithms and this and the supercomputers and the scientists in there, they're checked shirts and khaki pants. It was really I was up against the folks out in the Arctic Ocean with their husky dogs. I really did, too.

Speaker1: [00:55:46] I'm imagining big beards, you know, and like, you know, well,

Speaker3: [00:55:50] There's great there are great pictures from Yalnizyan, J.A. and whyI, and they're definitely, definitely worth looking at.

Speaker2: [00:55:56] Is this I'm just curious because I tried to find it and I couldn't. This island that's on the cover of the book represented is that young Mayan I thought it could be. I wanted it to be.

Speaker3: [00:56:05] It's so funny. You read that as an island rather than as the storm.

Speaker2: [00:56:09] Oh gosh, I read it as an island,

Speaker3: [00:56:11] But I will. I will say, and actually, I haven't. I haven't told anyone this yet. But if you plug in the coordinates indicated by the storm, something does come out.

Speaker1: [00:56:20] So a little Easter egg there. I like that.

Speaker2: [00:56:23] That's cool.

Speaker3: [00:56:24] We had to we had to choose some coordinates, so we chose carefully. So.

Speaker2: [00:56:28] So maybe as a final question, one of the things that struck me and just thinking deeply about the weather in reading your book and reflecting on it is that there's a really interesting kind of sympathy machine. I think that comes along with the weather as well. And let me maybe machine isn't the right word, but it's like a a sympathy or an empathy device. And you know, you brought up the cyclone fanny. And I think that's a good example. But. Or Hurricane Harvey or Sandy or any of these extreme storm events when they hit a place, there's a kind of outpouring of care and attention and donations and sympathy from friends and relatives, but also strangers from all over the world. And this seems to me a kind of global phenomenon in which human beings are really able to sort of sympathize with and reach out to other human beings who've suffered from weather, either because we've suffered ourselves or because here's my theory is because it's not quote unquote human inflicted. It's not, you know, it's not based on racial tensions. It's not a religious war. It's not a political battle. It's not a kind of human generated thing, you know, supposedly, but is also it's a kind of a natural event, right in which we can sort of feel sympathy for one another. So I wonder, do you see that as well? I mean, throughout the book, you talk about how empirical evidence from these stations shows us, you know, different variations in the weather. And then the supercomputers kind of pull it all together and shows us this other mesh of weather and predictive forms. But it seems to me that there's another kind of mash or a tie in together that happens with with weather events and with the weather in general, that kind of hits upon registers of human affect, maybe even more so in some ways than the kind of physical experience of undergoing some suffering from the weather, but that it creates it generates a kind of affective connection that might not be realized in other ways.

Speaker3: [00:58:26] I think I would. The way I would answer that is to go back to my sort of place training, which is to say that it's a foundational tenet that the way we, we perceive the world around us is influenced by by what's inside of us. You know that we it's not just, you know, that landscape is not not real, but applied. And I think that that's very complicated with weather because it yes, it it influences how we think and how we feel. But but we often see it in different ways based on how we think and how we feel. It goes both ways. So I think I mean, that's that's not it's not a great answer. I don't say more for me. To take another stab at it.

Speaker2: [00:59:02] Well, it just seems to me like maybe it's not even limited to weather, but I think of tsunamis and earthquakes, and these natural events kind of inspire kind activities or an outpouring of sympathy and care that I don't think we necessarily see in other contexts. There's something about weather events and natural disasters or natural events.

Speaker1: [00:59:25] I think that's the key. So.

Speaker2: [00:59:27] Now it's quote unquote natural. And so, you know, we put this scare quotes because as you pointed out, we are affecting climate and therefore we are affecting weather. So it's not that these it's not that hurricane. Isn't partially human created. It is, and it's interesting that it hit the the heart of petroleum modernity in the Western Hemisphere to write that irony is not lost on many people in Houston. So those that cause and effect as a piece of it, but at the same time, like during that storm, I had never heard from so many people who are very concerned. And it seems and I think you can see cognates of that all over the world as these natural disasters happen. And so it seems to me that that weather events and as they become more more common and more extreme, which they're predicted to be, we're also going to see conversely, not only, you know, more human and other suffering that comes about through these weather events, but also perhaps more human empathy and affective outreach that happens because of these shared events and experiences as well. So that makes sense.

Speaker3: [01:00:37] It does. I think it's I think it's a really interesting insight. I I noticed I think for me, one of the most striking things about the way we absorb these big events is the the vacillation between the satellite view between the image of the storm as a grand object, you know, as as something beyond that's only visible from space, sort of, you know, the totality of it is entirely, you know, we can only picture it, you know, because of this unique view that we have thanks to satellites and the space station, all of that. So there's and it's all very technologically mediated and there's a, you know, very specific kind of aesthetic to the way that we think of the storm as a whole. And then always those images are contrasted with these, with these with this very tight frame of the, you know, of of of of damage and the and and I think that I mean, for me, a lot of that human connection is about trying to understand, you know, trying to make sense of that grand scale, you know, trying to sort of bring that grand scale back to human experience and to reach out to to someone who has experienced it. And then as an empathetic and helpful, helpful gesture. I mean, I have to say, though, I find the opposite in a in a in the banal side of whether there is the sort of catastrophic and the banal side. It amazes me how on the banal side, everybody's weather is so different. You know, even even between New York and Washington, it's a different climate there than here.

Speaker3: [01:01:55] Or keep going up the eastern seaboard to Boston. It's like it's New York, and Washington and Boston have three different climates and three different relationships of weather. And when you go, I had a conversation with a with a colleague in L.A. and we were as we were talking about, you know what the stakes are for the forecast for them. You know, I just pulled up on my app what the forecast was for the next week in L.A. and it hits L.A. you know, it's another another sunny day. So it's, you know, the entire as far as the forecast goes high 74 or low sixty eight, whatever it was with a perfect, perfectly formed sine curve of highs and lows over the course of the day, you know, with no change whatsoever. And that's so what do you do with your what do you do with that in a conversation about about weather forecasting? And so that and that's so different from from places with more active weather and even Chicago thunderstorms are different from from New York thunderstorms and summer afternoons. And that's so I think that the empathetic linking across distance, I think, is a lot of a grasp for understanding weather, weather, kind of religious or technological. Just what what, what, what is this thing that has happened? Know what does it made of? How is it possibly so big? And then I think on the flip side of that, you know, we're really divided by our weather. You know, it's it's very different experiences

Speaker2: [01:03:03] And not just from place to place, but I know that, you know, you saw that we had a conversation with Nicole Stanislavsky. And then there's been this research that's come out in the last month or so about how men and women experience temperatures differently. And office spaces. Was the the testing ground, right? So, you know, one person seventy four degrees might not feel like seventy four degrees to, you know, the person sitting next to them, even depending on your build and your experience and even your gender. So it's kind of interesting, you know, there's the kind of numeric representation of of weather, and then there's the experiential side of what it feels like to be in that weather.

Speaker3: [01:03:43] Yeah, yeah. I mean, I have my my my partner's Canadian, and I learned in the time I spent there that, you know, yes, it's colder, but they also just wear better clothes. Yeah, I just had my first winter there. I couldn't believe, you know, I got frostbite on my toes because I didn't understand what you had to wear, like I just didn't like. It just didn't. I didn't realize that it's not, you know, they are more tolerant to certain extent, but it's just a different, a different kind of of adaptation and architecture in clothing and in how you move in and out of the outdoors. I-, it's it really. It's funny when you when after writing a book like this is this process of kind of hammering down and hammering down and hammering down. So it just becomes a very narrow path through this idea. And in our conversation, I recall the sort of the much, the much sort of, again, a poor weather metaphor, but the much sort of foggier all of these weird abstractions and sort of emotions and poetics that we that that we apply to the clouds, you know, and. And to the to this, this sort of constant, ineffable thing we live with every day, striking to me how much I push that away. All right, before we finish, will you tell me your Harvey story? I would really think I'd love to.

Speaker1: [01:04:52] Oh, sure. Yeah. So so what part of the Harvey story do

Speaker3: [01:04:54] You want to hear? Well, I guess for me, I'm really so curious when you came to terms with it that it was happening and what decision you made from it, and then I hope everything was OK. I guess those are the three pieces. Yeah.

Speaker1: [01:05:05] Well, we were fortunate enough to live. You know, Houston is twenty three bayous. Twenty three river systems. And only one of them is is appropriately defended by reservoirs. And we happen to live in that watershed. So we were fine, although we knew a lot of people who worked with us, whose houses were flooded and the campus itself got kind of flooded too. But basically. So we're kind of sitting on pins and needles waiting. But there was this thing when the hurricane hit it hit down by corpus, right? And there was a little lull between its hit and when Houston really started to get rained on. And so I think a lot of us had that first day of kind of kind of false sense of confidence. Oh, it's not going to be such a big thing. You know, there's not not as windy, some lightning, it's not going to be a big thing. And then it just poured like the heavens opened for four days straight, like biblical rain. And, you know, even though we were dry ourselves, I mean, everyone was kind of glued to the to the news, to Facebook and checking in on people. And we ended up doing a podcast with one of our colleagues who's a kind of ecological philosopher. And so we were trying to interpret the storm from the middle of it.

Speaker3: [01:06:10] Wow. And I think he was

Speaker2: [01:06:11] Sitting in his closet. We were sitting in our closet.

Speaker1: [01:06:14] Yeah, we were sitting in their closet, his closet. And you know, it was I think it was really a life changing event. And I don't know if Sandy was that way for you to. But I think for, you know, we had lived in Houston almost 10 years. At that point, we had moved in just after the previous Hurricane Ike had hit. We knew there was heavy rain, but it didn't really hit our neighborhood that much. And so I don't think we really understood, you know, the weather of Houston and what it is in ways that people who had lived there 30 or 40 years or even lived like half a mile away from us understood it.

Speaker2: [01:06:43] We were also able to walk out after the second day and walk to downtown because we live about three blocks from downtown where you have these underpasses that were completely flooded. Thirty feet of water and you know, people sort of maybe trying to drive up to them but realize and you can't get through that and say it was an astounding amount of rain, but in some ways it was a constant downpour. But it kind of varied in its intensity. Sometimes it was thunderstorm level downpour, what they would call raining cats and dogs like really heavy drops of rain. And then sometimes it was just sprinkling, but it just never stopped. It felt to me it felt very biblical. I'm not a religious person, but it felt like the 40 days and 40 nights because it just never stopped.

Speaker1: [01:07:24] But I think a thing that a lot of people don't understand is that Houston is 600 square miles. It's a giant city. So what might be happening in one part of it? You know where everyone's fine and another part where literally homes are underwater? You know, so I think when we would get these incredibly panicked messages from people who would be like, Oh my God, I'm seeing this stuff on the news, we would have to say, Well, you know, that's happening 10 miles away. And, you know, so it was one of those things. And you know, just like I'm sure the Staten Island experience of Sandy was different than the Bronx experience, right?

Speaker3: [01:07:54] Yeah. Yeah. Or, I mean, I remember going out with Sandy, we that the I went out to sort of check things out the next morning and our the coffee place in our corner was like getting a delivery. There was like, you know, it's just it was bizarre, you know, it was just it was like, you know, and then in Red Hook, two miles away, it was a disaster zone. I mean, for that in that sense, I think in both cases, those differences are real kind of dress rehearsal for the for the potential potential differences of climate change. I I'm not a dress rehearsal. It's the thing itself being a real kind of exacerbation of not not only of inequality, but these, you know, really strange lines between impact and safety.

Speaker1: [01:08:32] Our colleague Lacy Johnson, who's also a writer. Her house did flood and she was, you know, then kind of evacuated towards the center of the city. And she was just, you know, astounded to see people washing their cars in the middle of a hurricane. And she was like, Do you not understand that? You know, the water you're putting into that bayou is causing somebody's home to back up, you know, three miles upstream? And it's anyway all of these sorts of interconnections that both the ones that are visible and the ones that are invisible anyway. Yeah. Well, listen, Andrew, it's been an amazing conversation, a great book. The weather machine are dirty inside the forecast and anything else you want to plug or I know, I know you write for Wired sometimes, which happens to also been one of the jobs in many how he or my co-host had, once upon a time, the early days.

Speaker3: [01:09:15] Go ahead.

Speaker1: [01:09:16] Sorry. She doesn't want to tell the story, but she was like one of the first 10 employees of in fact, back when Wired was a pretty, pretty sketchy startup. Yeah. Anyway, what are

Speaker3: [01:09:25] You up to? Well, this is I mean, this has been the crux of it. I mean, I'm sort of beginning to think about more more stories in this kind of big infrastructure themes and that these kind of intersection of technology and infrastructure and policy. But I just I will say. You know, the weather book, it's it's the banality of weather. It's hard to sort of push people over the, you know, over the hump with that. So it's really it's very exciting to have you as readers sort of recognize that there are all these interesting stories in there. So I a second plug for that enthusiasm is what I'm getting at.

Speaker1: [01:09:55] So that's great. Yeah, we're going to we're going to put the word out and also post your website in the show notes, so people can follow up on events and so forth that are coming up connected to the book and your other publications. But yeah, first of all, just thanks and keep us. Keep us in mind when the next book comes out and also come visit in Houston because there are a lot of weather minded people down there, you're going to find a good audience for this book there also.

Speaker3: [01:10:17] Yeah, yeah. Where I've been, I mean, I've been thinking about where those where those audiences are and the Harvey experience, I think, is really it's really dramatic and important. So.